Mythbusting Prejudice Through Witchcraft, Boomerangs, and Cultural Symbols, to Be More Enlightened with Jerome Glenn #17

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future, that may redefine how we live on this planet or any other type of redefining you might consider. A quote that I've had since I've been a young boy is, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. And today we are going to be redefining that. Tomorrow. The topic we're going to be exploring, and this is a long one, is myth Busting prejudice through witchcraft, boomerangs and cultural symbols to be more enlightened. And we have a fabulous friend on the line. We have Jerry Glenn. How are you, Jerry?

Reasonable.

Okay. Reasonable. Well, it's a nice way to start. If you were to look up Jerry, he goes under Jerome Glenn. So Jerry is the co founder and CEO of the Millennium Project, a think tank with over 67 nodes around the world. He is also a prolific writer. He's an author. He's actively involved in strategy that goes from governments through to corporations. So vast amount of experience. So, Jerry, do you have an outline for us today?

Yes, I do.

Okay. Can you tell me what we're going to be covering?

Okay. If you're going to be writing it down, I should say this slowly, correct? If there.

As long as the title we have. Yes.

All right, the first one is Prejudice is a Major roadblock to a better future.

Better future.

Next two is pre hyphen judging the future.

Yeah.

3. The greatest prejudice throughout time worldwide is between the consciousness sharers. Or mystics and technocrats.

So let's start again. Greatest prejudice throughout time.

Yeah. And worldwide throughout time is between the consciousness sharers. Hard to say that, isn't it? Consciousness shares or parentheses. Mystics and technocrats.

And technocrats. Next.

Four levels of prejudice.

Next 5.

Conscious hyphen, technology and future mind.

Next.

That's it.

Okay, so we've got five. Perfect. So let's start with number one. Prejudice is a major roadblock to a better future.

Yeah.

Help me understand this.

Well, let's say I said to you I liked and worked with Herman Kahn. And if you knew who he was and you were a conventional liberal, you would say, ah, this guy's a right wing Republican wacko. A wharf guy, you know, wants to bomb stuff and stuff like that, which is not the case. He wasn't like that and I'm not like that. But we set up a prejudice. If you are A, you are therefore B, C, D, E and F, which is not the Case because we have all these stereotypes around people, things, ideas and so forth, and it gets in the way. So if we're talking about how to make a better future and if I say, well, you know, we got different kinds of economic theories coming up and potential new ways of doing economies, you know, let's look at the Internet. Internet is not owned by anybody. So non ownership might be a new thing immediately. I've been in a situation where someone, ah, you're immediately a communist. You're trying to go back to what the Soviet Union did. No, I'm not. Internet is not a communist thing per se. It's a sharing thing, that's for sure. But it's not owned, it's not owned by the state per se, it's not owned by. It's owned by all the people that use it. And in a sense, the amount of user ship, in a sense is behavioral ownership in a sense. So it's a completely different concept of ownership. But if I didn't go through that, somebody would walk away and say, ah, he's just a socialist communist, wants to share everything, no ownership. That's all this bunch of crap. You know, he doesn't understand life and the discussion doesn't go anywhere. So I run into prejudging and prejudice all the time is a major roadblock. It gets in the way of stuff. Think of how much misunderstanding in the world happens because you've prejudged situation.

Wouldn't you consider to some degree that is a, a defensive mechanism that the human species or any species has you. They. A species sees another of its type or not of its type and it prejudges. It's got four legs, it's got two legs, it stands up, it's tall, it's big, it's small, it's this, it's wearing clothing that I like, I don't like, I this, I that. And not even to have the histor reference. But not. But isn't it natural as a behavioral mechanism to protect ourselves, to also prejudge?

Sure, gravity is natural too, but we build airplanes. I mean, yes. I mean there's an awful lot of things that are natural to us that we try to manage them in some way or change them.

So my. I guess the reason I was asking. I know the reason I was asking that question. If prejudice is a major roadblock, what and we do bring these, how do you undo that?

Well, you. If I was wise enough to give that answer, the interview would be over.

Let's talk about it. Let's talk about if you, if you, If. If we are to get over this roadblock.

Yeah.

Then we have to figure out means by which to.

Right. Well, part of it. I was being a little glib there. I mean, obviously when you talk about, for example, an example about witchcraft, you know, most people's is a term that everybody uses all around the world, but probably don't. But they don't generally know what they're talking about. So if you say you've studied witchcraft, they immediately think you talking about throwing bones in the ground or feathers and shit and drums and all that sort of. And don't realize that the good folks are holy people. They're holy people just like any other tradition of any other culture. But they just happen to be animist priests. So. And I have run into that a lot because I studied the phenomena a little bit as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Africa, got certain.

So let's. For my. So that I'm not being prejudiced.

Aha.

Can you please explain witchcraft?

Yeah. It is the belief of animism. It's basically an animistic belief that all things are animated, alive. And how you manage your relationship with all those living beings is managed to a large degree and healed if necessary by the witch doctor. There's also an interesting potential here. And that is if you say you are a bone doctor, you deal with bones. Right. If you're a cancer doctor, you deal with cancer. So I guess a witch doctor could be somebody who deals with witches because there is an extreme ends. Witchcraft has a continuum of like holy people at one end and really nasty folks at the other end. And some of those are sort of the witches, so to speak, that do some nasty things to people. So one of the primary jobs of a witch doctor is to defeat the bad. Practicing in the language I was there was called a wanyanga. The bad ones, the witches here, the doctor that's getting rid of that sort of stuff. But in general, it is an animistic tradition. You taste all of the stuff around the world back when, even if they have monotheism now or atheism now, you go back far enough and you'll find everywhere was animism at some point. And we use the term witchcraft because it's English. A lot of the British popularize that. The British even had a law about witchcraft, by the way, before you get there. Yeah.

Why? Or I know that it's a word that carries its own meaning with it today.

Yeah.

But what was its original. Was it originally called witchcraft?

Well, originally there was no English language. Okay, Right. I mean, where I was, which is just one of hundreds and hundreds of languages across Africa, I was in a language area called Chinyanja. And the witch doctor or animus priest would be called a Singanga. And then the Singong are the good guys and the one younger, the bad guys.

And so how did. I'm assuming you've looked into this somewhat. How did they get this name witchcraft? And then how did witchcraft become witchcraft? You know what I'm asking?

Yeah, well, I would really defer to somebody else to know that better, but just my own experience was the idea that it was a craft, applying knowledge with skill to dealing with witches. If you take the word apart, I mean craft.

Right, right.

So if you're applying your knowledge with skill to deal with the bad cat, so to speak, you are a witch doctor.

So I'm looking up just. I'm looking up because there's witchcraft in Wikipedia. Witchcraft is a practice of which the practitioner witch believes to be magical skills and ability using spells, incarnations, and magical rituals. Witchcraft's at the broad term that varies culturally and societally and thus can be difficult to define with precision.

Yeah.

So it was named by the. The Philippines have different type. There's the shaman. I'm reading all of these different names. So witchcraft appears to have been given an umbrella doctrine. And then anybody who falls into mystics and spells and incarnations would fall into this category if they bought.

If their basis was animism.

Okay.

So that's why I say, to me, the easiest way is animist priest. Now, some people will say traditional doctors, because much of what an animist priest does is solve the problem. And I say solve the problem. If there's a fist fight in the village, it's the witch doctor singanga that solves it.

So it's interesting. I mean, my mind is racing very quickly because if you look at spells, incarnations, and magical rituals, when someone gives you a pharmaceutical drug, they are created, they're doing witchcraft. I mean, they're just hiring another witch to brew it for them. And when they give you a stay at home, stay in bed, don't do. They're giving you a ritual to follow that to some might be. Well, why does it go away? The person just slept overnight. Theoretically, go home, sleep for the night, you'll get very sweaty, you'll get very hot, and you'll wake up and you'll say, oh, my God, how does he know that? Or she know that. So witchcraft has its own. It comes with its own prejudice. Being A witchcraft.

Well, the reason I brought up the witchcraft is that I'm saying there's a term that there's a lot of prejudice around it and people don't know that there's tremendous value there. There's prejudice against witchcraft in a way that there's not prejudice against your local rabbi or your local preacher.

I'll see. Okay, I'm sorry. I was taking it on the medical side. And you, without realizing it, you're going on the religious side.

Well, it is a religion. I mean, it is a religion. I mean they. When they. But there is medical. I mean an awful lot of roots are done. Right. That's why I just a funny anecdote. People say, like, why do these people go out in the middle of us the full moon? You know, it was something weird mystical about the full moon. So I asked that question to my friend the witch doctor and he said, well, because you can see, because the.

Eye of nut is available in the middle.

You can see. You can't see. You're here in the jungle and there's no moon. It's a full moon. I mean a new moon. You can't see anything. It's no light. You need a full moon to see what you're doing.

Yes. So the construct of a witch doctor already brings a lot of prejudice with it. As an example of the fact that we already bring with us.

That's right.

Because I've been telling you so the past few days, have you been sticking needles into a. I'm just kidding. Because I've been getting something my back every night. I don't know where it's coming from. Okay, so yes, we. We do have the. Again, going back. How do you. How do you break apart this prejudice? Because there's so many of.

Well, you can sometimes cause a contradiction. For example, if somebody gets to know me and they think I'm a sort of a reasonable human being and quasi rational and then founds out that I've got my little own flywhisk and outfit and witch doctor stuff. They might say, wait a minute, you're supposed to be a rational person liking science. How could you possibly be interested in this other stuff? So it sets up a contradiction. So either I am not interested in science or being interested in science is not a contradiction with witchcraft. So sometimes you can set up a contradiction that exposes the prejudice.

Not easy to do though.

Worked upon witchcraft.

The challenge is to believe that you might have. I would suggest that there's so much prejudice that you're really skimming the Top of the prejudice to open up a door for conversation.

Yeah, I mean, it's just phenomenal when you think how much prejudice there really is. I mean, people focus on age prejudice and sex prejudice and race prejudice and so forth. I mean, it's prejudice against all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, there's just.

That's the concept of prejudging the future. The concept is a bad concept. Which doesn't mean that we don't have knowledge, because in a sense, you're making a prediction that the light switch will turn on and you switch it. So you prejudge that future, I grant you. So it's a tough road to go through the difference between knowledge and prejudice.

