Why We are Like Bees, and Why it Really, Really Matters, with Byron Reese, Futurist and Author of “We Are Agora”

Peter Crosby:

Welcome to unpacking the digital shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.

Peter Crosby:

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Almost two months ago to the day we had futurist and author Byron Reese on the podcast to talk about AI and its possibilities and risks. I warned you all then that I would have him back on to talk about his new book “We Are Agora”, in which he sets out to scientifically prove that humans together make a super organism like bees make a hive and what that means for our future and how we should spend our day. Nerdy, inspiring. Awesome. Rob Gonzalez and I had the pleasure of digging into agora with him. Byron Reese, welcome back to the podcast. Rob and I are so excited to talk with you about your latest book “We Are Agora”. Thank you so much.

Byron Reese:

I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Peter Crosby:

Yeah. I'd like to start with a line from your closing chapter. The message of this book is that though our challenges are great, we are more than up to the task of overcoming them. Did you know that was the message of the book when you started writing it or was it in the research and writing that you discovered its

Byron Reese:

Message? Definitely the latter. I write books mainly about things I don't know much about or questions I'm trying to answer. I wrote one about how people had such a different outcome than animals and this one came out of me being a beekeeper and learning something about bees. That bees are a superorganism. Beehives are the bee is an individual animal, but the group of bees, the hive is actually an animal, not metaphorically. It literally is it. It has a body temperature. Warm-blooded creature holds its body temperature at 97 degrees, has a hundred year lifespan. It has a memory of its own. It reproduces at its level. All these things, it's actually an animal. And I wondered if it was possible that humans together form another creature, and if so, what would that mean and can I prove it and what would that look like and why would I care? And I didn't know any of that. I really didn't when I started working on the book,

Peter Crosby:

That was why it was, I think in part why it is so fascinating to read is that you take us on that journey of discovery and I know it's part of your scientific method or you tell me, but to not draw any conclusion until you feel like you're done. And that's what it felt like and that was what was sort of so exciting about the ride.

Byron Reese:

Well, thank you. I've been told the books read like you're at lunch with a friend and you're talking about things that excite you and that's what I want it to be. And it is, you're right. My journey. Exactly, because really started with a different question, which is your cells are all alive, and if I took you apart a cell at a time and put each of those cells in a Petri dish, they would continue to live, but you will have vanished. What are you at that point? And it turns out are actually a superorganism as well. You're not, it's a strange thing. Somehow you are uniquely you and you occupy the same physical space as yourselves. I struggled the whole time I was writing the book, coming up with an analogy, and the closest one I got was, have you ever seen those posters? And it might be a poster of a kitten, but when you get in and you look at it really closely, you see that each of the pixels is a photo of different kittens.

Byron Reese:

And that's what we are. At one level we're cells, but at another level we're a different pattern and it's a continuity of that pattern that is us, but we're not really alive the way a cell is. We're like a community. And so then it does start seeming quite reasonable that a group of people are, you have about 250 different kinds of cells in your body that are highly specialized and those come together and through their interaction they form you. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics tracks about 10,000 different jobs. And those are analogous to the different cells, the different functions within this creature. I named the creature Agora, which is a word for an old marketplace in ancient Greece where all the people would come together and they would debate and they would do commerce and they would do all these things. It was like the energy of human interaction.

Byron Reese:

And so we are individual cells and this creature agora and the creature has a long lifespan and it can reproduce and it has a memory of its own and all these other things. And really what got me was the idea of could I prove it? Was it just kind of like a metaphor for people coming together can do more than we can individually or is it really an animal and how could I prove it? So I made falsifiable predictions that half a dozen of them that could all be disproven, that would logically come out of the fact of Agora being an actual creature. If it's a superorganism, it would have emergent capabilities that is the bulk of humanity together can do things that no individual can do. That would be the first one. Individual bees can't live apart from the beehive that they have co-evolved to a degree.

Byron Reese:

They're completely dependent on it. So a puls viable prediction would be that humans can't live outside of society. Another one was that we would enforce rigid conformity because if a bee or an ant starts acting weird, they kill it. Is there an equivalent with humans and so forth? And so I made a series of those and I have very little doubt that it is and I think I can prove it. And what is exciting to me about that? It's not one of those. Oh, well then, okay, nice to know. What I think it does is I think it provides an actual answer to the question, why are we here a scientific answer to the question, why are we here? And that's a tall order because science doesn't like why question science is like how does this happen? When did this happen? Why are we here? That is something science tries to change the subject on anytime that comes up and I think I know exactly why we are here. Turn in next week.

