002: Winning the No-Win Scenario e.g. Kobayashi Maru

MarkGleason: Welcome to the Apex Level to Power podcast. The podcast completely dedicated to your self empowerment. The title of this episode is Kobayashi Maru, beating the no win scenario. What we’re going to talk about is beating a rigged game. First, how do you know you are in a rigged game, in a no win scenario, and then what are some of the actions you can take to shift the paradigm and turn your no win scenario into a possible win-win scenario? In this podcast we talk about the three Apex levels, or ways of thinking that let you identify and control the invisible strings that dominate human interaction. As a reminder, at level 1 you were blind to anything other than your own perspective, and therefore you were vulnerable to influence, manipulation, and control. At level 2, you begin to see other perspectives and therefore can outmaneuver others. At level 3 you see the entire chess board of social power and learn to dominate the game. You change your level, you change your life, you change the world. Welcome to Apex level to power.     [music 00:01:12]Escape the herd, rise above the pack. This is the Apex Level to Power podcast, the only place in the web that teaches you to identify and control the invisible strings that dominate all human interaction. We teach sheep to become wolves, a challenge to be sure, but one that we answer and answer with vigor. I am your faithful host Mark Gleason, I welcome you to the program and I invite you to visit our little corner of the web at leveltopower.com for more information and to support the broadcast. I’d like to lay out for you a test of leadership. A fictional test of leadership that is used as a thought experiment in business circles to test someone’s character and leadership under pressure. Here’s the scenario. You are the captain of a spaceship and you are traveling with your crew along the neutral zone, which is the border between a neighboring empire which we have a tentative peace with. Your ship receives an emergency hail from across the neutral zone, from a friendly ship called the Kobayashi Maru. They are signaling that they are in dire distress and they are in need of assistance. You ask your communications officer to communicate back to your superiors and unfortunately you are out communication distance and you need to make a choice. Do you continue to your destination? Upon arriving there, contact your leadership and ask them what to do? Or, do you enter the neutral zone and attempt to rescue the crew even though it may start a war with the neighboring empire, or the third, or fourth, or fifth options that you could undertake that might solve this problem? So what do you do? Do you risk your crew, your life, your ship for a distress beacon across the neutral zone and the potential to rescue a crew? But what if it’s a trick? What if this is all a lure to get you to cross the border to start a war, and so that you can be attacked and your ship could be destroyed? A war can be started and the blame can be laid at your feet posthumously. But what if it’s not a trick? What if there really is a friendly crew over there running out of water, running out of air, running out of power, and will be long dead by the time you go get instructions and come back? What do you do? While some of you may have recognized, this is a training exercise that was offered in the fictional Star Trek series, and was given to all Star Fleet Academy Cadets, and it was offered as a no win scenario. This was called the Kobayashi Maru test. To the cadets were tested this was 1 scenario of 50 that they had successfully completed, and now they were engaging in the Kobayashi Maru test and they did not realize that it was a no win scenario because the test was programmed so you either have to leave the vessel behind and therefore leave those crew to die and deal with the consequences, and deal with the test givers afterwards raking you over the cause for why you would let that crew die, or if you went to go rescue this ship, an overwhelming enemy force attacked and destroyed your vessel. No matter how many times you took this test, you would fail. That is called the test of the Kobayashi Maru, the no win scenario. Now, interesting to note only one person ever beat the Kobayashi Maru, the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru, and no surprise that is Captain James Tiberius Kirk who after taking the test 3 times, finally realized that it was rigged. The test was rigged to be a no win scenario, and because he famously did not believe in a no win scenario, he reprogrammed the simulation to allow an opportunity for himself to win. Afterwards, they were trying to figure out whether to throw him out of the academy or give him an award, and they ended up giving him an award for originality, for beating the test. How does this relate to us? How does this relate to our lives? How does this relate to being a leader? How does it relate to business? Well, in business theory it has been noted when you were in a business situation, you need to recognize when you’re in a no win scenario, and you need to know how to deal with it. In some cases, like Captain James T. Kirk, you might need to refuse to play the game as it’s currently structured. That if you’re playing in a rigged game there is absolutely no reason to play, but perhaps there is a way to change the rules of the rigged game in a way where you can advance a successful business strategy. But let me ask you, how is it