Ask Me Anything! October 2024 edition

“What do you think you’re doing? And, um, why?”

This is a recording of a Substack live video AMA (“ask me anything”) session I hosted two days ago.

Around fifty people attended! I enjoyed it, and hope everyone else did too.

We had a preliminary discussion in the subscriber chat, which was very helpful for collecting questions and getting the conversation started.

I’ll do these monthly, for as long as there is interest. To participate, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you haven’t already:

You also need the Substack mobile app (iOS or Android):

The next live AMA session will be Saturday November 23rd, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time; noon Eastern. If you have the app open then, you’ll get a notification with a button to join.

I’ll open a preliminary chat thread on the 20th.

Transcript

I’m moved by how many people are showing up here. This is really great. Many people who, who I recognize and many people who I don’t know yet.

This format, the technology is less interactive than, for example, Zoom, which might be better. I thought I’d give this a go, partly just because it’s easily available, and partly I would like to support Substack. This is a new technology that they’re trying out. I really like Substack. I want them to succeed. So, giving this a trial run for their sake is a little bit of what I’m doing here, although it’s not the main thing.

I will dive in at the deep end. Benjamin Taylor asked a number of very hard questions, along with giving some very nice words of support, which I really appreciate— both the hard questions and the words of support. They could probably boil down to something like, “What do you think you’re doing? And, um, uh, why?”

And this is very hard because I don’t know, I don’t have, I don’t have good answers here. So, the first question is, “Is this one overall project, or many different projects?” And that’s a very on-point question.

And the answer is, it does feel to me like one huge project, because I have only one thing to say, which is: things go better when you don’t try to separate nebulosity and pattern. It’s very tempting to try to do that, because we don’t want nebulosity. We do want pattern to deliver control and certainty, so that you would know what to do, and have some confidence that things are going to go well. And that can never be guaranteed, because of nebulosity. So it’s good to always bear the nebulosity in mind.

This is a pattern that, it’s, it’s a phenomenon that is found in every domain of human experience and endeavor. So, uh, each of the many writing projects are looking at how this theme of pattern and nebulosity plays out in that realm. For example, the meta-rationality book is about how taking nebulosity into account is necessary for outstanding work in the domain of rational work.

So that’s the overall project. Um, embarrassingly, that means I’ve left a very large number of unfinished applications of that central theme in different areas.

Benjamin asks, “What are you hoping to achieve overall? Indeed, how do you see your job, role, or identity as a public intellectual?” Relatedly, Xpym asked, “How important do you see your own work in the grand scheme of things? Does humanity seem likely to figure out and widely adopt the complete stance?” (The complete stance is what you get if you don’t separate pattern from nebulosity.) Uh, “Is humanity likely to figure that out and figure out meta-rationality anytime soon? If I stop contributing tomorrow; if I don’t stop.”

I have no idea. I, I find this very difficult. Well, I find it very difficult because I, in a sense, because I don’t try. I really don’t have much in the way of identity as far as my work goes. I, I do the work and I try to do it as well as I can, as much as I can, and I try to make it as useful and interesting as I can. But like what is my role in that? I mean, it’s just that the writing happens and, and in some ways I’m not really involved, and I don’t form an identity as an intellectual or a writer or it’s, it’s not, I don’t know, I said these questions were difficult, I, I, and that I can’t answer them, so, but you know, maybe my non-answer is actually the best thing I can do here.

I want the work to be as useful as possible, and I think some of the ideas are important. They’re not necessarily original to me. I’m not sure anything that I have written is actually original. Uh, a lot of it is just repackaging ideas from particular academic literatures, or other sources, in ways that make them accessible. So in a sense, I’m a popularizer. Um, there’s probably some original synthesis in there, but I don’t, I mean, if I, if you’re an academic, you need to be really clear on this is my contribution. It’s mine. And I’m not interested in that.

I’m trying to read the chat as we go along here. Mike Slaton says: “It’s interesting that someone can know me from Twitter, vampire fiction, technical writing, a podcast, or this.”

Yeah, this is an attempt to feel out how I can be most useful and how the ideas, if they do have some value, can be most broadly disseminated in a way that they can be taken up and put to use.

”Some updates on the status of the websites, the AI book, the substack, etc. Are all the sites still active projects? How am I currently prioritizing them? What sorts of things might you expect to do when?”

