 Cool. Good morning for the West Coast. It is Monday, December 11th. This is an ad hoc Rex call about things we think are true but not necessarily. Our guest whom I will introduce in just a moment is Doug Carmichael. But first, as is relatively customary with Rexie things, I would love to read a poem as our introduction. And the poem is designed, titled Design by Billy Collins, who is at least a very entertaining and occasionally very pithy poet. So here it goes, designed by Billy Collins. I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger. This is the cycle of life, I say to no one. This is the wheel of fortune, the Arctic Circle. This is the ring of Kerry and the white rows of trolley. I say to the ghosts of my family, the dead fathers, the aunt who drowned, my unborn brothers and sisters, my unborn children. This is the sun with its glittering spokes on the bitter moon. This is the absolute circle of geometry, I say to the crack in the wall, to the birds who cross the window. This is the wheel I just invented to roll through the rest of my life, I say, touching my finger to my tongue. Hey, Mark. I was just reading an opening poem designed by Billy Collins. So let's go ahead and dive into our topic. You'll notice I'm in the call twice partly because if appropriate at some point, I've got it queued up to share my brain with everybody. And it turns out that in Zoom, when you do a screen share, whatever your, whoever's screen sharing takes over the screen for everybody, you can still see thumbnails across the bottom. So it's what I was hoping was just to have me show up in one window as me here and then another window with my brain so that you could choose to go look at it. That's not currently an option unless somebody knows how to do that in Zoom. So at some point, I might go that way. But let's dive in. And in one of said windows, we have Doug Carmichael, whom I've known for some time. I've completely forgotten how we ever first met. Doug, that story is lost in the midst of my mind. Do you have any memory of it? I think we might have met at David Eisenberg's place, his meeting on Cape Cod. That makes a lot of sense. And Mark Spaskowski writes that you guys met in Second Life, which is awesome. Uh-huh. Carlos, welcome. Glad to see you. Hi. Nice to see you, Jerry. Nice to see you all. I think Carlos is in Buenos Aires, right? Yep. And you might want to mute your microphone because you have a feedback from it. There we go. Thank you. So Doug, if you wouldn't mind just a couple of minutes of like, what is your journey to, how did you get where you are? And I know that we could take the whole call doing that, but what's the flavor of that? Well, to me, it looks like a straight line, but to everybody else, it looks weird. I went to Caltech to study physics because I had been told as a teenager that those were the people that understood the world. And when I got to Caltech and by my senior year, it was pretty clear the equations we were learning to write did not describe the state of the world as I understood it. And I'd also become much more interested in the people. I mean, people who were there like Alana's Pauling and Feynman and others. And so I actually, it was a couple of steps, but I ended up studying psychoanalysis in Mexico where they're from and became an analyst and practiced as an analyst. But a friend of mine, I got a grant from Harvard to study top technology corporations and their leadership. What kind of people were they? I looked at from a kind of psychoanalytic point of view. So doing that study, people in those companies, Hewlett Packard, for example, said, look, you really understand this, help us change. So we became change consultants without having planned on that. It turns out for understanding the world the way it is now, I think the physics to psychoanalysis from really tough science to the toughest humanities, actually, is a very useful path to have been on. For the last, well, I ran a project at Stanford called the Stanford Strategy Studio for a while. But the idea was how to have more intelligent adult conversations. People in the climate world picked up on that and wanted me to help them and I came to the conclusion that they were very painfully naive about economics, thinking, for example, that changing consumption would be enough. A friend of mine became director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking that George Soros had just set up. And I called him and said, Rob, I need to know more about economics. What do I do? And he said, we do too, come join us. So for the last eight years, I've been a consultant on strategy to the Institute. And it's been very tough because, in a way, economics is pushed out to the periphery, all the things that you need to change it, like history and anthropology. So it's not in the discussion. I know by now I've actually learned a lot about why this happened, who the culprits are, and what we might do about it. But that's been the path leading me to a view. Well, another piece that I put in is, I thought, you know, what do people really want? And after a lot of thinking, I felt that people really want to live in a combination of civilization and nature. And why don't we go back to Jerry's poem at the beginning before some of you were here on design? It's a design problem. Buckingham Minister Fuller said, we've got the globe and we've got a bunch of billions of people and putting them together is just a design issue. But you can't do design if you don't have a sense of the goal of the design. And so Garden World as a place to grow human beings has become kind of a project of mine. So Jerry, that's probably enough background. That's brilliant. Thank you because I was going to ask you next about Garden World. Could you go three sentences deeper into Garden World, just to give us a feeling for how you're fleshing the idea out? Well, I did a draft five years ago of a book, but I knew I didn't know enough. I think I know enough now, maybe. I'm redrafting it. So it's changing its focus. But the idea is that we've got to pull together a vision and politics in a practical way to cope with the problems that we're facing. This gets into the book that we're talking about today. The reason we need to understand books like this one is we can't change the world if we don't understand where we are and how we got here. And progressives, for example, tend to think that the world that will come out of progressive activity will look much more like this world we're in now does than it probably will. In fact, we might have to invent a world that's uncomfortable for people like us. It doesn't fit our character or life experience. But I've been thinking a lot about that. So I'm going to jump to one piece of it, which is if we start with the key problems, climate, unemployment, inequality, the failure of governance, and think of what a solution might look like. It looks to me like a very large part of the world's population has to change how they make a living and where they live. So we need an image of where they could go to or they're just going to resist like that. So I came up with a view that there are four key categories of employment, not 40 hour a week, but things that occupy people in a productive way that they could agree to. And the first category is greening everything from an economic and an aesthetic point of view. And that's a huge task. Every part of the globe needs thinking along those lines, especially on the aesthetics, not that the economy part. Also, like dealing with agribusiness and all that, we need to rethink it. Anyway, greening the world is the major category of future employment. The second is the welfare, taking care of the people whose lives are disrupted by the transition. And that's a big deal. I think of Herbert Hoover coming in to help feed Europe after World War I, and he apparently did a very good job of doing that. But we need that scale plus in order to hope for this location that people are going to go through. The third category of future employment is management of one and two. That is managing the greening of everything and the disruption of people's lives. It's going to be a management task beyond anything we have ever tried. There are things that are hints, like gentle motors being able to shift from cars to tanks and planes in 90 days. We need to learn from those models, but that's the kind of scale that I think we need. The fourth category is the education and arts to support one, two, and three. So to me, this is an attractive world to move towards. I don't know quite what it will feel like and what happens to my house, for example, as we shift to such a world. But it's working at the edge of a believable image of where we could go that is a change big enough to make a difference. And most proposed changes are not big enough to make a difference. Totally agree. And I think a big stimulus for this call is that we're trapped inside a lot of narratives and a lot of frames that don't let us imagine other ways or even have the conversation about how to get to other ways of being on earth together. And I think partly this is true because it serves a lot of interests to stay stuck where we are, the interests that are doing just fine or even stand a benefit. And then the little catalyst that provoked the conversation was I happen to be reading Against the Grain by James Scott and you had posted a review of it. And it's funny, James Scott has done a whole