Thank you, thank you very much for the invitation and happy birthday Samsung So I'm one of the probably two people here from Trinity College Dublin Where I came to get to know you more in the recent years that I've been there And of course I have learned a lot from you and I also Probably owe it to you a lot in terms of support especially in solving our two-body problem so Without let me also thank the organizers for giving me the opportunity to speak and apologize that I'm not going to My topic is not on neither or no normal is not on the gravity Although maybe some of the structure could have something to do could have some elements of integrability per se so a So the title is CFT and black holes and it may be much more catchy than what we actually Going to see we are not going to see much of black holes here But we're going to see some elements of them or let's say we start our baby steps in this direction so So where does this whole talk fits into so? It starts from the holographic principle the ADC 50 correspondence that tells us that we have some quantum field theories and they are have equivalent description in terms of a gravity in ADS space and given the recent Advances in techniques in conformal field theories for which some of the people here are Experts and pioneered them We would like to use them to deconstruct in a sense the holographic principle and learn more about gravity So what kind of questions we would like to ask in general is what type of theories have gravity description? What restrictions you can impose by physical consistency conditions and more specifically about black holes? Can we learn something by studying conformal field theories and here I'm merely thinking of higher dimensional conformal field theories? And of course several more questions So so in this talk we are going to discuss what we call holographic conformal field theories and by that I I don't mean theories that have an explicit holographic dual But theories that have certain characteristics that we come to acknowledge as such that give us an equivalent local gravitational description in terms of Einstein gravity actually So these are large and or large C where C is the parameter that defines the two-point function of the stress energy tensor in the CFT Conformal field theories which also have an infinite gap in the spectrum of operators which have of primary operators Which have spin higher than two? so there's been a lot of progress in studying such theories and one of the Perhaps basic work that sparked this whole initiative this whole approach was the work by Hemsker, Penedones, Polchinsky and Sully where it was first shown or depending on your level of You know rigorous your desire of rigorousness in proof They have shown that by studying the crossing equation that there is a one-to-one correspondence between local couplings in gravity and solutions to the crossing equation or peak coefficients, so furthermore several Several works followed that try to use consistency conditions and principles like unitarity or causality which Showed that basically this the couplings that are not present in Einstein gravity lead to several various inconsistencies and and So so these are some of the things that historically have brought As into into where we are today and we would like to go beyond that and study many things But at the same time now we are using we are we are using this all these techniques in order For example one approach would be to study try to compute Feynman diagrams in gravity by using conformal field theory techniques and of course there are many many other topics But the topic that as you as I alluded to it would be from the title that interests me are black hole and black hole physics Obviously, this is quite Further from where we stand at the moment and if we would like to understand them Well, the first thing that we want to do is perhaps see how in some sense emerge When we study conformal field theory, so we would like to see some elements of black hole physics that show up in conformal field theory correlation functions So one standard approach to study to study that to start for example looking at this would be to study thermal correlators because we know from our from the holographic principle and the idea safety correspondence that when we want to study CFT at finite temperature we can equivalently look in the large n and large coupling limit in the for the theory in ADS farce of black hole So and we can study correlation functions from there. However, this There has been Some approach in this some work in this direction, but the work that I will present here follows a slightly different route It uses the fact that We can look of the theory who can understand possibly several aspects of the same physics by looking at different correlation functions Since we have we are interested in theories at large n or large central charge We expect this I understand this in some sense like a thermodynamic limit for our system where we have a large number of degrees of freedom and In that sense we can may try to address a system by studying correlation functions Which involve two heavy operators that will effectively produce for us our thermal Backgrounds so these operators are termed heavy because in the limit where we send the central charge to infinity They're conformal dimension also scales the same way and the ratio delta heavy over C is roughly fixed so in the dual gravitational description the parameter that we are going to see a lot and its equivalent basically to delta heavy over C is the ratio of the Horizon radius to the ADS radius that's in four dimension specifically this equation since this will be mainly the focus of the stock although there are results beyond that and you can get to this relation through the ADS if the correspondence So this will be an important parameter for us here So what is the correlators that will That we will focus on in this talk is basically a correlation for the four-point correlation function the first perhaps Non-trivial step we can take we can look at two heavy operators and two light operators And they're all going to be scalar operators for simplicity and we expect that this will be more or less equivalent to a thermal CFT two-point function of light scalar operators so We know from experience from our holographic duality that in fact this object is cannot be analytically computed beyond for example cases in ADS 3 and So you would wonder how much mileage can we get how far can we go by looking perhaps at the unequivalent description in CFT and Well, what we can do so far is approach the problem in several Kinematical regimes that make it a bit more tractable and these are mainly two so far that we have looked at One of them is denoted by regi or a corner limit and the other is the light cone limit So let me say a few words about the first that are unfortunately. I'm not have time to discuss in this talk So in this limit, this is basically the technical definition of the limit let's say in terms of the CFT correlation function Which implies that you have to do a certain analytic continuation You're always looking Minkowski and correlator and you want to take both of zines the bar going to 1 which correspond to the conformal cross ratios with this ratio fixed So in this limit what we can do is we can we expect to get from this four-point correlation function or rather from this equivalent basically the scattering phase shift of a particle That is affected as traveling along anal geodesic by the presence of the black hole Which we expect to be like a particle of a very large mass so this is physically the limit that one is interested in there and this is a Work that we have been doing with Yin-Chen Andrei Parnachev, Robin Carlson and Peter Tadich two of our students and there is also a Contemporary work also by Fitzpatrick, Huang Li and Li as well So Unfortunately, I will not have time to discuss this. There are a lot of subtleties there Mainly in how one can define The classical phase shift from the gravitational description, but what our focus to it is in a much Simpler case in the what is called the light con limit where in terms of the cross ratios We have both zines the bar smaller than one the The two operators are such that they are the distances space like and we gradually approach the point where the distance between them becomes null and in this case there was There is like a wealth of results and it seems like a lot of information we can extract from this correlator in that limit Unfortunately, this doesn't have a clear let's say scattering picture interpretation that you would like to So so this is basically the outline of a talk There'll be some safety basics, but rather probably I will skip them in this audience We don't really need any safety basics and start from defining what is a holographic CFT What are basic our assumptions and then how we'll try to address the computation of this heavy heavy light light correlator So let me skip all this Generalities This is the crossing equation. Okay, and let me go to the holographic CFTs so To examine a CFTs, which have a holographic description as we said at the beginning we defined them in a sense We we will assume that they have a stress energy tensor operator and that there exists also to large Parameters in our system. We have a large number of degrees of freedom Here I call it n effectively is the square root of the central charge of the The parameter that sits in the two-point function of the stress energy tensor and that there's also this characteristic scale that separates the spectrum of operators of spin two and higher for primaries and Lore so in general we call we use the terminology of the Gauge theories, but here we don't have in mind any specific Lagrangian for our CFT so we will think of a single trace primaries like a set of primaries that We are given in our theory and can have spin up to two with Celebrated stress energy tensor and then double trace and multi-trace primaries are composite Operators that we can build from this original building blocks that our theory has So in general this would be There the rules that we are going to be interested in so when we have this is of order one in the large central charge a large number of degrees of freedom limit and These are like m2 double trace operators operate operate schematical primaries That can be composite primaries of this form where both operators are the same