Cheers. See you. Bye.

Interesting comparison, very interesting comparison.

It’ll be interesting to hear your take on the Scottish experience. I think you’re going up there first, and then coming down to London?

If want to meet up when you’re in London, just give me a shout, and I’ll hop on a plane.

Good. Enjoy your supper.

That’s one comfort.

I still think it has a place somewhere. I’ll explore it, and see what comes out of it.

That’s fine, that’s fine. It’s been good to talk, good to talk. Ask any questions you want down the line. I’m still thinking that this has a place. We could survive without it in the UK. You could survive without it.

Yeah.

That’s good. I think we’ve gotten to the point where we’re at the water cooler.

I said, "You’re going to lose that on the web if your search term is Ubuntu, because you just won’t be found." [laughs]

They’ve taken it straight from the Zulu and appropriated it again, without realizing it’s already being used. That’s a funny one. I actually helped somebody build a website, and I said, "You do realize Ubuntu has other meanings to a lot of other people?" "No."

It came out of the Zulu language, yeah. There’s Ubuntu social movement now, as well, which is reusing it. The word ubuntu, I’ve seen it used by social groups that weren’t even aware of the operating system.

There’s a lot of interesting, I think, a lot of very interesting lessons. Actually, probably deeper, there’s probably interesting lessons to look at the different indigenous communities, to see how in balance they are, compared to the Kalahari.

The Bushmen, the Kalahari, and that Central Africa stuff, that had taken hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to a stage where they were in harmony, in effect. There was no such thing as an externality. [audio drops out] from this, because if you didn’t, you died.

This is pre-Maori, pre-Aborigines. These are pre-where the Aborigines came from.

The amount of extinctions that we caused outside of Africa is phenomenal. These are the early humans.

Whereas when the then-humans landed in Asia and in America broadly -- Asia and America, those two migrations -- they found fauna that just didn’t understand what humans were. They just stood there, and bang, gone.

Not so much that. I think it’s because the tribes, if you look at the megafauna loss in Africa, it’s far less than anywhere else. What happened, the megafauna and the humans evolved together. The megafauna in Africa were aware of how dangerous humans were, and they avoided them.

I’ll throw in a curveball into that lot. When you look at the early migrations, actually, the ones where the Maoris came out of, that branch, and the later Native American branch, they actually caused a human amount of damage.

Did, yeah.

Absolutely.

They are fiercely egalitarian. Rather than just expect it, they will actually enforce it, which is unusual. I’m not sure you’d get away with that today, in our current culture. It’s counterintuitive.

This is part of his anthropology. He should have really understood what he was doing, but didn’t. They had to explain to him in simple worlds. They have this thing, they call it cursing the meat. It’s a way of, as the previous writer James Suzman, calls it, "fiercely egalitarian."

Extract for this, yeah. [quiet muttering] This is an extract from a book by an earlier anthropologist, where he falls foul of the unwritten rules. It’s a lovely story. He should have known, really, but he didn’t.

There’s a lovely story, another one. This is my favorite subject at the moment, so do tell me when I’m boring you. Otherwise, I’ll just carry on. There’s a lovely story of, say, East meets West. It’s not East meets West, but it’s that sort of thing, where an anthropologist ...

Whereas when it’s converted to money and a token, it’s then not connected with any emotional, somehow it seems OK to collect it, hoard it, and gather more. It’s a very different mindset. There’s some really interesting understandings, I think, from the Bushmen.

If somebody goes to a table, gets a plate, and piles it so that he can’t get anything more on the plate, he’ll get looks from other people. If he started filling his pockets as well, somebody would say something.

"My this year’s harvest, I know how long it’s taken me, how much it hurt, how the work, effort, and so on. In my head, it’s worth..." I’ve got the figure, and I can see what the equivalent is, and it’s mine, which is a very different mindset to, you ...

There’s lots of arguments about why we went from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. The jury’s still out on that. What happened was that suddenly, things had value and worth, whereas they weren’t exactly worthless before, but they weren’t ascribed a value, you could then park it and say, "It’s worth that ...

Otherwise, they’re competing for their square, their circle, their space, or their whatever. They don’t know they’re doing it. People don’t know they’re doing it. They don’t know they’re in a war footing or a loving footing. Those are these two footings.

There’s an awful lot of changes -- and there’s a couple of books. I can give you some books as well -- that illustrate what happens. It’s a mindset thing. We have this duality of nurturing empathy, and as you were saying, about getting people on board in that frame ...

Most people go back to the Napoleonic. They might go back to the Middle Ages. They might go back to the Dark Ages. Actually, to see where the inflection, the inflection point is 10,000 years ago. There’s an awful lot of interest, I think. I don’t know whether it’ll be ...

I like to go back not quite to assembler, but somewhere close, looking at something I’d like to -- there’s a link now. Grab the Google link -- understand the causation, as I said. When you go back, you go back, and you go back, let’s look at our history.

That’s very important. The thing I haven’t mentioned, which, actually, I’m not sure it is entirely relevant...Tell me when you’ve got to go, because I can talk to you for another couple of days, I think. When I started looking at this thinking, well...

[laughs] Now, you are kidding me.

You’ve got to define your resolution. Whereas analog, it’s at an atomic level, I don’t know, quantum level. I don’t know what level it is, but it’s very deep.

For a long time, it was much better, because it was stepless, because it was analog. I think there’s something there that I think we might have missed. I think there’s something useful there about that, because digital, there’s always steps somewhere.

We’re digressing slightly, but there was a very interesting chap called Richard Feynman you’ve probably heard of. He fought for a while to keep one of the old computers going that was analog. He had an analog weather computer.

I didn’t even bother.

I’ve got friends who started in assembler, which is a form of madness, I think.

What were you coding in, BASIC?

Then from there, I went straight into XML, because I was trying to do something with the mobile phones. They had a thing called WAP, which again, disappeared. Technology overtook me.

In many ways, I had a useful grounding, because I started with PostScript, trying to do stuff on printers. I don’t whether you’ve come across PostScript. PostScript is actually where PDFs came from. PDF is just an encapsulated version of PostScript. This is before the Web.

Which it isn’t, of course. It’s very much alive, it’s just not visible.

[laughs] That’s good, because most people go, "XML, it’s dead."

Have you eaten? I’m not holding up your supper.

...can’t we? Have you eaten?

I’ve done this pretty much for a long time in a sort of vacuum. [laughs] I called it climate change. I have documents on this...

I’ve got a document I can, which I’ve been playing with, which probably explains a bit more. It’s very interesting talking to you, because this is the first time I’ve talked to people who seem to understand the bigger picture of what’s going on.