What's up everybody Jason here for Jaspys case breaks calm We just filled up Jaspys 14 box legends rookies and stars basketball mixer random teams and again This is a 14 box mixer 30 total spots everybody gets a random team the NBA Just remember no veteran commons will ship and they only have a box of 1617 optics first-year optic as a $1,500 box plus Some 2021 prism choice all the way down to prism blaster very good mix of stuff guys pretend you're from monsters and And here we go guys so again these customers straight up Brian to David and then from Rhonda and Patrick got those straight up an Anthony all the way down to mark got those from prism blasters and hoops pack fillers So paid a fraction of the price to get it so congratulations. There's the customer names there in teams. Let's roll the dice It's a two and a three for five times. Good luck one two three four five Two and a three five times David down to Brian Frank boom five times one two three four Five five times five times Portland down to the Denver Nuggets So David you have the Portland Trail ladders out with the Rockets David with the Wizards Patrick with the Lakers Carl with the Spurs bow with the heat as well as Brian Frank with the jazz and the Kings Christopher with the Clippers David With the Raptors Ron Western with the Bulls run Richard Johansson with the Grizzlies Travels of the Hawks Mike Tower the Pacers Brian Frank you have the mornets Kaleel with the magic all over the Suns David with the nicks Brandon with the Bucks Brian Frank with the Mavericks Allen with the calves Robert with the 76ers Carly of the Nets Natalie with the Thunder Mark with the Pelicans Michael C with the Warriors Carl with the Pistons Nancy with the Celtics Zachary with the T Wolves and Brian Frank with the Denver Nuggets So I'll give you guys a quick minute or so to make any trades if you guys like I know this is a big mixer How to quickly go get that shoebox and hop up Josh really quick so you guys about a minute and When I get back there are no trades We'll start the mixer. I'll be right back guys I'm back guys. Did we get any trades spurs Nets pistons up blazes or pistons Brian want to trade anything grizzlies for a trade blaze for Grizzlies No, thanks, Suns up for trade Grizzlies for any team above Spurs Nets or pistons for Grizzlies wizards for Grizzlies. Don't think any of them are good enough for Gris Last year the 19 here Brian Frank Miami heat for pornets. No problem. No worries You can see that So no trades there is a lot of 19 in here, so grizzlies are pretty popular, but there is 16 17s, so obviously you can chase like Bama to Bob for the heat you have Denver Denver Nuggets with Murray 60-70 I believe Ben Simmons, I think it's a big rookie there. Obviously, you know kind of shaky Yeah, 2021 17 18 of course That is a Tatum. So you have one transfer Tatum there. I've plastered on the ball in those guys 1819 Louboutin Church, of course 1920 Zion drama and 2021 is actually I think just as loud as 2021 to 20 to 2019. So there you go. All right guys So let's just close the trade window then. All right, so 13 boxes here. I think we're gonna start off with some of the blasters This is a base blaster. This is a fanatics blaster We have chances, of course with certain parallels of fanatics last year's fanatics I think we're green parallels green ice, which it looks like this year. They're well the same So start with some blasters and we'll go with the biggest box pack would be the cello pack box Then we'll go to some status. We'll do some other heavy-based products like the optic retail and hobby Then we'll move on to absolute clear vision to optic or to a premium stock hoops and then we'll end it off with of course some of the higher-end stuff that's Chances and bigger rookies and bigger hits All in all, this should take me about an hour. I just wanted to give myself an hour and 20 But I got stuck doing some other stuff here on the show floor. We should still be done by like 6 20 Alex Caruso Bulls looking good guys. Cole Anthony Allen Arvison USA Richard Jefferson for the Utah Jazz That's a relic and I'll have a little Tyrese Halliburton quickly right behind him We have a D'Anthony Melton and a silver Doug McDermott as a Stuart rookie John DeNiser. All right, let's go with the So you're supposed to get one relic or one auto and I want to say guys I think we got an autograph in this box. So what fanatics blasters are a little bit different because The autographs are more common For blasters, I feel like out of a 20 box case most likely like 18 out of the 20 boxes are most likely relics Where I feel like fanatics is kind of more 50-50 And it looks like they might have got an autograph Just a hunch Green ice nice little color match Chris Middleton. That's a nice one Silver George Hill James Weissman rookie, nice little center in there too as well We have Luke Canard and yeah, we did get an autograph. Wow 2 out of 16. Sorry, I forgot the autographs are out of 16 Anthony Davis for the Lakers beautiful hit Lakers going to Patrick Sullivan who got the team straight up and last spot mojo Very nice Anthony Davis right there 2 out of 16 Isaac Acoro We have Norman Poel Cassius Stanley and a silver Derris Garland. That's a second year Clint Capella silver Josh Akoji The tire is not see rookie One last green and it's precious to chew a emerging green Okay, I know how to use Google translate, but yeah, his autograph has changed. I Don't remember it actually be like this actually that's good. That's a good observation there happened before Which I assume that if that did happen Patrick Sullivan, I'm sure you can contact him any I'm pretty sure they'll be able to fix that for you. I didn't even notice his autograph there I we should have an autograph somewhere out there. I'll try to compare it. Yeah, I don't even realize it Snap I think we actually have a Genesis guys Silver Bradley Beale Oh Get a big Genesis It is a rookie Genesis Quendari a weather spoon Genesis rookie for the Spurs Still very nice. Remember very rare to pull the Genesis. So I'll take it Carl there you go, buddy little Genesis short-term parallel Quendari a weather spoon Russell Westbrook Povey white Thomas Santoransky We have PG Paul George there is a garland rookie Contavious polo up hope little Zion base Yolkich Brandon Clark Smith Calvin Johnson rookie Dane Dalladane Seth Curry KP J Silver Brandon Clark NBA debut We have a Deandre Hunter green And kill Alexander Walker a little LeBron James base Scofield Ty Jerome Calauri Larry Bird Tobias Harris taco Rui Forbes Hunter debut Dame Dalladane say could them boy and he does the Laker now All right, so the pink camels Will Chamberlain Barclay PJ Washington, Jr. Kyrie Irving Nicolo Melly Kevin right USA Darius Bayley for the Thunder RJ Barrett very nice for the Knicks David with that one Tyler hero for the Miami Heat Bowl Bowl for Denver Nicolo Melly NBA debut Brandon Clark and LeBron James MVPs nice pinks were pretty solid Never gonna get a bowl bowl of just a chance to just play all the time Part of that shit This is status team all I've ever so many of boxes this guy's I've only ever pulled one autograph. They're rare, but they're there Pull a nice tray on one time. I actually pulled it in a box filler for you guys here But you're looking for certain parallels, of course, and then like I said, there is opportunity to get some numbered cards Like I said, it's extremely where Keldon Johnson Kevin Porter, Jr. Matisse Daigle new beginnings cam reddish Jason Tatum number to 125 symbols taco PJ LeBron James Tray young symbols Little splash Kobe white Any of Gafford RJ Barrett nice Zion Williamson, and this is a short print wave So if you look really closely some of these waves are a little bit different if you notice this one's like a little bluish Very nice That's a nice little Zion short print right there That's one of the pelicans and mark very nice And little card and symbols Sweet LeBron's also that short print wave Beautiful cards. Oh guys, really beautiful Alrighty, let's go with two more products is optic retail then we'll end off with the 1617 optics And from here on out to be pretty fast Yeah, we're chasing Tatum along the ball Donovan Mitchell Ogyana nobie for some reason Nick told me that they that Ogyana nobie is very very Wanted right now on a nobie stuff is gonna block you have the sacrament of King Drithy as well Darren Fox I guess he's had a good preseason is that one is that why people really want him in Jordan pool I guess both of those guys have had a good offseason and good preseason that Ogyana nobie and and Jordan pool Stuff is skyrocketing So for Raptors David, let's get you some Ogyana nobie Curry purple John and Isaac the Marcus Cousins Court Kings Sundarys Thornwall Aaron Gordon Caleb Swannigan Hassan White side Bama the bio would be in this 1718. Oh There's Ogyana nobie Raider rookie purple hollow Let's go Lebron Devon Reed And an autograph that is Alfonso McKinney for the Raptors Jimmy Butler hollow Lonzo ball hollow raider rookie very nice box Lonzo boss that has actually kind of gone up as well too with the Bulls They all look really good like blowing out teams in the preseason very nice there for the Lakers and Patrick Calcuzma Dylan Brooks Tom Bradley Stefan Kerr is gonna be numbered to 85 Derrick White Jason Tatum raider rookie. Wow.  