 Excellent. This is our Rex monthly check-in call on Wednesday, November 14th, 2018, which is rapidly winding to a close as an all-to-eventful year. Maybe for our December check-in call, we do a round robin of reflections on the year and hopes for the new year. I think that would be pretty useful. I'll provide the whiskey. Exactly. We'll have opioids administered to everybody. Everybody has to get wired up for a central line. Let's just get completely plastered if we're going to do that. Alcohol is the present to me. We all end up killing ourselves afterwards, for Christ's sake. Not a doubter. Go ahead. Do you want to bring Banny into the room? Oh, yeah. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to something called Banny, B-A-N-I. How many of you have heard of VUCA, V-U-C-A? Okay. So, in, you know, Jerry has, Estie, if you're raising your hand, I can't see it. VUCA was a concept developed in the Army War College in the late 1980s and really spread quickly throughout the military thinking in the 90s. VUCA is an acronym standing for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, and was used as a framing for how the world looked in the post-Cold War era. As it became increasingly networked, as it became increasingly interconnected, VUCA was a pretty useful way of framing the world. And it got picked up by business leaders and became, you know, so Bob Johansson at the Institute for the Future became a real proponent of using VUCA as a way of framing how the future, you know, what kinds of challenges we'll face in the future. So, it became part of, you know, a part of the language that we would use at IFTF. But I think it's become increasingly obsolete. You know, volatility, uncertainty, you know, we eat that for breakfast these days. These are not. Welcome to reality. Exactly. These are not descriptions of a difference. They're simply depictions, you know, terms that are just, that's reality. And so, I started to think through, well, let me step back and say, I was asked to write and talk about anarchy and chaos in the international system. In over the next 20 years, you know, the distinguishing between anarchy and chaos, a lot of people colloquially get they get used interchangeably in political science, they're quite different. But in thinking through chaos, I began to think through, you know, think about the ways that it would manifest. And it struck me that there's a time for a new kind of framing language. Banny stands for brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. Banny also has the benefit of being the old Norse word for death, but that's kind of the same side effect. Brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible, and it's actually intentionally parallels volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. So brittle, the thing about brittle systems is they look strong, they act strong, until suddenly they're not. Like institutions when they fall. I'm sorry? Like institutions when they fall. Exactly. And, you know, we, we can look at global, the global agricultural system. We can see plenty of examples, but the one that really leaps out at me is we never, never thought that democracy was a brittle system. And now we realize that it is. So anxious, as opposed to uncertain, I really see anxiety as being a powerful descriptor of how humans are interacting with each other, human behavior in this age. And a lot of it comes from malinformation, you know, that combination of misinformation and disinformation and hoaxes and hoaxes and hoaxes and fake news and fake fake news and all of these kinds of things really makes us feel like there are no good options. You know, we have, we have choices ahead of us and they're all bad. You know, that's that feeling of anxiety. Despair manifests from that. One of the things I wrote about described it as realizing that you missed your turn off an hour ago and it's 100 miles before the next exit. You know, that kind of that kind of feeling non-linearity is the one that doesn't apply well to people because I think the other the other three do, but it's the one that is the gives you the best sense of the larger perspective on what's happening in the world. Non-linearity can mean in its simplest form, the asymptotic exponential relationship between, you know, in some systems, but also there's a there's an element of a strong differential between cause and effect, the scale of cause, scale of effect. Non-linearity is inherent to chaos in the mathematics sense. We can see plenty of examples of non-linearity when it comes to climate. And one of my favorite slash horrifying, horrifyingly favorite elements of climate non-linearity is what's known as hysteresis. That is the long lag between cause and effect, initial trigger and ultimate impact. So, you know, the what we see in climate systems is a lag between the introduction of carbon into the atmosphere and the impacts of that carbon. We are the climate change effects that we're experiencing now are largely the result of carbon put into the atmosphere through the 1980s and early 90s. Which means we could have, the world could have adopted the Kyoto protocols and like exceeded them 20 years ago. And we would still be seeing exactly the same thing we're seeing now. And so this, the sense of disconnection between thoroughly connected systems, thoroughly connected events, helps to drive this feeling, these feelings of anxiety and the brittleness of systems. And it's really inherent to the chaos. And I think we can see non-linearity across multiple systems that exaggerate non-linearity, non-linear warfare. I think, Jerry, when we talked about this before you brought that up, you know, this notion of, you know, you don't have to put out a lot of effort to cause a massive reaction. I mean, the cost of the 9-11 attacks versus the impact the 9-11 attacks had, you know, that shows the dramatic that, you know, that disconnection can be. And then finally incomprehensibility, incomprehensible. I don't know what you're talking about. Exactly. You keep using that word to not think it means what you think it means. Exactly. Can you hold your hands up? I want to make sure you don't have six fingers. Prepare to die. Sorry. Yes. Sorry, go ahead. Incomprehensible. Yes. Incomprehensible is here where systems are basically too complex for the human mind to understand, at least not at present or not without augmentation. And what triggered this observation is what's happening with artificial intelligence in machine learning systems. How increasingly we're getting results that we can't understand how we get the results, but we know they work. And this is nothing new for in the world of software. Any of you who are programmers or work with programmers know that there are those examples of software where there's a line in the code that doesn't seem to do anything. But if you take it out, the program will compile or it crashes. And so you need to leave this seemingly non-working, non-functional line because otherwise it doesn't work. And that kind of experience of I don't know why this is working or I don't know why it's not working, but if I hold my thumb in a particular way, it does. And so that's that feeling of, or the recognition that we have increasingly have systems that are outside of the capacity of our current institutions to understand. And so you combine these four, the brittleness, the anxiety, the non-linearity and incomprehensibility. I think that makes for a much more powerful framing for the way things are falling apart, the way things seem to be going over, you know, looking forward. Definitely more so than VUCA. And so this is something that I worked out about a month and a half ago and have been chugging along on that really every time I brought it up to people there's been a strong response of yes, that makes sense. And so I'm hoping in talking about it with this group we can really think through, okay, how do you use this? How does this go from yes, that makes sense to and this is where I can see it being applied. And I don't know that yet and I'm hoping that we can start that conversation. And I just dropped a question at the end of the chat there. What is the matching Zen mental attitude to succeed in a BANI world? Like what, how do you frame your