 Welcome everybody. This is the Rex monthly check-in call on Wednesday July 11th 2018 as usual We have a poem this morning But Jamee is going to read it for us if you would The poem is entitled who burns for the perfect The poem is entitled who burns for the perfection of paper by Martin Espada At 16 I worked after high school hours at a printing plant the manufactured See I haven't finished my coffee yet. I apologize Too early for lecture for reading go for it at 16 I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages Then brushed red glue up and down the stack no gloves fingertips required for the perfection of paper Smoothing the exact rectangle sluggish by 9 p.m The hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin Hidden the glue would sting hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock 10 years later in law school I knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts That every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning Whoa I'm gonna read this again. Yeah, who burns for the perfection of paper At 16 I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages Then brushed red glue up and down the stack No gloves fingertips required for the perfection of paper Smoothing the exact rectangle sluggish by 9 p.m The hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin Hidden the glue would sting hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock 10 years later in law school I knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts That every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning That was who burns for the perfection of paper by Martin Espada Where'd you find that Jerry? That's good. That's there in my collection of poems But that's actually at uh, uh, library of congress. Uh, it's part of a collection of That billy collins put together called poetry 180. He's got two books out, uh, which is like 180 and then another 180 Uh, that's 180 poems and they're good. They're very good Lots of lots of good poetry out there And it feels like at the end when you read that to me I feel like we should then pan back and you should be there smoking in black and white like Like Todd Serling and then we enter the fantasy of our episode Um greetings everybody. Welcome to uh, uh, rex check-in. This Is just an informal call where you figure out where we are what we're working on. What's up? um and uh And then would anybody like to just start by checking in We're kind of rex-y things or any of us up to Come on jimé check in I'm I'm happy to talk. I'm not doing anything particularly rex-y at the moment. Um, the the writing on Um Future of trust for i of tf. I'm done with that project um Although one of the last pieces I wrote for it was on the the uh, the connection between international power international politics and trust and trying to figure out Oh, what's the right approach? You know, other than it's And so actually I ended up doing a little exploration of the difference between anarchy and chaos You know in classic international politics theory The global the global condition is that of anarchy. There is no international hierarchy of power You know every entity is a power unto itself and is responsible for its own security um and that is That does not necessarily imply chaos. You know, we know that From our own work here, you know this kind of stuff that we do We know that you can develop organizational structure Without an organizational model. That is you can you know, I think uh, bob Johansson is talking about organization organizing without organizations Open source, uh, all of these kinds of bottom-up movements where you are you know, essentially developing rules developing guidelines developing a Structured a structure of action without having to have an hierarchy hierarchy of control We're seeing that in reality and that really is a parallels what what the conventional model of the international structure is in contrast that with chaos where your chaos is the lack of that rule set um, you know the the lack of the ability to Make reasonable projections of what somebody else will do you know and What we're seeing right now is not so much that The world is unarctic and it's always been unarctic. What we're seeing is the intentional application of chaos as a way of undermining the power of others Um undermining the security of others And since the whole thing is around trust What chaos does trust in the international system is predicated upon the ability to um understand and See and be able to successfully expect what your other what others are going to do I can trust you because I have a very good understanding of what you're likely to do next We understand each other and that is the nature of trust at the international level What by by undermining the the capacity to behave in expected ways You're undermining that's how you undermine trust. That's how you Inclicate chaos and chaos is dangerous because um a lot of our security rests upon Being able to figure out what we're going to do based on what we know the others are going to do North Korea is actually a very trustable regime Not because they're good guys But because they historically behave in very Expected ways Nobody who specialized in north korea was at all surprised to hear The north korean government talk about Pompeo as as a gangster a week ago After you know after the incredibly successful meeting No, it was the the notion that north korea would suddenly start denuclearizing in a way that you know That trump et cetera at all expected that would have been unexpected and scary You know, what the hell's going on there They're behaving in a way that we understand we can trust that doesn't mean we can we'd like it doesn't mean that We will accept it But it it means it doesn't surprise us And surprise is what gets you in trouble at the international level So that's Perhaps uh relevant to what's going on today. I don't know if you saw In in the latest no puppet no puppet. You're the puppet moment From complaining about how how germany is completely controlled by russia Enforcing the sanctions on russia germany who said this Because germany buys a lot of natural gas for russia. Where else are they gonna get? You want them to buy it from us, I guess Saudi Arabia It's and that actually ascribes to rational emotive uh I think I think that it was very much you know trump is um embodied as the the notion that They're that narcissists project on to others what they're what they're they themselves are doing um And so I think it was just that's on his mind So he's gonna he's gonna blame somebody else say somebody else is doing it And and I think trump's number one motivation The number one motivation is um attention Press attention global attention and Whatever he does if you view through the the prism view through the lens of does this give him more eyes eyeballs focused on him Whatever choice he makes is going to be the one that that has better ratings And that doesn't mean approval But it's a tension. Yeah, remember narcissists don't care about negative