now when we have two scalar operators say one with m2, but m2 is Depends on to well, that's probably on two different operators than the correlation function behaves like one over n squared when The composite operator is made out of these two operators here that we have then it's of order one And in general when we see the stress tensor in the middle with two some other light operators that behaves like one over n So these are enough for what we're going to discuss here And we generally will also assume that the conformal dimension of the light operators is Not an integer because there are complications that show up in that case so what we're going to try to do is we're going to consider this correlator and We'll try to study the crossing equation Order by order in this parameter mu that we defined and in the light cone limit We're in this definition corresponds to Z bar one minus Z bar Z bar going to one So note that in effect what this does is Allow us to study what we would call the stress tensor sector of the correlator We'll see that a little bit more explicitly later And this is because effectively the parameter mu counts how many stress tensors appear within our correlation functions So whatever I will say today can apply more generally So it's what we're going to discuss is the stress tensor sector in a sense of this correlation function But the same sector is true and valid this in terms of OP coefficients and so on and so forth for a correlation function of all light operators so So what is the method we said we study by crossing so we'll study the contributions in both What we call T and S channel and just to set the notation here by T channel I mean when I bring the operators that identical to each other together and by S channel when I bring the operators that are not identical to each other together so Let's start from the T channel, which is a little bit easier But that's where the stress tensor sector sits and will be interested in it So if we expand it if we if you use the OP expansion to write our correlation function in terms of T channel We we have this G which denotes the blocks and P the product of OP coefficients of our operators And here by S and T I denote the spin and the twist of the operators that contribute in this generically infinite sum So now we are we are saying that we are going to study the correlator in some kinematic regime This kinematic regime is the light-con limit and in this case we see that the specific blocks Behave like this what I mean that they behave is that this is the leading term in an expansion in one minus The bar of the conformal blocks that we have so this leading term basically tells us that that the most important contribution to this infinite sum of For for the correlation function comes from operators of the smallest twist Also note here that what f is is basically something like a product of a hyper geometric function That depends on twist in the spin because we are going to see a lot of this F function later So So let's start our analysis step by step. We start from the first step, which is like the identity operator This is what gives us the disconnected correlation function Correlator where we have like product of two-point functions of heavy and light Here we don't see any dependence in mu in this parameter that we introduced now Let's see what happens at the next step. So now in Next we have to discuss what would be After twist zero, what is the lowestest operator and because of the unitarity conditions that That primary operators satisfying conformal field theory this leaves us to consider conserved currents and perhaps some some extra scalars beyond those so I Thinking of like a most generic situation we can have like a most generic safety We're going to consider a stress tensor and assume that there are no other Conserved currents in our theory. So in this case because of a word identity We can see that the product of will be Coefficient that our company the conformal block in this infinite sum Come are proportional to this parameter mu that I discussed from the beginning of the stock and will be the main An important aspect of this so now you can say, okay Definitely, we can have the stress tensor We can think of a theory that doesn't have other symmetries no other concept currents But what about other scalar operators in general if there are no symmetries There wouldn't be any reason for other scalar operators Even if they have lower twist than the stress energy tensor to have an OP eco efficient that scales with mu So that's why I discussed before that we are going to effectively focus on the stress tensor sector of the correlator But of course since we are setting the rules of the game. We can also say we assume that there is no other Contribution, so let's see what happens later basically what what we can see is that this product that the correlator admits an expansion in powers of mu in the t-channel and That goes also for the OP coefficient and what exactly do we have so at order mu Let's say we focus on the stress tensor sector, which comes with a factor of mu at order mu squared What we see is that we can make composites of two stress tensors and several derivatives in between You can obviously think of other composites where you have where you can also take Have some contraction so that Laplacian shows up or contracts several of the indices of one stress tensor with the other But in this case the twist is higher than this object without contraction So from the class of this multiple how I will call the multi-stress tensor operators that we have these This correspond to the minimum twist multi-stress tensor operators they will So now we see that the parameter mu will accompany the number of mu that we have tells us how many stress tensor seed within a composite operator that we have and Also given that we're looking at the light con limit We are allowed to focus on a specific set of all these composite operators However, still this does not simplify a lot of our work. Let's look at order mu squared So before at order mu you we could say, okay, we had just one operator That was giving us the lowest twist maybe some scalar or we can say that there will be coefficients in our theory Zero we can throw them away, but at order mu squared here. We see that we have Basically an infinite sum of operators because no many no matter how many derivatives We put here still the twist remains to be equal to four What's the actual reason and why why you are not you are giving me just the straighter rate of no love lessons or something Exactly what I said. So if you if you introduce you'll get higher conformal dimension and therefore the twist will be Higher so it won't be a lowest twist operator No Actually, we'll see in our recent work Maybe at the end I will say a few words that we can consider those as well Which expansion are you doing? Are you doing expansion like one or in one over C? It's not here the commuter. No in one minus the bar in light come It's the smallest parameter. It's even smaller than one over C one over See ah, no, no first. So first I take a C large And then I take mu and then I take one minus Z But then we'll see that basically I can define a parameter mu times one minus that bar which controls basically the summation If you want to expand the new that presumably You can even do it away from the light come because the expansion parameters mu times one minus it What's the actual spot? Yeah, the point is what contributes so the light come tells me that I have lost twist Maybe did I answer the question? Yeah, maybe you're right so So let's focus on order mu squared and try to see how we can re-sum basically this infinite contributions But in order to re-sum them we have to know what are the OP coefficients for these Operators we know that they come with an overall factor of mu squared but at the time Now the way I present the story is basically historically in the way actually we computed that now We have many ways of computing this OP coefficients At the time we didn't know this OP coefficients The only thing that existed in the literature were just a few of them like a handful of them computed in gravity by some similar expansion of the two-point function and But what we knew was that they all seem to have a structure of this form where this is the the conformal dimension of the light operator and this numbers a, b and c depend obviously on the spin of the operator that we consider since we have Operators of the same twist but different spin so the question was what were these functions? Could we basically these parameters can we write a generic formula for them so that we can perhaps? Afterwards be able to sum this infinite contribution and see what it gives us a order mu squared in our correlator And then whether we can actually evaluate the sums So once we have that the sums will be over some f functions, which are just some hyper geometric so We were actually able to find this OP coefficients With a little bit of guesswork and a little bit of looking at the other channel at the s channel behavior and the first thing that Helped us was the fact that we knew that in gravity when we have a large Delta light now Afterwards we can tell our delta light. We see that we can compute the two-point function of that this operator Remember, it's a two-point function at a thermal background. We can compute it through the black hole calculation by some geodesic Computation so this is the geodesics a computation you can do some regularization that doesn't that's not important But let's suppose now that we this is the result in ideas Let's suppose now that we expand in the parameter mu that Has the mass of the black hole inherent in it the first term will be the usual one That has information from the stress tensor sector from the stress tensor itself and the second term We see that the term that is the highest with delta L Comes basically from the first from the leading term But because of the exponentiation So that basically tells us that whatever this AS parameter is is such that when we do the sum What we get should be the light cone block. Let's say of the stress tensor squared And that's and looking at identities for hypergeometric function You can explicitly find what a s has to be in terms of the speed is this a guess or Well by now it's us. It's a checked with Laurentian version formula is checked with cross Channel calculation so it's now we can extract