 That's why I was starting to say those. You're very secure, man. You've got it locked down now The Rex call for May 2020 in lockdown It's breaking into this Rex call. That's right. No zoom bombers here except for us And they're starting to relax the relax lock on in different places like We just got some messages yesterday that Kate Brown of work of you know Governor of Oregon is saying if if certain things are met then these kind of establishments can open and these and these knees Like we're probably far from hitting those numbers, but especially the testing numbers as far as I can tell but It's something know if you notice that Numbers in China and South Korea have started to go up again after they've After they relax Quarantine which is expected, right? Hmm. And and also I think they have real tracking and we don't we have pulls for shit tracking. Yeah And where was it? Singapore was having trouble because there were some buildings that were basically immigrant dorms. That's right Immigrant door It's crazy Uh any reflections on the moment Insane and I'm used to being at home all the time. Yeah, this is not a big change of habits for you Exactly so exactly so are you missing going to like the the German place and having your reiner schnitzel and big beer? Well, I have Friday night I go out and then I hang out with my friends and I go to the bar at the bookstore. Yeah Yeah, and that's it. That's all I do. I don't really do anything else, but not having that it's just like throwing a switch in my head Makes messes me up and love and God help the people actually have real social interaction with I don't Well, how about you David? So why doesn't Foucault's books just do like as virtual zoom hangout in the evening on Fridays? Why don't they actually pick up and emulate this online? Look out Kevin. Oh, okay does not have a cell phone. It does not use the internet ever Oh, Jesus Christ. Isn't this the moment to do that? Cool to have no somebody that's deliberately unplugged. How about tin tin cans and string between your homes? I Met with him by the way in the park because he was near me We're having meetings with wine and up in the park Kevin welcome to the call You're muted by default and I was just asking for reflections on this moment just Like how everybody's thinking go ahead Jimmy. I'm just paying attention to the fact that you were coughing cherry There's something we need to pay attention to I'm good. Don't worry. Yeah, it's Actually, I need to I need to wean myself off the coffee Which appears to generate coughing because it kind of coats my vocal cords And I then have to cough to free them up, but I think this is the cause Although I like the coffee, so it's it's hard to say no. Yeah, no There are very few things that I would That would make me give up my coffee Really? So I grew up both parents drank coffee, you know for breakfast all the time And I grew up for some weird reason not wanting to be the person who had to have a couple cups Cups of coffee to get wake up in the morning So I didn't have a coffee habit and now I mostly have coffee or whatever But but there was this strange thing in the back of my head where I didn't want to have to kickstart my like my body into being with coffee my My my coffee response is more performative than actual I think You know the mornings that I go without coffee Don't actually go much differently from the ones where I do With the exception that I do occasionally get the caffeine or the lack of caffeine headache No, the the coffee with the reason I like having the coffee is I actually do like the flavor of unsweetened unmilked coffee and I like the the practice of Making the coffee and making the the cup or the or the iced coffee or whatever Just that that sense of not quite ritual, but you know in the in the neighborhood. It is a bit of a ritual I think very much What is your preferred coffee and technology? Um, well my preferred is a coffee press The one I use is a per is a that's a standard filter coffee filter maker because it's just Simpler to clean up coffee press. You have to deal with grounds and with the the One the filtered coffee maker just you know dumped up the filter and rinse. Yeah, and I'm the same as you Well, not the same as you I the French press is the press you're talking about, right? Yes, so I I've discovered that I like the French press best of all because I really like the grounds to swim around for a little bit I like the oils to come up And I and I don't mind a little bit of grounds in the bottom like Arab coffee. I don't mind that whatsoever No, no, I it's just mostly the the cleanup aspect. I'm lazy and so I don't want to have to deal with You know making sure that the grounds don't go down the drain don't put them in the garbage disposal I would imagine you'd have a robot do that for you by now Not so much Anybody else want to comment on their caffeine routine? Yeah, I'll not mine. I'll comment on my father's Routine he went all the way through World War two and Patton's army Without drinking coffee. He came back from the war and mom said, you know, you're you know you need to get with the rest of the world and and I have a cup of coffee in the morning and He said well, I I tried it and didn't like it and I put sugar in it and didn't like it And I put cream in it and I didn't like it and I put both sugar in cream and it didn't like it So I said if I'm not gonna like it, I'll drink it black So he got to the same place you did Jermay. Okay Why might just say, you know, I will try to make my wife happy, but I don't really like this stuff So he was a coffee drinker from then on Yeah, I mean he did for you know, he acquired the you know Acquired taste as it were And I kind of get the best of what you guys were talking about. I use a social Rouchie Percolator with a thermal carafe and What I do is I heat up a kettle of hot water boiling water and pour it on the grounds in the With the paper filter and do the same thing that you're discussing Jerry, which is let it Like it was in the in the press before I turn it on to perk so Two minutes for the oils to come up and then I turn it on and it goes in a thermal crack Makes pretty good cup pot of coffee. Mm-hmm I like that. I just I just take the entire espresso machine and submerge it in the tub And that way I get the effect of both the effect of both things I get the oh look you've got your coffee technology right at And you have a Chemex Susan why don't you're muted Susan? Why did they call that Chemex like? The name to me was always like off-putting. I don't want my copy to So off-putting I remember one time driving down the freeway It might have been one-on-one and I saw a big billboard and the billboard was basically Wrigley's gum and non-smoking or something I thought it was like they were trying to say instead of having a cigarette have a stick of gum And it made the mental association for me a lifetime non-smoker of Wrigley's and smoking And like haven't had a Adam had a stick of Wrigley's gum since there was the other backfired This is not a Chemex. Ah This is a this is an a sobo a sobo and they make fairly new ones and I've broken my glass filter But it doesn't require paper So it's a gold filter. You can they have very precise directions about how long you leave Water on the grounds to get the oils out etc. Etc. Now you still Ja may you still have to get rid of the grounds. Okay. Yeah, but Fast and this is a thermos. So you unscrew this like this Besides it looks cool doesn't it? Yeah, totally Except for the broken glass parts, but still Well, I know and of course I tried to get it replaced during COVID and of course they weren't working and they couldn't Yeah Yeah, there's some coffee machines that look like stills And doing all kinds of crazy things. I I didn't like the price tag. So I said, I don't think I will invest in one But they sure look cool We went April and I stated an Airbnb in Berkeley a couple times it was a Zen sort of a Zen monastery and Angel Kyoto Williams was the head monk in that place. She was lovely. She was she was really terrific but but She had the most unzen attitude toward coffee and there was a section of the kitchen which nobody could touch Which had a little scale and her coffee equipment and the coffees and whatever and it was like This is off This is the off-limit zone and then in the morning She'd show up with her iPhone app and she would weigh precisely Measure out water like everything and time the steeping exactly precisely until she had her cup of coffee and I'm like This is either a great Zen meditative exercise, which I can see or it's the least Zen attitude I've ever seen about coffee There's hilarious the the allow people in mechanism is not Good for hosts because it doesn't ping so I find myself keeping having to keep a watch on if anybody's asking to come into our Conversation, so I'm maybe in the settings somewhere. It'll have a better alert system for hosts because You can just turn that off But you don't have to have the waiting room I think if I close if I close the waiting room, I think then the participants thing will ping at the bottom of the screen for me I think that'll be better probably It's a story about the the Zen master and coffee reminded me years ago did a talk in Italy some place in Europe and One of the other speakers was somebody who worked for a variety of political figures over the years Was working for the UN at the time, but we had a conversation he worked for the Dalai Lama for a while and It turns out that the Dalai Lama really loves Chinese beef jerky and so this guy had a smuggled beef jerky to the Dalai Lama What's that in your coat I cannot tell you That's hilarious Um, Susan you're still muted if you're talking to us. Yeah So he would smuggle it into India, right? The