possible to step outside the rules of a rigged game? What skill set is required? What attribute do you need in order to step outside the rules of a game? Do you need intelligence? It’s not intelligence, there’s very smart people who get trapped in the rules of a rigged game. Is it connections? If you’re already in the rigged game, chances are you will have the connections to get you out. The first step to avoiding or diffusing a trap is knowing of its existence, and how do you know you’re in a rigged game? Well, the way to know you’re in a rigged game is by using the power of perspective. The level 1 who is locked into their viewpoint, into their way of seeing the world, to one way of seeing the world, is not going to be able to tell whether or not they’re playing a rigged game. Whether or not they’re involved in a no win scenario, and if they are involved in a no win scenario they’re certainly not going to know how can they shift the paradigm of the game. How can they shift their own paradigm and maybe even the paradigm of others in the game, to turn it from a rigged game into a game that can be won? This is the value of studying the Kobayashi Maru example. Ability to look at a problem that’s occurring, to look at a challenge that’s occurring in life, in business, and your relationships in the human power dynamics that surround you, and begin to shift the paradigm and look at other ways of approaching it so that you can thread the needle, and end up emerging having achieved your goals. In addition, thinking through the Kobayashi Maru scenario can help bolster your ability at cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to be able to see another perspective intellectually, to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Beating a Kobayashi Maru scenario is only possible if you can learn to think like your adversary, and in this case it’s learning to think like the designer of the scenario. It may seem like you have your perspective, you may seem like you have the perspective of the rival ships across the neutral zone, and the captain of the Kobayashi Maru which is the neutral zone. It may seem that those are the only players in this game, going between level 1, to level 2, to level 3, is being able to see the designer behind the scenario, who was actually pulling the strings? Who is actually the prime mover of the situation, and what are the levels of power we have on them? What are their objectives? What are they trying to accomplish? If you’re not even aware of their existence, you will not be able to find the right scenario to get you through the most treacherous of situations. In the story, as I said, Captain Kirk was the one person to beat the no win scenario. Many throughout the Star Trek books, I believe there actually is a book called The Kobayashi Maru, where most of the other officers recount how they approached the Kobayashi Maru. All in different ways, and again was all a reflection on their personality types and their character, which was the entire point of the test. The entire point of the test was to see how you handled failure, and in that way perhaps Kirk failed that test because he refused to accept failure at any price. Of course in the story that’s what makes him such a dynamic leader, is he absolutely does not believe, will not accept a no win scenario. In life we deal with all kinds of scenarios where you’re a rational actor and you are dealing with others, counting on them to be a rational actor. You can clearly see how it’s best for everyone if you take action A and they take action B. I’ve been involved in business deals for instance where I know that if I agree to something, and somebody else agrees to the same thing, that we will both be better off. It’s clear to me we’ll both be better off. Let’s talk about a real world example of a Kobayashi Maru, a no win scenario, and how that perhaps you can overcome it. I was advising on a very large business deal. It was a partnership between two companies. It was certainly clear to me that there was an agreement which was a clear win-win. That if they agreed to certain terms, that both of them would be much better off by any objective measure. I’m going to make this a very simple example to keep everything very, very clean so that it’s not too confusing. Essentially we had 2 companies. One of them was my client whom I was advising in a negotiation. Let’s say that there was $2 million available to be made by partnering with another company on a very, very simple transaction. This transaction would have no downside, it was a 1-time payment that would have absolutely no downside for either party. It was simply a windfall of cash and all they had to do was basically make an agreement, these two parties had to work together, there was nobody else they could make this deal with because of the unique position they both were in. They could partner and split this $2 million. Well, my client immediately saw that that was the best scenario. That partnering, splitting the money, $1 million each, was the ideal scenario. Our prospective partner however, did not see that, and no amount of convincing could convince them. The people across the table wanted to partner on the deal and they wanted the entire $2 million. This made no sense objectively because why would company 1 engage in a partnership where they derive absolutely no benefit from it? It makes no sense, therefore, company 1 will refuse that deal and both parties will be worse off, because they could have had $1 million each