 So it has the, this is the open global mind call on Thursday, January 26th, 2023. Judy, like much snow in the ground in Minneapolis or what's the, what's the sig? The actual snow on the ground is probably only five inches at this point, cause there's been some sun melt, but I have a drift that's over six feet tall across the street from my driveway where they plowed all of the snow when we got the 20 inch snowfall. And so that's pretty interesting. The neighborhood streets are pretty snow packed cause they got driven on before they were plowed and they had to work to uncover mailboxes because they were kind of covered up once the power went through. So it's been interesting. It's making me want to not be in Minnesota between December and March. I love to leave a house alone for that same reason cause I just worry about what could happen. And all over the houses, everything has icicles on them because even if you've got good insulation, the sun melt creates just enough to get icicles. And so they're kind of like three feet long and four inches thick at times, but luckily nobody would ever come close to my house. So I'm not worried about anybody getting killed or something, but it's, it's kind of bizarre. There's daggers everywhere. Judy, how typical or extreme is this winter compared to others? Actually, it's the warmest winter in 80 years. For the first, we haven't really had very many days when the high was below zero. I think the first one was last week. And usually in Minnesota, we get these clear days where it's really sunny and it just gets down to, the high is zero and the low is 20 something below or somewhat. We've, I don't remember ever having this big, a single snowfall, the 20 inch plus total snow in one storm is very unusual. We more typically get, we think it's a big snow if it's eight to 10 or eight to 12. And so that's not common. And I suspect it all has to do with the changing weather patterns. You could see this one coming from the West Coast. You can see all the water in California. I mean, it's just, we're getting more ocean evaporation and then re-deposited in different forms. It's the atmospheric rivers and arc storms and things like that. And before what you were just saying, Judy, I'd never thought of the dilemma of mail carriers doing or after blizzards. And I'd never thought about, oh, wait a minute, everybody's having trouble shoveling out and even like walking outside. How does anybody get the mail? How does the post office make it around? Most of the, well, in Minnesota now, all of the mail delivery is actually curbside so they can do it from a truck. So nobody comes to the door unless you have a parcel. And I try to keep things, my homeowner's association does a pretty decent job of plowing, but I have to get out there for and put salt on the stoop because the icicle melt on the front porch makes the front steps kind of icy. There's a couple of steps up to the door of the house. So it's been, it is interesting. I mean, I grew up in Illinois so I'm kind of used to the whole thing. And in the old days, people never had house delivery. It was always a mailbox curve. So it's kind of like they're going back to realizing that's more efficient for the mail service, although perhaps less convenient for homeowners. But I don't know, I'd think walking 50 feet to your front street to get your mail is a reasonable exercise demand to put on humans at this point. Yeah, exactly. We're so sedimentary. Also houses used to have cold shoots and milk boxes by the door for home delivery of said things. So maybe we need like drone delivery of physical mail, although all the physical mail that I mostly get now is flyers that I wish. Is there any way to have a class action suit to stop those flyers from having? Those are class stuff? Yeah, I just put all of it in the trash on my way through the garage. It goes from my mailbox directly into the trash with regret every time. Yeah. And I hate the stores that create that much paper and ship it around. And it's so inefficient now because the population is so accustomed to not actually reading anything that's physical anyhow. It's kind of a stupid thing to do, but they all seem to still wanna do it. They wanna give you coupons or things to try to get you to come in. The story I'd read is that Kmart, I think, tried to stop their flyers. They experimented with stopping the flyers and it turned out that people stopped showing up in the stores, like, I don't mean everybody, but sales definitely fell off and they were sort of forced to go back into the direct mail business of getting those things out. And that's depressing. Well, the sort of false advertising is another whole topic we could talk about sometime in terms of what's really a bargain compared to what's out there in very available pricing. And it's kind of nuts, but anyway. But at least today it's a bright sunny day. So it's actually really pretty in Minnesota. It's the classic winter day when the sun is out and you almost need sunglasses because of the glare off the snow. Of that. Welcome to the call, everybody. I put a topic on the call of what is truth and what our values prompted by Bentley, who then subsequently overnight put a different message after that in the matter most and said, oh, by the way, we tried this in the Canonic Debate Lab and the debate didn't go all that well. So I'm not sure it seems like it's sort of maybe a dead end. And I'm like, oh, oh, oh. And then I thought there are some really interesting ways that we might be able to handle this conversation. And Bentley's on this call, yay. Nice to see you. Hi, Klaus. Thanks for joining. But I think that there's lots of interesting ways we could go into this. I'm also happy to entertain motions to switch the topic entirely. But I wanted to dive in for one second into the topic just for a couple sort of light reasons and then see where it goes. In the chat, we're talking about direct mail for a bit. The neighborhood where I am in Portland used to be a really heavy direct mail hub and there's a large postal center that is being torn down. And its remaking is probably gonna reshape my whole neighborhood, but I have no idea what the plan is to do it. But I've watched as one after the other little old printing houses, printing shops, and then like junk mail, mass mail, creators, packagers, and then shippers closed down and got turned into five plus one condo units or apartment units in the neighborhood just all over the place. And it's been a transformation just, we've been here since 2015 and it's been quite a transformation in the hood seeing an industry basically vanish and be replaced with lots. So let me read from the etymology online, from the online etymology dictionary. Let me read the, actually I'm not gonna read some of the definition of truth. I'll post the link in the Zoom chat. But what I wanna do is Doug had sent us a link talking about trough and sort of trust between people. That doesn't show up that much in this particular etymology, but it does link back to Deru, which is, so, and this is kind of a proto-Indo-European root, meaning to be firm, solid, and said fast with specialized senses of wood or tree or derivatives referring to objects made of wood. And that seemed really interesting to me as a place. And then at the beginning of it, it says it's West Saxon from Privo or Mercian, faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, veracity, quality of being true, pledge, covenant. And to me, faith, fidelity, and loyalty are different from a scientific truth in notable and interesting ways. And so I thought I would drop those things in the conversation. And also, I checked in Raymond Williams' wonderful book, Keywords, and he does not define, he does not do the etymology or origins of truth or values. Neither word is actually in Keywords, which was interesting. Bentley, I don't know if you can talk from where you're calling in, but if you wanna jump in, you're listening while multitasking, I just noticed in the chat, so nevermind. Whoever would like to add in, please jump in. I just wanted to toss in that in my mind, my family didn't really talk about truth, but they talked, and they didn't use this word when we were kids, but discernment, the kind of, does that make sense to you, question? And the exploration of information at all times. And that's another dimension, I think, of the topic, different from the discrete one you proposed, but one that if we don't do today, I'd love to do some other time. Well, I'd like to find our way to things like discernment right away, because I think that that's a very interesting journey for us, Gil. So, discernment brings us right to the question of absolute versus subjective truth, which is part of what this conversation is. And one of the things I've been observing a lot lately is the difference between, I'm gonna walk off the plank here between physics truth and human truth. We all live in interpretation. We can't do other than that. There's no ultimate truth in human experience, much less understanding somebody else's experience, but I'm pretty certain that if I hold up the computer and drop it, it's gonna fall, because gravity is full off, right? Physics is telling us it actually is not that clear. So, it may be turtles all the way down. I'm wondering two things. One is what was Plato's definition of truth, if somebody's got that at hand. I'd like to know from Ken, what's troublesome about the word for you. Ken, you wanna jump in now and then I'll go to Mark. Sure, as my friend, Robert Gilman, says he's a astrophysicist. He says, in science, we believe all truth is partial subjective, excuse me, partial selective and provisional, because we always know that we're gonna discover more things. So, it's partial because we can only see part of things. The human experience is bounded