Rob Gonzalez:

Goodbye everyone. That's it. I will say I really like the structure of the book. It reminded me in some ways of the cosmos episode where they are doing powers of 10 and they start human scale and they zoom down to the cell and then down to the atom and then even below the atom and then they zoom out and you go from human to world to solar system to galaxy and so on and so forth. And it gives you just the sense of scale. And in this book you started with what is life even? Can we even define it? How have humans tried to define it over time? So building up from foundational principles up to the super organism. I thought that worked really well. I do have a question though, is I get the to your point on why I get the curiosity driving you to explore this idea, but was there something that was driving you for you yourself to actually make the argument for the Agora organism? Is there, I don't even know, a moral imperative or a drive that you have internally to discover the answer to that question that brought this up? Or is it simply curiosity?

Byron Reese:

No, I would say that it was more curiosity. The wonderful thing about it is when you think about beehives, the beehive doesn't work because of some super bee that does all the work. I mean the queen isn't really in charge. That's not even a very good metaphor. She's just the reproductive unit. The hive works because all the bees do their bit and that's the same with us. And if anything, the moral imperative that comes out of it is there a lot of people I know who feel like they should be doing more with their life that they have. And so gifts and they're put in these positions and they feel the weight of that or even the weight that they're not living up to their potential. And what I learned with this is it's best to put all of that behind you. That ago is so big, no one of us can actually influence it all that much.

Byron Reese:

It isn't the power people that run things, it turns out it's like a clock. The most important gears in the clock aren't the biggest ones. They just happen to be the biggest ones. And so the book almost is about chill. And really what it says is that bees make honey and they do it every be goes out and finds a flower and does this thing and comes back a little bit at a time. I tell a story in the book in the last chapter about a man who committed suicide in 1947 by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge. And there happened to be a scientist, I mean a psychologist who studied suicide at Stanford who went up to check these things out. And he went to that guy's apartment and it turns out he lived alone and he didn't really have any particular problems, but he had left a suicide note for nobody in particular.

Byron Reese:

It was not addressed to anybody. He just left it and it said, I'm going to walk to the bridge now. If one person smiles at me along the way, I will not jump. And I found that to be a chilling story that then that really is what we are to do as humans. That's the net of it all is we survive because we collectively support each other. And I go back to 50,000 years ago when we got down to maybe 800 mating pairs of humans and we look at how we survived then. And archeological evidence suggests we actually took care of the old and the affirmed and that agora like a beehive. It is affirmed and it works when all the parts just kind of do their thing and they support each other. It's a very modest conclusion in a way. It isn't a big grin. One,

Rob Gonzalez:

I feel so much better about my video game habits already. Yeah,

Peter Crosby:

You should just chill Rob. Just chill.

Byron Reese:

No, it's exactly what it is. I think what I say at the very end, I say put no heavier burden on yourself than this to try every day to be a slightly better person than you were yesterday. And try to smile at that person that is walking towards the bridge and that it's all that it takes to build utopia. All that it takes to build utopia.

Peter Crosby:

Wow. I'm going to have to think on that a lot. So as I was preparing for the podcast, I was like, sure, fitting this book into a 40 minute podcast. No problem. But here we are. So you write about the seven forces that are required to achieve superorganism status. Can you rattle off the seven and if you had seven minutes in an elevator with a skeptic, which probably means the elevator is broken down or you've pressed the emergency button. But in any event, if you had those seven minutes, what would you say about the forces to make them buy you a cup of coffee to hear more? What would you want to leave?

Byron Reese:

There's a phenomenon known as emergence. And emergence is when the whole of the system takes on properties that none of the components have. So no gear and a clock can tell time, but the clock can tell time. It has an emergent property of being able to tell time. You're an emergent creature by the way. None of your cells has a sense of humor, but you have a sense of humor. And emergence is a very mysterious thing. It is undeniably scientific, but the idea of how something can take on characteristics that it doesn't have is complicated. It's hard to understand. And I don't know that there's actually been a very good analysis of it and I broke it down to these seven things. You have to have a source of energy for instance. You have to have a way to encode information, even if it's passive, like a city can encodes information by you've heard of desire paths.