and instead neither has anything. This is bizarre. It was a bizarre situation which we found ourselves in and it was a Kobayashi Maru, a seeming no win scenario. Now, you might ask, “Well why?” Why would somebody be so silly as to walk away from $1 million when they could have nothing? That’s precisely the point, the situation was a bit more complicated than I’m explaining it to you. It’s not so complicated that I couldn’t spend 10 minutes walking almost anybody through it and they would see the wisdom of having $1 million versus nothing. In this case, we had a seeming no win situation, it was Kobayashi Maru. Whatever we did, if we took the deal and made no money then we’re worse off because we’ve wasted our time and have legal fees to process the contract and we’re basically just losing. If we walk away from the deal, then we’re walking away from $1 million cash, a $1 million windfall, and we’re still losing. We’re in a situation where we see a scenario, we see the path forward where both of us can be better off but the other party refuses to see that scenario. Therefore, despite our best efforts, despite seeing the ideal scenario, we instead have to accept being worse off. Now I use this example deliberately because the solution is intuitive. I think we all will be able to arrive at the proper solution to this, which is if company 1 and 2 are both arriving at this scenario together, and they’re both saying they’re here to make money, “We are here to get the most money we can. That is the game we’re playing together. We’re playing the game of making money.” Then certainly if that is true, the actions of company 2 make absolutely no sense. If your game is to make money, why would you accept a scenario where you’re going to make less money rather than more? Right, all things considered equal. That’s the key here, is that we negotiated a fantastic deal where both people would make money and somebody turned it down, which makes no sense. Unless they say they’re in the game to make money, they’re telling themselves they are in the game to make money, but really they’re not in the game to make money. They’re there for something else. They’re there for ego. They’re there on a power trip. They’re there to impress somebody. They’re there to teach somebody else a lesson, right? There’s many, many, many reasons why people do things. This is where the shift of paradigm is required. You need to shift the Paradigm and understand what is actually happening. Now in this case, the people that we’re dealing with at company 2 were perfectly reasonable. At some point we just had to say, “There’s something here we don’t understand. There’s some other imaginative person in this room who is somehow guiding events and we don’t understand why.” Let me sketch for you a similar example but perhaps might be a bit more close to home. Let’s say I have a poker game and everybody comes my poker game on Friday nights, and they all say the same thing. When you say, “Why do you play poker?” They say, “You know, it’s fun but I’m here to make money. I’m here to make money. I’m here to win a little bit. I’m in the game of making money, that’s why I’m playing.” We start playing and I am actually in the game to make money, and therefore all of my actions are aligned with that. I can’t drink too much if I’m going to be playing really good poker, and therefore I got to make sure I moderate what I drink. While somebody comes over and says they are there to make money, and then proceeds to drink a whole bunch of alcohol and get drunk, and therefore plays terrible cards, and therefore loses money. Well, the next day when they say, “Oh, I can’t believe I lost, maybe you cheated, or maybe I was just unlucky.” No, that’s not what it was. They were saying they’re playing the game to make money but their actions were out of line with that. They were out of integrity with their spoken commitment, and therefore people who come over, and they play, and they leave, and they say, “Gee, I wonder why I never win at poker? I’ve lost 12 times in a row now maybe somebody is cheating me. Or maybe I’m just the unluckiest person in the world,” and they go through life thinking that. If hey have a victim mentality at level 1, then they go through life thinking that way. When in reality they were not playing the game they said they were planning. To bring it back to my corporate example, they said they were there to make money, they weren’t. They were there because while the owners wanted to prove to their partners that they could make a really good deal, and therefore it wasn’t about the money exactly, it was about showing that they could negotiate a really good deal for the company. That meant 50-50 was not acceptable. They wanted to have more than 50-50, not because 50-50 wasn’t fair, it absolutely was fair in this particular business scenario. They want something more than fair because they wanted to prove what a fantastic negotiator they were. How does one approach that, or how does one approach a Kobayashi Maru? In this case the path forward is little more clear. Once we were able to ascertain there was somebody in the room who was influencing events that did not have the same objectives as everybody else, which is kind of hard to understand because $1 million cash for no risk is pretty tempting for most people. This was not what that was about, but once we realize there was somebody else in the game who was playing a different game than us, they were playing the game of power. They were playing the game of ego. They were playing the game of trying to demonstrate who was in control, and who was in power, and that’s what they cared about. They didn’t care about the money. The money wasn’t going in their pockets, they could care less. They decided that coming back with $1 million win was losing for them, because anybody could have negotiated that deal, it wasn’t going to be enough for them. What do we do? Of course, well, if you’re in negotiation, if you’re in the life, if you’re a person who never went to MIT but you realize that starting a tech startup is a fantastic way to make a huge amount of money, well, you don’t need to go to MIT. Many startup billionaires didn’t. What you need to do is find somebody who did go to MIT, or somebody with a technical skill and figure out what game they say they’re playing, and what game they’re actually playing. If they’re actually playing the game of, “I want ego, I want power, I want things other than money,” well, this misalignment is where deals can be made. If they want to have their name on a plaque and you want a larger share of the cash, well then guess what? A deal can be struck here. In my business scenario, we were able to make more money by giving him what for us were very minor concessions, but for him, proved what a fantastic negotiator he was. This is how you use the power of perspective to advance. Think back to that poker game for a second. Let’s say my goal in my poker game is to make money. I invite my friends over, it’s a fun time but really I’m not there to lose money, I’m there to make money. They’re there for friendship, right? They’re there more to casually have a good time. Well, that’s great because my goal then is to make sure that even though they’re losing to me in my poker, they’re having a fantastic time every week. Because if they do they’ll keep coming back regardless of the fact that they’re not making any money. It is the disconnect between our goals that lets us make these kinds of deals, so this is how the power of perspective helps you. I need to understand who at my poker table is really playing the game of making money, and if they’re not, what are they really there for? What about my boss, my coworker? What about the person I’m trying to pick up in a bar? What are they for? What game are they playing? What game am I playing? I may say I am playing the game of finding a fantastic understanding girl or guy to settle down with, and to be my soul mate, and to be somebody who will listen to me, and care about my hopes, dreams, and desires. That’s the game I say I’m playing, and I tell everybody that, I tell myself that. Why don’t I have a meaningful relationship, and where do I go to meet this person? I go club hopping in New York with my friends, where there’s huge amounts of alcohol, huge amounts of music, pounding music, dark lights. Now, my ability in that scenario to ascertain the buffness, the attractiveness of the guy or girl is pretty high. I can see an attractive girl and say, “Wow, she’s very attractive.” That’s pretty high. Having a conversation, understanding if she’s intelligent, understanding if she has the same values that I do. Understanding where she has a sense of humor, understanding whether she is the appropriate person who I might want to actually spend my life with, is extraordinarily difficult. How can that ever possibly work? It cannot. But, if I don’t realize that I can go through 10 years of life and say, “I just can’t believe I didn’t meet anybody. I just don’t know what happened. I guess I’m just not meant for love, poor me.” Because I am out of integrity, I am not playing the game that I say I’m playing. It’s important that you are in integrity, that your actions align with you or spoken, your stated goals. It’s also important that you use the power of perspective at level 1, level 2, level 3, to ascertain the disconnect between what people say they’re after, and what they’re actually after because that is how the strings of power are used upon you and how you can use the strings of power in order to turn no win scenarios into win-win scenarios, and advance your objectives in human society. If you go back to my business scenario for a second, I know a lot of you have a hard time believing that anybody is going to walk away from free, no strings attached money. We spend so much of our time chasing money and the freedom that money really represents, that sometimes when people are prepared to walk away from large sums of money, it seems counter-intuitive to us. Let me put you in a scenario where you also might think this is a more of a complicated issue than it might first appear. Here’s the conditions of our thought experiment, and scientists actually do perform this experiment. Where you’re in a room and there’s a stranger in another room, perhaps across the country somewhere. You’re never going to meet them, you don’t know who they are, there’s no way you guys are ever going to interact. This is the rules of the game, the rules of the game is that person will be offered a sum of money, $100, and they can choose how to divide it up between the two of you. That’s their choice. They have $100, they can choose to say 50-50 if we’re going to split it, or 55-45 and they’ll take the 55 you take the 45. All you know is that when it comes to you you can look at the deal they’re offering you. You can’t change the deal but you have the right to veto the deal. You can kill the entire deal so none of us make anything. They offer them $1,000, they get to decide how to divide