brain? How do you approach everything? If you assume that BANI is, you know, hitting the fan around you, what's the best way to deal with it and take advantage of it? So for example, with incomprehensibility, expert systems have rules, you can go see which rules fired, neural networks don't have any rules. They basically form up these calculations between them, these weightings between the neurons in the fake neural network. And you don't really have very little idea what happened. Maybe you can take a snapshot of that and you'd like inferring what happened afterward. So, but, but I will posit that the moment neural networks get better at diagnosing cancer, whether it's from an image or from behavior or from whatever, then humans, we will run there really fast. And nobody, not that many people will blink. I mean, you outperform human or other kinds of tests and it sort of doesn't matter that you can explain it. So I'm trying to figure out in some cases the incomprehensibility is just something we're going to manage to step over. And in other cases, it's something we might in fact want to take apart because something may be intentionally obfuscated as a strategy in this new BANI world, in which case we want to unmask it and blow the fog off the field of battle because the intentional creation of fog in conflict is now a known strategy. In the latest iteration of the BANI write up, I include that, you know, we can see some types of responses that seem to match the BANI elements of brutalness could be met by resilience, anxiety eased by empathy. Non-linearity would need flexibility. Incomprehensibility asks for intuition. And so I love this. Cool. Thank you. Can you repeat that? Yeah. So, brutalness could be met by resilience. Anxiety can be eased by empathy. Non-linearity would need flexibility. Incomprehensibility asks for intuition. I love BANI, by the way, I find me in a position where I can turn the audio on. I'm not sure I think anxiety versus empathy is, that's the one thing that doesn't strike me as useful. Okay. Yeah. I can definitely see it be fun to like have a table and just do a little bit of word association. I was wondering where, like patience, you know, I mean, there are other terms and stuff that might play. That would be fun to map, but it's a fruitful framework. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I especially call this out as a hints at response and a superficial response, you know, not trying to claim an equivalent depth to the framework. Okay. Yeah. First, a first stab at what are the kinds of things that would be useful human responses. And I do think that there is a, an argument to be made for empathy as a something that we need more of as a way of wrestling with the world that we're that we're in. Yeah, I wouldn't. Yeah, I don't want to give that up, but I think ST has a good point about anxious. I just want to talk about the previous system and then we're both like, welcome to reality. I think this is the same thing, actually, non-literarity happened all the time. And so when I think in a historical context, I think to myself, we humans love our narratives and we need them and we need metaphysics and we need all these things. Right. And of course, when the enlightenment knocked a bunch of that down. And then Nietzsche comes along goes, God's dad, welcome to what God, Nietzsche was saying, welcome to your brutal, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible world. If you think about it, that's what Nietzsche was doing, right? Yeah. And if you further think about it, the world's always had all of these things, non-linear, anxious. All of this stuff has happened as it always has been, right? Right. The stories that we tell ourselves are safe little narratives, right? Are being stripped away from us. You're absolutely right that the world has always had these components. And I think in the write-up, I currently make that call that out for the riddle-ness element. But I think the difference here is that in the past, the institutions that we had created, that we have created to grapple with the world have been more or less able to wrestle with these kinds of problems. And increasingly, the scale of the mani that we're facing exceeds the capacities of our institutions. But, you know, I would counter that and say that we humans always have the Armageddon story going on. It's still at this time. It's the end of history. And I really hate going there. I really want to read this out to May. I know. I know. I know with Bo here. I think what you pointed out with Luca is that we have narratives, deep narratives about those, because we humans so love our narratives that give us a decade or two. We'll come up with, right, working narratives. And when you shift the words like this, you need new narrative. And that is very true. And there are pieces of the old narrative that now need to be undone. So, yeah. Are you done? I see because I don't want to. Sorry, sorry. Jump in while I could. Yes. I'm sorry. So thank you for your. And also I want to add, but I do think to me there is, we are reaching a point where, like, I really see our current economic political social thing is very much like the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. We have gig workers that, you know, our government institutions and everything we used to manage have definitely worn out. We are at a time where if we went back to the 70s and 80s, the institutions were working with the world that they were dealing with, right? And in the previous, in the 19th century, early 20th century, when all of a sudden unemployment, all those things we did to accommodate the changing worlds, our institutions are definitely stretched. They are no longer dealing with reality well, and we do need a readjustment. It's happened before. So I want to point, say that, that about being there is a history kind of an end of history moment here going on, but it's a cycle. We've gone through it before and we were reaching where the point where institutions, governance, everything is not a social contract or all being stretched because the world is changed. So we're definitely in a big renegotiation. So that's the way I'd sneak up to the end of history. We are definitely at the end of a cycle of where our institutions have worn out, where we're very likely even dealing with like these gig workers. I can't believe like the government's doing nothing for them. They have no unemployment, nothing. They're paying it. They're paying an extra 7.5% tax, for example, for benefits they'll never get. And no one's just, everyone's just, oh, what, who cares? We're not dealing with reality, man. I know that very well. I've been self-employed since 2003. And so, yeah, I know about those taxes and, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think Esty will probably agree with me here. I don't need to speak to Esty, but back to her point about empathy. So anxiety to me is usually about, you have an expectation of the world and you know it's not working. And that's when anxiety, so that's where I don't, I think she's right about, empathy doesn't fit in there. I like, I glad you admitted, we want empathy to be in here. We want empathy to be in here somehow. But I don't think it does fit under anxiety. I think anxiety is about an expectation of the stability of the way the world's supposed to be. The world's supposed to be this way. And I can't trust it anymore. That's anxiety. Okay. We're at super. Esty? I think anxiety is also a genuine response to vulnerability. It's a fact, right? And just because you can make the move from your own head into someone else's head, which is what empathy is, doesn't mean that what you see in the other head isn't even more threatening and genuinely anxiety producing. So to me, it's apples and oranges, right? Okay. Or, you know, it's not even fruit on the two sides. I don't see them as that different, though. I see that, I don't know that empathy is the solution to anxiety, but I certainly see it as a path in to addressing the anxiety, to discovering what the sources of anxiety are. I mean, I think it's a piece of the solution. It may not be the perfect matching word, but I don't, I don't, it sounds like we're sort of checking it out the window here. I don't want