 Peter. Excellent. So welcome to the Rex Popup Call on Wednesday, January 31, 2018. Our guest is Jaume Cascio about how to survive the present. We're going to take this interesting places. And I will take us in with the poem by Muriel Ruckheiser titled Metaphor to Action, which goes as follows. Whether it is a speaker taught on a platform who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, whether it is the crash of lips on lips after absence and wanting, we must close the circuits of ideas now generate that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose. Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky. Here are the dynamos, steel black, harboring flame. Here is the man night walking who derives tomorrow's manifestos from this midnight's meeting. Here we require the proof in solidarity, iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating. And behind us in time are the men who second us as we continue. And near us is our love, no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, a close of the circuit and a fierce dazzle of purity. And over us is night, a field of pansies unfolding, charging with heat, its softness in a symbol to weld and prepare for action, our mind's intensity. So what made you pick that one, Juri? Roughly instinct and then kind of this notion that metaphor is partly about framing, is partly about how we communicate and express to each other. To me, metaphor is such a huge part of our puzzle of how we get things done and how we see forward, that it felt like a good place to start. Metaphor, futurism is an intrinsically metaphorical process. Because we can't accurately describe exactly what will be, we can only describe things that are similar, you know, things that are metaphorical. And so I'm glad you picked that one, although I was mildly disappointed that you didn't pick, yeah, it's the second coming. You know, things fall apart, the center does not hold, miradarchy is loosed upon the world. We can go there. The blood dim tide is loosened everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned, the best flak all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity. You should have told me, I could have had you recite it at the start. Well, then it goes on to, you know, what rough beast slouches from Bethlehem or Jerusalem or something like that. It gets all religious and shit, but I mean, the second coming, you know. Yeah, well. Good morning. Mika, I see you there, although I don't see you there. Well, that's funny, me too. Now's the time of monsters, yes. Good Lord. I would say I'd like to figure out what's going on there. Okay. Yeah. You're unmuted now. Okay. There we go. There you are. There you are. I would say I boycotted the State of the Union address, but that implies I ever had a plan to watch it. I find it very difficult to watch politicians speak, even ones that I agree with, because it, I keep hearing the things that they didn't say, that is near that they needed to say, but they don't. And it just makes me so frustrated because, you know, I've immersed myself in a job in a life path, really, that's been all about trying to figure out what might happen next and to see people who are intrinsically responsible for the state of things when something happens next, not embracing that responsibility, not accepting the consequences of their actions, of their choices. It pains me. So can you give an example? Like, I have a feeling some of those people might in fact be accepting the responsibilities of their actions and realizing that their actions seem really irresponsible and sort of going for it for some other motivation. No, you're right. That's what I'm thinking. You're right. People out there sort of flinging shit at the fan are doing so on purpose. They have some sort of reasoning. Right. And sometimes the reasoning is irrational. You know, the line that I've seen a lot online is more than a little scatological, but I think it makes sense that, for some of the hardcore conservatives, they would eat shit if a liberal had to smell their breath. You know, it's that notion of, you know, their responsibility or sense of responsibility is for the infliction of pain on opponents. Another set of assumptions, though. Maybe their responsibility is for infliction of destruction on the system. And if that means that their opponents have to like cry and scream and be frothy for a while, that's okay, because you got to break some eggs to make an omelet. I think there's multiple components, but I definitely agree with there is a value in trolling in and of itself that I see in conservative friends. Yeah, well, that's a whole side angle to it, but I'm trying to figure out what's the train and what's the snow that's blowing off the snow plow. And like, you know, how does this all kind of work? Because, Jame, you're walking through a series of things where you're, I think, imputing a principal motivation or intent for a particular action, and I'm trying to explore that space a little bit. But I'm backcasting that intent. I mean, I'm not necessarily assuming the intent, I'm looking at the consequences and trying to figure out what would lead us there. You know, and so when, you know, for a number of the statements that you read, the actions that are taken, not always by the political figures, but by their surrogates and backers. The surrogates, right. Yeah, yeah. There seem to be few rational, rational motivations, and that may be my own, you know, my own blindness, and I'm actually very willing to accept that it's blindness on my part, and I would like to be able to understand things better. Let me just say that one thing that I've been mulling since we, since I agreed to do this pop-up, is that there has been