 This is the Rex check-in call for February 2019. Today is Wednesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine's Day, which is St. Valentine was apparently not a big romantic. It was not, I don't know, the whole history of Valentine's Day is itself one of those twisty stories that I don't really know. But we are here just to check in to see what sort of rexie things are happening in our lives. Peter is in Brussels and was just reporting in about some work he's doing with Gerard Leonhard around digital ethics. And Gerard apparently has a new book coming out. Is the book done, Peter? The book is done. It was published in 2016. Oh, okay. So the book has been done for a while. Yeah, it's technology versus human. I think something along those lines. Excellent. Yeah, that gets your maze dander up. The future of content, the future of music, technology. I don't think I have, technology versus humanity, the coming clash between man and machine. Very interesting. Let me just do it. That's kind of an unfair fight. Man and machine? Yeah, because as tough as machines look, you can always call the plug. Yeah, exactly. That's true. And then it depends on the task you're choosing. You can choose to like pick up overriding tomatoes and see who wins. So here's Gerard. I've just added digital ethics. I met him at an event at Swissnex in 2012. That's his Twitter account here, some of his books. Was that the one of the, informate or data is the new oil? I don't know. It's not him. It's not him who's going to that phrase, I'm sure. Oh, you know what? You know what's really weird to me? What just happened? You were at that same event. Yes, I was. Yes, I was. Which is why I asked. As was Stoboyd. So I don't remember any of the content of that event. You apparently do. Well, I remember two things about it. One is that I'm actually pretty sure it was Gerard had pulled an image that I created off the net to use in one of his slides without any recognition or anyone knowing that, without him knowing that it was mine or anything like that. It was fine. It was just amusing. And the other is that the, I've actually been pretty fond of the argument that I made for that talk is about polluting the information stream as a way of protecting privacy. So steganography kind of. Yeah, kind of basically adding noise to the signal. Right. As a way of protecting privacy. If you can't stop people from knowing things about you but you want them to not be certain about what they know about you, make sure there are a lot of lies out there about you. Right, right. Just to show that I've been anal for a while, apparently I just searched data is the new oil and I came back to another Swissnext event in December, in January, March, April of 2012 called data is the new oil, which might in fact be the one you're thinking about. Yes. And so what I should do then is connect this to, and did you speak at this one? Did I? Yes. Well, that was the one that was not the one that we were, I always speak spoken for Swissnext once. Interesting. So, I had my knowledge. So that's 2012. The other Swissnext is, oh, shoot, I've got the same event in twice because I'm pretty sure that there shouldn't be any reason why I went to two things that Swissnext the same month. Makes sense. Right. And from privacy to publicity was Stowe Boyd's talk. How do you remember this? I don't know. I don't drink enough. That's great. So once, you know who Neil Stevenson is, right? The science fiction author. Again, I got to meet Neil at an event long ago, a small workshop that Chris Meyer put on. And then many years later, I went to a book talk he gave at Telegraph Books in Berkeley and I got there late, I sat way in the back and I asked the second question. And before he answers my question, he says, do you still have the world's largest brain? And I'm like, how the hell does he remember? Because I was already using the brain. I'd obviously shown it to him and this has been years ago. And I'm like, how do you remember that? And he said, I have a brain like a steel lint trap that he remembers everything. It's a little bit of a problem because he doesn't forget things, but it makes it easy to understand how he can do complicated plots like the Baroque cycle with lots of, it's very Tolstoyevian, lots of characters coming in and out of lots of history and it all kind of ties down, right? All the pieces come in, but it was really cool. It was just a neat thing to have them out of nowhere, pop up that way. I have a mind like a steel chain link fence. I can capture some things that a lot of stuff gets through anyway. So all we have to do is remain small enough? To avoid my recognition, yes. To elude capture? Yes, and I won't remember you. We'll just like be really tiny and tiny and diamond shaped, rhomboid. What else is anybody doing that's the rexie? Oh, wait, I have a poem I'd like to read. So, man, I'm breaking all protocol here. Let me read the poem that I picked out which is an homage to Mary Oliver who just passed a poem by Mary Oliver and is titled, Breakage. I go down to the edge of the sea, how everything shines in the morning light, the cusp of the welk, the broken cupboard of the clam, the opened blue mussels, moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. It's like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words. First, you figure out what each one means by itself, the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight. Then you begin slowly to read the whole story. Here's the link to the poem. Breakage by Mary Oliver. It overlaps with something that I've read and then thought about in the past. Littoral zones, basically coastlines, are at least according to some, you know, ecoscientists and paleontologists, one of the key places where evolution happens. Interstitial zones where evolution happens, where stuff gets broken and remade. And so just the poem there just put me in mind of thinking about, you know, the breaking isn't, breakage isn't the destruction of things. It's the opportunity for recombination. Totally agree. In fact, I used the analogy of estuaries and I'm not sure where estuaries and littoral zones are really different. The littoral is the whole coast and the estuary is where saltwater meets fresh. So I think the estuary needs a river. Right? I think that's right. The estuary needs a river meeting saltwater, meeting an ocean where the littoral zone is in fact the entire coastline. And so I really like using the metaphor of an estuary because estuaries are zones of variety, fertility, and change and you get all kinds of cool new life forms. You get nutrient changes, you get gradients. You get critters that can live some of their life in saltwater and some of their life in fresh. You get all those funky things that don't happen in other spaces. Is that a box? You're muted again. Yes, Susan. We wanna take you literally. Thank you. It's your boxes. Figurative deposits. Quite a lot. But I wanna show you a piece of art. It's gonna take me a second here. This is a digital artist. I think he's still in Barcelona. Used to be good friends of my former partner and I. Anyway, he lived on the Thames and he put out in the Thames. So he thought what was littoral was the tide zone, okay? And he laid out film, film, film, film for the whole way, for a distance, okay, of the tide. One tide's worth. He laid film out one tide's worth of all the stuff, the detritus, the little moves, the whatever for I forget how many feet it was for the one tide and then he created it. And so this book. Which unfolds, does the book keep unfolding that long? Yeah, it goes on. Wow. Very cool. Uh-oh, uh-oh. Uh-oh. Not, this is awkward, just a second. Yes, it goes on approximately like this. Wow, wow. Holy beans, that is awesome. Do you remember his name? Huh? Do you remember his name? Yes. Adam Lowe. L-O-W-E? Yeah. Anyway, I think this is the only piece I have left. I'm hit as Brian having taken a lot of them, but he's the sort of person here in terms of digital art would have, would take all the printers he could get. This is a number of years ago now, early 2000s, late 90s, and have them print the color gray. Uh-huh. Okay, and then blew it up, you know, so that you'd see how differently gray was represented by all these different printers. That's super cool. And he's gone on to do really wonderful, amazing stuff, but he was into printing 3D before 3D printing was available, et cetera. I'll just shut up on that. But yes, this is a really wonderful concept. I live there myself. I work there, which is maybe, yeah, that's enough. No, it's lovely. One of the 4,000 odd startups that came by to pitch me when I was doing the tech analyst dance had a product whose name is kicking right now, but it was basically a light sensor, a color sensor, and it looked like an old Apple digital camera, and you would set it down on the object whose light you wanted to measure, and it would take a reading, and then they had software, and the software was extremely cool, because the software would let you, for example, let's pretend you want to print a menu that's gonna look right under candlelight. So they could simulate what the thing you were looking at here in fluorescence was going to look like under candlelight, and