 This is the Rex call for June, 2021. We are halfway through 2021. Lockdown is unlocking. Stuff is happening. Temporarily. You think this is gonna be a third wave or a fourth wave, however you're counting? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So it's self-evident to you. It's like obvious that this is coming. The mutation rate is fairly significant and we're seeing the emergence of some pretty strongly virulent variants. The India situation is catastrophic and India has people who travel. It's not as locked down as China is even though China does have people who travel. Mostly it's we just were nowhere close to a strong enough majority of people vaccinated in the States to stop the emergence of another wave. Mika. Hey Mika. And so I'm, I say I'm probably, I forget there's two thirds, three quarters, 75% convinced there's gonna be another big wave later this year. You know, once winter hits. Coronavirus. So we're just like, is there going to be another big wave? Are we unlocking a little too soon? Well, I don't know if we're unlocking too soon. It's not a case of we're unlocked and so that's the problem. The problem is that we have too many people who are just refusing to get vaccinated. And so we can unlock and that's fine but just be prepared that we will need to lock up again because of the lack of vaccination density. You may know you're you're in a new spot. Jame, do you think that some of the people who are not vaccinated are think they're already and may in fact have some immunity because they already got it? Yes. I mean, that's definitely the case. We've seen that a number of the Congress people who are refusing to get vaccinated are saying that because they got COVID. But unfortunately we're seeing that while you do have some immunity, some level of immunity post COVID infection, it's not as strong as the immunity you get from a vaccination. And people who are getting a second wave COVID are getting or a second hit of COVID are often getting a very serious hit of it. And that's just not the case people who get infected get sick of COVID after being vaccinated. A small percentage of people who do. And so far all indications are if you get COVID after getting both your vaccination jabs, it will be a mild case. Now I still don't want it. I still don't want a mild case because there are all questions about long COVID that we can't answer yet. But so there's a percentage of people who think that they're immune because they got sick already. There's a percentage of people who are saying they'll wait until it actually gets full FDA approval. Okay, fine. We'll see whether they actually go ahead after that. There's a percentage who are waiting for the lottery numbers to get higher. Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit like Super Bowl vaccine, right? Yeah, a million dollars. The reward is high enough, I'll go get the vats. Right, a free donut just isn't enough. There are people who are also saying that it's just hard because it's inconvenient. My taxi driver yesterday to the airport. He works 12-hour days. And he wasn't vaccinated yet. He said it's just because I can't find the time to go do it. He's not a frontline worker and somebody didn't make it a priority to get a vaccine near him. He works for a private taxi service. I mean, I looked it up for him. I said, there's a pop-up center here at JFK. Why don't you go there? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there actually are quite a few places in the States in many locations, just to compartmentalize it. States in the many locations are places that get your vaccination at the grocery store, or get your vaccination at a pop-up. Mika, maybe next time you could pay him for a fare to go get his vaccine. Yeah, that's a thought. Just like say here, here's 25 bucks. Like pretend I ask you to drive to the parking lot over there where they have tents set up and get yourself jabbed. I have a friend who works for a group in the South Bronx and this is what they're doing. They're doing home visits, they're doing pop-ups and every day they're vaccinating dozens of people. And it's really because people, they didn't know where to go and you got to go find them. And I don't want to diminish the fact that there are people who are working multiple jobs who really can't get the time to do it. And there's definitely a class and availability issue there. But I would say that's not, and you were close to the majority or plurality of the people who were refusing to get vaccinated. They should repurpose all the same time, Mika. Yeah, exactly. They should repurpose all the ice cream trucks so that when you hear the little tinkling noise down the block and they've already got refrigeration, it's so handy, right? It's a funny idea. I'm actually doing a call later this week or next week, I forget, with an organization called Census Legacies. And what I know of it is that it is a group of grassroots organizations that built census outreach. You know, they basically ran lots of census outreach programs and they are sticking together to try and repurpose to do other forms of civic outreach. And I'm assuming a lot of them are doing vaccine stuff now. Some of this is a follow-on of where the government funding is, right? If you can figure out how to get paid to do this. That's what my friend in the South Bronx is doing. He works for a nonprofit and they are getting a lot of money right now just to do this. Interesting. Yeah. So it's where the fabric is worst, but Jame, your point is, we're already a pretty broken society and if we can't get to whatever number, what is your number? 80%, 90% vaccinate? I think it's 70 to 80, but 70 is usually the breakpoint that I see. And supposedly we're close to that in some states and- In some states. The ones that were reserved for Biden. But we're, yeah, exactly. No, that's actually true. If you added survivors of COVID to the VAX numbers in the other states, do we get anywhere near 70%? No. It won't, it probably won't be as bad as last winter. This probably means it's endemic. It means it's gonna be like the flu season. And by the way, the mRNA process is a miracle. It's a fricking miracle. The idea that they can like, okay, good. We decoded the genome. We then created a replica of the spike protein and then we created a method to actually introduce this in people. And most of the time was like testing to make sure the damn thing didn't kill people, right? Like the actual creation of the vaccine was done in remarkably little time. Which means, give me a new variant. I can lather rinse, repeat. And the verification cycle should be shorter. Right? So I'm less worried about big shocks. I'm completely freaked out about India and Brazil and Argentina and Peru and Ecuador and a whole bucket of countries that are just in the complete tubes because of this. Like that really freaks me out. But the places that have gotten vaccines and gotten vaccinated feel to me like, I don't know that they're gonna get them. And you're also making an assumption that any new crazy variant bypasses the defenses of the current vaccines. Well, no, I think that's a, that is a possibility. It's totally a possibility. But my concern is that because we have a lot of people who the combination of a significant portion of people being non-vaccinated and unlocking will, when the conditions become more amenable to the spread, we'll see another spike in cases in the US. And calls for a return to a lockdown. I don't know whether we'll do it. And in your favor, the Spanish flu was two full years of flu and the second wave was the lethal one. The very, very lethal one. So there could be another wave and it could be just just less lethal. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not hoping for it just to be really clear. You don't have like bets on this in Vegas? That's good. Five more in your stock. Five more in what stock? Moderna. Moderna, yeah. Well, the MRNA, you're actually right about that being a really breakthrough invention. Now, my understanding was that the group in Germany, for Pfizer group in Germany, that came, came, got the first version out was actually working on it prior to the revealing of COVID. It's actually, they were already working on this process and they said, ah, here's a perfect test, test case for it. Right. I mean, a whole lot of stuff had to be invented for this thing to work. I know that there are several cancer treatments in development using the MRNA approach. So this really could be an absolute medical breakthrough. And it could crack. A malaria treatment. Exactly. A malaria prevention. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. There's a whole bunch of stuff like that that's really amazing and like, man, if they do that, then we will have population problems. Well, and I saw speculation that there may even be, it may potentially be a way of attacking Alzheimer's, which would be outstanding. Yeah. So, so now that we've gotten COVID out of the way, what positive rexie things are happening in the world? What good things are any of us involved in? Well, that was quick. Go ahead. Actually, just before we leave COVID. Yeah. You know, over the last year, there've been multiple reports from Northern Italy, Southern France and Spain of appearance of evidence of COVID in 2019. And just a couple of days ago, this med archive article appeared testing waste, basically, which it seems to be becoming a very good way of finding indications of COVID and other things as well. But they found COVID since March, 2019. So, so the basic story is that we do not know much about this thing still. So that's interesting. So that also raises the interesting idea that cities need to keep and freeze a bank of samples of their sewage system. And evidently they did in Barcelona. Wow, that's super interesting. I mean, I know everybody tests the water supply and all that kind of stuff, but the idea that your poop drainage system is actually a great meter for your civic health is really interesting. Mark, if you could toss a link into the chat, that'd be great. Yeah. Because I really like to drill down more often. That's awful. I'd like to investigate more. And I will, so Dave just put a link to an interview with Nubara Fayyam in the thing. Nubara is actually a venture capitalist who funded the early work on the vaccine. He's really interesting. He's one interesting cat. I watched a different interview with him with, oh, what's his name at MIT? Oh, it'll come back to me. Anyway, it was a great interview. And his venture firm basically takes a really broad view of innovation and then tries to find where the lever is that somebody needs to try and then tries to find somebody who's doing the research and fund that. They sort of back their way into breakthrough discoveries. It's really super interesting. So I recommend watching that or just go on YouTube and do Nubara Fayyam. But I was surprised. He's got this sort of calm demeanor of, oh, I was just making paper airplanes and then we tried a new model and we sort of folded it and it flew a really long ways. It's like that kind of affect and tone. And it's like, he's inventing world-class vaccines and funding the people who discover that. So other, Mika, you had raised your hand about other positive things. No, I mean, you asked who's involved in anything positive. I just got off a call with a lovely group of people who are starting something called Civic Hall Brussels. And I think I've sent you one or two things about this, Jerry. The framing idea is to be a hub for people working on collective intelligence and trying to infuse more collective intelligence, problem-solving techniques in government at all levels. So I'm not, this is not a sparking memory for me yet. So I don't know that, because Brussels plus Civic Hall is not a thing. No, because it's not public yet. I mean, they've done a lot of events. They were gonna start last year, obviously COVID put a hold on that. But what is interesting to me is that they actually have a founding core philosophy, which is tighter than the one that we started with, which is to be this hub for work around collective intelligence as a methodology that governments should become platforms for. And so I think there's a place where these lines may intersect later, but with what you're doing with Open Global Mind. That's extremely, oh, Jimmy, do you mind connecting me to them? Yeah, yeah. I think I have, and you probably don't remember, but that's okay. Okay, sorry about that, man. Steven Boucher, B-O-U-C-H-E-R is sort of the intellectual driver. But yeah, it's nice for me, you know. I don't see it, I don't have seen it in your brain. He's not in my brain, which means that had you meant, the moment I had seen that, I would have added him and started sort of looking him up and stuff. So really cool. Yeah, yeah. Small seeds, you never know where they're gonna, you know, really. Yeah. You have to keep running. Well, and the Open Global Mind thing is growing in really interesting ways. So I am now a fiscal sponsor of 501C3 called Lion's Burg, which I've been in conversation with for five months, four months, something like that. And I think I mentioned here, steward ownership as a process. And so let me repeat it. So the guy who founded Lion's Burg comes out of construction. His last name is Sukut. He's the CEO of Sukut Construction and Rockforce Construction. If you wanted to build a new mall or a housing tract and needed to level the land, you bring these people in. And they're really good at that. And some 10 years ago, you had a crisis of conscience. He was like, I'm a good project manager. I love doing this, but I'd like to do something that actually helps the world. So he then did a bunch of research. And for the last five years, he's been going around like researching models that are sustainable, that feed the commons, that help people sort of achieve their highest goal, their highest purpose in life. And he found an old model that he decided is like really what he'd left to foster, which is steward ownership is what it's called. The Zeiss Foundation in Germany is steward owned. And that means that there's a foundation that owns all of the shares of a corporation. And by doing this, you take two ugly forms of organization, at least to me ugly, but you harness the predatory instincts of the C Corp to the purpose of the charity. And so all of a sudden you have a platform on which you can build, you can have a foundation that's doing open source software. You can have a for benefit. You can do a bunch of other different sorts of things. And Jordan is tugging a series of small entities like OGM, like open global mind into these waters of steward ownership. And we just completed the first step a couple of weeks ago, which allows me to go seek grant funding for OGM, which is a process I'm in the middle of right this second. I have a conversation later today with Tom Gruber, some of you know Tom Gruber, where I'm saying like, dude, I'm having trouble explaining this thing to people. Can you help me out? Because I'm unclear sort of what the longterm business model is, but I know exactly what the short term things are to sort of stand up the sharing of information of the kinds that we're talking about just before I jumped in with this, which is like we have vaccine solutions. We have a Civic Hall Brussels. And the whole notion of collective intelligence is like right in the middle of our sweet spot. Like how to do that and like what are the aspects that lead to the other phrase that I love is collaborative sense-making. So collective intelligence, collaborative sense-making are kind of neighbors to me. They may or may not be interchangeable. I haven't really worked the semantics of them, but they both attract a bunch of people who know that like what we all know together, like there's a title of a book if only we knew what we know, right? And we don't. And any of you who've ever done work in knowledge management, like maybe Susan and Mark and others, like you know that we don't know what we know. Go ahead, Susan. You are muted. There is that. There is that. Yeah, I was in the knowledge management circles for a long time, even though I didn't think of knowledge as a substance or something that you could own. But anyway, my reply, that was Carlo O'Dell. Yes. And my reply to that for a while, we would appear together occasionally on some talk circuit rather. And it was, I said if we only knew how we knew what we know. Yep. And that was sort of the side of the whole, the sort of a stepping stone to, you know, the processes are social as much as they are anything else. And what are the nature of those dynamics, blah, blah, blah. Any part of it that really appeals to you or really sort of fits your model of the world? Like should I read the book? Is there some stuff in there or contact Carlo? I think that what the title says it all, frankly. And it was mostly a plea to remember that everything, we have known so much of this, so much of the time, right? That we don't call on it. Our first instinct is not when we have an idea is who else thought of this? What did they do as you perfectly know? And this has been going on for centuries and centuries and centuries and millennia. So yeah, no problem. Anybody else on this? I want to ask a question about OGM. I mean, I thought a rexie thing, a rexie observation in OGM. But maybe I don't understand what rexie is anymore. I was going to ask about that. And then I thought, no, we don't really. I think it's mutated. And we're in a strange variant now, an evil variant. That's, we're not an evil variant. Darn it. This is just the way things are. Okay, so the. It's not a variant. System's not broken. It's working exactly as it was intended. No, it's not working as intended. Nothing works as it intended. Good point. You know, yeah, sorry. So there was a rexie, I had a rexie moment in a, I sort of lurk on the sidelines of OGM and I read the messages from every now and then. And I saw, I think it might have been Klaus. If it wasn't Klaus, it was a Klaus like person and who said, haven't we learned that none, that there is no model for sort of, you know, ginormous change, you know, that you can't sort of, just sort of declare, and we're all wondering why it doesn't happen. And I'm thinking, well, of course it doesn't. I mean, if you look at how things work socially, you can see why it wouldn't. And so. I think this is a really big, big, big topic. So can you unpack it a little bit? Well, if you look at, again, to go back at, you know, if you have an anthropologist sensibility, which I earned, I did not, I was not giving it. You didn't just do the box top, the box tops? No, I didn't and I didn't, I didn't. And it was always embarrassing because people would think I was an anthropologist because I was talking on behalf of anthropology or a certain kind of anthropology. And it was like, no, just because I like it doesn't mean I am one or that I think it's the only way to do things or that I think it drives me crazy. That's part of the same either way mindset. So, yeah, I think if you look, if you take a look at how change moves, right? And then only once ever in my entire career actually was able to emulate the way I thought it should work. And it did, it did work. Instagating or whatever a particular kind of change is that it does move just the way we're moving. Just the way we're moving now. We connect each other to people. We connect ideas to other ideas. We, you know, it's