The AI book is finished, it’s published. The website is, has the full text of the book along with some other related essays. I may write more about AI, in which case I would put it on that site. At the moment, I have nothing to say, because nobody knows what’s going on. It’s very confusing.

The other websites are all works in progress that— I think I’ve added something to each of the websites within the past year or so, and I expect I will keep doing that.

At the beginning of this year, I said, okay, I want to finish something. I’m going to concentrate on the meta-rationality book. I will finish that by the end of the year. I will do nothing else; when I have time to work, I will just work on meta-rationality.

Around about May, I realized that I was neglecting large parts of the readership by doing just that, and that it would be better to continue interleaving. So there’s been a lot of Vajrayana material that I’ve posted on Substack recently.

Um, also I realized this in the last month or so that the meta-rationality project is not going as I hoped. I had a detailed plan. Part of the plan was it would be no more than 200 pages. And at the rate that I’m currently going, it would be enormously more than that. So either I need to step back and do a much more superficial treatment; which might be the right thing, although I feel like a lot of the ideas really probably can’t get across without a lot of explanation and examples.

The other possibility would be to say, okay, this is a many-year project, like the Meaningness book, and I will just keep plugging away at it, and pieces will come out incrementally. I don’t know which of those is the better approach. I’m going to be trying to think about that hard over the next month or so.

All of the current writing goes on Substack. That’s because Substack has better distribution than my own websites. That’s partly because I used to promote my own websites via Twitter; that works less well than it used to. Substack is working well for me. My intention is that the writing that is part of one of the projects for which there is a website, I will copy back from Substack onto those websites, when I get around to it, or it seems appropriate or something. I haven’t done any of that yet, but that is the plan. So the websites are not abandoned, even though Substack is where all the writing has gone over the past year.

I can talk about my writing process, and that gets to several of the questions that were in the chat previously. Um, we have to talk about my brain. I have a very bad brain. I, I have ideas that are rationally worked out and very sensible about what I ought to write, and I have plans and outlines and priorities. And, I don’t get a, I don’t get a say in this. I mean, I can make plans as much as I like, and what actually happens is my brain does what it wants to do. So, I will be working on the meta-rationality book, which I think is serious and important and, uh, um, you know, might be very useful for a lot of people.

And, my brain gets some idiotic idea, like, “You really ought to write about the Dalai Lama’s piss test for enlightenment.” And I say “No, that’s, that’s ridiculous! Uh, this is a completely silly topic.” And my brain says, “Well, that’s what we’re going to write about.” And I say, “No, no, we’re writing about meta-rationality; it’s important.” And my brain says, “Nope, I’m writing about the piss test.” And it goes off and does that, and I don’t get a choice.

The weird thing is that those are often the things that are— go viral and become most influential. For example, “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” was… it’s essentially a footnote. It’s a long footnote to an unwritten section of Meaningness and Time. And the section of Meaningness and Time that is unwritten is actually important. And “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” is an offhand observation that my brain suddenly decided: today, that’s what we’re writing. And it took about three hours, and that’s probably my best known piece of work. So, and “The Piss Test,” it’s this little entertaining piece of nothing that increased the Substack subscribers by about a third in the course of a week.

So maybe my brain’s a lot smarter than I am, and I should just let it do whatever it thinks is best. I feel like it’s important to be disciplined and follow a plan, but, uh, but I don’t get a choice. So, you know, what happens is what happens anyway.

This relates to a question from ruby, about my approach to note taking. Uh, this is part of my writing process in general. This is kind of embarrassing. My approach to note taking is plain text files. My brain gets an idea. It says, “We need to write about this.” And I say, “no, that’s dumb.” It says, “no, we’re writing about that.” Um, and so I say, “Oh, all right,” I create a text file for that, I give it a title, uh, I stuff a couple of sentences from my brain into it, and then I try to forget about it. And over time, it accumulates notes from my background reading; uh, citations from academic literature, quotes from people’s blogs, um, and then bits of outline, bits of draft text. And these can accumulate for… there’s some files like that which are 20 years old, that pop out 20 years later. More often it’s a few years, sometimes it’s a few months.

Uh, sometimes my brain gets an idea, and insists on writing the whole thing right now, and then, then it comes out that day. But those are things that are in some sense trivial.

