 All right, this is an inside Jerry's brain call on Monday the 1st of June 2020 We are toward the end of lockdown and the beginning of possibly the meltdown of the United States I'm not quite sure but there are protests in the streets. Things are looking things looking really grim And we're we're here because I posted a couple videos about The subprime crisis and I was trying to diagnose why you know, why did it happen? And what what have we learned from it? What have we done and Richard? Having seen those sent back a really nice question, which is awesome that, you know, awesome that there's this thesis about SNP that we've cut relationships How might we mend it since we're using the metaphor of the fabric of society and the fabric of long-term relationships and all that how might we mend this and just just by way of introduction Richard if you want to say a little bit to about yourself as we had any of the call but I'll wait for the appropriate time Okay So then if you want to just riff a little bit on what your thoughts were and Where you work and then I can sort of take us into what what I was thinking as well Yeah, I mean, I think I think the thing that hit into my came into my head was the interdependency of Relationships across societies and and there was all that obviously Rendered a tear somewhere quite significant and but we haven't really looked at the I Guess the ripple effect well enough As as to what it's actually causing of in in various different aspects of studies and then there's like there's a Academic or Peter Fleming who uses the metaphor of the tidal wave So I think I think the book is he does it and it's the death of homoeconomus and It he basically suggests we're in stage four of the tidal wave So I can't remember what the various other stages of it So the financial crisis you had the the early warnings So the fish flopping around on the beach and then you had to build up of the wave And then you had the way question down with all the destruction and his his current metaphor is we're now seeing the wave pull back And it's just leaving the sludge everywhere and we're we're sort of wading through the sludge trying to find bits of value But but really it's a dirty and and and disgusting job So that that you know that it's a metaphor that It's quite powerful, but perhaps it doesn't give you much hope I think that I think the snipping the snipping metaphor is a bit more hopeful is that that it gives you the opportunity to Retire relationships and start doing something And it's just It's very easy to write the critique. It's less easy to As as always right time things back together again. Yeah, as always in human history. Yeah, it's funny because You know plans are worthless for planning is useful Everybody has a plan until you know their mouth hits a fist or whatever it was that Mike Tyson said There's a bunch of interesting sayings, but but trying to sort out why things happened I find absolutely fascinating and I have found Alternative explanations of historic events to be truly fascinating to the point of which I'm like Oh, why does nobody see it this way this this really if you can shift your perspective on why things happened It explains a lot of things and explanatory power Is a lovely thing. I think we're all looking for things that have explanatory power, right? And then and then on the repair front in particular with social systems anything that involves human beings who are these squishy You know bags of water held together with a little bit of protein and and lint or duct tape or something like that It's hard to predict or cause anything to happen and they're and what's happening right now in the United States is Violence is happening and the police are responding by turning the knob to 11 They're basically upping the violence instead of instead of realizing that there are other ways to de-escalate and that and that the Problems are systemic etc. So I think and I have a funny feeling just because of the heat of the moment of Of the protests that we're going to sort of switch back and forth between subprime retrospective and he and fixing and what's happening in society right now with policing and fixing because they're actually really related and so and so My approach to all this was that there were all these little long-term relationships and responsibilities that were holding things together And we're doing a reasonable job of it back when Things like you know holding assets for a long time once once you've made a loan Things like having your reputation and your own money on the line for a long time and that those things were all systematically taken away And so and since this is a these calls are called inside Jerry's brain Let me do a little screen sharing Of my brain and take us back into that section just So we can kind of pick up the plot where it was and this is the the Complicated section where I was trying to summarize the different kinds of long-term relationships that we snipped and so we snipped Bankers and investors Responsibility for long-term outcomes right So lenders used to know their clients and all of a sudden we sort of delaminated and this is where I hadn't heard the term vertical Disintegration before I had clearly heard about vertical integration But what happens when an industry goes from being vertically integrated to to being slivers of value being pulled out of it Is called vertical disintegration? So and here's an article from 2005 Sort of examining what you know, how and why markets emerged in mortgage in mortgage banking and how that all work so partly Partly the work of the work of Severing all these relationships was kind of patient and long term In the sense of many of these things took a really long time Like you don't take an industry like banking and and convert its very structure overnight and you don't do it through one order or one thing So in order to get back toward other other kinds of things you You need you need to put some mechanisms in place or laws in place that motivate people to do something different And that's so I just I'll just touch a couple things here and then and then come back into the conversation but then I also have a thought here lessons from SNP and finance and This was the third video was not just lessons, but we know what might we do and this area These are these are my lessons from it But then I I don't have a lot under what we have done after the global financial crisis I just don't and one One of my conclusions is we should have just rebooted Moody's Fitch and standard and course And it turns out that we don't have a lot of recourse That what they did doesn't run afoul of a whole bunch of laws and it's unclear whom they're responsible to and how this whole thing actually works Another thing is reinstating Glass-Steagall and there was an earnest effort by Elizabeth Warren John McCain and others to do that in 2013 which failed right and so so I'm interested in what What other what other ways you would see the kinds of things we would we could reinstate So what have they what have they done? What actually what actually we seen done that was positive Jerry so they did So they didn't pass some legislation. There was a certainly there was tarp and there was a bunch of of emergency Aid passed and then there were some laws passed but the laws were quickly weakened and the the basically the Here it is to the Dodd Frank Wall Street reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 Which happens after the meltdown under under Obama. It's led by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank And it leads the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and you may have followed this But Elizabeth Warren was essential in the creation of that bureau and then she was possibly going to lead it And there was objection to that So they put a fellow named Richard Cordray in charge and then they basically I think from my understanding defanged it they basically took progressively managed to Get rid of whatever power it had over control so and I'm and again, I'm no finance expert and I'm walking around here picking up evidence and trying to you know glue the evidence together to demonstrate how it all connected Systemically important financial institutions get extra scrutiny. That's that was sort of a review of the Dodd Frank reform act Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal About you know, there was a movement to repeal Dodd Frank Donald Trump plans to undo the Dodd Frank law and fiduciary rule Etc etc So then they passed the Economic Growth Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act in 2018 which weakened Dodd Frank so like that and and and It's it's actually really frustrating because I'm Partly what frustrates me here is that There was really no safe harbor from this disaster there were very few people who avoided it and I think I think the moment where I got that was when I read I Read this article. It's the economy doom copped by Michael Lewis and it's it was in Vanity Fair and he he very acutely had riffs on Germany's obsession with shit because There is that but then he talks about this little Eka Bay Deutsche Industrie Bank, which was this little fund Up in Northern Germany, which went bust because they had invested in CDOs and CDS's etc And I realized that that the the breaking of Glass-Siegel the linking together of everybody in In one big bucket Basically made it so that you your old savings bank was no longer a good old conservative savings back it was just as likely to be affected by this whole thing and one of one of one of my lessons from this whole disaster is that a savvy investors love volatility like You know, I went to I went to business school and you talk about beta and volatility and all that and you kind of had This idea that volatility is a bad thing that