Byron Reese:

That's where people on a campus take a shortcut across some field to get between two buildings that makes a trail and that trail is encoding information and every time you walk across it, you're accessing information because you're accessing this preferential task. The individual pieces of data are lost, but the information lives on and so forth. So there are these seven things I think come together that make emergence happen. It's very strange because there are these weird things like termites will eat non load bearing wood in a structure before they eat the load-bearing wood. Now termites don't know what load-bearing wood is, right? They don't know any of that. Bees when they go out, when they swarm every year and they go find a new home. There's all these complexities about what makes a great home having to do with the size of the opening, the proximity to ants, proximity to other bees is sheltered from the rain, how much volume inside of it, all of these things.

Byron Reese:

And no bee knows what they're doing, nobody knows what they're doing. We know that because none of them have ever stormed before. It's a one-time thing. They only live a few weeks. And so somehow they had this ability that's emergent or the hive has this emergent ability of being able to find a new home even though there's nothing, their brains are half the size of a grain of salt. That's all they have. And so how are they able to do these complicated things? And that's what that chapter, that's what that section is about. It says, here's how you get these higher levels of complexity from very simple things.

Rob Gonzalez:

Yeah, it reminds me of the old economist essay, and I think this might've a Milton Friedman essay about eye

Byron Reese:

Pencil.

Rob Gonzalez:

The pencil. Yeah,

Byron Reese:

Eye pencil. That is exactly right. In fact, I cite that. And so the thing is that it was written by a man named Leonard Reed and the idea was that nobody on the planet knows how to make a pencil. There's nobody who could fill the tree, make the paint, make the lead, crimp the feral, make the steel, all of that. Nobody but pencils get made. And what's fascinating is that the pencil is a simple example. Your body has 30 different elements in it. That's all it takes to make you. And iPhone has 60 different elements in it, and yet iPhones get made. And really I think by the way, that is the big, why are we here? I mean, I'll just say it out loud, which is, okay, I got to do this. Alright, why are we here? Why are we here? There's this theory called the Gaia Hypothesis, and it was put forth by a man named James Lovelock.

Byron Reese:

And what it says is that the earth behaves like a living organism. All the life on the earth behaves like a living organism that holds certain values within a realms that are conducive to life. What would that be? That would be why is the salinity of the ocean held constant for 500 million years? Every year more salt goes into the ocean and water evaporates. So why doesn't it get saltier every year? Well, there's a mechanism that keeps it steady. The percent of oxygen in the atmosphere unchanged, the temperature of the planet largely unchanged even though the sun's burning 30% hotter than it was a billion years ago. And so it has these mechanisms that hold things in life and places that are conducive to life. Now, it was unclear if Lovelock thought it was alive, I think he did. Or if he just said it behaved as if it is, it doesn't really matter for what I'm about to say.

Byron Reese:

If it is alive or behaves like a living system, what would it want? And you could say it has wants the way you say a sports car wants you to burn premium in it, right? It's a reasonable the system. You can dance around the wording. What are the ideal operating conditions of the system? It would want to live and it would want to reproduce. That's what all living things want. Should it worry about dying? Absolutely. A big rock is going to hit this planet. It's a statistical certainty. A big rock is going to hit this planet and wipe out the life. So what should it do? Well, what it needs. I wrote a whole book about why there's only one intelligent life on one intelligent life form on this planet. Why aren't there 20 or none? None would be the far more predictable number because almost all life isn't intelligent.

Byron Reese:

And it might be that intelligence is a pretty volatile substance, that intelligent things probe beyond their environment and then they die. And I think it's this, I think that planets that fail to evolve an intelligent lifeboard form get hit by rocks and go extinct and planets that evolve too many intelligent life forms blow themselves up and that there's this Goldilocks number of one. And that's still very risky. But what choice does the planet have? If it doesn't have one intelligent species to defend it, it's going to get hit by a rock and it's going to die. Now again, none of this means the planet's thinking about this or anything. You can just say it's Darwinian planets that over evolve too much life, die out under evolve life, die out. The planets that evolve one life form occasionally find an intelligent life form those perpetuate and they reproduce. And I believe that planets reproduce. And we'll talk about that in a minute if you want to.

Rob Gonzalez:

Yeah, it's interesting. There's a couple of things to dig into there. One is whether or not we get hit by a rock, the sun is going to expand and make life on earth on tenable anyway on some period of time. And go nova. So there's a ticking clock. Carl Sagan actually in his book Cosmos, had a wonderful section on the Drake equation, which is effectively, why haven't we heard from other intelligent species yet? And it kind of goes into the math, which I thought was pretty fascinating. But along those lines, I mean you're saying were a lot of planets either under evolve or over evolve Sagan in his book contact, I think that the main character asked the question, how do we survive this moment that we're in all of a sudden with atomic energy and atomic bombs and we've got the ability to extinguish everything.

