Joan Westenberg: Hawke has spent over a decade thinking about the social science of online spaces. ⁓ She's watched communities thrive and collapse, and she has opinions about why fast isn't always better when it comes to how we communicate. If you've ever felt like the internet is getting worse, And this conversation is probably for you. Hawk, welcome and it's good to have you.

Hawk: Magic, thank you. You too, I'm looking forward to it.

Joan Westenberg: So you've spent over a decade building community software. What's changed about how people gather online and what's been lost?

Hawk: ⁓ yeah, that's a huge question. Fundamentally, I think we used to be much more selective about the places that we chose to spend our time and visit regularly. We would arrive there with real intent. We would invest some time, prioritise time in our day to spend with those people that we were choosing. to converse with. Now we scroll this infinite feed, it's been assembled for us by somebody else, ⁓ not even necessarily curated. ⁓ I think that the content comes at us now. ⁓ It's often stripped of context and we all know the kind of flow and effects that can happen when people get stuck in ⁓ a chamber when they're not exposed to different viewpoints. So I think that ⁓ we have a fundamentally different relationship with how we engage online these days.

Joan Westenberg: And what is that relationship now? How do we define what the relationship is between, I guess between us and the internet?

Hawk: Yeah, I think that in utopia, ⁓ healthy communities, see to interactions around agency and trust and human connection and belonging. And I think that the balance has swung a lot more towards like an algorithmic or extrinsic reward. We're not making conscious choices. We've lost that sense of collective presence because we're not all seeing the same thing at the same time. We're not all in the same room together. The personalization, whilst it keeps us engaged, it doesn't necessarily keep us engaged in healthy ways. It's just closing those loops for us.

Joan Westenberg: been a lot of talk about the death of social media or people leaving various platforms in droves and it tends to happen in surges and trends. What do think people are actually looking for when they leave?

Hawk: I think that if they, I think they leave because they feel guilty. But I think if they look beneath the surface, it's that they're looking for agency, they're looking for authenticity, they're looking for some kind of control. And I think that there is recognition now that centralized platforms aren't prioritizing those healthy online relationships that we're to choose for ourselves. They're prioritizing. I guess, data monetization over tree connection. And I think that people are starting to, whether or not they have a philosophical view about what that looks like for them, they certainly don't feel like they are in control of the journey. feel like... ⁓ that combination of this influx of information that we're trying to process and it wasn't necessarily information that we chose in the first place and then followed by that kind of guilt that we feel when we realize that we're just infinitely scrawled.

Joan Westenberg: I want to touch on that guilt for a second. Do you think it's similar to when you binge eat on junk food, similar to when you know you're doing something that's unhealthy? that what we're talking about here?

Hawk: Yeah, I think so. think that the construct of social media changes the, I guess, the motivations and the incentives and attention becomes something to compete for and visibility becomes kind of the primary motivation we're trying to... ⁓ make our voices heard in this endless stream of noise, I guess, and because people aren't stopping to truly engage and understand the context behind the discussion and have an opinion that is ⁓ carefully thought through, that cycle just kind of continues and people end up walking away feeling like they did a whole lot of nothing.

Joan Westenberg: It comes down to attention, and I think everyone's attention is being fought over by algorithms. In your experience, what happens to a community when attention becomes a scarce resource?

Hawk: Yes. Yeah, two things spring to mind. think the first is that again, kind of talking more about what I spoke before, the motivations change. So we hear the loudest voices, we hear the most immediate thing that comes in as a response. And we feel compelled then to give a response back and we don't. slow down and question our responses. I don't think we we don't critically think so much anymore. We're not challenged in a healthy way that makes us stop and really kind of digest what is being spoken about and we just have this immediate defensive response often. Not always defensive, but certainly not something that we go, hang on, I'm going to walk away, have a bit of a think about this and come back and shoot my response off shortly. We're just always responding.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah, reactive. So there is a connection between the amount of attention you have and how reactive and gut-based the way you respond is.

Hawk: Totally, and that's part of the hidden text. And I think the other part is that we have stopped learning how to learn, I guess. We've stopped thinking for ourselves. We just ask questions now. We've stopped creating new knowledge as a result of really challenging each other's ideas. That kind of expectation of immediacy means that we talk but we don't really listen. I'm catastrophizing, but I think that collectively that's kind of what's starting to happen. The really deep thought and the connection, you know, those really uniquely human traits have just kind of disappeared because we're being so reactive and there isn't space for it.

