 Record to the cloud. Good. This is a Rex pop-up call on Friday, July 6th, 2018. We are talking about what to do now. What should we do? And that should become a little more evident as we dive into the topic. The poem I've found to take us in is titled One of the Monkees by Nicholas Johnson, and it runs as follows. I'm one of the monkeys they've got typing in a room full of monkeys. It's a play Shakespeare wrote back in the old days they want us to write again. So we're writing a play we never read. They keep inviting strangers to watch us, and the strangers say, they wrote to be or nutty to be. They stay too long if we write something exciting, but the bananas flow like wine. We know it's a crazy morbid ranting play, a stew full of murder love, but with a noble feel. Shocked. I see hack monkeys come and monkeys go, one keeper killed my father. What should I do? I'm watching him. My teeth are sharp as steel. What the hell was that, Jerry? What would you do? What is going on here? Well, there's a way to set the tone of the melee. I know. I'm going to, hey April, I'm going to read the poem again. It's One of the Monkees by Nicholas Johnson. I'm one of the monkeys they've got typing in a room full of monkeys. It's a play Shakespeare wrote back in the old days. They want us to write again. So we're writing a play we never read. They keep inviting strangers to watch us, and the strangers say, they wrote to be or nutty to be. They stay too long if we write something exciting, but that bananas flow like wine. We know it's a crazy morbid ranting play, a stew full of murder love, but with a noble feel. Shocked, I see hack monkeys come and monkeys go. One keeper killed my father. What should I do? I'm watching him. My teeth are sharp as steel. Monkeys are a typewriter from their point of view. So unfolds our life. Maybe that's the true God of the universe we're living in right now. That or mice. I have said more than once that I'm one of the monkeys, and I'm one of the ones that whoever wrote the script really should be a lot more original than they are. I mean, there are so many tells to this story. For example, it starts with a wiener, right, and then it turns out that guy, some guy named Pecker actually has all of the dirt. He is controlled the guy who's the editor of the national inquirer. Come on. Couldn't we have slightly more original names, at least? Tom Wolf would feel embarrassed about this. It's terrible. It's like some B-level script, and somehow we got sucked into it. Sorry, are you embarrassed to be found in this plot? I just think the plot should have a lot more originality. I want a little better richer life than this. May it not be handed over to Borges for the interim, because it's just going to get worse. So who would like to put an initial stake in the sand about what to do, what should be done? Because who feels relatively strongly about where we are and which direction things are headed and whether stepping out, stepping in, stepping across, stepping out. Any of those prepositions are each different strategy proposals, right? Which one? Mika, you've been told. I can rant about this for a while, if it's helpful to you. But I don't have a particularly satisfying answer, because I feel like we are like these tiny little boats being carried by a wave that has been building for a long time. And I'd like to stay afloat. I'd like to have my other good people in the boat with me. I want us to survive. But I don't know if there's really that much we can do to alter the large, like the tectonic level forces that created these waves and that worrying about that feels unproductive. Like I think a lot about our parents' generation. My mother was, as a child, her family had to go into hiding in Belgium when the Nazis occupied the country. And she was separated from her parents. And she was with her sister. And for a number of years they were in hiding. And luckily, they all survived. And she lived through worse than whatever we're in the middle of right now. Not that I'm suggesting that it could get worse here, too. But you need to have some perspective that the moment we're in right now with our government willfully breaking up families and harming little children for no other reason that they were trying to have a better life by coming here is it's obscene, but it's still not nearly as obscene as what my mother went through. Mika's mother, by the way, is a delightful human being. Oh, that's right. She met you at PDF. I hung out with her for a while. At the end of PDF it was really, really, really nice. That's right. She mentioned she enjoyed talking with you. I also think that we like to plan for future contingencies and some of the future contingencies that I think we all sense are possible are frighteningly divergent, like discontinuous with the present would be the way I would describe it. In other words, six months from now we could be in chaos because a whole set of people decide, yeah, we're going to really fuck the American 2018 elections. And instead of going through a normal, quote, election cycle, we'll go through something that we don't recognize and don't accept. And then what? What are the odds of that? How do you prepare for that? What the hell do you do? It's all very disconcerting and it makes it very, very hard to find the best way through. I've been saying to people for a while now that we're in a deep hole and it takes a while to get out of that hole. It took us a lot of time to get where we are in the mess that we're in so we don't get out of it fast. There are no shortcuts. If I had, I guess Michael Pollan has what was his six word aphorism about eat locally, eat less meat, whatever, six words. I can't remember what they are. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Thank you. The new ones take drugs not too often. Take drugs not too often. In small doses. Small doses, yeah. Okay. So my only answer on this, I have one piece of it, which is I think whatever we do we need to build more local community that part of why the good people, whoever we are, got as weak as we are politically is because we're not connected up locally. And that the organized that power in America is always a contest between organized money and organized people. And for the most part, the people are not very organized. And there's a lot of organized people in things like evangelical churches and gun clubs. Thus, they have more power than they would have numerically. They're just well organized. People who believe in, I don't know, climate change or whatever are numerically, we may be bigger in the polls, but we're just not locally organized. So we have much less power. And the system reflects that. So my only advice is whatever you're doing, if it doesn't include a lot of building up of local meaningful ongoing community engagement around whatever the issues are that you think you should be engaging on, you're not helping. We need to get more people together in more places. And that's the only silver lining of the last 18 months is that it is happening. That millions of people have decided there is nobody else here but us and that what they have to do is get together. And that's what the indivisible groups are doing in lots of places and the women's march huddles and the, et cetera. And I think that there's some hope in that. I thought things would be a lot worse by now compared to where they are because of that response. So I don't know if that helps at all, but that's a good start. Is that the only silver lining of this weird ass moment? Are you asking me? Everybody. Everybody. Yeah. Maybe someone else jumped in. Yeah. Anybody else? So I'll restate something I think I've said on the call before, which is that the week after the election happened, I realized only in retrospect that I had set aside all my wishes for the redesign of institutions and our whole world from trust. I had set them unconsciously aside in order to vote for the first woman president of the United States. And that I had little expectation or hope that she would actually tip at the windmills of the existing bureaucracies, the big institutions, the different things, that she would be a really good care, an overqualified caretaker of the status quo. And that made me sad, but it made me realize that despite this feeling of a little bit of shudder for it, that the shaking up or shattering of a lot of institutions, I'm not completely against. I think that it opens up the cracks through which the light can shine. It's also damaging a lot of people along the way, so I don't want to take that lightly. But I think that we need to redesign a lot of things, a whole lot of things. And we weren't going to get that moment or that opportunity unless some things got opened up. And so, weirdly, bizarrely, for me one of the silver linings is, if the people breaking things don't have a great plan B, then maybe other people with good plans and good ideas that come in can actually put some roots into the sidewalks and do something interesting that picks up energy and gets moving. Yeah, I buy that silver lining too. But having just tried to be an optimist, I just would add that it's also possible that the amount of breakage we're experiencing is, while it opens up room for productive and positive experiments, it also opens up some really horrible things too. And we could go further down the downward spiral before we come out the other end. These weird coalitions of outsiders that we seem to be getting of everybody who wants to, as you put it, the caretakers versus the institutionals versus the insurrectionists, I think you've had some people put it, Ethan Zuckerman. I mean, there are important reasons why the postwar institutions got built, right? Yes. Oh, and I was sort of talking about that before you all showed up. Okay. I mean, like, and the thing is, is that the current generation, the statistic that scares me the most is this chart that shows declining support for the statement that it's important to live in a democracy, and that the number of Western industrialized countries, the support for that statement is lowest among people age 30 and below. So people 60 and above get it. They're like, yeah, they remember what Nazism was and what fascism was, and that there have to be these kinds of checks on xenophobia, and the younger generation just looks at democracy and goes, it's not working. Look at all that gridlock. There's got to be something better. I'm really glad you brought this up, Mika, because if you pay attention to international news, okay, you've got Turkey, you've got Poland, and you've got the right wing at France. You have Italy. I mean, the West, this is happening to all of us. It really is like the 1930s. It's happening to all of us. And I was wondering the other day, I tended to think about all this stuff that's happened is that the working class in America who really lost, the white working class who lost position and power and money and jobs because of globalism, okay, but then wait a minute. Every segment of whites voted for these people, and I'm like, oh, maybe it's 0708 and the way it infected the whole world. I'm just throwing it, and I don't know if it's used for us to go down and speculate about this stuff. But I think we need to realize this is a broad-based phenomenon. It's not just happening here. We've got Brexit in the UK, for example. I mean, and it's taking over the West right now. It's funny because one of the lessons of history is that we often don't reach back far enough for good lessons to history. We usually reach back to the first-hand example, and it's often not that great an analogy to the current situation. So right now, a lot of people are reaching back to fascism and the Nazi Germany, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't have a better moment in history to suggest, but I think that it's weird because the institutions we built after World War II were pretty reasonable and got us someplace. The institutions we built after World War I were horrible and basically caused World War II, right, that the remedies, the damages, the reparations, all that kind of stuff basically took us into the Great Depression, took us into World War II. After World War II, maybe that's a whole different set of institutions. And some of them are probably timed out, and I don't know that we're really looking at them and thinking, OK, which ones, which ones do we improve? How do we improve them? What do we do? But I also think this general conversation about the more macro scale change is good for informing us about what to do now, right? Because partly, should we devote some of our brain cycles to the insurrectionist point of view about how do we change some of these current institutions? What's a good way to go about it? Another one is, do we just step out and go do good things? I mean, one of the things that was so heartening, Mika, when you and I were briefly, you stayed through most of a two day workshop that the B-Taiwan people ran the Monday, Tuesday after Personal Democracy Forum, and I was there for a little bit of it. But these people are building electronic platforms that support democracy and actual discourse among citizens of a nation, and they're trying to figure out how it works and they're trying to train other countries and how to use it. And they're kind of ignoring the hurricane that's just outside the door and doing really interesting work. That's the equal and opposite reaction theory, is that the other things that you would expect to be the antithesis of what we're observing is a natural occurrence. People will do that. Well, I'm glad somebody is. Bill, your role changed locally given the last couple of years, and how much has your attitude about what your own priorities are changed in that period? Well, one thing I would observe having April travels more than anybody that I know, but for the little bit of travel that I've done and the people I talked to, is that we're clearly moving back into a multinational modality as opposed to a global one. And that means still connected, but not homogenized, which is kind of one of the things that I think people are reacting to is I don't want to be just put into the blender and consider to just be only human. I want to be human plus whatever the narrative is that connects me to local or tribal or what I'm part of temporarily. I don't have some of the same feelings that other folks, because I'm adopted. So I don't have that deep sense of lineage that others have. But the point is that that seems to be happening pretty much across the board is that we're moving into that multinational modality. And so how do you connect the multinational as opposed to the global narrative, which I think is kind of getting rejected? Kevin, I think you have a good point. I'd like to repeat that to make sure I understood it. So in Europe, you have all this anger at the EU bureaucrats and Brussels, is that what you're talking about? Well, I mean, to the degree that Brussels represents the usurper of my identity, or my cultural heritage, that you have to be like, I'm reminded of, I'm trying to remember, it was Kurt Vonnegut that wrote, welcome to the monkey house, and that everybody was going to be handicapped down to the lowest common denominator to achieve equality, right? And that, do we really want to be handicapped that way and put it into the blender? Mike, and you're in Brexit land. What's going on in your brain? I think there are things which are really interesting here. So one thing about the, we'll ignore for the moment. We can barely hear you. Sorry. Your volume is very low. Speak some more. Your volume for some reason is very low. Let me just check on my sentence. Is that any better? A little better, yes. OK. So Brexit, well, first of all, let me say, I think the first thing you have to do looking at this is to ignore facts and logic. Because it's got absolutely nothing to do with it. If you look at this, if you actually look at the real political structure of the EU, it is profoundly democratic and profoundly representative. For example, there is no law made in the EU which can actually affect the UK unless it's ratified by the UK parliament. Everybody gets to vote on what those laws are going to be and they happen by common agreement. So the facts have nothing to do with it. However, I do think that Kevin's put his finger on something which is really important. And one of the things that the United Nations failed to do and one of the things that the EU has failed to do is to deal with the problem of fractal scaling. So they can actually have a proper local representation and local identity and still be able to cope with the things which now require global participation, like global warming, etc. There is no suggested structure which is credible for how that can happen, as far as I know. There may be, but even if there was, I do think that the other aspect of this is that you have got a whole bunch of people out there who are doing everything they can to deliberately focus everybody's attention on the primitive brain, as I would call it, on the lower brain completely because they know that if they can get everyone focused on their lower brain, then they can control them really easily. So I think our biggest battle right now, the biggest difficulty, the biggest thing to solve, seems to me to actually be around how do we deal with those poisonous and poisoned narratives which are so simple and so attractive. I remember growing up as a kid and I was saying, my sister was super smart. She was older than me too, so of course she was always super smart. I said to her, you know, why, how on earth did the Germans, the Nazis, end up doing this? And she said, well, I mean there are probably lots of different reasons. One of the reasons is that if you take a lot of frustrated and pissed off people and you offer them the opportunity of gaining something through destruction rather than construction, they'll take it because destruction takes five minutes. Construction takes a long time, a lot of effort, thought and caring and commitment. There's a few thoughts. Mike, could you say just a little bit more about what you mean by fractal scaling? Because I think that's really interesting and I'd love to pass the mic to April if she'd like to jump in because she's been doing a lot of thinking on a piece of these. I was actually thinking of Stafford Beer because one of the things I've been doing is doing all these interviews around organisational design, right? And around holocracy and stuff like that. And I think one of the things which seems to me really great about beer basically is that he looked at the constitution of a human nervous system in the brain and said like, why don't we create an organisation like that? How about we do some biomimicry because hey, that's what nature's been at this for a few billion years. Maybe it's got some pretty good insights and ideas. So the whole of the viable systems model is based on the human nervous system and the brain and it gives you a fractal scaling of responsibility and action. But the interesting thing is that if you get it right with fractal scaling, the fractal distribution, then what happens is you get the synthesising, you get the synthesising entities that you need without the super attractive to psychopath pinch points of massive power and money being accumulated in particular nodes, right? Big budgets and pyramidal structures are choke points and honeypots. And they really are dysfunctional to the solution of what are mostly distributed problems. So I totally, and we've been building very large institutions with pretty centralised structures over and over and over and handing to them the responsibility to fix a lot of these problems where the responsibility should lie with us a lot. Right. Yeah, I agree. And locally. Yeah. April, would you like to jump in? Um, just briefly. So I like this conversation a lot. And I think where I'm getting, it's not that I'm tripping up, it's that where my head is and what I'm, where I can't get from here to there. And in fairness, I totally get, as I shared in the chat early on, like, I want to focus on what do we do today. However, from where I sit and travels and like having spent the last three months, most largely also in a cocoon, really thinking about some of these issues or at least this nexus, it is very, very easy to me to see the pieces coming in on the one hand, the pieces fraying and segregating. And then on the other hand, sort of like an organic cell, you know, things are dividing and coming together all the time. And I guess going back, Kevin, I agree with you to some degree, but I would actually, I don't disagree with you, but from where I see it is that we actually see ultimately, although you would really have a strong case to be like going on today's observations, I don't see where I'm coming from from saying this. Ultimately, I really think that the nation's state layer, the state-centric geopolitical boundaries that we've drawn on the globe today, I really believe that's going to be gutted. Now, maybe not in our lifetimes, but that whole middle layer is just dissolving. And the backlash we see with nationalism is because people are like, holy shit, that's happening. We have to scramble back to what we know and fight for it even harder. I think that ultimately that loses, that you might win a battle and you're going to lose the war big time. And meanwhile, what we're looking at though to build on Mika and Mike is this two-layered global, much, much more global. And it's very easy for me theoretically to get my head around what a global kind of community that might have some aspect of governance or self-governance in it is, and then much, much more local. So figuratively, I think in the future, I'm going to have a passport that's related to a city. Yeah, I'm with you there, April. And it's going to have a global identity, but that middle band just goes away and all the shit, not all of