 here and I don't know if everybody knows this but now you can for free turn on live transcript and and all of a sudden you get live record of what was actually said without having to submit it to some other service or device or whatever else it's kind of cool and and then and then when you get your zoom downloads you get a fourth file or however many you've selected to get I get now for one of which is now a transcript it's like oh this is good that's so cool so I've turned that on if you click on the live transcript button and you can select having it having a subtitle it's it's interesting to see how it chooses to translate mumbling yes and and also you'll see correct mistranslations so you can you can see it unfold in front of you as it kind of stare at it's it's a little mesmerizing because it'll misrecognize something and then back backtrack correct it and and improve it it's really pretty wild wow I've been busy yeah it's bow oh yo bow I miss oh hey everybody I miss catching up on Susan what's going on Susan oh um we're having fire weather and um let's see that's always a little startling and um I just was finishing I won't go into it but I was I was decided to go back and read finish cast by Isabel Wilkerson and because I was thinking about how is this different from just plain old power stuff and I found it was different in one important way which is she has a far more nuanced analysis of the election about how it is that people vote not by these blocks that we think they vote in and all of the statistics that we collect but rather in traits of people that they would like to be like oh national voting hmm I'll leave you with that thought because actually don't leave us with that thought could you just untangle it just a little bit more um um well okay so uh yes I will but I'm gonna get the book out so I don't screw it up thank you yeah and I started the book and then dropped it and it's in the it's in this horrible trail of opened and barely read books in my kindles uh you know playlist so well I I dropped it and then I asked myself that question and I thought well you could finish the book and see you know yep and it's really good I love I love the as far as I got into it it's it's amazing at the end I mean it gets very uh storytell-ish and has a lot to lots of provocative examples um okay so she she argues for the caste system she um I mean regarding our our own societies in some cases is having a caste system um it's not the most felicitous term for the phenomenon but I think she does a good job of pulling it out and separating it see it seems to have rich histories in different places that are similar but really different right but she's you know she she did an analysis where she pulled out the three the three pillars or the work right and she said look this is what this is what they have in common cool um but I think it's really interesting when it has a you know she can use it to use the framework to analyze events for instance uh she said in the pivotal election of 2016 whether a oh here we go uh people with overlapping self-interests and who's we don't know anybody like that do we um we'll often gravitate toward the personal characteristic that accords them the most status many make an existential aspirational choice they vote up rather than across and usually not down they believe they know who will protect the interests of the straight that gives them the most status and that matters the most of them in the pivotal election of 2016 whether consciously or not the majority whites voted for the candidate who made the most direct appeals to the characteristic most rewarded in the caste system they went with the aspect of themselves that grants them the most power and status in the hierarchy so interesting Kevin we'll welcome the call we're talking about the book cast the origin of origins of our discontents and the students gone back and and finished it and just reporting back a little bit go ahead Susan sorry so anyway so that point that very point saying that that what we vote that what people vote for the majority of whites for instance then she gives some data below uh majority of whites for instance voted for the candidate who made the most direct appeals to the characteristic most rewarded in the caste system they went with the aspect of themselves that grants them the most power and status in the in the hierarchy so that's a different explanation yeah yeah the white vote yeah uh uh but it seems plausible to me um so what would be the differences in the definition that I just caught the end of and the phrase enlighten self-interest maybe not enlightened no I understand I just wanted to know I mean it's it's it I mean she does say she doesn't argue for this but she does say that it's we're not necessarily aware of this no and uh and that's what makes it so insidious I think um so for instance according to New York Times exit polling of 24,537 respondents 58 percent of white voters chose the Republican Donald Trump and only 37 went for the Democrat Hillary Clinton so all those people that won't really tell you the truth on a poll uh uh will or will deceive themselves even when they're very leery of single causal explanation it could very well be that you have people who voted for Trump because they thought it would be funny and and they also had you know there was an element that it wouldn't hurt them in the same way um there are people who voted for people who thought he wouldn't win even if they voted for people who thought he wouldn't win but it was a protest vote or they didn't like Hillary or you know for whatever reason whatever set of reasons and so when I see that such and such was the reason that Trump won it was sort of gets my hackles up I don't think she says that that was my my very loose interpreted interpretation there and I don't believe in the single cause either I think I think what was interesting to me was that it distributes the causes across a different space mm-hmm I love that phrase yeah it's great Susan yeah oh and that's what this framework does and I would go with that actually um so I've been worried about I love you for a while here's the here's my here's what I've collected on why do people support Trump I'll I'll share the link to this in our chat oh look at this you see oh this would be awesome and I've got to add a paraphrase of what you just said to that collection now uh Susan I'm trying to figure out how to phrase it and and and the first thought I had not being my brain not being fresh about cast but thinking about cast differences and saddest differences which was really interesting was the miracle that Donald Trump who is a better caricature of the greedy selfish billionaire than Thurston Howell the third on Gilligan's Island and Scrooge McDuck like really he outdoes both of them in that stereotype character how he could be seen as every man and as friendly to your average you know blue collar worker in the middle of the country they saw him as them and that that is this like conceptual leap that maybe that's not what I want I mean maybe maybe they were connecting themselves to him to pull themselves up to his perceived golden toilet status he hated the same people they hate that too yeah no that's so many things yeah actually he was hated by the people they hated one of the things that that I read recently that came out of early Trump interviews was they like me because I'm hated by rich people the enemy and I thought that was pardon yeah enemy of my enemy is my friend so I did and I thought that was very self-perceptive like like I think I think he understands and when I say he's a caricature of the eccentric billionaire I think it's very intentional but to go back to benefit of you know through the apprentice and shows like that of presenting himself as something to identify with you're fired I mean it's both funny and in some sense that was kind of the response to America that people you know wanted to get saw a clip of him in the three comments before you continue because I wanted to ask you I wanted to ask you whether I mean this business of multiple causes I mean here we are in this conversation trying to pick out all these reasons and and and if it's really many many many different things how do we how do we how do we understand that differently so we keep finding all these things that are plausible but in fact we don't know it's a complete landscape but it's it's a it's a large landscape and I think it stands in stark contrast to political polling and the ways that the that the political you know stuff is measured and thought about I mean it it really contradicts that because of its spread well Susan the design of a lot of the things they say are you for or against yes and you know so there you know there's no in between there's no gray area it's just you know you have to answer it's like going on the stand and testifying answer yes or no all right well that's right so you know these are leading questions that are done by pollsters and they don't necessarily reflect as jamae was saying the true nuance of you know all of the forces right and so that's a pollster you know flatland view of you know instant opinion right and sometimes not very predictive is it so just a couple of simple observations right for context born on Ohio moved to central Florida cocoa beach marina island when I was nine raised in the space coast um and I've got four older brothers four older sisters one younger sister and I'm probably all by myself on the island who didn't vote for Trump so there's that um a lot of the thing about Trump I think was first off system's completely broken it's completely crooked and I need somebody to come in and just smash it all down somebody who can't be bought because you know they're a self-made man and I've seen this kind of TV and I trust them so there's that the big reset um I think um the second thing is uh he's the first person that I associate with that is looking out for me and this comment comes from great conversation with my brother and one of my older sisters about as awkward and as uncomfortable as you feel right now in your two of the Trump administration brad that's how I felt throughout the entire eight years of Obama in America emerged that I didn't recognize it didn't resonate with my values it didn't represent me and in fact it was highly threatening to everything I believe in and everything that I feel that I've owned and earned and so I'm thrilled that there's a reset and I'm actually kind of a little giddy that you and your liberal friends are all feeling as just as uncomfortable as I had to feel for eight years so that was a big out hot and then the third thing is the thing I never really understood I was raised Christian scientist which is a whole another topic we'd love to get into sometime but in Maryland Florida the biggest church was a southern Baptist church that was very black and white evangelical you know and it was so black and white that it was one of the biggest churches because it was one of those populated churches most well funded churches and it was well funded by a bunch of scientists and engineers that worked at NASA and what really was trippy for me as I tried to deconstruct this in my early 20s and 30s was how could some of the smartest people that I know be so freaking stupid and blind how is it even possible but because they live in a universe where things are sorted things are black things are white and that's how the world works this was a highly convenient belief system that just kind of plugged into their DNA and so I think that's the third arc right very intelligent people supported Trump for very pragmatic reasons because they knew exactly what they were getting sure he's a racist absolutely you know what there's always been racism no big deal is he going to help me with my taxes heck yeah so I'll buy that all day I don't care about the future the consequence it just fits my my