How well can I appreciate beautiful things? Pretty well. Last time on Thunk, several weeks ago, sorry about that, we discussed camp, the subversion of normal aesthetic values in favor of a celebration of cohesion and volume of style, independent of substance. But we didn't really characterize what makes up normal aesthetic judgment, what it is that separates a van Gogh from a van painted with a unicorn. That's partially because aesthetics, the philosophy surrounding the particular sort of appreciation associated with beauty, is, as with many areas of philosophical inquiry, a fairly hairy subject. In fact, there's a debate as to whether the term aesthetic actually indicates anything specific enough to be worth discussing, so there's that. But let's assume for a moment that aesthetic is a meaningful category of stuff that we can talk about. Because I wanted to discuss an interesting intersection of ideas, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. We generally accept that there are moral obligations we are required to uphold. Things that are right and wrong according to some standard that we are somehow compelled to follow and enforce. We don't usually think of aesthetic considerations as belonging in the same category. It's hard to imagine that a tasteful flower arrangement might carry with it some mandate, like a trolley problem. But there are some examples of scenarios that seem to warrant some sort of aesthetic obligation. Good taste. If you're like me, when you think of aesthetics, your first thought might be an appeal to the very personal nature of aesthetic preference. People like different things, and that's totally okay. You might prefer Rembrandt to Banksy, or Slayer to Chopin, and nobody has any right to tell you you're wrong for enjoying the things that you enjoy. However, there are reasons to suspect that the matter of taste might not be an anything-goes sort of thing. That there are other considerations besides simply asking, what do you like? We generally accept that there are objective matters of fact about the world that are normative, that people can be right or wrong about, and can be independently confirmed by anyone with functional senses. The earth goes around the sun, the cat is on the mat, that sort of stuff. We also accept that there are subjective matters of opinion that are wholly non-normative, that we have no reason to expect consensus on. Your favorite color, pineapple on pizza. If someone tells you you're wrong for these preferences, they're either being sarcastic or weird. But what we think of as good taste can be seen as a weird combination of the two. It's both normative and subjective. You've probably heard the phrase, there's no accounting for taste, but we don't really act as though that were true. If someone were to pass up a perfectly cooked filet mignon for a leathery overgrilled hotdog, the way we would react to that decision would be as though they had made the wrong decision, as though they had chosen incorrectly, just as much as if they had chosen to stuff fireworks down their pants or said that an elephant is bigger than the moon. We might good-naturedly accept any of those decisions without making a big fuss about them, but we'd have to appeal to some reasoning that violates our instinctive reactions to characterize them as anything but wrong. In addition, there are individuals whose opinions we seek out, experts who we trust to correctly evaluate the aesthetic quality of certain works. Everyone has opinions, but we rely on professional critics to provide something more valuable than what we get from asking Bob from accounting what he thinks. They grant a more seasoned and nuanced evaluation of something's aesthetic merits. We can even trust that expertise so far as to make us question our own judgment. I read a book, I hated it, literary critics raved about it. I might well say something like, huh, I should give it another try, maybe I missed something. Now, philosophical skepticism extends a long ways, so it's totally understandable if you still have some doubts as to the existence of a normative aesthetic valuation. But just for the moment, let's accept the premise that there's something else going on besides pure individual preference, that there are some standards for aesthetic judgment that extend beyond the idea that there's no accounting for taste. Part two, aesthetic obligation. Let's say that you're at a wedding, everyone's looking very sharp in very nice formal attire, and here comes Simon in a ratty old t-shirt, flip flops, and pajama pants. Short of some convoluted sitcom explanation, it's pretty clear that Simon is not dressing appropriately for the occasion, and failing to fulfill some duty to the ceremony and those participating in it. You can easily imagine someone pulling him aside and rightly saying, you should go home and change, with more or less the same feel as you should tell the truth. This is an example of an aesthetic obligation, a responsibility that requires some act of aesthetic value to be satisfied, seemingly in the same way that moral obligations require moral acts. If you're feeling parsimonious, you might argue that the aesthetic component of the scenario isn't actually important, that it doesn't call out any special category of obligation, it's just set dressing for a deeper issue of ethics. However, there are other situations where that impulse faces complications. If you could push the Venus de Milo in