Joan Westenberg: Hmm. Collectively, have we forgotten how to have conversations online or have the tools failed us?

Hawk: ⁓ I think it's, yeah, it's a bit of both. We certainly have forgotten how to have conversations online, but I think that that is in part because of the talks. I think that certainly social media and instant messaging, both in the workplace and outside of work, socially, has changed the way that we talk to each other. ⁓ And it serves a very, very important role, ⁓ you know, in business and in quick decision making and in making new plans for the weekend, but is it the right forum in which to discuss, no pun intended, in which to discuss the, you know, those deeper, more critical. have those deeper, more critical conversations where we are creating new knowledge and recording it in a way that has context attached. And I think that's the really important part, having that context attached. Otherwise, essentially, you're just creating more of that text of people that are busy because they've got to reread everything over and over and over.

Joan Westenberg: There's the old saying that on the internet everything is forever. I'm starting to realise that's not actually true, it?

Hawk: No, isn't that ironic for such a long time we laughed about that. My mum warned me, know, we all, we warned our kids. ⁓ And yeah, I think that it's forever when we don't want it to be. But yeah, I think we've got a lot of work to do ⁓ if we want to think about those conversations that we're having in our community, you know, as our legacy. And I think that one of the things that kind of emotionally breaks my heart and professionally breaks my heart is that we spend our lives as community builders, encouraging people to enjoy the community and to invest their time, to truly invest their time and often more than their time. And I feel like we kind of have this... responsibility to be stewards of that information and to protect it for the people that we asked that of. And I recently was doing some research into old communities that I used to manage and sadly most of aren't there and that's years and years and years of knowledge and investment that I don't regret but I wish I had access to.

Joan Westenberg: These communities, in fact the internet itself, our stewardship of the internet is a responsibility and it increasingly feels like we have not taken that responsibility seriously. It's just been something that's there and we treat it however we want. But in doing so we've let it form a disrepair.

Hawk: Thank Yeah, I think so. But I also think that it was naivety on our part, rather than anything more malicious. I think that we took advantage of things as they happened and we rode the wave. And it wasn't until the wave started to get really big that we started to freak out. And I think a lot of that is the changing our technologies and all of a sudden people that went from generation of learning about the internet and then we sort of laugh at our parents that are dangerous on the internet and they're getting scammed all over the show and now everyone kind of feels that they're falling back into that place of do we have a real understanding of exactly what the future looks like and if we don't then as you say I think that that responsibility grows exponentially because we do have to find ways to protect not just that those conversations for the reasons I said before but for humanity I guess you know this is recorded history and we don't write books in the same way that we used to and yeah it is our whole history that if we rule that kind of feels again catastrophizing but I do think that ⁓ we should should we should slow down and make some smarter decisions now while we do have that opportunity.

Joan Westenberg: You've spoken about valuing people's time and attention. What does that look like in practice?

Hawk: Yeah, I think that probably the most fundamental aspect of it is that slowing down doesn't mean doing less. And I think that people often, it seems counterintuitive to ask people now in their busy lives, and we're talking about attention being a currency to spend more of it. But ultimately, it's the... the nature of that interaction, it's the speed that creates that urgency and that exhaustion. I think that, you know, anyone that's had kids knows you have to go through these early years of crazy things where you're repeating yourselves over and over and over and then you kind of reach this sweet spot when your kids can actually understand you and you feel like, hey, hang on a minute, now I can really start to invest in something that's longer term. And that's how I feel about communities, I think that. once you get through that, it would be foolish to say that people, don't want to kind of chase growth in the early days and engagement metrics are very important and we're trying to get through to that kind of healthy plateau stage. But once we do, I think that, yeah, the value in slowing down becomes. much more important. I think that how do we do that? That's what you asked me 10 minutes ago. I think there's lots of aspects. Embrace a synchronicity, set really clear boundaries around availability. I think be really intentional about what is appropriately a funeral and what information that we do want to persist. And I think. ⁓ the biggest part of it is having just a shared and collective understanding of what your mission is and that kind of breeds respect and once you have that respect and that connection then things start to make sense for everybody. It's only when there is that kind of ⁓ mismatched expectations or misunderstandings that people start to get warmed up about patterns breaking.

Joan Westenberg: What do do when when those mismatches occur? How do you bring people back into alignment?

