 So it is Wednesday, September 11th, the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. I happen to be in New York. This is a Rex check-in call for September of 2019. And yeah, here we are. Where is Eric? Oh, you're at home. Jamey is in San Francisco walking. Dave, you're at home. It looks like at home in the beautiful gorge that is actually your living room. And all the artifacts are kind of gone. It's good. It's like you look solid in there. It no longer looks like a part of your mountain is flying away. I think that's good. And Todd, where are you now? I am sitting at home. Rocking. Awesome. How is anybody? The last week seems to have been consumed, at least in my communities a little bit, by the whole Joey Ito, Jeffrey Epstein, shenanigans at the MIT Media Lab. And I keep reading sort of deeper and deeper analyses of it, commentary on it. And when I think I've sort of heard enough, then I read something else. And I'm like, oh, that's new. That's interesting. That's kind of worrisome. Has that affected anybody else on the call in any ways? I've been reading the post on your retreat listserv. It's definitely pushing buttons that are much larger than just the issue itself. And I'd be curious as to what you think those buttons might be. Buttons within these communities, you mean? Yeah. Todd, you just froze. Sorry, go ahead, Ben. Bob Frankson was interesting. Behind the opinions is significant. Todd, you're going to have to repeat what you said because you froze for a moment for us. The amount of feeling behind the opinions being expressed seems larger than the context of the issue itself. Yes. In particular, Tom's post to the list was like, whoa. And I almost posted right behind him, dude, you know, cool your fucking debts. And then Pete replied with this beautiful heartfelt, like absorbing the blow and reversing it perfectly in a way that allowed Tom to come back perfectly. And then I'm like, well, okay, that worked pretty well. And my hat's off to Pete for doing that so beautifully. Sorry for anybody listening to this. If it's obscure, but I'm kind of trying to preserve some of the anonymity of the people who are involved. But there was an interesting exchange on a mailing list I read about this whole Joey Ito situation and kind of what it implies and whether it was evil or just bad. How that all grows. Todd, are we going to jump in? You look like you wanted to say something else about it. No. No. And I would check in if I make sure my dog is not going to attack anyone. Be right back. Okay. And I apologize. I have the beginnings of a cold, I think. Not such a fun thing on the road. I can, I can take a quick minute to just comment on the. Please. Jeffrey Epstein thing is I feel like Neo in the matrix, you know, dodging bullets right and left. And I realized just how many people I am like, one or two degrees of separation away from our deeply in mesh. Yep. And fortunately, fortunately, nothing that I've been directly involved with has been. But it's way too close to home. Yeah. I've been wondering. Agreed entirely. And who else do we know that like, I would never think that person next to a G would be involved in this. And yet there he is. Right. And then we know people like Lawrence Lessig, who is an awesome lawyer and tries really, really hard to save civilization and protect the commons who wrote a dumb meme. I think that dumb letter justifying Joey's taking the money. It's like, oh, man, that's just not good. And there's a sort of a series of breaches of trust that are happening in the middle and a piece of it. That's kind of behind the scenes is, you know, is all money is all are all big pools of money tainted in some way because they're they're mostly ill gotten gains, which may be a very Marxist thought. I don't know. And if so, which ones are okay to take to take, you know, money from? Should you take money from Altria, the renamed Philip Morris? Should you, you know, should you take the Koch brothers invest a lot in women's issues trying to make the world better for women? Should you take, you know, their money for women's issues? And then I'm reminded that the Women's Tennis Association, the very, very first women's tour, the very first women's tournament was funded by Virginia Slims. Oh, yeah. That was in the movie. I remember that. Only sponsor they could find. That was in the Bobby Riggs versus Billy Jean movie. Only sponsor they could find was cigarettes. And it became the Virginia Slims tour of tennis back in a more innocent era. Innocent or, shall we say, more worldly, perhaps less innocent. Something like that. I don't know. I don't know. So, and also all these companies are just so desperate and thirsty for funding that, you know, executive directors are basically spending most of their time with wealthy people trying to figure out how to pry them loose of their money. And then we have behind it the other thread of corporations are now directing a whole lot of basic research in universities, whatever basic research is left has become more occupational or more development directed. And that's kind of a problem because we've lost, we've lost a lot of those issues. So, and I don't mean to gloss over that there's a pedophiles fortune that's sort of making its way into a cleansing machine. Right. Which is, how can there be any doubt that what Epstein is up to is sort of cleaning his money. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, we don't need to talk about this for long, but it's been occupying a few too many of my cycles in the last week, especially since the Ronan Faro piece came out. On Saturday, basically saying, yes, everything Joey said, he didn't tell you the whole story. So it does feel, it does feel a little too close to home. Any other, any other sort of last thoughts on this, this thing. No, thank you to the Koch brothers for their effect on America, that the brother that died, it's like good riddance. Often hits you in the ass, asshole. I need to, I need to log off for now. All right. Thanks for having me. See you in a minute. Thanks for having me. Have a good night. By the way, Todd, you didn't know I'm like, there's a guy you know, Philip York. He's here in Portland. I hang out with him occasionally. Meet Guy. Are you serious? I'm serious. How did that connection happen? Philosophy. Oh, okay. Philosophy. Yes. So I see almost every week. Wow. He and I were in a men's group together for, for some time. Wow. Cool. He's an exceptional human being. I really like him. Yeah. A lot of depth to that man. And he likes a lot of things I like. He likes history. He likes economics. He likes, I mean, that guy is, he's fun. He's a lot of fun. Victorian era literature. Yeah. Well, no, he likes literature. Yeah. He's, he's in a student French. One of the, one of the things I ended up kind of looking, researching sideways in the middle of the whole discussion, we were just talking about, Hey Susan. Was Martin Heidegger. And I know that you and Christie took a course where you studied how to remember that among others, but Heidegger was basically a booster of the Nazi party, et cetera, et cetera. When that happened. And it, you know, it affected his legacy. It affected everybody else, everything else around him. And Susan, I, I threw the whole Epstein, Joey Ito, a fair in the, in the pond here as our opening conversations. So we're, we're sort of, I think, toward the end of it, but, but it has a couple of dying gasps as we, as we go through it. And, you know, at what point do people's really stupid decisions make them untouchable? At what point do we try to redeem people and bring them back into society? And, and one of my beefs about today's society is that we have sort of call out of culture and a, you know, off with their heads culture, where when somebody does do something wrong, we kind of want to make sure they're fired, make sure they're banished, make sure we salt the earth that they stood on so that nothing ever grows on it. And I don't think that's healthy for society. Please go on, Jerry. That's an interesting point. Why is it not healthy society? Well, we're seeing it everywhere. First, first of all, the obvious thing is that it has a deep chilling effect on anybody stepping forward and saying, gosh, I made a boo boo. Right? Because if anybody making an error means it's off with their head, off with their head metaphorically, that means that, No one will admit error. Interesting. Right. So nobody's going to step forward and say anything. And then, and then in most ancient societies, they had methods for taking the, the somebody who did something wrong, whether it's stealing a chicken or murdering, you know, a neighbor and may, incorporating them back into the village's life. Inducting them back into the tribe. Yeah. And acknowledging the, you know, the hurt that they've caused, whatever. And, you know, the Degara tribe in West Africa would circle up around this person, bring family and healers and all that together and go at it together, which got, and the Los Angeles police district started borrowing some of these methods for dealing with gang members. Yeah. It sounds very much like truth and reconciliation, right? Kind of. It had, it borrow some, some traits from there. So, so, you know, the LAPD in some, one part of its life was, was trying to figure out like who are the top gang members who are involved in violent incidents, who are probably shooting the most people and going to them and saying, look, we have all sorts of records on you. We know exactly who you are. We know where you live. We know you've like shot a bunch of people and we would like you to stop. If you stop, we will help you come back in, like a spy coming in from the cold. And if you don't stop, we're going to make sure you go like up the river for a really, really, really long time. But around them was clergy, was family, and their grandma was there and everybody else. And it worked a lot. It worked really well. So, I'm worried that we're entering a stage of civilization where people are more disposable, where we don't try to do the hard work of connecting with them and listening to things that are hard and we don't do the hard work of reintegrating them into society. And Susan, you're muted. I think it looked like you were saying something a moment ago, but your mute is on. Yes, I was. I was just saying that there are a lot of us people. I mean, I think, you know, there's a sense of, that there are always more people, right? And you see this particularly in the workplace where, you know, you can just go get what you want and discard what you don't. And so, I don't know what that's at a root of, but I keep finding things that I think are, perhaps a consequence of there being so many people. Not the ones that Paul Ehrlich, you know, came up with back in the 60s or 70s, but with just having more people. What does that mean? We talk a lot about more connectivity, but I don't hear a lot of talk about just sheer numbers, which I sort of discounted for a long time, but I think it's time to think about. So by that, do you mean that people are more disposable then, Susan? I'm just wondering whether I think people are being treated as if they were more disposable. And I'm wondering if that comes from, that comes from in part, this sense that there's a, oh, there are lots of people. You know, we can find, we're connected now. We can find anybody we need for what we need. We don't have to work with people and try to save them, because after all, I'm being slightly, you know, facetious, but I think it's a question we should ask ourselves. And there's just another person behind them in line to perform the services they were performing or whatever. Exactly. Anybody else, reflections on that? And the person I would likely be as good if not better, because it's not just because there's another body. It's just there is a similar skill set, because there are so many people out there, because we have... And they might be cheaper. And a clean slate. Yeah. Don't have to miss it. Ah, I'm getting depressed just listening to this. Let's stop then. No, no, no. The analysis around are people more disposable because I think the history of people being disposable is we got lots of examples. I'm not sure how we measure that one exactly, but I do, I'm really interested in the idea that like the fact that we have more people somehow changes dynamics, right? Because we know that if you get enough of something in a system, it can change the characteristics of the system. And I think that's a really interesting question. I don't know what characteristics would necessarily change. Maybe. Commodification. Maybe, but I think all kinds of other system parts could change. And back to the earlier question of people being dismissed from the society. I think that one's really interesting, but I would argue that the restorative justice through the reconciliation, in some sense we have a technology that we now kind of understand we're actually teaching and people are becoming good at it, that's being distributed, that has a tendency to bring people back into society. I don't know if it's actually going to tip the process or not, but you can see growing through school districts and even into the court systems and it's being tested and it's being studied so that there is a technological response to this question, I think, that we're developing now. In some sense, we're getting smarter, I guess. I hope so. And so Gene mentioned that in the list too, right? That we need, what is the reconciliation kind of thing? And I feel like that's a critical issue and when do you do it versus when do you not? And does the research reveal, does the research reveal, I mean, something I would think would project would be that there's something about the cohesiveness of the tribe or the group that they're coming back in. Does that relate to the success of the reconciliation? A lot of the work as far as I know is being, and I'm just a passive observer, I don't know a lot of the details, but a lot of the work is being done in schools, in public school, to try to reduce the number of kids that get suspended from school and instead of suspending them and throwing them out of the school, they go through a process that keeps them in the school. So in that case, the tribe is a school, I guess. Or a classroom or a class? Yeah. It's not necessarily identified by race or country or anything like that. I was thinking about the family examples in particular. I mean, to be brought back into a family is a very strong thing. Yes, it's huge. It's funny. I don't feel, and maybe it's just I need a privileged life in nice places, I don't feel a population pressure, like suddenly there's way too many people. But in some places on earth, like there's a huge population squeeze because people are having lots of births or there's lots of immigration of different kinds. But I'm not feeling somehow that there's more people or too many people on earth all of a sudden, that that's not somehow making its way onto my radar screen. People I think know. Yeah. Especially I mean thinking of the ageism, right? Which I've got several experiences with now. And they just, you know, you're not wanted. Well, so the disposability part of it, I see everywhere. So I was just sort of trying to separate the issues a little bit. Oh my God, there's too many of us now is not resonating with me. But the, oh my God, we can just say next and just, you know, ghost somebody or get rid of somebody or cancel them. I think it was, it might have been Dana Boyd who wrote a piece on cancel culture. Basically when you cancel someone else, right? And you just, they just sort of don't exist. You elide them, you scrub them from your digital presence and everything else. And then digital relationships tend to, they're too easy to leave, right? If you're in a village and you're stuck in that village for most of the rest of your life, you're kind of going to want to make up with the people around you. All these digital villages and digital relationships don't really have that. A brief side note, I spent a couple days in Boston and stayed with some dear old friends who have a couple of daughters who are sort of teens and who have been struggling more than you would think with addiction to Instagram and all those kinds of things and a series of related problems which are insanely hard to manage. Just try to figure out what to do about these kids. And these are loving, humanly intelligent parents. It's all like, man, how does this, we're in a situation where your average youth has in hand a device that has more power than any of us had in hand 30 years ago, right? With all kinds of connectivity. Oh, disciplining kids, cool. Mother Jones, awesome, thank you. Yeah, I think the other side of this is zero tolerance, man. Yes. Zero tolerance isn't just the right way. You can hear Portland's mayor say it. I mean, this BF Skinner thing, I think this is a deep, dark shadow in our culture that's really icky. So say more about Skinnerian stuff playing out now. Well, I posted it there. Someone else in the group knows more about this than I do. Yeah, BF Skinner, sorry. Don't you know BF Skinner? Yes, I do, but I couldn't hear you. Oh, my knowledge ran out. So we're hoping you have knowledge on BF Skinner. And what's the connection you saw? For, you know, the zero tolerance, things have to be punished model of human behavior. Right. Well, we did, we did give that one up. Good. When did we give it up? Well, no, intellectually, we sort of did. But then those, those things don't make it into society. Necessarily. Well, look, that's, they're just, it's, you know, things are rife even in the animal kingdom. I mean, I don't think things operate on a giant population level, either Jerry, I was, I think it's, but the units that people operate in and are, are ostracized from. Those are very powerful things. And they can make somebody feel like an outsider. Right. And I think the operative dimensions, I'm looking at our insight and outside at all these different configurations that we pass into. And I don't know what, I have no idea what B.Skinner would say about that. Yeah. Yeah, me neither. I was listening to podcast the other day and they were talking about, you know, the fall in crime rates, right? We've been seeing, I think pretty much worldwide, but certainly in the U S pretty dramatic decreases in crime. And the guy was talking about how the New York police department because of the Eric Arner decision called kind of a workflow. I mean, and so they were decided they were not going to arrest anybody that was unnecessary, which seemed like probably a good objective. Yeah. Yeah. You go guys. And the crime rate dropped, you know, so the number of arrests went down and so did the crime rate. That is crazy. That was for all that stuff in the 80s that Giuliani did. The stop and frisk stuff, you know, clearly doesn't seem to have been all, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, clearly doesn't seem to have been all that useful. Right. And very biased. Extremely biased. Um, it's interesting because a lot of these things are shaping policy, right? Whether it's Carol Dweck and Edward Desi, or nudge theory from Cass Sunstein and Danny Connemann and others, or whatever people are trying to bake this into policies and what we do. And, and from the perspective of just wrecks and trust. Um, these are really important things because mostly the, the, the wrecks angle on this is that we try to come back into relationship. And that if we, if we do that, we can actually sort out how to behave together. Oh, the sunflower seeds by, um, I way away. Yeah. Too many people and I don't know just anything about that. We've seen the, the documentary that covers the village where they make, where they painted, made and painted the seeds. Crazy, like amazing. And apparently they're now selling them as souvenirs that are making extra, you know, money after the whole, after the whole of that was done. Um, but it's little, it's hand painted sunflower seeds that are actually pottery that, that where there are millions of them and enough of them that you can spread them on a huge installation for, and it's an art artwork. He is, he's just brilliant in terms of conceptualizing art. It's very meaningful. Have you seen, has anybody seen American factory? I just added it to my brain this morning because something, you know, pinged about it and it's on my list of things to watch. Want to, want to say something about it? It's on my list too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's notable because the Obamas are supporting it. And there's a little bit of an interview after the Netflix version with the Obamas that is kind of confusing, but whatever. But the, one of the things, and the movie is about a Chinese company starting a factory in Dayton, right? You know, what had been a GM, I think a GM, auto manufacturing plan. Yep. And, and it's really funny. One of the things that struck me was, Oh, this is what colonialism looks like. Chinese are moving into the United States and critiquing the American workers and trying to get them to work the right way. And they're not keeping up and, you know, they're having to manage them. And it's, the documentary is very frank. The footage of the conversations and the American workers and the Chinese workers would meet separately and the management talked about separately. I don't know all kinds of interesting things, but I think I have always wondered about what the, you know, people talk about colonialism a lot of kind of in the world. I'm in and I'm like, I never quite understood what it was. It was like, Oh, this is what it means. I get it now. Because, you know, because it was happening to people who looked like me and made it look more clear. But anyway, I thought it was a well worth watching. That's interesting because like the colonialism of one culture dominating another day. And the Chinese coming into the United States and essentially treating us like a developing country. And it's like, Oh, they're starting to look like one. I've been, I've been on the other side of this a few times. Yeah. And the, even in the trailer, there's a couple of those clips where the Chinese supervisors are saying, look, we're, we're training them on the same things over and over again. Not really getting it. And they're kind of slow. But there's also some clips in the trailer. So I haven't seen the whole doc yet, but this clips in the trailer about Chinese workers saying the pressure that we're under is incredible. Yeah. There's been quite a response, I think, in China to this whole thing too. So I haven't been tracking it down, but it's probably worth, worth looking at. Yeah. Most of us, they work six day work weeks. Exactly. That's in the move. That's a, there's an issue about that in the movie. Yes. Well, I just was talking to a young, a young friend of mine who came back from the internship. From a biotech lab in Japan. And, and her observation was there. She, she just didn't feel, she said, there just seems to be a, you know, the more time you spend at work, the better. And, you know, she wanted to do her work and get up. Right. Many years ago I spent, I shared a cab with a guy who was in the high end stone business. So he would sell marble and granite and all that kind of stuff. And he was regretting that. Carrara marble is the most famous marble in the world. And at this point it's much cheaper to take a large block of Carrara marble, drop it on a ship and send it to China for cutting. And when you're in China for cutting, it's dangerous. And there's like a line of people waiting to be the next guy to sit there, selling like crazy trying to get through the marble. So it's much cheaper to do, et cetera. Not done as well. But the skill of cutting marble is now gone from Italy, from Carrara anyway. Like the artisans who used to know how to do that, they, they, they lost their jobs. So there's tremendous implications for all these things, but bouncing back and forth and, and it like our policy makers don't seem to care to address these issues that much. So that's the level at which it would be pretty helpful if somebody said, Hey, but wait a minute. Yeah. Well, and it's hard, right? Because it's the policy makers, but also like, you know, they do a vote and they do a union vote in the movie. And, you know, and the workers vote. And so the outcome of the union vote is part of the storyline. Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, there's at the shop floor that people are making decisions. It was interesting. I mean, I combined this a little bit with the stuff about, you know, reading a little bit or learning a little bit about, you know, mass of the chicken farms, mass of the, you know, the, the, like, It's confined animal feeding operations. Yeah. And particularly for chickens, right? Because in chickens, like 90% of the meat that we produce, it's like, I didn't realize the numbers were so huge. Wow. So we primarily are a chicken company, a world or country, I think. And the way that contracts are set up, the farmers have to take out a loan to build the structures, the chicken houses, and then buy the chickens. And then they're able to sell them back at a fixed rate to the companies. And what was interesting to realize is what's happening effectively is that large corporations are able to outsource all the risk. So the farmers handle all the risk and the companies take guaranteed returns. And I was thinking about how many businesses we've set up that have that structure. So Uber, right? All the risks on the drivers, medical insurance, health insurance, right? All the risks on the patients. You know, the goal of the business model is to shift the risk to the consumer, to the customer, to the, to the, to the other part of the platform. Anywhere so that it's not on the, on the company. So it's not on the, the part that the shareholder, you can also shift it upstream to other companies. That's fine. If you have enough buyer power or if you have enough market power, you can just shift the risk to other people. That's a good example. Yeah. So Walmart, right? Exactly. So you squeeze suppliers to the point where they're barely making any profit. And, you know, if they stand, if they, if they stand business grade, if not, you turn to a supplier. Yeah. Rana Fubar talks about the, is it the financialization of our economy? And that, that sounds very much like that. Every little bit of our economy is being, you know, completely, you know, basically credit swaps. That's a credit swap to the farmer. Hello. You take the earth. It's really like the small farmers in the US have been under siege for a very, very, very, very long time in lots of different ways, hundreds of different ways. And so it's just a very difficult thing to be, to thrive as a small farmer here in the US. Well, it's going to get more. I was wondering why aren't we all. Susan, go ahead. Sorry. Why aren't we all wet? Oh, I thought I interrupted you Susan. So I was shutting up for a while. It's all right. So what about the credit rep, the business round table, huh? Business ought to step up. Jamie Dimon and his buddies. And then the B Corp response to it. Come on. That's super rexie. Come on. That's good. It's very good. And, uh, and taking us away from the depth of the, from the mass mass murder of chickens. Um, it's great. My lunch. Yeah. Um, I have a two thirds finished sort of, uh, op-edish piece for medium about the, the business round table decision. And the piece just keeps growing. So I need to cut a couple of pieces out and get it out. Um, but it's, What are you saying? Well, uh, partly my, my, my piece starts with, Hey, 25 years ago, I was in grad school and my roommate who is the guy, my roommate says, Hey, you should come with me and listen to this really interesting guy. Who's got a seminar. His name is Russell Acoff. And I'm like, Oh, okay. Well, whoever. And I go sit down with six people and Russ Acoff who proceeds to start telling these incredible stories about how things actually work in 10th grade language, but, but completely sort of collapsing and reshaping how I think things work. And he was one of the original systems theorists. Then one of his many riffs and he had a, you know, a million good riffs, but one of them was about stakeholders and how really, really business should be about stakeholders and not stockholders and et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, check, got it perfect. Now what? And it's 25 years ago. And it's like, man, it's 2019 and the business round table finally got around to saying something useful after Larry Fink and a bunch of others have been pounding on them after, you know, there've been lots of interesting people coming out trying to say this thing. And I'm, I'm convinced that even the business round table doing, you know, something symbolic like this is going to make that big a difference in the way corporations are run. Because Wall Street still behaves in the way Wall Street behaves. That hasn't changed because these companies aren't rushing to become B corps. And I, Dave, I'm not sure I saw or Bo, I'm not sure I saw the, sorry. Who said the B corp reply? I know. Oh, sorry. I'm not sure I've seen that. You want to put it in the chat if you can? Sure. I'll find it. Thanks. Because I collected a bunch of replies, but I'm not familiar with one from B corp themselves. Todd, any thoughts on this? Well, I, I do have thoughts on this, but I want to jump back to the, the prior conversations talking about documentaries and American factory. And I know Dave would probably back me up on this. I highly recommend everybody watch Biggest Little Farm. It is illuminating. It moved me. It's great storytelling. And it is the anecdote. It is the antidote to industrial farming. But is a, is a charming story in itself. And, and I think it points to this, this issue of size too. We were talking about population explosion. I've often wondered what would happen. If there was a progressive tax structure on businesses. Or employee limitations on businesses. So that there was disincentives to get too large. Sure. We're not going to stop you. From becoming a mega Nash international corporation. Right. But you are going to, you're going to pay a price for it. And this issue of size and scale. I've just been thinking a lot about the global local. And some of you know, I'm running for city council and my little Hamlet of a thousand people. And it's amazing to see how local the issues are here. You know, they're talking about individual trees. And the direction of a bike path. And there's people passionate and we're not talking about. Healthcare availability. And so how you have that mix of. This hyper local and the. How do we influence things at the top top end of the scale is, is, is really interesting to me. And I do think numbers have something to do with it. I'm kind of excited about what you could do in a, in a community of a thousand. We might be able to do something innovative. Yeah. I think there's a lot to be said for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just thumbs up and. Partly begin because I think we, this. I like to think of some things as being scale agnostic. Great. I think social dynamics are sort of. They're scale dependent. For one thing. And they. But they're the same dynamics, even in large numbers. So. Yeah. So what you're seeing in the local level. Well, it's just like there are a lot of zeros at a higher level. Right. And many more trees. So. The, the, what's going to go on in the meetings. May sound very much like what goes on at the Sierra club. About one tree. Great. Well, that's a great analogy. Yeah. Yeah. I still don't know what that means. But. So Todd, you totally really integrated it into your community. I have now joined it. Yeah. Today is actually my three year anniversary of moving here. Oh, cool. Man, it's been that long. Yeah. So where do you live? Saga tuck, Michigan. Are you on Lake? Yeah. On Lake Michigan. Wow. So was the town structured like a new England town? Cause my in-laws, when they lived in Vermont, you know, they joined up, went to the meetings and you know, everybody argued about the school budget and my, my father-in-law became like the treasurer did the numbers. And he was really fun. All the stuff. And he got to really affect chains by doing that. Yeah. I mean, there's a school board that covers. Three municipalities. But the city here, you know, meetings twice a month. Everything is public. Everything's recorded. Yeah. And you as a resident, I opt in to getting the agenda, the payables, the revenue every two weeks. I get about 60 pages of data. Wow. So they're pretty transparent. Yeah. And happy to communicate. Yes. There's ways in which they're not transparent, but they're, they're striving towards transparency. Yeah. I think to add to this social awareness thing, I think there's a notion of social transparency that goes along with it, which is to, uh, once you're part of a group, you begin to see where the fault lines are. Um, who's in, who's out, who's on the edge, who's this, who's that, all the rest of it, those things take a while to become a parent. And it's easier to hide them in larger numbers of people, but they're still there. Uh, it's interesting. We're getting back to the larger numbers of people as well. And in the middle of issues of governance, right? Go ahead, Bo, you're going to jump in. Wow. I'm just liking Susan. It's like Dr. Evil stuff this morning, man. I love that bookcase behind you, Susan. That's amazing. Is that built in your house or what? Yes. It's in her office. That's my, my many, my many different subject matters. You should see the house. It has many, many bookcases. I'm ready for that tour anytime you want to do it. It's, uh, yeah. What is Granicus? Granicus sounds like a, a Roman warrior. It's Granicus. Yeah. I don't know where they got the name. I don't know a lot about it. It's a commercial enterprise that a lot of cities use to do their, their archives and stuff. Interesting. But the, but the archives become a little proprietary. So it's just an interesting kind of their, you know, Granicus has a lot of control over these archives. So it's, it's the kind of stuff that. Public and private. Interesting. Um, one of the sort of big, rexy questions is what will it take to get people to do more governance with a little G and step away from government with a big G. Um, and this has like lots of implications. Um, one of which is sort of that government with a big G has become a consumer mass marketing exercise where we're right now at the early part. Unfortunately, of a real long electoral cycle where a lot of money will be asked for and spent mostly to put ads in front of people and to put, you know, to put spin stories on Facebook and Instagram or whatever. Um, which is not to my mind what governance is about. It's much more about Todd and his local city council. And, and if Todd and his local city council are talking about, should we chop down the tree that's kind of in the way in the park that looks a little diseased, but they're not talking about should we accept some immigrants, you know, from this next migratory ways. Is that helping? It is helping in a way in that, in that I'm assuming that you get to know each other and you get to see what's up. I've seen sort of public meetings go really well and go really poorly where some one person just jams everything up and everybody's like rolling their eyes going, you know, there, this person goes again, but it can be very high function. So, so the exercise of doing those things together can prep us for times of crisis, times of bigger issues, all that kind of thing. Um, when this is maybe a bad analogy or story, but in the, during the Vietnam war as, um, as the war was wearing on, uh, negotiations started in Geneva and the American delegation Kissinger and everybody else showed up and went to their hotels. The North Vietnamese delegation showed up and rented a house. Um, and then, and then the parties proceeded to spend a famous year, a year negotiating the shape of the table and who is going to sit where at the table. And all during this year that was like painfully dragging on, the Vietnamese were like, yeah, they were watching American media and in American responses to a Cronkite saying this is a quagmire and everything else. And they knew that they could sort of wait everything out. Um, and probably get a better deal at the end. Um, and they did. It worked really well. So, so part of this question is like in sometimes the actual negotiation isn't in the important thing. Like, like they were using the who's going to sit where at the table and what shape is the table going to have to figure out who had power on the other side of the table. Um, we know how it worked. Well, all those kinds of things. I don't know. Well, and then there's always, um, years ago when I was at my first board meeting for the Institute for Research on Learning, it was being held at the Xerox headquarters. And I had not attended the board meeting. At that level. I suppose ever. And I walked into the room and I thought, I have no idea where to sit. Oh, interesting. And then in our precious one hour with the board, the rest of the guys, and I'm sorry, they all were guys, um, spent time talking about what cars they drove. Oh, wow. It's amazing. It was amazing. I knew exactly what they were doing. They were positioning each other. Right. And it was interesting because finally the CEO of Xerox says, I drive a tourist. And Xerox is known as being kind of a, uh, you know, a blue company. Um, he would demonstrating the value. Right. Nice. Was this a layer? No, this was a, uh, a current. Okay. Previous CEO. Very interesting. Oh, a layer was probably driving something fancy. Yeah, it probably was. You know, he went on a motorcycle trip with John City Brown. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And then he got divorced. Oh. I did a, I did a speech in front of a layer and the board of Xerox invited in by their CIO a very, very, very long time ago. And who was CIO then? I'm forgetting exactly his name. I've got to remember. Um, and the first sign of trouble was the guy before me who was introducing me and also explaining where we were in their planning process, put up a foam core diagram that was maybe a foot tall, but like six feet wide on an easel. And it had a schematic of their planning process. And it was like a little arrow. You are here. There was a two year planning cycle. And this is in the middle of the internet's birth into public into public view. Right. And I'm like, Oh shit. These guys are obeying their two year planning cycle and none, none, none, none. We'll, we'll find them points with corporate supervision in the board, but they're completely going to blow this. And then, and then I gave an impassioned speech about you guys helped invent a lot of the Tinker toy parts of this inner tubes thing. Didn't really benefit from a lot of them, but you could lead, you know, a whole new renaissance of blah, blah, blah, blah. And at the end I remember feeling like a jet. I had just spoken into an anechoic chamber. Mm hmm. Like my words had just been absorbed by the walls. And the, the CIO was excited and he says, and he says, that was great, thank you so much, we're gonna let, and he was, the only energy in the room was with the guy who had invited me in. And everybody else was like, whatever. Yeah. Well, it's a little bit like, yes, and it continues. I don't know if you all know Brian Arthur, the sort of renegade economist. Anyway, at IBM, I hired him in as a, well, front of men as a, as a, as a consultant, and we couldn't find any way to bring him in, so we had to put him through manpower, but he wasn't. He came in as a temp through manpower? Yeah. He said, whatever works. That is completely true. He said a couple weeks there, and he says, you know, the last time I was in a place like this was in the 60s in Moscow. Uh-huh. There was just a kind of a weird article about him and Burning Man in the New York Times last week. Oh, really? Yep. I get my New York Times, Sunday New York Times? I don't know which part I can, let me post, I'll post a link to it right here, because I put it in my brain. Of course. Oh, I apologize. My bookshelves are my brain. And so I'm, the problem, because my brain is, you know, physically located. But I don't read my shelves as it should be. As it should be. So my apologies, I'm thinking of Paul Romer. It was not about Brian Arthur. Okay. Yeah. Oh yes, I read that. Yeah. Yep. I'm sorry. Well, it's not quite the small G government thing, Jerry, but I have been wondering, I don't know if anybody's been paying attention to the Trump administration threatening California because of the agreement with the auto manufacturers. Yeah. They're bringing anti-trust against the four many automakers. They're actually opening up an anti-trust case. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like they're hot. I mean, there isn't actually an agreement yet. So there is no case yet, but hopefully the administration is trying to derail the case or the agreement. And I guess they were already saying like Mercedes is already backed out, you know, so they're effective. But I've always tried, you know, like, I think Ostrom has this structure for how you do management of a commons, right? And the government has a role in the management of the commons and kind of holding the vessel for a little bit. And I feel like the agreement, you know, it was a pre-competitive agreement amongst manufacturers to try to improve performance. So it feels like this is the kind of direction we would like to see government going. Mm-hmm, for sure. And you have the Trump administration deliberately trying to sabotage it. And for reasons that I just, you know, don't really understand. I mean, I'm even sure what the Trump administration's like, they're getting out of it. But you know, at the very least, you can imagine that it's the same pattern that we always have, which is the bottom feeders have access to the Trump administration. So they don't want high performance. They want sucky performance. Well, because we have a right to drive as huge a truck as we feel like. Well, and I'm still not quite sure who thinks they're making money out of this stuff. But there's probably somebody out there who's gonna, you know, you know, it's somewhere in the Coke bag, or something like that. But anyway, I just think it was, it's interesting. And I guess I do feel like a number of these things we're talking about, I'm in the optimistic point of view, which is that this is what California was doing. It was a pretty good idea to do it. The Trump administration's fighting a backguard effort to try to stop it. But the trend is towards this kind of governance and decision-making, but it could be wrong, you know. Todd just asked a good question on the chat. And I don't know if you've looked at the long-term stock exchange much, but would love to, yeah, would love to have your take on it if you have one. Well, I could speak off the top of my head, and I'm very, so the most successful companies in the world that have the best performance on actual investment and that don't make dumb short-term decisions worldwide are closely hold family corporations. So that's just a fact. So the public companies being run for quote, shareholder value just don't really work out. A lot of people don't even realize that American stock market, new companies aren't even funded by the stock market. Capitalization's going down. It's, so anyways, Todd, please speak away. I loved, I, yes, I did a little bit about that, but you know, the best LTSC is a closely held family corporation. It's a great one. I totally agree with that. And I see the LTSC, if it takes off, as being a possible counteracting force against financialization of it overall. Actually, I did have a conversation with an owner of a business that went from a investor-led business to an employee-owned business that employees bought them out. And he said, this is about a month ago, he said a lot of investor-led startup companies that are in their middle stage that leadership is secretly talking about buying out the investors, that it's happening everywhere. I don't know why people would want to be in a public company. The only, the reason that maybe bubbles up the most is that you could maybe pump the stock so that it really blows up. Your package would be worth a lot and then you cash out. But everything else about being a public company does not appeal to me. It does not seem to make it easier to manage a company well. It does not, all kinds of stuff. I don't, but we have this mania that everybody should go public and become the next unicorn, the next behemoth. And I don't quite get it because as Bo, as you said, a lot of closely held private companies do really well. I think one of the things that, the question for Todd is, what is it about the LTSC that you think might be an antidote to financialization? My experience in a lot of the big companies and when they start to grow, I had a particular insider view on Zurich insurance, Zurich financial services. Finally, and I knew this about insurance to begin with, but to me, there's a money manufacturing industry, that's the financialization part. Yeah, a money manufacturing industry. Did you say money manufacturing industries? Yes, I did, yeah, yeah, and I, yeah. And so when I think about that, I'm interested to why the closely held family corporations might not be in the, they might be in the money manufacturing business, but they're still in their own business. Right? And that's, yeah. Yeah, what? So I don't know what the LTSC is gonna, why that might be an antidote, but Todd, maybe you could say some more. Well, and Bo, correct me if you're wrong, but my understanding is the LTSC doesn't have strict trading rules, but they are self-selecting companies that are declaring that we are, we are open for long-term investors, not short-term investors. So it's, if you're listed there, you're kind of sending a signal to the world as this is what we care about. What I would love is if there was also trading restrictions, aren't it? Because I think that could also, you know, shift the flow of money a little bit. Yeah, you know what, the funny thing is when you think about this is now most investing is passive, because most investing is BlackRock and the others, just adjusting their index-based funds. So the real decision and the real power is if those funds decided to do something about it, you know, and BlackRock and those other guys tomorrow all said, you know what, this running just for shareholder value, we're not really up with that anymore. That would matter, big. You know what would be really rex-y? Is if you couldn't make an investment without shaking someone's hand. Yeah, I like that, that's cool. And looking them in the eye. Yeah. Yes. And you know, another thing about this Todd, if you look, I posted this thing in the chat about LTESC would encourage long-term investors by asking, anyways, two tiered structures of power of shares. This is all over the place, right? I think even Facebook has that. So, you know, you can already see this going on all over the place, actually. This double tiered, you know, meant share structure where some shares have more power than the others. Isn't Google, doesn't Google have that too? I mean, sure you're seeing this all over the place, really. A lot of companies have created multiple categories of shares so that they can give away a lot of stock and not be voted out of office, basically. So they retain control over the organization. Does anyone know where the word bank comes from? Oh boy, here we go. I bet you do. Yeah, I'm just wondering if anybody else does. Once a guy was selling the blood of children back in the... No, no, no, no, no. This is a super simple one. It's from the Italian or the Latin banka, which is a bench, which is a bench. It's so basically you used to come sit down on the bench, talk about what you needed, shake hands and walk off with some funds or drop off some funds and have them safely stored or whatever, but it was a bench, banka is bench. You know, there was this great thing on NPR a couple days ago. This guy wrote this wonderful book, I could find it. But what he was saying is essentially, economists really, really did, all their dreams came true in the last 30 years. And Milton Friedman and let's run companies just for shareholder value and everything will take care of itself and the markets will solve everything. And you know what, absolutely true. We are completely living in that world. The 70s, from the 80s on, we have completely seen that. And I really, I think the new era that we're all walking into is, well, we've tried that and income distribution and inequality, that didn't work out, did it, you know? And I still, when you were saying shareholder stuff, Jerry, it's still like boggles my mind, but the Germans, right, every union's also on the board of directors. Employees always had stakeholder representation, right? Jerry, you knew that, right? I mean, sorry. You cut out a little bit, can you say that again? I was doing a whole squeed. Damn, okay. In Germany, they already, the employees and the unions as stakeholders are already on the board of directors of the companies there. Yes. It's in the German constitution, it turns out, that any company larger than 30 employees must have labor representation on its board. And I just found the article that I think you were referring to that like was great, it was a, it's a review of a book. Please put it in. I'll post it on a chat right now. I don't know if this is what you were talking about, but it's Benjamin Appelbaum, basically a bit of an excerpt from his new book, The Economist's Hour. That's it. Yep, and here's the, it was really excellent. And the book title is The Economist's Hour, False Profits, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society. I think that covers it. Yeah, pretty much. And I think it's really interesting to watch, there's another economist I can find the link that this idea that, it makes sense to me that we were talking on, so we're spending all this time talking about narrative as a guide to society. And so some of the economists are starting to say, talk about narrative as a guide to economics. And so like if you buy into the idea that shareholders are predominant, then you behave that way and you change the direction of society. But it was the narrative that did it, not any kind of underlying physics of economics or anything like that. We know that. But I guess I had never heard it translated that way. So I thought it was funny to think about it. I got to focus on their storytelling capacity. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not too smart, Susan. But frankly, just a while ago I had this guy, I realized that in economics, all our battles between economic theories are really battles about narratives. Yes. About what? They are battles of narratives. That's what it all is. Yep. So we had a couple of calls, we had a couple of Rex calls a while ago. I'm looking for, yeah, 2015. What are your scripts? Was basically a call we had in 2015 about what I, and my language for this is that we all have scripts running in our heads that were put there. And I think, I probably mentioned this way back then, but in the musical South Pacific, there's a beautiful song called You've Got to Be Carefully Taught, which is all about racism. It's like, we're not born racist, we're taught racism. And so we all have a bunch of scripts in our heads. We're mostly unconscious of all these scripts. We don't know we have them. Some of them tell us that those people across the river have green blood and eat their young. Some of us tell us that unless people are in dire threat of starvation, they will not work. Some of us tell us whatever, whatever. A lot of these have been manufactured. So if you then go look at the history of propaganda, and there's a really good book, Merchants of Doubt, I think is the title. And also Tim Wu, I don't think this is the same book. There's a couple of books that basically wouldn't go into how this all works. And it's crazy because a lot of these scripts were invented on purpose. Yeah, Merchants of Doubt is not the one, but I'll find Tim Wu's book as well. But he sort of goes into the history of how we were convinced to do seven. And part of it goes back, for example, do you know the Uncle Sam, I want you to join the army kind of poster? Okay, so that goes back actually to Lord Kitchener, because in World War I, they did the exact same poster with Lord Kitchener pointing out of the poster, saying I want you to join the army. And they expected one million people to show up and enlist for World War I. They got three million. Everybody's like, yep, gotta go. That really, really worked. Like patriotism and they had, everybody had romanticized warfare. So nobody was like, oh, they're just gonna send this into the mob and the machine guns. No, whole towns signed up and went into regiments together. So all the men of a town might get wiped out if this regiment had a really hard time on the front. All of this kind of stuff happened. So these scripts are basically battling for control over what we think, how we evaluate things like public policy, who to vote for, all of that. And coming back to what you were just saying about narratives. So I see sort of modern and ancient history as repeated battles over the controlling narratives of each era and that these narratives only shift every 300 to 500 to 1,000 years. Susan, I don't know if you'd give it different numbers, but for me, like the dominant narratives stay dominant for a long time. Well, the narrative in economics for our society changed in the 80s. I mean, Reagan and Thatcher and all that happened then. There's such a huge dividing line in America. I mean, labor power, labor had power all the way to the 70s and then gone, right? Plus the hierarchy of narratives, Jerry. So Judeo-Christianism, Christianity or something, if that's the level, but certainly market-based economics is a much more modern phenomenon. That's an important and up narrative. So I've got Reaganomics and then I've got sort of the conservative point of view about how things work. Yeah, your good buddy, Duke Gingrich. Boy, that guy had an effect. Whoa. And he's really smart. Like he hacked a lot of these scripts really, really well. Oh, yeah. So I think leadership is not always a good thing. Some people like Adolf Hitler was a great leader because he launched, you know, Germany and a bunch of other countries into a world war. Like that, I'm sorry, but that's kind of leadership. So leadership is not a- Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is that the social dynamics, those are not the place you can change anything because the same ones result in evil things, bad things and they are also a force for good. I mean, that fact alone should stop us dead in our tracks because so much of the time we try to apply the things we thought made things work better at the level of, you know, how we operate together and how nice we are to each other and all the rest of that stuff. When in fact, it works in both directions. This is making me realize Carlotta Perez, does everyone know that book? Yeah. I love that book. So I read that last year and there's parts of it. I just, like things that I'd never thought of, but as soon as you hear it, like, oh yeah, like does everyone know that unemployment insurance was more about being able to extend credit to consumers? Let me explain how that worked. Yeah. Capitalism needed to sell those damn cars and all those trinkets and things like that. And you can't extend revolving credit to people if they lose your job tomorrow and they're not gonna have any money. You seem to have forgotten that though. Go on, Susan, do you want that? It's not no go. So what I liked about Carlotta Perez's book is she pretty much, she points out that, you know, there was a reproachment from the gilded age of the elites, right? When, you know, J.P. Morgan, who's the guy who did, you know, standard oil, that the economy and the elites, all these things happened, right? At the end of the 19th century and then a depression happened and then everyone was like, this isn't worth it. This system doesn't work. And so, a renegotiation between the elites and the politicians and the people happened and that's why what happened in the 50s, right, after the end of the World War, because after the end of the war, the elites were scared to death that there was gonna be a depression again. They thought, okay, the war brought us out of the depression. As soon as this war is over, what happens? We're just gonna go right back into it. Anyway, so I really liked Alperra's, and I love, there's so many good points about that book, how the dominant narrative society, like the way institutions, the idea of mass, mass, mass manufacturing, like Henry Ford, everything, how Fordism influenced institutions and how people thought about things and how that just seeped into, the narrative seeped into how everything was done and how right now we have a technological change that's happened, the microchip, like 1972 and we're renegotiating. The culture is having to regear itself and I really like her perspective and I'm using it in my head all the time, by the way, for my investing thesis too. I think we have to renegotiate our social contracts. We have to renegotiate like people who are gig workers. Those people are not being taken care of. I mean, there's so much that has to happen and I think it will happen because things, I think a lot of people realize that right now we're not having any inflation. Geez, I feel like I'm taking everyone's time. I'm sorry. We don't have inflation. We lived off of quantitative easing. Central banks have been printing money, printing money, printing money, printing money, and pushing money everywhere. But what we haven't done, in which we should have done, like John Maynard Keynes, if he was alive today, he'd be looking at government saying, why aren't you guys spending a ton of money? Why isn't the fiscal spending worldwide? Why aren't you guys reinvesting into everything right now? That's how we don't have a depression because, but we're not doing it. We're in this weird, liminal, melee's time. And I'm telling you right now, the elites right now are really worried that if the trade war pushes the world economy into a recession with negative interest rates in Europe and everything, it'll basically come down to the governments will finally have to start spending money. And it's really exciting time. Daniel, what's up? That's enough of my screen for today. Why do you think it'll work this time around? Why do I think it'll work this time around? Because populism, because 0809 wiped out a belief, populists are winning across the world because the old order and the old promises and how things have worked, nobody believes them anymore, on the right or the left. That's why. I mean, can the optimistic take both? Wouldn't you argue that the battle has been engaged in some sense? I mean, in Italy, Mexico. Which battle do you mean? The populists. Whether the populists, I mean, if you mean by populist, you mean the Trumpists. I get really confused because there's authoritarian populism and then there's honest things that come from the people. And I'm like, those things are opposite ends of my mental spectrum. Why do they both get called populism? Yeah, well, it seems like a lot of good words get co-opted. Okay, that's crazy. There's an idea of populism that the established narratives on the left and the right, both of them aren't believed anymore. Like Bernie Sanders on the left, Trump on the right. To me, they're both manifestations of, hey, the way this used to work, we don't believe you anymore. Okay, as far as I wanna go, I want someone to correct me or something. No. Unfortunately. I went to this conference a little bit this week called Soil Not Oil in San Francisco and I was looking for regenerative agriculture kinds of folks and stuff and there were a bunch of them there and it's interesting. But it was also like just, I kind of like a public policy kind of Washington D.C. kind of nerdy wonky kind of orientation. And these were folks who are a little bit more extreme on their politics. So it was like, I was realizing regenerative agriculture and this connect community was also connected to 5G is gonna kill us, GMOs are bad, vaccines are bad. It was a little unclear as to kind of how strong those threads ran through the community. But I was like, I was like, whoa, I'm not so sure I'm supposed to be in this community or not, around this sets of ideas. And the 5G stuff in particular was like, I have no idea if 5G is gonna destroy our DNA or not. But I don't even know how to figure out whether I should be worried or not. Right. It was an issue at this time. Internet of Things is bad, yeah. Well, maybe it's because the Chinese control it and they'll be able to monitor us and it's part of the surveillance state, right? All right, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Yeah. Everyone needs to check out Jerry's brain for the conservatives model and then switch over to the liberals model. This is pretty fascinating. And so that's the stuff out of moral politics from George Lakoff. I'm looking, I've been desperately scanning around cause I've got another little nexus that's equally as interesting, but I'm not finding it. I'm finding a bunch of treasure troves here, but not the one I'm looking for, which is weird. Ooh, I love morality is like accounting. Yeah. And I wanna get the left one. Where's the left one? That's conservative. There should be a jump thought. It should be off to the side, a parallel with... Okay, liberal model, I found it, yep, sorry. Yep. Empathy, fuck that. And then I have a thought called conservative memes, which is interesting, but it's not the thing we're thinking about. This is kind of language created on purpose. This is language created on purpose to win political battles. So this is kind of the battle over the messaging and the narratives. So tax and spend, liberal elites, the death tax, death panels, anchor babies, cap and tax, crisis actors, all those kinds of things are language intentionally created to win stuff. And Fred Luntz is kind of the master of that. Dangerous to deviate? Okay, I got it. Sorry, sorry. Sex on it. This is so funny, Derek. Oh, it's so up there. Frank Luntz, sorry. Yeah, this is all, yeah. Well, Elizabeth Warren, let's talk about her a little bit. So up there, right? She's a technocrat, you know. I'm really surprised why Bernie doesn't seem to have the juice right now. What's going on? I like Bernie, because I want to hear the hell out of the elites. Because what a way I look at Americans' political system, the Senate holds anything back. So I want the most extreme left to just slam into the American political system, because it seems to me it's gonna take that for anything to happen. But we're being suppressed by the Democrats right now. There's a really, there's a titanic conflict going on right now. Debates like, does the American voting public want something extreme and interesting? Do they actually want a human with a plan, a good radical plan? Or do they just want somebody who's a break from Trump and who is reliable and trustworthy and will like navigate through these tough waters? And those are two completely different candidates. The latter is Amy Klobuchar. And then the former or Hickenlooper or a couple of other people that are saying, she, her tagline is, I'm the pragmatic progressive. And then on the other end are Bernie and a bunch of others who got like way out their plans and Bernie released a 17 trillion dollar plan to do a whole bunch of stuff. There's AOC's Green New Deal, which I thought originally when I heard about it, I'm like, oh, there should be a total business plan around green and renewing the economy. No, no, no, the Green New Deal is job guarantees and a whole bunch of other stuff. I mean, it's much more like the New Deal than a Green New Deal. It's a very old fashioned, yes. And so, and so I don't know. I think that people are thirsting for a big plan, like for big ideas that the tackle this well, not a caretaker, because Hillary was a caretaker and they did not elect her. Anybody else have a different take on this? Because we're gonna keep whittling down democratic contenders until like there'll be a couple standing and they're gonna fall on one side or the other of the... And then Hillary didn't get elected kind of argument, because I mean, sometimes she did, and it was a really a real anomaly looking at the numbers and stuff that she isn't the president, right? Well, Trump came to an inside straight on the Electoral College, yes. Yeah, so I mean, trying to interpret, then there's some meaning to the fact that Hillary lost seems a little bit of a stretch. So I think it was a random act. But, and then the other side is that I do feel like, I mean, I'm so angry right now, but the Republicans kind of running the table, I feel like gone too far, right? Did it kind of reveal the truth about themselves in many ways? And it's like all the things that you've been back are saying aren't anymore. And it's like whatever Trump says is fine and everybody's going online. And that that creates this opportunity for a radical shift. I don't think it's a policy shift, it's a philosophic shift of some sort in the courts. The world could be better or something. We really could make America great again, I guess. And so it's like it's an opportunity for a large change. And if you only do an incremental change, that would be a lost opportunity. Great. Anybody else with strong feelings about how this plays out? I think quietly and efficiently, as Elizabeth Warren is, like she's methodical, is she is building community. And I don't think that's getting a lot of press because it's not the same type of optimism driven Obama type. But I think her rise is largely having to do with, you know, she's got her shit all worked out. Yeah. I have to say, I took great pleasure in watching her like spank CEOs in the Senate basically because everything she said was like right. And her moral indignation rooted in principles and actual facts is a delight in that setting for me. It's also horrifying for at least a third of this country. They don't want somebody to come lecture them and point their finger at them necessarily. So I'm trying to figure out how this plays because people who meet her say that she's incredibly authentic and warm personally. April had her as a professor in law school. So April took either constitutional law or something like our contract law from Elizabeth Warren. So those are personally things very, very highly of her. And let's say she becomes the nominee who's the other half of the ticket and how do you balance it and all that? I mean, there's lots of interesting questions there. I did not know that about April. That's a really interesting thing to know. No. She become an attorney. Pardon? Yeah, she's a lawyer and pass the bar and all that kind of stuff. Still keeps up her California bar I think. Send her back. What, to California? Yeah. Or whatever shit little place she came from. I know. Anyone wanna put any other topic on the table for we have a couple of minutes before we should wrap? Anything else in our heads and hearts about the relationship economy and trust and similar sorts of things? I don't know, I mean, I would love, I'm still kind of my flavor of the week or two weeks not Jerry, is this idea of some kind of a book or something around mass collaboration. Right. And kind of revisiting what we know about mass collaboration. Did you already post the link to the doc here in the chat? Just post it again in case anybody's interested. Yeah, let me try to find it. Go ahead. No, and I just kind of, I mean, I guess I was, I had a conversation. I was talking with this guy at the well-being alliance, which is a consortium of kind of new economy type groups. And they're talking about how do they do, essentially they had a knowledge sharing problem, I think. And they're wanna build a platform for knowledge sharing so that people can find the best new economy things. And we were, and I was kind of saying, well, none of the stuff you're talking about will work. We've been trying it for a long time. That's not gonna do anything good. And he says, well, why? One of the questions he had was why didn't, why don't Wikis work? And I, it's like, I actually don't, I don't know, because I'm still kind of walking around talking about what an exciting thing Wikipedia is. But 20 years later, it's like it's the only one. Yeah, yeah. And it kind of, it was making me realize that there is like 20 years later, what do we know about mass collaboration? And I was even thinking from this conversation that we've ended up at this interesting hierarchy. Like at the very highest level of collaboration, these massive narratives are what organized us, probably, you know, there's a lesson in there, I think. Right. But at the lowest level of kind of like, why doesn't a wiki work? We also have a lot of details around like, well, we're gonna- Yes, yes. Yeah, please, Susie, I just, I'm finding this interesting. No, I have a question there because, you know, maybe, and I don't usually like to play the power card, but I will, maybe it's the, it's a small number of people who are actually running things at that giant narrative level. I mean, those are not the stories of people I know tell each other. They're not even aware of the economy. Right. And it's a small dynamic, right? And who is it? It's people who have power. And what kind of power? Well, political power, economic power, whatever kind of power, a whole bunch of it is concentrated. And so I think the dynamics are the same there. It's a small group. Try to get into that group. I mean, not so easy. Yeah, not so easy. And those groups that win in quotes, meaning their narratives become the dominant narratives for quite a while, that's usually the end of a really long struggle and lots of politics and lots of strife and lots of other things, right? So- I mean, Elizabeth Warren is not gonna be part of that. Yeah. And I'm wondering like, what is the right antidote to Trumpism? Is it earnestness? Is it simply honesty and reliability? Is it calm? Or is it coming back at him with a similar kind of approach yet a different way of doing it? Right? He's leaving him out of it. I'm tired of seeing his name. Oh, man. Ironically, a couple of people recently read, we're gonna miss him when he's gone. Like, because every day the news is like, your most popular reality TV show, run amok. Yeah. Crazy times. Crazy. Well, I gotta go because I gotta be ready for the lawyer talk, okay? All right, cool. Thank you everybody. Very nice to hear what's in your minds and let's be Rexie out there. Okay. Thanks, bye-bye. Bye-bye.