 This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, August 17th, 2023. It is good to see everybody. Let me turn on the transcript. There we go. And I think we'd do for a check-in call. So I thought we would just sort of do that and see what that takes us. I think a couple more people will probably show up, but I'm happy to sort of go into it. And I think maybe falling back on my original check-in format will work because last time waiting for people to check-in was funny. It wasn't working like it normally did. So I think I'll just go around the room and see what people are up to, and then we can go from there. So how about we start with Doug, then Doug. So Doug B, then Doug C, just to sort out the Dougs. Sure. So, for me, this has been the last few weeks have been the first time in my adult life I feel like I actually took a vacation from thinking in a directed intentional way. That sounds awesome. So I'm not sure why it alluded me for this long. But it's sort of nice to meet vacation that way. And I'm gearing up for next week when my full load kicks back in. And I'm sort of noticing a lot of changes in the way I'm seeing and relating to that. And I'm also notwithstanding my desire to not have it exert pull, undue pull and diversion from what I'm looking to really devote attention to. I'm really feeling the incoming of global change and meltdown and collapse. Every other day at least. I'm smelling Canada out my door. And Hawaii and the parade. And can your you posted a video of a French fellow with a few graphs. That basically said, you know, we're, we're already past that. That peak of the roller coaster. We're headed south quick. And it's not defined, but it's sort of de facto and coming. And this great void and unknown of how fast and how bad and what scale. And how many places at the same time. So I'm really sort of feeling the pressure that more than I have in a while. And I don't know whether that's opening up this really to vibrationally the reality of it. As a human being as a sensor, or whether it's just an escalation of incoming. And with that I'm complete. Thank you. How does vacation feel like what what's going on for you inside. And if I can follow on you said that your approach to next week is now different but you didn't tell us how it's different. You just muted yourself. The, the, the switch that sort of was thrown. Really involved. As an actor as a protagonist as a source as a driver diminishing to zero. And it being much more about energetically being in service and inquiry. So, I'm looking at a calendar landscape on a list of, you know, to do is an engagements collaborations and work. That involved me with that center of focus sort of that kind of egocentricity at the heart of doings. And so if you take that out. Then how do I, how do I adapt and modify my the way the change in the way I'm seeing and relating to all of that. With me being a lot less of a driver and a lot more of existing within, if that makes sense. And it's also completely contra the prevailing cultural order in terms of people relate to work and doing and all of that stuff. And I, you know, for the last six years I checked out of the transaction frame complete. I disconnected my service my work from meeting my needs. I've never imposed that on any collaborators or within any projects I'm involved with, but out of the blue my partner has been on vacation to be a mental came back and she was like, I've really come to a decision that I want us to do that with to be elemental, like to offer our services and not have it set up in a transactional frame of money for. And I was like, well, I can buy that inside I'm like jumping up and down and going, yeah. And it's challenging because you really have to figure out how to terraform and change the way you relate to the inflow side equation in meeting needs, when it's when meeting needs is disconnected from. And so that's sort of an exciting place to have company in terms of feeling into that and figuring out new ways of relating to that and doing that. So, yeah, those are the changes. Thanks, Doug. And I think you weren't here last week because your indication. And last week we went into sort of a conversation about collapse and decided that next week. I think it's great to kind of come back into a conversation having read a little bit more deeply and taken a bite out of different apples, both about collapse and about reconstruction revitalization so Pete put up a Google doc with a bunch of documents I think that can added a bunch of documents to that document. I mean a bunch of books to the document. I expect you to read them all before next week. And exactly. And a piece of what we're trying to do is divide and conquer so that we don't all have to read them all by next week. Exactly. So where are those references posted. I will post a link to the Google doc in the chat momentarily. In the meantime, you're next in the queue to check in so if the queue would be Doug see Hank Gill. Well, to me, climate change is ominous and invisible. And that's a difficult thing to live with. See the footprints of like a gigantic elephant stalking the earth. Maui being an example of one of the footsteps of climate change. I am impressed. I can't think of a better word. By how many people are not talking about how this climate thing might end. And where does it take us to. I just don't hear very much of that conversation. We're going to die. But how, why don't we talk about that. End of check in. Thanks Doug, I just pasted the Google doc in the chat. In thinking about today's check in, I made a list of seven different things, which were top of my attention. So that's too many for a check in so let me do one of the most recent things about two and a half hours ago. I came back from the first session of a course which I'm taking at university and the course is called learning through our body. And it has to do with knowing by using our senses, especially sense of hearing sense of tasting sense of smell. And today was the introduction and it was also the introduction to hearing, how do we hear things. What do we hear what don't we hear. Do we jump to interpretation, as soon as we hear something, or do we as Susan Sontag wrote back in the 60s post bone evaluation and really to what you hear. Can you hear history. Can you hear art. There's another course which I'm going to investigate called auditory cultures. As I think many of the people on this call my degree with. The Western countries, Western Western cultures were in what Walter on used to call orality, and then to use the myth of Plato with the, with the invention of the written word. We moved away from orality into being what you might even call colonized or victimized by our eyes, where for most people, most of the information we take in comes through seeing. So we did a number of interesting experiments inside the classroom, which was in a church. We closed our eyes for 30 seconds and listened. And what did we hear in the room and what did we hear outside in the city, and another exercise we moved out onto the roof where we could see the city but then closed our eyes and listen for a minute to hear all the kinds of things which jump to judgment or jump to interpretation. We don't normally hear the sounds of the city, and how even on implicitly they can become your comfort zone. And when you come back to a place, you love the sounds of the traffic or the sirens or the silence or the wind in the trees, whatever your comfort zone might be. So I was was fascinated by learning something that I had always taken for granted before. So I thought I'd just share that with you. Thank you, Hank. And it's really interesting how when you tune into your senses you just pick up a whole bunch of different things and how automatic we are about our senses so often including eating. I find that if I don't read email while eating I have a very different experience eating. I actually remember I ate and taste the food and feel the texture and all of that. All kind of shows up. Ken. This is like 50 of us there and they bring out a bowl of oranges and everybody goes over and grabs an orange and we spend 20 minutes looking at this orange smelling it sniffing it and just, you know, examining