 This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, November 30th, 2023. I almost said four. That was bad. It is nice to see everybody it is approaching so quickly and I had no idea I would be like on when I write notes and I put the date on the corner of the paper, like what am I doing writing to 023 that seems so futuristic somehow. Hey everybody. Greetings greetings greetings so nice to see you. Good morning everyone. Good morning. Good morning. The weather forecast in Portland is like little droplets for like eight or nine days. Yesterday was yesterday was really nice so we took a long walk but it's little droplets for nine days ahead. Is that common. And then it's never just solid blah it always opens up and then it's nice and then it gets cloudy and then it drizzles a little bit and then we seldom get really big downpours. Notice that you attribute nice to not wet. You know, drizzle is fine can sort of groten do stuff downpour is fun but you can't do much outdoors. I don't know. Of course, fun when it's warm. Of course, not fun when it's cold. Yeah, exactly. And also, like, we're in no danger of drought in this particular piece. I think Eastern Oregon is in fact part of the drought zone but. Yeah, it gets more Montana sort of gets much drier. Yeah, real fast, real fast. So how do you get in Oregon in your area. It'll snow once maybe twice a winter and it'll stick on the ground for a week, maybe two weeks, kind of per. And the first snow might stay until, until fall, a little bit but it's not bad. Not like Minnesota. Little, little different from Minnesota. Have you had snow already. Yes, we did. It lasted, it was, it was only, I don't know, half three quarters of an inch covered everything and was gone within two days. But we're starting to get consistent temperatures at or slightly above freezing for the highs. Client of mine in Western Michigan since it just got three inches days ago. There we go into the winter. Is it still on the ground or has it melted as of a day after it was still on the ground. Amazing. We are in check in mode this week, partly because I co opted check in mode to do an after action review our call about the Hamas situation, the Gaza situation before. And I think everybody on the call knows the protocol. So I'm going to step out of the conversation. I will coach anybody who doesn't know the protocol who steps in later in the chat. Shall we mute the chat for the whole check in portion or shall we allow the chat. I will go with consensus rule. I mean, Pete and I can create notes somewhere else and, and satisfy our pent up desires by pouring them into the chat once we're done checking in but it'd be fine to have open chat as far as I'm concerned. I had the impression that chat was more distracting when we were on a topic or something and maybe a little bit less distracting while we were checking in, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I do not I do not have that that perception. Go ahead, G. So I sort of agree with that. I mean it does take away from my attention to the verbal stuff if I'm tracking the chat. But I think it's not that distracting and it's able to be self managed by the handy measure of just closing the chat during the check in period. So, given that that's available. I will ask anybody who is disturbed to a chat to just take it out of view and rely on seeing it at the end and in the meantime we will chat away. I would suggest that yes, turning off the chat does not fix it. I mean, it means that whoever's, you know, turned off the chat isn't bombarded by it, but that, you know, if I were, if I didn't want the chat channel going on, because I wanted everybody to pay attention, turning it off for me doesn't help. It kind of makes it worse, because I don't see what's going on and, you know, people are still distracted. Just just an observation. Stacy, I was going to echo that, because I think the whole issue with the chat is if you're the one speaking, you know, it kind of makes you feel bad if somebody's chatting about something else and you're, you know, hoping for attention on to what you're speaking about. I suppose they're just throwing in a link that adds to what you're speaking about. It's just a little like the modern thing where you're talking to somebody and they're looking at their phone while they're, you know, right. I hear an uprising in the ranks. I think maybe we should not chat. And so, and so, and so Pete, for you and I, because we could secretly note take on the side and, and then pour that in later, but that would mean we wouldn't be paying as much attention, although you and I think that that would mean we would be paying just as much attention, because that is how we pay attention. But that's a whole other conversation. Should you and I solemnly swear not to take notes during the check-in portion? Yes, except that it's not clear to me that the convention of the room was the consensus. It's not clear to me that the consensus in the room was that today was a no chat day. And we haven't defined the word consensus, which would take another couple of calls on Stacy, please. How about in, how about as an exercise in autonomy, when you feel moved to use the chat, you stop, you check in, and then you make that decision for yourself and go with whatever consequences come. You've just invented Quaker chat, which could be a good serial in India. Gil. Yeah, I like the Quaker chat idea. I propose we have a future call about attention. And pay. I like that. Except apparently we're too distracted to have that call today. It just detracts from the check-in. Yeah. If we do today's check-in with the Quaker chat rules, then it's a laboratory for the question of attention that we can revisit as another call. I like that. So this, so in sense you've reframed the call as an experiment. Okay, can somebody clarify for me since I'm not a Quaker, what Quaker chat rules are. Ah, Quaker meeting is silent meeting, which means everybody goes into a room and goes quiet. And then whenever somebody has moved to speak. They kind of first check in to see whether they're just responding to what somebody else said or whatever they sort of, there's a little process called vocal ministry where you learn sort of what it's like to do a message in meeting. And then typically during a Quaker one hour long meeting, five or six people will stand up at some point randomly during the hour and say something that is for the meeting. It's not supposed to be in reply to anybody else's message, but just supposed to be like showing up when you hear the light, feel the light, see the light, speaking from the light is another phrase