to, I don't want to be, I want to be careful here because I don't see any of those, you know, flexibility, resilience, whatever, as solutions. And I really do see them as what's the pathway? You know, what might be the pathway to dealing with the BANI issues? So let me, let me go out of limb here and suggest something like agency as a response to anxiety. And because it takes one of the things, one of the narratives I'm sensitive to that is become quite dominant in the last five to 10 years is that somehow you, you're, you're not only responsible for all kinds of other things, as if you didn't need anyone or anything else in your life, but you're also responsible for what goes on inside you and right, should hack oneself emotionally. And if you're not, there's a, if you're not successful at that, i.e. you're feeling anxious or vulnerable or whatever, right? It's, it's a psycho emotional something failure and, and whereas, and if you need a simple example, you know, what's happening with women and me too, etc. says vulnerability is real, we've been dealing with it for fucking generations. And the only thing that will combat it is, is assuming agency of our own in some sort, you can't predict it because things are brittle and comprehensible, etc. But you, you, you, you as a human have agency. Anyway, out on the limb there. Mm hmm. No, no, I really like, really like that, that, that language. I'm looking to layer right on with with SD. So I dealt with anxiety. And my most effective way of finally dealing with was with CBT. I got a book on cognitive behavioral therapy. And what I learned in that book was in the process was like, Oh, okay, the reason I was anxious is because I was in a very dangerous, unstable world. And it was a adaptation to it. Right. And once I did that, then the shame about being anxious went away. It was like, yeah, I was in a dangerous place. Yep. And what CBT does is make you go into it and realize that, hey, you got that fight or flight response in your humanness. It's built in. It's how you survive. So this isn't malformed. It's simply look at the reality you're in, walk into it and realize that, yeah, it was dangerous. That's the way it was. So you're shaking your head. So I want you to go. So totally, totally, totally. I wanted to add in that it's fight, flight or freeze. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's in that frozenness, which tends to be my favorite anxious response, right there where that is a complete loss of agency, right? You're just using the water. Oh, and this bill was looking to jump in. Yeah, let me make room for bill. Let me try and integrate some of this stuff because in a way it fits with some sort of like a turn in the road that I've started to take and trying to deal with this, the banny stuff. In other words, the fact that it's so complicated and so unnerving and everything. But there's there's a book out called my big toe with TOE theory of everything by Thomas Campbell. Okay. And it sort of fits a little bit with the work of a minister by the name of Rob Bell, who sort of talks about the, the, the direction of growth and the basic theme of the theory of everything is that, in essence, if we are always looking at the macro more from the micro quantum level rather than the macro Newton level, if we are consciousness that is creating a perception of reality, then our job is to manage consciousness, not the things that were projecting out there that are problems. So there was this sort of fits with the, even the issue of anxiety relative to slash empathy or any other words, because in essence what he comes down to is you've got this is a bifurcation point you choose either fear, at which point you know whether you call it anxiety or anything else, you've got the conflation of all the problems being unsolvable, or you focus on care compassion and love, in which case you're looking for opportunities to help other people you're looking for opportunities for integration, you're looking for ways of getting over the anxiety, in other words, ramping it down. And at the same time, since this is all consciousness that's doing this, you're coming from the point of realizing that it really is an internal process. It really is your work, not changing the world out there, changing the way that you're going at this. Now I've got to just add one other sort of like structural overlay on the thing. One of the things that I'm just starting right now is is a program with the Monroe Institute. They've got that process called hemisync, which is basically the binaural, you know, trying to sort of do meditation to get to different stages they've got like 36 different stages of consciousness and everything that they can supposedly put you through. But, but I'm studying that. I've known about it for many years, probably more than 1520 years, but but I didn't until I realized and read about Thomas Campbell's work with it. He helped create it, because as a physicist and everything he he was actually having specific experiences with that. When he was in college, no in his first job, he had to do programming and they were doing programming on mainframes is back in the 60s and everything and he had problems with with correcting the code and everything because it's very complicated and they didn't have a lot of time on the machine and etc etc. And he realized when he was in meditation that in meditation, it would highlight the airlines in the code in red, so that he could then go back, make the changes without actually processing the code on the computer. And it was just blowing his mind. I mean, here he was a scientist and what how could this happen. My point is to get this back to the banny. In other words, if consciousness is really sort of playing with us here, and giving us, you know, your use of the word intuition, access to points of information that are not linear that are not mechanical that are not on the paper in front of us. And require that we do the work to access it. Clearly, if you don't believe in it, you're not going to access. You're not even try to access it. And again, going back to when going, you know, sort of talking about the Monroe Institute, their perception is that this is a learning school. Earth is a learning school. Period end of sense. It's always going to be a mess. It's intentionally a mess. It's all a mess in order for you to get over. It's being a mess. Because it's not the point fixing Earth School is not the point. Helping you deal with it in order to, in essence, recognize the opportunity for being another dimensions, which is part of the training that I'm going to be going through and out of body experiences. In other words, if you really, really, really trust that that exists, and that you can participate in that. And that's who you really are. None of the band he makes any difference. You smile at it. You smile at the fact that everybody is being, you know, trumped by what's going on, you know, that they've got all this mess. But meanwhile, you've got access to means by which you actually accomplish things. You actually cooperate with people. You actually have loving, joyful experiences. You actually enjoy the sunset or the sunrise or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, knowing that that that mess is not who you are. It's merely a stage against which you're participating in the School of Earth. Dave with his virtual background looks like he's participating in the School of Earth in a different orbit. I love that background. Yeah, it's awesome, actually. Bill, that's super interesting for like 80 different reasons. And I'll just throw a couple of responses on the table and see what everybody else wants. Now you're an ant inside of blades of grass. Beware of the very large creatures that will come trumping through. It would be cool if the backgrounds were animated and you could have like the foot coming down to crush you. Very easy to entertain here. Yeah, exactly. So one of the premises of Rax of this group and all that is that we used to know a bunch of this stuff and we managed to stop that out worldwide very effectively that Indigenous ways of knowing actually involve a lot of what you've just been talking about, Bill. And I'd love to know where you perceive that there's really