 Yeah, it's crazy. So one of my little light bulbs in this Ukraine situation is that it appears that Putin and Serkin and company are masters of nonlinear warfare. They're extremely, extremely sophisticated. And they are shit at actual warfare. Like, wow, like the Russian army has been a complete disappointment, a shocking disappointment. And it's just kind of crazy. And then they're losing their... I just get the feeling that a lot of that is actually the Russian troops themselves who are actually just looking at it and saying, hang on a minute, these are our people. We are actually shelling our own friends, pretty much. Yeah, it's crazy. Anyone feel strongly about it or want to jump in on what's been happening a bit? And Susan, I watched the video, I loved it. We'll come back to it. We can come back to it. Yeah, I just want to spend a little bit of time decompressing on Ukraine. Is there such a thing? Can we decompress on that? We might have to periodically is the thing is, you know, a couple pieces I've seen and read were like, hey, this is really just the beginning of a protracted, messy thing. Yeah, and it could cascade outward across Europe. And, you know, it's going to have economic repercussions and the avenues for Putin to suddenly decide to back off or to suddenly be pushed aside are slim. And so there's really not a lot of... Unless something dramatic happens and unexpected happens, this thing slogs for a while. And it's a slog that Putin kind of brought on himself. Although there's lots of interesting things about NATO and him, you know, making Ukraine part of NATO, being the last straw and all that kind of thing. Mr. Casio, good to see you. Hello, good morning. We're just sort of slowly marinating into Ukraine for a moment, as possibly the start of a longish thing. I remember attending an event that Chris Meyer ran at the CBI in Boston, just before the Bush v. Gore election. And we were meeting, we had an event during the day, and then we were going to watch the election together. And we all made bets about when we thought that the election would be decided. And nobody had a time for final verdict longer than a week away. Nobody picked any time more than a week away. And it was what, 54 days? Or how long did that drag out? Some long time. And so sometimes really weird things happen, right? And this feels like one of them. Because Putin presses the button and launches troops in. And as far as I'm concerned, I've been well marketed to, where I think that Russian troops are the people you need to be really afraid of. And they're lethal. And they know, they have a martial art called Sambo. And they have the best weapons. And they have like these Spetsnaz who can do anything, right? And it turns out they can apparently do almost nothing. It's kind of nuts. And part of it seems to be congenital. Part of it seems to be corruption. Part of it I'm thinking, I'm suspecting, might actually be a brownout by the smarter next tier of troops. Because they've seen Afghanistan, like, and by the way, from what I can tell, Afghanistan cost Russia only 15,000 soldiers. I thought it was much more. 15,000 soldiers died in Afghanistan. Grozny Chechnya was apparently somewhere between five and 20. They don't have good numbers. But Ukraine claims to have already killed 12,000 Russians. Russia will admit to 500. So the numbers somewhere in between. Right. Well, the bodies have to go home, don't they? But that's not really. One of the articles I read was that the Russians are leaving the bodies on the field, so they don't have to have draped coffins come home. And so they'll be buried in Ukraine as Ukrainian casualties. They'll get unmarked graves or whatever. Who knows, right? But that's a possibility because just like Trump didn't want to do testing because when you test, that's when you get statistics on COVID. He knows. Yeah, Putin may be doing everything he can. And he also gave a speech where he said conscripts will not be sent into battle. Only professional troops will be sent into battle. And it's like, actually, that is such a bald-faced lie among many other lies. But the conscripts are the ones who are being captured and killed. And it's like we're hearing stories of people calling their moms. The smartest thing the Ukrainians are doing, among others, is like getting soldiers to call their moms and then filming them crying into the phone saying, mom, I was teaching two weeks ago, then I got my call in and I was told it was a training exercise. And here I am captured by Ukrainians. It's like crazy. And unfortunately, that's a violation of the Geneva Convention. There's only a few violations going on, right? Yeah. As the various violations of the Geneva Convention going on in Ukraine, that's kind of on the minor side. But it is illegal for them to be basically putting captured soldiers or captured units up for public view. Oh, so you're saying the Ukrainians are violating the Geneva Convention because I was shaming captured soldiers. Yeah. They're just helping them call their moms. And then they're video recording that and putting that up on YouTube or whatever. As a prop, again, the back. So I'm and I was misguidedly going to a thought that I put in my brain evidence that Putin is committing war crimes or crimes against humanity of which there is plenty. You're right. You're supposed to treat prisoners relatively humanely. Right. I mean, this is not, I mean, they're letting them call their moms. That's very humane. But the fact that they are video recording it and making that public is a technical violation, the worst kind of violation or best kind. Yeah. Did you see the video from actually, I just saw it yesterday of the Russian. It wasn't a real tank. It was one of like a BTR 60 or something in one of their personnel carriers. Destroying a civilian in the car, driving down the road. Basically, apparently it was a couple in their sixties leaving. And as they're driving down a road, captured by a security camera on an adjacent building. And this Russian vehicle comes around the corner and then just fires three shots directly into the civilian car, obliterating it and of course killing new people. But that direct conscious attack on civilians. Yeah. I think they just also, according to a post I just saw they've completely destroyed a maternity hospital in one of the cities. Wow. Pushed into it. Pushed into it by NATO aggression, no doubt. Yes. That was irony, by the way. Well, you know, of course, actually the Ukrainian Nazis who blew up that maternity hospital was blamed it on the Russians. Isn't production amazing? Evil people always do such massive reduction. So I mean, it was Republicans years ago telling me that Obama wasn't going to give up power. I mean, it's just the same shit again and again. And a lot of these stories are cultivated, planted and fueled fan on purpose. I mean, this is very extremely intentional. The idea that 50% of the country believes that the election was stolen and that the rightful president is not president right now is completely intentional. And that ground was prepared for a really nice long time. Yeah. This is the three-dimensional chess game that Putin's been playing now for a long time. And this is what it was for. Right. And so there's a whole theory that nobody should ever have even had the notion that Moldova and Ukraine should be part of NATO, that that was a provocation of the Soviets and that the Soviets many years ago were promised, hey, we're not going to go there. And then we just kept breaking that promise. How much weight do you put on that? It was something that Kissinger and George Shulks and various folks in the late 90s were warning about, that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was talk about expanding NATO eastward. And so there were warnings from the outset that the Russians, and this was pre-Putin. Yeah. The Russians would not like that. So it's not outside the realm of reality for that to be an issue. At the same time, these were not, this was not a case of NATO forcing membership onto these countries. And in no case does NATO forbid the leaving of NATO. So it's a very different kind of situation than just simply we're going to push up our version of the Warsaw Pact up against your borders. So the U.S. has a long and ignoble history of the moment Latin America elects somebody who's a little too left for the government, we overthrow them. And we've done this like dozens of times. It's like shocking how many times we've actually done this. And tried and failed with Castro. They've tried to assassinate him, I don't know, 600 times or more or something like that. And he finds the man finally died of old age. But our Benz and Panama, I mean, there's this like really long litany of times where in our backyard, hey, look, the moment somebody gets too much looking like they're going to go lefty on us, we overthrow them. And so we're coming in saying, hey, you can't overthrow this country that was about to join the other side, which is, in fact, the heart