 We've tried to reverse that to work. This is the OGM community call for Thursday, August 18, 2022. Sorry, I can't go ahead. That's right. I was going to say, I have a beef with people who say nature is better off without humans. Humans are nature. Humans are an evolutionary part of it. And if we take ourselves out of the picture, the planet will grieve in its own way. And then in a couple hundred million years, there'll be something else. But we're here to be an expression of natural intelligence, not to take ourselves and call ourselves a cancer, just because certain people are acting that way. I love that. Thank you. And, and. Fucking a feisty today. Go Ken. Maybe you check in first. How about that? But you're, you're, I'm trying to remember what call it was just in the last week where I basically put up the idea that wilderness areas where new humans are allowed to go or accept as tourists are stupid. That humans who know what they're doing are good for the good for the earth, good for the forest, good for whatever. Yeah. And that, oh, I remember it was a, she may Casio did not like that. She may was like, no, no, no, no, wait a minute. And we had a very interesting conversation from there, but I caused his, his throat to tighten at some point on that. Yeah, it's in, in reading. Oh, what was it? Kevin Jones, you know, posted this thing about Ansel Adams had kicked the indigenous people out of the 70. And, and I'm like, I've heard that, but is it true? And turns out they were, they were thrown out to get somebody valiant 1850 by somebody named John Savage, I think. And so that was long, long before, and they never came back. That was long, long before Adams came along. And in that they said, one of the myths that Adams really was, that he propagated was very destructive was the idea of untouched nature. But in fact, humans have been around for millions of years. We have touched every part of nature. There's no part of this planet that was not touched, massaged, worked over, you know, and just because it didn't happen in ways that Europeans recognized it. Like when they got here, they didn't recognize farming because it wasn't in straight rows. They just saw, you know, these forests of chestnuts and acorns and stuff. So it's all nature's like, no, this is very definitely human intervention. So I think setting aside certain parts of the land for the recovery of ecosystems and animals is a great idea, but it's going to require that I would, I would posit that putting indigenous people on the land who know how to live on that land and work with it would make it far more beneficial than if you simply left the land to itself. And then I read that article on Pleistocene Park and what mammoths used to do, because they would knock trees over and they would create this, you know, savannas and grasslands. And, you know, we really have such a small understanding of how nature actually works. And it all comes from inside of our, well, we're the most superior intelligence on the planet, so therefore we must know what's going on. And it's just, it's pathetic the way that we project our superiority onto everything and think, well, you know, we're the height of evolution. I don't think so. We're just the latest, you know, example. What makes us so arrogant? Why do we do that so reliably? Testosterone. So is it TMR? TMR, TMR. Sorry. And this is now politically correct term. This is a grade school joke, but testosterone induced mental retardation. I think so. Which I think is like, you know, part of what broke the planet. I mean, there's a lot of that, I think, I think out there. Somewhere in my reading, it might have been Pinker, he talked about periodically throughout our history. There have been times when homicidal maniacs are ruling and the women have said, you know what, you can't keep this shit up. You guys got to take this out of here. And I think we're kind of at that point again. So in Iceland, there's a nice story about the global financial crisis and basically how a fisherman turned into mortgage brokers and, you know, subprime investors overnight and were suddenly really, really wealthy and then shitheads found all the money goes away and all the women turned to them and go, you assholes. And basically a lot of different things happen, including a constitutional rewrite that I think was done by men and women, but that never got ratified by Congress. So they don't get the new constitution is still sort of sitting there, but there's some cultures where they've sort of seen this at work and take in measures to kind of stop it. Let me just hold on that for a second if anybody else wants to chime in. Otherwise I'd love to go back to you Ken for check-in because that's what you're thinking maybe of checking in at the beginning. So anybody else with a thing they want to add to this? There are being no comments. Back to you in the booth. Okay. Good morning. Nice to see people. I don't have a lot to report. I'm still sitting on my patio with plantar fasciitis. It's just takes, you know, it's a lesson in patience and I'm really sick of lessons and patience. I'm fucking fed up with them. No. I feel like I've had so many lessons and patience in my life. And it's like, do I really need another one here? You know, if I get out of bed in the middle of the night, I'm reminded that, yeah, this is definitely still there. I have these really spongy shoes I wear during the day that prevent me from feeling a lot of pain. But if I walk barefoot, it's really painful. So I'm doing what I can to maintain an even keel. Trying to keep myself entertained and engaged. But this is two months now and it might be several more months and the summer is going away. And it's just been really hard. So I find that I'm having to draw in my gratitude practice a lot more than I normally do in order to keep myself from spiraling down into whatever it is I spiral down into. So that's why I'm a little bit feisty. And, you know, just observing the world through Zoom, connecting with people and reading the news and reading some interesting books. I just started a book on systems inspired leadership. Just completed Damon Cento's book on change, which I can't recommend enough. And yesterday I was on Gil's between the world's call. This might be of interest to people who are on this call. And I convinced him to let me run a cafe because, you know, every month it's Gil talking to people one to one. So we did three rounds and people are like, oh my God, this was the best call. Please do this again. So if you ever want to do that, Jerry, I'd be happy to help you design something like that. And we could give it a try. So people have a chance to work in small groups and get to know each other on a little deeper level. Stuart was there. He came in towards the end, but he maybe can say something about that. So that's me. I hope everybody else is well. And I'll just shut up and listen. Thanks, Ken. Really appreciate that. Hope your foot heals up quickly. Thank you. Stuart, did you want to add anything to that? From what you saw? No, I was only there for one third, one round, but I'm really familiar with cafe. As a matter of fact, I had dinner with, with David Isaacs and in Asheville a couple of months ago. Oh, wow. Or last month or something like that. And that was just wonderful. But anyway, you know, Ken brought a certain. A sense of a real humanity and a softerness to the, to the, to the gathering. And it's amazing when you ask a few personal questions, how deep the dive goes and how quickly and how much people appreciated that. So it was a lovely surprise experience. Because as I said, I showed up late. It was just, it was just really wonderful. And so I'm glad. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that, Stuart. That helps a lot. And I will add from our last. OGM call that I've been pondering a lot, sort of the, the dynamics, the diversity, things of that nature. And one of the words you said right now, Stuart softer really calls out to me. Which is lovely. So I would like to invite other process methods into what we do here. Let's figure out how to do it. Ken, maybe we, we can inspire to do a cafe format. OGM check in or something. And, but other, but also other people, other things. I'm like completely open to doing that. And realize that what we normally sort of. The, the assumed method of operation for these calls is. People sharing ideas, many of which are outside of their personal experience in the world and hustling to add links and share stuff. And I'm completely guilty of that in a way that's like a race to have an answer. And that that's not conducive to everybody and not necessarily a soft and welcoming kind of environment. So, so let's, let's change it up. Let's rearchitect some parts of this and go do that. Eric is asking me to describe render, which I'd love to do. Actually, I'd love to check in real quick. Because I'm in New York this afternoon. I fly home to Portland. I arrived here Sunday. Had to get from Newark airport into the city and felt like a complete newbie. And then, and then I'm like, ah, this Newark airport terminal. I'd forgotten how bad it is, how ugly. And wow, can't they put a sign up that tells you what the train is and hey, welcome back to New York. When I, when I was planning the trip, it looked like it was, there were going to be thunderstorms two days this week. It has been as beautiful as I've ever seen it in New York, like I've been here in four days and like just perfect, beautiful weather. You want to sit outside. You want to talk. It's very beguiling and it's very dangerous to be in New York when it's so pretty because you're like, oh, this isn't so bad. I could be here again. I lived here from 92 to 98 when I worked for Esther. And I got to interview Esther as the last session of the render event on Tuesday. They're going to be posting all the sessions of the render event on YouTube. It's just not produced yet. So it'll probably take a moment. I don't know if the Vimeo stream, which was live actually turned into a stored recording right away. I actually haven't checked. And we also talked yesterday in a deeper session about the Vimeo stream. We also talked a little bit about call outs, basically short clips that we would hope would go viral to take from different parts of the, of the sessions yesterday during the day. So apparently the Vimeo is available. So Eric, thank you. I didn't realize that I will, I will go click on that and add it to my brain and that's fantastic. There it is. Six hours and two minutes worth. Thank you. That was so easy. And so it was fun. It was like a really fun afternoon. The whole thing started at 1130 New York time and ended around seven with sort of some beer and wine. Lots. We attracted mostly white men, not a lot of diversity in the crowd, but a tremendously interesting sort of mix of people showing up who cared about this in lots of different ways. Met a guy from Princeton who teaches creativity, met some, lots of startup people, et cetera, et cetera. The reason that beta works, which is a venture capital firm here in New York, and I'm sitting in the beta works offices, little booths, a little video booth right now. The reason they ran this at all is that they're interested in running a camp around tools for thinking that's going to happen just in a couple of weeks. So they would like to have startups apply to be in the camp. They'll get a small investment from beta works and looks like some co-investors as well, like John Boorthwick, the founder of beta works has been talking to other funds to co-invest and sort of help build the sector. My major interest. I'm interested less in tools for thinking for individuals to create lovely but private bags of insights and woven knowledge and more in the creation of a commons of what we know and why we believe what we believe in all that kind of stuff. So I've got kind of an ulterior motive, which is how do we how do we foster the sharing of all this all this thinking into the common that leads toward better debate, better discussion, etc. We had a bunch of different sessions yesterday. One of the there was one point at which there were some five demos in a row was one of the sessions. I was one of the demos using my brain. My brain got a lot of airtime at the session, not because I was trying to proselytize the brain. I hope that message got through. But because I really wanted people to get a sense of what it's like for a person to do intense note taking in real time with a particular power tool for thinking. And I think that kind of made it across. But one of the other demos was Linus Lee, who is kind of doesn't have an offer isn't trying to build a startup is just jinking around on his own in cool ways and is really smart on this. And he had basically created something using GPT three, the transformer tool that uses large language models as a back end server where he could feed it a paragraph out of something. He would just drop the paragraph into a rectangle that had two axes on it. Let's say faster, slower or angrier kinder. And then he could drag that that he would drag a dot around in the space. And as he dragged the dot around in real time, the sentence would transform and be reworded. So if you went to slower, the sentence would become like, every couple of years, we meet to talk about tools for thinking. And if you went over to the left like every five minutes, we meet for tools for thinking or something like that. And it was everybody sort of gasped. It was a lovely demo of things we don't expect, things we don't think are happening that are now possible. And then when asked if he could just give people sort of access to the beta, he said, actually, no, my computer was pegged, like in the red, in the red zone and my server allocation was completely gone doing that in real time. There's no way like three people could do it at the same time. It was just an experiment, but it was really cool. And then the founders of Readwise were here. Alice Albrecht from Recollect was here doing AI kind of stuff in also in text and text generation and then also assembling text collections for writers, basically helping writers pick through and assemble and screen together a blog post, a book, an essay or whatever else. So, and Eric, I'd kind of like to see what you like than anyone else who listened into the live stream or whatever. I'd love other, well, while we're on the event, I'd love other feedback on it as well. Go ahead. Yeah, so I was impressed by Gordon's talk because he's thinking about the fundamental data layer and how you're going to interact between these tools. So he's looking at IFPS and I'm looking at HyperCore. And I'm wondering, okay, is there a synergy between these people and the D web camp? Could that be brought together somehow? Very likely, yes. I mean, there's lots of people, including Gordon, who are thinking really deeply about how do we distribute data and then bring it back together again when we need it in the right way with some permissioning, right? And he's busy trying to hack IPFS, the interplanetary file system, and other sorts of things to do that. And I'm not attending the D web meetup, which sounds like it's going to be, it hasn't happened yet, right? Yeah, Mark will be there. Yeah, it sounds like it's going to be super cool. Wish I could be. Anybody else have a thought on that crossing? I don't think so. But thanks for bringing that up, Eric. And D web has had monthly meetups. And they're deep in all that kind of stuff. And they're really good. They're totally fun. Yeah. So we would put a link to the web meetups. And Wendy Hanamura who runs them is awesome. I think this is the link to the D web meetup. Correct me if I'm wrong, please. You can go join there and then you'll get notices for the meetings and invited and it's a really smart crowd. Any other thoughts on the renderer session, otherwise I'll go back to check in round. Cool. Well, how about we go. Grace Julian. Bill. And I'm from there. I'm getting, I'm getting some echo from where you are. Somehow Grace. Yeah, I think you're not connected to the mic directly. Much better. Actually have the mic. Yay. Thank you. You turn on the mic. Good idea. Yeah, it's been really confronting week for me. I. I'm looking at raising money. And the number that I've said is $55 million through. The number that I've raised is $5 million. And that's the number that they raised her. And I'm trying to reach you here the entire time. I'm like, well, that seems like, you know, enough money to free a sponge that seems like a drop in the bucket for what I'm trying to do. And it's so crazy, right? Like, I am really clear that I have no clue what I'm doing. I've written. Something like 120 white papers for the project. And that's not including like the two or 300 organizations that I spoke to and either they didn't hire me or I didn't hire them or they asked me for free consulting or whatever. And I've watched really great projects that were very sensible. Completely failed raise any money. And I've seen absolutely ridiculous projects. That made no sense and had no previous expertise. And I have no idea how it works. And I talked to people at the time and all I've been doing. All I've been doing is just talking to people and saying, look, this one, I'll do, I'm raising money. What should I do? What do I do? And I just have this sense that's going to work. And I've just said it really better work because I honestly don't, I've been so inspired by what I'm working on. And I'm writing a white paper for it. I've been writing blog posts a couple of times a week. And I've been working with my two co-founders in Kenya and the Philippines when they're not threatened by violence because elections or earthquakes or typhoons are all having founders from the developing world. It's enlightening. It's enlightening. And it's the only way that I feel comfortable doing what I'm doing. And they're actually people that I want to be working with. They're just the coolest people. And that's why I chose them. But I feel like I have to succeed this time because I don't think I can write more white papers for shit points for the rest of my life. Or I've been writing white papers and blog posts for like the security industry, like API security and cloud security. And I just like, I can't do this. I can't. I was just so confronted by what I do for a living this week. Like, I'm really good tech writer. I write for the biggest companies in the world for storage and cloud and whatever. And anybody's read The Big Leap by Gay Hendrick. He talks about your area of excellence and then like your area of genius. And how your area of excellence is always pulling you back because you can make a lot of money at it. And people are always calling you to do it. And I'm like, this is my area of genius. This is Leap. And I'm right there. And I just had pressure. Like I just had just like an emotional moment. Like what the fuck am I writing? Is this crappy? Marketing pollution. It's just like one security company competing with the other one and who the hell cares, which application security protocol. It doesn't fricking matter. They're all the same there. And I write for both. And I'm like, I'm writing for the editor. It's like, I'm a copywriter. I'm writing this one and I'm like, and I tell them I'm writing for the editor and they're like, yeah, but you're the expert. I'm like, okay, great. It's so fucking absurd. I just have to raise at least enough money. That I can stop doing this crap work. That I'm excellent at. So yeah, that's why I am. Yeah. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So for some of our crowds or some of ourselves giving you a. Another stage rocket to boost you into that orbit. Like can we set up just the pop up call. To listen to where you are and what you're trying to get done. The figure out whoever wants to show up shows up, but it, you know, it'd be nice to help you solve that puzzle somehow. And I'll have to use some feedback. In some ways and some connections or some. Then else, right? Whatever. to help you to help you pop into the next orbit. Yes I accept that offer of help and I will set that up and probably I guess this time maybe on a different day of the week. We can pick time for next week and figure out something that works well for more people so cool. I mean this time works for me I could do maybe two or three or something. Yeah exactly cool that'd be great and and I think one of the things that is just obvious in my industry it's all about the height so the more people they can kind of height this at the moment I want to height this which is like be September 22nd we're going to be announcing live in Nairobi and London at conferences so like the more heights the better and we have some ideas about that and yeah and anything else you guys can contribute. Yeah thank you. Thank you. How is 8 a.m. Pacific so the same start time on the Wednesday the 24th of August? Does that work for you? No I have something an hour later would work for me and one hour later would work. Sounds perfect so 9 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday the 24th just picking it by fiat I will put a note out on OGM town square and figure the rest out as we go but if there's a good reason to switch it around we'll move it but at least we've got a place holder for that conversation. And I'll probably invite a couple of people for mine. Please anybody from your posse yeah. Thank you for being great. Thanks guys. This is this is like a for all mankind but for grace. No never mind bad analogy. Okay let's go back. I don't know Rachmani means merciful so like my whole name thing is like it's going. Oh I like that thank you the merciful. Let's go to Julian Bill Gill. So my brief check and I spent last week at the computer graphics conference in Vancouver. It's called say graph. Intendance was way down because of COVID I know many of my colleagues didn't go because of that but they projected for it so they actually didn't end up in the red. It's probably the biggest computer graphics conference in the world although your graphics is a fairly significant one much more academic. But one thing I wanted to mention from what I saw there this idea of putting power generators on top of the the the smokestacks that flare excess natural gas. So there have been companies who put devices on there to come to capture the energy and use it for something. So in graphics does everybody know what a anybody know what a render farm is? So okay so with this one company now is using them right now they're starting to power render farms using this excess gas flaring and they plan to expand excess energy recovery in other areas so I thought that was interesting that instead of going to crypto mining it's going to 3D animation. Then it came back to California had a cat emergency for the first couple days this week but he's he's back to normal now so in fact to work too. Thank you and any any highlights from the conference and it was SIGGRAPH right? Yeah that was SIGGRAPH. Not really so the exhibition the one trend I noticed was I guess you'd call it training and education. It's like all of these software packages have gotten pretty complex to use so you do need real training in order to learn how to use them and that was the main emphasis in the equipment exposition. I don't attend the academic part of the conference for two reasons one it's pretty damn expensive and second it's I'm such an old timer in the field I can just call it my colleagues and ask them what did your student just publish? So it's more a matter of networking and that's you know the networking has been cut out for three years now so of the people who were there was a chance to connect up with them again. So you're reminding me of a conference that I went to a very long time ago I think it was called BBSCon or something like that and it was the annual bulletin board systems conference where Mustang software and PicoSpan and and all the old FIDO net was I think there but all the old BBS vendors were there and it was early internet days might have been I think it was early web days already so the web was around and I'm going from person to person going okay okay y'all could build like the distributed internet and blah blah and they were all they were all fighting their old battles and not I couldn't find anybody who was busy thinking out of thinking their way out of the BBS space and into this future that we sort of got now that looks more like Vanity Fair magazine than organic stuff that was going on. It was really pretty amazing to me they were not doing that I had a similar experience that computer supported collaborative work whatever whatever that I went to where it was like the people who gave the speeches had given an almost the same speech like eight years earlier and they had like cinecures in the social network that was that conference and they weren't thinking hard about what this medium made possible how it changed everything and etc etc it's funny people do not grasp change and leap into it very readily yeah the sigrap would get you re-energized because there are people are constantly thinking in opposite directions as to what you just described for example if you try and design something a 3d software and it depends which package you're using as to how the data for that is stored and of course people want to be able to transfer their data to other packages so they can do other things and there's unlike the CAD industry where the big CAD vendors just really focus on customer liking they don't like their customers to do things like that in the 3d world there's much much less of that so you see seen this seen description formats popping up which this concept is called like the one from Pixar called usd or gltf from the chronos foundation and you're able to transfer your data between different packages fairly effortlessly um then also people do at sigrap I find people are trying to find figure out ways of using things that are just a little bit off that way or that way but the thing is when you do you end up with lots of serendipity and finding a whole new discovery just by trying to tweak a few concepts love that Stuart yeah I just wanted to comment on what you were saying Jerry about people's resistance to change and just how many many many many many folks in the world are just going along as if things will just continue to go along the way they are and they don't see all of the calamities that most of the folks on this call actually see that was one of the wonderful things about kens facilitation on gil's call yesterday the the notion that um so many people were in the same conversation I mean the last breakout group was what are you seeing and how are you feeling today about what's going on in the world and how are you coping with it so um I just wanted to punctuate what you said Jerry thank you if only somebody would write a book about driving a mid-constant change I mean I don't know um Grace yeah I just want to comment like we have this thing that we do like we say people are supposed to change and I would just like to invite us all to look at our own lives and where we're also resistant to change because it turns out that the people want to call our people that's all thank you um I think I had Bill, Doug, B, then Gil Mr. Anderson yeah good morning folks um all I can say is here in Texas it's now under 100 degrees for a few days so I was the high temperatures but um and we might get some rain after 56 days of nothing so um the only thing that really has concerned me is that Gil posted this really little this week article and I followed it up with this and read this very long piece by James Pogue in Vanity Fair about well the new right but it really disturbed me in a way but mostly has made me really think again about how we have to try and talk with each other um because the people highlighted in that call I mean you know they're my son's friends friends of my nephews and nieces and they're reading Aristotle they're not illiterate they're very well educated they're having conversations you know in compound sentences and it's like whoa these people are not you just can't write people off they are really thinking about things they hold some of the same critiques that I have about the current you know what we've built in this neoliberal capitalist kind of like markets are the answer the reason no alternative like where did that come from so they have the same concerns they just and I'm just like we have to be talking with these people these are not you know just aggrieved these are really you know well I don't want to say as competent as the rest of us so um it just really made me think this is going to be you this is really what we have to try and talk about and just now we just want to highlight what Grace mentioned I've been trying myself to when I make a generalized kind of judgment to see how well it applies to my own behavior which I often find is it often applies quite well but anyway so I'm just I don't know really I'm just struggling with coming to terms with that um you know regardless of what the politicians are capitalizing on in terms of you know the kind of arena in which they think they're operating I mean they are operating but you know they have their own illusion about what the world is so I mean that's that's where I'm at um I guess two questions one is um how how can you describe it just a wee bit more how this has affected you uh and then the second is I think this might make a really good subject for a call next Thursday I would love to bring more attention to this article this topic the general sort of dynamics of it and so forth it makes a lot of sense the article resonated really strongly with me as well okay so what I did I went to Jerry's brain because you posted the link thank you very much and I looked at all the links to this and I decided to oh what's that guy's name yes anyway one of the the open letter to open minded people the open minded progressives which he he wrote this long blog post in I don't know 2006 or eight or whatever and so I read it and what I recognized is stuff I don't write because when I think that way I'm like that isn't even worth putting on paper that's really sloppy nonetheless you know I mean for example you know he says well all these people on the left you know they make criticisms of you know blah blah this regime will help out the US in the way we behave in Central America I'm like yeah what's your point you got a point after that I already understand that so this is where I'm thinking that's where the conversation if it's going to go somewhere not just like you know look at the kind of sloppy incomplete thinking other people have it's like well yeah let's look at it that's what I'd like to do so that's one example so I don't mean so I'm a little cranky because I've been doing a lot of reading you know and good writing and thinking writing is well good writing reflects good thinking but good writing is not necessarily universal so can it crank me grace is a little cranky builds the little cranky I'm sensing a little pattern here all right we may have to I'm not cranky I'm feisty feisty not cranky my apologies my apologies I and I think feisty is a funner way of being cranky I mean angry or something like that don't forget curmudgeon yeah yeah curmudgeon but curmudgeonly can be very passive passive aggressive or whatever you just or in my case can't anchor us like like like like Roy Kent and Ted Lasso wow was someone else chiming in sorry I said in my case it's cantankerous cantankerousness nice you mean having a fucking mindset I like it um okay we have oh it's too many links back uh Doug Breitbart Gilrick um so my checking is actually um Grace had shared we had a sort of a sidebar a few weeks back and she had shared this idea of I see all these people raising you know 50 million dollars and in smoke and nonsense and it and it goes away and like well if they can do that then what if somebody like actually with intention integrity and and and ideas did it like why can't I do that and that really really struck a chord so um I'm working everybody that I'm currently working for with is in real aspirational manifesting tomorrow today spaces and all of those efforts universally bar none are the principles are all affected by um the old paradigm you know how to pay the bills how to like you know meet needs in the terms of the old paradigm right which is doing something and Grace you re re re raised it today with I do this work to make money to pay for the roof so that I can do the work I want to be doing and so um I sort of did some digging and there are 273,000 billionaires today like register that that's a really big number of people with really big obscene accumulations of wealth and I can't help but believe that out of 273,000 there isn't somebody that you know would be willing to take a walk on the wild side of um contributing their resource and their engagement and expertise in um in contributing to a value ecosystem in you know 100, 500 million dollar chunks to underwrite you know all of the people and and collaborations and efforts of folks looking to do it differently like really differently like not rooted in ownership not rooted in appreciation of value as value but actually just create co-creating and figuring out the new as value and uh disconnecting the quid pro quo of something for something transactional working for the money that pays the bills and all of that but really separating those things and people are generating what they're generating and and that's value contribution to the whole and people are defining what they need like what they actually need and so I've been living on with that and stewing on that for a few weeks and um and I'm feeling into a reorientation of how do I look for the billionaire like not raising money not like the that orientation but um like what are my qualifications for that person they're joining an ecosystem their value contribution is via currency but like what's required of them in order for them to qualify to fulfill that role and that's sort of blossoming pretty significantly and so that's what I've been you know in and amongst all the other stuff that's sort of what's been living for me thanks Doug um two things one importantly can fact check the billionaire number it's really 2700 not 27 000 uh billionaires that's a big difference in zeros uh in my brain it says there were 26 you're muted right now uh in my brain it says there were 2600 in 2019 so it makes sense at 2700 so thanks for that and be aware next time you like appreciate appreciate the correction thank you and then and then separately uh I was an old friend who's also a brain user who I haven't heard from in a while Jim Carrovala for a while he was with a company called the Shackleton company that was going to mine water out of the Shackleton crater on the moon and start the first network of space refueling stations because once you have mass off the earth which is very expensive moving around in space ain't that expensive and whoever's got the exons out there's going to like do pretty well maybe he was just a little bit early but he had the most sophisticated mesh of brain files and spreadsheets I've ever seen and he had a big database of billionaires because he was pretty sure that one of these he was looking for 80 billion for like seed seed funding and I was like well okay that's a large number Grace maybe you should ask for a large number is what I'm thinking but but then Shackleton exists no longer so maybe that's a bad model but he was thinking wouldn't a billionaire like to have their name on the first network of refueling stations in outer space which was I thought not an unreasonable thought um sorry for a long explanation of that um Klaus and Stuart yeah come in coming to I had COVID last week so my mind is like oh man it's an interesting experience in midday but and I came across two data points that sort of threw me into one was I listened to Noam Chomsky explain recently explain how humanity has ended a last call moment in history which will determine our collective future and then I listened to Jamie Dimon explain that people have to to a group of his key stakeholders mostly billionaires how frustrated he is that people can't get it through their six calls that we must boost oil and gas production to make it through the climate change period so when we are looking at at these 2700 whatever billionaires they live in a data world or in an information bubble right that is more in line with was it what the Jamie Dimon would think and propagate and they have theories about how to make it through this transition period that's simply diverged from what the Noam Chomsky sees and what most people who are really paying attention to the sea so so the reason why they are funding and I also I mean I see projects being funded that are just not in line with with where most people think we need to get going and initiate changes that are behavioral modifications that change the way that the American dream is structured and so I have a feeling that the the problem is not is not so much the billionaire class per se not wanting to help it's just that the idea of helping is based on on ideas that are not in line with where we think we need to go now thank you thank you story yeah Doug one of the things I thought of as you were speaking was there have been some letters sent to the US congress by wealthy high-income people please tax us more please tax us more and my my sense is that that demographic might be a place to look to one I know is one I know it can't make an hour is really good on that he says if we don't get tax more of the pitchforks are coming thanks George we have in the queue gill Rick Doug Carmichael yeah there's an article just out about how Bill Gates the climate hawk lobbied on the climate bill so it's complex out there a word in support of Jamie Diamond I haven't read his or I haven't read his actual language but I think one of the things he's saying is that we don't get to shut off fossil fuel tomorrow we have to invest in new infrastructure for renewables etc it's going to take fossil fuels maybe that's what he's saying but on the other hand where's my other hand going on that the other hand is that you know the business reality for these folks is that you know recognizing that fossil fuel industry is going to go away at some point they still want to extract all possible value from it on the way down so there's no rush on their side for that transition and that's you know economically rational right for them so with that to the check-in thanks Grace I just got off a call with a group of people called Future Capital that are looking at transforming the nature of business that started out with a gigantic systems map of the entire everything which made me think of OGM related to that I'm having a demo next week with the new version of one planet living which is a very interesting visual mapping scheme that has an action management component in it which is intriguing so after I see that I want to make an introduction between this network and that network because I think there might be some useful cross-licking of tools on personal check-in Stuart thank you for mentioning the call yesterday we had our monthly living between worlds call and Ken facilitated masterfully bringing world cafe process into zoom style breakout groups which people really appreciate it so Ken thank you again for that let's see so there's that I am speaking of white papers and raising capital and so forth we're we're getting we're diving deeper and getting traction on critical path capital we've identified a first vertical where we think we're going to try to do a roll-up of small and medium-sized companies to produce a network of employee-owned climate-oriented businesses Grace the 50 million is an interesting number I went the investor group that's most interested in us right now I said we're you know we're looking to raise $1 or $2 million to put all the deals together and they said no no just go for 50 not interesting enough if it's just one or two I said great you know you're gonna help us they said yes so so telling the truth and Grace I want to see a white paper for Grace Rachmani not buy grace but for grace so maybe that's the next one for you to write and just tell the truth on that in other news I'm finding myself in very strange mood these the moods these days on the one hand you know terror at the the you know first right attempt to dismantle American democracy and all the other things that come with that you know the new right article we were talking about before is not just the random emergence of intelligent college kids thinking about this stuff it's a 50-year program to shift the cultural background in this country that's been very focused and very effective and nothing that our folks are doing comes close to the to the strategic focus that the right and their money has been able to do so on the one hand you know periodically freaked out about that on the other hand fascinated at just the enormous amount of creativity around the world the growth of renewable energy the grassroots efforts at democracy and as I said with Ken yesterday some days I feel like I'm just you know pulling up pulling up the an easy chair getting a big bucket of popcorn and watching the show because it is fascinating to be in this moment of history absolutely unclear where it's going to go and so I move between you know between terror anger and all that stuff to just you know wonder and curiosity and fascination at what might be possible and to ground that a little bit as not just being you know delusional ramblings nobody predicted the Kansas vote outcome a couple of weeks ago nobody none of the polar you know it was like it was invisible and there it was and so while some people say oh we're doomed you know the republic is going to take over congress in November on the other hand if the democrats ran hard on issues where there are super majorities across the country even in red states which includes row and guns and a couple of other things there's actually the possibility of a democrat majority and then this you know this first step in adequate climate bill gets built on and all the other agendas that we talk about so I'm cranking up my referral machine to connect people to various get out the vote and vote organizing efforts that are doing very strategically focused work to get to move to move votes in critical districts around the country not just generally you know encourage people to vote but to target the canvassing efforts the calling efforts the door to door efforts the donation efforts and so forth in places where it can make a strategic difference both at federal level and at state level which is really key because we're seeing state legislatures state governors state secretaries of state being gradually rolled up by the anti-democratic juggernaut so as I have those I'll share those with OGM in the next week or two and that's it for me for the moment thank you go thanks a lot of stuff not a lot of stuff let's go Rick Doug Carmichael Stewart thank you Jerry I I invited a woman to join this group that I met on GRC and I just thought I don't know what the protocols are about inviting people but if we want diversity it might be a good idea for each of us to try and reach across younger generation etc to invite them in and listen so and I said I would share her her coursework that is to do with climate change anyway the thing that's top of mind for me is I've been playing around with this blog post for a while about how to ask big herioticious questions and I'm going to a writing group this afternoon where I'm going to get some critique on it and I'm hosting something next week and it's sort of along the lines of what Ken was talking about sort of cafe style it's not me presenting it it's actually giving a platform for people to think about what are their big herioticious questions so I might ask Grace what is your big herioticious question in terms of what she wants to do next in life or whatever or whatever she wants to do or anyone but it's really trying to understand what people are coming from and how they frame their own questions and it's not that the session isn't going to be about answering the question it's going to be about actually exploring and questioning your own question and explaining in a way that under other people understand what you're talking about and then getting feedback from others to see whether they understand it properly before even getting into anyway so I'll just pop in one question into the chat box with a reference of it this is still a work in progress but if there is interest within this group to host something like this I'd be happy to do so at some point down the road and can I suspect we could be if you're interested we could chat about how to co-create something along those lines I'm rick and I'm done speaking oh one last thing I forgot one thing the issue about going after billionaires I want to counter that because there is a book that Bernie said the woman who wrote the book on rules for revolutionary which actually was fundraising for Bernie Sanders who did an amazing job of fundraising and if you're going to co-op people they have to put they have to have skin the games and I think you know relying on visionary billionaires giving 50 billion dollar or whatever handouts for people to go after their pet projects or whatever it is I don't think is the way that we need to try and scale things up so anyway that's my two cents worth so do you mean Becky pond her name I keep on rather I think it's Becky Exley who wrote the book oh that's very funny because I have Becky Bond and Zach Exley having written the book and I'm inferring a certain something from what you just said well the idea behind that is that you actually instead of donating money they actually buying into the cryptocurrency and and there's a new concept that I haven't heard of before we talk about dowels but I met this guy in Spain he talks about distributive collaborative organizations and the framework behind that is to break down the silos between the different sectors because as long the different sectors remain disconnected you know the private public and political uh we're not going to be as effective so anyway thought um thank you um and there are many different efforts to try to figure out how this thing works many and we're so far not curing them all that well but I think we can thanks for posting your question in the chat brick we will we will deal with it asynchronously that way and let's go to Doug Carmichael Stewart and Jesse up so it seems to me that we are badly stuck and there's a lot of energy behind trying new ways of doing things without facing a biological problem that any new economic activity progressive or not creates more co2 there's just no way to avoid that fact um so I think we're not facing the logical issues squarely that put us in the uh that help clarify the trap that we're in thinking about this this week I thought what is the best frame for myself to be in to be thinking now and what I came to was the transformation in a society requires two things wealth and imagination and it's the imagination where we really are falling short and by imagination I mean things like going to the kind of mind that Nietzsche had uh to dark places to really creative strange places uh the speculation as to what kind of society we want really just sends ends up mostly so far as I can see is just more activity that's economic that pays off for people like us and that just does not deep enough uh to cope uh I've been thinking a lot and I don't have any conclusions yet about how to develop what you might call deep mind in relation to imagination but I think the combination of wealth which we have in society and the imagination which we don't have is the key to where the future might be when you say wealth dog do you mean monetary wealth do you mean some I mean the whole I started with money but then I realized come on ideas are wealth well so you have to be careful because that that word is easily taken to mean assets in the bank and you're in USD right right and I started there myself and I thought that's just not good enough that wealth is too wrapped up in consumerism and petty goals and petty transformations and we need to go much deeper thank you and and I have a deep well of stories and ideas about how the consumerization of our world basically made us stupid and got rid humans if you look at any five-year-old humans are innately curious and interested and innovative and want to connect and all that kind of stuff but we stamp it out of us our socialization processes and our cultural assumptions stamp it out of us really effectively so that then we have to train people how to be innovative and curious and it killed me when I read that they were trying to teach children empathy by bringing babies into like third-grade classrooms and passing the baby around and I'm like what have we done that we don't have empathy in third grade and we have to try to teach it this is really bad go ahead Doug so something I've thought about for a long time why is it that third graders all know they can paint and sing and fifth graders don't and we call it education to me I think that the issue might be that society must teach a bulk of the oncoming generation that they can't be creative because if they all were creative society would just blow up too much entropy too much going in different directions so it's a it's a anyway you get the point it's very much something like that there's a more structured approach to talking about that in education specifically called the hidden education the hidden curriculum of schooling which is like nominally I'm teaching your child to to write and do math but actually I'm teaching them to learn their place in the hierarchy of control to be quiet because I am God and I could put a mark on their record that'll last for a really long time etc etc yeah and what I'm suggesting is that's not just a bad thing it might be part of society's protecting itself too much creativity yeah and Julian thanks for putting the the play the Lego play thing up at play is just so important and and and just a small thing maybe thinking back on our group process here and what we do and how we go about it for me this little thing about looking up links and pasting links and trying to beat Pete to find a link and put it in the chat and whatever is play like like for me these conversations are play I I think of our our Thursday calls of like like sandbox playtime with really people I love and and that makes it fun but I know that I'm a couple sigmas often mean on some of these things yeah great speak but not in the other other meaning of beat right um oh who knows oh really you washed your hands of that of that whatever you're into man like my my gotcha um yeah there's some wonderful books on play like piaget's play dreams and imitation and childhood hoising as homo ludens these books say that play is not just an ancillary thing to a good society they're absolutely critical for human development a piaget makes it clear you cannot have knowledge without play where play is essentially treating of this as of that and looking at the consequences so yeah absolutely this was a theme I ran working at lego this is a theme I ran into quite frequently and is it uh not not just piaget but it also goes back to Montessori and piaget was a fan of her too yeah um ironically I met uh steward brown many years ago who was the head of the institute for play and I think we did an interview together or something like that I'm sorry but he was the least playful person I've met in a really long time he was kind of on a mission and it was just really down heartening to me or dispiriting at the end of the call I was like ah man institute for play really um anyway uh we have in our queue steward jesse pete oh one second objection is that the toy business is a lot of really hard work yeah yeah so is comedy yeah so uh picking up on on Doug's piece of the importance of creativity in part spurred on by a uh a fortune cookie uh I'm I'm mostly focused on using my own creativity at this point in time steward I use the word imagination not creativity I think they're importantly different um yeah but they're they're they're within the same realm I mean imagination and creativity to me there's so much hand in glove in those uh Doug and I think this is where in some ways uh you know we um undercut each other uh by making these kinds of distinctions um the poetic sense in me says that there's so much hand in glove and that words are so inadequate sometimes I think that we all know what we're what we're talking about when we talk about imagination and creativity and how people define that narrow lexicon can have distinctions so to try and put them into narrow boxes um I don't think is real useful I usually don't do that but I couldn't help I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't help but to allow my own critical thinking to to come in anyway that being said um I've been uh home with COVID for the last couple of weeks and it's been in some ways except for except for two very fluid days um not so bad it's been a very productive in some ways retreat I don't wish it for people but um you got to make the best of stuff that happens so two projects advancing one poetry I go back and forth between wanting to self publish and uh and and finding a publisher I'm sure that that will you know figure itself out but it's it's it's actually ready it's been over a 20 year project and it just is it's ready I'm done I can't look at the poems anymore I've got another month and a half of daily editing of one poem so that's that's kind of fun though when you finish a big project um it leaves space it's a little bit of post-partum uh two um I just signed a represented representation agreement with a an agent lawyer from a very well regarded small entertainment firm in in Los Angeles that has all the skills that I need for the um what I thought was a piece of science fiction but maybe not about how do we move the world from where we are to where we might like it to be as I layer in the creativity in it and go from a tome um expressing the whole to 35 individual segments of of social society and interaction that needs addressing and I kind of layer in um scenarios it it's becoming more of a reality that hey this could really be something and the validation of having an agent working on this on contingency is even more um heartening in some ways so this is kind of fun going forward um the last thing that I want to mention is with all our our machinations and conversations about more diversity more diversity I had this little brain fart the other day wouldn't it be really interesting if a group of old white men lead us through the morass of societal challenges that we're in right now and the first thing that came up was you know World War II uh uh uh being able to navigate through that um that's just a piece of fantasy what have you just a piece of humor is is what it is actually seeing the synapse of that juxtaposed to all of our current conversations so that's my check in thank you for listening thanks Stuart cool stuff um two sort of maybe one playful suggestion about getting near poems in the world and and I'm always about alternate ways but maybe you could pull a Jenny Holster or a Ministry of Reshelving kind of thing Jenny Holster was an artist who put aphorisms on park benches and other public spaces and you just kind of bump into them really pretty interesting and then uh the Ministry of Reshelving would go into uh into bookstores and libraries and like move books around kind of you know like stuff that used to be science fiction and is now current events that kind of thing uh pretty interesting yeah and Eric has a nice video about using Mark's MX tool to generate and regenerate poetry than Emily Dickinson's style or is it specifically from Emily Dickinson's words I'm forgetting it's a remix from first lines of her poems and it just generates a new poem thank you so it's not generating brand new text it's actually remixing first lines of Dickinson's poems so that's pretty cool and Eric if you want to put the link to that video in the chat that yeah I put my links already at the top of the chat so you get it great thank you awesome thank you um cool so we have Jesse Pete Eric hello everyone I am not going to be on video today because I'm recovering from surgery um but it's just a pleasure to listen to you all and um I'm going to diverge a little here and and then also converge back to um the the topic of imagination um as I work in the corporate worlds and toggle between uh community spaces um I'm thinking about these days how we have individual excellence then we can go up to like family excellence and then team excellence and community excellence and you know org excellence and then global excellence and we're talking about the sg at that point uh the sustainable development goals and in a way there's a scale of excellence where you just have to start with the basic needs basic needs of breathing eating drinking sleeping all the way to being able to be capable of using those tapping into those needs and so forth but what I'm noticing is that there is indicators of whatever we're talking about on a family level or on a corporate level or a community level or just even this call that the conversations are either in protection mode or in growth mode and you can't be in both together at the same time you have to either be in one or the other so they're indicators of being in protection mode or in growth mode at any level and when you talk about imagination that's like an indicator of growth mode right and you can't you can't have that that that imagination when you're in protection mode so I'm just those those those concepts and those thoughts are showing up for me nothing more than that just wanted to put it out there. Jesse thank you um and you say that you can't be in both modes is that your hunch is that based on the stuff you've read because sometimes when I hear the economy is like I hear people say humans don't multitask well and my own take is like you know talk to your average mom and you'll discover a human who is multitasking like crazy uh Esti Solomon Gray a dear friend has a thesis about multi-minding which is a form of multitasking etc etc and I'm like I don't believe that people can only single task in fact the world would be better off in my own little worldview if we had modes where we are completely focused and all disturbances are shushed away and then modes where we're like Bruce Lee in the field like dealing with with assaulting emails and tweets and whatever else in the most deficient way possible I want that environment as my as my desktop kind of thing so sorry that was a that was a bit of a tangent but but what can you say a little bit more about this uh you know either reacting or fearful versus imagination creativity kind of access. Yeah thank you for that it it's almost as if it's you um you can't feel love and be scared at the same time but maybe maybe scientifically you can your let your brain can be lit up at the same time in different parts of the brain who knows but and you can use money as an example of a mechanism that could be used for both protection and growth but um so you can't really it really depends on your your intention in the moment I guess the the intention is everything it starts the intention. I love that me too um Grace has a thought and then anybody else who wants to jump in please do it Grace. Yeah this really connects up I mean what you're saying about this um protective mode or creative mode really connects up a lot with the um communications modalities that I've been um working with or trained in or that I live with and there's this and I would say there's a couple of aspects of that one aspect is really just am I like in some ways how quickly do I react react what you said do I really fully absorb where you are and get where you are and then either respond or not respond in a way to what you had said you know and I and and and that's part of it part of it is this I think can be the creative mode is also how can you go into either first principles like oh I'm starting from with for me I'm starting when I first got into economy with an economy to me an economy is to have life brought this is very very like like but I would I had to erase everything that everybody told me about what an economy is before I kind of started you know how back would I far back when I go and I think also how how much are you willing to deal with your own shadows because just because this reactive mode that just is talking about is like something got triggered in me and now I've got to react and protect something whereas you know I came up to this calling like one of the things that I've really resolved for myself in where I am right now is I'm really committed to saying what I don't know because I mean I'm very arrogant you see none of you have noticed like I'm so arrogant that I think that I'm going to change the entire world economy um and and I have this way of being that makes it seem like I've got it all together and there's stuff I really don't know how to do and so I'm just really committed to being with that like being willing to expose my ignorance and my shadow and I think that's that's that connects like you can be in creative mode if you're willing if you don't have to protect that it's like you know what I actually I don't know thanks Grace Doug yeah uh back to imagination I think the difference between imagination and creativity is that imagination is slightly more open to the dark side than the idea of creativity thank you uh Jesse did you want to comment back or anyone else about the thoughts that Jesse put on the table yeah I just love the conversation oops you muted yourself accidentally sorry my my son just turned on the coffee maker it was very loud um I appreciate everyone's contributions to this talk because really you're personalizing and making meaning out of whatever I just said um when we all have different parts inside us uh internal family systems and yes one part can be lit up and saying something careful and then two seconds later it can be from a love standpoint or whatever protection mode versus creative mode and it could go back and forth within just milliseconds so I can understand the feeling of it happening at the same time um but it's just fascinating just to keep it as a underlying thought process as you as you create today thank you very much uh mr. Krause hi um I would love to play here and in matter most if you could make two lists 10 items each one list imagination and what comes in your mind when you think about imagination the other creativity what comes in your mind when you think about creativity and just post it in the matter most that's what and that's is all about to see what is in your mind that you have relation to a concept imagination the other concept creativity um I really busy today so I'll do it um a little later myself but uh I would just love to see what what everyone puts up thank you if you haven't already could you put that prompt in the chat in the in the matter most channel I will I'm busy my my computer guys so if anyone else wants you to do it but uh yeah somebody else can volunteer please we'll get it up thanks cool thanks mark we are at Pete Eric John thank you um it's always fun talking with everybody here uh today for me my check in is a little bit of show and tell um I'm going to share my screen real quick actually before I do that it's going to be about AI image generators turn your head away if you hate this already um but I will try not to hurt your eyes too much um it's an interesting new space that I kind of fell into and I think it's going to be really big um uh some of the some of the kind of revolutions we've seen before that you can probably remember um synthesizers invaded music um not the original genius Wendy Carlos she was doing something that was amazingly difficult but but later in the 90s or something like that it it got to be where you could play music without being able to play an instrument um and then um uh you would think that oh my gosh that means that all the musicians are out of a job um and nobody will ever actually play an instrument anymore and that's not true uh people still love to play instruments and are really good at it and I love to listen to people who play instruments well I also love to listen to people who can't play an instrument but can conjure up um amazing music out of the synthesized sounds um that are available available to them on their ipad or their or their mac or whatever um so I feel like uh images are going to be kind of similar um uh so maybe you know maybe you don't um there are a bunch of tools nowadays where you can type a description into a bot and the bot will say let me draw something that matches that description for you um and that's kind of literally the way it works the systems have looked at billions of images and they kind of and and their descriptions um and so you type a description and it's like yeah it kind of rummages through this attic of literally billions of images and kind of starts to make something that looks like the thing that um uh that you described and it's kind of an interesting the um they they call them generative adversarial networks um the it's it's kind of a I have this interesting picture in my head um one of the jobs of there's there's two beasts inside the bot one of the beasts takes just noise like random like uh like static from your tv and it tries to make it look more like your thing like Rick Astley's face with a sand hat or something like that um and then there's another one called the discriminator this beast looks at that that generated thing and it says no man it sucks yeah I do it again so it'll box the other one it's like punch and duty um playing together um so I have that image in my mind of these these bots um the other thing is these these things take a a halacious amount of compute power um so right now all the people doing image AI image generation are also burning up the planet the same way that crypto people are or the uh or the render farms are a problem for another day so let me do quick show and tell um and then we can maybe move on so today I haven't been doing the the link uh thing because in the background I was doing a different kind of play that I do which is photoshop um so uh this is something that this is the original version that a tool called mid journey gave me when I said an ethereal landscape with eight-fold symmetry uh it gave me a couple of different variations on a theme and this is the one that I liked and I actually thought this was really cool and I kept looking at it looking at it like you know that reflection down there I really like the idea of it being like inverted and different than the sky but yeah that's it's not going to read well for people uh so during this call um I apologize for multitasking this is the way I pay attention to people talking is by doodling um or or linking um so what I've done is spent the call replacing that uh the lake there with the reflection of the sky and it's in perspective and it's got a bunch of effects making it darker and stuff like that so it actually looks fairly real um so uh the other thing I wanted to show and tell real quick uh that the previous one was mid journey these are a bunch of images that dolly and I created um dolly is as mid journey and dolly are kind of the best right now there's another one called stable diffusion which is basically as good as mid journey and and dolly um mid journey tends to do this kind of the the creators of mid journey wanted it to be kind of painterly and this isn't the only style that mid journey does but um it's is a lot more painterly um dolly can do some real photorealistic stuff um I've shrunk these a bit um but the the real images aren't a lot bigger they don't have a lot more detail if you blow them up they get fuzzy and weird um but the thing that really strikes me about dolly is these are all synthetic images um the punch and duty show made these out of noise um based on a on a fairly simple description that I had you know a green metal toy frog or a purple metal toy frog um or happy expressions or um uh dinosaur in the sky that kind of stuff some of these that these get different styles uh the A.I. image generators uh you can tell them to you know make something from the 50s or make something stained glass or make something from the the 19th century um and it and it will make it you know uh in in a different art style as well as a different subject but so if if I can make images like this like kind of at the flick of a button it's actually a little bit more involved than that but um uh with not a lot of art training and certainly without any like skill to to draw um the I think the the world is going to shift kind of and we're going to end up in this um odd place it will feel very odd that um all of a sudden we have people who call themselves artists or illustrators who can't art and can't illustrate but they can be imaginative and creative and come up with conceptual stuff that nobody's ever seen before um because there wasn't a person who had the paintbrush um and you know 20 or 30 years of practice and an art history at background um just somebody off the street like me that that made something really cool and interesting so um one of the bad things that happened is all of a sudden you get floods if you're if you're on social media too much nowadays you'll get a bunch of people posting like look what I did with doll here look what I did with mid journey and after a while they kind of get repetitive um a little bit uh it takes a lot of curation uh to find the good ones kind of and find the novel ones um so we're going to get this flood of junk um and then we're going to get a reaction of people going oh my god please don't show me any more AI art stuff ever again I don't want it um but there's there's actually signal on there um and so we're going to have to build tools um I'm thinking we're going to be building um social you know ranking rating and sorting stuff we've done that you know since flicker there's there's ways that people you know process the images collaboratively and say these ones are better or these ones are worse this one looks like you know this one looks like the 1950s this one looks like um you know painting by Renoir um so uh the thing is we're going to have like um orders of magnitudes more images to sort and sift through um and and then I think there's going to be some interesting uh ecosystems uh another way I kind of think of me and dolly working together on stuff and one of the interesting things that somebody else said I hadn't realized that I thought um it took somebody else saying it um you actually end up in kind of a conversation with the bots or the punch and judy show uh it's like well that's not what I meant but what you made is really interesting and let me explore that a little further so you you end up not that the AI is talking to you but you end up navigating into spaces that you wouldn't have gone otherwise because you've got an AI kind of in front of you with a machete swinging at vines and stuff finding new things for your new vistas to explore right so um so uh as I go through this and curate something I you know me and the robot in front of me are swinging the machete and we end up this clearing and wow this is a really cool vision of something that I think nobody's ever seen before um and by the way bot could you make it bigger if you start making it bigger um to to keep the compute intensity down they the images are like really small they're like they come out a thousand by a thousand pixels a megapixel um the the actual resolution of them is worth worthwhile resolution is smaller than that it's like a quarter of a megapixel or something so when you blow them up they just get chunky um there's different ways you can blow them up you have another AI that just all it knows how to do is blow things up and make them look better but then they can get weird um so there are some of them it's like oh my god I would love to have this framed on my wall except it's this little postage stamp thing I need a real artist who can draw at scale to redraw this idea for me at scale you know so we're going to end up with all kinds of workflows and ecosystems where people need to help each other process this you know a huge morass of new images and creativity um and I think there's a lot of new markets in there for people who know how to do prompt engineering how to how to write the text against the the interesting images people who know how to make them bigger how to upscale them people who have fine art degrees and say well actually this is really cool but you know you've misframed it a little bit the bot misframed it for you let me fix that let me make it a lot bigger for you in a way that's that's attractive instead of ugly so I'm going to hit uh I'm going to send a a link to a manamos channel it's a tiny manamos channel right now but I'm I'm thinking through some of this stuff on that channel if you want to see more uh I I promise not to show AI art very much uh in places uh non-consentrally so this channel will be a consensual place to post more AI art hopefully hopefully mostly good and not bad thanks okay thank you um it's sort of a meditation on what's happening to art and text and everything else the computer generated x is suddenly on our on a tear julien go ahead so two things are wanting to bring up a relevant to what pete was just talking about in the late 70s uh hannah barbera introduced an assistive system to create animation and uh the entire animation staff went out on strike because the initial impressions were that they were going to be replaced by computers and big kerfuffle this went on for a bit until finally everybody realized that it was another tool much like switching from a fountain pen to a ballpoint pen the computer assist technology was another tool for the animators to use and the animators stayed employed uh there used to be a job called tweening in animation studios which is you'd get a cell and another cell and the tweeners would just do the in between cells to do for the frame rate you were looking for for animation it might have been that it might have been something else but those things go away but then the tweeners get to do something better right that's what happens is that you get rid of the drudgery and then people can be even more expressive and creative because they don't have to deal with drudgery all the time uh the other point i wanted to bring up was the drummer for the the rolling stones the late charlie watz and reading his obituary found out that one thing that gave him a distinctive sound was that he would always hit the beat a fraction of a second behind keith richards and so the two things i'm bringing up here is that you come up with all this automation but there's still no substitute for talent and there's no encoding for talent and yeah in computer science love that um we have a few people left in the queue but not much time we've kind of hit our max but i was gonna say eric if you want to this is kind of the queue that i have right now my apologies to those of us at the tail but eric if you wanted to jump in i also want to thank pete for the the plexus places posts that ran this morning basically saying here are our conversations here are the different ways that we're talking it's really beautiful it's jerry frozen we've never have had jerry for this before rested on it it's a new york thing quick to take a picture it's a good look mm-hmm he had jazz hands let's all let's all uh try and match the anybody have any idea what's saying right now what's that what's he saying right now it's a recording on his pc yeah that's the question is he recording locally or in the cloud and here and here let me show you such and such in my brain he dropped out yeah eric you want to go okay well i was gonna say i've been playing with marx mx system for two weeks and it's just sparking all kinds of dreams about where it could go and i could do a screen share if anyone wants to hang around a little okay emily's busy um thank you eric i just realized why i fell off but i can report back on that later every day at this time when i logged in for the first time at beta works it's kicking me off because it wants me to click on the approved thing i'm like why am i falling off so eric you're muted okay well out there you go yeah you're still muted okay now you should be unmuted yes okay so if you see this emily dickinson poetry generator up here just created a new poem this is my letter to the world the future never spoke a little madness in the spring etc isn't that cool but now i want to show you if i go further into this is my letter to the world i hit escape i type this is my just a few characters it finds the thought that matches and i hit enter and now i have references to walt whitman to the york poem to dickinson season three leaves of grass and an attachment with a tweet that i made so here is how i envision references to external objects in mx just like the brain has attachments well i could have a decentralized hyperdrive so like i have my local copy of the hyperdrive here and i could go into my tweets and i could copy this tweet and look at it i mean i'm thinking through the manual steps that could be automated later and like the videos here i have a youtube link and for the same video i have a local download in the videos directory and this is the video from dead poet society of robin williams teaching the class about york okay so oh captain my captain yes eric i'm wondering what would happen if you connected all this stuff up to the brain and then didn't tell jerry wait wait stop what okay so i'm dreaming about how to build this decentralized so that um we could share our mx's with each other and we could eventually import export between the brain and mx because what i've done is i've saved all my brains into a zip file and my my brains only take up 96 megabytes i don't know how many jerry's are what's caramba doing yeah so if you're interested in uh exploring this send me a note on that or most we're gonna have meetings with marcus um a few people who've who like fox pro or old tech or who just dream about ways of integrating this so um so mark got anything to say about this the whole point of a local global mind is that it's completely his no one else's he gets to do all the this has meaning to me right there's no bullshit from outside there's no bullshit from a bullshit factory there's no bullshit from advertisements there's no bullshit from television there's no bullshit from anybody else yeah i watched that video without ads isn't that amazing thank you you're welcome it's taken 38 years for someone to basically actually try it yeah and bring it up at d webcam to see what people are interested i i i may not be able to check in but i will be talking i love my proposal great and uh eric i just want to say one thing thank you i mean it's all just simple connections between tools but you're also illustrating it in a way that we can all be like oh okay i got that that makes kind of sense to me yeah michael you might have the last word today actually you won't because ken has offered to read a poem to take as much but first we'll go to michael i i just want to offer a question caveat observation on what pete um was showing you know one of the things that uh as as you know grace was mentioning the font pollution thing that happened when uh you know fonts were introduced in microsoft word and you know we all know about the the rapid ascension of comic sands when non-graphic designers got got their hands on on typeface choices um and the thing that's really interesting is like in all those cases you had um you had the fear like the fear of the tweeners you know and the henna barbera workers that you know they were going to lose out and graphic designers thinking oh when everybody has you know desktop graphic design tools there won't be a place for us and then the slow realization that oh there's still a difference in quality and it's just a tool and blah blah um i i there's something happening with visuals that's that's different that i'm fascinated by and that is that when you think of the difference between an artificial intelligence creating music the difference between using every note played by every possible instrument and some instruments that don't exist and some you know uh half steps that aren't in you know most music that that is sampled that's a different thing than sampling existing tunes and one of the things that i see happening in some of these um artificially created dolly images and other other i've played around with some other things is that you're you're picking up photographs and and paintings and illustrations and stylistic things that do exist that were somebody's assembled creative work that's sort of more like a sample and a piece of music um and the and what what eric just did with the with the poetry generation was tell us where this stuff that had been artificially assembled came from and i think in in artificial imagery on soli i want to know what the who photographed the photograph that is the primary sample source around which the other things are built you know somebody i'm like pete and i've argued about this a little bit but i would bet you that there are a few pictures of metal frogs um one of which generated that green one and a different one of which generated the purple one um and maybe one of them started off red not purple you know and and was a but but they're definitely stylistic things that come from you know a a nose in a face comes from a particular photograph we need that to be available information and for you know for that sampling to be at least acknowledged if not if not credited if not paid for because it's different than just pixels or notes you know basically what uh you know all this unpaid expression of translators that have done that have done translations that google's just slurping up and um basically saying well thank you for doing all this work for free we have the biggest computers so we can just you know take all this and you know make a profit on it and who is that wonderful person gerald leneer he basically stresses this point over and over and over and over again that uh it's not the it's not the computers it's the people who basically identified the meaning and some algorithms can basically you know leverage that already existing meaning that people in their minds have created and expressed and uh this is a very interesting paradox for our time and I do I just want to interject one more thing I do think that the difference between dexterity and virtuosity with your hands and being able to conceive of something you know as pizza you know they're they're just like there are people who have an idea for a plot but they aren't great wordsmiths or people who have a you know can hum a tune but they don't know how to play an instrument that kind of creativity can be enhanced and expressed by these technologies but if you're going to use if you're going to use source material from other creators just you know credit it um I love a machine where I could you know do a sketch and have the rendering finished or hum a tune and have it orchestrated in the style that I want but if it's literally using the work of other people credit it um I'm going to take us out of the call pretty soon because I actually have to head off to a couple meetings unless I should leave it open and whoever wants to close it closes it that'll work fine in which case I'm going to ask Ken to read his poem and then I'll skip off and pass the con will that work let's do that because it sounds like it's still hot here and I'm perfectly happy for the conversation to go on Ken please and I'm going to read this then I have to go um because Emily Dickinson was evoked today along with Jerry's brain I came up with her poem about the brain is wider than the sky the brain is wider than the sky for put them side by side the one the other will contain with ease and you beside the brain is deeper than the sea for hold them blue to blue the one the other will absorb as sponges buckets do the brain is just the weight of god for half them pound for pound and they will differ if they do as syllable from sound nice fine thanks thanks Ken I really appreciate that uh who would like that's dedicated to you Jerry and Mark and everybody else here who's got a brain and a sky and uh and I wish that they want to play with who would like to receive the con for me as I jump off I'm going to go good to see you I'll take care gotta go uh Mr. uh Stuart do you want it or Mark Caronza um Stuart not me no Stuart was raising his hand uh Michael yeah okay good uh let me just find you on the list there you are pink and thank you very much thank you Michael oh cool uh I can't tell you Eric how thrilled I am to see you basically putting your thinking in this simplest possible relational structure and doing your own damn thing that has absolutely nothing to do with me it is so thrilling I cannot tell you what I find is the fast data entry works a lot for me because that's what I grew up with and ever since we started doing data entry on the web I've just been so frustrated and this just brought it back and it's natural to me so the secret is basically it's a um interface it's a UI I developed for using while really really fucked up on drugs so the the best way that I've found to analyze a UI is to get stoned high whatever and basically try to use Microsoft Word or try to use anything and basically it's by making yourself intentionally stupid that you find what's not globally simple and it's just I don't know it's just a very simple but of course you know illegal thing to do simplicity is hard yes not in California anymore for for certain substances but um but we need to map all the innovations that came from people who use those drugs in the 60s or whatever surprised how many innovations have come from you know I I I will do a short check in the people at UF camp love my proposal and you know do web camp is just going to be 400 people of the most creative people on the planet just getting together in the medecino woods in the fog I wish y'all could be there um I I certainly would love to meet in person and that we never have is just absolutely fine that we will in the future I look forward to in fact I invite you all right now to my 60th birthday party end of November please please try to make something happen and to come to San Francisco because I will have one hell of a party and there will be the best the best friends thank you that you know this is a proposition that does not you know somebody said does not brush for evidence but I assert that I have the best friends that anybody's had and they see the point and we appreciate you oh I'm not talking about you I'm talking about the people you don't even know about I know oh they're they're just so incredible um and uh you know it's a celebration time um it feels like um I'm a I've been on a non-stop celebration from July 15th and it's uh gonna be just one hell of a d-web camp and then it's gonna be the next point is the hell of the birthday party so yeah just soak it all up and um yeah enjoy it it's been a long trip uh from uh a lot of pain uh through a lot of pain um the only way um out is through yeah um basically do baby steps of healing and then keep on going yes um where all those you know baby steps converge and kind of an uh exponential kind of thing and it's a fucking hell of a ride right now so I'm having fun good and uh I'm glad to be with uh the three of you four of you I'm not sure if I feel um it's just a link it's just a link so that's that's my check in um thank you uh Pete Eric Michael I'm listening Michael I'd love to pick up that discussion at some point yeah yeah yeah maybe maybe I mean I I mean but I also I I think about it in terms of memex and and and you know in terms of what Eric's doing and just sort of like how how the the contribution I mean I you know I was I was describing it in the sort of defensive way of of you know artists and photographers um but it it also like wants to be a positive opt-in force um like I don't know where you know if the dolly the dolly samples may