 This is the Brax call for August of 2021, and it seems like every time we have one of these calls, like the whole world has changed yet again. I don't know. Call me silly, but like Delta variant and Europe on fire and heat domes and Cuomo gone and like like, man. I'll accept for the last or at the end of the world. The last could be like the beginning of something new. But yeah, I just saw this thing hottest temperature in European history recorded 48.8 in Sicily. Wow. Wow. Yeah, I hear they're growing avocados in Sicily actually because the environment is too tropical on them. Hey, Putin's happy because Siberia turns into arable farmland. Yeah, that was a great F.T. ARC where they had animations showing how farmers, you know, are moving things up north and how grape growers, even in France, are going to England and like planting whales with grapes. Have you had that delicious Yorkshire Pinot Noir? Exactly. I mean, whoever thought that was going to happen. Yeah. And it was really good because it brought up the fact that, you know, how Greenland had many ice age when it got warm in Greenland for a while. So a number I think people who have difficulty with climate have bring that up and they're like, no, it's far worse than that. This makes this look like nothing. So anyway, the animations and everything, the F.T. ARC where it just showed how farmers are moving everything north and how crops are changing. And everything changes. Like years ago, I was reading how shifting temperatures in the Kalahari were endangering tribes people because the safe temperature range for mosquitoes was going up the mountain side. Not in the Kalahari, but in Tanzania. I forgot what the name of the mountain is. But basically, there were tribes people who'd never had disease problems because their mosquitoes couldn't live at their altitude. And all of a sudden they were all getting like all kinds of new sicknesses because there were mosquitoes. And that's just the wee tiny, you know, example of the complicated interlocking ecosystem elements that are now being like thrown up against the wall wholesale. Because this is just going to be get worse and worse. Yeah, here we are moving to the northwest and we didn't go far enough north, my friend. We need to go further north. I know, I know. Well, to me the, I mean, yeah, there's been like a dozen developments. But this two year study that I came across through the climate web guy, Mark Trexler, you know, which basically modeled all these projections and found that most likely is 3.5 degrees warming by 2100. In other words, that's baked in part of the pun. So that's kind of a, okay, what does the sane person do when they hear news like that? Yeah, I mean, and humans are really adaptable critters and seem to be able to tolerate the poorest of the poor suffering a lot and being displaced a lot and not worrying so much about it, letting it kind of happen. And so that it's easy to envision a world in which there are many more climate migrants, climate refugees, moving around trying to find places to be where nobody really knows where a good place to be is anymore, because everything's sort of in danger and everything in lockdown. And then meanwhile, the scariest part to me is like the systems being interrupted that might destroy our entire food system, right? And I think I said this on a Rex call before, but to me, when I stare at all the different things, I'm like, well, we could adapt our way around that and maybe around that. But if we destroy the oceans, if we manage, if we manage to kill off most of the sea life, we're done. We're like baked. Here's that. This is what you have about how climate's changing crops. Just look at the stuff shift north. It's like, holy crap. Boom, boom. Wow. Wow. Oh, whoa, whoa. See the green up in England there? 27. Yeah. Okay, I'll stop sharing, but this animation would be something like I just wanted to put it on Facebook, but Facebook isn't the place for reason. And then there was an article yesterday about how New Zealand is likely to be the best place to live through an apocalypse. Yeah, I keep coming across that. Dr. LaForge. Nice to see you. You're muted though, if you want to. Hi, Jerry. Hey, Tom. Hello. It's a bow. Hi. Good to see you again. Oh, hi. And Mark. Hi, Mark. I recognize that face. We're basically commiserating about climate disasters, Lumi. Wow. I was thinking, I've got a lot to do, but I need something to kind of cheer me up. So I'm going to go talk to my Rex buddies. You've come to the right place. You've come to the right place. So what's the most cheerful thing you've seen, actually, in the last bit? Five minutes ago, a hawk just landed on a railing right behind me. That's beautiful. I don't know if I can just tell you what my view looks like. Beautiful. Yeah. Fantastic. We have a nest on our porch, and the hawk came in. Clearly he was trying to find where the nest was, but he couldn't find it and left. So a nest of robins or some other bird? Yeah, I think they're like starlings or something. Yeah. Yeah, man. So how do we fix these problems? Just saying. But we'll start with you. Mark, we'll start with you. Good. Hey, Kevin. Actually, in terms of good stuff that's happened, I was up in Cape Britain, high Kevin, which is just north on the north part of Nova Scotia, just for a couple of days and in his valley. And it was this great kind of smoke blessing ceremony, which included an Indigenous elder from the Eskisuna Reserve, actually this elder who I've been studying a little bit with because my jaw dropped once when in conversation, he used the term knowledge gardening. And I thought, what? And it turns out this has been in use in the Mi'kmaq Indigenous community for hundreds or thousands of years. Wow. But anyway, so he was there and there was also a Tibetan Buddhist ripper shea there, and there were bagpipers there. And the weather changes every two seconds, but there was rain and there was sun and wind. And anyway, it was just a great moment of experiencing the best that the land has to offer. Wow. That's fabulous. Mi'kmaq, three sisters teaching in knowledge gardening. Very cool. Kevin, how goes it? Good. Glad to be with you. We started the call commiserating about the climate catastrophe that is looming upon us, and we are now hunting for something that will put smiles on our faces rather than frowns. Okay. Well, don't just plaster on a smile too fast, right? Before you read the whole IPCC report and decide we're actually trying to do something about that at choice flows. So you had to look at what we were doing with pandemic. So now we're trying to look at something that's analogous to that with choice experiments for climate on what you would actually be able to do and choose gamified to choose your carbon footprint as a person and or a business. So stay tuned. Sounds good. Sounds really good. Okay, but going to the more fun part, the gardening part, I love knowledge gardening that term. And for the first year after being here for 25 years, I was actually able to grow a tomato in my garden, right? After years of failure, I had a good crop this year. Excellent. It's been delicious. And the store ran out of Buffalo, Mozzarella, because everybody was harvesting their tomatoes at exactly the same time. Perfect. That's funny. So I'm going to back back to grim for just one second. I'm going to share a cartoon that passed by yesterday, the day before that really got me. Yeah. You could replace the second frame of this with a lot of incidents. Yeah. Yeah. But then again, the fact is that our country was founded on an imprint of adolescent rebellion, wanting to break away, and the imprint is stuck with us. And we continue to have a large portion of the population that's stuck in adolescence, does not understand interdependence, doesn't want to understand it, they want to be independent. And as long as you have that frame, you just don't care a lot about anybody else. Good point, Kevin. I mean, the idea of freedom is I can just do whatever I want. Plato and Aristotle would define there's no freedom unless there's an other. Being alone on a desert island, freedom is literally doesn't matter, right? It's all about in relation to other. Hey, if you're on the island, you better have somebody bringing you some food, some care, some tanks of gas, right? Because it's pretty bad living on an island without having some stuff brought in. That Plato and Aristotle's point is living alone like that. You're not even really quote a human being anymore. You might as well just be an animal when you're doing that. Without the polis, without society, without the group, humanity doesn't even really technically exist anymore. And so this very childish adolescent view of freedom that is being maintained, which is essentially, I can throw my rattle wherever I want, literally as a freedom almost for animals. It's not a freedom for human beings. So, I mean, it's also digging back into this psychology that had its heyday probably 25 years ago. In transaction analysis, we have a government set of entities that are talking to the population like their children. And the fact is, you are not going to successfully communicate to the population if you talk parental to adults. They are not going to willingly take the role of