 Do a couple of things. Sorry, I'm turning on the recorder just for grins. So I'm not going to, I'm going to mute in a sec. Sounds fine. Hey, Bo, how are you doing? Well, I'm alive. That's good. Beats all the alternatives. And I was going to say you and Arnie and I are overdue for some German food or something else. Yeah, Arnie's been up for it, too, and Arnie's in town. So we've been talking about getting together with you. Oh, cool. Let's let's make that let's make that happen. OK, that'd be great. We'll make it happen. Arnie and I are going through Shakespeare right now. And yeah, he's a big fan of Shakespeare, too. And so we're having a good time with Shakespeare, too. Can you map Shakespeare? What do you mean map? So there's a mapping of Shakespeare to British history and world history. There's a mapping of tragedies and comedies. And some plays kind of point to others and some incidents follow others. And so forth. Hey, Susan, yay. Oh, Arnie's doing that. You can be sure. Keep going. So I'm wondering what a map of Shakespeare's works looks like. You need to pose that to him. OK. I think that would be an interesting quest. And I mean, the Bible and Shakespeare, the works of Shakespeare kind of are like the anchor points for a lot of Western literature and so forth. The white Western canon, so to speak. Oh, well, yeah, Arnie's like he's like, oh, Dante is here. Shakespeare ripped off Dante here. He ripped off Greek tragedy here. See, that's that's what I mean. Exactly. Yes. Arnie's all that now. And it's it's just wonderful, actually. So so I want to visualize that. I want that to be explicit and in the environment so that other people can trip across it and go, oh, crap, really? Because I was just I was just in my brain this morning. I am eminently distractible. So I was updating what I have about the Umayyad Caliphate and how the Abbasids over through the Umayyads, but the surviving Umayyads went to Cordoba and basically created more Spain. And they preserved a copy of the the the Greek and Roman canon, which they took to Spain, then translated into Spanish later, but Arabic first, et cetera, et cetera. So so apparently Celtic monks and the Umayyads are the reasons why the Greek and Roman manuscripts exist at all today. We have all of them. We have, you know, Islam to think to thank for it, as well as as well as the Celts, I guess, and I haven't followed the Celtic story much, but apparently there's another copy that somewhere that made its way to the Celts. Well, the Celts are also the ones specifically the Irish monks who maintained they could still read Latin and everything. And through the Dark Ages, most of Europe forgot how to deal with Latin or anything. So Charlemagne rebuked the Church of the Monks and the priests for you guys don't know. You don't know how to read Latin anymore. You don't know how to deal with this. And so he imported monks from Ireland to reteach the monks of mainland Europe how to do Latin again. That's cool. So that that's I'm very, anyone whose Irish could be very proud of that fact, you know. Yeah. So how is everybody? How's how's everybody's Rex lives, et cetera? I want to ask something else, though. A friend of mine, yeah, was one specific ruler. I forget. I think he was a German, you know, anyways. He went to the Pope and basically argued that Islam had so outstripped Christianity that in the competition for civilization, they were losing very badly. Christianity was losing. Yeah, because Islam was Islam was flowering. They they were sitting there with all the works of Versailles and the Europeans had one work. And so they have their their science was going everything. So they were very advanced and Damascus, you know, was a wonderful place to be or Alexandria. And and he basically this one ruler just said, hey, we got it. We got it. We got to catch up. We got to throw this puppy in gear. We're not going to last if we, you know, up against them, if we don't do something about this. So interesting. So you have that happen. And then then Islam went fundamentalists and just put a full break on it, even though they were far heavier, far, far, far heavier. So the same thing happens in China. There's this famous The Voyages of Zheng Hei. I love that story, which is huge. Phenomenal. Yes, a giant. If you put the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria next to the flagship of Zheng Hei's 500 ship fleet. I know I love this story. You're like, oh, my God, it's like a dingy. It's like they were in a little like like Columbus was in a little like like rubber dingy in comparison and they float all over the place. They make multiple voyages and then the next emperor calls a halt. Burns it down, burns it down, gets rid of the ships and says, oops, no, we're going to reroute this money to fight the Mongols, et cetera, et cetera. And and stops all this like progress and globalization that could have happened just just like the and who is it? Is it the Berbers who basically shuts down Islam? How does how does how does Islam stop being this create? Because I think the Berbers come up. The the Moorish Spain gets crushed by the Catholics from the north and the Berbers from the south. And that's all that's what we've got. All the books back that we had lost, that Europe had lost from from the Greeks there. So yeah, because that was all sitting there in Spain, right. So anyway, I'm trying to figure out what was the dynamic that caused that same exact thing to happen for Islam. And my friend characterized it as they went to fundamentalism. Right. Well, the Wahhabis are kind of the fundamentalists. Sects at this point, Wahhabism is like the farthest right of. She may might know, might have all the answers, I think. Yes, the Berber class is perfect. So to me, we were just reflecting on how there was a golden age of Moorish Spain, and then it came to a halt. And Islam, all of Islam, all from all of you. There's also the Golden Age of Islam and basically Islamic scholars and all that. And then also in China, you have the explorations of Zheng He. And all of these things are ground to a halt by by emperors or rulers at some point. But why how and how did those things not survive them? And so Islam was far ahead of Europe. Remember, Jermay, they had they had all the books in Alexander that all they had scholars, they were doing all this stuff. They were going and Europe was far behind. And then Europe got the books from from them, caught up and Islam just stops. But if China and Islam had not put them, put the brakes on by themselves, we would be in a very different world today. Yeah, look at Kim Stanley Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt. Exactly, Susan, your novelization, sorry. That's OK. Years of Rice and Salt is really good. And it says, what if the plague had actually killed off all of Europeans? How would that have played forward? It's a really interesting alternative history. So the the Susan, you had a comment. Well, at the point where somebody said they did it to themselves, I said, just like we're doing it to ourselves. Mm hmm. Yep. So the the common the common thread for China and Islam, essentially, the caliphate is a large scale top down authoritarianism. In Europe, you had hundreds of independent duchies and fiefdoms and, you know, and kingdoms and the like. You basically, you had no central coordinate coordinated authority and therefore they were all competing with each other and fighting with each other. And at some point, that kind, that kind of friction prompts triggers evolution. Whereas you had, you know, you basically had the structure in place in both China and in the Middle East for the top down authority to rule by fiat and put a stop to things when they want to put a stop to things. And you just simply couldn't. There was no way for someone in Europe to tell all of Europe to stop doing X, Y, Z. Because it was too many little fiefdoms. It was it was just it was just too scattered around. You couldn't just hop on everybody at once. You had to go conquer the continent yet again. Damn it. And that's talking again and again about Europe, the massive competition between all the little states. And you think about, yeah, if you look at the Italians and all the things they did, yeah, it's again and again, you see that. That's a good point to make about the top down authority. Another thing I didn't really understand the Roman Empire and how it's when the invasions started happening, how weak the emperors were. And in a hundred years, there was no emperor that died in natural death. And they're like one seven year period. There were seven emperors. And that is not good to put in the job description when you're putting ads out for the next one. And then I didn't understand that the the emperors went to a complete totalitarian system, and then they had people like prostrate themselves on the floor and call them Lord and Master. And it became completely despotic and hydraulic despotism and the rule of micromanaging role, in fact. And that preceded the Dark Ages, because that didn't work. It didn't work. But yeah, that was the last stages