Good morning everybody and good morning to our satellite locations around the college. We're not ignoring you, which we could all be together. We're doing the best we can here. What I want to do is walk you through a line of thinking that I've been exploring. I've been examining the practical aspects of character within the context of the profession and that's what I want to talk about today. It turns out the lens through which you view your roles and responsibilities has a direct impact on how you come to decisions and make ethical choices. You go, hey John that's great.  Thank you for that. I'm gonna break that apart a little bit as we go through this. I came across this quote from the vice chief who you will hear from this afternoon and I found this particularly relevant to this discussion. Doing what is right seems obvious. I bet there have been many times in your careers where folks have told you do the right thing. You know what the right thing is, go do that. Right? It's obvious. Do the right thing. It's black and white. What's so hard about that? Do the right thing. Do I need to explain it any further? You know what the right thing is, go do that. Do you really? Right for whom? You? Your shipmates or your compadres? For the organization? Is it right for the mission? Is it right for the organization? Is it right for the institution? Is it right for all of those things? What is right? That's what we want to explore today. That's why I think this is so important. That's why I emphasize the right because we've got to find out what right is. Now, there's other dimensions to this statement by the vice chief. Rules are important, but doing what is right is imperative. So the implication might be that in order to do what is right, you may have to break a rule. Uh-oh. Wait a minute. That doesn't sound right. Do what's right. Break a rule. That's what we want to explore here a little bit today. This is where as professionals, in the profession of arms at least, the requirement for you to exercise professional judgment with discretion becomes so important. So clearly character plays a huge role in determining what right is. So I'm going to use the context of the US Navy through the lens of the Navy leader development framework. Back in April, when the chief of naval operations came up here to college and one established the College of Leadership and Ethics, but he also rolled out version 2.0 of his Navy leader development framework. And in that he really emphasized the importance of both competence and character. This is what he was talking about. There are two lanes in which we develop our people. One is a competence lane and one is a character lane. In the competence lane, these quotes come from him. You know, you've got to know what we're doing clearly. Our institutions, our organizations are clearly designed and organized and spend money on development of your competence, right? Everything that you've done in your careers up to this point has been largely competency based. You're even evaluated on your performance based on competency. Competency rules. Character, on the other hand, the senior says we've got to raise it up on equal footing with competence. Well, how do we do that? He charged all of the Navy communities to come up with strategies for their leader development for their people that included deliberately developing the character of their people. That's a challenge, right? We have schools for competence all over the place. How do you develop someone's character? Let's go to a school for character development. What does that look like? What do you focus on? Well, you might focus on following rules. Wait a minute. That doesn't seem to be enough, does it? So how do we do how how has our character been developed throughout our careers? Well, typically, it's over to you to do that. Right, you come into your organizations with a with a set of values that you've gained from your upbringing from maybe your faith tradition, from your experiences. And that's what you base your character on. And then the military in our case, puts in rules and regulations to and sets high standards, right, to modify your behavior to align with the values of the institution. And then we hold people accountable, right? That's typically the way we do that. So you're expected to follow the rules and regulations and achieve these high standards. And that helps form your character, right? That's not a bad model. I mean, we're using it, we produce great leaders in the military with that model, we produce leaders with character through that model. So it's not a bad model. What to see no saying, though, is that it's insufficient. It's not enough. He goes on to say that competence and character are so tightly intertwined that they must be strengthened together. So even though there might be two lanes in this, they have to be strengthened developed, because what he says is trust and confidence is the coin of the realm for us. In many dimensions, all of the dimensions where you talk about trust and competence, whether it's in the operational arena, where you have the trust and competence between commanders that can execute missions without oversight, commanders intent, or is the trust and confidence that we earn with the society that we serve. So I'm going to use the Navy's core values to try and illustrate what I'm talking about. The first thing I want to bring out and no matter what institutional values your organization has, they all have multiple dimensions to them. And if they have multiple dimensions to them, it doesn't, you don't have to stretch very far to come up with situations where those values might actually conflict. And you have to sort that out. So for the Navy, honor is one of our core values. And I particularly like this definition by retired Admiral Lawrence talking about taking the hard right instead of the easy wrong is a way to define your honor. And then the physical and moral attributes of courage, and then commitment to yourself, in this case, shipmates, Navy, institution, the nation, multiple dimensions to all of these. But I want to focus right now on the courage piece. And let me start off by making a couple assumptions about all of you. And I'm going to make the assumptions about our folks in the satellite locations even though I can't see you. Let me make this assumption. I'm going to make the assumption that you are all people of character and integrity. Is anybody pushback on that? Thank goodness. I hope so. I hope you think that you're a person of character integrity. Now let me make another assumption. Let me further assume that you'll always do the right thing. Any pushback? Person of character, you're gonna push back? Why not? Not always? At least you're honest. Good for you. You do know you're in the minority here. I'm just saying, but that's okay. There may be people in the satellite locations or all everybody's raising their hand, you know, I don't know. Very good. But for the most part, right? We all consider ourselves people of character and integrity and we'll always do the right thing. Alright, so let me ask this question. In respect to courage, which is more difficult to exercise physical courage or moral courage? Moral courage, it's a no brainer. It's hard. But here's the real question. If you are all people of character and integrity that will always do the right thing. Why is moral courage so hard? Oh, that's my normally get. Well, that's a good question. Right? That's what we're trying to explore here today. Moral courage is hard. And yet, I'm a person of character, and I always do the right thing. Well, if that's true, then moral courage is a cinch, because you always gonna do the right thing. But we know that it's not. Some conflict here, we got to try and resolve. But when you think about it, the extremes of both physical and moral courage, right? The extreme exercise official physical courage can result in your death. What's the extreme of a moral courage? Your career is over. And yet it's more difficult to exercise. I mean, that's a lot to think about. And yet we feel that way strongly. So I got me thinking about character.  