 Hi, this is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, February 8, 2024, an hour ago, hearings started around is Trump, can he be taken off ballots because of the 14th Amendment Section 3? I think that's the trial case, the case of trial. And we're talking about that a little bit. There are some shameful Supreme Courts in the back, the Taney Court, really bad, the Marshall Court before that. So some of our ancestors would be like, business as usual. I'm not just talking about the Supreme Court. I'm talking about the whole million that's occurring right now. Yeah. You know, what my parents and grandparents grew up with and the kind of culture they created was one that would not tolerate what's occurring today. And it's really amazing to me how quickly, we already talked about 1984, but really I think the thing that's most appropriate from Orwell's work is animal farm, you know. Four legs good, two legs bad. No, four legs good, two legs better. All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others. Ken, how would your ancestors have not allowed this to happen? Well, I don't think they would have ever voted for the extreme positions that are being put forth by some people. Yes, they were there. I mean, there was an American Nazi party, very strong in the 30s here in the US, but they never managed to get a hold of things. And I was also talking to my friend last night about how after World War II, the United States took the top scientist from Japan and Germany who were engaged in some horrible, horrible practices and brought them here because we wanted that intellectual capital. We wanted to know how to build bombs and how to do biological warfare. It's like, hey, that stuff, that's valuable for us. And so in that sense, that generation did fail us. You know, they brought that in and gave it shelter and it grew and it's been fed and nourished and it's pretty ugly. So a possible topic for our conversation today might be sort of swirling around these issues like stability and civic life, what happened to it? How do we get it back? What's up with that? I think that's a piece of what we're talking about here. It is. And I'm also aware, as I'm saying this, that when you say, how do we get it back? The back was never there unless you were a rich white male. If you were a person of color, if you were a woman, if you were a minority, you didn't have that. Well, you didn't have rights and you didn't have respect from other people, but there was civility within communities and across layers and stuff like that. People were still looking out for each other a bunch. There was a lot more interdependence that we relied on. Sorry, go ahead, Gil. In some communities, it wasn't in all communities. Yeah. Totally. There was no crow, et cetera, no civility there. I wonder if most of, sorry, I was just going to say, I wonder if most of what we think previous generations did is an illusion. That they were no different than we are. And that the only thing that changed was their circumstances. The context changed. Stuart, you're muted. I think some of it was survival. It was just period. They didn't have the technology, the tools, the mechanics to do stuff without the human horsepower of people coming together. I mean, that's one element of it, I think. There's been tremendous change in the communication processes over decades. In fact, even in recent decades, a lot of changes. And I think it has challenged and altered negatively the sense of community for many individuals. I think not everyone felt a sense of community to begin with, except perhaps with family and depending on neighborhood and locale, but there just seems to be a different sense of connection or absence of connection that's driving some of the issues right now. So I have a hypothesis. The Powell Memorandum, Citizens United and Social Media. You want to say a little more about that? Sure. The Powell Memorandum, Lewis Powell, who became Justice of the Supreme Court engaged by the Chamber of Commerce to lay out a strategy for how to, on the face of it, raise the role in respect of business in American society, but it became the game plan for what became the Reagan Revolution and a lot of other stuff that has happened since then. There's a film called Heist, the something, I think the stealing, the something of the American dream, which lays this out. Citizens United's Supreme Court decision that affirmed the illusion of the right of corporations as persons to free speech and broke the constraints of legalized bribery in the American political system. And social media, I don't have to tell you guys anything about that. So I would, you know, those seem like three big pieces of why the hell did we lose whatever we're talking about having lost. So wait, it was, it was Palermo Citizens United and what was your third one? Social media, social media. And, you know, and the best place to start on that is that that social networks film that was done by a couple of renegades from big tech a couple of years ago. Somebody knows the name of it better than I do. Yeah, I can't think of a name, but I was talking about, I'll just add, we could throw a lube off surveillance capitalism into the story if you want. I'll add a piece. As I understand it to the Powell doctrine, it was also to influence the educational process as opposed to real learning it was shifted into the development of corporate citizens slash consumers. Yeah, and this is really important. We all have these discussions. You started to frame it today of like, how do we do? How do we change? How do we make X, Y, Z happen? It's pretty random on the left. And here on the right, there was a document that was paid for and circulated and became the game planet has been a consistent touchstone for like about 50 years now. So, so the right would say that Rachel Carson's silent spring and all the effects after it are similar. No, seriously, they're on the left can point to a bunch of documents that moved opinions and that we point back to as touchstones, etc, etc. Also, I don't think the left is as disorganized as we make it necessarily. Well, yeah, it's all of the Supreme Court decisions in the 60s that affirmed individual rights, I think would be the some of the doctrinaire stuff of the left. I have a thought in my brain called books that catalyze social change across all different kinds of eras. I'll share a link to it right now in the chat. And I think it's a very apt point. Jerry, there are books that catalyze social change that had enormous ripples, but a book. And a movement is different than a strategy, strategic document, coordinated funding, coordinated organization. I mean, that we'll say the left has coordinated organizations too, but maybe they've just been more successful. I don't know. Francis Perkins and the New Deal. There were documents there. There were plans. There were, you know, the new, and the far right has been trying to take down the New Deal since it showed up. Go ahead, Kevin. You were muted. You were muted. Yeah, sorry. The right can do single issue partnerships on right to life. They just needed a single issue partnership, whereas the left, they needed a litmus test or they wouldn't partner with you. And so their linkage and their groups only grew arithmetically while the right grew geometrically. I found that also when I was doing my undercover research on the anti-gay folks and how that works. And, you know, the left's demand for litmus tests of purity. And the left is a litmus test cauldron with a lot of internal fire, you know, shooting at each other. Whereas the right says, I may hate you and I may hate you, but we agree on this. Let's do this. If I can oversimplify what you just said, maybe the right is an and construct and the left is an or construct. We're on the right. It's like, you hate this issue? Great. I had this other issue. We can work together. And the left is like, we disagree on this issue on a menu of issues. But if we disagree on a couple of them, I'm never talking to you. I can't collaborate with you. I was undercover when the folks who hate women priests were doing a deal with the folks who hated gay priests and they got over being against women in order to fight on being against gay. And they would still fight each other and other places. But they said, here's issues three, six and nine of our nine points agree with you and we can do it. And so they went to war together. Whereas we kept out the urban caucus because they were also right to life, but deeply socially connected. And so by the way we thought about who was in the room, we made our group smaller and weaker. We happened to win because we figured out what they were doing. They've been doing it a lot. This is the art of coalition building, right? Go ahead, Gil. Yeah. The other aspect to this thing is that the left tends to want to run on all issues at once. Like we have a campaign. Two things and somebody says, well, yeah, but what about this other thing? And what about that other thing? And you're going to end issues, you boil it down again and it comes back up again. So it's tough. It's very tough. And it's it's characteristic, I think of of left. It's an epistemological tactical weakness. You know, you can't go to war on the one thing you want to get done. You want to have a nest of issues. The other thing I want Kevin was saying about being able to build a green, you know, to find common ground. Back in the days of the New Deal, there was a united front and organizations that hated each other, worked against fascism and just had to do that. For me, the touchstone on coalition building was a speech that Bernice Reagan gave in California. Gosh, must have been back in the 1970s. Bernice Reagan was the founder of Sweet Honey and the Rock, the acapella group of great majesty and was an executive at Smithsonian Institution. And at a speech she gave, she said, if you're in a coalition and if you're not deeply uncomfortable all the time, your coalition's not big enough. And that for me is the, you know, is the the the musical overtone of what Kevin's saying here. We all like to be comfortable and with people who are comfortable and who people we like. And that's not politics. Doug, are we still searching for a topic? We seem to have landed on something like civility and where to go and how to get it back, but you can steer us if you'd like. Yeah, because I'm worried that we just kind of wandered into that. You wandered in after we had sort of started on the topic. So we're not, we're not being, we're not, we're not in the current wanderer mode. So the topic that would be on my mind is temperature is rising in the climate. I think we all know that that means disaster for our civilization. Why aren't we talking about that? Who's we Doug? This, this week? This week or some other? All of them. All the weeds. Megawhe. There's plenty of weeds talking about it. But we're not. Tense on where you look. Well, this, this group, us here in an OGM, it's not normally a big topic for us, but there are many, many weeds talking about the rising of, of the temperatures on the planet. I spend most of my time, my days in those conversations with people. Right. We're talking about, what is, what is the most powerful thing this group could do about that topic? If we focused all of our energies on it, like a laser, if we collimated all of our energies, Doug, what is the best thing we might turn out or do around that time? Well, I have my own conclusion. I don't know if it would be a conclusion for the group, but what we need is some kind of lifeboat strategy of gathered resources by communities in order to be able to sustain people under the worst conditions. Jim Bendell is running the deep adaptation community that's doing precisely that. Yeah, I agree. But we're not, we're not in that, I think we should be in that conversation. Um, we could, I know Jim, I know Jim personally, he's really busy doing, and doing his thing. We could, we could sort of cross pollinate or something like that. But, but if you wanted to be in that conversation daily, I would join Jim Bendell's chats and zooms and conversations and community. I'm already there. Okay. And I'm sure that Jim's not the only one, there are other people thinking about lifeboat strategies and adaptation and all that. That's, it's a sensible thing to think about. And then don't look up. The billionaires are busy building lifeboats so that they can grow out, populate other planets and be eaten by ground to rocks. I think an underlying issue is the personal energy that's available, and I won't say why or how at this point, but I just, I sense a tone of disengagement in many, many communities that is complex in its origin, but it prevents working together to get results. Um, and then from my own perspective, part of the reason I really love the civility topic is if we can't figure out how to cooperate with people whom we disagree with, we'll never address climate and other important issues successfully. We're just never going to get there. So I keep going back to the, the trust well, civility, uh, democratic discourse, governance, all those issues are really central to me because we seem to be in a Mexican standoff worldwide that is keeping us from doing any kind of concerted action on this. And, you know, it's not that we all have to agree on one message because viral things sometimes just cut across communities and cause behavioral change. Maybe we can figure out what the, what that virus should be. That's what I say. Then Kevin, please. Sorry, I thought my, uh, raising the hand would actually create a real raising of the hand. Ah, nice. We were using the analog technique. Yeah. Um, if, if we're going to open the, the conversation to something a little bit different or, you know, revisit whether this is the right conversation, I wonder if the idea of continuing the conversation within the current paradigm is, is the conversation that we should be having because that's what we're doing. Well, we have a paradigm that has possibly reached its end. And then we're trying to figure out why the current paradigm isn't working. If it's failing, it's because itself isn't the right paradigm for us anymore, if it ever was. Which paradigm so you're pointing to? Because we're living inside of our concept, our concept of democracy, our concept of how we have a capitalist system, our concept of everything that we currently hold from a societal perspective, which is a big ball of wax, right? Like none of it is, you can't really pull at any one piece. But it is bound by many fundamental ideas that have gotten us here. And the question I ask is, is it possible that the, the very problem that we're trying to understand isn't whether left to right or this political wing or even our ability to have civil discourse is something that we can deal with when it's an emergent property of a system that has caused us to not have civil discourse. And so how do we go to a to an underlying emergent fact that leads us in a different conversation? Maybe I'm not being clear in my statement. I think I understood you pretty clearly and a piece of me is like, well, great. So everything that we're living inside of needs to be replaced. A, with what? And B, how? I'm not sure it needs to be replaced. But the question is, if it's failing, it's failing for a reason. Like it's not failing. Let me restate that. Emergent social structures emerge in a certain period in time. They work for a period of time and then they fail. And historically, they've been replaced by something else, something else that emerges. And so to assume that the current structure is one that we need to work within, I think negates that reality that social structures change. And they change based on our technology. They change based on our knowledge. We now have the system we're working under is one that emerged a couple of hundred years ago when most people were uneducated, when most people didn't have high school, much less college education. And here we are now where everybody can communicate with anyone on the world. And anyone has access to just about every bit of information. And we're still running a system where