it. Then we go and put them back in the bowl and they mix them all up and then you have to go and find your orange and every single person found their orange. It was every orange is unique when you spend 1520 minutes looking at orange you go, I know that or that's my orange and I was really amazing just one of those things that when you really open your senses and examine something. You form a relationship with it and and it's just it blew my mind. It's like how does this happen. Were you told ahead of time you'd have that challenge or no just said grab an orange and we're going to do an orange meditation and then after we, we did this put it back and they and they mix along they go find orange and then you had to sit there and eat it mindfully like one, you know, peel it and and put one segment in your mouth and chew it thoroughly and wait until it's fully dissolved before you swallow and it was it took like 90 minutes to do this whole meditation is really amazing, but I tell you that you would have to retrieve your orange. They did not. You were not trying to memorize your orange to find it again. Yeah, it was just forming a bond with it like a pack exactly you know it's orange. I told you in advance would be completely different experience. Just wanted to make sure I understood the actual deal. Yeah. Exactly. Thanks Ken. That's really cool. Yeah. My next cue is Gil Klaus Mike. Yeah, I am just so enriched and fed already by what you all have said so far so thank you for that each of you. I was thinking of taking a ton also and just the reminder that it's it's so different to do one thing at a time. We normally do have many things at a time. And so enough said on that. Hank I've been, I guess I've been learning what you're talking about and also sort of re resetting my attitudes about it to from the notion that my mind is in my brain. To the notion that my mind is in my body to the notion that mind is in all of us together in the conversations interactions that we are the boundaries are blurred. And I like that I'm enriched by the blurring of the boundaries and the expansion of the sense of who I am and who we are in the story. And maybe has something to do Doug with what you're saying I am I am also in as several of you have said, in the grip of this wild roller coaster ride that we're in. What was the metaphor. You know something is happening here but you don't know what it is to you Mr Jones on Mr Jones here does know but the song reference. So, it's really disorienting to recognize that we have no ability to predict what's coming at us. So we have a general shape of it, but we don't know the details we don't know the timing. And, you know whether that's climate change or American politics or any of the number of crises that we're facing. It's all up for grabs. And so part of my practice is to is to learn how to be relatively calm and focused and deliberate and in the midst of the cast. I'm, I confess I've been one of the geezers who has had the attitude of well I'm, you know, sort of. I'm relieved that I won't see the worst of it. You know, others will, but I can't, I can't rest in that because I'm not, you know, I'm in my sense of connectedness and responsibility to the people I love and to the younger people I love and future generations and also the realization that yeah it's really actually going to bite us because it's moving very fast. So learning how to dance with massive uncertainty and and giving up the addiction to prediction. So many, so many of us have, you know, you turn on the telly and it's filled with people saying exactly what's going on and what's going to happen next nobody fucking knows. So, I'm finding, I'm finding some comfort in releasing the prediction addiction and just looking at what's the next thing to do. That's the best thing that I can do. And with that in mind the other part of the check in is I've talked, I've talked with you all before about critical path capital the private equity play that I've been building to acquire climate relevant small and medium sized businesses from aging and retiring owners, and not just not just improve their operations and focus and strategic relevance and collaborative coordination within them but to put them in the hands of their employees as employee owned and effective companies and this is this is a project that has really had a grip on me for about 11 or 12 years. And I've kept on picking it up, looking at the orange cat, examining the orange, figuring out strategies plans building collaborations making moves and putting it down thinking it's just like I can't do this for various reasons. In short term economics my wife's health issues, the Palo Alto gig, my energy as an older guy the the time horizon of launch, and whether I can make a five or 10 year commitment to something responsibly. I keep on putting it down, because of you know practical assessments. And it keeps on coming and picking me up like a like a big eagle grabbing me by its talents and say now we're called. We're going for a ride guy we are going for a ride. And the last, last several days I've been contacted by wasn't three. I think three other companies doing adjacent moves. Similar things and this are not exactly the same as what we're doing. So, maybe competitive actually maybe very complimentary in a very powerful way. And we just had a bid yesterday from a contract and company from some work on our house, and their business model was not what I'm talking about, but stunning in its creativity and its adjacency. I'm back. I'm back in the saddle or back in the closet eagle, trying to figure out how to make this damn thing work because there's something here that I think is really powerful and contributory to the challenges ahead. And trying to figure out how to do it. Kevin Jones I want to come back and talk with you again in probably a couple of weeks. I need to, I got some digesting of this slowly eating orange to do. But we've got stuff to talk about and Doug very much want to talk with you sooner than that, like in the next day or two if it if your calendar will permit. And yeah, Doug Carmichael the the footprints of the elephant was a very powerful image for me are you are you still here. Yeah, there you are. Okay, good. You know, something happening we can't quite see it. On the notion of nobody's talking about it though I just want to say two things. One is that Ken and I in close to the living between worlds call yesterday started with that question about like you know everybody says that nobody's talking about we had a very rich and provocative and personal strict and strategic conversation about that. It's really rewarding for us and other participants the video will have the video posted within the week and I'll share that with you guys when it's posted. But the other thing on nobody's talking about it is I've got a client who's working in the oil and gas industry in Houston actually chose to embed themselves there. It's important that they're hearing different conversations from their colleagues in the oil and gas industry. And it's not where we would like it to be, but it's like a, it's like a perplexed dismay acknowledgement of holy crap look at those footprints. What, what might those be like these are people who were saying like six months ago, there ain't no footprints. Shut up about your footprints and now they're like, they're unsettled. And I just take that as a very interesting marker in this conversation about nobody's talking but they're not talking about the way we'd like them to talk about it but man, they are no longer escaping it. They whoever some number of they so. And, and that's sorry to go on so long, but let me just say, we're in addition to all the physical and economic markers we're moving into a very strange psychological time in the world where people will be navigating their disarray and unfamiliarity and uncertainty in strange ways. And a blessing I'll say is this is that in that list can I'm sorry to steal your thunder here but you'll, I'll beg your forgiveness later in this list of books about collapse. Ken found a book about the regeneration of collapsing civilizations. I think we need to read both of these literatures. There's, there's a lot about how