Thanks everyone for coming. I'm Christy Freeland and I was really delighted to be asked to moderate this session and particularly so after spending about an hour drinking smoothies at the Google Cafe with Sendil Muley Natham Okay ish pronunciation who is a truly brilliant behavioral economist at Harvard and my job today is to ask him about his brilliant ideas and Also to give all of us a sense of who the guy is So I'm gonna start by asking you about the paper you're writing right now about angel technologies What are they and why should we care? Yeah, let me start with my favorite example partly because it affects me personally every day You know every night when I go to bed, I always set my alarm clock at 6 30 6 20 something like that. I Have a lot of goals when I go to bed at 11 or 12. I'm gonna get up at 6 20.  I don't know something. They're always good goals at 6 20 one of the great evils of society is realized which is the snooze bar because at 6 20 I Don't want to jog or write poetry or rather. No, I do want to jog. I do want to write poetry I just want to do it starting at 6 30 Hit this news bar, of course, it's 6 30 you can see what happens This is an interesting problem. I like this problem for a few reasons one I've been through this many many many times and I still haven't mastered it To there's a technology here. That's not helping me that much After all the alarm clock isn't doing in a way what I would want it to do just to get me up at the time that I wanted it to get me up and So there's a nice product on the market called clocky, which is this alarm clock with wheels and what it does is it rolls off the edge of the bed Goes off in a random direction And then starts beeping So you can imagine at 6 20 you have to get up and find clocky. So now you do get up at 6 20 This is a nice metaphor that I think after something that technology can do for us so in this case what clocky is doing for me is that you ever seen these cartoons where like There's like an angel on the shoulder and a devil on the shoulder and the devil is trying to get you to do something And the angels trying to do something better and I often think of many things in life as having an angel on the devil And there's a little fight what clocky does is it arms the angel up? Give the angel a little more ammunition to accomplish what the angel wants to accomplish And so I think that clocky for me is a metaphor for a type of technology that we will start to see consumers Increasingly demanding and firms increasingly figuring out how to provide which are not things like Technologies that just you know coke tastes good. I'm going to get it They're technologies that help us be the people we want to be This is not someone else telling me you ought to do X It's me saying I really struggle with this and I would love if something could help me do this better And so once I noticed this with clocky I started looking around and it is sort of an emerging trend It's very nascent, but it's nice to find these trends before you know They start to get full-blown and we can name it and there's a few products I think that are starting to fill the space up and it's an interesting space also because of what I do Which is behavioral science because I think behavioral science can move from the lab to Actually almost a form of engineering if we know these are the things that make people tick Can we use these insights to engineer things? What are other tools? What are other things? So I'm going to volunteer an alternative to clocky which doesn't have a snooze button and in my own personal life's case That's three children But it is a lot more expensive and time-consuming so I will grant you that What wouldn't know about the dog, but the kids definitely do it So the book you're working on now send bill is called the eternal bank What is the eternal bank and whose idea is it? So yeah, so the the that's the book. I'm working on next So I should say It's always the case that you're planning to do things as you can imagine That's a that's a book about my dad and it comes from the It comes from this thing. He once called me and he said you're an economist, right? This was 12 years after my PhD. So you would think he would know that I was an economist Okay, just a little footnote here You were a tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the time at the time. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah Okay, so you had a few credentials a little bit. Yeah, so I said yes, and then he said well I Need your help on something What so I want to start a bank and my dad has nothing to do with banking He has nothing to do with any of this And so I was about to explain to him that it's a little harder to start a bank than you might think But then I figured what why bother just tell me why do you want to start a bank? And he had this idea he said a lot of people out there who believe in reincarnation and Why should they go into the next life without money? They've accumulated a lot of money in this life Let them take that money into the next life. So they'll come to this bank and they'll give us Their money and some passcodes and when they're reincarnated if they're reincarnated They can come back recover their passcodes Because they'll remember Yeah, I'm not as well-versed in reincarnation as you might expect to give him my heritage So they they come back and they would give us the passcodes and my dad's idea was that we went either way either we have concrete proof of reincarnation or we get the float on their money and So he said and the best part of it. He said and we'll call this the eternal bank So the book is really about my dad is a very interesting guy And it's about his stories and what they tell us about and try to understand them through social science So this is this story is emblematic for me about what is creativity because obviously this is a very creative idea At the same time, I don't think any of us are gonna go out and set up the eternal bank So there's something slightly. It's very creative. It's almost too creative And so it's about understanding what the science of creativity is and how can you be too creative? So I think that one thing that we're finding in The research on science uncreativity It's almost like this is a gross simplification. It's almost like there's a spectrum between creativity and judgment if you almost think of creativity as Being able to see the world as it might be and Judgment as being able to see the world as it is you can see how those are remarkable opposition When you're very creative, you're looking past what is to what might be When you have great judgment part of what you do is you can really see things almost clearly for what they are And you can see how these are in like remarkable opposition And so that's why oftentimes creative people will say one brilliant thing and one thing where you're like that is Absolutely insane and they'll be convinced that both of them are great ideas And so that's the that's the tension And so that story for me and the research that I've been doing afterwards is around trying to understand that tension of what makes creativity So send all told me this story yesterday, and it really resonated with me because as it happened I had just re-read a paper by Robert Merton the sociologist Written in the 1960s where he had surveyed he and a colleague had surveyed a whole bunch of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and One of the findings as the scientists sort of reported their own theories of their success and their thinking One thing that all of them said was what was crucial was not so much Being brilliant because they said there are lots of people who are really really smart It was that they all felt they had a kind of intuition about where the hot and important issues were and They knew to work on those and not to work on the others And this sounded to me a lot like the judgment that send all was talking about that's so essential to creativity exactly That's right, and I think that that varies a lot There isn't great research on this, but I think that that mix that you need varies a lot by field So in Merton's case, he was talking a lot of scientists and Nobel Prizes and science are often given for things that are much more like Experimental advances and when you're doing a lot of experimental advances you need creativity But because there's a lot of heavy lift involved you need a lot of judgment But if you look at art I would speculate and you go out in this direction You need less judgment and a lot more just raw creativity and it sort of varies by field a very creative management consultant Probably not that helpful a somewhat creative management consultant with good judgment very helpful So I think it matters a lot is that a very creative auditor probably not helpful at all well In some places a little too helpful exactly exactly right so maybe when we're advising our kids once they finish their alarm clock We'll in our lives on Career choices we should try to figure out where they are on the creativity judgment spectrum Now send all you've talked to us a little bit about your dad And I was really fascinated to hear about your family story So I'm gonna ask you a little bit about that. Where were you born? So I was born in India I was born in a village Sort of about four hours. I used to say five hours south of Chennai, but what does hours mean? It's like an interesting thing where it's like the roads keep getting better So in effect the village is getting closer to Chennai. So how close is it now three hours pretty good. That's progress No, it's getting better much better. Yeah. Yeah, my teeth don't rattle anymore And then how old were you when you emigrated seven and that was to those the Los Angeles So yeah, we moved to LA my dad was there and then I was there There until I went to college and how did your dad manage to bring you guys from this small village five or three hours outside of Chennai? He came to do a PhD at Caltech and then He was here for about four years before Before he could bring us that's an example of an interesting almost angel technology because we didn't have a phone in our house and Maybe one in our village, but we didn't have a phone So my dad would make these audio tapes where he'd talk into them and tell us what he wanted to say And then I still remember The sort of the tapes would come and then you put it on the tape machine and like you'd hear your dad And it's like very interesting was one way, but it was still somehow intimate despite it's one way this did you make tapes for him? I Never even heard to me so And what was the experience of immigration like was it was it all on easy streets suddenly you got to America the roads paved with gold I Mean as a kid it was just another thing. It was like different. I mean to me It was like perfectly the only the only odd part of it was when I was 10 My dad lost his job Because of defense contracting rules and he couldn't work in the sector anymore and that was the rule was also the rule Was that he was an aerospace engineer? But if you worked in any building that had a defense contract you had to get the complete clearance Even if you weren't working on that so he would work on commercial airlines But still because he wasn't a citizen he couldn't no longer even work on commercial online projects So now you can be an aerospace engineer and the interesting part of it to me was I still in this moment where? It's kind of interesting where I said