by our senses and our thinking and the universe is vast and we are tiny. So, we just see what we think and we make up shit about it and we test it to see if it's true. So, it's partial, it's selective because we select out what we're capable of working with and it's provisional because as we go on and learn more things, our truth is gonna change. And so, from a scientific standpoint, that makes a lot of sense to me. Then you couple that with people who have religious proclivities and say there is just one truth. And Picasso said, if there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same topic, which I really love. And they couple that with righteousness and start to tell you how to live your life. And it's like, go away really fast, really far. So, I find truth, apple-t-truth. There's small-t-truths. And I think it was Heisenberg who said the opposite of a truth is a lie, but the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. So, a few things about truth from my little trove of truth in my brain, this brain. That was a very nice excursion through your trove of truth. I appreciate that. Mr. Cronza. I wanna make a recommendation. I just posted in the chat, the archive.org link to Jacob Brunowski's 1974 series, The Ascent of Man. And chapter 11, Knowledge or Certainty is a most excellent video essay on this very topic. And it's incompletely clear, beautiful, and powerful on one of the incredible examples of how to communicate on this very topic. And the ending is just part-rending. There is a notion called fallibilism from the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Purse. And fallibilism is well-defined in Wikipedia. Basically, all scientific knowledge is provisional. Science never proves anything. And those who say that we have certain knowledge are trying to manipulate you emotionally because of just this desire for certainty and a fear of uncertainty. That's it, thanks. I highly recommend checking out that video and sharing with high school students, maybe even junior high school students so that's kind of powerful. Thanks. I think one of my ancient regrets that you've just dug up out of the depths of memory is not having watched The Ascent of Man, which is interesting. And then I'd love maybe to watch it now given what else I've learned about history and other interpretations and so forth, like the dawn of everything, book club and whatnot, to see how all these things hold up and which direction this all went in. So I've always been leery of capital T truth. I've always said, when somebody shows up and tells you they know the truth with a big T, your little alarm bells probably ought to start sounding. And as Gil said, there's a few things that we can count on predictably that operate within certain realms and regimes like the laws of physics and such, but the predictability of chemical reactions and physics and so forth. But in general, it's like, beware of truth and beware of people that make you pledge to a particular set of truths as the membership criteria for a thing, whether it's a religion or something else. I think that's Rob getting a call because his icon's lighting up on my screen. And then as Eric posts in the chat, chat, GBT is now creating new truths for us with squishy air quotes around the word truths there, probably. But in some cases, let me take one particular path away from this topic, which is we seem to be in an era where arguing over what is true, even in a soft lowercase sense is a big deal of what's going on that the undermining of facts, the undermining of trust, the undermining of science, journalism, what have you is from my perspective, a weapon, a weapon of choice in the political and geo-emotional battles that we're going through. And so in some sense, there's this weaponization of truth and trust that's going on. Stacy. Rick asked an interesting question in the chat and I'm wondering if he wants to talk more about it or has an answer. Are you still there? He just went off camera though. He is back. How might you use discernment to seek the different domains of truth? Yeah, I sort of echo what Jerry was talking about, truth with a small T. I mean, there are a few truths as far as we can tell death, we could say, well, maybe that is an absolute truth. We're gone if we get something out of it. So we can quibble over things like that. So and I think it's worthwhile delineating the different domains because if you're predominantly trained in one domain, you go to a different domain and use your mindset from that domain to seek truth in a different domain, then you can run into problems. So I asked the question open-endedly. I'm not proposing that one has an answer because after all, we're seeking truth together. And Rick, can you start with like domain? Well, you said domains of truth. What do you mean? Can you give some examples of different domains of truth? Well, I mean, you can talk about the physical world. You could talk about the scientific world. You could talk about the natural world. You could talk about the psychological world. You could talk about the philosophical world. You could talk about the religious world. I mean, you can have a plethora of different domains that you may have, you've been trained in a certain way to look at things. So as a physician, I've been trained in a certain scientific way. Although I've always been a bit of a renegade because I thought it's a very limited perspective, particularly if you take your reductions perspective to truth seeking, which a lot of medicine tends to focus into. So if you don't understand your mindset when you're starting the discernment, then you're going to be limited and understanding different peoples of how they seek truth and how they see it. And to me, that's where the richness of the dialogue comes in is where we're clear about where we're coming from, the assumptions we're making about truth seeking and in which domains we're working in. Does that make sense? Yeah, thank you. Back to Stacy and then to Mark, go ahead, Stacy. No, I was just going to say it's that last part of what he said that I'm really interested in because what I notice is that when people are disagreeing, it's because they're focused on a different domain. And the problem is when we try to communicate with them, we're staying in our domain, which isn't going to work because that's why we're not in the same place to start with. Does that make sense? Yeah, and maybe sometimes we need a clarification of domains between speaking parties so that we can sort some of that out. Would that help? We just saw a different message of discernment as well. And so they go hand in hand. And if you don't have clarity over that, that's why it's so difficult to find middle ground. If you can work to some middle ground and appreciate different perspectives, you might be able to find something. I'm not so enamored with the idea of common ground. Thanks, Rick. Go ahead, Mark. I just wanted to observe as a scientist that truth is the best approximation today. It's not ever absolute. There's very little that scientists would say is true. They would just say that our best understanding is X and here's a good model. But I think decoupling it from the idea that there is absolute truth when it's a perception of humans is a complicated thing to try to do. Absolutely. Go ahead, Mark. You're remuted though. Had a very interesting experience. I am so lucky to be in love with a wonderful woman. And we're having a conversation where she says, she's very skeptical and oddly enough, a huge fan of objectivism and... And Rand. And Rand. And Rand. And Rand. And Rand, yes. Which is just like... Now what have you done? A complete challenge, exactly. Now what have I done? But I encourage her to stand up for her beliefs and what she knows and to test that. Anyway, she said she's kind of doubting her feelings because love is a hormonal oxytocin thing. And Rand is not the best role model for a romantic relationship. We'll just add that. I think I have some uncertainty related to this, yes. Just saying the history on that's not great. I completely agree with my level of tolerance to uncertainty. But I kind of took that, love is explained by oxytocin and kind of like, this is a little bit, oh yeah, this is one of my favorite comics, probably. Yeah, I think Ken Homer turned me on to that, not sure. Anyway, so we got into a little discussion about, there's a difference between description, that oxytocin has kind of a effect on emotional, human emotional feeling and feeling closeness. And the difference between how and why, description as opposed to explanation. And basically, oxytocin does not explain love. And it has a component there. There's an interesting kind of influence there, but love is much more difficult to find what the truth is, when how love is created. Yeah, exactly, it doesn't explain it at all. Or there's only a little kind of explanation. Anyway, enough about that. I'll go on to Bentley, unless there's any comments. Bentley, thanks for joining, jump in. Hey. So I did wanna just kind of, some things came to mind while listening to the conversation. One is, so one of the problems is, when people talk about like defining truth is that, and we talked about dimensions, that I think that if you take all the different ways people use that word, and you mapped it on any, the set of dimensions of the concepts that they're pointing to, and you drew a Venn diagram, I think some of those circles would not overlap. So the problem is the word in its current use is not definable. There's no definition that could cover all the uses of the word truth. And so the reason that this kind of came up is when we're doing debates and we're talking about truth, we needed a narrower definition. And I didn't even want it to include subjective truth because there's not much point