 This is the OGM weekly check-in call on Thursday, January 6th, 2022. I'm not accustomed to 2022 yet by any means. Like, I'm not sure I ever thought I'd be alive in a year called 2022. So it's slowly sinking in that we're doing that. It's down scientifically. Totally. And I had to, I had to write it down on a sheet of paper recently because I date my notes pages. And it was like, you know, one, two, two, two. And I'm like, wait, that's crazy. So it does seem like science fiction. I remember this song in the year 2525, if man is still alive. That was what I grew up with that song. We're not that far away from not being alive too. Okay. Nice to see you. I'm on my annual review and plan. Time. Excellent. And do you do isolate yourself for this or what, what's your, what's your custom? I usually go somewhere near the sea. Yeah, I don't isolate myself. I don't take the time to think about to review my last year and to set up goals for next year and the whole thing. That sounds like a great habit. Like, I don't do that. I don't, I don't actually make time every year to plan, which is dumb, but I don't actually pick a special spot where I would like to do that, which sounds even better. This gets me out of my daily routine. And this year actually accomplished a lot less usually I'm somewhere on 80% of what I thought I would accomplish and this year sort of more on 60%. But there are a lot of surprises too. So a lot of bonuses. Yeah, I love that. Would you like to just check in as part of, since you've got, since you sort of started talking about stuff. Sorry, Gil, what was that? I was saying that wasn't just a hello that was 50%. Oh, 50%. Nice. That's a good place to start. Yeah, it's one of the things that I do over here. Um, and I should be in my view magic moments. So it's not just my accomplishments, but I look back at it every week, but if I'm, you know, not, I look back to my calendar and all of my photographs from the year. And maybe some emails and texts and I look at where the magic moments. And that's really, you know, to remind myself, and this seems like an incredibly packed year. There's things that I did this year that seemed like it was three years ago just feels like I got so much in this year. And so many different experiences and I didn't travel quite a bit this year, which is surprising on the continent. I don't really travel by air anymore. But, um, yeah, I just, it was, it's really satisfying to see all the areas of my life coming together. And I also, so I have basically when I do the review review more than the planning that I have three sheets one is a compare what I said I would accomplish to what I did accomplish. And I give it a kind of a percentage. And I break it down to four to five. It's pretty like five years in my professional life and five years in my personal life. And then the sheet of the magic moments. And then the sheet of the gaps, like, where do I feel like there was really a big gap. And there really was only, there were only two places where I felt there was a gap. And one of them was big, but one of them was very small. So it's just been amazing. And then one of the things that I felt like I didn't do enough of last year was sort of outreach, getting my name out there, but not so much my name, but really the ideas so that people can, you know, find the ideas like, you know, mind viruses. And, and only this year I've had three opportunities to speak to the press and, you know, we're only on the sixth. So it just feels like, yeah, things are coming together it feels really comfortable. People are signing up for my workshop. And I'm really not doing a lot it's just being a clearing for something. And just being near the sea and down here. It's funny trying to find a restaurant is, you know, difficult because all of the places you're going to see it were about two hours from the mountains from the Alps. So this time everybody goes the Alps including the people who own the shops near the seaside. The seaside resorts are on vacation there. They're not expecting anybody around. Which is, that's why I chose it. It's always the week after school starts. So which sea are you at? I'm at the Adriatic Sea. It's a little peninsula out into the, it's just beautiful. It's like, it's wonderful. Is this a repeat visit to the same place or do you pick a different place to go every time? I usually pick a different place and I actually haven't been here for my retreat. But it is one of my favorite places in the country to go. Sounds great. Sounds great except for the finding food part. The food restaurants are absolutely excellent. So the depth of choices has not affected the quality of the choices. That's awesome. Thank you. Let's go John Gil Doug. There you go. Go ahead, John. Sorry. I'm just trying to pull things together here before the start. So what we're talking about the year. We're just checking in. So you don't need to. Yeah, whatever you'd like. It's just our normal check in rhythm. You don't need to do it. If you feel like doing year in review, that sounds good too, but whatever you'd like. Not quite up to doing year in review. Something that's a little more recent, but not just since last meeting. It's something that's been building and it's been in our discussions too. We've all talked about how. You know, we've talked about tribalism and I hesitate to use that word because it has long bad connotations. But I've been thinking of it more and more in a good way that several people have referred to this angle. Doug has referred to it a lot about tribalism. So. The people that we disagree with sharply. They are getting something by disagreeing with us beyond the disagreement. They're getting a sense of membership, a sense of connection to other people who have some level of it, maybe entirely symbolic. We might even, you know, we could, we could get cynical and say that they're being mutually exploitative, but let's not go there. Let's just, let's just reflect on the fact that somehow there's some connection that's working. There's something that's saying, hey, you, you're not alone. Not in that absolute sense of, you know, if you felt you were, you might commit suicide, but in that much more accessible sense that, you know, there are people who care enough about you. And what your, what's going on with you to participate in that. And perhaps to as a strategy for us, I'm going to just say us, you know, I mean, I think we're all in the ballpark. It's about a set of issues that there's another group of people who are completely set off by those issues. I have an anti-vaxxer, not, not an anti-vaxxer. I have a, I have a non-vaxxer, a concerned non-vaxxer in my family. She's connected to a larger community of, this runs the whole continuum from, you know, it's, I'm not against the fact, but I just don't like the fact that I'm forced to take it. And I don't like the fact that blah, blah, blah, and I'm not concerned and people get sick and you don't get to say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, you know, you don't get to do that, that that's that, that level of concern has been delegitimated. And one of the interesting people who's sounding that kind of a note is Charles Eisenstadt, who, you know, it's got a lot of, there's a lot of reasons to listen to Charles and to listen to what he's saying about a lot of things, you know, going all the way back to, even before Occupy Wall Street, where he was saying, you know, do you know Eisenstadt or Eisenstein? Eisenstein, you're right. Eisenstein. Yeah. You know, he said, if you were in the 1%, you'd be doing the same thing. And he didn't mean it cynically. He meant, he meant it compassionately. He said, hey, you know, understand, understand what those people are doing and why they're doing it in a compassionate way. So that has really been coming clear and clear to me more recently. And it's going to reorient my thinking and my strategy somewhat. I mean, I'm still a journeyman when it comes to things like how to facilitate meetings. People like Ken, who have been doing greater work and greater recent experience in that under combat conditions. But I'm still very focused on that. But I'm now getting more focused on this question of how do we connect in some more fundamental way with the humanity of the people that we want, that we're in the same bathtub, you know, let's, we got, we're in the same bathtub. Stop complaining about the water's too hot, the water's too cold. That's not where you start. It's true. But it's not where we can start. It's not going to help to go there. Initially, we got to go to, all right. So how are you being understood and supported? And we got to open with something much more like that. If we're going to survive, we're going to survive another couple of years. So that's kind of my check in. Thank you. Yeah. It's interesting, you've touched on two really strong things that I also care about that are kind of in my brain and I was just kind of pulling them from what you were saying. One of them is a thought I'll share real quick, which is this thought that I put in some time ago, which might be a little cynical, but it's an observation, much like what you just said. Alt-right trolls feel a sense of community inside their insurgency. And there's an article, the religious hunger of the radical right. This is above, is queuing on an ARG. And I've just connected it to the thought I'm creating for this call. But the idea that being part of an insurgency is an active community, it's exciting. There's a whole bunch of other things about it that are very much about being part of a tribe and belonging and feeling like your actions in life are worthwhile and a full series of things like that. And then separately, I think Grace many calls ago sort of slowed us down and said, hey, like there's real reasons to take a look at how this is being applied and the cycle. And I'm totally going to reframe what you had said, Grace, and sort of what we're thinking here. But there's reasons to reframe how we're thinking about the process of getting people to have a vaccine. And it should include skepticism about government and skepticism about big pharma and a bunch of other things like that in the conversation and so forth. And I'm really interested in the psychology of change and how people, so how people are brought along for change and how all this stuff happens. And I'm interested in anybody else's reflections on the psychology of change. Like there's a famous mayor of Bogota. I think it was Bogota named Antonas Mocus who hired mimes to basically hang out. They had a lot of accidents where people were getting run over on the streets. So they hired mimes to basically draw attention and slightly