Innovation, with JoAnn Garbin: “Say It Ugly!” — LBW 7.5

Welcome everybody. This is Living Between Worlds for May 20th, 2026. I'm Gil Friend, CEO of Naturologic and ontological coach to purpose-driven founders and executives building businesses that serve life. And in that spirit, I'm delighted to have with us today my friend and colleague Joanne Garbin, CEO of Regeneris Labs, uh, former innovation pot stirrer at Microsoft, where she's done some very interesting work, author of the book An Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, and all-around good person. I'm glad to welcome to Living Between Worlds. Hi, Joanne.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. I've usually been in the guest— in the peanut gallery, in the crowd.

Well, sometimes you are, but you also host a regular one of these yourself, don't you? Yes.

Yeah, we have a monthly live webcast called Innovating Out Loud and a weekly written series, Innovating Out Loud, because innovation is one of those things you can write about it all day, but until you do it and talk about it, you don't really know what's going on.

So what is it? What is innovation?

What's innovation? Yeah. The shortest answer is creating value for someone other than yourself.

Okay. Hence the generous part of regenerous.

Yes, absolutely. But I like— there's a quote in the book from one of the leaders at Microsoft, Julia Lucen. She actually just retired, but she led the developer division of the group for years. And she said, if your thing isn't creating value for other people, it's not innovation. It's just an idea. Okay, so, and I, I think that's true. Like, you can have great ideas, you can even have great inventions, but until they're out in the world doing something positive for others, it's not innovation.

Well, let's back it up a little bit. You're talking about until it's out in the world, but you also said that good innovation doesn't start with ideas.

Not in our method.

In your method, you said starting with ideas is failure mode, which I think is a really unusual concept for people. So could you speak into that a little more?

Yeah, in, in high performance innovation teams, you start with questions and good questions, better questions, bad questions, lots of questions before you get to ideas. And if you just naturally have an idea, you still step back from it and question it from as many angles as you can. Before you decide what to do next. Too many people have fallen into, in the innovation world, I'm not saying generally, but in the innovation world, in the dot-com era, when the framing of fail fast got introduced, it was actually taken out of context. Fail fast is not, oh, I have an idea, let's go try it and fail fast. Fail fast was the second part of a manifesto that started with learn fast. But being humans, we like to cut things apart and take them out of context, and then they take on a life of their own. And fail fast became this excuse or permission to have an idea and then spin up a bunch of people and spend a lot of money failing at it. Whereas if you have an idea and you ask questions of it, you can rule out a lot of things before you ever get out of your head or off the paper and into the real world.

Seems there's maybe a relationship between the two because fail fast is a kind of giving permission to do something that might not work. Asking lots of questions is giving permission to be foolish, not sound smart, not have something completely cooked before you open your mouth, right? So they're related.

They are related, but if you take the fail fast away from the learn fast and you don't encourage people to, um, do thought experiments, do paper prototypes, do really low testing and challenging of an idea before you start building it, you end up in a place where we see, you know, in the VC world, we see startups burning through millions, if not billions of dollars and they produce nothing of value.

So I want to talk about value some more, but let's come back to questions for a moment because if we start with questions, I mean, I've been in rooms where where people don't think they have any questions. You know, invite questions and people are silent. You know, the strategy of starting with the blank sheet of paper or the blank board to invite wide open creativity, I've found in many cases people need something to react to first. They don't know how to generate the blank page question. So what have you found about engaging people and asking questions first? When does it work and when does it doesn't? Or how do you stir that pot?

I think it always works, honestly. And if I don't know what the relationship is, like, if I'm sitting with somebody and I don't know what our relationship is about yet, and I just ask them questions about themselves, like, who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Like, not just like, what's your job title? But like, literally, What do you do every day? What's your day look like? What do you wish you didn't have to do anymore? Who do you do it with? How often do you do it with them? Where is it? Virtual? Is it in person? Like, you can— every single one of us can rattle off a few dozen questions about just about anything that are not yes/no. They're not binary. They're not closing. The conversation. They're opening the conversation. And then it's just wherever you're going, wherever that other person goes, you ask something that goes further with them and you try to just get momentum in the conversation. When it's with a group, it works kind of the same way.

Same way with a cross-functional team around a particular technical issue or project. Same way or different?

Same way. Yeah. For instance, I was just, I was chatting with somebody one-on-one yesterday and we were talking about the very standard thing we do in innovation or invention, engineering, business of a 2x2 matrix of impact versus effort. Probably anybody that's been in business has done that at some point and I had a company in Boston that was a 50-person company. And when I first joined them, they had asked me to figure out why can't we scale past a certain revenue point. I don't know. Let me talk to y'all. Let me figure it out with you. And so I brought 30 of them together in a room and I said, let's, you know, we had done some prep work or whatever about what we're working on and blah, blah, blah. But really, I needed to understand how they thought about impact and effort. So we sat at our tables for a little bit and they were cross-disciplinary. So we had a sales guy sitting with an ops guy sitting with a, and they were mostly men. I think I was one of 3 women, 4 women in the company with quality control, with the CEO. So we had all this intersection.. And I was like, all right, for the next 15 minutes, define impact. Every single person at the table, define impact and then define effort. And you heard the, well, impact is blah, blah, blah at each of the tables. And then the ops guy is like, no, that's not what impact is. Impact is getting the product out the door on time. Impact is being able to market it without, you know, with the margin preserved. So We spent a good hour and a half just questioning our own assumptions about what impact is and what effort is as a group of people with a shared mission of that company. And it wasn't until we did those definitions together that we could really look at all the ideas and questions and opportunities and say, Oh, that fits in this quadrant or that quadrant. Um, and that's just a simple example where most people would put impact and effort on the board and just start plotting things.

Mhm. So go, going slow to go fast.

Yes.

People don't know much about your background. Tell us a little bit more about your journey, um, and what feel like the, some notable successes and failures along the way.