debating about that. So what I was kind of hoping to do is kind of have a map of how people are using the word truth and then a way for people to point to, well, this is what I'm talking about because the ambiguity of that word is kind of one of the problems in communication. It's not that people are a lot of times not even really disagreeing, they're just miscommunicating. So when someone says it is true that, and I don't think many people, if you actually like tied them down to a table that they wouldn't admit that they're only at 99.9% certainty. I mean, there's a chance that we're in a matrix by aliens, right? So anything we see could be untrue. So no one in their heart of hearts really believes, I mean, they'll say there's an absolute truth, but no one actually, when it comes to brass tacks, I don't think very many people actually believe that any of their truths are at 100%. And that's also kind of one of the problems with science communication is that when we say that this is, it's not normal to put confidence bars on that. If there's been one study that hasn't been replicated, 51% confident. If it's the theory that's been proved out by thousands of studies, then there's 99.99, it'd be nice to have that as part of the communication. So maybe the word we should be looking for is certainty rather than truth. Just some thoughts. Thanks, Bentley. Mark. There's a wonderful term in art, of linguistic art, called umbrella term or umbrella word, where if you're looking for explanations of intelligence or testing intelligence, you're not gonna find it only in a IQ test. So intelligence, like love, like truth is an umbrella term. It covers many different things and using that one word for everything is just leading to reflexive miscommunication. And Gil asked in the chat, so what does this have to do with OGM? And Gil, I think that... No, I didn't ask that, Sherry, but I mean, it's sort of like that. I asked why are we so concerned with this topic? Why do we care about truth? And I think what someone just said about certainty is a clue to that, which is that we need enough certainty to be able to act, to make decisions to do things on our own and particularly to do things with other people. So to coordinate with other people, we need some agreement on relative certainty or enough certainty to say, yes, I will commit to do this with you or I won't. So the certainty is, I would argue always relative or subjective. It's always based on interpretation, but we try to find some degree of convergence so that we can act in the world. So that's one possible explanation, but I wanna return to the questions. Like, this matters a lot to people. I mean, you see it in this conversation in a common, relaxed way, but under the surface, I feel that what we're talking about matters to people. Out in the world is Ken and I were just exchanging the chat. People kill each other over this shit. So clearly it matters a lot. And other people are much more relativistic and flowy view about it. It doesn't matter so much, but can we say everybody's got a point at which they break or stand firm or will not accept or whatever. So I think there's something in that territory and it maybe is not as much of a philosophical question as a different kind of question. I don't know what to label it, but it's something, maybe something different. I wanna put a puzzle. I've been chewing on a tiny bit in the conversation, which is humans seem to love predictability and routine and humans seem to love novelty. And those two things are seem a bit contradictory and I'm unclear how they actually play together. So I've been sort of chucking them together in my head, but on the one hand, part of the reason why we seize truths and some kind of approach that you've just been describing, Gil, is that it's predictable. It's certain because a billion people said so too, so a billion people can't be wrong, right? That's a whole lot of people to be really wrong. And so we love the certainty, we want the certainty and yet we get bored with stuff, we seek novelty. Novelty seeking is a genuine, it's the reason that TikTok videos and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts are so appealing. It's like flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, like the infinite scroll, doom scrolling, all those things are humans addiction to the quest for novelty and we're big on that. And so maybe there's gradations, like we like novelty, but not so much in things that affect my life so profoundly, don't know, but I don't know where that boundary lies. And I think that our quest to hold onto truths with fervor is often this goal of trying to create consistency or predictability in some sense, Klaus then Mike. Yeah, this is one reason why I like theory you so much. Your theory, you never mentioned the word truth, but the going in assumption for any social systems change the project is that we just don't know enough about the issue. So they're starting when you look at the entry part of the you, they're starting out with the iceberg model. And so the first encouragement is, here's a question, we all have assumptions about this particular point, but let's just dig in and look below the water line and see what's down there. And then you reach a point of presencing, which is again, not necessarily both, but it is an aligned opinion about this phenomena that we're dealing with, which allows us now to move forward towards finding solutions on how to act upon it, right? Going into prototyping, I'm going into crystallizing and prototyping and then developing this. So if we could step back from the idea of truth and simply look at best available information that needs further amplification, that is in my mind, the most productive way within a team, because we don't need to argue, we just need more information and share the information. Thank you. Somebody's device is making a bunch of funny noises and I'm not exactly sure who's it is. All right, oh good. Thanks, go ahead, Mike. Sorry to join late. I'm really disappointed that I couldn't be here at the start, but I love the topic. I particularly like the focus on values, because in my world of digital policy, there's a lot of discussion at the international level about the need for policies that reflect our shared values or our common values or our democratic values. The Europeans are particularly fond of using that term. And then you press them and say, okay, so which shared values are you talking about? And what's the hierarchy of these values? The shared value of personal autonomy, more important than the shared value of life and security. And they can't ever answer it because there isn't a shared value. I mean, different countries have fundamentally different values, or at least the emphasis is different, even within the democratic countries. You go to Japan and it's so much more communitarian. And the idea that you have your right to free expression, well, that's important, but community and coherence and calm, I guess the phrase is wa, W-A. That's a value in Japan. And so I love the phrase, the term values, I just don't see it being applied in a coherent way. And I spent a lot of time with sociologists and anthropologists and they don't have any answers to these questions either. I don't know if we will ever agree on shared values. But I do think that respect for the truth and a desire to get more truth-y as a physicist, I know that we never get absolute truth outside of the church. And that's a bad place to look for truth. Everything is always an approximation. And I think that's the thing we need to teach our kids is that truth is very much something you approach asymptotically. You can get an extra significant digit. You can get your eighth decimal point, but we know that we are never gonna get the exact number and the exact truth about anything. So anyway, those are the reflections of a physicist, not a philosopher and a policymaker, not a sociologist. But I do wish we'd use these words in a more consistent way. And maybe we need different words. I mean, maybe that we don't say truth. Maybe we do talk about, I think I might be interested to know if anybody else had put another word out on the table that actually comes closer. Thank you very much. Again, I apologize for being late. Mike, thank you for joining. Usually you aren't able to join because you have overlapping calls. So I'm glad you're here. You're the first person to sort of put values into the conversation. So we haven't even gotten there. And thank you also for reminding me about the word truthiness, which I think fits in here really nicely. And I got rid of the domain, but years ago, after talking with BJ Fogg of captology, which is basically how to get people to change their minds, I bought the domain truthinessinstitute.org. And I was going to invite a couple of people to be like panelists or whatever sages at the truthiness institute so that they could point to stuff that was being floated that was like truthy, but not true or something. I don't remember exactly what the conversations were, but every time I talked with BJ, I was like, hey, BJ, use your powers for good. Remember the Spidey rule? Because the stuff he was teaching, and he was sort of a student of Robert Chaldini, and there's a whole lineage here of people who know exactly how to get people to say yes when they mean to say no. And that's dangerous knowledge, right? And that's also how we manipulate truth in some sense. We get people to acquiesce or to join. And there've been a couple of really interesting book references put in the chat. Gil is asking how many domains I own. I think the answer to that is too many. And I also have several ironic. So I own globalwarmingrealestate.com where the top line says, hey, if you don't believe the science, maybe you see a business opportunity. I own penisinsurance.xyz, I think, which was after Dobbs lost, I was like, hey, men, you're gonna have to buy insurance for this thing, because it could go off at any time. And we should make you liable, just like we should make gun owners liable for owning guns. And so I have a bunch of kind of ironic domains like that, which I haven't publicized very much or done much with. Mr. Batello, you are next in my queue. Thank you, Jerry. I just wanna depth tell on what Mike was talking about. I think there's imprecision, not just in the language of values, but also in virtues. And we mix those words up and we don't delineate them very well. And I'll just say one thing and give one example, which is values divide us, virtues can align us. And Jonathan Hague's book on the self-righteous mind is a brilliant expose about the difference value systems between levels of conservatives. We have the same values, but we have differences and priorities that separate us out. And that's where hierarchical values create so much of the friction. Whereas if you flip to a constellation of virtues and think of them in non-hierarchical ways, then you might be able to create some middle ground so you can navigate between our differences and value systems. So I think this particular thing, that's where I would add virtues into the mix because I think you could do a deep dive into that. Thanks, Rick. Mark, we're back to you. I think you wanted to jump in earlier, but thanks for your patience. Yeah. So I'm trying to think of the other scientists who are much more into the notion of precision weighted prediction error as how the brain works with sensory information and intellectual information. So the brain and ATM, or what is it called, automated temporal memory, different studies of artificial intelligence engaging with the world, basically say, here's a sensation. The brain is gonna predict what the next sensation is and by gauging the difference between the brain's prediction and the actual sensory input, it basically makes different kinds of adjustments in its future weighting and prediction. It's an absolutely brilliant kind of foundation of how the brain works and how the brain works to novelty and why it treasures novelty. So not only the mind, the brain. I highly recommend the short abstract and the link to the surfing and certainty prediction action and the embodied mind by Andy Clark, who's one of my favorite philosopher scientists. It's pretty quick and easy to read. Thanks. Thank you very much. Lots and lots of sort of books and research references in this call. And I wish we could sort of summarize these for each other, give each other the TLDRs on many of these things because they're run so deep and they're so interconnected. Well, to your point, Jerry, I just posted something to the list because I can't attach files here of two pages of Jonathan Hayes, The Moral Foundations of Political Thought, one of which is a diagram, one of which is explains each of the diagrams. So if you wanna look at that, it's kind of a very brief encapsulation of the righteous mind. Fabulous. Thank you. And I think that one slipped right past me. Well, it's one of the things that Hayes points out is that there are six values that are common to both left and right, but the people on the left tend to focus on just a couple of them and the people on the right focus on the rest. And that's why they continually win in debates and they continue in elections because the left keeps focusing on care and harm and fairness and the right. So what about purity? What about loyalty and whatnot? So it's a really interesting view of the divisions that are going on in this country. So I'm just gonna quote from my brain where I've taken some notes on the Moral Foundations Theory and there used to be five foundations of morality and now there's six is my understanding. And what I've got, let me just screen share for a sec. What I've got is this. So out of the righteous mind, Jonathan Haight, we go back to the five foundations of morality, authority and respect, fairness and reciprocity, harm and care, in group and loyalty, purity and sanctity. And the sixth apparently is liberty. Liberty and oppression is what Haight calls it. Okay, good. Let me just, done. So he's got care, harm, fairness, cheating, liberty and oppression, which are what the left tends to focus on. Sanctity and degradation, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion are what the right also, the right also talks about the three, but they also include those which many people on the left do not. It's interesting to note that when Haight wrote the happiness hypothesis, he said, I really believed that happiness came from within. And when I wrote the righteous mind, I shifted to believe that happiness comes from between and he started out as a very left-leaning liberal and after studying the conservative movements and what was going on, he said, I'm actually now much more moderate. I came to believe that you have a lot of really good points that get lost in the shuffle in the debates and he's quite shifted his political stance quite a bit from writing the degree searching or writing that book. It's really interesting how point of view equals ADIQ points. Like that's Alan Kay's quote from way back when and I just, it's one of my favorite quotes entirely because we're all sort of looking at the same data, the same stuff, the same media and the same things that flow by in the info torrent. Although I'll get the exact quote from my brain. I think it's point of view equals ADIQ points and I'm pretty sure it's AD, there we go. And I'll put the quote investigator page for it in. And so we're all kind of looking at the same morass of information and we're reading it in different ways and then there's all these human fallacies and biases and perceptual problems that come in there which is people will disconfirm or disbelieve things that disagree with their mental model, their point of view. So evidence that is perfectly satisfying to other people won't even make it onto the radar of people who don't believe something happens to be true. I'll use the word here just because it's so fun in this conversation. And so trying to figure out, so the talk I gave just recently in Bucharest was a talk explaining how I came up with my point of view for the talk I gave two years earlier, virtually for the same conference about how trust is the only way forward. And so that's sort of my thesis on trust and a whole bunch of other things. Like how did that show up? And so I tell that story and I'll put a link to the Bucharest talk in the chat but I tell that story because I feel like my point of view and what triggered this was talking about Democrats and Republicans and so forth or sorry, liberalism and conservatism which we were just doing is that I realized that both liberals and conservatives were like trying to install a male-dominated mechanistic universe where large institutions took over responsibility for things that humans should have responsibility for doing blah, blah, blah. And that folded into a bunch of other sort of ideas about how the world works that are maybe dimensionally a little bit different. I don't know exactly what but too many things to sort of drop into the conversation all at once here but it makes me realize that many people's truths are very contingent on their framing, their worldview which means their community, their society, their neighbors because these things run across social groups. We will hold truths within our social group also because the danger of ostracism is much greater than the danger of being caught in a lie or some inconvenient incongruity. Like ostracism is really bad for humans. Humans do not like ostracism. It's right up there just after death and things like that. Mark, go ahead, Mark Cronza. Yeah, just as a virtual facilitator, I'll just note seeing things in the chat but haven't heard from Patty or Hank yet. I think maybe Carl, yeah, I think we've heard from Carl just checking in to encourage if there's anything to contribute, not a demand. Thanks, Mark. And I sometimes use the facilitator's trick of anybody who's been speaking, please step back and whoever else would like to jump forward but let's do that for a moment and anybody who's been busy, go quiet and anybody else step in. Well, I've put a couple of things in the chat earlier about not only absoluter subjective truths but also suggestive and the seductive truths. And I think there's a lot of different categories or domains as was put earlier that we can put truths into. And I think it's really a matter of what works for individuals and the groups they're in. I definitely agree with what you said, Jerry, about the awfulness of ostracism and people will do anything to remain in a group about the comment of how many million or billion people we don't believe would be wrong while we see it every day in so-called false democracies where people like Orban or Trump or Boris Johnson get elected by millions of people who don't believe that what's being said matters whether it's true or not but it fits their version of reality they want to live with. And I put with a misspelling earlier in the chat as well, the example of the Truman Show. I mean, what's really true and what makes you happy? So, I mean, a lot of things I can comment on but I'm really enjoying listening to the rest. Thanks, Hank. Anyone else who hasn't jumped in yet? Hi, Mark, I appreciate you presenting that and I would love to actually pop something in the chat. It was right before you popped out of the room. It was, I think I just asked if you could share the name of that abstract which you had brought into conversation and the author. I would love to take a look at that. Otherwise, I don't know that I really have anything to add. I'm just enjoying listening. Thank you for following up on that, Patty. I have the same question. It floated by in the info flood. Could you repeat the wanted reference? Jerry, I don't know that I would be able to do much more than what I just did. You mentioned a summary article about the, I hate, I think wrote a summary article about Andy Clark's book or something like that. I think that's the right order, but I'm not sure. I think you can send it to the email list rather than putting it in the chat. I can't put files into the chat. I'm not, it's restricted. I think you just might need to repute your Zoom because it's not restricted at all. Really? Let me see. I'm sorry, you're trying to share a file? I always have trouble sharing files in Zoom. When I click on it says access to file restricted by your account admin. So. Gotcha. So I emailed it to the list. It's just, it's two pages. I drew a diagram and then I just copied each one of the care, harm, each one of the foundations. So it's really quick to read. And it gives a very quick summary of the main points in his book. And Patty, I think you're on the OGM list. Cool. So it's there. Awesome. Anybody else wanna jump in? I, yeah, actually something came up. I think what's coming up for me as I'm present for this part of the conversation is just this feels like curiosity around how advisable it is for certain. And I know we can't dictate who uses language and how they use it, but the potential power and harm of words that are used really frequently and freely, I think. And without perhaps much thought. Truth, I think could be one of those words. I think it's something, a word that is used with a lot of conviction often without a, yeah, maybe much, much thought or intention. And so to maybe just a larger curiosity around language use and the advisability of word choice, I guess, and certain words being used without thought and how potentially powerful and dangerous that is, that's just something through my lens. I'm very curious about language and language use. So I think that's what's coming up for me in this conversation. Thanks, Patty, me too. And in particular, politically, there's an awful lot of that going on right at this moment. It's a very hot topic, both from identity politics and political correctness, which is the right argument against the left in some sense. And then in other ways of sort of loaded terms and other kinds of things that are lighting fires all over the place. So I think this is a, and I think if, I think one of the domains in which open global mind has a lot of care, we haven't done that much, but it is politics and sort of active philosophical political discourse, because we would like people to be able to figure their way out, to collaborate together, to basically try to fix things instead of just being in the log jams that we're in so often. And also we have a, and we've created or we're living inside of a culture where we have kind of a vendetta mentality instead of it's the calling out versus calling in is the way I like to think of this trope. There've been a couple of good talks that I added to my brain about, hey, in a healthy society, you don't behead the person who did something wrong on salty earth they stood on. You actually try to figure out how to bring them back in to be a good participant in society. That's like what a healthy group ought to do. And we're not doing that. And then once you're busy beheading people for doing anything wrong, then you get all sorts of people who don't want to raise their hand and call out something that happened that might have been wrong because the axe is a little too close by. And that just spirals downward very quickly. So how do we get a society where we're saying something it's restorative justice as Stacey just wrote into the chat. Exactly, as opposed to retributive justice which is what we have now or proud justice which is sort of what we have now. And like retributive justice even means you've got inside the justice system. Mark then Petty. I think I mentioned this last week that I've been hanging out with Catholic philosophers at Lyceum.institute. And Mark you've got to mute on me. Anybody else hearing him? We cannot hear you. You're not muted in Zoom. You're muted some other way. Not hearing you yet. It could be an electromagnetic pulse has just gone through the Bay Area but I don't think so. I think it's this internet. Now it's crackly but coming back. Oh, wow, now everything is crackling. Now your video image is crackling. Oh, this is really fun. I'm totally enjoying whatever it is you're doing or whatever's happening. Yeah, he's messing with us. Yeah, yeah. Interpretive dance. We want to see interpretive dance. And in the chat he wrote, please move on. That was just so entertaining. Mark, thank you so much for the intermission entertainment there. Petty, Laura's yours. And you're muted. Thanks, just circling back around to what you were saying, Jerry, around you didn't call it cancel culture but I'm understanding what you're talking about to be cancel culture. I was thinking about that yesterday and how it occurred to me. I'm present with the punitive justice versus more of the Ubuntu approach to bringing in those who may have wandered, lost their way and bring them back into the tribe to bring them home to themselves. I'm familiar with that. But I think it occurred to me yesterday that it also kind of feels like a bypassing of sorts almost when someone, that the axe falls on someone's head for saying something that was whatever it was. And it almost kind of seems in my mind also like just an inability or unwillingness to engage with what is often like the nuance of what is actually happening in that. And really moving it quickly into black and white, right or wrong. Just kind of yesterday it occurred to me like that just kind of feels like perhaps a reflection of our collective or who's ever making these decisions, the ability or willingness to engage at a deeper level of emotional inquiry and just want to understand empathy. That occurred to me yesterday when the presence of that. Thank you. And it seems that nuance is out. Like it's hard to slow things down and say yo, yo, hey, hey, wait a minute that assertion you just made is not actually accurate because this, this, this. And there's no room or patience for the detail which might be mitigating and might not. It might explain really well why somebody did something. So we're in a very uncivil, this is my own, this is my truth of the situation is that we're in a, and I don't mind that the phrase my truth because I'm stating just the conclusion of my perceptions and sort of scratching my head about this. And probably I should substitute the word truth in there with my perception of what's happening or something like that or my conclusions are but we're in an extremely uncivil era and we have a superconducting public square which is owned by companies whose reward system is all about addicting us to the platform or in this case just not even minding who the hell shows up and what's being said on the platform which is what Musk seems to be doing to Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. So in that sphere, in this epoch how do we make our way back to civil discourse and calling in culture and a bunch of other things that healthy communities would do because it feels like the space we're in and the community interactions we're having are in many cases very uncivil and unhealthy for humans. Does anybody agree to disagree with that? I agree with that. And I think one of the ways we get back to a healthy community is to ask people what do you think makes a healthy community and to listen to every single voice including the ones who've traditionally been marginalized and I've included in the community because they've got an awful lot to contribute. Yep, yep, absolutely, Stacy. Yeah, to add on to what Ken's saying one of the things that I've been saying is that when I just observe it seems like there's a lack of curiosity and I think that ties into what Ken's saying is that curiosity should be where we start from. Love that, totally agree, Klaus? Yeah, Ken just triggered something that's really close to what I'm working on when you're saying community and paying attention to everybody in the community. So many of the solutions, I mean, right now we are really in a very transformative stage because there are billions of dollars being invested in the energy systems and food systems and so on. And the challenge is that it has to engage everyone in the population, right? So, but the solutions that are funded are top down and not bear in mind the uniqueness that you find in individual communities, socio-economic issues, climate issues, kind of ability access to water, water is a huge determinant on what communities can and cannot do. And so there is just no focus really on being inclusive to these marginalized groups because it takes a lot of work. It's counterintuitive to the way businesses operate. So there is an Egyptian professor who wrote a paper on the base of pyramid economy, or the base of pyramid economy, arguing that you really need a non-profit mindset to deal directly with these marginalized communities. But then, and that businesses should work through these non-profits in order to really function because they don't understand and they are incapable really to deal with this part of the market. But I mean, the most important part in my mind really is to avoid people becoming desperate, right? Because desperate people do desperate things. And looking as we transition here into changing the economy in very foundational ways, we still don't have a formula that assures this kind of inclusivity that Ken was just referring to. It is the most worrisome thing in my mind. Were you thinking of C.K. Prahalad? Thinking, I didn't hear you. Klaus was the writer you were talking about earlier, C.K. Prahalad, who I think is Indian, non-Egyptian, but is not the right guy, the Fortune of the Bottom of the Pyramid guy? I'll post the article, let me find out. And Ken just posted an article by Prahalad in the chat, which is why I'm asking as well. Patty, please. Yeah, Jerry, going back around to what you were asking earlier around nuances out and how do we begin to address building these bridges in the current state of things? I wonder how much inability to hold space for nuance or complexity or curiosity, as Stacy was saying, it might be a reflection of nervous system dysregulation and just the product of a lot of bodies in survival mode, right? I think even if the media hadn't had a part in post COVID, I think it would have already done it for a lot of people, but I think the media cycle is, this is my opinion, media cycle is having a big say or a helping hand in further just perpetuating the cycle of dysregulation on an individual level. And so maybe the question I'm asking is, how does that get addressed on a wider level, especially when the, and this is my understanding of the thing, the act of engaging in things that are dysregulating actually feels like good and it feels like it's scratching an itch and it can feel comfortable and like the new comfortable to the nervous system in the dysregulated system. Curious what other people's thoughts are around this. Thanks, Patty. And in situations like that, we will see comfort wherever we can. And often those relationships that end up are pretty tangled and dysfunctional, et cetera, et cetera. Kim? With regard to bottom of the pyramid, I was in a, I don't know where I was. I was in some online course and people were talking about this and they said, you know, they actually up to 3.0 now. The CK Prabha put out the base of the pyramid back in the early 2000s. And there have been some philanthropists and educational organizations studying this and they discovered related to community that when they went into a very poor community and they gave somebody a pig or a cow or a bicycle or something that would, you know, very minor investment that would help them to grow financially, they immediately discovered they're into something that's very common to human beings. As soon as that family began to do well, they were, oh, we're better than the rest of you and we're not gonna, you know, so what they're doing now is they try to invest in the entire community rather than the individual family in order to spread the wealth around. Cause if it's concentrated in one family, that family's gonna see themselves as better than it undoes all the good that they were tempted to do. So I think we also have to be really aware of human proclivities, you know? I mean, it's natural to when you start to do well, you're like, oh, I'm better than you. And, you know, we have to keep thinking on these really basic levels of what are to Patty's point, you know, not just dysregulated nervous systems, but also the appeal of being better than someone else. You know, so many people get their self-worth from comparing themselves to others rather than comparing themselves to who they want to be or how they used to be. It's fascinating to me how difficult it is to try to improve the world and how often, how little it pays back and I don't mean monetarily. I'm not that fond of Bill Gates's decisions, but certainly he has poured a whole bunch of money he made in ways I question into vaccines and a bunch of other health issues where the interventions in retrospect might in fact not have been the best interventions he could have done. And nevermind that there's a whole conspiracy theory that he's implanting chips and people through the vaccines, through the, you know, COVID vaccines and all that kind of stuff. Nevermind that layer of it. But I'm thinking of other people who tried hard to make things better and it doesn't often go well. I'm thinking of John Kerry who ran for president and was a Vietnam war hero, of three words that make me cringe and then came back and was a hero because he went into Congress and testified and said this war should not be happening. So twice a hero in different kinds of ways and then was very effectively disabled by the kinds of mechanisms we're talking about today with swift boating and other sorts of things that were about disinformation and the undermining of truth in the political marketplace on purpose as strategy. And that that's one of the cynical stories that I look back to and think, well, crap, that's the world we're living in today. That's the world that gives us our leaders. Gil, Patty, Mark. John Kerry also became Secretary of State very effectively and a remarkable global advocate for climate. So I would just note that you saying Jerry that it changes hard isn't in the domain of truth that we started the conversation in. It's in the domain of truth. You think it's not hard? Well, it is definitely my truth. It's my opinion. Yeah, it's an interpretation which is what we do. Other people are thrilled by challenges. Other people look at the world and say full of opportunity. Look at all this change that's happening. Some people say it's climate doom and some people say the momentum is accelerating and moving power. This is the realm of interpretation. And I don't say that to be critical, but just to note that Ken, when you talked about the human nature of superiority over others, I suspect that that's cultural and that that shows up different in different worlds. And in the case of India and bottom of the pyramid in the early days of Grumming Bank, they made their loans to groups of women in a village together. So that there can be mutual support and mutual encouragement, if you will, social pressure to repay loans and to support each other and repay loans was specifically designed not to atomize and self maximize but to build solidarity and support, which I will argue is as a natively human, if anything, as a natively human as the other. So I just wanna be really careful when we say people are like this because what I see is an infinite variety of how people are and what the, you know, the Graeber, Wengro book, The Dawn of Everything argues and I think pretty well supports is that that infinite variety has been there throughout our entire, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of existence on this planet. And for me, that's cause for enormous peace of mind and optimism. So there's my, I'm not gonna call it my truth because I don't feel that level of certainty about it but it's my orientation and how I navigate this mess that we're in right now on a good day. Yeah, thanks Gil. Thanks for bringing that up. I'll take a little piece of that and riff on it for a sec, which is the argument that Graeber and Wengro are trying to make is that, hey, human life way back when wasn't nasty, brutish and short, agriculture didn't civilize and save the world. There are all these other subtleties and humans had way richer repertory of ways that they stayed alive in ways that they didn't think, which is really cool. And I think a piece of what we're suffering from from our, from the conventional wisdom of history that they're trying to duel with is that people tried to narrow down those things into some sort of set truths about history, which are then useful for their political or sociological or other kinds of projects, right? If life is nasty, brutish and short and people are generally selfish and cruel, then we need my prison system and we need my punitive system and we need my whatever else because that's how we build arguments, right? And so, so much of this is all just intertwined. Patty. Ah, sorry, really appreciate Ken and especially Gil's skill sharing took me in a really interesting direction with what I was planning on, on presencing, which was that per Ken's suggestion of just maybe having wisdom and being aware of the human proclivities. I think what I was hearing in Ken's sharing was the, and perhaps it is this culture, deep prevalence of shame, I think that I understand self righteousness to be an offshoot, to be an expression, a manifestation of deep shame, right? And then when Gil said, offered or invited us to consider that, hey, maybe that's just this culture, I've never left, I've never been to another country. So I only know and had experienced this culture. So acknowledging that, but then I thinking like, oh man, that one surprised me for that to be close because to my awareness, American culture is the country most steeped in the traditions of Christianity. Does that track? Is that, or we have no, Gil, no, that's not it. Or we have, I guess I just assumed that we had really strong Christian or a framework of good, bad, bright and wrong. And my experience in the Catholic church was a deep experience of, I think, like humans are flawed cast out from the garden. There's, I think, shame built into the contract of let's say just Catholic religion. That's just been my experience. Others might feel differently about that. But I think- Paddy, the United States is probably the bastion of evangelical Christianity. But the Christian world includes Europe and the entire Americas, as well as a lot of others. I mean, was it more than a billion or a billion and a half Christians in the world? So- Thank you. And among developed nations, America is unusually religious. Yeah, that's what- But the great, but the growth markets for Christianity in particular Catholicism are South America, Latin America and Africa. I mean, those are just giant growth markets. Thank you. I'm realizing that I misspoke there, really just trying to acknowledge that there seems to be in maybe relation to other countries and especially strong presence of, you know, gildlanded evangelical Christian theology. And, you know, that's not something I'm all versed in, but I think this also brings up, for me, the, I don't know if anyone's familiar with David Hawkins' power versus force. He brings up this really interesting idea of their kind of going back to what Jerry was saying, you know, it's just feeling really difficult to change the world and this needle can feel difficult to move. When it's, you know, this is my internalizing Jerry, what you said, when it's, you know, tilted so far in one direction, David Hawkins suggests that there is, my word for it is like an emotional physics at play, right? That there's actually power and, you know, do degrees of, my belief is that there's actually something happening in the physics realm when the experience of emotion. And I'm curious how much that is at play with how difficult it is to, as we say, move the needle. David Hawkins suggests that things like the emotion of shame, the experience of shame on this progression of the energetic, I think he describes it as energetic power or the quality of each of the, you know, more prominent emotions, shame registers as one of the lowest and the one closest to the experience of death. And its power is exponentially, it's very strong, it's a very hard expression to move and to change. And so anyway, I don't know how I feel about the, how he arrived to those conclusions in his book and how he arrived at those measurements, but it's just an interesting concept and that's what's coming up for me, this conversation. Patty, thank you for that very much. And anything you can pass to us through the chat or the mailing list that'll route us back toward emotional physics and learning more about it, I would, we would appreciate a lot. That's just, that's just my, I haven't heard that before, that's just my name for it, that's just how I'm internalizing it, but I'll share the book. We can put a trademark after it and like drop it in the world with you. And then you made me think kind of of the opposite a little bit because shame is very much a tool, but right now, like one of my lessons from one of my truths from the Trumpocalypse is that shamelessness is an awesome political tool that anything you say three times is true is the Belman's fallacy. And so through mere repetition, you can cause things to come into being, but if you say things with no shame about how bald-faced a lie it is, like if yesterday you said that the moon was in the, in the sky and today you say it's the sun, if you don't have any shame about it, the system isn't strong enough to actually correct that. The system isn't strong enough to correct a bunch of people repeating lies. And I think we haven't talked so much about lying, but I guess some part of the opposite of truth is lies, but it seems like understanding that and then just doing that and repeating it is an active tactic in the world. So there we go. Judy and Mark, you're muted, Judy. Sorry, I do that for background. I just wanted to interject into the conversation the concept of interpersonal energy transfer, which is a physical concept that's been measured. There are energy domains that humans give off in other species and they interact with one another. So crowd following isn't just that you're listening to words and being influenced by words, you're actually picking up the energy, the emotion, et cetera of the people around you. And that's a dimension that we tend to neglect, but it's very powerful in terms of what engages people in their actions, thoughts and behaviors. And so that might be something for us to dive into it another time. Thank you very much, Mark. On that, the madness of crowds and the wisdom of crowds. When I was young, I would go with my dad, like young meaning like 12 to 16 to motivational seminars. And I would watch, you know, a very charismatic and anybody can be charismatic if you pay $1,000 an hour to be so. Basically, this crowd would be an emotional chain reaction. Everybody would kind of like a little bit amplify and that amplification would spread around. They'd get a little bit amplified and yeah, crowds can go nuts. What I was attempting to say before when I guess my computer had ran out of resources and battery power was I hang out with a number of Catholic philosophers at Lyceum Dot Institute and the point was made. I thought I brought it up last week that shame in Catholicism is a regulatory mechanism, not always a punishment mechanism and that in, you know, Catholicism is wide and deep. So there's, you know, all kinds of retribution as well as, you know, horrible massacres as well as, you know, feed the poor as, you know, one of the centers of the epiphany ceremony I went to. But the mention was, you know, the me too and the woke movement doesn't have a developed penance, forgiveness. You know, the kinds of things, you know, you go to confession, your sins are forgiven, go in peace. Kind of, you know, stability of, yeah, you're healed. Please, you know, try, try again, do better. You know, the community is with you and supports you in, you know, recognizing your mistake and helping you to rejoin the community. Anyway, thanks for this one. Mark, isn't calling in, I just touched on the chat, a form of forgiveness and confession, isn't that, I mean, that's sort of what I intended when I was describing the difference between call out and call in culture is that in a healthy community, that with the process you just described, which is sort of ritualized in Catholicism in certain ways is that. And it strikes me also that confession is this private thing between you and one priest in a booth under the white rose, which is the Virgin Mary's symbol. That's why it's called subrosa. That's why these conversations are secret. That's the etymology of subrosa. And why is that? Why is this not a more public confession of what happened like in a Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Witnessing, basically there's any number of group kinds of situations where, say even A, A, or it's like, you know. Right. My name's Mark and I'm a reader. Hi, Mark. I'm addicted to, I'm addicted to prints. Oh man, I'm so sorry. Like these book things, they're just like a pain, aren't they? The early years of English literature. Oh sweet. But I will confess today, three minutes ago is the first time I've ever heard of something in, I'm sorry, what it was. Calling in. Calling in, yeah, I've never heard that before just now. Thanks. I will put a link to calling in in my brain in the chat right now if you wanna go explore. Judy then, Michael. Judy, is your hand up from before? Yeah, I'll take it down. Okay, thanks. Dr. Grossman. Hi, all. I too am a print addict. My name is Michael. Hi, Michael. We'll have to form our own separate confession group, Mark. And anybody else who wants to join? I just wanted to throw out something on regarding shame that I don't know what to do with but seems to bear some conversation is I feel like shame has gone from a thing that an individual feels and either holds and deals with the ramifications of that or confesses to lift the burden or has whatever strange reactions they do to it to something that is much more prevalently asked of others, the shaming of others that you should feel shame about something that you don't feel shame about working in both directions politically as part of outrage culture. Can you believe that this person is shamelessly doing this terrible thing? And the person themselves doesn't think they're doing something shameful and offers their lack of shame in reaction but that that shame has become something of an artificial weapon wielded by those who want to shame. I mean, not that shaming didn't go on in the past in great measure, but now it really is more often called upon in reference to the other than people publicly offering their confessions of actual shame that Donald Trump's never apologized being the model, but constant shaming of others. Anyway, just wanted to share that for discussion. Thank you. Let's go into, we're late into the call, we're almost at the end, but let's go into silence for just a little bit to process that was a lot of stuff and then I'll bring us back out in a second. Thank you. Thank you very much. I wrote George Santos into the chat because I had a little light bulb go on and I had a couple of days ago that I know can, I had a little light bulb go off from my head that for some people on the alt-right, George Santos is a hero and a role model because look, you can lie about fricking everything and become a congressman and get to vote on stuff. And the fact that he continues to pour like shit into the world with lies is merely proof that it's impossible to remove somebody like that. Like it hasn't happened yet and might, but might not. Don't know, don't know how this exactly goes, but I realized that this is a, it may just be that he's a compulsive liar, but it may also be that this is just a modern, successful political tactic and that he is its fullest modern expression in the American political arena with lots of success. Yeah, exactly, Santos and West Wing. And so that scares me because we're sort of in those waters. That seems to be kind of where we are socially and I don't think that that goes away. The other thing I wanna say about Santos is very much like Trump, the more attention that he gets. So we think that, I think the press may think that, oh my gosh, rubbing this in his face and shaming him is just going to get rid of him and make him go away. And it's like, actually might be, might be the opposite. It might be that this is a fabulous way to own the media cycle. And one of the things that Trump understood that nobody else seemed to understand was that Trump didn't care if everybody was saying negative stuff about him. Owning the media cycle was the only thing he cared about and the victory. And if he could have a debate, and I've said this a long ago