 This is the OGM call on Thursday, June 15th, 2023. Hey, everybody. Gonna turn on the captions as well. There we go. I am in Waldfort, Oregon, which is on the coast below Cannon Beach, which is sort of the direct beach that if you were to drive west from Portland to go to the beach, you'd probably go to Cannon Beach. I'm south, well south of that, but north of the dunes, like the Dunes National Park and things like that are another hour south of us. It is chilly at the beach and it has been mostly, kind of, I've been here a couple of days, it's been mostly kind of foggy and gray and hard and like this is a, it's a treat to see the horizon and be able to see what's going on here. And it's cold enough that at some point I'll probably step inside for my fallback position, so to speak. How's everybody else? Hey. What's up, Andy? What's up, Andy? Cool. Carl, are you still in your dad's place or? Is me. Are you at your dad's place? Actually, it's now my place. Ah, okay. We went to settlement the 30th, so I'm now on the family home. Congratulations. Thanks. That's great. Um, we, um, so let me talk for a second about five minute universities just to sort of cue them up or spool them up for next call or the call after, depending if we want to do a check-in call next week. But this is now kind of a common format. A bunch of years ago I sort of created this format for the retreats that I run. And it was a wing of counterbalancing long, slow discussions or salon discussions and to drop in some peppy fast presentations about stuff and also to tap into the wisdom of the group that showed up because we know stuff about stuff that nobody knows we know. And one of my favorite five minute universities from way back when was by JP Rangaswamy who told us all how to make the world's best bolognese sauce because on a trip to Italy one year, he I think was in Bologna. I'm not sure or I don't remember all the details of the story. I don't know Pete were you there at that retreat? Doesn't ring a bell? Too bad. Any of you who were raised your hand but I think he might have been, let's pretend he was in Bologna and he went every lunch and dinner he went to a restaurant and ordered spaghetti bolognese. And then he narrowed down to his favorite one and then he went and asked the chef how do you make this? And I remember the recipe involved milk surprisingly and a couple of other sorts of things. And it was just he presented it so wonderfully and these are all meant to be five minute capsules of something you know about and it could be something really important. It could be something that can help us all manage life better. It could be something as simple as how to make tea. So I was going to see how many of us would like to share in and the format is five minutes of presentation, five minutes of Q and A bounce to the next person. And so if you want to continue the Q and A just corner the person over lunch or break or whatever afterwards is the idea but it's really fast moving and it covers a lot of different things. So we'll do an OGM call in the five minute university format. I'll just create a page maybe where we can sign up for it or something like that. It could be, Bologna could lead to world peace. I don't know. And I was reflecting that Italy, I may be really wrong about this but Italy is the only country I can think of in the world where there is a cuisine, a familiar cuisine named after most of the major cities. Like we know what Florentine means. We know what Parmesan means. We know what Romana means. Like those are all Italian cities and they have characteristic cuisines that we all kind of know. Pickleball. Have you seen paddle, P-A-D-E-L? Mike, you're aware of paddle? I am, I haven't played it, just seen it. So paddle is sort of kind of pickleball meets racket ball because it's played in a court with walls and you can bounce off the walls, which adds dimensionality to it and the ferocity of play. I'll put a link in the chat for some really good like paddle finals. But ferocity does not lead to world peace. Good point. Cableball is a sport that almost anybody can pick up in about half an hour and it is impossible to smash the ball. It's designed to be slow and precise. It's about finesse and placement and teamwork. Now you're gonna have a lot of trouble making peace with the tennis players. Well, Dinebreed. So we don't have to worry about them so much. That's good. Hi, Kate. Hi. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. My aunt is presenting, but she installed something that's getting in the way of her joining. Is there a meeting? The meeting URL? Passcode ID and passcode. So, oops. So if you give her this link, it should include the passcode. So that should get her in here. Great, great. I don't know what she installed. Oh, good. Thanks. All right, thank you. You're very welcome. I think it's changed the passcode to pickleball. In the interest of world peace? Yes, exactly. Oh, man. So, while that is happening, so any questions about five minute university? Anybody have a, I did a five minute university once at one of these events about tea. Just what I know about teas and the difference between black tea, green tea, white tea, infusions versus teas, how to brew tea, a couple of these really simple things. It was like quick and fun. There is questions, thoughts, topics you'd like to talk about. And I was talking with Pete. I tried to find a timer for Zoom so that I could set a timer up so that everybody can see the clock tick down. And I found a mediocre timer that only puts a timer in my window. So that when somebody's speaking, you wouldn't really be able to see the timer, et cetera. If anybody has a better timer solution for Zoom, LMK. Because it's not, wasn't it working right for me, anyway. No questions? Cool. Let's shift over to the topic then, which kind of needs Mark Caranza to be in the room for, although we're recording and we could then do it later, but I'm tempted to not go into Indigenous wisdom and ways of knowing because we won't have Mark's energy and spirit in the room while starting that conversation. So, oh, it would have been so cool if Mark had joined right at that moment, as I was saying that. Kate, you're muted. There we go. My aunt who's presenting says he's not coming, but I'm gonna text him. He's already said good morning to me, so maybe I can get him on here. Excellent. Sorry, and you're talking about Mark? Yeah, Mark Caranza. I did not know you were connected to him, so my apologies. I didn't understand that that's where you were, you all were coming from. I am very happy. And so we will kill some time and tell some jokes until he shows up. Thank you. And Janet, hi. Hi. I'm glad you made it into the Zoom. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, looking forward to it. I enjoyed it last time. This will be my second time. Excellent. So anyone have a burning topic? Anyone wanna talk about the Vision Pro headset or fires in Canada somehow darkening the skies of America or... Anything but the Trump indictment. Or that thing. I have a short topic, but it's rude to bring it up. So I'll bring it up anyway, but I apologize for being rude, I guess. Blue Sky is yet another micro blogging platform that kind of got started by Jack at Twitter. And then it might have ended up being a haven for Twitter refugees instead of Mastodon, except it wasn't quite ready. It's still in limited release invite only. I had been resisting the temptation to accept an invite from one of my friends because it's like, who needs more micro blogging? One must kind of kill Twitter for me. It's like, whatever. I'm on Mastodon, I'm on Noster. They're great. I miss my old Twitter that had the news of the world. By the way, there's a great, I'll put it in chat later. There's a great blog post by, and kind of an OGM person from Fellowship the Link. Aram actually explains pretty well why Twitter was as awesome it was. He said it wasn't a mic, it was an amp. Anyway, I finally accepted the invite from one of my friends. Yes, please, I have too much work to do this week, so I need something to work across Nate yet again and got on Blue Sky. Blue Sky ends up being very nice. I like it. It looks almost exactly like Twitter. It's very young and new. It's in the honeymoon phase. Everybody's cute and talking about how much they enjoy not being on Twitter, basically, without mentioning Twitter. There's not a lot of there. There's not enough people yet, I think. But some of the architectural stuff, I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the architectural stuff is actually really well done. And as an example, it's easy to swap in something based on your domain name instead of a handle. And it's going to work everywhere on Blue Sky, any distributed server, decentralized server, not just, Mastan doesn't really work that way, which is frustrating. Another thing is it's got an algorithmic feed, except it's not one algorithm. It's whatever algorithm you want. So there's a marketplace of algorithms for algorithmic feeds. And they're kind of plug and play. A few of them are written by the Blue Sky devs and a bunch of them aren't. And they are weird things like all news articles or all gay or all the people who want to be in the gay part of Blue Sky or some more complicated things like posts mostly from your friends and friends of people you follow and people they follow and more bias towards the interesting posts of them. So people are playing around with the algorithms and coming up with some good ones and different than the official one. So the whole modularity of the thing actually works. And I'm very pleasantly surprised to see that. So super frustrating that they don't have enough invites. I guess it's maybe kind of a good thing to grow it slowly, but it's something to look forward to, I think. And I'll let y'all know when I have invites which I don't expect for a while. So which part of that was ruined or out of step? It's like, thanks Pete. Thanks for virtue signaling that you got into this in-group