 They are going, oh, it's 10 o'clock. So you're on the opposite end, you know. Exactly. The Earth is a crazy little ball. Cool. So Hank has started the recording. It is Thursday, October 8, 2020. This is the Open Global Mind check-in call. Our habit is to go around and check in, which means what kinds of things are happening in our world that are OGM-related, that smell like OGM that we're in. Some of us are hip-deep in projects that are very much part of OGM. Some of us are just here curious and trying to figure out what to do, where to help, et cetera. So these calls are meant to help us, in some sense, get a sense for who's here, what do we care about, what are we good at, what are we up to. And I typically go from the bottom of my display in grid view in Zoom and work my way back up as a kind of a protocol for throwing it through the check-in. So right this minute, that would mean Ken, Mark, Lauren. And if everybody else can mute your microphones, that will help us. Yeah, can you repeat the order, please? Ken, Mark, Lauren. And I'll put it in the chat. Hello, everybody. I am home again, finally, after being on the road for most of September. Feel a lot better to be home and be able to go out and walk around. It's still very smoky down here. These fires are still burning pretty much out of control. What a debate last night. I found myself screaming. Shut the fuck up. Shut him up, shut him up, shut him up. I just woke up, so I'm really a little discombobulated. So I'm just going to say hello, it's nice to be here. And I've been trying to keep out the flow of emails going by and a lot of stuff is happening with OGM that I wish I was more cognizant of. But it's just been too busy to keep up with it all. So thank you for all the work that's going on behind the scenes here. And I'm happy to be here and I'll contribute more later. Hope. Bye. Ken, just so happy to see you back home. So much to say. Yeah, go ahead. I can say one more thing. I actually called my congressman, spoke to his aide and told him what was going on, what I was seeing behind the scenes of the census. And they said, well, we're not surprised. We're hearing this from a lot of people and there's really not a lot we can do. We've been working with the census and they are not responding at all. The leadership there doesn't seem to care. So don't expect very much in terms of, you know, which to me was just astonishing that you know, you reveal clear sabotage and dirty tricks going on behind the scenes in the Congresses. Yeah, we know. I'm assuming if Biden wins, there has to be a retake of the census. But that just may be me being naive if that's even possible. But no, I read an article in New York Times a few months ago about this, that if Congress controls both houses and you know, Biden is in there, that they will probably pass a special law because it's it's every 10 years. It happens. I was going to ask the 1790, but it would it would be well within their power to say, OK, we know this one is very screwed up. So we're going to redo it probably in 2022 or 2023. Yeah, the challenges we're still going to have so many people who do not trust the government, but I think we'll get a much more accurate count. So we'll see what happens. Fingers crossed. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. Mark, Lauren, Hank. Morning. Yeah, well, good. So don't go either. I haven't had coffee yet. But he feels that you cannot hear me. That's so much better. Yes. OK, OK. Yeah, I just I also woke up not so long ago and not coffee yet. So I don't know if my mind is that clear, but I didn't watch this debate either. I'm not interested. I guess I guess the politics has that that's completely turned me off. But I'm more excited to spend my time again, you know, I think this work with Indigenous people. So I'm officially bringing back Indigenous, Indigenous voices into Now What Edition in the Fall. So I don't know if you guys know what it is about. But if not, there is a website called NowWhat2020.com, I believe, where you can find out all different sort of programs. So maybe maybe OGM can also do something there. I don't know. There are so many great conversations that we're having here. That's that's it for now. Thank you and good morning. Bonjour. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Jerry, can you come back to me? There's so much noise here in the background. You bet. No worries. So let's do Hank, Rob and Judy. Yeah, good morning. Oh, geez, excuse me. Good morning, everybody. I feel like I just woke up, even though I've been up since like six. So that's kind of where I'm at, though I have had some coffee. It's just taking a minute to kick in. Just got off an interesting call. Yeah, right, Jerry. Just got off an interesting call with some folks here, you know, just kind of touching on some of the OGM design stuff that's that's been cool. So more to come, I think, on that, you know, just kind of as far as as personal stuff goes and just kind of things that I've been thinking about, just thinking a lot about just bias in general and how it shows up and how it's like created, specifically how it manifests itself like in large organizations or slash groups of people, you know, and really just kind of like visualizing it, I guess, but I may be more to come on that. Who knows? And I think the other thing is, you know, just sitting back and noticing the and I think I've hit on this before. And we all kind of have just, I don't know, man, the lack of discourse that's that's kind of going on. How do we how do we promote it, especially when, you know, sometimes comments are made in a way that don't seem to allow for it? You know, it's like, how do you how do you respond to somebody when they make a statement in a way that sets you up to, you know, any response that is not, you know, straight up agreement is is considered, you know, complete disagreement or disavowal. You know, how do you how do you show up in those conversations as a like a sentient like person who has their own opinions and thoughts that while they might be coming from the same place, you know, kind of might manifest themselves a little bit differently. So I've been thinking a lot about that. I think we maybe that's something that I'll never stop thinking about. But but that's kind of where where my head's been at today. So thanks, Jerry. It's good to see you guys. Sorry, I forgot to meet myself. Thanks, Hank. And I watched the whole debate completely like wrapped last night and got angry on Twitter afterward because a fly landed on Pence's head at some point for two minutes and sat there for two minutes. And the Twitterverse went crazy, riffing on the fly. And I'm like, this is part of the problem with journalism and everybody else is like, here's a debate where Kamala Harris, six of nine of her answers were body blows and successful and eloquent and beautiful. She kicked his ass up and down the hall. And instead, we're sitting here joking that the fly won the debate. And I was just mad. I was just livid. And I just put a funny video on the chat that Mandy Patinkin and his wife did about getting mad over these debates just to get out to get people to get out and vote. And this whole topic about whether or not we watch and how the debate works is such an OGM topic. I mean, part of part of what we would like to get to part of one of my wishes about our work together here is that we make civil discourse more possible, more frequent, an actually reliable thing that can get us someplace. So, Rob, Judy Neal. Hey, good morning, everyone from Washington, D.C. I think you all know that I work in the government ecosystem. And so I'll try to bring some snippets of that to these calls. I mentioned this in the chat last time, but I had to drop off. But there is an executive order from the president about how companies and agencies can give training. And it's really horrible and broad and encourages people to report their companies. It applies to government agencies. It applies to all government, all companies that receive government contracts, which our company is one, but also all grantees. So grantees would mean really universities, medical centers. So it's it's shocking to me that there hasn't been more visibility on this topic. So maybe, you know, turn on your radars and we'll kind of we'll kind of see that. We do a lot of work around the flood insurance program and we're bringing in some some expertise on design thinking and customer experience. And we had a discussion with with an interesting company and and about three quarters of a way through, I said, well, one of the requirements would be that you're all U.S. citizens and they were not. And so it was like it just was a reminder of the challenges working in the government environment. They try to make everything fair, but their process of making it fair is to exclude companies because it's, you know, feet long books of regulation and things you have to it takes 10 years to figure out what what is going on. There was nearly a government shutdown last Wednesday night, which also got very little coverage. And so just some of those things are kind of front and center in my world. And when I watch the debate and they talk about different levers they're going to pull and really even the politicians have no idea how Washington operates and so much gets done, you know, below below the congressional radar. And that maybe is an area that needs more focus on a brighter note, giving a presentation to my company on personal knowledge management today. So just kind of a starter starter jumping off point for some of our new professionals and pointing them in the right direction. So I'm excited about that. So that's it for now. That's awesome, Rob. And thank you so much for putting this in front of us. I had just sort of heard whispers in the flood tide on the side about these sorts of things happening and had no direct pointers into it. So your post and NPR article are like. Yeah, he's he's doing a lot of executive orders and they are not they don't go in through any review process. They're just boom. You you know, unless they get challenged in the courts, which obviously that path has its own challenges now. The executive order is basically just law. It's just it's just this is it. And Trump has spent much of his administration hitting the undue key on everything Obama did. And I have a feeling that we're going to need a sweeping undue key. You know, should Biden win this election? I think we're going to have to do the same sort of thing, which is just really it whipsaws everybody on the in the country. Correct. Thank you. Judy, Neil Jay, I don't have a lot new to report except that we've been talking almost every day of the week. And so I've just been trying to keep up. I thought that the session with the questions that you had, Jerry, yesterday were exceptional and the richness of people's response to that Google Doc will be very helpful. So I'd encourage any of you who haven't