Damn What a box very very nice So you got Tatum Lonzo ball Dearon Fox Ogyana nobie purple hollow of Lonzo ball This was a great retail box like so far first three boxes that I should pretty decent besides the Prism blaster. So actually first four boxes three out of the four. I've been pretty nice They didn't cool out that I love about makeshift that you just never know of course either all the boxes are gonna be so good or Potentially they're all gonna be so bad But the hope is obviously that we can get good boxes. I feel like so far We've actually gotten some good names that you're chasing for every year. We've opened right Great box just legit great box You got a number Tatum there. You got Bayley R. J. Barry bull bull a bronze. I don't you got a short print there All right, first box your Anthony Davis with a relic R. J. Then you got a short print Zion wave So we're pretty nice Now, of course, this is first-year optic 1617 do we got here guys Clay Thompson and again a lot of these hollows and colors Like staff and those guys they actually go for some good money Kauai Leonard lead series Damian Jones rookie nice to you though right there Denzel Valentine hollow Curry base and a Jabbar Parker to 199 Kobe Bryant for the Lakers all-stars Number to 99 very nice hit right there DeMar DeRose and hollow LeBron base Kobe Bryant all-stars base Will chamber than all stars for the San Francisco Warriors Stephen Curry hollow like I said some of these hollows will actually sell pretty well guys PSA 10s as well And our autograph is Joe Bollum boy. I have no idea that is But it's for the Utah Jazz Devin Booker hollow Tyler Ellis Hollow rookie and can take his call to a pulp for the pistons to one 99 Ron Baker Check the yellow And you booty a All right guys. Well to be honest that's Devin Curry Hollow. Actually, it's probably more than I More than it looks like Hooker hollow as well. All right guys. There you go. All right, let's go with some 1516 clear vision. So these ones hardly really have autographs. I believe there is autograph chances But you're mainly looking for those like brawn parallels And then of course you get like two numbered draft picks from 1516 so Devin Booker pony Car Anthony towns Kind of really cool cards over girls. Oh Speaking of that we got an autograph And it's Larry legend Larry bird clear vision autograph It's my first autographs. I've seen so far in this whole case. We've been working on Instagram Very nice for the Boston Celtics and Nancy Very very nice It's not expecting that the rookie here is TJ McConnell Those are base base We have Kelly over a junior Numbered rookie fattiest young ten ninety nine We have a standout insert Kevin Durant for the Thunder last one we got another numbered card for the Cavaliers LeBron James 57 out of 149. Wow. What another great box You got an autograph in this box. It's a nice numbered up cards as well Very solid box. I'll take that That's Cavs edition of LeBron James Allen with that one. All right, let's go with each two hoops Then we'll end it off with all of these other boxes right here Valentine LeBron James high voltage Hassan one time George Hill Dwight Palo, Jabbar Parker and Oz read Carl Malone Mike Scott and Steven Adams green Number two ninety nine who to your cats PJ Malik Beasley and Lonzo Ball KD Terrence Mann Evan Fornie a and a Brandon Clark, I believe the red Let's go some absolute 2021 Nice Danny of DJ to 75. That's a nice rookie right there For the Washington Wizards going to David B Josh Green DeAndre Hayden Patrick Williams Little relic there and Zeke Najie six-way relic and autograph to 199 For the Denver Nuggets. We have Chris Middleton to 99 Zion Williamson Russell Westbrook Kevin Love little relic For the Cavs and back-to-back Cavaliers to 25 Isaac of Coral Cavs, it's one Alan 89 full Chasem Luka Donchich Jacob Evans ready to rookie LeBron Chaim LeBron James a franchise features Good night, Jason. I'm just gonna Michael Bridges optic radio rookie hollow. Hey Jason. See you later man Winner stays Kareem Justin Jackson Ronald Purox And Joellen me hollow canter blood so Kyrie Thomas drew Aaron Holliday and Jared Vanderbilt No, Lula or Trey Not even MPJ three more boxes guys After this I should say little Marcus Aldridge and a test of time Devin Booker to 75 Bogdan Josh Green Aaron Gordon Randall Redemption Brandon Clark relic Mon Lamello Mon Lamello Make an appearance in our mixer rookie silhouettes part number 122 Jordan Nwara, man. All right. It's not there for the Bucks though It's going to Brandon. All right. We'll save this one for last. I love prison choice. It's like one of my favorites We'll go to the 2021 then we'll do 2019-20 and then we'll end up with We have Najee Marshall and LeBron James Dica That's number 13 out of 75 for the Lakers great break for the Lakers It's number 299 as well for the Pelicans Blake Griffin nice Lamello ball base. I'll take that Charlotte Hornets Allen with no sorry Hornets is Brian Frank and Karl already Christian Lerner for the T-Wolves award-winning T-Wolves at Zachary Schmidt and John Sally the 149 for the Detroit Pistons When a carl second to last box as good luck This box is heavy John Wall Yannis Mattrix and Lake Griffin number 250. We have a tunnel vision James Harden Number 299 Tony Snell 299 For the Detroit Pistons When a carl and tonight and Eric Pasha all what are the cool It is what it is All right, last box guys. Let me go get some really tabler's really quick. I need to get some more 55s. Come on Tiger strike And let it be Lamello Wiseman or Anthony Edwards. If not, give me a green scope to eat I want it all guys End it off with a banger These boxes are either so good or sometimes so bad Looks like no Tiger strike, but we can still get a green in here somewhere potentially Devon Booker Cody Zeller and Anthony Edwards. Whoo. There you go Sensational signatures for the T-Wolves Zachary Schmidt with the T-Wolves. Hell yeah, man. Let's go Yeah, we actually got moved around yesterday.  It moved it back to where it was Basically, we're back on the wall instead of being over there Now we have all that room over there for activities so we can build some bunk beds there so we want to stay and Now we're nearby a window and we have a smaller table now We got rid of that huge ass table. We have for no reason back to the first days. We're streaming here at Jasper's Dorian Finney-Smith KG Derek Rose Jalen Brown blue scopes Number to 49 for the Celtics and the last one is a rookie and it's Onyeka Akangu. Very nice 85 out of 88 for the Atlanta Hawks Travis Melbury. That's a nice one right there, man All right, so I'm glad we ended off with a nice box With that Anthony Edwards. That was pretty sweet Slacking Rex All righty guys well there you go That was the basketball mixer do a quick little recap These are kind of some of the bigger names bigger hits and we pulled out of the mixer here today And of course still a lot of other hits and rookies and numbered cards that'll be top-loaded penny sleeved So I have two huge stacks right here But again, we just ended off with a nice Anthony Edwards. That was really nice couple nice green Yellow blues Onyeka Akangu. That scope was really nice Christian Latiner tunnel vision there Lamella ball LeBron James numbered Jordan Norah rookie Silhouettes All right, Isaac Acoro was pretty nice Danny of Deja that LeBron James number with Larry Bird Kobe Bryant numbered Steph Curry Hollow Zion short print Anthony Davis autograph All right RJ Barrett LeBron James little Genesis The long the ball number there Tatum rookie long the ball hollow and oji on a nobie. I Still think that obviously I wish this could have been a little bit better for everybody But we still got some pretty nice cards though at the end of the day Some really nice stuff came out of this mixer. So I've seen a lot worse when we've done mixtures like this I'm happy that we got some nice stuff. So I appreciate you guys. That was just that was the break. No giveaways. No nothing 14 box legends rookies stars basketball makes sure our Jaspie's case breaks is done. Appreciate it guys