niche so these these are the things that I walk away from and then finally of course the obvious Trump isn't unique Trump is an emergent of a property that's always been there lurking underneath the surface and he was just the first incarnation of this thing in the physical space that you could touch and see can I point something else about this conversation okay so we're we're we're thinking of it we're talking about it as if an individual is making a choice and some of this is conscious and I completely agree with you I mean that's there's a lot of that that probably was going on is is that you know we don't we should take into account and bring on to the table you know the social construction of right when people don't know what who to vote for right or they don't want to be embarrassed at the dinner table when somebody says I hope you've voted for Trump right um that that's a very powerful force as well which isn't reflected either the in any of the you know the statistics or anything else um but I wanted to point out one more thing about the media and throw it on the tables I was thinking this is nice getting a whole bunch of stuff on the table the uh um the media uh oh I've been studying I mean the thing that hmm I've been watching the headlines I mean I I go through the Washington Post the New York Times the LA Times uh no Fox News what no Fox News no OANN no I made myself watch it once you know and I mean I I know that yes and and my neighbor said you have to watch the symptoms Simpsons you have no idea what the rest of the world is thinking he's probably right I get all my news through Joe Rogan is that a bad thing I don't know none of us is good all the way through anyway so uh I just I know I don't know how to grapple with this system where everything is so individuated and people do things like this without all snow bringing in the the social the social structure the social influences that people are under at the same time but the the other thing is that the media is like the yes no who pointed that out we're only getting sort of like do you want this or that you know but if you look at the headlines in the newspapers and in the journals uh there's always a question is it this is it possible that this is what's happening or something it's always a well they don't say it that way that would be better but it's always a yes or opposed yes or no and the presupposition is always the answer they want you to have so it's the news the news that they want to tell you is is presupposed in the question that they ask almost always yeah but what I really like about this isn't and I want you to have the chance to completely as explicate the thesis as much as possible so what I really like about this book what I'm briefly reading on Wikipedia and hearing from you is uh it's it's how it's an identity thing it's identity and identity very complex but I like to I like the identity component of this because I think that's a great deal of what's going on well and aspirational identity too I mean you are when you're voting you're you're you are thinking about the future not always in a self-interested fashion um yeah the identity and community research you know kind of what you were talking about Brad a moment ago I can't point to the source so excuse me but that when there's a narrative that you've heard since childhood repeated it shuts off your prefrontal cortex and your critical thinking you simply go into a different modality and so working at NASA and belonging to that you know Baptist church right are two different realities all right that you would never bring that quality of thinking to your work at NASA yeah all right and vice versa you're not going to bring rocket science into the congregation right so it's very interesting because you know the which tribe are you part of well I'm part of you know two main tribes scientists and I have you know this you know narrative from you know that imprinted on me a childhood right so um they're not necessarily in in congress but the the identity part is that we have multiple identities ties back to you don't have one idea no that makes a lot of sense I like that and I think we go in and out of as those of us who've been party to the social identity stories notice that that when you um you go into you know when you when you think when you're talking about identity um we the identity is socially influenced terribly right but many of us can go into into in and out of many different little communities of practice if you will and we're comfortable and we adopt that perspective when we're in so you don't notice necessarily but it's it's hard to see the contradictions between your work you know at nasa sense yeah and and everything else because it's you have people around you I mean I used to say and when I was back in the day when I gave talks was that you know you do you should worry terribly about who your kids are hanging out with oh yeah I mean just just you know that is you know my mother was uh well I was thinking about this last night actually who died some years ago now a few and uh I had a friend who was um I mean I you know I grew up in this very small closed midnight community and ended up with a friend in junior high who was uh in a family of it with an alcoholic father 14 kids and everything else and she decided she didn't want to be part of that and so she tried to make friends with me and I think my mother did her best to help help us the two of us uh to do things that she felt were more appropriate than what I might get into with her um even though the irony was that she was she was looking to not go to the parties that everybody else she knew was going to her friends were getting pregnant and blah blah blah so interesting so yeah Susan you still give talks you just have a much smaller audience right here that's right that's right I'm gonna give my bonus five days as well as Brad uh growing up partly in Wyoming where my my parents divorced uh I lived in a town of 150 in a valley that was 90 percent Mormon and uh there isn't anyone there who isn't a trumpet and I was hearing stuff uh when Obama was the last election uh on Obama's second term uh it was common for me to hear from members of my own family uh Obama's not going to let the election go there's a bunch of uh uh agents out in the desert going to go take archons and what's so interesting when I look back on it is they were already you know they were saying Obama wasn't going to let the election go they were projecting what they themselves were going to do that was very fascinating when I looked at that so I just want to give that eye to Brad know what you're talking about and I do I'm friends with a bunch of these people I grew up with in Wyoming on Facebook and the stuff that they post is truly horrifying and it's fascinating how fast facts get turned into a twisted meme I am and I mean remain friends with them because I want to see reality I want to see what's coming at me so yeah no I mean I feel like the CIA like yeah no so people you know what I mean yeah no so my so my little sister um three years my junior sold her house in Florida and moved to a patch of land in Kentucky um and is living in a trailer and completely content that now she has over 3,800 Facebook friends and she spends her entire day posting easily 40 to 50 to 70 posts every bit of it is reposts nothing original and that's that's her that's her gig you know she's in the deepest darkest parts of all of this craziness and I wondered how often you hear about George Soros or like yeah the amount of just straight up antisemitism and you name it codes right there it's so clear right we had worked with um you know this project hasn't gone anywhere but we've proposed a FEMA with the choice flows business a study um that if the Cascadia fault were to actually occur what is the willingness of the states that are to the east interior of the you know states that would be affected to take in refugees right US citizens but generally we're not I think that we we have indications through qualitative research that some of those citizens would look at those people coming in uh the same way that California's looked at people migrating from Oklahoma during the dust bowl right that they would be very unwelcome right so um we have not quantified that hypothesis but we have you know soft indications that there's a problem that would occur if you know people had to move from west to east I want to give a slight aphorism so am I um my hairdresser is that is the right winger and she took her Obama money and like bought a cabin that has no power outside of Oregon and she's moving out of town so I mean she's a whole thing okay yes and I asked her hey uh if you watch the squid game so this is getting back to the thesis in the book that says did you um did you um see the squid game and she said you think I want to watch a program where I see what the rich people do to people like me I already know what they want to do to me talk about caste identity but I I couldn't disagree with her I'm like yeah you pretty much got that a couple things a couple things I just want to throw in one I was reading last week that it seems that uh the Idaho hospitals are overwhelmed and so lots of people from Idaho are showing up in Portland hospitals uh lots of people who would like greater Idaho to be a state and are probably Trumpers are being taken care of over here then two of the things one is this this habit of projection of basically stating out loud what your intentions are and accusing and accusing the other side of the malfeasance that you are committing is a common common thing and is is in fact an offensive strategy uh it's like you know and if you look at Trump all the accusations made about about Democrats and socialism all that kind of stuff it's like holy crap it's like it's exactly what they're doing yeah and then and then the third observation is um very lots and lots and lots of people make decisions vote make personal choices buy stuff depending on what their neighbors and their tribe are doing and when your entire neighborhood is Trump and everybody's like fuck you the government is broken this is this is a big fuck you to the government join us there I can completely understand how those folks can't understand that somebody different won the election because there is nobody in their life and in their media nobody that was going to vote for the opposition biden was not on the radar image for them in particular if they're down several rabbit holes and are only looking at fox news and everything else it was like it was just inconceivable that someone else could actually earn enough votes to to beat their their dude right and I I get how people would be very convinced of that you know they're yes of course I mean we're all I mean part of the the whole thing about being able to sort of categorize thing in short-term and long-term memory and sorting it all out in your dreams in your sleep and the whole rest of that stuff is to get a lot of the crap out of the way and it's not surprising that we end up with a lot of stuff that is self-reinforcing um I don't know there must be some neuroscience on that somewhere I'm sure I'm sure lots of neuroscientists are working on these puzzles right now and it is it is the perfect storm in so many ways but you know the the article that's still haunting me Jerry is the one I shared with you about the military veterans know why your employees are leaving and it's talking about how the fact that COVID universally created an experience that's very much like soldiers going off to war and then coming home and having problems plugging back into normal because normal isn't normal anymore and they can't trust that it's normal or not and it's like this you know this re-acclamation period and people have been so stressed out because of COVID that you know they've gone into their self-reflective bunkers they're seeking information and