Rachael Maves: Hello everyone, you are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are speaking with Jacob Griscom. Jacob is the CEO of R &B Communications where he leads the development of AI-driven software and digital infrastructure for charter schools and the educational organizations. His work focuses on helping schools reduce complexity, replace fragmented tools, and build customized platforms that improve efficiency and outcomes.

Jacob is also developing Compart, a network-based system designed to better connect people with learning, work, and opportunity. He frequently speaks with educators and technologists about the future of AI, personalized learning, and the systems needed to unlock human potential. Jacob, thank you for joining me today.

Jacob Griscom: Well, thank you very much, Rachael Maves. I'm happy to be here.

Rachael Maves: So I'm excited to hear a little bit more about your background and your story. Usually in the podcast, we have lot of educators or people have been in the field of education and the weeds of teaching and administration, and that's not quite your story and background. So tell us a little bit about your career path and then how it's segmented into the education field.

Jacob Griscom: When I was, when I was in high school, I, I was a competitive runner, long distance runner, and I got a, I got a disease in my foot called Freiburg's infraction. It's usually reserved for like teenage ballerinas, but I got it. And, and so it kind of closed the door on at least being as competitive with the running, but it opened a door.

to say yes to the American Field Service and go live in Argentina as foreign exchange. So I was there, you know, through my years being 16, 17, came back home to my small town and was kind of like, all right, what else can you show me? And I picked up a couple of books at that time, The Secret Life of Plants and Autobiography v. Yogi.

And those got me interested in both the inner world of human capacity and experience, as well as the, as well as the inner world of plants and everything. Like what was the consciousness that was underlying these plants? Cause these studies were so fascinating to me on plant consciousness and what they were able to perceive and how they were able to, how they were able to experience our thoughts and respond to our intentions and that.

Both of those lit me up in different ways and they pushed me towards a starter career in Ayurveda, which means the science of life. was a holistic health discipline over in the West and a medical profession over in India. And so I did actually end up living in India as well and then came back home. And so my, my teaching was to adults that were learning Ayurveda and I was just

early 20s. came back home from India pregnant. like Sarah was pregnant, we, you know.

Rachael Maves: I was gonna say.

Jacob Griscom: So Ethan is 23 now and my other son's 20. so that was my first experience teaching was to adults. But what was different, of course, in that environment is that adults had raised their hand. They had opted into that experience. They were even paying money to do it. They wanted to be there. And so that's different than compulsory K-12 education.

So that was kind of my early career. I ended up building a practice in that space. And then I went on to do various things in sales and marketing, finding that my understanding of human behavior was also useful in those domains and how people make decisions and how they change behavior or don't. Understanding that people have to be...

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: have to have a certain level of dissatisfaction for them to actually really change anything in their lives. And that dissatisfaction can come from either wanting something that they have not been able to realize yet and like finally feeling like, okay, what am I missing? Or losing something that was very important to them and having to re-examine their priorities or their strategies that led to that loss. But dissatisfaction as

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: as an element for actual real human change. So throughout that, I built a lot of things. I built businesses, I sold businesses, I built things in the nonprofit space as well, coordinating public and private efforts. I ended up selling a business called Everyday Ayurveda to a firm out of New Delhi, India. And after consulting with them for a bit,

It was like 2017 and I got really into blockchain and crypto and the implications of what it, what it could mean to be able to remove unnecessary middlemen across. And my mind just went all over the place thinking about possibilities with that. Um, but yeah, worked in crypto and built that out. Then, um, got into other aspects of technology and business development.

And yeah, that led me to connecting with the R &B communications team. I took the CEO role after there was a sort of a leadership void and then an owner role with the team. education has become a focus for this company, especially charter school education in California, because I do feel that those are the two big levers that move civilization, policy and education.

