 Hello Doug. Good morning, Michael. We're the punctual ones. Pre punctual. Pre punctual. Yeah. For a long time I practiced as a psychoanalyst. And you really develop a sense of time. Yes, I imagine. It must be kind of hard though to cut people off who are really hurting, but it's the end of the 50 minute segment. Actually what's remarkable is how well they manage that. Yeah. And so that it always struck me how halfway through an hour we're not getting anywhere. But by the end of the hour, something good has happened. And that's the clients manage that really well. Yeah. Well, I think they often work to a deadline. Like a lot of us. But what I did, I came to dislike was the background of the industrial model behind the idea of the, you know, every Tuesday and Thursday at 10 o'clock in the morning, talking about psychoanalytic practice and timing. And how come Michael and I ended up here on time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, when you're all working at the White House, you learn that things have schedules. And if you're two minutes late, you're not on the plane. I also do a lot of work with the, with the Chinese, with the Japanese. I did a workshop in Zurich years ago. And a half hour before the workshop was due to start, like nobody was around. Like 15 minutes before the workshop was due to start, everybody was like having coffee and chatting and merrily. And two minutes before the workshop was due to start, everybody was in their seat looking at me. All the watches are synchronized. I'm going to do this more often. This is awesome. In contrast to Buenos Aires. Oh God. Oh no. If you get the day right. Well, if you show up. If you show up on time, like at the time you were told for a party in much of Latin America, certainly in VA. You're early, like the host may still be showering. They may still be getting ready. Quite interesting. Stacey can't hear anything in your background, but you are also not muted, but cannot hear. Okay, great. And I should leave it open. Awesome. I'm just turning off. I'm just turning off the GPS if you hear a noise. Okay. Don't get lost. All the way. Would say get lost. Miami. Okay. No, that's going to be drive. It's not like Boston. Yeah. And also the streets are a little bit straighter. Hey everybody. Welcome to the OGM weekly call. On Thursday, December 2nd. One. We have a fun topic ahead. And I'm interested in what just starting opinions about what everybody thinks about it. And where we might go and Eric, I thought I'd sort of, since you had posed the question so nicely, so elegantly for us. I'd ask you to kind of just refund at first. As background. Okay. So three Thursdays ago, we had a call about the metaverse. Inspired by Facebook's announcement, they're renaming the company meta and they're betting the company on, on the metaverse and its future presenting a really uninspiring vision of such a future, at least in my opinion. And in many people's eyes kind of co-opting the whole notion of a metaverse and disturbing the waters in a, in a pretty big way. And a lot of criticisms of the announcement and the potential there. Paint a pretty bleak future in different ways and, and you know, a surveillance future or a consumerist future or whatever else is going on. And the notion then stands up like, how could we make a better version of that? Because it's not like we're not going to be living in cyberspace and have hybrid lives or online and offline. What would a better notion of a metaverse look like? So I, so I bought the meta, the betterverse.org, put up a baby website and thought, let's, let's riff on that. Let's play with it. And so that's just as background. And so let me pass the floor to you Eric and see, like if you'd like to take us any place on it and then see who else has, and, and I'm interested in kind of laying down different kinds of tracks here, like, like paths we might explore and aspects of this. And then we can come back and sort of pick, like different pieces of it. So over to you. Okay, thanks. So in my question, I use the word desire mints. And that comes from agile systems development. And if you look it up on Google, you'll see some weird definitions of it, but let's just forget about what a systems developer would want and think, but let's dream about if we could have exactly what we wanted. Would this world look like the real world? Would it be like your own holodeck where you could go anywhere or whatever? Is it a Star Trek type of universe or something else? Or now this morning I just came up with some ideas and where's that? Yeah, here it is. Okay. So just I'm just going to read off some things that I read about interoperability. And I believe that the underlying data structure for interoperability is a graph. That's a technical computer science data structure. But and the things I was talking about earlier about zigzag, that's a special case of a graph. So it's similar. Now there are some decentralized internet projects working on pieces of the future where it would be outside of corporate interests. And one of them is using smart contracts to enforce the rules for the machines that provide cloud storage for user communities. So I think that that's a good direction going forward. And I also like thinking back to the days when the internet was just text that late 80s and the users came up with very innovative ways of connecting in communities and multi-user dungeons. And we learned from Barry Court how those were used in education. Now in the current world, the current season of Star Trek Discovery is actually using an augmented reality wall to film the series. And the filmmakers have things a lot easier than green screens. So it's just a current example. Now, if we can have our own metaverse, well, why should things get censored? For example, I found a video that I had downloaded a few months ago that's now off of YouTube. And it's a good video about tree intercropping to restore arid lands. And I put it back up on my YouTube and also on archive.org. Now, in terms of like business applications for the metaverse, like Microsoft has looked at things like the HoloLens, which is they're finding applications like in the construction industry. But there's a lot of other things like training and like in our previous call, the need for good education systems and connection with people. And you can even do individualized education. So where does this technology make sense? And like in my own explorations, see if I, if people were okay with all text and just sharing files and not worrying about how good it looks, we could do a lot of these things like individualized education with what's out there now with just sending files back and forth over where I have a laptop in my basement that's acting as the server and people can connect to it if they know the key. So that's where I'm going to leave it. Then we'll just riff on it. What do we really want? And yeah, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. That's a lot of good stuff. Grace. Cool. So, you know, like text, I don't have this, I don't have a conceptualization that we're going to go backwards to text. But I do envision, we've talked about this, like this kind of virtual reality. And I could, there are a couple of people who are working on this kind of idea of a game, like the whole world is this game, which of course it is. And this immersive experience where you'd have missions. Right? So it's like, okay. And I know that we're working on this. I know the XO group has been working on this kind of group. Like, you've got this mission to plan a tree and it shows up to you maybe on your, on your app on a Pokemon type, you know, go type of augmented reality or glasses of virtual reality. And it's like, okay, well tree planting is happening on Saturday and it fits into your schedule or as you're walking down the street, there's a piece of litter. And if you pick it up, it's like, ding, ding, you get some points. Like the whole world could be virtualized into a game. And the difference between work and play is completely. Random anyway, but this thing like, oh yeah, I picked up some stuff and I recycled my, my bottle and I, oh, I saw there were a bunch of people getting together to do whatever it was and you could. So you could actually have the, I mean, we will have an integrated reality. We do have an integrated reality question. How did integrated is, but. I think this random separation of. Having a job is like, with the gig economy took it one step, we could say one step towards like, okay, you can bid on a job and do a job, but you can go much further than that. Like, oh, I saw a pot hole in the, you know, whatever, and here's the pot hole and I'm going to market. It's like, okay, well you get something for market. And then then somebody gets something for fixing it. And then somebody gets something for validating that the pot hole got filled and the whole world could be just one kind of big game where there really is no. There's really no differentiation between your work and. I mean, I, people talk about like universal basic income or something like that. As a, and to me, it really does integrate into the, what does that even mean? Like what a, you know, like how do you even decide which task is a worthwhile task versus a not worthwhile task? This conversation is an unpaid task for all of us. Does that mean we're not creating value? No. This is one of the most valuable 90 minutes of our week. All of us. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. And we're not being paid for anything else. It's just worth valuable. And so it's this, this, this weird arbitrary thing about like, what are you getting paid for? I imagine that is kind of, and I think the hard part really is this not having a corporatization like what Eric was talking about. And how you choose your world. Like that's kind of weird thing, right? Like, I could be choosing, well I will be choosing my better verse. Oh, you have to speak in New York. I could bet a bus. in order to get it to my better verse. And I'll be choosing my better verse and you'll be choosing your better verse. And there's this kind of like, we have to not bump into each other because we see a different reality on the street, like actually like physically. But my sense is that I want it to be as real as the real world in some way or be very seamlessly integrated in this way that makes the real world better. Yeah, that's me. So Grace, is this gamified world a world you want to live in or a world you want to avoid? Is this like a good vision or a dark vision? It's really interesting, like that's such a weird thing to say. Oh wait a sec. Ingrid, could you mute? Ingrid's waiting a second. So it's like we live in the world we live in, right? And it could be quite easily argued that we live in a dystopia right now. But it could also be argued we live in paradise right now. You know, I don't see that as economy. It's just, it's inevitable that we're going in that direction. If we don't screw up the electrical grid, you know, there isn't some big solar flare. You know, like it's inevitable that that's the direction we're going in. So the only question is, which better verse do you get to you choose? Something like that. And I think- It can be both, I mean, it is both simultaneously, like thinking you're living in a better world than the one that's really out there is freaky, right? Like really freaky. And you're also sort of dropping another thing on the table in the conversation here, which is which world do you choose tends toward, hey, you know, there could be lots and lots of metaverses or better verses. And we could maybe have choices about which ones we show up and which ones we don't, or maybe we don't, right? But I realized at one point when, you know, and thinking about whether we can upload our minds into the cloud and, you know, uploading your brain, that whole theme, once you- And this was after reading Corey Doctro's walk away where that's part of the plot. I realized, oh crap, once you've uploaded yourself, A, you could upload yourself a thousand times and replicate yourself a thousand times. And then B, each of these could present as you and they could start having divergent experiences and there's like this whole philosophical thing that spills out there. And you could in fact be distributed into the cloud. And then you, depending on whether you were attaching things to yourself in the cloud to augment your capacity or whether you were under assault by others, the boundaries of your identity could in fact blur and shade into other kinds of things. And I was like, man, this is this, there's just a whole bunch of weird new issues that show up about ourselves, about like who we are and how we show up even once we upload ourselves in some way into this metaverse thing. So which world do you wanna be in starts to apply some sorts of choices and then a whole bunch of architectures and then a bunch of like, okay, let's apply malware to that scenario. And it gets really kind of ugly really quickly because then if you have a bug, you can't shake. If you have a malware remora that you can't get rid of in your new online persona when your meat bag is dead, now what happens, right? Are you wedded to it forever and you can't erase yourself? Are you a prisoner of this new space? Yeah, I mean, like to me, the whole idea of this, like uploading myself and living forever is just a weird kind of insanity and denial of the spiritual world. But it's clearly something a lot of people want, so they are gonna do that and good luck to them, won't be me. Hi, Mike, then Gil. Thanks for kicking this off so well and thanks to Eric for framing this. I'm at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and we've been looking at emerging technologies for quite a while and the metaverses of the latest thing we're trying to determine whether it's worth our time. So many of the issues that are raised in the policy world are already out there, whether it's privacy, competition policy, antitrust. There's a lot of things that we're already working on that feed right into this, but the nice thing about the metaverses is it's a hell of a case study and it excites people and it can get people to focus more attention. I personally am working very hard to make sure that we don't announce a new metaverse policy initiative. I think would be better served to just continue to work on data policy and cybersecurity and antitrust. But I think that the metaverse effort could be incredibly useful. Most of you know I was in the Clinton White House and that's what we did. The vision thing was the whole thing. We did some nice little demos. WhiteHouse.gov was $300,000 that probably provided $100 million in impact because everybody got excited about this idea of e-government. They'd never seen it before. Likewise, if there was something we could do that showed what a better verse was and was accessible to people without $400 goggles and 10 megabit per second connections, I think we could really, really make a huge difference. I'm only on this call about once a month because every other week I have the Net4Neighbors call. A similar group of very interested and very different types of people coming together to ask how can we take today's internet and just add a few things that would make it more trusted, more friendly, give us more control over the data that's being collected about us. And the two efforts could learn together very well and maybe we should do it. The team call, we have a prototype to play with. The model, I'm gonna talk way too long. So cut me off when you're ready, Jerry. But when I was at IBM, it was about the year, it was 1999, actually. And my boss was John Patrick and he was sort of chief internet visionary, vice president, always on the edge of getting fired for talking about how we have to move away from this old model, which is where IBM made most of its money. But the team developed this very nice next generation internet vision. And what was different is we didn't use any of those big four-syllable, five-syllable words like interoperability. We did the whole thing from the perspective of the user, the person at the keyboard, and we tried to use simple old Anglo-Saxon words. And John actually wrote a book in 2001, which came out the week after 9-11. So nobody noticed. But it was called Net Attitude. And it was written really for CEOs in the non-tech space who didn't really have a sense of where we were going. They just, they knew what the internet was today but they didn't know what it could be. And so let me just share the seven words. Fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, trusted. I'd argue we got about half of that so far. But if we could provide six or seven words about what the better verse should feel like, don't say collaborative, say friendly, or teaming, or somehow find a way to just use those as the bullet points and then build a story behind them and point out where some people are going the wrong way. I would argue that putting goggles on your face is just the opposite of friendly. It also doesn't blur the in-person with the metaverse. And that's the other thing that's missing from this concept. I mean, I think about half of you know I got married online in March. Best wedding ever. Cause we had 200 people in nine time zones as well as the 10 of us in the church. We'd had dancing. We did, I mean, it was really well done. The company's name is Wedfully with one L. They could be a case study. I'm trying to convince them that they should start deadfully, which is sort of for funerals, which is bad joke, but our most intense experiences could be enhanced by this kind of technology if it was a better verse. And if we didn't have to worry that it was being recorded and exploited and the next day after the funeral we weren't gonna get a whole bunch of emails from the state lawyers. So that's my short spin on this. And again, I would happily donate some words to this cause both short words and some paragraphs because we're working through a lot of these issues. And I think having a vision, having a place we're going to is probably the most important first step. Thank you, Jerry. Mike, I love that. Just a thought that I had as you were talking at the start about the Carnegie Embalement where you are and about trying to avoid putting a stake in the ground around metaverse and all that feels to me a world piece like space and the metaverse are these frontiers where a piece could easily get disrupted in major ways. And having a stake in the sand in those places feels extremely important to me. So how do you skirt it? How do you not put up a manifesto or whatever is a bad way to go about it? But how do you still play in that space? Because if you ignore that space you're very likely to be swamped by real-world events as they just show up. Well, I want to make clear. I object to metaverse policy as if we need to write a new policy for this new application of existing technologies and business models that we're already dealing with. But I think the metaverse and the betterverse are exactly the kind of vision that will get people excited about solving all these really hard problems. So I'm fully, we're totally in sync there. I would add that I had an incredibly important point I was going to add. Shoot. It'll come back to you. No, it won't. That's the problem. Shoot. But I'm sorry, I'll just, I'll go on from there. But the other thing we could do is we could, you know, try to play with Second Life or some other. Oh, that's the other point. There we go. There's a guy who some of you may know named Alistair Kroll. And he runs the best e-government conference in Canada, perhaps the best e-government conference in the world since he went virtual. And one reason it's so good is he's made full use of mingleware which is what I call things like Kumo, Remo. There's about a hundred of them that he actually evaluated, 104 different platforms for allowing people to move into a virtual reception room. And this conference they just did, FWD 50 was the best thing I've ever seen when it comes to a large event using these technologies. And if you do another one