 I'm actually kind of down on Zoom transcripts, the whatever company they use, I forget. It's not as good as Whisper. Whisper is a lot better. Whisper is really good. But I'm happy to have this added feature as part of Zoom. And this is the Open Global Mind weekly call on Thursday, February 22nd, 2024. Reaching the end of February already, and this goes by way too fast. Hey, Patty. Hey, Mike. Awesome to have you here. We left last call with a lot of things on the table. Haven't really focused our topic for this call. So I'd like to spend the first part of it, since it's a topic call, refining through to something that is for something that's worth our time here together. What could we focus on together that we could sharpen? And it might include a burning question that one of you has for a project that we could sort of collect our brains together on. It might be something else. But the floor is open for proposals, but I would love us to sit. Maybe we sit for a minute and just plunder the kinds of questions that we have going and then step in. Mike, do you have a clarifying question or do you have a proposal? I'll wait a minute or two. And I have a debate in my own head about what to put on a table, but so a minute will be useful. That sounds wonderful. So let's go quiet for a minute and plunder what question might we address that would be terrific use of our time here today. Is plunder a new thing, Jerry? Plunder? Yeah. You mean the habit of civilizations plundering other civilizations? I mean, you've invoking plundering in this context here. I've not heard you do that before. Where did I say plunder? Did I miss here? OK. I think you said plunder. Plunder. Yes. Yes. I'm like a plunder. I said plunder? How did I say plunder? I guess I heard plunder, so there's always that. I did too, actually. Must be on our collective minds or something like that. Fascinating. You and Doug going weird. All right. So let's go quiet for a minute for think time and then come back in with questions that we can work on together. And then we'll figure out which of those we'd like to do. I used to have the Jeopardy think music as a handy thing I could turn on during meetings, which would always get a good laugh. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah. But I don't anymore. I just realized I should probably put it someplace. Kalia, welcome to the call. I was just, we just were in silence for a moment to ponder, not plunder. What topic is worth our time today? What should we really sharpen our senses on, including possibilities of questions that any one of us is working on individually that we could help you with, things like that? Mike, the floor is yours. Mike, you've got the mic. Thank you very much. As I said, my brain is full of things that I would love to ponder. One of them is an issue that we're publishing a report on in a week, digital leadership. And we're having a public event online to launch a report called Korea's Path Towards Digital Leadership. And what we do is we look at 10 big digital policy issues that Korea is grappling with, and we give them letter grades, A for getting connected, F for protecting their computer systems. And then we do the same for the US, Japan, and Malaysia so that we can compare and contrast and learn lessons. So that's question one, is how can we get presidents and prime ministers to actually step up and weigh in on these digital issues? When I was in the Clinton-Gore White House, we did a lot of this, and it really made a difference. It probably gave the US a three-year head start on e-government, e-commerce, even social media. So that's step one. An even bigger issue doesn't just involve presidents and prime ministers, but how do politicians get their head around emerging technologies so that they're not just listening to sales pitches and hyperbolic reporting about blockchain or the internet of things or chat GPT? So that's an even bigger issue. And then the two things that have got me very depressed right now are related to information. One is purposeful disinformation, which we've talked about a lot, but we haven't talked enough about what do we do to counter all the mind control and brainwashing that is distorting our politics. Related to that is one of the oldest phrases around, and that is information overload. It's not just journalists and people who are supposed to make sense of the world. It's almost everybody who now thinks, how do I keep track of all this? Those are related issues. People are more likely to fall for disinformation if they are being swamped by stuff, some of which is true, some of which is not. So those four issues, I can talk about those. I'd love to talk about anything else that people are excited about. But if people want to follow up with me on some of these digital leadership issues, I'll put my coordinates in the chat. And one more issue that's come out more recently, and that is another old phrase, and that is generation gap. I've seen more and more disconnect between people in their 20s and people in their 60s, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I just learned that to all of us over 60 out of pocket means I'm not going to be available tomorrow. Under 30 out of pocket means I'm deranged. Apparently, this is something that TikTok has spread to the world. TikTok is now rewriting our dictionary. I think that was a wealth of ideas. Mike, do you or somebody have a map of the age and other demographics on different platforms? I've seen it, yeah. I mean, it's striking how different it is, particularly TikTok and Instagram. Yeah, and important in relation to what you're saying about disinformation. I think that topic is very timely, given the new wave of disclosures about what the Russians have been up to. But when you say, what are we going to do about it, it begs the Ken Homer question for me of who's we, buddy. Which has been asked several times in the chat. We the White House. We you at Carnegie. Who's we? I'm praying for this discussion that you're proposing. Yeah, yeah. In my mind, it's we people who are worried. So each and every one of us. Yeah, OK. Pete. I'm surprised to go so quick. But me too. I was like, Pete, with a small note of surprise, perhaps. I like Mike's topics. And I want to suggest an additional viewpoint on them. Not a replacement viewpoint, but an additional viewpoint. I think that the we there implicitly, in some sense, is people I will call informationists, people who actually look for information, think about information, and hope other people rationally do the same thing. I think another thing I observe in the world is that most people maybe aren't informationists. They're going along with some flow or some set of flows that are in their life. And they will actually kind of demonstrably ignore truth or correct or facts in favor of things that are locally more important to them, like connection to their in-groups, anti-connection to their out-groups. So those of us who are informationists kind of wonder, how is that a thing? Why would anybody not follow the information if we gave them the best information, if we gave them the right amount of information, not too much and not too little? Everything would work out. And I'm sorry to say informationists, I don't think that's true. I think it's more complicated than that. Thanks. I had muted myself. So I'm sitting here saying, Klaus, wondering why Klaus isn't hearing me. So please go ahead. You are muted. There we go. I'm checking my headphones here. That's me. It's me, the newbie problem. Yeah, I think the crux of the issue dates back to how we have been handling propaganda for many, many decades now. When you think about the tobacco scandal, how come none of these guys went to jail? I mean, you had a group of senior-level executives, consulting firms, PR agencies, deliberately set out to mislead the American public about the risks and dangers of smoking. And it was revealed. It was in front of Congress. Everybody knew about it. These guys had done it. They admitted to it. And no one ended up in any form or shape being admonished. Or I mean, admonished, yes, but having a consequence come out of this. And so the thing, of course, is that even until today, everybody sort of is doing it. I mean, the Democrats are doing it to some extent. The Republicans are doing it with Wicker. You have Fox News out there. I mean, you listen into Fox News by now spinning the impeachment discussion about Biden and all the revelations that came out in the last few days. And you just think we're on two different planets because the way the information is being processed within the Margaret network is just bluntly, deliberately misleading to say it as polite as one can. So we have no mechanisms in place to see propaganda for what it is. It's a form of warfare. I mean, it's warfare in the Second World War. Hitler basically did what social media is doing today with the AM radio when it came out. This was the first time you had a platform where you could broadcast, bypassing all channels, all restrictions, all precautions, and go directly to the base. And he succeeded wildly. And it has just become more sophisticated today. So this is not like a today issue. This is an issue that we have not resolved, which is to suppress the weaponization of information for political purposes. So it's more of a big picture kind of thing in my mind. Great topic, Klaus. Thank you. Patty, then Doug, then Gil. Yeah. I think the way I tend to think about this is I guess I'm really curious if there's a name for it. I think there are several names for how media has become seemingly and extricably linked with identity and how I think in my observation, this is just a theory, I guess. But I suspect that there is a correlation between how established one's sense of personal identity and self is and how susceptible they are to narratives that have a lot of weight behind them or seem to have a lot of weight behind them. And I think as I think about the people that I know in my life who are who seem, I mean, my judgment would be seem prone to misinformation and really ingesting a lot of misinformation and holding it as the over truth, I think I have lost hope that there is a way to engage with someone who has assimilated the misinformation in a way that makes the cost of understanding differently too high. So if there is, so I'm just thinking of two people I know who it seems like their marriage from the outside seems to have a lot of built or rather like a mutual experience in history in the denigrating of the other side, right? And the Fox News experience is shared. And sometimes I think, man, I think it would cost them so much to entertain or be open to the world being a little different, it would cost them too much. And so I think the way I tend to think about it is if I'm interacting with someone who is holding what seems to me to be a worldview that is maybe not as accurate a reflection of reality as others, I had that in mind in the background, Aki. I think to myself, man, if I'm in conversation with this person, is what I'm asking them to consider too expensive, too emotionally expensive, too expensive of their inner resources to regulate as they consider or become open to a different way of seeing the world. Thank you. I tried to paraphrase your statement or question in the chat. I don't know if I did it well. If I did it poorly, could you please restate it there or just come back in and say it differently? But Killa's also saying that information might not be the right framing for it. But belief systems, whatever that might be, guys. Thanks. Doug, you pressed one of the right buttons. You put your hand down, but you didn't hit it. Yeah, that's good. So in the spirit of doing it differently in service to generating a different result, and in the concept of doing it differently, what if we were to look at if we were to shift and replace a foundational feature of the present landscape with a replacement? So if there was to be a replacement of consumption and extraction and all of that with contribution on a fundamental principle level, on a foundational value orientational level. And from that place, express the new, exploring the new, put energy and attention and words to the new, like what would the world look like if? Not informed by everything in the rearview mirror and not including the sort of orientation approach practices, data driven research, all the stuff that is imposed upon manifesting or giving birth to new without bringing anything in other than what's needed in real time as it's explored. And I'm complete. Thanks, Doug. Again, I sort of paraphrased your question. Is correct being in the chat and improve on that a few times? Gil. Yeah. Still on the disinformation theme. Maybe someone can help me here. I remember seeing something I think in 2015, 2016 about Putin's explicit disinformation strategy to sow SOW, social discord in the United States with an objective of fraying the social fabric, building disagreement and tension within the American population. I have not been able to find the original reference, but it's the lens through which I'm watching the events play out because it seems that whether that was an intentional strategy or not, that's what's happening. But this was something that put it down to quite explicit geopolitical strategy on Putin's part. Anybody seen that? And this is a while ago. This is like, you know, I think early in the Trump campaign. I've seen several things like that where he's taking credit for it, taking credit for getting Trump elected. I mean, it's not just Putin. I mean, a number of the top officials have celebrated their success as being cognitive warfare experts. But I'm asking something I think deeper than that, Mike. The election for sure. But the geopolitical cognitive warfare strategy, the great game that I think he's up to, like we know we're not going to beat you on the battlefield. We're not going to do nuclear war. It goes back to Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table in a very different kind of context. But it's a very interesting approach to cultural destabilization. That's a joke. It's a tactic. Anyhow, so I'm. I'll put some references into this. There's a very early one that was very, that unpacked it in a much deeper way than what I've seen recently. So I'm looking for that. Yeah, there was a defect. There was a defect that recently unpacked this. And I forgot where I saw it. But he basically was saying that this has been like a 2030 campaign to destabilize the United States on a generational level, meaning they are interfering at a generational level to have a wave of people come up with completely different ways of understanding how the world works. And so long range, deep seated, actually truly an act of war when you wrap it up here. Very, very sophisticated. And we probably need to go back and look to what's named Durchin Putin's Whisperer. Yes. Peter Pope Renceff has done the best books on this. He has a new one coming out next month, I think, called How to Win an Information War. So we're still in the hunt for a topic. And I am not going to resist the temptation to say that Adam Curtis's documentary hypernormalization from 2016 convinced me that we are already in a non-linear war, which is the name that is often given to the thing you described, Gil. And it's important to call it that, Jerry, because a lot of people say, why don't we charge Trump and his guys with treason? But you can't charge treason without a declared enemy. Really? Yeah. Yeah. You need a declared enemy to have treason. Otherwise, it's another thing. If you sold American secrets to somebody who wasn't declared enemy, that's the enemy that's not treason? It's espionage. That seems ridiculous. I may be wrong, but that's my understanding of it. That's correct. Gil, you're right. You need the war context and frame to give rise to the legal definition of treason. Cool. I did not know that. Thank you. So it raises the question of if we in fact are at war with Russia in an information war, but it's not declared, what are the values or unvalues of declaring it? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea. Thank you. Patty, then Pete, then Stacy. This might be stepping back a couple steps from when I raised my hand. And maybe we could, Jarrod, to your point, we're still looking for a topic. I'd be inclined to suggest that we keep riffing on the misinformation topic. That's what feels like it's happening here. So that's where I'm heading, but. OK. So yeah, just after Doug's share, it made me think of the question Mike opened with, which was, and I might be not repeating it exactly how you said it, Mike, but it sounded like the question you were asking was, how can we engage with those who are or combat, those who are positing misinformation? Does that sound close, Mike, to what? It's more than just our individual efforts, although that concerns me most because my father and my brother are both victims of Fox News. But I think there's also society-wide efforts that we could tell our politicians to support. So Finland has a world-class effort to fight disinformation that starts in the second or third grade. They actually teach critical thinking skills, but they also teach the kids, this is what somebody does when they want to deceive you. This is what somebody does when they think you're stupid. So that's another way to do it. But yeah, you've captured my essence, and I'm glad you're interested in talking about this. The fact is we all focus on filtering out this stuff, but we really need to focus on how people react to the stuff because it's going to get through, and people are going to share it by word of mouth. So thank you. Yeah, thanks for clarifying. I'm inclined to agree with what Doug shared and that there might need to be a different level at which we are entering the problem that isn't the downstream. What to me would seem like the downstream expression of meeting force with force. And I think that there anybody, I don't know what that looks like, but I'm inclined to think that the open combat or direct combat of disinformation at the level of those disseminating, the disinformation wouldn't be productive. I don't know what the alternative looks like, but I don't think that that's the level of engagement that would be sustainable or productive. It's my first impressions. Thanks, Patty. Pete, then Stacy and feel free to take a moment, take a beat before stepping in so we can slow the mixer. I'm with Patty, it seems like the topic has kind of gelled into one and I like it. I don't like that it exists, but I like that we're talking about it. I wanted to add more complexity to our thinking about cyber warfare and disinformation and things like that. And I have a weird data point from yesterday, actually. It was an article in TechCrunch and I'll paste it here. Maybe no, maybe you don't know. Recently, in the past week or so, MasterDawn got seriously disrupted by spam. And this is partly due to the design of MasterDawn as a decentralized social media platform that doesn't have a lot of control over like stopping spam. I think it's a, from my point of view, it's actually kind of a design deficiency. It's not that a decentralized platform needs to have poor spam control. It's that MasterDawn grew up in an earlier and more naive time when it didn't seem like it would happen or something, I don't know. Anyway, that's kind of a side note to figure out why it got disrupted by spam. It could have been that disinformation experts were taking over. It looks a lot more like it was two teenagers having a feud in Japan and just getting bigger and bigger waves of stuff thrown at each other caused MasterDawn to kind of fall over. So in that article, a cybersecurity expert says something really interesting to me. He says, this reminds me back in 2016, Reddit and Spotify and big chunks of the internet fell down because of a botnet swarm. And this was bigger than the current MasterDawn one. And so he tells the story, like I went on NPR and had to explain what was going on. And the question was, well, this must be Putin, right? And he's like, a bunch of kids as teenagers. It wasn't actually Putin. So that's kind of a touchstone for me. It's easy to go, oh my God, disinformation, Trump won, whatever, and it must be Putin. I am certain that a large in large part Putin and whatever minions he has in Russia like continually try to disrupt our culture, American culture. And of course, the American information systems do the same thing around the world too, right? So I want to kind of caution maybe. It's easy to go, oh, okay, the problem is that Putin lives in the Kremlin someplace and is causing all of this. It's a lot more complicated than that. It's a multifaceted side. It's multifaceted, a multilateral thing. We do it, lots of people do it. And it's not necessarily always on purpose. Sometimes it's just kids playing on the internet, no, oddly enough. I think the thing that I worry about is that I can tell there are like massive cultural disruption forces going on in the US fighting information wars or stuff. And I think the folks behind them are really rich people who are kind of multi-homed around the world. I don't think they're necessarily Americans, but I don't think they're necessarily Putin either. And I think most of us aren't even aware of it. So I think big chunks of American culture gets swung around by shadowy forces. That it seems like, wow, Putin must be really shadowy to affect the 2016 election or something like that. I think it gets a lot more shadowy than that and a lot bigger and affects us much more deeply. So I'm not trying to minimize the fact that Russia does that kind of stuff, but I am trying to add that that's the tip of a very large and deep culturally affecting iceberg. Thanks. Just to complexify Pete's complexification a little bit more, does anybody consider advertising propaganda? Or propaganda advertising. Or propaganda advertising. And what is the business model of several, maybe a third of the world's largest corporations? Advertising. Doug, then Gil. And I think we are narrowing down on to the misinformation, misinformation topic. So I'll just say that. Go ahead, Gil. Just to respond to Pete and then my point, QAnon was a gaming community that escaped the box and was unleashed into the wild. Like, and that's the source of rights and sanity. Good chunk of the source of the rights and sanity. The point I wanted to make in alignment with my previous inquiry is the question is less about, for me, the fact of all of this going on as it is, what is it that's missing that's making people vulnerable to it? And that drops down into much more fundamental pieces like safety, identity that is internally centered, individual by individual, or on a mass societal level, why is there the absence of that? The absence of values, the absence of morality, the absence of ethics, the absence of sensed, internal sense knowing what's right from wrong, what's true, what's false, all of that. The underlying intrinsic ability to do that is instantiated in every human being. I absolutely believe that. The question is why have so many people lost themselves and lost those faculties? And I think that's, the inquiry isn't about how do you stop all the stuff that's keeping them lost. It's how do you provide them with what they need to return to rationality, return to judgment and return to discernment? And that's about needs as opposed to addressing the symptoms. And I'm complete. Doug, thank you very much for that. I'm gonna take a stab. I'm gonna open a bit of our can of worms by trying to take a brief answer at that, which is that allegedly, presumably, that's the role of religion, right? To give people meaning in a source of an anchor and a foundation and faith. And I think that religions have failed to do that largely. And what's happening is nuns are as the largest category in the US, religious category. The US is surprisingly religious, but the growing category right now is nuns, people who are spiritual, but not religious. They're leaving organized religion, not in droves, but considerably. The shift is pretty sharp. And then we have a general loss of trust in other institutions, like the government and the intentional undermining of trust in other institutions goes, go watch hypernormalization. And the result is people on board. And then all it takes is a plot thread to float in front of you that attaches itself to something like you're worried about your child and the MMP vaccine they're supposed to take. MMR, MMP, mumps, forgetting what that is. And all of a sudden you're in Q and A because you're a worried mom. And there's people out there saying, yes, yes, the vaccines are dangerous and you're down the rabbit hole. And so people are, I think, grasping a lot for what and why. And Doug, I think you've put your finger on a really important force in this whole question. What predisposes us to be accepting of alternate narratives that are particularly, in many cases, particularly dangerous? Thank you, MMR, measles, rubella, I think, yeah. Gil, could I just respond to that for a second? It won't be long. Western religion actually was the beginning of telling people you are not the center of your safety and stability. You need me to make it safe for you. So I call that the golden idol syndrome. You mean specifically Abrahamic religions is what you're calling? Correct, absolutely. So yeah, all organized religion was the earliest manifestation of, you need me to tell you how to be safe and what to do and what you need and what you don't need. And it was a replacement of individual grounding in space and centering a surrogacy that's actually the inception of the source, the root of how we ended up where we are today. Now everything is golden idols. Even somebody, you know, hawking some magic pillar cure or black box on the internet for corporations or for this or that or for whatever, the truth of the matter is, I can't make sense unless I'm certified in theory you. What the hell is that? So it's everything is distorted in this golden idol way and 99% of it all is not in service to the people that end up getting drawn or sucked in. Doesn't mean there may be not some intrinsic value in the initial insights, but the minute it became associated with idol and brand and certification or right, wrong and validation or a leadership or whatever the ship is, it's plain old paradigm forward, but it's the golden idol syndrome run wild because people do not believe they are capable of being their own orientation, their own North Star, their own center of reference. And that the whole system has been set up to say, you're not, you can't, you're not able, you're not qualified or you're not good enough for your whatever. Sorry, little rant, Gil. Thank you, Gribel. Yeah, more than a little rant, thank you for that. I get where you're going, I think I get where you're coming from and I have a substantially different interpretation of history than you do on this, which is probably a topic for another time, but I will say that there were plenty of gold and idols before the Abrahamic traditions arose. And in fact, the first of the Abrahamic traditions was a very explicit rebellion against golden idols, where it went since then is another story, but anyhow, so that's, let's flag tag that, maybe just you and me, maybe the group to come back to that one another time. I see it very differently than you do. The Abrahamic tradition that I pertain to says you need us, as a fundamental thing that it says, this says we need we. So anyhow, story for another time, but back to the disinformation story. And I like that we're on this topic, there's a lot here. Yes, I think it was Pete who said that this is, we're not just dealing with explicit intentional actions by particular actors, but we're dealing with the emergent properties of rapidly evolving complex systems that we don't know all the ways in which they work. And so are they vulnerable to teenagers in Japan? Yeah, are they vulnerable to software, which is open AI went cuckoo a couple of nights ago. So even with explicit computer code, we know the code is so complex that you can't possibly trap all bugs before you release it, how much more so with AI where we don't know exactly what's going on inside that thing. And we don't know what explicitly is going on inside this thing either. So there's that. A few threads. One is the, John Robb has done a lot of work on what he calls asymmetric warfare. Global Gorillaz is one of the brands he uses, John Robb, R-O-B-B, former Air Force pilot, software executive, et cetera. Comes from a more right of the political spectrum perspective than I do, but very important and valuable work. And it's one of the people who's really drilled into that game substantially. The, Jerry, you and others have said that we do this too. We all do this. We are outraged when we find Russian spies, but of course there are American spies all over the world. We're outraged at foreign influence in our elections, but we've mastered the game of influencing elections around the world for decades. It would be worthwhile in this conversation at some point to look at the writings of Edward Grenays and the writings of Eric Goebbels and other people who've been very explicit about how to, and Mao for that matter and Lenin and others who've been very explicit about how to use these tools and Justice Powell, Supreme Court Justice, who many know wrote the Powell memorandum in the early 1970s under commission by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to shift the perception and power of business in American society. And a lot of what we've seen over the past several decades is not so much random events as there's a playing out of the strategy laid out 50 years ago. A terrific resource on that is a film called Heist. There are several films called Heist. This one is subtitled, The Stealing of the American Dream, which lays out that story. And the last thing I'll say here, no, maybe not the last thing. I think the Finland example is really important. The training in dealing with this information as part of a very sophisticated educational system, really highly revered in the world. Finland pays their teachers well and invests seriously in education. And we're in a mirror image of what we do here. Where was it going with that? We have a very profound challenge in this country because of our commitment to free speech, which I'm committed to and think is deeply important, but it complicates this game for us a lot. In Canada, you're not allowed to lie on the news. It's against the law. Here it's not. And here it can't be. And the overlaps of that with cancel culture or whatever you want to call that game on both the left and the right is a whole other kind of information worth here that I'm frankly deeply concerned about. And it's having the effect in some circles of flattening and dumbing down the public debate and discussion and exploration of what we can find together. So that's enough. I'll just leave it there for now. Thanks, Gil. This is indeed a rich mother load of stuff. Stacy, please. Yeah, so I kept putting my hand up and down because I didn't think I could connect all the dots, but I want to go back to what Doug was saying because for those of us that believe that we have to learn to do ourselves better, I think what Doug was, so I agree with what Doug was saying. And where I come from is the belief that the role that the church played in the way that he described, which I think is accurate, is that learning communities can do that. So for me, experiencing is the midway point between being and doing. And learning communities provide that experience. So as an example, when Gil says in Canada, you can't lie on the news, that's the kind of question that if brought up in a learning community and every person was like talking about it, sort of like, let me not go off on a tangent. That's a way that in a group where you kind of know each other, maybe not that well or different pieces, you can just get a sense of how people feel about different things. But so some of you know that I'm in North Carolina living with someone that I am so, so close to who was for a very long time a devout maga. She's still a devout Catholic. And we have, she's not voting this time. She's absolute, right now she's not voting, which is a plus we're getting somewhere. But we were driving in the car yesterday and you know, I said, you know, I'm only poking at you because she was like, I know, I know, I know. And then she started to say, but she was feeling overwhelmed that how are we gonna fix this? Because I started, I finally got her to listen to some stuff about how like magas have infiltrated the evangelical movement, things like that. I know her and because I know her, I know that my way into her belief system is through a consciousness kind of, you know, and that's the other thing I wanted to say. You have to speak to people from their belief system, not change their belief system, go in there. But anyway, so I was, we were talking about whatever and at one point she just felt very overwhelmed like, but we're never gonna get them how are we gonna, and I looked at her and I said, we're all we have. And she just gasped and she was like, yes, I get it. So anyway, I just think again, because I mean, I come to this group because I really feel that the power we have is in creating learning communities. And I want to just emphasize the importance of the experience of that. And Jose, this is basically for you. I was gonna share this tomorrow because like you took us through a process and what I didn't share with you is that for me, the most important part of that process is that everybody's contributing something about themselves, not what they do, but a piece of who they are. And that, I think, fills in some of the gap of what Doug was saying, people are missing. I'm pretty complete. That was great. That was great. Thank you. Thanks, Ceci. Pete. I wanted to thank Doug B for bringing up QAnon because maybe it's a thing that we can kind of examine at arm's length now. It was horrible and disgusting and it's over, hopefully more