 This is the fourth, the first of four calls exploring governance or some word that will proxy for governance at the end of these calls, we will see how this plays out. We are recording these calls and I will post them to YouTube afterward. Turn on the captioning as well so we record a transcript. And the calls were sparked by a series of conversations in other settings. And too much kind of experience about how we're suffering from bad governance in different places and really I for one have too many stories of how the sausage got made how we got into these difficult and weird situations and I thought wouldn't it be great to share what's actually working to sort of look ahead and I think to describe what works and what might work in the future we will probably have to do some dipping into history, but I'd rather this not become a critique session of democracy and capitalism and everything and try to take it into some positive directions. One way of maybe framing that is if somebody made you dictator of a land and gave you magic powers and you were a benevolent dictator, what sorts of things would you institute or what sorts of things would you hope your people would would institute that would help everybody make good decisions and bring them all together. And I that I'm going a little far down the narrative here but I had asked in the invite, and I had asked people to answer some questions about governance and that resulted in this spreadsheet which I also gave a link to in the invite. So, you may have seen that there are several different answers I'd be happy if everybody just explored these to go through what people are hoping maybe to achieve through a conversation like this one. And we can stop and if somebody wants to bring out things that are in here or raise some of you are filled out this this chart if you want to bring those into the conversation please do. But I'd love to start with just to go around kind of popcorn style of what we think we mean by governance. And if you think that's the wrong word to use here because what what you suspect the context is please say so. But what do we mean by governance, and I'll, I'll start to go around by saying something just really brief which is, I often talk about the difference between little g governance and big g government. And I think governance doesn't need to be government but we always, we often elide those two things together we often think that govern governance must mean governments. And I think that even a hockey team that's deciding how to, you know, construct around Robin tournament at the end of their season. The outstanding rule for how to do that are determining governance for their small group that governance operates at all different scales and has all sorts of mysterious ways. Some of these are highly structured with Roberts rules of order. Some of these are just governed by norms or habits or custom. And all of these are as far as I'm concerned within the scope of this conversation. I would love to just have anybody who wants to step in and say what what does governance mean to you. Could I make a suggestion that we each take a moment and think about that and put our answer in the chat so we can read them collectively because it's going to be a long ping ponging back and forth if we're all saying something. We're going to react but if we take a minute and put in the chat that it might be a little easier on the phone conversation. Let's do that. So why don't we take a minute of quiet and answer the question which I will type in that right now. And let's be quiet for a minute or so while we answer this question individually. Don't wait just type your answers right into the chat as we go. So Gil writes, governance is how features coordinate and writes a way to organize society so that runs as effectively and positively as possible. Eleanor writes governance is how decisions are made and implemented for the group can for him governance is a set of agreements principles practices and rules that a group of people adopt to create their future together. Mine is quite similar how groups of humans collaborate to make decisions about their present and future including setting goals controlling bad actors going to hold much more. Judy says governance means both formal and informal rules guidelines for how an organization works makes decisions, etc. Stacey the structure and processes needed to make group decisions that pertain to what will be supported and created order provide for the welfare of the people that serves. And Doug peace versus violence is the problem. Avoid fixations on democracy which might well be the wrong choice fostering fragmentation, which is maybe a little bit ahead in our conversation Doug. But thank you for that. And one of the things that one of the reasons I called this a conversation about governance is that I didn't want to call it a conversation about democracy and how do we protect democracy and all that. For reasons I think you're pointing to dark. So, I'm on board with that as well. One of, one of the. It's interesting, I had a, I had a call with Corey doctor, maybe a year ago. And I love what Corey doctor writes, he's not only a really good science fiction writer, but he writes all kinds of stuff about digital rights management and privacy and the and certification of services and so forth. And my question to him was. I love your critiques. If someone gave you a magic button and made you emperor, what would you institute, what would you have us do, and any, he didn't have that much answer, at least, not in a way that I could piece together and I don't know if I if I went through and read through his materials, certainly, in some of his fiction which I've written he is posing some interesting answers so in a walk away. He talks about a way of saving an organization's memory and then improving it over time and reconstituting it. If they have to walk away from a settlement that got taken over by someone else, for example, but I'm really interested in what works what kinds of what are your favorite examples of governance. And can you just maybe tell us little stories about how you heard about them, why you like them, whatever else. Dave answered the last question is governance is techniques and institutions for hard groups of people coordinate. And let me go silent for another minute, and then take some of your favorite examples and put them in the chat as we just did. Let's tell a couple of stories about them. And let's see just what's good about them what's not good about them. So, I'll put the question in the chat again. So, thank you. Please keep adding your examples to it. Gil among several things mentioned mondergon, and I just wanted to call out something that a little piece that I know about longer gone which is true in some cooperatives which is most cooperatives and mondergon is the very famous large company that was created back in the 50s in northern Spain in the bath country of Spain, which has some 300 different companies making all sorts of products as training has a whole bunch of different rich interesting things. And typically in cooperatives individuals have to buy into the cooperative which they often do so at equity over time. But then at some point, often, apparently, members are like, Oh, I could cash out my share and it would be worth more right now. I just managed to sell it. The process of selling your shares and mondergon. I'm not even sure shares is the right word is intentionally full of little frictions and is intentionally slow you can't just sort of go on the insta trader and go click click and cash out. I have to go through a couple steps, because they've discovered that taking the time to making it a little slower to get out of your financial investment in the community makes way more people decide to stay in, not because it took too much friction to do it, but because they reconsider their role and the nature of the cooperative and their role in it. And I love that about it. I think sometimes sometimes good governance involves not high efficiency and maximum utility in a great interface, but other kinds of things about the realization of our interdependence about, you know, other other kinds of things like that. So that's just a tiny example of one thing I like about one thing I know and like about mondergon's methods. And so anybody who would