“What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it.”
It's a highlight of my newsletter almost every time you leave a comment, and this one definitely continues the trend. ...Apropos of this thought, the more I've learned about innovation in history, and research on innovation, the more I've realized how the disciplines are in conversation with one another, and if I were to create a dream educational curriculum it would be about the progression of human ideas, and making this import/export explicit. As an aside, the first paper that made Glaeser a famous economist was about how "spillover" of solutions between industries is primary reason that cities boost innovation so much. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/growthincities.pdf
I'm always amazed at the necessity of "inefficiency": how a drive towards pure utilitarianism can often lead to lower productivity. "I can't see what quantifiable results I'll get from this lunch/book/few-minutes-of-silence" -- but we need those experiences, for the benefits therefrom are vital to our overall productivity. This lunch conversation sparks new ideas; this book unlocks a problem in a different area from a new angle; these few minutes of silence clear the noise in my brain and help my next words be more meaningful, true, and effective. (Henri Nouwen strikes again!) Beneficial results don't have to be quantifiable to be TANGIBLE.
Thank you for this reminder, and for drawing attention to these important things!
Hey Ruth! Always great to see you here, and I couldn't agree more. Honestly, I almost never find that my professional challenge is to work more quickly, but very often that it is to work more slowly.
'Twas a purposeful blunder, perhaps (is there such a thing as "unconscious purpose"? I say yes), to illustrate your point in the most "meta" way possible. :)
“With more remote and hybrid work, I think we probably have to be more thoughtful about creating connections — to new people and new ideas. I don’t think it means we can’t do it, but perhaps we can’t rely on water-cooler or photocopier serendipity to the extent we might have in the past.”
Yes! So much of workplace culture was a by-product of just chucking people into a building and hoping for the best. Now - with remote/hybrid working - we have to actively create workplaces. And, actually, that’s pretty exciting.
As for tips - we have a ‘pits and peaks’ meeting every Friday. Each team member has to say what was the pit and what was the peak of their week.
Can be personal, professional, anything. Serves loads of functions - check people’s moods, opportunity to praise team-mates, and almost always leads to an interesting discussion about some aspect of what we do.
Ha, that is a great quote! I would imagine Glaeser loves that one, even if his tone is a bit more staid. You've prompted me to get the book. Thank you!
Ohhhhhh!! A while ago I started thinking about sexual vs asexual reproduction of ideas. Asexual: clones, exact copies. Sexual: the exchange that happens between you and the idea where the idea is passed on slightly different each time. With the richness of what’s happening in *you*.
Maybe that’s a good description for David’s interviews.
Such a problem, with a major conflict of time. I've retired, but my surgical colleagues tell me of the ever-increasing pressure for them to complete more cases. I hear patients tell me they never even meet their surgeon for major surgery until they have changed into a hospital gown and are on a gurney, ready to enter the operating room. I have a very difficult time imagining building reflection time into such a process. One can hope that the non-op physician, nurse-practitioner, or physician assistant who saw the patient earlier can have the expertise and time to manage the overall process, but that individual typically is not in the OR or the post-anesthesia area. That person might be the one who manages the patient's concerns after surgery, but possibly the surgeon or a third individual might do the follow-up. I fear that in many situations, the "old-fashioned" model of the thoughtful and knowledgeable surgeon managing the entire case has left us. I was delighted to see the phenomenal care provided to my own 96 year-old mom by two different surgeons in a small town over the last 3 years, so I know it's still possible!
Although I've been participating in it less since having kids, there is a strong carpool community at the Claremont Colleges carrying many of us east to work from the Pasadena area where we live. These rides often lead to the types of serendipitous conversations you mention. My close colleague even met his wife in carpool (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/style/they-met-in-a-car-pool-now-theyre-married.html)!
We certainly will miss serendipitous conversations in our new remote/hybrid approaches to work even if we don't notice it at first. Totally agree that we need to find new ways of intentionally encouraging this.
Also love the advice about reading old scientific papers. Some of the best advice for folks beginning their PhDs. Turns out there is a lot to learn from the annals of history. Old papers also tend to be shorter and to the point. Might be something for us to learn there too.
