 How are you? Doing good. Nice to see you again. Nice to see you. Hi, Jay. Hey, Scott. Oh, I can. And Jerry's brain has arrived. I don't know about. The brain is here. How is everyone? Right with you. Good. Good. A little depleted. I've been too, too many things lately, but. I hear you. Oh, Jerry's got the eye of saurin behind him. Uh-oh. Is that good? The world seems a little bit shaky. I don't know. It seems like it's a mood thing. But if you remember he, that means that he's closer to the objective. Then he just starts to open up. Where's your precious. And some very big ones. My precious is this thing called OGM. Hoping you're not going to throw us into the mountains. Just saying. Hi, Judith. You're all right, a bit depleted. I hear. Just tired. Yeah. staycation shortly after this call. After you get through a webinar that I'm hosting tonight, then I can be clear staycation for a little bit. 7 AM for you guys. I mean, that's really so admirable, admirable. Admiring of the fact that you're getting up for 7 AM meetings. It's 9 AM here, but I stay up pretty late. I can't compete with Charles. I can't figure out- Charles doesn't sleep, as far as I can tell. That's kind of what I feel. I actually sent him a note, said one on one time. I said, so are you up really late or up really early or you've just been up? I think Charles rests in a box that has some dirt from Transylvania in it. I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure. Oh, Ken. He's involved. Hello. I have a pun for you, Ken. I was going to post, but I'm not good at it. I never do puns, but I like puns. It says alcohol and calculus don't mix. So don't drink and derive. Very good. Ken, have you ever heard that one before? I have not heard that one before. That's a good one. You're way. You should post that. For those of you who don't know on Facebook when I was working for the census, I've run a group called Signs of World Awakening where I try to post positive developments in the world. And when I was doing crazy Irish for the census, I didn't have time to read a lot. So I just started to, I've been collecting puns and comics for years. I just started to post them. And now I have a whole bunch of people who are tagging me on puns and posting things. And it's spreading like a good bacteria. So if you have puns you'd like to send along, befriend me on Facebook. It's Ken Homer and I'll put you in Signs of World Awakening and you're free to join in the fun. And the only problem with that whole situation is that Facebook does not provide a grown emoji. I've sent out a picture of a grown button, however, which several people are now using quite regularly. You're definitely a grown punster. Yes. It's interesting to me how rapidly Neil responds with a pun. He's quite good. He's lightning fast. I just had a little meme going of make a band edible. So we had the rolling scones and Merle Haggis and Johnny B. Cookie and Chuck Berry Pie and things like that. It's a lot of fun. I was trying to figure out what the new version of a memoir would be since it seems like everybody kind of needs one. And the closest I could get was Memoir. I was just going to say that. That's good. Good. I like it. So let's start our round of check-ins and see where we are. Jamie says she's in a really noisy place. So I'll wait for a little bit and maybe she'll get into a quieter place. So let's go Julian Turrell's J. And Julian loved the Northern Lights. Thanks. Unfortunately, since last week, I've been subjected to an absurd number of distractions. And I haven't actually gotten any work done. Oh, that sounds good. How's your world? Well, actually, yeah, it's not quite true, trying to catch up on some emails and seeing all the good discussions going on. Like yesterday or the day before on the OGM mailing list, there was a good set of, well, because see, my primary objective is to be able to structure knowledge to the point where it can be viscerally manipulative. And there was some good discussion on the list within the last couple of days about tools to do that. Because there's a real issue. I mean, sure, there's ontological systems, like RDF knowledge stores, which allow people to describe knowledge to a degree. But it's not, of course, nearly enough. You can't take human history and put it into what was describable with OWL. OWL covers a certain number of things. And maybe it's great for the pharmaceutical industries, but it's not really good enough to cover how to do knowledge. So we're still on baby steps with that. And that's why I was enjoying the discussion yesterday. Julian, what do you mean by viscerally manipulative? In that your knowledge becomes something, it's not actually real, right? But it's there, you can perceive it. And by that, I mean, using some combination of your senses and your cognitive abilities. And then same thing is that you can then manage it. So that you are literally using your hands and your speech, whatever your body can do to manage the knowledge. Instead of typing commands into Excel or a SQL database. Well, one of my dreams about a future OGM platform is a little, well, it's less my dream than it's a way that I try to light this up in people's heads. Is to remind them of the minority report scene where Tom Cruise puts on the gloves and is busy like doing fluke, fluke, fluke, fluke, fluke. Which I'm not a big fan of navigating through 3D information space, but that's just me. But the idea that there's a common set of something that's active, that is in the world, that is multi-user, right? Cause there is just Tom doing fluke, fluke, fluke, fluke, fluke. What if you have that with a couple different people where the system each of them was using was adapted to their preferences, preferences about how to model reality, how to remember stuff, how to share? Absolutely, cause you've heard terms like virtual reality and augmented reality and so on. And the thing about any of these, whatever you call them realities is that they are subjective experiences. So that while everybody has their own cognitive abilities, the way that they use them to sense and manage things is subjective. And it's... Sorry, go ahead, Julian. So one thing is that this movie Minority Report is a starter along what I'm talking about. An example I like to use is you go onto a website and you drill down, right? This has been around for a long time. Well, to me, if you want to drill down, you would, if you were talking to somebody, right? In a collaborative sense, you would point to something with your finger and tell the other person, tell me more about that. And in my universe, that is the query to the database. It's not getting the mouse and clicking over here and clicking over here. It's you tell the computer, tell me more about that. And the other person, whoever else you're working with sees that, right? And here's that. And it's up to the digital system to figure out that you are pointing at something, what you're pointing at, recognize your speech that eventually translates down and send the system somewhere to a drill down. See, then this is visceral. Sure, using a mouse is visceral, but it doesn't relate to human cognitive abilities because you have to go through all these mapping models in your head to figure out what I want has to be translated into these commands as the computer can understand. And to me, it's the other way. The computer should be figuring out what I want. And I'll add two things to this scenario, Julian just described, because you're describing also what I'm feeling as well. One of them is that as you're manifesting in the middle of the Northern Lights, the way you represent things, I can seize parts of it and then connect them into the way I represent things. So I can sort of lasso in, for example, some thing that's important that I wanna remember and then draw it, connect it, attach it, remember it in my web of sense making somehow. And then the second thing is, and this is growing increasingly important to me, is there's an intelligent listener that's on my side, basically machine learning that is helping me. And yeah, I saw Scott Twitch too, it was good. There's an intelligence that's listening that is busy saying, oh, is this what you mean? How about this? I heard you do this. Can I complete it for you? Can I send it for you? Can I basically, as it gets to know you better and your preferences for how you manage that your world, it's busy doing things ahead of you so that you can get more things done more quickly. So anyway, and it would be fun to have, I think at some point we need a call where we just sort of fantasize what these things are and then roll back a little bit and say, well, good, that means we need this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing. Because as we aim toward what an OGM platform might be like, that's, these are the kinds of stories I'm keeping in mind because what I'd like to have is a place where machine learning experts can experiment with data we have available that lets them sort of step in and figure out how that works. So long-ish excursion, but fun. This is the stuff that animates me for why I'm here. So Charles J. Laura, did you want to add something, Julie? No. Okay. This is good enough. Because you were just describing that it's technology that leverages, is to leverage the human in a subjective way. Augmentation, human augmentation system. Slightly angle bargain. Sorry, Charles, go ahead. Charles. I love this, I'm just, this is totally why I'm here. And yeah, Jerry and others, no, I kind of also dreamed about this immersive mapping stuff. So I'm really eager to go into that and learn more what's going on and the possibilities. And I've been on this kind of odyssey of mapping and harvesting. And it occurred to me that kind of my recent extension or upgrade of role from map whisperer is map warrior. And that means literally fighting with maps. And yeah, what does that mean? It means both ways. So that's me. Yeah, on this journey through the valley of harvesting and dealing with the tech and the lack of interoperability or just staying the course, just keep breathing. That's me, the map warrior these days. Thank you so much, Charles. Jerry, Lauren rumor. Thank you for setting the tone, Julian. So a lot of my work this week has been taking all of the kind of leadership, storytelling, coaching work I've done and trying to democratize it and figure out how it can be spread to everybody. So not just the top level of the top level people that are getting on the biggest stage, but in the recognition that your stage is everywhere now. And so I've been, I just released my journal for free and a downloadable form and just been kind of spreading the word on that. And so what's interesting for me about what Julian said is that I've thought about, when you think about your landscape of stories, if our stories make up our lives, I've often thought like, what if it could be that your stories don't live here? They don't live here as the solution, but they live here as the solution, which is the ancient solution. So it's like some combination between a memory palace, hieroglyphics, sign language, what would be the best design solution so we could embody by triggers and remember these stories and be able to hold them. And I'm calling that knowledge. So like we'll take the tech part, very, very important, but for now put it over here and what is the full embodiment look like? So that's my check-in. That's a full head of check-in. And also your mission to democratize your work on storytelling is a really, really OGME mission. And I would love, let's set up a pop-up call where we can convene some people who would like to help you do that and let's see if we can put some rocket boosters on your mission and see what that means to you and what it means to some of us and how we do that. Because we're on the list in particular, we're sharing a whole bunch of solutions and issues and watch this and watch that. And part of what I think we need to get to is the meta part of it, of how do we get great solutions out in the world? How do we weave them into different usable contexts, the way that we were just sort of riffing on with Julian, et cetera, so it's really totally central. Thank you. Lauren, Romer, Doug. Hi everyone, it's so nice to see you. It's great to be here. Yeah, just Charles and I are just getting super specific about kind of processes we're developing and trying to see how we can take all this meta stuff that all these experts that are in this room and kind of design a process where we can take certain steps and see how we can just kind of jump in and start doing stuff and kind of augmenting, trying to create a community of impact where we