 So this is Friday, June 4th, 2021. The first of, I don't know, at least two today, conversations about what to show people who are interested in the next economy, the next society, whatever it might be. And Graham is really funny because we started an hour ago and he was like, I'm a little, if I seem a little distracted right now, it's because 10 minutes ago across the street from me, a building lit on fire. And so he was like, at first, he didn't see any fire engines, but he could hear some sirens in the background and then, you know, halfway through our column, like, so how's the fire doing? And he says, well, now there's water arching over the building, but he was, he was seeing flames shoot out of a warehousing building near him. So that was exciting. Yeah. How are you all? I'm good. I also want to ask you, I think Gila also mentioned a call like a philosophical type of conversation. I'm really interested in getting that on the calendar. I just don't know what the protocol is to push for it. We talk and then we look at the calendars and we, like the easiest way is we make a date to have that conversation. We frame the conversation in a way that's appealing to others. And then we post it on the Mattermost and on the Google group and say, hey, come join us. And which, so a piece of what I'm hoping we do here is have some of that philosophical conversation. So that, I don't know whether where I'm aiming actually will fulfill a piece of what you're thinking about. I'm hoping it does because, because a piece of this is like, what are the big ideas that are different from today's conventional wisdom that are actually, will productively take us into a better future? Right? Yeah. And who's explaining them all? I'm interested in local, in like the whole local economy tie-in kind of thing. Yeah. Actually, there's one more thing I wanted to say. You guys, I heard a frustration with not getting enough women here. And one of the things that I was thinking of is that like there are certain people, like, do you know Michelle Holiday, her work? Only by name. Okay. So there are certain people that I think maybe if we took the time and sent an invitation to them specifically, come for, talk about your work for 10 minutes, just a few minutes. Yeah. And to introduce, I think that would be a better way because there's, oh. So here's Michelle in my brain. I'm just, while you're talking, I just looked her up and she's Thrive Ability Montreal. She used to work at Coke. I apparently liked her thinking because back when I ran Rex, I was thinking of contacting her to ask if she might want to be a Rex fellow. So I think I'm very on board with her thinking and I have not invited her to anything or contacted her. So. So that would be my suggestion as a place to start. And I think she's fabulous. I really don't. Fabulous. That's a great idea. Thank you, Stacy. You're welcome. And why don't we use the Calls channel in Mattermost for our notes? If that's okay with everybody? So I'll just put a marker in there. When we get off this call, I will practice getting onto there. Because I also wanted to ask you, how do I get to Trove? So I'll give you a link to Trove right now. There's a, and he's renaming it. It used to be called Catalyst, but he ran into a name conflict around Catalyst. So the easiest thing I think I can give you is an invite to OGM on Catalyst, which is becoming Trove. And this, this invite, which I will put, I'll, that's right. I'll put it in the Zoom chat because you're not apparently on the Mattermost chat. So this should get you signed up. Signed up on Catalyst slash Trove. Okay. Howdy, Hank. Hello, good morning to you. Good afternoon to me. Exactly. Well, good night to Craig. He's, where are you from, Craig? I'm from Scotland, but I'm living in Thailand. I, right. Okay, good. So I'm a few hours ahead each day. We're representing all parts of the day. In fact, you, Craig, you could almost make the 4pm call because you'd be waking up maybe. I don't know what my 4pm is. What time for you? That'd be 6am. 6am. So if you're an early riser, it depends how late I work of an evening. Yeah, exactly. Jerry, apropos opening up OGM. Yes. And finding new ethnic groups and multiple genders and so on. So I just did a Google search for Black discussion groups. I did one earlier today and I've lost that. So I did another one now and I just posted them. There's a Facebook page. Black Intellectual Discussion Forum. That's what BDIF is. Wow, BDI. Now I'm reluctant to click on it because if I put Facebook, they will restart my account and I'm trying to get shot at. So I posted the link there. It just strikes me. I mean, there are people in groups like ours of all ethnicities all over the world, you know? In some of the other meetings I frequent, we have participants from Ghana and Nigeria and Singapore, Australia, men, women, elderly, youngsters. We've got Gen Z and everybody is in many, many of these groups. So it strikes me there's loads of places to go looking for people to case, perhaps to observe first and then perhaps invite to OGM or join the discussion with them and present yourself or oneself. We'll have you to inviting them to OGM because I saw someone posted in the Matamos chat yesterday that we, who was it? And he wanted to contribute $100 to pay for... A diversity expert to come in and advise us. Assistance from someone who's going to advise us to do things that we've already got suggestions for and haven't made any effort to follow up. Good point. And I'll, let me just switch your screen again because I just added Michelle Holiday to a thought that I've been curating called potential OGM co-conspirators. And there we go. So here's just A through B, right? There's a scroll bar up here. So I've got a whole bunch of people in this thought. And the little lock icon below it means that this is a private thought for me. This is not a thought that I'm sort of putting out in public. So if you go browse my brain, if I give you a... I can't actually give you a link to go find this because it's only visible to me. I could make it public, but it didn't seem part right. But here are a whole bunch of people doing really interesting work. And I just added Michelle because Stacy brought up Michelle. And I have made zero effort to reach out to these potential co-conspirators. So, BB Wunderman, Adebayo Akumalafi, Adrianne Marie Brown, there's a whole, he's a public intellectual all about post-activism and sacred activism. And frankly, this is a really good entry point to the conversation I intended to have now and this afternoon, because if these people have good videos, like here's one that I found, but I don't know that I watched it. It's like the times are urgent, let us slow down, slowing down intentionally, that's his conversation. But approaching these people and picking the ones who are not white males would be a really great strategy for broadening out our community. And then I have connected to it this other thought which is public. So, in fact, Stacy, one of the things that you may be able to find in Trove because what I did was I exported all the thoughts that are connected to OGM neighbor communities and then Vincent imported that into Trove. And I think that the OGM group is seated with some of this information in Trove, in his database, in his directory. And so here I have Game B, artificial brain network notebook app, a whole bunch of efforts on bridging the cultural divide, Braver Angels, beyond connecting the dots. There's a whole, and again, this is just A through C here, but there's a whole bunch of communities that we have made no effort to approach. And for me, one of the best ways to increase diversity in OGM is not so much to convince people who are more diverse than us to come join our conversation, but rather to be of service to people who are more diverse than us. And in so doing, hopefully they'll come join our conversation because when we jam here, good things happen for them in the problems they're trying to tackle. And I think that that orientation, I haven't tried to engineer, I haven't sort of convinced us to do, I haven't built time into our program. You know, this is an interesting thing. The call that I set up here, I just did on spontaneously yesterday, figuring short notice, we'll see who sees it and can show up. But we can do lots of these. And Stacey, the philosophical conversation you'd like to have is interesting in that same exact way, right? And one thing I haven't done is kind of flood our schedules with lots of different interesting, chewy, tasty kind of calls like this that are OGM-y, and then just to compound things because we don't have like a shared infrastructure because the OGM platform, whatever that is doesn't exist yet. And it's just me out here still with the brain, which is proprietary. And then other people using Miro and whatnot because the piece parts aren't connected behind the curtain, as we do all these calls, we're not busy building a shared asset, a shared knowledge base of what these things are, who these people are. So when I just showed you my potential OGM co-conspirators thought, I would love for that to be a social thought where you could say, hey, here's the people I think would be really interesting to bring into this conversation who are doing work that's resonant with what OGM is about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then I could like say, yes, yes, borrow, borrow, I don't know about this one, but, and then each of our points of view on that question would be preserved, right? Which is one of the goals of an OGM infrastructure. It's not to how modunize everybody's perspectives and ideas like Wikipedia needs to do to be a canonical encyclopedia, but rather to have shared resources that preserve individual points of view so that