Empowering all of us: what are we really good at and how will we ever know

So I'm Marcus, Marcus Orlovsky. I'm here in Wimbledon, southwest London.

Right now, I guess I work in the world of education. But when you say you work in the world of education, people say: so are you a teacher? Are you a parent? So why do you work in the world of education? Because I think we can all do our bit to improve the life chances of young people through education.

Well, you see, that's what becomes tricky.

The background to this is, I think in my country especially, we have a lot of young people who've been taught stuff in schools and they don't know why they need to learn it. And actually a lot of the teachers don't know what you can do with it anyway. And because we have this crazy testing system, at the end of a few years we sit students down to pass exams, to see what they can remember of stuff which they didn't know why they needed to learn, taught by teachers who don't know what you can do with it anyway.

So is it any surprise that some students, especially those in less affluent or less gifted communities, tend not to do [well]?

It's not a surprise.

And the really sad thing is that in the UK, a heck of a lot of teachers have only had one job, which is being teachers. The route they've gone through tends to be: doing okay at school, not necessarily brilliant, a few have done brilliantly, but the vast majority have done okay, not so badly. Then they've gone to university, an okay university, and they've done okay at university, and then they become teachers.

Whilst they were at university, their knowledge of the world grew. And as they have become teachers, the longer they spend in teaching, the more their currency of the world starts to decrease. A lot of teachers just go out and meet teachers. A lot of teachers are married to teachers. So the whole bubble of this peculiar teaching fraternity gets stronger and stronger as a bubble. And I don't think there's enough permeation between teachers and everybody else in the [world].

So actually, if I can keep going for a little bit longer: the reality is, in my country we have a population of about 65 million people, and we have about 700,000 people who are engaged in the world of education, which is just over 1%. And that 1% are responsible for teaching and training all the young people to enter this community of the other 99%. When you think about it, that's a bit crazy, isn't it?

Yeah, they are indeed. And it would be quite nice if they were more representative of society.

The dreadful thing in my country is that in the state school system, one has to be a qualified teacher to teach, but in the private sector, no such qualifications are needed. So arguably there is a wider breadth of education in the private sector than there necessarily is in the state sector.

That doesn't mean there aren't some outliers, but the generality of it is that too often, kids are taught by teachers. And unless they're in an environment where they have a wide range of opportunities being given to them, they may gradually close themselves down and think that examinations are the absolute be-all and end-all. Or if they don't think they can do very well, they can actually say: well, there's little hope for me. Which is a terrible waste.

Yeah. It sounds a bit simple, but like many others, I'll go into a school and give a keynote about opportunities in the world and all the usual sort of things which people do.

But the major interventions which I've had are when I've taken students to meet just ordinary people: people who are running their own organizations, who are working in big organizations or in small organizations, just so the students can meet other people.

But I discovered that in the world of education, if you take a bunch of students to meet someone, they tend to sit there and expect this person to teach them. And I say: look, you've got to ask them questions. You've got to find out. And I also discovered that a lot of students don't know how to do that, because in schools, certainly in my country, students aren't really encouraged to ask too many questions. It's sort of like challenging the teacher.

So very, very seldom do students say: what do you do outside of school? What is your background? What have you done before? If you weren't a teacher, what would you do? They don't ask those sorts of questions. So they don't really know their teachers very well. They know their teacher as somebody who teaches maths, and they don't assume that their maths teacher has an interest in music, or once upon a time was a great artist and just decided to be a maths teacher. They just don't know. So there's an awful lot of people in schools who've got fantastic talents, but they've harnessed themselves. They've confined themselves to subject areas.

So, to digress: if I take a bunch of students to meet [people], I discovered that a dozen students is about right. Because most people say: I'll bring a hundred students. Whoa, forget it. And if I just take students to meet one person, or two people in one organization, students tend to think: oh gosh, that is how business works. So I go to four or five on the same day, completely different. And then students go: gosh, there's no right or wrong way, is there? There's no definitive "this is how you should be".

And what's fascinating is when you take students to meet a professional accountant, then go and meet a dancer on the stage, then go and have lunch at a great restaurant, then maybe go to a hotel to see how the hotelier operates, and then maybe go to a tech company and meet somebody in real tech. What students discover is that it's a combination of the knowledge which you have and your ability to converse with people, the so-called soft skills, which are really hard to get examined in and get marks for, and other things which are critical. It's a combination: it's you as a person, your ability to communicate, your ability to make things happen, your ability to use the knowledge which you've got, which makes you into a great individual, and not just your ability to pass an exam or to talk about an exam.