Hawk: Yeah, I think it depends on how quickly it happens and it depends on probably the age of the community and how much, you know, they've created these collective norms along the way, how much you can say, hey guys, what the hell's happening here? I feel like we're starting to lose ⁓ some of the value in our discussions here. Are people going to go, well, screw you, I'm busy, I'm just going to leave, or you're asking too much of me. If that's the case, then the problem isn't the speed. ⁓ The problem is something deeper, right? People are ⁓ defending against something that they haven't been able to express. But if things are... healthy then hopefully people are along for the ride but again it comes down to tooling to a degree like you're not really going to be able to people to slow down on slack for instance and why would you to be frank if you chose slack you're not looking for a dex.

Joan Westenberg: Mm. You know, that real-time communication, the slack of Discord, it dominates how people work now. What gets lost when everything happens in real time like that?

Hawk: Well, obviously at a superficial level all of... the interactions like depth and that's fine if you're problem solving quickly or trying to deal with some kind of crisis. otherwise, just, the fast pace doesn't support the development of ideas. I think I said it before, like walking away from a discussion is really key to critical thinking. And if you don't have space to do that because an immediate response is required, then the depth of conversation just... decreases exponentially. I think that ⁓ then you add on top of that the layer of the lack of persistence, like the unstructured nature of chatmacks, that's unsuitable for long term storage. There's no sharing and revisiting of knowledge. People have to revisit the same conversation over and over. So they're reworking. That's a cost. ⁓ your histories forgotten, your values have to be constantly restated so you're never going to get that kind of cohesion of community that means you can go on the journey together. And that's if we're talking about a workplace, knowledge is a multiplier. If you're saying problems are discussed over and over, think about how much money you're wasting rediscovering everything.

Joan Westenberg: Now obviously discourse does have a chat functionality and messaging functionality and then the overall forum. How do you personally decide which of those you're going to use? When do you send somebody a chat message versus an actual message versus post topic?

Hawk: Mm. Yeah, I think ⁓ for me, there's a clear differentiation between what's urgent and what's important, I guess. know, one's about time and one's about value. If something is urgent because I need to draw someone's attention to something, perfect for chat. Or if she can ask somebody how their weekend was, perfect for chat. I'm never going to want to look that up again. But the moment you start talking about ⁓ anything that requires ⁓ conscious thought, ⁓ we have active protocols to move discussions back into discussion space, I guess. also use it for, like chat channels are brilliant when there's an incident. You're not going to spend half an hour waiting for somebody to respond to your forum thread when you're in crisis. ⁓ Yeah, aside from that, think if people, if the idea is to share and create and store knowledge, then that's not the way.

Joan Westenberg: all the notifications, the instant gratification, the instant responses, it's quite addictive. What do you say to somebody who is caught up in that addiction, in that dedication to getting instant feedback? How do you persuade them to slow down, to embrace tools that make them a little bit more intentional?

Hawk: Yeah, good question. I think that you might have to learn that. I am in the privileged position of having spent a decade using discourse where we kind of enforce that slowdown and that critical thinking with all sorts of layers of friction. ⁓ So I think that, you know, there's obviously a personal aspect to why you're choosing that in the first place. like it would be foolish to say that everyone should change. You're not going to get the rest of your community to move off slack necessarily because you don't like moving far. But I think that if we all start to talk more openly about that hidden tax and about the fact that we're not only not giving our best to the community, but we're slowly degrading our best self outside of it as well because we're just always context switching, we're always on the run and we're always forgetting things.

Joan Westenberg: It feels like there are three ownership groups in lot of communities. There's the users who are creating content, asking questions and engaging. There's the people who run the community, the moderators, owners and builders, and the people who build the actual tooling. Of those three groups, who really owns a community?

Hawk: ⁓ Yeah, there's an uncomfortable truth and that really is that it depends on the platform, I guess. I suppose we can kind of put them into... three board categories and that would be, you know, your centralized platforms, social media platforms, Facebook, ⁓ those sorts of things. Then you've got your proprietary platforms and then you've got open source and I think that if you are on one of the first, so if you're on a centralized platform, then they own everything, right? ⁓ They own... the data, there's no data portability mechanism from Facebook. The community exists at Meta's discretion. They control how your members engage. They can change that at any time. And they are actively prioritizing the financial gain that they get from pay-fusions. some data and add impressions and things like that. like the flip side is that there's very little work to build on, Your audience is there, that's why people do it. They're not trying to create a new habit for somebody, but also they're just creating another bad habit for somebody. And that's what bothers me. So the second group is the proprietary platforms. And that depends. You likely have control over

Joan Westenberg: Mm. Mm.