big differences. And here we could spend a whole lot of time going back into different cultures and all that. But, you know, the reason Marty Spiegelman is one of the first two Rex fellows was that she would bring sort of Indigenous ways of seeing into our conversations. And one of the one of the videos I need to produce is not the one I'm working on right now, but is how do we meld the best of the old with the best of the new? And how do we take how do we take the really deep insights about how inter twingled we all are and what sorts of energies work to create society and community and Commons from way back when because a lot of cultures had this and blend them with the fact that, you know, right now we're having a video call that where the marginal cost is practically zero, we're sharing resources and thinking out loud in ways that were hard to imagine just, you know, 20, 30 years ago. Certainly 40 years ago was like, this is far away, you know, AT&T tried to show it to us at the World's Fair and look at how far we've they've got. So I think I think there's a really interesting for me piece about marrying the best of the old and the best of the new. And then there's also this very nice, let's step off the current carousel of problem fixing as we see it. And let's see the whole situation differently and come at it with a different frame of mind. So I like that about it as well, because I'm all about reframing I love, I love like reframing problems so that you can sort of figure out and deal with them. So one of the other projects that I'll be putting into the whole wrecks complex here is up keto, which I think I've mentioned before. Up keto is my own little coining. It's it's it's I keto married with uplift or upward spiral. And it's, it's an approach to being in the world where everything that you touch is improved by your presence. Like, what does it mean to behave that way. And I would love to tune it to be resonant with the toe things that you're that you're dipping your toe into bill. Because it feels like there's a lot of sort of juicy good stuff there. And mechanically, your question I think is the right one about how do you integrate the two and and to me, it's what they've been doing for literally 50 years at the Monroe Institute. In other words, you've got to dig in. You've got to combine the science. So there was the whole point of Thomas Campbell getting involved. He was a physicist. He would apply scientific methods. You can do university to back them up. In other words, to take to take transcriptions of their work on remote viewing and everything. In other words, they really dug into it and established some scientific basis for it. But at the same time, you've got then got a shift to the other side, which I'll call the quantum physics of knowing that there's something you can't measure. You've got to have experiential knowledge. In other words, I did this and I had that experience and I was able to repeat it and I showed it to Joe and I showed it to Jane and they were able to repeat it, etc, etc. In other words, you combine what I'll call the multi sensory along with the sensory. In other words, the objective and the subject. Maybe we've got the intuition here by the way, Bill. Right. Exactly. That's for sure. And so in that context, you are over time and a long period of time, 30, 50 years of working on it in both of these cases. Monroe Institute, Tom Campbell's work, Bell's work, etc, to show that consciousness is really the one that's leading the show. In other words, giving us the challenge of finding ways to integrate. In other words, even you're asking the question, how do I integrate it is part of the point of consciousness. It says, let's his scientific language for us is reducing entropy. In other words, you're creating order in order to get more order so you can have a better experience of this thing called life. I have to say, Bill, I think we're bleeding into metaphysics here. Very, very much. But, but fortunately, in a way, if you were, you know, you don't necessarily, unfortunately, the TOE book is 800 pages. So I mean, it's three different books combined. So it's a tome, but you can get most of his stuff on YouTube. In other words, he's got lots of video interviews where he explains it and it's very easily understood and he's got conferences that are being done on it. And in other words, they've got that there's a good amount of academic research that's going on to support his work. And in essence, what he's doing is explaining that, okay, Newtonian physics can't be, you know, in other words, you don't see a fit between quantum physics and Newtonian physics. Well, what if you invert it, you know, and then try to say if, if the lead is quantum physics, can you explain quantum physics? Can you explain Newtonian physics through quantum? And the answer there is yes, you can. Because in essence, it gives you a structure by which you then objectify. In other words, his phrasing for it is the virtual reality experience. The world is a virtual reality that we are creating through our consciousness. And if we want a different experience, you've got to create that, which gets back to the self work. I think the way I would say is that that's what we were talking when we were talking about narratives where that your virtual reality is narratives. Right. I wish we had Evo Haining on the call. She's diving way deep into XR, which is kind of a superset of augmented reality and etc, etc. And she's way down that rabbit hole in very interesting ways. And I think she, I think she would have a lot of traction with this from a particular angle that would probably be also distracting. Maybe that's a subject of a separate call, but back to our regularly scheduled program, which is already in progress. I want to talk more about incomprehensible, Jimé, because I want to cost her one thing. Can you expatiate a little on that? Let's go there for a while. Just don't expect right on that. So when I talk about it, when I muse about incomprehensibility, I am thinking about systems where the cause and effect is causing effects aren't just disproportionate or disconnected, they're hidden. Where the institutions, whether they're educational, educational, religious or simply our cognitive skills don't seem able to capture what's happening in a way that makes sense. And very often it's in systems or situations where understanding why something happens is actually very important. So when thinking about artificial intelligence and machine learning, there's actually, there are laws now in place in the European Union that will require people or organizations that use algorithmic systems to make decisions, be able to explain how the algorithm came to that decision. And that's not going to be possible in many cases. Jimé, have you studied the Kinevan framework from Dave Snowden? I think you would love it and really it would help you in framing your models, because what you're describing is Kinevan's complex domain, where cause and effect are disconnected, and the way you behave in this domain is very different from the complicated domain, where experts can help you and you can sort of suss things out. And I think his leap into complex and understanding how to behave in complex is very germane here. It isn't, as far as I can tell, it isn't a leap off the merry-go-round and into the intuitive sphere and the sphere of rethinking what everything is, but it's somewhere in the space between, and I think it's really useful. The key aspect of complex systems is you can't predict them. In other words, they're not expert-based systems. That's complicated. But in essence, you find out what its, quote, disposition is by nudging it, figuring out what are the alternatives, and then nurturing or feeding that alternative that you want. I mean, that's his basic theory or concept on how to deal with complex systems. It's very much maybe a terrible analogy, but picture your favorite monster from fiction, orcs from Lord of the Rings or something like that, you're trying to herd a whole bunch of them, and you don't really know what planet they come from or what their behavior is or what they care about, but you need to get them to do something. So how do you experiment with them to get them to head in