of the Roman Empire. And as and as Susan was bringing into the conversation, we are busy turning the U.S. into the Handmaid's tale future, launching us backwards into some crazy ass pre-civilization. That's very strange. And that seems to be like sorry. Go ahead, Susan. Are we going to just say it could be, I mean, if this frat yeah, fractionalization, fractionalization continues, then. And we could go the way of states rights, right? In which case we'd have feuding little states and we could sort of break into those. I forget the name of the book, Jerry, you should know. The guy who proposed that there are really, really nine, nine countries in the U.S. American nation, nine nations of North America. Yeah. So that could that could be another way things break, right? Because these things don't just they're there are preexisting conditions and reasons why they break in the way that they do. But is it true that everybody that? Well, I guess we haven't figured out where authoritarian comes from and how to stop it. It's interesting. So the thing that augurs against the nation's thing, though, I love that book. By the way, I just read a book on the Scottish reformation, the Scottish Renaissance, which was so fun. Adam Smith, Hume, all of us. I mean, that was an amazing thing. That's because they were on almost an island, you know? That's I like to think of that, that they didn't have anybody an intellectual field that was so well established that they couldn't just invent their own. Well, I can't wait to go on and on and about that. I was really my Scottish blood. I've been very embarrassed about it because, boy, if you look off the opium wars, slavery, I mean, there are some downsides happens. There seems to be a Scotsman there, engineering it. Drinking and in that American nation's book, there was a point where Scots held the city of Philadelphia at Ransom because they wanted to go after these Native Americans. And I just read it. It's in a nation's book. And it was so bad. They were holding the whole city of Philadelphia. What? And so even your people, what's that religion again? I'm sorry, Jerry, your people, the breakers, Quakers actually picked up arms to defend Philadelphia from these Scots. What? What? When? When? What? Right. Oh, like the American nations. I pulled it out and read it to my mother-in-law who was here. I'm like, yeah, here's why I'm embarrassed to be a Scotsman. You're going to have my half of Scots blood and I pulled it out. There it is. That explains a lot. I didn't know that. I didn't know that at all. You didn't know what your Scots blood. Yeah, that's my southern link. Scottish. Sorry to make. When you make the Quakers arm themselves, you have gone too far. That's right. True. Yes. So I was reading that that Scottish Warfare from the book was so amazing because I got to actually get a little pride in everything. But so many things are different. Their jurisprudence is not based on precedent. It's based on reasons, based on Roman law. In fact, in Scotland, you usually went to France to study to study Roman law and then come back. So when they made the judgment on slavery, to them, it was a reason-based thing. So they don't care about precedent. So they have a very different law. That was really interesting. There was just so many things were much more different about Scotland than I ever realized. And also the Kirk and the way that so they basically engineer a kind of a humanism and soften their own religious stance and everything and and big property rights, economics, mercantilism, I mean, all the things they were engineering and they also had a great influence on America when the revolution happened. Their their their enlightenment was going on real strong. So a bunch of Scottish people came over here and like ran Princeton and basically provided like the the ideology for the American Revolution. That was really fascinating. What is the name of this book? Go get it. Jerry, you've met Joel Garrow, right? I don't know that I've ever met him. I was just thinking about that. Because he was a he was a G.B.N.er, of course. Yes, he was. I don't I don't remember actually shaking his mitt. He was the New York Times bestseller, and I say it was really it's really worth it. And there's a lot of things I didn't really understand about Adam Smith. So I got a much more nuanced view of Adam Smith than I ever did before. Which book is this now? How this how the the Scots invented the modern world. Earth, they're all coming. So this book plus nations is quite a way to understand sort of modern capitalism and modern America and the ideology of that we're living in right now because it was all engineered there. I mean, the Scots gave up their own parliament and joined the United Kingdom. But the deal is I think it's the best business deal and one of the best business deal in history was they then got access to trade throughout the British Empire without restriction or tariff or anything. And so I mean, it's the best business deal in history. It was Floyd and they then became it was like 14 days shorter to ship tobacco from Virginia to Scotland than it was to London. Also, and I need to fact check this, but Glasgow was the best protected port in the British Isles from the Spanish and the French. So Glasgow becomes the central port for trade with the colonies and Glasgow becomes filthy rich. So you get the tobacco lords, you get everybody else. And one of the things that Adam Smith does not mention in his book, The Wealth of Nations is slavery. And it turns out that his livelihood was facilitated by slavery because he was a patron of the tobacco lords and other kinds of people. So he's busy creating economic theories that we base a lot of our thinking on ignoring entirely the role of slave labor. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Okay, you can rail this for them. Yes, the tobacco lords definitely funded him when they were his buddies and he made fun of them actually in the wealth of nations. Because what he didn't like about the mercantilist system was essentially it was run by rich merchants who just kept making things for their own benefit, but then ultimately sort of hurting the whole system. So that was one of the reasons he was writing that. He thought that this basically insider-based corrupt government, very powerful capitalist combine was a bit resulted in some really stupid decisions. Another thing I didn't, that the educational system of Scotland because the Protestants wanting everybody to read the Bible, they had a higher level of education than anyone in Europe. So I didn't know that. Just sort of like America and the Puritans, everybody had to go to school, so you could read the Bible. That was fascinating to me. And another thing was is like in the best doctors in the world came from Scotland because at Oxford and Cambridge, it was dairy care for a doctor to actually touch a patient. There were barber surgeons. You didn't touch the patient. Whereas in Scotland, they insisted on basically practical plus theoretical, you did touch the patient, you became an actual practitioner. So I did so many differences between Scotland and England, I just never knew. So barber surgeon thing doesn't make sense to me because barber surgeon is like, you would do bloodletting or leaching or whatever else when you went and got your shave or tooth pulling too, which is why the barber pole is red and white. Basically the doctors at Oxford and Cambridge, it was involved in a theoretic exercise and then somebody else did the dirty work. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Now the barber pole is blood that they used to do. They used to have strips of linen as bandages that they would dry out. They would wash them and reuse them. So they would sort of wrap them around a pole and they would be nice and let over time. So yeah, I learned a lot about Scotland. I was able to get a little bit more or less shame about all the things they've done. And that, so yeah, IE slavery, the opium wars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So to bring us to the... Haggis, yes. To bring us into the presence a little bit more, I'm very interested that Putin and Trump might, maybe long stretch and wishful thinking be meeting their comeuppance simultaneously in different ways around the globe. Anybody feel like that's sort of happening? I feel like both of them are trapped in extremely elaborate, expensive, dangerous systems that they're going to have a very hard time escaping. Both of them. Yeah. I think both of them basically have their arm in the trap and it's tugging them in and tugging them in and tugging them in and eventually they both get wiped out somehow. I don't know how, but anybody else feel that optimistic? Jamey, it sounds like you might. 