being a child. So, you have to establish an adult-to-adult conversation, which we have been somewhat unwilling to do. So, I mean, we need a different methodology for doing that. Or just say, look, this is the way it's going to be. You're going to have to do it the way we do it in Singapore. We're in control. You'll do what we tell you to do day to day, and you'll just have to suck it up. But that isn't the way that we're wired either. That ain't going to go over very well. That ain't going to go over so well. I wanted to take your point about Desert Island, by the way, Kevin, because literary theory, there's endless analysis of Robinson Caruso. Because when Robinson Caruso was written by Daniel Defoe, I mean, it was literally, that guy was born in the 1600s. You have individualism and capitalism. This guy is on the Desert Island with all these stores from the ship, a slave. And if you actually analyze that novel, there's a lot of sickness in there. Interesting. You just saw that they're actually kids that did land on the island. They were, close to New Zealand. Instead of reverting back to the, we're all going to become each other. They were pretty civil to each other. And it's because they had a different cultural imprint. And they were able to live it out. And so the original novel of savagery and return to the primitive state didn't happen. The butterflies did not happen. You're absolutely right. I posted that on Facebook. It's hilarious. I think I got two likes, you know, by Jean, of course. Thanks to you, Jerry. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of hope in that. These kids did wonderfully actually. In the spirit of, good, good, good post there. Like it. Good to see you, my friend. Yeah, good to see you. In the spirit of sort of positive stories that might help. I'll post this link to our chat. George Monbeaud, you probably all know about, he's a journalist, writes for The Guardian and a bunch of other places written some books. And he says some other stuff about rewilding that I'm not crazy about. But this is probably the best TED talk I've ever seen. Or like right up there. And I'll tell you why. So let me go to our Zoom. Actually, let me first go to my brain and show you why. So here's what I did with his talk in my brain. So the new political story that changed everything. And he basically says that the neoliberal story pushed aside the Keynesian story that existed before. And the Keynesian story was, and all these stories, sorry, all these stories begin with disorder affects the land. And he makes a he does a very nice job of punctuating the speech by saying disorder affects the land. And every time he says it, it gets funnier as he goes through. And so in Keynesian story disorder affects the lands caused by the powerful and various forces of the economic elite, which have captured the world's wealth. The hero of the story the enabling state supported by working class and middle class people will contest that disorder by redistributing wealth and through spending public money on public goods will generate income and jobs restoring harmony to the land. That was the story that Keynesol that saw us through World War II, up until the neoliberal story which pushes that aside and says disorder affects the land caused by the powerful and various forces of the over mighty state whose collectivizing tendencies crush freedom and individualism and opportunity. And the hero of the story the entrepreneur will fight those powerful forces roll back the state and through creating wealth and opportunity restore harmony to the land. And then he says, and progressives have shown up with no new story. The problem here is that a story can only replace by a better story. And so he offers up what he calls the restoration story. Disorder afflicts the land caused by the powerful and various forces of people who say there is no such thing as society, who tell us that our highest purpose in life is to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin. The heroes of the story us will revolt against this disorder will fight those are nefarious forces by building rich engaging inclusive and generous communities. And in doing so will restore harmony to the land. And so I connected that up to rescue a whole bunch of different things. You'll see the bigger context here. I will then unshare but I found this really simple and compelling and I found his presentation of it astonishingly crisp and clear. Like this talk is like sentence by sentence just very, very beautifully done in my own. One after that is there's disorder in the land. Hold on though. One at a time. You go. I'm just saying that the one after that is the earth, the day the earth stood still, you know, there's disorder in the land, right? And the agent that is causing the disorder is human. So we're going to get rid of them so that earths are concerned. That's the alternate plot. That is the that is the alien story, which we want to try to avoid actually. Yeah, go ahead, Bo. So is that the link for it? And that's all I want. Is that the link for it? No, I have not pasted the link yet. Here's the link for his talk. Thank you. Yep. Yep. Yep. And I'm going to also post the link to what I did for to his talk in my brain. Because this is what I do with stuff I like. And it's part of what I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure out still how to get paid to do jujitsu on information and communities. And, you know, by weaving this context by making by making a better memory for society that we can actually build ideas on instead of always ripping through the same ideas over and over and over again, which is what consumerist individualist mass media society has done to us. A narrative that fits nicely his restoration narrative, by the way, because it's about we create a generous generative commons together that we can all thrive on. Okay. And I'd love to help do that. Love to. Tom, hate is really interesting. And then I try to read ministry for the future. I'm stuck in the early chapters. I'm thirsty every time I pick it up. And I'm not and he's not Faulkner. So I'm not like getting engaged in the writing. No, it's one of his least, I would say. On the other hand, I think he presents important ideas that we do not want to present or even think about, such as the need for black ops, which more and more people are thinking of. So, and I think he knows he's gone out on a limb that way. But I think, you know, people feel like kind of necessity. That's definitely worth thinking about. That's what good science fiction does, right? Yeah. But yeah, as it's not, yeah, it's not Faulkner. Yeah, he gets into this very kind of pedantic. I'm going to dump information on you every now and then. But there's also I didn't stick with the book, but I ended up doing it through audio book and found it more digestible that way. And the last three or four chapters are actually where it becomes much more hopeful. Everything comes together. All the black ops and the rewilding and everything. And the how do we have a monetary system that's based on carbon sequestration, for example, these ideas when you put them all together can create this perfect future. That's what he was trying to do. I think he kind of did the boil the ocean approach, which is what turns off a lot of people actually boil the ocean being an appropriate metaphor here as well. Yes. Yeah, so this I collected a whole bunch of different things about the book, but I haven't finished reading the book. It's in my kindle queue alongside way too many books that look really interesting that I still need to read. Yeah, jump to the last few chapters if you want to feel better about it, because the narrative, you know, the plot line with the different characters is so there's so many of them. Yeah, it's hard to get engaged in all of them. So just jump to the solution section. I wish Neil Stevenson had written this book. He was simply related. Is he? Oh, good. Because I read like the Baroque cycle, the three big book cycle. I remember like back in the day when I traveled, I always carried a big book. And for a while it was the Baroque cycle, one of the three volumes. And then the last volume of that cycle stayed on my night table for like two years, one centimeter from the end, because I didn't want to exit the world he had created for me. So I just didn't want to finish it. But also he has this way of weaving characters and plot in ways that are fantastic. And I remember reading a page where a plot was not moved forward at all. But I looked up and I was like, thank you, Neil, because the prose on the page was just so fun and beautiful. Like the writing, he had just really, really cared about the writing page by page. So anyway, I'm a huge Neil Stevenson panel. So one thing I want to mention, speaking of the land or this harmony in the land, Canada just got a new Governor General, Mary Simon, who's a Inuk woman, so the first Indigenous Governor General. So I send her a letter which kind of condensed a lot of thinking I've been doing, which really, which is about the last mile problem, which is that there's a gap between ideas and institutionalization and action. And I know institutions are a bad word. But if you don't institutionalize, you're nowhere, basically. Yeah, organized. What's