Lots of failures. I always joke, joke, but only because it's true that 99% of my life is hearing no. That might even be, might even be like 99.999% of my life is no. And that's because I've been an entrepreneur pretty much my whole life. I grew up in a family construction business in the blueberry fields and Pine Barrens of South Jersey, which is a totally different world than North Jersey. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Um, and so I grew up in construction. I have a mother that's an artist, a drummer, and a technical salesperson. So you can just imagine what kind of crazy mind she has. And I also grew up— I'm Gen X. I grew up at the end of the '70s through the '80s. So right after the EPA was formed, you know, right after Rachel Carson started getting recognized for the work that she did in Silent Spring. So me and my friends were all hippie dippy kids. Like we were all starting recycling programs and planting trees and doing trail walk cleanups and toy recycling programs with Toys for Tots at Christmas time. Like That was, that was like age 12 to 16 is, you know, all of that kind of boots on the ground environmental action. And when I went to college, I thought I was going to be an environmental scientist or engineer. I knew I was going to be an engineer. I like physics. I know that's weird, but I really do. I like math, but I also like creating things. I get that from my parents. And, but I thought I would go into environmental and then it wasn't the work I wanted to do. I went through a summer program and they had us out, you know, taking test tubes of water and then going back to a lab and analyzing it. And I was like, yeah, this is not the work I want to do. Meanwhile, mechanical engineering brought in a box of Legos And I was like, oh, now we're talking. So I ended up going mechanical, which was great because it is a very broad-based discipline. You learn a little bit of everything in mechanical. So fluids and heat transfer and structures and materials. And so you get kind of like this great set of building blocks, like Legos, that you can really, as a mechanical, become anything. And so with my entrepreneurial background, I started my first business when I was 10, um, needed to make money because we didn't have money. So I went out and learned how to make money. So when I graduated college, I just started putting together the engineering art of it with the business make money part of it, and I'm pretty stubborn, and I decided before I ever had my first job in this, you know, profession as an engineer that I was never going to work on garbage. I was never going to put widgets and whatnots into the world that end up in landfills. So my whole career I've been working at this intersection of sustainability, technology, and innovation, mostly in the built environment. So buildings and building systems, most recently as the head of the Data Center of the Future at Microsoft, which I know that doesn't sound like an entrepreneurial gig, but it took them 4 years to convince me to come inside. And then I ran it like a startup inside the walls until it could no longer be a startup. And then I left. Um, but all along the way I did energy efficiency, I did waste and carbon accounting. I did like the very first company I built and sold was an energy management company that worked in both, uh, supply and demand side for big corporations. So how do we buy energy and how do we use energy? But then it was right in the beginning of the 2000s when Climate Leaders— do you remember Climate Leaders, Gil? It's probably where we met. I do. I was in the room at meeting number 2 when it was 20 of us and we were still talking to WRI about what the GHG protocol should be, right? And we were going scope 3, no, we don't, we can't look at that. That's scary. But I built, one of the first platforms that helped global corporations gather all that information and make it useful, not just for reporting, but for intervention and mitigation. And that's the company I ended up selling to Johnson Controls in 2008, which tells you how long we've been trying to account for this crap. And having people say, ah, Um, so yeah, it just— I kept going. I kept trying to find problems in that intersection of sustainability and technology, and I kept trying to level up from do less harm to create more good, from mitigation to restoration and eventually regeneration. And I'm, I'm glad that the technology is now caught up that we can do things that are truly regenerative. Can we? Yeah, absolutely. But you got to ask the right questions.

Well, so give us, give us a favorite example of something that's truly regenerative and what were the right questions that got you and your colleagues there?

Okay. So, and you can challenge me on this. I think people do challenge me on this, but we have infrastructure that is one function, right? Like, let's look at power infrastructure. It moves electricity from point A to point B, and then somebody uses that and it's consumed. Mm-hmm. Consumption is at best going to net zero. But if you ask a different question, not how can I consume that energy, but how can I use it— energy can neither be created nor destroyed— so how can I use that energy and then pass it along to somebody else to be used? Now you can recycle at the very least that energy. But if you look a little broader and you go, hey, I used it to do this thing, that's generative. I used it to then do this thing, that's generative. And then this other thing, that's generative. Now this one unit of energy has produced many, many things. And when you look at the way nature works, That's what she does, you know, and we're just foolish that we don't follow her example.

We get, we get tricked by our own words, uh, you know. It's not that we're using energy, because like you say, energy can't be created or destroyed. We're using energy quality. Yes, right. We're taking high-quality energy, using it for a particular purpose, then have lower-quality energy, you know, you know, high temperature coming in for a particular function, lower temperature energy coming out, lower temperature energy coming out, lower temperature future energy coming out. And one of the ways we get into a mess is that we use the high-quality energy for purposes that are fine with lower-quality energy. Yes.

And that's— we overengineer.

And if you cascade the stack, if you cascade down the stack, you get exactly what you're talking about, right?

Yeah. And if you start with that different point in the future in mind, if you go, what would this look like if we design this first point of use such that it allowed for additional points of use. What does that look like? How is that system designed?

Mhm. So, so first principles design is a really big leap for a lot of people. Um, do you find it difficult or not so difficult to get people to start there with you?

I, so I use a process of discovery that is mostly about learning about the people. And then we have a thing in the book, um, a lesson in the book called Fit People with Things. Absolutely everyone has a role to play in innovation. To go from blank sheet of paper to something that is out in the world at scale, there are many, many, many people with different skills and aptitudes. You know, you've got— everybody loves to talk about the mad scientist daydreamers. Yeah. But if you don't have the detailed-oriented pencil-pushing planners, That daydream is never seeing the light of day. So you need everybody, but that doesn't mean you need everybody in the room at blank sheet of paper because that pencil pusher is going to drive everybody up a wall because they're going to want precision at a point where you cannot offer precision and they're going to want to converge to an answer way too early. In the process. And that's why we end up with a lot of things that meant to be positive and ended up having unintended, or un-inten— more times than not, unanticipated consequences. And unanticipated is the bigger problem because it inherently suggests you should have known. That was going to be a problem. So why didn't you know? And we would argue you didn't know because you didn't ask the right questions or enough questions.

Well, it seems there's a contradiction there though, Joanne, because you're saying have everybody involved but not everybody involved at every stage. But if they're not there at the blank sheet of paper, how do you ensure their perspectives or considerations are getting brought into the process early?

So, Through questions. I'm not going to be a broken record.

But no, but they're not there.