And education is kind of upstream of policy because it's influencing how do people think. It's the collective interior. And a lot of times things kind of descend from subtle to gross. And so things move from the interior to the exterior. What we think and what we focus on and what we don't think about and like that tends to kind of print out in the real world. So yeah, you asked about my career path. That's something about that.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: I love what you said about the two levers, policy and education. When I worked at the California Department of Education, part of what...

drew me into that position was the policy piece and how much bad policy and good policy has such an impact on our students and what that means and looks like. And I kind of had this belief that if we can have people in these positions that are thinking really deeply about policy and the downstream effect and what that means and looks like when it's in the implementation stage as you're creating it, that we could

have better outcomes for kids. Sometimes it's true and sometimes not, but that resonates. So tell me a little bit about this company, R &B Communications, the work that you're doing around AI-driven software. I mean, that's a huge hot button topic right now in the K-12 sector.

Jacob Griscom: Yeah, I don't think people quite realize how, I think people suspect and are maybe starting to feel the implications, but haven't really fully come to understand how big a change we're going through here. And what we've been doing for a long time is building software across industries, but within, you know, K-12 charters,

We've just been solving all of the business problems. We typically, a school will turn to us when the existing solution that they want isn't out there, right? Or maybe they have a platform that does it, but doesn't do it the way that they want. Or the cost of the platform is set up in such a way that it's not really priced for their size or their needs, or it's offering too much, too little, not the right way, that kind of thing.

Rachael Maves: Mm.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: Right. So in that, that's, those are all things that would cause somebody to look towards custom. Now, what would dissuade someone from custom is this, the time to delivery because building a custom application in the past, you know, first took going through the fairly detailed specifications and wireframe process. And then, and then, then a clear scope on the build. And then the build may take.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: three months, whatever it is, depending on the complexity of it. And the upfront cost may be somewhere in the 20 to 50 to a hundred thousand dollar range, depending on what it is, which you may still be able to justify because you're like, well, the ROI is still there over the next two years and the customization we're going to get and so on. But what's changed now that same software that takes a hundred thousand dollars and six months to build takes.

hundreds of dollars, a few thousand dollars, and it takes a day to build, at least to have like an MVP around. So what does that mean? That means directionally, all of that, there's a big shift to go from product to like operating system. So instead of buying product, product, product, product, product, pieces here and here and there,

Rachael Maves: Right?

Jacob Griscom: We've had to pivot our entire business model and we think we're directionally correct in where this is headed and that schools are going to realize this and that platforms that are have gobbled up a lot of market share and have like kind of sat back on their haunches and haven't had to like rapidly improve or rapidly respond because like in B2C business to consumer, you have very high cost sensitivity, but very low purchase friction people can just impulse buy.

Rachael Maves: Thank

Rachael Maves: Thank you.

Jacob Griscom: And B to B, you have to think in terms of what is the ROI? What's the return on investment? We're going to spend X and we're going to get back Y over what timeframe and what level of certainty? Okay, great. It makes sense or it doesn't. But then with B to G, you have like very high friction to get in, but very low cost sensitivity. Why? Because it's OPM is Milton Friedman's put it, it's other people's money.

Rachael Maves: You

Jacob Griscom: And, and so when you're spending other people's money, that's the, it's not because people are inherently, you know, corrupt or whatever. It's just that the incentive structure is aligned in such a way that when you're spending. Like it's the exact opposite. If you're spending your money on you, you care about both cost and quality. If you're spending other people's money on other people, then you start to care a lot less about both cost and quality.

Rachael Maves: you

Rachael Maves: Yeah. Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: So that's really interesting. as we see, there's these incumbents in the space. So we're like the piranha. And we come in, and now it's cleared us that there are things like, we won't ever touch SIS and like that. And now we're like, we can build an SIS in a few days. So of course, we're going to get to do it. So now everything is, think of it now instead of.

