 Oh, I was just thinking, I can't be only one here. Wait, is there something wrong? Hi. Well, it's very nice to see you. Very good to see you too. Nice background today. Thank you. I was just going to change it up, but if you like it. Stellar background today. It is Stellar. It is Stellar. So how are you doing? Pretty good. A few too many balls in the air. Not enough of them pain, but trying to sort out how to make all these things, you know, fly. I hear there's developments along the way here, little rumors popping up here and there. Yeah, and we've got like the channels in the matter most that anybody can go look at. Hey, George. Hi. Hey, Ray. Hey, Doug. Yeah. So it's all, it's a little bit like a star nursery where, you know, different elements are coalescing out of the primordial goo in some sense. So it's on the background, hence the background. Although my favorite background is the scene from Soul. Yes. I love to. I just love that background. That one is second to the control room from inside out. You know, last week I was trying to get in there because I had had this great joke on that subject and you didn't call on me. Oh shoot. If you called on me, what I would have said is, hey, I'm only here for Julie or Julian and some of the other backdrops. I don't know, it's not as funny now as I thought it was then. Maybe it was one of those things of the moment. In fact, I've been living in this whole world of audio versus video. We'll wait for more people to come on. I guess some phenomenal news. Absolutely. Oh, cool. Unbelievable stuff going on. Awesome. That's great. That's great. I'll share it with a wider group because I have a request. Excellent. Mike, how's newly married life? So when you're in a ring, that's the biggest change. And then updating records. Okay, so you're wedging life rather than partner. That's right. When I got married, I got my ring and I found I couldn't do coin magic anymore. I had to get rid of it with my wife's permission. I kept taking it on and off and on and off and on. It was going crazy, but I literally walk around with a coin in my hand. You can just file a groove into the coins or something. I actually can type with, I can palm coins in my hands and type just fine. So my wife really was, why, George, why aren't you wearing your ring? So, I don't know if surgeons have to do that or I'm sure there are, but violinists don't like to and magicians don't like to wear rings. And any good sailor doesn't wear any jewelry or anything on their hands, because that's what will catch and tear your finger off. Yep, that's right. It has happened to many. Yeah. I once borrowed a ring, I made it disappear and then I handed it back. It was the biggest diamond ring I ever saw in my life. I mean, this was up. And I handed it back and I went on and did some more magic and she was an elderly lady and she tapped me on the shoulder. She said, excuse me, Sonny, but I mean, I have my ring back and I went pale and I started sweating. She says, gotcha. Awesome. Really, I almost had a heart attack because it's gotta be a $3 million ring or more. You probably gave her a cardiac too during the trick, so she was just getting even. Why? I never accepted a ring like that ever. Again, and all my professional friends said, you idiot, you never accept a ring with a stone in it because if the stone drops out and, you know, but anyway. But it's magic. It's just magic. Or it was costume jewelry and she was gonna sue you. At least it wasn't a cigar ring like we did, like when I lost my virginity, right? I didn't know about that custom. I think cigars had gone out of style. That's right. You know, I haven't seen anybody smoking a pipe in like 20 years. Yes, my dad used to smoke a pipe. I used to smoke a pipe. Yeah, maybe I haven't for 40. Friend of mine who smoked a pipe died of lung cancer and about six months later, I thought, gee, you know, you haven't smoked a pipe. Oh, not since he died. I didn't consciously give it up. I didn't think about it. It just stopped weird. Weird survival strategy. That's how norms are made. Our subconsciouses are working, looking out for us. Exactly. So a couple words about our check-in calls and so far we're not that many here, which is great. Oh, and I'm realizing I totally, totally spaced on sending a note to the list last night saying that there's a check-in call today. I have a few too many things in my head. Well, you've done an actual experiment and I think you got your results. Which is my normal, yeah, exactly. Which is my normal habit to send a reminder call. And if anybody would send a note to the list saying, hey, join us in this call, I would appreciate it. Anybody who's got a second? I'll do that. Thank you very much. And we're busy thinking about how to, ironically, we're not that many right now on the call, but what to do about the Thursday calls if they keep growing because we call them check-in calls and we don't make it around to everybody to check in. And I don't want anybody to walk away feeling like that. That didn't work. So my best description of these calls so far is dip and mix or dip and stir. And what I mean is I treat, this is just the way I treat our Thursday check-in calls. I treat it as dipping the ladle into the river, the clear flowing river of what's happening in our community, among our people who are headed toward the sea on a particular sort of mission where we're not all exactly on the same mission, but we're kind of fellow travelers. And I'm dipping the ladle in to get a sense of what's happening at the time. And then when something interesting shows up in the ladle, I actually like put it in the pot and mix and stir because often when I do that, interesting things pop out of everybody else. You don't know who knows what about what or makes a great suggestion. And sometimes our individual projects are lit up and aided by the mixing. And also that way we get to know who's in the room and what they care about and how they're thinking about the thing they're doing and all of that. So it's kind of like dip and stir is kind of my approach to the calls. And we're considering like, should there be other calls with other rhythms? Yes. Should we have other check-in calls that other people host called the yes? Or I don't know that we've hit that scale, but nobody'd be offended if that happened. And we're trying to create sort of a distributed way of doing this OGM-y thing. I have a lot of suggestions for you that we can... If you wanted to lead off with some suggestions and then check indoors, that would be a phenomenal thing. I'd like to check-in first and would you give a context for the suggestions? Okay. And somebody's noise is next to the mic. I don't know who. Go ahead. So the joke will work now. I'm only here for Doug and Julian's backgrounds. Julian's got a new background every week apparently. And he's traveling the world. Who could miss the check-in call? And this is a new background for Doug. So, sorry, Judith, same old background for you, huh? It's convenient. Is that real or is it a background? That's real. Oh, okay. Well, it's a real photo. It's a real photo. That's why it doesn't change, right? It's a real photo, but it's not behind you at the moment, right? No, it's actually my bookcase downstairs at a different work area. Oh, okay, that's what I was doing. Exactly. So it's a blend of reality and not reality. Yeah, it's my bookcase, but it's not where I'm sitting right now. All right, so this crazy thing happened to me this week. I was on the, we're going back and forth with one of the heavy hitters on Twitter Spaces and which is the new audio version of Twitter. They're hoping it's gonna overtake Clubhouse which is a cesspool at the moment and to use the milder language. And he dragged out of me much to my surprise. His story has a crucial reason for my telling it. He dragged out something I hadn't realized. He said, well, let's get together to talk, but I prefer audio only, not a Zoom meeting. And I said, how come? And he said, well, he started playing back to me stuff I've been preaching for 30 or 40 years. And I said, wow, I've got some experience with that. He said, what's your experience? He dragged out of me that I am probably, much to my surprise at the time, the world's most experienced audio group conference moderator facilitator. What? Yes, I invented the telephone focus group and I've done close to 10,000 audio only group discussions of all kinds, focus groups, seminars, quest Q and A sessions, 15 different forms. I've trained hundreds of moderators and so he dragged us out of me. I never thought of it. I never did the mathematics, about eight or nine focus groups a week for 30 years, not counting client meetings and debriefings and all kinds of other things. So anyway, he said, well, you're so experienced. Why don't you come on to a, we'll set up a spaces. I didn't have the rights to use spaces yet. So he said, I'll set up a spaces and we'll invite people to learn moderating from George. He said, okay, I don't know how much is in my head. It could be 15 minutes long, it could be. So anyway, it's like riding a bicycle, all this stuff popped out of my head. It was originally supposed to be an hour. I kept apologizing for going over a little bit. They kept asking me question after question after question. Finally, we said, look, we're overstaying our welcomes, going on long, turning into a marathon. Those of you who leave, please leave with our thanks for participating. But I said, I'll answer questions as long as you want. So anyway, it went three hours. They then admitted me into spaces after all of them went back to the spaces people, said, hey, you gotta leave, let George on and listen to what the hell he has to say. So I threw a maiden voyage birthday, I mean, a maiden voyage celebration a few days ago, about three days ago when I got led onto spaces on April Fool's Day appropriately. And so we ran another one, it ran to three hours. And now it's causing a gigantic star. The people at spaces and at clubhouse are after me to transfer my expertise. So what I'm gonna, what I'm decided to do, I mean, I can't give away, I've got, my first telephone conference call was in 1971. It was an epiphany. I was studying for- Willing to get the phone had a cord on it. Yes, oh yeah. It was barely above a tin can with a string. There was an operator there too, wasn't there? Yes, so is he. Well, that's not just a joke. You couldn't set up a conference call without an operator. You called the conference call operator. She set up the conference call for you. She didn't know how to say hello to people. She didn't know how to welcome them. She didn't know anything. And despite all that, it's a long story that a lot of destructive testing. But I say I was going for a PhD in psychology and I was going for a PhD in psychology. And my specialty was group dynamics. So when I heard my first conference call, I said, holy shit, this is unbelievable. Nobody knew. Nobody knew what a conference call was. People who had been on a conference call, they had all fallen. Okay, I'm getting to the story. I'm sorry. Let me stop. So anyway, my expertise is finally getting recognized. I know that I could make either spaces or clubhouse or whichever one wants to take my technologies and make them the winner because the quality of the discussions over Facebook and, sorry, over spaces and Facebook and Instagram, all of them are developing audio services. Everyone. And they're not going to be able to survive without audio services. So. The, the audio only. This has some implications for Jerry. We need to do some experiments. Audio only conferences are better than video conferences. And I can prove it. I know nobody believes me who hears that the first time. Not a single person ever believed me when I say it. But then when I demonstrate it. Like we could turn off our video right now. Have a discussion. Turn it back on. Continue the discussion. Turn it back off. Etc. Etc. And what you'd universally say is I enjoyed the video much, much, much more. Because I like seeing the faces in the backgrounds and all that stuff. But the, the quality of the discussion. Absolutely was better audio only. No distractions. No. No. So I ran a podcast for nine years. Some of some of the people in this room were on it. It was called the Yitan. Tech weekly call. Weekly tech call. Yitan is Mandarin for conversations about change. I speak no Mandarin. So that was, it was a little odd. And it was pure audio. We used free conference call. We had a site. We had a side chat on IRC, which was