 Excellent. We are now recording. This is Wednesday, August 8, 2018. I can barely get used to saying that. This is our monthly check and call for Rex. And I have a poem to take us in titled The Fire by Katie Ford. And it goes as follows. When a human is asked about a particular fire, she comes close, then it's too hot, so she turns her face. And that's when the forest of her bearable life appears, always on the other side of the fire. The fire she's been asked to tell the story of, she has to turn from it. So the story you hear is that of pines and twitching leaves and how her body is like neither. All the while, there's a fire at her back, which she feels in fine detail as if the flame were a dremel and her back it's etching glass. You will not know all about the fire simply because you asked. When she speaks of the forest, this is what she is teaching you. You who thought you were her master. Hey Susan, let me read the poem again. It's The Fire by Katie Ford. When a human is asked about a particular fire, she comes close, then it is too hot, so she turns her face. And that is when the forest of her bearable life appears, always on the other side of the fire. The fire she's been asked to tell the story of, she has to turn from it. So the story you hear is that of pines and twitching leaves and how her body is like neither. All the while, there's a fire at her back, which she feels in fine detail as if the flame were a dremel and her back it's etching glass. You will not know all about the fire simply because you asked. When she speaks of the forest, this is what she is teaching you. You who thought you were her master. A sobering poem, but there's something just as part of our check-in. A friend sent me a link to a Patreon campaign by Stephanie Lepp, who has a podcast called Reckonings, which is all about personal change, in which Stephanie tries to interview, actually successfully interviews, a series of people on the topic of personal change. And that got me thinking about the stories we tell and the changes we're going through individually and as a culture, and how we all kind of cope with all that and make sense of it and so forth. So this poem felt like a resonant starting point for that quest. We, April and I are in Bellingham, Washington, north of Seattle. It is a beautiful little coastal town that it sort of survived the evisceration of small town America. So there's still kind of small shops and small town areas around here. It's got a little working harbor, which appears to still be working and doing things. It's got a rail line that runs right through it. So every now and then, we're staying at an Airbnb, and every now and then you hear the hoot and holler of a train, klaxon as it goes through intersections and so forth. And this morning we're checking out and we're going to head east, a little ways into south and east, into the forest by Mount Baker and go camping for a couple of days, which is why I screwed up moving this call and then had to move it back, because Friday actually we're going to be driving home. But we just finished the better part of a week in Seattle with a bunch like 30, well 25 families and their kids. So a group of like 80 or 90 running around Seattle for four days doing a whole lot of activities. I feel like I saw more of Seattle than I've seen in a really, really long time, which included a different air museum in Seattle. I had been to the Air Museum south of Seattle by the airport. There's a Boeing field down there and there's a very, very nice museum. Went there with my friend Sheila Kim some months ago. And anyway, it turns out if you go north to Everett, where Boeing is headquartered, Boeing has a factory tour that will blow your mind and a museum that's truly quite incredible about flight and how they make aircraft and all of that kind of thing. So that was kind of cool. Maybe the coolest thing we did was the underground tour of Pioneer Place area in Seattle, which is the oldest part of town. Anybody heard of or done the underground tour in Seattle? Bo has. Everybody else doesn't know. If you're in Seattle, go do this. It turns out that when the first settlers appeared in Seattle, when the first Western settlers appeared in Seattle, it was a craggy place with just a little bit of beach. It was just cliffs basically that ended in the sound. And kind of hard to make a town in and the first town they built was all out of wood and it burned down once or twice and at some point they have a great fire of Seattle. So the town then decided to take a hill nearby, which is where the space needle now stands. So the space needle used to be a substantial hill. They took the dirt from that hill and they basically filled in the old downtown to the tune of a couple stories deep. And they told all the merchants, okay, you can rebuild because everything got torn up by this great Seattle fire and all made out of wood, everything just gone. They said you can rebuild, you must rebuild out of brick or stone and you have to put your front entrance on the second story. So if you're going to have a grand archway and stairs and all that, that has to be up on the second story and we're going to fill in the street. And then there was a big debate about who's going to pay what and for four years they filled in the street, but there was no sidewalk. The sidewalk was in some cases 15 feet down in some cases 35 feet down. So they had a system of ladders across these open sidewalks. And then gradually they paved over those sidewalks up at street level. In the meantime, apparently 17 drunk men fell to their deaths in these gullies that were like moats around the buildings of downtown Seattle for a while. So now there's a system of tunnels under that part of town that you can walk through and you can see the old facades at ground level, a bunch of other interesting things down there. It's a little spooky. It's a little fun. And it's like, wait, what? This is all happening under Seattle. And it opens up different parts of Seattle's history that I have no idea about. So I feel like we've seen more of Seattle this time than I'd ever seen on any casual trip through. And it's changed my mind a bunch about the city. Anyway, all in the spirit of checking in and checking in and checking in and checking in. And that's the story about the city. About Rex E sort of stuff. Anybody else would like to check in. Just got pro Seattle. If you're interested in. In that sort of thing. Sherri priest C H E R I E. And then priest to last name. which is set in Seattle and has as its primary conceit the the search for a massive underground digging a piece of digging equipment referred to as the bone shaker. And so it seems to fit in that you know it would fit in that story. Very neatly in the story and then we could shift over to Elon Musk and his trencher digger thing to make hyper loop tunnels and God knows what. And flamethrowers apparently. And flamethrowers apparently, exactly. Jimmy, any any rexie things happening in your in your life at the moment? Let me think about it and get back to me, please. Cool, no worries. Susan, any any thoughts along these these alleys and sidewalks? Yes, and it triggers many things. I'm trying to sort through just for a couple. My Seattle story, I have several Seattle stories, but one was when I was 18 and I was going from my grandmother's house in Oregon up to Vancouver. British Columbia to do a voluntary service. This is between my high school senior year and my freshman college year in Chinatown. And I took the train and I met a woman on the train from Portland to Seattle who and she and I got to talking and somehow decided to stay with her overnight in Seattle who went to the needle and we stayed too long we had to walk home. And on the way home to her place, but she has was empty because she was moving out. There was a guy in a car who kept following us and then he got at his trunk and he got at some long thin