Whoever Struggles, Does The Learning

In the second part of his podcast, we dive deeper into integral teaching  with Ryan Derby-Talbot. From Quest University in Canada to Fulbright University of Vietnam, we will explore Dr. Derby-Talbot's adventures in building structures that support faculty and students as they immerse themselves in profound learning environments. 

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Ryan Derby-Talbot Whoever Struggles, Learns

Susan Clark: [00:00:00] Well, Ryan, welcome back to The Art of Dynamic Competence. I'm so glad we get to talk to you some more.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:00:06] Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back.

Susan Clark: [00:00:08] Well, in the last podcast, we had just begun to engage this concept of inquiry and some of the interesting challenges to learning that incorporates integral aspects, as you described in your time at University of Cairo. Well, after Cairo, where did you head next?

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:00:28] Yeah, after I left Cairo, I actually got a little bit frustrated dealing with some of the pushback that I was continuing to face, but I was also sort of looking for other opportunities. And so I ended up going to Quest University, Canada. And at the time that I went there, it was only two years old. It's a brand new. In 2007, it started it's a liberal arts college in Canada, and it was Canada's first secular, not for profit, independent liberal arts college. There are liberal arts colleges in Canada, but they tend to be at least religiously based. But what was fun about Quest was, it had been designed to be alternative, and so there were no departments. The academic building was one big circular hallway with no dead ends, where professors were randomly assigned to offices next to each other without any rhyme or reason to their academic discipline. So I was placed next to a Spanish literature scholar and on one side and an epidemiologist on the other side and a philosopher across the hall. And then the students themselves, there were no majors. And the ways that students focused their studies was to articulate a question for themselves. So they came to Quest and there was [00:01:38] two years of foundational coursework across [00:01:41] the liberal arts, and the coursework was largely in interdisciplinary classes, not entirely, but there were classes like Democracy and Justice and Reason and Freedom.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:01:52] And anyway, they explored these classes and at the end of their second year they spent a month. Quest's classes run a block plan system of one at a time. The students would spend a month creating this question that they wanted to pursue for their next two years of college and of course, plan and readings to go with it. And so the questions were meant to be these not overly specific things, but broad and compelling, and they worked with a faculty member through this process. So some students questions who I was their direct supervisor include one student who was interested in mathematics. Her question is, what is the relationship between beauty and symmetry? And she had all these courses that explored mathematics and some art and books about symmetry and art and patterns. Another student who was interested in design who wanted to make his own landscaping business, his question was How do limits foster creativity? And got interested in how when you constrain a problem, it allows you to actually act more freely inside of it. Another student, for example, really interested in community activism and counseling for young people, had a question about how do communities shape individuals and individuals shape communities? What I found was really interesting is, for example, with that student, is when you asked him about his question, [00:03:11] his eyes just lit up and [00:03:14] he started talking about all the readings he was doing, the classwork, the way that classes he was taking were tying into this, the projects he wanted to undertake, and research questions that would kind of bubble up out of that.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:03:27] And what I found from that is with students, it seemed to be [00:03:31] something fundamentally different about choosing a major, [00:03:35] which is, again, a kind of curated experience that you're opting into versus [00:03:39] articulating a question which is an organic building up and working out of something for oneself. [00:03:46] There seem to be something qualitatively different about those on par with the [00:03:51] same kind of epiphanies and developments of understanding that [00:03:54] I had been seeing from my calculus students in the project based calculus courses I had done. In other words, asking students to articulate questions, to define their directions was basically [00:04:05] asking them to do the struggle [00:04:07] of what they wanted to pursue and study. And in a way, it really led to this authentic engagement with learning in a way that was really quite palpable and profound. And students were in courses not because they had to take them as requirements as much as they were there to explore something they really cared about. And that creates a different kind of classroom experience.

Susan Clark: [00:04:27] Right.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:04:27] And I mean, I love this idea of having a question that [00:04:31] leads you into this mess of learning. [00:04:34] That's such a powerful thing that at times when I felt stuck in my own life, I've gone back to thinking about what is the question I want to be asking and what is the question plan I want to construct about asking it and engaging with it meaningfully, including what books do I want to read? What conversations do I want to have? One of my current questions is what kind of learning environments produce really authentic experiences of understanding. Sure, it's powerful to be able to articulate that.