or less. I think one of the things for me when I look at what happened with QAnon is not so much where it started or how it started, but that it spread. So it was an instance of social contagion, largely, that let it get big. It wasn't the fact that it was, you know, gaming community or 4chan or whatever it was. So I think it's important, you know, so maybe if we had Finlandized the US over the past 30 or 40 years so that social contagions, sociopathic social contagions like that would dampen themselves out rather than inflame people and have people jump on the bandwagon because it serves their personal interests and their excitement and their ability to beat up other people or whatever. You know, maybe the world would be a different place. So I think, so I really want to stress that there's kind of a root cause here which underpins a lot of these kinds of situations. It's that where we can flabby as a society and as a culture. It's not that we get poked once in a while. The poke isn't the real problem. The poke is, or sorry, the real problem is the fact that we've got laxity in our ability as a society to withstand perturbations, whether they're by accident, whether they're a bunch of teenagers having a laugh, whether it's Putin, whether it's whatever. Another thing I kind of reread some of the QAnon stuff, I would be shocked if QAnon wasn't deliberately engineered to be what it is. So it's easy to say, oh my God, the 4chan is horrible and it's the source of all evil. And if only we, you know, somebody paid a few 4chan people or convinced them, maybe without even paying them to do things and then kept feeding that fire. So we never found and convicted, we found and convicted kind of the idea of 4chan and a lot of people went, well, I guess we're done here. That was that problem. There was somebody else driving that thing, I think. And it was just too cleverly done and affected too much of the population to have been just a random act of violence. So I hope we can do a better job as a society learning to be more resistant to social contagion, especially the sociopathic kind rather than, you know, rather than just assume that it's all over and now that it's over. Good quick things before I go to Mike and Plaus. Hold on, Mike, just a sec. One is I put a post a little earlier in the chat to the essay by, to the, the thought is QAnon and ARG was a really good essay by Adrian Han. ARG is alternate reality game. And basically it's a big, if you look at it as a lark, as a big live action role play or an alternate reality game, a lot of things become clear because there's a game master who's dropping clues, blah, blah, blah, and you're like, wow, how do you run a whole bunch of people as if it were a game? It just, the framing works really, really well. And then the second thing I wanted to go to is, I just want to pull on one thread that's come up a bunch here, especially in the chat, we were talking about the Finnish education system and I put in some links about folk high schools back when and building. One of the answers that we hear a lot is, oh, let's just fix the schools. Let's just educate everybody. I think that might be a dead end for a couple of reasons. One is we're fighting over the schools right now. It's a, it's a knife fight in an elevator with people who are trying to get rid of, you know, basically because we have compulsory education and we have school boards and all of those things sort of corral up to choke points we have this knife fight in an elevator to try to figure out how to influence that. I think the answer, and I have a huge critique of the compulsory education system, watch my TEDx talk. So I'm wondering how we get better critical thinking from the ground up in a fractal completely distributed way through actions, through doing things together that improve our communities, et cetera, et cetera. How do we work better thinking into that thing rather than trying to reform the institutions and train everybody better to be critical thinkers which last I checked, fails often. And it seems to be rare in the world that we get an educational system that pulls that one off really well. So that's kind of where my thoughts on that are. Mike, then Klaus. Thanks, you helped answer some of the things that I wanted to frame some of the questions I wanted to ask because Paul, Pete, I don't see where you're saying that QAnon is over. I mean, there isn't such a stream of stuff tracked back to QAnon but the damage has been done. 20, 30 million people seem to believe some of the core tenants of the QAnon worldview that there's a bunch of pedophile Democrats who are trying to build global government. And I fully agree that there's a lot of effort going into perpetuating this. And it's a massive psychological operation, PSIOP. The irony though is that that phrase is being used by Fox News, OANN, some of the crazies and the MAGA fringe. They're describing what the Justice Department is doing as a PSIOP when the fact is is that Putin and his pals are doing things like QAnon and all this new revelation about a FBI, a FBI informant who is working directly with the Russian spy agency. I just, I think we have to figure out a multi-pronged approach to things like QAnon, including figuring out who's been pushing it. I mean, I have to believe that the US intelligence community has some pretty good ideas of where some of these things are happening. And I don't know why we haven't seen detailed information on where the hubs are. Where are these people sending all this material from? It just boggles my mind. But the most important is what Jerry said. Let's get the entire society talking about this stuff and thinking hard about what's truth and what's not. Starting with the kids is really important but I think the biggest problem here is people who have retired and in some cases are starting to think less critically, be more trusting or be more fearful or both. And I don't know how we reach them other than having their grandkids say, grandma, you know that QAnon isn't real. I think there's gotta be just a multi-generational and multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary approach and we're not doing it partly because every time the Biden administration tries to do something against disinformation, the other side yells, thought police, censorship. I mean, it's astonishing to me that the House of Representatives has defunded a number of these State Department initiatives that were aimed at stopping the spread of disinformation overseas where it was crippling our diplomatic efforts. My wife was our ambassador to Cyprus which is a beautiful place in a very dangerous neighborhood. Lots of Russian money, lots of Russian oligarchs or at least the mistresses of Russian oligarchs. It's incredibly sophisticated what they're doing there. There are Russians who own radio stations broadcasting in Russian as well as Greek. Anyway, harang harang. Harang away. I do think that one of the big mechanisms here is doing more of what Stacey does and which means visiting friends, taking them by the hand, having heartfelt conversations, approaching them from where they are within their belief system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And if many people undertake things like that that causes large-scale change. If only a few people do that doesn't cause enough change. Klaus and Patty. Yeah, I just wanted to throw in a consideration on a time scale. I love this letter from Tolstoy, a letter to a Hindu that was actually created the foundation for Mahatma Gandhi's mission and the way he approached his life. I mean, we just have to recognize that this is an inherent quality of our species. This is innately, deeply embedded in our culture just like there's no reason why somebody would use a club and hit somebody over the head to take away what he has, what he carries, but this is just part of the story. So you can go all the way back, like Tolstoy does in this letter, all the way back to as far as our recorded history let us travel. And then you go to science fiction and you go forward. It is the same story. There's not one science fiction writer who can envision a future that is not tainted with all the same pathologies that we have today. And that we have had historically. So obviously, this is a trait in our psyche and our way of being that has to be framed in by culture. So we have to have agreement that this is the way we conduct ourselves but the temptation to use this propaganda tool whether through religion or in which or through QAnon or in whichever