one immutable law, rule for foresight work, and that is people always overestimate the possibility of change in the short term and underestimate the degree of change in the long term. And it feels like this past year has upended that, because to a large degree, it feels like so much has changed and is changing around us so quickly, and looking forward, it feels like nothing will get better. Nothing will change. And it, I don't know if that's true, but it's truthy, it certainly feels true. And it's actually posed a real problem for those of us who make a point out of trying to think about what happens next, because what happens next seems so disconnected from what's happening now. I don't know if you saw, if you ever watched Saturday Night Live. Oh, never, I've never watched it. Anybody else? We never watched that. Well, I don't know if you saw the most recent one with Jessica Chastain. One of the skits they did was in the guise of a game show, but the game show was called, does it really matter? Does it even matter? And it was basically all of these scenes. If Trump does this, does it even matter? And the answer is always no, it doesn't even matter. And that's what it feels like sometimes. And maybe I'm just sort of giving in to the desire to vent, but it's really frustrating. And I suspect that all of you feel a similar kind of frustration because we know that there are some big problems out there, not just related to the current political leadership, but big systemic problems, big environmental problems, economic issues, that not only are not being addressed, they are being accelerated. And then you layer on top of that this cult-like behavior. That's not just in the United States, by the way. I don't know if you saw that the recently elected president of the Czech Republic refers to himself as the Czech Trump. Oh, that's fine. And we're seeing this similar kind of aggrieved nationalism showing up across Western nations. Does that make him a blank check? Sorry, I couldn't help that. You know, we're rapidly approaching the point where that joke won't make sense. I know, that's terrible. I was reading something about Scott Pruitt, the EPA director, who was actually a Jeb Bush advisor, who was very assertive back in the campaign in 2016, saying that Trump would be a constitutional nightmare, that he would be an authoritarian. And when asked about those statements this weekend, his response was, I don't remember saying that, and then making just sort of, Trump is a wonderful leader, and I'm just in awe of being able to work with him. It wasn't exactly that, but very much like that, that kind of, you can't be slightly critical. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Mika, you're dead in the smack in the middle of stuff. You wanna jump in? Well, yeah, I do, and it's interesting. This morning, spent about a half hour editing the draft of an article that Anjao Mina is writing for us. She does analysis of, well, she looks at memes. She looks at fandoms. She looks at digital culture. And she introduced, and it's an interesting piece because it's about why Trump is succeeding at dominating the sort of meta-narrative or at the national media narrative if such a thing exists. And there's a whole body of work about past politicians who understood or adapted more quickly to the new dominant media system and then thrived because of it. So FDR and the fireside chat with radio, obviously, Hitler also with mass media, like, you know, the Lenny Raphson, you know, the Reifenstahls, you know, moving with it, right? JFK beating Nixon if you watched the debate on TV, but not if you listened to it. Reagan as the most telegenic, you know, the pictures mattered more than the words is the thing that Dever pointed out. Arguably, you could say that Obama was the first to understand the power of social network organizing and big data analytics, and now here's Trump. And she was even playing further and talking about how the boomlit for Oprah, you know, which I don't believe is real and Oprah's already said she's not gonna run, but that the thing that one of the reasons why Oprah felt instinctively interesting other than maybe we like her politics more than Trump's is she is also like the king of all media, right? You know, the Trump built a brand, he, you know, around his properties that he then was a big TV celebrity with the apprentice and that he understands in a hyper fragmented news environment that just being the center of conversation means that you're driving attention towards you and you're starving everybody else for attention. And in the middle of the piece, she surfaces this term from a media scholar named Penny, what's her name? I'm looking at the piece right now because I wanna give appropriate credit. Money Penny? Huh? Is it Lori Penny? No, it's not Lori Penny. It's an academic that I'd not heard of before called Penny Andrews, host doc at the University of Leeds. And she talks, she introduces this term digital dissensus as opposed to digital consensus. And it strikes me as instinctively right, that we're in a hyper fragmented environment and Trump just happens to have the biggest chunk, you know? I mean, the weakness in this argument that Trump is a master of the new media environment is that he's incredibly unpopular for a president presiding over, you know, 5% unemployment, right? And a booming stock market and all those other things. He should be at 60%. And especially if he's so good at dominating media, which here's to be. Well, Peter Baker's opinion piece after the so-to talk last night said exactly that. He can sell the country, but not himself. Like his ratings are zero, but the country's booming along. Well, there's also an argument that I heard Seth