 This is the Rex alumni reunion of August 2020 like an alumni club, right? Where's my sherry? Good point. Good point. So My econometrics professor at Irvine was Jack Johnston who had written one of the good textbooks in econometrics and in his file Cabinet in his office at Irvine. He had some Teo Pepe Which he would pull out now and then so he that's as close as I've actually I've Never met an Oxford Don or anything like that, you know, so that's as close as I've come to the that look and feel Okay In the day Exactly, but Peter was just describing a school. He's standing up called the scaffold which has a pun in Dutch Because it's the word of Stelling That's and scaffold also means a thesis or a proposition So as he describes it, it's a transdisciplinary school with a non-conformist tribe to help them execute their works Wow As school like as in a place where people will come on it every day to Learn with each other. No, no, it's a it's a So it's a it's a long format So do the ideas that we create like a six month expedition with the number of Sessions during that expedition like two or three per month Some online some offline We have found some really great physical locations here in Flanders that we can Start looking at like there is something called The Winter Circus Which is an old Stone building that was used in the 50s, I think as a circus with elephants Circus It was not taken care of so very recently the city of Gent refurbished it completely so it has now been Made available at what they call casco, which means that you still they still have to paint inside and to set up the rooms inside but The structure is completely finished. And so they they kept the the roughness of the walls and it has a huge Central Plaza with a fantastic roof on it that is light coming from tops so it's going to be used as a new hotspot for gents To bring together artist entrepreneurs and engineers And Our friend peter hinson that gerry knows Is one of the members of the consortium that has won the exploitation bit for that circus So they they are in the last phase There's only one candidate. So it's a little bit a procedural Kafka story, but So the final chosen partner, there's only one will get an exploitation license for 75 years of that building But they have to To the building itself is a fantastic place to bring people together. So if we would Think about that school summer sessions would happen in the building some intermediate recessions would happen online All highly facilitated with artists and I'm taking too much space. So, you know, that's okay. Um, it's a cool project. Uh, so peter's describing a building that's been refurbished in gint turned into a Performance art education other sorts of space where I guess people are bidding on using the space for for a pretty long term Which is cool And he's looking at standing up a new century school called the scaffold Um Which we were just talking about so it's quite cool How's everybody nice to see everyone? Jamia are we getting closer to doom? Oh always Today is the best day we have left Wow, you know what? You should propagate an affirmation as a meme today is the best day of the rest of my life I know that because we're heading off the cliff No, no, I'm just thinking I was thinking last night that Do any of you remember bitsmus fitz Okay, so it's back in the george w bush administration the guy named Fitz Patrick Fitzgerald whatever was some prosecutor was going after the Some folks the the bush administration and there was so much crap online from you know, ostensibly liberal quarters about You know seeing carl row frog march out of the white house and just The the day that This guy was supposed to Put out his report was referred to by a lot of liberal Political sites as fitzmus And of course nothing came of it. It was just a bust And it's all the same kind of hype around um Mueller's report Now there was there was a bit more there's there with with the Mueller report, but not much just a bit and In terms of impact not much more of an impact and You know a lot of noise a lot of potential that really went over And so i'm beginning to suspect that we're going to see the same kind of thing around all of the January 6th prosecute now investigations and the Going into reading uh moral logo All that stuff is going to be a lot of noise a lot of potential disruption And nothing comes of it except this time This is going to be see going to be seen as the thing of the kind of Of reaction that a lot of folks in the Trump administration had after the Mueller report You know the Mueller report came out that basically hey, we were exonerated It was it was all a nothing murder and just nothing to to worry about We were too completely right So imagine that same kind of reaction cranked up a hundred fold after Trump Gets off from all of this That nothing actually sticks And nothing actually is done to hold him accountable and hold his administration accountable. I think that's a That feels like a the most likely outcome in this thought of the three potential outcomes of you know Yeah, them not doing anything was really bad would be a really bad idea them doing something and Getting me actually convicted on things that it the all of the investigations being entirely successful Would have led to enormous amounts of violence In the short term Probably be better in the long term But the worst possible outcome would be going after him to To trigger a whole bunch of violence And then not getting anything out of it. And I think that's what we're getting So that's my that's my happy thought of the day. That was so uplifting um Me I cannot I cannot help but I cannot help but turn to you and say is the news actually closing around his neck or not Well, I yeah, I I think um a bit I have a different opinion than jamae. I think the What the justice department and the FBI just did is is a pretty big deal. Um, and once you Take that step It will likely follow with um more serious legal action and I do think the air is seeping out of Uh republican based support for trump that doesn't mean that trump is um is Also in decline. I don't think that at all. Um, but Uh On balance, you know, I I was um, I wrote about this on monday, uh the During the watergate scandal People didn't know how it was going to end while it was going on Right, obviously There was a great deal of uh morbid fascination You know, uh, I quoted from um slow burn this really great podcast about Well various scandals, but if you haven't listened to episode the first series, which is all about watergate, it's great Um, it actually inspired the martha mitchell show that was just up on I forget netflix or something uh gaslit But he quotes um dick cavitt and then gorf vidal talking about how uh People just needed their watergate fix every day. They you know would rush out to buy the morning paper To find out what had just happened. We didn't have instantaneous communication The way we do now No one knew how it was going to end um So I just feel like, you know, we're in that sort of All kinds of possible paths can flow from this um moment We just don't know but it is a big deal and um, I would just you know, it's funny that that's where you went because I've been thinking that The big news Triggered by joni mitchell, of course coming back Uh and being able to perform Was joe manchin um deciding to green light a pretty big investment Across a whole bunch of things that he'd been blocking now. I know it's not everything we wanted But it's a heck of a lot more than we thought we were going to get two weeks ago The green new deal was gigantic Like like included a whole series of provisions that would have changed society dramatically forever. This is big. This is really pretty huge right, although Although mixed here and there but but big Well, I would just say that we demo, you know, we on the sort of center left side of the spectrum seem to be really really good at um deflating ourselves With no help from the other side This is the unassisted to unforced errors or just You know always seeing um, you know, what isn't happening rather than what is and arguably the acceleration of Uh, you know the shift to electrification seems pretty good to me to may your way more of an expert um But I just think that uh You know compared to what we thought Where we were stuck This winter where everything was blocked and nothing was going to be done and all we had was People screaming about the end of the world and nothing changing Um, at least now we have a story that well actually no Democrats used Somehow You know with only 50 votes um have managed to to do some substantial investment Enough that you know the experts seem to say well America is is You know doing a lot Uh, is it doing everything could it do more? Yes, of course, but you don't encourage people by Hitting them over the head and telling them how awful and what failures they are Seems to me No, no, and I would agree with that. Uh, I think that there is space between You know America is doing a lot and America is doing everything. I think there is And somewhere in that space is America is doing enough Yeah And uh, we're not close to that uh, you know in part because of little little things like um The requirement to have more investment in offshore drilling And I can't remember whether there's actually coal investment, but definitely the offshore drilling investment is required as part of it um the You know some of it was political some of it is political in an in an