Dhammasala. Yeah. Yeah Up over the you know up over Mount Everest just come down past the tourists like excuse me. Excuse me Got Turkey Turkey for the Dalai use a trebuchet Exactly. Oh, you just hurled them over the over the Mountains I once went to the Dalai Lama's birthday party And which he wasn't at for that particular day because well the dark that When the Dalai Lama came over from Tibet He came through the through the Himalayas obviously With his one servant and his horse and horse alone And he landed in the village or the town of Missouri Which is in in the foothills of the Himalayas the north of Delhi about 180 kilometers and Anyway, so there was a he stayed there for a long time and would come back periodically from Dharam Sala to that place and so and he had his his relatives came in his aunt for instance came to tea at my mother's house and We and then and then at the school that I was at had Tibetan food every Sunday night to give the Indian staff time off So it was a little taste of that It's really cool. Love that. I've always wanted to meet the his holiness so that I could say the obvious thing. Yeah, hello, dolly I'm sure he's never heard that before I bet he has Any other reflections on the moment or things you would love For those of you who recall the Banny conversation that we had here a few months ago I Did finally get around to right writing an updated piece that I put on medium and I'll put the link in the in the chat But I also did a podcast interview with Wade Rauch former editor-in-chief of Technology review and a number of other you know the science writer has actually now has a book that just came out on Extra-terrestrial life and the search for it But that podcast as soonish just came out yesterday Sort of a half-hour conversation edited down from a two and a half hour conversation but if it's The pandemic has been A powerful illustration of the kinds of concepts. I was wrestling with her. I am wrestling with with the Banny idea the Banny model and It's interesting to me that how people have responded to it We have a number of people who just like read for it and immediately said yes This is a description of reality that that makes sense So that's been interesting and mildly fulfilling and But I I Am so incredibly cynical about the likelihood of substantial change In society as a result of the pandemic. Well, there's Everyone at IFTF everyone that I that seems to be thinking about the future post pandemic future seems to be talking in terms of You know grandiose transformation to society. I just don't see it Yes, definitely changes here and there but I don't expect us to have an an economic transformation as a result of this I don't expect us to have a Mass mass political movement for around labor as a result of this Around expertise and science as a result of this the institutional inertia is so great and The the people who are in power are so cognizant of the need to protect themselves because of already existing changes underway In basically their need to protect themselves around around changes to deal with climate Apply very nicely to dealing with changes arising from COVID and so I Just feel like a curmudgeon when I when I talk to talk to folks that you know the in-student and around that about No, I don't really think that's going to be a flowering of a new society. No Go ahead everybody November election is kind of a tipping point either way it could be pretty transformative You think there's gonna be an election in November? for example Actually, if there is an election in November, I on balance, I suspect that Biden would win at least with win a fair count With the wood blue would lose sweet for example if you had a blue sweep in the election Wouldn't that kind of open up a whole bunch of these social transitions Democrats are nicer than Republicans as a general rule but there's there still have still have a lot of institutional ties and Me if Something I said in the in the podcast interview was that if this pandemic had started up six months earlier We probably would be looking at a Bernie Sanders candidacy for the Democrats but that didn't happen and the mainstream institutional But it's a political economic industry is Is still dominant and would be dominant under under Biden as well Probably probably more so simply because Biden would make sense. You know Biden's policies would make sense or be sensible as opposed to You know pulled out of one's butt To put things to fun, so I was gonna say I'm with you Partly because the I have been along to something called the future work forum for since 2003 and the person who started it Is a bit of a curmudgeon and a cynic and when we were Now and he's been around for a while too and he Anyway, he put that forward We were supposed to write something about it and everybody I all these glowing stories and and he came up with Sort of basically 10 statements instead. That's not gonna happen. Don't think that's gonna happen Dave go ahead you were gonna jump in you good. I just want to comment on the links I put Jermaine I already put your link we have above you scroll up. You'll see I did well as you were talking I fed your link. Yeah And you're muted that you did cool So a couple things one Jermaine you may want to read the big short over again or watch the movie again I love that movie me too and and it's just so rich like like this just so it's funny In management 101 a very long time ago our teacher showed us a scene from the right stuff And he showed us when the astronauts are basically standing in front of the Capitol like So where's the porthole and the joystick like you mean you're just gonna like there's gonna be human in a box And you're gonna send us up and like we're pilots What do you why do you even want us here? And so they all agree that they're not gonna fly no none of them will fly unless blah blah blah it's a negotiating scene The big short is full of nuggets like that about different sorts of issues Sorry, I adore it and the big lesson for me from reading the book was None of the six or so people who saw what was happening and bet against it Would ever want to replicate that experience in their lives again It was they were betting against this fat juicy market that just kept going up that was paying off Really really well, you know up on up until the cliff Everybody was like no this thing is never gonna turn around. It's it's great And they were busy ignoring a whole bunch of evidence toward the end of the little ride to the cliff But but they didn't want They didn't want their money to be in the pool betting against it because that money was dropping dropping dropping as you got near The cliff at which point it spiked right at which point your bet paid off But up until the bet pays off you're on the downhill ramp and everybody else is on the uphill ramp so curmudgeon re is not is unfortunately to me the lesson the moral of my story is that curmudgeon re is not Doesn't pay off well socially Even even if it pays off well if you sort of hit what's what's happening and then all of us have kind of We're throwing darts into the future and some of us will be right, you know a hundred years from now And who knows who but then we're gonna look back and say okay What did that person know and what were they thinking the other thing is this whole saying about you know For the turkey everything is great until the day that you know that it's not from from telep But then there's an article I just posted by Ray Dalio Who basically said? He went back and looked at all his research and he has done he has turned his staff on history They have just devoured history They've done a whole bunch of work trying to figure out economic cycles and how to bet on what what happens when? And so this article says oops I forgot to factor in the effect of pandemics and for example after World War one He thought the economics cycle was mostly due to the destruction of World War one. I guess what? Spanish flu and we don't talk about the Spanish flu much because it was so devastating It was really like it's shredded social fabric. It really tore things up worldwide Yeah, and in the US everywhere so so his thesis partly in there's also another guy who wrote a book recently I'll find it about how wars and pandemics are the only things that ever really catalyze social change or oh, no His thesis was that wars and pandemics are the only things that ever equalize inequality That it's in those moments that the great fortunes basically are taken down and that income taxes flip in order to pay for the war Or that you know people are killed off in some way that changes labor power Or it happens in lots of different guises over time, but we does that require the pandemic to be Horrifying because if you have if you have a pandemic that you are effectively countering, right? Does that still is that still in will they still induce a kind of that kind of change? So I will just pile on to my argument a little bit saying Trump last week tried to wrap up the coronavirus task force. He was like up their job is done He's trying to he's trying to get everybody back to work so that the economy will be booming by November So the people will still vote their pocketbooks and go. Oh, that wasn't so bad. Let's keep this guy in office So so I'm reasonably confident and I think the vote in the room here would be probably on the side of that's going to end badly And then and then in the background since he took office. There's this whole he's basically handing the world over to she In china. He's like hey here. Why don't you be world leader? I'll just be America first and be an idiot and screw everything up And and she is like gosh. Thank you so much Like we're going to screw things up ourselves every now and then but we're going to do everything We can to be the heroes at the end of this story everything we possibly can and so far It's working in the moment the u.s stops being the world's reserve currency and the petrodollar the moment those things break Things change and and the euro the eurozone seems to be falling apart The euro doesn't seem any more solid. So it seems to be the yuan And we can't really trust the yuan yet So part of what gallio says is it's going to be a slow transition because China has to put a couple things in place so that everybody else in the world goes Okay, we can jump over to the fence and go over to that playground And they need to talk to me bitcoin Bitcoin won't be the reserve currency. It's not going to be big point Bo come on hold it in hold it in Kevin you've been wanting to jump in while I was talking sorry And we don't hear you for some reason you're not muted on zoom so now we hear you You know the the point is that you know one of the You know secondary things after you open up the economy is if it doesn't go well You have a reason to post the election That is a danger That and so the fact is that that's the backup plan right and You know on on the history side the beginning part of you know why we actually have the united states is the You know the continental all right army did not defeat the british the british were defeated by illness All right, they just collapsed all right they they they you know They were so sick, right? They didn't have any immunity to what was going on, you know in a vague terms of nastiness here, right which the you know people who'd Been here for a while did have They you know they basically lost their own ability to fight. I have not ever heard that Do you have a reference from that? Give oh, yeah I'll I'll get it to you But there's a little bit of you know hg wells were of the worlds You know that you know they were defeated by the microbes right and you know the You know the the dominant thematic here the complex adaptive system that were part of Is in the is in the you know In motion to being defeated by the microbes So Yes A quick question Um, I probably all of you saw this but I was still taken by it The world economic forums released a report at the end of the the last year that had the 30 risks to business conducting business and Influenza and pandemic was the last very last one. Mm-hmm Yeah, it was it's quite that it's quite the chart and and pandemic is one of those things That's that's low on your list until it's top of your list. It's weird it I've been doing this kind of futurey stuff for about 25 years and pandemic has always been the go-to wild card So you do a set of scenarios, but let's add in a couple of wild cards. I might change change it all up Superstructed Well that but even that was like 18 or 13 years later Yeah, this is something I've really have been seen since you know as long as I've been doing this is that everyone wants to put the pandemic as the wild card Go, mmm. That's very serious and ignore it And so everyone's been caught or at least people who do this kind of foresight strategy stuff Have been conscious of the potential for a pandemic, but I've never taken it seriously And anybody who's smart on systems will tell you that sort of just in time Globalization creates fragile systems that monocropping creates monoculturist monocropping creates fragile systems that like like there's this ongoing critique of how we've basically optimized for cheap cheap plentiful and global And and that we're sort of paying the piper for that now And I put in the chat a little comment Kevin that would be really interested in whatever things you can find about the bugs bugs beat the British from the american slave coast Anybody who came to the Americas Kind of had to live here a year and then they were seasoned because 50% of the of the new immigrants would basically get sick and many of them would die So you would catch some of the diseases locally, you know swamp fever or whatever and then you would get better and then you were there You were more interesting and And and I don't know enough for this but and this isn't necessarily from my book But but um african slaves often came in because the malaria was prevalent in africa. They came in with predispositions to survive better those initial diseases So which made them economically more desirable than the scott's irish indentured servants who were showing up That's why we get that's why they shifted from indentured servants to slaves who were at the same rank in the hierarchy But were then given a superior social post like you were better than better than slaves But they were being treated the same as slaves roughly except their health outcomes were worse. So so, you know It then so then Virginia slaves become premium slaves in the colonies Because they have higher survival rates partly also because below the mason dixon line There's more more bugs more malaria more disease and they're growing crops that are more dangerous and more riskier to health So the survival rates of virginia slaves are higher the interest rate on raising slaves the natural interest that's called which is the birth of new babies Um is higher in virginia. So the the economics function better for them than for the rest of the slave states It's all weird sick and twisted Thank you, kevin So let's let's let's circle back. So that's review. I love where j may was going like no World order is not, you know, not we're not as much. We got to be careful about projecting our wish list Into what's going to happen here. So I just want to recapitulate that tonight because I want to get your thoughts straight in my head because um, well Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. We don't want to it's not helpful to be focused solely on the aspirational futures that could result from this Um, there will be big changes. There will definitely be be changes. I don't know I think there's there's more institutional resistance to those changes than it seems to be accounted for in the forecasts and scenarios that i'm seeing And the big changes Are really really hard to see. I mean, they're just hard to see the example that that I like to use but I have not been able to kind of fact check Properly was that in 2001 the space odyssey they have space travel, which we still don't have they have a bunch of stuff But they have like women's stewardesses in short and mini skirts basically serving food Um, and they miss they miss like women entering the workforce the pill They miss the women's revolution entirely like that's not part of the 2001 future um and Of all the changes that happen since then that's one of the biggies I'd say like one of the real biggies um, and so And and like the iphone is my my you know my run-up example I look back on what I was writing at new science associates and the services. I started that service I started a service called Intelligent document management and if you look at what I was covering it's kind of the web And then I started a service called continuous information environments where I was talking about Wireless computing pen computers remember pen computers go and moment and all those and a bunch of other stuff Low and In that service. I was describing the ingredients for what eventually becomes the iphone But I could not envision the iphone at all Right and and and we can't now envision A world without smartphones like the idea that there's a slab with no buttons on it except maybe a little power button and that it becomes our atm and our You know motion capture video like it's everything like all our tools got sucked into this one device That was hard to envision And it's hard to envision having a free map that you go around with like You know, I remember buying a garment at one point and going Ooh, this is clumsy and stupid and expensive and not up to date And now I've got a free one on this stupid device that I use for everything else So so those things were really hard to foresee Yeah, I think it's going to be easy to foresee though everything becoming touchless I don't see it I do I mean I I live it when I go to japan and I go to hong kong and I go to other places That you know, even the old buildings have been retrofit to You know, you don't have to touch the door to open it. You don't have to touch anything, you know to operate it so As low so nice to see you. I'm I'm wearing my nicola tesla t-shirt just for For grins. We so good to see you guys. I'm so happy that my other zoom called collect And I said, yes, I'm finally I can hand over to jerry's room It was my secret agents who are undermining your other zoom call. I sent them over to zoom bomb How are you? How's things where you are? Well, uh, all all is well. We are uh, um doing the the corona thing in a village of some 65 souls um out just near the lake balaton in uh, in hungary and uh, um refurbishing our old peasants That's we that's we bought a few years back. Um, and so Life is life is just great. I'm I'm managing a construction team now outside the family and So Everything is awesome. That's cool. Do you have like ducks and ducks and sheep or? Uh, we have we have little things growing out of the earth That that eva is uh is uh In charge of but we might actually venture You know even forward Even further out into the into the farming thing so Who knows who knows we actually just bought a Cheek as a or a chicken. I don't know as as a as a hand. I think as a press to a friend of in the neighboring village and It's still there and producing eggs. So like who knows who knows what's in there before you do that Go watch the documentary the biggest little farm Uh, which is sweet, uh, which is about a couple who were not farmers whose dog got them evicted from an urban flat And so they go out to the countryside and wind up in this farm and wind up starting to farm and kind of naively rediscovering a lot of holistic farming practices Um, and they had a they had a rough time of it, but it's a really nice But the husband is a documentary independent filmmaker So he's been recording all this stuff along the way and then he uses all his footage Uh to make this nice movie. So Yeah, it'll probably if eva is recording everything and putting it out on instagram So we have a little parallel story going here. That's fabulous. Yeah, right? So you'll have you already have your documentary in the making Yeah Um, you bow and the and david and jimmy As i've been seen it it's been too long Yeah, it's been too long jimmy, can we help you? instrument banny or think through any parts of it that are open questions for you or ponder what Any part of it that you think is missing or where it's headed or any of that? um so one thing that I I even talk about in the podcast that I that I still don't have a good answer for is what does the consequence of of um non-linearity Suggest so for all of the other two with all the other aspects of banny You know the brittleness leads to shattering The anxiety leads to terror um incomprehensibility leads to meaninglessness I don't have a good follows from for non-linearity And yet non-linearity has is arguably one of the more important parts of the banny construct in terms of explanatory power or at least insightful descriptive power um, so You know, I also don't have a good a good argument for what is um a useful counter to You know resolution to or not necessarily a solution, but Antidotes functional response to non-linearity. I'm sorry Antidote I think that's yeah, right right a really good question to you because I definitely me see Feeling it in myself. It's like I we're looking at these exponential curves We're looking at you know, I think reasonably dramatic changes for You know, well 24 months kind of and I can't I can't imagine You know, I got like a two-week window. It's like, okay, I can imagine standing in the house for two more weeks But after that, I don't get it. What's what's gonna happen then, you know It'll be normal again or something right and I do feel like you're you're pushing on something That's really really matters a lot and I my argument my first argument is it just reinforces the status quo You're not able to imagine it So you just you know, they get to the market. He's like, what the fuck's going on with the market? Well, I think it's the status quo people can't imagine What's really gonna happen and so they just keep doing what they did yesterday But anyway, I think it's a really interesting question Um, and I'm seeing at the same time as I'm seeing all the things you're talking about jamae happening I'm seeing lots of people doing some high function stuff to actually fix the world and to try to promote Different ways of being in the world and all of that and it's happening all over the place Some of it is happening very pragmatically at street level because it has to which is sort of mutual aid And how do we take care of the elderly and and people who you know Kids who were getting their their best meal of the day at school How do we make sure everybody gets kind of fed again? But some of which are at a much more abstract level like game b And a whole series of things like game b That that are coming out and some of them are pretty interesting And some of those people aren't merely philosophers, but they're actually pragmatists and they're doing they're doing cool stuff And some of that could break through and some of those ideas could kind of crystallize together The problem is that there's four dozen of them and each of these feel very strongly. Oh, it's game You know, it's it's our plan. It's it's like this is the model. It's it's donut economics It's transition towns. It's game b. It's whatever and there's not a good set of bridges sort of across them but They're trying to figure out how to change in the face of of banny systems and I think I think it's an interesting opportunity to to have that conversation maybe With several of those groups like if you pick, you know, jordan hall to come in and jim rutt and high-dish rimmer silka Hellfrey or you know, several people like that and just said hey, could you join me for a call to discuss The implications of this framework that might take you some really really interesting places and if you're lucky It might get them talking more to each other as they realize that their frameworks overlap a bunch What I've been saying a lot lately is that futures the future needs to be intersectional And I don't just mean in the the classic academic, you know cross demographic sense. I also mean that yes and cross discipline And and looking the future derives from the interest intersection of the seemingly disparate dynamics And when you have people who are too siloed Or too focused on their one particular issue They lose sight of of all the ways in which Other important issues will will hit them will cross with them intersect with them and End up sending them off in an entirely new vector Yeah, Susan you were going to jump in I just have a question first. I may uh, this is a naive question. Um, For sure I mean because I haven't read And listened to your bonny thing or thought it true is Is this just a is this not just is this actually the world has changed or is this a It's always been this way, right? Do we just haven't had to look at it like that because of some other changes in the world? Um more the former are you familiar with the vuka concept? Yes Army work all is volatility uncertainty complexity ambiguity Banny is a I started to construct the banny idea around the idea. Um By saying that vuka was no longer sufficient Everything is volatile. Everything is uncertain and complex and ambiguous in the The line I sometimes uses like there's a a bit a bit from the incredibles, you know that if everyone is special Nobody is well if everything is vuka nothing is And so well, what can't you what can we how can we describe the world that is beyond vuka? and each of the elements of banny are Intentionally taking the vuka elements and going a step further You know, so it's not just volatile. It's brittle. It's not just uncertain it's It's anxious It's complex. It's non-linear Ambiguous to incomprehensible Well, wasn't it always so? um I mean, I this is I mean, it's a you know, it could be it could be a It could be just that, you know, we fail to notice I I would not I would not push back very hard against that argument Um One thing I've been trying, you know, I've really been trying to be explicit about the fact that I'm still Trying to figure this out. This is an idea that came to me in late 2017 and or late 2018 and I've been You know building on it and ignoring it for months and coming back to it And it's there's something there The reaction I'm getting from people you know uh Peter in in Is wants to do an entire conference for the european banking system on the idea of banny uh, I'm You know when wade when I first The the conversation with wade was not initially going to be about about banny But he saw the piece that I drafted the piece that I wrote and just said we need to talk about this So clearly there's a there there But I haven't quite Um fully mapped it Which is which is partly why I'm why I'm suggesting you create a couple little super collider events Where you bring together people who who would have a lot to say About how to frame it where it might go what their particular project how it connects to it, etc As long as we don't open up an intellectual wormhole Well, that'd be okay. I mean It might cause like time travel and we might be able to go back and take fred trump and stop him from Meeting yeah We need to you know, he needs Stop before fred trump We need marty mcfly. Yeah, whatever um I put into the chat I have a question if banny seems to me the way that you're framing it especially with the incomprehensible word That it's an abandon all hope Um thesis right because if you can't comprehend it then you might as well just throw up in your hands and do nothing All right, so is it currently incomprehensible that you're really trying to Right, right. It's not permanently incomprehensible. It's currently incomprehensible. Um And There is uh It's not so much. I throw up throw up your hands. It's all in abandoned all hope. It's a The solutions we've been working on for years aren't going to work very well anymore We're aren't going to work at all anymore and we can't just assume that The kinds of tools that we've built for for dealing with the bukkah world You know for example scenario planning are going to be Are going to be of any use in a more extreme banny environment Um Banny sounds less dangerous than bukkah bukkah just I know bukkah mean banny sounds like it could be like a pet deer And yet it's an old Norse word for death. Yes. I've got that in my brain because you mentioned that once long ago But if scenario planning doesn't work then you need a new set of tools that will allow you to move toward You know understanding or being able to test hypotheses, right and I do not have them Now I got that I I think that the first You know Road toward this which I got out of cosmopolis, right? Um is Abandoning unjustified assumptions And you know, the fact is that you know, we're living under the accretion Of things that we consider to be reasonable assumptions that are no longer reasonable, right? So That that's a in my opinion. That is a start is you have to sunset assumptions And then you can validate you say well, this one's still valid, you know, so let's leave it in place This one seems to have some difficulty. So if we Go through that then we have some ability to know start to Work against