50-50, I think Putin is probably on his way. Is that the technical term? Yeah, whereas to extend your analogy of the arm caught in the trap, Trump will somehow manage to chew off his arm. There are three scenarios for the Trump situation. One of them is he's not indicted and the result is relatively calm in the short term, but very bad for our society in medium to longer term. There's the scenario that he is indicted and is convicted, which is probably very violent in the short term, but ultimately good for society and our governance. And then there's the nightmare scenario where he is indicted and not convicted, where he gets to trumpet that he was proven innocent and you know that he never did anything wrong because they couldn't even convict him and basically you get all the upfront violence and then you get the smug. And I think ultimately that is the worst of the three scenarios. In order to avoid that, and I think that's recognized that the Democrats recognize that. And so I think it's actually more likely that he's not indicted unless they can just absolutely 150% nail him. And now they're really digging up the evidence. You saw that Mike Lindell had his phone grabbed at a Hardy's. Or an Arby's, it's conflicting stories now. I don't know. Oh yes, okay. Well, you know, it may just be West Coast East Coast. They sounded like two, Hardy's, Arby's, I don't know. Don't forget about- Either way. The one I've been really, I don't like to obsess on politics but because of, you know, Russia's a big deal up for economics and investing. The economist has been having these some sessions, Zoom sessions where with their editors and they're really good at the defense editor. They've got a Russian editor, a guy who was in Russia and now is in Ukraine. You know, so they've got amazing coverage. And the one thing they keep pointing out is that one thing about Putin's fault is you do not know who will fill the power vacuum. Right. You cannot just take that as, oh, great, we're Scott free. Well, also like any good despot, he has decimated the ranks of the military and the political opposition. Like he's killed or put everybody in jail. And so it's unclear, like who manages to survive and jump back in. And people like Navalny, you know, pre becoming a martyr to Putin, Navalny was like kind of an asshole, not the best guy you want to charge of Russia either necessarily. Another big risk is the, I don't know if it's the further atomization of the remaining Russian state. Right. Which might be fine, but I mean, I think this might be the end of their world. The world has history of Russia's impact on the world. This could quite literally be the end of their ever having impact again. So let me take the other side of the thing I just put in the conversation, which is I'm having like a smiling couple of weeks here because it looks like the red tide of the midterm elections might not turn out to be a red tide. It looks like Dobbs might be the tipping point that just gets a lot of new people out to vote and that there isn't a complete and total wipe out of the Democratic Party, which they also sort of need, like the Republicans need it. And then Ukraine just really rocking kick-dass in Kharkiv in just in the last two weeks and took back a tremendous piece of territory and down in Kherson, basically has Russians pinned and trapped. Like there's a whole bunch of Russians and their supplies on the wrong side of the meeper and they can't get across. And apparently a bunch of companies are surrendering and refusing to fight and a bunch of other stuff. And I have no idea how Putin keeps the wheels on this cart because I just don't know. So I'm actually feeling kind of happy and hopeful that these things play themselves out in relatively good ways. Yes. There are major voices in Russia calling for Putin's removal. Yeah. No, they are promptly being arrested. No, they're not all. Well, you're right, not all of them, but the council members who said he's like, should be, he's committing treason, were interviewed on TV later. Like they weren't dead or had their nails, fingernails pulled out or anything like that. Now they might have to fill up. Absolutely, they're still tied. Absolutely, for all the window. And they should keep clear of all balconies and windows. That's for sure. Like even I would avoid elevators on principle, but Mika, did you wanna jump in? Yeah, I'm with you on the glimmers of optimism, but I personally, it'd be fun to come back a month or two from now and sort of play back the moment. We'll have another call in a month and we'll have exactly that opportunity. I mean, I'm sitting here, listening and also mulling what I was gonna write about today. And just to blurry up the picture a little. Good. Inflation has not been tamed. The market took a big dive yesterday and we know that means the Fed is gonna jack up interest rates and there's gonna be a lot of layoffs. People are gonna start hearing about that. The national rail strike could happen as early as Friday and that will sow a fair amount of chaos into supply chains and just generally consumer confidence, right? So your point about the weakening red tide is related to this sense of people having more or less absorbed what's going on with the economy. And now they're focusing more on, the threat to freedom represented by Dobs or represented by the far right candidates that are all over the ballot. And Lindsey Graham putting forward an abortion ban and getting slapped down for it. But, A, I'm always nervous, a little nervous about polling. We know that the Trump Republicans are less responsive in polling. So there may be an undercount. So, when Biden said we're at an inflection point in his speech, I mean, lots of things could go the wrong way Putin could decide that he has to show that he's still the biggest meanest bully. And he's been holding back on using the full force of his military, but now, let's show them what we can do with a few battlefield nukes, right? So holding back, I think at this point, I think we're at a point where we're at an inflection point where we're at a point where we're at an inflection point at this point only means nukes and maybe means some jet fighters, except like he doesn't have enough army left. He has taken the best fricking troops, the famous ones, the Spetsnaz and the FSV or whatever, he's taken the cream of the crop, thrown them into battle and they have been ground up and chewed out, like spit out. Right, but he has, he's much bigger and still can keep throwing people at this. And most of the opposition that's being voiced right now is people saying, why aren't we mobilizing even harder? It's as if... Well, a draft. It's like when we were losing the war in Vietnam and the right wing in America was like, why aren't we fighting harder? Why aren't we nuking them? We had the same dynamic here. It's not clear to me that if he loses that he gets replaced by someone we like. It's hardly clear who could replace him. That's a big blur. I mean, there are a lot of ways that we're in this, we're like leafs on the wind being blown around by forces way bigger than anything we can do it much about. I had a lot of friends who were on the White House lawn yesterday, because they had a big celebration of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which doesn't go far enough, but everybody was like, God damn it, we got to celebrate something. Yeah. And if you would just let them implement the damn thing, maybe we could make some progress. But I don't know, I've been reading forcing myself to read Balaji Srinivasan's book, The Network State. Has anybody here looked at this book? Do you know who he is? I've got it in my brain, I've not read it. Yeah, he's kind of the intellectual, one of the intellectual minds behind people like Peter Thiel. And the interesting thing about it, it's a crazy book. I'm gonna write about it next week and I'm still only two thirds of the way through. He has one really interesting idea which plays into what you were talking about with the history of China and Islam and the Middle Ages and which is that centralized top-down systems are weaker than decentralized bottom-up systems. Oh, I'm thoroughly familiar with this guy. Okay. Yeah, you are, you are. I'll give you one more sentence on it. He argues that there are three power systems in conflict with each other right now, which he summarizes as the Chinese Communist Party, the New York Times and Bitcoin. I'm sorry, and whom? And Bitcoin, the third one. And that independent libertarians are amassing around the world that Bitcoin will make possible. Top-down authoritarians are looking at China as the model. If China really succeeds in controlling COVID and managing its population with intense surveillance, then they have an exportable model. And we live under the reign of the New York Times, which is where he's really insane, but apparently the New York Times commands what woke capitalism then does to him. And the fact that Google, et cetera, see platform Trump as proof, this is where he slides into kind of craziness. But the idea that people are frustrated that the American democracy isn't really delivering and they want something else isn't wrong. And it certainly seems to me that a lot of the money and dynamism to create something new is coming from the blockchain bro world. I mean, there's way more money there. All you have to do is add Dow or blockchain to your idea and