very geeky. So the half of the community that came in from the financial world, because this was kind of a hybrid of me and Pip Coburn. Our communities. And I was usually. Most had never been on a conference call. Right. By the time I started the 10 calls, everybody had been on a conference call. Everybody was. Calling. I loved it. It was great. I deprecated it before podcasts got cool again. Cause I was trying to stream it off, you know, to the podcast systems. Right. And I find these calls richer. And I find these calls no less stimulating conversationally. So I'm interested. There's a special group of people. And also the, you can't beat video and face to face. The social aspects. The chat aspects and all that stuff. But for pure content. If we're trying to solve a problem. We're trying to make a decision. We have an output. We want. Audio is incredibly better than. Well, then I prefer shared document than audio. Only cause just seeing everybody's a little bit distracting and. Working over a shared document that you can collectively edit is super powerful and is better than. Well, I'm not so sure about this. Cause sometimes things like peer programming, being in the same room and staring over someone's shoulders. I strongly agree that a shared visual focus is, is very helpful. Especially once you go over four people. As soon as you get to six people. At least one person goes quiet. Yeah. A whiteboard. Particularly. Look, if you want a creative idea. Even having a chat stream. Ray, can you hold on until George is wondering, you can pull the person back or they can ask questions without interrupting the flow. As I'm about to ask, can we just speak one at a time, please? So I think a chat stream and a whiteboard or a Google doc is a very good. Visual focus. Thanks. That's one of the myths you. If you don't mind, Jerry. Go ahead, George. Asking people to speak one at a time. Is a great way to shut down the chat. You know, if you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind. If you don't mind a chat stream. If you don't mind a chat stream. Is a is a great way to shut down a discussion. I don't mean it critically. I don't mean the nest leaf. I'm trying to, I'm offering it helpfully. That every time I would train a moderator, the moderate would say, let's just speak one at a time. And I would say, no. Speak whenever you want. it out. If two or three of us start start to talk at the same time. I wish that was true George. So there I go speaking over you and the thing is that there are some people who are less likely to stop when two are speaking at once and if you leave that going all the way through then you'll get four strong voices. But in my conference system I had a little button that could immediately mute the whole everybody but me. So if I needed to break in I could do it but they couldn't. I mean there are ways there are control mechanisms. There are ways around it and it's not as bad as people think it is. That was very white male to me. North American. North American white belt. Yeah see Ken and I and well demonstrated and you know and and it really works but Ray's right that they somebody goes silent and the person the silent person in the room I don't say this publicly but I'll say it to you guys. The quietest person in the group is invariably either the smartest or the dumbest and you better find out damn fast because you may have the world's leading expert in something who's just holding back to see what other people are going to say and they don't want to dominate the discussion and being courteous. Ray was about to raise God his mouth open. Maybe it's a good time for around to hear from everyone briefly. Which is our process on these calls Ray. I wanted to ask Doug hit raise his hand which is the protocol we typically use in these calls for the floor for the next person to speak in sequence which is just our general protocol here which usually works pretty hummingly and George I'll come back to it but I'm extremely mindful of the quiet people on the call and often in groups I will ask all the people who've spoken to step back and not speak for the next half hour or whatever it is room for the voices that haven't spoken. Also I love having a chat channel because very often there's people who just are not verbal and they don't like speaking in front of the group but they're perfectly happy to contribute a whole bunch on the chat so the more kinds of media you can provide for the conversation often it makes four voices that didn't have a chance and that's really to do it rather than call on people because you call on people you embarrass them and you force them to talk and they may have nothing to say and that's a very gentle way of doing it the way you step forward if you want just out of courtesy want to hold back for a second see if there's anybody else trying to get in here you know that kind of thing cool but and I think we all have our facilitation I mean experienced facilitators have their bag of techniques and protocols and whatever and I appreciate sort of experimentation and going free for all here would work but I'm afraid that there's part of my job is to try to make sure that there isn't someone that overtakes most of our conversation here so we do hear from a bunch of people and with that let me trust me on off experiments with video though yeah just a dug for a second so you can jump in okay one of the things that's important about the visuals if you're having a serious conversation is seeing people's faces begin to move as though they want to speak and knowing that is very important and you can't do it in audio that's not true you hear them clearing their throat prior to speaking but you don't know who it is George yes I do because I have audio indicator lights that tell me who it was that cleared their throat oh well so you have god panel so so you had a god panel that let you mute selectively and know who was clearing their throat which is unusual yes but they're building it in their throat is now what most people do if they're getting ready to be in a conversation it comes at the very last moment before they speak and I'm busy watching for that and when when for me when zoom chats get bigger than I can see in one glance when we get two screens worth I then lose my ability to sort of watch the crowd and see who's leaning in or who's like wrinkling their even furrowing their brow because it's like ah that's not working for me and that to me is a cue that I might want to I might want to ping that person say all right all right what's the what's with the furrowed brow Mike I was going to say that that's exactly how Skype and zoom help they indicate who's lost who's got a question or if somebody's really nodding vigorously but not speaking up that's going to be really helpful to keep a vibrant debate going if you want a debate and and and as a speaker seeing somebody who looks confused really helps you remember okay I might have to dig into that a little deeper so I do a lot of non audio non video calls just because with a team I know well there's a rapport and there's a focus exactly yeah but that's with a team I know well I mean it's exactly so I'm going to um take moderate is prerogative and say a thank you actually we've never done any reflection on the ogm call about moderating and process and technology we haven't we've done very little talking about that we just kind of go in and do that so I appreciate that round I do want to head us back into the normal check-in round uh Eric was here only briefly so I'd love to go to Eric and then Kevin and then Vincent hey everyone nice to see your faces I felt like connecting um I had um yet my weeks have been really challenging uh as I said before but it's seem it's seeming to get better I'm getting more focus and perspective and I'm I'm working on what do I want do I want to engage in a social space or do I want to work on my own research because I know this if I go into this kind of spaces like keto lab ogm is more like everyone checks in and it's kind of okay but still it can be intense on my brain um and whenever I exchange with people who do similar things like the co-coaching it's like it's full on for me and I need I notice I need a lot of time to digest uh what I'm working on and um when I do that I notice that what I've written before and the research that I've done until now it does make sense and for me it's like how do I deal with this like I I'd like some people to listen to me and really take time and sometimes if it's socially awkward depends sometimes I'm really socially spot on I don't know it might the quality of my discourse certainly if it's uh texture textual email and stuff is not always the best but sometimes I can but like the whole scope of what I'm doing is so big it's so complex it's so layered that starting a conversation about it it takes at least an hour or something before your own level that it actually really makes sense and um I'm trying to package it into a format like a white paper or but still it's like it's all these worlds that come together it's it's like trying to summarize Jerry's brain that's like you can summarize what it's kind of is as a concept you can't summarize the contents of it um so I'm constantly in that process and trying to figure out like I it's been taking me weeks to buy a new phone that allows me to go to a clubhouse but I'm holding it back as well because in this kind of space it's it's also full on I imagine and it's constantly high speed very much reactive reacting to each other that's how I imagine it to be I don't know how much deep listening space there is or how much digestion of what's really going on they have a lot of pictures now that help help with that and they have a 15 club of people who are sight impaired and um blind and uh they're really really helpful and supportive with it you really ought to get a hold of them okay yeah I'll try it then so I hope I can buy an iPhone but uh yeah thanks and but you have a good there is a good quality of discussion if you look for it on clubs um it's sort of like the web like once everybody discovered the intertubes and the web a whole bunch of just crap showed up but the good stuff didn't go away it was just buried by a lot of crap um close to the top and well depends where the top is right because when all you've got is like google search or whatever if you don't know how to find your way to the good conversation and if the good conversation is protecting itself in some way to to remain a good conversation um then it may you may not you may not locate it so so it's easy to then make a mass judgment that this is all chaff it's all crap and and there's nothing good here um eric I don't know if you were on the phone when I was described when you were if you're on this call when I was describing the the sort of dip and mix approach I have to these calls but you may want to take that approach to to digesting the world because I I can really empathize with your situation in that I feel like I'm trying to digest the world and putting it in my brain and my act of putting in my in my brain a little piece at a time really works for me and it's just a little bite at a time and oh this is an interesting article where does it go how does it fit what else does it affect what can I connect it to and that's because of those of the gestures of using the brain but if you were to just take a little piece out and maybe it's little blog posts or whatever but try to describe this one paint stroke at a time that might actually help you and I think Judy has some advice as well go ahead Judy you're muted apologies I muted because the phone was ringing in the background thank you I have an alternate approach or at least it's my my mode and that is that I make notes of thought clusters you know just a topic and and then I because I need reflective time my process of adjusting is the reflection and the contemplation if you will and so I make notes of topics and then I come back to that list and pick one randomly or whichever is peaking to me and and just sit and reflect on it and and develop my thoughts around that and that works for me it's a it's a it's a very different approach than the one that Jerry's describing which is why I just thought I'd mention it electronics for your notes Judy like where are you actually I'm doing on paper because I I'm just not I kind of I'm a little old school that way it's a carryover from when I used to do active journaling which I don't do so much anymore um but it's just a you know it's it's it's kind of