 This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, October 5th, 2023. Ball is arriving and we are on our way into a new season. I think it's time for a check-in format call. We haven't done check-ins for a while. It would be lovely to figure out what we're up to and where we are. Our check-in format is usually one that kind of runs itself, meaning I don't intermediate, I don't step in that much, except to explain to people coming into the call who might not know what's going on or when things don't follow plan, but raise your electronic Zoom hand in order to take a turn, take your time stepping into the conversation. You can either share a topic that's worth all of our spending our time together on or what OGME things in your life are going on right now. And then when you're done, I will not pass to the next person. The next person can just unmute and then step in. And the small detail, if you lower your hand, you disappear from the upper corner and you fall into the crowd again. So that's interesting. I just got an a la recording request. Which normally doesn't happen. Normally these Fathom recorders do their thing and step in automatically. And so we will sort of head off into check-ins that way. And then when we're, please only check in one time, don't start a conversation from the check-ins, take notes, feel free to take notes in the chat or to ask questions in the chat or whatever. And then when we're all done checking in, we will head into a conversation around whatever seemed to be hottest for us or juiciest for us in the check-in round. And with that, I will go quiet and whoever would like to check in first either start talking or raise your hand and then jump in. And the, when we raise our hands, Zoom remembers those hands raised in order. So that order will work just fine as the queue for who is to go next. Hey Ken, hey Pete, we're just starting at check-in round. So I'm gonna go quiet and let people jump in as they wish. Well, I'll jump in since I haven't been here for a while. I've been busy with my nonprofit activity and what I'm finding interesting and starting to do a little research on is changing patterns of volunteerism. It seems as though every nonprofit I'm working with is having board members retire and not so easily finding new ones. And I'm uneasy about that in terms of a lot of the good work that's being done in various areas. So that's sort of my topic of increased understanding at the moment. And other than that life is good. I was in Kansas City for the weekend visiting with my daughter and son-in-law who had come up there from Houston. She came up because she'd forgotten to renew her driver's license. And unfortunately her car was car registration and her car sits in Kansas City because they don't want to pay for parking in Houston. So she needed to renew that. So that's part of the reason that they were up but she hadn't realized it was immediate. So it took part of our weekend to deal with that. A bit of family trivia. But I guess what I'm really interested in in terms of volunteerism is what we can do to enlist and engage additional people. I learned in my readings that the US actually has the highest level of volunteerism in the world which I did not know. And there's some interesting papers coming out of the UK and other places on global volunteerism. But I just thought it was, it's kind of on my mind. So I thought I'd share. That's enough for me. Well, let me go next because I also haven't been in the group for a long time. I spent a couple of very nice weeks on vacation in Portugal. And before that and especially since coming back, I've been working towards three different activities. Two of them I've mentioned here before. So I'll just mention them briefly. The third one is the most recent that's coming up this coming Saturday with a colleague at the World Federation of Future Studies where co-hosting a webinar about science fiction, books that have been made into science fiction films. We're going to do a number of coupled books and films, looking at questions like how does popular culture influence and affect how society's function and what people inside believe in. And secondly, what makes a book good and what makes a film good. Second of the activities is coming up on the 12th and the 19th of October with a number of colleagues. We're hosting two prototype sessions of intergenerational dialogue. We're putting people over 60 years old together in small groups with people who are 16 to 18 years old, skipping the intermediate generations and hoping to ignite conversations between society's elders, as we're calling them, and some of society's young people. And if they are both successful, we are hoping to extend it to more prototypes later in the autumn and winter. And in the first two prototypes, the 12th and the 19th will have young people and elders from the UK, from India and from Nigeria. And the third thing I'm working on is coming up on the 25th of October at the 50th anniversary conference of the World Federation of Future Studies. I'll be co-hosting a workshop which will attempt to give people a lived experience of democracy in 2073 by first giving them a lived experience of democracy in 1973, 50 years before today, then moving them today and then moving them to 50 years in the future. What happened to our dreams of democracy 50 years ago? Did they come out or have they changed what dreams of democracy do we have now for the next decades and what do you think will be emerging? So three interesting topics, possibly time zone, challenging for people on this call, but we will be moving them into other time zones after this. So that's the end of my check. Check in, yeah. Who is gone and not gone? Is there a roster or is there a list I'm missing somewhere? You didn't miss much, only a couple of people have gone so far, Judy and Hank, and feel free to jump in. Okay, I've been working locally. I work on neighborhood economics, which is we gather the people repairing local economies. We're doing that in San Antonio and it's national, but focused locally. But locally, I've been working on river rights and it's pretty interesting. I was part of this coalition of really strong environmental groups trying to get a plastic bag and styrofoam ban. And we got a resolution in our town, Black Mountain and one in Woodson. There was actually an ordinance in the county was about to do it. And a lot of enthusiasm and folks with it, it's really need to be part of a well run coalition of volunteers, but they're paid by their nonprofits. So it's National Resource Defense Fund, Mountain True, the local version of this region of the Sierra Club and Southern Environmental Law Center. And just when all those things got passed our legislature passed a ban that they stuck into the budget that came out of conference so nobody could see it, that banned those things. And like anything else, you can't, there may not be legal to have recycling cans anymore. They were saying, oh my God, what are we gonna do? And we have a super majority because of federally agreed upon gerrymandering in our state, granted a Republican super majority when they count for about 40% of the population. And so they're open to new legal ideas. They were tossing around common lawsuits and stuff. And so I've talked about the rights of the river. And so we've gotten the Southern Environmental Law folks to look at it and the Mountain True to look at it. And the folks with the Bunkham or the French Broad Coalition to look at it. We're drafting an ordinance, a bill of rights for the town of Black Mountain that says you can't pollute here and we're giving the rights of nature to this one in our river. So we're in the middle of drafting that and we got some volunteers and stuff. And the weird thing is rights of nature seems to be one of the only things that can be illegal equivalent to corporate personhood. And this strategy is really similar. There's a really good profile of Thurgood Marshall in the New Yorker. And before, you know, all his big things, he had 11 different court wins before the Supreme Court, incrementally changing things. And the woman who led the LGBT legal marriage also did lots of small wins in small places. You know, it was in the landscape and mindset shifts town by town when you do these things. And the same thing was true of win and suffrage. They started in one town where it was legal and everybody thought it was terrible. And then they went to... So it's this incremental strategy to change the mindset. So it's pretty interesting to be part of it. It's a long game, but so was voting rights. So that's kind of fun to do. And then the other thing was just, you know, people are realizing that doing, investing locally makes more sense. And so I'm getting some big dogs saying, hey, we want to think about this thing you're doing. And I'm meeting with some of these big funds at SoCAP. And that says, you know, really we need to be tied into this one big fund. And I'll go, it's called the reinvestment fund, multi-billion dollar CDFI. And they realized that they did one thing locally in New Jersey around food systems. And