I think. And then the saying that I like from Quakers is you should only break the silence to improve the silence. And I've used that at retreats over the years. Stacey, this is not nearly as dystopian as a Seinfeld episode. The 90s were the decade of friends and Seinfeld, and I couldn't stand either show. And to me they said something about the 90s. I was like, nah, these are not good humans. As opposed to the decade of Archie Bunker, which was like really examining social issues, etc, etc. So that was a lengthy preamble. I think we're agreed. What did we agree to, we agreed to not chat, except when when so moved. So, so to chat with a check in on intentions and relevance. Is that good. Okay, so that's a modification to the S protocol. The Quaker modification to the S protocol. I like it. So I am going to go quiet of either step in or use the hand to step into a queue the zoom hand. And when we're done with the check in when everybody has checked in, I will step back in and we will change the rules and chat at will. As we usually do. So, I'm passing the mic to whoever would like to check in. Before we wait, the more important the check in has to be. So I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to unmute now. So I can say something that seems kind of trivial, maybe not. Some of you may know about mastodon the Fediverse analog to Twitter. I had an interesting experience this week I've been I Twitter Twitter broke for me. I won't mention names, but Twitter broke for me and I kind of have been off of it for a long time. And that kind of broke social media for me. So I've never really been a Facebook person. I just don't like Facebook at all. Even though I have an account there, but I was I really love Twitter and I got a lot of my news from it and it was a fun and happy place. And I saw somewhere today, somebody was saying that, you know, Twitter's still there X is still there but it's like the soul got sucked out of it. It's a zombie of what it used to be. So anyway, Twitter is drawing me back or something is drawing me back and I've got started with AI art and NFTs again recently. Another story which I'm going to today. But the interesting mastodon thing was I had a mass, you know, I set up a master on account. And I thought I did the right thing by setting it up on a small community server. Because the promise of mastodon for me was it was was that it was decentralized and so you could kind of post anywhere and messages that would kind of float over the decentralized network of mastodon and, and like Monkey Dory and not like a centralized thing like Twitter or Facebook. So, with the help of some friends from kind of an OGM me OGM related subgroup called fellowship of the link yesterday. I had to move the, the little community server that I was on never really got going. I had a few dozen people and, and the way master on is set up it's not really, it doesn't make a cohesive community very well you have to put the community around around it, and then have a server instead of the other way around making a server doesn't make a community. So we didn't really have a big community, we didn't, we weren't really active the guy who was running was like, Oh my God, I thought this is going to be big. I'm using $42 a month for a big master on server that nobody's using so I'm going to have to switch domains and move someplace else. That was enough for me to go okay well I've had it with the little, the little baby server thing and I'm just going to move on to the biggest master on server the one that's kind of semi official. And so, long story short, it I realized that that I was a bit sad but I realized that that even master on it's basically like smaller copies of Twitter. Even though the architecture is supposed to be decentralized and there is a little bit of like messages flow around. If you want to see most of the messages, you kind of have to join the biggest server. And if you're on a little server. You won't get what's flowing around the Fediverse. And I was really disappointed to find this because, you know, the promise to me at least was this decentralized we can kind of post everywhere and it'll kind of work out. It doesn't work that way. It is really cool, comparing master on to Twitter that you can have as many bigger little, you know, Twitter like things with master on, but they don't talk very well amongst each other. So, that's my big epiphany that master on is kind of like open source Twitters, you can have as many as you want and they can be big and small but if you want, you know, kind of the feel of Twitter. Maybe you go to blue sky another story, or you go to master on that social so now I've got, you know, I transferred my account over to master on social. It's very cool. Master on is built so that you can move from server to server very easily so that worked. But I'm really sad that the promise of decentralized, you know, Fediverse didn't work out. And a competing thing. We talked about Nostra a little bit yesterday. Nostra is a competing thing that is like very decentralized but then there's no they're there kind of it just kind of like dissipates all over the place. And long story short, I, the, I, I was hurt by thinking that decentralization was further along than it that it is and, you know, it's cool and we should work keep working on it. And I'll keep working on it. It's not quite there yet. Thanks. Hi. Yeah, thanks Pete. I've also been thinking about decentralized social networks. And I'm thinking in terms of education, like, would it make sense to have a class use a social network where people keep their own data private, but they own their own data, and they choose what's shared with the class or with the school. But I don't know how to get there. I mean, there were attempts, like using the dat protocol to build your own social networks, but they were just experiments. So it's still the landscape is still tricky. And there are new advances to help people like get beyond the home network router issues to be able to get on these networks and share and contribute from your home network. And that's called hole punch. But yeah, like I keep. So, if when I find some time to look at it, okay, I'll see, okay, that's now evolved into hole punch and now I got to look at their new, what's the latest here. It's constantly evolving. And like, things that used to work for me like the command line, they don't support anymore. So it's frustrating, but I think it's where we need to get eventually. And I hope that the community keeps pushing for it even though it's very hard to make a business case for it. So leave it at that for now. I had a