front of a trolley to save three people, on what grounds might you abstain from doing so? If you can only save one of two paintings of equal moral worth from a fire, shouldn't you save the more beautiful one? The existence of legitimate aesthetic dilemmas is another good reason to suspect that there's something more interesting afoot than simple morality. Take the restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The bright riotous frescoes that Michelangelo originally painted were muted by a layer of soot from the candles burnt in the chapel until just a few decades ago. For many, although the restoration could be seen as more historically accurate to the original intent of the art, we'd lost something beautiful in the process, a somber humility, and a basement before the majesty of God. Were we right to remove the soot and restore the frescoes to their original gaudy exuberance, even at the cost of that unintended nobility acquired through centuries of use? There really isn't any moral framework that makes sense to apply to the question, but it seems just as fraught and urgent a dilemma as a trolley problem. Another possible point in support of some sort of aesthetic duty is that of aesthetic superrogation. The possibility of going above and beyond those requirements. Jumping on a grenade to save a group of people isn't usually thought of as a moral obligation. We wouldn't criticize anyone for failing to do so, but we would praise someone who did. Similarly, we wouldn't criticize anyone whose apartment got a little cluttered or dusty sometimes, but someone who always manages to keep their place spotless? That's virtuous in the extreme, sublime even. It supersedes the normal bounds of an aesthetic obligation. There's nothing really moral about it, but it is still a sort of virtue. Part 3. Utilitarian hedonism as aesthetic virtue. Some of these supposed aesthetic obligations seem to be imperatives to appreciate beauty or excellence, a directive to pay appropriate attention to something solely for its aesthetic merit. Think of someone who lives across the street from the Louvre, but never takes the time to look through any of it, or a person who travels to Mediora with some friends and, rather than watching the sun rise over the rocks, sits in the car and surfs Facebook on their phone. Although my reaction is tempered by a little bit of to each their own, there's also an intense feeling of something like disappointment or frustration, as if these people are doing something wrong or shameful. There's an element of self-improvement in there, but also a definite sense of obligation to appreciate beauty where possible. You don't get a pass on the Mediora thing if you saw it once already. But this impulse cuts the other way too. I feel dismayed, even outraged when someone who's had amazing experiences of aesthetic excellence can't seem to enjoy the simple things anymore. Someone who turns their nose up at boxed wine or a catchy pop song because the mundane, even the pretty good, isn't refined enough for their palate. There's one idea that I think sufficiently explains a reaction to both of these violations of aesthetic obligation. The term hedonism tends to carry connotations of vulgar indulgence, but in philosophical lingo it's an ethical position which places the pursuit of desirable mental states at the heart of all morality. For the hedonists, torturing people is bad because it places them in an undesired mental state of suffering or anguish. Giving them cake can be good because it places them in desired mental states of enjoying a tasty treat. And giving them too much cake is bad because it places them in undesired mental states of feeling unhealthy. The joy brought by appreciation of beauty is, obviously, a desirable mental state. A good hedonist would probably seek to encourage as much of it as possible, would even feel a distinct duty to facilitate it wherever they could, which has some interesting implications for their reactions to our two scenarios. An uncultured Philistine might be satisfied with a Big Mac or rewatching the same soap operas over and over, but more well-rounded individuals understand that there's a deeper, more nuanced, and more pleasurable mode of appreciation that's not accessible to the naive participant, as well as a whole world of more exciting possibilities. The total amount of pleasure in their lives is curtailed by their narrow window of taste and experience. Similarly, an overly refined fop who simply refuses to enjoy anything but the best of the best is missing out on pleasure they might be having.  In this framework of hedonistic utilitarianism, aesthetic obligation does ultimately reduce down to a moral obligation, specifically one to cultivate the greatest possible pleasure for the greatest number of people via aesthetic means. Saying that people should appreciate beauty wherever they find it doesn't really have the same mouthfeel as saying that they should take care of their children, for example. But when I think of a child who has denied the opportunity to experience aesthetic delights and relish in the pleasure of their senses, whether due to poor education or simple lack of opportunity, it does very much feel as though some wrong is being committed. What do you think? Are there distinct aesthetic obligations or are they just moral obligations of hedonistic utilitarianism? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and don't stop dunking.


