 a pretty complex schedule, but I looked forward to it. I know how that is. Oh, this is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, April 6th, 2023. I just saw that transcribed in front of me and it threw me for a loop for just a second. There we go. It's like, wait a minute, somebody's writing exactly what I'm saying. Oh right, I asked for that right now. Matthew, thank you for joining. It's a little bit earlier than the Monday call. I really wanted to join that, actually, but it's just too late in the evening. Yeah, yeah, it's too far gone. Too many martinis into the night. Exactly, how did you know that? I've really got a drunk Twitter, you know. Selfie moment when you're drunk is not a pretty sight. What was that, posting while drinking? What was the acronym, Pete, way back when? Posting while drunk or stone, something like that. P-W-D. Something like that, I forgot. And we don't have a topic for today unless we want to go back to the topic that Pete gifted us two weeks ago. Oh, interesting, does Zoom do Yiddish? It'd be an odd thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Jose, excellent. Stacy. Can I just make an announcement before we move on so that I don't shift? Because it's really on my mind. I've been going through some documents of court cases about the cover-up about many sex scandals and the church covering it up. And after having a conversation with Pete and John Kelly and we were talking about the need for journalists, I'm not interested in being a journalist, but I am interested in going through research and looking at, and as I was doing it this morning, wishing that I had other people to help me, I was like, this is a sense-doing activity. And so anyway, I just want to say that I am going to go through a lot of these documents throughout the day. Pete, I already sent the whole thing to Joanne, hoping she's going to go through some of them with me. But if anybody's interested in at least what's going on in Tennessee and the cover-up, people related to Huckabee and all that, please join me and maybe we could divide up some of the documents and take it from there. But I just had to get that off my chest because I'm really wound up. So Stacey, I'm going to share in the chat a link to this note in my brain. I've been tracking the issue for a very long time. I care as much about it as you do possibly. And you will see a whole lot of things in here because there's Pennsylvania for decades. This is Pennsylvania from 2018. There's other cases. There's a site called bishopaccountability.org. There's a whole bunch of resources that have been happening. So happy to jump in on that. I'd like to just add to the dimension of where I'm starting. It's with the actual court cases that wind up getting thrown out when victims come. But even though their case gets thrown out, it's already documented about the admissions of guilt, in particular in this case by John Perry, who was Huckabee's ghostwriter and also one of the people that worked in the school that just had the shooting where the person went to school. So there's really a lot there and it's more about the cover-up and what's happened, especially when you think about they're trying to make drag shows in public, illegal. They're doing all that, but yet, and I keep looking in the mainstream, there is nothing talking about what was in the manifesto. All they do, so there's just, I wanna focus on the legal part of it with the court cases. That's where I wanna start. So I'm done. Thank you for letting me get that out. And when you say the manifesto, you mean the Tennessee Shooters Manifesto, correct? Correct, correct. And I definitely understand why people wanna get rid of TikTok because there are a lot of people, they are doing some good work with documents, or as you guys like to say, the receipts. So I just, again, it's been a week and I haven't seen it on the mainstream yet and the ties with Huckabee and what we're going through in other issues in our government and coverups and things like that. Anyway, I'm done. Well, I'm glad you got that off your chest. Thank you. And it is a key issue. So let me put the car on neutral here for a second and see what you would like to do. I would be perfectly happy to update everyone on the OGM topics project and talk about what we're talking about on Mondays and see if anybody wants to join, but we don't have to do that because you could just show up on Mondays or we could go into other issues as well or we can hang out and roast marshmallows on the fire. And we could also compare notes because between Jose and Dave and Gil, we've got people who sort of have large-ish communities that they've been hosting for a long time. And it might be really interesting to sort of compare notes about how those communities are doing and where we think that might be aiming and what some synergies could be. That would be, that just occurs to me from who happens to have shown up on this morning's call. But who was just jumping in, was it Matthew? Yeah, there was a bit of a space there. So I'm particularly interested in just a quick recap of what's going on with the OGM topic subject because Monday evenings is quite late for me but it's difficult to get to it. And because I made a comment relating it to one of the things that we're discussing in the massive Wiki. So it's a thought pilot project. I was gonna catch up with Pete about this tomorrow in fact. So it's non-essential. There's something else, another subject, that's cool too. That's just one long good point there. Pete, go ahead. Monday evening is the, Monday evening for Matthew, he's in Europe. Monday evening, Gil is the since during calls which is where the OGM topics discussion has ended up. It's at 1030 Pacific. There's also Matthew talked about he and I talking tomorrow in the morning. I think it's eight a.m., something like that. There's the tools for thought map project meeting. I wanted to, if we don't have a topic, I have a suggestion which I think is actually not a great suggestion, but I'm gonna make it anyway. Perfect. Kind of similar to the OGM topics project. I wonder if we could take even 30 minutes, 40 minutes on this call today to open up a Google Docker, HackMD and just write the bullets of what topics OGM is interested in and have just a little bit of discussion about that and see which ones are bigger and which ones are smaller. You mean a list of topics the community is interested in? Do you mean a scope description of OGM boundaries? No, a list of the... An emergent list. List of, yeah. So, you know, soil health, climate change, carbon, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You wanna fire up the Hustvarna and start at HackMD? The non-carbon one, yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's an electric Hustvarna that makes, that has a speaker on it. So it sounds like a little two-stroke. Doug, as Doug says, everything that we do is a carbon generator. Causes carbon, even HackMD. So I would like us to go around the room and each person just say in a sentence what topic is on their mind, just a sentence, no more. And if we have the HackMD document open at that moment, we can no take into it those sentences. That's a reasonable way to feed what we're up to. So since I brought that up, I'll start. Sounds great. I will type in the chat. So what's on my mind is how close are we to the serious end game with climate change? And Pete is usually really good at grabbing from the transcript and pasting back to the chat. I'm not as handy with it, but that might be an easy way to do it. Thanks, Pete. There's the HackMD. Anybody who wants to, feel free to go to the HackMD and help edit this page. And cool. Who would like to go next? I think a go around like this is a reasonable way to go. So this is John. My topic question would be what is the form of democracy that would get us through the help us get through. Let's assume we get through it. Help us get through the difficult transitions of all the other issues, mainly climate change. What's the form? How do we modify democracy so that it's more robust and it gets us through these big changes? Thank you. Great question. I'll go and maybe in that spirit, what's on my mind this week is the the rapid pace of the legislative coups being undertaken by the Stalinist GOP. There's like, I don't know, 400 and some odd bills that