it. I'm just going through let's say the way we found it And at the beginning we found it a little bit with a bit of guesswork. Let's say But under which assumptions because you said are you aiming for gravity or using great is an input? So he saw here I had to so I didn't have this opaque coefficients and I would want ideally to have them or compute them in the CFT and get this result that will a give me gravity now I didn't have that so I tried to guess go my way around it with whatever results I had now However, we have tons of means to compute them and I can say that we can compute them From CFT alone using for example the Laurentian version formula So so that's what we use then we also use some information from the s channel computation and Let me just not bore you with the details of this computation just want to say that What what we see in the s channel is just all these double trace operators that are made out of heavy and light And the only thing that happens at each order in mu is that we get anomalous dimensions and no peak coefficients of these operators corrected compared to their mean field theory result So one can go ahead and try to study and it was useful for us at the time to focus on the small Region on top of the light cone limit because there we had a little bit of moral control and allowed us to basically guess The other parameters that sit in the opaque coefficients. How does this work? You usually look at the At you compute the correlator again in the s channel at order mu Assuming you have some corrections in opaque coefficients anomalous dimensions this you don't know but you can extract them from the stress tensor contribution in the t channel and then when you're going out order mu squared everything that you're interested in comes at the terms of Log squared and log where these pieces are the leading corrections at small z and these pieces are completely Determined by the previous order data So once we had the result we could actually also check with the Regel limit because we had explicit results there this would be the large impact parameter region of the regi limit and Also, it would be inverted in terms of how the limits are taken usually in the regi limit You first take sigma to zero and then Allow for fixed row and then a large in pop parameter. You take roll large Here we have first zooming in some sense in the light cone and then take sigma to zero However for several terms you can see exact matching So now let's go suppose we have these numbers I don't write them as complicated, but we have them and I can tell you we can compute them in Thousands of ways by now so we can establish we can do a purely safety calculation. Let's do the summation We can do the summation using other identities for hyper geometric functions that unfortunately We had to derive ourselves because although they're simple They didn't exist in the literature and what we get is the following result So this factor comes from the light cone expansion and accompanist factors of mu squared This overall term is just the disconnected correlator and this is the result that we see at order mu squared So we see that we have three terms Each of them depends on these functions f which are proportional to hyper geometrics and in front of them There are parameters that depend on delta light Obviously, this is the highest term that comes from stress tensor squared So what is the interesting observation here? It's like a trivial observation But however, it gives us a lot of mileage It's that every square this three plus three is six two plus four is six one plus five is six So what does this mean? So we thought okay Let's see. Would that mean something? Let's go to order mu cube. Let's now use some answers for the result of the correlator and Using this answer extract this coefficients So let's assume that at order mu cube the contribution of the stress tensor sector looks like this so it contains all the possible products of three f functions that we can have and There's some should go to one because to nine because we have F3 cube and F3 Remember is always the conformal block of the stress tensor sector in the light cone limit So we use this answer and by solving the crossing equation We were able actually to see that it's true and that and determine explicitly this coefficients However, there was a slight disappointment in the fact that we noticed that this sort of Hypergeometry functions are not really a true basis of something some of them were not independent from the other and You would say how on earth would you think of such a thing? and The reason we thought of that is because we actually had By chance observed a similar thing happening in two dimensions So in two dimensions the heavy heavy light block is known it exponentiates. There is a very clear simple form and In that case you can expand this in terms of said and you see the following That's now notice the function that sits in the exponent not the full correlator although for that is the same as well And what you see is indeed that you have a similar structure, but now of course You have the function if the hypergeometric Corresponds to F2 because this is what gives you the stress tensor So having this in mind is what led us to conjecture That something like that will happen in four dimensions and actually higher and Here I'm just writing the conjecture that the stress tensor sector of this heavy heavy light light correlator, and I would perhaps Remove the heavy heavy light light is just the stress tensor sector of any four-point correlator in the large and large Delta gap limit Should be given in terms should be expanded in powers of mu and at each order in mu to the k You will have a sum of products of f functions Where the there will be a k such functions that at order mu k and their sum should be equal to 233 times k What do you think Z bar to 1? So this is what I mean by that is that this is the leading term in the correlator the one that corresponds to the light con limit because I have neglected contributions of Multiple stress tensors that have higher twist. So this is exactly new Yeah, as a sum it will be exact in mew if I could re-sum this. Yeah, it would be exact in you and Of course, that's what you what you would actually hope for given that you know that something like that happens in two dimensions But unfortunately, although I was hoping that I would have to report on that. We don't have a finite We don't have a sum yet So what we have shown since then is that we can consistently use a such an answer to I don't know how Whatever higher order you want to check I mean you can do it Computational computer and you see up to order mu k and this answer satisfies the crossing equation is a consistent result And from that you can extract O p coefficients at higher orders in mu For these multi-stress tensor operators that you can then also cross check with the ones you can get from the Lorentzian version formula so what else Now actually we have checked that and we have also determined of the Coefficients and we established that at least to each order up to mu to the six that we can compute This correlation function this sector exponentiates in the same sense that it happens for the virazoro case So what I mean is that the structure in terms of a functions that show up in the whole correlator persists in the exponent in the exponent of an exponential and I can write my exponent in this form so maybe I will finish probably a little bit earlier, so The question is basically what underlies the structure and Unfortunately, we don't know yet. It would be much help to understand why Something like that can be even done in two dimensions. Does it mean something? one Point is then the question is can we resum the series and as I said unfortunately, we're not able to have a result as far But what we thought of obviously was the following Beyond the pure virazoro. We also have higher spin cases with w3 w4 and higher algebra algebras and for w3 The corresponding global block is f3 is this function that is now in four dimensions the global block of the stress tensor is the one of the spin three current in In two dimensions, so the question is Is it perhaps that if you try to resum? In that case, you know people have also computed their analog of the virazoro vacuum block for the w3 and From there you can take a limit where you scale the spin three charge with a central charge and that allows you to have only The spin three charge at order mu and then combinations of that at higher orders But what happens is that there is a term missing? So it's not the answer that we want is very close. So let me just show you at order Mu squared the W3 block will have a term that goes like f3 squared and a term that goes like f2 f4 But does not have a term that goes like f1 f5 Another piece of information is that this term is crucial to get the scattering phase shift correctly so now another Question is what happens when Delta light is an integer? I didn't say anything specific to that But some of you may have noticed that this OPE coefficients that are wrote schematically have a Terminator that it's equal to Delta L minus 2 and you wouldn't expect obviously to have any divergence here What happens is that when the light scalar has dimension equal to 2? There are composite scalar operators which contribute to the same order in the light con limit with a Multistress tensor operator and you have to solve some mixing problem in order to determine the OPE coefficients So that has not been done yet Now another question is whether you can go beyond the light con limit So what I mean by that is we computed the leading term in the expansion of Z bar going to 1 What about the sub leading or sub sub leading or how does it work? What you have to do is add now consider other operators that contribute together with the lowest list operator and These operators are the ones that you can have Contractions either between derivatives or between the stress tensors themselves and they obviously increase the twist So this is work that it's going to show up soon We were able to actually consider such contributions find the corresponding OPE coefficients in several sub leading orders in the slide con limit and what we determine is that It's okay. Maybe I should make a parenthesis here so one interesting aspect of this whole discussion is that you we were able to compute the stress tensor OPE coefficients exactly and They