All right, so I might do another afternoon Periscope today on a special topic. I want to talk about the Blight Authority and I want to talk about some ideas. I want to get your thinking caps on and see if we can think our way into the Golden Age. I'll give you a tease for it and it goes like this. So I'll do a special Periscope on this.

My take on the cost of living, which is a big part of poverty, which is a big part of the economy, etc., is that the cost of just owning a home or a place or even renting, but the cost of just living, is too high. And the homes are designed in a vacuum. In other words when somebody designs a home they design something that looks good, people will buy it, but it's really not about the entire way the community is organized. So I want to get your ideas later so you can think about it between now and then.

What if you were to start from scratch and say throw out every way that things have been done before? How would you design a small community? It doesn't have to be a whole city, just, you know, it could be several blocks. It could be something maybe something the size of a small college campus. If you were to design it from scratch from bare dirt and you were to say what's the best way to feed them, what's the best way for them to travel, what's the best way for them to get educated, what's the best way for them to have security, best way to care for the pets, best way to have good light and energy and low energy costs, what's the best way for people to interact with each other and be with people their age, what's the best way to take care of the elderly, what's the best way to do childcare in a safe way, what's the best way to have food equality.

This is one of Walk Newsome's I think really an innovation, probably one of the best. I'll give Walk some credit for this. I'm not sure if he's the original thinker on this but he's the one who's popularized the idea. The idea of food equality. Because your ability to be effective in this world is very much influenced by the food you eat because the food changes your chemistry. Chemistry changes how you think, how you feel, everything from your ability to handle pressure to your concentration and everything else. And I think he makes an extraordinarily important point that if there were some way to close the food equality gap you might see some big gains. It's worth experimenting with that in any event.

So you put on your thinking caps. I'll ask you for ideas later and you could put those ideas on the website at BlightAuthority.com. Blight is spelled B as in boy and then light. It's like be light. BlightAuthority.com. Go to the forum and you can put your own ideas down there as much as you want.

But just let me give you a snapshot of that. If you were to build a community today could you imagine that you would not build it to take advantage of smartphones? Just think of that one variable. Every home that's been built from the beginning of time through today has ignored the fact, largely ignored except for trivial reasons, the fact that people own smartphones, you know, above the age of 10 or whatever. And how would you design a place if you just assumed everybody including the kids had smartphones? Well one of the things you might do is instead of a kitchen in every home, your community might have a central cafeteria. And then everybody including the kids could just go to their smartphone and say, oh, peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Now below some age maybe the parent has to approve it but imagine the teenagers being able to feed themselves by just saying oh okay I'll choose from this. And again maybe the parents can limit what types of foods their kids can order so that they get only healthy stuff for example. And then the cafeteria brings it to your house and you've got a drop box on your house that either has a warmer or a cooler on it and you just stick it in there.

Imagine having runners, you know, just some teenagers or something who when the orders come in from all over the community they just grab it and take it. Now a central cafeteria would not only be jobs for people who had never worked before. Young people could become runners. They could learn to cook, etc. But they would be buying food in bulk and preparing it in bulk and that should bring the cost way down. Don't know for sure but I think it would. And then it would allow for example single parents. If you're a single parent and you've got to take care of feeding your kids and working that's a pretty big load. But if the kid can come home after school with an app and say give me a sandwich and the sandwich appears in 15 minutes in the drop box of their own house, you know mom or dad, the single parent, can just keep working and the kid has a good meal.

So that's just one small example and I'm not saying that's a good idea by the way. I'm just trying to expand your thinking that if you were to build a community from scratch you would most certainly include phones. A modern community today I'm not even sure it needs a garage because you could easily imagine ride-sharing using your smartphones. You could imagine using Uber using your smartphones. You could imagine knowing the bus schedule and exactly where the bus is. Imagine if you could see the bus on the map just like Uber so it'd be so convenient to take the bus. You could just stay in your house until it was time to go outside and there's the bus.

Imagine if you had security cameras everywhere and every resident of just the community, not the whole world, but every resident could look at the security cameras on their phone and they could see their own house only but they could also see the cameras on the street so they could check and check their kids on the street. Nothing bad happening out there. So but the point is, oh the other thing is here's, I put a home theater in my house because I make too much money and when I built the house I was like ah home theater. I'm gonna put this big screen in, these comfortable chairs and everything. And that was now you know 10 years ago. If I were to build a house today would I put a home theater in it? I would not. No amount of money would encourage me to build a home theater in a house I built today.

Why? Because let me show you how I watch movies today. That's it. I consume all of my television shows, all of my movies, all of my content on my phone because my phone comes with me and I can do other things. I can stick it in my pocket and keep my earphones on. I can do the laundry while I listen to the news. I can lay in bed you know in the dark and you know there's no loud TV on. No two people want to hear the same content at the same time so you could be in the house with three other family members. They've all got their headphones on and they're looking at their phones. So if you were to build a home from scratch today would you even include a screen like a TV screen? You know every home designed today has a place for the TV. Would you even bother if you were going to design one from scratch? Maybe not.

So just think about how living in a community could be completely different with smartphones. Here's another app that you should absolutely have. There's an app called the Neighborhood or maybe it's just Neighborhood. At the heart of it, so it's basically it's like a private Facebook for your neighborhood. That's a bad way to describe it because it doesn't, it's not for posting pictures of your family. It's for borrowing things or saying your dog is lost or does anybody have a babysitter. So it's basically a sharing information app for just your immediate neighborhood or you can define it to be as much of your small or big neighborhood.

Now I'll tell you, you use that for a while and you can't live without it because people are finding pets that have gotten away. They're in my neighborhood. We have coyotes and some dangerous animals that wander down once in a while and the word goes out you know put your cat inside there's a coyote out there. It's just amazingly useful. So just take that idea. Whether it's, yes Nextdoor. Is it called Nextdoor? Is that it? Oh I know I forget the name. Yeah I'm sorry it's not the neighborhood it's called Nextdoor. One word. Nextdoor. And yeah and WhatsApp groups etc.

So imagine how effective neighborhood watch would be if you just have apps and cameras. Yeah too much sharing is nothing private anymore. So one of the elements of a new neighborhood designed from scratch would be how much privacy people are willing to give up for how much benefit. And it seems to me that people who are moving from a crime-infested area, if you said to them here's the deal: for very low cost you can live in this awesome community but the trade-off is there are going to be cameras on all the public spaces. Would you say I don't like cameras in the public spaces but I do like living where there's no crime and my kids can go play outside so sign me up. As long as it wasn't required. Nobody would have to live there. You would simply choose to live there if the costs and benefits made sense. Would you give up some of your privacy while you're outside? I'm not talking about any privacy in your house but would you give up some public privacy for safety? A lot of people would.

Is this for low-income folks? Yeah everything I'm talking about so far is at least mentally I'm trying to design that for low-cost housing for the future for people with low incomes.