by doing that, they can get around their own regulations to do things interdisciplinary. So they could link health and housing and food in a way that they couldn't when they looked at the big issues. And so when they look at a place, they are somehow they're able to move their dollars around them to everybody. It's really kind of a cool thing. So we're in that space where they want to do that. So that's kind of cool. Maybe we can take advantage of it. So that's it for us. Thanks. I mean, if anybody wants to be part of the rights of nature thing, it's a pretty interesting thing. And he will work with you to do a local ordinance that can be part of this group of about 20 cities and towns that have done that. Yeah, I have been gone for a while. I just came back from a roadside trip to Chile and Argentina, which was amazing. Because what's called a really moves you behind the scene talking with really insightful local people. And my impression was that Chile is still traumatized by this Pinochet era. Everyone in every conversation that came up and it must have just been horrendous. And then the freedmen came up over and over this economic theory that they're trying to push down this road. And I'm thinking any economic theory that has the killer bunch of people to get implemented is probably not the ideal economic system. And Argentina is just going through an election completely surprised me compared to the image that Argentina has in the international financial markets and what you hear about them and so on. And what you see in reality is just completely different in any case, but it's just stunning. You saw the waterfalls and the modern range is there. So it was wonderful. Yeah, then coming back, I released, I wrote the piece with chat GBT on water because the political discussions in Washington already being loaded against anything climate change related so the agricultural committees in the house which are now Republican dominated refused to allow any bill to pass through that has climate change references. I mean, it's just insanity on steroids. So my point for writing this was basically let's change the conversation and talk about water because they're completely unprepared for that and it resonates widely with a lot of people who got washed out and got into flooding and what have you. But to my surprise, I released this knowing the Sierra Club and climate reality project and I have a mailing list that covers almost 3,000 NGOs small and large. The feedback particularly out of the Sierra Club was really surprising, right? Because particularly the leader from the California chapter, Jan, was the very adamant that she hated my paper, she hated it and Kamma came up with a number of books and articles that showed we all know this stuff and the way you have written it is so cold and so removed from the emotional content of what this ought to be and I couldn't figure out what she was talking about now but making a long story short, what came out is that she is talking in the queen spectrum. You know, we are just going through this Neo book where we are laid in the spiral dynamics as an algorithm, so to speak, right? To speak in color, to speak in language. And so what occurred to me is that chat GBT writes in bright orange and I didn't even recognize this as an orange language and because I'm like, I'm thinking, let's go at this from a yellow perspective so you reach all the colors and it turns out that just doesn't work. It just simply doesn't work because you have to customize the language uniquely to your audience. So I released this spiral dynamics paper to article there to the Sierra Club and we got into a really interesting discussion because it's like, oh my God, you know, it truly resonates with people to understand that there is a group of folks operating in red, you know, and there's paper on water but it got the green spectrum upset but the red and blue spectrum wouldn't even read it because it would just bounce off on them. And so you have to, you know, you have to really think about customizations of these papers or of this kind of information that penetrates, you know, that because you're really changing vocabulary, you're changing idiomatic expressions, you know, idioms and metaphors. So that turns out to be very interesting but then you have to think about, you know, Cambridge Analytica, for example, that's what they are doing, right? I mean, they're using spiral dynamics for their social media work. And so it's really, I think it's really a good idea to spend a little bit more time on that aspect. And the other thing that came out, which surprised me, I mean, I was just putting that in for political language but then it turns out that apparently the climate models just sort of missed water, you know, as a factor in a changing climate and focused almost exclusively on carbon and that has created, you know, a directional issue where the, I mean, you're not going to solve this with electric cars, obviously. And the lack of focus on agriculture, for example, and on land use in general is just really scary, you know, because land use, partly, you know, people talk about it, but to see the enormous impact it has on the overall climate on water cycles because roughly what happens is when you try out the soil with chemicals, you know, it loses its capacity to absorb and hold on to water. When that happens, then you don't have this evaporation process taking place that generates about 40 to 60% of local rains. Now, so you're creating a trison, the trison is heating up and actually repels clouds. And so it creates droughts. And then when clouds finally move in because you have a storm system coming through, the air is hot above this dry region, meaning it can hold more water, which in then dumps, right? So this is in a nutshell, the process like California, for example, you know, with these enormous rainfalls and floods that then, now you have six months of drought. But it's going across, I mean, I think there's like 32 million acres of corn under production. I mean, they're just enormous fields that have been completely tried out. So in any case, how to now translate this water story so that people can process it in their own language, you know, in their own reference points is going to be a good challenge. Then I was listening to Schmachtenberger, you know, Kevin, Ken, could add this video from his latest talk and also listen to the latest Al Gore story. And here you have, you know, people, talk leaders like this, talk about numbers, good. And so he has this big audience and he's telling them, you know, at some length, you know, that we're ending an era of humanity and what totally freaked me out is when he stopped at an extended speech there, people started clapping. Yeah, it was, it's so exciting. This is great stuff you're talking about. And I'm going to just told you, you know, you're going to die. It was something, your civilization is going to collapse and you think this is like, so people just don't process, you know, it just doesn't sink in from an emotional level there. So, yeah, and then I'm thinking, I should think less about all this stuff because it's mostly disturbing. Yeah, so anyway. Well, I will jump in, Jerry. Thanks. And that's great to see everybody. It's been a little while. This guy back from exploring the beach down in North Carolina and the closet, you're right, man. It's hot down there. Kind of shocking how what's happened in the last few months. I guess, I mean, my biggest update really is around this open source ecosystem stuff from the NSF. And Pete, thanks for putting that in the Plexi. That's such great work. And I do feel like it touches a little bit on stuff that Kevin's doing and Klaus is doing a little bit. The notion being that if we're going to do landscape regeneration, we need a large set of intellectual capital, if you will, that's reusable. I think Klaus, the book, probably falls into this category. It's reusable. It's malleable, it's growable, and provable, you know. So we basically need an open source ecosystem. And NSF is investing in open source ecosystems. So we ought to capture as much of this money as we possibly can to grow the open source ecosystem that we're going to use for landscape regeneration. And so we did a round of this last year, we just finished in September, where we just kind of engaged with people who are interested in this project and have open source things that they're developing that are related in some sense to regeneration. And we got six or seven proposals to go in. I don't know if anybody will get funded or not, but just the notion that there's a bunch of people out there who are doing work in the space that could be kind of co-investing, if you will, seems positive to me. So we'll keep doing another round for 2024, try to get some more proposals in. And in the meantime, I'm going to try to, just kind of create some notional structure for what this ecosystem starts to look like. And so, for example, I think there's a big piece which is around soil quality. There's another big piece which is around hydrology modeling, another piece around a form of an