unrelated to Not related to climate way, you know, they at this point there are zero electric cars in sold in the u.s. That that meet the criteria for the tax refund uh tax rebate because they have there is a limit on how much of the components can be produced in china and All of the all electric cars mostly because of the batteries and the battery material Uh, it currently sold in the u.s. Exceed that amount so, uh, luckily to knit luckily, uh, elan musk is going to fix the battery problem for us. So we'll be good there yeah, um Works by the way just as an aside and just to to explain a little bit of the cynicism It's now been revealed that um In in conversation that musk had with his biographer That the reason he was pushing hyperloop is he never expected it to do anything But he wanted to throw it in the way of the um high speed rail in california You want to do he wanted to derail high speed rail? exactly uh And you can have the pun um, but uh In terms of his intent with that it was purely to undermine You know that alternative mode of travel Yeah, and again, so It's hard not to be cynical in that kind of environment It's hard not to be cynical in today's environment period. I mean like takes an effort um, so Yeah, I you you are right mega that this was you know, this was a big deal Yeah, um, I think My my own reaction is that I really wish it was more. I I couldn't expect it to be more given current in current politics um What i'm afraid of and I think what a lot of people in the climate world are afraid of is that this is seen as being Okay, we've done it Now let's we don't have to worry about we don't have to spend any more money on it I don't have to get you know, deal with it anymore Oh, I don't think that's at the dc level at the dc level the dc people are always afraid of their own shadow afraid of Jumping on opportunities because who knows what the polls will actually say It's it's awful. We're gonna have more impetus As we continue to see, you know more climate degradation More people suffering and more pressure as a result. So it's You know, all I'd ask you is does the Bill do enough in your mind to create More positive incentives for the marketplace To jump Yeah, if you if you set cars aside because of the whole weirdness about the china stuff There's some really good incentives around Home home refix And in particular, it's some good support for heat pump heat pump HVAC heat pump water heaters and those Actually, we're looking at replacing our water heater with a heat pump based system because the the Uh support the financial support for doing so because they're more expensive But the financial support for doing so is improving And I I have to be careful With myself. I have to Caution myself that I am Because I have this framework in my head of um It will get worse before it gets better You know, I'm a long-term optimist short-term pessimist kind of framing It's too easy to Forget the it gets better Long-term optimist part of that equation It's too easy to get caught in the it'll get worse first or I'm a short-term pessimist first And uh, so Your response to what I had to say is actually a nice little kick and you kick in the knee about Not letting myself get too caught up in um Ironically short-term thinking The irony short term short term for me 10 to 20 years short term, okay Anyone else have a thesis or a theory of or a hope around these these issues? Jerry, could you just catch me up? What issues are we talking about? uh, yeah The the angry tangle of twine that is our politics and the earth in collapse and all those kinds of things Um and and the passage of the recent bill the inflation reduction act And its consequences and then before that we a little bit about whether the noose is closing around trump's neck or whether this is going to be another Mueller report Or a uh fits miss fits miss as jamae was reminding us from way back when Yeah um, so nobody's got a strong feeling about where this goes or a sense of some other Thread or force that's going through here. I'm really intrigued by the red tide Maybe shifting entirely that there was there was the conventional wisdom a month ago was that Conservatives were going to swamp democrats during the the 2022 midterms and that that is now I Think pretty up in the air and the local competitions as we see the primaries going all that are going actually reasonably well so and then And then and then the last two weeks have been pretty phenomenal for progressive attitudes between kansas Striking down hard a move to remove abortion from the kansas constitution. I think that's right Um to a whole series of other kinds of things One of the things kelly that really um Angers me or strikes me is that so many of the states with trigger laws now that grow is out of their way The laws they're passing are draconian. They are extreme They are way the hell out on the far right and i'm like, how did that happen? how did they preload A whole series of crazy ass laws that are going to hurt people actively who are alive that are endangering like And and it opens so many routes for contesting the laws. It's like You know, there's there's lots of avenues including Judaism, you know including freedom of religion as an avenue for for attacking dobs um I don't know. It seems crazy to me So I'm I'm sort of starting to see that conservatism is going to possibly I'm just this is just what we're thinking but drown in its own extremism as As the positions get more extreme more and more people will and you know people undecided and indeterminants and independence Will fall away from the extremist wing and say hey, I that's not what I want I might just say We I've saw some chat about kansas is that I read kansas more as a libertarian instinct right than a democratic instinct end of thought There was I saw some tweets about how the like the advertising To what against the amendment was around don't make government bigger As much as it was around preserve bodily autonomy or anything like that And we have a problem with this because No, it's just an observation. All right, some people are interpreting it as being a democratic instinct in kansas and I'm saying no, it's a libertarian instinct and You know having been born In the hospital in kansas city The The whole notion of strong women, right pioneer, you know, make it on your own is very strong there So this was you know This particular would you like to vote on taking, you know your your own ability to make your own choices away from it? No, I don't think so Which side of the border were you born in Uh I Was born in kansas city, missoula and but my family When we moved back from tulsa after the adoption. We lived in leewood, kansas so It the we dotted the the planes through That then on the memphis on chicago and then eventually new cane in connecticut There's a whole really interesting narrative. I'm forgetting which book this came from it might have been catalac desert Like these catalac desert about water in the west and how the railroads basically marketed the hill out of territories in the west That they completely knew nobody could farm Like like these were high planes may be good for grazing Some of it might actually sustain some cows most of it was not going to be good for kind of anything And they were like pimping this out because they needed to sell land to make you know They could make a whole big they could flip a buck by by selling these plots Then large land speculators waited for those farmers to go bust bought up their their plots for nothing and created large holdings Etc etc and I don't know how else it plays out But but there's this this whole kind of fiendish misstatement of what what what it was actually like to be out west and try to make a living So jerry, I'll just condense this into short. My father and his sister grew up As the son and daughter of a track foreman for the santa fe railroad Oh, wow, and they were building the second line between texas and chicago and as the line moved forward they they were actually housed in a Box car that was converted into the track foreman's residence amazing And every two or three weeks as the track moved forward They changed schools They went from every two or three weeks in new school. Wow So when we moved my dad said No sweat, you know Because he was moving all the time when he was a kid, right and made friends very easily You know, it was all You know part of hey, you know Change is good, right? Let's go. He skipped two grades When he was in grade school because he could hear all the lessons They were all being taught kind of simultaneously. So it's kind of like, oh, you know There's more to it, but It's very it's a very interesting backstory to why he ended up the way he was Do tell this story often in consulting engagements or speeches or things like that because it's a really lovely story about adapting to change or seeing changes are good Yeah, I mean when it's appropriate I mean, it's it's actually one of the When when I When I worked for the same company that my father worked for I hid those stories because I didn't want to You know Right on his coattails Right inside of a large organization. I wanted to you know Make my own way, but um You know since then, you know, I've told those stories much more often of that Um, what else is on anybody's mind? Rewilding Rewilding of the government No, actually there is I just Thanks for laughing, David um the uh a proposal in bio in the academic journal bioscience to link up 11 large