that dynamic is one of many that actually moves things around. And they do, they have to be put into practice. That's the thing. And the people who have the ideas to sell them the people who are any good at putting it in practice. And the people who put it in practice are dismissive of the people who have the ideas. And so it's not terribly happy. And that is broken. Could be fixed, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And this can't be orchestrated or what's the implication on whether change can be brought, larger scale change can be brought about or managed or instigated or I don't know what the right word is. Well, I think it's hard to explain and thank you for asking. I think it's because, excuse me, I haven't talked yet this morning. You got it wrong. Exactly. Precisely. And I think that, well, let me slow down. There's something about the way change happens. It does happen and it spreads like wildfire. Ways of doing things and it goes and we've talked about it as a going viral. But I don't know that we understand the dynamics of that and what the underlying conditions are that make that cause that to happen. If you start to look for them, they seem to be various. Already know them. So we know the phenomenon can take place. But the barriers to it spreading are social boundaries. They are, I once had a model that had, I think it was about eight or 10 dimensions of what it would be to try to build a measurement system about social coherence, okay? And to break it down into certain kinds of things like time dimensions and place dimensions and how cohesive was it? Cause a gang is extremely effective and extremely cohesive, but on many other dimensions undesirable. I mean, pirates were amazingly structured and democratic in different ways. If you read under the black flag or a bunch of other books about the golden age of piracy, they had insurance, they had a whole bunch of interesting stuff. Yeah. So it's not, you know, and that 401K programs. Oh, totally. Totally. You could do like donor advice funds, the whole thing. Years of piracy and then, you know, retirement. Oh, Jame, that's brilliant. Jame, that's totally brilliant. Thank you. Thank you for that. Well, talk to the pirates. I don't know. There still are pirates, you know? You know, September 19th, I think it's talked like a pirate day. Oh, again? Let's schedule one of these calls for that day. Exactly. I don't know pirate talk. Oh, Alkeel Hall, yeah. You wear a parrot, you get an eyepatch. You talk in blustery, kind of nautical English, British accent. I don't know. Oh. Sotomy, piratry. Sotomy in the pirate tradition. A first printing is available for 1,000 bucks. Damn. Yes, great. First edition printing. An old historian friend long ago told me that in the British Navy, like, Sotomy was commonplace. Like, this is how men entertained themselves while at sea and it wasn't punished. And then attitudes towards homosexuality changed sharply and I forgot where, why and when. And suddenly everything got stigmatized. But, you know, ancient Greece, British Navy, lots of places. Actually, there wasn't consistent with a recent CBC ideas program on the Vinci's sexuality. And it seems at the time he was living, things were more gay, let's say, but Sotomy was still taboo. So, you know, the kind of affection people felt for each other was much more, you know, explicitly expressed. Interesting. But I want to say about... Smile has been my understanding. Go ahead, Jim. Please, go. Well, I was going to switch back to punctuated equilibrium or change. Yeah. And I recently found out that there was a period called the Boring Billions or the Boring Billion. It was a billion year period in the Earth's history when there were only unicellular organisms. And it turns out the reason was that the oxygen level in the atmosphere was in this kind of intermediate zone where it wasn't very low, which would have been okay, or wasn't very high. It was just at the right level to kind of suppress development, which just shows how, you know, conditions, well, condition things. Yeah. So to speak. Exactly. So others on change. Anyway, one more there is... The one conclusion I came to was that it seemed something to do was to make sure that those conditions, you put those conditions in place, right? Right. If you know what they are. Yeah. If you know what they are, but take a small example, which I'm reminded by a call, I just got off of about the thing about workplace. And, you know, you can't work with anthropologists for very long without discovering that, you know, that they know they are very observant about the physical layout of things as well as the social layout of things and how they come together and fall apart and all the rest of that. So that's why I took the Institute for Research on Learning off on this long journey, not long enough, but long journey to explore what were the, you know, physical attributes of place that fostered learning, the social dimensions of learning. And... Did that turn into research papers or books or anything? You know, it sort of did, but it was all client work. I would say that all of our enormous amounts of intellectual capital were in the project proposals. Damn. I mean, damn client work because most of it is private and doesn't make it into the legacy bin anywhere. I know. I mean, I'm living with that legacy, that non-legacy right now. So it was refreshing to, I was, the Herman Miller was talking to a, one of the future work groups that I stay connected to and they were right on this sort of workplace thing. And they did start with noticing, look, people have been working in these hybrid ways for at least the last 15 years, ever since we got the internet and we had that kind of connection. Of course, before that we had couriers, but the observation was still that the physical place mattered. So that was, and that was where it was really fun to experiment with different configurations of space and different, we developed a practice-based, a practice-based community design system. And that was put into practice, right? You lose track of these things, you lose control of them, you don't know. And if you don't have a large enough organization to insert yourself in or get them to do the right metrics and promise to share them with you, it's gone. And I think that's true of many, many of these successful efforts. Yeah, yeah. Just to riff on what you're saying, how do you capture or do you capture or how do you represent the different qualities of the same space in different communities? Meaning a white barbershop really different from a black barbershop. And sort of here salons in black culture for men and for women are gigantic social connecting places where a lot of information changes hands, where relationships are made, et cetera. Not typical. Yeah, you should always take your spouse to your hairdresser. Yeah, you don't want them to learn all those secrets, do you? Well, I don't know. It might help. Yeah, it might actually be good therapy. Anyway, it's a different kind of therapy. So. Well, like bartenders. Yeah, but I think that's because we don't, you do have to get down to a certain grain size of how it is that the place supports. Well, I prefer to go in work first, right? I want to see how they get their work done. Out of that, out of that emerge some generalizations, right? That are maybe not terribly helpful, but they do elucidate, they illuminate, actually the differences in how the people are in those and what the practice, the social practice and the actual haircutting practice and everything else, how those things mesh together in one place. Because we forget that to get work done, it's the person doing the work and the community doing the work or the institution doing the work or whatever it is. That's the point where all of the resources come together. They have to all be present. If they're not there, it's ready to hand. Or if it's not ready to hand, you have to go get it. You have to, you know, what's, you can watch people have to go get things. And you can see how intricately they're designed. And the fact that the social dimensions are different, I mean, one could do, probably has been, well, no, probably hasn't been done, is to compare the two and see how, to see how, where the differences lie. Right. And I think a piece of preparing the spaces for generativity, I can project a bit on the conversation, has a lot to do with cultural assumptions and then societal assumptions or narratives that sort of float in the background. So one of the questions in the back of my head is, how do we, like, how do we hit the magic button to switch most people from thinking like homo economicus? And if only I act in my greedy self-interest, the invisible hand will make it all work out. And if only we had perfect markets for everything, everything would be fine, damn it. So why can't those pesky liberals get out of the way? Over to, hey, we're interdependent co-inhabitants of this pale blue dot, which is pretty fragile. And if we saw ourselves as interdependent, we would then be able to collaborate in a different way. And then there's this other neighboring narrative about intellectual property, where my goal is to invent things and then lock them away from my personal benefit and society will benefit because they will buy the thing that I did as opposed to, as we make breakthroughs, how do we share those breakthroughs so that the idea propagates and can cause change and change for good? And those are like intertwined contexts. And for me, I'm trying to create generative spaces. So one of the things that sprang out of recent open global mind conversations was a little side project we have to create a generative commons agreement. Because we were sitting