to him so now you don't have a job We're not getting money. So what happens if you don't get a job? I just curious. It was interesting and he said We what happens? We don't have money. We don't need Accurred to me as a child that the world would be such a place where just through chance you could end up with such a random Bad outcome because you know even when we're in India. It's not like I ever worried about not having something to eat per se You might not get candy But somehow the idea that the world would be this place where there's almost no net and you can fall very far That had a very long impact on me Okay, I'm gonna cheat and say you're working now on scarcity, right? Do you think that's connected? I think it is yes I've done a lot of work on poverty and I think it's I think it is very much related to it It's related to this notion. I think it's a I think that's the sort of the psychology and I think all of us probably feel it in one way or another so Some people may feel it money some people may feel it in time But that feeling of having very little and that feeling that you get when you just feel you have too little time That's something that I'm working on now. I have that's the book I'm working on which is around It turns out that there's a common psychology that arises every time people have too little So there's more in common between the poor and the busy And dieters and the lonely that there's a common psychology that all of those people draw upon that That seems to operate. It's something people haven't really noticed before Is that good for us? I mean certainly if we're on a diet, we feel pretty virtuous If we're very busy, we feel virtuous. We're working hard. Does it does scarcity make us better? Yeah, so that's one of the interesting things. It's like Scarcity has these amazing benefits because it focuses our mind So we find and others have found for example when you're working busy People are far more effective when they're on deadlines than they ever could be and you know, you've all this is well known to journalists By the way, I think it's well known to most of us. I think any any student who's like wow with five hours left I wrote a term paper that I couldn't write in five weeks Kind of understands that you know the power the motivating aspect of deadlines and it's not just bit time though So for example the poor This is an interesting fact. I think most people in our research that came out I think it's the opposite of what most people anticipated The poor are much better managers of their money than the rich significantly better managers in the sense that They I mean in every sense just like you're just like when you're very short on time you become a very good manager of Time the poorer better managers of money. So in many ways Scarcity does what you'd expect it to do the mind reacts by saying we have very little of this resource Let's marshal all our mental resources to focus it But there is a very bad side to scarcity, which is probably In the long run outweighs the benefit, which is because the mind is so focused on it You know it focuses involuntarily. So for example So think of the following You have a project that is due like you're working on a An article the deadline is the next evening the next afternoon You go home. You're going to spend time with your kids because you haven't seen them in a while There's nothing you can do on that project right now.    It's like your computer when you have like too many windows open Part of it is being taxed by this other process that's continually running And so as a result what it means is people who are under conditions of scarcity when they're trying to do anything There they are significantly worse. And so we find some striking evidence for example that When somebody becomes poor the same person when they're in times of poverty their IQ drops significantly a lot And other measures psychologists have these measures called executive control, which is what you use to exercise self control Which is what you use to focus Those drop quite a bit in fact the orders of magnitude are such that it's almost like when you become poorer It's almost like being moderately inebriated. So they're very big effects on cognitive load, but it's not about being poor It's not about the people the same person When they get more money The mind recovers because now the cognitive load is gone And it turns out the same is true for people who are on diets So we found we went and looked and there have been a lot of Trials around diets and when people are put onto diets not from the nutrition aspect They're getting plenty to eat from the from that point of view. That's true of the poor by the way that we study It's not nutrition But when they're put onto the diet even effective diets People lose quite a few IQ points while being on the diet because part of their mind is constantly Well thinking about food and that makes them less effective than whatever it is they're doing and so that to me was interesting because it kind of as as economists we tend to think of scarcity as I remember when I was telling one of my economists colleagues that oh, yeah I'm working on this sort of new research on scarcity.  It's called economics Which is true, but I think it's an older type person. No is the younger type person They probably just didn't like me But what they were What they were alluding to which is right economists Are brilliant at recognizing that everything in the world is scarce if you spend money on x you don't have money spend on y So let's call that physical scarcity What I think economists don't have an understood and they don't really maybe they don't care to understand Is that physical scarcity doesn't mean psychological scarcity? So I'll give you an example like most people in this room are lucky enough not to have money scarcity But you do have money scarcity you have a budget constraint however much money you have you have a physical amount of money Right, so we know from an economist point of view you're experiencing scarcity But let me show you from a psychology point of view that you're not experiencing scarcity if you were to lose $20 or 20 francs or whatever the currency might be From your Pocket you went out for a jog and it fell out. You might be annoyed at yourself You might say to yourself.  I shouldn't have lost that But you never ask yourself a question that people who are actually Experiencing money scarcity ask themselves Which is the question I'm now $20 poorer. What am I not going to buy? It doesn't feel like you've lost anything in some sense except a piece of paper Of course, we know from the physical point of view you have lost more than a piece of paper You must be buying $20 less of stuff because that's what the budget constraint is But it never feels that way in fact people who are experiencing money scarcity most definitely That's when you ask them free form questions such as this one of the first things they report is Well, I have to figure out what I'm not going to buy Now take time scarcity if an hour of your life is lost because your plane is delayed and you're very busy person You very much ask yourself. What am I not going to do if an hour is lost on a sunday afternoon That was a relaxing day. You don't ask yourself So that's the sense in which there's a big divide between the physical scarcity Which economists were right to point out exists everywhere And this psychological scarcity, which is a remarkable feature of the mind to allow us to feel Like we have millions of $20 bills endless amount of $20 bills So when you told me about this work yesterday, I was very delighted sendo as I told you For one reason which is I have been thinking that I really should go on a diet But I'm also finishing a book which the second draft is doing two weeks And I had told myself that I would just not start the diet until after the manuscript is done on the ground So it was too hard to do both things at once So I now I felt immediately vindicated and celebrated by having a huge meal last night So that was great. Thank you But are there other practical Lessons you can offer us so your story about the parent who has work And isn't has has made a choice to be with her or his children has the work to do later I think probably everyone in this room who has kids is familiar with that And we hate it. So how can we do better? So I think that Let's let's go back to where we started a little bit. I think that's where the angel technologies can be very very powerful. I think what We can start doing is we can start getting a tune to consumer needs that are of this type So that is there are quite a few consumer demands that are of the type of I'd like to do better at acts I want to be this person. I want to do these behaviors, but I'm not able to We can diagnose what's causing the wedge between I call this intention and action But you might want to say between wanting and doing But whatever is causing the wedge between wanting and doing we now have tools and behavioral science to understand that So for example, one of the reasons there's that wedge and we all know this from eating Is pure self-control. You don't want to eat that doughnut But then when you see the doughnut, you're like, oh this doughnut looks really good. Maybe I'll eat this doughnut But there are other things which are as important in fact arguably more important, but people underappreciate Which one of them I think it was probably even more important than raw self-control Which is mind wandering So you want to I'll give the most prosaic example of this, but that's also very important in the world You're a diabetic you've been diagnosed with this What used to be deadly ambitious disease, but now is controllable through Taking um pills, let's say let's say your early stages. So when the doctor tells you this you say wow It's really unfortunate, but I'm I'll take my pills. So that's what you want to do The reality is we know from the data that the average rate of pill taking is maybe about 65 percent roughly 65 to 75 That's not good because that means you're getting efficacy well below what you should be and that leads to a lot of consequences So that's a wedge between wanting and doing Now what's causing it? I think sort of mind wandering Forgetting inattention is one of the biggest sources of this because after all You live a busy life It's four in the afternoon. You're supposed to take your pill at lunchtime. You just forgot, but now it's back at home And like moves on so you miss it today And that's because diabetes is asymptomatic Nothing the devil in this case is not a strong devil. It's the neutral devil of kind of indifference You're like, well nothing is that long right now The angel can't be as loud as that indifference basically There's nothing for the angel to say no, no, but you have to take it. It's very consequential So there's this company that's created a way of making the angel very loud And it's called glow caps and what they do is I call it the passive aggressive pill bottle So it's got a little light and if you don't take it it starts by blinking It's like, oh, I really want attention. I haven't you haven't talked to me So if you don't open the pill bottle, but then if you don't open it after the blinking it starts beeping And if you don't open it after the beeping, this really is like a Like a friend who really needs attention. It starts sending you text messages And so That's an example where you can see you can diagnose the wanting