i thought i would start tonight by telling you two things that i think are probably true about you if you're like most people you are struggling with overeating that doesn't mean you're overweight just means that not eating too much has gotten pretty difficult the second thing is if you're like most people you're turning to the wrong solutions to try to address that problem so what i'm going to talk to you about tonight is how consumer culture makes us over eat and undermines our well being in a lot of ways so as americans we have a tendency to view over eating as an individual failure but that is really only half the story and i hope that you'll leave here with a different set of solutions some things that you haven't thought of before i want to start by talking about grocery stores i don't know about you guys but when i go to the grocery store i'm not just buying food i feel like most of what i'm doing is a kind of decoding propaganda decoding lights ok i'm someone who knows a lot about nutrition and i just can't believe how much effort i have to put into to just sort of think about how people might be trying to trick me it does sound a little paranoid when i hear myself say it aloud but there really is a lot of evidence about what's going on and not only is there all this deception and i'm not even talking about ingredient labels there's that there's also just the marketing the names of food the claims but i also feel like i can't really count on the f d a or elected officials to protect my interests or to hold these food companies accountable ok so those are the things that i'm concerned about i'm going to show you a couple examples this is just two things or three things i picked up from this is from bart tell you know let me let me hear what anything on here that makes you sort of suspicious or any propaganda and lies that you detect a licks  yeah exactly nectar from the guy exactly and you know here's the thing i want you to understand this was not like there was some guy in his office who was just thinking elixirs a cool word look let's call it but know this there was a team of probably ivy league m b a mind reading ninja who did a bunch of market research and they figured out  a licks or it's going to give people a certain feeling and part of that feeling is that we're going to want to spend more money on a soda ok but also you're going to feel like it's a treatment they put i don't know if you know this  medicinal note it's called in these energy drinks so that people feel like they are getting a treatment and not drinking fruit so that's on purpose it's almost like a placebo effect they're doing ok someone said natural what what does a company have to do to say that their product is natural anybody know absolutely nothing not one thing that term is not regulated by the f d a and in fact tonight when you go home go to their web site and just type in keyword natural and you'll see a statement where they say we're not going to define the word natural because that would be too difficult i thought that was what law makers do and regulatory agencies is that isn't defining difficult concepts and then making rules about them the very purview of public policy you know you decide what what's a felony what's a misdemeanor what's abortion what's intoxicated you you define those terms in some way what are the energy gives you energy what would you expect from that interesting well a lot of people i think would feel like oh yeah this will make me alert motivated you know i'll be on yes if you're a nutritionist energy simply means calories th actually like the one accurate claim on here this will give you energy what is it hundred twenty calories worth of energy how about this one  another drink yeah dry sparkling local company very familiar with it lemon grass reserve edition so clever and interestingly you know this was called dry soda just until couple months ago why do you suppose they change the name yes it is out they change this pretty much right at the time that marion nestle book sort of politics came out i mean this is not such a bad it has a lot less sugar than so but it's kind of interesting packaging now ok this is not a how i don't have the product here but i want to read you something funny this is from a lawsuit it's called belly at all versus nestle going to the whole lawsuit but i like this little beginning part because in the present case plaintiff was injured by the defendant's illegal sale of its misbranded eskimo pie plaintiff was deceived into purchasing eskimo pie because of label statements and wrongly believe that eskimo pyar was healthier than other similar products but that's a lawsuit over an ice cream sea in which people how other we get here what it this is interestingly this is not a frivolous lawsuit of any of any sort there's an organization the center for science in the public interest the radical concept using science to inform policy they have sponsored a number of lawsuits in mostly in california class action suits against food companies that won't comply with the law so in this case the f d a has actually sent nestle numerous warning letters about this product which is breaking the law the way the the packages and that nestle just ignores those letters did you know by the way that that is the f tool for and for some and a warning letter think about that server we'd like you to stop murdering people here's your warning letter i mean am i alone in questioning the effectiveness of that so that's what grocery stores used to look like right they even had better names back then piggly wiggly it's a great name spanx you want to go there here's grocery stores today average or she sure has forty thousand products and these products are highly designed by an army of food scientists with ph d s and biology and chemistry that's even before they get to the packaging and the marketing i'll tell you a quick story when i was in fifth grade i went over to a friend's house after school and her mom put  together a little snack like a vegetable to take a and some saw us we didn't call things could a table act them and i just said cut up vegetables or something but anyway i remember you know dipping a carrot into this sauce and just it was just the most