of these or if you wanna engage the smartest person I know or the most practical person, he's very smart, very articulate, but he's also the most practical. He wants to get stuff done. Alistair Kroll, I'll do an introduction for you. And the other thing is next week, I'm doing an event at the US Institute of Peace on tech for peace. Much of it is gonna be on artificial intelligence but I'm gonna put metaverse in there. Wait, cool. Thanks, Mike. Great stuff. Kim. Yeah. Really happy we're having this conversation. This is very rich and timely. Mike, yay to the short words and don't just put metaverse in there, put better verse in there. I think one of the most important things we can do right now is just sprinkle better verse dust all over the place, like a gorilla action to affect the conversation. Just put that, you know, have people thinking about what would be a better verse and the short words that, I think that could be very high leverage maybe. So by all means, I agree with you, Mike. No policy, not yet. Don't even know what this is. Couple of reactions. Grace, I don't like it that you said this is inevitable but I think you're right. One way or the other, we're going in this direction. It brings to mind for me a really rich meditation that Barrett Brown often uses with groups where he takes people through, over the course of a fair amount of time, 20 to 60 minutes into a deep reflection on why this is an absolutely terrible world that we're living at, all the dark sides and dark directions. That's kind of one phase of it. One phase of it is why this is the best of all possible. I forget which direction he's doing this in. So I think Stephen Pinker and all that stuff. And third, a meditation on the world is perfect as it is. So very Buddhist grounded sort of accepting reality as it comes to us. That's profound experience. It's very, very rich and very grounding in a way that opens people's sense of possibility and capacity to move creatively in the world. So I just, that arose in my memory, Grace, as you were talking about inevitability. I've got all the techy groovy enthusiasm for this and a great deal of fear of this technology emerging in the world of highly stratified modern capitalism. And what that turns into as a commodified thing, what we've seen, exactly what we were talking about of getting marketed the day after the funeral, all of that. This will be used by the existing systems and apparatus, which is not what we're all drawn to, but there it is. That's the dynamic that it's emerging in. And so the question of whether and how it can be shifted or cultured or nourished to open up this other capacity. I mean, if this was in the world of Star Trek X thousands of years from now, that would be a different story, but it's in the world of this sort of, advancing and falling apart world of modernity. You know, bifurcating, stratifying better and worse both happening together. And I guess the one thing I feel fairly certain about is that this will accelerate everything, good and bad. All right, Kevin, please. Oh, last thing. I think, just one very briefly, Grace's comments about the grid I think is critically important as the world becomes more and more dependent and we even are now on the cyber world than the brittleness of the power grid and other systems becomes critically desperately important. And so somebody might, this may be a project for Carnegie, is if we go into a world of the better verse and at some point, you know, at a regional level, national level or global level, the supporting systems collapse. What the fuck happens though? That's it. Thank you. We do a lot on that as part of our cyber policy initiative a lot on reliability of IT systems or banking. But yeah, this is exactly right. 90% or 99% isn't good enough. Mr. Jones. Yeah, one thing that occurs to me is that if the better verse, the metaverse, just call it the metaverse and maybe the metaverse sign, allows you to create your own world than you are in some sense sovereign in worlds or countries have their own currency. And so I think currency exchange and being able to value other worlds is a really key skill. And I don't think, you know, if you go with metaverse, everybody will have their own currency and you'll have to negotiate. Everything will be in some way, you know, currency exchange. And that's why I was listing the Dutch there as an example versus the British. They were able to have fewer troops around their multicultural trade because they can value the other better. And so they didn't need to enforce bad deals with more troops. So that's two huge things you've found on the table. One of them is currencies. And I think that there's a whole bunch of people working to create metaverses that are about DeFi distributed currencies, crypto tokens, the whole thing. And from what I'm perceiving, they think that the metaverse is in fact all about that. There's a bunch of other people who think it's about distributed sovereignty, autonomy, data distribution and don't care so much about crypto, although they see that crypto could be a means to it, but so is IPFS, which is not a cryptocurrency. But in fact, the distributed data store and there's a bunch of other, you know, IPFS is the interplanetary file system, right? And there's a bunch of other attempts to decentralize as well. And decentralization means lots and lots and lots and lots of interesting things. And having multiple currencies and then having to exchange between them has a bunch of interesting implications as well. In fact, non-fungibility or non-exchangeability is an interesting defense mechanism so that you're not purchasable. And then you said somewhere along the way, something like, and everything having a price or something like that, which is another big aspect, which is like, oh, are we heading toward a world where absolutely everything has a sticker price? And you can be like, that blade of grass, I'd like to buy that blade of grass and copy it onto my lawn. And then here, before passing the mic to Stuart and Doug, I just wanna throw in a question I've said a couple of times, I think on OGM calls, but originally this was my, this was my plaint against Facebook. Like, hey, why didn't Facebook start this other way? It would have been a different company. Now I'm realizing that this is my remedy for Facebook, that if I were trying to sue Facebook for antitrust for having eaten the world, I would try to redesign them around the question, what if Zuckerberg had designed Facebook for citizens instead of consumers? And there's a link to my brain where I've got that question. And for me- I think pricing doesn't have to have the capitalist myth embedded. So I just want the pricing to include social capital, spiritual capital, national, natural capital, all kinds of things. Precisely. That could be the buzzword for, that could be the slogan for our Net for Neighbors call. But also when Zuckerberg in his demo says, here's somebody walking by, I'm going to buy the sweater she's wearing. Of the underlying commerce model assumptions and everything else are that everything will have a price tag and this is what is going to fuel this new environment. If in fact we find some way to value and appreciate civic actions, feeding the commons, shareability and openness, and the mechanisms that are baked into because it's just damn software, the mechanisms baked into the platforms are completely different, they're civilization oriented, not capitalism oriented. That could be a gigantic differential for where this thing goes and what kind of world we're living in. So I really liked that. I think that that's a very juicy kind of topic for me. Stuart, off to you. Thank you, Jerry. Jerry, you just stole my thunder completely. Oh, I love that. I mean, that's great. It's wonderful. It's a great example of open global mind. But using the word citizens is really critical. One of the things we talked about in the last call that I was on was how can we use technology as a vehicle, a mechanism to actually change people's thinking? Because if we don't do that as a foundational level, we're not gonna use this in a positive way to create the kind of world that we wanna create. I was in a meeting yesterday, an initiative that's been going on for a number of years called Thoughtful Citizens. And essentially what's about, it's about educating people about how we can get along with lots of different demographic groups, lots of different thinking people. And so I think that's an essential foundational piece for all the reasons that Jerry just articulated. The other thing that I wanna mention is a concern and that concern is an image from a movie is coming up where people are essentially living in an extremely dystopian world, something like Waterworld or something like that. And then they plug into the metaverse and everything is wonderful. So I think we need to be mindful of that phenomenon as we engage in this conversation. Thanks Stuart, and I'm typing into the chat a nightmare I have now and then which is what if Kevin Costner has been right? What if Waterworld and the Postman and there's one more sci-fi dystopian sci-fi movie he's done and forgetting which one? What if he's right on all those things and we're moving into those futures? Not something I wanna have. But hey, metaverse could be sort of like those kinds of things. And Ingrid is a fan of the movies. Doug. Okay, I find myself thinking about what is the interface between better verse and nature? Do you wanna refund that for a second? Well, I thought about that. Here in OGM, our speeches tend to be long and I would like to move us towards more political, more precise language, that's shorter. Oh, that's funny, because I find our speeches short. I find that we whip, I find that we whip through issues really quickly and don't actually sort of dissolve into them with enough sort of time and attention and unpacking. Doug is referring to my long tirade about the need to use short words and short sentences. Is that it? Okay. In our quest for brevity, we went on at length. Thanks, Doug. Mike, do you