didn't depend on the details of the theory. For example, there was never any occurrence of Other parameters that normally appear in the three-point function of the stress of the stress tensor like The a conformal anomaly coefficient. So that could well have been Included in this but somehow the leading light com the multi stress tensor sector is independent of that and it's the same for Results for all the cases however, what you see as you go to sub leading orders you see these terms infiltrate and possibly spoiling This sort of universality as we can call it and what what is really Interesting here is that you can basically Determine and prove that everything is universal all this contribution Except for those that have total spin equal to zero or two Remember that in the t-channel only even spin contributes first So from spin four and higher all this multi-trace Multi-stress tensor sector is fixed and universal but spin zero and spin four contributions are not So and then so up to now I have only focused on the stress tensor sector of the correlator Obviously, this is a program and wants us to push it further and maybe after possibly we are able to re-sum this Consider Check if we can consider quasi normal modes or go beyond the large see address Generally physics close to the horizon That is possible probably due to the fact that we have like two competing limits that we can look at both the regi limit and the light Con limits we can extract results. So thank you very much for attention I understood that this approach you have that works in principle for any dimension. Ah, yeah, sorry I forgot to mention this. So we have checked several even dimensionality cases And they and they work but in all dimensionality CFT is that let's say that would correspond to ideas for Things were not as simple So we have we have we have tried to Consistent see get an answer but not yet. So I don't say so the problem is that for example one immediate the issue is that This these blocks are this is hypergeometrics in even dimensions that give us the block are Basic algebraic functions. That's not true in the other case And then it's also the fact that you have possibly to consider half integer values and different mixings and that Makes things a little bit complicated Thank you for the question Yes Can you with these techniques? Do the kind of thing that I'm at tea in chapter the Veneziano did which is ultra energy gravitational scattering of light states But the ultra energy large s makes a large mass and therefore Yeah, that is a little bit further away from the moment, but that's One thing that we are interested in doing so this so this stress tensor sector our Contributions are different orders in one over and basically so forget me It's like one over and squared one over and four So that they effectively tells us that we have a sector of several diagrams that could contribute in the process And we can possibly re-sum that So once that is done, then I could say that maybe we can approach this problem If the kinematic regime allows us to concentrate just on the we probably need some extra scalar contributions That's my feeling but Yes, you didn't mention the comparison with ideas Can you mention it if it works? Yeah, so so There's one to one You've got the same infinite sound Piper Joe metrics in it. Yes. Yes. Thank you


What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you were awesome and grab your bug out bags and load up on MREs because I've been enjoying a Battle Royale and that my friends is as sure a sign of the end times as you can get. The ancient christian question is Vampire the Masquerade Blood Hunt. Free to play Battle Royale available in Steam that's produced and developed by Sharkmob. The game is based on a popular tabletop role playing game about vampires. As such you were playing a shelf and game buffs by feeding on humans around the city. You can find your unique vampiric powers to leap along the rooftops of blaster enemies of the face with machine guns. While I have been enjoying this game there are of course some pretty glaring issues throughout so today we'll discuss what the game is, who's making it and my opinions of the overall experience. In Blood Hunt you choose from one of two arc types from three different vampiric clans. Each clan has its own ability and each arc type has its own as well. For example the Nosferatu clan my personal favorite can gain invisibility and a speed buff. Both the saboteur and prowler members of the aforementioned clan can execute this ability. However the saboteur has a unique ability that allows it to throw a sewer bomb while the prowler can scout areas with a sphere of bats.  The toreadore clan can send out an image of themselves and then blink to it. The muses can blind targets while the siren can heal themselves and allies in an AOE. For the most part Blood Hunt is just like any other BR game. You pick a spawn point, load in, and run around trying to find weapons and items true and about the map. However in Blood Hunt you can use your vampire sense to indicate where these weapon dumps are as well as any humans in your area. Feeding on humans is how you get your buffs. Regular humans show up white and are really only useful as a med pack when you're low health. The humans that glow however will give you buffs depending on their color and whatever disease they have. The buffs can be improved melee damage, health regen, or lowered cooldowns or effectiveness of your abilities. You can only have three of these buffs at any one time so choose wisely. If you don't plan to engage in any melee combat then stay away from the orange humans. You can increase the number of buffs you're able to get if you down an enemy you can then deoblerize them I guess that's how you pronounce it which it's basically an execute. This will heal you back to full and give you an extra buff slot. It's a bit of a gamble to do so of course you leave yourself completely exposed to anyone who is rushing into third party or duel. You also need to be careful about when you choose to feed on a human. Using your powers or eating somebody in full view of other humans will mark you on the map and other players will be able to easily locate you. Aside from the plain old humans there are also entity checkpoints throughout the map.  They don't miss their shots and they will track you for a pretty good distance. You can kill them but the entire time you'll be exposing yourself on the map with gunfire while taking damage making you an easy target for other players. I found that it's usually not worth it it's not worth the loot and I just avoid these fuckers. I did manage however to down one of the smaller groups and get the chain gun which was pretty damned fun. Blood Hunt is being developed and produced by Shark Mob, a Swedish AAA studio started by former developers of the division and Hitman. Blood Hunt is the first of three titles the company plans to work on. While the team members do have a proven track record of creating successful games I personally have a hard time placing any faith in AAA studios anymore. To make matters worse Shark Mob was recently acquired by Chinese media giant Tencent. I squarely blame the failing of my personal favorite game ever, Paragon, on the shoulders of Tencent and their greedy business practices. I have been enjoying this game so far but my general lack of trust in AAA studios combined with my deep abiding hatred of Tencent gives me quite an uneasy feeling going forward. There are some issues with the game, first and foremost in my mind is that melee weapons are advertised as a viable option as a main weapon type. Some of the abilities even seem to cater to it and there's a variety of melee weapons to choose from. However you would be a crazy person to try running around the map with melee weapons equipped. You seem to function just like any other VR, great when you're out of ammo of close but don't try bringing a sword to a gunfight. I have been clubbed to death with a spike bat but again I'm not very good so I imagine a more skillful player would have been able to gun that guy down. The big complaint many users have about this game is that the anti-cheat software you have to download with the game contains spyware. Shark Mob refutes this and says that the anti-cheat running when the game is off was a bug that they have since corrected. The original poster that sparked the entire spyware debate has also edited their original post to note that the anti-cheat doesn't include spyware. I don't mind running the anti-cheat but I 100% understand if others don't want to play the game for that reason. I mean we are dealing with Tencent here. This is probably a small thing overall but falling into water is instant death. I don't mind that as much as the Wilhelm scream that accompanies your death. Like why the Wilhelm scream did they think that was funny? It just strikes me as a cheap way to not hire a voice actor to do a proper death scream. The game also comes with all the standard battle royale problems. You wait five minutes to get into a match and then get gunned down by someone who happened to find a good weapon before you within 30 seconds. It feels bad. Even with the anti-cheat you do run into some hackers too. I'm not very good at the game so I often get wasted by people far more accurate than I but getting one shot three rooftops away by someone with a submachine gun is a bit recoculus. I also had an incident where someone was shooting at the rooftop I was about to climb over before I got to it which was pretty sus.   I've never played the tabletop game and I usually hate battle royales. Maybe it's the ease at which you could find loot. Maybe it's the joy of just straight eating people to gain buffs. If I had to come up with one reason though that I've been enjoying this game above other battle royales I would say it's the verticality in the mobility. I guess that's two reasons but anyway it's the verticality in the mobility. You can leap from rooftop to rooftop, run straight up walls, drop down, run through a tunnel and surprise your opponent by climbing up behind them.  Blood Hunt offers the opportunity to leap through the air, go invisible, locate your opponent with bats, gun them down with an SMG, and then execute them.  I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did please hit that like button for me. But for now this is the Mangoo signing off. You guys have a good one. Mangooos!