Susan Clark: [00:04:59] Well, let me ask you then, the faculty at Quest. So what was the requirement for them?

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:05:05] That's a really that's a really interesting question. Original faculty were sort of up for trying all kinds of alternative new things. That was the way the university was crafted, was to be innovative alternative to particularly big public research university, mainstream, Higher Education Canada. And so the faculty that were attracted to Quest at the start were sort of [00:05:27] highly up for experimenting. [00:05:29] They came up with this idea for the question I joined in when that was about two years old and kind of also felt immersed in kind of this experimentation. As Quest grew, though, we did find that some faculty were more [00:05:43] comfortable and empowered with the model of the question than others. [00:05:48] In fact, some faculty ended up it was a bit uncomfortable. And I think what the difference was that if you think about what academic training prepares faculty members to do, it prepares them to be [00:06:00] experts in fields [00:06:01] and how you are evaluated, as in how well you are able to showcase knowledge, showcase your understanding, and develop and produce knowledge in your field. And I remember when I was at Quest, I was working with a colleague of mine who is a philosopher who also quite interested in mathematics. And our courses had some commonalities. We, we were both interested in teaching about infinity, mind from the mathematical perspective is from the philosophical perspective. I remember as we were going through this experience, we talked as though the way that we learn to teach was as though we were imagining a committee of experts in the back of the room evaluating how correct our statements were.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:06:42] And that's what we needed to teach towards. And I remember sort of, I think that just got inherited from graduate school and from this idea that I was teaching, the last thing I wanted to do was say anything incorrectly. And so it was like we were teaching. We called it the committee. We were teaching towards the imaginary committee in the back of the room. The problem with that is that that's not who we should be teaching to. We should be teaching towards the students. And so saying something correct, of course, that's important. But what's much more important is that [00:07:10] the student is engaging with the question behind the answer that you're driving towards. [00:07:16] So I think what we ended up having a lot of conversations and again, it's this kind of shift. So rather than feeling like we were allegiant to our discipline and its knowledge, what we felt that our job was was to really help the students learn to have understandings of what we were trying to teach them. And actually, [00:07:34] the best way to do that was not to provide them with correct knowledge, but to actually put them in a kind of conundrum or crisis, [00:07:41] right? Where we're like, hey, here's a problem and you think you can handle it and then wait, that didn't work and then let them be there.

Susan Clark: [00:07:47] Was their support for faculty at Quest that would help them understand that transition, that expectation that may have been outside of their normal academic training.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:08:00] Yes. So this is interesting. I think if I had to do Quest again, I would have spent a lot more time on what you just described, which is helping provide a runway for faculty to be productive, engaging with this process of empowering students to take on questions for themselves, whether or not in a class or more broadly with this form of a question that they use to focus their studies. What I found at Quest was there were a lot of faculty members that saw what happens when you empower students to really own their learning this way, like when you let them articulate a question for themselves. But as you can imagine, these students, after only two years of college, are trying to define a question about something that's pretty grandiose and big, like how do we approach climate change effectively? And they make a lot of assumptions and they have limited knowledge. And often times they'll put together question plans that are pretty naive and shallow. Of course they do. They're undergraduates. They haven't explored the research in depth, and sometimes faculty members would get frustrated with that because it's like, this isn't respecting the deep fields that you need to be using and developing and building on in asking these questions.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:09:13] And so for some faculty members, it sort of felt like that empowering students to ask questions in this way was trivializing their academic work. And so there was some resistance to this. And I think if I had to do what we did at Quest over again, I would I didn't realize this, but I would have spent a lot more time working with faculty to talk about [00:09:33] the balance of wanting really to empower students to own their learning and engage productively in this authentic encounter with their question and their learning themselves alongside the need to make sure that they were incorporating important and deep content. And [00:09:51] so Quest kind of had an ad hoc environment where it was sort of for people who were excited about this, they really ran with it and developed. Interesting. Courses had great success mentoring students. But for others it felt, I think, unsettling and somehow [00:10:07] not aligned with [00:10:09] ensuring appropriate respect or acknowledgment of the depths of their academic fields, if that makes sense.