thing. Neither of us was very comfortable with this long thin thing. And and so we decided to walk, continue to walk a little more quickly, but not too quickly and to try to find somebody who was up who would let us call the police because there weren't any phones, cell phones in those days. And we finally found an old woman who didn't want to answer the door and we said, please, please, this is what's going on. We need to call the police. Could you call the police for us? And she did. And then we went back and they came and drove around the house every hour with, I mean this car did follow us to the house. It did drive around the block. And eventually the police started driving around the block too. It was a rather restless night, but I was thinking, oh dear. I could get murdered in Seattle and nobody would know. Anyway, that's the Seattle story. So I don't want to talk about sort of work things, although the core conversation, Jerry, it went well in Amsterdam and we continued to be an ongoing conversation in the next installation on Monday. But I have one of those moments flying home. So I was, for those of you who may or may not know, I was in England for a month. Staying with a good friend and seeing people and doing nice things and basically getting out of Trump land, which was terrific. Although Brexit's better, but it wasn't my problem. So anyway, as sometimes happens, one reads a juxtaposition of books that just sort of blows your mind. And so I was going to tell you about the juxtaposition of books because I thought this audience, if any, would like any of these, if not all of them, I think, and it's not underground at all. It's called, the first book is called The Overstory. And it's a recent novel. It's about 500 pages long, listed for the Book of Prize. And I apologize for not even remembering author, who might never have heard that. I think it's a first book. And it's a novel and it's so absorbing. It's, I, to describe it, well, very briefly, there are many different groups of people. And it's all about trees, about the overstory of trees. And have you, any of you read the book, whose name I'm not going to remember the author of it? The one on trees? Book on trees, the German guy on trees. I have it upstairs. I should have gotten it rather down. Letting those know how I'm going to go. I can get it for you. I can't believe you don't have it in your brain. Is this The Hidden Life of Trees? Yes, The Hidden Life of Trees. Okay, so the German guy is Peter Wolleben. Yeah. So I do have another brain. I was just looking him up. Okay, and how many of you have read this? Nobody's read it. I watched some video of him. Okay, well, it's a good read. And it's, you will have heard about all of this, but has to do with all of the kinds of communication among trees and the communities they build and the intricate connections to the fungal system and all of that, which blows one's mind. And we sort of knew this, but we didn't really. The second book, okay, is called Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith, who's a philosopher. The Octoplus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. Now, his question, okay, is all about, I'll come back to the other story and then I'm just moving a thread. His story is about consciousness and the fact that, you know, sort of saying, is it possible, must have been invented more than once and the cephalopods are the closest thing we have. And therefore we should study it and understand how these communication, how this work and how close is it to ours and how could consciousness arise physically and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, and it just, what, oh yeah, I'm talking too much. No, it's great. Anyway, so then the third one, okay, so this is a piece of that, but it's that it goes in the animal kingdom, the same story as the tree story, right, about all of that various communication between, you know, how one-celled creatures communicate and they can sense each other because they can tell the difference between whether or not there is more or less of a particular chemical in the water. I mean, it's just astonishing that we know all this, right? So if we know all this, why are we blowing ourselves up? I don't know, but that's the other. I won't go there either. Okay, so that's book number three. That was two. That was two, no, books, oh yeah, and then the over story. So the over story is the novel and it's about trees too and about, and it's all sort of, you know, and their little vignettes, they all come together. They're a story is woven through all these different vignettes and groups of people. One is about a chestnut tree in Iowa, which is probably true that survived the thing that killed all of the chestnut trees. And so it's interesting and then it's a story and it's a story about the great grandson or somebody who runs into somebody who's fleeing University of Iowa and they, they feel, she feels, oh yes, she got electrocuted and, anyway, ends up on the west coast and there's a lot about redwoods and trees and they're just many different kinds of trees and these people are wise, become all entwined and they start to ask, there's a psychologist in there who's studying, you know, how it is that people from San, University of Santa Cruz, of course. So those of us who are west coasters, you'll recognize various things, but it's asking a lot of questions like, you know, this question of how can we, why is it so hard to change our minds, you know, change minds socially? Why do we get into these things? What's, what's all that about? And just horrible, horrible stuff. And in the middle of all that, I was on the plane, I was trying to get cheap flights, so I had a flight from London to Washington, Dallas, had to spend a night in Washington and then take a flight to San Francisco. I mean, God knows. I mean, I guess it's more time than money. And anyway, I watched the Red Sparrow, which many of you have seen the movie, in the middle of all this. So there's these three books in the middle of all this, and it's all like together, maybe you wake up and see the world quite differently. How did Red Sparrow fit into the mix? Two ways. One is it was about intelligence, capital I intelligence. It was so violent, socially violent, that I could hardly, well, I couldn't watch it, actually. I'm not any good. I didn't grow up with television. And so I had to watch, I only watched the version with subtitles in English. I didn't listen to the sound. And how could, and the same thing, how could people, how could these people be so violent and so, and butcher each other and so sort of human at the same time? And how the sort of the whole psychology of convincing people of things and ferreting out what people think and thinking you know what they think and not knowing and the whole vagueness of it all. Anyway, it was just this very powerful, strong, completely wide awake 34 or 48 hours. Sounds lovely, thank you. That's a super interesting juxtaposition. Bo, you were going to jump in? I was just saying things, Susan. You can keep going with your impressions after you read those books. I'm really enjoying this. And Red Sparrow was an awful movie and characters and Russians were awful. It was shallow, it was just direct, made for 12-year-olds. Right, but I feel like it's- Back to the beauty of your books. Well, I think it was striking because I was so, I was in such a heightened state, which is the only way I could watch such a dreadful thing. You've got something from Red Sparrow that may not even have been there. Who knows, but it hit you at the moment where you were pondering the other books and the other things, right? So it came into the mix at just the right moment at that place. It's interesting. There's some new movies like John Wick and so forth that are sort of gratuitously violent and I mean, gratuitous violence has been with us in the movies for a while, but it seems like it's getting more