 I know, I know, me too. Welcome to the Rex call for Wednesday, January 10th, 2018. Our first call of 2018. It seems kind of strange that we're in 2018. I look at the number and I'm like, how did we get to 2018 so fast? How did, how did this even happen? But welcome to the new year. I will start us off with a poem titled you and your ilk, which has a bit to do with today's topic. It's written by Thomas Lux and goes as follows. You and your ilk. I have thought much upon who might be my ilk, and that I am ilk myself if I have ilk. Is one of my ilk or me the barber who cuts the hair of the blind and the man crushed by cruelties for which we can't imagine sorrow. Who would be his ilk? And whose ilk was it standing around hands in pockets May 1933 when 2,242 tons of books were burned? Not mine. So what makes my ilkness my ilkness? No answers, none forthcoming. To be one of the ilk, that's all I hoped for. To say hello to the mailman, nod to my neighbors, to watch my children climb the stairs of a big yellow bus which takes them to a place where they learn to read and write and eat their lunches from puzzle trays all around them amid the clatter and din, amid bananas, bread and milk, all around them, them and their ilk. So I'll read it again. It's just a sweet poem. You and your ilk by Thomas Lux. I have thought much upon who might be my ilk and that I am ilk myself if I have ilk. Is one of my ilk or me the barber who cuts the hair of the blind and the man crushed by cruel thieves for which we can't imagine sorrow? Who would be his ilk? And whose ilk was it standing around hands in pockets May 1933 when 2,242 tons of books were burned? Not mine. So what makes my ilkness my ilkness? No answers, none forthcoming. To be one of the ilk, that's all I hoped for. To say hello to the mailman, nod to my neighbors, to watch my children climb the stairs of a big yellow bus which takes them to a place where they learn to read and write and eat their lunches from puzzle trays all around them amid the clatter and din, amid bananas, bread and milk, all around them, them and their ilk. Welcome to 2018. We have a topic in front of us about building real relationships, about listening, about other sorts of things. Have any of you already run across the author of the video that I sent out, Anand Jury Dharadas? Have you seen any of his work already? Anybody? Nobody, okay. Because I had run across the second, the extra credit video that I sent in the invite. I had seen that one a while ago and it blew my mind. He basically went to a regular meeting of I think it was Aspen Institute where he was a fellow and met all his fellows and he's like, you guys are like my family. This is so cool and we are the problem. And he then very directly looked at them and said the fact that we sort of meet here in a friendly way and think that we're doing something reasonable and good to help the world is maybe part of the problem in an interesting way. And then in this new talk, his letter of apology, he's doing the same sort of thing. I think what I appreciate about Anand is the depth of introspection and the willingness to sort of take some responsibility for what's clearly broken out there and to put words around it in a way that I hadn't thought about putting words. Anyone have sort of a reaction to how this... How did this roll for any of you? Was it... I don't know. Mark, you're muted. Do you want to say a little bit about what it felt like? I don't know. I was waving to April. Oh, okay. I thought that was a comment. Jerry, this is Bill. Can you hear me? Yes, who you find? I've been struggling with this whole issue because of the fact that it interlaces with our interest in trying to find like a Trump town that we can go into and try and sort of explore ways to create jobs, to create community and all this kind of stuff. And in preparation for that, I've been watching YouTube interviews with Trump followers. And the material that you sent really sort of gave a little bit more of the background of where that comes from. And yet I don't... I'm still struggling to find any way of perceiving of being able to jump over that gap. In listening to Trump followers, I think somebody associated with the Dalai Lama articulated this with the word contempt. In other words, there's a level of contempt that's being expressed by the Trump followers that has no opening for dialogue. In other words, they literally... In this particular situation, it was around the Roy Moore situation. The whites were like, these blacks are so stupid. They've never gotten anything, excuse me, because they've never been... The Democrats can't get anything for them, but they've never gotten anything. They keep voting for them. They should vote with us. They're too stupid. Now, that kind of contempt is hard to overcome. In fact, they almost rile at the idea of a articulate, reasoned, logical, think it through. Where did the problem come from? How do we get... All of that to them is so foreign. It's like, no, it's my way of the hierarchy. Yeah. I'm unclear that logic is foreign, but it seems like logic is being rejected. I mean, if you ask them who to put in the lineup for the next game of their favorite baseball team, they'll give you stats, they'll give you logic. I think they can work that through. Whatever it might be, I think most humans are sort of there. We may be at a moment where the reasoned answer is outweighed by the passion and the contempt you're talking about, and also that the contempt that you're hearing them express may be mirroring the contempt they feel from the blue states, the coasts, whatever else it might be. This may actually be sort of a mutually reinforcing kind of situation where... That's exactly what the person from the Dalai Lama's group was talking about. We've got to stop reflecting that back to them. Yeah. And so the Dalai Lama would come at this with compassion. He'd be like, the thing to do here is to just absorb whatever anger is in the room and let it be and just come at this with compassion in different ways. I'm struck also that John Gottman, I think, or maybe it's Ekman. One of those researchers is the ones who researches marriages. And the micro gesture that they look for when they look at five minutes of tape of a couple talking is contempt. Right. I got that connection immediately. Yeah. And I'm struck with that within 15 minutes of a conversation with the couple and he can tell they're going to be divorced in five years. Exactly. And the emotion he senses is contempt or some level of that kind of relationship. So at a societal level, we seem to be there, right? Which means divorce at a societal level, which means revolution or uprising or tearing apart of a country or whatever. That's kind of where we are. I mean, other than being the Dalai Lama and expressing compassion, sort of in my mind, for Harkin's back, you had last year, I think it was the Parker Palmer review and he was talking about how long, in some cases, two years of expressing the compassion before all of a sudden it emerges. The reaction, the one example that he gave of the woman that they were talking to was a teacher that she was always bashing the black students and always just totally and then all of a sudden she got to know one of them and she was in tears. Yeah. Because all of a sudden now she understood their problem. A huge piece of this is familiarity. I mean, my favorite song on this topic is you've got to be carefully taught from the musical South Pacific. It's basically a song that says we're not born by us prejudiced or whatever. We are very carefully taught by the cultures into which we happen to be born by the birth lotto. You're born into a culture that hates ex-people or was attempted genocide. There's still a few of you around, but some other culture actually tried to wipe you out or whatever it might be or ancient grudges real or imagined. And I think, to my mind, familiarity is one of the few things that will overcome that. And in some cases, blinded familiarity, meaning one of the reasons early on when there were full text adventure games online, Muds and Moos and all that stuff, one of the reasons I loved them was that they were just text and you really couldn't tell who was sitting behind the other keyboard and you could make friends with somebody without realizing that had you seen them you would have avoided them. That would disclose itself maybe later. And then you'd be like, oh, and they beat me in like Nintendo Wii or they puzzled through this thing better than I was and maybe we can talk and have a relationship. So sometimes the skinnier, the communication method, that can be helpful too because it allows