they could adapt and adjust, and then I think the software was clever enough to back up into different print technologies or something like that. I'm not sure it could do that, because that would take a really big deep archive to figure out how different colors would render onto paper under certain lighting conditions, but that was their general thesis, and I loved it. It was like, because then you could take a picture of your screen, you could see how the color showed up on screen, compared to what it actually looked like in the room, et cetera, and it just disappeared. I saw them once, the item vanished from view after that. I think a couple of years later, I tried to search for it on Google and didn't find anything. There was no detritus, no flotsam left of their wreckage, which is sad because things like that, which takes me to another startup that came through that probably got classified after our briefing. They had a technology where they had a display technology where the display was also a camera, meaning instead of having a camera in the bezel right here, imagine that the display was done with a whole bunch of fiber optics laying in parallel to each other that were notched, and the notches were pixels coming out, so you would project light through one side and bend it the right way and color it the right way so that the light would project out, but then the notches on the other side of the imaginary fiber optics were actually taking in light. So the entire screen, so it eliminated parallax, so right now you can tell that I'm not looking at the camera, right now you can tell I'm looking at the camera. In this case, the whole screen would be a camera, and their detection algorithms were only good enough if I remember that they could do fuzzy black and white because they still needed to do a whole bunch of work to actually converge an image, get color, do whatever, I don't know what, but it was a brilliant idea that would basically turn any screen into a camera, like the whole thing, which is probably why I think it disappeared from view because I'm pretty sure it got classified, and who knows whether these things are out there, but it was super interesting. Any other rex-y goings on? Peter, do you wanna talk a little bit about what's in your brain these days? Yeah, I still do do the Academy. I've done a couple of works that have something to do with labyrinths, there's one behind me, by the way. The circle, it's on the side. Like it looks like a regular walking labyrinth that you would find at a monastery or wherever, yeah. And so then I found this book. So I learned that there's a difference between a maze and a labyrinth. Yeah, that makes total sense. One of the crazy things that's in the planning, it's, so I have many, many different labyrinths that I've made, but I'm going to make a lance art thing with my uncle Hubert. My uncle Hubert has a big farm, and so with the tractor, we are going to make a huge one of 140 meters in diameter. Well, you have a minotaur in the center. Here's the map, the scale design for what it is. So every path is about four meters wide, and in between the paths, there is one meter. So somebody is going to record it with a drone and looking from the top. And we are going to do it in the snow when it snows. Oh, okay. So it's ephemeral. So once it's... It's so very, very shining-like. I remember the Stephen King's version of the shining. Did I say? Yeah, I think it was a maze, not technically a maze, not a labyrinth, but... Yeah, it's in this, and the labyrinth, that labyrinth is also mentioned in this book. And then these days I'm doing birds. So I don't know if you want to see some. Sure, please. Where are my birds? And I'm just thinking about drones and all that. A different way of doing the labyrinth in the snow would be to 2D print it from a drone. Basically find something that will either mark or melt the snow wherever you drop it. And then make the pattern that way. Okay, I'm good. How can I share my screen? Maybe something... a little bit like people do images in latte foam now. There should be a button in this very bottom of the window that says share with a box. Yes, that's one. Share, share, share, optimize full screen. There should be another button that says sunny. Share completely sun. Basic whiteboard. Thanks for checking. Okay, so... Do you remember the Fat Man Detective skit they had? They would put on fat suits and bounce against each other. It was really dumb. Very vaguely. I don't recall actually watching the show much. What? All right. You have a very dark screen. Oh, there we go. There we go. Oh, beautiful. Oh, yeah. By the way, what you see underneath it is number five in the works. So that's not a good example of the newsletter I mentioned before. So this thing wants to do what I want to do so slow. So yesterday we released number four, as it opens. Of the newsletter? That's of the newsletter, yeah. So we are just getting started with it. I don't know why it takes so long. It was a very deep and dense newsletter. I didn't click. I didn't click. Oh, or you didn't click. I mean, it could be other way. Yeah, so there is some introduction. And then we have some highlights with Mordorzov and Ryshkov and some things that have to do with justice and law and the whole Facebook saga and China. And then some things about technology, some things about industry, some of organizations that pop up disturbing things, snippets, podcasts, Smiley, a tinder for dogs. It exists, really. So that's the... Oh, sorry. Yes? Go ahead, Susan. What kind of bird is it? Ah, I'm going back to the birds. I'm looking at them. Sorry. The birds have not left our screen. Yeah, we're still seeing birds. I don't know what birds it are. But if you... But I will show how it starts. These are the early ones. Just go through. They look sort of like pigeons. Yeah, it could be pigeons. And then... So, oh, little tryouts, tryouts, oh, tryouts. And then try different colors. But in the end, I decided to keep it super simple. And now I'm still doing some tryouts. Bore you with this. So then I have tried out different surfaces, different types of canvas with coating, no coating with different backgrounds. I can let them fly in formation, as you can see. And it becomes super simple, like just some touches, tick, tick, tick, tick. Little bit darker, tack. And it's done. Mm-hmm, nice. I think... The idea is to create a big one with a whole swarm of birds. But I must first internalize the shape of the bird in different positions, like this way, or that way, or that way. And, Peter, I have a feeling that when you screen shared, you screen shared an app window, not your whole desktop, so that we can't see the newsletter because it's not shared to us. If you want to close, stop sharing and reshare, we will then probably be able to see the newsletter. Stop share, whiteboard. Oh, good to see you. Hola. Kitas, senor Berdet. Advanced, portion of the screen. You're muted. Just desktop, or it's that simple. Yeah, desktop. There, now we see the whole thing. Okay. It's huge. You have a gigantic desktop, Peter. Yeah, thanks. This was the newsletter, sorry. So, we tried to make it a little bit polished. And Gert, he's, I mean, he's really a professional. He has a filmmaker in his team and a graphics people in his team. And now we are pulling together all sorts of videos and we are cutting video snippets off. For example, Tim Cook said privacy is human rights. So those little snippets, and he is using them in his presentation. This is his site. It's our next. It's also brand new sites. Like it went live two days ago. And there you can find all sorts of video recordings, graphics, everything is in put into the comments. So you can grab it and use it with that solution. Like over here, videos, blog. There was a lot there. Cool. So I'm painting. There is another thing coming up. You remember, I'm going to stop the share here. Yeah, thanks. You remember Peter Hinson? The name's familiar. Peter Hinson. He is running a company here in Belgium called NexWorks N-E-X-X-W-O-R-K-S, NexWorks. Okay. So they do all sort of things like innovation tours, innovation boot camps and so on and so forth. So I'm going to work for them as an explorer in residence. Cool. Being on the next speaker list, but I'm also going to create a new program for them, which is based on my previous work. So it's going to be some sort of retreat format. Where I'm doing the sort of things I did with Enotripe. So highly immersive experiences, bringing in artists and some anchored persons. And so it's like a week retreats in a very nice location for about 15 people. Nice. Europe has this set of very nice locations. It's quite amazing. Oh, yeah, everywhere on that location. Like here in the Americas and the new world, we think something that's 150 years old is old. Really? Seriously? Got to be kidding. Yeah. The classic cliche in America, a hundred years as old in Europe, a hundred miles is a long way away. Then a hundred miles is what kind of measurement is that? And then something that's not yet completely signed off, but I'm quite confident it's going to happen. So the person that replaced me to do Enotripe at Cybos, that person also left. So I'm in conversations with