You do. You ask the questions of everybody because you need the widest field of vision when you start an innovation initiative. If you start with just one person's view, you're going to get a very myopic solution and it's going to fail in big ways and small ways. But if you go wide and you get all of this input, which sounds painful, but it's actually really fun. You get people talking about who they are, what they know, what they do. Everybody will tell you everything. They'll tell you about kindergarten if you ask them. So you do that work first. And then what you do is you're collecting all that wisdom from people living at different parts. In the ecosystem. And when you start narrowing down your hypothesis of what might be the answer or the solution or the path forward, you make sure you use their own words.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So that when you go back to them, they see themselves in the thing you're bringing back to them. And now We're in this together. I see me in that. You heard me. You are now representing my vision. It's not Joanne's vision. It's their vision. Yeah. With the data center of the future, we interviewed 200 people before we even attempted a solution. And 100 of them were within Microsoft and 100 of them were all around Microsoft, including the people living in communities.

So let's dive into that a bit more, because it's a, it's a powerful example, and it's an issue that's very fresh in a lot of people's minds these days, and very polarizing, uh, as we know. Um, but before the how, come back a little, a step before that. You said it sounded like it took a bunch of convincing from Microsoft for you to come aboard.

If I understood you correctly. I don't like bureaucracy and I have, I would say pretty much everybody that's tried to be my boss will say that I am a bad employee and that I have problems with authority. The truth is I have problems with arbitrary authority. I have absolutely no problem with legit authority. I love smart people, especially people that I'm learning, you know, like I'm definitely not the smartest person. So I want to tap them for all that wisdom so that I can build something. I'm a builder. That's what I do.

So, so what persuaded you that Microsoft was going to be the land of appropriate authority, not arbitrary authority, when I think a lot of people's picture of it is that it's, you know, that bad kind of authority over there?

Yeah. So when they, when they first approached me, Satya was the brand new CEO, but I was helping the company in Boston, and it was just I was intrigued and flattered, but I could not in good conscience leave my company in Boston in the state they were in. I needed to see through what I had told them I would help them with. And I also only knew Microsoft as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, right? And I was like, that doesn't sound like a place I would enjoy. You know, like they're not running a humane situation. It didn't sound it to me anyway from the outside. Yep. But Satya is a different creature. He is a different kind of person. And so over the couple years that I was running out the initiative with the Boston group, I saw who Satya was as a leader. And I saw the investment they were making in the energy and sustainability teams because the energy team is who reached out to me, Brian Janus, who was the founder of the energy team. They didn't have an energy team before him. And Brian and I knew each other from the sustainability world. And when they were looking to expand their team, he's like, I knew this woman in Philadelphia. Who knows sustainability, energy, and tech. Let's call her. But it was early days and I was looking at it going, I'm not a politician, I'm not good at bureaucracy. Let's see what happens. When, you know, call number 4 came in, it was a very different picture. So it was 2018. I had left Boston, took a sabbatical. And I was able to just put up what they were suggesting next to all the other things I might work on. And because they were suggesting this massive piece of infrastructure, the data center, and that my job would be to reimagine it, and I was totally allowed to reimagine it from a place of sustainability or even regeneration. I was like, well, if we're successful, that could have a really massive positive impact in the world. And if I can prove that a data center can be regenerative, or at that point, actually, I was still focused on sustainable and circular. I was like, if I can prove our collective methods work on something as big and gnarly as a data center, That is a huge proof point for sustainable innovation.

And you did. So tell folks what that looks like. 'Cause I think when, you know, for most people, I imagine on the call, when you say data center, they think about big honkin' warehouses on the landscape, consuming enormous amounts of energy, you know, wasting enormous amounts of water, being a blight on the landscape. There's a movement around the country to resist, well, both data center warehouses and ice warehouses, what a thing. You have, you know, you have political constellations forming around opposition to data centers that are missing some of the questions that you're asking. So let's put that aside for a moment. What is it? What does a regenerative data center look like to you? Where do you and your team come to in this exploration?

What's possible? So what we did is we approached it not from how do we make a regenerative data center? Or how do we make a sustainable data center? We knew that was gonna meet the resistance. It was gonna be polarizing even in 2020. It would be polarizing. And so we approached it from, let me back up. The US may be resisting data centers at large now. The Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, they were all resisting it in 2020. So we're like the late kids to the conversation on resisting data centers. So that— those problems were already real. They've just now ballooned because there's just such a bigger, faster push for things. But we saw those signals back then when we did our discovery and we talked to 100 people around the world and all the things you just named Horizon Blight and the rest of it were the reasons. But when we talked to the 100 people within the company, within the data center industry, about their pain points of data centers, they had plenty of pain points too. They're like, do you know how hard it is to build these giant things from scratch every single time anywhere in the world. They were like, we should be manufacturing them in centralized factories in modular units that can ship on a flatbed and be sent to where they need to be in the world. Then we could have quality control and circularity and, you know, recycling and all of it. And safety, like just think about construction sites. And again, I'm a construction kid. The number one thing you're concerned about on any construction site is keeping the humans on that site safe. Yeah.

Unless you're a jerk.

Yeah. Right? Like, but if you're a good construction company, you can't afford your people getting hurt or worse. And it's a real possibility. So every time these hyperscalers are breaking ground, they're risking people, not just capital and equipment, but people. They don't want to be in that business. Like, that's not their business. They're— Microsoft's a software provider. They don't want to be a construction company. So again and again, we heard all these pain points. And what it amounts to, if you fast forward through a lot of steps, is manufactured, module, scalable, what we call fungible, meaning when the brain inside changes, which it does now ever faster. It used to be like a 3-year cycle that the computers got smarter. Now it's like 3 months and the hardware about once a year. That fungibility of I don't have to I don't have to swap out the whole facility. I can just take out the parts I need to take out and put them, you know, the new parts in. That's critical, right? Otherwise you end up having big things not doing anything. Being able to fit into land that is available. It's very hard to find hundreds of acres of land that is also conveniently located to power and internet. Much easier to find 20 acres. So we started asking questions about, can you build a data center that does what it needs to do at 20 acres or 10 acres or 100 acres or whatever the numbers need to be? We just started pushing on all the embedded assumptions of today's design. And if you go on my LinkedIn, there's a picture of what we landed on. It doesn't look at all like a data center. It looks like a garden. Yeah, um, it looks like the Shire, actually, from Tolkien, which is pretty funny. Did not mean it to look like the Shire, but it kind of does.

So, so let, let me, let me push on this for a second, because this— it's, it's a lovely vision. And from what I understand, you guys came up not only with the data centers that look like the Shire, but that are net-zero energy, net-zero water, regenerative, clicking all our checklists, but Microsoft didn't build them.