week of struggling with software and getting my mind wrapped around these communication tools that are emerging, which are just incredibly complex and it's probably take will take a while for this to sort itself out where some systems just prevailed. But I was in a meeting this morning, where Gene Ballinger presented a large language model that actually that's basically your GPT that can program cool. So you can talk with it. It's basically already an LLM. And then it starts trying relationship maps. It's still, it's still so between alpha and beta, but you can see this, you can see this coming on. So, you know, so he's now creating groups where you can, to advance this and work it. And then with the law, someone like me, I mean, I've always been stymied by trying to develop a kumum or program a kumum app, but it just blows my mind. But if I can talk to it, hey, I can do this. Now that that's, that's pretty incredible. And I've gotten into substack and that is exploding. It seems like everybody is testing their mailing lists to send out a first draft release and then see who gets stuck on it and generates interest. So it's really important to polish this introduction to the point where you can make it clear what you have in mind and why what you want to talk about. It should be of interest now. And there are some very smart people doing this. So now I'm on the receiving end of the substack messages and it's super impressive. I mean, it's intimidating, right? Because you try to, you try to keep up and then I just published a website. I mean, I redid an old website. I have a domain called foods with thoughts that I was able to release again. But then you get into holy smokes. What do you do with your email and how it's just, it's just amazing, you know, to, to, to try to stay on top of it to try to stay with it. But at the same time, I think what you, what we're observing is sort of an explosion in collective intelligence, right? Because the information that's getting around is just, it's just very impressive, you know, how, how information finds you. You know, I think the algorithms are improving in that information is routed to you that's relevant to you. And that's, that's, that's also of course very dangerous because it can be, it can be misused. And that's actually, I mean, one reason why I'm so intensely focused right now is because COP28 for the first time has a full day dedicated to food systems. The amount of, of ranker around this is incredible. You know, there is targeted misinformation. So I came across, I just, I just ran a test because in the Neo book progression, you know, where I'm, I'm trying to stake out a pathway to change. It became pretty obvious that, that you have to anticipate entrenched interests, refusing to yield. Right. So I just run a quick test and I came across the Heartland organization, sending out a book to 200,000 teachers in how they should talk about climate change, combined with a CD that talks them through it. I mean, it's just incredible that this can happen in a democracy where, you know, you just have an organization sending false information. I mean, completely misleading information to all the teachers, right. For K 12 instructions, this how they should talk about climate change. And so in the food system, we have that same thing that level. It's, it's very refined, very subtle, you know, in the way that it wants to perpetuate existing practices that are so destructive. So, so, so on the one hand, you have these tools, right. And you can't really function in this, in this setting, without being able to understand without understanding and using these tools. So that's a huge challenge for someone like me where I don't have any formal training to, to really, to really get into this. So that's sort of why I'm at, I mean, I'm just really trying to get to get a handle on these tools and then be find a way to stay inserted in this communications flow. And that is evolving in the food and agriculture sector, and that's getting that that's really wanting wanting to gain traction. Morning, everybody. I can see that I'm not well trained in Quaker meeting, because I'm drawn to respond to things that I've heard or pick up on things that I've heard and I'm going to do that a little bit and then say other things that that. That's the phrase Jerry. Speaking from the light, that's pretty good. Yeah, speaking of the light, you should only break the silence to improve the silences. Hopefully, we'll see. So Pete, thank you for the tips on mastodon. I've been, I've been perplexed by why so little relevant traffic and disappointed compared to what I've seen on other platforms. I haven't been as active there as I would have liked to be and I will now try again with your new model. I made a list last week or two of all the networks that I'm trying to happily relationships with. You know, from the, from the Twitter mastodon blue sky universe to Facebook to OGM and open global mind and schooling it's like, it's, it's crazy overwhelming cause you talked about trying to keep up can wiser than most of us has just unplugged from a lot of the shit decades ago and it's not troubled by it. So that's just kind of a crazy mystery to me I'm trying, trying, trying to think about how to rationalize and systematize and focus what I'm doing and have the pieces connect more wisely, like a kind of a cross publishing scheme. I was going to say about that. I've been very active on Facebook in the aftermath of the of the Gaza crisis. Less so the last week or two. And I'm really struck there and elsewhere at the, not just the shallowness but the ignorance of the public conversation part of this is what you know class were talking about disinformation as a, as an orchestrated strategy in our society these days. And so the common tendency of people to react with very strong opinions with very little knowledge of a situation the extreme case of that is people going ballistic on a headline, not having read the story. And of course headlines aren't written by the journalists wrote the story it's written by headline writers for particular purpose for different purposes with different publications. So I'm, I'm sad about that, and, you know, have made little efforts to clean some conversations up but that's like sweeping the beach and I'm not going to spend my life doing that. But a very, well, not exactly not exactly the same conversation but related to that I was on a call yesterday about sociocracy and governance systems. And I don't want to, I don't want to malign people by saying the conversation was superficial but it felt very naive to me. It felt like there's an