My name is Lorenz Schroding. I'm working for a publishing company in Switzerland. You can also chat with anybody. We're the publisher of the Swiss weekly newspaper, Wolfenzeit & Wollt. The company was founded in 1981. Don't get the images, it doesn't change either. We're a co-operative society. That means the company is owned by its workforce. You can find us on www.wollt.ch. Actually, we are really, really old school printers. So our workflow management system looks like this. So the columns are actually the stages where the texts are currently. So there are seven stages. Like when they go from proofreading to layout, the editor in charge just writes a timestamp in one of the rows. That's how we are working now. We're not that old school with layout. So it's not anymore that we're using glue and scissors in order to make the layout. That was before that we just have a DTP software and everything is on the file server. So there's no workflow automation tool or something like that. Normally, since we're on the weekly newspaper, we go and print Wednesday evening. We have that deadline, which is looming always. So then after that, the content is extracted and moved to the web page. So we have the same content on the web page, like on print. Except that it's a little bit complicated, like with image licenses and stuff like that. So sometimes we have to change images and add some other stuff on the website. So that takes a little bit of time. The problem with that workflow is also that the person who produces the website, if she or he runs into trouble, then most of the time, the print production, people are already gone. And he has to phone around and try to fix things. So that's not really, really, really good. But at the moment, it works for us. So our problem now is that we've figured out that our readers have those things and they wanted to have an app. So we made one. Normally, if you're producing apps or something, then the normal path is to add an API to the website and just get the content from there. But I feel that this will have another problem or this will cause other problems with our workflows. So the other thing people do is buy some really expensive, multi-channel publishing whatsoever workflow tools, which is not what I wanted to do because that also would have meant that we have another blocking into the proprietary software we're now using for ETP. So what I was now, the work that I did in the last year was create a software which allows us to assign the responsibility of creating the digital addition to the print production team. In order to do that, it was crucial that the print production team has instant feedback. So it doesn't work if they need to push a button and then wait and then load some other software and then look at the results and then go back to their ETP software and push the button again. Since, yeah, it's always really stressful around 5 PM and people do last minute changes and they just need the system to work in automatic fashion. So the architecture I came up with is, you see here, it is actually just a passive thing which observes the file system on the server. We're using for production, we do a spotlight on the Mac and it also works on iDotify and Linux. It just watches a directory and records the changes and passes it to the spread flow engine. Spread flow is a data flow engine. It means it's like huge data or like the amazing pixels like we've seen yesterday. Regrettably, I don't have such a beautiful interface for that. In my case, it's just Python code which is declaratively listing the steps of the workflow. Then on the other side, the output is different files. MongoDB is for the media content. I will show you afterwards. I have the HTML app and then for, in order to crop and convert images, I'm using Thumber with OpenCV that has a feature detection algorithm. So it's possible to automatically cut or crop images. Then for the PDF view in the app, I need to reassemble PDF pages into double spreads. And there's also XML output which goes to a Swiss media database and also to the association of the blind and visually impaired people. Thanks. So actually, the theme I've come up with just glues together all those amazing open source software which we already have like Exit 2, PDF RWA, RW for a PDF manipulation, and XML for exoslative processing, which is very important in order to extract the texts from the print content. Yeah, some graphs say. And also Panda can PDF to Cairo, which is amazing. I can show you an example afterwards for PDF to Cairo. OK, so I'm trying to do a demo now. How much time do I have? So this is what our production stuff is working with. OK, thanks. That's a view of the double spreads. So people like it to compare what images they have on the left and the right side. This is extracted automatically from the InDesign files. Pages are actually saved as JPEG in metadata. Then these are the stories with some metadata. It's also possible to add some warnings. People forget to do some things with them. And final publishing process is that's actually the HTML files produced by the data flow engine. Just to see that on the monitor view. Quite a problem for that one as well. Oh, nice. I have no idea. So we've just opened something. So that's actually the live preview. And yeah, if I change something in the InDesign file and save, then it will be automatically updated. Here I also have this graph here you see. So that's actually Adobe Illustrator file which is automatically cropped and rendered as an SVG such that I can display it in a web browser. So operand kyro are really great for such things. Then I think I'll put the slides again. Yeah, OK. So all the components are on my GitHub repository. What is missing? So I actually need, I really need more people who have use cases for such a thing. Because it's a bit difficult for me to come up with minimal examples from such a complex workflow we have now for us. So if you have like a smaller header or something, an obi project or something like that, it really would be easier to see some examples and perhaps provide ideas how to integrate with the system here. I cannot simply just publish all the things we have now since it's huge and it wouldn't be a really good example of use. So that's actually my question to you. If you have questions to me you can ask now.


I'm studying these problems deeply, I'm diving to the rest and to the darkest parts of America and to the lightest parts and I want to, you know, show people and teach people their own narrative because these narratives determine what we can do. And there is a narrative that exists, people just haven't read it. They just don't know about it because our schools were bad and stuff. They haven't taught them to love learn, they haven't taught them the great democratic inheritance that we have in America and in the world. But like, this place is awesome. America is so great, it's so great.  And only by loving it so much can you really deal with those things. But I believe that all the materials we need are there. We have the internet, we have the people, we have the need, we have all these ingredients. We just need these catalysts to start things moving. I want to help you that catalyst. Boom! What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sockian. We are on site at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in the beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about the great American novel. We have Aiden Fitzsimmons joining us on the show. Hello. Hello, Alan. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'm super pumped. Aiden and I have been talking so much prior to this interview. He's a philosopher, writer, and synthesizer focused on the great American novel, which puts together all of the most important ideas from American poetry, philosophy, literature, history, and thought. And you can check out Aiden's links below. Aiden, let's start things off with our question. What is your current take on the state of our world? Asymmetrical and hollowed out. So what I mean by that is history doesn't progress perfectly. The mean of every dice roll doesn't happen every time. So there's all these imperfections, all these things that get stuck.  There's something both striving and imperfect in us. And so our world is the last, I'd say since the 60s, the last time we saw sort of like a true like flood of consciousness of people starting to be aware of the structures around them that made them who they are and started wanting to like, you know, expand beyond them and create new structures. They sort of lost, right? They lost RFK was shot, MLK was shot, Nixon won, Reagan won, Clinton won, Bush won. It's been the same story for the past two years. The victory of capital. It's, you know, the Cold War, both sides lean into their own, lean into themselves, lean into their ego. Like you know what I mean? So communism gets a character of itself and capitalism in response to the USA becomes a character of itself. And we've been still living in that paradigm that the baby boomers sold out and created. We think of the baby boomers as the 60s like hippies, but that was like a small percent of them. Most of them sold out from the beginning and the rest sold out as time went on. And the, you know, Gen X and at least the first half of the millennials have sort of, you know, inherited that world, that paradigm. There hasn't been any change. No one's escaped. We've been seeing less and less sort of fewer and fewer of these like, you know, people who push us outside. And so what we have now is this culture that has sort of never known anything but this sort of consumerism, this sort of hollow, this idea that it's the end of history, this idea that we live in a world that's done with history. History was World War II and those easily narrativeizable things. I mean, in my US history class and my public school, we never got past Watergate. We didn't learn anything past them. We just don't know the history of the world that's created us that we're born into. We come into it totally oblivious and because of our affluence, which is hollowing out, money versus creation is a very different thing. We've been able to sort of sit back on ourselves for a while and let inertia sort of ossify, things haul from the inside because we can.  