talking, I was busy like looking at the memorandum agreement with Lyonsburg and the legal section that came from their very, very, very smart and kind lawyer was very old school. And we were like, we don't want this. We want something that's looking forward about how do we collaborate? And then how does somebody who owns IP sort of step into this conversation and preserve some rights over their IP? What do they need to mark or label or declare? But how do we work with a general intention to always improve the commons to make that this sort of ongoing assumption? And how do we do that under a regime where anything, any expression is automatically by default copyrighted because of the fricking copyright regime we have in the world, but the Southern in the US and the WTO and WIPO have basically foisted on everybody. So you have to almost defensively do stupid things in order to survive that gauntlet. But part of the generative commons agreement is like we love creative commons. They've done a really nice job with copyright and they have a bunch of very explicit, easy to use by CCNA, whatever. And that's great. So we include that by reference. But what about the rest of it? And then what about when you're stepping into a sphere, something more about generative intent, things like that. So that's the goal of this little generative commons agreement project. Just to explore that space and figure out what to do. If you're interested, we're starting to meet on Wednesday mornings at seven. This morning, there was a confusion so it wasn't that topic, but it'll start next week. It'll continue next week. But that's all in the interest of the mission you just described, Susan, which is, how do we create spaces? This being an intellectual, virtual space. But how do we create generative spaces? How do we create spaces that lean toward these kinds of shared collective intelligent outcomes? And if you look back to, I don't know what traditions you're looking back at too to see where that's been accomplished. The only ones I can think of, first one that comes to mind is the Amish tradition of, I mean, recently I read a piece on how it was that, that actually they do accept technology. It's just that they come to a collective agreement in the community and usually it's small scale is whether or not it's going to help the commons. And then they will say, yes, you can buy a tractor. Great. It's funny, a side story, but I think it's relevant. Mayor Park, who committed suicide later, but the mayor of Seoul was a huge fan of the sharing economy. And the city of Seoul did a whole bunch of stuff around the sharing economy. And when April went to talk to them and she was invited to be on their advisory committee, so she saw a lot of this. The reason they did all that was not to improve the ecology of the city, was not to save money, was not even to sort of share the resources more effectively. The actual ulterior motive is to build community. Yeah, yep. And all the other benefits were great benefits, love those are the benefits, but their objective was actually to rebuild community. But the community of practice idea, I mean, underlying that people get so entranced by the notion of community and they want to build communities and they want to have communities. Oh, community practice, I want one. You know, it's like, no, no, no, no. The point is that it takes practice and it's a sustained practice. You know, there has been this long tradition. Who was it? One of the Harvard Divinity School people who sort of came up with the idea that religion was really a practice. It wasn't a belief system. And there is certainly one theologian that happens to be my former partner, Brian's father. That... Is it any of these people? Peter Gomes? No, it's women. Okay, Elizabeth Schussler-Fierenza, Angie Thurston? No, she may not be there any longer. Darn. This is not the entire roster of faculty at the Divinity School. Anyway, so yeah, it's one of those little books, you know, the sort of paperback size that has a hard cover, light blue cover. Well, anyway, one of those. It'll come to you. And no, maybe not. Or maybe not. If that's there, I know where it is on the bookshelf. So I just don't have, live in my house anymore. I run and get it. So yeah. So anyway, so her point was, and I have a good Jewish friend who, a very good friend who, we have talked over the years over and over again about what it is to be religious and the notion of practice. And, you know, it's like, I remember, perhaps I've said this story, but I remember when I was 13 and told him, I probably said it recently, been on my mind a lot. I said, I didn't feel like going to my church. He says, oh, sometimes I don't either. I thought, well, then why do you go? I said, why do you go? He said, otherwise there wouldn't be a community. That's lovely. That's really lovely. Speaking of intellectual property abuse there of, you know, I grew up partly on a farm. So I know what being on a farm is like. So John Deere is having problems with farmers because of course they expect centers in computerized ignition systems. And so the others give us one example is on NPR and it just made me wanna scream. So the farmer's tractor stops and John Deere dealership has the only ability to diagnose the computer because it's their software, not his. Oh yeah. So he has to turn in his $100,000 tractor. Now, mind you, the way farm equipment is, it sits around and then when you need it, you need it. And you basically have a two week window and you better get it done or it's game over. So the dealership takes his tractor. It takes them a month to get around, diagnosing that it's a fuel sensor. And then they charge him like five grand to tell him it's a fuel sensor. So you've got legislators all over these farm states are actually now legislating. Yes, yes. You cannot own the software. This is, no, this doesn't work. But this story's been around in various versions now for some years and it's still, I mean, still trying to be fixed. And another thing these farmers are doing are saying, okay, we're gonna go find older tractors. We're not gonna buy tractors from you anymore. We are out of your system. So it's fascinating because you think about it. Everything's through the cloud. It's an intellectual product. So it's narrow view of intellectual property. It makes it so the tractor doesn't even work for you. It's basically a rentier extraction object. Yes. That's a great name, yeah. And so the right to repair is a big trope here and really important. And not much has happened around it that I can tell. And then like, yeah, exactly. And then like between Monsanto and Deer and probably a couple of other companies I'm not thinking about, like being a farmer is really hard. And I think Monsanto employees think they're saving the world by making more about food, when in fact they're destroying like the earth. And I would love to figure out how to crawl inside the leader's brains and change what they're doing like wholesale. And they just got bought by Bayer. And I don't know if that was good or bad. But Monsanto is one of the companies in my brain that's like under like, why do people work here? Say Bo, just to go back to the point you were making though, with respect, could you expand the thinking into this business of the IP around the vaccines? I mean, what could possibly be the argument that we shouldn't share? Oh, I think the only thing I've heard about we shouldn't share is that the technical know-how to make and produce these vaccines is different than just the IP of that. So that was the argument that the economist did, but I don't know if I completely buy it, but their argument was, go ahead, you've got to do that, but it's still gonna be them producing it. And that's the hard part. Well, yeah, and that's true. I mean, we used to say, I used people said, you know, we don't, partner, business partner once who said, well, we don't want to do this because they might take our ideas. And I'm going like, if they can take our ideas and put them into practice, they're welcome to them. Yeah. So, Jared, I've been meaning to have a dinner party with my philosophy buddies, and I want you to be there as the grand inquisitor. Ooh, ooh. Do I get to wear like a cloak and a hood? Yeah, exactly. You need a new costume. And a hair shirt? You get this to the end of the table, and I'm gonna set it up so that they all know that that's what you're there for. Can I put people to the torch? I mean, really, like, if you're gonna let me do this, you got to give me some leeway. Well, to the intellectual torch, you're welcome to. I've always wanted to know more about Autos de Fe. Because, I mean, we're having a good time by going through the whole Catholic Church history, and we are always talking history, and we're auditing basically the last 3,000 years. Awesome. I love that. Yeah, you enjoy it. You need Jerry. You need Jerry. He'll keep you on your toes. And back to Susan's questions about how change happens. I have a whole bunch of narrative I can do that's collected in my brain that I could do a screencast I haven't yet about the 1964, Goldwater's loss in the 64 turns into a whole rethinking of the Republican Party turns into the creation of the Hoover Institute, the AEI, a whole bunch of academic institutions and the hiring of a bunch of smart people to build an intellectual basis, the purchasing of AM radio and talk radio and all of that, like a whole series of planned long, long, long-term thinking that understood psychology and all that, that turned into, I have a thought I'll share, which is like how Republicans basically took over the agenda. And it was planned, it was smart, it was really, really slow long-term thinking and it worked. And right this