All right, so we'll go ahead and call the May 4th meeting of the Historic Preservation Commission to order Look at and call the roll Chairman Lane present Commissioner Jacobi Thank you Okay, seeing that we only have two commissioners present and therefore we do not have a quorum We will go ahead and cancel the meeting and resume Next month That's just an action. We don't need it. There's no obviously there's no vote. So there right so therefore the meeting is hereby canceled


We use a ton of plastics every day Now I know you're all thinking like okay. Wow, Milica. What else is new? But just because it's an old news doesn't mean that it's less of a problem Now we don't have to be so strict on ourselves because we are all making a collective effort We're using reusable water bottles. We switch to plastics straws from plastic straws obviously However, have you been to the supermarket lately if you go to the supermarket and I'll see all of these vegetables and fruits packed in Approximately a cubic meter of packaging you realize that we still have a long way to go The materials that we are using for this are hardly ideal candidates in order to make them We need to use oil derivatives and very high temperatures Apart from this this process generates a ton of greenhouse gases as well as About five trillion micro plastic particle pieces that are floating in our oceans and our organs. I Know it's not a nice feeling right now However, we also have to be realistic with ourselves Plastic has become such an intrinsic part of our lives that it's very hard to actually let it go completely but what we can do is to search for new and alternative materials and Ideally such a material would be made from renewable resources in an environmentally friendly way and be or have the potential to become cheap and Once such material already exists and it's made from the chemical called FDCA Now if for a second you think about Remnants of the wood industry as well as food waste these are essentially trash But they contain simple sugars that are not that different to the one we put in our tea and My job is to transform these sugars into FDCA with the help of nature or more precisely enzymes Enzymes are everywhere from helping us grow digesting our food or baking bread. They are part of almost every process on earth They are usually found in fungi and bacteria and they love water and very mild reaction conditions Moreover, we can bind them to a solid support and then we can easily remove them and reuse them Now what I've done in my research is basically that I have been trying to establish and establish a Cascade reaction in which by combining engineering and science we could Use plant and food waste to make FDCA using two different enzymes not to mention Potentially revolutionizing the way we produce our materials in that we use in our everyday lives and helped our planet Just a tiny bit


We all, many of us, know Mitch Kaypore, but he still deserves an introduction here. Mitch Kaypore is an American entrepreneur and impact investor, first known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry. Mitch and his wife, Frida, founded Kaypore Capital in 2009, a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in companies operating in the information technology, education, health, work, finance, mobile, justice, food, media, and retail sectors. The firm is based right here in Oakland, California. Talking to Mitch, who some see as a god or grandfather of this work, you can still hear that the urgency that remains in his voice. A strong believer of this work, he is here to talk to his colleague Arjan about the gaps of opportunity between the top, the bottom, and bringing them closer together to produce a more inclusive economy. Arjan Shuta is a trusted and experienced venture investor and founder of Core Innovation Capital, where he is invested in nerd wallet, opportune, ripple, coverhound, and 30 others. He is here today in his own words to have an honest conversation with Mitch about impact investing, what's real, and what's fake. Let's hear it from them. Please welcome to the stage Mitch and Arjan. Thank you, gentlemen. Hi, Mitch. Hi. Well, this will be an intimate conversation. If people want to come down front, we'll tell and spill the real secrets to the small group. What should we talk about?  Do you? Yeah, it's super unhelpful. Why? It's kind of discredited at this point because it means different things to different people. The orthodoxy in the world of money management thinks it's necessarily concessionary. Some people, as you said, think it's philanthropy in disguise and it distracts from the important issues of trying to build companies that simultaneously create real social and economic value. And I'd rather focus on that than get lost in labels. Makes sense. What about you? You run a fund. You have LPs. We don't have LPs at K-Borg Capital. Yeah, you have a distinct advantage on me. Take more extreme positions. Yeah, so the term is more problematic upstream than downstream for us. So a lot of in the LP world, while impact investing is said to have trillions of dollars of potential interest, we find that the greatest interest comes from people who have financial interest in our impact work or strategic interest in our impact work. Almost all the mission-driven impact is real but very temporary. So we find that a lot of the impact investors are catalytic. They make a one-time placement on a shiny object and then they move on to the next shiny impact object. Whereas these are all long-term things we're doing. These are not shiny objects, challenges that we're tackling. We're tackling big social and environmental issues, social in my case, everything in your case. And so indeed, LPs are much more skeptical about the term. On the entrepreneur side, actually, the term notwithstanding but being mission-driven is actually a competitive advantage. And so we consistently get into deals because we are genuine about our mission. And I think people feel that. Entrepreneurs feel that. Like they're taking pay cuts, et cetera, et cetera, to do something outlandish and big and difficult. And it's actually a competitive advantage. That was the biggest surprise for us when we went all in on impact in 2012. To be honest, it was a bit skeptical. It was Frida, my wife, who was nudging me about this. And I was afraid that it might chase off entrepreneurs if we said we're only investing in companies that close gaps of access or opportunity for underserved communities. It did chase off a few people, but what was completely surprising is what a brand advantage was when we planted a flag and said, this is what we care about and we think about this and this is how we measure ourselves. Entrepreneurs came out of the woodwork and said, I want you on my cap table. I've been told never I can't talk about this to people when I'm raising money, but this is where my heart is.  