Rob Gonzalez:

There's this tipping point beyond which we can either make the life that earth has created, including this agora organism, we can have it exist beyond the timeline that's associated with us or we can destroy ourselves. And how does that work with this agora thesis, right? If we're one giant organism that would want to reproduce and would want to survive, but we've got this ability to destroy ourselves and everything else and it's not clear that we're not going to, does the Agora concept give you faith that we're not going to, does it somehow give us resilience? You know what I mean? I don't know if that question No,

Byron Reese:

No, I love it. It's perfect. I couldn't have scripted that any better. You're talking about the great filter theory, the idea that the reason there's not more life is because there's this big filter that you get smart enough and you blow yourself up.

Rob Gonzalez:

Yes, that's exactly it.

Byron Reese:

So here's what I think. Let me tell you some really mysterious things. One, life appears to have only started on this planet one time, or we know it only persisted one time. How do we know that? Because all life is related to each other. That's why you can take, everybody knows you're 99% the same DNA as a chimp. You're 50% the same as mildew. There's one kind of life and you can take genes from it. It's all based on D-N-A-G-T-C-A encoding. It's all we have this one kind and what's weird? So that's strange. Okay, why did it just happen once? What's weird is it seems to have happened right as the earth was cooling way back at the very beginning. So that's really strange too. And then it seems to have evolved fully formed because we don't have older kinds of life non DNA life that somehow has come down.

Byron Reese:

It seems to have appeared in its full complexity. And I think all of that supports the notion called Penn Speria, which isn't particularly fringe. The idea that life came here, organic matter came here on a meteorite or something that just crashed into the planet. Now there's directed Penn Speria that aliens came and put people places. I'm not talking about that. This is just that biological matter can survive in space, it can land, it can land in a nice warm puddle on some planet and it can take hold. And then guess what would happen? It would be one kind of life. It would be fully formed. And by the way, its molecular makeup won't necessarily match the planet it's on, which is the case with us. We have elements in our life that exist way out of proportion with how common they are on the earth.

Byron Reese:

And so that's what I think happens is that planets reproduce the same way plants do. They send all these spores out that our son is a third generation son. There used to be one here, it blew up. Then there was a second one and it blew up and we're on the third one. And every time that happens, all this dialogical matter gets thrown everywhere. It drifts through space and lands on some planet and it's like, oh, it takes hold. And all of a sudden life comes up there and it's fully formed and it only happens once because it's this wildly improbable thing. And so should you take comfort in that? No, we still could blow ourselves up. That's the thing. Life is so inherently volatile. That's why the planet can't afford to evolve 20 intelligent species, only planets that occasionally evolve one. Those only occasionally make it. So no, we're not home free by any stretch of the imagination.

Rob Gonzalez:

Do you give credit to this planet for the other, the cousins to homo sapiens? There's about, I don't know, six other races. Neanderthals are the ones that everyone knows, but there's a handful of others that existed. Humans eventually won and then even humans went through the big squeeze 75,000 years ago or so. But is that just an exception to it? There were maybe six of us or were we all kind of the same thing and there just had to be one super organism that was going to win out.

Byron Reese:

I mean, I have an opinion on that, which is something happened to a human 50,000 years ago, give or take, that gave them speech. And what it really gave them was the ability to think in speech. There's a wonderful quote from Helen Keller where she talks about her mental life before her teacher came where she had no capacity of thought. She didn't realize she was a thing, that there existed a world outside of her, that she was part of something. She said time had no meaning to her. That's how I think we were. And then one human, this is kind of the G Nome Chomsky kind of theory. One human just fortuitously evolved disability, not to speak, but to think in language. That's a different way to think in language. And that is so that really is the secret sauce. And that so overwhelmingly powerful, that tribe immediately guided it.

Byron Reese:

Then they immediately took over everything. Now two falsifiable assumptions and all of that. One, if I'm right, we're going to find alien life and it's going to be our DNA so highly falsifiable, we're going to find G-T-C-A-D-N-A on other planets that you will be able to intersperse with our genes. The second thing is that when you look at when we got cave A, the first cave A weren't these stick figures. It was this beautiful stuff that just happened and we got that the exact same instant according to the archeological record that we got musical instruments and the same exact instant that we got representation of things, abstract representations like carvings of goddesses and things like that all happened the same week basically. And I think it was these humans, some human had this happen and it's so overwhelmingly powerful that they propagated and we are all descendants of her.