way it is expressed it's just too great because it's such a powerful tool to use. So it has to be made the wrong thing to do. It has to be the polite society doesn't do that sort of thing kind of approach. And if we were to cement it in right now, let's say collectively we here succeed in having the political process express disdain, educate the population on the risk and the danger of doing this. And then we get it all cleaned up within two, three generations would be right back to somebody figured out I can do this and it gives me advantage. I mean, that's at least where science fiction is going. It's basically saying it's inevitable that something will kick off this familiar race to the bottom once again. So I think we just philosophically accept this is what it is. It's part of who we are. It's part of our psyche. And so how do you reign it in? How do you put a fence post around it? So it stays contained. Thanks Paz. One of the things you said reminded me of an essay I just read Ted Joya is a really good prolific writer on the business of music and music itself and a bunch of other things. And he wrote this essay where he's talking about how entertainment ate art and now distraction is eating entertainment. And all of that is what we have as our cultural base to work with to try to answer the questions that you were just talking about. So some piece of art is working on principles and other sorts of things that attach to the soul and to the heart as opposed to just the brain and the senses. And we're losing that. It's being swallowed by a device that just wants the endless scroll of short bursts of something that keeps your attention and sort of the addiction doom loop that we seem to be in. And I'm kind of over-generalizing but I'm kind of not when you look at the stats on TikTok. For example, the amount of time young people are spending on TikTok is astonishing. And so if we want some culture or if we want some critical thinking or if we want other kinds of things, we're gonna have to in some sense wrestle it away by winning the war with TikTok. Through TikTok? I don't know. Patty. Just a couple of observations as the conversation's unfolding and I'm kind of watching how we're talking about information, what's occurring to me is that if the issue that we're discussing is happening at the level of myths or disinformation and our best ammunition seems to be discourse of narratives that are more truthful or more accurate truthful or more accurate representation of reality, it kind of sounds like even when we're able to package that in a way that that can be shared and in a way that seems to resonate with others and we can do it whatever we can to get a better discourse or more accurate or truthful discourse out there. It seems like even that can be quickly weaponized and used and kind of like redirected and pointed back in a direction. So what's coming to me is I wonder if back to what Doug had shared earlier in the chat, that the level of intervention for this at this, this pool of issues might not be at the level of countering with like more accurate or truthful information. It has to be at maybe a different level. And then it also occurred to me that it kind of seems like I was thinking of what Stacy was sharing about the experience you have with your friend. And it almost seems like there's a threshold beyond which if an idea passes it and it is able to reach a certain amount of people, then it can become weaponized. So it almost seems like there's some wisdom and I know Jerry echoed this at trying to maneuver through this and navigate this issue at a much more micro. Level, community level. I think what's something that occurred to me earlier in the conversation was maybe the, what that could look like is the revitalizing of third spaces and community and having smaller pockets of discourse that feel more safe and feel less charged and like there's less at stake and less at risk in the discourse that it's being had. Patty, thank you. You made me connect a couple of things from what you said. I wrote, reality is more boring than fantasy or rage. And I just want to elaborate on that for a second. The work of being citizens with each other, the boring work of making sense of the world, of improving our neighborhoods, all that is actually sort of boring unless you really love it. In which case it's fantastic. But compared to the crazy ass narratives of QAnon or conspiracy theories that are being floated, Taylor Swift as a Psyop, she's being paid by NATO to like, wait, what? Those things are actually fun and exciting. And you can read to their very retellable stories in Jay Golden's language of storytelling. They're really good. And then rage is another great weapon. And the far right magas have really, really figured out rage. There's a thought in my brain of Democrats are finally getting pissed off about stuff. And I collect that video clips of different Democrats in different places who were actually justifiably enraged and are letting the microphone have it or whoever they're speaking to have it that way. But the far right has figured out how to do this. I remember doing the Kavanaugh hearings when we were seeing whether he was gonna become a, thanks Doug, whether Kavanaugh was gonna become a Supreme Court Justice, Lindsey Graham comes out and he is a master actor. He goes into a patented outrage cycle where he is incensed and livid. And wow, he is just cashing in the chips right there because in fact, when Kavanaugh himself does his testimony, which was so beautifully, beautifully parodied by Matt Damon, I have to say Matt Damon doing Kavanaugh was just a master stroke of humor, unfortunately, because then it just made it funny instead of dangerous. But when Kavanaugh comes out and gets really mad, the first thing I thought was like, oh, okay. So Kavanaugh has given up on joining the Supreme Court and he is just going to cry and blame people now. And I was wrong. I was really wrong. That was read as righteous outrage and there were all other politics involved, but he managed to get on the Supreme Court. So this little equation that scares me a lot, that reality is more boring than fantasy or rage. And I think it's important that we remember that and maybe try to, I say this facetiously, but I'm trying to figure out one of the strategies, hide the broccoli. When kids don't want to eat their broccoli, you turn it into funny stuff, you make a game out of it, you do whatever. A friend of mine wanted to feed his kids carrot souffle. And he said, my kids are never going to eat carrot souffle. So he said to them, do you know what's for dinner tonight? Carrot ice cream. And they were like, ice cream? We like ice cream? Yeah, it can be hot though. It's not going to be cold, but it's going to be carrot ice cream. He sold it to them as ice cream. And that's sort of lying or covering things. So I don't think that's the way to do reality well, but can we make reality more engaging, more loving, more interesting, more connective? And I think the connective part of the boring task of community and building and civic life is actually the stuff that we're missing that Doug was pointing to earlier. I think that is a really big piece of what we're missing and I blame consumerism and individualism and all those things for separating us from one another and deprecating all that work of being citizens together on the planet. Patty, then Stacy. Man, love the analogy of hiding the broccoli. And I present it in the chat, but I also think this is kind of important to sit on for a second. Has anyone seen Ted Lasso here? Yeah, it was brilliant, right? It was so many moments and pockets of just a different, an alternative way of navigating in the world, being modeled for, and my experience was the first time I had seen anything like that modeled in popular media. And it has been the top three, top four on Apple TV ever since it showcased what was that four years ago now. Even though the season ended, the third season ended, I think it was just this last year, like it is still alive in the hearts of many, myself included, because we are thirsty for something else. We are thirsty for a different way. I say we, many, you know, not all, but I think there are many who are aware or have a sense, even if they don't know it, that there's a different way of doing it. And we just need to see it modeled, and we just need to see it celebrated and highlighted, kind of like I feel what happened with Ted Lasso. Part of what Jerry was sharing brought me back to what Doug had initially