us to form relationships that we might not normally form. Anybody else have an angle on, is it as bad as we're describing here? Are we at the point of sort of national level contempt that's factionalizing us and tearing us? Well, there's this lady that I met actually in Dubrovnik in 2016, Evelyn Lindner and she does something that she calls humiliation studies. And actually she's into dignity and humiliation studies. And I thought it was kind of an interesting concept. In a way it's kind of the flip side of contempt because people feel humiliated when they feel the victims of maybe unconscious contempt of like unconscious privilege, for example. And then it works both ways because then you have contempt flowing on both sides. But that leads to a loss of human dignity, which is kind of the interesting thing. So, and I think that's kind of interesting in terms of compassion, needs a sharp edge and the sharpest edge needs to be pointed toward oneself because that's really the only immediately effective change we can make is starting with ourselves and there's so much unconscious effect that's going on. I mean, for example, looking at Trump as a product of the American media essentially and he's correct, he's quote unquote a genius at that. He was very popular, he knows how to pull those strings and so on. In a way, he's like Asimov's mule in the second foundation. He's slightly mutant quality, but still very effective. But that media empire is something we have all created actually. So I don't think he's a creation of his base, so to speak, but he's able to magnetize that base based on these kind of fixation. The fixation economy, ultimately, that we have created. I mean, myself included, I've been part of it. So it's only our own bootstraps that are going to lift us up from that. Mr. Maynard, do you want to jump in mule-wise or otherwise? Yeah, I'm doing there. Well, I actually, I have been saying that Trump is the mule for over a year and Jerry knows this, but from a slightly different, coming back from a slightly different angle. I do future forecasting, futurism work for a living. And if you remember from foundations, foundation stories, Harry Selden was a psycho historian, which was essentially a mathematical futurist. And what was interesting about the mule was that he was not just outside the realm of what was considered plausible. He was outside the realm of what was considered possible. So it wasn't just a black swan. It wasn't just something that would, we've never seen that, so it probably doesn't exist. It was something that we can firmly believe this is not possible. And if you look at Trump from a political history perspective, we are simply, the way he has behaved and his effectiveness in this behavior was seen as simply not possible. That was not something that the system would allow. And I don't think we have a, I don't think we have yet developed the means to adapt to this, to the changes that he represents. And unfortunately we don't have a hidden second foundation to come and rescue our asses. So basically what I was thinking, just thinking this morning about the, so let's say Trump has a heart attack. He's too many, one too many big Macs has a heart attack and dies. Pence takes over. What is stopping Pence or whomever follows him? From simply following the same footsteps of saying no to the established norms. So that's really interesting. I have no way of imagining Pence playing a role like Trump has played. I can't see him breaking the norms the way Trump did. Trump seems, and in fact almost everybody still is waiting for Trump to normalize. It's like when will he stop being so crazy when in fact this is the MO that got him where he is and he's going to keep being Trump, right? Let Trump be Trump is sort of like the campaign motto inside. So I find that interesting because I'm not, and like should Oprah run against him, which you know shows up on Sunday from the Golden Globes after her talk for her wonderful like nine minutes on stage. And I'm unclear that Oprah can break a norm the way Trump can break a norm. And I don't know whether that's what's necessary to defeat Trump. I'm sorry I've taken us into a corner of the argument. But whether what Trump is doing is playing a role to provoke the kind of contempt and sentiment that we just talked about because that lights people up on both ends and creates a division he can exploit. I think that's super interesting. And I'm not clear that Pence even understands that. Well maybe Pence is not the right example. I should say that follows. But the point is that Trump has demonstrated that the system is not self-enforcing. Right. So this is our great weakness in the middle is that the system at many different levels and I'd love to explore this a little bit together seems to not converge. It seems to like tear. Can I just throw in an idea that follows that. I've been trying to study this to try and understand the mechanics of the system. And there's a book out by David Halley called the 17 contradictions of capitalism and the end of capitalism. And it's basically giving you exactly what you said. In other words that the system is inherently disassociative. In other words that the word that he uses a lot is alienation, universal alienation. And I've been reading psychological work that dovetails with that. And there was a lot of what we've done in terms of child raising and everything, trying to make it more mechanical, trying to make it more rootenized with respect to mechanization of the educational system and etc. It is all sort of splitting us apart because it's making us focus on our individual needs and our individual perspectives and our individual perception of what's right and wrong. And we become very almost supported and being individually oriented. And if the result of that the way that the book does, and I put together a summary by the way if anybody wants to, I can post it. I don't know how to post on this particular program. But in essence it would make it easier to go through the 17 different contradictions. And some of them are very simple things like freedom and domination. You can't have freedom too unless you're dominating somebody else. And that's in essence what the sort of dialogue of the neoliberalism is, is that I need to have unlimited freedom so that I can go into your country and fulfill everything and you don't have any right to stop me. So in a sense it's inherent in the system. Now what I'm getting at though, what we're looking at as a possible solution is cryptocurrencies. If you follow the logic, in other words what's driving that, it's lack of trust in the system. And the whole point of blockchain and this new program called Hashgraph is to be able to create a layer of trust in the system. Now we're actually working with some people who understand more of the mechanics on how you do this to try and create a currency which could be developed for low-income neighborhoods in order to establish an economy that is not controlled by the banks and not controlled by big business and not controlled by sort of the normal systems that in essence enable the domination of the system. And so in that sense they could start and we would seed it. We're actually starting to work with Grameen Bank America. They've just recently within the last month opened their first office in Miami and I think they're the 14th office in the United States. So the idea would be to integrate their micro loans with the potential of a cryptocurrency that would support a trust level that they could rely on and that could organize for their benefit not for the benefit of somebody else because it's all decentralized. And so they could actually start to develop their own system of economic viability, sustainability, and value orientation. They're not accepting somebody else's value. The focus of this is trust. In my mind going back to the contempt issue in other words how do you resolve that compassionness and the other ultimately whatever it is that you come up with as a systemic solution has to have embedded in it trust. And in my mind the more decentralized you have a trust based system the more likelihood you're willing to step into it and try and see if you can trust and you can be trusted. And so in that concept you come up with a structural solution not just a conversational solution. Just one point of clarification from the blockchain folks that I know they would take exception to the idea that the blockchain embeds trust. They actually would argue that blockchain is a trust less system no trust required for blockchain to function for Bitcoin to other kinds of cryptocurrencies that you no longer have to even think about trust because the system is self-enforcing. It's similar but I think it's an important conceptual difference. It's important conceptual difference but in essence if you were to sort of listen to the interviews of Lehman Baird the sort of founder of the hashgraph part or the supporter of it and he actually calls his company Swirls which is a combination of shared worlds where in essence it's that combination of yes trust built into the system but the shared world aspect being that I choose to be in this because I don't have to focus on it because it's inherent in the system. So I totally hear what and he goes through the list you know in terms of what's priority and he unfortunately lists fairness as the number three item security obviously is number one. But all I'm getting at is that I totally agree with you it's not inherent necessarily but if you build it in and then invite people to work within that world then you've got the ability to rely on it. Interesting so just a side note on blockchain and so forth everybody's trusting that these algorithms work that the servers aren't concentrated etc etc and last I checked until the Chinese government said we're all going to get out of this Bitcoin thing stop the mining all of the mines that were actually functioning were in China getting cheap energy and etc etc like they were all they didn't have locks on the doors the PLA could walk in at any moment and you know go ahead and take over all that kind of stuff so it's like there's this blind trust in an infrastructure that to me doesn't seem like it was you know very trustworthy and everybody's like this is working great let's go okay but that's where if you listen to Lehman Barrett stuff that's exactly what he criticizes he says it's not inherent in blockchain so a great headline on the Washington Post I'm looking for the URL right now that was Bitcoin is teaching libertarians the laws of economics that's cute just the idea that economics has a lot of people so who if anybody is approaching this in a useful creative way Bill you're diving in you're looking for communities and trying to figure out how to bridge these boundaries who else is tackling this in ways that are high function and by this I don't mean blockchain by this I mean this sort of bitter divide we've been talking about how do we reach out to the other how do we actually start these conversations that might cause some healing nobody's seen anything April what do you you're muted sorry I was hearing somebody I heard a voice in the background I thought someone else was speaking I think it's just somebody in the background in one of our yeah so that was very funny because I was like can they speak up no nothing to add at this point I'm just very much in listening mode at the moment yeah yeah I mean other than what I posted in the in the chat I feel this is a classic case in which here I could spout off about some opinion I actually have much more to learn and listen right now so keep going hi Dave yeah one thing I might want to mention is Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute and the theory you tried and his recents were soon to start cooperation with HuffPost where he is trying to improve the conversation so I don't have the URL right off the top but actually I'll dig it up and put it in the chat and he and that group has a pretty sophisticated theory but also praxis and I think both theory and praxis can be obstacles but they can also be enablers if you're not pushing if you're not pushing your religion you're pushing your relationship instead which hopefully is enabled by your practice so that's one of the best I've been able to come across in fact we had Otto as a guest of ours Todd brought him in as a guest on a Rex call so we've had some exposure to him and also Raj Sassodia through conscious capitalism things like that so there's some really interesting practitioners out there who at this moment seem like are on the fringe right they're not in the center of any conversation that's happening as politics basically spackles the wall with body parts so let me throw in the other kind of gorilla in the room which is the role of social media and all this and what Facebook wasn't aware of and have they woken up is this fixable I posted a couple of articles in the invite about their fundamental business model is flawed there's no way to back out of that so their job is to sell our attention they can never fix that spiral anybody have strong feelings about this about whether Facebook is as guilty as it seems to be they're being charged and whether or not it's fixable from their perspective let me enter and sort of interject an aspect that's an answer to that we're embarking on a program with legal women voters in Florida to try and make sure that a lot of millennials get into the political process and be prepared to vote in the 2018 election and to me it's going to be an experiment that started with my sort of looking at the website for legal women voters and sort of noticing it was really clunky and it didn't look millennial to me and when I started talking to some of the millennials in our office about how we could improve that etc they looked at me like oh nobody looks at websites and things like that anymore it's all social media and so I've got to re-envision the idea of how you do that kind of engagement because it's beginning to be more not even Facebook obviously they don't necessarily trust Facebook that's too rigid they've got their other systems none of which I'm really involved in at this point but the answer is you've got to go to where they are and talk in that way and don't assume that they don't know that those other places like Facebook are rigged and that they don't want to be there either how much do people not want to be on which platform it's really interesting because Facebook now has more active monthly users than there are humans in China Facebook is the largest country on earth so somebody's in there doing a lot of things every day and we're learning more and more that it's very spinnable it's funny many years ago I did some work with Target and Target's online presence was hosted by Amazon and at the time already Amazon was famous for micro marketing and for really knowing how to tweak what they were sending to everybody and all that but it turns out that Target which you would think would have been a major major major client had a complete junior varsity version of the Amazon platform it was basically like a store window where you put your products in they could not do any micro micro targeting micro anything they were given nothing and here it looks like Facebook has exposed to any amateur posing as anything a really sophisticated engine that lets you slice and dice and target for not a lot of money messages you've invented and pasted with the CNN logo or the RT logo or whatever you want to logo you can invent kind of a video and the vetting behind who and what and where does this come from is negligible but the power accessible is remarkable it seems like it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from what Amazon was offering Target back in the day and is this what you all are seeing well I think the way I see it is I mean personally I'm on Facebook and mainly because some of my friends and family are and although I found that more and more the experience is like shattered mirror shards and there's no sense of history it's and therefore I can understand the studies which show that the more you use Facebook the more your personal and social bonds break down the more unhappy you are I use Twitter I originally started using it because hey if someone has a good thinker and is following I want to follow that person but on the other hand it's become kind of a popularity contest also but I think behind both of those the core is in two words fixation monetization taking the attention economy and realizing the more I can get people to look at stuff the more I can monetize that zillions of web pages at the bottom you'll see all these cheesy little squares with click this and you'll see the 17s or this celebrity blah blah and same thing on Facebook there's more and more of this kind of stuff so ultimately I think it goes that it's economics driven so it's kind of like Naomi Klein's book on climate change where she says this changes everything and that behind all that is the fact that hey this is being driven by capitalism or it's being driven by unlimited Ponzi scheme growth basically and until you address that you're not really going to address anything so I think that's the bottom line and the economic growth has now been unleashed sort of more than ever before the current tax cut and other sorts of policies the rolling back of regulations everywhere have provoked the Dow and the NASDAQ to new records all kinds of crazy things are happening that's separate from Bitcoin's crazy run up at the end of last year as well Tom what how are you interpreting these things as macro forces now how does this fit the narratives that you're using yeah it's there's certain social currency in the United States that I think really need to be examined as the background to this and so I've been going back and rereading books like Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam Nicolled and Dymed Charles Murray had a book called Coming Apart but this idea of the social fabric of America declining and concurrent with that there's a couple of other things going on primarily it's the economic divide that we have the richer getting richer the concentration of wealth and so you have different groups of people that are all experiencing a lot of different tensions they feel frustrated they feel angry but how are they venting that or experiencing that or who do they see as accountable for that and that's where you get these sort of different tribes of people trying to explain what their world is like working class is a book by Joan Williams and she talks about you have the elites and the elites are in the red camp and the blue camp but right below them you've got this massive working class of people you've got the very poor and a lot of black Americans are in that very poor area and they the animosity between those two groups the white working class and these these welfare queens that Ronald Reagan invented that epitomize the poor who take from the system because these up at the top all these elite liberals are giving them stuff that they don't deserve that they are not earning and so there's this tension between these large groups but everybody is stressed at this point this is an economy with most of the people feeling a lot of tension average wages haven't gone up for most people since the 70s or 80s and so I'm trying to figure out what are the different groupings here early in the in the chat I posted an article like how half of America lost his fucking mind it was an article in of all places but it really did a good job of it kind of explaining the tensions between different groups if you look at Angus Deaton's Nobel Prize recently what was he studying he was studying how are people coping with these pressures you know they're turning to math they're turning to other drugs they're turning to self-inflicted gunshot wounds and suicides and alcohol Americans are killing themselves for the faster rate now that our actual life expectancy is going down compared to which is not happening in any other developed world so I'm trying to see these social tensions and then at the same time you have some really sophisticated people who have learned that these new social media can help them get their message out in a very targeted way so I'm assuming everybody's very familiar with Cambridge Analytica and you talk about micro-targeting they brag about having 4,000 different data points for every American but they also know the psychology of messaging and how they can help reinforce this echo chamber effect if you and at the same time you've got those behind the scenes if any of you have read Jane Meyer's Dark Money for example what are the Mercer's and the Cokes and everybody doing they're investing a lot of money in social engineering they started off years ago developing their institutes the think tanks that develop the ideas that get put into the legislation and these ideas then help concentrate the wealth in the very wealthy and you just saw it with the latest tax bill it's going to exacerbate this problem so how do we help people see that it's a systemic issue that there are rules to capitalism that we can address that we need to look at both the regulations and the taxation side of it not just what I consider what Raj is doing and by the way I'm helping develop the Atlanta chapter of conscious capitalism but I don't see that as a good fix I see that as individual actors within the system doing what they can without changing the system and companies like the one I used to work with at Coca-Cola they're much better at managing the system alright they it's their lobbyist that really do a lot of the hard work of making sure that we get the tax breaks we want that all of you are paying subsidizing all the Coca-Cola products through your taxes that subsidize for example the growing of corn or the refining of corn into high-proof toast corn syrup so it's that economic structure that we need to look at I think there are some people who are talking about the right fixes but then there's a completely different conversation of how does it feel to exist within that system and that true anger that these people have that voted for Trump is very very real but it's very difficult to ascribe your suffering to something as abstract as an economic policies well it's also interesting when Anand talks about how he was pretty convinced that his shining globalized all linked together world was going to be good for everybody like you know he was preaching the gospel of globalization let's say thinking that all ships would rise in it and not seeing or hearing which ships were actually sinking in the middle of the whole thing so it's interesting it's partly about where is our attention drawn what are we able to pay attention to a piece of it is about listening and I love how he talks about I heard you but I wasn't listening I actually didn't listen you know this idea that Trump's a master communicator and he really is is a smaller example a bigger example is in the book nothing is true and everything is possible which details how Putin really understood this emerging world very well and very early and his ability to control television statements and the messages that get out there the idea that you keep people confused and divided and distrustful of any authority or institution to the point where if nobody can agree on what truth is those who currently have the power are going to be able to benefit in that situation nobody's going to be able to get the power rest the power from them because there's going to be too much confusion and distrust and atomization of all enemies and we've talked here I talked about the documentary hyper normalization and this idea about nonlinear warfare where it's much cheaper to win an information war or a propaganda war than it is to drop bombs and you know shoot bullets so all of this like the pomerance of stuff is really really lovely evidence for how that's already underway we're hip deep in a nonlinear war as we speak we just sort of aren't reacting to it as if that were happening and then the problem with using a war metaphor and here all you know the war on drugs and the war on terror and a bunch of other things that have been kind of stupid ideas is that it gets you into either a defensive footing or a freak out and that's probably not the right answer either like the antidote to nonlinear warfare is not nonlinear counter insurgency you know there's an aspect to this and if anybody listening knows somebody had a thought that goes something like this which is nationalism is a great idea because it keeps people focused away from class divisions and we're seeing a rise in nationalism right now which really serves those who have power right now simply because we are not self organizing on class bases at this point we have this left versus right idea and not this lower class or wealthy versus unwealthy distinction keeping nationalism and xenophobia alive helps us, prevents us from other organizational schemes that would actually give us more power relative to those who have institutionalized governmental economic power right now also when you when we sort of started talking earlier about these narratives that are dominating the political sphere in some cases the swing of the far right away from logic and reason is the only way those parties are going to stay in power and what they're doing is incredibly powerful because we're not really very connected the social fabric is shredded we're not very connected in community we're not exactly sure whom to trust we're now bathed in a medium a wash in a medium that lets messages travel very very quickly and get moved around and amplified or how to look around whom to trust and what to think about are broken they're really down so we're at a very vulnerable moment in the middle of all this I think but we've created superconductivity for ideas and opinions we've cut away our history we don't remember stuff we've not taken the time to weave back together the kinds of we have a small group here that has some trust built each of us is in a variety of different communities and networks where there's trust built but those are we little things and none of them is reaching out hard to try to bridge to other networks to try to figure out how does this work with more and more people is anyone familiar with the work that Joe Brewer is doing because this idea that the Cambridge Analytica evil people culture-crafting which they're doing quite well but who is also on the side of good honing those same skills do you mean specifically the skills of how of sort of combat in the public arena verbal combat or do you mean other skills because Davis hip deep in the regenerative economy which is doing all kinds of positive stuff and it's not about the deficit side or the problem side but it's rather about thinking about how do we actually regenerate things including the ideas of capitalism so what which part of this do you mean Tom it seems that there's there are certain rules that are being applied right now in terms of keeping people confused and separated and you can control the dialogue that's going on out there all of which isn't really building toward anything but is seems to be used to keep things chaotic enough so that they can truly rally up against you there's no there there to push against as soon as you push against anyone truth or person that kind of dissipates in their work it's diverted to the next new thing and you never know who to trust and so somebody says something bad about me and you all want to gang up on me it's like well who do you really believe because I'll find 10 other people are going to say something good that's the situation we're in and so how do we exist in a cooperative effective way productive way in that environment versus just keeping the system chaotic enough to allow the status quo to stay well and often one slice of the population is played off against another so you would think that there'd be kind of class warfare in you know during reconstruction in other areas where the poor whites would get together with an emancipated blacks and they would like say hey great let's let's make sure that workers that people who normally don't get much have more and in fact what happens is the wealthy whites co-op the poor whites by saying hey you're going to get privilege you're going to get respect on the street you're going to get all these social cues of inclusion and respect that blacks will never get so you're with us not with them and and that works it works beautifully actually so I'm looking at the narratives today about who's trying to drive whom closer to whom or further away from whom how does this all play out I mean and in non-linear warfare partly what you want is just the fog of war so that you don't know whom to trust anyway and you kind of give up which is different as well well I think one aspect of this is that there's a well-funded techy infrastructure that creates supposedly value neutral tools which then became available to those who most want to take advantage of those tools and there's no kind of organic feedback in terms of the human ecosystem I mean Facebook is connecting a live experiment on two billion people as we speak and it's which apparently seems to be having significant effects you know both individually and socially so I think that you know I don't know what to do with that but that seems to be part of it and maybe that's the notion of you know you know there's a lot of smart nerds creating fantastic stuff and that's good that's fantastic and we'll make money on it too and but then there are consequences and it's really hard to anticipate and highly motivated people who scratched their heads for a while and figured out what was at hand what was available and have little to lose dove in and used the medium very very powerfully to foster their own ends and they did a great job of it and it's works both ways because you know like Obama succeeded because his people made use of those tools very well even though they were much more primitive at the time now they're much more sophisticated you know what did you say 4,000 data points on every person I mean that's well one of the big missed opportunities was when my Barack Obama was dropped as soon as Obama became president for a variety of reasons and nobody picked it up and started using it as a way of knitting society together and taking care of problems and rethinking how local politics and how local governance actually happens because there was a monster opportunity to do that and that was just left on the ground and I think a big reason why that goes away over the years of Obama's administration is that nobody actually did anything with it has anyone read Mark Lilla's book the once in future liberal basically I'm for liberals are too caught up in identity politics and unfortunately that feeds into this problem that we're talking about here because it causes us to identify subsets of liberals so you have women here black here poor here you know trans over there and it gives and it keeps us from aggregating our power and it allows everybody to have somebody to hate on the other side I haven't read the book I've got it sitting in front of me but if anyone has an assessment I'd love to hear it I've not heard of it and I'm looking it up now to me this is fascinating because one of the things that happened before the election cycle or during the election cycle was Black Lives Matter a whole series of what we would call identity politics things you know moments happening and now we have me too and times up and so on and so forth and from my perspective it's like well about damn time you know people who've been wrong severely through throughout time might actually be able to enter the arena as equals if we can sort some of these issues out and every time that gets anywhere near maybe being effective it gets beaten back by things like an assault on identity politics this is going to you this is divisive you're you know this is going to tear society apart can we act together and so I'm curious what everybody feels about this issue because I'm I'm totally on the side of let's actually respect everybody and let's honor the fact that some people have suffered a lot through history and figure out how to work with that but often that means that the people who inflicted the pain are going to have to cop to some responsibility for it even if it's generationally a couple of generations behind them it's really tough April what's your what's your general feeling on that issue you're still muted there there I'm unmuted yeah I know so I don't I don't know I I really struggle with this because I think I agree with everything that you're saying here but um well to play devils not even devils advocate the generational blame thing I think it's really tricky really fast um if you were not alive when really bad shit happened and yet you're somehow responsible for it that just bodes well that bodes poorly from the get go particularly from your perspective that human beings are born good so now we're in a situation where you're born good but you're socialized into a place that's less good or I mean I'm being totally opinionated here but you know fill in the blank with whatever you'd like and we're actually is there a layer that you're not actually born into the world good because you have all of this generational baggage I mean I guess where I'm with you I'm just really really struggling from the perspective I almost feel like okay so where do we put the shovel in the ground like figuratively put the shovel in the ground to start digging to start working to start going on this because what there is to unpack and here I'm just going to talk about I there's so many different threads we could talk about here you know is it gender is it minority status whatever but let's just say you know the privilege white male class middle of upper class that's going to be asking every piece of that cohort I do want to ask every piece of that cohort to give up a little something level and level things out just a little bit I'm in a total loss for what that first you know stake in the ground looks like well I shouldn't say the total loss I'm a total loss for what actually might stick what actually might work and lead to something instructive as opposed to more pushback resistance you know or pulling the veil over other people's eyes sorry you were going to say something let me just reflect a little bit on what you just said and I think it's very I think from my perspective it's really easy to stay with the position that people are born good and I think the request is and I'm probably oversimplifying this but the request is to people of privilege that generally means white men to pay attention to the privilege to be aware of it and then to adjust for it in whatever way they know how and to adjust for it means maybe to shut up when in a group and not trample over other people's conversations maybe to notice or to not blame someone else for their opinion that's different from yours but rather to listen to it with a different set of ears given history or maybe to you know there's lots of different ways in which this could play out and I think the request is and maybe the simplest way to say it is you know deep listening and loving speech on the part of people of privilege and if that happened a whole lot more we'd have a lot fewer of the rest of these problems is that just too simple sorry go ahead I think that it might need to be a little bit simpler okay good one of the books that I think I've referred to in the past is Mark Bly's Great Transformations and in it he does a good job of explaining two great transformations essentially over the last hundred years one was the New Deal era and the second was basically the takeover of that in other words dissing Keynesian economics and bringing in neoliberalism as the solution in other words free markets and his point really in structuring the book the Great Transformations is to say that we're dealing clearly in a very complex environment and our problem arises when we don't understand why something happened and in essence what the New Deal did for the economy back then was explain it on the lack of institutions to support certain guiding principles and at that time the guiding principles were focused on aggregate demand there was what can we do for social security what can we do for workers and to an extent that happened almost by accident because of the fact that FDR apparently started out trying to work with the powers that be at the supply side and couldn't get them to cooperate in essence they thought they already had control why do they need to do anything and so he literally was going out and teaching farmers and everything which was 70% of our economy at that time how to organize and how to articulate their needs and so they started building institutions now the whole point that Mark Blythe is at is that structurally if you're in a complex environment you really don't know what the solution is you don't even know what the cause is and so you have to postulate a simple perception of what the cause was with a structural ideation as he calls it of what the solution would be and then try it and the more the institutions in a way rigidly conformed to that in other words try it out and see whether or not it works it obviously creates a certain amount of resistance in the system which ultimately is going to crack and they're going to come up with a different explanation what was the neoliberal oh your Keynesian economics couldn't explain stagflation and therefore I'm going to bring in my neoliberalism and free markets are going to establish all this wonderfulness and we're going to be saved which again is this oversimplification but they get the institutions the Federal Reserve and everybody to adopt this simplification and they diss anybody that argues with it because in their mind we've got to test this before we can call it right or wrong that it did or didn't work and so all I'm saying is we're now searching for people who understand this we're searching for a new simplification that would enable us to start to build and to me this is the whole point of the cryptocurrencies they're a structural way to avoid being trapped by the existing elites just as an aside there was a wonderful analysis that was done about how failures in society ultimately come from the competing elites neither one of them wants to let go of their perception that they're right and so they end up consuming more and more of the of the social resources competing with everybody else because they really don't care about the little guys they just care about themselves and they don't want to let go of them being right and so in that context you need a decentralized system that has a certain level of constructed trust where you can trust in your own environment in your own town your own city your own life whatever so to my thinking that's the transformation that's structural in other words it needs to be institutional not necessarily institutional like in the FDA but more in the sense of some kind of a structure that you can trust and then you start to articulate what does that trust need if you don't like this group trust structure try another one and hence different sort of currency regimes different currency platforms that are emerging that might actually have those kinds of flavors to them where people would shop for a regime they like atop a coin and a currency system that they like in terms of the sort of dramatically simple messages I'm like so shocked that trickle down economics is back like I thought that was one of those vampires with like 10 stakes in its heart I thought plenty of economists had done a good job debunking it and yet you know here it comes rammed through at the end of the year and trickle down is back one of those crazy things in this case it's more it's more just a cover for kleptocracy perfect statement cover is exactly what it is it's bullshit and they know it's bullshit but they get away with it well they had to pass something and it had to smell like big tax cuts etc etc etc you know well and they do want to get rid of government so the fact that they end up with a whole bunch of money probably doesn't hurt yeah exactly I mean I'm really curious about the the identity politics stuff Tom and I haven't figured out I mean I mean we it's it I guess I'm mostly hearing old white dudes complain about it which makes me a little suspicious and two it's like well yeah that's kind of what politics is right I mean it's like you're representing your own interests and I don't know if you closely to any of the Boston Globe coverage of race in Boston you know where like the average wealth of black Bostonians is $8 you know it's it turns out that identity and actual status are pretty tightly tied so I can't quite see how we could do politics without an identity component so I don't understand kind of what the critique is about I hear people talk about it how it's bad I don't quite understand what like the option is like you know I'm supposed to do it more my identity but I don't know where that leads me so I don't care and there's enough people stuck in identity I don't even want to call it dead ends where whatever prejudice had happened whatever bias has happened is still alive and you know the evidence you just cited about the net worth of black citizens of Boston is that kind of thing it's like and there's 50 things that happened between redlining and job discrimination and who knows what that probably led to that and untangling that is you know policy makers worst nightmare and job guarantee and yet I it seems like except for maybe things like alternate economic systems in the crypto currency world which I don't see addressing these issues much which is a really interesting question for me because I'm involved in a project that should be doing exactly that so I'd like to take the conversation deeper into those waters of how might these alternative regimes work but otherwise other than that I see that we're like it feels like we're at ground zero right it feels like what have we exactly learned over the last couple centuries about how this stuff is supposed to work okay but Jerry to the extent looking at it you know with the the filter of you know the self-determination theory in other words we're supposed to go toward autonomy loneliness and competence it fits because of the fact that the identity politics is getting more and more granular in other words more and more responsibility for understanding your limits in other words a problem that you've only got eight dollars in Boston etc in other words we've relied to an extent too much on government and institutions to solve our problems for us and we need to sort of bring them home other words the old adage all politics is local and structure things in such a way that are more in our control not in their control and my point there that's why we're going toward cryptocurrencies because of the fact that in essence it's a way not just for the currency but to create that shared world where there isn't is an appreciation for the fact that you need more income you need less expenses let's try and