0:00 So. Yeah. Okay, so we fulfilled the pedestrian or pedestrian quota has been that now multi-level marketing nightmare stories. Yeah. In more ways than one. Okay. Well, maybe maybe we don't have enough to do another. We. But we do. Thank you. Do. Really? Yes we do. It's endless. Yes. This could go on forever. Oh, no. Forever. So I was just sharing with Sean this story about this multimodal marketing thing that was hilarious from back in the day.

0:31 Yeah. That was remember what sparked the why? I think we both had a multi-level marketing experience where we really tried to understand what the hell they were doing, but it right up being and we're lured in by the promise of money. Yeah. It's never made any same dangling carrots all over the place. Do they pay you decently in it.

0:54 Yeah. It's still. Yeah. Still pays well. Yeah. Well that's good. I mean I mean it's high pay is a relative term of course as far as wage go it's very it makes a lot of sense. Do it. People that want to go even higher. Do they eventually like by fancy bespoke suits and become corporate type people. I mean do they leave it and sort of.

1:19 But then they regress back to try to like get my I'm still a programmer and they'll come in with a hoodie. Yeah. Right. Like yeah. Yeah. I mean you could work for somebody like Anston Young, you know, and, consult and be. Yeah. The high level price sweater. There you go. See, you could work for them and do it for them.

1:39 It through them, you know. And so there's all these high profile consulting firms that will pay you buku dollars. And then, like Chris said, the regular IT job for a company ain't too bad. And you're inevitably like your your end goal is to work yourself out of a job because automations and you know, automations are the king right now.

2:00 Everything is automations. Automations. And so you get in there as an engineer, and you basically automate yourself out of out of a job and put it on you. You automate yourself out of a job, almost, you know, if you're effective. Yeah. So there's a degree of like, I don't know, self-preservation by continuously having to create the next automation.

2:17 Yep. And yeah, inevitably you're putting people out of work. But isn't that, like what this technology efficiencies and technology is doing anyway? But if you're in the right company, they find work for you. Right. Yeah. For sure. Well, and then in theory, it's always like kumbaya, like high brow, you know, lofty, like vision. But then the, the practical reality hits, like a little bit later.

2:42 I remember. Well, I could tell you all about my journalism career and how badly paid it was. But anyway, that's another story. I was asked to do an IT project one time. This is when I was at atrium when they were still carrying his healthcare. I worked there for five years as a programmer and was asked to do this one job where, what if if I had achieved what they were asking me to do would literally cost, 11 out of 12 people on this team their jobs because was automating, automating a data entry process using OCR and some other technologies.

3:14 And so they could have basically take the function of 12 people doing data entry and have just one person feeding the system. And OCR is optical character recognition. So they basically have it scan it in. Right. Yeah. Okay. So you got it, I guess to write for Computer World, I rule for an info in Computer World and Information week.

3:32 And I for years I did all that stuff but I use never I was never an IT person. I just happened to know enough that I was able to. Yeah, but now the technology has gotten so much more complicated that I couldn't pass up. I'm sure you catch yourself up in no time. So of the, you know, it wouldn't be that bad.

3:51 Got it. The nine box or whatever it was for performance rating. You have high and low, you know, cross that, that whole thing and then you know the they're going to keep the six. They're going to keep the six high performers on their reviews. And the other six that were released, Neil let go. And I was like, well, it seems reasonable to do this project.

4:10 It's worth doing it. Automations, you know, it's part of the normal job function. But, there's a there's a problem here is I'm the only one that could knows how to do this, first of all. And second of all, am I going to get a percentage of the money saved? You know, if I could this I'm coding it my my my own brave person.

4:27 I can do this right right now around here. And I knew it. I'm sure they both did that. Yeah. I was like, give me 50% of the savings that you've saved in the wage. And then I can maybe live with myself. No, I wasn't intending. I'm doing it. It was, it was. That was my barrier. I knew to reject it.

4:43 So. So then you could just say no. Yeah, I said no. They basically scrapped it into the project, but I, I gave them like a business proposal rather than as I, as a loyal employee, you know, like, oh sure, boss, I'll do whatever, you know, gave them. Okay. I'll do it under these conditions. Yeah. No, never. They'd never accept the conditions.

5:01 So the project got scrapped. And at least for a while, this 12 people kept out how they're doing. Data. Yeah. They sit there with this little rubber things on their thumbs, like flipping through. Oh, yeah. It's like I, I, I, I don't know how someone could possibly do that job. I literally go mad. The pink sticky stuff, they put the old thumb into some of its tacky.

5:22 Yeah, I'm incredibly stable person, but that would destabilize me, I'm sure. What were the entry? The gun. And probably at some point. What are they entering? Medical and medical data on medical. Yeah. Medical stuff off of old paper forms. It. But, forgoing all the form, just putting in the information, you know, just keeping the information. So they do a digital scan of it to archive the document permanently, digitally.

5:47 And then the data was to go feed it to the database. Right. So that made have it, you know, data warehousing. But the OCR stuff wasn't your stuff was going to take care of this data. Yeah. Because it was going to scan the scan right. The specific spots on the floor. And yeah, I had written a similar program that could do something along those lines.

6:05 And so they knew I had the capability to do it in here. That's a fun little IT story. But the point being, inevitably technology is a downsizing. So the theory goes that, oh, the technology creating these new levels of technology that opens up new careers, higher paying jobs, good, good paying jobs. But it's always long term. It's always a reduction in effort in force.

6:30 The total amount of work that's being done versus the actual human capacity to do that work. It's it's reversed. You can imagine back in the day, like harvest time in a field, you'd need a thousand migrant workers if you had, you know, a 100 acre farm or whatever. Right now they have one machine that's like GPS controlled.

6:49 There's not even a driver in it going through combine, going through harvesting, and there's still some stuff that can't be harvested that way. You have to have manual. Yeah. Until they figure that out because and now there's like things that go through and like even digital like eyes literally see the crop and cut it exactly when it's time to harvest, the machine goes over the field.