national reserves to form a multi-state wildlife corridor Uh, it's a huge trunk of land um And then reintroduced the gray wolf and the north american beaver as keystone species um basically the potential for The positive transformation of the physical environment that would come from this Uh, the main downside is it would mean Um, we're moving some grazing rights, but they that they very quickly argue need to be paid for of course um, but You know, you're gonna get a lot of pushback from in the american west from a lot of people who see that land as being you know There for the cows not for anything else Yeah, I haven't I haven't seen this piece or heard of this movement although a little Maybe hints of it. Is that all connected to land back for indigenous peoples because Because one of the big problems like when ansel adams wanted to photograph yosemite They shoved all the native tribes out of there and there's nothing better for wildlife than humans who know how to manage it well And so actually declaring a whole chunk to be pristine wildlife with no humans on it turns my stomach Why I see that I see that I I see that as a huge negative Okay, I am so completely in opposition to you I I don't understand why you would say that Environment managed by humans is better for the The diversity of species and the health of the environment than You know a no human environment Otherwise untouched There's a couple reasons. Maybe this is a great or good argument. I don't know. I'm not a utilitarian but Um, first of all, these were all lands that were originally managed really well for a couple tens of thousands of years Or maybe just 15,000 years by native americans. They were doing a fine job managing the american landscape before any europeans ever showed up, uh, there's lots of that and Plenty of history and this is true in australia and north and south america all over the place And they didn't have this notion of plots of land etc. So that's one thing second Taking out sort of cutting out these gigantic tracts of lands and saying nothing can happen on them We're just gonna let them go back to the wild is is is crazy and sort of dumb, isn't it? Why no, what why is it crazy? Um, because there's a lot of things you can do that are actually really useful and good Uh, sorry Are you guys getting hung up just to ask a question on the word management? Because I think that you're You're you're potentially using the term differently Jerry's I think is thinking more along the line of stewardship and management is more like modern uh, you know applying You know management techniques right of actively manage something right uh in jamae's case. I only offer that as a thesis um I where i'm getting hung up is the thought that Human intervention However articulated Into an ecosystem would be A good thing for the ecosystem A better thing for the ecosystem than In a sufficiently large space, which this looks like it would be A lack of human intervention due to the combination of space and time, you know physical physical space and enough time for systems to rebalance In terms of the health and diversity of that particular ecosystem I'm not I don't see why human intervention however However gussied up Right would be superior to that and I and you and I've had had this argument before jerry about the The no the idea that pre-contact pre-european contact north america was um A garden of delight and not a garden of unity and innocence uh, it's Never a claim i'm making Have you are overstating my claim heavily there? Yeah Implied jerry and we've had again. We've had this conversation before um I don't I want to plant in your head. I'll just leave it at that. I want to plant in your head the idea that Completely turning over a large swath of land to nature itself. It's a waste and a stupid thing for humans to do It's just so that actually gives me a physical reaction to hear you say that jerry I love that. Um, I I want to put that in your head The notion that turning it over without humans is a waste So actually it makes me feel it actually makes me feel a little bit nauseated Sorry about that someone that I respect so much would say that Maybe the waste is the is the wrong word to use. Um, and and I appreciate kevin working on vocabulary here for us because that is helpful um, what I so There's very little land in america That is as it was before settlement right what I you know like the pacific northwest was logged out of ponderosa pine What grew in its place was fur and lodgepole and a couple other things and the ecosystem is completely different Then we have invasive species. We have all sorts of undermining of the ecology So so there's a huge deficit Of all different kinds on the land that we're trying to sort of cut away So in on the one hand humans doing the right thing gently with nature in cooperation with nature greatly observant of nature Could in fact accelerate the improvement of nature back to recover what it needs to recover otherwise Some of these invasive species are just going to take over and well good luck Over over a couple millennia maybe over a couple more than millennia It might come back to some other balance, but maybe not So i'm saying i'm saying humans knowing what they're doing working to cooperate with nature might in fact do the right thing Over and over and over And turn this into a better carbon say a carbon capture zone, etc, etc Tom has large machines nearby. So it is ironic. Are they watering the lawns? The golf lawns Oh, they do that every night, but right now it's a couple of very large blowers that don't like leaves on the course Of course, of course, um, mr. Whitzel, you've been very patient Uh, no, I think it's a really interesting conversation But I mean there's two things that I I wonder about one is I think is I made it the The separation of humans from the environment is a kind of a a philosophical mistake And so somehow it just reinforces that kind of engineering somehow there's people and there's the environment And we should mix them kind of kind of notion and and I haven't really figured out how to How to understand that because i'm pretty separate from the environment But I feel like there's probably an insight in there that it's just this idea that humans are different from You know the environment is a bad is a bad thing, you know, we should we should work on that story So the the idea of a preserve you're preserving something from humans is kind of a bad notion in my mind But but i'm not exactly sure, you know in in our current status. It's like maybe a maybe a better thing But it's still a bad thing My understanding is that it wouldn't be it wouldn't be barring the the presence of humans, you know visitors and and tourists and Researchers and such it's is barry at least according to my understanding of it It would be removing The things like grazing land farmland cattle Lumber Whatever whatever remains the lumber industry in those in those areas But in mostly to it would mostly be getting getting rid of The grazing lands for for livestock In terms of management In management in the sense of removing invasive species The article that I saw did not cover that It's most the argument in in general around we wilding is mostly to allow the diversity of the Non-charismatic species basically the insects and the you know the rodents and the the various kinds of pollinators and all of these kinds of Well feral hogs actually that got that got mentioned In particular because the reintroduction of gray wolves would be really effective against the feral hogs And you know and then that's part of part of it as well. The it is the reintroduction of the Of that larger cycle That larger circle of life I can hear the jungle I haven't read the article so I don't know the details, but you know essentially that's what we've been doing with national park Right, so we have a history. Right. I think conservation and the notion of conservation is you know Preserve the environment from the damage of the people Right, but I think Jerry's right that the people have been integrated into these environments kind of forever so at least you know as long as humanity can remember and The idea of separating them out is a is a is an engineering kind of mindset profit and not not the way I would go And and I think there's also pretty good evidence that suggests that At least in many cases just leaving the land alone kind of Um Doesn't actually lead to rapid return. You know, there's there's some interesting stuff around what happens if you compare Land that was like once plowed but then left alone Um, and then how fast does it return to some kind of a you know natural healthy state? And it's very slow It's hundreds of years. Oh, yeah, and you know, these are the notion that we can create topsoil You know like from our childhood, right? It was like how how long did you guys learn it would take to create an inch of topsoil In grad school, what's the number? Do you remember a thousand years, right? That's why I remember at least right But you can do it in a couple of years if you have human engagement, you know, so It's it's the the actually humans can actually dramatically increase the rate of improvement If we engage correctly, so I'm a little worried about this idea of Continuing the idea that the humans are always bad humans shouldn't engage Humans that kind of thing If these are complex systems Of course yeah, yeah, I My neighbor Is preserved land? Okay, uh that belongs to the north carolina botanical