 So this is the Rex monthly check and call for October 2019. It is fall in Portland, Oregon. It is crispy and sunny today. I just came back from a road trip and I have a poem for us to start with titled, I Worried by Mary Oliver. Goes as follows. I worried a lot. Will the garden grow? Will the rivers flow in the right direction? Will the earth turn as it was taught? And if not, how shall I correct it? Was I right? Was I wrong? Will I be forgiven? Can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing? Even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless. Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it? Am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia? Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up and told, took my old body and went out into the morning and sang. Thank you for the sunshine, Bill. That's perfect. That's perfect. So how about we check in? I've been all over the place. I have a bunch of stuff to report back on, but would love to hear what mildly-rexy things any of you have been up to. I added to my herd immunity by getting my flu shot yesterday. Oh, good. I'm probably going to do that. Arm hurts like hell. Oh, really? Oh, great. Yeah. Well, you know, it's just, it's a, for some reason, flu shots always hurt. At least for me. But I don't fall victim to, what is it, Roseanne Barr syndrome? No, no. Were you suddenly become a redneck? No. No, it's basically there's something where you're- You're Guillain Barré. That's it. Same difference. Although the Roseanne Barr syndrome really does provoke interesting thoughts. I sort of prefer that. I'd like to catch that. Accompanied by a significant drop in IQ. Yeah. It is a problem. Yeah. So, you know, I'm not going to do anything else. We're actually sort of things. Kelly, how's the consortium doing? What's the top of mind for you guys these days? We're doing pretty great. I am at the coffee shop today. So there's some background noise. Because my family's home because it's no school. So I came to the coffee shop thinking it might be a little quieter. Anyway. Big win on that front. Yeah. Oh well. Six and one half dozen. Yeah. I was at the garden of the gods club, which apparently is kind of fancy. That's awesome. I had, I would join the garden of the gods club. That's an amazing old spot over there. That was just at the end. So go ahead. We were at the lodge at flying horse, which is has just unbelievable views of the whole mountain range from the meeting room, which is like our favorite way to do it. But it was a couple of very interesting things. Right. Everybody's still, so these are all support executives, people who are looking to design support and service organizations for big, mostly high tech companies. And everybody's talking about the digital transformation, which we've been talking about for a couple of years. Finally, people are like, wait, I think actually what we mean is a cultural transformation. So that was pretty cool to kind of finally have, have this shift to be like, so one of the, one of the people in the meeting was like, it seems like if this were plug and play, we would have done it already. And so this is, this feels like something sort of bigger in terms of how we're, how we're approaching these problems. Like the digital transformation sort of already happens. Now culturally, we have to catch up on our, in our organizations, which was really fun because I don't know if I talked about this last time on our recs call, but I was at a coaching workshop just recently. So coaching is one of the things that I do. I've been at that coaching workshop just recently. So coaching is one of the things that we talk about as being integral to this knowledge management methodology that we've been working on for 20 years. And, and my, my theory is that coaching is really how we shift the organization culturally because it's, it's conversations between people and as culture is emergent when, if you, if you can make space to talk to each other intentionally about what's going on in the organization and with us sort of. Even just tangentially personally, right? This is what's going on for me at work right now with talking that through with a peer, I think has huge implications for what the, what the, what the emergent culture of the organization does. So that's kind of what we're, what we're noodling on. And then, and tomorrow I leave for Germany for two, a two day meeting, which is a two day meeting. Well, going to be a long haul from Seattle, but I'm looking forward to it. That's just me and Matt, who's our new, our new executive director. Cool. What city do you get to go to? I'm going to Hanover. Oh, nice. My grandmother was from Hanover and I've really never been there. I think I've been there one day. So we're sort of dying laughing because on the Wikipedia page, there's a, there's something called the red line and Hanover, which connects all their 36 culturally important, you know, stops. So we go and walk the red line and have a coffee here and go to this museum and blah, blah. And it's around the Wikipedia page. And the description was, this was, they built the red line in order to counteract the, the assertion that Hanover was the most boring city in Germany. Fantastic. Looking forward to it. We have a red line. Right. Take that. Frank. That's the school. Sunny, sunny and crisp in Seattle too. Yeah. I'm loving the fall season right now. It's good. It's perfect. Yeah, that's fun in California right now. The, the weather. It's been, well, the blackouts have been for the most part more threat than realization. But I think that's an important intentional. Pacific gas and electric. Was declared to have be at fault for the, for massive wildfires in the past few years. And all sorts of restriction being put on how much they can, they can pass the costs on to customers and the like. So they're basically being punished for not maintaining their lines properly. And this I believe is punitive safety blackouts. I think it's on the part of California. It's complicit. It's a malicious compliance. Yeah, we're okay. You want us to be, to be more careful. We're going to be as careful as absolutely possible. And the inconvenience is you. Oh, I'm so sorry. And so some things I think. Since the Berkeley Hills are in the, the zone of potentially unsafe and high winds and bad lines. The power has been shut off to, has finally been shut off to UC Berkeley. So Janice is home because she works on campus, but they were saying they were going to shut it off on Wednesday. So they sent everybody home. But power was on the whole day. So basically the university had to pay all their employees for doing nothing on Wednesday. And then we'll shut it down. We'll shut it down Wednesday night, Thursday morning. Thursday rolls in. No, power sign. But everyone is still safe at home because PG and he says, we're going to shut it off. We're going to shut it off. They finally shut it off Thursday afternoon, but it's been crazy. And so you have a massive economic disruption, massive disruption of people's lives. And PG knee being technically correct that they are being, they're trying to be as safe as possible. By eliminating the possibility of high winds leading to sparks leading to wildfires. So this has been kind of surreal, just this moment of, we're going to shut down the state because we can, because this is what you want us to do, right? It's just so weird. I mean, even, and I thought that there were some pretty large swaths of just residential areas that were in fact blacked out. And the food in your freezer, Don, like everybody's freezer just got shot. You know, shot. I'm like, that's, that's a lot of money. Oxygen, people who are on oxygen. Yeah. Medical gear. The thing about some neighborhoods being, having the power shot off and that they actually have been, you know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of homes, it's because the, the lines upstream have been are dangerous. So those are closed down and then everything downstream suffers. Yeah. Right. Right. So what's the name for like a work rule, stoppage when a union doesn't really want to go on strike, but they want to be really mean. They just tell everybody, follow all the rules. Or something like that. Something like that. Right. And it just everything grinds to a halt because there's no way you can actually follow all the rules any place. I'd like to speak a little to this. So first of all, my wife is an executive at a grocery store company that has stores. So her day was not fun yesterday. Because imagine the spoilage in the store and how much. Yeah. Second of all, I posted on my Facebook page. I posted all the investigations around this PG anything. And I, because I, you know, I pay the bills for my mother's house in Carmel Valley. I got that little letter from PG. And I pointed out when I got it to my wife and my friends. Hey, looky here. Look at this letter here. So let's review what happened with PG. So California, it's not the fifth largest economy in the world. What is it now? Maybe the sixth or seven. So let's just look at this. We got California that has now has shanty towns. And now you're having South America style, black rolling blackouts. And you are the fourth richest economy in the world. Okay. So the