Hello, my name is David Kosnick and I'm really excited to chat with you today. I'm product lead at Coda and for the last year I've been obsessed with AI. How is AI going to change productivity? How is it going to change my role as a product manager? And what does that mean in terms of what skills are valuable? And so I wanted to share with you today some of my own tips and tricks that I've learned over the past year building Coda AI and using AI all the time as well to make my job better. And so let's jump in. Thanks for joining. I've been a product manager for about 13 years now. I started my PM career at Google. I worked initially on search and then on YouTube. I did very data oriented types of product work on search lots of AB testing and very design oriented product work at YouTube. Actually in both places I worked on AI. AI to power search and results and ranking. And AI to power early creativity tools for uploaders on YouTube. And so I've been long, fascinated and obsessed with AI. Where is it going? What's it going to enable? What's the important thing for people? And so I left YouTube after a while and started my own company in the video game space trying to build a next generation Minecraft. Initially in virtual reality and then became really excited about early generative technology that could basically make deepfake. So tried to make a deepfake sandbox video game, which was a ton of fun. And then joined Coda about three years ago. Worked on a ton of amazing things here. And AI started to become more and more powerful. And so of course, given my background, couldn't resist getting really excited about the possibilities of AI with Coda as well. And maybe to step back a little bit. We're all product managers here, interested in product. A lot of people call PMs the mini CEO of the product. Or Jack of all trades, the human glue, the conductor. What does a PM actually spend their time doing? What does my experience spend?  You are the glue, but it's really messy glue that binds different people and different teams together in a project. And so a little bit of my story of what work has felt like for a long time is someone asks a question in Slack or an email and your whatever tools you're favorite on. No, how does this thing work or is this a bug? And you're not actually sure the answer. And so what do I do? I'll go pull up Jura or my bug tracking tool and see is that an open issue? Is this something that's known? I can't find it. I'll dig around the docs. Maybe this is actually working as intended. Maybe someone's thought about this. I'll see, okay, is this really significant or other people complaining about this? I don't see it anywhere. How much time should I be spending on this? And pretty soon you have about 100 browser tabs open to answer one small question. And this is the life of a PM. And this is part of why I got excited about Kota. So I'm curious if anyone here has used Kota, please chime in in the comments. But for those who aren't familiar, Kota sits kind of at the intersection between rigid purpose built tools like Salesforce, Jira, Product Board, and free for all flexible surfaces like dots, sheets, and PDFs. And it has the best of both. I was a long-time Kota user before joining here. And part of what sold me on Kota was how you could really bring all of these different 100 tabs that cross a PM's life into one place. And so today I as a PM, I use Kota as a team hub, which is the one link to send for how a project is doing, what we're working on, what's happening, as tracker all the way from company level trackers with OKRs to sprints, who's doing what, and for write-ups that have extra interactivity and structure where people can vote on things and give quick reactions as they go through write-up. And Kota for me has been amazing as a single source of truth, simplifying process, creating visibility across teams, and most of all, speeding things up, speeding up my time, speeding up the team's time. So I tell you all of this as background of a little bit what my baseline has been like since using Kota, normally without AI at all. And I think that the reason that context is helpful is AI takes a lot of these same trends for me around bringing things together, moving faster, reducing redundancy, making all the team easier to contribute and pushes it to the next level. Like they're a perfect fit. And so I got obsessed with this idea when ChatGPT came out around what is busy work? And as a PM, I spend a lot of time on busy work personally. There's so many times I'll spend hours every week writing up next steps from different meetings, turning them into issues in task trackers. I'll be summarizing how different projects are going to different audiences and stakeholders. And the reason we end up as PMs doing a lot of this busy work is it's valuable. People find it useful to know what's going on to have someone who's triaging all the bugs, who's looking at all the feedback, who's doing these very repetitive manual things that create a feedback loop and create connective tissue within the team. And so busy work I found is valuable, but it can be very tedious and can be very repetitive. And so got really interested in this idea of like what if AI can help with this problem? Now, there's been a lot of AIs that have been coming over the last year that are writing assistants, and those are great. Writing assistants make content. But to really get rid of busy work became obsessed with this idea of like what is a work assistant? And a work assistant makes progress, not just content. And progress can take many different forms. And so as we got to working on building COTA AI here, we thought about flexibility and power of basically having building blocks that are AI integrations that can power really incredible solutions. And so we have one on a canvas that will help you write AI in a column that will do all sorts of tasks for you in what we call a block, which can synthesize context. And so wanted to show you a little bit of how I've been using these AI tools that we've been building at COTA as a PM, eating my own dog food while working on them to save time and have more impact. So here we are, actually, we were in a COTA talk this whole time. This was an embed into a Canva presentation, and I'm just popping out the navigation here, and you can see this is one page among many. So this is actually very similar to the team hubs that I'll have for different projects and different teams of things I'm working on. So usually these have, you know, a place for information about the team, what we're working on, and went to walk through a bit of a story of a scenario of how, as a PM, touching many different parts of a project, I've been using AI to save time. And so we'll begin the story with users, with feedback. And so feedback and feedback groups are the life cycle, the lifeblood of really productive teams, in my opinion. It's all validate where you're going. And so a very common thing I do is join customer calls all the time, you know, many days, multiple. And COTA has hundreds of different integrations, with Zoom transcripts, with Gong recordings. And so I started basically taking customer calls I was in, and integrating them into COTA as a table. And so you could see each row is a call, and here is basically the transcript of a call. And what I used to do is basically every call I'm on, I don't really get credit for the insights, unless a lot of the team can understand where those insights came from and why. And so for me to say, oh, I was in 20 calls last week, we really need to do that feature, is way less compelling to the whole team, than saying, here are 10 quotes that exactly explain why this is really important. And created that level of direct feedback creates so much buy-in from the broader team, and why are we doing what we're doing? Who is this helpful for? And so in the old world, pre-AI, I would spend a lot of time each week writing out my conclusions from talking to customers, copying other's key quotes, which is really helpful, builds my credibility, justifies our roadmap, is the sort of core insights we'll build our loop around, but it's a lot of time. And so one of the things I started using credit AI for is we have all these different interviews here, is I would go ahead and ask AI to summarize the transcript. And we have these nice drop-downs, say in one sentence, and I'm gonna go ahead and ask it to fill it in. You can see AI here starting to work, and every single one of these long transcripts now got summarized by AI. And the really cool thing about this is I can ask for a slightly different version. Let's update this one. And we've designed Code AI to be an assistant. It's a co-pilot, it's not an autopilot. And so each of these different responses are editable. So actually, I remember this call with Oliver, I was in on it, and I thought there was one other really interesting part, which is Oliver is currently looking at 20 tools to solve his problem. And so we've designed all of these to be editable. And so I found this type of AI to get me to a first draft, the 80% of effort to get most of the bones of something in literally seconds. And I'll often go through an interview and make sure these things look great, but it just saves me so much time. And here's another example. We have a whole taxonomy built out for future requests on what are the tags. We can look at trends over time. Really helpful to look at this type of aggregate data. Again, really painful to annotate. So I say, all right, AI go ahead and tag any product feedback from this transcript by the feature type. And the feature type is this table. This is a column in Coda that is a lookup into a whole schema of a bunch of options. So I'll go ahead and hit fill. And wow, it basically categorized instantly the type of feature requests that came up in each of these different calls. And there's tons and tons of different things here. And so one of the things I've loved about using