things fall apart. What do we do in the face of that is another, another, the age of unmooring, there's another place to investigate. So thank you all thank you for what you've shared and for letting me roll so long. I'm done. Thanks, Gil. Thanks a lot. At the very beginning you talked about multitasking and I just wanted to, I said this I think on a one or two OGM calls before but I, I don't like the trope that humans are terrible at multitasking. If you just look at a jazz ensemble. They are deeply multitasking at many different levels humans are really pretty good. I mean, I think that Westie Solomon Gray had a chunk of her career about multi-minding, and she says just look at a mom. And what a mom does what a mom with a job does all day long she's busy multitasking like crazy very efficiently. I prefer to think of it as a, as a polarity to manage. And I would, and long ago I proposed that there'd be interfaces that take us from single task, deep focus blanket everything covered everything else away. Over to, I'm going to enter Bruce Lee territory and multitask right now and I'm going to get rid of my big queue of emails that I haven't been able to touch and this whole set of articles that I need to forward the right people and whatever, and I'm going to make me to elect to be in one mode or the other, and that it's okay. And the problem with demonizing multitasking and telling us that humans are terrible at it is that it makes people not go in and do that it's like ooh this is taboo territory it's like why. Because if we could be very efficient about it you can get through a whole bunch of stuff to clear up more time for yourself to actually go and single task on purpose intentionally and clear the decks anyway I spoke about that longer now that I meant to. What was the phrase you used Jerry, instead of multitasking you mentioned a mom who was a multi multi minding, which is as much deeper. Yeah, SD Solomon Gray and I'll put a link to some of her work in the chat. You know Brian, Brian Franklin used to say that the most powerful person in any room is the person who's the most emotionally versatile. What I'm going to log with you is that you know humans who are versatile in the modes we can play it. Adaptable appropriate to the situation is really good. On the jazz musician though. Yeah, they're not multitasking they're doing one thing. They're playing they're doing one multi layered thing they're paying, they're paying attention to a multitude of things simultaneously. Yeah, I don't know it's one task they're they're making jazz beautiful music with other people, but they're the layers that they're mind that they're minding are like boggling sometimes. Yeah, it's ready. Yeah, and well Jerry you know this from being on the mat in the dojo. You're actually not paying attention to lots of different things. Something else is going on. I don't know how to describe it but it's not right here. You mean something's happening here but you don't know what it is. I think we should, I think we should, I think we should conduct the rest of this conversation just by quoting songs. Yeah, but I want to say, but I want to say. Yeah, is anybody familiar with the, the, the phenomenon of synesthesia. Yes, which is a person who all their emotions, all the senses are one, and that I think is what happens in great jazz, that there is no thinking there is no, and everything is just coming in. Thanks Stuart can briefly and then we'll go back to the queue. Two things. One, a distinction I heard that I really liked was humans can multitask we can listen to the radio and drive or listen to the news while we're watching the dishes but we can't multifocus which is why we can't drive and text at the same time. So I guess there are two very different frames of mind. There's tasking and focusing and if you're trying to focus on texting while you're driving 70 miles an hour, you're probably going to run off the road and kill yourself or someone else so I like that distinction. The second one is, I went to hear went and Marsalis talk about his book great sweet sweet swing blues on the road. And he said jazz is the most democratic art form because the person who with with the biggest years person can listen the most is who brings things together. And so what they're doing is, they're listening to what are the people doing and responding in the moment to their listening which brings us to a whole different ontological level of the listening of jazz is a very interesting ontology. Anyway, that's my, my comment. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Our cue is class Mike Ken. Yeah, it's actually a great metaphor. jazz, because it is in my mind multitasking because you really have to pay attention to so many things but it's aligned right. Everybody wants to play jazz you don't have one guy wants to play tango. They're all, they're all in the same in the same rhythm. And then it works. So but it has to is it requires a certain level of alignment. I'm always coming back to don't look up. I mean, the, the, so so much of what seems to unfold around us right now is really reflected in that movie. It's really difficult to to do a trend analysis and to to have a part understanding of what we're heading towards. I mean, right now the, you have both India and China flooding because the glaciers the Malayan glaciers are melting so fast. You know that the rivers can't can handle this and if you go online and then just take a look at how devastating this is where you're flooding catastrophic levels of flooding. And the pictures that you see our cars floating down the river and houses getting on more and so on, but you don't see the millions of acres of farmland that are getting flooded and wiping out entire crops. So China and India already have lost major parts of their crop here in the United States or winter crop is at the level of 1956. And that the worst mender crop, you know, since 1956. And so the, it's quite foreseeable that if we, if we don't change our way of living in this changing environment, then we'll, we'll invite some really bad times. There was an article that came out yesterday. How farm or cop insurance in the farm bill is paying farmers in Arizona to put crops down that don't belong into Arizona. It's too hard. It's too arid and so on. But then cop insurance compensates them for whatever losses they incur. So they keep doing it and somehow the governance of cop insurance doesn't anticipate changes and can't deal with changes now. So you can pretty much foresee food shortages now that are that are going to be increasingly catastrophic. We are going to continue to be shielded from it in North America and in, and in Europe because we have more money and we just keep buying food from countries that shouldn't really what they food because they don't have enough of it. But nowadays this, this commerce that takes place so we don't keep buying from South America and Indonesia, you know, and countries in Africa so we keep buying food now and supply ourselves. But this is, this is such a, I think that the core issue really is that we don't clock exponential change. It's just, and I must it happened to me because I've been, I've been working with the Sierra Club for six years going on seven years and so I've been really engaged in this field since my retirement really 10 years ago. And five years ago, you felt out of line saying, you know, by 2030 this could be really bad. I mean it was like no indication that 2022 2324 could be seeing significant impacts. But now here it is, and it's really accelerating. And there are so many risk factors out there. I mean, the tantra is melting, releasing methane. There's more methane underneath the tantra than there is in the atmosphere total greenhouse gases. And I mean so the, the, the amount of, of, of risk, you know, and the mitigation window is really closing. I mean, there is there's only so much you can do. We were talking about when Trump came in that, you know, when you figure there is a train going down the track. Now they were, they were throwing switches that make this train go into into the or maintain the same direction where you wanted to throw switches to turn that train which had happened under the Obama administration