wanna address Doug's question or I kinda wanna skip the queue for a second if anybody wants to actually tackle Doug's very- I did actually, that was part of it. Everybody in the queue is on that, so go, Mike. Well, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and I just mean nature is what it's all about. And so that's part of why I just rebel against the goggle idea. I got to see virtual reality in 1990 when Al Gore held the first hearing about virtual reality with Jaren Lanier. And back then I thought the same thing is, why would I wanna not see the rest of the world and not interact with the two? But I think we do have the real fear that this will be the distraction. This will take kids out of the playground and particularly the kids, the nature deficit disorder that kids and most adults already suffer from will get even worse. So I hope the interface is much better and maybe it's something better than Google Glasses but at least something that is augmented reality not virtual reality. But the other thing I wanted to touch real quick and this is something we can pick up later but the discussion we were just having about cryptocurrency and ways to exchange value, a lot of that sounds like the web three discussion and that clearly the metaverse, betterverse web three discussion sort of form a Venn diagram, but we need to do that. And we need to put it in the larger context. And again, I think the better verse could also be a case study for web three if we build it in a decentralized way. But that's probably our next session is on what is web three and how do we get a good one? And then the last thought is if you guys have a chance, watch the hour yesterday with Neil Stevenson. He did a event with the New America Foundation. Oh, New America, okay. America did it and it was on his new book but it wasn't really. And so he talked quite a bit about the metaverse, of course and it was both amusing and informative. Was it troubling too? Less than I thought it would be. I mean, I hadn't actually listened. I mean, I haven't heard him speak in at least 10 years. And I think he's much more focused in his conversation now and a little bit less depressing. Why don't we get Bruce Sterling on here to be depressing? That would be good. Oh yeah, that'd be fun. Thanks, Mike. Doug, if you'll lower your hand and then Ken. Ken Gil Stewart. Hello, everybody. I think I mentioned earlier this summer, I was reading a couple of books by Bob Johansson and I don't remember which one this appears in because I read two right at the same time. But he talks about gaming as the most powerful learning platform that ever invented. And so when I think of the metaverse and I just, my next-door neighbor bought the DVD of Fantastic Fun Guy and invited me over to watch on his new HDTV, which is really incredible. It wasn't the same as being in the theater, but I think I thought about one way that you might wanna actually use something like goggles would be to take kids out in nature and put goggles on them and have them look underground and see the mycelium and looking into the tree canopy and see all the animals and all the insects and that could be an extremely powerful way to augment reality and then have them do some kind of project where they're looking at the real world and seeing how can we rehabilitate this? How can we take the things that are being endangered and rehab them? So that kind of goes to Doug's point about nature and to Mike's about the goggles and stuff. And it's just, I think we have an amazing opportunity here and my big concern, which has been echoed by many people here, both spoken and in the chat, is if it's a profit-driven thing, it's gonna go south. It's really gonna suck. So how do we create an environment where this is funded for the betterment? For me, the betterverse is the betterment of humanity, our better ability to live in the world. Fuck the profit motive. We need ways to be more intelligent, both with nature and with each other. End of rant. Thanks, Ken. And I think if we pulled a hundred people out in the world, some of them would say better means more profitable and et cetera, et cetera. There'd be different ideas of what better in a betterverse might mean. I just wanna elaborate because we haven't said this and a couple of people might not be on it, but virtual reality is kind of completely immersive environments where you're in some artificial space or world. Augmented reality is where you can see through the goggles, through the lens, except things are dropped into your field of view and usually pinned to spots in your field of view. So augmented reality would be an interesting way to look at the mycelial networks that are in front of you as you look around. And in fact, to do tree identification and flora and fauna identification and you could do a whole bunch of things. And I'm kind of shocked that I have three or four Google Cardboards in my drawer, never bought a full-on headset, but was really excited looking forward to these kinds of applications for augmented reality that don't seem to be around, that world sort of petered out somehow and I'm not exactly sure how and why, but I think there's a whole bunch there. And then I've mis-underestimated some technologies. So when there was first talk about attaching cameras to cell phones, I was like, ah, this is bullshit. Like, this is just the phone companies want to be charging lots of money for fat bits and all that kind of stuff. And then I didn't realize that a little, a wee little lens, a wee little lens the size smaller than me pinky could take better pictures than my old Sony little DSLR. And that this would transform the world and that we would all be witnesses of crimes and beauty all the time because we were all packing HD video and still cameras all the time, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't, I did not see that coming for an instant until suddenly like I had to open my eyes and go, wow, that's really phenomenal and crazy. So I say that because in the world of the metaverse and augmented reality and virtual reality, we're all looking at the goggles, those damn expensive goggles. And like, they're clunky, they hide our faces, they're in the way and they're, it's really hard to imagine them going away. The closest I've heard of anything like that is contact lenses that have displays in them, which people are in fact experimenting with and I don't wear contacts. And I'm not sure I want to insert things in my eyes, but who knows? And maybe there's like a neural jack right into your visual cortex. So you could just display things directly. Mike is on with that, he's gonna be in line for the first like Jack and then we'll have a movie about that. You think the jacks are gonna be in the center of the forehead, that's awful. Well, no, it's, I mean, if it goes here, then it goes into the intellectual part of the brain. If it goes into the brainstem, then we're talking reptilian. And that's what really gets scary. That's when the political candidates are gonna plug right into the emotional part of my brain. That's scary. I love that, like inject some hormones now. No electrons or photons. No, no, I mean, I just mean like trigger the release of particular hormones. That's like very direct access. Anyway, so the path of technology and all that could be really different from what we expect and things may happen that make AR just simple and easy. For instance, if we wreck the atmosphere and all of us have to be wearing helmets all the time, then we've got a heads up display right in front of us. I guess that's a little bit dystopian. Gil Stewart, doc. Gee, just a little cherry. Yeah, I always assumed that the brain jack went into the occipital lobe, but who knows? The original Google glasses were not goggles. They were glasses with cool cameras on the side. Does anybody know what Apple's planning to produce? Is it gonna be blocky from the world or leave you in the world? I think it's a question. I'm interested in technology that enriches humanity and enriches our relationship with the living world doesn't distract us from it. And I think part of the mess that we're in here is that we think about ourselves as rational creatures in a mechanistic story with computers and electronics as our model of reality. And in fact, we're biological beings enmeshed in the living world, belonging to a living world. So it's not about nature. It's not about like better relationships with nature or taking care of nature, but living as if we belong to a living world with billions of other creatures and it richly interconnected in ways that we don't completely understand in bodies that we don't completely understand. We talk about circuitry for our brains, but we don't think with our brains. We think with our bodies. And we probably don't even think with our own bodies. We think with our bodies together. I mean, where is, who's doing the thinking in this conversation? When I'm, even when I'm speaking now is this me speaking or is this me in connection with all of you and my history and all that's woven together here. And we get, you know, the reductionism is dangerous because it's so narrow and it's so blinds us. So, you know, I'm in our house we have a, we have a skeptical conversation running for years about artificial intelligence. Jane says it's not artificial intelligence. It's simulated intelligence. Well, what would it look like if it was augmented or enriched intelligence? And so, you know, one of the questions that we need to be asking throughout this, I think I first got this from Bob Dunham, when looking at any issue, question, proposal, strategy whatever he will ask, well, for the sake of what? Why are we doing this? For what result and might add to that for the sake of whom? And with those two questions, a lot is disclosed and a lot is provoked in any conversation. And it invites at least for, you know for non-sociopathic billionaire power-hunger people. It involves- I'm sure there's some out there. I'm sure there's a few out there, I hear a few. There was an article yesterday talking about how great it is there's now women tech billionaires. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe not. So, you know, so, but those, what if those questions I think enrich a sense of connection and possibility and relationship? And, you know, so my takeaway from this conversation is gorilla pixie dust, you know like words to throw here and there and see what effect that could have on the conversation. And that would be another one. Thanks Gil. Thanks Gil. Stuart Doug John. Great, so once again, thank you, Gil for teaming this up. This whole notion of my response to the questions that you just posed, Gil, and we talk about and use the word betaverse is to use this to make a better world, to help create a better world, whatever that means. And I'm not sure exactly how to do this in terms of embedding education so that quote, people come out on the other side more house broken in terms of their capacity and ability to engage effectively with other human beings in the real world. I remember just before Microsoft was about to release SharePoint, the big collaborative software, they were thinking about bringing in people who knew something about human interactivity to help educate people because otherwise all they're selling is connectivity. And then in my way of thinking that that's all they're still doing, selling connectivity for all the reasons that Gil just articulated, collaboration is an essential human activity. And how can we get people to engage in that way to teach the necessary skills, concepts, awareness so that the world in fact can be a more hospitable place and people can be more thoughtful in the way they engage in it? So you said thinking about doing that, did they ever do that? No. No, I had a conversation about that but then they decided not to spend the money on actually doing that. What pops up in my mind is the potential to embed some kind of requirement of a tutorial and that could be something that could be designed with mass media to actually educate people about what it is to quote, be a human being. And I agree in principle with where you're heading, I think that a required video to watch in this tutorial is probably not gonna work. That's a bad word. I reminded here of how people learned UNIX back in the day which was they sat down at a terminal with a problem and they're like, ah, shit, how do you do that? It turned to the geek next to them who then said, oh, this is how and this is what we do. And it was a social learning exercise. Basically you came into the community by stumbling on and trying to figure out how to do stuff. And I'm not trying to argue that the metaverse should be as arcane as UNIX commands nor that it should be the command line metaverse which I'm sure Stevenson and others would actually like. Somebody's phone is ringing, sorry. But anyway, let's go to Doug then John and then I'll ask people who've been speaking up a lot already on the call to step back for sex so we can hear from people who haven't stepped in to the conversation yet, give them a chance. So Doug then John. The implicit theme in the better verse is that more is better. What if that's not true? What if less is better? I think, for example, of the impact on young people of having access to a million pieces of music. Does it make sitting down and struggling with a guitar for a couple of hours to make it make sense less likely to happen? And a virtual world is on the one hand of world of hyperabundance and potentially lots of stuff just available at anyone's beck and call. And yet less is more in most cases. So I think it's a really nice question to add to the conversation. John. Okay, I love this conversation. This is great. And I love the going out for the edges of possibility the kind of scenario thinking. I've done that professionally a couple of times but I'm gonna in response to what Doug just said in response to another chord in the conversation talk about the narrowing not narrowing for its own sake but I mean, that's good by itself. When is less more? The other reason to think about less is to think about what are the stepping stones from the current situation into the better verse. So a couple of thoughts about that as far as the capitalism in the mix of public private libraries have a new role in the present but they're still kind of limping along but one can imagine a public institute one can imagine a public better verse that has and then the way you do private activity in the public better verse is you publish a book. I mean, you submit a publication which is a set of interactivity and code and so on and so forth. And you can buy those things or you can come into an environment like a library and get access to them. It's just a way of thinking incrementally about how to get there. In the same breath, I only caught part of Grace's intro because I came in late but I liked this whole idea of the wait there's no separation. We're now separating jobs or separating locations what if that all goes away? And again, I think there's a couple of really interesting steps on the way there. We have these office type programs now where you can say, I'm available, my door is open, I'm working, I'm on the phone, blah, blah, blah. Well, the better verse has a couple of really interesting other possibilities you could attempt to, you could see a note. Oh, so and so is in the better verse. Let me contact them and then you notice, oh, we could meet for coffee over here or we could meet by the side of the river in nature or you could sit in front of my desk and there's a whole different tone to each of those meetings and I could put those different environments out with different names of people like if so and so knocks on my door, that's fine but it's office hours. They need to talk to me in my office but if so and so knocks on my door, hey, that'd be great. Open choice, you can meet me by the river or you can suggest a different place to meet and if so and so knocks, hey, let's go get a drink. I mean, this is a whole another layer of social tuning that is associated with the place in which we're virtually meeting and that's a whole available set of things to consider and it's also a stepping stone to the point where we don't have any boundaries and where everything is all mixed. Thanks and Grace, we never went back and picked up that thread that you also gave us about the blending or blurring of work and life and all of that, which I think is really important also because we sort of monetize and value things that look like work and then we undervalue or devalue or absolutely misvaluing things that fall out of that sphere. We've created a wall between those worlds that doesn't need to be. And then- It does need to be done. In which sense? Well, there's things that if you measure them, you devalue them, right? Right, exactly. Like my mom is better than your mom because she has more mom points, right? She hugged me more and so you- Hugged frequency was peaking like on Sundays. Yeah, right. And so you devalue or disincentivize doing good things if you start measuring them. So it's not random and it's not arbitrary that we've done that. There's a real good social reason for it. And so when we try to create these systems that are like impact planes and all that stuff that they're trying to do on the interchain and cosmos network and I've seen other networks like that, you start to corrupt goodness. And that, to me, that's the dystopia. The dystopia is when we count everything. Oh, I brushed my teeth. I went up and down 35 times and not 36 times with my toothbrush. So you get demerits. Your toothbrush gives you demerits. It's a little bit like a Midas touch curse sort of, right? It's like what money touches, it breaks in different ways. And some would argue that everything should be monetized because only markets work well. And that's a political philosophical point of view that some people hold. Small side note and then I'll go to Pete, which is, and I think I said this in one of our calls but I don't think it was one of these calls. I learned recently more than I wanted to know about Axie Infinity, which is an NFT game platform where a third of Filipinos are basically playing Axie Infinity against each other with little fake axolotls, playing a mindless game in order to earn something above what they could earn and working on Amazon and make it through the pandemic. But what if there was a game like Axie that it actually involved learning stuff and skilling up and fixing problems in your neighborhood and then being able, what if you got paid for learning? Wouldn't that be a cool thing? Why do we pay out for learning? Isn't learning good for society? It's like really perverse. Seems very strange to me. Pete. I was enchanced by Doug's question, what if less is more? And also struck by his example of music. I can say in my life some alternate universe, not one that we would build, but like some physical alternate universe. There was a Pete who went into music instead of tech. So I'm kind of rediscovering that late in life. My world is much better because of the long tail nature of music distribution. So the fact that 70 million songs are available to me on Spotify is actually an amazing and wonderful thing in my life and moves me towards creativity around music. It's interesting to think. I actually don't need, I don't need almost all of those. I only need the couple of thousand songs that are really entrancing to me. So in my couple of thousand songs that are entrancing to me are different than everybody else's couple of thousand songs. So I don't actually literally need all 70 million. It's just the fact that out of those 70 million, a couple thousand of them are really important to me and help me in my creative endeavors. Kind of the same thing on YouTube. Billions of videos and stuff like that. The long tail nature of it means that there are 10 or 15 musical theory experts who are entertaining and can present information in a way that is helpful to me and thoughtful. And I've learned more in a year on YouTube about music theory than I did when I was a teenager