 in 2016. I've always thought that, you know, some number of what you might call moderate Republicans didn't vote for Trump, but didn't vote for Clinton, voted for Gary. What was his name? Bauer? I don't know. Yeah, I don't remember either. All I remember is what's a lepo. Clearly, clearly made a big impression on all of us. Yeah, but I think a lot of these people would vote Democratic more, you know, than necessarily start a new party. But it's good. I mean, you know, Liz Cheney has, you know, kind of drawn a line in the sand. She's creating a poll there that I don't think is going to go away. So that's good. But the odds of a successful, you know, John Anderson, breakaway kind of thing. I don't think so. The Peloton ate John Anderson. I mean, it would be like, if they did it, it would be, you know, it's a suicide mission. I mean, it's a deliberate effort to draw votes away from let's say Trump runs again. But, you know, I'm more worried about what happens next year, not in 2024, because if all of these voting laws go through and are held up by the courts, you may have, you know, states basically saying, well, you know, we're going to pick and decide who won. Which is what they're trying to set up, of course. Yeah. So what a third of our Congress basically is saying that the vote was stolen, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like a third of these people are standing hard on that and are willing to stand up and applaud people and like publicly go out and say this. Jerry, they're saying there are questions that need to be investigated. No, to me, it's just like they're all a bag of skeptics. Why do Democrats not say, hey, there will be no negotiation, there will be no anything unless you all sign a pledge that says the election was legit. Biden is in fact the president. And if you don't do that, we're going to go pack the court, we're going to go pack the court, get rid of the filibuster, do everything we possibly can to just run the table until you come back to reality and talk to us and just like go for it. Because otherwise, otherwise, everybody's screwed. Why don't Democrats do that? Yeah. They're Democrats. Well, this generation of leadership doesn't do that. So was LBJ and so was FDR. And those were tough bastards. Like you did not want to be cornered by LBJ. Right. But Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi neither of them are LBJ. Sick AOC on them. She's a few years from leadership. Yeah, I know. I know. Oh, I can't wait. There's going to be a lot of rich white guys on Wall Street. They're going to have heart attacks when that happens. If we're still around by then. The problem is Schumer, in both cases, Pelosi and Schumer's majorities hang by threads, right? So that's an argument for running the table when you have something. And I know the Progressive Caucus wants them to do that. But they keep worrying about whatever the, they call them the majority makers. This is what Pelosi's term is for people who are vulnerable, moderate Democrats. Right. And so they spend a lot of their time thinking about what protects those people. Because they want to hold the majority rather than use the majority. The other problem is that even, I mean, the House has voted for that big voting rights bill. The problem is getting it through the Senate. Mika, I've heard them. Can I ask you what's the probability of Republicans taking the House in the midterms? No one knows yet. It's some of it has to do with how redistricting goes. I've seen some analyses from Democrats suggesting that things won't be quite as bad because of the census, as you might think. But they absolutely are in trouble. Oh, every midterm, you know, the president's party loses seats and they don't have very many they can afford to lose. And I understand that the Trump's part of the Republican Party is supplying a whole lot of money to everybody, right? So you essentially have Republicans sort of giving in in addition to their ideological distortion. We have money. Yep. And the question is whether we can get a wave like we had in 2018 when lots of freaked out Democrats worked really hard, voted in larger numbers. But we typically don't see that when, you know, I mean, they're it's a natural response, right? It's the intensity. You can't stay that politically intense all the time. Yeah, it's exhausting. That makes complete sense. Yeah, yeah, it's really hard. I mean, I see it and I think, you know, maybe by next winter, maybe people will be behaving differently. But is anybody pulling a Stacey Abrams nationwide? You mean like trying to develop more slow conversation, slow conversations going deep, basically stop treating this as a consumer mass marketing exercise, start treating it as citizen, trying to corral citizens into citizen conversations, doing that. People's action did that. They probably did the most amount of deep canvassing in swing states. You say nationwide. And at the end of the day, even when these groups want to do that kind of strategy, the places where they're going to do it first are going to be in the swing states. So I think they're hoping. Is Texas considered a swing state? Good question. I don't know because it seems to be very tippable right now. Every two years, it gets a little more tippable. And then Florida seems to be tipping entirely the wrong way because like I think the Cuban expats basically have eaten Florida. Yes. And the Democrats, Biden did not do a good job communicating to Latinos. They're all kinds of problems. It's so bad. Like this whole thing, man, how do we get back? It doesn't ease up. How do we get back to fixing things together as humans? When was the last time we did that, Jerry? We muddle through. I saw a whole bunch of that happening in early COVID pandemic in lockdown and basically mutual aid societies, food banks. A whole bunch of people got together, whether it was sewing masks at home and figuring out who needs masks, whatever. I saw a whole lot of mutual aid and shared resources happening during a year ago when this thing started. And post 9-11. So it's the same kind of mechanism. You have people who see a crisis will act together, but as soon as things start to feel normal again, they go back to their normal behavior. Yeah. Or that there is a... The boogeyman right now is internal to this culture as opposed to it being external. And so we rally whenever you finally provoke the United States into, okay, that's enough. We're going to do World War I, World War II. You will find commonality at those stress points. What I'm asking for is, do we have any examples of being able to act collectively in a positive way without that kind of stress? Does it have to be an example in this country? Pick someplace. Oh, sure. Pick a place. There's some high-functioning things happening around the world. I mean, depends what and where. And then a lot of these things get stalled. So Iceland reinvented their constitution, rewrote it from scratch in a great way apparently. It was really good. And then Parliament failed to pass it. So it's not approved. It's not the current constitution. But they did a terrific job that doesn't need to be thrown away. It's still sitting there, right? It's just like... So it's an exemplar, all right, with potential. Yeah. What you say about my people, Kevin. That's right. That's right. You don't want bow showing up in your backyard. Yes, you already do. I don't want bow showing up in my backyard. You bet. It's not like a barbecue. And all we need to do is shrink our population by a thousand fold. Exactly. Oh, good. Oh, well, now you're into the Marvel Comics solution, right? Clench your fist and make half the population disappear. There you go. We're always supposed to be spring right now, everybody. What about spring? So how's everybody adapting to the possibility of re-entry into normal society and travel and meeting humans? Well, I want to say a couple things. First of all, I really didn't realize how wound up and anxious I was about being even in moderately gen pop. I think it's odd. It's like, I'm not really... When I go out and I just realize I'm really messed up and I don't know it. My first advice, don't get no road rates. I didn't do that. But if anybody road rates, just shine on. We're all insane right now. But I'm really shocked about how I'm not being around people. Three or four people, it's kind of a strain. I've lost that social muscle. Is it sort of like a claustrophobic kind of thing, like an agoraphobia or like pandemic agoraphobia or something like that? Yeah. I would say it's somewhat similar to that, absolutely. I do have a plan to deprogram yourself somehow or like... No. I think what I'm planning to do is we're going to start having dinner parties and just start stepping up the number of people. You're going to be coming over, Jerry. I'm so glad you're getting it. Hot damn. It's just time to start stepping it up slowly. But I was really surprised how much my muscle, my kind of social muscle is just completely gone. Yeah. Mid-pandemic, a couple of friends came through town. April was down for the count. She wasn't feeling well. So I went and met them for dinner. I think I told this to you guys a long time ago. And walking toward a restaurant to have dinner with humans in the middle of the pandemic gave me like this terrible feeling just rising up. And then we sit outside and I sit down. And the first thing out of their mouths is like, we just got over COVID. I'm like, Oh, holy crap. Could you have told me that before I started walking here? Yeah. And then, you know, they told me the story. We had a normal thing. Nothing happened. No symptoms afterward or anything. But my mind was just zooming like crazy. And when they said we just got over COVID, I had a similar response to a much, much earlier incident. When I was with New Science Associates as an analyst, I would travel with our salespeople to Europe a bunch, which was totally fun. And at one point, Justin, our sales guy and I split in the morning. I did one meeting, he did another. And then we met, I think at Ramsma, which is a tobacco company. And I meet him at the executive's office. And as I opened the door to this roomy, big office, there's a desk over here and a little circular conference table with a window behind it. And the room is thick