can augment all the stuff that other people are doing. So basically the essence of our design is to kind of reward the first follower and people when you try someone else's idea or you listen to their presentation, you give feedback on the paper, that's what we're rewarding in this network because it's not just, we already have all these great ideas and big thinkers and visions and stuff like that, but what we all need are people willing to try out these ideas and to have a network of people who will try rec slabs or this kind of facilitation or these new things. That's I think what we're really lacking. So that's, we're getting really serious and talking to currency experts and stuff like that. And actually like just designing the first implementation of this network. So we kind of take entrepreneurs through this process. So yeah, that's what we're doing. We're really excited about it. And we have the harvest party on Monday. So that should be really fun. That's right, that's coming up and Thanksgiving is coming up and all these things are just rushing upon us at the end of the year. Right. And you're important, it gets dark ungodly early already. Thank you, Lauren. Romer, Doug, Judy. Good morning, everyone. It's nice to be back here. I got a chance lately to read the Autism Charmers book of Fury You and I'm just grateful for the group, kind of leading me towards autist work. And it is definitely something for me. So hopefully I could pay forward moving along. And it really kind of sink into me in terms of a better awareness of the different levels as you communicate or as you engage with a group. And yeah, it's a humbling, I would say experience for me just to realize how I get stuck with certain levels on his work. And yeah, it's kind of looking back. Oh my goodness, what have I done? So it's a great work and thank you for leading me the way towards that. Romer, thank you. And Otto's work and the whole community they've created around Fury You runs really, really deep. And they have the Presencing Institute and they do consulting for companies and companies listen to them and follow what they're doing and what they're doing involves emptying and dealing with your dark side and a whole bunch of stuff that most normal corporate consultancies never get close to that I can tell. So for me, Fury You and that whole sphere of activity is really an important sort of potential partner for us and so forth. And we're connected to Otto. Otto was a guest on a call I event a couple of years ago. We have many other connections to Fury You community. I'm sure Kelby Bird is a friend and she's sort of their facilitator. In the middle of all that, she does a lot of the drawings, a lot of the artwork for Fury You on black background with gold and silver and stuff like that is Kelby. So I wanna build some links over to Fury You at some point that are sort of robust and also then, and this is part of what being OGME as a verb might mean, what about Fury You do we absorb into how we work? Like what aspects of what they're up to? Should we absorb and adopt and adapt ourselves? Thank you for bringing that up in the conversation. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, Doug, Judy Parmjit. Okay, I think I'm unmuted. You are finally here. As some of you know, I've been working on this book called Garden World Politics and I finished the draft which is published up on the medium and I put a link in the chat for that. And my big quest now is to find a publisher although there's questions as to whether books even make sense in the current climate. My key client these days is the Institute for New Economic Thinking, George Soros' organization. And my task has really been to dutch them to get out of the mathematical way of thinking into more narrative way of thinking. And we've been making some real progress and that's pretty fascinating. A long story, but it's enough for now. Thanks, Doug. And since I seem to be riffing on what everybody's saying here, one of the really interesting questions in the OGM thinking space is what happens to books. Like what is the next communications medium, right? And one of my problems with books is that they're kind of monolithic and they're protected by digital rights management software and it's hard to refer to a paragraph in a book, right? So I use a little app called Readwise. I think that's the one that does this which basically picks up your Kindle markups. I try to buy Kindle books when I can now because I don't have room for a big library. But then I use the highlighter and things that I highlight show up in Readwise but they're not really useful in my world. I don't have a way to integrate them in what I do. And allegedly the best ideas in our world are buried in books because people who care a lot about stuff write books. That's our medium. So how do books live in this new world? How do they get deconstructed, riffed on? How is their content made more richly available? Because one of the things intellectual property overprotection does is it cuts the ideas out of the world in order to protect the author forever. And I don't think that's a great idea because I think that these great ideas ought to be remixed, harnessed, reused, et cetera. So what does that look like going forward? It is a huge and wonderful OGM question. Go ahead, Matt. Yeah, I think one of the challenges that I just maybe just to put on the board as to name with this is that a lot of research shows that when you read a physical book that your ability to absorb the information and understand it and to recall it is exponentially higher than when you read something in a digital format. And I think some of the reasons that neurologists think that that's the case is because of the way in which we have almost like physical proximity of ideas to each other and that you don't get as lost in where you are in space and time as you do in these digital models. And so I think it will be interesting to see how you get the superpower of digital, but the tactile, the kind of this tactile, kinesthetic almost appreciation for the physical. So it's just something to think about. Love that. And there's something about opening a book and the ritual of using a book in our culture that slows you down and makes you focus on one thing. And there's questions in the world about is long form writing going away? Is the book obsolete? Is writing itself obsolete? Those were all kinds of questions that have been around. And for me, one of the questions is how do we create a system where we can have our knob on the focus dial? Meaning at one moment we put it on fast at another moment we put it on slow. When you're on slow, everything else goes away. It's like one of those focus apps for all the other apps just dissolve away and you only see one thing and you have your ability to focus on one thing is improved because all the little notification buzzers and dings go away, you just focus. And when you're going fast, it's a little bit like Bruce Lee being attacked by multiple people in an early Hong Kong action cinema movie where these things coming in at you are stimuli, messages, tweets, but important things and how you deal with them, how you use their energy to forward them to the right conversation, to annotate them, to memorialize them, to weave them into context, to do that extremely quickly and efficiently is a really important aspect of how we do our work. And for me, it's not that long form is dead and multitasking is impossible. And I don't really like all these narratives so much as why don't we tune the tools so that we can turn the dial so that the system helps us deal with things quickly and efficiently or slow everything down and focus deeply in one thing. And if the system can be our assistant in that way, then I think it's a big win overall because we get to choose which of those modes to be in and conscious choice about how to use media and whether to turn the damn thing off or not and all of that is hugely important here. Yeah, that's the thing, is that the system needs to leverage the human. And one concept I've been working on since people have bugged me to write books is that well is a book still adequate in the 21st century? And I don't think not necessarily that it's obsolete but I think that it's no longer adequate. One of the reasons I installed writing a book is that every time I try to linearize what I'm thinking about, I realize that everything is deeply intertwinkled and I can't come up with an outline I love. And so there's probably like five books in my head that are not making their way into the world because the way I see everything is so intertwinkly that I'm much happier weaving the ideas into my brain and then narrating a story through the brain. That makes me totally, exactly. This is the new gesture. Yeah, one thing I've been looking at is if you... Julie, can you think of... Okay. If you think of Bonnegut so... The paradigm that I used in structuring the book... The paradigm that I used in structuring the book that made it easier was to put it in the form of where are we? How did we get here? What can happen and what should we do? Which sounds a little bit like a journey curve but who knows? Julian, go ahead. So I was gonna bring up Bonnegut Slaughterhouse 5 which is completely against the idea of linear. But yeah. We're all believed over this. Well, I mean that Slaughterhouse 5 was presented as a bunch of bubbles and so you had to assemble it in your mind. This gets back to the whole concept of mapping but what Jerry was saying about how this is related to that and how do you tie that all together? And I was gonna mention one of the things I've been working on is history. History is a graph database so that the thing is if when you study history you find out that, well, a book presents it linearly but when you look at one of the events there are things were going all over the place and in fact, I'm giving a lecture about this at the Neo4j Developer Conference in two weeks about using graph databases to represent history. Thank you and I'll go back to, I'll do a little brain sharing at the end. Jay, go ahead. I've got this experimental course I'm leading for founders. It's all people that I've already coached and I call it mythic moments and we've been following various continuous journey curves and each time we're gathering these essential stories from our lives and coming to the present, going to the future, going to the past, playing with time and what really comes up for me is that as my wife is a podcast and radio producer, as you know, Jerry, I keep on coming back to this like, okay, now we've got all these stories and they're essential stories of our lives or our leadership of our essence. We could even build them out and there's a something that you can make from this. There's a something that it's, again, an almost book that would be very prevalent for so many people like, because I know it's not just of course the stories and it's not just what you derive from the stories because there's also your essential studies, your brain science, your research, right? So there's like different components but that's a piece of it. So like, it feels like we're just on the precipice of some kind of like next level living book thing that seriously I think like I need one. So I'm just like, okay, I'm just gonna have to do one because I'm tired of talking about it but like, I just wanna bring that idea. I want to build that here. Like this is the lab in which to play with that and to experiment with it. And I think as we're forming up quests in the way that Matt was describing in the last couple of calls, I think there's a quest here for the future of the book or the future of how we communicate with each other, how we tell stories, how we memorialize, how we share, how that all connects because we've been stuck with a series of units of nuggets, you know, standard nugget sizes. There's the book, there's the tweet, there's the blog posts. They're not very interconnected, they're not very woven together. And like blog posts and tweet are brand new in the last 20 years. These are some of the semantic affordances of the web, right? But the web ended up looking kind of like a magazine, right? And efforts to hypertextualize, efforts to contextualize and all that haven't really gotten very far. We have a very, very clumsy, primitive way of sharing information through the web. And a piece of what OGM is really about is pushing that boundary toward useful things that are kind of intuitive, the way that Julian is describing. Like how do we make it, you know, how do we make it so I don't have to learn a new gesture vocabulary and train myself to do specific, you know, because you can easily see that like the Tom Cruise Minority Report interface might require a whole bunch of training and internalizing and that's not gonna work because 18 people are gonna learn that and the rest of us are not. So what is it that's very useful that way that winds up becoming a normal way for us to interact? And for me, it's like, I'm having this weird experience where I'm not taking all the time but I'm not taking into the same mind map. And it's insanely cool and fun and useful. And I'll do a little bit of screen sharing in a sec but I wanna make it through the check-ins but it's a joy to take notes in this environment because as something shows up that's important, I'm clicking it into the place where it belongs, where it feels to me like it belongs because it offers more evidence. It lights a little bulb about something that I care about which I'm hoping somebody else cares about because I share my brain out. So yeah, so it just keeps getting better and better. Judy Prangitska? Wow, what a stream. I'm in a fractal stream, I think because I'm carrying too many different things at the same time, all of which are exciting and moving in increasingly interesting and yet sort of slightly diverging directions. And as I mentioned in the front end, I'm kind of ready for a staycation to step back for a little bit and try to integrate across those multiple layers to get the wholeness back and then re-enter the work stream. Thank you, Judy. I'm feeling the same way, too many ores in the water. And then when one of them catches, you're like, whoa, cause it spins a little boat around. I have one comment though because I think I'd like us at some point to talk more about definitions of quest because there's the mythic quest and for some of the things that are O-G-M-E, quest is too long-term and vague and might be like Don Quixote. And so there's sort of this balance between the infinitely wonderful and the pragmatically achievable and where do we play on that huge continuum? Probably one of the more exciting things this week was a follow-up call on our group from the workshop. And more to say on that later when we've got our heads kind of screwed on straight, but we're working on some stuff. That sounds great, thank you. Time to get Scott, Jamie. Gosh, I'm interested in what I'm gonna say next. There's a lot of stuff going around about the term narrative. And we had a conversation before about when you're trying to find the truth and everything gets flooded and then you don't know what's the truth out of everything that's kind of in front of you. And I just feel that there seems to be like a surge, like a wave coming up of truth narrative because people are seeming to become aware that do you know what? If we just sit here and wait for somebody to come and do whatever needs doing politicians, it's just not happening, things are getting worse. And so they're kind of stirring now and they're looking at narratives and they're kind of them coming together and saying stuff in a way that's changing what the narrative is out there. So that then if people start to hear that then they start to also become more aware of how does that relate to them? And it works on so many different levels from the level around kind of who am I? Am I part of society or part of religion or something different and where are the overlaps? So there's all of that going on. And then there's all the stuff about organizations, you know, and groups and community groups and what are the truths that they've been following and acting on up until now? And what are the truths that actually are truths? And like racism is a result of so many things being missed out of the actual narrative and so is sexism and so on. And so, and I think that then it kind of builds up and builds up into systems and so on. And so I'm not really sure what the end of my business but there's a kind of, there's a whole wave that's kind of coming over. And I guess my, I see my role as being a bridge between because people are gonna pick up different things from the record and everything in the past. I've kind of seen something that I see as a solution like an idea or a report. And I'll go, hey guys, look at this, it's a solution. And most people around me will just look at the same thing and like shrug their shoulders and say, I don't really understand because they're not making the links. So it's like, it's presenting the right thing at the right time in front of the right person and it's a lot there to think about and leave it at that. That was really rich. And just to riff on what you're saying, a couple of things. One, my own belief is that we are deep in a non-linear war that there are people taking us into the post-truth, post-fact world on purpose because it lets them run elections and win big political games and gain power and that the media is like, wait a minute, wait a minute. We were all about like democratizing and making equal easy access to information and we've suddenly been used in this other way that the media and the social media platforms don't understand what just happened to them and how to fight it back. They're trying and all of this is a battle over the scripts that are running in our heads. Some of which are installed there by religion, by our early socialization, by other kinds of things. And then one of my favorite little sort of cultural nuggets about this is a song from the musical South Pacific which is, you've got to be carefully taught because South Pacific is about racism and the song basically says very sweetly, we're not born racists, we're made racists by our families, our cultures, right? And all those things, sexism, racism and all that are scripts in our heads are kind of installed there by things that happen to us that in many cases override actual experience and actual nature and actual observation, right? A lot of these scripts run counter to what nature would tell us if we actually stopped and slowed down and paid attention. Like you'd realize like all humans are equal and we all observe like attention and let's move forward and make things better. But there's a script that says, no, no, no, those people eat they're young and they have green blood. So stuff like that. So this is really central to OGM. What you just sort of went and riffed on in different ways is, I hate to say it, is equally central to OGM which sounds like nothing is central but this is like a hologram we're looking at, right? We're each taking a different look into the big ball of wax, Judy then Doug. I was just gonna say there's a whole neuropsychology thing on that too in terms of the mapping that actually occurs on the programming and that scripting can happen from toddler to on. It's essentially as soon as there's cognition and experience, the mapping is starting to occur. So the interventions later after the mapping have occurred are very difficult. Totally agree. And how humans are soft enough to change is an essential question here because if those circuits are getting burned in and are impossible to change we're all hosed because a lot of people have a lot of circuits burned in a really hard way. Doug, Jay, Ken. So I've been thinking about the word truth in relation to the Trump followers and I've come to the following. The word truth originally was trough and I pledge thee my trough. The word truth was used as a quality of relationships between people. And I think that the Trump followers are a lot about relationship in that sense. They have faith with Trump. Whereas for the progressives to pigeonhole a little bit truth has to do with fact. So you have a fact world and a truth relationship world and they really do not go together very well but putting it that way helps us understand both sides I think. I wish you'd said that to me 20 years ago, Doug that's really useful. Sorry, Jay then Ken. And then we'll go back to the chickens. Thank you so much, Doug. That's wonderful. I'm kind of addicted to etymology and I've been kind of struggling. If you look at my first webpage, I'm looking at is Trump is a great storyteller and I was looking at the different articles that were talking about that and why and what they were referencing specifically. And I think that, you know and I think that, you know, because I just like stop the steals like so journey curve. It's like where you are. You know exactly where you are. You know exactly what shared knowledge you have. You know exactly where it's going as opposed to I'm not even sure what the other opposing narrative is. It's it's just a reality. It's a reality struggle. But what I was going to say was maybe what we're gaining here, the gift of this is a kind of, it's not just it's not about we need to wrestle facts but rather we need to understand subjectivity. And that's what is the gift of this because we're just, it's just going by and we're calling it, oh dummies, itty-nits. They don't know whether, yeah, it's like no it's a shared reality. It's an immersive story which is told from a thousand perspectives. And if you are just perfectly like you said there Doug like if you're calling truth this if you're infusing truth for facts rather than truth for a relational shared understanding then the boat has already left. Totally insightful and useful for a present moment. Ken? There feels to me like there's a tie in here to the documentary movie The Corporation where they're talking about branding. And you know essentially branding is owning parts of your brain. Corporates want to own, they want when you think of laundry soap to automatically think of tide or when you think of mayonnaise, it's craft, whatever it is. And the history of advertising is very closely coupled to psychology and in a very shadow way. And it feels like now political consultants and media consultants and advertising have all come together in this battle of are we going for the evidence-based narrative or are we going for the narrative that controls the brain? So it just was as I'm listening to all this stuff that's just sort of popped in of that feels like an intersection point of really what we're doing about is we're looking here as a kind of a branding of we want to own people's brains and automatically make them think, hey, your position is being usurped. The election is being stolen even though the evidence says otherwise. Yes, so let's go back to our check-ins. Scott, Jamie, Pete Kaminsky. Alrighty, so something that almost never happens with this group. The thought that I had at the beginning has managed to come back again. So what I was gonna say a while ago is actually directly still on point. So I'll make this quick. All right, so I've been synthesizing my thinking tools for kids. And I made a major leap, which I talked about a little while ago about moving from 30 minutes of content for a 30 minute session to five minutes of content for a 30 minute session in the sense that I'm not the one imparting things to you. You are actually constructing your own knowledge. You are building your own knowledge and that that's actually much more effective. And that's something that Jerry, you referred to. How do I plug this into my own brain? Because if you can't do that, then it doesn't make any sense to you. So that led me to think about sense-making. And I've been thinking about the ethics and effectiveness of attempting to make sense for someone else versus creating the conditions and environment that enable, encourage and promote their own sense-making. So that relates to Jay's comment about seven billion perspectives, right? And what I landed on last night at four in the morning when I woke up thinking, which I often do, I found this thing called visual thinking strategies, BTS, which is using art and three questions to facilitate individual sense-making development, developing that skill. Here's the three questions. What they do is they put a piece of art up in front of you in front of the individual, in front of the group. And the three questions are, what is going on here in this picture? Second question, what do you see that makes you say that? And the third question is, what more can we find? And that's all they do. They simply facilitate asking those questions and create this environment where the person has to actually create the knowledge, use their own experience, use their own context in order to learn instead of, I'm going to teach you, I'm going to tell you about this painting and why it's important and significant. No, it's important that you bring your own self to that. So that's something that I was thinking about in terms of our bigger narrative about sense-making. Love that Scott, thank you. That's really useful. And that's one of those kinds of tools that we can put in the mix and map and so forth. Jamie, Pete Kaminski, then Pete Forsyte. Actually, these conversations are always so rich. Thank you all so much. So what I'm currently working on, the Society Library has wrapped up its COVID Convo project. We've downsized the team temporarily to focus on reworking the information processing pipeline because we found all these inefficiencies that could be made more automated. So we're working on that. And what I'm very excited about recently is we're working on our style and our storytelling and finding the right metaphors to talk about issues. So the angle that we're going for, given that some other people in this arena have been really good at telling stories about like the power of technology and how that manipulates minds and things like that, that seems to be taken care of by a good group. What we're looking to find are the metaphors and stories that can help describe how our capitalist context and how our democratic ideals are impossible to, like, cannot function, cannot really function because it relies on the premise that individuals are rational. And we wanna talk about how, like the overwhelming number of cognitive biases and logical fallacies really prevent people from intuitively and automatically being rational agents. So we've been trying to map metaphor, like the metaphor of food seems to map on the best because the dimensions in which we can describe food and how we grow it and where it comes from and how we transport and what it's made out of and how we consume it and what it does for us really maps well onto an information diet. So where does this information come from, from where it was grown, what, you know, how nutritious is it, yada, yada. So we're trying to find these stories in metaphor so we can describe how humanity's relationship with information is so incredibly important to participating in these ideals of social structure, like a capitalist economy or democracy, stuff like that. And then society library also got a brand new facelift on the website, which I'm also really excited about. It's still in the works and we still have other things to do, but I'm really excited to be moving into a design stage because not only is the tech team working on the information processing pipeline, but we have this data architecture for our climate change content and for COVID. And what I really wanna start working on is how can different data structures be visualized in different ways and design is kind of something that I really, really love to do. So I've been working on that. And all of this is in service of getting back out there to fundraise to complete our climate change debate maps. So for anyone here who hasn't already heard the society library, which is the nonprofit I work for, we've been mapping the US climate change debate and we found that there's about 274 subtopics of debate that Americans engage in and each one of those corresponds to six fundamental questions. So in these six questions, there's 274 subtopics. And then of course, each one of those subtopics implies like two to four, sometimes even seven positions you could take and then tens of thousands of arguments each. So it's a lot of work, but we do wanna exhaustively and comprehensively articulate the logic from all points of view on these climate change questions. And so that's kind of what we're up to. Wait, that's all? That's awesome. Yeah, Charles's mind is blown. Several of ours are like, whoa, okay, you're on fire. Thank you. And if you could put links in the chat so that we can go follow your work. This is also extremely OGM-y. How do we put turbo boosters on your Nikes? That would be fabulous. Pete Forsythe, I think we're getting some ambient noise from your mic if you wouldn't mind muting. Let's go, Pete Kaminsky, Pete Forsythe, Ben Cameron. Good morning, all. It's great to see everybody. I've been having some awesome two and three person OGM discussions. So if folks aren't doing that with already pick a few people that you wanna talk to and just give them a call or whatever, it's super fun. CSC, the Collaborative Sense Commons work I've got with the information communication tools has been kind of on a back burner for a month or so, but I think it's moving to a front burner again. So that's exciting. OGM Forum is percolating along. There's some cool stuff going on in FreeJay's brain. And for me this week, kind of, I think a big epiphany or something like that for me has been something that we see in many places, but the person I'm holding as kind of the person who explained it is Douglas Hofstadter, a logician philosopher. And he talks about the way people understand things is by chunking them into small enough bite-sized pieces, kind of, and then having the chunks. He doesn't say hierarchy, he actually says recursion, but you have, you know, this chunk is inside another bigger chunk which has got a lot of stuff going on. So in the discussion we've had about discussion on the OGM mailing list, it's helped me a lot to think of meta levels of things. So there's the discussion you might wanna be having and then there's discussing about how you might have that discussion and then there's discussion about how you might have the discussion about having the discussion, which I know gets stupid for most everybody really fast, but for better or worse, there's a few of us who are really into it. And most particularly I can come back around from all that theory about meta stuff and meta meta stuff, meta meta meta stuff and go, you know, there's discussions that you wanna have and discussions you don't wanna have. And if one person thinks they're in one meta level and the other person thinks they're in a different meta level, you're just gonna be annoyed with each other. So finding the meta level where you're talking about stuff, I wanna be talking about carbon, you know, carbon change or I wanna be talking about the tools for talking about carbon change. Those are completely different discussions even though they're related and you're just gonna piss each other off if you're in the wrong one. So this ties back a lot to several people have brought up spiral dynamics in our conversations and that's about, you know, matching levels. Neil, who can't make this call, it talks a lot about, you know, creating sort of a vertical space for different levels of activity. So there's a lot of us are trying to figure out how to do that. And I'd love to figure out how practically to do that so that we have some language and some tools around it. Thanks Pete. There's also the ability to freely move between those different dimensions Pete in the conversations. And some people can just flow with the shift to different portions of the agenda and others sort of tend to stay on a track. That's a great observation. If that's the case, then that's part of the disconnect that can be disharmonious for sure. Judy, can you say that again? Maybe just, can you elaborate on that just a little bit? I think there's a human dimension that has to do with the nimbleness of moving from one domain to another and shifting levels. And there are individuals who for whatever reason came with that entity or developed or procured that entity because it worked for them. And so if you're in a conversation with them and it changes from level A to level B, they can go with it. And they'll just start relating on level B and you'll have another continually evolving expansive conversation. And to some extent that's what's OGM-E about this group. But there's also even within any group there are individuals who aren't as nimble moving between those layers or those threads. I'm not sure it's fair to say layers because that implies hierarchy and it's really just difference. But if you're more in a stay in a thread mode, then it's not nimble to move to another one and there's a disconnect in the conversation. I'm not sure I made that better, Jay. I think I made it worse by talking too much, but. No, I mean it was helpful. And part of it was I was kind of fast switching between where some of Doug's information was and something else. So I missed one piece, but now that you've restated it, I'm tracking. And I do think that this level shifting or this ability to move across vantage points and move through vantage points, to nest the move up and down, the kind of the holons and stuff. It's really practical. Yeah. I mean, it's an essential skill of synthesis that I think is often missed from the linearity of the way that we teach things, right? I'm just gonna make that statement. I think the difference between learning and education is the linear and the fractal. Yeah. And I mean, and Jerry, you talk about this in terms of you have one brain that's everything is mapped together, right? And there's these links and I'll come to it in my checkup, but I'm trying to introduce a client of mine into a convert. They've asked me to talk to them about how to influence change in their organization, right? And we're struggling because every time we get into the conversation, they want to say, well, we need to start here. And then it keeps backing up and backing up, backing up versus where I want to go, which is you need to move into and connect dots and build knowledge and move across multiple levels to get to that place where you understand enough to change your mental models. And it's ways in are very difficult. And I think it's like, how do you get a linear on-ramp but then into the kind of this place of multiplicity? So just a question. Love that. Just a riff on what Judy put in the room a moment ago. The ability to step to see different perspectives on the sets of issues is also key to empathy. And one of the interesting important things to do is to have people put themselves in other people's shoes and see the world through their eyes if at all possible. And one of the things I'd love to figure out how to do is to help make those other persons, the scripts running inside their heads, make them more visible, more accessible, more testable, more adoptable, because we can pretend to know what somebody who just lost their job in Indiana feels like, who attends a Pentecostal church who listens to AM talk radio all the time. We can pretend to put ourselves in those shoes. And as a human, I can pretty easily feel empathy for their situation and that's not a problem. But seeing through their eyes is extremely difficult. So how do we make the scripts that are running in their heads more accessible? And here I keep going back to the Dave Gray's explain cards, his little diagnostic deck that he would hand to potential corporate clients for each card. And I've got a deck of them here, I can go find them, but where each card has something, is this a thing that's happening in your organization where we don't know what the facts are or we're triangulating a lot. We tell people things to tell other people things or whatever. And then you just sort the cards into two stacks and the stack of things that are yeses are the places to start your conversation with that person. And that was just a corporate diagnostic tool for how to walk into a consulting engagement. But I can also easily see that there might be a personality profile or some other kind of thing where you work your way through a series of scripts and go, yeah, this is me, no, this is not me. And at the end of the day, making those visible maybe only to yourself, but maybe to everybody else would be useful. And in my brain, I have something I call my belief snapshot. So I have a thought called my beliefs, which is always pinned at the top. It's very messy right now, because it's full of too many things. But one of the things it connects to is that people are born good. And that's just an assumption I make. That's part of my little frame of thinking. It's perfectly legit to think people are born somehow evil or one down, you know, original sin is basically people are born one down. Like you show up in the world and you need healing, you need to reconnect with God kind of thing. And I'm like, that's invented. I get that someone would have invented that because it's a really useful crowd control technique, but I'm not buying. And that informs a lot of the rest of things like assume good faith, right? And so how do we make more of this available to ourselves as a form of introspection for people to figure out what they think and how they think it and how to express it, but as a form of getting us together to do not just idea sex, but rather empathy and point of view comprehension and sort of dissolve into each other more in some way. And I think we're not doing that. We're busy sort of, we're busy having combat out in the sphere of