 care. Welcome to the griefer world. Pundits have declared that it's internet trolling in the real world. No, it's online game griefing, breaking things because you can, even or especially, if it reduces the enjoyment of others. And then I was asked, was this was this predicted by folks like Alvin Toffler? If I recall correctly, much of the futurist work of the 1960s and 1970s was predicated on the continued presence and power of the USSR. That truly distorted things even when other aspects are prescient. So Bruce, and I gave it as an example, Bruce Sterling's islands in the net. Then I said, it's no insight to say that we live in a world run by people who exploit weaknesses in the system. Not a new problem. But I don't think we've ever seen so many people with so much power who are so willing to completely deny reality if doing so can suit their goals. Again, the scale. It says obvious impacts on climate. Take a look at the Australian government unwillingness to connect climate and massive fucking wildfires. But given that it's reality, it affects everything. And it's like living in the Monty Python argument sketch. Did you ask for the five minute argument? We'll start with the five minute and see if we want to go to the eight. No, no, no. This is the three minute argument. You can't be here. Yeah. No, I didn't. Yeah. So the proper response to it's like the argument, the Monty Python argument sketch should say no, it isn't. Right. Right. But so that has gotten a lot of retweets and likes. And I'm not in the influencer level, but it was gratifying to see that that seemed to connect for a lot of people. Yeah. And I just, a bunch of people have joined us since you started talking. I turned the recorder on. So we are now recording the Rex check-in call for December of 2019. I have a couple poems I'd like to start us out with. But this is a great sequence of thoughts you threw in. And April says, she's listening on the call. She's actually got to be on a different call at the same time. So she's going to tag team. But there we go. And let me hit pause for just a second. Say hi to everybody. And read two poems for us. Hi, everybody. The first one is, and these are both poems I've read before in Rex, but you know what? Good things deserve a refresh. So this one, first one is by Billy Collins titled, I'm turning 10 because I just passed a little birthday. And this, this is sort of the feeling of it. So I'm turning 10 by Billy Collins. The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from meeting in bad light. A kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it's too early to be looking back, but that's because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one. And the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four, I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven, I was a soldier. At nine, a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then, it never fell so solemnly against the side of my treehouse. And my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today. All the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say goodbye to my imaginary friends. Time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me, I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. And the second poem is really quite different, although it's similar. It's titled How to Listen by Major Jackson. And I'll put the link in our chat. And it's a bit shorter. How to Listen by Major Jackson. I'm going to cock my head tonight like a dog in front of a glinchy's tavern on Locust. I'm going to stand beside the man who works all day combing his thatch of gray hair, corkscrewed in every direction. I'm going to pay attention to our lives unraveling between the forks of his fine tooth comb. For once, we won't talk about the end of the world or Vietnam or his exquisite paper shoes. For once, I'm going to ignore the profanity and the dancing and the jukebox so I can hear his head crackle beneath the sky's stretch of faint stars. I sent somebody an email yesterday in which I wrote something about 2020 as if it were an actual year and an actual date. And I think it was the first time I had sort of written anything where 2020 was intentionally like the year we're about to be in. And it was really weird. It just felt strange. I was like, well, okay, 2020 is not a date I expected to run across really soon. Similar to 2000 in that regard. I remember having a similar kind of reaction. 1984. Wait a minute, this was a book title, right? 2001 Space Odyssey. But where's my space travel? Plus, we just asked the, was it November 1, 2019, Blade Runner or something? Blade Runner date, right? And there's the back to the future date. Yeah, Blade Runner is now alternate history. Exactly. Has anybody else been having a little reaction to 2020 coming? Somebody told me that a trip at the end of January is coming up in six weeks. And I was like, I don't think that's true because that's next year. So that's got to be pretty far away. So far. So far. I've just been generally puzzled. But I mean, it's like a new thing for me to be experiencing, but just the elasticity of time and not being able to know how long ago something was or seems like it was a long, long time ago, but it was three years. And it's been, I've only in the last couple of months started going back to like my Facebook memories list, you know, which I never found before. And so I've been looking at that and I'm going, whoa, that was like only eight years or, you know, it's so anyways, I think it's exacerbated by that memories thing. But when I have some fun, give accurate dates to your old photos when you post them on Facebook, because you'll get a memory. Here's your memory from 1943 or, you know, that's a great idea. No, no, I've not heard that. Google photos does a really good job of, you know, here's the same day of five years ago, whatever. It also does a bunch of automatic lookbacks that are pretty good. You know, relive this day in five years ago or 10 years ago, if you've been putting in this long. Some of these things are like things that, I mean, I guess you were pre, I met you pre Facebook, but, but something like a whole bunch of the folks I know out in the Bay Area, I met because of a forum one event in 2008. And so the memory popped up, you know, kind of last in the last couple of weeks. And it's fascinating because like all of these threads connect back to this one unconference that, you know, that Bill Johnston hosted. And it's kind of amazing to think back what, you know, what that one little event did. Howard clicks with together so many different people. Yeah. And then Jame, let me go back to just for a second to what you were talking about into your tweet stream. Because back in the day, I noted the reality based community comment by Carl Rove. And I have it connected to the post factual world and a bunch of other articles retreat from empiricism on Ross, Ron Susskin's scoop, how America lost its mind, cover story of the Atlantic, the trouble with reality, rumination on moral panic in our time and also the general thought of the post factual world, which is, you know, about post truth, post factual, all that. And I think that Rove was giving us a nice look into the coming, the coming seasons. Yeah, exactly. And we didn't pay close enough attention at the time. That's the, you know, and frankly, that's my job and I didn't do my job right. My job is to take a look at these things and think through the larger scale implications, the ones that are not obvious but are potentially, potentially powerful. And what does pink mean, by the way? That purpley kind of color, I use yellow and that purpley color to call things out. And the yellow tends to be non-opinionated things. So whenever I get a crowded thought, I always start articles about that topic. So, you know, articles about truth should be right under truth. So that's yellow. But the purpley color is more fake news, how long will the post factual world go, the death march, I don't know why my brain is acting so slow right now. So here's yellow, articles about facts, articles about fake news, types of stuff would be in yellow. But then the purple, and to me, the yellow and the purple are just to draw your eye toward things that run deep. So it just means, hey, there's a lot more here. So this is your personal recommendation algorithm? Yeah, exactly. Colorful personal recommendation algorithm or CPAPL. How do we react against post truth? What should journalists do in the post factual world? How do we keep Trump from, wow, my brain is really slow. I think I have way too many things running. Anyway, let me stop sharing and see if I can't reboot the brain and stuff like that. And Dave just shared an Ezra Klein interview with Andrew Morance. Yeah, I just caught the last of what you were saying. I mean, this interview I thought was really excellent. And Morance, I guess, kind of embedded himself with some trolls. And so he was kind of studying the troll behavior. And I thought that the stuff around, again, some of the utopianism we had around the online community summits back 10, 12, 14 years ago, and how all this stuff is just democracy, and it's going to be wonderful. And kind of what's the implications of that? What are the responsibilities for it and stuff? They just had a really excellent conversation. And it's interesting. In the days when people with good intention were showing up on the net and we just connected to one another through open forums and open media, and there wasn't this underlying