you're trying to dampen volatility because you want growth to be regular and stable Savv investors don't want predictable stable growth predictable is really bad they want swings and If you can get everybody to pool their money on the swing and then catch the swings, right? You win big like that That's how you go home happy that you've conquered the you know You're the master of the universe you've conquered the world's financial system and I'm being a little a little cynical here But but the whole set of experiences around the subprime cases and then the global financial crisis made me go there right And I'll let me let me hit pause for a second and see how this reflects your own your own experience of it or reflectance on it I I certainly agree with the the loving volatility thing I mean, I think that's that's one of the I guess the the major challenges of the snips is that you're the the actual the fate or the expectations market and the actual market have been Totally disconnected because the expectations market wants volatility in the actual market wants stability and I I Would assume behind the scenes there's an awful lot of stuff going on to try and make it volatile so people can make money and with that kind of disconnect then You're in a very tricky position the anyway. I guess the anyway you can Deal with it is is what people something like Roger L. Martin's trying to do which is cast Try and argue that the expectations market needs to be reconfigured So then he doesn't do this kind of thing or the long-term stock exchange as well long to yet And then long term stock exchange, right? So that so the value is actually based on the real stuff that companies are doing And I think you've had a little You're getting beginning signals that that that is the case because I think that you know the big What's going on at the moment? You're gonna have The unicorns collapsing which were which would growth focused and it is how you make your Masses and there's a there's certainly an argument there that there's gonna be a shift away from growth to devalue for the investors trying to invest in that kind of thing so there's some kind of Discussion going on between the various different points around What investment or good investment should look like but it's clashing with a I guess even clashing. I guess it's even clashing with the software that these guys use which are just looking for Looking for volatile signals and and and doing it without even the trade is necessarily being involved Right, so there's a black box element. I think as well Exactly and here's a Roger Martin's book. I didn't I have not read this book But fixing the game bubble so good capitals and can learn from the NFL That's interesting. Very good. It's about stock prices are just like point spreads in football. Yeah. Yeah So he argues the real market is is can be doing extremely well But if it doesn't match what? What the spread suggests? The company doesn't get The capital is after the stock price will go down, right, right, so it doesn't really measure a real value Yeah, well, I remember also when I was in business school. I went to a lecture where a guy who was a world-class accountant Sort of corporate value accountant He did an analysis of Coca-Cola and he said here's the book value of Coca-Cola. I've gone deep I counted everything I went all over the place and he could account for two-thirds of Coca-Cola's market value as book value And he said and he pointed to the third he pointed to the rest of the other third. He said this is just a mystery The this is good will we put this in the big bucket of good will We you know if we're trying to assess the market value and give it some name or some identity we put this into this weird bucket called good will or something else and That was kind of not very helpful And and so there's this huge disconnect between actual value being created on the ground and what the markets are doing And what's weird is that when when lockdown hit and the stock market plunged faster and deeper than ever before Nobody expected it to have at least a short-term v recovery because it just it just started climbing immediately Partly I think because the investors who can swing markets really love volatility and the fact that all the air had gone out So quickly was a major shopping event and I don't know. I think we're still we're still on a precipice as far as I can tell I mean even even even our event my local investment with my wife It's just focused on once there's a swing in prices, which stocks look undervalued right everybody Yeah, well, it's not it's only bottom feeling. It's just here's the spikes and and it might impact somebody somebody somewhere else So she just looks at under what stocks that she thinks are historically undervalued rather than waiting for it to hit the bottom So she just looks at where You know as the as the turbulence is hit all this company seems very undervalued at the moment So it's worth worth investing in because they actually and so she does do the Sort of the market value what she thinks market value is versus expectations and it works reasonably well We make we make reasonable amount of money out of it But that's not what the big guys do right they Can try and create this quality they have they have enough heft that they can shift It's like it's like a wave making pool, you know, they have the energy to make the big waves There's another thing that was connected to that book to fixing the game Which was the the dumbest idea in the world maximizing shareholder value or post-inforbs by Steve Denning But this whole one of the contributors here is this notion that maximizing shareholder value is okay And you know and here I've got two thoughts opposite each other I've got defenders of maximizing shareholder value. Here's an here's an article from the economist Yeah, these are actually both from the economist Which is coming around by the way, and then here's a bunch of articles critiques of This whole notion of shareholder value and then that's coupled a lot with executive exorbitant executive compensation, which I have as well in there and and these are kind of like Bad ideas humming in the background informing all the other decisions that are being made in these systems in different ways Again, this is results you got Martin's work Popping in here as well because Martin argues that that shareholder value is a real problem And you should focus on customer delight Yeah, and and John K's work is incredibly important in this space His work on obliquity Of week strategies. Yeah. Yeah that that actually a liquidity and indirect way to success and that you're That's that that's a critique of shout of the shareholder value that if you take the shareholder value as a target You actually will stop Stop delivering shareholder value if you take it If it's at the focus point if you actually focus on the oblique stuff You're going to deliver shareholder value So you do the other stuff and you you create shareholder value But you don't focus on shareholder value as the be all and they'll end all it's it's a it's a by-product It's a by-product. So I think I think you've got people like Martin and John K and then there's the the the value is and so the strategic management forum in the UK and their Care concept of value is and which is all arguing around how we rethink value I don't have them. No, you probably wouldn't I should They only really operate in the UK So they do they they work they run a whole bunch of sort of HBR events around strategy and value And so they have a concept called value isn't They haven't written their book yet, I've just met them a few times. Oh interesting. So they're new He's been the guy that runs it for Barnet has been around for a long time He used to run he's run had the strategic planning for him and change it to the I misspelling it That's part of my problem here. Yeah, there you go. That's him Got a picture of him. So he's sort of been around the world speaking about he's trying to I Guess trying to create a methodology of putting all of this stuff together But because it's you'll find a whole bunch of stuff on on LinkedIn because it's so non mainstream Wow interesting He's quite big in this the sort of the the strategic thinkers in in the UK and they always sort of they run some really interesting events Part of the Drucker forum and stuff like that. So they work together That's super interesting. So I'm adding about I'm adding value isn't to my favorite one of my favorite thoughts in my brain Just called just called isms and so autodidacty system behaviorism asshole ism anti-semitism anti-positivism Anti-americanism etc. And so here's values on Which I will connect up to value How about casino ism? Is there such a movement? Why not why not no seriously? Yeah, I don't it's just a I mean I'm hearing this Conversation, and I'm wondering Why are we surprised I do have casino capitalism as a variant Yeah, and who's running the game who runs house here, right? Volatility improves the the opportunity for the players who've got the Tools to make it work I don't know. This is probably familiar to you Richard the the great money trick Haven't read that one it's Robert trestle the Ragged treasured philanthropist. Okay, I've read that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is the core of it. It's basically the The capitalist will employ the worker until the capitalist has enough asset and then the capitalist Closies down the plant walks away Not his job to apply the people at his job is to Satisfy shareholders etc etc and the the irony is perhaps the the other one here Which you might also know Never come Monday. No, this is why these conversations are good because I learned stuff Well never come Monday is the sort of the other end of it. It's the concept