Susan Clark: [00:10:17] It makes total sense and one of the challenges that we all have. So if we assume that we're going through a major cultural shift right now and right now I'm doing a lot of work actually myself on Jean Gebser, who's one of the phenomenalogists from Europe right around World War Two, who was writing a lot about how it is that cultural change happens. So if we just make this assumption, we're in the middle of it that those of us who are adults kind of fall into these groups of wanting to [00:10:50] cling to what we know is true and have that perpetuated. [00:10:55] And those who know that the process of learning and in discovering yourself is really critical and that what often happens is [00:11:05] you don't blend the two. The [00:11:07] challenge for anyone who's teaching is to be able to to have incredible depth of knowledge. That's that's how we get to where we are in academics and with that depth of knowledge, then to create that creative, authentic space where students can begin to explore some of that depth on their own and of course, continue to excite themselves to learn more as I go along. And so it's a real challenge I see across the board for faculty to be able to be in that middle space where you're really creating the content, the experiences, the problems that get students to go to that depth.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:11:45] I agree with that. Are you familiar with the book, The Reflective Practitioner, Susan?

Susan Clark: [00:11:50] Oh, sure, yeah.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:11:51] So that book by Donald Schon. So. Just in a nutshell, one of the things he explores in that book is why are some professionals, whether or not they're teachers or doctors or lawyers, [00:12:06] so much more effective than others, [00:12:07] even when they've had identical training? Right. And his point is that the professionals who are orienting to their body of work as a kind of [00:12:17] living set of experiments, [00:12:19] and when a new patient comes in or a new student comes in and or there's a new project to work on, they treat it as an opportunity to [00:12:27] inquire about what's unique about that situation. [00:12:30] Of course, they bring their entire repertoire of knowledge to it, but they engage with it in a [00:12:34] back and forth conversation and action, [00:12:36] he calls it. But it [00:12:38] deepens their understanding. [00:12:40] Correct, as opposed to just applying their technical knowledge. Right. And I think that distinction is very much at play at what you just said about learning and knowledge. And what makes the difference in achieving real understandings is having the learner have an opportunity to engage in this kind of conversation and action with a situation. And it's not at the expense of learning information. It's that it [00:13:08] incorporates learning information into a real live engagement, kind of authentic engagement and inquiry. [00:13:15] And one of the things I find so interesting as one of the conclusions about the reflective practitioner is not only are those reflective conversation in action practitioners more effective in their professions, [00:13:25] but they're happier. [00:13:27] Is one of the findings he has as it conducts this case studies? There's something genuinely satisfying about that kind of engagement.

Susan Clark: [00:13:34] And joyful.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:13:35] And joyful. That's right. But it comes at a bit of a cost because you don't get to necessarily be the "E" expert in your topic in the sense that you just can apply knowledge to it willy nilly. And you always know the answers and everything. [00:13:49] You actually are sort of always in this space of being a bit unsure, a bit uncertain, because you're allowing for the experience to be an inquiry rather than just an application. [00:14:02]

Susan Clark: [00:14:03] Fascinating. Well, then let's go the next step, Ryan, and talk about how you personally have experienced this yourself. Yeah, kind of. How have you found a way to be a curious academic?

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:14:18] Wow. I mean, I think one of the things I think that's really interesting that's happened to me as I've been exploring these things is in doing this work and trying to understand learning, I've had to [00:14:31] actually confront places where I realize I have gotten in my own way about learning. [00:14:37] And I, I think when it comes to trying to facilitate learning experiences for other people, the best way to do that is to [00:14:47] really be an authentic learner oneself. [00:14:49] And a lot of my work lately has been on trying to look at where I've got places, I have my own positions about how things should look in a classroom or how a conversation should go and places that I'm really attached and looking to see if I can. And it's hard because it's much less scripted. Mm hmm. And it's kind of like trying to have me have this dynamic competence in the moment of working with students, with classes, even with colleagues to adjust. And I think that's actually an incredibly powerful experience to go through as an adult.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:15:26] But it's also it's unsettling. Sure. And my own experience of this has been to really go through sort of a lot of self-reflection and even [00:15:36] admitting places I think I've made mistakes or [00:15:38] I didn't organize a class well because I really had it wanting to go a particular direction. Sure. And that's a really big ask. And so it's interesting because where a lot of my work has ended up going is trying to think about how to support teachers more than students. Right. Because I think that's where the fundamental work is going. So I think, you know, what I'll just say is [00:15:57] being honest and willing to engage in questions as they arise is strangely one of the first things we learned to do as a little kid. [00:16:07] Right? Right. Like little kids just pour questions out of them. But it also seems to be [00:16:12] one of the most fundamental places to return to as an adult, [00:16:15] to be able to sophisticatedly learn and open up learning opportunities for others, which I find to be remarkably challenging to do despite being such a natural human thing at our early years.