model of addicting us and selling us off, I think it was easy to think that, hey, this is going to be good. If this spreads to everybody, this might actually go good places. And then the winners of the game of Connect All wound up being the addictive platforms, et cetera, et cetera. And then we end up tangled in our underwear here. Well, and the fact that the algorithm that makes them be the winner is the one that makes us mad at each other is fascinating. Shut up. You ordered the five-minute argument for me. Did I get it out your nose, Kelly? Okay, that was the goal. Not yet. Has anybody played with the new platforms, like with Jimbo's new platform or the Miwi thing, or anybody trying these things out? I'm getting a lot of Miwi requests. I think I went on it and then decided not to do it. So I think I've got a profile in there, and people keep saying, you know, ping me, ping me, whatever, and I'm resisting yet another social media platform. So not that. And then the Tribune, the Wiki Tribune thing, I'm not trying. It's like, until I see some good, until things posted in Wiki Tribune show up in my natural, in my organic feed, meaning they've done good enough work that it gets referred forward, that I see it showing up, I won't pay much attention to that either. I guess the one thing that struck me, and it was from the Klein interview, was they were talking about how, you know, this idea of how it shows up organically is one of the kind of fallacies, perhaps, because the trolls are actually doing a very deliberate, you know, multi-person kind of effort to make things viral. And so when they make things trending, then it tips into real news. But it was a deliberate effort by a small group of people to make something trend. And I was wondering, well, geez, could we do that? You know, could a small group of us decide that we were going to focus in maybe in a new platform? And kind of deliberately, like in the morning, get together and say, all right, this is the idea we're going to promote this week or this today, and see if we could do a troll strategy. Which is what the other side is doing. Sorry, go ahead, Mark. No, I was just thinking of Greta Thunberg being Times Person of the Year, that that's a kind of symbolic attractor for such a movement. We'll see. Part of what makes, and I call these things denial of discourse attacks, and part of what makes them work is the coordination or the synchronization that you just described, Dave. It's, you know, lots of people say, all right, good. And the Republican strategy post-Dingrich in 94 was to pass around talking points and to punish anyone who deviated from the talking points. Hey, Bill, good to see you. Hello. It's all right. It's all right. Somebody needs to go back in time and strangle Frank Luntz to the crib. Good point. Hey, Jerry, can I take us back to Fifth Century BC to the Peloponnesian War for a little bit? Well, okay. Okay, I think that's good. Let me dial Zoom in to the Peloponnesian War. I've been just waiting for you to bring this up, so I'm really glad you did. Okay. I just want to read a little Aristophanes, and the post-Truth world was known as Sophism in Fifth Century BC. Oh, we're going back here. Okay, good. So first I want to read something that'll give us a little humor that's been on our current, okay. I just woke up, so I'll try to say this right. Demosthenes. According to the Oracle, you must become the greatest of men, sausage seller. Just tell me how a sausage seller can become a great man, Demosthenes. That is precisely why you will be great, because you are a sad rascal without shame, no better than a common market road, spoiled child of fortune. Everything fits together to ensure your greatness. But I have not had the least education. I can only read, and that very badly, Demosthenes, that is what makes you, that is what may stand in your way, almost knowing how to read. So there is our president. And then I'll just know a little paragraph. Go, go, go. So this is about talking about Sophism. This is better than a poetry slam. Go ahead. So this is about the end of the Peloponnesian War and what was going on with the Greeks and Sophism. All this was now lost in a partisan dissension the Peloponnesian War had engendered. The old ideal which conservatives like Aristophanes still admired of a life of simple piety, of respect for the law and religion and custom, and a patriotic devotion to one's city as a completion of fulfillment of one's own life had largely lost its force. The new type of man developing under the pressures of war was a cynic who believed that might was right, who rejected all the old loyalties and all the old virtues, unless they were expedient. That is unless they helped him accomplish his private ends. He was, in fact, the type of Athenian representative whose negotiations with, okay, so, and then just one other little thing. And this is a quote from that time where this is in a dialogue. You who pretend to be engaged in the pursuit of truth are appealing now to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are admirable by convention, not by nature. Conventions and nature are generally adherence with one another. Reasons, as I can see, is that makers of law are the majority who are weak, and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves, to their own interests, blah, blah, blah. So, post truth, Peloponnesian war. Done. I'm dropping the mic. I hope I didn't read too fast, but okay, I'm done. That was great. That was great. Are somebody, is somebody waiting to jump in? I can't tell. But just to add a little more, this is what Plato and both Plato and Aristotle were responding to, the overwhelming cynicism in the post-truth world. So that is why Plato, for example, invented the Amthoria forms. He wanted to get truth. So for you, and this lights up again our conversation that just began on one of our calls about Sophistry, that we need to turn into an inside jury's brain call separate, I think, from this, but we can roll the ball a bit here. But I'm really interested because, and this goes back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where Peer Zig is basically looking back on the Phaderis at one of Plato's books, and basically talking about Sophists. For me, the big question coming out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was, were the Sophists actually bad or were they good? And so when I look back, I'm like, wow, we picked the wrong team one, and we built the entire edifice of Western civilization on purely logical constructs, ignoring the connectedness, the social, the whatever. And when I give speeches, I say, we instructed the designers of all of our to ignore the woo-woo stuff, like forget about the soft skills, the community connection, you know, all that kind of stuff doesn't really matter. Well, another movement happened called the Stoa after Aristotle and Plato, in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, which was basically a repeat of the post-truth world. So Plato and Aristotle did not really hold sway. Their sway lasted for several hundred years, but yet again society fell apart and truth had to go and power had to come back. Those two movements we'll have to address, not just the Sophists. Exactly. And anybody who'd like to complete that set, jump on in, because I am no classicist, no expert on these things. I'm just sort of, this was my reaction from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I've always wanted to dig deeper in and I've never quite known, you know, where to point the flashlight. Like what I really like, what I really like, but what's really clear to me is like, the Peloponnesian War, you know, tore Greece apart, just tore them apart. And all of a sudden, they found themselves like killing fellow Greeks and enslaving them, when supposedly before that they were, you know, good guys. And, you know, it caused desperation and it dissolved in society, society-wide, and people not having a stake in the way things run. And power struggles. And that's what we're having right now. And ancient, the sort of the first half of it, as my amateur understanding is, the first half of ancient Greece is actually about democracy and about discourse and about a whole lot of interesting things. And then it basically falls apart. And the rest of ancient Greece is about Greece just falling apart until it falls. Until Rome takes over. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you really want Jimi's luck input now, man. Come on, Jimi. I threw it in. You're the future. Where's your article on that, Jimi? Come on. I am worthless. I apologize. Well, I'm wondering who among our communities is like, is like deeply, you know, schooled in these kinds of things because, because I think this is, you know, we're fighting, we're fighting ancient battles over and over again, right? We continue to do that. Bill, do you want to jump in? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would just, I would just sort of bring this forward a little bit. There was, there was a book written called Parable of the Tribes. Let me try and find this guy's name, Andrew Bard Schmuckler. He's a real sort of academic one, but basically what he was doing was translating Darwinism into sort of like a cultural sense of, you know, what, what, what, how did we get sidetracked? In other words, the whole concept of Darwinism or social Darwinism was that there was just, you know, in essence, fitness was the determination as to whether or not you were going to succeed. And in essence, what Schmuckler was getting into is the fact that that shifted with the whole agricultural shift to power being the determinant. In other words, whether or not you were fit was irrelevant. If you were powerful, then you were in charge and you got to make the rules, whether or not everybody else understood that or not. And it was interesting that I was, I was reading an article about the beginning of the process of, you know, of Nazism and, and fascism in Italy and how Mussolini and Hitler literally were recruited by institutional sources. I'd be, you know, in other words, the big German and Italian corporations. They basically got together sort of like what I would consider a Trump, you know, cabinet of industrialists that just say, I'm going to tear the system apart for my benefit. Now, in Germany and Italy, that was behind the scenes. In other words, they, they, that wasn't something that was visible in a cabinet level or whatever. And we're just seeing it more blatant now because of the fact that in essence, the, the nature of fascism, I mean, when you tear away that what I'll call the, the sort of, you know, vernacular of fascism being just bad fascism really is just corporate control of the business of the government. So are you seeing bill where I've just taken my brain to fascism is good for business. Right. In essence, fascism is business in control of the economy. Right. Without regard to any kind of social aspects. In other words, they, they, before Hitler, before Nazi, Germany was one of the most dramatic examples of social clauses, social support. It was, it was a perfect example of how things could be done. And to the extent that that was sort of like going over into Italy, you know, where the whole idea that their, their trains work perfectly. In other words, they, they had examples of how government could work well. All of that was privatized and torn apart and essentially demonized. In other words, that's, that's helping immigrants. That's helping Jews. That's helping, you know, people who are against us. In other words, they used all the language that Trump uses in order to establish a ground for the value of being fascist. One thing I'm finding, sorry, sorry, go on. So, but, but his whole point was that we've got to realize that we're selecting for power, not fitness. In other words, all of the, the, if you read the books on, you know, why we're cooperative and all this kind of stuff, it's really about the nature of human nature in wanting to cooperate in tribes and this that and the other thing, but that doesn't work if the overriding system is selecting for power, not social responsibility, not cooperation. Bill, man, you hit, you're hitting the ball out of the park, but you may say something. So I want to let you make going, right? Oh, I was just going to note that it's interesting and I wonder how it fits with, with what you've been talking about, Bill, that while Trump's initial cabinet posts were very much in the, in the realm of business leaders or, or institutional leaders who want to basically break things down for the benefit of industry. Many of those people are out and replaced by people who are obsequious. People who their goal, yeah, they may break up things for industry or damage change for industry, but that's almost secondary to appeasing, appeasing the leader. And the leader just wants to basically grab control for the benefit of business. No, he wants to grab control for the benefit of him. Yeah. The obsequious ones are firmly committed to business. Nothing. I think that you know, it's not top down. It's bottom up. I mean, it's like, if you bring in enough incompetence to competent people don't want to be there, right? So the people who actually know how to run the White House don't want to be there. So you've got really incompetent people coming in. And it's, it's, it's not like a master plan of, I mean, there may be, you know, I don't think, I mean, whoever killed Epstein may have a plan. I don't know. But, but these, the people, you know, what's happening now is just a dynamic, I think, that, that leads to a low level success outcome. I have a way to tie Bill's point in really well. Bill, wow, thanks. So here's how this all works out. Power is exactly at what results. So if you make truth, you introduced relativism, what's the sophist did, what's the stoist did, which is there's no truth. Everything's relative. It's all your point of view. Do you know what's left? The who has the power to make their point of view the truth. And that's what the sophist believe, and that's what the stoic believe. And if you really think about it, and there's no truth and everything's relative, and it's just whatever narrative you want to make up, then all that's left is who has the power to control the narrative. So Bill, you want to, you want to shift to a sort of, maybe a five or a thousand year plan. I was, I was watching an interpretation of this exact, you know, issue from a Taoist point of view. In other words, that basically the Tao says that you're supposed to respect the true nature of things. That there were true nature is not made, it is, and you have to respect what is, and that the fundamental driver of that is trust. And clearly trust is completely devoid in a system that's run by power because they don't trust anybody else. And just as an aside, I mean, one of one of my studies is something called human design developed by a guy out of Spain, but he passed away in 2009 or 10. But his prediction, human design is basically a nine chakra sense establishment of where humanity is moving from a consciousness point of view. And where we've been, according to his analysis, is what he calls a system of killer monkeys. And in essence, systems have been structured in such a way that it manages killer monkeys for the benefit of the 1%. That's a whole power issue. And he says that institutions have been structured intentionally to manage the masses. In other words, to manage the whole process so that it keeps us dumbed down, keeps us not communicating, not supporting things, not getting in our way, 90% of the time, 1% gets theirs, 90% of the time. And his point was that basically he was predicting before he passed away that somewhere around 2025, 2027, there was going to be a complete breakdown of institutions so that things like the Dow and things like self-organizing systems will begin to substitute for the institutions, which are completely failing, completely not serving anybody other than the 1%. And in essence, even the 1% doesn't feel that it's doing it efficiently anymore. So they want to break it down even more, which is going to propel the process even faster, which is good. In other words, the basic thing of the Dow is you should also always trust where you are as being the perfect place. In other words, it's the means by which you get to the next level, whether it's of consciousness or whatever. And I'm doing studies and everything. There's a woman, Patricia Alberra, who's into we consciousness, we evolution, collective consciousness. In other words, basically coming up with ways to actually articulate. In other words, create connections, universal, worldwide connections between people where you're communicating from your soul level, not your ego level. I mean, the beauty of this thing, and I'll try and find it and post it and everything, the work on the Dow is they say that the whole idea of anarchy is not effective because all you're doing is substituting a new agenda. In other words, you're right, they're wrong, as opposed to the trust that's inherent in the Dowism, which if you start to build trust, which is what we're trying to do in our Center for Social Change, in other words, organize things in such a way that you trust everybody. And if they screw up, figure out why they screwed up, they didn't probably do it intentionally. They just screwed up, but trust them again. And if it screws up again, trust them again. In other words, so that you're building trust as the fundamental guiding aspect, not some kind of logical, organized, institutional, conceptual thing that ultimately is going to fail because somebody else is going to argue with you and all of a sudden now it's fake news that you're right and you're wrong. Bill, I want to live in a world of killer monkeys because I'm a big killer monkey. So you're saying by selection, by power, you're okay. That was a joke. I just love the killer monkey thing, but I want to also address something your Darwinism thing. Darwin's theories are completely in pre-secratic philosophers. It's all there. It's amazing. A lot of people don't realize, I'm sure as soon as I say it, everyone else is going to go, oh yeah, there's this teleology and metaphysics to Darwinism that gets over applied and can justify the cruelest of cruelties. And we clearly do it. So I'm really glad you identified that because that's the other poison. There's no truth. There's only power. And then you pull in Darwinism with this teleology and stuff that people give to it. They give it all this power that it doesn't have, all this and they interpret that theory in all kinds of ways. It should not be interpreted and the interpretation essentially becomes, he who has the most power wins and deserves to win. If you're going back to the 500-year plan, you really have to invest your process and trust. And then Jerry and I have been talking for a while. I've sent them some articles where essentially I think that our institutional structure and our whole, all our society