 Hi, my name is Jerry Mikulski, and this is the first of a series of short videos. I call SNP, which are really about the the financial crisis that we had back in 2007-2008-2009. Now I call this SNP because I have this idea that we've been cutting long-term relationships in a harming society over time. SNP is really a way of talking about the metaphor we use of the fabric of society where all those little interrelationships are really the threads that hold together the fabric of society, and we've been cutting them through consumerization through a series of things. But here I want to talk about ways that we snip long-term relationships in finance, paving the way for the global financial crisis. Now I want to start in a slightly less confusing place. I'm using this tool called the brain. I did not create the software. I've been using it for 22 years. So the mind map I'm showing you, I've been curating for 22 years, and the articles I'll show you here have shown up since 2007, but some of them date back to news articles, videos, other sorts of pieces back from then. This is meant to be a demonstration of something I call open global mind. And if I switch over to my browser, you'll see that here is the the fledgling website for open global mind, which is meant to be a container to bring together people who will help us visualize and have great discourse about difficult topics, so that we might make better decisions together. Because my own conclusion, I think we've been making really really crappy decisions for a very long time, and I've got a whole bunch of reasons why that might have happened, but that's a whole different set of talks. But here I'm hoping to create this as a demonstration of why we might want a platform or a convening vessel called open global mind. But of course this demo is just me with this one brain talking and I'm an amateur, so imagine this swarmed by a whole lot of people. Now as I show you this, I'm going to show you some editorials. This isn't just facts and statements about what happened when, but there might be some points in here that you actively disagree with. The point really is to make those disagreements visible, to make them useful, so that when you and I sit down and talk, you might be able to say, you know, you know, I was with you up until this point over here, so then we can go focus on that, open it up, unpack it, investigate what I thought the evidence was for that, and go deeper into that particular question. As I said, I am no banker or lawyer. I am an informed amateur with the benefit of hindsight. It is 2020 right now. We are in the middle of lockdown from the coronavirus pandemic, and I've been curating this part of my brain for a really long time. Nevertheless, I'm sure I've missed a whole lot of things here. And I want to say right up front, because some of the strong opinions I'm going to offer are going to sound like I'm calling this a conspiracy theory. It's not. I have sort of this notion of cascading failures that I've been reading up on. There's a really great paper called How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook, who's a resilience expert. He wrote this in 1998. Here if you want to hit pause, you can read that many different reasons why complex systems fail. The subprime crisis was, in fact, a complex system failure. However, it was informed by scripts in our heads by basically shared principles like neoliberalism and free markets, and a whole series of things that managed to slice and dice and cut the long-term relationships that were there before. So, and here I'm jumping a little too far ahead, I have a little rogues gallery, a Hall of Shame of the people who individually contributed to the subprime crisis in different ways. But again, it wasn't one thing that drove this. Many failures created the subprime mistake. So, with that, I'm going to go here next to the center of this idea of the ways that we snip long-term relationships in finance, paving the way for the global financial crisis, but I'll do that in the next video.