Hawk: your data in the sense that you can possibly buy it from them. In some cases you wouldn't have to buy a cheque or contract but they certainly, ⁓ somebody said something to me today, that in those cases they're not your customers, they're your hostages ⁓ because ultimately yeah they can make the change at any time to the platform, they can deprecate functionality, they can not fix bugs for years. ⁓ potentially got contract lock-in. So whilst ⁓ the sales pitch is often that you own your data or that you have control of your community, I checked the fine print. Open Source is the third group and there you have ⁓ pretty much full autonomy. You own your data. ⁓ It acts like a SaaS product, but you can self-host if the business goes down. God help us. You've still got your data and you've still got full access to the code. So again, more work in some cases. Like no one's just going to on a whim self-host a massive community. But if they were hosting with an open source platform ⁓ as a SaaS offering and that disappeared for some reason, that they've got many, many options. So I think the answer to that is it depends. They've got open source.

Joan Westenberg: Hmm. If you have started your community on a closed platform, let's say you've got a, you've got a Reddit, a sub Reddit, or you've got a Facebook group. What's the point to which you should start looking to migrate off that and go onto your own platform?

Hawk: Yeah, good question. think it starts earlier than that and at the risk of something like it doing so, you should have an exit plan before you even start these days, I think. ⁓ Your exit strategy should be designed as part of your original community strategy because we talked about that responsibility and stewardship before and you know that is these days. ⁓ You can no longer claim plausible deniability. We all know what the dragons look like and so it's irresponsible in my opinion not to go in assuming the worst.

Joan Westenberg: Mm.

Hawk: You know, we don't know what the future looks like. Nothing's certain and nothing's forever. But I would say that most people that get caught out now don't get caught out because they made a stupid choice. They get caught out because they didn't know that the choice mattered at the time. And I think now we know that it does. There's always going to be a trade-off. Centralised platforms, as I said, have that very low barrier to entry, but the price is dependency. Community-owned platforms are way less risky, but they require more effort. So I suppose at the end of that comes down to how much you value your legacy.

Joan Westenberg: Hmm. And I guess you're, you face kind an ogre's choice at that point. If you've got a subreddit that is popular, you could try to launch your own platform, but then you're running the risk of how many people will take the effort to sign up for a new account. And that's, that's quite an existential risk for people.

Hawk: Yeah. Right, it is. Sorry, you're right. You asked me at what point do you make the decision? I think you make the decision the moment it becomes tabled. I think if you're worried, personally, I cut my losses, that's easy to say, you know, I don't have several million people relying on the community for my brand. So, you know, it's easy for me to sit here and say that. But I think that

Joan Westenberg: Mm.

Hawk: If you design from the start for the worst case scenario, that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of options. It probably takes the centralized platforms off the table, but it certainly doesn't take the others off the table. You've just got to be smart. And I think that provided you have access to your data and access to your data doesn't just mean a data dump either. Access to your data means at least two data dumps, which lots of community managers sadly don't recognize until they get charged for the second one. but you can't migrate without a disruption of service, without at least two sets of data. So there's lots of catches, I think, for first time or early community builders. So read widely and ask questions.

Joan Westenberg: Now I suppose the difficulty is that you don't know what you don't know. And I think there still is quite a gap for most people when it comes to open source. I feel like people still don't really get why they should care about open source. And they think, well, I'm not into code. I'm not a developer. Why do I care about open source?

Hawk: Yeah, yeah, there is a lot of stigma and there's a lot of old fear as well, guess. But I think that what's important to understand about open source is that ultimately it doesn't, I think the odd reputation was that it's not an enterprise set up, know, open source companies are immature or... the code's not of the same quality, but I think that philosophically, it aligns with not just community, but also with this kind of philosophy of human stewardship of all our information. The bottom line for safety is that no matter what happens, that code exists. And I think open source organizations at their core recognize that they don't feel comfortable charging for the software, they're charging for the value. And I think that the value is depending on what the product is in the hosting or in the security or in the privacy, whatever it is that's important to you. But ultimately, I cannot think of an example of proprietary software being

Joan Westenberg: Mm. Mm.

Hawk: safer being a safer option for community builders at the current time.

