Please join me in a few moments of centering silence and now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn number 126 and the words appear in your order of service. The First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors.  Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service so if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house please meet near the large glass windows on your left side of the auditorium after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service however because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven and commons are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around the child haven is back in that corner and the commons are behind the auditorium. The service can still be seen and heard well from those areas. This would also be an excellent time to turn off any devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour especially cell phone ringers and now I'd like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. At this service we have Mary Manoring taking care of sound for us our lay minister is Tom Boykoff our greeter is Patty Witty and our ushers are Gail Bliss, Marty Hollis and Anne Ostrom. We have Nancy Casa who will be fixing coffee and is back in the hospitality kitchen. We do have John Powell signed up to give a tour so remember to meet him over here at the end of the service if you'd like a tour. Please note the announcements in our red floors insert to your order of service which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about what's going on this week. Particularly you'll want to see the list of all the Christmas Eve services and hopefully you'll see one that looks like something you'd like to attend. Again welcome we hope today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit. We gather in the dim light and the damp chill of mid-December finding warmth from each other turning darkness to a time of light and nourishing hope where reason fails grateful for small miracles and everyday blessings we rejoice in the wonder of making light out of darkness love out of enmity and hope out of despair. I invite you to rise and body your own spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join your voices in reading the bolded italicized text may the light of joy we kindle this morning brighten our lives may the light of morality teach us the right may the light of freedom burn more purely in our hearts may the light of hope give us high vision may the light of Hanukkah solstice and the Christmas season never be extinguished from our lives and in the spirit of the season I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with Emma Warmbreeding and if we have some children among us today which I think I see just a few out there you'd like to come up for the message for all ages so where's all your ugly sweaters we can't have an ugly sweater contest without that's a pretty good one yeah I think there's a snowmobile on the front of it yeah no it's not it's a very pretty sweater did you know they have ugly sweater contests yeah why oh it's just a thing that old people do so this is this is a christmas story called a christmas card for mr mcfizz anybody ever heard this story that's one of my favorites mr mcfizz was a chipmunk you know what a chipmunk is little guy right exactly yeah and he lived in a burrow and the burrow was built beneath an old big oak tree and it was just as safe and as sound a burrow as anyone could hope for it and it gave mr mcfizz great peace of mind the previous owner though had left it in a terrible mess and mr mcfizz had a lot of hard work to do to clean it all out but fortunately there was nothing that mr mcfizz liked to do more than clean you believe that he did and so the job was a happy one he swept and he scrubbed and he repaired and he painted and everything was in good order and mr mcfizz was just as pleased as punch about his new home he took immense pride in that little house so imagine his horror when a pack rat family named the griswolds moved into the hollow stump next door you know what a pack rat is looks kind of like a gerbil all right that's a pack rat now mr griswold wasn't a bad sort of fellow he just was a little messy he was a serious collector and you know pack rats do collect things they love shiny little objects that they will bring back and put in their nests and so mr griswold was a collector forever finding treasures in other people's garbage and he would drag these home and stockpile them believing that someday all of this stuff would come in handy now mr mcfizz could barely stand to look out his window to see this growing pile of rubbish in his neighbor's yard and the situation just went from bad to worse and mr mcfizz's irritation turned to disgust and disgust turned into loathing as all of that clutter gradually accumulated in other words he didn't like mr griswold very much but it was not until december that his feelings about mr griswold turned into genuine hatred now like most fussy little creatures mr mcfizz didn't have many friends in fact mr mcfizz didn't have a single one most of the time this didn't bother him because he was always so busy with his cleaning but every christmas time he'd become just a little bit sad because he didn't have any friends now every day mr mcfizz would sort through his mail go out to his mailbox and open it up in his mail contained nothing but advertising circulars and bills and he desperately wished that just someone anyone would send him a single personal christmas card now in the past mr mcfizz had been able to cope with this emptiness in his life no christmas cards and no friends but then one horrible day in december after another disappointing trip to his mailbox he saw that there were several large envelopes in mr griswold's mailbox he snuck over and he examined those envelopes and they were all addressed hand addressed to the griswold family they surely had to be christmas cards and then he realized looking up that mrs griswold was standing on her porch staring at him he was so embarrassed he walked back to his house feeling very very guilty however this was only one of many bad days that followed because he observed a steady flow of christmas cards coming to mr griswold's mailbox mr mcfizz was never so relieved to see a christmas holiday passes this one but instead of forgetting all about it he worried about it all the next year and so when christmas approached again he decided he was going to play a very very nasty trick on the griswold's his plan was very simple in late november mr mcfizz took all of his savings and he went out and bought as many christmas cards as he could and then he addressed them all to himself he mailed a few of them every day to his address increasing the volume of cards as christmas day approached and then knowing where the postman stopped to get coffee every morning he would creep up to the postmaster's letter bag and he would steal all the griswold's christmas cards before he could deliver them mr mcfizz then settled into a thought about oh what a delightful delightful expression must be on the griswold's face because they weren't getting any christmas cards that would serve him right for being such a slob but to his surprise mr mcfizz didn't feel very good as he watched his neighbor day after day go to his mailbox open it up and find that it was empty and there wasn't a single christmas card in it and strangely enough mr mcfizz started to feel sorry for the griswold's and so sorry that one evening he sat down at his desk and he wrote out a christmas card and addressed it to the griswold family a few days later he watched mr griswold open his mailbox and take out the card that mr mcfizz had sent to him and mr mcfizz felt really good he understood now what christmas was all about and the best part of it was yet to come for the very next day mr mcfizz found a christmas card not one that he had addressed to himself but someone else had sent him a christmas card wishing him a very very christ merry christmas and you know who was from the griswold and they also invited mr mcfizz to come and join them for christmas dinner which he did and they drank eggnog and they ate roasted chestnuts and they sang christmas carols before a roaring fire and mr mcfizz could not remember a time when he ever had so much fun but even so all throughout that wonderful evening he wondered how maybe he could say to mr griswold could could you maybe clean up your yard a little oh well he thought to himself i guess that conversation will have to wait until easter so that's the story of mr mcfizz and mr griswold hope you enjoyed i hope you have a great christmas and we're going to sing you out as you head through your classes now carol rose will share with us our first reading this from the christian gospel of luke one day jesus was teaching and a lawyer stood up to test him teacher he said what must i do to inherit into eternal life jesus replied what is written in the law what do you read there the lawyer answered you shall love the lord god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself and jesus said to him you have given the right answer do this and you will live but wanting to justify himself the lawyer asked jesus and who is my neighbor jesus replied once a man was going down from jerusalem to jericho and fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him beat him and went away leaving him half dead now by chance a priest was going down the road and when he saw him he passed by on the other side so likewise a levite when he came to the place and saw him also passed by on the other side but a samaritan while traveling came near him and when he saw the stricken man he was moved by pity he went to him and bandaged his wounds having poured wine and oil on them then he put him on his own animal brought him to an inn and took care of him the next day he took out two denari gave them to the innkeeper and said take care of him and when i come back i will repay you whatever more you spent which of the three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers the lawyer said the one who showed him mercy jesus said go and do likewise the second reading is also taken from the gospel of luke the chapter the fourth chapter but in this instance the passage has been reworked by the british author philip pulman who is perhaps best known for his dark materials trilogy which includes the fictional book the golden compass when he returned to nazareth he went to the synagogue on the sabbath as he always did he stood up to read and the attendant handed him the scroll of the prophet isaia isn't this the son of joseph the carpenter someone whispered jesus read the words from one part of the book and then from another the spirit of the lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to let the oppressed go free to proclaim the year of the lord's favor he then gave the scroll back and all eyes in the synagogue were fixed upon him because everyone was eager to hear what he had to say you want a prophet he said more than that you want a miracle worker but you need to think a bit harder some of you know who i am jesus the son of joseph the carpenter and this nazareth is my hometown when has a prophet ever been honored in his hometown consider this if you think you deserve miracles because of who you are when there was a famine in the land of israel and no rain fell for three years whom did the prophet elisha help by god's command an israelite widow no a widow from sarapath in syden a foreigner and again were there lepers in the land of israel in elisha's time yes there were many the whom did he cure naaman the syrian do you think that what you are is enough you'd better start considering what you do who does this man think he is someone from the crowd demanded how dare he come here and speak to us like this yelled another this is scandalous said a third we shouldn't have to listen to a man running down his own people right here in our synagogue and before jesus could say another word they seized him and they dragged him to the hill above the town and they would have hurled him down from the top but in the confusion and in the struggle for some of jesus's followers were there and they fought the townspeople jesus managed to get away unharmed thank you my friends always wonderful to have chimes in the holiday season and with the approach of the christmas holidays the putative birthday of jesus of nazareth old ideas and images of him resurface in this season even non-subscribers to christian orthodoxy are more attuned to stories of jesus's nativity and of his subsequent ministry and i suspect that much of what the average person believes about jesus is relatively benign that he was generally speaking a gentle and peaceful man who roamed the countryside proclaiming love forgiveness and a redeemed human condition yes he could have a sharp tongue at times yes he did offend people at times but in the end hauled before the roman prefect ponches pilot for judgment jesus was judged by pilot to be blameless i find no basis for an accusation against this man pilot declares in the gospel of luke mark and matthew concur here too pilot seriously questions whether jesus deserves to be crucified what evil has he done he asks a jewish mob that's clamoring for his execution in john's gospel pilot examines jesus about his claims to kingship to which the latter replies my kingdom is not of this world the answer reassures pilot that jesus is not an enemy of the roman state to his accusers pilot says i find no case against him but the jews continue to demand jesus's death and although he demores twice more pilot finally does the crowds bidding what i wish to emphasize is that all four gospel writers go to considerable lengths to portray jesus as basically harmless a victim of jewish jealousy and resentment but by no means a threat to pox roman is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not the Pharisees asked jesus in an effort to trip him up give me a coin of the realm jesus says whose head and title are on this corn Caesar augustus they replied then give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to god what belongs to god and the Pharisees walk away chagrined and shaking their heads earlier on and after his baptism jesus retreats to the wilderness the devil appears and subjects him to three temptations the last of which is a chance to become a mighty ruler away from me satan jesus commands for it is written you shall worship the lord your god and serve him only clearly he has no desire to supplant the roman emperor and so the gospel writers drive a wedge between jesus and his jewish co-religionists while strongly suggesting that he has no bone to pick with Rome according to luke early in his ministry jesus even cures the servant of a roman military officer a centurion now contemporary new testament scholars are in substantial agreement that these writers who composed the gospels did so not out of a concern for historical accuracy but first to win converts to the new faith and second to protect themselves and these nascent christian communities from persecution and so to this end they embellished jesus's accomplishments and they recast his message so that it would not be construed by the romans as subversive the gospel the gospel writers had ample reason to be fearful the romans because the romans only recently in 66 ce had crushed a major jewish rebellion in palestine serious questions had been raised about judaism whether its followers could be trusted to toe the line and submit themselves to roman authority and at that time 66 ce christianity was still regarded as a branch and offshoot of judaism so this is the thing matthew mark luke and john wanted to establish jesus's bonafides for their readers but they also wanted to allay roman suspicions about the intentions of jesus's followers jesus was not a rebel and neither were we this is the subtext that the evangelists hoped that the romans would take to heart but these men are writing 30 40 50 years after the fact none of them were eyewitnesses to the events they described nor were they among the audiences that jesus addressed and scholars now offer considerable evidence that the evangelists whitewashed the story so that jesus would appear less revolutionary than he really was and as a result the gospels seriously understate the controversy that surrounded jesus during his brief and tumultuous ministry any analysis of his message has to begin with the concept of the kingdom of god variations on that term appear more than three dozen times in the gospel of matthew 32 times in the gospel of luke but what exactly was jesus referring to what sort of kingdom was this and in what sense might it possibly have been subversive now for the british comparative religion scholar sgf brandon the kingdom of god could have meant only one thing to his jewish listeners the restoration of jewish sovereignty brandon suggests that jesus had a greater stake in the future of israel than mainstream christian commentators have typically allowed jesus was executed as a rebel against rome and not as a heretic against judaism brandon insists and he offers several telling points to support this thesis first two of the gospels mentioned that jesus's inner circle included a disciple who was a self identified zealot an individual who today might be described as a freedom fighter the zealots were declared enemies of rome and it was they who launched that insurrection in 66 c e that i mentioned earlier and which was very quickly and very brutally put down second brandon addresses jesus's actions in the great temple of jerusalem where he drives out the money changers and chastises the priests this was truly provocative and revolutionary because the temple was the supreme religious institution of israel presided over by a priestly and hereditary aristocracy jesus's attack would have been seen as a direct assault on the tithing system that benefited the jerusalem elite enormously that's how they made their living it was also a serious challenge