I wouldn't call them net zero first. I would say it's regenerative by design. Okay. So every time you build something on a piece of land, you're removing some ecosystem function.

Mm-hmm.

So we started with how do we maintain or improve the ecosystem function of the developed land. And then we looked at the water cycle. How do we maintain or improve the water cycle? Not just the big water cycle, but the little water cycle. Interesting fact, like over in the Middle East, they built— this is— I don't remember who the builder of it was, but they built a data center that evaporated water.

Yeah.

Which everybody will say, oh, that's horrible. You're consuming water. But in fact, by doing that, it helped replenish the water, the small water cycle to irrigate fields 20 miles away. Yeah. So you have to look at the whole system because in that case, evaporation was the right answer. But that is not the case in somewhere like Southwest US, where it's at the end of the waterway and it's in high drought conditions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we did all of those. We looked at all of those things. Not— we didn't look macro level. We went down into all of the system and we created positive feedback loops at all of the system levels. And for the energy, it was, hey, we're buying green energy. Why is it dying at our site? How do we design this so that it uses and passes it along? And in the course of passing it along, it's displacing heat and electricity purchased by other people that's generated with fossil fuels. So now you're a net positive contribution to the grid, to the community, and to the environment.

So, which is, which is exactly the frame that I want to hear. And, uh, Biomemory Institute talked about doing similar things to some of their projects where they identified 28 ecosystem functions, built them into the layers of the GIS for port development in Africa. And the same criteria as you— how do we not degrade but enhance every one of those functions as a basic approach to design? So why aren't we seeing these yet?

Because, as I wrote most recently, Behavior is the biggest barrier to innovation, human behavior. Mm-hmm. It is not technical, it's not business case, it's not desirability, as we say in design, or feasibility in technical terms. It is literally the combination of different humans making choices that either move something forward or stop it. And it's not unique to Microsoft. It's where any group of humans get together to do anything. We're our own worst nightmares, all of us. And I'm not even excluding myself from that. There are environments that I get put in that I'm the barrier. I'm the behavior barrier because it triggers some fear or insecurity in me, and I'm just Ew, like I said, I have a problem with arbitrary authority. Well, had I known how to play the game better at Microsoft, maybe I could have moved it past first-of-a-kind design, right? And that's not my gift. I handed it to other people.

Some people love first-of-a-kind and some people hate first-of-a-kind. I remember I was at a panel at Climate Week a year or so ago in San Francisco. Session on data centers and one of the, you know, 4 very experienced people from different perspectives in the game. One of them saying, "Nobody cares about renewable energy in data centers. We're building them, we don't care. Money, it pencils out." And the person sitting next to her said, "That's all we're getting demand for and that's what we're building." So 2 people in the same game, completely different perspectives about what's possible, what's desirable, what's economic.

Yeah, here I just, I just saw where Google, Meta, which always surprised me when they do anything that aligns with me, and AWS are the 3 hyperscalers that are not putting gas turbines on site to power their infrastructure. And for 3 very different reasons. Google said, nope, that just counter our climate commitments and we're not going to do it. And AWS and Meta said it creates more problems for us than it solves. So they had a very practical approach to why not to do it. Google had more of a mission-driven approach of why not to do it. Same result. And personally, I don't care why you're not going to do it. I'm just glad you're not doing it. Don't put gas turbines on site.

In addition to the, what, 7 or 8 year long waiting time to get gas turbines.— for data centers.

Turbines are about 3 years right now. Down, down. Yeah, but transformers are pretty far out there. Yeah. And interconnection.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, critically important topic, not just for all the environmental reasons we've been discussing, but Ben Hunt at Second Foundation Partners will argue that data center CapEx is the only thing keeping the US economy afloat at this point.

It's pretty frightening how much money, how concentrated our economy is right now.

And being sucked into massive infrastructure with long-term impacts, but missing the opportunity to make the decisions that we're talking about here. Yes. Let's open it up to the room.

People have been listening quietly, and I'm sure there's a lot of thoughts in people's heads.

Can I just make one appeal? Please.

I know for a fact, that the way things change inside of these companies is by pressure from outside. This is why I'm sounding out as much as I can and sharing as much as I can about the work we already did. And I'm, I'm encouraging every community to say yes if, because no stops the conversation. Yes, if gives the internal people like me when I was there permission to move forward. It's just that human psychology again. If they hear it coming from me and I'm an employee, of course I want my pet project to move forward. Everybody wants their pet projects to move forward. But if they're hearing it from the outside and it's impeding their progress, of what they care about, they will get— they will do it. We've seen it in Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, everywhere else in the world that's already been through these conversations said yes if, and they got what they wanted.

That's great. And that yes if probably presumes some education of the people asking the yes if, so the if is well informed.

Yes.

Yes, but only if is how I would hear that.

That's why I keep publishing that list of things you can ask for that's not going to stop. Like they won't bat an eyelash about ecosystem preservation. They really won't. It is pennies on the dollar compared to what they're paying for the compute.

Yep. Good. Give us, give us a good link to those things in the chat so people can track that down.

I will. And, and, um, it's all on my LinkedIn. Just check out my LinkedIn.

There you go. So, Océane, we'll go to you. Anybody else, if you'd like to speak, please raise your hand. It'll stack you up in queue and we'll take you in order.

Welcome. Thank you. And yeah, really nice to meet the both of you. I've been following you, Joanne, for just a couple of weeks, but I got to see your article. So both the written piece and then more like the technical and commercial blueprints.

So yeah, I really enjoyed it.

And yeah, I guess I'm a little bit curious to, to hear a little bit more of the feedback that you've gotten from it.