we can contrast, compare, and improve our points of view, right? And then build together sort of the thing here, here's the batch of things we agreed on, and then here's the still kind of touchy, contentious issues, and here's how we're going about exploring them. And we're still in the dark, like with the tools part of this, and Pete has been building out Massive Wiki, which is sort of our default platform, which is really primitive at this point. I mean, it's marked down files that can smell like a wiki if you know how to shake the stick in the right way. So, so we're a year into this and still kind of floundering, but these are the kinds of things that I'm realizing we need to sort of move forward with. Did that all make sense? Yeah, well, that's good. Yes, it did. Very good, a link to the Mattermost conversation. I do indeed. Let me go back to Mattermost and pick up a link to this, to the Calls channel. Got it, got it, right? And paste it into our chat. Oh, that's it, exactly. Thank you. Perfect, thanks. So on. And so maybe I should go back and reframe this question as I'm setting it up for today's calls, or should we, or are there any other things to talk about before I do that? Sounds good, let's go there. Okay, yeah. So the idea is you bump into somebody who's maybe center right, like slightly conservative, but not QAnon. And they're curious and interested in like what's going on and what the big change of foot is. They don't need to be convinced that things are screwed up, that I'm trying to avoid beating the drum of everything's broken, we're all going to die. And trying to figure out who's got really interesting positive, possibly radical suggestions about moving forward. Who is sort of disrupting the status quo by thinking differently about the fundamental assumptions. So the call I just got off, when Craig joined I was talking to Graham Boyd, who's the inventor of fair shares commons. And he's written a book about this and he's got seminars and a couple of OGMers. Trey, Trey Ashley, Garen and Parmjit have been taking his seminar and working with him to learn the fair shares common stuff. And a piece of what happens in fair shares commons is that profits are pooled and then shared back out, which means that all of the entities, all of the little sovereign entities that are in the fair shares commons have a much higher survivability rate. And so part of our conversation just now was there's a metaphor here of why the casino usually wins, which is the casino has deeper pockets than everybody else. And what wipes out small gamblers is that they run out of their funds. And what wipes out little companies is they hit a couple of quarters where they drain their runway and they don't get another round of financing or debt or anything like that. And they're out of a game. And so that's why there's so many of small business failures, et cetera, et cetera. So fair shares, one of its benefits is it creates a much sounder platform for the survivability of small initiatives until they actually get lift up, which is cool. And he also said, part of his thesis also is that luck plays a much bigger role in company success than we ever attribute to it. That really so much of this is like roles of the dice. And if you can survive lots of roles of the dice, you are odds of success are much better. So that's interesting because he's undermining a bunch of conventional assumptions about economics. And one of the things I recommended to him on the call in the last hour was, hey, maybe you frame this as an antidote to the Laffer curve. Because Arthur Laffer was an economist whose work is really not based on a lot of facts, but Ronald Reagan seized on Laffer and made him like an important economist and used the Laffer curve to sell everybody trickle down economics. And trickle down economics says, which is dogma for Republicans right now. If you give tax cuts to big companies and wealthy individuals, they spend more money and that money trickles down the economy to all the poor people who then make a better living. And it turns out at least from my own perspective that this is bullshit thinking. It's a great way to convince everybody the tax cuts are okay. And in fact, the far right has convinced everybody that all kinds of taxation is taking. This is one of the things I hate about libertarian thinking is that they think that all taxes are illegal takings and they have no concept of the commons, no concept of other sorts of things. And again, this is just my own point of view on these things. And I would love to do virtual combat with libertarians and Hayekians and other sorts of people with tools like the brain and Kumu and Miro and whatnot. I'm looking forward and maybe this is a year ahead now from where we are today because of the tools. But, and I haven't found like a libertarian who's built a body of work like I built with the brain because you kind of need something to show and tell with to do this. But I would love to be in a place where we can have these conversations thoughtfully, slow them down a little bit and then put up, okay, so here's a question we think we framed nicely, what are some experiments that we can find out if anybody's run? What can we suggest to economics postdocs as courses of study and cross our fingers that somebody picks one up and goes and actually performs this research or whatever, right? So how might we become part of the frothy conversation that is all too often this combative conversation around big ideas that have little underpinning that have poor foundations, right? So that's part of the goal here. So this conversation and I keep drifting back toward this the broader purposes of open goal of mind but this little brainstorming I'm hoping I would love to uncover a series of, and I'm aiming for relatively short because there seems to be like this incredible Jurassic explosion or Cambrian explosion, sorry of like long form podcast conversations that are an hour and a half and clubhouse chats that are not recorded that are six hours long and stuff like that. I'm like, nobody you're talking to and trying to convince them something is gonna sit and listen to something for an hour and a half or 1% of those people will be willing to sit through an hour and a half but lots of people have an appetite for three minutes, six minutes, 10 minute bites. And one of the reason Ted talks are like no longer than 18 minutes is that they realize you can force somebody to say an awful lot in 18 minutes and there's a couple of Ted talks where I look up and I realized that we're only four minutes into the talk and I have learned a ton and I'm like, how did they compress so much, so well? And then there's other Ted talks where I'm 12 minutes and I'm like, is this person ever going to say anything? And so how do we find the shiny nuggets? How do we find the insightful ones? And in particular, the radicals, the disruptors so once we're thinking against the grain but who's thinking makes a lot of sense. And I've got some examples of this and I would love to find many more and I would love to make that library playlist, whatever publicly available and see if we can't crowdsource continually building it so that it gets easy to say, hey, if you're curious just knock on the door over here and then just follow your instincts through the materials that are there. You seem to have quite a collection of videos there already in the brain, Javi. I've got some, let me share the screen there. Let me just go back to it and go to sorting out the future and I put this link under the videos so it's not to make it a super category but just under and then there's a bunch of really different things. So depression and anxiety, the feminine economy and I'm realizing that Max, Lee, I'm forgetting her last name, Librois, something like that but I just two or three days ago I was captivated by this short video which I will find in a second if my brain search function is happy and I had a little bit of a brain search error earlier today so it may not be Libroisville there we go, Libroisville, there we go. So Max Libroisville does citizen science, she's working on pollution from plastics and then she has this video which I really loved on how Max Libroisville is changing how science is done in which she talks about how she is doing citizen science and is being of service to communities and she goes into communities that are like fishing communities that are affected by plastics and she asks them what they need and how to do things and the reason why she's researching ocean plastics is that she has this quirky personal habit where she likes tackling really difficult problems and several years ago somebody said, well why is nobody measuring how much plastic is in the oceans? And she's like, well because that's impossible and then that thought stopped her and then a month later she redirected her all her research and all her activities and she founded a clear, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research which invented a series of trawls basically things you can drag around and then collect up and measure to trawl for plastics in the ocean for example, so they have a baby legs trawl which you can assemble yourself with some bottled water bottles of plastic and a kid's tights basically you attach to the bottom and you staple this whole thing together and you drag it behind your boat or whatever or through your river and you pick up and count what you captured and that's a kind of citizen science. So I think that that's not specifically about how politics is changing but for me it's a really nice example of how science needs to change and how we can find our way to facts together and also about science in service to humans in built in towns. So I loved all that about it. So I'm just by making the