The note files are not cross referenced, they’re not in any fancy, uh, something like Obsidian, which looks really cool, and I like the idea, but I feel like, um, I, I, I don’t want to be administering my notes, I just want to stuff stuff in there and get it out of my head, and then I come back to it years later, and then that thing comes out.

Excellent question. Disciplined note taking is undoubtedly a good idea, and I don’t do it.

Frazer Mawson— thank you for all these questions, I really appreciate the questions, they’re great. “Will we ever get a Meaningness book? I’ve actually never made it to the end because I find reading books on my computer screen so painful!”

This is a hard question I don’t have an answer to, like all of these questions. So the Meaningness book is— there’s an outline; what is on the web is maybe 15 percent of what the outline says is supposed to be there, which means, obviously, I’m never going to finish it because I’ve been working on the Meaningness book, and putting pieces on the web, since 2010. Right, I’m doing about 1 percent of it per year, so it would be finished in the year, uh, 2110. I may live that long, but it will take some medical advances, which are… uncertain. So, uh, the whole book is not going to happen, probably!

I have thought that it would be good to extract from it pieces that could stand alone as a paperback or a Kindle book. People very often do ask for that.

I made the AI book into an actual book as an experiment, partly to see how much interest there actually is in a official book as opposed to a website. The answer is, there are less than a little less than 250 copies of the AI book in existence as a official book, as opposed to the website. Anything I post anywhere gets upwards of 2000 readers, probably. It’s hard to translate web analytics into actual readership. But it seems like there, in the case of that book, it’s less than, like, a ten to one ratio. And that would not be worth the amount of effort and time it takes to turn other things into finished books.

However, I finished the text of the AI book in February 2023, and put the whole thing on the web. I had intended that, immediately afterward, that would become a paper and Kindle book. I got quite sick then and was sick through most of 2023 and really didn’t, I wasn’t able to work, uh, until December. And I spent December turning the, uh, AI book text into a finished book. So that took a month. Uh, I don’t think it was worth it for 250 copies, but, because there was that long delay, maybe anybody who wanted to read that material had already read it on the web. And if there was actually new stuff that went into a book, people would want to read it in book form.

I don’t know how to gauge that. I periodically do polls on how many people would want to read a finished book. Uh, the answers are, are not interpretable. One possibility that came to mind while I was contemplating this yesterday is to run a Kickstarter. A Kickstarter, the model is you pledge a certain amount of money, and if enough people pledge that money, then a project happens. And, if not, then you get your money back. A Kickstarter, which said, okay, if a thousand people will pledge the price of a book, whatever that is, you know, twenty dollars or something, uh, that means there’s enough interest that it’s worth actually making a physical book, and I would go ahead. So if that seems like a good idea that you would want to go ahead with, then please let me know.

Chris asks, “I’d be interested in details on your sitting practice. Uh, how long you aim to do it per day, how you structure it, how you keep it fresh and alive, how you keep going with it. I’m struggling to fit mine into a hectic family life. Looking for inspiration. Thank you!”

Uh, thank you, Chris. I probably shouldn’t answer this question. I’ll do my best. I don’t feel I’m an expert on meditation. I don’t teach meditation. I write about Vajrayana theory. To an extent, I very tentatively have been teaching Vajrayana theory. So I would ask these questions of a meditation teacher who knows what they’re doing.

But I will say, my own practice is very undisciplined now, and I don’t recommend that. Everybody says it’s important to practice every day and to practice for a set amount of time. I’m not sure that advice is always good. If you can manage it, especially as a beginner, it is really good. Um, when I was a beginner, which is… a long time ago… I’m still a beginner. I’m not actually very good at meditation, which is why I don’t teach it, but when I was starting out, I aimed for 45 minutes a day and managed that most days. I was running a technology company at the time, so somehow it was possible to fit that in along with the 70 hour work week that I had. My life, personal life has been really chaotic in the past 15 years, and my discipline has disintegrated. So now it is very much a matter of, sometimes I’m inspired and I do it and sometimes I’m not.

I think the inspiration is key. And if you think that you want to meditate more, finding that inspiration, looking at what your motivations are, thinking about times when meditation seemed valuable, thinking about why, thinking about where you hope it may take you, and being reasonably concrete about that, and not thinking about “Enlightenment,” because who the hell knows what that means. Think concretely about what you want. And then think about “How will my meditation practice support that.” That is probably what’s going to take you forward. Again, I would recommend talking to somebody who knows what they’re talking about.