that The Workers withdraw I leave the capitalist to wonder what's going on Now one of the interesting things about the last few months has been that all the essential services That have been cut and maintained and whatever's who's where the one that's never stopped is bank interest Which drives rental Which basically is the The lifeblood of the whole damn game at some level or another it's all the small businesses are faced with rent costs Ellen Brown had a really good article the other day about how this was really just turning out to another bank bailout that Governments are issuing loans all over the place helicopter money coming from every direction you can think of it But the banks are still insisting on being repaid So again as a government we are going to Satisfy the banking industry to make sure that nothing falls off and we keep getting back to business as usual Sad For me this this looks like a Well history doing it all again, you know, there's never been anything unusual about this sort of a process It's get them up the ladder and then knock out the runs You Create energy to raise the bubble then the bubble burst right this is the the creating a waves because yeah in waves They have energy they have money. Yeah Let you get the dead cat balance if you if you go too far, right? But basically This seems to be well under control business as usual Drive in the suckers and then shake them off Okay, so Michael can I bring your can I bring your last cynical part of your character yourself into this and ask you what what? How might we We've some of the the snipped fabric here in the system and I know that You're one of one thing is you're a fan of circular money And just changing the nature of the aspect of money. What what other kinds of responsibilities and connections could be Mended here. I Think it's beyond Mending I Don't see how you're gonna put this cat back in his bag, you know, there's one that is bounced dead Well, I'm mixing too many and But Basically, this is a runaway condition that has run away derivatives on derivatives on derivatives on opportunity on corporate quarterly bonuses on Like in Canada, for instance the banks Annual profit is somewhere in excess of a thousand dollars per person in the country Now I haven't really traced the figures through it all but if their profit is a thousand dollars per person in the country What is their turnover? What is the? The figures on this stuff and it's pretty appalling when you think about it now Michael Hudson's got a very good critique of the banking industry is the parasite that persuaded the host That the banking industry is the host and we're lucky to have it Michael Hudson out of Kansas somewhere he's He's got credentials. He's the son of Carlos Hudson He's part of the modern monetary theater theory people Institute for the study of long-term economic trends I let and Here's how the how economic theory came to ignore the role of debt how finance behaves like a parasite toward the economy Exactly yeah, and here's I'm connecting up to parasites basically Parasitism parasites numb the host's nervous system. That's one of the ways that they they take over basically the control Their hosts And I guess my perception is that they this may have gone too far to come back I think particularly in regimes like the United States and with the other little issues that are bubbling up at the moment We may be looking at the big meltdown. Yeah Do you think it's you think that's globally gone too far or? We just said the United States specifically, but yeah, is it a global challenge? Well, it's driven by different issues I mean the Chinese stock market and the Chinese government are in a different world than the Americans the Russians yet again what's happening in in Qatar You know everybody's looking for a safe place to park their ass And everybody's made sure that there aren't that many safe places like it used to be we had blue chip stocks, right? They were considered this the the safe stalled stocks There's no more blue chip sector and the companies that used to perform in those industries are no longer Reliable and predictable in the way those used to be so There's very few safe harbors right now Defending I don't know what I don't know what it is and and we've all we've monetized everything So we think that money is important to hold in order to retire and not be poor And then we've made it so that it's really hard to protect really hard to put someplace and keep So everybody has a set like there's kind of a collective anxiety about this little dynamic here that that keeps us all at the end of our seats. Yeah, I think and it's it's It's sold as well the bank profits are good, but that's all right. They're in all of our pension plans They're in all of our RSPs. They're in all of our stock portfolios They're not in mind, baby I don't have many of these things You know so the idea that the banks are necessary to keep the numbers crunching so that the prediction of the Pension market is going to run That's a bit of a disaster. I think we're on that one And I'm just pointing here in my brain too I was trying to figure out how did I get to Michael Hudson and all of that And I think one of the vectors in was uh, and this is the david bin article I was just pointing to but but here's nick hanauer and his his now multiply given speech the pitchforks are coming Basically. Hey wealthy people like me Uh, don't you see that people are really pissed off that this hasn't been working Like can't you read the tea leaves? And so the this post by david brinn was basically pointing up to referring to hanauer and a bunch of others Brinn is a science fiction author who's kind of a conservative but has Interesting radical theories about how things ought to fit together But but partly I'm doing a little retrospective a little uh forensic research on how did I get? How did I get to Hudson and his ideas on parasitism? And what what I love about conversations like this is that first I learned a bunch of new things I hadn't heard of before which I then later go add to the brain, but also it turns over soil and stuff I had hit but not noticed So the articles you just mentioned, uh, you know Here's the ragged, you know the ragged trouser philanthropists book by trestle I had seen it obviously at some point in in the past and I think I got to it from a world economic forum article nine novels that changed the world here's a post that That somebody wrote And so that's you know the jungle grapes of wrath all quiet To kill a mockingbird uncle thom's cabin All of these all of these books are actually quite familiar except this funny one over here Right and and so I need to go back book that the main reason is it's a terrible book. Oh good. Yeah It's it's it's it's another, you know pamphlet attached by the binding, you know There's about seven little stories and it's it's well structured and It's survived in many adaptations and yeah tv spectaculars and so on but Basically, it's it's polemic pedantic preaching Boring so it's never the grapes of wrath scale or anything like that very interesting So I wonder how it made the weft thing because it must be saying something important It's right on the money. He's right on the money down dead and flat It's just that his delivery mechanism is polemic And nothing has changed in the hundred years since he published it. Wow Yeah, so here's I just went to perkins book confessions of economic hitman Which I almost always describe as the worst the worst written most interesting book out there Like like dude dude cannot write. It's a tarot. It's you know, this is as far from Faulkner as you can run in the room And and yet it's riveting because you know, how do we create dead traps? How do we how do we basically kidnap the resources in countries? We we get them to sign up for a really big program. They actually can't afford We colonize first we come with the guns then we come with the germs Then we offer a flag, but basically we import the money And money is a colon colonization device Well, this is this is what china is doing, of course in the belton road projects is that they're they're colonizing southeast asia and africa and other bits Which is That that almost beyond it. So I don't know whether this is is the right way to take this but but Is something more akin to china's model if china succeeds as america begins to disintegrate if if the worst case Is there going to be any learning from that? Good news bad news I mean, I don't see a difference We're still operating on scarcity power exploitation destruction lack of externalities under consideration You know, it's it's a power trip. Oh, yeah, absolutely whose power trip are we playing? Whoever's got the whip. Yeah, I think I mean, I think the That there is a little bit more skin in the game with some of the executives in china because of the government regulation and And like if you if you do this Yeah, I'm not suggesting that we do that but but you know Taking over all of the assets of of the people who committed to thought You know, we basically renationalizing the company If fraud was committed and imprisoning the the family and You know, that that's their response to this kind of thing Which makes you know, doing risk management in hong kong, which is what my wife does quite an interesting job because of the law Oh my god What is the knock on impact for for people who've been committed fraud in hong kong, which is a lots of people So so, you know, is is is that is that If china Begins to to push forward and because they're regulating to this this different level Is there any of any chance that there's parts of the west? I mean, I haven't been to america for years. So I All I hit all I hear is the the anti-regulation rhetoric that comes out of out of the republican party You know, is that so