Thanks for sharing the link to the interview with Katalin Karikó, look forward to reading that and sure that it will spark new insights. (P.S., wouldn't it be great for us to have more murals of our intellectual heroes around like that picture of Karikó at the top of your article?)
Haha...oh man, ok you win the carpool story share of the week! ...One other thing I've found with some older papers is that they provide more context for the research. My sense is that it might be because the authors weren't pressured to publish as much, and so they didn't fragment their work into many different papers, and instead collected more thoughts in one. As a reader, I definitely find that useful.
Re: murals, seems like a total no-brainer to me. How awesome would that be? I expect some outstanding young artists with large social media followings would be thrilled to create murals like this, and might simultaneously teach their followers about the person they're depicting.
In college there was an honors program with special seminars. You were not allowed to take a seminar that was in your major. The goal was to mix up backgrounds and viewpoints for both the students and the professors.
When taking classes, I tended to switch where I was sitting to get the chance to talk with different people. Especially when I started feeling comfortable.
Riding public transportation also gives opportunities for exchange with people you wouldn’t normally talk to. Not everyone will talk to everyone right away, but some things lead to more exchange: waiting for a late bus, running together to catch a bus, reading or knitting or folding origami.
And: church. I’ve left the church, but the one thing I do miss is the automatic contact with people from other backgrounds. Being Catholic meant church was a meeting ground for people from every country where there were Catholic missionaries. And social class.
This is an awesome note from start to finish. ...I tend to be introverted, at least when it comes to strangers, and it was actually getting into journalism that basically forced me to talk to people I never would have otherwise. It's a longer story, but I think that ended up being the greatest gift my work has given me. Once I got in the habit of doing it for work, I started doing it just for my own curiosity and growth, and I doubt I would have if just left to my own inclinations.
I've just found out about some new volunteer board members that I look forward to meeting in a couple of weeks. I'm so excited to meet them in person! Another way to meet people from other fields and geographic areas, but with some common interest.
I really enjoyed this. There are so many great techniques for getting ideas to cross-pollinate.
These serendipitous meetings are so important for cross pollination of ideas and perspectives. And I also agree with the idea that you should expose yourself to as many different ideas and topics as you possibly can. I'm looking forward to reading some of your links.
In a science firm I used to work for, we had PhD scientists from numerous disciplines who needed to work together to solve some very difficult client challenges. We hired for very smart people who were also curious about the expertise of their fellow scientists. Not only were they brilliant in their own area, they liked to and were able to ‘play well with others’. We reinforced that with a picnic table: from the beginning we had only one picnic table where everyone sat together. Over time the table got bigger as the company grew, but it was always just one table.
I’ve written a lot about this, but the upshot is that it was really important to our culture of designing creative solutions to have one place where everyone went and there was no place where cool kids could retreat to, or a reserved place for higher-ups. Everyone conversed together and you never knew when those serendipitous insights would happen. But they always did!
Sabrina, I love this, and it immediately brought to mind Ed Catmull's opening in Creativity Inc. about the importance of the table around which they held meetings. If you care to share a link, I'd love to read some of your writing about the picnic table.
Ah, the creative spirit of Pixar! I was so fortunate to be able to get a tour of their offices in Emeryville shortly after they built that space and moved in (many decades ago now!). They had so many creative ideas to cross-fertilise between disciplines; I loved them all and tried to incorporate as many as I could when our company moved offices too. For just one example, Pixar had a hallway where staff could showcase their personal artwork. As there were many talented artists throughout the company, this was an opportunity to uncover some of the more personal talents that might not otherwise come out in the workplace.
For our company, this took the form of a long hallway photo gallery of places our staff travelled outside of work, as we had a lot of adventurous global travellers.
While reading this I felt like there's an interesting way to deal with the lunch hour conundrum: make it a sharing one.. Somewhat of making the lunch hour by posing around a question like: "what is the challenge you're facing today? or what can we learn from each other"? as informally as possible..
I remember in my last job in office I had a group of 3-4 colleagues and every week someone would share an interesting article they read, and we would sit on lunch hour and just talk about it.. it's a bonding exercise, it's also 'generalist' learning..