the citizens are presumed to be ignorant, presumed to simply be able to check a box once every four years. And that's going to give them their voice. We've got a system that is based on antiquated technology. So, sorry, I could go up. And Jose, just to go a little further into what you're saying, I interpret a piece of what you said as being like Kondratiev wave theory or whatever that these civilizations go in historic cycles and they just emerge and we can't really help it. There's a cycle that's natural and happens. And I sort of agree and disagree. I think nature has organisms that go through phases. Just they kill off their nutrient medium or their host or whatever else and then they die. That happens. That's just the natural sort of thing. And I think that maps to the wave theories. But I think that our broken discourse right now is partly the result of an extremely explicit strategy to break discourse that can be addressed. This is not just an emergent phenomenon of where we are. There's really smart people who in different ways are causing this to be elevated, escalated, accelerated, amplified, whatever else you want to call it. Because the system isn't serving. Totally addressed. No, no, no, because they're using the system to actually do that on purpose. Because they want to break the other system. Totally agree. Totally agree. Kevin, if you're done chewing off to you and then Stacey and then Doug, that's the order that I saw the hands of. There we go. Okay, sorry. Okay. So I just want to say another thing to imagine is a reliable source of regular local abundance. And we've set up a watershed tax where we live that is coming from a carbon bonus on small farm loans, zero interest small farm loans. And so one of them is a land back tax that will come before the carbon payments to the farmers. And we're working with the Katua Band of Cherokee on that. And that's, you know, they know what to do. And then there's a local watershed tax that is will be a regular source of abundance that we have to give locally in a way that will, you know, enhance the ecosystem of the farmers. But then we got to figure out what to do with that regular resource. And so I'm gathering your group and right now we're looking at the intersection biodiversity and population level health that if you solve one, you help solve the other. So anyway, but it's, I would love this group to think about what you would do with a regular source of ecosystem thriving tax in your watershed. It's a pretty simple thing to replicate. But you'd have to imagine a regular source of abundance that can look out as long as a forest. Kevin, one of the things I love about what I understand of your efforts from the outside is that you're starting with people pretty much exactly where they are. You're addressing needs they have. And you're by looking at nature and nature services abundance in a different way, you're getting them to see their environment differently. And just seeing differently is a key, I think, to shifting how we act in the world. And instead of plunder and deplete, maintain, steward and improve, all those kinds of things come from seeing differently. And then you act differently. I don't know if that rings for you. Yeah, but it's not just seeing differently. It's like, here's the new resource, distribute it locally, figure out how to do it. You know, I don't have a plan, but I'm getting together some smart people. And I've been meeting for a couple of years with some of the local ones, and I'm bringing in the population health folks that I've come to be part of. The Federal Reserve has asked me to think about health systems and population health stuff with this group. And so I'm bringing those folks into the table saying, well, what would you do with this to help people get healthier in the neighborhoods you work in? Thanks, Kevin. Stacey, Doug, C, Klaus, Stewart. Well, I actually raised my hand to talk about something that Kevin had done, something really small that speaks to what Jose is talking about, which has to do with the way we organize. And Kevin started a small Facebook group about the Susquehanna watershed. And what I really love about it is that so I can come in and I can observe and try to learn what's going on because I have no clue. But I get to meet all the personalities the same way I would in a Zoom call, but in words. And other people get to do the same. And it's a safe environment to learn without having a lot of the social challenges of coming in as an outsider. But you also get to see where you may be interested or where what you're doing in your life might fit in. But it provides that opportunity to a lot of people at once that may not otherwise have those opportunities. And it's a much more organic way of knowing who you might fit with or seeing how you might fit in. And most important, it helps with learning and with new ideas and all the things that are really important for people that aren't at the policy level. So I just wanted to say that that little thing makes a big difference. And Kevin, you're muted. Thanks, Kevin. What makes it work is that we can say, look, we have a regular source of abundance that is focused on watershed health, this watershed where we live. And so think about it. This should last for 20 years. It should grow, assuming no societal collapse, et cetera. But it's localizing the food system and it's making it more viable to do it because of carbon payments. And you take the tax out of carbon payments before you pay the farmer. Can I just say one more thing real quick? Go for it, Stacey. Because what I want to highlight is it provides an opportunity for new outside of the box ideas that might be brought up in a way that wouldn't be brought up in the regular circles. Well, thank you. Okay, I'll be quiet. Doug C. So a metaphor that strikes me is that we get a puncture in our tire and we fix the puncture and get back on the road. That's what I think a lot of our conversations are like. We want to repair civility, but in doing so we'd be repairing the puncture in the tire and going back to the old system functioning. And we need a tougher conversation than that. And so to me, the point to start is the fact that given what we know now, temperature increases are going to make life on this planet intolerable or impossible. Why aren't we talking there? Instead of continuing to try to fix the puncture in the tire. I find that that's a hyper object and it's almost impossible to talk about. Do you find it's easy to talk about? No, I think it's hard. That's why I think we ought to try it because it's real. My guess is most of us here already believe it, but we're not talking about what we believe. So let me go back to the queue and I think Ken will address your question in a sec. Let's go, Klaus, Stuart, Ken. Yeah, I think I'm talking about it all the time. I just talk about it in ways where hopefully we can do something or create an action coming out of it. So this last roundup with the voter bill and the Secretary of Homeland Security vote and so on, it just shows and Jerry was already commenting on this incredible Crip that this propaganda network, however you define it, is achieving. It's unbelievable because even Biden was the day before on Tuesday coming out explaining in some detail how needed these resources are, more agents, more judges, more money for equipment and so on. And still it's being voted down because Trump says to vote it down and there is just no logic that cuts through this. And I'm here surrounded with a lot of seniors who are very, very red. And the conversations just absolutely fail. If you try to push forward with logic and reason, it absolutely fails. Because what I think may work, we actually have a meeting this afternoon with the Climate Reality Project about the release letters to several thousand farmers inviting them to talk about what their needs are and highlighting some of the resources that are being made available through the Inflation Reduction Act. And how that money is at risk. We're talking about 20 billion dollars that the government wants the Inflation Reduction Act wants to put into conservation programs to help farmers put in cover crops and pollinate the strips and very practical stuff. So Doug, I think this conversation has to break down into the reality that people live within to understand things within their context. And so, for example, to farmers, we don't talk about climate change because the moment you talk about climate change, you're done. They hang up on you. And so we are talking about soil and water sheds like Kevin is doing and that absolutely works. It resonates now. But even that is tough. I mean, we have had conversations, we are setting up some focus groups so we can talk with groups of farmers who without any political discourse here. But then at the end, you sort of say, well, I mean, but your representative voted against this. I mean, why are you voting for him or her if the vote goes against this? Yeah, but there's a lot of other things right now we're getting into the emotion of it. So we can talk the major level, top level and so on. It doesn't penetrate into the people who are currently the stumbling plot to change very by design and as effective as it ever was throughout history. I think nothing has changed because the tools have adapted to the new reality. Thanks, Klaus. I want to add a tiny bit of color from my own perspective just to clear something up, maybe. I'm not trying to say that the right has got a crazy strategy to destroy discourse and the left knows exactly what to do and we need to fix it the way the left is saying. I think the left is really messed up and I've got a friend who's was talking a lot about, hey, if the general public agrees with the less positions all the time, why isn't the left just running the table and winning all the elections? Why? So there must be something really broken about the progressive way of approaching all this and I think there is. I think there's deep dysfunction in the progressive movement, movements around the world and I'm interested in that as well. It's not the subject of this conversation. But I just wanted to put that in because I don't think the left has a fabulous answer for this, like all set up and ready to go. I call it naive and naivete. Thanks, Klaus. So Stuart Ken Gill. Yeah, so, pardon me, we're talking about systems that are in place and we're talking about a matrix that's in place. And we're talking about individual human beings that are in the rat wheel of this matrix driven by the way they have been programmed in the past. And picking up on Doug B's words, we need to learn how to do human beingness different. And that, I think, is the underlying place to really look for systemic change because if we're not looking there to use Doug C's words, we're putting patches on bent tires. I remember in the 2008 economic downturn, when they threw a bunch of patches on the economic system and the government upheld system, I went, oh, shit, they should have just let this thing collapse because the foundation of it is flawed. But of course, that didn't happen. So I'm not sure what the answer is. Nobody knows what the answer is in terms of how to get mass, individual, psychological, emotional change. You know, is it making everybody Buddhist or Buddha-like? That's, you know, pointing in that direction is what pops up for me. I've had this image in my mind for many, many years of civilization on a conveyor belt, and they get to a certain point and the bell jar comes down and somebody gongs the bell jar and people come out different. Or they come out adhering to the admonition of John Lennon, all you need is love. But that's, you know, it may sound hippie-dippy, California woo-woo, but that's behind all of this stuff. I mean, you know, what the Republicans are doing right now, what the right is doing is they're playing a game, okay? And they're operating within that game, and they're trying to win that game in their own definition of winning, okay? And they're doing the best that they can to win. And that happens, that's going on in so many different systems, but people can't seem to get to the bigger, larger picture. And I keep saying, you know, in my mind, people won't change until there's a greater level of pain, a much greater level of pain in a much larger massive population. So, and the other, the only last observation I want to make is that people always look for systemic change, as opposed to how people are operating within a system. Thanks, Stuart. Not an answer, but I think it's pointing to a very, very important factor. I'm going to say one letter of the alphabet to symbolize a pretty large social change that happened in the last decade. And everybody would be like, ah, crap, the letter is cute, as in QAnon. There is a conspiracy theory story that changed a whole lot of people's approach toward each other, toward life, and caused a lot of ruckus and is still banging around inside the system. So, and it's a ridiculous, from my perspective, it's a ridiculous notion, ridiculous set of ideas, but it really, really worked. And it worked partly because, pardon? Why did it work? It worked because it engaged a few people in things they suspected, and it gave them a narrative that was so freewheeling and whack-a-noodle that they could just sort of jump in. It was like a little act of faith, like, yeah, the system is that corrupt. I can't trust anything. I did the research here, here it is. And all of a sudden, they were down the rabbit hole of how everybody's making this happen behind the scenes. Anyway, I don't want to get us distracted on Q, and we've got a, we've got a good Q going of people who'd like to jump in. So, let me go back to that. All right, Ken, Doug, C, Jose, and Gil. Go ahead, Ken. And thank you for the pause. I may be in the Q, but I am not Q. Yeah, exactly. You're not of the Q. I am not of the Q, although Q was one of my favorite characters on Star Trek Next Gen. To address Doug's question about why people are not addressing some of the existential challenges, after they assigned me a media fast in my coaching program, the very first book I was assigned was Irving Elome's existential psychotherapy, which is this big huge fat tunnel. And Irving Elome was a wonderful therapist. I think he may still be alive, actually, or he's well into his 90s at this point. His point is the builds on Ernst Specker's style of death that people do not want to face death. Now, when they've had an existential brush, once a loved one dies or they have a near death experience, there's an opening where they're willing to look at it, but it can't be sustained very long because death is too overwhelming. The threat of annihilation is too much. Very few people can handle that. There's the whole thing I'm going to put in the chat here terror management theory of simply interviewing people in view of a funeral power will change their responses to the questions. We do not like to look at things that threaten our existence. And it's the minute you start to do that, there's a whole raft and host of responses that you'll get that will point at why you're stupid and bad for that and why people shouldn't pay attention to you. So it's very, very challenging to talk about, we are facing the end of our civilization as we know it, the end of the world as we know it doesn't mean the world is ending, just means our world is ending. And people don't want to deal with that for the most part. Those who do generally have done a fair amount of inner work, what I call inner homework, spiritual development work, in order to hold that, but the vast majority of people have not done that. And so it becomes extremely difficult to raise that topic and talk about it effectively in public conversations because it's way too easy to scare people, people freak out, and then those who will use the divide and conquer strategy step in and make you long for raising it and talk about how horrible you are. So it's got to be as Klaus points out, you have to come at it orthogonally. You can't talk directly about climate change with farmers, but if you can talk about soil health, you can get their attention. So I think we need a strategy for coping with climate change that doesn't talk about climate change itself, but rather how do we prepare, how do we observe the changes that are going on, and what can we do to conserve what works and prevent the things that we can see are damaging from continuing to do damage. But if we start talking about climate change with people, we're going to lose them. I know there's lots of folks out there who are talking about it and there's some movement, but on the whole, it's not, it's a non-starter in the US. It's pretty much accepted in Europe from what I saw when I was there. I mean, people talk about it openly and they seem much more further ahead than we are in a lot of ways, but I think it's really worth bearing in mind this, when you start talking about existential risks, you put people in a really bad psychological position and it's very hard for them to deal with it. Go ahead, Jerry. Thank you, Ken. Briefly, I think Doug C. is saying, if we keep doing incremental strategies because that's all that will work, we're all going to die together. We need something that will jump-start us over to something much more radical. And when World War II starts, it takes a couple months for automakers and other manufacturers to be making bombs and airplanes and all that kind of stuff. When they come to the president with a plan, they're like, in six months, we can start making, he's like, no, you're not, like next month, you'll be making these. And we don't have, and Greta Thunberg, bless her for putting herself in the crosshairs of this whole system, is like, hey, the house is on fire and you all aren't behaving as if the house is on fire. And I think Doug is channeling Greta, if I may. It's a real cross-generational thing here. And Doug, hold for a second. Gil's hand actually went down accidentally. I think it's Gil, Doug C, then Jose is the Q right now. So Gil, if you'll step in. Yeah, the difference from World War II is that the clear and present danger was clear and present. Very little argument about it. It wasn't actually that clear and present. There was huge argument. We were isolationists like crazy. Finally, Japan attacks us and tips us in. We were not going to mix in. No, before that, but once Japan attacked us. Yes, yes, but it took that. We were still some disagreeing about what to do, but it was pretty clear in a way that it is not pretty clear to most people yet right now. But that's not why I raised my hand. Doug, I appreciate, Doug, the passion and consistency with which you're raising this question. And I got two questions for you. One is you say nobody's talking about X. We're not talking about X. In your mind, what would it look like if we were talking about X? How would we know we were doing that? What would that look like? That's my first question. Well, should I answer? I'm out of the queue then. We're breaking protocol here. No, you're actually causing a break in the matrix, which is perfectly fine. So I think I don't, there's no time to make everybody into a Buddhist. There's no time to create a conversation that everybody's going to be in. It's going to lead to social change. The change is going to happen because the systems are going to break down. And it's just obvious. I'm asking a really specific, not a critique, not analysis, not diagnosis, but what would it look like if we were doing what you want us to be doing? I have no idea. Okay, fair enough. But if we did it, it would be different. We'll come back to you in a second. You're next in the queue. Second question is, the question you're asking is, why aren't we talking about X? What might be a better question to ask? And you don't have to answer that one, but I'm asking it. Yeah, I don't have an answer to that. I mean, I just start, why aren't we talking about X? Where X is clear. And the clear is that the temperature is going up. We see no forces in the world to lower that possibility. We're going to live through it and we're going to die through it. And there's no nice place at the end. I think that most of us kind of privately believe so why can't we talk about it here? Well, we talk about it a lot here. We do. Also, Doug, I don't think we do. I think we talk about side issues that imply that we can fix the problem and get on with it. Well, look today. Doug, when I look at extension level event probabilities as an amateur from the outside having read some, but not enough, the one I'm really worried about is we kill off life in the oceans, which is entangled with temperature going up. But really it has a lot to do with acidification, overfishing, as a whole bunch of other issues that have nothing to do with climate change that are doing a very good job of killing off life in the oceans. And if we kill off, if we manage to destroy the ocean life cycle, we would then, that does threaten all life on earth because that's what feeds the rest of life. Now, slowly raise the temperature. My view is that climate is a system, is a symptom of an extrapolative economic system that's killing us. The ocean is reflecting the same forces, but what it comes down to is we are going to die fairly quickly. I don't think we're out in 2050. We're certainly not out. I don't think 2030. I think the next couple of years are going to be really tough. We're going to start seeing reports of agricultural failure and project failure all over the place. And the floor is yours, if you want to say more, because you were next in the queue, Doug. No, that's it for now. I'm Paul Singh. And take your time stepping in. We've been hustling along and I'm in my usual slightly spun up mode. So everybody who, if you'd like to step in and take a moment, take a beat before you do, please do. But I think it's fair to say that Doug and all of us look at that problem that Doug just described as from our own respective perspective. In other words, if we think the issue is a human one, then that's our focus. If we think that it's a systemic one, then that's our focus. If we think it is a social one, but up, but up, but up. And so for me, the question is, how do we take the conversation beyond our perspectives and into something broader, something deeper in topic? And that requires all of us sort of just setting aside our own views, our own focus. And having a conversation that's maybe starts with some questions that take us down the path of figuring out what is it that we're, that underlies everything we're talking about. You talked about queue, Jerry. Queue emerges because there is a deficit. Right? It only resonates because there's a deficit. A deficit in culture, a deficit in culture, a deficit in nature, a deficit. It's one in the same. And it doesn't exist. I mean, wacky ideas have been around since the beginning of time. It's not a new thing to have wacky ideas. And, but those wacky ideas only resonate when there is a vacuum. And our society has created a vacuum for a hell of a lot of people. And when we, and not just in the United States, we have a unique situation here, but we, it's around the world. We have to address those questions in order to see what it is that is going to change. Because I don't disagree with Doug, either Doug. The question that for me isn't whether, whether they're right or wrong. The question is, how do we all have a conversation that is underlies all of our things? Because there's something that underlies all of our things. And we're not having that conversation. We're having the conversation of the politics of it and the, the, the practices in this one example, or the catastrophe, the catastrophic implications of it, none of which deal with the underlying cause. So to me, how do we tackle that as a conversation so that we're not each talking about our thing, but collectively talking about something that touches on everything each of us is focused on and passionate about. Because I think that brings us together, rather than having independent conversations about our topics. And then the rest of us are like, well, that's not my topic. So I could shut up at that point. No, Jose, thank you for saying that. Thank you for putting that in the conversation. Do you mind paraphrasing what you just said and putting it in the chat? And can I ask everybody to aim toward that question a bit for the, for some stretch of the rest of the next part of our conversation? Because it's a, it's a lovely ask of us. And I'd like to figure out what it means. And if we can reach higher than we're reaching, because that the great, it's a great ask. So thanks. The ask, I'm asking Jose to paraphrase this question to us. There are his requests. Can we aim higher for a different level of conversation where we can find agreement or something like that? I'm paraphrasing it badly. I need to jump off in seven minutes, but let me restate it. Can we aim lower in our conversation? Not higher as in to figure out a meta view or a bigger, you know, concept, but an underlying reality that is not being met. That's, I think, the conversation that we, we can have. What's happening underneath all of this? We forget that we're in the middle of a freaking game and we're still playing the goddamn game. And in these conversations, we're actually talking about moving the pieces around on the board as if those pieces are real. We've created the freaking game. Let's go underneath the game and let's have that conversation before we created the game. What's the desires that created the game in the first place? In a context of 200 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, where every time we created the game, we created a game on the basis of that time and context. And so, how do we have a conversation now that is different? I'm sorry that was longer than what I originally said, but it's about going down, not up. And I tried to tick notes about it in the chat and Gil just asked, are you asking, are you asking for a diagnosis of root causes, which is not what I think you're asking for? No, not at all. Okay. Thank you for leaving that with us, Jose. I know you're going to have to bounce at the top of the hour, but that was helpful. We have dugs in the queue. First a Dug B, then a Dug C, then we'll make our way through the alphabet to Stuart and Gil. Dug B whenever you want to step in, but you are muted. So I'm sort of going where Jose was suggesting possibility might exist. And Jose used to term once upon a time with me that I've mercilessly worn out that the center of sort of the answers to all of this is proto, not meta. It's dropping down into the fundamentals. So I am a living human being. I have generative, creative capacity to create and to contribute and to serve and to help others. And I stepped out of that game seven years ago and have been shedding and disconnecting and shedding and disconnecting from the imprinting of that for the last seven years. So I don't live transactionally and I seek to help and serve, not from a place of sacrifice or martyrdom, from a place of greatest joy and do that without that being connected to my needs, which is a separate question. So starting from that as a placeholder, it gets really interesting in that being in service contributing to the world, looking at needs through that lens. And I'm coming to believe that in a needs oriented way of relating to the world, if every person just focused on how they can help and how they can contribute and how they can meet needs of somebody other than themselves, the world writes itself really instantaneously. And the active ingredient in everything effective, everything that actually works, everything that points the way toward an alternative way of being and manifesting is at the root of Klaus and his latest efforts when he talks about speaking to the farmers at their level of need, that flow starts and energy starts and co-creation starts and collaboration starts. And in the context of the watershed project, and we've generated this resource pool and now we're pulling together to figure out how to use and the only question really needed to answer that question is, so what does the watershed need? Like you have these resources, ask the watershed and the watershed will tell you. It doesn't require experts and it doesn't require human translation, interpretation and filtering. And so like getting down to primary needs and meeting them, for me on a digital basis and us collectively is like sort of where salvation lay and people tend to respond to having their needs met and people tend to really be energized and thrive feeling valuable and contributing and meeting others needs. And that's like a wholesale replacement for the fiat currency, transactional scarcity, power control authority over economic everything, like just get down to the needs. So I apologize for the life of that, but that's as far as I've gotten. Thanks Doug. Doug, see whenever you'd like to step in. So Jose's view, if I get it right, is to look beneath the surface of the current way of looking at our problems and find a deeper structure. That seems to be ultimately an engineering approach to the problem. And it's never going to happen. That's not where we don't have the time. We've got too much population. Forces are too huge. Things are going to continue to have temperature rise and crises are going to mount making things more difficult. I think Doug B's approach of assessing needs is a long term project. And we don't have any time. We're not going to base a future on needs. Needs are going to be crushed, trampled over. It's going to be really rough. Why don't we talk about that? We keep falling back on colleagues. There must be a solution here somewhere if we just look at it properly. And there isn't. My own view, since people say what would it look like, I take the view that in Bali, when somebody dies, there's a funeral. And the funeral is a happiness event to shake up the body until it's ready to rejoin the dance of the universe. I think we could have a funeral for humanity in the positive sense. We had a good run. This was great. We've had a good time. All sorts of interesting things happen. Let's celebrate and then say goodbye. So if I understand you correctly, Doug, your emphasis is our call should be about preparing a death ritual and celebrating our lives. And we'd be good with that. Which reminds me of the great scene in Little Big Man where the native elder goes up onto the mountaintop having gone through this kind of death ritual and preparing to die. And there's a great ceremony and great loving and quiet for a few minutes. And then it starts to rain and raindrops fall on his face and he wakes up and is startled to find that he's actually not dead and has to go on living. Sorry to jump to the queue, but I couldn't resist. So what happens if the rain starts falling on us as we realize the temperature is continuing to rise? The forces that are creating none are out of our control. They're a long term. We can't do it. Well, as they say in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I'm not dead yet. I think there's going to be a lot of trauma and traumatic displacement in the world as climate disasters hit everybody and people try to figure out how to survive them and what to do. That's going to distract us from actually trying to do things that might in fact fix it, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't disagree that that's going to increase in the next years. I think that it's going to happen. I would love to know what the puzzles mean. The Fitbit? You said until we fix it. If we can fix it, I don't know. I think there's lots and lots of people trying to fix it. We've got a Thunberg. It's like, hey, you need to stop burning carbon. Well, burning carbon. What's interesting is that the pandemic shut everything down for a brief moment and we saw what life is like when there's no commercial activity of that kind. It sort of drew everything to a halt. No flights, no trains. Couldn't go to a restaurant. And then we started slowly figuring out how to do some of those things. But there was a period after 9-11 in the US, there were no airplanes in the air for three days, whatever it was. I forget. That was notable. And you're like, wait, that's what it's like when there's no planes flying around. So we've had a wee little taste of it and the economy ceases and food doesn't show up in the supermarket when all of that stops. And Doug, I know that Garden World is a way to feed yourself and make that kind of work. But nobody's helping everybody else figure out how to get from A to B. And no person in charge of a really large company is going to put their company out of business tomorrow because it's harming the environment. And Exxon is busy suing its new board members because they're trying to get it to get off fossil fuel consumption, which is a really lovely strategy, like get on the board and use capitalism to slow down capitalism's disastrous results. And they're being sued for doing that. Bill, do you want to hop the queue again? You're muted there. Yeah, I'm not anymore. Doug, with all love and respect, I'm really tired of hearing your song. You keep saying nobody has any plans and I can give you 50. One just top ahead is Mark C. Jacobson from Stanford University, get 135 countries representing 95% of the world's emissions to zero emission energy in the next, I forget that the time frame is for a measurable amount of money that is less than the money that McKinsey wants to spend on the fossil fuel industry. So will it work? I don't know. Is it the best plan? I don't know. Is it running to political obstacles? No doubt. But for you to say there are no plans is just really tired and ungrounded and weakens the impact of the very important thing that you're trying to say. And that's why I ask, is there a better question? Because the question you're asking, at least for me, is really, really not working. Well, I looked at Mark's plans and they basically are fairly technocratic, spend money on solutions. Okay, so look, so you don't like Mark's plan. That's fine. We can argue about that. It doesn't fit logic. There are no plans. It's nonsense. Doug, your logic is that all economic activity, even economic activity to rescue the planet, will fail because it's economic activity. That's what I hear you say, which basically says we can do nothing. Okay, I'll go with that for a moment. There's a lot of arguments in between. But that's what I hear you say, that every effort we make to try to mitigate climate change or rescue ourselves from this is in fact itself economic activity, and therefore is going to just accelerate the demand, the species demands. Which is a much more interesting provocation, Doug, than saying there are no plans. Because when you say there are no plans, people come up with lists of plans to prove you wrong. When you say any economic activity to save us is fucked because, that's really interesting and very challenging and very provocative. So all I know how to do is take people's proposed plans and look at the deep logic of them. And do they make economic sense? No, no, no. You're saying something much more powerful than that. Well, I'm only talking about how to approach people who think they have a plan. I mean, take, for example, people saying, let's put solar panels everywhere. Okay, it's getting pretty clear that we're putting most solar panels on flat land. That's the best agricultural land facility project. Yeah. Looking at the side issues that are stimulated by any plan is not something we seem to be good at doing. So we accept the costs unconsciously and persist in the idea that our plan is going to work. What we've seen is that the plans that have gone in place and there are a lot have created us energy produced by solar and wind. And all that's done is add energy to the existing curve, not cut, replace the existing curve. So you're saying that the plans are flawed for various reasons. That's a fair critique. That's different than saying there are no plans. I'm not saying there are no stupid plans. I'm saying that there are no plausible plans that hold up to quantitative analysis. Amendment accepted. That's not what you've been saying, but that's a better question already. It's not as powerful as your fundamental question, which is that any economic activity is counterproductive period. That's pretty radical and unusual and interesting. I would love to see an accounting for the major interesting plans for mitigation or change and your critiques of them and, if possible, your remix of said plans to something that might actually work. I would love to see that. That would make me really, really happy and I'd be happy to help you blow that horn as loud as we can. If you frustrate us when you say nobody's got a plan, we're all going to die. And by the way, anything we do is just going to not work anyway. That frustrates me too. Two different kinds of frustrations, sir. Yeah. Nobody has a plan at the level of grounded reality. That says disregard what you're saying. The other part of it is nothing we can do will work because of the tangle of the nature of reality. That's unsettling in a potentially very creative way. Let's pause on this and go back to our cue. We'll take a little silence first, Yeah, that sounds good. Let me take us into silence. I'll bring us back up in a moment. Thanks, Gil. That's a good idea. Thank you. Let's go to Stuart and Stacey. So I wanted to throw a couple of things into the mix. One relates to the demographic that we are in this conversation. I would imagine that most people on this call and I'm careful of over-generalizing have dealt with the existential question of death, are not walking around in a place of extreme need. And so we're skewed in what we're saying and it almost feels at times like we are the musicians playing as the Titanic is going down. Okay? Not that we're not making good music, we're making great music. People are doing nice little projects that are tilting at windmills, but and that's kind of a good thing. It's not a bad thing. Somebody said before, I think the conversation went to, yeah, I think it was Doug C was talking about, you know, in India when someone dies, they are Native American. I can't remember, you know, they get the body ready because it's been a good life. Now, the really bad shit that's going to hit the fan will likely happen after most of us died or we can actually say that we have had a good run on planet Earth. What would younger people say? What would 20-somethings be saying in this conversation right now? I don't know, okay? I don't know, but I think it's something to think about as part of the mix when we get down to being real with ourselves about what we're doing. That's all I wanted to say. Thanks, Stuart. Stacy, and then I regrettably have to close this room right at the hash because I have another call that I need this room for, alas, virtuality not being as flexible as I wish it were. Stacy, please go ahead. You're muted. Yeah, I find myself, well, I'm going to drop, I find myself unsure of what Doug C would hope the results of a different conversation would lead to. I'm not really sure what the need underneath is, but that's not what I raised my hand to say. I think this is going to where Jose tries to take us and I just want to use the example of when Doug B was just speaking before and he was saying how, you know, what he's done in his life and I noticed in the chat a few people recommended to him that he go over there and look for where you can be of service. And I think that's one of the key points that I just had. Who just left the call? Joan, Kevin. What Kevin does is that he's working with the people that are right there in what's going to affect them. Like this whole concept of decentralization that it seems we're always in agreement about that would be a better way to have different solutions for different locations. It seems that we often forget about that. And again, the reason that I brought up, Kevin's work just in the Facebook group is it allows for people to be where they are and still connect. So that Facebook group started out with the conversation of what do you think we should do and different ideas started coming up and then people could connect in that way. And I, again, just to repeat, I'm sorry. Oh, there