 This is the Rex call for November 2021 on November 10th. And I had the funny experience last night. I watched the first two thirds of Ready Player One. Anybody seen Ready Player One? Nobody has watched Ready Player One. Has I read it? And I heard, yeah, oh yeah. Whole family devoured the book and then we are all too scared to see the movie. Oh, I highly recommend the movie. It's actually very nice. And I didn't make it through the book. I sort of started it installed but the movie's excellent and several people had recommended it. I'm like, okay, I'm finally gonna watch it. So I got two thirds of the way through it last night and then closed that, opened my email and saw that the Ann Helen Peterson, Heather Cox Richardson email was in my inbox. She's the historian and she was on fire last night. She was like, it was really one of her best. And she's like, you know, our democracy is in the balance kind of thing. And I was like, oh wow, I just went from alternate reality like the world is in the balance into this like real world thing and they feel like the same thing. I feel like I'm just having like a melding of, you know, gameplay and alternate reality game with like what we're living in because there's a whole bunch of people who are acting brutally and irrationally at least from my little perspective to try to like take over the world. And it's like, man, could it come straight out already player one? The segue was way too smooth out of the movie and into reality, into our reality based or alternate facts based universe. Have we even gotten to talk about meta and the metaverse yet? We haven't, should we dip into that a little bit? No, we should skip it. Sorry, that's my own, okay, go ahead. You sure? Your face was amazing. No. Right after the word meta. Is anyone here what the Jewish translation of meta is? It's quite horrible. No, it's Hebrew. It's the word meta means dead. Yeah. Yeah, everybody started giggling. I'm bilingual. Everybody started giggling, you know, in our different holes, right? And the thing is- So that's what doing meta means, I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really, and it's the feminine form. Well, yeah, anyway, it has, by the rules of Hebrew grammar, you could say it is the, she is dead or she died, verb form, but there are other, yeah, anyway, it's quite, I don't know, it's a wish, it's a prayer, yeah. Okay, go on, I'm enjoying this, it's a prayer, what? I mean, I feel like having that thought in my mind, the minute I saw the new logo was, am I actually requesting this of the universe, or could it be that there's a subconscious, and it's not like Zuckerberg doesn't know any Hebrew speakers. I mean, he doesn't know any Jews, whether they're Hebrew speakers. Yeah, hard to say he doesn't. Who knows, who knows, right? Yeah. And when you do a major rebrand for like one of the world's most valuable companies, you probably do a little research into the linguistic, cross-cultural aspects, the name, et cetera. And this one, they must have just said, well, this one we can live with, because how many other four letter words that everybody can remember, are you actually gonna find that mean what you're trying to do? A rebrand like this would be at least a million dollars for the agency to do this. I mean, oh, for sure. I think it's the single strongest data point for nobody matters, but Mark, no one was asked, no one was listened to, there's just no other way. So, I'm sorry, go ahead, Essie. Yeah, no, I was going on, gesticulating. That's okay. I was enjoying it thoroughly, Essie. Please continue. So in the spirit of Rex calls and what I used to do, which was I'd read a poem at the start of our calls, I do have a poem, I subscribed to poem of the day from the Poetry Foundation, which is awesome. And yesterday's feels like, it felt like a Rexie poem, but given our conversation right now, it actually feels even Rexier, because as I read this, kind of think about the meta context. Ooh, I got to say it that way. So I'll put a post to link to the poem in our chat in case you want to read along with Mitch. And it's plans for altering the river by Richard Hugo. Plans for altering the river. Those who favor our plan to alter the river, raise your hand. Thank you for your vote. Last week you'll recall, I spoke about how water never complains, how it runs where you tell it, seemingly at home flooding grain or pinched by geometric banks, like those in this graphic depiction of our plan. We ask for power, a river boils or falls to tum our turbines. The river approves our plans to alter the river. Due to a shipwreck downstream, I'm sad to report a project is not on schedule. The boat was carrying cement for a concrete riprap balustrade that will force the river to run east of the factory site through the state-owned Grove of Cedar. Then the uncooperative Carpenters Union went on strike. When we got that settled and the concrete, given good weather, we can go ahead with our plan to alter the river. We have the injunction, we silence the opposition, the workers are back, the materials arrived and everything's humming. I thank you for this award, this handsome plaque I'll keep forever above my mantle and I'll read the inscription often allowed to remind me of how with your courageous backing, I fought our battle and won. I'll always remember this banquet, this day we started to alter the river. Flowers on the bank, a park on Forgotten Island, return of the cedar and salmon, who are these men? These Johnny come lately with plans to alter the river. What's this wild festival in May, celebrating the runoff, display floats on fire at night in a forest dance under the stars? Children sing through my locked door, old stranger, we're going to alter, to alter, alter the river just when the water was settled and at home. So that feels very meta somehow. Yeah. Like that seems to resonate entirely with the meta conversation that we just started into. Hey, Kevin. Yeah. And also just everything that's happening in general in the whole world and universe. There is that. I mean, really. Yeah, all that happens. Does this mean that 60 years hence, people will return to living in real life after? There are people doing that right now already. Having been living in metaverse. Could be. Kevin, and maybe Mark, I don't remember how early you came on the call, but I reported early on that last night I watched the first two thirds of Ready Player One, which I highly recommend. It's really good. And then I stopped reading that and I read Heather Cox Richardson's, the historian's newsletter for yesterday, which was just full of fire. It was a very good one. And I was surprised at the lack of discrepancy, the lack of jarring transition between war over civilization in the metaverse in the Ready Player One metaverse, which is indeed very much a metaverse in Zuckerberg's vision, I think. Including intellectual property rights and citations and all kinds of quotes. And it's basically a media fest of popular media and everything else and real world. The guy who invented the Easter egg loads eight miles away from me. Oh, cool. Love that. Can we blame him for everything? Sure, why not? Okay. It was supposed to be fun, right? It was fun. He invented the, which came first, the bunny or the egg? I don't think Kevin means the actual Easter egg. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I think he means the computer Easter egg, which is everyone familiar with what an Easter egg is in software? Yeah. But tell us again what the very first one was. Evidently, he's a friend of his name's escaping me but he's a friend of Richard Boyd who I work with. And evidently he was working with a software company that wasn't letting him take sufficient credit. So he put Easter eggs in that people could discover after release, right? And he kind of pointed to, hey, there are things to find beyond the explicit game, right? And so his name and some other artifacts were actually embedded in the game. David, oh, sorry, that's not, but yeah, there's an article in the New York Times, the secret history of Easter eggs, which I will post in our chat. He's come to some parties that we've had in the area with machine learning and AI people. Do you inspect your home afterward for Easter eggs? For like- Not here. Booby traps and another sort of something. Okay. I mean, I figured that the NSA would put all of the data recovery businesses out of business cause they have a copy of it sitting in the desert, right? Outside of Vegas. So as long as they don't mix that up with the area 51 critters, I think we're good. How is everybody? That was a big sigh, Kelly, how are you doing? It's freaking November. And I know we're not supposed to like, I mean, it's the most boring topic of conversation, but between November and the freaking darkness, like I've lived in Seattle for 22 years and I don't understand how literally every daylight savings ending. I'm like, why do I live in the frozen North and how is it dark this early every time? Like I just, it's just slays me. I had the same, like, yeah, when the Sunday morning and Monday morning, I was like, no, no, no, no. Actually afternoons, because the mornings are nicer, but the afternoons like, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. I turned on all the lights in my house and this, I think it changed also when I started working from home. Again, it's been 10 years, this is not new, but like 3.30 yesterday afternoon, I had to turn on all the lights in my house cause it was pouring rain also, but that just doesn't like, what, is it time for bed? Like I'm ready to hibernate. Yeah, me too, I agree. Going to bed earlier, doing all kinds of stuff. Mark, what time did I, like, I don't know what latitude you're at. Yeah, he's higher than we are. Yeah, I'm actually a little bit above, well, close to 45, but latitude that is. But by the way, your wish came true and some of your rain is happening right now. Oh, good. What I'm afraid is probably skipping the center of the country. Oh, that's bad. Yeah. I love visiting Japan at the time of year where the sun starts coming up around 3.45 in the morning and it gets dark at about four o'clock in the afternoon. Right, because they don't change the time, right? There's no time shift. So big mornings, right? Well, every year, daily savings time is like tonsils. Like every year, every year we're like, should we get rid of daylight savings time? Right? Like, gosh, darn, it's such an inconvenience and people mess things up. Should we just get rid of it? And then we keep it and it just keeps on going. Well, the legislation that was proposed recently to get rid of the shift was to hold on to daylight savings time forever. And to never date the standard. All right, that savings time would become the standard time, right? So our Senator, Patty Murray, who I like to pretend that I'm related to sometimes, I'm not just was on the floor being like, we should keep daylight savings time. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. And then I was doing the math. And on winter solstice at my house, the sun would rise at 920 a.m. Which I'm like, wait a minute. I don't, I don't know what's, which is worse. I don't know if the answer to that. Yeah. Well, what is it? China that has or had one time zone? I think it's China because they just didn't want to mess with time differences. So depending which end of China you were on, your day was incredibly different. Yeah. Or, you know, doing business with India, you know, they're on a half hour difference in many cases. And you're kind of like, this is thought of that. I don't, this, it's really weird. Really? Who thought of that? Like what was up? Well, well, it's also happening in Newfoundland. So Canada is in on the act. Newfoundland is a half hour different from everyone else. It is? How? Yeah. That seems like a bad compromise. So here's time. Could we go, could we go to the lawyer system and change time zones and six minute increments? Sure, military time basically, right? Tenths of hours? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I had to live under military time briefly because my first job was at Disneyland in the park and Disney keeps military time. So I got docked once for a tenth of an hour for being three minutes late to my post. I got docked for six minutes, which at $2.90 an hour was not a great amount of cash out of my pocket. This is a while back. So I don't think they pay 290 an hour anymore. I think, I think wages have gone up a little bit since then. Anyway, how is everybody? Anybody want to, Kevin, how's your world? Good. You know, talking about Disney, they haven't started the trams back up. So the families are parking out in the lots and they're having to hike a mile and a half into the park. Do you think they're in a good mood by the time they get to the entrance? So there's no trams to take you out to your cars or drop? They're having difficulty hiring people. So they're staffing the interior of the park but they don't have the trams up yet. Oops. And you probably don't want autonomous trams in a busy parking lot. That's probably a bad idea. I mean, they used to say that, you know, transportation logistics was one of the strengths of Disney, right? And that, you know, they did consulting with cities and so on and so forth. Right now, they're not getting a great report card. Well, they just use a forest pass and make, you know, if you actually really want to go to Disneyland once you're at the end and make that optional. Did anyone see Dune? By the way, I'm a huge Dune fan. So I went and saw it in the theater. Yeah. What'd you think of it? I mean, I liked both, right? I mean, I actually liked both versions, the earlier version and this one for different reasons. One of the reasons to like the original version is it was actually complete and didn't leave you hanging. There was a little bit of an expectation management problem at my house. So my husband was super psyched about this. And I, so it's been a long time since I've read it and which was great for me because I got to remember all the things that I really loved about it while I watched it. I loved almost everything about it. Like I loved the sort of way less dialogue. I loved the way they shot it. I loved the suite. I'm totally planning on going to see it in the theater because we watched it on the couch. But my poor dear husband, it ended and he was like, what? Yeah. That's awesome. Because we just, you know, there's a lot of Dune content. And so indeed it says Dune part one and you're like, okay, part one of how many, like no one's ever talked about this being only the first 500 pages of the first book. So maybe they're going a little bit further or maybe they're right. Like just total lack of kind of knowing what to expect. And he was not cool with that. Because then of course we're like, oh great, when's the next one coming out? And they're like, well, we're still considering whether or not we're going to green light the actual making of part two. So that made him lose his mind a little bit more, which was pretty cool. I knew more actors in the original Dune and Chronicles of Riddick than I know in this one. This is a clearly a more contemporary cast. But I will say that, you know, just to add into the sci-fi universe that while it's not authentic, you know, I was a big fan when I was a kid of the foundation series by Asimov. The new foundation on Apple Plus is very interesting. It's not truly authentic to the book. In fact, in the credits, they make a very small, right? I think that's based on, you know, the foundation series by Asimov. It's a smaller credit than any of the others in the role. And, but it's interesting. It's good. I'm looking forward to the last episode this Friday when it releases. Yeah, so I've read all the Dune books. I mean, all of them like eight times. What? And yes, long ago, but I re-read it like last year again, just for the hell of it. And so I waited to the theater. I just, I did like my religious duty. I did not watch some of the show crime, even though I had it. And I sat there, I went a little bit in the beginning with, oh, that's good. Did you kneel and cross yourself before getting your popcorn? Pretty much, man. That's why I wanted to know other people's opinions because to me, I know the text so well. I was watching and I thought this was a very superior interpretation. They stuck much more to the book. And what they did change was still like getting the spirit of the book. I mean, this thing was really on it. And I also agree with Kevin that the other movie is still very fun. And it's, you know, it's, what's his name? He's very good. Come on. What's his name? Sheldon? No, this director. Lynch. David Lynch. Oh, Lynch. Right, this movie. And it was dark and Max Von Sardo. I mean, come on. It was awesome. It was great. I mean, there's no way you can put that movie down. So anyway, I really enjoyed it. And I too was, boy, the ending was abrupt. Boom. All of a sudden it's part two. And you're like, uh-oh. And it didn't even feel like it was a cliffhanger that you wanted to go to part two, right? It just ended, right? It was a flat ending. And I'm kind of like, hmm. But I've done a little bit better to get me interested in the next one. Those two. I thought that was okay, though. I mean, like when I first read the book ages ago, it was monumental, but particularly for the idea of there being a planetary ecologist. So I mean, the book had a certain kind of impact. And Villeneuve, the director of this latest movie, you know, experienced that himself. And for him, that was the most important thing is to convey that kind of impact. And by coincidence, Netflix has been showing Lawrence of Arabia recently. I love that. And Lawrence of Arabia, Villeneuve saw on the big screen in Montreal when he was young, and that flipped him into a movie career. And it's very interesting because Lawrence of Arabia has these enormous desert scenes which work fantastically on a big screen. It's very similar, by the way, to 2001 in that sense, there's a big sense of space and of time. And Dune is very impactful on the same way. It's, you know, it has these panoramas. It has a certain kind of pacing. It has this imagery, like images of Chani appearing in Paul's mind, which are very haunting. So I found it great because it hits on a, below the consciousness sconda level as the Buddhists would say. It hits you on a perceptual and feeling level. And that gets, I think that gets it ready for going further. The first movie or Lynch's movie, I didn't feel, was at all faithful to that kind of dimension of the book. It was more about the, you know, this is a that, so to speak. But anyway, so I would recommend seeing it on the big screen. The original was more of a Mad Max movie, right? You don't get it, Lynch. Yeah, I wouldn't call it the original. I would call it the Deviance, but that's the Deviance. Well, that's what I would, I'm just saying the earlier one. The first major. A sense of fellow Acolyte and Mark, and I must say, Mark, you should, that movie, what you just went through should be like on the review. Yeah, absolutely. I was watching, I was in Rapture. My man, you are wonderful. I think the special effects were also better in the more recent one. The scale of the worm, right? And the way that it's portrayed, you know, it's much more lifelike. I also found myself resonating with different texts like Getty Prime, The Harkonnen Planet. Now I'm thinking, oh, is that Planet Earth in like 50 years with climate change? Like now I have- That's an interesting- Different associations. Yeah. Like, are we living on Getty Prime right now? The early days. And what do we think about Harkonnen versus Harkonnen because that was a little bit of a hiccup. No strong feelings on that from anybody? Yeah, good. In this sphere of true confessions, I will confess my absolute illiteracy here. I have never read any of the Dune Books or the Foundation, which is like this gaping hole in my background, I know. And I'm not even, I'm not much tempted to watch either movie or series at this point. And it seems weird to me and interesting to me that they're both showing up at the same time because they're both so foundational to people's imaginings of the world, et cetera, et cetera. And the one thing that's making me maybe want to watch Foundation, although we don't do Apple, we don't do Apple Plus, is the recent discovery to my great embarrassment of the Encyclopedia Galactica and the planet where they took people away to go build this Encyclopedia of everything that's happening in the world, which let me see what has eaten my last, yeah, planet terminus. What has eaten my last two years of life energy? Oh, wait, trying to create like a sense, collaborative sense-making of how the world works. It's like, I should probably know more about that. We need to mash up though with Douglas Adams and have the cafe at the end of the universe on terminus. Yes, I like that. It could be the terminus at the end of the universe. Yeah. Of course, this whole thing resonates nowadays because, you know, with the sense of impending doom and civilizational collapse, this kind of cataclysm for Libo, it's, you know, attempt to, you know, it's even what Elon Musk is doing with his Roadster and, you know, Nova Spivak putting CDs of, you know, Wikipedia and all kinds of stuff on the moon and so on. I think that that's kind of a real thought, especially our electronics and electricity-based civilization, which will get zapped so easily, you know, in a solar plane, you know, or whatever. We'll have life, instead of BC and AD, it'll be before BEMP and post EMP. That'll be like how the new regime is done. A couple of things. There's a sci-fi-ish book called The Second Sleep. Have I told you guys about it before? It's set in kind of the middle ages and it used to be that people slept twice. It used to be that we'd go to sleep and then we'd kind of wake up and maybe have a snack and sit and even talk for a couple of hours and then go back to sleep. So it's called The Second Sleep. And at the beginning of the book, I'm gonna spoil the plot for you. It's not Faulkner and it's interesting just for its premise. So at the beginning of the book, a monk shows up in an abbey. He's there because the abbot has died mysteriously and it might be a murder. So what's up? And three chapters into the book, the protagonist is looking through a hidden cupboard of things that he found that the abbot was collecting and he discovers a little shiny slab that has like an apple engraved on it. And three chapters into the book, you realize that this is a post-apocalyptic civilization sci-fi work where all technology was destroyed and gotten rid of all the cities melted and just went away and the church took over and said, don't worry, hold my beer, we've got this. And forbade anybody from looking into history of any kind because technology basically caused the near destruction of all mankind. So we're just going to avoid it entirely and that's basically a big piece of the plot of the book. It's like pretty interesting, but it feels sometimes like we're playing with these kinds of things at this point. Like where people are busy juggling with the future of earth and then you start talking about geoengineering and you're like, oh, that's really juggling, isn't it? I mean, the time that you're talking about is currently practiced in Europe on a regular basis in the Southern European countries. The shops are open from 10 to two and then you take a nap and then it opens up again at six, right, to 10 or 11. And that's, there are two sleep periods, a longer one at night and then a shorter one. So during the day, STD, did you want to jump in? I thought I wanted to, first of all, register that when I realized I could come today to check in, I had no idea we were going to be doing a dune deep dive. And it's just been amazing. And I wanted to share that it was, it included for me sending a signal message on our family, what used to be called the WhatsApp channel, but we finally actually moved everybody on it to signal all the time as Facebook went meta, right, in these last few weeks. So looping around. Anyway, I'm like, hey, when are we doing the family excursion to see dune in a real theater? Which will be the first time for any of us, right? And kind of a, yeah. That'd be nice. You could even sit in the theater where the signal chat, you know. Yeah, I hope not. I hope we'll like be passing the popcorn or whatever. Yeah. But so signaling the family about real life gathering, like movie theater has seemed like would I ever do that? And for all of us, dune was the thing that was like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna have to figure this out because we gotta see this together. And anyway, so just looping in a little meanwhile down here at 9.28 in the morning, right? So why are dune and foundation so famous and hardly anything Ursula Le Guin wrote, which includes alternate universes that have alternate economies that are much more humane and much more interesting than fighting over fricking spice, at least in my mind. Why is Ursula Le Guin's work so hidden? So not popular. You know, Asimov is a whole other generation. He wrote quite a while ago in the 1950s. I mean, I read him when I was really young. And you know, I don't think he's a great writer. He was an incredibly prolific writer. Herbert, on the other hand, I think is a very good writer. I didn't read the later books by the non-Herbert, non-original, but so it's... It's also remarkable. And Mark, you must have read foundation, I haven't, but I'm watching a series on Apple. And it's really interesting to realize that he wrote this stuff in the 40s. So all these ideas, which Herbert likely just ripped off straight and whole for me, I'm like a resurrection of people and golem, you know, genetically resurrecting people. I mean, there's all these ideas that it's just so interesting to see that Asimov may be birth. I don't know. I'd love to hear you speak to that, Mark. It really blows my mind to just realize how much like the architecture of Spotify was done by Asimov. Yeah, and I don't know if you guys know, but foundation was really influential for Paul Krogelman, for example. And he realized, well, there's no psycho history, so I'll go into economics. I read him saying that, actually. You're right, I just read that. And of course, Elon Musk, you know, it was foundational, so to speak, for Elon reading. So it really did influence a lot of people. But, you know, I don't think Asimov has the kind of personal or spiritual depth of Ursula, like, when? I mean, I think Ursula is like, for example, her take on dragons, I think, is the deepest of anyone I've ever read, and this includes Tolkien. So, you know, and I love her Earthsea trilogy books. So I've got Dune and Foundation series and Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars and Star Trek, and a bunch of other things, like The Ascent of Man, the Hollers catalog, The New York World's Fair, the Connection, and my trigger is the Connection series that James Burke did back in the 70s and 80s. I love that. I still have the books. And so this is my list, this is my list of pivotal books, paintings, movies, ideas, et cetera, which include things like Matthew Brady's photographs of the dead on the battlefield of, I think the first one was Antietam. And so before Brady shows up and shows photograph, and Brady, you had to sit and pose for photos and it was a delicate affair, so there were no battlefield photos. Nobody was on the field with a camera during battle, but afterward he went onto the battlefield and photographed bloated dead bodies, piled up in ditches where they died and they hadn't been taken care of yet. And until that moment, everybody's perception of war was of this glorified thing and there were battlefield painters. There were war artists, here's a few of them, and the way we knew about battles was that people like John Singer Sergeant and Adam Franster, Fonda Merlin, and Elizabeth Sutherndon Thompson, Lady Butler, by the way, was a battlefield painter. She paints the lone soldier coming back to Jalalabad after the British army has wiped out in the first Anglo-Oscar War. All of a sudden people see that war is horrible and it was very much the same with Dan Rather and others in the jungles of Vietnam and Cronkite reporting on the news and everybody seeing what a firefight looked like and what the results were when our people were being injured and dragged out in bags. It had a hugely shocking effect on perceptions and world public opinion. Jerry, I would just loosely say, even though you haven't read Foundation, you have the abstract start of a Harry Seldon, right? Psycho-history there. Which is kind of why when I suddenly late discovered- You've been building a model, right? When I discovered the encyclopedia galactica as part of, I'm like, ah, crap. I gotta go read this because absolutely, you know, psycho-history, et cetera. So Jerry, I'm suspecting that somewhere in your wet-matter brain as well as- The brain classic I have to refer to it now. Okay, some connection had been triggered between the 40s and Asimov and the birth of print English language sci-fi to the experience of all those immigrants from Europe with its great wars beforehand, birthing at the same time, the superheroes, right, as responses to. So anyway, I was gonna tell you take us back one step, undeniable, right? The world, yeah, they were called World Wars. For a reason, yeah, exactly, exactly. And the second one was a whole lot bigger, right? Yeah. A whole lot, anyway. So all of these people directly experienced. So I had, so I've got a bunch of stuff on sort of the origins of superheroes and sci-fi, but I have never made that connection you just made, which is a brilliant connection. And I just added it to my brain because I need to go back and kind of mind that load. So what I'm realizing through this conversation is that that moment that Mark you were talking about with these films coming out now, and we're in a big, people are turning to big time. That is to a scale and an experience of time that is orders of magnitude bigger than the new cycle and the daily horror, right? That we've been kind of ticking away for a while at this moment. And meanwhile, what's happened in the superhero universe versus Dune, et cetera, how that gene pool morphed in the comic strip to Marvel, Marvel, right? I don't have words for it, I just posed the contrast. Yes, well, I'm gonna spew some venom at the superhero ideas, which I see as it has two goals, one, a dying Imperium requires superpowers to keep itself going. Two, it's a recruitment tool for military to get children to come into the military. So that's what I see it. I see it as this horrifying, nightmarish, violent, narcissistic, crushing evil is what I see in the goddamn superheroes. And it's just like, no, that's not saving anybody. And this is your dream, isn't it, Empire? That you're gonna have some superhero to save your ass. No, but that's the- I want you to die. Okay, so that's what I think. Well, you just, that's the reveal in the plot for the boys, right? Which is, everybody thinks that these guys are helping everything and you peel back just a little bit inside the organization that supports them. And they're all pretty narcissistic, evil, right? People that have superpowers, right? And they're making bad decisions, right? And the organization that supports them is covering them up, right? So if you wanna see your instantiation of superheroes laid bare, right, and visible, go watch the boys. Also, here, I'll give you the philosophical background of this. What's going on is the solution has been for modernity, power control, more power, more control, more power over our resources. Let's use science, save technology and let's control and that's our power and more power and more power. And power just creates, this kind of dynamic just creates conflict. So there's more, there's power conflicts and everything is about who's in power and control right now. So also I see it as a sick, the ultimate expression of modernity's obsession with power and control. Yeah. So just, Harry Selden in the Asimov stuff, basically takes the premise that humanity is full of treachery and betrayal and that we're gonna do it to each other versus in the list that you gave, the Star Trek view is a very optimistic view of leadership and having a value system. And yeah, there are gonna be some other things that we have to deal with that don't share our values, but it's worth trying to reach out and discover and reach some kind of rapprochement with these other civilizations. That's a, you know, I think that's the major contribution of Star Trek, right? And my lifetime is that that is a completely different viewpoint than most science fiction. I love that, Kevin, totally agree. And also I recently found myself comparing and contrasting Star Trek and Star Wars. And Star Wars is one of, it's on my list. It's one of those that influence a lot of people. And I really, the more I go, the more I hate Star Wars. Like the characters are memorable, the music is fantastic. The special effects for mediocre, the space, the science fiction is really, really, really weak and bad. And the characters are kind of stupid and how many times can you have a Death Star that has a vulnerability if you shoot a photon torpedo right down the right tube at the right moment? Like you can't repeat that plot as often as they've worked that plot, but they do. And then in contrast, Star Trek with a shoestring budget almost canceled, you know, revived by a few people that said, no, no, no, you can't let this go. Explorers, not just outer, you know, the universe where no man has gone before, but issues that were really important at the time, right? And in the same way that Archie Bunker was busy exploring issues that were really important at the time in a way that people could actually connect with. Archie Bunker in space. Pretty much, pretty much. Like Spaceballs meets Middle America or something. I don't know. Star Trek had really good writing. I mean, and that was the difference. I mean, Star Wars has no good writing. It's just a serial thing. It's nothing. Yeah, the city on the edge of tomorrow was a Harlan Ellison script. I wanna go back a second to your screed about superheroes, though partly because to me, so I agree in some sense with what you said, but to me, a big piece of the superhero narrative is of this poor meek person who suddenly can fight back against the corrupt system. And it's about vengeance and justice and also a bit about vigilantism, all of which are about fighting back against the oppressed system. So I think that there's a very big underdog and let's fix things kind of vain running through superheroes. I don't see the superheroes as reinforcers of the status quo and enforcers of the bureaucracy and the incumbency. I don't see them as that much at all. Okay, I'm glad you did this because you just brought up something I'd really like to deal with. Awesome, I don't hold back, really, seriously. The American excuse for imperialism is basically this endless Clint Eastwood or John Wayne movie where the rules need to be dismissed and we turn vigilante and we use violence. This vigilante myth is really the myth that every narcissist tells themselves that narcissists are always the victim and that unusual, extra-legal measures are always called for, always called for. I don't completely agree with, I'm on board with that. Everything about the underdog, okay, there's only one superhero thing I do like and that's the Umbrella Academy on Netflix, which is about a dysfunctional family and it's awesome. Umbrella Academy is weird but awesome, yeah. Oh yeah, I love it. So that will be my only knit with what you said. Besides that, I'd like the rest of the group to the way in. Also, I'm interested in Kelly's point about hard versus soft, human development based in sci-fi. So yeah, that was like, I started writing that like a really long time ago. It was relevant when we, you know, when I started that whole paragraph but I thought I found that sort of distinction to be vaguely grating on me because, in part because it was framed at the time as like hard sci-fi is the real stuff and it's where we're really getting into like what's cool technologically speaking and if what we're gonna be talking about, basically if there's any element of magic or there's any element of humans expanding their own capabilities outside of what you can do with a machine, then that's soft sci-fi and that's really getting towards like at the fantasy world and something that is obviously not really cool or doable, right? So the idea, so what I, my thought, my suspicion as maybe Ursula Gwynn gets a little bit closer if she's talking about sort of like systems that we could actually make better as human beings together. Yes, but that's very different from magic. I mean, I agree in general but I think magic versus human potential, I think the magic in some sense destroys that because it turns thing into the realm of either angelic or demonic and you're basically helpless in between. I love that and I agree and I wonder if people feel like that about the Benagesera in Dune and how much of that, like is that magic or is that human development, right? So like that's the sort of, that's the question. How much? I was with you on this. Oh, I wanted to go there and so as soon as you're done calling it, I wanted to say something. I think that might be all I have to say about that. So, I'm studying Aristotle now and Aristotle and Nicmechan, ethics six goes, we basically, Aristotle and Plato were dismissing the gods and getting rid of their own religion. They were done with that stuff and their empire was falling apart called Venetian Wars and they wanted no more belief, let's talk about knowledge. And it was really fascinating to see both in Herbert's vision and in Asimov's vision, we still have religion. The Benagesera are architects, they're essentially religious architects. And this other religion, I don't know the name of it but I've been watching and found it. So they both project a religion which essentially means they think the future is still gonna be controlled by a bunch of people who have beliefs, sans knowledge. So I just wanna pose that to the group and that just hit me the other day like, wow, these people are projecting and this is not an age like the Star Trek kind of age where we'd have science and we have knowledge and we don't need, but no, these are, if you have beliefs still going on at Infinitum, you've got religious war. That's right. But the Dune plot is basically saying, okay, here's somebody who's being trained, right? But it's also informed, right? That's the hybrid, that's the hybrid, okay? That's being brought into the world, right? Is somebody who has the skill set and has some knowledge to apply it in a better way. Kelly, you wanna jump in? I'm just curious about the sort of proposition that religion is either belief or knowing that there isn't, from your perspective, there is no marriage. Is that? Yeah, I think you have to distinguish the way it's made. Good question, Kelly, is that my assumption? Indeed. Indeed. Interesting. Well, I wanna throw two things on the pile here. One, I haven't read the book, but I recently read some reviews of this book, Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. And basically Braveheart, John Wayne, all these sort of things, evangelicals basically adopted how a militant ideal of white Christian manhood came to pervade evangelical popular culture in America. And there's a reason why there's all these portraits of Trump as Rambo basically with dragons and flamethrowers and God knows what, is that this is actually a really, really strong meme out in the world. So I wanted to save that. And then a second thing is I realized only recently like acts of faith, and I'm talking here, I guess, in Catholicism or something, I don't know exactly, but it struck me that the idea of acts of faith these are intentional beliefs you must adopt to be part of a community, which are intentionally distancing you from reality, science, whatever else. So the idea that there was a virgin birth and that like the whole Catechism, right? Oh, a friend of ours pointed us to a bishop whose writings he really liked. So I watched a video of his and he starts with the Nicene Creed. And he says, the Nicene Creed is a great place to start. I'm like, I think I remember the Nicene Creed. I go read it. And it's basically, it's the acts of faith of the belief system of the Christian, of the Catholic church. And every blessed one of them is a leap of faith. These are acts of faith where you are crossing a mental and emotional, and I guess spiritual chasm to belong, to be part of this faith. But every one of them is a forceful intentional denial of whatever science might have been around. Yeah, well, they're unfalsifiable claims. Exactly, exactly. So the fact is that that means that they are, you know... But it's an exercise... It's not the realm of science or any other, you know, provable, right thing. You have to be in the faith, right? But it's an intentional, it's a deliberate exercise in the denial of ground truth. Well, I know that question. In exchange for an emotional ground truth. But you can either accept it as dogmatic or you're a seeker, okay? Those are two fundamentally different perspectives if you're going to be, you know, in that is... Yeah. You're gonna say, okay, these are true no matter what. Okay, so that's dogma, right? Versus if you're actually a scholar and you're reading, you know, the Bible, which Genesis are you gonna believe? Genesis one or Genesis two, right? Genesis one is a big watery empty void, okay? Genesis two is a desert, okay? You know, Adam and Eve are created simultaneously in Genesis one. Genesis two, you know, woman is a, you know, bone out of a man, right? They're contradictory, right? And the fact is that if, you know, a lot of the scholars, the people who are in the religion business are saying, it's a paradox, right? And it's meant to provoke discussion and to, you know, be part of a seeking, you know, tradition, right? I think about so many people cherry pick what they want to create dogma, right? So I just... I have to interject here. Please. Just to say, even before you started naming things like Catholicism and evangelical, evangelicals, you're really talking Christianity. And again, coming back to, I mean, big time Christianity, right? And so coming back to where we started the conversation, there is no word for religion in Hebrew. The concept does not exist, right? And the existence of these obviously, not only contradictory, but like completely incomparable types of stories in Genesis is not meant to force you to pick one. It's to confront you with, of course, none of this is true. How could we know? It's just literature and stories and opportunities for and expressions of thoughts, right? Of, and mostly thoughts about human nature. I'm a closet Hebrew fan. So I'm all for what you're saying, S.D. I mean, when I look back at the original texts and the way they interpret them, sin just simply means missing the mark. We're always in sin. Let's every year reflect on how we miss the mark and how it's hard to do better. And God is simply the objective, the whole, I mean, I love the Hebrew like vision. How are you gonna keep control of the women if that's what your approach is gonna be? You just prohibit them from entering the ministry of the priesthood. That's easy. I mean, then you apply a whole bunch of other misogynistic practices and bake them in. That's simple. Yeah, I'm saying, I'm saying if we take none of them. I know. Well, there's a reason. Wait, Kelly, say, Kelly, say more. Kelly would also start in the 70s. You could get your own bank account finally. I don't know how we let that one get by. Okay. I'm saying, I'm saying if we took, if this is what, so I have a lot of feelings about this. This is good. I'll call right up. Go, go. Don't cover it up. I love this idea. I love everything Estie just said, right? In terms of like scripture is an invitation to engage and everything Bo just said about like, yeah, let's take a second and just reflect on the past year and see where we miss the mark, right? And how much all of this and the sort of the difference between capital, our religion and lowercase our religion and acts of faith versus acts of faith, right? Like this whole idea that the entire, it feels to me like the entire conversation in the US has totally been co-opted by this super strict Christian, like Christianity as a form of command and control, which is what this whole thing ends up coming back down to anyway, right? Which is why I was cracking the joke about like, if we take this as an opportunity to trust our own experiences and do some reflection and combine sort of this idea of like, I absolutely have some faith. I probably don't have a formal religion, but like I can certainly marry that with my lived experience and with a bunch of knowing and with a bunch of science, right? And the only thing we have to give up to get that is the illusion of control, right? And so this invitation to dismiss your own experience and dismiss sort of like all of the, like the science and the whole, go ahead and embrace the, is it the Nicene Creed? Is that where we started, right? Like by denying that which you, your lived experiences or your, right? Like anything that we can prove, like it feels like there's a huge opportunity for people who are seekers or people who are interested in actual deeper connection to not have to do that with a capital R religion. Right on. I love that. And I gotta say, I really try not to go after people of faith. There's a lot of people of faith out there who I really respect. I mean, there's a lot of so, and it's funny, I love reading history and it's so interesting to see how Christianity turned from the Jesus cult to the state religion of the Roman Empire. Anyway, I don't want to dismiss people of faith. And also science can't give you ethics. That's the thing. False defiable hypothesis for ethics, science can't tell you the good. I mean, I gotta think about, oh no, it doesn't work. We wanna go down this one. We wanna go down this one. Okay, let's do this. Because this is where I think we're really going off the rails. Go for it, Kevin. I'm just gonna just remind everyone that the first major schism in recent Christianity was Protestantism, right? And the key word there is protest. Okay, is, hey guys, I mean, I'm gonna distill what Martin Luther put up on the door, but what he said was, hey, you know what, priests? I can pray for myself, right? I don't need you to be an intermediary to God, all right? I can do this myself. Thank you very much, all right? And then there's a whole bunch of derivatives, all right? But I think that the whole idea of the Protestant movement, if you go back to the protesting, all right, is we're still protesting. We still have a lot of people who are, you know, taking, you know, different points of view, all right? And that's healthy. I mean, when it gets, you know, when it gets so cohesive that it's dogma, that becomes somewhat problematic. Yeah, dogma is all Plato and Aristotle talk about. The Christopher Hissions of their age. Of course, Martin Luther was terrified about what he unleashed. And by the way, this takes me to another point. I don't wanna take us off people of faith and everything so Estie and Kelly, let's keep that going. But I was thinking the other day, Martin Luther also, that whole thing happened because of the printing press, right? When we had the printing press, it essentially Martin Luther was unleashed and religious wars for like several hundred years in Europe, where we just killed each other like flies. So I was thinking that I hold it, this is the point. Oh, go, go, go. The other day I was thinking like, wait a minute, what's going on with social media? Like I was thinking, God, is social media gonna rip our, rip our, rip our civilization apart? And I was thinking, oh my God, social media is a new Gutenberg press. In fact, it's millions of Gutenberg presses and the ability for people to like create their own bubble. So I'm now beginning to wonder, I'm playing with a hypothesis that essentially our civilization is being challenged by this monster we created, which is social media, self-publishing. What we've really unleashed, we can go look back for an analog in history and it's the printing press. And what happened? Society and power structures had to completely reset and religious wars just genocide left and right. So I wanna throw that in everyone's hopper and hang back and wait for your brilliant minds to tell me if I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I think you're right, but I want you to, every organization sees the innovation a different way. What the Catholic church saw in the Gutenberg press was this is fantastic. We're gonna put it on a cart with a donkey moving from one village to another with a priest and we're gonna print indulgences and dispensations. It's a money maker. Do you think they originally- It was the NFP of time. It was the NFP of time. What Mark Zuckerberg thinks too. I know, they weren't using it to spread knowledge. They still had the scribes back there making, I can make one Bible in my lifetime by transcribing it. It wasn't originally used to shift the power base. They still wanted to be the font of, you wanna know what's in the Bible, you gotta talk to me. That's what they wanted, but it didn't work out that way. I know, I know, I know. I love this topic. I am no theologian, et cetera, et cetera. And there are many different ways we could sort of go into this or we could skip around it and slide to other topics. But I, what's the dawn of everything? Yes, that's how you're muted, we can't hear you. Which came out this week, right? Yes, the Kindle version is out? Yes, it appeared on my Kindle. Pet fire. 36 hours ago, yes, yes, right. It's thick. No it isn't. I know. It's wonderful. What did that get to you today? I can't wait. Oh my God. Yeah, to your point, Beau, and by the way, I have that book on reserve at the on hold at the library, but I may break down and get it in e-form. I think what you're saying about the Gutenberg Press and social media is very true. And I think basically that's part of what's happened is it's destroyed the commons, but also it's destroyed the illusion that there was a commons because the commons was actually the printing presses owned by the olivarchy. And that's the New York Times and the Washington Post and those we consider that are all the news that are fit to print, which is no longer the case. So the upside is, yeah, there's other channels. The downside is there's no common ground. There's no civilization anymore. Okay. So the reason I lifted this tome up at this moment is because I think the Gutenberg Press to social media, Bo, is something that I think I've been hearing since we invented the internet, right? And it is the technology-framed narrative, right? It's the Golden Gate Bridge. First there was the one end, then there was the other and everything happens in between, right? This is our, and what this book does is to say, well, wait a minute, we've been around for way longer, way long before the, right? And people were no smarter. People were no less concerned about making sense of their lives and things around them, right? And again, it's so convenient that we've got this, for me, it's convenient, this reference to Genesis, right? We're talking a literature and we're talking a chain of conversation that literally goes back 3,000, 5,000 years, right? And the amazing thing to me is when I first started studying Judaism as an adult or being involved in Jewish conversations, the shocking thing was that it's not about the Bible, it's about all this other rabbinic literature, interconnected stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that the reason, what happens when you engage with it is that you're actually engaging with people who wrote literally by name 1,000 years ago, 1,500 years ago, right? And it was written, everybody, like people were taught to read and write. So I'm just zooming us out, right? Beyond the European modern technologic frame. Kelly's gesturing along with me. All right, now I can shut up. No, don't shut up. Kelly, go for it. Bo, you're muted. Kelly, go for it. Oh, you're actually not muted, but now we don't hear you. What happened? Oh, Kelly, go for it, Kelly. Okay, there you go. I've heard Bo the whole time. You can read his lips. It's like, go, Kelly, go. I was just saying basically preach it yesterday, like in terms of zooming us out, past the current, hard not to crack jokes about, are you telling me that we are not the center of this entire universe? I'm sorry to break that to you, Kelly. Well, you're not zooming out. I'm still a little ambivalent about human extinction, I have to admit. Yeah, yeah. Mark wants to zoom further. Go ahead, Mark. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the Abrahamic religions here. And it's a much bigger world, you know? And I think most of the world is not part of that tradition. We're not talking Abrahamic. We're talking, you know, the entire globe, we're talking all the religions of, quote, the East, right? Well, I hope so, yeah. We're talking about human beings having lived, and that's what this book is about, right? Having lived with one another and created social structures and epistemologies and all the fancy words, right? Yeah. That we knowledge ecology, evolution of people, right, are familiar with, goes back, right? Yeah, he says to, yeah, I won't go there. Christina Bowen's job title when she presents herself as knowledge ecologist. Yep. So Bowen mentioned- It's not cool, but you're muted, so we don't hear you in awe. That's okay, good. Mark, that's something. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned religion in context of the, of basically that even far in the future, there'll be religions, et cetera, talking about. And I think that's kind of inevitable because in a way, we always have our default mythology and the greater our area of knowledge and the greater the perimeter of ignorance. And so you have de facto beliefs because you have no choice. You have to, you know, on some things, you have to have some kind of stance even though you don't have any knowledge about it. I mean, there's tons of stuff science doesn't know about. So it says dark energy, dark matter, sounds like Darth Vader. And there's a lot of stuff like there's one big complaint about physics in the last 30, 40 years or maybe 50 years is that there's a lot of stuff that happens in the realm of complete unprovability. Like, you know, a lot of the quantum theory, mathematical theories are completely unverifiable but people indulge in them anyway. And, you know, I think on some levels that's kind of satisfying, but I think it's also inevitable. And even in terms of the market, like in Adam Smith, you know, supposedly talked about the invisible hand. There's only two places in his book where he uses that phrase. And in one of them, it's because the rich people put their finger on the scales. There's no fucking invisible hand. It's a myth, but people believe it. Oh, sorry about that. I know, did you just blow her mind? That was me laughing. I was, that was amazing. A small side note about Adam Smith. Oh, what's his name? Brown, Melvin Brown, something that he's a guy in Berkeley wrote a book talking about Adam Smith. And it turns out that what city was Adam Smith in? He was in Glasgow. What's interesting about Glasgow? Glasgow was the best sheltered port in the British Isles from the damned French and the damned Spanish. So Glasgow becomes very wealthy because it's one of the major ports of entry for trades from the new world. So there are very, very wealthy people in Glasgow who become Smith's patrons. What commodities are these people wealthy from? Uh-oh, here we go. Tobacco, cotton, sugar. What do these three commodities have in common? Let's just scratch our heads for just a second. Slavery. What does Adam Smith not really mention in his works? Slavery. And he's supposed to be building an economic theory of how the world works, right? It's just really screwed up. It's just really screwed up. Because he was being supported by patrons who were filthy rich because they were taking advantage of human beings, which does not enter the father of modern economics. Like seriously, it's completely crazy. Yes, I am increasingly very embarrassed about my Scottish blood. I looked it up and there's a Scotsman who basically he engineered the opium wars. Another Scotsman who engineered the play frame because your boat goes to Africa, picks up the slaves, goes to America, drops them off, sells them, loads up with tobacco and cotton comes back. That was Scottish, Scottish, Scottish, Scottish. They put a little too much whiskey in a Scotsman and things like that happen. I'm telling you, I mean, and then the other thing is, I, so there's so much there actually. Okay, how did I lose my way here a little bit? Oh yeah, the Scottish made a deal with the English crown. They would approve William of Orange being the king if they would have free trade and the English would never interrupt or tax their trade. The most successful deal in history was that deal that the Scots got out of the English. They were like, fine, you can have a king but let us do what we want and don't impede our trade. I mean, oh my God, the Scottish are like the techno capitalist evil. And I thought the Petrodomology on the Bidini. Oh my God. And I have a small theory based on little evidence that part of the reason Brexit passed was that a bunch of Scottish people voted for Brexit so that they could win their independence from the UK. Can I, can I say go and change your direction for a second? Take us back, Estie. Yeah, no, I, because I have to leave and I snuck this link into the chat without saying anything. And anyway, but I don't wanna leave with it just left there. So it's, the link is the sword and the sandwich sub-stack of Talia Lavin. And it's her series that just came out, Ministry of Violence. And this is, she wrote a book that came out about 18 months ago, which has the name, the word warlords, lords in the title about being her experience inside the white supremacist. Yeah, right. And she's astounding, okay. So this series is about the, not just the misogyny, but the belief in pain and the infliction of pain as child rearing and essential to the growth of a Christian soul in the incredible, right? And it's something which grew out of her putting out a tweet asking if anybody had stories of something and she got deluged with responses. Once you read it, it changes. Holy crap. So read culture warriors? So no, read the link, the ministry on her sub-stack, Ministry of Violence. Holy crap. Okay. Thank you, Estie. That's something I had no idea. You should also read warlords, but this is like right to the center of what is actually underneath, what, Mark, I remember this when you talked about Protestantism, right? And evangelical or Jerry, when you're showing your map, right? This is a piece of the underlayment of this country and ties back to, for Jerry's benefit, if nobody else is, Rianne Eisler's notion that cultures occur on a spectrum from what she calls partnership on one end and domination on the other, where the essence of domination is the right to inflict pain on others, which is an incredibly effective way to perpetuate a system of control and abuse. And so this is that window into this world under these movements at this minute. You, thank you, Estie, that was awesome. Thank you, thank you. That's super, super awesome. Here's the hierarchy of domination and here's the hierarchy of actualization under Rianne. Estie, you said culture exists on a spectrum between partnership and domination. Is that right? Right, cultures. This is in the chalice and the blade, which Rianne is. Right, that was essentially, that's the beginning of her work. And furthermore, she says in that book, she was an ancient historian. She is now ancient, chronologically, but she means a historian of pre-written history, right? Of those eras. And she pointed out, which is what I brought to Rex, to these conversations several years ago, that there's really no evidence that men dominated women in these cultures because it doesn't take rocket science to see that if the women aren't around, stuff ain't happening. No damn tribe, there is no damn tribe. And again, people were not stupid, right? And et cetera. So she's like, there's no actual evidence in the historical record, right? There's art that appears and blah, blah, blah, in which men are misusing women, but right. And so for me, so that was marvelous. It's like, oh, partnership, like this thing that comes natural and that it couldn't be more wreck, I mean, the wrexiness is inbuilt, right? I never really understood the domination. I understood her message about slavery, to me, it never, it was like the evil over there or in the past, I could not get it until Trump arrived on the scene, right? And the pain is the point and all of this. And then this series by her, by Talia, this Ministry of Violence brought it to me in a, I feel experiential, right? Turns out a common thing, and then I'm gonna, I have to go, a common thing in these circles is for women to not be able to bear the presence of a wooden kitchen implement in their homes as adults. Say that again? Can't have in their homes, won't allow into their homes the wooden mixing spoons or other such, because it was a very everyday implement of violence against them from when they were very young. Yeah. Like it's a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, to, so, not to make a dramatic exit, but I didn't wanna leave, speaking of Easter eggs, I didn't wanna leave Ministry of Violence, part one through three, as an Easter egg in the chest room. Gotta say that was a dramatic exit. I'm just like, okay, yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yep. But thank you, Essy. Lovely to see you, thank you for joining us. Yes, lovely to see you guys. And we should, next time I wanna talk about whether anybody's using Rome. I know a bunch of people who are big Rome fans, Rome research is the tool. It's like an outliner with backlinks, basically. Mark, are you using it? I'm using it, yeah, I'm not in a super heavy duty way, but yeah, I mean, I think it fundamentally lets you create kind of your personal wiki cloud in some sense, very effortlessly. There's also a... I'm doing something called the Rome book club. This, it's like a six or eight week thing and this is cohort number six. And it's fascinating. So I just put that out there because I think in some way I found this pursuit and the conversations has just been amazing. So if anybody, does anybody use Obsidian? So I've been using Obsidian some. You can kind of make Obsidian do some Romey sort of stuff, but they're different. Yes. There's also a project called Athens research, Rome Athens. And Athens is an open source version of Rome that's trying to solve the multi-user Rome problem sooner than Rome will, because Rome keeps saying, yes, yes, multi-users coming soon and they're doing nothing about it. And incidentally in the Rome world, they call that version multiplayer. Takes me back to ready player one. Exactly. So now I can leave. Yeah, because you've put a nice bow on that one. Bye. Thanks, Estie. Thank you. I gotta go too. I'm 17 minutes late for my 10 o'clock. Darn it. Jamie Kelly, because I really want to go off, I think Ben and Jezorite would tie into this so much because women, engineering, culture. And Dave is joining us. He just remembered to set his clocks ahead. Okay. So anyway, Kelly, let's talk Ben and Jezorite next time. Okay, good. Let's do that. Okay, bye. Hey, Dave. How are you doing? I'm here to join you in time for sign off here. Excellent. Well, it's so nice to see you, man. You look so happy and jolly. It's great to see you guys. Are you really on the islands or something? Or are you pretending to be? I'm just pretending. I'm in Oakland, which is its own little bit of paradise. It is. I miss the food. I miss the food. Which has an idyllic lagoon right behind me sitting. Exactly. Exactly. It has like porpoises and nymphs and water shows with orcas. It was a little sadder than that. There's this really wonderful newsletter that comes out every month from the folks who like the people that came out with the group is called, but it's like, you know, people who care for Lake Merritt. And they do the bird walks. They do water sampling and all this stuff. And they print out this five or six page print newsletter that they mail out every week every month. And this last one had an article about some kind of a shark that was photographed in the Lake Merritt. And it's like, wow, there's like living things in the lake. And then there's a little note saying, and then a shark was found into stress on the beach. And so I was like, oh, and now it's dead. The X shark. You just missed a good go around the religion and the meaning of life and sci-fi and superheroes and a bunch of other stuff. We were weaving a big long tail about a lot of cool stuff. I was a little bit worried if I didn't show up. I'd get like tossed across the room or something. But I'd be a keto master. Oh, yeah, thanks. Where's the link for this recorded video, Jerry? I'm not, do you email it to us? So how do we get the link? Yeah, yeah, I send a, I think I usually, I think I usually send a note afterward that says, hey, I've uploaded the call and here's the link. So. So what about what was on Patreon video if you want to speak? Oh, yeah. So I sent, I do not communicate well with my Patreon backers who are patient and wonderful. And so I did like an 11 minute video update of what the hell I've been up to. And if you look at my Patreon campaign page, basically it says I'm working on trust. And it's a whole thing about like, and I was like big on design from trust, which I'm still big on, but I had sort of set aside because what I discovered was kind of selling trust is like pushing a wet noodle up the wall. Trust is really essential, but you've got to sell something else in order to open that conversation. And then I found my way over into starting open global mind at the beginning of lockdown. So part of what I do in the video is I explain how trust, how design from trust led to inside Jerry's brain led to open global mind, led to a podcast that I'm standing up right now called weaving the world that has a shadow podcast called feeding the big fungus. Yeah. And so I'm mixing metaphors here, the weaving is a lovely metaphor because of things like Indra's net and weaving knowledge and the fabric of society, but the fungus is lovely because this is my 30 second riff on it, leaf cutter ants, whom we've probably seen nature videos of leaf cutter ants cutting pieces of leaves and scurrying into the nest. They can't actually digest leaf matter. So what the hell are they up to? They hand the leaves off to a subclass of ant inside the hive, who chew up and mulch up the leaf matter and then put it on a fungus, which they're farming symbiotically. And they're also known as farmer ants. And that fungus metabolizes the leaf matter and oozes an actor and some tasty fungus parts, which is what all the ants eat. So by making sure the fungus is healthy, the ant hive is healthy. And I have felt metaphorically by using my brain for 24 years and curating the structures of what I've seen, what I believe, what I hear, et cetera into my brain. I felt like a lonely ant at the fungus phase. And I've always been looking wrong, going like, this is really fun and useful. Where the hell is everybody? And why can't we do this together? So when Estie reports three minutes ago that she's in the Rome book club, and I'm pretty familiar with Rome research, they've done a phenomenal job of publicity. They have a lot of people who are like all, the Rome faithful is big, ROAM. But that they're doing book digestion using Rome is super interesting to me because one of the things I'd love to know is, what does it look like for me, a brain addict, to talk to a Rome addict about the same body of work and knowledge? Like what does the conversation we just had in the last hour and a half look like when we're sharing maps of what we know in a way that's more interchangeable than just screen sharing? And that's a piece of where I think open global mind is trying to go. And then there's this whole other soft squishy part of open global mind, which is about being open minded and being safe and being willing to talk to people who have very opposite opinions from yours. And then I try to explain some of that kind of stuff as well. So the video that I shot for my backers was, hey, here's what I've been up to. Your backing has been invaluable. Thank you. And et cetera. Right on. Can't wait to watch it. Thank you. Then all comments completely welcome. So this morning I had, if you're interested in helping with the podcast, every Wednesday morning at seven, there's a weaving the world operations call. So I had one this morning and we, like Pete Kaminsky is like in the engine room of all of this kind of stuff around open global mind, which is really fun. And he turned me on to Descript. So Descript.com, which is this super power tool for editing and creating a video and audio podcasts. And what you can do is you basically drop a video in there and it does an automatic transcription of the whole video. So it uses transcription software, but then you can edit the transcript and it edits the video or audio. So there's a little function in Descript, for example, that'll find and take out all of the ums and uhs and awkward pauses and coughs. Wow. And you just hit a button and poop, they're gone. And then you can output that as a video file. And then you hit another one and like it tries to make all this work, except it's an app you download to your machine. My MacBook Pro is a few years old and it was huffing and puffing and the fan was on and all the little lights were blinking red because, you know, my machine not strong enough to actually like climb uphill while doing Descript. So I had to stop and go, man, I, you know, this has got to work some other way. So Pete and I are busy working out the logistics of what artifacts to create around each podcast and what to do around how to, how to weave the podcasts into the world. That's why the podcast is called Weaving the World. Okay. All right. Thoughts, questions, suggestions? I just have a lot of things to look up. Go ahead, David and Mark. Yeah, I'm gonna share that one around and send them. Thank you. This Rome book club, what the hell is a Rome book club, man? Well, are you familiar at all with Rome research? No, I'm not. Okay, go to YouTube and type in Rome research and then just watch the first popular video explaining Rome and that'll give you a view of what looks like it's an outliner and it's an outliner with backlinks, which means any word or phrase you put double brackets around becomes a link through the whole space in that base of Rome and that document collection or it's not really a document collection. And so you can then kind of pivot and see what else mentions this thoughts. So traditional Christian marriage, you could put double brackets around that and then everywhere in that Rome database that you talk about that phrase, it's linkable, which is like, okay, good. And then people are using those things in pretty clever ways. My problem is when I go to an outliner, I feel like I've lost a limb because I don't like outliners anymore. Outliners are like, you know, they're hierarchical and they're kind of linear, right? In my world, I don't have a lot more dimensions but the added dimensionality of the brain is a power tool to me. Right? I think the links in Rome are not hierarchical. I mean, they kind of explode in all directions. Right. And I think really what they've done they've taken something really, really simple which is they took the idea of the Wiki link and the thing with the Wiki link is that you would click on it and they would ask you, do you want to create a new page for this thing? Whereas in Rome, you double bracket something in the background, there's already a page. Actually the original Wikis did exactly that. So that's an affordance, I think that's really important because it's automatically starts populating this cloud around yourself. And I think the other thing about Rome is they've really done a good job with the user experience. So that, you know, it's always the minimal number of clicks and so really the idea is fundamentally really, really simple. And as you said, they're not the first ones to have done it but I think they packaged it really well with their UI. I totally agree. And they've done really nice marketing and they've got a fan base because they keep, you know if you go on YouTube and do Rome research you will find, what's better Rome or Notion? I'm a Rome fan because this I turned I changed my whole life by starting to use Rome and it's a bit much because I don't think the tool is all that powerful but it's interesting. And Obsidian is basically a Markdown editor that also does links like this and backlinks and has plugins in his open source. And you can kind of mock what Rome does in Obsidian. And by the way, Harlan Hu, the inventor of the brain put Rome-like features into the latest version of the brain, which is version 12. So the notes, the little notes field in the brain actually has backlinks like Rome which I haven't really figured out how to use or what to do with. Yeah, and my question sort of lies in the middle of all that space which is what does the conversation look like between a Kumu fan, a Rome fan, a brain fan, a Miro fan and some other name your other favorite tool. What does a multi-tool conversation look like that's actually fruitful and useful? And then the second layer question could we have an environment within which you can switch to the better tool for the thing you're trying to do. So Christina Bowen can draw in Kumu a systems diagram that shows you that when the wolves eat the rabbits there's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I can't really do that easily in the brain. The brain is not good for systems flow diagrams or what ifs or any of that kind of stuff. So why couldn't I then say, oh, over here let's treat this space as if it were Kumu. And then let's go over here and treat this space as if it were a database lookup from air table or from something else. Like what does a flexible environment that mixes these tools together look like that's really exciting for me. I miss Prezi. So I was a Prezi black belt and they've changed Prezi dramatically two times. The first time they made it look more like PowerPoint but they kind of kept the Prezi functionality. Then sometime in the last year and a half they redid the Prezi and they lobotomized it. They basically put an ice pick in its forehead and shoved it around to the point where I had to cancel my account and I don't go back because I cannot make Prezi work the way I used to use it. It's no longer a power tool for me which hurts like crazy because when I go over to Miro which is sort of the era parent you can't tell a story in Miro like you can tell in Prezi. It doesn't actually work. Wow. You can't create a path. You can do frames in Miro. They're very awkward. They're clumsy. You can't actually sort of direct people through a path. It's really sucky. So I'm like, man my tools are even breaking as I go. And what I really want again is this blended tool space. Does that even make sense? Here's what I do. I'm now up to 188 pages with my fountain pen outlining Hegel's phenomenology. I am living basically like 1500 years ago. Nice. So is it a smart pen on smart paper so that that all gets annotated and saved? Oh, it's an English sterling silver fountain pen. Are you at least writing backwards so that nobody else can read it and you have to hold it up to a mirror? Nope, nope, nope. Okay. But you're not worrying about EMPs at least. Yeah, yeah. He's worrying about fire. Yeah, EMPs hit me with all the books. I don't know. I'm a sort of, this knows it's not getting wasted at all. Yeah, but a flood or a fire in your dust. Oh, true enough, true enough. Well, I'm kind of curious like, Jerry, I was, I mean, this makes me- You gotta go. Hi, Mark. Thanks, Mark. No, I was just kind of curious about the, so it's like this week, I finally kind of started to read a little bit about Web 3.0 stuff. Yeah. I guess it was probably Chris Dixon or something that I was starting to look at or something. And I don't know, I hadn't, I don't know if that, are you guys, are you guys already using that terminology or is it, is that something really old I just missed? Let's go there, David. Let's go to Web 3.0. Go ahead. Well, I mean, you know, and I think they're basically arguing that it'll be, it's a blockchainy web or something that's all linked together as opposed to the Web 2.0, which got all aggregated into the large sites. So distributed databases that are talking to each other. Yeah. And it sounds like what you're talking about is a very much linked together kind of world. So it seemed maybe Web 3.0-y, right? I mean, this idea that in some sense, you've got the brain attached to an outliner attached to a, you know, and it's like, yeah, right? That's the way it really ought to work. We ought to be able to link these tools back together again. So a couple of thoughts on that. And I just, Bo, you already have a link to my video, thanking my backers, but Dave, I don't think you do. So I just put that on the chat. Oh, I do indeed. I've got it. Oh, good. Cool. Thank you. So one thought, when you go using your browser to a new website and you click on a link, you are sending a message to that server and that server sends out a message to a bunch of servers around the world and it doesn't matter where those servers are. And that message says, hey, Jerry's browser needs this file from you. Would you please send it to him? And then your browser's got a catcher's mitt, catches all those incoming files from wherever the hell, assembles them really pretty and shows them to you. And where it doesn't get a file, it shows you a little broken icon that says, oops, couldn't get this image. And the fact that that degrades gracefully is one of the miracles that makes the web work, right? The fact that HTML is forgiving and that this whole DNS system actually manages to do that. And if you're, you know, if you're doing ghost or any kind of ad detection, you will, when you go to a website, like the number of hits that are happening in the background is sometimes astonishing, just to paint a new web page on a stupid site that has too much advertising. One of my questions is, why doesn't the brain behave like that? When I click on a new thought in my brain, why doesn't it say, where is my next set of tuples? And the tuples could be living on anybody's Rome research database or whatever on any server in the known universe. And then you just keep traversing brain space. Why doesn't the brain work that way? Partly because it's slow, but partly because Harlan is 24 years into one architecture and can't see his way to a different architecture, right? So that's just one little piece of it. It's like, what if all apps started to, what if you start separating apps from the data? And what if the data is distributed, reliable, contextual, linked, et cetera, et cetera? So one of the, when I talk about OGM as an architecture, I sort of talked about the soft squishy stuff on top, which is about trust and vulnerability and safety, and then the stuff at the bottom, which is about visualization, but then also about data. And if we can separate the tools from the data then, when I update a node that's about traditional Christian marriage, which came up in the talk earlier, that you missed, when I update that node, in this now shared data context, when someone else goes and looks at that node with a different tool, I don't care, they would have the option to see how I upgraded it, how I made it better and accept that or not. Think of it as a pull request on GitHub or something like that. That's really interesting. And then we could switch the visualization tool, but always be improving the data. So now D3 is like, well, so how's the data represented? And monster files in a silo program on a single server is centralized, is web two. So now let's put it in IPFS, the Interplanetary File System or some other distributed database. And those are all interesting, but kind of funky because it turns out that things disappear from IPFS. They don't last forever unless you pin them and you have to buy a pinning service that basically puts up a permanent version of whatever it is you think you're saving in IPFS. It gets really complicated really fast. So the moment you stop pinning, you've lost the data and like, that sucks, right? So I think that the idea of distributed data and then we have distributed apps and then we have, then you layer on top of that the whole newfound world of crypto and tokens and NFTs and DAOs, which are trying to harness all of the above and mostly wasting that effort by burning up a shit ton of energy on earth and sending around eight-bit graphics of stupid, ugly crap. And I'm really interested, part of the conversation here is should Open Global Mind be a DAO and should we be selling NFTs of what it looked like when we were creating a shared memory for the world from the very beginning? It wouldn't it be an interesting artifact to say, here's what it looked like when it was shitty and crappy and young and make that an investable vehicle. And what I love about NFTs and there's a few things to love about them is you can bake into the smart contract that on every subsequent sale, 10% goes back to the originators. Like, second sale of a book, the author gets nada. There were two collectors of famous artworks back in the day of modernism and all that. The husband was a postal worker who made almost no money but they became friends. There's a documentary about them. They're really cool. The Fogels, B-O-G-E-L. And they wound up being a power couple in art because they went to all these artists and made friends with them but they would buy art for like 200 bucks for a Rauschenberg or something like that. And like that Rauschenberg is now worth $10 million or $100 million and Rauschenberg, I think he's dead but ain't getting any of that. So all of a sudden we have a medium where if the thing it does appreciate and it can actually feed the creators which is beautiful and brilliant, right? So a piece of what I'm toying with is should my podcast, Weaving the World live on top of a dowel so that people who come in and help weave get rewarded with tokens that then, et cetera, et cetera. So sorry for the regression but we're thinking of trying to maybe harness all of these web three-ish kind of things in I think a beneficial way because I just see so much velvet rope. I see so much worthless, useless use of these technologies and people getting quite filthy rich about them so that there's too much money sloshing around now in the cryptoverse and it's not good yet. Still pretty rusty right now, pretty basic. Well, and that was, I mean, that's a really helpful, that's a really helpful, I mean, I was struck just personally, right? Partly thinking back on, you know, but when you were presenting your versions of the future of the Form One Community Summit about what, 20 years ago. And we were talking about the user-created content and the user-driven web and I guess web 2.0 and I was so excited about it, you know? And now I'm kind of looking at this stuff and I'm going, you know, I just don't fucking care. You know? Been there, done that. Well, I'm like, no, no, this is really exciting. I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't blow it off like that. But my first reaction was, no. We had the call with Gen about NFTs and, you know, the retreat call and it was really, really interesting and toward the end of the call, I was like, kind of got to speak up and I'm like, I ticked off like 10 reasons why I hate this world, why it's like not interesting and not useful. And then I ticked off a couple of reasons why I think there's like a pony here, but I'm just really not impressed with all this crap and a piece of it feels like already wealthy people finding a new velvet rope to hide behind because there are now discord servers that you can only get in if you've got five of a certain kind of token, which is worth like $30,000 and good luck to you finding your way to doing that, right? And it's like, these are people who don't have enough social life, but also buried in there are people who are changing the world and 30 years from now, all of this we will take for granted and will be the way a lot of stuff works. And I don't know which one. Which is what happened, you know, before, so. Yeah, exactly. That was, I think you're absolutely right. Well, and I guess one of my thoughts is, you know, a podcast isn't gonna do it, right? You can't, you gotta be running QDC or something. It's a different formulation, especially if it's gonna be a doubt, right? I mean, you're in some sense the marketing arm if that's the model. Yes, and so the reason I'm standing up a video podcast with an audio podcast behind it as well because you get audio kind of for free is that it's a known artifact that I can point to. And then the fungal analogy, the fungal metaphor works really nicely because mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the mycelial web. And so for me, episodes of a podcast are mushrooms that are visible above the surface that you can lop off and eat because you know it's, look, it's a mushroom. I can eat this and it's got nutritional value and whatever. But then below the surface, all of the content is being woven into and nutrients are being exchanged and, you know, minerals are being mined from the soil and whatever else you wanna say by analogy. It all kind of works, right? And part of this is how do we create a group of people who will happily be doing this weaving, mining, threading, connecting for the public good, feeding the new commons. Yeah, I mean, like, okay, so I'm translating you back into something more per se, but that I wanted to do around, you know, around regeneration, the global regeneration co-lab. You have a bunch of people who are content producers, they're doing interesting things. They're not, well, they're not, they don't have big audiences, right? So they're putting in the value of the cost of front, but they're not really getting the return for it. I wanna amplify those people for the social good. And, you know, my notion is what we need is a network. We need a ESPN for regeneration, right? Where the content is being fed in and amplified out because of something in the mausoleum. Like, like OANN, like One News America? Exactly, like exactly like that, right? I mean, there's some reason, you know, or maybe it's more like the AP or the UPI, right? In old days, because it's actually a little bit more co-oping, right? It probably is an employee-owned co-op of some sort. Which is what these DAOs kind of sort of are, right? Kind of sort of are. Kind of sort of are. I mean, how the fuck do you build something like that? Right, I mean, you know. So Reuters, I think Paul Reuter was the founder of Reuters. Originally he had a messenger pigeon business and he was busy like sending news from city to city with pigeons, via pigeons. Then the telegraph shows up and he is the first dude who goes, oh my God, this is super important and puts a desk next to the telegraph operator in every major city. And so Reuters becomes gigantic because they are the breaking news. Many, scroll many years forward. CNN, I think CNN's breakthrough moment is baby Jessica. So when baby Jessica gets stuck in the hole, CNN decides to go 24-7 because they can drop a truck with a satellite uplink anywhere on earth faster than anybody else can. Same thing, new technology, we did it faster, better. And all of a sudden the 24-hour news cycle around a breaking event is a thing and CNN suddenly goes huge and eats the world for a while. We're in a moment just like that. And one of these groups that's busy having parties with friends with benefits or whatever else is cracking the code for what this next gen thing looks like. And it's hard to tell which one because there's tons of them. And really seriously, in order to get into this one you have to load this wallet but then you have to take some, you have to pay some gas to go do this thing to pass messages behind your back to this other thing which is not really trustworthy but everybody uses it. And then you exchange that for this other currency at this exchange which is dicey. And then if you've done that then you can go over here. And then if you talk to Christopher Allen who's all about like the security of your tokens and all that from the retreat list, right? He's been saying, hey, I wrote a book about all these little crypto assets are completely naked and vulnerable unless you like print them on titanium. I'm like, ah, crap, seriously? Yeah, cause if you lose your password or lose your hard drive that has the asset that trillion dollars in Schmipto currency is gone. It's a crazy ass world. It's crazy. It's utterly crazy. I was reporting earlier in the call that I just last night for the first time I watched two thirds of Ready Player One. Yeah, that's good. And we are way too close to that world already. Is that on Hulu, right? So I'm gonna watch that on Hulu. I rented it on Amazon Prime for four bucks. Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't do Hulu yet. It might be on Hulu. That sounds like a better alternative. Thank you. Yeah, but that means I have to finish it tonight cause it's 48 hour rental. Like seriously, 48 hours, not long enough. How many episodes are there? It's just one movie. It's a two hour, 40 minute movie or something like that. Okay, great. Two and a half hour, something like that. Well, this was a fantastic call, wasn't it? Yeah, thank you. It was really fun. That was a lot of fun. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming in, Dave. Yeah, sorry to be late, but. That's all right. Love to Claudia. You came in when you were destined to come in. We're going to be up in Portland for Thanksgiving week. I don't know if you guys are still there, if you'd have time for a coffee or a beer or something like that. I think we would love to see you. And I think that your timing is impeccable. Actually, your timing is really good because right now April is like balls to the wall. If you'll forgive the expression with speaking appointments and all this other kind of stuff. And that calms right down as Thanksgiving approaches. So we'll save us. I mean, I think we get up there late Sunday and we'll be there pretty much all week. So grab us a slot and we'd love to see you. Send me a note and I'll inform the, I'll inform management and we'll figure it out. Fantastic. That'd be great. And maybe we can do a multi-person thing. So, yeah, cool. See you guys. See you guys. Thanks guys.