 Well, this is the open global mind call for Thursday, December 21, 2023. Doug Carmichael is in Malaysia and is about to explain how he got there or why he's there. Why? A lot of curiosity around climate change. Since I was in the Adriatic for six months and learning about that part of the world, I thought I'd balanced by going halfway around the world to another part of it. And just trying to understand how people are thinking and feeling and what they're going to do. And of course, just like it was in Europe, most people don't seem to radiate any feeling or thought about it at all, even though my guess is that they have a pretty thorough understanding of what's going on. That's interesting. Go ahead, where are you going to? I was going to say when I was in Italy, there'd been a big storm, I can't remember the name of it, in Kiran, I think, big storm in the Atlantic up near the British Isles. And part of that got down into the Mediterranean and there was a huge storm and we all know the waves were breaking over the seawall and it had gone really bad and a lot of flooding. And I was talking to the owner of this restaurant who was probably about 50 and he said, you know, and I was a kid, we'd get a storm like this every five, seven years. He said, now we have three or four a year. He said the climate is definitely changing there, you know, and people are aware of it. And it just was amazing to me to, you know, so many people here in the US are still buying the propaganda that climate change is a hoax that it's not really happening that, you know, we can get by and this guy's like, no, we see it, you know, it's definitely happening. And we don't know what to do. And it's, you know, we're really bugging politicians. You've got to have a plan. You've got to have that. And the EU is, you know, much further along in the US. I mean, they're certainly not perfect, but they're just refreshing to see ordinary person on the street or in a restaurant, very aware of it, talking about it, you know, and like, I don't know what we're going to do, but we've got to do something. And was that different for older people than younger people who have the experience of what it used to be? I'm assuming it's different for younger people. I didn't talk, I didn't hear from younger people about it. I engaged in about three, three climate change, two or three times in Congress says people just, you know, in talking about the weather. They're like, yeah, climate change is really happening. And those are all people, 40s, 50s, 60s. I didn't hear from, you know, I look at my own life, you know, when 66 years old and what's happened in terms of storms and changes, you know, and it's like, I really see the change, but someone who's, you know, 20, they, they, I don't know what, what they're noticing. I have to go and ask, how about you? Have you talked to young people about this? Nope. Can I see any young people? Well, we got to work on that. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So the young people I see most are my nieces and there seems to be a culture in my sister's lineage that folks, folks don't talk politics at dinner in family gatherings. And it's interesting because these are people who are political in their, in their adult lives. I mean, they're active in, you know, in, in electoral campaigns and so forth, but just don't want to go dark at all in family gatherings. And it's not like, it's not like people are polarized. I think people are pretty much not polarized, but just don't want to go there. From my few talks with younger people, they seem to be convinced that there's something to do that would make a difference. Technology, investment, money, we could buy our way out. That always works. What was a bunch of young folk who were really active, the sun sign movement, sunrise movement, and a bunch of others who, and, you know, school strikes or climate change and all that. And they've been screaming that the house is on fire for quite some time. And at this latest cop, it's like, well, okay, we're going to put a couple words in, agree to a couple words. And I think they feel like that's not enough. So and Jerry, one of the polls this week showed for the first time, 18 to 29 year old American voters breaking for Trump. Now it's early, but still that's kind of weird. It's kind of weird. Polls are bullshit. Yes. And yes, totally true. And polls this for outer double bullshit. And still it's weird. Yeah, it's a data point. It's notable data point. But is it a accurate data point? You can make anybody say anything if you phrase it right in a poll. So yeah, isn't this just more propaganda for, for, you know, telling people to be afraid. And, and, you know, I just I refuse to look at polls. You have you have very strong media filters and I commend you for it. I'm not able to try. I could try. Yeah, that would be reason you're not able. Have you tried? Well, there you go. So we don't have a topic and this is a topic week. And I think I said in the invite just an hour ago, and that we should wander around and find something that we'd like to talk about and go for it. I want to I'm posting to the chat, an article that hit me yesterday by Antonia Scatton from her reframing America substack. And I found this really clear and enlightening. I don't know that it had new news, but I thought her expression of what's up was really crisp. And one of the things she refers to is framing. And let me just share my screen for a sec. So these are my notes about the article, you know, if you haven't read it, etc. And here are the five reasons why five reasons to dump Trump, blah, blah, blah, what we're doing that's not seeing your screen. Oh, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it. Is it showing up for you? Not yet. Oh, that's fascinating. Maybe maybe it's just taking its time to get to you, but because I'm further away than Doug. Yeah. Am I the only one not seeing it? Yes, apparently. That's weird. I've never seen that happen before. That's definitely. Wow. How is that possible? I know. And you're seeing the rest of it. I'm seeing gallery view. Let me try speaker view. So weird. No, I don't have your screen. That's strange. Okay, we'll just keep going. Okay. So I'm showing the article titled Top Five Reasons to Dump Trump and MAGA Now, which I leave a little mark. Excellent. Next articles, I think are excellent. And one of the things she does is she says, look, I mean, the first rule of framing is that what you talk about is what you get. And, you know, that's connected to basically the notion of framing, reframing, lake off, and a bunch of other sorts of stuff. But I've been noticing recently and I was just thinking, gosh, I should make it more explicit in my brain. But Trump has been doing things like, no, I'll only be a dictator on day one. Right. That is engineered, crafted to spin everybody up, froth the right, froth the media, get everybody talking about Trump. And here she's like, you know, if and when we do talk about Trump, we should talk about the Trump we want, because you get what you write, what you talk about, the Trump who is pathetic and soon to be irrelevant to failed businessman and habitual criminal who will most likely be in jail by November. Our words should make him seem smaller and weaker, not bigger and stronger. But she's really saying, let's not do that even. Let's talk about the positive futures. Let's sort of go, you get what you talk about. And weirdly, even though there's these scary majorities and state legislatures and a bunch of other stuff in the Supreme Court is tilting the wrong way for people who lean the way we lean. Weirdly, the strongest weapon that Trump and his people have is everybody else crying out about them and screaming about them. It's sort of like bin Laden using American technology as a weapon against America. It's very much metaphorically similar in my head to that. It's like we are being hijacked very intentionally with and Trump is, I'm afraid, that Trump is an absolute master at picking shit to say that we'll get picked up by everybody, that we'll spin everybody into a tizzy for three days or however long the attention lasts. That's not so radical that it gets booted and offstage all of a sudden. A miracle act that I don't understand because Howard Dean gets kicked off the campaign trail for screaming forcefully to his troops, exhorting them and a week later he's not on the campaign trail. I've never understood what happened there. I think there was like shit behind the scenes. Go ahead, Gil. Trump is a master of this. That's one piece. The media depends on eyeballs. That's another piece. If it bleeds, it leads, etc. Don't think of an elephant. Human nature is another piece. And whose interests is all this stuff happening? It was another piece. In 2016, the last numbers I saw said that Trump got something like $2 billion of unheard media. Bernie Sanders for most of the campaign cycle was largely blacked out. Still got 44% of the vote in the primaries. But the playing field was remarkably skewed. What was the last question you asked? I kind of went backwards here. How did Howard Dean get bounced? Yeah, so two parts to that. One is that