All right, please talk about persuasive systems or are or not. Yeah, so systems generally fall into what I call the high ground maneuver. So the high ground maneuver in persuasion is something that takes you out of the weeds of the details and brings you to a level where everybody in the discussion says okay that makes sense. And you saw me do that right in front of you. So if you said is single-payer good or bad, is this particular change to healthcare good or bad, is this changing this rule or this regulation, would that be good or bad? The weeds is yes or no or what's the trade-off. The higher level is we don't know, let's run a test. So the brother test is always the high ground. It would be unusual to come up with an example argument, it's hard to think of one, in which it's better to start big before you've tested it small. And everybody recognizes that, right? Everybody's sense of the world, their common sense if you want to call it that, is going to recognize that testing small before you go big just makes sense.

We have tested communism. Well nobody's suggesting communism. How does that play into improved immigration system versus the wall? So the wall is exactly the same situation as this. We are currently in the process of replacing some parts of the existing border with better walls because there is funding for improvement, so for upgrades they have some funding. So we will soon be able to see if those better walls cause people to go to other places. You know, in the short run you assume that they just move to a different place to get across the border. If that happens that would be a validation that the wall at least is hard to scale. If the wall is put up in some locations and people are just jumping over it easily or just throwing their fentanyl over the top, well then you've learned something you didn't know. So the wall, because the wall would take so long to do it, it's a natural just by its nature you're testing it before you get to the big implementation. You can always cancel the budget if the first bunches of wall didn't make any difference.

What about scaling ideas from the test phase? Different outcomes possible. Yeah, so there's certainly some art and skill to developing a test that really does tell you something about the larger implementation. And there's certainly a risk that the test looks good when small but doesn't work at scale because you can't scale it. There's something about the scaling. So there's no clean answer other than it's always better to test because you'll be smarter than if you didn't. But you could still get the wrong answer. But that's always the possibility.

Can you suggest how a person could find employment in something like an ideation center? Well you would have to have the right skill set. There's a firm in San Francisco called IDEO and they're sort of a design ideation center, you could call it. I've worked with them before. And what they do is if you come in, you're a corporate customer and say I want to design a new computer device, it doesn't matter what you're designing, they do design for all kinds of stuff. And they'll put together a team that makes sense for this project. So they might include an engineer, might include a designer, might include an architect. So they'll pull together high-level people who've got PhDs and they've graduated MIT and some really smart people. And they'll put them together in a diverse little team and they'll very quickly run through ideas.

So to answer your question, how would you get a job at an ideation center that doesn't quite exist yet? You might start by becoming one of those things: an engineer or a designer, something that makes sense for being on that kind of a team. And then you have something to pitch should the ideation centers have come into being. What if you have a patent already? I don't know what you're talking about. So the answer is it just depends on the details.

All right, I'm just looking at your comments. Somebody said diversity is the enemy of the group. Not exactly. I believe that there are tests that show that the most effective group is one where somebody is very smart and the other people in the group are not necessarily that smart. The worst thing you could have is a group with five really smart people who are kind of similar because they would all have their own opinion of what to do but they're all smart and they don't want to give up so they would just fight with each other. So sometimes you're better with one smart person, one person who knows a certain skill, somebody has a certain point of view. That's why ethnic diversity is useful in all kinds of realms. Because if you're building something to sell it in one way or another, either politically or commercially, if you're looking to sell something to the general public you want as many different opinions before you commit to the expense. So ethnic, gender diversity, all of those different diversities are useful because you get the perspective without the expense.

All right, small tests tell us nothing about how corrupt it will be once it's large. You're right, you can't learn everything from a small test. But you can often learn if there was something there that just doesn't work. So you can find out if there's a big obvious flaw, why something won't work. What about the middle class? I don't understand the question.

At some point there has to be unity in goal. There can be unity in process. There can be unity in what the system is. And there can be unity in what the criteria is for an idea that gets through the system and is implemented.

Yeah, the Kanye comment about basketball is not as crazy as it sounds. In fact if you looked at, if you literally looked at any of the stuff that's being reported as crazy from Kanye, every bit of it has a perfectly good explanation which he actually presented in most cases there. So even the stuff about the hydrogen in airplanes and stuff like that, those all have a solid basis in reason. It's just that the press doesn't like reporting the good news.

Did somebody say that Kanye is periscoping? Keep saying cultural gravity. Yeah, so I've been getting lots of feedback from people who are responding to the concept of cultural gravity. I don't know if it's just because people like it because it makes them feel innocent for many problems. You know, well when you think that cultural gravity is part of the problem in urban areas, that your own community is preventing you from success, it sort of relieves you the observer from any guilt. It's like well it looks like they're doing it to themselves. So I worry that it could be taken that way as opposed to taken as a useful way to look at the situation. Something that has a practical, functional element to it.

Kanye was live earlier. He did a livestream on Periscope. But he's not even on Twitter anymore. But he was periscoping. Maybe so. Kanye's mind control. Go from last night. I'll do that. I will watch Kanye's Periscope from last night. Run with cultural gravity. Yeah, I'm going to stick with that for a while. I'm going to be testing that one and see if it gets any weight. Oh he's back on Twitter. Good. Okay, I'm definitely going to watch Kanye's mind control Periscope. That's got to be great. I can't wait.