her name? Organized, you know, Mary Simon. So she's the current Governor General. So here's the interesting thing. There's a saying, which I know has been in some movies and so on, the king and the land are one. I could also say queen and land are one because in Canada and in Commonwealth countries, the Governor General represents the queen of that country, not the queen of the UK, although it happens to be the same body as the queen of the UK. But queen and land are one. Governor General represents queen, so might as well mash together queen and the Governor General. And the Governor General represents the land directly. Now the land, of course, is a very important person in the indigenous thought. So I think there's a way here to bring in indigenous language and perspectives. And it's in some ways, it's crazy, like, you know, how do you change governmental institutions? Well, I think we're in a crazy period. And we need a way to bring ideas and governance together. And in particular, the land is basically the entire ecosystem. And there's also the regional and the state and so on. And so you want someone to be its voice in a seven generations view, because we have our like we're about to have another, you know, federal election here in Canada. You know, there's short termism is a problem. So in principle, this is a role that could be, you know, you can make a judo move on it, essentially. You know, chop it. Yeah, be like water. Be like water, yeah. So and then, you know, there's various things that fall out for me. You know, to have a long term perspective, you need something like a ministry for the future. You need a body that's concerned with that, and then that can feed into actual legislation, you know, with a long term view. Now, the Commonwealth countries, I think have this potential, even the UK itself, especially with maybe Prince Philip, not Prince Philip, Prince Charles, you know, being very eco minded and so on. So and then, you know, there's various other fallouts because, you know, perhaps one of the ways we need to start thinking more is of the land as a not just legal person, because we have this pathology of corporations as legal persons, but also as sentient beings. So we can distinguish them from legal persons, including, including AIs as possibly legal persons, but not sentient. A couple of things. The stupid misreading that has turned into corporations or legal persons has been hacked and used to create legal rights for the land in several places, like in Ecuador, the land has seats in their parliament, and things like that. So that's kind of interesting. I like the hacking of terrible legislation to make something better out of it. Second thing is, it turns out that when you look into indigenous ways of knowing, many of them are completely embedded and intertwined with their language and their land, like completely intertwined, like they're inextricable, inseparable. And when you push people off their land, you're breaking a lot of their cosmology and their way of being in ways, which I guess might be obvious, but also I've got a bunch of thoughts in my brain about how indigenous peoples, aborigines, and then in the North and South America, domesticated the landscape, not individual species or plots of land. That when the first fleet shows up in Australia from England, if you read their journals, they're writing like, you ride your horse into the forest and there's an apple, it's like a gentleman's garden. There's an apple up here and a gourd down there. And they attribute this just to Australia being a really cool place. They don't attribute it to the labors of the locals whom they consider to be heathens and brainless and lazy and stupid. But like the whole landscape had been domesticated, then Europe brings sheep and start growing sheep everywhere because, oh my God, this is a great place to grow sheep. That's what we'll do to make money. Sheep eat that whole landscape up because they're just pre-grazing the sheep. The sheep basically destroy the spin effects that's been planted over here on purpose. All the things that were curated that were manicured on purpose to take care of the land are just basically wiped out. And so so much comes down to land use, land ownership, exclusivity, the idea of ownership versus stewardship, all those kinds of things really like ate the world years ago. I might add that I don't have a problem with the notional idea of corporation functionally being a person. What I have difficulty with is that we don't fully apply all of the implications and laws because you need to be able to put the corporation in prison if they do something sufficiently wrong. And if that means that the only way to do that is to put all of the people who work for that corporation in prison for some period of time because it's the corpus that acted in a way, then that needs to be the deterrent. You need to be able to carefully choose who you choose to associate with. And strangely enough, like LLCs and corporations are intentionally structures to take liability away from the individual. I got that, but I'm saying that you embrace the corporation as person analogy and you can't just take the good parts and throw away the parts you don't like. You have to decide that you're going to take the thing, swallow it whole and apply everything that you would apply to that artificial construct that you would apply to an individual human. I agree. Mark, you were going to say something? Oh, I forgot what it was. I was just kind of brooding again about 3.5 degrees by the year 2100. So A, survival and B, maybe a bit of thrival. How do we do that? But I guess for me, it's working locally. And here in Nova Scotia, I think I'm in a somewhat privileged place compared to a lot of the rest of the world. I mean, yeah, we are a target for hurricanes. And yeah, we are starting to grow more and more wine here. What kind of wine do you grow there? Well, there's been, I mean, started with ice wine being one of the main things. And the Annapolis Valley has a whole bunch of vineyards. There's Luckets Vineyard, Whites, Rosais. Yeah, I mean, we have a winery region here in North Carolina, but they grow muscadine grapes, which makes a very sweet wine. And it's an acquired taste. So I'm just curious, what would grow in where you are? No, I think it started out with the ice wine, but it has broadened out. Seems like ice wine is a clever thing to grow there because it gets cold fast. And hey, look, here's our crop coming in. I was looking at photos from a few years ago at my former house with three feet of snow. I just don't see that anymore. So has anybody formulated escape plans? From one place to another on Earth or from Earth? I think from Earth it's hard to do because when you pay the half million dollars for the ticket on this base flight thing, everybody notices. So that's kind of hard. Well, it's a temporal issue again. How long are you talking? I'm going to Iceland next week. I'll be getting my passport. America blows up in the next election cycle. An Icelandic passport? Really? My mother's Icelandic, so I was born there so I can get one. And Iceland is in the EU or not? Nope. Oh, it's not? Why not? It has like EU rights, but they have their own currency. So I think it's sort of like, it's like Sweden. They have participate, pretty much follow the rules. They don't use the euro. And they're not a Schengen country either, right? They're not a what country? Schengen country. It's a subset of the EU. It might be. I think that's why they had that really interesting banking bubble. They were a tweener. That was very embarrassing. And you know, a country of 250,000 people, the guy running the central bank was a politician, not even an economist. And he pretty much walked out and said, oh, I'm going to support that bank, but not that bank. It was a complete melee. It was like a sophomore mistake. But I was, yeah. But the good news about Iceland is that their bankers went to jail. That's right. Like Iceland actually took measures and put people away for the shit they pulled during the global financial crisis, which other countries did not do. Like our country handed the system back to the banksters. Yeah, including one of my cousins. He went to jail. That's right. I heard everyone's a cousin in Iceland. They are. That was the next dynamic I was going to explain. You do something untoward or sleazy in that smaller country. Essentially, you better leave anyway. You can't walk down the street with all people going, hey, there's the asshole. That's what happens to you. It's interesting. It's more tribal. You can't hide. You can't hide. And you would think that that would cause better behavior. Oh, it does. It manifestly actually does. Well, I mean, during the global financial crisis, a lot of men went from being fishermen one day to being like global investors in derivatives the next day and made a fortune and then like took the whole country down the tubes. Right. And the women were like, dudes, that was not good. Is that a version of so long and thanks for all the fish? Sort of. Yeah. When they went to their buying bench, it just made me I couldn't believe it because I'm like, what does Iceland have to pledge as an asset? Energy, energy, geothermal, clean, green