AI is just how quickly I can scale it up for these types of repetitive, valuable tasks. And then I can spend my time reviewing, tweaking and telling the broader story of here's why these things are helpful or being in more customer calls instead of writing down all of the summaries afterwards. So I've been really, really finding this to be super helpful. So I have all these feature requests. I've got a whole bunch of insights. I need to go and write a practical requirement document. This is many people consider like one of the core jobs to be done of the PM is like, why should we work on? What should we work on? Like what are we building? Why for whom? And so for me, I'll say often product requirement documents, PRDs, I end up doing them, you know, at the last minute when I really need to do them to get a bunch of stakeholders bought in or to finalize some key decisions for engineering. And some of that for me, honestly, is like writer's block. Like it's kind of daunting knowing this is a core thing for PMs to get right to go and look at, you know, a blank canvas that looks like this and be like, man, I have a review coming up on this approach. And like, I have so much stuff in my head and knowing where to start and to get it out can be really challenging. And so I've been loving using AI to get again to that 80% starting line that first draft that I can react to really, really quickly. And so I'll go ahead here and just open a little slash command and say, I'll just put in a prompt here I was using earlier, write a two page product requirement document about a new image editor based on feedback from this feature request page. So all I do here is just go ahead and use an at reference to a page. Could have been a table, could have been a range of other things. And please include a section on the problem statement, a table of target audience and proposed features. And so I'm giving AI here context about all of these different transcripts on that other page, all the different future requests that customers mentioned. And let's see how it does. And so one of the really cool things here is AI can help with structure in addition to content. And so you'll notice it created this table of target audiences. It has an audience type, it has a description. And then we have this problem statement here and some proposed features. And maybe I'll say, you know, this problem statement, I'm going to go ahead and ask AI to refine it. I'd say, please make this twice as long and focus on why this problem matters. And I'll go ahead and ask AI to help. And here we go, I've got a couple of more helpful sentences. And again, it's just making that feedback group much, much easier and tighter to work with. And so one of the things I love about write-ups in Coda is they can be super interactive. And so one of my favorite Coda features in general is adding these little reaction buttons like thumbs up or thumbs down throughout and saying, hey, do you agree with this problem statement? And so when I send this doc to some stakeholders, I'm not wondering what they thought of it. I know at each point if they're bought in or not. And you'll see this pattern show up a bunch in the rest of our story. And so let's say I finished my PRD here and I'm going to take it to my weekly meeting. And so the way I run meetings in Coda is I have a table of topics and people can vote on them. And so I can get a sense of what people are most interested in. I can see, oh, two people are interested in this. Maybe I'll just grab them offline instead of using the whole group. And as the person running the meeting, I'll make the final choice, but use this as an input. And so people will vote. And so I have here a link to my products brief. And we'll have discussions and usually we'll do that right here. But as much like the transcript you saw earlier, I'll take notes live during a meeting about what people said. And again, at the end of my day, I'll be like, oh man, what are actually all the next steps based on this meeting? Like what needs to happen now? Who do I need to ping? I need to send a Slack reminder to people. And so I've been using AI for this, which has helped a lot. So I'll go ahead and add a new column here and I'll say find the action items from this notes column. And let's show it as checkboxes and let's keep it to a sentence per checkbox. And we'll go ahead and have AI come up with it. And so these are our next steps. And this is awesome. This is like a first draft of all the next steps that I would have had to copy paste by hand, slightly reword based on the discussions. And I can go ahead and paste this into a bunch of places or link to this in other parts of Coda. And so I've been, this has been saving me a lot of time. So let's say we had our weekly meeting here and everyone's really excited about the product requirement document. We go ahead and build it and we're ready to test it. Testing is a really important part of our feedback group.  We have a whole program of real users and I'd like to reach out to them. And one of the really cool things Coda has is these really deep integrations. And so I can go ahead and integrate my Gmail account, which I authenticated and click a button to basically send content from this draft thing from my email. So I can send emails from Coda, which is great. And so what I'd like to do is have a bunch of really personalized emails to teach these people that I can go and send out. So I could say, create a email, 50 words about a new image editor feature. Here's the contact, here's their title. Invite them to be a trusted tester. So I'll go ahead and generate these with AI and get a nice first draft out here. And maybe I want something that's like a little bit more personal. And so I'll say something like key points. Jess, I remember she has a dog. She has a dog. And this is context that doesn't really fit a clean template. I'm going to ask the AI in a second to incorporate these key points if it can. But it's not going to feel like mad libs where it's just throwing in a part of the email. Alan, I remember really cares about tech debt. So I can find a way to mention that. That's great. I'll go ahead and revise my prompt. So I'll generate an image. This is the contact. This is their title. They work at this company. Invite them to be a trusted tester of it if you can find a natural way to work in key points. So I'm just going to use at. And then the name of that column, please do the emails from David. And I'm going to go ahead and fill it out. Again, so here we go. Let's see. This one didn't mention the dog. This one, we said, given your passion for tech debt and dedication to addressing the tech debt, we believe your feedback would be invaluable. So one of the things I've been really enjoying is making this finding a pattern here that works and then scaling it up to, again, a really large group of people where it used to be. I would take a lot of time to write each of these by hand to get our trusted testers who are doing us a big favor, knowing how much we value and care about them. And I'm still able to do that, but do it a bit faster, which has been great. All right. So one last practical tip about code AI. We also have this thing we call AI block. And it was designed to help synthesize a lot of context. And so here we have a very typical project tracker. There's a timeline. There's a table of projects. And actually one really cool thing is these are actually the same table. And so this is a cool code, a feature called views, where you can basically have... Let me move my face here. So you can basically have data represented visually in a few different ways. So I could go ahead and change this here. And this changed as well. You can see these are basically the same data. And so I could say, all right, there's a whole bunch of context on this page. I have this block here and I like to summarize what the team is working on in the roadmap. And this is literally, you know, one of the most commonly asked questions of me as a PM. It'll come up at the start of executive reviews. What's the team working on? What's the status? It'll happen in Slack from dependent teams and like, hey, how's this tracking? And so it'd be really nice to just have a natural language response that's super easy to update as the team makes progress. So I'll go ahead and click create. And this has a summary of what's happening. And a cool thing is I can go ahead and refresh this. And so one of the things I have now is basically at the top of all of my trackers, all the little block that's just like, here's a summary of what's going on. And after our stand-up, I'll go ahead and update it. And if anyone asks what's happening, I'll just send them a link to that page. And I'll say, so you can check it out. You can see our roadmap and you can see a description of it in natural language, which has been, again, really helpful. In engineering, there's this concept of dry, don't repeat yourself. I feel like as a PM, there's a lot of repeating yourself in slightly different ways to slightly different audiences. And that's a really important part of the