garden. Um, so The reason that they acquired this land Was to Keep it from being developed. It's essentially, you know when james taylor talks about, you know The still and the booze that's going into chapel hill This is still house bottom. This is where the still was. Okay So it has some reasons that they Want to preserve it as is It's never been built on other than moonshiners going down there and you know harvesting some lumber, you know at the turn of the century and previous turn of the century Got plenty of alcohol in town now um, but You know the notion is that it's a habitat for You know turkeys and wolves and other things That in the more developed parts of this region People will shoot them or uh, you know, they don't want them here Uh, you know deer population all that kind of stuff. So they all have you know access You know to this, you know 60 acres of land that will not be developed. And so there's a purpose to it. Um Do researchers go in there from the botanical garden? You bet, right? They want to see what's going on They they take measurements. They look at you know, the diversity of the species that are there. Um And we function because we live here We're stewards of that land and and make sure that people aren't going on there to do stuff that you know We would prefer that they not do So, I mean that's just a perspective. All right, and it's somewhere in between You know the gerry and the jamae right views. All right, it's a hybrid. All right Because are they intervening? Yeah, they intervene because they wrote a big check to acquire the land Right for it to have the its current status. All right instead of moving forward as town creeps out from the university and becoming New homes or condominiums or a shopping center or something else because that kind of you know pristine land Is also a great opportunity to stick something on it all right end of my My observation, you know living next to preserved land I've been a funny a fun case is I've been watching this going going to go to the national park in Mozambique And they're deliberately restoring it after the civil war And it's kind of interesting to watch the but it's a very human driven thing. I mean the restoration completely mad Well, yes It's human driven in part because of human intervention in the past Trying to figure out how do we return? The arguments around hunting in a lot of places for example, whether it's trophy hunting in southern Africa or Whatever kind of hunting in north america much of it is it is driven by You know, not just a desire to make money for whatever is a particular political entity That's nearby, but the need to call The uh called deer in north america to call old elephants in particular In southern africa because humans have decimated the prep the the top predators And so Yeah, ducks unlimited is a good example of that kind of thing It's one of the better preservers of land in the u.s. Because duck hunters want to shoot ducks um I honestly don't know if that would be Uh forbidden in this particular in this particular proposal. I don't know We don't know the details of the proposal. Yeah, right My my gut reaction to what you're saying jerry it really comes from this notion that If you come from a recognition of how complex these systems are the kinds of broader services to the planet and to human civilization that's provided by the complex diversity of these large areas of of pristine quote-unquote ecosystem And Just my own knowledge of history of how seemingly smart interventions have turned out to be extraordinarily stupid In from a long-term perspective. And so whenever when I see you talking about, you know, smart management I I get this You know, we've heard this we've heard this song before Uh, it's not something that Has worked out very well in the past. And so I'm really dubious and The to what I have seen what I have seen is that to go back to your original observation There has been some talk of Um Connecting this kind of rewilding to native alert native american spaces That is its own set of complexities You know, because what we imagine was it was like in, you know, 1491 Doesn't doesn't necessarily it doesn't at all map to what it's like right now um And I'm just My preference in a lot of these spaces would be to Yeah, get your fucking hands off of it You know stop because what because what you because what you've seen has been so destructive and I and I I agree with you that most of what's been done is really destructive I just want to put a couple things in the conversation Um, and and Doug Tompkins who died in a kayaking accident But was the co-founder of Patagonia he and Yves Chouinard bought up a whole bunch of land in South America Trying to connect a bunch of ecosystems and parks, which is very likely an inspiration For the paper you shared with us Jermay and I I like that. I'm interested for me I'm what I'm what I'm trying to talk about is a knob setting And and and the slider Uh at the far right is there should be almost no humans allowed to live on the land We can have researchers in to see what's happening. We can have tourists walk through and camp But they got to clean everything leave nothing behind and leave and you know not touch anything The slider all the way on the left is hey, let's build condos and pave over that parking lot Or make a parking lot where there used to be wilderness Hugh, uh, David Byrne And I'm saying that the slider should be somewhere with let very intelligent humans Populate the land and help manage it back to better health and that that will accelerate the shift back to goodness And and I'm afraid that most that the default setting in conservationists and other and other activists said is no no no Humans have always been shitty on the land and as as counterproof to that I want to point to the two books about australia that I put in the chat Where when the first fleet arrives in australia They walk around and if you look in their journals, they they walk through and they're like This is like a gentleman's garden. You ride your horse through the the forest and you reach up and there's an apple You look down and there's a gourd. This is a fantastic place. They credit this to nature They think they think it's a forest orchard just because it was they then released their sheep all across the landscape and it turns out that They're finding Archaeologically that there was a ring of like green all around australia, which is now mostly barren desert But but the aboriginal tribes had managed to plant spin effects and do this and do that And and there was a ring of fertility all around australia That the sheep and I never realized how powerful sheep can be that the sheep basically ate Because they were just like let go like oh my god Look, there's all this stuff we can grow wool and so australia becomes this gigantic wool producer because there's lots to eat And very quickly very quickly The forest orchards turn back into raw thicket wilderness and are not actually useful for for for what they were they're still capturing carbon as trees and whatever but But they're usefulness as as agroforestry or food culture Which is a huge and cool thing which can help a lot of people live Close to to nature in a situation that would be less prone to wildfires. God damn it Goes away. So so I think all of these things are just really like in play and we ignore the benefits of smart humans intervening at our great peril And we cut away a huge wealth of space for people to live in and other sorts of things You know plenty of space for people to live in I mean plenty of space for people to with water with water at hand where what I'm saying Really, no, there's no north america north america is really not very densely populated We have some density on the east coast density in some cities But in terms of we have a lot of space and yes, even some space with water In terms of the australia story the one there's one word I would push back hard on You said lots lots of people Would be supported by the Yeah, the Forest orchards, you know the the food production I would argue instead that the reason that The those food orchards could persist is you didn't have a lot of people And the same let the same as in north on north america pre pre euro contact you had, you know A decent amount of people a healthy amount of people not a lot of people. There is a mapping. I'm happy to impact Yeah, there's a massive impact of population population pressure and all of these systems totally But like reading that's just a really good pandemic Mika You're taking your dystopia too far And I don't think there's any evidence that suggests kind of that modern industrial agriculture is more You know calorie dense than what could be done with a with a better agriculture system So I don't think that you could you know, we we're not we're not doing efficient kind of High production nutrition agriculture. That's not what's going on So I wouldn't rule out the fact that you could do you could farm Australia and and support as many people as being supported by australian agriculture today In a much more living systems friendly way Right. I mean, I I wouldn't use today as the base the baseline of a good good product Tiny a tiny alternate. Maybe not great example of what happened, but y'all have heard of the Magna Carta, right? Have you heard of the Charter of the Forest? So at the same time as the Magna Carta was written There was a companion document called the Charter of the Forest And it basically said hey now that we're starting to sort of fence off and enclose the forest and all that We are going to preserve a series of rights and easements So for example widows are allowed to forage their pigs in the forest for acorns Etc etc and a series of sort of easements into the king's land, which you know Is just for hunting deer and whatever else but but they understood that people lived off the land in different ways Sometimes more intelligently sometimes less Humanity has a really long and ignoble history of killing itself off by oh by destroying its environments You know Easter Island being a nice like little isolated example of it But but we we're always doing that wrong so that when we learn how to do it right to me That wisdom is precious Absolutely precious because it's very hard one Right and then we proceeded to take european western Christian man Destroy all this wisdom across the earth sample it out to make sure it never arose again and still somehow a lot of it survived Thank god and and apply logical western eventually scientific rational You know golden rice etc sort of sort of technology to try to fix the problems and not see where that got us So so ximé if you say that mostly when humans have intervened intervened this way it's it's ended up in a shit show I am in complete agreement I think that's completely right and I think that it's a it's a minority viewpoint that humans might be good for the Landscape, but I'm in that I'm in that camp And I want to say how do we create a really wise core? So so years ago Arthur Brock sent me a video that was on youtube. I guess youtube existed of paul crefell Who was this guy in the middle of northern california who with a hand trowel Was just taking a video and walking around and repairing the hillsides By following how water flows and when water flows together too much it cuts a gully the gully divides up Etc etc and all he was doing was helping water pool high on the hillsides And he had like photos of you know 10 15 year progression in in his hills Where he was clearly making a visible difference and improving the hillsides and then two months later I've happened into the videos about the loze plateau in china and how the same principles were being used at Country scale meaning the loze plateau is the size of belgium and they healed it They made it green again from it being a dust bowl that was sending dust over bejing so so from that time and and and then Six months ago middle of the pandemic. I get an unsolicited email from paul crefell Who says i've decided to poke my head out a little bit and so i googled my own name and your name is the first thing that showed up Hi there And so he's shown up on a couple of ogm calls. He's very peaceful He teaches you know in a school in the middle of california, but i'm thrilled that one of my heroes was kind of attracted to What we're trying to get done and i'm trying to figure out part of what ogm wants to do is distill out the wisdom Of hey follow water drop water high up on the hillside That's a pattern language to me of how to manage soil how to manage water all those kinds of things Spread that wisdom to lots of people and then let's focus on changing tax regimes zoning regimes all these other things To actually create healthy systems everywhere So i would i would tax i would create soil fertility rewards So that any industrial farmer that is depleting the soil is going to pay a really hefty sum for the depletion of the soil There's going to be a tax on that any farmer who actually adds to the soil organic metal on their on their land Is going to get a bonus a kickback A discount a tax reduction or whatever that might be Lather rinse repeat Right, but we don't have a tax policy like that We have a farm bill that pays farmers not to farm or that subsidizes a bunch of crops We don't need and that does a whole lot of stupid things and then we bundled like snap into it for some stupid reason Maybe so it couldn't be killed. So the other things couldn't be killed. I don't know It's how it's how the sausage gets made but but for me All of this is about how do we renegotiate the social contracts to fix the earth While taking better care of humans and the planet And so for me those options are all kind of on the table because I think that humans once knew how to do this pretty well Minus they didn't have computers. They didn't have sensors. They didn't have drones. They didn't have the inner tubes and now we do So isn't that cool And I have little confidence that AI And and science is going to solve this all by itself because that proves not to happen very well We're about to hit eight billion. We're just about to cross the eight billion mark Yeah, uh permaculture is a pattern language or I've seen some efforts to do it that way I would like to find which ones are are really viable because one of my Project goals in ogm is to take a bunch of healthy and interesting pattern languages and make them more available And then instrument them to make them more useful Let me let me explain that for one second because in the in the context of Permaculture it would play out differently and maybe more powerfully So there's a pattern language called liberating structures which nancy white and others help develop It's about facilitation of meetings one of the patterns in that pattern language is called one two four all Which means when you have a big group and a complicated topic give everybody time by themselves Pair them up put them in fours and come back to plenary That's interesting and few people have heard about this pattern because it's on some obscure Website that doesn't get much traffic. What if there was a zoom app? That was a facilitation chatbot expert that helped you and said, oh, you might want to you might want to use one two four All right now and then said if you press here I will set it up for you. I will set up the breakout rooms in zoom. I will name them I will put prompts in the chat. I will add a timer I will I will basically make it a lightweight task for you the junior and experience facilitator to run this higher level method called one two four all So that's what I call instrumenting. It's a terrible word But taking a pattern and actually making it available and then usable more usable by doing that Take that method and apply it now to wisdom about permaculture And to whatever we might learn from sensors and automation and blah blah blah. I don't know but but wow we could go crazy Turning wisdom into active betterant betterment for the planet I'm into that Like that that's what I'm hoping is out there on the horizon to do Did that make sense? Yeah Cool. Okay. Sorry for the long the long rift, but but but this stuff all fits together cool Kevin want to say more about What you're doing with the community college system? Well, I'm just saying that the We have one of the larger community college systems generally I think there are 58 campuses in North Carolina and they It's interesting that they do generate, you know, some of their own Knowledge, you know that beyond curriculum so we're taking all of the paper and getting it digitized all of the Things that are artifacts in the system and turning it into one knowledge base. All right So it's being funded by the state and so the Half of what you're discussing which is We have something. What do we know about that? Oh, well, look, here's all the things that are, you know That would light up in the system based on It's automatic because the the machine learning system that's ingesting it Was trained on the Dewey decimal system. All right, and so it's got 8,000 Of its own, you know, it's created beyond the zero to 999 it's created 8,000 more Categories, right that are, you know, in the in-betweens, you know, like the science section, you know, you know So a rate the It automatically meta tags this stuff. It does not require human, you know, it reads it and says, okay here's all the topics and it creates a Hyperdimensional fingerprint of that document, right so that it can be found and related to other things So that's half of of what you were just discussing. It does not Automatically create facilitation But I think it makes the, you know, the knowledge in that system much more accessible For facilitated discussions exploration research or curriculum development That's what I wanted to share if you want to see it at some point, you know as as it becomes real Let me know Um, thanks, kevin. Do you know if they're putting this online in some organized fashion? It will be. I mean the fact is it's being paid paid for by You know the state government and therefore it's you know, it's going to be a citizen access, right? Um you know Capability right that everybody will you know, what even if you're not attending community college you're going to have access to the knowledge base of the state community college system and That's a pretty interesting, you know You know the knowledge in the community college system is some degree less esoteric and more practical in nature. Absolutely And we're trying to get you know through Heidi since she's a master gardener We're trying to get the component of the Information that's at north carolina state included in this because all of the stuff that they try to put in the hands of Farmers and local gardeners and so on so forth. It would be great to have it accessible this way Cool love that Let's go forward. You've been freed from your Noisemakers nearby. Would you like to jump in and feel free to take