link here I just added it to the collection that I have. And then I have one link here on why Bitcoin is so bad to the planet. I have a funny one SNL a couple of weeks ago did an explanation of NFTs of non-fungible tokens. It's all mod like hip hoppy kind of funny music video. It's a really good explanation. Like it's a really good explanation of NFTs. So and to me humor is bonus points. Like if you can do something serious and funny, it's awesome. So similarly I put in just for Grins have you all seen the Amazon Silver Edition video? No. Oh my God, you're missing out. So I'll put this link in let me stop sharing so I can grab the link more easily. But I'll put the link in our chat right this minute because they did a skit where it's like, it's Alexa for seniors. And of course, all the seniors forget her name. So it's Cassandra, they call her by everything. And then all the things that seniors do, they start doing but Alexa Silver Edition has been programmed to just respond with, Yeah, and that's one of the funny parts of it. So totally worthwhile, but a couple of bits of humor in the collection are helpful as well. So let me pause and see where you wanna go because I think a stimulus for this conversation is what are the big questions about the horizon? Like as we look ahead into the great transition, which is one of them phrases for the big change, right? And there's a great transition initiative, there's a transition towns, there's a whole bunch of movements just around that phrasing. One of the questions is, what if everything becomes free? Another question is, what if robots automate everything and we're all out of work, but there's no social net? Another question is, what if we have abundant energy? Right, what if, and if you look at the cost of the price of photovoltaics, photovoltaic cells, the cost of solar has plunged, plunged. One of the funniest charts to see, and I've seen this in a couple of presentations, is about the International Energy Commission's predictions about the cost of solar. And so every year they do a new forecast and their forecasts all are aligned like this. Forecast here, forecast here, forecast here. The actual is this plunging line. The actual year-to-year is this line where the cost of photovoltaic just fell like dramatically. But every year along that line, their forecast is like the same stupid linear extrapolation. They didn't seem to understand that the technology they were supposed to cover had changed in some nature that progress along those dimensions were really helping. Good, is this the, and I've got a bunch of like young entrepreneurs, there's one who did it, the sweeper device, which sort of goes along the canals in Amsterdam and is picking up and compressing materials. I've got a few things like that, different kinds of pollution collection inventions. Yeah, it's the same fellow. He's also the guy who's done the, he's still trying, he's failed a couple of times, but he won't give up to encircle and collect the, what's it called? Pacific Jire? Yes, yes. He's had an increasing success on each attempt. I think this is the third attempt. And each time he fails and makes reports and gets publicity, he gets even more money from caring benefactors to try again, bigger scale. Yeah. Wonderful, his endeavors are a wonderful example to illustrate the what can be done and the power of positive thinking and so on. Exactly. So I've got, let me just, here's, let me just share screen again. So here's the North Pacific Jire marine debris, pollution from plastic, et cetera. And then here's a giant floating trash collector heads for the Pacific garbage patch is one of the articles I collected, Boyan Slot. That's the man. That's the man. We've got a project called the Ocean Cleanup, which is probably the one you were just talking about. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they call it. Exactly. Yeah. And so harvesting marine debris is basically, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to connect this to the North Pacific, Pacific Jire. And do I just do that or not? That's weird. There we go. So it did do it. And then here's marine debris. I read also somewhere that 70% of the plastics in the ocean is from fishing boats. Fishing nets are terrible. Most of it is fishing nets, right? Plastic straws and microplastics from face creams are miniscule, the volume of them is miniscule compared to the volume of plastics from other sources. Yeah. So I'm just adding lost fishing nets for a major ocean pollutant, which, because I didn't have that. And then I'm going to go back to marine debris. Here's harvesting marine debris. My poor computer is like, fan is on and I'm doing zoom plus the brain plus too many tabs open and there we go. So here's marine debris. And now I'll connect it to the thought I just put in. Here we go. So now I drag from this little circle I connected to lost fishing nets for a major ocean pollutant. Excuse me. There we go. And then here's the general topic of microplastics and sea creatures, which is a big deal and so forth. And I think there's a bunch of interesting stories of creative uses of pollutants, creative remediation. There was a Paul Stamets, who was the fungus expert. He did a talk years ago where he did some bioremediation using fungi. And I'm forgetting which one of these presentations that might have been. I'd have to go back and look at it. I think it's six ways mushrooms can save the world. And basically, he's been doing a lot of research and basically he had six piles of dirt I'm making up the numbers here, but he had six piles of dirt that were full of damage, rare earths or mineral pollution or chemical pollution or other kinds of things. And he then used six different methods to try to fix the contamination in the piles. One of what one of was that he inoculated the pile with mycelia. And when he came back a year later or whatever it was, remember the whole experiment. When he came back, basically there were birds nesting on that pile. Dave, great to see you. And when he came back, there were birds nesting on that pile because the mycelia had broken down the minerals. A couple of seeds has sort of landed on the soil which was now generative. A little bit of grass had grown and then some birds figured it out, made the seeds and sat down and made a nest. Yeah. And things like that are really cool. Hey Dave, so trying to collect up short snippets that would convince a center right-ish person with an open mind that there's a huge change of foot and what might we all do together to make that change happen? Like, so including kind of radical ideas like we're entering a society of abundance, not scarcity and we need to change, we need to flip some bits. So how to think about abundance. Big proposals for public policy shifts that might change other sorts of things. Yeah, basically an epiphany generator. I like that. Or an epiphany garden where somebody could bump into things and start thinking about like, how does this all work? Yeah, what a great question. Thank you. I mean, my experience has been that, I feel like in the last couple of years I've had an epiphany. Yeah. I kind of saw the regeneration thing and that's the word I use and it's a different thing and it fundamentally, like it is the new paradigm Buckminster Fuller talked about kind of. And I kind of, I know the day I had the epiphany and then when I look at it, it took like 10 years to get to that day kind of. So building up all the EDF experience and stuff, Jerry. But then you like, I walked around with Mark Barash on a day and he was telling these stories and the light went off. But if I hadn't had the previous 10 years I don't think the light would have ever gone off. So I just don't know how to get to these epiphany generators, but I would love to create one. Exactly. And I just renamed the thought in my brain to the great transition of epiphany garden. The other piece of it has just been like, we did with singing Frogs Farm is like, you visit one of these places. Yes. It's really visceral. You kind of like, oh, and so that helps, but I don't know about the rules. And so Dave and his wife invited me along to a visit to a sustainable or regenerative farm north of Sebastopol, which was awesome. I just love that visit. And my major takeaway from the visit was when you go regenerative in the middle of industrial agriculture, you make enemies in town. Like you who just made enemies of the dude that sells John Deere, the dude that sells fertilizer, the dude that sells seeds, you know, everybody who sells equipment that all the industrial farmers are busy relying on. And these are by the way, the wealthy people in town because farming is set up now so that farmers are kept poor and everybody in the supply chain is making a really nice cut and taking more of your hide, right? And so there's a social dilemma with growing regenerative that is addressable, right? Because these poor people, like all that, we looked at the neighboring farms which were all row cropping. Nobody around them was doing what they were doing. And then she tells this great story about how there were really bad rainstorms and lots of flooding last rainy season. And one of her neighbors had called saying, are you okay? We're about to evacuate, do you need any help? And she's sitting by the fireplace reading because her land is really absorbent. And there's like not an emergency on their little plot of land. And they don't have a lot of land, like singing frog's farm is tiny. And there's no emergency there because the land is busy like drinking thirstily because we're in a 20 year drought and the neighbors are all in a state of emergency. And that doesn't convince the neighbors that maybe they should change. So I got a lot of lessons from that visit David. And so how do we get