And maybe from—

I know you're saying that, you know, it's your pet project. So then in Microsoft and so on, you, you obviously wanted to go forward. But yeah, curious to hear if we can from Microsoft what, you know, what were their You know, you know, I, I'd love to see it be implemented. So yeah, curious to hear how we can get that going. Yeah, so our roles as mere citizens of the planet is in our own communities to, to be a part of that conversation. Yes, if, right, and to bring the information that people need and get engaged. You know, in the Netherlands It was a group of farmers that just put their foot down and started making trouble and showing up at town meetings saying, nope, like we're not doing this. But we were able to work with them and figure out the mutual benefit that could be created and we created it. And that was when I was at Microsoft. What I always tell all of my teams because I work in transformational innovation, like blank sheet of paper to something brand new. We always hit this brick wall. Like, it's— I just, like I said, 99.9% of my life is being told no. And I can dodge the nos and work around them all the way up to a point. And then it's like total brick wall. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to leave this here. I'm going to go start the new thing. Good work always finds a way forward. Always. Because the context changes, other people start seeing the need, more voices get involved. Like when you do the innovation work at the beginning that asks the question that taps into everybody's pain, and then you solve it, eventually that pain gets so acute that everybody starts asking for the solution. Now, do I wish we didn't have to wait for it to get so painful and we could actually preemptive, you know, preempt it and proactively solve it? Yes. But that just doesn't seem to be how we work as a, as a species. So, but I do have high confidence and I do see the signals of all the phone calls I get from people. Hey, we want to figure out this problem. We want to figure out that problem. I'm like, great, I'll tell you everything I know. I'll give you everything I can possibly legally give you, and I will point you to other people that can help you with the rest. Because we are now acutely feeling the pain, right? It's— it was not this painful in 2020 when my team started. It is much more painful now. And that's a good thing from a how-to-get-it-done point.

Thanks. Nils Stora, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to hear your way to kind of ask questions and identify pain points with customers. And I think it's also really, really impressive what Microsoft has done by saying we want to pull back our emissions since 1975 and then supporting regenerative agriculture and a lot of projects in order to get there. But what I'm kind of wondering was, at the moment, the trouble or the challenge is not only to identify customer problems that they're willing to pay for a solution for, but it's to avoid environmental problems and technologies that is just changing the problem instead of solving it. I mean, there's like solutions of hydrogen, which leaks out, delays then the downbreak of methane in the atmosphere and possesses then 12 times the warming potential of CO2. And it's impossible to contain hydrogen because it leaks through steel. So there is no green hydrogen. And at the moment now, there are so many entrepreneurs who are so happy when they find pain points and customer problems that somebody wants to pay for, that they don't really know whether they are creating real value for nature, companies, and people, and when they are just creating false value in terms of unpayable debts and, and even more problematic future. And that's also kind of Put a little bit what pisses me off of Microsoft is the way they've constantly been putting layer on layer and layer on their operating systems, demanding even more CPU and memory. I mean, I'm running Microsoft Vista PC with Ubuntu still, because if you— with Ubuntu, you don't have that kind of waste that Microsoft, that Intel has been kind of promoting. Which is also what's happening now in, in the, um, the language models, uh, that are wasting energy by just searching for what is wrong instead of just finding out what is, is right. And trying to find every time what's wrong in the algorithm creates much more energy use than actually doing the opposite, like they do in the Zettlin machine, which has a much, much lower energy usage and no hallucinations. So I'm just wondering, how are you able to not only identify customer value and what somebody wants to pay for in solutions and avoid making more problems and shifting the issues with environmental issues? How you— how can you calibrate in a way the proposals to find what's real value and what is just false value and future depths and imploding the economy like a lot of the US economy is based on at the moment.

Yeah, it's—

And Joanne, let me just tag on to that question if I could. When in the example you gave before about the cascades of value and ecosystem functionality, lots of the value is outside the boundary of calculation of the folks putting the money on the table to do the project.

So I'll just add that. And that's exactly where the problem starts. In engineering, we solve by drawing a boundary box What are our knowns? What are our variables? We start solving. My chief engineer on the Data Center of the Future, Eric Peterson, he's like, engineers solve to the requirements they're given. And it's such a true statement. And what we did with that is, Eric and I, let's give different requirements. So when I say customer in the regenerative standpoint, I am talking about the system. And I'm looking at what are the inputs to that system? What are the variables of that system? Well, environment's right there along with community and Microsoft. And what we said as a guiding principle of our effort was there's no, oh, we're going to do this one thing that's good for Microsoft, but bad for community and environment. Then we're going to do this other thing that's good for the environment, but bad for Microsoft and the community. Or bad for Microsoft. It's not philanthropy, right? They're a for-profit company. And when you constrain yourself to say, no, we have to create mutual value for the system of Microsoft community and nature, a whole bunch of things you would have done are no longer viable solutions. And when you get that out of the way, it forces you to solve it differently. This is why I say sustainability is innovation when you use it in that way, because so much of what we do today is not sustainable. Takes it off your, your option list, and it, it makes the engineers go, oh crap, that doesn't solve for all three. I gotta rethink it. And you know what? Engineers do not like leaving solutions, like problems unsolved. So if you tell them they have to solve for the 3, they will. They're very good at it. And so scientists too, artists, like all, like all of us are when we're given those constraints. The problem is, again, if we draw that boundary box Like one of the things I noticed about the industry at large is they design from the chip out. So the very first constraint I put on us as a team was we're going to design from the outside in because if we design from the chip out, we're never going to make it past the walls. Like we will run out of time and money and energy, people's attention. So I was like, if we start from outside in geopolitics, where we are in the world, what natural resources we need, what labor we have available, what's the, you know, the policies. We literally started with all of that before we got to the walls of the data center. And that changed everything we did thereafter.

And in what way does this imply also letting the engineers learn biology before they are left out in the world?

Well, Gil Friend mentioned the Biomimicry Institute and their counterpart B38, Biomimicry 338. They were a huge part of our team. I had actually The first biomimic in Microsoft was actually on our software customer team. And I met her and I was like, what are you doing? Like, you need to be in innovation. Like, get over here. And we created a role and we brought her in and then she brought her network in. So we had Dana and Janine and Seth and the whole cast of characters of biomimics here and in Europe. Amazing group of people. And We actually combine talent from 7 different companies to address the discovery design part of the project. So we didn't just rely on Microsoft people. We actually brought in a lot of perspectives from different people. And what that allowed us to do is I didn't need Eric and the engineers to become biologists overnight or biomimics overnight. But over the course of the 3-year program, they all adopted those skills and those perspectives. Eric, to this day, if you ask him, he said it's one of the most fun, interesting, and rewarding experiences of his 30-year career in the big tech world. Me too.

Like, absolutely inspiring work. So you had to get the— you had to get the breadth of experience in the room, the biologists at the design table and everybody else, so you could start from the outside in. You also need somebody who will set the frame.

Yes.

Three factors, whether that's you or Satya or somebody who says to the engineers, this is what you need to deal with. And that seems to be another critical variable there, right?

