And I think that it is only doing a disservice to ourselves, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on,

yeah um oh boy it's it's such an incendiary and polarizing topic as all controversial things are um it's one of those things where it's there are two quotes and they're by the same guy and they're both fictional characters but they so apply to ai right now they're both by um Jeff Goldblum's character, Ian Malcolm, in the Jurassic Park series.

And in one, he goes, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

And I love that quote, and I think it's so applicable to AI.

The other one that he says is in The Lost World, and he says, oh, yeah, ooh, ah, that's how it always starts.

But later there's running and screaming.

and it just feels so applicable to this nascent technology that we're dealing with.

I'd love to ask you the main question, which is, I would so appreciate you sharing a story or two stories where you feel like you experienced or witnessed something magical, miraculous, or mysterious.

My interview with the incredibly talented Aaron Ryan.

I wasn't swimming.

I was with a friend in 1990, I believe, in Mexico, in Mazatlan.

And my friend dared me 20,000 pesos to dive off a rock and swim in the Pacific Ocean out to a little peak that was up above the water.

But I dove out as maybe 100 feet, whatever.

I dove out, swam out to the rock, turned around, and I couldn't believe how far away the land looked.

Yeah, I was thinking about that.

Yeah.

What do you think are some of those core pillars of the process of going from idea to a published book?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And I want to answer just the previous thing.

There's a certain narcissism in it, of course.

That fear and worry of what people will think of you is narcissistic.

But if you can lay your narcissism aside and just do it for the sheer act of creation, it becomes easier.

So each book is not necessarily new or novel.

But where it all starts is this idea, right? So also a very complicated question, but I would love to explore this idea of like, where do the ideas come from? How do you know whether this idea is the one that you want to move forward with, package up into a book, into a product? Kind of what does that look like for you? Where do you feel like your ideas come from? And then how do you evaluate an idea? to know whether or not this is the one that you want to move forward with.

Seems pretty simple, but I'm gonna let Aaron get into the details.

If you had a hotel with 10 rooms, and you sold five of your 10 rooms, each for $100, we would call that a $50 RevPAR, 'cause it was $500 over 10 rooms.

So Philadelphia, a couple examples.

June 14th, RevPAR was up 44% compared to a year ago.

June 19th, which was also a match day, that was the Brazil-Haiti, was up 39%.

So those two numbers look pretty stable, right? 44%, 39%.

It makes the whole forecasting thing seem pretty easy.

We've also seen, as I'm sure you have seen in your work, some of the reporting around fewer than expected visitors showing up, right? Is that timeline something you're forecasting? Like, how do businesses know that at, say, one or three months out they should have X number of people booking reservations, otherwise it's going to be a dip?

It's kind of rare.

It is rare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there's so many incentives in addition to the ones that I just listed.

But yes, if you're talking about marketing, that's a huge issue and a huge specter for so many people.

Ooh, no, I've got to market, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Yeah.