and people were trying to force me and me crap that was moderately kind of useful in some direction but basically turned me off for decades. So I like the aphorism that less is more. And there's also something to having enough and having enough variety in the world and enough variety and access in different ways because the way I learned music theory is different than the way everybody else learns music theory and that's kind of the way it is. Music theory is hard and not intuitive. And that hard and not intuitive part is really sharp edged and makes it easy to shut down. So I have that experience in music and music theory. I have the opposite or I don't have that experience for tech. So this is something where I can kind of get a taste of what it is for other people to go into tech and go, oh my gosh, this is just too complicated and hard edged, I can't figure it out. For me, the tech part of that is just, it's easy and magical and I learned Unix by listening to Geeks but I didn't actually listen to Geeks, I just knew it. It's the weirdest thing. Wait, you were born with like a boost load program that understood Unix? I went to Caltech for computer programming and I already knew all the stuff that they taught me before they taught it to me. It's the weirdest thing. Same thing with Unix, I just sat down and it just makes logical sense. Of course, you would type, grep minus 4% 12 slash slash. Of course, that's the way I would design it too. Yeah, so there's some classic geeks who think like Pete and I lucked into the fact that those were the 15 or 10 or 15 years before me, they were the ones that invented all the tech that we need to use now. Love that. I'm gonna hold off going to you Gil for a second just to see if Ingrid, Ken, Wendy, Stacey, Julie and Michael, Eric, if you wanna step back in, whoever, if you wanna drop back in. All good? Okay, the mic is yours, Gil. And now my mouth is full. Ah, damn it. On the matter of less is more. So, assuming that I reduced my appetite to not driven by the machine to want, want, want, and I want just a little bit of what I want, well, there's eight billion of me. And that's a lot, those little bits add up to a lot of stuff and the variations in the combinatorics of all that adds up to a lot of stuff, which is why Pete, you need to have billions of songs even though you only wanna listen to a few thousand because my few thousand is gonna only partially overlap with your few thousand. So that's an interesting design universe to play in is how do we have requisite variety without over bloat? I don't know what that looks like. The other thought here was there've been a couple of comments in the thread about the relationship of all this development to profit motive. And my first reaction when somebody said, why can't we have a not-for-profit Facebook, where my mind automatically goes to, because it's trained as though no one would have invented it because there wouldn't have been the incentive that drove Zuck and all those people to whatever. But it's that we had dark in that that wasn't driven by that. It was maybe driven by global military power considerations and other weird stuff. But the point is that it was a publicly, i.e., socially, i.e., by us funded, massive engine of innovation for decades. So there's at least the proof case of some, there's something else possible that can give you transistors and space programs and internets and metaverses and so forth, other than being driven by dysfunctional college kids like Zuck. So there's that and we'll see other thought in there. Mike, I'm catching your brain farts here. We're having transient memory farts. Well, let's just leave it at that for now. Thanks. No worries. Eric, do you wanna say a little more about what you put in the chat? Okay, so see the way I've experienced these new decentralized tech platforms, it's, to me, it's amazing because it's like we're going back to giving, well, programmers had the power to build whatever they wanted and to have a canvas on the internet. And so I've seen that like around 2016 and somehow because it wasn't, they couldn't find a good use case that would make money or that would make sense. And then I saw a recent article about how opera browser tried the same thing. So why does it have to, why can't people innovate in their own spaces and why can't you have millions of people innovating and see what emerges where, well, people need the time and the space and then they have their real lives in the way, almost so, it's a, yeah, but maybe there are models where you can get, you could combine it with work. Like I think there are some innovation in like South America there may be some innovative companies doing things like that where they have like the whole community and family as part of a workplace innovating together and making money at the same time. So, we got to be think creatively. It feels like a rich experimental time. I mean, I think that we are in one of these punctuated equilibrium moments and I'm seeing tons and tons and tons of experimentation. My fear is that, and I think this is what happened when the Silicon Valley startup model kind of ate the world is that, hey, that model ate the world and those people were able to pour tons of money into something like Uber way quicker than a co-op was able to write software and get people to install a co-op shared app into their phones. And so they basically ate the market with money and then turned it into a non-actual market where drivers have a choice to either drive or not drive but other than that, they don't get to set prices, they don't get any benefits, they don't get carrappa. And so we have the, a big piece of the gig economy is like welcome to the precariat. We're gonna make sure you don't make enough money to make a living because we need the profits to get sucked into this large single corporate entity. And I just wanna bring up one thing before I go to Gil, which is there's a thing in economics called the iron law of wages. It's not called the law of wages. It's called the iron law of wages. I'll put the Wikipedia page in the chat. And it's like, why the hell? And it says that wages will tend toward the bare minimum to keep workers alive. That's basically what it says. Wages will always be forced to that place in a marketplace. And I'm like, why did somebody, thanks Pete, I kind of knew you'd do that faster than I could think it. Why would anybody call this the iron law of wages? It's because you want people to think that it's immutable, immovable, not possible to be circumvented, that this is a firm fact in the firmament of economics. And it ain't like fair wage laws and the idea that people could actually make a living and do well runs contrary to this iron law of wages. And so anybody who knows more about economic history, let me know where this came from because I can't stand things like that. And the world of economics so bitterly disappoints me so often, thank you. A minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. It's cray-cray. And it tells you why coal miners in England rise up. It tells you why there's peasant rebellions all the time. It tells you why these actions happen but it's because people seem to feel like it's okay to do that. Over to you, Bill. Yeah. The trouble with this conversation is that every time I have a thought, there were then in the 30 seconds I'm waiting to speak, there's like nine other ideas that came through. It is true. It's a problem. Yeah, it's really tough. The iron law of wages is an iron law of capitalism, not of economics. That's number one. There haven't always been wages. People need fair wages if we're on the job standard but if we're not on the job standard, wages becomes a non-issue. So the question is, how do we sustain comfortable life for all humans on the planet? Which not only Bucky Fuller was talking about 70 years ago but Edward Bellamy was talking about 120 years ago in this remarkable book called Looking Backward that I encourage people to have a look at as well as again, I'm gonna put in a plug for the dawn of everything by Graver and Wengro which just really blows open the sense of human possibility because of a much richer view of human history and what we have done and what we have been through. So, oh yeah, so what I raised my hand was your comment about UberJer and I liked the way you talked about it of money. How did you say money to buy the market? Yeah, so what Silicon Valley figured out was how to assemble a giant pool of money to go take over something quickly before everybody else got organized or could do anything. But it's not Andreessen software eats the world, it's money eats the world and the VC game at least in the particular case of Uber and the like is to fund something that can take over markets by operating at a loss for years and drive everybody out not through a competitive process but for what used to be called unfair business practices and used to be illegal. I remember when I was a kid, 1950s New York, there were gasoline price wars. You know, there would be several gas stations on multiple corners and they'd start driving their prices down and each would have to drive their other prices down and it's basically called beating your competitor to a pulp on driving them out of business then you jack your prices back up. With the Uber example and others, VC has institutionalized that process. I haven't done the legal research but I know this used to be illegal and at some point it became not. We used to have anti-trust laws and at some point we became not. So these are not iron laws, these are political laws. The political majority and elections last, last pluck years and elections actually matter. You know, we're in torment this week about the Supreme Court possibly every new Roe v. Whitney and people are arguing about, you know, what does this mean for the court and so forth? This happens because we lost a series of elections because we didn't muster the political force to control the political forces that issue judges and we're reaping the consequences of those losses and those