Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch, and welcome to another episode of Metaviews, recorded live at the Academy of the Impossible, where it's a pretty snowy day and the goats are spending it in the barn because who the heck wants to leave?

And American depression is really what's on my mind.

I don't know about you, Ted, but it's kind of the subject du jour as we stick air economic catastrophe in the gullet.

But of course, every Meta Views episode is a spontaneous conversation.

We genuinely don't know where it's gonna go.

And normally I have up on the top right there a kind of agenda list, but I've left that off for today.

There is literally no agenda.

We will still follow our traditional format, which starts with the news, partly because Metaviews publishes a daily newsletter on Substack, which we like to promote.

But, Ted, as you know, the purpose of the news is to turn to our guest in the kind of peer to peer journalism sense of good news, bad news, dystopian news.

Hey, it's all news.

What do you got for us today, Ted?

Ooh, wow, you threw right at me.

Well, you got it.

I don't have to tell you.

At Midnight tonight, the US puts on, whatever it is, 104% tariffs on China.

What are we doing, folks?

So this is a new day for everyone, good, bad, or indifferent.

We shall see.

How about you?

What do you see?

Well, I was going to see the subtext there, which not a lot of people are paying attention to, is TikTok, because the deadline for TikTok is coming up.

And while the Trump administration initially was like, hey, let's make a deal, and there's a lot of consortiums that have come together that comply with the legislation.

The veto rests with China.

China fundamentally has the right to say to ByteDance, a Chinese company, no, you will not sell TikTok.

It will go dark in the United States rather than be sold to another buyer.

And I have seen reports that in this tit for tat tariff trade war that the Chinese have said, look, this puts TikTok off the table.

And I haven't seen the Americans acknowledge that or address that as yet.

And the people bidding are acting as if the bid is still going on.

But I think this could be a casualty of the larger escalation of the trade war.

But we will see.

I put this there because, yes, there is the impact of the tariffs, but there's a lot of young people who are gonna be pretty pissed off if they lose TikTok, and that is exactly the type of thing that could change the narrative generally.

I will also, under the news department, give you a heads up, Ted, that this is, as you know, your second appearance here on Meta Views.

And we have a practice, a ritual, if you were, that you have to leave the show today with some type of title as a correspondent.

And you know, we've had some people take geographic correspondence.

We've had other people completely eschew the title of correspondent.

For example, to give you three examples, I was just before we started recording, thinking of our Southern European correspondent who I have to invite on the show because I just returned from Madrid and he and I have been talking about doing an event in Spain.

I just finished recording with our Radical American Wackadoo, which is the name that I pause for a moment because that is how that Mike, who I spoke to only hours ago, and I'm blanking on his name.

That's what he has chosen.

And finally, there is Anna Melnikoff, who is our dimensional liaison, who has been doing very interesting interviews with us.

So there really are no restrictions, there's no bounds on the correspondent title that you will assign yourself.

But I'm giving you the heads up so that it can percolate in the back of your mind as our conversation continues.

Which of course brings us to our WTF segment, which ostensibly stands for what's the Future?

And this is a moment, I think, in time in politics and culture, where it feels good to think about the future.

It feels good to imagine, certainly in my case, a day where there isn't a lot of snow on the ground and we're back out in the sun and things are starting to grow again.

But Ted, what do you got for us?

What do you see on your event horizon?

Wow.

Well, the event horizon is getting shorter and shorter, which means we must be getting closer to dipping into the black hole, or events are surpassing our ability to track and navigate them.

Hopefully the latter.

But I do think, you know, look, the future is a human created phenomena.

It does not exist.

And so really it's the framework from which we're going to look at the future.

So rather than tell you what I see, maybe it's more how I see.

And for sure, in a rapidly changing world, you know, whatever we predict today is going to be wrong tomorrow.

So it's, it really is that, you know, to the, the meta view, how do we see all of it in a constantly changing context versus thinking yesterday's context will be tomorrow's and it won't.

So it's more navigating the changes with a sense of clarity as to our values, purpose, direction, all that, and flexibility and nimbleness to the new events as they approach us.

Right on.

And one of the things I try to wrap my head around in that context is the issue of complexity and how people deal with complexity.

Partly because I'm kind of comfortable with it and in fact gravitate towards it.

But I find I'm often having to not so much translate, but allow people to open themselves to complexity.

And that when you spoke about methods, that's sort of where I'm wrestling with things on a linguistic level.

Although, to your point about the future being fiction, I love to point out that we used to live in a society where our institutions ensured that the future never happened.

And the most dramatic example, of course, was the Catholic Church, which at its heyday ensured that tomorrow would be like today and that only in heaven would you achieve some sense of transcendence, some sense of difference.

Yet we now live in a society where, to your point, we all accept tomorrow's going to be different.

And we have an embrace of uncertainty in a way that is almost ahistorical, but I think very empowering for us as humans and human beings.

Which brings us to our feature segment, which normally we break it up into three pillars and we try to weave our conversation.

But today, as we embrace a more anarchic approach to our spontaneous conversation, we've eschewed or foregone any initial three pillars, although those three pillars will emerge spontaneously without us necessarily designating them or looking towards them.

But we really wanted today to be as spontaneous a conversation as possible because, Ted, of course, you successfully won your first appearance here on metiviews.

It is a kind of win, loss, pass, fail, where if you get invited back again, congratulations, you've won.

And this is where we get to go into advanced topics, to really go into the deep end.

And I don't mean that in terms of in depth, hard knocked philosophical discussion.

I just mean we can go into advanced mode as two rhetoricians are really appreciating the value of language and the value of a conversation.

So I will kick things off with my own question and say, Ted, what brings you back?

Ah, well, and I gotta be honest, you bring me back.

And it's one of the things I wanted to ask you some questions about because certainly I want to know, but I'm hoping your audience wants to know as well, because I initially referred to you because you refer to yourself as a transdisciplinary type individual.

And again, your Website would talk about spanning technology, politics, business, religion.

It's polymathic in a way that we look at all these disciplines.

My question to you might be twofold.

One, what has you be interested in all these disciplines?

And B, speaking of meta, what do you see, especially in today's light, as being consistent across them?

Or perhaps not.

I mean I like connecting the dots fundamentally.

And where there's a certain privilege and pleasure in connecting the dots within a single discipline, within a single specialization, it's fundamentally limited.

And to your larger question, and you may have to ask it again, cause not immediately, but when I misanswer, I think diversity fundamentally is the crux, the pivot, the conflict of our current moment and our near term future.

And I wish it wasn't like I wish there wasn't this reaction against diversity.