And this is where people who are in my part of the process— well, I call myself either the conductor or, you know, the, the architect of the team and the the problem, we find little ways to hear what we want to hear and make it work for us. So there's this quote from Satya that says, at the core of your business, your first unit of scale, are you creating a surplus? That I think is the question. I found that and on every single conversation I had at the very start, There's a picture of Satya's face with that quote and the source. So now it wasn't Joanne saying, hey, we should rethink data centers, tell me all the pain points. It was Satya wants the first unit of scale of this company to be surplus. How are you, electrical engineer in the data center group, creating surplus? Right. And so you can, you can, you need a good leader, obviously, like This is why I wouldn't at the time, like, I would never go to Meta. Be very hard-pressed to go to AWS. Google's up there. I would have gone to Google, but most companies do not have that leadership. And he most importantly also has Amy Hood, who was, was and is a big driver of investment. And to have a CFO on board was huge.

Yeah. And all that may be a conversation for another time. Let's go to Peter and then Rick and then Océane. I'm going to go to Shel before you since he hasn't spoken, then come back to you if that's okay. Thank you. Well, and let me just ask everybody if you could be concise. We've got a half hour left of the call and I want to leave room for as many people as possible.

All right.

So I'll be as quick as I can. From my experience, engineers like clarity and they find ambiguity difficult to handle. What I'd like to do is to circle back to what you said earlier on, which is that you have a problem with arbitrary authority.

Just slightly.

And I don't think you're alone there. So at Greenbuild, I grabbed their troublemaker badge that I could stick on my name tag. And so I think it's our real challenge is how do we, how do we make wise choices? Yes. And it, I mean, I have no experience of data centers, so I can't really talk to those specifics, but I think what we're all looking for is wisdom.

Yeah.

And how do we within whatever context we're working in, how do we help wisdom emerge?

Yes, absolutely. And first I want to say there is, like everything, there's always a wide range of people. I'm an engineer, mechanical engineer, but I love ambiguity and uncertainty. As soon as it's all nailed down, I'm like, I'm bored, I'm out. So you just have to sort through and find— this is the People with Phase part of the work. Don't try to force, you know, rule-oriented people into blue sky areas. It just makes them unhappy, and then they make everybody else unhappy. So acknowledge who people are and play to their strengths while also stretching them. People like to stretch. They don't like to leap. But they like to stretch. Yeah. Um, but from the, the other side of it is, and this is where as a sustainability person, I might, if I'm not being clear, I might come off as counter to what we all believe is important, but making good choices like we have an abundance of data and information and knowledge. That gap between all of that and wisdom that would lead us to make better choices, that's complexity. And what most people aren't trained in, don't have the bandwidth for, you know, they're tired. They're running. Life is overwhelming. Their sphere of concern is already full. Complexity gets pushed out. And so we make bad choices. Here's where I, I'm on the side of the sustainability world that thinks AI is a good thing in the long run. AI is great at holding complexity. Now we gotta use it well as a tool. Can't just be like, oh, our AI gods will solve it all for us. No, it's like right now AI is the equivalent of the best drunk intern you've ever had. It's really not that great yet. But it's rapidly improving. And if we use it and improve it in a way to hold that complexity such that it gives us the easy choice, which is the better choice, we will start making better choices because we can tap into the knowledge and the wisdom of the world with it, which even the internet clearly doesn't let us do. Um, But, you know, garbage in, garbage out. We got to be careful with how we're building it, training it. Right now it's very Western world, northern hemisphere biased. It's very Silicon Valley biased. There's a lot of progress to be had still. I hope that answered, but yeah. Thanks, Trish. That is something we're focusing on in the lab, by the way, is it doesn't sound sexy at all, but decision intelligence and choice architecture, we feel like are really important things to understand and build.

Good. Thank you, Rick. And then Shel, and then Brian. Thank you, Gil. Um, John, I wanna touch on two points. One is asking good questions and asking it from a meta level. I put in the chat something that you cannot answer, and I don't expect anybody to answer quickly because it requires a lot of slow thinking, which are compound philosophical questions, which deals with that range. But I want to zoom in with a reductionist lens to the meaning, your meaning of regeneration, because regeneration can mean different things to different people. And when you call surplus, it depends on the constraints where you define the surplus because surplus can have unintended consequences if you zoom out far enough, the surplus may actually have more of a deficit impact than a surplus impact. So I'd like you to maybe clarify how you define, and there's more than one definition of regeneration, but also how it relates to the Sustainable Flourishing Goals, which are being advocated to replace the Sustainable Development Goals.

Hmm. So again, I'll start with my most simple definition I use for regenerative. It's creating positive feedback loops. And it's very not sexy. It's very much systems diagramming, causal mapping. Where are the inflows? Where are the outflows? What's amplifying? What's degrading? And just We embrace complexity, me and my partners. We don't want a diagram with 4 loops on it. We want a diagram with like 3,000 loops on it. And we're so excited to have tools that can help us manage all that because then we can start to, you know, again, I came up in this world. I remember the early conversations about defining materiality. I remember Nike getting called out for, hey, we don't have any footprint at all. And you're just like, yeah, you do. You just outsourced it. It's like, materially speaking, that's what we want to look at. But you can't know what's material until you map it. And it's never going to be perfect. Perfect, you know, that old saying, enemy of— is the enemy of done. Um, but if you don't think about things as stop and, uh, start and stop, but you think about it as everything is loopy and you start and you map it and you start in the most material part of the system and you make that system work without waste or where the things are amplifying each other and there's this mutual benefit exchange and then you expand it. And then you address the next layer and the next layer. It's complex. It is endless. It is loopy. And but that's— I feel like sometimes I feel like since the industrial age, we've been sold this story that things are linear. And if we just look around us, absolutely nothing in nature is linear. And so the more we try to make things linear or static or one and done, further away from achieving our goals we're going to be. So if we can all start embracing The loopiness. We actually, do we have one of those? So one of our sayings from the book is say it ugly, which if you've been listening to me for an hour and a half, that's kind of how I roll. Oh yeah, innovation is loopy. So, and then the last one of them is embrace the dilemma. You got to run toward it, right? Like, can't just stick your head in the sand and hide from the dilemma. You got to run toward it and figure it out, or somebody else will, and they may not have your values.