attention systems good to them So germany did you and your writing address um bipolar world my multi polar world like game theory because I remember I studied political economy extensively and What seems to me is all these bilateral agreements and breaking down multilateralism, which is Like a game theory it's a way to get lots of players to to go one way Whereas bilateralism, I mean, that's how world war one happened Yeah, uh, I I didn't I limited not limited on space. I have written about that Uh, did you ever read any of of ken waltz? theory of international politics manned the state and more It's sort of like the grand old man of of international politics died a couple years ago. I I work with him closely at when I did my Um graduate work in international politics and so But this The question of bipolar bipolar systems are very stable very stable. Yes very stable, but Um, which which doesn't mean they are peaceful necessarily. It means they don't fall apart easily multilateral systems are less stable but um Can be more can be more peaceful if there are If you but you have all these groups trying to basically balance out against each other um I'm not uh I actually don't think we're we're on the verge of any kind of shooting more Um, I'm not worried about that at least not anything cross-border Uh, if I think shoot any shooting more that happens that the us will be involved in most likely going to be internal Um, you know like that link I put in there she talked about the how the institutions are creating now institutions That we create institutions and then we forget why we created them Wow There is a story that it's apocryphal. I know this this hasn't happened but there is a story that I've seen time and again you have a group of chimpanzees in a cage with a um A stack of bananas in the center and anytime any of the chimps go after a banana They're a remote hose Squirt uh shoots water at them and so they all avoid the banana um And then you take one chimp out put a new chimp chimp in and as soon as that new chimp goes after The stack of bananas all the other chimps jump on them to stop him because they all because they otherwise would all get sprayed and then you keep selectively removing a chimp Until you know as each one learns That for some reason even though they never gets these new ones never get sprayed they attack The the anyone who goes after that soon you have replaced all of the chimps None of them have ever been sprayed, but all of them will attack They want the new one that goes after the bananas again There's no evidence that that experiment has actually been undertaken But it makes a nice kind of intuitive sense as understanding how these kinds of institutions become We embrace them, but we don't know why Hey Susan we're um, we uh, we're doing a check-in and uh Jame took us into trust and international relations that we started talking about anarchy versus chaos Which led us into a variety of interesting interesting corners Which we are only beginning to explore Yeah, I know I always brings us joy and fun to these conversations. You do this is fun um So a couple thoughts from what you're saying Jame One of them is that um anarchism Is one of those things that got demonized alongside socialism and communism And very effectively demonized like don't look over there. These are terrible things Nobody should be doing them. We will ostracize anybody who So much as contemplates these things we did that really effectively and I just want to read off in my brain I have a thought called types of anarchism So this is variance, right? So I have the following Anarcho capitalism anarcho communism anarcho pacifism Anarcho primitivism anarcho syndicalism Christian anarchism collectivist anarchism crypto anarchism Epistemological anarchism premarket anarchism Individualist anarchism rational anarchism social anarchism synthesis anarchism and trenarchists And I'm probably missing a few And each of these is a school of thought each of these I didn't make these up Each of these most of them have wikipedia page entries Most of them come stem from somebody doing stuff and friend for example One of the places I would love to go back in history is the second spanish republic Because there was a democratically elected government in spain after world war one that had a fantastic agenda They were doing all kinds of cool shit And they basically offended the royals the aristocrats the the military and the church who then went and fetch trenco from africa And what you have then is the the the spanish civil war Which is the prelude or the practice arena for the second world war, etc, etc But I want but but there's sort of anarchist Kind of governance models and strategies that were in place in the second spanish republic That I know only a tiny bit about I don't even know where to look to learn more But that has been so well squished out of history That we don't look there we don't go for these models and I think part of our explorations these days for how to govern Like what what does decentralized governance look like or what is a fractal? Representative system look like how do we? Delocate and make decisions together should explore these spaces because these are really really fruitful avenues But we have this problem that we've demonized the very the very topic. So part of this is a labeling issue Okay, it's for someone else to check in but yes anarchism is actually an idealist philosophy It is it is and I think that It's the more that we link that we that we conceptually link anarchism to the various kinds of open source open flat movements out there the The less scary it seems because all of these, you know The failings or the the weaknesses of open of open source free software and the like and the strengths map nicely to the failings and strengths of anarchic versus hierarchic regimes It's interesting because a lot of these forms of anarchism are about Self-governance or self-organizing systems Or self-sovereignty or whatever and then you know some of the crypto movements are moving toward self-sovereign identity. For example That's interesting. That's kind of in this realm Um actually anarchy is a lot about trust A lot We don't need the policeman with the cudgel and the laws and the rule and authority for over us all the time You know, I'd settle for a policeman with a cudgel. I what I don't want is the policeman in body armor with like submachine guns and the tank The militarization of the american police that is pretty It's horrible But the peel principles that that were the foundation of the metropolitan police in london were created by bobby peel a minister of parliament That's why police in england are called bobby's And the peel principles are all about this sort of non-violent approach toward toward stopping people. It's partly why The british by the bobby's are not armed Because arming escalates Anyway, i'm an amateur susan. Yes, you're you're muted. However Yes I'm i'm muted. Um in any of these explorations, um Have you come across or has anybody tried to write about how how well these scale? Because I think they require a pretty high degree of social cohesion And and that takes a lot of time and energy Um, what was the saying who said, um, I love socialism, but it takes too many evenings It's it's really like participation civic participation eats time, right? It really does and and it's Incredibly full Right. So so we've kind of outsourced all that to push button democracy that every four years We maybe push a button and then somebody goes and does a bunch of stuff and we don't have to worry about it So much except when we do have to worry about it so much, right? It's interesting. So so the three I've got an article in my head that I haven't written yet um titled scale kills and The that's a nice one the preamble to it is basically the three words. I've heard that have killed more good ideas In more companies and discussions are it won't scale Uh, because generally when we say scale we have an engineering mind about it It's like, you know Intel when it figures out which fab to use which technology to use for the next big fab They run like a dozen lines and parallel pick the best one Optimize it and then make everything exactly like that. They replicate it Um, so it's I think they call it something like replicate exactly Um, society doesn't work that way. So I'm really interested in what I think of as fractal or adaptive scale like how do we put guidelines out there that everybody can appropriate and and and adapt to their own situation that require them to get into A situation where they sort of trust each other That they then can reach out and you know touch the next community and see how that conversation goes and reach up To next layers of governance or whatever But I I think it's actually really doable from a social perspective people Uh, just need to they need good examples of how this works And may be a common platform to go talk on that might help although facebook has become that platform But you know de facto and facebook has almost no awareness of of its role in in all of this But I I think that that it's really doable Susan. I don't I don't I We everybody doesn't need to be like spending every evening in these discussions But if some proportion of our citizens actually Participate and do this it's good in ancient happens Uh, the ministerial positions were done by lottery by sortition So so every citizen could end up being just by chance for a year the minister of defense the minister of economy Or whatever the equivalent positions were in the Athenian government Yeah, isn't that why socrates played out our soul obsessed on education because every citizen would end up in the government So Susan, I don't know if that runs again runs counter to your experience on all the things or or whatever I was I was just thinking about um No, it's Something I didn't write a paper about about 25 years ago But uh, we had for a while there we were working with um at when I was at IRL And and we had a and I wasn't just doing management. We had a project with steelcase And we were helping them develop Well, the underlying model that we were using was a a social ecology that we were building And we had we had about um I'll hunt this up and send it around to people if they're interested But we had about five or six different criteria that we had extremes on Whereas if you if you sort of you know plotted a pattern across those different, you know parameters Or dimensions, whatever you prefer. Um, you had uh, you had different things like, um um gangs Where the cohesion was very very very tight And there were you know, everybody knew each other and I don't know It was just a whole bunch of those parameters that uh that had to Be there and I have never thought about whether any particular configuration was more likely to generate trust or not And how that would be tested. I have no idea but The point was that the dynamic the dimensions and the dynamics of the social cohesion are the same whether or not we view the resulting entity or clustering as um good for society or not or for us or not or for them or not or yeah, so, um it was it was sort of it was uh Yeah I I see that in the dynamics of the alt right because um people who might feel sort of lonely and outcast Who then band together on reddit and put in, you know, the next pepe a frog GIF Or gif whichever they feel like doing um and it goes viral There's a feeling of camaraderie and bonding happening across people There's a feeling among them that they're part of an insurrection That is in fact changing the world and that Is creating the kinds of attachment and trust that you're talking about except I think not on the side I'd like to grow All right, but I think if we if we want to deal with it we have to recognize that that the dynamics are the same Yeah, exactly I'm sorry before you were jumping in Susan can you speak to like when I I think a lot of us don't seem to realize that the lower part of our continent south america We've got failed state after failed state and the gains you're talking about seem to be an organizing principle That's taking over governance throughout those states Well, I guess one one we're thinking about that is that with any with any With any social group you will have you will eventually have politics you will eventually have to have all of those um all of those different things and so um That they take over well in the case of uh in the case of the uh The um the state They run in the whatever that was They they did take over governance of of a town when they moved in right and they they did govern right other people um And and yes, it's possible for anybody who's not part of that to feel left out That's why participation. I've been interested for a long time in the outcomes the outcomes of participatory versus representative democracy I don't actually think we understand very deeply what democracy means because Some people I think a perfect democracy is where every citizen who should be voting voted And and voting equals democracy No, well to some I mean to some System in which there was 100 participation by checking boxes and putting in ballots equals democracy And and and beyond that there are representatives who should be doing your bidding there's Campaining where they tell you what their platform whatever whatever, but that's that's to some people a perfect democracy Not to me Right those people who aren't but who don't know anything I prefer you don't vote. Please stay home. Well, there we go um, so so I mean All of this about participation about democracy about how we govern ourselves is right. I think right now up for grabs I think I think everybody sort of looked around going. What the hell because I think on our last call part of the conversation was that A lot of countries are heading toward authoritarian regimes that look and taste like democracy But in fact they weaken the courts they weaken the press Uh, they weaken the opposition look here at what poland is doing right this very minute and hunger and hungary and a bit in turkey So that they can say hey, we had elections and I won like a vast majority So we have controlling interest in in our version of parliament and look it's democracy One of the wisest things that I that I learned in graduate school in political science Was the was the statement um The success of a democracy is not determined by how you win It's determined by how you lose That is to say whether you win by a plebiscite or whatever that's not that doesn't determine what it's democracy it's whether you It's your ability or the the capacity of a group to give up leadership To give up all power if they lose Whatever is the step towards? You know how powers is uh exchanged If you can if you are willing to and will Uh successfully give up power To the to the people to the next group knowing that you'll have a chance again at some point in the future That is a successful democracy Um It's not just you know, do you do you vote? It's do you do you lose well? I'm curious what everybody on the call thinks a good democracy would be like Like what are the characteristics of a really great democracy? What are the traits that that matter? A build you want to jump in can you move closer to the mic? Sorry A little bit you're still kind of quiet Into whether we like it or not Bill we can't hear you. Yeah, you're really really faint and you're saying great stuff too Let me do you have an earphones. Can you plug yourself in? You know what might be happening you might be plugged in and you might just be away from that microphone because you're doing noise now Yeah, is this any better? Oh my god. Yes. Now you sound like you're inside. Yeah, I didn't I didn't realize Yeah, that's that's what was happening is that your headset was far away from your mouth, right? Okay, so so the book is called ages of discord a structural demographic analysis of american history and basically what they're doing is going back and forth between, you know, what elites were in charge and and controlling and in a way what I see with the I'll use the term deplorables and everything relative to trump is that they never had a representative They never had a leader that would speak for them and like them And so to the extent that they that that comes up and he gets that kind of attention The jamae was well that that I guess Bob was talking about some So he's bringing up the fact that attention is really what turns on trump not necessarily positive or negative just attention And so in that sense, he's leading a new segment of elite Which is that portion that wants control That wants to be authoritarian That feels that they're justified now. This is where I'd roll back into that book that I had mentioned some time ago by Mark Blythe the Great transformations Which basically says that whenever you get into a troubled situation a it's complex So nobody really knows what the problem is and so if somebody comes up with a solution that sounds like it's going to to work They will allow institutions to start getting built around that So that the they can try out that simplification process In other words, that's supposedly what happened with the kensyan economics and then the the the the the Heiseken and melton freeman put together a group the mount pelion society in 1945 And in essence began the process of waiting for the quote simplicity of the kensyan Program to fail so that they immediately in the 70s and 80s once stag flation occurred, which couldn't be explained by kensyan economics they Jumped in and started working that whole process so that they came up with a new simple answer, which was it's all about free markets Now it's interesting that somebody mentioned the issue with respect to latin america Well, it was almost precisely at that time that the chili chili a yende situation was coming up And melton freeman was lamenting the fact that he had no pure example of free markets So they spent nine months before the cia knowing that the cia was going in University of chicago spent nine months putting together a huge blue book or whatever they called it Which was the groundwork for how they were going to reorganize and take over and eviscerate any and all kinds of social services in order to get to a pure example of of A free market free from any kind even university students It started immediately after all yende was was was pushed out and everything they started to organize within the colleges They ripped them literally pulled them out of their their classrooms and shot them You know, they wanted nobody to believe that there was any value in social organization Or social benefits. They took all of the union people took them out of the country Incarcerated them like in a in a concentration camp until they agreed that they weren't going to they weren't going to compete With a yende with with pinotchet So in essence They got their ground zero and then they went from there to uruguay to bolivia to argentina In other words, this was uh naomi kline's book the shock doctrine In other words and and even like within the last five ten years The imf believes that they learned good stuff from that And that they had to use shock treatments in order to be able to get that now that to me reinforces the perception of the authoritarian Concept concept for the words as the as the next great transformation To simplify the process by saying i'm in charge get off the road You know, whether that's with with military equipment or words or You know, the the whole sort of trump approach to lying about stuff so that he can Refabricate the the the rules It's just a new methodology Now i say that as a preface to what i'm really working on Which i'm hoping Does have some value but more probably in my 500 year plan um There are two people that i'm studying with right now thomas huble who's who's does the work with William urey on meditate and mediate and he's got a new program out called the hidden law Which to a large extent and and how to transform Stress those are three programs that i've been working with him And the fundamental aspect of what he's trying to get across is that we need to be more paying attention to all of our our senses in other words not it's what what um gary zukov called multi sensory perceptions in his book seat of the soul and spiritual relationships And and it's really fascinating and i could try and find the there was an interview that he had with opera winfrey Which was very short not more than like 10 20 minutes or something but she was sort of drawing out of him that A spiritual relationship the way that gary zukov or huble would talk about it is willing to challenge themselves with Dealing with their projections dealing with their anxieties dealing with their problems In other words if i'm feeling Upset by something you've said i don't say you did this I say i'm having this feeling and the other person doesn't challenge them with you know, you're wrong You're misinterpreting they say where are you feeling that? And get in get the person in touch with what's going on so that they can get over it The distinction that i thought was very very healthy was the difference between a friendship and a spiritual relationship in other words a friend will try to To manage the situation so you don't get upset A friend will really try to sort of like Molify it they won't bring up the conflict won't Pull it out of you so that you can deal with it yourself Whereas in the spiritual relationship you're willing to take the challenge on of doing that now my point there is that in essence To get over this sort of search for simplification the great transformations You know authoritarianism is going to work where all this mealy mouth You know nato and and all this kind of you know be nice to everybody while they're screwing you and taking all my money And in other words, I think trump actually believes that europe is ripping us off And the china is ripping us off everybody that's got a balance of trade deficit is ripping us off stop it He doesn't understand economics at all to to you know to to really sort of support that but he thinks it And so his simplification is If i'm a authoritarian and I don't want that to happen i'm going to make that not happen That as somebody mentioned is sort of like a projection You're you're not taking facts into consideration. You're not dialoguing with the person. You're not feeling figuring out where you're benefiting In the background Separate and apart from what they're benefiting from So at the end of the day, there isn't the depth of Relationship the stuff that we're interested in there isn't the depth of understanding how you have a conversation that is a complex adaptive system that allows for Problems to come up, but it may not be what you're doing I may think it's what you're doing, but it's what I think you're doing that's causing me to have a problem It's that sort of I statement In other words, I'm not trying to to to tell you that you did something that you've got to fix I'm saying i'm having a concern Help me understand where my concern is coming from because it may be buried Way in the past has nothing to do with what's actually happening right now My my only point is that I think that the problems we've got are much much deeper than just Politics, you know, and it's in its simplest form, you know choice of red or blue or choice of You know liberal or conservative that those aren't really the choices It's whether or not you trust which is obviously what we're trying to talk about here The other person in that process really is it totally different and this is what both zukov and and Thomas fuebel are trying to say that they believe and I hope that they're true. They're right that we're going through a time where Individuals have got to realize the value of this and pick it up and start using it The value of which part The part of recognizing that the dialogue has to change I think I had mentioned at one time there was a representative of the Dalalama that was picking up on the fact that there's so much Demonizing of the other side That you can't get people to have a dialogue But that's intentional in many cases because I agree breaking of dialogue is a tactic. It's a nasty ass tactic But it's totally a tactic right But but we have to understand that for us to get back in the dialogue We've got to show respect If there's no respect that the other person sitting there laughing saying look I got it. I got them You know doing it my way I mean to me this is what the whole rapport between Putin and and Trump is that they they're they're liking each of them is liking the fact that that by destroying the other side They get a better shot at picking things up and and doing it their way They're loving it. Yep Yep, so it's it and to me it's a deep problem, but the You know if we're not going to solve it in our lifetime the least least we can do is solve it relative to ourselves You know it start to to adopt these new methodologies and new ways of communicating So that it creates exactly what we're trying to create which is relationship That's a very rexie thought you're you're Standing on there. Love that um Anyone else? What does this motivate for for the rest of us because I'm I didn't know about the blue book on argentina and chile and all that I was googling while you were while you were talking. So we'll have to Go research that because it's called the shock doctrine by Naomi Naomi Klein I know I know about that book, but but you had mentioned a blue book Oh, that's that's just what they created. Right. In other words, it was it was a model It's mentioned. It's mentioned in her book Um, well, I found a couple references to the blue book on argentina Which was created as a policy document chili, which was then used for other countries, you know nearby nearby So super interesting a little scary no I think it's worth mentioning that the shock doctrine book also describes how Essentially the Western oligarchs Through the collapse of the soviet union managed to put in place the eastern oligarchs And now we're reaping the fruits of that That's right. It's interesting In soccer you'd call that an own goal Very funny Um The good news is some people are actually working on reinstating democracy and trust and connections and all the kinds of things that we're worried about The bad news is Uh, in many cases their efforts are being swamped by this other mess that we're talking about The maybe extra bad news is that the media seems mostly to be only interested in the disaster part of it And so they're amplifying the disaster By giving it a lot of attention Is it the media or is it the audience? The media is not helping. I don't I don't think it's the audience I think it's the media and their business model their business model is eyeballs over over minutes, right? Right eyeballs and eyeballs the audience And so if they are if the audience wants the disaster the more inclined to tune in to read about Watch the disaster story then the hey look at work then the kumbaya story Then that's what they're gonna do I I have never been the I've never been inclined to blame the media writ large for for this is very very much an attention Whether it's a logical possibility What is their responsibility here because if if addiction is the goal and all we want I mean, does the media have any social responsibility Around what they show because otherwise we're just going to like go right down the gutter into whatever the lowest common denominator predictive media and And uh technology is and we'll be done. That's it media is a far too broad a term I mean when you media because you're when you say media you're including everything from You know cnn to To you know to uh EA games. Well, I could I could put up a website that might go viral. I mean Breitbart for example is media, right? Wow, you can't really distinguish these things anymore so much So who what is their responsibility? What is our responsibility to them? Susan? I think you're muted I am muted I was just gonna say but I think that's always been true Somehow I mean I think the point I was trying to make before is still we still haven't