And I said, yeah, but we're putting in like $150,000, $250,000 a deal. And these other guys are doing $5 million. It doesn't matter. Your voice counts every bit as much. And so like you, we continue to win deals that we would otherwise be completely uncompetitive in. And that's a kind of a hidden and secret advantage. Now you know about it, but most people don't. So let's double click on this idea, right? We're all here because we have some interest in social capital markets. You've talked about kind of real impact and fake impact. So what is, like, what are some of the misnomers you see out there? Well, so this is probably the single... Well, let me put it this way. When Anand Girardas wrote Winner's Take All, which I know he was here and somebody said he got the only standing ovation, I was thrilled because it was one more thing that I didn't have to write and I would never be able to write anything one 100th is good. But basically, he distinguishes between real change and fake change. And our metric, our criterion when we invest, as I said, is if this thing works, who's gonna benefit and will it close a gap of access or opportunity for a low income community or communities of color? And if it doesn't, it doesn't meet our impact criterion. So just because something is ed tech or health... Or fintech. Yeah, fintech doesn't make an impact. And in fact, we see things like really great online tutoring marketplaces that for $200 an hour will get your kid the world's best tutor. And impressive technology and the stuff works. And we go, this is anti-impact. This is gap widening. This is enabling affluent parents to purchase more advantage for their kids getting into college vis-a-vis everybody else. And people are sort of upset and offended. But it's ed tech. It's making the world a better place. It's helping people learn. And I'm going, no, that's sort of fake change. And then one more thing on this. Please. Well, go ahead. It's not far away. I was just going to say that increasingly I have come to understand the importance for investors of getting out of their own bubbles of privilege and bubbles of the little expensive gated communities that they live in down the peninsula that if you don't understand what people's lived experience is actually like, that you're trying to serve. If you can't connect with it, you're going to be a terrible investor and you're not going to be doing the world any kind of favor. And the best investing teams are ones where the people who are on the team can connect with and have shared lived experience with the entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurs come from a very wide set of backgrounds. That's where you're going to get real problem solved. So how do you do that?  You're living in the Bay Area. Like how do you connect with this underserved people that you want to affect personally? Just you. Secret weapon is my wife, Frieda K. Porclayne. You need to understand when she was in junior high school, she was cutting school to go pick it for the farm workers. And this was when Cesar Chavez was organizing them. So she has been at this for many decades and a lot has rubbed off. But the fact is that at K. Porclayne Capital, she and I are the only two white people. Everybody else is a person of color by design. And the folks in the firm have a different set of networks. They look different. We look different than the average firm. And I'm telling you, it helps an enormous amount when it comes to deal flow. And we go to different places. We go to HBCUs.  And we look and see who they're turning out. We go to the kind of places where a more diverse set of entrepreneurs are going to be found. It's not rocket science, but it's also not check the box. I have fatigue with my colleagues saying, well, we're four white male partners. What can we do? We want to be more diverse. Where do we start? It's sort of like they're expecting somebody to hand them a checklist of do this, do that, do the other thing, as if any part of the investing business actually worked that way. If you're serious about something, you've got to undertake to go figure out how you're either acting in your own behalf or standing in your own way. And Silicon Valley, HBC is still pretty much standing in its own way when it comes to diversity and inclusion. All right, so you're walking the talk on diversity and inclusion.  What's still ahead of you? Where do you feel like you need to improve more to walk your talk further for the next step that you care about? Well, we, like any other firm in our position that genuinely believes in impact, we have to produce results. We can't just be talk. It all has to do with showing that you can generate a portfolio with economic and social value that's not concessionary, that your returns are top quartile, and that you've got demonstrable impact. Are you doing that? We are, we went all in, as I said, in 2012, so we're six, seven years in. And what does all in mean? Like all of your capital, all of your wealth? No, it means that this is the only way we invest. Everything has to meet our impact criteria. All the companies need to sign our founders commitment, which says that they are committed to building a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture. That's cool, we have something like that too. That's the fair measure. So we are intending to publish interim results next year, which is a risky thing because they're not full exits and markets can go up and down, but the progress we've made and the kind of companies that are in the portfolio, and we've got made 120, 130 investments, are so good that we think it will actually help to show, hey, we have some results here. And so we're planning in 2019 and figuring out how to talk about that publicly. We're very inspired by Generation