7:10 I mean, so inevitably. And then of course, manufacturing, speaking specifically of China and which will segue us back into this discussion, is that in China, there's several cases where they have, you know, black they're called black factories to where there's no lights on in the factory at all because it's 100% full automated. Okay. It's a black factory.

7:32 I know they have black. Jealous? Yeah. I've never heard of Black Factory. Yeah. It's literally like full automation. And so even in the situation where you see, you know, manufacturing industry move over to someplace in the world where the labor is cheaper, that then runs its course as well when it becomes fully automated. And a friend of mine that we're going to have on the podcast, Noah, he worked for a Russian company that was trying to create a black factory for up fitting, regular like, say, American sports cars into EVs.

8:07 Okay. And, you know, they ended up going under, but he that's what they were trying to do was, hey, let's fully automate this. And this goes all the way back to original, like back in the early 70s and stuff. There was this was attempted by several technology companies. IBM tried like one of the first in the world, tried to fully automated factory making printers.

8:30 And we'll link that story in the extra content because that story is actually really interesting. They tried to add, Department of Defense money to try to make a fully automated factory creating printers. One more interesting thing about printers is that all colored printers put an invisible watermark on everything that's printed, so you can identify it. That's the printer forensically identifiable on which exact printer it comes from.

8:53 It's just it's a special combination of, like, invisible marks that, with the right detection equipment, you could see it and know exactly what printer, so that if someone tries to counterfeit money using a, you know, color laser printer, they can identify where it's being printed at, okay. Right. So that's a little cloak and dagger. And they've used Neal was talking about spy stuff.

9:16 That's why it's. Yeah. And they've actually used that to find people who had manufactured ransoms, had kidnaped people, all sorts of things. I could see it happening, it having forensic, very good forensic applications. But, you know, here in where we live, we have a lot of apples and we have almost all farm workers. They're migrants and they're not legal.

9:44 And so far Ice hasn't gotten them. They like, I'm wondering when that is going to happen. I mean, I was told that we have a strong farm lobby and that they're trying to keep ice out of here because they cannot function. They don't have all this automation yet, so they can't function without the migrant workers. But I've heard about the conditions in which they live, and they kind of broken down dormitories and trailers and things.

10:11 And I it's a very rough. Yeah. They had some people kept in a basement in San Bernardino for and a judge next to that, you know. So everywhere I've ever been in the world and I've been visited many countries, in every country I, I've ever been to seems to have a second class citizen of some type of Wiltshire.

10:30 They mostly poor, you know, country or ethical region that they draw those the labor pool firm. Right. So in Australia it was the Philippines, Filipinos in Russia. And this in in Hong Kong, the Filipinos, Hong Kong and Philippines. Right. I knew about that one. And then in America. Of course it's Latinos. And then in Europe, it's a lot of the migrants from the Middle East.

10:52 Yeah. Right. And so it's like everywhere you go in the in the quote unquote first world, which is a misnomer. But, you know, absolutely everywhere you go in the first world, there seems to be this whole entire army of second class citizens that is under glass doing all the dangerous and difficult work that are, you know, probably cared for.

11:09 And, you know, that's an abomination of modern society. But, you know, the back to the, the logo harp, you know. Idea is there's a degree of that there as well, right, in these elite Naomi, for example, it's part of this elite, you know, reverse journalistic, you know, coder in cahoots with the government. And then there's the masses.

11:29 Right. And I don't really spend a lot of time talking about what the masses do. I I'm focused more on this elite class in this particular book, but the masses are well, we know what happens to them at the end, but we will exploit. Yeah, I can't, I can't, but did you do give us a broad sketch of what happens to them and what kind of pressures they're under and what's happening.

11:53 So. Right. And the masses really don't mean anything until they do. And that's true in modern society. The masses don't mean anything until they exercise their power as a mass. Exactly. I agree, and that hasn't happened yet in this book, but it might in the next year go. Yeah. It's Oh. So our listeners are even getting a pre an early version two.

12:17 Well, there's I working on that. This is, this is a hard one because, you know, to do anything about a revolution or about a, at a rebellion of a, of a mass class, you have to be very creative. And it has cannot be. It isn't simple. You know, I talk my my husband Neil gave me the, the title of my new book, which I don't know if I will use, but he calls it the gyroscope.

12:43 And the reason he uses that is because, well, as I studied it, I mean, I used to fly airplanes, so I don't do it anymore. But, there's a physical phenomenon called procession. And you know what? That is okay. Yes, it's called p factor. And it and it's very it's very evident in, in airplanes when you know, you have a revolving gyroscope called a propeller.

13:08 And what happens, of course, is that the natural the force going down pushes the, the plane not exactly opposite, but it pushes it 90 degrees. So you get these perpendicular movements and you have to counteract them with the, with your brother. And, I came up with this idea that a revolution cannot be exactly the opposite. It cannot be a direct a repudiation of, of power, that what has to happen is that the whole population has to precess or tilt in a different direction, not expect it.

13:50 And so that's the I don't know, that's dang. But that's kind of well, you're thinking about it. You know, it isn't. It is profound because if you directly oppose then it then it can be met with equal and opposite force. But when it's misdirected and it comes from a different vector, then that can and you can way unexpected encountered Thor.

14:07 Well, that's how a lot of revolutions have worked, is the nonviolent civil revolutions that have not gone to the direct opposite or the direct opposition. But for example, there's a great book on that called The Force A Force More Powerful, which is about every nonviolent revolution that ever succeeded in. Almost all of them have done it in ways that were unexpected and that there was this there was this kind of mass procession in a different direction.

14:35 And that's how they they managed the no campaign in Chile. I believe it was Chile. What was it? Argentina? I think it was Chile. It was against, what was his neck? I'm having. I'm drawing a blank. I don't know, he was a dictator for 24 years, and they eventually had an advertising campaign that it was called the No campaign.

15:04 And they just they kept advertising what they didn't want instead of what they did want. And it ended up bringing him down. And that was one of them. It'll come to me. I, I will have to give you the name. You stick it here. We're going to throw it in the Oxford content. Right. But a lot of the, a lot of the revolutions that have succeeded, I mean, look at, you know, as in, in Poland.