quite I don't hear it being Grappled with we seem surprised that this happens when in fact it's always been happening and And um, and we can't I think I think we have to think differently about the ways we can counter it Because it's not just you know trust. I mean these people trust I mean the trust trust is not going alone is not going to any of these things will not do it, right? Uh, and most people have I mean when you look at the things that make society come here I mean again, which is a very strong kind of you know insist on allegiance Right the 10 commandments or any of those things are are themselves The sick of the same ilk so we have to figure out how it is that we're uh You know part of me wants to say but then this isn't over simplification So what we're talking about is inside versus outside whether you're an insider or an outsider That's also a dynamic that is at play Because wherever you feel like you're an outsider um You know then you will start to perceive power you will start to perceive All these other kinds of things. It's not I mean we're not gonna find one cause here, right? But that's part of the picture It's a very powerful You feel left out. You don't feel like you don't belong. You feel like your world is being dist. You feel like And it is that's the horrible About burning it down Pardon and they feel like burning it down because they're outsiders. I you can understand why I can understand why except I don't happen to believe in burning things down And that's that's that's something I don't know how one gets at you know, but you can You know, you have to push yourself Well, I come from a Mennonite background which is pacifist and we used to argue all of these times You know forever about when do you resist? You know, do you resist, you know and lived in a town where in the 50s? Well in the early 60s in the middle of kansas, you know, they During the vietnam war the kids downtown would come out to the Mennonite community All the guys out of the dorm because they were pacifists and they were supposed to fight back and beat them up silly in the cornfields Now what do you do with that? I mean Yeah, so I so so I think we have to I feel as if the whole discourse that we have or things that we have like resistance and pacifism None whatever and ever and all the rest of that stuff You can believe in that all you want to but you still have to make room for the fact that if you don't have some mechanism of Inviting participation Uh from others then um Yeah, I mean I lived in a closed a fairly socially closed community It worked beautifully for many things. It was very safe Nobody would right um wasn't as extreme as the anish where if you be misbehaved Um too much, you know, they would burn your barn down when then they would go back and build it up for you Just to teach you a lesson I mean these are these are very to me. These are very familiar sorts of tactic and I I find them I don't Want something nobody's thought of I guess Well, these are these are recurring social dynamics my question One question that bubbled up as you were talking was Does there always have to be a sharp inside and outside? Why can't we all feel like we're in And in this together and trying to figure this thing out together Because the moment we start drawing the inside and outside whoever's outside is going to get revenge when they get well It's not about drawing. I think I think what? There were inside of these emergent phenomenon just like trust and I think that it's you know Oh, I mean it starts with the strength of the ties, right? Cleeks think about cleeks think about girls cleeks. There's nothing Almost nothing cooler than girls cleek But you know, then the boundaries are so strong. It's it's partly the strength of the boundaries is partly Uh, I don't know where to take that thought I'm gonna inject some humor yesterday. I watched George Pukor's the women again, you know the 1929 movie I how do you how do you recognize that there is an out If everyone is in I mean do fish recognize they're in water You know the sort of the classic construction of it if you have no If there is no way of defining out Then how can everyone be well, you know, it's not it's not a definition, right? It's it's It's you know, all the boundaries are permeable or not. They're they're uh, I mean permeable to some degree um, you can Well, I mean, this is a small I mean we learn these things and we learn these social dynamics and Great school and in particularly in high school I mean, this is where adolescents form their identity and this business of being in or out of all the all trying out all these different, you know being part of um You know, if you the conditions for learning for instance Mostly social dynamics of learning or whether you want to be in and they want you to be in It's very hard to learn if if the people who hold the practice hold the Hold the keys to the kingdom as it were. Um, don't want you to be a part of it So it's a mutual. I think it's a mutual Thing it's not like you it's it's it's the nature of the relation you're in Not the nature of the relationship Well, that just stunned us all to silence Well, you know, I've been part of this Relational thinking is tricky, right? Um, there's I mean, we tend to in this in the society I mean, I just go on the um, you know, I've been doing um, measure measurement systems are trying to do them for a while um that are based on the on the um The interaction the quality of the interaction Not the properties of the parties who are interacting just to try to Get away from this either or two-sided kind of thing What is that? What has that taught you? Oh, we're not very good at it. Um That we in western thought I mean that this notion of reification, which is defined in western philosophy as You know objectifying something that is not an object Whereas that depends on I mean Sorry, this goes way back That depends on your metaphysics, right? And your physics actually whether you feel that Whether um You feel that something is an object whether whether there are objects. Let's just put it that way Whether all of these things that we try to call objects, which seems so clearly to be an object, right my phone All of these objects we have around us And I remember thinking as child, you know Well, once I started to learn about atoms and everything and I kept moving the object to the end of the table And I said, where's the end of the table? You know, where does the thing stop being a table and where do you know, I'm just driving myself nuts Just don't think about what the Just don't think about what the actual length of a coastline is So, I mean I I feel that you know, I mean we make mistake all kinds of things like we must take precision for rigor Um, we don't and those things are notoriously. I mean belonging is I mean all of that stuff We have such a trouble characterizing and we're only comfortable if it's numbers I think we're just going to have to get over that So there is rigor to be found. I guess that's one thing. I'm sorry. There is rigor