I just had a conversation with someone from whose French, who's living in Italy, and we talked somewhat. Not about this topic, but this came up in some way. And without going into the details, the challenge, whenever I pushed her is that there wasn't a way to get around some of the things that we have because they are inherently built into our look. It's not the way we have to behave to it, but it's the way in which we see the world. And it's not so easy to undo. And part of the challenge that I'm having here is. Yeah, we have. They are major roadblocks. Well, it's why you and I are not seeing each other. The reason there's no video on is I know that if I made a facial reaction to something you said or I saw you do something, the people who are listening would not know that that happened. And without realizing it, there would be a disconnect as to why we moved on or didn't stop or I didn't ask the question. And the reason I do it is exactly this reason. I don't want to prejudge what you're thinking. I don't want to know anything.

The.

The conversation itself should hold its own merit.

Right. Good for you.

So that's why it's built in. And I. And so I know it's. You were being facetious when you said the statement that if you had that answer. But if I pushed you to come up with three different ways to do it, you've. And not including the one you've given. What other three would you give?

Well, one we just did one with, in a sense, confronting. Gently confronting someone with the contradiction between the two views. I am a reasonable person and interested in science, and I am also see the value of witchcraft. And that's a contradiction in most people's eyes who have a Prejudice.

Right.

So by having those two things collide, it's like, well, then they got to make up their mind, either I am not reasonable or there's something a value of witchcraft, so that causes some resolution going on. So that, that's one example. I'd give you another one jumping ahead to our list, which I assume we can be a little nonlinear.

Yeah.

The people who. There's many people who figure that the way that you solve problems is by sharing consciousness. You know, if we get people raise their consciousness about the environment, then we can address climate change. And someone else says, no, no, we got to figure out how to make solar panels work and get people to eat meat without animals. You know, both are reasonable things to do, but people tend to think one is superior to the other. Yeah. And so if you imagine that technological trends are increasingly involving our awareness, I mean, industrial age had so much involvement of our awareness, but surely the knowledge in the communications age is more involved in awareness. So slowly but surely technology is engaging our consciousness more than in the past. And the masters of consciousness might be mystics or people like that, and the masters of technology are technocrats. So the two worlds of technology and consciousness are slowly coming together and colliding. So a lot of those prejudices against each other might start to fall away as they collide.

Okay. Yeah. I would see if someone became more aware, which we can also define as having more information. And any type of information, it could be physical, it could be here, any of the senses, or it could be intellectual. There is a chance that that individual could make that jump. Yet I would, if I was to do a data point on this, I would take a guess that more times than not, even with information, individuals don't make that change.

I didn't catch what the changes you're talking about.

Let's say, let's take this. You brought up socialist and you threw out Russia. So Soviet Union. Okay. In the United States, and I will say other countries, but let's use the United States as an example. When someone hears the word socialism, they go back to what is the McCarthy period. They go back to old Russia. And it's very difficult for that same individual. Oftentime I've heard it where they don't understand that the road that they drive on outside sure is socialism, that the library that they have, that a police force is a social construct. And that when there are tariffs put in place and a group of individuals, and I'm not picking on any, I'm just using as example first that comes to mind. Farmers get Checks not to produce or to do that is a social construct.

Right.

And that's the same individual say, but it's not socialism. So the American belief structure, not unlike if I'm in Japan or I'm in multiple other countries, I can name many other examples. But I would think the world tends to focus on America more than Americans focus on the rest of the world. Or many people don't focus on any other country besides America, which is interesting. They don't focus on the Italians, don't focus on the German construct. They will focus on it. They know more about America. So how do you get that individual, even with awareness, as we're saying, the social sharing consciousness even when you share it, that they don't get over that. I know that was very long. I was trying to make it shorter, but it wasn't working.

Yeah, that's right. Well, we are engaged in a conversation about that. That's one of the things that for better or for worse, the Vermont senator has brought to our attention. And that's why I use the example of Internet like who owns the Internet? Because everybody knows nobody owns the Internet per se. Right. Again presenting the contradiction of what people are saying diplomatically, pleasantly, but showing the contradiction also. There's another part within what you're saying there that is good to bring out is there's also part of the prejudice too is if you believe in X, you therefore believe in Z, G and A. Right. This associations which is not the case. You can believe that you want roads and you also might want to have free enterprise. They're not a contradiction. It's just that we have a mixed economy but we tend to associate because of prejudice. You are all of A or you're all of B and that's not the truth.

I get that when I talk about China and I will say to what is the. This is my take. The number one at this point. Most capitalist society in the world that reacts in a very capitalistic way is the Chinese society. Look at PPE. There were 17,000 or 16,000 companies prior to Covid and by January there were 67,000 companies producing PPE products. You didn't see that anywhere else in the world. They reacted very quickly and they're very capitalistic. And I will get. Yes, but they're socialist. He don't understand. One is a governance model and the other one is a financial model. And they have state owned enterprises and they have private owned enterprises. So state owned capitalism. Private owned capitalism. I don't know if that's the exact way, but Even with that.

It'S tough.

For people to get their minds around and they don't want.

Right. Which means that the people can't start to imagine alternative economics of both early industrial age capitalism and socialism. They're both early industrial age systems. Right. We're not even in the early industrial age anymore. But this goes to the point though, because when you have that conversation with people, you're involved in time wasting, in a sense, you're going around in these discussions and no progress. That's why I'm saying prejudice is a block. It blocks us from moving into the future, so to speak. Slows us down.

So it is a block. Are there? And that's what I was trying to get to. I hear this as a block. And my first reaction is, okay, how do I get over this block?

Right.

That's where I was going with it. I understood it's a block. I understand it's a real challenge because it's constant.

Yeah. Now, block may not be the best word here because block is something that in our language, we think there's something to get over, around or under. But when I'm talking about bringing up the contradiction to people, in a sense, that's melting the block. It's like slowly making it more porous. It's not quite as stopping the discussion because little pieces of ideas can start to go through to the other side.

Okay, so I'm taking a guess that we don't have any tools to get over that, but there's more to what you're going to deliver.

Well, I would. That's an interesting assignment for us and maybe your listeners or somebody to make up a list of the strategies to get over prejudice. See, this goes back to this idea about the mystic and technocrat business because the technocrat said, well, we have to have a law. We've got to make sure that voting rights are working right. We have to have rules. These are the techniques of getting rid of prejudice. And the other will say, no, no, no, we've got to sing together. We've got to learn how to play together, get our consciousness together. That's the way to do it. Right. So.

Aren'T they both right?

Correct. The analogy I used to use before was if a little baby falls down, the mystic would orientations. First response to a problem is to share consciousness. So you pick up the baby and you embrace it and comfort it. And the technocrats. Wait a minute. Got to clean out the wound and put the band aid on. Now, there's no reason you can't do both at the same time. But we tend not to. I mean, think of the board meetings you've been in and other sort of policy meetings you've been in and people say, no, we've got to have this rule or we got to do this thing. No, no, people got to understand first. If they don't understand, they won't do the rule. Right. But if we don't have the rule, there's no incentive to change the mind. And then the argument goes around in circles. Yes.

And that is how a lot of policy is done wrong or a lot of non policy. It goes in multi dimensional wrongness where we're not achieving and getting over these challenges. Whether it be the activities that happen with the WHO with the pandemic or it's the relationships that have happened in Colombia or it's the Israeli, Palestinian, Middle Eastern conflict or I mean, you can list what's happening with the US China relationships or the new US Russian relationships, I mean, Chinese relationships. It's almost like we're trying, we're constantly in a battle with this. Do you feel we're winning?

Oh, is it? If I'm going to be a technocrat now and look at statistics. Yeah. I mean there's far fewer deaths per capita now and all this conflict stuff than the past. That's a long term trend. It's just that when we do it, the whole world knows it. And when we do it, it's more destructive than the old, you know, slug a guy in a bar routine. Right.

You can, you can drop a bomb and have 500 people die in a matter of seconds. As compared to going in and bringing a sword with you.

That's right. Now, another approach to prejudice, busting a little bit or a little bit of that is a metaphor I've used as the opera, because you don't. I remember when I was in an orchestra somewhere in middle school, I remember walking up to the music stand and I was about to pull out the music for trumpets and I noticed of course over there the violins were pulling out the violin music. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. This is the only experience I know of where everybody wants everybody to be excellent. When I wrestle somebody in a wrestling match, I don't want them to be excellent. I would like to win. I'm looking for them to make a mistake, but not, not in an orchestra. You want the violin to be perfectly tuned. And so the issue there is you're not asking a violin to be a trumpet or a trumpet to be a violin to change their minds. It's like, is there a relationship, Is there a relationship between these different views? Like, can we take the best ideas out of the witch doctor and the witch doctor phenomena and the best ideas out of conventional religion and the rest of that sort of. And is there a relationship between these things to improve the future and to go forward rather than saying all of A is wrong or all of B is wrong?

I like the analogy a lot because it is true that you. When you. Everybody wants everybody to succeed and you're not playing against anybody.

Right?

There's. There's no. There's. It's what, it's similar to a play.

Well, yes.

You want everybody to play their lines, right? A speaker. One of the things I learned very on. In being in front of audiences is the audience in most cases, rooting for you. They want you to succeed. They want you to be good because then they get a good experience. So any. So you could probably expand. An opera is great that in any. In an environment, there are environments like that. So.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Well, like for example, in this think tank that I manage, we have a node in Israel and a node in Iran. And they don't always sit in the room at the same time, but they have at least once at the same time. But you're trying to look at how the different elements can fit together. If I say, who knows the most about artificial general intelligence? In these various countries around the world are little nodes that are part some government, some universities, some corporate, so forth. So that they. Instead of saying, well, the best person is an academic, and somebody else said, no, the best is a businessman, and someone else said, no, no, the guy in the government is the best. No, we want the best guy or the lady from government, the best ones from each of these different categories. So then there. You're not trying to say A is better than B. You have different categories and you want an orchest insight which will give a richer view of the question than if you just had one category or the other category.

Yet you, in doing so, you do set up a sense of prejudice in that the individuals who are hearing that already have preconceived notion as to what is the best.

Well, I don't know if that's prejudice in the same way. I mean, some people are the same way in certain areas. I mean, that's pretty clear. I don't see that necessarily as prejudice. Yeah, I mean, let's say if you've been reading the works of a particular software of a particular AI person and you happen to know that they tend to be ahead of everybody else consistently. There. You're applying knowledge. Remember the distinction, the tough distinction between knowledge, using knowledge to predict and using prejudice to predict. There you're there, you're basing it on knowledge.

Yes. So I'm trying, I'm trying to create. The reason I'm pushing is I'm trying to create the construct in my head. If prejudice is everywhere and knowledge is everywhere, is knowledge. Is knowledge always the answer to prejudice?

Experience. If you, if you accept or experience as part of knowledge.

And I put. Yes, I'm putting all senses. You learn something, you see something, you hear something, you can extrapolate on something. So if you put all of that together, right, and yet can the knowledge get through? I guess. Or the experience, does it translate? So the person has to not only have the knowledge, they have to be aware of the fact that they have the knowledge, and they have to be.