And I think it's getting, the rot is starting to show and things like Trump and things like, all the conflicts around the world, the way the social media is being used. You can tell that, the very fact that the internet's happened so full communication is almost possible and instead of achieving collective excellence together, all of our weaknesses are being amplified. It just shows that I guess another reason I say hollow is because our technology has stripped our morality. Martin Luther King has a quote about like that but it's just a general thought people have had for a long time. You know, especially post World War II, post like military industrial complex money, post the rationalization of the university and all these things. We have a world where people, we have a world created by the great minds and the great inventions, the great thoughts of everyone who's came before us but then we there inheritors who inherit this big, you know, cyborg we're all operating, you know, like together, we never read the driver. We haven't read the driver's manual. We haven't learned from the great people from our past. And we haven't realized that we have to. So I think we're hollow. I also think we're especially cool in the sense that like right now capital is kind of just digging in, right? Like capital, like money and power has been this big sift for a while. You ever see the elephant chart? People feeling different parts of the elephant saying that they're seeing different things. No, no, the elephant chart is a chart of world economic growth in the last like 50 years, right? And like percentage of growth. Imagine an elephant, right?  So like people in like, you know, developing economies like India and China is this big, big back of the trunk, like these huge growth in the last 50 years and then the very, the trunk, the tip, the tail is like the global, like 1%, 0.1%. But then the dip, the big dip, like near 0%, like people whose lives like haven't gotten like in a relative sense better since like the like 70s, 80s is like the former like NATO middle class, essentially. We're just been hauled out. We're seeing also, you know, affecting that now. And so capitals, and so people are starting to realize but also money and power have so many, you know, avenues which have power over us, the culture industry, like the way they can set all of our narratives, make us sort of blind to the things that need to be done. So we're right now seeing all this asymetrical digging in Fox News is another example to preserve power when its basis is being hauled out by the day. Same with our big Dow numbers. When we create measures, right, for an economy, when we create standards and measures and tests, we're going to start doing whatever we can to pass that test, whether or not we retain the actual virtues and goals that we're there to begin with. So once we make the Dow or like the Wall Street numbers, like the measure of the economy as a whole, we start like leaning into that way and trying to pass the test by any mean necessary without maybe showing the same underlying values that once made that test valuable. So that was a long ramble, but... You can tell that Aiden is a synthesizer. Yeah, I definitely think in broad strokes. And not so bracketly too, I'm just, you know, I don't want to like lay 100% claim to anything I say in a sense like I'm declaring truth. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Yeah, we know that. Totally know that. And you gave so many excellent examples throughout history through the use of technology. I loved the, even on the global scale, the idea of this elephant. And that's a really good way of displaying people that have been just taken out of what is just a couple of dollars a day of income to a couple of tens of dollars, if not even a hundred dollars a day of income compared to people that you used to make a hundred dollar a day income that have stayed in a hundred dollar a day income. Yes. And then the very end of the tail of the trunk which is just skyrocketing. The globalist sort of forces the companies in the... Yeah, that's a really good one. And also just your overall idea of the code that society has been pushing forth since really the industrial revolution has been about this number of the economy and the number of making civilization better, which we have in many ways eradicated a lot of disease and issues, increased longevity, increased the quality of living with a lot of access to information technology and this type of stuff's great. Oh, yes. Simultaneously, our spiritual actualization and transcendence and guide towards unity and cohesion and planetary harmony with nature and our ecosystem that we reside in has taken a back seat to the numbers of GDP and... Absolutely. Global warming. I mean, we've kind of changed that as an example of the effects of that.  Another way to put it as you initially said is that what happened to MLK, what happened to JFK, what happened to Lenin, what happened to a lot of these leaders around the world that wanted a deeper drive towards peace and harmony and unfortunately there seem to be potentially forces that work together to make sure that did not come to be and why has it been that Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan were potentially some of the targets for centralized banking to be implemented? Interesting. Yeah, and why are Iran and North Korea some of the last ones and why are they targets as well now? And what does cryptocurrency and blockchain technology mean for all of this and there's a lot more to unpack with you and I'm sure you have perspectives on all of what I just said and we could probably talk for like ever on all of this and let's jump, because let's jump, there's still so much to talk about. Let's jump. I'll move the chair, I'll do that. Yeah, you're good.  So let's jump into the journey. So born near Providence in Rhode Island in the United States in northeast corner and as a kid you didn't travel too much but you somehow managed to get hooked into being some good enough of a student to end up getting into Harvard. So teach us about you growing up as a kid and how that even happened. Okay. Growing up as a kid I grew up in Swansea, Massachusetts which is right over the border from Providence. This whole crazy colonial history as to why Swansea is part of Massachusetts which shouldn't be part of Rhode Island. Well, in Plymouth colony that doesn't exist anymore. But I love my home town very much and I love that the water is definitely in me. So I'm like Massachusetts and Boston but I'm also Rhode Island. And I have a little sister. I have two parents. My mom is very social and bubbly and just a saint and a go-getter and she's a very good person and she helps like English and second language and first generation low income kids get acclimated to UMass Dartmouth. UMass Massachusetts in the south when New Bedford and Fall River and they're pretty poor community so that's a huge population of UMass Dartmouth. And then my dad is like a historian. He teaches like occasionally at Rhode Island School of Design like he took a Vietnam War films class and stuff. But he was like the sort of stay-at-home dad growing up. And he's really brilliant. So him being my dad growing up definitely helped make me who I am. Same with my sister. My sister's much more like him. I'm more like my mom. So they raised me and when I was little I'd say I'm going to Harvard. I heard it's a pretty good school because I was that full of myself and then believed in my own intelligence that much. And then as like middle school and then I went to middle school and I sort of forgot about that. I left behind a child to sort of figure out how to be a person, how to socialize.  