what banny is suggesting in my opinion And let me go back for a second. I put connevin in the chat um, one of the interesting things about the connevin framework is that there's The my takeaway from connevin is that the major important division is between complicated and complex scenario settings And that most people know how to deal with complicated in which case experts can help you blah, blah, blah, blah Most people have no idea what to do in complex settings in which case what you do is different You test sense and respond. You don't like like and that is an adaptive method for dealing with Situations where you can't see what the future looks like. It's a it's a way to work your way out of that. Yeah, it's like an oodaloof That kind of yes. Yeah, I mean, I mean those all of those tools are Adaptive tools where you're making a new judgment moment by moment about what's real and what I ought to do about it Yep, and kevin was the when you said cosmopolous. Did you mean the tollman book that I just posted in the chat? Yep, steven toolman. I've never read this interesting. Thank you. I mean, I'd basically, you know adopted his Phrase of unjustified assumptions as being a foundational problem that we have in Basically running the place. All right, and I say place at a global level That that that turn does that that two-word phrase just suddenly crystallizes a whole bunch of stuff in my head Cool Well, I didn't I I didn't come up with a toolman the philosopher did so What's going on in the credit you anyway? That's all right. I'm adopted and you know, so I'm I adopt phrases too He's It really does it cuts through a lot of bs are really fast So jimé would you might with a group mind if I like threw in like my current thinking of the economic landscape Oh Please the fellow is yours mr. Bow. I would just like to throw this in in your brain hopper jimé You can see what what happens So the the oil price falling so but I've been reading Ray Dalio's big books, which are really interesting Because it's because he has things on the side that actually have the news at the time like the Times articles and everything so I read a recapitulation of His his outline of the Weimar Republic hyperinflation. I read the repression I read anyway, so and it's been very informative But what's clear among I would say the elite in finance is that Bretton Woods is now definitively dead when the oil price went down negative And it's really interesting. There's a thing I didn't know about the oil price That the Saudis and OPEC kept oil in constant gold terms ever since the 70s So they adjusted the price and adjusted to production to keep it a constant. Well, that constant is gone So, you know this current cycle we're in started when Nixon took us off the gold standard And and what I didn't realize is the stock market when a devout that was a devaluation of the dollar And in fact the europeans didn't want any dollars at that time the europeans were already saying no no no We don't want any more dollars dollars are junk. You're putting them like crazy Vietnam, you know the great Johnson's great, you know Yeah, all that stuff you guys know So the stock market roared up by the way the devaluation because the dollar was worthless and assets state the Assets were still worth something So we've been living in this post You know post Monetary world post Keynes, uh, what I'm sorry Bretton Woods Keynesian, right? So Bretton Woods now is dead it's gone and Also, that was all pegged to the fact that the doll in America was the dominant country And a big thing that Ray Dalio points out and I didn't really understand this one of the big fears that we economists have had is Are we going to go into japanification? You know go through what japan did where their stock market just tumbled and still hasn't come back But there's a point I didn't understand about the japanese or ray Dalio really helped me with and that was that Japan is not a debtor country. It's a creditor creditor country And essentially they have been living on their savings in foreign investments this whole time So while their stock market isn't roaring, they're doing very well because of all their overseas wealth Because nations have to balance out if you're a debtor country You've got to pay for it sooner or later and a big part of paying it off by the way is devaluation So Post-post, you know post-bretton wolves world We are a huge debtor nation unlike japan huge debtor nation And we because we've had this reserve currency. We've been able to just pretty much get away with murder because Like 80 of transactions in global trade are done with a dollar And right now the dollar is sky-high because of you know, the co-virus thing costs everyone to get afraid We have what we have now is a huge crisis boiling in emerging markets Because their debts and everything are in dollars and it's very hard to get dollars And if everyone didn't realize as the fed has been making deals with federal central banks across the world Pumping dollars into the world like, you know Because really the treasury bills the kind of depths that we're running right now If those sales are getting real creaky With a dollar this high, okay Anyway, so we are post imperium america and that's what redial is big point is about so We are now shifting a world order geopolitically To china and to other countries which are now more productive than us All right, you know are not debtor nations like ourselves. So this is a huge transition point So the what like financiers like myself are thinking is like, okay The dollar is set to be devalued this current high point in the dollar I'm sure myself and lots of other people are like, how do I get my money out of america? How do I get into real assets? I do not want to be in the dollar Forget about it right now. It's nice and high. This is a beautiful time to just Buy real assets and another thing I go ahead Could you give me just a quick one sentence when you say real assets What are examples of real assets in this context? companies go real estate power plants real Like not financial assets real assets that the money goes down I mean, isn't real estate really dangerous right this very moment because nobody's going to pay their rents Those landlords are not going to pay their bankers bankers going to like I think that real estate gets revalued right this minute So if you were to take all your dollars and buy real estate, you might hit a new low I wouldn't buy all my real estate. Yes. I'd be very worried right now about commercial real estate and stuff like that But you got okay, but financiers like like rat dolly will think in deck and think in decade chunks Yeah, and one thing he really makes but did I answer your question today? Oh, so yeah, um, yeah, I I'm not quite clear as to why for example gold Is considered a real asset when it's just another mutual agreement I mean every everyone says it's valuable. So it's valuable as opposed to actually having intrinsic utility value But you're really right. I mean Warren Buffett has a big thing about it but one thing I've I learned from Dahlio's thing is like there are decades where like From 2000 2010 gold beat the stock market gold beat stocks There are decades Where gold beat stocks and it's yes, it's mutual agreement But and it's a precious metal and and Buffett's point about there are no people. There are no ideas There's no revenue. What are you talking about? It's stupid in our metal But a lot of ways it's also What for example treasury interest is so low right now, you know, it's like 0.06 And and so for real big money Gold is now a substitute for treasuries Because at least it holds its value because in europe you have negative interest rates If you put your money in the bank in europe and remember we're talking about people who don't just have a couple million dollars We're talking about people who have like, oh, I got a park 50 billion. Where do I park 50 billion? Those are the people that are thinking like oh, shit Where am I going to park 50 billion if interest rates are negative in europe and they're 0.06 in america and the dollar is going to go down What's safe gold? So gold is essentially an alternative real Currency and Dahlio goes to this whole thing about the different kind of currencies So that's what it is. She may it's like it's ancient currency and Yeah, it's kind of stupid, but okay, Susan. Do you have a question? I had a question for for Well, so if I just a question for jerry is Is this a can is gold a candidate for trusts or the working of trust? Oh I mean the whole the whole question of money and trust is fascinating Right, because because money is a thing that lets us have arms length transactions and not need to vet the person We're buying the thing from so much And then if you layer on top of that a few laws like uniform Commercial codes and a bunch of other things that make sure that whoever's selling you the thing Probably is going to fulfill the promise, you know of what the thing is supposed to do Then then money kind of separates that but and we don't exchange gold for things It's just like we don't buy a lot of stuff with bitcoin anymore because bitcoin became speculative instead of transactional Which was sort of it's it's early death now in a sense Because because the bitcoin people kind of wanted it to be transactional not not speculative Um So gold plays this funny thing because as we're sitting here talking It's always been the shiny valuable thing in the background that people wanted to hoard because On the bet that if some disaster hit the thing that would hold its value is gold And because we're having that conversation. It's probably kind of true Because none of us is sitting here saying no no no emeralds None of us is sitting here saying no no no