Stop believing U.S. military invasions have noble intentions. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. I love how everyone's just pretending the Afghanistan papers never happened and the Taliban takeover is some kind of shocking tragedy instead of the thing everyone knew would happen because they've been knowingly lying about working to create a stable government this entire time. If the U.S. had a free press and was anything like a democracy, the government wouldn't be getting away with squandering thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on a 20-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making assholes obscenely wealthy. Thousands of human lives. Trillions of dollars. If Western mass media were anything remotely resembling what they purport to be, they would be making sure the public understands how badly their government just fucked them. Instead it's just, oh no, those poor Afghan women. War apologists talk about doing nothing like that's somehow worse than creating mountains of human corpses for power and profit. We've got to do something about the Taliban! We can't just do nothing! Uh, yeah you can. Please for the love of God do nothing. Doing nothing would be infinitely better than more military interventionism in a nation you've already tortured for 20 years for no valid reason. People who think U.S. interventionism solves problems just haven't gone through the mountains upon mountains of evidence that it definitely, definitely does not at all. Nobody honestly believes the U.S. needs to invade every nation in the world with illiberal cultural values. They only think that way with Afghanistan due to war propaganda.  They had 20 years to build a stable nation in Afghanistan, 20 years.  If you think the U.S. needs to be in Afghanistan so the Taliban doesn't take over then have some integrity and intellectual honesty and admit you want perpetual occupation. In which case you should be arguing for Afghan annexation so that at least they get votes and congressional representation. The objection shouldn't be that there was no withdrawal plan. It should be that there was no occupation plan. Nothing was done in those 20 years for the long term benefit of Afghans. The entire plan was stay and plunder as much as we can until we feel like leaving. And of course more than this, we should be upset that the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan at all, killing hundreds of thousands of people for no legitimate reason. When all you've got is an insanely overfunded military, every problem looks like a job for your insanely overfunded military. I am once again asking you to stop believing U.S. military invasions have noble intentions. And stop blaming this on the corrupt Afghan government. There was no Afghan government. There was just whatever random Afghans happened to be willing to align with the occupying force that invaded their country while it was there. All blame rests entirely on that occupying force. Now would be a great time to unrehabilitate public opinion of George W. Bush. People who think the U.S. military can be used for good remind me of that scene in Edward Scissorhands where he's going around the house accidentally slashing things and then trying to fix them but he can't fix them because he's got horrible Scissorhands that can only slash. Every time mass military murder fails to achieve good things the proponents of mass military murder show up saying, the problem is we didn't murder enough people. You'll never see westerners so concerned about humanitarian issues as when there's a chance some distant part of the world might not be subjected to military occupation by the most murderous power structure on earth. Oh no, the country is immediately returning to the state it was in before we started using mass military violence to force it to look a bit different for a while. That's like dressing your kid up as Batman for Halloween and then getting sad the next day because Batman's gone. Can't figure out why Americans keep consenting to a government foreign policy of piracy and mass murder which is killing people by the millions via starvation and military violence. All that theft must be buying them awesome benefits like great healthcare and quality of life. Americans must be the happiest, most thriving people in the world. So many movies depict young men coming home from World War II like, howdy ma, hey pop, boy it's great to be home, now I gotta go see about that girl.  I still can't get over how mainstream news stories about empire targeted countries can be based entirely on reports by think tanks that are openly funded by weapons manufacturers. Now is the fact that this is journalistic malpractice not obvious to everyone in the world. The international symbol for the United States should be the Pentagon. It's far more representative of what that nation stands for and what it does than some flag or an eagle.  It's the single most insane, destructive and unsustainable thing humans do. People who tell me I shouldn't focus on it as much are people who I just disregard because they simply don't grasp the horrific nature of war and the need to condemn it. Sure they could've just killed a saunge, but then the message to journalists would've been we'll get you if you expose our crimes, but we'll have to be sneaky about it, which is less intimidating than we'll get you if you expose our crimes and we'll do it right out in the open. Western rightists are being trained to blame Western civilizations rising authoritarianism on communism and Marxism, and as a result they are reacting to anti-capitalists like myself with increasing shrillness and hysteria, while the actual very capitalist authoritarians go unopposed. Just another regular reminder that there will never be peace and economic justice as long as the majority are successfully convinced by establishment propaganda that those things are not in their interest. The propaganda machine must first be discredited and rendered non-functioning. If you've got any urge to write articles or make videos or a podcast, just do it. You're infinitely more qualified to be the media than people who are paid by billionaires to lie, and they're not asking anyone for permission to speak.  You don't have to be perfect or professional quality or whatever, help give yourself permission to outright suck at first if that's how it plays out. Give yourself permission to not be perfect and just learn as you go and correct your mistakes as you make them. That's allowed.  Just do it. Don't stop if you don't get a big audience right away, or if you never do. It's not about that. If you can open even one person's eyes to one aspect of reality, you are helping humanity to become a more conscious species by that much. That's what it's about. That's what matters. And even if you don't do that, fleshing out your ideas in some public medium is a great way to help yourself become aware of more things and deepen your own understanding. So you're still improving humanity by that much. So no matter what happens, you can't lose. If we're ever to turn things around, it will be the result of a very large number of us grabbing a rope and tugging.  Start from there and see what happens.  If you are clinging tight to thoughts and beliefs, you're not able to relate to life as it is.  So you can't respond to life wisely. The character Inspector Javert from Les Miserables is a perfect description of what goes wrong when you emphasize narrative over reality. In his case, replacing true goodness with moralism, with shoulds and shouldn'ts and rules and laws instead of responding to life as it shows up, like Valjean. In contrast to Javert, Valjean is able to recognize Fantine's plight as a result of his own negligence, even though she shows up as a prostitute in trouble with the law. As his eyes are open to life as it is, he's able to exercise true compassion and help her and Cosette. People like Valjean are able to see through not just their own mental narratives, but the narratives that are imposed upon them externally by mass-scale propaganda. People like Javert will support every power agenda no matter how depraved, because they believe mental stories. Ego doesn't make it out alive. One way or another it's a goner. It either dies by being seen through, or it takes us all out with it. The good news is that every single one of us gets to make that choice in every single moment.


here is the list of things we specifically want somebody to be working on. We don't wanna lose sight of these things because these are issues that we remain concerned about and then as soon as some of them get resolved then GLL can bring the rule back to us and we can fix the rule if we can get it to go the other way. Okay. And I'm gonna do the presiding officer. Boy, it's amazing how many times the word the president appears. So we may need to put, we may need to put it into the definition at the beginning presiding officer means who's ever running the meeting the day of the meeting. We weren't taking away from the president all of the following. Okay. So I'm basically done other than that. In terms of this document. Every change we talked about in it other than presiding officer. So if any of the four of us read, I can, I will upload this once I've done presiding officer and I just called it ROPV7 revised on today's date post council. So it has this little label that this is where we got to. So can we then say, just based on how realistic it is that you're doing all these edits for us, Kathy, when do you feel comfortable that we can turn it back to, we can turn it to the clerk? This is separate from the comment period that the town council's making to the clerk. But we wanna turn it to clerk to see if anything else jumps out. I'll have this done. I have finance from two to four. This will be done by the end of the day. You know, I'll have it done potentially by five o'clock, but it'll be end of my Tuesday. Great. And so if you'll forward that along then, I think, let me find that actual email from Lynn that asked for that. Okay. And we can just respond to that email. Here it is. Yeah. Right. And I'll do it as an attached document so we don't risk changing this in any way. I'll just attach a document with a copy to everybody so they can just see where we go. You can reach the airport or you can read the attached document. Yeah. I'll keep the thread going that Lynn started about having the clerk. So let me, I'll pull that up again forward that. And then you can just attach it to that and reply to all those people. That'll be cool. And you know, in terms of getting ready to get this to final, I think, Mandy, you've done this before. I've only done it once where when we wanna create the table of contents, there's a way of taking the bolts and having it naturally appear. So we just need to build into our timeline of doing that or agree that that doesn't have to be done by June 3rd and it can be done after June 3rd. You know, whatever. That's the final getting the thing spiffy. I mean, everyone's got this document now in the public arena and it'll just be a better reader's guide to the... If we don't wanna do it by June 3rd, it could go on the list of things to do later past the full rules. It's missing a table of contents. We recommend that GOL add a table of conducts and an index so that there's some time there. It can be time consuming because if you change one more thing, it interacts with it. So you wanna leave it that till last. But I would rather send that over to GOL and along with our report that includes the section about all the things we want them to look at and say that our work is done because the rules have been accepted. But the insuring that the links are in there, the insuring that the table of contents and index of people wanna add. And I don't wanna add the text of the charges till this is done either the same way. And we will be unusual to do that, to do the full charge of the document, but it's fine with me. Give us a place to keep them in the meantime till we get this other structure going till we get what GOL's gonna apparently work hard on to get structured on the town website and which by-law review also talked about, right? They were talking about a structure. Here's the by-laws, here's the general by-law here and the policies, here's the rules of procedure and like people could actually go find everything. It would be amazing. I think we did it. We're done. So can I move to adjourn? Or do we have minutes to- I just do, that is a question, is would people, would someone take responsibility? Kathy, you had worked on this really hard for us the other week, is to where we are with minutes? Where are we with minutes?  I don't remember who took minutes at the last meeting. I did not. I did, and they're in a folder. They're in the draft minutes.  So how are we approving those minutes? By a vote. Okay, so we'll do that next time. Well, that's what I was wondering is when do we do that? So minutes from last week and this week, we will have on the 514 agenda. That means I move to adjourn. Is there a second? Okay, all those in favor? I third it. Aye. So this meeting is adjourned at 12, 21 PM so that all the people who are on the finance committee can go get some lunch before finance committee starts.