have been introduced in 40 some odd states to radically suppress the form of democracy that we seem to be in. So that. There will be therapists and blood pressure meds available for everyone after the session. And hopes and prayers. And hopes and prayer. Oh, well, we know that solves everything. Who'd like to jump in next? I will because I'm totally interested in what Gil's interested in. And I just, but I'm, I wanted to have a legal system can act to protect the least empowered and become more transparent. And everything that Gil said, all of those legal issues. I'm interested in framing a regenerative, helping advance a regenerative future and encouraging radical hope. Anyone else? Scott. I finally discovered the question that I was, I've been trying to answer with all of my framework building and stuff over the last 30 years. That sounds like an achievement. Well, it is an achievement I think because I've realized that learning what question you're trying to answer is something that I've danced around, but it's very focusing. So I'll offer that up as my, what's on my mind is this question. Are there simple universal structures that underpin the endless ways we think and express ourselves? Are there simple universal structures that underpin the endless ways we think and express ourselves? So the idea here is bridging, acknowledging the infinite diversity that we have and also seeking the commonality that potentially underpins that. The simplest example is we all have a body, every single one of us. And we're all, we have the ability to do things and the ability to not do things based on the physical limitations of that. Okay. That feels to me like it is something we all have in common. I have an entire framework of things that I believe are that. And so anyway, that's what's my, it's not just physical, but it's how we encounter the world and all kinds of things. Anyway, so that's what's top of mind for me because as I've completed my framework and I'm now trying to explain it in the form of the book and a website, will this turn out to be true and helpful? Thank you very much, Scott. Pete, you still have your hand up. Is that because you'd like to go next? It is up again. Excellent. And yes, I wanted to go next. I have to say that I, this is the thing I wanna say, but trepidatious about saying it. I don't think I can capture it in a way that makes sense. But in a couple of conversations I've had with some folks in the plex, the thing that struck me most or anything that has struck me, maybe not the most, but very dramatically was how, no offense folks, how full of ourselves humans are. Like when we talk about stuff, we talk about everything through a human perspective. It's like, so there's a bunch of other stuff that is on the planet that is probably kind of arguably more interesting than humans, but even something like climate change, it's like, what are the effects on the humans? What are the, it's all centered around how important I am and how important my brothers and sisters are and, oh my gosh, humanity. It's like, I kind of feel like we should get over ourselves and expand our consciousness a little bit more. I can't even say it in a way that kind of makes that make sense because obviously we're all human and talking to each other and that seems pretty important, but I have a gut feel that we're way too full of ourselves. Thanks. Thanks, Pete. I feel like we should all go silent and let the animals participate now or something. I don't know, it feels very anthrocentric now to ask someone else to speak, but in that spirit, let's do it. Yeah, maybe I'll speak to that a little bit. It's interesting, so I had two thoughts. One, which is antithetical in some ways to what Pete just expressed, how can we manage ourselves through the mayhem that we seem to be in right now and maintain some level of equanimity? But what came up as more important is, and I'll get to the point, there's a little preamble. In the late 90s, I used to teach weekend workshops at Esalen and I used to use music and I'm preparing to teach for a week at Espan, Mexico and I pulled out this music that I used to use 25 years ago. And the one song that jumped out at me was a song from a musical in the 70s called Jacques Burrell Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and then titled the song is If We Only Have Love. If We Only Have Love. And so the real thing of importance, I think, is how can we teach a massive amount of people quickly to just step into that place because we all know that all of the systems and everybody is articulated in a different system, all of the systems that we humans have created are not working right now. They're only gonna push us over the precipice. And so how can we just, whether it's Jacques Burrell or John Lennon imagine, how can we step back or Don Henley in the heart of the matter? It's about forgiveness. How can we move ourselves back to that place where we are human beings connected to each other? Thanks, George. Love that, Hank. Well, the timing is good because I'm going to build on what's the Stuart just said. I think people are really yearning for something positive. They can work together on to improve the future of the world. So the question I would ask is top of my mind is how to really support people working together to co-create positive futures for a better world. I am next, but I'm going to pause for a moment, partly also so I can note take properly. And mine is very much in line with the last two, the last several, but I typed in already how might we soften and flamed tempers enough to solve the major problems we face together? Cause if we don't figure out how to stop being split from each other, we're being cut from the herd like if you've ever watched in a rodeo, there's cattle cutting, which is super, super interesting. It's a person on a horse who's busy like taking a cow and cutting it from the herd in very subtle and highly expert ways. And we are being cut that way or our herds are being split very intentionally with a lot of strategy and sort of hate to use the word but wisdom in how humans work. And we need to figure out how to climb through that over that in the fray and link arms and figure out how to solve things together. Cause we can't, if we keep doing this, we can't go on. And I'm sorry, that was a lot more than one sentence. Ken, you are next. Good morning or afternoon or evening, depending upon where you are on the planet. I just put something in the chat about with Tico. This conversation about what's it gonna take for us to see that we're all one reminds me of this move called the Gnostic move. And the Gnostic move is where people say, if we can only just see we're all one, well, that's associated with spirit. It gets above things, it sees things from above where we are all one, but we don't live above. We live here on earth where we have self and other where we're in this world of dichotomy. And so the Gnostic move has not worked in over 2,000 years to heal the wounds required to be healed. So I think there's a different piece of work that's missing from there. Yes, love is great, but the Beatles were only partially right. Love is not all you need, a lot more than love. Yes, you need love, you need forgiveness, but you also need to be able to do shadow work. You need to be able to look at your culture that says these people don't belong, we're gonna exterminate them. And that is a very long piece of human history that people wanna just gloss over. Well, it's kinda like the story about Nazir Dean and he loses his keys and he's looking under the street lamp, the keys are lost in the dark. That's where we are. It's like, we're just gonna focus on the good stuff. And I'm all for focusing on the good. I'm a strength-based guy, but we have to be able to acknowledge that there's also a really dark aspect of humanity that needs confronting. So this idea that Native Americans have of Utiko, it's a mind virus. And this also ties into the conversation about we, when we say we're doing this and we're doing that. There are people who are definitely affected by this mind virus who are acting in ways that are really horrendous. And I don't know how to go up against the military industrial complex and the trillions of dollars that are invested and made in war and armaments. But those people control an awful lot of what's going on on the planet and they will take it down with them. And we need to find a way to go in there. It's called the Shambhala Warrior, when they're an undo that. And I don't know how to do that personally. I just know it needs to be done. So I'm all for love and imagination and freedom and forgiveness and making the world a better place. And that's what I dedicate my life to. And I'm also very cognizant of the fact that that alone is insufficient. We've got to be able to come together. And we saw this in the civil rights movement where we saw Dr. King lead people of marchers across the bridge there where they were beaten. And they knew they're gonna be beaten. They walked into that knowing that if we show people that this is what love can do but they had to take the beating. They had their heads split open and that got people motivated to say, we need to confront this collectively. I don't know where the Dr. Kings are right now. I don't know where the marchers are because look what's happening in Syria. Look at what's happening in Ukraine. How do we, I don't know how to do this but I know that that's a crucial missing piece. So I just wanna throw that in there. And the idea of Utiko, this mind virus, this hunger that exactly as you were saying, Jerry, we've been cut from the herd. We've been cut out of the earth by our worldviews, by our culture that says, you know, this is how to live. And it isn't. We've got to find a different way and getting there is really, really fucking hard. Thank you for listening. Jose and Stacey, and take as long as you like before stepping in if you'd want to give us a little breath to process everything. And Doug's original quest was to keep these to one sentence and where I did and we're sort of essaying, but that's okay. So somewhere in between. So I can't go with just one word. Oh my God, it has to be in between. It can't be less. It has to be more. You could do 1.5 words. It's nice going in a little later because all these themes sort of float together. I wonder if what we're saying is that we do have a mind virus, but that this mind virus we're all infected with. It's not the others that are infected with, but that we too are infected with. And that mind virus is that we've been looking at a social system rather than at life. And I think that is how we're being divided. That we're being divided by fighting the system rather than finding a way to live life. And the way that we live life is today absent from the recognition of life. It's always about everything, but it's the politics, it's the money, it's the systems, it's the ideology, it's the religions, whatever it is, it's never just life. And so my question is, can we reorganize around serving life and let go of the system we have? The system not only of the system of all of those things that I've just described, but the system of thinking that makes those things primal in our minds. Because they aren't real. They're just shit we made up and it's consuming us. And I'm done with that. Say what was the one word? Shit we made up. So I don't know if I feel the need to say this because I'm in this space with all men and I'm wondering if maybe it doesn't hit the right way. So I'll just, I just wanna say that I agree with everything I've heard. And I just wanna explain just a few little things of why I shifted like when Jerry mentioned the church crimes. So for years, I've been talking to really radical conservatives who have talked about, they've called Biden a pedophile, they've done this, that and the other. And I feel that by focusing on the legal system and the coverups, not necessarily the actual crimes because it's really about what we as people are willing to say, oh, well, that doesn't count. I feel like this issue touches on all the other things you're talking about because at the root, somehow crimes against women and children don't really make it to the top. Somehow all the power gets concentrated in the hands of male figures and I'm not casting blame. I'm just trying to say that just the way we evaluate things is not really on an equal basis. And I don't have the right words for everything I wanna say, but I do wanna mention that I feel in this case, the reason I've chosen this is I can go to those people who have gone on the record time and time without these disgusting, vile pedophiles and I can join with them and I can say, yes, let's look at this and without focusing just on the church because it's not just in the church. There are plenty of offenders that aren't religious at all. So I just wanted to share that because I agree with everything. But again, being that this is such a male space, I figured maybe I just have to highlight a little bit more about why this topic is important and a possible way to approach it that actually addresses almost everything else that's been said. Thank you. Thank you, Stacy. Dr. Ben-Pete. Well, here I go again being the curmudgeon and the conversation. I think I should be the court jester so nobody takes me seriously, it would be better. What I'm hearing in the conversation so far is an underlying tendency to be kind of new agey. If we all pray together, we can solve the problem. Let's say we can all get together. If we all get together, what are we actually gonna do? The practical issues like do we try to electrify everything and replace the grid and many other questions confront us that are gonna keep us divided because there are different projects that need to be done. So I find the idea of let's all become one, a weak scenario for the future. I'm not sure I said anything like let's all become one and that was not my intention. And I'm also not a fan of hopes and prayers that this thing will get fixed. So Doug, what you just said resonates a little bit but not a whole lot for me. And if I could jump in also, quote all become one, it's a bit of an underlying gestalt but I agree exactly with what Jerry said. You can't just hope from there, you've got to take action. So I don't think it's an either or at all. I think I'm the person who brought up all one with the Gnostic move. Thanks Ken. Ken, you also said that it failed. It has not brought about what it's supposed to. I've never studied the Koran but I'm told that somewhere in there it says, trust in Allah and tie your camel. It might be in the commentaries on the Koran. Thoughts and dreams and effective action, we have, we don't get to pick one or the other. I know Pete's waiting but I just to stay in this thread for a second. Going back to who was talking about this. Oh, geez. Sorry, my mind's a little fuzzy this morning. I'll let it go. What a great group of folks even though we are all human and kind of full of ourselves. Cece, I really liked what you said and thank you so much for being here. Even though we're all guys and I have to say looking at the Zoom thumbnails, it's gonna be hard to come back going, oh my God, it's just gonna be a bunch of guys. Anyway, and I wanna say something and I think I am not saying not all men but the reason I wanna say it, the reason I wanna say it is not because I have any desire to defend the male species or men or anything like that but to focus in a little bit more on what you said. I think the presenting issue is even though the offenders are almost all men in these cases and then they go into that Darvus cycle. The root cause is actually power. So the people in power make it so that the people in power are more in power and they get away with it more. And then that's like the nub of it. And then we've got another problem which is our society for millennia has been pushing power towards men and away from women. So both of those things are going on and it's especially toxic power which is largely toxic male power, that's the problem. So it feels like that shifts the focus a little bit because what you wanna work on I mean, it matters a lot but now it's kind of, I don't know, it's like if you're working on the power structure and the toxicity of power and concentration of power that's kind of the core of the problem, I think. I'm really interested in our very likely many and multiple opinions about what is that the root or core of the problem. I think that that's a lovely indication of focus and passion. It seems hard in my life experience for anyone to convince everyone else that this one thing over here is the root of the