assumption that that a different, that a different protocol can shift human behavior. And the question of taking that to scale from groups of 10 or 20 or 30 to groups of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands wasn't in the conversation. The question of how, how to combine democracy and agility. Consensus or various other kinds of models with with innovation. Just didn't seem to be there in the conversation I'll confess that I'm very my own experience on sociocracy and things like that is very shallow at this point. So I'm applying my criticism of others to myself. I was listening from the perspective of a guy trying to put together a cooperative holding company. A holding company full of cooperative businesses that cross on each other, and they don't just share ownership but share governance and so I'm immersed in trying to think about how that works. And I'm not feeling very enlightened from what I'm seeing so far. So that's very much on my mind. One thing that did become clear in that conversation is that is that there's a muddiness about governing governance and ownership, and they're not the same. And they're related and they can be synergistic or not, but lots to explore there. And much of that comes the question of trust, Jerry, which is a field you've been playing in for a long time is fundamental in the story. And so how is trust built and broken and reestablished and nurtured is very much alive and right now. Two other things real quick on the matter. Klaus, thank you for the GPT to Coomu thing I've been playing in AI is lately all the gentlemen in London who's been building LLMs based on different corpuses of stuff that I have. And one of which we've trained it on the four years of living between worlds conversations, which will preview it next month. So just that would can what is December 20. Third Wednesday of every month so we'll, we'll put the modeling to the conversation and let people participating in the call interact with it and see, see if it's valuable or useful in any kind of way so I'm intrigued by that whole game. I mentioned before the call started I was listening this morning to a lecture by John Searle philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, speaking to Google about AI. He, I haven't gotten to the point yet but I think he's going to come around to what my wife Jane has been set calling it for years as simulated intelligence, not artificial intelligence, very interesting and formal schema for his analysis I put the link in the chat way back to the top so have a look there. On the cop 28 climate conference and the intersection with the social media conversation I started propagating a meme yesterday called hashtag cop out. And it's getting picked up. Excuse me it's getting picked up very fast so that's kind of a fun experiment there. The strange international groping towards something led by an executive from the oil company with memos that were just discovered yesterday about how he plans to use the cop to further oil deals. So, we're in a mess. One of my most respected climate mappers and tractors said that he couldn't get into the ministry for the future. Which I think it's one of the more profound and important books on climate out these days that was kind of intriguing. And I have to leave at the top of the hour for another call so thank you for the chance to share time. So, try the challenge and not respond to a bunch of things that triggered. What's been being brought to my attention increasingly is storytelling. And there's a lot of things around that I'm actually looking to do one of the groups I was in years ago. I actually organized the Smithsonian storytelling weekend and things on one of my big projects would be to see if we could rekindle that next summer. July 20 is Saturday, and that'll be the 55th anniversary of Apollo 11. I'm trying to see if that could be a context to really try to bring things together there. And then, I'm also part of the International Society of Systemic Sciences and we'll be having our 2024 conference will be in DC, and third week of June, and things so a lot of things that are going on there. I guess it blows down to different the facilitation methods. So, that's kind of trying to really and then on strategic leverage points with facilitation it's really interesting to the pieces that have been coming back. And with with the brain I've been, I got introduced to Jeff Conklin and the whole dialogue mapping issue mapping process. You're familiar with that. Well, it's interesting because they did separate it out. But Jeff's energy has always been around the dialogue mapping, creating these maps and real time on shared screens. He's got maps of maps of maps of like the climate change thing that was in Copenhagen type of thing but, and then they're another one is Edward de Bono and the six thinking hats and things but it's interesting Edward de Bono and Jeff they're so obsessed with using it in meetings that they're it's kind of ignoring the power of it for individual sense making and things so that's kind of where I'm interested. And again and then actually trying to the compendium. It's the open source. From there of had to get the version Jeff develop what you guys you could call it the time nexus distribution and then there was Simon Buckingham shum and open UK and ourselves and stuff. We were using companion but then they took it in some different directions and things but when I died, it just kind of whether he was really seemed to be the energy behind it. So can I'm looking at can I kind of try to bring that functionality into the brains. Then my tool. And things but yeah so really the strategic leverage points I see your or storytelling and facilitating. And then I guess getting into that into the sense makings and it all kind of gets into the whole decision making process to. We need to be. All you can do is make the best decision. You have it like obligation to be come as well informed and then it's like you make this decision, but then you also have to. It's just intelligence that will recognize that we're on. That's not working. We need to come. We need to take correct other corrective actions and stuff, rather than being so locked into something. So, I'll stop there. It seems to me that that there's a really important theme here. It's not a new one, but it's becoming a burgeoning challenge. And then it all relies. It builds around the question of trust, but specifically for me in this conversation around information integrity. And how do you determine what is worthy information. And how can you check that out. And, and how can you inform others about the