I wish diversity was just a normal word and not something that's been politicized and contentious.

But fundamentally that's my answer to your first question was I always felt a certain homogeneity within a certain discipline, that I needed to connect the dots between the disciplines to understand a single discipline.

And maybe it was because I lend myself to comparative thinking more than I do to other forms of learning and other forms of education.

I really need to use metaphor, I really need to compare and contrast to wrap my head around stuff.

But I really love finding the hidden areas, the blind spots as it were.

Even though blind spots, kind of an ableist phrase.

And that's where I think intuitively I started to go to different disciplines.

I started to connect politics, economics, history, philosophy, but then physics and chemistry and biology.

And then when you get into more advanced specializations, really still stitching the dots.

And my experience at university as an undergrad was very much dissatisfaction with any single major.

And in the end I ended up doing an independent major in which I called it network studies.

But it was basically that it was trying to find the commonalities between all these different disciplines.

And that I felt gave me a better education, gives we as people a better sense making capability of the world we find ourselves in.

And that is on some levels the essence of metaviews, that you have to connect the dots.

You cannot stay within your comfort zone, you cannot stay within your domain of expertise.

You have to be an idiot somewhere, you have to be a novice somewhere.

And that's where to go back to diversity.

I think that's why we need to be more humble, we need to be more vulnerable, we need to open ourselves to other perspectives, critical perspectives.

And that is I think both the Conflict, but also the solution, the remedy to the world that we find ourselves in.

But it's easy for me to articulate it after the fact.

I think what I have done quite honestly is embrace intuition from a very early age and just follow that intuition.

So when I'm doing it, it's hard to articulate it.

After I'm doing it, that's a whole lot easier.

So I'll flip that into a question to throw right back at you.

Are you the kind of person to think about methodology?

Is methodology something that kind of motivates you as a thinker, as a practitioner, as a student of the world?

And I ask that because very few people think that way.

Very few people have the literacy to think of methods.

I'm curious if that's part of your wheelhouse, for lack of a better phrase.

Ah, interesting.

Well, I will answer the question with a qu.

No, I want to answer with a question, but I'm going to say yes in the sense of.

Well, let me back up back to what I was hearing what you're saying.

I know you use the phrase connect the dots, but I might even into it, you know, see the common patterns, right.

That the dots are not points, but maybe waves.

Right.

Or whatever the right metaphor is.

And I think similarly method methodology could be heard as sort of what you were saying within a narrow thing.

This is how you do it.

I almost think of it as a, as a rigor of thought and to question assumption.

And if you don't explicitly structure your thinking exactly to what you were saying, we can get caught in our boxes.

For instance, one of my tricks will always be, you know, it's either A, B or C or something else.

In other words, something that we haven't even thought of.

If you don't allow for that, you could convince yourself there's a finite choice set.

The other one that from a rigor of not so much process.

But you know, my consulting days, we always would talk about the current state as the as is and the future state the to be.

Okay, but still, how many clients never want to be where they are?

We just want to get somewhere else and to have the rigor to say, I get that.

Let's take a full of accounting of where we are.

You would be surprised how unclear we are about where we are so that we then can be much more clear about where we're trying to get to.

So yes, method in rigor, not method, method in narrow constrained, you know, thought.

Yeah, yeah.

And to your point, I've always felt that self awareness is aspirational, elusive, but quite scarce.

And in even those who do profess a certain level of self awareness, it's contextual.

But all you need is someone who is observant to start describing you and you start realizing there are aspects to yourself that you were not aware of that you had not realized, because you don't have the critical distance to see who we are or to see how other people perceive us being the nature that it is.

And your point about emergence, I think is very fair, that whatever we see, it doesn't preclude what could happen, which is anything, quite frankly.

Well, to your point of diversity, and you're right, it's become a bit of a trigger word.

But you know, you could call it heterogeneity of thought, of background, of perspective.

And if you look just to nature from once we have come and the more sophisticated model we've seen yet on this planet, it is about diversity and testing different paths, right?

Whether it's by intention or accident.

And it, number one, it creates new opportunistic species, as we've seen over the last couple hundred million years, and it prevents wiping out all of life.

And so similar, I think even in social context we can get, well, look at business, we get blindsided.

Name the case study, Kodak being stuck to the old film market when the digital world came out, right?

Cars, the way you made cars in Tesla, which has become a four letter word, but give him credit for thinking differently and then disrupting an industry.

So disruption is healthy, it moves us forward, it causes challenge, but in the end we are better for it.

And diversity of thought and application.

So yay to that.

And the image you evoked there was for a couple of decades now, I've been waiting for people to be disrupted out of the mainstream media cycle.

And unfortunately there are still many millions of North Americans who are locked into their Fox News, their cnn, some still getting newspaper delivery, versus I feel more empowered by having to do the work to construct my own digital environment, my own digital sources, my own critical literacy, which empowers me, but it takes a lot of labor and I think it's the convenience, the inertia, the, the lack of disruption that has kept a lot of people in that alternate timeline, that alternate time zone.

And unfortunately it's a source of depression for me partly because of the way in which it drives our current political environment on a very superficial and a very stupid level.

Remind me, where do we find you today in California?

TED Santa Monica, California, a couple blocks from the ocean, Beautiful day and how.

Did you find yourself in such a beautiful part of the country?

Well, I lived in Japan for six years.

I ran a company there and lost my hair in the process.

And after I left, corporate was running a subsidiary there and I came back to the States and I had been in San Francisco after Tokyo, San Francisco feels like a shrunken sweater that got in the dryer.

Yeah.

And it was an oh, shit moment.

And landed here.

And of course, haven't left because back to our conversation.

One of the things besides the weather is the diversity of thought, the ability to come here and reinvent as who you are and whatever you want to be, and the freedom of people to say, that's great, that is a rich environment to go back to your maybe farming experience.

Those are fertile grounds for possibility.

So, yeah.

Although, you know, there's.

There's a privilege for me in coming from a city like Toronto.

And Toronto is similar to Los Angeles, is similar to New York, is almost similar to Chicago in that these are cities where reinvention is the constant, where at any time any person can say, you know, I'm going to be a different person tomorrow.

And not only do people accept it, they celebrate it and they want to get behind it.

And that is different from where I currently live.

And I recognize, I was explaining this to someone else the other day, that there's a certain privilege in having that urban culture incubate your identity, your sense of self, and then be able to go somewhere that is inherently conservative, where you are still inoculated, you are still surrounded by this.

This rigor of experimentation, this rigor of evolution, of fluidity, of identity.

And that's where I come at nature with the yes and rather than the either or, because there is a more freedom of expression.