it, but a lot of the shit we're seeing today is a recognition, like a subconscious recognition that that's happening, but an utter freaking out that this may be happening so fight till we can to protect it and go deeper in it. I think it becomes a lot more like it's all Singapore, right, is that every node, like being in New York or Silicon Valley, it's a place, it's a nation state, it's an identity, it's a culture, right? And you're going to join up with that it and want to be part of that and they get connected. Right, but Miha, like your question is exactly mine, like I see that we're and I can even I think, I don't know that I would have been able to do this, certainly not a year ago, but as I've been really thinking about this hard because obviously I'm interested in this from the perspective of things like human rights and families belong together and all of that, but I'm also interested in terms of what does this mean for the future of work, talent mobility, governance, rethinking obviously government, but like there's a whole lot of really good opportunity breaking down some of these barriers that have been in place for so long. I don't mean to be short changing the pain and like all of the just the absolute minefield that exists between here and there, but I can see the breadcrumbs as to in a way how we get from here to there, but what's interesting is that Miha it's happening against this context with this backdrop which you laid out really well at the beginning which is we don't know I feel like it's a giant decision tree every day and we don't know what's going to happen three or six months from now. My strong suspicion is that the ultimate outcome is still the same of this gutting of the middle layer, but whether this requires I mean it's a really bad analogy but it's like backing out a car, Jerry knows I'm not great at it, like is this going to be a three point turn or a five point turn or are we going to get it the first time? I don't know and that's what just feels like we're being whipsawed every day, so it's hard to it's hard to get, but I still see it's hard for me to imagine a future just given the macro forces at play and obviously technology that that that this train hasn't you know it's left the station it's picking up momentum that it doesn't somehow just completely derail. Anyway too many analogies let me just go quiet there thanks Jerry. No it's really good really good stuff and the things that Mike was talking about a moment ago about the design of institutions from this sort of fractal distributed manner and a lot of Stafford Beers research and others and the viable system model and all that are actually intellectual underpinnings for the things that may well survive this epic and be the ways that we that we steer and guide what we know with one another in the future. I think there's a lot of wisdom in those those kinds of things. Let's go pragmatic for a second like good you know are we considering going and campaigning for somebody during the midterms like Dave you had a bunch of really like what do I do tomorrow and where where do I lean so that my life energy I'm putting your my words in your mouth but so my life energy is not wasted in this next cycle. Yeah I mean I was kind of thinking about what Mika was saying because I take the point that you know we have been through worst points in our lives but I was a little bit me one of the things I was playing over in my head was this image about you know the Germans in you know 32 or something like that and they're sitting there and they're watching this stuff happen and they're kind of going wow what's going on you know and and I'm wondering like Jesus what I'm doing right now I was like I'm just watching it come and then I'm gonna go oh fuck you know so so there is that and there's a fear right there I think that um and then the flip side is I think they're probably just again as you guys have gone through there there really is this breaking open and there's all these kinds of opportunity for I think really positive kinds of transition I guess I find the fear probably a little bit more motivating. Mika jump in. Yeah sorry I'm I think I'm okay now. The one thing about the Germans in 1932 I mean I spend a lot of time thinking about that period and I'm in the middle of reading a pretty interesting book right now about how the Nazis took over one town but there's this comment at one point which is that a lot of Germans would not have supported the Nazis if they knew what the Nazis were gonna do that that in the in the political battle between the Nazi party the communists the social democrats the other christian and nationalist parties that you know made up the Weimar Republic um yeah I mean Hitler was violent and racist but the there was a great deal of support for the the Nazis because they were just dynamic because they they they showed energy at a time when the established parties didn't um and not necessarily that the energy was and we're going to round up millions of people and kill them just because of who they are um so there's something to be said for the dynamism you know that this is a moment to be pushing like the Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who has just you know beat a establishment democrat in the primary and demonstrated you know something very interesting which is this is a moment where new leadership can step in fairly quickly um and capture attention and inspire and perhaps give people the sense that other there are other directions possible that's that um and it has been a moment in in Europe also where you see a lot of these new political parties Podemos, Sarisa in in Greece one of the things that's worrisome about it is when these parties start making weird alliances with the far right because they're also anti-establishment and that is creepy and that seems to be what's happening in Italy and that seems to be what has just happened in Greece as well but yeah we're all we're all you know trying to figure out where things are headed and we have as you said Jerry we have very poor analytical tools mm-hmm for for understanding go ahead which may make us actually see things less clearly yeah Mika I think your point about like the energeticness of Trumpism or is really an important point and this morning I just want to share this you know I'm a finance person and like that's my hobby it's what I've studied my whole life so I usually just read the financial times and economists and stuff but this morning I actually turned on CNBC just to listen to it now most of the journalists I actually like financial press journalists because that means they have economics degrees political economy degrees I usually am not offended by their stupidity okay and so I was listening to people I've known and I've heard for years saying things like well yeah we know terrorists don't work out but you know maybe Trump's doing something that's going to work I was hearing excuses from educated people who you know if we would be terrified about this happening with the democrats did it and they were just going along well maybe our powerful leader can do this and I was I was unbelievable I was like no so and that's what they're counting on me because your little point there not little point I think it's a big point of hey we're shaking things up there's