I came up with my own. I'm a pretty simple guy. So my definition is gonna be pretty simple. If you want a really good definition of character, I would commend you to the army. They've written absolutely wonderful documents about character. Well, here's mine. Not very self satisfying. Hey, John, that should be a little longer maybe a little few more words make say more stuff. No, that's what I use. And I'll explain that. Turns out, our character is revealed in the actions we take in every day in the environment that we're in. And those actions are based on what we value at that particular time. And that reveals our character. That's what I'm saying. And it turns out that environment in the context in which you lead and make decisions has a tremendous impact on how your characters revealed through the actions you take. And so when we talk about character integrity, the field of moral psychology is starting to challenge those notions. A lot of times we think of our character integrity as armor that we wear. I'm a person of character integrity. I will always do the right thing, because I'm a person of character integrity. So it's armor plating. In any situation, I got it, right? Folks of moral psychology say, man, not so much. I'm gonna try to convince you that the environment that you are in has more to do with your behavior than with that body of armor that you call character integrity. Let me prove that to you. To do that, I'm going to use the work of Dan Ariely. He's a professor now at Duke University. This is the book he wrote called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. And I recommend it to you. It's an easy read. But what Dan Ariely does is he studies cheating. That's pretty cool. So let me give you an example of some of the experiments he has done. He's up at Carnegie Mellon University up in Pittsburgh. And he has a group of students in a room. And the assignment is he's going to give them 10 math problems to solve. And these are math problems, by the way, the history major like me can solve. Okay, so they're easy. The problem is he doesn't give them enough time to solve the problems. So it goes like this. Bell rings, answers as many questions as you can. When the bell rings again, put your pencil down, take your answer sheet, take it to the front of the room, put it in a shredder, take a dollar for every correct answer. People cheat? What do you think? There's no accountability. Yeah, people cheat. And what he found, and the reason he knows this is because while he cheated, because the shredder only shred the outside of the answer sheet, so he knows how many questions people got right. So a really cheats to find out about cheating. Okay, but I guess that's okay. Turns out, thankfully, most cheap, most people only cheat a little. Some people cheat a lot. Some people don't cheat. But most people cheat a little. That's probably the good news in this. Usually, we're pretty good, as people, we're pretty good. But we don't mind cheating a little bit. And it goes kind of like this, right? You're cruising along the test, you get the question for, you're just starting on question five, you can see, you know the answer, the bell rings, you can't, you can't answer it, right? You can't put it down on paper. But you say to yourself, I knew the answer. What's the harm? Who's gonna know? I'm just gonna out shred it. I'm not, right? I can still feel good about myself because I knew the answer. What's the big deal? Right? He calls this our personal fudge factor. And we all have we all have personal fudge factors. It allows us to feel good about ourselves when you do something that perhaps isn't as good as we think it should be. Right? So the example I always use in here is, I'm going to make another assumption about all of you is that you can say to yourself to be a law abiding citizen, I know I certainly do. I pay my taxes. I don't violate the law. I'm a good person. I'm a good citizen. Yet I have absolutely no qualms about exceeding the speed limit every day. Right? No, right? So why do we speed? There's so many great answers, right? If you've driven around Rhode Island long enough, it's simple.  There was even a law in the state that if you're driving the speed limit in the passing lane, you're going to get a ticket. Yikes. Everybody's doing it. Also, I've got a, I'm a pretty skilled driver. My car has all these lane control things and radar cruise control. I'm good to go. And the speed limit's a guideline anyway. And what most people have told me, so this must be true, that you're not going to get a ticket up to seven miles over speed limit. I remember that. All right, now, 72 and a 65 is okay. But what happens, you're driving along middle lane, 95, 672 miles an hour. Somebody blows by you going 90. You go, oh, look at that guy, right? That guy's a hazard.  That's your first thought. Your second thought is great because the cops going to pull him over and not me. Usually that's my second thought anyway. So we judge others by their actions, right? We judge ourselves by our intent. So that guy blowing by us, we have no idea why that person's going 90 miles an hour. It could be an emergency. You could be on the way to a hospital. He's got to get, you know, whatever. We don't know that we just go, whoa. But we're doing 72 and a 65. And I'm a good guy. I'm a good person, right? Personal fudge factor. So let's go back to Ariely for a minute. So he runs this experiment again, with a different group of students. Only this time he has an actor in the room. So when the bells at Bell start to start the exercise, the actor stands up and says, I've solved them all grabs his answer sheet, puts it in the shredder takes 10 bucks walks out the class. The question for you does cheating go up or down? Up? This is your first introduction to the war college answer. It depends. It actually depends on the sweatshirt the actor is wearing. If he's wearing a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, this is the university where this is happening at cheating goes up. Any ideas why? It's one of us, right? It's just the way we do things around here must be okay. Think about think about the organizations you've come from. The culture and the climate of the organization you've been in. Did you modify your behavior to that culture and climate? You bet you did. You did things the way things are done around here. Now if the actor is wearing a pit sweatshirt, which is a university across town, cheating goes way down. In fact, it goes below the fudge factor. Why is that? We don't want to be like them, right? They're bad people. Isn't that amazing? So think about that. The environment that you set for your organization has a lot to do with the way people behave. And you can do very minor things to change people's behavior. Let me give you a couple of examples. The first example is what Ariely did. He did the same type of a test up at MIT with a group of students, except on the answer sheet at the top, there was a statement that essentially said, you know, I will well and faithfully answer these questions to the best of my ability in chords with the MIT Honor Code sign your name. Cheating went down. MIT doesn't have an Honor Code. Cheating goes down. He also tried an experiment with people to say before they answered the test, I want you to think about the 10 Commandments. Just think about it. It took the test cheating went down. I'll give you another example that will just blow your mind, at least it blows my mind every time I think about it. They did an experiment over in London in some office building over there. And they had a tea service, an honor system, you go in, make a cup of tea, put some money in a cup and out you go. They had a hidden camera so they could record behavior. And this is where it gets crazy. So on the days when they had a cup with flowers painted on it for the collection of the money, the donations, they got very little donations. So they changed it up. They painted a set of eyes on the cup. People put money in the cup.  Do you agree? I mean, is that nuts? With a set of painted eyes, change your behavior?  Because I didn't believe it, I thought I got to see, I got to try it. We have offices up a loose hall up in the third deck and there's classrooms up there. Some of you will enjoy those classrooms this fall.  And students come in to make themselves a cup of coffee at breaks and, and oh, we didn't mind, we weren't getting any money.  You folks are putting money in the cup. Is that nuts? Little changes in the environment will change your behavior. I'm a person of character integrity, right? Right? But you'll do all kinds of crazy stuff based on the environment that you're in. That's the issue here. That's the issue here. So for you, thinking as a leader, what is the environment that I'm creating for my people? Right? Exhortations to people to say, live by our core values, or be a person of character integrity, you're wasting your breath. Instead, what are the values you're trying to what is the environment you're creating in your organization?  Oh, boy. Right? Yep.  