There you go. Thanks, Joanne. Speaking of loopy, let's go to Shel and Brian. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm really glad to hear that it is possible to design a green and compact and regenerative data center. But Joanne, there are really two pieces of the opposition to data centers as I see them. One is the huge environmental impact, and you're addressing that one very nicely. But the other one is the application. How are we using the data? What data is it? How trustable is it? If it's— I mean, you hinted at something that I take for granted, which is that certain AI programs are liars, or misleaders. And there are huge privacy concerns, especially in an era where the government is weaponizing what little science they're allowing to remain in the service of privacy invasion and locking up enemies, etc. So could you talk a little bit about that piece, perhaps?

Yeah, I think, um, you know, there's only so much that's in our control as mere citizens. Um, so we have to exercise what influence we have in the people we vote for, the people we support. I am outwardly always critical of Meta. I don't own Meta stock. I don't use Meta products. I don't believe I was genuinely surprised that they made a good decision about gas turbines. But that's my value set, right? I tried my best to live consistently with my values, and I try to support both industry and government that aligns with my own values. I actually started in 2012. I built a platform for investing with your values, which today we take for granted. But in 2012, nobody was offering anything. And I was like, but I just sold a company and now I actually have money. I don't want to put it in that. So it's, it's actually really hard work though. Think about it. One of the conundrums that came up in that work. All right. You're pressed to choose between a company that invests to have women and good diversity representation at the executive level, but they have a terrible water footprint. What's more important? Oh, I don't know, right? Like, how do you— I think the humans, but without water, we're screwed. Shit, right? Like, there's all these things, these compromises, and It's not easy, but if we can just like, honestly, I would have invested in the diversity and the women because they would have gotten involved and said, we need a better water footprint. So I would have looked at the causations, right? The causal chain. So that's to say, like, I'm super proud of Anthropic for saying no to the now what's called Department of War. Which in itself is infuriating, um, to me. I am not happy that Anthropic then went and contracted from Colossus for their Texas data center that is all powered by mobile gas turbines. I'm like, come on, guys, you're the only ones. You can't be evil.

Well, they maybe need to hear from you, Joanne.

What's that?

Anthropic maybe needs to hear from you.

Yeah, it's, it's, um, but this is why I am shouting as much as I can from the platform I have. I accept the fact that I'm not a world leader and I'm not in the room with them, but if I can use my previous role at Microsoft to share the solutions to give them better choices and options, then I'm gonna do it. That's my job.

Yeah, I don't accept that fact, Joanne. I want to get you into some other rooms, but we'll talk about that. Shel, thanks for your question.

I'm a troublemaker. I get thrown out of rooms.

Well, this is a gang of troublemakers here. One of the common threads here.

Uh, uh, Monica, just finish one point for Shel because I don't think I gave a very satisfactory answer other than We have to make the best, best of it, and not participating is not going to help. Like we said that in investing all the time, if we leave the table, then we have no voice. We've got to stay in it and we got to make our voices heard.

Great.

Thanks.

Thanks, Monica, Brian, and George.

Thank you, Gil. I am always so happy when I join these calls. I'm so sorry my camera isn't working right now, so forgive me for that. But I think I'm just nodding my head and like, uh-huh, laughing and just learning so much from this call. So thank you so much, Joanne. And to be succinct, who do I quote for say it ugly, embrace the dilemma? And everything is loopy because I want to send that out into the world. Yes, those are mine and my co-author. And this is a book. All the proceeds go to STEAM education, not just STEM, but the arts as well, because without art and philosophy and music, we're screwed. So the Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft. It also, like, literally, this is the handbook of how I do what I do. So if you want to know how I do it and then also read how we saw it show up or not in Microsoft, this is the book and it's for a good cause. Thank you so much. And I also wanted to say that I'm excited to read, uh, Rick's, um, paper, um, that he's linked in the chat. Um, so, um, um, hasn't seen that yet, please check out Rick Botello's Sorry if I said that wrong, um, paper that's in the chat. Thank you. Very cool. Thanks for that call out.

Hi, Brian. Welcome. Gil, thank you. Uh, Joanne, I really appreciate your message. I want to reinforce the biological message. I'm just in from the University of Chicago Climate Engineering Initiative Symposium from yesterday, um, that was held in Chicago., and they had all sorts of things to say about stratospheric aerosols and other approaches, but were absolutely glaringly absent was the role of biosphere and bioregions on climate. And this is just a deaf ear, I'm sad to say, because my PhD is in engineering, and I, I, it just strikes me that it's with great hubris that people are going forward ignoring or discounting, actually, the pivotal role that life has to do with shaping the climate of our planet. And I just appreciate your saying that all engineers need a good training in biology because we're fighting an uphill battle right now. I mean, I'm shocked actually at the lack of insight in that regard.

Yeah, it is interesting how somewhere along the way we just started pretending that everything outside the boundary of the problem we draw is irrelevant, um, and dead.

I think some of the folks have been living in cities too long. You know, if you live in the city, you don't connect enough with nature? I'm still trying to figure it out, but it is a mechanistic view of the universe that I think has to change. Well, you know why? People still think that precipitation brings forth vegetation when in fact vegetation generates precipitation. You said it right there. Thank you, Gil. And everything, everything pivots once you start to see that. Exactly.

You know what's cool though? If we look through history, and this is, there's a woman I learned about through Rita McGrath. There's a woman, Carla Perez, who wrote about the techno-economic shifts that have happened throughout history. And when a technology is disruptive enough, it can actually create a new method of economy. The Industrial Age started by basically one guy named Richard Arkwright created the factory. Nobody— everybody worked in guilds and things before that, but he figured out how to bring everybody together on on the same timetable and schedule things. And that rolled into what we know and love and hate today. That gave us GDP. Yay. The most pointless measure of nothing now as we don't produce all that much.

I have to add just one thing.

Whose inventor cautioned us to not use GDP for what we use it for?

Yes.

Yeah, we're actually working on improved measures of social capital and environmental capital. Based on a number of developments, including assembly theory, Fristian free energy, and believe it or not, Shannon communications.

Well, we should chat because my group's very interested in new metrics. Great. But the good news is from Carla Perez is, and Rita speaks about this really elegantly, if you haven't attended Thought Sparks, You should look her up. She's one of the smartest people I've ever known. Um, we're in one of those inflection points, and if the decisions we make will be whether it's just more of the same economy we've been learning to hate for decades now, or we use this to bring about the new economy. And I, for one, am trying my best to do what I know how to do to bring about that new economy that is mutually beneficial for everyone, no matter where they are in the world, right? Because my mutual benefit here in Seattle is going to be very different from pretty much anybody anywhere else in the world.