bunch of different and interesting books. I'll actually let me do now what I threatened to do earlier. I'm just going to share my screen, start video, share screen. I'll just show and see how this works. So here's Scott and there we go. Here's Scott. Here's the book Against the Grain. So when I like a book, I take notes into my brain of it. And he talks about booty capitalism. And one of the points he's making that I really like is that many cultures, early cultures really didn't spend as much time sourcing food. We have this belief system that life was nasty, brutish and short and that everybody long ago was suffering and like really struggling. And one of the things, one of the stakes he's trying to put in the ground is, hey look, before we civilized, and here the word civilization he's holding up for question, before we civilized through the domestication of brains, life was actually probably better. And that early civilization, if you look at the fossil record, the bones of people in the early cities, suffered malnutrition because when you go to grains, you're missing the wide variety of things that people that lived out in the wetlands and eight, you know, 100 different things actually enjoyed. And that there was a 4,000 year gap between the domestication, early domestication of those grains. And when we actually start settling into what we might think of as city states, and that I'll just add the last thing that one of the principal reasons for all of that is taxation, that the early grains grow above ground, they grow in a synchronized way that makes them all harvestable at around the same time, which makes them very easy to, well not easy, but at least feasible to go tax. And that hence you get civilization in quotes. And this to me is one very tasty corner of a whole series of issues like this, and I'll stop the, stop the screen sharing at this point so we can go back to the conversation. But I'm, what did, how does this fit into your kind of macro view of things, Doug? Well, I found the book fascinating because it upset a lot of my macro view of things. Take, for example, that the early compounds that people find themselves living in had walls around them not to keep the barbarians out, but to keep the people in. Taxpayers. Taxpayers or slaves. The origin of slavery in early civilization is really clear in this book and fascinating. Another piece that really shifted my perspective on early life is that the hunter-gatherers are really smart people. They're not wandering around with a bow and arrow looking for something to shoot at. They are, have elaborate trap systems, ways of herding animals at the point that they're in their own migrations. The book points out that in Mesopotamia people were eating about 30 to 40 different kinds of meat and about 120 different kinds of vegetables. And those things moved with the seasons. So they're moving across a very wide spectrum of food input, which helped make them as healthy as they were given the conditions. And they didn't want to get civilized. That's one of the things. Wow. They fought it. They resisted it. The reason this is important to me is because I think that we need to think about alternative kinds of civilization, where the shift from where we are to there is as big as from feudalism to the Renaissance, for example. And that we're thinking too small scale. This book really opens it up. And I gotta say, the writing is just wonderful. This is a serious mature guy who is doing extraordinary things. And I just highly recommend it. By the way, all the links to the books, there are about six books that I think that are in this genre, are on my website, which is Doug Carmichael.com. And it's posting number 1922. So you can find them all there. Ah, okay. I didn't have that one. Do you know offhand what the six books are that you wrote about? Sure. Well, the least interesting is Fukuyama's new book on the origin of the structure of the state, basically since industrialization. And it's a good solid book of political history that I knew very little about. And I think we don't know very much political history. There's a book by, well, one that's not there that should be probably is Joseph Taters, the collapse of complex societies, which I think crucial background for these discussions. I'll just say a word about Tater. His view is that as societies grow, the maintenance costs grow faster than the output of the society. So you get to a point where it collapses because those curves cross each other. And the society tries to keep on going and it's broke. So it fails. That's made worse by the fact that the elites, the bad guy of the present is the elites. The elites own the infrastructure of the society, communications, transportation, things like that. When it starts going sour, instead of putting money into rebuilding and reinventing, they take costs out in order to take more money out for themselves as it moves towards collapse. So that just accelerates the process. And I think those two things are clearly going on in the world today. Another book, let me just look at it. And I'm just realizing that I did go look at your post. It's the post that starts with 1922, the problem of seeing the economy as a system, right? That's correct. Okay, good. So I'll just read them out so you don't have to go look for it. It's against the grain, which we've just been talking about. Capitalism and Modernity, The Great Debate by Jack Goodie. From Eukonomia to Political Economy, Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to Scientific Revolution by Germano Maifreda. This book, by the way, has an incredible amount of detail about what happened in the last 200 or 300 years that was completely new to me. Brilliant. Then there's Money Changes Everything, How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William Getzman. This is also a very mature book. He's in the business school at Yale University of all places. He's also very interested in art and has quite a collection and writes about it. But he's a very mature person thinking about the way, for example, and the clay tablets in Mesopotamia, 5000 BC, there are models of geometric progression of the change in the size of a herd of cattle. Wow. And that those were used as trading instruments at that time. The book is really wonderful. And a lot of people are tucked away in interesting places. They've sort of found vessels to carry them. Another one is Owning the Earth, The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andrew Linklater. I'm going to say a few words about this, too. A very important book. He's a Scott. Scott's not well recognized, and he should be. He points out, for example, that the ownership of land was compromised from early on by contracts that either made the land actually belong to the king or to a parliament or could only be inherited by children of the owner. All these constraints meant you couldn't go to the bank and borrow against the land because it was too risky from the bank's point of view. The first actual piece of property that was owned outright without constraints, he points out, were patents. Because when you got a patent, you actually owned it outright. Now, there might be a restriction on time, like in 22 years. But in the meanwhile, you had the total control over what happened to that. The first time that land was totally private was, of all things, the U.S. system of the homesteading. Because the government sold you the piece of land for $33 or whatever it was, and you owned it outright for the first time in history. That's amazing, because I think we tend to think of these things as having existed for a very long time in their current form. They're actually all very new, which means, hey, guys, we can change them. That's really interesting. Also, maybe an opposite point of view, I'm forgetting what book this was in, but basically, one of the many ways that the U.S. government used to break Native American ways of being, including the residential school system where we kidnapped their children and tried to westernize them, is we also put them on reservations and then we forced them to use lot and tract kind of divisions where they did not have that custom at all. You lived on the land communally. You saw the land as your common good. Then what happened was, the government later, a couple of years later, would come back and say, hey, it looks like you're not using these lots and these tracts and they would take them away. They would reduce the reservation by the unused lots and tracts, basically eating away further at what had been granted to the Native American tribes. It's super interesting how land use plays a really important role in a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Land use policy and then contracting and everything else. Where I live in Sonoma County, land is really interesting. It was owned by apple orchard growers. It got replaced by the vineyards because the vineyards pay off about three times as much per acre. It's polluting the river and we're getting lots of absentee ownership. So it makes it very difficult to experiment with anything, which is really crucial after the fires that we had because the constraints, legal and financial, are forcing people to rebuild what they had rather than to rethink what they could do. Great. We don't have a lot of room to really rethink in society. We don't flex a lot when we rethink it. I think that the Christ Church in New Zealand, I don't know