Yep, changes your behavior, maybe in a good way, maybe not in such a good way. And yet we tell people, be people of character and integrity. Of any of you, particularly our army brother, and if you've read Dr. Lenny Long's study and lying to ourselves on the army, if you haven't, I commend that to you. Institutionally, and I wouldn't just limit this to the army, I think it's certainly true of our Navy. We force people to lie. And yet we want you to be people of character and integrity, always do the right thing. Think about that environment. So think about it for your people. Also think about it in the environment that you're in and what's what's causing you to modify your behavior. That's the trip. Okay. This this simple diagram again, I told you I'm a pretty simple guy, I have a simple diagrams. It's a visual representation of the domains in which we make decisions. And I took it from an article that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in July of 1924. We study old stuff here sometimes. And the articles entitled Law and Manors, you can Google this and read it for yourself. It's it is a someone wrote down a speech given by Lord John Moulton. You go who's that guy? Well, I don't know, except that he was pretty influential in the British government before enduring World War one. And he wrote this this thing about law and manners, and talked about these three domains, which I think is really pertinent to our discussion here this morning. So I'm going to go through all of these briefly. First is the positive law domain. This is domain of compliance, bureaucracy, the low trust environment, right? Why do we have laws because in rules, we put rules in place mainly because there's a trust issue here. We can hold people accountable to these things. This is from the vice chief statement where rules are important, right? Rules are important. We have to have rules and regulations that govern actions, right? So people know what to do. So it's important. However, there's a couple problems with this domain. The first is, you put enough rules in place, you take away people's ability for self reliance. I'll give you the best example that I've been exposed to recently. It comes from the army, and I apologize to our army brethren. So you can tell me if this is true or not. But I heard back when that phone game, Pokemon game, I don't know if any of you played Pokemon walking around right? They've actually put rules in place for using Pokemon on a base on an army post. And I thought to myself, really? Really? We're going to govern every single aspect of someone's behavior down to Pokemon? Really? So what happens when our people come upon situations in which either the rule doesn't apply or there is no rule? Well, we say, do the right thing. Exercise judgment. And I would say, based on what if you tried to govern everyone's life with every single rule and regulation you could come up with? Doesn't compute, right? Here's the other one, which is probably more of a problem. This is a sense that if I just follow the rules and the regulations, I've done my duty. I've done enough. I would argue, no, you haven't. Again, go back to the Vice Chief statement. Rules are important. Doing what is right is imperative. So just following the rules, it's not enough. You haven't just done your duty. Alright, the free choice domain, which is the opposite end of the spectrum. This is the fun domain. This is, wow, spontaneity, originality, energy. This is where innovation happens, right? Because you can fail and it's okay. You can be really creative. This is an awesome domain. You can do anything you want. Yeah, right. If there isn't a rule or a reg to govern the activity, do it. You have complete freedom. Now, how do you think that works in the military? Probably not so much, right? We have this thing called good order and discipline. kind of butts up against this free choice domain. But that's the main that is out there. It's a domain that many of our people that come into the military come from in many cases. I want to focus most though on the domain in the middle. This domain of obedience to the unenforceable. I love that phrase. Lord John Multan. Boy, he was a good. So this is the domain of duty, obligation, selfless service. We're self regulating in this domain. We hold each other accountable. This is the domain of the profession. This is a high trust domain. So this is where the CNO's coin of the realm exists. And in this domain, and this is where doing what is right is imperative. It's also where you take the hard right instead of the easy wrong. So these three domains exist. The one that we're most focused on when we talk about character in the profession of arms is the domain of obedience to the unenforceable, except it gets pressure put on it from both sides. From the positive law domain, it gets pressure all the time. If something goes wrong in the military, we have basically three ways to fix the problem. We fire the leadership mandate more training, institute a new policy. And the combination of those three things somehow is to fix for everything, for everything that's gone wrong. And so that builds up over time, more and more rules and regulations and things not to do, which takes away from or in it puts pressure on that domain of obedience to the unenforceable, or it's on you to do what's right on you to do what's right when no one's looking domain. That's taken away from the pre free choice domain. The pressure typically comes from situations in which we lower our standards. There are things that perhaps weren't okay before. Well, maybe they are okay now. Because we've lowered our standards, pushes against the domain of obedience to the unenforceable. For the profession to flourish. The job of military professionals is to do everything in their power to strengthen the boundaries between those positive law and free choice domain and strengthen those boundaries, or in fact, push them back. Push them back. So the domain of obedience to the unenforceable truly is the largest of the three. I've been talking a lot about professions.  So I'm going to walk through what are historically considered attributes of a profession. First of course is providing a unique service to the society it serves. So if you use the examples of law and medicine and religion, you can say those professions provide justice, health and salvation, things that the society can't do for itself. For the profession of arms, we can say that we provide security. So it meets the criteria of the unique and vital service to the society. And it requires expert knowledge. And that expert knowledge needs to be applied with discretion and judgment. And so your year here at the Naval War College is all about enhancing your expert knowledge. That's what this year is about. So that you can leave here and apply all the things that you've learned in your new roles with discretion and judgment that has been enhanced. Trust of the society is earned. And I would argue has to be earned almost every day. Now for over 15 years, the military in the United States has had and enjoyed very high trust with the American people. That's why many of you have been greeted with people that come up to you that you don't know and say thank you for your service. For those of you that are not as old as me, there was a time when people didn't come up to you and thank you for your service, they would call you a baby killer. Throw eggs at you. So the trust of the society can be fleeting and has to be constantly earned. Right now we're in a very good place, but we can't let our guard down. We have to continually get the trust of the society, keep earning it. And we do that because we take our responsibilities for policing ourselves very seriously. We have a uniform code of military justice. We decide who comes into profession, who gets qualified in profession, who promotes in the profession and who leaves the profession. The profession does that, not some entity outside the profession. And by doing that, we're granted significant autonomy to carry out our roles. So the military, in fact, meets all of the characteristics of a profession. However, like any profession, it's also embedded in a bureaucracy. And up here, I've used I've taken a chart that was created by Dr. Don Snyder, retired Army colonel. And a book he wrote the future of the Army profession. And I kind of modified it a little to represent more of a Navy flavor to it. But it's essentially the same type of chart. But with any profession, the bureaucracy is necessary. And if you look at the functions of the profession of the bureaucracy, the hope is that even though they may be different, that they complement each other. That's the goal. It doesn't always work that way. I would say that it's probably fair to say that that much of what governs your daily activity comes from the bureaucracy. So its influence tends to be more visible. I have over the years taken this chart, I've taken the title profession and bureaucracy off of it. And I've showed it to senior leaders. And my question to them was, which column do you see yourself in? And the second question is, which column do you see the institution in? In this case, what I show is to the Navy officer. So which column do you see the Navy in? And the answers I get are kind of interesting. The answer is, for most people is, well, I like to see myself as this member of the profession. But I find myself most of the time, in the side of bureaucracy. I mean, when you think about why most people join the military, do they join it for the things around the bureaucracy side? I suspect not, right? Most of the reasons that people give for joining the military is because they want to be part of something larger than themselves. That's the profession side of the things. So there's this natural tension between the profession and the bureaucracy. And how you view what you do tells which side of this chart plays the largest in your life, right? And how you then