energy. Oh, I know about that. In fact, they're doing a lot of mining going on. Right. Bitcoin, crypto mining right now up there. I mean, I think I told you guys a story that April and I spoke at a conference in Reykjavik and the day before leaving, we got a tour of a data warehouse in Kefalvik, which is the former NATO air base right next to the Reykjavik airport in Kefalik. And we walked through this warehouse where they had knocked out the far wall and just put air filters in it because there's a standing breeze over Iceland. So half the energy for a data warehouse, they were just getting from the air because AC is expensive for energy. And 80% of the servers in that warehouse were Bitcoin miners. Mika, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm sorry. I'm late. That is all right. We've been trying to reimagine the future as it sits from this strange perspective where shit is hitting fan worldwide. Sounds like last month. It does, doesn't it? I mean, it's actually a topic that's hard to escape, I will say. Unless we were like a comedy troupe trying to write our next musical, which we could turn this into, which would be like fun. You know, if we were some global version of the capital steps. Stop the world I want to get off. Something like that. Something like that. Mika, can you update us on the legislation going through the Congress right now? Like, past the Senate? I don't have any inside dope for you. I mean, you see the same thing I see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something's happening. That's good. I'm more obsessed with my home state at the moment. Ah, okay. Your guests are going out through a little bit of wrenching through mails. What's your governor's step down? Finally, what I mean, I don't know. Is anybody else here from New York or care, but lived in New York? Yep. He's dominated our politics for more than a decade. And I do think the ramifications of this are pretty big because we, it's a New York is a blue state that hasn't really gone as far as it could go because of how he's wielded power. So it's possible we will do a lot more fairly soon on things like healthcare reform, climate change, that, you know, they've been bottled up to suit his political needs. And he ruled, I mean, he really ruled by fear. And so we have a generation of politicians who acclimated to a bully as the guy who was running the state. I mean, this is a guy who was so petty that minor bills that would pass the legislature innocuous things, you know, let's to provide a special vaccination service for airport workers. The bill was sponsored by the lead sponsor was one of his political enemies, a Democrat, a critic of his. So what he does is he doesn't sign bills when they pass. He waits until the very end of the legislative year. And if he wants, he can just veto things. It's not a pocket veto. He just vetoes them. And, you know, we didn't think it was ready. It's an incredibly petty but powerful use of the pen, which is all these legislators know their pet projects are all beholden to his whim. It's a very dysfunctional way of running things. What kind of a politician was Mario? Well, was he a mentor? Was he like this as well? Is this one of the family or is this like? It's complicated. I think someone who's a psychologist could help explain the dynamics between, you know, powerful, highly successful fathers and their son's desire to earn their respect and love. Because I think in, you know, we have two types of male politicians, the ones that don't have a father and the ones that are trying to live up to their fathers. Bill Clinton doesn't have a father. You know, Barack Obama didn't have a father. Donald Trump had a really mean bastard of a father. Mario Cuomo is more complicated because, you know, he comes out of the white part of Queens and his initial forays into politics are mediating a dispute, basically a very racially tinged dispute in the southeast part of Queens. And, you know, he was representing white homeowners and he mediated some kind of compromise. And that's what kind of, you know, got him attention that he had a way of bridging the racial divide. And I think he's loved by the black community because of his skill at doing that. As Governor Cuomo was a mixed bag, you know, he, one of the things few people know is he presided over the biggest expansion of prison building that New York state has ever seen. But he gave great speeches. You know, he had this national image as a counter to Reagan. You know, during the early Reagan years, you know, rising conscience of the Democratic Party. And reporters loved him because he was philosophical and thoughtful and articulate. Andrew was his enforcer. Andrew was, you know, at the age of 24, running his father's campaigns. Oh, wow. Yeah. And they called him the Dark Prince. Yeah, the Dark Prince. So he was like, I'm a manual. I have a book here. Where did I put it? Here. You'll enjoy this. This is, this just came out a couple of weeks ago. Wow. The title, right? But the, you know, when, when one of Cuomo's opponents was Ed Koch, and Andrew is widely believed to have been behind a, behind a whispering campaign that the slogan was vote for Cuomo, not the homo. So, you know, he's cultivated a reputation of, of brute force bullying. And I do think it's good that that's over, you know, and I think for men, it's interesting that we're all men here today. It's also a reckoning moment of, you know, that, that this way of running your office, you know, even, I mean, all the details in the allegations were corroborated. But part of it, it was, you have these other enablers around him were like, politics is tough. This is just how we work. You know, and I think what we're seeing is the, the younger generation, including younger legislators are like, no fucking way. This is not how things work anymore. The older legislators in Albany mostly were quiet about Cuomo's bullying. They just kept their heads down and, you know, tried to do their jobs. And it's a group of younger ones who really stuck their necks out and challenged him. Do you think Chris is going to get any blowback, right, from a family view? Yeah. I mean, but the thing is, CNN, what airs on television at night between the hours of 8 and 11 is not news. It's entertainment. Of course. So, you know, as long as his ratings are good, they probably don't care, you know, and he's, he's, he's got quite a presence. I have no idea. I really have no idea. I mean, unless there's another, you know, maybe more things will come out. But it is a good, I mean, for me, it's just the potential for New York to move forward. You know, we have a horrible relationship between the city. The mayor of New York City doesn't have home rule power. So he has to get along with the governor. The governor loved to torture our mayor. Whoever it was? Well, I think the Blasio, who was it before the Blasio? I guess it was Bloomberg. Bloomberg actually, it's interesting. I knew one of Bloomberg's right hand men. We dealt with him a lot. And he, they respected Cuomo because they work the same way. In other words, the Bloomberg operation is also a toxic one. Don't forget, Bloomberg, multiple sexual harassment claims against his company, against him. A woman came to him, an employee once who was pregnant, he told her to kill it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A total, another single man with a lot of power and comfort abusing it. Sounds like the tech world too, though, doesn't it? What was Daniel Monahan like? I went to school in upstate New York and I remember him representing and I thought, he seemed like an airy, cool guy. He did. And he's from a different time. You know? I mean, do we care to have senators like that anymore? It would be so nice to go back to it. Yeah. Colors, I like that. Reminds me of one of our conferences once where Seth Godin gave the final keynote and he walked out on stage and he had this giant slide photo of Abraham Lincoln behind him and he paused for a second and then he says, you know, we need more ugly presidents. That is the master of the one liner. That's not a joke, but a statement. He's really good at that. He's very, very good at that. Yeah. And then, you know, he gave his talk about, you know, ideas that spread wind. So make sure your ideas are spreadable. Anyway, so that's that's my report from the shores of the Hudson River. Lake Wobegon. Maybe some woe will be gone. I'm super happy for New York. Yeah. No, it could be. It could be a moment of opportunity. And, you know, we still have some very powerful industries here that want to keep things the way they are. But, you know, tell me what's going to happen in California with Newson. Yeah, that's I was going to bring that up next. Is anyone have any insight into that? Yeah, is anybody watching that? He is hanging on by a thread according to the polling. The state is evenly split between keeping him and getting rid of him. And there's a big difference between a recall election and, you know, the kind of allegations that Cuomo was facing and potential impeachment, right? True. And but I think the recall in California is almost like an emotional release. And people who will just go and be like the hell with him, the Republicans seem more motivated. That's a problem. I mean, California is the home of the ballot initiative, right? And, you know, they just love that kind of stuff. Chaos is their thing, baby. Not good. We can't afford more chaos right now. Every time we get another, you know, stupid governor and what the biggest state in the country, that would not be good. No, and the fifth largest economy in the world, which has a powered wave that's 100 years old. And California is just such an interesting paradox. I mean, they've got the brands, they've got the resources. They just can't seem to get it together. But it's not because they don't have money and brains because they do. Now, Texas has a newer power grid. It's just not a better power grid. As we've noticed. So to go back to your, I'm sorry, because I interrupted whatever thread you were on. Have you figured out what the, it's too bad Jamey isn't here today. You know, we're living through a good example. His things will be chaotic. What are those four words he has? B, B, and I brittle. I can look it up. It's his VUCA counterpart. It goes brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. Yeah. What are the ones that are in the Canadian framework, you know, complex. So simple, simple complicated complex chaotic. Yeah. I kind of like that framework a little bit better or well, they're different frameworks. I don't think I know they are. Bandy is not a matrix. He kind of framework. Bandy is like what's happening. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm reading at John Boyd's famous deck. So John Boyd was a retired Air Force Colonel who totally, totally revamped military thinking and never really wrote a book. There's a really nice biography of him. He did the Oodaloop exactly. But I'm reading through a PDF of his famous deck where he synthesizes military history and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. This is the best one that is Robert Corms. Exactly. Beauty. Read that book. It's fun reading. Totally fun. And in the acknowledgment section of that very book, Kevin, the author acknowledges Dick Cheney, who was a huge fan of Robert Boyd's, of John Boyd's. And Cheney was set deaf under Ford then later of our president. And I wrote an essay back when Bush versus Kerry, I wrote an essay saying the Republicans got inside the Democrats Oodaloop. Because if you remember swift boating, flip flopping, a whole bunch of stuff, all of which were spurious. So here is a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was in fact courageous in battle, who came home and was then courageous to say this is a terrible war, got turned into a flip flopper and a swift boat doubter and whatever else. It's like it was extremely skillful application of the Oodaloop. So my amateur theory from the outside here is that the far right has mastered a bunch of concepts like Oodaloop that are extremely useful in political combat, not just dogfights, which is where Boyd was looking when he introduced the Oodaloop. Bless you. Yeah. Well, I mean, Observe Oriented Sight Act as a short cycle and a decision making methodology, you know, has good implications if you're just trying to do tactics. It's not a good methodology for anything that's longer term, right? It's just good for, you know, a cycle that's probably not longer than 10 minutes. That's what it's designed for. Yeah, but you stay in it. I mean, I know that. I mean, after you do one Oodaloop, you do another one. You do another one, right? But also if you think about the political, like if you think about a political campaign, which has not happened in 20 minutes, it really applies well. Oh, yeah. But again, I would just say that you have to stay on message longer. But the tactics that get you from point to point and being able to be agile and reactive, right? Sure, I got that. The other point that I would make about Boyd is that before Oodaloop, his big contribution was applying physics to flying. And, you know, he has changed the architecture of what we're buying, right? Both the commercial airlines and, you know, in the fighter world, right? He did a tremendous job of telling people, look, you can't look at the manufacturer's specifications. Let me tell you what these things can actually do, right? And, you know, we're benefiting a lot, right, from his method of thinking. I would argue, in fact, the direct opposite right now, the F-35 would have him spinning in his grave. Oh, and so F-35 would not be a good, you know, because I'm not... He would hate the Osprey. He would hate the F-35. He would hate everything we're doing now. We've forgotten everything he tried to teach us. 100%. That's what I'm trying to say is that, you know, when we went into those other programs and we tried to harmonize the requirements, and then we're going to give the, you know, Marines a version and the Navy a version and the Air Force a version of the same thing. They're all under-optimized to purpose, right? And it's a 70 million dollar plane. It's insane. Yeah, the only time that ever worked was for air a flight, okay? Is they had a lot of planes, right? And you could rip the seats out and you would find underneath the seats that there were Bombay doors and their commercial aircraft, right? Just in case we need them, right? You never know when you're going to need a bomber. It's a great way to deliver your luggage straight to your house. Exactly, exactly. The AirDrop luggage system. We pick you up and drop off your luggage. Yes. I like it. Seat 14C. Nice to see you. You're home now. And they just put your luggage under your seat and just drop you out of the plane. I like it. I like it. I mean, that's a one-up on the Southwest Airlines model. Totally. You just don't have to land. Yeah, you do have to not swap seats, though, in flight. I like that. That's true. Anywho, so I'm really interested in models like UDA and a bunch of others because I think they explain a lot of the tactics and strategies that are happening on the ground now in politics and in the corporate world and in a bunch of other places that matter a bunch. And I have this amateur belief that the far right has internalized a whole bunch of psychology, sociology, media studies, everything else and understands it really deeply. And the far left is just like attacking each other. The circular firing squad is what we say. But the far left is like, no, no, no. If we're just earnest and talk to each other, it'll all work out. And it turns out that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. Newt Gingrich, by the way, is pivotal to my own history of the conservative party. So the 1964 Goldwater loss causes a crisis of conscience among conservatives. They rethink everything and start playing the long game. And the reason that state legislatures across the country are mostly read and are passing laws to get rid of actual election process and weakening the election process so that in the midterm and the next election, they might in fact be able to reverse a lot of these people's decisions is that in 1964, they started working on it. Yeah, and they had a couple of long range funders, not just long range thinkers, the states, the states, the coax, the melons, there's a whole bunch of them. Yeah, look, the left had some of that too. I mean, there are things that were created from the left. Like, like what? Pro bono law, for example. Okay, legal aid. That was created by the Ford Foundation. Just to give you one example. So it isn't like there was nothing. So when the other side attacks, at least we've got lawyers on the cheap. But pro bono law is not an offensive strategy. It's not a way to master the conversation. There are, I think there are a lot of, Jerry, this is where you and I disagree. I don't that the control of the narrative is as important as the community institutions on the ground. I think one of the ways to take back the narrative is to actually do useful stuff on the ground. Totally agree. Yeah, no, but I don't, we have a lot of people who spend a lot of time now, like George Lakoff has spawned a whole industry on the liberal side about, you know, message, how important the message is, how important the narrative is. It's a very big trend in progressive foundations these days to fund work on narrative change. And the thing is, is that my point here is that we have a last mile problem, which is that all that talk floats above people and not necessarily permeates to where we actually live and engage with each other. And whereas the right has a lot of local institutions, churches, gun clubs, homeschooling circles, you know, where people make connections that actually strengthen their commitments. And we, for the most part, outside of, you know, the university setting, don't have that. You may go to your local Starbucks and all the other people there are liberals, but you'd never know, because there's nothing about that shared experience that includes shared political identity. Totally agree. But you did get your triple caramel double heat latte though. Well, you know, they love selling the idea of Starbucks as the third place. But, you know, I'd much rather see it as a progressive bookstore that happens to have great coffee and also supports local organizing, local community activists. So, and that's what we're missing. That's part of what's been