 This is the OGM weekly check and call Thursday, March 16, 2023. And how was the last set of storms on the West Coast treated y'all. They were south of where I am so we're in really good shape. But boy, even with that, the level of panic is high. And the level of snowpack is high apparently. Yes. And the flooding was pretty significant wasn't it. There were places where. Yeah, it was flooded and washouts and stuff like that. A fascinating thing for us is that National Oceanographic does hourly measurements of the river height at the Gernville Bridge, and then has a page with a computer projection of where it's going. And it's been over the years I've been here very accurate. So you look at the graph and say, oh, it's only going up to there. We're fine. And you stop worrying about it. But 10 years ago, you couldn't do that. So every rising storm could become a big flood. It's a tremendous difference. Really interesting. It's not treating you wrong. We had road closures here in Palm Springs yesterday, because the snow melt is so drastic that it's flooding the streets here and then Palm Springs has a pretty good water evacuation system canals and everything. I mean, that is going to be a big thing for California as soon as the water turns now. The weather turns to have this massive snow melt. The water cycle itself is crazy. Go ahead, Judy. I was just going to say that in Minnesota. This is currently the fifth or sixth snowiest winter ever. And if we had had, we also had some unusually warm days in winter season, if the rainfall from that winter season were converted to snow, it would be the snowiest winter ever. So it's like, you know, 110 inches total, but it would have been 140 kind of thing. And that's a lot of snow. And I've been here 30 years and the 22 inch 21 to 22 inch one storm that we got was the most I've ever seen in one dump and it was real. Immobilizing thing, even though they were on top of it, we're good with plowing, you know, they plow twice or three times if they need to, but they don't do driveways two or three times. I worked out of my driveway and there was 21 inches of snow up to within a short distance of the garage door. I usually gets to close to the door but doesn't actually pile up on the door. That was daunting. And then even when they plow it with the they had to come in with different plows they usually do push plows that just sort of drop and back up and then push it to the side on the driveway this year. So that storm they came in with bucket plows, which meant they couldn't get close to the garage door, because they didn't want to push snow toward the garage door. So they only plowed till about four feet five feet from the garage door, which meant I was left with 21 inches and a five foot swath to if I wanted to get out before they came back with the man and a snowblower. I had to plow that and I don't like being feeling trapped in the house I had prescriptions to get so I, I shoveled, you know, a four by five patch of snow four by eight probably for the with the girl car. And it took a little while but it was doable, but that was impressive and then the snowdrifts have been across the street from my driveway where there's a green grass cul-de-sac pad. The snow was eight feet high, and everywhere else it's four to six. And between my house and my neighbors, it's eight. Wow. You said you said you got 110 inches I think what's the normal, what's the normal level of a normal width. 60 to 80. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Good luck. Unfortunately, I think it's a likely to be recurring pattern, given the amount of moisture that gets up into the air now and moves over and gets cold falls down. So it's, it's, it's got me thinking that maybe someplace central US in like Kansas city where my daughter was or something would be a more appropriate place to continue living. North West is very nice. California. It's hard to live in New England anymore after 33 years and I'm like, I'm done shoveling snow. No, I mean, there are lots of interesting places to go but I already have a place that I own in Kansas city that I was spending about half my time there when there was there as a postdoc so that's pretty convenient to to use. And if I were going to move I think I, I want to wait and see where she ends up because I want to end up probably, as I go into my truly elder years, closer to the kid. So she's in Houston now which would not be my first choice, both state entity. And so we'll see where she goes after her postdoc. Thank you. Go ahead. That's why we're snowboarding at the best of both worlds. Get out of the snow and then we just made it made it out in time. Cool. We have a check in this week and the protocol we've been leaning toward. I will describe is the s, the abbreviated s GM check in protocol. And it goes as follows please use the zoom hand raise to step into the conversation and the hand raises will be the same for all of us in gallery view. So you can tell kind of where you are in the queue. Use that to step in whenever you feel like it during the check ins. Before speaking, take a pause. Silence helps us all process. If you want unmute so that so that we all know that you're not pausing because you missed the instructions on the pause. But but that you're just being silent for a little bit and the silence has been really healthy and lovely for us. Then I will not pass the mic so don't expect me to say you know so and so is next and keep going. Keep your hand up while you talk and Lord after please that way you don't zip around in the in the gallery view and we all have to go home to find you. And then after check in, we will just participate together in sort of normal protocol, but during the check in phase please go only once. Don't, don't, don't jump in and start making the check in conversational we are just looking for answers to questions that matter to us. Feel free to use the chat throughout the call. The chat is just a variable we have we can turn it on and off. If this were more like quicker meeting I would ask that we not chatted all during check in but it. I'm feeling unless you all feel differently that the chat is okay and it lets us take notes and sort of release what we're thinking and so forth and I'll be fine with that as well. And then I'm also not going to do a strong focusing question but rather just what is happening for you in an og me kind of way by way of check in. So I will now go into some silence and Judy you're first in the queue so you bring us out and then I'll I'll come back when we're done checking in. Well, I jumped in just because there is clearly something that I'm working on right now where often my efforts are more diffuse. And that is trying to create a document that talks about after you bring people into a group with onboarding. How do you engage them, and then how do you enable them to participate fully in the group. And the engagement part is more straightforward in terms of the types of get to know each other understand each other strengths and zones of expertise. And those kinds of things it's sort of how do you get acquainted to become the beginning of a working group. But then when you talk about the enablement and what we would do in the group dynamics to enable full participation and creative output of content and working groups that are ongoing from an execution standpoint. I think that's going to be much more interesting to try to develop a framework that will work on that. And I'm working on this with Wendy McLean who's doing some work with other groups. And she's really doing the onboarding part and has that well underway, and I'm putting together this treatise possible plan for how we would engage and then enable the participation of the different groups. And I'm finding it fascinating actually to try to do. So I would welcome any thoughts or inputs from other people as well. Next. Thank you, Judith. I'm looking. I'm waiting for you to put your hand down. Oh, thank you. You're welcome. Thanks. Good