 Are you are you. So this is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, February 16, 2023. Hey, Mark, you're walking. I am. Excellent looks like a barn. Oh, it's just a Chevron. Too bad. Too bad that bucolic barns have been replaced by Chevron. I'm looking for how to turn on the transcript. It's, it keeps moving on me. I don't know why. Thank you. So beautiful transcript save. Good. Now that's working. Hi everybody. Doug is back from Malaysia and was just telling me a bit about staying in KL for two days and then going up to the jungles for four days, I think. It's been two days and it sounds like it was magical. Sounds like it was a lovely trip. Well, it was in a way visiting a wounded part of the, of the world. But people were amazingly healthy. So you saw both signs of stress and signs of health. All together, I guess. Yeah. So Doug, welcome back. I would still love to turn to the topic that you had posed in front of us maybe next week. Although there's a couple of topics sort of that are in front of us that we might choose from, but we might do that next week. This is a check in week. Last check in call two weeks ago, we did the Stacy protocol. The Stacy protocol is in my brain as the Stacy protocol. And I will talk through it, talk us through it again now. So we're familiar with it, which is raise your zoom hand if you are moved to add to the conversation. So you volunteer your way into the queue. I'm not picking the queue. Before speaking, please pause for however long you feel is fit. The silence helps us process. I will not pass the mic. So it turns out that in zoom, everybody sees the same queue because as the hands go up, that's the order they wind up in your view in. So if you're next in the queue, please step on in on your own. And then the chat is open season. So go ahead and chat away. Add your comments. And sometimes you can add into the chat what you thought you wanted to say by stepping in to take your turn in check in. And then the chat is open season. So if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to do that. Totally cool. And then you'll just check in a little bit later or something like that. Or maybe already checked in. But that is the way to, to proceed through this particular method of operations. Any questions or comments? What was the last yellow thing on your brain list? The last yellow thing on my brain list was potential brain drops, which is. Brain drops are basically. So I'm, I've been doing some of those and. Explaining the Stacy protocol is on my list of potential brain drops. How about that? Patty question. I do have a question. I haven't been in many of these check-ins. So just curious when we say check-ins, is it what's happening for me personally? Can check-ins include thoughts and curiosities? We've been pondering. What is the nature of the check-in? I guess. I think all of those qualify. The general umbrella is, is OG. So open global mindedness, which is a pretty broad umbrella. So yeah. I think that'll work out great. And with that, I will go quiet and let the first. People go. I think that's me. And I actually had a couple of meta comments to two meta comments. One of them is another part of the, the Stacy protocol I think that we came up with last time was that it was okay to go more than once, which is a little bit different than, than our usual check-ins. And the other thing is that I was on a. Actually it's the sense doing call with Joanne. Joanne and I were sharing an iPad to be on zoom. And there was one oddity with the, the hand. It was a Q that I think the person you are is always at the top of the queue. It looks like, so you have to kind of watch a little bit carefully. Go. You're saying not, that's not true. I even sound that. So it may be on an iPad. Maybe an iPad specific. I don't know. It was iPad specific. It's fine. I'm on a computer now. And it's not like that. But the iPad always kept us top left. And it was a little bit confusing to tell where you were. And Pete, thank you for clarifying. And I think we should also maybe have a Stacy protocol for check-in only and a Stacy protocol for the full call. And the check-in only means only go once and then don't, don't repeat. And then the full call means that's that protocol for how we run it. But thank you for differentiating. I have added that to my brain. Yeah. Another one was leave your hand up until you're done speaking. Thank you very much. And can we not call it that anymore? I mean, I'm really honored, but it's enough. Thank you. So we should brainstorm a different thing to call it. Maybe it sounds good or replacement would be good. Have it just S. S. I like the letter S. Okay. It flows. It's good. Call it the OGM protocol. I've already got a collection of three that I've described. They're all different. In my brain that we've been using an OGM so we can sort of switch back and forth. There was the Doug protocol. There's my default protocol. And now there's the. Protocol. I'm Peter. You complete. And Mr. Trexler, you are on the hoof. So you can't quite see the same display we see. So I will queue you in, but you. That's why that's why I raised my hand right away. Because I knew that only Pete has had had his hand raised. So it would be hard for me to lose track of where I was in the OGM. No, just a very quick thing. I'm reading Greta Thunberg's book. The climate book that just came out last week, I think. It's a massive book. It's an audio book of close to 18 hours. And even though I'm listening to it at 2.5 speed, it still is a long audio book. But it really, from an OGM perspective, I think that's what it sounds like is going to be about a hundred short snippet papers. From, you know, every conceivable expert on every conceivable. Topic. And, you know, it just. It just makes me wonder who is the audience for this thing. I mean, 18 hours. Of relatively simplistic, you know, aimed for a general audience. Discussions of pretty much. The topic in a format that no one's going to read. They'll forget everything that was in there pretty much instantaneously. And it just, you know, it just raises the question again of for a problem like climate change, the standard methods of communication, the standard methods of sense making, so to speak to the extent you want to cry and call it that. Just don't work. And I think I think this book is just a great example of that. From a jump in. Short moment of silence here. I mean, basically. We have to move on into very practical decision making steps. I mean, there's so many, there's so much information out there. It's just overwhelming. It's paralyzing, you know, the votes to journal at an article yesterday about this ice fields. There is about the collapse and. 11 feet of water rise, but then they say, you know, it's in the next hundreds of years. Well, no, it's just, this is maybe 30 years, right? 20, 30 years where we will experience this. And. So, so the, and nothing, it really is going to happen until the general public gets a sense of, I could be doing something here. You know, this is how I could engage and we just don't talk about it. And the reason for that is that you have a corporate structure. I mean, there are people who control the energy and the food and all of that. And they're just, I want to see any change happening that would change and force change into their business models. And in many cases, whether that's the electric sector or the food sector, those changes are pretty structural, pretty fundamental. And many of them, I mean, it's the Kodak model. Many of them, I'm not going to make it. And, and, and I'm not even trying really, you know, because in order to really everyone, like general bills and in my, like in my sector ties, they know exactly what needs to be done. They just don't want to do it now. And so to get the information translated to the general public, that really is the challenge. And the media systems are simply not, not working in, in educating the public and, and not alarming. I mean, you need to be alarmed in some way, but in a, in a constructive way, you know, where this is actionable. I can do something about this year. And so we're spinning, you know, and I've been doing this now for 10 years. You know, we just keep spinning. And, and in this group here, we're so aware of where we're heading into, but we're still not talking about very realistic steps. It's like in this webinar I was hosting on Tuesday in the chat. There was a very lively conversation happening in the, in the chat area. We have all these immigrants coming from South America, many of them are smallholder farms, farmers. You know, why don't we let them have five, 10 acres of farming and get into food production on a very hyper-local level and repair the damage that has been done to the environment. There are so many things we could be doing. We just, we just don't do it. Okay. I'll loop into this void. Sometimes should we have a conversation about what happens if we agree that we're not going to make it? Well, we're not going to make it. It's, you know, I mean, I'm come to eclipse was when I'm going to make it. It's as clear as can be. Doug, we, I'd like to have that conversation, but I'd like, I'm not sure how to have it. So I think designing how to have that conversation is an interesting question too. As usual, I want to know who's we and what do you mean by not going to make it, you're talking extinction, you're talking collapse of civilization, you're talking a reduction of human population from 8 billion down to 1 billion. Just curious, what does that mean to say we're not going to make it. Well, that would be part of the discussion. We could start with the breakdown of. Infrastructure and the supply shades. Well, I found myself in a very personal take on it this week. Am I, am I breaking the protocol here? Sorry. I'm on the iPad now, Pete, so I can't see what. So I'm going to go ahead and do the same. Sorry, Patty, Patty's up next. Sorry, Patty. It's okay. No need to apologize. Well, just real quick then. So for me, that we're not going to make it is. Is the. What impact is the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet to have on Bay Area real estate, which is where I live, not far from the water. So it just takes a whole catastrophe. Makes it very personal. I like the question. I appreciate Doug. I appreciate the question. Gill, I appreciate. You presencing. What's alive in you around Doug's question. And I. I will, I would love to check in. And I think. Perhaps part of that for me is I feel like acknowledging the, what I feel is the wisdom in Doug's question. You know, what would it look like to have the conversation that. I've never been a part of that conversation. I haven't witnessed anyone having that conversation. And I think that there is. There might be value and wisdom in. Having the conversation. That. So many have been, at least in my experience, it seems to be so many have just avoided having, we don't go there because we don't know how to have it. I think they're, I'm hearing a theme of a lack of per clauses, clauses sharing. Perhaps a lack of. Emotional inner resourcing. To support one and having that conversation. Or in having the conversation. To. The degree of identifying where action can and cannot be taken. In one's personal life. And I think that that. The sense of. In clauses sharing, I was hearing the elements of denial, perhaps. If, if I'm not acting. Might it be because I can't fathom. What it would mean to hold that truth and hold that possibility. And do I feel paralyzed? Do I feel. Do I feel paralyzed? And so in Doug's invitation to have that conversation. I feel that as an invitation to move forward into. And I think that that would be something that I would like to talk about for some might be the experience of paralysis and overwhelm and. And not, not for all, but I do feel it's a really. Beautiful invitation. I wouldn't know how to have that conversation. I'd be interested to be a part of it and witness it. My. I mean, back to what has been coming up in the chat around the country for the first time in my life, I'm 31 years, I know. Thank you. Yeah, I'm 31. I'm going to Costa Rica and I am going to be a stones throw away from the one and only Todd Hoskins and spending some time with with Todd when I'm out there. Yes. Yes. Thumbs up all around. I'm very excited for that many spending a month there and. Just thrilled. Hmm. Yeah, I think that's my check in. I feel complete for now. Hi, Judas. I'll step in just for a moment as moderator to facilitate something I'm noticing that many of you probably noticed, which is there's we're in a weird limbo state between check in and full conversation mode where we're responding to each other. So in check in. I think the intention is correct me if I'm wrong that each of us checks in with what is happening with us around us within us and what we do with our general shared topic. And per the Doug protocol. There's a check in round which then ends at which point we shift into okay, which of the things presented during check in would we like to spend the rest of our time together talking about. And then there's a slightly different protocol for that time. And I think I haven't been very clear about. About where we are or whether we're doing that because it would be nice to do. But we're not going to be replying to each other here kind of Quaker meeting style where messages don't answer other messages, but rather let everybody check in and we're not that big a group. And then go and then keep notes to yourself and then go into the general discussion that that feels like an interest like a slightly more structured use of our time and maybe the way to go for this one. I've got some, some finger wiggles on that. So why don't we treat this as check in for now and then we'll get back to that. So if everybody's kind of had their turn, we will then slow things down and turn things toward. All right, let's go into this, this or that. So thank you. And Mark, you Mark Caronza. You have the con. Quickly. For people who are joining late. Is there a way to have a. I guess on the matter most. There's some place that's shared the topic so I can check it before. And don't have to ask this question. Thanks. Mark, great question. I wish there was a, an arrival banner that hosts could, could write up so that for any particular zoom call, when a new entrance showed up, you could show them, Hey, this is this and this is what we're doing, but there wasn't such a thing. We in the chat, but you don't get to see the chat. You can see that from the beginning before you show up into the call. Yeah, or a sticky, sticky chat exactly. And the idea of putting it in the matter most channel is good too, although I don't think all of us check the matter most or are really participating that much on the matter most putting in there is good. We could have a simple web page and what I'm going to do is create wiki pages for each of these protocols. So that then there would be a one, two and a half. That could be a one that would be helpful for that explanation that could work too. So like that zoom is whiteboard. That's like the cone of silence, Ken. And I believe Mark is complete. So, Doug. It's okay. So I'm. I'll treat. This is my first check-in. And so stuff that's on my mind. Well, I just got back from a strip. where the juggles are filled with orcas and not tigers. It was an amazing trip. I also, two weeks ago, just published my book called Garden World Politics, which is at Amazon. And it was an amazing relief to get it out. And I've already drafted a second book called Thinking Thinking. And the idea is that we cannot solve climate change with the way that we're thinking. We need an alternative way. And so in the history of Western and Eastern civilization, have there been possible ways of developing our thinking that we haven't exploited yet that actually could cope? And I think that materialism builds up a world from the bottom up and never quite gets up very far. So can it be turned around and say, for example, that the universe is consciousness and our little consciousness is a moment every now and then when we break into that bigger consciousness. And the question is, what does the earth look like from that bigger consciousness? So that's been fun. I'm also struck by the fact that the paralysis that we feel has a kind of freedom in it. We don't have to do anything right. And that it's Napoleon once said it's urgent to wait. And maybe that's where we are end of check-in. Doug, you're up. So what's living for me is actually the circle up that Gil and Ken did yesterday around the meme of trust. Around the meme of trust. And trust for me is sort of loaded because you don't have the concept of trust without the concept of distrust. It sort of requires that duality and carries with it a basis or rationalization for shifting into blame. And ultimately it's rooted in fear, which is the concept of trust being broken and failing. So I was a bit challenged by that as the source soil for it. But what I noticed came out of it in the breakout rooms was in asking the question, did you experience a breach of trust in your life? Like what was that about? And what emerged in terms of the value in the gold wasn't about trust, but it was in people sharing those experiences, the sort of cathartic shifting into feeling and also connection by and between the people sharing with each other. And so people came out sharing more about that, the commonality connections, then thematically about the concept of trust itself. And that was sort of living for me because it's in my frame in orientation, the inquiry in the center is about connection and disconnection. And how can connection be provoked, catalyzed, increased by and between because out of that comes sort of awareness, care, empathy, all of the juicy stuff. And when that's underlying and aggregated, it generates movement, it generates action, it generates collective response. So that's sort of center of focus is living for me. Just as an aside, focusing on what if we don't make it, ultimately ends up in the same place in my mind, which is, are we gonna be any more consequential going down that rabbit hole in addressing what to do in the event of than we have been in avoiding that? I'm not sure it's not in the inquiry, same old, same old in mapping to how do we change or affect course. So, and I think that's it for me, I'm complete. So let me offer a check-in and a response that's kosher under whichever protocol we're operating in here. So, Doug, your quote, Doug C, your quote of Napoleon that's urgent to wait. What's the word? Feels like a very welcome interpretation of the mood that I'm in these days. I've been challenged by dealing effectively with all the balls that I have in the air, kind of frustrated at the pace of my pace of movement on projects and my coach on Monday said to me, well, what if you took the thing you think is the most important and just put it down for 90 days? And before I could even think of a response, my body just relaxed. I just felt the truth of that. And I've now done that and been kind of perplexed by it and wondering if it's the right thing to do or whatever, but Napoleon thanking Napoleon. Yeah, it's for me, it's urgent to wait. And it relates to the question of what if we don't make it because he was saying that in the heat of battle and conquest and so forth. And the notion of waiting, of being patient in the face of utter urgency when everybody is panicking is pretty important. When I have a friend who's an emergency responder, a former firefighter, firefighter, executive, whatever they call the folks in leadership and firefighting game. And we've probably talked about this before in OGM, but one of the things he shared is that when the folks are up in the timber of California fighting the forest fires on incredibly long ships without rest and so forth. When teams finally take a break and go back to camp for their few hours of rest, they take time to carefully properly stow all their gear. They don't just like collapsing exhaustion and dealing with it later. Everything is put away, cleaned up, hoses are coiled. There's a patience in the face of the urgency that's something worth us considering. And so I think about that when I think about a conversation about not making it and also that it's one of those places where that calls for a mirror conversation which is what are we doing that's working and what's working well. And the media is not attuned to that conversation. The media is attuned to believes it leads. But I would say that despite all not to disagree at all with what Doug and Klaus and others are saying about the looming disasters there's also incredible progress in all sorts of ways and all sorts of places and all sorts of levels. So I don't know if those conversations should happen separately or together but I feel a call to both of those. Last, Doug B, thank you for what you said about trust. I have a different interpretation about it than we do. So I would just, you know so it's part of my interpretations of what you described about what trust is is an interpretation of what trust is. Not a definition, but then thank you for that but you did call forth something that I didn't quite realize happened yesterday which is that trust grew in the course of that hour and a half of these, you know 20 or 40 people that were there. And it may be grew because of what you said about connection and sharing and intimacy. But something, you know I cannot know if this was in your mind but it wasn't in my mind going into that that we would actually grow trust in the course of the conversation about trust. That's kind of interesting. I'm complete. It was very much in my mind, Gil. Well, I figured you're way smarter than me about these things. Yeah, thanks Gil. I agree, I think there's very much an opportunity to blend the kind of conversations that Doug and Klaus wanna have in a way that keeps that hope in there and that also offers an opportunity to build connection and trust because that's what I think these kinds of calls do. So as my check-in one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about which I always think about is how people's actions don't always reflect the values they say they want to put forward. And it was interesting because I heard that in a conversation the other day and I'm gonna give credit to Kim Wright but it came to me by way of telephone that she said it. But I'm always thinking how like all of us and that goes for everybody in this room whether we like it or not, we've been conditioned under capitalism. And what I notice is that when we think of solutions we're still in that sort of paradigm and how that affects us. And I know for me personally when I'm in certain spaces, not necessarily here but spaces that even come together where they talk more about being drawn together because of spiritual reasons, the work they do, their motivation is still being drawn from that capitalist kind of paradigm. I noticed myself, I am hesitant to kind of point it out, well, wait a minute let's stay where we are because it's very hard to be the one saying, wait a minute, we're doing that old thing again. And what I'm trying to say in a very roundabout way is the more we have these conversations and now I'm talking about a conversation that might take what Doug wants to talk about what Klaus wants to talk about, bring it together in terms of, so what would we do? It's the end, what are we gonna do? Having all these different ideas in a hypothetical space allows for a lot of imagining and a lot of re-putting things together in different ways without the emotional blocks that sometimes keep us from speaking out. And I know I'm all over the place with this and maybe somebody that knows what I'm trying to say can state it's better, feel free, I won't take offense. But yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to be in a space where we could hear ideas about how we could do things better. And just real quickly, Klaus had mentioned, these people and these corporations, they know what to do, they're just not doing it. I'd like to hear that conversation with those people in the room. And really, I mean, okay, let me start over. What I notice, sometimes even with our own friends, they're doing something, or I'll just ask a question and I'll leave it at that. What would you do if a friend of yours were working on a project? Maybe it was a tech project. And you saw that there was a piece in there that down the road could really have harmful effects. How likely would you mention it? Maybe you had a solution to it, maybe you had a fix, maybe you didn't, but how likely would you be to speak that out? And that does tie into trust and different ways of looking at trust. And I'll stop there because mine's more of a thought prompt than anything else. There's an interesting phenomenon you're taking place right now. I was listening into some of the German conversations there. And the reason is that the Ukraine war just keeps accelerating. I mean, Russia is just not backing off and they're pouring hundreds of thousands of people into this fight even. So it's referred to as a meat grinder. For the last 10 days, Russia has lost something like 850 people a day. But the European Union is running out of ammunition. They have pretty much shot off all the stockpiles. They have thrown in the entire arsenal. And now the current production of artillery shells, for example, the Ukrainians are shooting off an annual production run in about two months. So that can't go on a whole lot longer without some really automatic shifts and it's creating a real soul searching in the Europeans because that's what being posed here. If anything is now more imminent and more dangerous than it was at the start of this conflict. So the Europeans really have to make up their mind how far they want to go. And it is creating a collective kind of soul searching on how to respond to this because they will have to mobilize industrial capacity at a scale that will impact the entire economy. It will impact the mechanics of the EU. And that's really maybe what it takes is to see and understand the threat ahead of you in a war. We can process, we can understand what that looks like. People just can't... You see a report that this iceberg is about to collapse and will rise sea levels by 11 feet. It just doesn't translate into this imminent threat. It's abstract, it's far removed, it's years into making. And I don't think our brains are designed to deal with this. So the complexity of what humanity is doing to the environment, it's at the intellectual level, at the thought leadership level, it's fully understood. We're really down to the way we can't continue to grow food the way we do because it destroys the rest of life. It just hasn't translated into the context it's just hasn't transformed yet and translated yet into an understanding of crisis that allows a collective response. So, and then of course the environmental changes by the time they come, you can't correct them anymore. In a war, you can mobilize and you can have a fairly immediate response. But with the environment, you have glaciers melting. One sort of Pakistan was under water last year because the Himalayan glaciers are melting at such a rapid pace. But what if the water is gone? The Himalayan glaciers are supporting China, Pakistan and India with critically important water. So what if that runs dry? You have like what three billion people living in that area. So the challenges I had are just stunningly complex. It just really blows my mind to think about it and I have to be super careful to not immerse into this in a way where it paralyzes me. But so yeah, I mean, I don't have any answers but I'm just saying it's the need is to mobilize the collective mind. And with all the technology that we have today we should be able to do this quite rapidly if the will to do so was available. I'm sorry, I just have a question. Maybe I missed something because I was typing the technology to move the collective mind. I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm referring to information technology. Okay. We have the capacity to structure information in ways that is compelling that can reach across the spiral and reach people to where they are. No, you can frame the issue in ways that becomes context specific to specific population groups. It's absolutely, it's a no-brainer but we are just unwilling to do it. Because I just wanna add in how important it is for the collective heart to be a part of that because that's really missing. Yeah, I'm gonna agree that it's not a no-brainer either. I mean, we have all kinds of technology but minds aren't changed by technology. Mines change in some other kind of way than technology what Mark Prexter talked about earlier about Greta's climate book. As a great example of technology and reach and branding and resources, but maybe without a strategy of change of what kind of communication is needed for whom to support them in moving. I think the question, the technology is, we can get into a conversation about social media technology and the impact it's had. But I think it's a fundamental question of how do minds change? That is not a no-brainer and needs really careful thought and a lot of experimentation because we don't know for sure but that's part of the question we're in. I don't know if anybody ever makes anybody else's minds change and yet minds change. One great reference on this, great resource on this is Spinoza Flores Dreyfus's book Disclosing New Worlds. I don't have the full title in front of me, Pete, can probably find it in an instant because the subtitle is interesting also. And it very much goes into the question of mind change at a business and political and cultural level. So I invite people to have a look at that. Thanks. So collapse would not be an instantaneous event, it would be a process. And in the process of collapse, there would be a margin phenomena. That's where I think things like classes projects are so important. So it's a, well, now back to the question of thinking and the collective thinking. We think of collective thinking as the sum of our thoughts of individuals coming together. I think that's wrong because it leaves us still with a fragmented world. If we start from the other end, that the parts are the product of the whole and the whole is what we need to be thinking about, we might come to a different place. I don't know, but that's my guess. I will point out briefly that we have slipped out of check-in mode into conversational mode and Doug, the pauses were intentional. We're sort of waiting between speakers to let things sort of soak in a little bit, but we have to rethink whether or not I should be managing the queue or anything like that because we're totally in conversation mode now and I was trying to bring us back into check-in mode. Yeah, I think there were no hands up. That's why I did that. Judy, I can't tell if you're just doing a long pause, but you're up. Oh, I didn't realize it was my turn, apologies. I guess I'm thinking a lot lately about how it is that people connect with other people and what that process is and how it moves from superficial to substantial and how it leads to actually thinking about things in different ways. So I'd be interested in exploring that further either today or at another time because it seems to me that we're all in variable states at any moment in time based on other distractions, other things going on in life and the ability to discern the inclination maybe more than the ability, the inclination to discern our state of self-awareness and our state of questioning and our ability to interact, to influence people and whether we have the responsibility or the opportunity or whatever to influence people, I would posit is not something that people think about very often that we're much more impulsive as a culture, as a humanity. And because of that, we're unable to grapple with big issues because it's so easily dismissed as it's outside my scope. I can't do anything to really help climate change. What difference will it make if I drive my car once a week instead of every day? And so I think there's a feeling of impotence that goes with that in terms of the immersion in the challenges of daily events. And there needs to be in my mind some sort of inspirational, uplifting occurrence to invite people to be reflective, to think beyond the immediacy of I have to cook dinner because everybody's gonna be here in 45 minutes. And I don't know how to address that. I struggle with it myself in terms of my own levels of distraction at times, but I'd be really interested to dive deeply into that conversation. I'm going to pause for a bit. Thanks. Hey, I raised my hand just to appreciate what an amazing time is to be alive. Really remarkable. So for some reason, things that occurred 30 years ago, keep popping up in my consciousness in this brain, not having an outboard brain. And so at the same retreat that I did the Beings in Deep Time with Joanna Macy, she was talking about face and despair. There's a lot of people who are looking at the world and saying it's hopeless for all. And this is early in 90s, it's all gonna go and we're gonna be extinct. But if I took you to the river, and I held you under water, you would very, very quickly find the will to live. You would start to fight. You would not simply go, oh, I'm just gonna drown. You would fight back. And climate change and many of the other things that we're facing are Medusa level fears. You look at them and you turn to stone, I'm paralyzed. I don't know what to do, right? It's an ancient mythic thing we're facing in terms of the energy of it. And somebody once said the time for pessimism is long past. We don't have time to wring our hands and go, oh, whoa is me, we have to come together and work. And MIT has the Center for Collective Intelligence. I recently watched a very interesting talk with Gary Hamill and Tom Malone about collective intelligence. And one of the questions was, what do you do when it's very clear that the collective intelligence is available but there are people in positions of power who refuse to acknowledge it? This is specifically about corporations. Like what do you do when you have a CEO or someone in the C-suite who's holding on to an old way of thinking? And Malone was very straightforward. He said that's definitely something that happens. There are people who they don't want to surrender to a higher, better way of knowing. They wanna hold all the power and they can delay collective intelligence for years. And I think that's what's happening with a lot of our quote leaders in positions of leadership and governance. They don't want to acknowledge that they don't have the answers. They don't wanna turn it over and say, hey, let's get some really good thinking about this. Who's got some ideas on this? Because that would mean that they don't know what they're doing. And if they don't know what they're doing, they would no longer be in power as leaders. So how do we, yes, that's Hamill's razor, I believe, Mark, to not ascribe to ignorance what can be explained to evil and it's the other way around, I think. Don't ascribe to evil what can be explained to ignorance. So I've been on fire for 35 years since I started to become aware of what was happening in the world ecologically since I read Bucky Fuller's critical path in 1987. And the need to not act out of urgency but to sit with my hair on fire, to sit with the challenges and to find a way to not be coming out of a place of fear and constriction to stay connected to resources to keep my mind open and focus on what is possible, what is happening that is supportive, that is moving towards that new world that we wanna see. And there's a lot of it. And the media does a shit job of reporting it. And I think Gil and I talk about moods a lot in the living between worlds calls and the media is responsible. And when I say media, I'm talking about Disney and Comcast and all these people who have interlocking boards of directors who say this is what we're gonna report. They do a really shit job of reminding us that there are amazing things happening all over the world. There are movements, if anybody's seen Paul Hawkins, blessed unrest with all the organizations behind him. Amazing things happening every single day but it doesn't get reported. And all we see is Putin and all this shit that's going on that is keeping the Medusa in front of us. It behooves certain people if most of us are paralyzed. I am not, I have no religion per se but I trust in evolution. I trust that the evolutionary intelligence that were 0.2 billion years ago, something on a ball of molten lava surrounded by a toxic cloud of gas came to life and has continued for 4.2 billion years every single generation to create everything we've seen around us, this amazing planet. And to me, that's the higher power that I surrender to. I don't know how to fix things. I do know how to help people talk through difficulty and I do know that it is possible for folks to, we're extremely polarized to actually confront that and move through it and come to a different understanding and the ability to work together. They don't have to see eye to eye on everything. They just have to have enough of a sense of what we're doing here is important to life. I think it was Golda Meir like 40 years ago who said something in the effect of if I can't convince Yasser Arafat to allow me to live, I at least have to convince him to allow my grandchildren to live. I will not forgive myself or him if we let our grandchildren carry this stupid grudge forward and kill each other. And so I think we're all coming to this point of, what are we gonna do? It's really a scary time and it's overwhelming and it's paralyzing and yet we can't be paralyzed and we can't rush to action. So it requires a tremendous capability of soul. Roka's poem, The Wing and Energy of Delight, take your well-disciplined strengths and stretch them between two opposing poles because inside the human heart is where God lives and learns. That's what we're called to do right now. We have to, as Nietzsche said, we have to become the gods that we've killed off because we are now responsible for the future, for the planet, for everything that's alive on it. It's a massive responsibility. I'm certainly not up to it, but I'll take what I have, what comes to me and do whatever I can. And that has to be enough. I cannot afford to let myself become distracted by the naysayers and the medusas out there. I just put one foot in front of the other and meet people and say hello and try and find a way to connect so that we can do something together that's useful. I am complete. Thank you. I actually sort of wanna check in and I made a couple of notes for myself in the chat. So I just wanna mention multiple things. The first season of the Tools for Thinking podcast is kind of done, but I've been collecting up summary pages for each of the episodes and finding all the missing parts and a couple episodes weren't produced yet and we lost the guy at BetaWorks who was doing all the productions. So I'm sort of corralling all that together, but expect me to be putting some links into our Mattermost and other places about the series, which was really cool. And it's very much about Tools for Thinking, but we had a bunch of really fun conversations, useful conversations in there. As I mentioned briefly earlier, I've been doing YouTube shorts just kind of experimentally with no fancy graphics or anything, just me talking head for 60 seconds, hit send and then weaving those into my brain in different ways. And I'm trying to figure out how they connect into a larger story because one of the problems with TikTok and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and all the short media is that they're not nuggets that are easily, that many people are weaving into narratives, never mind larger points of view or anything like that. And I think that those things are actually, I think that these shorts are actually lovely tools for weaving larger narratives and I'm trying to be an exemplar of that. I've got a page I'll share in the chat after I've finished checking in called Bigger Goals, which was my attempt to set bigger goals for me for 2023. And the first one was share stories of what's working, which was why I was doing these YouTube shorts. And the place where I focused down narrowly was a thought in my brain called revitalizing cities where for many years now, for a couple of decades now I've been collecting up stories which are TEDx talks and articles and examples and whatever ways in which cities are doing cool stuff that's often very grass rootsy. It's seldom top down by the city government. It's often something that just sort of came up in the spirit of storytelling because I have an amateur theory that when people see stories and then get excited about a story and then request resources because they'd like to try to do the thing that they heard in the story that that is a really interesting model for progress. And so I also created a page called what multiplayer sense making needs because I'm about this shared memory and my bigger goals are trying to match up with what the multiplayer sense making needs are from my perception, all comments welcome. This month's task is to create shared notes with other people. So anybody who'd like to share notes with me technologically through whatever note taking system you have ping me any way you like say so in the chat or whatever else but be really excited about that. And then I realized when I'd made that list some time ago in the chat here that the things that I'm talking about are intended to help dissolve problems in climate change and so forth. And I realized also that I'm mesmerized dreadfully by the Ukrainian situation. I really feel a lot of empathy for Ukraine. Small side note, my maternal grandfather was born in Chernovitz which is northeast of Kiev. So some of my DNA traces it's way back there as well but I'm realizing that the kind of mobilization that Greta Thunberg is looking for on climate change is the kind of mobilization we're now realizing we need to make for the war to get arms makers back on a war footing to take down Russia. And it's like, wow, those two things are exactly opposite. We need to destroy more of the earth and put more pollutants into the earth and create more weapons of devastation just to get the waters calm enough to maybe collaborate together to solve this other God forsaken crisis which we're busy not looking at. And so part of the reason I do a care a lot about sense making and trust between people is that we are now Medusid, we are immobilized not because, yes, because these are hyper objects these are problems, wicked problems they look too big to solve but also mostly because we are very intentionally manipulated against one another and we are being pitted in a battle over power over the joystick and the cockpit. We are being intentionally pitted against one another and the way you pit people against one another is you get them to buy narratives. That's it, narratives of the weapon and QAnon is a narrative, it's a narrative. And a whole mess of people bought that narrative and went out and did stuff in the world that I'm not thrilled about and there's a bunch of other narratives like that. The Great Replacement Theory is a narrative. There's a whole set of these narratives that are fueling and unfortunately arming a lot of people into this immobilization spot and I'm very interested in how we dissolve the immobilization and the reason I tell tiny stories, 60-second stories about things that work that might bring citizens together to create an edible landscape like the city of Todd Morden did in the UK which is one of my favorite TEDx talks is that I have a feeling that if people knew each other better they would stop fearing each other and if they got together over making food and putting food plants around their city they could ignore political boundaries, you're red and I'm blue and sort of get to the work of doing stuff together. And if we don't do that even at a small scale we stand no chance in face of the larger disasters that are happening. And then last thought by means of Chekin is a bit of a reply to earlier which is I think the way we fail is only catastrophic if we manage to wipe out major food systems. So we kill off the oceans as a food generating engine and we've wiped out most of humanity. There won't be that many people who managed to survive a complete loss of the food failure of the food system. But otherwise that failure is very lumpy the privileged people get eaten by our Brontorock as Meryl Streep did and don't look up. They get to get off the planet or whatever I don't know but the failure then is clumsy and slow and humans are insanely adaptable. That's one of our benefits and one of our, yes, Pam Warhurst is exactly the talk Kim, thank you. One of our great benefits is how adaptive humans are and one of our great weaknesses is how adaptive we are because we have no memory unless we keep telling the stories of what happened which is what song lines are which is how Germany deals with the Holocaust. They tell the stories over and over again and still Germany has this gigantic bar right movement that just keeps ballooning. It's like we can't and I refuse to believe that humans are just nasty and violent and that's just our fate and we should just arm up and defend ourselves better against the nasty people on the other side of the river. Sorry for the very long check-in but all these things are burbling around in my head. I am complete. Jerry, I see that your hand is still up. Is there silence that you are trying to invite in? I wanna honor it if so. There was a forgetfulness that I had invited in unintentionally. Perfect, I noticed if Mark is still here I noticed that Mark has a green when your box popped up Mark I saw the green check mark and I wanted to make space for you to check in before I reshared or shared again. Thank you Patty. I am still preparing, you're perfectly in line. Go for it. I will invite in a moment of silence first. Really been enjoying what's being shared. There's been a lot coming up for, no, hold on. There's been a lot coming up for me in the sharing that feels like it ties very much into what I am exploring in my own curiosity and in my own space. I continue to come back to this idea of collective emotional maturity. And it's, I think what that means to me when I think of emotional maturity in one human I see that as one's ability to hold among many other things to hold the possibility for a narrative that is not black and white but holds the complexity and the nuance of both sides. I see that as the ability to experience and to feel and be present with difficult, challenging we'll call them emotional experiences while still remaining in what some call like the window of tolerance or being able to keep one's nervous system safe and open. I see that as the ability to communicate clearly and to be connected with one's needs and to be able to articulate and advocate for those needs in a timely and appropriate manner among other things. These are just a few facets of how I understand and what I understand emotional maturity to be. And I think when as we've been in discussion what keeps coming up for me is this other I don't hear people thinking about this or talking about this and it could just be the sample size of the people that I interact with. But I continue to hear this idea when we talk about the experience of the emotional experience being one that like, oh, like it's not a formula, like, oh, you know it's when we are holding space for someone else or we're engaging with someone else the experience of emotion, it can't be it's not rigid, we're in flow with this other thing and it's not, there's no pattern there's no formula available. And I think I'm part of what I'm engaging with is I'm moving forward in challenge to that idea. And I suspect that there might be the possibility of emotional experience very possibly having the ability to be held in formula or pattern. And I suspect that they're, you know I think I've once on this call I refer to as emotional physics or power physics I just see time and time again it seems that there are pretty predictable ways that humans tend to cope, deal or lack thereof with emotional experiences given the resources that they do or do not have. And as I'm hearing elements of this conversation about something I heard Klaus say earlier was there's a lot of people who seem to understand the implications of what is coming and where we're headed and are unwilling to do anything. And I think the way through this lens that I'm trying to understand I also see it as they're unable to do anything actually unable and from unable I mean not that they can't raise their hand and move the thing to make the change but unable in the sense that they might not actually have enough inner resource to keep their body in a felt sense of safety, right? And whatever that definition of safety means to that that human body and in that way there is perhaps a true inability to act because I do think and it's my lens and my belief that we are only able to act as far as our nervous system can cope and handle and still perceive us to be maintaining safety, right? And so is what's coming up for me is what is keeping us locked in this sense of paralysis and is kind of saying this Medusa level fear merely an inability to, we just haven't evolved we haven't had enough time and awareness to evolve our human physical, collective human physical body into a space where we are able to navigate these situations with the emotional maturity said differently, nervous system, tolerance needed to act. And so I think when Judith was sharing that she suspects that what would be a really powerful and impactful collective experience to have at this time is one of deep inspiration if we were able to if we were modeled or if we were shown or told a narrative that was able to galvanize and inspire us towards movement and towards what we call like productive action. And I think until our, this is my suspicion until our collective places greater value in the story, the narrative of personal empowerment and rather than the victim narrative like I don't sense that shining moment of inspiration really holding much power for what Jerry was saying around, we are soul narratives and it's the narratives that it's kind of up to us to even say this Jerry but I understood it's up to us to kind of sort through those narratives and even to recognize that we're being told narratives, right? And what we do with that is our choice but I think what that brings up for me is I've recently been working with clients one-on-one and I'm working as a coach and so we're as I'm engaging with people who it seems very clear to me they're still in victim mentality. There's the question like, man, like how do you support someone in remembering their power? How do you support someone in moving out of victimhood or the victim mindset? And I just heard this was like two days ago. I just heard it was as listening to, I think it was a podcast interview with a therapist who said the most important part, one of the most important parts of supporting someone and moving out of that direction is you first have to acknowledge that they were at one time, they were a victim in childhood, if you were at home and you couldn't leave the situation where your parents were doing fighting whatever like you were a victim at that time but it was really interesting to hear her suggest that first there has to be an external acknowledgement to someone that yes, you were a victim before they can remember that like, oh, that was true for me at that time. Am I still there? Am I still a victim? And in encouraging direction, exploration, that direction I just had never heard that before. And so as we're in this conversation I'm curious about the collective, I think a lot of people unfortunately do feel that impotence and that how easy it may feel to be a victim and I don't love that word here. I suspect there's more appropriate language for that but just for our sake, I trust, we understand what I'm trying to say. How do we encourage, how do we get to a place where we're able to remember and consider and hold the possibility that we have power in my life, in my existence that I am able to affect change and that who I am and what I do does matter. I think I feel complete with that. That's what came up in the sharing. Thank you.