That's great. I'd love to follow up on metrics. And thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Brian. George will be the last one. Go ahead. No pressure. First of all, to say that the first factory is Arkwright doesn't really make sense. If you go back to the Warring States period for the Chinese, they were manufacturing in production lines automatic crossbows in the 3rd or 4th century AD. Wow.

You know, so, so there's a lot of history that we're not paying attention to because maybe it's just the first one that kind of expanded through Western North America.

Yeah, exactly. Um, I put in the, in the chat, um, I was wondering if you talked to Kevin O'Leary, who is doing Shark Tank, dude. Yeah, he's doing this huge data center in Utah.

9 gigawatts. What a disaster.

And he brags about having a degree in environmental science as an undergraduate.

Yeah.

And to pick up on that, you talked about working with Danish farmers who were against the data center, and then you worked with them and then things changed. I was wondering, you may not be the person to do this, but to take your data centers for the future and, and show it to the people who are around the country and around the world looking at the data centers that are being built today and say, hey, here's an alternative.

Oh, yeah.

As a political movement. And are you doing that? Are there people who are doing that? Is that happening?

I am. I am. I frequently email individual congressmen, senators, governors, mayors. Particularly mayors. When I hear about grumblies in a specific place in the world, I find out who the city council or town council is, and I— they get a random email from Joanne Garvin saying, you know, there's another way to do this, and if you ask for it, you'll get it. So I'm doing what I can from that standpoint. I'm And coming here with you all is part of that. It's how do we— I'm, I'm putting out publicly the materials that I can right now. I'm— I can't tell all the how, but there's so much of it that is public already. I'm just gathering the public stuff and packaging it up, encouraging people to go, hey, if you hear a rumbling, send this to the mayor. Tell them Joanne gave it to you. Like, tell them to call me if they have questions. And I'm not like— I'm talking to people all over the world, um, and I have seen in the last year a lot more people call me. I probably get a few dozen email and/or phone calls a week from all walks of everything, from solution providers all the way through energy companies and not so many of the data center companies. And I can tell you why if you're interested.

Yet, yet. Yes. Well, let me— I would suspect that there, there is a group forming which is, uh, against data centers.

Oh, absolutely.

And you're talking with those people as well?

I am not. I am trying to encourage them to take the yes if. I am talking to the people who are actually going to be pressed to have the discussions and make the decisions because that's just more efficient for me as somebody that's also trying to invent and innovate.

It, it, it makes sense, and it would be great if some of the no data centers people could hear from from you and hear about Yes If as an option. I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking in fact about AOC and Bernie Sanders and others and a political alignment that's forming that's not informed enough.

I've emailed them.

About what the options are. So I would invite anybody on this call who can either share Joanne's material with folks you know, or if you have an access point to get her in the room with some of those folks, whether the data center no people or the political people, or the data center builder people to get this story of what's possible and what the yes-if conversation could look like. That would be big leverage from the few dozen people here.

Yep. Somebody put in, how about starting at the community level? Absolutely. That's, that's why I like talking to mayors. This is a global problem that is super hyperlocal. Yeah. So And you've gotta connect with the people that are actually in the room being approached by all the hyperscalers and the co-locators. And you gotta empower them to have the conversation where they create mutual benefit. Yep.

And this is really essential because in this, in this landscape, just saying no data centers isn't a sufficient strategy. There's too big, powerful, and too big, too powerful and too much and too much momentum. And like you said, the tech technological inflection point that, you know, AI ain't going away anytime soon. So the question isn't just data centers and no data centers, it's data centers if, data centers how, where, and in what way. And I love what you said, Joanne, about it being global and hyperlocal because the decisions, the zoning decisions, the water allocation decisions and so forth are inevitably local. We see that in the very high percentage of ice warehouses that are being stopped. Yeah, that's something that could be stopped. Data centers have to be steered, and this is one of the critical elements of steerage of that into a better way of playing.

Data centers are our new utility, and at some point, maybe it gets to a point where they need to be nationalized, regulated at somewhere, you know, kind of like we have with our transmission lines. We're not there yet. I wouldn't want our current government being in charge of who gets what in the the digital world. But for now, the best thing to do is to show up informed about what the better options are and represent your community and help the community next door to you do the same thing.

Because as Ken Boulding said years ago, if it exists, it's possible.

Absolutely. And what my team always says is If we can think of it, it's possible. I have yet to come up with an idea so crazy I couldn't actually figure out how to build it eventually.

Maybe not being crazy enough yet.

I keep trying.

Very likely. Joanne, this has been a pleasure. Any, any last words for the group here?

You know, I talk to a lot of people around the world at a lot of different levels of the world, and there is far more good happening than bad. Yeah. And I think the most important thing is us all holding on to our positive view. It's not just about creating positive, it's about being positive. And doing the work. Yeah, like if it's important to you, do the work.

Yeah, yeah. You know, on the, on the more good than bad, I've, I, I wrote recently after San Francisco Climate Week that for all the bad in the world, and there's plenty, I'm actually thrilled at the momentum that I'm seeing, the innovation that I'm seeing, the resistance and creativity that I'm seeing across the planet. Uh, it's just, you know, and, and it's not the piece that the mainstream media likes to focus on, but it's, it's there if you look. And I'm really grateful to you, Joanne, for the work that you do and for the handholds that you've given us for, for this journey. Some of the things that stood out in my mind from this conversation is designing from the outside in, as you said. Um, Satya's, uh, challenge to are you creating a surplus at each unit of value, at each unit of scale, the first unit scale. Um, um, you define regeneration as positive feedback loops and going loopy in many loops and sort of building out to have a more inclusive wrapper around the loops that make sense in the decisions we're making. And, and fundamentally, as you said, to make the better choice easier. Yeah, we've always thought in the work we've done with corporates that if we can make stuff easier, more profitable, and fun then we get adoption. Yeah. And if we don't, then we don't.

The biomimics will tell you you can't change behavior, you can only change context. So if you make it fun and attractive and, and, and, that changes the context.

And, and, and. Yep. So thank, thank you again. Thank you all for being here today. Uh, we don't have our closing music, but I'm going to remind you, as I Stu.

You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye. You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye.