Living Between Worlds 3.10: Prediction Addiction, Premature Surrender, and The Work At Hand

Foreign. Welcome. This is November 16, 2022. This is the 25th in our monthly series of calls about living between worlds with dignity and grace and power. There's lots we could discuss this month. The elections, COP27, market meltdowns, platform meltdowns. But let's talk about us. Let's talk about listening and mood and care. Since these last months of all the things I described have really been about living between worlds, that, you know, that title that we declare for this series seems very apt as events unfold. You know, I have a dear friend who's been very up and down with the news. You know, how are you doing? If the news is good, she's doing great, and if the news is bad, she's doing terrible. Sort of like absorbed in what the buffeting that the media delivers to her is. And me not so much. Much more even keel paying attention to the same events, but reacting very differently. Last Wednesday, as the it became clear that the pink wave was that the red wave was showing up as a pink trickle. As it was as it became clear that the red wave was showing up as a pink trickle, she applauded me for my optimism. And I said, no, it's not optimism. It's not. It's just that I'm not jumping to conclusions based on partial data, partial in both senses of the world in deeply uncertain times. I'm just not cultivating a mood of serenity and less reactivity in the face of all the buffeting. You know, we've, we've, we've talked some before, I think about moods and interpretations, that we are all of us living in interpretations all the time, and that our interpretations and our moods are tangled together. One informs the other, gives rise to the other, constrains the other. So I've learned from my friend and teacher, Fernando Flores, that it's worth noticing moods and interrogating them and looking for, asking what's the assessment behind the mood in me and other people that I'm talking with and what opens up from that possibility? And this, I think, is indicative of what I've called prediction addiction and premature surrender that has filled the political dialogue these last months. Some of you may have seen the piece that I published this last week. You can find it on LinkedIn and Medium. I'll post a link a little later about prediction addiction and premature surrender and the task at hand. We're in this game, we're in this media game where everybody has to have some idea about what's going to happen next and what everything means and what will happen next. And if you're a professional pundit, you have to have an opinion. You cannot have dead air. You can change your opinion anytime you want. You don't have to reference your prior ones. You don't have to be accountable for your prior predictions. You just can pontificate. And we've all learned that from those people that we are immersed in. And, You know, we saw another example of it in the last couple of days, some explosions in Poland. And the Twitter sphere is awash with people saying, it was the Russians, we should bomb them. It was the Russians, we better not get into a war with them. Takes a day for it to sort out. And it turns out it wasn't the Russians. It was a stray Ukrainian missile. But everybody was dead sure on what happened and what needed to be done. And it's an invitation for a little humility and how we engage the complexity of the world. We saw another version of it around the election. So I can't tell you how many progressives I know, not just the general population, but even progressives who were saying two or three weeks ago, we are doomed. It's going to be a red wave. We're going to be swamped. Trump's going to run again. It's going to be fascism in the United States. It's all over. And it's fine to be freaked out about risks that you see on the landscape, but some people took that in the direction of I'm not even going to bother to vote because it's all over. And the only reason we got a pink trickle instead of a red wave is because people did vote. And people spent count, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people spent countless hours on the phone and on the block and walking and texting and driving that outcome. Some people have observed the critical role of Gen X in this election and not to diminish it, substantial majorities for Democrat candidates. Gen X women, 70 plus percent. Stunning and deeply important. And Gen Y. Ken, thank you. And yet the turnout for Gen X is south of 30%. What happens when Gen X starts voting in serious numbers? There's a very different kind of future, if you can imagine Gen x voting at 50% than at 30 or less. So it seems there's a huge challenge here, it seems to me where on the one hand, we need to fight like hell for the things that we care about. We've done a good job this election cycle with regard to Roe v. Wade, with regard to voting rights, election reform and so forth. On balance, pretty good. But this country is still clearly deeply polarized. The margins are very thin. And so it seems the other challenge is to find bridges to small and hopefully growing pieces of common ground. Where are the places where we can find common purpose, common agreement, declare common cares? You know, it's notable that for as long as I've been watching the polls, and I'm not going to get into my anti poll rant this time, but as long as I've been watching the polls, there have been super majorities on the issues that the folks gathered here tend to care about, super majorities across the political spectrum, and yet that's not reflected in our body politics. So it seems that at the same time that we have bitter battles being fought out, we have common cares and concerns deeply in this fragmented society. And I would argue around the world, and I want to be clear, I'm using the word cares and concerns interchangeably. And Ken and I discussed this before the call. I want to make a point here. Typically when we talk about concerns, people think about worries. We're using in the sense of the things that matter to us, the things that we care about, because ultimately, as human beings, we will take care of the things that we care about. And where we can find out that we care about the same thing, we can have common purpose in taking care of the things that we care about. But there's that challenge. We have to both do that and fight like hell to preserve Roe, defend climate, and so forth. We all of us care. We have cares that are temporal and personal, that are permanent and universal. Ken, do you want to say a word about that?

No, I think you're doing fine, Gil. I'll let you just go on.

Well, thank you, sir. I think, I think I may have shared with, with you before that. In the first Trump term, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who is a conservative Republican. Okay. Different from me, economist, very different from me, supply side economist. Very, very different from me Trump voter. Holy mackerel. But mutual friend. We got together and discovered that we really liked each other and we learned from each other. And his views on climate and my views on markets started to shift. Not like being persuaded, but like being informed and enriched and being able to have a conversation at a different level. And I will say with, you know, with no hesitation that we love each other deeply. And for me, that holds out a little glimpse of a possibility of something that could, you know, that could possibly emerge here. How do we, you know, how do we both fight and come together? How do we learn to have conversations with people who are different than ourselves, I'll go out on a limb. What if we weren't trying to convince each other to change each other's minds, but to have conversations in which we create new possibilities together? What might that look like? And that, as far as I can tell, comes down a lot. Not just to talking to people who are different than us, but listening to people who are different than us, listening to their cares, learning to hear what they actually care about. My friend Peter Yakovsky said in a call earlier this morning, learning to listen for perspectives, not truth or answers or decisions, but to really hear where someone is coming from and what in their world has given rise to that perspective that leads them to interpret the world the way they do and to live in the moods that they do, which is a very different kind of conversation than you're for this and I'm for that. We're going to fight time for both of those. This isn't easy to do. Understanding what someone else cares about is not a simple matter, and there's neurological challenges to that. Ken, I'm going to toss this one to you because you had an interesting reference on that yesterday.

Give me a little more context, because I was actually thinking of something else.

I wanted to say you had talked about. How about the evidence of that? It's very hard to know what someone else is really thinking.

Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. I'm reading a book called the Secret Life of the Brain. How Emotions Are Made. And I'm sorry, I don't have the author's name immediately on my tip of my tongue. It's a woman, and she's a neuroscientist. And she begins by dismissing or actually refuting very convincingly the idea that there are universal emotions. And when you see someone's face, you can tell that's an expression of anger or that's an expression of fear or surprise. Because that turns out when you really look at it carefully, that's. That's not the way it looks. Your nervous system might be in shock or surprise or anger and have a very different look on your face than my nervous system in chakra. Surprise or anger. There's no individual fingerprints, so we often make mistakes. When we see someone's face, we make the assumption we know what their emotion is. Instead of saying, you look shocked. Are you okay? You look surprised. You know what's going on. So the hint here is don't assume. Always check in. Always ask what's actually going on for you.

Yeah.

And there's, you know, there's there's, there's research, research that shows that the, the physiological states associated with, with fear and excitement are the same. What's going on in your body is the same. Whether you call it fear or excitement has to do with your interpretation, has to do with your training. And, you know, an athlete going into an event, a musician or speaker going on stage doing something for the first time. Some people are terrified, some people are thrilled. The difference is not in the physiology. It lives somewhere else. So I see there's lots of comments in the chat. What's this provoking for you all? We'll do some discussion in the round. I think about 10 minutes, Ken, and then we'll go into breakouts.

Yeah, I'd like to, I would like to add one quick story. Many years ago, I was asked to bring together a group of business people and peace activists. This was right after George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier with mission accomplished for the Iraq war. And it was a very hostile group, very challenging group. I didn't want to do it, but I was finally convinced to do so. So I said, you know, this is Jennifer, our graphic recorder. She's going to capture the output of today's conversation. Immediately somebody said, captures war language. You can't use war language. And I was like, okay, so what would you use instead? And I knew that it was going to be very challenging to get these people to talk to each other because they were all focused on their perspective. And so what I asked them to do in small groups was to think back to the first time they realized that peace was important to them. And after a couple of rounds of telling their stories of the first time, that they actually had a real hard recognition of peace is important. There were no longer peace activists and business people in that room. There were people engaged in the process of inquiring to what it takes to create a peaceful environment for ourselves and a peaceful society. So I think a lot of times we get, we look at the Medusa and we turn to stone like, oh, my God, it's a Trump voter. What do I do? Instead of saying, what do you care about? Why are you supporting this man? Why do you have this position? I'd like to understand. I don't want to try and refute it. I just want to know, how is it showing up for you as a care. So that's another little trim tab of if we want to have these conversations with people to come from a place of genuine humility and curiosity, not a place of I know better than you and I'M going to tell you how it needs to be and try to persuade you, because that's not going to work. That's going to backfire over time.

And how wild that gets that in 2016, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders heard the same cares in the American population in a way very different than Hillary Clinton and some bunch of other people did. You couldn't, in one way, you couldn't imagine people more diametrically opposed than those two men. And yet. So what's this provoke for you, folks?

Good to see you. And everybody else, two, two quick things I'm still sort of spinning in from having seen. There's a writer and a poet. His name is Ross Gay. I don't know if any of you know his work, but how delicious a talk. We, we saw him at the bookstore last night, and it was just this business of being able to take, you know, these are my words, this is my sort of extrapolation. But, but to take something like a word like pessimism, joy and delight and have them all live together and somehow or another. Gill and Ken, the thing that was raised or roused in me was this idea about being able to hold those kinds of things, which normally we, we have a feeling that they don't go.

Together.

But it was just delightful to be able to say. Somebody asked in the audience last night, my teenage son is not hopeful. And he got really quiet and he looked back at this woman and he said, how could he be? Now, that's not the answer that you expect. And he went on to talk about nuances and holding things and, and having some things not preclude others, just like I was saying. So that's, that's one thing that I'm still spinning from. Second thing, Gil, you, you remind me, I, I received on, on LinkedIn, which I've been fairly active on in the last while, and I put a note about Spanish students in Barcelona did a weak strike, and they now have insisted that the university create an ecology course that every student will take. And I saw that and I was like, wow, you know, how cool is that? And so I put a little note that I didn't, I didn't think was that, you know, effusive or over the top. But I put a little note on LinkedIn and what came back was a lot of people said, yeah, that's wonderful, and, you know, the sort of tribal things. And then there were some other people that said things like, oh, those kids are going to turn into, you know, it's nihilism. And it's you know, it's it. So I was trolled pretty. Not heavily, but I was trolled. And I realized from my days in Aikido that if you put any English on a move, if you put any extra zip on a move, if you guys know what I'm talking about in a, in a martial arts context, you, you could take somebody that was. Didn't have fight in them, and you could put fight in them by how you, you touch their body. And so I, I have to really start looking at. Even though, I think, you know, my, my comments on LinkedIn are fairly neutral, I think I'm putting some English on and it's provoking some people to, to, to, you know, and even my saying troll, that's. There's judgment. So anyway, I'll end there.

But Dale, maybe. Maybe you're putting English on your comments. Maybe. Yeah, they're coming in with English in their ears.

Totally.

Or both. Or neither. I mean, still, it's still worth having a look like, you know, what did I do here? What can I learn from this? But, you know, it ain't all on you any more than it's all on now. Yeah.

That'S a great point that somebody shows up with, with, you know, with fight. They're with fight from the get go.

Not somebody, man. All of us. All of us, yeah, necessarily fight from the get go. But we're all showing up with our histories. We can't not do that. And so again, it's an opportunity. Just kind of step back and notice what's going on here. George, greetings.

Hi, how are you doing? Over the last couple of years, I've developed the practice of not being railroaded. So when the news comes in.

George, can you mic up a little bit?

When the news comes in, I wait. So I don't get exercise. A missile falls in Poland because I don't know what the situation is. I don't know what the situation is in the Ukraine. In Ukraine, I don't know what the situation is in Russia. I withhold judgment until I actually have some facts on the ground and the story really makes sense. I refuse to get exercise. I refuse to get railroaded. I refuse to get excited because somebody wants me to be excited. And I just wait for the information to come in for me to make up my mind to understand what's actually going on as best I can, recognizing, of course, that I have my own blind spot. But I'm not going to rush to judgment anymore.

Yeah, thank you for that. You know, if you look at emts or firefighters or surgeons or pilots in an airliner whose engines are going out. These people don't rush. They don't go into frenzy and agitation and extreme action. They stop and they think. The airline pilot goes into or asks the co pilot to go into a large notebook and find the right page that reflects the situation and look at a logic tree of what to do, which to the layperson sounds like an insane delay, but has clear impact on the survivability of that crisis being face of extreme potential agitation. Yeah.

Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright and actress, made the same comment. She was at the big military hospital in Germany.

Yeah.

And observing. And she was saying, oh, you know, I've been in hospital dramas and everybody's walking and talking and there's all this excitement. And she said the urgency from the, from the real EMTs and doctors and nurses doesn't come across as. As being busy and excited. It comes across as focus.

Yeah.

And I thought that was really good, really useful.

Thank you.

George Christopher. Christophe, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

You're muted.

Thank you for having me. Hi, yeah, it's Christophe. So I was reflecting on what you said, and I think it's like this major disconnect is because people don't talk or don't listen to each other. There is those, like, kind of two worlds that, like, exist in parallel and they. They don't connect, or they only fight when they connect. Like, would there be a way to create dialogue? Like, I was thinking about what you said between the activists and the business people. Like, how could we get those people together into the dialogue so we can start to break those two worlds and then make them understand each other, but, like, do this at scale, because that's literally what America needs. Like, you have, like, like 100 million people on each side and they just. They just cannot connect. So I'm. I was wondering, like, could that be, like, is there something we could do to connect people in a. At a deeper level so they can talk and understand each other? So that's my thought.

America's even funnier than that. We have, like, 70 million people on each side and 120 million people who don't vote.

Yeah.

So there's that, too. But to your point. Yes, very much. We can do that. We. And, and we are doing that. People are doing that sort of thing. It's not what you see on the headline news, but with groups ranging from living room dialogues to the deep canvassing work that someone posted in the chat before, we are seeing this emerging in the political landscape. And to me it's a very rich territory. We can do this because we're doing it. We can do it in large organized masses and maybe we can do that in our own lives in some kind of way.

Yeah, I agree. And they like to your comment on.

The trolls.

Maybe it's an opportunity for you to reach out to them also and just start to create this dialogue. Like clearly they are engaging, like maybe there is something to do and connect with them. I don't know. Just an idea.

Thank you, Christophe. Mitch, please.

So I'm reflecting on the Russian doll of context that you have to take apart to try to understand everything we're talking about. Because we're talking about on the one hand, the media, which is a vast and constantly evolving environment which is primarily attention hungry. And then there's how each of us interact with one another. And I'm old enough to have been a print journalist and then a video journalist and then a streaming journalist. And now I try just not to say a damn thing until I have all the facts. None of the journalistic enterprises that I have influence over do real time news anymore. We take the time to do, to do the reflection. And I've also been really fortunate to spend about two hours with William Uri, who is the author of Getting to Yes, just in the past couple of weeks. And he talked about of all things, the conflict between North Korea and Donald Trump or between Kim and Donald Trump. And they mediated, his team mediated the relationship that allowed them to not fire missiles at one another. And they started off by first stepping back and writing each of the participants Trump and Kim's victory speech, which required them to really take into account not just the context in which the meeting might happen, the conflict was taking place, but understanding their intentions, their motivations, their drives, and most particularly their need to save face, which is absolutely ignored by the media. The media is all about say it and live with it. We, we don't live in an environment where our media is responsible and contributing to our ability to think. It is simply filling our heads with noise. And I don't know how to stop that other than to do what I'm doing incrementally, but with the, the companies that I can influence. But if there's a practice that could be propagated of reflection before speaking, which would require an entirely new social more that potentially is a way out of the conflict that we find ourselves immersed in by other people covering positions rather than reflecting a broad based reflective reality. I don't think I was as articulate.

As I would like worked for me. And it's one of the reasons that we're trying to just sort of slow the pace of this conversation down a little bit from, you know, one person.

To the next to allow for a.

Moment of reflection before speaking. You're also welcome if you get called on to, you know, to take some moments in silence before you speak, if you'd like to do that. Carolyn, welcome.