make decisions. So again, let me go back to your Naval War college education. If you're looking at this year through the lens of the profession, you might say, I am grateful for the investment my institution has made in me to increase my expert knowledge. And I have a professional obligation to apply myself to this year, because I owe it to pay its payback to the profession. You might look at through the lens of the bureaucracy and say, I got my JPME education done. Check in the box. I'm done. Right? But that's not saying one is good and one is bad. This is where that they are complementary. Yeah, you get your JPME credit. That's a good thing. And you also increase your expert knowledge. That's the way the profession and bureaucracy should be working together. Doesn't always happen that way. But as it makes an impact on how you approach this year, I would argue. The last chart I would show you is is this one in again, a simple chart, but explains the development of professionals over time. You know, we bring people into the military, we give them rules and regulations to follow. And then we expect them to obey those rules and regulations. And so we elicit from them compliance behavior. And what we say that that's really the moral minimum here. I showed this chart several years ago to a Navy captain who was very open and honest with me. And he said, John, you know, I just realized I've spent my whole career in that quarter. It's what I do. I didn't think about this. So hopefully as you gain experience, over time, as you become more committed to the institution, you start to develop a professional identity that aligns with the values of the institution. And that professional identity that allows you to exercise your discretion and judgment aligned with the values of the organization helps you do the right thing. But only if you look at it in that way. And that's how we get ethical leaders. That's what bolsters up the doing the right thing being imperative. And in why is this important, I would, I'm going to refer to Admiral Stockdale. Because he talked about military leaders having a moral obligation to not only make good choices, but to put themselves and others at risk. Therefore, they must be able to justify both to themselves and to others the potential cost and lives and resources of their choices in both a moral context, and in terms of accomplishment of worthwhile objectives. That's why this is so important. Because of what you do. So I have a few concluding thoughts. Doing what is right is imperative and taking the hard right instead of the easy wrong. And I would say the way that you can enhance your ability to do that is to view who you are, and what you do, primarily through the lens of the profession. Why do I say that? Because if you can do that, you take the me out of the situation, because it's not about you. I was talking to an officer about a month ago. And we were having this conversation and she was telling me about an experience that she had in a command in which she was something bad happened. And she wanted to say something. But her line of thinking went this way. I was new to the command. I was a young O five. I was a woman. Therefore, I didn't say anything. Think how much that would change if you took I out of that equation and looked at it through the lens of the profession. I would submit your character would be enhanced. So obedience to the man of the unenforceable is the goal. And then to further that goals expand the influence of that domain and everything that you do. And that the profession needs to tell the bureaucracy just how much bureaucracy it needs. It must be the dominant force here. For the profession of arms to be successful. As a former president of Naval War College was fond of saying only a profession can win a war bureaucracy cannot. So in concluding, I would say if you want to enhance the character of your people, then you must strengthen the profession. And with that, I would open up to any comments or questions from anyone. Yes, sir. We got mics here somewhere. Morning, sir. I'm Navy commander. I'm from Greece. My question is, you talked about characters versus about profession versus bureaucracy. My question has to do with character versus profile. Because we live in an era of social media, the era of everybody's want to build up his own good profile and spotless profile. And if we're if we're evaluating our personnel, which will bring the next generation of leaders, how we're going to protect these some people that might follow the rules, don't break regulations, but don't have the perfect profile, such as being we know being smokers or drinkers or even womanizers, no offense. But and the history is full of leaders who changed the flow of history and had and didn't have a good profile. How could we if we want to enhance their profile or protect them against others who follow the bureaucracy and have perfect profiles to follow a great career? And that the challenge that we all have, right? Pretty much. And if I understand your question, right? There are a lot of societal pressures on our people. There are a lot of institutional pressures on on all of you. The environment that you lead today is different than the environment I led in when I was on active duty. There's no question about that. I talked to an AVIG several several years ago that said, if you get a hotline complaint against you, even if it's not substantiated, that never that never goes away. That's a different world. If you allow me to make it a bit harder, it's the profile of the people that earns the trust of the society, or at least contributes to it. So are you talking about that the society, because of societal changes, and that changes the profile of people coming in? Is that what you're talking about? Isn't that a question? I know we've we've looked a lot at that. We've looked a lot of it, at least in terms of our Navy. And there's a lot of evidence, of course, that the people coming into the Navy today are certainly influenced by the society. But the good news is, they respond just as effectively to the things that we try to instill in them in being a member of the profession as anybody ever did. That's what that's what the people at our recruit training facilities tell us. They're motivated, their motivation for joining their motivation for being in the military is spans society's influence. It is consistent with how people have come into the military for years and years and years. That's encouraging that you can still provide people a set of values. In some cases, we know that some some of the people that have come into the military are devoid of of values in some cases, or their values aren't certainly not aligned with our military values. But they're responsive to growing and developing those values over time, by and large. Yes, sir. Lieutenant Commander Saad from Jaburi Navy. First, I thank you for your great presentation. I just a question. You have been in leadership domain a long time during your career. As you know, leadership is very difficult job. Leader must accept responsibility and failure. However, some leaders deny the failure to save institution or nation. What is the best way to convince your leadership? To convince leadership about accepting failure? About his failure because he say you are he's your support on it and you want to convince him that is not right. But he didn't accept this is because he say he accept his responsibility, but he didn't accept a failure. It's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. If it's a challenge in your name, I guarantee this challenging across the services in the United States. There's no question about it. I can speak at least in terms of the Navy's which is what I study. And over time, that has become more and more of a problem. In fact, we have seen where even decision making has moved up the chain of command over time. That that would illustrate a trust deficit and a low tolerance for failure. The good news, I think, is that at least for the Navy, and I think it's true for the other services, our senior leadership has recognized that. So you read documents like the Navy leader development framework, and the CNO's design for maintaining maritime superiority puts a high value on we need to enhance trust and confidence. So that means we have to let people act, make mistakes and move on. We still have a long way to go to to realize that aspirational aspect of those documents. But at least the senior leadership certainly in line with that thinking and trying to move in that direction. I think the I wouldn't be surprised if the Vice Chief talked about that this afternoon. And I would I would encourage you to ask him that question. Anybody else? Yes, sir. Good morning, sir. The Dukman office Malaysia NSE leadership competency and military are interrelated. My question is to which extent the leadership can influence competency and how the leadership may influence the company competency itself. I'm not sure I understood your question. I'm sorry. Could you repeat that please? Yes, sir. Leadership, competency