publicly shame through a little bit of ridicule. People who are doing stupid, crazy things in the street, J walkers, et cetera. And I'm kind of a fan of J walking because if you know the history of J walking, there's, there was an attempt to move people to the intersection so that they would obey so that car traffic could be like more properly released. But still, you know, when people are dying, can you do something that's humorous to shift behaviors? Right. And then J walking is less, well, J walking still kills people and so forth. But anybody, anybody sort of on tribalism, change any of those kind of notes? Stewart, go ahead. Yeah, well, it's got to do with identity, which is such a big piece. I mean, in the world of conflict resolution, people become identified with the cause and to give up a cause of some kind. Whether it's related to tribalism or some, some individual stance. It's almost like a near death experience. It's like, it's, it's like you're, you're asking people to give up their life force. It becomes kind of a life force for them. So that's, that's, you know, what pops up in, in, in my mind. And change happens. I think from, from, you know, an organizational perspective, I think we're given the opportunity to have real conversations about what they're feeling and what their experience is at kind of an intimate level, not, not, you know, when you make them the, the enemy. So that's what, what needs to happen is whole notion of, you know, of, of, of being able to have thoughtful conversations about what people's individual and personal experiences, only from that place will people even think about taking a different stance. Well, that Wendy, and then I'd love, Grace, if you would explain a little bit, what Edgar Goris are to us. Go ahead, Wendy. Oh my gosh, this is such a huge, such a huge topic. From my perspective, it, and I think what I can share that would be the most useful is has really a lot to do with neural psychology, right. And how we've learned so much in the last 20 years about our neuroplasticity and how to create new habits. And I think when it, where it, that intersects with the tribalism piece is why are we, it poses a question of why are we changing? Are we changing because we're trying to avoid something, or are we changing because we're going to something. And I think it's much more compelling to talk about how we're encouraging people to change because they're, they're moving towards something good rather than away from something, right? Because the tribalism, a lot of that is, is, is based in fear and needing to, needing to flock to another group of people that help us feel safe. There's a lot of science and research around that kind of piece too, how people not just, it's not just fight or flee. It's also flocking to other people. How can we get out of the fear based sort of mindset and move towards more of a, of a, of a community based mindset, a listening based mindset, right? And so the science around that has much more to do with recognizing that connection really forms a foundation for positive learning and positive change, right? And that you, you, you put that together with our brain to learn best the concepts from flow and things like that, where brains learn best when we're focused on something and we're at the edge of our learning, right? And we're enjoying what we're doing. So then gamification comes in the, in the equation here where we're reinforcing positive behaviors in ways that are not manipulative, but rather speak to people's passions and their joys and the where they want to go. And the natural inclination we all have when we're not afraid and we're not defensive to want to do what's better for everyone else as long as I'm also being served and I'm not being triggered by, right? So so many concepts in here. And I think oftentimes we are stuck kind of in our old paradigms of how do we fix what's bad instead of asking how do we create an environment that promotes these good, good elements of change. And I think that just even that shift in questioning and that shift of perspective could add a lot to finding the right solutions to get us out of this, right? So if you go, how can I force this person to believe what I believe is a very different kind of question than how can I guide people to do what's best for them and everybody else at the same time? Love that. Thanks, Wendy. Grace, a word about. Griggers or however it's pronounced. So yeah, I had just heard this concept this week. The film that I posted, it's just absolutely mind blowing. So the concept of something like this. That one of these reasons that in many cases you can say if you believe this, you believe that, right? Like if you're an anti-vaxxer and then you also voted for Trump, like what's the connection? This doesn't make any sense. And so this guy's been studying these things. And he says, okay, it sounds a little like conspiracy theory. But this idea of a good words is that we're actually cells of some worker being like a hive mind. You could call it like there's a hive mind, right? And then we're an element of that hive mind and that hive mind is trying to survive. It's not actually terribly different than saying that an organization doesn't change because the organization has created the culture, right? But this hive mind thing, if we're part of this egg reward or hive mind, we, my definition couldn't conceptualize it because it's like, you know, it's not like our liver is conscious that it's part of me. It's just operating as my liver. So if we are elements of this hive mind egg reward thing, then, and the egg reward is trying to survive, then as it shifts, we shift. And so if you, you know, you know, we're aware of January 6, right? If you storm the capital and then that all didn't work out, all of a sudden you've got some completely different opinion about it. Like if you ask the people who did that, you know, like what happened to change or whatever, that whole hive moved together toward some other explanation of things. And so that's the idea of this egg reward that you're, when you're in it, whatever egg reward you're in, that egg reward is up, you know, it's pumping you. And that's why you end up with these, you know, so, so from our perspective, we can talk about a sense of belonging, et cetera, et cetera. But from the perspective of the entity that we may or may not belong to, which we could never comprehend by definition, we're not free agents. So that was just conceptually really interesting. And yeah, and it explains a lot of things. And some of it's very kind of comforting, like, oh, I have to realize that if I'm trying to change some of his opinion, I'm uprooting them from there, you know, like whatever it is from there, from their garden bed and putting, trying to replant them in a new garden bed. And that's not a simple thing to do. Is there, are there similarities or really differences with Rana Gutt's notion of the Karas? Okay, so, so in Kat's cradle, he proposes a religion called Bokanism. And then he says that there are Karas's and Grand Faluns. And Karas's are the group you belong to, even though there's no identifying mark, you may not know what it is. And whoever knows, whoever remembers more about this, correct me in how I'm telling this. But your Karas is kind of your posse, your tribe, your whatever, but it may not be very explicit. And then a Grand Falun is a false Karas. It's basically a misleading kind of group, a group formation that turns negative. So anybody, anybody remember their Vonnegut better than me? And apparently not. That's pretty close. Cool. Thanks, Gil. Another notion. And I don't know if this appeared in the same place in, in Vonnegut, but there's that notion of, if there were only 12 middle names, obviously, you know, you know, reflection of the 12 tribes, but it says there are only 12 middle names and you had to have one of those. And then you could arrive in a town as a stranger, and you could go to the phone book and you'd say, well, here's the people who I have some connection with, even though we never met and I don't, we don't really know each other. And it was, I think it was both tongue in cheek as in, he knew that wouldn't be enough. And at the same time he wanted to suggest, well, why isn't that enough? You know, like, you know, something in that direction, something in that direction is needed and might be a good idea. It's quite similar to why the dietary laws for Jews work. So I gotta find the butcher in this town, because otherwise I can't eat because I have these dietary laws. Super interesting. Thank you. Stuart, go ahead, you're muted though. I just wanted to add that kind of common or, or, you know, push, pull or dichotomy here that, you know, are the only constants in the universe is change. And yet we as individual human beings resist change like, like it was a plague, which it just, you know, might be. So, you know, that's why that's why I think it takes a certain level of delicacy to get people to, to move and change and do things differently. It's interesting. Oh, good. It's important to resist change though. Unless it's not ever drive a car without shock absorbers. I've been in a car with really crappy shock absorbers. That's for sure. Yeah. Right. And look, the whole, the whole process of this thing is homeostasis. You know, this, this is designed to maintain itself within certain ranges of chemistry behavior and so forth. It's designed to maintain long term stability. You can't have too much change too fast. Or you die. You can't have not enough change in the face of changing conditions or you die. Yeah, I didn't say it was a bad, I didn't say it was a bad thing. Gil, I just said that's the, you know, the interesting push, pull about the phenomenons that we're talking about. And yet you could argue that constant changes always happening inside you know, chemical processes and other things that also if we're not happening would the body would die. That's right. And also, I just, I just, from this conversation, I'm connecting to two different thoughts in my brain. One of them is resistance to change, which we just brought up. But the other one is that people are incredibly adaptable. We are constantly changing in the face of something in convenience, something in our way, the lack of something, whatever. And we're like, okay, I'll just modify. We do considerable change constantly around the world. And then we take for granted the resulting setup. And we don't, we don't actively go back and necessarily correct it when the pressure goes away, things like that, which kind of adapt a lot. And one of the problems with humanity is that sometimes we adapt a lot to situations that are actually