them now to help them out as a freelancer, as a contractor, with this year's edition, which will be in London in September. But for me, the interesting thing is that, I mean, they're covered as far as Enotripe is concerned, but this is for the main customers. So the main part of the conference, they want to inject some immersive learning type of setup. So I'm discussing with them a special stage, which if I get what I have asked for, which looked like a sort of television studio, so half open, half closed, but with all sort of screens and immersive experiences and alive artists and that sort of things. And obviously they also asked that, obviously, they asked me also to come up with names for speakers. I know there are a lot of good people here in this group. And so one of the themes, Jerry, that they are considering is trust. What a good coincidence. One of my priorities right now is to get more speeches because I'm not getting asked to speak enough and that sounds fabulous. Yeah, and put me on your list of options as well, if you don't mind. Oh, so one of the things came is, thank you also for sharing that first write up of Bunny. So what I have positioned in my proposal is that on the special stage that I mentioned, I want content that is also put into context. And so what is the context? Part of the context is layoffs. It's one of the context. It's automation, it's AI, it's, but it's also, Ruka is, I mean, that was 40 years ago almost. Right. I mean, it was invented 40 years ago as I read from your paper. So now it's Bunny. So what does that mean? So it's not about surprising them, but I usually say what I'm doing these days, I'm creating interventions and provocations that create alertness and aliveness. So it's been sparks in the brain, in the University of Florida for months. Cool. Excellent. Also, Peter, remember that you had me do the brain behind a panel at Seabose? Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm trying to do more of that as well. And trying to figure out, and Kevin Kelly just wrote a piece about augmented reality, how he thinks it's the next big platform. I'm not sure I buy the argument about AR, but I would love to be in immersive environments with the brain, sort of basically mapping what you see, commenting, basically context commentary or something like that about some other activity that's going on. So I can both play improv host and reflect on things, but I'm really interested in doing the meta, like color commentary on somebody else's topic, the thing that they really care about and giving a different point of view on it or elaborating what they're saying with background info, the whole thing. I want to do a lot of that somehow and I can't figure out quite how to get the attention to do that. You want to be the pop-up video? That's it. I want to be the pop-up, the pop-up brainio. Exactly. If you remember that show from the 90s or early 2000s. Yep. And then the last thing, not taking too much space here, it's something called time capsules. Time capsules. It's like a mix of a performance and a documentary. So something large like that. And I'm doing this together with my cousin. His first name is Joost and his last name is the same as mine. Because his father married the sister of my father. And they're twins. It's complicated. Yes, it's complicated. My English is not good enough to explain. So, but he is the main curator, senior curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. The theme of fine arts is the Museum in Brussels where you have Madrid and Bruegel and everything. And so his core expertise is on pre-rubens, more specifically on York dance and Anthony Van Dijk. So he's a world expert on that. He has done his PhD in D-D-D-D. And so with him, we are doing time capsules. And to give an example, we are going to do one in Austria where we are going to visit a Duke and a Duke Chess who live on the big property in the Alps. So as far as you can see, they're property and they live in a big castle. But they're still living like they lived 50 years ago. So with traditional dress and so on. Oh, interesting. And so we are going to follow them with a camera. And I mean, very simple. Like the iPhone camera with the stabilizer. Very simple thing, not intrusive. And then we are going to read a new montage, a new collage of it, and interjected with my own soundscapes and with art historical commentary from my cousin and with music interview. So the end product is a sort of video documentary of how those people live with respect not to make fun of them because they still live that way. This is the sort of disconnects and acronyms that we find in this world. And another one that we are working on, as we speak, it's a sort of tryout that I'm going to test in this group, if that's okay. Once the tryout, the rough cut is ready. It's about Beyonce's video of the song, that was recorded in the Louvre in Paris. And so my cousin says, and we hear that the paintings they have chosen for that video are from an art historical point of view, the wrong paintings. So we are going to come up with an alternative narrative and imagery going from Win Wembers to David Bowie. And those, sorry. That sounds very cool. Yeah. Thanks. Has anyone heard of the Ark? Sorry, the movie is called Russian Ark. I'm turning this off. Have you heard of Russian Ark? I'm turning this off. So it's this guy, Alexander Sokurov, who films a one-hour movie with one shot on an early digital camera using Steadicam. Steadicam was brand new in the Hermitage Museum. And the movie is all about Russian history. So there were something like 5,000 actors and extras in this one movie. They took over the Hermitage for a day. They did three shoots of this. The reason the movie is 58 minutes long is that that's the largest portable hard drive they could acquire at the time. And it was all gonna be one continuous streaming shot. And the third take was the last take because the first two things broke and they had to hit it and they hit it. So the movie is the third take. But it's pretty brilliant. And you have, there's a guy who sort of walks you through. Then there's another narrator, a different narrator with a voiceover. And then you keep running into history, you know, into Russian history, Catherine the Great and whoever else. And there are three different ballroom scenes with three different orchestras. There are soldiers in full gear. There are all kinds of stuff in this one movie. Super interesting. And it was quite the feat of endurance and cleverness back in the day. And that was just one thing of the many things you were just saying. Sorry, Peter. I just found it, by the way, on Amazon Prime. So if anybody wants to watch it. Oh, sweet. Thank you. Yeah. Well, it's funny that you brought up Banny, Peter, because actually I'd been thinking about it. Not thinking about it because I hadn't been thinking about it. I realized that I have become something of a deadbeat dad to ideas. Basically, I come up with an interesting idea then I go out to buy a pack of smokes and never come back. And I don't know why that is. I haven't written anything more about that. No, I've been busy. But at the same time, it's like, okay, I did that. Now what's next? Occasionally, I come back to things. I actually had a chance to come back to something this past week that may be relevant a bit to what Peter was talking about and what we're talking about here. The idea of forensic futurism. And the notion is actually not to do foresight directly, but to take existing foresight pieces. Scenarios and forecasts and such. And drill down as to what they got right, what they got wrong, and why. You know, the most important question, what did they miss? You know, and to try to tease out how can you do this more effectively? How can you understand how foresight and scenarios can be useful? One way to do that is to actually understand our blind spots. Then you understand our blind spots by actually looking back at what forecasts we've made and dissecting them. And so forensics with its vague implication of bodies and hovering police officers just seemed like the appropriate take. And I got a chance to do that for an environmental forecast that IFTF did 10 years ago for an organization called JEMI, G-E-M-I, which is an NGO of a bunch of corporations working together on environmental issues. And IFTF did a 10-ish year forecast for JEMI and I got to go back through and say, okay, what of our micro scenarios and forecast ideas what seemed right and what did we miss? The things that we ended up getting right were largely those around collaboration and the use of social media and politics. You know, that is technologies that give people voices, whether or not those voices are used for good. The forecast aspects that we got the most that we tended to get wrong were those that took an interesting new piece of emerging technology or behavior or system and forecasts that organizations would use these in particularly smart ways. So basically anything, our forecast that assumed essentially passivity got those more or less right. The forecast that assumed intentional action, those we tended to get wrong, not because they went off and did something completely different and radical, but