I love it. And, actually, this is the main thing I miss from going into the office at my last job...when people were stuck on projects, their sort of "thinking out loud," just bouncing ideas off of others, was a fantastic way for everyone to learn and share. And given that our work was typically pretty solitary, it was a huge boost.
Loved this David! Speaking of serendipitous meetings and communications, I would love to collaborate with you on an article via Substack. Have loved range and the fascinating stories you've found in Range Widely!
Please let me know if we can find a way to contact and start our cross pollination!
Hey Leon, thanks so much! I've checked out and really enjoyed some of your writing. At the moment, I don't really have a mechanism for collaboration here — in part because I need to keep this newsletter pretty simple if I'm to keep it alive — but if/when I give that a try, I'll definitely let you know.
Love this perspective David, and especially that framing of creativity as merely "importing/exporting" ideas in different fields.
Recently I've been getting a bit into the world of Investing, Private Equity, and VC. Many of the mental models or frameworks applied in these fields tend to come from other fields, and once applied in this new sphere, are stress-tested.
Hey Armaan, thanks so much for this. And your point really fits well with Glaeser's work, in which he showed that solutions come from ideas jumping between fields, or "spillover" is the term used in a bunch of that research. ...Hope you're finding your new endeavors interesting!
I’m sad, and concerned, about the loss of lunching together. When I was a young attending surgeon, there was a once a period of 2-3 years that I had time to eat a real lunch in a special room called the faculty dining room. I will always remember one day when I was able to have a long lunch with Fred Robbins alone. I didn’t know until then that this man I’d just met was a Nobel prize winner for his work on poliovirus. That was something he simply mentioned in passing. What a remarkable time. Now lunch, if it ever happens at all, is a snack grabbed on the go between patients or phone calls. There’s little if any time for practicing physicians to interact with those in the lab, or to do part-time research themselves with their collaborating scientist colleagues. I’m glad that so many discoveries continue to happen, but I wonder how much the practicing scientists really understand what clinicians and their patients need, when many of those I know the most closely believe they no longer have that need for interacting with physicians. I’m not exactly sure how these cross-disciplinary collaborations can be restored, but I think it’s critical.
Angela, thanks so much for this note, and the amazing anecdote about Robbins! I share your concern. I don't know the answers, but I think it's so important that we'd better starting trying things. ...You also reminded me of a study I read recently in which surgical teams were randomly assigned either to use 100% of a given time allotment to do procedures, or 80% to do procedures and 20% to reflect as a group on how things went. The researchers found that performance improved in both groups, but more rapidly in the reflection group. I expect this is the case for basically any endeavor, and I worry that we're extinguishing that reflection time, both for individuals and groups.
I had been going through your catalog of articles a little while back - and, stumbled upon an article on Christopher Nolan I believe. Where he said, that he tries to do something outside of movies every day, such as, reading from different books and the like. Reminds me of that.
Haha...I gotcha. I was confused. I thought you meant that you came across another Nolan article that resonated with the Nolan point I'd made. Mea culpa! I plead guilty to reading too quickly on my phone;)
“What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it.”
—Brian Eno
It's a highlight of my newsletter almost every time you leave a comment, and this one definitely continues the trend. ...Apropos of this thought, the more I've learned about innovation in history, and research on innovation, the more I've realized how the disciplines are in conversation with one another, and if I were to create a dream educational curriculum it would be about the progression of human ideas, and making this import/export explicit. As an aside, the first paper that made Glaeser a famous economist was about how "spillover" of solutions between industries is primary reason that cities boost innovation so much. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/growthincities.pdf
the Renaissance person....
I'm always amazed at the necessity of "inefficiency": how a drive towards pure utilitarianism can often lead to lower productivity. "I can't see what quantifiable results I'll get from this lunch/book/few-minutes-of-silence" -- but we need those experiences, for the benefits therefrom are vital to our overall productivity. This lunch conversation sparks new ideas; this book unlocks a problem in a different area from a new angle; these few minutes of silence clear the noise in my brain and help my next words be more meaningful, true, and effective. (Henri Nouwen strikes again!) Beneficial results don't have to be quantifiable to be TANGIBLE.