problem and we should just focus on that and pay attention to it because everybody doesn't get over there and agree on that. And I'm just observing that over time. If I could just add one thing before Matthew goes in looking at that issue, at least when I do that with those people we also have to address our own shadows. So it's actually both of those things happening together the individual, the becoming or three of those things the becoming one and the being able to look at society. I just wanted to share that all those things come into life. Hello? Yes. Gil has to mute and it's Matthew's turn. I will mute Gil there. Go ahead Matthew. Yeah, I'm feeling a little bit like the apocryphal Finnish ambassador to the UN. Did you hear about the guy? No, I'll tell you the story later where I'll put it in chat. I really like where Tracy started this with because Tracy, you seem to be looking at something which is quite a concrete case. This is something that can be done by going through all these court papers and tackling it. And I'm more sympathetic with that idea because I don't think even 16 old grumpy men or 15 and an old grumpy lady can actually solve the world's problems in a Zoom call. We need to ask what we can do and do something. Jerry you're saying about how these people are very expertly dividing us. It's not as bad in Europe as it is in America. From what I can see, they seem to be doing a good job. They clearly have a lot of money. And that really helps them I think because it takes money to coordinate resources. If you don't have money to do it, you need to rely on people to motivate themselves. And I think in fact that all the people who are trying to divide us are a fewer number but well resourced, but I think they are outnumbered by people who would prefer that they wouldn't divide us. But those people are, they may outnumber the first group but they are divided. And that's why that we are being divided so that it's a little bit like have you ever seen the film, A Bug's Life? The Pixar at the very end, all the ads get together and kick the grasshoppers out. It's a little bit like that. And it reminds me of a post a very long time ago about I think the title of it was Ridiculously Easy Group Forming. Right from the beginning of web, what the original definition of web 2.0. Because if there are many people out there who don't wanna be divided but we are divided and it's difficult to form groups, then we can't get over that energy barrier and actually form groups and do something about it. So one thing I think we can do, that's why I put what I put in the HackMD is lower the barrier to group forming, lower the barrier between people so they can find each other, work together and collective intelligence basically. So, well, that's just what I wanted to say. Thanks Matthew, like you are back on back. The issue of sexuality is so interesting because society has never come up with a good form for how to do it without repression which leads to the outbreak of bad behavior. And it might be the nature of sexuality that there is no elegant solution to it. There are some cultures that I think have achieved pretty reasonable, interesting balances for that. I mean, Wenger and Graber's thesis is basically, hey, we've experimented with structure everywhere around the earth, it hasn't been as monotone as we paint it and some of those cultures probably invented really reasonable ways to do this. I'm not sure it's just structurally impossible to find a way that this works. There's a paper I read a couple of years ago that basically says matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy. And it was sort of in the conversation of the pale patriarchal penis people who are busy protecting the patriarchy are probably all afraid that they're going to be treated by the other side, if the other side wins given that this is obviously a yes, no binary thing the way they've been treating them. And that's not true. If you go look at matriarchal societies they're about egalitarianism and a bunch of other things super, super, super interesting. And it's a misconception that fuels fear that we're not busy putting out that fear or assuaging that fear or explaining what the heck this means or whatever. So I think it's really complicated but I don't know Doug, is anybody else convinced that it's impossible that gender finding a reasonable role between the genders in society if I'm paraphrasing poorly, let me know Doug is impossible, raise your hand if you think it's impossible. If you think it's impossible to what? For a society of whatever size to find an equitable and workable balance between the genders. I have a problem with the question because our culture is so toxically male that in our culture maybe it is impossible that's not to say that if I were reading Don of Everything that Graeber and Wengro wouldn't have said, oh, here's a matriarchal society. So I don't understand the question really. Gil? Yeah, this is not just to this but to this whole conversation. What if the world is messy and we'll never settle down? We seem to be talking as if there's a utopian end state that we can go to but what if this is just, what if life on earth is just messy and there's good and bad and it changes this way and that way and it evolves and regresses and that's the nature of things. And I ask this as an old grumpy man who has come of age in a very unusual, what, three quarters of a century in human history where I've lived most of my life with an orientation to a myth of historical progress rather than historical cycling. And we seem to want to take the, take the, you know, I'm on camera here, you know, take the downs in just one direction and maybe that's not how. You could run that illustration along the catenary curves of the Golden Gate Bridge in your background and that would be kind of an elegant hack. Except that it's, I have to do everything backwards and upside down. That would be even more elegant. Aesthetics aren't quite there for that, yes. Yeah, thank you, good point to you too. But I'm serious in my question or provocation. You know, we are talking as though we can drive unidirectional progress and maybe we can't and that maybe is the other lesson from Graeber and Wengrove. You know, infinite variety, enormous experimentation, lots of examples of human flourishing in very different ways than we take as normal now and the opposite right across the river or the opposite in the next century. So I guess the question there is, and this is maybe back to the way to go mind virus question that Ken raised earlier on is can we find some kind of peace of mind and effectiveness in the midst of the mess, in the mud? Thich Nhat Hanh said, no mud, no lotus. Thank you. Stuart, Hank, Dave, Pete, in slow progression. Yeah, so it is messy and you know, you think about, you know, all you need is love and then you think about a lion running down a gazelle so it can have food and all of the other things like that. Lion loves its cubs, Stuart. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's messy because you've got the incredible dichotomy there and that's just kind of the cone of life in a human body. There are some spiritualists who would say that, you know, this plane of existence is where we learn lessons about various kinds of feelings so that we can aspire to something higher. I wanted to briefly say something about the male-female dichotomy. You know, if you look back historically, we've been bouncing back and forth, I think, between a matriarchal and a patriarchal society. And I think one of the challenges right now or aspirations is how can we all coexist? How can we find the balance between male and female? And I think that could be a huge motivator and to take that a little further, it's not just male and female coexisting effectively, but also all the different races coexisting effectively to create some level of balance in terms of leadership structure. I mean, that is obviously will require letting go of all the othering that's going on right now. And that, you know, you might say that's an evolutionary leap that we all need to consciously be working on moment to moment to moment to moment. Thank you, Micah Ziers. Thank you. I lost my voice yesterday, so I hope you can hear me. Yeah, well, I'll start with the world is messy. Of course, we all know that as we can see so