doing and in clinical trials They're finding that to be very effective at increasing adherence But there are many more places than just taking taking pills. So let's go back to parenting So a very specific example I often think about is If you ask parents, how Good do you think it is to raise your voice in anger at your kids? Most parents will say that's not a good idea. I mean you need to be stern. You need to be firm Maybe you need to raise your voice because that's the right thing to do at that moment But you shouldn't do it just because you're angry I mean a lot of parents would say that I hope But of course when you ask them, well, how often have you done it in the last week? They'll say, well, okay, I've done it quite a few times. That's not good Now that's a great example between wanting and doing Now and I think technology can understand how we can solve that problem too Like introspect for yourself a little bit about what happens in that moment Again, it's a little bit of mind wandering. You get so caught up That you're just like if there was a technology at that moment that sensed Oh, look, there's a rise in your volume Let's just have a bracelet that detects it and then buzzes Silently to you it brings you back Well, I can tell you Sandil if there were such a bracelet my children would be giving it to me Exactly for every holiday We only have a few minutes left. So I want to ask you one final question, which is What makes you do what you do? What what what? excites you about your job what what? What wakes what gets you up in the morning not what keeps you up at night But what gets you up in the morning apart from the little clock I think it's two things one is Um Because of my experiences in life, I feel like I would love to I value doing things that have social value and do something I've been incredibly lucky and so when you look back and say wow, I'm really lucky It's a little unnerving because having been so lucky you feel it's Flip of a coin and other people who have not been lucky and who are surely more talented and so Trying to kind of get rid of put some put something back But the other thing that drives me at some visceral level is I was telling a student my this the other day It's like I love desserts and uh, there's a chocolate chip cookie that I really love in New York. It's this levan bakery It's possibly the best chocolate chip cookie in the world And when you eat that cookie, it's amazing. It's like your mouth fills like incredible pleasure But for me when you have like a good idea I would say it's the same visceral pleasure It's like It's not like any random idea But when the idea finally comes together and you say oh that makes sense. It's the same kind of just raw Just pleasure of like having seen it and unlike the chocolate chip cookie You have this other sort of egotistical advantage of like I might be the first person to have this idea Probably not true But you know egotistically you can fool yourself into saying that and that's a real pleasure Okay, I can't resist this slightly naughty question So having a great idea as good as this fabulous chocolate chip cookie Do you compare it to sex also when you talk to your students? Wow, that's no I do not compare it to sex when talking to my students. So I uh, we have certain rules at Harvard which uh Some of our faculty break, but No when talking to us we are safe you're among friends Is this being videotaped we'll edit this out later. Uh, no, it's different than sex. Let's leave it at that There's only one person involved Um, I cheated and I'm gonna ask you one last last question What's The big idea or the big subject apart from the ones you've told us that you would really like to have that breakthrough idea about Different question. So I I think that the the thing I'm nibbling around the edges that With angel technologies is part of sort of a Ideas 42 which is a a social venture we've set up and has a lot of good people And the thing that we're nibbling around the edges and really perfecting Is the thing we'd love a breakthrough on I think we're close but we're not there which is If you look at behavioral science Whether it's economics or psychology Their fields that are not they're almost like science like physics is they're not engineering And the biggest advantage is that some of the biggest breakthroughs in physics came from engineering By which I mean where you take a real problem and you're actually trying to solve it And I would love to see and that's what we've been doing at ideas 42 I would love to see a way that we can actually become engineers Engineering is a discipline that has it's a science in a way It has it uses scientific tools it uses analysis And I think right now where social science is is it's almost like The applied stuff is considered like a somebody will do it It's just guys at harvard eating chocolate chip cookies as it were Exactly connected to the real world right and I think that in a way when we have a more robust field of engineering Just like in physics it'll transform even pure science because when you go out and try stuff you realize Okay, this isn't going well. There's something we have wrong And we've already finding that in some of our projects behavioral ideas that look great in the lab You go try them on some projects and you're like this isn't working at all Which then makes you question. Well, what do we do in the wrong in the lab experiment? That wasn't so representative of the world and so that That would be the idea that I'd love to see in the next 15 years is to say well We created a field of sort of almost engineering in this area and I think that could be transformative for the world Okay. Well, thank you so much. I have been really fascinated by everything you've had to say today and by our conversation tomorrow I'm sure everyone else here has been too and we will all want to buy your book So when is it going to be published and what will the title be? Oh, the title is a source subject. I don't have a title, but it's published in january. So and and this is this This is the scarcity the scarcity book and who's the publisher? Uh hold a time books Publishing is weird. It's got this huge hierarchy every publisher is owned by some other publisher, but this is times books Okay times books something about scarcity. Sendil Malinatham I don't think there'll be lots of people with that name publishing a book in this area in january And and we will all buy it. Uh, thank you so much. Thank you very much


OK, thank you. So what have we done so far? We've defined outer space. That was for n, at least, 2. And this is a picture of it for n equals 2. So we defined it in three different ways, right? And we also defined the variance O and S. I defined those in two ways. So I'm only going to think really about these two ways. So what did I do? I defined it as a sphere complex, a part of a subspace of a sphere complex. And I defined it as a space of graphs with leaves, if S is positive. So that's what we've done so far. So in particular, in terms of sphere complexes, we had this manifold M and S, which is a connected sum of S1 cross S2 minus S balls. The sphere complex of M and S is defined the way you define the curve complex. It's isotopic classes of spheres. Complex of isotopic classes of spheres. And so let me just, I'm going to talk about this model for a while. Oh, sorry. And then O and S. I'm just reminding you of terminology and notation at the moment. O and S was a subspace consisting of basically of complete sphere systems. Now, this is the complete ones. Incomplete ones were called S infinity. So I'm not going to redefine all these things. I'm just reminding you, since you've had other things to think about over the weekend of what we called all these things. But I will show you, remind you in this picture. So here we have for n equals 2, here's a simplicial complex. It's got some infinite valent vertices and some bivalent vertices. So A here and B are each vertex is a single sphere in the manifold. So there's two different pictures of my doubled handle body. There's this kind where I've drawn just the handle body without doubling it yet. I should write times 2. And that's the sphere A. That's the sphere B. They form an edge because they're disjoint. And this is the picture where I've taken this picture, opened it up, so I get a ball with four patches on it. And then when I double, I get a three sphere with four two spheres on its boundary. And so since I've cut open along those spheres, each of them corresponds to two spheres in this picture. A, A bar, B, and B bar. And then where's the sphere C? Well, here's a sphere C. I need a sphere that makes the three simplex with this so I could use this for C. But there's another sphere I could add to this picture. Namely, yeah, let's not use that one. Let's use this one. I'll again draw only half of it. So I don't know whether you can see that. It kind of, here's a disk. This part goes in the back of the picture and this part is in the front of the picture. It's a little bit hard to see in this picture that C prime. In this picture, it's kind of easier to see. I should have drawn C first. This is C. It goes around A and B. And where's C prime? Well, it goes around A and B bar. So that's the picture over here. And then there are these little, these guys here, these bivalent vertices. I need orange chalk. So they correspond. So there's one other sphere in this picture I can draw. In this picture, it looks, well, yeah, OK. There it is. That's X. And in this picture, it looks like that. So depending on which kind of picture you like to draw, it's easier to see the spheres maybe in this picture than it is in that picture. I don't know. So that's a picture for n equals 2. It's hard to draw these pictures, right? But we know, especially after we assiduously did the exercises, that there's this dual picture. Instead of a sphere system, I could draw a graph. But the downside of that is I have to mark the graph. I have to mark the edges that aren't in a maximal tree with a basis. But it is easier to draw a graph than a handle body. And I could mark these like that and these like that. And if I, yeah, so the edge here is marked like that. And the orange guy looks like, well, maybe I should make it an orange, looks like that.  