these sorts of epiphanies recorded? And, you know, we could record our own videos of maybe I should tell the story in one of the like videos that I do and put it out. But I'm trying to find other people who've done this a lot over and over again, lather and repeat and then collect them up so that they're easy to bump into, easy to find. And especially- Would it be important to avoid politician bashing? I'm searching around on YouTube while you're speaking. So how to counter political lies was my latest search. I see Jimmy Kimmel's got a five minute documentary of Trump's 2000 lies. I haven't watched it, it must be hilarious but it's bashing Trump. Now I would love it. We'd probably all enjoy it for five minutes but there's a huge swath of the population who would hit us for even mentioning it, right? So I think it's possible to have a corner that's political if it's kind of marked as such. And if the pieces are actually sort of genuinely making a point rather than just bashing and if they make a good point and happen to say, and by the way, this is the opposite of what these politicians are doing or saying, I think that's totally fine. But it may need to be trigger-warned, trigger-labeled so that if people hit it who are fans of those, voted for those politicians and would react badly, hit it that they're able to maybe listen to it. Yeah, which is where humor often comes in well but I will say that 10 years ago I was lamenting that our best reporters seemed to be John Stewart and John Oliver. Like our best journalists seemed to be like comedians who were making the very best points. I remember when W gave a State of the Union talk and was coming up the aisle shaking hands and John Stewart did a voiceover analysis of that State of the Union talk. And at the beginning, he's really funny. He's like, cause W liked to give everybody nicknames. So he says, hey, brownie, hey, round face, hey, whatever. And he's making up all these nicknames for the different like Congress critters he's shaking hands with. But then his analysis of the talk was the best analysis I saw done after that State of the Union talk. Like what he says after the funny part is really dead on and very good analysis. So let's find more of those. And I think that there's probably, I'm just realizing John Oliver's 15 minute or half hour segments on one topic cause he takes, you know he takes this week tonight to, on one topic deep every time some of those have to be in this collection as well. We're acknowledging that the right side of the political spectrum is probably allergic to John Oliver and John Stewart and the left spot, the left's comedians maybe not so much Bill Maher because he's strangely sort of in the middle. But that might be really useful and I haven't gone through sort of the larger collection of John Oliver's pieces to pick them out. I'm also trying to find short segments inside of longer pieces. The idea then being, cause it's really easy on YouTube to send somebody a link with an offset. It's, you know ampersand T equals number of seconds and you're there. And there's when you do, when you hit the share button you just check the little box that says start at this moment, you know start at this timestamp and you're in business. So the idea there being if I can send you into an hour one of these long duration hour and a half podcasts but I can give you a 10 minutes snippet that's really vital. You might then rewind to the start and listen to the whole thing and that's a win. That's great. But you're unlikely to get there if the first 15 minutes are the host saying hey, here's our intro, our noisy musical intro and promoting the next couple of shows and then finally here's our guests and then finally we get somewhere. And then solar punk and also Afrofuturism, Ecofeminism, there are a whole bunch of until recently kind of marginalized ways of looking at the world in the future that are really interesting that I think are very useful here. So like in solar punk, are there pieces we can point to? And part of the problem with having a brief call about this is that really once we start talking about this and getting good ideas this is part of the reason why I booked two calls for today and I think I want to repeat this exercise is that we then need to go away and go, oh gosh, okay, let's do some research and find a couple snippets and then contribute them into the chat. Maybe I should create a new channel in the Mattermost called Epiphany Garden or something like that. Would that make sense? And then we can sort of share links there. That might work. And let me stop talking so you can all jump in because I'm excited about this, sorry. Well, listening to what you're saying as a sort of outsider because I don't live in the States and I have no reference points for the left-wing comics that you mentioned and most of what I know about America is filtered through my our day watching CNN. And you also happen to live in a high-functioning country. Well, that's another discussion altogether. Yeah, okay. But from my CNN bubble, when they are showing let's say Trump supporters and those various people who would like to get into dialogue with, they are so fanatic. They can be triggered by two wrong words or by the wrong nuance of, and I'll come back to what Craig was saying because I think that's really a big danger of triggering people even when you're not bashing a politician or not bashing their cherished values, they'll hear things which you don't intend. So I'm wondering if there shouldn't be this project or initiative done on several levels. One level is definitely preaching to the converted people in OGM. And people in OGM can really enjoy the different snippets and short videos that people are going to contribute and come up with. And maybe synthesize a kind of message that won't too easily be reinterpreted because looking at those people, Trump supporters and MAGA people and people who love the big lie, it's going to be very difficult to get past the many armadillo shells around their thinking. So to make it short, my suggestion is think about doing it in two or three levels and then testing the middle level. The OGM preaching to the converted level, then a kind of synthesis level where some best guesses are distilled from all the great things that are put together and then testing it somehow. Agreed. And I think, I mean, to my mind, the greatest instrument in social change is somebody taking somebody else by the hand to try something new. And usually the person who grabs the other person's hand needs to be pretty similar to the person who's undergoing the change, because if they're too different, they won't listen to them, it doesn't really work. Unless something really unusual happens, so one of my heroes is Daryl Davis, who's a black jazz musician who has a garage full of KKK roads, because many years ago he was playing boogie woogie in a bar and a white guy came up and sat up the piano and said, hey, I've never heard a white guy play, I mean, a black guy played Jerry Lee Lewis so well. And Davis says, well, I kind of help Lewis learn some piano. So I'm going to play a little bit of jazz and Lewis learned some piano. And it was like, whoa, and it turns out that this guy is a KKK Grand Wizard. And it turns out that two years later, they've invited each other to each other's homes and the wizard retires out of the KKK and gives Daryl his robe. Two years later, two years later. And Daryl's whole lesson is that listening with respect, even if you disagree with somebody, and even if they appear to be your mortal enemy, is really powerful. And I love that lesson, right? To me, that's a huge lesson. But that took showing up and being vulnerable and being patient and being respectful and a bunch of other things that are really difficult. But I want to put, you know, one of Daryl Davis's talks in here as well, I should totally do that. So I think a piece of our conversation here is how to structure the gardens so that there are different levels of reveal or layers of access or trigger warnings or I don't know what to call it. But, you know, how to design this so that people who are like, okay, I got this, I'm with the program, I'm convinced that racism, for instance, is a big problem and we need to make progress on it, what do we do? And that's the easy layer. And then there's the skeptics layer. And part of my problem with this intellectually is, and I think that this is fine because if we provide resources, other people can provide the human connection. But I think that the one person taking the other by the hand part is missing when it's just a collection online. If it's just a bunch of artifacts somewhere on a website or in a brain or in an OGM, whatever, or in a Wiki, great, who cares? But then those kinds of nuggets are the exact kind of viral things that then float through communities and change people's minds. And the far right has figured all this out. Like with Pepe the Frog gifts, right? Like during the election cycle, the far right was busy on eight Chan or infinity Chan going, hey, who's got the coolest Pepe the Frog thing that we're gonna make go viral today because we've built an echo chamber. And if we point to each other, suddenly the left is gonna be showing everybody in the world this Pepe meme, which is really like underhanded, but hey, that's publicity and how that's how we're gonna win this election. So that's the same thing. It's like ideas going viral through communities and they figured out how that works. Stacey, go ahead. Because this is brainstorming, I feel like I could say anything even if it's a little outrageous, but so for me, the best way would be if people were creating this together. So when you first started talking, my head went to, wouldn't it be great to invite a group of, whether