notations of stream of consciousness in terms of the desire to dive deeper on a topic but I know that if I dive deeper I won't listen to the rest of the conversation I'll check out for like four minutes because I'm thinking about it and by the time I might in this format want to say something the conversations move to a whole different point yeah and so so that's just a different way but from the times we interact Derek I think we may be somewhat similar in how we respond in the process yeah I actually when I do that when I just have a piece of paper in front of me and I put topics that like anchor points of what's going on then helps me to structure and to make like to to have a meaningful conversation as well otherwise it's just reaction reaction I've had this a lot also in workshops and and social change spaces so yeah agreed thank you Eric um Mike and Julian have their hands up so Mike and you're muted good anymore um I had a couple interesting experiences this week that I wanted to share and also get some input from this group um we had a session Tuesday night with the key people at one of the top international relations think tanks in China and it was a discussion on trade military operations and technology and I had just a few minutes to kind of share a sense of what's going on on tech policy and why the US and China are getting more and more competitive and even confrontational part of this is just Trump taking hostages and causing president Xi problems trying to show he's a tough guy but there's also a breakdown in communication and one of the problems is the Chinese talk about the technology front and standards wars and whenever they start really getting serious they quote from the art of war that doesn't make Americans comfortable it doesn't help those of us who want to find some room for common ground and cooperation on important projects from environmental technology to climate change I mean frankly the language is getting in the way and I'm also having a problem with a project we're doing with Korea where we've commissioned three papers on how to how to improve the information infrastructure of Korea and the fact there is that the papers that our collaborators have submitted are pretty waffly I mean they don't take stands so my question for the group is whether I can follow up with any of you who have had a lot of experience talking to the Chinese and might be able to give me a quick lesson on on how to how to communicate more effectively or maybe there's a book there there is one book I found on China called Dreaming in Chinese by Deb Fallows who's a and a great linguist and she analyzes in 10 different chapters 10 different Chinese words and gives you a sense of why their words mean different things to us but my my real problem is just this cultural divide is causing real problems I'm writing a paper on this clash of words and memes and and having a few linguistic insights would be helpful so a friend of mine in Belgium named Pascal Kappens specialized in China has written some books on China lives lived in Beijing for 20 years I think it's back in Belgium now I think but it's really good on this topic and we might be able to give you some good advice so I'll send an email intro separately Mike. I typed him in the matter most chat C-O-P-P-E-N-S Pascal, P-A-S-C-A-L Kappens, C-O-P-P-E-N-S. Thank you. Anybody else with tips on Mike if you email me. I'll go to you too. Mike, I have a colleague in Malaysia Andrew Cheng who's doing a lot of writing on Chinese-American revelations I'll send you his email on the chat. I can appreciate that. Ken do you want to finish what you're saying? Yeah, Mike if you email me I put my email in the chat here I have a friend who's done a lot of work he's from Taiwan he's all the work in China he's the person who helped get the World Cafe book translated into Chinese and he was very insistent that it not be done in simplified characters I know what that meant and I discovered when I went to Taiwan that when Mao came to power after he killed all the intellectuals he removed the full character set and only taught a very simplified character set which meant people couldn't actually express themselves with a lot of nuance and there's still a simplified character set over there in China so one important thing the other thing that pops into my head is that you know in China I'm not a Chinese expert but I do know the concept of saving face and given the way that the US treated China in the last four years it's just made the US needs to make some kind of overture to allow them to save face you know so that's got to be a large mood component of what's going on here that's just from my very you know way perspective over here. One of the key things coming out of the meeting was a very strong push from one of the Chinese side to say you've got to do a Biden Xi meeting there has to be sort of a you know we are together on this whether it's climate change or something else and and they pointed to the Obama Xi meeting that was held in 2013 outside of Palm Springs as you know a major milestone it was it was you know Xi's almost it made it sound like it was a coronation you know that the big American had said you are a worthy partner. Yeah it's a big gesture we should symbolically send over our table tennis team. I mean just lambs to the slaughter partly partly in jest but partly as a reset of diplomacy with China I mean seriously it would be a really interesting gesture to engage the US table tennis team about which I know nothing and bring them into a meeting so brief side story that just for inspiration I heard the story of how the Rainforest Action Network figured out how to connect with Mitsubishi which was busy harvesting Palm Forest in Borneo and the first couple meetings were really contentious they were really kind of nobody was getting anywhere and at the third meeting when they showed up the head of the Rainforest Action Network they exchanged business cards ceremonial again at the start of the meeting and he flipped his card over and he had his card translated into Japanese so everything on the back of his card was suited for the chairman of Mitsubishi and the chairman of Mitsubishi handed his card over on recycled paper and he had traveled to Borneo between the two meetings and had seen what was happening on the ground and he then later resigned from Mitsubishi and joined Rainforest Action Network and good things happened orangutans are still in trouble but the but the little symbolic gesture of the exchange of cards was momentous in their understanding that they hit each step forward toward each other right and there's there's millions of negotiating stories like that and each of us probably has some from our own lives and all that but but I think that sometimes sometimes small symbolic gestures like the table tennis team brought back because ping pong diplomacy was what cracked open China under Nixon right so so refer back to that and say we'd like to push the big red reset button and like clear the decks from what this trump dude did for a while and forget the wolf warrior approach because it's not working with us right if anybody's seen the movie wolf warrior and understands wolf warrior diplomacy that's the that is the mood that China is in right now they're attacking every they're tackling everything in the world as if they're at war with it and that they're going to win they're like superhero warriors anyway and that's just from my amateur see I think Pascal continue a lot more stuff and all can I make one real quick suggestion please go ahead George it's a meta suggestion forgive me if it's if you've done this before it seems obvious but wasn't to me a meta discussion with your colleagues about the cultural differences we tend to do this I notice your culture seems to do this how do we work around that how do we use that to our advantage I'm a new york interrupter when I do that just say that to me say new york and I'll shut up you know things like that and I notice that you are reticent to disagree you never disagree so there's there is Mitsuki Mitsubishi no I'm just using what you're thinking about something else made up war and names and names there's there is she doing doing her her polite bit and you can you know tell a Korean airline story about how the co-pilot was being courteous to the pilot and they all died you know stuff like that um and just an open this we and the funniest one I ever had was us with the British all English speakers obviously that's a matter of what happened with the British was it about was it about rubbers right I think it's misunderstandings over language yeah rubbers versus condoms exactly I mean there's plenty of so things like that between us let's go along the dial deodorant octopus was horrified the people in Japan because the octopus used dial deodorant under his arm except in Japan the octopus has eight legs think about that well this cross-country cultural story I've ever heard not arms interesting Mr. Jones and then Vincent and then Michael well I have to say I enjoyed almost none of the arguments by facilitators about how to do things I almost left so that's just my my take on it battling experts make me leave that's that's again just my take I've been working on this friends and family funding for black and brown entrepreneurs who don't have a rich uncle and I reported last week we completed our crowdfunding and then we have some foundation money teed up and we got asked by the county to become part of their budget this week and it was kind of a big deal because they have these little showcase funds the one bunkum kind fund which is our county you know where they show some things as a one-time thing but no they said connect with their economic development folks and so we're going to you know our metric at this point will be how many sole proprietors and mom and pops become job creators and how many jobs and what's the growth in revenue and what's the growth in income and then some kind of stab at net profit and then oddly enough just like an hour after the county said you know yeah just just you know talk talk to the economic development guy not the little showcase guy which is you know it means you're you're part of the annual budget in a way and they love the fact that it's an evergreen funds and they don't have to keep funding it they can expand it but we won't come back to them for money I've got an email from a guy in the UK from our Socap world and he runs the largest family foundation there and he's close to a guy at number 10 and we're going to be sort of adapting this methodology for you know thing to that they might want to adapt especially in the north of the country and in their rust belt with a phoenix fund but it's it's a nobody's quite done this mechanism of equity with revenue share for micro businesses who are not ready for debt so anyway it could be pretty interesting and be you know zooming with Boris and his folks that's this thing works forward so it's kind of cool but it's it's it's a it's a little catalytic thing that that unblocks you know a thing that is blocked that they didn't know how to do it but it was really pretty odd that you know an hour after the county said make it part of the real budget they said you know can you can you present to Downing Street that is awesome that is awesome I know it's kind of cool I was pretty glad about it having Kevin here talking about this reminds me that uh over on Mattermost and I'm looking at the Mattermost calls channel right now as our as our chat here as our persistent chat that Kevin had posted an article that was important to him in the food and agriculture channel and then Pete said no let's let's start a different channel for you and then like because there's nobody in the new channel on the new topic nobody shows up and hears and responds to Kevin so trying to figure out and I think Kevin it's the neighborhood economics channel is that the right one you're muted and and okay sorry yeah no it is not that Pete set it up it's called and because the economic ones I thought was I thought was for you yeah nobody showed up there either but this is this is like economic justice and racial parity which I'm not even on because I'm in the wrong one okay so if somebody will find that and post a link to that in the calls channel I would appreciate it and partly all to say I Kevin don't worry about it one of us who knows we'll do it and partly to say that a lot of us are bringing really interesting and important things to the group but our infrastructure isn't doing us the favor of making it easy to find those things to get attention and all that and we're busy negotiating like should the food and agriculture insecurity channel just only be about food and agriculture or should it also be about climate change and broader topics if so what are the umbrellas and how do these things sort of fit into each other so that we can all participate well so separate from this call ideas are welcome we have a sort of a facilitators channel on on matter most as well for anybody who wants to offer suggestions or just send me an email because then we avoid the channel's mess but we're busy trying to figure out how to fit our infrastructure to our actions and our rhythms and our technologies and then also if you've posted something interesting Michael thank you very much economic justice and racial parity is the name of the channel and also if if you've posted something that's actually really like important to you dear to your heart and important to what you're trying to get done mention it here like show up on Thursdays and say hey there's this really important thing I could use some attention who would like to join this conversation please come join me and that will help us figure out where to go and how to join you so I just joined your channel and we're on our way any other thoughts on sort of that part if not we will go back to Vincent Mark I'm not finding those channels Jerry where are they and so right so right now our chat is in the calls channel on matter most and then Mike and Michael just posted the last post on that channel is the new channel that Pete created for Kevin which ends with justice and racial parity visit do you see that yeah sorry sorry Jerry maybe just to jump in here please in matter most there are public channels and there are private channels right and there are direct messages you see that on your sideboard sideboard right if you hit the more button at the very bottom of the public channels you will see a list of all of the public channels that are available to you and then you can join from there I've actually gotten there before but I didn't realize exactly what it was so yeah it's just the more it's the more button and I think you know I think Jerry what we have to do also you know is start to we're starting to create pattern language so a channel that has the bracket ogm in front of it are sort of these you know general ogm you know kind of spaces then we have we're starting to say use the bracket quest meaning this is something where we want to be using that channel not for just discussions but for actually moving work forward against against the specific quest and it should have it in the description what the quest is and and what we want to do with it and so forth so I think I think as we get better at building channels you know labeling channels helping people understand those channels and even rationalizing and I think I think channel divesting channels is probably going to be one of the most important tasks that we totally agree and matt it brings a huge smile on my face for you to be doing tech support on matter most in this call it's like yes um and so thank you very much for that uh and I had a second thought but it's vanished from my head so let's go back to the queue which was Vincent mark michael hi everyone been uh on too too many screens lately doing a lot of computer work so i'm happy to get outside when it's nice out um been uh making some really great progress on catalyst and did a kind of demo the last kiko lab call on monday um and hoping to kind of be able to start onboarding people onto the platform uh within the next few weeks the main kind of three components and features that i've been focusing on which is it's actually uh been nice to be able to focus and not have to do everything and um is basically a member project and call directory that makes it very easy for people to update their profile project or event um and be able to and just kind of see what's going on at a very high picture level inside their communities and also be able to see what's going on between different communities that are connected um so that's like the very kind of basic of it um so yeah excited to share that more maybe next week um also i'm planning kind of a gather town event on april 17th right now we're calling it the change makers consortium just uh um wanted to kind of get a bunch of people together to have a focused conversation around projects and kind of networking around how to help each other on projects so if anyone wants to um sign up to kind of like do a one to five minute pitch on your your project um and be able to kind of have an audience to uh people who either want to work on things or or are sharing their own projects um the link i'll post in the chat it's um lu.ma luma slash uh the cc um for the change makers consortium um and it's going to be at um we picked a time so that it could work for anyone in california that wants to be up at six in the morning and anyone in australia that wants to stay up till midnight so we picked uh eight a.m. to noon uh eastern on a saturday that's five a.m. on so yes you have to be a really early bird in california sorry but if you want to come for the second half we're kind of going to be doing like pitches networking and then two hours later the same thing sounds great sounds great thank you Vincent that's great and you looked like you were on your phone so i was like you're not going to be able to post your link but that's perfect um because now we know where to go matt did you want to jump in go ahead i just wanted to ask Vincent just a catalyst directory question you know as i'm going through the sign-up process it has it has find an option underneath why you would you know why you would sign up and what if the answer is any and all and you don't know that's a great question um so i think that was just a kind of initial indicator for me to get a handle on like people signing up are they uh people who have communities that want a platform to use for their communities or are they people who are in communities that want their communities to use this and that also want to just like find out what's going on like kind of just to get a feeling of like who's going to um the site right and i actually think i'm i'm going to be getting rid of that that question um i don't like changing forms unless i completely redo it because then it kind of messes with the results like you have like you know the forms from halfway on having like this different question set so um but actually i've been completely rebuilding the site from scratch so it's going to be on a different link and something that i i would like to propose to the group is um unfortunately i found out there's another company that uh got the trademark for catalyst so i'm in a kind of midst of rebranding and i'm i'm wondering what folks think about the name trove um and the the url would be trove dot social how do you spell trove your ove because i'm because i'm a treasure trove paper and i are both advisors to a little company called tr ov i think dot com uh which is in the micro insurance business so that's really close but uh but i like trove it's with an e yes as in a treasure trove right yes mm-hmm yep you can also try load l o d e like the mother load you hit the mother load i like trove i think it's a really nice solid name from a branding perspective it sits well on the tongue everyone could you know pronounce it and it's a single syllable so i think it's a good name i also think it has multiple complexions and i like that about it uh there's already a couple tr ov companies out there not just the one that i mentioned um so the namespace might be a little crowded and that's just without the e and trove is is a power company i just typed into my browser yeah um but you may be able to do trove dot something else trove dot social trove dot network who knows what low high level domain would be really descriptive for what you're trying to do go ahead michael uh i was just going to say i i've done a lot of um work in the naming space and would be glad to talk to you about that one thing that strikes me about trove for what you're doing is does it seem um a little bit too static and and not you know like things end up in a trove it's not a it's not generally an active place um but i really like it it's a really great name it's just the thing it sounds like it describes doesn't sound like what i think you're doing um but let's talk to you more about it which is lovely advice yeah i appreciate that thanks cool um let's go to mark michael judy okay um i um i took on a new client lately um that's a long ago who is trying to tackle the injuries so it's it's in in in the health health care space um and trying to tackle the number of injuries happening during transportation and every time that i take a new client i learn a bunch of stuff and it's all about inefficiencies of course fixing inefficiencies and and so you have about 35 million registered admissions to hospitals in the united states and 140 million opportunities for incident injury during patient transport which uh and he sent me a bunch of videos and and these injuries are not just patient related they're also nurse related so this he has created the these group of doctors have created a technology to reduce that um which which is always fun because working for and with indigenous people really doesn't pay and i'm making a when i jumped in i'm sorry i was late um lots of work lately but it seems that you guys were talking about interculturality a bit a bit a bit um and it's it's it's something that i apply a lot um in in this indigenous context um the best approach so far has been around health care again um where you have you and it and it's always towards a group it's never two groups interculturality right it's one group meeting another one um so when one group is meeting another one you get to listen first that's why i always say you know listening is the most undervalued human skill um and what happens is um the western medicine or medical team some approach comes and meet the indigenous person with a traditional medicinal man or woman and they decide together what is the best um path to cure or solve one person's health problems um but it's ultimately that person that indigenous person decides which is very complex in itself because of course you know they depending of um the the level of uh acculturation and understanding of western medicine can be very complex can take a very long time if you transport that into a different situation it can take easily two to three years so in the diplomatic world i can understand that it can be a a big problem when solutions are needed by the way but but it's a i always enjoyed applying that there thank you with these simple things um two short things one is that um working with indigenous people i think pays really well just not in a currency like recognized on earth oh yeah um which is unfortunate but but you know there's like lots of words i guess and then years ago at an event in berlin i met a guy who an american expert who lived in berlin whose expertise was cross cultural communications online and his sweet spot at the time was u.s companies that had indian development staffs and all of the cross cultural misunderstandings that would happen in that particular parent but but i was like you have job security forever because because the the kinds of cross cultural communication that are happening and the the thinness the relative thinness of the medium and the opportunities for misunderstanding are so gigantic so it's a really it's a really really interesting space love the space um let's go michael judy matt and then ray and you are muted yeah sorry it's just a matter mostly with okay at error um one one little tidbit i want to throw in about the from the cross cultural misunderstanding thing was the introduction in latin america of the chevy nova knew you were going there okay just everyone knew that it was just the best which what does what does nova mean in spanish doesn't go no no va doesn't doesn't run yeah here we're selling you the chevy that doesn't run yeah it was the quintessential bad product naming in new country problem yeah so the other thing you have to check into vinson is what trove means and in other languages i don't i don't know um always important um i um i was i've been spending a lot of time and i'm trying to remember if i mentioned this in this meeting last week but um uh being frustrated around um the the entities we