of Russia, arguably, the Kievan Rus are sort of the Ur-Russian folk and they come from Kiev. And so, hey, the heart of Russia is now going to join NATO seemingly voluntarily, but who knows what happened in election cycle after election cycle that was screwed up. So it's weird. Yeah, I think there is a... Sorry, go on Susan, go on. I do have a question for all of you. Just to open it up, there's a new book out. And there are always a new book out. Anyway, one of the endless books on Merkel. And it turns out that, of course, haven't I thought about it for even just a second, I would realize that they actually knew each other. Is it called The Chancellor? All the Chancellor. Which... I'm sorry, which day? Yeah, who knew each other? Putin and Merkel. Putin and Merkel. Oh, because Putin lived in East Germany. Yeah. Holy crap, holy crap. Right, right, right. Yeah, and not only that, somewhere in this book, I think I'll get the title of the book for you. He was a spy base in East Germany for what, five or 10 years? Yes, it's The Chancellor. Oh crap. The Chancellor, the remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel. And one of the stories that comes out of that book is that the author thinks that this would not have happened as long as Merkel was Chancellor. Really? And it goes into some of the history there and it has more detail on what she thought of him and so on and so forth. Hey, fill us in, please. Fill us in, Susan. I don't care. I haven't read it. Oh, okay. So I'm not even good. I just, it's just that in the conversation I had with, was actually with Estie, of course. Estie. And at Teddy's last birthday. Anyway, so she thought I should read it and I started to buy it and then I thought, I don't want to know anymore. Right. We'll see. That's really interesting. Yeah, I thought it was, I mean, it's not a surprise once she said it and I thought, she said, of course. I mean, East Germany wasn't that big. Right. And if you were up, if you were up in any of the Yeah, and she was. Leadership ranks, you would have met. You would have met. Yeah, they would have, yeah. He was a. I don't seem to have the address. What? The address. Oh, sorry. He was talking to Kristi. Jame, you were also about to say something which has now escaped your mind. Yeah, of course. Just further pontificating. I do like the mentioning Putin was KGB spying or was in East Germany. I don't know if you've seen the pictures of Reagan's visit to Moscow with a young Putin there in the background as if he's a father introducing his kids to to Reagan. No, I don't know if it's ever been confirmed that it's Putin, but it's easy to find a lot of people claiming that it is. So does this 1988 picture show Putin's spying on Reagan? Yeah. Yeah. How old is Putin now? Do we know? We can easily find out. Eight years. Mr. Putin is 69 years old. Not that old. Yeah. He's so well on the other side of 69. He's just a young chicken. Yeah. But he was no more. No, he was no more. What? Go on. No more gregarious than he is now. And very not well, not terribly well-spoken. He's never been a terribly good speaker. So it's a yeah. Well, I do tend to think that anyone who points a gun at you is by by the very nature of a very good speaker. I see the I do think that there is a legitimate there is some legitimacy to the argument of that having NATO right on the Russian border in an important part of the an important part of Russia is problematic. Yeah, I think the parallel of if if Mexico joined a security alliance with China, we'd be rather nervous. We'd be nervous. Yes, we've had we've had Cuba 90 miles away or whatever it is from Florida for the past however many decades. But Cuba is tiny, right? Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe. In Europe. Right. Yeah. I mean, I was just reading today. Somebody recently published a history about of wheat in Ukraine. And it's a it's a huge, huge wheat producer. He used to export a lot of it to the US. Egypt is basically going to starve at this point because they spend two and a half billion dollars on wheat from Ukraine every year. So they the microprocessor industry is in trouble because the majority of neon used in neon lasers for chip production comes from Ukraine. I actually know actually know a few people who in business in the States who have got large numbers of staff out in Ukraine doing software development and stuff. Some of you know that I have a Mennonite heritage and the Mennonites, my father's family, well they brought wheat, the winter wheat, red turkey red wheat to the US from there. And they were they were invited by Catherine the Great to come and settle the Dnieper River and around there to to actually grow wheat and grow big farms. And they did. And so it turns out that that community there is near Edessa. And in the trade that I have my great great grandfather, great great great grandfather, all right, was there was there for a time. And he and my cousin said that has has been there. And he's sorry and he's been there and met a lot of the family that still is there. And and and has a said a message last week about how the tanks were coming through town. So it was it was, as I said to myself, suddenly it seemed a lot closer. But that whole wheat thing is is an amazing story. And that's how that week eventually, so they came to Kansas, they came to they they left in nineteen eighteen seventy four, a big bunch of them. And again, in nineteen seventeen, but mostly mostly eighteen seventy four. And they settled in Manitoba and in Kansas and in Guadalajara and in Paraguay. And that that whole that whole wheat belt is all, you know, much of it is not sub spring wheat. It's all winter wheat and all the way up. Super interesting. It's interesting. Yeah, I have friends who, as I was growing up, who followed the harvest. They got out of school early and they went down to Texas with their family and just started working their way up all the way into Canada. Meeting with the combines. I don't know if any people here understand that says it's a pretty interesting thing. Those combines are in huge and expensive machines. So they have these whole lines of them. They go and they just go harvest. And they're they're spread across the field and they just go whoosh. Well, see, if you want to see something scary, you could you can go to a fair in Gossell, Kansas once a year and they bring out all of their old the prairie machines that chewed up the prairie. Now, those those are huge. I mean, they're like the metal wheels that are, you know, good 12 feet in diameter. And and it just it just basically basically spirals towed behind a big tractor that just chewed up the whole prairie. Yeah. Yeah, they had to teach to stop the dust bowl. They had to teach farmers how to farm differently. Yes. And they did. And my father lived through the dust bowl in Oklahoma. So anyway, there are a lot of people there. And they I mean, a lot of men nights, the whole string of us there. And I guess I was going to say that I'm trying to think what I was going to say. Maybe I have a jammy problem here. Well, this interestingly sort of brings us in the proximity of Bali. And it sort of does. You know, how do you how do you retrain farmers to do something slightly differently to change behavior? And how does that behavior trickle around? Right. Part of what that video was that Susan sent. Did anybody happen to see it? I watched it last night. I don't know that we had enough warning to do it. But I and let me put just for fun. Let me put my notes about that video here on the shared screen. And so it's this it's this guy, Stephen Lansing, who is the author of Perfect Order, which is a book we've mentioned several times on Rex calls. Perfect Order is a study of water allocation and rice farming on Bali and how the green revolution almost killed it off and how anthropologists went in and discovered that the thousand year old rituals that were being held in the water temples in the subox on the mountain of the volcano in Bali. Actually, here I've got singing to the baby rice contained algorithms for really ideal allocation of which fields should lie fallow when, who gets how much water off the mountain, etc, etc. And that was all and it was it was all. The SUBAC, it was basically a irrigation system. And it was a yes. And and they had they had optimized that for for quite a while. The video, which you should watch if you're interested in this sort of thing is is quite a nice rap for the book. I think of it as bookends. So the his his march into the area of complexity, he was at the set, Lansing was at the Santa Fe Institute. He has positions at Michigan and, you know, anthropology, Michigan and yeah, anyway, decades of research. Yeah. And and Bali and Borneo and the Melee are a fellow and is famous and this is what I like is for his social ecological modeling. But he says he asks, you know, they did do a simulation and they found the networks. And the networks then did self-adapt. Self, they adapted. They programmed it sort of the way the