minute, right this minute, two idiots in the Senate are very effectively holding back a giant program to try to fix things. And I don't know what the workaround is. I don't know how to get there, but I can paint a picture of how we got to this impasse and it's not that one person said, let's all go do this, but there was a general consensus that worked through how that worked. I would bet, I believe if I had any money, I'd put some money down that the actual, that the group was very tightly socially connected. I mean, in those days, politics was a much smaller kind of phenomenon and people were deeply, deeply connected. So if you got a bunch together, then you really could make things happen. The fact that one or two people can hold the entire Congress hostage strikes me as bizarre, but it's happening. Well, this happened in Israel, Bibi is holding Israel hostage right now. Go ahead, Dave. And still, even though he's not the prime minister. Right. Well, I guess I've been trying to play the other side of this a little bit and just trying to understand it. And a little bit of a non sequitur, but why are we seeing an increase in murders in cities all across the country? Because lockdown is over and we hadn't fixed the problem before. No, murder rate was up prior to lockdown being over. All right, that's right. No, no, no. The murder rate was way out of hand before lockdown and we hadn't dealt with that. We didn't do anything. Oh, the reason is because now people are gathering together and you can kill a bunch of stuff. No, I don't think that's it. I think that I'm on a different list where this has been debated for a while. Crime is down except for murder during the pandemic. And the interpretation is that there are fewer eyes on the street. And as a result, the murder rate goes up because there are less bystanders that would interfere with somebody feeling like they could do this. And that makes sense to me. The other thing is obviously huge social deprivation creating a tremendous amount of tension. I'm glad, who raised this? Bo? No. Oh, no. Oh, it was David. Yeah, no, I'm glad you asked that question because it felt to me like when Jerry sort of primed this meeting, the what now as we emerge is really, really important. I'm living, I mean, I'm not in New York at the moment but we're probably going to elect a anti-crime former Republican former black cop as our next mayor. At least that's what the polling suggests right now. And the interpretation is that it's fear of crime because there has been a bump up in murders some of them the random kind, when it's a bystander who gets shot and others related to gangs and a backlash coming from the out of boroughs. Ranked choice voting doesn't seem to be helping either. But yeah, what does it say if New York elects Eric Adams who's positioned himself very well to take advantage of this? And in general, the idea that we're emerging from deprivation into needs that haven't been met and the fact that people need touch, the fact that people need to see each other physically and that some of that's beginning to be met, I find this a very confusing period to be honest. And I was kind of going, I was going a little bit the direction that Beau is taking this stuff with the idea of stresses. I mean, I kind of wonder if we need some kind of a temperature reading for society, right? I feel like society has a fever. And it's- So we need like an anal thermometer for society? I think that that's really the only way to get the information we're gonna need. And right, I mean, we're seeing the rapidity of change makes people nervous is one way to kind of I've interpreted it. And so the Trump phenomena is a reaction to the rapidity of change, right? And we're not through it yet. And so if our goal is, well, let's get faster change. I do think there is a pushback, you know, at some point something happens in the corpus of the society that, you know, a heart burst or something, I don't know what the- What does the- Changing the way you do things collectively is hard work and it's slow. Oh, and it makes people very anxious. Yes. And that anxiousness is, I think what we're seeing we've had a big disruption, several big disruptions and they're happening around the world, right? Again, it's just like, why? Why wouldn't it just be happening all around the world at the same time? There's, you know, something else is going on that's hard to interpret. Well, I think we may have hit the, no, we haven't talked about, well, I don't know if we need another topic, but- Oh, go for it. Well, population growth and the fact that we're reaching, it reminds me of those early ecological studies in which, you know, too many deer on the island and they start to do themselves in. And I feel like there's too many people on the planet. But most- But most- And climate change together are putting huge pressure on the system, which it can't handle. But actually most developing countries are depopulating. Like South Korea has the world's lowest fertility rate, which is 0.92. Replacement is 2.1. Africa is going to double in population in the next 10 years. That's what I mean. It's doing good. But only Africa is going to double in the next 10 years. Everything else is gonna like skinny out. So do those people migrate out? Latin America is also going to explode because their fertility rates are pretty high. But everywhere else is actually facing a population crisis. Right. Depending on how you define it. Yes. I mean, I think that this is people, people, you know, like the deer on the island sort of becoming infertile or choosing to be or, you know, just sort of saying enough can't handle it. It's like the pushback, apparently, in China when they put in the new three-channel policy and people say, I can't handle three children. I can't handle any children. And I'm just interested how any, like how do y'all feel about the population thing? Jame, I'm sure you've studied this awhile. Are we heading toward population doom? Is this gonna level out? Well, the, if you look at the trajectory of societies, it tends to be towards a decreasing population growth as they become more technologically and economically wealthy. Right. The, you know, and most importantly as women take on a greater role in social and cultural power. Which is also linked to girls' education. Is a huge, huge variable here. Noted population. Right. In developmental economics, people who are in poor countries, basically social security is having kids. Yeah. And that's why the pattern we was talking about is, has held for a long, long time. Just go on, Jame. Yeah. So the question is, will the arc of population change start to decline globally before we hit the limits of what we can support as a planet undergoing a climate disaster? And that's very uncertain. I'll say. I don't think you could have said, I don't think there are too many sentences you could have put together that would be more uncertain at this moment. But go ahead. Right. I was actually asked a number of years ago to write a sort of thing for a New York Times bit about population. And I said, look, if we can feed and support a planet of 10 billion people by the end of the century, that means we've actually succeeded as a planet because the way things look now, we're never gonna get to that population because people are gonna start dying of starvation. And so, and I got a lot of pushback for that because it was just not the framing that people were looking for, but getting to 10 billion people would be a sign of overall success because that means we can support people up to that point. Anyway, so I do find the population curves an interesting thing to look at. The, there, that has so many issues. One of the big crises that China is about to go into is that they have an even more unbalanced demographic than the United States, certainly, in terms of having an older population. And they have not historically had a meaningful social security system. No type of system. It's shocking. It's in the wrong documents and it's over. Sorry. Of the, if you remember, there's a wave of building cities that were empty in China. A lot of that was basically money going into ghost cities as a form of investment so that ostensibly they'd be able to have money come back from for retirement. That's where getting all the richer folks in China buying up land in California and Vancouver and Washington and Oregon. It's just basically trying to deal with a retirement. And so I don't know if this is, this is foremost on Winnie the Pooh's mind, but this is certainly something that's going to be an increasing challenge for the Chinese leadership over the next decade or two. How to deal with a dramatically unbalanced, demographically and economically population in a way that doesn't cause further global tension or further tension internally and then by extension globally. Yeah, there's just so much. Yeah. China's getting busy in its territorial edges, the increasing threats towards Taiwan. Everyone saw John Cena's abject apology for having implied that Taiwan was a country and he had to apologize in Mandarin. It's just, sorry. Before I forget, the anecdote around people working in jobs, why did they work there? I had the pleasure of organizing trips to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories back in the eighties when I worked for the Adelaide Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz. And so I got several opportunities to sit and talk with nuclear physicists at Lawrence Livermore. And that was back in the Reagan era of money going into SDI, money going into modernizing nuclear weapons. And I actually got a chance to ask, why do you do this? Because in many cases they recognized that there was at best moral ambiguity about what