So I had to socialize in this small public school where everyone's known each other for their whole lives in the same grade together. And so that definitely impacted me. And then I was in theater. I was an actor for the longest time. So I'm definitely still like an actor in my blood. Acting has informed my life in a lot of ways. I think acting is a very important aspect of being in general of being a person. I think everything is acting. And not in a false way but in a true way everything is acting. And then by the time I was at sophomore summer of high school I was starting to get like kind of just have a rough time with my parents and have a rough time in my life in general. And then I came out that summer with this burning dream that I was going to prove myself. I was going to go to Harvard. I knew my high school like the local community college was sort of like the standard slash the height. And so it wasn't like a plausible thing. It wasn't like tossed around. It wasn't like talked about. There weren't the guidance counselors who knew anything about anything. So I had to sort of do it myself. I had to sort of do it myself. I could do it. And I figured I might as well try my very hardest and believe that I can. That's the best chance that I'd have. And then if I fail it's like at least try my best. And so I applied Harvard Early Action. I got in and it was like the best day of my life. You know what I mean? Like wow. Harvard. It's crazy. I'm still very grateful for it. I still walk around like so grateful. I don't take anything for granted. What were the things that you did from sophomore to senior that you think got you to take it in? Besides like doing extracurriculars and being like president of the drama company and doing like a show choir and doing all this historical volunteering at a few local museums and like in Fall River. And there was also like a colonial museum in my hometown that I worked for. And it was my essays. It was my essays that got me in though. I mean the grades were all in my SAT subject tests and all blah blah blah. Like all the scores were perfect and stuff. But you know they didn't need another like of that. But my essays were unique. My essays were our why I got in. I'm 100% sure. I haven't checked my files or anything. But my essays were really good. And that was why I got in. What did you write about? So for my Common App Essay. They were both Harvard's Harvard Early Action. It was like one for one. The Common App Essay was like very like well written, dramatic. It was about theater and socialization and my like my life. And it was more tragic and like but also hopeful and powerful and like well written and about like me becoming a person. And then my Harvard supplement was a satire about the Iron Knight who was me on his quest to be better than all the like there's like these like silver and golden knights you know like with their squires shining their armor. And it was in his quest to go to the King, the Dean of Admissions and ask him and convince him to allow me to marry his daughter, the princess, Harvard. And I sort of just, it's a very funny A. So it was like a really like funny piece. I even made an incest joke about the Dean of Admissions because his name was Dean William Fitzsimmons. And so like I have one less M than him. But I made like an incest joke and I made it a Yale joke too. And it was just like funny. And then I ended with like this little sincere speech. Like a like purposefully and truthfully like sincere and naive speech. Sort of like yeah I know like there's all these awesome knights.  But I, and like I talked about myself and just, I can't you know I can't like swear any of these things to you. All I can say is that A. Like trying to win your princess, trying to make myself better to be worth this Harvard has made me better. This journey, this dream, having this dream that I worked so hard for has made me better. So I think you know I just thank you for, even if I don't get in like, even if I can't marry her like I thank you for that. And be like I just can't even begin to imagine the amazing things that we could do together. She and I. It was just very sincere and like youthful and heartfelt. Plus the joke about the Dean and incest probably like got like a, like the reader was probably like, pop Bill get in here. So they probably get my name look a little more remembered. So yeah. Okay, cool. That's good. That's good on you for writing a very strong essay. And what was it called in the addition to the essay? The Iron Knight or the. Yeah, but the Iron Knights called a, what is it called in addition to the essay? The Common App Essay? Oh, it was the Harvard Supplement. It was the Harvard Supplement Essay. Supplement, yeah. Yeah, so write whatever you want for Harvard. Cool, yeah, yeah. So the Supplement Essay plus all the leadership in the extracurriculars and the excellent grades and test scores. Okay, cool, cool. So then, all right. So you have this profound moment of the, oh my gosh, I'm in Harvard, holy cow. All right. What is it like landing here in 2016 in the Harvard Zoo? So I, on one hand I was very, you know, surreal and excited and grateful. Like I was meeting awesome people, making friends. But on the other hand, I was pretty disillusioned of very fast. Harvard, while being one of the best places on earth, was also because it's not using its power very well. It too is hollowed. It too is like sort of a lack of a lot of larger problems in society. And the problem with Harvard is you can see it happening around you. You can imagine like, okay, 50% of my classmates are going into like consulting and finance and going to reify power structures. And they got here because these various existential lottery factors of like these parents, this neighborhood, this school system, this upper middle class way of like life and moving through a system. I guess you just imagine like if everyone every year is like this across all the other, across Princeton, Chicago, Stanford, if everyone's like this, what are we going to do? Has everyone been like this for the past 15 years? Because a lot of things about the world today would make a lot of sense if like, if the leaders of the world have been like all like this. Because they're all just like, they're smart in a system following way. They're good at following the obvious cheese, whereas like Nietzsche would have torn his hair out. The more important intelligence is to like break out of the systems you're in, to transcend, to recombine, to subvert. And no one's doing it. I just expected to get there and be surrounded by like brilliant people in different ways who would all teach me something new and we'd all get excited talking until the wee hours and we'd synthesize and we'd try to save the world together. And then like that wasn't really happening. And then Trump got elected and I was, I mean everyone was shocked. Everyone was, had some personal reaction to it. But people moved on with life as usual really fast and I couldn't, I couldn't, Trump being elected is just like it's so much deeper than just a political problem or just like this problem or that problem. It's all of the problems that we haven't dealt with as a culture, as a civilization, as a world, as a country, as individuals for forever. All the things we've pushed off are still here and we still haven't dealt with them. The history that makes us is still unfinished. It's still flawed. There are sins in us as well as successes. And we haven't dealt with all of them. And we can. We have all the people. We have all the, every idea that exists is part of the energy kind of the whole. So we just have to take more of those holes in to fix the other parts. There's no, you know, there's no discontinuity. So we just have to dig and try harder. As a culture and as people, we just aren't. And so it's a deep cultural problem and I decided I wanted to go crazy because I felt like people weren't crazy enough. And I wanted to be crazier so I... Quick on the way there. Okay, okay. Yes, because I must say that you paint this beautiful visual of what potentially is old code propagating. Old code, yes. Without new code intervention. And so when we get too deep into these measurements that we were initially talking about at the beginning of GDP and the Dow and you go into the same, follow the cheese the same way that... Yeah, these hardened ruts, these contours. Yes, when the new code doesn't have space to breathe to be deployed into the world due to the economic machinery that's constantly going that it requires some sort of a crazy code deployment kind of like what we saw with whatever Satoshi Nakamoto and blockchain technology is in order for kind of the world in a sense to start getting flipped over on its head and so for the new code to actually get deployed. And I think that we need to give more breathing space for new code to come in to be able to tackle some of these problems. And so your vision... The way that you illustrated if this is right potentially Europe, Asia, the United States all these different places in the world these Ivy League academic institutions if the contours are that way towards the cheese we're in a sense, we're carving the problem for ourselves as we just keep deeper and as it keeps going. It's just well said. Thank you, thank you.  