well, the game was different then. One is that crazies on the right are handled differently than crazes on the left. And the other is that Democrats have no fucking backbone, I think, to use the technical term. So everything just folded instantly. What's the name? Al Franken, too. If Al Franken hadn't been purged, we would have had a Democratic majority. Mitch McConnell would not have been speaker. Holy crap, old ankle. So it's the old... I keep going back to that wonderful scene of Sean Connery and Kevin Costner and the untouchables about you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. And that's not peace, love, good vibes kind of language. That's part of the story here, speaking of framing. Yeah, thank you. But reading this article now was kind of a jerk my head up because I think it was last week only or maybe two weeks ago, that there was a flurry of articles about Trump being a dictator stimulated by the I will only be a dictator on day one comment. There was a flurry of excellent articles about how a second Trump term is going to be much, much worse. And here's why and here's how and here's why and here's how. And I'm like, man, I really enjoyed reading those and they had good stuff in them. And yet if you listen to Antonia Scatton, that was stupid. That was stupid to thrash around so publicly about that because part of what Antonia says in this post is, the more we talk about the possibility of Trump as a dictator and frame it as a possibility, as a likelihood, the more we normalize it and the more it will seem like an okay kind of thing. It just, we get used to things. Yeah, yeah. You know, language words reflect one's reality. And collectively, societally, words reflect the reality. It's like, what's the chicken and what's the egg? And if you take all the substance out, and you would just reduce it down to the quantification of language applied to what, language featuring what, literally on a base commoditized level, Trump wins. Why? Because media ratings are sustained by him. He's, he's the Taylor Swift of news. And, and if they were to literally not cover him, they'd get it in the teeth with the ratings, they'd see, you know, the Fox in the right media sore. And they're not prepared to economically give up the goodies. And that's the driver behind everything. So somebody explained to me, or spin me a story, tell me a scenario in which Trump does not get covered, and which we do not talk about him. How does that happen? Where does that happen? Anybody? Perhaps an extremely responsible media decides not to cover Trump because of the reasons that I've just stated. It's true, because how many people do you know, and I'll include myself among this, you know, I hear Trump and it's I immediately just my I send my mind someplace else. I don't want to hear about the guy because he's just, there he is, you know, and nothing he says is, is, is, is wise, makes sense. So why bother? And, and also, Gil, you grew up in New York. We all knew what an asshole Trump was from the time he was, you know, time he was, yeah. And you, Mike Bloomberg, Mike Bloomberg said in, in, I think it was 2017, maybe it was 2018, Mike Bloomberg said, everybody in New York knows he's a crook. Nobody will do business with him. He notably did not say that in 2016, but it might have carried some weight. I have no idea why not. But again, my question is, give me the scenario in which nobody talks about Trump. We don't talk about him. Democratic party elect, the Democratic campaign doesn't talk about him. Media doesn't talk about him. I don't, I don't see the scenario. I don't see the world in which that happens. So I'm going to give an alternative view here, which is that the Trump supporters are basically people who are losing out in contemporary American society. They see that happen. So they want somebody who's going to blow the system apart so it could reconfigure. In that mix, the Democrats are basically absent. They're the Democrats have shifted from being the party of the working class to being the party of the professionals. It's basically the professional class benefiting by the current approach to climate change, which is to invest like hell, make money as fast as you can. And cheat the whole thing is a big success. So that what we're getting actually is structurally understandable and sound. And by looking at Trump as being the bad guy, we're missing the dynamics of what's happening. I completely agree with you, Doug. And I think that's what was at work in 2016 when Bernie was the only one among the Dems who was telling that same story and was aiming at working class and played well. And there were, you know, there were, I think the story was misinterpreted, but a lot of folks, a lot of a lot of pundits said Bernie supporters went for Trump as if they were bad people. And what actually happened is that is that there are a bunch of people who were listening to both of those stories. They were not listening to the mainstream story. And when Bernie got shut down, they went to the only place the only place where they could go where someone was talking to them. So I agree with you completely. The Dems are part of the problem here. But I asked my question again, somebody give me maybe you maybe can give me what you posted in the chat. Give me a scenario in which we don't talk about Trump and Trump doesn't win. I don't have a scenario. I don't stop talking about it. Just freaking stop talking about it. Every time someone talks about Trump, say, I don't want to talk about him. He does not move the country forward and start writing letters to the editors or protesting to your media outlets and say, why have you learned anything? You are you are not helping the situation. The guy thrives on on any type of of attention. So your main attention. So you're running a mainstream media outlet. How do you cover him on your news broadcast? Somebody stand up and have some freaking backbone and say, we will not cover this anymore. Or we will cover this man as if he doesn't exist or actually or actually cover an event with the bare facts and then analytically say this this is Trump's attempt to gather our attention. So we're going to set that aside and go to go to the real news for the day. And what happens to your what happens to your ratings? They probably go up among people who give a shit. Here's the question around that. Okay, it's not just a matter of they stop covering Trump. What if they make it a political statement and they say, we're going to stop covering Trump, you the viewers need to support us in that decision. That has not been the dynamic with the media and their viewership for a long time. It's sort of what Pacifica does. Yes. Yes, that's the model. And and and if if mainstream media borrowed a page. I think they could actually appeal to their base people interested in being informed to show up. So we have to buy out and we have to buy out MSNBC and take it in this direction and do it and do it fast. Well, buy it out or just support it with our eyes and ears. That Trump is actually the story that he's speaking for a large part of the population. That's just basically pissed off and his pissed off candidate. And that's the news. The only way to get rid of that would be to have a better story that would be responsive to the needs of the population. And we're not there. Yeah, and that's exactly where I want you to go, Doug. Thank you. At this point in time, Trump has a track record of not doing anything, a track record of not keeping promises, a track record of not taking care of any of the people that he is. I would argue, Stuart, that Trump has been better for conservative causes than the last 10 Republican presidents. Reagan comes close. But if you look at the makeup of the Supreme Court and the federal bench right now and what Mitch McConnell did in collusion with Donald Trump and the Federalist Society, they did not do nothing. But he has not taken care of working people. No, but it still works. He doesn't give a shit. Big MSNBC headline yesterday or the day before like, holy mackerel, 20% of Republican blah, blah, blah, think he shouldn't be president if he committed these crimes. That was their headline. Their graphic said 70% think it's a crime. You know, so. But I think Doug is spot on. The only way to win this is to have a better story. And, you know, Biden's been one of the most successful presidents in a really long time in terms of what he's accomplished and what he's gotten through a hostile Congress. I mean, stunning to have gotten those bills through a hostile Congress. That's not what the media covers. That's not what the Ken are friends with the polls. That's not what the polls indicate. So there's a better story that's not being told. So there and then there's the story that Doug is focusing on, which is if there's all this shit happening in the world that pretty much quote, nobody talks about. So that's the media's issue right there is they're not covering the real news. They're covering what what generates profits, what generates eyeballs on pages and and and until we can shift that we're going to continue to have the problems we have, which in one way it's like, fine, just