and we can't because you don't have any invite codes. You probably have a whole bunch and you're not sharing them. It's rude, I think, but y'all know me and it's a report from some part of the world that you'll get to at some point. And I guess the reason I bring it up maybe is partly because I was like struck, like surprised. Oh my God, somebody can actually kind of like design a system and that might actually not suck. We could have a longer discussion, maybe a five minute university, why Mastodon is great and why it really, really, really sucks. That sounds cool. And I had gotten to the point with Mastodon. Mastodon is kind of like almost good enough, you know? It's like, okay, I guess we can limp along with this thing. It's got a lot of structural problems. Sociologically and partly technically, but mostly sociologically. And I was like, okay, well, I guess we're stuck with something that's twice as good as Twitter on its best days and like a hundredth as good as Twitter on its worst days. Blue Sky seems to be much more in the middle of that. It's like, this'll be maybe the good parts of Twitter without, I wouldn't say without the bad parts. It's gonna have bad parts of Twitter, but it'll be also tunable so that you can just grab kind of the chunk that you want instead of having to take the whole thing. Is there a desktop app? Part of my problem with Blue Sky is that it's only on my phone and I just don't pick up and use my phone that way. It's got a fine web version. Oh, good. I will need to find that. We have comments from Doug and Mike and then we'll switch because Mark has joined us. We will switch to the topic at hand. Well, I was just going to come up with another topic but that's now passed because Mark is here. I am afraid that is true. Why am I here? Pardon? I got a phone call saying that I need to be here and I was gonna basically eat breakfast, but okay, I'm here. My apologies, Mark. I sent out the OGM invite saying that we were gonna pick up the topic that you had talked about, indigenous wisdom. And so I thought you were here knowing that that was the case. Sorry, I've been busy this week with medical stuff, but okay, I'll stay here. Cool, and so now I don't understand what Janet is presenting, but I'd love to know. But before we do that, let's empty the queue and see what Mike was about to say, maybe about Blue Sky. No, it's not about Blue Sky. I was gonna be a little bit rude too and just ask a selfish question. I'm doing a lot of work on digital public infrastructure. Some people use the phrase digital public goods. If anybody knows anybody, they respect on that topic or have thought about, written about, spoken about, let me know. It's more about public goods. Digital public good is a phrase that Omidyar has been using. The United States State Department, particularly its development agencies are using that as an umbrella term for things that governments are doing to stimulate the growth of open infrastructure, not just for e-government, but for other purposes. And the classic example is what Estonia did for its own citizens for e-government, but the more important one by far is what India is doing with the India stack. And the three layers are Adhar, which is the digital identity layer. UPI, which is the universal public infrastructure layer. And then a layer for data sharing and data protection. The long term is DEPA, Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture. That's the least worked out. It hasn't really been implemented very widely and there's a lot of unanswered questions about it. But the whole idea is to do more projects like the internet was in 1985 when government got in there and built this network for one community and then everybody else could build on top of it. And if I may, that was beautiful and wonderful. And the answer I didn't know I needed. Thank you. Could you say a little bit more since you're sitting, since you sit in Washington sometimes about public good versus the commons or like private good or? Yeah, well, the phrase digital public good is being used for 101 different things. And it's most people working in the policy area have kind of shied away from that just because every time you use that phrase somebody thinks of something else. And because when you say public good it automatically prejudges the situation and says, okay, this will only be provided by government because it's a public good and otherwise not provided for the debate over digital public infrastructure is how does government do just enough? How do you stimulate a whole lot of investment from universities, from governments, from individuals and yet get it all working together? So that again, like the internet the government came in, built this network it had some anchor tenants and a whole bunch of universities and federal labs and then everybody said, whoa, look at this and everybody connected. So that's what the theory behind digital public infrastructure is and the reason they say public infrastructure rather than public good is because then you focus on the foundation not on the apps and you acknowledge that infrastructure is not just built by public institutions maybe funded. But anyway, that's I'm walking into I also want to apologize I have to leave in about 25 minutes but anybody who cares about DPI or wants to learn more you can also go to the Carnegie website and type in digital public infrastructure and you'll see some interesting pieces on what India is doing. Have you talked to Ethan Zuckerman? Yes, of course. Okay. He's the top most source that I can find on the subject right away. Right. Cool. Anybody who has leads or comments put them in the chat for a while send Mike an email or whatever else. Mark, do you have your hand up on this topic? Excellent, please jump in. Yeah, so gosh, around 2010 to 2009 I was brought to Chinatown, DC to basically help out with Microsoft's data mart. And basically they were hoping to provide free data resources, mainly from the UN but also NBA stats, NFL stats for sale and being an employee of the Internet Archive I'm also kind of wondering about, okay, how other groups like the EFF, like IPFS are basically fitting into this notion. And it's a notion I haven't really paid attention to but as part of the quantified self group everybody was talking about how can we basically take our homemade CPAP data or diabetes data and share it for the public good because we're all taking data in these completely different formats. How do we basically, yeah, create a data commons where we can kind of predictively get that. And when I talk to scientists and people who contribute to the data of science it's always kind of like, yeah, data quality is it's just too tough to basically take our data and reformat it so somebody else can use the data because there's so many tweaks of data quality along the way. Anyway, it's an interesting thing I'll certainly take a look at it but it just seems like there's so much where the audience is so broad for any particular tiny little slice of data to really kind of be spread across a public good. Well, that's why you start with subsets, right? And it may be that the oceanographic data sets are used to pull the oceanographic community together and to make sure you have good quality data you have provenance and you can see who's using it. I mean, that's part of it is you wanna build in I call it mutually assured disclosure. I'll do the effort, I'll put my data up there and I'll try to explain where it comes from. If you tell me when you use it and I can see that it's valuable and I can understand, I get feedback on how to make it more valuable. So that's the mutually assured disclosure part of it that has been missing. Either all the data gets sucked into a giant data ocean owned by Amazon or one of the data brokers and they use it for whoever knows what or I sit on the data myself and maybe give it to some friends who ask me politely. And the whole idea of DEPA is to empower data users and empower the people whose data is contributed to this architecture. But again, since people are just getting up to speed on this, you don't wanna talk about it now but I will put a very good reference. I already put one reference out there. We had the leader of the whole effort in the Indian government came to Washington and gave a wonderful hour long discussion about this. It was a fireside chat and I'm adding another one that just came out last week or last month from my colleagues in India on sort of high level, what makes this useful and what kind of principles do you want to embody in the architecture to make it work? But again, I really had a one sentence question which was, hey, has anybody heard about this and who's interested? So thank you, this is great. Mike, thank you very much. This is why I love this group. Thank you. Love that. Janet, this may be a brain fart on my part but I think you came ready to present something but I am not sure what you were ready to present. Would you, would you? Well, okay. So let me explain just a little bit. So, okay, this is my second meeting. So I was under the impression that we were gonna have quite a number of these five minute universals. Which was, I don't know if I wanna stick my baby out there if nobody else is, you know that kind of thing. But anyway, I practiced it a couple of times last night and I couldn't get it down to five minutes. But I mean, I don't know. It'd probably be prudent to hang out with the group for a few months before I really start contributing. I don't know, but I don't know, I can. And it could be amusing, we'll see. So I sent a note last night to the OGM Google group which you may not be on saying, gosh, I didn't do a good job of suiting the five minute university session, postponing it and saying, gosh, let's do that in a future call. And instead, let's turn our attention to Indigenous ways of knowing. And the question Mark had brought up but Mark was unaware that that was the shift that made. So we have an interesting situation here where we could kind of play with what we've got. I would be very excited to hear your talk and then you would effectively be launching the five minute universities in open global line, which is pretty cool as far as I can tell. But I totally understand that you may not want to like jump out that far or whatever else. And in sort of to balance all that out, we would not worry about the five minute timer and you could go over for a while and we would all like be totally groovy with that because you're the test pilot. Okay, well, you know, so this is a presentation. So I guess I don't mind doing it. And it's a presentation that or at least a kind of a pared down present version of it that I did for a conference in Santa Barbara at a permaculture conference. And the people that were in charge of it became interested in it after finding my book. And so I wrote a book called Recycle Everything, Why We Must, How We Can. And it's pretty short, you know, like an hour read, let's say or something. But I think that it embodies the ideas that would be needed to actually recycle everything. And it's, gee, maybe almost two decades old now. But I think it still holds water. And so I can without taking too much time so we can get around to the indigenous portion. If you want me to, I'll get started. I would love that, everybody else good with that. And since it's a five minute university and five minutes of Q&A, we'll be through in 10 minutes. And then we can shift. There we go. I'm excited to hear what you have to say. Okay, well, let's give it a try. Okay, hopefully you can see this. Yes. Okay, all right, so here we go. Recycle everything. Let me see our presentation mode. Yeah, can we really recycle everything? Yes, we can. Here's how. Recycling everything. Let's see, I gotta move some of this stuff here. So in this presentation, we're gonna see what's needed to make it happen. We're gonna dump current assumptions that prevent change, take a trip into the world of industry and science and explore breakthrough ideas. I'm Janet Unruh, I live in Portland, Oregon. And I've been an instructional designer for 30 plus years, manufacturing industry for 10 of those years. I have a master's of engineering and technology management from Portland State University. And I wrote this book. And so my journey was that I began looking for truly sustainable systems. Didn't find any, decided to design some and finally wrote the book. So what is the problem we're trying to address? Well, the earth is finite. We're using up its resources rather rapidly. Landfills and waste are burgeoning. And so let's just have a look at the current linear production consumption system. Okay, I'm sure you all know this. Let's just have a little quick look. So there's the raw materials extractors, the primary processors, part suppliers, producers or otherwise known as manufacturers, distributors, retail outlets, consumers. And finally, at the end of the line is the landfill. In some cases there are certain products that get remanufactured and where I worked, there was some, but ultimately in pretty much all these cases, things just wind up going into the landfill ultimately. And so the pressures on industry, the cost and the supply of raw materials are two of the risks in the SWAT calculation. And so raw material prices and supply problems at least are perceived to be increasing, which will just take that top one, the aluminum. It's perceived in these survey respondents that the price increase will be a threat as well as supply problems. And so the question is, can materials keep on flowing? And there are impacts on supply, such as price fluctuations, speculation, decreasing quality, lower grades and so on. And the one at the bottom, the dependency on oil and petrochemicals for transportation, for processing, for energy. These are all pressures on industry. So how much do we have left of the world's resources? Well, okay, some time back, there wasn't audit. I haven't found a more recent one, but this one was done by Armand Reller and Dr. Thomas Gradle at Yale. And their representation looks like this, which is maybe a little difficult to read. But these are some of the representative at the time that they calculated the number of years to exhaustion for various types of raw materials. And so recycling is an urgent matter. And currently the burden of recycling falls on consumers, local governments and concerned nonprofits, all of whom are at the end of the process. And so what do we mean by recycling? There's a lot of different terms for recycling and I just wanna clarify what I mean by recycling. And so let's take up-cycling. Up-cycling is when waste products are used to make new consumer products, such as perhaps if you like a picture frame made out of M&M wrappers or things like that. Down-cycling is the use of waste products to make like fillers or fuel. And but then again, after the second use, they are discarded. There's free-cycling, there's blended recycling. And by that, mainly, if you have such things as recycled aluminum cans, they have to be, their quality has to be bolstered with additional raw materials. And so what do we mean by real recycling? So none of those are real recycling. So real recycling means reusing materials to make the same products again and again. And this is the kind of recycling I wanna look at in this presentation. So what are we to take to recycle everything? So first of all, let's look at sustainable systems. Once a thing, here's what I believe. Once a thing can be imagined, it can be engineered. So reforming the system, let's look at it. So current efforts to reform the production consumption system focus on reducing the flow of material through the system by either slowing it down or decreasing the amount. And so what about redesigning the system? Here it is again. So what we would do to it is we would eliminate the beginning and the end stages and modify some of the roles and add a couple of other roles. And now we're gonna put it into the circle. So that's what we mean by sustainability. It has to flow in a circle. And so here's a little explanation of how it's gonna work. So the materials processor, no longer processes, raw materials, but also re, or I should say, ideally reprocesses recyclable materials. The new parts are made of reprocessed materials and the producer uses the new parts and parts from used products. Distributors take on the additional role of the collector. They lease products to the consumer and test products and lease them to secondary markets. Consumers lease the products and return them. And the disassembler, this is an interesting one, I think, they disassemble used products and send as is reusable parts to the producer and the used parts broker. They send parts that can't be reused to the materials processor. The used parts broker sells used parts to new parts suppliers and producers and sells the non-usable parts to the materials processor. So that completes the circle. So that would in turn entail extraction phasing out, landfills to stop growing, consumers lease products, producers manage their materials and track them throughout the cycle. And there could be new jobs and the system could become sustainable. And so one little distinction I just wanna make is in the case of, I call it organic, but what I mean, like take these chairs, for example, one would not paint them with paint or other types of varnishes or whatnot because that causes them not to be composted. So things that are compostable should be treated as such and not spoiled if you like with different coatings or treatments. So what would it take to recycle everything? Part two, recyclable materials. Here's where it gets fun to. So recyclable materials are critical to recycling everything and we have to back up all the way to the molecules. So there's been a lot of work done in it so far. Of course, it hasn't been applied quite yet. So requirements are key. So there's requirements already, of course. So if you need to have a hard plastic to serve as a housing for laptops, et cetera, you have your requirements. It has to be durable, washable, okay, maybe not black, but it has to be let's target 100% recyclable. So how can it work? So the product design would need to work very closely with material engineering and material engineering would then work with a, would write a reprocessing plan, namely the requirements for it. And then that would in turn be implemented by facilities and equipment. And so some examples of reprocessing can be, and this is something that has to be coordinated and not just done like an afterthought, it has to be done as part of the development process as to what type of reprocessing you're gonna use that's appropriate, but using heater, cold, electromagnetism, shredding, microwaves, et cetera, fusion torch. I just have been reading about that recently, programmable manner. And let's take, for example, here's one about shredding. So this company, Result Technology, they reprocess all this type of circuit boards and electric stuff. They basically put it into a centrifugal force and shred it and the output is these various compounds here. And of course, there's probably quite a bit of waste as well. All right, let's look at the design for disassembly. This is the third main part of the system. So here again, we've got material engineering and product design. And now the product design has to work very closely with facilities and equipment to design a disassembly plan. So you have the assembly plan and then you also have to have the disassembly plan. And so you have to write those requirements and then those requirements get sent over to facilities and equipment so that it can be implemented. Oops, the disassembly process has to be automated. All the joins between parts have to be reversible. The parts have to be recoverable. The materials have to be separable. And of course, the disassembly and reuse must be cost effective. Now here's an example that was done in the university, the technical university in Berlin where they set up a demonstration disassembly plant for such things as refrigerators. I mean, if you can see them in there, whoops. There's, I believe that's a washing machine. And so they actually took finished products and afterwards set up this disassembly process. Okay, and last of all, and this is the kind of we're getting to the end, resources are finite and must be managed. This is part of a new mindset that we need to have. Everyone has to adapt to a closed system for handling materials. Consumers would lease products and producers would need to manage materials and track them through the system. Well, okay, so we've got it all. And so if you want more detail, I've got my book, got it right here. And basically it talks more about the projections of raw material shortages, our strategic supply in this country and more detail in diagrams. That's it. Now that I do, did I get it in eight minutes this time? No, it was 12. Oh, sorry. 11 or 12 somewhere in there. I wasn't timing perfectly, but you went over by a little bit, but it was great. I really loved it. And we're gonna switch immediately to five minutes of Q and A. So at 8.45, we will switch topics again. Doug has a question for you. Okay. Yeah, I think this is quite admirable, but I think there's a real problem. And that is recycling is very energy intense. And that energy is gonna be produced under the current conditions by oil and coal. So it seems to me that puts us in a really difficult situation. You know, what's interesting is I just was reading this curious book that I just got. And this is actually a paper that was written in 1969. And they have solved the problem through the use of a fusion, what they call a fusion torch. And of course they want to use nuclear energy in different forms. And so realizing that energy is gonna be a problem for just about everything, not only recycling. That would be their solution would be to use, and they wanna use a fission instead of fusion, instead of fission, nuclear energy to accomplish all this. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's pie in the sky, but I don't know, I think we're gonna have to do something. Would that address your question, Doug? Well, I mean, using a fusion energy to do the recycling leaves out the fact that the energy that's produced by nuclear power has to be distributed somewhere in the factories that are doing the recycling. And those factories and those processes is gonna be run by energy. Okay, so it's coming from the nuclear power plant. But first of all, that's on long ways in the future time wise. And second, it's also an energy intense process because the nuclear plant has to be hooked up to something. So there's a lot of infrastructure costs. We have very little time for Q&A. So Doug, I'm gonna interrupt you and go to the next person. Thank you for that. Please get in touch with Janet if you want to keep going. Janet, could you unshare your presentation so we can see everyone better during the Q&A? And let's go to Gild and Paz. Yep. Janet, thank you for the densely packed story. Along lines with Doug is saying, I'm much more interested in the upstream solutions in what companies do, how products are designed, how they're manufactured, are they designed for durability or short life, product take back systems, extended producer responsibility policies that says that the entity that produces the problem has to pay for it. Not the consumer has to deal with recycling. And we see a primitive version of that in the bottle bill, bottle deposit legislations. But we did a project for one client, a very large manufacturing company where we found that a product take back system had the potential of doubling their global revenue. So like huge financial incentives rather than the end of life, kind of put a bandaid on it strategies that most recycling has been for so long. So I would love to see more of that in a future presentation. I think that would really enrich what you're doing here. Lots to say about all this stuff, but time is short. Thank you. Thanks, Gil. Ken. Oh, sorry, Klaus. Yeah, along the same lines of cost. The data is upfront costs involved in the design and in potentially the reconfiguration of sourcing raw materials. So companies have strenuously avoided adding cost. So Gil just mentioned the bottle bill, for example, that thing in California is ridiculous. I mean, there's no pickup. You don't get your money back. You know, I've, here in Oregon, it's pretty well regulated. They have separate recycled posts in California. That's just not the case. So that's just one example. So there is a cost involved. And in order to build a platform, you know, a playing field here that levels the game for everyone, you would need regulations. You would need to have a regulatory floor that compels companies to do this. So everybody has the same cost foundation. So how do you see that happening? How do you see the companies deal with the cost implications of using a circular economy? Well, I actually think that the pressures that come about when certain raw materials are increasingly costly to extract, when that cost becomes greater than the cost to recover, that that's when you're gonna see the change. We're not there yet. You know, and that's when I think the interest is gonna start to be generated. So it's always like, you know, when the cost, when the pain is worse, you know, to do what you would keep on doing what you're doing rather than to change course. And I mean, it's not, I don't even know if regulation would help, although I'm sure it would, but it could be just eventually, you know, to be ready with a solution when, you know, the extraction becomes too costly. It's not no longer cost effective compared to the new solution. Does that work? Does that make sense? Klaus? Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate, right? Because we don't really have a great deal of time. So there needs to at least be an on-ramp towards these conversions. And I don't see that really. I mean, the attempts that have been made to create an on-ramp like a bottle bill, for example, have been very fragile because the industry continues to negate any attempt by the government to regulate these issues. And I mean, we're just running out of time. So I just don't think this will be fast enough. Which is why I like this article where artificial intelligence may help us, right? Because maybe we can go from intelligence into the process to where it just flows without adding a lot of cost. We have gone over our five minutes by two minutes now, but we did go over at the beginning, but we're eating time from the other topics. So, Pete, I don't think the question you're about to ask is brief. Can you ask it very briefly? And Kate was in the queue, same thing. It's very brief and not even a question. Janet, I just wanted to say it for, I think maybe it's obvious, but thank you. That was a wonderful presentation. The engagement you see is maybe a little bit skeptical, but it is an expression of our love for your presentation. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it needs to be kind of punched around a bit so it can be improved. Yeah, yeah, we do that. Thanks. Thank you. I didn't think you were going there. Kate, did you want to say what you were going to say a moment ago and then we'll switch topics? Yeah, I just think there will be a lot more pressure in the future. This book will be a lot more popular in 200 years. We won't have a choice, but come back to this book, right? Yeah. Which is, which is, which is unfortunately how it's unfortunately how history works a lot. It's like we don't actually move until the stresses are so large that we can't avoid moving. And then we look back and we're like, oh gosh, so many people were telling us we had to do this. So maybe we can all conspire to figure out how to move things faster toward that. Janet, thank you so much. That was, that was really lovely. And you were brave and wonderful to jump in as the lead five-minute university. I think you have demonstrated that the challenge of nailing five minutes is quite a challenge. It is. And we will see how we go moving forward. I was at the, I was at, on the Stanford campus years ago, B.J. Fogg, who teaches a captology, basically how to get people to do stuff, ran a course where he had his students present in two and a half minutes. They had each team had two and a half minutes to present their results. And the way he, the way he figured it all out was he had a student with a glockenspiel at the front of the room. And at the two and a half minute mark, that student had to start hitting the glockenspiel. When the audience heard the glockenspiel, we had instructions to applaud loudly. And you can't talk over loud applause. And it worked. It was like all, and all those students were like on it and really nailing it. So I don't know that we'll do that here, but thank you for that. And with that, I'm going to switch to Mark with my apologies that we have taken up so much of the time of this call. We could move the topic also, if we find that we're like in a, in a good warm place at the end of our time, we can also always pick up the topic separately. But I was going to ask you, Mark, just to restate your, the position you stated earlier, your discomfort as just the starting provocation for this conversation. I'm sure. I'll start with a notion of history. Basically, we all start as two cells that join together. All animals start as a microscopic bit. And then we grow to the size and this wide and this deep or crazy. And there are, the humanity, what is that notion from big history? We have stored knowledge and transmitted knowledge through the ages. And people who come before us our ancestors are responsible for great extinctions and for warming the planet, for mass human cannibalism and death. And my heritage being from Toltec or Aztec or Mayan, I had this marvelous reveal when I read something called the Four Agreements. And Toltec wisdom from the ancients. And it's like, wait a second. Toltec wisdom was killing 4,000 slaves on a weekend. What is this Toltec wisdom? Repackaged as the Four Agreements and multiple things from Abruja, Abrujo, a witch, a wise man from the Toltecs. I actually have been reading a number of indigenous books suggested by a cousin of mine. And scale is interesting when we basically have something like the internet. What is the indigenous wisdom of the internet? I mean, these things take time to figure out. That's about it. I mistrust the Plains Indians who may have had a sustainable history of being very integrated with their environment when that's applied to the city of Chicago. Thanks. Mark, I think that's perfect. That's a really nice sort of rolling off point for where we are. And I appreciate you're sharing that with us. I'm going to pass the con to Kevin or to start the soft on this road. Yeah, I've been working with some indigenous folks about coming to our neighborhood economics and kind of entering the marketplace that is there for economic justice. But they have a condition that they don't like exits, that they don't see if it's working. Why would you stop? And so there's a deal that a friend negotiated with Eastern Bancherike, which are the ones here that hit up in the hills while everybody was sent to Oklahoma. So they're somewhat less trusting than a lot of tribes because they are the ones who hit up in the hills from the genocide. So anyway. And the town of Franklin and they agreed on a historical heritage, tourist attraction, local attraction that would tell the story of the tribe in that place and the story of the white people in that place. And so to get there in the principle of no exits they had to agree on a common future. And from what I'm told that that hasn't been done in the previous 400 years where a tribe and a white, in this case, a municipality agreed on a common future and a view of the past. I mean, you also have to talk about the recent unpleasantness of the Trail of Tears, that whole kind of thing. And so it's a story of the future, but it really they had to agree on a common future in order to make it work. And there's a whole lot of understanding on both sides where we have to do that. It was pretty cool. Kevin, can you say a tiny bit more about no exits? What does that mean? Well, that means when you do a business, you do exits like prep it for sale, right? I mean, you make money from a business by selling it, either to the public or to somebody else. And so, because you can extract, if you build a good business, you can extract a lot more time of sale. You make money when you sell it, and then you have the money. But they don't like deals that where either side would exit. So you have to imagine the future together linked. So that's the only way you can do it. Sharing the land together. We are all relations. It puzzles me often that capitalism hates stability. It's very strange, but I had an insight recently that speculators love beta volatility. They hate predictability. Way back in the day, IBM had really good CFO, and they had really stable earnings. They were managing everything to have total predictability. The stock market despised that and did not value or reward that at all. Stock market loves tipping things. And with that, I want to route us back toward indigenous historic violences and other sorts of things that trouble Mark because we could easily get into a conversation about the evils of capitalism, but that's sort of not the topic at hand. What, can we head back in toward Mark's provocation, please? Anyone who'd like to step in? Please, Ken. I would like to step in. So putting a quote in the chat from Taishinyaka Portas-Santok. Thanks to Doug Carmichael, I got a copy of the knowledge, how to reboot civilization if there's a massive fall, and it really strikes me that probably no one on this call would know how to actually live off the land if everything failed, if we had a radical discontinuity and suddenly the supply lines are gone. We are so dependent upon this massive system that should it break down, most of us would probably die. And so Tyson talks about indigenous, in his book he says, indigenous knowledge is the application of memories of living. Sorry, am I? Sorry. Gil, can you mute? Thanks. Indigenous knowledge is the application of any of the memory of living to improve past, present, or future, sustainably on a land base. And I don't think any of us is doing that because we're all Northern, most of us think we'll hank your Northern European, but most of us are North American, we're living inside of a very abstracted extractive system. And I just went on etymology online and found out that abstraction means withdrawal from worldly affairs, to drag away, detach, pull away, divert, and extraction is the process of withdrawing or obtaining. We live in an extractive and abstracted world that really is not coupled to the land base anymore. So to me, that means we've lost our indigeneity and how do we recover that? How do we, and this goes directly to Janet's earlier presentation around recycling everything. That's living sustainably on the planet. So I'm really curious how can people like us, us here on this call, learn to recover being Indigenous. What's gonna be required in our thinking, in our mindsets, our paradigms, as well as the change of behavior that will come from that to live inside of a system that's been going on for four billion years quite well until we came along and started to mess things up. Thank you. Thank you, Ken. Mark, you have a license to interrupt at any moment. Should you want to respond to any of these kinds of things, that will look like just jump in, and otherwise I will just manage the queue and go through the people who'd like to talk about this stuff. Thank you, Jerry. I certainly understand the where Ken's coming from and I go back to the notion of history. If I had wisdom from my great, great, great grandfather then I would have this continuity of my ancestors in a way that I'm, you know, the way that, you know, our history developed, you know, rent has taken over from oral history. I don't have that oral history tradition that comes from being in one place for a long time. I was born in New Jersey. New Jersey wisdom in the 1960s, early 1960s is not gonna help me. But I certainly empathize and, you know, hear the question that Ken raises. I would love to hear, you know, comments on that. Thank you, Ken. Thank you so much. I will point out that one of the famous trackers, I think Kevin knows him, Tom Scott or something. His early learnings and lessons were in the Pine Barons of New Jersey. And a lot of what he does is totally connected to the earth and it's funny because my notions of New Jersey shifted when I read his book. Pardon? Hey, Steph. Kevin, do we have noise? No, there we go. It's fun being host. Pete. Mark, thank you for the provocation. And I wish we had longer to talk about the whole topic because I think the provocation makes a space which is very rich and interesting but kind of also excludes a, you know, kind of the positive benefit of whatever we might call indigenous wisdom. And the thing that I wanted to contribute kind of was that I don't have a lot of experience with indigenous wisdom but I have some second hand listening to people like Ken or Wendy Elford or I forget the guy's name who spent a lot of time in South America. But one of the kind of the gleaning's I've got from listening to the second hand to those people is that part of indigenous wisdom is just context, contextualization. So Western people, European colonist energy is I'm gonna storm in and terraform this place so that it's like England, you know, wherever I came from. And a lot of indigenous wisdom is just hey dude, you know, we've been living here for 10,000 years we kind of know how the thing works. Why don't you like work with the thing, how it works rather than just flattening the whole thing and trying to make the best copy of England that you can. If we talk about colonialism, we'll be here for a while. Thank you. Great point, Doug. Sorry, Doug B. So there's a distinction between wisdom and consciousness and I think the indigenous that I've crossed hands with don't speak from wisdom, they advocate for a consciousness. And I just put a link in the chat that's Kogi's sort of expressing that the essence of that and a colleague of mine is working with an association that hosts them when they travel through Europe. And I really, I think it's really easy to get lost in knowledge and history and conduct and behaviors and the actions of ancient cultures as historical data and as horrific as behaviors as might have happened has nothing to do with the consciousness, the essential consciousness lesson that we have in the history of ancient culture. The essential consciousness lesson that the indigenous present-day indigenous tribes share are advocating for as voices. And I think the fundamental in it is that each individual is responsible for how that consciousness informs how they conduct them, how I behave, what I choose to do and not do, the way I choose to relate and not relate. And that sort of present moment where the rubber meets the run, the way I choose to relate and not relate. And that sort of present moment where the rubber meets the run and it's really easy to get sucked down all these rabbit holes because we have this thing on our shoulders that has this abstract thinking ability that keeps everybody distracted from the moment. And somebody published a shared a graph of North Atlantic ocean temperatures for the last 40 years and there was a range of all of these chartings, annual chartings and then this year disconnected from the mass of previous years, the line is up here and as of this week, like now, almost vertical. And it was breathtaking. Like from January to today, a one degree increase or a half a degree, it was a full half a degree increase in six months. Could you share that when you find it again? Yeah, I have the lead. I'm skeptical of anything that dramatic. Yeah, well, yeah, so was I until I saw it. Yeah, but yeah, no, absolutely. I'll put the link in the chat. But so I really think it's really Indigenous consciousness rather than Indigenous wisdom. And with that, I'm complete. Thank you, Doug. Gonna pause for a second to let that sink in. What I'm interested in is Catholic consciousness as an example. So Meister Eckhart, Hildegard de Bingen, the current Pope, whom am I to judge? Or actually, who am I to judge? When it comes to the consciousness of LGBT people in society, I'm wondering how being steeped in this 3,000, 2,000 year tradition that came from my parents and people who come from the Jewish tradition or a longer tradition, and they have a consciousness as well. And I'm trying to, certainly as a polygot religious person reading Pema Shodran and reading Titchhnot Han, oh, Titchhnot Han, certainly the adaptive consciousness that I get from being able to survey the whole richness of human wisdom. I'm kind of wondering about how to segment off one kind of wisdom, calling it Indigenous as opposed to the entire wisdom traditions of humanity. That's a different question that kind of comes back to me as someone with an Indigenous heritage, but I don't have the Indigenous wisdom that came from my grandmother, who was an orphan Indian in 1880 in Aguascalientes, Mexico, because she did not get wisdom. She got badness from the colonial interference. Please respond, Doug, if you can, because this really interests me. How can we take wisdom and apply it in our consciousness in the moment, but I'm not, I don't have that connection with Indigenous wisdom. I would have to go get it from either you or from books or from a structure that passes down the history. Thank you. Doug B, if you'd like to reply, please step in. Yeah, so wisdom is of the mental body. Elementally, it's an air. And consciousness is across all five bodies. So it's earth, water, fire, air, and space. It's multi-sensorial, multi-experience of dimensional, intrinsic to things that live into human beings. If I can interrupt you, Doug, it's more a question of how do we get it? So if we know what it is, how do me, how does Ken, how does Doug C, or Klaus, or Janet, or Kate get this consciousness? Yeah, and so all I can speak from is my own personal experience because it's a living dynamic thing. It's in verbs, not nouns. So probably the biggest single factor to shifting my own awareness and consciousness in these ways has been about letting go of attachments and letting go of beliefs and letting go of everything being centered around knowing, around mental, intellectual, abstract, academic, data, facts, instrumentalities, systems, frameworks, models, all of these intellectual constructions. It is not insane that I am not saying discarding all of that. I am not passing a judgment on all of that. I am not knocking all of that. I'm not negating that there is value or maybe a value in application from all of that. But all of that is not everything. And there are whole other domains and there's no way to tune in, sense into, feel into and shift into a different orientation unless those things that act as anchors and constraints, that take reality and reduce it to a perspective and a view and an orientation are lifted. And that's not a learning or going after or doing kind of thing. That's a discretion and discernment and opening up to an alternative way of thinking about things, of ways of seeing things that are not informed by all that and controlled and constrained. I don't know whether that helps, but that's all I got. Thank you. Yeah, I wanna get to Gil, but thank you for answering that. Go ahead, Ken. I'll be real quick before Gil. Check out of Water in the Spirit, Malodoma Sumay. He was from Burkina Faso, West African medicine man, captured by the Jesuits at age four, taken away from his village, traveled 110 miles through the jungle at age 19 to go back to his village and they wouldn't let him in because they didn't recognize him. And the elders said he can't come in, his mind has been tainted by modernity. And they eventually decided to let him in and they initiated him. And it's a harrowing story to read and that changed his consciousness in a hurry. Try being buried in the earth up to your neck overnight with, you know, I mean, that just, I get something in my body just rebelled like, no, no, no, please, no. But he describes initiation rights that he went through and some people don't make it. And there's something about these ancient rights of being told you are part of this vast universe that can wipe you out in a second. You need to be aware of the terror and the wonder. And we have as our industrialized people, no one is very close to the earth in our culture. And the earth is where all life exists. And if we're not close to the earth, we'll just be wiped away. So if you wanna change your consciousness, go do some work with some medicine people and get close to the earth. You will change your consciousness or the earth will change your consciousness. And you won't have to worry about where to find the wisdom because you'll start to think differently. Thank you, Gil, thanks for your patience. Gil, then me, my hand keeps automatically going down. I don't understand why. I've also got kind of a dicey internet connection here and who knows what's gonna happen. But let's go to Gil and then I'll step in. And, oh, by the way, in Malodoma, it means he who makes friends with others and there's an interesting backstory there as well. Makes friends with a stranger enemy. Wow. Mark, thank you so much for bringing us this topic. You know, you said before, if we started to talk about colonialism, we'd be here for a long time. I think this is a topic that invites a long time. I hope we return to this and give it the space. I find that already just in this last, what, 30 minutes, my mood has shifted, my breathing has shifted, my feeling in my body has shifted. I sense the mood in the room as different than certainly the first half of the call and then many of our calls. And there's something very inviting there that I hope we can return to. Yeah, Ken touched on one of the things I wanted to say is that, and Klaus, you mentioned this last week, when you and I were born in 1949, the world had 2.4 billion humans in it and we're now north of it. It's like more than triple, more than 50% urban. Most of us never touch the ground or walk on ground or lie on the ground or be buried in the earth. So there's this disconnect from life process that's part of the story. And I wonder about the boundaries of indigenous. I love the quote from Yonka Porta, but he comes from a lineage that has had some kind of continuous culture for what, perhaps 20, 30,000 years. Other people who we call indigenous, it might be measured in thousands of years. Some people who we call indigenous are relative newcomers to their place, to having displaced other people who are native to this place, not to put any negativity on that, but there's been transitions in human cultures and locations and places. So it strikes me that it's not only a matter of what is it, retaining memories of a life lived sustainably on a land base as part of that land base, but that last phrase strikes me as really important as part of that land base, as belonging to a place, belonging to the living world, belonging to each other, belonging to a community, having a very different sense of self and identity in relation to that community. And I've had only one experience working somewhat closely with indigenous folks in a client situation, and I'll talk about it more in another time if people are interested, but it was remarkable. There was something that I had never experienced before in the listening and the communication and the expectations there. Despite all the stresses of modernity and capitalism, colonialism, extraction and so forth, there's something that continues to carry forward how do we get it? I don't know. We're not gonna get most of us buried in the earth up to our next for a day. But I know that for me, it's been partly about listening, learning, trying to learn to listen differently, to listen at a different speed, to listen for different nuance. It's partly a matter of making a declaration to attempt to explore what it might be like to belong to the living world instead of to belong to whatever it was I thought I was belonging to my whole life or in addition to that. And so listen and declare and to inquire to just kind of ask different questions, to ask not the questions of knowledge and facts and data, but of context and relationship and again, belonging. And just one resource I'd offered to people, Gregory Bateson whose work, some of you know, was probably one of the strongest voices in the 20th century about context and connection and interconnection and relationship of stuff that we tend to carve up into little boxes and separate. And the Bateson Institute is releasing in September a reissue of Gregory's last book, Sacred Unity, which is a collection of essays. It's available from Triarchy Press, print in September, e-book is available now. And it's a Western British entry into this question that is profound and deep and I think very complimentary to SOMA and the others that we're talking and Yungaporte and the others that we're talking about here. So Mark again, thank you so much for raising this. I do hope we come back to this more. Thank you, Gil. I'll wait for Gil's comments to settle for a second. I certainly come from these questions from a Batesonian perspective and certainly Gregory Bateson's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson who talks against identity politics as opposed to either an exclusive identity or we're the Indians and you can't have any of our knowledge because you're the outsider or we're the Chicanos and you can't join us because we don't want you to eat our carnitas or, but to basically say there's an adaptive multiculturalism that basically says you join with the consciousness of I don't belong here. I do belong here at the same time. I don't know what's going on in this Persian wedding ceremony but I'm going to be adaptive and just kind of go with the flow and just listen for the context and be in the context. I suspect that Gregory would have a lot of issues with current identity politics because he was always very wary of our modern tendency to categorization and saying this, not that or this is in this box, this is in this box and seeing a much more blurry and inter twinkled world but he can't speak. And unfortunately, again, Mary Catherine Bateson died about three years ago. But Nora Bateson, his other daughter is carrying the family business with great richness and depth. They've been doing a series of webinars over the whole year. This year, last year was the 50th anniversary of Steps to an Ecology of Mind which for me was one of them, one of the real generative intersections in my life. And so International Bateson Institute, I think some of the recordings are posted, they're very... And Nora's notion of warm data is something I think Jerry has mentioned before. And I think, you know, if somebody wants to champion that or invite Nora, that would be amazing. I just would like to say that thank you, Gil. Go ahead, Jerry. Thank you. Thank you, Mark, and a couple of things. One, I was gonna take a pause also. Thank you for doing that. I think I'll do that also. Two, I'm gonna do facilitators prerogative. I love this conversation. Why don't we pick this up next week so that we can all relax for a moment and think, gosh, I'm gonna miss this conversation. We barely turned the soil. Yes, totally agree. And then I'm going to riff for a second and we're getting close to the half hour. I'm wondering, Ken, if you have found a poem, if you'd like to read it now, and then I'll step in and then we'll go as long as we want to to kind of finish the cue that we've got now. But I've got a few things I wanna put in the conversation, but I think I'll... Let me pause and go into silence. And Ken, you bring us out with a poem and then I'll step back in and then we'll go to Carl and Klaus. Sound good? Cool. Proclamation. Whereas the world is a house on fire, whereas the nations are filled with shouting, whereas hope seems small, sometimes a single bird on a wire left by migration behind, whereas kindness is seldom in the news and peace is an abstraction while war is real, whereas words are all I have, whereas my life is short, whereas I am afraid, whereas I am free despite all fire and anger and fear. Be it therefore resolved, a song shall be my calling, a song not yet made shall be my vocation, in peaceful words, the work of my remaining days. Thank you, Ken. If you or Pete would put a link to the poem. Oh, good. Mark and Pete both found it. And Stafford is fabulous. Oddly enough, the first proclamation poem I received was one with indigenous wisdom in it, a different poem. That was the first link about the Black Mountains. You wanna read it? Sure. Cook's Son is a story. Tucson is a linguistic alternative. The story in the many languages still heard in this place of Black Mountains. They are in the echo of lost forgotten languages, heard here even before the people arrived. The true story of this place recalls people walking deserts all their lives and continuing today, if only in their dreams. The true story is ringing in their footsteps in a place so quiet they can hear their blood moving through their veins. Their stories give shape to the mountains encircling this place. Laak is the story of water memories of this desert. And it's a bit longer than that, but that's how it starts. If you'd like me to finish it, it's about four more stanzas. But I think in terms of time, that was an introduction and we can go to Jerry, you had your hand up as well. But you can organize. I'm thinking maybe we might just open the next call with that as the full reading and take us in that way. That would be good. That'll give us time then. So I have to be here next Thursday. Can you? I can. Excellent, excellent. Thank you. I appreciate that. I was kind of forcing that issue, wasn't I? So I wanna put a little bit of stream of consciousness into the call partly by way of tying together some of the threads that have come up and every time somebody says something or puts something in the chat, I'm like, oh crap, right, that fits over here and so forth. So Mark, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a piece of what you're saying is, are we idealizing indigenous peoples? Are we like, we should all just stop thinking so Western and go do what the indigenous people did and you're like, well, shit, they were busy doing human sacrifice, they were doing all this violent crap. What is up with that? Why are we maybe overvaluing it or is it really that important or haven't Western religions and Western cultures also invented a whole bunch of great stuff? I think that some of your thinking is in that zone. Am I sort of, am I close with the dart? Unmuting. I was about to put in the meeting chat the other as savior, AI will save us. Oh, we hadn't even broached that wall yet. Jesus will save us. You know, Kevin Kelly and techno futurism will save us. The Indians will save us. The UFOs will save us. We, I hope that, where did he go? I don't see. Doug B, he had to drop off. He just, you'll see in the chat that he says or a war. Oh, okay. Sorry about that. But yeah, I mean, consciousness will save us. I've been raised in Orange County in the 80s with the New Age movement and the greed is good as well. I was in the same place. Tammy Baker and basically, their televangelism will save us. Trump will save us. It's a disease of the mind. Although the third patriarch of Zen says the disease of the mind is setting what I like against what I don't like. I don't like the savior stuff. All right. Well, at least Tammy was crying real tears. There we go. Yeah. You could tell me what the mascara dripping. Exactly, exactly. Kind of like Giuliani's sweat, but still. Somehow those two things are attached in my head. So let me sort of look at the little notes that I took and put in the chat. One of the things that I think happens is that cultures aren't homogenous over time. They shift, they morph. And sometimes I see some cultures that have really great seed ideas then get sort of taken over. It's like somebody eats their brain and suddenly they're very different cultures. And in my own amateur theory of history I kind of attribute that to sort of yin versus yang, male versus female. And I see very often that when matriarchal societies are taken over and become patrilineal or other kinds of societies dominated by men what we often get is violence fighting over a chokehold over the culture and other sorts of things. And I'm probably idealizing myself by saying that but there's a really interesting paper that I've mentioned a couple of times here which is like matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy. It is about egalitarianism and a bunch of other stuff. And I think men's fear is that, oh my God, we can't possibly flip the matriarchy because if they do to us what we've been doing to them we are well and truly fucked. And nobody wants that. And it's like they have no understanding of any other way to run the world but they know how crappy the top down sort of a patriarchal thing has been in different ways. And so they're fighting it. So there's this notion for me that cultures shift over time and sometimes the thing that an interesting culture did later on was really crappy and so we color it with the really crappy stuff. And I think that things like human sacrifice and all that are sort of part of that. And it could be the human sacrifice goes right back to the roots, I don't know. But I think it's interesting that we like Taoism I know only a little bit about Taoism but I know that the notion of Yin and Yang is really useful to me and I borrow it now and then to sort of explain things in my head and to other people but I know also that Taoism got incredibly ornate and ritualistic and if you really are Taoist today and you're trying to fulfill the thing you will never make it through all the prayers and rituals and things you have to do as a good Taoist and it's like that is just cruft and crust as far as I can tell. I don't know that those things really help anybody. So I'm trying to figure out I own fubarism.com what would you do if you could invent your own religion? And I'm like, how do we do a syncretist religion where we borrow belief systems that work and sort of bring them together into a new set of rituals and initiations. And we mentioned a little bit about initiations and that's how to get this indigenous wisdom thing. And it's like initiation rituals have been wiped out in most of our cultures in particular in Western culture we destroyed all the ways that older people were bringing younger people into the world and telling them, okay, good, you are now an adult and come on in and there are still bar and bat mitzvahs and there are still quinceaneras which are actually sort of weddings to Jesus. I'm not so sure I like that. But we've lost the older people have forgotten their responsibility to bring young people up into the world. That's a problem sort of layers onto the other problems. Then we talked only briefly about colonialism but it's an incredible irony to me that the two growth markets for evangelism and Catholicism in the world are Latin America and Africa. The two places that were absolutely transformed and I would say destroyed and reshaped by the colonial era that it kills me when I run into deeply devoutly Catholic Latin Americans and I grew up in Latin America I speak fluent Spanish who are more devout than anybody else I know and disconnected from whatever roots I thought I risk I loved from the cultures that they come from et cetera, et cetera. That kind of like I don't get that. It pains me to see that. And I have too much suspicion about Catholicism and what it did and how it works. That's a different conversation. I will, if I can. Yes. Try to make this short. I was interested in a young woman at a party. And she was- That sounds like a good story even as you start. So go ahead. She was blowing me off. And- Oh, damn it. Yeah. And so, I was kind of like, well, what are you into? And she goes, I'm really religious and I so, so I have the key words, tell me about your faith. And so she turns on and starts talking about it and how Catholicism is this really great thing and how she's really into sanaria. You can't use that black candle magic inside the house. So you have like a Weber grill and you light the black candle and you do your ritual in the house and you move it into the backyard so that black candle energy doesn't mess up the- Wow. You know, more than I asked for, but how Catholicism is basically voodoo and has been adapted into the Mayan. Yeah, Catholicism is, and Judaism is adaptable to a lot of different contexts. Anyway, short story, I hope. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll try to finish my little trail here because we're running over our time. And Carol, I'll try to give you a last word. So we haven't really mentioned intergenerational trauma, but I think that's what happens here is that there's a lot of bad shit that's gone down in the world. Remix, mix and remix all the stories that we've been telling and that we know about. And oh my God, there's a bunch of people who have legit beefs for stuff that happened to their ancestors from other people whose descendants are still alive and that creates all sorts of friction, but that is a delightful thing to actually fan. Those are flames you can fan and turn into identity wars and identity culture. And one of my questions here is like, hey, wait a minute, who gets to be indigenous? Don't we all have indigenous culture in the sense of we all go back to some groups, some tribes, someplace? Don't Europeans have like roots in some, there are a lot of early European groups and tribes that were very, very different from what we perceive today. They got stamped out really effectively because other people came into power and went about stamping out the Albijensians and one of the first crusades is the Albijensian Crusade. Just they were not terrible people, but they were declared heretics because what they were saying ran against the Catholic church. So there's a whole bunch of that stuff that kind of happens there, but I'm wondering like the fact of, and I may be misappropriating or misunderstanding indigeneity here, but what if we're all sort of indigenous and can find out and respect our various indigenous roots and figure out how to live together and recognizing those things and finding our way, initiating ourselves into being human together on the little fragile marble instead of being of a tribe or of a thing. And I don't mean here to wipe out long distance or long-term cultures because I think those cultures are really important. It's just that some of them include things like female general mutilation that are, I think, twists on the culture that don't, the way Mali Melcheng has been reducing FGM in West Africa is by going to the Imams in towns and saying, hey, this stuff isn't in the Quran, don't you see? And then they're like, oh, you're right. And then that village will shift. That village will stop doing FGM and it's a huge, huge change because it's a terrible practice. So stuff like that just happens in history and I'm puzzled about word to come up. Why do we do it? Men seem to fear women and I think FGM is a really good way to take it out on women and make sure that women don't keep their power in some sense. It's very weird. And then this sort of notion of belonging I think is essential and the identity culture, identity wars, identity politics are a way of saying, I belong, you don't belong, you're my tribe, you're not my tribe. And the far right worldwide is fueling these flames as hard as they can right now. In the meantime, the left in some places is trying hard to fix shit that's broken with kind of old school systems and large-scale change and some of it's working, some of it's not. And we're all ignoring the thing that Doug Carmichael's been trying to get us to talk about more often, which is like, damn, we're destroying the marble that we're standing on. We should kind of unify ourselves to get there. So I get that you regret that when you look over at the people that you're from, you see violence, I think there probably is a lot of wisdom there and the four agreements is an interesting book and there's a lot of interesting stuff there, but I think part of what we need is discernment together as a community and as individuals in community to figure out what are the good parts and what are the bad parts and how do we fuse together the good parts into something that's highly functional to build a good society together? And that's kind of the quest that I think I'm on is like, what is that? And I don't know enough, it's way above my pig grade to solve but I love the people that are in these places having these conversations together because I feel like we're making wee little bits of progress pecking that problem to pieces. Thank you, Jerry. I just would like to point out that discernment together is known as politics. No, oh my God. Oh, okay. Oh my God, that is so opposite for me. All right, because politics is manipulation. That's an interpretation. Yeah. Yeah, that's my take. And a whole lot of politics and we're at 940 almost. Exactly. Carl, please go. Yeah, Carl, off to you. Yeah, there's three. Well, there's a whole thing about perennial wisdom is something I've seen that talks about seeking that, what's that common wisdom traditions and things. There's a gospel according to Jesus, Steven Mitchell, who's an ancient language scholar and the Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff that Thomas Jefferson actually took all the copies of the Bible he had and he literally was cutting and pasting out the passages that he considered truly attributable to Jesus Nazareth and stuff and that's the beginning of that book. The other thing is a friend of mine from Fielding, Steve Hasson, he wrote the book, The Cult of Trump and he's been, his PhD was a bite model and if you do a search, he's published his dissertation and zoomed the public domain. Then I posted a link to interview from that on being site that gets into the trauma and how it spans generations. And I think that's a core part of trying to get to being in that kind of space that Doug Breitbart was talking about. And then the last thing I was seeing something about with all this FMRI stuff, I mean, it's so biased towards the Western culture. I mean, it's like, oh, this part of the brain lights up when we're angry. Well, people like from the Koji or these other things who says that they're angry or they're angry when that part of their brain lights up. So I mean, we need a whole, I mean, I think that's you know, in a whole area that needs to get explored more. Carl, thank you. Mark, you have the last word and then we will wrap this call and we convene next Thursday to continue the conversation. Yeah. Well, thank you, Jerry. Thank you, Carl. I did post the perennial philosophy I think from Wikipedia. Certainly that and all this Hussley's book, you know, there is, you know, and so many books back there are like, you know, wisdom of ancient man, something like that. Does it make me wise? Not all the time. I'd like to say hi to Kate. Hi, Kate. And her aunt Janet. Hi, aunt Janet. And we haven't heard from Michael or Hank or Scott, except in the meeting chat. And as, you know, side, what is it? Side facilitator. I'd just like to point out those things that maybe next time we'll hear from people who like we haven't heard from Kate, people who don't always speak, but thank you all. Thank you, Kate, for giving me a call and telling me get your ass over here. Yes, thank you. That worked really well, by the way. Yeah. I had to throw on a shirt, but I didn't have to throw on a shirt, but it was, how do you say part of the perennial philosophy that you don't show up in Zoom meetings without a shirt? A couple of people missed that message early in the pandemic, but it's sort of sorted out now. Yeah. Anyway, good to see Michael. It was great seeing you in San Francisco about a month or two ago. And boy, I wish we could have spent more time together. Thank you all. And yeah, this was a surprise to me and also a surprise to I think a lot of us that's like, huh, we're kind of thinking about this and this thinking together kind of worked differently from our usual thinking alone, we're presenting alone kind of, I'm not, you know, every once in a while I joke that, you know, I come here and somebody gets on a soap box and says, this is my soap box, okay, next soap box, okay, I'm on a soap box, okay, next soap box. And, you know, I'm over, how do you say? I'm oversimplifying that because that's not exactly what goes on here. People do listen. And I really think that, you know, the notion about listening differently, listening slower at a different speed. You know, the big question is how to go to the people who have, you know, in the, you know, step-wise models of consciousness, some kind of quote-unquote lower consciousness, but basically it's a different consciousness and say, we'd really like you to participate in a way that wasn't unkind, that wasn't putting someone else as the other as blame-worthy or the other as something that can be, you know, the other's not the savior, but the other's also not the demon as well. And again, I don't think any of us have the answer, but I think all those would like to find how to ask that question in a way that people can figure it out for themselves. Hey, the Democrats really don't hate us. They don't eat babies and they don't do all these things that are manipulative. Thanks, Charlie. Mark, thank you. Thank you, everybody, for being here. And until next week. Bye all. Bye all.