needs a renegotiation right now. We are actively in the middle of such a thing. Susan, did you want to jump in? I just wanted to, I've been reading, oh gosh, Darwin's Finches, the book that came out in the late 80s maybe, which is the people who went on to study the Finches after Darwin left and to extend them in quite detailed fashion as he did. And they, as climate change is moving in, they are observing the rapid evolution of the Finches. Of species? Of species, yes. And then Darwin's Finches, 1947. Yeah, well, there's another one. I will find it. Actually, I'll find it right now. We can all look. There's The Beak of the Finch and a different book. I just uploaded that video on the Dow and Trust issue. Yeah, cool. So this is, this is The Beak of the Finch. Is that the book, The Beak of the Finch? Sorry. The Beak of the Finch is the one that I'm talking about. Oh good. So that's what I was just showing. It's a totally different book, yes. What year is it published? I think 80, the 94, sorry. Thank you. Yeah, 94. So anyway, the point is that there's an interesting discussion in here about the, when the context changes, what happens. And that change, species can actually adapt quite quickly to the situation. I mean, they, you know, and if the situation changes again, they may die. You know, I don't know where the power argument comes in there, but I just thought it was worth pointing out that this work continues and the, and the, you know, people do go back and interpret the original, the original Darwinism in, well, they do, they do kind of crazy things with it, that's all. So we do that all the time. All right, those people. I was thinking that one of the things that I went, the question I really wanted to ask was, but don't all these power things apply to neoliberalism as well? For sure. And those dynamics, those social dynamics aren't, aren't any different or not, they don't change just because the, the narrative changes. But Susan, what, what are you trying to get at there? I mean, have you ever read Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine? In other words, that's exactly, in other words, they basically determined that in order to actually get neoliberalism tested, in other words, and basically Chile was the first place they were going to do it, that the University of Chicago has been nine months preparing for the CIA to go in there and kill Allende. You know, and basically they had a complete, they wanted it to be a prototype to prove that neoliberalism worked. If you're allowed to basically kill everybody that's got a social conscious and insist on dynamic control of the economy solely for the benefit of the rich. And that's exactly what they did. And they ended up basically quote, proving that it worked in Chile and then proceeded to go to Bolivia and Argentina and continue to sort of like roll through Latin America in order to prove that the shock was necessary in order to get the, the kind of, of shift to real neoliberalism rather than this coddling type of, you know, semi-level of social support, you know, when there should be none. It's not the rich, it's the stockholder, Bill. Don't you understand? We've got to manage for the benefit of the stockholder, dude. The problem with even referring to stockholders is that you're not, you're not dealing with the one tenth of one percent that are really sort of pulling the strings and paying for all of his stuff in the background. You know, I mean, how does Mitch McConnell become worth $24 million in the space of 10 years on a salary of $250,000 a year? You know, I mean- Well, he marries well, right? That's right. But they're both basically just psychopaths that are just- I gotta say, the Naomi Klein version that he just, I haven't read any of her stuff. And so I'll put that out there. But I, it sounds like a conspiracy theory that I don't buy, right? I think it implies a whole lot of confidence and too large a group. And I just can't, my worldview doesn't allow for that kind of a deliberate intervention at that scale, right? With that much evil kind of, I mean, I just don't get it. I don't believe it. So I wouldn't have to verify it. Do me a favor and at least try and get a summary of it or a YouTube summary of her description because it is, it is so detailed and so thorough in terms of how they did that. They're literally- What about conspiracies also, which I think Gore-Vidal expressed really well when people, and this was like back in the old days when people were worried about the Eastern, you know, Easterners running the country and so on. And he basically said, well, they all go to the same prep schools, they go to the same colleges, they hang out, they don't need to conspire, they already all think alike. And I think that's basically how shock doctrine works is that, you know, it's like emergent behavior essentially. And by the way, just as a really important footnote, let's not forget that Russia was also part of the whole shock doctrine thing and it's come back to bite us essentially. Okay, but Mark, Mark, let me just sort of footnote that because one of the leaders, I can't remember the name of the guy, the whole sort of like good side of shock doctrine, was totally, totally, totally depressed by the way that the U.S. handled Russia. Because in essence, every other place, even Chile, even, you know, Bolivia, etc., they always had a World Bank support system that was going along with it. Otherwise, there was going to be some dampening of the impact on the existing social system. Apparently, when they applied it in Russia, literally all of those sources backed off and said, screw them, they've got to do it the hard way. And that's why they ended up with the oligarchs, that's why they ended up with the killings, that's why they ended up with the whole KGB really running the entire government. All I'm saying is that the way that they did Russia, and it's in the book, the shock doctrine book, the way they did Russia, it was exactly the opposite of the way that they did the arrest because they wanted to punish Russia for not being cooperative enough. But also Russia was complicated by an explicit conspiracy, which is basically Clinton's support for Yeltsin. Okay, but that's part of the point. It was supposed to support it in a socially valued way. In other words, that was the way that they did the rest of the shock doctors, but they didn't do it. They withdrew it. Right, what I'll say, what Clinton did was basically he basically almost guaranteed Yeltsin's election, which validated this whole corruption that, you know, I mean Yeltsin, well, you know, I don't want a good details here, but I think it's a combination of kind of immersion behavior of people who just behave according to the way they're brought up and so on. And then there's explicit conspiracies as well. I won't doubt that for a second. I think Kelly had a comment or question. Well, only that I would I'm interested to go back to kind of Susan's point, which is because I think it ties into something that we're working on and we're just working on last week in my world, which is sort of related to the story of like, if you were a housewife in the 1950s and you had the mind of a nuclear physicist, what you did with that was you had very complicated systems in your kitchen about what type of work you could use where and what could go, you know, like we as humans build systems, I think, for our own selves designed to keep ourselves entertained. And so and so how do we build we will, I think, always want to move in tribes and we will always want to have in groups and out groups and we'll always want to have rivalries and this is where we were talking about this last week. We've built these incredibly unhelpful silos in our organizations that are that are these destructive rivalries when we're supposedly working toward the same end. And so can we what can we build as a structure that allows us to still move in those sort of ways but in a much more constructive with a much more constructive output, right. So can we build these sort of systems in from my perspective, just where I'm sitting now in our organizations that have this kind of like these team based rivalries that have actually excellent and constructive outputs. So fruitful rivalries of some sort of some kind, yeah, setting up intentional rivalries with a with a beneficial outcome, right or is rivalries the wrong word or right how do we build in groups and out groups that are actually constructive, I don't know. But you know, let me try again. Let me try again. I haven't tried to explain this for years. So the importance, Bill, of the noticing to go to Kelly's point that she was just making is that the dynamics of, I mean, I come from a world of this whole business of, for instance, one central idea being communities of practice, which are which are a social dynamic. They are an emergent phenomenon. They can be also formalized and authorized. But but they they are the way things work. And the inside and the outside is is kind of inevitable, right. So that would what would think that that simply recognizing that this is what's going on would give us some amount of understanding and new kinds of intervention. It operates on a very small scale. I mean, you know, it's in the practice of, of, you know, Trump's White House, the practice, the practices that have evolved there are recognizable from the outside. But it's very structurally, I mean, socially, socially bound, right? It's as tight as a gang. And, and those and those things are