put the pedal to the metal on the road to hell. Let's get there as fast as possible because it will all break down. But then we have what's there to replace it is the real issue. I mean, it's falling apart one way or another. The Democrats, Republicans are both incredibly beholden to big-moneyed interest. We need big money out of politics. I there's people working on that. Lessons working on that, you know, there's lots of progress. I'm not saying despair, but I'm saying paying attention to Trump is it's like looking down at the at the board, the separation of the boards are going across the bridge, your bike tire is going to go right into it. Aim high, just keep looking forward of what will work. You know, when I when I think of the success of the civil rights movement, black people in this country had, they were just completely disenfranchised. They didn't give up. They didn't say, well, it's never going to happen. They said, there's a check here. It's a promissory note from the United States government. The Constitution says, we're created equal. We're not get, we're here to collect. We need people to stand up and do that. And I think that's one reason why young people are disgusted by politics. They see it doesn't work. So they're, they're drifting away, which is a very dangerous thing because that means they'll end up in a freaking camp somewhere or be deported. But you know, this is the reality that's out there. And as a, as a individual person, my sanity depends upon not paying attention to Donald J. Trump, because the man is an insane, crazy making generator. He generates craziness and people freak out. And I refuse to buy into that. And people in Germany rode off Hitler as a crazy guy who's not going to amount to anything either. So there's never came to power with less than 20% of the vote. Guess where we are with Trump? What matters is not what's the right, what's the fair number. What matters is what wins in the game that we're in, which is a weird game. Civil rights movement is a great example to look at. And I'm glad you brought that up. So what do we have there? So we had the nonviolent direct action all over the South. We had that arising not out of random, but out of deep, consistent training for years of cadres of people who could do that. I mean, Rosa Parks was not a lady who got fed up one day and sat down on the bus. She was an operative who had been trained at Highlander Center as part of a campaign to do that. But so that's one piece of it. But the other piece of it is, you know, you're all old enough probably to remember this is, you know, the television footage of Bull Connor in Mississippi and people being firehosed and people being beaten. And that was on the news in the North. And that was part of the political context. And Dr. King spoke with President Johnson on a somewhat regular basis. I mean, work the politics of it both. It was it was working at all levels. There was demonizing Bull Connor and George Wallace. There was sitting down at lunch counters. There was background organizing work, all of that. We've got some of that today with the sunshine folks in the lawsuits. We don't have we don't have a party that's doing that in a consistent way. So I've been trying to interrupt for a while here, so I raised my hand, actually. Yeah, I just saw that. It was the first hand raised. So please. Thanks. You have to raise your hand and then call on yourself. Yeah, exactly. So I'm doing that. So a couple of things. Selling by dynamics was failing. Like, like they tried that that was the strategy for the campaign so far. And they're all kind of giving up on that saying, oops, that's, that's just not working. And then I think that there's is a an interesting opportunity to go meta. And I think this is an opportunity both for the Democratic campaign and for the press. But Jeff Zucker was the head of CNN News back in the day and is complicit in Trump's rise because he was also the producer of the apprentice. And there was a moment where Mitt Romney tried to throw his body across the Trump campaign in 2016. And he did a really badly done speech where there's PowerPoint basically shining on his face. He's standing in front of a projector. And he's like, this man is bad. We should not vote for him. And then what happens is an hour later or the next day, I'm forgetting exactly what it was. I'm sitting sort of I'm visiting my mom and I'm watching House and she watches CNN all the time or CNBC or whatever. And there's a there's a full screen where there's a stage Trump about to about to rebut or reply, right? There's a big stage with an American flag. And then there's talking heads on the on the left. And it's the screen stays like this for an hour with nobody on screen just waiting for Trump's reply. Then they give Trump an hour of free airtime where he pimps his hotels, eviscerates Romney does a whole bunch of other shit. And I'm like, wow, that was masterful. And I got to say his followers are all thinking, look at what he can do. And not just free media, but he can jerk these people around. He can like their fuses. It's insane. And it's a form of modern power. So then I had the thought, if Jeff Zucker had been responsible, he might have said, Hey, okay, guys, turn the cameras on me, stop, stop showing him, turn the cameras on me. And he would have looked into the screen and said, my fellow Americans, we've been hacked. And I don't mean that there's Chinese or Russian hackers in our servers, which there probably are. I mean, the man we're showing you has figured out how to use us against you. And until we sort out how this works, we're going to show you less of him. And we're going to bump up to this metal level and start talking about our business model and our business and you and how this all works. It's like, it's like the opposite of Mr. Beast in some sense. Mr. Beast is one of the most popular YouTubers makes a fortune on it, pours most of that money back into the show, which allows him to do ever larger and more spectacular stunts, et cetera. But he's created this crazy vortex of attention. And he is extremely explicit with his followers that, Hey, the more you follow me, the more you hit likes, the more this money pours into this thing and I can buy an island and give it to somebody, et cetera, et cetera. And he does. And it's this weird kind of crazy little phenomenon that's going on. So let me come back to the meta thing, because I think it's actually really important. One of Trump's skills is he is having a side conversation, a meta conversation with his followers. It's an in joke. And when the left and the media froth up, that's the key of the joke. And he's like, hold my beer, watch me do this. And then it works. It just works like crazy. So the left doesn't understand to go meta. The left is earnestly trying to tell a story of benefits and bright futures. The left is trying to paint like the right as evil and doing terrible things. That's just like a chatter conversation that a lot of people who are convinced otherwise are ignoring because they're not being talked to in the side channel. So I think one of my questions is how do you open a side channel conversation with people who are and then with which people, because there's a bunch of people who are just not going to listen to anything that runs against the model that's been painted. And then there's a bunch of people who will, who are like critically interested. It's the people who were Bernie people who went for Trump. I think those people were really pissed off about the country and thinking about the country and trying to figure out what the hell do we do? And nobody was talking to them either. So I think there's a meta dynamic where the press can actually look smarter and rise above the fray and say, hey, here's Trump in a small picture and picture in the screen. Trump is like the puny dictator. The wannabe dictator is thrashing on screen somewhere and that's much more editorial than the news should throw on it. But he's trying to get our attention. And we're going to mention it to you and we're going to give you a couple of bullets about his rant. But really we're going to go talk about other stuff and treat him as a small as a sideshow freak and not as the thing that's going on. And I'll add in that Hitler did jail time before becoming vice-counselor. And the current president of Brazil, Lula, was thrown in prison by his political opponents and is currently right this minute, the president of Brazil. So jail time doesn't guarantee anything. However, Colorado's big win yesterday. If SCOTUS actually holds that up and sorry, I'm going to ramble on to another part of politics, which is what we seem to be in here. And if we want, we can sort of change and shift the rest of our call. But there are two monster things that SCOTUS is going to decide in the next month or two. One of them is the accelerated request by Jack Smith to show that Trump is not immune from prosecution. And the other one is the 14th amendment disqualification clause that says that he is not actually qualified to run for office. Both of those are devastating. If SCOTUS finds either one of those against Trump, those two