Investment Management, which doesn't do VC, they do, this is the investment firm started by Al Gore and David Blood in early 2000s. Global large cap equities originally, but all built around sustainability, very broadly speaking, not just environmental. They were the real pioneer in that. Total skepticism when they started, we were founding investors. Cover of Institutional Investor Magazine on their 10th anniversary, they were one of the three top performing funds in the world of any kind in their category. Now $20 billion under management and they keep turning people away because they can't handle more. That's where I learned sooner or later you have to have results, you can't just be talk. So that's what we have to do. I mean, how do you look at what's your, you're committed to impact in the good sense? How are you going to sort of advance the cause and prove the case in your fund? We're limited partners by the way, so I have a little bit of self-interest here. Yeah, so we have a more specific mandate that we think about as democratizing prosperity in the United States. And so we're interested in investing in largely financial services, what we call fintech type companies that are serving people who don't have easy lives. We don't particularly care about the Henry's of the world. We care more about the Alice's of the world, right? The asset, light, income constrained, employed people. A lot of middle America and a lot of people in California, of course in the coast. And we measure two things. Our objective, our mission, is no compromise mission in margin. And so if we're doing our job right, we're a top-decile venture fund, where our competition is Sequoia, not another impact investment fund. And we're delivering tangible, measurable results about the externalities of our work. That's the tricky part, because I feel like if you don't measure it, you don't know if you're achieving it. And if you do measure it, and it becomes too much of an external metric, you start whitewashing stuff. And you start getting perverse incentives to inflate your numbers and these kinds of things, as people do frankly with their TVPI and MOICs, you know, kind of markups. So our approach is generally to be to be discreet about it. You know, we measure them, we don't publish them so that we don't feel compelled to pump them up. But our goal, I'll tell you what our goal is, in the next 10 years, we want to see a connection from core portfolio companies to something around a quarter trillion dollars of financial savings or income or wealth creation go to everyday Americans, which would be actually like GDP moving. Yes. So that's kind of a very clinical way to describe it.  What do you make of that? No, I think it's great. I mean, there are very few... It's very easy. You don't want to poke at that? Well, no, I don't want to... I mean, it's not an accident that the two of us are up here and Frida and I are fortunate to be able to have access to a very wide range of funds and I'm not just trying to butter you up, but there are two funds in the sort of VC world that are out and out competing with the mainstream that I think have a genuine commitment. Yours is one and the other is Reach Capital, which does ed tech investing and we wish that more firms were more hardcore about this. I mean, I'm an absolute believer in it and I'm willing to bet money that you're right. So, and we'll see. But I think it could reach a tipping point if one or two or three funds that are uncompromisingly impact do really well, particularly if they do well for more than one fund, it's gonna create a kind of a critical mass effect and tons of other capital will flow in after that. That's what happened with Generation. So, one of the reasons I actually do very little speaking is I think it's super difficult to convince people as a theoretical proposition, this is a good way to invest and so that's not time and effort well spent and my whole career was sort of- Present company accepted of course. No, I mean, you know, I'm not at a point in life pushing 70 where I'm not trying to prove as many things to as many people as I used to when I was younger. But having grown up in tech and spent 35 years at it, this is nothing new. I can remember, it was recently as the early 90s, when Wikipedia first came out and I was super enthusiastic about it, the scorn and skepticism of the knowledge community of publishers and people who worked in reference and scholars was profound. Yeah, I love that too. They would say, well, you know, there you've got more articles in this thing about Middle Earth than you do about the entire continent of Africa and you want me to take it seriously and you're telling me that if anybody can edit any article at any time, why should I ever believe anything? Now, all those people conveniently have amnesia and won't fess up to that, but I have the records of it and Wikipedia has evolved into something quietly and relatively quickly that is not only completely indispensable but is superior in any number of respects to conventional reference works like it tends to be up to date in the way that Encyclopedia Britannica never was. But my point is that I have lived through multiple waves where the conventional wisdom was wrong and was overturned. That's the entire history of tech. Nobody wanted personal computers to begin with except a few crazy people. Nobody thought that the internet was ever going to amount to anything and so now when it comes to the lens I have and looking at impact investing and this idea that look what we're doing, it's not a sideshow, it ought to be the main show and it ought to be the case that anybody who's running a business that doesn't have social purpose embedded in it, I hope future generations will look at those people the way we look at our ancestors who were slaveholders. Like barbaric. Fine. I'm ranting. That's why I'm interrupting. So social purpose embedded in it. Like isn't my social purpose your social degradation? Like how, what is, I can, like, you know. Yes. Well of course people will disagree but a world in which it was just assumed that business ought to have social purpose would be a different and better world in the same way that the world in which it's just assumed that every individual has basic human rights even though we don't agree about what those are is a better