to be found and that in thinking of things as being relational um thinking relationally doesn't mean is is It's to to figure out what's in relation with what what's the interaction like um, and for instance I mean This is really crazy when I was at IBM. We put together a set You know a model I put together a model of transactional versus interactional interactions um, and you could in you in order to be able to talk about the difference between um Uh transactional work and transactional interaction and interaction Over time of the entities in the in the system. So that part What's interesting is if you were trying to figure out why it was that you know, IBM's customers were Violating getting rid of their breaking their contracts without their ever having been any indication of the I mean that was the puzzle Any indication of um, unhappiness on the part of the Well, all you had to do was study You know look at the nature of the interaction Between the different parties And what was dropped on the floor and not dealt with and all the rest of that sort of stuff and everybody said you couldn't do it But now you can actually you could have system that if you didn't weren't terrified of them that looked at the uh, the various qualities of the interaction for instance, whether it's Um, civil and not whether it's this or not or something So you're describing sort of metadata about conversations Yeah, about pitch emotional valence. Yeah, um duration intention intention in so far as you could infer it Uh satisfaction all those kinds of things. Yeah And you have to be careful because you know, we have a lot of interaction that isn't that we don't as not of our choosing right and so You know if and and so you can have a dear dear friend That you don't interact with for over a period of time and as soon as you're with them. It's just exactly as if you've never been a part I don't know what that is But yes, you're you've got it. I mean you could you could look at that interaction. You could determine the qualities of it you could And I think that's a much more eastern way of thinking For sure That's funny when I did the talk on trust at the personal democracy forum. I started with the framework Uh, usually there's a kind of a triad That's uh, that's used for for what trust is but then you can also split it You can basically split it into kind of intellectual trust Which is, you know, I trust that this thing is going to happen again Uh, and then uh effective trust, which is whether you have the warm fuzzies about the person And the effective is why you know, you're taking late at night with with agent business partners before you ever talk business That's right because they need to figure out who you are It's um Well, and there's I mean if you just look at english language, you know, you have to be careful because well You know, we have trust that something will happen. We trust in something We trust someone I have trust I have or this whole weird one. I have to trust them because there's no other choice Which I find odd given the nature of trust, but we do that all the time Well, that's an act of faith When we send them off, you know, right they go off on their own Yep, somewhere. I think there's a there's a link over to acts of faith Like, you know, we we make a whole bunch of acts of faith every day There's a bunch of physics that we depend on that we don't expect is going to break tomorrow And then there's social physics that sort of behaves the same way until it doesn't It's interesting. I mean, I you know, you know, we're finding out physically not all that Clear cut either. Oh, yeah, that's true. I mean, I think the social physics The social physics really strong That's what that's what we have to understand Well, social physics is strong with this one um So I think trump is very trustworthy to his followers right now He even delegates are in love with trump because his he has had the biggest payoff so far for two years of effort Of any republican in the last 50 years The even the people in the the heartland who are Already being hurt by by the tariffs Still support him because they trust that he knows what he's doing Uh-huh Yeah, and that yeah back in the what was the hillbilly's elegy there was some explanation about What it was like to not be and there are articles too I have to Trust in someone so much that You you know, we're outsourcing trust kind of We're not building it, right Mr. LaForge, where's where does all this conversation put you? Hello everybody, how are you? Oh, that's a little lighter, please. Oh, well. Yeah, I've been here just sort of interloping just watching I've been out of rex for so long. It was fun just to see how the flow of the conversation goes and To to not interrupt that so thanks everybody. I heard a lot of very interesting things um And just in that last part Susan that you were talking about this idea of do you really know somebody like somebody? You haven't seen a long time when you mentioned that you instantly feel good to them Uh, and I am a strange strange loop Hofstetter has a he kind of goes into this digression where He talks about how his wife who recently passed away Really he in every instance after she died he would go I know exactly how she would have acted in this situation He's he talks about how he can run the subroutine in his brain that is her And it gets into this very medical physics does she exist if i'm actually running that program So nearly to who she really is in my head does she actually exist in my head? No But there's those are all fun things to consider. I think earlier in the conversation. I was much more interested in some of the How do we trust each other in a chaotic system? If you see what I put in the chat right there this idea that Putin has really learned with his political technologist how to create a chaotic system And when you can have you don't know which opposition parties are real or fake You don't know which news is real or fake When you can't when you the same person who is supposed to be the expert is spouting Completely opposite things contradicting themselves all the time What you're doing is you're putting us everybody in a situation where you It's very difficult and it takes so much effort to determine what is truth Most people are simply you know throw their arms up and say you know what i'm opting out I don't need to be engaged in politics, which is a wonderful outcome if you're putting If you're if you're the person who's trying to run the system The fewer people involved in it the fewer you have in opposition to you implementing your own ideas And I think a lot of that same playbook is exactly what i'm seeing with with trump I do believe that at the surface level. He is a trying to just get attention But he's trying to get attention with intention and that intention is this creating this system because While you're trying to spend all your time figuring out what he's up to you're not doing anything else Or it's causing more people to just say I can't deal with this guy. I'm getting the