lack of integrity of information, which leads to foundational changes in thinking that it's sort of like how do we bridge the human trust into an organizational dimension. And some organizations themselves have a climate of trust, and a sense of integrity of information and authenticity and so forth. But it's very difficult to discern. When you're out in the world, and you're just meeting and greeting, and trying to determine how to learn more about a topic that you're concerned about, and know that you're getting valid information. There needs to be an integrity or trust meter that can be applied, because we now have so many fragmented sources of information that it's almost impossible to vet the quality of that particular source of information. And that might be worthy of a longer call a focus call, as opposed to a check in call. But I think this is a group that could address the limitations of information accuracy, the current ways that one can guard against misinformation. And, and how to then use that in terms of the general public. And I'm thinking particularly in terms of the youth and rising generations of the world where the aging generation of the world. And we look at the world differently. But if everyone's based on a sound bite. How do we, as a society of humans, make sense of what's real and what isn't real. And discern this has just been mentioned, when a topic that's supposed to be internationally imbalanced is being co opted. So, I don't have an answer. It's a huge question, but it seems to me that this group would be a really good group to do some serious work about it and then in the course of that, figure out how to share that information or knowledge or growing wisdom with different groups of people. I keep wanting gills father notetaker to jump in and take a turn. Soon enough, soon enough that will happen. It's more disciplined than I am. And yeah, it might be compelled to reply to what everybody else said I don't, I don't know what will happen. In the spirit of checking in I'm I've been struggling to explain myself online to sort of say what's going on and after some advice mid summer, I tried to simplify what I was saying and ended up in very unsatisfactory kind of dead end valleys. Because when I simplified, when I simplified a lot, what I was trying to do sounds uninteresting and vanilla and I was like that I wouldn't, I wouldn't hire that person or whatever. I went to the alternate strategy of trying to explain my complexity and the complexity of the inter twingularity of things that I see, which is daunting, to say the least. And so I'm busy trying to experiment and I feel like I wish I could use massive wiki 10 years hence fully funded, and all singing all dancing, because I think Pete in my visions for what's possible with massive are very aligned. And there's just so many things that are interesting and one, and part of the problem is that there are many angles at which I'm tackling these different things I care about like collective memory, trust and sense making. And one of those angles is. Well, actually I just forgot the one that I was going to kind of talk about. So, one of those is the observation which I did a YouTube short about that worse that the web the internet is stuck in mainstream media metaphors that we have TV and radio and we have newspapers magazines and books, and we have phone calls with video and we don't have a whole lot we got transactions you can go buy stuff, and we don't have a lot of other stuff and even the, a lot of the media that were that I just listed are kind of hard to reuse and hard to repurpose and hard to weave together. And I'm really interested in trying to push media to some new level of utility for everybody. And that's that's hard but fun and interesting and that that's sort of one of the layers of experimentation that I'm trying to do. So I'm, I'm busy trying to figure, figure that out. And I think I'll, I think I'll leave it there. Sorry for having come in late. So, what I have to say might not fit anymore, but I have a feeling that this meeting has become somewhat dysfunctional. I believe that we had busy lives outside of open mind, and we came here and got relief by being able to be free and play at the edges. I no longer believe it, I don't think we're engaged with climate change, for example, outside this meeting in very effective ways. So we've become a group that is not talking about the most important thing that's going on, which seems to me just bizarre. So I'll stop there. I think that this meeting has become more functional, but I'm looking from a different point. So I've been in North Carolina with my friend who's husband past. I just be here to spend the holidays with her. These are going to be her first holidays alone. So I am in the wilderness. I have the woods on one side, the lake on the other side. And I really can imagine what girls going through on Facebook, I haven't been there in a while. I don't want to be there, mostly because of what Judith talked about, which is a big concern for me, but there's nothing I can do right now. I'll go back when the time is right. But most of my time and attention has been really on me in the being. I wish Doug Breitbart was here. So in really being me. And the reason that I say that I think this group is more functional. I feel that when the peak, I mean, this is just my opinion. So, you know, take it for what it's worth. But I feel like each one of you is bringing so much more of who you really are, as opposed to who you want to put out to the world for whatever reasons, you know, whatever. For whatever protection or whatever mechanisms, you know, we carry with us for the world. So in that regard, and to speak to what Gil was, what Gil was saying earlier about when he was talking about listening to sociocracy and wondering how we, like, what about the actual people in the system, because that has to change. So for me, I see, I see a lot of positive growth in this group. So yeah, maybe we're not, you know, or you guys aren't talking about what you see as solutions. But a lot of that was talk. And talk is great generates ideas. There's a lot, there's a lot already out there as far as I know, this particular group. And I think is, to me, I see this as, I don't know, this is like a smorgasbord group. I'm just going to stop here. It's nice to be here. So I've been. One thing to come up for recently I was reading a book. I think I had known this before but I hadn't really paid attention to it. That one of the issues Charles Darwin had about publishing the origin of species was that in that time. And he was pretty firm about it. Although he