what they've done now, but the heart of town was destroyed by the massive earthquake and it lay idle for a really long time, and the Maori came in and started figuring out with everybody what to do now. I don't know where it's gone, but I was hoping that something productive and different would happen out of that. We need to have much broader boundaries for our thinking. We're self-constraining because we tend to think these things are just true. There's one more book on that list I want to mention. A fascinating guy I've been in conversation with who's known New York, Doton Lesham. I think it's on there. The book has a weird title with a sense of humor, neoliberalism from Jesus to Foucault. It's actually the origins of neoliberalism, neoliberalism modeling the economy from Jesus to Foucault. What's going on in this book is pretty fascinating. First, that Aristotle and Plato, as most of us know, used the word economy, economia, household management, eco-household management, nomos as being management or the logic of. They both agreed that a well-managed estate should be able to produce a surplus, and they talked about it explicitly, and the purpose of the surplus should be to create leisure time to do philosophy and politics, and that spending it on things was a complete waste and should be a no-no. The fact that there's an alternative use of what the output of the economy should be should be part of our discussion, and it has not been. What Doton shows is that model of the well-managed estate producing surplus for politics and philosophy moved into early Christianity. You find, even in the epistles of St. Paul, the use of the word economia, meaning God's household, and that the logic held together that the purpose of God's household was to create a surplus from the land in order to support meditation and prayer towards God. Doton goes on to show that as the early church fathers became aware of the growing population, they realized that the surplus had to grow in order to give this opportunity to everybody, and it was part of reaching God's plan, having made the earth for human beings in order to realize themselves. The echoes of that kind of thinking, they're really strong in early Christianity, turns out I knew nothing about that, and it moves right through into the Renaissance as a view about what society's purpose is. We dropped the religious part, but kept the, a lot of the values part, that it should be for human fulfillment and all that, but we've lost any sense of what that means. And then we get Calvinism, and then we get prosperity, theology, and a bunch of other things kind of down the road, and there's a really long chain here that I know only a little bit about, and I'm sure lots of people on the call can go much deeper on. And I will monopolize you only for a moment longer, because I also had that book in my brain under the posting you had. And the neoliberal angle is really interesting because after Trump won the election in 2016, I went and did a bunch of research, had a bunch of enlightenment, but a few people wrote very, very interesting articles about how the left, how the Democratic Party basically became a champion of neoliberalism, and basically became sort of middle of the road conservatives on economy, which led to the point where there were a lot of dissatisfied people because nobody had paid attention to what that was doing to work and jobs, because it meant liberalizing trade boundaries, it meant feeding capitalism and letting capitalists have as cheap loans as possible a bunch of other things that Bill Clinton did. And the more I reflect on the Clinton presidency and then the Obama presidency, kind of the less I like them, I go back, I have a thought in my brain under Bill Clinton, under the Clinton administration, I have two thoughts. One of them is bad legislation that Clinton passed, and another one is good legislation that Clinton passed. And the first one, the bad one, the bad legislation that Clinton signed has eight acts under it, and the good legislation has one, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and I don't remember why I even put that there, but we, you know, one of the distinctions that I'd like to plum in the rest of our time here is the distinction we think there is between Democrats and Republicans in the US, which in many ways has vanished, or if ever there was that sharper distinction. Well, I think that's part of the motive for a lot of the people who actually voted for Trump, or even among progressive friends who thought we could not let the Democratic party of a Hillary-type in because it would just keep things getting worse. And we needed to shake the system up. Exactly. Exactly. And then that's what led me to think that, you know, of the 35% of American voters, whatever that number is, that are core Trump supporters, I don't believe that they're all misogynist, racist assholes. I think there's a very large piece of them that understand what's broken in the system and are so dissatisfied that they would send a man who they probably would agree is a wrecking ball in to see what he can wreck. Right. It was giving the figure to the system, but with a fairly more sophisticated understanding that we tend to give them credit for. Well, and I also think that's why there was such strong support for Mr. Sanders as well, right? Yes. He was an equal wrecking ball of a different nature. Exactly. And my problem was that I loved Bernie's critique of the system and how it was broken. If you remember the flowchart early on about who you're going to vote for, like the system is broken, only Trump and Bernie were on one side. Everybody else, like Hillary and all the other candidates, were down the other logical branch. Oh, everything's fine. My problem was that all of Bernie's solutions sounded like 1960s socialist politics. The good news, the good news being that nothing that Bernie was proposing isn't already successfully in use in Northern Europe. The bad news being that he didn't seem to understand the era we're in and the new possibilities of how we might reinvent how we govern, how we manage what we rank as goodness, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And now let me throw the doors open to whoever would like to jump in. On any part of this, it's a little question. I think the key question we're talking about is how much the things need to change in order to get changed. And what do we need to know differently than what we think we know now? Right. Do we really need calamity? Do we need people in desperate straits in order to catalyze substantial change? Or can we walk them over to some new place without that level of danger, of threat? Well, one question that I have now is, are we already in the midst of that catastrophe? It's not something which is possible. It's something that for many people already exists. Right. Well, if you talk to people who are well informed on climate change and the death of the oceans, et cetera, et cetera, we're plenty far down that path. And there's enough inertia behind it that anything we do today is actually not going to necessarily save us from a pretty major ecological disaster. So that leads to a conclusion. We're not going to make it, probably. And what it means is that the major task for all of us in the future is going to be taking care of people who are hurt. Other opinions, other perspectives that are supporting evidence? I feel like we are in the calamities socially as well as ecologically. The forces that we've seen unleashed and the really dark side of humanity, hatred, et cetera, has us on a path that I'm not sure we have any idea how to turn back from and is therefore already the catastrophe. So this is urgent. Part of the reason for this call, and I'd love at the end of this call maybe to think about what other, if we can spawn other wrecks like calls from this, like who else should we invite, what are the questions we might address? But I think that the reason we're here and the reason that what Esti just described is happening, giant swing to the far right across the world and populist authoritarianism and a bunch of other things going on that could easily get much, much worse. The dissolution of trust in media, trust in politicians, trust in business, trust in everything is the narratives that we're sitting here talking about. Because a lot of people believe, for example, this is a traditional conservative trope, that unless people fear starvation, they won't work. That we can't have a welfare system that will feed people reasonably well because then they simply won't go out and find work. And I think this has been thoroughly disproven in lots of different ways in lots of different places, but it is a very, it's a strong piece of the foundation of conservative thinking that lets people say, hey, trickle down is going to work. Let's get rid of most of the social safety net. And that all of that prevents us from even rethinking the social safety net. Because behind all of that is another frustration of mine, which is, why have we dollarized well-being and prosperity? Like when people who with really good intentions are trying to work on the millennium goals or whatever else, is they talk about how half of the globe's population lives in poverty as defined by maybe making less than $2 a day. And I would love to live in a world where most of us make less than $2 a day, where we're all fat and happy and have stuff, because stuff is getting