world than the world that came before that when people had no right. So it's not going to be a panacea but there are ways in which civilization could advance. Yeah but some of these are actually really challenging matters, right? So for example, so my domain is fintech and so in the whole sprawl of finance credit is an important component and when you think about serving the underserved there is a, I think, unstated presumption that everyone should have access to credit which I don't think is necessarily right and so people are doing all kinds of things to make credit available to people who are not in a position to repay it in some way or another or take the housing crisis, right? Like we've been promoting as part of the American dream putting everyone into a house and promoting home ownership. Now, you know, there were issues with that, right? Like that led to problems. You bet. So where are you going with that? Well, so how do we know what's good? Well, let me put this one. Who gets to decide? Well, there are very large issues of problems with civic engagement and our democracy that not the subject of this panel but they are inextricably linked to the kinds of things we were talking about. There is no way fully to have the conversation about sort of what's positive impact without also talking about what's our vision of social well-being? What does it mean? What's flourishing? What is everybody entitled to? And that stuff is also broken. Maybe even worse than it used to be and so ultimately in the fullness we can't just go about our jobs whatever we do in case investors or entrepreneurs and not worry about, oh, I don't understand politics. No, because we run into exactly the problem that you talk about that. What is the social consensus about what everybody is entitled to? And how do we achieve that? But that's not, that's a social and political issue and we can't walk away from that. I would just like to see our lives and business as investors be in harmony with whatever our vision of the social good is and we will have disputes and differences in my view as I'd like to have a real and functioning democracy where those kind of issues get settled. Let's talk about technology. So every tool is a weapon when you hold it right, right? And almost all technologies are propagated by people who are tremendously hopeful and idealistic and want a better world and often don't consider adequately the downside, the dangers of technology. You've been in tech for a couple years. Like how do you think about that? And what do you tell your entrepreneurs to think about your more high tech stack, deeper tech technology entrepreneurs to consider the downsides? Well the interesting thing is for the kind of investments we make and probably you make, the entrepreneurs tend to come in the door having a view of how they want the world to be in some regard or some sector of education or healthcare. So they're not agnostic about this. So which is a good thing because Silicon Valley is sick. That the dominant ethos of well it's technology and it scales and we want the world to be a better place so I'm just gonna go do it. Look at the effing message made and no sign out of it. I mean Facebook's entire business model is based on exploiting people. Even if they wanted to fix it, they can't without killing their business model and destroying hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap and there's no sign that people in the upper echelons in Silicon Valley are yet, I'm still hopeful, but no signs that they're yet serious about, let's say ethics. I mean the idea of appointing chief ethics officers which is now the kind of- Yeah, Kara Swisher was writing about that. Yeah, in the times. Well, did we fix diversity in Silicon Valley by appointing chief diversity officers? No, not exactly. And so I don't know how and where the comeuppance will be but it's clear that the romance of our society with tech is just about over and I actually think that's a good and wonderful thing. You think so? Yeah. A few years ago Warren Buffett didn't own a share of Apple. He owns a lot now and is buying even at a trillion dollars. I think that's a sustained romance. He has unusual and arguably superior taste. I'm talking about people, kids wanting to grow up to be the next Bill Gates that was back in the day or Mark Zuckerberg and being sort of or Elon Musk, global icons of that is our view and vision of success in the world is to be like that. I think it's not dead but I think people in general are looking much more carefully at that. There's a reassessment long overdue, much needed.  Well, I think I would ask people to spend a bunch of time assessing their own situation, particularly if they come from any kind of position of privilege or affluence or advantage to fully assess how they got where they got, how we got where we got and what kind of advantages we had and to try to see ourselves, because typically people with assets to deploy are not sometimes started from nothing but often not the case. And I think understanding that this idea of meritocracy that we got if we're successful where we got by being the best is a very self-serving idea. And I think if we can see ourselves more clearly in all of our foibles, we're in a better position to empathize and understand the genuine problems that other people have and to identify as investors, the entrepreneurs whose lived experience is going to lead them to have the kind of passion that can really solve some of these problems and that we stop looking, again, and my examples are investors at who's coming out of Stanford with a CS degree, stop looking at credentials and pedigree and start looking at who really has the vision and the resilience to take on the hard problems of building businesses that are gonna make a difference. But so it starts with self-assessment. That's what I think. Mitch, I am genuinely so pleased that I get to sit on the stage with you and to arguably call you a friend. When I first learned about you when I was in college and I was hacking up a storm and I read about you in Mondo 2000 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that you were doing with John Perry Barlow. So I've been a fan for several moons and this has been a real delight. Thank you so much. Thank you for suggesting we do this. I hope it's been valuable. Okay, thank you.