pointed and more precise somehow. What was that second movie mentioned? John Wick is Keanu Reeves as a hired killer or ex-military assassin who gets even with his enemies kind of thing, but it's sort of perfunctory murders all through the movie with increasing precision like you can't miss. First shot, one-shot kills where he puts the gun up to somebody's head and boom and at some point there's something very dehumanizing about the whole process and there's plenty of people critiquing Hollywood for a long time for violence and what it does to us, but it seems to be reaching new heights with things like Red Sparrow and Wickel and the others. Jerry, there's one way I like to think about this because I'm a big fan of these blow-up movies, so I've got to totally out myself and say I like all that stuff, but starting with like 24 I think is a good example of that. I wouldn't call it so much the gratuitous violence, but it's the idea that sometimes good people have to do bad stuff and you're seeing that not only in the movies like we're talking about, but you're also seeing it with this, yeah, he may not be telling the truth, but he's got to lie to get good things done and I think we've started to lose that good is good and bad is bad and sometimes the good people have to do bad things and it's allowing people to do things like trolling and fake news and it's not just showing up in our media, it's showing up in our daily lives. I think that's very much in the air and to make an omelet you have to break some eggs, sometimes the messenger is flawed, there's kind of a whole bunch of rationalizations for what's happening in different ways and it's very much in the mix right now and we've not only lost sort of what's good, what's bad, but what's a fact and what can we count on and all of that is being intentionally undermined because it paves the road nicely for somebody who's just, you know, changing, breaking stuff. Yeah, good book on that is Peter Pomeroffs, he wrote the book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, taken out of course from Henna Arnett's book, but in there he talks about Vladimir Putin, which interestingly enough he wrote almost the entire book about Putin without mentioning Putin more than once or twice, but he does talk about Vladimir Serkov, which a guy who has a job title, he's a political technologist and this idea of fake news and lying and getting people to taking schisms that exist and trying to make them larger, having the sycophantic type of media for your leader, you know, the leader's truth, whatever he says is the truth. It's not, and that idea in Red Sparrow too, remember that she goes to training and it's psychological training and that's what Putin's background is and this idea of how do you culture craft the society has been an art for a long time but now that we're interconnected we're seeing it show up in some pretty nefarious ways at a very large scale. I've mentioned a couple times on this call the documentary hypernormalization which goes into Serkov, so does the documentary Bitter Lake. Trump's mentioned it there too. Both by Adam Curtis. Trump makes like six appearances in hypernormalization. Which came out the year before he was elected too. And bingo, exactly, it's kind of crazy when you watch it and think about what happened or how that played out. Bo, sorry you were jumping in. No, I was just enjoying Tom's making some sense of these movies for me. Yes, thank you. And that's not facetious. I'm like, yeah, Tom, give it to him. Tell us, because the movies are the subconscious of the culture, so I enjoy the insight. It's funny because because of other cues, last night I watched one of the Hans Rosling videos about factualism, I basically called it, which is how to see the world through facts and he quizzes the audience about some basic world stats and the audience gets them all wrong, basically. How many girls are in school across the world? How many kids are vaccinated? A whole bunch of stats and everybody basically gets, how many kids will there be in 2100 on earth? Everybody gets all the numbers wrong. And he is extremely earnestly, he has since passed away, but his son is carrying the ball and other people, but he is very, very earnestly trying to make a very good case for fact-based decision making and how that goes. And that's sort of the opposite of what we're seeing play out in the political sphere, precisely the opposite. So there's this kind of battle, large-scale battle going on between how we see what we see, what we accept as true, and how that drives our decisions, which is not only fascinating, but maybe kind of urgently important because it's going to dictate a lot of what happens in the next decade. I think this thing that's missing from all of the accounts that we're getting, which is again, it's very much individual and psychology-based as if each of us ever got ourselves all together and had the right facts and all the rest of it, things would be better. Without understanding, sorry, this is my soapbox. I will say it only one more time, without understanding the social dynamics and how it is that we construct those so-called facts, that we construct the truth. And that that's a social process and it's the same fucking process, whether it's a lie or whether it's the truth. I keep saying that, and I haven't quite figured out why it's important yet, but it seems to me like it should be important. Exquisitely important, and also why do we refuse to change our minds so often in the face of everything? And a lot of it is loss of in-group status or gain of in-group status. I think so much of this has to do with group dynamics and a feeling of connectedness or belonging or achievement within a group or respect from others. And the fact or falsehood in the middle of it matters much less than the group membership. Well, and also I do think, and here is a psychological thing that was the whole Kahneman point about system one and system two, is that the value of being part of the group and distracting this identity, like the five of us can have a conversation and we will end up reinforcing our own beliefs. And at least we're a little bit able to, yeah, go beyond. Mr. Bannon, you look like a what? This is from the Financial Times. Yeah. Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is a media and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit, unquote. Yeah, and that's completely a tactic that is absolutely a tactic for what's going on. Basically create the fog of war intentionally, make it so that nobody knows exactly from the trust, where to go, and move from there. Hey, bro, welcome to the call. Hi, bro. Can't actually hear you. I don't know if you're muted or not, but we've, now we're hearing some background noise. Still not hearing you, but that's okay. But we've sort of taken a dive deep into, well, we went through intelligence and sort of the origins of intelligence through animals and trees and nature and all those kinds of things. And we made our way over to the current political scene and truths and falsehood and how it all plays, kind of spinning around this notion of what we believe and how we change our minds. Something like that. Anybody want to add fuel to that fire? Well, I'm film struck last night. I was watching a documentary about 30s and 40s German cinema. Yeah, it was very insightful about basically the Nazis on movie machine and how they diverted and it's very interesting the themes that they chose to do in their cinema to, oh boy, there was a quote from Hannah Arendt, I can't wait to go back and retrieve from it in post. There was a whole bunch of sort of bucolic, pastoral, idyllic, German nationalist stuff, I think. There was a bunch of that, wasn't there? A lot, yes, they're going into the past. Their cinema was very much about getting, diverting you into some other world. And retrieving the Wagnerian myths of the origins of Teutonic culture so