that's allowed the rabbit holes just to go bigger and deeper and harder than ever before because I'm already isolated so I might as well just you know find people like me with problems and fears like mine and find community because I don't get to talk to my diverse neighbors anymore because they're not allowed to see each other outside so you know I think I think there's been just this venturi tube of amplification that that's that's hit us at the same time just apropos perfect storm here's a thought I've been curating since the boogaloo kind of seemed to start so yeah so this is coronavirus plus black lives matter plus suddenly the boogaloo does this equal the perfect storm it's just the start of our meltdown and we've managed to avoid meltdown and like Biden and a bunch of other things in the meantime but that doesn't mean that this isn't actually actually stopping so I'll share a link to that in the chat. How many of you have heard this latest speculation about instead of a civil war we'll have something like Northern Ireland in the Troubles coming up. Yeah I mean it can't be a civil war because there's no easy geography unless you were to split the coasts or something like that that'd be interesting but the geography's lousy for this but some kind of insurgency or guerrilla warfare could easily happen. The attempt to kidnap that governor for example to me something's a bit like that go ahead Jimmy. Don't say it's the Indian partition actually the phrase that that I like that even though it comes from an odious source marginal trailer green talking about a national divorce right and I thought that actually captures the some of the nuances. I have to run so you guys all have a good rest of the month. You're supposed to help us figure this out. Yeah unfortunately I have a ton of writing to do for a scenarios of California in 10 50 and 100 years. That's sweet. Okay I can't hope you post that on Twitter and I'll read it. It will actually I don't know I can't post it on Twitter yet but it will be all very public when went with part of a whole California 100 project coming out in a few months. Well I live in California so either this did interest so please share it. Yes yes you can. Thank you. Here sir. Yes one thing one thing that also done on me is the entire fabric of democracy is dependent upon all of us commit to a shared idea which is written down on a piece of paper. It's kind of the silliest thing in the human experience to ever imagine right the source of authority is a bunch of words that a bunch of people wrote back in the day and we all we all agree to the social contract right and one of the big aha learnings I had during the Black Lives Matter process and as I got educated in that world was simply put when I you know if I'm an NFL player and I'm not going to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance or the National Anthem it's because it represents an America that doesn't represent me. Like I don't see myself anywhere in this Constitution. I don't see the Constitution protecting any of my rights so why should I give it the same respect that everybody else has when it doesn't reflect me and now I'm seeing this huge pivot on the other side that says legitimate political protest of course was you know January 6 those people clearly don't believe the Constitution represents them either and so this this this concept of a great divorce is quite fascinating because people no longer abide to that idea that you know the Constitution, democracy and and the rights reflect all of us. So how do you repair that? Exactly but I like Jame's you know comment that he threw out just before he left we're quoting it's more like India the partition of India when and you think about you know that Pakistan and Bangladesh maybe have their Muslimhood in common but they really have nothing much in common anymore right so if that's the left and the coast and the right coast right and that is a religious difference. Yeah speaking of the many causes and I do you know more and more I put the pieces together that the working class has been losing for 50 years and it turns out the way our taxation of our corporations work I just keep discovering more and more for example we waited taxes heavily on payroll taxes which means that any company that employed a lot of people had to either figure out a way not to do so or export the jobs so there's just so many ways so by the way the winners in all of these the way the taxation and fiscal policy have worked have been educated computers anything that's not a lot of people again and again and again and again and it it's stark stark to see like literally the cronyism that's gone on I can't believe if you the tax rate for corporations looks like a ski slope and the fact that they put it on payroll taxes that's like they're making the people pay it and it's just just watching this it's just I sit there and go uh and we said when Clinton did the WTO they said well we know we're gonna have to upskill the workers never happened never happened yeah but I want to say hi but I specifically want to say this I don't want a single cause I think this is one stressor it's not all of it yeah but it's been big been a big part just drop well the disparity there's the disparity of wealth and the and the ratios of the wealth disparity historically throughout the whole of history nothing good ever happens when it hits these numbers no the last time this happened it was like yeah it's not good and that's why I do think the social contract has to be rewritten um the last time we did this in the depression it was it was things were really bad and they literally went around to the rich people and said you're gonna have to pay more taxes and uh yep what about health care for these people what about unemployment all these things that we're looking at happened under the Roosevelt administration and happened under severe duress where the elites basically said uncle because also don't forget that before that the FBI was chasing up brown people who were bombing in America don't we we had times like this before we had anarchism it wasn't just Marxist scares there was lots of discontent in America in the gilded age okay and I would say that we have evidence to support what you're saying but it wasn't necessarily all government you know some of the you know leading banking and business interests came together and said you know what it's in our best interest to figure out how to do this right we don't have anyone that has that much civic mindedness left to come together right the way that you're suggesting I hope that we we do I hope we gain that capacity but I'm not seeing it at the moment and don't forget FDR was one of them he was an American aristocrat 100 I mean talking to everybody you want to school with everyone he grew up with I mean he was plugged in with the very people to make the deal with yeah 100 I just want to make I got went off camera from one I just want to tell you guys quickly why because since January 3rd like your friend with a cabin the Clark household has been off the grid we didn't move but the tree fell pulled out the electrical mass from the roof right and disconnected us from the electrical grid and my you know Mitsubishi diesel engine connected to the natural gas line has been running the house for a month and a half right now that's incredible so number one it's a testament to my world yeah it's a testament to a Japanese diesel engine right for one thing absolutely uh but the electrical people are here and putting stuff back on top of the house so I hope by the end of the day tomorrow I will be back on the grid back you know suck in the juice from the main line as opposed to making it on our own all right we have clearly worn out the bearings but it it's it's making some noises the bearings on the dynamo we've clearly stressed it so it's time that's amazing that's a long time it is I mean I go to bed please keep running I've been doing this I've been I have to say you know I'm off the grid I've been for 37-8 years now and you know I've had many nights like that like these are the equipment but um you know and I think I told this group last time that that you know having I just have to express my pleasure at having a Tesla power wall and uh new panels half the panels with three or four times amount amount of you know electricity and I can go to bed and once in a while something does kind of live out but I sleep better I bet well good for you I'm I'm thinking about putting that on the office I have some solar right now but it's enough solar to run the the notebook computers and the printers and it's it's really not enough to run the house all right so I'm thinking about scaling that up so you like Tesla well the people that I've been talking to and I've talked to many over the years um there are now competitors to Tesla out there I don't know how they rank I know that our installers um our installers said Tesla is the only thing right now and and they said it works you know if there's a problem it's not the Tesla yeah and uh and so I've had to learn all kinds of other things that can go wrong like you know it doesn't like temperatures below 50 degrees so I have to put a blanket on it you know yeah I mean the a lot of people who have done what you're doing go back and provide secondary wiring systems so they have lighting that's running DC instead of going through an inverter because it's just more efficient yeah we've done that we've done that uh when we moved here we had a trailer we lived in a mobile home for six years we were supposed to be there for a year and a half but anyway um of course our marriage our marriage or whatever it was partnership was much happier in that trailer than we ever were after that um and uh it had 12 oh okay we didn't put it in here because it was going to be really direct current is really expensive to run because if you have something big it's you got to have these giant cables and and now the the solar panels come with their own inverters yeah so they transmit ac which is another one of the miracles yeah all of my uh thinkpads that were running on the uh space shuttle and up on the space station they're still working we're all converted to 37 volts dc which is an air force nasa standard you don't want to touch that wire that would be bad yes yes so let me scroll back in our conversation for just one second to rethinking the social contract and ask a positive question um which is um hey who have you seen out there who's doing a good job rethinking the social contract at any scale in any way and so here's uh here's that thought in my brain this is this is the link i just shared in the chat and you know uh rethinking capitalism is uh is sort of wrapped in here there's a bunch of uh you know can capitalism be fixed uh is there other other systems uh even the things like voting are you know like how would how should we be making collective decisions and then my um my shorthand for this um i've got an open question which is what are our next stacks and here i'm borrowing solution stacks like the lamp stack linux apache uh you know my asql etc and i'm asking um what are our next stacks and i'm proposing that there's two of them there's a societal stack and an organizational stack and 50 years down the road there may not be two but right now there's the way we run our country uh politics voting uh contributions to political parties and the country has journalism and courts and what appears to be democracy but is turning into illiberal democracy a lot but that's what's happening to this top stack and the bottom stack is c-corps and 401c3s and you know all the different structures of how we organize businesses which are also under under attack and you know up for debate it's like hey web three thinks that uh national boundaries don't matter and that organizational boundaries don't matter we should all just live in dowels and vote our shares in the dow