was another thing with the water, when Doug said something about the needs of the watershed, the other element that comes in with what Kevin's doing is he's connecting people to the watershed because those individuals are getting to put their solution and tie it to the needs of the watershed. And so it's not just coming, one person's perspective, it's coming from every direction. So I'm sorry, I didn't have perfect words, but you'll figure it out. I'm going to put different framing on what you said, but I hope I'm saying something similar. You can correct me if not. But one of my, one of the things I've always thought was really good about how to make the world better is the appropriation of good ideas and then local adaptation. It never works when somebody shows up and says, well, I know exactly what you should do. Just follow precisely these instructions and then you voice that on everybody. That always breaks from what I've seen. But when you say, hey, here's a couple good ideas, which one works for you and then will help you make it work in your community, in your place, on your soil, with your crowd, that seems to stick really nicely and it's contagious. And sometimes it allows for a brand new idea with the cross pollination and somebody else from the outside can see something that the people in the circle weren't able to see because they were in the circle. Yep. Love that. Thanks, Stacy. Thank you for helping me. We are near the end of our call time, but we're not at it yet. Any wrapping thoughts? I kind of want to address a little bit of what Jose left on the call. I notice his icon is still here. I don't know if he's still able to hear us, but and I think I mentioned this before on the call, but years ago in a fit of peak about all these issues, I bought the domain foobarism.com and foobarism is a placeholder religion. And foobar is fucked up beyond all recognition from the First World War and other kinds of things. But foo.bar is a placeholder file name that programmers use when they're writing sort of sketching code out. They write foo.bar because we need a file here is input or output or whatever. And so I thought what would a placeholder religion look like? Because I'm not a fan of the current organized religions. And I thought one of the things that's missing, one of the reasons Q has a lot of grab is that it's sort of a religion. And religions are seem to be breaking. People, nuns, N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S, nuns is the largest growing group in the U.S. People are leaving churches and temples everywhere and heading off and saying, you know, I'm spiritual, but not religious. That's a big, big segment that's growing. And I think these people, and the word consumer informs the last 30, 35 years of my journey. And I think consumerism, one of its many flaws, is that it separated us from each other. It coupled up with individualism, rugged individualism, the marketing of the self, the pension only on the self, selfies, social media used to promote the self, all that kind of stuff is all of a pocket along with capitalism and consumerism. And so my goal, which I haven't pursued very hard is, what would you put in a religion? And how would you adapt it to what you want? And we've had conversations here before about the 10 Commandments and stuff like that. So my riff about the 10 Commandments comes from this search of what would you put in? And the thing I found that I would put in, my favorite of all of them, is Thich Nhat Hanh's advice for deep listening and loving speech. I'd be like, that is a really aces place to start. Deep listening and loving speech is a lovely first order thing to try to do when coming together to build community and build a good society and all those kinds of things. But I say, thank you for coming back into the call. I don't know if that starts to address what you're talking about, because I think that when you say that Q catches on because people have a deep need, I completely and totally agree. And I think that we're all our institutions are failing to provide something to address that need. And Suparism was a tongue-in-cheek way to come at that. And you're muted. So my other call actually just showed up, just as... Oh crap. Just as you're engaged again. Yes, I think that is the path that avails itself when we have that conversation. I think we start to think about a new life order, not a world order, but a life order. And a life order that isn't so much established by what we should do, but a recognition of what we are. And if we can look at what we are, rather than what we think we've been for a very long time, then I think it changes the way we create a new world order, if you will. But if we don't look at that, we're playing with the same game rules. And the same game rules are the problem. And so we've created a system where we're not willing to step away from the current system, the current game rules. And so for me, that conversation, I would really enjoy having some day where we take it down to some rude principles and then go from there to something, damn it, I think I may have lost my other call. Thank you for interrupting your incoming call and telling us this and feel free to... No, I just... He didn't show up on time, so I was taking advantage of it and enjoying our call. But I'm going to try to fix that and we'll see you guys next time. It feels like a good topic for a future OGM topic call. I need to figure out how to frame it or phrase it. Go ahead, Stuart. Yeah, Jerry, you asked first when I heard reflection on the call in some sense. And to me, as I think about the call, we just had the last 90 minutes. It's a perfect reflection of what we've been discussing. The call has been a little bit over here and over here and over here and over here and emotion and da-da-da-da-da-da. And we're dealing with something that's pretty big and has got a lot of facets to it and no absolute clear answers. So, I think the best way to be and I loved your statement about how we can be different talking about Thich Nhat Hanh. Actually, one of his books just showed up and it's a beautiful meditation on how we can handle life in some ways better. But we're in a very emergent phenomenon, emergent phenomenon. And I don't know if it's going to be any different, absent some catastrophe where there's a giving up of ways of being and a surrendering to some other authority. I don't know. Nobody knows. So, it's an interesting time to be alive to see what it is that's going to emerge out of the cauldron that we're currently swimming in. Alfred Nguyen, what are we worried? Any closing words for this call? Ken, might you have a poem for us? Indeed, I do. I believe I've read this one before, but it feels very appropriate today. This is going back to Vistaba Zimborska. It's called, A Contribution to Statistics. Out of 100 people, those who always know better, 52, doubting every step, nearly all the rest. Glad to lend a hand if it doesn't take too long, as high as 49. Always good because they can't be otherwise. Four, well, maybe five. Able to admire without envy, 18, suffering illusions induced by feeding youth, 60, give or take a few. Not to be taken lightly, 40 and four. Living in constant fear of someone or something, 77. Able of happiness, 20-something, tops. Harmless, singly, savage in crowds, half at least. Cool when forced by circumstances, excuse me, better not to know even ballpark figures. Wise after the fact, just a couple more than wise before. Taking only things from life, 30, I wish I were wrong. Hunched in pain, no flashlight in the dark, 83 sooner or later. Righteous, 35, which is a lot. Righteous and understanding, three. Worthy of compassion, 99. Mortal, 100 out of 100. Thus far, this figure still remains unchanged. I love that poem. Thank you for reminding me of it. The fabulous poem. Yeah, thank you. Thank you all. I have loved this call. This has been a really nourishing call for me and I think that our frictions are friendly frictions and productive frictions, so I look forward to more of them. Thanks all. Thank you.