it up between you, and you get to decide whether to veto the entire deal, or to accept the deal. Let’s say that they offered the first person $1 million, and let’s say that you are excited by this. You say, “Wow, we’ve been offered $1 million,” and then your deal comes through and they’ve made the proposal that they get 600,000 and you get 400,000. Now, this doesn’t seem fair, that for some reason they should get more. You have the power to veto the deal, but will you? You’re getting $400,000 and only your sense of fairness is all the sudden stands between you and $400,000. Well, let’s say that you keep your head and say, “Yes. Okay, I’m a little annoyed that we couldn’t just split this 50-50 but, I don’t know this person. I’m never going to see them again, so I will take the $400,000.” Great. Now let’s say that instead, it’s $1 million and the offer comes and they’ve chosen to give themselves $999,999 and to give you $1. They know it’s coming to you a stranger, they know you have the power to veto this deal, and they have decided to give themselves almost everything, and to give you a single dollar. You can’t change this deal but you have the power to veto the deal. One shot, veto the deal, you both walk away, or one shot, you can take the $1 and you can leave. Well, do you take the $1? See, a computer takes the dollar. A computer doesn’t have a sense of fairness. If you program a computer to play the game of making money, then the computer has a very easy decision here. “Scenario A, I make $1. Scenario B, I make $0, therefore I choose scenario A, $1 instantly, no problem.” A human has a much more difficult time choosing to give up $999,999 and taking $1. It somehow feels wrong. It feels unfair. It feels like you’re being taken advantage of and humans are hard-wired to say, “How dare that person do this to me? I’m going to punish them. I’m going to take the entire deal off the table. I’m going to veto both of us. That way both of us get nothing so there.” Here’s a scenario where maybe 5 minutes ago if I asked you the question, you watch this people silly turning down this free money, but you would have said, “I would have just taken the money, that’s crazy.” But here’s a scenario where you could literally be given free money. You can be given a free $1. $1 is better than no dollars. If you’re in the game to make money, if that’s the game you say you’re playing, you should take the $1. Now, I’m not saying you should be in the game to make money. What this example proves is there might be some things to you that are more important than making money. For instance, a sense of fairness. Emerging from a scenario with a sense of honor or fairness intact. To feel like you were not taken advantage of is a valuable thing to many people, and that is more important than the money to them. I’m not telling you what should be or should not be more important for you, what I’m saying is it’s important to know which game you’re playing. If you’re in a business, if you’re going for a promotion, if you’re in life, if you’re trying to find a mate, right, what game are you playing? Are you playing the game of finding a mate that will make you happy? Are you in the game of finding a mate your parents will approve of? Are you in the game to find a mate that your friends will approve of? These are different games to be playing. If you say, “I’m in the game of finding someone who’s going to make me happy,” but really you want to find somebody who is going to impress your friends, and they’ll be astonished and say, “Wow, you’re so lucky to be with that person.” Then guess what? If you’re going to choose somebody by their ability to astonish your friends, you are not going to end up with somebody to make you happy. In every aspect of your life you need to very carefully examine what it is that you’re in it for. What game are you actually playing? Then align your actions to that. You need to question when you’re not making success in life, when you’re hitting a plateau in life, you have to question, “What game am I playing?” Every time you think, “Oh no, I would know, I would know if that was really the game I wasn’t playing,” think about this scenario. Where somebody took $999,999 and gave you $1. Would you without blinking simply take the $1? Then you’re in the game to make money, then you’re playing the game in life that you thought you were playing. Anything else, right, debating over it, agonizing over it, struggling with it, means that you were unclear on which game you’re playing. Like I said, it doesn’t matter which one you’re playing, it doesn’t matter what your goals are, you set your goals but align your actions with those goals, or don’t play the game at all. There’s no point in playing unless you’re going to align your actions to help you achieve success. To bring this back the beginning, you’re that captain on the bridge of that Star Ship, moving along the neutral zone, trying to decide, do you rescue the crew? Do you risk your ship? Do you risk your crew? Do you risk a war by crossing into the neutral zone to investigate the distress call, which may or may not even be real? Could be a trap. Or, do you drop a [bulie 00:31:31] of your location, continue on to your destination, and inform your leadership of what happened and ask for direction? Now because this is a test of leadership, what you do is not nearly as important as why you did it. That’s what this is a test of. A test to see how you dealt with what looked like an unwinnable scenario. For instance, was there