Peter Crosby:

Byron, I'd love to digging to the next level or trying to find an example of the possibility of us not disturbing ourselves. One of the examples that you mentioned, which just because I'd seen the Netflix, Netflix program, society of the Snow recently, you talked about the Uruguay rugby team and their experience. And for those of our listeners that haven't seen society, the snow, I highly recommend it, but I was wondering if we could use that as a way of you explaining, I don't know. Is it fair to say that it gives you hope?

Byron Reese:

That does. There's two things along those lines. So the first one is there is this notion of the overview effect, which astronauts when they go up in the space and they look down and they see the unity of the earth and all of that, they had this profound realization that we're all one people and all of that. It's very inefficient to send people up to space to be able to look down the earth. And I hope that what Agora does is it is the overview effect. It sees us as all part of one animal. So the left ear doesn't have to like the right hand, but it has to know that they will share the same fate. They will live or die together. Now the story you talk about is actually something that happened to me before I wrote the book and that was I was reading about the story.

Byron Reese:

So 1972, this team of Uruguay rugby players and some other people, they crashed land in the mountains and a bunch die. Immediately a bunch die because there are all these blizzards that come and at one point a guy named Nando, one of the survivors is listening to their only working radio by himself and he hears a message that they have given up searching for them. They have been given up for dead. So he runs to his friends and he says, I just heard some great news on the radio and that is that we've been given up for dead. They called off the search and everybody was like, why is that good news? And he said, because it means we're going to get out of this on our own. And when I read that, I wondered if he really said that and what did he really think? So I love the world we live in because five minutes later after I asked myself that question, I found his email address and I sent him an email

Byron Reese:

And the next morning he wrote me back and he said, yeah, that's exactly what I said. He said it was terrible news that I just tried to put a positive spin on. But you see, I think he got it all wrong. It was great news because up until that point, they had been looking for the rescue plane. They had been waiting for the rescue planes to come get them. And the minute they had been given up for dad, he was right. They stopped looking to the sky for their answer and they looked the only other place they could look, which was within themselves. And so no rescue plane came and saved them. Those rugby players, they saved themselves. And that would be my same message. Carl Sagan delivered one very simple when he said, there's no hint that anybody's going to come and save us from ourselves. It's up to us. And that is what gives me is hope, is that when we stop looking for some external force to save us and we say, okay, we're going to do it ourselves. That's what I got from that.

Peter Crosby:

That's great. Yeah. I'm guessing everyone at this point is wondering if not screaming, what does this have to do with digital commerce? Stay in your lane Crosby. We will do this every once in a while as we'll. Open the aperture and say we need to find hope. And so can you answer the question when people you were saying you are here chill, you do what you can, you try and make that person smile. What does that have to do with digital commerce?

Byron Reese:

Well, what it says is that I give the analogy of, I use the example of Manhattan. Manhattan has 10,000 restaurants, has 40,000 restaurants, excuse me. And every day 10,000 tons of food is trucked in to restock those restaurants, 10,000 tons. And you say, okay, who's in charge of figuring out how much flour they need for bagels and how much cod to import and how much pizza sauce and all of that. And the answer of course is nobody is right. Every individual store just places their order and it happens to somehow be the right amount. The same thing with taxis. Nobody's saying, okay, we need 4,000 up here by Central Park and we need 800 over here. Every taxi driver just sort of does their thing and altogether it works. And so what it says is that whatever it is you do, it actually does matter.

Byron Reese:

It's all part of this functioning organism. You're like an actual cell in this giant creature. The reason we had to be created, the reason we're here is to deflect that asteroid before it hits the planet. Ultimately, that's why we're here. We even sent up a NASA sent up a dart probe to crash and into an asteroid, see if they could deflect it. Ultimately, we're here to protect the life on this planet. That's what our species is. And it's easy against something that big to feel inconsequential and small. Well, what is it that I'm doing? But it's like in order for that to happen, you had to have a school system and you had to have teachers and you had to have food, you had to have a person with a hoe hoeing. You had to all of that together. It's like we're bees in the hive. And so it's like whatever you do, don't second guess it that, oh, I should be doing more. Do what it is you do. That's your part to play in this. You're a bit of support for something else and then help other people when you can. It's very edifying to a person. Your role is small, but your role is essential.