sort of meet those at your door not in some big you know thing that the state of Florida the federal government passes but that we constructed for you in your neighborhood with you deciding what the criteria are so the the relationship economy narrative that fits nicely what you were just saying though is that we've been treated as mere consumers and we've consumerized every sector of human society which removed our sense of agency and responsibility and as consumers we were supposed to be good factory workers and good buyers of stuff we weren't supposed to be citizens anymore in fact there's an active shift of talking about us as citizens talking about us as mere as consumers and that's a very big mental shift for policymakers so we end up offloading outsourcing giving up our own engagement and responsibility to institutions and big government etc etc which are then justifiably the targets of our ranker right now is like you know these institutions are too big and they're doing too much we need less government totally agree but in the meantime we shredded our ability and even incentive to collaborate to fix these things together and yet around the world there are many groups that are trying to do that like the polemos people in Spain and there's just hundreds and hundreds of groups like this that are trying to take back agency authority responsibility and figure new ways to solve these problems now those do and don't overlap with the cryptocurrency realm and I think less than more which is what's interesting because I'm looking here trying to reflect I've been tracking those movements for a long time I'm fascinated by them I'm interested how might they use these new crypto platforms to implement some of these other ways of governing together and then I'll add a thought which is the piece about cryptocurrencies I find most fascinating is that they are programmable that you know Ethereum more than Bitcoin in Los Angeles somebody's phone that the cryptocurrencies are programmable which means that we can actually embed policy in the crypto ecosystems which is super interesting so I could invent a crypto coin that is only spendable within the Miami radius it's geofenced I could invent a coin that is a demerge currency it loses 10% of value every month that you don't spend it to force everybody to spend it and keep it in circulation etc etc that's super duper interesting and could be a policy lever I'm not hearing a lot of people play with that we're working on it oh excellent we'll speed it up we literally had a meeting yesterday with a person we're doing Bitcoin mining in our office simply so we can learn it and we're going to start doing like coin mining and the guy is going to start to organize how could we develop our own currency that has exactly we were described describing all the demerge part it was the fact that you're trying to increase circulation not hoarding which unfortunately Bitcoin is all hoarding at this point you'd be stupid to buy your pot with a Bitcoin today if it's going to be twice as much tomorrow you know what blew us away though I heard for the first time there are Bitcoin ATMs and in Miami where is the bulk of them in Liberty City which means what Liberty City is Liberty City is the lowest income area in the city of Miami they have an average income of around $11,000 a year I have no idea why they're there but the first Bitcoin I got was at a bar called Dirty Nellies in Halifax they had an ATM, Bitcoin ATM there I had never even heard of it before yesterday but I just feel comfortable that low income areas are beginning to acculturate to this and lowers finding ways to use it that we haven't even thought of yet mm-hmm so I'm wondering where's the leading edge of innovation on that front who besides you is out there figuring out hey how do we leverage the programmability of these environments and the distributed trust and the visibility or semi-transparency of the system to design new kinds of policy interventions new sorts of ecosystem dynamics et cetera et cetera and I think these efforts will be bedeviled by the fact that the successful and visible cryptocurrencies are the ones that people are looking at to appreciate like crazy which means they're not going to transact with them, they're going to buy and hold them which is the opposite of what you want for there to be a healthy sort of ecosystem you gotta build that in to an extent part of what drove me to this concept is that one of the I guess it was the first retailer that accepted Bitcoin overse.com Patrick I'm forgetting his last name but the founder of that has a venture capital group, Medici Ventures that has actually stated in one public I haven't found the specifics yet but they are willing to fund nonprofits Patrick Byrne Byrne, okay they're willing to fund nonprofit organizations to increase the proliferation of uses of cryptocurrencies in the low income areas. Now all I'm trying to get at is that they're at least seeing that there is a potential for the distribution that is related to income development, income generation assisting in social impact and stuff like that but definitely the guy who founded or is the primary lead of this Ashgraf, Lehman Baird is his company Swirls he really wants to have shared worlds in other words where you're choosing to have a fair environment to have criteria values criteria that are inherent in your world, your system so he's wanting to do that when you listen to him list the priorities of the institutions he's working with though that's kind of way down the list their primary driver is security if you have any other articles or things on Baird and Swirls that would be really interesting if you can put them on the rex list or something the best thing is for that is to just go to YouTube they've got very good long interviews with him and he loves to talk so he really gets into both how Ashgraf works and why thank you anything else about listening about I'm a believer that we're in the middle of an epidemic of not listening that listening is one of the things that broke and there are many people trying to do more listening and one of the things I loved about Anand's talk was that he said look I heard you but I wasn't listening and one of the things that I think is asked of people of privilege is to listen better to listen without taking offense to listen in the whole if you look up how to be a good ally and you try to figure out what to do one of the crib notes to people of privilege is hey you're not always the problem so don't take it personally and then another one of the crib notes is hey sometimes you are the problem but just take it easy Tom you wanted to jump in yeah and it's not exactly listening but it's the idea of where do you put your attention how are you able to put your attention I think that this has been a skill that we have lost due to the way we built our economy the different kind of repetitive jobs we've had and of course the social media has contributed to that but your ability to build a coherent self who you are to have an identity project that you are actually purposely constructing or to stay with a thought which is related to the listening that you were thinking about has to do with where your attention goes and what I think has happened is people have been raised particularly those who were born in the late 80s have don't have the skill of keeping their attention in a singular place and then at the same time we have an entire industry of attention architects of your attention and so you have this flightiness to people and it keeps them from feeling grounded from having a self that feels like they have an ongoing project that is them or to have outside of them ongoing projects so they end up really enjoying the next new video that shows up in their feed and I think it's hurting us as individuals I think my son is really suffering in this way right now and I've been reading Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head where he sees learning skill as one of the antidotes to this idea of attention deficit being grounded in the real world, the physical world the objects are there to give your attention in the anchor and the digital world is not so conducive to that thank you sorry I was interrupting earlier we're just we're America, the US the worst example in the world of consumer culture and it kind of ate all our culture it ate kind of every sector what we think we should aim for as life goals how we see ourselves whether we're beautiful or not worth anything and it doesn't benefit consumerism for us to be happy with ourselves and happy with what we have now so this whole idea about voluntary simplicity or