because they didn't do anything. Here's a really interesting technology around environmental monitoring. Well, nobody did anything with it. Now there were a couple of attempts, but nobody really pushed it. Here's an interesting new technology or interesting new process around applying open source thinking to, let's not fit with the actual point, but basically open source thinking in this one area that again, just sort of disappeared off the radar for people and it was actually a very informative and sobering to look back and realize that it's not that our forecasts were, not that our forecasts were wrong is that we were just too optimistic about people. So this is the famous macro myopia comment, right? Yes and no, because it's not so much that we overestimated the amount of change in a short amount of time. I think what it was is we overestimated the amount of change that organizations and people were willing to actively attempt. But there's also sort of this sort of luck and timing aspect to it. So I think macro myopia needs to live inside sort of a roulette wheel, a wheel of fortune kind of model where it's like of the 30 things you think are going to happen and change civilization dramatically, one or two of them are actually in fact going to happen and they're gonna seize and really cause the change. And the other five that you were really championing that were like, holy crap, if that happens so many good things happen, they just withered on the vine or they were too early and 20 years later, they suddenly got manifest, right? Right, right. Can I ask a question? Please, please. Yeah, so this is laudable if painful. And so I have a question though, and with an example that accompanies it. So have you thought about unpacking things where you figure out what it actually took to get things to change sort of under the rubric of say a social mind shift or something like that. Does it take one? That might be something to look for is do we have to actually change their minds about how things are in order to take that step? Definitely. And so I was, I won't say why I was doing this, but in the course of writing a chapter, I decided to illustrate, I went back to see about the Cuyahoga River. I think it was about the time that it was its 40th anniversary, 50th anniversary last year. So it's lighting on fire? Yeah, the flooding and fire, yeah, the lighting on fire and what it took to clean up that river. And I didn't go through enough literature to be comfortable. Sometimes my researcher identity gets in the way, but what I did look for was the kinds of things that had to happen along the way. And the one thing that I came up with, which was that the parties who got, it took 40 years to get to the point where you could go fishing or swimming in the river. Now that's a long time to keep something going and they did keep it going. It was sort of interested people, people passionate about their own river, but they did agree, so they had various parties, the people who wanted to be able to fish, the people who wanted to be able to use it to ship things and but not run into swimmers, all kinds of really nice complex social agreements that had to be made. And my interpretation of it was that it took, it took a shared, a shareable, not shared, but a shareable perspective, that means a shareable purpose, which is something that you take and a little bit like a boundary object and is interpreted in your own world. So they all could agree that they wanted a clean, shiny river. And that's what it took was the stick to it in this of that, but for each of the purposes, the real underneath that that they all had. But since they shared that, I think that was an important thing. And so I was thinking about going back, if you're going back, we often look at the failures more than we look at the successes. Success is sort of boring when it happens. This is very slow, complicated. But if you turn up any of that stuff, that would be great. Well, I looked back on the, I did a just a brief presentation packet for the Jimmy group who had asked me to do this. And as you were speaking, I realized that actually that I did try to do that a bit in that, and if you can see the screen or the page that I'm sharing, the stuff that was off target, not just it was the willingness to experiment, but the forecast did not recognize that the accurately forecast political disruption would serve as a barrier to organizations and communities. So basically one thing that we missed that I think is something that often shows up in complex forecasts is that one component of the projected future gets in the way of another. And for instance, one component being, for example, a component, what counts as a component? Well, let's see, here I was talking about, let me get the mouse over there again. So I think, here are the different forecasts around open source and eco markets and management, but it turns out that some of the stuff we did around polar or we observed around urbanization, polarizing extremes, fragmented state practices, these are what I mean by components, these sort of sub forecasts ended up being barriers to the successful fruition of other sub forecasts. And that's something I think happens quite a bit that when you do complex forecasts, multi-dynamic forecasts that you end up, it's too easy to end up missing out the ways that they can cancel each other or at that very least interfere with each other. Now, in a way, that's one of the reasons that single topic forecasts are a bit simpler is because you can imagine in the perfect world, here's how this manifests as opposed to here's this and then here's this messy thing and this messy thing and this messy thing and then oh, here's this other countervailing force coming in that you have to make sure you identify them all. I see that the last slide in your deck is the everything's fine slide. Yes. But everything- This is fine. This is fine. Yes, nice. I was going to say though, but of course it is messy and I think that gets so, we need to deal with, I don't know, the first time I, well, Jerry will maybe laugh at this, but when I was trying to get the Institute for Research on Learning to think differently about winning, I was, I had to, well, there had to be a mind shift that had to take place for people to actually do that, which I mean, among other things, one is that people are essentially cognitive misers and that they offload things onto their working environments, their home environments, everything. Our brains are outsourced actually. So I think the question is, would it make a difference in these forecasting things to actually look at the people, the groups of people who have to also, sometimes they have to change their mind, other times they don't, you have people who come in and would that be a lens? I realize it's messy. Oh yeah, no, that is often a lens. So a couple of things. One, you say people are, we offload our cognitive or we offload out our cognitive. The way I've always articulated it is that our brains extend beyond our skulls. Well, that's another way to put it. That's a more optimistic perspective, maybe. Maybe. The one where that means, I mean, we think we're so smart. Yeah, we're outsourcing our brains and getting other people to do it cheaper. No, what you said cognitive misers just is a bit of Bader-Meinhof. I had this, not the red, Bader-Meinhof? What are you thinking about? Well, Play to Shrimp is another way of putting it. This morning, Jane McGonigal had posted something about the new Frozen 2 trailer. And I said, I posted something about, hey, did you see the 1970s prequel on TV which ended a clip from the year without a Christmas or something like that is the song of the Heat Mizer. And so just that weird little tiny coincidence of cognitive miser, Heat Mizer. My brain is weird, and I apologize for that. But how's most brains, if you let them go and to do their thing, they will be like that? Yeah. So, Jame, in your will, do you have any provision to especially preserve your brain? Or are you going for the full cryo? Oh, no, God, no. You're our futurist. No, I'm serious. Have you thought about this? I have thought about it. I don't want to go for a cryo because I think that's basically it's a, the technology isn't there and you're just spending a lot of money for somebody to dump it out at the end. Yeah. No, I wouldn't mind having a digital ghost that extended beyond the grave. But other than that, no. Yeah. As we're thinking, as we talk about the impact of forecasts and these kinds of dissections of forecasts, I had to say that what I've been working on lately is this set of four 20-year scenarios for a big European automaker. That are, these are global scenarios of what everything in the world is going to look like more or less in 2040. But the focal dynamic, the focal differentiator between the scenarios is success at dealing with climate change. And so the first scenario was, you know, moderately successful. We actually make the right decisions. The second scenario was we don't do enough. We're still trying but we just don't do enough because we're too cautious. The fourth scenario, this game jumping, yes, I know. The fourth scenario is a transformation where we, you