had this explanation for variation and change and how things evolve. There was no purpose to it in the 1850s people were very much engaged in that there was sort of a providential order. And the people of life, the universe, Douglas Carmichael pointed this out in the garden world about, and that, and also, others you max favor and others point out this kind of nihilistic thing that happened with moving away from everyone just agreeing that, you know, there's a God and it's all good and it's because it's got a purpose. And so that's just thrown me into like, there's also fits with some of the Zen teaching side had experience with about purpose and ultimate purpose. So, I think part of what's happening and that makes it. I kind of feel it like a malaise a social malaise in our, or maybe part of our zeitgeist that we are struggling with this as a society as individuals as a world filled with people. And trying to either impune purpose, you know, put it somewhere. I'm not just, I just have to leave it like that. Oh, I will share one more thing. Last week for the first time I had what I would call a social dream that is a dream that I feel is part of the zeitgeist of our time about AI. I don't have notes, but it was both unsettling. I was in a very serious arguments with good friends of mine about philosophy. And I felt as my last note to myself as I felt like I was staring into some kind of an abyss. So I'll just leave that that I'm in this it's a very interesting. I think we're in at age where we. We're somehow struggling with the lack of a spiritual sort of underpinning that everybody like just agrees to, even if they didn't quite believe all the, you know, having a healthy. I think kind of the several people kind of either brought it up directly or kind of alluded to us having some gatherings outside this group to kind of maybe talk about, you know, or some of the projects or how we get to some things. So we can tie it into that and maybe it could even be a session like, like, as people like your region for 2024 or some things approach the end of the year, or something. Kevin you may have deduced that we're in check in mode and you're welcome to step in whenever you want and the pause is welcome. Well, I will say that I'm in AA. And what you say in AA is that you're not cured to have a one day reprieve contingent on your spiritual condition. For those who have trouble coping with spirituality the chapter to the agnostic in the big book is really good because it, it enables atheists and near atheists to act as if there is something spiritual that help gives them and a grounding without violating what they firmly don't believe. And so it's a, as Bill said it's it's a functional necessity to act as if you're not in a closed room with no windows. I'm going to make one post to the chat and things with one of my primary mentors is Bill Smith he had worked at the extra British overseas overseas airway corporation back in the when he was in his early 20s and he was really successful sometimes and so he's kind of dedicated his life to figuring out trying to figure out why he was successful and sometimes and other times. Not that when he came in to he's got. Well purpose that he could ties into the conversation and so purpose is a source of power. And of course, everybody, when you try to talk to certain people about purpose then it's all religion stuff so I've kind of tried to frame it as it's the authentic commitment to your purpose is what draws people so he has appreciation influence and control. And Paul is kind of power over influences can power with the clock. And then the latest thing we used to talk about power for but actually we're talking about appreciation is power beyond. I've been getting some real traction on triple S he's actually the Vice President for practice now so that's one of my main threads is this I triple S conference in June, and things about post the link to some of his articles, and particularly if anybody is a member about triple S already to things I'll be organizing some things and I'll invite this group to as well. I'm going to play moderator a little bit here we're still in the check in mode where you only speak once. No, we were there's a couple people who haven't stepped in yet. And when when that happens, I'll switch us over. Thanks. But I appreciate your comments. And if I'm wrong and everybody's gone already correct me, but there's a few who haven't, I can check in but it would be very brief which is that I'm preparing for see graph Asia, starting in 10 days. I've been completely focused on that. And really not much else. Just that. I'll do a check in on our rights of the river network we've got to environmental professors from Warren Wilson college and two students working on it on both writing a new ordinance and doing figuring out the marketing we've got a state legislator who's really interested in is doing our own bill and moving forward with that collaborative but it's all volunteer and you got to deal with somebody who was really entitled and doesn't show up to work and all that kind of stuff with it's purely volunteer but there's some really good ones so it's just anyway, it's moving forward. I've yet to check in but don't have much to say at the moment. I don't believe there. I appreciate that and can passed in the chat. And I think that's john Kelly on iPhone 11. And that's right. And if you'd like to check in that'd be great. Yeah, I just so I can talk. Sorry, I'm always late to these things or just or are gone. I'm usually working Thursday morning with a caregiver, you know, with caregiving clients. And the quick check in would be that that's what I do every week. I've got three people who are need extra assistance in one form or another. And that's really. Well, that's a whole book, you know that what that work is like. What it requires what it does for you what it takes from you, etc. I'm also writing a novel. I'm at 13 chapters 40,000 words. I have reached I came up with a new introduction, which, you know, I came in here late but it sounded like you were discussing. A little bit spirituality without conventional structures. And I that's certainly Jerry can say whether that introduction I came up with in fact speaks to that or speaks from that actually created a disembodied being who is my, my opener to the to the novel so on a bad day, I can say, you know, who do you think you are? It's Kim Stanley Robinson, you know, don't kid yourself, but on a good day, I can say no, no, that's not the question. The question is, is there a book here that nobody else could write. And just get it written, you know, and the rest, you