on where we're going to turn uh next and that's that is one proposal for one of the next stacks and i'm like whoa big big stuff is happening right now yeah i mean one of the reasons that uh you know i could understand what you're saying jerry in terms of convergence is that a lot of people live in companies that are functionally autocracies or illiberal democracies and therefore they are comfortable seeing it in their governance right um because they voluntarily turned over part of their consciousness to you know in existence in exchange for a salary right um and they need to understand the difference between you know being a citizen and being an employee right but they're blurring right the reality is blurring and so you don't have the same stark discomfort and so you're a little you're having a little bit of an eldest huxley moment that that we're we're comfortable inside of our self-imposed imprisonment right uh and we it doesn't feel like we are but indeed you know here it is anyone else there's another yes there's a that's another way to describe this this this um before you go on to your next scenario um um on the on the two sides there uh there's another way to look at that another way to look at that difference which i then don't don't know how to resolve which is the very um the work that years and years ago um and scmi did and um on and and i was trying to describe the difference between um authorized organization and um emergent or social organization okay and and that distinction whether it's authorized or not you know it depends by whom right but the people there there is something like where people don't want to participate in anything but they still have to be part of some community or not or as i am living here by myself i gave up you know uh many years ago and um so that's that's a distinction that drives different things so i don't know what happens when that those two uh they authorized the the social starts to refuse the authorized um and um i mean it's authored right that's what that word is for it's authored it's written down it's it's something that people agreed to and it's its own system and it works its own way right and then there's all this social stuff on the side that it interleaves with it's not like they're separate well let me let me go back for a second to the people agreed to thing and brad you kind of put that in the conversation earlier i'm not sure i think we're born into a situation and we we kind of accept our situation we don't ever sign a contract that says that we don't read the details if we're lucky we get a good civics teacher in school who says hey by the way this is what's actually in the constitution and these are your rights and here's what's going on most people are civically illiterate entirely they're busy being happy consumers of whatever it is that the forces that be put in front of them so i'm not sure that there's any kind of affirmative positive agreement to the contract or even an awareness of the contract there's this like growing up inside of some environment and then we talked a moment ago in the negative part of the conversation sort of about holy crap if everybody around you is going that down that direction you're going to join them and it's going to feel really unnatural and it's not it's not everyone it's everyone it's everyone that you care about or in touch with right yes and i mean if you if you how many of you like some of us who live in wyoming or live with the Mormons or you know got out of left you know a very tight community um sometimes i think it's a curse because i can see so much right you all these different things right i can see them happening i don't even know what to do about them right i have no idea even how to talk to people about that whole thing oh susan so the fact that when you walk in a situation from you know an odd situation you can see all the stuff they're accepting as normal as has given and you're like no wow you guys decided this you you know i don't think i don't think they decided it's no it's it's it's it is socially enforced i mean these two systems the things that get authorized okay by somebody right and some system is different in many ways to those it has similar effects to the really tight social constraints that one might live under but if one of those social social things and you go to another place if you don't notice that it's just another social thing i mean that's what you know going to india when you're 16 and traveling around and seeing the caste system and seeing all of this stuff going on right and the differences and the similarities because you're not part of it you can stand outside it a little bit and look at it it's just amazing so i might suggest that the people who have some awareness because of what they needed to do to become citizens if you become a citizen of the united states there's a certain amount of knowledge that you have to acquire to be able to you know obtain citizenship that same knowledge base to become a citizen needs to be taught in the schools yeah the basic you know knowledge of being a citizen that as you said jerry that you're born into all of that needs to be reintroduced into the curriculum because it's all evaporated so i'm not sure i'm unclear that i would rely on the curriculum and schooling to do this i think that we're not we're not living as citizens anymore we're not we're not what's the venue in which it would get delivered real life like our community should be living this way we should be working this way together i think i think yeah some level of construct service you know you you join the team or you join a local thing you get indoctrinated into what it means to be a citizen in a return i'll pay for your for your degree in college or whatever yeah two years of civic service would be great yeah something on yeah one year so brad in the suggestion you just made that's fine but the elites that have no need for it they're going to be completely free of that knowledge troops so that's a that that creates a another divide right that's unhealthy so i would say that you know uh you got to go back to the draft at a certain age and whether you're going to military or some kind of social service or something everybody's got to do something well i was i was you know i was in the Boy Scouts in the late 70s early 80s and so that's where i learned all my civic duty and constitutional theory and you know and then later in college but you know and the other thing that strikes me is i was talking to some of my friends i graduated high school in 81 and so you know reagan was huge and in that early 80s genre it was like hey you know i i feel good i feel proud to be an american isn't that awesome to feel proud to be an american and a lot of the a lot of the vibe of you know my trumpster friends and family members is i feel proud to be an american finally again we're standing up for america so this idea you know america is an idea that's that's built on super bowl commercials versus a social construct in in contract i think there's something there there too and make america something unique about the united states though i think in terms of this authorized versus societal contract which is that most countries precede and have lived through multiple governmental systems whereas the us you know 1776 and 89 uh it's it's basically a authorized country and inseparable from ideology in that sense so it's a little bit different than many other countries even though a lot of the you know issues are similar it's pretty unique and then on top of that there's a kind of quality of insulation that america has which is literally due to geography those two great options sure i think that canada could invade at any moment right canada could invade at any good i mean it's dangerous they could try last on the border but that that isolation is is extraordinary right you go to europe and their gas prices have always been dramatically higher than ours right and so they have a much more you know a gas economy matters more to them at a pragmatic level whereas us it doesn't matter because we don't have to worry about that because we're americans which takes us back to policies and subsidies i mean i read um catalac desert and a couple other books about water and it's like farmers in the middle of the country where they should not be growing crops are able to grow crops because water is delivered to them at 20 per acre foot that is costing like 200 per acre foot to get to them and these are the farmers who don't believe in socialism and then we take those juicy almonds and make milk out of bingo not anymore you know i mean if you well those of us who live in california right and you can see what's going on in the central valley and you can feel what's going on here my trees are desiccated even more desiccated than they were five or six years ago i mean they're just falling apart so let me let me let me let me get us back to the positive conversation thank you because i i then managed to hijack us back into the sort of negative conversation but but would you mind strapping on the crampons and taking us into gewolfenheit yeah i have to go guys i'd love to hear that but i have to depart you know good luck with the energy energy people we're close energy is close thank you just a little spark gap away are you talking about heidegger here or something yeah it's it's the german for throngness is gewolfenheit so if you wouldn't mind just like how does this relate to what we're talking about what is it well it very much relates to what susan's talking about and heidegger uses it again and again and it's like when you're in a situation you didn't choose it and it's just as the all-encompassing reality which you were basically born into oh wow you don't exactly question it and all of us are throne and this is how you know you don't choose to literally be alive your there's so many ways you're thrown so when heidegger uses it it's very very very powerful concept yeah basically susan could use that term to describe throne throne this heidegger's throne i put a link to it in the in the chat there's a wikipedia page for throne this so if you're interested thanks bo and i had never heard of the concept makes a ton of sense doesn't it's very powerful well it's important it's important because everybody is that's right yeah we're all thrown into our setting into our context into our lives so who should we pay attention to one of the thoughts in my brain just for example here sure screen one of the thoughts in my brain is communities trying to fix world problems uh game b common future dent economic space agency the open future coalition society 2045 uh donut economics uh the global solutions initiative the earth shop prize top tier impact the production board uh and then here's like regional and local donut economic initiatives uh i've got uh you know organizations building the regenerative economy under here seeds of dow zero food food print the open world alliance hasten regeneration global regeneration colab which is a close community to us i think uh uh dav witzel is is like a part of that so like are these people all wasting their time or should we join them all and put our energy behind them so i'd like to say i'm very i'm i'm very optimistic about we're gonna get through this we've gone through it before and we'll go through it again and the first seeds of seeing how we were transforming it was when the the covid crisis happened i was very worried about gig workers for example there was nothing of a law saying gig workers got in and it had been scaring me a lot because gig workers i mean what health insurance do they have what unemployment insurance do they have the system was built for fortism it was built for structural employment and hey it's really neat that the government really did respond and help those people out i mean you already saw that the system changed itself to take care of those