job. Communication, creating by in speaking different people's language is a lot of what makes great product managers really effective. And I think AI is making that a lot more accessible and a lot faster. And so I can ask AI to speak to a slightly more technical audience or a slightly less technical audience and not repeat myself. I can write one thing and ask AI to translate it, which has been really, really great. All right. So I gave you a few different examples of over the course of a project from taking customer requests, summarizing them, annotating them, writing with AI, running a weekly meeting where we use AI to summarize next steps, personalizing outreach to testers and summarizing what's happening in our team. I've been literally doing all of these every single week and it has saved me hours across each week and has been incredibly helpful. So these are a few of my favorite ways to leverage AI as a PM. And I would also say for folks who aren't currently PMs but are excited about product and are kind of curious about it, I think it's making a lot more accessible to do things that might have taken a lot more energy before as well, which I think is really awesome. So if you're excited to try out some of these tricks yourself, you can get started with some really great templates. So if you go over to coda.io. slash gallery slash AI, there's a ton of awesome AI tools and interactive documents for writing product requirement documents, having trackers, running customer research with AI that will help generate questions and summarize it, running brainstorms with AI where it can come up with other provocative questions and ideas. So yeah, I definitely encourage folks to check it out. And let me know what you think. You know, we're always working on code AI and as a PM, I'm also always looking for hacks to be more productive, save time. And so I'd love to hear what you all are doing with AI to move faster with your teams together. So thanks so much for tuning in today and yeah, let me know what you think. Go ahead. Goodbye.


Now let's start by talking about the problem. So anger, the universal problem, appears to exist at all times and in every culture. This isn't a culturally relative thing and it's not a temporally relative thing. So is there anybody here that has no idea what I think, you know, anger is some complicated philosophical concept that they have no idea what I'm talking about, never experienced anything to do with it, never felt it, never seen anybody else experience it? Right, of course not. It's the most common thing in the world. As Seneca says, it is the most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions. He frequently uses superlative terms when describing the greatest virtues and the greatest vices, but this one he really goes over the top in condemning. And that's because it is such an enormous problem. It's the first problem mentioned in the most ancient literature. So in the first line of Homer's Iliad, the oldest work of Greek literature, reads, Sin goddess the anger of Pellius, Pellius' son Achilles, and its devastation which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans. And in fact the initial cause of the entire Trojan War is Menelaus' anger over his wife Helen being taken by Paris to Troy, and so he basically causes a world war in order to cope with this anger. Just noticing a couple of articles popping up in my news feed from last week, like one from Time Magazine, Want to stay healthy as you age? Let go of anger. Or three ways to get rid of anger according to neuro-science. So every day there are articles coming out that will tell you how to manage anger, how to reduce anger, the importance of reducing anger, the problems associated with anger. So it's an ancient and a modern problem. I told you that story about how a former student of mine was ordered by a court to take anger management courses, and she was astonished to find that all of the recommendations in the workbook that she was given in connection with that course could be traced exactly to recommendations made by Seneca in his work on anger. And she read an entire paper essentially documenting that fact. The term anger management would not be acceptable to Seneca, because Seneca doesn't think that anger can be managed. It has to be rooted out and destroyed completely, completely extirpated. Any bit of anger is, by his definition, out of control, unmanageable, and the only way to avoid it and all of the bad things in connection with it are to prevent it from happening in the first place. And that takes a lot of preparation, basically a lifetime of preparation of getting used to and anticipating things that could make you angry and removing yourself from situations that could make you angry and hundreds of other individual pieces of advice that he gives in here, which I'll try to summarize for you. Now, first of all, the structure of the work, it's addressed to Seneca's older brother, and so it has a bit of a epistolary or letter-like feel to it. It also has kind of a dialogue-like feel, because as usual there's this anonymous voice that comes in and offers considerations or comments or objections every once in a while, although these aren't named characters and there isn't a specific dramatic setting and so forth. So in a way it's a kind of innovative work, kind of more like a manual or a handbook. But it follows some conventions about practical works, and the clearest of these is being divided into roughly two parts. First, a theoretical examination of questions and problems and definitions of what anger is, and that part spans book one through the 17th chapter of book two. And then a second part, which is really the heart of the thing, which is to give practical remedies and a therapeutic cure against anger and its ills, and that takes us from the 18th chapter of book two through the end of book three. So theory and practice, a comprehensive account of the phenomenon, but since it's a work of practical philosophy, a merely theoretical exposition would be worthless. We don't want to just know about anger, we want to know how to avoid becoming angry. But we can't come up with a theory about how to avoid becoming angry until we know what anger is and what causes it, hence the need for a theoretical investigation. Now here's a more detailed outline of the work and so I'll just walk you through that in case you didn't get a chance to read the first two books and we're dependent only on the third book available in our textbook. So he opens up with a really remarkable passage describing the horrors of anger. Then he addresses a number of questions. What counts as anger? Is anger a natural thing? Like do other animals experience it? Do children experience it? And so forth. Can anger ever be useful or controlled? Short answer to that question, as I've already said, is no. A comment on the use of anger in war and in peacetime discussion of anger in punishment and anger and magnanimity or greatness of soul. And then some answers to direct questions. Is anger voluntary? How does anger relate to savagery? Is it virtuous to be angry at evil or bad people? Will anger fend off contempt? Again, answer that no. Can you be rid of anger completely? Answer to that yes, surprisingly. Discussion of anger and noble character. The role of anger in oratory. A lot of oratory has to do with inspiring emotions in order to get the audience to go along with something. As somebody's writing about in this class. And is anger a spur to virtue? Answer that question no. So in the next section, so part two, we have a discussion of therapy or remedies for anger. He begins by dividing the subject and then he talks about how to avoid getting angry. And he has two large sets of advice. First, what we should do in the education of children in order to raise them in ways that will make them not have habits of becoming angry. And the second advice for adults. Because giving advice about how I should raise or treat children who are angry is one thing. But it might be too late by then. My parents might not have raised me correctly or yours might not have. In which case we need remedies for adult anger. And a lot of this has to do with inculcating various maxims or proverbs that you can reflect on. Like don't believe the worst about people. Don't be soft and over sensitive. Like a time I was driving on I5 and one of the most irritating things that tends to make me angry happens. Somebody cuts me off not using a blinker in front of me and caused me to slam on the brakes. Tempted to be angry but instead I replace that with thinking don't think the worst of this. What if this is a single mother with hungry crying children in her car who's late to pick up her child from elementary school and she's running late to get to work and so forth and she just didn't think to put her blinker on because she was already getting too close to the exit and was too consumed with that. I don't want to be angry with someone who's like that. I want to help someone. I should have slowed down and been driving more carefully anyway. So these kind of reflections that if you meditate on