dominant that You know regulation means lack of growth means Is there any way to Make it make a dent into that rhetoric? Well, go breath and a shot at it about 50 years ago That missed yeah But if as if if the crumble continues, is there a way to make a a dent in that rhetoric Yeah, well, I live on an island where three percent of our food supply is grown locally And the other 97 comes on trucks across the ferry Well, that's two percent more than we grow locally Good point So let me let me just inject a note of Optimism in this conversation so that we don't all don't all need counseling after the call Um and so I've gone to a part of my brain called promising solutions to world crises and thorny social problems and There are many many many people Making really interesting plays for how we might redesign society, humanity, economic systems, etc And I try to collect them here. So there's there's one thing called game b Jim rut is kind of the hub of game b. He Used to be an entrepreneur with net solutions and we use at the tomson corporation and at the source and he ran this he I think he No, I'm thinking of somebody else, but he was at Santa fans to do for a while and Game b is and game a is is basically the the present system game b is like where do we go from here And there's a whole bunch of energy on that right now a lot of people are doing Really interesting work there and there's some videos here on what is game b and how that works But there's a bunch of people doing these kinds of things and uh, some of these are subcategories So the idea of commoning living in the commons David bollier is is a huge force there There's a really tremendous, you know transition towns There's a lot of these have energy And are actually moving in interesting directions. It's just that they haven't Collected up their energy and and and linked up they haven't tipped any of the large institutions or The large institutions we're talking about haven't devastated themselves enough That someone else can pick up and jump in and I'll add a complicating factor here, which unfortunately comes from the dark side again People like steve van and a bunch of others believe in sort of these these cyclical theories about the fourth turning for example Which Basically says that every 80 years or so here's steve van and here's the fourth turning by neil howan william strouse generational theory and a bunch of other theories That say that we need to catalyze a disaster so that we can pick up and reorganize society Except I don't think that those of us on this call want to be in the society that bannon would like to reorganize Once everybody's picking up the pieces right? I think that bannon's approach to things has little to do With what I've been collecting here under promising solutions to world crises um And so I I'm I'm quite into the the sort of different interpretations of stage theory So we're beginning to there's three different ways of perceiving this Yes, one is the the the one that bannon is doing is that we go through these four sites. So it's the um The spangler stuff that the the the rise and fall of the The roman empire is that we go through these four stages of and the last stage is sort of decay and and and so So your birth your eyes you peek and you decay and decline and death And then out of it comes a reimagined Society and I think I mean bannon is almost kick a guardian in his Attempt to recreate christianity sort of an old school christianity on on earth Uh, and Freud, uh, sorry, um, night should talked about, you know, he was trying to recreate this sort of the the greek The joyous greek society pre christ But a lot of a lot of a lot of people who look at this as sort of a Nietzschean in in in their Direction, so that's one that's one um The second is that so the hegelian model is that there's actually no cycles that we just get more and more Turbulence as we create a more and more perfect society So before you get to your perfection, you you have all of these turbulent challenges that you have to get past But we're we're on an upward path Now my favorite theory is the sort of the the stuff that came out of the uk over the last 20 years so zygmunt bowman and Giddens and they talk about having to come to terms with just increasing fragmentation and liquidity of life That all we're going to get is a disintegration of certainty and more and more ambivalence and fragmentation and Different perceptions and different interpretations and we have to learn to live with it and we have to design institutions that can help us learn to live with this Rather than Train us to expect certainty and then deliver certainty. So I I think that's The way the world is we are we are going to go into a fragmenting liquefying society Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just that's the direction, but A lot of people like bannon find that extremely Anxiety provoking. Yeah, they would prefer to tear down a world like that to create a new form of order and in balance to the judeo christian kind of Rebirth of america for it with his judeo christian roots. It's the flip side of sharia law basically It's the christian version of thereof Yeah, so I I I think one of the big challenges is to Just want to say and this really and then one of the big one of the issues I have is a lot of the postmodernists try and do the The multiple interpretations stuff and they do it so badly They're going to fragmented identity rather into rather than into the sort of fluidity of of life But that's a divide that that sort of defines where we are at the moment. You've got One group wanting to tear down Different ways of interpreting the world and another group trying to create different ways of interpreting and they don't have to talk to each other Now where the economy in the banks sit in all of that. I'm not a hundred percent sure I think they're I think they're jammed in the middle of that whole thing because That's that's one of the major arenas where this battle plays out And those are the people who control who gets resources over time Etc. Etc. So, you know, then the other another one is politics political battles and the rise of the alt right around the world Is another one of the titanic arenas and these things probably have substantial overlaps I don't know about but one of this is one of the Fascinations I have right now. So this is one of my favorite thoughts right now Again to the dark side, but we're in a titanic battle over the narratives in our heads And by the way, by the way, we've always been this is just a characteristic of society And if you if you read the you've all know a harari. He's like, you know, our ability to create collective fictions This is what distinguishes humans from lots of other critters And I'm carrying that idea of collective fictions into collective fictions are how we control society once you get more than 12 people in the tent You need to figure out how to manage a whole bunch of people and the easiest way to do that is to convince them all of some script Some narrative some belief system And if you can if you can sort of tow the line on that and be consistent That works pretty well. And you know Ancient egypt does this for 2000 years Not because they don't know how to draw perspective and naturalistic renderings But because this is what religion says Sacred art looks like I thought that was Egyptian It was walk like in egyptian, but still that that was a later that was a later remix of said culture Yeah, I caught a um a broadcast by dave snodin the other day. I put the facebook link up there It's about an hour of snodin just Ripping it off. I don't know if you know dave snodin stuff. I've met him a couple times. He's brilliant whenever he speaks I take notes and I like fill my pita my sheet of paper immediately He's he I've never heard him quite so dense as he is in this He doesn't doesn't bother sort of elaborate you much. He just lays it down and moves on to the next one I was I was in his in call with him on wednesday and he was very dense Yeah Yeah, he's right in there One of the things he was he was mentioning was Memes are out tropes and narratives connected narratives Really? He thinks memes are out Memes are past days, sir. You've got to stay with it. Come on memes are over I don't know Well nobody does but he's making the point that if you're going to change things rather than just disrupt them It has to include some degree of coherence, right? Therefore narratives and tropes rather than bang bang memes now He also makes the point that our danger is um, what I think he called retrospective coherence Uh-huh that we go back to business as much as possible as we can Where if there's any indication here it is that business as usual is the problem, right? so We have the danger of people grabbing for um Just like it used to be And that's not where we really need to be So retrospective coherence in the way you understood it from him was Gosh, if only we could go back to the good old days It's like our desire to make a coherent view of the world by going by going back to that world Or now am I misunderstanding it short term back and I think he's tech talking about going back three months Not three years. Not 30 years. Oh really talking about the danger of people just sort of back to Exactly the same procedures and drivers and activities that have given us the Just in time supply chain all the fragility Well, we once this Humpty has Dumped and it has Why have I never heard that said before go ahead I don't know you just weren't in luck Anyway, this one is not going back on the wall You can't put these pieces to be I gotta oh look the plane crashed pick it up and throw it. It's not going to work Now all sorts of consequences are going to come out of this Nobody has any idea what they are unless they're Very lucky