suggested when Doug was saying that like, we're missing, we collectively may be missing this deeper fundamental piece. What about the ability to feel, right? I think that there are so many different ways in which feeling is being leveraged against what I would, you know, suppose as a very numb and very disconnected society. I think that the ability to feel things like joy and delight and pleasure and curiosity and wonder is a human need. And I think that that isn't a conversation that I hear being talked of very often. I don't think that there's common shared language that or even a recognition of that. And I think as a consequence, so many of us are being left to pursue things like true crime or, you know, really heavy shock value media in an attempt just to feel something. And so I think that another gap that the way that political discourse and news is being sent or shoved, you know, or shoved down our throats or are being sent to us is that it is filling this need we have to feel something. But unfortunately, I think often the outrage and the disgust and the self-righteousness can fill this gap. We don't know, many, many don't know that they have of feeling things that are different. And it is serving a need for many in that way. Unfortunately, that's just my take on it. Thanks, Pat. Stacy. Yeah, I was just gonna say real quickly since you brought up anger that that was one of the ways that I made a lot of headway with my friend is just getting like sometimes we would just focus on the energy of somebody. We wouldn't even like listen to what they were saying. And sometimes it was people that we didn't even know just so that I could get her to, because she is a very feeling and sensing person. And I basically just taught her ways to see whether somebody's message was authentic or whether it was trying to be manipulative regardless of what their opinion was or what they were trying to say. So I just taught her the skills, which I think is important because I know I don't learn unless I experience it myself. A whole bunch of people could tell me something. It might sway me. I might keep trying because I'm still not seeing it. But in the end, I'm not gonna get it until I get it. And I think there's a lot of people like that. I don't think it's just me. Thanks, Stacy. Let's just take a moment and go into silence for a bit because we've said a lot in an hour and a quarter. I'll bring us back out in a moment and love the Diamond Dogs reference in the chat. Thank you very much. Where to now? I will remind everybody that the second of four governance calls is coming up at 10. So 45 minutes from now, same Zoom. If you'd like to join, please bring people that don't look like us to the call. I don't want to be lost. So the place where I met with this is that the only way is always just radical transparency. I was listening to yesterday actually to a couple talking heads on the YouTube channel. And they were naming Jordan Johnson, specific members of Congress as liars. I mean, they're saying these guys are deliberately lying to the American public. They are repeating Russian propaganda. They are actually harming our discourse in our society. And so you would, the idea of being polite about this or avoiding a skirmish should have passed by now. And for the Biden administration, it would be time to take the gloves off, and to just outright say that. Say, this is a lie. You're perpetuating a lie that originated at the KGB. And just to make these shocking statements because any way of circumscribing things or being polite about things will weigh beyond this. It's not going to have the effect. So, and this is an understanding of, this is a war. I mean, the real consequences of losing this are as severe as having a shooting war, where you blow up each other's buildings because the impact on our economy, the impact on our tax system and our laws and everything is enormous. And what's at stake here is just absolutely incredible, not even to talk about having this collective need to prepare for an impending climate environment that is going to throw enormous challenges at us, which we're completely unprepared to deal with. So it's not just this immediate political scenario. The much bigger thing looming out there is that the environment has reached typical points that could just automatically alter the way our civilizations function. So I see that really from this point of, at some point in time, you'll have to take the safety off and go for it. Thanks, Tos. And I'm very torn about whether you should meet anger with anger or not. That's really, really hard for me. Not anger. I'm not talking about anger. You know, I mean, you don't have to be angry to defend yourself in a war. Yes. You just have to be conscious of your own safety and that of your children, your family. Thanks, Tos. Go ahead, Patty. Maybe a bit unrelated to what Klaus was sharing. This is, I just wanted to present something that I've been working on for a while. It's not complete by any stretch, but I'm curious to be interested to develop it with others, but I've been trying to track this. The conversation we're having to me points to, or invites me into the question of what's the most, can we find the most upstream iteration of what is causing all of this chaos that we're exploring together. And I've been considering the possibility of whatever personal power or power actually means this thing that tends to elude quantification and clear definitions in language. I'm curious of around how power might act as almost like a homeostatic function within a single body and how power transfer may be occurring between two people, they're not aware because this thing is actually fundamentally necessary for a human survival. And are we witnessing power transfer among and between humans at the collective level that made us be reflection of a deep, I think it got alluded to earlier in the conversation kind of a systematic, potentially systematic disempowerment of the collective. And now are we seeing power rippling and transferring between people in the way that it is today as a manifestation of that. So that's a conversation I would love to have with others. So please let me know. Seconding Mike, humor is a huge powerful tool. I didn't see that, but I agree with Mike 100%. I think that going back to what Jerry was saying, hiding the broccoli in packages of humor and wholesomeness and not snark and not degradation might be a really powerful tool going forward. So anyway, reach out please if you're interested in having that conversation together because yeah, I'd like to have it with others. A couple of things. One, I rude many years ago, maybe in the middle of the Trump administration, I rude the fact that our best journalists were comedians and how like the best critiques of the news were happening from the top comedians in the country. And I was like, journalism seems to have dropped the ball. Don't know exactly what's happening. Patty, if there's concurrence maybe, I think the notion of power might make a great topic two weeks from now. On our next topic call, we'll see if there's energy around that, but I'll put it down as a placeholder for two weeks from now. And yeah, off to you, Gil. There we go. Take some of it for the fingers to get there. I was surprised, Jerry, by your comment about anger. And so we had this little exchange in the chat. I asked Jerry for people who didn't see it. What do you do in the dojo? Where you learn very early on that anger is just not helpful. Anger constrains your ability to respond. Anger limits my freedom. Anger hurts me in some ways more than it hurts the other guy. And this is an embodied practice, not a theoretical one. So it's actually a very interesting place to play from. And I raise it because it's part of the challenge is bringing that dojo experience out into the real life of messiness in humans and arguments and road rage and politics and all that stuff. But it's instructive for us. But the other thought that comes up here is that is that rage is different than anger. Indignation is different than anger. Indignation, of course, I mean, it's right there in the word is tied to dignity. And indignation is kind of a, is a, sorry, running out of words here this morning. It's a reaction to an assault on dignity. And that's a very different kind of anger or different than what we usually think of as anger. So there's room for something here other than just calm and passive acceptance and such. And there's a place to fight. And it's a question of how do we fight? What do we fight? How do we fight? So that's another interesting thread for us to go down. And Jerry, I posted in the chat, I followed your link to the TED talk that you mentioned on the sidebar is something of the complexities of the martial artists mindset, which I haven't seen suspect might have something interesting for us. Sweet, thank you. I will tell the, I will tell the first story of that TEDx talk real quick here. There's an Aikido practitioner named Terry Dobson who is not the speaker in this thing. And it was my very first teacher. No way, that's awesome. I have stories to tell you about. So tell me if this is one of Terry's stories. He tells a story of how Terry was learning, he was getting, going up the ranks in Aikido and wanted to sort of try it out because in Aikido, we don't do open combat. We do partner work. And even when you're doing a test, it's still pretty fake. It's not, you're actually trying to hurt people. And so he was on the subway and he sees a really angry guy climb on the subway and he's like, oh. Let me just interject for people that don't know. Terry is a big, hulky guy. He's like, looks like a biker, could be a bouncer, probably was, continue. Aikido is really useful for bouncers. And so he's on the subway and he sees this really angry guy come on him and his brain is like, ah, I'm gonna get to use my Aikido now. And the guy is like drunk and like being kind of dangerous and accosting people. And just before Terry's about to intervene and do his Aikido magic, a voice comes from the back of the subway car. It's an old, old man who says, hey, and I'm forgetting how he intervened. But he said, you know, what's on your mind? And he basically talks. What do you have been drinking? What do you have been drinking? Socky. I love Socky. Thank you. Perfect. Me and my wife, we drink Socky every night. And bonds with a fellow who ends up prying in the old man's arms. And Dobson says, I know where the Aikido was in the subway car that night. It was the old man in the back of the car. Thank you, Ken. I just put a link to the YouTube to that. Yep. To the original story or to the same text? It's a retelling of it, but. Okay. Oh, good. Perfect. My retelling of Terry Dobson's train story from someone else. I love that. Thank you. Ramdars tells it also. Yeah, it's a good story. And it's a good story. There's two words that I often contrast against each other. There's being defenseless and being undefended. And the difference between the two is really important. Being defenseless means somebody could come and beat you up. You don't know how to defend yourself. Being undefended means you know how to defend yourself, but you put your guard down, which is an invitation of trust. It's an opening. And I think being undefended is really, really good. It's very close to being vulnerable. Has a lot to do with making yourself vulnerable on purpose, but not knowing that you're not that vulnerable because you could protect yourself if you needed to. What does that turn into in social media debate or political discourse? I'm unclear, but I think it's a good avenue. We have only a couple of minutes left in this call. Ken, is it a moment for a poem? Sure. Just gonna put something in the chat. I've recently become rather enamored with Jonathan Rosen who I had not heard of until recently. Used to have the RSA and chess champion and degree from Oxford on Harvard and Bristol, just really brilliant guy. And he's just introduced something called the anti-debate. In fact, it was Gil Fren to originally ordered me to this. So I don't have it at my fingertips, but if you look at the anti-debate, it talks a lot about how social media destroys the ability for people to converse. And it's like, we need something different. Debate is broken, what can we do? So it's anti-debate the answer. Let's see, I did choose a poem here as I was listening in and see if you can figure out the connection to this poem with misinformation and power structures. It's called Pope Jonan. After I learned to transubstantiate unleavened bread into the sacred host and swung the burning frankincense till blue green snakes of smoke coiled around the hem of my robe. And swayed through those fervent crowds, high up in a chapel chair, blessing and blessing the air, nearer to heaven than Cardinals archbishops, bishops, priests, being the victor of Rome, having made the Vatican my home, like the best of men. In nomine patris et filet et spiritus sancti amen. But twice as virtuous as them, I came to believe that I did not believe a word. So I tell you now, daughters or brides of the Lord that the closest I felt to the power of God was a sense of a hand lifting me up, flinging me down, lifting me up, flinging me down as my baby pushed out from between my legs where I lay in the road in my miracle, not a man or a pope at all. Carol Ann Duffy from The World's Wife. Love that. Do you mind reading that again? Sure. A little sip of something on my throat here. Thanks. And will you post a link to it or the text to it to the OGM list? Sure. Either way, thanks. Pope Jones, after I were to transubstantiate unleavened bread into the sacred host and swung the burning frankincense till blue-green snakes of smoke coiled around the hem of my room and swayed it through those fervent crowds high up in a papal chair, blessing and blessing the air, nearer to heaven than cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, being the vicar of Rome, having made the Vatican my home like the best of men. In nominate patres et patres et filet et spiritus sancti amen. But twice as virtuous as them, I came to believe that I did not believe a word. So I tell you now, daughters or brides of the Lord, that the closest I felt to the power of God was the sense of a hand lifting me up, flinging me down, lifting me, flinging me down, as my baby pushed out from between my legs where I lay in the road in my miracle, not a man or a pope at all. That is an awesome poem. Prisika, thank you, Ken. I had not heard that or heard of it or anything having heard of Pope John. You'd never heard of Pope John. I don't think so. George Bernard Shaw wrote a play and there's all sorts of stories about where this came from and where the truth lies, whether it was in the, I think it was either the 11th century or the 13th century. So this is like 13th century misinformation just to tie a bow on it. That's one explanation. Just a little bow on it. I knew someone picked up on where the disinformation fit in. Yeah, no, it's an amazing story and there's some hints that there was some bishop or somebody who lived this lie and got pregnant. But the best part about the story was that she was, he, she was chosen because unlike the other candidates, she didn't have all these children. The other cardinals all had kids and they wanted to promote their sons in particular into high positions at the Vatican. And so this one candidate didn't have that problem, somewhat younger. And that's why one of the reasons they picked her. Ah, the stories of the Medici popes and others. Well, as I say, this was probably 11th century. We're not sure. There's gotta be a good book on papal misbehavior. Volumes. Yeah. And then there's the good pope or the new pope with Judd, what's his name? Anyway, the actor. The young pope. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's his name? Are you talking about the young pope? Yeah. Jude Law. Yes, Jude Law. Thank you. There's also the movie, The Two Copes, which I went in very skeptical about, but I came out loving. It was really Hopkins and Christ doing an incredible job. I was I was really surprised that Benedict would pick Bergoglio as his successor. Like that kind of blew my brains. And that movie did a nice job of sort of setting that. Anyway, thank you all. This has been a treat. And more soon, join me on the democracy call and a half hour on the governance call. Damn it. Can I just say one thing, Jerry? Yes, please. You're surprised at Benedict making that choice. Yeah, they're opposites. Yeah, we need room to be surprised by people who we think we have figured out. Oh, totally. Yeah, the current back to Stacey's point at the very beginning. Yeah, the the license that the license Raj in India is taken down by a bureaucrat, nobody, Prime Minister of India, who nobody thinks is going to do anything good. And all of a sudden the regs all change and things change for the better. It happens all the time, I guess. But we do need to be open for it. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Great. Thank you all. See you soon.