hell out of this But there's also another psychological response people have in that situation, which is I can't remember. I think it was sir francis bake and said something about you either You have one of two mentalities when you're listening to something you're either asking yourself must I believe it Or can I believe it? In trump's support in a chaotic system, you just look for the person that you just want to be telling the truth I don't care if it's true or not. I do want america to be great again That's the guy I want to be telling the truth So the fact that others can prove that he's not actually speaking truth doesn't matter to you You're wanting him to be truthful to be telling you as it is that I can't fix everything is enough um, but I you know that to me puts a lot of I don't see trump as a a bright guy all per se, but it's an extremely intelligent strategy And I have a difficult time wondering how could somebody like him actually be implementing and choosing to implement this strategy Or does he have others who are with them helping him to do this? That's where you can make yourself sick just trying to come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories Mm-hmm So much of so much of what's happened through and with trump Seems intentional in retrospect Because too many things had to fall in place by accident for it all to have worked out just like randomly casually Um, and I don't mean that like there's a perfect master plan rolling out I just mean that I think a lot of what's happened has been very intentional and not merely serendipitous or accidental I find that it's safer to think about trump as being actually very cunning So, you know, whether or not you want to grant him the the title intelligent He's very cunning. I've gotten into a couple difficult conversations trying to say that he's in some form or another smart And that that didn't work because so cunning cunning good word um And there is I think we have especially those of us of this particular of our particular political persuasion We grant a lot of value to intelligence and we don't want to See our people who are behaving in ways we find reprehensible and stupid We don't want to see them as intelligent Even if there's good reason to believe that they are Um, so that may be what you're encountering jerry but While there's certainly evidence of that there are people behind the scenes operating operating with trump and you know I saw someone raise you a really good question. You know, why do why do we act as if the russian influence on the The 2016 election started with the the actual final election and didn't start with the um The primaries, you know trump emerging out of the pool of of like 16 different republican candidates um You know, it's it's really it's nice and re and reassuring you think well, there must be somebody behind that um It's also but it's useful strategically. I think useful to think okay. Well, what if He is the person who's thinking this through that he has spent however many years um as a media figure and he has learned You know intellectually viscerally whatever How to play that game? You know his his behavior around Um running the country is very much what you'd expect from somebody running a privately held business You know authoritarian control from the top Wanting to you know not wanting to have any losses around them You know, they don't want to have a a negative balance of grade because if you're having if you have a business You'd want to be spending more than you're taking in It's very simple You know approach, but if you think think of it that way a lot of his stuff makes a kind of sense um And you couple that with this desire for attention and a recognition of how to play that game How to get the attention? um I don't necessarily need I don't think you need a conspiracy theory to Recognize that he that there is a larger game being played and we're playing into it You know when we focus on crazy statements Uh, it just had a uh news blurb pop up on my screen that Trump is now demanding that nato allies boost their defense spending to 4% Wow. Yeah, it's only supposed to be 2% right? And I'm doubling when they're when they're still under 2% mostly. Wow. Yeah um You know, so we focus on the crazy statements and You know, don't pay attention to to other stuff because we we have a limited amount of time They're a limited amount of eyeballs in each of us I do this every time just really just kind of bring everyone down. No, no I think we're we're like we've gone around lots of interesting turns on the road here And we're all kind of thinking about it. Um Would anybody like to put a different object in the room like a different, uh A thing to chew on briefly and then we can wrap our call What was there something on your mind? You were just nodding. I have like an auctioneer's attention. So Well, I have two more books to read from virginia wolf. I'm reading uh night and day. I'm almost done with it Then I I really love her mind. So beautiful She's she's quite the original feminist too and she didn't like being called a feminist either So right now in this book she's tearing apart the idea of love and she's trying to figure out a way For a woman to have a relationship and not lose her freedom Which was a great concern in her own life. Yeah, she handed that over her husband and her So it's just I'm just enjoying her right now. That's where I'm going to go for the rest of the day Awesome. The cucumber movie watch was that little women? Oh the women George Cooke or 1939 women. Okay. Don't Crawford Oh my god, it's all women. There's not one man in the whole movie And uh, he had all the biggest female movie stars of the time in that movie and it's amazing They've tried to make it again, but it was never as good as the 1930 giant version That's amazing. Thank you. I didn't know about this movie And even the dogs are female in the movie. I mean, there's no men ever It's wonderful At least in front of the cameras, right Yeah Visible in the movie Well, cool, anybody want to take with their conversation? Will you ruin any further or drop anything else in otherwise? I might read the poem again Oh, and take us out We're good Jimmy if you don't mind I'll I'll take a swing at the poem at the end here It was titled who burns for the perfection of paper by martin espada and goes as follows At 16 I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages then brushed red glue up and down the stack No gloves fingertips required for the perfection of paper Smoothing the exact rectangle Sluggish by 9 p.m The hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin Hidden the glue would sting Hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock Ten years later in law school. I knew that every legal pat was glued with the sting of hidden cuts That every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning Good one. That's a lovely one. Yeah Thank you all. Uh, thank you fun and fabulous call. Thank you for checking in like this Uh, let's be careful out there We'll do Bye