in the casino so one of Two thoughts one is that I'm collecting up what large-scale social changes will look over the pandemic drive So what you know and there's plenty of talk about this But but from what you just said one of my takes on history is that for every large historic event There were there were a bunch of people who were right Before him a whole bunch. It's just that nobody was listening to them. What they were saying was so unpalatable So taboo so outrageous so unexpected that nobody could hear it Whatever it is a few of those people were just lucky because they were just like throwing spaghetti on the wall But a few of those people had a coherent view of what was up And could describe it and understand it so so after trump won I I I basically collected up my the best I could find Uh, where did I put it? I I've collected up the best articles about trump's win That I could that I could I could find which are these right here And so jonathan hate talking about stuff scott adam's dillbert Actually did some really good analysis of trump Adam kurtis in the documentary hyper hyper normalization talks about Trump figures six times in hyper normalization published in 2016 Uh, you know before he wins the way before he wins the election and all that So I also have a thought uh people and systems who predicted the trump victory. Here's scott adam's richard rorty mark blight michael moore who does this article five where is it? five reasons why trump will win Here it is Five reasons why trump will win excellent and accurate right and and and so I say all of that because Right now somebody is out there writing very reasonable pieces for what's going to stick and what's not sorry bringing us back to where we were in the conversation and I think Trying to figure out reasoning systems, you know, or some some kind of logics or ladderings or scaffolding for why is is really important and And Can help us figure out what which of the many promising solutions to this situation to back for example Or where to apply a lever or some glue to the situation so that Um, they can so that things cohere better and and so that one side tips and gets more energy more momentum more More whatever than the other. Does that make sense? But at this point what we're looking at is the fake news They post truth They make it up as you go along the right to believe what you like and so The the collective unintelligence Yes It's I mean we talk about Yeah, just the the things that we all don't want to talk about because they're so Edgy and problematic. So they just drift under the surface and become the norm Right that basically runs us whether we know it or not and The collective unintelligence at this point is run for the for cover No point sticking your head up. You're gonna get knocked off Which historically is a good strategy You know Gotta say a lot of the survivors are the ones who reacted that way for various bad events in the world in world history Um, and you're right. You're totally like and and for me the fake news is basically an extremely intentional undermining of trust That they're that that a bunch of people who studied sociology psychology mass psychology a whole bunch of interesting realms Have discovered that if you can strike fear in people's hearts and undermine their faith in science facts journalism, whatever Uh, you can then run the table for a while And and I think I mean historically you don't get to run the table for that long and things end badly, but people don't seem to mind that You know a few times that you get to run the table for a couple centuries. That's awful good Um, and I think that's maybe that that that they're making But uh, but this is I think this is very intentional So maybe cynicism Is the solution that you just stop believing anything Therefore you get you don't get the anxiety. Um Yeah, maybe maybe that that's well, it's it's it's I think I think um, I I Try to cultivate a kind of realistic optimism In myself and and by realistic I mean all the stuff I'm describing about what's going down and you know fake news and the things Michael's bringing up And I've got a few things I need to research and add to my brain afterward that I haven't heard of But but I want to be clear eyed about what's going down right now and not Ignore a bunch of things because They're too hard to contemplate or they just don't make sense from my old With my old lens stomach sense I'm not sure I think that's that's a more modern interpretation of cynicism than I was going for Oh good The alignment with apathy So I was going for this last sluss of dyke's critique of cynical reasons So when he devised between kekinicism and cynicism Um, and I'm always on the kin the the clinical side where where there's actually action involved that you you see the shit underlying What's going on, but that doesn't Depress you will make you apathetic It it's it's it's almost a perspective that an out of it comes comes action So when it moves me into irony rather than because I think you failed in his critique in the end of his critique So who is it slot? Can you name Peter sloss of dyke? Uh, s l o t e r d y k I think I will let google Critique of cynical reason Uh, s. Oh, uh, one t. You're right. Uh, Peter slaughtered back to poly university On the book No, that's maybe a different Peter slaughtered probably a different sort of dyke The book is criticism critique of cynical reason There we go cool Well, that's that's that's arguably that the great sort of modern critique of Of the of what's going on with cynicism. I mean he's been sort of Replaced a little bit by zizek in in that direction. Okay. This is really weird. You're seeing what I just did, right? So we figured out how to spell them correctly I went and looked it up again and uh, I at some point have run across obviously Peter But but I will note I didn't absorb him Meaning that was yes. I'm not surprised. It's a bastard of a book to read Three three attempts to understand what he was going on about And and I don't I don't buy all the books that are in my brain And I don't try to digest them all but I'm always happy when I find a really really excellent analysis in particular a comparative analysis between various people's thinking And so I had you know The book in here But I had no idea what role it plays in in thinking about the world So thank you for that and can you just can you just talk about this for a little bit more? Yeah, well, he's basically arguing that that we all have called the game So we sort of know to certain levels that that the good and the powerful are Are being cynical in there. There's a potted ethical intentions um And so that everyone is cynical To some extent because they've they've called the game and they don't believe the pronouncements of the powerful um And he just he he sort of historicizes that he he goes back into history and shows all the examples of it And then he argues that that's led us towards apathy and actually that there's an active form of cynicism If you go back to the the ancient greeks Uh that we've forgotten and and and that was that was almost a performance art That you you tried to reveal the shit In the midst of the tinsel and and sort of say well, you know that there however Smart and fancy you think you're being there's all of this going on underneath and and maybe we should Try and take a bit more of a middle ground and try and do something about it Rather than just ignore its existence or wallow in it, which are the the two other options Um now that sort of takes me into to to back to what Dave Snowden was trying to do. Yeah Yeah, Dave's incredibly cynical. I mean he's one of the most cynical people I've ever met And he's crying and and it's quite interesting because I I had this discussion with him about tropes and narratives last Wednesday So he's moving away from um delusion theory when he talks about um, what is it? What is it called tropes delusion has different word for tropes as appendages Uh, I mean he's going back into classical rhetoric when he goes into tropes and narratives um And that's what the right is doing the right uses tropes and the right uses rhetoric and the left uses science and rhetoric beats science every day Dave is trying to go back into rhetoric to to compete But he talks as michael said in this dense scientific language Yes, so he spent the masses of time talking about Sort of this quantum entanglements and using that in social science and you're sort of going well, I saw the follow day But I haven't read Yeah, yeah And so so we had a little discussion. I said look you've got to understand how tropes work before you can start Doing this and I talked about cynic decker, which is is tropes have there's there are four sort of master tropes in the work of the As a Kenneth Burke is the guy who sort of first wrote about this Um, and he talks about the four master tropes, which are metaphor metonymy, cynic decker and irony um, and you break When when someone Believes something it's when they start speaking in cynic decker. So which the metaphor gets broken down into metonymy So that's the sub parts of a metaphor And as you move back up to the concept for the metaphor So you start using the sub parts to within your speech And that illustrates what your belief system is So it's it's a movement instead of a movement down where you're trying to break a metaphor down into its component parts to To make sense of it. It's an element back up Where meaning when you you start using the component parts, I mean that that constructs your worldview So his argument is that's that he hears it everywhere And that's the process of getting someone to believe in a new in a new model of thinking Is to get is to break it down and turn it into something that everybody starts using So if you then go into the coughs work, that's