there's that hunk and all of this is replacing the 20s and 30s in Berlin which are basically... Yeah, the Weimar Republic. Yeah, party on, absolutely. A quagmire. Has anybody seen the series on Netflix Babylon Berlin? Sorry, Berlin Babylon. It's tuned up for me to watch next, actually, yes. It's actually fabulous. It's a detective mystery set in 30s Berlin with really great characters. The accents are actually Berliner-ish accents. The sets are quite realistic. The trams are old, all of that. But it's very well done. You get a sense for what's happening in town back then. Hey, I haven't seen Peter for a while. Hey, Peter, why don't you check in? Let's see what's going on with you. Okay, I'll do a mute. Thanks. As we are talking books, I'm in the middle of, I think, a really good one. It's from a British guy called James Brill. And the title of this book is New Dark Age, Technology and the End of the Future. And it's about, among many other things, it's about many other things. It's about climate. It's about surveillance. It's about the part that I'm now in is basically about the invisible infrastructure. And all the secrets that are hidden from normal people. It's a really intriguing book. It reads like a science fiction, but it isn't science fiction. It's reality today. And so I juxtapositioned. So I have been, well, quote-unquote, working. I don't work. I just play around. I've been playing around with an upcoming performance that I will do in September, where I'm using a metaphor of the prison cell to make some points. It just happens that I did some artwork about that in the beginning of the year. And just today, I bumped into a post from Silent Terry, which is titled, Welcome to Your Cubicle, Prisoner 10997. I'll drop it in the chat box. Where is the chat box here? Shall we try chat? Okay, here's the chat. Oh, I lost it. I'm sorry, type message here. We can find it. Yeah, I have it here. Yeah, cool. I mean, this is a new prison, brand new prison in Australia, which is organized like cubicles. And I'm really appalled by the first picture, which almost looks like, well, almost. It's like a business class department, but it's a prison cell in an open office plan. And it says under the picture, as with any open plan office, the facility has no privacy and a focus on monitoring of behavior. And then straight from SESDOC advertiser, correctional officers monitor inmates around the clock from first floor corridors, overlooking the pots and with infrared cameras for night monitoring. And immediate action team officers are stationed within the facility to provide a 24-7 response to critical incidents. I'm really appalled by this. And so you can see other pictures if you go through the link. It really looks like an open office with cubicles. And every cubicle looks like the picture that you see on the first page. Wow. So it is the Panopticon. Yeah, did Jeremy Bentham do the Panopticon prison in England? Yeah, the Panopticon meets the cubicle office plan. Wow. Seriously. Yes. I'm a little confused. This is your high security prison. So the fact that there's no privacy and there's monitoring of behavior seems to be intrinsic to that kind of environment, whether or not it looks like a cubicle. Yeah, so if you read on, apparently there is some sort of vetting or the sort of inmates that can go in those cubicles. But it's just terrible. It's absolutely terrible. I mean, I think- It's worse than a regular prison? I haven't been in a regular prison, but not as an inmate, but as a matter of fact, as a Santa Claus, I've been in a regular prison to distribute toys to the children of the prisoners. But I found this one felt very much like torture. I mean, no privacy and continuously being overwatched. And so if you combine this with what James Brittle is writing in his book about continuous surveillance. So he went on and he's a sort of guy that is doing his own documentaries and his own research. And he's also an artist, and he lives in Greece. And I mean, a really interesting chap. Yeah, for the Isaac of the Zeta. So to combine that with the prison cell performance, where I'm playing almost cinematographic soundscapes to the point of your German film watching, Weimar Republic. And so I found a couple of- I'm using a software to make music called Ableton. It doesn't matter. It's Ableton. Yeah, it's basically you can sample sounds and it gives you a keyboard where you can program any sound to any key and then loop them, repeat them, do all kinds of really cool stuff. They also have- It's a platform. So they also have apps and kits that you can download. So I downloaded a set this week for $29 of cinematographic effects, which are really like horror or very strange environments or interstellar type of things that you can start mixing. And so I'm using that sort of stuff in my performance to create a certain mood. And so my girl was watching me. My girl is 12, 13 in December and she has stopped it. It's so scary. Wow. So at the same time having fun. And I wrote a post this week or last week, which may be relevant or not to our conversation. And the title of the post was The Future is Not About Facts. It's the earlier point in the conversation. But it's completely different from a different angle. Like I'm using Tebow and Burnett's famous quote about technology. Then I started in my- Well, it's not a journal. It's a sort of file that I have with open threads lose IDs. I'm working on something that may end somewhere. I don't know. The working title is Fantasy Compensates Reality. And so it's the opening sentence for the time being is the fantasies become bigger and more fantastic. The more reality fails at fulfilling our needs. And then you get into- And this is also what James Bruddel is writing about. Fake scientific reports or fake use, obviously, or fake experiences. Like, I mean, there is this big dance festival that originated in Belgium. It's called Tomorrowland. I really don't want my tomorrow to be like in that Tomorrowland, but it's all fake. It's like Disney for adults, but it's all fake. And then there is another one called Bestival, the best festival, but it's all people dressed up like in a little bit like, what is it called? This festival in the desert in the U.S. Burning Rain. And it's all fake. And another one like distrust anything that fits a two by two matrix because it's an oversimplification of reality. That's what I'm playing around with these days. Super interesting. Isn't any attempt to describe Reality inherently an oversimplification of Reality? Sounds reasonable. I like that question. I want to use two by twos. Not because I thought they were a simplification, but because sometimes you just have to carve it up. You have to do violence to the world in order to understand it. And now we're back to the violence question. Yes. Violence for good. Violence for good. Was it good? It's interesting because models and stories are both essential, I think, to our walking around and figuring out where we fit and what's going on and what's up. And they're both completely dangerous because half the models and half the stories are broken and wrong. Like, you know, neoclassical economics have a whole bunch of models that we were convinced were actually working that have gotten us to a point right now where a lot of things are breaking partly because of these models. But who ever thought they were anything other than models? A whole bunch of people thought they were that the models were accurate enough or descriptive enough to build policies around them and then drive platforms around those policies and then make all that shit happen. And at some point there's a bunch of really interesting articles about how Democrats bought the neoconservative, not the neoconservative, the neoliberal agenda of globalism, et cetera. So Clinton, Bill, was actually a pretty good moderate Republican president. Yes, he was. Who then furthered the neoliberal agenda without regard toward the effects on workers and, you know, the middle class and everything else. And nature abhors the vacuum. So as soon as you kind of open up all the borders and digitize all the work, it's going to escape to the lowest bidder. That seems pretty straightforward. And the loser is going to be the person who's got reasonable income coming, which might in fact be a lot of American workers. So I think that was a big thing that happened. But all of this, so I think we're going back to the theme that comes up a lot in Rex Call, which is what are the scripts in our heads? Who controls or changes the scripts in our heads? How do we consider changing the scripts that we use to balance reality or goals or our future? What is it that we want in our futures and how does that map to all the activities that are happening around us? I think all of those are kind of our questions here in large measure. And one way of looking at what's happening out in the political sphere is that this is battles over the controlling narratives. There's a documentary series called Commanding Heights that talks about Hayek and Popper and basically libertarian views coming in, doing combat with social democracy and Keynes and a bunch of other views. And Commanding Heights sort of means, you know, who is going to own the Commanding Heights of policymaking? Yeah, and I have a nice little factile I just read about yesterday. And this is going to be a little bit complicated because it's economics. But so the central banks, what our current situation is because the central banks have done this quantitative beasing and lowered interest rates to some cases negative. Now they're looking back and we're now barely 10 years later reaching full capacity. So what it turns out is the central banks were so conservative after 0809, they have now cost the world more loss of output than the actual recession. Did I make that clear? Then did you understand me, Jerry? Maybe you want to say? So the loss in jobs and output and all the pain and suffering of 0809 recession has now been exceeded by the lassitude of the central banks because they were so obsessed with containing inflation. So they've now done more damage than all the financial shenanigans of 0809. Now, I think it's so abstract that most people aren't going to understand what I said. Well, all of this plays out in national austerity programs and backlash against austerity programs. I think it was Portugal. I'm trying to remember, there was a really great article recently about how I think the country of Portugal basically had screwed these austerity programs. We need to take care of our people and flip the whole thing. Refused the advice of all of these large entities like the IMF and the World Bank and political pressures to cut away all social services and flipped it and has sort of saved a lot of its ability to have an economy and a society. That's funny. I had a chance to go to Ostana-Kazakhstan a number of years ago for the Ostana Economic Forum. I remember your trip. Yes. It was billed as essentially a world economic forum for the developing world as the focus. What it was in actuality was Kazakhstan attempting to have a big enough audience to sell its oil, gas and mineral reserves. And so there were a few of us who were token, well, I was a token environmentalist and put it this way. Bjorn Lomborg was the closest thing I had to an ally at this event. And if you know who Bjorn Lomborg is, you'll know that's actually kind of a shocking thing to hear. Copenhagen consensus. Anyway, the last day of the event, there was a roundtable discussion of a variety of global leaders. A couple of Nobel Prize-winning economists. A couple of, let's see the, what was his name? Ukraine, former president of Ukraine was there. A few other people who were regional leaders, editor-in-chief of The Economist magazine. And the dominant conversation for the one-hour roundtable was how do we get the masses to accept more austerity? With some kinds of, it's really appalling that the Americans picked someone like Obama as their president. And a few other things. I actually started live tweeting it because I was just so shocked at what was being said. Very openly. Probably putting my life at risk because Kazakhstan is not really known as a friendly, liberal state. But, so the helots are not doing their duty by accepting their suffering with grace. Which is what a good helot should do. And there was a, there was definitely a point in time when you had leaders who only saw austerity as the, you know, who saw austerity as the only path forward. And couldn't see that the world was anything other than that particular economic model. And as we were talking about models a moment ago, it's just for me that the parallel here is having a navigation system in your car that follows what it believes to be the map, regardless of what reality says. So we'll go on a closed road because that's what the map says, no matter what the evidence says. You know, that conflict between evidence and model. That's a superb analogy too, Jimé, superb. And actually it's one of those interesting questions of, you know, is that going to happen with self-driving cars? You know, so as we automate our economy, do we rely more on models instead of evidence or something along those lines? Back to the Portugal thing just for one second. Neither April nor I are on the Zoom chat. If the article is titled, Portugal dared to cast aside austerity. It's having a major revival. If one of you wouldn't mind googling it and posting it to the Zoom, it will be on our collective chat as we remember it. And then back to Jimé for a second because Jimé, it strikes me that for the last 25 years or so, your role in the world has largely been to concoct narratives that will stimulate our neurons to see the future differently or to highlight threats. I mean, you've written a whole bunch about climate change and other kinds of crises coming and about trust and other sorts of topics. How does this conversation marry up with your own endeavors in building narratives? It helps to inform my efforts in that it's a reminder of the complexity and it's a reminder that I have to, that it's important not to divorce technological change from social and cultural change. So that's the one thing that worries me about. And I haven't read the Brill book and I'm looking forward to reading it, but worries, does he carve out technology as being this ominous other rather than being a cultural artifact? I mean, because glasses are technology, a glass is technology, but there are some technologies that have become so intrinsic to us that we stopped thinking about them as technology. That is, we stopped, we try to conceptualize technology as being something outside of our material world and technology is our cultural material world. Everything around me in this built environment is a kind of technology. That's what his book is about. I'm sorry? That is indeed what his book is about. Okay, good, good. Yeah, I look forward to reading it. It sounds like a must read. It's James Bridal. Yeah. Bridal? Okay. Yeah, like Bridal on a Horse. There's a term I heard long ago in undergrad, a techno-social change. And it feels like that's sort of how change happens is that we are societies and we move ahead and we have lives and we make or break societies and economies, but along the way, technology sort of changes everything. So here's the thing that I try to push back on. It's not just a case of technology change in society. Our culture and our societies change our technologies. The changes to our technologies are driven by the social and cultural demands and norms. Things that we decide to pursue, the way that we construct our tools, what the interfaces look like. You know, everything that we do create is driven by our cultural and social models. And it's really, I bristle at arguments and I know this is not what you were saying, Jerry, but it triggered it for me. That's okay. I like watching you bristle. It's cool. At the idea that technology is the driver, that technology changes and humans adapt to that. Yeah. No, it's co-evolution. It's co-evolution, very much so. And usually both sides are not fully informed and I don't think it's that technology emerges in response to needs shown by humans and so forth. Technology just kind of happens in different ways and sometimes it's driven by business models. Arguably, we should all have been driving electric cars this whole time because the earliest cars were actually electric and clean and pretty cool. And then, hey, the gasoline engine and petroleum and all that just took over. And now- But the gasoline and petroleum were a lot better. If you look, we still have not come with the battery. We have still not developed a battery in coming anywhere close to the energy density of gasoline. Of gasoline. That was the problem. And Jameo, it's just a rip for giving about technology and culture. The automobile, the width of it and everything we patterned after horse carriages. That was a completely cultural determination. And horse carriages have been built on the same axle width since the days of the Roman Empire. And the Roman roads. And the Roman roads. So there's a debate back and forth about just how true that is, but there's a good argument to be made that the size of our vehicles, the size of our roads, is still derived directly. There's a direct through line from the Roman Empire. Which very likely, the width of an ox cart is probably the width of two people sitting next to each other. You know, with a little bit of slack. With the butts of two animals. The two animals pulling the cart. Right. So it goes back to the geometries of the creatures involved. Peter, I'm interested. The paintings you did about window prison cells with bars in them. And you rift on that over and over and over with lots of different things. Were you usually looking out or were you sometimes looking in? And you probably have a bunch of them behind you, right? Well, that's what the performance is about. So this is, let me see. This is what the prisoner sees from within the cell. And this is what the person outside of the cell looks looking into the prison cell. I did not know to ask that question because Peter prompted that, but that was pretty amazing, right behind you. Yeah, yeah. So I'm combining it with, I think I found a post from this ribbon form. Is this Twitter name? Venkatesh Rao, I think. A Venky Rao or something like that. Yeah, Venkatesh Rao. Yeah, yeah. Let me see if I can open this thing here. I have a bunch of it put his posts here in my brain. We have all architects now. Yeah, but there is a, I think it's part of his book tempo. Consent of the surveilled. And there is something in there that is called the Freitag staircase. And it's also about narratives and stories. So I'm using a quote from him that is, I think, the same. That's so. Venkatesh Rao, it is, all our choices are among life stories that end with our individual deaths. And so then he gets into the Freitag staircase. And I think Tom, I think like this, which is basically, life is leading to entropic death in the end. The true life through a person's life, person goes through different stories, experiences. And hopefully you get better as you go through life. And so the point of the prison window is a moment of reflection. Am I standing inside or outside the prison cell? Am I just looking inwards or am I prepared to look outside of the prison cell? What's going on there? And so it's a moment of deciding to take personal leadership if you see something happening. And who is in what kind of prison? Yeah, and that's why also the picture of the prison cell in Australia comes in so timely. Because there is a part about open offices as well. It's about people collaborating and listening or not listening to each other. And there's a general backlash now about against open office plans. Yeah. Tom, you've been, you sort of chew on all these things and try to assemble a worldview and bring this in front of people as they go. Which parts of this resonate strongly for you? Well, in typical Rex fashion, we have a ginormous conversation going. So we can all choose multiple aspects of this. Exactly. So as opposed to taking that head on, why don't I just tell you a little bit about what I've been spending some time doing. It's like a rope. No, no, it's like a wall. We'll see if it, exactly, see if this thread ends up being spun together with the other threads in this conversation. So one of the, we're talking about, oh, seems like society's going crazy and things are spinning out of control. What are the things that cause this? We can go into who's master mining, but it's happening. And I've been thinking about the fact that we've really let go, at least in American culture, of the idea of teaching people. Education levels are not universal. We don't teach history as much. And these are conditions that allow these things to kind of come back. And I've been a good friend of mine. She's a professor at Agnes Scott College. She and I went on a road trip to Birmingham, Montgomery, Alabama, where they have the EJAI. It's the Equality and Justice Initiative. Its nickname is called the Lynching Museum. And right next to it is the Lynching Memorial. It's a fascinating study. And she gave me, she's a history professor, and so she was teaching me a lot about this. When you're hearing about the divisiveness that Trump is causing right now, and with simple dog whistles and things like, tweeting about LeBron or talking about the NFL, you don't have to really say, I'm against black people. But what he's trying to do is simply drive that wedge. And it's nothing more than a continuation of something happening. He's just the latest symptom. And going back and understanding the role of race within our society throughout the years, and reading these couple of books that she's given me lately, it's shocking how I thought I was kind of well read, and I thought I was a liberal from the Bay Area that knew enough about this kind of stuff. But these dynamics have been going on for a long time. What is different is the communication technologies we have. And so the severity with which you can spread good ideas or bad ideas has increased. If you've seen Brian Stevenson's TED Talk, he talks about mass incarceration, for example. We went from lynchings to executing and putting people in prisons, but it's a lot about controlling those sub-segments of society. For what reason? It's the same reason you have austerity programs. So that the folks that control the institutions that harness the power and collect all the economic wealth in this world can stay under people's control. So I don't know where I'm going with this, but I feel like I just by knowing more about how what I see and worry about today fits into a larger narrative has been very helpful. And then on a second thread, I live in a very- I'll just ask a question right there before you go to your second thread, if you can remember it. What does knowing more about it actually make you think or do differently? I mean, not you personally, but what does one- Right. Some people use it to excuse and say, well, this has been going on forever. I mean, I'm oversimplified. But other people are impelled to work even harder on it. It seems to me there has to be something else we're not seeing. Some other way of using that information. Yeah. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of Trump Republicans. And not a one of them will tell you he's a racist, but every single one of them has these views that we live in a very hostile world and we have to protect ourselves and our children from all the bad guys. And what, when you go back and you look at, you know, the book I'm reading right now is talking about Rosa Parks. And we use her as a, oh, she was a single woman who had a defiant moment. You know, you look at the work she put in before she was chosen to be the one to be represented in that case. It made you realize that everybody for years knew what the problems were in the South and they were trying to figure out how do we change people's minds? I think that's what we need to do today is to figure out how do we start to turn some of these conversations into framing them in a way that people realize that this isn't the way it ought to be. Attitudes evolve over time slowly, but I'm not sure what attitudes, you know, a liberal talking to a liberal is saying, we need fairness and equality and justice for everybody. And we all agree with each other. But there are good values that are held by the people who disagree with us, you know, the idea of justice and retribution and safety, security, control, those things are what they're also looking at. So I don't know where the conversation is going to go, but it's going to be more trying to put your head in the minds of those who disagree with you. I'm really trying to spend a lot less time with folks that I agree with and starting to just understand those I disagree with. And to that end, I've joined the Bible study group, the men's Bible study group here in my neighborhood. Not a one of them shares my ideas and they see me as the freak might be a strange world, but I'm the ground peg with a bunch of squares around me. But the point is I get to hear, you know, they have some really good motivations and values and trying to understand them. The problem is they all tend to get their news sources from Fox News. And so we do have this, you know, this idea that we have two different realities, like the world is built by culture, but we have multiple cultures that are coexisting right now. And these multiple cultures are reinforcing their own world views. But I really am afraid that we have a very few good people out there, like Joe Brewer right now is what he's trying to do with understanding how do you craft culture in a positive way? It seems that there are fewer people doing that, or at least it is harder to do that than it is to use it for various purposes, to drive people together, to control people, to deceive people. And so what I'm trying to do is just trying to understand where do we share common values before we try to say my culture should dominate your culture? How do we find where we overlap and try to build something that's going to allow us all to coexist? Thank you, Tom. Yeah, this whole question, I mean, during an era of polarization of values and narratives, it puts extra stress on the attempts to find overlaps in values and capacity to work together. So that is like the big work of our time. We're going to have to ask you in future, Tom, to check in about what you've learned in Bible study. Seriously, I want to hear it. Yeah, that's a great idea to engage them right in the heart of their culture. That's a great idea. And it's interesting that different characters in that group, I don't want to write about them without them knowing I'm doing everything, but they are very great characters. I'd say half of them are really struggling to get by. I mean, frankly, their world is how am I going to get the next sale kind of mentality? My daughter just went off to college and I'm feeling more financial stress is kind of stuff. Then there's others who are very good, high-powered jobs. One of them works for the Republican Party here in Georgia. And just to piss him off, I've been putting all my Democratic lawn signs out in the front yard. I make sure they're there on his as he drives to Bible study. He sees them. But he and another who works for Ernst and Young, I think of them very differently because these are thoughtful men with good educations who have very different values from me, very hardcore Republican conservative values. But then I also have this layer that I don't bring out into the open because it's... Why is it that they believe in these religious stories? They have some very literal explanation. When they read the Bible, a lot of that is literally true to them. And I have a hard time understanding how people compartmentalize like that, believing in things that could be seen as fantasy in my world view. So this goes back, I think, to the difference between faith and belief. And faith kind of, by definition, is a leap beyond what would be rationally normally acceptable. Faith is in fact an act of believing that the thing that might sound like a story or a tale or whatever is, in fact, in some way true. And I get lost beyond that. But in some sense, I think people of religious faith see science as a similar act of faith. And there's a whole bunch of scientists who are basically believing in the laws of evolution and nature and chemistry and mathematics as those things all come together to explain why we're here and how this thing all works. And in some cases, science sometimes takes steps too far, ignoring things that are in fact present but not measurable, for example. So these are competing narratives of faith that are trying to have a conversation about belief. And it's really hard to get down there. But it's really interesting, though. There are a lot of languages that don't have that word. Yeah. And there's, you know, Wilford Cantrell Smith, who was founded the Center for the Study of Whatever. Religions at Harvard, whatever that was called, and has a book called Faith and Belief. And it's very hard to go. But it does point out that that introduction of that into Christianity, for instance, is actually quite new. I mean, the Mennonites, which we grew up as, would not swear. Our faith was not a creed. We did not say we believed. Yeah. A lot of these conversations, I just set aside and say, okay, as opposed to truthfulness or not truthfulness, I allow that to just be there. And then I focus more on what is the meaning they give to it. And that's an interesting part because something doesn't have to be true or false for you to give it meaning. And what you do with that meaning, how are you going to live your life based on what you believe the meaning of that thing is? And this is close to where art lives, right? Art is there to help you make meaning. And whether the art is true or not, nobody would ask you whatever asked that question. It's a silly question. Art is art. But it's how we give meaning to it that I'm fascinated by. I suspect that your friends in the Bible Study group would be horribly offended at the idea that the Bible is not a source of truth. A source of truth, I think they, yeah. Only one of them is offended because he's a very literal person. He knows the ark was built and things like that. He knows if Adam and Eve existed. And I suspect that that different set that Jerry calls out between faith and belief, maybe at that heart, maybe at the heart of what some folks are wrestling with here, in that when you talk about belief in the literal truth of the Bible, to cite any part of it as being incorrect, potentially invalidates all of it. And so that, and then that runs headlong against them. One, you know, what I find to be the major difference between science as a system of belief and religion that science is intrinsically self-correcting or attempts to be self-correcting. With science, all knowledge, all truth is contingent until we get better evidence or we get different evidence. And that's something I've seen repeatedly, very religious people saying that they know their truth is better because their truth is constant and unchanging, whereas science is constantly changing. A religious understanding has been changing forever. Oh yeah. Just the way language changes, right. Why is that so frightening? I don't know. I might have, I might have a reason for this. I'd like to throw this in there. I call it my bare attack hypothesis. You know, if you never notice when someone has something like that happen, other human beings will say, what did you do? What did you do? Well, they want to figure out how that can't happen to me. And what I take the next step and what they want is a narrative where they're safe, where the universe is discreet, predictable, and they are safe. And all humans do this. We make narratives all the time where they don't belong. I mean, we cause it, causes that don't, you know, anyway. We see spaces in clouds. Yeah. But so what I think is, perhaps what these people are doing, God, in fact, I wrote it the other day in my own journal about what I, is that having a clockwork universe, the kind of clockwork universe science, you know, only 200 years ago wanted to invent and create for itself. Maybe that's what they're getting out of their strict interpretation and literal belief in the Bible is a safe, predictable, bearproof attack universe. And all of us want to do that. So I just, how about that guys? I throw that in. So Bo, when are you going to write the book titled The Bearproof Universe? I like it. Back to what Jameu was saying about, if one thing starts to be proven wrong, the whole thing might be. There's, in this context, a very ironic phrase that is, that happens in trials with juries, which is, I think it's called April will know for sure, fruit of the poisoned tree, which means that if one thing from one person giving testimony is provably wrong, you can discount the rest of their testimony. Although I may be wrong. Is he bringing that on TV today? All the time. All the time. But the reference to fruit of tree is ironic in this context, of course. Well, the one thing I don't want to do is tear anybody's world down. And so I'm very respect, I like listening to them disagreeing with each other too. I think that's very helpful. And in the analogy for at least, I'd say a good number of the people in this group, The Bear is, they look at me and say, what if there were no God? What if we didn't, if there weren't Christians in this world? And everything, all would be chaos. I wouldn't want to be in a foxhole with a atheist kind of thing. They believe that there would be no morality where this whole God thing to be disproven. And I agree with them. I don't want to live in a world where everybody's acting amorally. The question is, can you be immoral without that? And you know, I've been, I've read Jimmy, you mentioned the we see faces in the clouds kind of thing. And to try to understand religious thought, I read a lot of the four horsemen and they kind of go through that same logic of how we evolved to believe in God. But if anyone's read, I just bought a book I haven't started. His name is Robert Bella book on religion. It's the evolution of religion and how it existed. Now, how it helped us evolve and why we needed it and how it helped one group. You have to believe in multi-level selection if you're going to believe that religion played a role in evolution. But that's the area I'm going in is just to try and understand why, why did those with religious views out-compete and out-survive those without religious views? So Bella is spelled with an H, B-E-L-L-A-H, right? Yeah, yeah. And which book, Beyond Belief, Habits of the Heart, Religion and Human Evolution, The Broken Covenant? I think it's Religion and Human Evolution. If you're seeing the covers, it's a big black cover. From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Yeah, I'm reading a lot. I'm trying to find out, when it comes to social science, if they have a good grounding in evolutionary thinking, I'm giving those authors more credence lately. Cool. Thank you. This has been a great discussion. Anybody want to add some closing thoughts? The phrase that has been running through my head lately is the new normal. The new normal? Yeah. I just heard a piece on NPR yesterday about how the California wildfire situation is repeatedly being described as a new normal. And the Mendocino Complex fire is now the largest fire in recorded history in California and has consumed over one half of 1% of the state. And just thinking about the new normal, how do we respond to a new normal? Do we accept, adapt, or act? And can we resist the creation of a new or the emergence of a new normal? And how long does a new normal last? A phrase that I've used in my talk and talked before is the banality of the future. And that is not to say that the future is boring, but that for the people living in the scenario, the people living in these forecast futures, that's normal. That's their everyday existence. Whether we're talking about extreme climate change or AI or whatever, we look ahead and we see something disruptive and massive and world-changing. And for the people in these worlds that have changed, it is boring. It's their everyday existence. They're used to it. And I'm just wrestling with this idea of as Tom pointed out, is the new normal simply the phrase itself a form of acceptance and resignation? Or is it a recognition of a new fact or a new that our global conditions or our conditions around us have changed in a fundamental way and persistent way? And so this question of how do we deal with a new normal? How do we make a new normal that we want? That's what I've been... So if I can just try to end this on a more positive note and kind of wrap it up with a reference to something I was saying earlier. Are you going to show puppies and kittens video on YouTube? Oh my God, the reading what it was like to grow up in the South as a black person in the 40s or 50s, it was atrocious. But at one point, they started to have a new normal. They started to realize that they actually could make some changes. And so there was a trial where it was very common that black men would rape women and they wouldn't even be charged with anything. It was just the cops are all part of the KKK and they knew the guys and so they just let them go. But they had one case, these men were put on trial. Six white men were all tried and it took them three years just to get the charges brought and they kept fighting and they kept persisting and they saw justice and these men went to prison. 37 black men had been executed by electric chair in Mississippi for raping white women. Not a single white man had gone to prison. Now these six, none of them got executed but at least they all got put into prison for life. And when people saw that their efforts had a result like that, it started to give them the ability to realize that putting effort into other changes was worthwhile. And it's a slow slog. When you're going against the dominant culture, you're not going to change it overnight. But these types of small moves, when we can start to see that maybe there's a way to get out of this authoritarian state we're in right now, what is going to be that moment where we realize that maybe Mueller is going to be the person that shows us that the emperor has no clothes. Tom, thank you. That despite being a very painful story was in fact optimistic. Yeah, I always use rape stories to bring people up. Any other closing thoughts? One small thought is that across the world's languages, the future tense, that the past, non-past distinction is far more profound than past, present, and future. Just to go back to that earlier comment. And so it's not, to me, it's not so surprising that it's, that now, now it stands into the future. And it is unknowable. You got to watch the movie Arrival. Yeah. It's a lead linguistic science fiction, right? Or science fiction with a strong linguistic element. Actually, a lot of people say your language determines how you think. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this actually relates to the earlier. Cool. Well, thank you, everybody. This has been fantastic. Have a great August. I'll see you on a pop-up call soon. If you have pop-up call topics, let me know. We'll make them happen, whatever comes up in your heads. And for now, thank you. This has got lots in my head. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Bye.