them in advance then they will be easily available to you in a moment where you might become angry. Again further reflections to counter the onset of anger They cannot have wronged you or intended to wrong you. None of us are blameless. They should get the benefit of the doubt. Was it really unfair what they did or was it merely that it was unexpected to me? Also anger is an inhuman small-minded and useless emotion and reflect on the ugliness and the dangers of anger. Then in book three we have sort of a fresh start but where Seneca amps up the rhetoric even further and explains why anger has simply to be cured, totally eliminated, and not managed as it were. So he discusses, number one, how to avoid anger from coming on, the onset. So taking steps by modifying your environment and practices so that you won't get into situations that become angry. But then how to check one's anger when it's happening. By giving prescriptions, by giving examples. The way that anger can be suppressed in subordinates in people that are rising in power and many examples of where it was admirably controlled that you could try to imitate. And then again, further maxim or proverb-like reflections. Error is universal. Don't be small-minded. Be big-minded. Make allowances for people. Also, you're attaching great value to small things. That kind of false accounting is leading you into anger. And one of the most touching pieces, examine your conscience every day. At the end of the day, think back and remember your emotional reactions to things and think, was that proper? Was that the right way to handle it? And if it was not, then think about how you might modify your behavior. Finally, life is too short to waste it being angry. And that's going to relate to an entire treatise we're going to read on the shortness of life. So I'll comment on that in due course. Now anger is an emotion or what we call a pathway in Greek. If you remember back to my general introduction to stoic theories of pathway and emotions, the word pathway means something like disturbance, reaction, suffering, even disease. And so the very Greek, you know, the term emotion or even passion in English tends to come across sounding neutral or sometimes in the context of this crazy idea of like passionate love, even something that you might want to do. You might even think of it as a positive thing. That's almost impossible in Greek where the term itself means a bad thing that you want to get rid of. Like instead of talking about impassioned love, let's talk about diseased love, right? Disturbed love. That's how the stoics would look at it. Now remember that they're, because they have a cognitive theory of the emotions, they think that these emotions are cases where reasoning has failed and reasoning may have failed because one has the wrong value system. One's value system becomes corrupted and you think that things that are good are actually bad or you think that things that are bad are actually good and you think that you either have these things or you don't have these things. And so we can set up a grid of general definitions of emotions related to this. So when I falsely think that some good thing is present to me, like, oh, I'm a really rich guy and that's a good thing, then I might have delight in that, but that would actually be a disturbed, false emotion. Or if I think something present to me that's bad, like, oh, I have this chronic disease and that's a really bad thing, woe is me, I'm really sad about that, that's a wrong, that's a bad thing to think. Having a disease is just a dispreferred indifferent, cope with it, everybody has problems. If I think that something bad is absent but might be going to affect me, I would have fear or dread, like fear that this wave is going to crash over the ship and we're going to sink, that's really a matter of indifference. Just like life and death is, but if I value my life too much and think that that would actually be a bad thing, then I will experience an emotion of fear or dread. And finally, the category where I think that there's some good thing I don't have but it would be good if I did have, when in fact it isn't, is the category of desire or lust or appetite. Now it turns out that is the, which category does anger belong to? There's many ways possible that you can see of it, thinking of it being a bad thing that's present to you or something. But what's interesting is that the ancients tend to think of anger as being a kind of desire or an appetite. So if you really reflect on what anger is, you'll realize that when you're experiencing it, you have a burning desire to repay pain for pain that's been inflicted on you.  You want the person who caused you pain to suffer pain. You want revenge for it. You want retribution for it. And what the feeling is, is feeling this intense, intense desire that's extremely difficult to control and can in fact get out of hand. And so let's look for a second at the whole category of desire. Desire in general is an irrational kind of striving. Again a false judgment that something that's good is absent to me but that thing is not actually a good.  In the Stoic definition, sexual love is an effort to gain love resulting from the appearance of physical beauty and so forth. Dylan should take note of that because you were telling us that they're fine with sexual love and so forth. But there's this definition of eros as being actually a form of desire and a form of emotion or vice. But coralsomeness, thus unique vice and emotion which afflicts philosophers a desire concerned with one's philosophical school and defending it even when it might be wrong. Spiritedness, just a kind of incipient anger. An anger itself, a desire for revenge on one who seems to have done a wrong or an injustice inappropriately. And then we can define and distinguish several different kinds of anger. For example indignation, condemnation, retribution, realization and so forth. And the Greek Stoics have subdivisions of each of these classes which are themselves subdivisions of the more general kinds of emotion. Now notice that it's possible to distinguish anger from things like hatred and wrath. Don't just think of all of these things as being similar. Hatred is a progressive and increasing desire for things to go wrong for someone. It is actually quite a bit worse than anger. Wrath, long-standing and spiteful anger. So a lot of concern with definitions for each of these and that is because, again, they have a cognitive theory of the emotions. What's happening and what's causing emotions is a breakdown in reasoning. A false kind of reasoning. And so the basic strategy is going to be to replace the false reasoning with the correct form of reasoning which will allow us to avoid the emotion being produced in the first place. Now let's look in some more detail at Seneca's definitions of anger. They're pretty standard and relate to earlier views as he himself says. This is from a passage early in book one. Anger is the desire to take vengeance for a wrong. Or as Posidonius in earlier Stoics says, it's the desire to punish the person by whom you reckon you are unjustly harmed. Or he says, some others have defined it this way. Anger is the arousal of the mind to harm the person who has either harmed oneself or who wished to do so. That's actually a fragment of Seneca's on anger from a piece of the work that was mutilated and not transmitted, but it was described by an early church father named Lactantius in a book called On the Anger of God talking about how anger is a great thing. Actually, God's really angry. You ever read the Bible? He's a pretty angry guy and it's justified according to him. So this is a case of a justification of anger and Lactantius refutes these ridiculous Stoics who say anger's a bad thing, but in so doing preserves these attempts by Seneca to define it. Again, in book one, the clearest statement he makes is perhaps this one, Aristotle's definition is not very different from ours. He says that anger is the strong desire, or a burning desire would be another way to translate it, to return pain for pain. And there are other elements of Aristotle's definition that he doesn't comment on here, and I won't comment on here, although I will say some more about Aristotle's definition in due course. Now, just as the Romans have a scary number of words for how to kill people, so they have a scary number of words for species of anger, and Seneca goes on and on about this. So there's bitterness, harshness, testiness, being frenzied, ranting, difficult, prickly, and so forth. And each one of these being peevish, one of my favorites. And he goes on, he defines each of these, and he says, look, there are kinds of anger that simmer down short of shouting, some of that are frequent and difficult to shake, some that are savagely physical, not very verbal, some that are let loose in a torrent of abuse and curses, some forms don't go beyond complaining and sulking, some are deep and wavy and inward turning. There are a thousand other varieties of this polymorphous evil. Okay, but he thinks they all stem from one kind of cause. And