people and that's just the beginning so i'm very confident that that's going to happen i think another thing that's happening that i'm really hopeful about is stakeholder capitalism uh so i think that community and the workers all have a place and in germany for example i mean it's already been in the law for a long long long time uh so i think that's definitely on the rise for america too i think this uh shareholder value uh dogma is uh has run its course i think it's a dead dog yeah but it's well it's gonna it's gonna go down go down uh screaming and shouting sure sure it is um and like right now it's so funny you read the financial press and you hear this oh well wages are going up yay for the poor working people but then also uh oh corporate margins yeah corporate margins are going to get hurt that's right but also inflation wipes out the increase in wages so right there's a lot going on so i'm so we already saw uh we took care of the gig workers and that was another thing like our social we we needed to redo all the legislation i'm not sure the gig workers are cool right now bro i'm not sure we took care of them i think they managed oh no we started to i mean look at look at the the little nascent the little nascent stuff right in you know in the in the uber and uh lift worlds in in other places where it may not be the unions but um there's enough just enough flexibility in the financial system because people need workers that there's there's some room for people to speak up um and and they don't have to be you're like all the all the things that we had before right i think you know well there's something about this sort of you know when are we going to realize that the small scale is the large scale i mean to go back to jerry's question you know should we join all these what should we you know what should we do in the in the face of this um and i don't know the answer to that except to note that the answer doesn't have to be you know aggregating into great big things nice you said remember most people in america are employed by small businesses that's true walk one of these little businesses and you realize they have like 15 16 employees yeah it's just shocking and you realize that this is most of america yeah i mean so i don't know but if the small if we if the you know to reconcile ourselves to the hope of small scale you know it's it's um but then of course then it just opens up all the you know when you run into when you run into the thing or uh especially now that we're sort of you know separated out although i live in this thing that became is becoming a community through stress in part we're stressed also we have this commonality i mean we had all these weird things of the people who lived in the head property here and who bought into a poa i mean an hoa and nobody and the people that who are behind the gate that aren't so years ago i kind of introduced this term behind the gate and it's taken so pleased you know patience right you're just just sort of like throw it out there and see what happens keep reinforcing it um so uh yes well we are stressed yeah and we we've been told by the powers that be and i think everything other communities in the u.s are like this too i mean mallor for instance is like we're not uh we've been told look you people live out here you know when there's a wildfire we're not going to be able to help well that's as clear as it gets yeah you have to figure out your own exit strategies or your own survival strategies yeah um i mean i i have a neighbor who invited me to come jump in his water tank so stress has these really interesting effects um stress breaks a lot of things in a lot of people but along the way it causes some beautiful things so my favorite music is from latin america in the 70s it's the brazilian tropical ismo argentine reva trova it's just beautiful beautiful music caused by dictatorships that were kidnapping people and dropping them out of helicopters into the into the the river um and and so stress is interesting that way on a brighter note um a thing that just crossed my radar recently that's really interesting uh jim fallows is the senior editor for the atlantic he's actually written about my brain a couple times before in the atlantic he's a big user of tinderbox he's a fan of organizing your thinking and then i did a i did a i did a podcast interview with david allen just a couple weeks ago david allen is the getting things done guy and for some reason david allen in the in the afternotes saying hey here's the recording looped in jim fallows and uh and another guy uh and it was really interesting because fallows and his wife uh yay um david must have just finished a different call hey david hey everybody sorry greetings no worries glad to see you um so fallows and his wife flew in their plane he's a private pilot across the country over the last couple years they wrote a book about it called our town our towns and then they did a pbs style documentary about it but now they have the our town's civic foundation and jim's message back to the little group of people on email was um hey jerry the stuff that you're doing about marshaling resources for cities and all that kind of stuff is kind of exactly what we're doing so i wrote back saying love to help how can we help and haven't heard back yet but one of the most important things i think that the left can do right now is turn toward the center of the country i don't mean the center ideologically i mean let's let's go help everybody who feels left behind legitimately and justifiably who is in dire straits for lots of different reasons and let's be as clever as can be let's like science the shit out of this if anybody will listen to science but let's go help problem solve and be of service and i don't mean let's show up and say uh we've done a study and we have best practices and all you have to do is exactly this because from what i've noticed in the world those kinds of help models don't really work um you need to be of service and you need to tell stories you need to have resources but then you need to sit back and say what which of these things would you smells good to you what would you like to try right and that methodology i think would be super super helpful i don't know if it lights up for anybody else go ahead bro no i just well i love that don't come in and be mr elite and uh yeah with your side role and oh i learned i learned this when i attended a thing called opportunity collaboration so april and i were facilitators for op call for two different years back a while ago and ironically this was a kind of like a dating fast between social ventures like really interesting like half of the 300 people who showed up ran little social ventures and the other half were funders of social ventures and it was a little bit like a dating game for three days ironically at a club med on the on the mexican coast um sorry i know good place for that good place there you go um and of all the social ventures trying to do good in the world there was only one that i read into um which i remembered and i totally remember my conversation where they said our mo is to go approach a city a town someplace in guatemala or honduras or these are the countries where we do work where we do bit where we operate we approach the town we say what do you want us to do and in one case it was a soccer field and they were like don't you need a hospital or a school they're like no we need to get the kids off the street and in another case um they were about to build i think it was a hospital for a small town except the mayor who was kind of they had an election and the mayor who was a corrupt drunken asshole basically came in and so the guy telling me the story says at that point we called our funders and we said hey guess what we're pulling out of this town we're not and the the impulse because of impact investing and all these things is to just put numbers on the board like that didn't matter if the mayor was taking you know taking a slice of the money after a while we built a hospital and the scoreboard lights up and you're like great another another hospital built but in this case they backed out and the hospital wound up being built like two pounds over in a different town and it took longer and so forth but but i love their mo and and what scared me was of of the little ventures i was talking to everybody else was like we did a big study we've got best practices we have a methodology and the thing that we just drop in we're like air dropping some best way to do things and nothing drives me crazier than that yeah this goes back to the emergency emergency authority thing you were talking about susan right this goes back to the emergency versus authority or authorized yeah ways of managing that goes back and that bubbles back to one of the new stacks so i'm trying to figure out how do we wind up in stacks that have emergent properties that allow us to get to know each other and build community and become citizens again instead of mere consumers and for me that's a better verse and i i bought the better verse dot org right after zuckerberg said the metaverse is the thing we're after because i'm like wow zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse would have been embarrassing in 1995 right right but but we have like the tools on deck to build the better verse we've got it we're just not aiming that direction together sorry and i said a whole bunch of different things there and a couple of you wanted to jump in i'm curious jerry you they definitely rings a bunch of bells that i've been wondering about so but i i got to spend like last week of the week before i guess that in down in playa viva which is a a resort on the mixing coast but you know it's a regenerative resort and uh you do look regenerated thank you thank you it's this is not it but you know it's got the same concept um and you know it's fun to watch because he you know he started the resort about 15 years ago he's got you know kind of three-sided bamboo houses that are really gorgeous it's all solar powered he's got you know a solid you know kind of water system he's got a regenerative uh agriculture farm that's doing a lot of food for the for the resort and then he's kind of working up the watershed um they're investing in a school they're investing in the the family at the top of the mountain that does the the cocoa and the coffee plantations you know and and they're you know you can you can see kind of a watershed strategy developing and and i've been increasingly convinced that this watershed concept is really important and that a lot of our prior development strategy had been too particulate you know we're going to invest in schools or soccer court you know but we really need is that interaction across the initiative but the initiatives are still kind of independent right the school that they're investing in is not the same as the farm you know these are separate entities and and but they have synergistic effects so so the question i've wondered about is there's some way we can develop a structure that supports you know effectively watershed co-investment um that you know they would build on the opportunity on the synchronicity opportunities and i suspect this is what community development you know kind of looked like 20 years ago in the in the united states kind of urban development had the same problem that's why we have business improvement districts and stuff like that where you're trying to do mutual support within a region of a city but i'm not sure if we've done it as well outside of cities so anyway i kind of imagine that there's a platform that lets you know a place come up and say well we want to develop this watershed here's you know six different initiatives that various people want to invest in and then you invite investors to yeah i don't i don't know this one uh i do i do i agree that that's why i know about it yeah yeah and then