with smoke. There was a pall of smoke that like obscures the top half of people's bodies sort of in the room. And I opened the door and I'm like, I could run. I could just run right now, or I could grin and bear it and go in, which is what of course what I did. But it was horrifying. I was like, man, I am way past the smoke thing. What is going on here? It was weird. So I had a similar kind of moment there sitting down for like normal dinner with humans. And that makes me realize that it's embedded way further in my little psyche than I think it is. So in April's like dying to travel, she's like, okay, okay, where can we start going? How do we how do we start getting out? And apparently, apparently every every campsite and rental car in America is gone for the summer, like Americans are finally like set up and heading outdoors. Yeah. And I hate to be the opposite, but I've been living in the woods for almost 30 years now. And this is fine. I'm okay with what I've had to do. I'm twice as productive, not traveling. So I get more done, right, doing what we're doing here. And I've been doing it for a long time. So this and you know, with Heidi and her current in a situation where she's on oxygen, 24 seven, you know, she's not going to be traveling. Right. So for whatever life she's got left, right, I need to be spending it right here. And it's a good thing that I've got an environment that I enjoy. So I'll just say, I'm having kind of a, you know, opposite, you know, experience, but, you know, circumstances, you know, deals the deck differently for different people. And a lot of your travel was to Japan and other places, which is like two day white butt on either end of that. Oh, yeah. And I'm still planning, you know, we're, you know, we're planning a sensory safari in Japan, you know, next year, I mean, Tokyo is ready to host the world. And they're not going to get to do it for the Olympics. So we're going to take people, you know, through, you know, an experience and presence journey. Next year, you know, Kaz is going to help with that. And you start by feeding everybody not so dofu. I can tell you what you're not, they're not going to get fed is what I got fed by the Coca Cola people, which is chicken sashimi, which almost killed that idea. Okay. Yeah, it was, I didn't know I was eating raw chicken until I contracted the campylobacter bacteria and got screened by the CDC. And they said, where'd you get that? We don't want that in this country. Whoa. So let me tell you, it was a gift though, because I stopped drinking after that because I was essentially unconscious for a month. And it was, you know, detox, right? And I just said, guess what, I'm just not going to pick it up again. Right. Thank you, Japan. It was really nasty. Do you remember what it was like to be unconscious that long? Well, when I say unconscious, the, you don't mean comatose, you mean, I don't really mean comatose. What I mean is not functioning approximately an hour and a half a day, enough to eat and then have to go back to sleep for a month. And I was lucky that I was able to get myself back home because I had all the rescue antibiotics and I'm signed up for a remote medical program, right? Where I can, you know, phone it in, right? And they can take all the telemetry and crap. But the, so I had this big kit of stuff in my backpack that had every antifungal, every antibiotic, you know, and they said, you know, swallow package B, you know, and I got home because I wasn't contagious, but I was 105 degrees and my sheets were drenched when I woke up the next morning. And it was after I delivered a speech and they had halfway through the Q and A afterwards, I just started to lose it and was, you know, disoriented and they somehow got me back to my hotel room. Crazy trip. Wow. Adventures abroad. Dickens just see me. Dick, don't eat it, all right? But I want to show people the culture that gifts raps, apples in the grocery store, you know, and just understands the out-of-box experience better than any other culture in the world. And for the most part, it's designers and the senior design teams reporting to the chairman's office, which is very unusual here. But there are pretty interesting benefits, you know, for that kind of, you know, for design thinking to have that kind of elevated status. Sounds like a great journey. I've been in Japan very little and I was just struck with the high level of competence of everybody behind the counter or everybody playing a role knew what that role was and could perform it really, really, really well. Yeah, I go to a particular hotel, the New Otani, and the matriot D at the New Otani is the same matriot D that I have seen for the last 25 years. Wow. He's been in role a lot of this. I mean, once people, you know, start in a role, they have a tendency to stay in it and get, you know, become perfect at it, which is not the way that we see things. My relatively new guilty pleasure is Sumo. I don't know if any of you are Sumo fans. Sumo is hugely interesting and there's like multiple boshos a year and they last two weeks. And I'm now like, ooh, someday I want to go to a Sumo match. I want to go to Kokugikan or whatever it's called in Tokyo. They move the boshos around the country, but it's really, really interesting and my sport is Aikido. Sorry, there's a lot of Japanophile in me. Yeah, my dad was a wrestler, but he didn't have the mass for Sumo. So what else has shown up for us lately? Just to go back to your question, Jerry, about the transition. So we both got our second shots several, a couple of weeks ago. And as soon as we were two weeks, you know, done, you know, went to visit Leslie's parents in there where they've been stuck for the last year. It was hugs all around. We just had about 16 or 17 people together for Mother's Day. Every single person is vaccinated. I mean, except for the children. And yeah, it was surreal. It was surreal, but it didn't, you know, Bo, I didn't feel the kind of anxiety that you were describing. I felt that getting on a plane last summer to take the only trip I've taken in the past year out to Seattle to see my son. But, you know, I think now it's more like echoes of stress. I am getting on a plane in a few weeks to go get my dad, who's in San Francisco, and bring him back east for a couple of weeks. And the plane ride is, you know, I'm slightly nervous about. But they tell us, you know, if you're vaccinated, the chances of getting sick are very low. And if you do get sick, you're probably not going to get a severe case. So don't worry about the COVID worry about the people who are attacking each other on the plane. I did, I have to say, I just finished listening to this fascinating episode of This American Life from about two weeks ago, where Frank Luntz is hired by a foundation to try and figure out how to convince Trump voters to get vaccinated. Did anybody else listen to that? No, as a matter of fact, I've got a big follow-on study to that in the state of Washington. You do? Yeah, really? That was the sparking point was, yeah, okay, so that was qualitative. Let's do a quantitative follow-up and see if we can create a messaging system that will micro-message the people from negative to at least neutral. But we're actively trying to piggyback on what he started. That's so interesting. So my quick summary is he starts out with a focus group of Trump voters who he thought he had screened for people who were vaccine skeptic, but maybe. And in the first round of questions, it sounds like this group is like hardcore. No way, they just think the government is lying to them and they're being manipulated, they don't trust it. And then he brings in a couple of guest speakers and it's sort of midway through where Tom Frieden, who's the former CDC director, having had one bite talking to them comes back a second time and just makes a bunch of factual arguments. But they're really well selected factual arguments. I don't know, Kevin, if you can reproduce them. It was something along the lines of number one, if you get a vaccine, it's only going to be there for a little bit of time. And then if you get COVID, it's going to go throughout your body and you may have long-term issues, being a long-termer, and you don't want that. And he just kept on doing these little sound bites. He had them all in one minute. It was like 95% of doctors who have been offered the vaccine have gotten it as soon as they could. Exactly. This is like peer proof. Yes. And 100,000, if we all get vaccinated, then 100,000 Americans won't die in the future. And then he brings on Chris Christie and Chris Christie tells a story about being in the White House, helping Trump prep for the debates. And it was supposedly the safest place in the world, right? We know what that was. I was probably feeding McDonald's fries into his mouth. He says it was the safest place in the world because every time I went into that building, I was tested. And he says of the seven of us who were preparing Trump for the debates, six of us got COVID, Christie got it the worst, but Hope Hicks... Trump got it the next worst and Hope Hicks was number three. And she was like, she was jogging and she's young, but she was sick as a dog, right? She'd never been so sick. And then he describes how he came home and to what, his housekeepers or something? I forget who it was. No, no, he had relatives, right? One was a smoker and one was a longshoreman. Oh, great shape. Right. That was in really, really good, healthy shape because he was still on the job, on the docks in Jersey. Right. And he says they both got COVID and two weeks ago, they both died. And at that point, the whole tenor of the focus group shifts and suddenly everybody in the group who had been like zero to two, they're anywhere from five to 10 now in terms of planning to get vaccinated. Amazing. It was amazing. The thing I took away from it was they're really anti-government. Yeah. So you can't use any government signifiers. Politicians telling people like they showed them the video with George Bush and Barack Obama and, you know, all the ex presidents except for Trump getting vaccinated, that had no effect on them. But hearing from scientists and doctors. When Christie came on, the first thing he said was, well, you can't trust politicians. You can't trust me. Right. I don't know anything about this. Right. I decided, well, you know, since I don't know anything, I had to, you know, pay attention to the doctors. Right. And he didn't try to convince him of anything. He just told the story as you were saying. And because of the, you know, at least the way one said it because he was, remember at the beginning of things, he says, I'm not, I'm in trouble. Right. This thing's not going to work. Right. And, you know, he used some profanity to describe, you know, I'm, you know, and the, that for Dan rapid fire facts and then followed by a narrative, set them up to the flip. Right. And he's trying to figure out how do you, how do you package that? Right. And what I took away from it was that it wasn't the messaging as much as it was the source. Right. That you have to have the narrative tied to a source that you're willing, you know, to suspend your disbelief. And part of it is the source needs to be not too different from you. Yeah. If there's a lot of overlap in your belief systems and your attitudes and all that, then you're much more likely to believe them. Anybody who's clearly like one of those progressive like Antifa folks, like, like, like, you're not even going to hear like their mouth is their meat is going to waggle, but you're not actually going to hear the sounds coming out of the vocal cords. Yeah. So they've got to be near you. Yeah. So, you know, what we're trying to do is we're trying to create archetypes of the people, you know, so we understand, you know, their motivational composition, and then put in the, you know, Luntz was simply hypothesizing that maybe hearing from your family physician would have a greater impact. Well, the question is the family physician doesn't necessarily have time to compose personal messages. So part of the system we're trying to design is, does this sound like Charlie? Oh, yeah, that sounds like Charlie. Well, what should you say to him? All right. Well, here's a little narrative that you can adapt, all right, from understanding the types of patients that you have so you can do it rapidly, all right, as opposed to it being a big effort. So anyway, you did a really good job of replaying that episode, Micah. I literally just listened to it this morning. So it's very it's a it's a beautiful, it actually is a keeper in terms of, you know, a story, because he, you know, he did all that conservative research, but he feels bad about, you know, the fact that he had a heart attack, right, or a stroke, right, and his arm doesn't work anymore. And he said, you know, I've set up a situation where people aren't willing to help themselves. And he said, I feel guilty. So I want to help. Right. Well, long set of heart attack. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. He wrote. He's still a stroke. Disabled. Yeah. Wow. A year ago. So January. So for me, to me, you're totally right on it. He's like, the church doesn't grow if you don't welcome the sinner. And the fact is his techniques are actually very good. So you have to separate what he does from who he does it for. Frank Lantz is in my brain under dangerous knowledge. And you know how in the Grinch, in the Grinch, when they do the x-ray and like the heart is really, really tiny, but then it has the capacity to grow. It's possible that it's like that. Anyway, my comment in the chat here is like evangelical pastors, like there are churches where for years now the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens, everybody are basically Satan and have been demonized. Anything progressive is demonized. And like there's this constant drum beat from the church, from God, apparently, that has turned the left completely positively evil, like untouchables. And then AM Talk Radio, like conservatives figured this out and bought up all these AM radio stations. And you cruise around through the middle of the country and don't have your own music. The only thing to listen to is assholes basically telling you that the world is upside down and that, you know, like total gaslighting on AM radio. And it's constant. But it's not new, Jerry. I went to Billy Saul Hargis, Billy James, sorry, Billy Saul was the funny character that Imus came up with, Billy James Hargis in Tulsa. And he was telling the parishioners 45 years ago that, you know, the communists are evil and we ought to use the nukes and take them out now from the pulpit. Right. So I kind of go, well, that was interesting. I'm not going back to that, you know, church again, which brings me back to a different conversation that I was just having with someone recently about religion. It's like, Oh, I know, I met a really interesting and very intense person recently. And at toward the end of the conversation, turns out he's the next pastor and turns out that he lives his whole life by Jesus' precepts. And I'm like, that's great. So why don't any Christians do what you're doing? Like, so how does most of Christianity not in fact obey any of those precepts? And to me, that's like a failed program, like a complete failure of program. I don't have to understand how so many people who profess to be deeply religious could be behaving in ways that are so anti the principles, including your neighbor. It's selective. All right. It's contextual. And it's tribal. But I thought relativism was a liberal, fiendish way of manipulating reality. No, it's, it's everywhere. I know. I mean, all these, all these narratives are narratives that harness the news. Half of Catholicism is not based on what the Bible says. It's based on mores and a buildup of a culture around, you know, you know, they've got cananic law and all that this other stuff, right? That has nothing to do, right? With, you know, you know, what a fundamentalist Christian would be about. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. I know too much. Well, so I follow Chrissy Stroop on Twitter. She's an ex-vangelical. She's awesome. She wrote an ex-vangelical. She's an ex-vangelical. Exactly. I've never heard that term before. It's what you call ex-evangelicals. And exactly. And she's phenomenal. She wrote a book called Empty the Pews. And she is way out in front with sword and shield, like fighting what I think is a really good fight. That's correct. She hates Vangelis. But she, but she doesn't mind Beyonce for some reason. I don't know. I don't go figure. Anyway, Chrissy and the people she brings in and talks about are really, really interesting to follow because, because to me, there's this, there's this titanic religious battle that's happening right next to and behind the titanic political battle we're busy having right next to the healthcare battle that we're having. And these are all related and inter twingled and recursive and mutually reinforcing. Like, like the problem, the problem with stepping out, the problem with stepping out of ultra conservative society right now is that you are ostracized by everybody around you. And the reason so many people believe the election was stolen was that in communities that voted for Trump, almost everybody voted for Trump. And it's like nobody you know is on the other side. So how could there even be another side? How could that be a legitimate position to hold if everybody you know is on board with this kind of goofy sounding program? But yeah, it's possible the election was stolen. The system is rigged. Well, the deep stage, come on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's something there are other big lies. Yes. Well, so on this subject, I'm actually one of the calls I'm doing later today is trying to figure out who, if anybody is actually doing the work of trying to deprogram people out of QAnon. And what struck me a couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference called organizing 2.0, which has been around for a long time. It's for digital organizers, they work for labor unions, they work for community organizations, all progressive. And there was one session about QAnon. And the speakers were all therapists. And the frontline response appears to be individual therapists, many of whom are ex-cult survivors themselves. Wow. And a handful of people, I mean, it's like there's no funding. This is the part that surprised me. They're all of these causes that have organizations working to solve them. And I didn't see anything like that in this space. It's like a hot potato, nobody wants to hold on to it. And the people who attended the session, they're about 80 people in the audience, mostly women, interestingly. And they were all grassroots organizers saying, basically, either they have people in their own immediate families who they're like, what do I do about my uncle? Or the people coming to them through the community organizing that they do, just asking, what do we do about this? And to go back to your original question, which is, what do we do about a Republican party that's committed to a big lie? Is do we simply invest in trying to beat them at the polls? Or do we figure out how to deprogram? Which is ridiculous, I think, yeah. So part of the problem is that we're not looking at, we look at crises the wrong way. And once we put the wrong lens on them, we screw them up. So policing is a crisis, right? Bad mood. What's wrong? The crank in the chat, that's all. Yeah. So I feel free to let loose the crock in, if you want. But when we misdiagnose these problems, like the war on drugs, right, like there's a thought in my brain, stupid wars we're fighting, right? They shouldn't be framed as wars, none of them. In fact, I wish we had a US Department of Peace. Like our Department of Defense, euphemistically spoken, used to be called the Department of War. That's what it was called. It was the War Department. And then we called the Department of Defense, even though we'd like to invade other countries that haven't attacked us over and over again. So I don't know how defensive that is. But the Department of Peace is the State Department. But they don't actually fix peace, right? I got it. But I'm just saying that, you know, before you get DOD involved, the State's supposed to be in front of that, all right, to try to, you know. Laying the groundwork for invasion. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say that wrong? But I agree. No, that's the CIA. Oh, right, right, right. Come on. They're creating the provocation for the groundwork for invasion. Yeah, I mean, the fact is we're, we're clearly going to leave Afghanistan visibly. Okay. But we won't. Because we have another, you know, set of people that buy a whole bunch of stuff from Lockheed Martin, right? That isn't in DOD hands, right? Yeah. A lot of joystick stuff. So, so actually separate thing. I'm, I've got a task going, excuse me, I've got a task going to create a library of short clips that are from basically revolutionaries and disruptors, people who are thinking very differently. What I'm trying to find is kind of five to 10 minute clips from really, really, really good speeches on YouTube mostly. And I've got a small collection going. It's not great yet. But I'd love if any of you have ideas for like who I should include, please, LMK, you know, send me email or type it in the chat or whatever. Because I, because I think a piece of what I'm was missing that just came up in this conversation is people who were busy reframing crises as different under new frames that are actually highly functional, right? And I think that's really, really important. So one of them, for example, is Anand Giridharadas and his Aspen Institute talk where he says, Hey, I love you people. I'm in, you know, I'm a, it feels like family when I come see you all Aspen Institute fellows and you're part of the problem. And so am I. And this is how we become a lifestyle business to try to fix social problems when in fact we're busy hurting things. And he's got several speeches like that where he is just speaking truth to everybody, talking about how what Peter Buffett son of Warren Buffett called the philanthropic industrial complex is basically part of the problem. That's really interesting to me. And then once you hear those things, you start to see philanthropic efforts differently. So I'm looking for more of that. I'm looking for more disruptors and revolutionaries who are helping us see what's broken about the global economy, right? So, so there's David Graber is really, really good at this. That's sort of disabusing our notions of why money exists and how money works and what debt is and rethinking how the economy might work without being Karl Marx. Schmacktenberger is really good at this. Although he's way too long winded, I, you know, I haven't found like short pieces by Schmacktenberger. I finally found one and like, okay, this one I can, this one I can give people because it's, it's bite size. I'm looking for the Bon Bon version of the these deep sort of transformative thinkers. Hey, look, we showed up. Yeah, I want to just micro bridge for a moment. A new use for your brain. Are you familiar with what's going on right now with the United Nations global help desk? No. Okay. So I want to connect you to Todd Hoskins, who's, who's part of, you know, you know, Todd, he's working on that. There are some organization design issues that are associated with it. But I think that what you've amassed in the brain could be an indicator to what they're trying to do, which is, you know, a country calls, we're trying to do X. We don't know who to connect with. And, you know, it's, it's not, you're not going to get the help from the desk. You're going to get the connection from the desk. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You're having a pandemic? Very good. So my here for an argument or abuse. Exactly. I'm sorry. That's three doors down. I paid for the five minute clinic. So I just want to put a bug in your ear that you ought to talk to Todd, because I think that's a good use for what you've created over the last several decades. Thank you. That sounds awesome. That sounds fantastic. It is awesome. Yeah. And there's a, but I just got off a couple of calls where the open global mind group that I'm running and the PreJurys brain subset of it are working toward COP26. And we're trying to figure out, there's also a fellow named Mark Trexler, who's a black belt brain user. He uses his brain. He does the climate web. So if you go to climateweb.com, you'll find some of the stuff or the climatographers in his wife. And we're trying to figure out how to use our brains to sort of advise climate research. So his climate web is a huge body of climate research all woven together into a brain like structure. But really, really good stuff there. So we're trying to also figure out how to make a living while doing all that. And April, are you at Dragonfly? Oh, April. Oh, let me just give you a better climate web URL that it might be.org. Sorry, I'm here. I was on mute. Behavioral research in there on climate, Jerry, or is it mostly, you know, what's happening from a physical point of view? He has a whole variety of research. Like you can in fact go browse his brain for free. He switched it so that the body of research he's got now is just really browsable. And I'm happy to connect you to him because I think I'm just saying that we're about to bridge from doing pandemic choice experiments, quant to climate choice experiments. So if you, that would probably be interesting to see what's missing from his point of view. Yep. And I think there's I think there's a bunch of behavioral stuff in there, but I'm not sure. And he, you know, Mark would be able to tell you immediately. Perfect. But, but he's been curating climate change specific research for a really long time and make trying to make a living off that. I've got a whole bucket of everything, including all sorts of, you know, what motivates people to change their minds. Frank Luntz is a, is a subject of particular curiosity to me, like, like Chaldeany, Robert Chaldeany, who, who wrote the book influence, the psychology of persuasion. And all of them are in my brain under dangerous knowledge, because once you figure out what makes people say yes when they mean to say no, all kinds of things are possible. Right. Also interesting here is Mackenzie Scott. Yeah. But you have a tendency to embrace Chaldeany's first rule, which is first you than me. You are very generous first, okay, which, which evokes, you know, generosity from others. So while, you know, you may not like a lot of it, you know, you're actually are emblematic of his first principle. I get it. And I totally agree. He's also a mentor of Joe Polish, who's the mastermind guy I met a couple of years ago. So he shows up at Polish's events. And I'm like, oh, Jesus, wow. And I agree with you. And also Adam Grant wrote givers and takers. And April sort of has this observation that I'm so and that, you know, givers, there's several kinds of givers. And, and I forget, I forgot in the detail of it, but sort of where I fit in that hierarchy is interesting as well. So what do we do with this hodgepodge of ideas and stuffs? Mika, I'm really interested in where the points of leverage are in the political system. And, and I'm really interested in, in turning the political system into a system of governance with a little G, like, like, how do we, how do we defang, defuse, defrock, decultify politics on all sides and turn it back into us governing together well? I don't have very many good answers. And I would love to hear what you may have to say about this. But I'm, you know, because we, I think we're too big. Too big in what sense that the polities that make these decisions, you know, you gave us the example from Iceland, which is a homogenous nation of 350,000 people, right? And, you know, in New York, we're having a mayoral election right now. And it's, you know, driving everyone baddie. I mean, you know, this guy, Andrew Yang, who has one or two interesting new ideas, is ahead for no particular reason other than the fact that he's more famous than anybody else. He ran for president. Doesn't seem like a good way to, you know, you know, so I don't, it's so interesting that you sort of ask, how do we make the political system better at making decisions? And I'm always kind of like, it's, it's sort of a problem of infiltrating someone, somehow in the water supply. You know, I mean, some of it, it seems to me is generational. It is about who sits there for a very long time and just continues to operate in the old ways, and who is still a learner. And there are very few of them that seem to still be learners. By the time you get elected, you are fully formed as the thing you're going to continue to be. So you get the younger generation, you get new people in, and sometimes you do get an opportunity for change. But George Wallace and several other people had life changes late in life where they did actually mature. Yeah, but he was no longer a politician then here. And he was paralyzed in a wheelchair. Yeah. Right. So it's, but he had, but he had influence. Right. But my impression is still that they, while they have power rather than influence, there's a brief period where you can inject new ideas through new people. Yeah. Because they are, they're still in flux. They haven't yet been beaten down. They haven't yet discovered all the reasons why everybody else here is, is kind of, you know, dog paddling and content. Are they content? Yeah, I think, I mean, look, I'd, I'd, you know, just judging from my own state legislative, you know, the folks, they're, they really get ground down. Yeah, yeah. I also think that support systems for politicians are bad, you know, that in terms of the idea network, the Republicans have Alec. Right. I don't think there's anything nearly as, as well developed on the Democratic side in terms of getting, you know, giving people policy advice laws that have already, you know, been drafted that they can just use it. There are, there are shreds of them. They're just not as well funded. So a lot of this stuff goes back to the Goldwater loss in 1964 where the Republican party rethought everything and they invented the Hoover Institute and the AEI and a whole bunch of think tanks. They bought up all of AM radio. They, they did a whole bunch of things in a super organized way, including Alec, which is the model legislation, you know, entity. And the left apparently could not figure out any of this. It has some of these things, but it's mostly focused on a two year cycle. Right. So the left has something called the Analyst Institute, which is a research body that, you know, you