and welcome to The Creative Life, a collaborative production of Think Tech Kauaii and the American Creativity Association. Co-host Phyllis Belize joins me today in welcoming our guest, Daniel Burris. Daniel joins us from his office in San Diego. Daniel is one of the world's leading futurists on global trends and disruptive innovation. And The New York Times refers to Daniel as one of the top three business gurus. Welcome, Daniel Burris, to The Creative Life. Hey, thank you. Thank you very much. Great to be here. Daniel, you have started six innovative and six and successful businesses. You've written seven books that continue to be bestsellers in the United States and many other countries, including China. As a noteworthy futurist, you've been predicting future trends for over 38 years with an amazing level of accuracy. So let me start by asking you, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future and why? Well, I'm amazingly optimistic and a little thought on pessimistic, first of all. Yeah, pessimists, they never do anything. Why? They know it'll fail. So the only people that ever get anything done are optimists. So just a little insight on that. Secondly, I, as I travel around the world and I do a lot of that, I'm a 2 million mile flyer on three airlines. And that's only three of the many airlines that's going on. And I say that because I do like seeing this wonderful planet that we live on. And as I travel around, there are so many young as well as old bright lights out there, shining their light all over, using their creativity to drive innovative solutions to some of the biggest problems that we all face. And when you look at what the power of humans can do when they put their minds to it, it's really quite unlimited. So I'm very optimistic about our future. Well, that's good to hear and it's certainly refreshing, especially since seemingly there's never been more disruption and uncertainty than now, at least in my opinion. With that in mind, how can we solve problems and create a better future with all the chaotic uncertainty that's going on at this time? Well, there's a couple of elements to what you asked me. One is how do we solve problems and just a little thought on problem solving. Think of your biggest problem. I'm talking to all of us that are watching now. Think of your biggest problem right now. Probably didn't take long. It wouldn't surface up pretty quick. Now, here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to skip it. You see, whatever problem you've got, the reason you're being blocked by it, the reason you're having so much trouble with it is that's not it. You're working on the wrong problem. You've got to dig down by asking a few of the why questions and you'll get down to what the real one is. For example, my niece called the other day and she said, I can't seem to save any money. I'm trying to save money. Now, see, she has her first job and she knows her older sister can save money like crazy, but she is having trouble. She said, I'm trying, Uncle Dan, to save money, but I can't. What's the problem? I said, you're working on the wrong problem. That's the problem. Instead of working on trying to save money, you should work on how you spend your money. If you work on how you spend it, you'll find yourself saving a lot of money. I know that if you think money and funding is your problem, that's why money and funding is always your problem. That's the wrong problem. You've got to dig down a little deeper to find out what the real one looks like. First of all, whatever problem you've got, that's not it. Find the right one and you can solve it. Secondly, you asked about uncertainty and we surely are in a world with a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty does not empower me. The strategy, whether it's personal or business strategy based on uncertainty has high risk. In a world of seeming uncertainty other than death and taxes, I have to ask myself, am I certain of nothing else? The answer is I'm certain of thousands of things because certainty gives me the confidence to make bold moves. Certainty gives me the confidence to move forward when I was stuck before. One of the ways of getting certainty is by looking at trends. I know most people don't look at trends very much because they know some happen and some don't, but to find certainty in an uncertain world, try this. This is being used by the Pentagon. I'm on the Futures Group of the DOD as well as many other of the Fortune 100 companies and they're using this methodology. I'd like you to use it as well and that is there's no shortage of trends, the problems, which ones will happen, which ones won't. All trends are either hard trends based on future facts that will happen. In other words, you can't stop them, but you can see disruption and change before it disrupts, giving you the opportunity to become a positive disruptor, creating the transformations that need to happen to make the world better for everyone. The other type of trend is a soft trend. A soft trend is based on an assumption about the future that may or may not happen. The advantage of a soft trend is if you don't like it, you can change it. One insight I'm teaching you, all trends are either hard or soft and secondly, to make a trend burst into actionable life, you have to tie an opportunity to it. Again, the opportunity of a hard trend is to make change your best buddy, your biggest competitive advantage and personal advantage, because if you don't like change, you're not going to like the future. And secondly, soft trends, if you don't like something, you can change it. Those are two powerful ways of finding, so hard trends really gives you the certainty. And for example, technology, amazingly predictable. We went from 4G, we got 5G, is that it? No, I'm certain the next will be 6G followed by 7G. I'm giving you a simple example, but you see what I mean. And we're putting a lot in the cloud. Is the cloud getting full? No, they're going to put more in the cloud. And AI is not going to all of a sudden disappear if you don't like it. It's going to continue to get more powerful. The key is, what do we do with it? You see, a tool is not good or evil. A tool just is benign, really. It's us humans that determine whether a tool can be used for good or bad. And one of the things I've discovered in traveling the world is that most humans on the planet are good. Now, of course, if you got some bad leaders, that could be a problem. But most people are really good people. And they'd like more opportunity for their kids. And they would like to live a good life. And the majority are really good people. Well, that's another reason I'm optimistic. One other thing about creativity since this is the creative life. I would describe innovation. I would define innovation as applied creativity. Innovation is applied creativity. And the creative mind can do so much when you really unleash it and look for solutions to problems. For example, when I hear about old people, a lot of them end up in the hospital because they fell. A lot of broken hips out there. Ammonian broken hips are big, take out a lot of old people. So my creative mind, and I want yours to do this, I look at technology hard trends. For example, I started out with demographics, which is predictable. We're going to get older, a lot more old people that could be falling, right? That's predictable. Unless we solve that. So we could now put a little slipper that fits over a shoe. And on the end of that slipper, you could have a sensor that is wireless and goes to a Bluetooth device in their ear if they don't have a hearing aid or it goes to their hearing aid. And what it could do is it could signal them if there is a step going up or a step going down. And instead of just beeping, it can be voiced and say, step going down, step going up. Julie's toy is in your way. And you know what we could do? We could keep people from falling. We could keep people from falling down those steps or tripping on that toy. By the way, that thing I just described does not exist. Now let me ask you, do you think something like that no way will exist? Or do you think we'll see something like that? And the answer is we will see something like that because if it can be done, it will be done. All you have to do is use your creativity and then think of those hard trends in the three categories. Very quickly, it's not that hard, is you have demographics. Again, maybe we're not going to get younger all of a sudden. A lot of people are going to be retiring. That's not going to end. And you have technology and technology has been amazingly predictable. I've been doing it for 38 years very accurately. And the third is, this will surprise everyone, regulation, government regulation. And you would say, well, how could that be in there? And how could creativity play a role with regulations? But let me give you an exact example. One of the things I teach in my books, the latest one being Anticipatory Organization, is opposites work better. So when you hear regulation, right away you go to a big list of things you don't like. Why don't you try the opposite? Start looking at the things you do like. Elon Musk, every business he started was funded by government regulations. You could do that. Let me give you a real quick example to stir your creativity since this is about the creative life. And that is, there is a 26-year-old teacher in San Diego that heard about a new law in California. There's a real law that was passed just a couple of years ago. And the law said within three years, every kindergarten or first grader, half of their reading has to be nonfiction. That's a real law. Half of their reading has to be nonfiction. By the way, right now it's all fiction. A little engine that could is fiction. So you've got three years to have half of it nonfiction. And when you hear things like that, you start thinking, what are they thinking? Oh, it's California, or all of these kinds of things. But instead, this 26-year-old teacher in San Diego, she did the opposite, looked for opportunities. She made three phone calls. She called the San Diego School District. She called the Los Angeles School District. She called the San Diego School District. She goes wisely. They're big. And she said, look, you got three years to get compliance with that law. Half of the reading material for those little kids is nonfiction. If I supplied those books, would you be interested? To make a long story short, they underwrote her business. They became her key customers. And she didn't have to go on