 This is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, May 4th, 2023. Oh, good, you beat me to it. Captions, no, I was just reaching for them. Hey, everybody, how are you doing? Good, good. Oh, excellent. Many things swirling around in my head this morning. I was thinking we would continue the conversation about wokeness, wokeism that we started last week. I was trying to reset my brain into that conversation to remember where we were. And if you all would like to do that, let's do that. If not, let's find a different topic, but that was my instinct. Thoughts, preferences on topic in that way? Something else. Something different? Does anybody feel strongly about pursuing woke and wokeism any further? Nope, okay. But I've got a question. What's your question? And I wasn't here, so I apologize for missing last week. Wokeism is one of those things that confuses me because it ends up getting double bound and triple bound and quadruple bound kind of. So the things that I can think of that are like that are fascism and antifa or turf-ness. So it's always, every once in a while I'll start reading about how JK Rowling is or is not a turf. And then it's like the arguments go like levels of meta kind of that I can't follow. And so it ends up being really hard to understand where to be a, which side to be on and which meta side to be on and which meta, meta, meta side to be on. And at some point it's like, I'm so confused. So wokeism seems like a similar thing. So Pete, you wanted a discussion of modern culture? No, had a cope with that entanglement, I guess. So we got into a piece of this last week because, I have to say this, so my impression is that woke just means you're awake and aware to injustices that have happened to people who mostly don't look like us in the room here now. And that you might be willing to do something about it. That's all woke was meant to mean originally. And what's happening. Except even that, I think as I understand it, it's meant to be used by people who don't look like us. So then if I say woke, I'm woke. So there's a whole parallel conversation about what is anti-racism and who can be anti-racist and all of that. My own impression is that woke means, hey, people who caused this, are you woke? Is a fine and dandy thing. I don't think that this is, I don't think it's cultural appropriation for white folk to say that they might be woke or are trying to be woke. I don't think that's wrong at all. Is there any video? Unless they're being appropriative or ironic. So if people say it in good intent, then it's okay. If people say it in bad intent, then it's clearly... Yes, now the place I wanted to get to quickly before we spin in 15 directions was to directly answer your question, Pete, which is that my impression is that woke has been very intentionally weaponized and spun into multiple meanings and turned back on itself by people who have basically turned woke into a substitute for other racist words and are now happily using it everywhere. There's a war on woke, which is like, wow, okay, there's a war on people of color. Then just under a different name, except now it's being said all over the place. So your concern or confusion at the multi-layered meanings and all the different sort of nested whatever's is the natural outcome of this word battle, this ontological coup that's going on around words that matter. And one of the ironies that's in parallel here to me is that Antifa has turned into a terrible thing. And if you figure it out, it's like, ooh, that means anti-fascism. So if you're anti-anti-fascism, don't the anti's cancel out? And shouldn't that be simple math? But no, because Antifa sounds like a separate acronym thing. And the moment you're on that, you're down a completely different rabbit hole. So we don't need to slide into this conversation because there was some indication at the start of this call that this was not the pleasing topic of choice for today. But I'm happy to loiter here for a moment if this kicked up some dust. And Gilly, you were about to jump in a moment ago, but Stacey, sorry, I just saw your hand. The piece to that conversation that I think is important is how the word changed. So initially, if somebody called me woke, I took that as a compliment. And the way that the emotion underneath how that changed is people feeling things were being forced down their throat. And so then they would say, oh, you're woke. And I think that that element of feeling that something is being forced down somebody's throat is really important for us to keep in mind for other topics as well, because that's something that keeps coming up. Thank you. That energy might well be a topic for this call. It's a near neighbor to woke, but it isn't woke. And it's about the dynamics that we're seeing going on. So it's a possibility. Thanks, Stacey. That's interesting, Gil. Yeah, I just put it in the chat. What I'm hearing in Pete's question and where this conversation is going is how do we navigate weaponized conversations? Things get weaponized very quickly. They get polarized very quickly. They're witness tests very quickly. And I have found myself self-censoring online being very wary of waiting in where I may not know the context or people may have much more sensitive triggers than I do. And I feel very disoriented in the modern conversations about, Pete, you talked about woke and turf and Jerry risked on T-fun. There's a whole bunch of others we could add to that. Stuff gets very polarized and decontextualized very quickly. So Pete, I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth, but what I heard you saying is how the fuck do we navigate this stuff? How do we have generative edifying forwarding conversations in the midst of this cultural conversational environment that we seem to be in these days, is that? That makes good sense. And many of us are feeling like we're walking on eggs a lot, which is happening in this dynamic. Scott, Pete, Doug. Hey, everybody. Hey, Scott. I learned a word a couple of years ago that I've been looking for for 20-some years. It's the name of, you can call it a hyponym. I think it's hypernym, which is a word that encloses other words. So in other words, you have golden retriever, you have dog, you have canine, you have animal. Those are hypernims. And I was wondering what is the word that encompasses other words? And what I noticed with a lot of these is that it starts off very specific. And then to, I don't know if the right word is weaponized, but to, because I think it's used on both sides of the argument. If I make it more general, more hyponymonic, then you know what I'm talking about, right? And it's this whole, well, it was something specific. And now it's become, oh, well, it's all of the woke, or it's, well, you're on my side or you're not on my side, but we're not really talking about specifics anymore. We're talking about, oh, well, it's this generalized thing. Is this, if this even smells like that, just a little bit, that I'm going to put it under this umbrella of woke where I've zoomed out so far that it's just this vague concept. And then on the other side, it's the sniff test saying, you know what, this feels anti-woke to me. Without being specific, without being precise about what it is we're talking about. So that's kind of what it feels like to me is as the conversation goes on and the sides are drawn, the sides become more vague in general instead of more specific. So that's my thought. Thanks, Scott. Pete, and feel free to take a pause before jumping in. I guess the thinking through it in my head a little bit. The situation in which we find ourselves is having conversations with many more people and many more circles and many, many much larger circles than ever before. And so this terminology problem isn't really a problem if you get to sit down with a friend and with some honor and candor and deep listening and things like that, you can say, so what do you mean by woke? What are we talking about? I thought woke meant, you know, this, is that what you're talking about? You can have that context setting conversation in a way that makes sense. And then you don't have problems. You know, you chat out the shared context under which you're talking about. So we have a different situation in the public square which, you know, conceptually, if I say something like public square, I'm thinking of a big park and maybe some soapboxes or benches or something like that. And, you know, the people I'm talking to are kind of within shouting distance or less. And so that conceptually is, you know, it goes from an intimate conversation with friend or a few friends around a glass of wine and a coffee table to maybe a little bit larger thing. And that still feels like a conversation. And then I think what happens is we collapse a situation like where I'm on Twitter and all of a sudden I'm talking to a million people and there are, you know, 100 people in this conversation and they're on different sides and they have different things and a lot of them are in drive-my mode. 20 or 30% of them are bots and don't even care. And I know in my mind, and so I suspect that many people think that those are all kind of the same thing. Oh, I'm having a conversation. I'm having a conversation. I'm having a conversation. And what really happened was we jumped out of, out of a situation that humans have been dealing with for tens of thousands of years and into a situation which we think is similar, but it's not. It's not at all. It's a completely different beast. So in that journey from intimate conversation and in a living room to what feels like an internet conversation because I'm still in my living room on my laptop talking with what looks like people, we don't have affordances to help us understand that we've moved to a completely different situation. It's like we went from a dinghy to an aircraft carrier and we're going, oh, well, it's still a boat. It works the same. If I need it to turn, it turns the same. If I need it to stop, it stops the same. And it doesn't. So I think that's kind of the resolution for me that it's a context thing. Couple of things I'm reminded of. I'm reminded of being a young kid in Northern Nevada in elementary school, I think. And somebody came up to me once and said, are you a Northerner or a Southerner? And this was a completely new thing to me. This is kind of like, do you speak Pig Latin? Igpe, Attenley, Igspay or something like that. It's like, huh, what's that? What's a Northerner and what's a Southerner? It's like, well, if you live in the South, then you were against the, you were a rebel or against the union or whatever. And if you were in the North, and it's like on the West, that all that distinction kind of falls off. So already it didn't really make much sense to ask that question. And then I guess I had to pick sides, but I'm like, I don't know what side I'm picking. I don't know, or I guess I'm a Northerner because I live in Northern Nevada, not Southern Nevada. It's like, okay, now I know what side you're on. It's like, okay, that's great. I don't know how that helped us or how it didn't. So another thing I'm reminded of later in life, 30 years old or 40 years old, coming to a front door and some nice people, well-dressed nice people are going, hi, I'm here to ask you, do you believe in God? And as a literal minded person, this question is always just arresting, because I know there's a socially acceptable answer, which is yeah, of course, and a socially unacceptable answer, and at least in some circles, which is no, of course not. And then there's the answer, which I really want to give. It's like, okay, so by your question, I think I understand that you believe I know what you mean by when you say God, but I have to say that what I'm thinking about God and what you're thinking about God and the other person standing next to you thinks about God, I think they're probably all the same things. We're talking about a pretty big concept here. And to start the conversation with, do you believe in God? Skips over like a whole bunch of context setting. So there's an answer that you can give in hacker circles for this question and hacker circles from moons ago. There's an answer, I think it's Mu, the letter Mu, Greek letter Mu. It means I can't answer your question because there's no context within which to answer that question. So we can stop talking or we can get into a much longer conversation, which I don't think you have enough patience for because I think that the discussion of whether or not there is a God and who she or he is and if they are even human centric and et cetera, et cetera. I think that's a conversation that would take decades, probably longer than you have on my porch. So that's maybe even a bigger question than are you a turf or are you an antifreeze or are you woke? But it's kind of the same kind of thing. It's a conversation that we find ourselves in too much haste, I guess. And so the answer is kind of slowing down somehow. And I don't know how you do that on Twitter. So that's my new wonder. Thanks. Thanks, Pete. Doug B. You're muted. I can't help but feel it's a bit of a strong man to focus on words and weaponization of words and not drop below that to what's the underlying experiential human being dimensions of that. And ultimately language that characterized as weaponized is actually language that has been melded with an emotional limbic response. And the real sort of, I think, subject to juror and focus that would be worthy of discussion and exploration is how do you take a global population or if you want to zoom into a US population that is in such a state of fear as a steady, as an underlying steady state of being that it takes so little to trigger a guy shooting five people and awaiting him yesterday because he was told no to a medication that he needed. And this is sort of everywhere. And the thing about Gil's share about watching his language and carrying that Jerry, you echoed sort of a similar walk in on tender feet about what you say to who, where, when and what you might trigger. All of that through one lens, you can sort of denature it and go, well, that's a oppressive impact on freedom of speech and all of that. You can like intellectualize and abstract it. But the truth of the matter is that the level of fear and concern and trigger is much closer to the surface of the skin for many, many, many, many, many more people than I think it's been in quite a while. And how do you speak to that? How do you bring back safety and security when everybody's in fear of walking out of their door and incomplete? Thanks, Doug. It feels to me like what Biden has been trying to do is a strategy for that, which is say, hey, I'm here for all Americans and I'm gonna go try to pass things that make your life better and I'm not going to inflame things and go crazy and yell and I'm going to ignore the people who are doing that kind of as best I can. And that is a strategy. I don't know that it does not appear to be succeeding quite yet, but it takes time for that strategy to sort of sink in. And the other side has to go about the business of blowing itself up, which it is presently doing. The other side is just spinning nuclear to mix poor metaphors. Ken, then Gil. I think I've told this story before, so apologies for those who've heard it, but I was once asked back in 2004 to bring together a number of business people and peace activists. And I didn't want to do it because I find peace activists to be incredibly violent. They're like, oh, blood for oil. You know, they really take these extreme stands and I'm for peace and you're for war. And it was just, I didn't want to do it. But I did. I was convinced to finally do it. And so doing a World Cafe with about 80 people at the formerly beyond war, I can't remember what it is now, foundation for a global something or other. And I said, so this is Jennifer. She's my graphic recorder. She's gonna capture the visual output of today's conversation. And immediately somebody said, capture is war language. You can't use war language. And I was like, this is why I don't want to be in this room because I have these people who are just so triggered by a word, right? And I said, okay, fine. What would you use? What would you suggest? Oh, I don't know. I said, well, come up with the word, we'll use it. But right now we're gonna use capture. And so there's a lot of anxiety and challenge in the room. And I asked people, I knew that we couldn't start talking about the challenge because from an Ikea move, that's meeting the energy head on, right? So instead I asked people to tell a story. I said, all the tables are four. Please tell the story of the first time that you realized that peace was important to you. And we did two rounds of that. And it was really remarkable because most people went to a time when they were teenagers, when they tended to be a little bit more idealistic than they are as cynical adults. And they told really touching stories of something that occurred in their life that made them realize that peace was important. And at the end of two rounds, there were no longer peace activists and business people. There were a bunch of people concerned with peace. And we had a really much more productive conversation. So I think in terms of, I don't know how to de-weaponize a conversation on Twitter or Facebook or any other platform because you do have those, it's not a personal conversation. I think if you're in the same room or if you are in a resume room like this and you can see people's faces and you have appropriate facilitation and structure of the conversation, it's very possible to get past the weaponization. But out there in the larger world where there's all these forces of intentionally weaponizing people to divide them so that the status quo can continue, that's a much different animal that I do not know how to handle. So I just go about it one conversation at a time and try to bring as much awareness as possible and find questions that get people to think, what am I really concerned about here? Because if you shift from fears to concerns, you know, like what do we want? Why is this important? Then you get a very different tone and tone of the conversation and a different level of participation. Thank you. Thanks, Ken. I want to step back to Twitter for a second because Pete brought it up and you brought it up and say that somewhere early in Twitter's history, I realized, oh, this is really interesting because two people can have a relatively intimate conversation in public. And if they ignore all the retweets and replies and everybody else being pesky and whatever else, if they just manage each other and have a conversation and pace it any way they want to, and these are variables completely within their control, it can be very intimate and work really well and it can be a reliable, trustworthy, interesting conversation in public. It's when you get dragged into everything that everybody wants to do with you and twist you and turn you that it spins out of control but those are just variables in your control. The platform allows you to pretend those things ain't happening. And I think that's valuable and I don't think that's been destroyed quite yet even though I'm pretty sure that Elon is busy like putting a hole in the hole of the Twitter vessel. Gil Lennmark. Cherie, I agree that it's possible, it takes the discipline of an Aikido master. In other words, for people who are not practitioners of this stuff to... Not sure it's that level because I'm an Aikido master and I'm never getting there, but I could do this. I mean, master may not be the right word. I'm using it to spoke something. It's for those who don't know this, it's a practice of being centered and remaining centered even when perturbing things are thrown at you which could be someone coming to punch you or throw you to the ground or come at you with a weapon or yelling at you or calling you names is to be able to maintain center, calm, focus in the face of that. And that's what you're talking about doing on Twitter where it's challenging, but yeah, it's a kind of practice all dojo. Ken, I really appreciate what you said. I've been using the word care instead of concern because concern for a lot of people means worry. What are you concerned with? It's like, what are you worried about? That's not what you're trying to get at. You're trying to get at what matters to you. What do you really care about? So to your question earlier on of the Aikido moves in these conversations, I think it has to do with listening for care and being curious. And when I ask somebody, what do they care about in this matter? I have to really care in that question, right? It's not a gotcha question. It's not a setup or something. It's like a real authentic curiosity about a relationship which might be momentary and might be lifelong but it's about a relationship with a person and exploring what we each care about and where we might come together in that care. And some of you saw the news item yesterday that AOC and Matt Gaetz and two other Congresspeople came together on a piece of legislation about congressional corruption. It's kind of astounding, but they found they agreed on certain thing. They cared about certain things in common and found a basis for agreement which holds out a little glimmering of possibility to your violent peace activist thing. I will generalize on that and to say that it seems to be a lot easier for humans to talk about what we're against than what we're for. And frankly, that's partly, maybe it's partly psychological but it's partly, I don't know what the word for it is. Gregory Bateson and steps to an ecology of mind had a metal log with his daughter about opening question was daddy, why do things get into a muddle? And the short answer was that there are infinitely more states of disorder than order that are possible. So there's always more stuff to be against but what's interesting is what do you want? And that's what you were asking people. Like what was this first encounter with peace being important to you and that creates a strange attractor that people can organize a conversation around. So really rich and profound and thank you for that. I found the Jordan Peterson clip and I put it in the chat but the basic gist of it is somebody asked him, do you believe in God? He says, that really takes some unpacking because it depends on what do you mean by do and what do you mean by you? And what do you mean by believe and what do you mean by God? And a lot of people's heads explode with that and think, oh, there's Jordan Peterson doing his Jordan Peterson bullshit again but I think he's absolutely spot on because every one of those words has profoundly different potential meanings for different people. And unless I know which ones you are asking me I can't respond to you in a meaningful and respectful way and it sounds like wise ass but I find it to be enormously deep and kind of indicative of this conversation that we're having and how do I, how can I have that kind of conversation with strangers and bots and friends of friends of friends? I've disciplined myself to not respond to friends of friends in social media. I'll respond to friends but anytime I respond to friends of friends or even occasionally friends of friends of friends it goes to shit real fast because there's not context and there's not relationship there's not a container of respect and some degree of shared understanding of what the fuck we're talking about. It seems obvious to us than the whole, the weaponized conversations that Pete started us off with partly work because people take things as obvious. Well, I know that you mean X by Y therefore you're an idiot but I don't know what you mean unless I know you a little bit. Thank you. Thanks, Gil. Mark, Gene, Pete. I would like to call up the third patriarch of Zen. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. And Gregory Bateson talks about pathologies of communication and boy are we right there out of pathology of communication. I've been learning a lot having been forced to take time off from my day job to heal myself. I posted above, I'm wondering if I can post again. It's, there we go. A talk between an American philosopher and thank goodness the British, the English who colonized the world, tried to make it a better place, failed in some ways. I think the Indians are very happy that they speak English at the moment. Hard to say. But I at least say that, in fact, I will pay you to watch Peter Bogosian, how the Academy got woke and it's kind of thrown off my screen, why the new atheists are to blame us, why we are to blame. A take on wokeness, very different from anything I'm hearing here. And again, I'll repeat. Wokeness has hurt more of my friends who are female, lesbian, gay, whatever, than anything Trump has done. And that surprises the hell out of me. And I have to ask why. Anyway, they talk about street epistemology on the YouTube video. It's quite long, but worth a, and I'll give you my money back guarantee. If it wastes your time, ask me for how much money you want. And I will try to pay you back. Remaining centered, I really appreciate what you said, listening for care. I learned something about what one should do when insulted or triggered. Certainly in trauma care, which I'm trying to go through, trauma co-care, where we learn how to help each other in community, not professionals, we're not therapists, but try to be able to listen without judgment and let the person explain their story and get out the emotion. The theory is, you are able to release from the amygdala, the trigger, put it into words, and then have the hypothalamus. Is it hypothalamus? Again, brain is a little shaken. Amygdala? No, amygdala, the center of memory. But anyway, to get the executive function, hippocampus, thank you, to get the trauma into executive function language so you can say, this is what happened to me. This is how I responded. This is how I felt. And it moves from the amygdala, from the automatic trigger to the hippocampus and the trigger becomes a memory, a mere memory, rather than some kind of emotional hijacking that happens through emotion. You are not able to be controlled. Again, somebody said, when I said, yeah, my mother knows how to push all my buttons, my friend said, that's because she installed them. Now, when somebody goes off the rails, one might ask, and again, I found this on the internet and I don't have a ready reference, but are you okay? Are you okay? Just those three words. When somebody goes, you are pushing my, are you okay? It frames the, I have care for you, I'm in a relationship and I'm asking you, tell me about yourself rather than tell me what I am, which I get a lot of. Listening for care and actually being the person doing, caring, are you okay? Tell me, are you okay? I'm surprised you said that, are you okay? That kind of, I'm gonna accept your energy and I'm going to ask for more of your energy, but more of your energy, not about me, what about you? Are you okay? Jean, are you okay? People seldom think I'm okay. I just, I noticed this as Ken talked about not wanting to facilitate this meeting because of the nature of the responses from the people about peace. And then as Gil started talking and he talked about master and Jerry's immediate response to the term, we all seem to have our ping points and learning how to sort of get a hold of them and constrain them before we stick our foot in our mouth is really difficult. And it's sort of an ongoing challenge to learn to sort of bite your tongue and process the comment before you open your mouth. And so it's something that I work on a lot and some places I make progress and some places I don't. Thanks. Thanks, Jean. So now after this conversation, I have a wish that the magical people who run the social platforms, we live on Twitter and Facebook and whatever, the dear departed Twitter, I'm so sad. Why don't we just have affordances that make it much more clear that when we're having a high context conversation and add friction for low context interactions and just like tilt the playing field that we're on in social media. So that high context conversations come back to human scale and low text conversations just kind of get quieter and quieter and aren't a problem. So that was my wish. This is a childish wish. This is a wish similar to, I wish we didn't have a gun culture or I wish energy companies understood carbon and climate change, which actually of course they do I guess. So maybe that's not what I wish. I wish they would do something about carbon and climate change. And that's a childish wish. Not that we can't try to do things, but saying that there's this big Gollum, if I can use a technical term, something like Facebook is a meta Gollum, actually it's a really monstrous Gollum. Something like Twitter feels like only like a few Gollums put together. And by Gollum I mean something that's constructed and bigger, bigger than human, larger than human scale. And we humans still have a tendency to interact with large mechanistic creations that are made out of multiple humans as a human thing. I can interact with Microsoft as a human. I model it as a human. I interact with Google as a human. I interact with Twitter conceptually kind of as a human. I can go talk to Twitter. It tells me things, I can tell it things. It's made up of the number of people I can fit in my head, which Scott reminds us Dunbar talked about, the whole conversation about the Dunbar number we can skip right now. Anyway, the answer is not for, to ask the social platforms to do it, even if they could do it, they would screw it up. You can tell actually by, Musk is particularly ham-handed with his understanding of the dynamics of the way Twitter works and the marketplace that it occupies and things like that. But you can tell that when somebody of good intent tries to do something with a big Gollum, it's like, I'll put a leash around this Gollum and make it walk a straight narrow path towards high-context conversations and damping low-context conversations. This is gonna go wrong in a million ways because the problem is a lot, a lot bigger than that. Millions of people bigger. So the aid solution or an activity maybe, an activity that comes to me that I think works towards a solution is for those of us who've had conversations about this and have thought about it a little bit, I think we could actually, I think we could craft statements. Statement seems like the weak word right there, but craft an expression of belief. And I don't know what that would be. I'd have to think about it out of this conversation, but I think I have some beliefs now or I can reflect on this conversation and go back and read it and think about it and talk again. I think I have some beliefs, which if you start a conversation with, are you and Tifa or, do you love Jordan Peterson or are you woke or not woke? We're starting the conversation the wrong place. And I don't want to participate in those kinds of conversations. And so I don't. So beliefs like that, Gil had another one. I've learned not to respond on the socials to friends and friends because we don't have the context within which we can talk reasonably. And it's funny, I kind of reflected on that. I do actually respond to friends and friends on the socials, usually about technical questions. And I realized and it's kind of much more of a binary kind of answer. It's not a big, deep philosophical thing. It's like, how do you express this in a programming language or something like that? And there's a few obvious answers and not very much contention about it. But even then when I do that, I'm kind of making a small bet that my friend of friend has enough context and shares it with me that I can give them an answer and they're not gonna go ballistic. And nowadays in the US, I would be scared to have that kind of same contextual daring do on a driveway in a neighborhood that I didn't know going up to somebody's house and wondering if I'm gonna get shot. So at least on the socials, if they react badly, they're not, I won't end up with a bullet in me. Anyway, if I craft a set of beliefs and you craft a set of beliefs and we all craft a set of beliefs and some of them start resonating, harmonizing. And if we put that in our about page, more is the pity that we don't have about pages as a thing on the web. There's different, maybe it's on your blog, maybe it's in your Twitter profile, maybe it's on your slash now page. So maybe we also need to make an about page more of a thing. Maybe it's on your link tree, I don't know. But if we had pretty prominently, here's some important things. I believe that climate change is real and that we need to take concerted effort. I think we should do more of that. And I think I call on us as a community to do that in a way where we're singing in harmony and singing in a way that resonates and expands so that we can help change the world and that we can help change the world to be a more humane and safe and beautiful and wonderful place. And this, it's funny, this sounds like a childish wish, but I don't think it is. I think it's actually a good wish. And I think it's better than the, well, maybe Zuckerberg or Musk would care to hear my pleadings about changing their platform and then they're gonna screw it up anyway. Let's not do that. Let's take control and let's work together and let's learn to harmonize in a way that continues to expand and grow. Thanks. I'm picked before you go to questions. One, I and apparently I may be a couple of the people immediately when you brought up Gollum thought of Lord of the Rings Gollum and it took us quite a while to work over to the Jewish Gollum, which I think is what you meant. And my knowledge of the Jewish Gollum didn't fit what you were saying as a meta Gollum and so forth. I think of it as a created being out of mud and sort of an artificial being or something like that. And I wasn't interpreting what you were saying as being that. So could you explain a tiny bit? Thanks for the question and interestingly enough and I apologize, perhaps, perhaps I don't. I apologize for appropriating from a culture which I am not part of. Gollum, G-O-L-E-M is indeed a Jewish mythical creature. I'm not Jewish. And nowadays you start to see people using the wrong spelling actually which is really confusing. Oh, that's so crazy. And I had never thought of those two words as next to each other yet. So that happened in my head. So what I meant by a meta Gollum, I think the metaphor holds in my head. Maybe it does for other people. Maybe it doesn't, especially for Facebook. Facebook is something where I can, another thing I would account in there is the US financial system or the global financial system or the way energy companies work in the energy industry works. But those are kind of like bigger and fuzzier and harder to think of as meta Gollums. But if I look at Facebook, Facebook, one of the things about an artificial, a creature made out of mud, it's a monster, it stomps around, it makes a mess. It destroys things in inconvenient ways. But the Gollums that I've read about are still kind of human scale. You could see it towering over you. It's maybe 60 feet tall or something like that. And it stomps around and destroys a village or something like that. Facebook is a conglomeration of a bunch of those together. And I think maybe of a fractal Gollum or something like that. If you took not just one 60 foot monster but a dozen of them and made a much bigger monster and then you took a dozen of those and made a much bigger monster and took a dozen of those and made a much bigger monster. That's kind of where Facebook fits. It is so big and so large and has so much control over so much stuff. It's not like a single Gollum anymore. It's piles and piles and piles of Gollums all working together to, I'm gonna be, I'm sorry to be overly dramatic here. I get a little bit passionate about Facebook. So while I'll pause myself and tell the story, I have a mailing list that's 30 or 35 years old, maybe 40 years old that I've been on for 35 years or something like that. It's a bunch of people who talk about culture and being human together and things like that. And it's, it has always been a, it's where some of my best friends are. I've actually seen some of them in person strangely enough. The person who spoke the most there and who kind of held up the whole conversation because she was just so vociferous on the list. She didn't talk so much about herself and what she was living and stuff like that. Her amount of conversation made it possible for us to have smaller conversations within kind of the sheltering tree of her, like just churn of stream of consciousness stuff every day. She could post literally dozens of messages a day and this list used to run 200 messages a day, no problem. And everybody on the list was like, yeah, no worries. People who like stumbled into the list accidentally, it was nominally about English language which we didn't talk about very much. People would stumble in and like their heads would explode a day or two later. It's like, how do I get off this? Shut it off, please, I can't stand it. This woman who's now in her 80s moved over to Facebook five or 10 years ago or something like that and which essentially killed the list because she moved her center of discourse from the mailing list where we all were to Facebook and Facebook groups and stuff like that. And it's a beautiful, wonderful thing. I was just on a call with a group of the friends a week or two ago and she said, Facebook came up and she said, I love Facebook. Facebook is an amazing part of my life. If I didn't have Facebook, it would make it so that I couldn't keep track of all the people I keep track of. She would be bereft. The whole world would collapse for her without Facebook. So I have a different feeling about Facebook, the God that is Facebook. I don't believe in Facebook. I think it's a horror on humanity. It is like an absolute horror on humanity because what it does, it's built to be a golem. It doesn't think, it doesn't care. All it cares about is moving around. When it moves around, what happens is it vacuums up dopamine cycles by the literal billions, which is a number you cannot imagine. Literal billions of people live inside this machine that puppets them around, as if they were puppets. They're marionettes on strings, doing whatever Zuckerberg in some like, you know, fractal level way, way, way above you is pulling strings because he thinks, oh, I'm just driving a golem. It's no big deal. Humanity's fine. No worries. He's manipulating billions of people to have lives different than they want to have. I actually don't care. I appreciate, her name is Natalie. I appreciate Natalie and her life. I like that she's mostly, I hope she's doing this with agency, but I know from being on Facebook, it takes me about, I don't go to Facebook very often. It takes me about 30 seconds to get sucked into the timeline and be scrolling and like watching and like, blah, blah. And I can't think anymore. And I know that the billions of people in Facebook aren't so much more well-trained than me to resist that. So, you know, when Facebook says, you know, Facebook knows like thousands of posts that it could give you and it also knows that it can't give you more than a few dozen every day because you literally can't read it. So it's picking and choosing what you're seeing. It's picking and choosing what you think. It's picking and choosing the friends for you. It's saying, this friend over here wants to be in touch with you. When that friend doesn't want to be in touch with you, it's just that they, you know, through the machination of social networks, they've decided that, you know, it would be great if these two people got together because that would increase their engagement, you know, 0.06% and yada, yada, yada. So Facebook for me is not one golem. It's not the golem of the algorithm. It's not the golem of a CEO who doesn't have the human decency to think about what he's doing to billions of people in their lives, literally. I, you know, I really appreciate that Mark has done an awesome job at making Natalie's life better, but he has done it in a way billions of times. He has robbed people of their agency. He's taken it away from them. And he's given them something which is kind of, you know, kind of a foe agency. So Mark, Mark is human. Certainly he's not a golem, but the thing that he operates as a golem and, you know, and it sits on the shoulders of other golems and it's on the shoulders of other golems and it sits on the shoulders of other golems. So that's what I meant by a medical. Thanks for the question. Dang, thanks Pete, I appreciate that. Stacy, thank you very much for your patience and step in whenever you feel like. Well, I apologize beforehand because it's gonna be hard to connect all my thoughts because so much time has gone by. But he gave me a new one. So the first thing I wanna say is, well, so when Mark was talking at one point, he said, we're all atheists and I was like, no, I'm not an atheist. So to Pete, something you said about appropriating the term, Mark, you don't have to answer that about the atheists, but there's no, so as somebody who believes in a concept called God, whatever that may mean, there's no appropriation. Everything belongs to everyone. That would be like appropriating a color can't be done. It's all of us, it's all for everything. But Jerry put up, I didn't know what new atheism was. So he put up the Wikipedia and I read it and it talked about new atheists are the ones that believe that rather than tolerating the religious, they should be mocked and criticized. And that's what I wanna speak to because I really do think new atheists are the problem because while I don't believe that people with strong, fundamentalist, superstitious beliefs should be ignored, I do think there should be discussion. But I think that it should be the kind of discussion that you would have if you were a teacher speaking to a child, you wouldn't mock them. You would draw them out with questions. There's something, I'm trying to think. Okay, now I wanna connect to Facebook for a minute. So with the whole thing about Facebook, Facebook can be the way to make it a positive thing is when you have your own group. And hearing you speak is making me think I wanna go back and restart my page that I had a couple of years ago because it can be really powerful but you have to be able to have your own group so that it's not a question of having the algorithms control you. It's a question of everybody can come to the group because it is really good. What was missing was the Zoom piece of it. I mean, Doug's the only person that I actually met through Facebook here but I have a lot of other communities that my first contact with them and getting to know them was through Facebook and I would have never gotten to know them. Speaking to friends and friends, I do speak to friends and friends when it's a political thing and the friends are what Jerry would call muggles. I'll usually start with a question just to very, just because I know there's no context there. But unlike a lot of you, oftentimes I have a different situation where the friends of friends are way more educated than I am. They're in these academic circles and frankly, I don't agree with them but I'm also not sure that I really understand what they're saying. And so I'll also start with a question but I'll let them know. I'm not sure I understand you but I'll also tell them my point of view. And what that does is it lets the other people in the group that are also as educated as they are see that what I'm saying has value and maybe see that what the other person is saying doesn't have so much value but nobody wanted to question that person before. I don't know if I'm explaining the point I'm trying to make but what I'm trying to say is that and when Scott was talking about these words that encompass everything else, there's not enough differentiation between what's happening in a group. And sometimes that's because no one wants to question the more powerful voice, let's say. Yeah, I'm all over the place because we've had so many different thoughts. What I most wanted, when I first raised my hand it was really about not mocking but yes, having the discussions and yes, questioning. So I actually like being in groups where there are people so I'm in one group now and it's atheist and Christians which I don't love that so much because it's really people that just wanna mock each other. There's a whole world of Christians that don't believe the Bible literally. I'm in agreement with them. I don't wanna separate myself from them because the messages are the ones I resonate with. So why would I want to, those are my allies. People that believe in the messages are my allies. Yeah, so I'll stop there but the mocking is a real issue and the only time that I will use mocking is with a bully but that's because that's the world they're in and they might need a little bit of that in order to step back because they're bullies, thanks. Thanks, Stacy. I wanna pick up on one thread that you picked up on which is why I put the strength of weak ties in the chat earlier and that is this idea of friends of friends and how do you manage friends of friends? And Gil had said, I just don't interact with anybody who's not a friend. And I'm like, I find that one of the claims of the strength of weak ties is that your close ties, your strong ties are kind of in an echo chamber and you're seeing the same stuff you have very similar opinions and that your weak ties are where novelty enters your social networks. And I kind of discovered that that seems to be true and Stacy what you're seem to be saying to me is that remaining permeable to those very weak ties but finding a really good way to negotiate entry with them and to make contact is really important. And for me, if I see somebody I don't really know but who's connected through a connection and they appear to be trolling me, I will ignore those. I don't ignore the trolls is probably reasonable advice. Don't feed the trolls. But if they're trying in some sincere way to make contact I will reply and I will answer questions and I will do whatever I can because I learn a lot from those interactions. I'll learn some very different way of seeing what I'm thinking or whatever else. So I think that we each have figured out out of necessity our policies, our personal policies for how to deal with strangers or whatever. And this is like a whole new layer on how to deal with strangers as opposed to like don't take rides from people on the street. And we're in entirely new waters now. And I'm so glad I don't have like a teen or a preteen kid that I'm trying to raise right now. This stuff is just so slippery and dangerous and the forces of play are so difficult to corral. But I'll wrap there. I just wanted to say that this week ties thing is important and then also earlier, I think it was Scott put in the Dunbar number. We've raised this a bunch of different times. I think Dunbar is much more complicated and less straightforward than we think it is. And I'd love to have that conversation. I will post in the chat a very good interview with Robin Dunbar that really complexifies the issue a lot and is a good starting point for figuring out what to do. With that, I will turn the floor over to Mark, Hank, Scott. Hey, wonderful, rich things to respond to. I was on the street yesterday and a family with two little girls came by and I said, hi, who are you? And the little girl was in a stroller. And the parents said, she doesn't respond to men's strangers, women's strangers. She responds to it. The men's strangers, she's sketchy about. I'm going like, oh, oh, okay. I'll ask her little sister. And she's Molly, her little sister is like, you know, the joy of kids to connect, make eye contact and interact. It's just like, oh, you know, how come I'm not, you know, a kindergarten teacher, how come I'm not getting this feedback every day because I don't have kids. Never had, you know, never had them. But it's like, oh my God, I forgot to have kids. Um, so boy, going backwards in chronological order, five spokes around the hub of the wheel, the hub is empty in order to accommodate an axle. Without that emptiness, the cart would not roll. That's what's important about what's missing, what's not there, what Terry Deacon describes as the ontology of what's absent, being critical to, well, it's from the doubt aging. It's like the fifth or second, I forget where in the doubt aging that is, but I could find it very quickly or I'm not talking. Anyway, Terry Deacon, thank you. And I highly recommend the eight months that took me to read Incomplete Nature, how mind emerged from matter, eight months of my life. I don't, we can't all spend that. I'm thankful I did, but Mary Catherine Bateson Mary Catherine Bateson is a shero of mine. And she's female, she talks in a wonderful, wonderful talk on the long now. I highly recommend, I should find it and post it about aging. And since we're all aging, some of us are older than me at 60, it's amazingly important to take a look at, but she wrote in an earlier book peripheral visions, I believe it was, that there's a difference between two types of multiculturalism, identity multiculturalism where I say, I'm Mexican and Cinco de Mayo is tomorrow and you can't drink tequila tomorrow because that's appropriating my culture. Fuck that, get drunk, celebrate. But no, September 16th, I think it is, Israel Mexican Independence Day, Cinco de Mayo is more of an American kind of adaptation or Mexican American notion of a certain kind of independence in relation to the United States more. So, know your history, especially if you're Mexican drink Happy Cinco de Mayo tomorrow, have a great time celebrating my culture, our culture because it's not my identity to be Mexican or Mexican American or Costa Rican or white or somewhat white or one eighth Swedish. I can go to the Jewish culture and say, there's this notion of a golem and that's adaptive multiculturalism to say, there's so many cultures in the world. There's the Tibetans, there's the people in Myanmar who are fighting, they have different cultures, Tamil and also Islamic mix coming into East Asia and take the best and the worst of every culture and mix it together rather than say, I apologize, I'm sorry, Pete, that I'm appropriating something from a culture that's not mine. No, Pete, we're all connected, that culture is yours. It's yours for the taking, it's yours for the enriching to say, I want this notion from this 16th century rabbi and it's amazing, look at it, gosh. Hey, I'm gonna tell everybody about this because it was from the 16th century, you know, long ago the 16th century was incredible. That kind of enthusiasm of look at this other culture, look at what they did, look at the Patala palace in Tibet. Oh my God, the Chinese are like using it as a tourist attraction, but oh my God, it's beautiful. And when was that built, maybe the 16th century? Thank you, Gil, for also really, really enjoying the beauty and humanity of Mary, Catherine Bateson. I cannot recommend her books enough starting with the book about the 1956 Bergwarstein Conference, Our Own Metaphor. Thank you, Gil. Talking about a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation. Thank you, Jerry. So being able to choose how we adapt rather than just how we evolve naturally, quote unquote, in how when we become our own environment to respond to, how do we change the environment that's not under our control when we have control over the environment? Deep, deep philosophical question. And I went over my time, which was, oh, seven minutes. Damn, damn, I didn't wanna go that long. Thank you for listening. And again, I'm grateful for listening to the rest of you. That's just been an incredible talk of mine. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, step in at your leisure. Well, as Mark said, so many rich things to respond to. And I'm very late raising my hands and the conversation has gone much further long than what I wanted to respond to. So I'll just respond quickly to two things that Mark said. One is Cinco de Mayo tomorrow is liberation day in the Netherlands. It's a very important holiday here. So all cultures have their special Cinco de Mayo style celebrations. The other thing is about, well, the hotel had built so many hundreds of years ago. Big article in a Dutch newspaper today, radical Hindus in India are trying to change history saying that the Taj Mahal was not built by Muslims but was actually built by Hindus before the Muslims came. But what I really wanted to talk about was something that was very important in the beginning of the conversation about hijacked words and weaponized words and how we feel uncomfortable when using them after a while and maybe stop using them. And I did a small post back an hour ago about the other side of weaponized and hijacked words which is the boy who tried Wolf's effect. No one's interested in listening to or paying attention to these hyperused words like democracy or peace, maybe very soon climate change or sustainability. I mean, they've been done to death. We've all been there. We've done that. It's so for the century, people turn off just when the need for conversation is very important. And made me think that that's one of the things that's behind the big lie and why people invented the big lie and to bring a big lie up to date in the 21st century. The reason that Trump and other Democrats lie out loud all the time is not to convince people that they're right. It's to help people distrust everything they hear or read from any politician or any scientist or anyone who tries honestly to have a conversation about what things mean and why things matter. So I don't know what to do about this boy who cried Wolf's effect. I just wanna pose the question for today or maybe next week or another week. So I've got to get off the call in a few minutes. I wanna go to the Memorial Day event in the town center, which I've hosted about earlier. And it's about having two minutes of silence experienced together with hundreds of people, very moving and very reflective. So when I pop off, I'll also be reflecting on this call. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Hank. I really appreciate knowing that. Scott, it's up to you. So take a couple of notes to make this concise. This is a story I've told before. I'm going back to the weak ties, which I am fond of Jerry. And I think one of the themes that has gone through this conversations over the last several weeks has been how to have better conversations, how to bring it down to the individual level at some point, talking to anyone, treating anyone as an equal. As opposed to seeing groups. So this is my drive-through story. So I was in a fast food drive-through line and I was busy and I had a very low car. And I got up to the line, up to the window and I put my card out and a hand took it. And then a hand gave it back and then a hand came out and handed me a bag which I grabbed and put it in the seat next to me and I rolled forward. And then it hit me. I have no idea who that was. I don't know if they were tall, short, green, blue, old, young, nothing. I have no idea. That could have been a robotic arm as far as. And I kind of vowed, you know what? I'm never gonna do that. I'm never gonna do that again. Treat someone like they're not even there. And I think this relates to the weak ties thing. So one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of people know who I am in the town. I'm in. And it's not because I'm well-known. It's because I always see them. And by see them, I mean acknowledge them. And it's the weirdest thing. It takes like, it's like nothing. It's so small. And yet they know who I am because I'm the guy who always says, oh, hi, Karen. How you doing? How's that van that you tried to get? You know, or whatever it happens to me. It doesn't matter. So part of it is in the weak ties is that you actually have to acknowledge that you have them. Otherwise you're not gonna develop them. Your pharmacist, the person who always schedules your appointments or confirms, you know, whatever, those are all, they're not transactional. They're other people. And one of the things that I'm not really just very social but it's helped me practice conversation because I think you'll take this in the right way. It doesn't really matter. There's not a lot on the line when I engage with my pharmacist and it's also not a space where I'm gonna have an argument because it's not, you know, I can bring up things and if it feels, you know, you kind of go back and forth and if it feels a little weird, you just don't go there and everyone just kind of goes on. And I think it's just a neat space to develop those conversational skills and to be exposed to a much broader group of people that we're actually exposed to and we don't even see them. And so I think that that weak ties thing is an important way for us to be more of a community when it's really, really easy to not be a community because we're busy and we're doing whatever. So I'll close with the thought that I had, oh, geez, this is from 2020, 1126. So this would have been the Thanksgiving time period from the OGM call. And someone had posted something, I think it was on Facebook actually. It was, give me three words better than I love you. And my response was tell me more and I keep coming back to this because I think tell me more says, I'm more interested in you than I am in me. I'm gonna devote some time to you. I'm gonna listen, tell me more. And I think that that's a fantastic way of strengthening a weak tie in just a moment. Someone else tell you something. They're the checkout person at the grocery store and they're gonna say, oh yeah, well, I like these. And it's so easy to just go, who cares, you know? Like shut up and bag my groceries. Or, oh, really, tell me more. And the lights come on. It's like, oh, I'm seeing, this is great. And it never fails. So anyway, that's enough for me. Mr. Homer, you know what to do. Thank you, Scott. You reminded me of something that Jerry's, Wave April posted, I don't know, a year, two years ago and during the pandemic about how because we were all trapped at home, we had lost a whole layer of our network interaction, which was the people that we talked to at the grocery store, see on the street. They're not friends. They may not even be acquaintances. They may just be people we see on a regular basis and nod to and acknowledge them. And how critical that is for the appropriate and good, healthy functioning of communities. There's, I don't know all the science behind it and maybe, maybe Jerry could dig out the post, but there's just having these interactions enriches people's lives in ways that they don't realize. And I think we take that for granted, you know? I always talk to the person checking out my groceries. I would say, how are you? And people will say, I'm good. Thanks for asking. And this one afternoon, this happened at Trader Joe's and I said, well, don't people usually ask? And she said, no. And I said, well, what percentage? She said, maybe one in 10 comes along and asked me, most people that are on their phone, you know, I'm like, that's terrible. I actually have seen in smaller stores and shops, I've seen signs that say, no shoes, no shirt, no cell phones, no service, you know? Because if I've seen people like walk through and never acknowledge that there's a person there doing them a service of checking out their groceries and they're just on their phone with their friend. And I just think that is a horrible, very, very rude way to be in the world. And it's an affront to my sensibilities, you know, for whatever that sort of thing. Like I just walk around, I walk around every other time and just think, what's wrong with you? Why can't you take the time to connect with this person who's actually doing something that if they weren't there, you'd go hungry. You know, that's actually a pretty big thing they're doing for you. You just don't recognize it. So I just, your kids get off my lawn. It's kind of the mood I'm in. And the wrong red dress shootings thing. Oh my God. Taking on a whole new dark. Wrong driveway, the wrong car, girls gets into a car and you know, my, oh my God, you know? And that takes us into the whole conversation about the rage farming that's going on. And social media is one of those places where there's huge amounts of rage farming going on. You know, people want to know why people are going off at the drop of a hat. Well, you got industries devoted to stirring up the amygdala of your segments of the population, making them outraged and feeling like they're being screwed over and the people doing it are the people who are also being screwed over instead of the people who are actually doing the screwing. So, which brings up a bizarre cartoon of waiter at a restaurant and a couple and the guy says, by the way, why do you charge a corkage fee for a bottle of the screw cap? And the waiter says, cause it sounds better than a screwage fee and I'll stop. I'm here all week folks, try the brisket. Thanks Ken. Mark, starting your timer. We had, I've worked for thieves. I have made a living from toner pirates working for a philosopher who has the best intentions and basically would knew how to use rhetoric. You call people up and say, I'm from S, ABL, we're handling your toner cartridges recharging. What's the model? We don't have the model number of your Xerox. Was it the Xerox? And they say, oh no, no, no, it's a Canon. It's a Canon 510. Would you like us to refill your cartridges? And they, oh yeah, yeah. I guess we need more cartridges. Okay, we're gonna send you a crate. It's gonna be $1,500 for four, creative of four cartridges of toner. And thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, who can I get to sign the check? And they would have a phone script where they would basically suck money and charge 10 times what toner costs. And this was fascinating to me and it's fascinating to me at 60 looking what I did at age 21. Helping people rip people off. I did it. I ripped people off by writing software to help these people make more money by ripping off businesses by having people who were philosophically smarter and knew the tricks of rhetoric to suck money into their own pocket. They are best performers who are on the phone team or porn stars. They knew how to connect to people in Orange County in the 80s. I keep on forgetting my own history and it's just amazing. I have so much more to say, but it's 926 and I went on for two minutes and 15 seconds. That's enough, come on, thanks. Mark, thank you. I don't know, I was in OC in the 80s and I missed that experience somehow. I feel like I should go back and hunt some of that stuff down. The other thing, again, rhetoric in the 80s. What was it? The gospel of success. Jesus wants you to be racist. Jesus wants you to be rich. Tammy Faye Baker. Yeah, Orange County in the 80s. Tammy Faye Baker and right across from South Coast Plaza, that grand golden, oh God, what was the crystal cathedral? Oh my God, I forgot all about that. Garden Grove. Well, I went there once. I had relatively Christian friends who invited me to a concert. And the first clue I had that something was going on beyond what I thought was the name of the band was gonna play was called Mustard Seed Faith. And I'm like, that sounds vaguely biblical. Anyway. Yeah. That's my own history I forget and I'm doomed to repeat it sometimes. That's, I guess, one of my core insights that I just had right this second that's gonna change my life. I forget my own history and I'm doomed to repeat it. Did somebody help me remember that? Ironically. We're recording that. I think we can. Thanks, Mark. Mr. Homer. Today's poem was really easy. It's a limerick? It's a limerick. No, although I have some. My favorite limerick actually has a bad pun embedded in it. So it combines the two lowest forms of humor. That is so perfect for you though. Yeah, so I'll tell you that before I do the real serious poem, which is there once was a poem named Clyde, who fell in an outhouse and died. He had a young brother who fell in another. No, they both were interred side by side. I'm really sorry, but you made me do that. That's really nice. Probably the most elegant limerick I've ever heard. All right, so today's poem comes from Antonio Machado. And the title is, Is My Soul a Sleep? Is my soul asleep? Have those beehives that work in the night stopped? And the water wheel of thought, is it going around now, cups empty, carrying only shadows? No, my soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches its eyes wide open, far off things and listens at the shores of the great silence. Have a great week, y'all. Thank you, Ken. And thank you, everybody. See you in a week? See a few of you far more frequently than that. Doug has dropped off. Guy? The recording is still on. One of the things that was wonderful about KikoLav was we just had an event that was formal. Let's reflect on this informally as friends off camera. Now, I haven't made time in my day for that today, but boy was that a powerful pattern. And it really increased our connection, even though we're just vibrations in the air impacting our sensory systems and a reality one pixel deep that I can cover with my finger. I don't exist anymore. There I am. Hey, baby. Hey, you know that old baby trick, you know. I'm gone. I'm here again. Concrete operationalism. Yeah. Sacey. Yeah. Can I just also throw out like a new suggestion that before we end the call, maybe you just put out like an announced, you know, sort of like, is there anybody that has anything that they really want to add before we leave? Just as sort of like, if somebody has something pressing, thanks. Under that. Not even pressing, but just something that they don't want to, you know, they want to be able to drop off. Does anybody have anything they want to add before we drop off? Pete? Go ahead, Mark. And Stacey. Jenny, you didn't say anything. I was listening for you. The mute button is still muted. You're looking for the app? Looking for it. No. So no, I didn't. I was very happy just being quiet and taking things in and seeing what the, so this is what my second or third time only. So each time has been quite different. So I'm really just getting used to you all, but I enjoyed tonight and the, you know, and the scope of the comments. Jenny. I enjoyed it. Thank you. I don't want to interrupt you because I'm going to say this ironically, we suffer from male answer syndrome here tremendously. Right? We do. I celebrate Stacey because she's so brave and has lasted out about 20 women who've come and gone because they just couldn't take it. Thank you, Stacey. Thank you. Thank you. Now, Jerry has heard this before and so has Pete and so has Scott and Eric, but Jenny, we need more women's voices. We really do. We really, really do. Well, I take that on board. So next time around, I'll pipe up a bit. I will shut up more for you to talk. Whoa, I don't know about that. Any day. Any day. Please, Jenny, talk more. Okay. If only to keep Mark. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you all. Good night, you all. Really appreciate it. Bye. Bye.