quite, quite small, but they keep happening. And they're the same things. You know, whenever you get a new, whenever you get a new journal in an academic field, you know, behind it is a community of practice. It's not just one individual. It's a whole way of seeing the world. It's a whole way of doing these things. And we go in and out. I mean, we're having all this trouble with different with all this identity stuff and and inclusive inclusivity. And I listened to a conversation yesterday about all these different things. And the only way we seem to have is to open up and include everyone and every identity and every everything rather than understanding that we all go in and out of identities all day long. And we participate in different ways. And I think the thing is that the things that make the things that we like good are the same dynamics that are the things that make the things that are bad. So where does that leave us? I mean, what are what are the what are the options? I mean, I'm inclined to think that there aren't as many conspiracies like the whole World Trade Center conspiracy. I said, if only we were that organized, we're not just art, right? What's traveling is ways of thinking and and if only the ways of doing things. If only the W administration. If only the W administration had been halfway as that competent in anything, right? If only somebody was in control to that level, right? I mean, nobody is going on. That's the power is terribly important to understand. And it does it does drive a lot. But you know, there's also resistance to power. There's also the power that arises in their resistance. I mean, it's not it's not like there's I'm not arguing that these patterns, historical patterns are not visible. But I think they they come about for the same reasons, which is what we're wrestling with. Bill, did you want to jump in? Well, it just is a I spent a certain amount of time trying to understand that 9 11 situation. And I've got to tell you, there's so much evidence. And to the extent that you talk about W, you know, not being smart enough or whatever, it really wasn't the United States that was doing it was the Israelis. They were organizing entire thing. They basically was I don't know if you're aware of the fact that apparently Netanyahu is a very good friend of the guy Silverman that's the owner of the was nine months before 911 occurred. This guy Silverman bought the World Trade Towers for like a billion dollars, which apparently was a way considered way overpriced because there was problems with with with you know, the aluminum stuff. In other words, that they had to redo in the entire building and nobody wanted the buildings. And so the fact that he and he spent, you know, like six weeks negotiating just the insurance claim, just the insurance and ended up structuring in such a way that he got double paid for the value of the building because there were two events. You know, this was well thought out. The building was shut down for like two weeks to do quote, electrical work and everything during which time they actually have films of Israeli quote, students that were in there with material that was basically used for the thermite cutting of the the materials so that you know, as it was falling and basically would fall freefall statistically, it's impossible impossible for those buildings to fall freefall without the the structural aspect being cut out. And the fact that for weeks afterwards, there was molten you know, metal down below, which is impossible to heat to that level with airline fuel, you know, so there's so much evidence and if you watch some of the pictures, there's one picture in particular when the building is falling that you'll notice that basically you can see the steel infrastructure standing up and then all of a sudden poof, it turns into dust. In other words, there were things that were going on and from what I've studied and there's a whole book on this a woman who basically is into understanding this this dynamic of how you can you can pulverize steel from afar. In other words, basically the US government is in has this technology and basically dissolve those buildings. If you look at some of the pictures of the collateral building, that doesn't argue against my point at all. In fact, it sort of, yeah, they're there they knew exactly what they were doing, but it was not the US government that was that was directing it was the Israelis. All right. They know for sure how to handle these things in a secretive way. Let me revise my point to say that I think that the, you know, yeah, maybe maybe we would wish that the government was that organized and you know, they may have been organized, but it didn't take a lot of people if that's true, suppose it is, then it wouldn't have taken a lot of people. It would have taken small communities of people who had very special talents who all the rest of it that that could be marshaled and brought into play that those dynamics happen right all the time and sometimes sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and so I'd like to put a whole not a huge yeah. I'd like to put a hold on the 9 11 conversation and take that elsewhere for a moment, but I'd like anybody mentions chemtrails. I'm going to scream. Okay. I might actually say the word just to hear you scream if you may, but but no, I'm going to hold back. Jerry, is it okay? I'll be curious, Bill, how how you test these theories yourself, right? There's a lot of respect for your ideas, a lot of respect for the stuff that you bring to this group. This topic I don't have, I don't really buy. So I'd be really curious kind of how you're, what are you testing it against? How are you, how can you be so convinced, I guess, is kind of what I'm wondering. I just spend, you know, first of all, I'm merely watching that as an example. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the fact that two years before George W. Bush got into power, they wrote a piece. In other words, basically he and the neoliberals got together and had this this articulation of how without Russia around, we should organize the world for our own benefit and start taking charge. And they said that what we're lacking so far is a dynamic event like Pearl Harbor in order to accomplish that. Well, I've always wanted to get invited to the neoliberal meetings and I don't know what I'm talking about. This is in writing two years before. So I mean, they've outlined exactly what they're doing and that's exactly what they had to do within the Defense Department. Basically, Cheney eradicated the CIA's support and everything in terms of the war in and in Middle East and built a completely new system of investigation, everything in the Defense Department in order to overcome the limits of the CIA. In other words, the CIA wasn't cooperating. But let me shift for a second because I totally agree with you that this is sort of irrelevant in the sense that to me, I'm trying to find out where in things like the Dow, you find the way to build trust. In other words, if you think systemically, one of the interesting books that I read, Mark Blythe wrote a book called The Great Transformations. And his whole point in there was that if you look at the cultural aspects of how decision making is done in such a way that you create institutions that test how you're going to deal with things that are inherently complex systems. In other words, basically Mark Blythe primarily being an economist is dealing with the nature of complex economic systems. And so his whole point there was that when you look at the cultural background of like Norway and Sweden, et cetera, as opposed to the United States, where we have more of a corporate control of the situation, you get a different language that's basically saying, okay, if we're going to organize the system, what institutions do we need to do to test our perception of what works. That was the whole concept of the New Deal. That was the whole concept of the Federal Reserve system. In other words, you set up a system that in some way reflects what you think the complex solution is. And then you embed that in the institution and require that it stay fixated on that. Which nicely goes to our topic. I mean, this really, you've just gone right back into the middle of the heart of our topic, I think, because the neoliberal agenda that started this conversation that was in the invite is a series of ways of seeing the world, which then led to a bunch of people having licensed to design institutions that took over our lives, that affected a whole bunch of people who are now fighting back in the streets. Let me just give you the historical timeline along that. So you see how well thought out that process that you just described was occurring. Basically, at the end of World War II, they set up a Mount Pellion Society. In other words, it was basically Hayek and Milton Friedman and others that basically sort of decided that there's no way that in this environment with the New Deal, et cetera, that we're going to stop the Keynesian economics from doing what it's doing. But we know, quote, unquote, that it's wrong. We need to break down the systems, et cetera, in such a way that we have more control over it. And so they set up this organization that in essence started populating. What we now have is all these think tanks, primarily funded by the Koch brothers and people like that, where we've got literally thousands, thousands of PhDs that are churning out papers saying, this is right, which is bullshit. There's