have to be. Sounds like a large collection of psychotherapists. Yeah, no, it's not. But what they do is they fund and propagate tons of very, very useful studies on voter behavior and what tactics you can use to move voters. But it is very focused on winning elections. Okay. And that's been around now, I think for 15 or 20 years. And the reason why, you know, all these little subtle nudges that work, right? When I call you up and ask you, oh, you're going to vote on, you know, next month, do you have a plan? What's your plan? Right. That that's there because their studies have found that if you ask people to articulate exactly how they plan to go vote, turnout goes up 2%, whatever. Right. So the Analyst Institute is one leg of a intellectual infrastructure. There's something now called the Movement Cooperative, which is very new. It's only about four years old, which is about collective purchasing of things like data and development of tech tools. But we don't have the same kind of committed billionaires that the right has, willing to pay for decades of investment in institution building. That's because you're not the party of capital. We're not. It hurts. It's a problem. And, you know, so Soros's money, for example, has mostly gone into voter activation. And a lot in Eastern Europe. He's been heroic about that. He's been a heroic in Eastern Europe because it's more about education than it is, he's invested in civic infrastructure there. But here he's mostly invested in things like America Speaks, which is a voter activation, a very, very big one. But most of its money goes into, you know, basically, some of what helps people like Stacey Abrams, but not at the deep level that you're talking about. We have a very weak media system. I was reading a really interesting paper by Peter Murray, who wrote a very interesting piece a few years ago called The Secrets of Scale, which is why organizations like the NRA and the AARP are so successful is because they provide a service to millions of members. They're not just an ideological advocacy organization. And he had one really key point. Every two years, Democrats pour hundreds of millions of dollars paying for advertising, where Republicans are pouring their money into media itself, right? So they have a massive alternative media system they've built up. We spend money on ads. And he's arguing that Democrats have to make similarly huge investments in progressive media. And not just political media, the type of stuff that Air America did, but stuff that's rooted in culture, that covers sports as much as it covers politics, say. Amika, wouldn't you say the Democratic Party is also very colleague-lot? It's a much bigger tent than the Republican Party? Yep. It's harder to be a collection of interest groups and different ethnic identities than it is to be the party of white Christian nationalists. Yeah. I'm capital. Don't forget capital. On the other hand, America is like the only country where we actually do have the chance of becoming a multiracial democracy. I mean, I still believe that's a possibility, but it's really hard. Don't get yourself on the Europeans and their racism. Don't get yourself. Yeah. So one of the levers, I think, in this mix, just to take us to a different place, but on the same issue, is that for people with privilege, and my favorite saying about people of privilege is the privilege of privilege is not noticing the privilege. Nice. And I don't know who said that, but I've heard it long ago and I've adopted it entirely. But one of the problems is that for anybody in a position of privilege, all of these modern things sound like loss. They all sound like loss, loss of status, loss of opportunity, loss of the odds of getting the good position. Like everything, if we suddenly get equity and everybody's on the same level playing field, that just sounds like loss over and over again. Then you could make technical scientific explanations about the power of diversity to improve outcomes. You could do a whole bunch of things, but really, I think, until and unless a bunch of those people feel like there won't be loss, they'll be gained from these changes. And that could be from small personal experiences, just being taken by the hand to try something out and going, oh, that's actually much nicer, more interesting, more something. And I didn't lose a lot of status. In fact, I gained more status because I suddenly am looked upon whatever. I'm making up the story. But one of the narratives here, I think it's important, is about changing the perception of these changes as a kind of loss to them as a kind of gain. And I don't think that you have to make things up. I don't think you have to invent things to get that narrative. I think they just cannot hear that narrative. They're not completely not understanding. That's really funny. You're married to the wrong Peter Murray. That's all. I mean, the right Peter Murray. I'm sorry, Kelly, you totally married the right Peter Murray. That's all a matter of perspective. Exactly. Exactly. I'll see you guys. See you later. Thanks, Kelly. So anyway, that's one of the angles. And then a different angle on these things is that I have two other thoughts in my brain. One of them says that Black Lives Matter is white people's problem. And me too is men's problem. That the other people are the victims of all those processes. And so as a white guy, I feel like I need to spend a whole bunch more of my life energy talking to other white guys and others to sort this shit up, because it's on us. It's like it's not on the victims to figure this out and tell their stories and to whatever else. And I haven't figured out how to wrap my arms around that and do something positive that way. April, did you want to jump in? You just unmuted. Did you unmute accidentally? Oh, no. I dropped from my phone and joined from my laptop. Oh, nice. It's easier to chat. But I'm still in motion. So no, just hi, everyone. Sorry, I'm listening. Cool. Thanks. So back to anybody who wants to throw other like highfalutin theories into this mix. I've really been enjoying your contribution today, Mika. I really, I remember a while ago, months ago, we talked about you know, talking futures that people can walk into that are, you know, important, you know, instead of shame and whatever. And I definitely think we could do a lot more of that. Because it's so much fear. It's just so many fear stories that are going on all the time, when like, oh, the lower classes just getting screwed so bad since the 70s. The numbers are just devastating to the middle class and the working class. And those fear narratives are completely intentional. Those fear narratives are entirely and completely strategic and intentional. And the people pumping them know what they're doing and are all in chorus because they realize that when they line up, this is being on message. Part of the gingrich evolution was making sure everybody was on message. If everybody does it, and if you repeat it back and forth, this is partly the echo chamber. And if something shows up here on a little blog, and then a couple famous people talk about it, and then it shows up on Fox News, then suddenly the other networks have to report on it. That process is at play. All of these processes have been explored, experimented with, and successfully flown to the point where crazy man Trump won an election for four years, right? Another thing is, the lower classes and the middle class, their social mobility or medium income, the numbers are just terrifying. And the poor whites are in the same boat as poor blacks. They're both screwed. They don't have generational wealth. They're going nowhere. But there's no equality of opportunity in this country anymore. There's no equality of opportunity. It doesn't even, it's not even beginning. It's not even on the horizon anymore. So why aren't we talking, like there's so many narratives you could do for, like, didn't Martin Luther King, wasn't that his turn that made him truly dangerous was when he went, hey, let's go after poor white people. That was brilliant. He also, when he decided to criticize the war in Vietnam, that was dangerous too. Yeah. And if you really cast any of those sorts of things, you'll realize that poor whites may be economically in the same jam, but they're socially classed above poor blacks. And therefore that lever is used against them constantly. The last thing they have is they can denigrate black people and brown people to exalt themselves. That's their last little piece of hope. The person further down the totem pole socially gets kicked. You know, I guess what I'm wondering about is the rural versus suburban, urban, right? Because I think what you're really describing is more about rural white America being stuck and also the degree to which... Rural, Rust Belt. Don't forget Rust Belt, Mika. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the people who, you know, to the degree that there's a brain drain to urban areas and then, you know, these places really feel stuck and resentful. And, you know, nobody has a good answer for them. And then a Trump comes along and says, I care about you. Yeah, he made an incredible bond with them. Yeah. Even though he's a better caricature of the greedy billionaire than Zirsten Hall III, which is an amazing feat. It's an amazing feat of alchemy. He painted the right people, Jerry. He hated the right people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, you know, I'm very curious about how much Biden's huge infrastructure spending will flow into these places and perhaps alter some circumstances, whether it will be anything close to enough. You know, I, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the challenging thing with our conversations is how not to be like completely despairing to moralize. Yeah, yeah, it's true, you know. And so on the plus side, I would say, you know, the fact that Biden has certainly aimed way bigger than we expected he would, right? And that the amounts of money that are going to sluice down are really quite substantial. And, you know, to the extent that they're trying to put a lot of the money into investments in a post-carbon economy, it's probably not enough, right, Jimé? But it's, it's a big directional shift, that's for sure. It does seem like a big directional shift and maybe one where we can accelerate. You know, I'm the proud new owner of a electric hybrid and, you know, we're still on our first tank of gas and we've been driving the car for more than two months. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's mostly local driving, yes. But still, you know, when I tell people I've, well, we're getting about 200 miles a gallon on the gas that we've used and the electricity from my house is, you know, 20, it's one fifth the cost per mile to charge my car than it is to, you know, pay for the gas. People are like, you know, I mean, that's pretty amazing. And there's like a fifth of the moving parts. Yes, for the lithium mining, I feel really good about it. But actually all the power around you is wind power. Yeah. But you've actually got both. So you have more parts because you've got internal combustion and electric. But your plane electric is like, the parts list is incredibly, incredibly short. Here on Nextdoor in the neighborhood in Portland, hybrid vehicles show up, appreuses show up all the time as the victims of catalyst theft. Yes. People are up under them and somebody bought a catalyst shield, apparently. You can buy something to try to protect your catalyst. Gone. Yeah. And it's like, Jesus, wow. Happening in California, too. There's platinum in those things. So they're not reselling them to reinstall on somebody's Prius that just got a stolen. They're doing it for the raw materials. They recycle the platinum out of them. Seriously. There's that much platinum in there? Oh, yeah. Maybe I'll go into this as a side hustle. I can say from my investments, the platinum has done very well. Wow. How much? How much? Refinance recycling. I traded in the Prius when we got the new car. So they kept the converter. I should have pulled the converter out first. What kind of plug-in hybrid did you get, Mika? I got the Toyota RAV4 Prime. And we're very happy with it. I have a 2012 plug-in Prius sound. We bought a Tesla Model 3 a couple of years ago. So we basically use the Prius now for longer trips, because you don't have to worry about doing it a charge midway. Because that is, as convenient as Tesla has made it, it's still a hell of a lot less convenient than gassing up once every couple of months. Yeah. Like if you're out in a ton upon about it, give up when you run out of gas. Yeah. Yeah. Boy. So I was trying for hope. Someone else. Go. Yeah. Susan, what's up in your world? Oh. Well, I was thinking, I was pretty happy till I came to listen to you guys. Damn it. That's our job. Well, I just, on the personal level, I just had a two-day trip out to, of all places, Sacramento, where a good friend of mine has moved after retiring. Been a lovely time on the American River. It was the first time I'd taken a road trip in a car for, you know, for a long time. I loved it. I thought it was terrific. I had no, no, no rejoining action because she was in the Cade community. She was a drive-up. And then you, you go, go into this lovely place and take walks along the river. And the food is good. And the company was terrific. And I feel pleased. Did you go on the river at all? Pardon? Did you go on the river? We went on the river. We were on, well, we were on one of the tributaries. And she's recently taken up, being retired has its points, you know. And I will send along one thing because I've, I'm getting closer and closer to pretending I'm not working, right? And to stop pretending I'm working. And I'm, I'm working though, just on other things. And, and she said, you know, she said, I just want to look forward. I'm not, I'm not going to stand on my accomplishments, even though she's a very accomplished woman. And so it's all about planning and doing things that she encounters. And, you know, she's a little bit better than I am at, she's taking up bird watching. And of course there are lots of birds on the American river. It's the whole North American flyway, right? So it's terrific in the winter anyway. Anyway, so there's that. The other thing is I'm finding that I'm reading a whole lot more, that I used to read fiction a lot for escape, among other things. I didn't watch TV. I didn't go to lots of movies. I didn't do any of those things. All of a sudden I'm reading lots and lots of nonfiction. Which a friend's mother told me it would happen. Okay. About my age. A prediction phenomenon. And what I'm reading. So I have, I have a, an insight to offer. Perhaps you've all had this. I've been reading a combination of books, which is sometimes what happens when you inadvertently end up reading in a whole area. And this area, I don't think it's an area in your brain, Jerry, yet. What? Well, I don't know. You tell me after I give you the books, okay? Okay. Okay. This is like stumped the brain. Okay. So how would show up by Mia Mirdsong? Now she's a friend, a good friend of Teddy's actually. Yeah, I know Mia. Do you? Yeah. Okay. Well, okay. So the, what I got out of this book was, was that the notion of intentional family in the way that we, familiar with intentional, intentional community. And, and I think that's an idea. And I keep thinking Teddy that maybe, you know, Teddy and I've kind of fallen into that by accident. But anyway, there's that. Here's another book called Wilding, which is instead, it's wilding instead of re-wilding. It comes out of England. It's one of the first, you know, places in, yeah. Exactly. And after I read this, I wish I had, I wish I had approached where I live completely differently. Although I did partly about wilding, which is that I pulled out a lot of non-natives, never planted anything new. And, but I had to do a lot of destruction, especially because of dead trees and fire prevention. Okay. I've also been reading, which I know you all know, the Hidden Life of Trees. Have you read Overstory? Is that, you know, this is, and this is starting to theme of my finding, is that it's like, we talk about animals and we talk about trees and forests and all of these things as if we find it astonishing that they are like us. And I think what we should be finding is that we are like them. So... We're the older life forms. Pardon? They're the older life forms. We're the new... I know, I know. Yeah, we, yeah. I always thought Jerry had a little bit of a scent of oak about him. Scent of oak? Oh, speaking of the scent of oak, I had to have these big, huge trees cut up. I mean, it's just, it's horrifying. I mean, the front line of climate change, right? And some of them I've just left to die in the forest and, you know, go back to whatever they're going to go to. But the other day it was extremely hot and the wood, the wood had been cut and the smell of hot oak was just overwhelming. I mean, I had never, I had smelled it when it had been cut but it didn't, it didn't just strike me as that I didn't know that. I just didn't know that. I don't know what that's good for. And then this book called Timefulness. How thinking like a geologist can help save the world. I had wanted to do that. And this is a book that makes geology seem sort of intimate in the way that I'm also reading that book called Your Inner Fish. Which makes the history of biology intimate. It makes it, it makes it tangible. It makes it like you learn all these fascinating things about. And the people who work on this, right? The people who have discovered all these wonderful things and can look into the past in ways that they never could before. Something like the, the, the, the, the, the archeologists have access to views of things that suddenly that they've never had access to before. And what that all means and, you know, and, and, and part of me is sad about all that knowledge that we don't, it's mostly in Jerry's brain, but that we don't, we just, these things don't find their way into conversation about solutions. You know, and I, well, we should stop thinking about problems and start, stop thinking about problems, I think. Anyway, and anyway, so there's this book. There's a Life of Inner Fish. And then I got this one off of somebody's, some, something, Teddy, but, sorry, Jerry, don't get your views. In, in somebody, and maybe it was OGM, this book came out in a perfect order. Yes, I would have mentioned it. I think it's about complexity and ballet. Yeah. And that's a favorite story of mine to tell. Pardon? It's a favorite story of mine to tell. Yes. I just, I just told the story of perfect order to a guy who was living in Bali three days ago. And did he know about it? No. Oh. I had no idea. And, okay. And so then there are all these socially built systems that we, that we, where we, we live with nature and we, we participate with nature and it's a player. And well, I mean, I'm not yet ready to go join where I step. So, so, so the perfect order story to me is a really nice name next door neighbor to the John C. the Brown story about, I think it's a JSP story about the Xerox repair technician. It's not, well, it's his story, but it's not, he got it from somebody else. Okay. Good. And it's actually an IRL story, right? No, it's not even an IRL story. It's a Xerox Park story. Okay. So they were doing, yes, but go ahead. The story is that they were going to build an extra system for their repair techs in the early days of extra systems. And then finally, the center of anthropologists and who said, nope, let's give them all walkie-talkies basically. And, and you leave the walkie-talkie on all day. And this is where, oh, this comes from a Tin Venger and Jean Lave and communities of practice, I think. Cause. Well, no, it preceded that. Wow. Well, it's old, but the idea was that everybody started talking when you got to your, because early copiers were electromechanical devices that were very complicated and very temperamental. And so the repair people had very complex repair scenarios which they started narrating. And then from the periphery, somebody would jump in and say, oh, oh, oh, I had one just like that on Tuesday. Have you tried doing blank? Exactly. And that turned out to really. We've not had a strategy. They knew that their stuff was complicated and they didn't make money on their copiers. Yeah. But they, they decided to go ahead, it was a conscious decision to go ahead and make them complicated. But to train. Oh, really? Yes. I did not know that. To train, to train, have high end technicians who would become, which is why they were dressed in white and all the rest. I mean, you know. Which means you're that they then depend on you. You're basically building in your business model for. Absolutely. Just like, just like the money came and the money came from, you know, paper and toner. Wow. Well, that story before the toner, the toner was designed to work with the Xerox copiers and not with other copiers. And so when we were, I was working on at Xerox and they said, oh my God, we're, you know, what are we going to do? The people who know how to make toner are retiring. They're going to retire. And they were looking far ahead. Xerox being Xerox. And we were hired at IRL to go in and, and talk to and talk to them about, you know, what could, how could they possibly keep the knowledge? What did they need to do? They were quite open to it. And it was sort of out of that, that some of the work that I did and, you know, the two by two that just used all the time was sort of, you know, tacit and, you know, whatever, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge and, you know, all the rest of this stuff and the community's a practice story that went with it. And we went, I went to them and I said, I said, we really want to come and see how you, how you design the toner. And they said, you really, you really want to see that? I said, yeah, I said, well, where would we go? And they said, well, you know, if you really want to see it, you'll go with us to the storage room where all of the examples of this toners that we tried and didn't use and a walkthrough of, you know, this machine, you know, this 1040 looks a lot like the, remember how we did that? Yeah, well, let's go. And they would be reminded by the toners on the shelf. Wow. I know you're saying, wow. And the thing is, that's the way it is everywhere. Yeah. All the time. And when people talk in the corporate world about, you know, whether they should be, you know, the, the more, the more the knowledge is, is, is, is intangible, the less likely we are to look for, for the physical support for it. Yeah. Which can be, you know, the technology can be the, the system that that's, and now they're starting all over again and oh, how are we going to make hybrid work? And I said, it's always hybrid. Okay, people, it was always hybrid. And, you know, and people depend on these things and they can't tell you that they depend on these things. Because the better you are at it, the less you remember about what it was like to not know. If only any of this were applicable to governance and politics. Oh yeah. So here we are still, you know, 20 years into the 21st century and none of this seems to be. Common knowledge. Yeah. And it doesn't inform. I mean, it's the same complaint that Mike is making. It's like, why? I mean, sometimes I think about it as a scale issue. Like, why is, what's wrong with small scale stuff? Yeah. So I have an essay I haven't published titled, Scale Hills and the primary mission of the essay is to say, the three words I've seen kill more good ideas are, it won't scale. Because everybody has this engineering scale idea of we must replicate exactly like Intel used to scale, you know, their chip making process. You figure out which line works best and then you replicate that exactly. And that's actually not how humans work. Right. Right. So, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm just looking outside here at this funny community that I live in. I'm finally calling it a community when I moved here. It was just a random set of people. And, and now we have to confront things, you know, give us an earthquake. Boom, we're on it. Right. Give us a forest fire. Boom, we're on it. And, and it's quite a good life here. Small scale. And I was just going to say one more thing about, you know, the rural and the urban before we, before we, I lived Ruraly, I live Ruraly, right. And people always say, I didn't know those things went on in Kansas. I didn't know you had that, you know, you knew you wore white, you know, you had sock hops and you had, you know, and I'm thinking, why don't you think that stuff spreads? Why do you think that's everywhere? And, and why do you think we wouldn't know? Why do you think we wouldn't get PhDs? Why do you think we wouldn't? That's my rant for today. I like I said, I was happy when I got here. I'm marginally happier now that I've had a rant. And you have raised our spirits considerably. Thank you for that, that riff rant. Rove through all those interesting works. And you're reminding me of a bunch of stuff, which I'll just put on the table quickly, which is, I think that scales of time thing is hugely important. Yes. And that, and that if we were to, and this is just my fantasy, but if we were to slow down dolphin speech or hummingbird speech or other things that sound like chittering to us and then try to decode it, we might actually discover that, that other animals are just living at different scales of time. They're just living beside us in their own world, and we don't have any idea about it. And the reason you can't catch the damn flies is that his clock is just actually way faster. And he's responding, everything is just like cycling faster or something like that. But also there's the Stuart Brands sort of paste layer diagram, which is, you know, the scale of different things change, which is a really primitive cut at, I think a really interesting idea. But if you marry that up to sort of the mutually reinforcing cycles of dysfunction that we live inside of, that gets really interesting. Because then when you're trying to hack the system to work your way back out into some new system, you have to pay attention to all those things. And the scales of change idea shows up as a really nice lever for long-term distributed change. Mr. Sifri. Yeah, so I mean, but just to go back to the place that I pigeonholed in as Mr. Politics, I just want to say. But thank you. I was like, when Bo, I want to thank you for your help. Yeah, no, but I'd like to push back on your assumption that I know that much, but. You just prove it every time you send out anything. So that's it. Yeah, well, but the thing is, number one, I want to distinguish between politicians who need to win elections and survive. And people in government who actually often are problem solvers, right? Okay. And that there is a problem solving community there. That's not seen very much. And often they also have to keep their heads down and just do the work. To see no one knows about it. Right. You only hear about failure. I was talking with my physical therapist the other day who's from Australia. And we got into a whole conversation about politics. And, you know, in Australia, you can go out dancing without a mask. Okay. They have a conservative government. They have Murdoch. But he, what he said to me is when COVID came, it was never politicized. In other words, the head of the conservative party and the head of the labor party were saying the same things, which was listen to the scientists. And that's the CDC's playbook. Yeah. Yeah. The problem is we threw away the playbook with Trump. It became politicized and now we're dealing, you know, unfortunately with the after effects of that. It didn't have to go so badly. Australia is a good counter example. But that was all intentional. You think Trump had any intention other than his own personal political survival? I think everybody on the far right, I think everybody on the far right is looking for wedge issues to separate the right from the left and to prove that there's this gigantic chasm that can never be bridged. We can argue about that. But why didn't it happen in Australia then? So they don't have the same chasm. Their chasm works different. It does work different. I suppose the right in Australia isn't as feral as the right here, maybe. That's true. And they're a damned island like New Zealand. Yeah, but they're a damned island and also fewer people. I mean, the thing that came up earlier, we dropped that idea that said, you know, maybe we just can't govern at this scale. Maybe not. Well, the founders didn't think we'd have one country this big. They thought there'd be like seven countries on the continent or something like that. So that's a whole bunch of other conversations. Yeah. But yes, point well taken. And let me ask you a question, Mr. Politician. And I take your point. I write about politics. I don't practice it. No, I mean, maybe I'm late in coming to this. But as politics became a profession, right, distinct from government, whatever. Public service. Public service, yes. That seems to me to be terribly detrimental. And it allows for it allows for the professionalization of things that are harmful in the way that we see in some corporations, the way we see in other places. Right. And it seems to me that that the politicists, I mean, the professionalization happened kind of in my lifetime. Is that true? Gee, I don't know. You mean in terms of incumbency? I think it's been around for a long time. And it takes a certain personality. And in some cases, actually, people who are good at it. And we've had some great politicians in the past. It's not like they're all automatically bad. No, no, they're not. And the social dynamics are the same, right? I mean, the family is really strong in this. And I will say one other thing related to Jerry's comment about me too. I have a hunch that as more women get into politics and as we get over the 30 to 35 percent threshold, we'll see some improvements, systemic improvements. And that old patterns will be challenged in some ways that are quite effective. And I think it's also true that countries led by women certainly have done better overall. That may be another one of these like deep changes that will help us. But I would love to see that. And I know how petty women can be though. Yeah, well, right. They have problems there too. So a couple of things. One is that there's this parallel thing. You were talking about the professionalization of politics. Countries didn't used to have professional standing armies. That was a new thing. I think Napoleon basically or thereabouts is like the first like, you know, there's now always going