exchange, whether it's, you know, it's barter or Bitcoin. And these are the stack that were gradually growing that will enable us to be much more adept at change. And I was going to highlight, there's one book that I've been reading that just got me really excited. I don't know if anybody else was running into this one by Dorn Cox, the guy that's done open the FarmOS stuff, an open team. And he's written the book on open source stuff for agriculture. And it's like, it's the book, I'm glad I didn't have to write kind of, it's really good. I'll stick a link in the chat, but, but anyway, some of the, some of the intellectual framework is out there in pretty good shape. And now it's kind of getting to the details. Well, I can, I can go, I'm studying Italian. I'm going to Italy in two weeks. My wife and I are doing one Pimsler lesson a day. And I gotta say the Pimsler course is really, really good. It set up very much the way we learn language. You don't attempt to read anything. You just listen and repeat and listen and repeat before you ever get into the learning and it's set up so that if you get 80% of the lesson, then that's enough and it keeps reinforcing over time. So even though I had a couple of lessons, I actually feel like I'm learning a language far better than I ever managed with my high school Spanish, for example, we're leaving two weeks from today. So this, I have one more call after this and I'll be gone for a couple of weeks. And I'm pretty excited. We're gonna visit Tuscany for about two and a half weeks. And it's been a chore to get train tickets and accommodations, but that is all handled now. I have tickets to go see David in, Michelangelo's David in Florence. It's just, I'm really, really psyched. Cause I had a very different take when people were applauding for Daniel. I thought that they were applauding because finally somebody had named what they knew and was saying, this is what's going on. I didn't think it was a celebration of, oh my goodness, we're coming into history. It's like, thank you. Somebody is actually speaking this stuff in a way that, but that's just, that's how I interpret it. It's all open to interpretation. So I just, I appreciated what he said about, allow yourself to get depressed. I think we need, we need to be looking with clear eyes at what's going on. And it is really depressing. It's actually can take us to the edge of despair or even tumble us into the abyss of despair. And that's why I think we need, we need people versed in how to handle despair to help people go through the eye of that needle cause it's really going to be challenging. But denial doesn't work. And so, that's a whole nother ball of wax of how to do that. But yeah, right now, mostly I'm just focused on, I'm putting the problems of the world aside so I can go and enjoy a few weeks in Italy. I've spent so much time thinking about all the challenges in the world that I just need a little break. So that's where I am. And that's where I'll be for a little while. Well, several things I've been thinking about. One is that the nation state is too small to deal with climate change. But civilizations might be the right size because civilizations run on emotional energy where states run on different kinds of specious logic. Along with that, I've been thinking of poetry like, when Dante says, Midway, the course of this life, I found myself lost in a dark wood. It's that kind of language that I think we need. And people like us need to be writing even bad poetry much more than we do because it'll surface the words that really count. So that's my check in. Kevin, I think we'll step in once we've all checked in. So Carl, whenever you feel like it, I think we'll skip past Kevin's hands for a moment. Yeah, so I'm kind of disorganized today as you could probably tell with going in and out. And now I'm on my laptop and things working on getting head movers here and the part two of moving in under the same roof is still as painful as moving to other locations. I'll be out next week myself too. There's an enabling conference here in DC which is about the assistive technology. So that's what I focus on in my work and things. And then they'll be the main interagency, government interagency thing November 7th, 8th and 9th which will be in person for the first time in four years. It'd be nice to see some people in person again. They're both of those events. I've been getting, I don't know if you're getting in or heard of them yet but there's a voters of tomorrow group that's out there. I've been getting deluge with the emails from a 16 year old chief of staff. So, it's like Gen Z is awakening. So that's an encouraging thing. And then I also run across, there's a resilient cities network. So there's a whole network of cities that have chief resilience officers and things. Kind of the, yes, I'm kind of been going the opposite direction. I'm done there. It's looking at the networking cities and stuff. That's really where our divide is between urban and rural. There's a guy from Princeton University did a purple America map. I don't know if you've seen this but it's just like by county and things in the red versus blue and then even green for independence and things. And then he had the idea to superimpose the night, the satellite nighttime. So you can see like each pixel of light probably represents the certain number of people or whatever, but you superimpose those maps and it's just stunning. I mean, this was years ago. So I haven't looked at it recently, but he did all the way back to like the 2000 election. Things, so that's kind of where those are kind of the two things I wanted to bring to people's attention. And I'll put a link in the chat. I see Kevin's hands up but since he spoke already, I'll check in. So I don't know if it's supposed to be up. Yeah, I have to run outs in my refrigerator's dead. So I have to go buy it and give away my food. But I did wanna check in and say that I was happy to hear Klaus mentioning the idea of colors. Even though I don't know what the colors mean, I'm gonna read the article but it's sort of what I've been trying to talk about with tone for different audience. So I'm gonna learn more about what the colors mean to people in academia. And the other thing I wanted to say is I was watching I was watching the chips hearing and I was listening to the commerce secretary. And I was kind of happy to hear her speaking because I was hearing her trying to explain that they can accomplish goals and still do other things at the same time. And it was a kind of win-win thinking that I haven't heard before, at least in government. And maybe I'm naive, maybe it's just because she's a woman but I really felt that she had a different way of looking at things. And it made me feel hopeful. It made me feel hopeful. And when Kevin mentioned interdisciplinary, whatever rules had to be changed to allow for that, it sort of fit into the way this woman was thinking and how I always try to think locally but don't necessarily know how to go about promoting that for lack of a better word. So I just like the way I have seen or it appears that the thinking has changed. That's my check-in. Maybe the chat GPT summary can make it more articulate. I don't have a check-in but I have an idea for a different kind of check-in someday. Where instead of each of us speaking something about us, we ask somebody else about something that we know, they know about this idea. I think it would take a little bit of thought and care because you don't want it to be completely random. But it might be fun. Is there anything that's completely random? David Bohm says something that happens once in the universe as a number of one. I have a couple of things. I haven't been here in very infrequent just because it's time slot sometimes conflicts with things my wife and I are doing or how we arrange our lives. One reason that I like to check-in like today is I've learned an enormous amount about things that are worthy of my own attention. So I appreciate that quite a bit. One thing I have been doing is related to what Douglas said. I've been reading some of what Doug gave me posting which I really appreciate. But also I've been doing a lot of reading of women philosophers, feminists, political theorists and it actually is changing my whole way that I'm making sense of things. And the one thing that came up, I posted something from Jacqueline Rose in the chat but she has written a book that she wrote during our ongoing pandemic called The Plague, Living Death in Our Times. She's British. And I just found it, it opened up to me something that to myself is really important about psychoanalysis, which as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum mentioned is something that Americans aren't really very much interested in. They'd rather have a quick fix than to actually be sad. And so something that's come up for me is this, I think it was just mentioned about being aware of how the situation we're actually in right now and being able to have our feelings about that in addition to trying to take actions that seem helpful. But I don't really have, I mean, I feel like that's what Pete, it's really a me proud. I'm working on me here and trying to be able to, you know, be better equipped to not be overwhelmed. Anyway, thank y'all. There's only a couple of us who haven't checked in yet. So we're just about done with the check-in round. And I have just a tiny check-in because check-ins are not meant to respond to other check-ins, but I'm resonating strongly with the sadness and grief meme trope idea that has shown up a couple of times and culturally how Americans process or fail to process or intentionally avoid processing sadness and grief and things like that and the instant fix. And I'm also really interested in thresholds. There's a conversation, I'm on a list with a bunch of old telecom geeks and it's the most conservative list I'm on. It has a bunch of people who are pretty far to the right. They're not mega crazy, but they're very conservative. And it's just interesting to watch the conversations go back and forth. And one guy was poo-pooing like, gosh, everything sounds like climate change, like a disaster. If this happened, if this weather even happened, it was because climate change and won't they just stop? And then a friend of some of ours, David Weinberger, who's on the same list and a very thoughtful author asked, so what event would cause you to think climate change was real? And there's been no answer yet, but I'm really interested in that threshold. Like, what would have to happen? Because when things just get worse and worse and worse slowly and slowly, but they get worse to the point where numbers are really out of whack. And if you go look at current reports, September was the hottest month ever recorded. It's like things are really out of whack in some way. And I'm convinced, but there's a whole mess of people out there who are not. And I don't know what has to happen in the world for them to go, oh crap, something is happening large enough, important enough that we might need to change behaviors, industrial structures, whatever else. And that's sort of keeping us from getting any place in different ways. Hey, John, welcome to the call. We're doing a check-in round and we're just about done. There's only a couple of people left to check in. And that's it for me. I'm complete. Well, some are long. I've been trying to avoid doom and gloom because it's so easy to find here. But in the last, in this calendar year, I've been incredibly busy for the last five months of building some software that demonstrates the HCI issues that I've talked about over the years. And it came to a boil at the beginning of July when first off, my daughter got engaged. And then two days later, I incorporated Nuon Play LLC, which is the startup building software that I talked about. Four days later, my son got engaged. And this is all, while leading up to the page C-Graph conference, it was in Plex. If this year was the 50th, which I had to participate in two ways. One as assisting the current chair and the other as a contributor since I'm a longtime graphics team. And so this brought up a lot of activity. The conference was in the beginning of August. At the same time, I also founded a nonprofit, the Center for Computer Graphics History, which is first off going to be about history, second be a resource, and second be, and third be a topic for research. And that my idea is about accessing history are different than the way it's conventionally done. And then once C-Graph was over, I had to start working on the design for next year's conference. So the last five months have been an incredible lot of activity. It's been fires all day long without pause. And the feeling kind of refreshed because it's all creative. I know something happened in the US House of Representatives. Well, I know pretty much what happened, but I'm just staying away from it. I want to create instead of be morose. So I think John, well, Ken, did you go? Yep. So John, if you'd like to check in, I think we've got everybody else and then we can head into conversation space. One clarification from the chat is I'm not doing what's currently called UI, UX, or HDR or anything like that, because I have completely redefined what the notion is. I'm gonna have to come up with a new term because all of the current terms are polluted. This sounds like a little topic we could maybe be helpful with. So hold that thought. Yeah, it's... Go ahead, John. Okay, thank you. Well, I'm gonna ask for just a minute here. I'm... Don't hit anybody while talking to us. Right, right. I'm just gonna look for a pullover spot. Oh, okay. Okay, here we go. Pullover spot. Great. Okay. So, yeah, I feel an object. Can you, John, can you turn your... Intimacy with this group, even though... Can you turn your video back off? Your audio was clipping a lot, and if you turn the video off, the audio should be... Okay, let me... I'll turn the video off just a sec here. Thanks. Go for it. Okay, is that better? Yes. So, yeah, it's interesting to come back into this group as intermittently, but it feels more... Like, coming home, then I would have guessed it would. There's something about that. There is a continuity here, even though the whole group is very meta, and everybody is very capable of taking it off these great conceptual ski jumps. It still feels very much like, oh, yes, I know this group. I see where we're going. Okay, so what I've been up to is I've been a little bit focused on the harms and potential benefits of AI, and more specifically, the large language models, and working on a pretty long and pretty complicated scenario for how that could play out fictionally, and I'm integrating that scenario with... We just lost your audio, John. Oh, John just fell off the call. He has got pissed off. Yeah, I feel like, oh, this guy's working on stuff that's dangerous. Yeah. Okay, did I come back? Yeah. Am I back? I saw it. Okay, great. I got a message reconnecting, okay. Yeah, so I'm writing about a safe civilization team that's very diverse and that has personality AIs supporting it, and the personality AIs are associated with famous historical figures like Estelis and Hedy Lamar, and some indigenous folks as well. So it's a lot of fun. It's a big challenge. I recently sent something to you, Jerry, about the whole question of harms and benefits. And so that's a big question, and that's whether you think of it as being on your plate or not, it's right here, it's present, it's alive, and it will come into our lives. It is coming into our lives in important ways. So, and I know I've got a sketchy connection here, so maybe that's enough for me as a check-in. That's what I'm up to, really appreciating this group, and I suspect there are people here who will have a lot to, could contribute a lot to my thinking, and I look forward connecting with you individually, you know, Jerry and Pete and others about that, okay. Hi, Paul. Thank you, John. Thanks very much, that worked out, that worked out. Technology is our friend today. We are now in conversational mode. Kevin, the floor is yours. Thank you. This is in response to Dave Whitzel. In my experience, open source is pretty expensive, you know, to actually get it to the point where you can share it. And in the work I do, we're really looking a lot at replicability, you know. There's like a fund that does down payments for folks who are at risk of displacement in Colorado that we're working with a guy that he's, and we're just highlighting, that they're replicating it in Austin and San Antonio, coming out of savings for one. Replicability is really important, but it's really hard. I was interviewing somebody yesterday who's built the best local investing exchange in the country. It's in Maryland, the Maryland neighborhood exchange. And she's totally supported by philanthropy and she can't afford to come to the conference to talk about something that should be replicated. So I'm saying, look, we'll do it, go fund me, I'll put it 500 bucks, we need you there. But the folks who are doing these things don't have the money to explain to other folks how to replicate them. And there's so many one-off sorts of things. I've got a whole, I got a newsletter out. So many things that there's one of these and there should be a bunch, you know, from the food system bank in Connecticut to Michigan doing a credit on your local taxes of $3,000. You get half of that back if you invest in local businesses. And none of those are stitched together at all. And replicability is really, it takes lots of things to get it going once. And everybody forgets that, you know, there's this community entrepreneur that's stitching the whole ecosystem together. And that's really hard, but the solution actually works. And so it's, I'm just really stuck on replicability. I'm skeptical of open source. I've been around a couple of things and keeping everything ready to be put out there is high cost. And maybe I should talk to you offline, Dave, but the stuff I'm seeing, there's a bunch of things that are one-offs that should be done other places. Kevin, are you kind of asking how could we reduce the costs or overhead of replicability? I think that's what