So if you didn't, I just did it for you. Anyway, that's outer space in rank 2. And you can do that in any dimensions. So I wanted to make some remarks about these complexes, these sphere complexes. Let's start with no punctures. So in the literature, people have studied this often using the graph or tree model of outer space. And it's also called in the literature the free splitting complex of the free group. And why is that? It's because if I have a sphere, if I take any single sphere, it either splits the manifold into two pieces. And Van Kampen's theorem says that the fundamental group of the whole thing is a fundamental group of that, pi 1 of the left, amalgamated along the trivial group, which is the fundamental group of a sphere, pi 1 of the right-hand side. So that's the splitting of the free group. If I used a non-separating sphere, this is using the sphere x. If I use a non-separating sphere, I get a representation of the free group as pi 1 of the remainder, m minus s, as an h and n extension. And anyway, in either case, it's a splitting of the free group into pieces. So that's why it's called the free splitting complex. It's a little bit more complicated to define if you do this. I think this is pretty clear what it is. But people have worked with that. And in particular, the big result on that is in 2012, Handel and Mosher proved that S of m is Gromov hyperbolic. So they did that by thinking of it in terms of these free splitting, in terms of graphs and trees, in 2013, Ilyan and Horbez gave a proof using spheres. So it doesn't deviate much from this proof. But I think it's easier to understand, because it's got the definition of the complex is simple. And well, I'm obviously biased. I like sphere complexes. So this is a delta hyperbolic space. So people often think of studying outer automorphisms of free groups as they want to imitate things that have been done for mapping class groups. Well, one of the big results in mapping class groups is that the curve complex is delta hyperbolic. And this gives you an analog for out of fn. The sphere complex is delta hyperbolic. So that was remarks on for n equals 0. I also wanted to make remarks about, well, on S for S bigger than 0. First of all, when I defined outer space and rank n, I only talked about n at least 2. I did write it up there. But for n equals 1, it already makes sense for n equals 1 as long as S is positive. Yeah, I already said that. Because what is the handle body in this case? Well, it's a handle body of genus 1. That's just S1 cross S2, a single doubled solids torus. And I've got a hole in it. So there are spheres, non-trivial spheres. There are spheres that are not homotopic to the boundary. There's one. And yeah, I could leave. So I think I asked you to think a little bit about this space. It also makes sense for n equals 0 if S is bigger than or equal to 3. Well, let's make 4. If S is at least 4. So what is the doubled handle body if n equals 0? Well, you can think of a handle body as a three sphere with some handles attached. You attach n handles. If n is 0, you don't attach any handles. So m0 is just the three sphere. And so if I have a three sphere and I take at least three balls out of it, I wanted to take four balls. If I just take three balls out of it, then any sphere I try to draw in, this is going to be parallel to one of the boundary components. But if I take four balls out, then there are interesting non-trivial spheres. So this makes sense. As long as I've got at least four, if I remove at least four balls, I have an O is 0 S. So there is one subtlety about when I'm talking about the sphere complex of m and S, which I guess I already alluded to when I was drawing this picture for S bigger than 0. I don't use spheres. There's another kind of trivial sphere. I said before that trivial spheres are spheres that don't bound balls. But I also want to think of a sphere as trivial if it's parallel to a boundary component. So I remember in terms of graphs, supposing I have, let me do a surface of genus 2, if I've got at least one hole in it. In terms of, so a sphere system is dual to this. Here's an example of a sphere system. If I didn't have this hole, then this sphere would be the same as that sphere. But I got a hole there. It blocks that. So I'm a little bit right. There's an example of a sphere system. And dual to this sphere system is a graph. It's got three components, one, two, four edges. And remember what I did with this boundary component was I drew an extra edge from the boundary component to the graph. Now that boundary component doesn't have a sphere going through it. If you remember, I thought of a point in this space as a point in the middle of a simplex, which I gave barocentric coordinates to. So I'm thinking of this as a sphere system with weights on it, but the leaves don't have weights. So the leaves don't have lengths, just the internal edges. So in fact, other people are studying this sphere complex. Well, more precisely, they're looking at the quotient. Oh, yeah, I should have mentioned. We got these sphere complexes. And we also have these groups, A and S. Well, it's diffeomorphisms of this guy up to or homeomorphisms, diffeomorphisms, whichever, modulo-dane twists. Or it's also homotopy equivalences of a graph that looks like that. So those are the groups A and S. They act on these spaces. If S equals 1, this is a group of automorphisms of a free group. If S equals 0, it's the group of outer automorphisms. And in general, it's a group. And if I look at the quotient of this complex, the whole complex, the whole sphere complex, this is a space that other people have been studying for other reasons. Yeah. Well, let's take N at least 1 is called the modular space of tropical curves. So I guess what I'm doing at the beginning is telling you different names for these spaces and the ways different people study them. So algebraic geometers are interested in this as a kind of degeneration of the modular space of Riemann surfaces. It can be seen as living at infinity of the modular space. And in fact, it's isomorphic, homeomorphic, to the curve complex of the surface of genus, the appropriate genus, whatever the appropriate genus is, modulo A, I guess it's 2g, something like that. So this thing is definitely not the same as the curve complex, the sphere complex. However, when you mod out by the group action, it actually becomes the same. So it's the same space. So that's the modular space of tropical curves. If N equals 0, well, then what is this group? If N equals 0, then a graph is just, there's my graph, S. And I'm looking at homotopy equivalences of that graph that fix the leaves. So there aren't too many up to homotopy. So I'm looking at the whole sphere complex, M0S. The tropical geometers call that the tropical grass manian. Actually, it's not very hard to prove that this thing, we know pretty much everything you could possibly want to know about this. There's a symmetric group that permutes the leaves. So the homology of this space is a representation of the symmetric group, and we know what it is. In fact, we know the homology of this space. We know, in fact, it's only got homology in one dimension. And in fact, the whole thing is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres of dimension S minus 4. So that space is well understood. OK, so this is outer space. I wanted to find, in the first lecture today, I want to define a couple of related spaces that are pretty easy to define. And then in the second hour, I'm finally going to tell you. So I've defined all these really pretty spaces, which I just like because they're pretty. But it turns out they're actually good for something, too. And so that's what I'm going to do in the second hour is kind of tell you how we've used these spaces to prove things about the groups. But I still have some more pictures to show you. So that's what we're doing. OK, so we were remarked last time. So what? This is the sphere complex I've drawn a picture of here. The outer space in this picture is just interiors of the simplices that aren't orange. All these guys are orange. I'm going to make them all orange. Yeah, I guess I shouldn't have made these orange. So it's just the interiors of the two simplices. It doesn't include any of the vertices because if I just have a single sphere, the complement isn't simply connected. And actually, if I have a and x, its complement isn't simply connected either. So the line from a to x is not part of outer space either. And certainly x isn't. So a single sphere or a pair of spheres, one of which is separating, is actually not in outer space. And that has the unfortunate consequence that when I take the quotient by the group, it's not compact. And so in particular, this space is not quasi-isometric to the group I'm studying. And as a geometric group theorist, I don't like that. If I add in the orange stuff, then I do get something that's compact. The quotient is compact. But the stabilizers aren't finite. And as a geometric group theorist, I don't like that either. So how do I fix that? It's almost compact.  So what I'm going to do is just throw that stuff away. And the right way to do that, this is only true, of course, for n, at least 2. I'm going to take the barocentric subdivision, ns. OK, so let me do that. Do this in two stages. I'll take the barocentric subdivision. It'll start to look kind of messy in my picture. It'll definitely start to look messy in my picture. And I can keep going, but you get the idea, right? I divide every triangle into six triangles. And now what I do is throw it. So I now have a simplicial complex, which is a refinement of the simplicial complex I started with. And now I'm going to throw out all of the vertices that aren't in outer space by simplices n, o, and s. So in this case, let me look at this triangle here. So I'm going to throw out all of these vertices. So in this triangle, let me not, this picture's too messy. Let me just draw it over here. I've got a, c, and b. And I've taken the barocentric subdivision. And this vertex is not in outer space. This isn't, and this isn't. So the only vertices that are are that vertex, that vertex, and that vertex, and that vertex. And so I'm just going to take the sub-complex that's spanned by those vertices. Yeah? You don't want that not there? Or is k and s the ones that you're removing? Or am I just going to? In. Yes. Thank you. Simplices that are actually in outer space, yes. So that's what it looks like here. On the other hand, the simplex a, b, and x, well, x isn't in outer space, a isn't in outer space, and b isn't in outer space. But on the other hand, the simplex spanned by, so remember, what is a complex in the barocentric subdivision? So simplex is a chain, or vertex rather, is a chain, s not contained in sk. That's a k simplex, yeah, vertex. Right. So this is a, this is a and c, and ac is in outer space, a, c, b is in outer space, a, b is, c, b is. So I have those vertices. Here I have a, b is in outer space, a, b, x is in outer space, but nothing else is. x, b isn't, that doesn't cut my thing into simply connected pieces, so it isn't, and all I've got is this. OK, that's the spine of outer space. It's the spine KNS is the spine of ONS, and it doesn't contain any simplices that aren't allowed. It lives inside of ONS and misses stuff at infinity, yeah, misses bad systems. So it misses bad systems, so in particular, it's KNS mod ONS is compact, is a, no, so the action, what am I trying to say, the action is proper. The only place I got into trouble in this sphere picture is when I had a vertex here or a one cell where the associated sphere system had a non-simply connected complement, and then the stabilizer of that system was infinite. But as long as I've gotten rid of all those simplices, then the stabilizers are all finite, and the action is proper. And and the KNS mod ANS is compact. So it's everything I want. ANS, it's got, I now have, oh yeah, well, I haven't said quite everything I need to say. I also need to say and ONS deformation retracts onto KNS. And that's easy to see, in particular in this picture. In the bare centric subdivision, I have some faces, some simplices. And these simplices have one face that's in KNS and one face that's not. Every simplex has at least some face that's not because there's a vertex. None of the vertices are ever in outer space.  Here too, here most of the simplex retracts onto the vertex that is in outer space. And of course, the bare center of every maximal vertex is in outer space because, yeah, that's how I defined outer space. Simplex is a sphere system that's complete. Question? Yeah? Does the dimension always go down exactly like I want? The simplisher? No. This is an exercise on your sheet. One, two, I've got another board somewhere. Yes, it's an exercise. Well, you already did the exercise computing the dimension of ONS. We had dimension of ONS is 3n minus 4 plus s. That was if n's at least 2 to get n's at least 2. And the dimension of KNS is 2n minus 3 plus s if n is at least 2. And the answer is slightly different if n equals 0 or 1. And that's also part of the exercise. Right. So that says KNS is contractable. It's this says nothing. And that says the action's proper and the quotient's compact. So let's see. Right. So I want to understand a little more about the space KNS. It's a space that's, as we'll see next hour, is used a lot to study the group. So let me first talk about the local structure. So as I've defined it, KNS is a simplicial complex. It's a sub-complex of the sphere complex that's, yeah. I was going to draw it in this picture. But this picture's too messy. But I'll draw it anyway. I'll get rid of all of the extraneous stuff and just keep the spine. So what does a spine look like? Well, we saw it looks like that in these simplices, like that in those simplices. So it looks like a trivalent graph with little spikes sticking up out of it. I guess I'm not quite done. I should have drawn it in a different color. That's why it's called the spine as it looks kind of spine-like. I should have drawn it in a different color. OK, so what does KNS look like? Well, what's a simplex in KNS? First of all, it's in the barycentric subdivision. So it's a chain of subgraphs of systems. S0 contained in S1 contained in SK. This is a K-simplex. Each of these systems gives you a simplex in the original space. And what's a simplex in the barycentric subdivision? It's a chain of simplices. So that's a chain of simplices of systems in the, you know, on my iPad I could do this and just erase the stuff I didn't want and just leave the stuff I do want. It's really nice, but I don't have my iPad. It's much worse on the chalkboard. OK, so for instance, right. So this vertex here corresponds to the system ABC. That's that vertex, is that system ABC. This vertex is a system AB. So we have AB contained in ABC. That's this one simplex in the spine. So a simplex in this barycentric subdivision is a chain of systems. And they're all complete. So an interesting thing happens when you think of the dual graph. What happens if I look at the dual graph to this system? It's got three edges. What happens when I remove a sphere? Well, if I remove the middle sphere, this is A, B, and C. It collapses to the edge corresponding to that sphere, collapses to a point. I may be collapsing more than. So as I go down this chain, I'm throwing out spheres, and that means I'm collapsing graphs. Chain of collapses, G. Let me call it GK. But I'm not allowed to collapse any subgraph. I can only collapse. I have to keep the fundamental group Fn. And that means I can only collapse. C collapses forests. A forest is a subgraph with no cycles. So that's one way to describe. There's two ways to describe a simplex in the spine. One is a chain of sphere systems. The other is a chain of forest collapses. Of course, this isn't enough to say what the point in outer space is. These guys come with markings. And in order to be a simplex, the marking has to get dragged along with the collapses. So that has to commute. OK, so that's what a simplex looks like. What does the link of a vertex look like? Let's start with a trivalent graph, or in other words, a maximal system where the thing is cut into pairs of three punctured spheres corresponds to a graph, which is trivalent. To go down, I collapse an edge, or another edge, and another edge, and another edge, or maybe I could collapse the whole forest at once. So the link of G is graphs obtainable by collapsing a forest. So I can measure this by the geometric realization of the partially ordered set of forests in G. Once I've got a trivalent graph that's like a maximal system I can't stick anymore spheres in. So those are the only kinds of things in the link. So this is just maybe a fancy way of saying this. You look at all the graphs you could get by collapsing a forest. You get one for every forest. So that's a vertex in the link. And so then the link that you get is called the geometric realization of this partially ordered set of forests. And it's OK to erase this. What about the link of a, yeah. So what's the smallest dimensional simplex I have here? It's one where I have the minimal number of spheres I need to cut this into. So the complement's simply connected. If I have genus G, if I have genus N, if I take N spheres, I can cut it into a single simply connected thing. And the dual graph is going to be a rose. So we know what the link of a vertex is if the graph is trivalent. To think about the link of a vertex, a rose, it's easier to think in terms of sphere systems. So a rose is a minimal complete system. So if I have a minimal complete system, it cuts M, let me call it S, not because it's very small, M minus S not if I cut it open. I have a1, a1 bar, a2, a2 bar, N bar. Well, if I have a minimal complete system, I'm just looking at spheres I can add to it. So that's just the set of spheres I can put in this picture. This is an M0 to N. That's a ball with two N holes in it. So that's M0 to N. And I'm looking at spheres I can put in it. So the link, so this manifold is that. So its link of S0 is isomorphic to M0 to N. So that was easy. And by what I said, if I didn't already erase it, I probably already did. We know exactly everything about this. This is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres of dimension 2N minus 4. And what in general, if, yes, and yeah, no, here it is. There's the SM0S, which of spheres of dimension S minus 4. And what if I'm in between if G is not trivalent rows? And that's saying that the sphere system is not minimal, not maximal. Right, I'm just talking about a vertex, sorry. This is not trivalent non-row. So that means that's not minimal and not maximal. So I can look at M minus S. And I get a MNS minus S. And I get every sphere that I could, everything I could add to this sphere system also is part of the link. Gives me a bigger system. On the other hand, everything I could collapse in G gives me a smaller system. So if I kind of look at everything, yeah. So I'm looking at everything I could get by collapsing a forest. I'm looking at everything I could get by adding spheres to S. I've kind of mixed the two pictures of what these spaces are. But the link is going to be the joint, the simplicial joint, of these two complexes. So there's a theorem that says this post set of forests is spherical, too. I'm not going to guess at the dimension. Number of vertices minus 4, yeah, some dimension. And so that implies that the link of any vertex is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres. If I take a wedge of spheres and take the simplicial joint with another wedge of spheres, I'm going to get a wedge of spheres. So yeah, let me point out in this picture, the space I have is not a manifold. It's got these places where it's got, yeah, that's not a manifold point. But on the other hand, the link of a vertex and the spine, so the spine isn't a manifold either. The whole space isn't a manifold. The spine isn't a manifold. In a manifold, the link of a ver, if you triangulated your manifold, the link of a vertex would be a sphere. In this space, the link of the vertex is not a sphere, but it's not so bad. It's homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres of the correct dimension. In fact, the dimension is the dimension of the spine minus 1. So that's, oh yeah, I've got 10 minutes. That's a little bit about what this space looks like. At least locally, it kind of looks sort of manifold-ish, even though it's definitely not a manifold. I wanted to tell you about one other space before I tell you what we use all this stuff for, because I really like this space. And also one of my co-authors is sitting in the audience. And it has the good effect of simplifying that picture. So let me call one more space. It's called the boardification. So this is another way of getting something which is proper and co-compact on which the group acts. So it's another way of getting rid of these nasty simplices that are out at infinity. The first thing we can do is get rid of some of them by only using spheres that don't separate MNS. So define O and S reduced to be the subspace. Well, I guess I could do it for the whole sphere complex. It is a sub-complex spanned by non-separating spheres. So I'm not going to use these silly x's, because they separate my manifold. So instead I'm just going to not use them. And then my space looks much nicer. All the orange stuff disappears. And again, this would be a whole lot easier with my iPad. OK, so what I did before is I kind of went on the inside of this space way down to, you know, I took the bare centric subdivision and threw out the bad simplices, bad vertices. Now instead of throwing out the bad vertices, I'm just going to cut them off. So I just want to cut off the bad vertices.  So how do I make that precise? So given a graph, a marked graph or a sphere system, S contained in S reduced. So this is right. So this corresponds to a simplex. Yeah, so this is a sphere system. It gives me a whole simplex sigma of S. So for instance here, I've got three spheres. That's a sphere system. That's a two simplex. I'm going to define J of S. It's going to be something sitting inside of sigma of S.  So what's a core subgraph? It's too hard to get the top one. I'm just using two ports. S0 is contained in S. That's a complete system. So this is core. Let S1 be the other spheres. So S0 is core. If the spheres of S0 are non-separating in M minus S1. So for example, my simple example, over and over and over again, A, B, and C. That's my sphere system S. If I look at just the sphere system A, then what's left over is B and C. And if I cut the manifold open along B and C, it looks like A becomes separating. So this is not core. On the other hand, if I started with A and B, the rest of it is C. And if I just take out C, then where were we? A and B. They're not separating. So this is core. I have one minute to tell you what to do. What I'm going to do is take all of these simplices corresponding to some sphere system S.  So in A, B, and C, A, C is core. So I'm going to slice off B. A, B is core.  And B, C is core.  And what I'm left with is just that. That's called J of S. In this picture over here, I'm just slicing off the stuff that I don't like in every simplex. So I'm throwing this stuff all away. And I'm left with just that. And that's co-compact. And let me just tell you what's true about this space. So if I slice off carefully, these things all fit together to give me a deformation retract of my space, I should say slice deeper if S not is smaller.  So I make sure I make a new face every time I slice. The resulting space is homeomorphic to the Bestvena Fane Bordification. One more space. It's this space. It's homeomorphic to the Bestvena Fane Bordification of ON. That's for S equals 0. And that's in a paper by Kayuva Bukes, Peter Smiley, and myself, the fact that it's homeomorphic. Bestvena Fane made this Bordification in 2000. This paper is 2018. And I'm over time. So I'll tell you what you use this. Well, I'll tell you what you use all these spaces for in the next hour. But I don't know. I hope you like the construction of these spaces. I think they're pretty.