all be public domain and you know whatever so but so I I'm gonna guess that um that dolly really does synthesize stuff there aren't any metal toy frogs that that look like that it knows what frogs look like it knows what metal toys look like and it knows what if you know a photographic lens looks like and all that kind of stuff it's it's very similar mark mark brought up uh google translate um so I think it's a lot like um you know google's to get google translate to work google sucked up billions or trillions of words that were mapped by humans right and so um there's there's a I and and dolly works the same way um you know it's not that uh it's not like I can make up a novel sentence and google can still translate it it's not because there's an instance of that translation somewhere that somebody wrote down it's that it's blended together five or six or 20 or 100 or 600 or 1000 different translations to get the same meaning um so at some point the the contribution kind of fades away it's it's I I don't think you can say who made this you can say that google scooped up a bunch of cultural um the google and whoever else open I have scooped up a bunch of cultural asset and is now monetizing it um I I think that's a fair thing to say um there's another weird thing it's like how could you get how could you get a thing like google translate except by doing that um so and how could google have found the probably hundreds of thousands of human translators going back you know 150 years or something like that who've done translations how could you how could google have found all of those people to give them blended credit for you know the the sentence that just got translated that the images I think are very similar to that I I can also think of the same thing in music synthesis right um if if I get a beautiful bell sound with a lot of reverb and stuff like that the way that that synthesis happened is some some engineer a set of engineers was at the final kind of assembly point of a bunch of um domain knowledge and sampling and and physics and all kinds of stuff um so you know there's some guy who some some woman who figured out the the formula for you know just tapping on metal and getting resonances and stuff like that and that got folded into that and you know somebody did a sample probably a hundred samples of different bells and different parts of the world and you know all of that stuff gets smushed together into this you know amazing sample when you press like a key on a keyboard it goes you know and it's like how would you it's it's at some point it kind of becomes cultural memory rather than you know individual sampling um so I think those those three things for me are very similar the cultural sampling that Dolly does to create an image is very similar I think to the cultural sampling that Google did for um translation and very similar to the way that we've built synthesized synthesized sounds and nobody gets credit for the synthesized sounds you know maybe the final person sometimes you know I sample back from you know bought from blah blah blah and they got you know some small amount of money to pay for it but they're standing on the shoulders of many many many other people um who you know did or didn't get credit probably didn't yeah yeah I mean you and I have had this this exchange before Eric and Mark you know just where I think um I am I am less convinced that than Pete that there are not recognizable just just from the experimentation I've done and a little bit of reading that there are not discernible portions of you know existing but it's not it's not a collection of the right pixels and knowledge that there's a little bit of whether it's quite there definitely there are definitely times where you can see you know oh that's a Salvador Dolly eye or something like that or no right yeah that's all right um but but even then it's probably Salvador Dolly sampled over you know 30 years or something like that from a bunch of different influences um in general I the the images that I see coming out of Dolly they're they're just like you can tell this to mash up ideas that like just have never been mashed up before right and it just doesn't so it understands geometry it understands kind of the way lenses work it understands the way light goes through like glass and stuff and it it has a bunch of like the like just knowledge about that that the the ones that I look at aren't sound I I'm pretty sure they're just completely synthesized they're just I mean one thing I've been trying to experiment with and it's a hard instruction to do but I think it's informative is if you if you ask one of these programs to rotate something you know from like if you're dealing with a face from full face to to profile or you know light light it in a different way it's hard to get it to follow that those instructions but um it looks to me like it's not taking the same information and applying your new instructions to it it is oh I've got to do a profile so I've got a sample from images that are profiles not not the image that I gave you with the exact same extract instructions yeah they don't have any memory right now of what they're building I and I wouldn't say sample a profile what I would say is it tries to remember what a profile looks like and it keeps drawing you know different things until it says this looks like a profile that I remember and it's remembering thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of profiles or silhouettes or whatever right I am so so happy to hear you use the language it understands this knowledge and it remembers it remembers because that's so wrong it's so absolutely completely wrong it is just not it is not remembering it is not understanding and it's not knowing it is oh god it's so easy to fool ourselves it's it's just beautiful to to hear that I mean I respect you completely and I think you're a brilliant person and I love your pieces but you're so wrong and I just don't you know have the the ability to to to kind of go into that um it's not using sign processes it's not using semiosis it's using a kind or it's not using the kind of understanding knowing and what was the other one um remembering that is what we call understanding knowing and remembering that Eric does that Pete does that Michael does it's doing a mechanical process and understanding is not mechanical knowing is not mechanical remembering is not mechanical it's biological it's it's a biological process that um yes we can do something that's analogous to it but to assign that kind of mythopoic language the same language that refer to a friend a lover a ourselves doing understanding knowing and remembering and give that to Dolly I am just absolutely thrilled to hear you say that because it's just so absolutely frightening and loving at the same time that fear and love at the same time that what's your name said didn't exist it's right fucking there right there god damn it hallelujah praise the lord thank you man hey you're welcome thank you for listening I'd love to talk about that more too yeah um it's it's all a way of trying to find the time to be an artist rather than an engineer and I just need to shift my shift my ability in in this world and in this life from fixing 20 year old php and doing new um JavaScript um object design to just you know living a much you know so my computer died and I've got eight you know things of writing the um talk today which I'll type in later when I can um so we got fox pro off your computer just in time no no okay it's the uh the cpad x1 nano yeah the uh the backlight died and so okay I could not get it to you could plug in a monitor that anymore no no no no that was a thing uh it used to work on the monitor but somehow it stopped working and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get to reconnect to the monitor so I drove to the internet archive and connected it and thank god it connected to the monitor and I took the date off and now I'm going to use a different computer um to present at dweb do you realize how big the um repair of old computers is on the youtube that people have videos showing them oh yeah it's just amazing yeah it's a it's a fuse that has a tiny little crack on it and I have yeah yeah it brings the right to repair because like a guy was trying to open up a phone and it took a half hour with an i fix it I am I am such the poor artist that I don't have enough to pay $81 to Lenovo to get the warranty um so that they can come in and fix it tomorrow so that I can use it for dweb um and I'm leaving Monday um so I just thank god I have an older computer that um is broken in a different way um it won't run on battery it has to be plugged in but uh you know it's just you find a problem you root around it and uh you know make make something work so one thing related to that I'm backing up all my mx uh daily zip files to the decentralized web so I have a copy on my network if people want to share and peer seed it it's possible I mean just exploring the possibilities here um I mentioned that Pete the um that your meme brain yeah I'm I have that in my mind as well so like I'm shifted between mx meme brain just comparing them I can't wrap my head around the python code right now but I could get this concept of how you get jason out of rain yeah you know um the um mercantuan did a wonderful thing and he rewrote a lot of meme brain um in much much more elegant python right um which I cannot now read very well I get it yeah it's hard to follow yeah so if you if you uh hit the commit log yeah the commit history I could go back okay look back at my last one cool thank you it will probably be I write him fairly simple yeah but we grow procedurally yeah yeah yeah exactly so yeah thanks for what you're doing um thanks so much I'm so happy that you're using what your own way it's so beautiful to me cool and uh I have a hell of a lot of work to do um for this 400 people in the in the woods east of medicino um so um it's not only me thank you so much isn't it fun work yeah it's sort of it's it's funer work than basically yes looking at the code and you know I'm kind of letting down my colleagues on the ux team but you know I'm I'm a baby I'm a baby something here at the internet archive yeah well I found when I took a vacation people did they did fine yeah they did fine exactly you know when I was out for cancer for a year they did fine so you know um it's just uh a friggin risk to just start acting as an artist and see if they'll continue to pay me hopefully and you squeeze it in like Albert Einstein did um let's chat more about okay guys yeah of these three okay thanks okay mile yeah I'll stay with you Mike and Mike hey gill gill we're still we're still with gill sure that's fine jerry can I get this out if needed yeah um uh yeah no I thank you for your note on matter most and and you know I and and thank you for everything you've been you've been doing you know with regard to you know Stacey and and um and I'm I'm sort of feeling my way a little bit that that proposal happened to hit me in a moment where I was so overwhelmed anyway okay I said to Stacey I can't really I don't really have the bandwidth for this right now and uh you know I um yeah I just wanted to acknowledge that okay that's cool thank you and and I'm also curious to to you know to talk to you about um you know just some of this uh um differently formatted brain overlap and and um and ways to consensually share the stuff that we all amass yeah it's you know it's just a summary it comes down to managing keys rather than permissions in a server so like I could create as many keys as I want if I share one with you it's what I want to share with you right share one with Marcus what I trust him to see right and share one publicly maybe without attribution yeah I can have a public like if if you if you want I mean a kind of circling back to the to the music and art sampling thing like if you want to put out your stuff into the world to be part of other people's samples I mean yeah like sounds like 20 years ago they're public domain and they're available for people yeah yeah yeah yeah okay cool yeah just uh contact me on matter most we'll set up some time like us okay all right all right thanks everybody we're gonna leave I don't know if Gil's gonna keep this song forever all right bye you have control you could end the meeting actually yeah do an ending for and and I'm I'm just assuming that wherever Jerry had the the recording being saved to it's gonna go yeah it should it shows up on my hard drive oh yeah you could be mail him yeah yeah yeah okay yeah try that end meeting for all just want to make sure it works yeah