free to cheap to make in different ways. Well, in fact, a lot of people in the world who are under $2 a day are living in forests or in planes away from civilization, and they're actually fairly happy. The reduction of well-being to the dollar is a kind of a pathetic attempt at numericizing society. In a weird way, it impoverishes us all. Yes. Because it ignores the different kinds of wealth that we actually all live in. And that's why I like against the grain, because it's really saying, hey, you know, people outside the system led good lives and they didn't want to be in the system. They resisted like mad for a very long time. Exactly. One of the things that I think that well-being is better is the problem with slavery. It wasn't a little thing. It was the way the world was organized. Two-thirds of the world's population might have been living in slavery for a long, long time. The slavery in the Caribbean produced more wealth than all the United States until 1815. The big houses in England that you see in Dalton Abbey were built on slide money. It's really a terrible history that we have of elites seizing human energy for their own purpose. And the question then is, are we really still living in slavery? The 40-hour a week job, the small apartment, the limited food supplies that we have. We think our food is pretty good, but compared to what it was, we're really way behind. And the book I'm talking is brain size. The brain size of domesticated animals, rats, chickens, pigeons, donkeys, are smaller than their counterpart in the wild. The author goes on to say, hey, it's also true of human beings. Domestication is not good for us from an evolutionary point of view. One of Scott's interesting points is that not only did we domesticate grains and livestock and all that, but we domesticated ourselves to a lot of effects. One of the weird effects of domestication is that fertility goes up. Birth rates go up because people living on the land have lower fertility rates, etc. I just put two links in that I wanted to weave into what Doug just said. One of them is a book I read last year that I love. It's very dark, but it's called The American Slave Coast by Ned and Connie Sablette, husband wife, historians. He is also an expert in Cuban music, has a band and a record label, helped bring a lot of Cuban music to the world back over the last 40 years. He proposes that America had a slave coast, just like Africa had a gold coast and an ivory coast, which are the names of the most productive asset passing those shores. So he then goes in to describe how no American at the dawn of the Civil War, no American could envision America being prosperous without slavery, not the north, not the south. Everybody thought this was going to be a calamity economically because you measured wealth by how many slaves you owned. There was a bit of gold in the US, but mostly the wealthiest people had the most slaves in the US. And so they proposed that the American Revolutionary War was actually a successful Civil War because the Americans saw the abolitionists coming in the UK. UK does abolition way before we do. And they were like, oh, God, this is going to really screw up our economy. We must break away. It wasn't taxation without representation. That's actually a red herring they say. And then they say that the American Civil War was actually a successful Revolutionary War because it breaks the legal back of slavery in the US. And that that's a revolution in affairs, in how we see things. Then I put another link to the documentary 13th, if anybody's watched that. It basically says, hey, look, the old plantation system and the slave patrols that used to run across the south and go into the north to recover escaped slaves, we just sort of replaced that with the modern penitentiary system. And there is a very famous jail in Louisiana called Angola, very large prison, which in fact sits on the same plot as a plantation known as Angola. I think that's all right. And it points to the power of alternative narratives. One of the things that I've done in the economic world is pushing the idea of narratives. Every economic paper is embedded in an implicit narrative. But people don't take responsibility for those narratives. They're not taught how to do better ones. So the narrative idea, along with design, I think are two leveraged points for a better future. Love that. I'm having an idea for a future Rex call that's not about content but about process because I'm in the process of trying to develop a meeting, an event that hopefully will be more productive than most face-to-face events. And it would involve people watching the event being what I'm calling basically story threaders who are creating narratives like you just described. So I think I'll propose that for Rex separately. The pieces that I've learned that I want to add in here that I find extremely helpful and they have to do with the origin of words that we think are kind of rooted in physical nature. The idea of capital, we all use the word capital all the time. Almost nobody knows where it comes from and I've looked at a large number of histories of economics. The word capital is Latin coming from cap for head as in a new head of cattle, which was a phrase that was used in Rome and we use it today still. How many had a cattle you got over your place? The idea that capital is the result of a birthing process which increases the size of the herd. That's what capital comes from. So the system that we have is a few tweaks on top of that system. It's not something that like capital is a part of nature the way helium is. Just to add a dark twist to this from the American slave coast book. Plantation owners viewed the birth of new slaves as natural increase, as a form of interest on their capital. Right, and the Latin word for interest is offspring. The word used for money interest is offspring just as from cattle. And the ownership of the cow and the calf also went to the ownership of women and children who were treated in the same way. Now that to us is fairly terrifying, but if you've ever lived on a farm with animals, what you come to in your eye-to-eye contact with the cows or the goats or whatever is extremely intimate and powerful. And the difference between looking at a goat's eyes that you know and live with and looking at a person's eyes is not that different. I find that pretty interesting. One more word and it's origin I want to throw in here. Private property. The conservatives tend to treat property as though it's a part of nature, that is it comes that way. And it's certainly if you look at John Locke and so on, they're making that kind of argument. This is the way it goes. The word property is the same as proper, that's what it comes from. And it was used initially as what it is that shows the rank of a man of quality in society. So it was a social sign, what's proper? Are you dressed properly for your rank in society? Or this is the sword that you wear, appropriate to what you're doing. We still use it today. Are you dressed appropriately for the dinner? It's amazing. So property is just the alienation and objectification of a social sign. That's pretty terrific. Private is also interesting. Private comes from Latin, which goes pre-vatus, and I don't quite know how to parse that out. But it means to take, to remove from the public sphere. So private is what is removed. It isn't like we, liberal society, put things into the commons. The actual social process is to take them out. And the Romans even thought that when something was pre-vatus, it should, the feeling about it should be one of loss and despair. Because the thing by being removed from society has lost its social role. It's become a dead thing. Boy, have we moved a long way from that. But these origins suggest the flexibility in the system that we're in, which we need to have hope about if we're thinking about what to do with it in the future. I just put a couple books in the chat. There's a really interesting book called Keywords by the philosopher Raymond Williams, where he goes into the etymology of a lot of words we take for granted. And some of the etymologies you just talked about are probably in there as well. Actually, which is striking. I like, I like Raymond, I mean, Williams is an amazing person, but people don't touch them. Yeah, people don't, we don't want to go look under the under that rock. We treat it as though it's a part of nature. Then I put in Polanyi's Great Transformation, which is one of my favorite books. And I've got a video up online about what I learned, you know, it's a five minute video that's actually six minutes long, I think, about what I learned from the Great Transformation. And then Louis Hyde is worth reading here, The Gift and Common as Air. One of many interesting explorations now about the commons, because we lost our notions of the commons. We used to live on the commons together, and then we turned the commons into natural resources, which companies sequester and plunder. And only now in the last 15, 20 years, our company's waking up and saying, like Lee Anderson said of interface flooring, hey, we're plunderers, we need to stop actually doing this, because it's hurting us. And we can still have business without plundering, we just need to see differently. And I think that's, I think that's part of what we're asking here is, how do we get, how do we have people see differently? And I'm, I'm seeing evidence that many