quite toxic and dangerous and difficult. And instead of going back and fixing them and paying attention, we're like, well, I guess this is the new normal. I think that that's a piece of the dynamic as well. Doug, then Julian. Yeah. One of the things about the people on the right, or the anti-vexers, that whole collection is not just their tribalism, which is real. But the fact that they also have an analysis of what's going on, which we don't pay enough attention to. The sense in which they feel like the life they thought they had is coming apart is deep and real because it is. And so we have to pay attention to the belief systems as well as to the tribalism. Agreed. Totally. Thanks, Doug. I lead through that directly into my check-in. Would that be all right? Let me, let me, let me get Julian into this, this piece of the conversation, then we'll go back to you for, then we'll go back to Gil for checking. Just to comment, Doug, what you described it about the tribalism of those folks applies to us too. Of course. Same game. Cool. Julian. With respect to change, I was going to bring up the parable about the frog in the pot of boiling water. In other words, change happens whether or not humans like it. And the other thing is I still want to know what happens about driving a car without shock absorbers. It's hard to roll. So by the way, Jim Fallows wrote a piece, debunking the boiling frog myth, which is quite fun. But there's a whole, let me just do a quick screen share. There's a whole back and forth about the boiling the frog. And then, and then there's a series of articles in the Atlantic piece on the boiled frog front, the boiled frog myth. Hey, really knock it off. The world frog myth. Stop the lying now. And then somebody, I think this is Steve. Yeah. Oh, this is Brad DeLong and which James Fallows is a frog stepping on a global warming water. And he's carrying a hockey stick, et cetera. So there's a kind of a cute dead end over there. You know, if we substitute human for frog, it would still, it would actually be true because you think about humans who are missing that change is going on very, very gradually and suddenly 10 years later, they realize, Hey, when did this happen? So I think by deduction, you're saying that frogs are way smarter than humans. They're way smarter than me. So that's good. I think we're saying that some stories are true, even if they're not true. Love that. So back to our check and round. Let's go. Gildug Wendy. Golly. So many things here. So the hundredth monkey story too takes the same beating. If you, if you dig into the science behind it, but it's useful story. Golly. I post, I think the group yesterday called an inconvenient truce, which is worth reading around this process of tribalism and changes from a site called epsilon theory, which is ostensibly an investment site, but really is probing a lot of the kind of questions we're interested in. And it basically uses the metaphor of medieval fortifications to unpack the games of critical race theory, COVID and the insurrection and tribalism. And, and, and a phrase that echoes through the article is they want us to fight. It basically asserts that we as human populations are a lot less far apart on most things than we think we are, but the game is designed to polarize us. And it's a, it's a fascinating article. It starts with the story of the Christmas truce from 1914, which I think most people are familiar with. And it says notably that wasn't the only time that happened. It happened in 1915 and 1916 and in many places in many wars around the world, but the generals really don't like this. So they suppressed the stories, number one. And number two, often designed military initiatives and bombardments and so forth around Christmas Eve so that their soldiers wouldn't have the opportunity to see the humanity on the other side. And it goes from there into the orchestration of polarization around these critical issues. He doesn't do climate, but you can construct a similar story around that. So I would encourage people to have a look at that. I'm still digesting it, but found it really, really rich. And the metaphor is that there was some, in medieval fortifications, there was the model and the Bailey. There was the fortification and there was the town outside the fortification. And so you could do a stage withdrawal in the face of conflict. And the analogy that this Russ, what his name is saying is that the game around things like anti-vax is put on a really extreme position. And then when people jump on you for the extreme position back up to the more reasonable position, which is like we have concerns about vaccine safety, which is a fair question to ask. This is a rapidly introduced thing. And then the strange attractor, that's maybe one of the most powerful things that we have to play with here. So number one, we're doing check-in, right? Yeah. So Grace, I appreciated what you shared. I've tried to do that every year. I did more of it this year than in previous years. I kind of get waylaid somewhere through the process. I found that lately I'm very much aware of what didn't happen, what was missing, the intended and the accomplished list and the gaps between them is very present to me. But I just did a quick review as listening to you and thought, no, actually, there's, you know, there's a lot of accomplishment that I sort of miss in the attention to the gaps. So thank you for that reminder. What that's led to for me right now is this really powerful exercise and extreme focus, realizing that if I'm going to do what I want to do in the world, I need to really narrow my game, sharpen my game, dial in the focus, much more sharply. I took a lead from, You joined the Ken Homer movement. I joined the Ken Homer movement. I don't know if Ken is boycotting OGM for January too, but I went off Facebook a few days ago. And this week has been hugely more productive than any week in recent memory. And I miss people. I'm doing, you know, but I'm actually spending more time on LinkedIn, which is probably more professionally productive for me. But more time with me thinking and just really cranking. And what I'm mostly cranking on, I've talked about this before, but I've been, I sort of been carrying around this idea for 10 years or more. Actually, that's the idea has been carrying me around to build a new kind of investment fund, do private equity for good and to use the tools of private equity, not to buy companies and strip them of their assets and leave a smoking shell on the landscape by companies. Not to put too, to find a point on that one. Not to put a point, but to buy companies focusing on the silver tsunami and green the shit out of which improves their operating margins, refocus their strategy around purpose and climate and circular, bring all of the tools of, of more human and dynamic coordination from entrepreneurship to language action to open books management into helping the company operates and then exit, not by selling to a private equity firm doing an IPO, but by selling to the employees who now own the company and have been brought up to capacity to run. Have you heard the term exit to community? I have. I just got off a call with Kevin Doyle and a bunch of other folks, Kevin was here. I guess right here, Kevin. I can't see on the screen. Yeah, he's here. I kind of speeded there in the leaf litter. So there's a lot of activity in this realm. I'm wanting to marry the green and the co-op in the silver tsunami. I've got a partner who's got a successful track record running funds. We're going to do this as a two stage first fund will be a portfolio of companies that meet certain criteria. Me going through filters of energy mobility built in the environment and food and ag talk to Klaus about that later. My partner has a track record of 18% per year return for years using a financial radar to identify companies that are whose value is down and who is likely to come back up. And so our hypothesis is that if you put those two together, something very interesting happens. That'll be fund one and fund one will be the farm team for fund two, from which we can pick some of those companies to actually acquire controlling interest in as well as sourcing from other places. Kevin's been focused a lot on community economics and place-based business development strategies. This could very much tie into that, but we'll see how it goes. And I am seriously jazzed. I've got a pretty good draft first deck. I have a one page from six months ago that I haven't touched. So I'm going to go ahead and go ahead and do a little bit of review and then we'll start walking this around. What that's meant is that, yeah, Facebook is bye-bye for a while. The thoughts of building a bunch of courses is bye-bye. The thoughts of continuing consulting business is probably bye-bye for a while. I think I'm going to do fund and coaching. And not stuff that requires deliverables commitments to clients. Pretty interesting. That sounds awesome. How can we help you get those things done? Sounds great. Those of you who are interested could review the docs once I have them. Those of you who know people might want to invest, introduce me. In particular, if you know people who are refugees from Wall Street, hedge fund, private equity experience who want to do good shit with their lives. And even more particularly, if we do go into the turnaround business, which is the plan here, we're going to need really skillful experienced managers to bring into companies to help do the work. And not private equity hatchage job managers, but people who are sensitive to relationship and community and cooperative and so forth. Has anybody coined the phrase green around yet? The word green around? Can I have that? Sure. All yours. You could call it the green around fund. Yeah. We're calling it critical path to capital for now. We're going to see what we'll pick up. Cool. Thanks. Let's go. Doug Wendy Stewart. What's been on my mind this week is the idea that it's a question. Can humanity think its way out of the problem that we're in? And the problem is not only climate, but it's the oceans. It's our institutions, health, education, money, the way business operates. If you look at where we are as a society, it's the sum of many billions of little decisions that people have made over the centuries. And it's an extremely complex culture of a woven tapestry. And now that tapestry is leading to our demise. So the question is, is there any way that thought could be integrated in such a way across the globe that it would be adequate to dealing with the situation that we're in? So it's really saying to my surprise that thinking about thought might be one of the most important things to do. Can you repeat that last part? Yes, Tom. Thinking about thought is one of the most important things we can do. Could you go a little deeper on that, Doug? Well, I don't know if I can. It's so striking that we have people saying things like, let's think of how to do better without realizing that probably to get to better things have to fall apart some first, which means huge social costs and confusion and the need for new forms of welfare. But people aren't thinking through that way. Most people who are thinking are thinking in silos still. They're thinking, how do you change society without things changing? They want the institutions to stay pretty much the same. They're not up for giving up a living in private houses, for example, or flying in planes. So I would argue that the last electoral cycle was very much about a bunch of people saying, we need to destroy the system in order to reinvent the system and we're willing to send a fire ship into the system to do so. And that didn't have to do with, hey, we need to stop driving cars and burning fossil fuels. So remember that I said that we've got to look at the belief that the system is right. And it's true that in many ways they are more systemic than the progressives. Right. I'm on board with that. Anybody else? Cool. Let's go, Wendy Stewart, Kevin. So I've been, I enjoyed the break and really gave myself a chance to think more creatively and dive into what I want my role to be in these conversations and my work for 2022. And what's interesting is I have resisted for the last, say a year and a half and even more so as I met people building something. It has been very hard to resist building something because there's pressure to have a book or build the website or what is it that you do, right? That's kind of a common thing in our culture. And yet I feel so strongly about not creating another silo or something that then needs to be integrated in some way that I think I ended the year really getting some clarity on I think the best role that I can play is in weaving more and more. And what does that mean, right? Because we've been talking a lot about that too. So what does that mean, the weaving part? And so I started to think about what is it that we need. And we already touched on this in our conversation today about envisioning, right? And I started envisioning the positive and our whole conversation about better verse was about that too. And I started thinking more about that and discovering really in my efforts to create visual technology in a new way that can inspire. I was struck with the same conundrum of I need the thing that I want to build because to build the thing is so new and so complicated that I kind of need the thing I want to build to build the thing that I need. And that's the big thing that I've been playing with all year. So, okay, let me break that apart. So all of these threads started to speak to me in a new way of how about envisioning two things, not just one thing. Envisioning where we could potentially go if we waved a magic wand and technology was no limitation and change was easy for us. So what kind of universe would we want to live in? What does that better verse look like? Let's start throwing stuff up against a wall and seeing what sticks, right? What are the cornerstones? What are the main features without thinking about the limitations of getting to those things? And then the other envisioning is what's the next one step or two steps or three steps? So that started to manifest in my mind as, hey, wait a minute, what's the next step? What's the next step? What's the next step? What's the next step? What's the next step in the field? Researching to see what's potentially coming up for the long-term. And the other is who's actually applying some of those new concepts right now? And how is that working? How is it rippling? How is it affecting? How is it creating immediate, more immediate changes? How is it affecting? And we need a shorter term. Here are the organizations and things that are starting to do it. And I started to create a categorization framework based on, freed would be happy based on Barbara Marks Hubbard's. Wheel of co-creation, just using those sectors because they're used in so many, I know they're echoed and a lot of other frameworks as well as being a community version. Of where of the. What's the next step? What's the next step? What's the next step? We need to organize where we need to go. And who is starting to apply the concepts. So if we're talking about economics, what's the ideal version? Who's describing the ideal version of economics that we'd love to get to one day. And then who's actually trying to do that. In some way, shape or form, even if it's just a little slice or it could be the bigger part of it. We also need a personal framework. And something else is two different things as you've got the community thing framework. And then we also need a personal framework because we have our own personal journey towards things. So sometimes organizations and people are, I'm sorry, organizations and concepts are really for an individual to either further themselves or find their way in the world or find where they best. Fit or right. And sometimes it's really about an organization doing the same thing. And then it's really about a system. So I realized there was a natural split there too. So I'm starting to play with. Catalogging. Weaving. Putting down on paper. And wondering if these categories now are the right categories or not. Do things fit in? And as things fit in, it's validates for me that these are, these are decent categories to use. And I would prefer to use categories that have been well thought through by other people that have been around for a long time. And so that's kind of where I've been. On the creative side, thinking about the weaving of our sovereignty. Again, that, that personal side of the journey with the community side of the journey. I'll share with you guys the latest image that I've been messing around with. I lost track of it. Oh, I closed it. Hold on one second. Just go to history, but it's probably not. No, it's there. I just gotta. Open it up one second. Yeah, I just had to open it up again. Get back to hit the share. Button. Here we go. So I, I sat down to think about what's wisdom. How do we get there? How do we weave? And instead of doing a chart. I guess I thought I was going to do a chart. I ended up drawing a picture. And then I used a mapping software actually for fantasy or fantasy games and D&D and stuff. And my daughter had to create this image out of it. So this is the personal version of our own path. With the path in the middle being kind of what we're set with originally the beliefs, information, culture, knowledge, stories that are given to us. And then we start to wind our own version of, of wisdom, threads and, you know, inspiration in the form of the sparkles and finding out our own weavings of gems and nuggets of knowledge. And out of the darkness comes a better understanding of ourselves. So it's kind of all, all in there. And I was just, I've been playing with that. And then there's a, I'm going to work with someone to do a 3d model. To me, this was the individual person. And then kind of in a calculus fashion. And so I'm just repeating that a million times with, you know, or infinitely with a bunch of people, if you spiral this on a vertical axis, you end up with a 3d picture that looks different. And so that's kind of next for me and I'm starting to, I think that's going to end up finding its way back into an image that we can use that'll help create a vision for the future. But who knows, it was fun to make in the meantime. Well, look at it. Is the moon in chains? Those are roots. That's interesting. I read, I read, I read chains first two. And then I realized they're the roots of the tree that's above. Okay. Hmm. Yeah, yeah. But I read chains to Wendy visually. Yeah. And, and I shared it with another group recently and they, and someone else said chains to me, that was more like Celtic knots. Yeah. I can go there. Yeah. You could, you could fiddle with it a little and shift the focus a little bit. Yeah. I think if I reduce the contrast, even in the image, it would probably improve the, the, how it reads. And also on the roots, if the roots got even thinner toward the end, they wouldn't read as chains because chains are usually consistent, you know, with, et cetera. But visually it looks like they're kind of, except for the thicker trunk at the top, which is part of my, my clue. But I love the, the diagram and thank you for sharing it with us. And I posted a couple of things in the chat. One is Indra, the concept of Indra's net might be really interesting. I've sort of jewels hanging in the net and the jewels are sort of wisdom. It's a little bit like the glass bead game ish sort of, sort of idea about, about knowledge and, and, and how we share it. And then I posted also a video that I did longer ago, why I do what I do where I riff on yin and yang. Cause one of, one of the parts of my thesis is that we've been suffering from a young overdose for somewhere between 300 to 3000 years. Yeah. And that we're in an era of the rebalancing of yin and yang right now. And if we handle that with care, we actually get somewhere really good. So I love your use of yin and yang here. Yeah. And that just, that just came out. I actually don't know a ton about yin and yang, but I do know plenty of other people who've written on that. And that have talked about how we're the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. Yeah. So I used yin and yang in a speech I did for UPSLA, the object oriented programming association many, many years ago. And I think the speech is online. I'll find a link to that too. And after the speech, a young lady came up and very, very politely said, I think you meant that yin is the feminine energy and yang is the map cause I'd flip them. I was just like putting it up there. And so then I was like, Oh, I gotta read up a little bit here. But love that. Anybody else thoughts on this? Scott. Jump on in. The thing I learned most about this that was that the, the center line is actually the path. So from Dow, Dow is the path and the path is the line. So we think about it as two shapes that are together, but it's actually the line in the center where you are supposed to be. And that's where you were in balance. Because if you're following that, that line. So it's just something to think about because it's, it's the shape that isn't there. In a sense, you know, because you have these two pieces and it's like, Oh yeah, it's everybody knows the light and the dark up to down the, you know, day night, all that, but I haven't run into anyone yet. I've already knew, well, on the street and, and known that that path was there. And I didn't know that until a couple of years ago. Okay. So that's really fascinating because I didn't know that either. But you drew it. I didn't know that intellectually. But that's what I drew. Right. How fascinating. And so then if you spiral it, so you're not going to get a clean picture, but you might also, you might all be kind of interested in this now. The path becomes an infinity. And so infinite, the infinity part brings to mind for me immediately, polarity management. Are you familiar with that? Hmm. So, so you were, when you began talking, you were talking about envisioning a future that we want. And then who's doing stuff immediately now. And I was like, Oh, polarity management because polarity management says when, when you're facing a situation where things are kind of binary, this or that really often, you're just talking about opposite ends of a polarity. And you can manage polarities very creatively, by just going back and forth in an infinity loop. And so what that means is if your team is like, we have to plan for the future. No, we need to do stuff right now. You say, I'm making this up. Hey, this month, we're going to take a really long-term look. And then next month, all you people who need to get busy, we're going to come back into this part and, and do the near-term stuff. And so, and so partly this, this walk back and forth. And then I wish Neil Davidson were on this call because he's got all sorts of models that kind of build on this as well in terms of, you know, elaborating on the, on the different kinds of loops. Yeah. And last night, I, I sensed into the same thing. It just kind of came to me late at night where the infinity, I mean, I've come to this in a couple of different ways before, but, but it came with this new language that I was starting to play with of, of sensing out into the field and then applying it back, right? Which is exactly what you were saying. So, um, yeah, of that polarity. And I think the other ways I've used it before in the past are used to do parenting workshops. And so we would talk about emotions and how the, the center point, um, you're, you'd swing out and how the dynamic system of a family or a dynamic system of anyone with emotions. If you, if you, um, if your child is getting completely like unruly right before bed and you try to swing the other direction to, um, say, no, this is, it's time to go to bed. The polarity that's created there will actually encourage your child to balance it by going further into crazy. But if you get playful for a little bit, it actually kind of helps everything come back into the center. So, um, just interesting how all that stuff kind of plays in here. It's like an Aikido bedtime strategy. I love that. Um, because Aikido is all about blending energies. Um, Doug, then Sam. I just want to know the name of that software, please. Oh, the software used to draw that Wendy. Can you type that in? Can you give us a link in the chat? Perfect. Thanks. Uh, go ahead, Doug, then Simon. Uh, Doug, you muted. Thank you. Um, Yen Yang comes from, uh, Yen meaning the dark side of the hill and Yang meaning the bright side of the hill. And the idea is to use the entire landscape. So there's not a path that can be discerned through it. But the idea is to use all of it. Uh, and to feel the freedom of moving into the dark and into the light. And continually getting the synthesis, but not trying to reach out to pull out of it. A solution. Thanks, Doug. Um, Samuel. Yeah. Um, well, you know, it's funny. And now that I listed everyone, most of what I was going to say is, has been said. But you know, one, one thing, one while listening to you when you had the graphic up and you're talking about it, um, You got me thinking that like a lot of people when they see this, they apply it to themselves as like, you know, this is, I want to bring balance to myself. But usually in life where 99% or more. Involved with other people. And probably the balance ends up being a interdependency instead of like somehow. You can't like an isolation, bring balance to yourself without taking in the environmental context. And the example that you gave is the thing that you talked about with putting your kids to bed is exactly what happens to me every single night that I put my kids. And I never really even thought about the strategy that you mentioned. Um, but we just, sometimes we just try anything, just random stuff just to see if we can shake up the dynamic. Um, but anyway, it makes me, you've got me thinking that really it's like, maybe it isn't meant to be an individual improvement thing. And maybe it's meant to think, be thinking about how you can bring balance to the interdependence between people. I love that. I don't know though, really you tell me. Love that. Thank you. Um, Stuart, you were holding your hand up and you're also next in the queue. So whichever, if you'd like to jump in and. I'll jump in and, um, and check in because what, what I want to say, I think, um, speaks to all of it. Um, I wanted to punctuate what Wendy was saying. And what you veiled a Jerry, this notion of moving. The masculine to the feminine and how, how critical it is, you know, the demographic of this call is not lost on me looking around at the screen. Um, but, you know, the, the male, um, in some ways biological drive to, to, to thrust forward. Has this, you know, look at where it's got us over the last, you know, Jerry, you throughout 3000 years. I just think that's just so important to consider. And it, it, it, it reminded me of being seven guys out of a group of 37 on a, on a spiritual journey and us coming to the conclusion that we needed to be fierce in our femininity, um, fierce in our femininity. Right. Exactly. But that was, that was kind of what we came up with. And we didn't, we didn't mean grace. I see you grimacing over there. Yeah. It was the best metaphor that we could describe it. I mean, we needed to make sure that we, we, we held that value and way of being strongly. Um, I wanted a comment also, we moved along too quickly on what Doug's Doug said in his check in about thinking about thinking. Um, I think that that's just such a critical piece. Um, what is it that people are thinking? And where that took me was the notion of, um, how many people are, um, Have the capacity to really think about their own thinking. Because that's, that's in some ways what drives everything. It drives individual action. It drives communal action to be aware of what you're thinking and how that thinking results in, in, in action. Um, I did a little bit of work with Robert Keegan on adult development theory. And I think it's, it's only about 10% of the population. That is what he, he, he calls self-transforming, meaning has the capacity to actually change themselves because of reflection on their thinking. Um, I just wanted to throw those two things out about how important that is. So, um, moving into my, my, my own personal check in, I spent a week on retreat. Um, it was rather a luxurious retreat and a spawn in, in Mexico, just across the border. Uh, and, and took near to Kati. Um, and I just unplugged from, um, all media feeds and kind of let myself, you know, engage with exercise and hiking and, and that, that, that kind of stuff. Um, and that was really good. It also, you know, gave me some time to think. Um, and I continue to, um, be enthused about my large poetry collection of 365 poems. Uh, one day, uh, one home a day with reflective questions. Um, you know, model after Mark Nepo's book of awakening. Uh, I'm writing my way through, you know, how we get to where we are, to where we might like to be. And it's been an interesting progression. Um, cause I wrote this 30 page overview and, you know, outline 37 areas that need attention. Um, then I said, well, I can't possibly write this. And then I started writing it. So, uh, the writing is a little bit shorter for each chapter, but that's okay. And then I'm going to start layering, um, dialogue onto it and put characters because this is really meant to be an episodic, um, TV show at some point in time that, that, that hopefully will have value. Um, I was really moved. I'm really being moved a little bit by two things now, a book called, um, Ministry of the Future. Um, it's a wonderful piece of, of, um, science fiction and the movie don't look up, which I thought was just an extraordinary, um, Hollywood representation of how unconscious most of the leadership in the world is. And I thought that they did it in a, in a, in a wonderful way. It had mixed reviews. Um, if anybody hasn't seen it, you know, if you've seen it, I think that the reviewers that didn't like it, just didn't get the message and thought it was just, you know, a comedy. So, um, reviews of the reviewers. It's, it's striking. It's, it's, people always disagree about movies. I've rarely seen something where the disagreement was so fiercely polarized as around this, which I think is pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Gil. So that's my, that's my, that's my, my check in one, you know, uh, one, one, one step in front of another, uh, one day at a time. Um, I think that's the kind of the time span that we're in and, um, practicing a whole bunch of non-attachment. Love that. Thanks, Stuart. Uh, let's go, Kevin, Michael Julian, except Kevin just had to drop off because it's the top of the hour, I think. So that was a near miss. I should, I should have put him in the queue a little earlier. Uh, let's go Michael Julian, uh, Stacey. Uh, um, just, uh, drinking in that moment of, um, of knowing I'm next in the queue and have somebody's whole, uh, check in to, to prepare. And then suddenly having that. Um, so, um, I, I've had a, um, a really nice and reflective, um, break over the holiday. Um, and, uh, you know, some, some similar thoughts to Wendy's about, you know, about siloing, um, and trying to figure out how do we, together, um, figure out what I'm doing with what other people are doing, how to support other people in doing what they're doing. Um, and, uh, and it's interesting. I, I was just, um, DMing Gil. A lot of what I've been thinking about is, is generational in a way. I mean, silver tsunami related, um, in that I feel like so many of the mores of the digital world were, um, you know, the, the boomers. And even Gen Xers played catch up to, um, and you know, like, oh, oh, oh, I can, I can play this. I can do this. And, you know, ended up being leaders in their way, but in a game on the social media front that was defaunt, the rules of which were defined by people who were younger than them, more, uh, exhibitionist than them. Um, and, um, and the more, I don't mean to generalize about entire generations, but I think there are many, um, and there are many in this group included in this that are more, more thoughtful and introspective and, and deliberate about, um, what they want to do and, um, how they want to accomplish things even, even while wanting to work speedily, you know, doing it with, with conscience and thought and, and, um, and collaboratively and less free, freelancerally, that's, I know that's not a word. Um, and how, how to enable those people to participate and reassert and, and share their knowledge and experience and background with a lot of the, with a lot of, you know, I was, um, Deeming Gill about a friend of mine who's, who's got a background in, in private equity. Um, and there are many, you know, refugees from fields that have not been governed by the, the, the right interests and, and need a green around. Um, and, uh, how to draw on their knowledge, how to empower them, um, you know, bring them into a new kind of conversation. I mean, I think it's, it's very much what we've all been talking about without specifically talking about the, the generational aspects of it. Um, and I've been focusing that on that a lot and talking to people who are older than I am as well as, you know, constantly trying to keep up with people who are older than I am. Um, yeah, just wanted to throw that out there and, uh, I'll do it for me for now. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for checking in. Uh, let's go Julian Stacey Samuel. Uh, before I check in, I just wanted to mention that my response to something like, okay, boomer or anything like that has been, uh, boomers invented that thing in your hand. So what, what have you done? It's come back. I'm sure that, I'm sure that earns a lot of respect. Yeah. I'm an old contanker as Codger. What do I care? The, uh, my check-in is that over the holiday break, I got funding dangled in front of me. And you know, for some time I've been talking about this grand idea of, uh, changing how humans interact with technology and now with, uh, actual possibility of funding in front of me. Um, I've been spending the last few days focusing on writing it up somehow and figuring out how to properly demonstrate it to the point of, uh, giving other people to, to, uh, grok it. So that's my check-in. That sounds awesome. Godspeed on that. Um, uh, Stacey Samuel. So I was going to use my check-in to share a poem. That really meant a lot to me. And at first I was a little nervous because I didn't know how it would land for people here. But as a carrier of hope, I want you to know that there are a lot of people that this poem resonates with. So it's cool. I'm going to have to get it. Cause now this chat just covered where I had it set up. Bad chat. It's called for a new beginning. In out of the way places of the heart. Where your thoughts never think to wander. This beginning has been quietly forming. Waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire. Feeling the emptiness growing inside you. Noticing how you willed yourself on. Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety. And the gray promises that sameness whispered. The waves of turmoil rise and relent. Wondered, would you always live like this? Then the delight when your courage kindled. And out of you stepped onto new ground. Your eyes young again with energy and dream. A path of plentitude opening before you. Though your destination is not yet clear. You can trust the promise of this opening. Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning. That is at one with your life's desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure. Hold nothing back. Learn to find ease in risk. Soon you will be home in a new rhythm. For your soul senses the world that awaits you. And that's from John Donnie. And I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you, Stacy. That's great. And somehow timely and really good for the start of the year and the end of the year and. All of those kinds of things. Samuel Scott, Mark. Hey everyone. Happy new year to everyone. Yeah, I've been, I've been going through a lot of changes over the last two or three weeks. Finishing my positions with a lot of. The projects that I was working on. So I'd started a new business in December. And then I started a new business. That's pretty much the same business I had, but with a different name and doing some different stuff. And I'm just really in the time of massive change here. And then mostly, frankly. Keeping my head down doing tons and tons of work and learning. I do a combination of software engineering and research. And I'm still doing the domain of things. Like if I'm have to understand the economics of things or complex system science or whatever. You know, when I work with people. The work that I do. Does involve software. And data analysis, but it also involves modeling and understanding what they're doing. And so I'm, I've been very active doing that. And I still anticipate throughout 2022 being deeply involved. And I'm still working on, I'm still working on, I'm still working on regionalizing food systems. And attracting investment to. Recreating local and regional food systems. In the Midwest area that I live in. So that's. That's my update. It's kind of a generic one, but that's, that's what I'm involved in. And. But I'm shifting from working with the not for profit to working with some people that are actually going to be doing the work in aquaponics and so on. And once I get underway, I'll, if I, when I rejoin you all, I can try to give more information on that. Anyway, that's me. Thanks, Sam. That sounds great. That sounds super interesting. And some days we're doing what we do. And, and, and, you know, it sounds like it sounds like you're immersed in stuff that you care about a lot that, you know, is, you know, you're not going to have to work with other people. You're not going to have to work with other people, not just your soul. If you feed your brain, all those kinds of things. So can ask for more. Can, can I just throw out to. For anyone else did that remind, did Samuels check in, remind you of Klaus and his work too. So if you guys don't know each other, you would, it would probably be really rich for you guys to connect with each other. Jones, I have communicated with Klaus behind the scenes, and I have a standing offer to him to do that kind of work. And he was very interested in it but he's been the process building up the ability to be ready to do that to do the work that I do. So, but yes, I would love to help Klaus map and model and be able to, you know, kind of make the investment in business cases for the, for everything he shared. That's pretty much exactly what I've been doing over the past two years so it would, it would be a good fit you're totally. But we did happen to talk with them behind the scenes about that. And so once once he's ready I'll, you know, definitely be glad to help him do that. Yeah, good point, Randy, thank you. Yeah, I mean I think sometimes sometimes I just one other thought sometimes it's important to continue to weave the people who are so busy doing what they're doing that they forget that there's someone else who can help them out right and they. And we tend to have a, oh my gosh, I have to do everything and so lately I've been thinking about right how can we be the funnel, some of us could be the funnel to continue to help remind those oh you don't need to build a new flat platform that exists. Oh you don't need to do all the data collection. You know someone else is there to help with that and to start to to bring that together we're not in the same company, but in that same way of going there are resources here available. Yeah. The last little bit that I'll add is that what Klaus proposes to do from what I've studied in in the food systems and impact in the environment, what he proposes to do could have some of the greatest impact in making a difference like right now. And that's the area that he's targeting produces a huge amount of the food that's consumed in a minute and that's also exported to the rest of the world so it's it's actually quite it could make a big difference if he can, if they can succeed with that project. And a huge amount of greenhouse gas and and there's like five different wins in that Nexus it's really interesting so it's a which is which is why Klaus is completely on fire about about getting this done lovely. Thank you. Scott and Mark. Everybody. I thought I'd pop in say hello. My stuff is, as I've said for time that I've been part of this group which is not an offer, you're gonna have her so my stuff is never so grandiose. I'm not change trying to change the world unless I say that world is what I can see around me. So, maybe that is the world who knows. I'm suffering from a wealth of opportunity at the moment, so that would be suffering. You know, I guess the people, a lot of the stress that we have nowadays is because we have too many options. And is that really worth complaining about. I don't know. I don't think so. You have to choose. And if you have a choice that means that you have a wealth. And so that's kind of the way I look at it. Something I've been trying recently which has been really interesting to me. We're making mobiles. Sweet. And, you know, you know, I do a little, a little artsy stuff, but it's interesting because a mobile. If you set it up in a decent spot, it's always, it's always changing. It's always moving. And it reminds me to prevent to kind of get away from my perfectionist tendencies which would be, I have this thing figured out I have this framework this model this situation this relationship, whatever it happens to be. And then there it is. I've got it done and I've done the last little chip on my sculpture and now it's perfect. And the mobile is constantly spinning and rotating and showing me new interactions and new perspectives and new ways to look at it. And it's always changing within a framework of the same thing. So, it's just a reminder to me to don't try to get locked into one. Okay, now I've got it figured out. And one of the joy is the potential of the in, which is hasn't hasn't formed yet. So, that's just some thoughts. The informed possibilities. Thanks Scott, and thank you for for visiting. Good morning and happy New Year. I got my second shingrix or shingles vaccine. And it was predicted I would get a fever. And I did. I'm taking it easy and listening. I had some conversations Tuesday. I was thinking about a connection game, or what an OGM game would be, and basically, you know, ask in some ways what your values are, how much time you're going to spend in with other people. And, you know, what a point system for hours spent in conversations in a group hours spent one on one, or maybe, you know, partial hours spent and you know there's so many people on this call that I've yet to spend some one on one time with and certainly a number, quite a number who I have and it's kind of like okay where what's the intention how do we track it is tracking it's something that can be fun. And kind of like something that gives an insight in some kind of way. You know, I'll continue playing with it for a little while. But anybody interested. Yeah, please connect with me. That's it. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. I have a little comment on that from something I discovered about a year and a year and a half ago. Then I realized that most of my interactions with other people were not synchronous. I had, I had flipped a mostly asynchronous time and by that I mean if I'm reading someone's something that someone wrote from watching a video of someone that was produced at a different time. However, right at this moment we have 1510 whatever people who are all in the same time at the same time. So, it's a, it's a limit. The limiter you can only spend so much time in, in the same time with someone. And we create this. It felt dishonest to me at that point. And then let me, let me say this. To be honest with me to think that I could get more interactions with people than the time that I was awake. In other words, I can get, I can get two hours worth of interactions if I just skimmerly fast, because I'm, I'm reading something that someone is fast or I'm watching something at a faster speed or I'm a multitasking in that sense and then I can't actually stack more human one on one synchronous time. It doesn't scale. You can only. And so the theory was like, I can I can interact with 10 hours worth of human content production in three hours. If I scan if I scan if I go faster, and that's how most people are interacting with the world most of the time because it's inefficient to interact with groups in the same space one on one. And yet it's it's richer. So that was just a thought. Could you go a little deeper with the and yet it's richer. There is a back and forth. There is a context that comes with it. There's a space in between there. When you when it's all inhale. There's no exhale there's no opportunity to really think about what it was that you just heard. And that happens in this, in this space sometimes is we'll just go from subject to subject to subject and wow Doug just said something really profound and then we'll move on to the next thing because we're constrained in our time and and the gift of of being one on one or being in the same spaces. So yes, yes about richer. It's interesting. That's a that's a good question I don't have a great answer for that. It felt more. Like I said it felt more honest to me, because this is the amount of interaction time that I have with, and I can either do it asynchronously and pretend that I'm stacking productivity which, okay yeah I can do that. I'm really, I don't know am I really interacting fully with others or not. And so that maybe the word fully is a hint. It just felt like it was richer when I was having that synchronous time with people there was just something, something different qualitatively. The sounds like what's usually described as quality time. Yeah, yes. Yes, and maybe that maybe that's what it is maybe it's, it's that we are existing in the same doing the same thing at the same time doesn't matter for in the same space. You know you people all over the place who knows where you are, but right at this moment we are all in this little space of, you know, this little time window, and we're sharing that. And I'm giving it to someone else. And that's just interesting about how that connects like when I'm watching someone's YouTube video, I can look all over the place I can be doing other stuff I can put it on a high speed. I don't care, because I'm not insulting them I'm not there's no, you know, there's no reciprocation that I have to provide from a social feedback standpoint. I don't know why it can be difficult to make videos is Jerry would know probably like to your phone, like okay I'm going to tell you about this deep important thing and I can't see anyone. So I don't know if I'm getting a feedback so different. So different. Yeah, yeah. And, you know I had said to the, the Metacogs group was a while ago that I noticed that I when I'm talking about something, if I have a bunch of faces who are not even saying anything. I say changes how I say it. And I could be talking about something with no response verbally in my living room sitting on my couch. Just talking to myself, which is kind of what I'm doing right at this point, and it would be totally different, it would be much less rich, but by looking around scanning I'm seeing okay. Some people are, some people are leaning in the very interested it's like okay what does that do to me that makes me think that this is interesting. And then I think why is this interesting and it feeds back on myself and it just gets really rich because you are giving me that space to think aloud. What I would love to do is mix it up. So, say, you know, every fourth meeting, everybody turns their video off, and it's just voice. It's like a phone call. Doug, is that called clubhouse. Okay. It was a phone call with somebody yesterday. It was very strange and wonderful. We could call it a clubhouse emulation mode. Go ahead, Doug. Okay, I think that part of human development is what happens when two people are looking at each other. And what one person says, stirs up every neuron in the body of the other. You can see that happening. So when you're talking with somebody you're affected by the fact that you're affecting them. If you break that loop and turned in just input without output, I think the brain really suffers in its development. And that's a real problem. Even in zoom, there's some advantages to the, all the faces on the screen, but there's some disadvantages by not having a whole body. For example, there's no smell of each other that there I think is in real face to face conversations. And the striking thing to me is that human development is based on all of our brain, all of our neurons, all of our home months involved in each conversation. And if we break that into pieces, we're probably breaking up our human development. And Stacey and then me, you're muted. Although the gestures are really good. You're saying I got thrown off for a minute. I wanted to. So, yes and no to what Doug was just saying. So I, I'm definitely one of these people I like to look at somebody's face I like to see everybody's reaction. And that being said, there's another time where a phone conversation or not seeing the person and really tuning into that energy with your other senses. There's something there, you know, we forget we have other senses. And it goes beyond five. And Mark, you have a great voice. So that's why you like having voice. That's it. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah. I'm thinking of the voice, the TV show, the voice where people are just focused on the quality of what the voice is, is expressing. And also the whole notion that it goes back to the I can't remember the word. E grows something or other where we're, we're part of a larger organism. And that's what it is when we have all of this stimulation. Right. There's something energetic about it. There's something physics like about the, the, the connections and the movements and the micro movements that that we we impact each other like, like that. The content, the content of their, of their, of their articulation is some way going to be impacted by who you think about them and what the visual is that they present. You know, so it's, it's, it's a, it's a complex thing, but we grow and are part of some level of a bigger whole by the interaction that comes up. It's like I used to refer to it as third body, one plus one equals something that's up here someplace. It's what love relationships are about. I love that. A couple of thoughts, several that you just triggered right now, Stuart, and I'll just put my notes in the chat. So in barbershopping, there's something called the bird. So barbershop quartet is for men singing for women is called sweet adelines. But when the group is in really good harmony you hear an overnote an overtone called the bird. I think there's probably equivalents and other kinds of musical settings but that's the only one I know about. And it's and it's maybe that's a piece of what you're thinking about also but in some other dimension because what you're talking about is, I like to talk about conversations. And I started Jerry's weekend retreats with people with whom I was holding a ha conversations where by speaking together somehow we had built something together that wasn't there in either of our heads beforehand, and it was like a lovely product of our interaction in the moment so so I love all those things. I remember I read ages ago that live nets corresponded with over 600 people during the enlightenment during his career and I'm like, I send emails to 600 people like in a couple days every week like like the speed and scale of our communication right now is insane. And and live nets had to sit down with Quillen ink and wait a couple months and hope that the messenger. You know, whether it was like horse plus ship plus whatever made it to the other end and then wait for a thoughtful reply and then someone might actually take a month to sit down and think about the question right out of an answer Who knows like the pace of our of our thinking together is so so vastly different than it has been in kind of in any previous era we have this instantanity which creates this incredible flood so the info torrent is so gigantic and then part of our battles individually and we've heard a bunch of it here about going someplace special turning off socials. Gil you and Ken Homer getting off of Facebook and all that kind of thing is our attempts to cope and manage the info torrent. And for me coping with the info torrent and being focused is a polarity that I try to manage. And so, so I don't, I don't think that people are not multitaskers I think that we don't have a really really good multitasking interface so we're crappy at it because it's so hard to do. But if somebody optimized for like, and the image I have here is Bruce Lee, being attacked by six people simultaneously it's like, here's in here's a lot of incoming things. So I'm going to do this one over and forward it to the right subset of people and if I can post something about it with a comment over here. And if I can reshare this and like this, like that act of being in the torrent, but very quickly doing the right things quickly and feeling like we like you've done a tremendous amount, and then setting that aside, switching your brain switching your context and going into deep slow focus mode to actually pay attention and to do something else. That seems to me to be really important. And, and so when I read it when I read some article about how people are terrible multitaskers you should only serial task I'm like, Well, no, actually I don't I don't, I'm not buying that kind of thing. He'll go ahead and then I'll step back in. Yeah what we're describing was feeling to me like a keto practice where it's not like being in the torrent and then going somewhere else to be still it's learning to be still in the middle of the torrent. And I find that stillness you're going to get squashed. So in a keto is my sport and in a keto there's a thing called round Dory, where everybody runs at you and you're basically sort of throw them aside and step around and you try to throw people into the path of the next person who's attacking you because that is actually pretty helpful. But, but a big piece of a keto is being aware that the one person you're dealing with isn't the only person who might be present. So again is not about attacking people it's about defending yourself it's a defensive martial art. And it's metaphorically very rich in terms of strategy and other sorts of things go ahead. But I'm, I'm, I'm speaking to the to a deeper layer than the technique of, I mean, you know, yes, you know, not don't get hung up on one attack or throw one into the other all that stuff there's moves to do but it only works if you can find your own center. And you'll stand that's because as soon as you, as soon as you feel the fear, you lose your ability to move. And the key in Aikido is Chi. So do is the way the path I is harmony. So Aikido is the way of harmony with universal life force or T. And there's a bunch of energetic semi spiritual work in Aikido, a little bit and the founder of Aikido had a whole spiritual background that that I don't know very much about. And some of the most practical who I know it has saved my life on the freeway any number of times. There you go. There was an Aikido practitioner named George Leonard who was in San Francisco and one of my regrets in life is not having attended some of his classes before he passed away so he seemed like a really extraordinary human to get to know a couple of the things just by way of checking. The idea of weaving and what Wendy said earlier about like, like doing more weaving. So there's like so much weaving in my life right now in different metaphorically in different ways. And so the weaving the world podcast that we're busy sort of standing up and Stacy's been helping me a whole bunch, including a whole kind of focused effort to trend to transcribe an interview that I did with Daryl Davis which will, it'll show back up in in our community once we produce that and so forth. But the podcast, the idea of the podcast was to have these shadow episodes that I was calling composting sessions or something like that and composting is a smelly, not that great metaphor, even though the idea is to break things around the nutrient value and enrich them again and sort of, you know, enrich the soil to amend the soil with with with healthy organic thoughts. So, I'm now borrowing from open street maps which through mapping parties. And this is before the day when all of us were carrying GPS enabled smartphones around. People who had GPS, you know, garments and other kinds of devices that had GPS on them, they'd pull them together in some town somewhere, teach the newbies what to do, send everybody off on a route, and then come back together and upload all the data to the open street maps database. And it was a form of really fun you'd learn something new you'd collaborate and in the end, you would have mapped some part of your of your environment it was really cool and some parts of Germany are so well mapped that a tree and tree is like lat long marked on a layer of open street maps is really, it's really interesting how productive that could be. So I was thinking what do weaving parties look like, and I'm not sure what weaving parties look like and I could use some help thinking this through, because I know what my, you know, so what my behavior looks like when I'm sitting on a call is this. So here's, here's, here's the note for today's call. Here are all the call. Here's every call we've had an OGM on Thursdays. Here is the poem that Stacy read which was already in my brain here's john O'Donohue who's a poet, who also wrote been not which was recently on poem of the day I think. So a lot of the topics here is shingricks resistance to change. We've been suffering from young overdose ministry for the future again and young, etc, etc, so I know. I know what I do to weave during the call this is my my loom. This is how I weave, and I publish this and anybody can go wander it in a couple people do not a lot. I don't know what it's like when different people with different tools come together and try to do that together and make a bigger artifact and I think that's part of what Wendy was talking about earlier it's like, what does it look like when we're weaving actively together, and I'm extremely interested in that question. We had a call, we had one OGM call that I called a ho down a while ago. And in the ho down, we picked a topic and it was something climate change related, and then five of us I think we're using different tools me in the brain. Robert best and mind manager, I think somebody was on Miro, etc. And then at the end of the call we compared notes with how we'd use each of our tools on the same topic, which was interesting. And I just didn't go back and repeat that probably could have turned that into into its own sequence of, let's get better at that and that'll teach us what this weaving thing is. And then, second thing by way of check in, I forwarded to the list unfinished 21 which is a sweet conference in Romania. I story threaded it with an illustrator named Emma Schmidt, and she and I basically listened to a bunch of recordings of sessions, which would be the normal sessions in a conference. And then she and I did riffs on it on what we heard in those sessions, and story threading is a practice I'd like to stand up if anybody thinks they'd like to be a story threader let me know, because I think that would be really interesting to create that as a practice, the same way that today you can go hire a graphic facilitator for an event. I think that you should be able to hire one or more story threaders for an event or a meeting or whatever. And so, story threading is finding sort of weaving through the nuggets of shiny insight that show up in meetings. And in particular, story threaders have an opposite or an orthogonal mission to graphic facilitators, meaning graphic facilitators job usually is to faithfully capture and render visually what's actually being said in the meeting as best they can. And they're trying to capture the essence of what in fact got said, story threaders have the mission to look around and see what what great bright thing felt to the ground and was lost on the cutting room floor, except they picked it up and turn it into a narrative. And story threaders have full permission to bring their own perspective and ideas into that conversation to then weave those embers into some interesting story line some new narrative that might have gotten lost. So they have kind of this broadening role or mandate in meetings and that's, again, just trying to stand this up as a practice and see where it goes. So, I'll just stop there. Any thoughts about wherever we've been on the call because we've run over our time a little bit and Scott about anxiety. I was just flushing out a bit of the things that market asked because I didn't think my answer was complete and I went back and found in my brain. Some of the comments that I had written for myself. Awesome. The last one I think is the most interesting and relevant that I had some success with people who were struggling with anxiety. And I realized if they move to the synchronous and local. Instead of the asynchronous and global it helped, and it helped right away. What's here right now. And then you know they their breath could start to slow and they would get a handle on it. Instead of worrying about infinity, which is essentially what the globe is for any single human. It's it's infinity. Just now synchronous and here what can you see is everything okay in your room. Yeah, actually everything's okay in my room. Look out the window is everything okay out the window. Okay, yeah, and it's very easy to let ourselves be concerned with infinity, but only if you can handle it. How about that. Well that and it was Ram Dass who wrote be here now back apparently in 1971. Perspective of just how small we are just now. It's changed like you would think that be here now wouldn't be such a difficult thing to think about doing. It's kind of obvious. And yet, here we are. So really enjoy be there then. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of the fun thing. A cartoonist. I can't remember him but a punk cartoonist had a cartoon called stick boy. And stick boy was trying to figure out the university was in the New Age bookstore and one of the books was be there then the other one, a favorite of mine, the goddess wants blood. Nice. Scott it was going to bring up that as you get into more mathematics it turns out that there's an infinity of infinities. What people refer to as infinity is the mathematicians call all of no. And there was actually all of one to etc, all the way up to infinity. Damn it. So in parallel lives we are even more overwhelmed that we're in our right now right here. I wonder where the first it could be this stuff is figured out been figured out before and we're just rediscovering. Can we scroll ahead to our future selves and figure out that it all turns out okay. Well that'd be a good thought for you given that it's January 6. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Grace you were saying something. Oh it's saying some of our future selves are being more overwhelmed at some of our parallel selves and some of our parallel selves are much calmer and more centered. We're enjoying the sunshine. This is starting to sound like Rick and Morty. With that, thank you all. Stacy, thank you for reading a poem in OGM we should do that more often. And let's welcome to 2022. See y'all in the inner tubes. Thank you.