a book called Fed Up that was written by a journalist who was associated with the Fed in Texas, the Dallas Fed, who basically called them out for the fact that they would not do a report, an analysis that didn't have three years of tested data. How do you do that in the middle of a crisis? As a resident, as economists in the room, can I speak to this stuff in a minute? Okay. Yeah. But what I'm trying to get at is that the Mount Pellerin Society knew that they had to invest in creating a network. In other words, an alternative set of institutions that when Keynesian didn't work and stagflation basically couldn't be explained by Keynesian economics and everything. So they immediately rushed in and said, oh, neoliberalism is the answer. And obviously they got control at that point and started making all the changes. So that at the end of the day, they got the ability, which is a point of chili, et cetera, to test their theory of neoliberalism being the correct way to design economies so that they benefit, at least those who want to be benefited. So that process and now obviously what's happening is that neoliberalism can't solve the problem because they really don't understand the system either. If you start looking at Stephen Keynes' work in economics, there's a huge impact of private debt, which the neoliberals don't acknowledge at all. Let's go, because actually you're going to find out I'm not as much a disagreement as you may think I am. But after this, I want you may to speak to the conspiracy of culture. So first of all, first of all, all the studies and philosophy I'm doing, it's keenly attacking economics, which I studied. And the one thing that played on our startle would say was all this idea that you can split up knowledge into these individual molecules that aren't related, has really poisoned our knowledge. It's split it up. And economics is fundamentally about what are we going to do with our resources. And that, by the way, is an ethical question. So I don't think it's just about that. Let me finish my point. So yes, when PhDs, when theories are coming out by Hayek and others, they have political ethical ends. And yes, they have steered us into a very bad place because they are in essence political. And yes, all those professors and think tanks are in essence political. And they are politicking to have resources shunted to what they think ethically is the right place. And yes, we have really reached a bad end right now. And it's not working. So absolutely agree with that. But it's not working for us. It's working for the one percent. Yeah. And so Hayek and all the things you want to say about that, I don't think a grand conspiracy in dark rooms happened. The conspiracy was influence, which is what happened with society. Yeah, we don't have to call that conspiracy. It's just a collective action in order to get their way. And I thought I saw Susan reacting pretty heavily here. Susan, do you want to step in? You're muted. You're still muted. Susan, you're Mike. Hey, Mike. Excuse me. Is a matter of scale on which these things work. And so, I mean, I was looking at your brain there. And I'm looking at a beautiful picture of lots and lots of different groupings of people and groupings of different ideas and all the rest of that stuff. The scale of what it takes is generated by a lot of that kind of thing. It's generated in families and friends and ways of doing things. I don't think it has to be, in order to have a big effect, it doesn't have to be at a large scale. It doesn't have to be deliberate. That's what I want to say. I'm not sure what you just said, Susan, because in order to have a large effect, it kind of has to have a large scale. I think the word scale is very freighted here. So I want to take that out for a minute. Yeah. I think the place to look for answers are ways in which to do these things is at the scale at which they take place and are formed, where ideas are formed and all the rest of it. And basically... In mortar? Huh? Just kidding. In mortar. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't... Yeah. You don't need a conspiracy to have a large scale effect. Yeah. And I think a big piece of our conversation is about how do things cascade across society. How do large numbers of people change their minds or agree to some new program? I think that's a very big piece of our conversations here. Well, and we do a lot of it right in this group, right? When somebody brings a new idea and we hash it over and we turn it upside down and inside out and all the rest of us and we make judgments and some of us change our minds and some of us don't. And that's happening all over the world all the time. I want to provide a short insight into economics I had recently when I was studying Egypt again for some damn reason. And I realized watching this that Egypt was a fantastically successful society. It was definitely the place you want to live at the time. And so they had a tremendous amount of surplus, a tremendous amount of resources to get sitting there on the Nile. And it was really well organized. And the pharaoh essentially, you know, and hydraulic despotism, which was all about making sure the crops got watered and the coronaries of the pharaoh and yada, yada, yada. Really nice, sweet system. Okay, great job. And but what did they do with their excess resources? They built cities for the dead. And that's fine. It worked and employed lots of people. You know, literally economics is that just that or that's it's whatever you decide is important if you got to do it. And if everybody cooperates with it, then and it works for enough people in this society. I mean, look at these cities outside the cities of the dead where all the work been and everything worked. So that's what I'm trying to point out about resources and economics is it's a fundamental ethical decision as a silent decision about what do we care about? Oh, we care about building cities for the dead. Let's go do it. We care about building the biggest military in the world. Let's go do it. That's so I just want to provide that insight about economics. There's no it really is that or that's okay done. Like we could be on Mars right now if we really cared about doing it, but we don't. So we haven't done it. So where are we? Anyone want to orient us? Let me just go back to the question of trust because in essence the the I'm transfixed by the fact that when you listen to true sort of Taoist perspective on how humanity works, in other words, what's the true nature of humanity and how consciousness is evolving its equity. It makes sense that if you're gonna do something wrong, in other words, rely on institutions to tell you what to do because you can't figure it out, then it makes sense that if you start trying to work from trust that you have a different experience of the world. Now, let's just assume that doom and gloom is real. In other words, that we do have a relatively cataclysmic problem with the world where gloating is climate change and this that and the other thing. There's a substantial loss of human life, etc., etc. But you get these smaller groups, tribes even necessarily, you know, 100,000 people or maybe just 150 people that do trust each other and know that they're coming from trust. There was no that they're that that's what makes things work well and you have an experience of that. Then all of a sudden that starts to ripple sort of the language of what we're saying culture you know ripples throughout and sort of creates a category. But so far the category has been to defend yourself through a system, whether it's neoliberalism or Keynesian or fill in the blank, that at some point doesn't work because it's not necessarily working for the group that wants it to work. In other words, I don't know whether you're familiar with the the percentages of our economy that the banking industry controls. It used to be back in the 40s somewhere in the neighborhood of 5%. It's now 20%, 18 to 20%. And that happened that was actually predicted by an economist in 1945 saying that we've created a political system that supports unions and ultimately it's going to be a conflict of interest or market share issue between capitalists and labor and they're going to decimate the the political nature and the political support for unions in order to do that, which is precisely what happened. He almost predicted it to a year from the point you was saying was going to take about somewhere around 20, 25 years, which is when Margaret Thatcher and Reagan came in and did exactly that. And now we've gone from 5% to 18, 20% of in essence, worthless part of the economy because that's your, you know, what's the word they use for it. In other words, the people that the renties. The financialization of the economy. They're just basically taking it over for their benefit. Yeah, it's also just a bunch of imaginary, funny, funny bullshit. The actualization of the economy, that's completely happened. It's completely, you know, those amounts of money swamp the real economy. Yeah, and the ability for the for banks to actually create money in drill. Yeah, that's all true. But one thing I disagree with you, Bill, is that what is this? Are you positing that institutions need to be extinguished? I think no, no, no, no, no. No, but Bob, remember, the point of the great transformations, the point of the great transformations was that we need to understand that we're living in a complex environment. Oh yeah. And that therefore you need to test your systems, your systemic