to be an army. And here it's eaten the economy basically like Eisenhower warned us and boom, there we are. But when you have a standing army, they need to go to war every now and then, or their arsenal doesn't wear down or they don't they don't get promoted through the ranks or whatever. So that's kind of there. Then I have I have undo unwarranted, maybe warranted, but just too much hope in the next generations. So there's a thought in my brain. Does 2020 mark a generational tipping point where I point to the sunrise movement and Greta Thunberg, the Stonem Douglas kids, AOC in the squad, Jacinda Arden, you know, to get to the older level of that cohort. But there's a there's a whole bunch of youngins who now that information moves around like mushroom spores, like, like, like the cost of moving information around it. We've discovered the dark side of this because like QAnon theories spread like wildfire, but also good shit, good stories, like stories of how to do things better spread like like mushroom spores as well, which is phenomenal. If the youngins can figure out how to link arms and vote in a whole new cohort of people who think more like mushrooms and trees and less like, you know, standing armies and standing politicians, we could fix a lot of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to make a couple points. First, my wife had a great couple of the days. Do the best and brightest go into politics today. That's what I'd like Mika to address. But second, you know, politics is an honorable profession. And I think we unduly denigrate them. I mean, if you really think about it at the top level of society, who's going to make the decisions? There are decisions which capital should not make and business should not make. Somebody's got to make the call. It's really hard. It's messy. The parties involved and who, you know, it's some we need a political class and it is an honorable profession and it is messy. Of course it is. So let Mika go. Yeah, I think it's an honorable profession too. And it's over-maligned. I think what we're seeing emerge with people like AOC is a certain capacity for collaborative engagement that is still only halfway there. And I think there's some potential for it to get better. But it's the scale issue is where I see a problem of like, how do you, you know, 700,000, trying to represent 700,000 people when initially it was what, 35,000 was the size of the original districts in the House of Representatives. So the bigger it gets, the less great, you know, we end up with things like Andrew Yang maybe being our next mayor for no other reason other than name recognition. Whereas the mayors, the people who have to run smaller jurisdictions seem to be the best of the bunch. So, you know, to some degree sort of like, let's break the bigger jurisdictions down, right? What about proportional representation, Mika? What about proportional representation? As I watch Israel flounder, I wonder about proportional representation. Ouch! I mean, you've got to have a high threshold for the smaller parties, so you don't end up with 15 parties, right? But it's also the reason America didn't deal with minorities, because the first, I suppose, voting system means that minorities basically never get, they take, you know, centuries for them to get any influence. Yes, building is to try things like rank choice voting, which is what we're going through at the moment in New York, is interesting. And so, you know, we may see more experiments like, you know, multi-member districts where you can have minority representation, it's sort of quasi-proportional. I don't know. I mean, I don't think these changes come quickly enough to, you know, we need, you know, if things weren't insane, for example, I had an opportunity to try and develop a local assembly model for my member of Congress, Jamal Bowman. But it's been insane. You know, I can barely get the attention of his staff, and I'm friends with him, I'm friends with his chief of staff. They want to do it, but they had to go through January 6th. They've been through COVID. I mean, it's, you know, one crisis after another doesn't leave you a lot of time to think and innovate. And so, if we're asking these people to also be democracy innovators, it's really tough. Yeah, I remember from my learning from a political economy, the whole American system of governance is built to be very non-innovative and be very stable. Yeah. Slowly, ostentatiously change, which has been very fortunate for the world when we became right. There is this line about how the states are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, but at the moment, they seem to be laboratories of authoritarian laboratories of chaos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And with that, happy note. I'm so glad we solved all this stuff. Can I just say, Susan, I really appreciated seeing what was on your desk. Me too. And I am reading a lot too. And it does seem like a fun way to engage at another level, which is like, what are the last four or five books somebody's read that are really, you know, staying with you? I was very happy that you didn't stump the band, but I had your books in my brain. Did you have them in the same place? So they were in my brain. So they're not, you know what I mean, how close in the network were they? I mean, I want to know, is there a, you know, this looks like a field to me. It looks like a, or something. This is the problem with Jerry's brain, which is you can't, as a friend, get in there and go, oh, well, I want to cluster these things. Well, that's why OGM exists as a project, by the way. So these books were not connected before, but now they're one degree. Now they're related. They're not directly connected, they're connected to today's call, which is connected to the playlist of all Rex calls, which I will post and you can go browse. So I connected Wilding, Timefulness, Hidden Life of Trees, How We Show Up, Perfect Order, Chrissy Stroop, Your Inner Fish, The Herd, all those things are sort of linked up while we were talking. And so this is now, you know, you can go find your way to this thought, which isn't, I haven't synced to the cloud yet, so you won't find it quite yet. But I, you know, that helps. And in other senses, I'm busy weaving those things myself, Susan. So what I wish is that you had access to a tool, it doesn't have to be the brain, that was brain-like in its capacity to help you record stuff and represent it and curate it in some way that was meaningful to you. And the same was Jermay, same with Mika, same with Foe, same with all of us. And I also don't believe that everybody must be weaving contexts like this, but rather, like Wikipedia, if a few people get our busy beavers and do this, the rest of us can, by reference, go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what Mika said over here, and just point to it, right? But we don't have a medium where we can point to one another's thinking and repositories beyond, there's a tweet, there's a blog post, right? And Mika, your newsletters are fabulous and large of links, and I can easily kill an hour and a half following your links, half of which I have never heard of, and there are studies and people doing great work, your mental map of civic tech, I would love to just do a bulk and mind meld and be able to import into my persistent map of how these things work, right? And probably half of the things under straight up proposal to Mackenzie Scott and see what she thinks. I know, how do we do that? I'd love to do that. Mika, you need to add Jermay to your newsletters. Mika, please, me too. Yeah, open to anybody, just go there and sign up, okay? So, here we go. Thanks, Mika. Bye. Quickly ask, are the books that Susan mentioned today linked to Susan's entry in your brain? Because I know Susan has an entry in your brain. No, I don't put in who recommended or who introduced me to somebody. I don't put those links in. Those to me are meta. It's not a case of me have recommended or introduced you. It's a case of, this is something that's connected to her way that she's looking at the world. So, if I had more time to debrief from this call, and that little conversation where I said this dimension about time and expansive and contractive time and all that, I would create a new node, not this call, but I would create a new thought that would be kind of like, there's a thought in my brain called my ah-has about food, soil, you know, all of that, where one day I realized, oh, shit, I've got a lot of stuff on soil fertility, no-till farming, mycelia, a whole bunch of stuff that was unconnected. And I created this sort of meta node, this nexus for those things, which you can then go and see the connections through. And I can also create smaller narratives, sub-narratives and all that. So, with a little more time, I would do what you just said, Jermay, but it would then be me expressing that, not Susan expressing that. So, the reason I went on this riff about, damn it, Susan, I wish you had the medium to play with like that, is that I would love to follow your trail through all those works. What I'd like is also a way to press 2x on the, or whatever, so that you get extra time to put all your notes down, but it doesn't take up all the time. Exactly. That'd be great. But what I do find is that by doing this a little bit for a long, long time, when I connect up to the Hidden Life of Trees, I got a bunch of stuff on it already, like it's rich already, right? So then connecting into something that's rich already and doing that five times from a new node means that I spent a little tiny bit of time doing some jujitsu, and the web I just wove is really rich. I was wondering if I could go to my bookshelves and redo my bookshelves. I thought if I pulled all the books off, and I just started to make piles. So, back when Al Chang was my housemate in the Berkeley Hills, at one point we pulled a bunch of my books down, and I told stories through the books. I basically, and I think I have those videos in a little folder. Maybe I'll post them to YouTube and share them out. So, cool. Well, I'm so glad to see everyone. Thank you. This is totally fun. Happy screening. Do this more often. And Jamai, stiff upper lip. Sweet potatoes. Very nutritious. Thanks. Bye, folks.