hollowed out in the last 40 years. And the Democrats and the labor movement helped accelerate that process by taking advantage of industrial forms of political power, mostly around organizing money. Yeah. So, yeah. Every once in a while, you know, and on a fairly predictable basis, you know, the non-conservative, you know, groups that are lots more progressive will pick something that's easily attackable, like defund the police as a, you know, as a thematic with as much, you know, interesting things about, you know, what you can do to reallocate resources. That's a really dumb, all right, praise, all right. And, you know, just, you know, conjures up all, you know, like, no protection for the, you know, for anyone in the community. It's just, it's just kind of like, why would you pick up the mantle of any conversation, you know, like that? It's like somebody needs to just take somebody's side and say, this is not a good meme. Well, there was a lot of debate about it. And if you haven't noticed, it's used a lot less than it used to be, but that's the hot house problem. It seems to me, which is you can, you do have places where a lot of very left-wing people hang out with each other and there's a bit of a competition to be the most pure, the most righteous. Yeah, 100%. It's very unhealthy. So the point is that it's that instinct that that's the highest virtue as opposed to most effective. The fact is that, you know, the conservative side, you know, has more embraced effectiveness than they have, right? Yeah, but I don't know, guys. I think we're in a moment where compared to when Obama was in his first year, I would say progressives are getting a ton done. And they've wielded power in far more responsible ways than we've seen in a long time. There's a very interesting dynamic between the more moderate and more left-wing sides of the Democratic Party right now. And a tremendous understanding that we don't have a lot of time, we got to try and get a lot of shit done. It's a very tough box to be in. And a toast to the infrastructure bill. Can somebody say something about what this is going to mean for broadband? I'm here with the Dalai Lama, by the way. I have one of those cups too. Oh, good. By the way, I don't disagree that, you know, the urgency and the let's get something done while we have power. Yeah. Is that's fine. All right. I'm only talking about, all right, construction of narratives. I was only talking about that. I absolutely agree that you shouldn't get, you know, boxed in by let's play nice and see what we can get done. All right. No, I mean, you've seen cycle after cycle of that and work, right? When you've got power, use it. Right. And Mika, before you joined the call, I had pointed to George Monbeo's TEDx talk. I just reposted the link about the new story. And it's all about story and how the neoliberal story pushed aside the Keynesian story and how the progressives showed up and they didn't actually have a story and only a story can replace a story and how he's offering basically a new story, which he's not inventing. He's sort of putting it together from what's actually I think happening. And I love this talk. I really like this talk really good. I just put it in the Zoom chat here. So it's the YouTube link and then my brain link, because I debriefed it into my brain. Okay. You know, Biden is going to end up, you know, being constantly conjoined because of this spending, right, with being Biden the builder, which should have been Trump's brand, you know, you know, even though he was really just a brand licensing guy, you know, at the end of the day, you know, that was the one thing he probably could have done, right, that people would have said, yeah, he knows how to do that, but he never, he never got off the dime. And you know why, Jerry? Because he was too tightly tied into the oodle-loop to get far enough out and plan and do something about it. And sorry, the thing you're talking about was the infrastructure bill or no, what? I'm talking about Trump, you know, had these infrastructure things where he's trying to pick it off, but he would use the, he would get, you know, involved in the oodle-loop of the moment of how he was trying to spin things. He couldn't get out far enough to make anything happen that was substantial. I totally agree. So, I mean, so the oodle-loop blinds you from being able to accomplish some things that require longer term, you know. So I think oodle-loop shouldn't be your overarching method for approaching everything, but oodle-loop in combination with some real clever strategy and some Sun Tzu is lethal. Again, I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying you don't get blinded by, you know, oh, we'll just do that. Yeah. Right. Even when the Marines or the Green Berets or the, you know, Navy SEALs get sent out, they have orders. They use the oodle-loop to accomplish, you know, whatever the objective is. Right. Oodle-loop without an objective, right, is chaos. Right. Well, also without trained people at the end. Yeah, 100%. So at the beginning of World War II, Germany has one of the smartest militaries there has ever been, and America has one of the stupidest. Our military, like, you can be court-martialed for insubordination for anything. It's all about chain of command. We are idiots. We're not paying attention to technology, et cetera. And Hitler inherits, does not invent, but the reconstituted Wehrmacht that comes out after World War I is actually one of the smartest militaries that ever got made. These are very intelligent people. They're scholars. They're given command intent. Like, you go do this thing over there. I don't really care how you do it. They're given extremely autonomous work units to go do stuff. The whole thing is very, very flexible and powerful. And our people are mostly idiots. We have stupid people in charge of our military. And then we slowly kind of die and learn our way through it. Well, remember Patton? Patton can hardly get the army to adopt tanks. His wife on a tank, and that pissed off the brass, because you're like, well, you're making photos of us. And then think about what, think about how the Eisenhower was just a colonel and basically Roosevelt just put him on charge and said, slaughter those bastards. And he did. I mean, they elevated a colonel basically to the top to take over because the whole structure was rotten to the core. Anyway, and these things apparently have cycles because we seem to be doing a lot of stupid things again. But, you know, I've got to go at this point. I appreciate the discussion and it's great seeing all of you folks. Thank you. Same here. Thank you, Evan. Cheers. Cheers, Kevin. Actually, same chance. Thanks, Mark. Mark, you got to go too, Mark. Yeah. Yeah. What would you say is the right book to read on the stupid American army getting smart? Oh, God. This is a mix of a bunch of things from a bunch of different places. Let me think about that and get back to you. Okay. Yeah. I'm trying even to remember where I got it from. But if you said anything unusual in the American military in 1938, you were screwed. They had no place for Mavericks. There was no outside thinking. There was nothing going on that was interesting. They were like a danger to themselves. They were just like they had their horses and their yacht clubs. Basically, it was a real nice aristocratic lifestyle. I will say that. It was a sinecure, as I guess they used to say. I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff about the Wehrmacht and the reinvention of the Wehrmacht that's super interesting there. I didn't know you were a fan of military history, Jerry. I alas, I am. Kenneth Tyler, if anybody remembers Kenneth Tyler from Retreats, he was the Seed Wiki guy out of South Berkeley. It looks like Grizzly Adams, the white beard guy. He was a fan of military history. He and I talked a bunch and would meet at coffee shops in Berkeley. A bunch of this reading comes from him about some of that. I was really hoping Jamey was going to be here today because I wanted to talk blockchain. So Jamey had an IFTF. He sent me a note saying I've got an IFTF call that overlaps. I may be able to drop in at the end of the Rex call, but I don't see him yet. So I imagine that may not happen. So Jerry, are you keeping up on blockchain and everything? Sort of. I just was watching, I was watching a seminar on DAOs, basically a Stanford University held a one day virtual thing on DAOs. And I had a nice conversation with John Vorthwick asking me if OGM opened Global Mind for my project is a DAO. And I'm like, well, I don't know, but that's interesting. And I just got to say I'm watching this conference on DAOs and it's like, they're not explaining DAOs well at all. It's just not working for me. And it's like, here's DAOs. Look, here's a list of the biggest DAOs. And I'm like, yeah, but you didn't actually, it's a stack of contracts. Yeah, not really. That's not really helping me. And so I'm sort of puzzling my way through parts of that trying to figure out how that might fit. But my idea of what open global mind is like changes every week as I have great conversations. And as we and OGM keep having interesting conversations. And so at this point, my, at this point, I'm still trying to fund this thing