responses in institutions that somehow articulate and actually do what you think is a solution. You don't know at the time you're setting up the new deal or whatever, that it's really going to work. And obviously, there was a lot of debate about that as to whether or not it was going to work. But at the end of the day, they had to test it somehow. And so I'm not saying that institutions are good or bad, it's just that they have their time. Yes, they work for a period of time, and then they don't. Yeah, totally worked. Yep. And, and, and Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, we overturned that stuff. And we have been living in, you know, shareholder value land for a couple of decades. And it's not working out so great. And we need to renegotiate the social contract. Jerry and I are talking about this all the time. Jerry, why aren't you coming in about trust and everything, my friend? By the way, the ex-urban city for the dead, Jame, rock on. That's hilarious. Of course, I would say the suburbs that you're talking about are already the city of the dead. Ex-urban sprawl of the dead. All of the dead sounds like the next movie somebody has to make. Seriously. Suburbia colon, sprawl of the dead. Ex-urbia, sorry, sprawl of the dead. I want to scroll back to like 800 different spots in this call, but I'm just going to pick one. And Bill, I love what you say about trust and how we have to keep going back to the well of trust and keep, you know, routing people back to trust to fix institutions and to get things done. And then holding that up against your belief in that 9-11 was an Israeli job is like, wow, you're believing, you have a high emphasis on trust. And sorry, Jame, thanks. You have a high emphasis on trust, and yet you're believing in some really trust-breaking kind of feces. So how does that all fit? You see, it's what I would call the systemic understanding. In other words, if the institutions, in other words, go back to Ross's concept, you know, human design, that our institutions are to manage killer monkeys. Okay. And in other words, the killer monkeys want to be in control. And so in that context, in order to evolve consciously, and I'm talking about true conscious evolution, you have to come from that which is now not the power orientation, not the control orientation, not the one percent orientation, not to demonize it. In other words, in this this town thing that, you know, they're very clear about, do not make wrong that which got us where we are. You always, in the Dow, you always start with where you are, as perfect. But at the end of the day, you need to shift. In other words, whether it's the 9-11 or, you know, whatever happens in any other kind of, you know, chili and ayende and all that kind of stuff, that just merely shows you that the one percent are doing their job. They're basically the termites or the process that is creating what they want. And to the extent that they're articulate about that and very effective about that and very focused on that, excuse me, that's what you got to do. But we keep giving up our power. I mean, you heard that phrase a million times probably in social context as well as personal, you know, sort of the development consciousness, we keep giving up our power. And to the extent that you're going to rebuild that at any level, let's call it a social level, you need to deteriorate and destroy, to an extent, the existing institutions, not because they're bad, but because of the fact that they were built for the wrong purpose. Which is, I think, why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump. I totally agree with you. But let me articulate that slightly differently because, in a way, we were getting close to this and talking about the competition between, like, Margaret Thatcher, Reagan, Dominic and the economics itself. In essence, part of the why nations fail is because you basically get different competing elites that think that they've got the right answer, which is part of the Dallas thing. Whenever you get an anarchist coming in and saying, I've got a better answer, the answer is no, you know, because you've just got a different agenda, you know, and in that context, agendas don't work. They basically set up a new level of competition. But the whole articulation, the whole fight between elites is between the elites that are basically controlling from the left, as opposed to the right, and we know enough about Hillary Clinton and whether it's Joseph Biden or anybody else, that they're as much controlled by the system in the 1% as the Republicans are. So it's not like the institutions are somehow, some of them are right and some of them are wrong. They're all inherently captured. And once they're captured, they're not flexible enough. They're not intended to be flexible enough in order to respond to the everyday person, their needs, et cetera. And so in that context, assume for a second, just make it easy that trust is the true glue that will build a respectful, healthy society. That literally could take five or six hundred years to do. Two weeks, I mean, these things move quickly sometimes. Well, but the problem is you've got to have some means and the internet is one of those means by which to get people to organize. Because again, going back to giving up your power, we have an election. People elect, you know, whoever, Trump or, you know, whoever. And at the end of the day, they step back and stop working. They stop doing anything. I've heard criticisms over the last couple of weeks that, you know, these Bernie Sanders people are horrible because they stick around. You know, they keep working after the election. And it's like, that's a problem. You know, and in essence, for the political system, yes, it's a problem. They want you to go back to sleep, you know, and let them do whatever they're going to do in the background. So my point is that whether it's 9-11 or any kind of Trump, you know, election, et cetera, you've got the problem of elites fighting with each other over who's who can do it. And the way that it's been described that I think is most accurate is the Trump basically says that, that, you know, we billionaires are entitled to run the world. So we're going to come in and decimate everything and make it work for us better. And so we don't need politicians to intercede anymore. We don't need diplomats to intercede anymore. No, we're just going to bully this into the position we want it to be in. And so it's so raw now that it's easier for the other side to be more articulate about what do we want in terms of social conflict? What do we want in terms of this kind of conversation? What do we want in terms of trustworthy systems, et cetera? That conversation can't go on until they're motivated to really stand up and stay up, not go to sleep every four years. Anybody want to jump in with where you feel we are? What is this our feelings about this? And this might this might be like going a little meta on the whole thing, but and actually going back to the beginning of the conversation and and using is about Plato and Aristotle. It's basically that and this is actually part of a investigation I've just started with a group of people at White House in New York City, which is it's called fully empirical science and technology. And part of the idea is that, okay, so, you know, modern science had a fully empirical view of so-called objective reality. Number one, number two, kind of 20th century that got softened and squished a bit, especially in terms of the quantum realm, the realm of the very small, also the realm of the very large. And then there's the notion of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which I think also needs to become part of a fully empirical view. I mean, obviously hardcore science elides subjectivity or suspends it. It says, let's pretend it doesn't make a difference and for many realms it doesn't. The kind of realms we're talking about, it obviously makes a huge difference. And so I think this is kind of where our fundamental thinking needs to go forward. And I think we're at in the early stages of kind of a paradigm shift among hardcore scientists as well as people studying phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy and so on. And that also relates to our being embedded a complex adaptive or non-adaptive system where we say there's a huge anthropogenic aspect to climate change, which basically means that our subjectivities make a huge difference to the real world. Maybe that's enough. And I think one of the things that the flashed in my head as we were going is that some of the big movements we've talked about, whether it's neoliberalism or the Chicago school boys or whatever else, had these kind of conversations. I think they've gone through these sorts of things and they've ended up thinking, oh shit, wait a minute, if we do this thing over here and then all repeat it together and then put it in the schools and then this and that and the other, it can become doctrine and then look where that goes. So this may seem like a bit of a chaotic conversation cutting into a whole bunch of different things, but I think it's the means by which a lot of groups end up developing new things to sell, new ideas or points of view to sell across the world. And there's a lot of hungry buyers, there's a lot of people out there who in order to hold on power in order to remain members of their tribe, in order to what have you, will bite. And there's a whole bunch of belief systems that then have tremendous