Thank you for this reminder, and for drawing attention to these important things!
Hey Ruth! Always great to see you here, and I couldn't agree more. Honestly, I almost never find that my professional challenge is to work more quickly, but very often that it is to work more slowly.
...and it's too perfect that I wrote the above comment in such a rush that I had to come back and fix a typo. SIGH!
'Twas a purposeful blunder, perhaps (is there such a thing as "unconscious purpose"? I say yes), to illustrate your point in the most "meta" way possible. :)
“With more remote and hybrid work, I think we probably have to be more thoughtful about creating connections — to new people and new ideas. I don’t think it means we can’t do it, but perhaps we can’t rely on water-cooler or photocopier serendipity to the extent we might have in the past.”
Yes! So much of workplace culture was a by-product of just chucking people into a building and hoping for the best. Now - with remote/hybrid working - we have to actively create workplaces. And, actually, that’s pretty exciting.
As for tips - we have a ‘pits and peaks’ meeting every Friday. Each team member has to say what was the pit and what was the peak of their week.
Can be personal, professional, anything. Serves loads of functions - check people’s moods, opportunity to praise team-mates, and almost always leads to an interesting discussion about some aspect of what we do.
Scott, love this. I think I'm going to try "pits and peaks" with my own family and see how it goes. Sounds like a great exercise.
Really enjoyed reading this David.
Reminded me of a qoute from the book 'Geography of Genius' by Eric Weiner. ' Cities are places where ideas come to have sex'.
So much of what we do is because of the places we are in and the people we have with us.
Thanks.
Ha, that is a great quote! I would imagine Glaeser loves that one, even if his tone is a bit more staid. You've prompted me to get the book. Thank you!
Ohhhhhh!! A while ago I started thinking about sexual vs asexual reproduction of ideas. Asexual: clones, exact copies. Sexual: the exchange that happens between you and the idea where the idea is passed on slightly different each time. With the richness of what’s happening in *you*.
Maybe that’s a good description for David’s interviews.
Such a problem, with a major conflict of time. I've retired, but my surgical colleagues tell me of the ever-increasing pressure for them to complete more cases. I hear patients tell me they never even meet their surgeon for major surgery until they have changed into a hospital gown and are on a gurney, ready to enter the operating room. I have a very difficult time imagining building reflection time into such a process. One can hope that the non-op physician, nurse-practitioner, or physician assistant who saw the patient earlier can have the expertise and time to manage the overall process, but that individual typically is not in the OR or the post-anesthesia area. That person might be the one who manages the patient's concerns after surgery, but possibly the surgeon or a third individual might do the follow-up. I fear that in many situations, the "old-fashioned" model of the thoughtful and knowledgeable surgeon managing the entire case has left us. I was delighted to see the phenomenal care provided to my own 96 year-old mom by two different surgeons in a small town over the last 3 years, so I know it's still possible!
Although I've been participating in it less since having kids, there is a strong carpool community at the Claremont Colleges carrying many of us east to work from the Pasadena area where we live. These rides often lead to the types of serendipitous conversations you mention. My close colleague even met his wife in carpool (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/style/they-met-in-a-car-pool-now-theyre-married.html)!
We certainly will miss serendipitous conversations in our new remote/hybrid approaches to work even if we don't notice it at first. Totally agree that we need to find new ways of intentionally encouraging this.
Also love the advice about reading old scientific papers. Some of the best advice for folks beginning their PhDs. Turns out there is a lot to learn from the annals of history. Old papers also tend to be shorter and to the point. Might be something for us to learn there too.
Thanks for sharing the link to the interview with Katalin Karikó, look forward to reading that and sure that it will spark new insights. (P.S., wouldn't it be great for us to have more murals of our intellectual heroes around like that picture of Karikó at the top of your article?)
Haha...oh man, ok you win the carpool story share of the week! ...One other thing I've found with some older papers is that they provide more context for the research. My sense is that it might be because the authors weren't pressured to publish as much, and so they didn't fragment their work into many different papers, and instead collected more thoughts in one. As a reader, I definitely find that useful.