a motion here yeah I heard that today in CNBC I was shocked interesting in the spirit of the topic of our call and also because we've been treading on Godwin territory here about Nazism and all that I just want to go back and offer a couple of thoughts on on that part of it first my mother is alive because her parents got fled Germany in 1939 in one on one of the last steamships out of Hamburg my grant I have a story I'll tell some other time about my grandfather and Kristallnacht because I think Kristallnacht in 1938 November was basically the sign that they had to get out of Dodge that that was like the sign that things were like gone and done and crap Alice Miller the Swiss psychotherapist wrote a bunch of really good analyses about why Germany was ready for Hitler and she talks about what's called poisonous pedagogy the German education system was like the Prussian military education system which we then later imported and inherited actually around that time but she basically says the Germans were ready they were more obedient than your average population and ready for somebody who came along and said make us great again in that particular way so so that that's kind of interesting because we're not we're not in that particular phase we're dumber than we normally would be but I don't think we're more obedient than we normally would be and then long ago after the wall came down I was in Berlin going around and there was an exhibit where they had taken street lights and they'd put banners next to the street lights commemorating things that led up to the Nazi era and the one that I saw had on one side a big a chess piece and on the other side if you read it it basically talked about how on this date in 1933 the Nazi Party passed the law making it illegal for Jews to join chess clubs now chess clubs don't have a big lobby right and so noses camel under tent ball rock rolling downhill whatever whatever other metaphors you want to use so one of the things we have to really kind of watch out for and worry about is sort of the creeping that the things that nobody will defend up front becoming things that nobody can answer for later on which which did happen back then and then the last thing I'll say in the in the Godwin space I wish this was like a safe harbor like it was Godwin territory but it's not it's actually dangerous territory to talk about is that the thing that should have signaled to everybody oh shit we need to all like act up and stop this was the night of the long knives when hitler and the brown shirts basically killed off all their opposition and suddenly there was nobody left by the way small side note fascism is really friendly to corporations corporations love fascism because fascism creates cartels it reduces competition it kills off the labor unions it means really high profits and guaranteed sales for corporations so corporations adore mostly fascism but the moment so in the spirit of our call if I saw the level of violence escalate more toward the night of the long knives I would completely change what I think I do day to day right now because we don't seem to be on that path and I don't picture Trump doing that maybe he can incite motorcycle gangs to do that but I don't think so I'm interested in building the alternatives like like my life energy goes up my mojo shows up I get happy and I'm connected and in the flow when I'm trying to figure out how do we help people learn anything they want at any age with almost no money how do we rethink how citizens get together and make decisions together and manage their comments how do we get more people to understand what the hell commons even are since we've all seen you know we all seem to have been trained out of them right we consume consume so so that bigger unfortunate history framing informs a lot why I think I'm doing what I'm doing day to day jerry I love what you said and I think yeah let's let's get away from the goblin territory but I want to go through the territory up people are hurting out there and I don't think more hate more division actually addresses their problems and I think this reach for you know make America great again or make Poland great again or make Italy great again or make Britain great again is an expression of that so let's deal with that but the problem is that being happy and trying to build stuff is really hard because there are people intentionally trying to break discourse and create fear and anger very much as was said here earlier like like we are easily manipulated when we're very fearful and that is a it's a it's a perfectly valid tactic even if a hateful one yeah you know this trade war stuff right now it that directly benefits certain industries and I was reading today in the final times they have they've actually excluded these extended supply chains for automakers for example so if you look the way they're doing this this is completely rent seeking by specific politically positioned and parable corporations specifically I mean I think I think it is I agree with you Jerry actually everything you just said but I do also think we need to be extremely aware of the fact that for example Mr. Putin is is rubbing his hands with absolutely over everything which is happening in Europe and in the US and there is absolutely I mean there are more and more evidences emerging every day in the UK just recent just now the lead the whole leave campaign is actually looking at five different charges of illegal campaigning there's billions of like it seems like hundreds of millions at least coming from Russia into the into the coffers of the leave campaign but no one knew about them was never properly accounted for it sure I don't think that this is not this is not this is not conspiracy theory stuff that this this is a Putin has long had a really significant desire to split NATO and to split apart the split apart the European Union as well my favorite explanation of the scenario you just described Mike is in the documentary hyper normalization by Adam Curtis where he describes Surkin who is Putin's lieutenant and that and he basically says look we're already in a non-linear war that the fact that we don't know whom to trust and that facts in the news just apparatus are being broken intentionally leaves us at the mercy of all the rest of these forces and so so the realistic cynical part of me thinks that we are in fact in a non-linear war but here's here though is is where here's a great example of what of what April was talking about earlier on about actually how all of those divisions and barriers are just actually in practice completely dissolving I I hired a guy in the Ukraine to do some animation for my for my company right and it was and I hadn't hear from him for like seven eight days and I sent him a message finally saying look do you want to do this or not and he wrote me back a message saying yeah absolutely I want to do it because I love what you're doing he said but I've been volunteering at the front and I was there with my best friend replacing tractor trails on an anti-aircraft gun and he got shot through the head so I had to take him back to his homeland Jesus boom hello Ukraine and this is to me that was like that was like yeah this is happening all the time actually there's nothing actually no matter how hard various people who want