So I’m looking at the chat here… Benjamin Taylor asks good questions. “What was the tech company I ran?”

It was a, um, an informatics company for management of certain kinds of chemical information in the pharmaceutical drug discovery industry. I happened into that because I’d been doing AI, and AI was at the time at an impasse. There was no progress possible, as far as I could see. And I also was increasingly thinking that AI, if it did make progress, it would probably be a bad thing, which on the whole is still my belief. So I didn’t want to continue with AI.

But I had these technical skills and I thought, “What can I do that’s actually going to be valuable?” And applying those in the pharmaceutical drug discovery area seemed like one of, it seemed like the thing that I could do that would be most useful and practical. So that’s what I did.

Govind Manian asks, “I would be very interested to hear you talk about where Vajrayana and adult developmental theory need to be, to meet the current moment, and what’s challenging about getting there.”

That’s potentially three different questions. There’s what does Vajrayana need to do? What does adult developmental theory need to do? And there’s, uh, the question of a synthesis there, which I think is possible.

Regarding Vajrayana, first of all, I would say this is a question for my monthly Vajrayana Q&A, but really that question is maybe better addressed to my spouse, Charlie Awbery, who, um, co-founded an organization called Evolving Ground, which is devoted to exactly this question, of working out a contemporary interpretation of Vajrayana that meets current needs. Govind and Charlie are good friends, so, uh, I, this is, this is advice that Govind doesn’t need, but that everyone else or some other people might find useful: talk to Charlie.

Um, adult developmental theory is very influential for, for myself and also for Charlie. Uh, we talk about it a great deal, and we do see a lot of opportunities for synthesis between that and Vajrayana, and are actively working on that.

For the theory itself, what I think is really important at this stage is somebody to do some good science. Because we’ve got a lot of theory that’s all very interesting, and there’s a lot of anecdotes. I can give personal anecdotes. Lots of people can give anecdotes saying this is really helpful. But we don’t have solid data, which should not be very difficult to get. But somehow somebody with enough background in psychometrics, academic psychology of development, somebody needs to do the work.

That probably needs funding, which is probably difficult to get from standard sources. Uh, if anybody has money burning a hole in their pocket that they want to use to support some kind of science, thinking about how that might happen could be something to do.

I want to know whether the theory is true. What parts of the theory are true? What parts of the theory are off somewhat? Overall, I think it’s true and important, but it would be really good to demonstrate that, partly just to make it more widely known and accessible. This, this is a, an academic psychology research project.

There’s a lot of metarational work here to be done, which is problem identification. So, what, exactly what questions are we trying to answer, and that, that question is inseparable from what methods can we use to answer those questions.

I mean, the most interesting question for me is what interventions can help people through stage transitions, and I’m particularly interested in the stage four to stage five transition, which is from rationality to meta-rationality, or from, uh, a systematic way of approaching life into a fluid, interactive way of approaching life. That’s what I’m most interested in. Figuring out exactly what the academic research question there is would be a lot of work.

Um, I’m afraid I don’t know how to pronounce this name. It’s E G E M E N, Egemen, perhaps. “After reading the stuff that you published, I started exploring, finding my own way. Instead of learning, reading, consuming, and taking advice from others. Is this hubris or freedom? How should one strike the balance between the subjective feel on how to approach meaningness, meditation, and Buddhism, and under which circumstances should one take advice instead?”

Uh, these are excellent, very difficult questions. This is a question coming from a stage five point of view. It’s a meta question, of how do I… how best to approach the object level? Everything in, at the stage five level, has to be responsive to purposes and circumstances, and it’s going to be, in this case, very individual. So I can’t give generalized advice about this.

Um, I think that the statement of the question is excellent, because it points at this in terms of there being a balance, um, between doing one’s own experimentation and having some trust in one’s own ability to make sense of things; and also recognizing that we’re all fallible, and sometimes advice and mentoring are extremely important. And, uh, going back and forth between those, and through experience, learning where it’s time to seek advice, uh, this has to be somewhat a matter of feel. There aren’t any definite guidelines or principles possible here, I think.

james asks, uh, “You said that you don’t regard yourself as a philosopher because philosophers use methods that you do not use. I find this very puzzling, because I regard the primary and original method of philosophy to be verbal, verbal argumentation. Simply making good arguments for beliefs and approaches to life. Something that you (meaning me) certainly do a lot of.”