All of these piecemeal things that have to be cobbled together and aren't cobbled together well, and don't share data well together. Now you have one operating system like platform hosting layer. And then you have categories of applications that you need, but the application itself is not, it's not, we're not like not building it now over here and then reselling it over here. No, we're just rebuilding it over here exactly the way they need it now.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Rachael Maves: That's right.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: So the IP in a way is really just shifting to our security stack around it, the modularity around it, the spec sheet around it. But this is the thing, like this is for schools and everybody has start thinking in terms of, know, and like probably Hollywood, probably gaming, like every domain, it's like there is no moat there in the same way. It's because now you can just.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: What's the way to say it? AI is middle to middle. Artificial intelligence is middle to middle. Humans are end to end. So it still requires us to point and direct the rocket ship. And the more articulate you are and the more developed your ideas are and the more clear you are directionally, the better you're gonna be able to steer that rocket ship. And then on the back end, the more you're gonna be able to refine it, iterate on it.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: frame.

Jacob Griscom: curate it, have taste, that kind of stuff. So those are the human domains as we see it right now today. It's the end-to-end environment. AI is middle-to-middle and that changes assumptions about everything. If you haven't rethought absolutely everything about your business, about your school, about the future, then that is both understandable and there are things to think about.

Rachael Maves: Have you read that book, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow? Daniel Kahn, you would probably really like it, but the premise of it is really challenging the way that our brains work and what we process really fast and what we process that requires us to slow down and actually think about it and be engaged. And the challenge in his book is the things that we think we take the time to actually think about.

Jacob Griscom: Mm-mm.

Rachael Maves: we don't, it happens very fast and all the assumptions that come out of that. But when I was reading that book, it was like, you feel like you're going a little bit down the rabbit hole, like in Alice in Wonderland, where all of a sudden you're challenging and thinking.

what do I really think and is that really what I think about this? And it just pulls apart all of the foundational assumptions that you've put into place around your own worldview and belief systems and all those things. But I feel like AI is doing a little bit of the same thing, just in a different setting around we can't keep reorienting to the things that we've held before as cornerstones. And this is if we aren't thinking about an opening up to the ways that this begins to explode.

then we'll either be left behind or doing a disservice at least in the education sector I truly believe.

Jacob Griscom: That's right. Yeah. Back to the premise that behavior is only changing if somebody has enough of a felt sense of dissatisfaction. And that may come from interior triggers or it may become because the world is forcing it from the outside. And the world could be in a partner or a family member or friends, or it could mean a macro change of conditions, which we have it at various levels right now. We have, you know, I do this presentation called Arc and Fork, where I talk about

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: this major global shift from a material to electrical consciousness. then major like Dahlia's empire cycles, the end of American empire and the rise of the re-rise, re-ascent of Chinese empire and that shifting polarity of the world. And what does that mean? And then Straus and Howe's generational cycles that were in the crisis, the winter.

of this 80 to 100 year crisis cycle where we consistently tear down whatever institutions were running during this generation in preparation for what we rebuild in the spring.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, so thinking about the work that you're doing, everything that you're seeing from a global perspective in this layer of AI, what keeps you up at night about education in its current state?

Jacob Griscom: that the future of education is not schools.

Rachael Maves: Tell me more about that.

Jacob Griscom: in the same way that like the FDA can measure, oh, we've presented X number of like drug or surgery injuries or deaths.

Rachael Maves: Hmm.

Jacob Griscom: But what's not being measured is the number of deaths that are being caused by the FDA preventing things from coming to market.

Rachael Maves: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: that in the same way public education will measure graduation rates, standards, achievements, and so on, but is not measuring the damage we're doing to human beings and society by putting people in school in the first place.

Rachael Maves: Hmm. Hmm.

Jacob Griscom: So my revisioning of like, well, what is the, because learning is clearly something that is like natural innate to a human being. We come out being totally learning sponges. The senses are open. We're taking everything in. Right. And so in the same way that you're pointing to like this idea of a re-examination of concepts, our current system of education,

Rachael Maves: you

Jacob Griscom: was like forked, forked, forked. We can roughly trace it back to, okay, the Greeks were there. They gave us Socratic discussion, exploration of ideas. Then the Romans gave us some concepts of like merit and rising based on ability and so on. And the British started to segment society by roles. And then the American education system brought in

the idea of universality, while everybody's getting an education. But it also came about during an industrial period where the purpose of that education was really to just set people up so that they could be cogs in the machine. So I think we're due now for the next fork. And I think the fork is a bit of like the old thing becomes the new thing. And so because

learning is a natural innate human capacity. I have like an operating assumption that by making it compulsory, that that does more damage than good. That it means that

Rachael Maves: interesting.