Peter Crosby:

I love that. I think I remember when I was coming out of college, I felt like I need to make a difference and was trying to rattle around to figure out what that was and I thought it needed to be in government or I thought I needed to run something big. And over time I've just begun to realize that my big thing is the people that I see, the people that I work with, the people that I love, how I show up in the world and that reverberation, if you multiply all those reverberations and they're more positive than not, than goodness should result. It's sort of how I ended up feeling about it. It made me, I guess sort of the choke pill you were talking about. I guess I got there. That's

Byron Reese:

A hundred percent what the book is about. It says that 93% of us are good, only 7% of us are bad. I actually have a reason for that, a highly exact number. And that is that if those 93% of the people, that's why history slowly but inevitably gets better. I know it doesn't seem that way sometimes, but you compare today to 50 years ago or 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. By any measure, you want life expectancy, infant mortality, status of women, individual liberty, self-government access to education, any metric you want almost anywhere in the world by any standard, things are better now than they were anytime in the past. So we're on the right track because those 93% of good people do total good things all the time. And collectively those billions of positive things or are billions of trips to flowers to get a little bit of nectar to go make a little honey and do our part.

Peter Crosby:

So much of what it seems like the instigation for your research really was this deep understanding and curiosity about bees and as an example. Yeah.

Byron Reese:

Can I tell that story real quickly? This is a funny

Peter Crosby:

Story.

Byron Reese:

Yes, please. So I grew up on a farm in east Texas. My parents were good people, but they had a moral blind spot on the issue of child labor. And I was one of those kids who had chores every morning in the dark before I went to school. But I was a boy scout. And so one week I got a break from my chores and I went to Boy Scout camp. And when you go to Boy Scout camp, you take merit badge classes and they're always about Woodcraft, but I was a real nerdy kid. Surprise, surprise. I was a nerdy kid. And one summer I go there and I saw they finally had a nerdy merit badge I could sign up for and it was bookkeeping. So I signed up for bookkeeping because I thought, what more fun could I have this summer than to learn accounting? Right? Well, seven other nerdy boy scouts all show up and the instructor, the bookkeeping instructor comes out and says, there is no such thing as a bookkeeping merit badge. The Boy Scouts of America would never offer a bookkeeping merit badge. It was a typo and you've all just signed up for beekeeping.

Byron Reese:

And that is the story of how I became a beekeeper.

Rob Gonzalez:

That's awesome. How's the honey real good? We should have asked that at some point.

Byron Reese:

I love the bees. There's an old mythology that when a bee owner dies, you go, it is called the telling of the bees. And you go tell the bees, you go tell the hide your owner died and that they will understand that there's 30, 40,000 bees in that hive. And if you count the number of neurons each bee, that hive is about as many neurons as an animal has. So it makes sense. It just distributed, we're just biased against it because it's not contained in a fleshy orb. It's distributed, but this doesn't mean it's not a creature. And I did read that when Queen Elizabeth died, they went and told the royal bees that she had passed away. There's a lot of lore like that in it.

Byron Reese:

My bees also, they never bothered me when I would mow the grass around them, I could push the power mower, I push it under them on hot days, they would form a big beard outside of the hive and they would all flap their wings and they would circulate air through it. Fabulous creatures. And again, none of them know what they're doing. What they're all thinking is, alright, I'm going to go hang on this beard and flap my wings, but I have no idea why I'm doing this. They don't know. They don't know about convection. It's an emergent property that comes about from the interaction of these six forces that you mentioned at the beginning.

Peter Crosby:

So I'll just close with reinforcing what you have said a couple of times through here, the quote that really stood out to me. So put no heavier burden on yourself other than you can be and try every day to be a slightly better person than you were yesterday. That really is all it takes to build utopia. And then you say, we really can do this. And how do I know? Because we are Agora. So Byron, thank you so much for being so freaking curious and not stopping your curiosity until you get an answer that is provable. And then using that to inspire the rest of us. We really appreciate you. Well,

Byron Reese:

Thank you for having me on the thank you to your audience for indulging something that's not digital marketing. I tried my best to tie it in.

Peter Crosby:

Our audience is part of the 93%, so it's all they little appreciate. Very good. Well, I am thinking of that one, but yeah, everybody else. Yeah, that one. Yeah. Yeah. Byron, thank you so much. Thank you. Great to talk to you again. Thanks again to Byron for joining us, his book “We Are Agora” is available wherever you buy your books. And of course Amazon, thanks to you for being part of the DSI super organism.