Yeah, the culture. Yeah, so I read on the road by Jack Kerouac he was like beat generation they drove around the country having adventures they knew time like we know time Jack, we know time as much muchness per second like living life, like very freeing reading that book was like a very freeing experience and it's got plenty of flaws and it's not my favorite book ever but it's one of them and it inspired me to like they also hitchhiked a little bit in the book they mostly drove but back in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s it was very normal to hitchhike it was like jazz would come home and hitchhike it was irrespective of what they did because we already have cars and we're already going somewhere yeah, come along with a neighbor, come along with a friend whereas in this sort of victory of capital scenario that I described earlier this like post, makes a post radiant especially this fear, this digging in this ego sort of conservative impulse this sort of this closeness this anti-liberalism, this anti-openness sort of impulse to like live in your own you know, community and be afraid of what's on TV that narrative went over that idea of like hitchhiker is a murderer and the person picking up a hitchhiker is a murderer so everyone's a murderer and we can't trust one another and I think that's very related to our problems like politically today the idea that we just like our countrymen, like my brother in Georgia isn't my brother he's the other to be afraid of and that's stupid where everyone's people, you know everyone's people and people are good you know, 99% and we can't let like the 1% ruin that for us, you know and so I wanted to prove that there was still trust and still community and still things to be learned eventually to be had and so I decided to hitchhike around America the summer between freshman and sophomore year and I did, I you know I saved up some money, worked at a burrito bar for May and half of June and then at the end of June I set out with my backpack and I did a whole 8,000 mile you know loop-de-loop around America, saw all these national parks all these cities, these cultural areas, talked to you know, 180 drivers plus another couple hundred people on the streets of cities and couch-served people, hosts and things like that and I just like I just had such profound effects on me it changed me forever I mean I'll never be the same I'm gonna go again this summer too I mean I can't resist anymore I get too antsy I gotta go the road's like right there that same road touches San Francisco so it's like, it's right there so yeah, adventure in America and since then I've been you know, trying to write a novel about it about the journey, using that journey and probably the journey I'm doing this summer as like the plot, as the basis for this adventure story but use it as an excuse to sort of paint this mosaic of ideas and arguments and essences from America like American thought, American history American, the best American philosophers the greatest American novels the greatest American poetry the ideas that make America America not only the ideas that have existed but the ideas that have been gestured towards the things that have been implied from day one like all my creative equal right we've been always trying to get to there we've been, you know there's all these ideas and there's all these problems too these deep, deep bad things to dig through too but we have to we have to dig all the way through them we have to take them all in us Walt Whitman who's like the most American person he's the American culture he's the American prophet he's expansive in his call for what the greatest poet will be which is like himself but also calling to the future he's like future followers talks about how America is like the greatest of poems and it draws from every language in the land it draws all these things it's like the great synthesizer it's the great open vessel the great open synthetic thing full honesty to take in your time to take in the zeitgeist essentially as a vast oceanic tide to be your time to be the voice that comes through you after your time goes into you I guess I'm rambling a little bit you're crushing it you're doing so well and the way that you talk again is just so evident of really strong synthesizer so what happens when you end up going and 180 different hitchhiked drivers that you rode with hundreds of people from different cities different national parks probably 250 rides now yeah yeah you're about to go on potentially more definitely a lot of the greatest American novelists and poets also synthesis synthesizing all of this together thinkers and it kind of produces you yeah and so this is it makes a lot of sense hearing you speak the way you do because in a more hollowed out world that's kind of following the same contours towards the cheese we're missing people yes like you and I hope that the same way that we view people like Alex K Chen that introduced us that shout out that we view people like you and him and myself as going in a way that is carving out a different contour and that that different contour can lead other young people to follow their own unique novel contours absolutely my path is my path is to try to open as many paths as possible for others that's definitely what I want to do with my book the title the title is beaten path BEATIN apostrophe path so it's the president's me it's happening it's the synthesis of all those paths and the bibliography of the book which will itself be a conspectus of like the greatest of America as an idea of course incomplete conspectus but a good starting point on the last for anyone with this one book just sort of start their own journey through American thought and to be able to follow to read Emerson or to read Tony Morrison to bounce off my journey my path and that bibliography is beaten paths like T-E-N past tense plural paths so it's this sort of you know the way the president combines at a point from yeah yeah so Aiden also decided that after he decides to take on this massive journey across the the United States that he also is doing a lot of articles and poems and getting involved in in some writing on campus and and you're now to the point where you're just kind of like well maybe I need to compound my intelligence with absolute freedom and so this is one of the things that I think is difficult for for young people to make decisions on as well as the contours already you know you've etched yourself three years of that path and so for you to be able to say like is me in my most awakened state and you said in the 60s we had potentially one of the greatest eruptions of awakening and consciousness that kind of again just fell back into the economic machine that could it potentially be that young people after one year two years three years of school kind of sometimes if they're really wanting to compound their intelligence outside of that academic institution system need to pull the plug and you're kind of considering that as potentially you know what you need to do to write the great American novel Yes Yeah I've been toying with this for like a year now if I want to take time off because I'm so dedicated to this project I've bought ferociously like all these books right I have hundred like so many books that are sitting there waiting to be read that I'm very excited to read that fit into this long web this web of time that is like American ideas right that the more I read the more the picture clear stuff out the more each indicates one another the more these central dialogues these central themes develop themselves I can see who responds to who I can see how Jean Tumor responds to Cormac McCarthy I can see where Whitman and Emerson diverge and what that means for their followers after you know what I mean like so it makes me want to read all the time like my free time is reading but it's reading what I want to read rather than my classes and I've done well in my past two years to make all my classes majority of my classes fit in with this project but at this point next year I have to write a thesis for social studies which is my major which I don't feel ready to do I'd rather focus entirely on this get this project done first and really go all in on it rather than split myself up and I just feel at this point that being in school is going to be back as far as time pressure systems people to talk to distractions writing and reading for a class rather than for me I want to be able to make my novel a full-time job that I wake up in the morning read, write, read, write and hitchhike for vacations and to be in that mindset again because it's a very different mindset than school mindset just being on the road like because your environment is so different it makes your mind very different and philosophical I can't wait to get back to that state of mind and at this point I just think that self-education will do better for me than being educated by Harvard especially when I'm like even though I'm on like full financial aid like paying to be there like someone's paying me to be there like why would I pay to be there when I could learn faster and better on my own for now and then come back sort of extend my Harvard time a little bit longer you know be able to like visit I'll be able to meet more Harvard students and I make a lot of friends I make a lot of friends you know I talk to people from trees and stuff and I like one around I talk to strangers today I talk to like five strangers it was sunny out you know I was like wandering anyway so being at Harvard physically for more years like more friends definitely valuable to me also being able to like audit classes I can just show up to lectures and learn I guess learning for me is much more about learning than it is about the degree even though I'll get the degree which is why I know I'll be fun I'm not gonna like die of starvation I'd rather this is what matters to me is this