Godin make recently that Trump's, there's a type of branding where you're deliberately provoking a negative reaction. And that it's a very risky way to grow your brand because you piss a lot of people off, but they're all talking about you, right? Of course. And in the American political system, given how it actually empowers minorities over majorities, Trump doesn't need 51% to govern. He's got, you know, and he's got the Republicans. He's got a majority of self-identified Republicans. There's some evidence that the number of people who identify as Republicans is shrinking. But the polls don't tell you that. So when you see 80, 85% Republicans still supporting Trump, it may be a smaller group, but to your average Republican House member, that's their base. So they're sticking with him because he's still popular. Well, that's their base. And also because of the nature of the primary system in those states. Yeah, exactly. But to your point, Jamey, about feeling sort of despairing at the moment, I think a lot of it is that, you know, we grew up through a period where there were dominant narratives we all shared and experienced together, right? There were only three sources of news every night and that was the only thing that was on. And so, you know, we grew up expecting that there would be coherence. And now we live in this unbelievable incoherence and Trump is just the loudest, you know, Barker in the carnival. And the Democrats can't counter him because they don't have a leader. Isn't Trump very different from everybody else who was running in his party? Yes. He seems to understand and do something that nobody else got, not Hillary, not the press, not anybody else. And it has to do with what you were just saying, that when you're deliberately provoking negative reactions, I mean, look at Benetton, right? Benetton's ad campaigns way back when, priests kissing a woman like all, you know, they were deliberately provoking at really intense social issues, but that was their ad campaign and it worked really, really well. They didn't have to do much and Madonna, right? Madonna was always pushing the boundaries of culture to get attention. And sort of inoffensively, although you might have been outraged because she might have been, you know, pushing your buttons. But here now we have a politician who did that as an organized strategy ongoing and it worked and it's still working. What we don't know is whether it's organized, Jerry. I think it's instinctive. Yeah, and it's- I think it's intentional. It's the ongoing part that I would emphasize because that is, we actually have had politicians that have been provocateurs. Yeah. When you think about Barry Goldwater, you can think about, what's his name in Alabama, the governor, George Wallace. We have had politicians in the past, but none of them had been able to maintain a consistent, overwhelming narrative. So basically they would have one big blast and then sort of settle down into something into your normal state. With Trump, what we're seeing, and I would argue we see something similar with the other Trumpets around the world. The Trumpets, yes. Is this persistence of provocation? That what we're seeing is an ongoing process of every day coming up with something new. Yeah, that's the whole thing, the F5 o'clock. Every day is coming up with something new. Every day regaining that control over the narrative. Mika said something about starving other people's attention or starving other players of attention. And that's exactly what's happening. He has perfected, consciously or otherwise, perfected a method of keeping all eyes on him. But that means it is ongoing. You were saying, no, no, that's what I'm saying. It is ongoing. It is ongoing, yes, that's precisely my point. Yeah, yeah, I mean, somehow or other, Stormy Daniels was a mere bump in the road. And you guys, I mean, I just looking at my own behavior, I feel like if I wake up in the morning and Trump hasn't said something out right, are you disappointed? Yeah. I think I'm feeding off of kind of. I totally get that. And so like the last week or so has been a little bit calm. There was no blow up at the speech. And it's like, ah, damn, there's no big thing going on. I think it's kind of addictive. It's the Facebook phenomenon. The system has been fragmented and we're not sharing the same news reality anymore. Even the five of us don't have the same news reality. I mean, I'm thinking of the one day in the last year where I felt good. And I bet it was the same day that you felt good, which is the day that, well, there were two of them. There was all the victories in the November election and then there was Doug Jones. There was the Alabama election, right? And both of them were better than expected. But they were also moments where the old system of formalized democracy gave all of us a little atomized and organized by the way, we're not all atomized anymore. A lot of us are organized a way to kind of go big and say, yeah, fuck you back. And we had one day where we got to do that and it felt better. You know, it's possible, Jimay, that a year from now or even nine months from now, after the 2018 election, we're all gonna be feeling very differently. Either we're gonna be feeling a lot better because we've stopped the bleeding or we're gonna really feel worse. Yeah, I suspect it'll be the latter. I don't agree. The reason I say that and I mean it partially tongue-in-cheek just because it's my job to be the doomsayer. Where's your scythe? You do need a cloak and a scythe. You need a hood and a scythe. You're far in a hoodie there. It looks like you've got the black hood and that. And you've got the beard. It's so perfect. It looks more like unabomber, I think. It's partially