different kinds of hard try it's actually impossible to stop us talking to each other and doing shit with each other in a way which has never been possible before and that to me is part of the dissolution and fluidization of nation state which has got everyone so terrified well you know I I don't know enough about Putin to say for sure but I just read Timothy Snyder's book the road to time freedom and he makes a very scary and to me convincing argument that Putin since 2012 when he tried when he stole the election that reinstalled him as president has quite deliberately put Russia on a path to to create some kind of weird white christian nationalist eurasian union and that you know he's rehabilitated a bunch of obscure fascist thinkers and he's he's done he thrives on on a more chaotic environment and we had been vulnerable to it because our technocratic leaders told us that history was over and that we didn't have to learn the lessons of the past or even understand them you know so we may not even understand quite clearly what is the threat that we're we're dealing with and I think there's a real danger in myth in underestimating the threat yeah yeah to go back to your point about asymmetric war priority happening right and and also there's a real danger of not understanding what happened to you which is which is what I still think about liberals and the press is that is that they were wrestled to the ground and thrown off the stage by means that they still don't quite understand and and the nature of power has shifted in ways that are quite fundamental and hopefully temporary but but the left and the press don't understand how they're sort of they're beginning to suspect but but how they're aiding and abetting these new dynamics of power and I think all of that is tangly and I'm not certain about the opinions I hold on it but I think it's extremely important to understand because otherwise what we do tomorrow the ways we respond protest or do whatever might add fuel to these fires unintentionally but but you know when when when liberals do nitric liberal reactions they're in fact fueling a lot of congealing and community building on the far right the far right's going like yeah we got them we poke them in the eye again and that's what we're looking for we're actually not out to fix civilization we're out to provoke anger on the part of the people who we think broke this thing right and and that that's a battle that's a sub battle that's kind of happening in the middle of all these other other scaled battles. Bill I'm curious are you seeing these things play out in any way in your local work in local community or is this all separate from your activity or like like does this fray penetrate into what you're up to? Yes in two ways locally just within the last two to three weeks we've got a group that actually operates out of our office that is developing a blockchain by city it's called Digital Town and it's actually a public company and they've chosen Miami as I think their second rollout city the first I think was Austin but in any event what they're trying to do is essentially what I'm hearing people talk about in other words create some local control in other words so that at the end of the day it may be chaos around you in other words in the global sense but locally you've got more control more ability to create for your own community and it's literally sort of focused on the community as Miami not as Florida or Southeast Florida whatever otherwise it's relatively localized but it's to me it's it's and if you listen to the the banter of the guy's name is Rob Monster which is an amazing name for somebody Rob monster right but he's he's really into overstating I would say this class conflict um class conflict between the rich and the poor in other words he pictures of 500 foot yachts and everything and we've got it we've got to stop that and so I mean that's his core motivation but the other hand I'm I was really intrigued with that article that was sent around about the the role of mediation as opposed to other ways because I just happened to be participating in two different um programs by Thomas Hubel that is sort of like an international conflict resolution uh person and he'd had a program called meditate and mediate with a guy named Bill William Yuri who literally was active with the getting to yes Korean situation and and that together with his current thing called the hidden law and something called um transformation of stress he's really emphasizing the need for us to have a better communication so that we can at a higher level the world's more international level have this sort of sense that it's possible to create cooperation which to april's point ends up being local and this is where I get into all my system stuff with Jeremy Rifkin where he basically is is showing that the combination of the internet and everything is creating distributed cognition distributed decision making distributed opportunities all over the place for taking it away from that middle layer there was a thing we don't trust government national government etc and and bringing it home the word so that we we may not be able to trust it way over there like in wall street but we can we can trust it locally so to me it's a very interesting mixture because on the one hand that sort of meditate and mediate is is very ethereal and when I find it almost it's sort of like unsettling the sense that I've got to rely on that I mean I've got no problems to get it to work but then it appears right in front of me you know in a blockchain structure which if you look at things like hashgraph Lehman Brown he calls his company shared worlds because he's using blockchain times it's slightly different but you know this is processed called hashgraph is is creating worlds that you can rely on that you can trust that it is distributed okay so it's complicated but hell hello you know that's what we're living out these days so to me it's a strange configuration a combination of things that gives me at least some ability to go to sleep at night and trust that tomorrow there's going to be something around you know that we can work with I love that thank you Bill you're just reminded me of an article I read in the last couple days that has nothing to do with blockchain or probably even the internet but there's a little town in Michoacán Mexico called Chiran which was completely under sort of all sorts of waves of corruption and gangsterism and drug cartel and political problems and so they basically got together and kicked everybody out they said no political parties we're not going to join the national election we're just going to sort of take over and become sovereign at our level and they did and this happened back years ago like 2011 is when this movement started and they are presently sort of autonomously governing their own their own backyard and I don't know what that means in terms of their you know relations to other entities and all that but they very much took over control over their own resources and capacities I'm happy to send some links around about about this one once the one article was from the BBC Chiran the town that threw out police politicians and gangsters from the guardian the Mexican indigenous community that ran politicians out of town anybody else with a different