people are, and I'm interested in, in catalyzing a faster change of perspective, because I think it's already happening in many interesting places. The commons is an interesting leverage point, certainly towards a better future. And it's confused because of Garrett Hardin's paper on the tragedy of the commons, which almost all of us have been affected by, even if we haven't read it. Where Hardin is saying that the farmers ruined the commons by putting too many cows on them. Historically, that's not what happened at all. The farmers knew exactly how many cows you could put there, and how to regulate that communally by tradition and feeling for each other. And it was the aristocrats looking to join the emerging commercial economy that needed cash and closed in the commons. And you have all these protests like Luddites and like the protests against the enclosure movements. And you know, over and over again, there are revolts of different kinds of people trying to resist the tractor beam of capitalism, private property, land ownership, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, the people who have guns and steel usually fare better. And you know, including the Dutch East India Company and the British early corporations that were armies. These companies were legitimate armies. They had the permission of their kings and queens to go plunder on behalf of the crown. And Jerry, I think that progressives carry the wrong images in their mind, like the Luddites. I think one thinks of a Luddite, one thinks of a kind of a stevedore on the docks with lots of muscles and no brain breaking stuff up. Typically, the Luddites were really smart people and they had a very detailed critique of what they were doing. I think Queen Victoria tried to get laws passed to protect home knitters and weavers when the first mills come out, because she can see that the cottage employment that's keeping the countryside sort of prosperous, she can see that it's going to be devastated. And I think they don't let her do any of that. Nobody passes that kind of bill. And then one of the things that Polanyi goes into in the Great Transformation is a series of poor laws called the Spenemlen Laws, or ACTS, which Britain tries to pass to create some sort of safety net and those fail. So all of this really hits everybody hard and quickly and causes a lot of pain. Anybody disagree with these narratives or want to add color to them or whatever? Mark, Esti, Godlos, we have a bow. Unless Mark has, Mark, were you about to say something? No, go ahead. I was going to ask a question. I started reading Donut Economics and I'm just wondering if others have read that and how it weaves in here. Well, yeah, I have read it and it's pretty good. It's a little more conservative actually that I like, and it's conserving categories of thought. I mean, you know, we would be a lot better off. We all stopped using the word economics and the economics department has disappeared. And I'm an econ undergrad. Totally agree. So how is she conservative? That's, for me, the book arrived as in some way or I purchased it when I began to realize that it was a woman disaffected with economics who undertook to redraw the fundamental pictures by which we've been deluded in our understanding of things. So where is she conservative? This is exactly- Well, it's been a while since I've looked at the book. The memory is that if you look at what she wants to move towards, it actually preserves a lot of economics vocabulary. Okay. So the Donut, let me jump in and I have not read the book but this might light up what you all who have read it saw. The Donut basically is look, we can overshoot or undershoot and we need to stay within this band, which looks like a donut and each sector is a sector of human activity. The problem is that she then, I think, is using conventional economic narrative to explain what it means to not overshoot and to not fall under. And what we actually need is a transformation of those things. So in a sense, the Donut and also, I think it's very hard to talk to a capitalist and say, stay within this ring. Capitalism is not structured to stay inside of a ring. It doesn't like it. It doesn't want it. That's not a motivating force. So even though I think progressives and in particular ecological fans look at the Donut and say, yes, yes, yes, because nobody understands overshoot and all those kinds of things and how they're harming- how we are presently harming the earth, I think any business person looking at the Donut models like, how the hell am I supposed to manage in this donut world? I don't get it. That's not what we do every day. Part of the reason this is so important is because a lot of us think that the way to save the economy and deal with unemployment is by green technology. The problem with that strategy is it leaves in place the mechanism of the concentration of wealth, which I think will continually put limits on the benefits we can get from the technologies that we have. We need new models of social ownership that are not boring to deal with the technologies that could really help us towards a better future. If we think that the economy is going to grow in terms of dollars, we're probably making a mistake because it might not. It also is not going to deal with the unemployment issue because any initiative now to move in any direction that has economic implications is going to be... I'm also trying to... Go ahead, Bo. Jump in, Bo. It'll cause this location and it'll actually cause unemployment in the short term. If a manager has increased demand for their product, the immediate thought is I need to have more workers, but I should not do it with people. I should do it with machines. So growth in the green economy incentivizes automation. Anybody else? How does this resonate for you or not? Go ahead. So actually, I had a kind of a frustration. I'm sure we all do. And there's a kind of... Maybe one context is Naomi Klein's idea of shock doctrine. So the idea of a crisis and then whatever ideas are lying around or whatever forces can kind of get sucked in there and transformed and she gives the example of the transition of the Soviet Union to Russia and neoliberalism pouring in or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and so on. And so kind of the frustration I have is that there's a lot of good ideas here and there's hundreds of groups and people, thousands with great ideas. But how does that process of those ideas speak into a crisis? How can that be effective? Because it seems to be largely ineffective. And I'm thinking that may partly relate to Doug to your four categories. You had education in the arts. And maybe that's in other words, in terms of telling stories, which are compelling and which actually reach the guts of people. So it moves them. So that's the kind of frustration. I will echo your frustration, Mark, and I will point out that part of the reason why I write this minute, three quarters of American state legislatures are conservative and three quarters of the governorships are in conservative hands. Plus the House and the Senate and the presidency is that they had a 35, 40 year plan to actually go put people in place that was backed by buying up all of AM Talk Radio, backed by churches being on board, backed by Newt Gingrich's scorched earth policy. They actually all lined up on a, I think, dangerous to civilization approach that won. The only problem for them is that the wrong guy ate the party and won. Like they did not want Donald Trump to be up front on the quarter deck commanding the ship. But he seized what they, he, you know, you reap what you sow. They sowed this with a very long-term look. And in the meantime, progressives were like, let's make a better movie. Let's, you know, what's it called? Participant productions. I mean, there's some phenomenal documentaries and media and storytelling out there. I love them. I catalog most of them in my brain. I am unclear that they moved the needle as much as slowly getting control over the mechanisms of power and now probably three, maybe four, Supreme Court appointments for Trump or a Pence or whoever. That's really long-term thinking, right? So, so they took a very big gamble on a high-risk strategy that seems to have paid off. And here I go back to the accelerationism that Doug and I were talking about when we started sort of chatting before the call, which is there's a whole feeling that, hey, if we just accelerate how bad capitalism is and let it destroy the earth, then people will be motivated to do something different. You know, that's a school of thought as well. So I'm unclear how this works and I'm not saying that progressives should follow now a 30-year plan to do exactly the same thing conservatives did, but I do think my own plan is, how do we create mycelial trust networks? Basically, on the ground, people, the people, networks of whom do you trust and how do we remember what we know and share with one another what we know and build up from there and then reach out to the people who disagree with us and have reasonable conversations about why and how we disagree and reinvent governance models from the ground up. And that's probably a 15-year plan, but I don't see a short-term plan dislodging the energy and the anger that is currently in place. I don't see how anything short-term actually manages to solve or address any of these problems credibly. Yeah, for me, the short-term is all about being