us in a different direction? Sure, I'll go backwards a little bit and then take us in a different direction But having moved from Atlanta to colorado I was commuting up to boulder to work at that cbd company I used to work at and I had to get used to the fact that they had these Parts of the freeway where you had to be alert to just stop Because the migratory path of the elk and the moose go across it and they've set up these systems For them to cross the roads they get the right away. That's the default thinking here And they've developed these really clever gateways to keep cattle in but allow the larger animals to pass through And it really felt like a nice adaptation of coexisting with each other So there are ways that I have noticed that people do that It does tend to be the the larger more animals that we all love You know, it's the ones that little kids play with with dolls that that tend to get that kind of treatment You know, there's uh, they found a muskrat that nobody cares about so um And then the other thing I wanted to mention is like kevin you were just talking about universities. I've been following um, jonathan heights uh involvement with heterodox university Um, and their tagline kind of came to mind earlier when we're all arguing about What's good management should there be people human intervention everything their tagline is great minds don't always think alike And I love that, you know, it's a really nice way of thinking because their mission Is to stop this hyper Polarization that's going on and the sensitivity that the younger generation has grown up with if you've read the coddling of the American mind They're talking about how Those who are now young adults have grown up so sheltered that There are there's this general attitude that their ideas can be violence Which is not true, you know, you can't be hurt by an idea But you need to be if you believe that you need to be protected from those So you go and you go to campuses and you protest against different speakers who have viewpoints You don't like the helping to figure out number one How do we get more viewpoints into universities because most universities now are hyper polarized themselves You if you don't want to go to a liberal college, there are colleges for you But the problem is we've been sort of self selecting the whole bill bishop thing, you know, where we've sorted ourselves ideologically even at the the level of our colleges So that's one thing UNC just adopted a version of the University of Chicago principles You know to be Hey, you know, we're not going to have as many safe spaces for the ideas We'll have safe spaces for you know physical for sure, right? But you know more Ability to you know bring in, you know A higher variety and diversity of ideas We'll see how well that works out That this is a university that's been around since what 1789, all right Around here that's the only reason it was it had continuity was I think it got down to three students and one professor during the civil war And then built back up any of it It's tough because our general society has gotten to the point now where if you don't like somebody's ideas You shut them down with ad hominem attacks You don't Argue against them or try to convince them of a different way of thinking, but that's why you need to be able to teach Both symbolic logic and argumentation at a younger age because you need to be able to recognize what ad hominem attack is, right? a lot of people Said oh, we just shifted away from the issue to attacking the other person, you know And they don't know that the shift has occurred, right? So um, we have a little bit of logic blindness, right in our you know We we don't teach it. That's a shame Yeah, it's also the ability to move another person too is not a skill that we that's argumentation for sure I mean the you know the the people who learn argumentation you know at You know for practical purposes is if you go to law school, you know is that you know, I'm I have to take a position I'm going to be arguing against the other person for an outcome. Um, there are some sub disciplines like negotiation and so on and so forth, you know to some degree, you know, but argumentation in its pure form uh Again, you don't get access to something like that until you're in, you know College and it should be taught, you know to the general population probably in junior high school or early high school In my I mean In we're not going to get civics back anytime soon. So at least people should be able to, you know, communicate and argue persuasively with with each other in a way that they don't resort to an ad hominem attack, right? And they stay with the the issues There's just so much to talk about about regaining civil discourse and Council culture and how that's been weaponized and all those sorts of things. That's another huge one. Yeah, that is a big one. I um They heterodoxy university, they had a convention here in Colorado and I actually went ahead and attended it and it was Really refreshing to be around people with such great new thinking and I put a link in the chat there to a guy from Colorado State University Who I saw I went to his workshop there and I'm thinking I'm going to follow up and talk to him He's probably the brexiest person I've met in a long long time Because what he's doing is he works with uh wicked problems And one of the Kirkerson Yes, exactly. Sorry So think of something like one of the projects he used an illustration for his deliberative process is How do we allocate water rights in colorado, which is a huge issue right now? And the thing is you you have very powerful constituencies with very different opinions And all those opinions are values based you can't say that it's not we need to return the water to the land to maintain nature We need to support the animals But we also need to help grow our community and grow industry and you know that so how do you get people with these Value-based disagreements to come together and he's come up with the processes for working through those things um It's definitely something that I wanted to work with And then just something else I just wanted to share with all of you that I'm not currently employed but i'm doing some consulting and pro bono work and one of the clients that I have Is trying to say how do we fix? How we take care of children it's they don't like to say it but really they're working with the foster care system They believe the foster care system needs to be replaced And this is a huge problem. I started thinking wow. This is a great wicked problem, right? How do we fix this and maybe I can combine those two to get together? But if you look at the the latest ruling on abortion This idea of how we take care of foster children is going to be really I believe in the next few years getting a lot more attention Because guess what in a lot of states in america. We're going to have a lot more unwanted kids Yeah, or people born into families that Maybe want the children but don't have the resources to take care of them So does the state have an obligation to step in with resources because they said sorry you got to have this kid You know or if they say no, I don't want this child Where's that child going to go and who's going to manage the? Distribution of children in the future. So they have these large wicked problems And I'm trying to figure out how are we going to address this and I'm trying to help this organization say The time is now for you to start getting a public image. You know, it's aliyah is the name of the organization. It's pretty small But it's a very noble ambition because they believe families need to be supported better than they are That's the crux of what they believe the problem is Um, but anyway, that's that's when I think about what I'm doing the the first one you got there first aliyah But anyway, that's that's what I'm working on. That's what's on my head these days and Every time I start to think about what it is I want to spend my time on if I'm doing pro bono work It tends to be these rexie kind of things. So Uh, I'm back in this conversation It's great Jerry I've got to go and everyone who's great seeing you. Um Kevin. Thank you. Take care and have a great month ahead. We'll talk in september Yeah, thank you Um, peter if you could direct the conversation toward anything at all in the universe, what would you direct it toward? And you're muted. I I know the sky's the limit anything at all So anything can go I Went to visit last night Artists in plunders young guy young 45 ish That's very young. Oh my gosh. That's young His name is uh nick erving I'm going to show his So studio nick erving Thanks nick erving.com And so he's doing stuff Convenient when you first look at some of his earlier works, you see blobs Uh, which are quite huge sculptures Of polystyrene that are 3d printed So he's designing his sculptures in in 3d on this in the software And then sending it to a tree 3d print shop um But he's on this borderline between I mean, he's uh traditionally trained He's a huge fan of henry moore and A couple of other of the the british sculpture school And so a lot of his recent works If you look at it, you will think well, there are they have been generated by code But they're not They're not generated by code. They're hand-drawn in 3d As a real artist and then sent to a very advanced 3d printer shop or he's going back to Keramics real ceramics ceramics Yeah, where he's really molding or shaping the things