I'm, yeah, yeah, yes. And a lot of the costs are these soft knitting together, you know, this woman, Stephanie Geller, goes from meeting to meeting all over Baltimore, you know, and it can't afford a plane flight, you know, but she's really, she's made, you know, almost $6 million goes to 250 mostly businesses of color through 10,000 people investing. So it's, it clearly can be done, but nobody pays for the, you know, the social entrepreneur doing the good is barely sustainable. And yet what she's done should, could and should be done so many places. That's just where I'm starting. Does she have a Patreon page or any other patronage model website? Yeah, you know, I'm trying to get a GoFundMe to get her to come into the room where we have a bunch of foundations who would love it, but she can't afford a plane. So that's, you know, this is not a Patreon problem. This is a foundation, see the solution and help it get bigger problem. I mean, Patreon is okay, but people do five bucks. I mean, you know, you might get 500 or 1,000 a month and you have to work it. And the cost of Patreon is, you know, it gets you to beans, but not pork, you know. Raman, but not whatever. Yeah, thanks Kevin. Klaus? Yeah, I just did the community event here in Bend because I've been, you know, working for some time to transfer what I've been doing for these, for national groups like business climate leader and Sarah Club and so on to do that at a local level. And the, so what I wanted to really do is a form of focus school research that highlights the core issues at community level. So what do we here in Bend need to advance our agricultural system, our food system in a base of pyramid, opportunity, access to food, access to shelter and so on. We had a county commissioner joining because we made enough noise around it with Citizen Climate Lobby. We had members from city council, Senator Merkley, Laurie Chavez, who's a member of Republican member of the House Agricultural Committee sent their staffers to it. The room was packed and had just a really good local team, director of the local school system food. The neighborhood impact person responsible for feeding, you know, disadvantaged children, families. So now we had a videographer come in and record the event. Now we started out with the Kiss the Ground 45 minutes short version of the film that explains what's happening in nature and on the soil and how the water cycle interacts and so on. So I've been looking through the video and Pete, I'm gonna, we can't publish it yet. I'll be still going through some processes here, but the data that came out of this conversation is amazing, you know, all these punctures, you know, that you see that we don't have any meat processing capacity, we don't, we build up funding sources for the WIC program and so on and so on. And anyway, I think you really need the goal community by community, you know, this is, because each community has different dynamics, different players and you don't know where they are, you know, you can go to the Sierra Club in one community and they're on fire and then you go to the next community and all they wanna do is nature walks. And so you can't go through centralized organizations, you have to build it from the ground and up and find what I call also a coalition of the willing, you know, you get people who get it. We found a young lady who's a farm, who started as a farmer. She is totally on fire. I mean, she has, she's smart, she has amazing amount of energy and great ideas, you know, and so, you know, we can use, we can work with her to team her up with, now a couple other people who are working as a grant writer, you know, there's, there's a conservation district in one area as a wonderful person. So it really comes down to developing a process structure, you know, that works a community level to bring players together and engages the community, which is why these kind of panel discussions are really helpful because you're bringing in the community. You're bringing in the most important decision makers like the county commission that got really animated in the meeting, he got really engaged, you know, and we had some discussions where, for example, we found out that in Deschutes County we don't fund the soil and water conservation district for whatever mysterious reason, you know, it just, they basically don't know what that is, now it works and what it's supposed to do. So I think it may, whereas in some other counties, you know, I mean, I was working up at the Palouse and they just put $10 million into their soil and water conservation district. So you have these differences which are so community specific that, so anyway, long story, so I think more than software, you know, and developing fancy communication tools, it's a process that we have to engage in and after that it doesn't matter whether you work with an Excel spreadsheet or whatever websites you want to do, it's just basically getting the data together. Thanks, Kass, Ken and Dave. I want to go back to something you said about Dave Weinberger's question of what would it take for you to, did you say, what would it take for you to believe climate change is real as that both question was? I'm paraphrasing, but yeah. Yeah, I'm reading Monica Guzman's book, which I highly recommend. She's one of the founders of Bravery Angels, as the book is called, I never thought of it that way. And that question is loaded as in I'm going to convince you, I'm trying to convince you with climate change is real. So it's a bad way in. Probably close to 10 years ago, Reuters did a series on climate change but they didn't mention climate change. They just used title indicators which have been around for hundreds of years. People have been marking where tides are. This is when the Tea Party was really big and there's a, Chesapeake Bay has seen some of the highest levels of seal arise on the East Coast. And so there's a woman who is a county supervisor standing at the edge of her dock saying, I don't believe in climate change, but I have to admit my dock is underwater and it's never been underwater before. And so I think a better approach would be to not say, what would it take to convince you that this is real? But to say, what do you think is going on? How do you account for the fact that your dock is underwater? And really be in a curious space to try and understand the other person before attempting to convince them that your position is right and that climate change is real. Because there are people out there, some of whom you'll never reach. They're just, they're in denial that you're not gonna crack it. But there's a lot of people who really aren't sure. And they, if they're given the opportunity to actually be in a conversation where you're curious about that understanding. And Guzman talks a lot about stories. How stories really are what change people. That if you don't know where people have been, where they're coming from, if you don't know their story, then facts are never gonna change your mind. And she tells some great stories. Her, my mother is a Mexican Catholic, which is its own thing. And one day in Boston, she saw a couple walking in front of her and she realized it was actually a male couple. And one of them leaned over and kissed the other one. And she had been up to that point, adamantly against homosexuality. And she said, I recognize that it was the same kind of kiss your father gives to me. It was love, it was just love. It was so normal. And all of a sudden she released her story of the church teachings around homosexuality. See, this is two people who love each other. And that's a beautiful thing. And that changed her. And so I think when we come into conversations with the, I'm right, climate change is happening, whatever it is you think is going on and you're wrong, then we're really setting ourselves up for failure and setting ourselves up for a deeper argument rather than how can we be engaged with people, whether we change their mind or not, just to hear their side of things. And maybe after five or 10 or 100 conversations with curious people, they start to go, maybe I'm, maybe I got something to learn here. Maybe I'm not right. Maybe there's some other way. So I'm just really enjoying this book and finding a lot of value in her approach of be curious, be curious, be curious. Do not let your assumptions get in the way. Do not let your, don't argue for your point of view, try to understand the other person first, which goes to Stephen Covey's seek first to understand before attempting to be understood. So just thought I'd throw that in there. Thanks, Ken. That's really helpful. Dave? And maybe we should do a special session sharing everything we know and think and suspect and fear about storytelling and narrative. And that would be a really good use of our time is, because I agree very much that narrative is like huge, really important here. And the more, the better we can get at it, the better our chances of figuring stuff out. Go ahead, Dave. Hey, and Jerry on that one, if you were ever in the mood to do like a cross network call or something, I'd love to invite the GOC folks to that, for example. Sounds great. Do a plexi call or something like that. Plexi call. Yeah, and I guess, I mean, I was just gonna think, I was kind of responding to Kevin, I guess he just dropped off, but Carl, thanks a lot for the link, I'll follow up on that. But I guess, so one of the intuitions I've been having is, and I'd love to see if anybody else shares it, is that in some sense, if you think about, well, we have to do things in near term and in far term, we don't get to choose one or the other, and we have to do both, right? And the part of the value of the open-sourced concept is that it's compounded interest, right? It's like we need the assets upon which the society grows to be shared, not proprietary, right? That's one of the issues that we need to deal with as we're going forwards. And so if we're going to kind of create a new regenerative future, we want the assets that drive that regenerative future to be held in the comments. And those are, they're not their software, but they're also data, they're legal contracts and there's curriculum, I mean, it's all the intellectual assets, everything that has zero marginal cost of distribution, right? ought to be held in the comments and not be captured for extraction by rich people who can manipulate IP. And though I guess that I'm a little bit, that's a little bit of a theory, but it's if we were to see, and the internet I think demonstrates that model, right? Most of the huge chunk of the core of the internet is in the comments and it has allowed wide distribution of people, jobs and the global, right? We've had a global impact on employment by opening up the source of the internet and who would transform economies all over the world. And so yeah, chunks of it is still being captured, but a big chunk of it hasn't. And we also have enabled amazing capacity. I mean, you can launch an open AI on top of this massive stack that we've built over the last 30 years. And anyway, so I'm just curious if anybody else resonates with this notion that we need an intellectual core, a big open source bank account essentially, but there were hefty interest off of and that ought to be publicly held. Pete, I'll remix it then. Thanks, Jay. Dave, that makes a ton of sense and it's well explained to it. It explains, a lot of times, people don't think in terms of financial realities and assets and compound interest and stuff like that and with open source, but it's a good way to think about it and I think important. And I like Ken and Ken, thank you so much for talking about stories. I'm intrigued by, Jerry, your conveyance of David Weinberger's question. What would it take to convince you that climate change is real? And I think there's one of the, a lot of us who grew up with a scientific education take for granted that you can predict things. And I think another thing that we do is take for granted that predictions like that are obviously to me, they're obviously imprecise. So 30 or 40 years ago when scientists started to say, I think there's gonna be a problem here, I think this is what's gonna happen and they would get a question or an argument and they would say, well, I don't know, it's gonna be between this range and that range. For a lot of people who haven't had a scientific education, that means that they don't know what they're talking about rather than they do know what they're talking about. So I am not saying that we should not do science and I'm especially not saying that we should not do predictions. I definitely think that we should. But I think a lot of us, me included, walk around with kind of the, hey, I've looked at that evidence, I've seen the trend lines. I kind of can tell you what's gonna happen. That's not a particularly human thing to do. Humans don't work that way. Humans haven't worked that way for tens of thousands of years. I love your hands, Jai. Obviously humanity has made a ton of progress by doing science and by predicting and things like that. And yeah, if I think about a lot of humanity, I don't know, like 80% or something like that, they work on stories and religion and tribalism and connections to your neighbors and positive connections to your neighbors and negative connections to your neighbors. And the whole, you can predict your way out of this thing or you can predict what's going to happen is I think it's a challenging thing and it's not obvious and it's less obvious than I think to those of us to whom it is obvious. So I think another component of meeting people where they are with climate change is to talk about what's happening now, how's your peer doing and is it underwater and what would you do about that? And I think you could step from there into a little bit of what we would call scenario planning. Hey, I'm not saying it's gonna happen necessarily but what if this land got a lot drier? What would happen? Not saying that would but what would we want to do in that case maybe and maybe we should think about doing something like that just in case rather than you have to do it now because otherwise everything is, there ends up being a component of what I think is perceived by most, many people, maybe not most people, maybe most people. There's a component of what is perceived as alarmism and in our, maybe the past couple of generations, the past couple of generations, we've weaponized, people have weaponized, not necessarily scientists, but people have weaponized predictions and illusions, illusory statements. Our dear departed, Mr. Trump was spectacular at weaponizing the ability to say something that had no basis in fact as if it were something to rally around. And so we get into these arguments like, well, it feels like it's an argument, right? I wanna tell you something true. I know this to be true because I did the science and it's like, really, that's what you're going to argue with somebody about. We need to have a lot more connection and I think we need to have a lot more empathy for people to whom the science is not an intuitively obvious answer to things. Even if it is an intuitively obvious answer to me, for instance, I've worked up to my education to be able to hear a scientist and go, well, okay, let me check her calculations and her predictions and her background. And yeah, I believe that. That's a very tempting way to believe in things that folks around here are native to and it's anti-native to a lot of people. Thanks. Thanks, Pete. I wanna sprinkle four or five different things in here in response to some of what we've been saying. Partly, Pete, I did that around people don't predict or were not good predictors in the sense of, I think this is in dawn of everything as well in that we needed to say, hey, about this time is next year is when the fish are gonna run. And if we sprinkle seeds here, I predict that they'll grow up and we'll be able to harvest them next year when we come by this area. And by the way, the kangaroos really like this kind of plant. We should just enhance this kind of plant near this forest where the kangaroos hang up, et cetera. And I think there was a lot of that that helped us thrive and figure things out really well. Hence everybody trying to do astronomy, the Mayans and Aztecs doing astronomy and all that or ancient Egypt. Like the people who predicted when the Nile was going to flood were really important people in society. Don't know if they were that good. And then there's a whole bunch of research that seems to be kind of resonating inward to itself on how the brain is a prediction engine. And that resonates really well with how LLMs work because it's busy predicting what the next most sensible word might be. And I'm sensing some kind of very interesting convergence there of a bunch of different things. So that's one little bucket of things. Then this is gonna sound weird coming from me, but while I appreciate more appropriate ways of gently entering conversations and all that, isn't the house on fucking fire? And isn't this an emergency? And how do we get people to take dramatic action, which is what Doug C. is trying to get us to do forever, by gently walking into a situation which is a piece of the argument. The other piece is that sometimes some of these people actually will only listen to people who have balls and bluster and tell a crazy ass story. And some of the stories that are floating that are belief systems now are that Democrats drink the blood of young people as a fountain of youth and a whole bunch of other kinds of things. They're seriously crazy ass stories that QAnon propagates because they work. And once you're in a cult like that, we've had a couple of little conversations about sort of what happens to cults and culty programming. Like when predictions, when cult predictions don't happen, the cults double down. The people don't leave cults easily. So I'm afraid that by talking about all these things, I'm just realizing how crazy the situation is and how difficult it is to actually break free. Because we can try to approach people by saying, hey, your feet are wet on the dock. Could that lead to something? And that might open the conversation. It might also be that we're showing up with the wrong story and it's not crazy enough or the deliverer of the story isn't manic or ballsy enough or I don't know what. I'm just concerned that we're spinning madly in like in a Mexican standoff. It's like a knife fight in an elevator. That's what Congress feels like right now. And we have a lot of things we could do together very nicely that wouldn't bring about crisis that would actually fix things that would like improve communities and settle in the climate and other kinds of things. There's plenty of work to do. It'd be happy work. It would create full employment, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm frustrated because I wish I understood better which method will have the most results to be really like best results for the most people kind of thing. Judy then Pete, utilitarian I think is the right word. All right, I had to unmute. I think, I guess I'm intrigued by the conversation today that's really around in my mind how to get people to openly think and converse with each other, share opinions and intake changes that they may be insensitive to or not wanting to cope with. And I think that would be worth the discussion separately as a topic. It's around sort of communication, understanding and influence or something like that because I find that a lot of people aren't interested in facts at all and they're influenced most by what the people they respect think. And so that's a social dynamic that we can learn to use but it bothers me that people aren't wanting to do the homework of thinking about stuff or aren't accustomed to doing that. I don't know that they don't want to but it has a lot to do with how we intake information. And I think this is a pretty rich area that would probably be of broad interest and worth some deeper diving. Thanks Judy, I agree. Thanks Judy. Well, my thanks to all of you because you're all people who read, learn, think, listen and share. Thanks for your time. Jay, I wanted to pick up where you were talking about humans in the past, learning to predict and surviving thereby, the fish are going around this time or the kangaroos like these kinds of plants or whatever. And I want to do a bit of a thought experiment around that. So one of the interesting things about, and obviously I think a lot of our ancestors survived that way. So theoretically we humans have the ability to not only like observe over the course of years and then learn to predict things and then learn to transmit those predictions down through time in stories or grandma says, whatever, however that happens. I guess I have a bit of a, I'm trying not to say contrarian. I have a bit of a, one of the things I like to do is like, what if it was different? What if the story was different? So if I'm thinking back to how humans survived over the past 100,000 years, one story is that, well, we got better and better in predicting the future, learning what animals were where, when, things like that. A different story I could tell in a contrarian way. And maybe this is true and maybe it's not. Maybe the truth is actually someplace in the middle. A different story is what if humans are really good at coming up with crazy-ass theories about things and sticking to them like glue. So in this scenario, what happened over the past 100,000 years is out of 10 or 20 or 100 tribal groups in Africa, large family groups, tribal groups, 80% of them died out because what happened was humans were really good at coming up with crazy-ass predictions and transmitting them to their offspring. And in most cases, they were stupid, right? I predict that there's going to be a herd of wildebeest coming through here every year for the next 1,000 years or something like that. And next year, no wildebeest, the year after that, it is my crazy-ass theory. And so these people who were gathered around whatever natural phenomenon that was predicted by the shamans end up starving to death and that branch dies out. I think I could make a pretty convincing argument that this evolutionary strategy of exploring a lot of spaces and having most of those die horrible deaths because they starve to death or because they're in the wrong place when there is a wildebeest stampede and they all get run over or something like that, maybe humanity survived because of its ability to diversify and have cults that mostly died. So I think this is kind of like looking at his name right now. I'm looking at his name right now. There's the survivorship bias guy, Waldman, I think, is like, the reason that we think these things happened is because these are the ones that are survived, what we're not looking at is all the ones that didn't survive. So just a kind of a different way to think about why we see the behavior that we do now, maybe this is evolutionarily really appropriate behavior, even though it's maddlingly frustrating when we've gotten to the point where we can use our computers and math and stuff like that to actually and a lot of scientific process to kind of winnow out the things that are crazy and the things that aren't. Maybe that's not the way humanity survived and maybe a big part of our challenge now is learning how to cope with the ability for humans to believe crazy stuff. Can I accommodate your theory to my theory a little bit and see if you agree? Yes, I love the thesis from Dawn of Everything that we've tried a whole bunch of experiments all over the place. That makes complete sense. It's great and it beats the narratives of life was nasty, brutish and short and then we invented civilization. So I'm completely on board with that. And a lot of tribes created like Darwin Award winners and basically extincted themselves by being stupid and doing stupid stuff, including embedding really stupid ideas like female general mutilation into the culture which they replicated over and over and over and forced people to do and became so embedded in the culture you couldn't be in the culture unless you participated in stupid behavior. But a bunch of communities figured stuff out and what they figured out was derived wisdom indigenous wisdom, whatever you want to call it and they passed that down through songlines, through stories, through narratives, through weaving, through whatever it was they passed a cultural narrative to the next generation. And that stuff included a whole bunch of predictions and usefulness and if you go into the forest and you see a plant that looks like this it's really good for headaches or whatever, right? All of that stuff was what they figured out and I call this hard one wisdom. So I put a link in the chat to my brain on hard one wisdom. And I think that's not incommensurate. I think that those things fit together really well. It's like being stupid about how the world works is what helps you extinct yourself more quickly but when you figure stuff out, that helps you predict. No? Yeah, makes perfect sense and they accommodate well together. The point I was trying to make was that I think we get frustrated, we who think we know everything get frustrated when we see people who stick to beliefs because some masterful Shaman told them that rather than believing their own eyes even, they'll believe a masterful Shaman over the evidence of their own family or their own lived experience. So I think those of us who think we know everything look at people who are believing crazy stuff like they're stupid or like all we have to do is tell them a little bit better. What if humans survived as well as we had because one of our core strengths is telling each other crazy stories and believing them? What if that's so deeply ingrained in us that you don't get rid of it by telling better stories or by, you know, and so, you know, right now 80% of the mortal population maybe is on the path of, you know, certain destruction, you know, maybe that has happened before and that's the way it works, you know, and what I don't know what we do, you know those of us who think we know everything I don't know what we do in that case but it's, it may be an extreme evolutionary advantage that we have to believe bullshit. I have two survivorship stories I wanted to relate real quick. One of them is where I live in California and probably where everybody lives but where I live in California there's this plant called Poison Oak and if you wander around in nature long enough you'll traipse through a patch of Poison Oak and many of us European descendants get these nasty terrible rashes that would kill you if you didn't have like good medical care. And, you know, and then there's stories from hundreds of years ago where the native folk here use the same plants, they use the nice strong sims to make baskets and, you know, stuff like that. And I kind of put those two things together, you know I was like, I think probably the first people who ever came here, you know, 20 or 30% of them had nasty allergies to Uesheral and died, you know. So the immunity that the native people have to Poison Oak is a hard one thing and it wasn't one by, you know, indigenous wisdom even it was a bunch of people died who were, you know not immune to it. The other survivorship story I find really fascinating is at some point in the last few hundred years people realized that in South America there was this thing called maize growing corn and it was, you know, bountiful easily multiplying crop and it had lots of like lots of calories. So they imported this corn maize over to Italy and people started eating it and the poor people started eating mostly corn and then they started dying from niacin deficiency because if you don't do some really tricky like unobvious things when you're preparing corn you don't get the vitamin B2 out of it. And so you go back to South America and it turns out that the native people there had learned over time that, you know you have to grind it up and then you have to soak in a certain, you know certain chemicals for a while and stuff like that and cook it a certain way and then you get enough nutrition out of it to survive. And this again, it's like this, you know partly it's indigenous wisdom partly it's the families that did, you know grandma had this weird way of making corn and I don't know why she did it but she said, you have to do it this way. The families who didn't have that familiar tradition of preparing corn in a certain way got weaker and died. You know, so a lot of our wisdom I think is actually genetically won as well as intellectually won. Klaus and Julien, thank you for your patience. Go ahead Klaus. Yeah, along the same vein. The Arab cultures were leading in math and science for quite a while, very accomplished until Prophet Muhammad declared a math calculating math witchcraft which ended that entire era. So it's just one story like this wiped out, you know an entire civilization's progress. But what I wanted to throw in here is I've been working for maybe like seven years or so now with lobbying organizations, you know different ones, Sierra Club, CCL and so on and went to Washington several times and local and talked with legislators and what have you and I mean, I must say it's just shocking you know, the amount of ignorance and lack of even basic comprehension of science and the shocking lack of acceptance of what is scientific knowledge, manipulating it instead and at this time we are so at risk, you know of having literally trillions, billions, trillions of dollars allocated to run this economy to the wrong direction and really finish it off. It's just spectacular. And the average citizen is just not aware of it. I mean, you just don't think about that people who are making decisions for all of us are basically very ignorant, you know in and not just that they're ignorant they are they are willfully ignorant, you know about rejecting what should be best available course and so on and so on. So I keep saying engage, you know it's you can't ignore this and I know it's like, you know most people's eyes glaze over and you say you should call your representative you should be known to your senator you should be a voice out there but boys it's our collective future it depends on it, you know you would be amazed some of the conversations that are fat, you know it's just stunning and so, you know sorry it's just more bad news here, I'm sorry. That's all right Klaus, we're sympathetic. Three quick comments, one from Pete I've done extensive research on poison oaks and some one of those people you talked about and I found out that it's very easily neutralized so it could be that the natives discovered the neutralization process instead of killing themselves off. Second is along the themes of natural selection what Klaus was just saying is that thanks to modern technology those people who were too stupid to survive by themselves back in the past nowadays with things like bombs and pollution and all that stuff when they're too stupid to survive by themselves they take out the next 10 valleys with them or maybe even the next 100 valleys so this is a different circumstance than we faced a million years ago and then third the thing about traditions there's the old joke about somebody who was preparing a roast and cut off the last three inches of the roast before putting them in the oven does everybody know that joke? Yeah, okay. And that's on the theme of passing knowledge along. And some wisdom is encoded really weird and in strange ways in the book Perfect Order about Bali the writer talks about how the Green Revolution came to Bali almost killed off not only rice farming on Bali but the reefs offshore because fertilizer and crap came out and good blooms and all that they sent an anthropologist who figured out that the thousand year old rituals that were being performed in the water temples in the Subox which are the little districts that were managing water coming off the mountain incorporated algorithms for how whose fields should lie fallow when how much water each farmer should get, et cetera, et cetera but they were encoded in ritual and it took them a while to figure out that this was hard won wisdom that was baked into arcane process that had to be decoded, I guess and that's my best memory of the story. We have run over time, Ken is luckily still here and I'm willing to bet he has a lovely poem for us again today and I'm going to see if he would like to step in and do that. I do and I will but I need to know from Julian how do you neutralize poison oak? This is an important question since I live in Marin County. All right, I was just typing it in erushial is acidic so it's neutralized with a base easiest way to find a base these days is a soap not the chemistry lab stuff like dove or iris ring, but a soap that's just simple soap like lie lie, well, yeah, although that's pretty extreme and you only get about two hours before the erushial gets under your skin and then you're stuck, so. All right, thank you. Good to know. And I have field tested this a few times, so. So I, this poem has come to mind several times this week so I thought I read it today. It's a roomy poem. It's called the snake catcher and the frozen snake. Listen to this and hear the mystery inside. A snake catcher went into the mountains to find a snake. He wanted a friendly pet and one that would amaze audiences but he was looking for a reptile something that has no knowledge of friendship. It was winter. In the deep snow he saw a frighteningly large dead snake. He was afraid to touch it, but he did. In fact, he dragged the thing back to Baghdad hoping people would pay to see it. This is how foolish we've become. A human being as a mountain range. Snakes are fascinated by us. Yet we sell ourselves to look at a dead snake. We are like a beautiful satin used to patch burlap. Come, see the dragon I killed and hear the adventures. That's what he announced and a large crowd came but the dragon was not dead, just dormant. He set up show at the crossroads. A ring of gawking rubes got thicker and thicker. Everybody on tiptoe, men, women, noble peasant all packed together unconscious of their differences. It was like the resurrection. He began to unwind the thick ropes and remove the cloth coverings. He'd wrapped it so well in some little movement. The hot Iraqi sun had woken the terrible life. The people nearest started screaming panic. The dragon tore easily and hungry hoose killing many instantly. The snake catcher stood there frozen. What have I brought out of the mountains? The snake braced against a post and crushed the man and consumed him. The snake is your animal soul. When you bring it into the hot air of your wanting energy warmed by that and the prospect of power and wealth it does massive damage. Leave it in the snow mountains. Don't expect to oppose it with quietness and sweetness and wishing. The nafs don't respond to those. They can't be killed. It takes a Moses to deal with such a beast and to lead it back and make it lie down in the snow. But there was no Moses then. Hundreds of thousands died. And thank you. Can you share a link to that either in the chat or later on? Yeah, I'll signify. It's from this wonderful book by Robert Boyd, edited by Robert Boyd called The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy, which has poems from Mirabai and Kamiir and Rumi, Israelis himself and Machado and Hopkins and Dickinson. It's a terrific anthology, sacred poems from many cultures. If you like poetry, it longs on your shelf. Love that. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you all. This was fun. I'm tentatively booking next Thursday for a call to share our best wisdom on narratives, storytelling, et cetera, et cetera. So let's go for that as a topic and we can do a little homework between now and then. And otherwise, nice to see everybody. When are we gonna get back to music? That was an awesome call. Music was good. So maybe we do music after that. And if you've upgraded to Sonoma, you get a bunch of automatic gestures in video, which are kind of cool. You upgraded to a point zero. I always wait for point one. It's working. It's working. Thank you all. Carl, thanks for recommending pinning Ken while he was reading that was a good idea. I will try to remember that. John, good to see you stationary. Enjoy your meal. Thank you everybody. Bye. Bye everybody.