opportunistic to the reality that the interlinking of all these complex systems is so extraordinary. It strikes me some of the things you said about the Clinton presidency. It interlocked the world. Good or bad, right or wrong, right? There's so many systems that are now interlocked and as everything starts to fail, the cascade of faults that is triggered through all these interlocking systems starting to fail because of the cross-dependencies between them and whether it be ecological, financial, economic, political, you name it, the interconnectivity is quite extraordinary. In those chasms, in those failure points, is when an opportunistic agenda can be heard. A lot of this is about institutional blindness. I'm equally struck by what could easily be painted as a massive conspiracy theory on the part of all these forces of evil coming together over the course of the past 30 to 60 years, to be honest with you. I don't think they're all that smart. I just think that they're very good about painting a picture of a very forced point of view that's tied to fear and scarcity. And that's an instinctual thing that people resonate with, right? And when you're talking a vision of abundance and belief in a future that can't yet be seen or held, but you know it to be true, that's a hard thing to sell when you're facing black and white scarcity. So yeah, the whole damn thing's about to collapse and I think it's collapsing all around us and that Monty Python quote about, I'm not dead yet, well. It's only a flesh wound. I'm sorry, you're looking pretty dead. I think that's the thing. I think we've got to be nimble and tactical about when and where and how we expose. Okay, so you know, and then we get to ask the classic pop psychologist Dr. Phil question of, so how's that working for you? That whole everything that doesn't work anymore. Exactly. Every now and then I look at Hanlon's razor, which is never a tribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It's a way of sort of calming down a little bit when you see conspiracies everywhere. And yet I think that a lot of people together have in fact kind of conspired to create the situation we're in in lots of different ways. So somebody was jumping in, please jump in again. Yeah, sorry, Jerry here, Carlos. I'm not putting the video because a lot of things happening behind me is going to be a little destructive. But I wanted to just play, I mean, everything's been fascinating. And you know, blown my mind, the amazing concepts that you guys are throwing out there. I just wanted to play like Dale's ad-hoc for a second because I'm with everything you guys are saying, but just I was looking for an old post on Facebook that I posted. It was in April. And I'll read you a couple of quotes. This is from different like very, apparently very smart people. One quote is, civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. Another, that was by John Wall, a biologist from Harvard. Another one is, it is already too late to avoid mass starvation. That was by Dennis Hayes, chief organizer of Earth's Day. And another one was in 25 years, between 75 and 80% of all the species of living animals will be extinct. That's by Dr. Sydney Dylan Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. All those quotes are from the first Earth's Day in 1970. And when I read them, it's similar to all this like predictions about AI, how in 10 or 20 years, what something amazing is going to happen. It's never like no predictions are ever about in a hundred or 200 years. It's always, I wonder if we're not all sort of wired to imagine that we have to be protagonists of the calamity. We have to be, it's always within our timeline, right? And it was, this is how way they felt in the 1970s. And I wonder if, because the reason I think, if it was harmless, then I wouldn't bring it up. But I think the ways that you can approach a problem, especially such a complex problem with so many interdependencies, will change a lot, depending on the time that you're planning for, right? So if you need to settle home in 20 years, you're going to do something very different than if you have 100. So I guess the question that I have is, how do we, how can we be, instead of sort of being emotional or being sort of acting scared because we're seeing some, we're seeing bad things around us, what can we do to be as accurate as possible in predicting the timelines before things are going to happen so we can make accurate plans for it? Well, my own view is that we can't make accurate plans. Given that we should really do everything to increase the flexibility and responsiveness of the system. Notice I was a meeting in Palo Alto with a city planner two months ago. And their whole idea was to respond to the problems of increased traffic and population by building more substantial systems. And the substantial systems are going to be the hardest to change with sea level rise in Palo Alto and any other kind of climate problem that we might face. So flexibility becomes an aesthetic goal of very practical consequences. It's funny, the three words that I've seen historically, I don't know that I have a lot of firsthand observations of this, I'm generalizing a bit, but the three words I've seen kill more interesting projects in the world are it won't scale. And by which I mean, somebody comes up with a good idea, but it's organic and it requires cooperation and it's hard to measure. And it doesn't have the qualities that an engineer or a manager would like because you can't put KPIs on it easily, you can't scale it by replicating it exactly. But a lot of the solutions that I think we need to head toward that are about resiliency and flexibility and all that that Doug was just describing are in fact things where people need to adapt and adopt and change things for their local circumstance. They need to pick up responsibility again to govern their local commons and so forth. And then my own frame around all of this is that the consumerization of our entire lives over the last 50-100 years basically removed our sense of agency and turned us into mere consumers who don't have that initiative anymore. We don't feel we have the permission or the agency or even the power to go change stuff. And the really beautiful cool thing is with the cost basically so much stuff is available online for free and power tools are at hand. Your phone is a 3D design studio. It's a high definition video recorder. It's 1500 things just your phone. Like we were just at the beginning of starting to understand how to use these things together for the common good. And there are these people doing open government data and building common open databases and open code of different kinds. Google is putting a TensorFlow out so that people can try it and use it. There's a whole bunch of really amazing stuff that's basically free to use. You have to know how to use it. You have to know it exists but go to town. We need to figure out how to help those people all pull together. What do we do about the fact that most of our friends make their living by making systems more complex? We don't pay people to make things simple. And the complexity is going to kill us because the fragility is so obvious. By the way, this comes to a different narrative too which is that I hear a lot of people say the world is constantly getting more complex etc etc and I agree with the premise you just made I think in the way you mean it but I want to point out that go talk to an herbalist or a woman who understands medicinal properties of the nature surrounding her in the earth. That's incredibly complex. Like life has always been complex. It's just that we didn't have smartphones in the inner tubes before. We didn't have instantaneous communications of what happened in Beijing like a minute ago. So that changes things. In the middle of all that there are people trying to complexify because they don't understand the principles of simplicity or how to get to something simpler. But to me life has always been like crazy complicated and the smartest people are the ones who understand it in the simplest way usually or often by understanding nature's forces and using those as guiding principles for where to categorize and how to think about what's happening. Yeah I would pick up on that too because I do wonder if the in fact the error has been the other way. The pursuit of efficiency for example is a simplifying kind of thing. And I'd say that the efficient systems are fragile. The living systems tend to be lots of inefficiency, lots of overlap, lots of duplication. They're very complex I'd say but perhaps more robust. So maybe we have that framing wrong. And I guess I stuck a couple of links in just to flag them. So one is the books by David Montgomery. Around Dirt, the first one. And I think it just touches on a whole bunch of the stuff that you guys were talking about. He kind of has this idea that by mining the earth we have we destroy fertile soil and there's like a thousand year cycle of empire that basically people you settle an area, you mine the soil, the soil gets depleted, the empire collapses. Then he repeats that theory with a crime around the world. And then he uses it to explain kind of why slavery grew up in the United States. And a number of other things. It just has this funny overlap with a bunch of the things I thought from the conversation. That's great. And then the other thing I put in here was just I just grabbed an image off