Thank you. So, two responses. One is sometimes we don't need to talk anymore. Sometimes if we have a shared task. It's amazing how having to put sandbags along the riverbank together does wonders for building community and moving. Some of the more, The more abstract conflicts aside, I was an election official this past election in a very, very red precinct that I think went for the Republicans 99%. And the captain, the chair of that particular precinct, wrote to me afterwards and said, I would love to work with you again, anytime, any place. And we had all brought food, we had a potluck. It's a very long day and difficult. And our shared task made the Republicans and the rare Democrats have a common purpose. And it was a lovely thing. The only thing I want to follow up about saving face is my organization has two bylaws that aren't often spoken. One is that original conflict, conflict between other people stays with the original parties. We don't bring it to our group. And the other is you have a moral obligation to pass on compliments. And I have found that passing on compliments is, is an astonishing thing to happen. And I once had two very big name academics who hated each other. And one of the academics said about the other, well, at least he does good footnotes. And I passed that comment on. I said, you'll never believe what he said about you. He said, you just do these fabulous footnotes. And the guy said, he said that? I said, he did. And you know how much information you convey in those footnotes. What an amazing thing. And I just found that compliments are one of the great things. And on my Twitter account, I'm just astonished at how so many of the climate people, the great writers that I'm part of on Twitter or I'm not, I'm one of the adoring fans.

By.

Elevating them and celebrating together completely changes how someone can feel about themselves within a group as a public presence. I just want to say how much setting aside our own anxiety and our own ego needs in the moment and just celebrating someone else's good fortune, someone else's remarkable skill, however big or Small can shift some of those. Those conflicts in. In ways that we may never know.

Beautiful. Thank you.

Yes. We do a couple of breakout rooms.

Let's do that.

Okay. So we'd like to offer you a chance to go a little bit deeper with a smaller group on this. Going to set up some breakout rooms. First round question is how do you listen for cares and concerns? How do you listen for cares and concerns? Welcome back. I hope you had a good conversation. I know what often happens is you just get into something juicy and the time is up. So we're going to do another 15 minutes and we'll come back and have about 20 minutes this round. We'll have about 15 minutes in plenary at the end. And the question this time around is whose cares and concerns are you listening to? Welcome back. Gil, you have a harvest question here for folks. You just want to ask them to say whatever's on their mind.

What was unexpected, illuminating, opening for you in those conversations?

Okay, I see Jan has his hand raised. Jan?

Yeah. Forgive me. I'm not presentable, so I'm just giving you my Bentley College IBM colloquial picture. But I actually am embarrassed because I hit the wrong button just as Mitch was saying something profound about dealing with the media bias and the disconnect on what's important in reporting. And Mitch, would you be willing to just share, you were saying you founded a company that was addressing that issue. Would you be willing to just say a little bit?

Oh, yeah, this was actually. It was a nonprofit effort back in the early 2000s, right. When blogging started, called correspondences.org and what we were trying to do is figure out how to do local coverage. So we engaged high school and to lesser extent, college journalism programs and offered them a place to publish. And so we were getting articles from all over the country that covered local issues, sometimes just what was going on inside a high school. But more often than not, they broadened their perspective because we asked them to think about their community. And it wasn't an enduring effort, but it was instructive to think about the problem of.

Of.

How to source local perspective at a time in which global or national context overwhelms most of the information we see.

Right.

And I think you said that partially out of my statement that I'm feeling tremendously hopeful being on the ground here in Sonoma county, watching the things that are happening in the faith communities and other parts of the county on the. On the grassroots level that are basically never mentioned, never seen in the media. Maybe the local free, you Know Bohemian or the, or the west county newspaper. You know, they just had like five local heroes, but there are hundreds and hundreds of these local heroes around. And I think I was just saying that I'm actually very hopeful seeing things on the ground that are completely disconnected from the media mass perceptual monopoly that skews us toward what's bad.

Well.

And also skews us towards what gets the most clicks versus what's the most substantive information.

Right, right. Anyway, thank you, Mitch.

Excellent. Anybody else? What does this conversation provoke for you?