investigations that next California is a utility. PGD is a utility. If tomorrow PGD, which means they get a guarantee profit margin. Okay. So what that means is if they wanted to fix those power lines, they just go, Hey, that's going to cost a trillion dollars. They go to the California's, you know, the regulating board go, it's going to cost a trillion dollars. And there's really, it'll be done. So they have very big limits on what they can charge. Yeah. The, the CPUC, the California public utilities commission has actually been fairly careful about, careful slash restrictive about how much money they authorize. So good. I've got to be checked out. So it's a combination of the basically bad governance and inertia on PGD. So it's either, then this is with the Wall Street Journal part, but you just have to know by the restraint of the system as a utility, it's either the state, stop them from doing it. And though there are power line parts of this grid. They're almost a hundred years old. Okay. So now let's think about this. We're talking about Silicon Valley. We're talking about California. Let's just, is everyone tracking with me that, you know, you know, let's just, is everyone tracking with me that if you guys have a hundred year old power system, a power grid, this is something ain't right here. So by the way, Germany also has these problems. Germany has a, if you go over Germany, which I guess Kelly, you're going to soon find out they don't exactly have great internet because they are very good about balanced budgets and austerity. We almost, so what was the typical economic response? FYI to a near depression, 0809, a fiscal spending, but no, we do tax cuts instead. We do austerity. So in other words, I think this, this is happening all over the OECD countries, us and others that we have creaking infrastructure that we really need to do something about. But instead, just because of ideology and more tax breaks for rich people, we're not taking care of business. The fourth largest economy in the world, which think about the talent in California. If there's one place in the world to build a 21st century power grid and have the talent, the people and the money to do it, it's California. Actually the grid, the grid eventually goes away. Much of the grid goes away. What you do is you get local self-sufficiency with micro power and a bunch of other stuff. And hopefully the large pieces of the smaller communities that are far away don't need to be bridged with high power lines. They wind up being mostly self-sufficient, I think. Jermaine probably knows much more about this than I do. But it feels like the grid as it stands is slowly going to fall away anyway. The grid as it stands is incompatible with the move to a large electricity-based transportation base. We got a Tesla recently. Just a Model 3. So not the hugely expensive kind, but it's cool. And it's amazing to God. I love driving that thing. But if we don't, it's really hard to find a place to charge if you have a power outage in your town. If we had an outage, we can't charge it home. Superchargers in the neighborhood, well, that's all part of the same grid. So one of the reasons that Tesla is actually selling these home, these big home batteries so that you have a well of electricity that you can call on in case of an outage. And that links up with people who have home solar. Because if you have home power generation, putting it in the standard way, the power goes out in the neighborhood, your power is out too. It doesn't matter if you have the sun shining because basically you're connected to the grid. You're just another component on the larger grid. So if you have a home battery that's basically looping in and charging in for some of that stuff, some of the power that you're generating, then you can be roughly okay for a short while. But we're dealing with legacy infrastructure. And some of it has not been repaired and revised because it's expensive. Some of it has not been repaired and revised because of legacy social and political infrastructure. Some of it has not been repaired and revised because of legal issues. Whatever legal issues might come up. And frankly, when you have people who, when you do have issues of attempts to repair and revise, there's this real question, well, how do you do it? Do you build towards a modular grid where you have local self-sufficiency? Or do you build for resilience where you have lots of places that are self-sufficient but then have cross-sufficiency? It's... The future is please tell me while you live in the fourth richest country in the world and you have shantytowns and a power grid. The shantytowns aren't in my neighborhood. Well, you have because it's the largest population in the downtown. You have shantytowns because, well, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes some of it comes from a really high cost of living. So you have people being driven out of their homes. Some of it comes because big cities and other states like to give one-way tickets to California to their homeless people. And so we have an influx of homeless people coming into California who did not lose their homes in California. We live in Portland. So Jerry and I, we have shantytowns that are moved around all the time. They occupy a lot. So I'm not just pointing fingers, but let's just say one thing. There isn't a shortage of resources to take care of these problems. We as a society are simply making some bad choices. We are. And we have for a while. You say fourth largest economy, fifth for a long time. We have progressive leadership now. But, you know, we just recently had, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and then, you know, Gray Davis before that, who was ostensibly a Democrat, but was very well-named. You had, who was Pete Wilson? This is not the ability. And we just recently have the super majority in the legislature. So finally able to pass some laws to do, to rebuild some stuff that we couldn't do before because there was. And they're now being sued. So, so the Trump administration is suing the major automakers because they've chosen to follow California's auto standards, which are higher than the ones that are being rolled back federally. And they're being sued for that because Trump doesn't want any, you know, anybody going around is releasing all this. A couple of things just to throw in the event. I, the second, the last event that was that included Ramaz Nam as a speaker. Have you ever seen him speak? Oh yeah. So he is great. I love him. He's a science fiction writer and an all about energy. And he has chart after chart after chart after chart after chart, which are all well done and interesting where I'm pretty convinced we're walking into an abundant energy future. Like, like in particular, the cost of solar have plunged way faster than anybody in the industry foresaw. In fact, the EIA or whatever the, the, the, the famous, the funniest of all the charts that, that anybody's showing these days on energy are the predictions, the forecast from the association that's supposed to represent energy in this way. And their forecasts all kind of go like this. This is the, you know, the, the falling cost of power and the actual falling cost of powers like that. And then three years revision. Every year's revision is no better than the previous one. No better at all. It's just like a parallel lumpy line. And, and you start thinking about, what are the implications of the student power? You start thinking a lot also about alternate storage methods, like how do we do batteries? You know, there's one system that basically you hauls, bricks up into a big tower and uses potential energy. And that's a battery, right? That's a battery. You can do water. You can make it a little artificial lake. You can pump water up and pump water down. But those are all batteries because you store energy and you can, you can, you know, attach a, a turbine or a dynamo to these things and turn it back into electricity. We're actually, we have some really interesting ideas around large scale energy storage and energy production for that matter. Beyond, beyond solar, although photo, as Mez says, photovoltaics are dropping in, in cost at a ridiculously fast rate. Baseload power with thorium, also really funky stuff around what they call hydrokinetic energy that is the motion, the motion of the ocean. So underwater tidal flows and the like, basically a constant generation of power. The ore is fantastic. I'm sorry? The ore is fantastic. We have this huge tidal change. And the technology is all developed in Norway. It's ready to go, baby. Yep. The, the main difficulty remains small scale storage because, yeah, and that's actually, we, I love driving a Tesla, but it's essentially Bay Area driving only. We did a, it ostensibly has a 240 mile range. We did a drive up to Chico earlier in the year, which is 150 miles away. We had to recharge twice along the way. We were using the air conditioning and, you know, there are some hills to climb. And, you know, the, it, it has a particular range under ideal conditions, but it just simply doesn't store enough power. The energy density of gasoline is unmatched. Why doesn't somebody create mobile electric recharging stations, basically take a large truck, put a big battery on it, run it on the freeway. And then we do what, what, what jet fighters do in refueling on, on the freeway. Boom, boom, boom. Exactly. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, the sound of the cars sliding. Exactly. Well, you doc, you go in, you go into follow me mode and you basically, you, you trust Tesla a lot more than I do. You slave your car to the car. I trust Tony Stark. He'll, he'll like. Hey, did you ask for the ejector seats option in your, in your Tesla, man? Actually, no, we, the metaphorical, no, we didn't, we did not get the full self driving package. Cause I just know how crappy bad that is. And frankly doesn't have the right gear to make it work right. Because there's no LiDAR on Tesla. No LiDAR. Only cameras. Only cameras. And I think other sensors probably. Yeah. Now cameras are very, that's kind of cool. We actually, it provides a built in car security system. You just plug a USB stick and it does a, it loops a recording of all the cameras. But. Well, that's a useful feature in our new Gilded Aids of extreme income disparity. Exactly. Key lots sort of like touch your Tesla. Did you, did you see the report about the woman who was caught keying a Tesla a couple of weeks ago by the car video? You tell me, fellow aristocrat today. What did you do? Did the car incinerate her with laser beams right after? No, they didn't, she didn't get that option or the person to get into it on the car. About that package. Yeah. Yeah, that's, they keep telling us, but we went to, you know, did you, did you, I'm sorry. Did you do the karaoke upgrade yet? How's that? You know, we might have, it did auto updates, but no pun intended. I think about that. But we haven't been playing, we don't really play with it. It's, it's, it's functional. It's soapy technology. What about your role as the world's leading futurist? Don't you need to like, you know, mod this thing and make sure that it hops over traffic. Now we get to use his calling against him. This is going to be great. Yeah. Why don't you have every video game and everything. Do you realize how far this is an infinite regress on place? Light. Hi. I suppose I'm just a failure. I apologize for that. Me too. I'm a failure too. Oh man. So I also wanted to go back to the housing thing. Housing first strategies are working really well in cities that are applying them. That just temporary shelter doesn't actually get, solve anybody's problem except for one night at a time, but getting people in simple affordable housing. Let's them have an address. Let's them get showered. Let's them maybe get a job, a bunch of other stuff. You have to fold, you have to fold into this mental health and addiction. So I don't demand that they be off drugs and all clean before they get in the housing too. It's unconditional. It's unconditional. You just give them a place to be. That's fantastic. That's great. It actually helps. And then Portugal seems to be over and over again, a really great example because in 2001, they decriminalized all drugs. They have a president who's done a really good job. They said to the austerity, threateners during the last depression, they basically said a few and didn't do that. And the population is better off and they just had a, they're just, I think in the middle of a new election, they have a strange coalition that has a really interesting guy in charge who I think is getting reelected through strange coalitions, but in a good way. So Portugal I think is a place to watch and right next door, Spain is in meltdown. So, you know, there's little bits also, Ethiopia, the Ethiopia's new president just won the Nobel Peace Prize. They announced it this morning and he's the guy who, the moment he comes into office, basically creates an amnesty for the, the war they've been having with Eritrea. Eritrea. Yeah. And totally changes the situation. It's incredible. Hey, hey for the good news. Thank you, Jerry. You're welcome. And then, and then the other, the other event I was at at the beginning of this trip, I went straight to a visioneering. Anybody heard of visioneering? Anybody heard. It's a little bit like mouse catering actually, you'd be shocked how close that is. So anybody heard of the X prize. So the Ansari X prize was the first X prize that was basically for suborbital, you know, a private private company get above 140 or 100 kilometers twice within two weeks and bring everybody back to Earth safely. Yeah. And Bert Rotan and his company basically won it with Spaceship One and, you know, big check handed over and then, and that was back in 96 or 97 or 98 somewhere in there. And then the X prize people were like, wow, that worked. Now what do we do? So then they started doing a bunch of, a bunch of these exercises on whatever. Then they, they had at one point, at one point after a board meeting or something like that, they just stayed, they just kept talking into the night and had a terrific conversation about what the next prizes should be. That turned into the visioneering conference, which is now a three day event. Highly produced. This one was held on the Paramount studios a lot and was really interesting. And I got invited in. I got, you know, Compton to go see it. And one of the things that made me very, very happy that the whole thing was a strange mix of naive philanthropists with a lot of money, honing up money for projects. You were like, I'm not sure that's ever going to actually work. So there was, there was a bunch of that going on, but Dave, you would be shocked at how up front and center regenerative ag was and less so the regenerative economy, but regenerative ag was, was big and the regenerative ag project that I was kind of part of early in the going was like runner up. There's like everybody votes, votes, votes, votes, votes. And one, one of the initiatives shows up as the X prize winner, which means that X prize is going to put more energy behind it. But along the way, anybody in the audience can fund, you know, at half a million dollars, any one of these things is fully funded, which means a project team will go like make it start happening. And so a bunch of these other projects got fully funded along the way. So it's not like that, like the one thing is the only thing that floats out of visionary. So it's really pretty interesting as a fundraising mechanism. It's awesome. Everything was high production values. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I was, I was happy at how normal regenerative ag sounded and how emphatic the people behind it were that this is it's it's carbon sequestration. It's better and more food. It saves small farmers. It replenishes the aquifer. It's like a, you know, it's like, not just the trifecta, but is there a quadrifecta? I don't know, but it's just, just got a whole lot of bang for the buck. So biodiversity, biodiversity. Thank you. Exactly. Probably good for insects and all that as well, because you're not doing any, you're not doing fertilizers and pesticides. You're doing a bunch of compost. So it's really good for the compost makers. But David, are you seeing a lot of, like what's happening in Rasa and sort of the regen sector right now? We're, we're, what's your like finger in the wind? Uh, yeah, I did do, I did like the Google trends kind of thing with regenerative ag and sustainable ag a couple of weeks ago. And, and you can see a pretty steady climb in the use of the term regenerative ag. And it actually is now spiked over sustainable ag a couple of times. So, you know, I think the dominant term would probably still be sustainable ag, but regeneration is clearly growing. So I think it means adoption of the term. Um, you know, who knows what people mean by it when they say it. It's got, it got mentioned a couple of times in the like, um, a RORC I think mentioned in one of the debates and so did Tim Ryan. So it's got a little bit of play in politics and then, you know, it's got some pretty rich proponent. So Elon Musk's brothers kind of involved and, um, Eric Schmidt's wife and, you know, you've got, you've got big chunks of cash, um, that are engaged in this stuff. It does seem like people, you know, sell their software company and then buy a regenerative ranch. Um, so it's a, it's a fun toy. But, and I, there's, I can tell the ideas are pretty sound. So, I kind of suspect we will continue to see it, you know, uh, taking off. It's a real battle with the, you know, we did do this thing 50 years ago or something with, you know, Earl Butts saying agriculture was go big or go home kind of in the industrialization of agriculture. Right. But I love that effort behind that, I think. Well, Nixon told Butts to basically make carbs cheap. And so that's why we have, that's why we have really cheap carbs now, like, like a whole bunch of things were thrown into place that, the program we're now suffering from and like the diabetes, spikes and everything else. So it's kind of weird. I mean, you know, you know, I mean, I try not to go back in history and think that these decisions were incredibly cynical. Um, you know, even a PG and E, you know, it's like, I don't think they're deliberately not maintaining the lines. Yeah. But sometimes you look and say, wow, that one looks pretty cynical. So anyway, so anyway, I