things are devastating because the lack of immunity means all these cases are going to go forward and have some impact. And if SCOTUS finds, if Thomas doesn't recuse himself and SCOTUS finds for Trump on both counts, I don't think that's going to be a pretty picture. I think that's going to be a real... I moved my timeline to move to Italy really fast. Yeah, I think that's going to be a real bad mess and all that stuff's going to happen just in the next couple of months. It has to. Possibly some of it in the next couple of weeks. So we're shifting into New Year and that's sort of what's in the air. Gil and Stuart. No, it's actually me than Gil. I apologize. It's Stuart and Gil. Go ahead, Stuart. Yeah. It took my hand out. So what I wanted to say, it's kind of a continuation or a slightly different way of saying what Jerry said. Trump decided to play a different game. Some of it is out of the Roy Cohen School, but generally he's just that and which really demonstrated that the system depends upon rational actors who follow the system. And he just decided to play a totally different game. Except of late, I think he realized, you know, they really could throw my ass in jail. And I don't know that I want to play that game. So I think he's starting to play a little bit within the lines for that reason. They can throw my ass in jail and they can strip me of all of my businesses that I've worked on. So that was one thing I wanted to say. The other thing I wanted to say was and I've been home with COVID for the last few days. Fortunately, yesterday I think was the worst. And it, you know, and it's not so bad. So I've watched more media than usual. And I've watched a few movies, one of which is Julia Roberts's new movie about it's called Leave the World Behind. And it's all of a sudden the whole world is kind of is kind of falling apart. But the thing that I wanted to take away was where I took away and I realized that this morning, there was a, you know, illusion of invasion of other countries in the US as things start to fall apart. Strange things like the the sound waves in Cuba that injured diplomats a few years ago. But all of a sudden, what happened in Israel, you know, everybody thought that Israel was totally and completely invincible. And all of a sudden boom, while politics was looking someplace else. So while everybody is focused on Trump, what really is kind of going on with national security, because he is just the vortex of sucking in every single piece of energy and and media. So that that that, I think that was what I wanted to mention in this in this conversation, because a lot of my own thinking goes, look at all the fucking time we're wasting on this, all of the things that aren't getting looked at and addressed that that could be. And the last thing I wanted to say was this notion of coming up with a better story for everyone of what Biden has been able to do, you know, is that going to really, really get get broadcast. But kudos to Trump. He's a master of the media. He just he just doesn't pay attention to what's going on. And he's a master of the media, the way he does it, even in the debates with Hillary, if you think if you think back to them. That's it. Thank you, Gil. Go ahead, Gil. And I'll jump in a little bit about those debates. Yeah, I want to catch my breath here for a moment after all that. Thank you. Yeah. So master of the media, but he also he found he found the weak spot, which is that the the American system in checks and balances depends on people being in that game, you know, and respecting the rules and playing by the rules. And he said, I don't have to do that. So that was never anticipated by the founders, I don't think. Jerry, to to what you said, first of all, curse you for Mr. Beast. I had never heard of Mr. Beast. And now I'm going to have to put on what now I'm going to have to put on my Ken Cloak and not go watch them watching this. Good luck. Good luck on that. We'll see. So you you have fucked up my day. Thank you very much. Number one, number two on the shift in coverage of Trump, MSNBC is sort of doing that. I mean, they're all they're all over the legal cases, but they're not covering his rallies. And they're saying, you know, he's having a rally now. We've got a camera there. If anything newsworthy happens, we will cut away and cover it. But otherwise, it's all bullshit and we're not covering it. So they're doing that. I don't know how the other ones are handling that. It has seemed to me for a long time, speaking of the reaction of all this on the Dems, is that is that this is designed to make the left apoplectic and frozen deer in the headlights, the amount. So I'm coming back to agreeing with you guys in a way I didn't before, but the amount of attention on like, did you see what Trump did today? Holy shit, this is awful. How could he do that? This one, you know, that whole kind of coverage is immobilized. A different kind of coverage saying he's doing these things, they're shitty for these reasons. Here's what we're doing about it. Here's the world we're trying to build, blah, blah, blah, is a different kind of reaction to it. The challenge that I wonder about here is that if the if the left goes meta, as you and others are suggesting, do they get covered at all? How do you go meta in a way that's covered? And again, the only the only good example we have in recent times is Bernie Sanders, who went meta, fought against the blackout, persevered, did pretty well under the circumstances. But he's a very rare character in, you know, in the American political landscape. I mean, like, can we take a moment and think about who else in the in the pantheon has the potential of carrying this kind of story? Who comes to mind for you guys? You mean what political person or what person, any place in general? Political. Well, you know, the people, you know, Bill McKibben is not a political person. So I would include him. I would include the sunshine people, you know, activists, public intellectuals, journalists. And political people. That's a good panoply. And maybe there's some other thing there. You know, you know, the single most powerful person in the world right now this minute today is somebody named Taylor Swift. Across all lines, all markets globally. Within certain bounds. I think that she messes with her brand by jumping into things like this. I absolutely parallel. I agree. But that lens, in response to Gil's question, going outside of the cognitive silo of our age group and tuning into the generational differences of 20 somethings and 30 somethings today, it's a whole different inquiry in terms of who are there, who are their lightning rods, or who are their influencers, literally labeled as such. And the susceptibility of some of them to sort of decide this question is relevant in their lifestyle cultural frame. And that's not like a stretch. That's not a stretch. The only negative reason for that whole weirdness of 20 somethings turning on Biden is because of the whole Israel-Palestinian thing. And they've been sold a bill of goods through their channels. Yep. It says Biden's a bad guy for supporting Israel, supporting slaughter of Palestinians and all that in a framing of complete contextual ignorance. But they're susceptible to influence that easily. And there are channels and individuals that nobody on this screen even knows exist that control half a million, a million, a million, a half, two million and up every day. And they blow in the wind based on what lifestyle and culturally is the center of gravity of their age demographic that mass media, they're not looking at TV. They're not watching any of the media channels. Any of us have contact. And I know personally for me, like I don't do Instagram at all. And their attention is 80% driven by Instagram. So I think it's about getting out of the getting out of our silo and our box and thinking more creatively about how to affect gen, you know, constituencies where they are living. Yep. Really briefly on the debates with Hillary, I just want to throw this in. Trump is really aware, I think, I did a series of six videos right after the 2016 election about dealing with Trump and this is in there. I'll post the link to the to that playlist in a sec. But Trump was really aware that he would not survive a normal debate with anybody. He is a shitty debater. He's a really he's a really good screed guy. And he's very he's a character of himself, which is another a different point. But he figured out that with in the debates against Hillary, he figured out that he needed to do something in each debate that would spin the media and get everybody crazy. So for the next three days, they would be yelling at him, but not thinking about the content of the debate and no longer analyzing the debate on the terms of the debate. Right. Right. So so he thrives by shattering whatever norms and expectations. He is like destroying Overton's window constantly as he bounces around the world. And I actually think that's a very explicit strategy. So his dodging, the Republican debates this cycle was perfect because because he looked more powerful by saying that not going to show up. I do not think