Jacob Griscom: that our first experience of it, even if we're the personality type that does okay with it and like we're extroverted or you we find our group and we have like this thing called like a good time or an okay time at school, we're still being sorted based on age and geography. We're still, it's still not something we would have like come up with on our own and been like you know I want to put myself in this system. Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: in this building for six and half hours a day.

Jacob Griscom: And so to whatever degree, there then develops some level of aversion or distortion around the idea of learning. That it's either not fun, torture, work. It's something other than the joy and delight and magic of being a learning machine.

So when I'm living over in outside of Singapore in our special economic zone of Forest City, and we're start doing startup societies or startup countries, and I've got kids in that environment, and I'm watching an eight and 10 year old sister like win a hackathon. It's not because they were exceptional like genius out of the box, it's simply that the conditions that they've come up in have allowed them to remain like learning machines. They haven't had that.

that distortion added. And so they're able to engage with people older than them, younger than them quite easily. So you set up an environment where when you have basically what I would call society as a service or what I'm, pending as kind of network unions, which is the vision I have for what's a really natural operating mode that solves all of the problems instead of just consistently trimming the branches and not addressing the trunks and the roots.

Rachael Maves: Mmm.

Jacob Griscom: then a 12 year old can teach a 30 year old and the natural organization is not around age and geography, but it's around interest and aptitude.

And so people are constantly making offers. Here's what I'm interested in when to pass along. Here's what I need to learn and I'm interested in doing. The places where there's the most interest in alignment become recurrent clubs, groups, courses, whatever. But people are constantly opting into it based on again, interest and aptitude rather than compulsion, age and geography. So that's a pretty interesting idea. And if you think of it as society as a service,

Rachael Maves: Mm.

Jacob Griscom: It's like the new SaaS, right? Software is about society as a service. So it covers your housing level. It covers your food level. It covers your health and fitness level. It covers the aligned community. And it covers learning, but within a system that is much more organic and natural to the human being, the human operating system.

And it builds equity and not in the buzzword of like equity sense, but like actual wealth accumulation by contributing to the community over time. have like a, like a software that it forms like a digital nervous system for the community and also allows like a local living economy to happen off, off of dollar rails, off of crypto, just within, within a sort of a local, very hyper local currency system.

Rachael Maves: you

Jacob Griscom: So to me, that's much more interesting because it's then addressing all of the fragmentation of life instead of just a band-aid treatment around this or that issue within the system. And so now you've solved now the housing issue, you've solved the health issue, you've solved the education issue, you've solved the wealth building issue, and you've brought all of the costs down, like the hard cost as well as the soft cost of fragmented life.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: and you've leveled up across all of these areas. So that directionally, I don't know if that keeps me up so much because I sleep really well, but.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: But it does give me like a north star to point towards and an interesting deposition to be in where I have to kind of Trojan horse in this big idea within all of the band-aid treatments I'm helping charters with, which is let me help you with the reality of your today while also saying, hey, we need to be building this other better thing parallel for the future so that we have like an exit into, because there is no certainty around.

Rachael Maves: Yes.

Jacob Griscom: what happens at end of empire and especially in the state with $18 billion in deficit and, and, and, and.

Rachael Maves: That was going to be my follow up question for you, Jacob, because the like I hear what you're saying about this North Star and that feels like immediately like overwhelming. How do you even get there? What are those first next steps? And as you're working with charter schools, assuming that this is the premise of moving forward, what are one or two?

like really tangible next steps that move them into that space of education being something that isn't constrained in the same way that it is today.