This is in reference to an offhand note I posted on Substack the day before yesterday, I think, um, which got a lot of responses, mainly hostile, um, because I said that philosophy is bad. I do believe philosophy is bad and we should stop it. Uh, That’s partly a slightly trollish statement. Because it’s trying to get a rise. Because I want to understand what people think is valuable about philosophy. That is, non-academics. I mean, academic philosophers have their own ideas about this, but there’s a lot of people who find value in philosophy, and I don’t fully understand what’s going on there, and I think there’s an important misunderstanding that I would like to elucidate; but I haven’t located exactly what the misunderstanding is.

Um, I’m not sure whether to write about this. It’s a big topic that I don’t understand very well yet. It could be another book project, and I don’t want to do another book project! I want to finish at least one of the ones that I’ve already got underway! But maybe there’s some way of doing something much smaller that would still be useful.

Argumentation is very important in some parts of philosophy, maybe not all of them. Continental philosophy in the past half century has not been interested in argumentation, and I think it was right to make that move. Continental philosophy in the last half century has a lot of serious defects, but I think that was a correct move.

I don’t make arguments for beliefs, for the most part. I’m not interested in that. And that’s because at the meta-rational level, we’re not seeking the truth of propositions. Because what truth means is contextual, it’s purpose dependent. This is the opening of the meta-rationality book: “Is there any water in the refrigerator?” “Yes.” “Where? I can’t see it.” “It’s in the cells of the eggplant!” Was that true? I mean, in some sense, yes. And in some sense, no. So, the question at the meta-rational level is what do we even mean by truth in, in, in, in, a particular circumstance for a particular purpose; and is truth even a question of interest?

It may be much more important to make good distinctions, for example; and distinctions aren’t true or false. Uh, they are illuminating in a different way. The value of distinctions is also recognized within philosophy. I’m just using that as an example of something where you shouldn’t really argue that a distinction is right. You argue that a distinction is useful for certain purposes. And that’s not really a truth claim as such, or it’s not a philosophical truth claim. I mean, the way you do that is by pointing at specific examples of, here’s how that distinction turned out to be useful in this situation. That’s what I try to do. So the meta-rationality book is illustrated with people introducing new distinctions, for example, and how that played out as being useful in some practical way.

Ludwig Yeetgenstein— it’s a reference to Wittgenstein, who’s one of the philosophers who’s most influenced me— says, “I got interested in your writing via Meaningness. At some point later, I read some of Hubert Dreyfus writing on AI and was pleasantly surprised to see you cited there. I realized then that I didn’t actually know anything about your professional background in AI work. Can you give a summary of your background before you got into your current phase of writing?”

Um, I’m old enough that I’ve done a lot of odd things. When I was a kid, uh, I was interested in “the mind.” I’m no longer interested in the mind. I’m interested in thinking, but I don’t think minds have very much to do with thinking. But as a kid I was interested in the mind, and so, uh, cognitive science was just really getting underway when I was a kid. So I was really excited by that. There was this synthesis of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and linguistics and neuroscience and anthropology, and all these disciplines that seemed to have something important to say about the mind.

Also I, I loved computers. I, I, I still love computers, although I also hate them. So I, went and did a PhD in artificial intelligence. I did academic work in that field that was influential at the time. It’s all long since forgotten, so I have no academic credentials.

In the course of that, I, I realized that AI was a dead end because it had this basis in rationalism, which is Hubert Dreyfus’ critique of it, and I understood at a certain point that he was right about that, and I, uh, with my collaborator, Phil Agre, we tried to work out what would a non-rationalist approach to artificial intelligence be, and we had some success with that. Dreyfus wrote an interesting paper called “What is Heideggerian AI, and how it would have to be more Heideggerian to work,” or something like that. And it was basically about our work. Dreyfus, for those who don’t know, was a prominent critic of AI. He was a professor of philosophy at Berkeley. He was probably the foremost scholar of Heidegger of his era. I didn’t know him well, but I regard him as one of my important teachers as well as influences.

So then I, I mentioned earlier, I decided AI was a dead end. I went into the pharmaceutical industry to apply what I knew there. Uh, I did that for a few years and decided that was a dead end. I was getting more and more serious about my Buddhist practice. I retired and, um, my plan had been to practice full time… -ish. I thought I’d be also writing something. That didn’t work out as expected. But I did learn an enormous amount, so it wasn’t time wasted.

The Meaningness project actually came out of that. It originated as an attempt to make sense of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and form, which is an academic subject within Buddhism that is enormously complicated, enormously obscure. And I thought, well, “I can write up a popular version of this that will make sense to people and that’ll be valuable.” And, uh, you know, that turned into this unfinishable, gigantic book about everything. So, that’s something about my background.

Chapter23 asks, “I’d love to feel the differences between meaningfulness and Integral or metamodernism.”

Oh, that’s a good question. I know it’s a good question because I’m not exactly sure what the answer is. I think there, there is a lot in common there. There’s an essay on the meaningness site called “I Seem to be a Fiction,” which is kind of about my relationship with Ken Wilber’s work. The joke is that I may have been fictionalized as a character in one of his books. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it would make sense if it were true. So it’s partly just, that’s a good joke. Uh, um, but partly it’s trying to sort out what do I think about his work and um, I, I kind of gave up at a certain point. There’s a crossover, but I’m not getting a good answer here.

Mike Slaton says: it’s very difficult to navigate my work because this, it’s scattered across six or more websites. And it, it all is, because there’s one overarching theme, it’s all cross linked. Uh, and it’s… I’ve been writing it, when I can, for, uh, fifteen years now, ish. So, Mike says, “I would never have known about Francis Schaeffer, who was an evangelical theologian who was influential mid 20th century, how he, in some sense, tried to do what I’m doing.”

Yeah, that was a weird and exciting discovery. And I wrote it up just because it was weird, and I, you know, I like weird things. It amuses me.

” The culture war,” Mike continues, “is so confusing and hard to understand.” Yeah, I mean, I find it confusing and hard to understand. And in 2016, when I wrote that, I was that was sort of top of mind for me. Um, I still think about it a lot. I still have a lot of draft essays about the culture war. And I think I have some things to say that are different and might be useful.

But, you know, there’s so much written about the culture war. And there’s so much danger of audience capture. There is so, people have such strong feelings that they want to argue, and I, I’m not interested in arguing, it’s, it, uh, so, you know, I, if I say anything about the culture war, I’ll just put something out there and not try to argue it.

This is not a good way of building an audience, but, I, there’s a podcast coming up which is about the relationship between my work and the work of Jordan Peterson when he was an academic psychologist, before he became a cultural warrior. Uh, there’s a lot of connections between our, our intellectual work when he was being an academic psychologist. Um, and then he became a culture warrior, he was captured by his audience, and that did not go well for him personally, I think, as well as probably his attempt to intervene in the culture war was at most partly successful, but maybe actually counterproductive. So, that’s a cautionary tale for me, personally.

Max Soweski says, “What do you make of the bifurcation between ‘me’ and ‘my brain,’ with conflicting priorities? I have the same thing, like there’s a current of desire I can tap into that often feels separate from me and seems threatening, scary, or unintuitive.”

Um, yeah. Uh, I mean, life is weird. Uh, brains are weird. They, they, who knows what, what they’re up to. Um, you know, I have this complicated relationship with my brain that is— Yeah, it works out well enough on the whole. Uh, I, I wish it was more obedient, but maybe it’s better that, uh, I give it free rein. On the other hand, if I gave it free rein, then there’d be this outpouring of ridiculousness, and that would be entertaining, perhaps, but maybe not so valuable.

I think my brain does things it enjoys. And I think it’s important to be both useful and to enjoy yourself, and to help other people enjoy themselves by producing things that are enjoyable, that are fun, that are weird, that get you thinking. So, uh, so I, I try to combine those, and I do the boring stuff and my brain does the fun stuff, and maybe it works out for the best.

So, um, we’re basically at time here. Uh, I want to thank all of you for participating. I’m really, uh, pleased that so many of you took the time to show up, um, and for the excellent difficult questions, many of them somewhat embarrassing.

Please let me know what you think about this format. Would you like me to do this again? Is this broadcast only format— I’m a little unsure about that. Let me know what you think. And also, any advice or thoughts you have about how this went and what you’d like to see in the future, that would be great.

Thank you all, and, I hope to see you again, um, maybe in this format, or maybe elsewhere. So long.

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