with his hands and then putting them in an oven and And so his studio is a It's a real studio But he's super professional. I'm really uh very impressed how he's so professional from an artist's point of view And also from an entrepreneur's point of view And he's a perfectionist in everything so he has a I mean, I'm going a little bit all over the places Uh, but he is such a huge fan. Maybe I should show it somehow. It's somewhere on his website There's a couple of things that he has done recently. So and this is a booklet. I can see that So he created his own online museum, which you can find on his website It's completely self-made including the space, etc. And he has uh one of the biggest private collections of Henry Moore art books in the world So he has something like 310 Henry Moore art books There's only one organization that has more and it's the Henry Moore foundation Which has a couple of thousands And the other guy that I Met recently I may have mentioned before he's doing something that is called the arena This sounds familiar And it has a very nice book He's a very nice So the the story is that uh I mean, he's associated in I don't know in which way exactly but he's associated with the insiats leadership um At uh full-time blue And so he wants to change education He doesn't believe in that model anymore. He wants to go back to basics so basically the The one who teaches or the one who critiques or the one who has the is transferring knowledge Is just on a whiteboard or a blackboard with chalk and a small group of students gathered in an arena small arena So he went to a friend's architect and he said Can you design for me like a little arena for 25 persons? That is transportable because instead of sending people all to full-time blue I want to Ship the arena to different places in the world And then meet other people there and teach other people there and the architect said no, I'm not going to do that I said well Well, why not because I first want to understand what is your moonshot dream? And the moonshot dream that they landed on was to build a floating arena That is going to be shown at the venice biannale in november this year on the canals of venice um Why am I saying all these things? It's um And and and so both the artist he he pointed me to a couple of of other books about being an artist and doing the work So I really like the The invitation to do the work every day whether You're in the mood or not Because things happen as you start drawing and sculpting and designing and and so on and so on And associations are made so And it's in that sort of of a mindset that i'm i'm also thinking about the scaffold that I mentioned in the beginning of the conversation Which is a sort of pop-up school or whatever you want to call it Where we invited transdisciplinary non-conformist tribe of people as sort of Navigators to provoke to To Let things emerge that otherwise would not emerge if you will not let not do the work so i'm highly inspired by both persons nick and win over here from the arena And have his poster in front of me I mean he did a He did an amazing thing. He he built a cabinet And I mentioned also in the in the chat the book of james bridal things the things are related to each other The james bridal has a new book since april Which has a lot to do with what we have been discussed in this call It's called ways of being And it's in essence about non-human intelligences so the starting point in the book is talking about artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is trying to To meet to match human intelligence. But this point is Is that the real good benchmark is human intelligence the good benchmark? There are other non-human intelligences That are probably more intelligent than we are and so also the examples of that combined combining a Reservations reservation zones and making them larger so that the wolves I mean they don't stay within the reservations They really go all over the places and But he's going very far in that and he brings in the topics of Of analog computers And about randomness As a way to make decisions And so I think the whole thesis in the book which I just have finished is that a lot of the Choices we have made as humans are And how we have created computers are To help us make decisions between Two points But analog computers can inform us of other things than just What we have to decide about so it's a fascinating book and I think it's it's The work I'm trying to do it's about letting emerge to use unpaneled tones works What is present there and to create a scaffold for that it becomes possible to emerge And then do something but it's about acting as well. It's about what John Hegel calls it's about Instigating and I don't like the work creating but instigating and let flourish Impact groups in organizations, but that's what's on my mind Taking us in the direction of art And and also like and and what is intelligence And how should and how should we use our understandings of intelligence to design our future? right Where where the default setting is oh human intelligence is the is the bar and we Should just make things sort of like humans and one of those quests which I consider sort of silly is agi sort of Artificial general intelligence or androids that look and act exactly like us, which is like why are we wasting a whole lot of time doing that? and for example in contact with As part of the advisory team I put together there is a young german architect young lady from Just stood there. She's a vr architect Andrea ion kojo kura kura With a really really very solid philosophical background as well So the discussions we are having is that vr is not interesting In the context of what i'm trying to do what she's trying to do is not interesting as trying to replicate reality So to give the example of the winter circus that I mentioned before which is an arena sort of you It's very tempting to recreate that In a vr environment and let people run around with their avatars in that sort of thing and just do exactly the same things that they do today In a physical environment, but that's not interesting so how can you use vr to Bring people in an environment where they Become aware of other skills and other possible behaviors and then Learn those and come back like I mean you can easily imagine that you are Putting in an environment where you are an octopus with eight arms. So what would you do with eight arms? And so once you have that knowledge you come back the james your your mutes Thank you. Sorry. Uh, you know the term skewnorf, right? you know it's basically a Physical instantiation. Okay, so you all know what it is The kind of vr that replicates physical reality is a kind of skewnorf It is a way of introducing People to this new technology. There's new particular interface With a language a pattern language that they already recognize and they already understand I Would expect that a lot of people that quite a few people would find it very confusing and upsetting To find themselves as an octopus with eight arms in vr because they have they've barely wrapped their minds around how do I control myself in vr as myself And so until that has become normalized You recognize how this works Those you know the Overlapping of vr virtual reality and physical reality becomes is a is a necessary step for a lot of people I just see it as a as a well as a skewnorf. And so I I think ultimately you are absolutely correct. Absolutely Uh, but I but I wouldn't be so so quick to disparage The utility of having um a mirror world When you were talking about the ceramics I've been taking a ceramics class and a lot of what you said really kind of ranks true I was just making a simple statue. You know, it's not going to be a thing fancy It's just a crow but as I'm making it the wing fella And I'm thinking oh dear it's broken. I thought my professor's like it's not broken It just wants to be a different shape than you want it to be And so why don't you work with the clay to come up with a compromise? And now I have a statue of a bird with a broken wing And it's just really interesting. I did another one where I did a dragon head and I got into that flow state where I realized hours had gone by and then I look at what I created and I go I almost felt like I It was something that had just appeared to me at that moment I don't really remember the the creating process for half of what I did Um, but it's been a real joy doing this I took another one where I saw a picture of a cubist painting that Picasso did of a picture You know water picture And I thought why don't I make that and do a 3d product? And it's nothing like what he created. It's nothing like Uh an ambition I had it just came about um, so anyway this the the art Conversations very interesting and then just one note on the the work that you were sharing It's interesting to see what he's doing in the sense that as our technologies emerge Artists are some of the first to figure out what the hell can we do with this? Because his type of art could not have existed long ago And we did that all the time and it's just I would love to see a history of What artists have done with different technologies? Some technologies don't change. I would say ceramics is probably the oldest most Probably the first things that humans did to create was mold mud Uh painting another one that hasn't changed much but a lot of this other stuff is Now that we have computer aided design What can we what the hell can we do