Jacob Griscom: It's a really difficult ask. So it would, it could only happen if people are, are like able to see the time and place that we're in, like as it is, not as they would hope it to be. And if they can acknowledge like, okay, changes, rapid change, dramatic change is a foot, even if it's not my preference. And so what does it look like to become instead of like,

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: You know, just give me one thing that I can hold onto. Like, if there's not really a solid ground to stand on, if the energy of this time is much more of like a, like a surfer riding a wave and then saying, okay, this one's about petered out, let's paddle back and catch whatever next one is forming. That's a very different place to be in. And, you know, admins and so on are already typically.

energetically, psychologically underwater in terms of just fielding incoming.

So, I don't know if this is the right approach, but it's the best I can make sense of today is take all of the C work off of their plates, like leverage, just make what they have to do within the system just so much more efficient, cost-effective, integrated, et cetera, pull as much busy work and BS off of people's plates as possible so they can be doing more of.

their A work, their high value kind of person to person connectivity, human level work. Either way that creates value today. And it's like a business model that makes sense for today and directionally where we're headed. But then to the 1%, 3%, the 5 % that someone can begin to be thinking about and building the parallel reality.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: stream.

Jacob Griscom: I think it descends from the cloud to the land. So you build it with, that's why Kpart is such interesting software to me. It's a brand new category of software that I've built. And it's about creating like a digital nervous system for a network, which is a group of people by indexing the individuals in it in an integral way. In other words, we want to know, okay, what is Rachael's like subjective reality of her?

her interior individual space, what is her objective reality, her skills, abilities, basic health and so on. But also what is her inter subjective, her cultural affinities and realities. She speaks English, she's an American, but what tribal sort of affinities does she have and what subgroups is she a part of and so on. And then her exterior collective.

which is like the systems that she's a part of, what roles does she consistently play, whether it's in family or in organizations or in society or community and so on. So now we have like an interesting integral lens on this person. And now the goal within that network becomes the vector. So now if Rachael wants to accomplish something within health, wealth, relationships, career, hobbies, awareness, whatever it is,

She can now point that goal by articulating that goal out into the network. And the software is now going to find alignment with anybody else in that network that's very highly aligned with helping to achieve or support or explore that goal across whatever, you know, number of those quadrants are really relevant for it. Sometimes all you need is a skill. Okay, great. But sometimes you need a skill plus a shared worldview.

Rachael Maves: Hmm.

Jacob Griscom: Or sometimes you need like a skill plus like an opposing worldview so you can see blind spots. So that becomes really interesting to be able to do that. And then also have like an economy within that network of what we call asks and tasks. What would you, if you're trying to coordinate human behavior, what are you asking people in your network to do that they can then be compensated, incentivized to do without having to pay them all in dollars and

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: That's right.

Jacob Griscom: run 1099s and all of the complexity of the state, just have like a platform level credit within the network. So that's really interesting because if schools then could even take that project on, they would get immense value today in terms of being able to see and like online resources that are not currently used within people, within their parent networks, within whatever.

and incentivize actions that they wanna see that don't involve having to give people like pay raises. It can just be more of a circulating economy of activity as well as sort of voice. That's the other side, the other credit on this platform. And that is what I would call kind of building that capacity in the cloud.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: because now when it comes down to, let's actually become capable of this, we're a network that's capable of some level of collective action.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: The next step in a startup society is then the crowdfunding of territory. So then you have to actually buy or convert some sort of land, some sort of real estate into, where are people actually going to be living and who should be living together? That really is gonna be determined best by cultural affinities like.

There is no United States of America anymore. As far as I'm concerned, there's more of a disunited tribes of North America. And so when you get one country, two nations, you were like red American, blue America don't marry each other anymore. They rarely hire each other. They exist in totally separate media domains. It's like, you know, one generation of that ideology creates biology and you've got like a Sunni Shiite situation.

And these are not people that can like live together anymore. And so especially if the one thing holding them together, like a common currency begins to become more shaky at the end of empire and so on. So at that point, then it becomes really relevant. And the school could be an interesting, one of the many interesting places to pilot that is to say, well, what cultural affinities do we have within our collective and what would it look like to start to

Like in technology, we have this idea of you create value when you bundle, unbundle and rebundle. So like you have like songs and we bundled them into CDs and then we unbundled them into MP3s and then we rebundled them into Spotify playlist. So right now we're in this, in the phase kind of collectively in the West of the unbundling. So there has to be an answer to how do we rebundle, especially if the, you know, the shouting and the shooting gets worse.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: How do we re-bundle in a way that's intentional, coordinated and with people that are gonna be able to find some alignment and build something along the lines of these network unions where they can take care of, like the Maslow and Howe says in these fourth turnings, we know that the things that we've had in the past, some of them have and some of them are crumbling.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: but that there will be something that comes after it. And so, you know, if you're in tech, if you're a builder, the interest becomes, well, what's the positive thing we're building for? What is the rebundling that makes sense for our time and place? So that's kind of how I see it. You have to build it in the cloud first, then it can descend to the land.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, I what what you're saying I think puts some vocabulary maybe to something that is felt I think in education right now. The more conversations I have a lot of people are feeling like we're just kind of waiting to see how this emerges because something will emerge from it. There will be a massive shift, but I don't know if anyone has quite yet.

outside of you with the way that you're seeing the North Star, there's not that collective North Star yet. And I think that people are feeling that right now.

Jacob Griscom: And it would be hard to do that from the inside because what you're describing is we're going to cannibalize our current system in some form. know, so hopefully we're like, the, the, the, like the low, the lowest amount of trauma possible would be great. But sometimes again, people have to hit it's like in health, it's like, okay, you've been doing this unhealthy thing, unhealthy thing, unhealthy thing. You've gotten away. but there came the heart attack. Now you're like, let me reconsider. so.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: Yeah, it would be difficult because again, that OPM, that other people's money, it is a heroine of a type and sort of, you know, voluntarily moving off of it feels very difficult.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Jacob Griscom: And yet, so how does that happen? So typically, if you're like an investor, you'll do this thing called hedge or diversify and you'll start to put a few, you'll start to build out some uncorrelated assets. And so I think that's the general concept here. We need to build out some uncorrelated assets to public K-12 education that are in line with the, I think the deepest spirit.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: of the charter movement, which was, hey, we need to do this better. We need to serve humans better. We need to serve kids better. That relates to then how humanity and civilization unfolds. Then people that went into charters had at least some level of that in their DNA because they wanted to try new things and experiment new things, they, you know, they're constrained still within so much.

Rachael Maves: Yeah.

Jacob Griscom: accountability, that the very nature of just keeping the thing alive means they can't be purely focused on human outcomes. They have to be first focused on institutional survival and then human outcomes.

Rachael Maves: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's yeah, that is very true and we've just

exacerbated that problem, think, in the layerings that we've put on for education and what the expectations are and what even public education is for that it never was when it was first created. But Jacob, we are so far over time. This was a very unexpected, wonderful conversation that I'm going to have to go through and spend some time thinking. I really appreciate it.

Jacob Griscom: Yeah. Well, people that haven't plugged in yet, they can come to the AI and ed tech mastermind. do open office hours every Thursday, currently afternoon. So people can plug in and have whatever conversation they want, whatever they're exploring. Very practical, very philosophical, wherever you want and need to go. Accommodate that. yeah. And then whatever conversations people want to have around solving and improving the systems that are not working for them the way that they want today.

Rachael Maves: Mm.

Jacob Griscom: and then the bigger picture around how can they start to build and diversify for tomorrow.

Rachael Maves: Mm-hmm.

Rachael Maves: I love it. Well, thank you for your time today, Jacob. I appreciate it.

Jacob Griscom: Thank you to you, Rachael.

Rachael Maves: This spring, PARSEC knows you're working hard to budget for the next school year. Check out our resources page on our website to help with your compliance documents and strategic plan alignment at www.parseceducation.com slash resources. We are here to support you and hope these resources take time of the stress out of the heavy lift.

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.