what he argues with the Was it the the George lay cough? Yeah the um, I think you know, don't you gerry? Yeah, yeah He was a neighbor in Berkeley and I met him in a couple events So he took what does he talk about the the Metaphors we live by The stern father and the nurturing mother or exactly something moral politics Here moral politics So he talks about sort of that paternalistic metaphor The nurture and parent and the strict father strict father. Yeah, so you can see By the language people use which belief system that they they're embedded in and they believe fiction the fiction that they will defend with their lives So the argument that I think the argument and perhaps partially you made him in one of our previous conversations is the right is incredibly good at this Yes left is incredibly bad at this. Yes, the left only has lay cough kind of and the right has a whole army of people Yeah, and Dave was trying to do it is not using language That I mean it's losing language that even the brightest of the bright struggled to follow That's really How do you change that? Wow, she's trying to do into a into a sort of a holding metaphor that works So so one of my beliefs is that the post modernists Were largely right They were correct in their critiques, but two problems. They were too early The the tidal wave had not crested over them. The consumerism had to play out a lot longer Than where they were in time But also they ended up speaking only to themselves in a jargon That was impossible to penetrate from the outside. So so they made themselves useless By basically creating an sort of an internecine discipline That that nobody else could penetrate. So it sounds like it sounds like that might be a habit custom practice or result Of thinking very deeply about something that matters where your language gets refined This is what happens in phd programs. Your language gets refined So that every word is freighted and what you think this word means is not what the general public thinks this word means Those are two There's like there's like this gap between the specialized term and the public perception of the term And so I think I think what you're saying is If you can take an every man's approach toward language tropes Ideas and just drop them in one at a time so that they're easily accessible absorbable and and forwardable and likable and You know retweetable You can then take over the conversation You're a synaptic key. I guess which as a word. I've never paid attention to And now and now must And and therefore you can change The narrative that ruled that dominates us in the way that I was talking about earlier And I just took us to another thought in my brain Which is another really important one emotion and membership trump reason most of the time stories are the vessel Absolutely Yes, so I could create and and this is one of my misgivings with using the brain and trying to work into an environment Where we might do more of conversations like this with a little bit of context, which is This is not emotional or I can tell stories around the brain, which is interesting That's kind of this interesting middle ground But this is my attempt to marshal facts arguments definitions relationships references context And that's all reason right and so somebody who can who can instead appeal well to emotions and create a really slap-dash fabulous A narrative is going to wash right over Attempts to attempts to do The logic of the matter and so i'm trying to figure out How do for me personally How do I tell better stories? How do I how do I connect through emotions instead of through? You know these these other vessels And how does that all work? You're going to struggle because you're a heart of scientists and scientists scientists find a rhetoric a dirty word Yes, um, because they they think the best argument should win Exactly, which is what science tries to do itself internally Yeah, absolutely, but that's not how you win the hearts and minds of the public Correct You you do something else um Yeah How do you do so the question here? How do you how do you end up having a richer? Rich of a cabin or about in trump's terms a dump of a cabin, right, but it tracks more people Well, how do you do that scott adams's? analyses Of trump from the seduction community perspective We're absolute genius So here's here's scott adams on trump. Here's scott adams. He's the the guy who writes dillbert Here's dillbert, which is an industry of its own came out in 1989 but he he is a Kind of a contrarian, like I'd say and he came out with a whole bunch of really nice posts Which I went through like clown genius trump the closer trump makes univision do the perp walk Trump and birtherism etc These are all his analyses of trump at work And this is why when I did my videos on trump, I was like trump is far more on the ball and far more dangerous than we think he is Not that not that trump understands delos and has figured out the mechanisms in our brains Or the neurochemistry and the dopamine and the none of that not not a piece of that He's probably never picked up a book on any of this stuff and doesn't care But he has an understanding a deep understanding built from roi kohn and his father and a bunch of others Of how humans individually and collectively work From this fear perspective and this manipulation perspective and these things he's a black belt in a complete black belt Right and so what's interesting one of the silver linings of the trump era is that There are now on the table a whole bunch of topics that were sort of taboo And we're just off the table a long time ago. We can now talk about all this stuff Right, it's it's out. It's out. It's it's bubbled forth and a lot of the people a lot of the latent Racism that was buried in the country is now boiling over in the streets and the racists have come out and said here I am Right, that's interesting But what to do about it? Right And how to combat extremely intelligent narrative overthrow Yeah, it's intelligence narrative couched in in in dumb words. That's even more powerful That's what that's what took me to Scott Adams analyzing Trump. He said he said watch this clip And in this trip in this clip trump would say the same thing over and over again He basically he sounded like a babbling idiot Except except at the end of it. You're like, oh crap and one of the points I make in in the videos on I did on trump is My buddy al basically said Um, you know Right after the election right after trump wins the election So what's what was hillary going to do had she won and I couldn't come up with anything And what's trump going to do on on on inauguration day and trump had trained me In his program I could enumerate his program And that was Really frightening to me like I felt the chill run through my body When I realized that I'd been trained to do this through the methods i'm trying to collect up and understand here Well, just two things. Well, I mean I had a bit of an argument with mark ritz and how they sort of a marketing professor out of melvin Um where he uh, he was arguing that the digital technology in facebook etc was the sort of the cause of trump's win and I said no, he's um He's a master showman and it's it's it's the word of mouth that we're the companies the tv performances and and and the the stadia Um events etc. Um, it's all coordinated to be a great rhetorical show Yes, and it works and it works and that's always worked. It's worked for two and a half thousand years So why is it going to stop working now all of a sudden? Um, well, yeah Judy welcome to the call. We're right down the rabbit hole here Um, it looks like there Nice to see you and you're muted right now. So if you want to jump in, um We've we've gone from uh snip and the financial crisis way down the rabbit hole into Uh cynical. What was it? Realism, no, cynical the critique of cynical reason. Yeah, cynical reason and trumpism and and uh How emotion trump's logic and a whole bunch of other things Sorry, I just saw the note now. I hadn't didn't have it on my calendar originally Um, so for whatever reason, I don't remember whether we got a note out or it just sort of happened No worries. Thanks. Thanks for being here. Um Yeah, so trying to figure all this stuff out So, yeah, how how do you how do you make levedon? That's that's the key I think or or there's a whole different piece of this which is just speaking from the heart and being very present Which also creates those kinds of connections Yeah, you've got this sort of idea. You've got the the paradox of authenticity then haven't you which is very interesting that that The the public of so so disbelieve in any politician being authentic And even even horrific authenticity like trump has great is attractive Because you you you think well, he because this is this is the critique of cynical reason I've called the game all politicians are our game the game plan as well trump doesn't seem to be Yeah, he's horrific, but at least he's saying I think I believe that what he's in what he's saying I believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do Sorry, go ahead. So what'd you say I said horrifying though it is. Yeah, exactly um, and Let me just add that There's a book air guitar essays on our democracy by Dave Hickey who is a rolling stone writer basically a music critic And he's and in this book the first chapter is a pan to las vegas and he says las vegas is the only authentic american city Because what you see is what you get Like the cracks are right there everybody knows that it's that there's like a veneer over like And it's it's a really interesting riff and so I added to my brain trump is authentic like vegas is authentic Right and uh, that's under why do people support trump and I've got a bunch of reasons Right including Trump has been a gold mine for conservatives He's paid off like if you put if you put your chips on the trump on the trump number on the on the craps table um, it's it's paid off really well so far and And I'm back to my cynicism here and unfortunately if you wanted the system broken In order that some new system may rise from the ashes We are on that glide path right this second We're on final approach arguably However, then you get I think that's where the hope might lie. I'd like to hear michael on banks again But the hope is that you know once you break the system the generation that's coming up doesn't believe in the system that um Bannon particularly wants to rebuild for example You know, you're actually going to get a whole bunch of people building it or not the kind of people you You expected to build it because you don't have any control of of of that bit Where when it was reborn you don't have the planning control. It's it's it's organic Um, so that there might be hope there that that a whole bunch of people start trying to build a different system and if the banks Don't get in the way Well, the banks are the way Basically the banks have been running this show for so long And uh, it's it's a Hudson line, you know, they are the parasites that took over Um, when I was at business school and it was long long time ago 1970 Um on exit I was generally regarded by the business policy guy as the man most likely to rob a bank And I've been working on that ever since because it's really a wonderful prospect. Um We the banks deal in linear money The straight through stuff The banks could do circular money in a flash No time at all for them to implement closed-loop currencies Closed-loop currencies Van City for instance Vancouver's credit union has um half a million account holders Staff of 150 They're a big big operation. They're basically a bank that says they're very cool. Yeah, they're they're the good money boys They could offer for instance time banks all across Vancouver in a manner of minutes You know in most credit union software now you can create a separate savings account for your dog a separate saving account for your car insurance or whatever Um, and you just do it on the fly. You designate another account Now if a set of accounts were designated as non transferable i.e. I can't take Value out of this account and put it in there because this one is in US dollars this one is in Canadian dollars. This one is in ours You obviously can't translate ours into dollars So you have a closed loop of hours to hours accounts amongst Say all the people in the subdivision all the people in the sector of the city as an option There's no cost to the banks to do that. There's no impediment Back in in 82 when we started the lead system the the first opportunity I had was to Talk to my local credit union. They said yes, great idea. We'd love to do this, but we don't run the software Go down to Vancouver. So I went through the bc central credit union Organization they agreed it was a useful prospect. We took it to the main frame On the south of town and they said well Uh, you're one credit union amongst the 60 that we serve. Therefore, there's no budget allocation for this. So forget it But that was the only reason for not doing it. So it was inconvenient Really a brief interjection because I learned a bunch about credit unions I talked to the the guy who's running the internet credit union The short-lived internet credit union that the internet archive started And he said it's really easy to start a credit union And by the way, the software is right there at hand you approach a qso a credit union service organization And you basically lease their software and you you know use their platform All of that is great and easy the problem comes if you want anything different Because the these this software is certified to go. It's okay for banking as it is Almost no changes are accepted. So so basically credit unions are awesome. I wish there were more And they are frozen in time because innovation is almost impossible in the sector until somebody fixes this problem so so We should have people's banks. We should you know public banks We should have a whole bunch of things but those avenues have been really like reliably closed in so many ways That's crazy. But but it is Well as applied to hard assets, you know, the usual financial security stuff. Yes, well plugged considerable limits and enforced in the software and all the expectations, but There's really no reason why a credit union couldn't Simply offer its account holders a gateway out Through their identity as defined by the credit union. That's the authentication. Yep Press this button if you're interested and that takes you into the shadow zone of self-defined circular monies Exactly Um at your own risk And here's here's my collection of alternative currencies which includes includes cash clash Yeah Um, so the issue is not Whether it's possible the issue for me is why is it not being done right and what can be done to drive it? and I I was um I was actually on my way to career in February got called off Day before I flew at the end of january for various reasons if you can understand And the the event was um universal basic income conversation about What's going on in europe the brits were there the europeans the americans canadians um The reason that japan career is interested in this is that basically if they do go basic income It's about 600 billion a year Which is A drop in the bucket. I mean, let's be clear about it. We're just talking about the accounting But you've got to get that through the politics right And 600 billion looks like a really big number. So is there a cheaper way of approaching this? That was the proposition I was going to take to korea For korean years Spoken with a scottish english canadian accent it wasn't A high probability of getting anywhere, but fortunately They cancelled Now not going to a place gives me a lot more latitude on what would have happened if i'd been Exactly and not only didn't I go to korea? I didn't go to germany. I didn't go to iceland I didn't go to brazil. There's all sorts of places on the planet. I didn't go to Be exactly the same problem How are they going to introduce something that saves to their ass? The korean problem is that they train everybody militarily, you know, everybody knows how to carry a gun and plant an explosive They don't know how to find a job Parasite was um a powerful piece of have you seen power not watch it It's mcbeth in in eastern clothe. It's cool. It's it's really a profound piece of work It's the the most interesting thing i've seen in that genre for an awful long time. Okay. It just bumped up our queue Yeah, um, and it ties into hudson's problem You know like how do you get out from the parasite? Yeah, well, let me um Sorry you're done Are you through with that? Not quite the the the issue is that there's another aspect and this is a guy called tim jenkin Who's a big man in the old currency movement? He was a south african Who was imprisoned for eight years for printing pamphlets in 1978 in um praetoria high security jail tim jenkin. You can find that one would be j i n k j e n k i n He got out of the prison through 12 doors By constructing wooden keys and a lot of other things It's a fascinating story. You can see it on wikipedia. There's a He wrote a book which is brilliant. They made a 40 minute video which is a national geographic product and it's brilliant and last month harry potter came out with a dino ragcliffe played jenkin in a remake The the remake really looks pretty crappy tell you the truth What do you expect? But the point i'm making about this is that jenkin found his way out of the prison through the walls His statement in his book is that he felt himself to be outside the prison morally emotionally So many ways just his physical frame was inside the walls and he had to go out through the walls because he couldn't go up There was no way up But on the other hand dealing with a banking system I think there's a very clear way up Just let's float ourselves above this crap and gain Values in the economy out of the way that we run it rather than trying to compensate for the crap. We've been left with So So that's my trajectory on that is don't try and go through the walls of the banking system Don't try and beat the regulatory process. Don't try and get Moral behavior in executives who are paid on bonuses Change the game play a different game and and a couple thoughts One is that This moment of lockdown has has changed so many behaviors quite radically That it makes people look around for alternatives like people like crap, you know What the kids are home and we like we're trying to do what the school said to do and that's not working so well It's making everybody unhappy. So how do we actually How do we actually fix this from here? How do we actually fix this from here and and do something productive? There we go and and so I'm losing my train of thought. Sorry. There we go. Um and partly The second thought I wanted to throw in was back to Back to how How some things don't turn out the way some planners want and and this is back to what richard was saying a little little while ago One of my beliefs and this comes from reading books like the red and the blue And a bunch of other things was that newt gingrich basically brought us the current era of political divisiveness That when he wins the the midterm election that's made speaker the house He instantiates a new set of rules for everybody where nobody from the right should talk to anybody on the left Congress people used to room together eat together exercise together Socialized together all of that was off the table, etc And and so there's a scorched earth strategy basically pursued for 30 years which trump inherits And i'm reasonably sure that newt gingrich thought he was going to be king But the last person he really wanted to own the kingdom was this guy donald trump Who had had his eyes on the kingdom for 40 years? Right and and trump is a fabulous opportunity And and saw that the ground had been laid that was actually perfect Perfect for trump and one of the things I see in the videos is That the path that trump took to win Was possibly the only path he might have taken not that he saw all the twists and turns But that insulting absolutely everybody and being outrageous and being a clown and all those things were actually quite intentional Because for example a guy like donald trump would never survive an actual debate with ted cruz Who is a you know yield debate winning champion? And hillary clinton who can hold her own with facts and all that kind of stuff So so he had to make sure that none of the debates would actually debate that all of the debates were a show a display of modern power And in modern power owning the media cycle is what wins So all of that to say that The way that the current the way our current political Dynamics on the ground Got there was a lot of patient work by a lot of people whose work was then co-opted Right And so the people in charge now aren't necessarily people who who thought it up and and did a lot of the ground work And i'm i'm just really interested in how do we make our way back into Um something more fruitful More productive than we have just a couple minutes left in our you know 90 minutes here, but any if any of you want to put in some Some maybe uh optimistic, uh or mis misplaced optimism in the at the end of the conversation here I mean is is it the the the last breath of a dying generation, though? Um, it's just both pessimistic and optimistic simultaneously I agree Um, you know, I've forgotten the guy's name, but he wrote the s-curve And he sort of that's his argument. Michael. Uh, sorry. No, uh, dick foster A different different but different version different different s-curve. Yeah um And then he's made this argument that we're we're seeing that this current culture we're seeing is the dying breath of a of a group of traditionalists who can't see the way The way that the world is going to change is because of the technology technological leaps that we're that are being made um That that's I think it's a very plausible argument. I just can't remember isn't it Hold on. Let me let me share. You're really good at this. So, uh, let me see if any of these s-curves Is it jumping the s-curve newness and No, uh, it's probably not the cordy. He calls it the s-curve the book might not be called the s-curve Yeah, which would be a diesis No, no, uh, is it profiting from technological change? No, no, uh, let's let's google it and find it. So I'll find it. Um, yeah And it's not diffusion. It's certainly not diffusion of innovations that ever roger stuff No, but it's it's I can't remember the name of his book. It's not the s-curve. He talked about the s-curve in it And what was the sorry can you say again what he was saying in the book? So he basically argues that we're experiencing six s-curves. So we're we're we're seeing this exponential growth Um, he talks I think he talks about 40 odd, but there's six core ones and one of them is He's arguing this counter-cultural movement by traditionalists who who find again, it sort of goes back to the argument I was making about Fragmentation they find it they find they're so provoked into anxiety by the current Fragmented state of the world is that they are willing in order to get order. They are willing to embrace the devil Right, um and and the counter and that's the ether. This is the last breath And this this this they've been prodded into action by stuff that was going on and and they've they voted in these Sort of authoritarians promising them a stable world, but they're not going to um It's not going to last something else is going to happen afterwards, which is his argument Is a very clear argument he makes if I could remember his name. Yeah, yeah Amazing Um, it'll cut it'll come to you and I'm looking forward to to looking at that um Michael any any thoughts from from what we've turned over here the last 90 minutes Landon Morris. That's his name. Oh Landon or Langdon Landon That the book is probably not called the s-curve Uh, I've got one of his book Agile Innovation their evolutionary approach to accelerated success, but that's probably not the book That's not it, but it's it's it's whatever his He's a futurist, right? Yeah, he's a futurist, but it was a really I presented at the same conference with him He noted. Yeah, and that's the bit that stuck in my mind that that the um That there were there was some kind of flattening out of this Of all of these exponential changes, which is standard and we're going to see it happen with this So foresight he wrote foresight and extreme creativity strategy for the 21st century Agile innovation managing the evolving corporation fourth generation r&d soulful branding Uh, I don't know it doesn't sound like any of these. Oh, it doesn't does it? Yeah um The big shift the big shift it's the big shift. Oh 83 most important changes 83 I love it But he reduces it to six in his keynote So it feels a bit like Tom Peters to me when he had to do the same thing with the In search of excellence stuff. Here's all these ideas But actually our brains are only big enough to understand six. So I talk about six Mm-hmm, but it's it's because basically has all I think all 83 of the rest curves and then he Um, he sort of explains what's going on in these very different dimensions. It's really interesting. I'm not sure whether he's right Yeah, um, but I hope he is because it does it is quite a hopeful world that he's talking about Exiting into Well, I think that's probably the core um Was that but being down so long it looks like up to me Remember that one Unfortunately, I didn't read it Oh, it's it's powerful. I mean, it doesn't speak any answers, but it points out the uh, dynamic um and I guess that's it. There's no other direction but up in the sense of The transitions that we're looking at I I'm seeing it as a shift from um A sequential sort of tree planting attitude like build things sequentially logically to um the mycelium fruits There's an outburst of Sort of information driven Responses All over the world Without without planning or pattern In in sense of um It's predictable. It's an it's emergent. It's um, it's the caterpillar butterfly thing Well, this is where snowden is really useful, too Yeah, I think so because his whole sense respond, you know probe sense response thing, etc. Is like right on this adjacent possible What's next? the the um Can't um nor Bateson had aligned the other day about Be careful that in this particular metamorphosis. We don't end up as a caterpillar with wings. Yeah. Yeah And that I think is is the problem we're facing is that we may end up with a paint job Significantly lipstick on the pig. Yeah, and and that's and that's why what we were talking about earlier about uh, synecdoche and sort of uh, the ability for Small digestible narratives to take over the larger world view is super interesting And richard any other thing any of the thoughts you have on that or other things? Um, I mean I would the only the The only the tactic for me. I think that we is how do you how do you disrupt? uh linguistic systems without causing angst how do you cause laughter instead? um That's key for me always. Well, this is where john stewart. I mean Of five ten years ago. I put a thought in my brain that said why are comedians our best journalists right now I write a I write an academic paper on that Yeah, and it was and it was true. Was it funny? Was it funny? Um, no But it's crazy, right like like the best analysis was coming out of journalists studios That's sorry out of comedian studios And it's nuts. So so maybe there is a path for that Yeah, I mean and so I mean I argued that that stewart was was really revealing the absurdities in modern life In a way that that didn't necessarily offend everybody It got people thinking and the only but the only I don't see So my my challenge is I think you know that colbert was supposed to take over the stewart mantle But he's just become an anti trump kind of cliche now Yeah, and and the only the people with the person really with with the crown is john oliver. Yeah um But yeah, that that for me is where you know, it's true speaking to power in a way that doesn't necessarily Yeah, and unfortunately john oliver is trapped. It's trapped in his format Yes, john oliver has created a delivery mechanism that is a little prison of his own. Yeah, which is too bad Yeah, he doesn't he doesn't have the the the playfulness that stewart had So we sort of lost stewart at the wrong time almost right But also oliver's bite size now is 20 minutes on a particular one topic at a time And that just like in this in the speedy world and the small nugget world that we have it doesn't it's not really working Um, we should wrap our call. It's been Phenomenal. Thank you. It's been a treat to you to explore this territory with you Um any and all afterthoughts welcome. I'll put this recording on on youtube and We can marvel over it 20 years from now when the world is different That's I'm sorry. Yeah, exactly Thank you. Richard. Thank you for asking your question. Well, I thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it Um, michael, thank you for being here judy. Thanks for for joining. I'm sorry That we didn't click in your calendar a little better early on but Here we are. Okay. I'll hear the recording and maybe drop some notes to people. That sounds great. Thank you Thank you for another slice of jerry. That was Thank you very much. Awesome. Thanks guys. Have a good day. You too. Bye. Bye