and military are interrelated. My question is to which extent the leadership can influence competency and how the leadership may influence the competency yourself. The competency of self. Yeah, I mean, the competency of your man because leadership is between leaders and followers. So how the leaders may use his leadership to influence his followers competency. I think like I said earlier, I think the most important thing is to establish the sort of environment or climate within the organization that not only encourages but promotes the development, not only your people's competency, but their character together is the key. And, and, and a lot of times we get so wrapped up in the issues of the day, the tasks that you're trying to get through answering the mail up the chain of command, you can lose sight of that expediency. It can be a great threat to that. And so I think for the leader again is to focus a lot on that environment across the command to ensure that you're eliciting from your people the sorts of behaviors that encourage their development, both competence and character. So it gets into the way you train, for example, how realistic is the training that you're willing to do. In some cases, realistic training can be quite dangerous. And if you're in a kind of a risk avoidance type of person, you might not want to go there. And if you don't go there, well, then you're not going to develop the competency of your people to the degree that you probably should as an example. I think we have time for one more. Hey, Michael down here in front. Thanks. Sir, I'm Captain Rohan Joseph from Sri Lanka Navy. I was wondering, we have seen politicians, some great military leaders, once they reach a particular level of their life or career, you see them basically screw them up, right? Now, having such so much of openness or exposure to leadership and qualities and ethics and all of these things, why aren't they, you know, sure when they see like who I'm going, I'm waiting for trouble, what, why, why doesn't they, they are not aware of that particular situation that sparks them that should come into their brain until you're going to cross this line. So how does these great leaders fall into such a trap at the last moment and end up in real, you know, there are a lot of reasons for that. I would submit. But one would certainly be looking at themselves through their own lens, right? So as they as you get more senior, right? We used to say you don't get any better looking. You know, people don't love you more. You just because of your position, right? People could become attracted to you, you get more attention to you. And the and the danger is, is that you like it. And things become more about you than perhaps your role in the profession. You lose sight of that. That's certainly one. It can also be, like I said, the environment in which you're leading can can perhaps get you down that path as well. And, and although we certainly don't know, but I think the part of the issues with the problems out in seventh week with Glenn Defense Marine, that environment in many people contributed to the decisions that they made that turned out to be illegal. And along the way, probably didn't think they were doing anything all that wrong. So that's a factor. There are also people that to be quite honest, sometimes get promoted that I have the poor character, right? I think it's fair to say, in the military, the competence will trump character. That's sometimes that's a harsh statement. I made that statement to the CNO. Oh my gosh, that did not go well. But what the heck? I'm a retired guy. I mean, what can he do to me? Oh my gosh. So, but when you think about it, right? And there's plenty of examples of this, and I'm sure you're familiar with people that have a particular competency that the institution values greatly, but they have a character flaw. And we may overlook that character flaw until we get to a point where you can't overlook it anymore, and you gotta do something, right? That was the point I was trying to make. His statement back was, well, that's not going to be the case anymore. Okay. Yes, sir. Aye, sir.  But you get the point. So there are multiple dimensions to that. And we're all susceptible, right? Like, remember, we judge ourselves by our intent. So we can explain away a lot of things in our behavior and still feel good about ourselves. And the more you do that over time, that slippery slope gets slippery. And before you know it, you're right there and you said in a place where you would say, I will never be like them. And there you are. So you're content that one of the things and Gene's gonna follow me. It's a great segue is the degree of self awareness you have about yourself plays a huge role in this. And why we focus on it so much here at the college. I want to thank you all for your great attention.


OK, so at UCLA, I study how learning and memory processes affect eating behaviors and how eating is learned about and remembered. And so as a memory researcher, something that I've always been interested in is just this basic question of, why is some information better remembered than others? And so this is something that probably everyone here has some familiarity with. We know that there are some things that can be quite difficult to remember, such as maybe where you left your keys or the name of someone you just met, and yet there are other things that are really easy to remember. So this could be maybe the phone number that you haven't used in several years, but would easily come to mind. And so we know that there's this large variability in terms of memory performance. The question is, why? So if you were to consult your local memory textbook, you'd find a lot of diagrams and models that look something like this. And the basic idea with all these models is that information comes into the memory system. Depending on the model that you're choosing, the information is going to get processed slightly differently. But basically, how well the information makes it through these channels is going to dictate the strength of the memory as it's transferred to long-term storage. And so an issue that I've always had with these models of memory is just this basic question of, what is input? It's this very large blanket term, and it doesn't really lend itself to the possibility that the memory system might be biased towards remembering some kinds of information over others. And what this really speaks to is a larger debate that's been going on for several decades in cognitive science, and that is, are cognitive abilities, in this case memory, are they just this blank slate, or are we systematically biased, for memory at least, to remember certain information over others? And so some of the work that I and a number of people have been doing for the past several years has been trying to document that there are these systematic biases to the human memory system that reflect evolutionary pressures. So a really nice and recent example of this is that we find better recall for objects when they're described as being touched by someone who's sick compared to someone who's described as being healthy. And so the way these experiments work is participants come into the lab and there are these different trials, and in these trials there are objects and the objects are just described as being touched by different people. And so in the first trial we have a coffee cup, which is described as being touched by someone who has a high fever, but then we also have trials like an object like this hat that's described as being touched by someone who has green eyes. And so participants do a number of these trials and then they're just asked to remember all of the different objects that they saw and of course this is all nicely counterbalanced so you've got all the different variations of objects and descriptions. And what we find is that we have better memory for objects when they're described as being touched by someone who's sick compared to someone who's described as healthy. And you can get the exact same effect if you get rid of the descriptions and you just put pictures of faces and you say this person touched this object but then you vary some of the faces just look like healthy individuals but then some of the faces are showing signs of sickness. So maybe like a runny nose or watery eyes, you get a similar effect. And so the idea here is that it looks like the memory system is biased towards tracking potential sources of contamination. And this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. The first sort of documentation of these biases in the human memory system is known as a survival processing effect. And so here what the researchers did was they had participants come into the lab again and they told them that they're gonna see a wordless and they had to rate those words based on their relevance to this imagined survival scenario. And they're told that, you know, they're supposed to imagine themselves stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without