15:29 I mean, that was a nonviolent revolution. And a lot of the really important ones have been not a direct opposition. The Danes, when the Nazis took over in in World War Two, the Danes went in. And they did they did a noontime. They would do strikes. They would just stop working. And then they bang. They bang pots and pans and and then surreptitiously, they would send, weapons, people to blow up various.

16:02 That was the most that they did that they would blow up supply lines. They blow up some of the trains that the Nazis were using to supply there. What does a serious disruption and but all told, eventually the Nazis left because they were getting so much funny flack in a weird way that they they just very cleverly did it.

16:24 There was actually a PBS series on that called A Force More Powerful. None of this. So there's a theory, prevailing theory now that if around 3.5% of your population participates in that nonviolent protest, right, that's your critical mass, right? And that you're going to you're going to have that's your tipping point, you're going to have overthrown, you know, within a relatively short period of time, whatever governments in power.

16:54 And and that really might apply to all even into in America, the modern society is whether or not people just stop working. They just, you know, in a concerted, organized way. They start working, stop working first at noon, they stop working for days at a time. Wow. They won't don't show up for work. But it would have to be masses of people to do that.

17:17 Jeremy. Dry shop. That's right. Just shot shut down whatever is in power. Anyway, that's something I've been thinking about for the next. Nice. Yeah. Wait. Anyway, excited about that? All right, so any more questions about. Yeah. For sure. So in this this procession of this character, in this evolution of this character, Naomi in the first book is, you know, this this I see like a really interesting theme.

17:44 At least it ties into, some of my life experiences. Is that kind of this, this heart being broken, right? Give an initial sense of a loss of humanity to some extent or a loss. It's almost like a grieving process type thing that she goes on, she undergoes. And, that kind of hard being broken, inevitably, I think, kind of led to the potential for it being open, you know, later and then this, this kind of like catalyst to launch her into this whole, you know, transhumanist implantation, becoming more of a cyborg, you know, stuff made that a little more fluid because it was like that loss had occurred.

18:21 And so she felt, to my mind is me putting myself. I guess that's the story is, was that that that kind of like that loss and that difficulty in that heartache then kind of makes you feel for, at least for a little while, a little less human anyway. And so that was like maybe the barrier to entry to make the decision to actually go through and become, you know, more of the cyborg type person.

18:43 I think a little more fluid for the character. But then with those additional capabilities, like we said earlier, restoring the humanity, the humanity coming from the the exposure to this, this hyper technology. Right. And then combined with the recovery from the heartache like boom, brings her full circle with an open heart and open mind. And then the truth is undeniable.

19:04 The truth then activates the humanity that's still there. Well, it sounds like you wrote the book. You. He. He said it better than I could. There we go. I think you're right on. I, I think that's what a lot of us have to go through to be able to grow. Yeah. Then we have to have the. I think Judith, yours once called it necessary losses that you have to lose a loss before you learn and grow up in that work is common to humanity.

19:36 I mean, that is it. We must sometimes strip away the non-essential, or that's what that which is encumber us before we can gain, before we can pick up, before we can add. And I mean, this book typifies that, you know, it's like it's there, right? It's like it's it's not like, overt, but it's all there which is, which makes it even more elegant, more poetic, more artistic, more creative is that it's all there.

20:05 It's just not it doesn't have to be explicitly said. It's just appears in the arc of the story, in the archives. Yes. In something I really wanted to say about your writing. Your writing is to be praised for its precise. Yet, as he said, poetic style dive. I mean, you got precision here, but you have a flow and you have, you know, and it's you elevate the mundane.

20:28 So it's good stuff. And then when you do go through it, it like the, for me, all different types of I read mostly nonfiction, but the, the fiction that I do read a lot of times, like I get scenes in my mind, but they don't roll. They don't flow like a movie. Right? But when you read the logo harp and you go through it, it's like literally plays like a movie in your mind.

20:52 You can almost like see the the progression. Now, why do you think that is? I'm not sure. I think it's the, that's a good question. Why exactly is that? First of all, the, you describe a lot of the landscapes in pretty, pretty detail. Like you take the extra time to like, explain like kind of what Naomi seeing, especially those scenes, like the skiing scenes.

21:13 And. Right. You get a lots of the loses. The undersea loses. Yeah. That's a very strange technology. The tunnels. The loses, the caves. Yes. That's all part of. But actually it's really based on my real experience. I mean, I know I haven't been a mile under undersea with a luge, I, I, I, I have I watched, Nordic, losers.

21:38 Yeah. In competition. And it gave me the idea of doing of thinking about hypersonic transport under the ocean, through tunnels that people, you know, people would lie back and they would be strapped and they would they would wish there or they would use their minds to control that. And some of the physical, what it reminded me of is the what they finally realized after some of the attempts, the tunnel.

22:05 You know, the basically the transportation across the English Channel there and, you know, and just the idea behind it. But, I mean, I keep coming back to this idea of titles that you keep mentioning, the new book of the old book and the possible subtitle you had there. I think I found a nod to what you were mentioning earlier that I wanted to confirm.

22:34 Yeah. So on your first page or the title page of the book, there's some translated Chinese there. I gotta I think I know what it means. Which which part you talking about here? Oh, here I think so. I think it's that first page. I only have the book, so I think it's okay. Yeah. It says Megawati are bottom, which means America second.

22:58 Yes. Yes. America the second edition. Yeah. And you you had mentioned that earlier that that was a proposed title for the book. So really that's what I was wanting to confirm that that means America the second edition. And sometimes I, I thought of when I lived in China, I, I thought that China was experiencing something like the power moves that we used to feel.