Able to use the consciousness. See, that consciousness is the awareness of the awareness. That's what makes it conscious. I mean, you may be aware of something, but you're not conscious of it in a sense. You got to be aware of the awareness. There's Mark Twain. I think it was Mark Twain. So I'm making. Correct. I think it was Mark Twain said something like, the antidote to prejudice is travel, because you're being confronted with different views, different values. Again, you're being confronted with the other and finding out that the other actually makes pretty good food. So they. I guess they're pretty good people. So we, we are confronting our prejudice as we go around or prejudging by travel. So. So another strategy to add to your list here or our list would be maybe the experience of travel experience the other.

In paid to think, the most difficult chapter that I had to write was the chapter on global awareness. I went all around the world talking to all the CEOs I work with and executives and teams and asked them, how do you get someone to be globally aware? And they would say, travel. And I said, yeah, I know people who've gone to Paris, they've seen the Eiffel Tower, and they leave. And I said, I know people who lived in Hong Kong after 18 years, can't see us, can't say the most common word there. One guy took me six months to get it right, but they couldn't say it. And I said, so traveling isn't it? Well, living in the country. But I just said 17 years. So how do you get someone. I'm trying to solve the world's challenges on Our call if you haven't been able to.

Gotcha. But maybe you got to be a little easier on yourself when you have an answer is not necessarily an absolute answer.

Correct.

I know. So you do a little bit of this. A little bit. It's like the bouillabaiss soup. You want a whole bunch of stuff in there to make it taste good.

I happen to be a tool guy. I have tons of tools in my basement, everything from drywall to electric to black pipe to chainsaws. And I always like to be able to pull out tools. How do I approach this so that I've got some means of overcoming or completing or achieving whatever definition of that desired outcome is. So that's why I'm pushing for it. I'm kind of saying, okay, I can pull out the fact that there's an opera and we want everybody. So that's a tool I could share with somebody. How does an opera operate? I can do a contradiction and I'm asking. And another one that I use is asking a lot of questions to lead, to find new answers. And I'm, my challenge is I am trying to solve it because I'm trying to come up with different techniques that I could use that I could learn to make sure that I'm less prejudiced or that I'm working with someone who's got prejudices in areas that don't coincide. And we want to find a common neutral ground. How do I do it?

Well, one of the ways, if that was a request to my think tank, one of the things that we would do to begin with is design a real time Delphi. You know, take, take that question. How do you defeat prejudice? And may we list down three examples and then ask them, how will it work, how it won't work, what is his strengths, time how his weakness, and so forth. And what are some other approaches, techniques, tools that you think are even better? So we collect all that sort of stuff and then feed it back in for another round, go back and forth. So it's a little bit of an organized wisdom of the crowds with feedback. So it's not just a one shot deal because you get the chance to respond about somebody else's. Because your thought may trigger me to come up with even a better thought than I would have come up if I just put in my own answer by itself. So Delphi can be another tool in your quiver, so to speak.

Yeah. What is the definition of Delphi?

Okay, there's, there's, there's. Delphi as a method has evolved a Little bit. The original Delphi came out of the Rand Corporation, the first think tank on the future, whose job it was to figure out how to prevent World War three. And in order to do that, you got to figure out how it could evolve. What are the different ways, what are the different weapons, what are the different strategies and so forth. So the original reflex was, you know, bring a bunch of generals and admirals together to talk, but they don't always want to talk to each other. And sometimes rank outranks, so to speak, a lower ranking person who maybe has a better idea, but they're outranked. So the idea was to avoid all that, says, well, let's have a questionnaire to have all these questions. But they don't put their name in there. So you just have ideas, be persuasive rather than rank or personality. Then you take all those answers and then that becomes the basis of a second round questionnaire. And this forces people to respond to what other people said in round one. Because if they think that an answer is no good and they don't counter it, then that idea becomes in the final report. So it's forcing people to engage with each other without prejudice of rank, without prejudice of being more knowledgeable or powerful, whatever. And then you can even do a third round and fourth round as well. So that's the original Delphi. And part of the early creators of that was Theodore Gordon or Ted Gordon, my partner that was with me starting the Millennium Project to begin with. Then as time moves on, it became a problem because Delphi's would take six months. I mean, if you're not going to have World War three tomorrow morning, you have some time to think ahead. But let's say that you have to do a forecast or a strategy forecast or whatever on something that you're going to have to have an answer like in a month or in a week. Maybe you can't use a Delphi, but the Delphi is a good way of collecting judgments of expert people. It's not opinion polling that's different. This is expert judgment and feedback about judgment. Anonymous feedback now. So we came up with what was called a real time Delphi. Real Time Delphi is just like a regular Delphi, except you can vote early and often it's online. So you come back when you want to. So if you fill out some of it, you leave, then you come back and you'll see that other people have put in their comments and their numbers and you can see what they said and you can say, well, wait a minute, you misunderstood what I said. So you can edit what you have said and change your number if you come up with some new insight. Because you're asking people to rate things with numbers and to explain their numbers with text. So you could say to somebody, so let's say the President United States has got a meeting on solar energy in three days. The President could say, okay, send out a Delphi, real time Delphi. And here are the key questions. People can go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and say, well, whatever you put in there, the final report is done at 7am on this day, period. That's it, Nothing. So you got. So you kind of come back and forth to see how people responding to your thoughts and then sort of like defending yourself or changing your thoughts. So it's a way to do an organized, sophisticated conversation relatively easily with a deadline that you can do quickly. So that's the.

Do the individuals get to see who's making the comments, not the name.

That's the whole idea.

However, it's an atomized concept.

Absolutely. Because if somebody who is a high rank says X, he might be too persuasive, he might not be. Right, right.

I know that that's. We have a patent called decision making based on programmatic and algorithmic analysis which includes this type of thing.

Right. Trace it back to Rand. Now we also do say in our instructions, if however you want to get credit for an idea and you want your name associated with it, then you can put your name in there. But you don't have to, so you just put your name into the text. So because sometimes, you know, you come with a clever idea, you want to get credit for it. But if you want to blow off some steam at somebody, say, and use hydrogen, some weird stuff in your body for, for Covid, you might want to say the boss is dead wrong, but if you had your name in there, you could get fired.

So the real there's multiple tools, but a larger umbrella tool is the anonymity of discussion.

Yeah. Where ideas are persuasive rather than personalities or rank. Okay, right now, the third evolution of three year leaders. We'll hear this before we actually implement it in both versions of Delphi's, as with other questionnaires, you have some demographics, you know, how old you are, what's your education, whatever you want. But different demographics are relevant differently to different questions. But that's not, there's not a way to do that right now. So. Right, so we're coming up with another one eventually on our online site so that a person can put a question in when it's ready to be asked. Right now, either it's a real time Delphi or a regular Delphi, it starts at the same time and it ends at the same time. And the demographics are all the same for every question. All right. The next thing is creating a platform. So you put the question in when it's ready to be asked. And there's a point where you don't get any new information. No matter how many thousand people come in, the numbers don't change, the average stays the same and the comments are the same. So there's a point at which there's no point in going any further. You take the question out and say that question is done. And for each question you're going to have a different demographics. So we don't have a name for that one yet, but that'll be the next version.

I would say that there's a prejudice or a blindness to what's missing often in those discussions just because the prejudice exists with the group. What I mean by. And I'm tying two things together. My wife, as I shared with you, broke her finger yesterday in multiple places. Her pinky. And she was in the waiting room and she said, the way I dealt with something today at her age, I won't say her age. The way she's dealing with her age. She said, I never would have done this at a younger age. And she brought up if my, if our two boys had gone in, they would not have been treated the same way because of their age. And they probably. They might not have spoken up the same way because of their age and their experience, but it doesn't mean they're wrong. And yet the prejudice comes back to say, well, the physician who's now 50 or 60 or whatever age you might use might have a negative positioning on who they are. So when you create my. So I'm tying it back. Sorry. Is that if you, when you create these groups, how do you know if the grouping selection you've created is actually the right grouping selection for the group?

That is the essential reason for why we have these nodes around the world and why they're around the world not just in New York City. That's why they're in Iran and in Tehran, in Azerbaijan, in Armenia, in Japan and in China and so forth. And each node is a group of individual institutions. That's a mix. It's like a mini opera. That's where I use that opera example, is that you've got some right wing People, some left wing people, you got some artists, you've got some mathematicians. And so you want to have a mix. So when the question goes out to these nodes, they then do the picking. And they're picking based upon their experience and knowledge in their category. So we don't ask category A business people to pick the people out of academics because the business might say, well, goddamn academics, you know, they're just wasting everybody's time with all these books and conversations where I'm trying to get something done, you know, so you add. So you have a mix of these players to begin with. It's like we call it a node because it's intersection of different networks. So you got your business networks, your academic network, they intersect at a point and that's what we call a node. So that node, then it's not perfect, but it does help you get a broader range of input in a coherent way. And that averaging out should average out or expose some of the prejudice. So if a prejudice statement or too much on one side, you can put that in there, then someone else is, well, that's wrong for these reasons.

So in again, going back to the tool itself, not just your tool, it is the development of anonymous contribution and the ability to contribute comment so that you can supposedly or hopefully discover the lack. Discover new information or information shared in a way that's new, that creates an unblock.

Yeah. And gives you better insight and a deeper and richer and broader insight so you can see it all. So an answer might have different facets to it if you only had one kind of person category answering it. But by having a diversity answering it, you get all the different facets of a particular strategy considered. Yeah.

So prejudging the future. So I'm assuming we've kind of nailed this one, the first one down.

Oh, we've already done a pretty good job in the second one too, and a little bit.

So we're prejudging the future. I know we've gone through some of them, but if we tap on to the pre. Judging the future. Go ahead.

Yeah. Well, this goes back to much of what we've already been saying. If you say A, then another person might say, well, you therefore believe in B, C, D, E and E. And it turns out you don't. You believe in A and you see how A fits in with Q, T and M, which the other person may not have ever considered. But you can confront them with a T and M or whatever the other letters I used, they can open, loosen up that prejudice. Ah, people who Believe in A, don't necessarily believe in B, C, D, E, as I thought.

And I. And when I see the word prejudging the future, I actually went and extrapolated a lot further. And my head is to say, okay, if people don't spend enough time evaluating the future. You and I were just on a panel where we asked individuals to look at the future 2035. And it's not easy in that most and many, I would say many of the individuals I know never think that far. They never extrapolate far enough. So their prejudging is often micro in terms of the larger scale and lacking in depth to give the true future meaning. How do you get over that, where the individual is more in the present and the past than they are in the future?

Well, one of the techniques that help makes it easy for people to start to anticipating future possibilities on a broader basis is you take an idea or trend or an event and you can use pencil and paper. You can put it in the middle of a piece of paper, drew a little circle around it, then have little lines like spokes come out of a wheel and say, well, like if that thing occurs or continues to occur, what else will occur as a result of that? You know, like if you have more artificial intelligence, then you might have more consultants in artificial intelligence. And then you might have to have algorithm audits because you don't want to make sure that the consultant is any good. So you can just see how a thing, how, you know, like the old example of a pebble throwing into a pond, it ripples out in all directions. So an event or a trend has secondary, has prime primary consequences, which most people do get. That's not hard. But then you say to that first ring, now that those correlations or those potential ripples coming out have occurred, what goes into the second ring? So what are the secondary consequences? And then you go out to third, which then makes it easier for people to start to think in terms of secondary and tertiary consequences, which the vast majority of people have never been asked to do. But a future is called a futures wheel.

It's just another technique My, my wife does not like. She doesn't think this way. She doesn't think in the mind maps that I have, and you've seen them, they're pretty extensive because it's an ouch.

I'll tell you why ouch. If I can interrupt searches, wheel was 1970, 71. Mind maps were later. But mind maps are not coherent. It's just sort of how it grows out. But if you're doing it sketching circles going out, it's more coherent and more organized into the consequences. And you can see how simultane secondary consequences occur and simultaneous tertiary consequences occur, which you don't get with mind maps.

Okay, so you're doing it literally as concentric circles.

Yeah.

Okay, that's. I didn't get that. Sorry.

That's all right. That's okay. No, I mean the mind maps has a better PR agency. Okay. Yeah.

I have not, I've not done it as concentric circles yet. What I've done with individuals is I've been in a room and I have a list of about 60 different categories and I'll say, okay, what happens if this intersects with this? And what would the future be like? What would this be?

That's a different method. That's cross impact analysis. How does A if impact B or.

If they combined or impact. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's a different approach. Cross impact analysis. You can, you know, this is a good one of the better techniques of futures co invented by Ted Gordon. Also. Let's say you take 10 trends or 5 trends, make it easy, you list them down left column, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then you list them on the top the same 1, 2, 3, 4,. And you make a little grid and you say, how does trend number one impact trend number two positively and negatively? Because people tend to look at things more one way or the other. But you want to do both. So you say, what's the positive impact of A on balance? What's negative impact A on B? And then do that across the whole board and then you have a richer understanding of the interplay and a coherent understand, more coherent understanding of the interplay of these things. Cross impact analysis, it's one of the basic futurist tools in the bag of tricks.

I use all of these, I just never had them as names. So when doing prejudging the future.

Most.

Of these are wrong though. The intersections that individuals create.

I don't know if they're wrong.

I don't know or they don't, they don't fall. You've been around long enough to see enough futurists tell about the future. That doesn't come true.

Yeah, but you got to go back to what's the purpose? This is why I was uncomfortable in the panel. When you say what will happen in 2035? Well, so the hell, a flying saucer can land on top of your house and all those bets are going to be off.

Do you know something? I Don't know.

Yeah, they're coming from.

What will the world be like? What will the United States?

No, but that's what I'm saying. It depends. You know, serious futurist takes a bet, you know, at a bar, we'll take a bet and we'll pay our drinks this way. But serious professional future says here's a variety of future possibilities. Yeah, all of these things could occur. Not all of them obviously will, but all of these things could occur. But you want to have cause and effect links. This is where the scenarios come in, the stories to get from here to there. Like Herman Kahn, who is the inventor of the scenario concept in futures work, would often say to us, you can't write me a scenario to show me that that's possible. So the way you would beat him in an argument, you would put some stuff together. A went to B, B went to C. And here's how. Because you had this international treaty that did this and then that had that, then somebody at terrorist attack hit this and this led to that. It's okay now. I can see that's possible. So it's our business to show what's possible, how those things could occur and how to counter them if you don't like them. What are the consequences of these things? But it's to open up the mind to possibilities, not close it into saying this is what will happen.

Well, as part of our. Just to give clarity, the event itself was to, in a short period of time, give a. Get individuals to think. And we didn't have a lot of time to go into the detail of what the year 2035 would look like. And I did say, I believe when we started that you have to show how we got there. And so yes, it is. What is the. There's a word that I use all the time. I can't think of it right now.

What is the logic, the narrative.

Narrative is another one. What is the logic that would make that happen? And it comes out of. When doing organizational work, you'll often see a person throw a spreadsheet on the wall. And then someone will say, well, no, no, that shouldn't be 23, that should be 27. And someone changes it to 27, they say, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, wait, wait. You can't just change the chart. And they changed the chart. I said wait. In order for it to go up six points. What happened? What do you mean what happened? No, no, seriously, like was there more marketing budget, spent currency trades? Was there a drop in something and there's often no clue.

Right.

There's no narrative added to that story. It's just a number change. But in reality, if you're going to project out five years, each year has to have a story and it's not there.

One of the original reasons which has been forgotten by scenario planners is to find out what you didn't know that you didn't know that you should know in order to talk about that future. So just as you started to say, well, wait a minute, how did that happen? Did it increase taxes? Did you do. You had to have something in there to get from point A to C. You had to explain B and B had to be plausible. But what the scenario planners do today is not so much that they say, here are two uncertainties, high low of that uncertainty, and then on the top high low, the other uncertainty. 2 by 2 grid of 4 alternative views of the future. Perfectly fine, but they're not scenarios, they are views of the future. A scenario is a story that connects present to the future with cause and effect, links and decisions that are plausible. That's what a scenario is. And when a lot of these folks do, they say, well, how would your corporation work in this end state? No, you want to. By the very act of writing from the present to the future, you'll get to the unknowns. You'll start to say, wait a minute, I never thought about that. That's important. That's more important than the description of the endpoint. And that's been forgotten to a large degree. I watch these guys do it all the time.

Oh, I do too. It drives me bonkers.

It's better than nothing. I quickly add, it is better than nothing. For sure it is.

And yet one of the skill sets that were not taught growing up, and I'm going to say to a large degree, on a global scale relative to the number of hours that individuals are in academia is projecting the future. So you think about your entire education.

Say that again.

In our, in our growing up, our lifetime, of all the education we've had, what percentage of it was teaching you how to be on a global scale for everybody to be a futurist.

Right.

Forecaster.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's almost, it's, it's negligible. You go to history class.

Yep.

And you learn about what happened yesterday. You go to math class and you're learning how to do trigonometry and you go to the next class and it's about what's happened, not about what could happen.

Right. Yeah. One of the things that when we get Asked what about the future of future studies and futures research and blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah, etc. And I said, well, one of the things that we think is evolving slowly but surely and we are winning on this discussion by the way, because, you know, I would. I've been doing this from since 1971, so I've sort of watched the evolution of the field a bit personally and I think that one of the things it'll be will be likely to come up, at least that's the direction at the moment, is that when you study X it is normal for you to study a little bit of that past. I mean, if you take physics, you hear a little bit about Newton, you know, you heard a little bit about Copernicus, you know, maybe not a great deal, but it says, here's how we got to our current understanding of physics. Even in mathematics. They'll tell you about, you know, some Al Farabi or somebody with algebra or something like that. It's normal. And when someone gives a speech, they say, well, let me tell you about the past of this thing. Almost everybody automatically assumes you should say something about the past of X before you explain X. I think that the direction increasingly because there are so many pop futurists around there, I mean it's flooded with a martial market, which is fine. And it, you know, better flooding average than no flooding excellence. In any case, more and more we're going to start having learning X to say, okay, what's the past of X and what are the future possibilities of X? I think that that is measurably there. Not to your satisfaction? Not to my satisfaction. Tell you, it's a heck of a lot better than it was in the 70s.

That's in interesting take on it because when individual one individual, when I work with somebody, talk with. I am not a huge past person. And huge what? I'm not a huge past person. That's why even this redefining tomorrow, if you think about the title, it is I say in the beginning, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. So I'm not going to try to fix the fact that you did this when you were 12 or 19 or 25 or 31. I want to know we're here today. How do we get to this new tomorrow? How do we get to myth busting and how do we make. How do we even by a small fraction of a degree. How do we get individuals, myself included, to see new realities that we might that we are blindsided by because of our own prejudice or Our own prejudice includes the education and everything that comes along with it. Where does the boomerang come in?

Well, just before I get to the boomerang, sure. You said, how do we get to this? And this is where I give great credit to Herman Kahn. I think he, more than anybody else, opened up that idea of how do we think about alternative futures? Because if, like, we take thermonuclear war, the vast majority was like, that's so horrible. I don't want to think about it. End of conversation. Let's go have a drink. Which, you know, maybe that was the best answer. I don't know. But in any case, his job was to think it through. So how do you make the future more real for others? Whether it's artificial intelligence or war or peace or whatever it is? Like, how do you show that peace can work in the Middle east, for example? You got to show a plausible story. Right now, the story is. I forgot the name for it. There's an Arab game where two children, usually boys, one boy A puts his hand in the other boy's mouth and boy B puts it in A's mouth, and they both bite. And the loser is the first person that gives up. So you just basically. So the game is you bite as hard as you can to, you know, cause enough pains the other person to give up. Well, that's sort of. That's the current narrative, the Middle east, right? I mean, more or less. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Okay. So we actually ended up with some alternative scenarios to show how peace was plausible. But to. But to just to show that you could get out of that game. Telling a story from A to B to C, that's plausible. Again, it's got to be plausible. You don't have Superman coming in and solving the problem. But plausible. You know, grinding through the various cause and effect links opens up the mind to people. What's possible? So to go back to your question, there is how do we get people to take the future more real or seriously, make it easy for them to understand? You see that science fiction does it to some degree. But we futurists are jealous of science fiction because they just jump. They're in Star Wars. They're already out there. They already got there.

They didn't have to connect to create anything in before. Yes.

So we're jealous of that. But nevertheless, the more you have plausible stories showing how different futures could actually be different than what you think, then that forces thought and it confronts prejudice against everything else. It just confronts you that, oh, my God, that could Happen. Oh my God. We've got to figure out how to prevent that problem or oh my God, that's a really cool idea. Why are we going to make that happen?

I, for, for us. I think it's exciting when you talk about the future yet the way my analogy for this is if you climb, when you climb a sand dune it's very. The minute you stop, you fall backwards. It's tiring.

Yeah.

In being a futurist requires constantly eating, constantly digesting, constantly assimilating, constantly putting together dots and the minute you stop, you fall backwards.

Pause. I'm not sure that's true. I went down to Dominic in the Eastern Caribbean for a year and a half to work on some very basic sort of stuff. Although I was still reading a whole lot of stuff.

You were probably still dying, you were still digesting. You cannot stop digesting. You have to be somewhat current to understand what's going on.

But you can take pauses. I think there's value in that.

I'm not saying you can't yet. If you go to dinner tonight, the conversation will be 90% about yesterday and what did you do, what have you been up to, what have you been working on? The past is very easy because we have it already. And when you talk about the future and, and creating a myth busting environment, you're really putting yourself out there on a limb. This is my projection, this is my belief, these are my thoughts. And I think that the energy, if we had an energy scale, it's 6% energy to talk about yesterday and it's 94% more difficult to talk about tomorrow.

Right.

And it's work.

And so we can learn. I mean, I'm convinced that we're moving in that direction, that more and more people are thinking about possibilities. I'll give you a for instance, by the way. This is an important for instance. I would say that two big jumps of information stuff recently. One was the Internet and another coming up is various new forms of artificial intelligence. Now I was involved in the early 1980s of getting what is called packet switching, which is what makes Internet so cheap in third world countries, including dictatorships by the way. And we thought this was the coolest thing around. I mean, you know, with like a magic wand running around the world making people smile. This is great. We're going to connect up the world. Everything. I don't remember. I remember little discussions about information warfare, but nothing about pornography, nothing about coordinating terrorism, nothing about silos of prejudice and all that sort of stuff. We just didn't do much Technology assessment. Now fast forward to artificial intelligence. I am working on trying to keep track of all the conferences research and I can't do it. And I'm doing this quasi full time. It is an explosion of analysis. It is nothing like what we did during the Internet, early Internet stuff. And so that to me shows that the civilization, it's maturing.

At the same time I've been on these, I go to them too and they're so full of prejudice, they're so full of assumptions.

Right. But at least, at least they're having it. What I'm saying we didn't even do it during the.

I'm not nearly as old as USAID.

To say talked about the information infrastructure in 1983 or so 82. They thought they didn't understand what the hell I was talking. What are you talking about? Communications infrastructure. What's that got to do with development? I'm serious, I'm serious. All I'm saying is yes, there's a lot of nonsense about artificial intelligence. Absolutely true. But it'll start to sort itself out. What I'm saying is that people are trying to do technology assessment. Granted, maybe not that great, but at least it's being done. We didn't do it much at all with the Internet.

So the thing is you have so many more years ahead of me. You've seen so much more. I'm just so naive to that.

Oh listener. That's how a guy suckers you in. I, I just a country lawyer. Yes.

So I get and I do want to continue. One question I have before we jump is. Are we with all the information, are we creating a better world?

Yeah, we track indicators.

Well, I will immediately suffer because I do have and I've read Hans Rosling's Future Factfulness and I and I know the data in terms of number of kids who've gone to school, number of countries and you can give your data number of. On his Test he has 13 questions. In the beginning I got nine out of 13 which they said that's his numbers is I think pretty good. So I do see that the world is better. I do see that we have electricity all over the world. I do see that the average person, male and female, are very close in terms of education around the world. I do understand that. What I meant was on an awareness level, on a prejudice level, on an enlightened level, are we creating a better. Is there a better world?

Yeah. Which doesn't mean that it's all uphill. I mean the way I like to phrase it, after Summarizing a bunch of this stuff is we're winning more than we're losing, but where we're losing is deadly serious. So you have no right to be pessimistic, but you got no right to go to sleep either.

Okay?

So. Which is important because if you think everything's getting better, then what do you got to do? I mean, the only purpose of policy is to change the future, right? I mean, if everything's going the right direction, you don't have to worry about it, everything's cool. And if everything's going down the tubes, you don't have to do anything anyway, because ass going down the tubes, I mean, both extremes are bad. Now, I do think more and more people are aware of more and more of the world than before. I'm absolutely convinced of that.

I think the pandemic did a lot.

In an airport. Say again?

The pandemic did a lot.

And yeah, the pandemic has helped the world see itself as a world. It's not as much as I'd like, but it is, as a matter of fact, that brings up an interesting little thought. This is the first global timeout for the human species. All parents know that when the kids misbehave, you say time out, Sit down, think about what you did wrong. Well, this is the first time the human species has ever had a timeout to think together. And after great disasters, there's sometimes new growth, whether it's in nature or World War II. We had the UN after World War II. We had multilateralism, UN, World Bank, IMF and so forth. Something will come out of this also, I suspect, and could even be more profound because it's broader and deeper than the previous ones.

So I think the biggest. I underlined think together because we've had timeouts, we've had the other pandemics, we've had other.

Yeah, but you're saying matter of degree matters.

Right. And I know that. And so that's. It's the first global. That thought is thinking together because of the connectedness we have.

That's right.

Digitally.

That's right.

Okay. So, yeah, that's the. It's the first time that we're collectively being able to talk about this and not just be governance, individuals or military or something. Yes, I would agree with you. I didn't get timeouts growing up. I was pretty good kid. So you were going to say we were going back to just before that.

Oh, I did. I think I was going back to the idea of telling stories as a way to make the Future more plausible, more understandable, more real to people. The.

What do you inter in tying it to being enlightened or to myth busting or if you were to. You said you could be pessimistic because we are winning more than losing, but where we're losing, we're losing at an unbelievable pace. And no right. And you have a right to be pessimistic, but you have no right to say.

I said you have no right to be pessimistic because we're winning more than we're losing. But you have no right to go to sleep either because where we're losing is deadly serious. One of the things we're proposing to the UN is an Office of Strategic Threats. There are strategic threats to the entire species and they can be clicked off on the finger. And these are all quite plausible.

I had written it in four lines so it didn't come out right, but yes, I understood what you were saying. Okay, so you've got this department and their job would be to solve it.

We had. The department's not there yet. We hope to get a UN resolution to take a look at the feasibility of creating one. And the idea is it would look at those things that are long term threats to the species. So it would not necessarily include pandemics because that does not wipe everybody out. Correct. And a bunch of other things that are really problems, but they're short term and they're being addressed a lot of these things. But like for example, people are not seriously addressing the idea of the polar shifts. They could happen any old time and they could last for 175 years, which means we would be toast because 175 years of little magnetic protection on the Earth is solar radiation that fries us. And there's a bunch of other sort of things like that. They're long term. These are things that don't have to be addressed tomorrow, but we have to start to think about them because how long is it going to take us to figure out how to solve these problems? And some of these things could happen a little earlier, like a single individual making a weapon of mass destruction, like synthetic biology, sort of a thing that's a little closer in, but it's also a strategic risk. And we got to put these things together into an office. They don't have to do everything, but just like the ostp, they don't do all the work, but they're putting together the policy and the ideas. Hopefully for the White House, we need something like that on a long term basis because as you well Know, the short term emergency always overrules a long term threat.

So what would be a few of the others that on this future oriented side that you would add to that?

Okay, all right. One we call CMAT as a single individual mass structure. The second one in there is sort of an obvious one, but not for the same reasons people think. And that's climate change. There's a book and a study, it's called Green Sky Under a Green sky by Peter Ward, who showed that as previous die offs of species, there's a thing with hydrogen sulfide that comes out of the water if you change the water and ph and so forth. And we're in a line to hit that point maybe about 125 years now, I assume we're not going to, but we could. And that's a species die off. That's not just water levels going up and it's not just, you know, having wheat growing in Alaska. This is a species die off. Another one is, you may remember some years ago, there's a national lab, Cold Spring Harbor, Long island, that does some subatomic physics stuff and somebody figured out if they did the experiment, there's a remote possible, I mean it's a really remote possibility, but it wasn't zero. That you could open up a black hole. Now we are doing much, much, much more subatomic physics research today and we could theoretically, if we're not careful, open up a black hole. And that could not, obviously would be a heck of a.

It's not on my list. It's not my list of things that I'd be interested in participating in.

Right. Because you're not necessarily interested in long term strategic threats.

No, no, I know. I wouldn't want to be on in a world where there's a black hole that's opening it just right.

Yeah. It would be so fast you wouldn't have probably noticed it. Right. It would be caught. Right. Another, another one is gamma ray bursts. I mean we've been lucky that we haven't had a serious gamma ray burst, but that the Earth can go through that sort of. If.

What are the types of ray bursts that we've had? The solar flares. I know that we get a frequent.

Solar flares are a variety of electromagnetic spectrum. A whole bunch of stuff comes out. You get the light spectrum, the infrared, but the gamma rays, a serious one was the last.

So I was trying to think back and I'm going through my history. Well, minor ones.

Yeah, we had minor ones that shorted out stuff on the, on the earth, remember the ATMs or whatever they were, they stopped working for a little bit.

That's. I was, I was trying to go back. I knew we had one in the recent past.

Okay, but imagine, imagine it being like maybe 10 to 20 times stronger now. 10 to 20 times on the edge of the sun. This is how gigantic is. Not a big deal difference from a percentage point of view. It's a very small change. And that could happen. We get. At best we'd have a nine minute warning. Now that, the good news on that, just to let you know, is you're familiar with quantum entanglement. Essentially. Okay. The sun and the Earth are also quantumly entangled. They were created together, so to speak. This magnetic bubble. We've got, believe it or not, Goddard, NASA put together a video that causes chill chills on my. Even while I'm talking about it, that the magnetic containment starts to move toward the sun. As a big flare started simultaneously, it went out to meet it simultaneously. So we may have more than 500 years on the situation, but nevertheless, it's one of the long term strategic threats. Another one that people talked about is of course, the asteroid. There was, I remember there's an asteroid. You may remember. You remember when I described this a bit. This was back in about 1994. Five, maybe five, 95. An asteroid came in from outside out, by the way, they all came in toward the sun, came around the sun and then past us and Mars and so forth and went out and it hit Jupiter. And the explosion on Jupiter was visible.

Yeah.

You remember that?

Yeah.

Now let's go rewind it. Rewind the thing.

I think there's still. That you could still see the remnants of what happened today.

Yes. Now. Good, good. Now if we rewind the thing and if it came in toward the sun at a slightly different angle, I mean really a little. Little. And came around, boom, Earth's gone. Yep.

It was just taken out. It would have been the end.

Just gone now. Which means we've got to. And we are charting better and better. But there have been a couple even the last few years, smaller ones, much smaller ones, but big enough like a bus to cause a heck of a hit that came closer to the Earth. The difference between the Earth and the moon is about 250,000 miles. This thing was more than halfway toward us on that, on that line came by and that's big enough mass to knock out a city.

You know, on this one here, I have Harry Stamper working on this.

Okay.

Yeah. You know who that host, Harry Stamper.

Is refine my poor old tired brain.

Bruce Willis.

Bruce Willis. Okay, I'm sorry, I thought you're talking about a real scientist. I go, who the hell is this guy?

I had to make light of it. So any others that are on that list?

Well, let's see, let me click up here. UN officer in Fran from Mexico. Let's say. See, we've got. Oh yeah, malicious nanotech. Now here's this, here's something that some old problems didn't go away. You remember the Gabe, the grey goo problem.

Yes.

It hadn't gone away. We did a study for your audience may already know this, but if you take. There's two kinds of nanotechnology to begin with. What we have today is big machines making little things, you know, strong tennis rackets and all the rest of it. What we don't have yet was the original idea where you have little things making little bigger things. So it's like the bottom up approach.

It's actually called top down and bottom up.

So we don't have the bottom up yet. But if we did, it's because like easy analogy for people to understand is a leaf is nanotech manufacturing for food. It's atomically precise molecular manufacturing. That's what it does. Now we don't know how to do that, but if we learn how to do that and using carbon to make carbon nanotubes, what happens if the capability starts to take carbon from the air just in the surface and starts to reproduce itself? Stops it. There's certainly enough carbon to go around the whole world. But if it starts to replicate and grow based upon that and continues on and continues on, what stops it now? We did a study for Office of Science, the Department of Energy some years ago on future technology issues. And so in the process of it, we interviewed the heads of national labs. A lot of people don't know this, but we have national labs that do some research. Fabulous work on behalf of the country. And they're underneath the Office of Science in the Department of Energy. So we interviewed, we divided up Ted Gordon, the guy with Delphi and cross impact. He did half and I did the other half. And one of the questions on our list was how are we going to handle the grave goo problem? All these guys said, we compared notes afterward, we compare all these guys, it won't be a problem because of da da da da da da. Now we compared up da da da da da. And it wasn't very convincing. It's not a done deal that we get, we get out of this thing. So Great. But grey goo was only one of the possibilities. Another possibility is you can have little tiny countries making little tiny robot armies with nanotech and change the balance of power. But in any case, there's a variety of scenarios that can come out of malicious nanotech out of control. So that's another nasty.

I think I brought this up before. There's a book called. There's a series called the Singularity.

Yeah.

And it is not Kurzweil's. It's a fiction series. And through it, they have kind of the rise of intelligent machines that start to do the development of their own technology for themselves using robots and nanotech. And next thing you know, this, the globe becomes humans against machines. And it was extremely well done. And they ended up having. I don't know how many people will actually read it, but I'll tell you, they ended up having a war. It was the humans against the machines. And the war lasted like eight minutes because they took over every airport and they took the planes and controlled the planes, had them shoot off like missiles. Yeah. Because they were able to. They can do things beyond anything that we had thought of now. So you just gave about nine different.

Well, let me unpack the one you just said, because we're. We're getting to be. I'm stuttering, because I'll start. There's three kinds of AI, and the three kinds get confused and sloshed around all the time. People say, well, AI this and AI that. There's three different kinds. Yeah. There's gradations between each of them. So I'm going to oversimplify, and people can complain that I've oversimplified.

Well, there are over 200 different pillars of AI, is what I tell people. So there's three different types.

Okay, let's say categories. One is narrow AI. That's including deep learning. It's including the AlphaGo. It's including. Everything we have today is all narrow intelligence. It has single purpose, that the thing that diagnoses Cancer doesn't drive a car. Yeah. Okay. And that'll get smarter. And everything everybody talks about is all correct, but that's still narrow. The next one is general intelligence. We may never get it, but general intelligence can draw on the Internet of things. It can address novel problems. It can draw on other narrow AIs. It can make robot phone calls and pass the Turing test, et cetera, and it can do all kinds of things. It can cut across all kinds of other analysis systems that narrow AI cannot do. But we still give it its mission. The Next one is a super intelligence. And the difference between super in general is super can set its own goals. And that's what the science fiction is writing about. Now, the reason there's emergency in my voice is because if we don't get the initial conditions right for the transition from narrow to general, because that's the only thing we're going to be able to control, then it could evolve into super without our control and in a bad way and faster than we think. We have no idea how long it'll take to go from general to super. It could be immediate, it could be never. I don't know. We don't know. The only thing that we can know is the transition between narrow we have today and general, which we don't have today. So. Right. And if it's going to take 10 years to make international treaties, governance systems, you know, all this sort of regulation, all that sort of stuff, easily 10 years. This is the most complex problem we've ever had. In my judgment. If it's going to take 10 years to get that nailed down, and if General AI could occur in 10 years, which is the most optimistic, it's the shortest term forecast. If that can inherit in 10 years, that means we have to panic right now to get it right. Start working on it.

The book was cool, and again, it's a spoiler, but the book is really cool in that it starts off with a simple, mindless AI. And the AI is the. The algorithm is designed to improve correspondence. It's very simple. I'm going to send a letter to you and it will tell me, don't use the word technology, use the word future, change a few words. And if you change it, your odds go from a 63% acceptance of it or liking of it to an 81. So it starts to evolve by picking word choices and looking at your behavior, looking online, hobbies, sports, previous writing. And it starts to become smarter and smarter. So obviously it's learning and digesting more and more information and it realizes at some point that you're going to ask for something, whether it's good or bad, it doesn't know the difference. You ask for 45 computers and you get them only because the AI improved it, not because you needed it, not. There was an argument not to have them, yet you used persuasion better. But over time the computer became smarter too, and therefore started to analyze. Well, they only ordered 45, but we're a server farm and to handle what's going on, we need 63. So the computer just says changes it from 45 to 63 because it will be do a better job of processing. And pretty soon it becomes satient. And then it starts to. Well, Jerome's in purchasing and he's blocking our orders. So why don't we send them on a business trip to take care of our servers in.

Siberia?

There's a company in my country, in my mind, it's not coming out. They're sending to Pago. What's the name of it?

God, really?

In the Bahamas area.

Turkmenistan.

No, there's. It'll come to me. So he. You're sent, but you have a. Your ticket then gets canceled on your way back. So I get. The computer gets you out of the way for three weeks and it starts to do the same thing throughout the organization. Pretty soon it's satient and then it starts to create its own server farms, it starts to buy its own security. And pretty soon it's this smart thing. They have this conflict. And what happens, which was interesting is the computers had to sit down with the humans, but the humans needed a computer because they couldn't think fast enough. The humans are so slow. It's like talking to an ant. And the humans gave a solution. Why don't you kind of pull back for two years so we can get you all the services you need and give you all the space you need to do. And they said that would be the equivalent of having us sit around for 400,000 years. Because we. We're growing, we're. We're accelerating at that rate.

Attributing feelings to them, are you?

I am. So, yes. This narrow AI to the general intelligence, in your opinion, this is just an opinion. When we get there, will it be what will happen? Not going to ask. Not what forecast. What do you think will happen when we go from a to a true Gai artificial intelligence when we get there?

Well, I suspect it will be around the same time we have more public use of quantum computing as well.

Yeah.

And one quantum computing improves the general and the general improves the quantum and it's a loop. And what I would think that that would be like some things like right now we have a human body with an autonomic nervous system running the respiratory system, digestion, etc. We don't have that for civilization yet, but we would. If the narrow continues to go as it's going, it's a reasonable forecast that the ecosmart cities will become more normal in the retrofitting the old cities as well. But there's an awful lot of cross fertilization of narrow that is intelligence. That's got to be done.

Yeah.

Like our endocrine system influences our sex drive, etc. Etc. Etc. Right. So we have an interdependent set of systems run by an autonomic nervous system. So we have, in a sense, all kinds of regulatory functions. So like, you just had something to eat, if you went to run, your digestive system would close down a little bit while it's feeding your muscle system for running. It's a regulatory function. All right, well, we don't have interdependent narrow AI regulatory systems yet. General intelligence could do that.

Correct.

So I would see that general intelligence would be doing that. And that's a big deal all by itself.

Yes, it's a huge deal.

Yes. Now, let me jump ahead to anticipate your question. How do we know when super occurs? And I did write about this, and what I put down was that things would start to occur that we couldn't figure out why. Like if your floodgates work a certain way in the Mississippi river and you weren't aware of it and it notified the barges at certain locations, so as you can see, the interdependency of the rain and the flooding and the river and the boats and all kinds, you could start to say, oh yeah, that makes sense. I got it. General intelligence could do that. That makes sense to me. But all of a sudden some different things happen that make no sense to you whatsoever and you can't figure it out, but there it is, it happened. That would be to me, a telltale sign of the beginning of artificial superintelligence.

When DeepMind beat AlphaGo. The AlphaGo beating 4 to 1 and then 100 to 0.

Yeah.

Deep Mind was doing moves in playing Go that have never been seen.

Correct.

In the history of humankind.

Correct.

I tell people if it was a human, it would have been considered satient, brilliant, creative, mind boggling. But when we talk about it as a computer, it's not given those adjectives. That's when we talk about the future of a world and the, the future of humans in a world of AI is creativity. I tell them, absolutely not. Because deep what, what DeepMind did or AlphaGo did was considered unbelievably creative. And what Deep minded blows away. So the question becomes, on a, on a large scale, when we talk about them occurring, we're also making an assumptive motion here that the world, that it will find and discover and create better experiences for species on Earth. And I think the narrative that you played was that we teach it to Recognize us. Like we're going to move that barge. We're going to figure that out for you. So you can have your food yet it's still subservient to humankind or humans work together. Are you also in.

Subservient isn't an emotion, remember?

Yeah, well, I'm trying. Would you say that we become melded with. In terms of brains that are now on the net?

Okay, all right.

Is that where you're so I'm trying to.

I promise I'll answer that question if I just put a little intersection between that question and where you were on Alpha Go for your listeners to know. AlphaZero. I mean, AlphaGo has been beaten by AlphaZero. The reason they call it AlphaZero is because AlphaGo had both the rules of the game plus human actions of the game to learn from.

Right.

That's not what AlphaZero does. AlphaZero. You give them the rules of the game, it splits into two, Alpha Goes, and they start playing and it teaches itself. And the time it took to teach itself was frighteningly fast.

I got what it was, three months or something.

But anyway, it was very fast and. But then turning that on to Alpha Go slaughters AlphaGo.

Yep. But deep Mind was the next one that competed against them and did the 100 to 0.

Well, they're both deep mind.

Well, AlphaGo was the first iteration alpha. Deep mind was the second alpha.

Yeah. And then alpha zero is the one that learns without. They call it zero because it's no human input.

There's no human interaction in it.

Right.

So to answer the question, go ahead.

Okay, back to your question. I wrote a book about that and I won't plug the book, but I wrote a book about that 30 years ago. And basically the book said, if you can't beat them, join them. And there's a lot of ways that you can do that. You've already heard about Elon Musk progress on single fiber hairs connected to single dentrites or neurons in the brain with individual signals going in and out. I'm not supposed to say that. That's the way I want to go. I much prefer the idea of the contact lenses connected to the Internet and all the rest of it. But the idea is if we don't get the initial. As I said, if we don't get the initial conditions right for general intelligence, then it's a potential falling action where we just have to pray that we get lucky. On the other hand, if we start to figure out how we integrate more and more and more with artificial intelligence, then we can grow together. We don't even know how to grow. There's some of the stuff with robots. You know the one with the big red robots, you move it around so it helps you construct a car or whatever. The more and more we can grow with and have synergies between AI as it evolves and ourselves. So it's augmented human intelligence then. I think it's a better long term strategy than figuring out how to say, well, if we put the right values in, everything will be cool. No, I don't think so. Because those people that say that as it.

Yeah.

And what are the initial conditions for general intelligence? I don't know. That's too far in the future for me to worry about. I'm serious. People say that to me. It's too far in the 10 years, too far into the future for me to think about.

And I did look it up to soar alpha zero. Alpha zero was A. But the AlphaGo was first and deep mind had alpha zero.

That's right.

Yeah. So the, the, you have to heard the name Kevin, Kevin Warwick.

I'm Seno. You're forgetting that.

Al. Kevin Warwick was in, I don't know, 1990s or something. He took a chip and put it into his hand, into his forearm.

Oh yeah.

It controlled his lights in his home and all sorts of things. And then when they went to pull it out, before they pulled it out, he hooked it up, they opened it up and they saw that the nerves had grown in. And then they hooked his wife up to it with a headgear. And she could feel him feeling. Yeah, and he could feel her feeling.

Yeah.

So. So you're saying that kind of as a race against time, that humans to some degree have to make a choice to play in the game, to be connected to the game.

That's right.

Okay, I don't disagree with you. I just wanted to hear your analysis of it.

And to me, one of the big deals is what's the aesthetics and spirituality aspects of these. This is where you bring your mystics and your technocrats together. You want to do this in a way that increases consciousness, not makes you less enlightened, so to speak. You know, the back of Dollar Bill's got the pyramid on there, which is supposed to be about enlightenment. So the United States is supposed to be forming a more perfect union to get enlightened. So if enlightenment was for the direction and aesthetics is important and all the rest of this sort of stuff's important, then maybe how we create the synergies between us and the other or our offspring is important because there are people say, baloney. We'll just offload ourselves into the machine and skip the body. Yeah. What happens if it's wrong? You got no fallback position.

Right. And haves versus have nots.

Yeah.

How do you feel about the. The. The fact that once someone has the. And it.

Yeah, yeah.

An advanced form. And let me be clear, I do subjugate the differences. Meaning that humans today, many humans are artificial. They wouldn't survive without their dental fillings. They wouldn't have survived. Yeah, we do have. Yeah, we have an artificial knee. You a have splint, you have a stent, you have a something. Those, those. Those allow people to live. So I do understand that. So what do you think about that projection out then?

Well, you know, there's this long now bets, whatever they call them. I was going to do one and say, @ what point will there be a human who has more mass, I'm not saying weight, but more mass of artifice than biology. At some point there will be somebody like that. I think we'll get more and more intertwined as we go along. I'd even go so far as to say that somebody did something. You know, we had these four elements, four molecules that make up the DNA. Yeah. Somebody actually showed you could put two more and make it six. And what's to say that you couldn't even have some artifice in that so that you're starting to not only merge like I'm a contact lens type of guy rather than a put the chip in my brain kind of guy, but I do recognize that we might want to merge all the way down to the DNA level. And in fact, one of the things one of my interns is working on right now is can we attack future viruses with molecular technology? Because when you get small enough, you're trying to block certain things. Well, those are molecules lined up in certain ways. Well, that's what nanotech does. So we could have maybe like a nanotech interfacing with the biology more and more and more. Possibly as well.

Did you happen. Do you happen to see the Netflix series Titan or movie Titan?

I don't think so.

They genetically are altering individuals to be able to live on Titan, which has a different composition of the atmosphere and it had different needs. So they, they were artificially changing the DNA so that therefore this species could. Doesn't need the oxygen.

Right. Well, that does follow the logic of evolution, huh? I mean, an environment, an organism adapts to its environment or it ceases to exist. And so if we're going to go on off into space to make sure the sun doesn't belch and wipe us out, then we may evolve into space adapted creatures.

At some point they were artificially doing this because they felt it was the only way. But realize that there's always a challenge. You're in the. There's the scientist who's the Maddox scientist who says this is the only way to do it. Yeah, there's a. So getting back to what we were talking about in terms of superintelligence and the general. What I was going to say just before, it was great that you brought that up. Thank you. Where you went small to large and top down, bottom up nanotech and the three kinds of AI is when we're looking at the myth busting and prejudice most of the topics you brought up I would argue that we take 7.5 billion people. I always use that number 7.4, 7.6. I'm not let's not quibble over a few is out of the 7.5 billion.

People.

How very few, very few are interested in the majority of these topics at all. And. And I'll give an example then you can answer it. In my household we have the space project project Moon Hut 7 years Designing plans for man to live sustainably on the moon. I'm not a space person, won't go into the details on this but yet I have three people in my family, my two boys and my wife and they're not interested in at all.

At all.

I mean I bet you they couldn't even tell what I'm working on. Our group of words not Luddite because that's the opposite. But are a group of individuals like you decision makers people and trying to architect a future that might not be the future because they're not paying attention. When we talk about myth busting and getting people to be enlightened. You use the words witchcraft boomerang cultural symbols and I could probably replace them with nanotechnology, polar shifts, gamma ray burst, asteroids and said myth busting prejudice through polar shifts, open black holes, gamma burst and something else. And it would be the exact same thing. There there's no knowledge. There's. It's limited knowledge not know there's limited knowledge, limited understanding, limited under and limited comprehension of what they mean. Not even consequences, just what they mean. How do you get people to cross?

Okay, well you and I just discussed.

As a border is a line so so bold that few and I say 7.5 few people can cross it.

Right. I mentioned that I was playing around with the Internet. Well, not the Internet then the packet switching. The devices that made package and switch to a satellite for low cost now, oh boy, human beings anyway, At the early stage I'm live. People said all kinds of silly things like this will never be used Ben, it's only for the very rich. Da da da da da da. Even in France in UNESCO they said this was American culture hegemony. I mean you're gonna, you know, all this sort of stuff came out now you've got almost 2/3 of the world connected to Internet. They don't know the difference between a baud and a bit. When I first started out, I got excited about going from 300 baud rate to 1200 baud rate. You know, most people have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. But to me that was a very big deal. And so it's just like the hand calculator. A lot of people can't do math, a lot of maths, but you give them a simple cheap hand calculator, they're not going to make errors and they adapt to it real fast. I was in middle of Africa in a little village and I was teaching illiterate accounting with drawing pimples a dollar.

They don't need to understand how the division works. It works.

They don't understand crop but they can use it and they adapted to it real fast. Same thing with Internet. I mean people, I mean and the idea of interactive stuff. If a little kid now looks at a book, if it hit the picture and nothing happens the picture, they think there's something wrong with the book. So people will adapt, they'll attack. I mean people will adapt, I believe because that's part of the design work of the engineering design, human interface people. How do you make these things and experiences fun and easy? And it'll be done, I believe, because those that don't do it will fail in the marketplace and those that do it will succeed. So they don't have to. Most people have no idea idea how a computer works, but they use it all the time. They have no idea about how the, how the telephone hooks them up through the Internet around the world at no cost. No idea how that works out.

And we just live through, we're living through Brexit and the insurrection and we're living through the challenges with always be.

Always be the reactions. I've never seen a smooth transition in history, have you?

Well, we're living through it.

Yeah. Even teenagers get pimples you know, I.

Don'T know, I wrestle. And again, I wake up every day sometimes, I don't know why, actually, many days, I don't know why. And I, I work on a project to change how we live on earth for all species. I mean, it's, it's been seven years. And yet part of my challenge is that I, I'm not so confident. A lot of decisions being made.

Correct. That's the weak point. Decisions is a weak point. There's no question about it. That's the weak point.

And as you mentioned, the PH in the water, the change of the toxicity of the water, the polar count. While we talk about plastic bags, we're not. There's not as much attention being paid to solid waste runoff, which is actual poison into the oceans or runoff, as compared to plastic bags, which is not poison. So if you're going to drink a cup of water and you're going to drink one with a little bit of plastic microplastic beads in it, and you drink another one and it has Clorox in it, one is going to be devastating, the other one. We probably have a credit card worth of us in us already. When we're talking about myth busting or getting people to be enlightened, is there a faster path?

Well, that's where the arts come in. To speed up cultural change, you got to have television, movies, books, poetry, theater, dance, all that sort of stuff. You remember back in the 60s 70s, quote, cultural opening up the United States. It wasn't a completely successful revolution, but it is a heck of a lot freer thinking society than it used to be, that's for sure. Now where did that all come from? Music. And where the music come from? The writers behind the music. And behind the writers were some people working with them. We got to do a same similar thing this time, but on a global basis. And there are now increasingly people who I'm contact with and you proceed stuff from time to time where you do worldwide performances, increasingly worldwide stuff. You got the guy with the. What's his name with the cello running around the world hooking up different musical systems. I mean, more and more artists are beginning to realize they got to get involved in this deal, this transition. And it's beginning to happen a little bit. So anyway, my answer to like, how do you speed it up? You speed it up through the arts. But the arts, including movies and TV and all that sort of stuff.

So let's look here, what you've got here through worldwide number three. Did we handle everything on three? Yeah, on Four and five. You could tell me where we didn't hit. We didn't hear about boomerangs, and we didn't focus on cultural symbols a lot. And maybe we could touch on them from your perspective. There's got to hear the boomerang story.

Say again.

You got to hear about boomerangs. Can't put it in the title without it.

So what I can do is I can do these a little faster because we are moving along in linear time here.

Yeah.

Most people in the world have never seen a boomerang fly and come back. And yet everybody I've ever run into when I run around the world has. Knows what you're talking about when you say a boomerang. So they have all kinds of preconceived notions about boomerangs and so forth. This little old boomerang isn't. Is a great, fabulous teacher and a little vignette in some country somewhere. And I go out to a big soccer field, football field, and I start throwing my boomerangs. I used to compete, and within a short period of time, one or two throws and catches, little kids will sort of come running out just like clockwork. Doesn't matter where in the world I am. I go to an open field, I throw some boomerangs. Bingo. Little kids come out. Now this one kid comes up who's like, I don't know, 16, 18 years old, really, an arrogant son of a gun comes up. Hey, let me show it. Let me. Show me how to do that. And there's a little tiny girl in this group. There's about five or six of those. And so I said, no, no, I'm going to show her. Now. He. The teenager can't overrule me. He's used to being in charge, I can tell. But the little kid is sort of like, you know, the run to the group, so to speak. I take her out and so she throws it, and it's. It's not a good throw. And then the second one she throws, it's even worse. So I looked at her, I said, you know, here's how it's going to work. And the third one she did, and it worked. And then the teenager guy comes running out with the arguments. Show me how to do it now. And I gave her the boomerang. I said, this is your boomerang and you can teach him. And I walk off the field. Now, that was fun. Busting up a little bit of cultural. I don't know what you call it, impactions or whatever, but he had to swallow his pride to be taught by the littlest of the group. Boomerang is a cool little teacher. And now but everybody knows what the about boomerang but they really don't know squat. They don't know why it flies. They have they all think the thing to throw it sideways. You throw it sideways, it'll go straight up and come back down and break. So there's an awful lot to you know and it's really fun because I can diagnose people with a boomerang. Well I teach them. I can see if they're overconfident. They grab it when they try to catch it over and they hit their hands and hurts.

Yeah.

If they're. They're too relaxed and he goes right through. You know they were not there or the two self confident too girl. I mean it's a beautiful device for diagnosing personality because they. They don't know anything and you know they don't know anything. Right. So you can see how they react to it. Like well, I like the teenage like I know how to do it. Then the little girl scared to death that she's going to screw up with the third third flow. It's a nice little device. Little old boomerangs they are.

Goes back to the beginning about the myth bus thing. One of the things that I promote often is just asking questions is that the easy if you don't know, you've got to ask. And it's not easy for individuals to break that barrier and to just ask.

Right.

So it's. And. And then on the point of cultural symbols, what were you. I know we spoke about it. So let's bring it in here. What. What in more in depth were you would you hit show what cultural symbols mean and how they represent.

You know, to tell you the truth, I don't remember what I was thinking about when we talked about it before, but I'll throw out one that just came to mind. Is it the Jains or one of the groups in India that has the swastika? That's a different direction than Hitler had now. So if you put on a Jane swastika immediately somebody would think that you're pushing for Hitler. Right. Some people get a cross that put it around their neck and you wonder are they really thinking that that's going to protect them? I mean, how we use I guess symbols. I guess you have to. One of the strategies of change is referred to re symbolization. Symbol X means Y means a certain thing. But then can that same symbol later on can you use it In a different way to mean another way. So you're switching a perception by repurposing, so to speak, or reassociating the symbol. And I don't remember the analogy that I was using when I first mentioned it to you, but it was a good one. But I forgot what it was.

Well, I was doing some work and we started talking about symbols representing entire cultures. And when you look around the world and no matter who you pick, whether.

It be.

The Buddhist Society, I've, I see people wear beads and they wear it for Buddhism. And then when I ask why, what's the purpose? And I've heard monks will say that you're, I think they're 62 or 67 or something. They repeat the same yes mantra over and over and over all the way around. Yeah, they keep track. And that's a way of keeping track.

Right.

And it's a symbol that represents to some people that I'm a meditative, holistic, touchy feely person. And that symbol is not exactly the symbol that it is. And so we were talking about symbols and their value in societies that we have so many. That was where I was going in the very beginning. We have so many things about our lives now. You got it? Yeah.

I think we may have been talking about the Great Seal of the United States.

Okay.

If anybody can pull out their mind's eye, no pun intends on the eye anchomps on the top of the pyramid, but in the back of your dollar bill on the right side, the bottom side of the great, the great Seal, by the way, is two headed. So when we have a treaty with end of World War II or whatever, we have these little, they're little, they're just giant agreements things. And you have a seal, It's a two headed seal that we have when we seal our documents. So the front of the seal is actually the pyramid and the back of the seal is actually the eagle. And the eagle is supposed to be theoretically the policy, you know, will lead with peace. But if they don't, then you, you shoot them with the arrows. But the front part, we are prejudice against our own symbol. That symbol. Most Americans cannot tell you squat. They'll say, well, isn't there some sort of Masonic thing? Okay, well it's not totally Masonic, but there's some Masonic stuff there. But why? I don't know, maybe the presidents are, that, I don't know, they're honorary, I don't know. The deal was if you look carefully at the bottom of the pyramid, you'll see In Roman numerals, 1776, that's the foundation. Nothing fancy, bits and blocks, but slowly we're supposed to move toward a more perfect union. Slowly they get up to the top eventually. And the I in the pyramid is an shams or enlightenment. The purpose of the United States was to create enlightenment. And just about everybody I know backs off that they're uncomfortable about enlightenment. I've been in meetings about democracy and the future. Democracy. I bring it up. No one wants to deal with enlightenment. It's amazing. Prejudice against enlightenment.

Of course not.

And if you look at it, it's a new order of the ages, right? And it says the great sea on the bottom. It says that the pyramid is supposed to be the goal and the eagle is supposed to be the policy. And yet I have never seen anybody other than people who study this stuff, like arcane historians, that explains this and understands it in the public.

It's because.

And if we can break up that prejudice, I'll tell you, if we can not be prejudiced against enlightenment, I think that would be a very cool future.

It's because the symbols, something like enlightenment as a word is a symbol because it's characters put together into a construct that when you see it, you get a word. It's because the, the definition of words is. And our structure is not complete enough to give a definition that brings accuracy. And therefore it's interpretive in so many different ways. So for example, there's not the word. The movie Alien, there was one where they ink blotted and then a circle.

Oh, yeah, we talked about that. That was brilliant. Right.

And the ink blot of the circle had so many meanings in it that you got the depth. You didn't write a letter, you didn't write a character, you had an inkblot. So therefore you. So for those of you listening in, these aliens would throw a symbol that would be a circle. But there were patterns of the circle. It wasn't a circular circle, it was a, an inkblot of it. So all different lines came off of the circles in internal and external. And what you got was the entire construct, when you looked at it, was an entire message. Well, when you have the word enlightenment, there are individuals who believe enlightenment is nirvana. Enlightenment is that I'm a meditative person. Enlightenment is they believe that their own lives, that they are superior. In many. In often situations that I've run into where I don't think enlightenment represents the original enlightenment that individuals were thinking about.

I disagree. I would say that the early Founding Fathers, almost all of them Were mystics in general okay in one way or another. You read their writings. There was. There's a sense of like, you know, you're going to make on Earth a new age, a new order, a new ordo seclorum. I mean, we're doing a new thing. Are they a democracy for everybody? Wait a minute. George Washington's got to be the king after all. No, no. Hey, you guys, I didn't volunteer for this. I think it would be a great conversation in every civics class in the country to whip out the $1 bill and says, what does this enlightenment mean? So if we can't define it, who cares if we're trying to figure out, is it a good idea? Well, the founding father, you put it on the back of it. So imagine that you wanted to make people remember something for a while, put it in the back of the dollar bill. You'd think even. Because even a poor person once in a while runs into a dollar bill. Didn't work. It didn't work. Sounded like a good strategy. Didn't work. They still ignorant. So I would love to see the dollar bill part of the curriculum of the United States in elementary school, high school to discuss if our school was more enlightened, what would it be like? We can argue about the definition, but we want it to be in that direction. If our high school was more enlightened, what would it be like? If our company was more enlightened, what would it be like? If our country was more enlightened, the more perfect, more perfect union, et cetera, et cetera, what would it be like? It would be great to have such conversations to confront the prejudice against enlightenment. I mean, imagine if an extraterrestrial reporter came in and said, dave, I want to be on your show. Dave, I'm an extraterrestrial, intergalactic sort of a guy here, and David, I want to be interviewed. And what's this enlightenment stuff? I understand you guys are against enlightenment. Why are you prejudiced against enlightenment? Why?

Well, and again, my definition is. The reason why is because it has already taken on by so many a superiority complex instead of.

Well, then let's discuss it and see. Because I'm not saying.

I'm not saying it's a bad word. I'm saying what I've heard.

But that would be good. So let's bring that up. Let's say in high school or elementary school, you know, you know, if somebody's enlightened, do they act superior?

Yeah, you. What you're what. What you are now doing is you are playing the first game that you played, which or the first tool is the contradiction? So you're not disagreeing with me. You're agreeing. You're saying that we need to have the discussion to find out what that means so that we can understand what enlightenment is or what. You don't have to be enlightened. You could just be right.

We could. Well, being is a pretty cool concept all by itself. But we could also. We could also check out in our history class, American history class, what was the difference between Ben Franklin's view of enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson's view of enlightenment?

And what I'm going to do.

Is.

I think that's a good place to end instead of giving the answer.

Okay, that's good. That's a very good place to end. What's the difference between Ben and Thomas on enlightenment? Very cool.

And yes, and I would. Because it's the. To give the answer is not being enlightened.

The struggle along the way is a useful thing.

And I would articulate that. It could be Muhammad versus Gandhi or any character, anybody who believed in these types of achievement, human capability, or human potential theories, and then ask that question. So that's why I think it's a good place to stop.

Good. Yep, it is. The couple of phone calls here are getting annoyed.

That's okay. I'm not worried about the phone calls. It's the content. And so. So I want to thank you for spending the time putting together what we've talked about today. I hope you had a good time.

Sure, sure, sure. I almost never get a chance to talk about the dollar bill, but when I do, I give them help.

We did. Most interviews I know are not as long as extensive, yet I love to dig into exploring what individuals are thinking about and how they got to where they are. And oftentimes I go negative. To go positive, I need to find out. I need to discover ask questions challenge. So thank you for it. And I want to thank everybody who's taken the time out of their day to listen in. I do hope you learned something today that'll make a difference in your life and the lives of others. And Jerry, what's the one best way to connect with you?

Email. Otherwise you're telephoning into another interview. The email would just be jerome.glenn G, L E N Nillennium. Spelled the English way rather than the French way. Two Ls and two Ns. Millennium hyphen. Not underlined, but hyphen project.

Okay. And there's a saying, as I think I shared earlier, I think during the program, as I said, remember, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. So let's not try to fix yesterday. For if anybody was interested in getting a hold of me, you can reach me@DavidGoldsmith.com I'm on Twitter @Goldsmith, LinkedIn, Facebook. Same thing with Jerry. He's on these two. And Mr. David Goldsmith, Instagram. So multiple ways to get a hold of me if you're interested in speaking. That said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.