 This is Open Global Minds Weekly Thursday check-in call for January 20th, 2022. We just wander around the room and see what OGMU things people have been up to. But first, Grace, thank you for taking us in yesterday, a week ago. And there's just lots of energy and thank you then also afterward for what you posted to the list. So I'm going to talk about your activities and how to move forward. So partly I'm trying to figure out all those moving parts. Tuesday we have build OGM calls and my intention was to talk about how to build scaffolding. And we ended up talking about something else the whole time, but trying to figure out how to make this really fruitful so that, you know, you get support from OGM and all kind of works out. And Tuesdays for the next six weeks are just booked because of my workshop, although I don't know what time it is. If it's around this time, I could potentially show up. I just don't like, I don't know where to look for the calls. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So the Tuesday and Wednesday there's calls at 7am Pacific. So it's an hour earlier. And the Tuesday one is build OGM and the Wednesday one is weaving the world operations, which I may repurpose or it may shift around but that but the build OGM calls we wind up having really interesting conversations just about what is this funny ami boy thing. And how do we make it be more of what it might be. Pete, thank you for reminding me about the transcripts. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean the whole fabric thing it's really interesting I don't know if guys guys know but someone started a liminal web now discussion on a discord server have you guys seen this. No. So, basically this guy Jared Lucas, who actually did my workshop in the previous cohort, and is involved in some AI stuff started this to try and bring together these liminal web folks, whether that's, you know rebel wisdom, the stowa, the intellectual dark web and like kind of create a Dow, which the first paper that was written was not well thought out but it was just this kind of call to people. And some, you know, and they've been having weekly calls, which are a little bit late at night for me. I guess they're about something like 11 or 12 noon Pacific time or something like that. And they're just these amazing deep interesting calls and one of the things they're sort of talking about is. Before we say we're going to do something let's figure out what we are and we want and there's this kind of respect for the fact that, given the minds that are in the room, what we could invent might end up in the wrong hands. I think OGM is in that same position, and that we need to sort of start to start formulate what this thing is. And one of the, I mean the bottom line problem, obviously is the bottom line because that's why it's called the bottom. Anyway, which is we're all doing this great content and we're not getting paid for it so it's kind of the spare time thing and for some people that's easier and some people that's more difficult. It was just this amazing conversation this amazing discord group and it's, it's just forming. And there may be, you know, 2030 people on this call every week and it goes for two or three hours, and it's really this just, who are we let's get to know each other let's establish the trust. Before we build things and I think that OGM has kind of gotten to that point like we kind of built the trust. We feel comfortable with you another one another. We don't think anybody here is going to take this dangerous thing that we create and put it in the wrong hands. And now we're at the creation stages really interesting to see this other group forming and going through this thing. And there's certainly a parallel group and I'll put the discord chat here. I think it's really, you know, it's within. There are people. There are people. What's the topic of this thing I came in while you're in the middle of your. The liminal web now. Yeah, okay, yes. Somebody Pete has has done this. Yeah. This this thing. And I'll send the discord link as well for people who want to look at that all this. I can't, I can't do it as fast as Pete. I don't think anybody can. And I did, I did a quick Google while you're talking and I got the first hit was a video called meta modern spirituality the liminal web and community tasks. And the whole meta modernism theme I tripped across last year sometime under lockdown sometime and really rang my bell it was like wow okay this this meta modernism thing could really work. I'm not entirely sure I can explain it to anybody yet but but it feels like a, like a really good direction. Here's a quick picture. And you notice our friend Jim right there in the middle. Oh man, and rebel wisdom game be culture. A little bit everything. Hey. Hi. My sense of everything is like grab a screenshot. I yeah there's a I also put that link that's just a blog post. There's a link in the chat. Thank you. My sense of everything is. It's funny like it just as a physical sensation I get this like little like cringiness because it's so white academic intellectual man all up here talking about stuff. It's been extremely difficult for me to break into this group. And I'm white and intellectual, I've been in the crypto space five years, like I get this cringy like it's going to be a bunch of us creating gorilla NFTs again like, like I'm like, let it not be that please, you know, feeling and also like if you just look at those rings they're very it's an exclusive kind of group and that's okay right like this is our little clan this is our little culture. But there's something about it that is like, if that's what sense making is it's like okay, it's a it's another bubble it's another little filter bubble of only people who can and you listen to some of these people. And you know that 90% of the population is people who aren't even just who are intellectual but not native English speakers is like, well, this is not accessible. So, yeah. Oh, great. Thank you for putting it in the conversation Pete were you about to jump in. Or was that just an intake of breath. Just an intake of breath. I actually I had a quick question for grace, you said it with grace he said it was hard to break into it, and was that hard because it was exclusionary or hard because it's like oh my gosh yet another, you know, overly white overly clustered. I think it's, it's, it's a closed group. It's a close it's, it's just very simple. If you look at these people they've all got quite popular podcasts in which they interview one another, and then if somebody's in they get passed from one podcast the other. And if you're not in you're not in. That's really interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of communities where there's sort of mutual gatekeeping and they attend one another's things. Yeah. And they're sort of insular impermeable, whatever the right word is there, you know, they create an ecosystem of their own and they're happy to stay within it. And anybody in OGM would fit in to their demographic but if you're not in you're not in OGM is very open door. OGM is is not insular and not impermeable or. Like, I joined a call and I had didn't have there was no gatekeeping somebody said you should join this call and I joined the call. Yeah, is that not these other words, more more gaity. They're, they're much more moderated in terms of there's a moderator of a conversation like that, like there's a Jerry except their Jerry decides who talks and it's not not everybody gets a turn. Right there Jerry is like to accept that try to make it so that everybody gets a turn. Yeah, and in their thing it's like we're going to hear from these four people this week. So is this kind of self referential more highly moderated constellation, a good thing or a bad thing is it powerful does it build something that we don't build or is it creepy or how do we think about it. My assessment is that it's really interesting for about three or four months and then it's like okay. I've learned what these people have to say. Interesting we don't have. We as a GM haven't looked around and some of us have very active lives in other communities but we haven't kind of looked around a lot actively and said hey who's out there and who's making a lot of progress and who has a good ethos. And who has good practices and like whose community can we can read rub shoulders with or borrow some practices from or things like that we haven't done a lot of that. So I was feeling that there's some, there's some really deeply sort of insular inward facing conversations that are interesting but trapped out going on, and then there's some really like open, but like the future is happening right now in front of us it's you know, the people, the people who will be referenced 200 years from now are busy doing their thing right now. They're just out there I mean what my one of my questions is has for a long time been, who was I using as like who is the Alice Miller of our time. Like like who's going to crack the code on some important piece of how society works how people works, you know which of which of these many theories actually actually works. So do you want to continue a little bit just by way of checking and then I'll take us around the room a little bit more. I'm just going to say me and you know we can move on. This isn't necessarily a question but yeah I've been, I've been my workshop got completely booked up. I had to close registrations. And it's been really exciting keeping busy, and I've been working on a little pitch deck that I'm going to. I said did my graphic artist today and so I'll be able to pitch the money thing that I'm working on. Once she gets through it and I'd love your feedback so that's me. That sounds great. Thank you that's wonderful. Let's go Doug, Pete, Michael. I find myself kind of self dominated by the simple thought that of all the talk that's going on. Nobody hardly is talking about what to do if we start to fail, what kind of backup plan, what kind of contingency. Well I'll just stop. That's the key thought. It's a very rare thing to find somebody's going to talk about what we do if things start falling apart. Is the deep adaptation community cover that for you or are you aware of them because Jim Bandel and a bunch of people are off trying to figure out hey just doing little things isn't going to work. You know things are breaking we're going to have to figure out how to survive when things break. I'm not aware of that group. It should be, but there's so many groups as part of the problem. That is probably problem and we have a super conductive communications medium where we can all like, I remember a brief moment when I started creating videos and I was like, Ah, where am I going to host these like like really seriously how am I going to put these up and make them available. Go ahead. And then YouTube and then Google buys YouTube and I'm like, wait, what, why did you, isn't that just a suck of energy and what how, and now it's like I don't know exactly how I live without YouTube. So the people in the dark web stuff seem to me characterized by two three things. First, they're very athletic. They've got a lot of energy. Second, they tend to be very smart. Third, they tend to be extremely well self educated. And for they seem to be somewhat conspiracy minded. And it's hard to deal with that but it's like, I'm sure many things like that are going on around the world. Can you say more about conspiracy minded what you mean by that. Well, they tend to us versus them view of the world where us as a very small number and them is huge forces. And so they tend to discount the possibility of dialogue into the major part of the population. They're also beginning to raise money. Daniel Schmackenberger for one seems to be drawing money from somewhere. I'll just add a little bit from my brain so here's the intellectual dark web but it has a Wikipedia page etc and there's an article in salon godless drifters having new atheists merged with the far right. And so I'm talking to Torres Bogosian Lindsay Kraus Schermer, Pinker, you know, Sam Harris, like there's a whole bunch of people in this intellectual dark web and it does grace for me also it has this connotation of conspire assist and some some very deep hard thinking and some really interesting different points of view and then a bunch of stuff it's like oh crap really. I think that's what we have to puzzle our way through together. It's like it's like, well, this stuff you just said like I'm completely on board with and this stuff over here word that come from. And how do we, how do we sort of cool our jets collectively and have those conversations. Anyone else with thoughts on. So that's telling that particular article of a society in which when you have views that fall into several categories right like you said some of these things yeah some of these things know they're like for right. Right like if you've got this one opinion, like, I don't know, whatever. And you know and I think that's one of the things that that particular article kind of fell into but also. Yeah, okay, I get what you're saying. It's interesting because there seems to be a small constellation of beliefs that kind of go together there's like a basket of beliefs that aren't necessarily related that sort of seem to be a package and if you buy one you wind up going into the others. And I don't know. I'm interested in other people's sort of opinions or theories on this but but it's interesting to me how a collection of things some of which are sensible and some of which are not sensible all get locked together sometimes in really interesting ways. John. Yeah, so I'm going to take just as one of these slices and I think, well we'll see, I think Grace will agree with me this is, this is troublesome territory this is where a lot of things run afoul, or get very difficult to to to manage. So my sister is seeing now we get into this word, I was about to say anti vax, and even she, you know she's a. A deep Steiner person follows Rudolph Steiner, and she lives in a community that is, you know, eh, you know, and and the aunt is all over the place for some of it's like. Oh my current you know we're going to get it you're going to get it it's a flu and oh yeah if you're if you're old or you got diabetes well you know you should have taken better care of yourself. But yeah you're going to you might die you might die you know when you know we seriously we would show up we would we would be at your bedside we would pray for you we would hold you, but I mean, you know, don't do this vaccine thing, just because a half a percent or 1% of the population is going to die from it don't do that don't that because that puts the 99% that injects something that's untested. And then there's the whole conspiracy group that says oh no it's it was very well tested it's it's graphing, it's going to get in your body and that's how you know, and 5g is going to come along and then you're going to be controlled because you you accepted the vaccine. And it's really tough, even with really smart people to navigate the nuance and to say well, okay, you could have you know there's a there's a very reasonable basis for, you know, saying wait a minute, wait a minute. This thing was not sufficiently tested. I'm not ready to do that. The next questions you know now you get into the joke of it thing you say, well, as a responsible human being therefore I should put a mask on. That's what I would say, you know, if you say, you know I got some concerns about the vaccine. I understand that. Put the mask on, because you're running around in public. But the problem is that the same people who I got some concern about the vaccine are also I got some concern about the government and the health people and Fauci and the Chinese and so I'm therefore not going to wear a mask. Wait a minute. You know, it's really really hard to thread the needle with with all those folks and this has just been my experience and and I'm still struggling with it. I don't know if, you know, some of the rest of you can probably chime in and shed some light on this. I don't know about shutting light but Can you throw some shade on this. I can't do that either. I just, I just wanted to note that this is an interesting and to this group probably kind of ticklish burr under our saddle to be thinking about these folks and and I wanted to say, by the way, I think one of the things that we need to do more of is to look up is the right direction maybe down is better direction but I think a lot of the. I think a lot of our world is manipulated by by people that we don't really think about people and organizations that we don't really think about very much. So when I see people making a lot of noise. It's like well, why are they making a lot of noise and who's encouraging them to make a lot of noise and who set up the kind of the societal conditions in which that kind of noise gets made and spread right. Sometimes that's kind of an emergent property of our society, but I think also sometimes it's a billionaire or, you know, a handful of billionaires, or, or for an act for nations or whatever right I think we have a lot of manipulation going on purposeful manipulation that we account for as like oh my god that person is doing something acts you know it's like yeah you know that person and a bunch of other people and maybe that's now I sound like a conspiracy theorist. Maybe that's a bigger more diffuse action going on the the poster kids for this for me or the cook brothers if I pronouncing their name correctly. And you mean coke Charles and yeah the cook brothers. You know or, I guess they're a good example Rupert Murdoch is another good example of somebody who just did a bunch of manipulation and as far as I can tell he just did it because he was a griefer a berserker. And the cook brothers, you know, got lucky one of the kind of the familial and business lottery and then thought that that was because they were brilliant and smart and, and passionate and knew all the right things right and so then they spent the rest of their lives, spending billions of dollars on thousands of little things all over the place that you know unless you pull back and start drawing maps you you don't really you can't conceive of how big their influence was because it's just distributed all over the place right. And that's I think an easy example to look at I think there are trickier ones where there's you know millions of things that look disconnected until you can pull far enough back and go, they're probably connected. And I think that Yeah, very briefly, I think we were all brought up in some sense to think that we're important that each of us as a little individual is important and not realize you know how unimportant we are as a as a tiny cell in in this large living body. We call Gaia or the universe, and add to that the whole notion that we were brought up to be competitive and not think that much about other people. And if you add those two things up. It really reeks for trouble in the future. I mean, and not not this whole notion of everybody having an opinion, and people focused on, you know, it's my right it's my right as my right as opposed to having some level of responsibility for the larger community. Doug, did you want to jump in. Well, just to say that I think that the anti vaxxers and the people like Daniel Schmackenberger are at really different sides of this question. I think that Schmackenberger and Sam Harrison that group want to maintain an independence from minutes. They are as critical of the bad sense making as we are. I think it's, if you haven't, looking at Schmackenberger's insolency project is really worthwhile. He's a very smart about game theory is very smart about history. He puts it together in ways that are just really worth listening to. And some of the people he pals around with are pretty good. And they do good interviews with each other. I just wish some of Schmackenberger's materials were shorter. Grace knows this I'm like, does he have anything that's brief anything at all that's brief and I found like a six minute video which I'll post in the chat which is actually brief and I'm like okay this is good and it's just a narrative with some fancy fancy video art basically stock stock video footage but but the words I really agree with like I liked it a lot. So I'll find that. Mr. Cronza. There's something that I've noticed over time. Watching the intellectual dark web is when they accrue followers their behavior changes slightly. And I'm not exactly sure how to put this either celebrity effect or the call before the power of the, the bottom, something like that, where it just seems, and you know this is possibly a certainly a prejudice of mine that the need to maintain attention to maintain a revenue stream to maintain followers. I'm allergic to it. And it seems to be a thing that is a very large force in the way that we need to connect through media. I'm not exactly sure what to do about it but I see it I call it out and I wonder, huh. I used to call it look at me as an, and you know, I'm just not exactly sure where to come down either. Yes, the people who are making a lot of noise deserve to make a lot of noise or yes the people who are making a lot of noise have ulterior motives and shut them up now. I just, I just don't know, but there's something there. Thanks Mark. It's interesting. I'm reminded of the moment I realized after Hillary lost to Trump in 2016. I realized that I had set aside all of my deeply held beliefs about how screwed up the system is and how we've designed everything from how institutions are like asked backwards and all that and set all of that aside to vote for the person I was hoping would be the first woman president of the United States. Because because unconsciously I knew she was a steward of the status quo and sort of entirely part of the engine that was feeding all those things I don't like that I'd like to redesign and I had. I harbored no hope that she was going to take a radical approach toward those issues and reestablish trust and do other kinds of things, you know, having watched her for three decades fight off, you know, assaults and whatever and I think that endures you also it's like you stop, you stop wanting to try to listen to anybody. And then, and then a second thing I want to put in the conversation is that it used to be that you know the Andy Warhol everybody has 15 minutes of fame. You're in an era of instant almost random celebrity where things go viral for good and bad and suddenly you're in the spotlight and it's really hard to erase it and your life is transformed and who knows what happens there and school kids growing up with cell phones and TikTok are like, maybe this one. And it's like it's like in the back of our heads everybody kind of knows that maybe, and some people I think really hope for this. And that means that they pitch themselves more radically more aggressively more whatever because that's how you get attention. There's there's forces and feedback mechanisms here that are new that we haven't figured out how to make productive that don't really help us with society. And then my like my quest for the last 30 years has been about the word consumer. So I have a whole narrative about the consumerization of our lives. And instead of being citizens anymore, we're mere consumers. And when you're a citizen you actually care about the things we're talking about here interdependence, the fabric of society, relationships, how things get done together, common outcomes, all that kind of stuff is like a part of citizenship, and consumers are just supposed to buy more stuff or the economy will come to a halt and then there's going to be a global disaster. And we all know that that narrative doesn't really actually work because we're heading toward a global disaster because of that attitude. It's like, that's so completely backwards and yet we're just completely inside that system and take it for granted. We don't we don't really work hard to change it. And I think some of the groups we're talking about here are working hard to change it in very radically different ways. And some people have a really big microphone. Yeah, a bunch of things mark I wonder if you're distrust of the attention seekers, maybe related to the fact you have a job. Whoops. I'm not committed. Came came way before that. Yeah, I'm not to single you up at the point of you know, for those of us who are who are itinerant crafts people and artists of the of the of the bright web. We're sort of stuck in that game to some degree. And whether it's you know, building podcasts or learning academies or selling consulting services or whatever it is we're you know, we're somehow in that's ongoing self promotional way that you're not if you have a job, it's going to be a 20 year career to go to work and get a paycheck. It's a different different kind of game. On the Hillary thing Jerry I feel you and I had a kind of moment with Ken show with Obama who was yet again a Democratic presidential candidate who was not my choice. Among the whole kind of who I voted for. And I realized some point in that process that I thought you know, I don't agree with him about everything but you know on balance that's where I'm going to go and I realize wait a minute I don't even agree with myself on everything. So looking for complete unity of agreement with somebody candidate or friend or anything else just like you know sort of left my left my constellation at that point I realize things are much more complex and nuanced and shifty for me to understand that. But I want to come back to Doug's provocation about what if everything starts to fail. And that's a real consideration for me now in a way that it hasn't been for a really long time, and we talk about it as conspiratorial but it's also a kind of steely I taking assessment of what we're looking at in the world, and what has brought us to the state that we're in today. And it's, you know, it's not just climate and climates to climates a symptom not a cause we've got biodiversity decline got potential ecosystem collapse at a vast scale. We've got toxification of living systems at a vast scale something we're very concerned with because Jane who's a dealing with multiple myeloma has found pretty to her pretty persuasive evidence of the impact of the phosate in the ideology of that disease when you start looking to play phosate the stuff is fucking everywhere. And so, you know, there's, there's the possibilities of economic decline climate decline biological decline the impact of immune status on future pandemics and on and on and on. And the little matter of capitalism that gets very little talked about. And the matter of power which gets almost never talked about I mean in all the discussions I see about economics no one's talking about power, and concentration of power manipulation of power so not to not to, you know, feed conspiratorial fires but it's a, it's a, it's a complex mess, as Russ a cough used to talk about not a problem but a mess that's inter tangled, and the pieces pull on each other. So, you know, I've been finding that to be a real real challenge to my congenital optimism, just sort of where I've lived for as long as I can remember and I. This was triggered in particular by watching don't look now at the end of last year which took me. Don't look up. Yeah. Thank you. Which took me to a mood that I hadn't felt for decades. And I was to mobilize for a couple of days I clawed my way back out of it and I'm back at work and actually work is thrilling at the moment. You know, the, the individual actions that we take in the face of the cosmic group was up in the thread above there, I think it's really important. So, but Doug what do you know what do you do if everything starts to fail. You know, do you, you know, do you build monasteries that can preserve knowledge and manuscripts and lots of good science fiction with suggestions. Yeah, and some history. And what do we do personally. You know, do we do we stay here do we leave here. Where we put ourselves in the economy, how do we take care of ourselves physically what kind of communities do we build which is back, you know, I'm much more attracted to this kind of community than to the than that intellectual dark web graphic or or whatever it was that we saw earlier on. But this is weird, you know, because I don't get to walk with most of you or hug any of you or, you know, have extended, you know, extended evenings together in a cozy space and all the things that we used to do and I really relish I miss the physicality of contact I've, I've been, I've been, you know, I've adapted to zoom very well over the past couple years but the loss of the tactile it's really starting to get to him. It's embarrassing Gil has a scratching post in his living room that he's just like hugging. That's why I go off camera every now and then. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And to the thing you were saying about about consumer. I've been kind of running the same mean for a long time myself and you know, yes to everything you said and also, you know, if you think about it in ecological terms there is no consumption there's only transformation. You know, I take in materials I put out materials by my material basis changes there's nothing there's nothing consumed it's all changes form and consumption. As a term used to be what we call tuberculosis TB back in the day. Yeah, this is a disease that would eat you out from the inside and now it's something that we prize and like you said you know if we don't shop the terrorists will have one. Even while Biden talks about build back better and aggressive climate plan which we're not going to see they talked about well we got to buy more shit, all of which drives climate disaster. Thanks. Ken and then let's go back to the queue. Good morning. Good evening wherever you might be afternoon. A lot of as always so many things to talk about. The issue of power. It really disturbed me when Obama came into office that he did not work diligently to take away and undo some of the powers that Congress granted to Bush after 911 which were brought in sweeping and really horrifically misplaced. I think there's a conversation missing in our public sphere about power, the original intent of setting up. The three branches of government was to have checks and balances so nobody became too powerful. And we have now eroded that pretty effectively to where there's this huge concentration of power and we're seeing this even with minority you know you get you get Mitch McConnell and and the Republicans able to block minority rule at majority rule you know so it's just very disturbing to me that that has never been addressed in the last 20 years since since 911 and I don't know how to get that conversation going in the public sphere. Flipping completely to a different place. Some of you know that I went off of social media at the beginning of the year as part of my dry you worry. I don't drink alcohol and I go off social media and I've decided not to go back to Facebook until something changes there because I just you know when I weigh out. I love my birthday I get 300 people wishing me have a birthday that's fantastic. And then there's genocide. They don't equate I can't be on that you know with that, knowing that I'm contributing to that kind of business model. I'm really looking at 20 years ago when I took my coaching course, I was put out of media fast which is very hard for me I thought I'd become an idiot I was told you can't read any books, no magazines, no newspapers. No watching the news no watching TV I was like, you need to just chill and just empty yourself and I thought how am I going to do this. I discovered that in the process of that in coaching we talk about moods as predispositions to action and mainstream media absorbing the news every day led me to a mood of feeling outraged and powerless, which was not a good feeling and not something I wanted to really encourage myself. So now I'm kind of having the same thing where I'm off social media going, you know, am I going to become irrelevant. I'm not, I'm not putting stuff out there. What happens to my business. No one's going to see me. I've forgotten about you already entirely. Yeah, I know that's why I had to show up today right so you know there's this this tension between how do I participate in this crazy ass world. And do so in a way that that feels like there's some integrity and some some ethical basis behind it. And that requires going into some very you know polluted waters. No one gets way clean here. So those are just a couple of things on my mind that that were stirred by this conversation. The last thing I want to say about conspiracy. I don't know 25 years ago I read David Corten's book when corporations rule the world and he was talking about conspiracy theories and and I think it was a Filipino economist. Maybe a Brazilian economist, but the guy said, you know, by the time you get to run, if you reach the C suite of a fortune 500 corporation, it's very unlikely you're going to be a conspiracy theorist, you know, you are way too independent and thoughtful to be able to do that. However, when there's an ideology around neoliberal economics, it shows up from the outside we look at ago that looks like conspiracy because these people are basically doing anything they can to concentrate wealth and power. And so it's not so much a conspiracy as is an ideology and I think that actually plays into the hands of people who are open to conspiracy kind of thinking because they can point to these things and say see see that's what that is and they don't have the framework to say actually that's because there's this neoliberal capital capitalism ideology at work here and it's not a conspiracy but it sure looks like one because the results look very similar. End of my rant. Thanks Ken. Let's go Pete Kevin, Michael Gil. Thank you. I'm going to, I'm going to run through, I read up a list of things on my mind, and I'm going to put that in the chat and run through them real quickly. And I apologize or don't apologize or whatever this is not this all seems very prosaic where we're on a kind of a existential terror today and this feels like it's not so so Robert Keith came up with this great idea of hey we should have like a monthly update of what's going on in OGM. You mentioned that on one of the channels and we've kind of batted it around a for a few messages. I, I, I'm really tempted to start something I'm taking out the code name is by by weekly plex dispatch, which would be kind of a newsletter that's going on in around OGM OGM and the places around that, at least I know of. So look for that look especially for me sending an email probably to the OGM list and maybe to matter most saying hey, do you have any news for the next edition of you know whatever this thing is going to be called. The OGM forum is a really cool experiment we had using discourse in 2021. Maybe 2020. It was pretty active, but we kind of ended up shifting away from it. It requires some energy and investment to maintain it, even if we're not using it. And so me and some of the folks maintaining it are are expecting to close it down so that we don't have to spend energy maintaining it basically. Hopefully, nobody is sad about that if you're super sad about that, not in an existential way, super sad like, Oh, I was just about to post something there and we were going to have this amazing conversation and oh my gosh, you can't blow it away. If it's that kind of conversation get all of me if it's like oh I'm sad that we don't discuss in cool places. Yeah, we've discussed in lots of cool places so don't worry about it. The collaborative tech technology Alliance and other really cool group that some of us are connected with has has started to tip toe its way into probably using CSC matter most as it's kind of one of its core chat places. So, if you see new folks wandering around the halls of CSC matter most say hi and be pleasant and all that kind of stuff, or be yourself whether or not that's pleasant or not whatever. And real quick mention when he offered and I are doing this cool thing, which is, there's a pattern of a talk like this that's recorded that has a transcript that could have a transcript that then gets digested woven. I'm starting to think of this as knowledge facilitation, taking the artifacts of a live thing and annotating and adding value to it with links and a good transcript and stuff like that. A number of us in different places have been kind of talking through that this gets done, mostly in the abstract mostly we haven't been doing it. It's really cool when he offered and I kind of like backed into ending up really doing this for real and there's a real live website with nice pictures and graphics and design stuff like that. It's a very short website there's only like three or four pages. But it's coming together really well and it feels really, really productive and fun to see it coming together so I can't show it yet we're putting the finishing touches on it but we did that and it's going to get released soon and we want to do more of it and I think a number of us want to do more of it and a number of us want to see that happening more in general so maybe that's a little bit of a signpost for it's actually happening. Some of you have heard me talk about I'm really passionately interested and have been for a long time in community currencies. I wanted, I want to do an inter community community currency with GM and some of the other communities, and the money conversation was really interesting and kind of delayed me kind of talking about the community currency idea because I wanted to get more clear on the idea of money and and what, especially a community currency experiment if we were to try that would be. And for me the, the, the code name for this is spring I'm not crazy about the name but I don't hate it either. The reason I would want to be doing a community currency experiment is not for all of the possible reasons that there, we could be doing an experiment like that, and I don't necessarily need everybody to participate even. But the things I really want to explore our micro payments, the capability for micro payments, and then also using money like things as signaling, signaling mechanisms, peer to peer signaling, especially but also kind of, you know what does this group think, and the way that the community currency is somebody like Pete says hey you know should I do X project, Y project or Z project. And you know let's let's put some of our funny money paper paper tokens towards one or the other, or, or all three or whatever. So, the money conversation made me realize that we have lots of different ways of thinking about money and, and, and, and most of them aren't particularly interesting to me, maybe as a way to say it. But there are a few that are super interesting and they're not necessarily the mainstream ones kind of so thinking of money as a signaling mechanism, and a voting mechanism is something that's I think going to be really hard for people to go, but money is a store of value, you know it's like, yeah. If you think about it the right way and if it's the right kind of monopoly money, you know, you know, you can kind of look at monopoly money for instance and go well this is obviously not a store of value it's it's tokens and in a in a game that we play right that's kind of where I want to go with that community currency experiment so I'll write up more about it and talk more about it. Um, maybe, maybe kind of a really big thing Jerry and I and some of the build to a jam folks have talked about where conversations happen so we have a really interesting conversation. It kind of in progress, the money one and then there was the Civil War one which is also interesting. I think Jerry and I talked about this and came to kind of a conclusion but then we had to quit before we actually wrote up the conclusion so maybe. So, I've got my, my memory of how that ended up. The mailing list is an interesting place to have a conversation but it's, it's, it's also a little bit difficult it gets kind of wound up and tangled and stuff like that. The OGM forum is another great place to have that kind of conversation we kind of demonstrated to ourselves that, you know, for one reason or another whatever reason, we're probably not going to use the OGM forum. I think my guess is Jerry is going to make a manamose channel for money and a manamose channel for for maybe the Civil War topic, and maybe we'll continue some of the conversation there. Not everybody's going to make it over to manamose so I would expect some of the conversation to continue to happen in the email list. I expect some of the conversation to continue to happen in zoom calls. So this is a big evaluation for me from two years ago when I thought about where OGM should have conversations. I'm now much more of the opinion that they, we have conversations where they're easy to have conversations and demonstrably that's manamose zoom email list. I think that the thing and then, you know, and then there's a wish that, oh, I wish there was a more permanent archive of things or a more organized place where we could see, you know, what the things that we talked about are. So we've experimented with a wiki in the forum. Miro. I, I don't see mass participation in any of those happening, but I do see people who are super passionate about wikis or forums or mirror or whatever. So my guess is where we go from here is that people like me who are passionate about one of those mediums. That is kind of hard for most people to use effectively really participate in feel like they're at home in. I think there should be a few more of people like me who just library the heck out of things. I think those library librarian folks should get together a little bit more and talk about that and maybe grow the practice of doing that. And then, especially most critically for me, do that in a way that because each of us has our favorite library building mine is a wiki, you know, sometimes it's a forum sometimes it's Miro sometimes it's Kumu. Sometimes it's air table or something else. So let's go ahead and use those tools, but make them usable for other people. So Miro people can log in and wander around and see things. Massive wikis have a way to turn things massive wikis into websites that just look like regular websites. Let's make it so those things are visible and viewable as archives, even if they're not participatory in that way and then let's make them interoperate as much as possible. Partly technology and partly what we like to call IP or licensing or something like that. I get really cranky whenever we even start to talk about licensing because I think the whole thing is IP is just stupid to me it's just like, and it's crazy making. So it really rankles me even to be thinking about that. Obviously, so and one one one practice for that and I don't do this. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't a lot of things just are. So we have, we have an IP regime and we have licensing regimes and stuff like that so unless you are affirmatively not participating in like if you say this is this is public domain. If you affirmatively, if you don't say that if you just kind of like ignore the problem because it's rankles you. Your thing is essentially locked up, you know, it's legally locked up at least whether or not people break the law and steal, steal your stuff and, and you know share it. Anyway, so, so technical interoperability but also licensing interoperability. I think that, you know, as we're making these archives of amazingly wonderful stuff that somebody like me if it's in, if it's in mirror or if it's in Kumu or wherever, you know, please make it so that other people can go well, I can't use I can certainly use a massive wiki and I'm just going to lift and shift it. And you know I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings I'm not I don't want to step on I don't want to steal your stuff if you don't want me to. So, part of interoperability is also licensing and I hate the term. License by the way is something called copy heart, and you can say it in different ways but basically the message is copying is an act of love please share, you know copy the heck out of this because you know that's love sharing so. Last but not least, maybe, because we talked a little bit about Facebook. I've got a link in in the chat to a short essay by David weekly. David is somebody that that I know pretty well he was a wiki person, and probably some of the Silicon Valley people here know him. He worked for Facebook a long time he's smart guy. He, he came up with an interesting thing he's like okay so all this hyper sharing Facebook he kinds of stuff not just Facebook but. He thinks that it led to a uniform uniformity of closeness. If going into the idea of like oh wow Facebook is going to let you share with you know distant people and close people and it's all going to be wonderful and maybe the distant people will get closer and the close people will get even closer. He's like you know it seems like what happened is everybody kind of like got uniformly close uniformly close, so you don't end up being super into it on Facebook generally you end up being kind of distant even with your close friends, you say things that look pretty and sound pretty and stuff like that. So everybody the close people end up kind of getting farther away when you're sharing on social media and then the far people end up getting you know about the same distance. So he kind of ended up ended up thinking that's, that's the way it works. He's, he's ends it in a hopeful note he's like okay so those of us who are tool makers can start to work on this problem and make it so you know we have different ways of sharing that preserve and enhance each of the ways that each of the modalities that we have in sharing distance instead of like collapsing at all into like arms length kind of so. Thanks. Pete thank you there's like 15 things I want to say and we have Richard grace and Doug, but however, Kevin Jones asked to step in for a bit and he's got to step off the call briefly so I'd love to go Kevin and then it's the three of you who were like eager to speak. I want to take a quick note so you don't forget what we want to say please. Kevin. Yeah, I've, if you look at this, you know I love the money thread, but oddly enough, people have reached out to say tell me more what you think about money so I've been writing more targeted to them and figuring out what I really think about it and it's been really helpful to me. On the hope thing, I'm leading a class for my grandsons and Stephanie black woman who also leads our funds grandsons on the true cost of the Tesla, and one, they're, they're, they're concerned about whether their generation should hope. And it's a real serious discussion they're seeing things that are hopeful but they wonder if they should have their, you know, hope as a wholesale action is difficult for them. It's kind of interesting. I've also been a follower of Ken Homer. And leaving Facebook and don't miss it on conspiracies you know the BB&T bank did a really interesting thing they set aside $30 million in their foundation, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but they dribbled it out at 500,000 a piece to really small colleges, apartments, and all you had to do to have an endowed chair which means you like, you know, can actually buy a house instead of a teeny cottage or whatever is teach the values of and ran in your, in your economics. And so it was, it was directly linked to and ran thinking teaching teach the business school that thinking underlying all the spreadsheets and things, and you get, you know, you get half your salary every year, you know, from, from this bank that wants to keep people ruthlessly focused on old style capitalism. So, you know, this thing is just I just happened to know about one of them. It's a was a regional bank now it's a national bank, but you know, people want people to be, you know, it's a matrix kind of thing, you know, get the matrix of economics taught in the business schools where half a million counts a lot, you know, it's not a big school, but it's most schools. So that's really it. It's really stuck with me and whether one was a young woman at Wellesley kind of an expensive school and she's in the battle and fellowship which is Madeline Albright, you know, and so they're really seeing top people doing really good things. But it doesn't conform with how she sees the world and it's trouble. And my 17 year old is kind of going back and forth, you know, they're all going back and forth they're seeing things that are hopeful but you know, should it should should teenagers hope, you know, it's kind of the thing is teenagers to early 20s. I was a didn't have a clear answer with it with them. Thanks Kevin. I think it's been other times like this but it's a very hard time to be young. It's a really hard time to be young. Let's go Richard Grace Doug and then back to the queue. Is that me that you were calling on Jerry. Indeed it is okay great. Thanks for joining us. Yes, my first visit and so I'm a little hesitant to, but I thought I could address some things by just a very brief history being that I retired from the EPA at the end of last year so yay on several counts but my job during that time was to go into communities that were in potential hazardous situations. I'm a geologist by training so all this was, you know from going in there but I found that there are certain patterns which is that potential danger is terrible, because you don't know whether to sell your house or you're safe to stay or whatever it is. And so fear tends to, I mean uncertainty tends to create fear and fear is often masked as anger. And so I have worked in the last part of my career in participatory mapping. And what I'll say about that is this. We use words, we use words like we use the internet, we just assume that they're always here and that they will be supported. But that's not true. And one of my examples is horsepower you know we say oh horsepower you know but I don't know who on this call might know but the way that the word came about was taking a horse and hanging a 550 pound weight off a cliff and seeing how much energy it burned to raise that weight one second. So that horsepower became a symbol for an entire hunk of work. And somebody on here said earlier you know the anti faxers and then had to pull it back, you know because that's not really. So, the deal with participatory mapping is this you get groups of people together that are on a quest for oh sorry I was invited here through jack park for doesn't know so I'll use his term and say that you get people together that are organized toward a quest and I always use building the community park, you know whatever it is it could be big it can be small but. The most important thing that I think about that entire exercises that they begin by developing a mutual vocabulary. They create a meta community you know there's the individuals and just like in a marriage they're still the marriage but there's the meta language that goes on. So that's what I'm interested in and I'll just say that as a comment and also a little introduction that. You know I'm interested in having. Oh, as Jack and I have talked about quite a bit we want to be able to create a trust sufficient to accomplish a task request. We don't have to have everybody trust and everybody all the time we have to have enough trust to do that one thing and one last point that I'll add two last points. I believe it's the flocks, I believe that sells flock together to form my body and so I'm amazed every day when I wake up instead of a blob of protoplasm so sells flock to me you know Adam spot and we flock obviously you know we flock together as communities and all that. And there was one other thing I wanted to say but I think I forgot it so I better stop. So it's nice to meet everybody and I'll look forward to joining y'all as time permits. Thanks Richard that was great. Really nice to meet you and you share lots of interests and activities and curiosities with a bunch of us so it's great to have you in the conversation. Let's go grace and Doug. Cool yeah welcome. It's always good to have new people. So I wrote a whole bunch of notes. Yeah. So yeah you just mentioned this like Richard just mentioned this word anti vaxxers and I just, you know, I just think it's not an appropriate use of a word because I don't even know what it means now. Like the word anti vaxxer has been attached to anybody who is hesitant about getting this particular treatment, which, which I'm not sure is actually a vaccine they had to change the dictionary definition and Miriam Webster. The word vaccine has been used differently based on this particular treatment. So, yeah, when somebody says anti vaxxer I don't know if you're talking about the anti vaxxers like that as we define the before COVID or like the people who are hesitant to take vaccine so, and I think that this has been a propaganda to get people who don't fall into the category of opposing a measles vaccine for example, like to group all these people together and so I think we need to be careful about vocabulary in that in that sense. And I guess also on this whole thing about you know we were talking about like this conspiracy theory and you know they're talking about something I agree with and then they disagree to me. Somebody has that kind of set of views that I can't match with one another like they don't belong in that group. To me that's a sign there's their thinking. Because they don't belong to a group that says this is your list of beliefs. And so I don't, I'm actually kind of refreshed by that I'm like okay, they've got some beliefs that belong in this category and some beliefs that belong in this category, whatever you call it, they must actually be thinking and not just adopting that from their filter bubble, something like that so I actually kind of find that a good phenomenon when I meet when I meet up with that. But regarding this, the, I just want to say one word about the matter most the reason I don't use matter most is just the proliferation of different chat things like discord seems to be where everybody is these days. I can't do matter most I got slack discord like, but I would really prefer a threaded chat to the email lists, like, I anyway. And then with the currency. It's interesting. I'm just going to kind of say one thing because monetary currency is a certain thing and I do like the idea of currency is signaling and somebody called me this. I have a lot of these calls this week talking about her community currency that was to encourage certain community behaviors regenerative behavior sharing behavior or whatever. And she was calling them sprinkles and I'm like well sprinkles come in different colors. So you should start, you know, like you might want to start in your community by playing a game where you have different colored monopoly money. And this one means that person, this is an appreciation like I just appreciate you for at least showing up right. And this one is but you did a good job, right. Like it's not just appreciation but it's actually you know outstanding work. And this one is, you know, so I felt like this idea of sprinkles that each one of these signals that we would give to one another or award one would mean something different would be much more meaningful and what Pete was talking about, and also in the community as a whole because we're not really here necessarily to do kind of money business. But those signals. Yeah, they could be a lot more nuanced and a lot more interesting in that way and the great thing about digital is you can kind of track them one of the things that they found and give it they had it when they first started four different things. And you could give as many of the points as you wanted. And then some people would give two points and some people would give 100 points I was like, oh wait a second like, what does that mean, because it was free to give so. Yeah, and you could, you could track like oh this person always gives a lot of points and appreciates everybody maybe their appreciation thank you doesn't mean as much as somebody who is stingy or with that point like if I got a point from so and so you know that really So it's really, I think there's a way to do that in a more nuanced way to do a lot. More interesting signaling, because one of the things about like I use money to tip people, and to also reward them for extra good behavior, and also just you know like it's it much is it. Anyway, that's that's what I had to say. So many different purposes. Grace you're reminding me that the whole the meta currency project of which holo and the whole low currency and all that kind of stuff is this kind of a cleaving of a piece of a glacier that's floated off into the big oceans. The currency project really covered so many of the things you've been talking about here about trust at local scale about tracking value through communities about making some sort of reward systems available it's really interesting so so, and I haven't I haven't sort of talked about the art in a really long time but I'm wondering how much of what they came up with back in the day is has survived the transformation into the holo project and all of those kinds of things but yeah it hasn't you know it hasn't. Some of the people are still doing that but a lot I mean in some ways that's kind of got passed on to me, not intentionally but art and I spent quite a long time together and he's really busy with something completely different so. So cool. Yeah, love to find out what. Um, chain, you know. Oh, that thing. Yeah, good. I was like, we wait he's moved on from all the chain. Cool. I'm done. You're muted. There you go. Sorry about that. My phone rang. I have a question to build on Pete's quest for conversational software and the question is how come we've I've never heard it mentioned here but the software that the well runs on is pretty darn good for conversation, why don't we look at stuff like that. This course is not unlike because man. Yeah. Because man is probably old I haven't looked at it for three years or whatever but I well so we looked at some a different way to answer that we've looked at something that's not unlike because man we looked at discourse we found it to be super useful and practical and we didn't use it. And Pico spend dates back to the days of the terminal scrolling off your screen and everybody was you know saving your buffer so you could remember what was said and all that kind of stuff but it had the thread of discussions that you're talking about it was it was a convivial place partly because the humans who who who were in it who populated it, and a bunch of humans who poured a lot of life energy into it and what they thought and so forth it was a good it was a good community until it was a. The well was a good online community until it became the best online community and all the headlines, and then it was like doom from then on, which led me to say communities are like mushrooms. They thrive in dark places like under floorboards and stuff like that. The moment you shine like the bright Klee glides on a community you're going to screw something up, because the forces that make it sort of hang together are really important. Back to check ins we haven't managed to check in that many people. If I may real quick. So, similar thing us net. Some of the features and functionality of us net for me were like we still haven't reached those right so it's it's funny that we have this thing and software products or whatever. This is a software use where a lot of times stuff that is old, had amazing, amazing capability and we, and we struggle to kind of reinvent it every 10 or 15 years, just the way the way the world works. Thanks Pete. So, Michael kill and actually meant Stuart. Go ahead Michael. Yeah. I wanted to circle back to something that was mentioned earlier. Well, what Mark was saying about the look at me as I'm. That is, you know, so much a part of how we are forced to function now. You know that the idea of living in some kind of meritocratic world where you do what you do. And if you do it well, you hang out your shingle, you know, you'll, you'll do okay. And, and calling attention to yourself and, you know, waving your hands a lot and running through the street was not not done, you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't go to a doctor who ran through the street and said, Hey, these are my views on this and these are my views on that now. But if, if somebody's not raising their profile, doctors might have been bad example but you know, if somebody's not raising their profile they're not heard from. So I was thinking about how Shoshana Zuboff talks about land going from the commons to a commodity, and that attention has done likewise. You know, we weren't, we weren't terribly, we didn't hoard our attention and meet it out, it was, you know, abundant and freely shared when there wasn't so much to pay attention to maybe, and now the war for attention is on. It's being, you know, our attention is being staked out by, you know, first, first by, by television and, and, you know, we used to be amazed that, oh my God, there are people who spend, you know, six hours a day watching television how unhealthy, and, you know, the same people who were who were stunned by that once upon a time now spend more time than that on their devices. And, and the people who are fighting for how much attention we spend on their app and devices are the land grabbers in this rush. I don't know how, how we solve that and, you know, it also I think speaks to the IP rush and staking out, you know, your claim to some way of doing one thing so that, you know, and trying to get everybody to do it your way instead of instead of sharing that. Yeah, just wanted to share that thought and, and, and as regards Facebook and that and that piece that you shared Pete about how it changes the circles I caught myself this morning just checking in on Facebook which I do because of my old friends who I am there with and one of my best friends, you know, who I went to elementary school with, you know, toasted at my wedding and, you know, dear friend just became a grandmother and posted a picture of her new grandchild, and I clicked the heart, you know, button and just felt this rush of sadness that, you know, one of the people that I'm closest to informed me of this important fact in her life through this platform, and I responded with the least effort possible. You know, a single click of my mouse, and, and Facebook one, you know, Facebook now knows a little bit, you know, triangulate a little bit more about me and, and who's important to me and what's important to me and can, you know, even if I'm not expressing that much of my personal interests. So a little bit better that they might leave a little bit closer to that person. And yeah, so sharing that feeling. And lastly, I wanted to talk about and, and, and push the question. Grace's sprinkles, or, you know, her friend sprinkles and the idea of currencies that are that mean different things that came out of that I think there's a lot to that. You know, the upvotes the likes the claps on medium and that problem that you have when people have an unbounded amount of them. You know, what does it mean that I clapped, you know, twice and somebody else clapped 100 times and, you know, how, you know, should I have a limited quality based on how much I post well that panelizes the, the thoughtful lurker who isn't a poster and doesn't garner, you know, likes and claps but wants to wants to value other people's work with their with putting it out. And I don't I don't know how we, how we solve for that one but I do think it's an avenue to explore. That's very cool. Thanks Michael. Thanks everybody. I think it's a small, I guess ironic note which is that handwritten postcards and reading cards have appreciated. Like when you actually in this era of Hey, I could have just clicked on the heart, when you sit down and write a note and do whatever like like the value of that has actually gone up, because that used to be the thing you did by default and now it's like, oh my God, oh my God are you serious you pulled out a sheet of paper and and you remember how to handwrite and you put a you licked a stamp. That's crazy nobody does that like, you know, the strange worlds were in. And it looks like we're not going to make the full round of checking I apologize for that, but let's go. Who did I have in the queue Gil Stewart Julian. He was gone. He was gone. I'm looking around going, wait, wait, where's Gil where's Gil Stewart Julian john. Great. So, so what pops up for me is as a check in is much to my surprise over the past seven or eight years. I think I've become a good Buddhist. And that's what keep me. That's what keeps keeping me upright and not not crazy it's like, you know, the dialogue the conversation about vaxxers and anti vaxxers. It doesn't engage me at all. You know, bottom line I think it's silly not to get vaccinated based upon all of the, the numbers that are coming out and you know, people can can, you know, pick at each other back and forth as much as they want. I just realized that I've been going strong for like 57 years, and it's time to just accept a little bit of elderhood and and and sit back and watch some of what's going on and, you know, do what you can with what you have where you are seems to, really have, have sunk in. I'm leaving for Mexico tomorrow morning on a week long urban vacation in Mexico City where I've never been just to kind of enjoy the city. I've been traveling a little bit here and there. You know, I'm not, I'm not concerned about getting sick. I'm more concerned about getting stuck at the country. But, you know, what will what will be will be. I feel kind of fortunate in a certain way and that the little world that I've created seems to be working. It seems to be making some contributions here or there. And, and that's my check in and thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. If you have a chance to go to the archaeological museum insane and also realize that Mexico City was a floating city that that originally it was a floating island that then got settled in. Yeah, which leads to some weird things in the present. Like like parts of the city or buildings that are settling by a couple inches a year sort of thing. It's like not good as they pump up the aquifer that actually gets worse. It's a really fascinating city. And during your travels. So let's go Julian Julian John Scott. So my check in is that I mentioned a couple weeks ago I've been working on the actual description of my project Venturi, which I've been talking about for years and I was finally pushed to put down actually on paper, although not with a pen I'm still using software. But it's taken a while reminds me of the Mark Twain quote about, you know, I would have written you a short letter but I didn't have the time so. And that has been the emphasis on trying to keep this proposal from turning into a book was taking the time to make sure that it did turn out to be that that short letter. So I'm happy to report it's about 90% done hoping to finish today. Sounds great. You're going to see it. Let's go John Scott Mark. Okay, just a quick note. Partly a response to Stuart. Yeah, I, I would prefer not to be even paying any attention to the backs anti backs of all that kind of stuff but the problem is that, you know, I'm, I'm family members, you know, and and also, I have, I've got the full change. I've got the brilliant. But arguably, you know, you look at their sources, people who have deep, deep, deep conspiracy stories, and then moving along I've got people say well no no of course you know no I'm, I'm for vaccines but this one wasn't done right. You know this one was rushed and there's some stuff they didn't tell us. And there's some stuff about here you know and so it's like it's like, how do you deal with that you know you make your own decision. Okay, I'm going to go this way I understand it's not not a black and white case but I'm going to go this way. But then you have to make the decision of, okay, I'm going to be in meetings. Some of these meetings are going to have people who are at a greater health risk than me. Some of that we know that the people in those meetings are not vaccinated. We know that they're not so keen about wearing a mask. I do. It's the question of how do you manage that. The very human process of mixing up your body with other bodies and back vaccinated not vaccinated mask not masked indoors. It might be helpful. I don't know that everybody knows that you were heavily involved in elder care and you're around vulnerable populations all the time like this. This is sort of what you've been doing for years. That is, but and actually the, I don't run into the issue as much in my with my elder clients because it's just, we're doing we've done it we're doing it there's there's no objecting there's no non back there's no anti backs in my client base. It's on my family, which is much more complicated, because of course you're going to get together as a family and of course there's relatives and some of those relatives are are older and vulnerable. And how do you deal with that so that it's, I don't have any answers you know but I mean we just we try to listen, you try to say okay, try to say, where would you know, it's really complicated, but I told my sister, I said, look. If you got sick, and if I know you're not happy about the Western medical system, but we would push it as hard as we could to get you the best care that we could I was trying to just express both concern, but also competent concern for her situation. No, you can't it's like the kid asked you, you know, is everything going to be alright or the Russians going to invade you and you can't answer you know, you have to say, it's okay it's okay I will support you. I can't say what's going to happen but you have my support that's the that's the only thing you can do in a situation like that. One quick personal note that's very off from anything we've been discussing is in the novel I'm writing I have three spaceships. One of them has Robert Kennedy in it one of them has John F Kennedy in it they each have a coach. They each have a a cantor it's which is a how you know the ship itself is a robot. And the Martin Luther King ship didn't make it just because I can't write. You know what Martin Luther King would say I'm having a hard enough time writing what Robert Kennedy would say under certain circumstances. I tried pseudo right. Interesting. I would like to find a way I'm sure there's a way to do it. It might be expensive, too expensive because I look at the, the rates on GPT three tokens, but I would love to not just take the Kennedys but take the heroes or the consciences of the people that I'm writing about and bring in the writing about the conscious person and put the conscious person writing into the computer and basically have that be a character in my story. So as a for instance, the, the computer in the John F Kennedy ship which is called new frontier, the computer is not named by him it's named by his coach was named Monica and Monica decides that the computer is going to be Norma Jean. Why do that well because she wants to get she wants to, you know say listen, there's some stuff you need to face about your past. And I'm not going to hit you on the head with it but I'm going to, you're not going to get away with not facing. So I'm looking for a way to take everything written about Marilyn Monroe, get it in GPT three, and use that as a basis for having some dialogue between the coach, John F Kennedy, and their computer. I don't know if I can pull it off but it's certainly fun to think about. It is a cool quest. Yeah. I'm Stacy, thanks john Stacy want to jump in. Yeah, that was interesting john. Just going to the Kobe thing. For me the biggest problem was that there were people that did get sick when they got injected. And there was never any opportunity for them to discuss this it was immediately shut down. So, very, very, very small percentage. But if these companies were not doing the right thing by them. If something should have been put in place so that let's say you're part of this trial. There's a fund so if you get sick, we will address it. That wasn't done. I guess what I'm trying to say is the more you fight to silence somebody, the more you energize the message they're trying to say and that's where the division comes from. So I kind of take the role that Stuart takes. I don't. Everybody knows what's right for that I kind of take that position, but I still look to find a common solution whether that's will make sure you're wearing a mask. But the whole thing that everything was silenced in the beginning I think was a big problem at this point I don't know how that gets unraveled. I want to mention it because it happens with other things as well and it, it starts on an individual level just when we're having our one on one conversations. I would love to be a fly on the wall for an after action review on pandemic strategies country by country by country by country like what would you have done differently with like smart honest people sort of thinking oh this is where we really screwed up and then we screwed this up and then and then, damn, and this happened. I'm going to call a fire jury smart honest people I'm you know where you're going to find that I'm keep searching in the town square. So there's a guy and I may have my Greek history mixed up but there's a fellow who stands in front of the local safe way which is only a couple blocks away, and is always wrapped in in blankets and with sandals and he'll be out there in the cold weather he's out there all the time he never speaks he waves and people. He smiles a lot he's got a beard, and he's looked the same now for I don't know three four years. I kind of call him diogenes as I walk by but it's hard. Let's go Scott Mark Ken and then we're probably going to not make it that far into that list. Okay, I'll make this pretty quick. So regarding attention and why everybody's after attention and paying for it, you know, obviously scarcity increases valuation and the less that we have the more it's worth to people, I think. It's interesting. The idea about sharing on Facebook made you a little or liking on Facebook makes you a little feeling a little like queasy about that. And yet, you know, here's Jerry with 470,000 thoughts that are publicly available to anyone at any time. So it's interesting he's almost hidden in the flood. I mean, oh yeah there's all those opinions but wow that's just, that's too many I'm not even going to go look at that. And Jerry I was just listening to your interview with Fritz, which I believe was posted month ago. I don't know that's what I was doing the first half of this call. And one of the things came up to me and I don't have any answer for it it's just something I want to throw out there is the idea I keep hearing how things are broken. And to me I think that that's a word that we need to dive into at some point because to me broken means something was working, and that it's now not working. And it needs to be repaired to its former state that to me says that's that's my definition of broken okay this thing was broken and now needs to be fixed. And what I'm wondering is like, okay so when we say that if that's true, then what state is it that was was so ideal that we want to return to it. Is that a nostalgia problem, or is it something new that you're trying to create, and in that sense you're not fixing in the sense that fixing something that was broken. You're moving from one state to another, and it's from one state to a different state instead of returning to a previous whole state so it's just a word I'm challenging the group on, and that's it for me. Thanks. You're reminding me of why I don't really like sustainability and resilience and why I prefer thriving and flourishing. And that is that that to me sustainability and resilience are like a rubber band they're implied, taking some kind of impact and then snapping back to where you were before. We're thriving flourishing, allow for the reshaping of what's happening and responses and systems and whatever else and to make things better so words were back to words. And I think I had Mark, and then Ken. Yeah, I continue to attempt to think. I've rejoined this group of the Lyceum Institute, it is a group of Catholic philosophers. Whether in the religious or Jesuit still more Dominican kind of form of even Thomas, they're actually St. Thomas Aquinas. Nuts man they're crazy about clients. It's fascinating I mean, certainly there's conversations about abortion that I'm not particularly fond of but I am taking a course on. So I'm going to talk about Mary Lottman and John Deely and cultural semiotics which in universities semiotics is woolly and wild, and I was hoping this one would be a little less so and it is a little less so but basically you know how do. What are the meaning structures of culture. And it's fascinating and confusing and I will pass in the interest of time. Thanks Mark. I'm Ken. So we're going past our end time. Just by a little bit just a little bit. I'll keep this brief. I'm noticing that one thing the pandemic has done that years of positive psychology and all sorts of other things and Buddhism failed to do was I really shifted my focus to what I'm grateful for. This came about about two months into the pandemic when my wife and I were just complaining oh we can't go to live music we can't go to the theater we can't do this can't do that. We're going to go crazy if all we do is thought think about things we can't do let's start to focus on we're grateful for, you know, Netflix and zoom thank God I can be entertained and I can connect with people here you know so I've really been making it a daily practice to find things that I'm grateful about and one of those right now is I'm really grateful that I have some paying work. So I have a couple of clients and potential for a couple more and so I've in the time that I'm not wasting no longer wasting on Facebook I've been I've been you know doing some actual work and it just feels really good to coming to the new year with some work. And I'm also really grateful that we've passed the solstice and I can see the days getting longer and it's brighter and that just always makes me feel good. And groups like this you know I feel so blessed to be part of a community where I have you know these brilliant people to come and talk with and listen to and learn with and learn from and I'm going to be in New York. In a couple weeks and Stacy and Mark and Wendy are all going to come and visit me and have dinner and I was like, you guys in the middle of pandemic and I just I feel so, you know, it really touches my heart. So I'm grateful for for these sorts of things and really happy to be, you know, still alive and and you know I sat last night. My wife was working and I having dinner by myself and I always have a moment, you know, we take a moment for meal and I just sat there and take a moment for myself and I thought to myself, you know, it is a privilege to eat. There are so many people throughout in the world now throughout history, who have gone hungry and I'm sitting here with a full plate and I just absorbed you know I'm I am privileged in this moment in time to have enough. And maybe I don't have everything I want but I got enough, and that is enough. And, you know, I'm very concerned about the state of the world but I'm sitting in someone just said do what I can with what I have where I am. And that's what I'm focused on and I'm not letting the, the doom porn overwhelm me. Thank you. Thank you can and I think that's a lovely lovely note to end our call on Julian. Ken, what you were just saying about enough this is something I'd like to bring up at some point because it's really driven home to me in Denmark but it would take. Well, it's time 33 already so maybe think of that for the future. So, and the topic of enough is lovely and wide and deep so we should set back into it. Thank you everybody. And I'm really grateful for our conversations for our time together for all the things we kicked up and turn around. So soon. See ya.