any basic survival materials. And over the next few months you need to find a steady supply of food and water and protect yourself from predators. So that's the encoding scenario that they're given. Then they're shown a series of just regular concrete nouns but hopefully they're imagining some sort of situation like this and they're thinking, how am I gonna use all these different words in this survival scenario? And then the control group that this gets run against is a scenario where participants are asked to imagine that they're planning moving to a foreign land. They need to locate a new home and purchase new belongings. And so you've got very similarly worded scenarios but hopefully the participants are thinking of something that looks a little bit more like this. And of course the emphasis on this scenario isn't really anything of fitness value. And the nice thing about this design is that all the participants are given the exact same words in the exact same order. Everything's exactly the same. It's just the encoding scenario that we give to them. So then we ask them how many words that they saw and just write them all down and we get much better memory performance when items are encoded in the survival scenario compared to the moving scenario and I'll get to the pleasant scenario in a second. But it's not anything, the important thing to keep in mind it's not anything about the words themselves. So these are just random nouns and they're not any more relevant to the survival task than to this moving task. It seems to be something about the way people are encoding this information which is yielding the better retention. And so this kind of made a big splash in the memory world because we know about the different encoding scenarios that can yield really good memory performance. And what you see when you compare those different encoding scenarios to the survival scenario, you get sort of this off the chart memory performance when words are processed in this evolutionarily relevant manner. And so my contribution to this work, this is what I did as an undergraduate, was I reasoned if there's a survival processing effect and the idea behind it is that there are these evolutionary pressures that have affected the memory system, then there should be some sort of memory bias towards raising children. That's a very important part of evolution. And so we should see a similar benefit if we put the emphasis on raising a child. And so we just created a very similarly worded encoding scenario, but now we say that you've just parented a child and you have to provide care and nourishment to that child and we compare that to the survival group and the pleasantness control group. And the pleasantness control group, it's just sort of a gold standard way of encoding information to yield good memory. And what we see is we get a similar benefit to memory when words are encoded in this parenting scenario, it's basically just as strong as the survival processing scenario. So this was a neat finding, but we wanted to take it a little bit further and we asked this question of how general is this parent processing scenario? Is it specific to just your own child? Or if we describe the child as being adopted, and thus it's a little bit less fitness relevant, will we see any differences in memory performance? So we just took our original parenting scenario and we tweaked a few words and now it read that it was an adopted child and we compare the two parenting scenarios and then we also had participants imagine that either their child or an adopted child was doing the survival situation, so we call it third person survival processing. And what we find is it's pretty interesting, we see this main effect of biological relatedness affecting memory performance on these two tasks. So this seems to be a memory bias when these scenarios are relevant to your own children compared to an adopted child. And so I think these findings can be nicely summarized by this idea that the evolutionary fitness relevance of a stimulus, a behavior event, we can just say information, it seems to potentiate the ability of that information to be later remembered. And so if we're thinking about modeling human memory from a computational standpoint, it would be nice to incorporate this factor, we've decided to call it omega, that somehow quantifies the fitness relevance of information and then we'd predict there's this linear relationship between the omega value, which is again, this is the quantified fitness relevance of an event and the likelihood that that information will be remembered. And so you could use potentially this omega scaling factor to scale existing models of memory and you'd be able to explain a lot of the existing data that I just reviewed. But of course, anytime you introduce any new type of theory or model, not only do you wanna explain existing data, but you also wanna generate novel hypotheses and then test them with empirical methods. And so it's nice about the scaling factors that it makes very clear predictions about the way memory will proceed. And so basically as long as we can vary information on its fitness relevance, we should see differences in memory outcomes. So that got us interested in looking at memory of eating because eating is this really obviously evolutionary important behavior that people do every day. The other reason why we're interested in eating is that while these imagined scenarios are interesting for theoretical reasons, it's sort of hard to know what to make of these imagined scenarios. They're a little bit weird and it's not entirely clear what, how they relate to real world behavior. So we decided let's just actually look at real world behavior. And suggestive that there might be evolutionary pressures on the human memory system that bias it towards remember eating events or food relevant information. There's a really neat study done by researchers at Santa Barbara a few years ago where they had participants walk through a farmer's market and they basically sampled all the stands. They got a little bit of food at each stand. And then the researchers brought the participants into a tent and they had them just recreate all the different stand locations of the farmer's market. And what they find is this really interesting result where the memory accuracy, so on the y-axis we have memory error. So lower values means more accurate memory. More accurate memory for the location of the stands was associated with the caloric density of the food that was sold at each stand. And so this actually fits exactly the prediction that our omega scaling factor would make as you vary the fitness relevance of information in this instance caloric density of a food item we're seeing better memory performance. So that's nice and encouraging. But there's another reason why we were interested in looking at memory of eating. And that's because it turns out that memory and eating processes are highly intertwined. So memory actually turns out to play an important role in moderating future food consumption. And so if I were to ask a lot of people what causes eating, probably a standard answer would be something that reflects a homeostatic model where there's some sort of lack of nutrients. There's a detection of that lack of nutrients and so then a signal gets sent to encourage eating. Then as you eat, there's the detection that nutrients are coming into the system so there's some sort of stop signal that will stop eating and that's a nice homeostatic model. And certainly we know that such a model exists and we've worked out the physiology quite well in both rodent and human models. And yet a lot of people are starting to realize that a purely homeostatic model of eating can't explain all eating behaviors. And specifically it can't explain eating behaviors that we find particularly problematic. So if we eat just because we're lacking nutrients that doesn't explain why people overeat or why they eat when they're not hungry or lacking nutrients. So a number of people have started to suggest that there are other factors that influence eating and one of the recent ideas that's been gaining popularity is that perhaps memory is motivating eating behavior. And so this idea got started by looking at patients with amnesia like the famous patient HM and a phenomenon that they would observe with these patients is that you could serve them a meal and then they'd finish the meal, get rid of it and then they'd very quickly forget about the meal because of their condition. And then what you could do is you could serve them the exact same meal and they would readily accept it and start eating. And you could do this over and over again in a cyclic fashion. Similar to this, their self-reported hunger levels didn't seem to correlate strongly with their time since their last meal. And so this seems to suggest that something about having an intact memory of your most recent meal is impacting how hungry you are and how much you eat at a subsequent meal. Related to this, we can get similar effects in healthy individuals. So