Joan Westenberg: If you have a small bunch of your mates, a small little community, you've got a group chat. What's the point? What's the number where you should actually start to think about, okay, we need to build something else now. We need our own platform.

Hawk: I think the answer is what we call in community building critical mass and that's when you as the community builder, whether you're the, you know, the, the, the founder of the book club or the co-founder of the brand, once ⁓ the community is

Joan Westenberg: Mm.

Hawk: doing more of the work than you are, you're no longer having to stimulate discussions, you're no longer having to help people make connections, you could go on holiday for a weekend, would still engagement and interactions and whatever it is that's valuable for you, depending on the community continues. At that point, you've then got something that's valuable. And I think that that's when you start to think about, yeah.

Joan Westenberg: Hmm. Mmm.

Hawk: what your longer term plan looks like. And I don't think that a long term plan means that you should expect that your community is gonna last forever either. As I was saying before, just researching articles and looking for things I wrote three or four years ago, it's annoying that that stuff's gone. I would have engaged differently or been more... intentional about how much time I spent if I had have known that that information was just going to disappear.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah, you often think about communities like rock bands, you know, just because a band was fantastic for a few years and then broke up doesn't mean that the band should never have existed. It's okay for people to come together in a group and do something creative, do something communicative together for a period of time.

Hawk: Holy. Totally, yeah, totally. I mean, in other ways, like there's trillions of communities out there that exist, products that no longer exist, you know, for TV shows that haven't been on for hundreds of years, well, that was ridiculous, you know, for decades. And those communities are no longer existing because of that product or that TV show or that whatever. And if that community is gone, that's fine. Those people have that connection forever. there's...

Joan Westenberg: Mm. No.

Hawk: We engage in communities not always because we want to write lots of stuff. There's lots of other intrinsic reasons that we engage intentionally online. I think that understanding what those motivations are is a really important part of figuring out what your kind of longer term strategy looks like as well. What are people there for? Are they there just for the... now are they there to get an answer to something that is not going to be a problem for them any longer? Is it a parenting forum? They're not going to be parents of toddlers in five years time or whatever. But that doesn't mean that that information, you know, I've talked about this quite a lot recently, doesn't mean that the value of that information is growing and growing because people are still looking for it, people are still using it, people are still getting value from it, even if the people that wrote it in the first place are no longer engaged in that community or that community is no longer a running community.

Joan Westenberg: I think an underrated factor here is actually loneliness. And we often don't consider just how important this is. Yes, somebody is on a dev forum. Yes, they're on a video game forum. But they're actually there because they're lonely and they want connection and they want to find other people. And so you have to facilitate that, not just the sharing of knowledge, not just the discussions. These are people who need each other.

Hawk: Yeah, that's right. And if you play your cards right, those people then create those values and norms and culture and environment that they want to be part of. you know, that self sustains through generations of the community, whatever that looks like, whether it fractures, whether it closes, whether it keeps running forever, you know. ⁓ And I think we're at a point now, like, you know, two decades ago when I started building communities, that was the first online communities. We didn't know what it was going to look like down the line. We could guess based on, you know, extrapolate based on social science, but we hadn't seen it play out. And so I think now, you know, sort of 20, 25 years on, we're at a place where we should be starting to learn from these long patterns.

Joan Westenberg: Hmm.

Hawk: to know whether it made sense to shut communities down, it used to break our hearts. You know, we've spent years, weeks, years, months, whatever, building this thing and to say goodbye to it felt like giving up on a really important goal. But I think we've now learned that actually, sometimes that's the best and most sensible and kindest thing to do. But it's taken this many years for us to see those cycles play out. So I think that nobody should feel guilty for decisions that they've made up until now, but they should start to really think carefully about the ones they make from here on.

Joan Westenberg: Thinking about those future decisions, if communities are a part of the future, what do need to be doing to build them differently?

Hawk: I think we need to design for depth and longevity. I think we need to really value persistent knowledge. I think we need to value the relationships and the connections that you talked about just then above all else. Because communities at the end of the day are human systems. And ⁓ if we consider attention that currency that we talked about before, we want to invest in systems that enable people. to have autonomy over how they engage and to have some agency over that currency that they're spending ⁓ in your space and I think also yeah going back to remembering what the motivations for being there are if you're not motivated by that dopamine closing loop of social media then as a community body you have got a harder job to do but It's ⁓ valuable work, That's ultimately what we want. We want people engaging in thoughtful ways with people that they care about because they want to learn together, not because those people have the loudest voice or because that content's been pushed in front of us or because we're lonely and so we're just looking for something to do to shut our mind off as opposed to that actual human connection which is what ultimately solves that loneliness.