Susan Clark: [00:16:29] Oh, that's perfect, Ryan. So now if we assume that this is a natural place for us to return to, how have you seen institutions of higher education engaging these more integrated and authentic learning environments?

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:16:44] It's been interesting because as I've been spending time thinking about how students learn and watching how the [00:16:52] more ownership they have over situations, the more they can struggle with things, the better they learn. [00:16:56] It's really become a key question about, Well, how do you build an institution, right? That really facilitates that for students. And in my case, how do you build a college or university that facilitates that? So I had the extraordinary privilege of being the founding chief academic officer at Fulbright University, Vietnam, which just opened in 2019. And it's Vietnam's first not for profit private university. It's got a liberal arts core, but also involves engineering. And the reason I ended up being in the founding chief academic officer role is that having come from Quest, which is in this family of innovative new start up colleges and universities trying to approach education in a different way. Fulbright was designed to be innovative and tailored to Vietnam, and in particular, Vietnam has this situation where so many students, if they can, will leave the country to go find university opportunities elsewhere. So Fulbright was meant to be a Vietnamese institution that was really in service to Vietnamese students and Vietnam. When I was at Quest, I was a faculty member for several years, and then I had the position of chief academic officer. So I really was thinking how to help an institution really have an authentic learning environment, be the heart of what it's about. So one of the things we did at Fulbright going in is the undergraduate program launched in 2019, but we actually admitted, pre admitted students, 50 of them, into the program to start in 2018 and work with the founding faculty in designing aspects of the curriculum and academic program together, using methods of design thinking.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:18:41] And it was a wonderful experience. That wasn't our original idea. We learned about it from Olin College of Engineering, who had done something similar in 2001 Olin opened then. And what they did, as has been recounted to me, is, you know, they admitted their first class of 30 students and six weeks before they were ready to launch, realized they weren't ready to launch, that they didn't have their curriculum developed, that they weren't really sure how everything was going to go. And they did this amazing thing of bringing the students in anyway. And because they're engineers, they sort of have you know, they use this process of design. To involve the students in designing the college with them. And their provost, Mark Somerville was really instrumental in a lot of conversations in founding Fulbright and a colleague that I worked with closely, and he said that he thought that that year at Olin College, where they had brought in those students to help build the program, was the best thing they ever did, not because of the ideas that it produced. You know, it produced some new ideas, certainly, but [00:19:45] because of the culture it instilled. Hmm. And the idea is that when students have an opportunity to engage, they are not receiving a program built for them. They are responsible for contributing to its being built. [00:20:00]