Re: murals, seems like a total no-brainer to me. How awesome would that be? I expect some outstanding young artists with large social media followings would be thrilled to create murals like this, and might simultaneously teach their followers about the person they're depicting.
How *did* the pressure to publish more (and more and more) come about?
Is it parallel to professors requiring certain numbers of pages from students?
.., School as the origin of spamming?
In college there was an honors program with special seminars. You were not allowed to take a seminar that was in your major. The goal was to mix up backgrounds and viewpoints for both the students and the professors.
When taking classes, I tended to switch where I was sitting to get the chance to talk with different people. Especially when I started feeling comfortable.
Riding public transportation also gives opportunities for exchange with people you wouldn’t normally talk to. Not everyone will talk to everyone right away, but some things lead to more exchange: waiting for a late bus, running together to catch a bus, reading or knitting or folding origami.
And: church. I’ve left the church, but the one thing I do miss is the automatic contact with people from other backgrounds. Being Catholic meant church was a meeting ground for people from every country where there were Catholic missionaries. And social class.
This is an awesome note from start to finish. ...I tend to be introverted, at least when it comes to strangers, and it was actually getting into journalism that basically forced me to talk to people I never would have otherwise. It's a longer story, but I think that ended up being the greatest gift my work has given me. Once I got in the habit of doing it for work, I started doing it just for my own curiosity and growth, and I doubt I would have if just left to my own inclinations.
I've just found out about some new volunteer board members that I look forward to meeting in a couple of weeks. I'm so excited to meet them in person! Another way to meet people from other fields and geographic areas, but with some common interest.
This sounds like a story I’d enjoy hearing.
I really enjoyed this. There are so many great techniques for getting ideas to cross-pollinate.
These serendipitous meetings are so important for cross pollination of ideas and perspectives. And I also agree with the idea that you should expose yourself to as many different ideas and topics as you possibly can. I'm looking forward to reading some of your links.
In a science firm I used to work for, we had PhD scientists from numerous disciplines who needed to work together to solve some very difficult client challenges. We hired for very smart people who were also curious about the expertise of their fellow scientists. Not only were they brilliant in their own area, they liked to and were able to ‘play well with others’. We reinforced that with a picnic table: from the beginning we had only one picnic table where everyone sat together. Over time the table got bigger as the company grew, but it was always just one table.
I’ve written a lot about this, but the upshot is that it was really important to our culture of designing creative solutions to have one place where everyone went and there was no place where cool kids could retreat to, or a reserved place for higher-ups. Everyone conversed together and you never knew when those serendipitous insights would happen. But they always did!
Thanks for a really interesting article!
Sabrina, I love this, and it immediately brought to mind Ed Catmull's opening in Creativity Inc. about the importance of the table around which they held meetings. If you care to share a link, I'd love to read some of your writing about the picnic table.
Ah, the creative spirit of Pixar! I was so fortunate to be able to get a tour of their offices in Emeryville shortly after they built that space and moved in (many decades ago now!). They had so many creative ideas to cross-fertilise between disciplines; I loved them all and tried to incorporate as many as I could when our company moved offices too. For just one example, Pixar had a hallway where staff could showcase their personal artwork. As there were many talented artists throughout the company, this was an opportunity to uncover some of the more personal talents that might not otherwise come out in the workplace.
For our company, this took the form of a long hallway photo gallery of places our staff travelled outside of work, as we had a lot of adventurous global travellers.
Thanks so much for asking for a link; here is the most recent version: https://geographyofhome.substack.com/p/picnic-table-wisdom
While reading this I felt like there's an interesting way to deal with the lunch hour conundrum: make it a sharing one.. Somewhat of making the lunch hour by posing around a question like: "what is the challenge you're facing today? or what can we learn from each other"? as informally as possible..
I remember in my last job in office I had a group of 3-4 colleagues and every week someone would share an interesting article they read, and we would sit on lunch hour and just talk about it.. it's a bonding exercise, it's also 'generalist' learning..