SUBACs were working and they programmed it out. And sure enough, they were self self organizing. The question was, what do you do with that self organization? And you don't come in and do it top down. For sure. But the the video does have an interesting example of getting even more, more into it. Yeah. With, you know, complex adaptive systems and discovering that they, what was the name? Jerry, do you remember the name of the model but the physicist? I sure do. Looked it up. It's the icing model. That's right. Named after Ernst Eising and Wilhelm Lenz who discovered it. I don't know why Lenz didn't get his name on the model, but it's about ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics, all of which I know nothing about. But what Lansing shows is that with a simple algorithm for how farmers can help optimize their behavior on their little plot of land, the patterns in a SUBAC in a territory wind up resembling this icing model, which says that they wind up cohering. And he shows satellite maps with behavior over time that winds up creating larger clumps of patterns that organize as a system instead of just local organization. And the thing that I didn't understand was when he shows little algorithm, is that an algorithm that's from the temple rituals or is that a new algorithm that they recommended to the farmers? Oh, I think, I think they didn't recommend an algorithm. I think they used the fact that this was true to actually inform the farmers that it would be okay that if they used less water, that that comes into it, that's what is sustainability's order story. So if they use less water, they had higher increase. And the thing about the water was, they flood all those terraces. And the timing and the release of the water is controlled at the point of the water temple for the subac that it's hosting. And when they flooded the fields, what they were doing was getting the pests out. If you flood the field, even the mice and the rats, they all go, they drown. So it took a huge amount of water to do that. And they discovered that they could get pest eradication with less water. Well, he also discovered he took metering equipment down, measuring equipment. And he discovered that flooding the paddies released a whole bunch of methane. And then they discovered that flooding the paddies to a centimeter from the surface was sufficient to perform the task at hand and completely dramatically reduced the methane creation because the anaerobic bacteria didn't start like chewing things up and making methane. And so then they had, and this is the part that I didn't quite get from the thing, they had to convince the farmers to stop flooding the fields completely and to start going only to a certain depth. Well, the surprise, I think the surprise and that came out of the video, I believe the surprise was that actually the, they're having less water also, that they didn't think that it would increase the yield, but it did. That was the surprise. That was probably the convincing thing for the farmers to think about adopting that. And Lansing says, we were wondering how to convince people, but then it turns out that this better behavior doubled the yields. And then it was a downhill run from there. But all of this is about complexity in sustainability is like the frame for the whole talk. And he's talking about how complexity theory seems to play out in these settings where you wouldn't expect them to. Yeah. And he said it's not chaotic. I mean, the sort of he calls them mosaics, the patterns, which reflect where the water has been put, where they are in the growing cycle, et cetera. And all that was managed for thousands of years. And they got very good at it. And so when the Green Revolution came in, it just destroyed that. The other thing that's not evident in that video is the role that the water temples played and the religious role that they play and the fact that it turned into, you could, you could, you could, you could went to your subeck. Oh, on the fields. So there were these concave and convex things. So the valleys were convex, but the water temples had around them pools and everything else. So it was sort of concave. I mean, yes. Concave, because they could hold water. They could hold water. And then that was what was released through the weir at some agreed time and amount. And oh, there's, in his, in the book, I think it's an important thing. Part of the, how do you get this to do? Get this to work. Too much paper. Okay. Yeah. Then here's the interesting question at the, in the, at the end of the book is do we gain anything by viewing water temple networks as complex adaptive systems? And the answer to that question is yes again. And the five things that they concluded from this long period of measuring, measuring and talking to the people and working with the whole system that networks can solve problems, that there's a progression from a local to global solutions that work structure matters, higher level control matters. They had that too. And the dynamics are not tied to the particularities of Bali. So they can find this going on other places. The, what's the religion there had the, there's a big gender story, which I'm not going to go into, but the, it was the men and the women masculine and feminine and that goes into the, the Hindu and the practice. The Pradhana is about the creation of order. And that's, that's what women do. And Pradhana aligns the role of women with the goddesses. So it, there's a whole religious layer to this. And the masculine is, is, is the source of, is a source of disorder, the source of order and disorder. And, but it's these masculine and the feminine that come together. Makes so much sense that men would be the source of disorder. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. It wasn't, yeah. No, I'm just saying. Yeah. And, but they also play a role in creating order too, because that, that hierarchy, the patriarchy is, plays quite a role in, in making those decisions as well. But then the women come in and create order. And what they do is they, they create discontinuities. And then they resolve that discontinuities arise. And then they resolve those by realigning the elements of the system. And it's quite an elaborate social system over time. I just found a study about gender differences and meta-cognitive skills involving. Don't know if it's useful or not, but it's sort of on the lines of what you're talking about. So on the one hand, I'm sitting here thinking, it does the farmers no good to know that there's an icing model involved. And that's, that's like a light bulb going off for researchers. And they want, they wonder back. They're like, yeah, our model is actually mirror reality. But it turns out that these rituals have been like functioning really quite well. Thank you very much for that interference. But then, but then the, one of the insights that I expected you to list when you listed the five was. Oh, sorry, I'll send the URL. You're, you're right. One of the insights I expected you to say was, Hey, if we got cheap sensors in everywhere, we would help local farmers discover things they could tweak and then using their algorithms and their community and sort of sharing out what's going on. They could find their way to better solutions on their own, right? But they do find their way to better solutions on their own, right? Yeah. Yeah. But the whole, they didn't find this one. Right. There's a subplot here of him taking this bulky equipment to measure methane output from plants that wasn't local and that could be made cheaper. Like you, you could easily envision a very inexpensive way of measuring a methane exhaust for anything, just like I would love there to be. So after the Fukushima earthquake, Joey Ito and others created open source Geiger counters and got those spread all over Japan so that they could get like crowdsourced readings about radiation. Brilliant. Well, how about, yeah, that sounds like such a good idea. Somebody must have thought of that. They did that. That's what happened after Fukushima. No, I know. I know. I know what I meant. I meant in soil. So the thing I would love to foster is soil organic matter readers that are insanely cheap and DIY and open sourced and whatever and just propagate those around the earth. And then I'd love to change tax systems to reward anybody who improves soil organic matter and sharply penalize anybody who decreases soil organic matter. And I think a lot of other things would then shift around a bit because the incentives would be better aligned with regenerative agriculture and all that kind of stuff. And industrial farming would suffer. Like there'd finally be a tax on the pigs, the pig houses and the chicken poops and all the things that destroy the landscape and the earth. Yes, one would like. So I was just saying, I'm going to, well, I will look it up later. But my guess is there are people who have you know, handheld, simple to use DIY methane meters. But I was looking for, I was looking for sensors for