on OGM calls, I said, Trump understood that he could not survive a normal debate with any smart person. Like he was not going to win an actual debate. So he had to undermine every debate so that the three days after each debate, the whole conversation was only about him and not about how the other person won the debate or none of that, none of that. Which meant he always had to escalate a little bit, but never so much that he would be thrown off the rails. And then I'll just throw in the little fact that, eight years of Obama and the biggest controversy is he wears a light gray suit one day and Trump on any one day would do 10, 15, 30 things that were far more egregious and get away with them and still be a viable contender right now for the next electoral cycle. That's amazing. And that's commentary to me on how far truthiness has slipped from being a funny thing that Colbert leveraged to being fundamental to the electoral, political, emotional cycle right now. And that frightens me very deeply. Was it beige? I thought it was 10. I mean, I thought it was light gray. Well, 10 or beige, it was, you know. Well, if it was beige, that was clearly a criminal offense. I mean, absolutely. I'm amazed you didn't get impeached. Exactly. Michael, I think you still have your hand up from earlier. So I will go to Patty. Yeah, I don't, I don't, excuse me. I don't know that there's any way to track this, but what comes up for me is this curiosity around there. I wonder if there's a correlation between a sense of maybe our relationship with truth and our relationship with our own like felt embodied sense of personal power or lack thereof, right? And I wonder if there's some, I don't know how the two would be related, but I sense that they might be related. Don't know how to name it though. And I think people, so part of my trope on where we are right now is that people are feeling very powerless. That there's a few people who are feeling quite a bit of power because they're managing to move public opinion and do whatever else, but there's a whole bunch of humans who feel disaffected, alienated, powerless in the face of mega crises, poly crises now, that's the word of the year, right? And so I think very much so. And our hunt for truth and certainty in the middle of powerlessness is why this dynamic feels maybe so hard. Something like, does that ring for you Patty or would you explain it differently? I don't know that I would explain it differently. Yeah, that resonates. Thanks for speaking to that. Thanks. Gil and then Ken has a poem for us on the way out. Powerlessness is something that we're sold. Powerlessness is part of the game and part of the strategy to persuade us that we're powerless and to persuade us that we're empty and to encourage us to go buy shit and not organize to change things and take power. And I would strongly recommend that people take a look at Anand Giraharidas's new book, Persuasion. There's a bunch of interviews of him on the tubes about that and what he's basically arguing is the hell with this powerlessness story and the hell with its human nature this way, that way it's time to just like strap in and out compete these folks and do a better job of selling a better story. And there's a lot of successes in the last election cycle as well as in many other places around the world. He's basically saying quit whining and get to work eloquently with stories and examples and the book is called Persuasion. The books are called The Persuaders. I put the full title in there. The Persuaders, thank you, even better. And it's about that, there you go. Really juicy, interesting. Start with a couple of the recent videos in the book if you want, but it sets a very different mood for this story. It's easy to feel despair in times like these, which is an interpretation of how to live in the world, but it's really worth remembering that they are pumping despair at us. Yes. In whose interest is it for us to feel despair? It's a version of the follow the money story, right? Yeah. In whose interests, who wants you to feel that way? It's funny because if we were, if muggles, if civilians, if citizens were intelligent, trustworthy, connected, and actively working to make their lives better, a lot of the political crap wouldn't work. It would have to go away. And so it doesn't, I'm sorry to be so cynical, but it doesn't behoove anybody to have us be those things. That's right. Well, it's not that it doesn't behoove anybody. So the question is, who does it behoove? Those are possible allies. Michael, you're back on the queue. So I assume you want to jump back in. Yeah, I just wanted to add to what Gil and some others have been saying, and we've been back to the sort of projected shame thing. The negativity that is the most effective, unfortunately, and I wonder, I'm curious about how the persuaders deals with this. Politicians and public figures have seen that the negative about the other is more powerful than the positive about themselves or proclaiming a vision. It's more the scare of the painful, awful stuff that the other wants to do. Yeah, just that. That advantage is unfortunately whoever's putting that out in effect, it's sort of been proven in our society at the current time. And it feels like that's a time-honored, underhanded political thing that dates back as far as we can sort of read in some sense. I guess. Stacey, I think you'll have the last word here. And then we might have two poems. I think Ken and Mark both have poems. So Stacey, please. Yeah, I just wanted to say two simple things about shame. One is that what I've observed and witnessed and spoken to people, the best ways to get rid of shame seem to be in those small groups of trusted people doing it together where you have the same components that you have in restorative justice, which is sort of a community hearing different sides, empathizing, and you have those safety factors built in. Because you know your love just like Patty mentioned, the Ubuntu way. It's the same principle. I've been calling it pre-storative justice because I want to see systems that build those in to the way we do things. The other thing I wanted to say is going back to politics, I think that we make a big mistake by not separating the deed from the person. So as much as we might really be mad at George Santos, by trying to shame him, that's not helping us. Where we should be shaming it, who are the people that would support a liar? How foolish are they to think he won't lie about something else? But what I'm trying to say is not to direct shame at a person, but to direct shame at an act. Because too many people are incapable of seeing situations objectively depending on who's involved. So if we can remove the person from the situation and just talk about the situation, I think that would be in our best interest. Thanks, Stacy. You're reminding me by coining pre-storative justice that years ago I met, I think it's this woman in my brain, Ruth Morris, who created something called transformative justice. And she had a really interesting critique of restorative justice. And I think if memory serves the process of transformative justice involved looking up at the system to figure out what were the problems in the system that caused the situation, we're busy trying to remedy and making some effort to reach up and correct the system as well in so far as it could be done. If I could just add quickly and look at what are the things that work because I feel like a lot of times we forget to take those things that are actually working. So I'm making YouTube shorts about what works to revitalize cities right now. It was a little feature in Pete's Plex. Anybody who'd like to do those things and like pass them in let me know, I'll link to them and add them. Because I think we need to, Stacy, to what you just said, we need a lot of stories in the world of what's working in every domain because people don't know. People don't have time to waste like going and finding stuff. They don't hear like, there's a lot of good being shared and the medium for sharing stuff is now just as free as the medium for destroying the world. So why don't we just share the good stuff? Gil, we will talk about that. Mark, you have a poem for us. And I think that will wrap our call today. And Ken had to leave, so I'm sorry I messed that up. Yes. Thank you. I'd like to highlight the work of Marion Moore. A New England poet. 1887 to 1972. Brilliant. Rye moralist. And this is the book. Brilliant. Rye moralist. And this is medium length. I'll try to read it quickly and clearly. You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than an asset. That in view of the fact that spirit creates form. We are justified in supposing that you must have brains for you. You must be able of the unit stiff and sharp conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority. And liking for everything self dependent. Anything an ambitious civilization. Might produce. For you, unaided to attempt through sheer reserve. To confute presumptions resulting from observation is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen. But Rose, if you are brilliant, it is not because your pedals are the without which nothing of preeminence. You would look minus thorns. Like a what is this a mere peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm. The elements are mildew. But what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without coordination? What are you talking about, Mark? I'm sorry. What guarding the infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered to violently. Your thorns are the best part of you. Roses only. Mary and more. Thank you, Mark. Really appreciate that. Thanks everybody. Lovely being here with you. Thanks for speaking your truths. Together. There you go again. Thanks everyone. Thank you all. Bye bye.