Well, I, I think that I, I've learned that I'm not. I mean, I reflected on how few strangers I've really spoken to and under what circumstances in the last, you know, two and a half years. And I'm an outgoing chatty person and, and I have to listen to myself about whether I'm actually listening to the other person and. But I, I just don't have as many people who are like genuinely, Genuinely likely to be different in multiple unexpected dimensions for me. So.

And you're saying more so since COVID but was assaulted beforehand.

And I'm someone who likes to chat with people and ever since the crime rates went down, a great deal feels a lot safer in chatting with people because I grew up in a pretty rough environment. So crime really affects my willingness to engage in public space and the perception of crime. So I guess your question made me realize like, wow, I'm interacting with people through media and they're not that different from me.

Yeah, thanks David. Christophe.

Hi.

So talking to David quite a bit during those two sessions like, and he brought up something very interesting that politics.

Is.

Usually played in a very short term, like just a few months, weeks before the election. Everybody gets excited and there's a lot happening. But he was working with people more in the long run and people is looking to run in the next term, in two years and trying to see how we can support them in the long run. I thought it was very insightful that, that there is also a long term politic where we only think about like shifting people at the last minute very often, like just the media drives us towards that. But there is, there is also a long game to at play here that's, that's interesting to play. So that's, that's where we are going. That I thought was very insightful.

Thank you, Stuart. And then Alistair.

Yeah, it was interesting that the four.

Of us that included George and Jane and dawn, we all seemed to be listening through a species perspective. That was the filter that everybody was using to listen to what's going on in mass media, what's going on in the world today.

Alstair.

Yes. So this is a bit of a half baked reflection, but yeah, basically there's when we're speaking, you know, about, I don't know, climate change or Ukraine or some other issue. There's also, we also have of course, like you said, cares and concerns, you know, and emotional stuff going on and don't have good ways of talking about it, especially in our culture, you know, so we might need to, it's easy to get distracted by whatever someone is saying about climate change or Ukraine or whatever and ignore the, I know the emotional aspect of that. So we might need to specifically, I don't say ignore, you know, the points that someone is making about climate change or whatever, but you need to specifically focus, you know, on someone's emotions. Otherwise it's so easy to get distracted or triggered by the points that I'm making. Yeah.

Thank you.

That's all. Thanks.

Jan. I see you still your hand up. Is that from before or did you want to speak again?

Yeah, I wanted to say that I think that first of all, Alistair, I really like what you just said there about, about how it's so easy to kind of go with the content and that just gives me a cue of kind of not doing that immediate like mental exchange but just pausing for a moment and thinking how could I bring a reflective, you know, bring the visceral into, into, into the conversation. So thank you. Just wanted to mention in the vein of long term approaches to politics that one thing that I think is very positive and I think one of the reasons that I'm, I feel so optimistic about the grassroots of this country and what's going on that's invisible in the media sphere is because I've been very involved in the community leadership movement and actually held 110 focus groups with 2,000 leaders, which is about half percent. Well, it's 0.4% of the population of Santa Barbara county over a three and a half year period and created a school of collaborative civic leadership called Leadership Santa Barbara County. Elitesb.org is the URL. It ran for 32 years, seven years with an all Spanish language program running parallel. And we now have almost 1,000 graduates in Santa Barbara county who've been through this community leadership program. That is the curriculum is delivered by the participants and the community has done almost 400 additional focus groups since Delia and I stepped down after year three. And the community leadership movement is a movement of helping to build broad based leaders who can then participate in the political sphere and in the civic sphere with a broader point of view. And so if any of you are in cities or towns of any size, pretty much every community has these community leadership programs that are usually out of the chamber of commerce or one of the local industry associations. But there's a fantastic body of alumni in these programs now that have been going since some of them, since the 60s. That's much more long term civic education, broad based process stuff. And it's, it's throughout the United States there are thousands and thousands of these programs around. Just throw that out as something very positive that's broad based and inclusive. And interestingly, the programs that are used to build an individual's power base usually fail and either go away completely or they stop and then the alumni start them back up as a truly inclusive process. So anyway, I just want to throw that out as something, many, many things in our society that are very hopeful and positive that are invisible in the media sphere.

Very inspiring. Thank you, Ken.

Yeah, I have a friend who will often say, you know, I haven't spoken on this before, so I'm really interested to see what I'm going to say. And in, in being in these breakout sessions, I realized I.