wanting less or having enough or plentitude or whatever you want to call it absolutely throws a wrench in the works of consumer economics and the growth of the economy as the measure of health etc etc and yet Tom everything you said was like you know what probably the best thing you could do is be happy with who you are and maybe by association with what you've got at this moment and then work from there does that run counter to what you're saying or along with no it runs along with it and I have to also like when I talk about this with my son or with other people just in the chat a little while ago I mentioned the book monoculture this idea that we have every era has an overarching theme that kind of helps you when you're saying who are you or why am I going to college it's like I'm a guy who has this job or I'm going to get this degree to make money the idea that economy becomes the concept that helps you your relationships who you are things like that that's a reality we can't get away with that you may not like it but don't try fighting it understand that and so when you're talking to people about helping them craft a meaningful life you're going to have to use that language this idea of trying to opt out of that is something that's beyond the control of you're not going to change the situation and individuals can opt out of that but the vast majority of people need to learn in a system that is dominated by not Liberté or Fraternité or anything like that it's dominated by money Jerry has a comment on your point about listening though I just finished reading a book by Van Jones how he came apart and how we can come together which really tries to sort of signal that this crisis of in essence what you were saying correctly of not listening to us brings us to a point where we're forced to listen to each other and the whole sort of vote for Trump in my mind you know the vote by essentially the flyover America was stop ignoring me you know which clearly Hillary Clinton did in other words didn't even go to Michigan or you know places that she should have gone to to have a presence but at the end of the day the point is that we do need to listen and we need to listen more carefully more structurally in other words in ways that are trustworthy and that that process I think somebody mentioned earlier Otto Scharman you know Scharmer's concept of theory you which is you know a little bit of mixing the attention but the openness to a broader attention in other words that it's not just what I need it's what is the system so that you can then have a better dialogue absolutely I think one of the most fascinating concepts Scharmer is that leadership is not a function of well certainly not a function there's a notion of heroic leadership leadership by an individual but leadership is a function of a system and to me that's really interesting especially as we're entering more and more the era of we have highly was I intelligent tool systems that are working with in which are becoming more and more autonomous and so we're looking at a situation where it's not only the human system that is leading but there's a kind of ecology of human and tool system which together leads and creates you know just like in Facebook we're now beginning to study the consequences of you know what's happened there so I think I found to be a very useful concept but the challenge of course is how you know we have personal insights we have personal intentions and then how do we hold that as a group and then how do we hold that as a society and as institutions because you know institutions are sometimes used as a bad word but you know one of the comments ironically from David from of all people about Trump is that within government institutions are trying to undermine what he's doing but that also is dangerous because the institutions are undermining themselves you know they're kind of cheating or going on the side so that question of how do we institutionalize and systematize our intention that's kind of one way to raise the question totally agree I just looked up Donella Meadows 12 leverage points to intervene in a system and I'll read the top 3 in order 3 2 1 so the third most powerful way to intervene in a system is the goal of the whole system change the goal of the system number 2 is the mindset or paradigm that the system its goal structures delays parameters arises from and then number 1 she writes power to transcend paradigms which I'm not sure I understand Todd you want to jump in say a little more you're still muted now you know I just think that that is a timeless, timeless book and I go back to it again and again I get chills down my spine when I read it because it feels relevant for nearly any situation very wise woman yeah also I think Bill when you were talking earlier I put a post in the chat that a lot of what you were saying about how to explore whether it's in cryptocurrency environments or others fits nicely Dave Snowden's Kinebin framework about when you're in a complex environment you don't know cause and effect don't actually marry up well and you need to run a lot of experiments react and respond properly when the experiments run and let the individual intentions be explored and expressed in other words the way he does it it's almost like they begin to articulate things that they didn't tell anybody else before because he lets their stories tell the issues not some person doing a survey trying to get a yes no answer exactly it has so much wisdom it's really fascinating there's all these great names in the chat there's Meg Wheatley and Suryukov Putin's lieutenant who helped create the fog of war and all those other things any concluding thoughts around this topic anything you wish we had said or things that this conversation has made you want to go dive into the biggest count to me is the real community building part of it there was I think that I personally got sort of at least feelers out there to try and understand the process but to me it's got to somehow engage a two way communication I overheard two millennials talking saying they just didn't want to get involved at all in politics and that was so very how do you get them to use their ability to comment to create values it's interesting because that is the real challenge so I draw a really big distinction between politics and governance and then also between big G government and little G governance and I don't blame a soul for not wanting to get involved in politics you basically in the sausage factory and it's not pretty what's happening and who knows so I can in some sense understand what they might have been saying but I do wish that they wanted to get involved in some form of governance which they probably don't but to me if they could figure out how to come together with others to manage some resource to make decisions about their own place to do those kinds of things that's a very large element of the formation of community around things that are meaningful so we're going to have a pop-up call a Rex call with a friend of mine named Mark who's been writing about learning for years and one of his role model schools is a school called the Riverside Academy in Ahmedabad and they have a principal called ICANN this is like the governing principal of the school and what they're doing effectively is branding agency to the kids and saying hey go fix something in your world you can, go do it and so they're collecting up stories in a database on the website that Mark hosts of kids in different classes, different age groups different cohorts, different cities around the world because this is spread across India, it's spread to other places of kids going out in the world and fixing stuff and then one of my main critiques of school is that it's this artificial petri dish where we lift kids out of society to help let their actions have any consequence on their lives so this flips that exactly and it's a nice example of the kind of thing that can lead to some productive outcome so we'll have a pop-up Rex call I think it's next Tuesday with Mark around this any other wrapping thoughts on this topic? Bill, I think you're going to want to have kind of an addictive component to the community building piece like sprinkle cinnamon and jujubes on it yeah, a lot of sugar or something or maybe just include likes and stuff I think like little button a little button when you press it it gives you a little bit of opioid solution feedback, yeah exactly Facebook any other thoughts? with that let us wrap the first Rex call of the new year of 2018 and good luck to everybody, see you online thank you very much for being here really appreciate it thanks guys