ideas. And then we're, you know, cancel cultures, wiping people off the map when they say something wrong or do something wrong so that freedom of expression is kind of constrained in different ways. And we're not respecting everybody or feeling empathy for them. In fact, we're getting angrier and angrier as things go. So I think Biden has his hands full is a weird way to wrap this little riff on things. So let me go at, someone just held up their hand, was it Doug? Yeah, do you wanna comment on that? Well, yeah, very quickly. I think that when people are thinking their thoughts are surrounded by a sea of anxiety and it keeps them from wanting to go anywhere except to the safe stones that they already know. And we've got to learn how to handle that kind of anxiety in the relationship to thought. Couldn't agree more. For those of you who recognize this, this is the control room from Inside Out, the movie about emotions, that's really, really good. So, when- I think it's simplicity. I was just gonna say the simplicity of Scott's three questions in terms of really opening up the learning process may be the key to that because it takes the emphasis off of responding to me and takes it internal to the person to do something. And if you follow the link I put in the chat around BTS, you'll see those questions and some other stuff mapped in my brain. I had forgotten I'd put that in. So Scott, thank you for reloading that in my wet brain because that's really important stuff. So, Pete Forsyth, Ken, Matt. Good morning, I'm sorry for that audio problem. Can you hear me now? Yeah, you're just fine. No, yes? Yes. Yeah, sorry about that. I was trying to get the phone computer link going and hit it off. It wasn't happy for you. Yeah, well, it is now. Anyway, I'm sorry to join late and if there's a specific prompt, I feel like I have a couple of points that tie in with what people are saying, but if there was a specific prompt, I missed it. The prompt is just that this is a check-in call. I saw every Thursday morning- Just a check-in. Okay. We're just sort of saying what's OGM in our lives or have we made progress on the things we talked about last time, that kind of thing. Totally appropriate what you're saying. Great. Okay. So the first thing, you know, just kind of, just on the topic, I guess, of misinformation and what do we do about it, the two things that are, and I might touch on the empathy bit as well. The first thing that's on my mind is the, well, I'm in Portland, I think, like Jerry and maybe others on the call. And I've been pretty consumed by and involved in the racial justice protests here. And there was a movie that just came out. It was briefly available for free streaming online just for a couple of days. They're still figuring out their distribution. So I posted that. Actually, Charles posted that, I think on my behalf of the list. I guess I put it in the telegram channel and Charles forwarded it along. It actually led to a really interesting conversation that mostly went off the list with Glenn McGrew, I think is his name on the list. So, I mean, that just really has me. It's been a challenging movie to watch and absorb and share with people outside of town and in town. You know, it's a documentary that like a tremendous amount of work clearly went into it. They had 17 in-depth interviews with a variety of people that kind of anchored it and a lot of footage. And they put it together, I think their interviews took place in August. So they put together a pretty high production value, you know, hour and a half documentary in just a few months, just kind of mind boggling. But, and so, you know, I wanna respect that. And at the same time, there are so many places in it where it feels like it missed the mark or is conveying a narrative that sort of reinforces stuff that I'm already bummed out that my friends outside of Portland are getting through the national media, that kind of thing. You know, there are things that I think it gets really, really right. And probably the biggest issues, I think it really gets right. But it's just, it's hard to process and watch. And I've been, in a way, I've been enjoying that process and in a way that process has been stressing me out. It's really been gratifying to have several people in my life outside of Portland that it was the thing that they sat down and watched and like, and gave an hour and a half of their attention to what's going on here. And, you know, and are like, are that much more open to reflecting on it. But it puts me in a place of sort of wondering how to work my kind of on the ground, direct experience, anecdotal experience into sort of helping a narrative get closer to something that feels like the truth to me. You know, I'm not a scientist. I'm not a, you know, I've dabbled in journalism. I'm not a journalist, I'm not an academic. So, you know, in a lot of ways there's sort of like data-based approaches that are important, but also in a lot of ways that there's a lot of knowledge that data can never really capture, right? That like, that really has to do with having human perception and being in the right place at the right time and, you know, having some kind of empathy skills. And I should also say, like, I'll just briefly, like right now I'm struggling a little bit in a group of folks that I work with around the protests, around some issues of empathy and trusting each other around racial justice issues and sort of how to be in that group. So, yeah, kind of challenging all around. And the other thing that I wanted to mention, I don't remember if I've mentioned on this call before. I probably did when I first got into it, but I'm now in the midst of an in-depth six months campaign to add information about local newspapers to Wikipedia. So this is a project that is very much designed to combat the underlying causes of the spread of misinformation and empower people to make quick assessments where they're already looking, meaning Google searches, which are informed by Wikipedia content. You know, to help people at the moment when they're wondering, is this a real source? Is this something that I should trust? Rather than trying to force them to come to a separate place to get that information. And we're putting together a probably our, you know, sort of biggest push, public call, edit us on, it's gonna be on December 12th. So if people are interested in that, maybe mark that on your calendar. I'm sure I'll put the announcement in the OGM channels, but it's, I think a great opportunity to learn a little bit about Wikipedia and also to kind of pitch in on a campaign that I think is important. Thank you. That's awesome. I think social justice issues are really central here and I wanna create a pop-up call to try to describe how we might form ourselves up around some of these things because we have diversity questions here that are really important. And I think that the way to do that is not to recruit more diverse people in, but to serve more diverse people and to be of service to groups that could really use our help and they could really use our help and their hands are full. Their hands are really quite full. So I'd like to sort of focus on that and see what that might turn into. Well, as you were talking, I was thinking also yesterday and the day before there were a couple of stories of nurses and intensive care units who have people who are dying of COVID who don't believe they have COVID until they die. Like right to their dying breath, they're like, there's no way this is COVID, COVID is a hoax. I must be having a heart attack or something else. And that's just, it's just deeply saddening, right? As it goes. And then I put a, this may seem like a non sequitur, but you're talking about local news and local newspapers. I put an article called the substackerati in there because a whole lot of journalists are leaving mainstream media and going off on their own and making a living from paid newsletters. It's very simple model. It's like, hey, you write a newsletter, people subscribe to you. It's sort of like it's like using medium and going to Patreon, except that the whole thing is glued together in one in a very old fashioned model. But a lot of very smart authors are leaving mainstream publications and small publications. And actually are completely, it's like the number of people who are gonna be able to make a living from this could be large. And so hyper local media, which was a thing like 10 years ago might morph into highly credible voices and some crazy voices who get paid to have personal, very personal newsletters that are well informed, well written. And if we do our job well, more contextualized and better woven into everything else that's out there, that could be super interesting. So I'm really interested into the future of journalism and news, how we hear about events that happen, what we consider a fact and not a fact. So this tumbles back into 15 other interesting issues. Go ahead. The first place my mind goes with that topic kind of as a Wikipedia and as someone who tries to process information through the lens of trusted sources is how are the librarians gonna handle that? Now and in 20 years and like librarians who have the unenviable task of kind of making sure that the most credible or mainstream voices, I don't know if I chose maybe not the right words there, but that the most important voices are captured and made available for the long term. Like if things are sort of distributed into a bunch of self produced newsletters, that becomes a, and it's, I mean, that's true of so much of our media these days with things kind of splintering off it's a much more complicated. Task than it used to be. And we rely on that task being done well, we all rely on that. Yeah, it would be really, really fun to think through how to help librarians because if this works well, librarians become our coaches for making sense of the world locally. Right? Because it used to be that they would help us find the right books or research documents to support whatever requests we were on whether it's a science fair project or whatever, or I need to, I'm looking for some good novels for fireside reading during the winter. But in some other way, librarians can be a core because thanks to Andrew Carnegie who was making up for other evils in his life, we have public libraries all over the country, which are trying to sort out what to do in the pandemic and what to do in the internet and what to do in all these things. But librarians could easily be sort of the leading edge of sense-making everywhere. And I think they would completely understand sort of what's some piece of what we mean by sense-making. And then another part of it would be blocked by their notion of what librarian is and means and their training and so forth. Scott, then Pramjit. Simple comment relates to last week, I think we were talking about context and the difference between Jerry's brain and Jerry and how Jerry's the guide for Jerry's brain, right? And the idea that the librarians are replications of Jerry throughout the world and the libraries are Jerry's brain. And the sense that I think we've left too many people to the idea that all the answers are out there. You just have to go get them. And that's not helpful for most people. Thank you, Scott. Pramjit. Okay, somebody was talking about Wikipedia just a while ago. And I've just put in the chat, ChadO times one. Now, this is something interesting because I saw a video of somebody with a packaging for the AstraZeneca vaccine. And on there, it had that, whether it's a chemical or whatever it is. Well, okay, Pete, cool. And then so they were saying that what they did was they looked up in Wikipedia, what that was. And then they gave us the definition of what Wikipedia was saying it was. And it was something to do with breaking down your RNA and da-da-da. And so it didn't feel like it was very good news because it's messing about with your DNA and what have you. And so then I went to have a look in Wikipedia to see what it says. And do you know what? They'd moved, they'd just removed it completely. And they had just put the link instead of reading about that, they had just put general information about vaccines. So stuff about librarians and everything is great up to a point, but we're still having information withheld that isn't deemed good for us to know. Two short comments and then I'll turn it over to Pete who probably knows a whole lot more than me by orders of magnitude. One is that Wikipedia is always reorganizing itself so it could be that a specific thing winds up in the category basket or winds up moved around because this is how we do things on Wikipedia so it gets sorted around. But it sounds like the detail you were looking for got lost altogether. Yeah, then replace the whole link with a link that was generalized information about the vaccine with no reference to that specific thing. Of what was happening, that specific genome, it looks like an address of a genome or something like that. And then second thing is because there is one Wikipedia, even though there are forks and there's all sorts of things happening around it Wikipedia is something but because it's centralized and there is one it is a battleground. And every now and then Wikipedia has to lock certain pages because there's too many fights over what to put on the page so they have to wait until the steamer on the issue until some controversial thing sort of dies down. So the fact of its centrality and the fact that it's almost always among the 10 most visited websites in the world means that it has become this battleground for what is truth, right? Along with Snopes, which is completely overwhelmed along with a few other websites. So I don't repeat if you wanna riff on that but I think that probably describes some piece of your reality in the last decade. Sure, yeah. So I mean, I can, Palmjits, did I say your name right? Yeah, I can't comment too specifically on the particular example you gave obviously I don't really know the details of it but I can comment on the phenomenon a bit. I think in terms of really setting the table for that I think Jerry did a nice job of that and I would say that Wikipedia started off as something that had big aspirations but little reason to believe that it would be for any of the people involved to believe that it would be anywhere near the scale of influence and ubiquity that it's come to. So in a way, you could look at the early days of Wikipedia as kind of a bunch of friends, new friends people have met each other through the internet but a bunch of friends just trying to make sense of the world and kind of keep that information available to each other and the world. And as the process that Jerry described as it became sort of the one central place that is a useful guidepost even if it's not 100% reliably accurate that's useful in navigating your way towards other information the importance of getting it right has really increased. And Wikipedia's processes have adapted to some degree to meet that need but in other ways I think the problem is very difficult to do. I mean, if the whole way that you scale is by bringing in more and more people and having them do more and more stuff that's outside their expertise there are gonna be problems associated with that where people don't necessarily make the right judgment. So I think with a case like you described I think the most important thing is for as many people in the world as possible to have a basic sort of grounding in Wikipedia literacy like to sort of understand the basic mechanics of how things move around on it and how decisions are made. So that when something like that happens that's in an area you really care about that you have the ability yourself to look at the talk page to look at the, if there was a discussion about deletion or if there's an edit history behind the person who made that decision to figure out who it was that made that change. And have they been focusing all of their attention on articles just like that or are they mostly writing articles about basketball players and this was a weird little side at it like, to kind of to number one to sort of build your own understanding of what happened and number two if you want to to be able to step in and make your own comment and make your own argument for how you think things should be. So, but I really, I do feel a little bit like a voice in the wilderness in emphasizing the importance of just understanding how Wikipedia works. The software features that were designed primarily for editors of Wikipedia with the idea of that anybody could be an editor are also really useful to more motivated readers. And it's a much, much lower bar to kind of learn what the tools are in Wikipedia that help you get that basic sense of what's going on around you than to actually ask you to actually, become an invested editor and write articles and things like that. And I really just wish that we could get better integrated into schools and libraries and things like that on that level of, it can be an entry point to people becoming an editor but I think that it's a much easier thing to accomplish to help people just get a basic comment. Thank you so much. That's super useful. Pete Kaminski. That's a, it's a really good, I don't know. It's an interesting observation project and useful I think and interesting to talk about maybe in this group too. So to first order one way of thinking of Wikipedia is like it's, it's kind of a crowdsourced encyclopedia Britannica, right? And the crowdsourced part of it means that it's a little bit worse in some ways because there aren't like professional editors getting paid lots of money to make sure that kind of the information is accurate. But on the other hand, it's crowdsourced so you get a lot more information than you could ever fit into the bandwidth of the encyclopedia Britannica production process. But so that's one way you can kind of think about Wikipedia and maybe that's the kind of the general like since it has PD in the name and since it is actually amazing information resource that's maybe a primary way we think about it. Another way to think about it is Wikipedia is basically a battleground for understanding and sharing information. So if you think about facts and concepts that aren't very controversial, they kind of get put up and they get vetted a little bit and it sticks for things that have more controversy or things that are evolving more rapidly, especially controversial things, it actually gets into a pitched battle, literally a battle where people are going back and forth, no, it means this, no, it means that, right? So everybody's fighting for their own truth instead of for kind of neutral facts in the middle. And Wikipedia to kind of pick up something that Pete F said, it's super amazing to really get to understand the complexity of the bureaucracy that Wikipedia manages that battleground with. And they're doing this amazingly effective job for them in the main of keeping the thing generative and useful and informative and to first order, mainly correct, mainly relevant and things like that. The bureaucracy of that is just amazing and rich and deep. And it's actually, I think, one of the most beautiful things that humans have ever done, literally, is figuring out how we're going to manage tens of thousands of people fighting over what truth means on the web. So it's fascinating to look at it in depth and it's hard to kind of understand and it's amazing at the scope of that management of battle process, essentially. Yeah, I think there's, I think, just real briefly, I think that just to kind of amplify and build on what you were just saying, Pete, I think the importance of Wikipedia as really the by far biggest collaborative project in human history, there are so many sites that incorporate collaboration, but Wikipedia is the one that put collaboration at the center. It doesn't mean that it gets it right, but it is fascinating, I think, to see what were the components that made it possible for tens or hundreds of thousands of people to work together towards a common goal. And I really think that's an important area of study, too. Cool, thank you. Just to complete our check-in round, let's go Ken, Phelan, Meal, and then me. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you all and be back here again. I always appreciate this. Boy, there's been so much that's gone on here. At the moment, I'm not doing very much. I just filed for unemployment. I'm gonna take a little time and relax. So I'm just kind of reading, trying to keep up with the fire hose that is the email thread on Open Global Mind, which is just really amazing. A couple of things I wanted to say regarding some of what's gone on this morning. I find when I facilitate groups that are often at contention that it's really helpful to slow things down. I think people, we get into conversations. We miss certain conversational literacies, like the literacy of, are we talking about, are we making the I statements what I believe? Are we making we statements of what we believe? Are we making it statements of factual statements? And just having those three buckets can be really useful and paying attention to the vocabulary. So people will shift very quickly from I to we to it without actually making the distinction. So that's a really helpful thing to do is just make those distinctions to people and ask them to have a conversation just using I statements. And then shift now, let's look at the same thing from we statements. What do we agree on? What do we disagree on, right? And then what can we say is objective about this and teasing that out often brings about much deeper levels of understanding than we get if we're just launched into it. So that's one of the conversational literacies that I try to bring to people when I work with them. And I would say in general, unless you're underwater without breathing apparatus or in a smoke filled room, a deep breath is almost always appropriate. And taking a deep breath and slowing down and just like, okay, you've said something that I disagree with, but let's unpack that. Let's not just try to fight about it. Why do I disagree? Here's why I disagree, right? And why do you see it that way? And going to Jerry's belief of if we assume good faith and good intent, then people see things differently for different reasons. So let's unpack why that is and make the space. I facilitated a very contentious group once where it was peace activists and business people and I had them start by telling a story of when did you realize peace was important to you? And that created a space for people to tell a personal story that no one could argue with. And there was no longer peace activists and business people. There were a bunch of people in the room concerned about peace from very different perspectives. So shifting the focus from, what is here to what allows this to come together into some kind of convergence that we all care about? So those are my thoughts on the conversation so far today and I will let other people go now. Thank you so much. And yeah, you reminded me of something I'll bring up when I check in. So let's go to Phelan and then Neil. Although Phelan's just gone on mute, are you still there? Yes, I'm still here. Cool. It was you that had the background noise but if you wanna go ahead and talk to me. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Hey guys, it's been a while since I've actually checked in. I missed a great portion of this and apologize for arriving in so late. I guess checking in, I can say what's been on the top of heart and mind and hopefully it connects to what everyone has been talking about now. I guess I'll connect to what Neil and I were talking about before arriving at this meeting. That's why we're late was this idea of slowing down as we race to develop technologies and methodologies to address all of these things that we're confronted with. How can we play the perfect balance of slow and fast? Slow enough to understand the environment that we're in but fast enough to actually be effective. Yeah, that's what's at heart in mind and trying to connect with people to understand how they're addressing that. I won't take too much time. Thank you very much and thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. Neil. Thanks for that beautiful little segue. We just had a really good heart to heart and we met here. So here's another example of how OGM helps people to see each other because they can show up more authentically. Picking up on the slowing down but also on the Dunkirk example. The story I was just saying to Phelan is probably worth just sharing quickly here. In Australia, I used to celebrate with others in Australia, the World War I and World War II veterans that didn't come home at the Cenotaph. And last year in Australia, they had where I was at Memorial Avenue in a Cenotaph and the women in the local community had hand crocheted red poppies and over a thousand red poppies were put on display at the Cenotaph. And I took photographs of those. And one of my photographs has a poem on a stick and it said, in Flanders Fields. I now live in those Flanders Fields. I took a photograph of a poppy in one of those fields, 200 meters from the Haverley War Cemetery. And I visited the Haverley War Cemetery, Commonwealth War Cemetery, on the Remembrance Day on the 11th. There were some Belgians putting wreaths and flowers onto graves. And I asked, did they know these people? And they said, no. But we're a group who honour the fallen and in this case, we're honouring the fallen from this bomber that crashed nearby on D-Day. And so the connection here with D-Day and slowing down. Now, I leave the cemetery, walk across the road. And this is the story I was telling Fallen. I'm in a forest, 30, 40 meter high trees, autumn colours. On the ground are tree stumps that are shin height. Everyone is flat, has moss on it, has fungi growing on it and leaves on it. Even though there's a freeway 50 meters away, I tune that out. I can hear the leaves falling from the upper canopy. Clicking through the layers of branches still there and sometimes landing on the branches. So the whole process is slowing down. The slowing down where the leaves have rested on the leaves that are fading has left a kiss of chlorophyll when they've been blown away again. So the colour hasn't faded yet. So life continues. By the time it gets closer to the ground, they're landing on the tree stumps. And this is where the goosebumps get me. There's a poem still gestating. The life from the top of the trees is landed on the altars to the dead trees. 50 meters away from where people are putting live flowers onto dead people's graves. And so we're not honouring this biosphere we're destroying, but we are honouring the people that were part of this organisational effort around Dunkirk. And so we somehow have to get to this point of slowing things down in nature and then composting this process. And so the story that resonated with me and the three hooks that I had to come in here is very much around how do we reconcile this celebration of human activity with this celebration or non-celebration of the life force which we are destroying and then the technological solution, our quick fix. The example I thought of the phylum was the leaf blower. So I'm standing on a forest floor covered in leaves and the quickest answer to cleaning those up would be a leaf blower. Noisy, intrusive, very, very fast and completely ignoring the slow processes of nature falling down, recomposting, becoming soil, becoming community, becoming ecosystem. And so if we can hold those two energies, the everything looks like a leaf and I've got a leaf blower and here's how we actually use leaves to get a better community, I think we'll actually have something to move forward with. Thank you. And thanks Phylum for the beautiful conversation before we came. Thank you all. Wow, Neil, thank you so much. Jayde, do you want to jump in? Thank you so much. That's beautiful, Neil. I really appreciate it. I'd just like to attach to that the idea, a little reminder that Thanksgiving is coming and I've really been thinking that it's really up for a reboot. We think about, oh, okay, that's nice. Here's a meal and the natives came and there was a harvest. But if we slow that down and we imagine the first harvest and we imagine the arrival and the great journey and what it took to get here, I think it's really more about how are we embraced by this beautiful planet on which we live? How are we a part of it? How are we receiving the gifts of it? And how do we celebrate that instead of necessarily like just a, let's have a great meal with family? And so since we're not necessarily having those gatherings, I just wanted to identify this might be a real moment of a Thanksgiving reboot. Thanks, Jay. Let me check in and then I'll pass it to Matt, who's back. Awesome. And I have a bunch of things I want to check out and I'll try to do it quickly. First, I kind of see these calls as a form of composting, although we don't slow down quite enough, but the idea that we're each putting into the call, what we're working on and how we see this thing and then we're turning it over and we reflect on each other's missions and ideas and all of that. It's just for me, a form of mulching, composting, processing all of this so that we each walk away with a slightly more harmonized vision of what on earth it is we're trying to do here and how we might fit into the broader scheme of things. Then when I went to Oaxaca in Mexico, my idea of Halloween was completely reset because the idea of trick or treat and walking around demanding candy and doing costumes is replaced for me now by being grateful for your ancestors going, doing something to around them, their graves with flowers. And if Uncle Joe loved his tequila, then you put a bottle of tequila on his grave site and we actually went into cemeteries on during day of the dead and sat with people who were celebrating their families and took some flowers of our own and sat with another couple and did our own ofrenda, it's called our own offering. So that was a total reframe for me for Halloween. So, go ahead, Charles. If I might just quickly jump in maybe 30-second story. I heard a podcast musician who grew up in Mexico in a very rural village was describing a scene on day of the dead where, and this was kind of often throughout the year, the babies dying from lack of healthcare and the moms going through this whole parade ritual of wailing on their hands and knees crawling through the town and the family and the sister circles laying out the carpets in front of her throughout the village. Wow. Amazing image. Thank you. Thank you. So, back to what Neil was saying, back to what we were just talking about. Also, there might be a really interesting reset of Thanksgiving just around gratitude because it is called Thanksgiving. And I think we might actually sort of help do a little Mexican wave around just sharing, being grateful in social media and whatever else and thinking through that in different ways. Ken? I wanna add onto what Charles was saying. I have a friend who his mother was from Ukraine and when she passed a few years ago, we went to her funeral and they had hired professional mourners who were wailing and crying and it was the most moving funeral I'd ever been to. I mean, I didn't, I'd never met this woman but I was really moved by it with a power that these three women who were all in black and they just were wailing and crying. And, you know, like it was very powerful. And then I couple that with some of you know that I've been a kind of a student of Michael Mead for many years and Michael talks about the need for public grief rituals and how, you know, we will begin to heal as a culture when we reintroduce public grief into our sphere. Cause right now grief is very privatized. You do not, it used to be that you wore, you know, sackcloth and ashes and covered the mirrors and all that stuff and, you know, people respected when someone had died that you gave them the space to be in mourning. And now it's like, nope, you know, right back to work the next day and maybe wear a black armband and, you know, and, oh, my condolences, but there's no longer this public acceptance of this person is undergoing sorrow. You know, we've removed public sorrow. And so I think it's really important that we get back to the grief that is just right in the other room there of the devastation of the planet of 250,000 people dead from COVID of, you know, there's so many things to be grieved. And it's interesting to me that we have, you know, the day of the dead at the beginning of October, right? Excuse me, the beginning of November, all Saints Day is usually November 1st and then Thanksgiving is just three weeks later. So first we grieve and then we give thanks and we need to reboot that in our lives. I think it would be really helpful. That'd be super awesome. And you just added something else to my check-in list which is my favorite take on why Joe Biden has found his moment was an article called, the Biden is the emissary of grief because like much more than most humans, he has withstood and been gracious and graceful inside of a tremendous amount of grief. And he is famous for helping anybody else on whatever side of the aisle was around him and other citizens make their way through grief. So I think that if he seizes that at this moment that we're really at a place where we need some grieving and grieving could be a very unifying thing. So I'll go back to my check-in really quick. Go ahead, Charles. Just a code on Thanksgiving, it's the same calendar day here in Switzerland. It's the day where they turn on the lights, basically the holiday lights, the Christmas lights. It's a Likter fest. So it's kind of interesting because it also goes with the gratitude, the return or the injection of sunlight in the darkness. Thank you. So a couple of quick things to add to the conversation. One of my favorite inspiring videos from long ago is this really crappy VHS quality video about upward spiral and this guy, Paul Craful in Northern California, who's walking around healing the hill sides with a hand trowel. And he's basically, and Arthur Brock basically put this video in front of me a long, long time ago. And he's basically just walking around talking about the principles of how you heal a hillside. And what you do is you try to trap water further and further uphill because if water creates a gully, the gully cuts through the hillside, it soily roads, the hillside degrades. The water is no longer up high on the hill so the vegetation starts to die off. And the way you can help it is by trapping, pooling water up high. So he's with a little hand trowel, he's filling in the gullies and letting water pool. And he has pictures, 10 years before, 10 years after of what happens to the hill sides. And one dude sort of walking around doing this heals an entire part of a small part of the world. And then two months later, I found a documentary about the Lowe's Plateau in China, L-O-E-S-S is a form of loose friable soil where the Chinese government employ villagers in this part of China that was blowing away, causing a huge dust bowl to employ same principles at very large scale, basically re-greening this entire portion of China that's the size of Belgium. So the Lowe's Plateau documentary is also in my brain, I can put links to it. Next thing is about slowing down, I realized after the election that I'd been a big fan of the Lincoln project videos and ooh, they're making all these great ads. And it suddenly dawned on me that it's likely, and this is kind of controversial, that the Lincoln project did not move the needle at all on the right side of the country. That they weren't listening that what the Lincoln project was doing was entertaining the left really well. But my second aha on that was that the Lincoln project was busy doing consumer mass marketing politics, that it was a consumer exercise to make a bunch of ads and put ads in the sphere and try to fill the sphere. And I was just reading an article about Susan Collins getting re-elected and Manians saying, Jesus, like so much money came in here, that it was just offensive. Like this was clearly like somebody ganged up on poor Susan who represents us. So they voted her back in, right? And so I think that we need to, so there's been also a couple of articles about deep canvassing, which is at least, canvassing is usually knock on the door, are you gonna vote? Are you gonna vote for whoever? Here's a plier, let's go. And if you're really smart, you've got an app that tells you what their background is and you ask a couple of questions. Deep canvassing is actually slowing down and having empathy. And there's a couple other initiatives to do this. I think those are far more fruitful. And preferable to me is actual governance with a small g where we don't have an election every four years or whatever or two years where we know where people stand because they're participating and because their opinion is in the public sphere that feels more OGM-y than anything else. And as we agree and disagree on facts, those become part of our fabric of decision-making and governance. Wouldn't that be even better than deep canvassing? So that's the whole thing. And then finally, I'm having some super interesting conversations with a new friend named Jordan Sukut who's created a thing called Lion's Bird, which is, I mentioned him a little bit here. I just wanna sort of prep this because we're gonna set up a pop-up call to introduce Jordan to OGM because he's building a sort of method where you create a steward ownership. And steward ownership is basically a way of keeping ideas permanently in the commons of creating profitable businesses that can not be easily bought and turned into exit strategy startups of doing a bunch of different things. So I want to introduce that here because I think steward ownership might be a great method for us, a great framing for OGM to do its work in the world. And then in my last conversation with Jordan yesterday, I was like, you're doing all this incredibly great stuff around ideas in the commons and so forth. And right next to that is the actual physical commons and community lamb trusts and a whole bunch of ways of protecting where we are. And he's like, yep, exactly. And went into a whole riff on that. So I think that part of what Jordan is trying to pioneer and he spent five years sort of researching and framing up how to create this business model and make it work is how to nurture a whole series of commons that we are all involved in maintaining and secure those and make them actually work. So I'm very excited about introducing him to our conversations here with that. And we're way over our 90 minutes time but I'll turn it over to Matt if you want to check in and wrap up. And then a couple of us, I was going to stay on the line with Charles afterward to brief on something else. Charles, I don't know if you want to stay here or if we can go to a different room but we'll sort that out too. So Matt over to you. Wow, I don't know how all of a sudden I started to get one of the sort of the anchor on these calls and stuff but it's just incredible to sit here and try not to speak because I like to speak and just to absorb and to be a little slower. What I'm working on right now I mentioned to people is trying to design a kind of an influencers toolkit for one of my clients and helping them to fundamentally think differently. And it's been difficult to get on ramps into things like mental models, systems thinking, persuasion, facilitation and things of that nature. But so my head's filled with a lot of this really good material on that, on that influential project. It's a pretty heavy piece of writing and documentation. So maybe at some point I'd love to set up a call and take people through it and to kind of further build out almost like a micro brain if you will on this so that we can, I'd love to collaborate with some people to not only round out my thinking but also to add the texture of other people's voices. So that's what I'm working on. I also, you guys reminded me of a project that I started and I need to continue it. I've been sitting down with different people, dinner parties and things like that when I get a group of people together and it's hard in COVID. I've been starting something called the New Holidays Project. And basically the way that it works, as I say, we go kind of around the group and I can sort of send you this that these can be existing or kind of new, newly established holidays and these are about codifying our sacred beliefs, right? And what would be the holidays that you would choose if you could only pick 10 of them? And what would those 10 be and when would they be in the year? And so this idea of kind of some holiday that's like Day of the Dead where we think about those that have come before us. Someone called it Indigenous thinking or holiday or to then giving gratitude for what we have. Like what would those sacred beliefs be and how would we codify them into a set of holidays throughout the year? And maybe it's an OGME project where we actually create 10 days and we celebrate those 10 days together and we focus on one of these things. So I can send around a little bit of the documentation but I think that would be kind of fun to create a new set of rituals that bring us into those spaces that are defined for thinking slow. So maybe with that, yeah, rum spring I was one of the days that someone had mentioned that. Someone did that? That's so cool. I love that. It came out of it. So we all have them. And I think if we said OGM, we had to create 10 of them. What would they be and how would we make them and would we reappropriate certain things like meanings and stuff. I love that. And we could replace Columbus Day. We could get a lot of things fixed up here. Yeah. And Veterans Day and Memorial Day could actually be maybe more appropriately done and we could figure out who our actual heroes are. Well, and we could also from an inclusion standpoint maybe get a little bit beyond what's on the American Bank calendar. Precisely. And for anybody who doesn't know rum spring is an Amish custom where I think when you're 18 you basically get two years to go. Rum spring means jumping around like spring in in German is jumping around and you get to go drink and do whatever they help you get you get out of your system all the things that are not allowed in our culture. And then at the end of your room spring of time you get to decide whether you come back. So you get to come back you choose whether to come back into Amish society and stay or go. It's very cool. So imagine having a day where you get to do that every year. It's like carnival where you mask up and nobody knows who you are when you run around. Scott, go ahead. And the most significant thing I thought about that was that you choose that after you've been out as opposed to in other religions where you are indoctrinated before you get that choice before you get that experience. And I thought, wow, that's a great idea that you get to go have a larger context and then decide. Exactly, making room for the decision giving people a little experience of the decision and all of that. Any concluding thoughts? Just a brief, just a really brief comment on what you were saying, Jerry, Oregon and I think something like a dozen or so other states no longer do celebrate Columbus Day. It is Indigenous People's Day. So I mean, I think that's an important trajectory but we're on it. Well, a really important piece of all of this bridging the cultural divide and all that is being able to talk about the doctor side of history because a piece of what's happening is that a whole bunch of people are really offended when you start to say something bad happened way back when. And there's plenty of reasons for it that's a much deeper discussion. But, you know, and the Black Lives Matter movement then opened a let's take down the statues and let's rename the schools and streets movement which was awesome, like lovely and way the hell overdue. You know, the idea that there's a dozen American forts named after Confederate generals. Like the U.S. Army, you know, Fort Hood, for example is named after John Bell Hood who was like a vicious asshole. And like, we need to rename these places and it's okay, they'll get over it. They'll like find a better name for some of these forts. We might need to rename them but we also might need to remember the names that we originally gave them so that we remember our history, right? And I think that that's part of part of the becoming more sophisticated, right? Formally known as is important to know the journey step not just to wipe clear the, you know, where we came from. And I think an appropriate place for memories like that is sort of a Holocaust museum kind of thing or, you know, like the lynching museum in Mississippi, I think, where, you know and then the consequences of all these actions were we named all these forts after these people, et cetera, et cetera. Because in a museum you can then go back and reflect on history. But is it not important though to say that, like for some people that this person died for a set of the beliefs that we held sacred at that time and now we might be evolving from those beliefs but still to give your life in service of your sacred beliefs is a noble act potentially. And so even if that noble act was misguided but I mean, who's to say where any of us are on the right side of history? So I don't know. I think it's a more complicated thing than just wiping this lake clean. I agree. And I wasn't suggesting to wipe this lake clean but a small example, then I'll go to Neil and then we'll come out of this call. Cesar Chavez Street in San Francisco and the Mission District the center kind of outlines the bottom of the Mission District used to be called Army Street. And it doesn't say Cesar Chavez formerly known as Army Street, right? And maybe that's just too many letters for the sign but partly it's who were memorializing at the monument at the street at the school. So if you went to, you know to Jeb Stuart High School I don't know that when it's renamed to the Flowering Peaks High School I'm not sure you need to put on the front door formerly the Jeb, you know, Stuart High School but the idea that Jeb Stuart existed and gave his life for his cause and all that is interesting and belongs someplace for sure. I don't wanna trot ski his existence but I don't want to honor. Is it to me, the naming of streets and schools and the placement of monuments is what we honor in our culture. And it's a commentary on who we respect. And so if somebody fought on what's clearly the wrong side I'm not that interested in having monuments to them, right? I'm really interested in having a place where that person's life can be looked at and turned over and understood and definitely not in wiping out memory of them but for sure not. And there's a degree of courage and fighting for the wrong causes but I think warfare is stupid and ugly and anybody who went and lost their life in a stupid war, you know Colin Powell had an opportunity to stop the Iraq war. He did not need to go to the United Nations and lie. And so I'm angry at Colin Powell and will die angry at Colin Powell for not having thrown his body and his career in front of a whole bunch of people who died as a result of that war, $3 trillion war, right? He had personally, I believe a chance to step in front and say, I was supposed to tell you this but I'm not going to. I'm gonna back us off this stupid conflict. So for me, noble deaths in battle are often wasted lives. Anyway, sorry, you got me on a long rift there. Neil, then Julian, then we'll wrap this call. It looks like Julian has a short one. Did you want to go first, Julian? Yeah, I was gonna make sure to point out that some of these chains that you're talking about, for example, renaming Fort Hood doesn't go back far enough because the indigenous peoples already had a name before it was called whatever was called. Totally on board with that. And the fact that we have so many native names of places that don't respect and don't care about what they're doing. And we had a practice briefly, I think here and in other calls of changing your name in Zoom to what land we're on, which is a lovely way of respecting that, lots there. Neil, I'm smelling you might have a poem that relates to this. I do, but I haven't got it in front of me. But the connection here is that love and grief are a couplet. And we fight for it, we love and we grieve what we lost because we loved it. What Phelan just said there about where is it? Remembering, rehife and remembering, putting back together, making whole again, recognising we're on opposite sides of conflicts with somebody, otherwise it wouldn't have been a conflict. The intergenerational grief that comes and is held in the families and in the bloodlines for multiple generations. The collective trauma, which are the fault lines that are now cracking in America and will crack in Europe as we increase pressures. Unless we find ways to heal these and mutually recognise the universal harms which cause these such as genocide and the universal interests with which we then have a noble responsibility to act on behalf of the whole to heal, we will fail. And we will fail on the same fault lines regardless of what celebrations, regardless of what statues we have. So this is about embodiment, feeling it, honouring it, loving it and grieving it as we lose it and unless we can do that we can't embody it and bring it forward because it's only from that deep place of deep wisdom and understanding that we can actually start to anticipate the design of something better than what's got us into all these fuck ups in the past. Thanks. Thank you, Neil. That seems like a nice place to wrap this call. I appreciate it. Thank you all for such a generative, heartfelt, important, confusing, composty call. I really appreciate your being here. Beautiful. Smell it. So are we having a call next Thursday? It is Thanksgiving. I don't know if people want to go. Oh, I totally forgot that it was Thanksgiving. Good point. Let's talk about that on the list. I'm up for it because I'm not traveling with you that day. It's the harvest week. Let's have a call. Could we make it at eight instead of seven? Oh, you mean to like not wake up sorely? Yeah, that would be really awesome. I think we can adjust. All right, so that sounds very reasonable. All right, thanks everybody. Take care. Have a great week. Thanks a lot. Hey, Neil, can you hear me?