tongue-in-cheek, but it's also because my observation of this process has been that, yes, we've had these momentary elections, but Jones would not have won if Moore had not been such an abysmally horrible candidate, person, and Jones only won by a few percent. It doesn't matter, it was fucking Alabama. I know, I know. Yes, so it does make it so remarkable. I think the pushback against Mueller, I think what we're seeing is the process of trying to undermine the legitimacy of any opposition. Oh, I agree. This is a terrifying moment these last few days that are the worst I've seen. One of the things I was thinking about, that Jones having an awful opponent component, I'm not sure that's exactly accidental. It may be part of the system. I mean, there's a reason Trump can't get good staff, right? There's a reason the administration keeps screwing up. It's because he doesn't have that good people. He doesn't have good people because he's Trump. Not that many people want to work for Sauron. Or incompetent people that are going to go to a prison, right? And so I think that there's actually part of the system and part of the reason we're seeing Nazis being pulled back into the political sphere is because there is a sense that the Republican Party is desperately reaching out to the margins to try to preserve its power, right? That's not an accident. That's a deliberate thing. And it's being kind of a quality level reaction to that. Now, I don't think we can always count on it, right? But people keep saying, well, Trump was only, if he'd not been so incompetent, he would have a great presidency. Well, if he wasn't so incompetent, he wouldn't be Trump, right? I mean, he can't have, oh. So because my game is to try to think about the what ifs, I can't help but think about what if there is an active attempt to impeach, whether it's after 2018 or after a Mueller report that is especially damning. Will the people who have been the most vocal supporters allow that to happen, allow that to happen without any kind of violence? Yeah, yeah. Well, look, impeachment doesn't happen without the Democrats taking back the house. And the odds are, I would say that they do take back the house and they maybe start a process of impeachment, but the more important thing is that if they take back the house, they can block most of his bad stuff, which frankly it's less, I mean, I'm scared that Trump is dangerous in foreign policy and that if you really wanna scare yourself, you read these tea leaves of him talking about, I wanna unify the country, but usually the only thing that unifies a country is like when something big and bad happens, would be really bad if something big and bad happened, but you know, it would unify us. And then in the meantime, his ambassador to South Korea just withdrew and said, these people are nuts, that we can't- He didn't withdraw, he was withdrawn. He was not, yeah, he did not make the choice to withdraw. It was actually the administration chose not to push him forward. And then he published a critical piece in the Washington Post, okay. Yeah, but you know, he's been withdrawn because he was being critical because they're thinking of a decapitation strike against North Korea, which is- A bloody nose strategy is the truth they're using. Yeah. And it does feel like they've run up to Iraq. Right? It has been to that. It's like kind of like, you're not really doing this, are you? And then the drum beat continues. It's like, oh, this is really stupid, you can't be doing this. Right. The drum beat to Iraq was more coherent. I lived through that. I was part of the people who were trying to dissent against it. The New Yorker magazine was in favor of invading Iraq. Okay, I mean, a lead opinion supported Bush. Most of the Democrats voted to authorize going to war. But now a lead opinion doesn't matter. So it's- I disagree with you, Dave. I don't think- Thanks to the president. The sales job, look, they may take us to war, I agree, but it will not be one that, like Iraq, was popular from the beginning. The one thing that will make it popular is if the Koreans do something stupid and give us a pretext, you know? Or the Koreans are perceived to have done something stupid. That's right. Gulf of Tonkin. So I love this part of the discussion, in particular because in the run up to the Iraq war, I saw some of the best critical writing that I've seen in a really long time and the moment the war began, all of that just vanished. It's just like poof in a cloud of dust and suddenly we were in a wartime situation. We had a wartime president who then got reelected, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I wanna go back to our premise here about how do we survive present? Partly because the very way we started, I'm really, really interested in the belief systems we all have and the filters we're using to see the news and interpret things. And I think that looking ahead and seeing different things really depends on loosening some of those filters and preconceptions in different directions, which is what scenario planning sort of tries to do in a structured way by driving quadrants of story. But still, the two dimensions you pick in scenario planning could be vanilla dimensions. There are multiple methodologies. It doesn't have to be the GBN style. Yeah. The University of Hawaii. You know from IFTF, the University of Hawaii has been pushing a archetypes model where you have growth decline constraint and growth collapse constraint and transformation. And you use basically those four archetypes, you can fit anything into them. I mean, mixed feelings about that, but you don't have to be limited to just that four quadrant model. But I think your point is well taken that we do