a propane. Methane or propane? Propane. Propane, okay. Okay. Anyway, I wandered into this whole world of sensors. And it is really difficult. And those, the sensors that can sense a gas in the middle of all the other gases is a pretty tricky thing to do. Not to say it can't be done or hasn't been done. Yeah. You think that the bong industry would be really good at propane research, but still. Yeah. Well, it is, yeah, I just had a new water system put in and in my up here and I have a propane heater, which is just gobbles propane. I mean, it's ridiculous. But I wanted to know if it was leaking. If the new water heater, which was on demand, was leaking propane. And you can buy widgets. They're not all that rare. They're not terribly expensive, but they are. It's a lot safer than walking around the device with a lighter. Much safer than that. Well, or actually soapy water, you know. Yeah. I use soapy water, but then you have this mess. You have this huge mess of soapy water all over your pot. Exactly. Exactly. Whatever. Anyway. So anyway, any, and Jamebo, any thoughts from the Bali stuff for sustainability plus complexity or all that? And Jame, I'm remembering a lot. Your talks about RK dynamics and ecosystems and how those apply to our doomed futures and all of that. You've been in these waters for a long time as well. I'm listening. I didn't, I didn't see the link to the video until late, so I didn't get a chance to watch it. So I'm listening. And I don't want to get my mouth, get ahead of my brain. And Lance, Lance thing is, Lance thing is lovely. I'd never seen a picture of him. So I'd read Perfect Order years ago and I had no idea from him. It's just nice to hear him talk. Yeah. And he's very, he's very, you can tell these kind and thoughtful and he, he gives credit where credit is due. Yeah. So he'd be the last person to take credit for all of this, all of these insights, but he's very open to, you know, I mean, the Santa Fe Institute is no, is a really interesting place. I wonder how well these methodologies, these very old, very well-tested methodologies will work in a changing climate environment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, changing, you know, changing timing and amounts of rainfall, changing temperatures and insulation. Where things will happily grow. I mean, there's home ranges, I guess is what it's called for animals and insects. How amenable is this process to evolution? Does it evolve well, or is it very much a product of its environment? It's, I mean, when he says the dynamics are not tied to the particularities of Bali, I read that to mean also that the implication was that this kind of social ecology, that's what I would call it, that social ecology, is a process that goes on and is the adaptive, it is the adaptive process for people. And we mess it up, as well as, you know, adjusting to it. But it's the incremental changes and the fact that, of course, I think that's a really an outstanding question is how fast can things adapt. I'm surprised at all the changes that have been here in the 35 years I've lived here. The bugs are different. I miss swatting away flies and mosquitoes. Like, I have not been surrounded by flies and mosquitoes now for decades. And I'm like, where the hell do they go? What's going on? Yeah. And mosquitoes, of course, are, yes, mosquitoes, are food for a lot of things. As we are willing food for them. Yes. Sort of pivoting a little. Jamebo, any interesting things in your, in your worlds? Any things that are like, whoa, what's this? I'm just kind of worried about World War. That's what I said to, I said, when Jerry suggested that I said, I've been working on this, digging around to see what I can find out about this guy and what he's done and how, where it went. And he said, well, why don't we talk about that? And then you sent out your thing about the war and I sent a message back saying, oh, I forgot, but I forgot the war. And it was just to realize that I had been so engaged in this, trying to pull this big picture and get it wrangled into a story or two. That I was relieved of that for a time. I would recommend, you know, get a really deep thing that you have to figure out. Yeah, exactly. Spend a day on that because it clears the mind. It doesn't help. It comes right back. But it's for a time there, you're left in peace. Have you all heard of Constructor Theory? I've heard of it. So let me put a, I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday about Constructor Theory. Let me paste also an explanation, which is not the best explanation, but it's a reasonable one for now. And let me share screen. And the conversation started with this idea of scaffolding. And Susan, I have this idea that you're, you're going to really like Constructor Theory. And it's kind of like information has a cost. I'm not going to explain this well, but I'm going to explain it better than I was able to explain it yesterday. That information has a cost and the constructors create, Oh, there was a nice graphic somewhere that I'm forgetting about now that depend on scaffolding and substrates. They use substrates so that when we, when we write a report and leave it out in cyberspace, that's kind of a substrate. Boy, I'm explaining it really poorly. And it's connected to ergodic theory and ergodicity, which comes from dynamical systems theory, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm forgetting exactly who's guilty of creating ergodicity. But I realized, I realized that when I use the metaphor of leaf cutter ants and the big fungus to describe me and the brain and open global mind, and let me rewind for a second to explain that. So I think I've said this several times here, but leaf cutter ants can't digest leaves. Why are they bringing leaves into the nest? They hand those little leaf cuttings off to a subgenre of that kind of ant, which multers up the leaves, puts them on a fungus, which they have a symbiotic relationship with underground in the nest. That fungus metabolizes leaf matter and oozes fungus parts and nectar, which feeds the entire hive. Metaphorically, as I curate my brain and add stuff to it, I feel like I'm gardening this fungus. I feel like I'm curating a fungus, which is nutritious to a few people because there are a few hearty souls who send me messages to say, hey, thank you for publishing your brain. I always go look in it first when I have to research something, or I found this and you didn't have this. Could you add it? And I do, and blah, blah, blah. That happens a little bit on the side all the time. But it struck me in conversation yesterday that my big fungus analogy for me curating this information source and wanting... So I think of myself as a lone ant at the fungus space for 24 years because the brain is not a good collective intelligence tool. There is a team brain version, but it doesn't actually work the way it needs to work. But I feel like where the hell is everybody else? This is really fun. We should be creating a shared memory together. This is just an awesome task. And we don't all have to be using the brain. We could be using different tools that connect in to create this scaffolding for how we think. And that's where it connects back up into constructor theory because it's like, oh my God, Wendy. And Wendy Elford is the woman that... And Pete Kaminsky, who you all know. So Pete and Wendy were on a call with me that went more than an hour and a half about this because she runs incredibly deep on this. She's highly trained in David Snowden's Kenevan framework and sense maker mechanisms and all that. And so she's been using that to help Kenevan Australia create stuff around water and like it runs into Indigenous wisdom and a bunch of other really interesting things. I know, I know. But you know what? A couple of little ants working steadily over time create stuff, right? That's the thing. Do you want to break into song? No, I'll pass. Okay, good. It's like one of those moments in the musical where you go from prose to song, right? I'm sorry, my brain goes in weird directions. That's great. My brain is ineffable. It's what we love about Chuchamé, among many other virtues. But anyway, there's this idea an open global mind was born from this frustration I have that I've been sitting here with a quirky tool weaving, curating, gardening by myself making topiary out of ideas, which I find incredibly useful and other people are like, not sure I get it. And I completely get it, but I can't do it. Well, partly I'm like there's if there were the Wikipedia was not created by everybody on earth going and making an entry. Wikipedia was created by a couple of manic obsesses doing really good work together. And then this crowdsourcing dynamic where lots of other people came in and said, you know, I'm going to fix the Oxford commas and you know, I'm going to fix usage and citation processing and whatever. Awesome. But a few tens of thousands of people gave us Wikipedia. A few tens of thousands of people obsessive like me could give us