project and it feels urgent I already feel because I started this whole idea and like essentially like early 2017 I feel guilty that it wasn't ready for 2020 you know what I mean like I feel like responsible like I feel like if I had been more dedicated maybe I could have done it faster and at this point I definitely want to have it done at least before the 2022 midterms yeah man yeah so this is one of the things that we were chatting about a little beforehand off camera too is that this requires a good amount of calculus of math of analyzing trajectory of life outcome and for all of those that are watching that either are in school themselves or that have family members or friends that are in school that are contemplating this this is actually very important question to ask where do you map your life trajectory if you are to just full time do what you love every single moment of every day if you are as passionate as Aiden is or if you just have some some true north that you really need to follow in this exact moment you with the mind that is you know 16 18 20 years old is just compounding the knowledge that you gain at 16 18 or 20 versus if you wait until you're 22 or 24 or 26 to go towards that true north so going at it as early as possible so critical so this is a very important thing to do math and calculus on this life trajectory but I'm really happy that you're voicing this because it's such a crucial topic for other people to think about and have conversations about you know I'm just grateful that you are you have a true north that you can pursue with this the fact that you have that and you're 20 20 and you're 20 and you have a true north that you can pursue like that at least for now once you finish it you move on and patience is a very important thing because you're going to continue synthesizing information and it's just going to keep getting better and better and better but then yes there does need to be some sort of a publication sometimes it's good to do I won't force it out I'll let the art dictate itself yeah that's extremely important I'd rather get the great American novel right in a timeless sense correct so it might take a little bit longer than just waiting a year until 2020 but just also that you know you mention these funny things that you know that you are very centric in your behaviors you know you likely climb more trees than I do but I definitely climb at least a tree a month or two and that's so important to do that and I got cuts and stuff yeah from tree climbing and it gives there's so many important things that come with that not only does it feel like it's where we come from but also it's it's just a beautiful thing to be centric be hanging out on the tree and just looking people watching slash talking to people it's just a very fun thing I want to hit on some of your thoughts around what's happening with our ability to engage and inspire generation Z yeah so we have like you mentioned the beginning that with millennials why has there been such a again just following a very similar path into the economy rather than this uproar and this ability to deploy the new code in Gen Z on the other hand is a lot younger they've had technology growing up their whole lives they're kind of technology experts in a sense of knowing what's happening at the cutting edge of the moment that it's happening in a fluid sense too in a fluid or phone technology versus potentially one that like you know Gen Z doesn't really I guess understand what's happening at the edge of synthetic biology so it's kind of a different edge in a sense but for them to be able to rally and engage and move forward on a subject and I love your your thought here with something that galvanizes them like this idea of water yeah so teach us about this okay so yeah I think Gen Z is important but I think because of the deterministic way that the world is Generation Z because media is an extension of our humanity right and because the way we can act is very much constrained and determined by the words and narratives that we have to act upon the fact that we weren't raised on capital like capital-owned television you know I mean like our narrative and the fact that yes we had the same shitty education as generation we had the same shitty education that the past and the worst because we haven't like you know the more the world changes the more we keep things the same the farther apart sort of they get we do have the internet we had Wikipedia we had the Wild West internet we had like downloading illegal movies because we could you know I mean so I think that we have a very specific sort of way that like knowledge is ours in a way that it wasn't before and I think that Generation Z also very realistically the future matters in our calculus even of course we discount the future but it's still we also do count it like the idea that there's like super high rates of like anxiety and depression stuff among the younger generation yes it's part social media yes that's part education system but it's also part like a realistic response to like the shit storm that's going to come for like for us for like like climate migration all the various threats to existential life destabilization all these things like they're going to happen around us so we have a huge responsibility we have to clean up like three generations of putting things off we have to like do a lot we have to take a burden on our backs and we got to be able to rise up we got to be ready for the wave has to be there you know I mean we have to be there ready so we need to start now trying wicked hard to be ready to prepare for those challenges while you was learning and learning and acting in the world and trying to like do things make things better no matter where you are it will require new ways of thinking about the individual's relationship to society and to the past and to the future it requires a lot of moral personal even like religious change in the way that we act in the world and so generation Z well with the Green America novel I'm trying to capitalize and get a platform right I want to use that tendency to get a foothold to get a platform and then use to say radically different things than what old people are saying because I'm like young and smart and have these things to say and I'm studying these problems deeply I'm diving to the rest into the the darkest parts of America into the lightest parts and I want to you know show people and teach people their own narrative because these narrative stories are their own narrative because these narratives determine what we can do and there is a narrative that exists people just haven't read it they just don't know about it because our schools were bad and stuff they haven't taught them to love them they haven't taught them the great democratic inheritance that we have in America and in the world but like this place is awesome America's so great it's so great and it's also really fucking up and it's been like so and I believe that all the materials we need are there we have the internet we have the people we have the need we have all these ingredients we just need these catalysts to start things moving I want to help be that catalyst I want to help not only like help connect people with Gen Z the way that you do and the way that Alex does but I also want to inspire our dialogue I want to inspire other people to do their own crazy thing hitchhike. It's scary. But everyone has a thing, a crazy thing they can do. I want everyone to start doing that because we need people to do that. We need Hail Marys at this point. Just climate change alone. And so I want to help inspire that and I want to try to get a platform and leverage it in ways that can sort of help start movements. There's some activist movements I have in mind just for America alone. I had this whole idea that after college I'd love to do a new American Lyceum. This is a quicker version. The Lyceum movement was 1800s. There's also the Religious Chautauqua movement, which are these self-educated, these adult education movements in early America. So people like Rapalda Emerson would go from town to town to the town hall and it'd be a big town event and he'd give his lecture and teach them stuff. And then there's the Freedom Bus rides in the 60s, the Civil Rights Movement, 50s, 60s, the Civil Rights Movement, 50s, I guess, first. The Freedom Riders who would like willingly go to these places to like be like high, like segregation's bad.  That's a side idea. But I just think like I want a platform and I'll use it very well. I'm gonna use a platform very well if I get it. And you mentioned water. So part of this whole Gen Z thing I'm trying to do is the idea of like a water religion. So I study social theory at Harvard. It's like my thing. Or that's like my major technically. Probably should be English looking back on it, but it's too late now. Or histon lit. But social studies is great. I love social theory. I love philosophy. And one of the big sort of themes that's emerged in my study of social theory is the A, how fundamental the like religious impulse. Emile Durkheim's elementary forms of religious life. Amazing book.  