try to use scenarios. We try to use forecasting models, forecasting methods as a way of stripping away the obvious bias. You're never gonna strip away all of the bias, but you can try to strip away the obvious bias and try to come up with something, different visions of the future that all seem equally plausible. And as you've heard me say a million times that I know I'm gonna be wrong, I wanna be usefully wrong. And so, the idea with these scenarios is that you're with any forecast is you're trying to come up with incorrect but useful visions of what could happen as a consequence of present day drivers, present day choices, and try to figure out, okay, what do these have in common? What kinds of strategy could we come up with that would actually work across these because whatever actually does happen, presumably it'll be a better fit, which is why things like, you know, mules, wildcards that are completely outside are the set of what we accept as reality are so disruptive. I'd love for us to maybe share some of the ways we handle these things because I'm realizing that one of my MOs and looking ahead is, and I do this very selectively, it all depends on my own sort of bias for you in the world but I'll take a thing that's possible in the future and I'll kind of assume it to be true. And I'll just kind of live in that world as if that thing were actually true. So my assumption right now after having watched hypernormalization and reading up on Surkov and non-linear warfare, I assume we are currently in a non-linear war, we just don't realize it yet. And that all these strategies are really quite intentional, they may not be coordinated, the people may not be as smart as we think, but this is all happening for that which then gives me tremendously different explanations for all this crap that's happening day to day and lets me bear them in a very different way because I'm seeing a different threat, I'm seeing a different dynamic going on, I'm seeing, and it gives me a little bit of plausible predictable force on what they might try to do next, although I haven't successfully predicted it, but then when things happen, I'm like, oh shit, that makes total sense. That makes total sense in this scenario, which is not the scenario which I see the press doing constantly. Oh my God, look at this outrageous thing that Trump did, soon he'll be normal again and then the moment people try to normalize him like after last night's speech or the very first time he spoke in front of Congress, he looked almost presidential and Van Jones sort of saying tonight he became president, holy crap. The moment we try to normalize him. You say that again last night, did he? No, no, no, he actually has been trying to live that down and trying to go completely off the ground. I'm on a list with him and I attacked him, I did something that I got a lot of trouble for, I went after him personally and I was like, what the fuck did you do? Yeah. Oh boy. So I'd love for us to sort of think about and turn over, what's our MO? How do we do this? Because I realized that I do that and I've done that a couple of different ways over technology or whatever, like let's assume that this is going to be true now what happens? Let's assume ubiquitous wireless communications worldwide is cheap and everybody's suddenly on this thing. Holy crap, now what? Let's assume there's a search engine that lets you find anything and I won't claim that I knew that one way ahead of time. But if you can do that, it gives you a kind of clairvoyance into different future states but if your point of view doesn't let you entertain some of those weird and difficult ones. So one of the ones I'm entertaining right now that I hate is, what if we're at the beginning of 200 years of mistrust, of trust being broken, of facts being broken, of scientific method going away. Romanticism is backlash against the enlightenment. Everybody just said, oh, screw that. We're not gonna fix everything through science and enlightenment. Let's go tell stories and let's go back to our native roots. Hitler runs against democracy. In 1933, Hitler is saying, look at the democracies, look how screwed up they are. They're a shit show, look at their economy. I can bring us back to prosperity and pride. Just vote for me and they do. Right, so what are these narratives? Well, yeah, enough of them do that and then he's not taken seriously that he winds up decapitating everybody and shibbing shaboom. Well, I see Hitler's rise to power a lot like Trump's rise to power in one way, which is everybody in his party, in Trump's party, underestimated him. Same as the elites in Germany. And he won a game, he basically survived a multiplayer game where all the other players thought that they would use him to kill somebody else that was more important to kill. Exactly. And when it came time to kill him, they wouldn't unite to do it. But also, he was the only guy who pulled out the actual knives. He pulled out the knives. No, well, getting to being appointed chancellor, he didn't pull out the knives. Right, but that moment, I don't, I think it's rare to have a leader like that who's ready to actually decapitate, actually kill after that. Yeah, when he had to kill his own opponents, sure. But I'm just saying that the book 30 Days to Power, which I read last year is really interesting. And by the way, historians still don't fully understand how this happened. You know, that at the beginning of January 1933, the newspapers had written off Hitler, that he was like in the dustbin of history, his party was in decline. And 30 days later, he's chancellor. How did that happen? Well, Berlusconi's about to win a vote in Italy. And once he times out on his prohibition for money for