plutonium. None of us is sitting here saying no no no rubber duckies Like like like the the thing We and most of the people would point to is like gold in some form and so it's like Yeah, that's kind of a salt. It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know what that is There's probably a rhetorical term for this but but even though it has no functional value Even though it doesn't earn interest and there's no, you know, mechanical or anything to it It's still this common store of value when civilization comes close to grinding to a halt Jerry it's not true that it has no functional value. It's used a lot in electronics. Yes, that's true But it's it's fungible, you know, so that that part Let me go back to my historical thing. So World War and World War II was so interesting like There was really, you know a contest between Anglo-Saxon world England us versus Germany and Japan two new rising powers And so we won that but by the way, there was deflation and inflation and so many things when you read The stuff about the depression. It sounds so current. Oh my god Income inequality just oh, it's everywhere, you know banks and just dead everywhere. Oh, it's just fascinating as hell So right now we are it's america England versus China And Russia and China and Russia are working together. They want the dollar broken They want to get world transactions out of the dollar because we have so much political power Like what we've done to to we weaponized the dollar with what we did with with Iran Now world trade wants a way where they can get out of the dollar So we are just witnessing this this historical shift Right now and it has economic and political consequences Now I want to talk back Go ahead. Can you explain the role of mmt in all of this the what the mmt monetary? Okay, modern monetary So here's the fascinating thing this helicopter money, which is essentially i'll explain it to everyone out there So mmt is essentially well, we can just print dollars and we can and we can spend them Oh, well, guess what that's what we did in world war two And then what we did at the end of world war two. So we had this huge amount of debt So what we did was the federal reserve did What they went out would be called monitor monitor isn't sorry. Hold on. I'm getting excited So like Kiwi quantitative easing Kiwi has been done before the federal reserve did it through world war two and did it through the fifties And what the fed did was they inflated the national national debt away They held interest rates down And the economy was growing higher at a higher rate of growth than interest rates were So essentially they inflated the debt away everyone that held treasury bills through the fifties Which most people did because no one wanted to be in the stock market Actually got paid with cheaper dollars. They got ripped off And the dollar points out how that's how income was shifted from rich to poor because all the rich were in t bills and so Quantitative easing none of this is new None of it and and and in fact Again, the top tiers of finance are saying this is what america's federal reserve is going to have to do Same thing again that we did at the end of world war two So I put an article in there for you from to dashi nakame that would you know Advance your scholarship on what japan and other places are are doing because you're spot on right about your observation and One of the assumptions again going back to the assumption world is that we said oh It's going to all shift from the united states to the you want Hold it stop right. So you're There's no reason to believe that we're going to go from one monopoly to another monopoly, all right We may get an oligopoly of currencies a basket of currencies And we will simply be a participant in the basket, all right, so I You know the assumption that there has to be one dominant currency, you know fiat currency on the planet I think that's going to break too And I can give you argument for that right away and that is like america was trustworthy. We did the un I mean the post world war two. We were a very Cooperative of the marshal plan. We were trustworthy. So going with the doll was fine. I don't think anyone trusts china the same way So I think that that goes right there with you there. No one wants to do us the chinese one But okay, I'll just say this There are going to be dimensions of trustworthiness. Okay is trust is is china a trustworthy maker of stuff, okay And you know what? They are a reliable maker of stuff. Okay, and therefore they have one dimension of trust. Okay It's narrow, right and you say well, I would really like to have an american like entity You know coming in and filling some of the other kinds of trust Well, we're going to give a little bit of that to the eu right and we're going to have a little bit You know, so the fact is that's why the market basket starts to work, right? Is that you don't get trust from one source I just did anyone see that recently how the german supreme court Had went against the eu central bank. This is a huge thing. I'm betting jamae knows about this So essentially in order for the europeans to do what we've done and print a bunch of money and save everybody That the european central bank ecb have to be able to do this Well, the german court just ruled against that saying, you know, well, we don't really have to do that We're not going to back you up This is an existential crisis for the eu project. The eu is having 12 existential crises at the same time Yeah, and and really if they don't do that I mean they could just essentially do exactly what they did before world war one a whole place could just Anyway, I'm done with my Really good bow That was juicy. That was juicy and useful But I want to know now what whether this changed anything about bonnie. I mean does bonnie sort of look like um Of what we just call it bonnie doom my bonnie over the ocean my bonnie over the sea that one uh Not yet, but this is not something that I just sort of Slap back and forth on I wanted to think about it first I mean I stuck in a link to Somebody talking about this new schiller book Around how economics is moved by narratives which i'm finding kind of this whole concept of narratives really interesting and You know we've got narratives everywhere now So but but it does make me I mean I I'm increasingly feeling like we're really in the heliocentric Era of economics. I mean this economics doesn't really explain anything very reliably And I kind of question whether or not our you know analysis based on certainly macroeconomics is worth really squat um And you know I actually might be more convinced by you know great stories of dragons and the economics will follow But um, do you mean geocentric? Uh, geocentric yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know the economics just doesn't work I'm sharing my screen here because this is one of the Big questions in my head for the last long period Uh, that we're we're just we've always been but we are now particularly and this is periodic So for a while we just kind of run along with these narratives and we play them out And then every now and then there's this punctuated equilibrium moment where whoa And there are huge debates. There are riots in the streets. There are economic dislocations There's a lot of bad stuff But we're in this titanic battle over the narratives in our heads And the narratives in our heads come out of religion. They come out of politics They come out of spin meisters. They come out of everything And we are not aware of most of the narrative of the scripts in our heads We've done a couple of brex calls about the scripts in our heads Um, and we're just not aware of them. They're buried really deep And a lot of them are social assumptions that are buried really deep which we take for granted because that's where institutions are So my whole quest into trust uncovered a lot of these social assumptions. So I was like, oh crap We do things in this stupid industrial coercive controlling way because we lost faith in humans And look, there's there's a highly functional alternative that costs less is reconnective, etc Why are we not doing well? We're not doing that because the dominant narrative says no This is dangerous and crazy and and that would never work and we've convinced everybody that this is dangerous and crazy I remember a really long time ago. I read I decided to read something by the anarchists So I so I went and picked up a book by uh, oh Bakunin might have been bakunin Animals cooperating. I think it's over here Uh, no, it's not in here. I'll try some collaboration in nature Might have been bakunin. Anyway, I start I start reading this book by an anarchist like one of the big anarchists And the first half of the book is all about, you know termites and coyotes and everything else and how they how they You know cooperate, uh in uh in nature, and I'm like, seriously, this is one of those scary anarchists He's just trying to tell us how nature organizes itself here kropotkin. Sorry. So I think it was this one Um mutual aid, right? And and and and we had darwin instead who said survival, you know And darwin gets misinterpreted as being all about survival of the fittest, etc, etc And that becomes our dominant narrative. So we create this this nature's battle as marketplace battle as Economic models and these are completely dominant and we assume them to be true along with all these other buried scripts So just to go back here I'm very interested in and and this is why marketers are so dangerous like like really good narrative creators are so dangerous and And so and so I got invited into a guy's Facebook group over the weekend And I sort of fall it's it's all about kind of visual narratives and storytelling and I'm like awesome