Good morning.

It is 25 years after I've left Wall Street, 25 years after I had a bee in my bonnet to understand,

care about and engage with the human predicament. And that comes with a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is I often integrate insights from between various disciplines.

And the curse is that I can't help unsee things.

So normal everyday things like an advertisement or a billboard or a television show or a piece of art give me unbidden systems inferences.

And today I'd like to talk about one of these images, a piece of art,

that has been prominent in my prefrontal cortex the last couple weeks. It is this image from

photographer Emmanuel Tarty about a sloth in Costa Rica climbing,

a fence post by barbed wire. The picture was a finalist in the National Geographic Wildlife

Photo of the Year. It's titled, There's No Place Like Home.

I probably have spent two full hours looking at this image in the last couple weeks,

elapsed time, over time.

And I'd like to share some of the wide boundary insights that have come to my mind and and heart while looking at this this image Firstly, it is a piece of art.

Like, I can't stop looking at it.

And I think the definition of good art is something that you get mesmerized by.

You get lost in. You look at. And the colors and the

composition and this sloth in motion, slow motion, climbing up this fence post and the encroaching

soybean plantation or whatever that is next to a forest, it's just,

it tells a story. So it's it captures your attention as art. That's point number one.

Point number two in our class Reality 101, I taught my students about the concept of supernormal stimuli, which is some stimulation or some signal in our modern world that gives us an intense replication, but on steroids, on leverage, then our ancestral cues.

The example I used to use was a popsicle stick painted red that was larger than the baby birds put into a baby bird's nest.

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