Shark Tank. Why? Well, because she was being creative, but she was looking at what most of us hate, but she started with what she loved. So government regulations, tremendous opportunity, amazing funding there. Have you been looking for that with opportunities? Take a look at technology. Technology allows us to, with our creativity, innovate. And we're just entering the new dawn of a new world of innovation. And things, and because technology is so inexpensive and so powerful, anyone can solve any problem if you address the right problem and skip the one that's the wrong one. And remember, we have demographics. And there are so many opportunities in demographics. Again, just being creative here and giving you a demographic example, a lot of people like to go boating. A lot of people love to go fishing. But as you get older, it gets kind of hard to launch the boat. And in fact, at some point, it gets kind of hard to get in the boat. So what if you and I created the easy launch trailer for senior? Would we have a built-in growing demographic every year more people getting that demographic? Well, yes, predictable, as a matter of fact. Would we know which countries to export that product to and which ones to not export to? Oh, yes. Aging populations like Japan, like the United States, by the way, China's got an aging population. The one white child thing didn't work out all that good. And then we have also young population. A Istanbul average age is 28. Well, I'm not going to take the product there. But I know exactly which countries I will take it to with certainty. You see how I'm combining certainty with hard trends, with the creative mind, innovation, and providing solutions. By the way, there is no easy launch trailer for seniors right now. You think we know way we'll see that? Well, you know, we will see that. Why? Because if it can be done, it will be done. And if you apply your creativity to this, how can you not get excited? It can reinvent everything. The first step to get to that launch is to get the seniors to be able to have a pathway to walk on. And each pathways are generally rough. So we do see a little bit of the first step coming through. Make it a little bit easier to get to the launch. Fascinating. I mean, I just love what we're hearing. And let's see what Phyllis has for you. Yeah, I'm interested to connect the dots on today's show, Dan. And you entitled it Flash Foresight. Really, what I'm wondering is how does the everyday person gain access to this flashing foresight? And is it fair to say that one way to do that is to follow hard trends and then see where they intersect with your abilities or your resources. And then you look where there's going to be crashes in the trends. And you use those as opportunities. Come in with saving graces. We're talking about business now and employment, but also could be applications where we're going to take art. So the flash foresight is more like necessity being the mother of invention. We look for the necessitous problems and trends. That's our flashing. That's our foresight. And then we intersect that with our abilities or in our assets to come up with what we foresee as problems. So you're talking about the power of foresight and certainty is certainly the hard trends. Yeah, hard trends give you certainty. And let me address the idea of flash foresight for just a second. Actually, my book number six was called Flash Foresight. And the subtitle of it was how to see the invisible and do the impossible. Well, how can you see the invisible and do the impossible? And how do you get flash foresight? So let me tie that together so you see why I made that title the way I did. And that is the minute that an invisible solution to a seemingly impossible problem becomes visible. You get a flash of foresight. The minute that you get something that you think you can't do and all of a sudden that becomes visible, whether it's a trend, a hard trend, a soft trend that you could influence, when those things that were invisible to you become visible, you get a flash of foresight, allowing you to move forward in a way that you couldn't have moved before. And basically there are triggers to give you make the invisible visible. One is separating hard trends from soft trends. It helps you to make the invisible visible, giving you a flash of foresight. The other one, another one I shared with you is problem skipping. Actually, learning how to be a good problem skipper will give you a flash of foresight because the reason you aren't moving forward is because you're being blocked by something and when you realize that the thing that's blocking you is actually not the real problem, it's something underneath and you peel the onion back. All of a sudden I've never had a problem that you can't solve. Very quickly, once you define what the real problem is, by the way that makes the invisible visible, allowing giving you a flash of foresight, allowing you to go forward. I mentioned another way to make the invisible visible, giving you a flash of foresight. I very quickly mentioned what I call the law of opposite. And that is, if you look in the exact opposite direction, you then where you're looking now, you can see what was previously an invisible solution. And so they combined, let me give you a combination. Years ago, they were trying to make the first Jaws movie. And they had trouble with the Jaws movie and it almost did not happen because they were trying to make a real scary looking shark and it didn't look scary and it didn't look real. And they had trouble making this thing and they made a different one and another one and another one and they all looked from me and they were having big trouble until somebody applied the skip it principle. And they said, and they applied the law of opposite. They said, well, instead of having the shark, let's have the shark be invisible. Let's not show the shark. Let's show what the shark is seeing when he's swimming underneath all that food, those people. So they skipped trying to make it look cool and dangerous and said, let's not look at the shark at all. Let's skip that. Let's do the opposite. Let's not have them in there at all. By the way, that allowed that to go forward. It wasn't until towards the end of the movie in the middle of the movie, they started showing the shark that didn't look all that great, but by then you were already into a good movie and didn't care. So skip it. The law of opposite, hard trends, soft trends, are ways of making the invisible visible, giving you a flash of foresight, allowing you to move forward where you were stuck before. If I could, I want to share with you when you were talking about that flash of foresight. There is another backdrop to these forces and it's your own emotions. I'm talking for personal experience, your own emotions, your own consciousness. And I had to chill when you said that because I flashed across my mind how many times I have had that instant observation or I've seen that or I saw the solution and then I took myself out of it. I took myself back from it. I got afraid.  We'll just see, they're not allowed what they see. There's no, there's no buffer, but those, what do you do or do you talk in your groups about how you create your own safe space to allow that free flow of insight to be said and not just able as soon as you see it? Well, that is a great question. Thank you for asking that because the reason that we get worried about it or we don't have the, we don't want to share it with others because it might be a crazy idea. All of those things that keep us from moving forward and then someday, by the way, that will happen and you'll say, I thought of that 10 years ago. But yeah, right? That's happened to you because I know and it's happened to you too. But here's the thing. That's where hard trends and soft trends actually really help. It sounds academic, but it's not. It deals with the inner you because you did not have the confidence in your idea. You were uncertain of the quality of your idea. You were loaded with uncertainty and that kept you keeping it in. You didn't share it. Uncertainty does not give you the confidence to make a bold move. Certainty gives you the confidence to make bold moves. When you have certainty, then you can speak up and when you're looking at a hard trend that you know will happen and you have the confidence that, yeah, I know that's going to happen. And then you see and you have an idea that ties to that. That's your creative solution. Then what you have is the confidence to tell it to other people because you know, again, what I'm giving you is the power of certainty. It's really the science of certainty and it helps overcome those inner challenges. The other things is, you know, I'm not actually another thing you've pointed on and I'll just bring this to bear and that is whatever is keeping us from doing things, whatever it might be, the real problem can be found by looking in the mirror in the morning. We are the problem. Every. We are the block. It isn't somebody else's. In some thing, it's our mindset. And as I've traveled around the world, you know, both vacationing and helping people, what I've discovered is it's all a game of mindset. You see the world as scarce or abundant. There's not enough good job or there's endless good job. I just want to go find one of them. There's no opportunity. Oh, there's tremendous opportunity.  