so that I can stand in the middle of this thing and do what I do best to make it work. And my best guess at this is that on the surface, it's a show, like a vlog or a podcast that's called Weaving the World. But that underground, it's us doing OGM-y things with the results of all of that. And basically connecting things up the way that during a call, I'll be curating in my brain. Imagine if six people were doing that. And imagine if during the call, we had a little button on the interface that allowed us to say, oh, I thought that was important. And then later that gets synchronized to the to the track, and you can actually easily go back to the to the memorable things during the call. And you can weave that into further discourse, etc, etc, etc. So trying to figure out like, how to stand that thing up. And then we had an interesting conversation last week about is OGM a movement or an organization? And I'm, is it a hashtag or is it a dot com or a dot org? And I'm increasingly convinced it's a hashtag. What if it's an ICO? What if you use a completely different funding model and do an ICO? And that we maybe pass the time when ICOs and tokens are hot and interesting, and you could just suddenly gin up a lot of money out of thin air by doing that. I don't know. What if it's a what if it's an NFT, and we may have missed that moment as well? Why would you use a scam to fund the thing? It's not a scam, Mika. Don't be so status quo. You know, I do worry about this in one respect, which is I think on the left, we're really good at weaving together ideas and bringing in everything we know. In truth, what gets a lot of stuff done on the right is harnessing emotions. And the as we're spending time weaving ideas together, better and better and better, they're doing that. So I'm looking to harness sort of eudaimonic emotions, like like collaborative goodwill, like how can we frickin fix the world before we destroy it? That harnesses a lot of emotions as well. And I think that that's a piece of what lots of groups are trying really hard to do. But everybody has a different approach, even as a whole bunch of people who are trying to fix food, right, food and soil. Awesome. But you talk to some of them, they're like, get rid of all the cows that cows cause methane. You talk to Alan Saber, and he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, cows are really important to make healthy soil. It's like, really, we can't even figure that one out. So the problem is that these things are all complicated. And people are, we're not grooved for complexity anymore. We're not, we're not happy with ambiguity. We just want black and white answers. And the far right has done a really good job of black and white answers. And floginizing and making fun of. Yeah. So it's funny, you know, I think the left uses simple ideas too. And it's just that when you're in the middle of it, like, I mean, this is what I said in my newsletter yesterday in response to the climate change report, which is scaring people in general isn't a great way to organize for positive change. It is a great way if you want to build an authoritarian populist movement, just scare people. But if you want people to, you know, be more likely to support something positive, you have to make them feel hopeful. Obama was really good in 2007 and 2008 at promoting the idea of hope that the great story of America is the hope that things will be better for me and my family and my community. And he constantly reminded people where he fit in that story, where immigrants fit in that story, how we've as a country moved in the direction of increasing opportunity for more people. It was all about not fear mongering but hope mongering. And the good thing is, is he created high expectations. The fact that he then dashed many of those expectations in governing that he didn't realize how much that created this kind of capital. And the other thing is he didn't know that the racist backlash would be as bad and big that the Republicans would so opportunistically just lean in that direction. The emotion I think we need to focus on is hope. And the hard thing is that the rational brains that are putting out the facts are scaring us. I mean, the most interesting thing about the climate change report yesterday that I was picking up was people saying, this body does this wrong by leading with the natural science portion of the report first. There are two more parts to the climate change report that will come out next year and they're about mitigation and adaptation. And there's going to be a lot more social science there about what's working. If you tell people that things are working and actually we know what to do, and it's just about phasing out fossil fuels a bit faster and electrifying a lot faster, that's a hopeful story. But not when you go, it's code read for the environment. The world's on fire and look at all these scary pictures, scare people and they behave like cattle, you know, which is they group together and they look for a leader to protect them. Well said, Nick. But you know, it's funny. I went looking yesterday for more political science on the what happens when you organize using fear versus hope and there's very little. I was looking for hard data on it and I didn't see much. But I do think that in general, we have to make hope our defining theme. I think how Reagan used hope or those narratives to get the working class to sell themselves out. Holy shit. I mean, wow. Yeah, yeah. Well, he was selling something to the white working class. Don't forget. Yeah. If this link is still working, it's worth a watch. This is a kid's philosophy slam. Okay. I'll put the link in a chat and it's kids asked the question, which is more powerful hope or fear. And like there's a seven or a 10 year old who gives an astonishing answer. Yeah, I'm hoping that link still works. Yep. It's coming up. I will look at it. Maybe I'll write some more about this. Yeah. And there's kind of an interesting thing I would I haven't really kind of focused what this idea is. But this idea that in the in the new sphere, there are big ideas that are affecting the entire society at once. The agent responsibility is a good book on how we've reframed what responsibility means. And this idea, I want to figure out what are the big ideas that are right now affecting how people behave. And one of the ones that I've seen is this idea that if you can get people to be afraid, they they opt out. And so people are really learning how to use that. And the right does that very, very well. I get almost upset when I have a neighbor in my house the other day, and I'm trying not to offend her when I'm telling her, she just goes off. No, all government is bad. You can't trust any government. I don't vote in all this. And this has become a large one of the by would a key theme in the new sphere of what is causing people to behave the way they are. Now, if we can reframe that in a way where, okay, what are the ideas that are nascent, we can promote like hope to motivate action, because right now I think that there's in a VUCA world, it is a natural response to just say, I can't understand all this, just forget it. And then when you do that, it leaves fewer people who are taking action to mold the world. And you end up with the Koch brothers having even more power because everybody else is letting them do their thing. And on the left, we've got all these great ideas, but we don't focus and concentrate our actions, the way they do on the right. Jane Mayer isn't going to write a book about the secret cabal of leftists. And I don't know where to go with this, but I'm thinking there's something. I'm sure Ann Coulter is going to. Yeah. Probably written that book. She hasn't like turned into dust or something. Oh, God. That's a really good point, Tom. I don't disagree with you that there definitely feels like there's something there. I do wonder sometimes if they looking at us would say the same thing off the right is all over the place. You know, we have too many ideas and the left is beating us. You know, they're, you know, they're about to take over blah, blah, blah. Yeah, this, this book right here, one person on one book really shows how they systematically did a lot of things to say. And if you look at their situation, they don't have the numbers going forward. But if they can do things like manipulate elections, getting everybody to doubt that elections are real or reliable, getting the people who monitor elections to be part of their team. And then I heard just in passing at NPR in the background this morning, they said that, hey, this great Biden success on getting infrastructure passed and people's energy toward voter reform is kind of waning. And so HR one isn't going to be passing. I'm going, no, that's probably one of the more important things going on right now. There is a strategy around that, that bill, which is they're going to introduce two pieces of it, which of course the Republicans will filibuster and then Schumer is hoping to have like a serious debate and vote. I still don't see how we break the filibuster. And so the best that can be expected there might be a more modest bill. But yeah, no, it feels like they've already checkmated the chance of federal legislation that preempts