And so, sadly, we don't necessarily value those soft skills in the academic system as much as maybe we should. We don't have an exam in being a nice person. We don't have an exam in being able to encourage others to do great things for themselves. We don't have an exam in creativity. And these are all the things which are the key skills for success later on in [life], as well as the ability to use the knowledge you've got. If you just have knowledge and don't know how to use it, I don't know if there's much use in that knowledge, unless you're very lucky and find somebody who can exploit the knowledge which you have.

So that's roughly what I do. And then the really great thing is to get the students to share that knowledge with others, because then they become more confident. They start valuing the skills which they've got and the knowledge which they've got. And once people start valuing themselves and the knowledge they've got, they become more confident in [themselves]. And I think more students should have the skills and the aspirations, or the confidence about themselves. That's what I do.

Well, I suppose it goes back. I had a difficult childhood. My father was a violent man. My mother was very small. [He] beat my mum and me for no reason. And I got saved by my grandmother, that's my father's mother, who took me to live with her, and my mother, who got brain damaged in some of the attacks.

Through my time at school, I sort of had these two lives. I had one life where I pretended that everything at home was really lovely, and outside I was sort of: gosh, what is going to happen? But because we had no money, I realized I've got to do everything myself. And I think I was lucky, actually. I think that was probably the thing. Some of my friends were very complacent. They lived in nice homes, they lived with great families, and so they didn't really do very much. I didn't [have that]. So I had to, and I think that helped me.

And then I started recognizing that a lot of people have got a huge amount of talent and just don't realize it. Some years later, when I was a chartered accountant, which I became entirely by accident, I became director of recruitment for a firm. I was going around meeting students who wanted to be recruited into our big firm. And I realized that there are some students who are supremely well qualified but have no pizzazz, and others who have got loads of pizzazz but don't have the qualifications to get through the recruitment process. And I thought: this is just crazy. So let's see if I can solve those few things.

Then I joined the corporate world from the world of the big accounting firms, and students were inviting me to go to their countries and talk. I discovered that a lot of students like to hear those words and like to be challenged, because they also realize that soft skills are important, and that maybe they need to spend a bit more time working out what they can do with the knowledge they've got.

And then some years later, quite recently, well, seven years ago, I had a stroke. Funnily enough, I was at a conference. I opened the conference and I was going to do the closing keynote, and over lunch I had a stroke. So I went back into the room to deliver my closing keynote, and I couldn't talk properly. Fortunately, the organizer said: gosh, Marcus, there's something really badly wrong.

In hospital [they found] I had a stroke. I had a brain hemorrhage, which is blood that has got nowhere to go, so it just fills up your brain and actually squishes it. In my time in hospital, I had to learn how to walk and talk again. Well, talk sensibly.

A lot of people were saying: oh, a lot of people in his condition make a near-normal recovery in about a year. And I was thinking: God, that's a long time. I've been asked to do the opening keynote for the National Association of Head Teachers in 14 days' time. I'm not going to cancel it. I just have to work out how I am going to do it.

A lot of medical professionals were saying: well, it's just not possible. Forget it. So I realized: a lot of medical professionals have never had a stroke. They've observed other people with strokes, and everything they are basing their assessment on, how long it will take me to recover, is based upon what other people have [experienced]. And when people get told it takes a year to recover, they go: oh, okay, then I'll just sign off for a year. No, I'm not going to sign off for a whole year. I'm going to see what I can do.

And do you know what was really interesting? In the meetings I was having with the consultants, we were getting more and more trainee doctors into the audience. It was almost like a training session, I think because I'm reasonably articulate and I could describe what it was like.

So yes, of course, I gave the opening keynote for the National Association of Head Teachers 14 days later. But my goodness, it was a little bit of a struggle, just the basic things. In my country we have paper tickets and we have RFID cards, proximity readers. The previous day, or during the test, I'd used a paper ticket, and so I then tried to push this card into the paper ticket [slot], and I had to [rethink] all my paradigms. I was colorblind, I couldn't talk properly, and I lost my ability to do really quick mental arithmetic. Some of it's come back, I've got some workarounds. My eyes are all over the place.