a substrate above Wikipedia and Google that actually weaves together what people are thinking and where it comes from and why. And we need that scaffolding. We need that structure, that substrate, that conversational anchoring so that we're not having the same conversations over and over and over and over fruitlessly so that we have a shared memory that other people can lift higher from, etc. And then I'm starting to see books and PDFs as little prisons for interesting ideas. Like what our smartest people do is they write books. And then what do we do with books? We wrap them in DRM and we put them out there and we spank people who debrief, decode, decipher what's in the book and disseminate it because it might actually be useful information for the world. Right? And PDFs make it hard to sort of use information. I'm one of the people who believes PDF is where information goes to die. And so we're taking great ideas and we're not amplifying them and making them more useful and usable. Bless you. We're actually locking them away and making it harder to fix the problems that we're all facing. Bless you again. I intercepted it. I got it. No, no. Okay. Oh, there's another one coming. Are you a three-sneezer? Okay. I met someone once who was like a seven or a nine-sneezer and it was really funny because she'd start sneezing. And we'd go choo, choo, choo. And you'd be like until she was done and then it was gone. But it was predictable. The number was predictable. So anyway, that's my rant on all of this and scaffolding and fungi. So I own the bigfungus.org but I haven't done much about it. But the idea is let's all and it's because it's tongue-in-cheek let's all go feed the big fungus because if we do this properly and tend symbiotically to our information commons and information resource like it's back, yay. If we tend to this resource together well we might actually advance civilization because I've got high hopes. I've got... Well, one of the things that I... Mike, you might want to leave again. No, that's what I came back for. While you were gone, we took psilocybin and all of us. We're basically tripping. You were going to say something. I think one of the things that seems to me to be missing is a match or a... I mean, I don't know. A match between the social ecology and these things, right? I mean, he's the first... The anthropologist that... He's very close to doing that of having this social system and the actual social ecology they're merged. I mean, he brings them together as a... How was that not actually originally happening in Bali before the Green Revolution showed up? How was that not already a thing on the ground? It was already a thing on the ground, right? But it's the story... It's the meta story that I'm thinking about. Okay. Okay, as... You know, how does change happen? Because I've been messing around in that space for ages. And one of the examples that I keep going back to is... I used it here once. The Kaya Hoga River burning. The fire, whether it's lit on fire? Yeah, lit on fire, yeah. And to go back, and I read enough to substantiate my hypothesis, which is that what you need for these kinds of things is... I will confess, as a researcher, because you're not supposed to do that. I guess you're not supposed to do that. But we all do. Was that it was what was important there. It took 50 years to clean up the river. Okay. And when they celebrated it, it became obvious to me that what worked was a shareable idea. And the shareable idea was they all wanted clean water. But they wanted it for very different reasons. So, you know, the people who... There were the people who brought their boats through. They wanted to be able to get, you know, shipping channels be clearer. They wanted... The fishermen wanted to be able to fish again. The... International symbol for... Yeah, exactly. They wanted to fish. They wanted to, you know, go swimming. They wanted all of these different things for different reasons. But it all came together under the rubric of clean water. That was never a decision. It was never... I couldn't find any place... Well, I didn't go that deeply. But it didn't jump out from the stuff that I was reading. That that was the driver. And so this idea of a shareable... A shareable... Purpose is more important than shared. Because if you try to distill it into something everybody's going to agree to, that is just hopeless. Yeah, you can't reach consensus. And that's why team brain, for example, doesn't really work, is that it kind of requires consensus on what's being added across people. And why OGM doesn't think that the brain is the answer, but there's like a half dozen or a dozen different kinds of ways of visualizing information that need to meet in the middle someplace. And the tools need to collaborate, but also the substrate, the scaffolding needs to permit each individual to express their own point of view and then blend it into the larger point of view where they see fit. So one of the reasons I love the brain is that it just... It holds my point of view. It's not claiming to be anybody else's point of view, but if I were to trip across a web of ideas that Jame has written about our case accession and how that affects what we should do about the climate, I could link into that and say, in this area, Jame speaks for me and speaks for these 62,323 other people who said, this cluster of ideas is really fantastic and we're behind it. And that's the way that... Because otherwise all you get is eight point however many... I don't know how many humans are on earth right now, but billion different versions of reality if you start to figure out where the overlaps are and how to crystallize and connect and agree on small subsets individually, then you start to get this collective thing. I didn't realize there may have to go. But does that make sense? It does. Just to be throwing a slightly contrarian spanner here, if I may, it does seem to me that we have this very, very long deeply embedded adversarial concept about knowledge and thought structures and stuff like that, which makes it extremely difficult to arrive at consensus. So for example, as the guy who wrote about metaphor said, that's it, Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, this was when they were talking about how actually most of metaphor, most of the metaphors which we use to talk about discussion are all taken from war in Western culture, nearly every single one of them. And one of the things that I found really interesting was that when I actually run metaphor workshops, which actually require people to translate what they are thinking or what they're doing into a metaphorical journey through a landscape, they all start, well, first of all, they all start having fun. Secondly, they all start going, oh, you know what? Yeah, that metaphor that you came up with, that's kind of like, that's kind of like a bit that fits into another bit of my metaphor over here. And people who were originally thought that they were going to completely disagree with each other because they have their own particular agendas when they're thinking with their left brain suddenly find that they've got common cause and they end up with a picture of a journey that they can all take together. So I think there's something really valuable in recognising that we tend to be inherit this bias in how we try and process this stuff. And I think... Yes, and I think... Why an image? Sorry, sorry. You mean the fecal metaphor kind of thing? Yes, when I was... ...building the Institute for Research on Learning and we had this motley crew of, you know, my experience at CSLI at Stanford had been that everybody liked being in this interdisciplinary stew for the first year. And then when the second year came around and you got more further into what people were actually thinking and what they were actually working on, vehement disagreement would surface. And so I thought for the Institute and I think what I like about the metaphor using that metaphor, I can imagine, I can imagine the building was that I said, okay, split everybody up into groups in which we had both administrators, we actually split ourselves up in the building so that the administrators were in among us to hear the conversations. Oh, that's great. And then when the... When one of those sociolinguists was sitting next to the HR person, she said, I had no idea what went on in there or what the work was. I mean, what it was. And just being in the hallway and overhearing things and so on and so forth. So much of the time we would recommend that they just redistribute the people. There's all these interesting stories about building planning and for interaction, including was it Oxford or Cambridge where the departments would be centered around stairwells? Yes. Instead of being, this floor is English. They'd be like, no, no, no. English is around this stairwell up and down. And then the movement up and down the stairwell was a part of the social interaction. Because they don't, otherwise they don't. I mean, there was what's his name, Tom at MIT. Tom, I'll think of it. Malone. Malone. Yeah. You know, the research on people don't go up the stairs. You know, they don't go, they don't mesh on floors. But on the other hand, I had a big argument with Genentech about and the design of these big stairways that come down to a hub. And I wanted to see what was going on. Who was talking with whom on the stairways? Because we used to video that at Send Microsystems. Because they wanted to know how, they wanted us to recommend what collaborative technologies they should use. I said, what do you know about collaboration in this company now? Okay. And the collaboration, of course, was very tied to hallways. And at, you know, in the morning, everybody would be looking into each other's rooms to see who was there. We called that glancing like this. I mean, you could just see them going, seeing who's there, can they step in? And about four o'clock in the afternoon, they were all sort of done and they'd come out and stand in the hallways and talk. And it was the timing of it, the rhythm of it. And then who talked to whom. So we did, some people wouldn't play, but most of the people didn't mind being videoed. And actually looking at who knew whom. You know, had they worked together before and you didn't, you got elevator behavior, but among people who didn't know each other or hadn't worked together. And a very powerful part of the thing I always insisted on was that we find situations that were working the way we wanted them to work. So if somebody was going to take all the insurance agents out of their offices and have them work remotely, how were you going to replace that? Replace those kinds of things. Because that was the scaffolding and the sort of metaphorical scaffolding that you're talking about is very real in a building. And putting people next to each other and working next to each other. And finding, there was one person who was assigning projects in the morning and actually would say, go sit next, here, here you've got this kind of a, was actually building a scaffolding plan for each person in the room as to what they needed and what kinds of cases. And she would distribute the cases and say, go sit next to so-and-so, you'll need this. It's very powerful. It is. Anyway, so I decided to, it's also useful to the way Mike was talking about giving people a metaphor, a job to come up with metaphors. I wanted them to come up with a floor plan for, or a plan for how the institute would look in five years if we could build a building. Oh, that's great, yeah. And, you know, and they got, they really got in there. And the funny thing was we had five groups and all of them came up with the same idea. Some version of mobile office, you know, some people had that have little caravans that you could, you know, ring, ring and then you could go park next to somebody else and various, various wonderful things like that. So there was this complete desire to want to collaborate. It's really interesting. That's another thing of building, all right. You know, it has to be, people have to build things together. The only way we got the computer scientist and anthropologist to work together and stop arguing was to send them to a client together when the director and I couldn't go. Did they also stop arguing, did they also stop arguing when they started working on visualising what their different architectural structure would look like? Yes, yes, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. I mean, our friend Dave Gray makes his entire living out of helping people to get past serious strategic problems by making them draw them out. Yeah, yes, yes. Changing the medium, right, can actually induce that. But you have to feel like you don't have to know all about the medium in order to participate. Yeah, yeah. So a couple of things here. One, I clearly believe in turning decisions over to locals to figure things out like open space technology and a bunch of design from trust. I also believe that's really hard sometimes for people to get out of their ruts or out of their preconceptions. And one of the lessons of drawing on the right side of the brain, if any of you ever read that, Betty Edwards, back in the day, she has you draw an image and you sort of draw it. And then she has you turn the image upside down and draw it. And when you draw it right side up, when you get to the ear, you're like, oh, your brain hops in and goes, oh, I know how to draw an ear. You do this and then you do this and there's an ear. Look, it looks like an ear. And when you turn it upside down, you're merely drawing shapes and shadows. And when you draw shapes and shadows and ignore what your brain knows about an ear, you draw much more accurate representation of what's in front of you. So in planning a building for ourselves or whatever, I'm reminded of my household in West Philly, my second year in grad school, I found the house. I told the students the year before that we're leaving. Don't offer this to anybody else. I got this and then I recruited some buddies and there were five guys in a six bedroom big home in West Philly. And one of us had had a really interesting household at York University in Canada. And he said, what we did was not, this is my shelf in the fridge. This is your shelf in the fridge. We divided up the household into what each person was really good at. So Rafael and I were meats, vegetables, fresh stuff, because we knew how to shop. One other guy was dry goods, cleaning products, toilet paper, make sure the house is always full of that. One guy was the banker. He was busy calculating how much we were spending and then telling us how much we had to put in the drawer for the next month. This is way before everything is credit card. So a cash drawer was fine and we luckily didn't get robbed. And so we split up the tasks and then the fridge, if you really wanted something personally, you put your name on it and you put it somewhere, but the fridge was then an organic fridge. And that insight from one person in our group who had had a really high functioning household in York infected our entire household. And we had a lovely year because of this. We also had a, the house book was by the only telephone in the house, which was on the ground floor at the base of the stairs. And we used to leave funny messages for each other, tease each other and leave, hey, so-and-so called for you. Our voicemail equivalent was in the book that was in the house. And one of the boxes that I have to sort through right now contains that book, which I'm actually eager to find again. But I'm saying all of this because we have all these preconceptions for how to do stuff. And when left to go, like, go design what you want the building to look like, we will really often fall back on the rut. And it's like, oh, let's put the anthropologist over there and the, you know, the aquarium designers over here. But any one of these little hacks, when told, will hook in our brains and this is why pattern languages are so useful, is that a good pattern language will make these little other sorts of insights memorable and will put them into play in the design process. And so a piece of what I think is necessary for catalyzing positive change is telling lots of stories of interesting quirky things, translating as much of the wisdom from those stories into a pattern language that you can then start using to talk because you need to talk at a higher level. And that's what pattern language lets you do. And we're not doing all of that. So sorry, long, long screen, but, but I love the idea of having people design things in order to change metaphors, in order to rethink the social engineering or social ecology of their spaces, but they need a little bit of stimulus to do so. Right. But I mean, I think, I think the premise of I think we were about five years in before we had that little exercise. But I think people were struck by what they had. Right. I'm having an urge to do a Zoom call with my buddy Rafael and have this conversation again. Yeah, it's, but again, it was, I mean, notice the dynamics, the dynamics, the social dynamics of, you know, expertise. I mean, my, my partner that I built this place with and I desperately tried to not fall into gendered rules. And in the end we had to because, I mean, we shared a lot. I remember, you know, when we, when I finally understood triangles in the abstract, we needed to figure out how we're to put a water tank up the hill. How far up did we need to put it to get 35 PSI? Well, I had no idea how to do that. And then he said, well, of course you do. So we went out and walked off the steps, walked up and, you know, it happened. But time, you know, I would end up doing the cooking and cleaning and he would end up doing the, doing the, all the calculations for the working drawings. I'm loving this. Institutes, houses, making expeditions to the North Pole. We didn't go to the North Pole. We went as far as the Arctic Ocean and stuck our feet in it. But that was really nice. Oh, what were you saying? You're muted itself. I was saying I was enjoying the sound of the birds in the background. Oh, yeah. You're Susan. I can hear them. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm enjoying that. And also the fireplace behind Mike. What is that, Mike? Yeah, there are birds outside of my window. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to tell you how long I spent making that fireplace, but I did. Nice. It would be sort of strangely fitting in this conversation if there was a bird roasting over your fire. No bird roasting over my fire today. Well, I have a fire as well, but it's a propane fire. Is yours a propane fire or is it a wood fire? It's a wood fire. Yeah, it's a wood burning fire. Is the top of your stove or cooktop? Can you actually cook on that or is that just a heating stove? Yeah, you can if you really, really want to. I don't know if I'd necessarily advise it. It's pretty difficult to control the temperature. Yeah, it's great for keeping toast hot on, though. You could heat a kettle of water. Yeah, you could, but I take it a long, long time. Yes, it does. I used to live with a wood stove. I think, yeah, I just use it for heat, but... You know, the Vermont castings in a big open space, I mean, you can actually heat a volume of air with the Vermont castings and there's no shortage of wood here. Now that everything's dying with plenty of wood. Yeah, I mean, I think that maybe it's not a bad thing to have one solid fuel form of heating at the moment, eh? Yeah. So Bo, is the economic situation going to go right down the shitter or what's your take on where all this stuff is taking us? The biggest danger, so right now, one of our problems is the Fed trying to kill inflation, raising interest rates when the economy is starting to slow down. So this is actually not... Optimal. Yeah, this is really not optimal. So they talk about policy error and that's what they're talking about, is how the Fed's going to soft land the economy. The other point is, I think there's a lot of contention about whether this is supply chain problems that are causing us inflation. It's not all of it, but again, does model query policy deal with supply chains? No, it doesn't. As far as Europe, Europe right now is the big danger because Mike, how likely do you think it is Europe's going to, probably say we're not going to buy any more oil or natural gas from Russia? How likely is that? I think that our guy, it's really difficult to tell, isn't it? Because at the moment, so much of it is like bravado. So Germany's saying that they're going to try and cancel almost all of it. And I think they actually, but I think Germany probably will because they actually have some kind of plan for doing it, right? But Germany's shut down a whole bunch of functioning nukes. Yeah, but I think they're actually considering reopening them. That's what I would do. Don't shut them down. And I do. I think the UK is absolutely useless. Don't expect to see any shred of integrity or ideologically, genuinely ideologically motivated behavior from out of the UK. They're all in Russia's pocket anyway, as far as I can make out pretty much. So the biggest next changer is Europe, besides to stop using Russian fuel and oil, gas and oil. Then you've got a 70s style like supply shock. And it's not. Now, unlike the 70s, we use about a quarter less oil and gas to produce stuff. So it's not as bad as that. That kind of supply shock to Europe will really hurt them. And Europe's not really doing that well right now anyway. They, unlike us, our policymakers did such a good job in our through the pandemic of pumping money in everybody's hands. Europe didn't do that. Europe is not even back to trend. We are back to trend. So another way of saying this is Europe's already weak in that they take that supply shock. It's going to really hurt. And there I see them as the most vulnerable actually right now of really getting hurt. Yeah, I think that they will be a supply shock in Europe regardless of what people say. I think it will be just impossible for them to completely go back to the Russian relying on Russian energy because it's just now absolutely clear to everybody what a completely stupid thing it was to do. I mean, you know, I've been saying for the past 15 years, excuse me, how about like focusing hugely investing in renewables, local generation, thorium reactors, local grids, network, local grids, loads of resilience to any terrorist attack or anything else, safe nuclear energy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Might as well not have wasted my breath really. So talking to Merkel, I mean, where the Germans shut down all the reactors, but I also heard that one of the things that really pushed from a German friend of mine is that the Black Forest was full of a lot of stuff from Chernobyl. Oh, right. Not only Fukushima, it was basically the experience of that. Like zombies and stuff like that. What's funny is that there's France with the other 7% of the power from nuclear reactors. I mean, France is going to walk through this pretty well, actually. Yeah, no, I think they will. I think they'll probably go through it okay. A UK is going to be completely, completely screwed because now we're not even in the European energy buying consortium. Right, right. Is it just a shit storm waiting there? But also like Egypt buys almost $3 billion worth of wheat from Ukraine every year? That's happening. And the thing about wheat is, and that's great that Susan's here, is that America has enough capacity to completely fill in the missing wheat. But problem is, you needed the planet last year. I'm laughing, I shouldn't be laughing. Well, and a lot of those, you know, a lot of the wheat growing areas are, have gone back to grass. I mean, because we thought we didn't need that much. Right. Remember when there were farm subsidies? Yeah. I mean, the farm subsidies are going like gone. Are they? I thought we still had lots of subsidies, like in the farm bill, like tobacco, like we're paying tobacco farmers to not grow tobacco and all that kind of stuff. I thought that was still baked in. And I could be entirely wrong. Some of it for the small farmers, not so much. Yeah. Nothing good happens for small farmers. Like we torture small farmers. But it's about big business. Yeah. But agrib, you know, the industrial farmers get all sorts of like interesting, juicy socialist kind of things. Yeah, that's right. The ironies, the ironies are so deep. I read Cadillac Desert, which is about water in the West in America. And, you know, the middle of the country, where the high plains West of the Mississippi, where really you shouldn't be growing crops a lot. I have lots of crops. They're part of the red basket because irrigation. And they're getting water that cost, that they're paying $20 an acre foot for water that costs like $200 an acre foot to get to them. Yeah. Shit like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't see. Well, the other thing. I demand, you know, I actually think, I think there will be shocks, but I think that it may be incredibly, so there may be some incredible surprises about how people adapt. Yeah. I'm hoping, yeah. Yeah. I mean, here the, you know, we have PG&E in California, Pacific Gas and Electric Rate, which is not servicing the population very well at all. And they're burning down everything. Yep. And it's just ridiculous. Anyway, so it's happening here in this little pocket that I live in, between the ocean and the bay, there's a town called LaHonda, which has been in blackout so many times. And they don't, they say, oh, we're going to, you know, we're going to, over the last couple of years, they put them in blackout over and over and over. Wow. So partly because of fire, danger. So, and they don't tell them when they're going to do it. And then they put in these, never mind. I don't want to go into it. It's caused the town of LaHonda to decide to put in a microgrid. And, you know, we, I just put in New Solar and the company that did it was doing, this is one of their first off grid. I'm off the grid, have been off the grid for 35 years. And some people are just terrified by it. And I'm liking. You're an old hand. Those new panels. And I'm just liking the sun shining and having power. I mean, it's just amazing. Yeah. And all your manual, you know, so Susan every morning and evening had to go throw, throw switches at the battery bank and stuff like that to decouple the inverter or whatever. I don't remember what, just to have the cycle work every day. Yeah. And that, and now that's gone. I had, I used to have 19 electrical boxes. And now I have like, I've won a Tesla Gateway plus a couple of boxes for distribution. And that is an app for that. Yeah. There's an app for the Tesla Gateway, although I was going to go down and restart the solar panels, but we decided it was because, oh, so my lesson, the lesson I have learned from this thing is that they did not think through what it was like to come up to an existing electrical system. You know, how far do you push into that system? How far do you, you know, replace things? How far do you, whatever, and I had, it's been a huge learning curve for me to debug. So it took me about two seconds this weekend to figure out that the reason that the Siberian couldn't get the pumps that diesel on Sunday, which is the data pump diesel, which we now went a whole month one was, and so the battery died. And it took me, and the battery died. And to discern that the battery had died didn't take, it was, it was purchased in 2017. And this is the thing that starts the generator. We hadn't been running the generator, so it hadn't been charged, was also getting old. And it took, it took two catastrophes when the Tesla power wall went down because we used up all the power. And if I had been paying attention, but I wasn't because it had two sunny days in a row. And I'm thinking, wow, we're in heaven here. But we weren't because that when the, you know, when the generator wasn't running because it didn't turn on, it was supposed to automatically turn on, but I didn't know it hadn't turned on. So you have, I think, what one could call a low IQ grid as opposed to a smart grid, but you're heading toward a smart grid. But right now you have kind of like a dunderhead grid. Yeah. We could call it a dunder grid. A dunder grid, yes. A dunder grid. Anyway, at least the Siberian thanked me. He said, you've got that fixed really promptly. I had to drive down to the bay side and get whatever and get the battery and bring it up here. I couldn't even lift the damn thing for the generator. And I had to call my fix-it person to come over and put it in. I'm looking at the time, and I actually have another two people showing up at the half hour for a different call. And that call, I was going to solicit your help also. I'm trying to stand up, pick Jerry's brain as a way to make a living. And so if you would stare at that and any comments, welcome. Because I'm trying to figure out like, hey, can I actually, and it's complicated in several different ways, but I love sitting and brainstorming with people while using both my brains. So why not get paid for that? Well, exactly. Oh, you can try that. That's great. Yeah, so anyway, so I'm about to head off and try to do that. And I did a couple of test calls. So I have a couple of picked Jerry's brain prototype calls, one of which you can find pointed to from that website. And the second person that I did it with, just yesterday, sent me back a bunch of really interesting like detailed comments, which were beautiful. Like he really took time and made comments. And he also said, you know, Jerry, if the call is going to be 60 minutes or 90 minutes, I kind of have to prep for an hour. Then afterward, if I'm going to take this seriously, I need to listen to the call again. And then I need to do some self-work. And so my investment on my side, he said, is like five or six hours, realistically, if I take this seriously. And I'm like, you are completely right. And that I could take that two different directions. One is, why don't I play that up and say, hey, to actually do this properly, you're going to need five or six hours. And here's a template for what you could do with that time, how you could go through it. And that, I think, is actually added value to what I bring to it. Or that means I should skinny down the length of time that I spend with them. And someone said that Benkatesh Rao was selling like his time in six minute increments, kind of as a joke, but kind of as a serious thing. And I can't find that any place. So that's interesting too. Like I could just jam with a bunch of different people for an hour. I could do 10 people in an hour in six minute increments. Maybe I should do that. But getting the practice of actually doing that extra five or six hours is no joke. I mean, we had to build that at the Institute for the Collaborative Anthropology. They don't work together. And we had to process one hour of field work with five or six hours of work. So wait, so the Collaborative Anthropologists weren't collaborating? They didn't know how. That's amazing. But it makes total sense. Of course it does. It's ironic in a funny way. And it's completely ironic. Because everybody said, I don't understand what they're doing and they're just going out and observing. Well, everybody can observe, right? So that's a big deal. And I think it's not that. It's the analysis. Yeah, I think if you want to get the mother of all disagreements going, get a bunch of experts about the same thing and put them in one room. Yes. And I just don't do that anymore. It's so much better. You know, to have somebody stand up and say, oh, yeah, I know about that. Or don't forget about. I mean, that's why Jerry's conversations work. Why Rex works, I think. And it's the size of a conversation, which is five to seven people. Anyway, this is, I see this. Oh, so you have to evolve a practice. Of analysis and the best thing to do is be able to do it with a team, doing this with a team that has to do something. Something happen so that they have a shareable role. Here's one of my friends now. I honestly think I have just very briefly before I have to go anyway on the brain thing. If you think about it, I think the six minute idea is it's amusing, but unless you can work out a way of making the switching cost virtually zero, it's going to be a nightmare to administer. And now also my feeling is that given the vast scope and scale of everything you've put together, you should be trying, you should be pitching it as being a transformational high-end type thing that people do. This is something that you need. This is something which can supercharge something that you want to do if it's a really serious proposition, a really serious project. And it will mean that you have got lots and lots of follow-up to do, which of course we can help with for a suitable fee. For a certain, yes. I can help you build that practice. Stacy, I was just putting in front of everyone a brief description of Scott's reply with like, hey, it actually takes me five or six hours to process this if I'm going to take it seriously, versus, hey, should I sell my time in six minute increments? And just like take the bite size way down. And I'm tempted to experiment with both, and then to turn the big one into a practice, as you're saying right now. And then to figure out, is there a lightweight way to do context switching and to do like Bruce Lee being chased by ninjas on the other small side? I don't know. But to me it's really intriguing because I'm pretty quick using it. The problem is that sometimes I don't understand what somebody's after for a half hour. And sometimes it's not the first thing they say that actually is what they meant to say. It's the fifth thing they say. And it isn't until you've thrashed around for a little bit that you discover, oh, what you really mean is this. And that doesn't happen in six minutes usually. No, and getting into, I have in my own document, practice documentation, I have a whole thing on, getting in. Getting in to a company, getting insight, or getting access to the kind of thing that you want to look at because you know that that's got a key, is a key to figuring out how this other problem that they have can be resolved. Makes sense. And I'll say, I think you need to remember house as well. Right? Everybody lies. Patients always lie. Customers, they do the same thing. They will come to you telling you that they've got one particular problem. But the real problem is something that you have to discover. Exactly. Right. And then they think that, and if you get it right, the annoying thing is they think they knew it already. Yeah, well. It's like, sure you did. That's the zen life for you. Well, actually, the consulting sweet spot is when somebody comes up to you after a meeting and says, I've been trying to tell them that for a decade. But because you came in from the outside, they actually listened to you, and now we might actually get something done. That's like, that's sort of the opposite effect. But I like it. Kind of like it when that happens. Because people don't listen. Once you're an employee, like really often, they don't listen to you. Very strange. Having an external relationship in some at least mental independence really is a big deal. Yes. Well, I was, yes. That's what, and then I went in to be inside one because I thought, I can't, I need to know how this works from the inside. Exactly. Which was, anyway. All right. See you later, everyone. Thank you, folks. Yes, guys. Nice to meet you. You forgot about the war for an hour a day, Bo. Okay. I'm prescribing that. All right. Ow. I'll just go read philosophy. I don't want to do it. There you go. Yeah, yeah. There you go. Which one? That's the meaning of the system. You mean the Peloponnesian War, right? Right. No, I'll just do Aristotle's metaphysics. Okay. Yes. There we go. Good to see you. Bye-bye. Thanks, everyone.