 This is the Build OGM call for Tuesday, November 30th, 2021. Hey, Stacy. Hello. Are you driving or out and about? Not yet. Not yet. I'm walking the dog right now. I'll be in the car in a few minutes. Thanks. Excellent. Now you're in the category of OGMers who are walking the dog. Which is a thing. It's a category. Excellent. Um, and so, uh, so Stacy, I just told Pete that I haven't written yet a note, a lot sort of canvassing for a virtual assistant of some sort. So I do that. And also, and Mr. Kranza. And Pete has just started to hack MD for our note taking. And there's Mark. No mark. Yes, Mark. There. Excellent. Excellent. Mark. Has the vessel control of his machine back from the software. Amons. Was that string orientation? Yes. Nice. Nice. Morning. Morning. How goes it for you. Um, turn 59 yesterday. Happy birthday. That's right. I'm turning to 62. Holy shit. Yeah, how'd that happen? That's my basic baseline reaction. Just like seriously, how'd that happen? Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, good. I've had some back surgery last week. I'm kind of recovering from that and here to listen and just barely woke up. So I will do some more listening and then catch up as we go on. Thanks for joining me. And then Pete, you and I I think need to catch up on crowd and items about how things fit. And we've got a call later today to do some of that sex. So that should be fine. And then I've been paying attention to picture his brain for the last, basically over the long weekend, because I really got to figure out a normal steady stream of income, etc, etc. And so I've got lots of moving parts up and I haven't rewritten like the homepage of pictures brain. But that's where my attention has been. It's been on like how do I and have you heard of a language market fit? So I will find the article. But product market fit is a common phrase sort of in startup community. But there's a there was a nice article from first round, I think. There it is. There was a nice article from first round where it talks about finding language market fit, which is like what language does your market speak and how do you connect with them? And parts of the article were sort of way more elaborate than things that I think I'm going to do about, you know, market testing in large mass market ways, but parts the article really good about about finding that language. And so I'm trying to figure out how not to speak about me, but how to speak about the needs I can fulfill as picture his brain. So that's kind of where my head is for the top top of the page. And so maybe the thing to do is to collectively draft a virtual assistant note. I think that would probably that would certainly help me move forward on stuff. I can be okay. I can do would work. And I'm just getting caught up. And then through the budget from the rep foundation grant that my Mac should be on its way. I got a note that it's on its way into customs from in Shenzhen or somewhere. And then the payment hasn't actually processed properly. So somehow the Mac is in motion toward me, but the money hasn't been deducted from my account. And I spent a bunch of time yesterday with my bank going, what's the deal here? And Apple doesn't seem to know. And they want to just send me a machine. I'm okay. But anyway, so can't wait for that because my fan just kicked on and things are already slowing down. So it's glorious. I'm not looking forward to is how many things probably aren't going to be native. I'm going to have to work around because I use a bunch of menu or whatever they're called the new plugins, you know, basically a virtual clipboard and a couple other good things. Text expander that your text expander has not been rewritten from one. And I'm pretty reliant on that. Okay. So shall I screen share or show you? Either way. Why don't I in that way? There we go. Volunteers needed dangerous mission survival, not guaranteed. So this is actually for weaving the world. It's this is for this is for the world. Yeah, this has nothing to do with pictures brain. This is entirely weaving the world. And it's a friendly note to people I know to find out who's got and who could recommend a virtual assistant service or person. Right? Capitalization. So how did people, I guess there weren't that many people reading them, but there were no spaces or periods like early on everything was just run on and there were no upper and lower case. There was none of that. It was just like word, word, word, word, word, word, word, word, word. And you had to parse it in your head and fit pauses in. And then they started to try to do like spaces and pauses for like the breathing breaks. I kind of think it was it was more like stenography. And like we have a, you know, written culture for 2000 years or whatever. But 2000, 3000 years ago, I think probably it was still mostly voice. And the written stuff was crib notes for, you know, remembering what you remembered. This reminds me in a bizarre way of another pattern I think I've recently observed. Wendy Elford and I have been talking about dows among other things. And there's an interesting thing where dows are actually two parts. There's the people who set up the rules of the game. And then there's, and then you, you code the rules of the game in smart contract language and then you play the game, right? So a lot of the attention around dows is watching and thinking about the players playing the game. After the machinko machine is already set up, right? It's like, okay, so, you know, I'm putting a ball here, I'm putting a ball here, and it goes down this way. That's people look at the operation of it. And if you think about it for more than about two seconds, it's actually more important how you set up the game so much the way the game gets played. Even though the way the game gets played is interesting, you know, how do you build a coalition? How do you delegate your votes? How do you, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's still interesting. But it's, all of that is on the foundation of in the ground of how the dow is set up, right? So thinking about that and thinking why we pay attention to the operation of the dow rather than the creation, the construction of the dow. I think my, I have a new hypothesis. My hypothesis is that we are so used to the way organizations work. Autonomous organizations, which we call corporations now, especially big ones. And we're used to them being opaque. So, you know, so we have these massive autonomous organizations in our lives called Google and Facebook and Apple and, you know, GM and whatever. And all the news that we talked about is, you know, what's, which ports are or are not on the MacBook or, you know, you know, how many, how many small retailers has Amazon squashed or, you know, the way Walmart pays its staff or doesn't pay its staff, right? So we talk about the operation of the autonomous organization. We don't talk about the way the organization is built because for a hundred years or so, corporations are behind a veil where they get to do and construct themselves however they want within, you know, some bounds. And so we just think of organization. Hey, there's an organization. What's it doing? What's it thinking? How is it the chink of balls falling through the pins? Right? And, and in a dow, you really want to think of it the opposite way. How have we set up the dow? How will we set up a dow? How will we set up a dow better than other dows, right? We have, you know, here's a dow. We've just given you the clay to create an organization that isn't a copy of Apple and isn't a copy of Facebook. Do that, right? And everybody's like, yeah, I don't know how to do that. It's too hard, but I'm really interested in the way the chink of balls fall. So that's my hypothesis about dows. And I think, so I have a prediction that as we keep setting up dows, we're actually going to continue to replicate for probably years, maybe a decade, we're going to continue to replicate centralized organizations. We're going to go, okay, we need a new organization and it's going to be decentralized this time. And it's going to end up having a hierarchy and having the centralization that Apple does or Facebook does or whatever, right? Just because we don't have the linguistics to be able to describe something different and imagine something different and to create something different. So I love that, love that line. And let me just stop sharing for a second so we can see each other. Partly it seems like corporations have like default settings. And we assume that those default settings are all the same and that there's these people called market analysts or Wall Street who give a damn about that, but they only give a damn about that within really, really narrow constraints. And then every now and then a corporation innovates a whole bunch on that. It makes Wall Street angry, which is only when we hear about it. So it's like, Zuckerberg still has controlling interest because he has his own category of shares of Facebook that cannot vote everybody kind of thing, right? And he just made that a part of the death pact of investing in Facebook. And that was unusual. And Google, when it launched, was unusual in some of their documents and how they organized themselves. So it was like, oh, there's exceptions to the default settings, right? But we've gotten so used to the default settings. And the default settings create like a rapacious corporation, which is like the critique in the air or the spin in the air for since the 60s at least, if not well before, and yet now it's seeming maybe getting a little bit of lift. But we don't change those default settings, even though we all know that like these default settings kind of suck, right? And then and now somebody saying, hey, there's a new way to create organizations to coordinate activity, to invest together and route the funds. And I'm a little surprised that we don't have the equivalent of sourdough starter library or DNA collections for like, here's the best of Dow structure that I've seen. And just like, let's go mix and match and put it on GitHub. And like, oh, somebody just had a really clever idea. And we were swapping out this piece of DNA of how Dow's work. And this is this is proving to work better in lots and lots of communities. And but only if you've done this work beforehand together, to get to that point of trust or whatever, right. And so description of the dance and all of that. And maybe this is happening in a time in a couple of times. It's happening really well, actually. Oh, okay. So I'm missing that. So, so then I have another hypothesis. Wendy's, Wendy's happens to have a focus on Dow's for a couple of weeks. And and kind of immediately she went to the, you know, the, the human parts of, of how we might coordinate and work together, right, the community aspects of it and the psychological aspects of it and taking care of each other and things like that. And I said, yeah, I'll tell you what, Wendy, could you pull up? Mezal's hierarchy for me. And let's talk about where we are, right. So, so my hypothesis there, she, she like made a she made a similar face actually when I said my radar goes off because whenever anybody invokes Mezal's hierarchy, I'm usually like, oh, great. This is not going to go well. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Mezal's hierarchy is not the, is not perfect, but it's still kind of a useful tool. Here's where we, yeah, overused. So where are we in the, I had a great friend, Tiffany Von Emel, who, who taught me a lot about Mezal's breaks, which is, which is even more exciting than, Mezal's breaks is even more exciting than Mezal's hierarchy. Good point. Tools, tools are, are really stupid, unless they're in the hands of an expert and, you know, using the tool and you go, okay, well, I wouldn't have expected that from that tool. Otherwise, otherwise you get this. Yeah. So, so I said, I'll tell you what my hypothesis again is that we're at the physiological level and the safety security level, the bottom two levels, right. We've kind of been able to get our heads around the, the bits and bobs that, that create non-fungibility and, you know, and student, student anonymity, wallet addresses and things like that. That's kind of the physiological layer. There's, there's bits and bobs that, that create the frameworks that we want to build on. And then there's the safety security thing, which is next. We're, we're still stumbling, not infrequently, do you hear, you know, and this, you know, Dow or cryptocurrency or, or NFT scheme or something like that, just had, you know, as 60% of its assets wiped out by, you know, finding a bug or somebody, you know, found an exploit or something like that. We're barely able to, like, get the systems working at their minimum level. Like you can kind of, you know, wake up in the morning and go check your crypto and go, yeah, it's still there. You know, thank God. Because it's, it's not a, you know, it's not a done deal. You know, I have a little bit of crypto and every morning I wake up and thank God it's still there. It hasn't been wiped out by a bug. So the, the levels above that, where we start talking about how do people work together? How do, you know, how do we create love and safety and friendship and things like that, right? That's all you can see from where we are. You can see that and you can imagine communities swapping best practices back and forth. The best practices right now are around how not to get yourself killed, basically. So it's kind of like we're in the wild west phase of I don't have to become lunch. Yeah. So, so rather than Maslow's may I suggest like the rising of life forms out of the primordial goo and that we're still kind of in the phase where cell walls burst and the salinity suddenly changes dramatically and like, oops, we're all dead. And stuff like that. And when we're starting to come into the place where there are simple cellular life forms and they're replicating so they're able to move around and kind of do stuff. So we've got a little bit of like kinky sexual reproduction going on in, in the primordial goo, but we don't have complex structures and we don't know how to, you know, exactly don't know where it's going. So and I'd be very comfortable with the primordial goo because the work. So there is a lot of recombination and, you know, innovation and, and copying of innovation or more improvement of innovation. But it's really, you know, cell walls and things like that. It's and replication. But that conversation seems to be happening like still like in the closet someplace between a few geeks, like, like, I wish that conversation were part of how do we make civilization better and we're being held in public salons. So that like, like that room over there, they're turning our words over here into some code to test and then bring back to us. But we're going to sit here and talk through what are good ways to organize, you know, people to do. Totally agree. And Wendy, Wendy will be giving a talk about Dallas. And that's where she's going to go, you know. Hey, look over here. There's stuff going on. And it's probably going to change the world. And I don't know, maybe you want to be involved. It's, it's not hard to get involved. It's, it's super easy to wait in. Rob O'Keefe actually in one of the OGM channels on Black Cheney. It's on an OGM channel, but it's the Mattermost channel. He said, so it looks like it's me and me and Charles and Pete who are interested in any of this crypto stuff. Am I weird, you know, is this, why does nobody care? Am I an outlier? You know, what's, what's going on? So it's easy to wait in. It's confusing and crazy, you know, crazy making and things like that, just like the internet was, you know, back in, you know, 1990 small number. Yeah. But it's funny because the internet's got a bunch of really sophisticated things that run, that run the thing, right, that make the tubes run. And yet there we go. The internet's got a bunch of crazy sophisticated things that make everything sort of work, but I could kind of talk you through roughly how things like, like happen, like what it gets to routing tables and all that. Like I probably get lost. If you teleport yourself back to 1992, you know, it was, it was the Wild West, right? But the algorithms were simpler then and a lot of the ways that these devices connected were, you know, were working okay. They weren't actually simpler. Really? No, because I find, I find very rapidly somebody will say, okay, this works this way and then let's assume that over here and then they'll layer five things on top of it and it was like, but doesn't that violate some of the fundamental assumptions of the underlying layers? And nobody answers that. And like I find very quickly, I'm leveraged into a place where really, I'm not sure what's happened. Crypto, crypto, crypto. In 1992, that was the same thing, right? It's like, I wasn't feeling that whatsoever in 1992. Like at all, I was like, oh good, this is a better protocol. And here's how it layers up. I think you, so then you had more experience or more. And I'm not a geek. I could explain to you what and how and why and how, how progress was going to happen. Well, so like the difference between you, CP mail and internet mail, right? It's like, okay, I need to mail somebody at university and Stockholm or something like that. Today, am I going to try to use this new internet mail with that in the middle? Or is it a bank path, you know, and where's the bank path and stuff like that, right? To learn what a bank path is, yeah, to learn what a bank path is, is not trivial, you know, it's like, it gets a little arcane under the hood, but I could say, hey, there's this kind of competition brewing between at signs and bank marks as part of like how we address emails. Same exact thing with crypto. It's way, way more opaque to me than that. Like, like, like orders of magnitude more opaque than that. Because, because what's happening feels, feels to me complex enough that it's opaque, that it's suspicious. I feel like, you know, so that the internet stuff back in the day, it was, you know, like, if you, if you let yourself get involved in it, you knew that the internet stuff was writing on top of TCP IP packets. And, you know, you had to know what TCP IP packets were and how many of them stuffed, you know, how to split stuff up. There's this, still that layer of complexity underneath that you could involve yourself with and go crazy about, right? And at some point, you go, I don't know why this internet mail stuff works, because, you know, we topped up stuff and there's duplicated packets and lost packets and, you know, that it's the same kind of stuff over in crypto, you know, you can explain to you about that. You can write above that and go, okay, there's proof of stake and proof of work, you know, and you don't have to really understand all of the bits and bobs about, you know, hash calculations and stuff like that for proof of work. You can kind of take a top-level view and go, okay, we want to switch over to proof of stake, you know, and it's the same kind of abstraction of layers and things like that. The, the, the basic, maybe I'm a geek. But the basic, I'm not sure that maybe it was necessary there, but still. The, the basic, you know, operation of DAOs or NFTs or things like that, it's not really more complicated than email or Usenet or, you know, whatever. Same, same kind of, you know, and it's got the same kind of depth. All the depth that's under crypto was maybe not all of it, but a lot of it was, you know, routing tables and, you know, BGP protocols and all that kind of stuff. Okay. But there's a party happening somewhere where these things are being fruitfully improved in community. And not enough non-geeks participate. I think even the most of many of the crypto people feel like that too. So when these call is for more non-geeks to join that party? It's a talk at a conference as far as I understand it. That's, so she came in, you know, now that, now that I brought in primordial stages of evolution or massless hierarchy, she came in at kind of the top, right? It's like, okay, well, we've had autonomous organizations for probably, you know, a couple of thousand years right now. We know actually autonomous organizations pretty well, and we know how you would do them to make monopolies or, you know, all the other kinds of weird things that autonomous organizations do. And it's like, well, of course, you would kind of make them human scale and have, you know, care for the community and things like that. So, so my assertion to her is that that's not where we are. But meeting in the middle, she and I, it's like, well, but that's where we should go, right? I'm like, yeah, sure, you know, and a lot of people think that in crypto, you know, a lot of people are going, it's a trillion dollars sloshing around in, you know, crypto stuff. And it's going to matter at some point. And to me, to me, current cryptocurrency efforts are mostly like selfish genes. They're basically entirely out for themselves trying to build something up. And philosophically, this raises the question of, what if quantum computing, what if, what if qubits could be holistic in some sense and represent whether the world is better or worse off by the transaction at hand? And wouldn't that be interesting? So a couple of levels of the tech stock, but the same use case, people are designing tokens right now that have different social characteristics. So, you know, people work on that in crypto right now. And the people who are doing it are specialists rather than, you know, human factors people, we need more human factors people, more people who are going to be affected by crypto in 20 years, participating in the early designing and things like that. But it sounds like we need more guions or more holistic thinkers or something like that in the mix because, because most everybody I see doing this kind of stuff is like a stoic libertarian objectivist, like looking to maximize local profit. There's a lot of different people and there are a lot of guidance. I think one of the things that I can say is true is that there's an immediate, like sour taste, like bitter taste, let's drop that out of our mouth and not try to keep chewing because of Silk Road, because of people who tried to make billions of dollars because of, you know, lots of stuff and stuff like that. As I've said in another call with you and a bunch of other people, there's a pony in there. It's not all hype. Yes, there is a trillion dollars flushing around doing crazy stuff and a trillion dollars makes people crazy. That the tech, the underlying technology is useful and it's currently being used in valuable and interesting ways and it's going to continue to grow and take over more of our lives. You know, more people should get into it, even though there is that bitter taste of, oh my god, it's the wild west. If I go out in the middle of daylight in this dusty old town, I'm going to get shot. So to me in the march of human progress and civilization, the monetization of everything and the commodification of everything, we're not really good steps. Like these did not improve civilization, even though they made it more efficient and more whatever. And what this feels like is like, oh great, now we're moving into an era where you will know the location and meta identity and everything behind every object and you'll have to acquire every object, everything. That's the bitter taste, right? Well, it's not just bitter taste, it could be a poisoned pill. It could be that we're turning the whole world into a fugu. Yeah, no. It's a different way to look at it at the same technology is like, oh my god, now we can have multi-valued tokens. Now we can actually value people, planet and profit at the same time. So the technology that we're talking about is a potential savior. It's a potential path out of the mess that we've done with mono-valued money. So as Vitalik Buterin, one of the people who's talking about Gaia and multi-valued currencies and this lovely path out. I don't know. I don't follow Vitalik, right? I'm just saying there's like a couple of really loud voices that all sound to me like the same voice, which is the opposite of that. It's the bitter thing, right? It's like, you know, I have no offense to Mr. Buterin. But from afar, what I see him doing is scrambling like the Dickens to make sure the little timber house that he's built on the parry doesn't fall over. It's in danger of falling over all the time, right? So I think he's totally absorbed in just making sure that Ethereum can do lots of transactions and it's going to swap over to Ethereum too and be proof of stake rather than proof of work. I think he's completely focused on that and doesn't have any mind space for anything else. There are people doing the good work, you know, who are saying, let's, you know, okay, now we've got cryptocurrency, let's make, let's fix currency. Marcus, Stacy, any thoughts on this? I don't have the right language, but if you remember, Jerry, I had sent you those seeds and I couldn't get to go through. But I know that, I know that you're friends with Yokem and I think he could explain more about what's going on there. But I think there are some really good people because I was there like when they were first starting up a couple of years ago and I watched the human part of it. And even though I didn't understand the rest of it, I know that I like what's there and I know that some other people that I follow like Anna-Louis Smithson is very involved there. And that's a signal to me right there. So I would recommend you look and check what's going on there. Thank you. And this is Joachim Stroh, right? I'm pretty sure he's aware, you know, I don't know how, I don't know how involved he is now, but I know a while back he had his finger in there. The originator, his name is is Raikey Gordon. Raikey Gordon, yeah, I've got, I'm going to screen share so we can see who, what, where. So here's seeds, a regenerative financial system, Raikey Gordon, a currency with a conscience comes out of Haifa DHO, Distributed Human Organization. I've already got them under potential OGM architecture components and under regenerative agriculture and a couple videos. I haven't watched all these videos, so I don't exactly know or remember all of the moving parts, but that's, I'll connect this to today's call. Well, there are a lot of videos where they filmed how they created the Constitution. So, okay, good. I'm glad they're on your, yeah, thank you, in your brain. They're in the map. They have the approval, that's the best you'd say. Well, I mean, I'm trying to figure out where these conversations are having and who's having the conscious conversation. And my fear is that there's only a few people in dark corners having the fruitful conversations and they will be swamped and just forgotten in history as happens. Like, like at these stages, people who are trying to say things that are good for the whole don't often survive the winnowing process of what becomes the set of guidelines for the next tranche of progress. And I think Pete made a good point when he was talking about, like, not having the language for something. It's also like, you just get caught up, like, you don't even, like I catch myself thinking in the old ways when I think that, oh, that's not me, I'm thinking a whole different thing. But it's just we're programmed, we're so used to a certain way of thinking that we really need to take a step back and get a fresh pair of eyes. Agreed. Mark, any thoughts? I completely agree, Stacey. Certainly, my experience with getting sick was a heck of a lot of got to get back to work, work, work, got to get back on the treadmill. When can I do that? That's a tough nut to crack. And what? I made a comment the other day, and I appreciated Laura and, forget your last name. Edwards. Edwards. Comment. But basically, I've, you know, encountered communities and, you know, they have different tones and different feels and, you know, there are people who have large organizations who are doing really interesting things that I just react to, like, ooh, I don't fit here. And shall I continue with that organization because of means and ends? Or should I aesthetically say, you know, I want to place a belong? And that's a tough question in the wild west. You know, Pete, Jerry, and Stacey feel safe, right? And they don't try to sell me. They don't try and manipulate me. They don't try to, and, you know, this the sales and marketing and branding kind of way that the internet has evolved into feels creepy. And I'm not, you know, I haven't put the time into investigating dows. I just kind of said, aha, here's a chunk of decentralized organization. And when somebody works it out, I'll put a toe in and see if I can take a look at it. But I've kind of ignored it. And ignored it with a purpose. You know, basically read more stuff. And think about some of the stuff that is more semiotic and basically, how do we create meaning and make sense together rather than how do we coordinate our actions in a way that we're not stepping on each other's toes? We have a sense of fairness and that fairness is trusted. And there's somehow some currency or money or or value that is different from the kind of value that is meaning in life. But it's actually putting food on the table. And putting food on the table is incredibly important. It's just not something I'm great at. Hey, I can empathize. And I always refer to it as putting food on your family just in honor of W and his malapropisms. Thanks, Mark. Yeah. And from my own take relative to what you were just saying, I can see an easy path to creating or instantiating a DAO for OGM and working our way through some of these things together as an experiment. But partly because I think we have a community that's pretty high trust. We haven't been forged through fire very much. So, you know, that tends to make communities different. But I think we have a, you know, there's a lot of possibility and potential here, which is kind of why I'm trying to figure out where is the, where is the fruitful civilization level conversation happening to share DAO building instructions back to what Pete started with, because the initial conditions of this drive everything. And in this case, it's code and a series of smart contracts and, you know, and ways of determining play. And most DAOs do not appear to be Calvin ball at this point where these things are easily changed anywhere you feel like it later down the road. I think it feels like most of them you're kind of pouring concrete foundations pretty early with rebar that are going to be hard to move around. April and I were just reminiscing about being in Vienna for a trip two years ago. And seeing the flak towers. And you do all know about the flak towers that were in Berlin, Vienna, and a bunch of European cities. And these things are monster, like monstrous facilities, poured of concrete and rebar and whatnot. And they would put any aircraft weapons up on top. And you might, you might be lucky and drop a bomb on it and wipe out the people on it one time, but the tower wasn't going to crumble. So, you know, and these things are still standing and unlikely ever to be taken down. And it feels to me sometimes like some of the tech artifacts that we're building are like that they're hard to hard to unwind, although much less difficult to unwind than poured concrete in the middle of the city. You're muted. Thank you. I have a heck of a lot of disagreements with Jaron Lanier. Yeah, me too. However, however, however, dude is smart. Dude has a dude also. Yeah. One of his earlier books, he talks about, you know, the kind of lock-in that we have with word processors. You know, boy, word star, boy, that was like everything. And then it became word perfect. And then Microsoft Word. And now it's like Google Docs. And that's not exactly a flak tower, but still somehow there's a lot. Microsoft Word is totally a flak tower. Microsoft Office kind of. You get a theoretician talking about WYSIWYG and Microsoft Word. And it's like, okay, that's where we went wrong. And they know the name of the guy who invented Microsoft Word. And it's like... Wow. I think I've had this discussion with not Bob Franksman, but... Who else has it been? The spreadsheet guy. Yeah. Bricklin. Dan Bricklin didn't invent the spreadsheet to do calculations. It was actually a layout machine. But then he's like, okay, so then we got Microsoft Word. Everybody thinks they're a layout person. And it's all terrible. And it's none of it is semantic. So here's Charlie Strauss writing on SA, why Microsoft Word must die. I don't know if that's what you were thinking about, but... Well, if I were you, I would like it to flak tower. To where? Flak towers. Well, I already, I know I, look, I already did that. Thank God. Okay. My life is complete. So wait, you're saying, you're saying I would link Microsoft Word to flak towers? Yes. Yes. That's only a metaphor that's going to work in this conversation. Although here... It's a powerful metaphor. I love it. Hold on. Hold on. Let me just do this. So now, now I can create it. So this has happened in our conversation, so it gives context from our conversation. I'm waiting for the down beach ball to go away. And now I can connect this up to flak towers. And Microsoft Word. And that didn't work. Come on, baby. There we go. Okay, and I'll stop the screen sharing for a second. So, yeah. And my fear is that new paradigms, when they get popular and kind of eat the world, eat the world for a long time. Like, we end up in those things for 10 years to 100 years. And so, we're in one of these punctuated equilibrium moments right this minute. Like, we're living and breathing through one of the moments of chaos between regimes. And a lot, and this is why I have one of the two new stacks question in my head, which is a whole bunch of different assumptions about how society works, how we vote, how we cooperate, how we fund benefits for humans, how we assemble companies into things, how value gets measured, how value gets moved around and rewarded. All of them things are up for renegotiation right now. And there's some really clever solutions out there. There's a bunch of ponies that have like, like pasted on bat ears and, you know, elephants trunks and stuff like that. And we're like, no, no, no. Where's like the actual pony? Where's the sparkle pony? And how do we like make sure that the future regime is mostly sparkle pine? Right. But my fear right now is that the regime is going to be platypus. And, you know, platypus have nasty barbs on their legs. You don't want to get close to. Jerry, there's an underlying assumption in that transition between order, having chaos in the middle. I'm I have a suspicion. It's certainly not a grounded. We love that kind of thing. Go for it. Notion that as we have accelerated the way that humans are able to connect with each other, there's no order that we're actually headed towards. It's all it's chaos all the way down. In the future, you know, I'm not exactly sure about that, but it seems as if, you know, the J curve, the hockey stick phenomena that there are so many interacting parts to culture, to economics, to technology and the speed that I'm not sure that there is a emergent order that I can point to. Maybe that's because we're in the chaos. I can certainly you know, agree that, you know, that's where we have where we are in the process of emergence, but I'm not I'm not exactly sure that there is an order on the other side in the way that civilization used to work or used to be thought of, certainly in the enlightenment and in any post-enlightenment regime that I that I really know of. So I don't know Pete. I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I think I think clearly one of the possible outcomes of the next 50 years is a really extremely chaotic everyone to themselves kind of kind of world where governments have kind of lost authority and broken apart. People have split away in different ways and found and managed to protect different strongholds or something like that and that there's generalized kind of chaos across the land and what what a thousand years from now if they're still in the human's round might be seen as the second dark ages just like we wound up with the Second World War. So I don't think that's out of the question and a lot of the stuff that's happening right now is of life changing extinction level event importance that that the the forces are on the ground that could lead us in that kind of direction. I think just because humans being humans and looking back on history and I was just looking at uh and and I was kind of curating this part of my brain recently so I've got the revolutions of 1848 the springtime of the peoples the prog uprising the german revolutions the french revolution of 18 by the way there's been a whole bunch of french revolutions I didn't realize that and a whole bunch of Paris communes but then but then this thought that came out of a book or an article that I read probably the largest and most violent systemic crisis occurred between 1854 and 1871. It's the main de restoration it's the Indian rebellion is the seapoy mutiny it's the gun dot site in Germany the Spanish glorious revolution and then preceded by the revolutions I just pointed to and and this basically changes you know these are sort of and I was trying to create a thought called years of turmoil and I was putting you know our current protests I think I created this little this tiny nexus here back in 2019 when we had street protests and a whole bunch of stuff and this is connected to was 20 2006 peak democracy and and so on so so I think we're in the mill right now we're in we're in the the great reshaping and one of the reasons I love our work in OGM is that I feel like we're fighting the good fight to try to figure out what the next ground rules are and how to live together and and how to explain those damn things to to other people who aren't involved yet and maybe even recruit them into being part of a civilization that's busy trying to share knowledge and rebuild how to how to do stuff right right that that's what that's what's energizing about this whole effort for me and I don't know if you want to riff on that Pete but where you fall on those spectra it's I find it really hard to I can imagine a bunch of different paths but it's hard to imagine which one is going to be the one it's a book but can you see fruitful paths oh yeah definitely the um I think I mailed it to the GM list there was there was that cool article about went to the other list a guided civic revival and I actually when I look at that it's it it looks like a bit of a Trojan horse to me the way that the article is written um because uh because they have this huge bibliography um and bibliography is it's a lot of it it's about economics so it it looks to me like a Trojan horse that you would wheel into the economic halls and say oh look you know you can just tell that we should you know have a well well-sighted econ paper uh we should have a guided civic retreat by a revival right um and then the economists and you know their iris towers can go um guided civic revival that sounds like great you know in the meantime I think there are other people going you know revolt revolution and they're talking about the same thing um just in different language remember small is beautiful yep and I you know I am highly influenced by the whole earth review and the and the co-evolution quarterly um I certainly you know love place I mean for my birthday I went to West Marin and it's like ah I feel good here and I feel rooted to this wonderful place um because I go there again and again and again and I pay attention to landscape and climate and you know I went to Dillon beach and you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you because of the fog and it was just ah this is weird I wouldn't have chosen to go here if I knew there was fog here but it's um what I choose to be with in a particular kind of way and the uh I I was fortunate to connect with uh Laura Edwards and she's she thinks in a different way than I do but I can learn from it I find that she sparks um at least seven different flips of my way of thinking and one of them you know I think about meaning in a linguistic way and Laura thinks about meaning in a value way and I didn't get that until she she she brought that up and um yeah anyway I'm thinking about it but the what value we can create together I mean you you went through this you know how's really created who's creating the value um before Jerry um I want to listen to the recording of this and and uh get all of them exactly but um I keep on going back to my own experiments of having campfires I get two other people who don't know each other the conversation is incredible um and then here we are at four and and you know other calls we have 20 and that's of a kind of scale a kind of network dynamics and we're talking here about network dynamics from you know maybe individual to the entire Gaia and these network dynamics of say Dows which I'm open completely to understanding and and paying more attention to um uh certainly uh I told uh Brewster um that you know when it comes to cryptocurrency I'm kind of a a Luddite um and he goes Luddite working at the internet archive are you sure it's like well segmentation here but um the DAO seems to be able to or at least thought about you know this what what is the scale of the DAO is the simple question is it 20 people is it 500 people is it above or below the Dunbar number is it you know the scale of uh Apple or IBM or or not um you know does this make sense at the level of the ability to get the type of things done that we want in our culture like MacBooks like Microsoft Word things that are big things that that take time and and a heck of a lot of coordination and are valuable um you know uh space colonies that type of thing um hmm don't know um interesting uh conversation if you were bringing this up and for uh stirring the box around yeah thanks Mark um there's an interesting human tension between the desire to be a little extended family tribe which is what humans are supposed to be and this massive billions of people machine that humanity has become and it's just you know it's it's a part of life there's a real dichotomy there they're two different things um except we we have a foot in both of them and I knew nothing I mean I didn't remember adding this book to my brain before but this is from 1941 by Leopold Korr who's a really famous thinker in this area but this union now a plea for society based upon small autonomous unions is like what we're talking about right yeah as far as I can tell and Korr is kind of the spark of small as beautiful which is the thing that heads toward you know uh you have Schumacher and Hazel Henderson who said Schumacher etc etc there's like a whole lineage there um but I'd be really interested in sort of seeing if anybody's updating those kinds of things yeah uh tables of six are a really great conversational size like that's a that's a very very nice size for having several different interesting conversations and not being overwhelmed and you know getting to know everybody who's at the table and all that kind of stuff um Russ Akoff uh when he would set up workshops and do stuff he would use you know Miller's magic number seven plus or minus two to do the groups so each table would have seven plus or minus two people at it no more than nine because that's the number of people who's who's threads you could hold in your head you could you kind of track that that number of people yeah it looks like uh Paul Panguero um archived the essay is it a book an essay you know what length it is essay okay cool that's great that means it's just a long read there's just too many interesting long reads and I you know um I need to move myself faster into the place where we're munching on long reads together does that make sense yeah makes a lot of sense and mulching them and composting them together and figuring out what the connections are and talking about these kinds of lineages and threads these these little mycelial connections between ideas together um speaking of this yeah um Mary Medjali I mentioned in a past conversation and I went back to her book um wisdom information and wonder what is knowledge for I mean certainly you know I'm coming in on the um you know global brain kind of idea what there we go that's this is what I did not explicitly ask for but what I wanted to say thank you cool and I've not read this book I don't remember even that it's in my brain so thank you for totally highly suggested um first chapter huh you know uh why are we doing these knowledge practices um especially when it comes to specialization yep um and uh a very very wise set of questions that she's asking in the first chapter um and and goes on to to you know engage them more deeply but you know the the point of information can't be just to store it and I brought that up at a at a meeting uh you know one of the open lunches at the internet archive before I joined them um used to go to the Friday lunches all the time and the reply was yeah but we have to store it too that's you know that's a very difficult technical um task that takes a heck of a lot of resources yes I agree yes we have to store it too but it can't be only storage a long read um very valuable thank you looks really interesting um I and these days one of the first things I do is find out if there's a really good review of it or if somebody did a video explaining it on youtube um because usually you often I'll find a 20 minute digest of a good book that that brings me up to date kind of and then now and then it's like oh shit I gotta read this which is why I'm reading Iowa Way's biography now which is fascinating just fascinating his father's birth was a bad portent for his family so they sent them off to live with like poor folk here's one line from my 1000 plus notions from the book a line that I read yesterday or day before yesterday systems of external reward are notoriously as crude and uncertain in their working as systems of punishment this is the extrinsic rewards trumpin's intrinsic motivation kind of thing where's the quote from um somewhere in the book probably the third chapter from midgeley's wisdom book yeah thank you but you know um and all of this goes right back to hell the dowels and the design of dowels exactly I mean it's right there yes um you know what is the value of knowledge itself for its own sake and you know what is the value of knowledge as a commodity you know Pete thank you anyway um thank you yeah thank you and we we've gone an hour and Pete did draft some more paragraphs to a note that I should send looking for a virtual assistant we should look at it real quick we should look at it real quick let's um go back to it over here so uh hi it's jerry I've got a new podcast let me get thumbnails out of the way um I've got a new podcast coming up called leaving the world which is about blah blah blah I'm looking for a smart and thoughtful person to help with doing the operations side of the world things like looking for hosting services for podcasts helping me schedule the requests keeping track of all the little tasks that will need to get done someone you right now please ping me with leads or questions thanks um so is this a description of is this the best description of what I'm looking for I think is the question Mark go ahead time limit uh basically uh hours per hours per month or week or something yeah there's no notion of uh amount a budget or a time yeah yeah I mean I'm not looking to hire a full-time person that's for sure so yeah uh is it monthly or um I don't actually know sort of a rhythm of uh how many episodes might might turn out because because a piece of me is playing with how much of the normal conversations we're having even like this one actually are pieces of this conversation leaving the world episodes in some sense right uh because there there there are things that we were talking about that make a lot of sense in that context here uh from how do dows fit to leopold core and mary migley and good old e f and e f shoemaker was at the coal board it's it's astonishing to me in world history how many things find their way back to coal coal is like this this this this ugly dusty thing at the heart of so much of human history coal mile right unlike well yeah sort of you know the sappers in world war one are basically coal miners from wherever the surviving coal miners were in england because they knew how to dig and stay alive and in the civil war as well yeah yeah we get a lot of human activity around energy yeah and food and killing other humans yeah their positions exactly time-honored tradition at least for our culture yeah yeah yeah exactly and there were other cultures where it wasn't such a big deal and the problem is the interface between those two those two types of cultures that that's really problematic in human history i mean one of one of my big questions is how do you create a pacifist culture that can survive assault by not so pacifist cultures that's that's really important how do you and walk away was interesting in that way like corey doctor's book because he's like just walk away from the thing you built because you can always build a new one and in fact the new one you can improve because you've changed your mind about the the software designs for how to do stuff and then you just instantiated because we've invented matter compilers and you can get you know you can get water from moisture in the air etc etc so we're not quite that far on the tech and i don't know what other visions are appealing in this sense because human history is just this bad story of interesting civilizations wiped out by their warring neighbors go ahead mark you've heard of what people have called the books of e and m banks the culture series yeah i think it's something like automated luxury communism but there's also gay automated luxury right and and you know it's there's falk which is uh yeah well it's the f4 free now fully automated luxury fully automated fully automated luxury communism yep haven't heard of that acronym but thank you yep yep falk uh there we go and i hadn't heard of the different variants so i've got uh falk here but not the others and utopian visions of automation uh automation may bring us a comfy future uh here's one a i could perfect communism you know the the work of um cyber net assist stafford beer oh yes um uh was moving in that a i could perfect communism uh notion but uh stafford is a really cool thinker and and his books are a mixture of tight set and hand drawn and they're very they're they're not abstract and plaky they're just they're like integral and beautiful and i wish i wish i actually spent more time finishing and reading i which one was it platform for change is the one i this one was this is the one that i had yeah yeah and the pages are different colors uh like it's all white quite black he must have been held for his publishers to work with but really fun as a thinker teens integrity and he got wrapped up into project cybersyn with a yende chile which ended badly which ended really badly anyway thank you for this conversation let me go back to the letter for a second so so pete thank you for for what you wrote i think i need to just spend a little bit of time with the second paragraph looking for you know what the you could totally rewrite it um well i like the rest of it yeah fully automated luxury gay space communism in know your name on the wrong place sweet that's the whole thing thank you i forgot about space the old space yeah it's like nuke the gay whales for jesus which was a thing back in the 80s i guess nuke the gay whales for christ yeah um thank you more soon no i'm just i'm i'm i'm uh i'm censoring myself because richard category had a set of bumper stickers that were guaranteed to get you pulled out of your car and beaten to a pulp in the south but um it's not pretty good it's not it's not appropriate for this conversation uh because it's being recorded okay to be to be uh yeah so so jerry it's time to stop the recording i think that's entirely can say one or two things and then we can there we go