And how that makes us who we are. And people like Max Weber and in the Frankfurt School, these sort of more depressing social theorists coming out of mainly Germany and like the late hundreds or the 1900s. They all talked about how rationalization was like destroying, like evacuating meaning from society, right? Like killing religion, making things meaningless. And they were like a big, they were very afraid of that. And I, there's a lot of calls for a new kind of religion from Durkheim, also from people that modern day like Roberto Unger, a philosopher, a very interesting philosopher who's still teaching at Harvard. Roberto Unger, who are the religion of the future. Here also Emile Durkheim had a call for like a religion of individualism. So the only thing that connects us is how different we are, you know, the way of religion and democratic liberalism coalesce. And also Walt Whitman and his democratic vistas, which is like his big essay on like the essence of democracy. It's brilliant. And democratic vistas, he wanted to realize a democracy, democracy is a way deeper idea than just a political system.  It's like a way of conceptualizing the world. It's introspective and social and full of love and full of like, and it requires full like, it's the mediation of the individual society, which is the problem that's gone all the way back, right? How to mediate individual in society. And democracy is like the one that maximizes that, understanding that the individual needs society to grow and the society needs the individual to like be free and full, sort of realize it's sort of like liberal potential in order to continue to be back to society. And democracy, like Whitman talks about how he wants to start a religion of democracy, like a democratic religion that's based on like love and sort of Anyway, this call has been here for a while. There's a need. There's a narrative about it. There's calls for it. And I think water as it's like a very tangible, real symbol to project these ideas onto and use to create a religion. Water religion would first of all be very individualized. So we have their own version of it. We all drink water. So it has a commonality, but also raw made up of water, raw made up of water. Yes. But you can project your own meanings onto it. The only sort of requirement would be like, yes, to be conscious. Every time you drink water, every time you take a shower, see hear the rain or whatever, just to like actively be conscious of that water to be like, thank you water to think of the civilization, the year civilization of pipes that brought that water to you to think of the cycle of water from the oceans to the rivers to the mountains and to the deer into you into the ground into the grass into the ground again into you to think of yourself as water and everyone around you as water to try to see the water in them to see the same, you know, blue aura in their veins that you have. So just feel because religions need a connection to a larger whole a sense of blind. That's that societal thing society, God, the idea of God is basically just society that the constant the consciousness that we come from a larger whole that determines us that we're somehow a part of but also subordinate to and smaller than but also ourselves to water is that but extends beyond our tribe to our life. So what I think would a help deal with global warning just warming just in a sort of consciousness way. It also has rituals. It's the only ritual besides like, you know, breathing that we all perform. It's the only ritual and religion needs rituals to solidify it. It kind of combines like Confucianism and Taoism, these two different threads of Chinese thought in a way that's kind of hard to explain about contours early contours and the water. It's kind of both because deliberate action and nonaction and water refreshes us, right? It's like a reset. It's like made a new it's youth. It's it's life like all the so Christianity uses water for like life, right? Like in all of major world religions have some sort of water symbolism involved some sort of water ritual involved with the washing of the hands or the purification of something or a rain dance, you know, like water is essential to everything. And given that we live in a world where we can create meaning, yes, God's dead right, like God's dead and stuff. You know, it happened. But we can still create meaning and it need not be a delusion.  And it's the common denominator, you know, it's the common denominator, it connects us to everything flows through us. We sweat and we pee, it makes our neurons, you know, allowed to be wet. And and then we get tired. We've explained a lot actually with dance, we can just take a big old, you know, big old sip of water. Cheers. Thank you, water. And we got to do it anyway. So it's, it's like we might as well, you know, we might as well be conscious of it. That gratitude has a powerful effect. I started noticing that it changes my habits. It makes me, I'm better hydrated these days, for sure. I'm way better hydrated, like than I used to be in. We could do better with not having the plastic bottles. Oh, for sure. For sure. I have refilled that one constantly with mine too. But I'm missing the cap too. I spill it on myself on the way here. Then it does leak the plastic into the water. So yeah, so we can we can we can do better. But the entire idea of being grateful for water is extremely important. Gratitude is powerful. Gratitude is very powerful for water, for the shower, for so many other times that we can see the 8 billion of us as water. Yes. And this is a really good connecting thread across Generation Z, that even the millennials can get behind and try and push up to some of the people that are older than even us, and potentially catalyze that massive movement to get faster to unity to unlock more of the creative potential in the minds, make the basic physiological needs met in people. And I love that unifying thread. It's also it's also something that, like you said, that we can just be grateful for too. It's a good one. It's, yeah, that that that's a great narrative that I hope gets embedded into the Great American novel, but also into the movements that you inspire like we want to get behind the Great American novel we want to get behind water. Like we love those two things. And I'm excited to continue, you know, doing more of these conversations and hopefully engaging more people with what you're building. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you're I'm glad you're on board. It's I think it's a very powerful thing. Water is the ultimate symbol. It's the ultimate symbol. It's always been, you know. And I just want to use that I want to use that it's been there. It's not it's not original with me. I'm just I'm just passing through my, you know, semipermeable memory. But I think that water religions have profound effects. In fear in Lillian, Las Vegas, there's this line, where he looks out from like the, you know, Sierra Nevada, whatever he's looking out to the West towards California. And he has this line, he's like, I can almost see the high watermark, the high watermark being like this in the 60s, where when consciousness was being raised, like, where the water, the floods of change consciousness like got to, and then receded, you know, except the idea of the failed movement. So also talking about Generation Z, it's like blue generations, water generation, whatever you want to call it. The idea of like the floods coming. I guess not I think about this like a scary reality because the floods are also like coming in a scary way, right? There's like actual floods, but also, but our flood to meet it, you know, we'll flood to meet the flood, I guess. And also, I guess just like in a personal sense, not only do I associate the color blue and water with association, I associate water, I use water as like a main mental structure for myself. It's a way I conceptualize things. You've been using the word contours with me. And that's a way and I'm glad you picked up on that. That's like a way to think about things through the contours, right? This idea of like, ruts and reality flows through time, because water is water has always been like a simple metaphor for time, for consciousness, the stream of consciousness for for history, right? For the progress of history for for flows, hitting one another, the stops and starts, the trickles, the causality. Also, water is so much it's been here for billions of years. And it is just transcendent of human six million years of civilization, constructing and evolution. So just just even that notion alone that that we can bond over something that transcends us like that. Yes. Yeah, it's powerful. And it bonds, you know, what almost they stick together, but they also have that polarity to them. You also fill containers, they can also expand beyond those tainters, and they can harden to become containers themselves. So I just a thing of water as a tool for using that for thing of ideas themselves and association itself. The the use of the word contours and ruts and old code. Yes, there's another way. Yeah. So water is like an O G code. It's an original gangster code, you know, it's been there for so long day like day one, right? And so if you think about it in terms of like, let's say day one being big bang, sure, it's not necessarily day one, but it is so far into back before the evolution of humans. And so it's just that thinking about old code in that sense, what is the new code updates that we can make using metaphors analogies that tie into the old code that is not the banking infrastructure. But but that is water. And how can that awaken people to unity? So I like, I like that a lot. And we're you're heading with that. I want to hit on a couple other things on the way we have to talk about the the current era of the use of the technological devices because they are both so incredibly connecting and just able to access knowledge so well. Simultaneously, it is causing a lot of issues. What are your thoughts, especially being 20 in the Cambridge area, Harvard, etc. What are your thoughts? Yeah, yeah, my thoughts are that are my phone is an extension of my body.  