with it? And people are just experimenting and I love it Yeah, there there is a An initiative I think from the 50s That it's highly inspirational for me. I think it's called EAT Experiments in art and technology And those guys were involved by the way don't they were involved by the building of the coca-cola Pavillon in in the 50s So they were working with artists and engineers and creating with the latest technologies all sorts of crazy things So there's a lot there of what what they're doing with that but what I loved in the book that is Information that I found that is describing is is at a certain moment They flipped or the change gears and they said We are not going to Say to the engineers This is what the artist has dreamed up And just you built a technology to make it happen No, they flipped it around and they asked and I think it's a fantastic question. What do you have? So they asked to the engineers. What do you have? And that is the starting point for the artist to starting it. What can I do with it? So it's just that sort of Changing gears and trying to imagine the big future And starting from an empty plate. It's starting from what do we have? That would be interesting in a in a scaffolding school to start with that and ending up with The really fundamental biggest question Is what do you really want? Texas That's one that's in that's interesting It reminds me of a thought I had while we were talking about intelligence because intelligence is almost a useless term because My intelligence is completely irrelevant to an octopus's intelligence. It has to do with What are what are their goals? You know, what what is it that they're trying to achieve? What do they need? And different types of intelligences will serve different goals We are and so the book the book of james The book of james bridle is full of those examples That where humans consider certain animals non-intelligent because they cannot Right basically copy human behavior But they have other behaviors that we even are not able to notice We have there was this maybe a rival where Did anyone see that movie arrival? Where these aliens come and we these linguists try to we had this like global effort To try to communicate with them because wow a new life form a different type of intelligence And it's just ironic. We're not putting that much effort into all the different intelligences that we already coexist with here on this planet Absolutely How little we know about everything Yeah But we think we know lots Well, we don't have to to manage things obviously That's what you mean by manage And and management As i'm Conceiving it there is informed by lots of lessons over time hard one by an experimental and curious mindset Meaning hey, I think this is going to happen. You think this is going to happen Can we set up an experiment or can we ask other people who tried and failed or you know, how can we figure this one out together? and and what we're missing Is an environment and I mean like an idea environment and an insight and data and knowledge environment that lets us Have that conversation in a very fruitful way Yeah That I agree with you on that We don't have that and and what I would love for example is the weaving of every speech you've ever given jamae and every post you've ever written and every book you've You've written or contributed to um With all of the same points you've made connected across the talks And then connected to other research in those areas with the ability to then dive deeper and go see what's up and And what the current state of it is and then connected to a really lively conversation about that topic right now Which happens to be on reddit or stack overflow or quora or somewhere else Like hey go if you want to talk about that right this minute go over here Um, and that would be really interesting and I think useful for civilization I'll get to work Am I asking for too much? Well a serious piece of my present quest is what would it take to stand that thing up? Because I don't I don't think that's a platform like linkedin or facebook and and one platform to rule them all I think that's terrible I do think it requires like a tom soyer Kind of mind of how do you get everybody to paint the fence? uh Which also requires some idea of defining the paint brush and the paint and the fence enough that People know what to pick up and do and where to put it And I'm finding those things pretty challenging like next week. I'll be in new york For john borthwick and beta works are running a think camp Later in the fall and as a preview of that and it's like a mixer for that we're doing a render session next week in new york and and we're just you can the The livestream will be free, etc. So if you want to watch I could post the link in our chat um But even just defining what our tools for thinking which is the umbrella for this event like what is a tool for thinking? That's a really hard question to answer accurately because in principle whenever you write using a word processor You're doing some thinking but for me a plain word processor is not a tool for thinking Nor is evernote which is a you know multi-page sort of slight power tool for writing down ideas But if you added a couple features to any of those tools they start to turn into tools for thinking right, so roam research Athens log seek Mem there's a whole bunch of these tools that look like outliners with rich backlinks And there's a bunch of people who are on board on fire about using them to write notes They're not that much more advanced than think tank was back when dave weiner wrote it in what 1985 or something silly like that Right they don't do that much more than that. It's basically think tank plus backlinks And yet those are tools for thinking And trying to figure out how to make them all work together is like a fun project You don't want a platform you want an api api some protocols are core here absolutely core And and and how do you get different tools to play together without falling to their lowest common denominator? So preserving the richness of what each of them brings to the party Because different tools are good at different things There is something happening right now that is not Directly connected to this but is an interesting parallel about How do you how do you preserve the richness? Right now if you are on android or any other system and you send me a message And not to me on my iphone it comes through as a basic sms And the sms nms all you know very basic rudimentary no matter how rich the message was you sent it only can come through to me And if you were to send it to a particular other platform any other platform that doesn't support the android Or an or an iphone Protocols it gets stripped down to its bare minimum Google is trying to push rcs which is an advanced version of sms essentially that allows for these kinds of you know encryption and rich messaging and images and all that Apple is pushing back against that doesn't want to adopt rcs because it would it would reduce the advantage it has over android The whole point of it is that Or where i'm going with this is the the stumbling block to the Inclusion of everyone's all these diverse rich presentations Is sometimes the profit motive And so it's not it there isn't a technical reason why apple couldn't add an rcs protocol to iMessage It's purely competitive advantage And so as soon as you said you know talking about Interreading these different platforms or these different approaches You know my immediate thought is okay. How do you do that without? You know running running headlong into somebody's profit advantage And so this immediately takes me back to the stories About from about how the web was the internet and the web were born In comparison to how things worked in the itu and the old standards bodies and the iso And in the old standards bodies somebody with a lot of market power would come up and say oh I've got a standard and then there'd be a lot of muscle of the kind you just described applied in those committees and generally The standard holder would be trying to wrestle a position of strategic advantage for their own spec Or isolate their own spec from everybody else and compete on hey We have the biggest market share or something like that And the internet was a way to try to avoid doing that by having the itf And working code running code and many eyes or whatever i've forgotten the phrase But but but the methodology for the internet tried to Run around those dynamics and worked for a lot of things and then sort of stalls out in a lot of places Because the competitive thing winds up jamming it so e-commerce kind of stalls out and then goes through I've watched like a step function in e-commerce where suddenly we had XML xml was a big leap forward for e-commerce right Then we had other sorts of things and and and like you can see that things bump up And so so a really important piece here is to try to figure out that dynamic to preserve the healthy competition Yeah, the competing standards and exactly How do you how do you get healthy? protocol dynamics and one of the ways Is to do this out of the limelight without a profit motive staring you in the face right away That that is one of the ways I got a book Yeah, we run over as in I have to leave so You are a book You don't look like a book um I'm no Not going to go there. All right. Okay. So it's good. Lovely to see you all. I'll see you next month Thank you. Same here My folks Rolf thanks Bye guys