Susan Clark: [00:20:00] Sure.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:20:00]  [00:20:00]And so rather than complaining when problems are happening and asking for administrators to intervene and considering themselves as consumers, they're creating solutions to problems as they identify them. [00:20:11] Right. They feel responsible and empowered to really take on those problems themselves. And so I think that's been very successful at Olin. And in fact, every year they have a day where they will just stop classes and engage in a day of design together to recapture that spirit from that first year. Anyway, at Fulbright we were influenced by this. We decided to do it too. So I was there in Vietnam in 2017 working to recruit initial faculty members and initial students, and we had 15 faculty members and we had 50 students that we started. And what we did for that year was we had a sort of basic framework of some curricular ideas and some sort of outlines of what the program could look like as a kind of starting point. And then we just ran design modules all year long. Where teams of faculty and students would work on something together. So they're going to work on what the course science course was going to be, or they were going to develop an experiential learning program, or they were going to figure out how to fit out the makerspace on campus.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:21:09] And it's really interesting because it was [00:21:12] actually a really confusing, very productively confusing year for the faculty and students. [00:21:18] And what I mean by that is not confusing because they were unclear about what to do, but because their roles were really being interfered with in a way that was unsettling but ultimately very powerful. So what I mean by that is normally faculty members are the ones with the answers, and in the co-design space, the faculty members were actually opening up their classes, their questions and these projects to involvement from students. So they were sort of [00:21:44] notching themselves down from this role of ultimate authority. [00:21:48] And we had an international faculty and there were cultural factors and there were age factors involved. Some faculty members were able to do that more easily than others. Right. And on the flip side, the students were being asked to step out of their roles as students and actually, you know, take some ownership for not just learning things, but talking about their experience and having the authority of their experience be where they spoke from. But I mean, it was confusing. I mean, sometimes students were like, what are we doing here? I'm not learning anything in these classes. And it was like, Well, you're not taking classes, you're designing a program.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:22:19] And by the way, [00:22:19] you're learning a lot that you're not noticing because it's all happening invisibly as you're engaging yourself in questions. [00:22:25] And one of the most powerful things out of the co-design year, I think, is not just I mean, there were certain things that were really interesting that were produced out of the program. But by far, to me, the most powerful thing was these assumptions about education that people carried with them were forced to the surface for view right as they came up in design sessions. And so faculty, I'll give you an example. Some faculty members were working with students to try and create an introductory writing and rhetoric course. And so the faculty had come in and they were trying some things with students, and then ultimately they just decided, you know what, let's have the students figure this out. We're going to throw away our outline and have the students start from scratch. Right? And they did that and the [00:23:08] students rebelled [00:23:10] against them on that. They were like, What are you talking about? We don't know what to do. And the faculty members then said, [00:23:15] Listen, we'll help and support you, but we really want you to come up with a plan. [00:23:18]

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:23:18] And what's really interesting is that the students did take over that process, worked on trying to figure out a way of involving kind of Eastern and Western approaches to rhetoric in of course. And they did put together a loose outline. But what's amazing was watching the students talk about that, you would have felt that you were sort of at an education conference with a seasoned researcher explaining the challenges of designing a writing course in listening to how the students were talking about that course because they had been really you know, it's one thing to say go design a writing course, but then as they're debating what should be in it and what shouldn't be in it. Right. [00:23:53] They're running into all these assumptions [00:23:55] about why why should you be writing in the first place and why should this be important part of a of a university education? And in what ways should writing be developed that matters? And what we found in the co-design year was there are [00:24:07] so many fundamental questions in education that get swept under the rug, [00:24:13] hurriedly rushed past and these assumptions upon which education is [00:24:17] built, that if you actually can surface, they become really powerful. They [00:24:23] change the way that the students and professors engage.

Susan Clark: [00:24:26] Well, Ryan, in Egypt, where you first started this process and there was a revolt and then there was this deeper understanding. And you were so impressed with how they spoke about it. Were you finding it was also the assumptions that they were working on, on these math problems in the early days that were really the engaging piece to it, the assumption part?

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:24:49] Yeah. I mean, I think what was powerful to me about the Egypt experience is that the [00:24:54] students started to see themselves as the producers of their own knowledge. [00:24:59] You know, they weren't just repeating something that was written on the board. They were able to generate things that they were quoting and referencing. Mm hmm. And in a similar spirit in Fulbright, it wasn't the students just repeating something they'd read or something that someone had told them. They were able to [00:25:18] author their understanding through their own direct experience. [00:25:22] It doesn't mean they weren't reading stuff. They were right. They were they were totally engaging with this information. But they saw themselves, I think, as the source of that of those ideas. And that kind of ownership produces a different orientation. And I think because of that, what you said about their assumptions, I think what's [00:25:41] what's so difficult about assumptions is they're tremendously hard to see. [00:25:45]

Susan Clark: [00:25:45] Yes.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:25:45] When we carry them. Right. And higher education is filled with them.