the right direction, maybe? So like, what do they respond to? What seems to work? What goes out of control? How do you test and respond in a very adaptive way? I want to, if I might, push us to dive off the diving board into a very deep end. Okay. I put two kind of links in the chat while we were speaking earlier. And the second of the two, The Order of Time by Carlo Novelli is, I think, essential reading for us. He really starts from quantum mechanics and doesn't insist that Newtonian be a subset, but recasts all framing, all the frames that we're talking about. It's a very dense read, but, and the audio book is narrated by none other than Benedict Cumberbatch. So it is the first physics book that I have read while driving up and down 280. Nice. A state of complete ecstasy. And if it's Benedict, it all must be true then. It is astounding. And there have been a few times where he keeps rolling, right? He's into it, he's reading, and I need to go slower because my mind is just right, but I'm not going to fuck with Benedict's boy. So, and I would love us to kind of go there together into that. You know, if we can put that on our collective agenda. The links before that, and I think I'm pretty sure I mentioned Nancy Abrams to Jerry a while ago, but because I read, I came across her work. Her husband is one of the famous cosmologists, right? Black holes, et cetera. And she's a historian of science. And in the book, A God That Could Be Real, she starts from a place of why is it, with all of her science background, she starts with a place of why is it that even when you show up for diet programs, let alone 12 step, right? People find utility in the notion of God. That's sort of in the preface. What is it that is happening in that conversation with this thing they call God or higher source in this most pragmatic, right, of context. And in the course of the book, there are several diagrams of the succession of cosmologies that have characterized Western civilization, which literally starts from there's above and below. It's like Genesis, right? It's like very simple idea of the world. And she ends up in a place where this God that could be real could be that because we actually have a cosmology in very modern times, the last 20, 30 years that actually could be real. And it ends in a place where what is what is there to be accessed is very social. It is the product of humans. Anyway, both of these for related but different reasons completely open our minds exactly in the place where it needs to be for Benny in my in my experience and Carlo, right, the because time doesn't really exist. There is no absolute time anywhere. Right. The degree to which the world is incomprehensible to us organisms, right, is is is deep. So, yeah. Are you familiar with the things that he just talked about and do they fit back in at all with the theory of everything that Campbell is proposing things like that I'm interested in where these things might touch. You know, it's interesting. I've read that Carlos book. And I found found it. And I'm going to have to go back and then find my copy because I always market with my comments and everything but I found it to be. You're going to find this strange but superficial. And I found it unconvincing in its approach because he started with a basic assumption I can recall exactly what it was, but an assumption that was wrong. The words I've read other stuff about that particular source that he was working with, and it was wrong. And it just sort of destroyed the entire book because I agree with you that there's a lot to that book. And there's about this value to it but he just unfortunately started with the with the wrong. It's like the butterfly effect, you know, small changes at the very beginning you have a huge, you know, change at the end. But but to me, it gets back to what I'll call because I'm sure that the problem with my resistance to Carlos work was it's kind of mechanical. In other words, it starts with something and then goes to something else and then goes to something else. And that's not what the theory of evolution or theory of everything relates to it's much more fluid. It's much more, you know, a sense of where is the connection that we're trying with consciousness once connection doesn't want things that things are just, in essence, periodic results and they're always going to be changing. And so to be stuck with that, in other words, stuck with the thing and trying to analyze the thing isn't really the point. He's counter thing. He says things don't exist. It's all process. I agree. And that's why, in fact, I want to find my copy, but but there was one source that he started out with that I just unfortunately disagree with. And it just sort of colored the rest of my reading. I went to hear a novelist, a book event last night, the book is called The Weight of Ink, and it intermingles characters in modern London and 17th century Amsterdam. And it took the author, it's a fabulous book, took the author 13 years to write it. She had a couple of kids, etc. But she was talking about how she had to and she did this enormous amount of research about everything in the 17th century Amsterdam. Because if you read one thing as a reader, if you happen to know one thing and right you get it's all over. And as what the meaning of spending 13 years writing a novel was sinking into the audience, right? I hope she's right. So Bill just proved that in fact, you lose people, yeah. Just a little thing. The little thing which is irrecoverable. It's something about brittleness, right? Well, if you're building an edifice on a foundation and the foundation has chips in it, then the edifice is bad. If you're looking through a holographic thing and one of the threads, one of the paths is flawed, that's different, right? So long ago I heard Dick Foster, the guy who invented the S-curve, X McKinsey, senior McKinsey guy, give a talk. And this talk was sort of, it was clearly his valedictory talk. He was showing his theory of history in the world and he starts with Plato and Aristotle. And I'm like, shit. And like the moment he started, I'm like, shit, I'm done, right? Because I don't think the world starts with Plato and Aristotle and how wonderfully we built a rational world on top of their logic and blah, blah, blah, blah. But he does that and he goes through, you know, his vision of where we are and where we're going. And his beginning salvo was complete nonsense to me. And so anyway, I think it depends on whether you're, even how you write about the thing you're writing about. Are you looking at it through a variety of peep holes or are you building an edifice that relies entirely on the initial logic, for example? Yeah, and my criticism of this book is that it has a very standard structure. Part one, part two, part three, the chapters, you know, kind of chunk through. And that's not the way that just feels wrong to me. And I think that lays him open to stuff like you're saying they'll wear. And, yeah. And I'm wondering whether, sorry, I'm wondering whether in discourse it would be different. I'm wondering whether I'm wondering whether he or his editor forced him to linearize his logic to make it come out as a book, which is a serial artifact. And whether his thinking is much more holographic than that. And whether he in discussion would be different. And I have no idea. There's a bunch of videos on YouTube of him talking about the books. I think that there's an opportunity to taste how he approaches it there. Also could be something where the, he wanted people to focus on the ideas he or the other one, people to focus on the ideas and not get distracted by a, an unconventional structure. Yep. It may have been in the book proposal stage where they said, okay, who is your audience and he decided other other scientists like me are the audience I need to convince them. So therefore he needed to write something digestible by scientists, which was It also feels like academic writing in that I've, I found I had to kind of forgive or swallow really bad right. That sucks. I hate it when that happens. Yeah. There's a couple of really good books that are terribly written. Right. I don't think that English is this first language, but you know, it's just, there's, they speak in a