failures, not just losses but failures to organize effectively to win. This is for me the dark side of people saying, oh, why bother voting? There's no difference between the two parties. Yeah, I get that and here we are. These are the consequences. Yeah, and I just wanna go back. Pete posted a really interesting thing about the iron law wages to the chat which is according to Alexander Gray, Friedman LaSalle gets the credit for having and entered the phrase at the iron law wages as he wrote about das Eisene und Grausene Gesetze and Grausene is a great German word. So I think he meant this ironically as like in the way that Polanyi is describing capitalism but he's not saying, hey, this is how economics works but this is the result of economics. So Pete, thank you. I need to flip that around in my head because it's not, I think it's not coming from economists saying, it's impossible to move wages around. It's coming from an observer saying, hey, look what capitalism has done to us. We are bound by this cruel law, this cruel law in quotes. So thank you for that. Why is economics called the dismal science and why is it that people consider laws of economics to be laws of nature when they're all negotiated agreements between people who control the fucking markets? Because it's up there. And after all that bullshit, it's just people saying, hey, here's how we're gonna keep ourselves going and fuck the rest of the world because we don't give a shit. Wendy or Doug wanna jump in? Gil, go ahead, they're both past. Just real briefly, I still remember Econ one on one in college, I was a physics major and took my first economics course and sat there with the sky drawing charts on the wall explaining these as laws. Guns and butter. So, and I was in a world where laws were like, you know, gravity and economics and all that. And I said, so, you know, can you shut, where's the experimental evidence for this? All the experiments, where's the data to support this? And quickly found, it's like, this is the law, take it and I walked out and it was done with that story. So I was an economics major undergraduate and after looking at the advanced economic theory courses and four-page formulas with variables that you have no idea the accuracy of any data put in, I said, this really is voodoo science, which a lot of people call economics. It is absolute voodoo. Hi everyone, my name is Jerry and I was an econ major too. And what happened to me was in Econ 101, when we dispensed with externalities in about 15 minutes, I ended up finding a professor I really liked, Charlie Lave, who was an econometrician and I wound up learning econometrics, which I call how to lie with numbers. So I have little to no faith in sort of economic theory and all those kinds of things, even though I'm dismissing it probably at my great peril because it's run so much of the world, but I kind of stayed in the major, but found a way to find a corner of it that actually philosophically worked for me somehow. And I was not that deep a thinker back then. So I'm probably layering on some intention and some awareness that wasn't present to me at the time. Doug, you're muted. Okay, to show us how arbitrary some of this can be, if you think of the typical balance sheet of a corporation, it has profit on one side and it has wages on the other side. So profit is considered a good and wages are considered a bad. What would happen if you took the balance sheet and put wages on the par with profit as a social good? Then there could be a political struggle about the division between profit and wages, but there wouldn't be the implicit motive now to cut costs, which means to cut labor and to cut wages. I've been trying to track down where in the history of accounting that happened, I haven't found it yet, but it's just a really good question. Well, Doug, get in touch with Paul Herman at Hip Investor, some investment management firm. Paul runs this riff a little deeper than you'd want. He's in audiences of business people that says, what's your biggest asset? And everybody's got in the modern catechism and the hands go up and they say, are people, are people our business biggest asset? Because everybody knows that's the correct answer now. And Paul says, okay, where are they on your balance sheet? And the room goes silent. It goes uncomfortably silent and then somebody says, wait a minute, they're on the lot, they're booked as liabilities. Same Doug as what you're saying, but the balance sheet side rather than the P&L. And so people are a liability, research and development is a cost and it skews the whole thinking. In India, Paul's identified at least a dozen and a half large companies that don't do it that way, that actually book employers as assets, book wages as investment and treat it very differently. So within the framework of capitalism, there are some different ways to play this. And Doug, Paul might have the answer to your question. Also, I'll put you guys up. A friend of a couple of ours, Andy Maffay, Pete, I think you know, Andy as well, he picked up some work done by a guy who was trying to reinvent accounting, double entry bookkeeping, which goes back to Luca Pacioli, who was a priest back in Venice or something like that, kind of invented double entry bookkeeping. And he has been playing with, he's not a coder, so I don't think this is available as a program, you could go run instead of into it, but he's been playing with a system that if it existed, would sort of allow us to measure events that would then balance out in terms of energy exchange, monetary exchange, a whole series of things in each event that you could then instead of keeping five sets of books, which a lot of companies do, they have the books they keep for where our materials in the queue, and then they have the books that are, what did we pay in taxes? Then they have the books that are, what are we actually making as a profit? I mean, those are all kind of separate sorts of books that would unify them in a really interesting way. And probably possibly, I haven't had this thought with it, allow you to revalue the way different things are represented on the books, so that you value the earth and the continuation of the commons and resources more highly, so that you value humans and their labor product more, more, more, et cetera, et cetera. Go ahead Stuart. Yeah, about 30 years ago, there were articles in Forbes and Fortune magazine about some experiments that they were doing in Scandinavian countries to shift the balance sheets just the way we're thinking. So if you also think a little deeper and go back to the origin of how accounting was determined, it's back to the perpetuation of the feudal system and it was created by capitalists to perpetuate their staying in power. So all of a sudden, we're at a time where, perhaps we can have an impact on this and perhaps not, perhaps it's too late, but that's the origin of it. It's not any different than the legal system. When you think about going to court and jousting in some ways, the modern legal system is not a whole lot different from the accounting system. Nothing civil about civil litigation. Damn, Ms. Nomer, thank you. Ingrid, I didn't think I was gonna chat, but I just have to stay listening to this. I just saw a whole argument on LinkedIn by the Dutch government because you can't make the kinds of profits you can in America if you are a startup. You have to protect your employees. There are so many laws that make it so we cannot compete with America and people are upset about it. They want to make their startups here, but they realize that they can't. I have the same feeling sometimes too because a lot of my profit I have to give back to the government here, but it's really interesting. Besides that, how do you make an appetite in America for people even wanting to include the human quotient? The long range profitability is not about money. It's whether or not you have still have a planet at the end. We're not even taking any of these economic costs into any of these equations. I don't understand it. And it's so interesting to hear this. Now that I live over here and hear you talking about this, it feels like there's no way the power is so hungry over there for money only. Yeah, it's crazy. Thanks Ingrid. And if you can successfully get everybody's brain aligned on economic theories and models that say money is paramount et cetera, et cetera. And there's like a whole big plot there that several of us could probably riff on for a half hour. You can do that. You can actually wipe out protection methods and legislation and other kinds of things that are trying really hard to keep that mechanism from eating the world. And in the US, we've done a really good job of, you know, voiding most of those in the package that the Democrats are trying to pass right now. Paid home leave after birth is a contentious issue and the US is the only industrialized country that actually doesn't offer any. It's like, and they're fighting over four weeks of it, right? Doug, then Julian, and then let's spend the last couple of minutes sort of going back to our better verse questions and see if anybody has any kind of summary thoughts around the better verse. Go ahead, Doug. Aristotle and Plato used the word economics with the non-mixed part of it meant law. What striking is in earlier Greek language, the word nomos came from nomia, which actually meant equal distribution. So contained within the idea of economics is equal distribution. How did that happen? Well, it happened because people had their little bunch of cattle and as the populations going up, graphs became the measure of value and it was seen that it was unequal and the earlier society had been an equal society of the distribution of the kill and so on. So nomia comes in as an attempt to push back to equal distribution against the tendency towards unequal distribution. You don't get a law unless there's a need. That was the need. So embedded in economics is the history of equal distribution being the doll. It's just like the ironies of the board game Monopoly