more people will come and pay attention to you. And don't forget, he was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He is not a dummy. He's not a dummy. He's a great synthesizer, but also operating from a starting point that I can't swallow at all. I mean, I think he's insane and also blind to the ways that racism and capitalism work in America, which is kind of wild to kind of read his analysis, read from within his worldview of where we are. He has a whole interesting scenario for anarchy breaking out in the United States leading to more people either being interested in the Chinese model or founding new countries. That's why the network state, the idea of the network state is that virtually we're already seceding from each other. So why not go further and get those groups of people, found a new country on some principle, like our country is gonna be a place where we only abide by a non-sugar diet or something. And then you find all the people who agree with that and you begin to crowdfund buying territory. And then at some point you have actual land and then you apply for recognition as some new sovereign entity. And maybe, I don't know, the government of El Salvador recognizes your embassy or something. You can also go and find a new city in a state and say, listen, we've got 300,000 people this much income but this is kind of laws we want and you can basically shock governments. He talks about doing that too. Well, that idea intrigues me a lot because it's not far from what we kind of have already in that you can buy citizenship in different countries. Estonia has offered people digital citizenship, right? But you're not actually getting citizenship. You're getting a permanent identity. There are other countries that are actually trying to sell citizenship but Estonia is not, the e-residency is not that. Okay, buy your citizenship in many countries. If you have put up enough money, you can get a passport. Creating a new one is the interesting part, right? Like at what point does somebody just go for it? To what degree are those islands that, you know, Necker Island and the one that Sergei Bryn owns but nobody talks about in the Caribbean, how much are they? Voldemort Island. I just, it's called, I saw the name recently. I was like, what? He owns his own island? Of course. I'll track this guy a little bit. It is interesting, but one thing, critique I have of these doubts. Remember, I think I told everyone the story a while ago about the one that a friend was involved in and they decided to vote a whale out. The whale was simply an early investor that made a lot of money. And then once they did that, the currency just collapsed 90%. The thing is, the strength of democracy are not just about, oh yeah, everyone can vote on everything. In fact, our state works really well because we have tons of decisions made every day by experts that don't require the legislature approving them. And actually the strength of democracy is there's actually very much the strength of the institutions that make daily decisions to run things that don't require a vote on everything. So I think in a lot of ways is dows, they celebrate the demos voting on everything when that's actually a weakness and very inefficient. And I would be a nightmare to live in such a state as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. Some of us do. What? Some of us do. Yeah, you mean you. You're talking about your community season? I vote on everything. Since you're leaving soon, can we? No, I'm not leaving soon. I'm only leaving for a while. Okay. At the top of the hour, she has to step out of the call for 15 minutes. That's all. Okay. Yeah. If you read what she posted. And by the way, for inflation, it's funny, Mike gets so funny when you mentioned it, I realize I'm always thinking about it from one perspective and realize, oh, because thinking about it politically. So of course, I've been preparing for the situation now for some years and it has come. One thing about inflation, though, to recognize is it never just does this and also what the Federal Reserve is doing has a lag. And a lot of this is supply chain. So I'm frankly betting on the end of the year. I think this, you know, yesterday was a really bad day. But frankly, I think that it's actually going to work out very well. And inflation is going to moderate for a while. And I also think the Fed can only go so far pushing on a string because they can't raise interest rates to the point where the federal government's tax interest payments are super high. So I actually think the Democrats are likely to get a gift and they've already got a huge gift in the gas prices. I think politically, the gas prices at the pump is the thing which I think really hits the normal person. When people pay 100 bucks to fill their tank that used to cost 60 bucks, that's like a whack on the head. They get that immediately. And thank God the Democrats in the state, we're not facing what European politicians are at. 80, 90% increase in your energy bill. Europe is going to have one hard winner, baby. Quick question about inflation, what goes into the basket that gets measured for the official inflation rate? To what degree is the spike in housing prices factored into the inflation rate? And what would happen to the inflation rate if that was removed? Well, yep, that's weighted in. It is weighted in. And in fact, I believe it is. Yes, so I think it's moderating right now. I don't know the exact amount of the weight into it. But also the weight also includes rent, which has been very bad, actually. Rent has been going up a lot. Well, my point, though, is that it is, OK, third of the value of the market basket of goods. Yeah, so if housing represents about a third of that, housing appears to be an outlier in terms of the actual speed of price increases. And so I wonder how much of the gas, and then you had housing. And I wonder how much the day-to-day inflation is hitting if you take away housing costs. Well, I think also housing lags. It takes a while to raise rents on people. But so I'm afraid we're not likely to have good news. It's going to be continuing bad news to me from housing. Oh, yeah, no, I'm not trying to say that at all. I'm trying to get a sense of what people's day-to-day experience of inflation is. You mentioned gasoline being a key part of the day-to-day experience of inflation. But if that price is decreasing, what other drivers, upward drivers are there that are actually playing an outsize role? Housing appears to be playing an outsize role. But that's not something that necessarily affects you day-to-day, in part because of the lag, in part because you don't buy a house every week. A couple days ago, I ended up going down the rabbit hole of the productivity pay gap, which is a trope that conservatives apparently hate and have tried really hard to undermine or get rid of. But seems to me to be kind of a factual thing. And it goes back to the famous diagrams that say, hey, somewhere around 1971, 1974, there was this huge split where real wages for laborers stayed level after that. And the 1% started sucking up all the money. And there's a bunch of charts. And I read one objector from Hoover or Cato or AEI. And they were like, well, they're measuring the wrong things. And they changed all the metrics. Basically, they said, well, you shouldn't take this measure. You should take this one. And I didn't have time to go look at what they were doing to the analysis. But it felt like they were cherry picking to get rid of that anomaly in the data. Let's just switch the metrics. But at this point, we seem to be, maybe, at a moment where wages are justifiably climbing back out of the gutter. And people might be able to make sort of a living wage. Although at $15 an hour, that's still not a living wage, not even close. So isn't that naturally going to lead to a lot of inflation because it bubbles back through prices somewhere? Or does automation take care of that? Or it feels to me like there's some long arc of justice happening around wage brutality that will play itself out as inflation as well. Yes. Frankly, I do think everyone that the inflation is going to be pretty much the rule of order for this coming decade. But the thing is, it doesn't just do this. It goes up, it goes down. So it's not just one way. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Wages will feed into prices. The wage price spiral is the feared thing from the 70s. The return of that is exactly what every investor stays up at night worrying about. Because you're right, it will feed into the venture. When I was a kid in Argentina, at one point, they took three zeros off the currency. And then when I was a grown up after grad school, I had a short project, like a seven-week project in Argentina. And they were suffering pretty hard inflation. I was getting a per diem, which was fixed every two weeks or something like that. I was getting some amount of local currency. And I received my per diem one day at the start of a long holiday weekend. It was like a five-day holiday weekend when most stores are going to be closed. And I suddenly had the thought, oh, I kind of need to spend a bunch of this real quick now. I, we were in Patagonia a few years ago. And went out to dinner one night. And I paid in cash in dollars. And I happened to glance back at the restaurant owner as he went to pick up the money off the table. And he was beaming with happiness because he saw that I had left dollars rather than a Pesos or a credit card. And yeah, we have one friend who lives there, who is a journalist for ABC News, who makes his income in dollars. So they've been insulated from it. But his son repairs bicycles. And as soon as he makes a sale, he buys another bike to fix. Because the money itself. That's as it came for the price of the bike goes up, right? Whatever. Whatever it is, it makes more sense to get the hard object than to let your cash slowly melt or quickly melt. Right. It's really disconcerting. It's really disconcerting. Very disconcerting. Yeah. The argument in wants investors right now is this the 1970s and the 1940s? I think it's the 1940s. So that's what I'm betting on is this is the 1940s, which did have big periods of inflation, but it wasn't as devastating as the 70s. I don't think we're actually heading to the 70s again. And we also have a lot of pressures for inflation to keep going, because by the way, this geopolitical conflict with China, this re-onsuring of supply chains since the pandemic most certainly showed their vulnerability. This is going to be more expensive mixed up in America. And it's also going to be wonderful for labor, by the way. And the new act, the inflation act, right? Have the chips thing part of it, which everybody is very happy about. But yeah, reshoring is going to cause a little inflation too. It's also going to cause great employment opportunities. I think sort of, because I think that automation is going to factor into so much of the reshoring that there won't be that many jobs created by bringing work back to the US. Because automation has gotten really good at doing a lot of the stuff from soup to nuts, where what you need is repair people walking around, not assembly people. And I don't know that that has a huge effect. I really hate to tell you this. But so the effective tax rate on corporate profits has sunk in the last 50 years from 30% to 10. Right. OK. You want to talk about political power. Oh, totally. Wow. Now here's where they increase the taxes. On payroll. So by the way, remember that's half paid by the employer, half paid by the employee. By the way, talk about making the workers pay. Wow. But guess what that does to corporations? So any company, it means you want to minimize your payroll. So it's benefited technology, service and banking and finance. And if you look at this fiscal policy decision, which was made by both political parties, it is horrific what it did to employment. And it was undeniable what they did and for whom they did it. And frankly, it kind of turns my stomach. It turns my stomach, frankly, really does. So yeah, that automation thing is pushed by that. When your main tax is from payroll, hiring human beings, what do you do? Minimize, minimize, minimize, minimize. Get rid of humans. I just shared this thought in my brain because way back when, I was like, hey, corporations do not like full-time employees. They're doing everything they possibly can to get rid of full-time employees. And I think pandemic sort of helped with that a little bit. But it's massive. And remember, Trump even further reduced the marginal tax rate on corporate profits again. I mean, if you really want to talk about there's rulers in the country, and they just get what they want and screw everybody else. That's what they did. I mean, it's really bad. It's really, really bad. All right, let's talk about China, by the way. I want to talk about China because let's worry about Taiwan and everything. That seems to be the next way the world can blow up. And I've been reading in Foreign Affairs and Economists about Z and the cultural personality he's building and the Party Congress this year. And they're completely disastrous in zero tolerance, COVID policy. I mean, the thing mucking up the world right now in a lot of ways is, wow, does anyone have? I'd like to hear the group's thoughts on that because, wow. Anybody have thoughts on Xi and China? To me. I want to extend, do people? Oh, sorry. There's a question for Jeremy. No, go on. Go for it. No, please. So what's your current thinking on, I mean, I can't help but think about how many people will die in China? Is it going to be enough to have an impact on the population there, COVID? Well, right now, they're not even inoculating. They're not using our inoculations. They have their own, which is inferior. And so I guess there haven't been a lot of deaths yet. That they talk about. OK. Right. Yeah, they talk about it. And then a friend of mine suggested that, you know, the Taiwan thing, you don't necessarily need to take Taiwan. You could just blockade it. And that terrified me. And New Berlin, and it's an island. Come on, you could blockade it. That's actually a very good plan. If I was thinking evil. So you're Xi and you just watched Putin completely, completely fuck up Ukraine. What lessons do you take from that? I mean, certainly there's a lot of battlefield lessons that we hope they don't learn. Taiwan has taken a lot of this to heart and is arming itself up to be a spiky hedgehog. I mean, if you're if you're Taiwan, you want to be a puffer fish or a hedgehog or something where ingesting you is just going to be a nasty, nasty ass project. A barricade is the right thing. Yeah. I don't think the PLA is as weak as the Russian army. One. I think they have many more humans who would probably like poor on like, you could just overwhelm people by just dropping humans on the island, but less technology, fewer weapons. I think that their army is not as developed as the Russian army, the vaunted Russian, until recently vaunted Russian army was. Then they have a great Navy. They've been just stomping money into their Navy now for decades. They got nuclear submarines. They got aircraft carriers. They got it all, baby. Wait, China? Yes. Yeah. How many aircraft carriers do they have? I thought they had one. Well, they just got one big one, but remember aircraft carriers are actually no longer the ultimate weapon. They instead have been building those islands in the South China Sea. I mean, they can't be sunk. They get hit with a missile. I mean, that's a problem. Aircraft carriers are not a new thing. They instead have been building static aircraft carriers in the form of islands. Shimei, you were going to say something, right? No, I'm just, nothing, nothing of important. Yeah. So I'm, Z also, he's in the kind of a weak position as to the way the zero COVID policy and the regular folks are not happy about what he's doing to them. Well, and just to make things worse, China is going through the worst heatwave ever recorded and drought and crops are basically sizzling on the vine. Like it's affecting harvest dramatically. And remember the way historically in China, emperors, you know, they basically usually don't, they suffer violent deaths if enough pain is caused in the society. And I think that the communist party in China just thinks of themselves is basically emperor for now. I think that's where they understand themselves historically and politically. So are there any... Certainly the way he's acting. Are there any, are any of you hopeful about experiments going on with how we all should govern ourselves better? Things that might go viral. I mean, one of the things that I think biology's book talks about as nations of choice, this idea that people might sort of opt into some other kinds of organizations that they, where they connect their primary allegiance. I'm kind of making that up because I didn't, I saw the link in my brain and I haven't read the book. You got it, he says that. Okay, thank you. And so one of the big questions for me these days is, hey, who's going to invent the next really great kind of coordination and governance system that we're gonna take for granted in 100 years? And I think that the piece parts for that are on the table right now. I think that all these funky things, whether it's NFTs and DAOs or co-ops connected through whatever or de-growth and de-globalization or whatever, somewhere in that pudding are the piece parts that we're gonna be living inside of in 100 years and take for granted. And they're gonna be, I think, considerably different from the status quo today. This is my own hunch. Well, one of the things I wanna address with Susan brought up earlier about nations and the breaking up of America. If America broke up like that, our world influence would just sink, our unified market. I mean, it would be disastrous for us economically and politically, we would basically turn into some backwater. What did? Not California. Right. Not California. I mean, California all by itself is the fifth largest economy on the planet, right? Wait, wait, wait, wait. I think you dropped to six, but... Oh, damn