genre unto themselves. You know, so all of those, all of those reasons, but it's also really tough. I mean, I am some of you know I've been thinking about time timing, right. Continuity of consciousness all constructed etc for a decade at least in a very foreground way. And I feel like this. This is, is taking me to I just grabbed the words I would have words for the things that I've been intuiting for many years, right, but he makes it hard to grab the words I agree. Whereas Abrams is this journey on on what it is to be a human right and a cosmologist right to be a woman with a weight problem and a cosmologist and it's a it's a lovely thing. Just to play with your words a little bit ST even though it's taking you a couple of decades of journey into time it feels like just yesterday. I started cleaning out my closet right at the counter to that is I started cleaning out certain piles in my closet and I find these things and it's like, we said that I wrote that way this, and it was, yeah. And it was, it wasn't just yesterday it was 2008 Jerry when we had that meeting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This has been very similar to me. Good. I don't mean. Real. To me, I think we've gone lots of interesting places that feed banny but are different from. Well, I want to stay on Bonnie this is fun man. So it's having a banny good time. Yeah, haha. How do you celebrate banny this is an important thing. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation whiskey. Or tequila whiskey is not your thing or rum or right. Yeah. It's actually been something I've been wrestling with is that if you if you go back through the work that I've done I spent a lot of time as playing an optimist on TV or online. The inherent conceit of world changing, you know, the site that I that I co founded was that, you know, the problems are big, but we know, but we have solutions. Really, this is this isn't something. This isn't devastating this is something that we can, we can overcome this being climate change or, you know, inequality all various global issues taking global issues seriously, but focusing on what we can do about them. And clear right optimism. These various phrases that meant to imply that, you know, we can get through it. And I've been wrestling with that. Because I spent a lot of time in recent years focusing on the future of the climate and the interaction between climate and politics interaction between climate and demography. Climate and technology. And it's really damn hard to be an optimist. I have, you know, I am genuinely worried for the futures of my, you know, nieces and nephews. And getting through creating a space in my life for the comment that intersection of I would say pessimism. But God really grasping for the right for the precise language here, but the knowing sense that our future is getting away from us. And yet recognizing that we actually know what to do. We have the solution, the tools at hand the institution, the institutional systems are there. They aren't perfect, but we have we have steps that we can take. And yet we don't do it. And that used to make me angry. Now it just, it just makes me sad. And Banny is, I think, a grasp, a gesture at trying to give framing to the chaos that I'm witnessing. And by giving it, by creating a framing that more genuinely speaks to that sense of chaos, then then VUCA. VUCA seems very structured and controllable. Yes, it's volatile, but we could deal with it. It's uncertain, but we can be a little uncertainty. And it doesn't really speak to chaos. And chaos is what we're experiencing and I, and I don't know what to do. And my, my job has been for the last 30 years, 25 years to help people figure out what to do. So, I think some people are working very hard at doing some of these things, you know, David Bollier and 1000 people we track and read and think about. I also have a belief that sometimes a lot of things look like they're not making any progress and then suddenly we're in a different world. And it's like, holy shit, how did we, like, it seems like just yesterday that we were thinking this is impossible, nothing's going to happen. And suddenly we're over in this other world. And I can, I can think of a couple moments in my life where from one year to the next, it seemed like, wow, we're seeing everything differently here. And I don't just mean the 2016 election. But so, so I'm really interested in the tipping points to borrow a now cliched phrase, but, but how do we connect up all the different movements. So, so Dave is deeply into regenerative agriculture and regenerative economy movement. There are tons of people through that movement doing fantastic work, putting great ideas out, convincing people to go start small farms and grow organically and heal the soil and do this and do that. That's really, really interesting. What other movements need to be layered together with that, that together make for a big sea change in the way we see one another, the way we see the earth. And I have a funny optimistic feeling that that could happen, may not happen in my lifetime. But I think that that very rapid changes of consciousness sometimes, sometimes just take place. And then they settle in for 200 to 2000 years. It will happen. It will happen. I actually have, I'm a long term, curious optimist, almost a long term utopian. But a lot of people are going to suffer. But just as you were speaking, I had this idea strike me that, you know, what we're in some ways what we're trying to articulate is how do we make. Just the apocalypse itself a brittle concept. Yeah. So we basically see apocalypse we see the end of the world we see chaos, and all of the these issues as being overwhelming. But perhaps they are themselves also brittle phenomena. And how do we reinforce that riffing on your notion of a lot of people are going to suffer. I'm going to turn the tables on that. So for example, I met this really, really great guy Alexander bets who runs refugees international or something like that. And part of our conversation was, how can you treat a refugee as a first class citizen. Meaning, how, how can I bring state of the art resources to their fingertips so that as they think of things they want to do, whether it's something they want to learn or build or whatever, that those resources are somehow at hand. And it may mean relocating it may mean living in a completely different way but it might mean living in a much better way. Long ago in a fit of peak after you get another, I think IFTF event about the domain raftify.com thinking, okay, like climate disaster or like, you know, we're going to lose landmass but guess what three quarters of the earth is already water. Why don't we learn to live on the water. And we're going to have to learn to live to raft our lives together and then reconfigure them, you know, so imagine imagine a modular means of living on on the oceans. And that could work any place and if you could build the right things you could live really, really well in that way. Right. So, so I don't know. How do we, how do we play with these things experiment with them that's different from, you know, the sea setting Institute which is trying to create a libertarian cruise ship where people can live for the rest of their lives. I really love doing you journey talk about being a long term optimist in the apocalypse brittle because you remember the club of Rome, we human beings are muddling through and we all we just keep muddling through. Yeah, what we do. It's sloppy. It's messy. It's bloody. But nevertheless, when we're millions and billions of people die. It's always, you know, like what do people think when they were in the middle of the black death in Europe. That's the end of the world, right? How these swords hurt. Yeah. And by the way, the black death frees up mouth to feed that the next couple hundred years are pretty good. You're basically it's the Thanos theory for the scene, the Avengers movie. There's Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book the the years of rice and salt. It's good and alternate history based on the idea that the black death killed 90% of the people of Europe and basically wiped out Europe as any kind of political global actor. So what happens to the world when