this isn't just some quirk of patients with amnesia. So you can do things that manipulate the strength of someone's meal memory by either having them watch TV or play video games, essentially anything to distract them. And not only do they have a reduced memory of the eating event, but they'll also eat more food in the future. And this is obviously concerning because we know this type of distracted eating is rising in prevalence. People often eat while distracted. In fact, we have entire food genres that are dedicated towards this sort of eating in front of a television screen. And yet the empirical data is quite clear. This style of eating can promote future overeating. We've also known for a long time that memory processes and obesity are associated with each other. So you can put rats on a Western diet and not only do they quickly gain weight, but you also very quickly can observe these deficits in memory performance on a large number of different tasks. Conversely, you can lesion the hippocampus, which is an important brain region for memory formation. And we see increases in food consumption and then weight gain. And you get the exact same types of effects in humans. So BMI is negatively correlated with episodic memory performance. And then in children and adults with obesity, we see reduced gray matter in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which are areas that are associated with memory formation. Now there's this obvious issue of causality here. So is it that people with just poor memory performance, assuming there's some sort of distribution, is it that those who have just generally poor memory performance are more susceptible to gaining weight and obesity, or is obesity causing these deficits in memory performance? There seems to be a little bit of evidence of both, but there also seems to be evidence that these things are working together in a cyclic fashion such that eating a Western diet is disrupting hippocampal function. We know the hippocampus is important for memory formation and that memory moderates future eating. And so if that is now messed up, you're eating more of that Western diet. And so you've got this vicious cycle of obesity and cognitive decline. So bringing this all together, we got really interested in this question of just our meal memory special. And the idea behind this is that if memory of a recent meal is so important for moderating future food consumption, is it better remembered than other similar procedural tasks? And while you might think that memory of eating might be poor because you have that experience of having difficulty, maybe remembering what you ate a few days ago, those of us who study procedural memories know that most behaviors aren't all that well remembered. So if I were to ask you how many stop signs you pass on your way home from work every day, you'd probably give me a fairly inaccurate answer. That's just the way the procedural memory works. And so our question was, is memory for eating no different or because of this important role that memory plays in moderating future consumption, is it actually an enhanced form of memory? And then the other reason we were interested in this question is what I alluded to earlier and that's this larger theoretical question of, is the human memory system shaped by evolution to preferentially remember some types of behaviors over others? So our hypothesis is that meal memory should be particularly strong. And so the way we have to test this is comparing memory of eating compared to some sort of similar task that it isn't eating. So the way that we do this is we bring participants into the lab and they sit at a setup that looks something like this. So we've got a cardboard box with these different symbols around it, a bowl filled with either M&Ms or beads and then this narrow glass container. And we tell our participants that we're interested in studying memory of verbal information while distracted. And so while they watch this film, they're gonna have to either eat an M&M or move an M&M from one bowl to the container or move a bead from the bowl to the container every time a tone is sounded.  And so then participants do this task. We then move them to a new context and they do a little distractor task. And then we ask them questions about memory for information that they heard during the video. We ask them to recreate this task context and we ask them critically, how many times did they perform this task? And what's nice about this procedure is that we know every single person did their respective tasks exactly 30 times. So we know that because they're only toned, they're only 30 tones throughout the video, but we can also just weigh the bowls as these people leave and confirm that they actually did the task exactly 30 times.  And so we're looking now at memory error for how many times they did the task. And what we see quite strongly is that you get much better memory when you're doing this eating behavior compared to these nearly identical behaviors that aren't eating. And so they're lacking the fitness relevance. Similar to this, when we ask participants to recreate the task context, we get better memory performance. So again, this is error for recreating the context, better memory when subjects are eating instead of these other two similar tasks. Now this isn't quite significant, it's sort of hovering around statistically significant. So we're not entirely sure how reliable this effect is, but the general direction is fitting our hypothesis. So the important evolutionary aspects of this eating task, where you're doing it, and specifically what you're doing are well remembered, but then questions about how long the video lasted or information that was presented during the video, we don't see any differences between the groups. So that really nicely fits our hypotheses. Another really interesting finding that we found was that BMI was negatively correlated with contextual memory performance only in the eating condition. So only when participants were in that condition where they're eating food, we actually see better memory for recreating the context with participants of higher BMI. Now I should preface this with, we didn't actively recruit high BMI individuals, this just fell from recruiting a large number of subjects, and so we need to replicate this further. But an interesting theoretical understanding of these results is that perhaps overweight individuals are encoding more of their eating environments, which then can make them more susceptible to cues that are associated with that eating environment. And so this is known as the Incentive Motivation Theory, it's quite popular these days. And so the way this works is that we know every time you have an eating event, there are these cues that come right before the food that you eat. And what can happen is that these cues and that food outcome can enter these Pavlovian relationships with each other, such that this cue, the McDonald's sign, gets learned as a reliable predictor of a food outcome. And as a result of learning this relationship, the next time you encounter that stimulus or a stimulus that resembles a conditioned stimulus, it's gonna activate a memory of the food outcome and that can motivate desire to consume food. And so we know this is how a lot of addiction-like behaviors happen. This nicely explains why addicts can go through a rehab program somewhere else, they feel really good, no desire to use the drug, and then they come home to their hometown and they start experiencing all these cues that were associated with the drug outcome and now all of a sudden they're triggered to obtain the drug outcome. So we think that might be happening with eating behaviors. And so what our results suggest is that possibly eating, sorry, obesity is related to stronger cue food outcome learning. And again, we have this really interesting question of causality. So is there just some sort of distribution of people's ability to learn these cue food outcome associations and those that are really good at it are now more susceptible to gaining weight? Or is obesity somehow changing the learning preferences towards learning and being better at learning these cue food outcome associations? So these are interesting studies that we'd like to look at in the future. Now one issue that we had with our findings was a concern that our M&Ms contain glucose and it turns out that glucose is actually a really important substrate for the hippocampus. It sort of fuels its performance. And so there have been studies that shown that large amounts of glucose ingestion either before or after a task can improve memory performance. Now this is usually a very large dose of glucose nowhere near what we're using in our M&Ms but nonetheless this is still a potential physiological explanation of our results. So we're arguing that there's something about this eating behavior that's really evolutionarily important and that's what's causing this benefit in memory but it's possible that maybe it's just because the participants who are