You know, the teams are going to jump out on you and you got to give credit and respect when it's due.  They played with a sense of purpose, very comfortable. You know, just the tale of the way the rhythm of the game goes at times and you got to play through it. We cut it to five. I think we're like two minutes left to go or six. They're already left to go and then they get it back up to 18. Then we come out of half time and it's just back and forth at that point. They just kept it going and we went into zone and they started attacking the zone. And then, you know, Ricky just started getting downhill and just really started picking a part of our defense. So, you know, it starts on the outset, especially with me setting the tone.  That's just the telltale sign of just how aggressive I am not in the game, you know, getting downhill and really just setting the press and slowing the game down and really getting to my spots. You know, so a lot of the accountability falls on me and really just the game plan of guarding Ricky and not, you know, being in the right spots. That's a really good offense over there, but what issues are you seeing with the defense of communication and how do you clean that up with other potent offenses on the way? I just think that we, you know, I think we respect the Aaron Baines a little bit too much from the three-point line. I know he's shooting a high clip from the, you know, from the three-point line, but that's one of the guys you got to let him beat us. You know, us as a group, we just got to make that decision, follow on the game plan, obviously, but just make adjustments. You know, some backdoor cuts. I got beat on some backdoor cuts.  They were doing really well. So like I said, you just got to give them credit and respect. You know, they really just, you know, on back screens really just tested our communication and it just wasn't there at the certain level we needed to be. This isn't, I guess, the first time, though, we're in the early onset of a game. You guys have kind of dug a hole, mainly on the defensive end. I mean, have you noticed a similarity or a trend in those, a worrying trend and falling behind early? I mean, it's early in the season, man. I don't think there's any time that's really complicated or over-complicate what a trend is when we're still developing as a team, you know, especially when we've had some good games where we start out very well in defensive end and other games where we haven't. So, you know, you just got to find that consistency and that's part of the maturity of a developing team.  It's basketball. You know, you just got to play with a sense of purpose, physicality, and, you know, just being in the right spots. I think that we can give up some tough twos or some tough contested shots at the rim, but, you know, whether we're in a small lineup or a big lineup out there, we just got to make the right decisions on that end and be there for one another. There's another talented team coming up in a couple of days. What's the number one thing that you feel as a team you'd like to clean up heading to that one against the Jazz? Just hit first mentality. You know, we came out, got hit in the mouth pretty early in the game, and, you know, when you have that at a very, you know, it's a lot more crowded than I've been in Phoenix the last few years, so it was really good to see, you know, kind of the fans getting into it as well, and they were feeding off their energy, and then they got off to that, you know, that big lead, and like I said, they never look back. So, we're going to Utah, even more hostile environment, you know, just look forward to those type of challenges, but for me personally, just really starting out getting to the rim and being aggressive and getting in the paint and then making some extra opportunities for my teammates. In some ways, is this an aberration? Because Kenny said this is the first team that's really played five out with five guys who could hit from three. Were they just a little bit different kind of animal for you guys to tackle? Who, Phoenix? Phoenix, yeah.  I think that, you know, Banes being in the five, really testing our bigs. But Frank coming in, I think in the second half we were taking advantage of the overtop, you know, alley-oops to DJ and him being in the right spots, which, you know, in the first half, I think getting downhill, you know, Banes was clogging up the paint, or Frank was there, or Kelly was getting his hands on a few basketballs. You know, they were just longing the paint, really being in, you know, forcing out to our shooters, getting tough contests, and like I said, you just gave credit to the Phoenix Suns tonight, just playing very well.