know, will will deal with elsewhere. So that's probably enough for a check in for me today. Good to hear from here and see those you I've heard and seen so far in this talk. John, thank you and whatever time you can come to spend with us we appreciate we realize you've got commitments and responsibilities. So thank you for for making time to be here. I think that's everybody checked in. I'll switch. I'll switch the big toggle into normal conversation mode. We've only got a quarter of an hour left. But what is and I think I misunderstood at the beginning when Gil was talking about, I think it was Gil who mentioned GPT for, and I heard cobalt. But I think it was GPT Kumu. Dang, okay, I gotta I gotta change that around. So there's a GPT that'll helps to create Kumu maps, which is a much cooler thing than GPT that speaks cobalt. And if I may, a simple way to think of a GPT. It's a natural language interface to something. So, in, in, you know, you don't have to like over complicated with, you know, oh my God, it's thinking or it's going to take over the world or whatever, you know, a GPT is a way to speak natural language and get it to do something like to Kumu. And do we have a link to the GPT that can program Kumu? Is that a, I bet we can source one. So what else is on people's minds? I'm so this question about people need some belief system to hang on to is really, really interesting to me super fascinating. One of the big trends out there right now is nuns. And I don't mean NUNS, I mean NONES, which means people who are spiritual but not religious or something like that, kind of hard to declare. But they do believe in some kind of power but they're not interested in any of the organized religions that that segment of the population is growing and growing pretty quickly. I think that modern, modernist liberal society has done really shitty job of giving people even places to come convene and think about a belief system that might like work or hang or, or resonate for them. So the nuns are kind of fishing around and one of the problems is when you're fishing around and there's nothing that really is working collectively, you will see sometimes onto really stupid theories or cults or whatever else and so a bunch of people are right for the picking I think for, for not so healthy ideas for society. So I'm really interested in that and in a fit of peak around this kind of question years ago I bought the domain foobarism.com, a couple of you know about that. There's not much on the site but foobar is a placeholder file name in programming foo.bar is what you'll put in sometimes in code when you're just doing sample code or want to sample file name. It's based on foobar fucked up beyond all recognition which I think dates back to World War one, when someone would show up and say hey, Sergeant has a situation in the trench they foobar sir, and on from there. So it's meant to be a placeholder religion foobar, and I'd be happy to collaborate with anyone who wants to do more about it but it's meant to be a very tongue in cheek exercise about a very serious question, which is what would you put. What would you invent a religion what would you put in it. And why use the word religion in lowercase and very lightly there. It's called a metastatic metasyntactic syntactic variable I did not know that. Thank you. I will add that and there's a Julian has the book. Awesome two copies of the foobar and snafu nice there which are of course totally related situation normal all fucked up. Thank you. Yeah, it's good about saying the situation abnormal not fucked up. Love that. Don't forget picnic. What was picnic picnic is problem in chair nut and computer. Oh, right, right. Thank you. And then pep cat is the other one. Remember pep cat. Problem exists between chair and keyboard. Anything else that popped up in people's heads that they'd like to talk about. Well on this idea of religion spirituality God creator, whatever. One of the things that I found very useful in my coaching practices to talk about spiritual intelligence not from the standpoint of religion but spiritual intelligence is whatever makes you feel connected to something larger than yourself. And for some people that is God that is the religion. It's very hard to believe your family was their work or nature. When that is missing, then it's very hard to have a life of meaning and purpose, and when it's present, even in the midst of terrible challenges, it's much easier to have a life of meaning and purpose and you know I'm not. I'm not someone I'm not a fiest and believe in a God, or I should say I actually believe in all the gods except when it says I'm no way away because that's a very troublesome God. I look at the evolution of the black church. And I think of, you know, a dear friend of mine who says you know my ancestors are here slaves 200 years ago and, you know, they had nothing they had no rights nothing and you almost if you're in that position you would almost have to invent an afterlife and a God that says once you go through this you will be rewarded. And so I have tremendous respect for that as a, as a survival strategy as something that can help you move through really dark wilderness and you know the desert where you're just you know it feels like you've been abandoned so it's certainly something that occupies the minds of a great many people on this planet. And there's all these ways of unpacking it depending upon where you are, but it feels like a fairly universal thing to for a need to feel connected to something larger than yourself, whatever that might be. And so I just start to throw that in. This isn't well thought out, but since it's make believe in going to Fubor. Imagine if sound were the God. Then each one of us in everything we speak were God that would automatically put a responsibility and a mindfulness in our focus. That's just what came to me, I figured I'd share it. And you have just made what I love about Quakerism, because the fundamental belief of Quakerism is that God is in everyone, and it doesn't necessarily do it from the voice. But it starts with that assumption, which means if I harm you I'm harming me why would I do that. And it also means that people have sort of a sacred presence that is worth honoring. So Quakers, many orthodoxish Quakers would speak in plain speak, which is now and the, and the reason for it wasn't to be ornate. The reason for it was to sort of sacralize the address of the other, like, you know, instead of just you pay buddy, it was now. And which I find I've never tried doing that for a day. But I find that's really interesting. Let me just pull in one more