this is like a playground and then He's some guy named Jeff Gomez comes and says hi. I don't know why And I go like who's this Jeff Gomez? So everything you're looking at right now did not exist before the weekend I'd never heard of Jeff Gomez And then I went and watched his TEDx talk from 2010 But before that I was I was reading his whole series about why is what's going on right now happening It's really really good. And when I bring up Adam Curtis and hyper normalization and whatnot in our conversations here He's on top of that too, but he's a story maker He basically has he basically helped avatar become avatar And he did this with a whole bunch of different big properties that you would recognize And coming at it from the trans media storytelling perspective his company is called starlight runner And and so This to me is really cool like like okay We've got a lot of people on the job who are figuring out how this is working We're beginning to bubble up some of the stories And if we can connect some of these communities so that they can maybe pull together And not unify them because the moment they all become one community Some idiot like Joseph Stalin, you know a paranoid Crazy person from the republic of georgia comes and takes over the nice pyramid that we've built It's just like it's just like trump basically came in and grabbed a hold Of the thing that newt gingrich built Right the newt and a bunch of others built a GOP that had a scorched earth strategy That was doing really interesting things on the ground and trump says Thank you so much hold my beer. I got this and this actually trump is an excellent example And the impact of trump is excellent example of unjustified assumptions the unjustified assumption in the stability of democracy Yes, you know in the stability of democratic norms Yeah, I mean It was a complete You know unexpected outcome I want to go to the point that I really found fascinating that I learned from the car lot of paras and Ray Dalio and that's that wealth concentrations keep go back and forth And Ray Dalio really shows how when the rich get too rich capitalism just can't work and so The things happen to ship the money back deep inflations wars everything and essentially he also talks about the populous cycle So right now the money is right over here and it's not working and it's going to be shifted back And that's what the fed did with financial Refression keeping interest rates really low and everything and ripping off rich people and the 50s So that also is in the cards. We have so much world debt That excuses and narratives will be found Money back and if I were a futures jamae, I would be obsessing on that. Okay, would um, that's a very quick question In this model would the would the pandemic be a catalyst for that kind of transition? Yes And how does this fit with piquetti Is this just the same thing Mechanisms I don't know I haven't read him. I don't want to just talk about him book report next time next month I'm still respect that surprises me no So to I know Two comments on what bohaz is saying First nick hanauer the billionaire has been saying this for years like If if we keep doing this crap that we're doing the people are going to show up with pitchforks and hey wealthy people You're going to be really sorry So he's been saying this for a really long time loud and clear. He's really good. And then the other thing is From what you're saying, but it sounds like the wealth actually makes its way down the scale and then back up the scale I don't have any perception that since civilization shows up that the poor actually ever were non poor Like they're constantly squeezed and bled and they don't get they don't get really rich now You know china just lifted 200 or 300 million people up into you know out of poverty into middle class from money terms Which is I think historically the largest uplift Since civilization ate our lives Of people getting a bit more prosperous But but I don't I don't get that I get the swings and I get that the rich get less rich I don't get that the poor get less poor Um, yeah, actually jubilee in the bible the plagues in europe. We make sure nobody knows about jubilee in the bible We make sure nobody ever hears about jubilee and and the plagues in in europe in the dark Really made for people much more wealthy. I really helped them out big time But one was the last time there was a jubilee. Sorry. I'm like, is that even a historic artifact? So the way we do jubilee now is we we have inflation and we do like what the what the fed did at the end of world war two Was essentially a jubilee. They they they essentially inflated away the debt They paid the debt off with dollars that were worth interesting half what they were Hadn't thought about it shows. It's just fascinating any pretty much says it straight out But yeah, the elites in the banks and the federal reserve, they know what they're doing and they know that it has to be done Yeah, I've seen paul krugman talk about inflating away the debt. Yep Fantastic economist by the way. Yeah economist are kind of sad that he's so political because he's so good We all want him doing more research He has to be political because the conversation has to be taken into the arena And and all the so what an interesting thing I ran into. Um, oh god. What's his name? Uh, Barry Lynn The guy who was in the controversy about being supported by google blah blah blah And he has a whole narrative that he talked me through about how we shifted from seeing Our citizens as citizens to consumers And he can he can point to the philosophers The economists the theorists the politicians The he can basically work his way down through through lester thorough and and so you know reaganomics and all of that And he can he can show what happened and it's it's really really really interesting and it you know central to the kind of stuff that I'm Talking about because I've been worried about the word consumer for so long But he puts he puts sort of philosophical political economic texture on it that I really love May so can you come back next time with all your insights and stuff like that? I wanted to throw that in your brain because this is a fascinating time. I'm excited every day I'm just sitting there. I wake up excited about what's happening So what's your safe harbour and what's your safe harbour investment goal? Yeah, I'm definitely I'm Buying more gold all the time and the next thing I'm doing is figuring out other countries to put the money to Do they pull a dump truck to your front yard and just you get Just a dump it when uh, when spacex becomes a regular thing Of doing orbital launches with people Because once we start getting a functional asteroid mining the years enough golden one asteroid one moderate, you know Monitor small size asteroid. Yeah, there's more gold than there's ever been mined on earth Shoot, I will never go past 15 percent of our portfolio and go So there you go But yeah, I've heard that before Jamaica. Uh, yeah people are waiting to do that Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, and the more that we move into gold as the the key the key Uh, everything's gone to fit currency. Yeah, then the more that becomes attractive exactly So a decade ago my buddy Jim Caravalla, who's also a black belt brain user Um, showed me his business plans for the shackleton energy corporation Which was going to mine water off the far side of the moon split it into hydrogen and oxygen And build the first line of basically refueling stations in outer space Because because lifting anything off the earth lifting fuel off the earth is insanely stupid and expensive And and also When you're out of the gravitational pull of any particular celestial body Moving around in outer space not that expensive in terms of energy. You don't need that much propellant Um, although it's a really long ways to go And I was just learning about the epstein drive. Everybody know about the epstein drive Have you ever read the books or watched the series the expanse? Watch expanse Okay, the expanse is brilliant the guy who kills himself sort of the guy who's in the little solo spacecraft Who goes too fast and goes flat? That's epstein and he invented the epstein drive that the whole series is based on that enables the kind of hard sci-fi space travel They do in the expanse then just yesterday. I was watching a video explaining the exp which is really funny It's like i'm sorry. You're explaining the science behind the science fiction book But it turns out that they're sort of close to plausible and that the science in expanse is closer to good science then I'll put a i'll put a link here before we wrap up because we're almost at the end of our call But i'll put the video here in the call But you know, we're kind of at the stage where We're almost looking at actual epstein drives because I was just in the exo world thing on tuesday They had a one day event after the three day event that was a little while ago And you know ex exo stuff exponential organization stuff is all about exponential changes and one of the speakers is from as nam Who is really really really good? Oh my gosh My gosh who is really really really good at explaining how energy is going to be too cheap to meter not because of nuclear But because of solar We're basically heading right into a plentiful plentiful energy energy center and I don't know how to refute what he's saying I love his arguments. I think he's I think he's completely on it No, I think that's absolutely correct about energy at least at least energy and and we could still misuse it We could still do a whole bunch of stupid things Um, but we're heading into some kind of To get money over to an oligopoly for the damn energy too. Exactly Just like I've read uh, what douglas