China and India and Africa are the dominant players and in particular Christianity doesn't survive. Tell me where this goes. I'm fascinated. No, it's a it's a big book. It's KSR. Yeah, I love I love Stan. I think he he has brilliant ideas about the world. He's not a good writer of characters. So I would recommend years of the years of rice and salt, not because he has, you know, he's weaving a, you know, a sense of of how people live in these worlds so much as he's just he's he describes worlds beautifully. He did the Mars trilogy. Red Mars, Green Mars, blue Mars, which remains one of my favorite series of books of political books ever. I mean, if you ever want to figure out how do you how do you construct a constitution for an off world colony. Here's the here's a series of books that tell you about it. But yeah, so I hesitate to give away what happens because it's mostly you want to read it for the world, not for the plot. Okay. I'm having a great time. Thanks everybody. Me too. One more thing to push on in the two columns, the word association, which is flexibility alongside nonlinearity. There's a nonlinearity when you begin to perceive it in action causes. Holy fuck, what, you know, must, must act yesterday. Right. Must act now must act and flexibility feels. Yeah. So don't even need to finish that. So what if this group here, and this conversation, do we have other words that might make this list close to perfect. See, just as an aside, the response list was, you know, is a sentence or two in the, in the last paragraphs of these is not the dominant argument. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, left column. So, you know, it's our job to help make the right column. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, please. Any suggestions, ideas? I can offer one thing, which is I've never been happy about the word sustainable and resilient. So I prefer thriving and flourishing. And to me, the difference is between what elastic and plastic. So if you, if you tense a rubber band and then let it go, the rubber band will always go back to its original shape. Plastic, however, remolds itself and can be made into a new shape. So to me, resilience and sustainability both imply, hey, we were hit by something really big and really bad, but we either survived or made it back to where we were. It's sort of operating under the joy line per, as it were. And in fact, in fact, I've applied the joy line model to this. I just haven't cut that video yet. Whereas thrive ability, courtesy, Gene Russell and others and flourishing open a path toward positive action that isn't in response to the bad things toward where Bill was talking a bunch earlier and an open possibilities of living a very different lifestyle that might actually be much better in the end. You don't know until you've lived in it or tried it, but it opens up the possibility of doing things really differently. And it's not fearfully holding on to the status quo forever. Exactly. And if we can get into a state of stepping into new status quo is, that's really interesting because the hardest thing in the world is to let go of things. Now, I was looking on the site that, as he put on the chat earlier, it's like, well, it appears that in human nature, the hardest thing to do is to let go of your gods. Right. That seems to be the worst battle that happens anywhere and look at all the people who've died because of that. So getting people to be able to imagine and step into new and potentially better ways of being with each other would be a huge virtue. So let me just throw this out there. Because this is something that I've been mulling for a while that I think fits in this part of the conversation. Do you know what non-Newtonian materials are? Materials, not necessarily. I know about, what's this name, Korzybski. So non-Newtonian materials are, they're usually liquids where they react in different ways depending upon how much pressure is applied, how quickly. So you can basically, the sort of the canonical example or canonical video of something like this is a tub or a pool that's clearly full of fluid. You can move your hand through it, but you can run across it because at the impact of a, of a footfall, it solidifies just for that, just briefly. And, you know, so there must, I think there has to be something there about systems that can under normal situations can be fluid, can mold themselves into their channels, can move, basically you can move through it. But if it, if something hard and fast hits, they're able to withstand it. Rather than simply being split by it or, you know, having to swallow it, you know, you can resist it. And I don't know if that's the perfect, the perfect analogy, but I think there's something there. I think that's one of many strategies. The other strategy is to simply let the thing flow through you as if you didn't exist. I mean, there's many, many different maybe approaches to resisting a force. But, but I think part of this, if you step back for a minute, a little bit is identifying what the forces are and whether they're good or bad toward your, for your objectives. And when they're bad, can they can be converted to good? Like, I'm really interested in sort of Aikido or Jujitsu flips on, hey, this terrible thing is about to happen. Hey, wait a minute, if we just tweak it this way, it turns into a reasonably good thing. And just to play devil's advocate, I think a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump see him as that. Okay, they wanted all the institutions that we were criticizing at the start of this call to be shattered and thrown into the air and basically broken in ways that required their replacement or their patching or their complete reconfiguration. And I can't blame them for that because I think all of us share at some level this this, you know, this may with what we've done with institutions and how poorly they seem to be suited to the purpose of making civilization better in different ways. And there's lots of arguments and lots of conversations behind that. But, but how do you sort of appropriate and redirect things that might be like a horrible terrible fate and bring them to some useful purpose. Does make me think that like in one of the things is you go into with that assumption and then you never update your cards. The commitment for a lot of people has gotten even stronger, given all the data, and it's kind of, how do you do both of these things. Something the brittleness is around not learning. Exactly. Brittleness is around not learning as I was just a David. Yeah, right. I mean, we you don't, you don't, you don't update, you know, you're not agile, you're not flexible, you're not, you know, you don't observe new, new data or something. Right. Yeah, and you talk about flexibility. That's what you are. You're what scared and defended. So does everybody know the difference between undefended and defenseless? Oh, I can't wait. So I got I wrote about this long time ago, but it's been a while since I thought of it. So to be defenseless is when when the bad guy shows up, I'm probably dead, like they could really hurt me to be undefended is to know how to defend yourself but to put your hands down to open up a moment of vulnerability that says I could defend myself if need be, but I'm willing to be vulnerable right now. And to be undefended is really a cool approach. It's a it's a type of vulnerability. I love it. It is also a kind of a defense. If you believe that that signal is going to change. Right. And, and I think is often the hidden message under stories of bravery under under a certain subset of stories of bravery. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. We're all trying to figure out how after a lifetime of saying, I'll be resilient. Yeah. I'll just be the one to flex here. Yeah, exactly. Or I haven't got any choice and maybe I am to blame. So just what Jerry just said, you may or may not know this that to flex has become in popular language for you today. To brag. That and so basically what I'm seeing a lot of like on Twitter or Reddit, you know, that's that's an odd flex, but okay, you know, referring to somebody, you know, talking themselves up about something. So to flex actually has taken on an interesting and interesting new meaning. I think the derivation is by sex. I don't know, no doubt, no doubt, but it's, um, yeah, but it's just, you know, when I hear that suddenly I am hearing that in a different frame now. Oh, yeah. This cap on backwards. Interesting. So undefended defenses possible defenseless defenses not right to generalize it a bit more. Yep. So and undefended may be a choice, maybe a circumstance. But it's more likely more plausible that it can change if needed. Then and undefended in the meaning I'm using it as does not mean hey we left the fort undefended. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean that it means that, you know, we could defend ourselves but we are choosing to let let down our arms. It's a there's a famous story that came out of I think Afghanistan where there was a lieutenant and his squad who were in a village and things were really heating up. It looked like things might turn into like nastiness and shooting pretty quickly and he basically shouted out take a knee. And everybody in his squad immediately got it and dropped their weapon lowered their weapon to the ground and took a knee they basically got on their knee. One knee. And at that point it diffused the situation because the other side could see that okay they're not they're not about to raise the weapons and shoot shoot all of us. So what does that look like in all different in all different kinds of settings. Right. I've been doing a little bit of Aikido, which I love and one of the interesting things about Aikido is when you're doing a really complicated throw and you're in the middle of it. And you're starting to master it you're starting to think like oh I know what's happening and I know where where my partner is and I know where this is going. You get this sense of calm in the middle of the storm. You get a sense like oh okay this is this isn't this ain't so bad this is actually a little bit fun and I and I can see around myself much more than I would if I were fearful. I have a sense of peripheral vision that I didn't have before a whole bunch of other stuff shows up. So I think partly there's a tangent here also about being able to defend yourself is a prerequisite for walking into a situation confidently. Right. And this is where my dad taught me to shoot you know he used to load his own ammo I'm pretty familiar with weapons and all that. And I have friends who were raised with parents who were completely panicked about weapons and as adults these friends are completely panicked about weapons they wouldn't know what to do they have no idea what the arguments are about. They're they're sort of uninformed and therefore sort of defenseless in the middle of an argument about gun control or you know what do we do. So I think I think all these things are are interesting use cases or scenarios in which the things we're talking about are useful. You know what you're describing with that sense of calm confidence in the middle of things. Actually reminds is evokes for me what I feel when I'm giving a talk on stage in front of a thousand people or whatever is that you know I definitely have some nervousness going up onto the stage. But once the talk gets rolling and most of these I do with the slides as a framework by just give it to speak extemporaneously. Once it's rolling, I can feel it and there's a there's a definite shift in my body chemistry is the feeling in my gut. And it is a sense of recognizing the fun. I don't know if I have a greater sense of what's around me. I think I have a better greater sense of the mental space around me that is you know what what is the story what that I'm telling what is the the narrative that I'm laying out what is the world that I'm building. You've also you have a lot to say and you've got a lot of stage time so you've lost the stage fright of being up there. One thing one thing I'll ask is like, are you more aware of the reactions and emotions of the people you're talking to are you better able to tune into over here that person looks really skeptical or this person's really like with me. And can you address that do you have more room awareness with of your audience as when you get in that mode, not consciously. There have been two times in giving in giving talks that I've felt horribly nervous on stage for a big chunk of the time. One was in Manchester, UK I was giving a talk on geoengineering and climate, and I had just gotten over cold so my voice was really weak and a woman drunken woman in the audience started heckling me. But that's also spaghetti and you know kind of thing and Manchester who do. And, you know, my voice is my tool, and my voice was weak. And so I felt like I couldn't I had no way of exercising any kind of control over that situation. So your lightsaber felt like a little pencil flashlight. Exactly. Yeah, the other time in a completely different kind of situation. Have you ever had if you ever heard something called whoop stock. So, a comedy musicians pollen storm and Adam Savage for mythbusters will we can would do a nerd culture comedy show stage show, usually in parallel with like comic cons and things like that. Well they came up to San Francisco. And they typically have you know the the four principles plus variety of other others. And Phil plate, the bad astronomer was scheduled to be on their team, and he had to drop out of the last minute. So, two weeks before the event will I've done will for a while it calls me says hey would you like to be in Woodstock. And so I got to go to the great American music hall and in front of an audience of a few thousand people and do a 20 minute funny talk on the end of the world. In front of a bunch of people and being smart, being insightful, being provocative. I can do that go up in front of a couple thousand people and be funny. That scared the shit out of me. And I was nervous the entire time. Now, I'm told it didn't show and I feel very nice but that sense in both of those sense it was, I have no idea how to manage this. And I have no idea how any of this connects to what we've been talking about but just that sense of how do we how do we grapple with situations that are outside of what we expect to be able to control. So, I have a, to me there was a little waves of connection to this to the prior part of the conversation right sounding as you were speaking and then I looked up and saw the time and I was like, Okay, So, so here's, here's my closing line, right. I think what you were describing Jemma was what, as a, my first sort of identity was as an improvisational dancer, and that moment you know where we would agree how it starts. And like literally who's going to walk where and be right on the stage and then there's this some piece of time of indeterminate length in which you're kind of looking for that place where all of a sudden it's there it's happening. So, this is one. This is my example of some of the waves that were coming off of what you were speaking right and here's my closing. So now I know that the next time I am in a moment of the apprehension of non linearity. I will say, Oh, God, if you exist. Please send me a lily pad path of non Newtonian materials. There we go. Perfect that you might run across the new tour. Exactly. Exactly. I like it. Solid thing right that emerges out of who knows what to step on in the others. Okay. That is awesome. That's what the end of the call right there. That's perfect. I was sort of going to say anybody else with closing closing thoughts as eloquent as that I mean that's that's perfect. Perfect. Thank you. Anyone else want to throw anything else on the conversation before we do wrap. This was loads of fun guys too much fun for what day is it? It's like the middle of the week. It's Humpe. Yeah, this is Humpe. God, couldn't be better. Yeah. Thank you all. Thank you very much for letting me help help me figure figure through this. I hope it helped. It did. And I want to see if you write it up to me. I want to see it. Yeah, I can. I don't know. I think I have everyone's email address, but I'll send I'll send out my latest draft to Jerry and he can forward it if I don't. Okay, you can also you can just put it on the on the rec list or like as well. That's easy. Okay. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Bye guys.