 I've gone to one of these adaptogenic beverages mushrooms and twigs and things like that. Oh nice. Don't the twigs like go down hard? The twigs are ground up and the mushrooms are really wild and it's very good. The energy is clean and smooth. Do you go zero to 60 in three seconds now or? I'm just I'm just strolling man. Well, we are here for the OGM weekly call on Thursday, November 2nd, 2023. I am just getting over a tiny cold. I tested negative on COVID tests a couple times. So it's not that but my voice is a little gravelly and I will go on mute because I'm a little cough now and then. And we are in check in mode, which has been quite interesting of late, more like quicker meeting than anything else. Jesse, I think you're the only one who hasn't been here for a recent check-in. So I'll I'll explain the protocol. And what we do is I will step out of the conversation entirely. Whoever wants to go next can volunteer into the queue, either, you know, just raise your hand, your electronic zoom hand, or just step in if nobody's if nobody's talking. Only go once during the check-in part of the conversation. So don't this is not a conversational part we're not replying to everybody else. And there's considerable controversy over whether or not to use the chat, because using the chat is distracting and not very much like Quaker meeting. And we did the calls, at least two weeks ago started feeling like Quaker meeting because they were long stretches of silence where we were kind of like hanging out which is, and I'm a huge fan of Quaker meeting. I'm happy to take a vote or something like that on whether or not to use the chat today. Anybody, anybody. So Gil says let's experiment with no chat. Pete and I are probably the two people who are most compulsive about needing to look everything up that anybody says and then share it back into the chat. Pete will either of us explode if this happens. I can type a bunch of stuff on a notepad seems like a shame, not to share it. But but I totally also get the I get the idea of meeting reverence. So in the lack of presence. I love to chat. I love using the chat. I love what people put in the chat, but I noticed last time that I was not fully, I was not a Quaker meeting thing. And it wasn't it wasn't meant to emulate a Quaker meeting it just started feeling a little Quaker meeting ish which which and you know the chat is one of those levers we can try. And Stacy you had your hand up. Yeah, I was going to suggest a compromise of leaving it open to put like one sentence in as a place marker if you just wanted to get something there for the future. So I'm thinking that Pete suggestion is really good, which is those of us compelled to do so can take notes in a notepad application and then when we were done with the check in section, we'll just pour those into the chat and then they'll they'll exist there for everybody. And that that makes it so the chat is clean through this portion until we're all checked in let's do that. Let's go with that today. And, and Pete, we should be mindful also that our note taking even while in a notepad is distraction and whatever. And I will say that, and I'm not sure how much how strongly I feel about this but like Kalia Hamlin when she attends a meeting. She brings her pastels and she sits on the ground and starts coloring, because that allows her to be present, because she's interacting her mind with some coloring, let's the rest of her show up and be present in the conversation, and she ain't missing a thing in the room, but she needs that. And Pete, I don't know how much you and I need to, like, no take to me. It feels a little feels a little like that which is why I bring that up to me it feels a lot like that. And I could do doodling just as easily but I apologize. I also I'm going to have to leave at the hour. And Pete has a different call he's running that he has to switch to cool. It sounds like the guidance is be present. Yes, and be present is the way to go. And then, if it so happens that we start talking pretty quickly after each other take your time stepping into the conversation, a piece of how this all started was that our normal weekly calls were like And we started inserting some mindful pauses between participating. And so, Doug you had your hand up was that a comment for now or was that you did you want to check in. No, it was just a comment I so I've been practicing for the last three four years I've been doing K when George poor dubbed chaotic chat. Which is literally real time transcription of everything. And yeah, I have I have notes of GM meetings every meeting I'm in I do that in real time. And it is a manipulative augmentation of attentional focus for me. It is not something that is in the same space as a chat signal from the zoom room as a as an additional channel of incoming. Which I do find like violently challenging and disruptive of my attentional lock on whatever's being said by whoever whenever. So, this whole attentional thing is actually really deep. I have a group of people and somebody really likes having a mural board going because of that augmentation for him. And somebody else that's like completely blows up their brain and makes it impossible for them to track. So it's just, this is deep water not shallow water in terms of all of these facets. Go ahead Doug, Doug C. Most of the comments are about the person writing in chat. I think it's possible to write and listen fairly easily. It's much harder to read and listen. So I'm much more concerned about what's happening to the people who are trying to track what we're reading. So it does not distress you if some of us are busy no ticking or typing or doing whatever else. No, it doesn't bother me. The psychology for the listener is that what's being listened to stimulates not only the surface layer of the meaning but deeper layers that are kind of unconscious. But if they're reading a chat, it breaks the connection to those deeper layers. And so one's left with just a superficial series of words. Well, I'm going to intercept us getting into a conversation about that right now. And ask that we go into silence and whoever wants to lead off, either jump in or raise your hand and then jump in. And I will not be handing off between people so I won't acknowledge anybody until we're kind of all done checking in. If somebody else joins the group and doesn't know the rules, I might jump in and explain them or type them into the chat, which is annoying but sort of necessary so that people understand what's happening. And did I forget any rules? I think there were more rules. And the idea here is not to have a conversation with each other through what we say but rather to check in and what's happening with us in an OGM kind of way or in the world, etc. With that, I will mute myself and let's go. I guess I'll go. Hi everyone. Nice to see you again. It's been a while. So first of all, I invited my, my mom Karen who has been on the list for a while now, but she's here Karen offline so she might kind of just listen in this first time. But yes, welcome. She's the smartest woman I know and so you'll really enjoy her conversations once you get involved in those discussions. Let's see. Checking in. I really appreciate your caffeine comment because I'm off of caffeine for the next two weeks. Jerry and it's, it's really hard. It's really hard. I don't know why a small little drink every day, how you start off a whole day can change everything when you're when you have a routine. So anyways, I'm not a fully here and I really want to be so I'm looking for other other options besides just tea. So I appreciate the attention thing as well for a chat I start reading the chat and I don't listen to the person talking I just can't do both I don't think our brains can do both so thank you for that. And I've been very much involved in the topic of food lately. I was really really trying to do SDGs, you know diving into that making change making waves, going with systems thinking creating these gigantic systems maps and I realized, I have to just start in my own brain in my own backyard. And where does everything connect food. And I know some of you are very much into this topic. So I went from completely flexitarian in June when I was laid off of Amazon. And I finally had time on my hands to actually practice a different diet, which is whole food plant based, and I was having a lot of troubles. So I did it for environmental I did it for health I did it for many reasons but yeah, I had a hard time so I've been just struggling and moving through the, the, the motion of figuring out how to eat well and in limitations but I don't like using limitations is more like expansion a whole nother version of expansion and making changes there. So I struggled I created an app to help myself and now I'm just kind of beta testing it with other people. So if anybody's interested in having a little view of a beta test version I'm all for that. Other than that, I'm, I'm moving into this winter, looking at the dark jury skies right now in Seattle, and thinking I need coffee. Thank you. Well, I'll go and I'll be curmudgeoning as I seem to be lately. The silence disturbs me. I mean, here we have such an intelligent group of people. And we're acting as though we're in conversations about the world's troubles all the time and we need to be here in order to be silent in order to recover. I don't believe that we're in such good conversations and why we are trying to have one puzzle. Silence is a funny thing. I've learned that silence can actually be an important part of conversations. And I'm remembering 10, 10 years, eight years ago, I was involved in a project with some people out of the Ken Wilbur universe to produce a five day immersive sustainability training. That was by design, mind, body, spirit. And it was a remarkable thing. I'll show happy to talk about another time. But I was really disoriented by the planning meetings because every planning meeting started with a 20 minute silent meditation of the group together. And I found it very uncomfortable at first. And then deeply, deeply rewarding. For what what happened in the rest of the meetings. And the opportunity to settle and reflect together. In silence was as valuable as the things that we said to each other afterwards. So. And sometimes it's uncomfortable for me and sometimes not. I know that when we're silent together, there's a lot going on behind all these sets of eyes and maybe individual and isolated, but maybe not. So, I'm intrigued by that. And we're not supposed to respond, but I'm, I'm, I'm fed by some of what's been said already. I mentioned adaptogenic beverage. I'll put something in the chat when we're permitted to do that by the chat police. But on diet, I've been on the ketogenic diet for the last couple of months, and have found a drop 10 or 15 pounds. Lost a whole bunch of belly fat that I've been trying to shake for 15 years. And I think I'm about to transition back into some adaptation of a normal diet, but that the dropping carbs and doing intermittent fasting. Has been good for me, I guess. What else is going on for me is I'm, I'm still moving in and out of PTSD. In relation to the. What to call it, the mess in the Middle East, the death in the Middle East. Some days of being very immobilized by it and other days of being relatively normal until I'm not. And I shared something in Plex yesterday Pete thanks for that. That's sort of where I've come to in the course of that. It's made for it's made for strange work experience being able to concentrate and being and being not able to concentrate which. My sister who's a psychotherapist, you know, labeled as PTSD a couple of days in, I just, you know, I didn't see it as that. But seems pretty classic post post traumatic stress syndrome and pre traumatic stress syndrome, you know, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Part of the in and out is been pivoting on critical path capital. For those of you who are who don't know this is an effort to build a holding company to buy small and medium sized climate relevant companies from retiring. Owners and lift their value sharpen their focus and improve their work process and put them in the hands of their employees. And we've come to the conclusion that that that taking the guidance of all sorts of people said you really got to focus focus very tightly on a particular niche was the wrong strategy and this is now moving into a portfolio diversified portfolio of many different kinds of climate relevant companies, possibly with not just cooperative not just employee ownership of the individual businesses but cross ownership of the businesses with each other. We're taking a page from the ergodic entrepreneur principles that Graham Boyd out of Belgium has been working on seems to be a way of providing a lot more metastability across the network. So, we're looking at how to build a financial stack that will do that. And other news. I'm going to be the kickoff speaker Monday at a four day solutions summit coming out of the Rayburn office building in Congress produced by Eleanor McCain. Monday is the climate day with me and Mark Jacobson from Stanford and Rebecca Solnit. So many of you know and a couple of other folks. And so I've been both building my own. I get to do a four minute opening presentation and a 20 minute interview of me. And so I've been working to distill, you know, if I get four minutes with a stack of federal and state and local elected officials. What's the essence of what I need to tell them. I built my own draft, and then I went to the LinkedIn crowd to say what will you say I got a very rich and fairly convergent perspective from I don't know about 40 or 50 people there. Several of whom went to chat GPT to invite it into the crowd sourcing. And again, surprisingly convergent. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But it's interesting. It's an interesting thing. And so that's just sort of bubbling slowly in the background I do a half hour here and an hour there and it will gradually coalesce by Sunday and they won't do that Monday at all. I can share a link for that later on as well. That's, that's, that's what I got for you right now. Thank you. And of course open to your suggestions of what to tell these folks on Monday. I'll go. I'll, I'll try to put some links to some of the things I'm talking about in chat later but it might also end up on the matter most channel later. One of the, one of the delights for me this morning was kind of a blast from the past. We're on the massive wiki channel in matter most. We ended up talking about a little bit of structured data, like if you have data in a database how how much you represent that in a markdown wiki. And even if it's a good idea, usually it's not. But anyway, some some back and forth discussion led me to talk a little bit about what we called category pages back in around 2001 on wikis categories were the equivalent, the information equivalent of what we call tags or hashtags now. And so it kind of took me back to that time, you know, 2002 2003 2004, when Flickr implemented tags and folksonomy folksonomy was the word coined by Thomas Vendorval, one of the folks back in that community back in the day. So I remember thinking, oh my gosh, we call it categories, we should call it tags. That was a total branding mistake. So poking around back then I found some photos from something called tag camp, which was in Silicon Valley in 2005 and there was back in the day. It was a rich and vibrant community of folks doing all kinds of cool stuff. Before the dot com boom kind of and there was a photographer amateur photographer, not really an amateur. Scott Beal, he also had a web hosting company blog blog hosting company called laughing squid so we call them laughing squid usually. Anyway, he's got some amazing photos from tag camp and just looking at the folks from 2005. Brought me right back to that day it was it was a joy and a wonder. And I wish I could kind of like capture that feeling and and convey it to you because it was a special time with a bunch of special people and you know it was like right back there. It's very really cool. So today I have a maybe you don't want it but I have a COVID PSA. The pandemic is not over. My wife and I still wear a mask anytime we're sharing air with people, including the university reunion I went to. I was like one of two or three people, you know, and in a couple hundred people and we were mostly outdoors but we were indoors sometimes. I had my mask on literally the whole time except for somebody finally convinced me to hold my breath and take it off for 20 seconds to take one of the photos, but all the other photos I felt kind of stupid but I had my mask. I want to convey that the stupid feeling faded quickly and the feeling that I knowing that I didn't get COVID was really has been really satisfying since then. I think most of society's moved on from COVID and we don't worry about it anymore. My wife and I still worry about it. And when we hear people stories about people who might have had health problems before COVID, end up dying now. Was that because of COVID? Was it not because of COVID? I hear of airplane accidents. A pilot makes this kind of a simple error of being told to wait until another plane lands and then all of a sudden he's taking off and clips the other plane. Why did you take off? It's like, I don't know, I was, you know, I don't know too much going on. To me that sounds a lot like potentially COVID brain injury. So I wonder if we're going to see more of that coming up. Anyway, today we're getting our vaccine. So sorry for talking scary. Know that I'm storing a mask whenever I'm sharing air with folks and please get your vaccines. One last thing, the Plex was kind of interesting yesterday because there's a lot of AI stuff on it and in it. And I'm reflecting on whether or not that's good or bad. I don't know. I could talk a lot about that. But this week, there were a couple interesting, there was a really interesting discussion on fellowship of the link, which is kind of an OGM community sub community with a bunch of geeks who talk about hypertext and things like that. One of the smart folks there around Zuckershaw said something really interesting. He's like, yeah, it's kind of, I don't know how useful this whole thing is. And I made the statement something like conversational interfaces to computing and information. I think it's the future. And I think it's going to sweep the world in the same way that PCs did and then GUIs did and then touchscreen interfaces did. The next big thing is, for me, conversational interfaces to computers, you're going to be talking to your computing environment rather than looking at a screen. Aaron was not convinced at all. He made a pretty good argument that I don't, I don't see the point. I get the idea that a lot of people are finding chat to PD like a fun tour and useful kind of for some things, but I don't see it getting big. I argued the other way that, and I really surprised myself by saying I get that chat to PT is hard for most people to use. That was a really surprising thing to hear me say but I know that it's true. So chat to PT is easy to try and hard to counter intuitively hard to adopt into your into your daily practice of information flow and tasks digital digital mediated tasks. I think about anything that you're doing it with a computer you should have chat to PT sitting next to you, so that you can say hey what am I, you know, remind me what I'm doing. How do I do this thing. Is it true that blah blah blah whatever. And I know that we can't depend on the current version of chat to PT to answer truthfully but even a structured answer that that I have to like. Sometimes the structured answers are just good enough, you know, I need an outline for paper I need, you know, I need to know how the arguments go on this command line tool. How do you, how do you set this setting in, in, you know, a web design application or something like that and it will give me an answer that is, you know, in the moment easy for me to converse with and find, and all that stuff is great. I have an answer that I don't know if it's true or not, you know, what was that quote from Voltaire about blah blah, and sometimes we'll make up an answer sometimes it won't but I can, I have, you know, a structure that I can, I can work against. So my, the way I think of it's like if you're using a computer you should have a computer for your computer it's called chat to PT. It's really interesting. The thing where RM said yeah I don't think this is going to be a big deal. And I think it's going to be really big deal, and also is a really surprise for me to say that yeah it's not there yet it's it's too hard for most people to use, even though it's really easy to try. It's hard to adapt. And finally there's, I'm involved in a couple places in entrepreneurship in the AI field. And it's starting to get going bigger and bigger. There's more and more of it going. And also the discussion spaces I know of for it are kind of vacuums right now not a lot of conversation is going on, which surprises me. But if you're interested in entrepreneurship and in the AI space, or especially maybe if you know somebody who is. I'd love to talk to you to figure out where we're going to have these conversations because we aren't having enough of them. And I know it's, we had on the same fellowship link call we had, I think also in the future has been we had a back and forth you know is this all a fad or not. It is certainly an AI fad going on a tulip bulb thing going on, but there's also, from, from my point of view at least, there's a lot of real stuff going on underneath and, and we need to start digging into it. Thanks. I knew my checking was going to be about how the mid east and what was happening there is basically encompassing everything part, everything in my life, every piece of my life it's touching, and how I was working hard to separate you know to lean on my spiritual and keep my energy clean for lack of a better word. But I have to say that I'm even more uncomfortable at the lack of attention being paid to it. I didn't come last week, because I knew the conversation was going to be on music. And I was really, really disappointed, because like how Doug see is talking about the need for the conversations. And I look to this group as such an important group. It's just, it's, it's really distressing to me that there isn't conversation in this particular group about what's happening in the Middle East for myself. I'm in different groups where it's hard to have a conversation, because they're private groups, and they're either 100% pro Israel and you cannot speak about anything else without being called an anti Senate, or they're totally pro Palestinian, and you're not for peace and you don't care about people. And there is very little in between. And I'm still in the learning phase. It's only been in this past month that I and I have my views have consistently changed. I mean I'm still the same person I still have the same values I still always know there's many sides. Most importantly, I've been on some, when I say pro Palestinian, this is specifically heavily Muslim site, where I don't want to speak too much because I got to be honest, I don't feel totally safe. But I have seen some fake AI generated. I mean I watched a video of Netanyahu saying, admitting, which I know is false, that they bombed the hospital. And it absolutely looks like a real video. And all I could do is just comment that we know for a fact this is why you know there's enough to be genuinely upset about. Why do you have to put the fake stuff, you know, and just, you know, putting in a pool and they left my comment there. I also reported it. But then there's other videos and there's no way to authenticate anything. And this is on both sides, all sides. It's frightening. It's really, really frightening. You know, I wasn't upset in the beginning, when people were upset that their non Jewish friends weren't reaching out to them. I didn't get upset because I know my friends look at me as American. I'm not that sensitive that I felt I needed a personal Oh how are you doing. I appreciated it. But I, that was not a big deal to me. It's becoming a big deal that I don't see. I don't see more of an effort to show how Muslims and Jews are basically in the same situation as far as hate crime. And I don't see why that is not, you know, there's, it's just hard for that to become the focus, because of what's happening separately. And again, the fact that we're not discussing it in a group like this that I respect so much. I just feel like my heart racing and my blood boiling. So I had to mention that. And thank you. And I know it's not intentional. So I just want to say a few things in response to some of the things that I've heard and share a little bit about my own perspective and what's been floating around in my brain lately. A few weeks ago. I don't remember what the context was. But the question put was when was the last time you had a huge belly laugh. And what immediately came to mind was within a few days of that occurrence. I've been reflecting on, reflecting on what's like a tuba sound. I've been reflecting on, you know, what's going on externally in the world. And I just started to laugh into the deepest part of my belly. I didn't care. It's that every capacity that I knew and learned for sense making in the world. It just, it just, it didn't touch anything about what was going on externally. It didn't get anywhere near it. You cannot make sense of this. At least I cannot make sense of this. And, and each different episode contributes to what Gil just was, you know, professionally categorized by his sister as PTSD. And I've been saying for a while we're living in a we're all living in a PTSD world and saying it publicly I've been saying it teaching, you can't make this stuff up. It's certainly that somebody newly elected to Congress got there and said, you know, these people are really very smart. Surprise surprise. But I mean this is the context that we are, we're trying to do our best and exist and Doug I understand your frustration I've seen your sharing of chapters picking up and, and you're sharing good stuff. And I understand we ought to be talking about this, but, but somehow at this moment in time. And, you know, I have a sense it will, you know, it will, it will change. I don't know that there's anything to do but just kind of watch it all unravel, watch it unraveling. I mean, you know, I keep using the phrase tilting at windmills. Because it seems like that's, that's what we're doing. And yeah, we, we I think do do the best when we try to carry on with the good work that we're all doing. But it's hard. You know, it's not easy. It's, it's, it's really is hard. Somebody said yesterday, I think. I can't remember who it was. They gotten calls from two of their good friends saying, I don't know that I can stay here anymore. You know, it's just getting too crazy and a little bit too insane. It's pretty nuts. And this is, you know, this is coming out of the, out of the being of someone who's usually, you know, pretty positive and then, you know, we can, we can, you know, we can fix this we need to keep tilting at windmills. I don't know if we can fix it, but at least, at least we can keep ourselves upright. Here we are. It's, it's, you know, it's the world that it's the world that that seems to have manifested itself around us. The only saw us was was at some spiritual perspective, some metaphysical perspective. You know, I've heard it said that, Oh, this is the plane you come to feel feelings. This is the plane of existence. The only plane of existence where you can feel these these feelings. Well, we're getting a dose. We're getting a dose this this current lifetime. Thank you for listening. And there are tears behind all of this. I'm walking around tearful. Most of the time when I stop and pay attention to what's going on inside. I'd like to talk about two pretty different things. One of them is really pragmatic. And the other one is related to the topic that's come up a bunch of a bunch of times now on this call. The first one is I'm trying to redo my Patreon page. I've had a picture on page for like seven years since they first came out. And there's a whole bunch I can say about that except that Patreon just had a big makeover recently and there's a beautiful video by Jack Conti the founder of Patreon and I will share it when we're back to using the chat. There's a beautiful video of what he means and what it's supposed to be able to do and all that. And I was like, Oh, this is awesome. And then you start using their software. And you're like, wait, what? Because because the software seems not to match the promise of of the vision. And that seems to be in Pete and I've had a couple conversations about this. That seems to be sort of endemic, maybe to Patreon and maybe just to the industry. But it would be really lovely to have a more powerful platform from which to do things like that. And part of my question, and I've been asking this in a couple places, including repeat is what are the platforms. And I went and looked at Kofi. And there's a whole bunch of them. I'm not a Kickstarter because I'm not a one time project sort of thing. Etc. Etc. And there's no better platform right now than Patreon. But then if you go look at Patreon project pages, which used to be really interesting, Patreon project pages for everybody. Almost always an explainer video that they that the creator had to produce and then some explanation of what the mission was and so forth. And now all they've done is whatever tears used to you set up for donating for for being a backer. Those tears show up under the name of the page. There's a little link that says about which there were there might or might not be a good explanation of what this person is doing. And it's completely dumbed down. It's very weird and distressing to me because I loved the old way it worked. And I'd love to be able to do more that and I'll find a workaround. I'll do something different but it's just weird that maybe what happened was they found that the click rate and the sign up rate was better when all they did was show the tears and that just seems odd to me seems totally off. And then secondly, I've been going through a whole bunch of documents basically I had like 25 boxes of files from my life, my parents lives and my maternal grandparents lives to go through which I've been dragging along with me for years and years and years never got to. And then finally like making way through and we, April and I call this melting boxes because the boxes are annoying just sitting there. And what I'm doing is I'm throwing away 80% 90% scanning 15% and then keeping maybe 5% which are the important documents I just actually want to have the original of. And the scanning is really fun because it sort of creates a compendium that I can kind of back up online but that I where I can see a lot of family history, and I've hit a bunch of interesting things including. And this is a piece of my family history that relates to what's happening here. I learned when I was 24 years old that my mother's father's mother was Jewish. Nobody had ever told me I didn't know that I knew that, you know, my, my, so my maternal, my mother's maiden name is Krauthammer, and she was born in Berlin in 1934, she passed away a couple of December's ago. But, and I knew that my family had escaped Germany and 39 but we've never ever talked about how why what the background and it's really interesting that when I was little, my grandparents my maternal grandparents visited us a lot. And I loved to be put to sleep by my grandmother and I would always ask her to tell me stories about my mom when she was young, and I never got good stories. They just didn't want to share the stuff that happened way back when and I think it was like weird and it was awful. And so I've got a bunch of documents now. And I have, for example, the original steamship tickets that my grandmother and the two kids had to get out of Hamburg to head toward the Caribbean where I think they met up with my grandfather who had left, who left a couple months here. And they had like a short little window I found documents that are character witnesses and approval by the, by the Berlin police department, saying they're good to go they have 30 days to get out of town with a swastika stamp on the bottom. And then I went through a stack of onion skin correspondence if anybody remembers when airmail was expensive everybody used to use onion skin paper which was really light and almost transparent but kind of strong and so I had a whole stack of correspondence in German and I speak enough German to make my way through with a little help of Google translate for the hard words. I got through I read the stack and found a bunch of a bunch of history because every now and then my grandfather, who I called opi would relate a piece of the story of his life story. It's interesting and I'll, I'll just add the, this is like this incredibly poignant part about my grandfather's life which is, he had two ways of making a living when up until that point. Oh, sorry that's a Apple Sonoma feature. When you, excuse me when you hold up a V it sends balloons into the screen because it thinks you're celebrating. By the way, this cascades the celebration thing. I know. And just I can't help it. This does the laser light show, which all of which by all of which leavens my conversation a little bit with humor which I really appreciate. So anyway, my grandfather had two ways of making a living. He was a shoe representative so I don't think he sold shoes on the show on the floor, but he represented shoemakers wholesale to other shoe shops. He had merchants windows, which means writing sale on Sunday 20% off putting merchant the window all of that. I learned that he fell off a ladder he had to jump off a ladder in 1943 later. Sorry. He had to jump off a ladder and got injured and this whole story about that is correspondence but in in this document he writes about. He got fired from the shoe shop because his boss was worried that he'd lose a government contract for having a Jew working for him. And then he describes how on 8th of November 1938, his life fell apart. And that date might be familiar to you all it's Kristallnacht. And it's the night that Joseph Goebbels went on the radio and said hey, if anything bad were to happen to Jewish merchants shops and synagogues we would look the other way. And then German citizens went and destroyed an incredible number of stores and synagogues. Damn this cold. And then the first time I sort of discovered this was when I'd gone to Germany to put my grandfather in a nursing home in bottom bottom where they lived out their lives. And I read this, a piece of this back then and I thought this all this correspondence was lost. And now I have it again. But on that day my grandfather's second way of making a living is surgically wiped out. And in the documents, one of the documents I read this week he says my life was shattered. Not only did all the Jewish merchants windows go away but all the all the non Jews who were hiring me kindly were scared that to death and stopped hiring me. And at that point I think his full time job was getting them alive out of Germany. So I didn't necessarily mean to share all of that right now in our call but it seems like we're, it seems like we're moving globally into times that need stronger interventions the way Doug C is asking us to do. And I'm mindful that we are a good group of thoughtful people who might do more. So thank you. So I pretty much live full time in the space of the question of what is doing what is doing mean. In the face of everything. And I had a couple of really interesting conversations this week. Out of which some things surface. Very much living for me that I'd love to share here. One of them is around all of the technology centered. Emergences and challenges and debate and questioning. And one of the things that came came to me was that we're actually in the middle of the singularity. In fact, not as an abstract concept and not reduced to machine being a smart as or smarter than the Turing test right. It's literally our technology capabilities and affordances have surpassed our ability to control them to understand them to manage them in just about every domain. And so the tail is wagging the dog and the results of that are things like, you know, QAnon is an alternative reality amusement park for gamer coders. Escaping the reservation and going into the general public and all of a sudden it's turned the world upside down ethically morally, etc. The consequences of all these things the fact that in principle a rambunctious high school student or college student with a crisper apparatus and AI can design a virus idly and propagate and lease it into the world that would wipe out our species. And those means are at hand. For anybody it's all it's out there, like it's open source and the largest systems and enterprise structures and data structures in the world today defy any one or group of sysops to fully know and understand all of the moving parts. So that's one piece of the puzzle. And to do about that ultimately comes down to the human being deploying using the technology and the decisions and values ethics morals or lack there are in the hands of held by the user. So it ultimately reduces back to my mind to the human values and orientation. So that's one piece of the puzzle and the other piece of the puzzle was again human centered. Is it possible in the most complex intractable dark horrendous contexts. To change the orientation and consciousness and perspective to inquiry curiosity and opportunity. Like, how could this a recontextualization here. What did materially change and transform the orientation to what's going on. So, I had mentioned the ways back playing around and noodling with the idea of if the petrochemical oil industry fossil fuel industry decided to transition and transform to remediating all the damage that it's cost the planet. And I'm missing all its infrastructure and assets to that mission there's plenty of money to be made doing that in the Middle East. If Israel were to relate to this situation not as the extermination of Hamas but actually the rescue of its hostages and the Palestinians. Not just in Gaza but on the West Bank on the West Bank. And so, and in all of this it's in the we contextualization transformation reorientation to the way that I think about it. To the way we think about it to a change the game change the reality. And that in just about every context that's possible instantaneously, if there's enough collective shift fast enough. I think the world is sort of there, like the best bulk grassroots bottom up populations involved in all of this, don't want it. Like they're, they're there to be catalyzed. And for the first time in our history. Incidentally, the technologies available enable a collective viral catalyzing of those intrinsic potentials to flip scripts and change orientations and just stop the insanity and reorient. So, that's that I'm complete but that's what's been living for me. We had lost power which is why I dropped off so I logged on and probably about 30 seconds before it doesn't start. Yeah, it's times sparse and check you and I'm just going to be taking time off on the 13th to 17th of November. I'm just trying to recover from this crazy year, not knowing if I was going to have to move all the, and then actually moving under the same roof. Everything's still in the basement. I guess with I actually was using this the other day this was actually my screen this happened to my screen while I was on call it at work and stuff so I actually did. I actually did go and grab the looks damn close to the matrix. So, yeah, I just, I, the deadline was yesterday so what I had implied to reenroll and the PhD program starting in January. Trying to act together and then there's a guy Dan Rome. He wrote a book the back of an Afghan he actually has a back in university. And he's got a course time to write your book and stuff so I'm kind of signed up for that. A friend who's work one to work on her book so we're going to kind of be accountability thing to actually helping her with organizing things in the brain, actually sharing one of the licenses with her. And then trying to see kind of have the really focus my, my quote unquote book is like the telling the high level story of the dissertation and then kind of having that dynamic of kind of helping to focus and then my, my chair gave me an ultimatum that I needed to see writing that I need to be writing for 14 year old audience. So, it's like, so there's that dynamic of, you know, right, having the right for the academic audience, but then so I'm thinking it kind of be two layers so you could have, you could have like, like the level for the general audience and then dive in each section kind of dive into the, into the, into the research. So, yeah, it's the pieces are kind of kind of coming together so I've got three. I've got it's a nine component framework but I got three stories that are addressing three of you three each and stuff so I've been feeling pretty good about that. Time to look at subtle cast and then I mentioned that before but just trying to figure out how to have a more structured approach and time blocking and all that stuff so that's kind of where I'm at right now. That'll stop. I think you went earlier and I think we are missing a couple people who still haven't checked in so I'm wondering if those people would like to check in, if you'll hold on a second. Yeah, I'll, it's very short this week. I have a book on based on some lectures by the political theorist Wendy Brown called nihilistic times, and the subtitle is thinking with Max Weber, but what struck me in reading this. It's this whole idea about thinking with. So she's just done this for years has gone back to Max Weber's writings on vocation and politics and is trying to in these lectures show what some of that writing has to say to what we're experiencing right now and how we might, as I read it, think with what I think they wrote about what we're actually involved in right now. And so I guess that's, I mean, so I'm attempting to do that and I think maybe on calls like this. We might be attempting to do that. But I might call thinking together with each other. And I don't know how that might be represented. After the fact, but I don't know. I'm sorry I came in late. We had our time zone changed last weekend here. And I just assumed that America would go back from daylight savings to wintertime at the same moment but I'm glad I'm here for the last half hour. There are other things on my mind, but I'll also keep it short so other people can discuss things that was said. I think I've mentioned the last time I was on one of these calls that we were planning series of intergenerational dialogues in October, bringing together teenagers from 16 to 18 years. And society's elders as we call them older than 60 and in connection with World Values Day on the 12th of October and the 19th of October. We had to to our dialogues and Stuart nice to see you again. Stuart was in the group that thought together and help put this first prototype together. We had young people from Nigeria and Kenya from India and the UK. And there were elders from 10 different countries, ranging from American Americans who got up very early to Australians who stayed up very late. There were 36 people in the first session 16 and the second one. And what I was very happy to experience is that young people, at least the young people we had on the calls were enthusiastic, articulate, aspirational, ready to take part in making society better. They weren't at all stressed and fearful as so many media media issues report them to be, and they were not afraid to speak their minds. Young people in India who said they're happy there in a democracy and they don't like at all what their government is doing and they're planning to take their voices. They have the homes and the schools in the streets to let them government know that not everyone supports them. So it was a very inspiring experience, although lots of things went wrong. There were very big technical issues. The UK was horrible. And in Nigeria it was okay and in India it was excellent but essentially the young people from the UK couldn't be heard and could only engage in using the chat to bring their ideas forward. The time zones made it difficult for people to take part. But young people and it was hard to have the elders understand that it was supposed to be a conversation and not a stage that older people could preach to the younger. But all in all everyone was very pleased. A lot of the people on the calls, especially the young people said if there were more calls they'd like to take part. And so now with different groups we're trying to think of ways to take it further, get around technical issues, have different conversations and different time zones to really involve people in America and Australia with people in Europe and people in Asia. And learn as we go along because as our assumption in advance was young people and older people have a lot to say to each other proved the need to follow at any rate in these two prototypes to be true. Or any and all ideas from OGM are certainly welcome. Thank you so much. Glad you joined. Sorry about the time change we changed this Sunday. I think it was. Yeah, this Sunday we shift again so it's going to screw you up next week as well so just to keep you on your toes. I understand Karen thank you for being on this call I understand you'd like to pass which is fine which I think means everybody's checked in. And Karen if you would like to say something just feel free to jump in whenever. And after Doug, Doug C. Well I have to say that I've been appalled a bit by this call. And the lack of touching on key issues. I'm inclined to think, well I fought the impulse of leaving wasn't hard to defeat that impulse. But it was a struggle. I think that the singularity is the point where humans become as stupid as computers. And I think that Don Quixote was right. They're not windmills they're dragons. And that's where we are. And Karen did you want to jump in. I just wanted to thank you for all your thoughts, and I'll be back. Not that. Thank you. And this one's different from many of our calls so it's an interesting experiment. Doug, I appreciate your challenging us to aim higher. I'm unclear what you think aiming higher would be like and how it would work. Enough of a scientist to think that starting with facts is a way to liberate the imagination. And we're in the situation where CO2 is rising. Temperature is going to continue to rise. We're moving into desperate territory. And the issue is how does this end. And we can still talk about it even if there's nothing we can do. There's no dignity in facing the truth. Maybe just possibly something will emerge. But it can't emerge if we're not talking about it. This is not a series of calls about climate change crisis. That's not what this is. This is a group of people meeting to talk about a whole bunch of things that might as one byproduct help solve the global climate change crisis. But there's as far as I when I count when I look out and count I see five or six simultaneous crises of which climate change is just one. And we're not talking about any of them. I thought we talked about quite a few of them today. In several different ways. I was surprised by your comment about not touching on key issues because we've touched on at least Israel, Palestine and climate and singularity. And perhaps a few other things we haven't had, you know, we're doing check-ins. We're not having back and forth conversation on them. But those were all live in this conversation. And we've talked about some we've talked about climate certainly in more detail other times. I'm perplexed by your comment. And I'm interested in your question, Doug, partly because I've tried in OGM to get us to create a permanent record of note taking and ideas woven together and what this thing I call the big fungus. And I do that every time in my brain. I do that every time I call. I read a bunch of stuff and I post it openly on the web in hope that that newly woven context is useful to solving some of the problems but frankly, we haven't gotten very far on doing any of that and that would be starting from facts that would be covering the major issues that would be a whole lot of good stuff. So my angle on how might we improve these conversations is not really work. And I'm happy. I'm happily still doing my own note taking and probably have gotten a little better at it since we started OGM calls I think that my, my methods for for note taking or some somehow a little bit crisper. But that's not helping anybody at this point either. Stuart, go ahead. You're muted. Yeah, I was I was just going to add is that I think this is one of the last places of people who aren't aware of what's going on in the world. So the notion of, you know, not talking about it or not thinking about it doesn't necessarily mean that people don't have awareness or consciousness. I just needed to kind of push back on that a little bit. I don't think a week goes by when there's not some conversation or someone sharing a project that is in some way a contribution to the poly crisis multi crisis that we all face. Could we do more. Yeah, could we spend, you know, could everyone spend every waking hour, you know, might that be called for is somebody doing that. I don't know, but I think that's, you know, continuing to stand straight up and not succumb to emotions that bowl us over. I think is a is a useful perspective. Thanks Stuart. As Stacy, I'll pass to you next. It's funny that you raised your hand just as I was about to address what you brought into the conversation earlier. And it seems a really great idea to make next week's GM call about the Israel Gaza situation. And to see if we can bring our best game to it. And step it up a bit. So I will, I will, unless somebody thinks it's a terrible idea, I will make that next week's topic. I just have one sentence to say because it struck me. What I don't think we're aware of, because I mean I certainly wasn't is the deep fear being experienced by many people. And that's something that in coming to in conversation is important to come out. I really did not understand and not only did I not understand. I didn't experience it the way I'm starting to experience it now. And I think that's telling as well. Thank you, Jerry. Thanks, Stacy. I think the framing of PTSD of a collective PTSD. Some might seem hyperbolic. But there's also something sort of called collective trauma. And there's intergenerational trauma and there's a bunch of other kinds of things that happen. And and one of the things that's going on is that we're all afraid of which shoe is going to drop next. It's like we're in Melda, we're in Melda Marcus's closet. And in an earthquake. And it's like, I'm not going to be killed by the Jimmy choose. I don't know. Because they do have the lotto heels. But, but PTSD is an interesting way to describe this and it makes me think that the movements that might be productive to solve some of these problems might involve how you handle PTSD at a social level. To start sort of approaching people in different ways. We have just a couple minutes more. Let's jump in. And pick up any topic that we touched on or anything else you'd like to bring in. Sorry. Go ahead. I didn't know to raise my hand or not, but yeah, that's fine. Well, I know you all know this, but we're just meant to be in a tribe and have all the input that we can respond to. But we have so much going on media wise it's just every day. Over consumption is what's happening. We're eating too much, and we're not meant to eat that much and not bad food either. So, and metaphorically speaking, there's a balance of what you're going to choose to take in or I choose to take in and it's not having the media on so much more than other people that I know in my circle and I just hear it from my circle then what's happening. I think I've been told I've been told that I'm not in touch with what the news is. That's that's the negativity part of it. Yes, I get it. But I will go and look for it and I'll pull it when I need it. I feel like I'm going to bring this down to the moment of agency and control and well being for ourselves and individually because we all have to choose that for ourselves first and I think that if we can bring into our day today is just when we're eating to use that as a metaphor to nourish ourselves only with something nourishing. Thank you for that, Stuart. Oh, I was just going to say at some time I have a poem that seems like a work leak worthy cap on on what we've been saying. That seems like a great way to wrap this call and can being in Italy and all the great thing. Bill, did you want to say something before the poem. Yeah, I had two thoughts that just I could. I can process them. Well, just what Jesse said was really interesting. Just about focusing on eating and trying to I will say being older. Somehow portion control is, I would say it's easier just because my eyes are quite as bigger bigger than my stomach right now. But the thing that I know you said that you know, when you said well we're all parts of tribes. And I've been trying to push myself to not think like that. Like this is what we always say. I'm like, well, don't say that. I've been trying to like can we not just say it's always been like you know this is just the way it is and I would like to like say to myself, maybe it isn't like that, or doesn't have to be like that, or it's just been like that. So I think there is some way to try and think about things differently or just to get out of what we consider to be. This is the way things are. And I don't mean that's just my struggle right now I've been trying to force myself to do that so I don't fall into all parts of tribes therefore blah blah blah. It's like, maybe that premises likely to sort of premise out. And then maybe I'd have different, you know, next steps. And I've lost the other thing because you know, what can I tell you, I couldn't remember it. The floor is yours. Great. Thank you. So this is actually today's poem. It's the poem for November 2nd and it's called aftermath aftermath. And the reflective questions are, do you interact with people whose use differ from yours. What you, what might you learn with curiosity and empathy. Aftermath. Now the time here, the place begin to act from grace, begin to act from grace, battle joined action noble fighting only generates trouble. Breach created by push or shove. Then we show what we're made of character. That's truly real display how to teach and heal fierce fight on the wire. No winner or one to retire combat in venues changing players thinking rearranging. Can we learn from Winters night. Can we learn from Winters night. Can body politic cease to fight energy wasted, silly fray better spent another way. Win or loser. A very old frame. How about a bigger game. A sacred collaborations, a new pulse for great nations. We have tools technology. Let's aspire to real democracy. Time to move in this direction. Let others watch and pay attention. Thanks to it. This pesky cough cough is letting me talk much. Really appreciate you appreciate you're being here and. Bonding everything we said. Until next week everybody. Thanks Jerry thanks everyone.