let investors i'll put it in yeah and then do that you know so there's some kind of distributed synchronicity i guess is the question so i've wondered whether there's a play in something like that um um a couple things uh john wasley powell the kind of explorer of the west proposed to congress that all the states west of the mississippi that their boundaries be aligned with watersheds and he sent the map in outlining where the peak where the crests were it would have been a fabulous idea it would have been really awesome instead of course we were busy dividing these states up around the homestead act and also slavery like uh free land free soil versus slave states and all that kind of politics and crap which is why there's a north and south dakota for example um but perfect order is interesting because it's about the management of water and other things on the slopes of the volcano at bolly uh and uh it's a really lovely book by an anthropologist about how when the green revolution hits bolly the the the scientists almost kill not only farming but the reefs offshore because the scientists say hey you need to grow this new variant called golden rice it's much it yields much better it's more nutritious okay good then you're gonna probably want to put some fertilizer in your soil so here's some fertilizer and these little manual gates you have for irrigation no no no let's do this sort of electromechanical system and they failed to notice a bunch of stuff and then the punch line which i told i think in a rex call years ago uh but the punch line was that the thousand-year-old hindu rituals that they were repeating every whatever in the temples that trickle down the the the mountain uh contained algorithms for efficient and and actually almost optimal allocation of which fields to flood who gets how much water uh you know when to plant all this other kind of stuff it was super interesting it was baked into what looked like pure religion and and the anthropologists were like oh my god we destroyed that and i don't know how i don't know what happened after i don't know how how they resolved it or what's what's happened since yeah so i think i mean to me the the watershed concept is really powerful and you know i mean this is like in bolly it was always the and there's the folks at the bottom of the mountain that wanted to head to control the irrigation system because you know if they weren't getting the water they were the ones that objected and you know and this is kind of in the oestrum world and stuff but i just feel like i do feel like there there is a gap between the you know all the people who claim they have lots of money to invest in social impact and there's all these people who say they have projects that will upgrade in social impact and they're not getting funded so there's some kind of a funding gap and i don't know how i feel like the rule it has to be changed on both sides right it can't just be one sides fucked up they're both fucked up so you've got to adjust both of them but it's like what would the what would the cooperation tools look like they would enable you know enable you know okay so i'm a funder i invest in schools well let me invest in schools that are going to support this watershed you know i care about biodiversity i want to plant mangroves okay well here's a watershed that has mangroves in schools let's do those simultaneously i don't know how do we facilitate that kind of thing well i think this this is probably an important one and it makes me think jerry there must be a way to find out what happened yeah yeah yeah there's gotta be some update or some yeah somehow to figure out what did we learn anything and did the development people learn anything from the process right because because it's one thing to have a light bulb go off that oh my god by trying to improve this community we almost killed them it's another thing to say oh we've we've modified our development process in x y and z ways and now we're not killing off our clients well it will be i will i will take it upon myself because i uh to see if i can this out because uh i think what this this book also contributes to in the understanding the anthropologist the anthropologist i mean i do think the anthropologists are the pretty much the only ones who do try to go in with an open mind and that's the famous story about xerox and the copiers in the field right that that is the birth story of the irl where you work so yeah so that that and you know many more yeah but it is it the discipline that that the ethnographers learned is is the discipline of not judging and i remember when i told us to we had some anthropologists at ibm and when i went to work there because i wanted to know how one of these systems actually worked and i went through the oh this isn't so bad and then oh my god it really is but that um trying to work in that system and they had hired some anthropologists and they were crowing about it this was long after other people had had anthropologists finally an anthropologist um and then they kept thinking i was an anthropologist which was not my role there anyway um enough about me that um um what what's in here is is a story about what that they unpacked what was you know you can look at the chapters of it uh the what was what was the the hindu religion doing there i mean it's the the more older i get the more i think that what these systems are these religious systems are and their practice right that it's a practice and it's about how to live your life so you've just opened a really interesting pandora's box for me which one um well um i have a whole riff on like the 10 commandments uh and like nobody knows the second commandment for example by the way there's a bunch of different versions of the 10 commandments depending where you are so there's no consistent real 10 commandments but the but the usual who knows the usual second commandment and don't be embarrassed nobody knows this number one is i am your god your only god there will be no other gods before me which is licensed to get rid of the people who believe in other gods by the way yes number two is no graven images which all muslims and jews obey assiduously and all christians violate and twice on sunday except midnight's don't no graven images bingo look that seriously right that meant no but first but first of all number two what the hell is it doing among the 10 ways to live a life like really seriously what is no graven images even doing on the list well it's my question it doesn't appear to me to be wisdom for for living a good life so so my riff is basically like throw out the 10 commandments there are crappy instructions for living a life and where else in the bible do you actually get positive instruction because it's not it's not about that it's about it's about the practice which is an emergent social phenomenon so ignore the instruction manual just pay attention to the practices no well i would start there for sure i mean if i were walking into a situation so when you when they walked in here and they just threw out the whole watershed system that was in a way it took a long painful painful thing before and it looks like if you look at the titles they must have gotten somewhere because here's tyrant sorcerers and democrats at the chapter yeah hieroglyphs of reason the chapter demigods at the summit so you know that's they were unpacked they they really did some try to they wrestled with it right for sure they messed it up and then they had to wrestle with the the mess they made but what you said a moment ago i i love and is is like is a pandora's box for me because religion ought to be a knowledge management systems for transmitting wisdom about how to live a great society how to build a huge great society but they don't appear to be there's a lot of command and control structures going on right exactly and it's the authors it's the authorization engine yes this but not that i mean that's that's crazy so um so along these lines in a fit of peak a couple years ago um i bought the domain foobarism.com inventing a placeholder religion because foo.bar is a placeholder file name for geeks and i was like if you were going to invent a new religion for the purposes kind of you just described susan what would be in that religion wouldn't invent a religion well elrond hubbard did well look where that got us exactly no but but religions are religions are clever hacks of ways of getting people to do the same thing what's wrong with inventing a religion i've been thinking it i mean we i've been doing this uh we should emerge out of the practice is what it should do all right the practice go ahead yes but i just think i mean i i think it's a very different question than how do you manage watershed but i think it's interesting no it's absolutely in that religion in that book because it's one of the same the reason i think the reason susan went there was that the hindu rituals contained management practice for watershed yeah fair enough that's fun i mean the probably hindu hindu probably has a management practice for many things we don't have to adopt all of hinduism to order in order to understand well exactly right but but the idea that you're trying to understand movement making and motivation by studying how religions have done it i think it's really interesting and so we've been doing the buddha sangha where we're listening to the to the the Rinpoche you know read his fucking book in i guess in apolly i don't even know what these languages read in and then translated into English into English in the last chapter has been around how to have a teacher and who the teacher needs to be and how a buddhist teacher is not a cult clearly that it's like wait a minute how do i know that you know and it's kind of but you can see the self-awareness of the deliberately you know deliberate trying to build the groups and reinforce the teaching and move people along and you know a lot of buddhism i think is got really good messages the rest of society should learn you know so i'm not all that i don't feel all that bad about them trying to transmit it but anyway it's as far as just kind of understanding the logic of how do you do a movement it's like yeah look at religions man they've been pretty effective anybody else on this i would be except i gotta run so oh shit sorry i'll catch you next time take care guys i'll be in here brad yeah bye actually so speaking of religion and and buddhism uh there's been an escalation you all remember zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance indeed and pik nakhan recently died and he had a book out that i i'm reserved at the library the title was zen in the art of peacemaking when i actually picked up the book the title had changed it was zen in the art of saving the planet and i think that says something but it's quite interesting because it's and i actually have to return the book because i was reading so many other books also but um it says something interesting about uh you know if we're talking about anthropogenic climate change anthropos is the key part and what drives anthropos so i think the kind of religious and i think that has a lot to do with religion because there's you know has a lot to do with an image of oneself and how one positions oneself kind of in a greater in a kind of huge ecology so speaking of watershed i would very much agree that this kind of uh self identification which has many many religious elements uh is is pretty key although it raises the question like uh in terms of this kind of religious or in this example of you know uh hindu traditions uh affecting agriculture is is that authorization or is that emergent you know well i think i mean look it's yeah it's funny that you cottoned on to the emergence we had a big argument those of us were dealing with this concept a while back about about whether emergence was the right word and um because everything emerges right but you know