they be educators or students, which are diverse in nature and put them on teams of three, allowed them access to your resources and sort of had a contest where they create something. Now you have people that are already, they're the same, but they're different, but they're working together to create the most balanced educational video that could later be used somewhere else. Now you have those diverse people putting out their own product. And we already know from that COVID article that 12 people were responsible for all that, for most of that misinformation. So if we could switch that and use it to the positive, we get 12 people on board that are, they've worked together to get there and they've built relationships on the way and there's this, you know, okay. I'll stop. That was great. Oh, terrific. Go on. Yeah, that's perfect. That's really good. I am. And how do you, what governor mechanism do you apply to these groups? What goal do you give them that orients them back toward the regenerative future as opposed to slipping just over the event horizon down the rabbit hole of QAnon and other kinds of conspiracy theories which are sort of doing the opposite, right? Because it would be a very fruitful exercise to sit down and collect up QAnon videos that support, you know, crazy points of view to do exactly the same exercise in the wrong direction. That's entertaining and doable as well. What I try to do just in my life with conversations is I try to those crazy points of view. I try to look at them instead of fighting them, say let's imagine this is true. Right. How could we use it to our advantage? Right. So it's just like reframing. And one argument also that works sometimes with extreme points of view is to take them further to the extreme and say, well, if that's true, if that really is true, then it's pointing here. And is that even possible? Is that a, you know, how does that world work? But again, that's what we normally do and that's still pushback. I'm saying don't push back. Like for example, I can't even give you examples. Some of these things are just so crazy what people are thinking. But I think I mentioned it yesterday just with the extended unemployment. How I just reframe those conversations to look at the positive. So the wages are going up. You know, there's a reason they need people. Make them pay more. Those are good things. Those are not bad things. And when people tell me to wake up and they're talking about COVID, I tell them to wake up and stop thinking you were born to work for $10 an hour, 50 hours a week. That's where you have to wake. So I'm agreeing with them, but I'm saying, hold on, there's more. There could be something good in that. Yeah, exactly. And you're opening really interesting questions like how do you leave things at hand when the conversation has gone down a twisty path into really strange theories? Like how do you reach those people and ask the kinds of questions you just asked, Stacy? So yesterday, somebody posted something and it was one of these, hmm, and they were drawing, the hum was about the hacking of the meat plant and how Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland. So, hmm, that must mean he's behind it. Right. And I just couldn't pass it. I tried to pass it. And what I did is I just kind of made a joke and I said, okay, so who's responsible for the MTA attack? And somebody said, Elon Musk. And I just put like a laugh face. And it was enough and that person, the first person who I know, you know, I knew her from high school, she didn't go back at me because she real, it was one of her allies that made the joke because that's what I'm trying to say. Even people within the group realize that some of their friends are a little too far gone. Yes. And that's where humor, you know, like, I'm not, I mean, they know who I am. So they already know that I don't agree with a lot of what they're saying, but they also think I'm pretty reasonable. So it kind of stopped the conversation. And I do plan on going back and on another site, somebody put something about another, hmm, and this was about why are, why is the government paying people to get the COVID vaccine? And that one I'll go back and I'll answer really nicely because, you know, some of these people I know for 30 years, but they're just, they have really not seen how, in my opinion, they haven't seen how manipulated they've been by propaganda. And that's the really weird thing about QAnon, for example, is that I think a big reason it exists is that it acknowledges and preys on the fact that we've been manipulated by propaganda and by all kinds of stuff. And it's like, yes, that's right. And then it routes you down the rabbit hole of some really crazy ass theories. And you're like, oh, okay, not that stuff, but the hook really is stuff that makes a lot of sense that we would probably agree with. That's like the opening salvo is, and is stuff that normal politicians are busy denying or avoiding. I mean, the fact that Donald Trump is almost the only major politician who said that Bush was lying when he led us into the Iraq war, right? I'm like, please, why did nobody else say this? Like, like, could y'all just be brave and like make that statement? So I don't have to say that Trump is one of the few politicians who like put that out there. And it's like, ah, anyway. So I feel like you were saying it earlier, Jerry, around the, I kind of, I don't know how many dimensions that are to this question. But one, it's got to be some kind of like continuum, like how close are they on you? Of course you on the scale, are they, right? And so the, you know, the Q and on folks, and I've kind of given up trying to interact with a whole bunch of my old high school friends because they're just too cray-cray. I mean, I don't know what to do with this stuff. And, you know, you end up with it's the end of times and thank God, God's coming to kill us all. You know, they're like, okay, I don't know what to do with that. So I'm not gonna deal with that end of the scale. Well, I actually kind of really frustrated with all my friends who were like really devoted to climate activism and the entire world has to change because of climate. It's like, yeah, but what about all the other things? You know, we have to fix more than one thing at a time. And so I actually think they're kind of a group that I would love to have more influence on. So anyway, I do think there's a continuum and there must be multiple issues. And then one of the things you made me think when you were talking a little bit earlier is that there probably are like dimensions. To me, they're part of my epiphany. My epiphany came on several dimensions, I think. And I wonder if you can almost attack them one by one. So the abundance thing, you know, the fact that things can have positive some outcomes. I just felt like all my economics background was didn't include that kind of thinking, you know? And so a living systems versus engineered system, right? Kind of like, you know, the system's dynamic stuff. So I do feel like that we probably could set, you know, identify, you know, maybe there's little epiphanies or something that you kind of, and when you bring them all together then you get like a really fundamental change, but you can actually kind of tackle them one by one. Exactly, you're exactly on the spirit of what I'm trying to curate here. What I'm hoping we curate together here is the series of epiphanies that unlock different ways of seeing. And you're reminding me that I've got a bunch of thoughts in my brain about stupid wars we're fighting like the war on drugs and a bunch of others. It's like, can we stop treating these things as wars? And some of the videos that are already in the collection, there's two of them on poverty that are really brilliant. It's like how we're thinking about poverty is asked backwards, it's just wrong. And if you listen to the talk, you'd be like, oh, okay. So there's like major social problems going on. And then I have an allergy to people who show up and say, the dominant problem in the world is X and we all need to, you know, drop everything and focus only on X. And that's like, and let's pretend that that's, you know, climate change mitigation. And it's like, yes, except we can't pass any legislation because trust is broken. And unless we address trust somehow, we'll make no progress on this other thing. And like you said, Dave, I think we need to work in everywhere at once. And a piece of what I'm hoping OGM does is we figure out how to help everybody who's making sense move together forward or move forward together. And Dave, are you on the Mattermost Chats? You know, I'm not following them very much. I mean, give me a... That's fine. We're using, I'll put a link in the Zoom to the channel that we're using in case you want to go there. We've been paraphrasing you in this chat, but I'm trying to centralize the chat over there. Yeah. So that we have a continuous conversation on this topic. And is it too early for me to spot a different channel in the Mattermost around this question or should we keep it in the Calls channel? Anybody have a strong feeling about this? No strong feelings. Okay. Then it's probably too early. So let's just use the OGM Calls channel for this conversation. And then I feel like the little loan gardener because I've been feeding one brain file for 23 years. I feel like the loan termite that's feeding the fungus under the hive. And it's been frustrating because the brain is not that good at multi-person curating and we don't have other kinds of media that make it easy, except for sharing playlists on YouTube or other sort of conventional tools. So I'm interested in sort of clever hacks of that. That said, apparently the technology exists to make things go viral and to