like to just step in for other things Hank is talking about the Netherlands. For example, thank you want to say a little bit more about what you said to the shot. Yeah. And I think commenting on that. Gil asked the question in the chat. Is that recently or has always been so speculations as to why it's difficult to speculate about why. But I'll tell another story. I first got here in 1970 and I really felt at home because it was a very tolerant place. And people accepted what was going well and what was going wrong. And there was a kind of community feeling about this. And I said, well, let's go to our happy place and let's keep it happy. And sometime in around the year 2000. One of the reasons people here think things changed is because a lot of opinion leaders, politicians, people who think things through seem to be ignoring an undercurrent of lots of people who were dissatisfied and their voices rarely got heard. They didn't get heard in the media. They weren't involved in public discourse. And from that moment, there were a number of political assassinations. And a lot of threats to public officials. So the tenor of the conversation changed very much to you. You're threatening me. Who are you? You should be stopped. That's maybe one superficial story I can tell about that. And as far as Finland goes, it's a small country. It's a big country with only a small population and people rely on each other to get through the very cold winters. And one way to get through the very cold winters is learn from things that go right and wrong and bond with your fellow Finnish people. And that's possibly a bit idealistic because they also have their problems with right wing extremists. But let me leave it for that at the moment. Thanks, Hank. There's a book titled Amsterdam, which is about the Netherlands, that talks a lot about Dutch culture and how the fact that most of Holland's, the Netherlands land is reclaimed from the ocean and polders is a huge piece of the culture because a lot of the Netherlands is below sea level, or was below sea level and much of it still is. And so the pumping of water out and the protecting of the dykes was crucial to society. Like anybody who would undermine that was threatening all of the Netherlands. And that created a particular civic mindedness. There's another string in here about building and basically a form of civic education that a lot of northern European Scandinavian countries instituted. And then there's another piece of it in the in the book Amsterdam, which is that the Netherlands was one of the few areas that didn't have feudalism so much, because they have the herring trade. And, and they invented the herring boat called the herring bus they invented a way of filling herring that kept the spleen and the liver in the herring and made those those enzymes made the herring tastes better. So Holland herring was a premium product and merchants got wealthy in a different way than other countries so feudalism doesn't hit the Netherlands and all these. These are three different things I know from different sources, much of it from the book Amsterdam. But they, they converge in a kind of civic mindedness that it may be special to the Netherlands or maybe contagious I don't know. It's all true. And that's applied to the country I chose to live in back in the 1970s. But let me just give an example about the water and working together to protect the Netherlands from water. Back when there were a lot of a lot of immigration from European countries. Everyone was brought into the community of working together to protect the country against water. When many immigrants started to come from Islamic countries, typically desert countries, the conversation changed to how can we help these people coming from desert countries who want a lot of water know how we work here in the Netherlands. Because we don't want a lot of water, but back about 2000 that conversation changed to all those ignorant people from desert countries they're just going to take over our society and let us drown. So your stories are great. The book Amsterdam is very good. But the discourse is unfortunately different at the moment. And that's happening in lots of different places. Yeah. Doug, you said you have a story about Mondragon. You're muted. Sorry about that. New Year's here. There's a lot of fireworks. I went I went to Mondragon with Jack Joyce who was president of the American bricklayer union. And because I was there as part of the union group. We probably had access that one people coming from the banking sector and so on did not. What I saw was fascinating and that is that at the end of the work day. The answer is that your space gets cleaned up so it doesn't like anybody ever been there. It's like the hotel room had been totally cleaned at that culture of picking everything up seems to need to be a foundation for the way that they related to each other. Why that cultural piece thinking that just the ownership, for example, might solve the problem. Thanks, Doug. There's something about respecting the space or mutual respect, etc. that's baked into some of these examples in a nice way. Go ahead, Gil. You're muted. Fascinating Doug. Thank you for that. I have not heard that story before and I've been looking at Mondragon a lot. It's very eliminating. I rise back to Hank what you said about things changing in the Netherlands, perhaps with the influx of immigration from people from desert countries and Jerry to what I think you said before about friction. And so you have friction in relation to exiting Mondragon. And that strikes me as like the function of shock absorbers in a car that damp oscillations. So it's different than free. It's kind of like friction, but it's different than friction. And checks and balances have that function in this federal system and the enormous frustration of how hard it is to amend the Constitution has that function. You don't want to change a constitution too quickly. You don't want it whipping back and forth. You want something that's stable and some things that change at a certain pace. And you know, I think about the semi permeable membrane that surrounds a cell. Living systems work because the membrane is semi permeable. It's not totally permeable. It's not totally closed. It lets stuff in with some degree of of damping of the pace and filtering of the nature of change. And well, let me go out on a limb here. So open immigration is a stress to that bringing somebody new into the Mondragon culture without being able to orient them and absorb them and let them absorb the culture is a challenge. You want them to be able to sense and feel into and adopt the norms over time. And just one last thing on this. I've been talking a lot with guy named Mike Brady, who was the CEO of Grayston Bakery. Some of you may know it as the bakery in Yonkers that became the primary supplier to Penn and Jerry's ice cream for their brownie flavor stuff. And Grayston, which was founded by a Buddhist monk named Bernie Glassman developed a remarkable open hire policy, which to say that anybody who knocks on the door looking for a job is hired on the spot. If there's a position open, or maybe even if there's not a position open. And obviously this is not for, you know, CFOs, but for workers in the bakery. And, you know, people say, how could you possibly do that? He said, well, look, number one, we bring people in and we give them simple tasks and they get trained and acculturated by their coworkers. And they learn, and these are people who maybe have never had a job in their lives, don't know even the most basic thing about showing up on time in the morning. And they're acculturated by their coworkers and most of them get acculturated and absorbed into the system. Some don't. And there's a way of dealing with that. How do you deal with this economically? Well, they don't have an HR department. They don't do job searching. They don't do vetting. They don't do, they don't do a whole layer of expense that exists in a normal company is gone and replaced by this quick and slow process of integration people into the cultural norms. I imagine Mundergarn's got something like that. Maybe it's more formal. But it can only work if people say, yeah, I'm in with these standards. And if they're not, they're going to somehow be either fired or eased out or find life so uncomfortable