The world is fantastic. It's just beginning and blooming. In other words, our mindset really is powerful. And Phyllis, there's a concept that I shared in my very first speech 38 years ago. And I've given over 3000 since then all around the world and huge audiences. The first one was to actually intercity junior high school. I had about 1000 kids in there talking about their future. And I introduced the concept of future view. Let me introduce that now. And because it's real germane, how you view the future to a great extent shapes your actions in the present. For example, right now there's people that are buying Apple computer stock. There's people that are selling it. They have a different view of the future of Apple. Some kids are thinking of going to drugs. Some kids are thinking of going to college. Some people would never start a business. Some people would love to start a business. So it's all based on how you see the future. So here's future view. How you view the future shapes how you act today. By the way, how you act today will shape your future. In other words, your future view will determine the future view. And I think everybody's future view is based on a rear view mirror view, not a windshield view. We're looking at the way it always has been and the way it always was. Instead of looking forward and seeing out the windshield and seeing the amazing opportunity that's there. We have a mountain of opportunity in front of us right now and it takes creative minds. And that mountain is fogged in by, guess what? The news. Why? Because bad news sells and good news doesn't sell. And if there's no bad news, they give you the anniversary of bad news just to make sure you get enough of it. Every good news station has failed. So what I'd like you to do is to blow away all the fog, listen a little less to all of the banter and all that stuff, and start observing the amazing mountain, as solid as granite, or the volcano there on the big island, whatever you're going to do, it's solid. It's there. And hard trends and identifying them can help you with that. Do you think folks that have trouble moving forward in identifying the correct problem or taking risks, do you think sometimes that's a buildup of previous failures even in their youth? Well, I think one of the principles that I like to teach is to fail fast so that you can learn faster. And I mean, when I started out teaching biology and physics, and when I started my first company, which was I had an idea for an airplane design, and I built a test float at 37 national locations in the first year, when I left education and started a business, which I'd never had a business class before, probably helped me, by the way. But I'd never had a business class. Two things were really important. Number one, I knew I'd have to fail fast because I couldn't forward the fail slow. But I needed to learn from those failures. Just failing is no good, learning from those failures.  I know people that are wise, and I know people that are just old. I'd rather be a wise old person with the difference. Wise old people learn from their mistakes, so they don't keep repeating them. And by the way, they learn from other people's mistakes, so they don't repeat those either. So I think part of it is doing that kind of discipline, not being afraid of failure, but rather see it as a learning experience and allows you to go forward faster. The other thing, by the way, I did is I didn't compete because competition is difficult. So I looked at what the competition was doing, so I knew what not to do. They're already doing it. Why should I bother? Why don't I look at what they're not doing? And when I looked at what they're not doing and created a list, wow, it's gigantic, open country, perfect for a creative life and a creative mind. That is really interesting, that particular concept. One other thing I'd love to figure out, I know we're getting close to our timing, I think, but being creative life, let me fit one other little thing in that I've got to do because of the title of this program. When I turned 28, I made a commitment myself, and it's been an amazing thing as it's unfolded over the decades. I decided to learn one new thing every year and make it a discipline. So one year, I learned how to hang life. One year, I learned how to dance. One year, I learned how to do fancy dives off the diving board. One year, I learned how to make movies. One year, I got into photography. One year, I learned how to cook. One year, there was an open mic at a comedy club and I went and did that for a year. And well, I mean, that was decades and decades and decades ago. I've got a wide palette of experiences that I can draw from. Either way, there were some failures I learned from in there that were really powerful.  I've been a feature artist at a couple of universities who would have known. I've actually one, I made films one year and all five films that I made, funded myself inexpensively, borrowed a camera. And they all won first place film festivals who would have known.  You want to leave this planet and discover what's next without ever even exploring all that's inside of you. And there's a lot. One thing a year is doable.  Well, Daniel, the information you've shared with us is fascinating and I think really helpful and really practical. And I know you had to make time to be with us. And we truly appreciate having you. And I'm very sorry to say without that, at this point, we need to conclude. So you Mahalo and you have been watching the creative life with co-host Phyllis Please and Darling Boyd along with our wonderful guest futurist, Daniel Burris. Our takeaways for today are many, a better understanding of disruptive innovation and how to maximize outcomes using creative foresight and certainty. And we certainly hope that you will all join us in two weeks when we return with the creative life. Until then, thanks to our guest, Daniel Burris. Aloha.


Pastoralists have lived on this land for nearly 4,000 years. Maasai people respect the mara because it provides everything our livestock needs. The world's drylands are exceptional lands that have excited people's imaginations for generations, for good reason. Drylands cover more than 40% of Earth's land surface, more than any other type of land, and are home to most of the Earth's savannas. Known as the Savannah Continent, Africa has more savannas than on any other continent on Earth. Close to 120 million people, about two-thirds of the rural drylands population across West and East Africa, depend on livestock for their income, nutrition and way of life. Many of these are pastoralists who herd their cattle, camels, sheep or goats across the drier parts of these savannas. Their animals feed off the seasonal, patchy vegetation that grow on soils where crop farming is difficult or impossible. In the past, we assumed that most drylands used in common by herders could become overgrazed and degraded. Now, we understand that climate has far more impact on these ecosystems than grazing. East Africa, unlike the rest of the world, has a twice a year wet and dry season. Because wet seasons can be short and dry seasons long, savanna plants must respond quickly to rainfall, as must the people and wildlife who depend upon them. When a savanna is lush and green, the animals and pastoralists grow rich and fat. When it grows parched and brown the next season, the animals and their people grow lean. The extraordinary productivity of grasslands is manifest by the vast and varied herds of wild animals that have always roamed the plains of East Africa. Natural grasslands generate a vast store of energy derived from the sun, the soil and water that animals exploit. The hidden secret of these landscapes is that while in forests, most of life is found on top of the ground. In African savannas, life teams below ground. Grasses survive by storing starchy food reserves in their underground stems. So even when straw above ground turns dry and yellow, the roots below remain alive, storing starch that stimulates new growth almost immediately when the first rains arrive. Unlike crop farmers, herders and their livestock can move to take advantage of patches of green grass and intermittent water sources to survive dry spells. Did you know that while a forest appears to have more plant food than a grassland, grassland often has the same amount or more of edible leaf biomass. Dryland pastoralists produce more than half of Africa's red meat and milk. In Kenya, 90% of the meat consumed by the population is supplied by the 16 million dryland livestock herders in the country. Most of these herders inhabit arid and semi-arid lands that cover most of Kenya and sustain both wildlife and livestock. Savanna grasslands are not fragile lands. They are built to survive periodic drought and flooding, grazing and burning. And because they are naturally resilient, drylands that do become degraded can return to health with appropriate land use. Africa is remarkable, not because there are many types of mammals, but because they are so big. No other place in the world supports the diversity of large mammals that live in Africa today. In East Africa, people and wildlife co-evolved together. An African conservation ethic for pastoral savannas is one that promotes conservation with development and development with conservation. Did you know that Tanzania has more land in protected areas than any country in the western world and the national government of Kenya spends more on protected areas per square kilometer than the United States does? In Kenya, about half the nation's wildlife still live outside wildlife preserves on pastoral lands. Where pastoralists share fairly in-the-profit stemming from wildlife conservation, conflicts between people and wildlife can be turned back into coexistence. But when farms cover a major part of a savanna, most wildlife disappear. New and accelerating political, economic and climatic stresses are challenging pastoral resilience and ability to adapt. Changing land tenure arrangements, ad hoc land use policies and increasing human population and agricultural demands are driving people onto formally open range lands. Human settlements in these areas are disrupting the traditional roots of mobile herders, livestock and wildlife. Further exacerbating this challenge is the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events due to climate change. In response to these changes, pastoralists are creating new ways to manage range lands. Community-based range land management is one of the most promising means of achieving socially just, economically viable and environmentally sustainable management of range lands. Did you know, in Kenya, pastoralists are creating institutions such as conservancies and grazing associations to unify fragmented dry lands? Today, the Kenya Wildlife Service and local county councils and the Tanzanian National Parks Authority all share some of the proceeds from tourist fees with local pastoral communities. A novel, index-based drought insurance for dry land livestock keepers has been piloted and scaled up successfully in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. A more resilient and stable dry lands livestock economy is achievable. Some 30 years ago, saving the last rainforest from the acts of development caught the imagination of the world. As our understanding grew, so did our commitment to protect the indigenous peoples as well as biodiversity of the rainforests. The great savannah lands of eastern Africa, cradle of humankind, home to traditional nomadic pastoralists and the last refuge of some of the most spectacular wildlife populations on Earth should draw similar levels and kinds of global commitment. Thank you.