Statistics and Excel. Histograms with different bucket sizes. Got data? Let's get stuck into it with statistics and Excel. You're not required to, but if you have access to OneNote we're in the icon on the left hand side. OneNote and Excel presentations tab of 1040 histogram with different bucket sizes. We're also attempting to upload our transcripts to OneNote. You can use the immersive reader tool to change the language of the transcripts and then either read through or actually listen to the transcripts in multiple languages using the timestamps to tie in to the video presentations. Desktop version of OneNote here. The information, the data on the left hand side. We are imagining to be annual salary or annual income of employees at say a corporation. Same data sets we've been taking a look at in prior presentation. Instead of having that data ordered by like alphabetical order of employees, first thing we typically do is sort that data either from lowest to highest or highest to lowest. That gives us a general sense of the data and then we've been talking about pictorial representations. The major two being the box and whiskers and the histogram. We're now focused on the histogram which gives us that nice spread of the data and we looked at a histogram in a prior presentation and if you actually create a histogram in Excel, Excel being a great tool of course to be able to put together these pictorial images, Excel will usually give you a pretty good approximation but Excel is going to have to make some approximations to create the histogram and one of the main things it has to do is think about well how many boxes do we want down below and what's going to be the spread between the boxes. So in other words we have our data on the left hand side. What we want to do is put that data into buckets so that we can then see how many items fall into each of those buckets. So then of course the question is well how spread out should the buckets be? What kind of buckets should we be making and Excel if we just highlight the data and insert a histogram will make some of those assumptions. So here for example 55,000 to 58,400 so we only have one of the data points in here. Nothing is in the buckets of 58 all the way up to 65,200 and then when we go to 65,200 to 68,600, 65,200 to 68,600 somewhere around here we've got five data sets and so on and so forth. Now if we make some changes to our histogram then it can make a big change in what the what the histogram looks like and if there's a big change to what the histogram looks like that could make changes in terms of our perception of what the histogram is telling us. So from a positive perspective that means that we can alter some of the items on the histogram in order to get a better picture of what it is that we're trying to narrow in on the negative side of that you can also imagine and this is often what happens in practical in practice people using histograms to kind of support an opinion that they already have in place. So if someone has an opinion that they want to put some kind of policy in place in the corporation or something like that then then they might manipulate the look of a histogram or whatever pictorial representation they are using to better represent their argument. So what we want to do then is to be able to say okay how can we use the histogram when we're really trying to actually understand the data so we can zero in on the on a picture that is best representative from multiple angles and how can we see how someone might try to kind of be deceptive with the manipulation of the histograms if they're trying to argue for a particular point and of course in order to do that we have to put our mind in the mindset of someone who's kind of trying to be deceptive with the histograms so that we can guard against someone trying to be deceptive with any pictorial representations of data. All right. So by default on the left hand side this is kind of of the information related to this x-axis the buckets the two major categories are going to be the bandwidth and the number of bins. Now currently we have it as automatic so it's on automatic which means these two are grayed out and Excel just put in three thousand four hundred for the bandwidth. So in other words the difference between these two numbers if I pull up the trusty calculator and we do some calculations with it we're going to say that the endpoint fifty eight four hundred minus fifty five is going to be that three thousand four hundred distance between you know how big the bucket is and then we have nine buckets so we've got one two three four five six seven eight nine buckets. Now if I change either of these if I change the bend width then the buckets will typically change automatically within Excel because if I decrease the number the bandwidth you would expect that we would need more buckets in order to clear the entire data set to populate the entire data set. However, we could lower the number of buckets by also using the overflow bin and the underflow bin. In other words, if I have the outliers at the end at the tail ends here we could try to trim off the outliers at the tail end. So let's see how these can be implemented. Here's another pictorial representation. What happened here? We changed the data the bin from automatic to bend width of seven thousand. So now if I look at the bend width we have sixty two thousand minus fifty five thousand seven thousand different. So we have a big bend bigger bends here big big bend and and and so it also automatically changed the number of bends from what do we have up here nine to five bends. Now you can you can notice that if you just look at the look and feel of these two graphs they give you a pretty you know different look and feel. So you've got this one you know is is still orientated towards the middle here but you got these outliers towards the end. And if I do it this way it's really emphasizing you know this middle point because of the bend sizes. So if I if I go back down again and we say let's look at another one and let's say that we we then make the bucket sizes very small. So in this case we took the bend width only to two hundred. So now it's way down to two hundred. So you got fifty five thousand to fifty five two hundred only a two hundred dollar you know difference between the bends. Well that means you're going to need a whole lot of bends to cover the data from fifty five thousand up to eighty four thousand. I have a hundred and forty five bends in here and it also means that.


Good afternoon everyone and welcome We're gonna begin with an opening reading from Richard Gilbert who was Kelly's childhood minister, right? One of them him and Alina Chapin. Yeah It's called what we share Let us celebrate the common rituals that make us kin The poignancy of welcome and farewell The anguish of defeat the tender touching of those who call us friend the exuberant joy of birth The empty space in our heart when a loved one died The ultimate loneliness that each knows the warm embrace of comrades who welcome us to the celebration of life Let us also celebrate the questions that persist and Perplex and do not yield to our need for answers The shining moments when the subslance across our dim meaning path meandering path and illuminates the way the strange and anxious excitement of moving to new places to call home the Fragments of frustration when our best efforts yield pitiful results The helplessness we feel in a world that sometimes presents only problems The high joy when some small victory for humanity is one and we have helped it happen In all our moments of doubt and despair of problem and pain Let us remember the common lot shared by our human kin in all our times of truth and triumph of faith and fortitude Let us celebrate what we share We are after all In this together Well, good morning everybody Thank you for being here My name is Jenny Conroy and I'm the president of the board of trustees and I really appreciate everyone Being here to have this conversation with us, especially on this extremely chilly and snowy day We're and I'm sure a lot of us would like to be cuddled up at home I know I would so really appreciate everyone being here today to have this conversation with us as I said My name is Jenny. We have a few more members of the board here joy and Emily and Emily And at the future Town halls will have other board members as well, and I think we also have some finance committee members here Where's Anne and Chuck, but there's Anne and Chuck, okay, well, we got a big big crew so just I think we're just missing Ed But he'll be in one of the future town halls So the reason we are here today. I want to just first go over Let me actually let me just do a little housekeeping first and then we'll go over our purpose So if you look at our agenda We are going to be spending some time talking about You know what's been going on over the past several years how we got to where we are right now and Where we're going and then Kelly and Kelly will be going over our proposed staff restructuring And we'll talk about our next steps and then have some time for questions So we really want to have a good conversation and have questions We'd like to see if we can hold those until kind of get the whole context and we'll be developing an FAQ as well from some of the questions today so that we can share those with the congregation as we go through this process and This is also recorded this first portion is going to be recorded for folks who can't attend But it will end before the discussion But just so you know we'll have that part recorded so the information can be shared So the purpose of why we are here today is to share more about our financial position and To start this conversation in January. We won't be voting as a congregation on the budget until May But we were having these town halls to talk about our financial position and our proposed solutions for that And then we'll have a financial forum in February as well And then we'll be voting on the budget for the next fiscal year in May The finance committee and the board have prepared some information for you to kind of say how did we get here? So that you understand the full financial picture So we'll be talking to you through that in a moment here and again the financial forum will be going to leave Even deeper will be in February So our purpose again today is to share our our proposed restructuring have a conversation Answer questions and to really be Clear about where we are and where we want to go in the future. Okay, so if you want to advance the first slide here So why we are here at our May 2023 parish meeting when we approve the budget as a congregation If you recall at that time we said we're in we're kind of in a We're sounding the alarm. We're kind of in a challenging position right now at that time in the last budget We used some government funding and used pretty much all of our reserves To retain all of our staff at that time without a pay raise So if you recall we retained all our staff But we were not able to give them any pay raise at a time when as you know the inflation was pretty high So At this point, we don't have cash reserves anymore. We did dip into those last Last year and in previous years and we'll talk about that in a little more detail And we also don't have that pandemic era funding. We have about a two hundred thousand dollar shortfall for our budget two hundred thousand dollars to try to retain our budget from last year and Looking at all the places we can cut It's still a staff is still our largest part of the budget by far And so that's why we're in this position of having to resize our staff at this time We feel and be able to pay them fairly and have that a Better size staff for where we are right now and then position if you ask for the future and be able to grow from there So if you've talked to family and friends, maybe you know that we are not unique among UU churches Or any churches really and in some ways we are in a fairly Fairly fortunate position as compared to some places. I know my parents church They've had a completely sell their building and they don't even they are meeting somewhere else right now So in a lot of ways we're in a fairly fortunate situation, but not not unique And