And that's part of why I do a podcast.

That's part of why I maintain connections with people like yourself who live in places like Santa Monica.

Because that's my cultural vibe, that's my cultural frequency versus I am making friends here.

But it's different and it's a different vibe.

And in fact, to be derogatory for a moment, the first thing that my partner and I were shocked by when we moved here was the literal lack of genetic diversity, that everyone kind of looks the same versus we're used to a global city where genetically every single person is so radically different from everyone else that you have that sensibility.

And again, you take it for granted, but it speaks to how large the urban rural divide really is.

Well, Q.

And I want to.

I would love to get this question in on you in that context, there is the place in which we are.

Got that.

But we're in a digital place right now and it's a place that you did create this meta view right space.

And I love that you have this like what you almost call an open source intelligence like osint and you know, that is a universe of its own.

I have a question for you.

You have fascinating people like me on now.

I was listening to a variety of your people and I wonder of all these individual perspectives, how either have you or would you like to, or could you, you know, use that as fodder to create a common how do we get this information that's being brought here to expand and impact other people?

So those are several questions and I will try to answer those questions.

But again, if you feel I'm misanswering or dodging, feel free to double down in in the spirit of a spontaneous conversation.

And I'll start with my own little humble brag that I am the co author on the original academic paper that defines open source intelligence.

I'm pretty sure we published it 2001, maybe 2002.

Quite a number of citations.

So yes, this concept of open source intelligence has always fascinated me, me especially on the level of how do we educate society, how do we inform the citizenry, how do we raise all boats, as it were, so that we have the society we want without expecting education to do it, but to do it ourselves as a world?

And I have collected a motley crew of fascinating characters over the now 25 years that I've been doing this.

You know, some of whom really hate attention and the public spotlight.

So it's tough to get them to play the podcast game.

Others are, we've done over the years salons, both in person and online.

And salons are a kind of methodology where you take the spontaneous conversation to the group.

And it has produced some fantastic insights, experiences, and the best to go to your point of scale, for a couple of years we partnered with this woman who was running the.

I want to say the House of.

No, the House of Commons.

It was called the House of Commons.

It was an underground restaurant.

She was a chef and she had connections with the Toronto restaurant industry.

So we would do these fantastic meals in which each course you'd have a wine, a plate and a conversation topic and all three would be paired perfectly and it would be this brilliant manifestation of ideas, food, wine and company and culture that was the peak kind of Metaview's salon.

But it is a little like Herding cats.

And to go where I've always aspired to, a kind of open source intelligence agency, the kind of people who have been attracted to have retained, like there's a little bit of individualism to it.

Right.

I come at this more with a collectivist lens of I really want to get everyone together.

Like, you know, a line I love to use is there.

There would be no Keith Richards without Mick Jagger, there'd be no Paul McCartney without John Lennon, and vice versa.

Right.

Like, there's an inherent collaboration in art and in media that, that I think is integral to, to this.

But also, if I might be so bold, it's almost as if our moment wasn't there yet and now it is.

Right where previously we were all kind of on the periphery, on the margin, all just weirdos.

But as Hunter Thompson once said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

And it does feel like there's an opportunity for this cast of characters to really embody a narrative, a story, a play, an experience, let alone any of the other million things that we could brainstorm.

But I think where I have been hesitant is in my 30 years of professional experience, the more I try, the more I fail, the more I don't try, the more I succeed.

And it's a bit of a paradox.

And I say that in the sense that I think when I try, I'm way too ambitious and I overestimate the appetite of the audience versus when I don't try, it's easier for the audience to come to me.

And I'd say it's somewhere in the middle.

And I've yet to be able to find that sweet spot of kind of where it is in the middle.

But again, I'm rambling here, so bail me out with a follow up question.

Well, I also want to watch our.

Time because I love that.

Just a quick one, of course, because.

For the record, when you don't have me throwing back a question at you, that's when you know you've gotten me and I'm on the, the heels of my feet.

Well, it's on the cusp of our conversation.

So, you know, obviously as a coach, I love a distinction and often the distinction is between being attached to an outcome and simply being committed to it.

Yes.

And I think what happened is we get attached to us figuring it out versus saying, hey, the ball's going to go over the fence and inviting everyone else into it.

But yeah, so just a piece there, you know, to our conversation of what's changing in the world and that the ability to think, see forward is shorter and shorter.

Maybe you are exactly right.

That consider that the.

The open source information.

Excuse me, I think you said intelligence.

Which I.

Oh, yes.

Consider a level up from information.

Right?

Data.

There's information.

Information in context creates, you know, you know, experience or wisdom.

We're talking diamonds in the rough.

That.

That's always been the goal here, right?

Like, crush that carbon as much as you can so that you get the real gems of insight and intelligence.

That's the metaview's goal.

Yes.

Well, and to, I think what you might be accidentally up to, or maybe intentionally, you know, the way humanity has come to think started all the way back in our caveman times when, you know, it mattered how far something was from you.

Our language is rooted in this physical existence.

And now we're in this literally right now, non real experience, right?

And our language is not aligned with it, nor is our thinking, because our thinking also thinks in those constructs.

So perhaps the quote unquote, intelligence is a new model of thought that will allow humans to maybe, you know, move to the next level together and actually create a metahuman sort of consciousness that we're desperately bumping up against the glass ceiling 100%.

And this is where I think you and I share the emergence phenomena that you kind of walk the walk.

You anticipate these things, but it is.

What you describe is so profound.

Who are we to pre imagine it?

If we're wise, we recognize it when it happens, right?

And we happen to bring ourselves and the right people, the right cast of characters to sort of make that happen.

But you raise another problem.

I have straddled both the old economy and the new economy simultaneously, and I've done this in a way that commits to neither and conversely, doesn't fully take advantage of either.

And I'll give you two examples.

The new economy we could, for lack of better purposes, call digital media, right?

And this is where people make money on YouTube, they make money on TikTok.

They do all these things.

And as a Canadian, there's an inherent disadvantage there because, for example, I have a video.

What's that?

Because you guys are honest?

No, no, because TikTok has a payment program for Americans, not Canadians.

So, for example, I posted a video last Thursday of my dogs and goats that currently has 10 million views.

And if I was American, that would be maybe ten grand, right?

Due to all.

And this, I have one with 30 million views.

I have a lot of Tiktoks of my dogs.

I could be an animal media proficient If I lived in America, but not in Canada.

Right.

As one example of how the economics of that are different.

So I've always kind of leaned away from that new world.

Cause it's kind of weird, the whole algorithm shit.

The old world, to use a Hollywood example, is agents.

And I was talking to someone earlier today that the entertainment industry has still intermediaries, and it's agents who right across the entertainment industry, they're the ones who fundamentally are your advocate.

They help you have a career or not have a career.

So I've had Canadian speaking agents my entire life, and it's been very successful, and it's allowed me to have a decent career as a public speaker here in Canada.

But there's limits to that.

Right?

And fundamentally, if I, as a talented individual, had an agent in America previous to the current fucking administration, that's redundant.

Yeah.

It would have been a different scenario.

Right?

But part of me is like, no, fuck the old.

I want to figure out the new.

So you see the paradox that it's not just the timing of the philosophy, of the ideas, of the language, of the culture, but it's also the business models, because they seem to be straddling both sides.

Both are trying to figure out what's going on.

The influencers tend to be the most toxic.

And the people who are still within the old industry are, you know, for lack of a better phrase, the Nepo babies.

The people who have kind of inherited, they've graduated, They've got the social connection to get in.

And if you don't have the social connection, you're kind of shit out of luck.

I'm rambling.

You got to bail me out here.

Well, I hear you.

I mean, it's.

It's sort of the same conversation.

We may well be in a transition point to something new, and we're bumping up against it.

I.

I had great faith 15, 20 years ago that our quote, unquote, young people would say, get out of the office, Boomer, we're going to take over.

And they didn't.

I know, indifferent, Boomer wouldn't go and whatnot.

But it is silly that we have this idea of different currencies.

It is silly that we have these ideas of my country, your country, and it's okay for me to dump shit in your backyard, but don't put it in mine.

Right?

And until we actually move from this small tribal mentality which continues there to your point, to be able to understand, comprehend collective as a planetary collective, and of course, now maybe interplanetary, we're Just going to be stuck in the siloism.

So back to maybe, as you were saying, these two models, the future and the past.

It made me think of the hemispheres of the brain, the very rational sort of linear, logical thinking that's done very great things for us.

And then back to your intuition and the artistic, the holistic, and bringing these two into what looks like a paradox.

But it's sort of interesting when things are paradoxical, paradox.

It gives you an underlying, you know, interdependence of these things.

Then until we understand them as such with their silos.

I think you may have just hit the nose or the cord of our mutual appreciation society here, partly because my entire professional political, emotional philosophy has been what you just described has been trying to unite the hemisphere, trying to connect my logical intellect with my emotional intuition and recognize that they are one.

Right.

It's the sage who walks the path that fundamentally is the very elusive, very difficult.

But that is fundamentally my lifelong project.

And the joke that I've used to describe that is what do you call a society of multiple paradoxes?

A paradise.

And you know, it speaks to a number of different ways in which there is a great opportunity in front of us and tremendous contradiction that makes that opportunity feel just beyond our grasp.

So personally, I'm okay with time, but I'm conscious that you may not be.

So I'm great.

I'm going to rope us into a side tangent, but still, you're welcome to pursue your questioning and, and line of thinking as you see fit.

One of my methods is the salon, and I alluded to that earlier, that I like bringing together a group of people who do not entirely all know each other and have a spontaneous facilitated conversation.

And what's interesting is it kind of rests upon everyone respecting the conversation.

Like there has to be a certain base social contract.

And that's part of the invite only basis, right, of how I bring people in and they know that I'm doing this and they know that there's a certain etiquette of respect.

Everybody else, express yourself how you see fit, but respect is the basis of the group conversation.

And it's good when you sort of have that.

But I've been itching to do this again.

And Ted, I think you would really enjoy participating.

So I have two challenges for you.

One we can address right now in our current brainstorm, and then the other is for you to kind of take home and think about.

The first is I have an itching to do it, but I don't yet have the topic.

So Let us discuss the topic and the second before we return to the first is for you to bring one or two friends, right?

So one or two people who you think would be like, hey, you know, I met this Jesse guy, he's got this crazy approach to conversations and he's doing this salon thing.

It's recorded, it's online, but I think it would be really fun.

But back to number one, to your point, I've got this motley crew of characters who when I say, hey, I've got a salon, they're like, we're down.

But lately the only reason I haven't organized one over the last couple of months is I just don't feel I've got the right topic.

Ted, any thoughts?

Let's brainstorm.

If I were to say to you, hey, I've got these really interesting, really eclectic, really creative people who will blow your mind when they answer any kind of question, what is the question?

What is the topic?

What is the thing that we should collectively wrap our heads around, that in particular that you, Ted, would benefit from us wrapping our heads around.

Because that's the other trick is that if we can have a topic that everyone thinks, yes, I would benefit from having a conversation with other smart people on that topic.

That's the secret sauce.

Well, I'll just spontaneously throw out.

You know, I had an interesting conversation with someone last week and she, she said something that was very obvious to her, but it hadn't been to me, which is of course, that humans project into the future.

We started that whole conversation and you know, you're, you know that your, your perception creates the future and all that sort of language.

But she equally said the same mental framework, the, the, the, the way in which you see things reflects on how you see the past.

Yes, right there is.

And it's so easy to say, so hard to really get.

There is only this moment and there really, there's some facts of the past.

This thing happened at 3:00 and that thing.

But my story of the past is completely different than yours and others.

And it's to your question, it is that mental, you tell me framework, mental model, the way of conceiving and perceiving the way things are.

If we could.

What is the right word?

Create a common ontology, for lack of better term, what are the objects, events, stages, and how can we have a common language from a conceptual level to then really have an accurate assessment of what is and isn't versus the hallucinations that we think are basically our story?

So whatever filter is I think that would be an interesting conversation.

Ontology.

That's it.

Well done.

That will be the subject of the salon.

I think it is very Zeitgeist.

It's very au courant to mangle some German and then some French.

I really like that a lot.

And I really like the way ontology, also, to that point of human projection, gives all the participants a lot to project their own hopes and ideas and challenges.

Because the other word that was coming up, ontology, is much better.

It's much more inclusive, it's much more wide ranging.

But the other word that I've been wrestling with in a paradoxical way is ideology.

Because ideology is something that I've always.

That has on some levels, repulsed me, right?

Like, I've always disliked ideologues, and I've always disliked rigid ideologies.

But at the same time, as someone who loves ideas, I recognize the value of ideology, that it kind of helps do exactly what you were describing.

And one of the other conversations I've been having on our sibling podcast, Red Tory, is that our current ideologies do not help us understand this moment.

Because to your point, we're looking at the future through the lens of the past, and a lot has changed.

There are a lot of new factors.

There are a lot of new variables.

And at the same time, I used to have this comparison where I'd say the 20th century was all about ideology fostered by ideologues.

And the 21st century is going to be about pedagogy fostered by pedagogues.

Because in the 20th century, we were following ideas because we thought ideas would set us free.

But now we really recognize that learning is what makes us human and learning is what empowers us as humans.

And I was hoping that the leaders of the 21st century would be teachers, would be learners, would be people who help us wrap our heads around pedagogy.

In the sense of learning and teaching.

We kind of have the opposite of that right in which our leaders are not only the opposite of teachers, but we are going more.

This is why ontology really feels like the right concept and right phrase, because unfortunately, my pedagogy prediction really seemed to have fallen flat.

And maybe ontology will help correct our course.

Well, twofold ontology, I think, is the study of being, but it's also, you know, we think of hierarchies.

We're very good at thinking in hierarchies.

But then in ontology, you can have all the cross references between these things, which creates that much more Rich, diverse set.

So it needs to have enough structure, right.

But not so much that it's limiting and that's the game.

But what I like about the being part is I think we need to get back to foundations.

And I say this because on the one hand, there's climate change, so there's our whole relationship with nature, which I think we need to be interrogating and examining and being more open and vulnerable to.

Second, there's this whole artificial intelligence freak show, which again brings up issues of being, of who we are, what it means, and whether we are creating a new being, what that means, yada, yada, yada.

But then there's your point of illusion and what is real and what does it mean to be who we are in a cultural sense, in a social sense, in a informational intelligence sense.

It feels like we got a huge basket of stuff from which we would then have all sorts of other things that, you know, allow for fun insight and fun play.

Well, I think, you know, to your point that we, I.

Right.

We associate these with our physicality.

Right.

And so we're very, very much entrenched in the physical universe.

But I'm going to say that the entirety of what we've just done over the last.

Whatever it's been has been ideas through a can, you know, with a string on it.

It's called words.

But none of it was real.

It was ideas.

Well, hold on though.

I was ready to allow you to do the argument of none of it was real.

But if your argument is that it's not real because ideas, you lose me there, because ideas are very real.

Well, we have a philosophical conversation.

I mean, it's not physical then.

Forgive me, right?

But even then, I think ideas are kind of physical.

Like I say this in the.

I'm including the microscopic and the bacterial.

And a powerful idea will change the way in which you are wired.

And there is an actual physical imprint of that, let alone what could be happening in your gut.

So again, this is where I get off into a little bit of abstraction.

I acknowledge to your point, anyone who says the only way to fix this is by doing right, so you're right, I limited by not saying my and something else.

So to your point, idea probably has a real component and a non real.

Right?

So again, so to your point, the who you are in the world, yes, we tend to orient me, my belongings, my stuff, my friends.

But you'd said this earlier, like who you are to other people, that's not a physicality, that's a perception that's a non physicality that very quote unquote real in an experiential sense, but just not in a literal physical sense.

And so there is a increasingly non physical aspect of us, who we are, what we do, that continues to expand with AI and all, and yet we're trying to shove it in a physical bubble.

We need a new metaphor.

Well, and let's riff on that for a moment.

I agree with you 100% that we need more than a new metaphor, we need a new culture.

And within that culture exists metaphor and exists language.

But to attempt to try to bring our conversation to a relative close, not yet, but to start seeing where the exit is.

And I hope that I've been successful in parlaying or disabling or deferring distracting some of your questions to keep my identity as much of a mystery as possible.

But it strikes me that what you were just describing reminded me of reputation.

Because where I feel the United States government, the Trump administration is making a really arrogant mistake, is really damaging the reputation of the United States 100%.

And I say that because they focus on things they can quantify that they think are real, that they think are tangible.

And yet there is nothing more powerful than reputation.

And it is entirely ephemeral, it is entirely perceived, and yet it is also real and translates to real things.

And very few people, I believe, understand the value of trust and reputation and cultivate trust and reputation in a sustainable manner.

And I kind of feel one of the learning opportunities right now of United States government policy is how they are so radically foolishly sabotaging their own reputation and credibility on the international stage.

No argument.

And I'll throw this, forget all the politics.

I think we have small minded people who just don't understand complexity.

That's it.

Yeah, 100% and corrupt and all that stuff.

But what you call United States again we refer to as this continental space.

I'll push back and say yes, we have buildings, we have cities, we have monuments and come see them all.

But the US and democracy, right, is again an idea.

Yes.

Much of what you speak of, it's a concept that everyone, you know, we just, yes, there was a truthism to this and we've literally to back to your synapses.

We have erased something that in the non physical sphere is becoming very physical and it may become confrontational.

What a shame for a country who invented branding, took consumerism to the nth level and then to your point, the most the highest leverage thing you can have is a brand.

But maybe, maybe that is the silver lining.

Like maybe that is the light at the end of the tunnel.

And, you know, in other conversations I've had, I've sort of said, you know, when is Hollywood going to step up and play their role in this current battle?

Because we are seeing a situation in which a good idea could really make a difference and not just a good idea.

I think part of what we're discussing today is a good philosophy, a good culture that is inclusive in the sense that people want to belong to it, but it advances us, it gets us past this conflict, it gets us past this morass, it gets us past this kind of friction point that we find ourselves in, that if we keep pushing the old ideas at this friction point, it'll break.

But if we sweep it up with new ideas, that fundamentally is an opportunity to heal, to refocus, to return to the aspirations that were America, to return to the aspirations that are democracy, and to bring us back full circle.

That's what I've always done really well, that my relationship with reality is tenuous enough that I can get into an idea in a way that allows it to take off.

And that's why, personally, I've always found Los Angeles and New York very welcoming, because for different reasons, those are cities where ideas are welcome, where ideas can take off, where crazy ideas at the very least have an airing compared to other parts of our world, where new ideas are attacked or shit on or dismissed or marginalized.

And that's where I think there is the kernel of a greater future, of a resurgent democracy, provided we don't succumb to the kind of historical determinism of oh yeah, I saw it in the past.

So therefore it's guaranteed it's gonna happen in the future.

So with that in mind, I will contradict myself.

Maybe we're not entering the next great American Depression.

Maybe it's just a head fake and there will be an opportunity for things to turn around.

It is the last dying lunge.

And had Trump not been elected, it would have been the end of an era of sorry, but male chauvinistic, ego driven, corrupt control, all that stuff.

Right?

And I do think I have.

I think people are smarter than we give them credit.

The problem is they've forgotten that they're smart enough and think someone else knows.

Better to now they're not given the opportunity.

Well.

Or not taking it.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Because you did.

Although it's.

That's different.