it. You did. San Bernardino's prime to secede, okay? So that's an... Oh yeah, so is... Don't worry about that. But I think it's a sign that a county wants to secede from California. But you've had the greater Idaho now, but there's been this movement in the Northeast for a succession of Lassen County and a couple of other places that that's been going on for quite some time. So that noise, that's just noise. California is running a budget surplus, you know? And we just announced that we're going to be guaranteeing free lunch and breakfast for all... Showoffs, showoffs. And then Gavin Newsom is busy like, okay, go to abortion.ca.gov and you can get information. It's like the dude's like doing good stuff. Yeah. Wait. But wait. A third of the population in San Francisco was polled this week and they want to leave San Francisco. Yeah, and? Yeah, so they'll just... So we're just, we're mixing things up. Yeah. Well, to go back to Bo's point, it's not so much do we get to chaotic, you know, higher intensity conflict than what we have now, but do we get to sort of a national divorce agreement? And, you know, I can imagine a confederated system where, you know, states sort of break into, you know, we end up with two major agglomerations, the South and, you know, parts of, you know, wherever they waive the confederate flag a lot. And, yeah, and then the West Coast and much of the Northeast and the land bridge being most of Canada. I don't know. I don't know. We don't have to stay united to still be financially, you know, what does that then do to our financial importance in the world? Does the dollar, you know, we'd obviously complicated way of solving that. Well, first of all, let me say, I really liked the national divorce language. It's the first alternate to secession and civil war that actually resonates. Yeah. And it actually has a, I think there's some cultural depth to it that allows for a tense, but peaceful separation. Right. The problem is Colorado. And particularly if you look at the, you know, the division of the state by state division, you have the West Coast with some parts of Nevada and, you know, maybe New Mexico. Greater Idaho. But then you have the Northeast and then along the Eastern seaboard. But right there in the middle of everything is Colorado. It doesn't connect to anything. And it's just as blue as California in most respects. But if you look at this map, it's just sort of wave, hand wave away the Colorado issue, but you have the West Coast and the East Coast, and then you have as a different country, the center. Is that reminding anyone of the Indian partition? Because you had East Pakistan and West Pakistan. Yeah. And then they had just, you know, it was just a really nasty period. And that's actually a parallel that came to mind a few months ago to me is just the, would we have a partition style situation in the US if there was this kind of national divorce of people feeling that they have to migrate out of, you know, quote unquote, hostile areas or the people or places where they're a minority. Or they get badgered to leave. Yeah. No, I think it's still a bloody mess. Well, catch me up guys. I don't know about this national divorce stuff, but does it have basically, do we act still like the EU or something? Do we do find some way to have some? There have been a variety of discussions. I don't think there's any one settled model. You know, there are all sorts of issues around, you know, you mentioned finance, certainly currency and control of currency, military bases, ports and shipping. Yeah. I did a little experiment when this came up somewhere else, sort of like, where are the nukes? Who's got them? Well, he got them in the Midwest or Intermountain West and you have them on submarines. So basically both countries have a good supply of nukes. Some nukes. Well, as long as we both have nukes, we're probably not going to destroy each other. Right? The thing I don't understand about this is like, you know, we're facing China. We would marginalize ourselves. We would basically, it would be really disastrous. And currency, economic, militarily, politically, we would just, I mean, I don't know if you remember that in 2016 there was a big, California would be like inside the France. Go ahead, Jimmy. I'm sorry, in 2016, there was a big Cal exit discussion. You know, should California succeed after Trump was elected? Turns out that the major group pushing that idea in California was Russian funded. So, you know, other parts of the world recognized that a split United States would be a depowered United States. Yeah, the other idea is to break California into five states and probably, you know, get six more, you know, gain a net six Democratic senators. Yeah, it's, there's a kind of way that the Democrats are the last institutional, you know, establishment party in that they won't play with ideas like this. You know, while you have the opportunity at DC as a state, why aren't you doing that? What's wrong with that? Well, adding a state actually requires a fairly, a super majority of other states too. I don't know about that. Derek, could you look, could you, do you have in your brain about how you add a state? We used to do this all the time. I don't have a lot on it, but it's easy to look up. Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, a bunch of other things like that that's been in the offing. And then similar to packing the court, there's been some conversations about just creating some new states in order to change tip to balance in the Senate and other sorts of things. And certainly the creation of our states, John Wesley Powell, way back when, famously sent Congress a map and said, hey, everything was the Mississippi should be states on water catchment, water basin. Well, all it takes is majority vote in the house and the Senate, Jimmy. Really? Simple majority? Yeah. Let's go start a state. Come on, guys. And I guess that's one in the house like two or three times. It's actually got a majority vote for DC, right? It's just the Senate, you know, get us one or two more senators and we can add, and then we can add DC. And we may very well get that one or two more senators. I am really looking forward to Senator Federman. Yeah, let's hope he's still compost mantis at that point, but... Yeah, I actually met him a few years ago. I was on a panel with him. Yeah, really cool guy. He's a very cool guy. Back when he was just mayor of whatever city that was, but... Yes. He's, as soon as he gets into the Senate, it's great because they've already got a big program for helping people who need nursing care. Well, an argument for the... That's a joke. For America... Oh, no, no. No, Diane Feinstein's the joke. An argument for this nation's atomization of America would be just what England was throwing from the EU. Because that's rather recent and they basically cost themselves the same thing. They walk away. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, by the way... I like the idea of us... And we elites, like someone like me, was like, ah, they're not going to do it. They're not going to do it. But I am so surprised how often I meet educated people from England who are not nutbags, who are like, yeah, out of the EU. I'm sick of it, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, it's really surprising to me the cross-section of British people who are all for leaving the EU. Who are not nuts, you know? I'm sorry, I'm just gonna shut up now. Have you talked to them recently? You know, because how are they feeling about it now? In the last year I talked to a guy. What, did he seem a little racist? Yeah, he seemed a little racist. His problems seem to be about the immigrants from Eastern Europe and his little town in England and everything. A lot of things he said were very odious. And, but anyways, you know, I think people like us want to ignore these things and their cultural power and to sort of pretend they're not there, but they are there, you know? Sorry, that's a little depressing. I want to inject a topic into this conversation if I might. Please, inject a way. I have to go away. And you have to leave, yes, but inject first. Okay, well, no, I guess maybe, maybe, I don't know who's best to start with here, but I may perhaps. I mean, the climate change is happening at such a rate. It's having a huge impact on food supplies. And that will eventually have impact on the economy and it will have impact on politics. When one adds that to the current picture, what directions, Jaume, do you see things moving in? I mean, suppose they, I mean, they will move, that will happen, right? Can I have a little input to that? Because yeah, what I'm thinking immediately about that is the Colorado River, Arizona, Mexico, like those states are going to get hurt bad. Well, New Mexico is different from Arizona in that it still has some aquifers. I mean, it won't, you know, bail it out, but isn't that right, Jeremy? And I think, you know, it is, it is true that the West of the United States, water does not come, water comes in rainfall, unpredictable rainfall amounts. And, you