a lot of the state stuff. But the coordination, I don't know if it's through Alec or whatever that they're doing, but each of these states that are passing similar laws that are all drafted somehow in a very focused way is a very serious affront to democracy right now. And absolutely. And to hear that the energy behind that is falling is waning is very frustrating. It makes me want to start opting out. Yep, yep, that's another part of the problem of telling people that things are terrible, which is it creates despair, which is a demobilizing emotion. Amika, are you seeing anybody positive about the midterm election? Because I'm seeing kind of uniformly Democrats are doomed going to lose the Senate and maybe the House. I'm arguing that the Senate is up for grabs. The Democrats can actually go on the offense in some parts of the country. And I don't have a sure sense yet on the House because there's so much redistricting that has to happen. And so I've seen arguments that the redistricting won't hurt the Democrats as badly as people think. But yes, it's true that most of the time the party in power loses in the midterm. So we have to buck a very tough historic trend. In some respects, I'm sort of rooting for Trump to be scarier next year, just as a way of reminding people that they really do have to vote. 2018 was unusual, right? The Democrats came out in much larger numbers than expected. I would say the biggest variable is whether we can get young people to turn out in similar numbers in 2022 as they've done in the last two cycles. That's the one new variable. The youth vote was way up in 2020, and that trend is heavily Democratic. So if you can get young people out voting in 2022, it's just so much harder because there's no one election. There's lots of little local elections. You have to care about that. I'm sure Republicans can find a way to make young people not able to vote on election days. Why everybody just doesn't go to vote by mail countrywide? You get delivered a ballot, and good luck to you. I don't understand. I'm in Oregon. We've had mail-in voting for years. We were the first, and now there's like seven states that do mail-in voting. The majority of votes here in Colorado. It works like a dream. No big deal. Don't know why somebody doesn't just say, hey, let's just go to mail-in voting across the country. That's paper votes. They don't have to worry about election tabulation machines, blah, blah, blah. We've airgapped the counting devices that will tabulate your little black marks on the paper. It's trustworthy. Here you go. And the states that have it like it and states that have blue majorities governing them are adding it, and we're going in two different directions. That's the big story is we're just going in two different directions. But also, I think a piece of this, I think we agree on this narrative that the Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party that has realized the only way it's going to keep power and win elections is by undermining the process of elections and all the other sort of pertinent systems like journalism, like science, like facts, like debate and discourse. All those things need to be undermined, or they're just out of power for decades. It's not, and it's not new. I mean, they've been thinking that way since the Mississippi plan in what, the 1950s. Right. Yeah. So what I would just say, to merge two disparate threads, anybody who's helping them that you can somehow diffuse their power, their ability to help, that's a good move to make, which is why I'm, I see the sort of the tech sector as kind of in the middle playing footsie with the right, partly because some of them are right wingers, some of them are libertarians who hate the state. Some of them are Peter Thiel, who I think I don't understand his political philosophy either. A gay man who's in cahoots with reactionaries. But I do see the way that, for example, tech, one of the new centers of tech is Miami, which is a big open, no masks, a friend of mine who's down there, Dina Kaplan, called it the COVID optional zone. And a lot of people now are getting sick, but you've got the mayor of Miami trying to make it the center for crypto. I mean, I see the crypto movement as crypto right wing, frankly, in a lot of what it says and does and argues for. And I don't think politically it's helping. I like the fact that some people want decentralized, figure out how to decentralize power. But I don't see, I just see it as just a gigantic get rich quick scam that a lot of people are winning right now. And so it's like a Ponzi scheme. Come on in. Water's great. Look how much money I made. But if you think about who's funding the recall effort in California, and you discover seeming liberals, Jason Calacanus, you know, the that whole canisters behind the recall. No, he's funding the recall of Chesa Bhutan in San Francisco. Okay. Which is again another reactionary move, you know, basically privileged white people who think crime is up because, you know, we have a progressive DA. And yeah. So I know Calacanus from being a skinny 19 year old who used to surreptitiously drop a bunch of photocopied copies of Silicon Alley reporter on our front desk and then escape down the elevator. That's funny. Yeah, very successful. Yeah, I've known Calacanus forever from back then. And many, many years ago and early in my history of publishing my brain, he sent me an email one time and said, Jerry, I just spent an hour going through your brain. And I think I learned more about you than I would have spent in three hours of conversation. And one of the thoughts one of the thoughts he ran into is things my dad taught me. That's nice. It was cool. It was cool paying attention. But he's an interesting cat. I had no idea he's that involved in this thing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I spent some time. He and Chamath Palpatia and two other guys have a very, very popular podcast. Right. And every now and then I listened to that to sort of get a whiff of whatever it is they're smoking. Exactly. Yeah, just in the sort of what's that piece of the zeitgeist up to. Yeah. So I would say if you're worried about the next two years and you know where you, which places you, you know, you have some leverage, one place is to ask these tech people, what are you doing enabling Republicans? You know, what are you doing to prevent that? That's my two cents. I like it. I love that, Tom, you have a dog parading back and forth in your background. Is it actually a real dog? Or is it like a robot dog that's been trained like a program to walk back and forth in the background? Jerry, you just figured it out. Because this is a dog that's over 14 years old and still acts like a puppy. Oh, man, who health scares and everything. But all of a sudden he just has found the fountain of youth again. So because he's robotic. I bought my dad a robot dog. These $99 dogs, the New Yorker had an article about them. And they're giving them to more elderly people as a cure for loneliness. And what's amazing is he knows it's not a real dog. But it's a great conversation starter. He jokes with it. He's been in and out of nursing homes lately. And he's, you know, he jokes with it. They love it. It actually brings him some joy. And it's just this, you know, not even that sophisticated doll, you know, that can make a few barking noises and turn its head and wag its tail. You know, humans have the wonderful ability to see sentience in just about anything. Oh, my God. One of my college professors was the inventor of the pet rock. And, you know, they've done psychology tests where you could just show a circle in a square moving around a screen. And people make up narratives about what the intentionality is for these. In Scott McCloud's understanding comics, he has the pyramid model of or the big triangle of how we understand comics. And one of the interesting insights he like shows you is that a more abstract character, and there's like some, some comics are very lifelike, they're rendered, they're drawn very lifelike. And others are just like circle with a couple dots, kind of the more abstract, the easier it is to put ourselves in the character. And then, and then he goes into Tintin for a while, which is one of my favorite comics of all time. And Tintin has lifelike surroundings, but Tintin's face, somehow weirdly, Tintin's face is incredibly simple, like very simply drawn. And yet, the rest of it has this heavy, heavy ink line drawing that's a famous particular style that RJ kind of pioneered. And it's really pretty realistic. And I don't know how he does that. I don't know, I don't know how he manages the boundary. But very abstract faces make it easier for you to put yourself in the story. So as we devise the new progressive story, we'll make sure that our faces are blurred. More abstracted. A little bit like V for Vendetta. Oh, no, wait, that's something else entirely. Yeah. Anyway, thank you all for hanging out. I don't know where the women of Rex went. I know where one of them is, but I'm missing Susan and Kelly and so forth. So we shall see. We shall see. But thank you. And lots to think about. Really appreciate it. Same here. Always good to see you guys. Thank you. Good to see you. Bye. Bye, everyone.