many people in the chat have agreed, but that's how I see active hope. That's what active hope is about as Joanna Macy and various other societal elders describe it. It's about doing things anyway, even if there's no guarantee you'll succeed because the energy in doing the things that need to be done will move the whole world further towards achieving the positive hopes that we collectively share. And that relates back to my original question, how about not only doing it ourselves but supporting others who are doing it. And while I have the floor, I just want to mention something that struck me early on when I heard Jose saying and I'm going to terribly paraphrase you now. But what I heard was that attacking the system is distracting us. And then it was echoed in a different way when Doug said the different projects that we need to be done, they're dividing us. They're splitting us apart. They're distracting our attention from just doing what we and our constituency feels needs to be done. So that's a point that I've heard two people say and it struck me. So I just want to add it like once again into the mix. Thank you. Thanks. I think I've completely distracted myself by I, Stuart said something beautiful that he said there are some spiritualists who would say that this point of existence is where we learn lessons about various kinds of feelings so that we can aspire to something higher. And I said, not that I am a spiritualist professionally anyway, I said the same thing to a friend this week except from the opposite point of view, people and animals and rocks and plants and bacteria and stuff are the way the universe makes little buds to sense itself. So we're all part of the same universe. We were like taste buds or smelling glands of the universe. Exactly, yes. It's kind of cool. And then so the little taste buds, sometimes they have wars and stuff like that. Thank goodness I talked about that long enough that I remembered what I was going to say. Excellent. There's another along with the male, female balance, dichotomy, whatever. One of the interesting dichotomies that I learned from Graeber and Wengro and the Dawn of Everything which is also I think really important was the way they kind of cast it and I'm going to do a poor, poor job of collapsing anything from the book into a small number of sentences. So please read the book. But one of the big dichotomies that they identified was what they called the hill people versus the city people. So the hill people live closer to the land and the city people kind of build up an edifice and that ends up being edifices and structures and councils and stuff like that. That ends up being a big, that was for a long time, that was kind of the cultural balance. So I think in some sense, the city people kind of won and hierarchicalized everything and killed all the hill people or whatever absorbed all the hill people. But that's kind of a balance that they can go back in historical time and see that it used to be a balance or maybe a balance is the wrong way to say it. It used to be that there wasn't big hierarchical thing that covered the whole earth. There were cities that were big but then there were lots of people living in the hills. Another interesting thing that I learned from Dawn of Everything is that historically not all city-state structures were hierarchical. So we have a really hard time seeing anything but well, hierarchy is the only way to organize this mass. And of course, that means that there's going to be a king at top or a despot actually at the top and everything and the shit is gonna rain down from there. They found a number of examples of really huge cities that didn't have hierarchical structure. It was much more flat. And they don't have city council records from that kind of stuff. So what they can observe is that over a huge geographical space, they had lots of people living together but everybody was living in pretty much the same kind of house. So you didn't find a central government structure and then the rulers living palatially and then all the peasants. Everybody was kind of just hanging out together. So part of the reason that they go through those kind of historical observations is that Western people, especially the culture that we live in, we end up thinking that our culture is the only culture that's possibly imaginable, possibly practical. And a lot of their point is, no, it's not. It's kind of a historical accident and maybe too much winning by the city people that got us, they don't say it that way, but we're out of balance and we used to work over tens of thousands of years. Humans have had lots of experiments at different ways to live. And some of them are good and some of them are bad and some of them are just the way people live. Ours is not, our structure is not inevitable. And so it's a good thing to take away. And I think Graber spent much of his career trying to take down, fight, undermine the dysfunctional institutions that had eaten our world and become the largest and most powerful institutions of the day. That was kind of his, I feel, it feels like that was a big piece of his quest. And I wish he'd lived longer to do more of it. Jose, you're next whenever you wanna step in. What Hank brought back up for me, what seems to be a big concern with all of our conversations in every group is that we keep rehashing a lot of the same thing from the same worldview. And we keep saying, well, we have the wrong worldview. Jerry just said it. And pardon me, Pete just said it. And there are other worldviews and those worldviews change how we see things. And we think otherwise when we have those worldviews, I think that's all true. Question for me is, how do we ground a new worldview that isn't grounded in the same thing we currently have, the same thing that we're starting from this point? How do we take a step back away from this point and ground something new? And so the question for me has been, excuse me, how do we reframe life in a way that isn't framed by the systems we have? And over the last few hundred years, we've done a really good job of understanding external nature. We now understand the universe in a really, really good way, much better than we did before. Because of it, we're able to talk to each other around the world on this technology because we understood that there are fundamentals in nature that we can work with and that those fundamentals in nature can allow us to manipulate nature to serve us in the way that it's serving us. What we've failed to do is look at nature inside us. In the same six to 300 years of evolution, we've kept the same ideas about what humanity is. We still have the same worldview about what we are. We still talk about ourselves with the same language, the same structures, the same ideas. We don't think about ourselves as a piece of nature, as a piece of life. We bring that worldview of what we are. And so what if we start looking at ourselves as a piece of nature, a piece of life that is not grounded in ideologies, theories, worldviews that we keep rehashing, but something completely new. And that that is what we then use to talk to each other from. That new worldview. And we learn to use that new worldview because until we do, I don't think we can actually get beyond where we're at because we keep rehashing the same thing. Because we keep rehashing the same thing over and over and over again. For clarification, Jose, when you say something completely new, do you mean something completely old like humans relating to nature and their bodies? Or do you mean something new? Something new. We don't relate to nature. We are nature. No, but we separate. We've cut ourselves away from nature. So we're not really integrated well anymore. Right. And we, some of our languages, well, we should take care of nature. And we should reconnect in it. No, we are nature. It's that separation in the first place that brings us to that. Now we're the caretakers of nature. I love what you're saying. And I'm getting a little bit of that famous cartoon where the two scientists are pointing to a square and they say, well, a miracle happens here because something completely new means it doesn't exist yet or means that somebody's already said it and we just need to find it and follow it. And also, how do you convince 8 billion people to think about this new thing or to adopt this new frame of mind? That's the part where I'm stuck. Right. So good questions. One, it's not new in the sense that we have to reinvent something or reinvent something that's never existed. Right. The difference is that the traditions that understand us to be nature have not been allowed to propagate, right? So that understanding that we are nature and that nature is us is part of something that we have seen examples of, right? That's why I was asking if you meant something completely new or something, for instance, like indigenous ways of knowing which many of which seem to speak to the thing, the point of view that you were just espousing. Yeah, but I think there's a subtle difference there. We often say it's us and nature, right? And reconnecting with nature rather than recognizing we are nature. I think we have little, I think we have at best a superficial understanding of indigenous ways of knowing because those things are so rooted in language and place and everything else that once you're uprooted from those things and you're dealing with it in an abstract way, we do the best we can, but man, we are not in those places in those times and can barely conceive of what that means. Which is one of the reasons why I struggled to even equate that, right? It's because I don't understand it well enough to be able to say. But the other part of that really good question is, well, how do we get people to do this? I think we don't need to get 8 billion people to do this. I think we need to get enough people that are capable of doing this already and are wanting to do things differently and that those people will model what happens moving forward. And it's not gonna happen overnight and it's not gonna happen in a way that I think any of us predict, but I can't take a step back and think, okay, if we don't adopt this new worldview, how do we keep doing things without it? And we can't do it by ourselves. No one individual can adopt a new worldview, right? All of us have to support each other in whatever that new worldview is because the second you take a step, you're smacked in the head with the old worldview. If everybody around you is not providing you with that mirror of what that new thing is. Sorry for the long, long thing there. That was lovely. No need to apologize. I'll say thank you for that. Sabanfou Sume, who is Melodoma Sume's wife, tells a story of a bunch of European women coming to Burkina Faso and they were just chattering and chattering about all this stuff that made no sense to Sabanfou and her friends. And so they took them down to the river and they dug out little hollows and laid them in the mud and covered them in mud and said, just be quiet. And after an hour, these women completely changed everything they were talking about. They had a very different experience. If you want to ground, go out and lay on the earth. The earth will talk to you. If you really want to ground, go through an initiation where you're buried in the earth overnight up to your neck like Melodoma did. It's a terrifying experience. Just giving you the willies, just thinking about it where you can't move but we have lost the indigenous practice of initiation, which we're talking about gender earlier or Doug mentioned sexuality. Children don't really have much of a differentiation in terms of for there, but once the hormones kick in, then you become something different. And initiation took place at puberty because that's when testosterone and estrogen would enter the system and testosterone can be extremely dangerous. It's really, really, you know, cause of a lot of problems here if we want to look for original causes. Testosterone's a good one to consider. And it was a way of ensuring that people understood that nature could take you out in a second, that you are actually part of nature, but nature is overwhelming and awe-inspiring and also that you needed the people in your tribe to care for you because without them you were alone against nature and you'd be wiped out. So I don't think anybody, I don't think most modern people have any sense of that these days. We think that, you know, we'd just go to the store and get where we want, but what happens when the supply chains that Doug keeps talking about no longer deliver food, you know, and what happens when there's no electricity to pump your water and we're left to our own devices and this is not a far-fetched reality here. This is something that could happen almost overnight and it's happening in many places around the planet right now. You know, look what's happening in Ukraine. All you need is some despot to declare war and start bombing the shit out of your country and you're back in a world that we thought we left behind a long time ago and it can happen here anytime. So a lot of Indigenous people talk about all my relations. They see the world as alive. I think one of our problems, one of our big problems is that we see the world as inert and the world has agency, water has agency. If you don't get initiated by your tribe, you'll get initiated by nature sooner or later and we are now coming up on that. As the planet heats up, as floods and fires take place, humans are undergoing a massive initiation and a lot of us won't survive but those who do will have a different appreciation for how to be in the world. I just don't know what kind of world they're going to be in. Thank you Ken. Every time you reach up to Unmute, I think you're pressing a reset button and you're like coming into wakefulness. I'm going to try and experiment. So I apologize in advance if it goes awry. But one of the things that I value, I think, in tough conversations is something completely different. So I love where this conversation is going and I wanted to ask a completely different question. Twitter, what's up with that? I used to love Twitter. Twitter was my jam. It was where I got all my news from. It was where I hung out with friends. It did go through a number of evolutions of what friends meant. I can still remember the second phase of Twitter I was in where it was a few hundred people from Silicon Valley and the big news was when a couple, it was almost like watching text messages because it was text messages where a couple, we watched them break up in real time because they were all Levy-Devy or something and then one of them was at the airport texting about the other one and the other one was off, not caring about the person arriving at the airport. It was a joy and a wonder. So then Twitter now is much, much, much bigger than that. But it sustained me through the pandemic with a lot of information and a lot of discovery and stuff. When our dear Mr. Musk bought Twitter and started breaking it, it was when the company broke third-party API access to Twitter that I'm like, okay, well, I guess I'm not out of here, but I can't use it the way I used to because the official clients suck and I was using a great third-party client and they broke that. So I went into web mode. I wasn't going to install one of their clients. So I've been reading it on the web. I've been, I post the thing, hey, most of my stuff has given me a mastodon. I haven't posted since. I've still been favoriting things. It's getting to the point where even that is becoming difficult. It's difficult to use the tool that Twitter is becoming because of the way it works in our, the way it's being warped in our society. And I'm starting to wonder if I should be more vocal about let's leave Twitter or let's stop using Twitter. So I would love to have some discussion around that. It's a big social force and it's gotten cancerous in a lot of ways. It's still doing a lot of good, but week by week kind of the one I remember the one I remember from yesterday was on Twitter, somebody, a blind person saying, okay, well, they broke my client and I can't be here anymore because I can't navigate the stuff anymore. I had a third party client that worked for me and now I don't. When is the tipping point? When do we say enough is enough? And I either kill my account or delete all my old tweets but leave Peter Kaminski there with a redirect to mastodon or wherever. So I that's a thing that I would like to talk about. Even though I know maybe it's not the most important thing for everybody. We will see if people want to take you up. When you when you brought that in, I heard like an alley McBeal type record scratch, like in the narrative here, which is fine. I think that's great. My own takes so far has been, Twitter has been so valuable to me that I keep, I will stick with it until my turn. I will stick with it until my Twitter feed is completely dysfunctional and stupid and then I'll go away and I will bear with all the absurdities and strangenesses because it still works and I have the same love affair with Twitter that you had Pete, which is it's my early warning system. It's where I connect with a lot of people that works really well for me and he hasn't managed to destroy it yet but I have this funny feeling that his mission actually is to destroy it. He's working on it. Yeah. I think you should destroy it a little further and then Corey Doctorow should buy it for a dollar and rebuild it. Well, there's this whole exit to community strategy which is let's just wait long enough to the value of the thing is so low that we can crowdsource, crowdfund purchasing it back or something. Anyone else on Twitter and the topic Pete injected in the conversation? If not, and I'm assuming Doug and Stacy that you weren't stepping in about Twitter, raise your hands if you are. Okay. I actually have a comment about Twitter. That sounds great. First you then Scott. Which is that it used to be a friendly place to go to. It felt like it met you halfway. Now I feel like I'm coming into a bunch of rubble and it's very hard to figure out what's going on so it's become very dysfunctional but I want to go back to the previous conversation about the unity of humanity. I actually believe the groundwork, no pun intended for a new religion is emerging and it has to do with the fires, the earthquakes, the floods, the rising sea levels. People are becoming aware of the earth as itself a changing living critter. It's not the indigenous view which actually assumes that the earth is constant. The new appreciation that the world is developing of we are living on top of a series of tectonic plates that float on hot lava is actually a fascinating view. We have been lucky to participate in a moment in the Earth's history where human life was possible. And we're going to move out of that period one way or another. I mean, we all know the sun's going to go out at some point but this is happening faster. And to appreciate the earth as a living critter that has been hospitable to us for a while and will no longer be and move on is actually a kind of beautiful view. Thanks Dr. The word I like in that realm is re-sacralization. A few too many syllables but if we saw one another and the thing we're standing on as sacred and I don't mean religiously sacred but as sacred in some way maybe would behave differently. It's sacred but it's moving. That's what, that's the new thought. Sacred and always in flux. Stacey. Just to respond to Doug's comment I'm still hearing a division between us and the earth. Not hearing that connection that we are actually of the same. So I just wanna mention that. The other thing, I have a question and it's not one that I want you to answer. It's one I want you to think about because it applies to, I believe it was Jose talking about recognition and I put in the comments what some of the things that make that hard. Imagine that you were to pass me in the street and I'm laying on the ground and you say, what are you doing? And I say, I'm connecting with my mother. I'm just giving an example. Imagine I were to tell you that I learned so much from my dog. I might get away with it, I might not. And I'm just trying to point out it depends who you're talking to. In the church, you can say, well, God told me this. Might not be a problem. So I just wanna throw that out there. Thanks, Stacy. And Jose, I like what you're raising with us and I keep wrestling with it in the sense of I'm very focused, one of my amateur theories is that human history is the struggle between opposing groups in the cockpit of humanity, wrestling over the joystick, how we get to control civilization, wherever their cockpit, whatever range their cockpit has. And then generally what most people who gain control over the joystick do is they try to expand the size of the airplane by conquering territory or whatever else. And I'm like, yeah, that sucks. Like how do we step away from the cockpit and realize that we're basically co-inhabitants and co-critters with all these other things, trying to make the earth a better place and step back into the place that you're trying to have us focus on. But I keep being dragged into the ideological abstract conversation because it feels to me like that's where the battle is. And if I can pop that bubble somehow, if I can be Milton Erickson with a handshake induction at a societal level and convince people to re-sacralize one another and the pale blue dot, maybe that'll work. And it could be entirely quixotic and fruitless. I think that that type of thinking is how we've, our worldview of how we think today, that we have to go from back to the cockpit. What you've just said is going back into the cockpit and how to get everybody to do this one thing or how to be this one thing or not everything to do this one thing. Because re-sacralization to me is a distributed phenomenon. It's not everybody agreed to the same religion and swear the same oath at all. It's just see the world of sacred in whatever way works for you and whatever that means for you. Don't care. For me, the question of understanding this as, that we are life, that life is what we're doing and that life evolved to serve life. That there is no good, there is no bad. There isn't a single cockpit that all of that reality, if we start to explore that and understand that and speak to that in a way that we can learn how this instrument is serving that evolutionary purpose of life and that this thing that life created, this consciousness that life created can take us astray, can make us feel like it is our cockpit and not just there to serve the instrument that is life. And so how do we understand that about one another and each other and have these conversations at that level? I'm not suggesting that it's easy and I don't know how to do it at scale, but until we have those conversations, I don't think we move away from we returning back to today's world view and today's issues within that world view. That to me is what I keep, I don't know how we walk away from a world view when all we do is reinforce it every single time. And I will point out maybe something that's too pragmatic, but Joe Biden's strategy against the GQP and MAGA world seems to be, hey, we're gonna just get busy and try to fix things in the country. And I don't mean to make him sound like perfect or anything like that, but he's basically saying, we're going to ignore all the turmoil over in the other room and let you people implode. And in the meantime, we're gonna try to make people's lives better. And I think that's actually a very wise strategy. And I think it has a little tiny something to do with what you just said. Yes, well, and I would argue even more so would be not to be even associated with a party and not to be associated with an ideology, but go even more fundamental. I think none of us would say today that, oh, how do we make gold? None of us would go, well, we can stir some lead together and some other things and we could probably make gold. We know we can't make gold, right? We know where gold is made. We know how gold is made. We know what gold is, but we don't know what human behavior is, right? We know the fundamentals of our external world. We don't know the fundamentals of human behavior. And that to me, that's where we're missing our dialogue around that. And I also know that it makes people like Pete uncomfortable because it's like, we're so... How do we have this conversation? I don't even know how to have it, but my question isn't, do you wanna partake? My question is, is this a question that needs to be tackled? How do we avoid being stuck in the same worldview and just continuing to re-emphasize it? Thank you. Thank you very much. Gil, my apologies for interrupting you and the queue, but you need to return that soil a little bit. It's all in the flow. It's a good soil turning because what you've been saying, Jerry, and what Jose has just been saying mixes with what I was preparing to say. So let me sort of try to dance with all of this. Gary, when you were talking about the fight over the cockpit, the thought that arose in me was like, when did that start? When did it start being a cockpit? Because there wasn't always a cockpit. Certainly wasn't always a big-scale cockpit. And I think one of the lessons that I at least draw from Graeber and Wengro is that the game changed at some point. It wasn't always the game we're in now. This is not the entirety of human history. There were other ways of living and other experiences. And so I think the question of when it shifted is an important one. The story we were raised on is that it shifted with cities and they say, no, actually not. But when did it shift? What were the characteristics of that shift? That's part of the diagnostic that maybe helps us see our options in a different way. Jose, there was so much rich in what you said, but it's hard to grasp on a single piece of it. Except that you said to Jerry's, I think really good characterization of Biden's strategy. It's just like not getting sucked into the MAGA gang. You said, great, but not enough, not getting sucked into any of it, but we live in the world that we live in also. We live in the world of one and we live in the world of the living world. And we also live in the world of humans now in industrial civilization with politics and money and so forth. And so it seems that we're destined or doomed or something to be able to play in both games somehow. And maybe the richness of the OGM-y flavored play is that we are intertwined by nature. That's one of the things that maybe characterizes the folks here is that we cross boundaries a lot and we tie things together. Last though, which is where I was raised my hand in, it was about the conversations of recirculation and can really very, very move, I was very moved viscerally by your description of Somae's story about grounding, not as a concept of grounding of like, on the ground, in the ground, buried in the ground. And I find myself moved and sad because today on this planet, more than half of us live in cities. That percentage is rising. That means that there's a huge percentage of humanity that has never touched the ground and has never seen the sky. And that for me is kind of a resonant, I don't know, it's not a summary, it's a resonant view of the mess, that how can we be of the living world if we can't contact it? And if we built shells around ourselves that keep us from the direct physical experience the overwhelming physical experience, the bigger than me physical experience of the living world and, you know, and the sense of the visceral sense of oneness that humans can sometimes experience. Sorry, please go ahead. So I think that we are too dominated in our thinking by the view that we could make earth into a heaven, a perfect world that would endure forever. And it gets in the way of our thinking about what can we do to make the world a better place in the next 10 years or the rest of this afternoon? That the idea of an infinite good place is seductive, but boy does it get in the way of actually loving where we are. I've been thinking about or just finished the book, Chipboard about the rise of the semiconductor industry. And a few of a year ago, I got to visit the Samsung factory in Malaysia. And I find myself comparing the experience of a hunter-gatherer walking along a path where every footstep takes you into a new territory with new things to see, new beauties, new apprehensions. It's wonderful. In the chip factory, all the walls are white, all the machinery is white, the clothes you wear are white. It's the most reduced environment one could imagine and yet we make people actually work in that place. The hunter-gatherer has a much more stimulating world. Thanks, Doug. Getting near the end of our call and I have a slight suspicion that Mr. Homer may have a poem on board. What's amazing to me is I try to find a poem the day before and it always seems to fit. Yeah, that's how it works. So it's kind of an oracle thing. This is another poem by one of my favorite poets her name is Vistava Zimborska. And it's called Life While You Wait. Life while you wait, performance without rehearsal, body without alterations, head without premeditation. I know nothing of the role I play. I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it. I have to guess on the spot just what this play is all about. Ill-prepared for the privilege of living, I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands. I improvise, although I loathe improvisation. I trip at every step over my own ignorance. I can't conceal my aced manners and my instincts are for hammy histrionics. State fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me even more. Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel. Words and impulses you can't take back, stars you'll never get counted. Your character, like a raincoat, you button on the run. The pitiful results of all this unexpectedness. If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, we'll repeat a single Thursday that is passed. But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen. Is it fair I ask people in my voice a little hoarse since I couldn't even clear my throat off stage? You'd be wrong to think it's just a slap-dash quiz taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no, I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is. The props are surprisingly precise. The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer. Why the farthest galaxies have been turned on? Oh no, there's no question. This must be the premiere and whatever I do will be forever what I have done. I'll drop that into the OGM list. Thank you. Thank you all, it's great to see you. Have a great week. Same here. Do we not have time to let Michael check in? Or I think Jose also wants you to say, I'll stay, I want to hear. I think Jose had something he was in the queue for and Michael, if you'd like to jump in, that'd be great too. Go ahead Jose. I started saying something earlier and then sort of lost train of thought and the conversation sort of reignited it. When we think about how it is that we're about to do things, we kind of go meta trying to figure out the bigger view of things. And obviously that's a necessary essential part. But what we don't do is go proto. How do things emerge? And we don't do that very well when it comes to us. Why am I feeling this way? Why do we even have these feelings? Why do I even have these urges? Why is it that these things happen in me? We all have them. We all have the urges for making change. But then when we start thinking about how we make that change, we go meta and we just like, well, we need to redesign the whole thing and we gotta start and we don't go, well, how do we deal with the fundamentals of what's happening in each of us? Because it's not happening in us from an ideological perspective, it's happening to us because of nature. And we don't look at our nature from that perspective. We all feel it and we don't all know it, why we feel it. So that's the question that keeps resonating for me. How do we understand why we feel the feelings we do about wanting to make change? All of us come back to these calls all the time because we're motivated to want to make change. And we don't pry into that question enough, in my opinion. Actually, this is a repeating episode of The Last of Us and we've all been infected by a toxoplasmosis-style virus that has us just keep coming back to these calls endlessly repeating the same phrases. It's actually a dataist play, which is a terrible place to end the call on given the lovely poem that Ken just read us. Anyone have anything else they'd like to say? Otherwise we shall all come. Yeah. I would gently disagree and say that the question of going proto versus going meta is a pretty good place to end. There we go. Yeah. No, I put a bad bow on that as all. Yeah. And I would say that we are, these conversations are perfect because this is where we all are. This is the reality of the quote, interesting times we're all living in and we are thinking and drawn to these conversations because this is on our minds as we wander around tilting at windmills. Now, that's a very nice place to end the call on. Thank you for that, Stuart. Bye, everybody. See you all on the inner tubes. Thanks.