LIVE TUESDAY CALL NUMBER 21

CHRIS CHRISTIE’S BRIDGE SCANDAL

We all know the story: in an apparent act of political retribution for the mayor of Ft. Lee not endorsing his re-election, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’ staff ordered lane closings on the George Washington Bridge for four days, causing a dangerous gridlock over the week of 9/11.

The thing I just can’t shake about this story is that it is so stupid (not to mention evil and mendacious) that I have a hard time believing it’s true.  So I guess that puts me in the same category as Chris Christie, who spent two hours with reporters saying roughly the same thing.  Which leaves me with two interpretations, either the Governor is telling the truth about not knowing about the plot, or he is a sociopath who is playing a high stakes game that he is destined to lose.

I’m betting on the former: that Christie is just too smart to be involved such an misbegotten act of political revenge.  My guess is he, like most politicians (including great presidents as well as the Founding Fathers) had created a culture among his staff of “reward our friends and punish our enemies” while keeping a buffer of plausible deniability that kept his hands technically clean. I explain in the recording…

THE NEXT ECONOMY: AN INTERVIEW WITH SAID DAWLABANI

Next we turned our attention to an impressive new Integral book: MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System, and visited with its author, Said Dawlabani,

Dawlabani charts historical economic systems according to their position on the spiral of development. He has worked with Don Beck, co-author of Spiral Dynamics, for over ten years, and definitely stands on Beck’s shoulders with a virtuoso understanding of the Spiral Dynamics’ model of evolution, and a brilliant application of its explanatory power to the dismal science of economics. As I told Said early in our conversation, this is the book I’ve been waiting for, and I finished reading it with a much more sophisticated understanding of the karmas of the historical economic systems humans have created, especially the ones that are online (and fighting with each other) right now.

For my review of Said’s book and a full length audio conversation, click here.

Listen to an excerpt below. The full audio is on Integral Life.

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