already added your thoughts to do so. I think we're on the crux of perhaps, I hope, really shaping who we what we believe in, who we are, what we want to be and how we're going to do something. And I think that's an exciting time for all of us. And meanwhile, I'm sort of scrambling around here. So many people are stressed for so many different reasons that I'm trying to figure out all the time each time I meet a person on the line, you know, how do I respond to them with resilience when they're not experiencing any resilience? Because it's almost like you have to do that human interface first in order to be able to even have a discourse of any kind. And I've been spending a lot of time just thinking about that in terms of the state of the world and how do we get collective kindness going at a grassroots level everywhere? That's I think we just need to all settle down a little bit and feel like somebody does care about us. So random acts of kindness, persistent, random acts of kindness, whatever. I'm just thinking about that today. Judy, thank you for mentioning that. Also, government benefits ran out for almost everybody by now. There's there's been lock up in Congress about doing any follow up. We have an election coming. Trump took negotiations off the table, and then there's going to be an election. Even if Biden wins, there's plenty of conjecture about whether or not Trump is going to let go of the reins easily. And so the next couple months could be hellish for a lot of people. And I'm wondering what we might do or how this works or what's going to happen. But I think that we're entering. We're entering a real kind of spiky, dangerous landscape. And so being kind to people, I think, is extra, extra warranted. So thank you for putting that in front of us that way as well. There's just way too much going on in the world right now. Neil J. Julian. Hi, everybody, Neil from Belgium here. And Belgium and other parts of Europe are about to go into second wave type concerns. You know, ICU started to back up in Brussels, people being redirected to other hospitals. So, you know, not sure exactly the full implications yet, obviously tightening of restrictions. Healthcare systems have been pretty resilient up to date, but they're all going, oh, God, here we go again. And so it's going to be interesting to see how people cope with this next wave as things start to shut down. I think it's dawning on people that the challenges are systemic, not just one off and that these things aren't going to be fixed easily. Picking up on Judith's point, I've had many conversations as well and sensing into the conversations with individuals, but also with collectives is so critical to this. And part of the reason I like this group is this is a secular fellowship group with people of high cognitive capability, maturity, right? But we're also holding a fair bit of heart. And so the some other groups I belong to are much more and collective presence and coming from the spiritual heart based rather than head based stuff. And so it's interesting to be sort of playing at these interfaces with head, heart, hands, the doers, the thinkers, the feelers, how do we bring all that stuff together? At the same time, having to play with the dynamics, I think both Rob and Hank were talking about this and Mark were talking about this, the dynamics of groups, group trust. When everybody's under pressure, they can see their potential futures diminishing. They can see the threats on the horizon, still experiencing trauma and grief. There's intergenerational trauma and grief coming through. And there's no governance that's actually enabling any pathway out of that yet. So being part of a self-organising group like this, that's really seeking to actively find ways of bringing beauty, goodness, truth, love, compassion, empathy and high cognitive ability into multiple places is sort of kick that I need occasionally, especially when other groups get into the stage of sort of competitive feelings of threat and how do you show up whole if you've been perceived as a threat because you're actually operating at a level more than they can yet cope with and you're trying to bring something too soon. And I saw a wonderful statement today and I'll finish on this, operating at the speed of trust, you know, and how do you bring yourself if you've already brought too much and everybody goes, oh, it's a bit too scary. And, you know, you find yourself then ostracised by that group. And so it's finding, finding that pathway through that is really interesting for me at the moment. So thank you. Nice to be here. Damn it. I'm forgetting to do the mute. Thank you very much, Neil. Jay, Julian, Bentley. Morning. So back in Ashland. Another twenty three hundred mile bonsai family, Kerouacian National Lampoon vacation road trip, which was very potent. It's amazing when you all you have to do is just get up and drive. It's just something really kind of clean about that. This particular segment, we took a northerly route and some of the highlights or deep lights were Mount Rushmore. Thinking a lot about the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 in the Black Hills and just kind of coming into the Black Hills and seeing these profound kind of ancestral mountains. It's just rocks like you could just feel the grandmothers and these rocks and then you kind of span over and then there's this very white face of George Washington there in the place where, you know, the treaty had had been made just decades before and then broken. And being there with the kids was really profound and trying to hold it in a really non-judgmental way, not saying like anybody's bad, but just it's like, what do you do when you have a clear agreement with the entire nation of people? And then it just completely was broken and then you put your face of your own grandfathers on the mountain. And then the next piece being like the next day going to Butte, Montana and seeing it in half the mountain actually removed and listening to podcasts about like the Berkeley pit and what does it mean when you take all of the copper out of a mountain and leave the toxins behind and still now try to make it, try to fix it through a superfund site. So this is kind of the overarching theme that I'm that I'm present with right now is the idea that the evolution we're in a kind of concurrent conflicting evolution that that somehow we had to get here that the the the course of America was going to come right to this moment that the the conflict of having to leave all of the places, especially England, where to begin this country and come with a certain consciousness, but not one that would actually be able to sustain the land for thousands of years as the people who had lived here before were able to do. So the place where I'm landing with this after a couple of days of sleep, in addition to when I began my my conversation with you guys talking about micrology and mythology, the kind of transformations on the ground and the great transformations in the collective. And I'm really I'm still kind of stretched between both in my daily work, I do the micrology work. The just kind of culminating. I'm really landing on like the necessity for reality experiments. I really feel like we need a future and story is is a way to anchor us in a future that's possible so we can kind of like just carry a glimmer of hope. And so I'm going to be reporting back to to to you guys on this. But it may be a pure story experiment, but with threads of functional, supportive reality that help to let us know that that future is possible. So that's what I'm playing with. That's fabulous. Thank you. And we just let me see if I can reach it with my chord here. There we go. Sorry. Sort of technical thing. Oh, no, sorry. So this is Jay's book, which we just got in the mail very happily. So congratulations, Jay. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's obviously really a hard thing to make anything these days. But thank you so much, Jerry. And Ken's got his copy. It's great. This is lovely. So congratulations. Yeah, Ken, where are you? Yay, thank you so much. Cool link. I actually had to get it replaced because the first one they sent in an envelope that was very well padded and the spine was broken. So I had to send it back and get a second copy. But man, yeah, it's it's a very cool book. It's it's short, but it's it's got a lot in it. And, you know, there's a lot of a lot of fun stuff in here. I recommend that to people. You guys are just so cool. I can't get over it. So many neat things that you're doing on the side. Julian Bentley, Doug. Oh, good morning from a Palo Alto that's not read. So I guess I've mentioned before I'm working on the history of computer graphics. And last week, I was able to import the what they call the art show. This is one of the functions at the annual convention. This going back about 40 years and I was able to import that into Neo4j. And the the good thing about this is that my visualizer using 3D graphics hits Neo4j. So I've been able to run queries between the art history database and the ACM digital library and put them into the visualizer and look at query results using that. One thing about this visualizer, it also works with the brain files so that you can import those databases to as because they are all knowledge graphs. This is on my long term quest to make knowledge something that's manageable and easy to access and manage for people. So bit by bit, I make this more reliable. There's a major committee meeting on Monday that I'm targeting for because right now my application, my software crashes 50 percent as well, actually more than more like 75 percent of the time when you try it. But I expect to have that spiffed up on Monday. That sounds awesome, Julian. If you have a URL for the project and you can share that with us, that'd be great. I mean, it may not be at that stage, but that would be really fun to see. And it might also be useful for the free Jerry's brain project. That would be really interesting. What's that? I did try to import your brain once, but the it's too big. What was the art? That's a quote for me is your brain is too big. I love that. Sorry, Rob. Go ahead. What's the art history database you referenced, Julian? This is the SIGGRAPH ACM SIGGRAPH art. The art show component of the annual conference. OK, I thought you referenced the separate one that was art history. Oh, yeah, because it's considered art history as opposed to art. OK, so. Well, I'm cool. We have, sorry, I lost my Bentley Doug and then Pete. Everybody, I have been out of these calls for a while. I've been moving and several other things. Lots too much exciting stuff. I think I said this last time I was here, I'm still participating in the free Jerry's brain call, trying to free his brain, his too big brain. And and I'm interested in I like Julian's work. Also, we might need to figure out a way that it could pull in and display a partial set. So