he's going to dodge the debates with Biden. I think there are going to be debates. And if he's still in the arena, I think he totally wants to be on stage next to Biden. I think he he's not going to avoid those because boy can he milk that situation. Yep. So I'm wondering how that's all going to go forward. Sorry about that. Right now he skips the debates and he gets covered for skipping the debates. And he looks more powerful when we went up, which is nuts. Just just quickly on Taylor. Gilden Kost and Doug C. Yeah, quickly on Taylor Swift. Worth paying attention to her. She is doing massive voter registration. Answer. So she's bringing in young voters in a very explicit way. She doesn't have to worry about media coverage because she is her own media. She controls and we were talking about that before she controls her own media channel. She can do whatever she wants. They are also attacking the hell out of her. I mean, there's an enormous amount of right wing rage on her. So that's worth noting. Did anybody see Scott Galloway's 2024 prediction show last week? You mentioned it, but it wasn't available yet. So I haven't watched it. It may still not be and it's worth seeing when you can. To his credit, he actually says, here were my 2023 predictions and how I did, which most prognosticators don't do. There's a bunch that go back and say, here's how I scored. Well, that's good. So he did that and he does 2024s and there was a lot in there. And it's really, it was really fascinating. The thing that surprised me and to Doug, your point about Instagram is Instagram's old hat to its TikTok. And he had some stats about the percentage of activity and eyeballs and so forth on TikTok and the growth of TikTok. And he said, you know, from an investment point of view, I would, this is something to throw money on because it's growing booming, but do I really want to invest in a propaganda channel? You know, controlled by the CPC. But he looked at the attention of different demographics on different platforms. And we are absolutely effing clueless. Speaking for myself, I've never been on TikTok. I don't do Instagram, you know, so I'm an old boomer guy who's on Facebook and what shitter and the other things, but that's not where the kids are. And he interestingly talked about it in the context of entertainment industry futures, said this, you know, Netflix and so forth is dead compared to TikTok. You know, you got Hollywood's dead. You got hundreds of people or thousands of people making movies and you've got hundreds of millions of people making stuff on TikTok. The size of the volume of traffic on TikTok is astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. Yeah, listening in. I don't know that we need to look for a person. I think we need to look for a mindset that is shifting and connecting. So in my world with farmers, for example, and I think we need to radically increase the granularity of the conversations because we're bouncing around in generalities. And that doesn't really connect. So, for example, farmers, the Mike Johnson House of Representatives right now is helping on walking back the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the monies that have been allocated there for climate change mitigation issues, for example. So that whole, you can't wrap your mind around the energy that the industry is putting in to avoid, you know, having these investments go forward. So in the Farm Bill, for example, there's a specific item that $20 billion allocated to what is called the conservation programs titled to conservation programs. That pays farmers for roughly stated ecosystem services, regenerating their soil, making the soil functioning again, to absorb and hold water, to increase the microbiota inside the soil, biodiversity, watershed repair and all of those things. They want this out, right? I mean, they absolutely want this money out because it will impact the entire food industry. So conversely, I'm working, you know, with the Regenerate America team on building farm to table market systems, meaning you recreate the aggregation capacity, processes, logistics, and engage retailers, catering operators and so on to shift their menus and their recipes and all of that. Now, 90% roughly of farmers vote Republican. A lot of the small farmers and the Republican have somehow managed to associate regulations, regulatory frames with Democrats. So all these crazy things they need to do and the distortions caused by crop insurance and I mean, I could give you examples, you just can't believe how crazy this stuff is and how destructive, you know, to the environment. Farmers think, yeah, this is these crazy Democrats, these liberals who come up with all this crazy stuff. When it in all reality, it's from the industry who put their lobbyists into the regulatory, you have heard about the revolving door stuff, right? That's how this thing really happens. And the farmers don't understand it. The information just doesn't penetrate there. And a big thing has to do with the inability of well educated people to communicate with a farmer, you know, who basically thinks that, you know, they're higher powers in charge of the climate. Why are you talking about the climate with me? So the mission that had a presentation to the climate reality project last week, saying, don't talk to a farmer by climate change. The moment you walk into the door and talk about climate change, the conversation is over. Right. I mean, he's already identified you as there are some crazy liberals who know comes up with this stuff. No, you need to talk about soil. Right. You need to talk about the water that is at risk, you know, and the these crazy weather patterns that seem to change out of nowhere, you got to be prepared for it. So you and then you have to somehow transition into, you know, the government is putting this money in for you to do that. But they want to take it away. So the there is all this noise that Trump is causing and that the Republican house members are causing is distracting from the understanding of very technical, very granular issues that are impacting not just the farmers, but also in the electricity sector. I mean, in the energy sector, you know, why don't we talk about gas stations having to convert to deal with electric cars or repair shops or the entire supply chain and so on. So we don't have the conversations that we need to have in order to facilitate a technical transition into a new industrial reality. And so that's where I think the conversations need to go. I mean, that's my mission for this next year is to be very specific, you know, go down to the cloud, get into the into the soil. Cool. Yeah. Thank you, Klaus. And we will try to help you with new books, etc. So um, Doug C. Okay. I think our tendency is still to blame the media and Trump for our problems. At a higher meta level, the financialization of the economy, the changing of the economy into the technical structures that Klaus was just talking about are for in the minds of most people taking power away from them and putting it somewhere else. And if we don't understand that, we're not going to do better. The going after Trump and the media is the wrong way to go, because in fact, they are reflecting the reality that people live in much better than the left is doing. In fact, there really is no left, because the left progressives support the financialization and the technology base for a new society. And people don't want to go there. And they're probably right. Stuart, you're muted. There you go. Just from the last few comments that were made, the whole notion that the system has become too big, it's imploding on itself. And I'm back to one of the many, many wise things that Schmackenberger has said that the systems are so big that there's always going to be some folks that choose to gain the system as opposed to thinking in terms of what would be the best solution for more people. And that's what we've got to it. That's what we've gotten to at this point in time. It's not about the best solution. It used to be that people from both sides would get together and come up with something, but now that game is over. I don't know how it functions. I really don't, looking from the outside, how does that function? And you've got to be, you've got to be crazy to actually choose to work within that system in certain ways. At least it would make me a little crazy. So people are retiring out, a bunch of people, many of whom are the moderates that would have been great to still have around. And also this last Congress was the least productive Congress almost in history. They passed kind of nothing. So I don't know how that plays out in the next election cycle. Yeah, and I think Biden was able to get shit done just because he knew the way the institution works so well for 50 years involved there. It's not just that he knew the way the institution works. He knew how to have conversations with people that could move things into votes and decisions. I mean, he got shit done, but look at the vote counts. He had lots of Republican votes on every single thing that he passed. Now, that is something we're thinking about. Like, how did that