office, he could be prime minister again. Yeah, bye, Kelly. Thanks, Kelly. So can you, Jerry, can you say more about non-linear warfare as your explanatory frame? Sure. The reason why I ask is something interesting that popped on my radar yesterday, the day before. Because what the Republicans had just started to do this week is extraordinary. The idea that the House judiciary, Republicans are investigating the FBI and the Justice Department, this is unprecedented. The best defense is a really good offense. But it's talk about norm breaking, right? The FBI, which, by the way, may turn out to be much stronger than we know. But... The case for the FBI. The FBI. John Heiliman, who is a pretty centrist commentator, had an interview, he was on TV with two Democratic congressmen and he asked both of them the same question. Is it possible that Devin Nunes has been compromised by the Russians? And that he's actually doing this because the Russians have something on him. And as an explant, what the fuck is Devin Nunes doing? Right? But if you operate from the, oh, well, they got dirt on, that maybe what happened here is the Russians in cahoots with the NRA pumped millions of dollars into the election, not just for Trump, but for House Republicans, they targeted House races too. They, by the way, they hacked the DCCC, not just the DNC. And so this might explain some of the truly bizarre behavior we're seeing that isn't just the usual Save Your President behavior, but it's also personally this guy is compromised. So part of what you're describing, and Jame, you can come in after me and fill in the rest, but partially what you're describing is more rational, underhanded strategy of the sort of dirty tricks kind or just simple blackmail and other things. Nonlinear warfare is more confusing. And I land on that vector through Adam Curtis's documentaries, Bitter Lake and hypernormalization. I just put a link to the Wikipedia page for hypernormalization in our chat. And basically, nonlinear warfare says, hey, information warfare, confusing other people and winning without bullets and bombs is much cheaper than blowing people up. It's much, much cheaper. And it's insane how far you can get with it. So part of what they do is they create intentionally the fog of war. They confuse facts. They make sure that nobody trusts the media. They make sure nobody knows whom to trust. And it's all intentional because when you're really confused, you're going to simply pick up the narrative that makes you feel good. And if I can then in the sea of crap, if I can then present a narrative that makes you feel like your nationality is going to be great again, name your thing. But we're seeing nationalism rise along with populism, along with all this crap worldwide. And part of it is nobody knows what to hang on to. And part of the problem here is that democracy and rational thinking is relatively boring in the face of this. When Dave says, I wake up in the morning and if Trump doesn't own the news with some new thing, I'm a little bit disappointed, I have the same, I'm guilty of the same feeling. I'm like, ah, damn it. He didn't do something really fucked up again. And in a weird way, when the election was about to happen and many people thought Hillary was going to win, it was like, aw, too bad, we won't be able to make fun of him as much anymore. Like the comedy, the butt of comedy was going to be off the main screen. Sure. And so anyway, so that's part of this hyper, this non-linear warfare thing. I sometimes wonder what might have happened had Hillary won. Had she spent an extra day in Wisconsin or whatever was the factor, or somebody didn't click on those Facebook links and send it to a hundred of their friends. There wouldn't have changed the outcome in Congress. So we would have seen a President Clinton vilified for, having been vilified for decades, up against a Congress that has, the entire Obama presidency of experience of pushing back and obstruction. And then with Trump and the Trump News Network, which was apparently the whole plan, being a constant knife in her back about everything with made up stories alongside misinterpretations, alongside facts. And just how depressing and miserable that would be, in part because it would seem like there's just no end to this. That we just went through eight years of that, almost eight years of that with Obama, aside from the first few months. Now we're going to have another four to eight years of that with Clinton, oh my God, has this ever changed? And one thing that I can say that, have just a glimmer, a winter green lifesaver flash it in the dark of hope, is that one of the possible consequences of this darkest timeline we're in, is that it might actually result in some systemic level change. That if we can survive Trump, and I mean that literally in terms of, bloody no strategies at all, if we can survive Trump, then we might actually come out of this with a more resilient system. And that's sort of what I cling on to as maybe, just maybe. You asked me when my coping strategy, aside from whiskey, the coping strategy is in some respects, doomsaing. Because if I try to think through all of the possible horrible consequences of what's happening now, and then what reality turns out to be not quite that bad, then it's actually kind of a relief. Uh-huh. There we go. Good, you wanna mute your mic for a sec or take that? Nope. Okay. Let's go ahead. And it's funny, because I have to go the other way. I have to go towards optimism, because if I get it into the doomsaing, then I just kind of like give up, and then I get the whiskey too, our kind of, so I've had to go the other way, and like, oh, we're gonna have a regenerative future, and there's this abundance