 there we go cool this is the rex month they call for august of 2020 it's wednesday august 12th yesterday camo harris was chosen by joe biden as her is his running mate for the 2020 election it just filled the news it was and maybe my favorite several favorite parts of it one was i am just so looking forward to the debate with pence oh yeah he is and the problem here is that the expectations are so high right and the thing trump successfully did was he deflated expectations before every debate and then he basically gamed every debate um so i'm worried that everybody's gonna be like oh yeah she's she's gonna kick pence's ass and then all pence has to do is survive and he's you know he'll he'll fair okay but still it's gonna be it's gonna be like mass market entertainment um and then if you've any of you've been watching like videos about camo's backstory how she grew up and and all of that it's cnn has a nice article that apple just sent me this morning that has a kind of a video profile of her coming up and it's really sweet hey why don't you put that in the chat jerry i'm gonna find it right now you gotta reopen my brain so shut everything down how's everybody doing should we do a a little a little checking of the in yes let's do please do you want to start me oh yeah go ahead come on uh me so i've been really taking uh take trying to do the real sort of european old school summer take it off time you know i went to the coast yesterday you know so i've been really trying to just do nothing but of course i don't really achieve that but you know it's a good try i'm watching the republicans you know i've keep from course close tabs on the economics and everything that's going down and you know i'm enjoying gold going up i think we're currencies being devalued it's really weird to see the republicans do the same thing they did in the depression and threaten the recovery with you know this austerity thing by the way it happened like three times the depression they would put money in economy come back up and then they go let's bounce budget let's not do that anymore boom it goes right back in and so far don't make any mistake about this the politicians in the central bank have done everything perfectly everything really yes they've done amazing job huh and i'm not used to hearing that yeah that's that's the whole thing i really want everyone to understand they've done a great job they've done everything right so far um but if they if they choke demand off and stop throwing the money out um build this austerity that's how come the recovery was so slow from 0809 they stopped obama from doing that we've been really fortunate to be in an election cycle um i think because that made it so that they would send that checks out i don't know if republicans would have done it if it wasn't an election cycle and i'm also beginning to wonder this may be a crack about 30 of mine but if the republicans think that trump's going to really lose the election then i think their degree of cooperation with throwing money out could go down go down down because they're like remember i they don't represent the people the regular people these are capitalists and you know that money is going to have to come back when the government spends all this money that money can have to come back but doesn't modern monetary theory say the government can print as many bills as it feels like and then if you're a capitalist don't you want the government to just generate more money so that you can suck it out of the economy in your usual vile way all right so modern monetary theory is not anything the government actually practices through world war two and into the 50s they also did something called monetary um repression which is the the fed had the held the yield curve down so treasury bills paid this very low percentage rate but inflation was far ahead of this in other words there was negative yields so the way the u.s government got rid of the debt that they had to undertake to win world war two was they they essentially um they they they underpaid people for bonds another way of saying that is they took money from the rich and gave it to the poor so they actually took money directly from the capitalists they redistributed wealth and they did it for like 20 years and that's something the wealthy wanted wanted to buy those bonds yeah the wealthy were in a big problem situation like where am i going to get a return on my money oh treasury bills okay well treasury bills were so far under inflation that they were essentially getting paid back with dollars that were worth 30 40 less and that's and in fact this this habit of doing this is going all the way back to salon of Greece the for several thousand years governments have done this exact same thing and it's what we did world war two modern monetary theory is not new at all it's just what we did in the 1940s and we're going to have to do it this time uh we're going to raise taxes and we're going to do that and the feds are already talking about this in their minutes oh we're they're already talking about yield curve control so it's already in the official minutes so the smart money right is like knows this is going to happen and essentially it's also something we have to do because capitalism doesn't really work great when you have this extremes of wealth that we have right now i mean it's just so astonishing leads to revolutions yeah yeah it's just no it doesn't work this way so anyway so this government the kind of deficits if you look at the curves the kind of deficits we're spending the kind of money and what's different about this period from 0809 is when we printed all the money in 0809 it just went to bank balance sheets it just plugged holes in bank balance sheets it never got out into the real economy for people and that's why inflation didn't resolve not no problem this time the money is going directly from the fed to the treasury to the people okay and it's a good thing believe me this is a good thing don't don't that is the exact right thing to do because in the depression remember banks went bankrupt money just disappeared and no money went to the people and not and so again let me reiterate that the central bank and the government are doing wonderful things it's the same it's the same thing back in um england and great britain way back when like like nobody had pound sterling like like everything was expensive you know a person's salary might be 30 pounds a year 30 pounds a year and so you know a shilling or a pants or a farthing was worth a whole a whole great bunch but but but they were locked in a way that i don't understand historically where just nobody had money it was really hard to come by money um same thing happens in the british roge in india the bengal famine happens because nobody in the bengali area of india has money to buy rice it's not that there's no rice there's rice in the warehouses and the british will not release it but nobody has money to buy rice so they starve and die this i'm i bet that those situations were a result of it the money being tied to actual physical gold yes and i think there were actual physical money constraints because they hadn't decided that you're free to print as much as you feel like now regardless of what you hear from crackedbott saying it's not a great thing to have that behind your currency because you can't create more of it in exactly these situations um so so it's much fiat money has the advantage of being able to do this uh of being able to print it and do what we're doing right now and believe me again we're doing great but there's we're going to have to pay for taxes you're going to go sky high and they should realize the effective tax rate in corporations is 10 percent and and republicans would like to get rid of the corporate tax entirely it's just astonishing how far how far the money classes have totally dominated since the 1980s i mean wow the reagan the reagan revolution really did all this yeah i mean it was a huge shift huge change okay i'm going as you can you can tell what i'm thinking about cool uh you know um i think i think the different parts of this sees different you know we each have our radar and our filters and the things that were that were sort of tracking so thanks for the update um dave where is your secure and disclosed location i am hanging out in the northeast kingdom of vermont oh nice we've been here about a month and we were thinking we would go back to california now but we really can't go for the good reason to go back so i think we're just gonna stay longer i don't know so it sounds great my mother-in-law has a beautiful cabin here and we're on this gorgeous lake and i kind of spend my afternoons you know down lakeside and it's pretty sweet wow david no one terrible no one if i only had your chair bow i think it might be perfect yeah that's not a neat david i mean hot this stuff makes you sweat so i don't know and and so dave what sort of stuff are you up to what do you what's uh what's on your mind you know i've been spending what few productive hours i have um with a new david hodgson gig he's doing this global regeneration colab um and so it's you know it's uh trying to do a social network capacity building accelerator thing um focused around bioregional regeneration so it's been pretty i'm really enjoying it it's pretty cool i mean he's got about 450 people kind of on a google list a pretty active slack channel doing you know six or eight hours of zoom meeting a week um on various topics you yesterday there was one on a regeneration project outside rio that some folks are trying to get funded and so you know they're presenting their project and some kind of people are advising on fundraising and talking about how to tell those stories yeah people eat narrative and you know kind of an interesting mix of talents combined with some practices um so you know it sounds like i'm scheduling zoom meetings and you know putting out the weekly newsletter and things like that but yeah are you still doing rosa or is this folded into that ross is kind of gone quiescent i mean it's it's kind of folded in i'd say i mean rosa the regenerative agriculture sector accelerator was the prod a product of the last time hodgson did something like this um you know six years ago um so but you know we never got much traction with it and so this feels like it's got a little bit more traction and it's a little bit i was never that interested in the focus on agriculture per se because it's like regenerative culture is more fun yeah yeah for sure and this has a little bit of a broader broader uh swath it's a huge broad tent and have you guys found um funders investors vcs who are focusing on regenerative is there such a thing um there seems to be you know one of the conversation that keeps coming up is this notion that there's all kinds of funders who want to invest in regeneration but they can't find any projects and then all these project people that are doing regenerative projects and can't find any funders and it's kind of like there's a gap here somewhere um put them all in the same room turn off the lights yeah it does seem like it seems like tinder may not be the only answer to this but um i actually think it's a structural gap and we should explore why it's a structural gap but um but anyway that conversation is pretty regular and you know we don't have a bunch of you know people who want to invest in this group it's more kind of practitioner types and solo change makers and you know folks who have projects that are they're trying to get off the ground you know it's that the normal yeah the cool really interesting group but they're they're not the uh the wall street funders um if you can put a link or two this is a i'm assuming an open group that we could join the conversation if you wanted or what is it you know it's not it's member only but you're like i can you know if you guys are interested in joining i would welcome you um and you know so you have to get a referral from somebody to sign up and then you get a membership you get access to the slack group and the google calendar and stuff like that and there's basically nothing in public other than that so interesting fascinating okay so it's all being kept behind the curtain yeah yeah um i'd love to link up through open global line because it feels like a very simpatico kind of project so well here let me i'm gonna stick the the membership form into the chat and if you guys are at all interested in playing cool thanks thank you thank you thank you can find the membership but i'll i'll get it i'll get it here cool and claudia's remote working or claudia's working for vermont yeah she's doing yeah she's got a whole another story ship i don't know my wife is um head of a group that does health data integration in california so they get data from health insurance companies and doctors and hospitals and put it all into a great big database they've got i think they think some data for 20 million californians at this point um and it turns out health data is kind of an interesting topic right now so there's all kinds of things going on a lot of negotiations with governor's office about you know who has to share what data went and what where is all the corona testing data and stuff like that wow she's staying pretty busy wow but yeah doing it from vermont yeah sounds great thank you um susan what's uh want to check in sure um i just um started the essence is enumeration yesterday and um this is a really interesting time to be trying to do that um so uh for the first time the us senses is on an iphone the data collection right it's fine except that where i live we don't have a lot of connection but it works it works pretty well um and and i went through um serious amount of training um and uh but what is concerning i think is that for instance so now we have paper balance i mean paper paper balance paper census forms we have mailed census forms we did ours online through the web online collection and this thing i get generated i got 36 cases this morning okay now there's no way i'm going to do 36 cases of those 22 were uh mailing addresses because they try to put you in your local environment so i'm up here you know around skyline boulevard and where i live and pestering my neighbors and stuff and uh but but they're mailing addresses right because i can tell because they're not you know the addresses my mailing address is at the gate three miles away and it got five numbers and it's on skyline boulevard right these all have three numbers right and i know where most of them are there's a big couple of big batches of mailboxes on logs you know up and down skyline so there's nobody there at the mailbox right and i don't know what address it's assigned to they've given you the scavenger hunt version right and and that was i can't go in there i don't i mean i don't know how to find the people that are supposed to be correlated with that particular mailbox wow and another interesting thing is is so i'm wondering where all this is coming from i mean and most of the people i talked to you yesterday were had already claimed that they had already sent it in now there's a special case so there's about seven cases for nerfu what's nerfu um not responded uh to the undocumented no they're not they just didn't respond but that's a special category of like six there are six categories of case right some of them are double checks to make sure the quality checks some of them are two of them are that two of them are um um just to verify that the address is there and there is there is a building there and that it's livable in or not and uh and there are various cases like this and some of them um but everybody i talked to yesterday claimed that they had not only sent in things but had done it online too so now we have data that i entered data that is was mailed in and data that was put in online and many people have done all three wow you tell me what's going to happen this is going to be a record-matching nightmare among among many other nightmares because they're busy trying to shut down the census right now right right right well they they shut down they cut off a month right so sam tail county is now hiring a thousand new enumerators this week do you know ken homer no so he's in um marin and he was was an enumerator also and had like 40 people under him he was sort of a supervisor oh yeah he was supervisor yeah of the area and uh he was not enjoying the process at this point because it was going crazy and they were shutting it down i'm hypothesizing if this is a bad enough shit show that if biden gets reelected the first thing he should do is run the census again next year yeah is that even a possibility uh that has i have not heard that mentioned no um i know my supervisor is also going nuts um you know we have to do things like i the first day i get my little case and there's an icon of a hand of a old-fashioned hat telephone and sat there what's that and he says i have no idea nobody else seems to know either you know in several hours later turns up and it says that uh i can't remember what it means actually right now but um i was pretty impressed with how organized it was i was impressed with how willing everybody is to talk that i have talked to so far yeah we were warned about we had all kinds of training on what to do about the dangerous cases and if somebody shows up with the baseball bat at the door just you know thank them for their time and leave leave quickly call and leave very quickly and call then there were things like oh the the interesting thing about the there are incidents and accidents right the first third of them is car accidents of people driving around it getting in accidents because you're right you're going places you don't really know and you're looking around trying to find you know an address and uh the second set is um oh no the first no first huge category the third is is falls the next is car accidents and the last is animal bites mostly dogs in your neighborhood it could be amu it could be sheep it could be sheep it could we don't well we don't have sheep anymore we have we have llamas well except that i'm not sure there are any llamas left because the mountain lions did in the line llama and a zebra no okay yes i can see the zebra it seems like such a natural fit yeah oh the zebras were so wonderful yeah those zebras damn i came home from work and there was a baby llama a baby there was a uh two sicilian donkeys and a uh and a zebra baby in a parkridge in a pear tree and a lot too all of it wow right now we have a surfeit of sicilian donkeys and they're rather noisy and funny and you know but they don't go walking anymore because the neighbors got tired of well the worst thing that happened was that when the camel ate the wisteria the neighbors james mcnevans bucks of bucks fame uh his wife was growing wisteria they live in the neighborhood and she um anyway she was unhappy wow i spent 12 years growing that wisteria and the camel came in and just ate it whence come at the donkeys the donkeys have been here for a while they're they're huge fun hi esti and they um hi yeah anyway i had it somebody from portugal here uh for working on a project and um and and he asked what that somebody asked what that was i said oh those are silly sicilian donkeys he says well are there any other kind these are very small donkeys in case there's a big emergency and the road is wiped out they can help you get everything off the hillside that's true you can ride the sicilian donkeys right down to safety yeah that's right could do that anyway that's the that's the news from uh longridge and that's the news from the census front and uh it all feels like uh one more comment my supervisor said look they don't they don't really care just just do as much as you can do just just do it and if you can't you know that wow they're beyond caring i think yeah it's so it's such a hassle it's so it's so pressurized that uh yeah and a lot of people might be returning forms through the us postal service which is the self under under stress so it's like these things are just building on top of each other crazy yeah yeah our poor local post offices uh yes it's still there um best do you want to check in um quickly i was just going to say and we have kamala and that i want that to remain my key check in for at least another hour we spent a little time at the start of the call just like all cheering and jaz hands yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so so add me into that um post hot yeah for sure oh i'm i'm i will join in video shortly but i'll keep myself both muted and off video for the next bit thanks um anything else you want anything else you want to check in on besides besides kamala uh no because um uh no because i'm trying to stay in the positivity and the yes and the deep sense of i will just add this i remembered this morning as i woke up the moment when it seems like a hundred years ago or five or something driving down 101 to go to my spin class and in the depths of the beginning of the primary campaign and really being angry at joe for joining that you know and like do we have to really and then some from somewhere deep down seeped up and i think i was probably like 101 menlo parkish when it happened and i was like gee could joe biden and kamala harris yes well exactly your face is exactly what and it sort of went up and down i was like where the hell did you come up with that from and oh my goodness i describe it as that moment of when the when you swallow the whiskey the first gulp and it starts diffusing right yeah so i'm in i'm wanting to appreciate the whiskey today so kamala is a shot of whiskey yeah the peace the biden kamala ticket right and that she is and i'll you know one more moment of joy is watching rachel madow kind of present kamala on her show last night was just like okay kill me now perhaps you have to but i'm i'm happy at this moment so i'm i'm trying to maintain that into the morning and that i give you guys permission to be the next part of my life deprive deprive people of things for long enough and a small victory like this feels like exactly exactly when exactly exactly um mark would you like to take it uh sure uh i'm checking in here from helifax and it was scotia canada and i was just telling jerry earlier uh i guess this area is considered the safest covid spot in north america um like we've had zero new cases in uh i don't know quite a few weeks the few cases we have in the last few months have all come in from outside so we're all paranoid about outsiders but there is this atlantic or maritime bubble where people can within the new brunswick pei new scotia new from land you can travel freely but even from other places in canada you have to shelter for two weeks anyway so that's one thing and it's kind of i don't think we're particularly virtuous but it just that's kind of the karma of what's been happening um and uh um you know i was able to get beautiful cloth masks five dollars a piece from a local japanese store and they actually feel good uh which is unusual um otherwise uh actually i guess maybe along with many other people it's in terms of climate change climate collapse uh you know i i kind of realized that we're past the point of hey we can do something about this um really it's a matter of uh you know how do we survive uh you know upcoming catastrophe which is not helped by uh well and maybe uh you know looking to my neighbor down south the us it's it's considering how huge an impact the us has you know that adds further kind of negative thoughts on that whole situation but for example i read this the new york reviewer book says this article actually i'll paste that in uh by bill mckibbin reviewing this book by mark linus on our final warning uh but climate change and uh uh it's pretty grim and you know so so what i started thinking about is okay how do we prepare uh both for short-term shocks long-term shocks um and uh uh you know there's the whole trump thing in the us is like totally cataclysmic but it's a minor cataclysm in some sense because there's this enormous monster right behind that and so yeah uh hopefully uh uh uh you know january 20th things will switch along onto different dimensions although you know again i i've got to admit that in terms of foreign policy uh the dems and the gop are not all that different and uh you know there's a lot of grim stuff although hopefully we won't go this kind of insanity about uh you know in amplifying stuff completely you know unnecessarily because things are tough enough as they are so yeah so uh those are especially this thing about realizing this thing with climate change that in in this century you know we're going to have really significant collapse we're going to have you know like there are 53 degree temperatures in uh middle east uh you know a few days ago that's very close to the 54 degree wet bulb temperature that's the highest human beings can take um so and i guess the other part of it is is that there's this interesting word i've really come to like proprioception which is the ability of an organism to both perceive and to respond in such a way so that a it stays upright so when we walk we do the all the right things but in terms of societal proprioception um you know i think it's really clear that our governance uh is lacking that our systems of governance and uh so for example i got Princeton study that showed that yeah when you actually look at what happens and what legislation gets passed in the us it's it's not a democracy in in in any quasi-literal sense of that but an oligarchy or a platocracy because you know what serves the interests of those in power is what actually get tends to get passed and and there's huge blind spot in that um so how do you address that kind of inertia of blind spot um on the one hand but actually more interestingly maybe is you know our democracy is screwed up because like uh through our media through the internet through all these devices that hopefully would have improved our access to information and to knowledge to better knowledge that in fact it's often working the opposite way and which means it's undermining the possibility of democracy undermining because we need to inform citizenry so so maybe the final thing i mentioned is the kind of hopeful things i find is that there are these kind of almost like genius bodhisattvas that seem to be popping up and one of them actually is someone you introduced to me uh jerry which is audrey tang and you know she's she's actually had a lot of work to do also with you know taiwan's response to covid and so on and then more recently i've come across this guy yoshaba j-o-s-c-h-a i'll put the name in and uh and you know interesting he's an ai guy a nerd um and but on the other hand very extraordinary in terms of being very human so for example he says that the real model for people for people like him isn't really like libanets or newton or einstein it's gutha you know someone who uh wolfgang gutha uh you know someone who uh you know brings together all these kind of aspects of uh human uh sanity as well as uh you know clear intellect and so on and you know scientific research investigation and so on so again this this is coming back to your proprioception that we need to restore our ability to see what is really going on because you can only live in a you know reality tv universe for so long and and the problem with trump is that he's always had the bankruptcy system to bail him out but there's nothing to bail out you know when you're at the top no one's going to bail you out and and we're at the top of the kind of food chain in terms of the planet and no one's going to bail us out either um so it's uh there's no uh you know there's no salvation and i come from elsewhere here uh and going to mars is uh i mean that's its own adventure um that's not going to bail us out either i'd like to say um i've given a couple speeches where i say some people think we should just get off this rock and then i add i've read enough good science fiction to know you don't want to be on the first thousand spaceships yeah like that just ends badly it's it's you know and you have to make your own everything you know you and everything has to work flawlessly or you're all that so anyway so i guess that's in terms of checking there's like themes running through that's awesome and i need i so i added the link to joshua in my brain and he's like a a notable person for me but i hadn't been paying enough attention and i i love the meme on on gutta as a context for for what to do so i went and looked at gutta in my brain while you were talking and i'm like oh interesting and i've read zero zero gutta um and i was reading a biography of alexander von humboldt who is a crazy interesting fellow as well back in the day like it's part of the reason why we have natural sciences at all um was was insanely interesting explorer and chronicler and scientist but but but how to think about just how to frame all these things really matters um jerry can i jump in with a note to add to that amazing thing from mark please do and i think mark was about to jump in too so go ahead go ahead oh okay sorry i can't see everyone that's a thing go ahead so proprioception proprioception is the thing that if you're a young dancer who's also scientifically um endowed shall we say you learn early and the main thing about proprioception is that it is inside the system it is what you lose when for instance you pop your acl while skiing and in the process of the surgery you no longer somehow no feel the connection between along the back of your leg between the hip joint and where your leg is in space and you can't use external cues right so there's nobody coming to save you because it has to go through the system and the nervous system etc so i love this pulling this forward which seems to be happening now and applying it at the societal level so thank you so much for that my one of my first obsessions proprioception and knee mechanics right from age 17 is providing insight thanks to you into today thank you mark did you want to add something okay uh we don't hear you right now you're muted but uh that's fine okay oh there you go you're now unmuted you're good okay yeah i mean the thing about um you know questions how we govern ourselves and if we're introducing systems which kind of systematically undermine our ability to perceive what's really important um i mean that that that's like undermining of the possibility of democracy or if it's being effective at least and so uh so it's uh it's a really interesting question and partly it's you know it's like we give free range for our technology just i mean even though there's usually you know i mean there's sort of caveats like in terms of you know all kinds of biological technology uh gene editing technology and of course nuclear powers a long-standing example as well um but uh uh you know it's like our social media introduced these things on a huge scale millions and billions of people and then we see what happens and it's you know if we ran vaccine trials that way we had millions of people dead basically you know so uh there's an interesting article i read about how um the reason plants are green is kind of paradoxical because you would expect that in order to make photosynthesis really possible there would be no green at all but it turns out that in order to stabilize the process and make it kind of sustainable over time over changes in light happening uh it's much less efficient than it theoretically could be but long term that's a better way for life to get along essentially it's more stable and so that's kind of an interesting process because we always tend to aim for max efficiency let's extract everything and so on well nature nature is wasteful but but in good redundant ways usually um that's fascinating so so between proprioception and the rest of this we may be losing and and sort of there's a thought in my brain was 2006 peak democracy um because since then we've had the global shift massive shift to the far right authoritarian populism illiberal democracy all that kind of stuff is just getting huge um and so we may be losing our control apparatus and as esti added the control apparatus often is sort of buried in the system and if you sever those ligaments and nerves and and sensory apparatus then you lose the ability to actually control your downhill slide or to make it turn it into something else and that's really interesting yeah um and first of all to know where you are you know there are early notions of proprioception were about how you know where your body is in and the pieces of it in 3d space and how is it that you get your hand to the plate when you pick it up and how is it right that you know where your arabesque is as you're twirling right um and and i think it degrades this is part of what mark again thank you in little bits right but those blind spots render things discontinuous right um the loss of the signal in a very small segment right and assuming that as nature goes that keeps happening um so we don't literally don't know where we are let alone and once you know where you are the system can can process that as direction yeah setting direction yeah it's really beautiful um orientation is really important yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's the it's the afferent it's the incoming signal proprioception that and it yeah that that's critical um let me let me do a check in i've got a bunch of little things or each of which is sort of big but i'll try to be brief but i just typed into the chat a reminder to myself for the topics that we're building in my head um the first is just this notion that there are these gigantic wicked problems that seem to be getting more wicked because we're ignoring them and fighting over or even addressing them so right now we're an electoral cycle we're worried about trump and the trump apocalypse you've got a pandemic going which they're not responding to well none of which allows us to actually deal with climate change you know like like climate change is off the table as a thing we can act on together right now and and god willing it's actually a unifying factor if we can you know if we can achieve regime change in the u.s um but even then who knows you know who knows how this moves forward so so it's like had we all been acting in unison and been able to figure out where we were and i really i like this theme of orientation and proprioception a lot um because we're losing we're losing the ability to know where we are and therefore which direction to head and therefore what to do next and these things were all quite crucial to figuring out like how to deal unless we're unless it's all everyone to themselves and we form little bubbles everywhere and each bubble figures out a local solution like let's build a raft and i was joking earlier in the chat you know every every building from here forward should float because if sea level is going to rise many many more than a decade ago maybe 15 years ago after a conference i jokingly bought the domain raftify.com and i put up a brief website which is now gone but but the notion was three quarters of the earth's surface is already water that's going to rise we need to learn to live on the oceans so let's go to you know and i had a i had a rex call i think early on about uh ocean sailing protocol or whatever was called open ocean sailing i think he called it and it was at the same time as sea setting was coming up and he said no no no don't call it sea setting because sea setting is a bunch of libertarians who are trying to create a libertarian ideal culture on us on a cruise ship somewhere in the middle of the ocean he was trying to invent a series of open hardware and software protocols so that we could all go build stuff that would function well that would generate energy off of solar and wave wave action and wind that would you know how to how to make food how to basically live live on the ocean so and that's not even among the list of things i was thinking about but i put china and climate change and all those like i'm i'm unclear what the hell to do about china because of the Uyghurs in hong kong which we should mourn uh and and you know so on the on the one hand i think china is way ahead of many people i think that china is likely to come out of this whole mess of kind of sort of collapsing incidents as the the leading society on earth and it'll be a surveillance society um and that's just you know like tough tough beans because that's the way it's going to play because the rest of us will be shooting ourselves in the footwell enough that we won't be in action um and then uh i'm a fan of the kenevan framework uh davis noden's kenevan framework and and pendleton julian do you guys all know and some of you do some of you don't so she's a really interesting thinker she's been collaborating with uh john cili brown for the last five plus years maybe maybe ten years and then they have a series of books about design and on the one hand i love what they're doing and and is not only familiar with with kenevan but she's kind of um gone through it and into she has a critique of kenevan and and sort of more useful framings but then the work is kind of impenetrable so i've got two books right here at hand um one book i got which is called pragmatic imagination it's the sort of the introduction to their design and bound series i think this is backwards because i'm mirroring my display does this show up as as correct for you guys or is this backwards oh so you see it right that's it's it's mirroring just for me oh that's right it's locally mirrored because we like to see ourselves the way we look in the mirror because otherwise we think we're looking weird for everybody else so interesting the human mind and then recently i got this book uh theirs uh because i was trying to learn about systems of action which is a part of the framework that they're trying to build and this was i had to get this from lulu press because that's how they've published it and it took two weeks to get here and it gets here and then i read the opening paragraph the opening paragraph is basically this is the change triangle a meta tool for change that is about designing an ecology of conditions for change that works on changing an organization or system itself which i'm like okay cool cool cool booklet 14 systems of action is our other meta tool for change i'm like shit that's the thing i'm trying to learn about why did i get this book and why did i wait two weeks for the book and why is all this information locked away in in like book form right like i'm pissed because because this is inaccessible and also an's writing is more academic than my normal filters are set so i have a hard time reading kind of the the stuff that they're writing in fact i had to stop reading this book because i got i got some ways into it and i'm like i think i'm clearly in their audience and i am just having to read things five times over again and i had the good fortune in in grad school um to study under russell a cough who was an early systems thinker and a cough had this insane skill of writing about very sophisticated things in a 10th grade level so that you would read it and you'd be like why did nobody tell me about this before and you could read it and absorb it and remember it immediately and i'm finding the the going really thick which brings me to open global mind which is like my passion project to this point and the thing that i'm really excited about and part of what i want to do with ogm is make ideas like sort of liberate them amplify them and turbocharge them because i i know that there's a whole bunch of ponies in here i just don't have the effort and it's locked away inside of you know softbound softbound book from lulu press um how do we connect this to action and make it so that groups like the group that davis talking about earlier can you know and all the ideas that they're creating actually are amplified and available to people because we need to get together and figure out where are we like to orient ourselves figure out where are we where do we think we're aiming and we don't need a consensus on this we need a what quakers call sense of the meeting we need a sense of unison and a sense of community we don't need 100 for the vote to agree that like that's north and we're all going to do exactly this i think that's that's wrong but we need to collectively act in in in a general direction so that we're actually amplifying one another's efforts pulling everybody along etc etc etc so that's kind of messy um so that was the thinking about connevin and frameworks and and it ties really well to this idea of where we are then a small thing a couple nights ago uh april was off on a writing retreat she she booked a local airbnb to go right for a couple days and i and a couple friends from san francisco were in town they've left san francisco but they were in town so i had actual dinner with friends at a restaurant which i hadn't done in so long that as i walked up toward the restaurant i was having all these weird feelings in me like wait wait what what and and it was just this weird i was like battling myself to go sit with them outside at a restaurant and have dinner and then the first thing they say when when i sit down it's like they cheerfully say oh yeah yeah we had covid we're over it now and i'm like what and wouldn't it have been nice had they told me that before i showed up because then i could process it on my own like because nobody knows the long tail of covid and you might test positive but we don't really know how this thing hides i was impressed many years ago when i came back from one of my few trips to india and i thought i had malaria and i was lucky enough to talk to a woman who is a an expert in tropical diseases and she said well it turns out there's five kinds of malaria we have no test that will tell you that malaria is in your system the only way we have to catch it is if you have an incident and it flares up and we take a swab and look there's one of the there's one of the five organisms of malaria and i was like wait wait wait so it hides in your system your whole life and you there's we have no scientific way of identifying that you're carrying malaria it's like yep and i don't know if the science on that has changed but my mind was blown by that because our biologies are actually really intricate and complicated and so here these two guys these friends who are who are like cheerfully well we're over it we're done we tested positive we're good and my insides are again going we turned out to have a lovely dinner and a great time but but i all these like and that's very light sort of compared to the collective trauma that people are going through compared to and i'm going to go back to what both started with sort of the economics of this compared to the fact that benefits are ending right now congress is in lockdown the president proposed something that has the lockdown worse and there's going to be this upstream cascade i i think i think you know when when people who hold leases don't pay their leases and the landlords can't pay their banks and the banks can't participate in the system and nobody's paying taxes because nobody's making money and the tax system falls apart all of this collapses in really in much larger ways than we've witnessed so far so right so and and i envy whoever wins the next election because this winning is going to be like very bittersweet because you know if we think obama inherited a bag of shit in you know 2008 2009 this is this is like 10 100 times worse than that with the climate apocalypse just over the horizon that nobody's acting on right and so it's just there's just so much to do and we're not and we're actively undermining our ability to come to a consensus of a rough consensus of where we are and what to do together and so that's part of the mission of open global mind is to figure out how do we make better to collective decisions and part of the part of my inspiration which i don't think i've articulated this way before is how do we tackle these kinds of problems together and in particular over that damned cultural divide right how do we bridge that cultural divide to to to manage to do something together with people who are our our others with a capital o we're busy otherizing a whole lot of folks and here one you know one of my heroes is daryl davis i might have mentioned him on previous recs calls daryl is a black jazz pianist who years ago was playing piano in a bar and a white guy walks up to him says hey i never heard a black black guy play jerry lee louis quite that well and daryl says well big surprise i i taught jerry lee louis how to play some piano and they became friends and it turns out this guy was a clan member and so now maybe three decades later um daryl davis has a garage full of kkk robes because he very patiently sat down and attended kkk rallies and sat had dinner with kkk members was invited into their homes and they started retiring out including a couple grand wizards um and it's a story of patience and vulnerability and trust and all that kind of stuff and there's a nice documentary about daryl where toward the end of the documentary two young black activists are in the documentary they're being interviewed and they are mad as hell at daryl they just pissed at him because they think he's wasting his time they're like just even talking to these people it's a waste of time and i'm like no he's not because if we can melt if we can melt the grudges if we can hear them and we can deal with them we won't have half the population against the other half and everybody like tilting at windmills because otherwise i think we're locked in locked in a mortal struggle we're busy fighting over the joystick while the plane flies you know into a cliff and that's that's kind of a metaphor for where we are right this second and and and over all of civilization i think we've been fighting over the joystick there's a thought in my brain we're in a titanic battle of the scripts in our heads and we've had a couple rex calls about the scripts in our heads and then at the end of that thought in my brain it says and we always have been because this is what religions do this is what grand societies do and and every every hundred years every 300 years we get a whole new set of scripts implanted and the old way of being together is wiped out but like we don't remember what life was like before this is one of the reasons i love polanyi's book the great transformation is that he's describing how we live before the industrial revolution and then the early effects of industrialization that's what he's describing and for me it's a refresher course on how we lived before everything had a price before you know money land and labor three three new fictitious commodities took over our brains like if you don't have money you can't stay alive guess what that wasn't true before 1700 simply wasn't true right we lived in very different ways that we can no longer conceive of so now our debate is is it is it free market capitalism or socialism slash communism which look how broken that was you know look at Mao and Stalin look how horrible that system was and it's like this is a false dichotomy but it's the argument we're having over and over again and we can't get past it and so we're disoriented completely and and i'll refer again to hypernormalization the documentary by adam kurtis where he says we are already in a non-linear war and that in this non-linear war intentional disorientation is the perfect tool to get what you want and so if we're surrounded by danger and we're told to fear one another and to fear the danger we are very easy to manipulate and james is reporting in that if we can cut population back down under a billion we'll probably be okay which which i you know that could happen on the next 10 years of war is really high and start and then after the economic war the wheel war happens and in the meantime the natural war happens and and i think i've mentioned in rex calls before that the the one of the natural catastrophes that really scares me because sea levels rise people will move around there will be my you know refugees uh et cetera et cetera but we'll kind of adapt and deal and wealthy people will go find themselves a better place the the the one that i'm really worried about is the oceans and the oceans are under like 10 different you know simultaneous crises and if we kill off life in the oceans we've basically killed off life on earth and that that's the one that seems to me like an extinction level event that all the others rich people will avoid as best they can people with pitchforks will come try to take what they have et cetera it'll be messy but it doesn't it doesn't cause like civilizational collapse that's the one that really scares me the most and i just saw something about cast yesterday in the flow so esti if you want to tell us a little bit about that and then jame i'd love for you to check in you missed everybody we've been all over the place already so esti do you want to say a little bit about cast uh i'm about uh halfway through the book and um i think it is when you mentioned polanyi right i realized that in some ways this book is the next one for me and that sequence so fundamentally