think it's, I think it's exciting that the, you know, in my little world of trying to be advocates for regenerative ag, it's still a very small, um, fractured kind of, you know, stumbling effort, I'd say. So the one thing I noticed the other day, I was at a conference here in San Francisco, uh, called a soil not oil. And I don't think I mentioned this to you, Jerry, but I can't remember that one of the things that, um, you know, I'm like this moderate kind of, you know, fat white guy with policy background, right? Um, and the conference overlapped with some anti-vaccine themes, uh, with five, five G is going to kill us. Kind of messaging. That was a big piece. Um, certainly a lot of, you know, stuff around GMOs. And so it's kind of this weird anti-science component as well. That I was a little bit uncomfortable with. It's like, Oh wow, how did these different, um, how did these different communities overlap? It's, yeah, it's really interesting when something natural shows up, the conversation includes those kinds of people. His nickname was Rusty. Uh, Rusty butts. Exactly. You're totally on a journey. I am 14 years old. Well, you don't always start with fart jokes here on the calls. So I don't know that that's true. They're silent, but deadly. Yeah. Um, so, so has regenerative, sorry, Dave, has regenerative kind of picked up. And superseded what a permaculture was 10 years ago. I mean, 10 years ago you got rich, you went and built the permaculture farm. I think permaculture is a reasonable subset of, of Regen, right? Yeah. A lot of the ideas that kind of the framework comes out of permaculture. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think so. And I don't know why one word is catching on over the other. I would say. Yeah. I'm not sure why. And regenerative works better with, in other frameworks, like you were saying regenerative economy kinds of things. I mean, I still get excited about, I mean, I, I'm interested, I've been involved in agriculture primarily because we saw a lot of farms that you could point at that were regenerative and were successful. You can go visit a regenerative farm and tell that it's different. Uh-huh. And so it's just very, it's a bright spot kind of thing. But I like sticking regenerative in front of everything just because I end up with different, you know, to me, it means positive some. And, and I think that the positive somehow we've been, you know, it's economics. I think it's the, when we study economics, it's the allocation of scarcity. You never get to a positive some framework. So people aren't used to thinking about it. And so I felt like a switch flip. And it was like, whoa, you could go past that line. What would happen then? And so the word regenerative for me means going past that, that line from zero some to positive some. Yeah. And one of the things when we went to singing frog farms, you and Claudia and I, Dave, one of the things that hit me and lots of things hit me really well, that was such a great trip. One of the things that hit me is if you go to regen or permaculture or whatever, you have suddenly made enemies with the wealthy people in your, your nearest town, because those are the people that represent caterpillar, fertilizers, pesticides, and all the things you're going to stop buying. You're basically going off grid or off the, off the plantation or whatever, off the reservation. I guess it's called terrible sayings. They're all lousy. You're basically breaking the local economy, which depends on everybody buying a whole bunch of that stuff and being in, you know, in debt and the bank and the bankers aren't going to love you because you're not going to need large loans for all that stuff, et cetera, et cetera. So, so super interesting. But it's an interesting moment too, because I've had a number of these conversations where, you know, ranchers and farmers are just getting crushed. So they're barely holding on to going bankrupt anyway. So it's, you know, it's kind of like, well, this kind of is going away one way or another. So I don't know, I'm not sure how that plays into the dynamics that you're talking about. It's not a healthy economy. Yeah, it's a mess. It's a, the food systems in trouble just from economics, never mind everything else is happening with it. Yeah. And the climate change component and just kind of the environmental degradation piece, it matters, right? I mean, we're talking huge damages that, you know, we should have been able to ameliorate. So two people who were in the crowd of visioneering were state senators from Wyoming and both looked like they'd been fed lots of beef for a long time. But they were really good. They were like, we need to save the small farmers. This is a crisis. And they were on staging, one of them was on stage in a vest and cowboy hat looking large and sort of in charge. And actually kind of a little teary eyed because, you know, I'm an eighth generation farmer and we're going away. We're an endangered species. Sorry, Jermaine. You're going to jump in. Was I probably with a smart ass comment. But I did actually spend the day Wednesday. And it was actually, that's a member of the email saying that I'm glad that you shifted the date of this all day Wednesday. It was at an IFTF meeting with the dairy farmers of America on a future of milk project. And it was very entry. Basically you had of the eight people who were there for were from the organization and for were actual hands on dairy farmers. Hands on dairy farm with like 2000 head of milk cows. But you know, it's a lot of hands on comparatively small farms compared to the the big industrial farms that produce 50, almost 60% of the milk that's consumed in the US comes from five large industrial farms, five large farms. Wow. Yeah. Wow. How many people in the room were lactose intolerant? You know, I don't know, but the two people who were leading the project were both hardcore vegan. And the dairy people knew that going in. So that was actually, that was an interesting experience. And I went to, I finished high school in Huntington Beach, California. And I used to ride my bike to work, to school, to work right past a dairy, which I am positive is no longer there. But you could tell, you didn't have to be looking around to tell when the dairy was getting close. Well, and that's a good example. You go if I don't, if you get a chance, I mean, to go to a regenerative dairy, but again, you can tell. I mean, they don't, they don't smell, you know, that it's just, they're just kind of amazing. So when you actually work with nature, so many problems go away, right? And I think the problem is that in people's heads, it's impossible to make enough food doing regenerative agriculture. That's basically the first thing anybody will say. Yeah, that would be cute. That would be really great. But we need to feed a lot of people. So we need the masses of food. And the only way to do that is through industrial production. And I think that's, that's like the first, the first barrier. And then that reminds me that one of the interesting people I met at visioneering is a guy who kind of was a very early quant on Wall Street, really good with numbers. He does risk mitigation now for corporations. He seems to be an executive whisperer who can take issues. They don't want to deal with like climate change, but can play out, Hey, look, here's the risks to your bottom line that I see. And he's completely credible to them. And he helps them create mitigation strategies that lie in the middle somewhere. And clever mitigation strategies. They didn't get that many examples, but you know, if you're going to build a wall to try to keep the ocean away, why don't you build an adaptable wall, an adjustable wall that goes up easily or something like that. I don't know where you're not investing here, but with an idea toward change, blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to talk to him some more because you know, trust and risk fit really well together. I liked him a lot. And I was, we were talking earlier about organizational change and cultural change and Kelly, you know, that's kind of where we started this conversation. And I was reminded about this guy and his approach with, with orgs, large orgs. Actually trust was one of the big themes of the conversation on Wednesday. You know, how, you know, how do you maintain trust with your consumers? Or actually they talk about it in a post-consumer, post-consumer language. Well, that's good. You know, how do you maintain trust with your, with the people who are, who are devouring your, who are consuming your product? Good fine. Did they have like trust milk question mark t-shirts? No. No, although I really have been trying to lay the groundwork for the idea to start spreading the rumor that the whole Hamilton thing emerged as a response to the old Aaron Burr got milk ad. I missed Aaron Burr saying got milk. No, no, it, it was a, an ad from like God, the early nineties, maybe even the 1980s of a historian that was listening to a radio program and for, for the $1,000, you know, here's our prize question. Who shot Alexander Hamilton? And this guy's like in this museum type, type room with like the bullet that killed Alexander Hamilton and all these Aaron Burr things, but he just