but then it got all wiped out again. And so now we have we have we have none under the Biden administration they're trying to reset this change in direction that we just lost the most precious years to really to really get into this and make an impact so but in in still in all of this. You have, you have a political system and a financial system that absolutely refuses to to deal with this. And I don't know how I don't know what it takes because when you look around in Hawaii when we're talking about the devastation in Hawaii but you don't have a camera ever put on the agricultural fields that could wipe out. You know, the agriculture agricultural production center there, and they were doing seeds mostly and so on so the, the, the, the, the impact of all this and you try to be positive killer totally understand, you know, you're trying to focus on what can I do next but it is also important to step back and understand the, the most likely direction this is taking right I mean put statistical averages on trend lines. And, and, and then mix it and see where is this most likely going to go the form for variations right. And when you do that when you see these trend lines going unfolding in front of you. Now it's, it's like this overpull asteroid coming our way. Now it is. It is really not complicated. As I watched the Elon Musk, the other day, giving a 12 minutes perspective on climate change, and he started out by saying it's really not complicated. It isn't right. I mean we're making it complicated. It's not complicated. It's that these are very basic physics now that are that that we have set in motion. So having said all that it's nice to see that of all the groups I'm working with the Sierra Club is ramping up and and people are getting really excited and focused because that's probably the group that's closest to nature and to to working with the environment and with the base of pyramid economy and so it's good to see that they're they're really getting active and excited but then when you look at what's happening in Washington. The defenses are ramping up. It's not like you make an impact explaining that he is what's happening and here's where we should go. No, I mean they're digging in. Not to perpetuate systems that are clearly harmful. So, so now I just now try to stay in the middle. I feel like that right. I mean, the community. It's it's an emotional thing that that hits you, you know too much right it's sometimes it's better to just warp yourself off and board it off and what have you but and then the other thing is that I did work in a company where we are operating in 30 countries. So I sort of a linkage right I pick up reports or pick up news clips from places that I'm somewhat familiar with and and and you see the collective impact. You know, I mean, you, you, you see these climate impacts in India and China and Pakistan, you know, in Africa and Sudan, Yemen and so on. And, and it's, it's marching forward. Right. I mean, it's, it's global. And so you can talk about a collapse of civilizations that's all good but you know, those were those were localized events that we that we historically experience this is not localized anymore. Now this is global there's no place where too bad we screwed up. Now this part of the world but let's go someplace else there's no place else to go to. So anyway, I'm sorry I mean I just need to be up and positive and all this stuff and. And, but, yeah, no I think we're in for a rough ride and I don't know who or the guilt you were thinking that maybe that's for the next generation. I don't think so. I don't think we're going to make another 10 years. Living in, in a, in a civilization and in a technical environment as we're used to right now I don't. I think this is going to run so much faster than we then we then we can process or accept emotionally. On our call in 2033 we can compare notes. See how it went. Man. Like, can Carl. Thanks. Really interesting insights today, although I hear the same theme, and it's been running through my head as well about collapse and and unpredictable change. Like Hank I have at least seven items on my list, and I'm going to do it in in in Twitter form. The first really exciting news is that on Wednesday my daughter starts a masters of public health program at George Washington University, looking at the impact of environment. Go Lizzie, can she come do a presentation for us at some point just what what she's interested in and where she's headed. I think she could do several presentations and she should, which certainly helped the gender balance in this. I agree entirely. But that's exciting and she's part of the Millican school which has tons of money and so she's not going to go too deeply in debt. Kathleen and I are signing the papers on our new house in an hour and a half. Whoa. But that's kind of fun, just moving two miles. And in the process, having to try to purge some of the garbage that I have so we don't carry it all with me into the new house, which is of course impossible. Anybody has any good meditations on throwing things or, I mean, he has something to offer you. I have something to offer. I don't know if they have them in your area, but I use an organizing company which actually comes in packs and sorts and does whatever you want it to do, and gets it ready to go. And they just took away bookcases and chairs and lamps and other things and they get them to the right donor and get me a receipt so you might look up professional organizers in your area. Yeah, I actually I hired one who was working at my church the problem is not the big stuff, the bookcases and things like that. It's the paper, it's the paper and sometimes it's a single piece of paper from 32 years ago. It's a great personal meaning that has great historical meaning. You know, it was a direct to the speech I wrote for Al Gore that kind of pushed the UN in a new direction. Yeah, I'm the only one who has it. I get that. I have a different process for doing those but what they've done to help me is they put it all in order by date, and they selectively pull out what they think might be important so I can go through the rest separately. So again, it just it saved me tons of time because they were packing up. I had, I think nine boxes of books coming out of these glass fronted bookcases that I was getting rid of that we're sitting in the first area because I had so many other bookcases already full in the house. So, just a thought. That's a good thought. I think the other thing I need is a robot that will just come in and digitize my entire life. Yeah, there's including all my books and violate all the copyright. Part of it is that I'm an old timer, and it's like, but what if all that goes down what if the internet goes down and all my books are no longer available to me because I don't have physical copies of them. Now the ones I got rid of were mostly junk paperbacks, although as I started going through them I thought well I should pull out women's reality that was a classic in 1970 on women's issues. I thought if I do this I'll never get rid of the books and I haven't looked at women's reality in 20 years. I have the same problem though I feel I owe it to that book, particularly if it was given to me by the author with a signature and I, and I read one page that had great meaning. You can refresh, you can refresh all of that on women's issues by listening to America for hours monologue in Barbie. We thought we saw it last night totally worth seeing it's. It's funky. I think Gil has a two finger intervention here to solve my problem. I can't solve your problem I'm going to applaud Judy's organizers plan of putting it, putting the papers in date order so you can go through them quickly of course that doesn't work as well if you haven't dated your notes. I usually use a lot of times I printed them and I have stacks of paper that I printed that I thought were important. Those can be sorted because they're printed by date but it's, no it's, it's a it's a perennial issue. All the ones that say in the bottom of them don't print this email. Probably. I've got the same problem we're purging a lot we're not moving but we're trying to do a lot of purging and and and one of the bottlenecks is the