uh addressing um and you know one of the points she makes about slavery is that it's eight generations 10 generation 10 generations races entirely socially constructed anyway i just offer it to us as a and the writing is beautiful it is both six-synced and lyrical and she uh brings personal in stories and reference into it just perfectly beautifully i think it's also the next form of writing in some ways really the yin and yang um uh change your change your worldview non-fiction um so and she talks about three cast so the three modern examples of cast are slavery in this country um the nazis and india whoa so yeah that's enough to say back to our back to our program back to our program which is already in progress and i just purchased the kindle version i have already outlined far more than kindle will ever let me export to a word so i can't stop underlining just the writing yeah i'm i'm reading sand talk and i'm reading it on kindle but i'm highlighting and my problem with sand talk was i was running out of room to highlight because you know when you highlight adjacent sentences you can't tell it yes two different clusters yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah unless you take the time to highlight in a different you know pastel highlighter color which i wasn't doing which i'm doing on my kindle that doesn't have color gotcha dammit um bo have you read the book or are you pasting from a review pasting for a review cool thanks has anybody read the book yet okay let's let's um let's a couple of us dive in and sd as you read further if you want to like book reports to i'll share back more that would be really fantastic and then uh dav what's the solar punk link well i've been trying actually was having a little bit of an interaction around this morning around positivity and negativity i feel like one of the like themes of regeneration ought to be that we're opportunity oriented not problem oriented problems kind of you know you're trying to get to whatever peak you're on but you might not be on the right peak and opportunity kind of just allows us to kind of do a i think a positive you know uh exciting motivating kind of transition so i i kind of react now to like wicked problems and all these kinds of framings which seem to me to be pushing us back into a deal framework um but then how do you explore that and so you know bobby fishkin was pointing out that there people are developing this new genre of of science fiction so solar punk or hope punk or eco punk or you know there's there's people trying to tell a story of what the future could be that's not dystopic you know that has positive outcomes inevitably has lots of solar solar energy and and blimps moving everybody around and things like that but what's not like about a blimp you know i i want my own now so yeah i had dirigibles dirigibles are canonically a sign that you're living in an alternate universe yes like i see i see a lot of blimps around this must be some other some other world or some alternate future um let me let me rift for a second and then pass it to you to me um partly because i went through this phase a while ago and and when i heard about appreciative inquiry from david cooper writer and i'm like i need to learn more and i looked around and cooper writer has not written very much that's articulated about it and then i said surely there's a small book about appreciative inquiry so sure enough there's a book called the little book of appreciative inquiry amazingly enough so i bought that got it read it and it said almost nothing and and so i was i was kind of stuck because this idea of let's look let's look together toward a positive outcome is a brilliant idea and it and it runs completely counter to my general attitude that unless you understand something about how the sausage got made you're going to end up with the same sausage in the same situation you're going to guide your way back into the same familiar rut because you need to understand what was broken about the system how the system broke and i think cast is trying to uncover what we did was we invented a social contract construct that these people are worse than than us and therefore it's okay for us to kill them off right or enslave them or whatever and i just finished reading a doc watching a documentary called king leopold's ghost which is based on the book about king leopold the second of belgium i had read the book before the documentary was like a fresh new look because it had it had filmed and a whole bunch of new things including a scroll through what happened to the congo since then with lamumba and and everybody else and it was like a big wake-up call again about how shitty humans can be to other other humans all of this kind of provoked by the global reaction to the just to the taking down of confederate monuments in the u.s. which is turned into hey king leopold of belgium not the coolest dude etc so anyway i'm trying to figure out how much bad news to deliver in order to get people together to design a better system because i i think i agree with what david just said a lot which is if we have these solar punk or positive visions of the world we can get together and do stuff my fear is that we won't do stuff that falls far enough away from where we are to actually rethink these things and in order to do that we need to understand a bit of how things got here and to have some orienting principles around how to steer and how to guide which is partly what rex was has been and partly what design from trust is meant to be so so my notion for design from trust is hey all our institutions are broken partly because we lost faith in humans if we start redesigning these systems from an assumption that most people have good intent look we get better cheaper outcomes at renit society etc etc etc it's not so great for monopolists that's too bad sorry about that and you know play that out but out it was a it was a junior varsity attempt to give us a simple guideline trust assume good intent was like the the foundational part to get us toward acting together in a way that might get us away from the current institutions which assume that we're all acting in bad faith which is where digital which is where technology is is going anyway we're going to have a surveillance society and we're going to have algorithms that try to make all the decisions for us we're going to move away from humans actually coming back into community and learning to trust each other if the technocrats have their way and the tech even the techno utopians have their way so so with that light introduction jamae do you want to do a check in good morning everyone i'm sorry that i end up late i unfortunately now have a a weekly 8 30 call that is scheduled for half hour usually runs an hour and 15 so but that weekly call i have to f related but it's just yet another example of how much work i'm finding myself doing i'm actually very busy these days which is runs contrary to most of the rest of the world unfortunately but so much of it is around um building potemkin futures basically you know working with organizations as they try to think through their futures that are not shiny and happy you know they're challenging and um you know provocative but completely miss the point i mean nobody wants wants to hear about the things that they don't have an easy or even a difficult answer for like the pandemic and the super four and the in the super game that that you guys created for ifts right exactly right back in 2009 right um and so it's well i don't know if any of you saw my post on twitter yesterday is the reason i keep my hair cut short is to keep me from ripping it all out in frustration you know when i when i do this work is um um you know and so at the same time i could pay my mortgage and that's a good thing and so i'm not going to you know hold on to the principle that this none of this is actually good for the planet so i'm going to say no no i'm going to say yes take the money and you know cross my fingers be be glad that i'm on the the downhill part of my life yeah let's see just working just as a positive follow-up some of you might recall that my wife had endemic real cancer she had her surgery she's in recovery recovery has gone well she's actually back back to work working from home but back to work and so that's very much a relief that's wonderful thank you yeah i mean this that moment of her coming in to where i was sitting and saying basically i need to have cancer surgery mm-hmm it's just so surreal yeah you know and she was really lucky that it's caught very early and didn't spread at all and you know require no chemo or anything like that it's like basically the best case for a worst-case situation um but damn that was that was stressful yeah um some of you might recall the whole banny stuff that uh we played around with for a while well it continues to spread like the like like the creeping cognitive mold that it is and i'm now seeing people talking about it in brazil and germany and this guy in germany actually came up with a really great infographic comparing uh banny and buca and i'll send it to jerry's list so that you can distribute it but it's actually a really interesting illustration and nice summary of it and uh so it's it's it's always heartening to see i you know potentially useful ideas spread let's see um yeah i'm just trying to um i'm as i told somebody i'm a professional doom scroller and um you know there's only so much i can get away from on your linkedin profile it's actually on my facebook page now as my bio professional doom scroller awesome that's great um it's uh you know i can't get away from it can i ask you a question yes please if we were to like hit the neuralizer and you know vanish the current situation and which you just described very nicely which is i'm doing this because this and this and this and i can pay the mortgage and so forth but if but if you had if you had not if you didn't have to worry about funds and funding and could just sort of blank the screen and devote your life energy to some activity what would that be um horribly it would be pretty much a thing okay in what ways might have i have been fascinated for decades by the interplay of history and innovation and fear and and um creativity that lead to building different futures i mean i i wrote about future stuff in college and then in the eights in grad school in the nineties this is i've been doing you know professional future stuff for 25 years this is really um fascinating and compelling and seductive and terrifying and i can't look away and so if you cleared out everything based on who i have become over the years i would very quickly gravitate back towards trying to understand the world and where it's going by inventing narratives that illustrate where the where the forces you're detecting are likely to take us sort of thing so that people can engage that is that has turned out to be a useful way of um weaponizing the work basically making you know reifying the the the work you know the the observations and to make them into something that other people can use it turns out i have a you know a my moderate skill for writing and that turns out you know what no i'm i know a lot people who write a lot better than i do uh but i'm uh but it turns out that that's a useful a useful combination have you ever wish that somebody was i would go i do youtube videos have you ever wish that someone was taking these and dramatizing them into movies or into other works i have had the enormous gift of having seen some of these some of the stuff i've written dramatized and it it's unsettling because and not in a bad way necessarily but i have constructed worlds in my head and to see them become um 3d instantiation with actual people it and that's um you know it's unsettling in that sense of it's like you know a tremor under your feet but um i am trying to understand how you know there's a part of me that's trying to connect what i'm seeing and my hearing my words come from somebody's mouth with the logic and world building that i've been doing and that i've done in my head i wrote something years ago about the fact that being playing dungeons and dragons in high school and college and primarily being the dungeon master for people for the gaming that has been a really critical part of how i've constructed my my present day life um basically it has been you know it was my task to build the world you know within which other people tell their stories and that in many ways that's what scenario scenario writing is you're building multiple worlds you know within which other people create their own visions of the future you know and sometimes that involves telling narratives sometimes that involves essentially you know creating a verbal spreadsheet but um you know this has been something that's been in that's been in in terms of almost in um almost genetic for me um i'm really curious about working genetically i'm sorry the doom scroller part of it does that is the doom part inevitable i guess i was trying to figure out how to like frame it i mean it's appealing right i mean i feel like and certainly like if you watch nonprofit advertising it's all catastrophe oriented because that's what raises the money you don't have a lot of nonprofits telling a happy story because people don't fund the happy stories they fund the doom stories but i mean like one of my is like if you were doing the same profession 150 years ago and you would predict the doom would it look like what we're in would you have predicted i mean is this doom or would you have predicted this or i mean how do you how do you test the counterfactual i guess it's kind of the question but well the the goal of this isn't to be isn't to predict predictive for people who do futures work you have predicted the dirty word and it is to um illustrate possible consequences and to you know the the cliche that i use in my talks is um you know to trigger epiphanies you know to to allow people to see the possible consequences of their present day choices in new ways aren't there positive possible consequences and do you ever tell me how do you become a doom scroller why aren't you a an optimism an optimism so do you ever hear the the website world changing started in 2003 it was uh alec stefan and i founded it in 2003 as an expressly optimistic site for looking at you know we know the world there are a lot of problems let's look at the solution let's focus on the not just not happy stories but here are the tools and ideas and models and beliefs that push us forward and don't just keep keep us mired in catastrophe and um so i don't know if you saw and the uh the group chat early on i said something like a i was an optimist for a while i hated it well no i i actually i was the primary writer for that site for several years you're a hard-carrying optimist a hard-carrying optimist and um seeing so much of what i could spending so much time looking at what we could do and not seeing its material loss looking at all of the ways we could solve our problems and seeing people flat out refuse to take that path seeing our our intrinsic human ability to create turned into um shit and something it's been we this is not a new thing you know circa 2010 it is something that has been part of the human experience but as the problems that we are facing have become so um colossal as the complexity of the challenges have become so um spaghettified um yeah the the the source code for the world is spaghetti code it is it's it's made me the worst kind of optimist it the kind of that i'm the disappointed optimist i'm the frustrated cynical optimist because i know we could we could do this we can do this right i know exactly how we can do this and do this right and we fucking refuse to do it um and so for me doom-scrolling just happens to be the particular cliche of the moment um i i i like it as a as a term but it's a fairly recent thing in a little evaporating time you know the reality is that i'm not so much doom-scrolling as i'm world-scrolling i'm you know trying to see the pieces as they emerge and you know catch the hints the distant early warnings you know the i try to be the doom line um the doom line you're 1950s so cold war sector you're the doom line we can invent the new acronym or the doom line of the doom line yeah exactly um a different question um yes over time you've written a lot um when you write all these stories for iftf do they own the ip or do you sorry do they own the ip on the stories or do you uh it depends on the project um when i do stuff expressly for a commercial client it's there it's work for hire the it's work for hire but in in the particular um construction of a set of ideas the ideas remain mine and ideas will get used elsewhere um i'm asking partly sorry go ahead i'm asking partly because uh just to propose an experiment for you if you'd like because because this is kind of your legacy these are the things you've created and i think your hand is blocking your microphone oh sorry uh that better yeah okay good um so so these pieces you've written are kind of your legacy this is you know the your writing is your legacy so i'm asking about whether you have the freedom to do with it that's what that's why the ip question but then i'm like thinking well one thing you could do and you could just try this with a story or two is put them on git book or hit record uh or hit record i don't even know if hit record is still around but it was really kind of a cool site um started by the actor whose name escapes me now um and it was basically places where other people can riff on the plot and sort of if it's git book then they can do fork and pull and you can elaborate the stories and basically build a community story from from like you could seed something and then see where it goes and just experimenting with maybe doom literature or doom visualizations or or something like that and then also and and git book would be just books and writing um hit record would be uh other media so people would you know be creating videos animations what what what have you and maybe much more i don't know but i'm trying to imagine if you took some pieces of of your work of your legacy and and and stimulated imagination and production in different ways it might ripple out much more than it has so far bet worth pursuing i'll take a look at that thank you chair um one other point i want to make though is that you know i make joke about doom swirling and they call myself a professional eschatologist whatever is the amusing phrase of the moment for me um but that's not entirely true when i when i construct scenarios of challenging complex sometimes horrifying futures they're never straightforward disaster movies you know my goal when i try to when i try to construct these scenarios and to understand how could people live in this world what are the moments of of uh joy that they could find in this world where do where are people happy in this world as much as you know these may be world worth hard to find happiness you know where are the ways in which these worlds are um in what ways are these worlds but now in what ways are these world do these worlds feel normal for the people who are living living in them i mean good scenarios you know from my perspective a good scenario should let you feel let you experience what it's like to live in this as the normal world and it may be challenging it may be confusing but for you in that for you in this world in this future of course that's the latest that's which brings me back to an idea i had back when we were both at the idea factory basically trying to elaborate on gbn multiple scenario forecasts with the novellas and i was like okay so even if if idea factory and we do our job perfectly a subset of the company shows up and has a three-day experience which is transformative they go back into the normal environment the half-life of these ideas is like that and basically it all dies how about if as one thing we did we created four mailing lists you know i i do thanks estie um how about if we created four mailing lists one for each scenario and we populated each mailing list with a couple of actors like we used to hire the flying valencias but but these would be really really good sort of uh thread hosts whose job it was to provoke and enforce the scenario logic of each of the different scenarios so that the client and others whoever could inhabit these worlds over time and elaborate the fantasies and draw them out in different ways and i think i only mentioned this once never got picked up but but but partly i think change happens through repeated exposure we need to dip into the stream often and this would be a very low-cost thing to do uh might be an interesting experiment anyway i thought i did get out of old memory and put it back on a table no it's interesting i think the the main and that was in the yes but with four narratives but go ahead the yes but aspect is um because you know i can never do a yes and um uh it's time do people will people have time to spend living in these alternate worlds i think you know that i think you know that they will just may not be the subset of people you'd like to be in that world but there there's plenty of people who if they find something tasty we'll spend an inordinate amount of time on it but but you're looking for like the leaders or the designers or the whatever's of the world to spend the the appropriate time in marinating in the scenarios um because there's no contract of scenarios being a professional professional product then yeah the idea would be to get the people who have the opportunity who have the ability to make decisions that can influence the direction that we go either for the organization or for the planet that would be wonderful um in terms of just simply getting getting people writ large to start to think about think about different possible futures rather than just feeling narrowly driven into a single inevitable outcome that i love that's kind of what we did back in 2009 was superstructure um you know the idea of having except there was just one scenario but but here you might have the opportunity to play out multiple multiple worlds right um i don't know how i don't know how effective that would be if i don't know how people would respond to that it's certainly um i certainly wouldn't dismiss it anybody have my thoughts on this want to rip on this yeah i feel like i'm totally suddenly monopolizing everything and i'm very sorry since we're at time too i think this is what the rex check-ins do is like something tasty shows up in the call and we just pursue it for a while and so don't don't feel guilty i think this was for me it was fascinating um i'm just wondering if anybody else wants to chip in or has has riffs on this but please this is this is our mo okay yeah the thing that comes to mind is uh for some reason i thought a rock and roll and and the thing about rock and roll is that not that there was this you know one supergroup which like dominant i mean there were supergroups obviously but there were garage bands everywhere and so it was something which stimulated a lot of people to do it you know it's kind of a meme i suppose and but but you get a lot of people who get hooked and then they do it and so it kind of replicates and uh i don't know maybe there's something to that as a mohawk there's certainly far fewer groupies in the scenario world damn it um and i recently heard the story told of how the Beatles got famous which was one of these like small coincidences kind of stories which was riveting it was like oh my god that's so completely cool um other thoughts i know bo has something to add i did i i i just keep thinking about how the the virus thing and we're living a world of store time it's really exciting it's it's like a car crash i'm excited and enthralled i'm like wow you know 100 years from now people are gonna be what was it like to live then and i mean it now and so i have the car crash thing that i'm living through um but also it seems to me there's this liminal state we're in this is very liminal since we're having to suspend normal reality it really is a very powerful time and in history we're we're sitting on the sidelines and there could be some really positive outcomes to this because we're having to like this is i mean what's so different about this from the depression was in the depression they blamed people oh they got what they deserved i can't blame anyone for this virus well you can't of course the chinese but but so what about that jamae group what do you guys think about that i i just think there's something this is a very powerful and creative time in some respects too yeah um this isn't this this is a response so maybe it may sound off and i keep thinking about what would have happened if hillary clinton had won in in 2016 um we undoubtedly would would not have gone through a lot of the crap that we've been going through to probably have handled the virus much better if she was still in office because remember if she won she would still have to deal with an entirely republican uh congress that would have as their task of day one getting rid of her she would have gone through several impeachments or at least impeachment indictments possibly one or two impeachment hearings whether it was because of ben gazi or something made up or some random event um the all of the crap that happened with russia would have been um put put pushed away as being she's just being a sore winner you know trying to investigate that stuff trump would have a completely unchecked voice and he has an unchecked voice now to the extent that he can say whatever he wants but there are there are literally millions of people who push back on him push back at him and that wouldn't be the case if he had lost and then became the head of trump and then um and so i think in many respects the potential that we have for a better future in the next decade is because trump won not in spite of trump winning because we wouldn't i don't think we would have had aoc i don't think we'd have had you know the the squad we wouldn't have had the 2018 democrat the the kinds of democrats of one in 2018 winning i think we would have we it would have been a dismal four years that just would have felt stagnant it may not have felt disastrous it may not have felt like we're on the edge of catastrophe but it would have felt stagnant and frankly and clinton would have been blamed from high heavens for the report coronavirus uh had had she been in office and the republic will stop money coming out of the federal government these six hundred dollar checks that that wouldn't have happened right you're to think of all the things that that we have been pushing for that would not have gotten a hearing had we've been still living in the essentially the legacy of the 1990s um and uh and so it's exciting it is that it is a kind of a car crash or maybe it is teetering around the edge of a cliff we have to we have the possibility here of things going to just utter shit and hell and there's certainly many reasons to believe that that they will but we also have pieces showing up forces in play that could push back really hard push back harder than we ever ever could have hoped even 10 years ago um yeah what do black lives matter would that would that kind of cultural tsunami that's hitting us would that have happened if it was president um probably not it really depends on one of the reasons that black lives matter this the latest iteration of it has become so powerful is because of the troops being sent off to the i'm sorry uh you're muted trump is the federal troops being sent and trump has helped accelerate and empower and quicken things well as also the the velocity and ferocity of the coronavirus because so many people were not have not been working or were working from home suddenly you had a mass of people who were available to protest in portland that's what people are doing instead of working absolutely yeah you know and that's not and i don't mean that as kind of snide humor i mean that seriously you have people who in in the past may have wanted to protest had sympathies but you know they had to deal with their jobs had deal with taking the kids to school whatever and now they have time and space and they have a they have an outlet for the frustration and anger they feel about what's happening and and getting that direct pushback so they could have something and someone to really focus their anger at and it's um i don't know again it i don't want to make it sound like everything is wonderful because of the disaster we're going through but i think that the disaster has become an enabler for um positive drivers that wouldn't have been there before is that optimistic enough for you david love that i definitely had that same problem with kind of like it's like yeah it's going to be fundamentally different because of this stuff and it's like you know for better or worse we're going to look back and say yeah trump made the world better what's that joke about it you know well i can't like well let's see you know the you know the the guy whose kid breaks his leg and everybody says oh that's too bad is we'll see the need the kid doesn't have to go to war and the guy says that's great we'll see so it's definitely that scenario exactly we have gone well over our our normal 90 minutes um i i really appreciate everybody being here and uh and for what we do so um i appreciate you giving us a space fueling thank you thank you thanks jerry thank you all very very much great to see everybody see you on the inner tubes