effects on people at the other end of the receiving end of the institutions. So the idea that people won't do anything unless they're under the imminent threat of starvation, which is a conservative belief. The effects of the design of institutions, effects are anybody's desire to offer a safety net of any kind, etc, etc, etc. And the very implicit moral and ethical judgments that the right is doing on those people. Huge, gigantic, gigantic. But we take that for granted right now. I mean, the austerity movements worldwide are like, oops, our economy is not doing well, we got to cut back on all these services for all these people. And all those people suffer at the end of it because we've cut away all their other ways of maintaining themselves. It used to be that carpenters, workers in a factory using wood had the right to pick up all the pieces that fell to the ground and take them home for firewood or to make their own chair or whatever it is. They had, you know, they had rights to the to the debris. Those rights got cut away along with every other right. Beautifully said, Jerry. Thank you, my friend. I'd be a little bit curious. I don't know if this is if it's possible to make the call, but I've been wondering about it. Oh, that it seems to me that I can think of that seems like we've had at least two kind of really big economic failures, failures in economic theory that I've seen. One is this idea that that minimum wages are increasing minimum wage will drop employment, right, right, which seems to not be happening. But that was a really strongly held economic thesis, I felt. And the other has been this idea that inflation and employment are tied. And you know, somehow we've been pouring money into the economy and play, you know, employment at the lowest level ever, we're still not seeing inflation. These were fun. When I was growing up, right, these were the fundamental tenants of kind of economic policy. And they seem to be wrong as far as I can tell. And I'd be curious kind of what I mean, I haven't heard a lot of critique of this. I'd be curious kind of in the at least in the mainstream. I'd be curious if you have any explanation or if they're really an issue or not. But you're hitting a real pet peeve of mine, Dave, which is my favorite example of it is this thing called the iron law of wages. It's not called the law of wages. And there's a whole lot of laws, I keep them under laws in quotes, because there's, you know, lots of people have coined laws, everything from Moore's law, you know, Sarnoff's law, Rosenfeld's law, et cetera, et cetera. So I got a lot of laws. This one of all of them is called the iron law of wages. And it comes from Andrew Carnegie. And it's basically it says that wages tend to the to the minimum necessary to sustain the worker. That's the law. The law says that wages will always move toward the minimum necessary to sustain the worker. And it's an iron law. I think it's called an iron law because you are meant to not actually think about it. You are meant to never question it. Right. And so there's a really nice essay in Harper's, it's poverty necessary by Marilyn Robinson, who's thinking I really, really, really, really, really like. And she quotes all the books that I'm talking about here. I'll put a link to this in our chat. But she's trying to figure out, hey, like we just have the wrong ideas going on here. We're thinking about this all ass backwards in some pretty huge ways. That's why so I like all the rocks that we're turning over here and all the things we're contributing to the conversation, because I think that these are aspects of idea failure or idea victory. I mean, in some sense, in some sense, the failure, Dave, you're describing this as the failure of some big economic ideas. I would suggest that this is the the temporal success of some big ideas put in the world in order to benefit a few people. And that and that now they've played out and we finally managed to undermine them like profit maximization is the sole purpose of a firm. That one is falling, right? That one is falling. But boy, has that held sway for a really long time. And if you look at Jack Welch and how Fortune magazine and others held him up as the knight and hero and shining armor of business and of society for the longest time and what his reputation is now, that's really interesting course of life. Well said, my friend. Yeah, and all these economic relationships that are changing, David, I will adjust that a little bit. You know, an economy is a system of human relations and it changes. So law, like Jerry's pointing out, we really shouldn't use that term. These are not laws. These are big assumptions, big economic and iron law calls me so much. I mean, really, when I was like, wait, what's this? What's this iron law? And I started looking up, you know, what it was and I was like, this is crazy, crazy stuff. Like this is a way to eat people's brains. So one of my favorite books is this Polanyi's Great Transformation and Murray Rothbard, the head of the Mises society writes a rebuttal. He writes a rebuttal to the book and he writes a letter to Mises fans and everybody else. And the rebuttal is full of bile and piss. And basically the rebuttal is language to make sure you never go try to read this book because it's so heinous. Now the book is lovely and inoffensive and is not trying to do any of the things that Rothbard accuses that are doing, most of which he is actually perpetrating in his rebuttal letter. And people hold Rothbard and a bunch of other, you know, libertarians up as gods and demigods. I'm like, Jesus, these people are trying to own the intellectual space and they're trying to make it so that we can't, you know, experiment our way to better things, et cetera, et cetera. Experimental economics is a really interesting thing because it says, hey, let's actually go use some reason to try to find our way to better, you know, better answers. So there's another term, philanthropy, what's it called, altruistic philanthropy or something like that. But sort of data-based analyses of how these things work. And even those get suspect because they get public money. And Bo just put some interesting things on. Essentially, Herbert Hoover made a moralistic judgment that about austerity and caused the depression after the stock market crash. And I think it's most of our recessions are caused by the Federal Reserve and caused by them using rules like David's pointed out about employment and inflation, for example, they throw us into it. So blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's real. Exactly. And we are now three minutes from the end of this call. And there is an inside Jerry's brain call at the top of the hour if anybody wants to keep talking. Yeah, let's talk about that. I was really interested, man. It's going to be a lot of fun, Jerry. Who's coming up? I don't know who'll be on it, but, you know, pass the word. But yeah, any final thoughts? Dave, you're muted. I hope anybody, it's interesting playing along, but I was amused with, I'd seen far as I'd done this tweet about using the framing of, you know, what adequate explanations were. And I was realizing I thought that was a really interesting frame in the context of this call that like, how do we explain things? And I would love to see anybody have riffs on what adequate explanations of different phenomena might be from your perspectives or projecting onto somebody else's perspective perhaps. So is this a riff on never ascribed to evil? What is adequately explained by incompetence? Yeah. Okay. So it's meant to be a riff on that. Yeah. Nice. And so I don't know, it just seemed like it's actually kind of, especially in the context of this call, it's kind of, I was thinking it's like, it's kind of a helpful back and forth. I was amused by myself. And sorry, this is not Occam's razor. What's the, what's the name of this of the principle? I don't know. Isn't it close to Occam's razor, right? I don't, I'm here to find the, I should go back in. I've just found it. I've just found it. Let me share it on the zoom as we close out here. As far as I call it Hanlon's razor. It's called Hanlon's razor. Yeah. And he says, you have attributed conditions to villainy that simply resolved from stupidity. So the idea is never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Yeah, there's the tweet that got me. Yeah. And so he's riffing on that. And he's talking about medical care, so. Yeah. Any closing thoughts? Try more trust. Try more trust. I'm all in favor of that. That's totally the heart of where I'm coming from these days. It's like, and I don't think people understand how deeply trust has been undermined and broken, often very intentionally. I don't think people understand how many movements are rediscovering trust and implementing it in really cool ways that actually work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So more of that in future calls. Right. But for now. Well, in a version of that that I'd love to talk about is, but like kind of who don't you trust? Like the difference between enemies and opponents. Interesting. About it. But I do think that there's a category of people that are not trustworthy. And perhaps they could be restored into trust. But anyway, I think we have a large, in our political system right now, we have a large number of people who basically need to be banished. They are not trustworthy. And so what do you do in that case? Love that. So thanks everybody. See whoever wants to rejoin in a half hour.