to the spiritual authority enjoyed by these hereditary elites and by sowing anarchy and disorder within the jewish community jesus made life all that much more difficult for the roman overseers this invasion of israel's holy of holies was audacious enough that the upper echelons of society both jewish and roman would have had ample reason to apprehend and to neutralize jesus now luke is the only one of the four gospel writers who makes even passing reference to the serious charges that jesus faced when he went before pilot having delivered him to the prefect the council of jewish elders charge jesus with perverting the nation forbidding us to pay taxes to caesar and saying that he himself is the messiah brandon says that luke intends his readers to understand that these accusations were malicious but in reality they were probably quite accurate and then finally brandon notes that after his death jesus's closest associates established a community a congregation a presence in jerusalem and this community predicted that jesus would return shortly in supernatural power and glory to redeem israel from oppression and give it sovereignty over the gentiles in other words those jews who were closest to jesus a number of among the number was his own brother james for them he was and continued to be the long awaited messiah the savior of god's chosen people the historian michael grant says that his was a stormy personality jesus argued constantly with formal formidable ferocity he felt an immovable certainty that he was the figure through whom god's purposes would be fulfilled and this absolute conviction of an entirely peculiar relationship with god this was not completely unknown among israel's religious leaders but in jesus it became a great deal more vigorous and violent than anyone else's so that's one school of thought about jesus the rebel but now let me introduce to you another school that diverges from the one that i just outlined it is similar in that it paints a picture of jesus as an authentic rebel and the difference between the two views hinges again on variant interpretations of the kingdom of god was jesus first and foremost a jewish patriot a militant advocate for israelite sovereignty the second school says not so much rather he was a religious reformer bent on breaking down the historic and cultic barriers to genuine human communion jesus's vision of the kingdom was radically inclusive this school of thought says and therefore it was profoundly threatening to the parochial stakeholders in a social system that prevail at that time in israel for establishment jews of the first century Pharisees Sadducees Levites scribes priests nothing was more important for all of these people than purity holiness and holiness in the Hebrew language literally means separateness to achieve and to maintain purity one had to observe a strict set of rules avoiding contamination with anything that could be judged to be unclean and this purity code created a world in ancient Palestine of sharp social boundaries and by extension of vast inequities and jesus himself was probably a victim of this very system he was from Nazareth in Galilee can anything good come out of Nazareth a future disciple asks in the first chapter of john's gospel and although he was Jewish as a Galilean he would have been regarded by his southern Judean brethren as tainted scratch a Galilean and find a Samaritan was a commonly held opinion moreover jesus bore the stigma of being a momser he was an israelite of suspect parentage the people of his own village called him mary's son not jesus as would have been customary and as a mamser jesus would have been excluded from the mainstream of religious life such people ruse chilton informs us lived in a cast apart and they were denied a voice in israel's public and religious life and that may help to explain why oftentimes jesus spoke to his audiences out in the open air on seasides and hillsides rather than in the synagogue so this then was probably a man who had suffered the indignities of israel's ancient purity system and as a result jesus identified with those who had been subjected to similar treatment and the list of those would include all Gentiles the abjectly poor whose poverty was believed to be a consequence of their own sinfulness the disease that deformed and the maimed because bodily wholeness connoted purity certain occupations like tax collector and even shepherd and finally those who were considered to be unclean included all women the purity system marcus bore writes established a spectrum of people ranging from the very pure through varying degrees of purity down to the radically impure according to the purity map of the time priests and levites came first and the temple was the geographic and cultic center of that map the gospels provide ample evidence that jesus was adamantly opposed to this system in both word and indeed he sought continuously to undercut it and the parable of the good Samaritan is a case in point and it undoubtedly struck its first century listeners as profoundly subversive so as you heard from Karen a near dead man probably unconscious is lying in a ditch a priest and then a levite approach and they see the man and they pass him by on the other side they refuse to render aid why is that out of fear of contamination the man is bleeding perhaps he's already dead for all they know and thus on two counts that man is unclean putting their own purity concerns first the priest and the levite walk this wide berth around him the Samaritan not only helps the stricken man but goes above and beyond bandaging his wounds paying for his care and for his logic but in Israel Samaritans were themselves classified as unclean so to compare this man favorably with the ultra clean priest and levite would have struck many as scandalous why would jesus share a story like that because he was bent on overthrowing a purity system in order that a kingdom of love and compassion could replace it and his behavior was of appease with his teaching jesus touched leopard lepers and hemorrhaging women he entered a graveyard to exercise a man's demons he practiced indiscriminate table fellowship anybody was welcome he challenged the practice of ritual hand washing before meals he invited women into his intimate circle where they enjoyed essential parity with men and on one occasion he called a woman who was afflicted with a spinal disease he called her a daughter of Abraham walter wink says this is an expression never before seen in jewish literature because women in ancient israel were saved through their men so to call this woman a daughter of Abraham was to give her status as a full-fledged member of the covenant and with equal standing before god and now let's revisit that jerusalem temple episode here again we have israel's holy of holies the place where the strictest rules of purity had to be maintained the temple jack miles tells us was not just the central shrine of the jewish religious establishment it was also the seat of such political power as the nation of israel retained and thus jesus's invasion was an act of the utmost seriousness and could in fact have been grounds for execution because his was a frontal assault on conventions that many jews solemnly upheld it does it disrupted an economic activity that the powerful elites depended on for their livelihood and many jews of the time believed that it was only by living in harmony with the strict commandments of god and his prohibitions maintaining this high degree of holiness it was only by doing this that the almighty would eventually be moved to intervene on their behalf and drive the romans from israel so in the eyes of the officials and many others michael grant says jesus's actions would have seemed like megalomania or perhaps even of madness but jesus's experience of god and his convictions about the kingdom they were of a completely different order for him marcus borg explains compassion not holiness is the dominant quality of god and it is therefore the ethos of the community that seeks to mirror god this ultimately was what the kingdom of god was all about for jesus nevertheless as bart airman says at times jesus pushed his emphasis on love to such an extreme that it seemed to others that he was discounting god's law as recorded in scripture so what happened to this jesus this jesus the rebel it largely disappeared with the first century destruction of jerusalem and its great temple and the community of followers that sought to carry jesus's work forward separated from israel christianity became a gentile religion its founder a dying and rising god similar to others that were popular in the greco-roman world at that time and the cause of course became much much greater not deliverance from roman oppression or from a harsh purity system but deliverance instead whole human race from sin and from death rebel jesus is not the one we celebrate in our christmas carols but it is the one that jackson brown that great folk rock singer celebrates in one of his songs and so i conclude these reflections with the lyrics to jackson brown's rebel jesus the streets are filled with laughter and light and the music of the season and the merchant's windows are all bright with the faces of the children and the families hurrying to their homes as the sky darkens and freezes will be gathering around the hearths and tables giving thanks for all god's graces and the birth of rebel jesus they call him by the prince of peace they call him by the savior and they pray to him upon the sea and in every bold endeavor as they fill his churches with their pride and gold and their faith in him increases but they've turned the nature that i worshiped in from a temple to a robber's den in the words of rebel jesus we guard our world with locks and guns and we guard our fine possessions and once a year when christmas comes we give to our relations and perhaps we give a little to the poor if the generosity should seize us but if and one should interfere in the business of why they are poor they get the same as rebel jesus but pardon me if i have seemed to take the tone of judgment for i've no wish to come between this day and your enjoyment in this life of hardship and of earthly toil we have need of anything that frees us so i bid you pleasure and i bid you cheer from a heathen and a pagan on the side of rebel jesus blessed be and amen our offertory today as you can see will be shared with briar patch youth services as it was last week did you great work in our community on behalf of young people so please be generous as a community of memory and hope and through this time and place we bring our whole and at times our broken selves we carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared we pause now to acknowledge an entry by cece bowyard who asks for our prayers and our care for her niece who is in stage four cancer and so we we wish the best for her and for her family in this holiday season in addition to that concern just mentioned we would acknowledge any unexpressed ones that remain among us as a community holding them with equal concern in our hearts but a sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope blessed be and amen and now i invite you to rise in body and spirit as we sing together our closing hymn number two seventy six please be seated for the benediction and the post this week all over the western world children have been asking their parents that age old question when will it be christmas why is it taking so long i think i know the answer it will finally be christmas when every crib is a shrine it will finally be christmas when every child is received as though he or she were the messiah it will finally be christmas when we learn to see that the holy and the sacred is not up there or out there but in here readily apparent in the ordinary world of sight and of sound it will finally be christmas when we learn to value our differences rather than to fear them and it will finally be christmas when we recognize that the holiday is an anticipation of foretaste of the peaceful kingdom for which our hearts long and for a particular birth that took place so long ago it will finally be christmas when the birthing of a new consciousness takes place in all of us not just today and tomorrow and through christmas but all year long and we each do what we can to hasten that day along blessed be and amen


I'm Gabriela Chang, CSO and co-founder of Epic Hub. I'm an industrial and product designer and artist and writer and I work for the Secretary of Economic Development in Chiapas, Mexico. And I was also an organic coffee producer. I'm thrilled to be here to talk with you about the amazing opportunity arising for using WebTree to solve one of the most pressing problems in this world, the unbanked farmers. I'm here to remind all of you that blockchain initial promise was to enable a financial system where no one was left outside excluded. Shocking data. According to the World Bank, a quarter of the world population is excluded from the traditional financial system. So this means that the only source for working capital for nearly 2 billion people is shark lungs and they often have to pay over 100% interest for the little money they can borrow within their communities. But news from these 2 billion people, 70% are small holder farmers living in poverty despite producing a third of the world's food, our food. They live and work in very fragile ecosystems we all need to protect for our own sake. Money for these tiny farmers is scarce and outrageously expensive, preventing them from keeping a benefit after paying the debt. Although the annual financial need accounts for almost $1 trillion annually, they are not eligible for microfinancials, microcredits, because they are not able to pay every week or every month. This is known as the poverty cycle. They are good payers. There is no record to prove it. So quite often risk is perceived way higher than it really is. An example, the global benchmark for group loans, group of solidarity groups, the default is less than 3%. There should be people queuing to invest in these farmers. This enormous dysfunction is also a blue ocean opportunity to build a better economic system leveraging on blockchain and crypto as catalyst for true development. The global paradox of the economy inspired us to connect complementary economic regions to benefit both parties in a win-win arbitrage, where lenders and farmers become partners that no longer pay abusive interest for loans or negative rates for the savings. Through our lending and staking platform, almost anyone in the world can invest into cure projects and earn a return while generating triple impact, social, economic, and environmental. Fintech approach to the unbanks usually is focused on data to do the credit scoring or in assets to act as collateral. But small farmers live in areas with no connectivity and their small lands are of no commercial interest. So for them, they have designed crowd collateral, connecting DeFi to the productive economy of the real world, building a most resilient model where GIL doesn't come from derivative, sorry, does not come from financial derivatives, but from real agriculture. And this is GIL farmers backing the loans of actual farmers. The key is to leverage on crypto to develop the incentives to create the proper incentive loops, as we call. We built an international community where all stakeholders benefit from interacting. Our mission is to improve the living standard of the small-holder farmers through their own productivity. Why? Because there's no future without sustainability and it's a huge business opportunity to leverage on blockchain and web tree to replace and pre-internet and inefficient supply chain, transforming scarcity and inequality into abundance and true development. We are one of the most awarded and recognized projects within the REFI, the regenerative finance space. They say web true, it's about competition and web tree about collaboration. We need to collaborate in order to solve the huge problem the planet is facing. That most, remember this, most of the greenest areas of the world is where the unbanked lived. So we need to secure their well-being to secure ours. We need to stop thinking financial inclusion, it's about solving others' problems. We need to work together using blockchain and crypto to bring back balance to humanity. Join us. It's a good business to do good. Thank you. Woo! Thank you for the optimistic message at the end. We still have two minutes for questions, so please raise your hand. Our volunteers will bring the mic for you. No, we need that for the streaming. Sorry. Hello, hello, there you go. Hola, Gorilla. Hola. I have a question, what's the biggest roadblock to specifically ethic hubs scaling massively? I know you've been around for a while, so I'm just wondering how do we scale ethic hub and projects like it to reach more farmers all over the world, right? And obviously sort of with nuances, et cetera, but what are the roadblocks? True collaboration. We started in, we're in the space since 2017. We launched a platform in 2018, and it's very hard to grow with the available resources that we start from scratch. And the challenge is to bring together all the actors. We are already working, we are attending over 500 families. We are in three countries and we are growing, but the challenge is to bring more actors to the ecosystem. We work by links of trust, by circles of trust, and theory of games. So we are working with trust here, and we are actually having the partnership with ICA, which is an institutional entity, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation for Agriculture, and we are already doing some other partnerships in order to access the farmers that are already selected by these trusted entities. And from there, go down the pyramid of the social population. Now to Gabriela, gracias Gabriela. De nada, gracias a todos. Si tienen más preguntas, if you have more questions, you can contact me later. Thank you very much.


The Benway State House of Assembly has concluded screening of nominees whose names were forwarded to it by Governor Hyacin Eliye for appointment as commissioners and members of the State Executive Council. The first and second batches of the 17 commissioners designates were last week screened for appointment by the Assembly. Some of the commissioner nominees spoke to newsmen shortly after being screened and shared ideas on what they will be bringing to the State Executive Council of Governor Hyacin Eliye. IGR is a major component that determines your inflow as part of the federal allocation account. So if IGR is low, you are going to have a multiplier effect of low factors, low federal allocation. So the first thing is in case IGR, IGR is low because of a couple of reasons. Government needs to be predetermined on individuals, what they do, corporations, what they earn and how they earn it, so that they can accurately tax them. The systems need to be automated so that it is tamper-proof, human beings can't manipulate it from tax assessment to tax collections. It should expect service. I've been given the opportunity by His Excellency to serve as a commissioner should the House confirm it. And I want to believe there is nothing I would give more than our service to the people of the State. So if you would be an effective subordinate, when you are everything, pro-fast solution of the problems around your master, I would never be. I don't want to be another group of people. I would be. I would be. I would be. Yes. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


And this subject of this panel is near and dear to my heart. For 20 years, my wife has been telling me that she doesn't understand what I do. And I'm really bad at explaining it. And what we need are really good narratives around issues of complexity, science, technology, and society. It is a truism, but nonetheless true, that the problems that face us today are really complex, are wicked, are very difficult to know. What cause and effect chains exist, how you push on the problem in one way and get something completely different that you didn't expect on the other end. And yet, the tools that we have for talking about these problems, whether it's climate change or immigration or tax reform or the internet and privacy, seem often very impoverished. And in desperation, I've found myself increasingly turning to narrative as something that can capture complexity in ways that sort of standard expository discussion and argumentation don't be able to seem to do very well. So that's what we want to explore today. And our three panelists are Vandana Singh, Dave Ryjewski, and Carl Schroeder.  So instead, although I do know Dave, I'm going to ask the panelists today to just for a minute or two talk about what they do and how they think about the connection between what they do and complex sociotechnical problems. So why don't we just start with you, Vandana? All right, well, my name is Vandana Singh. And I am a science fiction writer, but I'm also an associate professor at a small university, Framingham State University, where, among other things, I research climate change, science pedagogies. And I'm very, very interested in climate change as a science and also as a wicked problem. And I write about it. I stay up nights thinking about it. And so that's my big thing. Hi, I'm Dave Ryjewski. I run the science and technology innovation program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. So I get to play with all kinds of technologies. I do work on nanotech, synthetic biology, cognitive neuroscience, video games, citizen science. So I get to the point where, essentially, I get to play with those things that are indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur Clarke said. But there are also, I think it's an important point, Ed Tenor at Princeton said, that there are also the things that promote self-deception, precisely because they're so magical. And so these technologies are always skewing much more towards the benefits than the risks. They're skewing towards centralized control and not decentralized control. So you're inherently at a very dangerous fulcrum when you're dealing with these technologies. I don't believe there's actually a deficit of innovation. I think there's a deficit of futures. That our inability to think coherently about the future is the most dangerous thing that we're dealing with right now. And essentially, we're wasting the prefrontal cortex of our brains. I mean, we're essentially wired to do this and we don't do it much. And so we could talk a little bit more about, I've been involved with science fiction writers for 10 or 12 years for specific reasons we can discuss, but one of the issues for me is how do you create very compelling narratives about the future? I'm Carl Schrader, I'm a science fiction writer and foresight her, or futurist, we don't really have a good term for that. For the last 15 years or so, I've been working for clients like the Canadian government and army on expressing and communicating complex ideas, particularly about the future. Actually, a book I'd recommend about that is Dynamics and Action, whose author is escaping me right now, but the thesis of the book is that complex dynamical systems which, well, can only really be understood in terms of the context and history. When you write context and history, that's something we call a narrative. It's called a story. So the best way to actually analyze certain kinds of real world problems literally is narrative. I did my master's thesis on translating foresight findings into fiction as a way of communicating them in a concise zipped package. And I continue to work on that kind of exploration. Great, thanks. So I'm hoping to put your actual stories at the center of our conversation and I'll get to them in a minute. I wanted to start with asking Dave, who's the policy wonk and the odd man out in the group to talk a little bit about, to expand on your point about the value of fiction in addressing policy problems. Because as you say, when we're talking about these emerging technologies and how they are always expressed in terms of the wonderful things they do, usually with the deficit of imagination of possibilities. And then it turned over to people like me to figure out how to think about the policy frameworks around those. And obviously, you found that to be unsatisfactory and have therefore pulled in people like Mandana and Carl to help you. So can you talk a little bit about why you've done that and how it worked? Sure, I mean, I'll start with a depressing story. In 2000, I went around. And I interviewed all the major heads of the policy and planning offices in the government. Of course, we're free to talk now because they just left government, Health and Human Services, the State Department that had a premier policy and planning unit. Basically, I went through every agency. I asked them, how far ahead do you think? And they said, not very far. I said, what did you think you were going to do before you got into this job? I thought I was going to think about the future. And none of them did. And so I started to go agency by agency and said, who thinks about the future?  It goes out four or five years, and you use essentially to maximize your budget for next year. Who actually thinks about the future? And I ended up in NASA. And a guy, I talked to a guy. He said, let me show you our 200-year plan. That's great. OK, so you got my attention. And at that point in time, NASA was run by Dan Golden. And Dan's senior advisor was a guy named Yojo Kondi, or Kondo, I think. Some of you, sci-fi writers know him as Eric Katani. So here's a guy that was running NASA, whose primary advisor was an astrophysicist and a sci-fi writer. And so we actually worked with NASA to start. We had a meeting where we actually brought in all kinds of science fiction writers with people from all over the government. Arthur Clark dropped in via satellite. We had Charles Sheffield, who's unfortunately passed away. I sent a TV crew out to do interviews with Greg Bear, Elizabeth Moon, Joe Haldeman. So incredible numbers of sci-fi writers. Just to think long term with government agencies, and it was an incredible exercise. But I couldn't sustain it. So the thing that I started to think about is how actually would you create an interface that would allow this to happen on a constant basis? Which I think is part of what you guys are doing here. Because I think it really is important. Because I think the narrative is important. Though the other thing I like, I want it from the narratives. I want a narrative where I can touch the button. And that's one of the things that got me into video games. So I want to be able to push on A and C that B doesn't happen. But not only do I want a story. I want a story with an algorithm behind it that would allow me to say, OK, I'm not going to understand complexity until I can play with it. And so I would love to be able to figure out my ideal world is can I actually engage the people that really can write great narratives? And put those together with the models and sort of the complexity behind these systems. So there's climate change, or intervening in pandemics, whatever it is. But I do believe that it's something that George Lakoff said. It's a cognitive linguist. That framing precedes policy. So one thing we can get to later is the question of who gets to write the algorithms and why we should trust them. So you guys in some sense are writing the algorithms. So let me take the liberty of quickly describing your two stories. And then maybe we can discuss them. But again, I want to focus on this theme of how you think about bringing a really complex and determined open system type problem into the discipline of a narrative in a way that respects the complexity of the problem. So two wonderful stories, if you haven't around them, please go do so right afterwards. Carl's story is called Degrees of Freedom. I've never done this before. It makes me nervous. So if I screw up, you'll just correct me, right? But it's a story. I'll silently judge you. Yeah, please. You're right. So it's a story about how indigenous people in Western Canada using some fascinating speculative decision support technologies work to undermine the power and influence of the centralized national government. And the narrative plays out through the conflicting roles and worldviews of a father and son, which provides a lot of the narrative tension. But complexity itself provides some of the narrative tension, the wickedness of the problems of equality and environment that Carl's concerned with. It's an explicit theme in the story. And these hybrid decision support social media technologies, they're portrayed as crucial for helping to manage the complexity. And in that way, there's a strong connection to Vandana's story, which is called Entanglement. And it's a succession of brief, thematically related narratives about individuals, in most cases, I'd say, kind of sad, lonely individuals, working in different ways in different parts of the world to try to address climate change. And through the story, we see a kind of growing, almost mysterious evidence that the separate narratives, as separate narratives usually do, have more explicit connection to that we only learn about, of course, near the end. As with degrees of freedom, we learn again about an intriguing speculative social networking technology, which in this case provides this kind of almost mysterious connection among the characters. So here, the complexity is portrayed differently. It's through the rich diversity of places, the environmental difficulties, the personal challenges behind each narrative. So what I want to start off with is what seems to me to be kind of an interesting tension here, especially regarding our previous panel, which is that you both find great hope in the capacity of, I guess this is even a positive hieroglyph, the capacity of these complex cognitive social decision support technologies and actually bringing people together and bringing societies together to have shared understandings that enable maybe better collective action. And so talk a little bit about your view of technology, especially perhaps in light of the complexities that we've already been discussing today. Well, a few years back I noticed something about science fiction and by extension the community that reads science fiction. And that is that we're perfectly happy to speculate about wild amazing advances in biology and nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and materials and space travel. The one thing we will not imagine is that we could improve the way we make decisions. It's a gigantic blind spot. And I wanted to explore that and look at that. And when I did, I discovered that in fact, we have already got amazing tools, technologies, and methodologies that do this, that improve the way we make decisions both collectively and in groups. But people don't know about it because they assume in advance that it can't be done. So all of this story does is trot some of those out. None of these are my ideas. Things like structured dialogic design. It's been around for ages. It was used in Cyprus. It's a governmental tool used by some of the First Nations bands in the US as their governmental modus operandi. I'm just putting out things that already exist. And I'm a little bit shocked that this is seen as innovative. Shocked. Well, in my story, I envision technology in a certain context. And in complex systems, I think context is just as important as the thing you're looking at. So if I may, and I know that many people in this room already know this, some better than I do, let me attempt to define what I mean by complexity. And then I'll weave in how I saw technology as part of it in my story. So a complex system is one with many interacting parts where the interactions are strong. The interactions are non-linear, typically, so that the behavior of the system as a whole cannot be easily, cannot, in fact, be obtained or be even studied to some extent without an understanding of the interactions. So it's another way of saying that the sum is greater than its parts. And such systems have interesting features, like feedback loops, tipping points, sometimes complex systems are chaotic. So the way I see it, and I come from an aggressively democratic nation, and where having arguments is a good thing, in fact, there's even a book called The Argumentative Indian. So the way I saw it is, all right, what's the context and what are the struggles that are playing out? And instead of having technology being developed in a top-down way, because technology has impact on people and on society and on lives, and it changes things. And sometimes it's not always in the interests of the people who use it, as we've been hearing during the course of the day. So what I wanted to do was invert that and violate the third forbidden H, as Neil talked about. And I wanted to see, what could happen if people developed a technology to serve a need through some kind of a community experience, instead of it being invented for you by Apple, for instance.  And so the way I was looking at it was that this is a wicked problem. The way I conceptualize a wicked problem is one that arises in a complex system. And we have interlocking complex systems here. We have the climate system, which is complex. We have societies, which are parts of the whole equation, which are complex. We have, we've been told we live in the Anthropocene, but some scholars are challenging that and saying, we live in the capitalocene. So, and essentially saying that climate change is the logical end result of runaway capitalism. So it's not so much a species thing, as Anthropocene suggests, as a particular kind of paradigm. And so what I wanted to look at was, what if you looked at technology as arising from people who are concerned about things, and when you look at global problems, when you look at wicked problems, you have to shed certain or perhaps dilute or put away certain aspects of your identity and put on other cloaks in a way. So for instance, it's less important whether you are American or from Serbia or from India when you're looking at a global problem, because nature doesn't give a damn about political boundaries. And so in a sense, in those situations, for those contexts, it makes sense to put on a kind of global citizens hat, and we don't know how to do that. We have things like the internet, we have Facebook and so on and so forth, but they haven't gone as far as I would like to see science fictionally in creating a global environmental consciousness. So in my story, among the two things, two ways that technology comes in. One is through a massive citizen science project on the Arctic Ocean, which is ground zero for climate change, because temperatures are rising there twice as fast as the globe on an average. And so there's a massive citizen science surveillance project that involves incidentally hacked drones, among other things. And then the other way that technology comes in is through a kind of internet-based device that connects people from different countries and different backgrounds through what I imagine is the community of strangers, people you don't know connecting to you in needed moments to make a difference. So sorry, I went on a little long, but I wanted to put it in the right context. So I wanna pursue this notion of aggressive democracy, which I think is really interesting. And Carl, even if I shouldn't be surprised, I thought the description of the process and technology of getting people in a room to make sure that they each understand one another's perspective, so that they can actually have a conversation where when they're nodding they really understand what the person on the other side of the table is saying. Seemed to address one aspect of a problem that I haven't heard discussed yet today, but which I think underlies so much of this, which is diversity of values and value conflict. And so I'm curious, it seemed to me that your stories took a different perspective. So, Vanda, you're pretty clear about where you stand and make that the narrative serve your value perspective. Whereas Carl, it seemed to me you're willing to be more agnostic and say something about the importance of values emerging from democratic discourse that's truly democratic. So I wonder if you could each talk about how you see your own values via these complex situations that you're trying to elucidate and the role of the story in addressing value dispute. And then that'll lead to my question to Dave, so you'll just have to be in suspense. Well, by deliberately choosing the Haida as the context, I was choosing I am not Haida. And therefore I deliberately took off the table the possibility that I could be representing this group in order to focus on what was on the table which was the method or methodologies involved. So the story is not about the advocacy of a particular group, it's about advocacy of certain methodologies. For instance, in the story there's a website called wegetit.com. I wanted it to be I agree.com but I think that's already taken. But it's a website where there are discussion forums but the only action that you can take is to agree. You can either agree or drop out of the discussion. And this is in deliberate contrast to the way the internet forum structure is set up right now which is apparently to foster disagreement. If you look at the way the internet acts, it often acts as a saint but if you look at the way the internet talks, it talks like a psychopath. Discussion forums are fundamentally broken in that they are disagreement generators. So one of the things I wanted is okay, could we just tweak that? And the story as a whole is one of the things I say is that there will be no Facebook for politics because politics is too wicked and complex a problem and too multifaceted but you can improve small things. And in the story hundreds of small things are improved simultaneously which gives the effect of improving politics. But one of the things you can improve is just the way that people agree about the fundamental meaning of words when they're discussing things on the internet. Structured dialogic design which is something I allude to developed by Aleko Kostakas and others is a workshop tool that does this. One of the things I wondered was could you take that workshop tool which works efficiently for up to about 60 people in a room and magnify it so that it'll work for a million? And if you only solve one little problem like that, you can have a magnified effect on people's ability to get along. And that was really all that I was trying to say. Well, that's saying a lot given the current politics around these wicked problems. So yeah, so Bonnet, can you address the question? Yeah, yeah, that, but I would like to distinguish between values and models because, you know, well, even in, and I would also like to say that you probably shouldn't judge my values by my stories necessarily because part of the wonderful fascination of writing and writing fiction, writing science fiction is that really anything is, anything can be set up to be interrogated including one's most dearly held assumptions about the world. And one thing that I've learned by being a scientist, my background's in theoretical particle physics is that there are, you know, ideologies are like models. They have limited usefulness. They have domains of validity. They are not a deity, you know. So, you know, I feel free to critique anything from capitalism to communism to whatever. In fact, I think we need new isms because we are in a new age where we are recognizing the complexity and interconnectedness of the world. And so the old Newtonian paradigm of the clockwork universe is one of the things I was playing with in my story that, and in fact, any good fiction is really an attempt to look at a situation in the real world. So for instance, I could write a dry treatise about the psychology and the geopolitics of a certain area in India and about a family feud involving inheritance and property and so on and so forth. And I could do that as a sociology project or an anthropology project, but then I could also write the Mahabharata, which is a great epic. And so that's what fiction does. It, because we cannot, because human beings and human systems are not simple systems. We are multivariable systems with very non-linear interactions. That's why we have literature. That's why we have arts because they are basically, they somehow condense the complexity of the problem into that one experience. And so when I look at values, and I propose them as a thought experiment or it's more like I'm looking at a model or a paradigm of the way of looking at the world and really anything is up to be kind of challenged and interrogated. And now that the Newtonian Clockwork universe, which we know does not exist, is being questioned. And now that we are recognizing that the way we live, everything that we do, including how we recreate, how we enjoy ourselves, there's a history behind it. Look at the Industrial Revolution. Nuclear families did not really exist before the Industrial Revolution. So the Newtonian paradigm of the Clockwork universe informs every aspect of our lives. And the great pity is that the universe is, in fact, not Newtonian. So what I like to imagine in my stories is what if we had societies or interactions between people or technologies that were based on a non-Newtonian, more realistic paradigm of the universe. And one of the things we learn again and again in different contexts in the universe, if you're doing quantum physics or in complex systems theory, is connection. Things are connected. And so that was the main thing pushing me. Of course, one of the similarities between ideologies and models is once someone falls in love with one, they tend to stick with it for the rest of their lives.  So Dave, you're in the belly of the beast and these guys get to write their stories, but you're trying to actually influence policy and the narratives around policy. And a cliché is, of course, that one good anecdote is worth a thousand data points in Congress. But nonetheless, it seems like we haven't yet gotten very good at using narrative to influence the way we talk about these complex sociotechnical problems. So can you talk a little bit about your experiences and where you think we need to go if we're going to actually have narrative do work for us in places like Washington DC? So I'll give you an example that kind of builds off of the things that you were talking about in your story. About five years ago, I had this idea that one of the things that gets battled with in Washington is the budget. There is no policy, there's just a budget. The illusion that we have, the budget drives everything. So I had this idea, OK, what if I can get a million people to play with the budget? So we actually built a game, and it's built on a lot of the macroeconomic models that are used by the Congressional Budget Office, right, to inform the Congress. And we put it out there and the thing that was quite amazing is now there's over two million people that played it. And you enter the game through a narrative. We ask you to take a value stand. I really want to do energy independence. I believe in a better social safety net, whatever it is. And now you build the budget, right, go, right? And you've got access to 80, 100 policies, right? And of course, it's a big data machine. We had a huge arguments about, OK, how do we protect the people that are putting data in? Do we let them share data about their demographics, right, because there's a certain about a value we get on the back end. Anyway, the short story is it goes viral. It's in thousands of schools across America. All of a sudden, people are playing with a relatively complicated system that nobody thought they could ever understand, right? We get 40,000 emails from people saying, this is the first time I ever understood what the alternative to a minimum tax was, right? So people get to play with all these things that they always wanted to do. Let's get rid of foreign aid assumptions, right? Just test your assumptions. I don't like the EPA, cut the EPA's budget in half. Of course, nothing happens in the big picture, but they get to play it. They can crash this, a flight simulator. And we're collecting all the data in the back end. Now the wonderful thing that happens, right, is that if you collect a million data points, you actually begin to see that people start to act almost against their own self-interest. So one of the things we found was older people were willing to raise a social security age threshold. The wealthier people were willing to pay more for prescription drugs, right? So all of a sudden, when they were put in a situation where they had to make really severe trade-offs, right? How did they get put in those situations? Was it stripped by narrative that then caused them to make choices? Yeah, they had to make choices. So I think one of the things we're working now on a global dynamic simulation where you play with the entire global energy system. You get to control how you produce energy. Set carbon tax. What would you do? What if you had millions of people playing this? We have another game working on the Arctic, actually. What happens when the ice melts, right? And all of a sudden mineral rights opened up and fish rights, right? How are we going to sort of essentially, and that's a soft sort of soft governance system up there. So I think the thing that's interesting to me about these stories is that we have the capacity, technologically, to give these conflict systems to millions of people. But we can't give them to the appropriation subcommittee chairs. No. And that's what we have to do. Well, we have to do that. But I think the interesting thing was that it allowed us, as the data came back, we worked with American public media in a bunch of, it allowed us to create an alternative narrative, right? It was different from the Talking Heads in Washington. So we actually had journalists going on to interview. It's also different from all the interest groups that don't engage in these negotiations there in their own silos, right? And so the interesting thing was this alternative narrative actually emerged from people that were playing the game. The other surprising thing that this is kind of, it's not so startling, but it's scary. I'll tell you, I went to a party. I met somebody from the Congressional Budget Office. I told him, we developed this game. And they said, we play it all the time. So I said, why do you guys play it? I mean, it's based on your models. He said, but we never see the whole picture. Well, selfishly, I could continue to probe. But I think we should see if the people have questions starting to move back. What's that game all? A budget hero. A budget hero, yeah. Probably you heard in Europe, we launched in 2000 a big program, knowledge, economy, and society, the most vibrant one in the world. And today, we don't talk about it anymore. We come to America to learn something. My question is a following. I'll give you a real story this summer in Switzerland. You know about autism. It will be a march this coming Sunday. And until a recent study, everybody thought that autism is due for 80% to genetics. And it engaged a lot of resources. And now, a later study confirmed is less than 50%. Or this is almost a paradigm shift according to the experts. Now, we have so many information which mobilized resources, financial resources, political resources, like the case of autism. And we don't know how to handle it. How would you address this issue? We try to think of it like conduct more experiments, get people more involved, and so on. But how could we correct? Because we multiply those mistakes now. Autism is a huge social cost, human cost, at least in Switzerland. I have my grandson. So how would you address this issue? We heard very much in many other cases. But everything related to human condition is costly. How do we handle this? So is the bigger question here, how do you use narrative to basically change the framings around complex issues that are rooted in bad ideas? Is that the basic idea? Yeah, there are, again, ways of, I'm blanking on a particular morphological analysis, for instance. You can use that to explore very complex solution spaces for complex problems. And I'm sure that Europe does that. But you can, with tools like the budget hero, and in my story, I have seen Canada, you can let people literally play through the possibilities. You don't assume that the current studies on autism are correct, but you have to do a risk analysis. And say, right now, right here, on the basis of what we know, we have to make an investment. You know, it might turn out later that you were wrong, and that the science was wrong. But you have no other option than to do that. Sometimes it will just, you will have gone down a blind alley. But if you went down that blind alley, you know, using all the correct steps, basically, you're blameless in doing that. Just sometimes the real world cannot be anticipated. But there is a space, of course, for evidence-based policy, and that's a different conversation. But my other hobby horse right now is getting away from ideology to evidence-based.  When you were doing your introduction, you mentioned synthetic biology and nanotechnology, and you put them in the context of technologies, futures, magic, that lends more to centralization and decentralization, but those are very active hacker spaces, both of them. And in your story, in particular, I get the feeling that there was a hacking of government going on. I mean, I'm not faulting the tools, but this was a serious attempt to hack the governmental body. And I'm curious, how do you provide a solution when people are out there making their own solutions at the same time? There is no central solution to a lot of these problems because they have many solutions that are being attacked simultaneously by small groups, or sometimes not so small groups. I'm not necessarily an advocate of the situation that I'm describing in the story, first of all, because what I'm describing is government becoming more of a marketplace, where there are literally alternative governments that you can choose to ally yourself with. And I am a believer in the necessity of an ongoing state apparatus, but what I was saying basically was that there's going to be a negotiation and a conversation is gonna be forced upon government by technology and technologists, and they're gonna have to be ready for it. I think we work with bio-hackers, these are people that have more and more capacity. In fact, I have the capacity in my office not to swab DNA and amplify it and analyze it for $700. So one of the issues is how do you actually allow these people to innovate? Because there could be a lot of, but how do you allow them to do that in a safe way, in a responsible way? So one of the programs we came up with is called Ask a Biosafety Officer, and basically we went to the universities where they have biosafety officers and we said, would you be willing to volunteer time to help these folks? And we set up an anonymized website so that the DIY bio folks can actually pose a question. And that's sort of rooted to the various universities, to the professionals, and so it's an attempt to kind of take this world of government, which is hierarchically controlled, we know the rules, we know the regs, closed IP, and how do you interface that with a world that's network based, where there's open sharing, there's a gift economy, it's a completely different world. So the question just come in, and they're ferreted out and the questions come back and there's sort of a whole archive of answers. The problem we had was we tried for eight months to get this launched and nobody would insure it. It was an interesting question about how do you operate in the space, right? So we ended up having to go to Lloyds of London. Lloyds of London to get to, and they had to figure out how would I insure these people in the university, because the university was not gonna insure these folks if they're talking to garage biologists. So we cost us five grand a year to insure the people in the universities. But that was kind of a wicked problem because it wasn't obvious how we were actually gonna get this whole system to work because it was built outside of the system, right? I'm glad Lloyds exists for that reason. I'll be out of the question. Yes, this question is for Dave. Since you raised the issue of future studies, since science and technology are dominant forces in society and research and innovation are inherently future oriented, yet how many PhD programs do we have in future studies? I posited that very few because when I got interested in future studies, I couldn't find just one graduate school in the University of Houston led by Peter Bishop and Andy Hines and a PhD program at University of Hawaii and one in Australia led by Richard Slaughter but one in Canada now in Toronto. Why don't we have PhD program in future studies? Because of the National Academy of Sciences and similar organizations that create including the universities themselves that create a standard for what counts and I don't know what kind of fight they had in Toronto. It's a design program in a design school. That was how it happened. I can tell you that we're fighting similar battles at a university that is very open to innovation. The problem is really among the faculty. It's not the administration. It's a hard time getting a committee together because I want to pursue future study as an inquiry and they don't want to touch it. Yeah, this is a significant obstacle to taking this discussion to the next step in terms of how do you mainstream it and what we consider to be legitimate valid ways of intellectual expression in the academy of expressing ourselves intellectually in the academy. In 1977, the National Science Foundation, NSF had a program called RAN, Research Applied to National Needs. And the RAN program actually did a large report on trying to think about how you would create future studies, a discipline. Because that was the issue. It never had any scientific legitimacy. And so there was an attempt in the 70s to actually create a NSF to see whether they could raise this up to the point where it became recognized as a discipline, which gets you over some of the resistance in universities, but not completely. And tell everyone what happened to RAN. It's gone. Well, no, I think it's still in the book. It's not in the law. It might be in the law. It might be in the law. Part of the problem with that era was that we all thought that future studies should be about prediction. And that was kind of the killer. Now what you have is schools and practitioners who are focusing on the issue of uncertainty itself. So rather than the futurists, I've been thinking of calling myself an ambiguous. Well, and this gets to Vandan's point about the difficulty of getting past the idea of a Newtonian Cartesian world. It is not about the deterministic path to a future. It is about exploring the spaces. And thank goodness we have wonderful narrative writers to help us do it, which would be a great last thing to say, I suppose. Do we have any time left? So do you have a quick question? The mention of Lloyds of London triggered something in me, a memory. And that is back in the 1980s, Lloyds of London was doing the only long-term research into climate change because of the insurance risk. So I wondered, what other unusual organizations have you come across that is doing similar long-term, planning long-term strategy if our government agencies were having such difficulty with it a few years ago? The insurance folks are great, especially the reinserted folks because they usually pick up the dregs that nobody will insure. So when Nanotech started out, I mean it was Swiss re-insurance, Munich re-insurance, Allianz, Lloyds, because they couldn't monetize the risks. And that makes them very, very uncomfortable. So, and they've obviously climate changed. So I've done a lot of work with, there's an emerging risk unit at Lloyds, and that's their only job. And their job is to inform the entire insurance industry. But there's not a lot of, I mean, one of the things when I spent six years in the White House, I had this vision that I would walk down the hall and there would be an office, there'd be a plaque on the wall that said the U.S. Department of Unintended Consequences. We fail, so you don't have to. How many people would it take just to think, I'm talking about the government, our government as a whole, could we afford a dozen people just to think through the unintended consequences potentially of our policies? No, we can't do that, so. Huh? Yeah, Andy's, yeah. But that's a rare, yeah. So I wanna indulge myself with one last question of the authors, which is, I had a sense that perhaps in both stories of a bit of regret and that the world is so complex. And I was particularly taken by the fact that you both had central characters who were indigenous, and that obviously symbolizes all sorts of things in a non-indigenous reader about simplicity and harmony. So I'm curious about whether or not you have each fully embraced, spiritually embraced the notion of complexity and indeterminacy, or if there's really a romantic core in your ambition that wishes we could get back to a simpler world. No. No, no, I really, as I say, I like being an ambiguous, I like the complexity of all this stuff. And complexity does not mean chaos necessarily.  So I mean, lately I've been exploring cybernetics, which is something that people won't study anymore, but it's all about homeostasis in complex systems. And homeostasis, and again, a word that just doesn't get used anymore, or studied, and it's a very important concept for us right now. And it's quite compatible with complexity. Bondi, would you like the last word here? Similarly, I think I actually rejoice in complexity because it's in complexity, I think, that we have, or in complex systems, are also systems of great hope. And I'm going to end with what a student of mine once told me. This was when I was first learning how to teach climate change, and when I started to do it reasonably well, I realized that all my students would get depressed. But then, I added a study of complexity to my story about climate, and to explain some of the whys and wherefores. And I remember one student looking unusually chipper after a series of lectures, and I asked her why? And she said that she thinks she has hope because after all, she said, well, the global climate system is complex, but so are human societies, as I'd been saying, but what she had realized was that just as complex systems have tipping points, so do sociological systems. And so that she realized that although she was just one little cog in a machine, that if you have the right parameters, and even a small shift in the right parameters can change human behavior, then why not be hopeful? Because she still had a role that she could usefully play in making the future that is to come. So I just want to end with that story. Thank you. We'll end with that. Thank you.