happen? Why did that work? What did he do? What were the deals like? How is it possible in the most polarized and like, Jerry, to your point, ineffective Congress in forever to get some massive things through? Supposedly Gil, Biden is an anachronism in some ways left over from an era before, quote, Gingrich made everything a scorched earth policy. And before when when Congress people used to move their families to Washington, interact with each other all the time, now they just go home every weekend to raise money. No, that was now what Newt did that to break the the collegial relationships that people had with each other. So that's gone. But you can't say Biden's an anachronism if he was able to pull this off. What did he do? You know, even in the face of this was possible. Now, what he didn't do is he didn't pack the court while he had the majority, which I kind of wish he had done the first two years. But, you know, that's a more complicated question. But yeah, you know, the game is changing out from under us. People are playing by different sets of rules. And yet here we are, figuring out what to do. An anachronism in the sense that there are only a few people left who have those personal relationships that I think account for what it was he was able to accomplish. Otherwise, people, A, wouldn't listen, B, the thought of crossing the line and voting with the other party was just like, it's impossible. And you can't do it. It's a deafness hanging. It's a it's a it's a it's signing your own death war. Before passing the can I just want to say, in what ways can Democrats paint outside the lines? And this goes back to the thing I was saying earlier about being going meta. But what are some viable ways to paint outside the lines, even while making progress? So I look at this, not through the lens of politics, but through the lens of mood. In my world, on logical coaching, we talk about moods as predispositions to action. And so I might have a mood at work where I feel valued of ambition and wonder, I think I can make stuff happen here, or I might have a mood at work where I don't feel valued. And so I'm like, okay, I'm resentful. And I'm resigned. Nothing's worth that going here. And there's a lot of moods out there that are being manipulated through politics. And mostly they're the negative moods, the moods of resignation and resentment and and getting people angry. I remember reading something about, you know, all the people who are protesting the Vietnam War. Yeah, a lot of them were protesting out of a genuine concern, you know, that the war was morally wrong. A lot of them were just saying, I'm out here because I don't want to stick it to the man. And there is always that level of people out there. And if you can stir their mood up, it can be incredibly dangerous and incredibly, you know, destructive. And so there's a politics of mood going on here of let's stir up the mood of destruction, resentment and resignation and anger. And, you know, Anne Richards once said, any damn fool can knock down a barn, but it takes a village to raise one, you know, and we've got a bunch of people out there who are hell bent on knocking down the barn. They don't have any plan, any desire for or any hope for or any intention of building a new barn. They just want to knock everything down so they can walk away with profits and, you know, the spoils. And so, you know, as I listen to these conversations about what's going on, I'm thinking, what mood's getting getting evoked here? You know, there's a lot of fear in this. That's why I say polls are bullshit. We have no idea what's going to happen next November. No one, anybody, I don't care what you're studying, you do not know what's going to happen because there's way too many variables. But then we take this in clean information, we pass it all over the place and say, be afraid, Trump's in the lead. And I'm like, screw you, you're, that's, I'm not buying into your, your vision of the world here. That's not my vision of the world. Now, I'm in anachronism. I haven't owned a TV since 1990. And I have no plans to get one. And I don't watch the news and I don't immerse myself in the news because it interferes with my ability to be effective in the world. It takes me out of myself and puts me in a place where I'm anxious and I'm afraid. And if I'm anxious and afraid and feel defensive, I can't move. And, you know, I don't know how much longer I have left. I'd like to do something useful in the world. But the only way I can do that is if I can, if I can keep my body and my mind calm and open and curious. And calm and open and curious are, are previous positions to being able to learn. And I don't, and, and to, and to be flexible and to say, all right, why are you upset about what's going on underneath this, you know, and people get too caught up in the, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. It's not effective. And so people look at me like, well, you're just in denial. I'm not in denial. Man, I can tell you about shit I've gone through and survived and I know what's happening in the world. I've been studying ecology for 36 freaking years. I know what's happening. I know where things are melting and how much extinction is going on. I live with this all the time. It's very, very hard. But if I, all I do is think about the horrible stuff, then I get into a place where I can't be effective at all. So I very consciously choose not to engage in certain conversations. The fourth of the five wonderful precepts from tick.on talks about the importance of what you take in, not just your diet, but also conversations and media that you allow in your system. It's not that I am ignoring this because I don't think it's important. I'm ignoring it because it's important to my soul. It's important to my personal development, my ability to be effective in the world. I scan the headlines. I hear the conversations. I'm as informed as I need to be. I will not give my time and attention over to propagating negative, be afraid stuff. I'm like, what can I do? What's good risk assessment and what's good mediation and amelioration here? And then what can I do that's focusing on what is possible and what's going to wake people up and put them in a mood of we can do this? Obama was really effective because his phrase was, yes, we can. How many people want to say no, we can't? I want to be on the yes, we can side. So that's what I'm focusing on with regards to the moods that get manipulated and not the facts or the stories. Stories are really important because they need to lead to the moods. But if we would spend time calming ourselves down and saying, okay, we have a disagreement here. What is the source of that disagreement? You're unhappy. Why? I'm unhappy too. Did you realize how much we have in common? Read Monica Gussman's book. I never thought of it like that. You know, she's a braver angels person. It's fantastic. She's a Mexican American. Her parents came from Mexico. They were Trump supporters. They voted for Trump and she says blue as it gets living in Seattle and her journey of how to build bridges between people who disagree so that they can actually be in moods of curiosity and wonder and get stuff done instead of demonizing and polarizing and being afraid. That's, to me, a far more productive kind of conversation to have than going, you know, Donald Trump is master of manipulation. So what? You know, there have been masters in manipulation forever. Read or watch Richard III. I mean, talk about manipulation. Jesus, right? Shakespeare had this, you know, down hundreds of years ago. It's not news. It's an old story that keeps sucking people in. Don't get sucked in. End of rant. Thank you for listening. Was this the maelstrom? Thanks, Ken. Klaus and Doug C. Yeah, I just feel we need to be radically engaged in practical and technical discussions. So remember what was it? Analytica Britannica, the Facebook scandal, right, which very successfully segmented some 10 million people into groups and then addressed them on a highly individual level. So I think there are people who are mad at the system for at meta level, the same reasons, but then from a practical perspective, very different reasons. So I'm focusing on food, which is after all, one third of global emissions and a much larger share of very destructive impacts on the biosphere. But there are others. I mean, what do gas station owners think about the electrification of the transportation fleet? Right. Now, if you own a repair shop or you're an auto mechanic trained on the combustion engine, what do all these changes mean to you? And when it comes to that, to engage with people where they are at at a very personal, practical level and then link that to the behavior of the political process, what is actually happening to them. So I totally ignore conversations, but I watch actions. So when you see what they are opposing and proposing in the house right now, you see the footprints, the fingerprints of the industry all over them. They are amazingly biased in the way they're supporting the fossil fuel industry. And that reaches into the food and agriculture sector as well. So if you just focus on what does that mean for a farmer? What does this mean to a food processor? No, the small business, because you know, I mean, there's a guy, a PhD from working for Bayer Monsanto, who is on LinkedIn, explaining to people they shouldn't be worried about pesticides and all of this stuff, because there's just not enough in it. I mean, it's just insane how the industry is operating on so many levels. But what does it mean to the farmer? And how can you incentivize small-scale local businesses to focus away from all this noise on very practical steps? My Congressperson is a Republican, and she's on the Agricultural Committee, and I'm now publishing every once in a while an article in the local paper that's holding her feet to the fire because I'm being very specific about the impact of legislation that is in the works, and she has to defend her position now. And so that talks about the very technical down-to-earth, highly granular issues. So I'm just, you know, in general, trying to get away from meta-level down to where is the action? Where does it matter to people who are so mad and upset right now? Thanks, House. Go ahead, Stuart. You need to unmute. Thank you. I didn't want you guys to hear all of my coughing. I was just curious, Ken, did you talk to any folks in Italy about the Berlusconi phenomenon? Because in some ways, it's a little parallel to Trump. You did not. I avoided political conversations. I was just trying to enjoy the countryside. Beautiful. The Apparals. Thank you. I will say something important, though. Excuse me, Doug. When we were in Siena, I went to the beautiful synagogue there, which has been damaged by earthquakes, so you can't go into it, but you can stand on the doorway and take pictures. I noticed a couple of policemen coming in, and I was talking to this woman. She said, how was the anti-Semitism here in Italy? She said, actually, Italy is an island of friendliness towards the Jews in Europe compared to other countries. She said, you saw these policemen, they come by a couple of times a day at random times just to let people know that they're trolling and they're very friendly and they're respectful. I said, what about your Prime Minister? She said, one of the first things she did once she was elected was to reach out to the Jewish Communion saying, I'm not here to target the Jews. I think she probably said, I'm here to target the immigrants from Africa, but not the Jews. That was actually really heartening news because my wife is Jewish, and if we're going to go to Italy, I want to make sure I'm not bringing her to a highly anti-Semitic country. We're in a time of, as Gil says, we're in a time of monsters, but we're in this time of very heightened contrast. Sanity is becoming harder and harder to find and requires more and more work to maintain. That's true. Doug C, I'm glad you're back. I saw you fall off and I was like, no. My battery ran down surprisingly faster than I expected. Basically, what I want to say is a version of what I've already said, and that is that the global economy is going through huge changes. It's no longer a democracy, it's no longer a macro market even. It's a kind of feudalist centralized ownership and power, and people are really freaked out about it, and there's no politics that's responding to help them because the people have the political power are still benefiting. If you looked at what happened at COP, basically the agenda was how to turn climate change into an issue where you invest money and get paid off. That's the big game. As long as that's what's happening, aren't people going to be pissed off and don't have a right to be pissed off? Then we have to think more deeply about what the larger crisis is and of rent. Thank you. Oh, I think he was putting his hand down and turned off his device. We have 15-ish minutes left in our call, so we change the tenor and go anyplace else. Oh, there we go. What a great idea, Jerry, when you put out the little note this morning. The first thing that came to my mind was, why don't we talk a little bit about as Pollyanna and Childish as this may seem? Why can't we act all year round like we act around Christmastime? That was the theme that popped into my mind. Why can't we treat others with kindness? Who's we? We is me, Ken. Thank you for that. Why not? I do my best to do that, but in some ways, of course, it's all of us responsible for creating the amazingly dichotomous world. Is it us or is it the media that's creating this? Of course it is. It's argument. It puts eyes on written text and what grabs people into media, you know, one against the other. It's such an interesting phenomenon of our culture. My ego says maybe it had something to do with the legal profession and the sports professions of winning and losing, and that becomes such an amazing mindset of folks and the idea of real dialogue to try to solve some of the challenges that we're facing kind of falls to the background. I picked on you about who's we steward because holidays is a very tough time for a lot of people. You know, it's one of the highest suicide rates is at the holidays and, you know, I just wrote a little story in the plex about coming through my own difficulty with the holidays. So a lot of people don't think of the holidays as a time when we're being good to each other. It's quite the opposite. Thank you. It reminds me of right after 9 11 about the time when Bush basically said, go shopping. The best thing you can do is go shopping. America open for business. I was shopping bag with handles for the flag. I mean, well, Jesus, what was that about? So yeah, I was just so tempted to create like an alternate speech for what I wish he had said, which was, Hey, especially those of you in New York, when you're getting on the subway right now, you are looking at each other with new eyes, with a sort of tenderness and vulnerability and a sense of shared experience and trauma and some fear and other sorts of things. Let's go deeper into that for a little while. And the best thing we can do is actually step through and into that feeling of care. And let's change the nature of how we interact. And Stuart, I'm sort of working up towards what you were just saying in the sense of, I don't want every day to be the day after 9 11, but I think we fail. We fail to seize moments when there's a softening of the veneer. There's a cracking of the surface. There's a moment where somebody in position of leadership or something that goes crazy viral pops out of nowhere can shift our approaches or attitudes toward each other or shift the mood. The way Ken was talking about mood earlier. I would love to see more of that. You know, I actually have, you just brought to mind a story mentioning 9 11, Jerry. It's an interesting, I think, political story. I was still really active in doing at least one program a year for the American Bar Association during that period of time. And I felt kind of compelled to do a program about 9 11 and the response in New York City, the response of the legal community. And I had a number of different speakers on panels. And I was also absolutely guilty putting a panel up with a pro and a con. It was during the debate about the Patriot Act, if anybody remembers that, which was right after 9 11. It was part of the Bush administration. And one of the people I had on the panel that I was networked into was the guy who was the head of the Federal Judicial Center, who was a former Jag officer. And at one point in time, he said, you know, Stuart, you have in your mind that I am pro Patriot Act. But what I need to tell you is that there is shit in there that we wouldn't even even thought of asking for. It's just way, way, way over the top. So I guess the reason that I told the story is that even in places that you think that you might think need your reaction are to one side, not always, not always so. Not always so. And right now, I think in the world in some ways, Liz Cheney might be a classic example of that. Pardon me. Just to make your share real, my brother-in-law was was like number three in the county police force until he retired out. He's now chief of police and a municipal department. And at the time of the Patriot Act passage, he shared something, and I was like, what? Built into the act, every law enforcement officer in the United States, local state, had to swear, had to take an oath, and were effectively, constructively deputized as a federal domestic military. That exists. That's in place. That's in place. And I remember just like, I remember my reaction then, and I still carry that at what has been and what was engineered. Doug, who wanted that in the bill? I have no idea. I have no idea. But Cheney, it's part, I'm sure it was Cheney, he was the architect, but that was one of the pieces. And it was with an eye toward a national domestic mobilization of police authority. That would have been Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the other architects of the project for the American Century. That was all into that. I was actually at a business or social responsibility conference in Washington DC during that time. I think it was about 2003, maybe. Yeah. Okay. So do you remember Wolfowitz was speaking and somebody spoke up and said something and immediately was called out as being a democratic plant. And then he turned to the guy and said, Mr. President, please continue because Wolf was the president of World Bank and they called him Mr. President. And it's like, what just happened here? There was something, that was a plant. That was definitely an orchestrated thing to shift. Everybody went, ooh, being in Washington DC after 9-11 for the first couple of years, it was a very scary place. They just felt like a lot of male level and energy around there. I was there from 2000 to 2003. Yes. I spent most of my time in DC. And as a matter of fact, I was at a meeting at the Washington DC legal. I was doing a project as a consultant when 9-11 happened and we could see smoke from the Pentagon. Somebody called it out. But I had a leave ken for that reason or chose to leave. I said, I got to get out of here because every time I heard a helicopter, it was like a little bit of PTSD. It just jiggered all kinds of emotions in that context. Yeah. Because they were putting barricades all over the place. It was starting to feel very uncomfortable. Case in point, people on the defensive can't learn and they get aggressive in their defense. We have to take care of ourselves and we'll do whatever it takes, even if it means storing out everything this country stands for, which is what the Patriot Act did. Yeah. So we have a Patriot Act and we have Citizens United and those are the bulwarks of the problem that we face that we've been talking about in various ways on this call. And what was the one that undid the Voting Rights Act? That's another important one to remember. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, there's been a concerted effort on the part of the right to dismantle the rights and privileges and responsibility, rights and privileges of that were granted by the Constitution and saying, Constitution is just a piece of paper and needs to be interpreted exactly as written in the title as written because things do not move. This is a document outside of time. We have to obey it and it's like, in what world does this actually play out in the long run as a good thing? This is, it amazes me, Jerry's talked about this being an amnesiac society. We have no sense of history in this country and I'm saying we, in the sense of the majority of people who are out there doing the work. And it's like, you just study any piece of history from any country for more than a couple hundred years to see this kind of thing pops up and it always leads to a bad end. Why do we not learn this is my question. How do we learn the lessons of this and incorporate them so we make wiser decisions? Well, we're, we're a stunningly a historic society. Just watch Jay Leno for a little bit about that. Is he still on? No. Nobody used to see, I can't even remember him anymore. He used to do this thing of going out to the street and ask people questions about obvious, you know, geographical and historical things. And, you know, it's, we're clueless. And, you know, kids aren't taught civics anymore. And then, to your question. And that, and that, that, that shared social context is critical. And one of the things the right has been trying to do is to, is to shred the social fabric. So, you know, metal level problem. Notable about originalism is that the Colorado court decision this week meticulously built, I think there's like 300 references to building the box of originalism that this is, this is just what the words in the Constitution say. You can interpret it any other way and basically throwing down a challenge to the Supreme Court. If you guys are saying you're originalists, this is what the originalist says. And we'll see what they do with that. They'll either, well, we'll see what they do with that. The other thing I wanted to say, Ken, was dang, it's tough when the conversation is so rich. There was something else there, Colorado, and I forget what, anyway, somebody else. I just also wanted to mention, Ken, I wanted to add the overturning of Roe v. Wade as one of the big ones also in terms of breaking down civil liberties. Roe v. Wade is important, but it's not structural the way that the citizens of the United, oh yeah, I remember the other thing I wanted to say, speaking of history. So there's a film that my friend Donnie Goldmacher made some years ago called Heist, the something, the stealing of the American dream I think is a subtitle. There's a couple of films with that name. This is not a caper film, it's a political documentary. And it pivots around the Powell Memorandum of 1970, what, 1973 or 74, which laid out in detail the Republican game plan that is played out over the next several decades. And very few people are aware of it or reference it, but you look at that and what we're seeing now is no surprise at all. There was a plan, it was agreed to, it was propagated, it was exercised with discipline, all of which are things that are kind of rare on the left in this country. Yep. Doug, thank you. And we're getting near the end of our time and I'm hoping Ken is going to help us slide into the rest of our day in a better mood. So clearly a lot of the right is opposed to change and originalism is part of that. So I think it behooves us to figure out what are the changes that they don't want to have happen and see if we can build something from that. I went like this because the right is not opposed to change. They're very much in favor of change. You look at what they've done the past 10 years. They're dramatically in favor of change, but change for what, for whom is more the question. And talking to change or not change, I think is a dangerous way to go at it. They want to turn the clock back, I think, Gil. That's where their change is oriented to. Let's recreate the America of the 1950s. That is the role of reactionaries. They want to change. I think back and forward is not a useful frame for it. It's for the sake of what and for the sake of whom. For me is a more useful frame. And before Ken gives us his poem, I want to get a quote in the chat that may be relevant for us. And from Gil's good buddy, Hunter Lovens, I watched a panel with her and she said, you know, the problem with revolutions is that the people who tend to get hurt are women, children and poor people and intellectuals. Revolutions are really not desirable. So those calling for them need to look at who suffers in revolution. And if you want women, children, poor people and intellectuals to suffer, then go for revolution. Otherwise, let's go for an uprising rather than uprising. I just dropped a two-minute video into the chat of it. It's just watch it. It's hysterical. It's a take of the scene in when Harry met Sally, where Sally is in the Delacate Testament. Jay Leno makes a brief appearance in there. It'll definitely shift your mood and help you to have a better day. But I do have a poem. And it just, as I was listening, I just found this like two minutes ago. This is called For the Unknown Enemy. It's another William Stafford poem. What's the title again? For the Unknown Enemy. William Stafford. This monument is for the unknown good in our enemies. Like a picture, their life began to appear. They gathered home in the evening and sang. Above their fields they saw a new sky. A holiday came and they carried the baby to the park for a party. Sunlight surrounded them. Here we glimpse what our minds long turned away from. The great mutual blindness darkened that sunlight in the park and the sky that was new in the holidays. This monument says that one afternoon we stood there, lighting a part of our minds escape. They came back, but different. Enemy, one day, we glimpsed your life. This monument is for you. Want to hear it again? Yeah, please. This monument is for the unknown good in our enemies. Like a picture, their life began to appear. They gathered at home in the evening and sang. Above their fields they saw a new sky. A holiday came and they carried the baby to the park for a party. Sunlight surrounded them. Here we glimpse what our minds long turned away from. The great mutual blindness darkened that sunlight in the park and the sky that was new in the holidays. This monument says that one afternoon we stood here, lighting a part of our minds escape. They came back, but different. Enemy, one day, we glimpsed your life. This monument is for you. Thank you. It's a wonderful poem. I had never heard it before. Really interesting. Yeah. You know, briefly, very briefly, it reminds me of being involved in a multi-author book years ago that progressive things in the legal profession. And one of the one of the chapter authors shared that his work was doing nothing but capital appeals. Everyone looked at him and said, how do you do that? He said, I go visit my client in jail and find something to love about them. Wow. The beautiful place to stand for today. Thank you. Thank you for going through a hard conversation gracefully. Appreciate it. Happy solstice. Happy solstice. So there it is. And next week is the last call of the year. Be there. All right. Thanks all. Thank you. Thanks for joining us from way far away, Doug.