they were doing. And some of them acknowledge that if what they designed ever used, it would be horrific. They didn't because they got to do cool science that they couldn't do anywhere else. And I bet you that that is what's going on at Monsanto, that you have bioengineers and technicians who are able to do cool science with a level of funding, a level of institutional support, they could get nowhere else. And if your primary goal is to do cool science and not to think about the implications or to deal with the impression that somebody else's job or it's just too big for me to worry about, or I don't know how this is actually gonna work out. All I know is what I hear. So I'm just gonna focus on what I know. AI included. Yeah, you could throw in, AI would be something along those lines. Anyone who does anything on the military around face recognition. You know, there's a whole range of scientific endeavors that are really cool just from a narrow point of view, from that narrowly focused perspective that have all sorts of enormous and problematic implications. But for people who want to do the cool science, this is where you go to do the cool science. And so I think that's why people work at Monsanto. That's why people work in a lot of these problems. But isn't that true also of engineers who want to build cool science? Yeah. Yeah, you get to do things that you couldn't do anywhere else that would be, that are spectacular or provocative or groundbreaking, hopefully, sometimes literally. So yeah, exactly, AI and engineering. It's all about being able to do something cool and not allowing yourself to look outside that narrow frame. Personal identity is very strong and professional identity is huge, right? And they're egos that require stroking. Well, that actually sounds more dismissive. That actually sounds more dismissive than I mean it. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dave. Yeah, maybe there's an ego being stroked there, but it's really just that sense of self-actualization. They get to do something that nobody else or very few other people get to do. I agree with that, though I would say that to the degree that professions have developed some level of ethical codes, you get some barriers. So in the medical field, you do, there is controversy at least about doctors who are in the pay of pharmaceutical companies and at the same time prescribing the drugs that they are in effect being paid to endorse. I think in the field of AI, we don't have that. I mean, the nuclear physicists after the bomb was created did go through a process at least partially of what's the work that we wanna do and what's the work that we shouldn't do? And it feels like some of this was starting a few years ago in the tech sector, it's yet one more thing that feels like it got interrupted by the pandemic, which raises an interesting question of do these things come back or do they get forgotten? But part of the tech lash was a infusion of funding into efforts to build ethical tech, responsible tech. Those are at least organizationally things that have some a little bit of traction. I don't really have a feel for whether that's gonna come back twice as strong now or be forgotten. But once you're in a setting like a Monsanto where all your peers are, where you're not exposed to a dissenter or in your field doesn't, but aren't they under pressure at least in some ways with the anti-GMO movement? I mean, I don't really know. I think you're right about in general that this is a... Well, they've been fighting this battle against activists forever, like really forever, which I think only hardens you. It's like, well, we're screwed no matter what we do. It just hardens your resolve into the current strategy kind of. Yeah, also some of these people are kind of crazy and it only reinforces that we're the smart ones. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Bo, you wanna jump in? Oh, I was just saying that when we have the philosophy of science empiricism can't make ethics. And it's because empiricism doesn't give you ethics. It's always ex-post. Okay, what are we gonna optimize for all human beings? Well, they can't do ethics and you can't derive ethics from empiricism, which is scientific truth is empiricism. It's a constant problem. Yeah. Well, that's a showstopper. Yeah, I don't know if that's true, but it's not something that I think we can work out in the next 25 minutes. We can try. Well, it's because I think that there is, one of the way I am not a theist. Yeah. I haven't been for a very long time, but I do think that I have a comparatively, a relatively strong sense of ethics around the planet. And I realized that a lot of it comes from what I perceive as a perspective, an evolutionary perspective, not in a Darwinian, social Darwinism perspective by any means, but in the sense of what can we do to enable the further proliferation and healthy proliferation of life on the planet. Do the choices I make allow for greater healthy development and spread of life on this planet? Unless you think that too much life is gonna overpopulate us and kill us, but yes. But even then, I said, what are the choices I make? And life as a planetary whole, not necessarily of any one species, although not trying to go after, minimize any one species necessarily. So I'm not anti-human, I'm not a zero population activist. Although I have written scenarios along those lines where people leave the Earth as a, the scenario that I wrote for National Park Service for their centennial a few years back, I talked about, well, let's look out 100, 500 years. People have left the Earth as a global park, but that's neither here nor there. Oh, I like it, sorry. Yeah, I described it as, we leave the Earth as a park, and either as an untouched and letting things go as they may or try to pull back all the human influence or impacts on the planet. But we spread, as it is, it's a growing sphere of DNA and mind centered on Earth, which is not abandoned, not ignored, but celebrated. So you've just headed towards something that really interests me, that I haven't explored enough, which is I have a belief that long ago, we used to know how to take care of nature, how to manage landscapes and live together off the landscape. If you go to Australia, if you go to Northern South America, the huge portions of the landmass were actually managed. It's just that it didn't look like farming and ranching to Europeans when they showed up, so they ignored it and then destroyed it. And so there's kind of this, oh shoot, where was I heading? Oh, so when we create parks, we evacuate all the humans off the parks, which means we drive Native Americans off the choice lands because the park is the prettiest part of the land. And my belief is we should have some other category, which is like smart humans who know how to collaborate with land, we want them living on this land because humans that know what they're doing are really good for the land, right? And what we've done is we've created these sanctuaries, we've created wilderness areas where there can be no human habitation. It's like, I'm sorry, that's just stupid. No, well, Mika's right that it's park service staff because if you're talking about having- They're not the same. Well, so you want to make a zoo? No, not at all. For the natives. No, no, no, no, no. You basically have the enclosed place of, it's like the Hawaiian country safari. I'm going to give you a reservation. Look, dear, how I had an Asani convention, I'm going to give you this crappy little piece of land that has no water, no anything, or we would like you to be stewards of the most beautiful parts of our country. It's not a zoo. That's a false dichotomy. Framing it as a zoo is a terrible thing. Well, but that's what you're describing. I didn't say that at all. No, you didn't say it. I didn't imply it. I didn't intend it. Terry. You're talking about- Oh no, look what happens when we try to construct an ideal. Well, I'm just saying, Jamay, that- This is how hard it is. This is real hard work, man. Of course, of course. But anybody else have strong feelings about parks? No parks, humans, no humans, Native American tribes? Mika. I do want to remember- Well, Amazon, in the Amazon, we do have efforts. One of my friends Emily Jacoby runs an organization called Digital Democracy that works with indigenous villages in different parts of the Amazon on stewardship and community self-defense. And they are dealing- They know their land very, very well and how to live off of it and not tear it all apart, right? So that they're in symbiosis. And their biggest challenge is the extractive industries that are encroaching. Absolutely. And one of the most interesting things about their work is they've worked with these communities to develop the indigenous tech skills. So the communities learn how to build and operate their own drones to map their own areas. And they've developed a mapping tool and a mapping language that is really rich for just describing the local fauna and flora. It's called MAPIO. And they're very, very deliberate about not putting these maps up on the web. This is about, because maps are tools for colonial extraction. And so what they're trying to do is protect the people in place before the process that you're trying to fix has happened. And it's a wonderful group. So I think- Give a link to MAPIO. I'll find one for you. Thanks. So I think what you're saying is that the indigenous, the people who are infused with knowledge about how to steward the land should be living on that land rather than it's just there for tourists and hikers. Bing, precisely. And don't forget, there's this wonderful video that this guy here in Oregon did about our forests. And the Native Americans