we have together I think it's really important for us to remember we have weathered some challenging years in many different ways that we'll talk about and We haven't had to lay off staff We've made it through some very challenging years and have really retained But at this time we feel that we need to make a change and there are all signs of really good positive signs of growth and Resurgence, so we'll talk about those two So We have the shortfall of about two hundred thousand dollars We don't have those reserves and we feel that we are in this position now where we have the necessary cuts to staffing So we're gonna spend a little time Emily Smith and I are gonna spend a little time saying how do we get here before we go Into the staff restructuring so if you want to advance So a lot of this doesn't come as a surprise to any of you But there's been just a refresh here. We've had some very challenging and unique years. We had a pandemic We went to virtual services Which means, you know, we're not passing the basket at that time. We had some people step away during the pandemic We also had to cancel events during the pandemic. All those are ways that we raise money So, you know historic time of having this pandemic Followed by an economic recession, of course. We all we all felt that Then we have ongoing high expenses our atrium building that We built came after record growth. It's beautiful. We are so glad we have this this is a six million dollar building came after record growth In 2006 this is ongoing expense for us as well as our historic building. So we have high expenses that stay with us and that record inflation That we've experienced now starting to slow down a little bit But we've had that record inflation that we're dealing with so we have ongoing high expenses and and the challenge of the pandemic and then of course we have a ministerial Transition that we've been going through that's another challenge. We had our long-term Minister Michael Shuler's retirement We had three years of interim ministers and now we're moving into our co-minister. We're Co-minister model. We're building on that But we had that transition time and a lot of challenges up and down for three years and At the same time we had some long-term Pledge members pass away or step away at that time So all these there's all these factors that we've had both that we experience uniquely and that everyone experience that have put Us here to where we are right now and Emily Smith is going to come and talk about some of the other factors Yeah, so we want to go to the next slide So another factor in our current financial situation is declining membership and pledges as Jenny was mentioning We are certainly not alone in this situation A cross-organized religion that there's been a decline in participation One statistic on this is that between 2013 and 2021 Catholic mass attendance was down 40% and 61 of the 102 parishes polled regularly operated without a dub or with a deficit We also know that there are many other Unitarian Universalist congregations in similar places also Experiencing declining pledges and membership So just overall reinforcing the message that we're not alone in this situation Next slide For some specifics on our membership and pledges over time We polled some numbers from 2008, which is the year that this atrium addition to the building opened and from today Which is a representation of our last complete financial year and what we're seeing so far in this financial year So in 2008 we had 1475 members We had 847 pledges totaling just over a million dollars and that works out to an average pledge of about $1,275 Today we have 1040 members, which is about a 30% decline from 2008 We have 457 Individual pledges, which total about $950,000 and Although those three numbers are all lower than they were in 2008 It's worth noting that the average pledge today is significantly higher than in 2008. It's now just over $2,000 So we're gonna talk a little more about Some hopeful signs that we're seeing in the midst of our difficult situation But I do think that higher average pledge is one of them To me the story that that statistic suggests is that the people who are here are Committed to this place and to this congregation, and I think that's helpful to keep in mind Next slide So over the last several years, we've had a discrepancy between our income and our expenses So far we've been able to Make up the difference with a couple different stopgap measures One of them is that over three years we got about $500,000 in government assistance in the form of the payment protection program and employee retention credits These funds are no longer available to us We have also for over or for about a decade now Used cash reserves to help us balance our budget At our last parish meeting we voted to do this again For this financial year using about a hundred seventy five thousand dollars of our cash reserves was what was projected we would need That's the that was the majority of the remainder of our cash reserves at the end of this financial year We expect to be to have a less than a hundred thousand dollars remaining So it's not really something we can pull from again We had hoped that using cash reserves in this way could be a bridge to financial stability without them But unfortunately that just has not proven out One more slide So the bottom line Thinking about the stopgaps we've used so far is that that they just aren't there anymore We have come to a place where our stopgaps are our reserves our relief funds have been used up And our expenses still exceed our income Which puts us to a point of needing to cut expenses for next year in order to avoid debt Thank you, you've got one more slide Thank You Emily and I think it is important to note You know we were very resourceful and it was that we use those pandemic funds Do exactly what they were designed to do was to retain staff and not have to lay people off at such a hard time So very resourceful, which is wonderful that we were able to To take all those measures and I want before we move on I want to make sure that everyone knows it, you know this That no we're not no one's happy about this, but it's not a Time to panic. There are such wonderful signs of what's going on in our congregation And so we wanted to highlight just a few of them and I certainly have noticed this so many new visitors You know coming and see it with their different with their name tags on and so we have had 347 visitors book signatures since July We have had 14 new members sign the book since July and four more are pending and Our new UU classes we had 20 members in October so that was a very large class and then we have another session coming up in February and On our online services, so we still we're back here together in person, but we still have our online services We have a hundred seventy two views per week of our online services plus 280 attendant attendees in person a week and then for our December holiday all of our services in December. We had a total of 2748 attendees so we have a lot of Energy and if you're here this morning with the kids in the RE programs We have a lot of energy, but a lot of the growth from that lags a little bit You know if you have new members you're not asking them to to make huge donations right away So some of that lags a little bit, so we feel that at this time we need to Restructure to position ourselves for growth, so I think there's a lot of hope and energy. This isn't You know a time to think they're constricting, but it is a time to be Realistic and make smart choices for FUS. So with that I'll give it to Kelly and Kelly Thanks, Jenny. So as has been alluded to and we don't want to bury the lead any further In order to have a staffing structure that matches what our Consistent annual income is both pledges and then the other income sources that we have on a regular basis That's things like her the rental Income that we get from parking and from the two Partners that we share our building with those those are the consistent sources of revenue right unlike the sort of one time Sources of money we were talking about having depleted in order to have a staff that actually fits within that Foundation this the relatively secure income streams we have Kelly and I spent a lot of time thinking about Okay, what are the basic needs that we need to fulfill that are? core obligations of the congregation and How can we fulfill them within our means and then where there was any? Flexibility or room for judgment How can we match that as best we can though and we can't match it perfectly to the Personalities that we already have because we have a staff that we highly value We're grateful for everyone who works here, and we want to find a way to where possible Go forward with them as you know as much as possible where they want to yeah, so that's what we're gonna show you now Yeah, we wanted to say that how we got here is that we started back in August With our new mission and vision statements, and we took all the current titles and all the current people out of the equation and said What is the staffing structure? We need to meet our mission and our vision We did a lot of consultation with our regional staff Also with colleagues who are in very similar situations We have many many colleagues who are in the same boat that we are One that we talked to you as part of a consortium of large Similar size to ours congregations in the DC area. There's five of them All five of them are in this position Some of them have Endowments historic endowments that they are just going to pull from much like our cash reserves We don't have that and the others are changing their staffing structures when the largest amount of Expense comes from personnel That's where it's got to come from We found almost $50,000 that we are pulling from administrative and program budgets and The other hundred and fifty six ish had to come from personnel So here's where we are So looking on the screen you'll see that we are the The plan we have presented to the board and formed a consensus with them about Maintains co-ministry we did start this conversation between us with the question Do we think that that continues to be the right model for F us? It was not an easy Thing to reckon with and to sit together and think okay Do we think that this is this is the way that actually in the best interest of the institution? I would say that given the fact that the congregation has so recently voted to embark on this model and the fact that Relative to our number of members We are in we are among the congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association with the highest ratio of Members to ministers right that's so it's not unusual to find a two-minister congregation if you have 500 people we are a two-minister congregation with about a thousand people so Given that we felt pretty secure and saying okay at least for now Continuing with co-ministry we believe makes sense so given that the next level down the org chart is a set of five Director level positions some of these are Title changes some of them are not some of them are not some of them are more familiar to you as existing titles The intention is that this is a team of five people at the same Organizational level and who will be compensated the same for their time although it is important to highlight three of these positions are full-time two of the positions are halftime the next level are the critical support and Practical organizational roles again some of these are familiar or maybe familiar to you to you things like we have a facilities manager We need to continue to have a facilities manager That's essential to a congregation that owns a campus as expansive as ours and not for nothing That campus is a major revenue Generator for us and so it needs to be seen to if for no other reason than to maintain that I mean there are other reasons right but also You can't chimp you can't you cannot scrimp on that and expect to still have the revenue generated by it There is one new position a wholly new position on this list and that is the office assistant position to focus on both communications and The administration of our important databases an institution that has a thousand members and many times that in terms of Individual people that are connected to us in one way or another Needs someone who is in charge of handling all of that information flow Yeah, so those of you that have been here a while The refrain I've been hearing for the past week from folks is this has been a long time in coming This has been a long time in coming. This is the moment when we have to do a very hard thing It's not a crisis. We're not standing before you to say it is time to sell a building Or it is time to rent this out to something else This isn't a crisis, but this is a point of difficulty and we need to make difficult decisions You know how we've dealt with this in the past Five six more years of no cost of living of staff saying what do you mean cost of living? we don't get that here of Waiting for someone to retire or waiting for someone to leave their job and we just don't replace them So this is our moment when we look at the organization and we say what is the structure to serve us now? How do we live within our means? This is sustainable. It is Stabilizing and it sets us up for continued growth So really what we want you to take away today is that while this is a very hard thing Yes This is the thing that needs to be done in order to Set us up to keep moving forward We can't keep doing the thing of just chipping away at it a little bit here and there We also hope that you will take away well, what can I do about this?  