boxes full of papers. If an organizer came in they would just take them and pitch them and I know that there's like one page or maybe two in that box that are critically important. And the practice that I'm practicing is to pick a box and set a timer and just blaze through it as fast as I possibly can. And the only looking for the gem and ignoring everything else and I will pull the gem and then dump the box. I'm going through many boxes to go to you in just a second I'm going through many boxes to the point where I'm finding acetates. Oh yeah I've printed before so I've made it back to 1996, which is apparently the last year that I used acetates before going to other devices. This is a presentation for Coopers and Librand June of 96, and a whole bunch of other things and some of these things I'm scanning because I don't have the original files anymore and I just want to remember what I said back when. So I've got I bought a little a little quick snap scan scanner, and that's working really well sorry that was going to be part of my check in Stuart and then let's get back to the queue. Yeah, so just two quick things one. I think there's a national service call who's got junk. Come and pick up anything. Okay, expensive. Okay, well I just, I just throw it out. The other point is as we're going through stuff, you know, maybe what we wrote 3040 50 years ago was just not that important, not worth the time to dig in and just just get rid of stuff. It makes you feel really good because you so much of it right, you know Jerry in particular you can go back and listen to some of the talks he gave at PC forum 30 years ago. Just finish my check in though just check in the other quick thing is I am still struggling to get words on paper I have all I have four talks, four talks that should be four papers. You've got to get these done. And again, I think a cattle prod is the only thing to use at this point. One of my distractions though I posted in the chat on Monday we're having a really interesting preview of a new book called digital empires, which will be out in 10 days, it's by a new Bradford, the author of the Brussels Redirect, which is how Brussels has been trying to shape the digital infrastructure of our future. And now she's looking at the US, China, and Europe, and all the ways in which they're trying to constrain, define redirect. What digital technology will do. And just to finish, one of the reasons I haven't been able to get my writing done is I am just immersed in tracking the Trump trials. It reminds me of what I did when I was 10 watching the, or actually 12 and I was watching the Watergate hearings, and in 87 when I was watching the Iran Contra escapades as I was finishing my PhD thesis. I mean this really seems significant and I want to understand what's going on and you know what what what could happen because it's a moment in history. And the last last thought was on my check in was, I'm not going to give a song I'm going to give a movie. I do think idiocracy is the movie of our time I agree don't look up is great farce but idiocracy is way too true. There's a very sad story in today's paper about subway surfing and a boy here in Washington DC, who in order to take a tick tock video climbed on top of a metro subway, and, and you know went riding on it until he fell off and died. Just crazy stuff going on. It is almost as if tick tock was invented to make us dumber and kill ourselves. Now a hopeful thing and to suggest a topic for the future. I think the only thing that will save us is ritual past we all went to church. My ritual is making coffee for my wonderful wife before she wakes up every morning, and I'm getting very obsessive about trying to find the best coffee and the best way to make it. Tea might be an even better ritual that both the Japanese and the British seem to be really big into it. But in a time of total uncertainty and instability, having something you do every day, or every week. Maybe the answer, maybe what we need to build on. So maybe that's a topic for a future session. Fair enough. Oh, great. Judy briefly and then we'll go to just one quick comment, because all of us are I'm sure prodigious readers and have books coming out the wazoo in our house. There's an organization I discovered a number of years ago, called a be booksellers. It's American Book Exchange, and they actually list books that are first, first editions have inscriptions from the author that kind of thing. And that might be an organization to see if you could supply to books because then they get recycled to the right people. Thanks Judy. Our cue is Ken Carl Stewart. Well speaking of purging. I have about 1000 CDs at my house, and I don't want to take them with me when I leave so I am sitting here for Amazon day I bought a two terabyte drive that's this big and this thin and I'm sitting here transferring 1000 CDs. For the last two months, I'm about 650 CDs in I do a few every day and getting those in order. It's actually part of a psychological campaign to get myself ready to move out of this place, possibly to Europe we're looking at going to Italy. And it's like, there's this huge psychological hurdle of packing up a house. There's so much inertia there all books and records and I have set tapes and CDs and you know furniture and like wow man I can't even think about it. But this is a tangible step I've taken this and now that I'm, I'm new this like now I have a commitment to once a week, go to the garage, take down a bankers box look through it, sort it, sift it, toss it, save keep whatever I reduce everything so it's helping me to to get motivated. After a long time of pushing this off to the, you know, not till the end but but long enough to where it was feeling like there's some pressure so that's my that's my purge and then you know, my wife was really into Marie Kondo for a while so you know we took every single article of the closet later on the bed, picked it up said does this spark joy. Now, okay toss it. Yeah, I like this I'm going to keep this so that's that's something I do is you know, I like talking to my objects, you know, do. So do I want to keep this this I've never listened to this I have this I have I'm finding CDs on open that I'm sitting in my collection like where did this come from gave me this but since storage is cheap it's all going on the drive. It's been a better frame than I was a few weeks ago that this summer has been very hard. Doug I came in the middle of your share so I don't know exactly we were saying but you know the heat the fires all the the crazy stuff has just hit me very hard of you know I've been tracking this for 36 years 1987 is when I started tracking climate change and stuff and not that long Mike or my mouth is off right. It's the opposite of this. Yeah, okay, because I take this as I disagree but yeah. And I remember working with Joanna Macy in the early night she talked about figure ground reversal. And I think one of the things the Anthropocene is doing is in the holocene. The environment was in the background, we it was stable it was, you know, we could count on things. Anthropocene things we have climate chaos. The background of the environment is now the foreground of our lives and, and the agency of guy is coming to the floor we're seeing all kinds of, of the facts that that are way beyond our ability to control and possibly, you know, going to take us to the, or the to adapt. And so, I was in a, as if I was in a funk but I can't stay there for very long you know, when the first book I read after my assigned media fast and my coaching course was Irving you lones existential psychotherapy which is a big fat Tom and it's a really well written book that I, I like you loans writing. And he says you know, there are times in life when, when the existential door opens up a loved one dies, and you spend your plunged into this chaos and, and it's a time of incredible discovery, but it's a place that very few sustain being in the, you know, it's very uncomfortable we want to get out of it. And I think what's happening now is, is that level of existential angst, which has been pushed away and denied for so long is breaking through for a lot of people, and it's extremely like, Oh man, I don't like this at all. And, you know, I have equally long time 36 years ago I started to meditate and I've learned with moods as well, not just thoughts but with moods to say, This is just a passing mood I don't want to get attached to this I'm going to observe it I'm going to feel it and notice it's here but I'm not going to hang on to it or cling to it or, you know, so that practicing of non attachment is really helpful, especially with, with moods of terror and fear. You know, I do my best to cultivate moods that are generative for myself but there's times when I have to just say, Oh, man, I'm overwhelmed here. And if I can let that and go, I'll be an overwhelm until overwhelm moves along either because I shifted or it's on a chord. And that's me to not get sucked in as much. And so, after about four to six weeks of going, Hey, I'm now back on. Okay, yeah, it's, it's, it's really grim and a lot of terrible things are headed our way but I have what I call compassionate determination. I'm not going to give up. I'm going to keep doing whatever I can do. I know it's not nearly enough but it's, it's what I can do and it's what I need to do. So, so that's giving me me tapping into some some resilience. I'm reminded of Camus thing about, you know, in midst of winter I found within me an invincible summer. I don't have a huge amount of great futures in my mind, but I have a huge amount of determination in my soul that I'll just work with until my last breath. So, thanks for listening. Thank you. Thank you and welcome back. Carl Stewart Kevin. I'm in Carl there you are good. Why the few acts here to tough acts to follow. It's just, it's, I've been going back and forth with between just so frustrated with having ideas for the past 1520 years that just can't get any traction on it. It's just in the past few days in fact I had a long conversation with that be yesterday and stuff but it's kind of focusing on like the on the core, like some core events that are coming on we can't, you can't predict the future you can be thinking about what kind of presence I'm going to have at a conference in October, and especially if those are annual conferences or whatever so it's kind of the approach I'm going to take. Got a lot of, a lot of things going on we just got a new, our new chief data scientists just started at GSA July 31. And we have a section 508 which is the people with disabilities that's a biggest assessment everybody had to submit assessment. So, looking at how that ties in one of the projects I'm doing at work is we have a, we have a team mailbox I'm actually looking at having a Gmail front end to the brain kind of thing so and towards developing a kind of the proof of concept we're getting into team brain and stuff that work and I've had team brain for quite a while and stuff so work with Doug on some things and a number of other people at school, but yeah I really see. I think it's kind of finding those organizations are trying to get back to basics with time and things there's a 9091 rule that I run across that said for the first 90 minutes for 90 days, the first 90 minutes should be focused on one major goal. The thing then with getting things done there's a two minute rule. I'm horrible at estimating time though but I'm actually have started tagging items that I think should take two minutes or less and then there's the, the, because a lot of times you do have to follow up and keep track of stuff. Anyway, and then there's the Pomodoro technique, which is, I don't know how much. It's basically 25 minute time blocking and stuff between those. So I'm just trying to kind of get back to basics on on the time things and then. And that's trying to identify and there's so many different lanes I went through. I thought we were going to have to move back in January. This year has been crazy. We, there were four, four loads of stuff that people took to landfills I think it was somewhere between 10 and 11,000 pounds of stuff mostly old papers and stuff I still have more to go through the treasures and stuff I found. I found a CD which was the first 508 compliant version of word perfect back in 1999. I found the DVDs that are the now defunct federal knowledge management working group and stuff. And then as you say go through stuff and I found like a bunch of old family photos stuck in a box with 1996 tax returns. So you can't, you think you're you can just go through boxes and throw them away but it's tough so. Yeah, so I did buy the house so at least they don't have to deal with. I've got uncertainty and where I'm going to be living now. I think basics, like I said, kind of focusing on time and different ways to, and then the thinking in terms of the events that I'm involved in in the communities. Doug Engelbar talks about networked improvement communities and stuff so I mean I, you know, systematically improving the improvement processes and things. The groups that are really the ones that are really focusing on trying to improve things. But yeah it's, it's scary with the way things are going. Yeah, that I'll post the link it's my, I've made it my Facebook cover but Ray Anderson's work with interface carpet and he read. Engelbart inspired the paradigm weeks or whatever and Ray Anderson really is a. He, he left from conservation, which he framed is starting with Rachel Carson and silent spring to do what he was saying restorative and stuff sustainability is not enough sustainability is just about not doing more harm. We do no more harm that's not enough, we need to be trying to help the planet heal we need to be trying to help the planet heal faster. I mean that's kind of, I came up with catalytic leapses the name of the company I want to try to get started. And as you said, it's got to do, got to just do stuff so. Mode and I guess some Stuart slept still. So I'll stop there. Thanks Carl. Haven't seen you in a while so we're happy to happy to see you. The queue is Stuart Kevin Pete. Richness richness. You've given me to play off tickled my, my mind in so many different, different ways. I was just thinking that if I was checking in yesterday. I'd be in almost like a little cocaine rush. And in the sense that it was a heavy day of steroids and drugs. And, and, and it was really interesting it reminded me of watching the movie Bullworth. Last week which is an extraordinary prescient movie that was made almost 40 years ago something like that Warren Beatty's last film and I understand why I understand why he stopped. And, you know, that being said, I echo Gil's thoughts about the incredible value that this conversation provides for all of us. You know, we just may be the mystics and prophets of our age in this conversation here. Who knows, you know, who knows, who knows. But the thing that I appreciate most is that most everybody here is aware of what's going on. And yet we're neither modeling or complaining we just continue to put one foot in front of another, doing the work that we, we are supposed to be doing whatever that happens to be but somehow we've all gotten to that place of you know what I come to call inner space. You know we've conquered the physical world class you said it beautifully this is, you know previously collapses were, were local but this one, this one is global. There's no place to run and hide no place else to go except for the folks who want to go colonize our space to wish I wish them, you know, the best of the best of luck or people building shelters or buying guns. I don't know where it's going. You know, all of our calm presence and the projects we're working on. No pun intended may be totally trumped by folks acting in a dystopian way in the antithesis of what it means to be a human being. Doug I had, I had a Doug be I had a thought about your, your check in it reminded me of two things one, you know the switch from an anthropomorphic view into a, you know, as an individual into I'm not the center of this. It brought me back to around 1990 when I was really having a rough time. And I found someone that I worked with for a short period of time, who happened to be the wife of Richard Bandler, famous for a bandler and Grinder. What, what their work? Neural linguistic programming NLP. Anyway, Bandler was a controversial character, but his wife had developed this body of work around consulting to people to ascertain what the driving question of their life was, and how that might be modified to make for a quote better life. And I was living the question of, I have to save the world. I personally have to save the world. And she says, Well, no wonder you're, you're, you're crazed. I mean, that's just, you know, that's just a question that'll, you know, run you off the cliff. It's disastrous. And so we modified it to, to, you know, be a person who helps and contributes to what it is that's, that's going on the world. And can like you I've been following climate. Since I first read Al Gore's first book. I don't remember exactly when it was published but I read it in the, in the, in the late 80s as an eye opening piece. I helped him write it while he was still in the Senate so earth and the balance. Yeah, that was it. That was a beautiful thinking like in, in 93, I published an article in the legal profession called silver foxes in the art of resolution. And in articulated my ideal of what a great judge lawyer mediator would actually do in looking at all sides of any situation and applying some wisdom to it. And there's, there's, by the way, it happened to be an article that precipitated meeting my meeting my, my, my wife, who I was with for about 23 years. The first thing she said to me was, and this is around 93, you're not the silver fox, you're, you're much too young to be the silver fox. But now I kind of feel like I've grown into that identity a little bit. But when, when, when you were talking about purging Mike, I immediately thought of the 25 suits in my closets. From a bygone, from a bygone era, anytime it feels like the closets are too full, I say, Oh, I think I got to get rid of those. Those are, those are ridiculous along with these things called ties that, you know, every once in a while you need one for a funeral or something like that. But this notion of silver foxes. I think it's what we aspire and want to be at this moment in time. You know, we all know what's going on and no one's running around like chicken little with their heads car off, which is a beautiful thing to see and observe I think. You raised a great point when you start to talk about presence, which, which, which puts me into, you know, the whole Meg, Meg Wheatley universe of who do you who do we choose to be at this moment in time. Are we going to be our worst human, or our best human. And that, that to me is, I'm realizing how magical the work with Meg has been over the last seven or eight years. You know, my primary meditation teacher was a guy named Jerry Grinnelli who was also a gramminated Grammy nominated jazz musician, a drummer. And it's a most amazing thing to study meditation with an ADD. And I'm not a fanatical drummer. But, but that whole universe forced me to really think about. Oh, are we in a place of collapse, because Meg came to that conclusion. Early on, early on. The notion of a book even focuses it better than the, than the first one, but the idea of who do we choose to be. And it's amazing how most everyone, if not everyone on this call is choosing to be a certain kind of presence as we go forward. But I went through, you know, a little mindset. Wait a minute, maybe this is all falling apart. All the things that you hold in your whole life aspire to. To get to maybe all of those foundational pieces don't mean anything anymore, because we have killed a goose that laid the golden egg. And there's no stopping the emergent trajectory. And, and yeah, so our mindsets turned to so what after collapse, when is collapse we don't know. You know, what a great opportunity to live in a place of not knowing. I think that that's enough rambling, because it feels like a little bit of a ramble, but I just, I guess I want to save it. It's a privilege to be in this conversation with all of you. And so many of you are doing just such great work in the face of not knowing. Thank you. Thank you Stuart. At the beginning of this call I thought we'd be done with check ins real quick and then off into conversations and we are not likely to make it through the queue, which is Kevin, is that happening on your computer. Yes, but as luck would have it Kevin you are next in the queue so if you can resolve the thing that just started playing and jump in that would be great Kevin Pete Julian. Okay, well you know if I weren't on a four hour delay and oh here I would have missed the call. So that's the upside of the morning, I guess you'd say. But going back a step, you know ballot of a thin man, you know you go into a room and you know something's happening that you don't know what it is. Mr. Jones came out when I was in seventh grade, but he had no idea what was going on. I was still wearing flannel line jeans because they felt good where everybody came back in much later. Yeah, well yeah but I everybody was doing white Levi's and I didn't understand that fashion had become a thing in seventh grade so it was just one of those things. I'm up here in Chicago have we're working with a college that is we're getting really close to a figure out a model that can eliminate student debt, making the college a work college and was tuition grants and some other things like that. It's pretty interesting. I'm also. Now I understand the voice that was impinging on us so Kevin. Yes, I'm meeting the decision in Montana is really great and I'm meeting with I put it in the link in the community environmental legal defense group, and they're working on personhood of rivers as and townships that can have rights over and they run a network of about seven or eight places that are making real progress. And so we're going to see if we can get them engaged with with us want to know a river and they really do guide groups into meeting and it gives folks a linear task that you can be at endlessly and incrementally and everybody's court opinions in Vermont help you in North Carolina some. It's a pretty interesting group like that. And there's a there's a real vital network that they've set up so it's a pretty interesting thing. So, you know, I can take, as I look at the future I don't really have a friend who's working with 90,000 refugees in a city in Thailand. And he, he says, look, I don't look at the horizon I look at the proximate. And, you know, he looks at these refugees that he was able to place. And he doesn't look at the things he doesn't if you look at the horizon he loses hope he looks at the next refugee he works with. He can do stuff and I've always found for me. The Serenity Fair really works. I've, you know, worked at the things I have powers to change and I don't focus on the things I don't. And, you know, despair is the common substrate for so much. And I just, you know, for some reason, I don't go there in my mind doesn't go there. So, anyway, the, so that's, that's my response to where we're going on stuff. Thanks Kevin you're reminding me that this week there were, there was a big win and a big loss for the Commons the loss was the Internet archive got basically lost the lawsuit. 8 and 9. Kevin if you can mute. There we go good. The Internet archive lost a big lawsuit against book publishers and also got sued by record labels for publishing 78 that have gone completely out of print that nobody is actually making available that's a really weird lawsuit but the archive is in a lot of trouble. And the win was in Montana, where a judge found for the, the, the kids, who are basically suing because their futures are being impinged and Montana happened to have a law that says it's not. I think you're next in the queue and let me finish on the Montana lawsuit is really interesting because of the facts that were agreed upon, and the way that they set up how climate could be used so anybody working on river personhood was greatly, you know, the way that they were stipulated and agreed to. It's a really interesting precedent of how you can get this done. It's, it's more than just a case it's, it's, it's the, it's the facts that were disputed, and the climate deniers that were shown to not be so it's a it's a really, you know it's a modular mobile precedent kind of thing, you can drop this this part into anything that this network is doing. Thanks, thanks for, thanks for amplifying on that Kevin. Pete, it is your turn. Thanks Jane thanks everybody I'm going to skip over collapse and resilience, kind of, because I have a bunch of other stuff I want to talk about real quick. In my life. My wife and I are still covered conscious covered is still around folks use a mask, get your indoor air cleaned. Don't, don't stay in dirty indoor air. Wear a good mask, which means not a cloth one or even a surgical mask, you need it in 95. Tux came out yesterday. It's a really good issue. Check it out. Lots of cool stuff. There's a group that we did our first meeting today, working on markdown and get for collaborative writing, which is very similar to massive wiki but a little bit different focus more on writing, and maybe getting some fancier collaboration features from get and get hub. We might have a, we'll probably have another meeting next Thursday at 7am. Massive wiki bill Anderson and I are continuing to do cool stuff with massive wiki. Slow but steady, it's getting better and better. I've got my past shift people start up with Matthew Lowry and Wendy Alfred who are both actually OGM or is even though they're in strange parts of the world, where it's hard to get to this meeting. We teach people about AI and other interesting technology stuff. So that's coming along well. Jordan is kind of back on the ground and doing stuff. It's he's re centered from Lion's Berg to his personal brand kind of and he's going to be fundraising as has Jordan Nicholas for the next few months and making a go of it. So, you know, I've been working together and some helping get stuff. He's going to have a podcast called above the chaos, which should be a lot of fun. I'm still having a ton of fun with and ton of fun and other stuff with chat to BT and mid journey now. I was out of mid journey for a while and, and, and I played with staple diffusion and dolly they're all wonderful mid journey five is pretty mind blowing and amazing. And it also I've, I've done, I think I've done literally thousands of major images. One of the things that does is there's a whole bunch of very trite things that it does. And I think I, there's a, you kind of have to break through the, you know, the first, you know, images that it creates and get to more interesting ones and I think I've done that so more news on that at some point. Talking about, you know, like, oh my gosh, you know, collapse is coming or whatever resilience is coming or whatever. It's a really interesting I think of, you know, 50,000 years ago or something like that your band of humans, you know, you're a few interlocking families. You are 30 or 40 or 50 of you. You've lived on this land for, you know, as long as you can remember the elders tell stories of, you know, maybe a couple hundred years ago. You are on the edge. And it wiped out pretty easily, you know, if novel disease comes through it's going to kill you all. If the matriarchs get all all trampled by elephants or buffalo or, or, you know, a few people keep people get taken out by sabre two tigers. You're in a world of hurt like your, your little civilization is going to collapse. So it's really striking to me somehow I always when we talk about global civilization and humanity, you know, having problems. It's like, we've been through this before. And, you know, and I guess we'll get through it again. I tried real quick to do some research on population bottlenecks. There's a lot of research figuring out what happened when, where, but it's been the case through human history deep time and human history. Humans have gotten down to a few thousand individuals, like, that's the whole population of humans, and then have come back. And maybe a couple times different places. So, not that we're guaranteed to have a population bottleneck and come back, but that's what happens. And last but not least, can I, I'm cheered to hear your story of 1000 CDs and getting them digitized onto hard drives. I have a different story because I'm an early adopter. I signed up for a service called Murphy back probably 20 years ago or something like that. Murphy the name comes from materials recycling facility actually. And the promise was, you ship them all your bulky CDs, and they put them in a warehouse and they digitize them and you can stream them whenever you want. This was before streaming was big. And a cool thing I really liked also was, you can trade your CDs with other people. And since it's just moving a marker in the database, it's there's no overhead there's no shipping overhead right. I have about 1000 CDs at Murphy. Some of them are like CDs that you can't find anywhere, you know I have the one one copy I've ever heard of. I'm sure they were like 100 copies but you know they're scattered to the wind. So Murphy, the company went bankrupt at some point a decade ago or something like that. And literally, they moved out landlord took over and it's like okay well I've got a warehouse I need to repurpose and it's full of this crap. The box is full of whatever. So they were really literally going to throw everything away landfill everything, including my CDs. Luckily or unluckily, there was an entrepreneur who had a failed streaming music business. And he's like, I could buy the like the remaining assets I could buy all those CDs and I could regenerate the whole Murphy service. And so he went on that path and he's like five or 10 years into it. This has been a Greek tragedy for this guy. He couldn't figure out how to pay enough money in Wisconsin where the warehouse was so we found a place in Arkansas moved everything there. The warehouse there gets broken into there's you know rats and holes and and these and people with building licenses that have scanned them and things like that. He posted videos once in a while you know I'm still at it guys. Keep the faith and his idea is really to reconstitute the thing and have me paying again for you know 10 or 20 bucks a month streaming the ability to stream my CDs. So, I don't know what that story is it's a it's a fascinating story of our tail. And recommendation. It's not a recommendation yet and I feel really bad for the guy. I have this every once in a while have a dream of driving to Arkansas with enough boxes to pack pick pick and pack all of my CDs. I don't know that that's ever going to happen. I don't know if it's been very patient with all of our music and including some like burn CDs of Canadian, you know, folklore and, and Christmas songs and things like that from her childhood, you know, it's like okay Pete so shall we can we ever listen to those again and I'm like, so a fun story, can I wish I were you at this point even though I'm not sure are all the boxes of CDs would have made it through the serial moves that we've had anyway so. Thank you. Thanks, Pete. And can you have a poem for us. I do you know I've been listening to this call. So many things as I've got like six poems open based on things that people have said but I'm actually going to go with one that that it's a little grim, but I like it it's called the first on TV, or Walter Cronkite. This is the 20th century. You are there preparing to skin a human being alive. Your part will be to remain calm and to participate with the flare in his work as you follow his hand. The slow delicate way the knife between the skin and the flesh and see the red meat emerge. Tiny rivulets of blood will flow from the naked flesh over the hands of the player, your eyes will waiver and turn away, but turn back to witness the unprecedented, the incredible for you are there, and your part will be to remain calm. You will smash the screen with your fist, you will try to reach the program on the phone like a madman gripping it by the neck, as if it were the neck of the flare and you will scream into the receiver, get me station XYZ at once at once to you here. But your part will be to remain calm. David Ignatow. Bam. And that's the way it is. Except it's not, which is what he said after his last broadcast. Good to see you all. Thank you everybody. Good to see everyone take care. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Lovely call. See you next week when let's do some homework and get ready for conversation.