took a bite of a peanut butter sandwich and his milk, glass of milk was empty. So it's calling. Now I get it. I totally missed that ad. I'm going to look it up on YouTube when we're done here. I'm sure you can find it because it was actually a really big thing for a while. And I, I, I'm 99.999. Continuing percent sure that Lynn Miranda, Lin-Manuel Miranda did not get inspired to do the Hamilton musical on the basis of that ad, but I just really want to start that rumor. I think that's a good bet than an interesting rumor. See, there's a, there's a, and then there's a, there's a stopping version of that rumor. You started and then somehow or another, there's a massive break in at the museum, that all the stuff is stolen and, you know, the people, I don't know, there's, you know, it's an innocent cute little rumor. And then, you know, it's all goes wrong. You know, it looks like a cute little pet. And then it gets claws and teeth. And then you feed it after midnight. Don't want to do that. Hey, I stuck a link into the, to the movie, the biggest little farm that you guys haven't had. It's on my list of things to see. It's a beautiful little, it's all regenerative, but it's a beautiful. Yeah. Well, then, you know, kind of mainstream movie about a farm. And I see that Kelly put in a link to the ad. Awesome. Thank you, Kelly. Clever girl. So I've been spending most of my time. I have to do a 30 minute presentation on climate. In two weeks. For the tenure forecast. And this is a group of people who are all, the audience members are all people who are very familiar with the basics. So this is, this is not going to be an intro to carbon or even a, let's make sure we all believe kind of thing. It's okay. You know what's happening. Now we'll sink through the repercussions. And I, while I don't directly address the term trust. I think it's underlies a lot of, a lot of this because the approach that I've taken is to look at. Not the political economic. I don't have any technical issues, but three themes of rage, fear and grief. And just the. I wrote, you know, when I wrote about the initial forecast in April, I put it in line around the, our descendants may not forgive us. And then only to hear Greta Thunberg say more or less the same thing. A couple of weeks ago. It's like, yeah, this is, this is, this is a real issue that. Some people are furious. And you may or may not be aware that both the Christ church shooter and the El Paso shooter. Right wing alt-right maniacs. Included a little bits about climate anger. Not being not as disbelievers, but as being angry that this is happening as part of their manifestos. Oh, really? Yeah. Hmm. Yes. And fear is, you know, a lot of this, a lot of that is talking about migration and refugees. You know, I think there is an argument to be made that Steve Bannon's plans around immigration. Had or have a climate aspect that he just knew. He knew his audience would not accept. I think he's pumping that. Yeah. He's pumping it now. And then grief. Grief is, you know, not just solo style. But just that recognition that we could have done something. We knew what we had to do and we didn't do it. And just, you know, watching, you know, I don't know if you saw that there was a funeral for a glacier in Iceland in August and a funeral for a glacier in Switzerland. Switzerland. We put a plaque just last month. We put a plaque. So one of the interesting things, and this seems, this is probably a different level than what you're talking about there, but one of the things that I, I heard in the last month or so that was new to me was, was trying, I keep trying to reframe it away from climate and away from carbon. They kind of feel like we're too reductionist there. And one of the storylines that I was hearing was kind of around a hydrology cycle. So in the, in the metaphor of soil as a sponge, but how what we're, you know, it's a system, a more systems oriented kind of thing. We just need to remove carbon and everything gets better. Right. We have to mean, we have to realize that we're in this complicated system and we're participating in it. So what is the, you know, what's the kind of the metaphor that you're using for that system. And I'm finding that the hydrology cycle kind of stuff to be pretty helpful. And again, because it has multiple implications too, right? It's not, you know, this idea that we're just going to take a bunch of carbon out of the air and make jewelry out of it or something like that. We're, we're, you know, we have to, we have to deal with these other kinds of byproducts and stuff. So whatever it's worth. Thank you. Part of the fear, the fierce portion of the, of the song and dance, very mournful song and dance is, are you going to wear a hood? Actually a plague doctor mask. Perfect. Is about what's called a desynchronization of first bloom. So first bloom, according, is the term that botanists use to describe the, the point in the seasonal cycle when plants first, you know, flowering plants first bloom. And that is based on temperature. And requires a presence of pollinators for those plants to reproduce properly. Right. The migration of pollinators is not based on temperature based on other cycles. And light levels, I think. And what we're seeing is a desynchronization of the point to first bloom and the arrival of pollinators such that plants are less and less reproducing properly. And pollinators aren't being fed properly. Now migratory birds are, are losing food. 76% of wildlife refuges in the United States are reporting a early seasonal, early first bloom. 50% are reporting an extremely early first bloom against historical records. And so that's kind of like mind blowing. Think about, do we have these systems that have, that evolve to be integrated? And to truth be told, will evolve to be integrated again. Right. They'll read that. I mean, in enough time, but that's longer than our lifespans. I think it happens when temperatures changed in a hilly area and suddenly mosquitoes are present 200 feet or 400 feet higher than they used to be. And that changes ecosystems up and down. Pine bark, pine bark beetles are, are, have now taken hold further north than they used to simply because they would not, they previously would get frozen out. They would get enough warm, warm weather. Right. In, you know, in the northern latitudes of the United States. And also at some point somewhere, I don't think I, I'll check my brain to see if it's in there, but I thought I either read an article or saw a video about a single field and how during the day at different stages, different flowers bloom open and appeal to different pollinators. So, so it was really interesting. You know, naturally choreographed sequence where, where birds would come in and see, and different insects can see different parts of the spectrum so that the plants that like them, that want them as their pollinator basically just like, Oh look, it's like neon to them in the field. And it was going through all of that and how, but how time of day played a role as well, which was super interesting. And of course, if nobody's around on the time of day, when you've got your sign out saying, you know, the lodge is open. Edad Joe's that's bad news. Yeah. Yeah. Edad Joe's Petunia. Exactly. And let me go back to your thesis for a second. This may not help your presentation, but it occurs to me that our conversation about the grid and battery storage is really parallel to fear and anger. And that what's happening is that we're storing up like all these, all this malfeasance, all this lack of, of working on stuff, all this overhang of crap that younger people are inheriting is like a battery. And it, you know, it need, it needs to be let out every now and then hence protests, but, you know, it could be turned to some good as well. If we sort of, if we figure out how to, how to connect these things up, but I think there's an energy metaphor here that, that my brain was sort of chewing on as you were talking. I'll mold that back. I'll mold that in my back brain. But, um, but yeah, the, this trilogy of rage, fear and grief, rage really applying to younger people, fear hitting hard in the political system, grief. That's me. And this has been an, an emotionally wrenching presentation development, but at the same time feels critical to be speaking in that language now. Um, we can't just talk about parts per million. You know, we, we can't just talk about, um, emissions, uh, um, something like you on the term I want new emissions levels and the lag between emissions and temperature. We have to be talking about how people will respond. And so talking to these mostly business people saying, your stakeholders are going to be depressed. You will have, you'll have large parts of your workforce who don't feel like they have a future. Or we'll feel complicit in taking away our future. PTSD, something akin to PTSD will be, you know, increasingly common. I think we're seeing, we're starting to see it now. Um, and, and you can't forget to maintain, you know, take care of your own emotions. You can't, you have to be able to put the mask on yourself before you put the mask on others. Um, and sorry, I was just going from the, from the, is there an account or is there an opposite take on it? And I don't