you when you have authorization that drives that drives certain kinds of practice development then there's the practice development that arises out of engaging with the environment and the people around you and everything else right and trying to get things done those things eventually kind of come together and and when work when things work those are a bit symbiotic um and and uh the the temptation is to formalize you know too much and to uh and to to authorize it and say this is a good best practice i mean in my business we were in the business of developing practice because that seemed to me that's how you learn right that's if if if what you know is embedded in practice then develop then one way to leverage things might be to come in and understand the practice and then you know move it in various ways because you've yeah anyway i won't go there that's a whole long conversation but um yeah let me just stop there i love that i mean how how could we get a new social operating system to misapply uh you know software into society but but how can we get a new stack or the new ways of doing that are more emergent and less loose and less written down i mean what's what's happening in web three is there's a bunch of people who believe that if you set up a dashboard of projects let people vote with either their presence or the number of shares they own in the dow and then uh have proposals going through the dow as in a marketplace of ideas that that's actually going to lead to a highly functional organization and if only we did that well everything would be fine and i've got my doubts a little bit about that yes and notice that what's happening though is is just at the point what is that what's what's being authorized uh is it's kind of blessing certain aspects of the practice right and and that and if you keep doing that then you do get into trouble the question is how does you how do you um well it is hard messing with practice and i've had arguments with anthropologists about it because they think it's sort of you know the way it is is the way it is right and but you can we affect it all the time but the fun thing about technology is that it changes practice on a dime like i remember writing about instant messaging one month and then some months later hearing somebody on a bus in Manhattan saying i am me that and i'm like holy shit this is hitting the mainstream like this is already out and not one of the early i am companies spent a dime on marketing these these things propagated virally because they were so damn useful yeah right and so aim ic you don't need you don't need i mean the technology is enabler right yes but that change behaviors it changed it like it you know and nowadays nobody can imagine life before smartphones and google maps on their phone right but imagine imagine okay so there was and facebook for all for all the bad it's done oh that's fine it's true um but there was a you know if you look back to uh we had a woman penny uh Eckert who was a sociolinguist who did a lot of work on uh um jocks and burnouts which is a a typical bifurcation in the various forms that goes through american high schools um and uh and she um she did she did she would have these wonderful accounts of things like you know where where the changes come from so she was of the the school that it wasn't the whole transkin thing about the change in language comes from the the comes from the uh the the the you know in children being born in different genetic things and then it ranges rearranges the whole you know innate structure of language that were born with um but she would look at things like and she she was of the opinion that and argued for many years that it was actually change language change happened in adolescence when and that it was at that point where you were sort of beginning to develop your own identity and you know who you wanted to be with and not be with and what you wanted to be like and whether you wanted to be goth or whether you wanted to be this or that and the other thing right and that those were that was the phenomenon that we need to pay attention to anyway it turned out that on closer and close inspection of a particular fashion which was way back in the 80s and probably started in the 80s was for the um you know for in in especially in in the black population of skinny jeans and they it was called pegging to peg your jeans i mean they would get so tight that you couldn't get them on right women do this why they do this i don't know but anyway uh the um that jet that that pegging thing would then it would when it migrated it migrated very fast across the social system and across the the the race boundaries across social boundaries but it would find it would wiggle its way in um and one of the things that i used to try to figure out was you know just a principle to operate on was if you want a certain practice or you think that a certain practice would be good or a company has a strategy and they want to shift everything like take away the branch offices and put in laptops you need to go find where people are are actually accomplishing what needs to be done the work that needs to be done whether you like it or dislike it or hate companies or whatever it's um is that you actually have to you have to go find it you know go somewhere where people are already succeeding at what they are without the resources of a branch office you know how do they get their work done and that generalizes absolutely and you can you know and just sort of getting people to go there and they willingly went with us we had we were assigned these two young women a staff person and a you know promising promising individuals and i remember when i and we i i was stuck doing it myself because we were having an uproar in the end of irel and i was trying to do this project at the same time um so i ended up you know and i would work with this woman who was on a staff person and i said so what did you what did you see today what did you learn to that she said they're just not following the rules i thought what do you mean they're not following was she they're not following was i well what are they doing you know well they just not doing it the way they should be and and that was she could not i mean it took a days days and days of okay what did you see uh and uh and tell me tell me how they got that piece of paper or that decision how did they get that decision made and began to open her eyes to what was actually going on well now of course that really disrupts a lot of things but in the in that are the seeds of the new practice that you might want to encourage right and so getting the people you take the people take the people who uh are going to you know move out of their offices and take their managers and those people and put them together with the people right who who are already doing it that way and get the conversation going and the way it worked was really you can't document this you can't put a number on it but the people said oh we can't do what they're doing because blah blah blah blah blah but what can you do but then you wait that's fabric so well who's doing this who in the world is using this approach where do i where do we immerse ourselves in this what is it called but it's not how do we follow the rules of this process well i mean i i i'm dying to live under this regime you use these principles to make change like i think that i act this way or i try to yeah you do but how do we how do we do more of this how do we pour some oxygen on this all right well i thought the way to pour oxygen on this was to get people to um so i i was a fan of practice documentation and i did write manuals for and tried to um you know get the fuji xerox guys in their knowledge management organization to actually understand what it was to do this and there was some conceptual work and then he says but what's the process sake he go he said what is the process here i said what's the process the process is go out and look at what's going on well how do you do that and eventually broke that down into you know hints and ways of you know how to get into the organization how to know when you're accepted how to you know all the rest of this and to co practice first i mean just to go in there and hunt um and if you can get them to do it it's even better so it's i learned it from bcg actually ready willing enable you know so there were a bunch of principles and things like that people say oh you know we gotta have you gotta have the ceo involved well it's nice if you can but what if you can't what's the difference between somebody who's a champion and somebody who's a sponsor i mean the chat you get easy to find champions who will want to do what you do why to think of all the stuff but they have no money they have no power right how do you you have to you have to sort of pull the systems through more thank you um and we go ahead that's a that was just i mean i'd ask this question a couple months ago and i didn't get very many positive reactions but i wonder how much of our time has spent trying to influence everyone other people's behavior i think kind of each individual spent a lot of time trying to influence other people's behavior which i don't it's fascinating and and i guess what i was i was what man this is a theory for maybe both could test it but it's like i don't think the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice i think it might bend towards coordination you know like there's always and so like if you could go i wonder if you could go through our history and you could see stepwise functions to greater and greater coordination amongst people right so you know you talk about being it would try to do it without judgment right so like the enclosure movement may have been good or bad but it facilitated coordination or you know the east indian corporation right that was a step in the corporation the nation stake is coordination you know language is coordination the internet is coordination right the market is coordination right and so what we're striving for is i'd say now that the challenge today is kind of a global coordination that we've never really enabled right so we tried with the un maybe or something like that but like to respond to climate change we need a level of coordination we've never shown capacity for but we can look for those places where it does i mean you know it's going to be lumpy the social system that emerges out of all of this stuff is lumpy okay and people individuals work their way in and through around all this and there's any any holy ecology that exists out there you know and and you can you can find people have different roles you know and instead of going for the star in the middle of the of the community practice you look for the people who have who have have belong belonging have legitimacy across the boundary you wish to cross i mean there's an ongoing debate i would say in history right between coordination via the autocrat and coordination via the democrat right can we distribute coordination or can we centralize it is the fundamental the way it works is that it's very distributed this is one of the points of the new the the dawn of everything yes this is one of the points it's like hey people old societies didn't suddenly go from hunter gatherers who are struggling to make a living in civilization when we invent agriculture and suddenly everything is hierarchical and look how look how great civilization is that that that is a myth and what happened was these extremely rich various forms of decentralized sometimes switching you know shifting for the seasons or for the purpose that that the group was was around different kinds of governance that often were incredibly like autonomous decentralized they were really about how their how their different tribes learned to be a tribe well and that's yes how a tribe learns to be a tribe that's that's a wonderful story doesn't mean the think