Encouraging others to pledge if this place matters to you Contact Cheryl and say I'll do a testimonial during the annual campaign Right, I'm willing to speak and What we're hoping people will do is what Alyssa and her family did last year to say what the place means and then to say So I'm gonna give this much more Cheryl is going to be recreating the stewardship ministry team if Being involved in fundraising the pledge campaign if you're comfortable talking to folks about money and we know not everybody is if You're comfortable talk with Cheryl and be a part of that stewardship ministry team Janet is recreating the membership ministry team and it's gonna be across the board So if you say I really want to talk to those first-time visitors And I want to see what brings them here and I want to try to get them involved if you say I actually want to talk to our longtime members. What keeps you here? What's kept you here for 10 20 30 years? I want to talk to those people in the middle that are at about three to five years and Though that's often a time where if they haven't engaged they're gonna walk away. I want to grab those people You might be thinking I was a coming-of-age parent and I actually stayed after coming of age Most of my friends did not so I want to work with those parents of middle schoolers and ninth graders and try to keep them Wherever your interest is in membership Get in touch with Janet and tell her how you want to help so Cheryl for stewardship Cheryl if you want to increase your pledge Janet for anything involving membership, and let's check other things. We wanted to highlight I mentioned before you know our former system of No cost of living or not worrying about the UUA salary guidelines All of the staff up here will be compensated at the 24 25 UUA salary guideline of a level D Congregation it's getting into the weeds a little bit level D is up to 800 members The UUA made guidelines for congregations up to that number and then said if you're bigger than that add 20% we are not at the add 20% to that But we are at that level D and when we first looked at those numbers We said there's no way we're gonna get there in the next ten years And we got there by doing this and that's huge And then staff who were already at that level Will receive a 2% cost of living increase in the coming year Someone emailed the board email and asked about ministers and cost of living noting that for many many years Michael didn't take cost of living increases, so let's be clear We are not included in any increase for the coming year. Yeah, that's everybody else. It's everybody else We know we're the highest paid employees you got we are not questioning that we know the numbers We are also the ones making these decisions and we want to make sure that we do not benefit from this in any way. Yeah I think is that our I think that was our main List we wanted to okay. Yes This is perhaps familiar to some of you to be of use by Marge Piercy The people I love the best jump into work head first Without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight They seem to become natives of that element the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls I love people who harness themselves an ox to a heavy cart Who pull like water buffalo with massive patients? Who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward who do what has to be done again and again? I Want to be with people who submerge in the task Who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along Who are not parlor generals and field deserters? But move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out The work of the world is common as mud Botched it smears the hands crumbles to dust But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies clean and evident Greek amphoras for wine or oil Hopi vases that held corn are put in museums, but you know they were made to be used The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real Thanks for being here today. Thank you for your questions They will form the FAQ that will go up on our website and it's really good to see you all Thank you friends


Paris, the most romantic city in the world. Grand tree lined avenues, iconic landmarks, modern and Gothic architecture, expansive parks and gardens which caress the river Seine as it winds past the churches, museums and art galleries. Paris in the springtime, lauded in film and song is even more iconic. What if I told you you could experience all this in just four hours or so by running a marathon which has more crowd support than most of the Abbott marathon majors and certainly has more rumours than all but New York. When you consider the weather is almost always perfect, if you like the big city marathon experience, there are few places better to be in April each year. It's expensive as marathons go but crucially there is no ballot system and no qualification required.  No wonder then that I have been captivated by Paris ever since I ran it as my first marathon back in 2012. Luckily for me my brother-in-law lives in Paris so it's easy and cheap for us in terms of travel and accommodation. Here is my medal from that first year. Even before the film my run channel I was taking a video camera with me to document my experiences. Having seriously got the running bug and run my first ever marathon I was keen to improve my time. This prompted me to join a running club towards the end of 2012 and start training for a return to Paris in 2013. I set a goal of under 3 hours 30 minutes and trained hard through the winter. The result was a successful 328 and this is my medal from that second year in Paris. I enjoyed that, it was gorgeous, lovely run, perfect weather, lovely for running and I only felt, I only felt really fine, not too much. A year later I'd come up with a cunning plan. I was going to carry a camera with me as I ran. I'd tested this a few weeks before at the Eastbourne Half Marathon and it seemed like it might work. Unfortunately it did have a negative effect on my time. It was also a very warm year and I was slower than in the previous year. But this was the film my run channel in its embryonic state. Raw and unconcerned with subscriber numbers or sponsorship deals. And here's my medal from that run in 2014. Where did you get that from? For running? Yeah, for running. Did you do the running? Yes. Did you? Yes. It wasn't daddy that did the running then? No. No, you did the running. By 2015 I was on the hunt for a marathon PB and a good for age qualifying time for the London marathon. To this date the Paris Marathon this year remains my fastest time on that course. It's not the flattest of road marathons with some undulations and about 150 meters of elevation gain. By comparison Berlin has around 70 meters of elevation gain and is the world record marathon course. Here is my medal from 2015. By 2016 the film my run brand was well established and I was contracted to run Paris by James who wanted me to film him running his 98th marathon. We crossed the line in three hours and 20 minutes and James went on to complete his 100 marathons as now done well over 100 marathons and is also something of a 100 mile distance expert. By the way if you're enjoying the video please do click the thumbs up and share it with your friends and if you're not subscribed go on. It won't cost you a penny and it really helps out the channel enormously. Thank you. Starting on the Champs Elysees the route heads down to Place de la Concorde and then along Ruda Rivoli to Bastille passing the Louvre and Notre Dame Cathedral. It passes through Bois de Vansan before following the river along to the Eiffel Tower and then on through Bois de Boulogne to the finish at the Arc de Triomphe. It took me three hours and 19 minutes on another warm day in 2017, but I got this medal and my second fastest Paris Marathon time. Up to this point my wife Victoria had been a spectator only, a running widow if you will, but Paris 2018 would be her second ever marathon and we ran it together. We set a somewhat ambitious target of under four hours on what was a very hot day. It didn't quite work out but we thoroughly enjoyed running together and we seem to work quite well together as a team and here's the medal that we got for that year. I wanted to try and run fast again in 2019, but another warm Parisian day and a lack of fitness probably contributed to what was in my eyes a dire performance of three hours 33 minutes, having set out to try 315. But I collected my eighth medal and by now I was determined to try and make it 10 in a row. Covid put paid to the event in 2020, but in October 2021 at a postponed Paris Marathon, Victoria was ready for another attempt at a sub four hour marathon. She was solid and strong all the way through and I could not have been more proud of her. She finished in three hours 57 minutes, a PV by more than 26 minutes. So medal number nine was in the bag and we didn't have long to wait for medal number 10. This one was achieved in the company of Victoria and our Zwift friends. I've been running on Zwift for six years now on the My Run and the Noble Pro treadmills and we've made some really good friends. By the way, if you are looking for a smart treadmill to use on Zwift, can I point you in the direction of my referral code? It's always down there in the description of all the videos that I produce and it'll give you an amazing discount on the awesome Noble Pro treadmill range. So as well as running online with our Zwift friends, we now arrange in real life meetups and the 2022 Paris Marathon was one of those. Once again, Victoria smashed her goals of London and Boston qualification, beating her 2021 time by 10 minutes and here is our 2022 Paris Marathon medal. I am registered to run Paris again in 2023 to collect my 11th medal. For big city atmosphere, in my experience it's only beaten by London, although the start of Paris with everyone on the Champs Elysees in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, it blows London out of the water. I love the way this start is much better than London every time. It's far more exciting and Paris is also less congested with rhinos and people carrying bathtubs and it's packed with iconic landmarks. I love it. But do you love it?  What did you think? Let me know in the comments down below and if you'd like to watch Victoria's amazing Boston qualifier video then that is linked just here. So click that now to continue supporting the Film My Run channel and we will see you on the start line next time.


Hi, I'm Milton Glaser, and I'm a designer. We're all designers, in fact, but I do it as a profession. And I earned my living that way. I found it to be an extremely desirable activity, especially when you have a receptive client and a receptive audience. But just making things is one of the greatest pleasures that the human species has discovered.