would periodically burn it. They never let it get as bad as it is right now. I can send you hundreds of books. And he had pictures like, here's the picture of 1900. Look, here's the picture now. And you're like, ooh, looks like we Europeans don't know how to ask things very well. Look at that. So the forest service has been very adamant internally about the need to allow fires, but they know that it just doesn't work politically. I actually worked on a scenario project for the forest service around fires, wildland fires, and they're desperate internally to figure out how to tell the story of the need for fires in a society where the political leaders and the economic leaders don't wanna see that happen. So a brief. And they're the ones who control the funding. A brief informational aside before we turn to the Jewish space lasers. There's a book called The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Loh and Hau Tsing, which is really like charming and insightful. And she talks about the Matsutake mushroom. And it turns out that in the 70s, the Japanese have kind of over farmed Matsutake, which they love. They've over farmed them in Japan. They're looking around for sources. It turns out there's a whole bunch of Asian, Eastern Asian refugees in the US who know how to subsist in the forest. And so they wind up going into the forests of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest and finding Matsutake. And then there's a group of middlemen who wind up being sort of the, they buy up the foragers sell to the middlemen who sell to Japan and it all kind of works out. But at the beginning of the book, it says the Pacific Northwest was mostly Ponderosa forest. And we logged it all out successfully. I don't know about all, but we logged out all the Ponderosa. And what grows after Ponderosa is Lodgepole pine or fir. Ponderosa doesn't come back easily. And who loves the foot, the base of a 10 year old Lodgepole pine, Matsutake mushrooms. So Matsutake, Matsutake thrive in damaged forests, which was like this layers of things happening that were like, holy crap, that's like really, really interesting. Cause if the Ponderosa's were still there, there probably wouldn't be Matsutake there via the mushrooms, whatever. But Matsutake like just the Lodgepole, they're happy at the roots of a Lodgepole pine, a mature Lodgepole pine. And then she goes into the layers of economy that got created around this and how they're basically trying to make a marginal existence in the forest, et cetera. It's super, super cool. But that's just one of them, many ingredients that are going on here. And I wonder like walking distance from our home here in Portland is a plaque that says right here, there used to be a lumber museum or a lumber Lodge or something. It was a gigantic, almost like a cathedral. It wasn't any kind of religious thing, but it was made out of these beautiful huge timbers. And there were a couple of black and white photos you could find of it. And it's gone now. There's a condo standing where the plaque is. But that was there kind of as this monument to the ponderoses that were here. That were just like there for the cutting. And all those ancient pictures of lumberjacks at the base of a tree that's wider than they are tall, sometimes two acts are like, damn. There's a great podcast called Timber Wars that Oregon Public Radio is doing, which was the best thing to read. And there was a very interesting moment when Bill Clinton came to town and they had all the forestry guys. And it was also interesting to hear the evolution within the Forest Service themselves. They were originally, their original mission was to manage resources and to utilize those resources. And essentially a bunch of very, very smart guys working in the Forest Service started figuring out like, hey, you know what, this really isn't. And so within the Forest Service, basically there's an intellectual like Colonel of old growth and realizing it. So Bill Clinton came to town and had a big old summit with them all in one room. Cause they didn't even know what old growth force they had in the Northwest. They didn't know. So they started doing maps on hotel room floors together and figuring it out. And it's really fascinating to hear. Maps are pretty useful. And it was also really interesting is that you, I tended to have a cartoon view about the loggers versus the forestry people and everything else. And it's such a complex intertwining of things going on. Cause you know, you went here in Oregon, you drive around and you see all these little towns that are just dead. And you realize forestry ended, so they ended. And you could, but really understanding how the whole thing worked out was really fascinating. And so these people even tried to work with those small towns and figure out a way, figure out ways. So it's such a complex story. It just, but it's a beautiful story. It's like farms in the Midwest. I mean, that's whole minds in West Virginia. So if we could figure out how to have a regenerative mindset, we could remediate a lot of these things, but we would need a bunch of leeway on policy because mostly policy locks us out of being able to fix these things. There's just way too much legislation and structure poured in place that feels immovable that keeps us from making progress on a bunch of these things. But like, you know, the conversation we're having in all of its dynamics and I just, I've been taking notes in my brain. So I did have Mappy on my brain, it turns out. But here's the mushroom at the end of the world. Here's Rick Pearlstein. Here's how conservatives took over the US agenda. I added the boring billion, which I didn't have and now I need to map it into history. But like in an hour and a half, we've just, you know, touched on a bunch of stuff that really kind of matters here. And how do we liberate humans to fix these things? Because it's mostly its mindset and poured concrete in the form of poured concrete, but also legislation that keeps us from fixing this stuff. Give people a sense of the future. And that means giving people a sense that they're not on the edge of personal disaster. So people who feel like they're one paycheck away from their home and family are not people who are thinking about what are the best things that we can do for the longer term? What can I do for the next generation if I can't feed my kids now? So I'm in a conversation at 7 a.m. on Mondays with a couple of guys from Amsterdam and Sweden. And one of them is Hank Kunen, who has a thing called positive cartography. And he's trying to work with citizens of the Netherlands, old, young, whoever, to try to create positive maps, pictures, images of their future for the reason you just said. But it's great if we can have images. And actually, you know, this is something that I've talked to a variety of people that I know who are writers and comic book writers and illustrators, like, how do we come up with these visions of what a good future could look like? But ultimately, the issue of poverty and something like precarity, actually precarity more than poverty. The issue of precarity is what keeps us from being able to think long-term because it's very difficult to think long-term. If you know that a lot of the steps that you can take that will ultimately be good will have an initial downturn as a consequence and you can't survive that. You don't have enough money in the bank to handle a $400 emergency expense. You're certainly not gonna be able to handle having a complete revolution of the economic system, at least in the short term. And so I've seen this over and over again, people I've spoken to, people I've had given talks to and people I've spoken with. There's just so much worry about dealing with the immediate, dealing with the tangible and visceral that to have a vision of a better world in the future is nice, but as imaginary as thinking that fairies are gonna come down and think us all in the head and give us pumpkin-based transportation systems. I would like one of those. And shoot, I just had a thought in my head. About the precariat. Oh, April and I got to attend Davos some years ago and they treated me really nicely. She was the attendee and I was her plus one, but I got a pass and I got to go to a bunch of stuff and I signed up for a poverty simulation exercise. And a nonprofit had taken the basement of a local apartment tower and they'd converted all the lockers and the storage lockers that are in the dingy basement. They'd converted it into a pretend little sort of a refugee camp. And they split us up into families and JP Ranga Swami was in a family pod with me. And we were given a bunch of paper and flour and water and told to make bags out of newspaper. And basically you use the flour and water to make a paste. You fold it, you try to make a little bag and you put it in the heap. And your job then is to sell the bags you made to a merchant who's standing around and everything's working at pretty light speed and they do cycles. So like it's another day you need to have made some money so you can actually pay for some water and some food and whatever. And a couple of things like April did the exercise a different day and hated it and she's been in more poor places on earth than I have. I really liked it because one thing sank in really, really loud and clear, which was when you're under a lot of pressure and it's intense and it's kind of existential and we knew we weren't gonna get killed ourselves but boy to try to make it through you don't have time to be clever. You don't have time to think you're just trying to sort of make your way through. Right? And then every now and then one of these people like a merchant would come by and say, yeah, these are