since he accepts Aristotle's definition on anger, let's look a bit at Aristotle's theory. Now, as you will remember from reading the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, specifically the 13th chapter, Aristotle divides the human soul into two parts, a rational and an irrational part. The irrational part is divided into a vegetative, reproductive, growth-oriented part over which we have no rational control or influence, but also a part, and this is the part in which we experience desires, appetites, emotions, and so forth, which can be modulated and subjected and controlled by reason. Now, I mention that because that psychology and that theory of the human psyche is very different than the Stoics, who do not think that there are two parts of the soul, there's only one part of the soul, the rational part of the soul. So Aristotle's theory of anger is going to be different because he has a different assumption about the structure of the mind and of psychology. According to Aristotle, it's a virtue related to anger, and as a virtue, it's a mean state that stands between a deficiency of anger and an excess of anger. So it's possible, of course, to feel an excessive amount of anger. You could feel too much anger or feel it too often or feel it too strongly. And the vice associated with this habit is something like irascibility or bad temper or something. Okay, so that's the name of a vice where you experience too much anger in excess of anger. You have a habit of tending towards anger. And there's a mean, which the mean he calls gentleness, which suggests that one is gentle and that they don't become too angry or they are not angry for too long or too often, but somehow you experience the gentle person experiences anger to the right degree. For example, they see something unjust happen that will make them angry, but they won't go completely out of control and they won't do anything that hurts their own interests and so on. And then because, according to Aristotle's theory, every virtue is a mean state between an excess and a deficiency, there must be some state where people feel a deficient amount of anger, according to the theory. Now, it doesn't actually seem that there are such people ever met somebody that you thought, they just don't get angry enough. But Aristotle says we don't really perceive it because it's not a social problem like the excess is. People getting too angry is a big problem, but people not getting angry enough really doesn't bug us so we don't talk about it. In fact, we don't even have a name for it, so Aristotle invents a name for it. Yeah. That would be a radical deficiency of anger. That would be a horrible inhuman vice, according to Aristotle. So in fact, he might say it's not possible to feel none. But if one did, then that would be a vice just as much as the excess is a vice. It might not be as big of a problem for people, but it still is a vice. Meaning there's something morally wrong with you if you don't feel the right amount of anger. There's obviously something morally wrong with you if you feel too much anger, but there's also something morally wrong with you if you don't feel enough anger, according to Aristotle. And this is encapsulated in what Seneca calls theophrasis' objection that a good person can't help but being angered by bad things or evils. So if I hear about somebody doing something evil, harming some innocent children or using chemical weapons on somebody, then I should become angry at that. And a good person will be angry at that.  Something like that seems wrong. But Seneca's answer to that is that if that were true, that the wise and good people were angered by evils, then the wise person would be the most inclined to anger and would have the most reason to constantly be angry. They would see and appreciate all the bad things that are happening and see this sort of ocean of vice that we're surrounded by, and then they could do nothing but be angry about that. And then so the person, the sage, the wise person who we think of as being the calmest person, the one freest of passions, the one who's acting most rationally, would be just the one that's actually flying off the handle and completely angry and upset all the time. So Seneca's view is actually going to be that we should extirpate, that is root out and destroy anger. Again, they don't accept that there's an irrational part of the soul in which it is natural for anger to be produced. The entire soul is rational and anger is produced by some irrational movement within it. And he argues that it cannot be contained or controlled or in any way used for good. It never has good outcomes. That's just another way of saying it is a vice. Vices are the flip side of virtues. Virtues always produce good things. Wisdom always produces good things, for example. Anger always produces bad things, so lack of self-control or cowardice always produces bad things. Anger is a vice, so it always produces bad things. Anything that supposedly could be accomplished in anger, and you can mention all sorts of stuff like people fight better or wage war better or punish others better if they're angry, Seneca goes case by case and denies that and shows how that could all be much more effectively done by using calm, calculated reason.  But what you should do is just slowly, calmly calculate how you're going to undermine and destroy that person for doing that. That would be way more effective. And he says, gladiators win by using reason. They get destroyed when they become angry and can't think through what they're trying to do. And then he gives all these examples in history of generals and so forth who made the wrong moves because of anger and the ones that were defeated by people who maintained this calm, rational outlook on it. OK, so like all other emotions, what we want to do here is totally eliminate or extra pay it. But the question is how can it be eliminated? Because it seems to be a process that doesn't admit of much revision. There's an appearance to me that somebody has done something wrong to me. OK, somebody didn't turn on their blinker or somebody flicked their fingers in my face or something like that. That seems to immediately give rise to a sort of impulse, a desire to return pain for that pain inflicted on me. And that's the state of anger. So we can't eliminate every appearance that something wrong has been done to us because that's constantly happening wherever we go. And the desire to repay pain for pain is just a kind of organic desire that we feel. So how, in fact, can we eliminate it? Well, the first thing we do is we analyze all emotional reactions in general, but anger in particular, to three different states. First, a preemotional state where the initial stimulus happens and the appearance of what's going on occurs. And this may also be accompanied by an involuntary reaction. So in the case, in the example of fear, which we've already talked about, I see a wave crashing over the ship. And so I start cowering or something. I mean, not that going like this is going to protect me from a giant wave coming over a ship, but there's this kind of involuntary reaction that initially happens. Or if somebody just walks up to me on the street and slaps me or assaults me, some kind of outrageous thing like that flicks their fingers in my face, I might blink. That's an involuntary reaction. Nobody can train themselves not to blink when you stick fingers in their eyes. But that's not an emotion to blink or to cower like that. Again, see an attractive body and become aroused. You get an erection or something. That isn't an emotion. That's just this kind of initial involuntary reaction. There's another stage that happens after the appearance is in the mind. And that's the judgment stage where you actually have a cognitive reaction. You think, oh my god, a wave is crashing over the ship and this is a bad thing because it's going to sink to the bottom of the ocean and I'm going to drown. Or somebody outrageously slapping me on the street is a bad thing because I will have been slighted by an inferior.  Now reason is able to operate here at this stage and could avoid, in a sense, to such an appearance that leads to that full-blown emotion. So we could replace those judgments about a wave crashing over a ship being a bad thing with realizing it's an indifferent thing. What's the worst that could happen? I could die drowning at the bottom of the ocean. So what? That's not twice. Or counteracting these other cognitive processes, thoughts, judgments that lead to the third and final stage which is technically what the emotion is an out-of-control form of suffering or experience like fear in the first case, anger in the second case, or lust in the third place. And this is where it is beyond the power of reason to have any effective influence. So we have no control over the first or the third stages. The first stage because we can't control what happens to us. That's a matter of, well, fate to put it metaphysically but what other people and what external things happen to us. And we have no control over the third stage because by the time it's gotten to that stage it's growing, it's out of control and it's going to last its course. So most of these other emotions go away on their own so fear ends up dissipating at some point. Lust ends up dissipating at some point. But anger is really dangerous because it doesn't actually seem to have some natural course that it just runs. It's like fire. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. And there seems to be no way to contain it once you've made a judgment that I've got to get revenge. I've got to make that person feel pain for that pain. Then by then you're out of control. But again, we can affect the judgment and the cognition so our entire strategy is going to be basically to intervene at that phase and make sure that those judgments that lead to the third stage aren't enacted. So he goes into detail. Here's a passage from book two in which he describes the three stages. It's beyond doubt that anger is stirred and we have the impression that we've been wronged. The question is whether anger follows directly upon that very appearance launching its attack without the mind's collaboration or whether it's stirred with the mind's ascent. We hold that anger ventures nothing on its own but acts only with the mind's approval for having the impression that one has been done wrong, desiring to take vengeance for it, and then combining both in the judgment that one ought not to have been harmed and that one ought to be avenged. None of this is proper to a mere impulse set in motion independent of our will. So again, we have an impression that wrong has been done to us. Then we make a judgment and here he describes this as actually two judgments that get conjoined. I ought not to have suffered harm and one ought to avenge harms that are done to one. And if you combine those two judgments with the impression that wrong has been done to you, then you are led by a kind of practical syllogism to an inevitable conclusion that I must avenge and I must cause pain, I must return pain for pain and one has a burning desire to avenge that for a perceived wrong. Okay, so let me pause there in case you have any comments or questions. I can get into some more detail about Seneca's doctrine, but I think this is the basic idea. So apathy would be the ideal, historic state, right? Not in our sense of it, but in the past. Yes, so I would rather that you use the Latinate expression like apothea and apathy because although people are really love it when I say, hey, the whole point of this philosophy is apathy. It doesn't mean sitting there doing nothing. It means apothea means not suffering emotional distress, not suffering from the disease of an out of control mental state that you can't influence and reign in. Okay, so that's right. When I talk about extirpation and that means rooting out and destroying completely, then the ideal for it is apothea.  So yes, the ideal is apathy. Other questions? Yeah. So I say like pressure is defined as something that is present, but it is not actually good. So it is the false judgment. So that's a cynical, so historic philosophy, but it's so key for the end of like the life that people should achieve like pressure. Well, there are these positive emotional states like joy that correspond to correct cognitive judgments. So that there is something good that's present to me and it actually is good. So give me an example of something good. No, health is a preferred indifferent. It's not good. What are you crazy? Health? Health? Sickness? Who cares about that? Give me an example of something actually good. What? Like what? Wisdom. Wisdom is a good and it's always good. So suppose that I was a wise person, quite a stretch, but imagine that I was. Okay? And I was conscious of being wise. Then I would think there's a good thing present to me and I would be right. It actually is a good thing. And so the resulting emotion would be a kind of joy about that. But it would be easy to control and just experiencing, to experience that joy without it being this out of control state of indulging and enjoyment or pleasure that's actually a confused belief that these luxuries or whatever that are present to me are good things. Okay? So this is one of the problems with the term apothea that's confusing because there's actually these so-called you-pathia that is good pathologies, good diseases to have as it were, good experiences or good emotional states to be in. And so it isn't pure apothea in the sense of no experiences, no emotion whatsoever. It's that the only emotions you would have would be these good ones that are the result of true judgments and a true value system. But the term apothea describes the state of the Stoic Sage because they're not suffering from the bad and painful emotions that are regularly what we think of emotions, fear, pain, anger and so on. Yeah? On the last part of the paragraph, I think that he put the whole issue on the will to anger. So if everything is really on the will related to anger, then what's the point of the let's say instant vicinity that you know there is for example in some, there is an argument that for example in some countries that they say capital punishment is not humane punishment. They say why? They say even if somebody who just out of the instant vicinity killed somebody, he has not done it based on his own will to anger, but he just instantly became insane and they threw out the gun or hit somebody. I'm glad you're not my attorney because that's a really lame case you just made out. He just instantly became angry and it's not his fault.  There's a thing about blushing when you're embarrassed and blinking when something comes out your eyes and maybe cowering when something's about to hit you. There's reactions like that and we don't have control over those. Actually some people actually do gain control even over those things and Seneca points that out but he says it's actually they're going too far, that's inhuman. There's no point in never blinking. I mean this is why the Stoics would basically disagree with every element of everything you said including the capital punishment is not justified. They certainly think it is.  In the process of controlling anger are you essentially like evading or like getting rid of anger itself or are you using it in a more strategic manner? You're getting rid of it. There is no way to use it in a strategic manner because once it gets to the stage of full blown anger you'll find you can't control it or contain it you can't reason with it or anything it's just a driving irrational force a burning desire that you can't overcome. So the two things again that we need to do therapeutically are one educate children so that they have habits not to ever experience it but then for adults that haven't got a good enough education on that front then we have two strategies one prevention coming up with the means of avoiding the initial impressions even happening and two coping with when the onset is happening when somebody inevitably doesn't use a blinker and gets in front of you then what kind of strategies and techniques do you employ? And on this slide which has a lot of detail so you can look at it later after I post it here's a bunch of the practical advice you'll notice that all of it is aimed at never experiencing anger So unlike Aristotle who wants you to feel a certain amount of anger and use it to your advantage and warfare and punishing and just having righteous indignation about our political situation who's not angry about what the hell is going on in Washington and that sort of thing and you ought to be angry that's Aristotle's view but that's rejected completely by this Stoic view Yeah? For Seneca so there's not is there a way for him to say you could use like the cold calculated reason to get revenge like would that be okay? like if you're not thinking I have to get revenge but if you don't experience anger just use cold calculated reason Yes, the problem doesn't seem to be with revenge which you might think that's the problem if you're not angry then you can still get revenge and be okay on his view and you can actually get it much more effectively by reasoning through it and that's what you really want it's just anger is a really ineffective means towards getting what you want which is doing this now we could reflect on whether it always makes sense to repay pain for pain and in fact his theory of punishment is not that kind of crude just retribution alright so actually his view about punishment is that punishment should be about rehabilitating people changing them so that they don't in the future inflict pain unduly on other people but in this work he does not problematize as it were the notion of revenge or even repaying pain for pain it's the problem with the emotion of anger and you might think I mean there is a theory of revenge that makes it an extension of justice makes it a kind of justice and again although he disagrees with that theory of justice that's not the point of this treatise is not to talk about what justice is but this particular emotion so he doesn't have to fight that battle too to make this point