 AI companion. This is the governance call on Thursday, March 7, 2024. Tom, Zoom has a couple of AI features they've enabled in the last couple of months. One of them is the AI companion, which is kind of a chat bot in the chat. So you can bring up the chat companion and notice it says it gives you a couple hints. Catch me up, what are the action items, et cetera. It's kind of looking at the transcript and trying to be smart about what Scott said. But in our experience so far, it lags the conversation by a bit. So if you try to ask it a question about something that happened in the last couple of minutes, it's not likely to be very smart. But once it catches up, it's really pretty good. Then the AI summary is something I've been using on almost all my calls. And after the call, I will get an email with a summary as if there had been a smart, better than high schooler sitting in our meeting taking notes. And it works well. It'll say, like, Tom and Jerry talked about wise democracy. And they decided Tom's going to send Jerry a follow up or whatever, blah, blah, blah, and on from there. It's pretty interesting. So now that we've turned everything on and we have a few more people who've joined us, people I haven't seen in a very long time. We all just got off a call a half hour ago, many of us. The standing OGM weekly call. I was thinking, Hank, if you wouldn't mind reporting in on your Iceland adventure at the Rethinking Democracy event. Yeah, let me just give a short overview of it because it hasn't all been digested in my head. And we still have to get together to make several documents from different perspectives. But essentially it was about the Rethinking Democracy and how Nordic countries might be able to Rethink Democracy in such a way that it could be an inspiration to the rest of the world. It was in Iceland. The last of three days altogether, there were about 60 people who attended and one of the very nice things about it is that for change, there were a lot of young people. Usually when I go to conferences, the people are all in their, well, maybe 40s, but 50s, 60s, et cetera. But there were a dozen people in, at least a dozen people in their 20s. People came from all the five Nordic countries of Europe and from other countries as well as far away as Nepal and Uruguay, we had delegates. And it was a half day of short presentations, including a presentation about how values determine how we think and feel and relate to issues of democracy and thinking about short-term, middle-term or long-term futures as a lead-in to that. We asked all the participants to fill out a values assessment survey in advance and the Norwegian woman who is an expert on values and culture sort of told us where we were and remarked on a few things that were interesting to her and might be interesting to the group. And there was another presentation or actually two presentations by the parliamentary futures committee one of Finland and one of Iceland. And although they go by different names, it seems that about a dozen or more countries that have parliamentary futures committees, which might be called different things. A lot of them have just started up. Finland has been running for, I'd say, almost 20 years. And what role a parliamentary futures committee has on advising the politicians, their colleagues in the parliament and the cabinet, on what is good for that country's quality of life. And all agree that the future of the parliament all agreed that the quality of life in Northern Europe, the so-called Nordic model, was very good. It was the one model where lots of people could point to back at the end of the last century in the beginning of this one as successful social democracies. They're all being eroded by the same kind of forces that are eroding democracies in America and India and the Netherlands and wherever. But from their own, the research of the people who attended, young people in those five countries do feel it's important to have a much more public discourse about what democracy was, is and could be. And one of the ambitions of the people attending the conference was to see how that could be done at all levels of the society, the normal well-educated people who might do that anyway, but also the more dissatisfied people with a lower education who feel threatened by migration and artificial intelligence, but also at the level of politicians, not only at national, but also at regional and especially at the city level. After, let's see if I'm counting in my head, five hours of presentations, we had a visit to the Iceland Parliament. Iceland is the country with the longest continuing parliament in the world. Sorry. I don't think. Sorry? Yeah. I don't think, I think it's called. Yeah, exactly. And it started in the 10th century and at different locations before Reykjavik was anything, but places in the country, it has continued since the 10th century and the secretary general of the parliament gave us a guided tour. We were met by the prime minister of Iceland and it sort of sets the scene of how one Nordic country, Iceland, has been involved with so-called or so-labeled democratic processes for many centuries. And the second day of the conference were full day democracy labs, one based on technology and artificial intelligence as a driver of change in society, one based on climate and climate change as a driver for change in society and one based on governance institutions and paradigms as a driver for change in society. And they were at it eight hours on the second day and the morning of the third day and things were reported in the plenary at the end of the conference. And I can go into more detail about what happened, especially in my lab, because I was co-facilitating one of the labs, but perhaps I've told enough to stimulate ideas or thinking from other people. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Two things, is there a link for the conference? Because I don't remember what it was called and if there's a link, I would love to add that. And then did the parliament offer any successful explanation for why they failed to ratify their redesigned constitution? No, no. That's sort of a shameful thing that happened. Yeah, yeah, I agree. But things like that were, let's put it a different way, we were very, very interested in how parliamentary committees for the future work and why they have in Finland been reasonably successful in influencing their legislation for 20 years and what other countries could learn from that. So we didn't really get many questions about something as specific as that. Interesting, interesting. Anybody else with questions for Hank? The Danes, I'm sorry, good, oops. Go ahead, Tom. Did the Danes mention their consensus conference innovation that was operating 20 years ago, but I don't know if it's still operating? It wasn't brought up in the plenaries or in my lab, though it very well may have come up in either of the other two labs. If you put it in the chat, maybe we can Google it and see if it's still on. Oh, excellent, thanks. I think it's the Office of Technology or something like that. Yeah. Innovated it. It's a major citizen engagement, public citizen engagement. Sounds very good, yeah. I will now put a link to the conference in the chat. Hank, I'm interested in your personal assessment of what would you walk away with? What gave you hope? What has you concerned? Where do you think this is going? Just not asking you to go over it, but just from a personal point of view as a participant, what was it like? It was a little like, how can I describe it? It was a little like lots of people who are passionate in diverse ways, cognitively or emotionally, being in the same room with others like themselves committed, shall I use the word, semi-committed to learning new things so they could take it away and do things. And that's a feeling that I don't usually get at conferences or meetings. It's like, well, I think A and all the other people think X, Y, Z. This was everyone's thinking X, Y, Z together. So it was a kind of, if I use the word, a kind of homecoming feeling for many people. I had two major takeaways. One was that young people in many different countries are very concerned about public conversation about the futures that democracy might take. And the other was a sort of process learning since I was in the team of eight people who developed it, how we did everything wrong and how if we did another one, we'd change lots of things and try to have online streaming and organize online conversational groups in 10 or 15 different countries around the world. So we sort of were a finger, let's say that in English. It was a sort of practice to how to do something and we learned a lot about how to do it better. And the main message for me was there's not enough really good public discourse about this in lots and lots of different countries. And it's probably the time to do it to help organize it or to create conditions so it can emerge and stuff like that. Thank you. Thank you, Hank. As part of this call, I'm kind of thinking of asking the group what are potential questions we could address, for example. Tom, thank you for the links to consensus conference. I was gonna go do some research after the call and I have to do less of that. And so one of the questions that I think comes naturally from what you just reported back is what would help young people run with this and fix the world to be a little optimistic about the question. And that's a question I would love to address because I think young folks are like on it. There's a bunch of really alarmed and activated and smart young people around the world. A totally different question is one that Gil asked on the OGM list, which was like, hey, how do we prevent November 2024 from being a MAGA runaway? And how do we like stop that train from either flying off the rails or coming into the station, whichever train you think it is? And that's an interesting question as well. Although my instincts are that there's things that are fundamentally broken that aren't that amenable to tactics in the short term. I don't know, but I think that's a super interesting question. And I'm curious what other questions that we might talk about are in your brains as in Ken. So I just, I'm gonna put a link to the Plex that came out today because it's got Gil's wonderful contribution where he asked chat GPT, what would happen if we placed wellbeing of the living world at the center of everything? And you can go in there and read that. It's really quite remarkable. And I think personally, I think focusing on the questions of what's broken and how do we fix it is not the right approach because that's not gonna get us where we need to go but focusing on the question of what if we attend to the wellbeing of every system at every level for all living beings and the entire planet, that would be a different organizing principle and a different organizing paradigm for influencing how we would design governance structures. And thank you, Gil, for doing that. It's a tremendous public service. Thanks, Ken. Credit where credit is due. This got started by an article from Andrew Winston, author of Net Positive, together with Paul Palmer, Unilever CEO, an interesting cat. And Andrew asked chat GPT for, I forget the exact prop but the narrative of the current world and got that and then said, what if you centered human wellbeing, which produced a very interesting response. And I thought that was not focused enough. So I said, wellbeing is a living world. And yeah, it's a fascinating thing for a lot of different reasons. I both agree and disagree. Can I agree that that narrative is fundamental and to animate human spirit and imagination, to have us thinking about the things that are working, part of my MO, I guess we call these theories have changed these days, for a long time has been to highlight examples of things that are working, things that are good things that call to people across political divisions to combat the, oh shit, nothing's working narrative that we are peddled all the time. To say here, like, millions of examples of creative human endeavor that are inspiring and inviting and seductive and call us in to do more like that. So yeah, yes, yes, yes and all that. And on the November question, I would like us to have the operating space after January, 2025 to do the kind of things we're talking about. It's not tactics to the exclusion of all that, but my interpretation is that we're in a very serious self-defense situation here. And there are times when, this is really tricky stuff. There are times when you have to drop everything and take care of an emergency. If you do that all the time, you're truly fucked in other ways. And even the firefighters who were doing like 18 hour days fighting California wildfires, when they end their day, they actually clean up their equipment and put it away. So there's a kind of taking care, even in the face of emergency that has to happen. The metaphor that keeps coming to me on the, I don't know if you wanna call this tactics or strategy or break it down that way. But if I'm hiking on a trail and I find somebody who has fallen and broken their leg and they're bleeding out their thigh, I'm gonna turn it at them. That doesn't build their long-term health. It's not the strategy for repairing the trail or doing all sorts of other things. But if I don't take urgent action in that circumstance, they will die. That's a different kind of conversation than the kind of conversation we usually have. And it's feeling to me like we are in that kind of historic moment. Historical moments are usually named a century or several centuries later by somebody looking retrospectively and saying, oh, that time then was a historical moment. I don't know if people back then felt like they were living in one, but I feel like we're living in one. And so that's very challenging in terms of how to context and frame the actions. So. Thanks, Kim. Dave? Yeah, thanks Hank. I was thinking that actually one of the fun exercises that I would probably enjoy is kind of, how would we design that conference? Kind of like, how would we do it? What would it look like? Cause I feel like the kind of the facilitation and the vessel holding is one of those things that you guys have a lot of skills at. And I was struck by the idea. I do think that the back casting part is really a great opportunity. And so Gil kind of positing what is the future world that we're looking for that we want to achieve? How do we get there? As opposed to the world's broken out and we fix it for ending. Dave, could I just jump in for a second? That's not back casting. That's planning toward an inspired goal. What back casting is, which is what the natural step used and what NASA used in the Apollo mission is to stand in that future as though it had actually happened and then ask what happened in the last interval, the last year, the last five years, last 10 years, what happened in the interval before that and work your way back to now. I learned this as a little kid when I was trying to solve mazes in newspapers when there were mazes and when there were newspapers. And found that you could often find a different solution starting from the end than starting from the beginning. Standing here now, looking at both infinite possibility and obvious obstacles, it's hard to see a path. And the path becomes more apparent when you stand in the imagined success and ask, how did we get here? It's a very different mood that's generated. Yeah, thanks. That's a really helpful distinction. And I hadn't made it. Yeah, and it really resonates with it. My life only makes sense if I look at it backwards. I never would have predicted where I am today. And it's a really important one, Dave, because lots of people talk about that backcasting and mostly they mean planning. And they're just different things. They're both relevant. They're just different. Great, yeah. And so like, and Fishkin's been doing this really cool. I think it's backcasting stuff using chat GPT, kind of where he has a series of questions about like what academic specialty were developed that, and they learned that from a whole new set of college departments and things that existed because of this and things. But anyway, so where I was going on this is partly there's conversations I had like the other day where people were saying, we're talking about the good old days and they meant the 90s. And I was thinking, wow, 90s is the good old days. And versus today, which were not good, days bad, 90s were good. And I was trying to figure out what that translated to and my interpretation was, and this is the way I remember the 90s, is the 90s were optimistic. In the 90s, when the wall was coming down, when apartheid was ending, the economy was up, there was this hope. So in the 90s, we had a vision of the future which was optimistic. And somehow today, when we have a whole bunch of stuff, the world's really fucking good, I think, our vision of the future is bad. And so I kind of think that a lot of what we mean by, you know, MAGA is going back to a time when the vision of the future was good. So I felt like, and I feel like a lot of the conversations were kind of fighting the last war, right? We're gonna have really good trenches in France and stuff. And we haven't really internalized what's changed so that we need to, you know, what is it that we're evolving that we need to adjust to? And I would argue things like, you know, bioregional regeneration are things that we need to evolve to. And also, like, I mean, it was interesting, Hank, that here you say they talked about AI and what was the other shiny thing that was kind of coming in the future that we should focus on? Yeah, climate change. Climate change is two things. And those are both, you know, important, but I don't compare it to things like global literacy rates or kind of the impending population dynamics. Or, I mean, you know, there's much more fundamental economic growth in Southeast Asia. I kind of feel like we picked the shiny things for, especially the Western world and probably have missed a bunch of really other fundamental changes that are underway. It'd be interesting to go back and look at kind of, well, what are the fundamental changes we should be thinking about to do the back casting or forward planning, whichever one it is. But anyway, really interesting stuff. So this, I'll just note that this thing that we're chewing on is definitely a wicked problem or a hyper-object or both of the above and more because we have already sort of six different things, six different expressions about what's an important thing to tackle and how do we approach the animal? So, any other questions we could answer approaches to state here that you'd like to get on the table? I just, I posted with the COGM list and I just posted it here. This lecture by Almatof Gosh, who's an amazing writer, Indian novelist who's written a couple of non-fiction books and that makes Curse and The Great Dearrangement. He did a lecture at Cambridge last month and talking about how with a handful of people with more power than has ever been held by anyone, these guys, Zuckerberg and Musk, that their influence over the media, over what people think through social media is unmatched in history. And they have a vision of the world that is we're gonna stockpile and live behind closed gates till the apocalypse, comes they call it the event and we're gonna survive. And it's like, this is an enormously powerful narrative that's out there being propagated by people who do not have the interests of the greater good at art. And Rushkov's done a good job of taking them down. What are you gonna do with your Navy SEALs who once there's no money, why would they protect you anymore? Why wouldn't they take over your food supplies? And it's just, it's really worth pondering and the fact that he's from outside of what he calls the Anglosphere, he offers a very different perspective on things. I find it incredibly informative. And so it's one of those questions that we've got power dynamics that are unique in history of human beings, as far as I can tell. Yeah, there's a lot of ways in which this is same old, same old, but there's some really new novel emerging things here in terms of when you have a Zuckerberg in charge of Facebook who can influence billions of people. How do you handle it? What's the governance structure to reign in that power? And so it's just, I have no answer, but it's a question that needs to be on the table. What I said on the panel I was on a couple of days ago was Facebook is the largest country on earth. The monthly average users of Facebook are larger than the populations of India and China combined. And it's run by a Prince Ling who has no adult supervision. And we just kind of like, well, okay, that's fine. That's just free enterprise. And who's designed his governance system to keep his investors out of having any oversight of him. Right, right. Tom, please go ahead. Yeah, you're putting this. Anybody have questions that we could answer here? I go, well, all the questions I have can't be answered easily. I don't even know. They don't have to be easily answered. I don't think, I don't even know if the question answer mode, like questioning the problem solving mode, questioning the question answer mode, the, to what extent are the questions, wake up questions to live into what some people call strategic questions. The best example of strategic question is why does the emperor have no clothes on? Answering question is totally beside the point. But there's one of the things that I put as long link. I don't know if it works. It's from my own feed. But in the New York Times today, there's a discussion of why is Trump meeting with Urban from Hungary? And it describes the authoritarian arrangement in Hungary is wildly different from what's in Russia and most of these other places, that he runs it primarily by information control. He doesn't put people in prison to shoot them. He just cast a population. He studied how to do this and does this really well. And the fact that Trump was meeting with what's his name from X, Elon Musk, yeah. Yeah, with Musk, who has tremendous information control power on and that playing and Trump of course loves, loves Putin as well. But the sense of what we may have to pay lots more attention to a lot of focus on Trump replacing hundreds of people as soon as he gets into office on his first day, which is itself a big deal. But his ability to move people and without having much facts and without having much information control compared to what he could have if he had allies in the mass media and control of the government, that sort of thing is something what's the, I keep going, what's the Aikido move? There's no, we don't have anything remotely like the power, you know, financial power, political power, you know, whatever. It's like, what is the unexpected thing to intervene that would shift the butterfly flap, whatever, that would potentially shift things that that's where my mind goes. And that's in the context of the fact that I'm not sure anything works. This is a manifestation of such larger dynamics have been going on so long. That's a whole mother inquiry, which is related to an overshoot book that I put in the chat and the Schmackenberger and the, you know, things like that, that I'd like to explore sometime, but these are gigantic questions. And once I confront them, it's like, I don't even know what my work's about anymore. And it's that level of challenge. So check. Thanks, Tom. I just wanna throw in a really quick fantasy of mine before going to Stacey then Hank, which is that I keep looking for what Milton Erickson would have done for society. And Milton Erickson was a therapist and hypnotist who tried to talk to people's unconscious and changed their repertoire of behaviors. And he was known for his handshake induction because when you go to shake somebody's hand, you kind of enter a loop, your body, your mind disconnects from what you're doing. And he would linger in the handshake. And by the time he ended the handshake, the person, the subject was in a trance. And I'm wondering what are the things, what is the, and I think that we are in a trance very much. Like if you study modern media and how it operates, we're sort of in a constant trance of sorts. And I'm wondering what are the things to do to break the trance that we're in and shift us back to seeing each other again as humans and to seeing the earth as sacred in some way, et cetera, et cetera. Going back to the wellbeing of all critters at all levels would be great, but that's not a logical door to enter. That's some other way to enter that door, I think. Anyway, so I have this fantasy that somebody's gonna figure out what that magic phrase is and that will go viral like the ice bucket challenge and all of a sudden we can all start pulling on the rope in the same direction for a change. Stacy, please. Yeah, so I think breaking the trance is gonna have something to do with what Hank's talking about wanting to do. And we discussed on the call earlier about different types of people. And I think that plays into who needs to be in these conversations. But I wanna say something that's really scary and I saved it for this call, not to discuss it, but I think there's something you all should know. So some of you may not know, or I'm sure you don't know, I try to get a feel of what's happening in the different YouTube worlds from different audiences. And there's two trends that are really scary to me. One has to do with the commercials that are being inserted to the different programs that are there that are pitting minorities against immigrants. So that's a real, that scares me because that's really riling the anger. But an even scarier thing because we talked about on the other called an open-minded kind of way of being and a closed-minded kind of way of being. And I think it's important to realize that people that fall into conspiracies have a good open-minded part, except sometimes it gets diverted. Well, I've noticed that there are a number, a growing number of psychics that are putting out political videos. And I find that very scary. Back in 2016, because I had a good girlfriend who pushed me, oh, you have to meet with this one psychic. I went and I did it and it was free. And she had some gift, like we all have some intuition, but she started talking to me about Trump. So I started speaking to her in the spiritual language that I'm capable of speaking of in, and I realized that she was just not legitimate. And again, creating a perception to these people that are looking and listening to what the future is gonna look like is a really big problem because it's all about perception. So I just wanted to share that here. Stacey, I hadn't heard about that at all. And part of my impression here is that the vectors for change are unusual and different from what we think they are. They're not logic and debate or anything or something like that. They are religious, they are games, they are, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If I could just add one thing, that's why it's so important that we find a way to have conversational spaces that are drawing from all the different sectors, like all different kinds of people. How would I, you know, like you guys wouldn't know what I just told you because I'm sure not most, you know you don't have too many people in your circles that are sitting looking to see what the different YouTube groups are listening to. You know, we really need to have those kinds of spaces. Thanks, Stacey. Thank you. Go ahead. Well, just putting in the chat some things I want to add. What I haven't put in the chat relates to Jerry. You're talking about wake up from the trends. And I, in my own way of talking about it, always call it sleepwalking. So how do you awake and see that you've been walking in your sleep all the time? And I do think there are magic words. And that's what I mean when I say, when I put in the chat is what stories do we tell ourselves and what stories do we tell each other? Because those stories build up into our entire perception of what's right and wrong and good and bad in the world. And what are those stories which should be told to young people and old people and people from all walks of life. And I put all walks of life in quotation marks because we're all walking through life some wide awake or party awake or sleepwalking. And we're all on some kind of path and we don't know if it's our path. We don't know where it's going, but we are still taking that path. And I would also recommend retelling the story from the last quote was Gil's story which Jerry retold about the drunken and abusive man in the subway and how there were magic words that could be said to him to make that situation to diffuse a potentially bad situation. And to that extent, I think there are words that young people can say to each other and old people can say to each other and old and young can exchange. And I think it's up to people like us who are conscious of that to try to find them to get people to prototype stories. And yeah, well, anyway, I'll leave it at that. Thanks, Hank. And just for, and Dave, who I think weren't on the last call, this is Terry Dobson on Aikido Sensei's story about being on a subway and having an angry man he wanted to neutralize Aikido, get neutralized by an old man in the back of the train who said, hey, what you been drinking? And the guy was like, sake. My wife and I really liked drinking sake. And by the end of the ride, the angry guy, angry dangerous looking guy is crying on his shoulder. There's a great little YouTube clip from a martial arts master. I think it's Krav Magaga, which is not known for its gentleness as a technique. And he presents a half a dozen situations of where you could get into a real fight. And the first one I remember is like, you're in a bar and somebody says, you looking at me? And he says, yeah, that shirt's really interesting. I got a shirt like that back at home. Or, you looking at my girl? Yeah, it's her name, Marilyn. Sure, I had knew somebody named Marilyn. Just like, hmm, just, both diverting the energy and engaging with the person at the same time, really fascinating. I'll see if I can find the clip. There must be strategic parallels to that for the mass situation. Well, that's the invitation is how do we find those? And, you know, I'd love to hear you say more about that Tom, because in, you know, if a guy gets in my face in a bar, it's very, this is the conversation that's right here. If it's me and the world of America now, where are the places of engagement? How does the engagement happen? How does that metaphor translate into this? Really, I don't know. You got thoughts, Tom? Well, I would need it. It would go in a variety of different directions. It's not a clear line of inquiry, sort of an open-ended inquiry. And I noticed David had something. I don't know if people want to explore there with all the stops and wonders and whims that we'll get as we explore that. So, for the time being, I'll have David do say his things. Oh, okay, Tom, thanks. Well, I mean, I guess I was just struck by, I was coming back to the problem framing and feeling like one of the problems with the problem framing is that it looks back and we're in a future, you know? And so the fact that we have a different media structure, I don't know if it's good or bad, it's different, right? So we can wish we could go back to Walter Cronkite, but we're not. So we have Mr. Beast instead, you know? And what's it mean to have Mr. Beast, you know? And I don't know how influential Zuckerberg is. I mean, if he told everybody to do something, would they, I mean, Taylor Swift, can she really get people to vote? I don't know, I don't think so. Some, maybe, maybe enough. But, you know, actually, when we talk about a lot of these things, it really is the margin, right? It's the three or 4% at the edge that we really care about, including the vote in November, right? So I guess, you know, we talk a lot about democracy and the governance calls and I'm kind of like, yes, democracy was a really interesting technology that we designed a couple hundred years ago and it's still useful and we're revolving it and it's good and, you know, California just went through another jungle primary. There's all kinds of weird things that come out of it and stuff like that. So we can keep playing with democracy, but we're in a future that has this very different and what kinds of new technology are we gonna require that I think have principles like people get to have autonomy, you know, and they get responsibility. We're not gonna have orbit making the decisions for us. There's still gonna be, you know, the masses get to participate in decision-making, but we need new technologies for that. And so what are those technologies look like is kind of the, for the situation that you're in, you know, you're not fixing the problem that was broken and trying to go back or we're trying to move forward into the new space that we're in. And one of the observations I've had is that, you know, thinking about Robert Putnam in the Bowling alone book and that, you know, this notion that, oh my God, society's losing its tensile strength because people don't join together anymore and we don't go bowling and we don't join the Elks Club. And it's like both things are true, right? So is it fixed to go back and get a bunch of people to join the Elks Club and go bowling or is it to like start to have a bunch of organizations like Jerry who just convene people on Zoom and then they have conversations and they have community and they build trust, you know, and you have lots and lots of lots of these happening around the world in all kinds of different languages crossing all kinds of networks, you know, is that better or worse than bowling at? So I don't know, but it's different and that's the state we're in. I feel like we're, you know, we're kind of like not giving ourselves credit, but we don't get the bowling. So Jerry, maybe you could get organized more bowling and as I said, as far as we could really have it all. But anyway, I just feel like we're, you know, we are adapting to this modern future and we're creating it and it's good, you know? And Dave, a piece of what you said takes me back to why I sort of started these calls, which was I really wanted to know what's working and help make it easy to propagate what's working so that people in any place can sort of pick up things that seem to work really well and replicate them in their community. When I found a house in West Philly for my second year in grad school, I recruited a couple buddies to join me in the house the next year, one of whom had had a great household at the University of York and he brought in a couple of house governing rules that we all adopted very happily and they worked really well for a whole year and they were different from the usual way you would sort of divide up tasks or whatever else. And that's the kind of contagion that I'd love to find and share and Tom and his co-intelligence colleagues have developed the wise democracy pattern language. There's also liberating structures and a couple other things in the group works deck nearby all of which have wisdom in them, distilled wisdom, lovely deglazed wisdom from a lot of people who care and few of which are getting the play that I think they could get if we figured out ways of getting them to be more contagious more easily adopted, more whatever that is. And I'm interested in that process because I think that if people can up their game in how we converse with one another and how we approach one another, some of these problems will start to melt because a lot of the fear is built up from alienation and intentionally provoked fear. And once I'm afraid of you I'm just not gonna listen to anything you have to say. In fact, I will often take the opposite stance just on principle or because my tribe says so or whatever. Then and we need to melt the tribalism we need to melt the fear we need to melt a lot of those things so that we can get back into co-intelligence. And I just got to stick in like, you know eight years ago when I was like arguing the one thing that we really needed to do was to have the destruction of the GOP. It was the problem and we had to break it down and get rid of it replace it with a new party. It's like be very careful what you wish for. It's your fault. Your fault. Yeah. Gil and Tom also if you wanna jump in and talk about sort of where you've been with all this but let's start with Gil for a sec. Gil is actually Jane in this case. Oh, great. Hi Jane, yay. As I was listening a question came to me which I consider myself a womanist, not a feminist and I wonder what conversation this group would be having if the Republican and far-right religious agenda was focused on tying men's tubes and denying them reproductive rights. Oh yeah, it'd be really different real quick. Because there's a level of existential desperation in women that I think is unperceived even still. I completely agree, I think. Well, I think that the far-right is extremely good at lighting hot fires and blowing a lot of oxygen on stupid ass issues to distract us from really important issues that are actually on the table, like women's rights. And part of me wants to know how do you disable that? How do you neutralize that? Because a critical race theory and whether trans kids should have separate bathrooms, there's a lot of oxygen, a lot of oxygen been blown on those two issues very intentionally because if you're screaming about this over here, who's gonna pay attention to that big thing that we're slipping through the back door over there? And that scares me a lot. And I think that it's doable. Go ahead, Sissy. But the right did something very smart that we don't do. So when it came to the issue of abortion, the Republican women that I spoke to bought into the story, which was totally fake, that it was only about states' rights versus federal rights. So again, they're more devious, what can I say? They're more devious and manipulative, but we could be smarter about changing the conversations. But it should be clear by now when states' rights story has been bullshit from the beginning. The Republicans are in favor of states' rights when it serves their purposes and they're opposed to states' rights when it serves their purposes and the Supremes have made that abundantly clear. For sure. The other thing about the abortion story is that it's a marvelous story of framing. Because when they claimed the label pro-life, it implicitly made everybody else anti-life. And instead of refuting the framing, the left moved into this pro-life versus pro-choice thing. And I'm for abortion rights and I'm pro-life. Not in the sense that the Republicans are pro-life, but I'm just like my stance in the world is pro-life and pro-choice. And what's his name? The Cal guy, the framing guy whatever his name was from. Lekoff. Lekoff, thank you, sorry. Lekoff is the left one, from is the right one. The one who did pro-life and all that is David Frum. No, no, no, it was before that. There is a guy on the right, I can't think of his name, because all that language stuff about, but I don't think it's Frum. Frum was a speechwriter. You're right, it's not Frum, it's Frank Luntz. Frank Luntz, yeah, there we go. I always confuse the two. He's been generous with his advice to the Democrats too, but they don't take it. Yeah. And one of the things that Luntz and Crow demonstrated is that if you can inject a powerful frame, you basically own the stage and all the debate happens within your frame. And in that game, you've lost before you've started. Well, the frame is really, this is really about life-loving and lovable futures. A livable future may be a very miserable one, but it may be livable because human beings tolerate an enormous amount of suffering before they take up war. So it's really, it's about a lovable future. Thanks, Jane. Tommy, thank you for a while. The Republican, the junk tank and think tank people are studying night and day how to dismantle our voting system. And that's the destruction of reproductive rights and the destruction of voting system and voting rights. This is just, this is the tyrannosaurus rex that we're facing. It is, it's awful. I completely agree. Tommy, I've had your hand up for a while. Also, I would just love your reflections on what got you into what you've done for many years now and what you wish would happen. Again, so complex. Seems like, seems like an easy thing to answer. What I was going to say in this was that the whole framing thing is a subset of story and the power of story and the extent to which narrative structures are how we perceive reality and function in reality. When you look at quantum science and stuff like that, it's like what's around us is not this stuff. It feels a probability kind of and we have constructed as any species constructs a particular way of seeing the world that will allow us to function as bodies. That's how we're evolved and there's so much else going on and we create stories that work for us and battered kids and unemployed people and people who are rich and everybody creates stories that then they live into and the framing is functioning at a story level and one of my big inquiries, I get a sense that you can talk about a story field that there's actually a field like a magnetic field and all of iron filings line up in the story of the American way of life which I call AWOL. The American way of life is a narrative structure. It has lots of different parts to it and people, you have to relate to it. You have to either follow it or battle it, all of which support it. Here's a gentleman named Tom Adley who ran the story field conference with Peggy Holman in 2007. Right, so that's how you remember it. Yeah, and that conference, I was the only person who was upset at that conference. I actually cried at the end of it in the little talk that's online but the sense that people came to the conference to find out better ways of doing their particular kind of story work and I wanted to shift into how can we do, how can we think together about how to intervene at the level of narrative in the culture? So that there's a different field, a different narrative field that we are presenting that other people really, that's like imagineering is one of the things I put. You write a story or create a story of some kind that appeals to people and that gives them everything they need to live it. It's like the monkey wrench gang did that for Earth first. You want to put the monkey wrench in the people who are fucking with your environment, read the book, it tells you how to put the syrup in the earth moving equipment and block it up. So having those kinds of stories and that's been manifested on both sides, those right wing stories that have had the power for people to just move. But that inquiry about how do we intervene particularly when we're not in control of massive amounts of media? Is there some way to use virality and narrative strategically and with a lot of knowledge? That's one point of intervention that I have to admit when you say how I got here and what I think needs to be done, I don't know what needs to be done. I have lots of inquiries and I have a deep sense from the references I put earlier that all the ideas I've ever had are nowhere remotely near handling the challenges we face. So the level of mystery that I'm working on right now is gigantic. I'm doing a book on co-intelligence but that's just because this guy who's promoting AI, using AI in your life and work has a book coming out called Co-intelligence. He's about to colonize the intellectual space I've been working on for 30 years and now I have to get a book out that has that title. Oh wow. But I don't really believe the stuff in the book that's gonna handle it. If we made it through the eye of the needle some of this stuff would be part of it. But it's not okay, here's the solution. It's nothing remotely like that in my own mind. So it goes on and on and on. And all my work arose out of the Great Peace March 1986. 400 people walking across the country for nine months with nobody in charge. And that's a whole fascinating story in itself. And that gave me an insight into there's a radically different way to function in the world than our usual ways. And my inquiries into that generated all this stuff. But as you can sense there's tons of other stuff to talk about behind all that. And I don't wanna colonize our brief time. Check. Thanks, Tom. And I'd like to end our call at the top of the hour because I had sort of promised these would be one hour calls but at least we're kind of just going. Hank and Gil. Yeah. I'll take it as a pattern anyway. Yeah, thanks Tom for talking about it the way you do. And I wasn't actually familiar with the wise democracy patterning language but I'll look into that later today and tomorrow. And I'd like to sort of hopefully build on what you were just saying and referring to Stacey and Stacey's journey for exploring what other people are thinking like and what words and stories they use. My big question is do we really know what kind of stories and books and pop lyrics and comic books and films are actually changing the way young people see the world, shifting their consciousness. I mean, I don't know where there's a source of that but I think what's very important is if we want to make kind of intervention someplace one thing that's really important is to know about what's influencing teenagers and preteens because those are the people who will have to take over the world tomorrow. Thanks, thanks. I've put some of the story, the major storytellers in the chat. Thank you. Gil. I've got a pop for another call real quickly. I love where we've gone. I like, Tom, I like your question about how we use virality. It's not only done by people who have power and money and the story of the 700 Club of the Christian Right is a great example of something that seemingly came out of nowhere. I had a window into it in the early what, the 80s I guess, when it was young. And so things are possible here and just look at Lord Taylor Swift who just told 282 million followers to vote. There have been cultural shifts over my lifetime that have happened in various ways some centrally driven, some virally driven. It strikes me that one of the challenges we have and Tom, I wonder if there's any way you can stop this guy from seizing your space but we, before it can bust me on the way the general way that we keep talking about here are not primarily oriented around power and wealth and we're dealing with people who are primarily oriented around power and wealth. And we play differently because of that and it's good and bad. It's like it's advantageous and limiting in various kinds of ways. And it's something worth us talking about and it's the subway story is one lovely analog of that. But that's one of many stories we could tell and need to tell, check. Is Jane still there? Yeah. So I just want to end with a little very quick anecdote. Gil and I are both part of a study group for some non-togical coaching book series. And there's a woman in this group who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Heartland, right? And she relayed to us in the group, she said, the young women on campus are outraged and they are totally organizing and voting and getting the word out. So just a little glimpse of, it's not an answer, but young women are especially incensed at what's going on and they are mobilizing and acting and organizing. So a little glimmer of hope. So when I ask the question at the top of the call, how do we help young people run with it? That's a piece of what I mean. Yeah. That's a piece of what I mean right there. We often ask, how do we get more young people onto our calls? Maybe that's the wrong question. I think that is the wrong question. I'm trying to figure out how do we help them get this done? Yeah. Yeah. Good. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'll see you next week, same time. If anybody wants to figure out where and how we help young folks do this, bring that information back with you next Thursday. When we rejoin our Mary band. Tiktok, right? Yeah, Tiktok. Is that where all the young people are these days? I can totally see you mastering Tiktok, Dave. Jane says surrender to their health. We have ways to make you Tiktok. Oh. Ha ha ha ha. On that mark it's ticking. It certainly is. Thanks all. Bye bye.