get ideas propagated across the world for cheap. So that's all doable, I guess. I propose you're a version, Jerry, to people who say screw all that. This is the most important thing. And this goes to what Stacey raised a few days ago. Media, the news, the right-hand, the right-wing news and the misinformation on social media. It's such a damaging aspect of what's coming into half of the brains in the Western world. Surely you can't really deal with anything in a constructive way if you're not dealing with the facts. I found another video I want to watch. It's a discussion on BBC about whether it should or if it's even possible to make it illegal for politicians to lie. I don't know what that conversation involves. I haven't heard it, but the subject is of primary importance in my mind. I mean, some of the things that, it was about a week ago, some of these Republican politicians in the States are talking about January 6th was a very, very, very six was a regular tourist visit. It was like a tourist visit, yeah. I mean, lies, lies, lies, the blackest, bold-faced, most horrible, destructive lies. And millions of people are sucking this in, as well as gospel. How the hell are we ever gonna deal with people who believe this stuff? These are people who believe what they're told. They're told often enough by the figures they watch on TV and the voices they hear on talk radio. They believe what they're told. So let me put a different spin on what you just said, which is that for me, misinformation, disinformation, all that is actually a strategy, is a tactic, is a technique, is a method. And it doesn't mean that the people uttering these things are stupid. It means that they've decided it's okay to do this because situation is so desperate that you're gonna have to lie like a rug in order to change the course of the conversation and prevent, for instance, an actual commission from saying that five Congress people should be indicted for crimes because they were busy, you know, because it turns out that their phone records show that they were talking to the people in the crowd directing them into the building, for example, which I think might actually be true, right? And an investigation might actually indict Trump incitement to riot, et cetera, et cetera. And clearly they don't want that because they've all dropped the Trump Kool-Aid. So these are all measured lies that are done without, not because they're dumb and they've been fooled into believing this, but because they believe this is their only option is to lie this way. And so therefore one of the lies is we just have to minimize January 6th and convince people that this was normal. And so we gaslight by saying this was just like a tourist visit and people buy it not because they're too dumb to see that there was like a riot and windows were broken and people were hurt, but rather because that, if we can just convince everybody that that narrative is true, then we might still win some elections. And there's a titanic battle on the ground in the US right now between a party that appears to be clearly racist and has figured out that if elections are fair, they will never like win a majority again and be able to control legislation and the judiciary and whatever else. And another party that's like not smart enough about the tools and methods to do things but is fighting over whether to break like things like the filibuster right now in order to drive more legislation and stop this insidious process from happening. And one of my motives for this quest on the Epiphany Garden is to try to steer clear of today's combat on the streets like I just described and to move us toward the horizon where we can talk about, oh, if you switch your brain from scarcity to abundance, these interesting things happen to you. And oh, if you start thinking about equity differently and about poverty differently, other programs will make sense to you now. And then to pull us away from this really like knife fight in an elevator which is what I think is happening right now politically out into a place where it's easier to talk about the horizon and what happens over the horizon together and where people might be able to agree on those sorts of things. Without going toward, we just need world peace and here's a rosy, all crystals, all singing future which I think is great but isn't tangible, doesn't give you ways to shift your thinking, things to do. Yeah, there's certainly more profit in focusing on how good the future can be if we do this and that rather than focus on how awful it's gonna be if we don't do. Exactly. You just get defensiveness to that, that's a kind of attack but the other forum is inspirational. Exactly. There's a piece of this that I'm really looking for and I wasted a lot of time sort of throwing away videos because I just couldn't find this nugget but there are a whole bunch of initiatives in the world trying to change a flip a bit in humans so that we stop seeing ourselves as separate individuals competing for scarce resources and start facing ourselves as completely interdependent and needing to figure out how to keep the pale blue dot so that it's fruitfully feeding us all and not like falling apart but the shift from ownership to stewardship, the shift from private property and private rights to social sort of things flipping that bit so that people start seeing each other as necessary to each other, right? Rather than as competitors for scarce resources and I haven't found those nuggets very easily and there's a bunch of people doing heavy lifting on this and there's lots of movements trying to cause that shift toward from independence to interdependence declarations of interdependence there's several of those out and I'd love to discover where those little nuggets are where the shiny bits are of somebody explaining that really well because I think those are like high leverage pieces in the middle of this puzzle. Yeah. Does OGM have a YouTube channel? So I had a person I didn't know wrote me a couple of months ago and said hey, I noticed that all the OGM videos are going out on your private channel there should be an OGM channel and right this moment, OGM is trying to stand itself up as a bit of an entity like an entity with some legal structure which I'm in the middle of and one of the questions there is should there be an OGM separate OGM Gmail account and that would imply then a YouTube channel and stuff like that. The answer to that is probably yes but it's kind of complicated enough that I don't wanna complicate my life until that actually is done well and necessary and I understand how to share a business account, right? And that should probably be a Google suite account and then that means paying some money to Google and a couple of other things I think. So the short answer is not yet but I think it's imminent and necessary and I would, anybody who's got lots of wisdom on that I'd love to pick their brains. I'm not that one. I recognize the value of YouTube. You have to reach the people where they are. Yeah, yeah. I selectively use YouTube about two hours a week so I'm no expert. And I waste way too much time on YouTube. Did you know that YouTube is the world's second most popular search engine? Oh, is it? So the first one's Google. Google won that race still but the second most popular also owned by Google of course is YouTube. People use YouTube like a general purpose search engine and it works pretty well because somebody poured like everything in the world into YouTube, right? And so you'll find stuff. And if you wanna figure out how to tie a bow tie or why your left hip is hurting or how to, I was trying to figure out the closet door that's right next to me the hinge was broken and I just looked at it and I just couldn't figure out how to repair it and within a couple of minutes I'd found exactly the video I needed and I'm like, oh, I do that. Okay, good. Same thing happened to our refrigerator door handle. The bottom popped out and I'm like, how do I video done? So people have learned how to use these things pretty well. And one of the things that gives me hope is that people have learned how to use simple instruments like Pinterest, Instagram, et cetera with hashtags in very sophisticated ways. And there are communities that are doing really cool stuff just by harnessing hashtags and filtering sort of interesting stuff across their community. That's really cool. And I think that's a piece of this. And I think that some of the videos I need to include are from people like Dana Boyd and other sociologists who've done a really nice job of examining the influences of social media in our society, good and bad but they seem more of the good than some of the critics see. So I think I need to go turn over those rocks a little bit. Yes, please, Stacy. So for me, one of the elements that social media addresses is this ability of people to be able to connect and participate even if it's just in a very small way. And so I, all right, this is the pie in the sky kind of brainstorming now. Because I keep having somebody keep saying create great art, and I have it in my head over and over and it gets me crazy. I live in a town, Nyack, New York that would be the perfect test situation for what you were talking about when you were talking about that economy and the tokens. And the reason I say it would be perfect, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. It's small, which makes kind of a difference because you can contain certain things, but it's progressive, it's diverse and most importantly, it's creative. And there is already so many interconnections in my community that if framed right, there is no doubt that we could get people on board and then it could be filmed and then we've created something and we're doing it. You know, like