novel flavor i had never tasted anything like it it was so delicious and i asked i said what is this and i remember her mom goes oh no it's new it's called ranch dressing that was kind of the early days of these people that are called professional flavor wrists that were making these novel flavors and putting them into foods i've heard there's one political scientists who refers to this kind of food as edible commodities and i like that term because it really got it emphasizes these are consumer products as much or really more than they are food at least food as we used to know it and by the way it's not just this kind of stuff and packages these days foods like this are actually a lot like that that is the sweet tango apple which is  trademarked patented apple it was in research and development for ten years university of minnesota you have to pay a lot of money to grow that apple it's called a club apple and you know i mean that's that's fine with me i can't stand biting into a mealy apple that's oh well that's a terrible feeling if someone wants to spend ten years developing a perfectly crispy apple here's my two bucks and that's that's fine but i think we should know that even fruit produce things that we you know we have so many associations with with apples being so pure in the garden of eden keeping the doctor away it's important to know that they are now consumer products as well so this kind of consumerization that i'm talking to you about it's not just food i mean it's everything i'll tell you another little story this was actually this was also when i was in the fifth grade and this big year for me i joined the girl scouts i had wanted to be in girl scouts for a long time and my mom and i we went and got the uniform the side the bray and i think that when i joined i happened to be the time of year for girl scout cookies so that was the first thing that we did sold girl scout cookies then after that we had a this fundraiser and we had to sell these garfield seat belt covers you remember the cartoon character garfield so this was like a plastic sleeve adorned by garfield and then you put it over your seat belt yeah so take two useful product surely none of those are sitting in landfills today ok then after that we did a thing where we sold magazines scripture and that one was a contest service here like a big grand prize for that and i was motivated by that so every day after school i went out selling subscriptions and i went i won the contest and the grand prize was a hardback book by bob vila called back to basics how many improvement you wonder why i remember the exact title thirty five years later well it was bitterly disappointing i mean that's you know for a ten for anybody really i think it as a grand prize for but for a ten year old child it made no sense and so i quit the girl scouts after that i mean i just i just had it i mean it was really dis and then after i quit i even felt worse i mean i i felt like a quitter i felt like i had sort of given up or i didn't fulfill the commitment that i made and you know what i couldn't understand at that time was that my feelings were really about the commercialization of childhood the consumerization of childhood that that's what i was struggling with in that and i mean you don't have to be a developmental psychologist to know that little kids shouldn't be out selling things door to door right they should be taking standardized tests there's a lot of studies about that so what i want you to notice though is that how this kind of cultural problem commodification consumerization that was something i experienced as an individual failure i blamed myself and i want you to consider that just like i did with girl scouts with over eighty we are internalizing a cultural problem as an individual failure ok so let me pose this question to you what do you do say on january first you wake up and your pants don't fit happens to many people do you do you file a class action lawsuit you get bigger pants but is it one of those that most people do or that happens to yeah let's look at some of the things here some things we do i mean there's a lot of you know products think about what all these things have in common besides tasting like crap you know all called you know notice the word free lie zero populates all these labels these products are they're false promises i think they're really appealing to this part of us that so much wishes that some things didn't count i mean that's just a fundamental that's so appealing the idea that i don't know maybe somehow something won't count right that's why they put it get out of jail free card of the monopoly game you know it appeals to this wish that we have to get away with stuff somehow and i think it's a lot better to just confront the brutal reality that nothing is free there is there is a price there is a price for these things to pay in a different way but notice that there are some other other things that work the same way subprime mortgages for example that that whole thing was based on these promised same kinds of false promises oh it's zero down it's low interest now you'll figure it out somehow just just have what you want you know it's not going to count right now that was the promise and of course we see what happened there these are there's lots of different kinds of supplements these are sometimes upscale kind of health stores sometimes  are super supplements twenty five billion dollars in sales annually for supplements and i don't know if you know this none of these products are tested before they go to store shelves they're not tested right now they're actually twenty thousand emergency room visits per year related to supplements usually resulting in liver damage the f d a used to have the power they used they f d a used to see that all supplements were tested before they went on to store shelves that power got taken away from them and you we have a senator orrin hatch to thank for that look up the law called the shea that he sponsored because he lives in a state with a huge supplement industry that stripped that power from the f d a we might turn to prescription medications some of those fen phen to mean works it just gives you heart damage but it will help you fit