Susan Clark: [00:25:50] Well, life is filled with them.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:25:51] Life is filled with them. Exactly. And it's hard to ask about them because people are sort of ready to run right past them because we already understand what they already should be. It's like Heidegger's inauthentic understanding, how one understands what an education should be. It's already understood. We already know that's what universities look like. But if [00:26:08] you actually stop and engage these assumptions, it's really powerful what can be revealed. [00:26:13] So one of the problems we found with the co-design here was it actually was really hard to translate this outside of the group of co designers. So the faculty and the students that were going through this were having these [00:26:28] epiphanies, conversations, ideas, they were engaged, they were realizing things, and then they would want to talk to it. And, [00:26:37] you know, they had this new rhetoric course that they had proposed. And what's difficult is the first thing that people tended to do outside of the co-design year when they saw some of these things, is to criticize them about how they're not like what you already know, writing courses should be like.    Like, well, wait a minute. What about this? I mean, we had a another course we developed at Fulbright when I was involved in was this course called Logic and Limitations, which is about what is logical thinking and how can you apply it. And it involves computer science, it involved mathematics, it involved some science.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:27:06] And when we would present this idea to other academics, especially external to the university, well, how are they going to learn about this particular method from this particular course I teach? And what about this and this? And they would pick it apart and say all the content that it's missing. And what became so difficult for us on the inside was, well, that wasn't what was important. What was important was that this course had been built because we saw it was helping create a different kind of learning experience that we felt was really powerful for students, one that helped them make a lot of coherent sense about what you're really doing when you're thinking mathematically, what you're doing when you're thinking computationally, right. But it was so difficult to translate because people could only view them from the assumptions they were carrying in about education, and especially for people invested in education as a kind of knowledge driven enterprise, content driven enterprise, it becomes really difficult to understand these these kinds of things. So as I'm sure you know, higher education is not necessarily known for being a radically innovative and fast change environment. In fact, it's known for being conservative and slow to change. Universities have looked the same, by and large, for the past 200 years.

Susan Clark: [00:28:17] Well, Ryan, I think part of the reason it's so hard for universities to change why they are institutions that persevere is that this work is really, really hard. What we're talking about with authenticity, inquiry, integral understandings of material that go beyond your own assumptions and your own expectations is not easy work. It causes a great deal of discomfort and dis ease. All the things that we've been talking about that make the students revolt and sometimes have faculty quite upset that their expertize, their understanding, their view of the world is not what's being promoted. And it's really fun for me to talk with you because I look forward to hearing more about what you're doing at Deep Springs, because really engaging this process of inquiry and getting into this integral space so that we can begin to see things differently is extremely hard and we all have to try to see how we can accomplish it individually.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:29:30] Yeah, I completely I resonate with that. And I think what's so challenging is that inquiry isn't about a classroom exercise. It's this fully human way of orienting towards situations and it's emotional, right? I mean, that's one of the things that's so challenging about.

Susan Clark: [00:29:51] Very emotional.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:29:52] Current times is positionally is emotion is an emotional experience, right? Someone says something you don't agree with right away. There's a visceral, emotional response to it, and it's sort of desire to sort of stop, intervene and say something. Right, respond, blurt back, interrupt even. And the problem is that the personality doesn't resolve further positionally, doesn't resolve the stagnation of personality. Only inquiry and stepping back.

Susan Clark: [00:30:17] Causes.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:30:17] War. Opening up. Exactly. Opening up is what can allow for bigger pictures to be seen. I mean, this dialectic approach where instead of sort of the right or the wrong answer, sort of standing back and trying to see the bigger picture. And it takes a lot of emotional intelligence and emotional management to be able to do that when those emotions of positionally strike. I mean, I think probably the most significant thing it really takes is an ability to listen and suspend the desire to state your own position right away. And instead try to understand what it is that you're not seeing. Try to even understand the other person's position first. And then ask questions to open it up. And the irony is that is exactly I guess it's not the irony, but the amazing thing is that that's exactly the same thing about what makes a classroom environment effective is not just sort of the repetition of a of a pre established position, but the willingness to open up the mess underneath. When you put those positions at risk and ask questions and are willing to take the time to try and understand the bigger picture that you haven't yet seen.

Susan Clark: [00:31:25] Beautifully said. Beautifully said. Well, Ryan, this has been amazing talking with you. I've enjoyed it immensely. I think there's lots of food for thought and we'll see where this all goes.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:31:37] Well, thanks, Susan. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk. I love to talk about these things. For years have struggled to try and find the articulations that help bring things to light in a clear way. So any time I have a chance to talk together, and especially with someone who's spent a long time thinking about related and other things in a sophisticated way, it's a real opportunity. So thank you very much for this opportunity to talk with you and to hear your thoughts as well.

Susan Clark: [00:32:02] We'll talk to you again soon.

Ryan Derby-Talbot: [00:32:04] Great. Thank you.