know, we've sort of used it all up. What's underground. Most of the water, they do get it from this huge federal projects that are very expensive. I mean, these dams, everything, okay. Well, we don't know. Yes, so that, I mean, that could just break apart the West tier because I don't know what, I mean, people are still moving to Phoenix, right? What? That's crazy, but there was an article recently about why are people still moving into places where there's no water, no resources. But that was interesting about Las Vegas. That's been very good at reducing their water uses. But that was kind of, that seems to be a moderate success. God, lost. Yeah, actually, there's been, I've seen some interesting discussions around water in California and, you know, should we be investing in desalination, that kind of stuff. There's still a lot of room to reduce water usage from things like, okay, you gotta stop growing almonds. You know, almonds are just ridiculously wasteful of water to, okay, Nestle, you can no longer drain aquifers at 1930s prices. Right. The, you know, so there's still, the number of people who still water their lawns is unfortunate. All of that, so all of that points to, we have room to reduce how much we're actually using in a lot of Western states before we need to start embarking on something like desalination. But because desalination is, well, it's problematic, but it's possible. It's problematic because you basically dump a lot of salt sludge back into the ocean, which really messes up the ecosystem. So that has to be done in a really specific way to... You could form it up in little bricks and put it on land. In principle. Yeah. So, yeah, but water is the big crisis. The, I think what's gonna end up having to happen in the West, you know, California grows a major part of the American agricultural basket. I mean, people kind of forget that California isn't just tech, isn't just tech center, it's also a major source of food for the country. That's Asia, right? I mean, it's based in California as are Ukraine. Jamaica, right? California, the United States and Ukraine. Well, different food stuff, but yeah. But Ukraine, now are Ukraine. They don't grow lettuce in Ukraine. And we're gonna grow a lot of wheat in California. Yeah, the wheat and the rice production and everything is really important. Ukraine is a huge bread basket. Yeah. But Susan's right that there have been, there were really issues around the heat with California agriculture this past summer. So there's gonna have to be some adaptation to what gets grown. I think that's gonna be the biggest sticking point is getting the farmers to shift their crops. Yes, Jerry? I'll just turn the volume up on the topic around a little bit, which is we've been talking about inflation and housing prices and what component is housing and wages and so forth. But the big gray rhino that's like standing right in front of us is that we might actually be at that moment where climate disasters happen at enough scale that they destroy a major piece of the food supply, totally spike inflation, cause a lot of people to starve and cause major social unrest everywhere. Like we could be in that little decade right now. And given the last couple of years extreme weather, like if you're sort of looking at it, you're like, wow, there's a really large events happening and a lot of people suffering. A third of Pakistan is flooded right now. Have you seen the satellite pictures? It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. And don't forget that the climate crisis in the Middle East and everything is driving all of some of Greece and Europe. What about South America? Right. I mean, Brazil and Canada, last I heard, were the two countries that have like an overabundance of water, the Pacific Northwest is happily drenched. We'll be okay here, but it's bad. And then in the same breath I'll say, solar power appears to be plunging in costs still. It's like, we do in some weird way have energy too cheap to meter in particular because once you've installed solar power in some way, you don't have to pay for feedstocks. It just like generates energy forever. And with unlimited energy, you could do desal. You could just throw energy. Hey, we have spikes, we have excess. Awesome. You could throw it at making stuff or desalifying water any place. You could pull water from the atmosphere someplace. There isn't that much, but you could do that. Solar is actually the cheapest form of energy on the planet. Yep. Two cents per kilowatt hour. Something along the lines. And 10 cents per kilowatt hour is the tradeoff against coal. Wind is a little bit more expensive and then fossils are much higher up there. Solar is already the cheapest form of energy. The issue with desalination is not because of solar is not really the power consumption, which is considerable, but it is the what do you do with the waste material? And I don't know what the issue is around making bricks. So we take, use sneakers and put them in road beds. We take like, like there's gotta be an interesting thing to do with the crappy, you know, the toxic stuff that shows up when you do desal. There has to be an elegant solution there. In particular, if you have energy to devote to it. So I have, I have a, oh, excuse me. I have an unrelated topic that's, that it actually is, I'm giving a talk in Sri Lanka tomorrow morning. Tomorrow, are you traveling? I am not traveling. I am doing this remotely. I have been, I was asked to give a 90 minute and I said no, but it's gonna be a 30 to 45 minute presentation and discussion around Bani and the, the recent crisis in Sri Lanka apparently as part of, as a, as a pre-work, pre preliminary event for a conference in Sri Lanka organized by one of their big universities on the topic of Bani. Damn. Well, yeah. So you're like, you're like the keynote. Do they, too bad you're not there in person. I will be recording a keynote for, for the actual conference as well. But tomorrow is a live, live webinar event. Just too bad you're not there in person because they'd probably carry you in a palanquin or however you say that. Well, I don't know if I want to go, go to Sri Lanka right now. It's been pretty crazy there. Yeah. But, so what's your question? I don't know a lot about Sri Lanka. Do you have any idea how they even like got to you or? Oh God, Bani is a global phenomenon right now outside of the West. I get multiple emails on a Google alerts every day, every day about articles written about Bani. There is a, is not the first Bani focus conference. There was one in Mexico last year, but South and Central America, South Asia, increasingly now Russia. I'm getting articles about Bani written by authors around the world. It is, it is a big deal. When I, when I put Bani in to Google search, the first suggestion was Jamaica Cascio Bani. Wow. I, I, I'm impressed. It is, it's totally talking to me, but this may end up being the, my legacy. It's, for a lot of people, it has become a useful framing for a chaotic world. Yes. So when I Googled Bani, the first hits, well, the first hit is like the word BAN, which is a monetary unit in Romania, but none of the first hits are you, Jamai. I think you need to correct this. Yes, really. They're, they're writing about you and they're pointing to you, that's good, but none of them are like, I think you. Well, should be, I know it's not, I know it's not the top one. I think insights leadership Bani, is that you? No. Okay. And we're all probably getting slightly different results, but my first top results are all about Bani and point to you nicely, but none of them are you. Okay. We've taken you off track. Were you hoping to talk about your talk or shall we keep talking about your search engine optimization strategy? Exactly. Thank you. Actually, that's really interesting because a few days ago, the, my medium piece, which was the, the first public presentation of a first outside IFTF public presentation. No, really, does anyone have any kind of insight or interesting perspective on what, what has happened in Sri Lanka? Bo? Hold on. Yes, I do. So the inflation really hit them hard. It's a small country that basically mismanaged their economy. And bye-bye. That's what happened to them. That's what they mismanaged their economy. With a terribly military, you know, leader elevated into power who, you know, thought he could govern the economy by decree or something. So actually Rajapaksa said, hey, all farms must go organic immediately. There was no supply chain. There was no thinking, nothing was done. And it completely crushed the agricultural sector. They were like, you know. It didn't work out that well for Stalin either. Yeah. Well, yeah. But I mean, he was looking at regenerative ag. He was looking, he was looking at good stuff. And I think he got sold on the idea and then implemented it in a really, really terrible, stupid way. I, the person who was the organizer of this webinar also suggested that the China Belt and Road Initiative might play a role in this as well. So they borrowed a bunch of money from China for absurd problems. China wants you to default because China wants to own it. I mean, that's what China's doing. This is their new imperialism, baby. Yep. And it's a very smart one. So I don't, I don't know if you heard why this was relevant though. You, you had stepped away. I'm giving a talk to Sri Lankan University tomorrow. No, I heard. I've been a very judge for you. By the way, I did a search on it. And the first article I got was it mentions in May, Bani versus VUCA, a new actor who described the world. Right. VUCA. Yeah, VUCA was developed in the late 1980s by the U.S. Army War College, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous as a way of basically framing conversations around a post-Cold War, post-Cold War world. And it actually was a pretty useful term. Business analysts loved it. Business consultants started using VUCA all over the place. The big deal at GBN, Bob Johansson at IFTF that uses it all the time. Yes, Bani is death and old Norse as well. Yes, that's actually, I knew that. But VUCA was a big deal. But for me, VUCA, I started thinking about VUCA as, you know, we eat VUCA for breakfast these days. It is, it's the water in which we swim. And so it doesn't actually, that framing doesn't tell us anything. And so as things got more chaotic, in particular after Trump really started to make a footprint on global politics, I started turning around what would be a follow-on and Bani is what I came up with in 2018. Gave a presentation at IFTF at one of their 10-year forecast events. And then when the pandemic hit in 2020, I repurposed that, you know, the script to that presentation and published it on Medium and just boom. Yeah, I'm on your Medium article right now because that guy puts you in the footnote with a link right to your Medium article. Yay, yay, Jame, yay. So what organization tasks you to come talk to them in Sri Lanka? It is a university whose name I can't pronounce. Nice. Well, good. Hopefully you can school the next, the new, the incoming class of elites and how to run their damn country. Yeah. Yeah. It's been very interesting. It's a lot of business people, of course. I actually gave a big talk to Pepsi Mexico or Pepsi South America on Bani last year. An Austrian consultancy brought me in to do a webinar. There is a Brazilian magazine around a new magazine that focuses on chaos that is explicitly tries to reference Bani in every issue. The guy who's the main publisher of it wants to write a book on Bani and Brazil. And so, yeah, it's crazy. God, it looks like Sri Lanka just did everything wrong. They printed money, ran down the foreign reserves. Right. I did this organic thing. Oh my God. Ooh, ready. Nice. Ooh, okay. Good job, girl. Could you toss a link to what you're looking at, Bo? Oh, it's just, it was the Wikipedia page, showed it. Oh, it's a Wiki page. Okay. I'm just meeting Jamey's paragraph where he says, it doesn't have to be that way. At a surface level, the components of the acronym might even hide it, hinted opportunities for response. Brittleness could be met by readiness, resilience and slack, anxiety could be eased by empathy and mindfulness. Non-linearity would need context and flexibility. Well, that's where I threw a democracy in instead of, because I needed a D-word. And incomprehensibility asks for transparency and intuition. But it's... I'll search the economists, Jamey, and send you articles if you want. One of the things I find about them. Yeah, if there's anything that you think is particularly insightful. Yeah, I'm just doing a deep dive today so I can sound relatively intelligent tomorrow morning at 6.30 a.m. Yeah. Because Sri Lanka is 12 and a half hours ahead. Oh, okay. Yeah, and a half thing. Yeah, it's actually kind of funny, but... That's exciting. At least you can give your talk in English. Yeah, yeah. Convince you. Government mismanage. Go ahead, sorry. I see that you have the ready... What I actually came up with was IRI, I-R-I-E. And it's not a direct one-to-one across, but it was intuition, resilience, innovation, or no, imagination and empathy. I think, well, intuition, I forget what the other I is, but basically, I think the empathy part is a big deal. The resilience is a big deal. Those are the two that have been consistent. But... Isn't the reason to include something like democracy is because, in theory, democracies don't have famines. Open systems respond better to catastrophes than closed ones. In principle. In principle. That's what you said, right? I'm not certain that democratic or democracy is at the same pace layer. Pace layer as intuition, resilience, and empathy, but... No, that's true. That's true. Anyway, so that's my immediate concern. Exciting. But... There's probably a nifty consulting and coaching business called Thriving with Banny or something like that, which is like, how do you make it through a Banny world? Well, actually, I grabbed the domain age of Banny and Mundo Banny. Mundo Banny is a very common phrase in the Brazilian and South American, more broadly, South American pieces. And there's nothing they didn't do wrong, Sri Lanka. Wow. Price controls, they did the whole suite of bad ideas. Poor bastards. How big is Sri Lanka? How many million people is it? Should be easy to Google. We had a little listening bot, it would have told us already. Alexa, how big is Sri Lanka? Oh, and then you have Alexa working in your house. Oh, wow, is that true? 25 million, really? That's... Taiwan size. That's interesting. Wow, that's not small. Not big either. It's kind of an ideal size. I got to go, guys. I got to get on a call with my dad's doctor. Oh, no worries. Good to see you. Thanks, Mika. Oh, well, they're examining him now. Actually, now I don't have to leave. Oh, OK. We're almost done. Yeah, we're right up at our time. Fascinating conversation. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And Mika, it will be fun to check in in the next couple of months to see if any of this plays out. Oh, well, we'll say out, yeah. Well, you know, two months is will be will be post-election. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Wow, that's just crazy. It's an inflection point. Boy, Bonnie, with the climate crisis, Jimé, I mean, you got a book, are you going to create a consulting firm and rake in the dough on this or what? I mean, I think Bonnie's just come up more and more and more relevant to everybody. Yeah, I know. I know I need to write a book. I know I need to write a book. You. All right, I got to go. All right, OK. There are guys. Book in the offing. What is there? That was his phone ringing. A sound I haven't heard for a while, partly because I don't do iPhones. Yeah, Jimé, you want to run a global consulting firm on Bonnie? I mean, your life could get consumed by this. You let it. Yeah, which is why I don't. I'm actually very happy to be Johnny Bonnie Seed and have it be an idea that becomes part of the conversation. As opposed to something that is a, you know, a branded approach. I actually just viscerally like the idea of something I created, having a life of its own, a lot more than something I created, having a trademark after it. I agree. I could see that. And also your life to get the end of your research would end because your life would just be sucked up into doing it to running the monster. Yeah, maybe maybe a Bonnie tattoo, you know, well, if someone comes up with a good symbol, I mean, I don't know if in the medium piece, I used a danger of death symbol from Dyson London. I took a picture of it in London. Yes, been hit by a lightning bolt. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the actual, the text below it. I don't know if I don't think I included it in the, in the image, but the text below that sign, you know, was danger of death. Yeah. So what you might do is take, take dude doing this. And then remember the Gary Larson cartoon of the crisis clinic, which is basically on fire, going towards rapids. And there's some other disaster happening. It's like, like a real crisis clinic. So take, take dude and have lightning strike and then have nuclear radiation sign and then have a starvation, like five different apocalypse is hitting. The black swan with radiation. Well, no, that's actually that's actually a bio, bio weapon, bio weapon. And then of course, I also have. Oh, where did it go? Oh, well. Um, Oh, here it is. Oh, nice. I didn't know that there were 3d figs. It's a, uh, Yeah, this is fine. Not bobblehead. We got, um, not really a bobblehead. Anyway, we got dumpster fire ornaments for the last two years for our Christmas tree. Yep. We need. All right. Any last thoughts? Yeah. Any last thoughts? Um, just got this fast in the article. They cause where they're using, uh, they, they have, um, Satellite photographs to show the, basically the economic fall of, of Sri Lanka. Oh, wow. Yeah. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. Oh, wow. Yeah. I'd love to see that. Okay. I will send that to them. Wow. Wow. Okay. All right. I'll do a bunch of PDF prints for you. Jimmy. Thank you very much. But it's great. Again, good luck. Same here. See you next month. Bye. Yeah, happy, happy talk.