possibility, and it's all gonna be wonderful. And I agree, it kind of is contingent on surviving the current era and the destruction of the Republic of Korea today, but then the world's gonna be better. And so, but I have to see the bright side of it. Yeah, the world won't be better, it'll be different. And I want it to be better. Well, I want a pony. You know, the one thing that I, at one point I tried to make in a lot of the talks I gave about foresight thinking is that we have to remember that for the people living in this horrible, spectacular, wonderful dystopian future, that world is normal. What they're seeing around them is their normal day-to-day life. And so we have this luxury of perspective, of looking ahead and seeing the shiny utopia, seeing the horrible swamp-like dystopia. We see these changes as being something different and weird, but we have to remember that for the people who are living them, this is their day-to-day reality. And this is what they've become accustomed to. And so what frustrates me, frightens me, bothers me about the current sociopolitical landscape is that it makes that feeling of normalization, it challenges that feeling of normalization. And I know there's been all sorts of statements that we don't want Trump to be normalized, you're right. But at the same time, we, one of the things about having this kind of persistent provocation, you know, this ongoing process of poking and poking and poking is that we never get to feel like we're having a normal life again. So Jame, can I just say that I completely sympathize, but I often try to think about the last thing, we're not having a normal life, right? So two things, first of all, is it possible that what our parents' generation experienced the post-war boom was exceptional, not typical, right? And that, you know, I mean, I also, I always remind myself, my mother as a child was, her whole family had to go into hiding during the war. They were luckily hidden by the resistance in Belgium, and they all survived. But, you know, I mean, they went through so much worse. I know. And so, you know, whenever we, you know, so like put it in some perspective, okay? I mean, I'm scared of the future going bad. And I do believe that we're running out of time to change course on climate for sure. But I don't think that gives us, I think we've just got to keep perspective against what, you know, I mean, in some ways life is better than it's ever been in terms of life expectancy or, you know, medicine. I mean, all those people who are abandoning experts still, I mean, many of them still take their medicine and go to the doctor. They still use their iPhones. They still use their iPhones. Yes, right? They all believe that the eclipse was gonna happen at the date and time that the scientists said it would. You know, I, Jerry's heard me talk about this 50 year scenario. Yeah. That starts with, you know, economic decline then leads into, you know, a period of great technological transformation, but ultimately accumulates in a global scale war where they use, where chemical weapons are used, followed immediately by a global pandemic where you actually have millions of people around the world killed. Which, you know, finally you end up with a bit of an economic boom that is underscored, you know, underpinnings are completely fragile and eventually that whole thing collapsed. You have an even bigger economic decline which leads to the collapse of governments around the world, the rise of fascism and genocide as policy, which culminates in yet another global scale war that ends with a, you know, the shocking nuclear attack. And I've just described 1895-1945. Right. And so what you were saying a moment ago about perspective, it has smacked me in the face with my own scenario. Yeah. You know, we have been through as bad as this is as of now, we have been through worse. Right. And somebody, again, all my conversations blur after a while and I'm trying to remember, oh, I know who said this. I was, it was, it was Rick Hertzberg from the New Yorker. We were at a dinner together. And his comment was that the rise of nationalism is tied to a generation that did not experience World War II. Right. So, you know, people who don't have a visceral memory of the horror of where nationalism takes us. Are willing to go back somehow. Yeah. It's weird. Like, well, also like in Japan, I understand in the school system, they don't teach World War II. Like Germany lives and relives it and has memorials and Germany has internalized, we fuck this up really big time and we need to keep poking ourselves in the soul or something might happen. So I trust Germany on that, despite the fact of the rise of neo-Nazis in Germany and skinheads and the whole thing, right? Right. But Japan is explicitly ignoring this. And so we have generations of kids who are growing up in like really, really weird warped culture. There are one and a half million Hikikomori in Japan basically shut in grownups who didn't make it onto the escalator of get a, you know, pass a test, get a job, pass a test, get a job, whatever. They fill out the escalator and Japan is incredibly unforgiving for anybody who falls off the escalator. So that and 15 other strange things going on. What happens when all these energies turn the wrong way? And how do we stay in contact with all these people? Because we now have an electronic backdoor that people can reach out through and people can find some solidarity through. Like the It Gets Better videos that came out a couple years ago were tremendous because you then heard these stories of Mormon kids who under their covers with their phones were watching the videos going, oh, okay, maybe it's going to be okay at the end. I don't have to worry about being bullied again tomorrow or I will be, but maybe there's a, you know, an exit strategy somehow. So how do we handle all this? Shame, help us out. How do we handle the present? It's so messy. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're our only hope. And I'm turned to the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama. Not really helping. I got to get one of those cups. I got no wisdom from the Dalai Lama. I've been told a non-quadruped Dalai Lama story by a guy who actually worked with him. I gave a talk with him in Italy, basically the Dalai Lama is addicted to Chinese beef jerky. Oh really? He obviously can't go and get it himself. So basically anyone who goes into China, who's going to meet him later, smuggles back beef jerky for him. Nice. I just, that's always a door cut. But it has to be vegetarian beef jerky. No, that's the thing, real beef jerky. How do we get through this? A lot of it's going to be making horrible jokes. Okay. Dalai Lama and the darkest timelines. Yes. And a lot of it is going to be, God, it's gonna have to come through acceptance that we have to wrestle with the world as it is. That we, whatever vision of a better tomorrow we have, whatever vision of an alternative future we have, or an alternative present we have. You know, it's okay, this is what the world is and this is what we need to grapple with. This is, in many respects, it's the old world changing philosophy of, we have all the pieces for a better future, but we have to respond to the problems that exist. And I do think, despite my doomsaing predilections, I do think narratives of a successful future will be very helpful, very fruitful. And I've actually been encouraging friends of mine who are comic book writers and science fiction writers to try to do stuff like this, simply because having a common language about what a successful, resilient, equitable future could look like, that is still interesting and exciting and unboring and not just another Star Trek rehash. Mm-hmm. That I think could be really encouraging and enlightening, of seeing that a better world isn't just a fantasy, but it's something that we can, we can see up from here to there. And right now it's really difficult to see from here to there. Mm-hmm. How much of this is, what's it mean that we're Americans having this conversation, right? I was thinking about your example of Japan, and I kind of immediately discarded it thinking, well, Japan's not moving the global conversation, right? If they have problems, but if they're insular, and- They're shrinking. The population is shrinking. And it just don't seem to be affecting the global conversation the way they did when you were kids. But China, clearly, has got this global perspective that's just wild, right? I mean, you look at the investments that are making in Africa, for example. Oh, shit, what's going on here? Yeah. So some of this seems to me that we are seeing that transition from America as the superpower to America as another, we're going through our UK moment. But, and we have the difference that we could destroy the world on the way out. There's a definite tension in here. But how much of this conversation is because we are just, we're sitting where we are today. And I mean, part of this is also colored by last few years we visited as a tourist, right? Visited in Vietnam and India. And both of those places don't feel desperate to me, right? I mean, they feel pretty energetic and happy. So I don't know that they're having kind of this angst and self-doubt that we're having here. Could that be because you can't, you are not able to read their social media? Well, I don't know. It could be lots of reasons, right? It could be lots of reasons. But if you go, you wander through the streets of Hanoi or Mumbai, you just see a lot of busy people and you don't see a lot of records, you know? It's things wrong. Yeah, but actually, if you wander through the streets of New York or wander through the streets of LA, you see a lot of busy people. Yeah, I look out my window, I see a lot of homeless people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, San Francisco is kind of the worst mess in the U.S. that way. Yeah. I have to go. It's time. Yeah. Any wisdom? Thank you for the therapy session. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all. I listed up above some silver linings that I've seen from the moment, which is that conversations are hot now that weren't hot before, that we were kind of ignoring, that there's cracks in the system that might actually be filled by better ideas, stuff like that. So I don't know. I think I tend to look toward those things and I'm looking for the simple suggestions that might actually change people's the way we see what we're up against, what we're up to, where we're headed. That's kind of my therapy. I think that I tend to go on to. Kevin Jones is the regenerative economy conference he's going to do. I mean, there is a narrative that's kind of growing. We should totally have a call about that. So yeah, that's it. Jamay, last word? I'm just saying that there's a possibility that I subconsciously try to go for the darkest scenarios and the doom saying simply to push people through sheer annoyance into thinking something more positive. Because it just bugs the hell out of people that all I seem to come up with are horrible, horrible outcomes. No, it just tells you that you need to do something better. Don't follow me. Just push back. Don't do as I do. Don't head toward doom. Don't follow leaders. Watch your parking meters. There you go. Oh, I like that. That's so profound. Thank you all. Thank you very much. This was a great call. Really appreciate it. Good to see you.