know if it's true, but I have this image that like world war two, it's kind of a, the collective response led to almost a euphoria around engagement and meaning and mission. I mean, is there, is there a hypothetical, which is a positive version, which is this actually could be, could be unifying and could be energizing. And it certainly has lots of innovation potential. I don't know things like that. I'm just, I'm trying to go up with a happy side to this. Great question, David. Great question. Um, possibly the big, the most significant difference between something like a world war two and something like this is the time is the, the amount of time you have to act, the amount of time necessary for your act to result in something. Um, so you, you know, send the women into the factories. You, you know, give them in rifles and send them off to Europe. And, you know, that all takes place pretty quickly and you see the effects very quickly. Something called hysteresis. That's the term I was looking for before. Um, thermal ocean, thermal inertia, variety of other ways about the system is slow. Oh, we could stop putting any carbon into the atmosphere right this very second globally. And we would still see another couple of decades of warming, continued warming, not just, you know, and we'll see continued temperatures at this level for centuries. So it's, there isn't a fast response, fast visible response. So that's actually one of the, one of the political dilemmas. And I think I've brought this up here before that you will ask people to make major changes in their lives and they won't see any benefit from it. You know, at least not in the short term, but agriculture folks would argue that, you know, the goal is not again, carbon out of the air necessarily. The goal is increased photosynthesis. Right. So, and it turns out you can dramatically increase photosynthesis pretty rapidly. So, and I don't know what the, I don't know about this reverse climate change kind of format. That's, that seems questionable to me, but I think we could, I mean, you know, and NASA just had some research recently talked about the world is greening, right? Because of mostly China and India. But I do think that again, we've been looking at this as a technical problem from the industrial side. And I feel like we're missing a big chunk of the store. So, and, and, and I got to drop off. This is so much fun. I really enjoyed it. Fun? I'm sorry. And I would love to have coffee again. So I don't know, you know, if you get really depressed and want to get together and have coffee all the time. That's actually one of the things that my first slide in the grief section is, is a picture of a cup of coffee because it turns out coffee. Coffee beans are extremely fragile. It's a bummer. You have to drop off because I wanted you to riff more on what you just said, Dave. But yeah. I got to drop everybody here. Yeah. No, thanks for doing this. It was really fun. Go ahead. No, it's just, I, you remember world changing, Jerry. You remember, I spent years and years writing about solutions, things we can do to fix this problem. And the voice in the forest. Well, I don't know. I mean, first you had, you had and have a following. Second, have you considered like turning the volume to 11 or something like that? I mean, there are, there are YouTube celebrities, there are YouTubers who kind of just amp things up and suddenly go from 100,000 views to a million views. And you've got like the stentorian voice that's perfect for this. You're really good on cam on stage, whatever, whatever. And you have a shit ton of things you could say extemporaneously without preparing scripts. You could just go. You could have people on. You could rake them over the coals. You could praise them and hug them. You could tell fart jokes, exactly. I mean, I mean, really, if you wanted to just crank the volume up, I think you might actually break through. And all of that to say, got a toonberg is broken through and we're still not doing anything big. So maybe that wouldn't help so much. But, but, but that jaded view aside, it might actually help. I wish that you could be right. Have you tried? How do you know I'm wrong? Trust me. No. I have tried in different ways at different times, never to any kind of full military campaign level. I'm also conscious of the fact that I'm another old white guy and it's really time for old white guys to sit down and shut up around a lot of this shit. You could be the old white guy who brings everybody else, all the women and people of color on the issue in as guests and goes, you, you, you talk, you talk, you talk. But, but also people are still listening to old white guys, especially other old white guys, which I really feel like so appreciative of the old white guys who are standing up and saying these things, right? Because there's a, even still there's a, what's the word when you have the, I'm going to listen to the other old white guy. I can't remember the word. Credibility? No. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing, right? Like, oh, here's someone who looks like us saying these words that we don't want to hear or understand. And so I don't think that is, I think that's a point in your corner. And you've just made it slightly better to be an old white guy today for weeks. I thank you Kelly. I just have to say, I just have to say is these days that there are a few days when it's really a great thing to be that. I can't tell you how much I appreciate being surrounded by old white guys who are saying all the right words, right? Because the executive summit, I was thrilled. There were two things that happened. One, we were gender balanced in the room, 27 people and we were gender balanced, which we often are at consortium events. Because Craig likes to say that women understand this better than men, which I, is another thing that I love because that kind of makes me a little bit crazy in terms of, assigning gender roles that way. But the other thing that happened was there were, and all of the men in the room are great advocates for equality and for, like all of these things that we are sort of working toward. And one of them who used to make me crazy because he felt like such a sort of a stick in the mud patriarch has changed his language to talk about other executives as being well, when he or she gets into that position, you know, like had changed the way he was talking about pronouns to include he or she, as opposed to just the default he, and I couldn't believe how much that made a difference for me, right? Like I couldn't believe how much I noticed it and I couldn't believe how much I appreciated it because I don't, my tendency is to just not, I don't think that I think about stuff like that, right? I know we default the default gender's male and that's fine and blah, blah, blah blah blah. But I didn't think I would have this particular guy really, he seemed to have made a shift in the last probably five years. And it seemed to be unconscious at this point, right? He wasn't performing His integrity. He's internalized it and it was, It was hugely gratifying, right. Just, it was very interesting. So it's funny because that, that makes you think of something that I read a while ago that really struck me and then visible announcement in things like email and your Twitter bio and such of what pronouns you use. And, okay, a few people are going to look at me and wonder, does this person use a he or a she or maybe a they? But by putting it on in my Twitter bio, what I'm doing is I'm making it visible so that people who do fear these, you know, have fears around this can see that this is a person who listens. This is a person who's paying attention. You know, and, you know, I had, I had been kind of, I had felt kind of a pushback against, oh God, it seems really silly to be putting he, she, you know, whatever, you know, he, him on as my signature file in an email. But now I get it. I get why having that visible matters. As far as the climate stuff is concerned, it's really hard for me not to think it's too, that it's already too late. And I'll, you know, being completely honest with you. I look at the stuff, I mean, you, you know that I, my work, my life is all about looking at how big systems intertwine. And I look at a big system, the big systems around climate and around trade and around energy and around politics and tribalism and nationalism. And there are some improvements. I think Mez is, is absolutely right with regards to energy and he's incredibly optimistic. And I wish I could be that optimistic. But there are just so many pieces that aren't working well in ways that aren't just nonproductive, they're counterproductive. So when you say what you just said, I do a little bit of mental logic and extrapolate to mean that you think it's an extinction level event, not that you think things are so shitty, we can't reverse them, but that we're probably all going to die because of this because, because if not, you'd be like, well, things are going to get really crappy, but we need to get busy to protect these people and those people and those people in this way and change this policy, there would be a lot to do because there's going to be trauma. So I'm interpreting what you just said as we are well and royally fucked. No, I appreciate you saying that because that's not exactly what I mean. I do mean more along the lines of we are looking at centuries, decades, probably centuries of misery for most people on the planet. But misery mitigation is a busy, is a busy thing. There's, there's your new career when, when young people ask you what career should I go into misery mitigation? Totally. I'm a misery mitigator. You are, Jerry. Oh God, that just sounds awful. But by the way, April just landed in Changi Airport. She's flying home from Kuala Lumpur. She has a long layover in Changi, which is now like the world's most like crazy, interesting airport. They've done all kinds of cool stuff. So she's going to totally enjoy that because who loves airports, April loves airports. And then she has like long flights and economy class to get home. She sends her love. I said, do you want to jump on the call? And she said, I got, I got stuff. I got to say hello and tell her not to say anything about Winnie the Pooh. Yeah. Or she may not make her next flight, but it's Singapore. Do they? Oh, no, sing. Okay. It's not in Shenzhen. No, that'd be very different. And then a small second thing, as you, if you want to really dramatize your presentation and you don't usually use background music, but I highly recommend Barbers Adagio for Strings, which is the kind of the dirge they played at Kennedy's. When Kennedy was killed, they put this on the radio. It's a, it's a, and people understand this as kind of beautiful dirge music. And it also, there's a crescendo in it. So at some point, at some point, the music rises, rises, rises, rises, rises, peaks, and you could build your whole narrative arc to peek with the music. It would be quite a stunning thing. I, that would be interesting to experiment with. Or maybe, or maybe do the speech and then remix it, refactor it, and do a shoot a video with music as background. So what I have done for this, for the presentation, and I have to get back to working on it here today, is an interstitial between every section of pictures of my cats. That, you know, this is, this is how I cope. And I know that this, this talk is going to be rough for some people. So I'm offering up pictures of my kitties. Along, you know, here and there along the way. I mean, it, it's kind of silly, but at the same time, I, it just, I don't, I don't like feeling like this. I honestly don't. It may seem like I do, but I don't. I would really much rather, you know how much I want to be wrong. I would, I desperately want to be absolutely 100% wrong about all of this. I would be so happy, utterly happy if to be wrong. I'm glad I don't have kids. The thing I, the thing I really like about this, I'm glad I don't have kids. The thing I, I love about Thunberg, Thunberg and the responses to her. And there's a whole bunch of far righties that are freaking out about her in interesting ways. But the things I like are sort of people saying, hey, hey, look, here's an angry young woman who doesn't feel like she needs to smile for anybody. Doesn't feel she needs to kowtow to anybody. Doesn't feel anybody else, anybody's program. She needs to, she needs to be careful about what she endorses and whom now because she's so central that that's going to cause a whole bunch of sort of contagious backlash, but, but, but she's in these environments where she's angry and is, and this is like appropriate anger. And she's manifesting it really well. And that makes me happy too. I love that clip of her watching as Trump walks through the hall. Did you see the, did you see the little gift that somebody made of it, which is like, they've got the label. Earth and asteroid on them, like, like Trump says earth and then asteroid is on, on Greta. I haven't seen that one though. But I did, did it do a screen grab of this, that look of pure hatred on her face as, you know, for my talk. I guess I'm talking like Dana Carvey than a hitting person there, but still. But anyway, hey, it's Friday. It's Friday. I was worried, but now I'm not. And I honestly, honestly, I really apologize because I do this every damn time and I'm sick of it. I'm probably as sick of it as you guys are. And I'm, I am, I'm sorry. Don't be sorry. You're chewing on one of the world's great issues and you're doing so in, with whole heart. And you think through these things very beautifully and we are, I am happy to be of help if we can be to help you think them through to help you, whatever, whatever. And, and really, we, we love you. If there's no, don't be sorry. No, sorry. Happy to witness it, Jim. I'm very happy to be part of your journey. Thank you. So what are you up to, Beau? Philosophy. Peloponnesian war. You know, that's not the way most people answer that question. I've been, so I've been reading this really great book. Um, Modernity and Plato. And, uh, It has a lot of markers in it. Oh dude. All right. So, um, and I came across this fantastic paragraph where philosophy explains bigotry. Can I read it? Yeah, please. Please do. Opinion is superior to perception because it knows what it has before itself. In contrast to rational thought, however, Opinion cannot recognize this function in its specific possibilities purely for itself. I wish Jamaican read this to me. It knows that this is a scissor, a house, et cetera, and therefore easily believes that everything that is a scissor or house must have the identical visible properties. That is why opinion considered purely for itself has a marked tendency to be intolerant towards everything that is foreign or new to it. Hmm. The foreignness or newness of a thing or the impression of absolute foreignness or newness is not due to the conceptual content of the specific object, but rather due to the different way in which this object realizes a universal and that's familiar content, blah, blah, blah, but wow, isn't that something? Hmm. And it totally, I could go further into it. Wow. I love philosophy. And it was forgotten by a guy named Arbogast. Arbogast is a German. He's a, yeah. So this whole group has been about, um, how modernity must took Plato and Aristotle and oversimplified them, turned them into cartoons. And then how we came to be in a relativistic time where you know, it's all relativism. So when it's relative, by the way, there's no shared truth anymore. And this explains also the deterioration or our politics. It explains why we don't have any, there's no shared truth anymore. Climate, you name it, right? I mean, and so I was reading this and it's just like, okay, well, why don't I go check the history about this? Well, uh, Plato and Aristotle. Okay, what happened? Well, the Peloponnesian war, uh, a vast huge, you know, empire, Athens, uh, peaks and then starts to go into decline and starts pushing people around in colonies and, and, um, and God dies, the gods are dead. Uh, it just so eerily our own time because Plato and Aristotle were, were, Sophistry had happened too. So, you know, everybody got cynical. Everybody just became every man for himself and woman for himself, you know, just became all that. And, um, so they wanted to reclaim the truth. Both Plato and Aristotle were obsessed about how can we have like talk, have a shared discourse again? How can we agree on what's true and what's real? And that was like their driving goals. Uh, so I'm reading this and it's just like, oh my God, it looks just like our time. I mean, an ancient empire in decline, Athens, America, huge long war, Peloponnesian war. How long many years have we been in war? Anyways, the parallels. I'm just reading this going a history certainly does rhyme. The, uh, the history of the, uh, that the Eucydides book on the history of the Peloponnesian war is actually considered to be standard reading in political science. Had to read that in my core course at Irvine and didn't actually finish it. I think I thought it through it. Unfortunately, I wasn't into it back then. Just watch 300. It's more or less the same thing. Yeah. Yeah So so so bow at some point over some beers I want to have this conversation because I have a very contrarian Opinion about everything you just said So to me Plato Socrates Aristotle are the start of the fuck up of the world that And and for example, I was at an interesting little conference seven eight ten years ago And Richard Foster dick Foster from the McKinsey guy who wrote about S curves He got up and he spoke and you could tell as he was prepping to speak and his his introduction This was like his valedictory speech. He had thought really hard about this And it was all about human thought and all that and he starts with Plato Aristotle and I immediately go you asshole because There was thinking way before them if you read the alphabet versus the goddess by Leonard Schlein and a bunch of other stuff Indigenous ways of knowing way before were to my mind much healthier than what Plato and Aristotle do to us and We why are Plato and Aristotle not indigenous ways of knowing? They're absolutely not They're busy building these philosophical foundational stones that everybody else is going to lay building blocks on top of that Don't really accord in many ways with indigenous cosmologies Yeah, and I and I Haven't thought that question through so I'm going to go dig a bit and look at it But they do not represent whatsoever Indigenous ways of knowing they represent some wholesale way of philosophizing our existence on earth and building sort of an edifice around that and so we have logic and structures on top of this that We think is how civilization is supposed to work to me. It's not Okay, so so I put in here So you said we had so close to back then it was a terrible thing So I bet everybody gets a different thing from the books then in the art of motorcycle maintenance probably the thing I got from Zen was oh What if the Sophists were right and what if they got written into history as the assholes who could take anybody's position? Because because basically this is the battle that he's saying is that Plato and Aristotle against the Sophists back in the day And so it'll never subtle wins So they're the heroes and we base all of our civilization on them to me the Sophists might have been the heroes And if you start looking up sophistry, it's different from what you think it is just like What's the word We're gonna fall into So no no anarchy just like the word anarchy is the demonization of a whole bunch of really really good ideas like the anarchists a Lot of the anarchists had fabulous ideas, but they got branded as anarchists Anarchy got branded as this thing that's gonna take us down the shithole So we need these forms of political social and economic control which we bought into because otherwise anarchy So to me the narrative is what if the other side at one? I'm I think we're basing civilization on the wrong sets of thinking Well right now. We're doing sophistry very well Well, depends what you mean by sophistry Depends what you mean by sophistry if you mean double time. See, I don't think sophistry is double-speak or Flying or whatever is a fruitful conversation And I have a great guy for us that bring along to do it too I'd love that and and I've never taken a philosophy class in my life I'm an amateur on this you you're like you you've read so much more than I have on all this But but my whole my whole view of the world Is what I just said And and in the talks I just gave I just gave similar talks in two different venues to two completely different audiences But in the middle of it now and I can show this to you guys on the next call Or we can build a separate call around it, but I have my story My story of trust is basically that long ago around the world We used to know how to live in community on the commons And we got that and those words community and commons in whatever dialect or whatever the local way of expressing was where Everybody knew that's how we stayed alive Then we broke that worldwide mostly in the colonial era We went around the Catholic Church went around and stamped this out of everybody on purpose with great force and Said you can't wear your native clothes. You can't speak your native tongue We're going to dress you up and make you Catholic etc etc, then we get them You know mercantilism and we get industrialism then we get consumerism all of which repeat this abuse and destroy cultures around the world And now we are naively rediscovering Some of the wisdom we had way back when about how to take care of troublemakers in the tribe How to take care of your ground and and our knowledge about how to take care of our comments was very hard one Because first we killed off all the megafauna so wherever humans touch a continent the megafauna go away the fossil record just no more No more megafauna, but then over time a bunch of cultures disappear But a bunch of them thrive and so for example and on a couple recent calls I mentioned Some books and videos I've seen on how in Australia and when the first fleet shows up And when the Europeans show up on the shores of Australia and come ashore If you read their journals in handwriting it says I can't believe it the woods here when you when you ride your horse Through are open. It's like a gentleman's garden. You can reach up and there's an apple you look down and there's a gourd It's amazing how this naturally showed up and they they do not attribute any of this to the wisdom of the locals Who they think are lazy and stupid like look how lazy this guy is pulling fish out of the river well For 30,000 years he's been going to the same weir that his ancestors created and when he knows the fisher about to run He blocks the bottom of the weir fish pile up inside the weir. He goes and he's like meh got some protein for a while He's really smart because they're watching the environment planting things and there's a ring around Australia That was fertile except then the first week comes and the same thing happens to the Native Americans guns, germs and seal Too far into the Rousseau thing that everything was wonderful for a hundred You can have Rousseau and you can dunk them in the river hate Rousseau And and and so but everybody brings up Rousseau. This is not the noble Why is Kelly laughing? It's Kelly laughing like what kind of conversation have I landed into Rousseau is like the first defense against this argument It's like no no we can't go look at the noble savage that that never happened It doesn't work and i'm like bullshit people we used to know how to live In community on the commons and that really mattered to us And we understood that if we broke those things we we we died And so we're having a large scale version of that right now so to me Modernity and Play-Doh, I don't know bow and I want to have that conversation in depth And I think we should record it and see what we can do with it just because I think it's really super super interesting So Let's play with that. I'm gonna insist there'll be one other guy there with Soundscreen and I'm gonna bring a second two and you get to choose the weapons I say I say shotgun microphones just because it sounds good all right We have a showdown We express lovely dweeb, aren't we? So so I think what's funny is what we've gotten to here accidentally At the end of our call is something we all care about a lot And that we've been digging on and chewing on personally a lot And I the number of bookmarks and underlines and comments in your book says how much you care about this particular topic And how the the book you're reading illustrated for you that this moment is parallel to what they're saying and no no no Like and I understood that and I heard that and it's just that it conflicted with my view of how history works And and who said what to whom but I love that Right, so so like We care I say let's go on this. Let's The only thing we can lose is our own ignorance and I'm determined to get rid of as much of my ignorance as possible before I die Excellent. Love that. Love that Um, so we're right at the end of our normal call time. Jermaine's got to actually go create a speech Any last words from anybody on this and maybe what we'll do is set up either a rec call or maybe I'll do an inside Jerry's brain call Around this or maybe we sit down in a coffee shop and set up a camera We'll figure out what to do about this bow, but whatever you're comfortable with. Maybe you're not comfortable with recording it Um, it would be useful to record it. I think it'd be great to yeah, I'd love to Um, and we we should take our time with it sometime. Maybe it's a two or three conversation thing. I don't know Um, any last any last words from anybody on this call? Well since Kelly's been laughing so much. I want to hear Oh Yay, I call these phone calls my filling the well call because I there's a bunch of yammering that happens in my world That's all very specific to my world. And so I love coming to these calls because it's so many different perspectives on So many different things and so I'm so grateful to be here and have the well filled Now I get to go make connections with other things Yay, thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I love that Oh and um back to our battery thing one thing just came into my head too bad Susan wasn't on the call because Susan lives in a house that is off the grid. It's basically three miles downhill off of skyline in the valley They've had battery trouble forever They have a huge bank of batteries in the backyard and the and the diesel generator And basically they they charge up the batteries at the generator. They're off grid And so they've been dealing with for ages and the batteries last I heard were all getting old and not recharging properly, etc So I don't know if they've bought a tesla battery bank or what's happened But she's been living the bad the off-grid battery life for a long time. So back to our regular schedule program. Any other thoughts Um My piece on the apocalypse for the bolstern atomic scientists Uh is is going is going to print. So I will have a link when it's available. I'll send that Because of course Apocalypse Doom Lucky to me big luck to me. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I say that with love I know I know you do sherry. Where are you doom with a smile? I always do. Yeah, and that makes people worry. You always doom. I mean do Just kidding Sweet then let's let's Let's wrap this call and uh And see what we would do with all this thing Nice work jaman. That was very video-affecting All right, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye