You are probably familiar with the classification of simple Lie groups. Some of them are special linear, some are orthogonal, and some are symplectic. Some of them are over R, and some are over C. Slightly less known is the fact that the weirder real forms can all be represented over H. You might think that all the other groups that exist are just a weird quirk of the classification, and it is impossible to see a group of type E_7 in the wild. In my talk, I will show that in fact all Lie groups arise in a natural linear algebraic interpretation of all the Lie groups. It’s just that your field might be sometimes very slightly nonassociative.