 there we go. So this is the OGM call for Thursday, January 19, 2023. And the first couple times I wrote 2023, I, I couldn't sort of figure out how I'd gotten as far as 2023. So there we are. It's just like a big number. It feels like you've made a dent into the century when you start getting near the quarter, the quartermark. We're living in the future, Jerry. We are. We're living in the future we didn't imagine. Although I for one, I'm glad we have zoom in the internet. I for one, welcome our new ant overlords. Exactly. Oh, man. Now, is that an acronym for superior intelligence? Or do you just mean the critters? The Simpsons. Oh, okay. It's from the Simpsons. I have not watched enough Simpsons episode in my life. Shortcoming. You know, I resisted for a long time. I thought it was going to be really stupid. And I found out it's incredibly subversive and very sophisticated. It's the same thing happened to me with Futurama. I was like, I'm going to love this series. And then I just didn't get hooked. It's very strange. I got hooked on the Simpsons after two episodes. Well, we are reconvening in the spirit of improving our dialogues. And we have with us this time, instead of me experimenting with what I thought Doug's format was, we actually have Doug Carmacko with us to explain what this was and take us in. Doug, the con is yours and I will step in whenever you wish. So I'm going to run this process. And then at the end of the morning meeting, I'll talk about why we're doing it quite this way. Because there's some interesting ideas about it. It's quite simple. What I want everybody to do is be thinking about what in the last week was the most important thing you thought about that would make a good conversation. And what we're going to do is go around the room and have everybody speak without interruption by others. And we're going to start off by getting somebody to volunteer to go first. And when that person finishes, they pick the next person who then speaks and then they pick the next person and so we fill the room. So I think that's pretty clear. It's just a number. What's been on your mind in the last week that you think is most worth a serious conversation? So who would like to start? Anybody volunteer to start? I'll start. Thanks, Ken. I have a pretty simple short thing that's really been on my mind. I'm working with a client right now and the question they're asking me is how do we influence people that we have no power or authority over? These are folks you have to work with and maybe they don't really want to be in partnership with us. So how to create an environment where when we need something from someone who is in our network and perhaps a stakeholder in our company who isn't really, they're reticent to work together, but we need to work with them and they don't want to actually meet us where we need to be met. So how do we address that? So pick the next person. I will pick Judith. Thanks, Ken. Let me think for a second. I think for me the thought I had was how do I select the activities and the engagements that are most aligned with my long-range goal of using my time to somehow make the world a better place for folks? And what are my criteria for choosing which organizations I work with or which groups I try to influence? So pass the baton to somebody. Klaus? Yeah, my aha moment this week was I've spent the last since my retirement really working on climate food and climate change connected issues. I've been trying to break into my own industry. I know this a lot of my former colleagues are following me on LinkedIn, but I've been trying to get someone to actually act on what it is that we know about a changing climate and its impact on the food system. And I gave up about six years ago working as a consultant because I ended up working on theme parks and stuff like that and joined NGOs and worked my way into several NGOs sort of in an advisory function. I mean Mr. Seraclub, International Grassroots Network, but I keep trying to link up with my industry. Klaus, can I get you to state what the issue is that you've been thinking about and let us fill in the details later? The core issue is that all these high tech innovations that are coming into the food sector, particularly in biotech and so on, none of them consider the impact they are having on ordinary people and how that will impact their lives. Because food being at the system of the pyramid of our needs deeply impacts the way we live, the way we function, our health, our well-being and everything around us. And you can't get a company, no matter what size, to think it's any of their business that they should worry about what that does to people living in the inner cities, living in world districts. You just can't make the connections. It doesn't sink in because you can't make any money there. So that's my big beef this week. Gil, do you want to go next? Please. Let me pass for a moment, please. Choose someone else. Can you then pick someone else? Okay, I'll pick Pete. Okay. Thanks, Klaus. Most important thing I thought about last week is it seems like small, but it's also really big. How can individuals know what's true and what's not? How do we know what to believe? I'll pick Stacey. I've been thinking sort of a combination of what Pete and Ken are talking about, but mostly I've been thinking about how we have many solutions, but sometimes we're trying to force a certain solution in the wrong direction. And what I mean by that is sometimes there's an overcorrection where it's almost like if you give medicine to a healthy person, you make them sick. And I think I'm seeing a little bit of that in looking to find a balance between male and female energy. Stacey, pick the next person. I'm sorry. Doug. Which one? Oh, I'm sorry. Doug Bay. Well, this week, this last week, I had someone suggest a share I made to her was my Dharma reason for being here, but it revolved around the idea that the source of all of our ills are the law and the current legal system. And having people give that up requires offering them a replacement. And the dots that connected for me because of my elemental work is that the true natural law are the five elements and that we could actually replace current legal systems and structures with elemental principles, which are the prevailing reality that we live in and that actually govern what happens in it. So that's me. And who hasn't gone? Rick or Eric? I'm not sure. Have either of you gone? Rick, you want to go first? Next. You know, I want to thank Doug for presenting this format. I was in another group and we were struggling with how to use Zoom more effectively. And what I'm particularly interested in is the notion of co-creating generative dialogues and getting away from our sort of talking head type of presentations or regurgitating our scripts that we've said many times before, where you actually say something original that triggers somebody else to come up with original thing. And the sharing of that sort of novelty and creates a different sort of space of transformational collaboration. So that's what I'm interested in. And, you know, the difficulties is how to create some simple rules for Zoom to do that. And I'll just share the evolution of the thought, which is not complete in trying to facilitate this. And that is how to create a thread. I mean, this is what we're doing now is divergent. It's a gender setting, whatever. There's merit to that. There's no question it's good to know what's on top of people's minds. But if you want to go into a theme of something, then an evolving thing that can go off in different directions, depending upon the flow that's the collective flow of the group, is when somebody speaks, it's sort of, you know, just like a using the talking stick. But the problem is, is you don't have the same cues in a Zoom environment of, you're not watching everyone the same way if you're in the room and you get a sense of people's energies of how it's, you know, emerging. So the ideas we came up with is that when you respond, you respond to what the person's saying first. And then you can, you can ask the person to respond to your response so that it's not serial monologues. But to add a twist to it, you're going to have one finger, two finger, and you can't put them up until the person's finished speaking. Because once, I experienced when people, a lot of people, you know, when people put their hands up, it's sort of, you know, your thinking changes because of what the previous person said. But if you allow people to spontaneously say, I just want to respond, or I want to respond and add, and then go back to the person to respond to it. So it creates a more of a dialogic format. And so anyway, that's what I'm interested in, how to create Zoom experiences where there is a theme or a question you start off with, and let the group co-create, emerge new ways of thinking, understanding, etc. So that's what comes top of mind for me. And by thought, is Eric the last one? Do you see? Is there? Yeah, thank you. Okay. Okay, I'm going to paste and chat the thoughts that popped into my mind today. But sometimes whether we want to talk about that or something else. I think I just feel a sense of acceleration since the year started. And I don't know if we're accelerating off a cliff or what. So I'll leave it at that. Okay, you want to pick the next person? We've got several still to go. Stewart, did you go? No, who else? No, I'm left. I'm still left. Okay, Gil. Yeah. Jerry. Okay, Gil. Muted. How, how will we get through the next two years? Better position for the next 20, not worse position for the next 20. Make a next person, Stewart? Yeah. So, Stewart, what we're doing is what's been most on our mind in the last week that's worth a serious conversation. Thanks. No, I heard the direction. Thank you, Doug. So what's up for me here is the notion that the US Congress is literally driving the bus over the cliff. And we're sitting here watching it. They're driving the bus over the cliff. And what that evokes for me is the words of the Declaration of Independence of the people, by the people, for the people, not of the congressman, for the congressman, by the congressman. And the egoic thinking is just rampant. And that's a microcosm and a macrocosm that we're living in in terms of the underlying thought processes that we've all been brainwashed. I mean, they could be doing a whole lot of good, but here we are in this more ass. So, next person? I will pick who hasn't gone yet. Michael. Hi, Al. I've been thinking about something that relates a little bit to what Stewart was just saying about driving off a cliff. And it's the easily seen difference between responsibility and cooperation among members of a not dysfunctional family that where a baby isn't competing with an adult and a stay-at-home person isn't competing with a someone going out in the workforce. They're figuring out how their interaction works for the entire family and an elder is looked after and not expected to make their own way. And versus the notion of competing individuals in a capitalist world, particularly, but in general, people competing for resources opposed to understanding that sharing their resources and skills and abilities is the way to succeed. And the scaling of that, which has been successful and unsuccessful among certain families, tribes, communities, states on up over the millennia. And trying to figure out how we can, obviously, the ideal is that we reach a state as a global family where the circumstances of the least able of us or the most threatened of us is important to the most resourced or able of us. And we just naturally are moved to take care of ourselves as a whole family. Can I get you to stop there and pass on? Sure. Yeah, I'll do that. And I'll pass on to Carl. Carl, what we're doing is what's been on our mind in the last week and some of the most important thing for our conversation. Okay. Obviously, the craziness of being inside the Beltway and work for the government. I mean, the situation is kind of crazy. I guess that's sort of the short term. And then the longer term stuff is, I mean, we got all this stuff that's they talk about seven generations and stuff, but every generation as a seventh generation or your group, you've got the connections for the generations plus or minus three of yours and things. So yeah, that's kind of where my thoughts have been on stuff really looking at some of the long term strategies and scenarios. That's kind of what I've been looking at. So I'll stop there because I'm not sure if I have the right context or not. So I think anybody not gone yet besides me? Jerry and John and Mark. No, there's John. You go ahead. Okay, yes. Well, at the risk of just going with the headline as opposed to something I've been cooking all week, I just got the headline or the YouTube this morning about artificial wounds. Some company putting this out and it was the reaction to it included the possibility that it was entirely fake. But if it was even half serious, it opened up all kinds of issues immediately in terms of the most obvious brave the world 1984 when would be a state manufacturing people and ensuring their loyalty because it manufactured them. So that was pretty nightmarish thought. So that's worth discussing. And does anybody else who's left? I can't see the screen. Jerry and Mark. Okay, Mark, if you're there. Yeah, I'm here. So in terms of this week in particular, I've been part of a group sort of finance sector and climate change. And it's been intended to be an advanced sort of expert dialogue, 60 people. And it's just been maddening. I mean, it's done by email and it's just a serial monologue that literally just every 60 seconds, I get a ping that there's a new email in my box and a new post on the system. And I just can't figure out what the point is at all. And yet everyone in the group seems perfectly happy with this serial monologue that will go nowhere over the course of five days of dialogue. So that certainly been on my mind this week. Jerry. Thanks, Doug. Inspired a bunch by the conversations we've had about sense doing and other sorts of things. And just thinking about the things we would like to sense do about the top question that's on my mind is how do you build sufficient trust that people will soften enough to lower anger and fear to cooperate to make their lives better in any way they want, that they need. Because I think that that's a formula for dissolving some of our dilemmas in the world right now. Like there's a couple layers to it, but that's kind of the formulation I've gotten my head right now. So I think we've gone around everybody. I'm going to leave myself out for the moment. At this point, we've been stimulated by what everybody's been thinking about. So the floor is open for wherever it wants to go. And the only nudge is because you know you're being listened to try and keep it short. So since we have this quiet, I'm going to stick myself in. What's been on my mind this week is the conundrum of new economic activity creates new relationships. Relationships tend to be a little sticky, which means that it might change even harder. You imagine a hundred people gathered shoulder to shoulder in the middle of a football field. Any one of them can move through the group with a little resistance. If everybody reaches out and grabs the arm of a person nearby and holds on, nobody can move. And that's kind of what's happening in society right now. We're increasing activity, which creates relationships, which are sticky, which increases the glue, which means changes even harder. So that's what's been on my mind. And so in the spirit of jumping in on conversations, I'd love to just jump into what you just said, Doug. Partly because I'm unclear that stickier relationships, which I think means more trusted relationships. And here we can bring in the weak ties versus strong ties work and other things like that. But I'm unclear that stickier relationships mean less change directly, that the binding somehow prevents motion. There are group dynamics that clearly do that. Like this is how cults operate. They create extremely sticky relationships, so there's no leeway for change, innovation, or trying to break out of the cult. But that's not what I think of as regular the stickiness in social interactions. Sorry, Doug, I just wanted to add that. Yeah, an example is the states which have passed laws, which make it illegal to put new transmission lines across the state line. So that makes doing a new grid almost impossible. Sorry, how's that an example of human? Because you have these contractual regulatory relationships. So contracts is one form of relationship. Laws are one form of relationship. And they just make things sticky. So yeah, I totally agree. Anybody else who wants to jump in, please do. For me, like, laws are a way of trying to pour concrete around social arrangements. And so sticky, like very sticky, if you prohibit things, you know, like we are currently trying to stop, I'm currently trying to stop the US from becoming the handmaid's tail. Because it seems like a bunch of people want to make things very sticky on that front by passing laws that prohibit really legitimate healthcare interventions, which is crazy. And so I did not think you were talking about laws. I thought you were operating at some other level. So I was I was jarred when you brought in laws in that sense. Anybody else thoughts? Dark B. And you're muted. There you go. The definition jar you just shared, which is law as a sort of agreement by and between um relationship and agreement alone doesn't equal law. What the word law definitionally requires is that the agreed conventions by and between that the violation of that agreement breach of that agreement carries a penalty. It is the enforceability of the agreement by that mechanism that is fundamental to the law and the legal system. If you shift orientation and drop the penalty for failure to comply or align or or behave in conformity with of and you shift orientation to the why that happened and what's needed to help those not in compliance. It changes the whole equation and orientation as a contribution. Thanks. Let's do it. So I just wanted to throw into the mix that um from from everybody's comments um and I'm thinking specifically at Gil, because I'm looking at his face when he said, you know, how are we going to get through the next two years? We've got all these things percolating the war in Ukraine, climate issues, food issues, um legal issues, governance issues, and they're all percolating. And um and I'm reminded and I think I've said this here on this call before from my my my time in the you know when I was doing a lot of mediation and the mantra used to be oh they haven't felt enough pain yet and in in all of these things that are percolating it's not mass pain. We haven't felt that. I found myself last week you know in response to a lot of friends saying how you doing in these terrible mass floods in California saying that I'm dry feeling kind of like yeah I'm I'm I'm one of the fortunate ones. But um maybe what we need is a mass event to really wake more and more and more people up although my sense is if that happens people will continue in their same um individual and personal carping and and won't uh won't start to let go and and and see the collective. Jerry you mentioned softening and I think that that's exactly what I was just kind of pointing at. Thanks Stuart. Uh Klaus. Yeah in this in the same way as Stuart was just mentioning um I think we need to have a common agreement about the peril that we're in as the collective and um the only you know a real example that comes to mind that is more contemporary would be World War II. The mobilization that took place during World War II but only after Pearl Harbor happened and you know when you look back historically through a lot of um interactions that took place before the US engaged um and and really did this mobilization to the internal conflicts at the time were very similar to what we have today. Normally at an active Nazi party you had all kinds of uh uh streams within the within society. It wasn't until this became a real existential threat where you could see long term this is a serious disruption um that could that could imperil you know the United States itself did did it really engage but once that happened when you think about the the uh implications right when you converted an automobile factory within six months to hold out tanks or another factory that within a really short bit of time produced airplanes and then mass produced these things think about what the takes to make that happen. There had to be some engineer who was working on an assembly line before making cars who now had to figure out how do I change this and you could not direct this top down. It had to be built bottom up where everybody in this factory knew what the uh intended outcome was right and and self directed self mobilized here and that's what it will take right now we will really need um to have a collective understanding where people self mobilize to do the right thing meaning you know we need to restore our environment we need to have uh we need to protect our food supply we need to have people who are at the low end of the economy not just in the us but period to to help them to help themselves right because people who are desperate to cut down the last three to live another day so you so you can't let people get desperate right you have to prevent desperation in the uh base of pyramid economy and so to for that to happen is a mindset shift it's a reformation that needs to take place where with where our own instincts you know tell us to cooperate because I need to help somebody who's helping somebody to fix stuff kind of mentality and and I think we're getting pretty close unfortunately we can't afford to get much closer because then we'll have crashes with tipping points where no it's going to be too late um Doug I've kind of stepped in as traffic director here would you rather like uh run the room um I let it let itself manage itself okay I will stop managing it so I'm going to come in just as a person class uh in the example of world war two the factory already had relationships which could change what they were doing uh the whole society was organized around laws that could be implemented through the structure of congress and the president's office to respond to the crisis we don't have those structures now that could play that role yeah on top of it it's global right because the globalization the world economic forum has more influence and power than any individual government so so clearly um what would have to happen is that the elites or financial elites are really controlled and a very few people really control the the core levels of the uh economy would have to come to the conclusion that we need to change course here and we need to engage sectors of the economy that we never paid any attention to so so government has always been like in a mediating role right because to maintain social systems uh that that you know perpetuate no society as a whole but the with the loss of of influence by individual governments you have companies supersede this power and and social systems have been degrading ever since no i'm not ever since i mean they have been degrading well you know um maybe the elites need to come around to this point of view or maybe there needs to be a different kind of power structure in the world right uh i would disagree with Doug uh i think the structures are there but they're being fought over and seized and directed in different ways than they had been um had been intended or had been in previous years i've been i've been asking um folks what might it be like if we did businesses though we actually belong to the living world and as though we actually belong to each other and i guess the variation on that question that comes to mind class listening to you is what does it take for us to come to that belief uh us in the broad in the broadest possible sense yeah um and uh you know as a and it's a profound shift in worldview it's one the humans have lived in for tens of millennia but not lately um i'm reminded listening to you guys of um a sort of weird joke that the great ray anderson used to tell of somebody who um leaps or falls or tries to fly off the top of the empire state building and as he's plummeting toward the ground he's passing 83rd floor someone opens the window and looks out and says how you doing he says pretty good so far and you know that's the mood that most folks are living in is we're pretty good so far uh i think most people don't have any grasp of the scale of the calamity of the ecological calamity that we may be facing certainly no grasp of exponential growth um you know tap any tap any hundred people on the street and how many of them know that 70 percent of insect species are gone you know and that 90 percent of top fish in the oceans are gone um and um you know and that and you follow that trend further it doesn't look very nice but you know who knows that no it's not it's not discussed it's not reported on and even there you know the sense of how that the rate of change changes it's you know itself is just it's not in the common mind so how do we learn to be part of the living world and act as if rick you're muted so we don't hear you i was just using my one finger as a signal that i wanted to respond to gill um entomarch and um i put a question in there about uh the issue of pain how much pain will it take and i i think where as i said in this little entree we were we're living in a narcotic age of wokeness denial misinformation disinformation so we're sort of numbed and we're not responding but we're also building on what mark was saying we're we're ineffective we're ineffective collaborators we don't know how to come together with a a communitarian way of moving beyond the hero's journey etc which is remarkably ineffective which means we have to think about working together in a very different way that we have been doing because the magnitude of the problem is so enormous then um well we by the way there can i i would say we in terms of people who aspire to be change agents i'm not talking about we the royal beyond that people who feel like they want to take on the challenge to see if they can improve and address the problems we are which i think almost everyone in this room probably would like to work towards but the question is how can we do it together well one of the things that we've done as a as a culture as a society we've taken all the indigenous wisdom and put them on reservations we just crowded people into these little reservations and and these are the folks who have a different psychology it's no wonder that there's so much alcoholism on on Native American reservations because um being forced to live in a in a in a concrete created man create person create human created world caused this incredible level of on we and and and that that's the place to find some connection to the natural world as a beginning i'm reading you know a little book now by a guy named four hour four arrows who's also has a an American name he's a phd professor in multiple universities i can't think of his name but it's it's quoting the wisdom of symbol which is just kind of eye opening in in in so many different ways and just coincidentally there's a lot of reference here has been a lot of reference to collaborating in a different way my my daily poem today is called agreements which i'll be happy to read at the end if if people want to hear stacy you had your hand up please come yeah this is actually what i've been thinking about this week it didn't come to mind before but what i wanted to respond to gill and to you is can we actually live with the natural world if we don't address our own human centricism i don't know if human centricism is actually a word but i think that we all have some of it and we may not be aware of that don't wait for anybody to direct you just jump in if you want to and uh yeah um yeah four hours is one of the professors at at fielding where i'm going to school so i've had many conversations with him yeah it's um yeah he's he's a lot of his passion is about this um decolonizing the curriculum is a big big part of that so actually a lot of the stuff that ties together i've had ideas that i'm going to be pitching for a fielding symposium or a series and things so that's one of my one of my projects for the for the year yeah i mean there's so much um well i brought it up before but yeah i've had ideas um i did i have to do a lot of writing too i've been hanging off but one of the ideas i have is about a pascal's wager revisited and uh pascal um yeah it was basically there is a god there isn't a god you live a virtuous life you live like there's not a god so it was eternal salvation eternal damnation you live a virtuous life or you uh it doesn't matter kind of thing so the you should live a virtuous life and i think we can apply the same kind of thing to um climate change in the problem so i have ideas for a pascal's wager revisited so curl i've i've had a similar thought before and i don't i don't i have never gone into pascal's wager in enough depth and i'm wondering if anybody else in the zoom has done so my understanding of pascal's wager is well just in case there is a god you might as well act well because in that case you're gonna be okay you know when you're judged in the afterlife even if you don't happen to believe in god and so for me one of the things i've puzzled over about climate change deniers is hey let's just what what if this thing is actually sort of off its wheels uh wouldn't it be wouldn't it benefit us to sort of do some work to mitigate climate change but and i'm i'm wondering if that's the same interpretation you had and i'm wondering also if i'm misinterpreting pascal's wager yeah um the stanford um encyclopedia philosophy there i mean it's it's amazing you've had uh centuries of theologians and and philosophers like um arguing these exquisite arguments and stuff and it's like it's a mathematician i mean he's he invented or he's the one who brought together probably in statistics so he could have an advantage rolling dice so my my main premise is that that was a thought experiment about infinite payoffs and stuff so that's one aspect of it that i'm kind of looking at so it would be getting into game theory and all this type of stuff too but maybe that's somebody is that somebody else's dissertation or i've got about at least a dozen let's go to gill part of the part of the climate denier world is the folks who believe in the rapture you know and don't care about is they're focused on an afterlife and in fact folks think the sooner the better um which is kind of analogous to the folks earlier who are talking about it maybe it's got to get worse there's not enough pain uh which reminds me of the line from some of my old marxoid friends which drove me crazy about heightening the contradictions of like let's make stuff worse so that to build the revolutionary potential so things will blow up and change and it always struck me as a not only cynical deeply immoral way to view the world you know so my my question i think was back to you steward is uh you know do we just have to wait for stuff to get so bad that people pop or there are ways to encourage uh and nurture a less less crazy transition yeah um i think it's back to um one of the things there's that old quote that's attributed to Churchill but apparently it's not him that uh that americans can be counted on to do the right thing after they've exhausted all other possibilities yeah yeah so maybe humans only get intelligent when our backs are utterly to the wall and we've you know everything else we've tried has failed i don't know yeah it's it's in what just popped up in my mind gill is is you know our worst famous statement climate change you know denial is not just a river in egypt um we know what to do we know what to do in other words you know we we we could do mass transformation of human psyches human programming um where we are we could do mass education you know i don't think we have a resource problem on this planet really don't i think we have a distribution problem i think if we if we figured out how to how to create basic needs for everyone um you know we could we could turn this into heaven on earth uh but the the will is not there and people's psychology uh seems to mostly go in the in the in the in the opposite direction or and that just may be my fantasy um good morning i apologize for joining this late um i have had a uh incredibly wonderful um weekend in couple of days and i'm kind of really mistrusting like it feels like somebody has the finger on the positive scale and just i'm hitting all the green lights and um having incredible conversations and i'm really not sure what this conversation is about but i'm reminded of a couple things um one is one of my favorite lines from a comic book i completely refuse to admit that i'm in denial and uh so i've healed from cancer hopefully although um the uh you know cure um of the chemo um has incredible side effects um including you know chemo brain confusion and i've just been you know doing the right things and i feel oddly enough smarter than ever and i don't trust that as well i don't trust kind of this feeling of invincibility um talk to the doctor yesterday and they said yeah that could be a mania we really want to pay attention to that and um so you know hopefully i'm wise and smart enough to um yeah follow through on this um yesterday was a cancer um uh group um called the ucsf survivorship wellness um put on by their psycho oncology department and um oddly enough the theme was dealing with uncertainty and so i've been uh you know it was just one of these you know synchronicity coincidences that um you know it was just like oh my god this is really too cool but one of the um participants said you know she no longer fears death and it was a real um opening an awareness and blessing for her and i had to reflect and go yeah because of a lot of the work i've done and through the shit i've been through i am absolutely no longer in fear of death and it's just like you know um every day i wake up that's a good day um but it's not part of my psychological complex anymore and damn what's it used to um and i just feel it's such a blessing um go ahead um gil i'm just on that mark how has that shift affected you it's different in your life with that belief being different the honest answer is i don't know yet so my research has to do with the assumption that feeling human feelings are real they're as real as you know the atomic number of lead being you know a certain number they're as real as two plus two equals four there is a you know reality um not only to communication to life to intelligence but also on a much deeper level feeling is something that moves people um it moves animals um you know there's lots of science fiction that you know it's another dimension where other beings live um and and certainly religious um tradition as well and um to tell you the truth gil i just don't know yet um oddly enough um one of the other coincidences was i'm kind of trying to research this multivariate polar coordinate system for threat detection but also friendship of and closeness of say a brother or mark can i get you to be a little aware of time sharing sure i will um sorry about that but basically how do i how do i visualize either threats or love of a group of people in a visual and interactive way um and i'm i'm you know just starting to play with us um thanks for the question gil i don't know um and doug go ahead yeah um mark you and i at some point should connect we have more commonalities that are uh visible to the universe um so i just wanted to correlate some loops um class you mentioned the mobilization in world war two and there's a there's a story there's a subtext to that um um roosevelt was confronting a country that did not want to get involved and john toland wrote a book on hitler and uncovered that roosevelt knew about pearl harbor two days before it happened and he did not take any action to mitigate the damage because he felt he needed that in order to catalyze the country into engagement in world war two that was a deliberate decision rooted in using the human mechanism of fear to motivate that collective bottom up activation and fear has been to mark's comment about the emotions fear has been the principal for our you know for the developed world and cultures um almost from inception and the evolutionary shift and the question is whether as a species we're evolutionarily up to the task of doing it is transcending motivation by fear and scarcity and actually shifting orientation into um love and care and inclusion and a value set that uh is oriented toward what's needed to enable balance each and service to each other um versus the competitive dystopic nightmare that we are in the middle of now so i think we have mark up next mark trexler uh yeah just a couple of follow-up uh points one you know for many years ago there was this theory that once we had some real climatic events i.e hurricane flooding new orleans that that would be the trigger point for people responding to climate change and and it now that we've had a whole series of sort of empirical tests of that it it turns out it's not true that that as people experience that kind of disaster all they want to do is recover they don't want to think about alternatives and new strategies and new worlds they just want to get back to where they were and and so it turns out that's the hardest time to actually influence their thinking about some of these issues so so that's a real challenge in terms of waiting for the waiting for the big one so to speak the other just point is that we always talk about sort of the climate denialists etc a bit i'm always struck by the fact that that based on a bunch of different research out there you know there are a hundred million people in the us who are alarmed or concerned about climate change a hundred million people about 50 of them actually know what they could do most effectively to tackle climate change in other words basically no one everyone says i recycle which has nothing to do with climate change and so you know we've got this massive group of people out there and if we wait for them to figure this out on their own we're going to be waiting for a long time and yet there are no we have no structures out there to sort of inform people on a day to day week to week month to month basis where they could be most effective at any given time in tackling one piece one chess piece on the chess board of making progress on climate change and i think it's remarkable that we we keep talking about all of these issues so much and yet some basic structures for helping people be effective simply don't exist and i'll stop there i think the common theme that's coming to mind for me is two things actually whether or not there's any sense of connection that people feel with anything because it feels to me like we've become very disconnected which then means we that tends to lead to disengagement and other things and i think also that the vast majority of humans don't spend a lot of time thinking they're so engaged in doing and if you're doing without thinking then it's not very effective i don't know how to remedy either of these two issues but i'd be interested in what people think well yeah i would argue there are actually structures available to engage with because in every community you have literally a dozen NGOs who are working to help people who have fallen on hard times or are impoverished or not children who needs support because we have millions of children living in the street and being food insecure i mean we have conditions that are just that are just incredible but the resources don't go there and when you when you raise awareness that the help really needs to get into these communities when you have where you have food deserts and people living in the street and so on you can't make any money there this is not a commercial zone that allows a top-down approach where you know you create a product and or a franchise or what have you and then you roll it out and become a billionaire so there's the resources currently i mean enormous billions of dollars are going into greenwashing schemes they're going into all kinds of investments that have no impact on helping people that that need to become self-sufficient as a first step and and need to be secured so it's simply a matter of reprioritizing and and and apling i mean i constantly run into the issue that people who really want to help others are constantly begging for money you know they have to donate their time and then lo and behold they may get a cramp someplace right but it is just amazing whereas on the other hand people who really have talent technical skills engineering skills thinking skills they are busy you know thinking about the next invention that is going to make them a millionaire so so there is this uh so the infrastructure is there we just need to pay attention to it and resource it well it is my feeling that anytime you put money into a project it generates activity which creates more co2 is that part of where we're stuck i'm not sure i agree with this that um because you can put money into um you know local programs that that assist people to find housing to build communities to secure their food supply that does that does the opposite is that you can you can invest carbon negative absolutely it's possible okay i i like i like hearing what judy said um that it feels like we've become very disconnected and i think it's actually something different um what i think is that people can't really imagine stuff bigger than your extended family so when we see population scale things happening um it's it's not that anybody's directing that it's an emergent property of lots of small many many small groups kind of interacting so you can kind of imagine the size of your extended family and whether or not they're doing well and whether or not that extended family is doing well or whether you want to partner with them or whether you want to fight with them um maybe you can imagine maybe some of us can imagine you know i've got a gang of thugs um and i'm going to run around and take things from other other extended families um and then maybe there's there's kind of viral effects uh we obviously people you know can move in millions uh one way or another way in in opinion but that i think is not thinking it's not thinking about let me move with a million people it's a lot more like lemmings and of the million people i can see you know 20 or 30 or 50 in a few extended families around me and they seem to be moving towards the cliff and i should be moving towards the cliff oh my god why wouldn't i move towards the cliff everybody else is so i i think where we find ourselves is imagining that the united states or the world is the 20 or 50 people in an extended family and try to have a lever to move it because in the same way that i would move 20 or 50 people in an extended family and it's just a like you know like three or four or five orders of magnitude different in scale and that amount of scale is just something that's really really really hard for any of us to navigate and i think that's the problem the problem is we see problems we want to work on problems but we don't know how to move people in more than a group of you know 50 or 100 or 200 or maybe a thousand thanks so again synchronously i've been talking about this with many different people and as part of the internet archive we serve millions of people a day for free we have been raising incredible amounts of money i think as donations we had a dweb meet up last night where brilliant people working for the good all met each other there are nonprofits that in local bay area that get together at least twice a year and you know electronic found freedom foundation wikipedia internet archive you know the the neighbors i live next to we we try to you know exchange numbers in case of emergencies you know working at many different levels of scale our truck internet archive truck got stolen we posted on reddit somebody found it in oakland and we're getting it back and i'm proposing that at least one panel the kids at the sutra elementary school half a block from the internet archive are you know given a donation or supported to paint one panel of the truck and then you know engage other artists in the bay area i just you know and you know the recent experience of you know having cancer and being part of support groups where everybody is just like i wish for your best health and know you're you know going through shit right now because i've been there um that's good action i think we're doing it here right now um i certainly see danger and i see challenge but i also see possibility and um i thank everybody here for uh listening and uh you know trying to connect thanks um go ahead sewer thanks i want i want to start uh by by reading um the yesterday zen quote which i think is wonderful in this living world the body i give up and burn would be wretched if i thought of myself as anything but firewood i think that's just a wonderful kind of philosophical construct and moves us off of our own ego now that being said i think we've come through a period of great luxury uh great luxury meaning to live in a in a democracy and and to be able to you know kind of flourish in some ways in democracy but i think we've come to the end of that rope as as i've looked at at at um you know history i see that the greatest mass social changes happened because of autocracy um and i can't believe i'm about to say this but but but i i know gill you you you could disagree and many would disagree and that's okay you know it's okay but continual disagreement is going to have us go over the cliff some benevolent quote dictator or some other term to kind of massively organize where we are and and and and make a plan to move us forward okay my uber's would you know volunteer for the program but you know it doesn't look like people will will put me in charge in in this lifetime but we we know what the challenges are we know what to do it's a question of organization and and meanwhile you know so much of the activities we're engaged in are you know fiddling while Rome is burning um and here we are i'm struck by that phrase that we know what to do i hear it all the time i don't think we know what to do we need to cut uh co2 and cutting co2 means cutting some kind of commercial or domestic activities uh i look around my room right now and there's power going to the computer there's an electric heater uh there are two kitties uh that eat food out of a can which has to be manufactured and that um stuff in the can has to be grown uh i see uh a dozen projects that are going to be undertaken slowly like uh wiring a uh a plug that seems to have come disconnected uh none of them are in the spirit of cutting co2 they all add to it and i'm just puzzled uh with this idea that we know what to do i think if we knew what to do we have a very difficult different conversation i don't think we know what to do some of it is all of a sudden i think doug just putting a stop to all those activities and to live in a way that's much more you know close to the land and that's why i keep going back to we don't have the political or in or individual will to actually um do that but i think that that that if you if you brought a group of people together you know they could say we need to do this this this this and this and speculated without regard to the cost or the transition or the changes in in the way people are living massive massive massive difference you know as if we if we all went out on a camping trip okay or i remember years ago there was a somebody who said you know i could live in central park and just went out into central park in new york and was able to forage for food etc etc yeah when we are so far from ready to do that that's the kind of action that i think you know needs to happen but what about on the camping trip you know it's going to take a vehicle to get us there uh that's going to use gasoline we'll walk kill yeah i don't think you can fit all of new york and central parks do it um i'm i'm of the perspective that we actually know a lot about what to do this has been sort of the core of my orientation and worked for the last 50 years since doing world game with bucky and the crew which confirmed for me that we could be successful on this planet that we're not constrained by resources but there's other things in the way than that um dug you and i just agree on that um uh but you know your wiring of your plug and feeding your kitties is a pretty small piece of the problem well actually i'm not i'm i'm wiring your plug let's leave the kitties out of it kitties are part of the problem but you know we we need to look at a sense of proportion about where the scale of the damage comes from and so is it like 70 percent of global emissions are the result of a hundred companies activities so we can start to get strategic about things and think about other ways of doing plugs and um you know if if if i if i mine the copper with with coal powered energy or renewable powered energy the impacts are different down the road so that's the whole conversation we could have at another time perhaps but to stewart your your dream of autocracy um which dug i've heard you speak about you've heard you speak about it also um is to me is very flawed for a couple of reasons one is that you know it's not true that only social changes only come out of autocratic activity and we can cite you know lots and lots of examples of other ways that that has happened in fact out of deny a challenge to work to autocratic activity but the the logical flaw in that argument is who the fuck is the benevolent autocrat and who's choosing them and so that that ends that strategy pretty quickly i mean it may happen at random you know there was a while where people thought elon musk might be a good contributor to that uh i don't think anybody's thinking that this this week right so um um the autocrat theory breaks for me on on ashby's law of requisite variety you know nobody with that much power can be aware of what they need to be aware to do what needs to be done so for me that's a dead end we need to go find some other path than getting an autocrat or living in central park off the land by the way um you know one of the things that people have argued for a long time is zero population growth or declining population too many people on earth china appears to be on a verge of demographic demographic collapse um which you know some people say great less resource load but on the other hand less people to make stuff and less people to pay taxes and so demographic collapse economic collapse um so anyway i'll stop there i i just need to say gilf thank you for taking my bait i'm being a pro i'm being a provocateur is what i'm doing okay i'm half awake enough to just fall into the traps i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not saying that you know this is the only way but i think in the discussion it's important to look at that as as as as as you know potential opposite and and elan must did cross my mind also he and he and you know donald trump saying you know trump saying i could i can i can fix everything and and we thought musk was going to be part of the answer but you know he's driven himself off the cliff mm yeah if i may come back to uh dux point do we actually know what to do i mean the reason why i really uh loved theory you that whole concept is because what we typically do is we identify there is a problem there is a there is an issue here and then we jump over to okay here must be the solutions and what we don't do is go the curve of exploration to really understand the problem so we we don't lack solutions we lack understanding of problems because when you see what the the tech world comes up with these are not solutions to the problem the way most of us understand them so they're fixing stuff without understanding the systemic relationships of the issues that they're playing with right you're playing with a complex adaptive system so any anything you do in that system requires you to have a deep understanding of the moving parts that you are impacting within that system and that's what we're disconnecting you know we're spending literally they're spending billions of dollars when you look at the world economic forum and stuff that just makes no sense and in fact in most cases make stuff worse right so why is that it's because the the nature of the problem is not being accepted there is almost like like emotional rejection right because it implies the need to change at a profound level that that changes business models you know at a level that people who are in charge of those things simply can't even imagine wrapping their mind around so no we don't we don't have a solution problem we have a definition problem of what is the problem I'm going to come in here and say a word about the process and then have Ken do his poem after a discussion about the process several things that I ran a thing at Stanford for a while called the Stanford strategy studio and the idea was to experiment and how to have better adult conversations and I learned a lot from that of which the stuff today is a part the reason to have each person speak is it really changes the person's perception of themselves if they've heard themselves speak in the group it's really quite powerful and it prevents well the other thing by going around the room and getting what's been on everybody's mind is it opens up into multiple agendas and prevents the tendency groups have to want to narrow down to a single topic in order to lower the anxiety from all the issues today was a fairly good example of doing this although there seems to me a stiltedness in the rooms in the room so to speak but I think that's coming from the existential situation we're in and not anything about the group process so those are some thoughts any reactions to doing things this way um yeah I'm on the abalone alliance consensus process which basically um and there's other consensus processes that I researched on the net and basically there are processes you know always have a facilitator and as well as a leader on ken and I have had conversations about you know his you know conscious conversations as well I think you know human training we can learn how to do this and thanks I just posted to the list earlier this morning a piece about how can a how can a business with four times the revenue per square foot of its surrounding businesses with 10 000 workers and no CEO operate other models up there yeah Doug I thought I thought it worked well um it at times verged on being a conversation um the hand raising is something it's a practice I think we're used to but I think we would be better off if we all learned how to be respectful in terms of time so that there could be more uh real interaction the other comments on the process I mean in a way the the process is aimed at being almost inconspicuous uh so that things happen fairly naturally um the idea that we're having a consensus conversation in a way this method is to avoid a consensus too early uh and to open up uh to the groups uh many pseudopodia out into the reality we're living in if there's no more comments uh Ken you want to give us a poem about actually I was going to comment on something else the not about the process but uh Stuart said he has a poem so I will defer to Stuart for a poem well that's right oh sorry okay sure I'll share the poem I was also going to briefly comment very briefly on what Klaus was saying um the whole notion of um people's opinions are based upon their underlying psychology and value set and the only way that I think we're going to progress forward is if our leaders had the capacity to be reflective enough in that way to see that they're operating within the system and they need to get out of the system uh in order to produce some real value going forward okay um Stuart before you go I I actually feel compelled to to share what I was going to share before which is I've been observing this conversation that all agency appears to be centered in humans and we are in a living world where there are all kinds of entities that have tremendous agency that we're ignoring and um until we can actually come to grips with that and feel it in ourselves we're going to continue to try and reinvent uh we're going to continue to try and get out of the box run by by feeling the walls of the box going okay we have to break through this I don't think that actually works I think we need some very new thinking so rather than an engineering approach of how do we solve this I have the question of what does a a human level immune response to we have humans currently are an autoimmune disease on the planet you know we have we have violated so many of the biological and natural um quote laws that are out there that we have put ourselves in the position of being on the verge of extinction so what does an immune response not an engineered response right immune response that comes sweeps over the entire organism and wakes it up and has a per has it lived at a different level has it produced a different kind of um reaction I think is the question that for me is more interesting than how do we solve our problems thank you I'll be quiet now and and and contrary to what I said before about a uh uh one person you know running the whole show the bubbling up um that happens when we're in in conversation and dialogue at a deeper level is where the solutions may come from so the part where the silence is more important than the speaking so the poem is called partnering agreements all over the place don't pay attention conflicts to face guiding grounding focus collaboration producing results beyond expectation expressing joint vision and a plan build trust with woman and man alignment enables states of grace with the gift of agreement in place alone don't do much stumble about harnessed in tandem we become stout hook up talents to a group with a mission marvel the results of a shared vision partnerships grounded in covenant light you up with energy abundant connect with people at work be clear with loved ones don't be a jerk know what you are what you're about join with others stand back and shout amazed and thrilled with delight joyous teamwork makes your life bright outcomes beyond what you had in mind life force of traction wells up you find satisfaction fills your heart joining others life becomes art you're ken do you want to do a poem no i think we should just sit with search books good and i have to actually prepare to hear that poem again then i have to head off the call so i'm going to turn the con over to ken but thank you all i'm dug thank you for for running the session yeah i'll post it in our in our in our email thread thank you actually thank you and and i was going to say i was almost moved to say a dog when he asked can if he had a poem what's the matter to mine wasn't good enough i think that expression was what what am i a chop liver it was a good one you don't like the red tie looks like people are leaving good to see you all have a wonderful week see you next week i hope take care don't close the con yet can i want to grab the chat okay everybody wants to chat go ahead and get it before i close the meeting but thank you thank you ken thanks everybody all right adios hey ken good to see you good to see you mark yeah been a long time it has how's your how's your weather and hillside and everything we're doing okay where i am we have not had any uh any flooding here in centerfell but you know you don't have to go very far to find some pretty pretty nasty stuff out here no i mean i i know uh in past um uh rain um you know all kinds of stuff has happened and fair facts and along you know um