the net at the net and I don't think it's the best one necessarily. But I'm continually troubled by this idea that in my mind as near as I can tell from everything I see, the world is dramatically better than it was 50 years ago. On so many dimensions that are very important. Global poverty, global hunger, global health, rights, education, literacy, and I think we need to give credit in a large extent. It is better because of neoclassical economics. That this stuff kind of worked and over the last 50 years we've had an amazing transformation. So I kind of feel like I'm not sure that's to say that they are right today or that neoclassical economics is the correct model. But I do feel like saying, oh, it's been a disaster is probably not correct. It's like we've created a scenario where we've done a lot of good things but we need to do good things. We need to think differently. So that's fine. But I'd say that complete critique of neoclassical economics is being failed or bad would ignore history. And I've seen this conversation play out on Facebook a couple times in the last month and Neil Gorinflow of Shareable did a very nice job of putting up a series of countering stats which are basically about how well we're destroying the earth at the same moment as the other stats are happening. Also, if you peel back the layers if you look at like literacy, for example, Americans are getting illiterate. The Army does literacy exams when they draft people before World War II, there was 4% illiteracy among the incoming draftees before the Korean War. And I just read this this morning which is why I can quote the numbers. Before the Korean War was 19%. Before the Vietnam War was 27% American illiteracy. So this is one of the fallacies. We go back and forth on our critique of American politics and American structure and then global implications. And I think we flip back and forth a little bit. So the whether or not American literacy is going down interesting argument. Global literacy, I don't think there's any doubt has had dramatic impact, right? So question of whether or not, like for example, we can do a Trump analysis but I don't really understand how the Trump analysis explains global authoritarianism. I want to pick up on your point about global income because I think that most of the people I know have accepted the idea that we've lifted billions out of poverty. I spend a fair amount of time traveling in the third world and what I see is places much in Asia, some in South America, some in Africa where people are pushed off the land by the local military to get the land for the local politicians to be able to sell it and invest the money. And the people are moved into high rise apartment buildings where life is really quite terrible if you go and interview them and their children. And so they argue that horrible things aren't happening all over the world. But I'm arguing that it's the it's actually the major trend. The quality of life in the third world I think is deteriorating quite rapidly. So I would love to know, I think this is a super important argument. I see it happening all the time. Dave, I sympathize with what you're saying and I'm really glad you put it in our conversation. Well, I wanted to stick it in because I brought this up in the context of the new economics up a few times and kind of gotten slapped down hard. Don't think it can be discarded that simply. So there may be problems with that and maybe missing critical components that era maybe passed. But I think we have to acknowledge it. And I'm sitting here talking to you on an iPad. I'm holding in my hands a little slab of unobtainium that magically, you know, can render things from the inner tubes. And there's a laptop on my lap actually that is a miracle all produced by, thank you very much, capitalism and the overwhelming use of intellectual property and science pushed really hard and a bunch of other things. So agreed. And there's the appearance of abundance in the middle of strange scarcities. I'm wondering, do any of us know a thinker in the world who is handling this particular juncture of issues really well? Because I don't think Donut Economics conquers this, although it's in the right territory. Like, is anybody saying, hey look, on the one hand, there are a bunch of races that seem to be doing really well. On the other hand, a lot of people are desperate and like one of my beliefs is that poverty is a dismal trap and that people stuck in poverty are mostly going to go down deeper into poverty. That it's in particular in the U.S. where our social safety net is so crappy there's a bunch of different reasons for it but basically that's a death, a downward death spiral. And there's a lot of people getting sucked into that kind of a dynamic downward while global literacy rates are going up, which is great. And then, by the way, Cuba and Guatemala had like 98, 99% literacy rates because they use no money whatsoever but they thought global, they thought national literacy was really important, right? Cuba's health stats are far better than ours and they have very few big expensive devices. They took a different approach. The problem with aggregated stats is that it lumps together countries living in very different ways, international influences of all the narratives we're talking about, the theft of property that doesn't get reflected in the numbers. I'd love to find somebody who's articulating this dilemma well but acknowledging both arguments well. And maybe that's just a question to put to all of us and if we find one we can like put it back on the list or something like that but I'd love to know that. Well, I'm sure there are people doing it and we just don't really know who they are. I mean there are reports within the basement of the World Bank that make these discussions pretty well. They just aren't public. I think the advantage of the question you're raising is it's actually something that can be dealt with somewhat empirically because we can actually find out the answer to this and I really hope we do much better at doing it. Brad, go ahead. It's really hard for me to have this conversation and not wax in a theological vein. It's just really tough. Do you want to wax just for a moment? I'm just saying there's so much to solve for that there is an unknown thing that's off the paper that can only exist in a metaphysical theological universe. And if you look at the heritage if you look at the narrative of history I mean and if you really I mean just pick on you know Christianity Old Testament stuff there's not any narratives that are currently happening today that aren't referenceable back then and every time a society went rogue wrath of God stuff happened and it right said it itself and people got righteous again and things worked themselves out and so the calamity of errors that we find ourselves in is extraordinarily predictable in what's going to happen next right so how can we make sure that this epoch of civilization learns faster and better from this and boomerangs back faster and better but I don't think you can turn the ship around and I don't think that it's that it's nearly inside of the laws of the economy as an example I think I think the abundance that has been created through our economic structures and the waste and pain they're both useful that they're both useful for this second emergence that's inevitably on the other side of what's going down right now I mean that's that's where my that's where my my head goes it's hard for me not to go there so would I be paraphrasing you poorly by saying shit happens then we recover and we've seen this rodeo before we've seen it a hundred times before and and and humans are innately selfish and self-centered and it's just our lot in life so how can we evolve out through that right well no no I'm just saying the people I'm just disagreeing with that statement the people that rise to power and control the systems are pretty good at that genetic characteristic oh that that I totally agree with the society be complex enough that an elite makes sense certainly hunter-gatherers had an easy communal life so when an anthropologist says what happens when you starve and the hunter-gatherer says it's impossible for one of us to start there everything for the last moment yeah um so one of the things in my little video about the Great Transformation is that Pellani writes that in around 1650 poverty is a new word in the vocabulary we might all die of a famine we might all die because the Huns show up across the hill and kill us all but the idea that one household is going to die because they don't have a job is it's just an impossibility so so there's no word poverty before the industrial evolution begins and then about 1750 there's another new word unemployment because before the industrial evolution everybody's got a task even the village idiot it's like you know go watch the goats for a while or whatever and I love both of those observations right because for me they speak to the fact that somebody subscribed to a belief system that wasn't reality but a convenient way to classify assets but once they they they anchored their self identity into this false belief system then they could see no escape other than to be unemployed and to start to death correct and part of our and I think you've circled right back to the beginning of the spark of this particular conversation which we should probably wrap in another 10 minutes which is somehow