That's like on a hair trigger ready for a vibration. And that's like a part of me, you know, when my phone's on my right pocket. When I was in the road, the same thing, right? When I was in the road, it's like, phone right pocket. And then like, in pepper spray pocket as well. And then wallet left pocket. And not having it being over there now during our filming. I wasn't conscious of before, because I was like, totally in you. But now that like, we brought up like, now I'm unconscious, that it's not here. It's an extension of our body extension of our social minds, primarily, if we like, I really see our minds that are the social world as the most important thing. That's why social there's so important to me because we are so much more social than we think we are way to the word individuals, you know, we have an ego or whatever. And we're not we're we're we're our best friends, we're our parents, we're our sisters, or we're our dance or we're we're we're sister ex death dance partner, you know, we're the dance partner for these people, the conglomeration of them all. And all of our thoughts, because language such as I thought in language is a social phenomenon that emerged from the need to understand one another, according to Habermas, then then then all of these important high level thoughts are in some way tied to our social brain. And so the the fact that, like, our phone can extend our social work, we have like messenger in our pocket is so powerful. But as you pointed out to me earlier, we, when we were talking about phone, it's we also have, and my friend Andrew Zuckerman said this to me last week, and he's very right that we have a skinner box in our pockets, we're like, we're pointing ourselves, we're putting ourselves in the clutches of everyone who wants to sell something, we're putting us in the clutches of our worst, you know, addiction impulses.  Yeah, it's ridiculous, the power they have. And like, I consider myself someone who like, since a young age, just care a lot about like, you know, being a person in psychology, philosophy just having a self like taking it very seriously, like, I have I'm a person, I'm a human, this is this is wild, you know, this isn't going to try to figure this out. But most people don't.  And how much less time are we spending on our creative actualization and transcendence to absorb this like, on one hand, memes broadly understood, you know, like, in the way that Walt Whitman could be a meme, like, create us and they pass us a week, we can use them to synthesize. But it becomes that becomes a point when it's no longer a productive thing, or since that synthetic thing, rather, just a reproductive like, to watch the office for the second, anyone who's watched the office more than once all the way through should totally reevaluate their lives. Like you're not growing, you're not changing, you're absorbing, you know, you're just it's comfort. The difference between the difference between procreate effort, the what has that are they urge and urge and urge always the procreate urge of the world to be allowed with the procreate urge of the world is one thing. But to have recreate comfort, right, to like recreate, just become fee to listen to the song that you know, rather than the new song that will challenge you to and having a song stuck in your head is that power that wants to read that wants to relax to not really think too hard to like sit back on your laurels. That's a really powerful thing that we that I'm very worried about kids younger than me, especially because like they likewise, like I got my first phone at junior year of high school. So which on one hand is world world historically new and significant. But on the other hand, compared to kids five years younger than me, it's wicked old. And if they also got phones in these internet devices that were way more developed and tailored to them with big money and big data for a decade, whereas me using the internet in my public library when I was younger, like, was different. But also the same, but also the same, you know, I'm not trying to make binaries here. It's just these nuances, I guess. Yeah.  So I want to use it. I want to use it more optimally. Yeah, and more consciously, more optimally. Yeah, it comes over to rather than like a part of it. Yeah, so that's the that's the big one is that the access to an unlimited abundance of knowledge is so critical. Finding the signal in that knowledge for whatever one's fullest potential is is so critical. And and to be able to consciously use the tool for that purpose is is just so important. We got to change some of the the models that the corporations are using to make money off of the attention economy. We got to change some of that and advertising. That's the new code. These are the new code deployments that have to happen. What is one thing that every child should know going into the exponential technology age? It's the historical sense, I think the sense that you're, yeah, we're thrown to life, you know, we're essentially and we're put into a narrative. The narrative has been going on for thousands of years, right? There's a whole story so far that's in your very molecules, in your bones, that all the powers and forces and narratives that have ever existed are in you and a part of you and could create you. However, you also do have the power as an individual to make actions in that story to change the story, to add to it. And so I guess it's just sort of like there's this kind of paradoxical taking life seriously and not taking life too seriously. This sort of contradiction that everyone needs to really maintain in them.  I need to learn everything about it because there's so much to learn. And of course we learn everything, but if everyone learns something and a bunch of things and synthesize them in different ways and becomes a unique individual, then when all the parts clutch into more, you know, more interactions, more synthesis, more holes, we just progress and get better faster and more wholesomely. We need people, we need people to be, like, to have different ghosts in them so that those different ghosts from the past can talk.  Like, Zhuangzi and Nietzsche both dug into the history of their philosophical traditions and flipped them upside down and kind of like, were wrapping things in similar ways. But they could never talk in real life. But in a young, in a young girl's mind who's watching this video at 16, who's interested in, like, freedom and, like, and perspectives and changing your way of viewing the world, reading both at the same time, those two brilliant people can have a conversation with her in her head and be relayed and then as if they were living today and could react to today. And that's just so important. So I think everyone needs to self-cultivate more and take their historical positions seriously. The fact that they are made of history, but they also will be making the future in a very real sense, in a very, like, individual sense. And of course, individually, each individual on one level doesn't have a lot of value relative to the whole. But I think that way of, but, but the little value that they do have is also an immense, great value, depending on how you zoom. I think, I think, I think people zoom is a little bit in the hollowness. Like, we think, we think that this world is like status quo. We think that we were born into just like generic life. Let's figure it out.  You know what I mean? But that's the narrative is not ended. We're still doing history. We're still we have to take it really seriously, but also not too seriously in the sense that we can't believe everything around us and follow the cheese, follow the sort of obvious paths, follow the narratives that are given exactly. So it's like that mixing of taking things seriously and not too seriously. Realizing the standing on the shoulders of giants, the hundred billion humans before us that built civilization, tackling the biggest challenges that we have ahead of us, building the new codes. The relationship between memory and prophecy. TSL, I've been really obsessed with the four quartet lately, which is like TSL, it's like big like masterpiece of the final four poems. They're all meditations on time and they're all got a Nobel Prize. And they're like the crowd of a lifetime's effort and little getting the last one is about fire and like time and so the end of the cycle. There's been one of my favorite lines that have been like repeating in the shower like a mantra lately because it's been to just driving me up the wall. It's I'm going to turn the camera to it's me dramatic. This is the use of memory for liberation. Not less of love, but expanding of love beyond desire and so liberation from the future as well as the past. So this is the use of memory for liberation for liberation. Like we free ourselves. We don't free ourselves by living in a hollow present. Our present only comes full when we have a present with reference to the past hard one taking in absorbing of the past and by putting in relation to the future that we expect. If we expect to face these problems or if we want to make a future this way, we need to take the materials we have and make it happen. We have all the materials. We just don't have them in an active sense. And we need to we need to we really desperately need to. And how about we do are we in a simulation? I mean a simulation. So that's a great question. I thought about it for a long time. I actually I know it's been like it talks about a lot of recent years, but I remember when I was younger, I had like a similar thought that I entertained for a while. So I started thinking about the world. And on one level makes a lot of sense, right? Like as long as one reality gets, you know, far enough to start simulating realities, then most of the realities would be the simulated realities. Pretty much all of them except but there's still that need for that one base. There's still the need for that one non simulated reality, right? In order to start sending realities, unless I'm not caught up in everything that people are talking about, because I, you know, there might be other positions. But the way I understood it is that like you would still require some sort of organic, you know, base reality to then simulate the rest. And of course, that might be limiting the conversation. But in that sense, I would say that like why wouldn't we be the organic reality? If it is still necessary. I also might be thinking about this totally wrong. It might be an issue that only position has side of space and time in a way that we can't really understand. We would need to be thought about in that sense. So in that sense, maybe, maybe, you know, the progress of reality or realities or whatever is, you know, there's like a bell curve for every possibility as the smash goes outwards, right? And like in the sort of perfect mean reality where everything went according to, I mean, like maybe then that one simulates the rest, similar to the possibilities that could have happened in like, not retroactively, but sort of in a sort of like a trunk, you know, branched sense, I guess I'm rambling. I do do do we live in a simulation? I think that I think that even if we don't, we still kind of do, but I think that whatever reality could make all this laziness happen is like a simulation.  Life is pretty wild and awesome and full of muchness. And whatever it is, I just want to absorb more of it. And the last question is what is the most beautiful thing in the world? Oh, definitely, definitely people's eyes, like your eyes, your pupils and your irises, looking to people's eyes, like the past like six months, my favorite thing to do, like favorite activity, best thing in the world, people's eyes on one hand, right, they're all unique and beautiful on the irises, right? They have like green, brown, blue, all these shades of colors within like everyone's eyes are uniquely different. And that's like individuality, right? That's like the identity, the identity with something that's been taken in. It's the being that all of your absorbed becoming so far has like left. Like it's like, this is you so far, it's the identity. But then the pupil is that like that yin, right?  So in the people's eyes, the most people think ever it commutes, it communicates so much more than words in some senses. It reminds us that we're not a solipsistic world. I think Descartes was a big mistake, right? Obviously Descartes is great. And like Cartesian planes are cool. But solipsism is a big trap. It relates to sort of all of the West's biggest problems, like imperialism and like instrumental rationality and not understand the world and like a other domination sort of sense, this visual culture for Marshall McLuhan, this idea that there's like this otherizing way of being solipsism is a big mistake. We're all connected. We're all deeply interconnected. We're all, you know, this we're a society where the species where we're humanity more than we are individual humans in some senses. And I always remind us of that. And also falling in love. So I love looking into your eyes, right?  I love looking into strangers eyes, too. But then looking into the eyes of so many like love and you've already been in their eyes before it combines like that comfort and that newness. Eyes is just the most beautiful thing. So I love people's eyes. I love I just love looking at people's eyes. I love I love sharing myself with them. I love that they can see me and I love to like release like all my defenses to like look them in the eye to like show them like I'm here. I'm vulnerable. I'm yours. And I'm on your team. And I'm on your team, Alan, of course, I'm on I'm on our lovely audiences team. And yeah, so I as the most beautiful thing in the world. Grateful for my site. That was very eloquently described. Yeah, I love eyes as well. I'm really happy that that was the beautiful thing in the world for you. Thank you. Yeah, there's so much to unpack still about our conversation. And in all of its nuance, there was so much good stuff that we discussed. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you rocked it. Thank you, Alan. Yeah, and I love you very much. I love you too, Alan. I love what you're building. I appreciate that. Yeah, we're going to rock it together. We're going to keep growing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, together. Yeah, leveling up and building, co-creating. There's this line where it's like he goes up to a hill before Don. He looks like the starry, the full packed heavens of stars. And he's like, and this line is like, and my spirit said, when we become the enfolders of those orbs and of the pleasure and knowledge of everything within them, will we be full and content then? And then I answered, no, we will then lift and level to the next level to absorb more. There's always like a greater there's always there's always more that Emerson is this essay called circles is always you always draw a larger circle around each circle. That's a very essential piece of American thought is that idea of constant change, constant transcendence, constant experimentation, constant encapsulating of a larger whole. Yeah, yeah. That's so exciting. Sorry, one more thing, one more thing. There's another women line where he goes, now understand me well. It is provided in the essence of in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, from any fruition of success, no matter what shall come forth, something to make a greater struggle necessary. So that's what I want to leave. It's so good. It's just the amount of synthesizing that you've been doing across the greatest thinkers and poets and novelists. It's just been outstanding and it's so evident in the way that you speak about history and the way that you speak about solving and tackling the challenges with things like great American novel, as well as even the water as such a binding thing for us. And I'm really grateful for you and I'm grateful for our ability to have an audience that has cared about that episode, what we talked about. Thanks, audience. Everyone, I urge you. I urge you. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Give us your thoughts in the comments below in the episode. I urge you to check out the great American novel. Check out what Aidan's work is what he's doing. Check out the links in the bio to that. Have more conversations around you about the subjects that we talked about your friends, your family, your coworkers, people on the internet. Just get conversing more about some of these great American ideas, as well as about how we can put the new codes in that can tackle some of these greatest challenges and support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the organizations around the world that you believe in support simulation. Our links are below, so you can continue doing cool things like hopefully by 2020, building out the recording studio in Cambridge, our second one in addition to the one in San Francisco. And also go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace. Peace. Nice. Good job. Thank you. Good job. That was so fire. Awesome. I'm glad. Yeah, you rocked it.


How long could you stand working your current job? A 100-year-old man has just set the world record for longest career at the same company. 84 years. Walter Orthman took a job at a Brazilian textile company in 1938, at the age of 15. And he's been there ever since. Walter believes the best part about having a job is the sense of purpose, commitment, and routine. And he advises people to work for a good company in a field that motivates them. For Walter, that has been one job for his entire life. For most of us, we change jobs and even industries fairly often. And I think that will continue as our life spans increase. We may continue to reinvent ourselves many times over. So Walter's achievements could be quite rare for many years to come.