maybe we should discuss that sometime. Yeah, so I yeah, I'm all discombobulated. So I will probably have to drop off this call. I will be lurking and then just throwing grenades over the wall every once while and then I'll participate a little bit deeper when I can. But I love hearing all this stuff. Thank you, Bentley. And glad your move is sounds like it's going smoothly. So that's good. I got my lights up so you can see me this time. Exactly. Full lighting. Great. I will let discombobulated lurking grenade throw on the water. Yes. At least you can see it coming. Doug Pete Ingrid. Well, I'm working on the final draft of this book I've been working on called Garden World Politics. And the view is that if we don't have an image of the future, it's very hard to work towards it. Whatever kind of restorative work we're doing, if it has a vector that's clear to us towards the future, I think it clarifies a lot of what the efforts are and what the discussions need to be about. I've been working lately on the idea that that things will unfold without a terminal point. It's there's a goal of Garden World as the way of integrating the need for food and the need for habitat in an attractive kind of Chris Alexandrian sort of way. But then we go through that towards thinking about rebuilding the whole civilization. And I've realized that the idea of civilization is very controversial because it implies hierarchy and power. And but if they don't do that, what's the alternative? So that's where I'm thinking right now. Which, of course, takes us to the question posed to Gandhi. What do you think of Western civilization to which his answer was? That would be a great idea. Or something I'm paraphrasing poorly, but basically it'd be great if we had one. So now so many things have gone through the chat that I've lost my my my my cue. Pete Ingrid Scott. Good morning, all. I wish I had a more concise way to put it. I've been thinking mostly about tools for groups like this, different kinds of tools and how we might use them and how we might use them better. I don't have I don't have anything more crisp than that yet. So maybe that's good for me today. Awesome. And I bumped into a fellow who's got a project titled As We May Think, which is inspired by, as you might imagine, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think paper and so forth. And will hopefully be in our conversation at some point soon. Ingrid Scott Kloss. Ingrid, welcome. Yeah, I'm new to this and came in by the Flux mindset group and have been watching your conversations unfold over email. And then I saw your Google Doc and then usually I'm in Amsterdam. So this is not not a great time for me. So I couldn't join, but I was really intrigued by the last the Google Doc and this whole plan, pretty, pretty interesting stuff. And I guess if I could if I could say anything, I've been thinking a lot lately about this giant transformational shift to isolation for a lot of people for months and months now. And what it's doing to us that we haven't even considered yet. Good and bad. So I'm really curious about what's happening with people and finding a way to sort of communicate. You know, find community within that isolation, I guess, because this is not going away and we've already made a weird shift into something else, even if things come completely back to normal, which is not going to happen. We all know, right? So, yeah. But anyway, thanks for having me on this. Very interesting. So happy you're here. Thanks, Ingrid. This is this is terrific. And for me, like my sport, my sport is Aikido, which is a full contact martial art and you're breathing in somebody's face. That ain't going to be happening for a while. So what we're doing is we're training in a park with the Joe, which is a stick and we're running that separately, standing separate from each other. And it's heartbreaking because it's such a fun sport. And then I occasionally hold retreats and some of the people on this call have been to many of my retreats. And first thing I do when people show up with their sheets, we all we hug. And it's like, I don't I get like, when is that going to happen again? My heart is just so so hurting for for that to come back. So thanks for for reminding us to pay attention to those effects. Neil, you want to jump in? Quick one. We've mentioned a bit about the trauma. We've mentioned a bit about the losses. We've mentioned a bit about grieving for those things we can't do. And there's an evolutionary window here. Doug was talking about it in terms of finding a vector for the future. Some of the futures we're imagining are impossible. They are no longer possible. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can redirect energies towards things which might be possible. And so this is part of the facing reality challenge that we've all got. How do we heal from the past and stop pursuing impossible dreams in systems context and redirect energies? I just want to share that because people started it's dawning on people and they don't have the tools to cope with it yet and they're going to be critically needed. Thanks. And I'll just riff on one thing you said here about how do we type and talk at the same time? How do we redirect energies? And I long ago I heard about Milton Erickson, psychotherapist and hypnotist. He used to use hypnotism to fix, to help people talk to them. He was trying to open a new conversation with their unconscious and he would do very tiny things sometimes that would cause large changes in behavior to the patient by giving them a better repertory of options to choose from when they approached the bridge because they had a phobia about crossing bridges, for example. And I've always been trying to figure out what is Wu Wei? What is the action through least action that will in fact tip us towards suddenly seeing each other again as humans who are sharing a planet? And there's like there's hundreds of movements out there trying to do this in every way they know how and it hasn't worked because our brains are still eating with consumer mass market capitalism and neoliberalism and God knows what other kinds of scripts that are in our heads. So I keep looking for what are the simple subtle things that will carry and tip and catalyze and whatever metaphor you want to use us into suddenly a different way of being with each other, seeing each other, being with each other and doing things with each other. That would be lovely to do. And I actually own the domain CB do, which I was developing with Marty Spiegelman, who is a shaman. And we never we never actually finished the workshop or started hosting the workshop. We built around that idea. So J.S. Which is what is which project called? Which project do you mean, Jay? What did I say that? It's not a project like however you call this a subtle peacemaking reality transformation project. I it's in my head. It's not it doesn't really have a tangible project name, but we could pick up CB do and go with that, for example. But but I think that this is like maybe I'm describing something that a bunch of us have sort of seen or thinking about it. Is that what what it feels like? I don't know. Yeah. To say that it's at least seven of us are talking about the exact same thing from different angles, probably more of us thinking about it. I just would love to, you know, whether it's the radical kindness or subtle changes, just like something we anchor to and make a breakout, whatever that looks like, I'm down. OK, me too. And that I really like that. Thank you. So we've got again, I've got to scroll back up. Scott Klaus, Lauren, the map. Hi, everyone. A couple of things. The one that's most on point with where we are right at the moment is I had another call with Lauren and Charles earlier in the week and an idea. I proposed an idea that just top the head and they both jumped on it. And so I thought I'd share with you. So the idea is about conflict in a meeting, something that they were dealing with. And the idea I had was if a conflict appears, the group gets to vote. You know, as simple as that. Do we continue the debate? Do we let these two people fight it out because we like we see something happening here that we want to have continue? Or. We say, no, this is not going to happen in this space at this time. And we stop, we stop the argument, if you will. The reason I say that is that I saw a debate, formal debate in an auditorium to people. And when they got to the Q&A section, they asked the audience. This is normally where we break for half an hour to the Q&A. And do you want us to keep going or do you want us to do the Q&A? And they have responded with applause, saying, we want the debate to continue. And so it was a way of sort of. Reading the room and saying, OK, are you more interested in seeing how this plays out? Or are you all feeling uncomfortable in thinking this argument doesn't belong here? And it was just a way of kind of interrupting that. And so I thought I'd share that with you. Um, the second thing was that Neil challenged me in another meeting earlier this week. I think it was. And it's got me really thinking about the thing that I've been talking about so much, which is taking these ideas and taking them to kids or to people who are less plugged into the things that we're doing on it right now. And he was challenging us to say, well, we need in 10 years there might not be the coastlines that we need. We might not have the environment that we need. If we just say, we're going to I'm going to teach the kids because by the time they get there, maybe it's it's too late. And I realized this is why I think Neil, you are challenging me. And I appreciate that, that it feels like a subtle way of hiding for myself. Because if I just if I just teach the kids, then it's their problem to solve. And that I appreciate you kind of calling me on that. I still might do that, but at least I know what I'm doing. So that's it for me. Tom, thank you. That's really that's really nice. Thanks, Scott. Can I just respond? Just briefly, thanks for much of that, Mike. And the challenge we've got is we have to teach the kids and we have to teach the adults and the kids are smart enough to do it. If the if the adults that are currently preventing it get out of the way, but if they're in the way until the kids get to the point of employment, it's too late because those jobs won't exist. Those coastlines won't exist. Those environments won't exist. So thanks for that. One interesting thing is that kids are often a really good vector to get to the adults in the city of Curitiba in the 70s, the mayor's army and learner did a bunch of really transformative things that were super cool. And one of the things they did was they made Curitiba the greenest city in South America by teaching the kids about recycling and having them teach their adults and straighten out their households. Then I think in Guatemala or Honduras, I'm forgetting where they achieved literacy adult, they like boosted adult literacy by 20 percent by basically having the kid. They stopped school for two weeks. They said, everybody go home, find adults who are who can't read and teach them to read. And like, like just just stopping everything and having young people teach older people to read for two weeks, boosted literacy. And I'm probably exaggerating the story, but I'm forgetting which country. But the kids are often a vector to helping adults go ahead. Mark, you want to jump in? Yeah, I just wanted to some of you might have wonder. I don't know what that pictures was. And that's my son. Um, was that eight years ago? He asked me about a week or two before Thursday. Hey, Papa, what do you want to do for Thursday? Put some thought into that. And I said, hey, you know, there is a cove up north that we visited once. Let's go back. And what we did, we cleaned it. So that's him with a bag of, you know, litter. And then we, right by where I live on the top, they are, you know, several parks. So we adopted a grove and we cleaned it too. We removed about five bags of five gallon leaders over the course of almost a year. And he changed completely the place, the energy. And since then I find, you know, my son, my son is just that. So he has to, you know, educating the kids, bringing them outside and, and teaching them that way. Thank you for sharing that, Mark. That's lovely. Klaus, Lauren, Nat, Scott, before that, Scott. Yeah, I just have one quick thing that I forgot to mention. The other thing I was working on, Doug, thank you for recommending Bruno Latour. I am not quite advanced enough to understand everything that he's saying. But I did, I'm pasting a video in the chat, it's like 45 minutes or so, that I was able to capture and that idea of having that vector that you're heading towards, I think the way he conceptualized it is we have created this path where you're either going forward or backward. And he said there's a third attractor and that. So progress is not a fight between is this progress or this progress going forwards or going back. It's actually progress is towards this third place and going backwards. Regression is actually going back to the the other places. And he draws it up on the whiteboard and he's wonderful to listen to. But thank you for that, Doug. I think this is this is a terrific video. Super cool. Thank you, Scott. Klaus, Lauren, Matt. Yeah, good morning. Yesterday was was an interesting day. It started out really good and ended up with my wife throwing objects at the television set listening to the debate. But I started out with a conversation with the founders, co-founders of Kiss the Crown. And I don't know if you have seen the film or heard about it. I'm going to put it into the into the chat here. Kiss the Crown is an organization really well funded through grants. Private money focused completely on soil restoration and regenerative organic agriculture. So they created this film that they have been working on for like seven years. And it's just wonderful. I mean, it's an amazing documentation, how we have the capacity to restore soil and thereby solve so many climate change related issues. So we decided we decided and formed already a team with the Sierra Club where we will show this film for one week to the 3.8 million members and then finish that. There's a panel discussion on what can you do about this? What does this mean to you as a consumer and how can you engage in your community to fast to accelerate the conversion of farming into a regenerative process? And I jumped off that call to the Natural Products Expo and two observations there. One was the software was fascinating. I mean, the way the software is structured, you can literally go into an expo room and look at products and you can visit individual booths. And when you enter, there's a sales person that will connect you. You can see the products. You can order samples. I mean, fascinating. And the expo started out with a keynote presentation. And I actually copied the speaker notes yesterday to the OGM chat. And I was just blown away how the speaker had summarized the key issues that we have with our food system from a consumer's perspective. So here, these are now the products that we need to focus on to build our own immune system. And this is this immunocompromised busword that's starting to float. And this entire conference was totally keyed in to that particular concept. So I can see a convergence and inflection points in the agricultural sector where consumers are becoming mild in and aware of what does my personal buying behavior do to this entire process there. And the industry is really beginning to understand that this is shifting and we need to flow with it. So that was very encouraging. I mean, I really felt moved yesterday in how many people are jumping in. We have a couple of teams now at Citizen Climate Lobby working on presentations to the farming community to talk with farmers about climate change. So it's moving. It's happening. Klaus, thank you. And I'll just a side note, sort of historic side note for me. My last 25, 30 years journey to where I am on trust and other issues started from the word consumer. And I think that part of our problem is we're thinking about and calling those people consumers instead of citizens or instead of people and that when they're mere consumers, they're only job is to go buy stuff that's wrapped in styrofoam in the store. When when we think of them differently, their job is to co-produce, to be more mindful about it, to steward the soil, to do all the different kinds of things you're talking about. So I think there's an interesting vocabulary issue that's eaten our brains as well in the middle of all that. Lauren and then that. Hey, everybody. First, I want to say that the Matt and Hank and the planners of the of the upcoming OGM session, yeah, the workshop, we would love to we would love to help you in any way we can and to join that. So, yeah, you can have a lot of help with that if you want it. And great, great. We're really into that. And yeah, so it's really exciting that the little session yesterday was really exciting, kind of trying to get a vision for OGM. And we just had so many exciting possibilities. And I think I've said this before, before, but I'll say it again. I think that it could be something that spans across several organizational kinds of entities, and maybe it can have like a nonprofit side and for profit side. And and Charles and I did a plan to lead, you know, towards the end of this month, maybe more realistically, in November, kind of a community wide kind of hold down, grant hold down to search for possible funding mechanisms and to coordinate our effort to do those. And I just wanted to mention on October 19th and on our Monday session, we're going to have Howard, Ryan Gold, maybe talk about crap detection and also so Judy's friend, Kyle, so that should be fun. That sounds great. Thanks. Thanks, Lauren. And I think you're going to put that invite on the OGM last night. Yeah. Cool. And I haven't caught up on this morning's email, so you might already have done that. Matt, over to you in the booth. All right. Hello, everybody. Good morning. Good evening. It's great to see everyone. Maybe before I talk about where where some of the planning is for this alignment session, there's a couple of things on my mind. The first is we had our kind of our first exposure at my daughter's school to COVID. So it's coming. There's a group of kids, not my daughter, but a group of kids that are on lockdown. So they basically said everyone who was in that same group has to be quarantined for 14 days before coming back to school, regardless of whether they get tested or not. So that's going to be interesting to see how this plays out with the opening and closing of almost like a sub, where you shut different compartments and contain things. The second thing is I have finished reading and rereading down to earth by Latour and happy to spend time talking about it. There's some sections that I really need to process with some other people. But I do think it's it's fascinating and Doug, I'm very interested to hear and to read your work and how you're thinking. I completely agree that part of the problem that we're dealing with now is that we can speak about the problems. But what we can't do is we can't paint a big enough picture to feel safe like a hermit crab to leave our shell and move into some other shell. And so until we have that vision that is is a better reality for four people, people are going to hold on to the homes that they have and the money that they have in all of those things. And so I think part of change is painting that that future picture. So the the other thing is I'm working on a project right now. This is with all of the CFOs of a major financial services company. And we're talking about they invited me in to talk about how they can better influence change in their organization and what are the skills around influence and everything that I've been you know, reading and coming up with as I search for that word in particular are things like, you know, Marcus Cerilio and how to win an argument and, you know, how to, you know, influence people and be friends. And they're all it's all really, to me, it's it's manipulative stuff. And so this program is really about helping them understand that influence comes through helping seek people, see differently, think differently and therefore act differently. And I'd love if anyone has sorry for the the noise of the actually see someone right out my window fixing the roof. Are they trying to break down your door? And is this like a police invasion? Yeah, yeah, they're they're repairing the roof back there. But it looks like it looks like a well that lurking grenade throw to me. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But if anyone has anything that on influence and on how influence works in more of a facilitative way, I'd love to I love to read anything in the catch up on stuff. I'm I'm building some curriculum now and feel pretty happy with it, but always interested in new things. So with that, as Lauren mentioned, at at the end of last week's adventure, you know, my sense is that we're ready. We're ready as a group to take the next step of putting some definition around this. And Judith, I know you've mentioned this a couple of different times around. How do we get aligned on who we are, what we want to be, what we're going to do, where we want to go. And I know yesterday's conversation was a really positive start. But I want to we're trying to create a program. We have a loose structure for what that's going to look like. I know Charles reached out and Lauren, maybe we can grab a quick call to take you guys through it. But we'd like to invite everyone to participate. I do think it's going to take a kind of a body of time. But the goal is for us to walk out of there feeling more aligned around where this thing is going. And Ingrid, I know you're first you're you're new to this call. But really appreciate the diversity of voices. And I think I wanted to spell the myth around the fact that we don't have the answers yet. We have ideas and now it's time to start to shape those into maybe some lines of thought in some trajectories. And so that's the objective of this of the session that we'll have. And there'll be a little bit of work beforehand. But I want to just encourage anyone who wants to see this project, take the next step to be a part of that. And and we'll we'll talk about it more next next Thursday in terms of what the work is and stuff. And I think Jerry is going to communicate with everyone about, you know, are you in? I think what it means to be in is next week we'll launch an individual assignment for everyone to give people an opportunity to put down their own thoughts about what they think OGM should look like. We want to do this at an individual level because that's one of the ways to preserve the diversity versus the loudest voices. Then the week after that, we're looking to do a opportunity for people to share their perspectives with each other in small teams. Just to listen to those perspectives. There'll be a week, hopefully a week's time after that for people to reflect on. We reflect on what they heard. And then when we get together and I think we're targeting Thursday, the 29th, we can maybe move that, but I'd prefer to get it in before the election so that we can, you know, not be consumed by post-election craziness. On the 29th, we're looking to spend about five hours where we integrate. Each team will integrate their perspectives into a shared view. We'll report those things out and then we'll synthesize the material into, again, a set of trajectories that we can start to build some momentum around in addition to continuing this check-in. So that's the plan. We'll have more documented by next week for the kickoff, but Jerry's going to ask if you want to be a participant and if you can commit the time because, you know, it is a time-consuming process, but I think that's what's going to be required to get us aligned to kind of get over this threshold moment that we're in right now. So let me stop there. Cool. Thank you. Feeling welcome to the call. We just finished our round of check-ins and you just jumped in, so it's not quite fair to leap to you to check in. But if you'd like to, you're welcome to. No, just listen to whatever else I can listen to. Sounds great. So let me just pause and see where we would like to take the conversation right this second. I shared the Google Doc we're talking about was a working document from yesterday's OGM call about starting the conversation about why are we here? What are we actually doing together? So that's further up in the chat and we can post it again. But where should we go with the conversation right now? I just want to see what we put a whole bunch of interesting things on the table in the check-in. Well, I'm going to jump in here. I have a feeling that it's very hard to be thinking about the future right now because we are looking at it as something we can do to add to the current situation and make it better. But I think we're in a period of punctuated equilibrium where all efforts are plural and there's so much going on and we have no idea what's going to succeed coming out of that. So it's very hard to figure out what to do to restore or repair what we have when we're going to go through a period of entropy where everything seems to be falling apart. And then the question is, how do we conduct ourselves through that period? And I'm doing a sort of agree because I totally agree that we're in a period of punctuated equilibrium. I'm not sure that I feel an uncertainty about where to lean or what to do, not that there's any guarantee that what we do is good. I think that what we're doing right here is right on target for a good thing we might do to get this done. So what's cool about the moment is that we're in this weird, liminal, transitional, melty moment where a lot of institutions are cracking, which has the terrible side effects that a whole bunch of groups and people are suffering. And the nets that are usually trying to be there to catch them are being broken intentionally, et cetera. So that's miserable. But what it does is it sort of opens us up and softens us up to actually maybe help and step in. And it feels also like positive behaviors that are repeated and grooved right now will be durable through the punctuated equilibrium moment and may actually pick up and frame the way we are with each other later. And unfortunately, the whole situation could go to hell in a handbasket, and we could end up in some kind of Dante-ish ring of hell together, in which case we will be happy to have formed some communities that we trust, because that will make living in whatever ring of hell we end up in a lot more bearable, I think. Anyway, that's my own take on it, is that yes, the situation. But I don't feel at a complete loss for what to do about it. I feel like the conversation we're holding here is important for what to do about it. Does that make sense, Doug? But there was another point that Doug said is how are we going to do it. And that's, to me, it's even more important than the what. Because we lead by example. Going back to the story with my son, the core teaching was reciprocity. You come to a place, you enjoy the place. So you do something for the place that you're in, or the space. So cleaning it, even though the trash is coming from somebody else, is part of that reciprocal relationship that you have with the place. Love that. And that implies a particular point of view or frame of mind with what place even means. And how do we get there, Klaus and Kim? Yeah, I mean, I think we are in a period that may get a lot worse where people are basically worried about food and shelter, just the basics. I think the number is something like 40 million people are at the risk of eviction by the end of December. And then there's moratorium runs out. And this number is hopefully going to call. And food insecurity is a real thing. So my take has been that there is really nothing to be invented. Everything is already out there somewhere. There are so many best case examples of what you can do to protect your community, to find community, join community, and so on. I think just gathering this up and making it accessible and helping people with information because the market is staffed of information. And unfortunately, our government is dysfunctional. And normally where government agencies like the USDA and the farm, the housing, and everyone where they would lead the initiative to help people, they are dysfunctional. So how can we gather information and make information available and enrich people who can help each other and don't know about each other? Thanks, Klaus. And I just posted something that's a little bit cynical in the chat, which is that if you think that Trump and his government are out to actually shatter the system and that that's part of what they were hired to do, they're actually doing a really good job on it. The reason I think Trump's base doesn't shrink below like 35% is that he is actually scoring like an A on destroying norms, destroying the system, dismantling the government, shattering the world agreements, all that kind of stuff. He's really performing on that. And that is horrifying, I think, to a lot of us. And I have this weird moment where what I just said about we're in a liminal space, like when I voted for Hillary, I was voting for the first woman to be president of the United States, but I was setting aside mentally, unconsciously, all my plans to redesign the world from trust and to do this and to do that. I was like setting those aside because I knew that Hillary was going to be a steward of the status quo. And I think what's broken right now is the status quo. And what scares me about Biden is that he might be a great steward of the status quo and sort of bring us back to where we were. And I'm really interested in that's going somewhere different from where we were. Really interested in the fact that things have been smashed and dissolved and shattered and shaken is beneficial in a transition to a better way of being together to solve the different kinds of problems that we face. Ken? A couple of things come up for me. Michael Mead is someone who I've spent a lot of time reading and studying. He's a mythologist and storyteller and former leader in the men's movement. And Michael talks about the fact that the world does not end. There have been many movements in history. So it's the end of the world, the end of the world, the world continues. It might be the end of our world. We may be looking, we may be right on the precipice of the end of the world that we have known and grown up in is definitely going through major transformation. But unless we really bring about an amazingly cataclysmic event, there will still be people for a very long time. They may not have the kind of quality of life and the kind of quality of environment that we've had in order to have the kind of decent life that we've got. But there are going to be people here. And I think that's really important to remember that there will still be people. So that's kind of my baseline for starting. And then when was the mission accomplished thing where Bush landed on the aircraft carrier and said, we've won the war? That was like 100 days into the Iraq war. Somewhere there are somewhere there are. 2003. OK, so in 2003, thank you. In 2003, a woman invited me to bring together, she wanted me to facilitate a World Cafe for business people and peace activists. And I didn't want to do it. I said, I don't want to do it. She said, why not? Peace activists are the most violent people I know. They're out there going, no blood for oil, no blood for oil. I mean, they're really like harsh in their stance about what peace means. And she finally convinced me. And so I got there and I said, you know, this is Jennifer. She's our graphic recorder. She's going to capture what comes out of today in terms of output. And immediately somebody goes, capture is war language. You can't use war language in this room. And this is actually at the Foundation for Gold Committee, which had previously been beyond war. So that's where this is taking place. And I was like, this is why I didn't want to do this project. Right. And I said, OK, well, you know, what would you have us use? So that was a minor issue. But the way that I got around things was I had people sit at tables of four. And I said, OK, so we're here to talk about peace. And I'd like you to tell the story of the first time that you can remember that peace was going to be important in your life. When did you wake up to the fact that peace was something that was meaningful? Two rounds of that. And within an hour of people sharing their stories, and most of them went back to a time when they were idealistic as a young teenager, maybe 10, 12, 14, somewhere in there, everybody had moved from being a business person or a peace activist to being a person interested in peace. So I think the way that we facilitate, the way that we frame questions is extremely important. Where we point a group's attention, we can point it the way that politics works is to point your attention to what doesn't work and then divide people by talking about the other side can't fix it, we can fix it, and then they just start slinging them up. If instead they said, what's important? What do you guys really want to have happen here? What's the function of government? Why is it important to have people coming in and taking care of things who were collecting all this money from taxes that gets dispersed? Really important things for us to spend it on. If we could get that conversation going on, we would have really different types of relationships. I think of Joan Blades after she got down to move on, founded Living Room Conversations. That's brought together people on the right and the left by asking questions that aren't divisive but are more about what do you care about and why do you care about them? People from opposite eyes of ideologies are saying, we actually have a lot more in common than we have dividing us. And now we see that the system as currently constructed is actually working against everybody's common interests. So there are examples of this working out there. And I think it's just a really important framing. And the last point I want to make is I have this little allergic reaction to the question of how do we do something? Because I think how do we do something puts us into a problem solution engineering mindset and it closes off imagination. So rather than ask how do we do, I like to pose the question of what would it look like if? So what would it look like if Open Global Mind were successful? What would it look like if we had a culture that was building towards a desirable future? It takes us out of the, oh, we have to figure something out into, let's imagine it together. And that just creates a much more broadened playing field. So that's my rift for the day. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Ken, very much. Jay. So some of the conversations that have been coming up for me lately and I've been observing a lot of people kind of leaving California, leaving Oregon, saying the fires are too much. We need to go find a different place. And the question I keep coming back to is not as much about where do we live as it is about how do we live? And I just keep anchoring that. And it's not an easy thing to kind of reframe, especially when you're dealing with trauma and realities of family and everything. But on our trip across and back across the country, we stayed at this, there's this new app called Hipcamp, which I might've mentioned on the way out. And the reason I bring this up is because it's basically a relationship of trust. It's Airbnb without the structure. So you can just go to a place where you can lay down your tent. You don't have to talk to anybody or see anybody. It all happens on the app. Very COVID-appropriate. I believe that there's, as we're asking this question, not just where are we gonna live, but how are we gonna live? And there's gonna be a lot, a lot of people, especially a lot of young people or young-ish, 30s, 40s uprooting. There is a big opportunity to say, okay, well, what is that elevated network of places? What does it look like? What might it look like? Go out into the future and say, what could binomatic living actually look like? Because we're, I mean, I'm kind of tended to that anyway. Being in a place consistently for a long time is a pretty new thing for me. So, but what is the real stable and real vibrant way of doing that, which might mean staying in one place for six months, eight months, mean smokes here, we're gonna go to the desert, et cetera. So, I just wanted to bring that into the conversation. Thanks, Jay. And every now and then I wound up pondering about nomadic peoples and how this works because a lot of folks in the Americas before the Europeans get here move around a bunch. And we tend to sort of map territories and they sort of, and April and I were in Mongolia a couple of years ago and the Mongolians on the steppe who were mostly herders, they move three times a year. They have sort of three, the reason they have gurres that are really easy to pack up is that they can break down a gurre in a couple of hours, load it up and just truck on off. And when they move to winter quarters, tucked up into the Hillsmore, they leave behind the cows and the horses, I think, I'm not sure. Cows and horses can kind of take care of themselves, but they leave them behind and they take the sheep and the goats and their camels with them, something like that. And that there's a whole bunch of rhythms established and the attitudes toward place and so forth are really interesting. Another tiny thing, there's no fences out there. You just go sort of graze your animals in different places. And at one point, and the way you get the cows to come back home is you sort of rope up a calf from one of the lead cows back at camp. And so that cow wants to come back to her calf later in the day. And at one point we were sitting there and our hosts cows had come back and then another bunch of cows just comes from over there, walks through our camp and walks over there to their camp with nobody leading them. They just sort of go back. And I'm like, this thing is on autopilot by people who seem to understand a lot about the land and the critters and everything else. I like how this works. And then we've managed to sort of plant down and put fences around everything and use ownership to say, this is mine, not yours. And then we started doing those things way too close to forests and in the middle of places that burn without having taken care of the landscape. So it's really, really messy everywhere as we sort of walk through and do this. But what does a modern nomadic lifestyle look like where we're rooted in place somehow, somewhere, which might be multiple place, but where we're rooted in community in places like this, right? Where we know people who do and show up and share and help build. Neil. Sorry to dash your hopes, guys. 7.8 billion people nomadically roaming the planet looking for better places as climate collapse, ecological collapse, sea level rise, political collapse, geopolitical collapse happens, isn't going to happen. So I feel for you. I can't see all your faces at the moment because I'm looking at a diagram which I posted in the OGM Google Doc that was posted earlier in this point. I love the idea about how do we live? I'm coming back to Doug's point about place-based connection. So we need to work with the places we have. People are still looking for the best place to be, but geopolitics, migration, everything else is going to screw that up. So we need, I believe this is the people-centric approach and from my diagram, empowered individuals collaborating in intergenerational communities of healing, co-design and development. They have to somehow mutually create exemplar, cohesive communities of need and communities of care, operating within better understood, changing linked social-ecological system limits, right? These are going to be islands of sanity. Not everybody's going to make it through this evolutionary bottleneck. The question is how many can get through, right? And if so, how many models have we got that are tailored for places and anticipatorily designed for what we know is coming already, not just how do we survive in this place? So uprooting from California and going somewhere else to continue business as usual ain't gonna last you long, I'm afraid. I've been on this journey for 15 years with multiple other people. And so to me, the highest objective of something like OGM is to share the information about the crises, the diagnoses, the responses and to find ways of how do we bring people together around better recognized rules of engagement, better recognized rules of responsibility, the meta rules for how we co-define the rules and the leadership required to actually live in real communities, in real places, in times of real stress and not just shooting everybody at the border or lobbing grenades over the boundary. Neil, thank you, that's fantastic. One tiny thing before I passed to Jay, a long ago I had a conversation with Alex Betts who runs a really important refugee organization. I can look, he's in my brain and I was trying to figure out why don't we treat refugees as first class global citizens? We can give them a digital ID, we can give them first rate digital tools with a tablet and some wifi. They can be full peers with video with what have you and these things are simple and cheap to set up pretty much anywhere on earth. Instead, what we have is refugees who often in camps are not allowed to work, have no citizen status, have no this, have no that. So we're gonna have a whole lot more refugees as you started with, which is bleak and very realistic, I think. There's just gonna be a lot of people moving around not against their will, not because they want to. How do we make that life much more bearable in some way and how do we attach to their person more value, more capacity, more assets, more whatever so that they can build as they have to move, for example? And just a very quick follow up. Hurricane Katrina, there were 150 to 250,000 internal climate change refugees in the United States. So they've moved to somewhere else, they don't understand. They've gone there with the existing tools to try and live in existing economies. A project I was involved with looking at the, literally the relocation of the entire nation of Tuvalu, the islands in the Pacific with 11,000 people. They will go underwater, they're going underwater now. They've got too many people because they've taken a market-based economy based on mission rezeal. And so what would happen if they moved the entire population to Australia, which is one of the biggest generators of greenhouse gas emissions? So the assumption is we can't let these people in because they're bringing a worse model. What if they brought a better model, right? What if they brought a better model of how to live together, how to use circular economy, how to live within the carrying capacity? So to me, these are system design opportunities and system design necessities. And as I say, not everybody's gonna get through so we need multiple models. So systems design, laboratory or alliance is so critical to this and it has to be tailored for place and not just current place, but future place, anticipating what's coming to these places, ties into classes, discussions about soil regeneration and regenerative farming. These models alone aren't going to work unless we seriously do whole systems design which includes governance. Thanks. Thank you. Jay? Yeah, I just wanted to say that I thank you. That's a beautiful assessment, Neil. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think that the territories we're talking about and the acts is not necessarily something for every single person, but there is a trend that we're seeing and it's gonna increase and it's a certain segment of the population that isn't necessarily entirely out of resources. So that's a segment, but maybe that can be leveraged to anchor certain places to like I think about the mission system, right? One day's walk, except the opposite approach, right? It's not the place where you actually enslave the indigenous people. It's actually when you put a place where you can return to becoming an indigenous person over the course of a great period of time. And so I just wanted to just add this little bit that what I'm referencing is in semi-nomadic is not like, oh, we're here now and we're there now. It's a little bit more like what Jerry was talking about is if you're three places over the course of a year, we left here because the smoke was intense for us and we were gonna go see my kid's grandparents, but we had friends who live on the land that came to stay here. And so there is some kind of model which can be anchored in place that hip camp is a little seat of. That's all I'm saying is that there's a potential there. And the idea of hip camp plus climate refugees has probably occurred to somebody but is really super interesting. Like, what does that look like as we start to flex how we use the land and how we share the land or what we expect of somebody staying on the land and how we tend it. And along with sort of indigenous populations that migrated a lot, they would sprinkle a whole bunch of seeds somewhere and then come back next season when they had sprouted. And that was some of their food and it was also food for some of the prey that they were going to catch. And they would show up at the river when they knew the fish were about to run and they would close the weir, wait for the fish to fill the weir, pull the fish out, dry them out, carry them with. I mean, they understood the rhythms of the land and of nature on the land. And we've lost most of those connections in different places or we've managed to dam up the river so that there's no fish running in them or whatever. We've managed to cock this up quite deeply. We're getting 10 minutes to the end of our call. Any closing thoughts about where we are and how to deal with it? I just like to say, Jerry, that I thought the Google Docs approach to framing that we used the other day was so powerful that perhaps we should attempt some other discrete task things in the same framework. And I don't mean tasks like what we're gonna do tomorrow, but I mean tasks like we need to frame X that would move us to proposing Y, that kind of thing. Because I think it's a way to come to some group consensus, at least within a subset of people if not the entire scope of people on opportunities for alignment and action. Do you sort of mean, for example, in a very overly simplistic way, a Google Doc for each project we think we're doing so that people can share thoughts and build up what to do? Is that a reasonable approach? Yeah, I think I would start with a little, sort of water the buckets before I start with the individual products project. And we do have discourse, which we're not using in this way, which isn't Google Docs. Pete, go ahead. A quick shout out. I think Judy's on to something and access workshops looks really good for that kind of stuff. That's all right. Access work, okay. Cool, and there's a sort of a bunch of modifications of Zoom. A couple of us are familiar with Lucas Chaffee's Kiko and Kiko Chat, which wraps around Zoom and Google Docs and Miro. And one of the features Kiko offers, which Zoom doesn't offer is from open space, the ability for people to move themselves between breakup rooms, which is hard in regular Zoom. But that's one particular feature. And Pete, I'm not familiar enough with access, so I need to go figure out what they're up to. Julian. Part of what I'm thinking is that, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I think there's energy here that we can marshal outside of the attempts to be collectively gathered in a single location. And so the asynchronous participation and inserting information into the flow, even though we're doing it a different time than the other groups, some people see it later and so on, I think that would really help us coalesce our vision and begin to identify things that we can test as a pilot in our own situation, or I don't know, maybe I'm not making sense, but... You're making sense on what you're asking is a very OGME question. It's like, what is the infrastructure, the technical infrastructure for our shared memory about these things we'd like to do together. And it's what Scott talked about at the beginning of the call about, maybe we need a directory or a hub and spoke model or other kinds of things, right? It's all of these things. Julian, go ahead. I really like Judy's idea. And following up on a conversation, let's see, I forgot who was earlier about, why does peace important to you? I think some of the initial contributions could be from everybody as to why OGME is important. Thank you. Other thoughts, Scott. Quick thought, Jerry, that was in our previous call. So I'll quick highlight it. The idea here was that, what does this look like from a tangible software standpoint? And the thought I presented was a hub and spoke in the sense that the spokes are all the different pieces of software we have now, have in the future. And I've always tried to corral those, but only in my head. And it all got better when I started using the brain. And it doesn't have to be the brain, it can be anything. As my central repository. So this is the place I go to first. And if I have a doc over here, I attach it to this place. Attach, attach, attach so that I always go to this one place and it only needs to be able to help me collect and connect. It doesn't need to be able to do everything. It's just a very simple, easy way to do that. And so that was the hub and spoke context that we were talking about. And also one of the most important insights from 22 years of using the brain for me is this idea of a curated memory that's ongoing. And I have a video I'll share here about, I think I'm having a really unique experience with this brain thing, because almost nobody has a tool that allows them to keep an ongoing memory like this and to share it out. But never mind the sharing out part, just to have something reliable for yourself where all of the different moving parts can be found and are stitched together, woven together into a larger context. And so the very question Judy was asking a little while ago about how do we remember this and all that is kind of that. It's like, what does that look like for a group? And how does it suit different people's best ways of working in representation? So we're kind of struggling to make the discourse forums work, but the discourse forums we could use in this way as well. Like there's nothing stopping us from do that. In fact, threads or posts can be wiki-like, which I don't fully understand yet, sorry Pete, but part of it is how do we evolve this infrastructure together to make it actually do our bidding and to be really powerful and shareable outside and all of that. Judy, I think you'd raise your hand. Well, I'm just, I see the brain as predominantly a knowledge preservation content focus and perhaps I'm viewing it incorrectly and there's a way to extract a new hub that's all of the action focuses. Because that's part of what I'm interested in is how do we align shared action to have more impact? And it's sort of the downhill of a realization that we share a value and that we want to work toward furthering that value or helping a certain group of people or whatever. But I'm struggling a little bit with how to frame the coalescence of action in terms of who's already doing it, I should talk to them, who else should I invite in because they're aligned here? How can we test it in Minnesota? Can we test it in Minnesota and Brussels at the same time so we have comparison points? It's a form of evolution of social action in a sense. Right. And I'm saying this poorly I think, but anyway. Making sense to me and I'll just relate one of the ways I use the brain. So I use the brain in ways that probably cover four or five different kinds of tools because one of the tools is like, it's a mind map of industry structures and products and services and people and all that. Another way is when I get a new project, I start a thought in my brain, I usually mark it private unless the project is completely open like this is. And then I connect to it, a lot of the people who are essential to the project, a lot of the working documents are there. So when I need to go figure out, where was the Miro board for this particular thing? I go to my brain as Scott was describing and it's right there and I just follow that link out. And so I have little collections of documents that are related to ongoing things. So I'm using it not as a planning tool or as a getting or as a GTD tool which other people use the brain for or as a to-do list, but I use it as the collection of things and people that matter to a particular issue. And then that project is also connected up into its general theme. So if this project is about collaboration or collective intelligence or whatever else, then it'll be connected to that which then leads you to all the other things related. And so I'm using it very much in that way which for me personally is really fruitful, has been very satisfying and works quite well. And I'm not that organized in other parts of my life but that's worked really well. Neil, you had your hand up. Yeah, just a quick one. Judy and I had a conversation earlier in the week and riffing off Scott's hub and spoke. One of the examples we used was octopus. The octopus is an intelligent being with a central brain, huge capacity for seeing, changing, morphing, but it has eight tentacles all of which have their own brains and can feel in multiple different directions simultaneously sensing the environment and changing shape, literally morphing to suit what's required. And so it's just riffing on that as a more ecological slash living process of evolving in the context into which it's being placed. So I don't see it just as a static repository. I see it as a static repository being refined through multiple sensory organs of which Jerry is probably the biggest. If that's not a root thing to say. You are our skin, Jerry. So this capacity for finding, retrieving, collecting, bringing and then weaving is something that octopuses do, right? They can also get through narrow gaps. And so I think there's some really powerful analogies here if we use living systems rather than wheels like the one I had to get replaced on my bike today. I think a spokes break. I was lucky. Yeah, thanks. That's a difficult failure that's hurts. Yes. And kind of like Wikipedia, a few people do a bunch of curation and then millions and millions and millions of people enjoy the fruits of their labor. Everybody doesn't have to be doing the act of weaving and curating. It would be enough if we had a bunch of people, a small group of people from very different perspectives doing the weaving and curating. And if the rest of us were able to tap into that, reuse it and enhance it in whatever way worked for us. Appropriate it, link into it, improve it, whatever. But just, that's kind of part of the vision here. It's not that everybody becomes a brain user or a kumu user or whatever, but rather that we have a simple enough infrastructure where everybody can use it like we use Wikipedia and then enrich it, feed it back because it's a commons. And that that is simple enough that we're sort of not overwhelming everybody but that our world there is a little simpler to be in. Neil. So one quick practical thing on that. If you're going to have a commons, you're going to have to have commons managers or nurturers or maintainers. And so one of the elements here is question mark, how much would it cost to actually employ people to do that? Or is this all for love, not money? Because if that's a critical function of growing the intelligence and the capacity of the brain, then the commons process needs to have an economic mechanism for feeding the benefits from those, or sorry, some of the benefits from those who are gaining benefit from it back into it. Wikipedia struggles on occasions because it relies on volunteer labor and it needs money and energy to run, et cetera, et cetera. You guys would know more about that than me. So what are the stocks, what are the flows and how do we get flows going which are sustainable? Because that's going to be the key once it becomes seen as a learning organism capable of doing things better than an encyclopedia, right? And because people are behind the scenes going, yes, I just helped you with your inquiry. You've got an organismal, if that's not the wrong word, ecosystemic approach to how do we bring the benefits of this to the world, not just here's a stock of knowledge and if you want to access it, here's the fee. Yeah, thank you, Doug. Yeah, here's something to try and imagine. How does a commons cope with migrants? Which commons do you mean? The information commons doesn't care. No, no, a land food living commons. Yeah, yeah, that's a huge issue. That's a giant issue coming, whooping us over the head now. I mean, it seems to me that private property prevents migration, but migration is one of the standard ways that species, including humans, have coped with change. Also, in England and a bunch of European countries, there are rights of access to private property. So you're allowed to camp on somebody's land for three days, I believe, as long as you leave it as it was and they cannot move you from it. So I have a funny feeling that either those laws are gonna get changed to the worst or that's gonna be happening a whole bunch more and we're gonna see the results of the frictions that that kicks up. And then we're gonna take us out of the call. Yeah, the disturbing thing really is that there is absolutely no leadership focused on these issues. In fact, everybody's sticking in, defending their own territory, closing down instead of developing joint solutions. When you look at the existing refugee crisis in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean region there, that's no solution. I mean, there are millions of people already herded into camps with absolutely no way out and no way to go. And in the meantime, the food supply is running out. And so we already have food shortages emerging. So if there's anything that we can do to initiate a thought process of engaging the future which is already inevitable, I mean, I think that would be hugely helpful. So a very cynical scenario you just reminded me of that I read some months ago was that the autocratic populist countries that are shutting down their barriers and banning foreigners from doing whatever and really, really doing what you just described are not climate skeptics or deniers. They're in fact fully aware of the disastrous scenarios we're moving toward and what they're doing is building up the defensive barriers so that they can protect their walls and keep their fortunes and defend themselves against climate refugees that may be coming. And I hate to think that that's true, but it seems plausible. So, and I don't want to end the call on that. I need to know something about puppies and dolphins or something before we go out. Marc. Yeah, I met recently, where is he from? Down, Senegal. A man from Senegal who migrated to Spain. He wanted to go to France, but then he met his better half in Spain and lives now in Valencia and he's been hired by the city of Valencia to build a model where immigrants are actually engaged into the future, brought in to think about the future of the city itself. And he's really, he's a bit at the beginning of it and I'm wondering if everything that I've heard here is could really benefit his own thinking path. So, I don't know if there would be something to do there. I mean, he's really brilliant. Is there a way that the group can work on something like this? All right, it's possible. We probably need to link arms with somebody who's in the middle of doing something like that, like the fellow you talk to and figure out how we might be helpful to it. Anyone else have a thought? On a positive note, I watched probably many of you have seen it, a film on Octopi called Octopus My Teacher about a guy who spends an entire year visiting one octopus and developing a relationship with it, it's an amazing film. Octopus My Teacher. That's actually my octopus teacher. And that fellow's family has to be the most patient humans on earth, because, and he does something really dangerous. He is free to, you know, no tank, no anything. He's just holding his breath and going down and hanging out with the same octopus for a year. It's insane, it's beautiful. And really, I'd like impressively shot. He's a very incredibly good photographer for doing all this. And he had, there were other people who were diving with him. There's also some videos you can watch of the making of and the relationships and the producers and the woman he met who sort of fueled the whole thing. It's really interesting. Any last words before we wrap this call? Neil, please. Just a positive comment. There is a latent desire for transformative change everywhere I go. And it's currently prevented by people that think they're doing it, right? And so this is the future of markets. This is the future of insurance. This is the future of our investment. This is the redirected investment. This is everything, right? At the moment, there is no market model because it doesn't pay in the current paradigm. We have to find a way to catch the current paradigm as it falls off its plateau of complacency, right? It's sitting here thinking it's resilient and it's collapsing. So designing into the future has to say, how do we catch those that are falling off, whether it's the refugees, the migrants or others? But everywhere I go, there is a latent desire for transformative change. So change agents that can bring this sort of systemic understanding, systemic knowledge. Then there's ways forward. I think if I heard Mark's question correctly, it was around sustainable cities. The design requirements for this need to find the willing communities that already have it applied. Come back to Judy's point, where are the places where the same model could be applied globally because the climate's the same or going to be the same? Where are the models that exist now that could be transferred to somewhere that's gonna be a desert in 50 years time? And how do we get that planning? Because that's the redirection of capital investment globally. And unless somebody can get that thinking happening, nothing's gonna change because it'll be the boiling frog syndrome. So I think we're on the cusp and I really think we've got some of the tools and I'm very keen to work with anybody that can see how to land this stuff but also how to hold the big picture concepts. And it's the vertical threads through and the vertical alignment and coherence through different levels of doing through to thinking conceptualizing, which is required. And that's so lacking that capacity to hold the thread not just to do the piece. And I think online global mind can do that. And just to riff on what you said and then take us out of the call. My own, some of my images around what you just said are of the value of storytelling here. That part of what the problem is, is that anybody who's in a crisis basically sees that there's this like raging river next to them. And somebody's making some word sounds about how life is better on the other side of the river but they can't picture themselves crossing that river. They can't even imagine putting a toe into the river. And so the stories we can tell are like stones in the river like solid footholds across that torrent so that they can find their way to a different way of being a different way of living whatever else it might be. And lots of stories told around real life situations and Kuri Chiba did this thing with kids that turned them into the greenest city. That's kind of cool. We're not really, but there's a piece of that story we'd like to borrow, appropriate, adapt and implement locally. And once that happens over and over and over and over and over and then if smart people can be of service, experts on tap, not on top kind of thing, then I think we get somewhere really quickly because people can retake their sense of agency. They can start redesigning the building within these nested crises that are impinging all the time. But so one of the mental images that works really well for me is how do we put stones in that river so that people can say, other humans have crossed the river before and they're doing great. And suddenly I have a much clearer vision of what life is like over there and I'm willing to take those steps. And also, how do we put those steps closer to shore? How do we make the stones larger, metaphorically? But if the stone is slippery and out in the middle I'm not gonna try that leap. But if I only have to change my behavior a little bit to test it and taste it and I like it and then I can go to the next step, we're then we're moving. So you kind of have to make that somehow work. Thank you all for another awesome conversation. I really appreciate these very deeply. Namaste y'all, namaste right here for a while. And you'll hear more about the workshop shortly and thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks everybody, wonderful. Bye everyone. Take care. Take care, bye.