But I delivered the keynote, and it was only at the end of it that I said: look, I'm sorry if it wasn't very good. I had a stroke 14 days ago. And they went: wow. My goodness, the place erupted. And then they asked me to do it again, and about a month later it was a heck of a lot better.

But I think when I was in hospital, a lot of people just consigned themselves to the fact that it's going to take about a year, or about a year and a half. And I think that's what happens in school. Some kids get told: you're not going to be very successful. And they just [think]: well, I won't be very successful.

I think we get very easily influenced by experts telling us things. Whether it's teachers who say you're not very clever, or experts who say it takes a year to recover, so it'll take a year, or parents who say you're a waste of space, or friends who say: forget education and go sell drugs. We get very easily influenced. And I think in our society, Western society, and I'm talking really about the UK, a bit about the United States and Australasia, it's very easy to start believing this stuff.

And then we have a world where a lot of people go to work doing a job they don't like, they don't do it very well, and they do it because they want to explore themselves in their free time. What would be nice is if we could all make use of each other's talents and generally make the world a better place, but certainly live more fulfilling lives.

Gosh, that sounds almost religious, doesn't it? I don't mean it to. But I think we all have a duty to ourselves and to each other to make the most of our talents, because the one given is that we're only here for a limited amount of time in this space and time, so let's make the most of it. And ideally, let's leave some sort of positive mark of our very existence.

So that's why I'm doing it, actually. That's a hell of a long answer and a terrible ramble, I'm sorry about that. But I think that's it. The stroke sort of kickstarted me a little bit more. So I love working with students who everybody thinks won't be successful, and sometimes they think it of themselves. That's my long answer to a short [question].

Well, I got involved with the TED community by accident. I got asked to give a talk at TEDx in Vilnius some years ago, and I didn't know what TEDx was. I flew into Vilnius and was met by a couple of people who whisked me into the auditorium, and suddenly I realized: gosh, this is the real thing. And now I've hosted a number of TEDxes and I coach TEDx [speakers].

The one thing which I've discovered is that at the end of the day, people are jolly nice. They've got lots of great ideas and they really like sharing them. But we get very easily dismissed into this single word which defines you. You're an architect, you're a lawyer, you're a tech person, and it's sort of like: that's what you've always been, and that's what you're always going to be.

And the more we realize that there are some scientists who are really great musicians, who were going to be doctors, or doctors who've turned into something else, we suddenly [see] we are terribly, terribly fluid. The fact that I speak English doesn't mean that this is me. Maybe if I was brought up in a different country, this same piece of flesh would be speaking a different language, with a different cultural feel. So maybe we have to realize that actually there are lots of cultures. Let's see what cultures there are. Let's see what countries there are. Let's see what everything in there is.

And the paradigm which I think is crazy is when people start defining themselves, and they define themselves as Scottish, and the Scottish need to be different from the English, and so we'll separate. Or: I'm Belarusian, and we need to stop all this stuff. What happened very recently is that incident of an aircraft which was on its way from Athens to Vilnius in Lithuania and got diverted into Belarus, to Minsk, so that one guy and his girlfriend could be taken off and arrested. What is going on? You're a journalist, so you're a criminal? Come on. This horrible thing of trying to define people in single words, I think, is crazy.

And because of that, we start defining ourselves based around [it]: I'm an architect, I can't possibly be an accountant or whatever. And if you just think about single-word definitions, we can quite often start assigning a sex to it. So: I'm into technology. And in people's minds: right, so you must be a guy. I'm an engineer, I'm a car mechanic: all right, so you're a guy. I'm a dressmaker: so you're a girl. I'm a cook: gosh, okay. We have male and female chefs, but are you a chef or a cook? A cook: you're a girl. And if you're a chef, oh, maybe you're a guy. And we have this crazy set of definitions. I speak Swahili: right, you must be black. I speak Arabic: all right, so you must be a brownish color. And we start [making] a crazy set of assessments when we meet people.

You can see that in my country, when people apply for jobs and they have names, people immediately assess what the person looks like: are they tall, short, male, female, or whatever. And that definitely defines them and opens up opportunities or not, which is crazy. So my name is Marcus. People can't quite work that one out, because it is Roman, but it's also... so I get away with it. But Marcus: clearly I'm a guy. People are very keen on single-word definitions, and those paradigms, the assumptions people make about each other, my goodness, it takes time to break those mindsets sometimes.