if they move on. But so for me, it speaks to this larger question of the pace of change. And we now have a planet that is highly stressed by very rapid rates of change, not just in technology and the movement of human populations in the cultural blasting of social media and so forth. And so adaptation to changing rates of change is part of the mystery in here. Love that. There's something important about the interdependence and trust among people in a high functioning group that may be hard to bottle, but seems to characterize the high functioning groups that we're sharing here. And that's not about having a great rulebook. It's about some other aspects of relationship and interdependence coming to the floor in some sense. Ken, you wanted to take us in a slightly different direction. I'm happy to go there if you want to pose the question. Were you about to jump in or something else? I was just observing that we've gone from examples to attitudes, it feels like, and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I think attitudes are incredibly important, you know, and we often don't talk about them. We focus on what are the practices with the rules with guidelines, blah, blah, blah. I pulled up from my quotes document, you know, the attitude of the Honorable Harvest from Robin Wall, Robin Wall Kimmer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which I know some of you have read. I read it on Dave Weitzel's recommendation and I'm very glad that Dave recommended it because it's a fantastic book, but there is something about the attitude of we are part of something much larger and if we care for the of the largeness that we're part of then we'll be taken care of versus I got to get what I can and if my getting what I can cost you tough shit because life is hard, right? And so to me that feels like a fundamental attitude that is a polarity to be managed in any system of governance because there are always some people who say I need to get this for myself, I don't care if I want to. And how so that takes into the question of how do we manage those priorities in a governance system? You know, what does that look like? We touched on this or in our OGM call today, you know, Jerry asked the question of why do so many people behave so horribly towards other people? And how do you design a system of governance that doesn't eliminate that because it's impossible to eliminate but minimizes it and creates a way for it to be held collectively so that it does the least amount of damage. Is there a really interesting question to be around for a governance conversation? Thank you. Eleanor, you mentioned refugees and immigrants, which I think are a super hot topic, but that's clearly a fire that's being stoked but it's also an actual problem and so forth. And it's not just in the US, it's all over the place. Where would you like that to take us? I'm on board with the issue a lot. Thanks Jerry and hi everybody, nice to meet you all. I think the question of immigrants in relation to governance is as many facets. One of the most immediate and obvious ones is now with millions of refugees coming out of Ukraine, coming out of environmental refugees. It's flooding into Europe, somewhat in the United States, and it poses a real problem that Gil was talking about in terms of the laundromat. It's like, how are countries assimilating or not assimilating the immigrants and what does that mean for the culture and the politics and ultimately the system of governance in the country. It's probably the single most powerful factor that has powered the rise of authoritarian right wing parties, certainly in Europe and also in the United States for witnessing it in this presidential election again. I think we've got to think about how do we handle the challenge at this time tremendous change and upheaval all over the world and millions of environmental refugees on top of the political refugee. How are countries dealing with it, how are systems of governance dealing it with it, what kind of system of governance works, how much does having a big influx of people from outside the culture change what the culture is and change how governance happens or should be happening. I love that. Sorry, I hate that this is a huge issue a monster issue everywhere I love how you're framing it. I agree a lot and it seems like there's some a couple of overlapping really big things here one of them is, how does any group, not including not refugees like Mondragon assimilate strangers. How do people come into a group and pick up the norms and process and become good participants in the group. And that that's its own really interesting big question that a lot of people are have good advice on. Then there's this other thing about, we're going to have increasing numbers of involuntarily displaced people, whether it's for national conflict climate change disaster, whatever it might be. I don't think anybody's doing a great job of dealing with that. And we certainly see that like when when the Ukraine war broke out like Germany absorbed an incredible number of Ukrainians and Poland did as well. And a lot of other countries are sort of reticent, and then northern Africa as migrations into Europe, and all of that, which on cynical days I see as colonialism just coming back to bite. Europe's but. But the, like, there are going to be increased numbers of displaced people and if we handle them well. We can diffuse perhaps a lot of the hatred and and and fear that's being read on purpose. But, but when you just started talking historically it, many of the major conflicts on the planet were about those people are coming to take away our lifestyle. We have to stop the external invaders and that. And I don't mean that there was an army at the gates. I mean that it was random people who had been shoved up against the gates. They weren't organized in any in any particular way to take over the country but there was this fear that the country would lose its identity as people. It's whatever. And, and so this is everywhere. Let me be quiet and go to the queue. Doug Judy then can. I like to go back to the origin of the word governance and Kyber from to govern, which implies that there's a goal towards where we're trying to go, which seems to be left out a lot of governance discussions. But you need a destination, then governance follows fairly naturally without a goal. It's very, very hard to figure out how to organize because everybody's different directions that makes sense individually. Stacy's definition of governance included for the community's well being or the groups well being which seems like a goal. Is that too general for you. How would you spend what's a good one look like. It's also not universal. I mean, the problem, for example, Mussolini and Hitler thought that a certain way they were doing good but for their communities. And so that was for the well of the good of their own people who they were explicitly defining as not other people, etc. Yeah, you'll go ahead. I just want to question. I don't think that's a universal definition. That's a definition that we probably all share that democracy certainly share I don't know feudal systems share that I don't know if, if, you know, if crime syndicate families share that the circle of concern is narrower. Like early Christianity, the view was that it was economics. That is, it was the governance of the monastery to serve God's purpose. And it was highly structured around that goal. Totally agree. Judy, you're muted. I'm sorry about that. I guess one of the questions that I have is how open to communication and organization is and how it's governments practices facilitate or inhibit the openness of the communication, because the flexibility may or may not be in the governance documents to allow the expression of different points of view. So, the ability to regenerate framing of governance to incorporate voices that are different from the ones that originally formulated the governance is is a subtle but a very important aspect and so often now governance is like it's in concrete takes an active incredible initiative to change governance in documents as a rule, and it was set up initially for stability, but the foundations that provide stability now are different than the foundations that provided in 50 years ago. So, this is sort of a, it's not a tidy topic. But I think it's something that we would want to consider. Not at all a tidy topic. Thanks, Judy. Ken. As you were speaking Jerry about. Migrants and immigrants and, and, you know, he's thinking, you know, your connection has just gone terrible on us. Can you pause for a second. Your connection is totally booked. I can hear you now, but your video has not resumed good. Now you might be better. Please start again. Okay. So can you hear me now. You're good. You're like the Verizon guy now. So, as Jerry was speaking about earlier about all the kind of refugees and migrants and immigrants. First of all, the history of the United States is is filled with horrible chapters of incredible violence towards Irish, Chinese, Asian, I mean just you name a population and yet at the same time it's also filled with an amazing integration of those populations. One of the things that I find so disgusting about a certain character running from president is that this country is a country made of immigrants it's not a melting pot because we have a melt that it's more like a toss salad but we've managed to do incredible things together. And so I think there's something there worth worth exploring and you know I thinking also have Jerry's design from trust, you know, the best way to make someone trust for this actually trust them to do something and hold them accountable for it. And as long as they it's something they agree is important, generally do it. I think about Carol Sanford deal and I interviewed her for a call a while back she's got a book called no more gold stars talks about being in Africa right after Mandela came to power and she talking with illiterate village people who you know these folks had very little in the way of education and resources and yet they come up with something they called promises beyond ableness, which was where they knew that everyone in their village was willing to do a job because they would bring prosperity to the village. And so they were invested in doing a great job, not just for the company but for their entire village and their families, and that brought them to a level of accountability and a level of, of productivity that was unheard of. And so I think, going back to attitudes, if our, if we can explore attitudes about what do we think is possible with people and how can we invest in them. And invest in a governance model that brings out the best in people, and doesn't assume the worst will happen as control for brothers assumes the best can happen and then controls for the variables that tend to bring out the worst. I think that's a potential way to and I love seeing fireworks behind Jerry what I'm saying this but you know that you just described some of the precepts of design from trust this thing I need to finish writing a book about but exactly that like how do you how do you assume you have good intent, not naively because some people do have bad intent. How do you build the least rules needed and the best norms possible, so that good things wind up happening and it turns out you design a very different system from one where you assume that most people are bad actors. And what's interesting with refugees is that worse were, you know, there are a group of strangers that may share some cultural background because they may be coming from the same country or escaping the same conflict or something like that, but we treat them as individual threats. And I'm wondering how I had a conversation with Alex bets who runs an NGO about refugees years ago and I was like, Is there any way we could treat refugees as first class citizens, because one of the other problems with being a refugee is you have no papers you may not even have documents you mean your documents may have been taken along the way or been burned at the origin or whatever. You're sort of undocumented. In some cases you don't have a country because you would be killed if you went back to your country so now you don't have a home. You can't in many places you can't work. Apparently the average tenure in a refugee camp is 17 years. So you are not likely to get out of there quickly. And what I was thinking was, why don't we give them some kind of global citizenship. Just just make them a full fledged citizen with an actual identity which they can bear digitally. And this this was an interesting use of blockchain as far as I was concerned, or sort of past the blockchain storm, but but some way of maintaining a sustainable distributed identity. And then, if once you have like the Google suite or something like that which costs the marginal cost of delivering that to you is zero. That's the same power tools everybody else has, allowing these people to work and figuring out how to help them train up or do whatever else is great. There's so many things you could do if you treated refugees as complete citizens of the world, who happened to be dislocated right now. Right, but we don't do that and we don't do that at all. So I, that was just on my wishlist but it was never sort of coming to that way. Judy, I think you're done with what you were saying, Dave. Yeah, I guess I was kind of hopping back to stuff that you made me think around, you know, kind of messiness. And it's been, I feel like it was like a little bit of a light bulb for me the last couple of months around. We talk about governance that we think about the the government, but actually kind of trying to use like a living systems meta lens. It's a huge messy set of governance is that we live within right, and they bump up against each other and there's all kinds of tensions and you know, we need something as dramatic as the federal government versus Texas on the border, you know, with citizens, you know, riflemen hanging out there and stuff like that, but, but, you know, I made a line about liking the state of the government in California and I think it's really interesting. I think that all kinds of interesting things about having a one party state, but also having a ton of the power to devolving down to the counties, which are pretty diverse. And you have all kinds of weird things that the states prize get counties to do kind of at the county's resistance. So government is really messy. And I think if we try to think of it as like what's a good government course that we, you know, you ignore all the messiness that's so much fun. And, and it's kind of like any technology can be used for good and for bad. And so that you know you'll made a joke about mob bosses and you know the goal of mob bosses and stuff like that. And I have a suspicion that what we're seeing in a lot of modern crime is a lot of really successful self organized governance that steals catalytic converters and iPhones. You know, so these are mobs of people who are coordinating to do stuff that a bunch of society doesn't like. But you know they're doing it quite effectively they're probably distributing income they're managing their hierarchy somebody's in charge they're picking a date. They're putting us to work. A lot of good decision making going on. So anyway, I just, I think the messiness is pretty inherent. I love that I think it's deeply messy and I'm trying to figure out which principles bubble up what what tool kits could we give people to generate highly functioning governance structures by picking and choosing from other high functioning orbs because you don't want to just do you know cookie cutter templates of everything. And also, in some high crime areas like favelas and so forth, the gangs would actually become the governance the reason Hamas I think is big and Gaza is that Hamas was building schools and hospitals for people and sort of trying to be the government. At the same time it was as it was trying to wipe out Israel and that's a really a recipe for for failure in any way, but in many cases you have gangs or thugs who bring peace to the area as long as you let them do their thing. And the police or authorities in the country are either also corrupt or are powerless in those areas in different ways. And then we try to pass laws and fix a lot of these things and the laws don't always break. Like what tax from Anna. Yeah, the Roman Empire brings peace as long as you agree to be a subject. Exactly. Well, and just looking historically like the Mongol Empire. The Mongols were really interesting because if you agreed to join the empire if you sort of said we