back into your pants these are popular vita mix splendor juicers green juice and smoothies i'm convinced you could just take a green donut and put it in a blender and people be like that so green that just the color green gives things what's called a health halo kind of imagine it has all these healthy properties because it's associated with vegetables in this case you can feel like one tiny piece of kale in and the whole thing magically becomes healthy but most juice and smoothies are just lots of liquid sugar if you're one of the people who truly makes you know green smoothies or green juice without a lot of fruit in it you are a better person than i am because those things taste like hell and i don't know but it can be done it can be done so a lot of us you know higher what diet coaches personal trainers lots of books out there and you know it's not that none of these things ever work many of these you can work but they're just they're often not sustaining  solutions to the problem what i want to call your attention to is that all these things i just showed you they're all really just alternate forms of consumerism you're just consuming a different thing and set of food so you know think about that for a second if really what we want to do is consume less does it does the solution to the solution be consuming more there's you know there's a tension there's a paradox there in some ways it's kind of like robbing peter to pay paul which is consuming new things and then as i mentioned a lot of those things just don't work but let's think about for a second you know why do we keep doing this i mean why do we persistently turn to solutions like that to people in other places in the world people in africa well that's not a good example let me use an example of a more similar culture and economy people in germany turn to solutions like syria anybody here who could represent on something psychologists call locus of control which just has to do with to what extent we feel like we are in charge of things that happen to us that we control things that happen to us kind of control our destiny so this is a cross cultural study it was actually involved a lot more countries i just pulled those look how different the u s is compared to so many other countries how much we think we can control our lives and what's going to happen to us and affect change this is a very it's a uniquely american belief that we can make ourselves into anything we want through hard work willpower discipline and right it some people call it american exceptionalism i've also saw it called the fun tear mentality it's true of places also like canada and australia it's like you know frontier to conquer and the kind of cultural beliefs that we internalize from that take a look at this this is a commercial that air why do we work so hard for on this stuff other countries they work stroll home they stop by the cafe they take august off for you like that w like that because we're crazy driven hard working believers that's why those other countries think we're nuts whatever when the wright brothers and saying bill gates les paul or we not only pointed to the moon that's right we went up there you know we got bored so we left got a car of there left the keys in and you know one is where the only one's going back up there that's why but i digress it's pretty simple you work hard you create your own lu  and then actually there's even a reference to the that fun to or mentality what was it the moon yeah frontier another frontier we conquered right so this is what i'm talking about this this narrative of personal transformation that we can just make ourselves and whatever it's very appealing i'll concede that it is it's empowering to feel like we can do that but there are some different problems with it one is it draws our attention away from these cultural and economic problems that i'm talking about it narrows the focus onto the self so instead of filing a class action lawsuit against a corporation it's harming consumers instead of voting orrin hatch out of office instead of demanding that federal nutrition guidelines follow current science we're buying green juice trying to make that change trying to control over eating by buying this product when there's  a systemic political and economic problem that's that's the underlying cause so not only are these solutions we often turn to ineffective but they also do us quite a bit of harm because they don't work we often engage in self blame after these diets fail or we stop going to the personal trainer or kettle boiled or whatever it is we compare ourselves to others that doesn't make us feel good it's a lot of research coming out just looking at even how social media can make people feel bad because of this comparison to others and then we just imagine we should try harder we should just be more have a little more willpower don marshmallow ok take a look at this let you kind of absorb that tac airport can you see what that is so they spent a lot of money put in putting in these water bottle refilling stations a couple years ago they put out a bunch of press releases and you know they did it to reduce waste of plastic bottles and to get people to drink water and they crowed about what a great thing it was they were doing and then about a year later they have this advertisement up to you deserve better than water and then there's this like nine hundred calorie frappuccino with whipped cream on it and it's directing you to these two you know places w can get it i really think right here i mean what you're seeing is consume less consume more and i think that is the defining paradox of our time right there everybody in here wants to consume less i mean this is a group of people who are concerned about the environment and of us wants the glaciers to melt we don't want landfills even if you don't care about that nobody wants to be overweight nobody wants to be diabetic we all want to consume less but we also have a very powerful evolutionary instinct to consume more really humans are designed to binge eat and hoard resources objects i don't think it's any coincidence that two new so that's kind of the contradiction we're dealing with the question is what are the solutions i'm