And we do that in seconds. I do this with students sometimes: I just show them a face and say: do you think this is a nice person? And just on the basis of a momentary glance, they go: I don't think so. And we do that as we meet people. We assess people terribly quickly. We don't get people to challenge [that]. What does the work of Harvard University [say]? It's seven seconds. That's all you've got. Gosh, really? We are that quick in judging people.

So if I could change this, I'd say: let's not be so judgmental about each other, [and not] try to put people into these crazy boxes. So you're Muslim, so you must be a terrorist? What, really? You're Irish, you must be in the IRA? What, really? You're Russian... Bonkers, bonkers. Crazy.

Yes.

Without even realizing it.

I was fascinated by this at the firm I was at. It was EY, a big firm of financial advisors, a quarter of a million people around the world. When you take someone on when they first start, they're new. They don't really know how things get done around here. And if they do a paper for somebody senior and give it to the senior person, there's almost invariably going to be some things in it which aren't very good. Almost invariably. Or at least not to the reviewer's taste: maybe they've used the wrong language, the wrong words, the wrong color, silly things. And then the reviewer will mark it or make some adjustments and send it back.

And if that hasn't all been adjusted to the satisfaction of the reviewer, then what happens is that the junior person thinks: well, this senior person is going to correct everything. And the senior person will immediately decide that this junior person, on the basis of two bits of information, is not very good at doing stuff. And that sets that relationship, and that relationship continues for a long, long time, just because of the very first thing which happened at the very beginning.

And then they start playing to that. So in a year's time, the junior person knows that the senior person is going to correct everything anyway, so there's no point in really going to a super-duper effort, because they're going to correct it anyway. And the senior person then realizes they have to correct it, because that whole thing just self-perpetuates. And sometimes they haven't had the conversation: so why do you correct it? Because you make mistakes. Well, which mistakes do you not like? I don't like that one: you're writing in green ink, I prefer you to write in black. If you'd just told me, I'd have changed it.

And I think that goes for a lot of cases. It can happen in school on the very first day. If you were late to school on your very first day, and the teacher goes: you're late. Yeah, but who cares? Anyway, it's only school. Puff. You're the troublemaker, and you'll be the troublemaker forever. And all the time that teacher is going to remember that you're the troublemaker, and they'll tell their friends. And the same thing can happen to you with your teachers: on the first day, they weren't very nice to you, for whatever reason. Maybe they had a bad day, they just snapped. Then that continues.

And I think that happens everywhere we go. We start building up these mind pictures, these assumptions. And I sometimes get people to challenge it themselves.

I'll say: have you ever been to a restaurant and had a meal which was fabulous, and you tell your friends: this is a great restaurant, you should go? Now that's based upon the evidence of one meal on one day with one team of cooks and chefs. And then you might go again, and the meal is dreadful. Do you then go in your mind: right, so I went to a bad restaurant which had a good day when I got a great meal? Or: is this a great restaurant which had a bad day? The vast majority of people, I think, say: gosh, I wonder what happened, it's usually so good. And then you go again, and how many times do you have to go to that restaurant before you realize it was a bad restaurant, which just had a good day on your first visit? On the other hand, if you go to a restaurant and have a bad meal, do you ever go back? So maybe you never realize it was a great restaurant that just happened to have a bad day.

I think that's the reality. It's very hard for us to break away from. We take a snapshot decision and we extrapolate it. That's what it is. And it takes a bit of time before we reassess. So we're gathering information all the time. We're making snap decisions, we're putting them into our memory banks. We're using this as a piece of AI which we then apply to everything else. It's a learned mechanism, it's a learned experience and it's a learned response. And then we apply that same thing. And so by accident we have a bias which has developed subconsciously, but [it] becomes very difficult to get [rid of].

Yeah. But it doesn't mean that [they were] dishonest with you. It doesn't mean that they did it deliberately. It's just, they didn't know, and they did their very best.

It's interesting sometimes. Let's say: I give a lot of presentations, and I've discovered my style, and my style is humorous. It can be serious at times, and I might alternate. So if I go serious, people realize that this is serious, because usually it's fairly light and loose. But it's always factual and truthful in every way. I'll never say something which isn't true, as far as I know.

And I remember once, when I wasn't too comfortable with myself and didn't know what my style was, I used to watch these programs of people giving amazing lectures standing in one place, and I thought: I can't do that, I'm just no good at it. And I went on a course on how to present, and the person got two chairs and put them apart. He got me to stand on these two chairs, one leg over here, one leg over there, which would force me not to be able to move, or I'd fall off. And I was terrible at it.