23:20 And really in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, we had that advantage. I mean, when they were going through their nightmare with the Cultural Revolution from 66 to 76, we were still doing very well, although 73, 74. Yeah, we were starting to have supply issues. Well, we had the oil crisis. We had, you know, Watergate, we had a lot of we had assassinations and it was starting to and then, of course, with the the rise of this kind of weaponizing political strategy and the the parties, it started really with Gingrich, but a lot of there was a it was starting to I felt it was starting to devolve in the late 70s, early 80s did

24:12 it, in your opinion, just kind of accidentally coalesce again and firm itself up or. Oh, you just you mean the American culture? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've all I lived I've lived through this whole thing. And I gotta tell you, that's why I'm asking. Did it just keep devolving or did it start back up? Well, I, I think that's a whole discussion of another podcast with a lot of political experts that I'm not one of them, but I would say that we're not in good shape right now.

24:42 No, we're in terrible shape. And we all agree and I, I think the seeds were planted a very long time ago, although it's interesting. We we got the six volume series of Carl Sandburg. You know, he lived right around the corner here. Oh, there's a very beautiful. If if you had more time, I would take you over to his house, which is right around the corner.

25:04 It's just like five miles away. Goodness, it already could have shown on 267 acres. Beautiful. And his wife raised goats. So she had said the goats are still there. They. It's part of the national park. It's part of a Idaho. It's like a land grant kind of thing. Yeah. And they still keep the goat farm and they keep the house.

25:24 And, they had a flood. They they ruined dam. They hurricane Aileen ruined the dam. But, what was I getting? But Sandburg's six volume on Abraham Lincoln. Wow. Is a very good reminder. That's 150 years ago, this country was also torn apart big time. And he had lots. And in the media was cruel beyond belief and lying.

25:56 And depending on where you were coming from, there you hear one story versus another story in the English media, the French media, they all had it out for either Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. Wow. So if you can feel a certain amount of hope that it's cyclical, okay. And that we're living in another kind of civil war, only it's euthanasia easily attribute that that label this time easily.

26:26 China is very different though. When I went to China the first time, well, actually I went the first time in the 90s, but but when I finally taught there in 2011 and 12, and then I went to Hong Kong in 2013, who Jintao was a president and he was much more progressive than she. Jinping. It was a much more open environment.

26:49 It was never really, really open. But academically and otherwise, there was much more of an exchange. It was less antipathy. And, I think Obama was, you know, when Obama was president, he was sending lots of students over there to learn Chinese and try to, you know, correct a lot of the trade imbalances and the stealing of intellectual property that was going on.

27:16 And since then, now look at how we look at China as the adversary, the, the enemy rather than a global partner. And, I think that's sad because it engendered mean the vision of a logo harp is that both countries.

27:37 Have are not really caring for people, not for the masses. They're not. China comes up with a way to take care of the masses, but the masses are like children, and they have to be disciplined and given bedtime stories, and they're not allowed to be adopts, creating their own destiny. One one of the critics, Marianne, you know, when she interviewed me, said, what would your life be like if your whole future was pre-written for you?

28:15 And that to me is very close to what has happened. It's either chaos, conspiracy theories, but in a sense, all the people who are not like you, all the people who are not technological, who don't do well in math, who don't do well in statistics, who don't do well in computer languages. There are as many roles for people now as there used to be in this country, and the country is becoming you.

28:42 You are part of that class of highly skilled digital experts who do things that make other people obsolete and also create a sense of separation and an alien nation between the smart haves and the not quite so smart, not happy in. The thing is, I, I, for lack of a better term, I feel like we are the city, we are the ones in the know, and we can see the broader a little bit more the broader arc than some of the other people.

29:16 All three of us, unfortunately. And, you know, yeah, we are instruments of this change and we accelerated and we're grappling with that all the time. I see kind of a by forecasted to a ten of a two tiered approach here. One is like, you know, nothing matters. Who cares? Drop empathy, get what you need. You know, get get yours empties a week as if these a witness have disaster.

29:38 Thank you. Ellen. Well I know right. You know, this type of this type of, psychology and mentality really feeds into this unbridled, blind ambition that, you know, ties into narcissism in kind of like the the kill switch for humanity, you know, inevitably, because the technology is ever getting more and more potent as we move forward into the future.

29:57 Technology is not declining in potency. No. Technology is only increasing in its potency. And so when if technology in and of itself is just a, you know, tool, it could be it's how it's implemented becomes its decision on whether or not it was good or bad. The implementation is what decides if a technology is good or bad, not the technology itself.

30:18 And so when you take this idea, this kind of like stated philosophy over state of philosophy of, you know, nothing matters, just, you know, this blind ambition, it doesn't matter. You know, technology is then by default becomes weaponized with that paradigm. So it's like use technology as an extraction mechanic to extract as much wealth, time, tension, resource, etc..

30:40 Yes. You know, from and then we have the other kind of like of course the gradient. But then you kind of have the other aspect to where people are like, hey, you know, we're going to want to use technology for the greater good. You know, you could take something like nuclear technology. It can be used to build a power plant and power cities and, you know, give us all this like, great, which would be nice, you know?

31:00 Right. And then you can, you can, you know, refine it and, you know, whatever entails weapons for no reason. Because once you use them, you're going to die, too. I mean, that's the part that's insane, right? Right. So it's forever mutually assured destruction. Yeah. So the the comprehension of the physics and the discoveries in science then lead to these potential technologies, but then how those technologies actually implemented and expressed becomes the actual fate or aka outcome for all of us.

31:28 Yes. It's implementation and application. Yeah. And that's no real big deal. When somebody in China, in a cave with some bat dung and a mortar and pestle, makes the first gunpowder and blows or eyebrows off right when they put a spark to it, that's one thing, right? But then when technologies become so poorly in the future. Sorry I didn't even make you laugh like that.

31:47 But, you know, technology is becoming so potent in the future. Somebody's messing with what? Something from a particle accelerator making a temporary black hole that evaporates. I mean, some of these technologies become so potent that the obvious potentiality and weaponization of that technology can be the detriment to all of us. And if you take this like just blame and vision, doing it for the sake of doing it, you say what I'm saying, it's extremely dangerous.

32:09 And what the it seems like technology is doing is just steering more and more resources into the hands of these type of people. And and if that's the right answer for long, it isn't, because the greater the potency of the technology, the greater the need for ethics and careful application and study, because it's technology has always been a prime mover.

32:29 It is the application of our knowledge. It's capturing natural phenomenon and bringing it into it's turning it into a workhorse. It's capturing the the mechanisms of our universe and putting them under our control. But some the problem is the one is that the whole sense of I talk about this a little bit in the other interview I did, but the, the radio interview, I think the corporatist model, which is really applies to China as well.

33:05 It's just that the state is the corporation. Yeah, state owns the corporations. As long as that kind of power is concentrated in. A technocratic elite and also a an economic elite, the consideration for all the things you care about humanism, fairness, equality, frights, trying to bring people up, all of that is getting lost. And I, I mean, we, we know this this is not any any news, but it's very, very dangerous and very sad because people who care about elevating the masses or trying to improve their education and improve certainly their livelihoods, we're being we're really becoming dinosaurs.

34:04 Yeah. I think I mean, I wrote this book partially as a swan song to me. What did I learn in my in my whole life? It is that the thing that I really that my parents cared about and that I cared about my my parents were involved with the Congress of Racial Equality at an early age. My mother was involved with the American Negro Theater.

34:27 She was actually in a book by Gordon Heath, who was one of the early Denzel Washington of the American Black Theater, and he ended up moving to Paris because it was so toxic here. But, you know, her pictures over there, incidentally? Well, it's very pretty. But that loss, you know, you're talking about a level of love and thinking about all humanity that I just don't hear about much anymore.

34:57 I hear the Christians think about the Christians, and they hate everybody else. And the I mean, I'm just not getting this. The Muslims, the Jews, the Jews are supporting who who is really you know, he's committing genocide. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think there's much debate there. And and it's all about power. It's just you can't even, you know, there was a time when we were growing up that we thought Israel was the good guy and that the Palestinians, everybody wanted to kill off the Jews.

35:29 But now look what has happened. You know, the the the victim has turned into the victor and now is he's banging on other enjoying the misapplication of technology and warfare that they're dominating. But it's all about unfortunately, it's all about the concentration of power and that whole utopian vision of equality and love and, you know, carry for everyone, isn't there?

36:01 It's not in style. Yeah. And I don't know how to change it. So part of it was that I wrote a book over a 12 year period that was kind of a compendium of that. How would I think through a character who would first be drawn to power and then decide in the end that she couldn't cooperate with that power?

36:25 I mean, that was well, I think it ties to the the prophetic nature of the book. I mean, the experiences that you're bringing, the education level that you're bringing and everything that's I mean, you're probably one of the most literary people I've ever met. You know, thank you for sure. And then, you know, you you couple that with this hyper education that you've had and, you know, I mean amazing education background and then diverse experience traveling and all these different, you know, touch points all all across the globe, you know, coalesces in this like prophetic novel.

36:58 And then what what happens? You explain what happens in the book, and I promise I'd give anything really big away here. But, you know, this idea that this person is now this transhuman person, that's the bleeding edge of hyper technology, right, is embedded with hyper technology, basically has had this like up and down human emotional component with, you know, heartaches and trials and tribulations throughout her course, her the arc of her life, you know, now sitting at the front line, if you will, of hyper technology through that, through that conduit discovers humanity.

37:35 That's true. Put that on the larger arc of all of society. Is that this technology, at the end of the day, might actually be what finally causes us to unlock our, our humanity. Like, I know it's a pie in the sky and it's wishful thinking, but let's let's take a quick look. You go through anthropology, anthropology, anthropological record, and you look at some of the, you know, known recorded history.

37:56 And what you see is, you know, worrying nations, technology coming in in one type, technologically superior, country or nation or tribe or whatever, then dominates even sometimes extinct. The other one, I mean, Cro-Magnon man and, you know, is gone. And, you know, Neanderthals are gone by the you know, it's anthropological record shows that, you know, these, like, proto humans were wiped out by modern humans.

38:20 Right, right. So race and modern humans use technology to dominate and conquer the others. And so if you get locked into this, this, this tragic kind of worldview, which is inaccurate that the majority of human effort is, is about dominating and overpowering other right, other groups of humans. And that's the natural way survival of the fittest type, you know, viewpoint of of the arc of human history.

38:49 You're missing out on the truth, which is, you know, people working together mostly in positive ways to try to build society, try to build community, tried to build resources, try to, you know, have progeny, have offspring, have, you know, in development, build and grow is the dominant effort of humanity. Yes. And then we have these outliers that come in and then use technology in that quest for power.

39:10 That blinding vision comes through and upset the whole apple cart. It that's it. We that's how we got here, was working together. We got here by, you know, understanding, empathizing and having common goals and directing resources. That's how the pyramids were built. That's how any of the great accomplishments of man were pushed through. And, you know, ultimately, I can't disagree with anything you said there.

39:42 It really is this small minority that has dared to concentrate power that is in opposition to the rest of humanity, whose goals are probably just to live and eat and hang out. Yeah, right. Well, cooperate. You know, have you ever read Tamil Paglia book called Sexual Personae? What she really does the number on the gender issues, the male of the female, the power.

40:07 But she also does a lot of interesting. I mean, she really she's an expert in art. That's really her thing. Despite all that, you know, she had a lot of publicity when she started out. Her book was very famous. But she really divided the world between the Apollonian and what she described as the Apollonian impulse to, to distance man from nature.

40:35 And that nature was, was considered in some respects like Venus de Villa doors. You know that fact dirty, unpredictable, cool force that that particularly the Greeks. But even some of the Egyptians, you know, she was like making fun of of Nefertiti statue. And I totally disagree with her interpretation. But it was she said it was a very Apollonian statue, you know, the huge head, the beautiful headdress, the almost inhumanly perfect chiseling of the face, which was not like most of the Egyptian, you know, the three quarter profile.

41:13 But she has some very interesting things to say about men and women as well, and whether or not this so-called mankind that really the people who have been running things since the beginning of in men and you know that she's actually for that, but I believe she was she is ironically, she's a very interesting woman, but she was really she was not really arguing that she was describing this.

41:40 I think she called it Sonic. This whole of the Earth thing, that the whole attempt of civilization is to move away from the dirty Earth talk, to conquer and immortalize values that are just the opposite. Well, and, unfortunately, you know, you say that, you know, our whole progress as humans has been to move away. Well, certainly you haven't described it as nature, but but when you describe it as, trying to create a vision of a world that is not the same as our world from dinosaurs, from, you know, gardener was plants, whatever that we're, that we're trying to create, you know, a utopia of some sort or some kind of social situation that

42:35 is, you know, basically Apollonian and and I, I'm not sure how that maps to my vision of the logo harp, but I can tell you that, she moves away from that kind of belief or in the perfection of the powers that be to a much more curious and strange reawakening of her. Sure, it's that bifurcating of technology.

43:06 It's the technology can be used as a means of control and manipulation and all this kind of stuff, but it also can be used as a methodology by which we unlock our own humanity. It's right there in the story. Right? And I just hope that you're right, that there is some better future. But if we don't start getting rid of these dictators who are really running the oligarchy, the oligarchic structure is not just in Hungary or in parts of Africa or in China.

43:34 It's here it has. And as a result, the wrong people with very little moral sense are pretty much pushing civilization in a completely wrong direction here. So I think that what happens is that you have this triumph of the human spirit, spirit that always seems to come, come into play. It definitely comes through in the novel. I mean, you you show clearly the triumph of the human spirit.

44:00 I try, right? Try it. And so that part of our nature is the triumph of the human spirit. And it's cliche and a bit of a trope, but I think it's I think it's there because when we have this performance, we have performance metrics that we can now start to look at, you know, in this domain of hyper technology and how that technology is applied, what's the actual actual what's the, you know, what's the performance outcome of that methodology about applying technology?

44:25 Well, that's all all this like terrible stuff that's happening right now is creating data points as to why that's so terrible. So we're beginning to now have the tools by which we can use the metrics to then formulate the better approach. So sometimes things have to get bad before they get good. Well, this this whole entire, you know, kind of current moment in history, I think is creating a lot of data which can then be in the not so distant future used to model against, to prevent that from happening.

44:54 What about human prejudice and racism? I mean, you know, part of the reason that Kamala Harris lost this election is she's of color, she's a woman, and we have never been able to elect a woman. Even though Hillary won by 3 million popular votes, she didn't even do. Harris didn't even do that. Like, how do you get how do you meld advanced technology with the betters, better angels of our own nature, because there are just too many people who are just their haters.

45:28 They there's no better way to put it. And ultimately, in my personal opinion, the answer isn't just in data, it's in we look at what is not being satisfied. These people need something. These people, you know, didn't they? They feel disenfranchized, they feel separated. They feel not part of the limousine liberals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what do we have to in my personal opinion, we have to make them hold.

46:01 We have to be a big tent and be inclusive and make it for everyone, because the promise of globalization left them behind. The promise of high technology left them behind. And, you know, unfortunately, the way we've been applying technology and the way we've been talking about it today is there's always a group that gets left behind. That's right.

46:22 And that has to be fixed. Well, yeah. The also the the another way that this can come in is that like let's make social media really social. Let's get to where social media lives up to the name. Right. And starts to start to introduce people again to people. But so how do you do that? Oh, he's got an idea, I think I think I, I think I have an idea is that, there's, there's plenty of examples of like, let's say, you know, some, you know, white southern Alabama guy that grew up and, you know, grew up in a racist structure, family, whatever, you know, goes out to Montgomery and lands in the University of

46:58 Alabama, if that's where it is, I think it might be. And, you know, for the first time in his life has a black roommate, you know, and it's like, oh, my gosh, who's this guy? You know, day one, day one rolling up in there. But now the person's away from the family their way from that environment and their the new environment, just like this person that came from a different, you know, subculture.

47:17 And then these two people with it almost invariably within the course of six months or, you know, around there sometimes a couple of weeks, but, you know, around 3 to 6 months and being best friends and realize that 99% of everything in their lives in common and all that falls away, all of the all of the tropes, all of the racism, all of the bigotry, all that just automatically naturally falls off.

47:41 Because. Right. Because because all you've done is you've just taken two people, humans, human beings, and put them together. And when you put them together, they just naturally come to the conclusion that there's a shared experience here, the human experience and the human equation, which they have almost entirely in common. And so then all of the, the nonsense that they're their misinformation that they were filled with upbringing or their environment or whatever just falls to the wayside to the reality.

48:06 Just much like Naomi, right? The reality he sets in. But there's another way to do it. I always thought that the best thing we could have ever done in American education is not to not to destroy the Department of Education, but instead to require that every child have an experience in which they go to a different culture and meet different people from where they are from 100%.

48:33 How many people, whether it's you go to the Indian reservation, whether you go to you work with sharecroppers or former sharecroppers, whether you pick apples with Hispanics, whether you go to to Europe, Russia, China, go somewhere else and find out how the other half. Yes. The problem with America, I think the vast majority of people who are voting for people like Trump is because they have never been anywhere else, right?

49:02 America is some of the least traveled as citizens of most of the world. So tell me, as for people that you've met in your life, entire parents of your entire life, people that you know are well traveled and have experience, multiple cultures and like the way you just described, how many of those people are xenophobic? How many of those people are racist?

49:19 I'm seeing none. Close. Close to zero, right? The only the only way we get older, people get more, tend to get more conservative, and they tend to alert and they get more tribal. But people who are truly educated and have had good experiences with other kinds of people are less likely to start weaponizing and hating and doing all the things that we get.

49:43 Innocent, you said, have had good experiences. I think people who seek good experiences, well, sometimes you get lucky and you got one because, for example, you were in a program where you had to work as an intern in some other place other than in the middle of Alabama, the middle of Kentucky, the of North Carolina, the to go north, you had to go south, you had to go somewhere else where people were different and get out of your comfort zone.

50:11 I think that was the biggest change in my life. I went to Taiwan. I went to Europe when I was 12. My parents took me there. I first trip, I went to Taiwan to learn Chinese because I didn't know what I wanted to do in my life. I did have a Chinese boyfriend who was in some respects like the Marco I created in here.

50:33 He wasn't quite that bad, but. But he had a very. He had a a family that did not want him to marry outside of his ethnicity or his, you know, his background. They wanted him to marry a nice Chinese girl. And here I come, along with blond hair and blue eyes and oh, my God. And she doesn't even she doesn't even want to be a doctor or nurse.

50:56 She actually wants to be a writer. What the hell is that? And so I went to Taiwan after it was over to try to learn. I wanted to learn something about what? He was thrown. Yeah, and that's what made me when I. I lived with a Chinese family. They were wonderful to me. Okay. And, I lived there for almost 11 months, and it just changed everything for me.

51:21 I mean, I didn't come from a particularly prejudiced family. I didn't my parents were pretty. I mean, my as I said, my mother worked for the American degree of theater. My father, right, you know, campaigned for civil rights, but you don't really feel it until you go there and you and you live it with other people. I've lived in Indonesia, I've lived in Africa, I've lived in in Hong Kong, China, I've lived in Europe several times.

51:48 I mean, you know, because you've done it to you, then that's the thing. It's you were saying you thought people needed to have that transformative experience individually, and they do. It doesn't matter what background you come from, you need to experience the other, whatever that is. Even if you come from a particularly open background. I'm from the backwoods of Kentucky, and my other was actually the less backwoods of Gastonia and Charlotte.

52:15 And believe it or not, that was weirdly transformative. But then I started, I saw this sea of sameness there and started seeking out other experiences. And yeah, I had a that's to your credit, but I'm just saying that our country would be very different. Pardon me for interrupting. No, no, no. But I think our country would and could be very different if that were requirement to be able to graduate, even high school.

52:43 You had to go live and learn and work somewhere else for six months, for a year, for however long the the way the Israelis require the kids to go into the army for two years. You know, I think that now, I don't think that's such a good idea, right, because of what's happened. But look, look who's running the show.

53:04 But I really do think that would have made a huge change in our country if every single child had the chance to make a friend and see a community other than where they lived. There's no doubt about it. I, I, I agree with the 100% on that. There's I, I envision this, this like feature world where even through technology just, just, just that alone is built into the system like that's the default, being able to experience other cultures and other ideas and other just points of view and, you know, other people that don't look exactly like you built in as the default of the system will then start to produce,

53:45 obviously a big sea change. But what what happens when you do have the people that do have the privilege of being able to go out and and explore the world and see the world and understand different cultures and labor like you described, they don't just see the truth about the human condition. They come back with that shared experience to then distribute.

54:04 So when you come back when when you like, do see the world and you come back and you realize there's like the human condition everywhere, and people are people everywhere, and you understand that fully, you carry that now through every encounter in your life. You say to me, so when we to get a critical mass that we would mention some critical mass before to get a critical mass, you wouldn't mass, you wouldn't have to have every single person do that.

54:28 No, you just have to have enough people do that. To where? Then the whole sea changes with this new kind of understanding of what humanity is. And then we have to be forced to change the power structure of corporations. I don't know how to do it. I don't think communism, communism around the world has not proven to be the ideal either.

54:49 No, it's a mess in Russia. It's extremely corrupt. They've had a lot of corruption in China. There's a great book that is called The Party by. I have it in the back. It's wonderful. It was written about ten years ago by a Financial Times correspondent who lived in Beijing for many years. The best, absolute, best explication of all of the structure of the Communist Party in China.

55:14 But I think that the public sentiment change in this whole entire idea of measurements of success, if there was a cultural shift in how actual like people measured success. So like what? What it's considered successful and not successful, if that were able to to to shift based on like more metrics based reality of like how people are doing, like how how are you doing measurements of wellness and people were able to apply those internally.

55:41 And there's a lot of technology that's doing this now. Like, you know, smartwatches that have the biometric feedback and stuff like that, you can get some start to get some real time feedback on how you're doing, like how what your how, you know, how are you doing, how are you performing? And then how are your children performing or how are your loved one, how are your family performing?

55:57 And I think that if you start to like, say, look at the typical American right now, the measurement of success is like, are you famous, politically connected or wealthy or celebrity of something like this? Like kind of the. That's pretty much it. Yeah. I mean, that's like sort of like this idea of what success is and looks like.

56:13 But imagine if, if that were to somehow start to transform. And I think there's some possibilities here with social media and technology could be highly influencing in this dimension. They say, okay, let's look at how I'm doing and let's look at how my family is doing, my community and my state and my city. You know, let's see how all the let's let's look at the actual metrics, the measurements of data and how we're doing, and then use that as our measure of success.

56:35 And in contrast to other nations, even, like, how do you get rid of the huge number of people who work to disrupt society, to feed disinformation, to naive people, to create videos that are true? I think I weaponized I there's a lot of bad stuff. There is. I think you have to say of filters, yes, but you have to take their you have to take their power away through social punishment for one.

57:06 Okay. That's what way to do it. That not saying it's the only way and I'm not saying it's the only ingredient, but you have to have a cultural shift where we don't the only the lone inventor. We don't glorify that person who hoards the most. We instead glorify. We were talking about self-deprecation and it being essential to it culture.

57:29 Well, one of the other essential things is give. And, you know, we have to have that shift into open source communities where things are built by the community and, you know, by degrees. That's the shift we need. We need it's community built, it's community shared. It's, you know, we need to shift from a cathedral model where one group or person builds this thing and it comes to fruition perfectly, to the bazaar model where everybody participates, everybody's in.

58:03 And generally we move in this direction and eventually we get there, but everybody's involved. And then, you know, to and to expand on Chris's idea here and made me think of Star Trek The Next Generation. How what's the goal function here? What do you guys do? Well, the goal is to improve yourself. And that's the goal we have to shift to is yeah, we can use the technology to objectively monitor our success and what we're doing and why.

58:32 But the goal has to be I'm not competing against 20,000 others, I'm competing against me. And that takes that kind of chops down your ego, that kind of chops down the whole, you know, praise and adoration for the billionaire. It's it's I think that's the beginnings of it. But I'm not saying that's all of it. The the crave and the impulsion of the drive for the strongman leader is just the just the reflection of an internal weakness.

59:00 Anyway. So the only people that need this strong man leader is the weak. Yeah, well, well, it would someone to tell them what to do. I think this is unfortunately, it's been it's been a a war between the strongman leader and a a more equitable, decent, humane leader now. But even that now, I mean, look at Abraham Lincoln.

59:32 Look at what he was up against. I mean, he was to me. Oh, to a lot of us, he was a hero. And he he kind of stumbled into it. And, the world has gotten a lot more complicated and a lot dirtier since that happened. I think, to some extent, you're saying to get away from the Apollonian model because the Apollonian model really stresses not only the beauty of the individual, but also the domination of the few.

1:00:06 Yeah. And and I think wish do we need to go go back to dirty nature, second nature, a more equitable sharing of power? Do we really believe women can run things as well as men? I think probably run things better than men, but that's my personal opinion. Hey, my one big data point I keep coming back to is you all have a look at a recent study was women need more sleep because they use their brains more.

1:00:35 But a secondary a secondary one was women have a thicker, thicker corpus callosum, which is a bridge between two thirds of the brain. They have better connections. Yeah. So you guys can shove more data between the two hemispheres. You can multitask better. You can, you know, the and generally aren't is inclined to violence. Is this testosterone driven morons.

1:01:00 So let's try it for yourself. All right. Just kidding. All right, I just want. Can I just say one more thing? You can say whatever you want. Sure. Okay, I, I don't know how edit this, but what I want to say about why I think people should at least try and read the logo harp. Because. Because it is a vision of the choice between free will and a kind of mind slavery.

1:01:29 And I think that is what is happening now, and that there is a way out, even for people who idolize power, that there is a way to remember the lessons, that the good stuff, and that there is such a thing as doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing, and working for the right side and working for that larger community that you're talking about, and living with the uncertainty that we don't know, that we don't all have to be dispatched at the same time.

1:02:08 We need to know we need to cling to some individuality, but also learn to live in a social sphere. And I just hope we make it. I, yeah, but anyway, I did put a lot of thought into this, and I think that Naomi exemplifies that struggle, and eventually she finds she ends up doing the right thing. And it's not always easy.

1:02:38 It's often self-sacrifice. You don't make a lot of money, always doing the right thing. I'd be interested in finding out whether you one we would ever consider running for office, or whether you would be polluted by the amount of money that would be required and the interests that would push you to a leadership position, because I think you could do it.

1:02:59 We need more people like you. Appreciate that. The, you know, the the cliche thing I've heard said, but it fits so, so perfectly at the moment is that it's always darkest before dawn. And I really believe that, like with technology serving humanity, inevitably where it's the other way around instead of it to undermine, exploit, you know, take advantage of being used as a leverage, as a tool to, you know, extract and, and dominate.

1:03:26 If there's when, when, when that, you know, dawn kind of arises, which I think it really will through vanity because it's the truth. I think it's truth is that when we turn this technology to work for us, there's literally no limit to then what we can achieve. But as long as we continue to use it in, in, in seems like the trending direction to exploit, undermine, coerce, right advantage, dominate if we keep using it in that dimension, I think that we're have a high chance of ending up in a dystopian nightmare dystopian future.

1:03:57 But the truth, much like in the in the logo, hard work, you know, Naomi sees the truth. She gets the truth at the end. And the truth is that, you know, if we enable the better parts of our humanity and we pull through and we start putting technology in service up of ourselves, there's really nothing that can't happen positively.

1:04:15 Yeah. I mean, I think two of the major things here, I agree with everything you're saying. And I think really it's imagination in this book and moral inquiry really stand out. I mean, everything that we just talked about is in there. And, you know, you're another. Yeah. And, you know, actually in some of the reviews of your book, people mentioned those two things as being positive imagination and moral inquiry.

1:04:39 And, you know, I think that's what we've been doing here is examining our basis instincts through the lens of this thing, because, I mean, you really get a lot of tools to chip away at it, to look at it and some mirrors, some really bad for mirrors. So for somebody and for the people who don't like to read anymore, for whatever reason, the audiobook is going to come out.

1:05:01 We hope in September it'll be on audible. And, I'm working, I'm working with the publicist, and we may be doing a translation in Chinese for people who are more comfortable with that language. Cool. The book is available on Amazon. Ingram Spark Through Light Source, Barnes and Noble, and I hope we'll get it on Kobo writing life in a few others.

1:05:27 So neither direct to digital. So if some listener wants to right now just go out and buy it. What's the best the fastest way? Best. The easiest. Well, you could order it on Amazon and get it pretty fast. Okay. If you don't like Amazon, you can get an Epub or a soft pack. Right now, if you go into a Barnes and Noble store, they can order the book within, I believe 3 to 5 days and, the other and you can order it online on Barnes and Noble as well.

1:05:58 And I will be working on Kobo writing life. And there's another organization called Draft to Digital. I have to look into that one. So but as I said, the thing I'm most excited about now is that the audiobook is going to come out. Yeah, that's super exciting. So last question then about that is like, which if you don't mind sharing this, what supports you the most?

1:06:17 Like what gives you what gives you the best? What makes you the most money? What makes you the most money? What because all these different, you know, outfits, they they take very large portions. Which one? Which right now Amazon pays more. So we're sorry. People are tied with love people to go to their bookstores and ask for the book, because that way it'll get on the shelves and people will see it and maybe be curious.

1:06:42 Sure. Okay. They can also go to my website, Leaping Tiger press.com, because I have all these supplemental information about Naomi, and we have chapter excerpts. And of course, and there's a link through to purchase on the website as well. Oh yeah. Okay. So and it's also a pretty cool video of it's a 55 second video. I'll say it again.

1:07:03 It's what's the website a website one more time. Okay. Leaping tiger press.com. Leaping tiger press. Super. Thank you. Well there it is. Thank you.