eating are getting this physiological ingestion of glucose. So what we did was we brought new participants back into the lab and we had them all perform the bead moving task. So again a task that's of no fitness relevance but we have some of them drink a liquid solution before and after the task that contains sugar and it contains the exact same amount of sugar that they would have had if they would have consumed those 30 M&Ms and then we compare that to a group that drinks Stivia so this is a sweetener that doesn't have glucose or just a water control group. So now we have three conditions. All of them are performing a behavior that we think is low on a fitness value but some of them are getting quite a bit of glucose as they do the task. And what we see in line with our predictions is no differences in memory performance for these three groups. And we also when we look at the group that was drinking the sugar, we don't see this association anymore between BMI and memory for the eating environment. And we don't get any differences either for the content of the video or the duration of it. So putting this all together, we've developed what we're calling the memory of eating task or the meat. And what we like about this is that it seems to be this nice simple behavioral paradigm that will enable us and others to systematically study memory of eating behaviors. And so, yeah, this is our setup. What's nice about this procedure, not only do I think we've already asked and answered a few interesting questions but will enable us to answer a large number of new and novel questions. So things like how is memory of eating influenced by the food item that's being consumed? So we can do things like look at is eating 30 peanuts just as well remembered or better remembered than eating 30 pieces of popcorn. So this is a question that memory researchers probably wouldn't consider because again, they're relying on these models of just information coming into the memory system and there's not much discussion about what is that information but our omega scaling factor makes this prediction that well, the peanuts are more calorically dense, they're of higher fitness value and so we should see better memory performance when you do this task and you're eating peanuts compared to popcorn. And of course, we'll see how the data plans out. We can also look at how pace of eating affects memory of eating. And so by using this task because we cue participants on when to eat, we're effectively getting to set the eating pace and so what we can do either by spacing out or collapsing the distribution of the tones, we can look at how fast versus slow eating affects memory of eating and that might have downstream effects on future food consumption. And again, all these materials are really cheap, they're easy to use. We've put the Python code that controls the video and the beeps all online and made it freely available and so we're hoping that other memory researchers or eating researchers will adopt this paradigm and we can study it together. So in conclusion, I hope I've showed you that the human memory system is biased towards remembering fitness relevant information and this should inform how we formalize models of memory and how we conceptualize the structure of the human mind. We've shown that meal memories seem to be particularly strong and they may be contributing to weight regulation and obesity may be related to an increased ability to learn cue food associations but of course we need to run replication studies with higher populations of, greater populations of high BMI individuals to confirm or deny these findings. So with that, I'd like to thank Aaron Blaisdell and Janet Tamayama who are my advisors, a team of undergrads who have helped with a lot of this work, my funding source, UCLA and the Dish Lab for their support and I'd be happy to take any questions. I'll kick off a question. Sure. Given that this is the ancestral health symposium and a lot of us are interested in taking what we understand scientifically about the evolutionary mismatch of our modern environment and how our physiology functions including our mental physiology, what could be some implications of this research for how we can then use this in our own daily lives? Yeah, so some of the memory researchers, especially the ones that have pioneered the work that memory of eating seems to influence how much you eat in the future, have been trying to promote eating practices that basically improve meal memories and so they've done some work just basically at a psychological level, queuing people just to focus on their eating events so the opposite of distracting them, having them really focus on the sensory aspects of their eating events seems to reduce how much they eat in the future and they've also looked into if you can choose food items that perhaps you need to chew for longer, that might result in better memory of eating and so I would say any type of manipulation that you can do that makes you more focused on your eating event will probably likely make you feel fuller and eat less in the future. Based upon your research, do you think that dessert, so having a meal but then having dessert, would that be the infusion of sugar to make that meal more memorable? That's what I haven't thought about it that way. Yeah, that's possible. Given we know that glucose ingestion can improve memory, so that's possible. You could eat something and then ingest a lot of glucose and then that might make the meal memory more stronger but of course now you've ingested a lot of glucose which has its own consequences. But what's nice is this area of memory of eating, like we really don't know the factors that influence memory of eating and so we're hoping with this paradigm and other researchers are now getting on board with this, we can actually start to determine the factors that influence memory of eating. I found the results in the HM case really surprising but also very persuasive. Do you, can you tell me more about that?  How many times could he eat a meal? So from those papers, they're old papers but I've read that they can give him about 1,000 calories so I think they do 300 calories per meal and by the third one or fourth one they just stop it. At some point he'll not eat anymore but the surprising thing is, is that they will continue to eat in this way. Right, thank you. Related to that actually I'll just throw in a slide. So this was looked at in a really nice controlled model with modern neuroscience techniques. So basically what we have the ability to do now is basically zap memories from a living mouse and so what they did was they had some mice eat and then they got rid of the memory for eating and what that did was it resulted in quicker initiation of a future meal and then they ate much more on that future meal. And so this is a really nice controlled model of that old effects with HM and the amnesiac patients. And when you say zap the memory here, are you just doing something to prevent the long-term potential? Yeah, you're disrupting the consolidation of the memory. Wow, cool, thank you. The person's impression of the fitness relevance of some food can vary from person to person. So if you ask someone here how healthy the healthy whole grains in front of them are, you might get a different answer, very different answer to somebody off the street. Is there any indication of someone's understanding of the fitness relevance versus the actual fitness relevance of the food stuff? Yeah, that's a really good question. So when we've been thinking about the scaling factor, something that I've decided is at first it was just going to be the fitness relevance of an event or information, but it seems like it has to be the sort of perceived fitness relevance, like it might have to do with actually individual perception of the fitness relevance of an event. And so there's actually the finding I was talking about about you show pictures of a face of someone who touched an object and sometimes the people look sick. If you describe the people who look sick as actors who are wearing makeup, you get rid of the effect. And so to me, that suggests that there's something about perceiving it as being of more greater fitness value that's affecting the memory. What I think, so we've had this question too, is we want to vary food items based on their fitness relevance and see if we get differences in memory. The question is like, well, which food items do we choose? We've thought a lot about this. I think ultimately the approach that we're going to take is just trying a lot of different food items, seeing if we get any differences in memory, just seeing differences in memory for different food items would be really interesting. And then we can start to look at the characteristics that emerge of the food items that are very well remembered. So perhaps it's something about salt content or fat content could be a number of things. I think we're going to see the way the data plays out and then we'll arise conclusions from that. That's lunch. Thank you.