we've bought these narratives that have us locked into sort of belief systems and structures and institutions that are poured in very deep concrete with rebar and what we're asking is how might we loosen those foundations in some way or how might we undermine or work around those foundations in some way and accelerate a shift toward a different kind of a way of seeing ourselves in society well and the other thing is is that I don't think I think we have to outsmart the assault on logic that is a piece we haven't even talked about the post factual society and what I described earlier is the scorcherous strategy on the far right to take over the world depends on that actually playing out further and you can you can see it happening but there is I do I love the the big metaphor store the big you know and and of course a number of people are I think talking about this how do we reframe our view of the world but but the transition from you know acknowledging that we're in an Anthropocene to like really understanding that we're in an Anthropocene and therefore it's our job kind of that there's a there's a maturation step that means people have to take responsibility for the future in a way that I think we've always managed to avoid and in some sense I think the traditional kleptocrat approach is I can steal as much as I want because I can't really affect anything I mean there's you know there's an assumption that it's it's why people loot during a hurricane right it's like well society's collapsing I might as well get this TV right yeah and so it's it's an amazing it'll be an amazing if we survive it it'll be amazing transformation to get into this we have to use our logic we have to use our capacity you know it's our job now to kind of take we're the grownups in the room right wow what exactly can I ask it sorry let's get Esti first and then Carlos I my comments go back a few steps in the conversation but so one of them is that there have in fact been things left off the equation out of the picture and the term that's stuck in my mind for that is the caring economy is completely and caring in all of its sense from child rearing to husbandry of natural resources to well-being and that has been off the ledger right for for and you could argue for how long and what in what parts of the world the second was your comment that like there when you said theological I thought oh great right but there's a wonderful book that has just totally turned my brain around which is by a cosmologist and a historian of science named Ellen Abrams was written several books with her husband who is actually part of the cosmology team that's brought us black polls etc and it's called a god that could be real or something like that and the the part that is first of all it came to mind because she traces again with simple pictures right the view of the world that that existed and Old Testament has nothing to do with Christianity that's another thing but in the Old Testament language about firmament above below in between a very simple model that is right there in the world and that's how it appeared and subsequent cosmologic models in use in the culture she points to the fact that we're because we actually now know something about cosmology in the scientific sense that there's a whole other system that is calling for us as as now in this Anthropocene time or we are the agents of preserving the world to adopt in which and here I would need to pull the book out to have the words there is something about the social for her God resides in what the clusters of human consciousness have co-constructed over time and so in some way I mean I I think I had downloaded this book on my Kindle when I heard a panel on which she appeared for God it was there started leading it one rainy day and haven't quite recovered since but we don't know how to right oh no I'm resonating with everything you're talking about yeah we'll we'll give you a yeah so I would love this group to take that on right as a what the and I yeah can you I see can you compose that into into a query for Rex and I'll we'll set up another call and dive dive into that Carlos you were going to jump in yeah I have a question for for Doug because it seems like it seems like the call has been a lot about sort of the big problems and the potential big solutions and what kind of system we can implement but to take it into a more sort of small scale what would you do considering all these problems we've been talking about and considering what we should be doing to improve our lives what should I do with my life what should I do for me and my family at a very small scale how would you change how you live or how you're going to live the next whatever amount of years in order to be better prepared and have a richer life in this sort of potential catastrophic world we're going to be living in I have the answer written out on a three by five card but I can't find it sweet oh damn it it's like the library it's like the library of Babylon right somewhere in the library is the index to all the books you just have to find it that is fantastic I mean I think that the beginning of the answer is really pay attention to what's happening around you and what your own experience of it is because what can happen has to come out of what is and I'm going to bounce on top of that if you if you don't mind because we're all wave forms and we're all interconnected even without the help of the Clinton administration what if we behaved from a point of view of abundance the most charitable instincts and all of us are easily triggered and nurtured when we feel like we have plenty to share and oftentimes a point of view of scarcity is self doubt it's fear of the future it's it's it's stars from the past and it forces us to behave in a non good way so if you could suspend disbelief and believe in a better place and then act every day consciously from that point of view I think the positive ripples would be quite extraordinary so Brad I I love that thought I'm I'm all over that capitalism seems to require scarcity because I went to business school and they were to teach you that scarcity equals value which is basically a proxy for hey if if something is abundant you should make it scarce by reducing its availability and only then is there a business model available and the example my go-to example for the opposite of that is IBM and open source software where open source software is not scarce it's perfectly abundant because when I light my taper off of yours it is not diminished and IBM became a pretty good open source citizen and made three four billion dollars worth of service revenues on top of a newly replenished information commons which is which is like involves a whole bunch of the pieces of narrative that we're looking at here so how do we how do we lather rinse repeat amplify those kinds of things yeah yep I'm with you and we are getting near 90 minutes I kind of want to hand the virtual microphone back to Doug and say do you just want to reflect on where we've been and and take us out and if you want ask any questions that are lying near the top of your head now and we'll write those down and maybe you know create a couple other conversations like this I don't have any focused thought that comes from this except to say that the discussion that we're in raises all the issues that keep coming up and lots of conversations and we're not making a lot of progress what I find is here are people I've never met before I love you all you know that's this has already enhanced the little corner of my life maybe there's a clue in that as to what to do I find the issue of what to do to make things better really hard because the leverage for example Sonoma County where I live north of San Francisco ought to be self-sustaining in agriculture it's not because it pulls out pours out all these grapes I don't see how to change that I've looked at what's happening with rebuilding from the fire and what I see is interlocking pieces of paper regulations and contracts are basically forcing people to rebuild what they have and I can't find a little interstacy where you can get a different piece of logic into the system but we got to keep trying and one of the things that's clear in the world right now is there are hundreds of thousands of experiments of people trying really interesting things my concern is that local initiatives tend to actually be harsh on the environment they're not smart about energy use they're not smart on many secondary consequences of what they're doing I don't know what to do about that except maybe somebody asked Robert Frost once what do you think about life and he says it keeps going on it's also Gandhi what do you think about western civilization something like it's a nice concept if you ever get there your great idea sure he's right actually in west that's another piece of discussion is western civilization with its over objectification part of the problem cool well I'm thank you all this has been a treat and hopefully stimulus for more more calls like this but for right now let's log off and wish everybody a happy end of year May 2018 be a little less challenging and a little more uplifting on the change side for all of us and everybody else then 2017 has been 2017 has been a real strange one one for the record books but thank you all for being here Doug thank you very much for being our guest and starting us down this path thanks everybody take care