told you that you cannot come to town hall and give a talk without offering solutions and it's not that i don't want to offer solutions i do i am concerned about solutions but you know if you heard what i just said we over value individual solutions you know everybody wants oh the five tips that will help us do whatever and again that pulls our attention away from the kind of political changes cultural changes that are essential for there to be really meaningful change solutions things i think about what is just generally limiting exposure to advertising marketing messages i mean have you noticed you actually cannot even go to the bathroom anymore and there's a public bathroom they have advertisements in the stalls in the new places we're constantly bombarded with i mean think about like times square or something like that right all of the consumer messages things like even something as simple as discarding or unsubscribing catalogs come so sometimes i get a even though i have requested to be taken off the list countless times i still will get a catalog one hundred time from a store called design within reach and i love design i love looking at beautifully made things and what they do and how were they made but i learned that lesson when that catalog comes i take it like a hot potato and i put it in the recycling bin because i know exactly what's going to happen i can be perfectly happy before i open that up happy as a clam and then what happens after i look through it i feel like i'm racking something there's some now i'm unhappy because there's a thing out there that could somehow make my life better or more authentic we pleasing it's just a distraction i don't even want that in my periphery so i don't look at that kind of related to that is just reducing variety there are just so i mean there used to be one kind of to read oh nacho cheese there are now seventeen kinds of derivatives and they're not nacho cheese there a like three d explosion jacked up three rock ranch noodles or so i mean i don't even know they have so many they're so intense to and so that kind of those flavors are so over stimulating to the brain that you are desensitizing ourselves i mean think about if you're eating those derivatives how is just an actual piece of cheese going to taste good you want to be able to taste it right like air i saw something on buzz feed last week like sixteen ethnic shakes you don't wan what does that have a hair what is that cotton candy or i mean i can't afford to miss those i better afford to miss those i don't want to do that to my brain like i don't need to add sixteen things to my list of things that are hard to resist i don't want them on my horizon at all so just reducing variety at some of the retraining your palate ok is rethinking your reference group reference group is a concept that economists use that refers to just sort of how we make sense of ourselves it's just totally human nature to compare yourselves to other people your neighbors your family your friends but these days we're exposed in the social media with reality shows we're exposed to these lifestyles and people are all this awesome food and you feel like oh i have to have that or i'm not cool or whatever words exposed to all these reference groups of people doing all these amazing things or at least it kind of looks like that and so really kind of recalibrating who really are your peers what are they doing are are they going to these fancy restaurants and you know instagram and pictures or buying expensive things luxury goods you know the show keeping up with the what why is it called that keeping up with the cardassian what sort of reference to keeping up with the joneses it's such a clever name but i mean think about it we used to only have to keep up with the joneses but like god now we have to keep up with the car dash that's what reference group is about is really thinking about who are my peers do i have to be like these other people and finding some way to another want to just kind of and learning instant gratification there are so many things now you know amazon has like one one click buy i turn that off you know let things layer crew in your shopping cart have a little cooling off period you might find if you let things have a crew and the car or on a list that you keep some of the go back and i'm like w put that that's done i don't need that you know after a week or so passes you know what everything is designed for impulse purchasing impulse eating you can just look at the grocery store checkout before things like waiting twenty minutes before you have second second helping lots of things like that to impulse control the last thing that i think is a good idea is making things happen you know we i don't know if you know this we make two hundred food decisions a day yes and he probably figured this out it's really hard to make two hundred good food decisions every day the people who look like that's what they're doing that isn't what they're doing a lot you know the secret what they've done is made a bunch of things automatic they just have these ingrained routines they have over meal every morning for breakfast and i'm not saying it to do that but there's been example they bring their lunch every day or they they never put sugar in their coffee or they don't have that you know whatever their things are they've made a decision and then that's they're not thinking about it if you just you know walk into starbucks and you're like ha what should i have for breakfast you're already a goner you get where i'm going with this that making a lot of these decisions automatic means now you're making one hundred fifty decision today or one hundred a day it takes a lot less thinking a lot less willpower to make fewer food decisions ok let me leave you with kind of a final observation you know notice that none of these things on here have been to do with calories or or points or fat i'm not saying those things are important but there's a bigger picture here what unifies all these things is that they're just about consuming less of everything and so when we re frame the problem of over eating as a problem of overconsumption that shift gives us more effective and  strategies to push back against these forces of consumer culture that's it that's all i've got you it is actually fantastic news that the f d a is now under a lot of pressure from people who decided to take a political stand decided that they are going to start listing they're not calling it natural sugar added sugar but but essentially it is what you're saying where for example if something really is just let's say it's fruit juice and it really just is pureed fruit and strained nothing else added that has it that will have quite a bit of sugar but zero out of sugar because that's what the new labels will reflect right now though if you go to the store and buy juice there is a lot that has they wondered up the fruit strained it and the going to be any regulation of the term natural hi my question has to do with some brain research that i've been reading about the mapping of the brain and how there is research going on where different researchers are trying to figure out well if i stimulate through sound a certain part of the brain i can get you to think that you're smelling something right in front of you so it's kind of like how to enhance if you're watching a movie how to make it seem more real and so i'm wondering if you know anything about the brain mapping projects that are going on that might stimulate us to through sound do things that like like have a small popcorn when it's not really there or whatever if you know anything about that well that's a good question i don't i don't know too much about that but a couple things i know there is  area now called neuro marketing i don't know if you've heard about that but as marketers are using m r i s and brain scans really to see what will make people buy more stuff so i don't know about that research th stuff that you're talking about i have actually on that tango apple i showed you there's i guess a whole body of science just on the crew the sound of the crunch like with the cells shatter in this certain way to have vibrate on the ear drum in a way that's very pleasing and they were trying to get that part of the sweet tango apple so i don't know what about it but i'll say you know it if freaks me out because you know really what you're what you're talking about is creating a hallucination and that's what a host nation is when we hear something is not the smell something that's not really there and that it disturbs me that that could be created by people who are making food or advertisements i think that's like a really scary trojan horse into the brain  so that's all i know about it can we over consume information or content i wonder that i mean sometimes i will spend all day saturday reading and will have this sense of a sort of aeration this appetite to read oh my god i'm like bingeing here this is out of control you know there's something kind of there's just so much content out there and i think we have the since of urgency to keep up with it there is and i don't have the reference offhand but there actually is a wonderful article that just came out last year by two harvard psychologist about consuming content over consuming content in the kind of media that mostly print media or electronic media so i can give you that reference but i think it's a really good question to ask because the way i'm thinking about things is that all this consumerism consuming has some kind of unified appeal or something consistent so i think that has to be accounted for but i haven't i haven't gotten farther than that is american exceptionalis yeah really putting me on the spot with that one and you know i saw one on early review already my book has just been out like two weeks and somebody already called me a liberal angry and anti american am very anti american for that matter well i wasn't like a double edged sword i mean there's so many you know think about all the great i think there's a lot of great things about america i mean you could just stop there willie nelson yeah but obviously it has come at a price and my own view about this i mean when i was writing this book i just so surprised at how every every theme every argument that i was working on always took me to regulation like that always like wow how did this get so out of control oh it's not very well regulated and i'm actually quite surprised that you know i never thought as a psychologist i would have to become expert on regulation last summer i read a book about you a big by harvard professor about the f d a called reputation and power and you know that the f d a really has a huge effect on our well being psychological and physical well being so you know i think america's great american exceptionalism you know might be a little arrogant perhaps at times but you know i think kind of back to the pope what the pope is saying is it's not that capitalism or global capitalism is bad it's that when it's just unrestrained and bloated and unregulated and corporations are held accountable that's when it really kind of goes south so i see that as a huge as a real problem so if these kind of political solutions come to fruition will food costs more and and should it well i mean should it i don't know i don't think i ought to be the one answering those questions but we don't pay what food actually costs mostly because of the corn so we're not paying the real price of food and when you're not paying the real price of things like honestly same thing with gas you're you're consuming you're your behavior will be different you're going to consume different food if it's cheap because it has lots of corn in it than food that's totally unsubsidized and so yes it'll definitely be more expensive but i think there are also probably you know if you go economists or political scientists could answer more questions about i don't know what if production has significantly changed more local more regional that i'm not sure about but i can say that we're not paying and leisure buying all you know from farmers markets or organic food then you're piping a real price of food and that's why everybody says well you know good food costs a lot of money  so but you know if you're buying food like i showed you in that that was a picture of fred meyer you're not paying the real cost how much of our overconsuming is related to disconnectedness thank you for asking that i should i should write you a check for asking that question that is actually a lot of my book is about that because you know i was showing you these kind of things that we do you know by supplements and polls and all the stuff  over eat but the truth is we really do that for any kind of distress or dysphoria and i think you know they're there i think it's true that there is a disconnect in this not just because of the digital age even before that though you know it's a very we live in a huge country it's very common for people to the kind of people who would you know come to town hall you probably moved away from the town you grew up and maybe you went to college or you  far away from your family isolated there's a lot of social isolation not as much community fabric and so yes i think if you know my own feeling about this and i'm a psychologist i love psychology it's great but i think psychology as a discipline has been complicit in kind of overselling these solutions and that can be you know depressants it can be therapy which i believe in and it's great but a lot of those a lot of the solutions that psychology offers are not addressing i think the underlying problem which is exactly what you said good evening thank you for that talk it was a great mix of entertainment information controversy and humor thank you it was it was fun to watch so i work at the university as well and i work on teams that we do research on physical activity and nutrition and we agree that basically the personal choice is really kind of out of the picture and it's there are more systematic things in  the way that our environments are constructed right that lead to bad decisions and and so in what you showed in the last deck of slides was i felt were a lot of things that were suggestions t individuals about ok what can i do to fight this consumer culture and i was hoping that you could give a little insight on what you think about in terms of a broader societal or policy directions or things that we can do not just to say like ok i'm going to i'm going to not look at that thing but what can i do to help turn the tide against consumerism ok thank you both such a thoughtful question which is  repeating what i hope was clear individual solutions are limited i know we all we want them i wanted to i was told i'd be facing an angry mob if i didn't give them but i agree the bigger solutions are these systemic forces that are something i think about a lot and i don't know if you've heard of organization it's called the center for new american dream and there's really their whole mission is exactly what you're talking about which is how do you make some kind of culture why shift and they have a lot of initiatives that have to do with just like getting to know your neighbors and having more of a sharing economy among namers i mean i've got a neighbor here tonight we've got the same leaf blower and then another guy down the street has the same same exact model and then somebody else about two streets down none of us were ever blowing leaves at the same time why are four of those leaf blowers all in this you know tiny radius we could just like maybe have a shed and you know share them so that would be kind of a someone or sharing economy they have like tool sharing libraries and stuff like that those are the kinds of solutions that that organization is focused on in terms of thinking about ways to her project we offer by our own you know whatever it is and i think for food obviously lots of strides have been made in just having farmers markets and now those are even getting to be smaller neighborhood based ones probably less people here saw an article that just came out in the new york times about how people are  really moving away from packaged foods sodas junk food so clearly something is going on with food education like schools school lunches so i think it depends a lot of what your situation is if you have kids i think you know being involved in what what is their school doing for lunch like that's a great thing even at your job you know if you have vending machines you know your focus i think is on the built environment and how it kind of puts people in her final bad decision making and gosh the food i mean there are just so many things like that you know now they've got some vending machines with carrot sticks they don't have them at my job i'd like to get them because when you're you know you forgot your lunch you're really hungry and then there's just the kind of standard vending machine that's an example of how you get pushed in these bad decisions so you know i think sort of each person looking at their neighborhood their workplace their kids schools to think about how could i put pressure on this little organization in my orbit to make a change and then i think everyone should look at the center for new american dream i love their their  stuff so the question is what can we really do i you know i have to admit i when i got to the end of writing this book i was i was very demoralized i have a friend colleague i want to stop you yeah it's good for you to write the book because it gives you know the people that really want to make the change you want to do think it gives us ideas that we can use to change the way we do things and make things better for us and maybe the people around us yeah you know again i don't want to stop you but i understand you know well what i want to say is i remember this conversation  depressed and he said well i've always suffered from political depression political depression yes yes so but by the end of writing this book i you know i got to the last chapter that i imagined as very hopeful and uplifting and then when i really did all the research and writing and i got that i just found to write you know why even try so you know it it i i agree with you yeah i angry with you but you know i think it is a struggle for me to kind of come up with some of the solutions but i don't want to sugar coat no pun intended that you know that i think the political reality the cultural reality it is kind of bleak i mean there's a lot of complacency that has gotten that political complacency that's gotten us to where we are now so i don't know