And I say that's different in the sense that I'm not American.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And granted, there's different ways that keep Canadians stupid and there's different ways that prevent Canadians from taking that opportunity.

In my case, it really was a confluence of special events, obviously culminating in my parents.

But I say this because my parents were part of a culture and community of people who fled the United States, right?

Draft dodgers who were then part of an intentional community of people who were fleeing the Vietnam War.

And so it created a kind of counterculture that I was then kind of inoculated or raised in.

And I think that's where it's important that we celebrate places like LA and New York and we celebrate places that are not entirely American, but still part of America, because that's where you do have these types of exceptions, granted.

Sorry, go ahead.

Well, so I want to just.

Again, I hear you And I think LA, NY, and let's not hear them as places as much as mindsets.

And those live all over the place, in every population, in every neighborhood, that mindset is alive.

And we need to let those people know you're not crazy.

Open your mouth and do something.

Yes, you can.

And okay, let's bring that full circle because to me, that would be a hypothetical scenario, a meta views hypothetical scenario.

And I say this because we have an opportunity with these types of digital communities, right?

We have an opportunity to reach people who do not have access to the urban cosmopolitanism that celebrates change, that celebrates fluidity.

But we can create and provide those spaces online and we can do so in a way that is incredibly profound.

And this is an area that I have studied this particular part of the marketplace because there have been a lot of startups, there have been a lot of enterprises that have attempted to do this.

And where most of them have failed is twofold.

A lack of a properly participatory culture, because there would still be too.

It would be too many lurkers, right?

What has worked for metaviews is the people who come to a salon.

Everyone comes to participate, right?

Like nobody is lurking.

They understand that there is a responsibility to participate.

And I haven't seen that elsewhere.

People neglect that.

And then the other piece is governance, that people don't anticipate conflicts, they don't recognize the need for conflict resolution.

They don't recognize the need that in many cases you'll have cliques, right?

Or factions develop and you need to bring them together, right?

You need to constantly be programming.

So I'll go further.

And even a name drop here.

So there is this one enterprise called Inter intellect.com kind of spelled like it sounds.

I N T E R I N T E L l e c t.com they had a lot of success at the peak of the pandemic, when everyone was really kind of lonely and seeking connection.

And they clearly have some funding because they're still going, even though they are now a kind of Potemkin village of once they once were.

But the idea is, right?

And they used the language of salons and they meant to be a kind of platform for people, for anyone to organize salons.

So I joined, thinking I would bring the medivue salons there and that they would be an opportunity to find new people and whatever.

But I was greatly disappointed with their culture, which is very kind of passive and like, you know, one entertainer, everyone watching rather than everyone participating.

And they're overly focused on monetization, Right.

To the point that, like, you can't have free participants.

Right.

Like everyone has to pay and everything has to be tied to Stripe and everything has to be tied to PayPal.

And for me, like, I acknowledge monetization is important and has a role, but it is secondary to culture.

Right.

If you do not foster a culture in which people want to be there, in which people love it and they want to be part of it, then it doesn't matter if you monetize, right?

You have to get the joy first, then you get in the.

You pass.

Anyway, I digress.

We could go on and on and on.

I'll.

Yes.

And that.

Yes, I feel strongly about this too.

Too much to share in a short segment.

I listened to a radio segment years ago and that's what really started me on my journey.

And it was called these things, I think.

And I have yet to find out where I heard that.

If I made it up, I could swear with npr I have.

But it inspired me just to ask, what do I think?

What do I think that, like, it's kind of a who am I?

But it's really deeper and.

Well, the point is, if there's not something you are curious to know about, then all these contexts and forums and salons, there's no personal investigation that you're curious about.

And without that, it's stuff.

Yes.

So I kind of invite people to listen within and.

And what is it you could be curious about?

Yeah, And I'd go even further.

Like, what's at stake for you?

What's your stake?

Right.

And it doesn't have to be substantive, it doesn't have to be monetary.

It could be spiritual, could be emotional, could be a learning project.

Right.

I'M learning X.

But you got to have some skin in the game.

There's got to be a reason for you to care.

Because the thing about inter intellect that I couldn't handle was like in the average salon and granted they were still only getting five people, but even if they got 10 or 15, 2/3 of the cameras would be off.

Right?

And you can't do that.

Everyone has to be present, everyone has to be looking at each other.

You all have to be.

And that.

It frustrates me that professors tolerate that in graduate level seminars.

It frustrates me that event organizers tolerate that.

Like maybe you're not doing enough to incentivize people to turn their cameras on, but like you have to have that human connection, otherwise what's the point?

Well, and we could go on this thing.

I did a lot of work once upon a time with Landmark Education and people have all their thoughts on it, but they had a couple of interesting, you know, what they call distinctions.

One of course was integrity.

And we could talk all about what that means, just fundamentals.

But one of those is also taking responsibility and being accountable for something.

If it's not your space and you're a participant, shame on you.

We co own this conversation and if you're not, then you're not co leading.

We don't need co followers 100%.

And granted, I think there's an important gradient or scale there because not everyone can participate in the same way.

So I think it's important to kind of make a subjective grade.

But there has to be that moral commitment, there has to be that desire.

And this goes back to my kind of driving passion to, for lack of a better phrase, unite the hemispheres in the brain, right?

That if someone is purely logical and not emotion, they are not making the most of their thinking.

If they're purely emotional and not logical, they're not really connecting with their needs on a fundamental level.

So there has to be this connection between learning and joy and risk and new ideas and emergence and connection.

And it's very difficult to kind of present that in a coherent manner.

But once people experience it, they can't go back, right?

It becomes something like for me, I can't go back to school, for example.

Example.

Right.

I can't sit in the seat for that very long.

I want to get up and move around.

So it's.

This gets back to, I think, the larger meta view that we've been discussing, which is we feel that there is this new society amongst us.

We feel that we are in this moment of history, where anything is possible.

And yet it feels like we are still using the language, we are still using the modes, we are still using the configuration of the 20th century, when instead we need to reconfigure ourselves with each other to take advantage of this moment, to make the most of this moment, the carpe diem.

And it frustrates me that we feel this, we see this, but it feels like there's one little last step to make that happen.

And maybe ontology is the piece, is the key to opening that up.

It could be, it could be.

I'll, you know, I'll just share this that I think.

Of course, we're all born brilliant, right?

And we're kind of untaught to think, you know, wildly, imagine wildly.

And it's.

Look, you and I been at this for how many years to unwind?

And so your frustration may be, it may be built into the, the, the being that evolved to survive in a physical world and we just ain't got the capacity to deal with this.

Non physical AI might be our partner in this space.

Okay.

On the other hand, it could also be that we, this needs to happen at the formation level.

Start working with young people and let's just throw a crazy idea.

Why do we have a young people salon?

I'm down.

I, I will let us discuss that now, but before we do, I gotta quickly respond to something else you just said.

Actually, no train went right off the track.

Let's go back to the young people.

It all comes down to their leadership and consent.

And I say this in the sense that we have had young people.

When I say young people, really, I mean like 21, 2019, participate in our salons and under the right circumstances, that is, I think their family or their parents were also involved.

It was great.

I have in my podcasting journey, been desperately trying to find younger guests and younger people to talk to.

And I have been greatly disappointed in the experiences I've had with them, partly because I felt that the critical thinking skills were just not there and their willingness to go on that path was also not there.

But which it is to say, I'm game.

The problem is I worry about us as old people selecting like, I would rather create a scenario in which we were so attractive to those young people that they came to us.

That is they self selected themselves.

So maybe it's a design and framing issue, not so much the ontology one, but another one where we frame the subject in a way that it is very tantalizing to the type of young people that we would desire versus I've had some bad experiences in terms of an old people and other old people trying to recruit young people because there always seems to be a kind of cognitive bias that gets us the wrong or the not randomly sampled young people to be more apt or appropriate there.

Well, and so I totally hear you and maybe it's not for us to be in that damn room.

So, you know, let's talk about the kinds of conversations that 10, 12, 14, 16 year olds want to be having and what would be a format that would be cool for them and you know, create the space, but have them lead it, you know what I mean?

And maybe coach the people so that they can develop language around this and have them create something of their own out of their own, not from us or by us.

And I know companies that have attempted to do that in the past and the ones that were successful became very profitable agencies because to understand what that particular cohort is thinking, saying and doing has always been incredibly valuable intelligence.

Because it does feel like we are now back into the methodology part of the conversation of how one builds open source intelligence, let alone how one productizes it.

We've still been talking about the joy of the process because that's really been the secret to mediview success is the journey's got to be a lot of fun.

And in being a lot of fun, that means that the outcome can be to be determined.

Right.

That it can be classically emergent.

I feel sorry.

Go ahead.

No, please.

Well, I'll say yes.

And your thing.

I know it's.

Look, when we talk about the US presidency, it's, you know, like 51% of the people said, you know, I want that.

It's not like everyone mad to have a breakover effect.

Right.

If the number is 50%, after which we agree that it's not I don't feel well, it's I don't feel good, then that's what it becomes.

Right?

So language can morph just like anything else.

But if we have these children, you and I are having an idealistic conversation.

You could say that's childlike.

There's a lot of adults that.

Right.

Think that way.

A whole other conversation I've been having with people is the greatest disappointment of my life was to realize there are no adults, that for the most part we are children really just trying to figure things out.

We're waiting for the adults to show up.

They've never showed up.

And we got a bit of a Lord of the Flies scenario here.

And we're trying to come to terms with it.

It's true.

We are digressing.

We're running all over the place.

Are there questions that you came to this session with that you feel have not been addressed?

As I start to lean more towards wrapping us up well again and concluding this chapter of our ongoing conversation, the.

Curiosity, and I think it's showing up through our conversation is who are you as a commitment, a possibility?

I'm not sure the right wording.

Right.

Because yes, there's you, and then it makes it sound like you.

But if we take a look at your body of work, we could say that it's in there.

And my question might be, again, for you, for us, you're out here doing it.

You're carrying the flag, you're having the people talk, and then they go off and do their thing.

How do we help you?

What do you need from this community that would help you continue what it is you're up to?

I mean, that's an excellent question.

The short answer is a shit ton of money.

So if you know Warren Buffett and you want to put a line in his will, we could do a lot with that.

But you said something earlier that I want to come back to, and it was getting into how people connect.

And I think I've always been an individual on certain levels, and I've had individualist tendencies, but I am also a little alarmed by the narcissism in our society.

And I suppose what I desire is frameworks for people to work together, frameworks for people to connect, frameworks for people to recognize that as human beings, we've evolved to live with each other, right?

To be social, to cooperate, to collaborate.

And I feel that we've lost that to go to our theme on a linguistic level.

So part of what I've tried to do is create environments for that to happen in new ways, in emergent ways.

Part of what I would desire to go back to, the podcast idea is to cultivate a cast of characters like yourself that are geographically distributed, right?

So that no matter whether it's climate change, whether it's bad policies, whether it's hunger, that we've all got each other's back, that we can all connect with each other.

I mean, that's really abstract, but that's the answer to the question.

That's kind of what I want to do with meta views.

And I suppose on a basic level, it's, I say, hey, I'm gonna do a salon, and all you motherfuckers show up and have a great Conversation and connect with each other.

Go.

Yeah, this is pretty cool.

I like all this metaviews thing.

It's really connecting the dots biologically in terms of actual human beings who granted, are connecting digitally, but are nonetheless learning of each other and becoming stronger as a group.

So to summarize, I love the idea that sum is greater.

The whole.

What is it?

The whole is greater than the sum.

Some of the parts.

Yeah.

Yes, that thing.

That's what I want to achieve.

That would be the ideal if I had a infinite budget to do so.

Great.

But even with no money, that is the focus.

Well, you may have answered it and perhaps that's what we do.

Look, I appreciate you having me on this thing, but this message won't get out if your message isn't get.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's the mutual aid part.

As being an entrepreneur yourself and assuming there's others that feel it's important to get these conversations out there.

You know, this may be a new TED Talk stage where you are facilitating thought leadership.

Right.

And keyword leadership.

It's one thing to say these things, I think, but there's a.

What do we do with this?

Yeah, we're not necessarily creating burden, but if we.

If we have leaders, which we do.

You have a reach.

Yes.

There are other people who have a reach.

There are people who have tremendous reach that we can impact half the planet with.

Not a big lot of people.

And let's just focus on America right now.

That's a big enough task.

You know, again, nothing like a wake up call.

I think this certainly will wake people out of a slumber.

And I don't know that we have the answers.

I think we all have the answers inside.

I'm bullish on people and you have to be.

I think people are more smart than they give themselves credit.

And it's sort of like your parents believing in you.

We have to hold people to a higher level than they hold themselves.

And to your point, I think we have a moral commitment to do the opposite of dumbing down, that we need to be communicating with ourselves and other people, not only on the assumption that they're smart, but on the assumption that we are underestimating their intelligence.

And that I think will foster greater confidence in one's own intellect across the land, across the hemisphere, as it were.

Yeah, I think.

And to your point of young people, I'm not sure I had these ideas or the confidence in them to express them at a younger age.

That might come with age and then not caring what people think that.

Okay, great.

So let's use the wisdom of the elders.

There's a wonderful.

If I'm going to give you a shout out, there's an organization called Modern Elder Academy and Chip Conley, who wrote, you know, you're not done when you're 55 or 60 or 65, number one.

And number two, there's a whole younger generation that can teach you and you can teach them, and there's a wonderful thing happening there.

Yeah, I really love the work he's doing there in part because I think our concept of aging is obsolete and that we need to completely reimagine what aging means and what it is.

And we did do a few salons actually on that subject.

And one of the key takeaways that I remember is we have all these categories for demographics until you get to 65 plus.

And yet everyone in the 65 is far more diverse in terms of all aspects of their ideas, their perspectives, all of that.

So it's again, lots of subjects in areas to mind that are really beneficial once you start sharing that with society as a whole.

Well, let's play with your concept of not just open source intelligence, but how about open source wisdom?

Yes.

And maybe there's a whole bunch of people that don't have anything to do with their time have been, you know, expunged from society.

And they're.

They may be the vestiges of morality, ethics, you know, civility, the arts, everything that we don't teach anymore because it doesn't pay.

They may be a.

There's a whole army that's ready to go if they knew that they could.

Yeah, 100%.

And, and that is not to get technical.

That's as simple as just providing a culture.

Because right now the culture tends to be one of fighting.

Right.

Of people arguing with each other.

And that's where a lot of that energy goes.

But you put that energy into a collaborative conversation.

You put that energy into a kind of shared ritual, for lack of a better word, in which you're all coming together to talk about something, to dissect something, to enjoy each other's company.

I mean, that's where we really start to deal with the pandemic of loneliness that is gripping our society and has tremendous potential.

So this is where I think that you are onto something with the ontology piece, because all of these are elements of being.

Right.

What does it mean to be being.

Sorry.

To be aging as a being.

What does it mean to be evolving as a being?

What does it mean when we now recognize that identity is not static, that we're constantly changing as we live, as we learn, as we grow.

Right.

These are, are all topics that are not being discussed in mainstream society, but are in demand to mainstream society.

So much potential there.

Yeah.

So I'm with you.

And I want to do one more shout out.

Number one, the idea of being, we keep.

We sort of use that as a phrase for entities like humans.

And that's true.

But there's a beingness, being as a verb.

Right.

There's a whole again, none physical part of being.

That's very real.

The reason I had the word ontology, not because I read a lot, is because I'm familiar with someone closely who has been working on a software capability for 20, 30 years that works on open source information.

Know anyone that might have a thought about that?

It's a computerized system that is an ontology based metaphor that I think it's called mito Systems, M I T O Systems.

And he's brilliant.

And it's threaded architectures, but it inverts the data, whatever scheme, so that the data drives the execution, not some program.

And it may not be a bad metaphor, nor not a bad tool to enable, empower, a new way of expressing, communicating, sharing, analyzing information, especially in the open source realm.

Right on.

And while I assume very much that I'm going to start that sentence again.

Agreed.

But I do tend to have a little bit of a reaction to software in general, although that's probably a prejudice on my part because I think you were right earlier when you said AI may play a role in helping, helping to facilitate this transition, and that software you were describing is in essence an iteration of that.

Any final words?

Ted, before we conclude this session, we are coming to the point where you need to come up with a title for yourself, a way to describe your role within the cast of characters here on this digital stage that we call metaviews.

You know, as we were playing with, I had Interstellar Cave Dweller, but I kind of like Quantum Cave Dweller.

Quantum Cave dwellers.

I'm working to live and be in quantum.

And I realize how limited my mind still is to truly play in that realm.

Right on.

The Quantum Cave Dweller.

The.

Say it again.

The Quantum Cave dweller, whose primary purpose is to help us bend our minds, but whose secondary purpose is to help us with enunciation.

Because the Quantum Cave dweller is a mouthful that we will say many times until we get it right.

Now, Ted, I want to ask you for two things beyond the things I've already asked you one to book your next appointment here on meta views in the calendar and then two, send me some possible dates and times.

No guarantees for the salon.

I have already, before even us having this conversation have done the same with some other people.

I didn't have a topic with them.

We now have a topic.

But I am starting to poll people as to convenient days and times so that we can have as much overlap.

So if you could email me some days and time in addition to booking your next appearance on mediviews, we can get this salon on Antology rocking and rolling.

Any final words?

No, but I have.

He's brilliant.

Beyond you and I.

Okay, but here's my caveat and this is you're on the fence here because on the one hand, yes, I did ask you to invite people, so you have that privilege.

But here's the caveat.

You have to make sure that all participants recognize that they are not the star.

Oh yes.

That they are just one of many person.

They should participate as much as everybody else.

Because I can guarantee you that if our good friend Laura, who is our northern European correspondent, that if she's able to make it, she also probably has software that provides a similar function.

So we want to make sure.

Yes, I would love to have him or they participate.

But you as our ambassador have to manage expectations that this is very much a collective enterprise and that everyone wants to participate equally.

If that's good, then I trust your judgment.

I'm with you.

And no selling.

He's a nerd like us.

And then the only reason he's come up with the software thing is because he's a philosopher and sees things completely different.

He just so happens to do software.

But it's not about that.

It's about the philosophy of how we think, do and be and.

And it's an uphill battle against the entrenched.

And so he's one of us in terms of fighting the good fight.

Right on.

And I like the direction we've taken.

Thank you, our dear quantum cave dweller.

Partly because as I was returning from this trip I had to Spain.

I was really thinking about how to better leverage the talent that has gravitated around the meta views milieu.

And I think you've really helped me crystallize some of that thinking today.

So thank you very much Ted, as always, our audience can learn more about you via your website ted whetstone.com anywhere else in which they can connect and learn more.

No, that's good.

That's great.

Again, thanks for coming back.

We hope to have you again soon.

Meta Views is available on all the audio podcast platforms.

We're on TikTok if you want to see my goats and dogs have a lot of fun.

It seems to be a real joy for people in the world.

World.

And of course, we're on YouTube and substack and all these other platforms.

But maybe we will have to revisit the idea of where these salons should be if they are to reach a larger audience, because I think these social media platforms are inherently limited.

But with that said, thanks for coming.

We'll see everyone soon.

Stay fresh, stay cool, stay dry, and stay Canadian.

I hope for most of you.

And if you're American, stay the heck out of Canada.

Okay, thanks everybody.

We'll talk to you soon.