the mistake that often gets made is if you go in and you see and you have a story about how it's working that doesn't mean it's good or that it's good for society it means that's what is 80 percent of Ethiopian women used to be i don't know if they still are um circumcised that is a bad practice but that is what society had and if you were not circumcised you were not marriageable right and you know we did go in and mess with it right but notice that i mean i don't know that this is true but i happen to have no somebody who's studied this but i don't know that person very well is that it was often women who convinced other women well it became a norm you were not marriageable you you would not have a life if you weren't um molly mulching hacked the whole system in west africa not Ethiopia but she's been going from tribe to tribe talking to the moms of the villages yeah saying hey guess what fg i'm not in the Quran and they're like really and then they have the conversation and it often catches and once the imam is on board yeah exactly and actually change so she's working through the systems yes using their documents and and you would think that this will work in the us around the bible and the the the boogaloo apocalypse but it's not well because unless everybody thinks that we're already in revelations well i yeah which i think a lot of people do i remember saying the most important thing when i was in junior high we were at a bible study group and i that was the last person in the world they thought would want a bible study group and i said what they said we want to study i said revelation and the the minister said what i said we want to study revelation he said who does we want to study i had two people that's awesome and then of course that was going over we went around the sunday school whole sunday school apparatus right yeah do that because because they have a schedule for what you should study when and there's a whole yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's like you know here you go walk or walk that's a wonderful story citizen gosh it's really cool well that thing is i yeah i just you know it was sometimes i don't know how i ever got the courage to do that but i think it wasn't courage i think it was i couldn't think of any you know i couldn't think of any other way and it just seemed he was a fairly intellectual pastor for men and i and uh and we were lucky to have him and he was willing to do it do i remember what i learned then not really except the process of doing it right cool so i mean it pardon nothing no so i think of the thing is you don't you know i came from the school if you don't care how it gets if you don't care who gets the credit you can get a lot done yeah and that is true and you don't get it i mean at irl when they handed out you know at ten year anniversary and they handed out all these things they didn't give one to me and the director said i think i made a mistake and i i said you made the biggest mistake you've made and i basically checked out uh harry truman has a quote it's amazing what you can accomplish when you do not care who gets the credit it is true what was i i'm not familiar with your background i'm sorry what was irl i'm not familiar oh the irl was the institute for research on learning i put a link to it in the chat though and it was a it was paid for by the it was a xerox park john cd brown and co invention and um he wanted to prove show that you know technology could affect one of the good things in the world would be education so it was a technology is going to save education thing and he sold it to david currents who was the ceo of xerox at the time uh on the ground who had written a book called training the untrainable and so somehow that the technology was going to all be this and i walked in and i got oh no but somehow it's not how i met you susan through jsp because i knew i think it was ester it was ester oh okay ester maybe and jsp okay because remember you got sent to the irl to irl to write one of the well that's that's how i basically there was an issue of the newsletter on irl and that's how i met penny penny eckard and a couple others yeah yeah so i kind of got in there and i thought i'm going to run with this and nobody asked me to run the i just sort of named myself the research director and started in and tried to knit these pieces that i had and and i thought well we're going to have to make money and we have to have something unique and it looks to me like this sort of this social perspective on learning might be something that isn't there because we're so focused on individuals which is not a problem we're all individuals we like ourselves or not and yeah it's all like that so uh and so it was in that sort of transition it took me and i wanted that to happen which meant that these sort of educational psychologists had to go took several years uh and it just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking so so there are so many dysfunctional brilliant people with dysfunctional ideas with which we run the world and sorting the dysfunctional ones from the highly functional ones is difficult and not not easy for people buried in the dysfunctional systems and raising an awareness of how to make those choices seems to me to be a civilizational skill we need to propagate somehow so that people find their way into the high functioning ones and away from terrible ones and and and dave you were talking earlier about the structures of coordination and all that and and like the british east india company and all that one of these things is the treaty of torresillas where the pope basically says hey you explorers going out for spain and in portugal if you meet anybody and they don't know the name of jesus christ uh their land everything they have is yours because you are going to bring christ to them etc etc it was licensed basically for colonialism and to take over the world and that was a set of legal structures and justifications to do that right and the maury are like the only tribe worldwide who survived yeah that effect um partly because it wasn't the spanish or the or the portuguese showing up well they were too far away they had they had a little room over there you know geography geography geography does wonders like for the us but but anyway so often so much of world history is about the crappy structures overwhelming uh functioning societies and one of one of my big open questions is can a pacifist well-run society survive assault from the people next door who have gunstorms steal and an angry disposition and who are like and less to lose it's unclear and the and i guess that you know what i was just positing was kind of the you know a values free perspective of it which is yes and but it was you know but there was coordination implied right yeah i'd say every one of these decisions had a coordination component and so maybe coordination isn't the right kind of reduction i like i don't like your focus on the coordination it's just a good and good and it's it's it's it's the least it's sort of yeah but we don't like the people who go around and cherry pick cherry pick the pieces that work for them and work to put something together right the people who know how to do that uh and and i think uh i grew up well so did you that's why we're talking and how do you actually make that happen i mean i i gave up i said i can't first of all there's a whole world out there and i want to understand how it works because clearly we we can live in this small place and we can do all the stuff but we're not exactly having fun okay and so that brings me to my second book of the day which is Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich um who you must know and uh thanks to Teddy moving out of this space in my moving in i had i wanted to move all his books so i could move some books in because my books are my brain right and so i'm bringing them in one by one anyway i found some interesting books in his pile of course which i stopped to read and this one is um it's a history of collective it's a history of collective joy and it's an it's an assessment it's an assessment of of the last 400 years or 500 years of western life being full of depression and depressed people and how and she goes through the history of the loss of ecstatic ecstatic dance ecstatic aspects of religion and how and you know and and how the and how of course the the command and control systems came in and said this is a mess you're violating all the things it turns out it was an exquisitely crafted they were exquisitely crafted practices that you know you had to do right in order to gain the benefit you couldn't just go off you know and have her you know you know screw with everybody you wanted to or anyway no you couldn't do it that way it would have it had its own system uh i don't know if she's right or wrong but it's actually um you know i don't know how she got away with this book actually and thank you for reminding me of the existence of the book i totally spaced on it it's on my kindle cue like i bought it years ago and didn't really stick to it but well but see if you have your books in front of you like this you go like oh wait maybe this has something to do with cast so we just moved up two floors in the same building into a place that has room and we closed down our storage bins which is a mess because we have boxes all over in front of us now and they will exist for a long time except one of the really big benefits is i get to see my books again which i didn't think was going to happen in my lifetime i had kind of written them off yeah my books are just gonna die in storage and so am i but in this case like we're gonna build some bookshelves and i'll see my books again so i you know i'll be back in that world among the paper people yeah well welcome back i love it that way yeah yeah i i mean my house is still full of all my books double stacked i mean thousands and you have a lot my poor renters you know would like some bookshelves so i'm thinking i took off the first thing i brought over was about 25 uh indian cookbooks and i thought okay i'm just gonna cook indian food that's it i tried making you know a kakaliki soup the other day and what didn't really was it was great but as kakaliki soup but it wasn't satisfying so yes i i applaud your move into bookshelves rejoining the physical world um we've gone for a lot longer than i 90 minutes um the time is whisked on by do i do any of you want to add a couple thoughts to where we are or things that are still in your in your queue to to discuss here no i enjoyed what happened i don't want to desecrate it i gotta toss in one more though because it's a tiny one but i always laugh at it is that it's from from you jerry is that in terms of all the our experiments with coordination the fax machine was one of the bad ones and how we ended up on that thread is crazy but you know at least be chopped it off so except wait wait okay i have a whole riff on how the fax machine was a 10-year detour but it wasn't a attempt at a coordination it was an experiment a coordination that we could have done better with but we wrote it well it was invented in 1921 and we didn't get around to it until 1991 actually it was invented in like the 1800s there was a primitive a very early version of a fax that had a pendulum that would that would drop ink on a piece of paper according to a signal i forgot what it is i probably got it in my brain but the but the idea of transmission of a piece of an image on a piece of paper is is way older than the fax machine as we know it yeah it's very interesting i really enjoyed it susan it's really fun thank you thank you for sharing your your mind and your heart and your history and everything with us so nicely it's like this makes me think i keep thinking what can i do what can i do what can i do and i still don't know there's that big question thanks guys until see it until soon