to me, that's what Facebook did. I didn't know what Facebook was when I first went on it. I'll stop because I could get overly excited. So I love that and I love, I want you to get more excited about that. So one of my friends and heroes is Arthur Brock, who is the founder of the Holo chain, Holo movement, et cetera. But before that for 25, 30 years, he was working with a couple of colleagues on something called, oh heck, what was it called? I'll find it in my brain. Oh man, it's always easy for me to remember and now it's gone. Anyway, the meta currency project, there we go. And it ran really, really deep. And I had several long conversations with him and Eric Harris-Bron and their third collaborator, Jean-François Nouvelle. So the three of them basically were coding and thinking very, very deeply about these things. Then at some point a decade ago, somebody who owned a cardboard mill on the Hudson donated it to them temporarily because it was derelict, nobody was in there. And they went and they started a school and they invented basically agile learning centers, ALCs and ELL, a bunch of sort of fast learning things that apply agile to learning in a business sort of setting and they invented a bunch of stuff, put it out in the world. And other people then across the US and I think in other countries have picked up the agile learning center model which is an add water and stir, build your own little school kind of thing which is really cool sort of instructions. And I'm a little sad that Arthur's last seven, 10 years have been kind of hijacked by this Holochain thing because what they discovered I think was when blockchain got really famous and big and started taking over the world a few years ago, they realized that they could split off a piece of the meta currency project and go launch this thing they called Holochain and that it would make more sense than blockchain. And then a whole bunch of reality happened and I think they were a little stuck in trying to make Holochain an actual platform that can in fact compete with blockchain and do all the things that it promises to do because reality got in the way in lots of places but there's a whole string of really interesting ideas and thinking that came out of Arthur's work. In particular, there's a video he shot years ago about Bessie the cow, any of you who've seen this, it's an explanation of value and he's unpacking value and my own interpretation of Arthur's riff on Bessie the cow and value. He talks about how Bessie in the marketplace is worth $1,228 worth of stakes and blood and bones and whatever like that's what Bessie's worth but Bessie was also the best milk producer in the herd but Bessie was also his favorite cow and he basically unpacked lots of layers of value that Bessie had which the modern economy compresses into dollar value, right? Because you buy and sell, you take Bessie to the auction you sell her and they cut her up into bones and bits but this idea that we've compressed value to me is one of these ah-ha little moments about, oh, why don't we let value breathe and stop making and for me one of my favorite videos is one of my favorite books is The Great Transformation by Carl Polanyi which was written in 1944 and it's a description of life from pre-industrial to early industrial society and he's talking about partly about how in pre-industrial society everything didn't have a price. Like most of us stayed alive without having to earn money to stay alive. Most of us stayed alive because we were householding which means you planted potatoes and carrots and had chickens in the backyard and you had a pig and when you slaughtered the pig you shared the pig out with your neighbors because when the Joneses killed their pig everybody ate two and there weren't refrigerators and freezers, right? So you could salt or smoke but et cetera and he talks about that process and how modern assumptions aid our brains and he talks about how three fictitious commodity and I did a short video on this that I should put in the garden because he talks about how the industrial revolution creates three fictitious new commodities land, labor and money. And it isn't that land, labor and money didn't exist before but you couldn't go down to century 21 real estate and buy a plot of land because it belonged to the church or the king or was inherited or whatever. Like there wasn't a free market for property for land. There wasn't the labor force. People were apprenticed or tied to a feudal lord or there wasn't the free labor force that could pick up and go take your job at the factory and then everything didn't have a price. There were coins but they were kind of exceptional and if you read Graber's book Debt and you read sort of the first thing he does is debunk the myth that economists love that money exists because it replaced barter. He's like within a village there was very little barter. People stayed alive in these other ways that he describes reciprocity, redistribution and householding. And so all of that comes together into this story that is how the modern narrative aid our lives back around 1750 and that through all of history before that the implication is through all of history before that humans lived together and stayed alive in different ways where everything didn't have a price and all the things we take for granted now didn't exist. And it's a bit Stacy what you were saying earlier that you don't have to work like 80 hour work weeks and devote all your labor to the thing. Like that model is something that we were sold that is now up for renegotiation. And so for me one of the exciting quests right now is hey, if we're renegotiating the social contract in several different ways, what does that turn into next? And so the quest here for epiphanies is a way of feeding that conversation is a way of feeding our explorations into what are the next viable contracts at the social level which is sort of geopolitical and sort of economic and at the enterprise level, which is what is a company what is a for-profit nonprofit? What model should the company use? How does value make its way around all of this? And what are the value models in all of this that nurture the thing we share the commons between us? Sorry, that was kind of a long rant but I'm trying to talk my way through this is like the talking cure. Trying to talk my way through why do this and how does it fit and what is the broader philosophical conversation that is necessary so that these things hang together in a new narrative, in a new web of ideas. Yes. I just want to highlight what you just said about the talking cure and talking your way through because I think we need to afford that to other people to start thinking about what is it they really think? Cause like what Craig was saying, I kind of agree there are certain, I don't think they're too dumb but I think there's no thinking involved. It's like just a default setting. So I think we just have to create an environment where we allow people to talk a little bit more. You know, like I said, well, so if you think that this was Antifa on January 6th don't you want a commission to find out? Let's find out. You know, just I think we need to listen to people more is what I'm saying. And I don't mean the voices that are already out there because those voices made it to the top for a reason but I'm talking about the ones that are feeling stifled which is who Trump tapped into. Totally agree, totally agree. So we've gone almost an hour and a half. We should probably wrap up the half or before. I'm happy to, well certainly let's continue this on the chats, on the calls channel in Mattermost. There's another call today at four if anybody wants to rejoin and if you wanna recruit anybody else to come in and totally open to any suggestions for how to go about this quest. I will continue to update my brain around this thought and post that in the Mattermost chat so we can sort of circle around there. There are plenty of other ways to manifest this list and maybe an interesting thing is to create an Instagram channel. I don't really like Instagram but maybe there's an interesting path here to put this conversation somewhere else and create a feed that we can sort of continually drop interesting things into. I don't know. I like the idea of a multi-tiered multi-ringed garden where people who are at different stages in this process can find materials that are resonant for them and that don't cause them to bounce out of the garden entirely. Cause I'm all too aware that when the entity that's trying to tell you something is too different from you and is saying something that's too contrarian to your belief systems your very likely reaction is to jump out the door and pull the ripcord. Can I just tell an anecdote about that because I thought of it during listening to part of the conversation earlier. Yes, please. Well, living in Europe, I was born in America but I've lived more than 15 years in Europe and I don't think I understand much about what's been going on in America in the last 20 or 30 years. But there was a time when my wife and I went back to America and we did these trips to national parks and as you know, you go into a national park and then there's a pull out for cars with a beautiful overlook. So we'd be at some of these taking pictures and chat and all other kinds of other cars would stop there and you'd get into conversation with other people, a lot of Americans three generations together taking a family vacation. And it was during the period when John Kerry was running against George W. And for my point of view, having lived in Europe and my wife as a Dutch woman, we couldn't understand how people could vote again for George W. Bush after four years, his first four years. And he's robbing poor people to pay his