morning. This is more of a personal than og me check in. I tried to take four weeks off and try to get temporary leave from February 3 to March 3. And that was almost impossible. So I finally got a temporary disability lasting from February 3 to April 3. So 12 weeks went through a lot of pain and found that the healing resources, not only of UCSF, but all over the place are just overwhelmed. Like a six month waiting list for a certain kind of CBT help. And that's just wrong. I'm asking for help. I'm in deep financial stress because of not wanting to work, but just not being able to just because of the life events, people dying, people dying with cancer and as a cancer survivor. Yeah, it's been hard. I need $300 to last me until the California disability kicks in. I would like 500 bucks. And I'd really wish for 1000 bucks. If people in this call can, you know, help with 100 bucks each three of you. I'll pay you back. I'm good for it. Thank you. Well, that's hard to follow. What's on my mind are two things. The first is that thinking about how people think about climate change. I've come to the metaphor of the right brain left brain. The other half of our brain thinks that climate change is a big deal and some disaster is going to have personal consequences. The other half of our brain looks at daily life and it's little tasks and what to how to continue that with no reference to climate change at all. So it's not denial it's more of a schizophrenic process. Because of living in Northern California quite really the way I do. I'm not very affected by climate change issues and the local people are not very much either. So I'm feeling kind of out of touch so in response. I've decided to move in late April to Montenegro, which takes me kind of the country on the east side of the Adriatic. It's a very complicated place in terms of the war in Ukraine in terms of climate change in terms of technology. It's a very dynamic place. So I'm looking forward to that. What is materializing in my world of relating agriculture and the food system to climate change and looking at this is such a existential crisis that we're moving into this year. This year is going to be already probably the first of an incredible challenge to keep to keep food on the table for for a lot of people around the world. The need for systems thinking and systems tools is finally penetrating. And I had a first meeting yesterday with a coop in Central California, a few farmers and different participants of the supply chain. And here we where we are starting to to help people think in terms of of a systems approach to engage in their community. So that means, so that the challenge if I just put the challenge into a nutshell here is that we have reached consensus with the farming and large that they need to change what they're calling because the primary design imperative fear is to restore soil back to health, not to put carbon and microorganisms back into the soil and and restart the cycle of life inside the soil. But in order to do that, and I'm actually working with a company that develops specialized seeds and they're developing an artificial intelligence program to match seeds with with bio regions. So they have satellite data that shows micro climates down to like a very small grid. And if they match that with data from the types of soil that a farmer has an overlay that with the particular climate data they can make recommendations on he has a seed that is good for you in this region. And now it can deal with our climates with wet climates with different types of temperatures and so on. So that's all in place, the intelligence is there now to do that. What's not in place is this farmer now wanting to change into a different type of coops are using a specialized seed to find then a market to sell this into. Connect this farmer is an aggregator with logistics with a processor and then this market with this market access in order to complete this entire cycle and the days clear indications that the industry is not interested in. When you talk about fast food and processed food industries, which is not about 90% of our dollar sales. There's no interest in engaging with that at scale. There are experiments here and there, but I'll take 20 years to unfold that into any kind of volume so the system has to be rebuilt from the ground up. So you have to have hyper reach hyper local and regional projects evolve. So Jean Berger is, is developing Kumu as a discussion tool. So they have just released a new version of their software where you, you can carry multiple conversations similar to what we do, but instead of using slack, you know the conversation is kept inside of Kumu. The experience isn't particularly in this meeting yesterday when you're dealing with with farmers who are so engaged in their, in their work, they may have no, these are not huge farmers but what we call Acacos of the middle they have a few hundred acres. So they're significantly in size, but they, you can't get practitioners like this to sit on the computer and look at the Kumu map and find out how they need to insert their their opinions and so on. So there's a huge need to change to make this kind of information technology that we have been using here at OGM and that Jean has been working on for a lifetime to make that accessible to people who are like basically technology you know, and, and to to help them think in terms of systems to just so to see the systemic connections now that we are stitching together here. We're calling it the coalition of the billing in a community. And so the third process is really easy. You know, you get because they're smart people so they get right into this but then to make these tools useful so they can become independent you know you can you can send them off and and let them perpetuate this. That will take some some some work. So that's going to be my focus this year is to is to develop is to assist in the educational process to help people will use and use information tools that are very commonplace in big companies where where that's you can you have the privilege of training and and access to specialists and so on. But in the small business community, medium sized business community, these tools are still not penetrated and to make that accessible that's a big deal and this will help us usually to to to rebuild this this quantum food business there. So, when we get a little further genius is big into it I mean he lost all this tools and tools development and maybe we can we can pick up on this and and maybe we can see what what can be done to simplify and make those make that technology accessible. I've got a bunch of things I'd love to check in on and check in that often on these calls so I made notes for myself in the chat, which will be cryptic until I unpack them right now. I'm just increasingly aware of all the layered persistent threats that are outside and the messiness the world and I want the Ukraine crisis to wrap up quickly and it's not and all the and that's just one of many different layers of things going on. And yesterday I had a catch up conversation with Kyle Shannon, who was an old friend from New York City in 1995, he and a bunch of early early webmasters in New York started getting together and they formed a worldwide web artists consortium or whack. So, which is where I met a whole bunch of really cool people in New York, and it was really fun because they had filthy looker was not their motive, they were just trying to figure out how to make this web thing do cool stuff, even though they were building, they were starting to build commercial sites and all that. And it was just this frothy lovely conversation that attracted creative and clever people. And Kyle is having a moment like that now around generative AI and it started for him was stable diffusion and the image generation, but it's sort of cutting into other areas now and he's hosting a new generative AI salon. I think it's on Mondays or Tuesdays and forgetting when the standing call is I don't have it exactly on my calendar properly but I'll, we'll find a link and put it in here because I recommend if you want to catch up on what's happening with all this stuff it's a really good place to go and to see some demos of people doing good stuff with it. And then the conversation kind of exploded my wet brain with the conversation with Kyle, just the one on one yesterday, because started thinking about a bunch of different things, including, I had had a conversation just before Kyle with either Josephina who is the founder of Jane co founder of saying, which is kind of a platform for making sense of stuff and simply showing little palettes of things to one another. For what you've seen around different topics kind of a sense making platform and her goal is very similar to my goal and I think some of our goals here in our GM, and she and I had had sort of rude the fact that there are all these platform choices out there is no sphere protocol or rich burdens DXOS or I could name a few others, or a different layer co makery versus disco co op versus social co op versus a few other layers. And I could easily say it's way beyond my pay grade to make those comparisons and boy it's going to take a lot of time to sort out what's what. And suddenly talking to call us like. Yeah, but we could feed a lot of this stuff into the GPT and ask it for these sorts of things and make leaps through some of the things that seem really impenetrable and hard to do. Pete thanks for putting the link to the AI salons in the chat. And suddenly I started thinking that a lot of the things I see as barriers might be dissolved if I am and others who are on similar sorts of missions got pretty good at using chat GPT and GPT for and all those kinds of engines. And suddenly I started thinking about how to better extend myself. And then I started thinking about how to take us down a particular set of avenues, but then also, there's a one of the one of the many threads that's coming out of the chat GPT invasion into our spheres is, hey, why bother taking notes. It takes me as you might expect extremely wrong, but it takes me into a place of trying to figure out pragmatically and practically, what is a fruitful and useful combination of good note taking, and I have a particular quirky version of that in my brain and some of the tools, but how might we combine our own note taking and note sharing out into the big fungus as I call it in very fruitful ways that then get amplified by all this generative AI that's hitting our world. So, so that so so we had a bunch of sort of ideas around that that got me real excited about maybe changing just the way I see the limitations and possibilities around me the way we're interacting, the kinds of things that we generate. Kyle and another friend Monique Elwell created a company called Storyvine. I think it was Kyle's creation way back more than a decade ago I think now, which lets you create kind of useful B roll videos for companies, and he's looking back at his company going. I don't know a lot of what I thought was cool about it it seems obsolete now in light of this, but there's a couple assets that are unique and look what you can do to his company his startup with all this new technology and that riff was really interesting. And so I think there's a I think there's a tremendous amount there. And I'm trying to think hard and would love sort of help on the path of what does it mean to extend myself big Lee, a lot. And I'm also trying to fashion up an offer for public speaking because despite being an old white guy. I think I have a lot to say and I think I'm pretty good on stage or in a virtual meeting and I would love to get more speeches. So I'm, I was calling it my life as a cyborg because I've got 25 years of externalizing my brain which makes me some flavor of cyborg. I don't have any artificial extended body parts but there's lots of flavor of cyborg. And then I had a conversation with a guy who said, you know, that's kind of a boring title how about something more like confessions of a cyborg. I was like, yeah, that thing. And so I'm wondering what the confessions of a cyborg are and as I every time I shower I come up with a slightly bigger conception of what that might be or feel like, or taste like and that's that's exciting to me. So, so, and then, and then occasionally as happened at the end of the conversation with Kyle, I end up feeling like my brain is being pulled too hard and in sort of these different directions I feel like spider man in the metaverse. Where I've suddenly fallen through the cracks I feel like everything everywhere all at once where I might be landing in the wrong metaverse right now. And wow, I better sort of be careful in navigating this works. Because I need to, I need to maintain my Drishti which is, if you're doing a yoga practice Drishti is a point that you sort of defocus on that helps you balance in, in difficult poses like one legged poses. And, and April and I are using Drishti metaphorically for how to find some stability in turbulent times and I as I started I think we're in pretty turbulent times. So, I'm trying to navigate that boundary as well because one of the questions I asked Pete when in one of our early conversations in the chat GPT excitement was Pete. Are you feeling like you're losing your boundaries. Like where do where do we end and where does this thing start and we when we start ingesting materials created by this thing and taking those as, as fact and all that how does that work and just interesting things there so with apologies for a relatively lengthy check in but all of that stuff is swirling in my head and I wanted to share it out and see who else is, who else is interested. And thanks. Thank you, Jerry. I rather like check ins that are non sequiturs. I'm not a fan of conversational check ins or check ins that create a conversation. If we're doing pure check in. However, I happen to have an interesting experience with chat GPT yesterday, and I wish my check in was not about chat GPT I wish it were about something interesting like tide pools or grass or something. But anyway, I learned something interesting yesterday I was playing with a 87,000 word corpus text conversation from a bunch of people. And, and I'll probably share it. I'll share what I was working on. You know sometime later this week on the agenda list. But anyway, 87,000 words is a lot. There were, you know, like a half dozen participants in this conversation, very rich and deep interesting conversation. So, as is my want. I thought, huh, maybe I could get chat GPT to summarize this. And my first caveat is, you know, watch out when anybody actually AI or a human is summarizing something. You're going to miss stuff. So, the thing I learned, I won't go into a lot of detail. I'll save that for an email, but a really interesting thing I learned, which surprised me and I didn't know it before is that I found that you want to use chat GPT as a verb, and not as a noun. You want to, you want to have a conversation with it about the corpus that you're looking at, you don't want to have a one and done kind of thing. So, with a long conversation of 87,000 words. You can, it turns out I had to break it up a lot I had to break that thing up into eight different pieces so that I could feed it into chat GPT and and otherwise it's too big. But in the process of kind of doing that, I fed it chunks of the text, a couple times. And it came back with a different summarization each time sometimes the summaries were shorter sometimes they were longer sometimes it zeroed in on some really interesting details sometimes it didn't. So, not that not that it's a human, but it was also a little bit surprising that a bot doesn't have a, you know, a standard answer for a standard input that's something that we're kind of used to bots just kind of, you know, are, are not, not very variable. The variation, and then my ability to kind of ask it for different things made me realize that it's something I've started doing with chat GPT anyway, working with it iteratively is a lot better than working with it, one and done. So, you know, so that's my my big lesson my big takeaway by my big share. And it's a big shift, because we're used to we're used to, you know, even that so the weird thing is, and I felt guilty about this kind of because I was throwing a lot of text out and I'm using their new model to GPT GPT for which is just out and they've got a limit on how much you can use it at once kind of and so I was trying not to use it very much but kind of inevitably I did and and the it's, it's, it's a different experience, I guess, you know, in the olden days, I would, you know, have somebody summarize 10,000 words or whatever, and you would only do it once because it's kind of a pain. But when you do it over and over and especially when it changes every time and especially when you can ask it different questions. You know, now give me a shorter summary now give me a longer summary now zero in on the concepts rather than what people said now, you know, give me a really, really short summary of it or who said what or or that kind of thing. And it's very patient and, you know, it's not on not on the timer and it doesn't get bored of you asking the same thing over and over and over that it really qualitatively changes how how you absorb the material. It's it's like you're it's kind of like you're in a in a workshop. You know, with a bunch of different perspectives on the thing. You kind of have to drive the perspectives, but chat GPT is very willing for you to do that, you know, now make a limerick out of it, where did was there anything funny in here. Was there anything super serious was it sad was it, you know, so iterate with chat GPT, don't just use it as a task bot use it as a co pilot or navigator as you're exploring information. I like the silence. I've been rediscovering the joys of jet lag and the silence dances very well with that. Just sit and be quiet for a long time. But in the interest of flow so I just traveled for the first time since coven, which was strange and actually okay. I kind of working vacation went to a board meeting and had some downtime and feel pretty slammed having come back. So there's that on the board of a company that's deeply involved in energy storage, since my life is drifting a lot to energy transition these days. And fascinating stuff, some of which I can talk about another time some of which not yet, but pretty exciting stuff run and just as a side note has started to shift my perspective on the role of hydrogen in the transition have been very skeptical of now considerably less so. So that for another time. And I hosted another living between worlds call yesterday this is third Wednesday of every month. Talking about with with bill bowie from our 3.0 about networks and tipping points. And included the work of Santola which Ken has brought up before I find myself not persuaded particularly by the math of tipping point of the tipping point conversation. But very fascinated about the, the nature and significance of connectivity in networks what those connectivity maps look like. Excuse me. And I guess the one thing I summarize about that is that those maps that look like fireworks and maps that look like fishnets and maps that look like collections of fishnets loosely connected by a few connections or clusters of fishnets richly connected by multiple connections which feels more like what we do here. And more appealing to me. And Ken may have more to say about that. And last but certainly not least, like Pete I've been talking before with our friend chat GP T very much echo Pete what you're saying about iteration being key. You kind of a conversational iteration, I find that it's that it's first pass is like 70%. Not just useful but accurate, you know, asking a questions about things that I know I find that it's just dead wrong on certain things but it cleans up pretty good. If you poke it and guide it. It's a nation kind of theoretical conversation about is that as good is this bad you know what's the what's the social dynamics and possible future of all this to how to use it, recognizing that the game is on. You know, and whatever we say this is this is going to be a big part of our future. So I'm looking at how to get to know it and how to use it to my advantage and not just let the big guys do stuff and for me. My first recognition is that it's a damn good research assistant. Really good at doing complex scans fast, including the chair I think you mentioned this earlier, saying, you know, give me give me a table comparison of this area with your years and rows and years and columns and go at it. And then two or three iterations and it's actually pretty damn good at that point as a starting point. And what I'm starting to do and really focus on is using it as a rat writing ally. And to both mine and repurpose my existing work and help me crank out the stuff that I want to do in the next phase so Peter like your term of co pilot. So for me research assistant and co pilot might be a good way to play with that. And that's what I got for now. So I'm in just a little bit apologize for joining late and leaving early. But here in Washington things have gone completely screwy and not just because of Silicon Valley bank. Last week we had three different hearings on Capitol Hill on the future of the internet. And they were just surreal. I mean I, I don't know if anybody else is watching these hearings but it's so depressing to see the political establishment so far behind where the technology is. And the fact that she chat GP T is now scaring everybody and that Twitter is being blamed for the, for the collapse of the Silicon Valley bank makes the politicians even more fearful. I'm seeing this, not just in the United States. There are a few countries where they seem to go actually be digging down and talking to the people who understand the technology but my life has been tech policy for 35 years and it's just things are going off the rails. It's all about trying to hurt your enemies and help your friends. It's so sad to see this new economy being wrapped around the old games where companies use lobbyists to get regulations to give them advantage in the marketplace and hurt their competitors. Rather than asking the question what's good for all of us and how do we share more knowledge with more people more effectively. And the latest thing is of course the biggest threat to chat GP T which is the people who produce all this content that is being used as input are now saying what's in it for me. And some artists of course are making the case in a pretty visual way saying hey, you know, chat GP T is making paintings that look just like mine. What is that. So there's a whole new fight over copyright that could very much constrain chat GP team. And then the other thing is that we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around China. And that was another hearing that we was held last week on how it's us or them, China is an existential threat. And some politicians who use that phrase understand that when you say existential threat it means we can exist, or they can exist, we can't exist together. But that's another trend and it's a bipartisan trend. I don't know how we walk back from that the Chinese are actually trying to walk back there. They're doing a lot of grassroots person to person diplomacy. At a high level the rhetoric is still pretty disturbing. So it's, it's, it's been a very strange week. But thank you for letting us share. And it's always good to hear what everybody else is up to. Hello. Anyone who hasn't checked in yet this is your momentum. Jerry if I can add one more thing just to share a personal point. Well, my, my halftime job for the last four months has been cleaning out my house, particularly a basement full of 30 years of artifacts. And it's been absolutely fascinating to dig through papers from my White House years and from my even before then when I was in the Senate, and around 1990. And just to see these documents that were so full of optimism, and many things predicting what our future could be with the internet and supercomputing. We've achieved a lot of it. And it's kind of, it's kind of bittersweet though to see that we've also achieved a lot of other stuff that hasn't been all that helpful. We need to celebrate what we have accomplished a lot more. And I've been posting photos of some of these documents, because there was, there was kind of a George Jetson kind of ethos at the time right. It was, there was going to be magic. And, and we've, we've, we've created a lot of magic, but we just keep asking those so what's next. We don't celebrate the magic we've already created. And we don't celebrate some of the small case studies that may be happening over here that nobody knows about. So, that's, that's my my plea to this community and to everyone else is let's let's celebrate the, the progress we've made. Well, as my friend Bob Horn says, I've never talked about this before, so I'm curious to see what I'm going to say. I never know what I'm going to say when I come up for a check in here, but I think I'll open with gratitude to Pete. For over a year now he's put together the Plex every couple of weeks. It's been so rich and so phenomenal. And I know it's a big amount of work and I don't know that he gets the accolades and recognition he deserves. So, Pete, thank you so much. You were a genuine community service guy. And I really appreciate it. Mark, I want to thank you for having the courage to ask for what you need. I wish more of us did that. And I'm sorry you're in tough straits and I see a bunch of people have stepped forward to help and I think you're going to make it with the help of the community, which brings me to how many people here are. I mean, with Peter and Trudy Johnson lens, but they're in fairly dire straits, and there's a community coming together to support them that is really inspiring to see some of its financial a lot of it is, is, you know, how do we work with the law in Oregon to take these people and what does it look like to grow older. They're both in their later 70s now and compromise by health and like, what can we do to support each other because the social safety nets are failing us and we need to do some community around that so I'm kind of on the periphery of that community I've only participated in a couple calls but it's also very inspiring to see so my thing lately is. I don't know if this is apocryphal or not but I heard this story that you know and that when they do the tour de France there's still these bridges with the timbers going lengthwise and there's spaces between them and we're driving their bikes and crashing and having problems and the sport psychologist said the key is to focus all the way down the bridge look really far down the road do not look down where you are you have to look forward to look down down the road not look down at the road but look. When I took driver's I said aim high and you're going to look where you want to go and I find that to be a really lovely metaphor for anytime I look down I get really scared. I see all the holes I see the fact that we've run off the cliff and we haven't quite fallen yet it's like the coyote you know. But if I look where I want to go, then things seem a lot more doable and a lot more a lot easier to handle. So, for years we've heard this quote from Einstein, you know that you can't solve a problem with the level of thinking that created it which is actually not an accurate quote he was in the New York Times editorial he was asking for $200,000 to begin an education program to change people thinking because he said the unleashing of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking. And, but he wasn't clear on how do we shift what what does it look like to get out of the level of thinking that actually created a problem. And there's another quote of his that says imagination is more important than knowledge and I think that's, that's the way out. When we find ourselves stuck and asking how do we solve this how do we do this. I think that's the wrong question at the wrong time it's the right question for a different time but it's the wrong question to start with. Because if we want to get out of the level of thinking we have to first step into imagination and say well what this what would this look like. It's a situation work where everybody's taking care of, and that can lead us into an imaginative realm where we can get some real ideas on how things are going to work. Then once we have a sense of that we can start to ask now how do we actually actually actualize that operationalize that make it practical. So, I'm, I don't think what might this look like is enough go I think that's really weak. I want to know how does what would this look like if every single life form was taken care of because that's where Earth did Earth evolved this amazing, you know, fluorescence of life everywhere and as the poet says the children of all species were taking care of for all time, and humans have come along and fallen out of that and we're, we're creating the six mass extinction so what does it look like for the world to be for humans to play a part in the world where we're killing it instead of destroying it. That to me is a question worth exploring. And I don't have the facility for it but I do my best. So, anyway, just a bunch of rambling stuff. I'm reading an amazing book called water always wins which I can't recommend highly enough if you want to know about water and and it just it touches everything. And if you are water people have a saying, there's two kinds of levees, those that have failed and those that are going to fail. Leveeing does not work great infrastructure does not work we've got to. There's this thing called the slow water movement how can we slow water down so that it percolates an area and replenishes the soil and not run off of all the concrete they put around the world. So, really interesting book if you want to check that out. It's very fun. That's Paul craft know this is Erica, guys, I think. And I think you went Paul curfew rather than. Anyway, so that's just some stuff that went around in my brain. As always, it's a, it's a pleasure to be on these calls with you I learned so much from people and just, you know, I'm still asking when I go into public buildings with people. But I'm getting out a little bit more but but this community, along with a couple others online has sustained me for three years through the pandemic and made me feel connected to people when I felt very disconnected so I also want to offer some gratitude for that. Thank you. Do we know if David is by his machine. Yeah, you're my next. You are. Thanks for asking Stacy. I was going to check in in a moment. Same way, but you're on deck. Yeah, these are such great check ins I kind of like it's like, like deep and meaningful and I'm thinking oh I don't really have a deep meaningful check in but I'm going to go with it. We've been, we've been traveling a lot over the last year we left our apartment in Oakland, June, and haven't been haven't had a fixed address since then. And well for a couple more months at least. And it's been interesting to experience a couple of things one is the number of things you need an address for, including like car registration and things like that help health insurance and stuff like that but we've, we've been testing Kaiser's remote health services and things like that. But I've been a little bit struck by and thinking about Mike and the internet and the you know the miracles of the internet, how robust that travel infrastructure has been. We just really haven't had any problem. We can book flights on airlines around the world. We get our hotel rooms. You know, in Indonesia we're using the Uber competitor over and over again, it just works. It's like kind of global infrastructure is pretty robust right now. And a ton of it relies on the internet. Right. Like how the hell that they became stable. But, but it's kind of fascinating and being in a place like Indonesia, who are in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, with the exception maybe of Cambodia. And those places seem really kind of upbeat, like, you know, they're excited in Indonesia is we lived there back in the 90s. And it's just, you know, kind of come into its own at the continent, you know, dynamic country in a way that I didn't think it was, you know, 30 years So it may be some of this introspection that we're dealing with a little bit, you know, Eurocentric or American centric and there's some of the world that's not experiencing the same drama that that we are. So, anyway, you know, your house and travel more is one of my. So I just don't know. I just don't know. I'm looking to a whole bunch of smart people. Check in about what they're doing and what they're thinking about just drives the I don't know a little bit further. I spent two weeks in Hawaii which was just lovely. We're not thinking about anything. Looking a lot of beautiful natural terrain. And looking at the ocean. And it was just kind of lovely to do that for two weeks and not think very much about the kinds of challenges that we seem to be facing. It's really interesting listening to Mike talk about what's going on in DC and the idiots that are running our country. For the most part, not all listening to David talk about you know the importance of getting out that there are other perspectives and different parts of the world. I don't think Stuart's devices frozen because I don't think he's holding up that pose for this long. It's a new Asuna. Say, see if you want to start then we'll pick up with Stuart when he figures out that it's okay. Well, Mike's check in really got me rattled in a few it touched on a lot of what I'm thinking about and. When he talks about you know the threat of you know tick tock and how it's being used. And I wonder how many people on this call is as savvy as everybody is actually knows what the threat, like the the threat is forgetting about who is the person they're focusing on, what is the actual threat like how is that a danger and those. What I'm trying to say is there's a lack of beginner information. In general, and these are the people that are still weighing in with opinions and talking about things. And that ties into what I've been thinking about because I recently, I recently recently dawned on me that what Fox News and the right wing media is is really a babysitting that's designed to keep people occupied and doing other things. And what I did the other day in one of these groups where there's the two political groups, you know yelling back and forth. I took a new approach and I said, I'm going to do this the Tucker Carlson way since I know there are a lot of fans here. And I started asking questions, questions like what happened the few days before the Silicon Bank run. Why, why is Fox not focused on signature bank when Barney Franks on the board and that would be an easy target. And now with this arrest of the billionaire the Chinese billionaire, who has ties to ban and heavy into crypto was working on a media company, and just declared bankruptcy, like I just read all those questions. I guess what I'm trying. Yeah, I'm all over the place because in the beginning of the call class had mentioned how they're trying to think of ways to get people who aren't technological to use tools. And that's always focused on the media and what drives people that aren't deep thinkers to engage and that tied in with what Judy was saying, but I just feel that there's no place for people that want to learn. People fall on the conspiracy side, because we usually say they're dumb, but the thing is, when a lot of people that fall into conspiracies do have curiosity, they shouldn't be confused with the other half of their team that just is looking to like, you know, jump on and you know throw their emotions in a certain direction. So, yeah, so that's my ramble. I guess what I would like to see, because I consider myself a learner with a curious mind. There's so many smart people. I would love to be able to choose two people to sit in to sit in pick their brains together, because I would pick different people for different topics. And I think that affects how engagement happens. And yeah, again, it's hard to articulate what I mean because I'm always looking at things from, you know, a higher perspective and looking at all the different different systems. So it's hard to pull all my thoughts together, but that's the best I can do. And I think everybody's checked in. Am I correct? Have you missed anybody? Cool. On this protocol, I don't track as carefully whether I got everybody. Oh, good. Jenny, thanks for joining the call. We have just finished a check-in round. So happy to have you here. And I was just going to follow up on something Stacy said and then we can, if you'd like, you can sort of say hi and check in a little bit. And Stacy, what I wanted to say was that I've landed at the same sort of place, which is there's not a lot of material for people to just pick up and figure out what's going on. And my motivation was a little bit different, which was there are a lot of simple things and inexpensive things that people can do to make their lives better. They just don't know that they exist. They don't, it's hard to invent new behaviors and they haven't heard the stories. So I started creating YouTube shorts, 60-second videos, just my talking head, no fancy graphics of any kind, to try to say, hey, look, there's a bunch of these things out here. So the link I put in the chat, the shorts to revitalize cities, is a YouTube short that tries to basically, I'll do a quick screen share for a sec, since we're in the discussion part of our conversation now. But so here's the page that I shared. Here are the shorts that I created. Here's a build a net of a landscape, which is my 60-second explanation of this very nice 2012 TEDx talk by Pam Warhurst from the city of Todd Morden in Northern England, talking about one way to revitalize your city. And so I was trying to motivate myself to make more of these. I haven't made nearly as many as I'd like because I'd like there to be a simple tapestry or big fungus of content that is popular, that is not freighted politically, that is just like hate. If you're curious and you want to figure out what to do, troll through this list and maybe you'll find something you and your neighbors would like to do. And so I think that I agree entirely that there's not nearly enough material like this out there. I don't know where it should live, which is kind of why I went toward YouTube shorts because Instagram reels and Tik Tok and those sorts of things seem to be the flow that a lot of people are paying attention to right now. So maybe if you drop little, little rafts into that flow, they'll float in front of people who could find them and benefit from them. I don't know. I think there's lots of interesting dynamics here, but I'm curious. I don't know. I'm curious about what ways you think would work better, because I might lean that way. Yeah, I don't have an answer to that. The only thing I would say is back when David Gray had started the school the possible in order to join you had to like write up a lap so I had to come up with a project because I didn't have one. And the idea that I had, it was for a fact checking lab, we've had teams of people that had opposite political views. And it wasn't really so much about the fact checking itself, but it was about the relationship building between those people that were working on the team together. So again, I can only, I can't answer what you're asking I could just tell you where I think a small starting point is. Thanks, Stacy. And I'm going to also put a link to my am one of my amateur theories of change, which is that storytelling of the kind I just said plus trusted relationships plus a few resources can lead to lasting change and it's one of the few change dynamics that I that I've seen actually work in places. Mark, and then after whatever Mark go ahead and step in and then we'll pause there and Jenny, if you'd like to check in all will go to you but Mark around the first and then Jenny. It's a little silence for a while. I've been an AI researcher since the 80s. And I highly mistrust. I spent yesterday with AI researcher Monica Anderson that I posted about in chat. She's absolutely brilliant. She gave me a case for her AI called a confidant. A personal AI that basically reads all of your self written material and basically sees how it can help. I'll try to make this as short as possible. The case study was a wounded veteran who is alone and hurting and the AI would look for and find somebody a couple blocks away who has extra time and extra resources and could help. And I said, that's a wonderful case study. Here's my problem with it. The problem is the same problem why a social worker or the veterans administration or, or, you know, the person's care team. You know, I would rather give them money than the billions spent on AI. The problem is the same. Number one, will the veteran who's in trouble ask for help? Number two, will that veteran listen? Number three, if help is offered, will that veteran accept it? That's the same problem with the social worker and the community care and with an AI. It's way cheaper to pay people and give them the time to help each other rather than spend it on this ridiculous speeding up of our society where we text people instead of call. And we have reflexive misunderstandings of these short, tiny texts because everybody is too speed it up to listen. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. Before going to Stuart, Jenny, if you'd like to step in and also we're sort of adopting as a practice just take an arbitrarily long pause before jumping in if you'd like to just we're appreciating silence between what everybody says a lot these days. Jerry, I just wanted to say that I did not finish my check in. Oh, that's right. I was either I was either interrupted by the Alameda power company or God. Just, just as I was about to get into something that I thought might be interesting. That's totally right and I apologize for not remembering that when the last we saw you you were like this for a suspiciously long time. So I'm Jenny, would you rather go or have Stuart finish what he was checking out? Oh, let's start finish. I mean, I'm kind of jumping on a train as it rolls. So I just let me jump carry on and if I have something I must say I'll let you know. Sounds great. Thank you. Stuart, the floor is yours. So, Mark, thank you for kind of a team that up because I couldn't agree with you more in terms of we are, we are in a, we are in a morass of our own of our own making. And I'm just kind of feeling flooded with so many words, so many words and and and so little time for for real connection. And that's where the juice of life really is. So I've been, I've been reading in earnest this wonderful book and I think I've mentioned it here before, called restoring the kinship worldview, Indigenous voices introduced 28 precepts for balancing life on Earth. Four arrows and Darcy at Norway's. And it's really filled with the 28 chapters of incredible Indigenous wisdom by people who were both deeply steeped in preserving Indigenous wisdom, and people who have also accomplished a lot in, in the, in the, in the Western world, in terms of, you know, academic standing and doctorates and all kinds of credentials like that. And more and more I found myself retreating a little bit from all of the buzz and the morass that we're in. And so the only other piece of the check in is, I've started to write my way through in earnest, these 34 five things that I've identified that we needed to address as a species. And one of the consistent themes that keeps coming up is, we need to just clean our hard drives. We need to create a system that just doesn't work. And the hard drive is just, is just there. And, you know, in some ways, let the reprogramming process begin. But one of the things that comes out of the kinship world is that there had been, you know, nobody, nobody can actually know this for a fact. And it's three four something like that mass extinctions in the history of, of, of the planet. And it seems that we're, we're, we're pushing towards another one, because of the, in some ways, the electromagnetic energy that we're creating with a lot of the different insanity that human beings are perpetuating on earth. I saw a little piece in the media about beginning to drill in Uganda for oil, that they are, you know, cutting down the forest and destroying the elephant territory. It just is heartbreaking. What we're doing as human beings in the name of money and profit and progress. So that's my check. Thank you, Stuart. Jenny, I'll leave it to you to jump in whenever you feel like, and mark the floor is yours and be posse as you wish. Thank you. Thank you, Stuart. Thank you for thanking me. You're welcome. Stuart talked about cleaning our hard drives. I work at the Internet Archive. We have 100 petabytes of hard drives. Problem is not that we have so much information. It's how to get to people how to basically let people access it. It's called basically search. It's an incredibly difficult problem. And we're looking at AI to help. The stored wisdom of mankind is there. The ancient Greeks. First to know harm. To know thyself. The Boy Scout motto, be prepared. And what I'm learning to ask for help, asking for help. Incredibly simple. Did I follow all of these precepts and things that have been known for not centuries, but millennia? No. And so I hurt myself. But I did have that information. But I didn't listen inside until I got hurt really, really bad. Now, in AI, there's a number of philosophers. There's associated disciplines. One of those disciplines is philosophy of mind and Jerry Fodor in a personal conversation at UC Berkeley after talking after listening to his talk basically said, you know, history repeats itself. First is cognitive science than his AI. But the AI practitioners typically don't know cognitive science. They're looking for a quick profit. Good for them. They want to feed their families. They want to, you know, possibly do good in the world or Google's motto, don't be evil. Now, the motto is, be as evil as we can get away with. Apple. You can do anything you want just so long as we basically, you know, have a control over our ecosystem. So that we make as much profit as possible. Don't have that much more to say, except the information is already there. The people who are good are already here. It's a problem of coordination. We're all willing to cooperate. But us, Jerry's kids, don't coordinate very well at all. And that's really difficult to do. And there's lots of bugs. I'm a professional software debugger. I can't solve it. I can only try to use a process. Identify the problem. Check the problem statement by requirements document. The code. Do the tests. And deploy. Thank you. We have a few minutes left in our usual. 90 minutes, 90 minutes of call. And I'm curious where we are and what we'd like to talk about in this last stretch. Doug, the floor is yours. Yeah, I think this image of being serrat flooded with words is really important. To me, it's like we've been building a sand castle, which has a form, but then it starts to fall apart. What becomes visceral is all the grains of sand. And the form is being lost. And that's what's happening to our words. It's very hard to find a place to land and the sea of words. Where you can say anything that's really meaningful. That's likely to catch on. And it's funny because I'm. And you triggered in my head the, the web is dead. The internet is dead. There's a whole series of tropes about how, you know, this, this, this thing has become just spoiled by commercial presence or by chaff. Or by misinformation or by name your force. I find that my experience of the inner tubes and the web and all that is as fruitful, probably more fruitful and joyful than ever, that there is a tremendous flood, a torrent of crap out there. But that if you sort of like dusted off and like burnish the shiny, the shiny bits. It's still vibrant and full of insights and aliveness. And then I, then I was thinking about how the shiny bits still float downstream and and I, you know, you can sort of spot them and pick them up and and pull them out. And other people see other shiny bits and some of that is the, the, the, the maelstrom of misinformation that it has some of us worried sick. Doug, I think that that somehow things are still going viral things are still for good and bad. The system is still doing a lot of that stuff it's not, it hasn't it hasn't collapsed in on itself, it's just reshaping itself constantly. Which is, and maybe part of what you mean by the sand castle being wiped out is that we build a little structure and then it get you know wave comes in and takes out that the turret and that side of the castle or something like that. But I'm sort of struggling because I see both the deluge, but also the virtue or the benefit of the medium is still happening. Klaus then Stuart, and take your time. I would. I mean, as scary and challenging. It all is when you, when you look around at the exponential pace that the environment is is shifting and changing because of what we have done, not just in form of climate change in a sense of having released fossil fuels but also an incredible destruction of the natural environment, mostly through the food system. The, the awareness knows through the information systems that we have in place is also increasing exponentially. And I think we underestimate the impact of information that is going out there. And then, for example, the sustainability professional group has 350,000 members. And so I'm through various groups, there's a million people that are participating in conversations related to basically the food system, you know, and the, the energy system really focused on my Lucia now. We started talking about the farm bill three years ago. We created a zero club focus, we created a book club and got into the minutiae of how this thing works. It's the biggest bill after the defense bill and no one has ever heard of it really. And we are deep, deep into details now talking with members of Congress having by now a large number of people who are really understanding how this works and how these investments are being distributed and allocated and so on. I mean, there is some reason for optimism and doubling down on sharing information. Really, that's the most important part is to just to just consolidate information in ways that makes people aware that this is a system. These systemic connections if you push a button here, it has an impact on all these other points here. And so, yeah, I don't know if we, if we can swing fast enough. And, and the, the most, the most, the most challenging thing really is that in spite of understanding how dangerous this all is and how we're really teetering at tipping points that we can't afford to pass and probably have passed several have passed already several people are just so stuck with their, with their own world, they just don't want to let go. And the, it's just like in the energy sector when you think about electrifying the automobile industry, thinking about all the car mechanics, you know, spent a lifetime working on combustion engines and all of a sudden the entire skill sets now is rapidly becoming obsolete and extrapolate this to the entire industry, but this all means how disruptive this is you have that same disruption, no impending on in the way we handle food and this is multi trillion dollar industry globally connected. The sheer magnitude of change facing us is completely overwhelming. But when you go down to the ground level, you see people starting to listen up, starting to get hopeful, starting to see where they can engage. So, so I don't know where I'm going with this. But I'm, I have seen a progression of consciousness of conscious awareness about the environmental impact of our action and our connectedness to nature that is really very remarkable. Is it fast enough. I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm trying to stay. I'm trying to stay optimistic, but it's, it's, it's, it's a challenge. That's, pardon me. I want in response to what Doug said. I feel almost disincentivized to publish anything to put words out, because the morass and the sea out there is just so huge that why bother. Everything is just going to get lost. Anyway, and then a class I think that optimism or pessimism is not a really useful perspective right now because we don't know, which is don't know. And so we do the work because it's the work to do wonderful quote from the Talmud do not be daunted by the word by the enormity of the world's grief. You justly now love mercy now walk humbly now, you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. So it's kind of, we have to do the work, because it's what we're here to do. And that that's as an individual, you know, everybody here is doing their best to make a contribution in some way. And, and, and that's all we can do right now. But the idea of optimism or pessimism, or thinking that we're going to, you know, have the solution. I don't think it's useful. I think it'll make you crazy. Just my thought. Another problem. Another William Stafford poem. It's amazing to me how I choose these night before and they somehow just seem apropos of the call. This is called Jeremiah at Minimogish. Somewhere up there, God has poised the big answer to the new doctrine written all over this country in concrete by the corporation everyone has bought into that leads to where the minotaur waits. It's just over there by the new mall, or at the end of your carefully planned university course, your Malik award, your honors, your degree fastened like a dog tag around your neck for life. As the freeways are nodding around cities, getting ready to reach out, but scattered in little pieces, the old times trail off into the mountains and hide forming their avalanche. Then salvation. Somewhere up there, God has poised the big answer to the new doctrine written all over this country in concrete by the corporation everyone has bought into that leads to where the minotaur waits. It's just over there by the new mall, or at the end of your carefully planned university course, your Malik award, your honors, your degree fastened like a dog tag around your neck for life. As freeways are nodding around cities, getting ready to reach out, but scattered in little pieces, the old times trail off into the mountains and hide forming their avalanche. Then salvation. Have a great week y'all. Thank you, Ken. Beautiful poem. Can't go wrong with him Stafford Stafford for the win. The way it is. And that's the way it is on Thursday March 16 2023. And everybody who knows what I just echoed raised your hand. And on his last night of saying that when the mic went off he said, except it isn't. Thank you Walter. Thank you all we're kind of at the end of this week's call. I appreciate your presence. I love the pauses and have a lot of tabs to go track down and harvest into me brain. Mark we will send some resources and you'd like to have a last word. Yeah, thanks for the poem is very great. One of the things I loved about and forgive me chemo brain. I don't remember the collective intelligence thing that was done by people in France and is really good. But after the check in after the formal thing, then they stopped recording and people had a party, people had social time. And that was incredibly good. So that's a process suggestion for these Thursday calls. Thanks, everybody have a good time. And please take care of yourselves. Exactly. Thanks Mark. Thanks everyone. See you on the inner tubes.