terrible bags and shred your bags and throw them in the air. And you were like, oh fuck. And then at one point late in the game one of the guys comes by and says, well, I see that you kind of need some, you see you're kind of in a fix here. I'd be willing to adopt your daughter for X bucks. And you're like, oh, Jesus, right? And it had never been more clear to me how that dilemma works, how frequent it must be, what's going on there and all of that. And it was awful. It was just really like this moral dilemma where do we all die? Do we sacrifice the kids? Do we this? Do we that? Really, really crazy. And every nonprofit's efforts to prevent this from happening and to lessen it are noble and fantastic. And oh my God, they're up against crazy stuff. I also have a thought in my bed and put a link to here called poverty is a dismal trap where I have a bunch of different things about how being poor is really expensive. Everything costs more to poor people and it's a piece of privilege that people of privilege absolutely ignore and don't realize. Like money is more expensive. I watched a video or read a story once about a guy who had lost. He was convicted, comes out of jail, can't hold a bank account because he's got a felony record. Therefore, he needs to buy debit cards or something like that. I'm getting it wrong. But when he did have a job and did get some money, he had to go to a cash checking place to actually turn it into cash. Then he had to buy a debit card. So by the time he earned a hundred bucks it had turned into 80 bucks that he could use. And I'm making up the numbers, but it was awful. And he had to use public transit to get around. And he had no driver's license and all these things just added up to the point where you're like, how do you even dig out of that situation? My favorite part of that story is that you can buy $200 shoes that'll last you for 10 years or you can buy $20 shoes that'll last you maybe a year and maybe more than $20 shoes. But basically being able to buy the quality of things that last takes more money than people have. And the paying a lot more for shoes over time. And that's just the one example that I've seen used repeatedly of you want something that's gonna last, well, you can't afford it. So you spend more money buying things that are crap because that's all you can afford. I grew up in a fairly low income environment although fortunately I got to move out of that. So I have some degree of empathy just from my own lived experience but enough to recognize that I know nowhere near enough about what it's actually like to be living in that kind of circumstance. And I know that a lot of the things, a lot of the visions of the future that I like to write about and the kinds of engagement with the environment and stuff like that that I talk about is simply out of reach for the vast majority of people on this planet. And the problems that they are facing now and we'll face as the future becomes even more brittle and anxious and nonlinear and incomprehensible. I think that's somewhere. Yeah, as the future becomes even more complex and problematic, their response is going to determine whether a better future is even possible because if they don't get the better future they're gonna demand at least something. And I think this century is gonna be known very much around the axiom of if people aren't given something, given what they need, they're gonna take it. And Nick Hanauer is quite eloquent about this about if the billionaires don't wake up everybody's gonna be in their homes with pitchforks. Yeah, the pitchforks are coming against this trope. And don't forget that what's been demonstrated in the last year is, well, we have the resources and we can do it. Yeah, and I don't think that's lost on anybody. Yeah. Why do you think lots of people aren't going back to shit jobs? Yeah. Agreed. And that augurs well for the future because come on, yeah, we can do this. Only if things bend, only if the system changes. It's changing. So anybody have a good story or a funny joke for us to end on? So we don't all end in apocalyptic doom? Well, I'm really looking forward to the UAP slash UFO report. Oh, okay. That's coming out any day now. It looks like there's something going on that we don't have an explanation for that none of the answers are encouraging because if it's something that is, well, there are non-U.S. technologies that means China, Russia, whomever is way more advanced than anyone expected. To what were there beyond? Because these things would have to have been started production in the late 90s or early 2000s. This is like centuries in advance or it's something that is outside of our even approach of control, something from off the planet, something from a different time or dimension. This is real and nobody knows what it is. It's actually kind of cool. Go ahead, Mika. So, you're raising that. Why hasn't the Navy improved its methods of evidence collection? Oh, no, no, they have actually much better but they're just not releasing it. Because that would, well, in part because that would give away what their technologies can do in terms of the image gathering and such. But there are pictures that have been floating around of like taken by the pilots with their camera phones or with the plane. Can we make out alien faces? Because we could use our face recognition systems on that. No, unfortunately not. Unfortunately not. But you make out fairly close shots of what these things look like. And no obvious vector control, no obvious. Meg, are they time travelers, dimensional travelers, or just plain old visitors from somewhere outside the solar system? Okay, how does everybody vote? Time travelers. Sysadmins. Sysadmins. Sysadmins. Does anyone have a link for this? I'd like to read about this a little. Yeah. Yeah, actually, Washington posted a big thing. 60 Minutes did a lengthy interview with one of the people that was actually very interesting just a few weeks ago. If you do 60 Minutes UFOs, you'll find it. So I had a very tiny brush, not with a UFO, but with like what the technological answer to this might be, which is a long time ago, and I can't find this video or evidence of this anymore. There was a little technology company that was using microflaps on a remote control airplane. And microflaps are basically, you know, very, very small scale little flaps on the surface of the plane. And it was like a flying wing design. So it didn't have rudders and ailerons or whatever. And this thing was unbelievably maneuverable. So because it could change the shape of the air around itself like that, it could kind of move in ways that are really unusual for any kind of aircraft. And if a human had been on board, they would have been squished or whatever. So, you know, robotic or remote controlled, but that technology simply vanished. Classified. And that's what I thought. And I've seen a couple of things sort of that ilk that just disappeared on me. And I'm like, oh, must have been classified. Or, so. Or, or, or, or, or, or, or, you know. Or. When Xerox, we're not there yet. With the, once the, when Xerox was doing its color printing, they demonstrated to the government. How does it be? Dollars. Yeah. That they could print dollars that were. They could counterfeit dollars that were undistinguishable from dollar dollars. Yeah. And you know what, Xerox stopped making those machines. Yeah. Actually now there's tech built into every scanner and even into Photoshop. I tried to edit a photo I'd taken years ago that was a pile of different, different currencies from around the world. I was just going to put it into a presentation and Photoshop would not let me edit it because there were currency, there was currency visible. Wow. That's interesting. So I mean, so I was just throwing that out as, you know, there's another story for it's disappearing. Right. Which was made, was made, whatever. It could be that in fact, the powers that be were managed to convince somebody that this wasn't a really good idea. Samorais gave up guns in the 16th century. Having discussed the incompetence of government in every other area, now we have to believe in the hyper-competence of government too. Yes. But that's how things work. I'm sorry. Okay. Well, this is a hyper-competence. I would feel like there's a hyper-competence issue if we were trying to posit that these were, you know, these UAPs are things that we actually, our own spy planes. Yeah. Right. The idea that the military has been suppressing this information, that actually given the combination of military classification and presumably diligence and the sociocultural pressure that says this is ridiculous. Yes. Oh, little green men. Yeah. You know, can we use, can we use our face recognition to see the aliens in the window? Right. That kind of teacher creation. Is our government inventing something like the other governments do to, you know, create new headlines so that we take our minds off of whatever's going on now. What do you think the COVID pandemic was? Oh, God. Oh, God. Do we have to end the call on that note? Okay. No, I actually have seen that, that very argument. Of course you have. And I'm just saying, we're sitting around here sailing just like those guys. Are you opposed? And the new report coming out. Or yeah. There's my theremin when I need it. What is that hiding? What is that taking our attention away from? Yes, Will. All right. Oh. The election being stolen. I don't know. All right. With general side-eye, we should wrap this call for this month. I think. I don't know. Thank you very rich and delightful discussion. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for continuing to host this. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Love this. Thanks. Bye.