which was originally called the Landlord's Game and it was a very eloquent complaint against how Monopoly hurt people and it turned into this celebration of capitalism. Julian. So I was going to really back up what Ingrid said, having lived in both Europe and the US. One thing that struck me about American culture is that Americans seem to think anything goes as long as somebody makes a buck. It doesn't matter who or what's getting fucked over. If somebody's making a buck, it's good. And what really surprises me is that Americans tend to not even care if they themselves are the one getting fucked over if somebody's making a buck. So this was my sour comment for the morning and like I said, I'm really backing up what Ingrid said a minute ago. Well, thanks for showing up in the chat in such a hearty way and I agree. It's like it's bad. So let's marinate for a second with our original question. What would a better verse look like? Because I think a big piece of our conversation went into dysfunctions of the current universe. You never mind the metaverse and how that works. And a question I wanted to ask in the middle was is anybody out there building a better verse you would love to live in? Have you seen whether it's a governance mechanism that has nothing to do with technology or a techno immersive environment that's actually utopian to you or a set of principles whereby we could reach such things? Who's busy building in your eyes a better verse? And maybe that's a question for next time we do this conversation or for our chat room because I think it's a good question to keep in the back of our heads. But I want to locate the people who are busy building the better verse right now, engage them in conversation, figure out what they're doing, have what they're having, et cetera, et cetera. Stuart. Yeah, I read a great poem a number of years ago by a Hawaiian poet named Kristin Zambuca and it had such a huge impact. It's about this quest of some indigenous people looking for someone with the answer and ultimately concluding and we all know this that the answer was in them. So we might be the people to do that. It's like Milana just repeated over and over again. Wendy. Yeah, what I'm seeing is pieces everywhere. Not one thing being developed that is an answer but and I think that's so appropriate that it's pieces because I think the next thing that's to come is gonna be as we've talked about in this group before like the weaving together of all these things because the answer needs to be a holistic systems view we need all the pieces in order to create the answer. And so I think this is why we're struggling and also why if we can get this right why it has great potential too because it will help the entire system to rise together but it's a struggle because it's all gotta come together. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The good news is that UNIX is a big bag of utilities masquerading as an operating system. It's just a whole bunch of different commands that know how to interoperate. And it gives us a little bit of a blueprint for how you might create lots of interoperating parts that end up coordinating reasonably gracefully. So I keep looking around and society as computers it allows you metaphor but I keep looking around for ways in which this bag of different bits can actually shake themselves together into a resonant, coherent, relatively useful platform for us to live on. Yeah, and let me if you don't mind let me just jump back in on that and say it's not just the technical piece either, right? And we touched on that today as well. It's how it's coming to a better understanding of how humans interact with the technology and using the technology to enable better thinking more creativity, more connection, more learning through using that those tools. So it becomes even more complicated, right? When we put the whole human dynamic sphere on it and realize that we need to understand better how humans do what they do, how we can separate technology from what humans do best so that we're not trying to make technology do what humans should be doing and we're not doing the reverse either, right? So there's a lot there that we haven't really that we all have a sense of but I'm not sure really science has given us a lot of answers on yet and that we're gonna need in order to build this correctly because like other people have said too today it's gonna go fast. And you know, you said it on a small it's like hitting a golf ball. It's making me think of that, right? It's slight little variation at the beginning ends up in a completely different spot at the end. So it's important to lay down good foundations. Doug just put a link to his garden world politics in the chat. He is attempting to articulate one of these kinds of visions as well. And maybe at some point we should slow down and sort of unpack what's in there. Ken. Sort of aware that this is a US tech centric conversation. It's like everything's gonna come out of Silicon Valley and I'm really keenly aware that China and India and Africa have billions of people and very different technical infrastructures and what's their better verse? You know, I'm like Africa doesn't have the same kind of internet infrastructure we have. It's all on their phones. And yet they're doing amazing things. There's these bank, I haven't got enough from here to articulate it well but I know there's a whole banking system that goes over your phone. And so that's part of, you know what we need to be as looking at the better verse what are other countries doing? I think sitting here in the US and saying well this is what it's gonna look like is that same kind of sitting on top of the hill and saying this is what it's gonna be without including the voices that Wendy was just talking about. We need to get these other voices in the room other people in the room. Thanks Ken. Mike. As a former professor I have a nasty habit of giving out reading assignments but I started this morning tuning into a great briefing on the new version of the network readiness index which was provided by, it's a spin-off from the World Economic Forum. Been doing it for almost 20 years and it ranks 130 different countries in four different categories related to how well they're adopting to digital technologies. And the reason I mention it Ken is because you can look at that and quickly see which countries are really coming on strong. I was glad to see that India has jumped from the low 80s to 67. And that countries like Rwanda which is quite a poor country is getting recognition. And there are only 101 on the list but they're still best in class. And you can even plot out a lot of the analysis showing which countries are overachieving doing better than their income per capita would indicate. And it's one of the best of these surveys that I've seen. I don't have the link. Oh, somebody put the link in already. Thank you very much Pete. Pete of course found the link and put it in a chat. Thanks Mike. Anyone with a wrapping thought? Something Ken. Yeah, just I'm seeing all these thanks Pete and I'm thinking Pete's really this amazing asset who augments so well our calls. And that made me just think I don't wanna just express my gratitude to Pete. I wanna express my gratitude to all of you. We didn't have a call last Thursday on Thanksgiving and this group, this cohort, everybody who joins here has been so important to me especially over the time of the pandemic. Just it's kind of a link to my sanity. So I just wanted to say thank you all for being in my life and for being here and being part of this wonderful conversation. And I really deeply appreciate everybody here. Ken, thank you. Me too. You're speaking for me as well. I need the optimism. We focus on the bad things but there's always a sense that we'll fix them. We know too much about how the sausage is made but we can see the bolognese. We smell the bolognese. Like it's over there. It's over there. We can do this. I have a suggestion before we go. It'll take about 30 seconds. Yes please. Starting with Mike's thought about what are the words that will inspire? So now that we've had this conversation how about we do like think of one word that describes the better verse that you would like to see and then put it in chat? Cool. That's a great one. Do you want to write the question into the chat in all caps? Sure. We will forgive the all caps but that will visually make it easy to mark that off and then we will think about our answers. And should we do a cascade where we just give everybody like 30 seconds of silence to write and then if we all just do it at once so we're not influenced by their thoughts? We could, although Mike and Ingrid just went for it. But yes, let's do that. Perfect, thank you. So let me, on my cue. Oops, everybody's going for it anyway. Forget the cascade. Just put your name. Just put your word. We're an unruly group, Jerry. It's so true. It's just so true. Y'all are so hard to corral. And very eager. Yeah. Eager, eager. And really positive despite the world, which is really lovely. It's a consistent trait, I think, in people in our ambits here. And I really appreciate it because I think we're not, I don't think we're being naive. I think as Ken said, we're sometimes being very self-centered in the sense of where we live and what we're good at. But it's not that we don't care about the larger sphere. And between us all, we know way too many dark stories about what's happened in the world and what's going on today. But we're all still motivated to figure out how these pieces fit into something more interesting. I can't help but notice your Bosch triptych behind you. Who's that? Very intentional. Very intentional for the theme. Thanks, Ken. Let me point out that I'm standing in front of Brother Lane then. Excellent. Love that. Well, thanks, everybody. This has been a fabulous call. Really appreciate you and appreciate this time we get together. Thank you, everyone. Bye, thanks, Ken. I love you and prosper. Happy driving, Stacey. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Barry?