different angle on all this I mean one of the interesting nodes in my in my brain in my online brain is the thought I call was 2006 peak democracy and this idea that democracy has either been owned in different ways or corrupted in different ways or may by itself be unmanageable or maybe overrun by other methods and what we're seeing is autocracies in other countries that are made to look like democracies so they still hold elections they still have courts they still have some press but they weaken each of the institutions to the point where it's the appearance they go through the motions of a democracy and yet in many cases they're no longer democratic if I can use that word and think that we know what even we mean by the word democratic any other thoughts can you've been spending a lot of time in in Japan recently what do Japanese folks think about all these things happening in other places I can't hear you can you hear me now yes okay um you may have seen the article that I sent around from Tadashi Nakame an economist in uh in Japan is a private economist that Napier Collins introduced me to um there is a strong sense that in Japan that the companies themselves need to become more in tune with the other places where they do business so that there's a bit of internal transformation that's necessary to be more open to other places other cultures other ideas some of that is is being underscored by you know the the awakening that they're going to be in the middle of the Olympics in a couple of years and the world's going to come visit right uh are we ready you know for you know for that visit for people to rediscover you know um uh Japan so um I think that they're you know kind of frothy but again the you know the multicultural aspect is is clearly in play here because at the core of of this is you know a notion that only the Japanese can be Japanese right and that there's no outsider that can actually understand or grok you know who we are the best you can do is be strange gaijin right so I'm kind of you know there um I might also say that that the content evolution Federation ambassador to China um you know we're currently looking at um you know frame of the of supply chain and you know some active interest in some companies that have been operating on the end of of a purchase order to make things for other visible suppliers you know in the world that they're coming to the realization that they're going to have to generate their own demand um and as a result I think that the role of of some of those folks will be you know is that demand going to be in China which is one of the largest growth markets itself and that it will turn inward or whether they're going to try to build demand generation and brands and you know try to do that on a on a selected market you know multinational basis outside I think that that's depending on how quickly um you know this tariff situation causes things to unravel uh you know the demand will become you know more severe and more pronounced faster so those are just a couple of observations that I would uh that I'd make thank you yeah I appreciate it and it's interesting I mean it's really interesting how how many different relationships are shaken up right now compared to two years ago like how many cages have effectively been rattled how many people having to reconsider their strategies how many how many people are having to make contingency plans because supply chains will be disrupted because you know whatever else may be happening and it's it's all it all seems quite real on the ground right now it does um Mika given the conversation so far and do you want to articulate your own personal logics about what to do right now and if anybody else who wants to afterward I'd like to hear I was trying I I was reflecting on the poem that you started things with trying to figure out uh if the poem offered any uh metaphorical help any light on the subject yeah and just keep typing yeah just keep typing want to bustle right right uh hamlet sooner or later but watch out with the monkey with the gleam in his eye the monkey with the gleam in his eye he's watch out for him he's in charge now um you know I I have uh I I remain an optimist about our capacity to um you know the resilience that uh that so far the United States civil society has shown in the face of uh some very severe stresses and that um uh you know I I I still believe that it's possible for us to uh to hold the this this big tide at bay um though I I you know I I am trying to prepare myself for the possibility that we live we no longer live in the world of our parents and grandparents at all and that uh the breaking is going to keep happening at an accelerated pace um and I I you know it's like earth one earth earth two which one are you in um so I'm I'm very you know I think a lot about the idea that this resistance has to get to be more real and stronger and be prepared for bigger shocks and be prepared to take bigger steps to try and and and uh uh prevent more bad things from happening I don't think we can be complacent about you know children being ripped from their parents for example um and I think a lot of people are acting in with that in mind compared to in other situations where maybe we were complacent or we went along to go to Mike's point about the primitive brain you know the fear driven brain um a lot of us are not operating I think from the fear driven brain alone where we are trying to think empathetically as well um uh and so far the worst you know we've I think there's been more drag on Trumpism than you know him being able to come in and do everything that he wanted to do in the first hundred days maybe some of that is due to his incompetence um but I don't you know I I don't have many I mean you know if you want to know what you should do with your money between now and November I can give you a little answer which is go to a website called movement vote which is is the best aggregator of dollars going to local groups that do voter registration and voter protection and voter mobilization and they will spend the money in the best place as possible I trust them okay uh so if you're looking to just put some money somewhere and think all right at least I gave some money and maybe uh you know the the the other work that I find really interesting at the moment and it's it's really nascent are people who are trying to use some new techniques for voter persuasion called deep canvassing which is way more conversational and way more empathetic uh about making people feel heard as you try and engage them to understand where they should uh you know come down in a particular election we have a group here at civic hall which is a bunch of liberal and progressive activists from Brooklyn who are doing this on Staten Island in a in a swing district um and you know they're going to have a little bit of results to show by November about you know were they able to change hearts and minds I I think we do know I'll I'll get you the link for movement vote I think it's movement vote it's movement dot vote or maybe it's movement dot vote they've got a bunch of addresses but you know so there are there are little tactics right now that are like if you want to stick your energy where it can do some marginal good in the in the sort of fight for you know the democrats at least becoming a check on Trump's power by winning back one of or both houses of congress that's like the short term best thing you can do I think to prevent things from getting worse you'll there'll still be plenty of room for creative initiatives even if Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the house oh god please and she will not be speaker for very long believe me if she even makes it as speaker yeah um but I'll take her over Paul Ryan any day good point um a question for you before and I before going to others whoever would like to sort of jump in with me what are you doing now and why um but a question which is do you have any mental typology or taxonomy of resistance movements that are right for this context and I ask that because there's a reason the GOP is known as the party of no which to my own narrative is that they mounted a very effective resistance to Obama and Obama but the changes that Obama tried to bring they basically pursued since the gingrich revolution in 94 the the GOP basically pursued a scorched earth strategy to make sure that nobody talked to anybody that nobody compromised that everybody stayed on message the gerrymandering meant that the tea party had inordinate effects on primaries and nobody cared about generals all that kind of stuff but but there was there was a really effective ground game setup that included local elections everywhere at every level so that by the time trump wins one of the statistics that blows my mind the week after is that three quarters of the state houses are republican three quarters of the governorships are republican uh never mind president vice president and soon you know supreme court and all that that somebody had some form of resistance while not holding the office during clinton and obama that worked really well if you have kind of uh if you're willing to contemplate that a negative strategy that's probably destructive to the country worked well and and i realize that's not necessarily good language but does that make sense so from given that as background or history uh or wallpaper what what two resistance movements that might be really a viable now uh look like because as far as i know the left has not gotten those things done no and like i said it took a long time to get this week and you don't get strong again uh overnight yeah exactly i mean i the piece i wrote about obama's failure in 2008 to continue his own grassroots movement to is a big piece of the explanation of how democrats lost a thousand state house seats there were 50 000 people in obama's grassroots army who said they wanted to run for office in 2009 and they did nothing to support them wow nothing that was an opportunity lost absolutely anybody else with opinions on all of this rough fuck nice title i'm sorry i just was checking the the name it's david daly sorry okay i mean i do think i think that there is going to be turmoil necessarily surprised me if that didn't end up happening somewhat on a global level even more than it is at the moment i think that the i think when it comes down to what can we do i think it's a question of everything we everything that we possibly can to mitigate the amount of damage which is going to happen during this period of transition because there is going to be damage i don't know about that but having said that i would also say i would also say that every story that we can tell about people actually collaborating and doing things together and winning really well through doing that is a real impact has a real every time we can tell a story about how alternatives work really well we have an impact it's interesting uh mika a little while ago metaphorically used can we hold the tide at bay and i was realizing well gosh we haven't talked that much about climate change and how that might play into the whole equation and one of the interesting things that has happened is because of trump's explicit sort of denial removal from that process a whole lot of other entities have jumped in and there's a c40 cities initiative and april and i had coffee with a friend of ours who's local who's involved in c40 they're actually trying to figure out what to do and really compelling ways a lot of employees of large corporations are becoming much more activist within their walls to steer their leadership toward more ethical decisions we're seeing that happening so so i'm very interested in those movements because i think that that breakage at the top might mean much more participation at other layers where participation has been weaker and different uh mike the the chat is all saved and i will forward all of this and i'll publish the video on youtube so it'll all be there i am glad to hear that as well because i am in the car on the way to our kids wedding but i've enjoyed this this conversation i'd love to throw in just my personal take on this this question of what do we do uh i i think in this onslaught of actions and chaos that's being created uh which i think is often very intentional um those of us who are have been trained to think and even those who have been trained to think very well can be overwhelmed by the options and the emotions that come along with the options in that thinking state and that doing state so part of my my own work is moving from a question of what do i do to who am i being and in that being states how do i move beyond my reactivity um and how can i move more quickly into hard find alignment quick action so if i'm drawn to give money to the people that make it just said to not spend time calculating about it if i'm drawn to jumping into regenerative out agriculture uh to take quick action and i worry that for us so-called elites we spend way too much time calculating i'm sighing heavily nicely put top thank you what's the hand motion for sighing heavily like this i know good question i i think there's also this the universal oil boy the earth's cream of oil um anybody else want to jump in with what to do now and where you're coming from on it else i might read the poem again and take us out but i'm happy to hear um anyone else's take on this we're good all right this has been fun this has been uh a good go around i really appreciate everybody's sort of turning the soil on different parts of this question if parts of this feel like topics for another pop-up call uh send me a note and we'll we'll schedule one i'm back in i might get to talk about some of this stuff and a couple keynotes coming up so i might reach out for more help excellent sounds good please do thanks april so our poem is one of the monkeys by nicholas johnson and goes thus i'm one of the monkeys they've got typing in a room full of monkeys it's a play shakespeare wrote back in the old days they want us to write again so we're writing a play we never read they keep inviting strangers to watch us and the strangers say they wrote to be or nutty to be they stay too long if we write something exciting but the bananas flow like wine we know it's a crazy morbid ranting play a stew full of murder love but with a noble feel shocked i see hack monkeys come and monkeys go one keeper killed my father what should i do i'm watching him my teeth are sharp as steel wow at this point we should just cut off the video yeah thank you oh bo you have the best thanks everybody great call thanks bye