point that came to me as you were speaking, because the notion of sound is very important to me. But listening to you speak I'm realizing, you know, men's history has always been written, where women's history seems to have been told in story, or sung. So I think they're, for me at least there's something really important in putting it into sound, as opposed to writing or thinking that the next step. Two thoughts on that one it's kind of funny that it's called his story and there are puns about her story. And the second is that literate traditions, the people of the word, I see that with with some with weight on where that comes from deprecate oral traditions singing traditions, all those kinds of things and I think I'm projecting here but I think very often think that nothing of sophistication could be passed down through oral traditions or just by by mentoring or word of mouth or coaching or apprenticeship or whatever else. I'm totally wrong and my, my head's been spun around with, you know, the dawn of everything and plenty of other books about how sophisticated and interesting, and in many cases how humane and advanced pre word societies were and a lot of things to think about, which is the thesis of the alphabet versus the goddess Leonard Schlein's book is that linear writing fucks up our brains that that before linear writing. We have very balanced kind of a yin and yang is balanced kind of kind of worldviews in many cultures that had succeeded up to that stage. He goes around the world in this book and I think he pushes the thesis a little too hard, but I really like it. And he says look at Greece, for example, pre alphabet Greece and post alphabet Greece, pre alphabet Greece you have Diana badass goddess of the hunt, you have pan and a whole bunch of characters Bacchus, there's a whole there's a whole pantheon of free alphabet Greece that's different from post alphabet where you have what men giving birth from their head and thigh. Women are deprecated and there's a, I've said before the pushing aside of the divine feminine is one of his plot points, which I really like. But, but the alphabet might in fact have been part of our problem, in many ways, even though it's given us the ability, like Michael's background is a wall full of shelves. Julian was showing us books and his bookcase Bill Anderson talked about books and has books right there in the background books are everywhere kens got some book a bookshelf shelf right behind him. CDs. That's your CD bookcase. That's one of one of three. Holy beans. So that's what happened when you didn't when you got rid of your TV in 1990. Yeah, I just I read listening music. Yes, I love it. Julian, please. It's going to mention that the history horse story thing is more than a pun because it's actually now memorialized in the computer graphics history project. They could easily be lost on a list of female monster mathematicians and I never did not want to see them get relegated just because of their gender. And then as you were talking about history becoming linear that's another thing that I'm fighting in this computer graphics history project, and then there will be a lot more to show as it gets developed over the next eight months. Because yeah, the ideas and I think Edward Tufty has talked about this also in his ransom guilt PowerPoint, the idea that everything can be shoved and funneled into a single stream is just not reality. There's no way to make things easy to try to deal with but we have the technology now where we don't have to limit ourselves to the anachronisms of the last two millennia. Now I'm extra interested in your conference. Very, I think you you inadvertently made a little slip there. Diana was Roman part of us to be grease. Oh, thank you. I'm not that good on the gods and goddesses so I don't I put them I misplaced them on the shelves often. I don't be careful because they don't get along. I don't think they like that about me. We'll go back and correct the transcript now. I shall. Judy, you just DM'd me in the chat. Can you want to either copy that into so everybody can see it or just say it out loud because I really like the idea. Well I was just thinking that it would be interesting. I fall into the category of spiritual but not religious. But it goes beyond sort of all religions in scope because it would be interesting I think to talk about spirituality in the context of honor for all things. Animal earth, air, stars, etc. Rather than the human need to frame in a human structure. That sounds like a good. That's a good overall topic as well. Anyone care to title it or condense it or Maybe what is spirituality would be a big open question. Are you there God. It's me, it's me, you. Maybe it's things like feeling connected to nature the rhythm of the trees or the cycle of the seasons or the, the change in the movement of the trees I mean it's a connection that is not human in itself, but it encompasses humanity but much more. It's an honor for all things. Yeah, I think is a better term than spirituality. I'm tempted to make. I'm tempted to make next Thursday's call title honor for all things. Sound reasonable. Done. Thanks Judy. Great idea. Sir Ken Homer. If thou hast a poet. Among thine books. It with us. I could indeed it. Perfect. I pulled up several poems during this, this call. But I think I'm going to go with Mary Oliver. When death comes. When death comes, like the hungry bear and autumn. When death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me and snaps the purse shut. When death comes, like the measel pox. When death comes, like an iceberg between the shoulder blades. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering, what is it going to be like that cottage of darkness. And therefore, I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood. And I look upon time as no more than an idea. And I consider eternity as another possibility. And I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular. And each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending as all music does towards silence. And each body, a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say, all my life, I was a bride married to amazement. And I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. What was the title of the poem, Kim? When Death Comes by Mary Oliver, I'll post it to the OGM. I put a link to a version of it. I mean, a copy of it on the web in the chat, Judy. The last link in the chat is the poem. It's a beautiful poem. Thank you. Mary Oliver is a genius. She is. Was, yes. Yeah, was. Thank you all. We have a nice topic for next week. Ponder and share. And thank you. Bye.