I love it. And, actually, this is the main thing I miss from going into the office at my last job...when people were stuck on projects, their sort of "thinking out loud," just bouncing ideas off of others, was a fantastic way for everyone to learn and share. And given that our work was typically pretty solitary, it was a huge boost.
Loved this David! Speaking of serendipitous meetings and communications, I would love to collaborate with you on an article via Substack. Have loved range and the fascinating stories you've found in Range Widely!
Please let me know if we can find a way to contact and start our cross pollination!
Hey Leon, thanks so much! I've checked out and really enjoyed some of your writing. At the moment, I don't really have a mechanism for collaboration here — in part because I need to keep this newsletter pretty simple if I'm to keep it alive — but if/when I give that a try, I'll definitely let you know.
Thanks so much for your read! Appreciate that Range Widely is very simple! Could I request setting up mutual recommendations on Substack?
Thanks again
Thanks so much for your read! Appreciate that Range Widely is very simple! Could I request setting up mutual recommendations on Substack?
Thanks again
Love this perspective David, and especially that framing of creativity as merely "importing/exporting" ideas in different fields.
Recently I've been getting a bit into the world of Investing, Private Equity, and VC. Many of the mental models or frameworks applied in these fields tend to come from other fields, and once applied in this new sphere, are stress-tested.
Really interesting.
Thanks.
Hey Armaan, thanks so much for this. And your point really fits well with Glaeser's work, in which he showed that solutions come from ideas jumping between fields, or "spillover" is the term used in a bunch of that research. ...Hope you're finding your new endeavors interesting!
Exactly!
Thanks so much David, truly appreciate the work you're doing.
Read Range about 6 months ago and I've truly never felt more confident in pursuing my interests without fear of "not being niched enough".
F "niching down" and specializing into a tiny pigeonhole of a person!
I’m sad, and concerned, about the loss of lunching together. When I was a young attending surgeon, there was a once a period of 2-3 years that I had time to eat a real lunch in a special room called the faculty dining room. I will always remember one day when I was able to have a long lunch with Fred Robbins alone. I didn’t know until then that this man I’d just met was a Nobel prize winner for his work on poliovirus. That was something he simply mentioned in passing. What a remarkable time. Now lunch, if it ever happens at all, is a snack grabbed on the go between patients or phone calls. There’s little if any time for practicing physicians to interact with those in the lab, or to do part-time research themselves with their collaborating scientist colleagues. I’m glad that so many discoveries continue to happen, but I wonder how much the practicing scientists really understand what clinicians and their patients need, when many of those I know the most closely believe they no longer have that need for interacting with physicians. I’m not exactly sure how these cross-disciplinary collaborations can be restored, but I think it’s critical.
Angela, thanks so much for this note, and the amazing anecdote about Robbins! I share your concern. I don't know the answers, but I think it's so important that we'd better starting trying things. ...You also reminded me of a study I read recently in which surgical teams were randomly assigned either to use 100% of a given time allotment to do procedures, or 80% to do procedures and 20% to reflect as a group on how things went. The researchers found that performance improved in both groups, but more rapidly in the reflection group. I expect this is the case for basically any endeavor, and I worry that we're extinguishing that reflection time, both for individuals and groups.
wow! just wow
Thanks for reading, Nicole! So glad it sounds like you found it interesting.
Really enjoyed this David.
I had been going through your catalog of articles a little while back - and, stumbled upon an article on Christopher Nolan I believe. Where he said, that he tries to do something outside of movies every day, such as, reading from different books and the like. Reminds me of that.
Cc: this one! https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/christopher-nolan-reads-without-purpose
Woaa, cool! Thanks for that Matt, and if you have that article handy, I'd love to check it out. If not, don't hassle over it.
It was your article! The one from above. A few sentences in.
Haha...I gotcha. I was confused. I thought you meant that you came across another Nolan article that resonated with the Nolan point I'd made. Mea culpa! I plead guilty to reading too quickly on my phone;)
No, I wrote it poorly!
I was like searching for the article, as I wrote the note. So, you got a conscious articulation of what was going on in my brain haha.