An array is an arrangement of objects into rows and columns. Arrays are useful in helping students understand multiplication. Okay, it looks like you guys did a great job building your arrays. Is there anybody who would like to share one that they built? Okay, Alyssa. What multiplication sentence did you write to go with your array? Six times five equals thirty. Excellent. So you can see in her array, she built one that has six columns and five rows. Now if I took this array and I turned it this way, I would now have five columns and six rows, but still thirty blocks. So it doesn't matter in what way we have the numbers written, we're going to get the same answer. This is called the commutative property of multiplication. And mine is a seven times four array. And instead, we did it five plus two and multiplied it as two separate questions. It may be easier to remember or have a strategy for figuring out a table if we've forgotten what seven times four is. So it would look like this on the board. We'd have an array that would be five times four and an array that would be two times four, which would give us our answer of twenty-eight. This is a really good strategy because a kid's kid gives the opportunity to visualize what they're multiplying to really understand what the numbers are that they are working with. It also allows them to work with easier numbers, friendlier numbers, instead of trying to work with the whole number itself. This same strategy of breaking numbers into friendlier numbers to multiply can be used when multiplying two-digit numbers. And we'll do thirty-six times forty-two. Now this can be a difficult numbers to work with on its own, but if we wanted to make this a little easier, how could we break up these numbers so a little easier to work with? How could we write these as friendlier numbers to multiply? Jack? Thirty plus six times forty plus two. Great, good job. Okay, so I've taken this question and I've made it into an array. And if you take a look at the smart board, you can see the array that would come from a question like this. There's a lot more squares and it's a much bigger array, but it is still a really good way to show up, show how we are multiplying the numbers, and how we can break them up into parts. So what we're going to do is we're going to look at each part of our array to try to figure out what thirty-six times forty-two is. So the first part of the array we're going to look at is the big blue section. So this big blue section would be thirty times forty.  Evan? Twelve hundred. Very good. There would be one thousand two hundred blocks inside of that array. To complete the question, we also need to multiply the simple equations of thirty times two, forty times six, and six times two. By adding these products together, we can easily determine the solution to our question. Does anyone know what that total would be? Rusef? One thousand five hundred twelve. Good. One thousand five hundred and twelve. Good answer, Rusef. Well done. I'm going to get you to work on a problem on your own, draw the array that goes with it, and label all the parts. So the problem I'm going to get you to work on today is fifty three times twenty eight. Okay, give that one a try. We'll see how you do. It is important for students to explain their strategy to others. I split up fifty three into fifty plus three, and twenty eight into twenty plus eight, and then I put it into an array. Then I added it all up, all four numbers up, and it equaled one thousand four hundred and eighty four. Today we're going to look at multiplying these same larger numbers without necessarily needing to draw the array, but instead always visualizing one, and remembering what the array looked like, and how we're breaking up our numbers. The problem we're going to work on today is twenty three times fifty four. So if we were to take this number, and break it up into easier parts to work with, what would we break it up into? Brianna?  Now if I were going to write that as an array, or visualize it as an array, this is what it might look like. The teacher is making the connection between the question and the drawing of an array to help students see how the written work reflects the array. So we have twenty plus three times fifty plus four. So if we were to start by looking at this array here, which is twenty times fifty, can anyone tell me how many parts or how many squares would be in that array? Owen? One thousand. That's correct. One thousand. And over here we can see in the question itself, here's our twenty times fifty, and twenty times fifty equals one thousand. To complete the question, we also need to multiply the simple equations of twenty times four, three times fifty, and three times four. Once we have all the parts of the array completed or all the parts of the question multiplied, we can add them all together to get the total. Does anyone know what the total would be? Bruce? One thousand two hundred forty-two. Perfect. Good job. One thousand two hundred forty-two. Once students understand how to multiply using an array by breaking numbers into parts, they no longer need to draw the array. I've been teaching for a long time, and I used to just teach the algorithm method that we learned, you know, when I was a kid. And when I was hesitant, as anybody is, to change to the new strategies because change is always difficult. But what I noticed immediately from the year I was only using the algorithm to the year when the kids were allowed to use arrays and other strategies was an increase in the number of kids that understood how to multiply. Thank you.