know, indistinguishable form of magic, we are as gods, et cetera, et cetera. We get to figure out some things that cause significant changes. And the third scenario is the collapse scenario. And so on the one hand, it's been really interesting to dive down and write these 3,000, 3,500 word scenarios around what a world looks like where you get it right. And what a world looks like when you actually just don't quite get it. All based on the idea that the world doesn't end in 2040, things continue past that. And so what have you set up by that point for continuing past? And I'm just having the hardest damn time coming up with a collapse scenario that at the same time offers opportunities to turn things around and remains honest. Here's one. You know, things have gotten so bad that really, really we're not driving cars anymore because nobody can afford any fuel. We can't manufacture them. We can't, that it's in, that sort of in spite of ourselves, the world goes on because in fact, we do adapt to living in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. About half of us do, yeah. Yeah, but that's enough to claim, you know, it's not nice, but you know. No, I know, and I'm just, I guess I want to try to articulate a world that does. So for all of the things that have seemed to be positive, I try to throw out, okay, and here's the people who are resistant to it. Here are the challenges that emerge from it. Here are the people that get terrified by these kinds of changes. And so I really hate giving a purely pessimistic scenario. I want to be able to find, I want to be able to see some pathways out. And so that's what I'm wrestling with today. But just along those lines, the first draft. Don't have to say that the first draft of materials that I sent to this company, you know, this is the right answer for the future, since this company around environmental futures apparently terrified them. Oh, good. And they came back and told us that they're actually making fundamental changes to their business strategy models. And what they have changed, what they list as their number one corporate interest. You know, this is what we believe around, and it's now they're refocusing on how do we be a responsible planetary citizen? That's crazy. Yeah, it is. It's like, oh, crap, that. It works. This is a company I know you've heard of. So this is, they're a big one. And for them to come out and very vocally say, you scared the crap out of us and we did our own research and it saw that you weren't fooling us. This is really the situation. That felt good. I have to say that felt good. Congrats. That's lovely. Yeah, it was great. Go ahead, Bill. That's huge. I hope so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've done this kind of work long enough to know that big changes can be easily reversed, especially if new leadership comes in. I'm just scrolling back through a couple of notes I put in our chat just to remind me of little interesting markers. But when you were talking about what did we get right or wrong and doing some forensic analysis, my favorite example, which I've never been able to find again, I thought it was in the introduction to one of Doug Rushkoff's books. And it turns out that Doug is like, I don't remember that. And it is the following, which is that in 2001, a space Odyssey, we think we're going to be traveling to an outer space, et cetera, et cetera. But there's like stewardesses with short skirts on this interplanetary flight. We miss the women's movement. Like Kubrick and Clark and everybody miss the women's movement, women's rights, the pill, whatever, what have you. It's just not present. And that's what changed between then and the actual year 2001 and nevermind 2019. Like that was a, you know, one gigantic change that just wasn't even, you know, on their radar. Yeah, that's something that I've written about a few times. And it's just that we tend to focus our forecasts. We in the broader, futurist community tend to focus our forecasts on technology. And the big changes that have really shaped what our world looks like are the social ones. And this, by the way, is why my little DBA is called associate. Because I believe that the social changes that we're going through are going to be more profound than the economic, structural, technological changes that we've seen so far. You know, I think if you took somebody from, you know, 18, from 1899 and dropped them into the present, a lot of stuff would be confusing at first, but then they'd understand, okay, well, yeah, that is essentially a version of a horse drawn carriage or one of those early motor cars that we saw. And oh yes, I heard people talking about heavier than air flight as being something people were working on. Yes, you can do communications without a wire. That's fantastic. But what the hell is that slur for a black person walking hand in hand with a white woman? You know, why are those two men kissing? You know, the things that for us are like, okay, that's what the world looks like. It's the social things that would be terrifying and disruptive and outside the realm of what they see about the world, what they can perceive about the world. And I have kind of a narrow definition of actual innovation and maybe innovation is not the right word here, but I tend to see a lot of things that are just incremental change that we made this faster, lighter, cheaper, okay, great. To me, actual innovation usually breaks a taboo. That there's something we thought was impossible, immoral or fattening or whatever, but and then it changes and we're like, holy crap, okay, now everybody's doing that or now we can do it. There's a whole bunch of them and a lot of this is sort of social. It's like, well, these sorts of people could never do acts is a long standing trope that keeps getting disproven as we sort of slowly get rights for everybody. Go ahead, Susan. And I think that happens and I think it doesn't happen individual by individual. I think it happens in a funny way at the level of practice where groups of people, I just was, this is an anecdote, but it's revealing. Last night on the phone talking to a good friend who's from Harvard and has been one of the people who championed for women in many ways quietly there. And she happens to be on a board of that's important in AI and this is how the IC, for instance, was an example of the Me Too thing playing out in the women being, the women on the community, finally there was more than one, there were three of them and they decided they weren't gonna do all the secretariat work, administrative work. And they insisted that one of the men, that they hire or spend their money on a proper administrator who knew how to do what needed to be done and not just somebody new who you thought would just do all the grunt work. It was amazing and there we were, the two of us on the phone, late at night, cheering. I mean, it was a moment. That's awesome. It really was lovely. When I take groups and I break them up into small groups to go do work, if they need a reporter or a rapporteur, the last thing I say before I send them off is I say, often this task falls on women, so I would recommend you not do that. Do they obey you? They do pretty well, yeah. They do pretty well. If you pointed out. Yeah. Although, I mean, one of the things that I'm very, I'm determined to do is figure out a way to make visible the work that doesn't get noticed, because I mean, it matters to lots of things like it matters to automation, right? Right. We leave it to the people who normally think about what needs to be automated. They're gonna ignore all the other stuff, and they do. Did you ever see my pink color future essay, Susan? No. This is four or five years ago, arguing that the jobs that will be, that are and will be hardest to automate, and automate writ large, so everything from AI to algorithms and robots are the ones that involve empathy. So it's gonna be a lot easier to replace a university professor than a kindergarten teacher. It's gonna be a lot easier to replace a heart surgeon than a nurse. It's gonna be a lot easier to replace a clothing designer than a hairdresser. But will anybody notice any of the people who are in charge of automation will they notice? Well, no, no, but my point there is that the jobs that are likely to persist are the jobs that have historically been performed by women and have historically been given, been ascribed low value, but they're jobs that are not gonna be easy to replace. No matter how sophisticated your robots are, unless you hit the singularity, your robot's not gonna be able to come for the crying six-year-old. And so that raises- Yeah, but one wonders, one wonders if the social fabric is rent, just push the story, is whether or not anybody will notice the six, I mean, nobody's noticing that the six-year-olds are going hungry in this country, really. We're not, yeah. Dume, somebody was listening to you, there's an article on AI in the Financial Times, the robot-proof skills that give women an edge in the age of AI. Nice. And boy, are we gonna grab it. Oh, well, maybe, or maybe just like computer programming went from being a woman's job to a man's job. This is something that- I'm not that optimistic, actually, because