rush cough has been writing lately because one of the things he talked about is a meeting that he had with a number of Very high-level silicon valley executives who wanted to talk to him about actually non silicon valley big finance executives Wanted him wanting to talk to him about How soon robots robots will be available to serve as bodyguards Because they think that everything's going to go to hell and they won't be able to trust their human bodyguards Um, and they also want to figure out where should they hide away basically survive the apocalypse and all that. Yeah. Yeah um, it's fun. Doug is funny, uh I agree with his ends, but almost always disagree with his means Meaning when he builds an argument to convince me about something. I'm like nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. But the thing he's aiming toward Yep, exactly that like yeah, like that's gonna happen. That's a good way of describing it But but his whole arguments and he's also heavily into the mark stallman Uh, marshall mcclellan kind of thing He's kind of a stallman disciple and that just like torques my brain too. So anyway, why don't we ask Laszlo to give us an update on central european stuff in eastern europe and when is when is the My god, what are they gonna kick out hungary? I'm muted my friend. We want to do you I have I have a serious issue here, but I try to give uh, give my best which is uh, everything's um, um going normal as you would as you would think in a crazy place like Like central europe In the busy for laszlo these days I took a minyari of your give me one minute, okay So, uh, so yeah, the situation is uh, is is probably the worst as they've ever been Uh, the the the guy who'll be The guy that that uh, send bashing's home, you know in 1889 is now Um, it's basically a a dictator like the dictator powers which is um Which is a very interesting moment in his life Because uh, he was a severely beaten kid by his father Um, uh, and the best way to create the social Like a like a bright kid like styling like hitler. Yeah get a very very bright kid and beat him every day Without a reason the classic if you have a hat you get a beating if you have no head on you get a beating right Wasn't he also a student of soros? He was a protege of soros The protege of soros back in 89 when when soros was basically taking these guys out of Hungary to london to to give some better direction And um, and I know the sort of the inner story I was I was member of the party at that time until 93 when he took power Uh, uh, and and when he basically first eradicated everybody was against him and And the interesting point is that that when this happened, uh, when he was able to uh He basically came out as a dictator, right? So they had they had a parliamentary meeting when he said I want this power unrevolved Automatically for as long as as I'm asking my own parliament where I have two-thirds majority to revoke And then everybody said like why would you want it and he said just because And then guys said like but you already have it like in the constitution It's after it's like you just have to do it every two weeks Yeah, but I don't want to do every two weeks the same vote Okay, so we can give you 90 days like three months and then it's just like four votes a year Right. That's like with your two-thirds majority. The guy says no to that, right? So so at this point like, you know, the You know the the emperor has no clothes or the or the whatever the the teeth came out or something So now we know what's going on here, right? So we nobody can have any sort of doubt And and interestingly, you know in like from my own sort of mind and and mental points of view This is also a great turning point for him because I think this is what he wanted all the time, right to be the The the strongest man in a country so nobody can beat him like he's dead beat here, right? So now he gets it like he gets Just imagine this like you you you dream of the of the biggest thing you can dream of and then you get it And then you make a big of the next day You wake up the next day and nothing changed, right? Your inner child is still frightened And beaten because you never was able to connect to it and and console it and and be able to, you know Grow out of this. So what happens then, right? So I think this was a big moment for in the history of hungry weather He could say like, okay guys, I had the wrong idea all along, you know, I was I was running for, you know I was I wanting, uh, you know a super powers for the past You know 20 years of my politics and now it turns out that That this, you know, let's try something else, right? Well, this this I think this has one pump percent chance what didn't happen and now um, I think it's uh I think it's just uh, just the the matter of of uh, of of, you know, hungary's uh democratic Uh Institutions we don't have anymore. So so democratic Instincts or or or or any sort of uh, sort of self-governing Rebellious instincts to if they can come out or or if everybody would just go into the Finally, we have a big daddy who would save us from all the bad things outside So it's a it's a very grim situation legally and And we can see how whole thing is Is built up in a in a very nicely set Script or they started to use for instance the the law against the the the The people who would uh, how would you call it? You know the the Who spreads like like untruth, you know, or like like uh misinformation Like the information. There isn't a stronger word, you know, that uh, that like panic, uh, you know panic this information And and they they actually started to use the law on whom on on a nobody, right? So they picked an actual nobody from from like, you know, who posted on facebook something, right? Like he like so they they're building up the campaign They didn't start to pick out the the you know, the strongest individuals in opposition But they you know, they start, you know, like like they basically so there is like a script going on, of course and then um, they still um We still have a like a like a so-called democracy But also the the the the voting machines Uh, the voting computers sadly crashed for two hours on election night So between like 8 p.m. And 10 p.m. It's really like it's up to you to figure out what happened So I cannot tell you any good news from here But the weather is amazing the wine is still amazing the countryside is lush and beautiful the the the women are gorgeous the kids are running around And uh, and and it's rotten to the core. So I historically Yeah, historically hungry bats way above its weight, uh in in like brilliant people like what's up with that Yes, because it feels like that if you're in the country, you have this this 220 kilo Luggage tool that you have to move around and when you leave the country you can put this luggage down on the border And so everybody just takes off because suddenly you're just you know free to fly That's great. I don't man I met a guy who the guy who does the uh, these endurance races He actually intentionally carries around a kettlebell All the time so when he travels he puts his kettlebell through whatever and at one point his wife got him a new one And they thought they were ordering a 20 pound kettlebell. It came back 20 kilos And he carried it And the guy says yeah, whatever let's do it. Like I got this and and he does it Intentionally from a stoic kind of philosophical perspective that this is good for him in the long run, etc You know much better to have a country where you're not not all carrying kettlebells all the time Exactly. What do you think of the EU project? What do you think of the EU project? Germany versus everybody else France, Italy it's uh All I know is that we haven't seen uh, you know this this many years of uh, you know go peacefully You know in the past, you know, I don't know Europe hasn't had this much peace for past centuries It feels uncomfortable. It feels historically uncomfortable to not have armies roaming over the countryside all the time So, so, uh, yeah, I'm I'm I would I was I don't have a very clear, um Perspective on the EU. I have to tell you I thought it was uh, it was uh, for me That was the the the only thing that came out of it that finally France and Germany stopped fighting whether whether I'm pretty sure that that that That it'll break off like there's no way to to to have the the crazy poles and the hunts and these guys But then again, you have Bulgaria who's like rushing into the EU zone to the euro zone, right? So, um, yeah, I really that there's definitely gonna be In my I don't think that they can they can they can pull it like they can like hold this together for long I don't think so even and and if For me if this was more mostly economical They needed new markets and that's what we hunts provided and the poles provided and and maybe that's that's uh, that is Gonna change now. So, um Yeah, yeah, I don't have a very educated opinion. I'm I'm mostly uh In the family and running around with my daughter in the playground. So that's just a great way to resolve the situation for now. I mean What else are you gonna do? Yeah, bam? Thank you Thanks for joining and thanks for telling us what's up. Yeah, I love to be back more Fascinating discussion Um, yeah, we've gone we've run over our time a little bit. Uh, so we should wrap the call, but thank you. This is uh, A joy, uh, even though the topics might have been a little somber. Let's say a little cloudy Um, it's so like so just look just a just a tish Uh, it's still delightful to hang with you all. Thank you Until next time And jamey, thank you like I had not noticed that today was the day and that it wasn't on my calendar and Your email this morning Caused this call. So thank you. Glad to be the ping. Yay Bye everybody. Bye. Bye