rich friends. And in a sort of careful way, we might broach this conversation. And the answer we got over and over again was, well, you're right, he's stealing from us and he's lying to us and so, but that other guy, he wants the homosexual marriage. How could you ever? So it doesn't matter what George Bush is doing to us because and there was one cord in all of the many things that John Kerry was saying that convinced people and I'm sure it's the same with a lot of the Trump people and the Q and on people. And coming back to this talking cure and also the listening cure. Yeah, yeah. In this hour and a half, I remembered that and it's a kind of epiphany. It's too bad David's not here. It was an epiphany. Suddenly I understood how people could choose of an idiot or a criminal because there's something that they value much more deeply. And since I don't have that value set, I can't understand that. So the talking cure and as Stacey you were saying, getting people to talk and listen with respect, that's a real way forward. You're also pointing out the unfortunate fact that there are single issue voters on several things. Abortion and women's rights, gay marriage and other issues around identity, sexuality, et cetera and guns and the people on guns are like, you're gonna pry the guns out of my cold dead hands kind of things, you know, Charlton Pesson style and they're adamant, just adamant. And those constituencies will consistently vote conservative and form I think a very hard to move kernel core of the conservative movement, which conservatives often go back to and fuel and pump that fire. Like they pour oxygen on that flame because they know that they need to do that. Go ahead, Stacey. Yeah, I just wanna point out, especially with the gun thing because I've seen this really happen where people who are not really into guns at all, 10 years later, they are like all for guns. And what I wanna point out though is the role that being part of a community played. And this is what I say to those people that are mocking me and telling me to wake up. What I throw back at them is how they've been manipulated into this gun culture, you know, and how, you know, the gun industry has created the best marketing program to fool you all. And that's how I get into that conversation where we start talking about how many guns do you need? Well, where did you get all this fear from? Because again, these people are very quick to tell me that I'm living in fear because I choose to get vaccinated. So I'm just kind of taking what they already believe about people being manipulated. And I'm showing them, well, you know, you need a TV station all about guns. You need accessories for guns. But anyway, the point I really wanted to make is that sense of being part of a community. So there are gun groups and that becomes a socialization mechanism. And that's really important. So for that reason, I brought us to this thought in my brain, emotion and membership reason most of the time and stories are the vessel by which my usual explanation of this is, let's pretend OGM is five years more mature and we have tools to present beautiful arguments visually with irrefutable evidence, et cetera, et cetera. And if my argument will cause you to be ostracized by your community, if accepting my argument will make you like bounce from your friends, from your communities, from your groups, you will happily deny my reality and disagree with me. And in fact, actively voice bullshit, from the other side, it's not a problem. And so this is connected to another important thought for me, which is this one that we are in a Titanic battle over the narratives in our heads. And in fact, this is my story of civilization that religions, all those things are all about programming up the stories in our heads, right? And that that is why people who design ad campaigns and political campaigns and spin and echo chambers and all of that are so dangerous because if you can convince everybody and trickle down economics, you can change all the policies, you can redesign all the systems, you can build stuff that is a prison for the people who suffer. Like another thought somewhere else in my brain is like, you do not wanna be a peasant pretty much anywhere on earth at any time because the peasants always have the blood squeezed out of them by whoever's in power. Like being a peasant really sucks. And just being a pioneer in America when you moved west, given some land, everybody knew that most of that land didn't get enough rain to do anything and it was gonna not be productive and that you were gonna fail. And then the railroad would show up and blackmail you because, hey, how else are you gonna get your goods to market, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, and then now with Monsanto which got bought by Bayer and is trying, there's just, there's so many of these and they're layered on top of each other, right? And so part of me is really eagerly looking for the emotion and membership hacks to the whole system because there's a piece of me that's busy trying to say, how do I present information in a way that's factual and easy to absorb and build on and build logical arguments? And I really think that's important. I wanna do that. And then there's this thought in my brain which says, yeah, good luck with that. And so I'm always looking for, all right, all right, all right. So how do we appeal to people and bring them by the hand to try something different? Right? And so I'm on that a lot. And then Hank, back to your story, just yesterday, I read a long post, might even have been this morning when I first woke up, I think it was yesterday. I'm on a little mailing list of telecom geeks. And one of them, I think is Dutch. He's a Dutch or Swedish, I think he's Dutch. And he wrote this long post about how when he grew up, America was the hero. And America was the thing that he looked forward to and like America had all the great stuff and all the great social innovations seemed to be coming from America and how that's flipped. And how in Europe now, you look across the pond and it's like, not that much you wanna import anymore, not that much you wanna bring in, right? And so there's a lot of high functioning institutions, healthcare systems, of course, like so much better, health outcomes, all those kinds of things just been done better. And in America, we've become sort of jingoistic and xenophobic and all of those kinds of things, partly so that we don't have to look at other high functioning systems, right? One of the things I discovered, so I mentioned that the great transformation is, actually let me screen share again because this is a fun and then we can wrap the call. TGT, the great transformation is the book. So I'm searching, oops, TGT, great. There we go. So years ago, somebody who was a fan so there's, I've got opposite the great transformation. I've got a thought called critiques of TGT. So there's a bunch of critiques here and then there is here. There's a post by Murray Rothbard who was the head of the Mises Society. So Murray Rothbard is a thinker. Let me just go to him. He was the head of the Mises Institute. Ludwig von Mises is one of the Austrian economists who is sort of some of the premises behind libertarianism, right? And so Murray Rothbard writes this letter to his followers at the Mises Institute and the letter is titled down with primitivism, a thorough critique of Polanyi. And this is my note full of vile. And when you read this letter, which is a critique of Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, what he's trying to do is he's trying to convince all of his followers never to pick up and read this book. And he commits in this letter, all of the sins that he's accusing Polanyi of committing. He's like, Polanyi's doing this, no, no, no. And every one of those things is something that he's actually actively engaging in in this letter, which is just an attempt to make sure nobody goes and actually calmly reads Polanyi because Polanyi makes a lot of sense and Polanyi is not saying we should all go back to the noble savage Russoian world. He's none of that stuff. Polanyi is an economic historian who is busy looking at actual numbers at how the early industrial society fucked us up and at early efforts to compensate for that with poor laws and with a bunch of other things. And he's just chronicling what happened and how dangerous it was. And nobody who loves capitalism and thinks libertarianism is the pinnacle society wants anybody else to read that. So a lot of things on the far right are attempts to make sure that interesting stuff on the other side doesn't get paid attention to, which is a tactic, right? It's a tactic. So thank you for showing up here. I really appreciate it. It's been totally, totally, totally fun. I'm gonna post this recording to YouTube and then post the link to the calls chat like our normal ones, like our Thursday calls. I'll be back on same place, same channel at four. 4 p.m. Pacific this afternoon. If anybody had to be nicely asleep. Right, three hours? Three hours from now. No, it's only 9.31 for me here and that's 4 p.m. So more than three hours from now. Okay, I'll find it. Cool, and then we can book another call like this next week or whatever, I'll find out. I'll make that decision this afternoon. Okay, I enjoyed this conversation a lot and I learned, well, I got all kinds of insights of things I hadn't thought about in that way before. So thanks, everyone. That's great, I love that. Thank you. I won't be there for Pacific time, but if there's another call next week when I can make it, I'll check in again. I'll make sure one of them is early. Okay, guys. Thank you all. Have a nice day, further and nice weekends. You too. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.