I keep thinking how much, so those of you who don't know me, how many years I have spent fielding teams or been-on teams out there, unpacking what's really going on and how people are getting their work done, down to counting which technologies they're using, why they're using them, why they're not using them, who they're talking to, who they're not talking to, that whole complex system is the details and the funny way don't matter. The fact that what matters is what it actually takes to get a task done. And how many things you have to touch? How many conversations do there have to be? How many pieces of technology got used in getting that work done? And it's huge. And I've never yet seen any, I have yet to see and I've been through, I've been through re-engineering, I've been through work process, I've been through workflow, I've been through work practice analysis, I've been through all that stuff. And what's invisible is huge. Huge. My ask to this group is, if you wanted to make that visible, I mean, my schemes are all too tiny. So two thoughts, one tiny thought, I just want to scroll back up the thing and offer Jermay something, because he probably saw it, but maybe you're not the deadbeat dad of ideas, maybe you're the Johnny Appleseed or Al Hubbard of ideas. And Al Hubbard was the Johnny Appleseed of LSD back in the day. I'll take that one. Yeah, and maybe there's a very useful role for someone somewhere to play, looking through your materials, picking up the shiny nuggets and putting them places, handing them to people, remixing them, doing whatever. But I think that somebody who keeps envisioning different sorts of worlds and places and ideas that you don't have to go back and finish them all, that what you're doing and doing that is really valuable, it's awesome, just keep going. But can we, the larger we, organize around the trail of ideas you leave to do something useful with them and put them to work in different ways? I think that would be fun and interesting. So that's one thought. And then totally separate back to what Susan was just saying, one of my beliefs is that socialization is actually kind of a mess. That one of my favorite songs on this theme is you've got to be carefully taught from South Pacific, which is a musical about racism. And you've got to be carefully taught, basically it says nobody's born hitting other people. You are taught this by your people. You're taught that those other people eat their young and have green blood and therefore we should kill them all. And most of the things we're talking about that are problematic are socialized into us. They're belief systems that were given or taught. A lot of this is not innate in the human. So May, this is just my belief system. But I think- No, no, no, no. I'm just thinking that South Pacific also has a song there's nothing like a dame. A good point. You know, the 1940s were not politically correct in any way. But part of what I'm really interested in here is how do we hack the scripts that are in our heads? And then what I just described is the job of politics and spin meisters and everybody else. Like how do we hack the script in our heads so that we believe that trickle down economics actually works so we can give big tax cuts to the rich? That's a hack. And it's a hack. It's an actual hack. And many of these actually work, right? Cause otherwise we wouldn't have like the shit policies and politics that exist in many places right now. So I'm trying to figure out what are the simple things we can do to get under those bad ideas and replace them with good scripts with more helpful, more useful scripts? How do we remind people that the commons matters and that the commons exist? And on and on and on. And I'll close with this. There's 15 different projects to try to reinvent the American dream or try to reinvent how we measure corporate success away from the Dow Jones and what is your stock price today and the national welfare from being GDP growth, right? These are all I think generally agreed bad metrics. The better metrics haven't won. And the better feedback loops are not in place yet. So we still have corporations doing stupid things and the executive is making too much money and this and that and the other. So just a news report from yesterday, literally from yesterday. You may or may not be familiar with the company Blizzard Entertainment. They make a world of Warcraft and a number of other computer games. They had their big annual report yesterday where they announced that they had made their highest profits ever. But because they didn't do as well as they thought they could, they were firing 800 people. So even though they had their best year ever, they're still firing 800 people. Oh, and by the way, their C level executives all got big bonuses because they had their best year ever. And that just... Who'd they fire? Programmers and a lot of community managers. So basically when you have big multiplayer games, it's important to have people online who can basically referee arguments and sort of keep people on track and not griefing each other. And so they fired a bunch of those people and a bunch of game programmers. So 800 people, including some of the most popular of the most popular among the community, community managers, not the ones who are best at giving out the PR line. And thank you, Bo. Okay, and the person who wrote the story about robot-proof skills is named Sarah O'Connor. I know, no, no, no, no, no, no. Come on, seriously? Sarah O'Connor. That's awesome. He too, the machine, man. Bill, any thoughts? You've been quiet, we've been tromping all over the place. Does any of this ring bells for you or is there something that you've been working on that you'd like us to chew on with you? Well, I continue to sort of dig into this whole relationship realm, which is obviously our sort of central core challenge. Callan. It's totally off topic to an extent, but at the same time, it's sort of fundamental to my continuing to try and figure out what's the real core problem. And I think I've reported in the past, I've really been impressed by the work of Dr. Sue Johnson, who's done stuff on what's called EFT, Emotional Focusing Therapy. So what was fascinating was that I did a workshop with a guy named Mike Singer, who was the author of Untethered Soul and the Surrender Experiment. And in essence, his take on relationship issues really sort of flipped Dr. Johnson's work on its head. And I mentioned this only to the extent that we really, I think we're all trying to understand really what, either at a social level or societal level or a personal level, what really drives relationships so that they're healthy. So in what way is this flipped? It's flipped in the following way. First of all, the name of EFT, Emotional Focused Therapy, clearly says that Dr. Sue Johnson thinks that she's focusing on the emotional side, which from my talking to psychologists trying to apply it and everything and watching her videos is a little bit challenging because in essence, she doesn't help the people understand, in other words, to her mind, mentalize the process. She insists that they get it emotionally. Now the problem, when you assume that that makes sense for a second, the problem when you listen to Singer is that it's never not mentalized. In other words, if you take a mystic, he's basically lived his life in the woods in a Tibetan temple that he built and everything. He believes seriously that all of life is an experience of energy coming through us. And that the first thing that that energy does when it runs into a blockage, in other words, something happened when you were three years old, eight years old, 10 years old, whatever. And so you've blocked it, it becomes resistance. And at that point, in essence, you begin to mentalize, in other words, the energy attaches itself to a distraction. In other words, it makes up something so that you don't touch that repressed aspect. And so what Dr. Sue Johnson is doing by watching Emotions, quote unquote, which according to Singer is just the first manifestation. In other words, the first thing that happens when the energy comes in and you have an experience is that there's a thought about it. And then there's an emotion and feeling about it. So you're seeing the manifestation, the physicalization, the form occur around that entrance of the energy, the experience. But meanwhile, if it, in other words, consciousness is doing that in a way that hides the blocked energy, then you fundamentally miss the point of what you're playing with because you're not playing with the hidden energy that's been blocked and doesn't wanna deal with it. You're dealing with a diversion that is like whack-a-mole. In other words, you solve it here and it moves over there and then it moves over there and then it moves over there. So what Dr. Sue Johnson is, in a way, sort of trapped herself in, is dealing with a symptom, not the cause. And that's what I'm in the process of trying to sort of set up some research workshops around and there was just to attract people and get them to say, how did it work? How did this work, et cetera? And then sort of report back because Dr. Sue Johnson has a very, very robust research engine, in other words, if you can show the start of it, then she would probably pick up on it and work with it from there. But in essence, I've been told by the psychologist that work with that method that she is dead set against training and mentalizing her process. She doesn't want that happen. She wants it to be totally emotionally evolving with the couple, which when you watch the examples that they have as training tapes, they're horrible. Horrible in the sense that the couple suffers for eight, 10, 20 sessions, not getting it because they're not allowed to learn the system. They want them to experience the learning of the system, which if you're caught in the problem, it's kind of hard to learn it. You know, especially if your mind is very good at hiding it. All I'm saying is that I'm still digging really deep into this relationship thing to try and figure out. And then next Friday, I'm heading out to this Arthur Friendly College of Spirituality and spend a week sort of living in the environment of how do you experience that other dimension? Or so that you're really accepting it, seeing it as something that we're supposed to be moving toward transcending this one. In other words, remember the point of the Monroe Institute was that this dimension is entirely, intentionally screwed up so that we feel the resistance and or have the experience of feeling as a way to understand the resistance and then learn to go back to our witness experience and just let it go, because there's nothing wrong. It's all a process of teaching us, but we've got to pay attention to the learning and stop getting caught up in believing that there's really a problem unless we make it into a problem. So anyway, it's my current process. I'm struggling with it in the sense that I'm getting information, but bumping into resistance to the information. I hear parallels to that second arrow hypothesis, is it Buddha or something, the second arrow thing? That's first arrow, it's what happens, what you do with it in your head when the second arrow, that you create it. Right, and when you hear it, when somebody says that, it's like, oh, wow, that makes sense, there's, I feel that. So I have a, I'd like to talk about, I just, I sent Jermay this article from the FT, and we've all been, remember, I love economic history, history, economics. And I'm just gonna read you, sorry, I'll read to the group, I can't help it because it's just, this has been like in my head. Here's a short story that should seem familiar, a great power unsurpassed in military might and technological prowess, exports its free trade economic model throughout the globe, borders collapse, distances shrink, the world seems smaller. But market excesses and political dysfunction eventually lead other nations to question the wisdom of its approach and another power rises. One whose dominance is built on a system of economic nationalism and industrial policy. As it flourishes, the first stagnates, sparking a conflict that leads not only to war, but to a decade long decline in global trade and financial assets. I'm referring, of course, to the last wave of globalization involving Great Britain and Germany, which eventually died with the First World War and the Great Depression. Wow. And it's worth noting that Great Britain and Germany were each other's number one trade partners at the time that the war started. There's a whole bunch of dark history here. So at the end of World War I, we have the Versailles Treaty where Germany is forced to make exorbitant reparations the French want to make sure that the Germans are dead and buried and will never come back and attack them. British foreign policy is such that they never want to have one dominant power on the continent because they always come over and try to invade us. And at the end of World War I, the French look like the dominant power. So the British undermine the French by paying whatever reparations the Germans make to France. So they're funded by the British. The British basically help the Germans recover and become what we see in World War II. Among many other funny little corners of history. So if I recall right, the Germans funded Lenin? Also, there's the, so one of the subplots. And the British had McCartney. One of the subplots of Babylon, Berlin is a train full of gold that's heading through Germany toward Russia. So this article that being the FT also cites a World Bank report on the cycles of globalism. Jame, you should definitely, you can get that links in the article. Oh my God, I just love this kind of thing. But anyways, I mean, it was scary enough thinking, oh, the parallels are to 1930s, but now this thing really hits it. It even hits it with the eight decades thing, which it doesn't even need to rhyme that closely. I don't know, what, Jame, what do you think? Have you listened to the blog, Hardcore History with Dan Carlin? It's actually really, he's not a professional historian, but he's an interested amateur who does a lot of interviews and conversations with historians. He has a multi, he had a multi-part, God, I think it was like 12-part or something massive like that series called Blueprint for Armageddon about World War I. The origins of and the pathways through World War I that I think you might find horribly fascinating. It was compelling and really depressing in part because you can see, even without him bringing it up, there are parallels you can see to what's happening now. But Hardcore History is the blog and Blueprint for Armageddon is the series. Okay, I got it written down. And I don't mean to impress myself but we are definitely like the other things we're going on here is hegemony has ending for America and it's so interesting. It wasn't, I don't know if it was in this article or the other one, but it said something like, now we really have to look at 9-11 was a turning point. So our brief unipolar dominance of the world, 1989, fall of the Soviet Union, and then 9-11, the multi-polar world and now we're on the down slide. This is, so the question, and I raise this, I think in the, in a message you in chat, but I think it's worth considering and way too big to reach in conclusions before we're done here today, but just to throw it out. What does a world without a hegemon look like? Because I think you're right that the US is losing its hegemonic role, but China has some really big issues that it's not facing, that are going to, they're gonna come home to roost very soon around demographics, around minorities, already seeing the violent suppression of the Uyghurs in Western China and there are more, there's actually a rising, well, I had been Al-Qaeda and now it's associating itself with ISIL, but a Muslim extremist movement in Western China. And then you add of the ecological problems, the ongoing desertification of the North, and China is not well positioned to be an ongoing hegemon either. So what does a world without leadership look like? So we're getting close to the end of our time together and I wanted to briefly tie what Bill put into the conversation to what we're talking about right now, because that's one of my interests because one of my amateur theories is that a lot of what happens interpersonally at the human scale, scales right up to organizational corporate and scales right up to social intercultural global. And that I had in my brain earlier, you might have seen it, the body keeps the score by Vessel van der Kolk and this idea that trauma hides in the body. And I really like where Bill was going about, Sue Johnson needs us to experience the emotions of it and forces people down that path. And I have a feeling that there are many ways to skin this cat, a terrible saying, whoever came up with many ways to skin this cat or that all roads lead to Rome, but I'm not sure we all wanna be in Rome, but still, I think there's lots of different approaches that can crack open this thing, but that our unconscious is really good at self defense and the self-defense that it's working on here is those thorny things where we're stuck are really painful and whenever Jerry wants to open one of those, it's just awful. So I'm going to make sure we avoid doing that always. And I'm gonna construct whatever kinds of stories I need to construct and build large structures around the boulder, around the hidden obstacle so that we never have to go crack this thing open. And a lot of therapy is about discovering where the hell the boulders are and smashing them or turning them into a like a brain koozie sculpture or a whoever. And so I'm really interested in where corporations hide the trauma and a lot of corporations are built on systematic trauma, like on stealing something and plundering it or whatever. Listen to Lee Anderson, the late Lee Anderson of Interface Flooring saying, I figured out that we're just plunderers and we need to stop doing that. So they're just not in relationship with nature and humans, they're busy trying to poke, prod, convince, do, you know, steal, whatever. And then when we get up to the national level, this whole thing about politics and warfare, I'm an amateur lover of history. And, you know, every time I start pursuing like, okay, maybe I'll understand the Ottoman Empire a little better or what about those crusades or, you know, even the Boer Wars, just like what or Serbia is, how do they fit? Go to any part of the world and start trying to figure out who did what to whom. And it's super complicated and thorny and difficult. And we just keep repeating these things over and over again. One of my favorite sort of thoughts in my brain is lessons from history. And there's a subcategory of history, which is like, why don't we ever learn lessons from history? Well, like there's several books on that theme. And I'm particularly interested here in the lessons from history at the geopolitical level tied to how do we get through trauma and heal trauma together? And I think that all of that has something to do with the scripts in our heads that are invented to circumvent the boulders or some of which can actually get us to see past or through the boulders and actually talk to each other and connect again. As I suspect we once used to be able to do. I'm sorry, I can't help but think of this course I was auditing online with the Yale guy who was talking about Jane Goodall and primate her primate studies. And she thought that they lived in this Russo piece, Jerry, but it turns out that 20 years, every 20 years, the great apes go to war and kill each other. So I don't know about your thing, president about the past, but we used to know how to do this. And then- I don't want to use one observation by Jane Goodall about- No it's not. Then they looked at and they looked at pre-industrial man and they went through all these pre-industrial societies all over the world and they kept finding that pattern too. Sorry. Well, send me more links because I keep all that evidence as well. I just think that we are innately capable of living in community on the comments. Peter, thank you for being here. Thank you. I really appreciate your being here. Good to see you, Peter. Oh Peter, thanks so much for your email. I really, I just love the links I find through there. I'll stick to it. Just as a support for the concept that this keeps repeating, I'm just finishing up a book called The Theater of Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life, where he basically catalogs going back, individuals going back hundreds of years to periods before Christ, et cetera. But essentially saying the same thing that Bo just said, which is that these cycles, these processes, it keeps happening over and over again. There were sexual revolutions back in the 600 period and what Zeldin sort of like tracks is the degree to which that's correlated to government willingness to be open as opposed to closed. In other words, when the sexual revolution becomes too great, they don't want all that freedom, they don't want all that self-expression, they just start to close it down. So it's that kind of cycle that we go through. But it just keeps happening and according to him, it sort of basically never gets anywhere. Interesting, that's too bad. There's no happy endings? No, I mean, there's a happy ending for Zeldin because the fact that he can talk about them, but he doesn't necessarily see any solution. I watched an academic on a YouTube video talking about the problem of learning from history. And his basic take was that the problem is that nation-states really don't have anybody to judge their performance and tell them that there's no parent, there's no organization that says, you're bad, go back to your room. And so you've ultimately got this freedom, no matter how big or small the country is, to do whatever they think is good for them. Oh, I have to add something else, Jerry. It's critical, I'll give you this gift too. So I'll find the course link for you. But so he goes out through all this research and this guy's very meticulous. It's gonna be over hours, you're gonna have to see this. But he does say in the end that humans and their culture have been able to obviate this. So interestingly, Jerry, your solution isn't in the past. It's in the future and humans' ability to create culture and it has worked. And he does say that in the end. So there is hope, but it's not because there was some who's so like eating behind us. It's because we- I'm not gonna vote for so, yeah. Yeah, but anyway, so it is really cool because he does show how culture has, anyway, so there is hope. It's not all the present at all. It's quite beautiful. Yes, yes. And that's the concepts, by the way, of people like Gary Zukoff who wrote Spiritual Partnership, which basically says what you're saying. In the words that there is an evolution of consciousness. We are getting to be more multi-sensory, you know, who's paying attention to our feelings, paying attention to what's causing this particular issue. So there is potential that it's going to work, but it takes a future consciousness, not some kind of idealization of a simpler past. Yes, and I didn't mean to insult you, Jerry, by saying you worshiped yourself blindly. Well, what's funny is- I would feel insulted if I were you. Totally, but what's interesting here too is there are a few thinkers, few works that have kind of become locked in place in our Western culture in these sorts of discussions. So- I'll question Lee too. So the tragedy of the commons, a stupid essay by Garrett Hardin convinced everybody that commons are impossible. Rousseau's noble savage, which isn't exactly what Rousseau is saying anyway, gets stuck. Another favorite of mine to pick apart is the hierarchy of needs. Maslow is actually a brilliant guy and a real humanist who's fighting off the behavioralists and skinarians and everybody else and everybody misinterprets the hierarchy of needs. So, but these things defeat good conversations around these topics because it's like, oh yeah, you're just saying, you're just echoing Rousseau and it's like you can put a cap on that and just set that thing aside because we're never going to get to that conversation. So I'm interested in how do we actually hold the conversation without the tropes breaking it? My favorite is Thomas Hobbes' The State of Nature. Nasty British and Short. Red in Tooth and Claw. Yeah, so that's right, Red in Tooth and Claw. Well, that's Tennyson. That's Alfred Lord of Tennyson. But I guess he's quoted by, but yeah, but Nasty British and Short is the, yeah. And I sort of collect these. So keep riffing and we'll pull them together. Bill, you're about to say something I can tell. Yeah, Zeldin wrote a book called Conversations. Because he basically asked the same question that you're asking. In other words, how do we have better conversations? And in essence, his solution or his recommendation is that we try. In other words, his perception is that there, if we keep, and that's the whole point of the longer book that he's got, if we keep looking at expressions of that variation in the past and stop putting a cap on it and just dismissing an idea and open ourselves up, he has something that he calls a menu of conversations. In other words, he goes around the world and offers unique questions so that when you're having a conversation in a group, don't ask, you know, what's the weather or how's your friends, you know, no, ask deeper questions so that you have a better conversation. But he believes he's a great believer in the concept of a conversation changing people. There was a fact that you're willing to talk about it enables you to open up to the fact that you should be able to learn from conversing. Yeah. I really, I'm really glad you're here. How dare I even not tell you the very beautiful end? I didn't mean, I hate, I hate people who kill ideas in a cynical, cynicism is cheap. It's easy. Cynics, you can have them all. No, you can be skeptical, but cynicism is cheap and easy and destructive. You know where cynicism comes from, by the way? No. The original, I just learned this, the original configuration of the word, C-Y-N is Greek for dog. It's, oh. There was a philosopher or whatever, many who just wanted to be totally antithetical to everything that was serious and elite and everything. And so he invented cynicism, living like a dog. Interesting. I like the Greeks view of this very much. Isn't that cute? You mean loving and loyal? No. The willingness to be naked in front of the world and happy. Love that. And the communal consumption of poop. Yeah, well, with that, let me take us up by rereading the poem. Many of you were not here at the beginning of the call. The poem is Breakage by Mary Oliver and goes as follows. I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light, the cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam, the opened blue mussels, moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred and nothing at all, whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. It's like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of little words. First you figure out what each one means by itself, the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight. Then you begin slowly to read the whole story. And that seems a nice description of our conversation today. Don't know how that happens, but. Broken but in a good way. There it is, exactly, exactly. Let's go drop some shells, okay, guys? Okay. Thank you, thank everybody for being here. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye.