 We're jumping right into the middle of something moderately controversial, but my amateur theory is that a lot of the mess that we're looking at politically right now is unfinished business from how the civil war was concluded poorly. And I'm unclear that more severe punishments would have been a good thing, because I think guillotining and so forth is not good, but I think that also we did not do a good job. There's this whole lost cause of a confederacy, which is a trope and a meme across the south. If you look up the daughters of the American confederacy and see what they've done over the years to propagate and turn into heroes, the warriors from the south, it's astonishing. And it's astonishingly successful. And so I look at Peru right now, which is in Melton. I look at around the world at all these conflicts. I look at Germany, which has the rise of the far right, even though Germany has taken a very different path. And my amateur understanding of Japan versus Germany around World War II is that Germany feels the guilt deeply and teaches it and has monuments and is very public about it. And there's a whole bunch of things you can point to in Germany where they relive and teach, hey, this was terrible, we can't do this anymore. And one of the worrisome aspects of the Ukraine conflict right now is that Germany is upping their military budget. It's like, ooh, I'm not so sure about that. But in Japan, I understand they don't teach World War II or Japan's role in World War II. They have the opposite sort of the opposite thing about it. And just to complicate matters, Japan is the only country that's ever had nuclear bombs dropped on it in anger by us. It's like, well, that's kind of sucky. And so all these things mix in my head because one of the reasons I care about doing what we're doing here is conflict reduction and peacemaking and trying to help people solve problems together to make their lives better. And I've got lots of stories I can tell about how that, when you can do that, it actually works, but OMG is it hard? Yeah, I think the other really interesting case study in this flavor is Spain, right, where they have federal laws of forgetting. There is specific legal strength around forgetting or at least not thinking about the Spanish Civil War, which is particularly effective in some ways, I think, because like most other countries also don't think much about the Spanish Civil War. I find that when talking to people, usually, my favorite indicator of this is when you ask people about what conflict is in Pan's labyrinth and they're like, oh, it's World War II, but it's not World War II because I don't know how it works in other countries, but certainly in America, they don't teach the Spanish Civil War at all. So that's interesting. There's so much conflict in the century that it's just like maybe not analyzed enough in popular culture to some extent or in basic education. I mean, in Argentina, who was, of course, marked by a lot of these processes also very differently from the core of Europe, because your Argentina was one of the last countries declaring war on Nazi Germany, and, of course, in America, it's shaped by a lot of the stories of people going there unlawfully and your Nazis actually taking refuge there. Spanish Civil War is definitely also a very interesting case just because of how Franco was empowered until the 70s and died in power was very as a hero. Recently, he was moved out of the momento de los caídos and the riot was there doing a fastest tribute in Europe and in Spain. Yes, and here, Jerry, I think also of family trauma and family history and the hitters of communities, as they deal with pain, the Spanish side of my family, my mother's side, left the Civil War after, you know, so my grandfather was in a concentration camp after losing against Franco as a Catalan and escaped the black market and the conditions after the Civil War and unfortunately went to Argentina where 30 years later, their son was murdered in the United States in the United States. Wow. So they escaped fascism to have their son fall prey. To see fascism take their son? Yes. And it's a story which is like, well, there's tens of thousands like this in Argentina only. Well, of course, like, you know, with this composite of the Civil War, that's different back in the generation, but this was a fraction, but still like there's many similar stories. And then, you know, so anyway, I guess, you know me, I guess I share this because, you know, I talk about everything of fascism as a, as your opponent, honestly, and I, you know, like I remind, I think often of poppers, you know, the pile of tolerance as, you know, I really try not to hold grudges and, you know, to practice a particular charity and non-violence, of course, and so on, like in many of us, but I feel like, you know, I feel okay. And this is something I'm also open to discussing at any moment with calling fascists the one group that can be tolerated. I don't know how you think about this, but this is essentially my, my high line exactly. And, and, you know, of course, I think back about how this even relates to many not, you know, like a verbally violent or just, you know, social context, and how we deal with, you know, the far right before they take up machines of violence, like the state to some extent, which has a monopoly on violence. Right. And, you know, just thinking about what's happening, like you say in the many countries. Avram, it's great to see you on the call again. Thanks for joining us. Oh, yeah. Is there a general reference for how to end conflicts? Well, like, is there a place? I mean, I should talk to Mike Nelson, who now is at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, or international peace, I think, and see what he says. That seems very, very interesting as a research topic, for sure. And I'm thinking of, I know there's one book I want to read this year. I don't know if you know it is called The History of Revolution, I think is the name, by Murek Wucin, who, you know, I really liked from before. But this is like a multi volume book. And I wonder if it covers this. I feel I'm very short, you know, because revolutions are like one class of conflict that clearly requires the offer. Murek Wucin. Murek. Yeah, sorry. Yep. The author of The Revolution, a municipalist. And it's cool. I think it's a difficult topic to read because it's I think it's not obvious what you would do to change culture, you know, what you might like, like Lincoln, you know, the obvious thing to do might backfire. It might depend a lot on the culture of the people that, you know, I think Germany ended up the way it did, partly because the German people are the way they are. I put it in the notes. I happen to know from Japan, I got into an interesting conversation. And the gist of it was that the military kind of manipulated the people on the emperor into World War Two. And, you know, I don't that's what that's what people think. Anyway, that's, you know, kind of like common, the common knowledge of that time was that the military really messed up and and got us, you know, where we shouldn't have been. And they felt a lot of shame about the people I was talking talking to. It's interesting. Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. No, please. I just got to say it's interesting because I ended up doing some reading about this randomly and like there was is part of the peace process and intentional focus on the Japanese emperor from the Allied powers as sort of the place to deposit the blame. So it's not just like an internal thing. It was a concentrated approach to say, you know, the emperor was the person in charge, but like they're needed to be like a specific process by which they didn't. What was it where they tried to make it so that Japan could find a way towards settlement that involved purposeful manipulation and forgetting and also particular information flows around it. The other thing that I think is really interesting sort of in that place and I put a bunch of links into these under that Holocaust memory topics, which is another sort of research hole I fell down recently is like how we rewrite the history as time goes on. The YouTube video I put in there is like an interview with a academic who watched what was at the time all four hundred Holocaust movies that he could find had been made and how like particular framings had been done in order to change sort of what people got out of it. Like this very particular and there's an interesting conversation about it, too, which is like, is this intentional or is it just this is what sells and if it's what sells, like, what does that mean as well? Which is he was like, especially after the success of Schindler's list, a lot of the Holocaust media became about the righteous gentiles, non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust, even though so much more of what happened was not about that and how that leads to particular allowances of forgetting. I also put a link by the same academic about his experience in Poland that I thought was interesting as sort of an example of how the experience of forgetting or the experience of sort of pushing history off into saying it's something else can be realized in some particularly nasty ways. For those not familiar, like Poland has a really big problem right now with fascism and part of that is how they have pushed off all the responsibility of Poland and Polish people's roles in World War Two in the Holocaust on to Germany and negated all blame on themselves in their interpretation of history. And I thought that's sort of a really interesting also case study and the articles are all very interesting. I'd highly recommend regarding forgetting and what you were saying earlier about Spain. There's a book, The Ghosts of Spain, which starts with some new stories that broke, I don't know, 2010 ish. I don't remember exactly I can look it up, but they were finding mass graves across Spain and it was erosion. It was whatever. And they were suddenly locating mass graves and all of a sudden, like a boil festering under the skin, the fact that they had had this agreement is called something that no coffee or there's a Spanish phrase for it. In fact, if I look for Ghosts of Spain, I should be able to find it. There was this agreement to not talk about what had happened under Francoism and so forth that backfired badly, because then society just sort of fell into these conversations that were very traumatic, because they've been festering for so long. So the piece of this is, you have a pact for forgetting. Thank you. Exactly, or pacto del obito, yeah. And then there's also I talked with a guy in South Africa, a white fellow who lived in South Africa who was really worried and he was reporting to me that we think Truth and Reconciliation Committees and all that kind of stuff that happened in South Africa was helpful. But it turns out that apartheid is alive and well and black people in South Africa are not doing much better at all. The situation is still like really crappy. And he was trying to figure that out. And so just to note that Argentina, thanks so much. We also have two laws in the 80s, like to try to push society forward towards healing. But they were essentially for, they forgave a lot of people who were in positions of power and in the military, done terrible things. And they were repealed later, much later in the 2000s. And that was like a second round of healing, more like real healing, I would say, personally. And a bit, maybe, thoroughly, they were called Ovedencia de Vida en Punto Final, which Ovedencia de Vida means it's about the responsibility to take orders, how you shouldn't be held accountable if you took an order in a part of a hurricane organization like a dictatorship state. And the second one, Punto Final, which just means the period that you put at the end of a text. So the final point. So essentially saying, this is closure. And essentially, we close a narrative here. And we will not erase it. What was interesting also after Argentina in 1985 is that some of the people got convicted and put in prison for life sentences, like Videl, who was the president, and I think Viola also and a couple others. But then a few, a bunch were acquitted. But then Carlos Menem came in and basically forgave them and amnestyed them. And then later, Alfonsin, I think, comes in and reverses that. It's not Alfonsin. I think he was doing kismet. Yes, yes, exactly. Kirchner comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no. That was a mistake. We need to go back and reopen these trials. So politically, there's this backlash back and forth. And that keeps this whole thing alive and festering in the society as well. And there was, like, going back to the South, in the US, a similar process in the 2000s where, finally, for example, some of the official portraits of Viola were taken down in a process similar to, I think, some of the statues from the confederate leaders. Yeah, confederate monuments coming down. Yes. Yeah. Thomas Piketty talks about it in his last book, Unequality, that he goes back and looks at the economics of a lot of these major shifts and the long-term effects they have on various countries. So he looks at the ends of slavery in Britain and France, several of the island nations, and in the US. And, broadly, we gave all the money and reparations away to slave owners for the loss of the value of their slaves rather than the other direction of providing some kind of economic restoration for the people who were slaves themselves and giving them something then to build off of. And in the US, I think a lot of that is compounded by Lincoln's death, followed by his successor, who essentially said, the war didn't happen. Let's go back to business as usual. We don't have slavery back, but we're going to essentially reverse gears and take the political philosophy of the Deep South, which didn't allow any of that. The South did not have their feet held to the fire to answer for the problems and issues, and they just let it. So it then festered for another couple decades after. But one of the things I find super interesting in looking at, and particularly with the last week, with the election of the Speaker of the House, if you look at all of the times it's taken more than six votes to get a speaker, almost all of them occurred leading up to the Civil War, a little bit shortly after, and then again, with the rise of white power again in the 1920s. And here you see it yet again. So all these speakership issues are how do we build political coalition around grappling with white supremacy in the United States? And all of those occurrences with the speakership have coincided with how we deal with that historically. Crazy. Three short things. Lincoln tried to float buyouts for slaveholders. He basically said, hey, we'll compensate you all to free the slaves. And that's sort of a piece of what you're saying. As a terrific book, The American Slave Coast, I just put a link to it in my brain there. I met the authors who are a couple who are also experts in Cuban music and musicians and really interesting. And they basically say that before the US Civil War, nobody in the US, not North or South, could imagine the US succeeding or surviving without slavery. Everybody was in bed with it. Etna Insurance in Connecticut was busy selling insurance policies on slaves. Rhode Island was the shipbuilding industry. They were building slave ships. New York was financing all of the above, including King Cotton, which was making everybody rich. And the way you knew who the wealthiest person in the country was was the person who owned the most lives. Because the idea of bank accounts full of gold or whatever wasn't the measure of comparison. It was really like who controlled the most people. So they say a bunch of really interesting things in this book, which I'll skip right now. But then I just came out of a conversation where we were talking about the speakership election. And my fear, and this, I think mirrors a lot the buildup to the Civil War that you were just pointing to, Chris. My fear is that what happened in this election wasn't just party politics where a minority held out for its demands, but rather the far right eating the Republican Party and trying to digest. It was basically the snake loosening its jaws and eating the pig because the pig did not stamp out the snake early enough and say, hey, sedition caucus, if you actually voted to not certify the election or otherwise supporting insurrection, we've got this 14th amendment that says you actually can't come into the house and take your seat again. We didn't do that. And Republicans objected a little bit and then went back in line. And there's this enormous problem of when you, and this goes right back to how do you end conflict. When you don't prosecute or sanction bad behavior, it just comes back up and gets worse. But now it's like, hey, the bad behavior seems to have worked. Let's do that again because it's a power play. And technically you can look at all of this, it's just power plays. People take very inhumane, very awful policies because it wins them power and privilege and elections. Completely. And that's happening right now. And then when money is no object, after Citizens United, there's no limit on spending. So if you spend enough money cynically advertising sort of works, if you fill the airwaves, you can make these elections, razor thin margin elections because both sides are pouring money into the media businesses to just try to make their way through. And there's no part of that that smells to me like civic engagement and civilization and society and governance with citizens, among citizens. Well, that's compounded with the social media ability to micro target people. So that instead of having, 10, 15 years ago, you had a hot mic moment would destroy a politician. And now they can say things in public with winks and nods, but then they can say the actual statement of I hate this or I'm against this and micro target to an audience who's not gonna jump up and down and say, hey, they're saying this in private but something else in public. So one of my concerns is how might someone, maybe we create tools that allow for the better coordination of sanctions, for example. And the only, the example I've used for a couple of years is if the press corps had had a shared memory where they could agree, hey, here's six things that Trump says every speech that we know are bald face lies. We're gonna give him one, but at the second one, we're all gonna stand up and leave the room because we know that attention is oxygen to Donald Trump. He knows that we can't close the eye because our business model depends on it, but we're gonna close the eye and we're gonna walk away. Then maybe that will rein in some of his behavior, but maybe not. But tactics like that were impossible to do, not impossible, you could have a back room deal and people could meet in a restaurant and agree to do this, but there was no more visible means to do it so that everybody would be like, oh, okay, here's the list and we're all gonna play, drink a shot the next time that Trump starts down the list and guess what, at the second shot, everybody left the room and we lost the feed. And oops, lost the feed is big. I don't remember the reference, but I seem to recall there was an academic who had studied media in the middle 20th century and looked at newspaper coverage of the KKK and broadly because most media outlets were in the center or at least pushed to the center and it was rare that you had extreme media outlets the way we do now because there's a broader way of doing that or a different way of doing that, but they essentially didn't provide coverage of the KKK, the front of newspapers, there was some coverage but not enough that gave them oxygen to pull together the people who wanted to be there were essentially helper or crew for them who just didn't do it. And we don't have that kind of center forcing focus now within media, it's all, the extreme views are what draws the attention online and so that's what gets the attention and everybody's pulled to the outside rather than push to the middle. Yup. Polarization problem, yes. I mean, here is like, I guess, personally, I don't know if this is interesting, but here goes. Surely, when I think about counteracting against this polarization phenomenon that we seem to see in most complex social systems including social networks, I go back to something you, I think you hinted at Jerry on maybe tools for reticordination using a coordination of sanctions for example, and you said, all these press corps or whoever, whichever group who wants to share memory to take cohesive action to put it some way. And also in a way that resists for an inspection and encouraged for the inspection. And here I always think back on like, if you want a large group of people to agree on something like this, which seems like, what is at the root of improving coordination to me, how much, what is the minimum and what the work you will have to do? What is the minimum they will have to agree on to then be able to always like recover a cooperative context to put this on way. And then to me, it's like something I don't know, I would like to discuss. Like, you know, my mind usually goes to a top level domain. If you can agree on a top level domain to start resolving say positions, entities, opinions, or at least to get the means to do so, then that seems to be like to be less efficient, right? Because you can install with your software you want there. And then you think of a wiki or as you know, in my case, an hour or a massive wiki or a global brain, right? Or the big fungus. And here I go to, you know, we have the word three, and there we could say, I love that. We can have to go to the domain, but the domain system seems good enough for now. So then it's like, I guess I still go back to that, which is like, you know, maybe an exercise to do. For some people who've been, you know, this master on instance or this wiki or this newspaper, which is sort of like what makes the system potentially look like compatible with the old media or whatever, no? So I don't know if you have an opinion there, you know, if you could tell one domain name or one word, one sentence, I don't know if it's an interesting exercise, but you know, if you meet someone you're like, let's cooperate from now on. And you have like five seconds before your vote leaves or your space, you know, why do you say? Sometimes we say political positions, but I don't know if you have thoughts on these on or books to read essentially, right? It's like a category of thing, no? I have kind of a story around that. I can't find my, where you guys are yet. Let me, I'm on the wrong tab. But one of the things that really struck me after doing business in Silicon Valley for 25 years or something like that was the amount of structure and informal, you know, informal structure and informal and formal structure, I guess, that once you kind of got it, it made everything a lot easier. So a short history of Silicon Valley starts in the 70s. Actually before that, a lot of the electronics industry kind of got started at Stanford and there was a professor there who taught a lot of electronics students including Hewlett and Packard. And that was kind of the start of the industry. But 20 or 30 years later, it had gotten to the point where you would have an established company and then people would leave it and start new companies kind of like Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. And so from the 70s, that could just keep growing and growing and growing. And by the 80s and 90s, you had a lot of understanding of companies would kind of look the other way about employment agreements and standards like that because everybody was benefiting by this promiscuous behavior of employees leaving one company and going to another company. So then on top of that, the venture capital industry started growing. And there were just a lot of as somebody who was starting doing venture capital stuff in the early 90s. It took a while to understand the culture and the norms, but once you did, everybody kind of worked the same way. So all the VCs had the same kind of structure of working with startup people. They didn't require a lot of formal agreements. They could get going pretty quickly. They would introduce you to banks that had similar kinds of easy start things, lawyers to draw contracts. All the lawyers had a bunch of boilerplate agreements on their shelves. And so by the 90s or so, there was an informal way of entering this society that had a lot of informal rules about funding and agreements and things like fractional CTOs and fractional CFOs, markets where you could hire people with expertise, but only hire part of them. They would work for multiple startups. And the banks all knew how to work with that and all the law firms had libraries of documents that would get reused and reused and reused. So the whole thing was on top of each of the commercial industries and in different parts of commercial industries, legal and finance, employment kinds of things. Everybody worked together to have this super industry of co-operation. Everybody was competing and everybody was cooperating and continuing to kind of recycle the money and human resources to keep getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster. And it was very cooperative. It was also kind of cut-throat at the same time, but the thing that really struck me was how much of the infrastructure was kind of built across all of that over the course of decades, tons of legal agreements and tons of operating procedures and banks and tons of experience from VCs doing it over and over and over and the first ones getting, teaching the next generation how to do it and the next generation how to do it. And so there was lots of trade secrets, but also kind of like lots of sharing and sloshing the information and the infrastructure back and forth. And that was, it was just huge. It made things expand and go really fast in the 90s and the 2000s and then the 2010s. Now it's kind of post that in lots of ways in lots of interesting ways. I have many times described what you just described, Pete, talking about how Silicon Valley sort of optimized this. I think one of the ways it came up a lot was if you wanted to start a startup in 2010, you could go to Silicon Valley, wave a flag in the field and a whole bunch of people would show up with contracts, with term sheets, with money, with everything. The road was paved with gold stones, but if you wanted to start a multi-stakeholder co-op, you had to invent your own road. Like you had to do everything. And so Nathan Schneider at University of Colorado Boulder got a million dollar grant from Google back in the day. You know, Nathan? Nathan Schneider, really, I didn't know that. Yeah, he's such a co-op. He's in the financial group. He got a million dollars a few years ago, maybe five, six years ago from Google to go study this and make it better. I don't know where he got with that. But his job was to try to figure out how to pave that road for co-ops. And then it's also the platform co-op coalition or whatever they're called, Simone Cicero. There's a bunch of people trying to figure that out. Go ahead Pete. It's hard to overestimate the amount of infrastructure you need for that kind of stuff, for like a new model like co-ops or something like that. It's just like, the thing that struck me in Silicon Valley was how much of the interlocking parts and it ends up in different domains, right? Legal and finance are like completely different domains and they have to stitch together and work so that when your lawyer says, I'm gonna give you this agreement and you're gonna walk in over to the bank. The bank goes, oh yeah, I've seen this agreement before and I'm just gonna do it. That kind of cooperation between different domains is really hard to like bootstrap. And it's hard to even understand where, like how much of that stuff that you need. If you're an entrepreneur, you walk into the field and weigh the flag and you get this whole marketplace, but you don't know how to construct an equivalent marketplace. Like you couldn't even imagine all the different piece parts put together, right? Or you as a person entering that marketplace don't necessarily know the complexity of what has been built up and what to expect. So you see a lot of companies that had VC funding that now, you know, a lot of them died because the people within them didn't know how to navigate them. But similarly you have that kind of tight integration of all those pieces coming together is you see it a lot in the cultural West. Whereas let's say in the Middle East, there are places you'll walk into a store and you can't pick up and touch the merchandise because there's no pre-arranged level of trust. So you have to indicate to the person the thing you wanna see or look at and they'll take it off the shelf and then hand it to you. And sometimes they may say, I wanna see your money first to even see that you have enough money that you could purchase the thing to make it worth their time. But those kind of levels of trust which may go into kind of Jerry's idea of kind of designing for trust becomes a thing. But the cultural milieu that you find yourself in may be one that totally locks out those bits and pieces. So I can, having looked at some smaller indigenous cultures and how they do that type of trust or knowledge transfer from one person to another, it's like in academia, you work your way up and you build a certain level of knowledge to then be able to understand the next thing that comes after that. In some indigenous cultures, they made sure that you knew all those prerequisites first before you were initiated into that next higher level. But that also became part of the reason why the elders were so respected is because they were the living repositories of all the cultural knowledge and information that then needed to be handed down to the next generation. So how do you store that and spread it out enough that a small famine doesn't kill all your elders or some sickness, you know, COVID comes along and wipes out half of your elders. How do you not lose the cultural value but still move on and do it in a calculated way? Well, I'm glad we're not operating in a very simple domain. This would all be right. Well, that's the problem. It's so complex that what you do now, you can't necessarily know the second and third order effects of things later on down the line. So I'm kind of reminded too of having lived in multiple parts of the United States and seen and experienced the individual cultures was kind of an interesting eye-opening moment when I read Colin Woodard's book, America Nations, because he doesn't look at America as a monolithic whole the way most history books do. He broke it up into chunks and in his case, he did 11 pieces, each of which had kind of a founder effect of people moving into a particular area with a certain mode of thinking and philosophy that then spread to larger chunks of area around it. And those early kind of founder effects 250 years ago are still super obvious in modern day politics as well as language and other customs and cultures. But one of the things I see having spent a lot of time in the Deep South, it's a very hierarchical organized culture that is male dominated and family centric and that flows up both through politics and religion to the men who are at the tops of those chains. And it's a very Aristotelian centric society still that pays deference upwards in those ways that aren't always good. So I worry that people say we can educate our way out of these problems by showing people here's the train of thought to get to where we need to be. But within that culture, it doesn't matter what the train of thought is, it matters what does my father say, what does my grandfather say, what does my preacher or minister say, and that's what I'm gonna do. Yeah, we never use the problem too. Can we find someone who is like that person who released this path maybe as a communication tool? You know. I put in the chat a book that's related that I'm really wondering whether the 11 regional cultures matches well to the folk ways and I'll be on seed. And I'll read real quick from the notes that took in my brain. In Albion Seed, which I've not read but I've read a review of it that gave me this thing. It basically says in the 1620s, Puritans went to New England. In the 1640s, Cavaliers went to Virginia. In the 1670s, Quakers went to Pennsylvania. In the 1700s, Irish borderers went to Appalachia. And that each of those was a very different group immigrating from Britain and with a very different culture and then this is kind of back to the American slave coast. The Cavalier culture in the south was an elegant way to cover the shit that was happening behind the curtain because slavery was really horrifying. So what do you do? You mask that with gentlemanly culture and dueling and exaggerated politeness and protection of women and all that kind of stuff. And that gives you a narrative for why you're actually a superior race. Well, you couple that with the fact that for 2000 plus years of philosophy prior to that, there was the Scala Nachari or this hierarchical ladder with God at the top and then all of his creations and men being the pinnacle and then below them women and children and then finally at the dead bottom, you know the slugs and the moving creature, the tiny moving creatures. But that's the framework that we've, the West generally has used for so long now, we don't even think about it. We don't question it. It's just this is the way it is. And so you don't, you know, there are places where we need to question our elders. This is the job of religions, right? Yeah. This is the job of religions is to invent and reinforce and make sure that anybody who steps out of line gets spanked these chains of being and hierarchy so that we maintain some control over society. And we force people to agree to that, right? So it was a light bulb went off in my head a few years ago about like in Christianity or in particular subgroups of Christianity, you basically have to agree. You have to pledge that you believe that there was a virgin birth, that there was this, there was that. It's the catechism or whatever. And each of the things you're agreeing to is a leap of faith. And I suddenly don't know me, leaps of faith are very intentional agreements of non-scientific, nonfactual things. They are parts of the mystery of the faith, which is not only not explicable by science, but in fact runs counter to science mostly. And for me, it suddenly turned into, oh wow, this is a way to get all of your followers to agree to break facts because we're all agreeing to a mystery of the faith that when you're in the faith, you have agreed to that. That's a piece of the program. And I just saw it in a very different light all of a sudden. I was like, wow, so make induction into your club, mandatory and an active act of denial of other sorts of realities. Which just selects for a particular trait then or like, and of course forces a trait. Like you say, there's like a, they're in the time. It reminds me a bit of like how, you know, how spam works or like, you know, a lot of scans where like, you know, you go by numbers and people set self-select into it through a process to some extent. Most of the history of Christianity is very fraught with that. So we don't, Christianity now is the religion about Jesus. It's not the religion of Jesus. So up until roughly the fifth century, all of it is internal fights and strife over who's orthodoxy is better than who else's orthodoxy. And ultimately the chunks of the state picked it up and that helped force orthodoxy. And then you get into, as information passes, you get into things like the Spanish inquisition of, you know, people are having outside thoughts and we can't allow that. So let's come up with a way to force them and kill them and show our power over them so that they fall in line into that hierarchy. Completely. Here I think of Frithjof Capara, you know? Of course, he was, he clarified for me a lot. At least the terminology here where he really opposed clearly spirituality and religiosity, with religion being sort of hierarchical, sort of by definition and spirituality being more like a direct non-mediated experience. We coexist in Christianity with the mystics, right? The relation of mystics also, I see the mystics after that as a heterarchical, doesn't make sense, right? Or like, or anti-hierarchical or whatever you want to see it. And of course, against the orthodoxy of different, Vatican, orthodox church and so on, from churches, Anglican. Well, a lot of it tends to start in cities where there is a higher density of people. Sometime in the last two or three years, I realized the word pagan. We use it to describe religions or nebulous religions and local, what we call religious customs. But the original word essentially meant countryside. So the pagani, the pagans are the people who don't live in the city, the people who haven't been absorbed into bulk Christianity. And because of that, they believe in something else that's not us. So we're othering them and over time, that word shifts and changes to have a religious meaning rather than the othering meaning. I mean, it still has an othering meaning yet, but every time you hear the word pagan, you should really, especially in older historical context, you should think, oh, the people in the countryside who aren't part of the establishment. Yeah, it's it. Oh, go ahead. Really quickly, same thing goes for the book Against the Green by James Scott, where he says that barbarians were the people who hadn't been civilized yet, the people outside the gates, the Marsh Arabs who lived out freely and had better diets at blah, blah, blah. So go ahead. I'm just gonna add, it's interesting because it's not necessarily consistent right across all cultures. One of the things, I'm definitely not an expert on this, but there's a great series on HBO that does different folk horror stories from different Asian cultures, which ended up with each one, I ended up researching a lot about each. What was really interesting to me is that there is like freelance shaman priesthood in Korea, which I knew nothing about. That was like still, that is still very present in both urban and rural settings. And it's, and what was interesting to me was it is very non-hierarchical. The basically each of these shamans, let me put the link in here. Each of the shamans basically have their own set of reliefs, their own set of gods and their own approaches. And then on top of that, like this is a job that people support them at doing. These are not just shamans, but professional shamans who come into this very non-hierarchically and in a very sort of, in the traditional meeting, an archaic way, which I thought was very interesting as a potential like, you know, very outside Western experience in terms of religion. Makes sense. I think also like, I don't know if they, I will be super interesting in researching more of these, but you know, like some of the heretic, I know moments that I think we're in the Italian peninsula in the Middle Ages, like the Cathars, I don't know how the- The Cathars. The Cathars, yeah. Puerto Ecos has written lovely things about them. And you know, to some extent also like you said, Chris, you know, associated with, you know, communities living elsewhere or like, you know, maybe all the centers of power, I think also like monasteries of course, which can be seen as hierarchical of course, internally, but they are like self-contained hierarchies sometimes and can actually be on a wider scale, opposed a heretical event sometimes to, opposed to the center hierarchy. And this is where like, you know, different scales, I guess, you know, like cities can be as centers of panacea in my guess, or to put them in some way or non-conformance or, you know, heretics in a wider country, you know. So the Cathars, the Albigensian Crusade, which was the precursor of the medieval Inquisition and the other Crusades, was against the Cathars. Yeah, they didn't fire it very well. Yeah, it's bad to get like the church directing their energy against you. It's not, you don't want to do that. But one of the areas of the world that fascinates me is the whole Cataluña to Longodoc. Basically the Pyrenees cultures, which span into France into that whole bottom area. And all the languages that predate Castilian Spanish were born there and were spoken there. And there's a whole bunch of them, Longodoc, Longodoc, Troubadour, Occitan, Catalan, and a few others. And they were all sort of interrelated. But these were really strong, really interesting cultures that got stamped out by everybody around them. So the Catholic church stamped them out, the Spanish government stamped them out, the Spanish government has this long and ignoble history of trying to destroy the Cataluña and the Basque people and so on and so forth. By the way, April did the Camino de Portugal this year. She did 18 days walking from Porto up to Santiago de Compostela and then west to the end of the earth. And then this year, she's booked already the Camino del Norte, which goes through Basque country and lasts 46 days. And I'm gonna join her for some segment of it. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, I always say with some friends, we're gonna go. Yeah, we'll be super interested in knowing when, yes. So anyway, so I'm a sucker for all this reframing, an absolute sucker for this reframing because I think a lot of the things we take for granted in the world these days and how it works and who's up and who's down and who's in and who's out and all that are flipped. And Pete led a book group talking about the Dawn of Everything, the Wengro and Graber book, and they went wonderfully deep into the lessons out of that. I couldn't follow enough into it, but loved that you were doing that, Pete. One of my favorite books is Against the Grain, which is kind of a feeder into that thesis. So James Scott flipped my brain on that earlier. And one of the major tropes or themes in my life is that the first good history book I ever read was Tragedy and Hope recommended by John Taylor Gatto, the retired New York high school teacher who helped popularize on schooling. And after reading that book, I was like, oh crap, history can be very different. And so all the books that we're sort of referencing here are the better history books that are like, hey, guess what? The narrative you've been swallowing or you've been told or you've been taught or sold or forced to adopt is in fact broken in these ways. And so, yeah. So I have a history canon that I keep in my brain, of course, which looks like this. Very interesting. So reading clubs are very interesting, I guess. Kind of group. And I did one, intended to do one, and not intended to do two. And I keep wondering if they are like good, minimum viable coordination points to submit them. I agree on that list as well. And I see how far you owe a lot of orchid in the organization. Yeah, I guess I'm, well. So one of the things I've learned to pay attention to is demonization. Like when somebody says that is a terrible group or a terrible thing, very often, it's a very sensible thing or group and the people accusing it and demonizing it are busy trying to get nobody to go look at it because it's allegedly so horrible. And occasionally that group really is horrible, but that's the exception, not the rule in my experience. Yeah, completely. And so anarchists fall into this bucket. It's like anarchism as far as I can understand it. And there's like 30 flavors of anarchism, but anarchism is an attempt to figure out how do people get along well, functionally thriving with minimal government. So it's a form of decentralized self-organization that takes lots of different flavors, right? And I'm like, that doesn't sound so half bad. And yet anarchism we've equated with chaos and terrible things. And we've made sure that nobody goes and looks at the anarchists or calls themselves an anarchist. Although these days we have crypto anarchists and anarcho syndicates, a bunch of other interesting things. I mean...