surrender our city were part of you. They would let you keep your religion. They would take not too big attacks, they would put you on the new Silk Road and make basically make you wealthy through commerce. They would take a lot of your people and split them into their army so that your group wasn't didn't remain as its own group within the army, but got distributed in the army which I think was really clever as well. And it turned out that that you know people who joined the Mongols did pretty well. And they had a whole bunch of other rules I'm forgetting that were really interesting. There's also pirate law is a bunch of books about pirate law. Did you know that pirates had property and casualty insurance basically where there was a certain share you would get if you lost an arm or an eye in an attack. And, you know, they would split the booty. There's a whole bunch of things about the age of piracy where there's actually a science fiction series. I only read the first one it was called quarter share. It's very mundane science fiction it's science fiction written on purpose to sound boring. This is what life would be will be like in this future, and quarter share was the share you got from a sort of piracy, except in space. And I don't think this was part piracy this was more merchant to merchant listen, and then you would you would get promoted to a better ranking you would get a half share you would get a full share you would get several shares whatever that might be. But those these things exist all over the place and they show up in as we're just saying right now, sometimes in the unlikeliest places. And we can borrow from a lot of these models. There's there's nothing to say that that that you know something that makes a thing work in a difficult setting isn't good. So East Germany, if any of you have seen the eyes of others or or anything like that, the former East Germany was a very low trust environment and you would think that that was just like the truth through the whole thing, except extreme high high stress environments extreme high trust underground environments. So the way you actually got your medical care or your meds or your education or whatever else in the DVR was through extreme high trust underground connections there was a black market for things. And people knew that if they were found out the punishment the penalties for it were really really heavy. So, all is not it's very messy as Dave was saying it's all is not as it seems at the surface. Go ahead, Ken then Eleanor. I want to go to something that Hank mentioned on our OGM call this morning around. This is a topic that's been here in New York for a long time, which is public conversations around governance. And, you know, we have the technology this the cyber technology to convene large groups of people to break them into small groups where they can have in depth conversations and properly facilitated they can arrive at that pretty good decisions and agreements on things and then feed those into a larger whole. But that's not being used for for governance to the best of my knowledge right now. And, you know, I asked the question early on in the chat of, if we believe that governance of buying for the people is desirable then what are the ways in which we can make sure that those people who agree who consent to be governed have a voice in governance. And so I'm really interested in how we might. And I'm going to work with Hank and Pete anybody else on this and, you know, what can we prototype here that would start let's start small just at a community level, you know, and, and I think there's actually lots of examples of this happening at where people come together and say, you know, here's what I'm really here's what's important to me. And, and Hank says that and Eleanor and I know, you know, you've got things that I didn't feel report by now that I hear them, I agree those are important. So we agree upon a set of important things. Now, how can we make this work what it looked like it was working, not how we problem solve the existing, you know, thing that's not working but what would it look like let's be imaginative to create here, and what was somebody does and then say now, what exists that support that and what needs to be tweaked a little bit to support that once we need to be invented full cough. Then we'd have a path forward to something really effective I think. Thanks Hank I love your enthusiasm. Eleanor do you mind if Gil jumps into respond here. Go ahead go. You're muted. I didn't see your hand up if you want to follow Ken. No, no, no, go right ahead Gil. I can't can't have you spent much time at City Council meetings. City Council meetings are exactly why you don't try to troubleshoot the existing because they do not work very well. Not what I asked you. I have spent I spent hours at City Council meetings and they're incredibly frustrating and boring. I raised it not to say let's fix it but that might be an interesting discreet focus for the reinvention that you're talking about. You know, let's take a city, you know, community of 10,000 people or 60 or 100,000 people or whatever. And what what what could the governance of that look like. That's a different question what's wrong with working right now. I didn't ask what's wrong. Yeah, we all know what's wrong. I spent like a large part of my life for five years City Council meetings. Yes, I know and it's amazed you're still standing. Yeah, but the like what could the governance system of a city look like is an interesting question it's like not not the global rambling conversation we're having but like you know here's a laboratory. Maybe it exists maybe it's like a thought experiment laboratory or maybe it's new city being built in California though I doubt they'd want to hear this. And in the course of asking that question we could look and say what are examples of the piece what it. What's the pattern language to steal from Christopher Alexander what is the pattern language of local governance from which we could maybe stitch together something that is a hypothesis or a provocation or a model. Maybe it's tried somewhere maybe it's just a book maybe it's a simulation online I don't know. But I think it and I don't mean to rush this because we've got four weeks scheduled for this conversation. And we want to do diverge converge diverge converge in the conversation. But the notion of taking this whole thing and saying, what if we applied it to a specific situation of a place and a size. And what what might be possible there. Let me just quickly respond to that there's actually, and probably someone on here this call knows more about it than I do. There was a committee in Congress recently that was all about how can Congress actually get shit done. And they did incredible things I can't I read about it and it's why my mind is drawing blank on the specifics but so we know that that it is possible we have examples of it. And so I think, you know, it's just something that I feel is very disappointed with the public conversations project because the name led me to believe that they were having public conversations but actually they're very private conversations they were bringing together pro life and pro choice people and having got behind the door conversations. So what they had to do for the first year was just enumerate what are all the words that trigger you into no longer hearing and accepting of the person and we'll put those on the list and now we need different vocabulary to talk so that was a useful thing but it didn't filter out into the public. So I'd like a real public conversations project that involves the public in talking through difficult issues. So I thank you for your patience. Boris will actually worked out great because guild laid a framework for something I was going to suggest and so gills suggesting and we focus on a particular time place issue and look at the governance there. What's working. I was going to suggest I don't know what the agenda is for the next three conversations but it seems to me one possibility would be to look at this issue of immigration, because I think it's both a symptom of ineffective government and a cause of ineffective government in the sense that for example, it's a it's a symptom of ineffective government we have millions of immigrants wanting to leave Central and South America because they have no economic opportunity they're at threats of violence by their government. So they come to the United States to try and have a nice life. And now that that's happening in so many places around the world. You know it's a symptom of ineffective governance that we're having more and more environmental refugees we have not as countries are as a global community, effectively dealt with the global climate change problem. So therefore we will have millions and millions more environmental refugees so it's a symptom of ineffective government to have so many immigrants and refugees. And at the same time it's a major cause that is pushing these right wing governments throughout Europe in the United States now. So, if we just a thought if we kind of maybe look deeply at the immigration issue maybe in the United States to say, how do we deal effectively from you know what is what works for effective governance and dealing with the immigration issue. So it's an it's an offering. Thank you, and we are, I hope, are going to structure the next three calls here. I can and I've had a couple calls about a couple of conversations about where to take these conversations and what to do, but I would like us to sort of formulate where we would like to focus. I very much like the idea of picking a couple specific instances and making this pretty concrete. So maybe one approach to that is to pick two or three specific instances, then each of us does some work on this before next week, and then reports back in and deepens that conversation some so we can generalize what works what doesn't work whatever lessons we want to take from it that that would be exciting for me. I don't know if it'd be exciting for you. We've been talking about two kinds of what you're calling instances one is is kind of a place or institutional based like a city. What would work in a city. And the other is Eleanor's point about immigration is a more issue based instance. I would suggest if we do that that we don't do just one. I was saying, let's, let's pick three examples. But we, you know, but we could do, you know, we could conceivably say, here's a, here's a locus of jurisdiction. If we're going to do immigrant immigration, it might not be a city, it might be a state or something with a controllable border, but I don't know. But so one thing might be a locus of jurisdiction and the other two or three would be a specific topic like immigration or economic justice or climate and what have you. And then we can kind of dance between them. I'm sort of understanding what you're saying, but I'm not sure I'm completely. I'm sort of I'm sort of understanding what I'm saying. That's good. Perfect. Then we're then we're understanding each other perfectly. Judy, please jump in. Well, I'm just wondering, this is such a rich and complex topic. Would we want to choose examples to work on that are typical of a certain type of situation, you know, a community, a social group, professional group, a government group. They're just the governance documents tend to be very specific to the institution they're seeking to govern. So I'm not sure how to tackle in a more general sense governance unless we set out to say, well, what are the constant elements of governance, wherever it might be applied. And if we had a list of the constant elements and some of the sub elements under the constant elements, then we might be able to more effectively triage instances in terms of what applies. This is not a knowledge area for me. So there may be examples of this already in print or available that would help us with it, but I'm just trying to. It's such a broad area. And you know what I would do for a national professional association is totally different than I do for a local humanitarian. So, I think that's where I'm puzzled about this. Yeah, I think what you're describing Judy might be a couple steps ahead of us in the sense of, we don't have the resources probably or the time right now to study multiple cases and to draw general conclusions out of them. Although I am sort of saying, can we can we create or find pattern languages that there's Tom at the end crew have designed the wise democracy pattern language it exists I'll put a link to it in the chat. I think we've done a lot of work on that. I'm barely familiar with it and I invited Tom and some of his people to these calls and I'm hoping to convince them to join us because I think just even learning from what they've done will move us substantially forward in this conversation. I think that focusing on specific instances will in fact help help us sort of sharpen our lenses and the way we're talking about these kinds of things. These are three pretty different things because refugees are a special case of humans on the move with no citizenship with no resources, etc. I think they're hugely important but they're really different from city hall conversations with people who've lived in the city and our fourth generation of that city, and are trying to make local decisions with the same people again, those are almost at opposite ends of the governance spectrum, although that doesn't mean. It doesn't mean to imply that they need very different governance solutions entirely. I just mean that those are very very different settings. So I'd be pleased to do like city governance, and I'm very interested in what smaller cities. I just did a Google search while we were talking for the best government cities, and it was like New York Amsterdam Singapore and I'm like, we need to go to the next tier down and find some high functioning smaller places and see who's doing something really different. Thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate it. So, can we pick a couple now or should we just do that in the in the commerce in the chat. What should we do. I just had a quick suggestion that between now and next call we think about. We have three hours left. What would be useful for us to do through it when we could do lots of things but would make the most sense. So that's this question of what's the simplest most elegant step I can take that is the least amount of effort with the highest return on my effort. So, if we think about that and come back in our next call it might help to containerize us a little bit I want to go. That sounds great. Happy also to talk about that on the GM list or on the matter most channel for this thoughts on that. I'm pretty happy with how this one actually is really good call. Thank you. I'm me too because my brain is all juiced up now and I'm, I'm turning over lots of stuff that feels feels like it's direction to correct. So, although Dave seems to be living in a dystopian world right now already so maybe there maybe there's no hope. The government that did it. Really. They were there to help. Yeah. The nine scariest words of the English language right. I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Thank you Ronnie Reagan. My favorite about Reagan comes from Robert boy who said Ronald Reagan was a kind of grand central station for the trains of disaster. Yeah. It's meant to be one hour calls so I'm going to wrap our call kind of now. Let's think about agendas together on email on the matter most matter most channel of the GM town square would be a nice place to do this. I don't think spawning a new a new channel for this conversation is warranted yet. But let's let's talk there if we can. And thank you very much for this I will post the recording etc etc as usual. And more soon more next week. Do you have another minute. Yes, I can hang out. I just want to ask you about yesterday's conversation with the domain and Kevin. Yeah, around kind of assets and I'm trying to try to do a version of that conversation for some of the GRC stuff, and I was trying to identify what was spicy about it. And I think I'm probably too deep in the weeds of my own stuff kind of so I was just wondering I was curious about your reaction to what was interesting that I could kind of try to capture and move to another space. Sure. When you say what was spicy about it to do human what we've got we got you know there was an interesting conversation going in there was clearly disagreement I guess or something. And I was trying to feel like what you know and I think so like I've been trying to like have this framing around. Like, to me assets are a new thing and I'm really I'm like rediscovering the means of production. I know there's an important issue. Like I was sort of went back and was like, probably will try to read Marx on Wikipedia and stuff it's like oh smart guy. But you know I've never read it before so so the notion in my side I think I have this underlying assumption, which is, you know, not big chunks of society want to make something better. That thing they're making better as an asset government in some senses to help society make things better. You know that's why we have it. And then the battle between like socialism and capitalism and kind of is like who gets who captures the better part. I think part of the spiciness came out in that jamae and I were hearing you and saying wow you're using the language of capitalism to frame commons and other things that don't that suffer under capitalist rule. And so the idea of growth and ownership and all that are part of the problem from what we were trying to say. And so that that's where it got spicy for us is like okay so how do we get language of the commons language of stewardship instead of ownership, all those sorts of things. And, and then there's also this this interesting conversation. Jose Leal wasn't on this call but he's not very happy about the use of the word governance for these calls, because he thinks all governance involves some coercion and control. Like, well, yeah, like, if you read Len Ostrom's rules for, you know, managing commons well, you need to be able to exclude people you need to be able to punish malpractors you need to be there's a couple things you actually do need to be able to control that are different from, you know, the way Putin is controlling Russian society as a counter example. So. So I think part of it was vocabulary, it was just like framing in language, and how do we find our way to more comfortable places to talk about all this because if we can also talk about collaboration or co creation, but that that gets too general for me and bleeds away from the topics that that I think are interesting to focus on here. Yeah, yeah, so that so what and so one of the things I was thinking about this morning was kind of part of part of what I think I am trying to intentionally do is like capture the wisdom of economics, you know, kind of feeling we can't pass out, you know, a couple hundred years of economics thinking that there's value in there. And, and we've actually been studying some of the things that we talked about it. You know, it's not like it's not like the Commons were unknown, they were framed in different ways. And you know, Ostrom's I think one of the big things she did was create them as a, as a focus of attention in economics, right. And governance and but but we knew stuff before I mean you know it's like I don't know I was in this call the other day where they're once again trashing the tragedy the Commons paper, the hardened paper. And never forget that out. It's like, what are you saying that we don't have tragedies in the comments. I mean, sweet little paper. The guys in asshole, maybe I don't know. If you were not supposed to watch Woody Allen movies, I don't know, but it's not that it's not that it's, it's that he's over general. He's a soil biologist who's busy over generalizing and creates a trope that convinces everybody that Commons don't work because there's always a tragedy of the Commons. Look, people are just selfish paper says but I mean my page is we can go back and read it but yeah yeah so here I'm going to say the notion that this there is the potential tragedies of the Commons seems pretty like that's a useful concept. Yes, it's not that there aren't tragedies of Commons Commons fail all the time they need active human management to work. So I just shared a link to my brain where I collect critiques of the tragedy the Commons argument. There's a bunch of good stuff there. There's a whole mess of good writing there you're welcome to to go through. But many, many places we could go with this I just want to be helpful to your question. Yeah, thanks. Well, I, you know, I was trying to figure out like how to do an hour conversation and I keep spinning around and so. So one of the points of using asset instead of capital was to try to like remove, try to remove some of the bad words, you know, those words are words out of capitalism. Yeah, suppose I always felt like asset was like less less burden, maybe. Well, so when we treat. Yes and no I think I think different people mean different things by asset, but but in capitalism, if you think of humans as a cost that's one thing if you think of them as an asset you treat them differently and that's sort of good you want to treat your, your human factors as assets. But then you're objectifying them and just treating them as if they were like the steel that goes into your mill. So the asset language is hard. I think same thing. We also talked a bit about value and you know, value in capitalism is dollars and profit and increase and value to society is actually not needing money in some cases just like sustainability and natural resources not being depleted rather than being depleted. So there's all these forces are play there. Sorry, Hank, go ahead. We really have an effective conversation about this. We've got to clearly define upfront what the different meanings of value or asset or or governance is because you can't just make up your own words and expect everyone to understand them. But we can help people understand the different words that are used or the different ways to use words and then possibly with a larger group, create new language to discuss new concepts. And that might mean that we wind up giving words different color or shading like there could be capitalist value and commons value and social value and we might be able to distinguish that those things are different in these ways. And if we agree to that then it lets us walk in. Yeah, one I always come across and things I say and write is return on investment. I mean, yeah, what kind of return are you talking about and what kind of investment and there's a lot of stuff about intangibles in there, and maybe 80% of the people think only about tangibles and not about intangible. So I've learned always to try to help people by saying yes I recognize different meanings and this one a or b or x or y is what I'm talking about. So yeah, and so when I was trying to figure it can we strip away kind of the confounding words and get to core concepts or that like you when you strip away all the confounding words you got nothing left. But so in that example you were using where the investment in an asset in capitalism leads to money. So, so the notion that seems sound to me is that if I invest in a piece of software that software can get better. And that better is useful. Right. And that's kind of the pure. That's the point right now there's a question like who owns the software who can reuse the software who got the benefit of the software. Right, there's those kinds of questions too but the notion that I put effort in and it got better. That seems like we should be able to agree on that. Yes, and then, but but you're pointing into a really interesting area because the difference between open source software and proprietary software. They both follow that rule but then they both have different value to society and IBM, a highly for profit company, saved the company by adopting open source software a story I can tell under Lou Gerson or a control free CEO who used to be at who somehow understood that this was the path to actually save the company so IBM which makes lots of profits and files more patents than anybody except maybe Hitachi or Paul come is a good player in the open source space and which and in that space they have to have a different frame of mind about who owns and what is an asset and how does it work and what is its long term value. So, I think that's kind of what I'm trying to push on so so let's not have whether let's not do the judgment over whether IBM's good or bad. But they're instrumental in improving one of the things I think it might be critical is that the system is dynamic has to improve. Part of the open source issue is, if it doesn't improve, it doesn't work right so I can go I can look at Linux or I can look at Windows, and I can argue both of those are assets that are valuable that are useful. Right, one of them gates has managed to siphon off a whole bunch of value and privatize it. Linux I guess I don't know, you know, nobody has done that or IBM has done that or how you want to argue it. I don't know how we would do the calculation about which one has been more valuable to society. You know that a lot of the guys I've saw some recent valuations of like Linux they seem way too low to me, but I expect they're they're in the intention there are the intangible sex but you're asking for a You're asking for a capitalist valuation of open source software, which is contrary to the whole idea back to the fundamental don't we want there to be more value value and if there's an approach that creates more Stock market measures not at all. No, no, no, let's let your measures pick your value by definition of value cool society. I'm assuming your definition proxies as it gives good for society. Hold on. So 96.3% of the top 1 million web servers run on Linux. Now so the web basically depends entirely on open source Linux is the web valuable. Now, should that be priced up should we should we say oh let's let's value that in the stock market let's sell shares on no. But I'm saying that that's an example, you know, and I'm the huge, you know, when it's webfam right so but I'm saying that that asset base exists, it is valuable to society. Now you're going to tell me windows isn't valuable or. I'm going to tell you windows is a bag of spaghetti code that's been shit software for a really long time I will say that. I'm running on it man this is I'm talking to you thanks to. I'm so sorry. I have always felt sorry for I was on windows for a really long time. And it was solid. So back in the back in the day with DOS you had to buy three other people software to have a viable computer. Getting better. Barely the dynamism of it it kept getting better. Windows have always been like dog food compared to other things that existed that were better. Anyway, and that's maybe and I'm not a coder. But, but, but there's sort of incommensurates being matched up here and if you wanted to redefine how value is measured that'd be awesome and I think that's where we get into commercial value market value. So, for example, a long time ago I said in a really smart accountants lecture about the market value of Coca Cola versus the book value of Coca Cola. And they said look, I've just gone through coax books here's their book value here's their market value. And one fully one third of the market value was unexplainable by by their book value, which was the amount of juice in cans in warehouses blah blah blah blah the staff that the buildings and all that. And he said, This is weird. This is good. Is this goodwill. Is this that we just lump this into the goodwill category. This is the market being crazy and valuing Coca Cola because it's got a strong brand. I think that goes into brand brand goodwill or something like that right. So there's all these different kinds of value and we saw also like chronological age mental age physical age, all the different kinds of age that we think of now. People, same sort of thing. And as Hank said, if we could distinguish those better from each other, I think we'll have more fruitful conversations on this. So where I'm trying to get back to is the notion of landscape regeneration. That's my hobby horse. That right. I, you know, I think the future needs more landscape regeneration. And, and, and I'm arguing that if you have landscape regeneration, you, the landscape is an asset that becomes more valuable. I'm in total agreement landscape regeneration is profitable. So, so one of my wish list items is that we create a soil organic matter tax that any, any, any company that leaves soil depleted and you could measure soil organic matter through physical testing through satellites through there's a bunch of different ways maybe to get good metrics on soil organic matter. If you deplete your soil after every cycle, like industrial farming does, you're going to pay a whack load of money it's going to be a heavy tax. If you improve soil organic matter, we're the government will ship you money. That is a way of rewarding value creation around landscape regeneration right there. And if you want to propose one of those and fit it into the farm bill somehow, and get them to swallow the broccoli and do that that would be fantastic. And same thing for aquifer replenishment, so that Nestle and other water vendors get stunning taxes imposed on them for draining the aquifers that they suck their little straw into that they pay nothing for. Right. So the big water companies bottling water, which is a horrifying thing bottled water is one of the stupidest worst things for for for the planet. Can we tax the shit out of them. And the plastic it comes in. Yes, that's what that's part of the reason it's not box water which uses like, you know, waxy paper boxes okay fine. But but but shipping water run is energy consumptive all these terrible things about let's just like make the aquifer better create abundance and let people drink water that the whole in Bolivia, they passed the law privatizing all water. The water fell on your roof and you had gutters that led to a little barrel. That was your local cistern where you could keep drinking water. That was illegal for a while in Bolivia until the citizens all rose up and said no screw this. And Bechtel the engineering company had won the contract to enforce it so it was a bad day for Bechtel. But but these are fights over the comments fights over value fights over all these things. Well fights over who captures the profit bingo precisely that we want the value. So this is this is I'm trying to distinguish right between the creation of the value and the dispersion of the value we want to create. And so one of the things I felt like I we got pushed up back on a couple of times last week is even the notion of the creation of the value is that implies grow in some sense right there's the creation of value implies growth. In an economic sense. No. No, if soil organic matter was getting better, but you were just growing enough crops to feed everybody there's no growth necessarily implied growth is not needed. Growth is a really complicated issue all by itself here. And capitalism is addicted to growth capitalism only works with growth I get that growth is not a bad thing I'm not saying that at all I'm just saying that to feed people and have them be happy and learning and making their world better does not require growth. Which assumption you're making. Yes. And I'm no philosopher nor an economist nor any I pretend to be an economist because I have an econ degree from Irvine but not really. I don't know that's all that how that stuff works, but growth is not needed for a thriving society. So we're going to have massive depopulation as all the curves seem to show, which scares this shit out of me I'm like wait live. In how little time if we depopulate we're just going to go to not. Okay, which one are you worried about you're worried about climate change immigration or you're worried about depopulation. I'm worried about all of them. So from yesterday's conversation, one of the ones I'm really worried about is we kill off life in the oceans and then we don't have to worry about depopulation because we're going to be no population. Some arguments to life in the oceans increasing dramatically because the carbon and sunlight is really good for it. Let me just drop one thing in here, because I've got to got to go it's later. But back about 20 years ago, the Japanese made the distinction between growth without prosperity and prosperity without growth. It's, it's changed with different governments in different economic systems since then but it's always stuck in my mind that you can champion prosperity without growth. I like that I've not heard that distinction before that's nice. There's a book title I'm pasting in the chat, which I'm not read but it's by Tim Jackson, and I've got an opposite, which you may be amused by. I've got an opposite of thought called we're obsessed by economic growth. Cool. I've got, I've got a boogie and prep. Yeah, you did not solve my problem, which I thank you just dammit used. Okay, I really appreciate it. But thanks for going back into it and I'm happy to keep doing that. Okay, thanks. Great. Bye bye.