have at our disposal i know touch jerry a little bit about um you know corporations for-profits non-profits steward ownership co-ops uh all the all the different things that a company could be um because having a company that was started as a c-corp in the process of becoming a b-corp um that's you know it could be worse but it's it doesn't feel reflective of everyone what we're trying to do so um talking to a lot of people and anybody who'd be interested in in talking about that in this in this group i would love to to talk to um i see you point matt and i'm thrilled to talk to you about that um i'm in the same i'm on the same journey okay all right and and there's a piece of due diligence uh the stewards of ogm need to do which is some kind of ogme mapping of the alternative business frameworks for as we move forward into some better millennium we hope um what are the alternatives and what are the tradeoffs and what you know what are some good paths to choose uh into that because we we need better platforms for our work together platforms that are more mindful of of the comments that we share uh of the intangibles that mark is busy helping etc and the other thing i wanted to to bring up along that story is aside from the the actual legalities a seed i want to plant that came out of another conversation i was having that uh with some mozilla foe um is you know when you think of the structures of all organizational structures be they non-profits or whatever they're sort of you know a legal entity that by nature is going to be a pyramid you know there there's there's somebody in charge some entity in charge whether it's an individual or not um and it's really hard to collaborate with like-minded organizations i mean you know just just with all the good spirit behind it i know what you guys are going through with you know memorandum of understanding with with lionsburg and you know what are we and how does it work um and the mechanics of just a circle of people who are doing related things as opposed to a triangle being brought together and you know and as managing to assemble the right people i know how to do that you know i feel like i can i can say oh this person seems like somebody who'd want to be part of this in this person but then how do you structure especially in a nascent entity or a changing entity you know you've got to come up with stock option agreements and and you know some or or pay somebody some you know deserved high fee for their time per hour um instead of figuring out some reciprocal way to be in a circle together and do each other good um it it's just a it's such a frustration about the way that commercial world is structured and there's lots of models that sort of have followed this out to the extreme so there's one entrepreneur who i can find uh in my brain but he decided to pay everybody $70,000 the secretary makes $70,000 everybody gets $70,000 a year salary which which took people who were struggling to like he didn't realize there were people that he was employing of his only 150 employees or something like small company he didn't realize that people in his own company were struggling with making the rent and getting food and and whatever else and so going to $70,000 immediately resolved those those well i'm over generalizing but really put fix that and then created other social tensions and you know other kinds of things a completely different model is sen co in brazil ricardo semler if anybody's read any of his stuff there's some beautiful interviews on youtube about ricardo semler uh he's written a couple books that are really good but in semco all of their books were transparent and the staff said everybody's salaries and bonuses so that everybody knew what everybody else was making which is a radical form of transparency but they also knew all of the levers of the business so they knew not to drain the business of profits to invest in the future so so complete transparency allowed them to create sort of fair balancing of what was happening and that there's a senco is a deep trust-based enterprise and is really interesting for those kind of things and those are two really different models and there's a bunch of other models that are perking up as we you know as we live and breathe right here so it's a really interesting moment for figuring out what these new platforms are and which ones one might choose that feel fair and equitable for the group of people showing up to do somebody of work together right and if and if it's also a loose community that has just people flowing in and out how do you preserve the community while having a platform that lets people sort of make a living on it as well that's that's the a piece of what we're facing right now Vincent and then sorry Ken and then Vincent because Ken had his hand up quite a bit earlier um yeah Michael you're relatively new to the calls or at least I haven't been on calls with you very often before and I looked at factor and I'm just really interested could you just say a little bit about factor because the source time I'd seen it and it looked really interesting to me and I hope you people won't mind you taking a little time to let us know what you're doing thank you for that Ken um you know this is something I should be better at than I am but uh I'll give it a shot I would encourage people to to take a look at the at the landing page just because it gives you a fair idea um it's it's straddling a lot of areas but it is an attempt to give people a place to gather organize and share the things that matter to them in the word I always use which is an unfamiliar uncomfortable word word is in a creative way you know we live in a this this always on world you know this FOMO world where all the stuff is happening and we got to be there and you're you're inundated by it and yet trying to escape from it and when you think of the other extreme of a library things have to be published to even make it there so that's a selection process and then they're organized and you can find them and we're trying to create a way for people to see something that matters gather it consciously put it together it can be something that you do alone you know it's certainly a single player mode activity as well as doing a small group as well as eventually be able to share with the public um and skeletally it's most similar to Pinterest I would say and you can have a private board and you know nobody else sees it or work on some project with somebody or you can look for other people uh with interest according to yours um the other thing it is from a from a consumer point of view and an efforts point of view is it's member supported on a freemium model or a Dropbox where if you use a lot and you feel good about it paying for it to get extra features you can but you can use it for free and there's no advertising and because of all of that there's nothing in our in no way is in our interest for you to spend a lot of time on the platform we don't benefit from that we're not trying to distract you we just want you to do what you came to do and get out and you might that's that's a little bit of a meandering uh elevator pitch but that's that's what the factor is based on that I wonder if there's maybe something that we in OGM could do on factor to just help us get our dip our toes in the water see what it's like and maybe it would benefit both communities and there's a there's a conversation Michael and I had barely cracked the door on which is what might he do with factor that would turn it into a piece of the mapping platform that we're talking about here uh so I think that there's a there's an experiment there to be done and having having a bunch of people in OGM who are familiar with factor and using it sort of power using it for for uh keeping this kind of information would be really really cool it would work and I'm wondering and Michael I don't know if you've ever talked with Vincent uh but he's using no code tools like air table to build that catalyst and all that does that's not that far from from kind of your use use models for factor although factor I think doesn't have the power not no code kind of front end of creating all these filters and and whatever else but but there's some interesting I think uh hybrid marriage there that's possible as well go ahead sorry I was just gonna say uh you know Peter had had pointed me at Vincent and I just connected with him and uh I hope to talk to you soon fellow fellow brooklyn I sweet oh also your local cool yeah I I just send you I did not linked him by the way well he we're making all the connections yeah um let's go to Judy Matt Ray oh actually could I um jump in real quick I had my hand raised to respond to the I apologize yes you did so um yeah one thing it's funny Jerry I was also thinking about that um example I was gonna pose the question to the group how would you feel if you were like the founder of a startup and like you know you're this like amazing board of advisor came in and they said you had to have you know the $60,000 salary and you had to have the same pay as everyone else in the company that joined from this point until like a hundred people like how would you feel about that that's actually something I wanted to kind of get feedback on um on what people think about that and I don't remember what happened to equity distributions in that company so it could be that you know salary is equal which is fine because cash flow and that's what you're paying like random mortgage from they're booming they're booming they were in the news a month ago and they have really really done well well part of what happened was their productivity shots are the root I mean it's the oldest conversation it's can somebody find the name of the company his name is Dave something I can try to find it in my brain I've got a bunch of links around it but they but they did really well so productivity skyrocketed their their revenues per employee tripled or something like that over over a couple years etc but part of this might be that they got a whole bunch of press from having done this this HR kind of thing right so so how much of this is the the the stock the Barbara Streisand effect or whatever else but it's super interesting go ahead Matt I mean from a just personal experience basis I mean when we started collective next we paid ourselves less than our employees I mean that was that was the risk right that was the way that it started right and I think these economic relationships that you have with various people in your system can take a lot of different forms and I think the real you know the real question is how do we have multiple mental models and the dexterity to apply them based on differentiated needs and experiences right I have some employees that need a tremendous amount of stability I need some employees that need lots of flexibility I have some people who were employees who need more flexibility than employment so they move to a kind of a network contractor relationship model I have some contractors that are on a base amount of retainer plus additional money if the volume goes up so I think I think I think the problem we have is we kind of get ourselves locked in single mental model views of how relationships work but you know I dated one girl where our relationship was very different than the one that I now have with my wife thank god but you know you you you are always in these you know dynamic situations so Vincent to answer the question I think if it works for the community then I would be totally fine with it you know if the ultimate goal is to propagate the valuable ideas that you're pursuing then you're kind of take a different approach than if the ultimate goal is to monetize your you know efforts then you can take a very different strategy and I think that's part of the debate that's going on right now is are we building durable value creating businesses or are we trying to hoodwink ourselves into you know payouts and so maybe that last comment was a little bit too tuple but that's that would be my answer works for me so let's go to Judy map and Ray for chickens yeah I've just been continuing with practicing principles and observing ways that are effective to outreach to other groups that are not connected to the groups that I'm in and mostly it's it's a one-on-one or one-on-two you know I'd like to know more about your organization can we get together and chat about it as a way to sort of engage people with different perspectives so that we can have a more rich conversation and learn from one another that's great and it's really interesting because a Klaus who is not on today's call connected several of us to a bunch of chemical engineers who were really gung-ho on how to solve for climate change and I was thinking I was thinking that like somehow connecting them with you because I think you would all sort of come from a similar point of view in different ways and that got me thinking heavily about how because they're the presentation I watched this their solutions were what if you put engineers in charge of the world and it was all engineering and very little about social engineering or you know which is just a euphemism kind of but but you know very very little about how to make this work in society whom to link arms with you know creative partnerships other sorts of things but the science and it was just rocking it was just dang so I think figuring out some of those blends and combos I'm really interested in how to get movements to move to catch and to catch fire and to link arms and then to fuel one another so that we can actually catalyze large scale change through small scale small scale changes and connections and that how do we get good at that it's one of my one of my goals here actually one of the thoughts that I have on that because of my engagement with large professional networks is that large professional networks are a natural way to do that because every member is a member of multiple other networks and so they're frequently focused on the big topics that are affecting society you know sustainability climate change agriculture you know all those sub-disciplines at least in the science professionals but there's a lot of people there with social responsibility goals and they're used to working in industrial institutions and academic institutions and so on so I just think that personal connections through professional networks is a powerful way to reach organizations at a different level so just to to draw out what you're saying I think correct me if I'm wrong but not only so we're coming out of a world where people got a career and stayed with a company for as long as they could and retired out that's that's just changing like crazy but not only that but each person is now facing their own complexification as they start to figure out purpose social mission like how do I how do I make what I do in the world actually like help the world which is pretty simple it's a simple question it's a really hard question to answer for a lot of people and and in so doing we've made our worlds more complex because we're now members of several different circles groups organizations we might be doing contract work with you know multiple orgs at the same time and it gets very messy and we're that maybe it may not be a stretch to say we're the first generations to be going through that particular set of changes well the first ones that are really enabled with technology to do it yeah vastly easy but most of these professional organizations are a hundred plus years old and have been doing global networking by whatever the best method was at the time exactly centuries and so I think they also have that global connectedness you know friends that you met at the conference in China who live in China and others who you met there who are from the UK and from Germany and from Africa and I think it's those personal networks that are going to end up being quite important in identifying organizational networks to stress this out a little bit but to add a historic analogy it feels to me like we're at the opposite end of something that happened a long ago with the beginnings of civilization there's a really nice book against the grain by James Scott I love this book I highly recommend it I'll put a link to it in the chat in a second and he talks about how we tend to think that civilization happens when we domesticate agriculture we domesticate grains and we get agriculture turns out this 4 000 years between the domestication of grains and the first cities Uruk or all of that and he studies Mesopotamia and the marsh Arabs and it turns out that when people got civilized and put in cities if you look at their skeletal remains they had diet deficiencies like crazy their skeletons were not very happy because they had suddenly been constricted in their diet to eating the major grains and not very many other things while the marsh Arabs were out on the land moving because they understood when the fish were running here where to get this work and they had a hugely varied diet so they were really quite healthy and doing just fine and then over in China maybe around around the same sort of eras they referred to people as cooked or uncooked and the cooked people were the people they had brought into cities and civilized and so the whole book is kind of this the skeptical look at what civilization means and what it brought to us that it wasn't necessarily this huge gift that organized us and made everything prosper but rather destroyed a whole bunch of ways of understanding how to live with nature and the things that I think we're in some sense we're trying to reclaim now so it's weird because now we're sort of heading away from the mono prop mono career mono a mono thing into this much more mixy world that's confusing to us and and except now we have power tools for for sharing communicating you know now you can get on on a zoom call or a or a clubhouse call with people around the world no problem and the marginal cost you is zero anyway um let's go matt ray dug i'm at your muted alas alas um real quick i just wanted to write down that uh in that chat what does it mean to live in uh in a mixy world i kind of like this idea of a mixy world right um and navigating the mixy world and so i've got a lot of things and going on right now lots and lots of things so i think my world is mixy um i just sold in very disconnects to maybe something you're talking about i just sold an engagement with a large organization where we are taking every single one of their 17 000 employees through small group 10 to you know 15 people conversations 75 minute conversation so um in two months so that's 13 1300 facilitated dialogues in in in two months um related to um thinking about how do how do we become how does that organization become more inclusive um it sort of brings to brings to this you know the the conversation that um you know judith and i sponsored last tuesday with just a few people and we're going to be continuing about ogm and and you know what does it mean for us to be open you know really open and you know one of my reflections as i'm thinking about this call and i'm thinking about who we are and again i look around the room at at you know it's a nice smaller group today but it's still you know it's clear to me that we are not open um we might have openness in our hearts but even the very structure of this call um the way that it operates um who we are as individuals the way that we talk um creates a certain type of um sets of barriers and so i'm i'm really interested in i'm just really interested in holding open that space um for us to for us to investigate um and um and at the end of the day what i've been learning is that all of these changes all the changes that i want to make within the clients that i'm working with and help them make um ultimately start with me um and my willingness to to sort of be open to rethinking and reimagining and redoing and so um that's kind of what i've been working on the other thing that's just been on my mind i've been talking to geary who i know some of you guys know um and um we're looking to engage him and maybe it's vincent it's you and you know michael it's you as well and pete but i'm interested in trying trying out within my small ecosystem of collective necks building you know building kind of in you know this um these knowledge webs and collaborative knowledge web development which is a little you know it's ogme it kind of fits in what we're doing and stuff there's some of the tools for connectors and all that stuff but um if people are interested in and and from an economic standpoint what we're what we're trying to do is and i'm also talking to jordan at leisberg is that i may make a donation to leisberg we may create a from that donation we may create a donor advice fund within the leisberg construct where collective necks may pay for some time um the foundation may pay for some of the time and then the people who are working on the projects may contribute some of their time so this idea of multi funding sources for singular pursuits that then move all the knowledge from those pursuits into the commons is starting to get to this dexterity of kind of really trying to think creatively about economic relationships um so we can we can break the hierarchies of them so that's that's what i'm thinking about thank you for that that's great um dog then julian okay um i've been really puzzling about climate change and where people like in this group actually are with it for example i find myself thinking that given who we are as human beings facing the fact that there's a nexus of contracts that link everybody together we can't break that and the glue is carrying us towards catastrophe climate wise and we're stuck we just can't we're not smart enough uh our smartness is not organized in a way that lets us break through our relationships and contracts with each other so um you know i think we have the possibility of breaking apart the society that we're in and reforming another one but the resistance is so huge and the people if we try and break apart the egg that we have people are going to look for pieces of it that they can manipulate in the old way ownership control and so on so it seems to me that we're stuck and that there's poetry in that to be faced maybe it's just the way it is and we should learn to appreciate the world that we're in given the fact that it's going in a bad direction we cannot do anything about it thanks dog um yeah um thank you and piece of it is uh claus you know of all of us claus seems to be to be tilting directly into the food system and he's very explicitly dealing with the system because he knows that the distribution systems which are kind of locked and loaded around the world are a huge piece of the problem of trying to make any sort of change down at farming all the way up at people eating food and all of that and there's people trying to tackle the system at many different levels with little success and it seems like the glue that binds these systems together whether that's contracts or whether that's economics and wealth which then controls politics or whether it's something else seems that that glue is stronger than crisis until the crisis is overwhelming and when the crisis is overwhelming is not the moment at which you want to be redesigning the system and that in the rhythms of systems change the one thing that disrupts that is when a new system sort of tips up and just overtakes the old system in the in mid-flight and here an easy example is voice over ip taking over long distance phone calls right the phone companies didn't know that was going to happen they thought they were going to sell fat bits and have a great uh sort of monopoly on communications then the internet eats them and eats them without provoking a world crisis and changes the way and the costs and the nature of our ability to communicate that that was a that was a gigantic shift of a very locked-in bureaucracy go to the itu go go look at any national phone company and how much each government dependent on the national phone company to make exorbitant profits to pass off as bribes to their you know to their brothers and cronies um and then look at what's happened since and and the desperate attempt and in some cases successful attempt to tamp down on the internet to stop internal dissent and all of that so that that's a change that's happened in our lifetimes very visibly um of the scale that we're talking about so and matt you don't think so no i think i think the scale of that change is um is you know much smaller a pimple on the butt of what we're talking about a colorful metaphor indeed i mean i i just you know the thing that dug brings up which i i really want to honor is that we made choices along the way as a civilization as humanity that have wired deep deep deep deep into the way that we operate around ownership and and and so those contracts to break are are they are as systemic as they come and we we like to think you know this idea of um you know let's let's pilot iterate you know test learn scale right you know we go through these things it's we are not dealing with a problem that that can be can be done can be handled in that way right this is not about working on the fringes and then connecting connecting the dots it is it is at the very core of you know this is a cut this is this is catharsis at human scale all at the same time where there has to be breakdown there has to be it it's like you know coal into diamonds i mean it lick it liquefies and it's like how do we how do we engineer a moment where society liquefies and then restructures itself quickly enough that we can can can leap that abyss and i think you know dug maybe the answer is we we wait we wait until things start to really burn until creative destruction takes its course and then we're ready to rebuild you know i i don't know i've been wrestling with the same thing that you're wrestling with it's it's it's um you know i think i can work the fringes and i think we can so so one strategy is wait for creative destruction the other strategies you create alternative reality and you invite people to that alternative reality and we run it differently where we run our lives together with other people that want to run their lives together outside of the bounds of you know the rest of the world and then you and then you move people over into those things i mean it's a it's because part of the challenge right now is we've run out of room for nation building you know the democratic experience that came from the united states was because there was land to be taken there's no more land to be taken there's no more and this is why elan musk wants to move to mars you know he thinks mars is the opportunity to reinvent humanity not just to live but but a whole new society now the fear is that we poured over again industrial mindsets into that thing i mean we are talking about the mental model of all mental models that has to change simultaneously and that's scary i don't know so take i hope you take this in the right spirit you're sounding a lot like steve bannon who is an accelerationist who is like hey let's break the system because i want to i want to be the king who just who designs the next system when we've crushed and destroyed all of this and and one of and one of my narratives for for donald trump why donald trump was elected in the first place was that i think a lot of his followers were like the system is so screwed in a way that we would generally agree with that we need to hire a guy who's just going to come in with a wrecking ball and he tried pretty hard and and they hired it they hired a guy that was basically an industrialist i mean so they weren't they weren't hiring someone to break it down they were hiring somebody you know to capitalize on their fear and their you know so he really was i mean if you talk to my mom he is he is a model of her father's generation not a model of the future generation so he he's not a tear it down in the way that you know people think he's a tear it down in in a different type of well i don't know that it's absolutely by the way i'd love to see a poll if anybody knows of a poll that has sort of the segments of trump followers between uh world's best businessman you know apprentice apprentice branded world's best businessman versus this dude could actually break the system enough that we could get into a new system i'd love to know that spectrum mark do you have some info on that yeah yeah i mean i have i have enough um republican friends um that is that is you know kind of evenly split um but but definitely the lower you go um on on the social stratus um there you'll find people who really are upset with the system they feel let down um and and that's and that's enough to get a guy elected or that was enough to get a guy elected yeah one of the is what what should i'm sorry all right go ahead julian's got a bolt i was going to try to get him before we had to wrap and i have to head to a new call soon but let's finish this part of the conversation go ahead michael i was just going to say from a math point of view that the the polling that does show a balanced tipping number of trump voters who would have supported bernie you know i mean there are enough of those to say that these are people who just wanted to blow things up you know in the sense that they didn't want the establishment candidate for whatever other reasons they might have had so remember the flow chart that showed up early in the election cycle the 2015 election cycle there was a flow chart that said is the system fucked up and then of the yes branch had trump and bernie the no branch had everybody else right and and everybody else was busy sort of and i realized a week after hillary lost that i had voted for a steward of the status quo like i realized that she was going to be really good for the status quo and that that was a reason why so many people had voted against her among many others like the demonization of the clintons and all that but but and i don't think there's a blanket explanation but i'm i'm interested in how big each of those segments is because what you do when you're building a weird coalition like this is you gather up all those segments and you appeal to all of them so if you look back on the apprentice series as branding it's just genius if you're going to run for president as the the world's greatest smartest billionaire businessman you run a a reality show for a decade that gets great ratings and then you've convinced a whole tier of of the american economy and voters that you're the world's best businessman they and they they believe it and that's different from tearing the system apart but not incompatible with tearing the system apart in a weird in a strange kind of way and the guy and the guy who lives in a gold room with a gold toilet being somehow representative of the farmer out in the middle of the field who is nothing like that and and feeling an alliance that's a that's an active alchemy and magic in in my head but it worked go ahead matt and then mark and then we will wrap the call we move from dug and matt's check in into trump somehow can we yes let go of that narrative for a while i'm trying to cleanse him out of my system here okay good point that we've we've headed there shall we wrap so i just i just i just want to say that that however we look at the situation the framing is essential the framing explains so much of so when we say oh you know there is a bunch of people who want to blow things up it doesn't help it just it's just not true um so you have to do that part of framing or what we well yeah yeah yeah yeah but but i mean i mean you know it's it's the same i leave the same in the amazon right um and and it's sometimes you you have to work and redefine how people see the problem to have a chance to fix it totally great um does anyone want to offer something that'll cleanse our cleanse our minds i do that can increase and i'm sorry dug up because he he said two things he said there's poetry in that and he said that's the way it is and so that made me grab this book called that's the way it is uh or the way it is which is new and selected poems by my favorite poet william stafford and um so the poem the way it is very short i think it will wrap up here um there's a thread you follow it goes among things that change but it doesn't change people wonder about what you are pursuing you have to explain about the thread but it's hard for others to see while you hold it you can't get lost tragedies happen people get hurt or die you suffer and get old nothing you can do to stop times unfolding you don't ever let go of the thread um thank you ken and i had the poem in my brain i just added the link to it in my brain partly only because above it you'll see a link called poems for rex which is connected to another one called poems read in rex and if you'd like to have a collection of interesting poems to to ponder or to read in front of groups because i used to start every rex meeting with a poem which made me read a lot more poetry and stafford is great so thank you for that and and sorry to jump in with that so quickly after you read the poem uh but i think a bunch of us including me have to jump to different calls but thank you bye everybody have a great week and there you have it who we are yeah we'll get we'll get time like um thanks for your contact i'll have my i'll have my assistant reach out and all that stuff but i do feel like we're on we are circling around similar you know similar things yeah and and i also um in that in that circling i'm i'm really i've i've put you know my my life savings into factor um and um you know i want it to to be something and i'm not you know to i think it was you who was saying to you know vincent you know are you in this for the jackpot um that's not what you said but you know or are you in this because you really want this thing to exist and that's primary and you know everybody's somewhere on that spectrum um i'm a lot more on the you know i really want this to exist and be a model for the thing's place so i'm looking to involve other people and and uh are you guys are you guys had um i mean maybe even um i'm i'm actually curating something right now um for a big big client we're calling it um when we did this event it was modeled off of you know kind of a ted it was a ted style event and we called it comfy chair right people i created it i took over the ballrooms and instead of doing the normal chairs we put big living room furniture and um and so they called it they called it comfy chair and we put content on the stage and then and then over time it's sort of you know kind of lost its moment which was fine and we're rebooting it in the virtual world but this time i said well let's not do sort of an event let's do a more of it let's have it be more like a festival a virtual festival week right you know you have multiple things going on multiple places and all that kind of stuff um and so we're calling it couchella um it's sort of a nod to nod back to the comfy chair i didn't do the branding on either one of these but um i'm going i'm going with it but one of the things that we're really interested in is this idea of developing a hub for you know for the content to live after the fact where where people can look at what's been produced but then start to comment and add their own knowledge into it and you know um we have a very simple um what i'm kind of um multi directional slipstream where you can you can scroll down you know just flip through it just like a normal slipstream but then when you get to a piece of content you can actually flip the other way where you you flow through the content that's been curated against or stimulated from that content right um and i don't know you know be interesting to see it's almost like a willy wonka and the chocolate factory kind of elevator kind of thing that being said if factor is is kind of an interesting place i might have an enterprise you know an enterprise client that we could you know we could get we could start the conversation now the problem is is there they're a year they're a year process to get any kind of enterprise license because they go through all the security do the blah blah blah blah right but um maybe a little bit of a demo of what you're building um and understanding that i also think my digital practice um we we build front end little microsites for people is is in in our you know to help one of our change engagements we're not building a lot of back end but i've been having conversations with i just hired someone to run that group at the beginning of the year but i'm starting to talk to them about some of these og me type ideas maybe you're maybe you're a couple of clicks ahead and we just we just start to think about it right together um you know i don't have a desire to to own everything and build everything but i i i think sometimes these partnership models are so hard because of the alignment and the control or the or the overhead becomes difficult to manage when you start to get a bundle of different organizations and go to market together right um you're you're you're basically over the client over pays for everything um and then your value proposition just breaks down so i i just think that there's you know some conversations to be had lots yeah that sounds i mean i'm i'm all about conversations and uh and what you're saying i i want to familiarize myself a little bit i mean i've looked at your your site i have a you know general idea of of what you do and the breadth of what you do it looks really cool yeah and um you know my one of the things that i'm frustrated by is like my background is in uh i may not be the best verbally but i'm really good at helping people you know i started off as a magazine creative director okay and then editor and you know figuring out what it is people are trying to communicate packaging it putting the signage on it um editing it billing it and now you know for me what i feel like i'm wanting to do with factor is is give everybody the tools to do all of that so they can find what they want to find present what they want to present uh cross pollinate and curate um so yeah i'm i'm there are there's a there's a lot of overlap and and what i like to do well so it's interesting so we we are we're changed facilitators right we design creative interventions or new systems and we install them and you know we either conduct them into the system of the organizations we work with or we build out the infrastructure and those sorts of things so we're we're really we're really trying to get in orbit with our clients and then look at these opportunities to say okay how how might we help them unlock something think about something move forward in a reasonable way and so um it started out as you know strategy workshops that's what i got trained in designing um and then i took it to my clients and then i i was like well it's not just the workshop there's all of these other superpowers that i wish i had right and so as a i was a sculpture major and i was a new genre sculpture people say well what what medium do you work in you know what tools do you like do you and i was like i'll use whatever it is you know i'm kind of a like gather gather steal shamelessly and then use it for whatever that that expression was so that's kind of what i did with collective next we built a creative arm that's like a call it an agency but we only use it for our work we're not doing like logo design and branding for restaurants right we have a productions group which is made up of people that um mostly we're like npr journalists and reporters and you know kind of thing and then we have this digital group which you know there are people who know how to do kind of web design and front end kind of stuff and now i'm interested in fission which is and kind of all these back end kind of open systems and you know things so um and those are those are our capabilities right and capabilities are just building blocks that that are solution designers who are kind of our consulting arm will go and configure for clients to do these strategic interventions and then we also take those capabilities and we send that sell them direct to market for anyone else who wants to take them and configure them right so we have people who scribe conversations on the wall you know do graphic facilitation and anybody who wants a graphic facilitator can call us and get a graphic facilitator we're not doing the we're not designing the intervention they are but they're using our capability to do that so it's kind of it's kind of a dual distribution model right and i'm interested in now moving into capabilities not just being pools of resource resources know how but actually building block platform kind of componentry right um and and what i really want to build is the 21st century operating system which we can then install in these organizations to help them better sense what's going on in the world make sense of that and then make choices based on that and then align and mobilize their organization around around those changes and my belief is if we create systemic awareness they will have no choice but to make better decisions right so this client is a big financial services company which i'm doing coachella and one of the whole areas that we we want to focus on is emerging economies we want to introduce them to the fact that they think about the economy being this but really there's there's feminist economies and there's decentralized economies and there's the sharing economy and you know and sort of open up open up those conversations and by putting it into a provocative session which we say you know these are the ideas that you you're you're going to reject out of hand but be open-minded to them just in case i can slip in you know trojan horse a bunch of content that it's not my choice about how they run their business but it is but it is my job to expose so in some ways like an editor i'm curating content i'm you know my producers are producing you know different sort of situations my creative group is organizing that in a way that becomes compelling right that we're building these you know hopefully building this microsite slipstream kind of thing and so um that's that's it i'm an interventionist um which is why my answer to Doug's question was i struggle i've been working with one client for almost 20 years they're privately held um i have a direct relationship with the owner of the company um so you know she is 100% in control of this and i've moved them you know just a little bit you know um which i hope but so then i go how does that scale to you know nine billion people i mean i go geez it's and i've been working at this for a long time and um so i wonder you know what gets these big companies off the dime is when they start seeing you know seeing their gravestones and then they go shit we have to change or we're gonna die and most of them by the time they get there it's only a matter of time and so then so then it's just a it's just a question about glide path and you know die best is sure and and then pivoting something into something and then rebuilding something completely new out of that out of that destruction right so anyway that's that's a little bit about us and um where we're at how long has factor been in business how long have you guys been around well we've been an entity for over five years um and uh i had a co-founder who left at the beginning of the pandemic for personal reason he he and his family shot out of here and moved back to australia which is where um i had a co-founder that moved back to australia for personal i had a co-founder that moved back to australia for personal reasons funny and uh so so since then there's been a you know both between covid and the realizations it brought and uh and just you know the the slowdown of various things there's been some refocusing and we're sort of at a flex point so i almost feel like we're a new business rather than a five-year-old business but we've got a product you know that exists and it's you know in public beta and we're not really publicizing it right now because of these changes that we want to make but a lot of it has to do with um you know getting the money behind it that we need and uh and that has to do with entity entity clarification and and how we're working together um one thing parenthetically that i was just going to mention is you were talking about um businesses becoming extinct the thing i was doing before this after i left the you know full-time publishing world i worked for time eighth as an editor at large like 2003 or something like that and then i was just doing consulting which i had before which was mostly talking about digital transformation to legacy media companies where you know i knew people and it was so heart wrenching to see these brands that had so much brand equity that you know why wasn't i mean i wrote a proposal for for people people magazine that basically was facebook and you know they owned the brand people and and this was like way way and this was like late 90s and you know that whole being able to see what you could be if you took off if if you just considered who you are and what your purpose is without like well we have you know you know 17 copy editors what's their job going to be if right which is something you have to consider but if you start there you know that's not that's not going to leave you open to the possibilities that will stop you from becoming extinct yeah i i mean i i completely agree and there's uh there's an old axiom that i that i've been carrying around for many years which is nothing fails like success right the more successful we are the more entrenched we are in the behaviors that produce that success which means the more likely that when context changes that we're not capable of changing with it right um so i mean that's i mean that's the thing we we blind ourselves to these things because we have you know 10 copy editors that do copy editing that have always done copy editing and and that's they the system itself will perpetuate all things that relate to copy editing until you know until it's destroyed um which is different than if you take almost like um there's a economist named Cesar Hidalgo who talks about really about these capability mindsets and so if you start viewing copy editing as a capability versus a set of tasks then you go well what is copy editing you know what is the job that it's actually doing and how does that job become useful in whatever context right it's the difference between the like this idea of a theme which has a subject and object and you know all the stuff in a ream which takes the subject out of it and then that ream becomes the capability only and you can put whatever subject into it right that's this you know it's context independent so that you can then be interoperable with the context as it's evolving so i know i got a little um little philosophical there but um as you pivot let's you know let's talk i mean you know i'm i'm i'm interested in conversations as well i'm interested in seeing what's going on and you know if if you want to beta in anywhere you know i mean i can i'm trying to sell my clients into places where we can beta right i'm trying to get them to pay me to build you know stuff for the commons but that they get the perpetual use license to right um you know that kind of model so i i mean let's let's let's be serious about moving some of the stuff forward that's cool nice uh nice connecting yeah yeah any final thoughts um just that i'd really like to continue the conversation i just feel have felt you know a real rapport with you um which is you know getting back to our other other conversation easy because we're you know why guys in brooklyn have a certain age and blah blah like like like i'm not i'm uh i'm living in boston you're living in brooklyn and um okay so we're we're both you know i grew up in the midwest though so i bring some of that but yeah um i was born in the midwest but i grew up on the west coast so where were you where were you born people i mean it's not really the midwest well yeah i mean it depends people in people in ohio say they're on the east coast but you know they're really part of the the breast belt right we all kind that kind of you know i was born outside of moaqi so there's a lot of the same dna and then you lived out in cali for a while before going yeah yeah i mean i mostly grew up in in berkeley so that's a whole another thing yeah yeah well i went to graduate school and lived in san francisco so yeah i i've been to the berkeley hills a couple of parties there i was definitely a fish out of water so um yeah that's where my mom my mom lives in the you know the base of the berkeley hills okay the gourmet ghetto as they used to call it faith and east and pete's coffee and all those things are cool very cool um yeah oakland is um is um seeming to have a kind of an interesting renaissance right now definitely the brooklyn north the bay area yeah it's pretty pretty cool that's the school i should have gone to then versus the san francisco art institute but um it was what ccic or yeah um just you know um yeah it was a little bit more it was a little bit more i think adventurous i was in a my program was a great it was a great program i went there and i just i couldn't stand it um i couldn't it was too i was like i came from a liberal arts school and went and even that was just a big shot going from um liberal arts artists to to an art school only and the whole art world in the 90s and san francisco in that time frame was like facebook before facebook where everybody wanted to become friends but nobody was friend it would be your friend um you know what i'm saying it was about connecting and then saying you're my friend and um so moving out east it's maybe more my more my feel um so cool um well it's nice connecting i'll have um katya greens her name and i'll have her reach out and we'll uh we'll find some time to you know to keep talking sure sounds good all right take care