a third option here? What was your third option? Was there anything else you could do to increase your knowledge or to learn more about this scenario? You can’t see any enemy ships in the neutral zone, are they there? I don’t know. Is there any way to find out? I don’t know. If you are at level 1, all you can see is your own point of view. “Oh, poor me. I’m sitting on this ship. I’m in a terrible scenario, either way I lose. Either I leave a crew behind to die and my leadership is going to hold me accountable, or I cross over into the neutral zone. I could start a war, my whole ship could be killed, at which point we’ll also call that one a loss. Poor me, what am I to do? Do I go and rescue the crew, maybe being lured into a trap, or do I go on my merry way?” Let’s talk about this for a level 1, level 2, level 3 scenario. You’re cruising along, this event happens. It appears like it’s a no win scenario, on one hand you can leave at a potential crew there to die, on the other hand it might be a trap where your crew gets killed, and you start a war. Either way this looks like you’re not coming out of this scenario looking very good but what happens if we get emotional during those times, we get frustrated? We collapse level 1, our most blinkered, we [come 00:33:21] into the moment where our cognitive empathy goes down. Our ability to see other perspectives goes down to one perspective, ours. “Oh poor us, I’m locked into the scenario, what do I do? There’s no way out. Either way I come out of the scenario looking badly. What do I do?” Well, the problem with being at level 1 is that you only see the obvious options. You don’t see another way forward, therefore you are likely to miss an ideal scenario to walk through any given situation. Let’s say you achieved level 2. You calm down, you start thinking from the perspective of the captain of the Kobayashi Maru. The captain of a possible enemy ship that might be waiting out there to destroy you if you were to cross into the neutral zone. You start putting yourself in these different perspectives. Well other scenarios start opening themselves up to you. For instance, here’s a third scenario. Staying on your side of the neutral zone, would you be able for instance, to launch a torpedo and destroy the Kobayashi Maru? Destroy it, so rather than leave them, can you destroy the ship so they’re not left to die of lack of oxygen, perhaps get captured and tortured by your possible enemy. Now, you may say, “But that’s crazy. Why would I destroy my own ship?” We’ll, any of you who ever watched a military movie where someone’s about to be captured and tortured, and they tell their friends, “If I get taken shoot me,” you could understand why. My point is not that you’re going to do that. My point is looking at it from other perspectives begins to open up other options. For instance, what would you do if you’re a captain of the Kobayashi Maru and a friendly ship just fired a torpedo at you? Well, you can’t communicate with them very well because all you have is this distress beacon, so I guess you’re not going to do much except rage your screen as a torpedo comes in to your ship. What are you going to do if you’re an enemy captain who is pretending to be the Kobayashi Maru, trying to lure a ship into the neutral zone so that it can be trapped? Now there’s a torpedo fired at you. Well now what are you going to do? You are going to probably move your ship. Give up the ghost and move your ship. You’re going to give up the game and get out of the way of that torpedo. Now, is there a way you could disable the torpedo in a way that can’t be detected, and fire it at the ship? It looks like it’s live but it’s disarmed, and we fire that at the Kobayashi Maru. Well now if it’s a real scenario, they will see the torpedo coming in, they will be quite concerned about it for a few minutes but it will harmlessly miss them, or bounce off their hull. However if they are an enemy captain, they will be severely tested as to whether they’re ready to dedicate themselves to this deception. Whether or not you were going to go on to your destination or you were intending to go on to the neutral zone and go after that ship, firing a disarmed torpedo at them seems in either case to be an additional step you could take to learn more information so you might be able to shift the rules a bit and give yourself an opportunity at a winning scenario. You wouldn’t even see it at level 1. You might not even see it at level 2. At level 3, when all scenarios are on the table from all parties, and you’re weaving a tapestry of what you would do. Of what a theoretical Kobayashi Maru captain would do. Of what a theoretical enemy captain might do, it is only by weaving all of these hypothetical perspectives together, that you can find the optimal strategy to gain information, threading the needle, and navigating yourself through a no win scenario. I hope you found value here. This is just an introduction to the topic of dealing with Kobayashi Maru scenarios, identifying them, changing the game, overcoming them. We’ll be dealing with this on many more podcasts to come. If you have a particular scenario that you are struggling with, feel free to email us at info@leveltopower.com. We will be happy to address that on future podcasts. When it comes to your self empowerment, I, like Captain James T. Kirk, do not believe in a no win scenario. If you change your level, you can change your life, and you can change the world. Welcome to Apex Level to Power. [music 00:38:24]