Joan Westenberg: So lot of that comes down to culture, culture and values. How do you think about instilling culture and values into a community? Do you model it? Do you have rules? ⁓

Hawk: all of those. I think the communities that I have seen ⁓ survive the longest are communities that had ⁓ a very deeply connected core group that started it and that might have been because they were really passionate about the subject or because they were already a close group of friends. There's lots of reasons that can happen but continuing to model that behavior and to consistently talk about the things that make that culture part of what you want are important. And I think that ⁓ Again, that's part of the value of their long-term knowledge. People can keep finding that information easily It's there all the time and it's built into the way that people interact when people are interacting really quickly there isn't room to Even try and think about what they necessarily intended by what they did. We are just reacting right and often we're reacting with all of the bias that we've already got You know that we're carrying around and therefore we're operating under assumption half of the time It's possibly not what they meant in the first place and I think that we need to break that pattern, need to somehow make sure that we insert mechanisms that make people stop and take a pause and ⁓ add something valuable to the conversation.

Joan Westenberg: That's one thing that you wish community builders understood about communities and about where they're going.

Hawk: Right now the number one thing everyone's gonna roll their eyes is AI. I really really there is so much fear out there around data privacy, legit fear around data privacy and around, you know, online safety and around what that looks like in the future. And like I talked about before, we don't know what the future looks like. So we should be wary, but these conversations that we're talking about as this gold that we want to ⁓ protect.

Joan Westenberg: Hmm.

Hawk: ⁓ the easiest way to protect that is by disseminating it widely and ⁓ you know training our selective data on sorry training these models on our our selected data subsets is going to be a fantastic way to carry that community legacy, but also being pretty important for humankind, think. Otherwise, we are just re-reading the same information over over again, right? Because AI is only as good as the data it consumes.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah. And what are you personally most excited to be working on right now at Discourse? Even over the next year at Discourse, what does that look like?

Hawk: Over the next year. On a personal note, I, well no, it's not a personal note. I'm not doing the work. I don't do much of the actual work these days, but I'm really excited about the new community strategy that we've got for Meta. We have never had, it pains me to say it, but we've never had a formalized community strategy. We were... you know, we were fortunate that the open source community kind of sustained itself without needing very much stewardship. And so for the first time, we're going to spend some investment on that and I'm excited about it. I am also really excited about seeing what happens with AI and communities. I am really excited about what happens when we create ways for these models to continue to out data more easily, ⁓ more effectively and with more context. think that the faster we kind of embrace that in a way that makes us comfortable as well, ⁓ the better things are gonna be. So yeah, I'm really excited to watch what the team are doing in that regard.

Joan Westenberg: Consent's a huge part of that, it? And discourse has been careful about how we monitor and manage and grant consent and how we give every community, owner and builder, that level of control and that level of decision making.

Hawk: Yes, like I get righteous about this because, you know, people sometimes congratulate Sam and I on, you know, protecting our customers' data and not trying to sell it. It's not our data. Yeah, I don't feel comfortable with the concept of monetizing other people's stuff without asking. And in this case, it's data.

Joan Westenberg: Mmm. Mmm. Yeah. And so it's down to every single community owner to make that decision and make that choice for themselves.

Hawk: Yeah. It is, and I think they should. what we're trying to do with the tooling is make, I guess, as we always have, everything is behind a setting so that, you you customize things to suit yourself. There's some communities where it's absolutely not going to be appropriate for any data to ever be shared. And in other communities, you know, if you've got a brand community, why the hell would you not want all of the most up-to-date information about your brand being, you know, keeping the data sets evergreen?

Joan Westenberg: Yeah.

Hawk: But yeah, I've lost my train of thought, so let's stop it then. I forgot what I was saying. I was ranting. I can finish this one, I?

Joan Westenberg: It's fair enough it gets away from us Look, thank you very much for this. It's been fun. It's been a great conversation. I'm thankful I've had this time with you. I will be excited to see what happens over the next year and I will be absolutely tapping into whatever new tools come out with this course. So thank you.

Hawk: Thank you, Gem. It's always a pleasure to chat with you.