And they said: if you want to be able to present, you have to stay in one place. You mustn't fiddle with pens. You mustn't fiddle with things. You should keep the same eye contact and turn and talk to different people. You should be well prepared. You should rehearse it. You should do everything. If I try to do that, it's terrible. It just doesn't [work].

So when some person says "this is the way you should do things", actually it is: this is the way I've discovered works for me. You have to discover what works for you.

And it's exactly the same as when I was at school. I am quite quick with mathematics and images and design. I'm quite fast, but I don't know why this is the answer. I can see the answer, but I can't tell you why very easily. And at school I used to be told: you're just guessing, they're just lucky guesses. You know: 99 lucky guesses out of 99 tasks.

And it's the same with poetry: I'm not very good at writing poetry. So when I write poetry, I have to do it in the conventional way, step by step by step, and it's rubbish. And some people can take a hundred words, go away for three minutes, come back, and it's beautiful to read. And you say: why did you do it in this order? I don't know. So if I try to learn from you how to do stuff, it seems right. But equally, I can't teach you how I can see numbers, because I don't quite know how I do it. So when you force me to say how I did it, I find it really hard.

And so I think a lot of people get caught in all of that. And the worst thing is when you look at somebody who is excellent and you go: my goodness, they're so good, I can never be like that. And we don't realize they've just gone through a series of learning things to discover that this is what works for them. And maybe if we all realized that, we wouldn't be so frustrated. My goodness, I think the world is full of people who watch other people on YouTube or wherever else and get dissatisfied with themselves: if only I could do that. Oh, I'm no good at this. I'm no good at that.

I remember talking to somebody, and I said: do you play the piano? And they said no. And I said: why not? Did you try? Yeah, I tried learning when I was five. Couldn't do it. Can't do it now. And I remember thinking it was crazy. It comes down to: well, when you were five, how big were your fingers? They were tiny little sausage fingers. I said: how big are they now? How do you know? Very different.

Mind you, I find it quite hard to play the piano as well, so it's not a very good example. But I think we're very quick to judge ourselves. We're very quick to make these [judgments]. I'm saying the same old stuff over and over. I'm sorry, I'm getting terribly boring.

And it gets worse, because I think we imprison people in their own inadequacies.

I remember the first time I met this chap. He was a very senior manager at a really big international organization. And I said: do you really like it here? And the way I said that indicates what I was expecting the answer to be. And he clearly said: no, it's a job. And I said: would you prefer to do something else? Oh yeah. I said: well, why don't you? He said: because in another 15 years I will qualify for the executive pension scheme.

And I remember thinking: for 15 years you are going to consign yourself to doing a job which doesn't excite you, spending your waking, decent hours doing something you don't like, because in 15 years' time, if you're still alive, you will be able to draw an executive pension. My goodness, that's terrible. I didn't want to say that to him.

But I think there are a lot of people who just resign themselves to doing something they don't like, to wasting their lives, on the basis that once they've retired, they can do something. But I don't know if they'll ever be free. They imprison themselves.

And sometimes I meet people who got made redundant: their company went bust, they got fired, whatever happened. And I've often found them saying: ah, I got made redundant, the best thing that ever happened to me. I redesigned my life. Well, isn't it sad that you have to wait until somebody else makes the decision for you, for you to make your own decisions? You have to be denied the opportunity of continuing to do the job you don't like. God, that's terrible.

Well, the truthful answer is: how will we know what our potential is until we try everything? And there's not enough time to try everything.

So generally, I think what we all do by accident is this: what we think we're best at is most likely what we are least bad at. So I do a number of things: I'm not very good at that, I'm not very good at that, I'm not very great at this, I'm good at this. So that's what I'm best at. No. If I try something else, I might find I'm much better at that than I'm good at this. And unless I give myself the opportunity of trying different things, allowing myself to try different things, I may never discover what I'm best at.

And sometimes it takes other people to say: but you're really good at this. And maybe we just don't value them enough. We don't value the people who are trying to help us enough.

But fundamentally, I believe that the chances are that what we think we're best at is most likely what we are least bad at. And when we look at it like "this is what I'm least bad at", it almost begs the question: well, what else might you be better at? As opposed to "this is what I'm good at", which is quite a final statement. "What I'm least bad at" is sort of like a continuum. "What I'm best at" is ending the conversation.

So: I'm least bad at talking to people. I'm least bad at enthusing students about where their futures might be. I'm least bad at helping people to be great speakers on the TED stage. I'm least bad at hosting TEDx.

Do you know what's even worse? Sorry, it's not even worse, I think it's related to things like that. Quite often, when people are really good at something and they have that talent, whether it's natural or it's developed or honed, or wherever they ended up with that talent, and they're with people who find it impossible to do that, rather than think "gosh, that's my talent", they might be tempted to think those people are stupid.

Yeah, exactly. And so instead of recognizing my skill set, it is actually recognizing the deficiencies in other people against my skill set, which may not be the right thing: to say that you're just stupid. Everybody is stupid.

Well, I think the pandemic has the potential for making a bit of a structural change in the way we operate.

Until now, close proximity of people, in an office, in a theater, in an aircraft, in a school, was necessary in order to have good communication, for people to be able to learn from each other and discover and share great experiences. And that's why we started building big offices, and people left their homes and spent time getting to their office to go to work, because that's where their people are, and that's where I can work best. That's why we took kids from their homes and grouped them together in places called schools, so that we could teach them better.

I think we're now discovering that sometimes I work better from home. And I remember in the early days, when people would say to me, I think I'm going to work from home, my natural thought process was: taking the day off, sort of thing. Because we didn't have the technology at home to be able to continue working. There was home and work, there was home and school, and the divider was probably access to resources. The office is where I've got resources: other people, technology. School is where I've got resources.

Well, what the pandemic has done is highlight the fact that we have transferable resources. So I'm at home in Wimbledon. I'm talking to you in Vienna. We are on a screen, we're having a conversation, and I didn't need to spend the time to go to Vienna to have this short conversation with you. Now I can see you, and I know how you are, because we've met. If we hadn't met, maybe this wouldn't be such a good discussion.

What the pandemic has done in the world of education is sort of demonstrate that you can learn from home without having to be in school, and you can learn stuff. [But] can you feel this? Can you get the soft skills? For young people to live in the world, bringing people together is really important, as are shared experiences. And if we separate that, we are potentially growing individual people who develop themselves in isolation from this community type [of life], because it's on the screen. I don't know what the ultimate impact is going to be when we go back, if we go back, into more communal activities. I don't think we've yet discovered that.

But I can already see in my country, when schools reopened, there have been a lot of parents, and a lot of students actually, who have been nervous about going back to school because of the proximity of other people, because of the potential of catching Corona. And so even though everyone's saying it's perfectly safe, they've been immunized and they've all had their inoculations, I think there's something here which is saying: oh, I don't know if I trust that. Because maybe I've been vaccinated against a virus, but maybe there's another one coming out.

So we've potentially done something very damaging to young people, where they are missing out on the development of the social skills which are necessary. How do you talk? How do you communicate with people who, at first sight, you don't think are like you? That judgmental thing. In school, we have rich people and poor people and yellow people and black people, and [we] put them all together as we grow: that multicultural, multi-age, although within limitations of ages, approach to life. If we start segregating people by putting them on their own screen, maybe we're missing that.

And as we are doing more and more on screen, we can't see how big you are, how tall you are. We don't know. Because everybody's roughly the same sort of size, which is roughly a head and shoulders, which fits into the confines of the box which I'm in. So I don't know.

So I think with young people, I know there are formative ages. I think it's the five, six and seven year olds which I'm more concerned about. The twos to fours, who are much better supported, aren't [affected] so much. I'm much less concerned about 16, 17, 18 year olds.

But the other thing in the world of education is that in our schools, students aren't getting exposure to the world of people outside at a really serious, intellectual type of level. We have things called work experience, where students go out to places of work and do something. That's all stopped. It's virtual, it's not the same.

So I think potentially we have a slightly damaged grouping of people: the COVID kids. I think it may have more lasting effects than we think. We've got a slight growth of mental health issues in our country, primarily because of the lack of socialization, I guess.

Yeah, it'll be fascinating. What's going to be really fascinating in 20 years' time is when you and your daughter are talking to young kids, and they're saying: whoa, look at that. What is that? Oh, I've read about that in the books.

Oh...

I would like people to say that I was a good guy who helped a lot of other people, and maybe helped some people discover themselves. Yeah, that sort of thing. That's what I think.

If I die sooner.

Thank you very much for this beautiful conversation, and thank you for inviting me onto it.

Bye-bye, thank you.