 This is the OGM call open global mind on Thursday, March 7, 2024. I've, we've been a little bit out of sequence because I was MIA last week and can thank you very much for hosting last week. And I think we're due for a check in so unless somebody would like us to go in a different direction altogether. I was thinking we would start with a check in and then see where that takes us. And I think we'll, we know all, all of us are experienced here. Ah, no sound. That's not good. Sorry, that was me. That's right. No, Ken Ken's reporting in that he has no sound so he's going to connect back in. So I'll wait for Ken to come back and then we can jump into the, the circle. Meanwhile, I'll say that as of super Tuesday this week it appears that the old duo is back as the candidates for this next election cycle and it is all so strange. You're muted. Careful about falling into the dominant narrative about old guys. That's true. Diversion from the substance and leads us to forget things like that Nelson Mandela was in his upper 70s when he became president of South Africa and etc. I'm less concerned about old guys than I am about the status quo and the way this whole thing is played out so yeah. Plenty of concern to talk about. Yep. No, it's just so much to worry about. It's a little time. Come on, Ken. Join us back. Come back, Ken. Come back. There's a big article in several of the Dutch newspapers today about the predicted third party candidates and the damage they could do. Mostly to Biden's campaigns as it was framed here but there are also some who might take votes away from Trump. Do you see any or hear any serious talk about third party campaigns these days? Yes, yes and very worrisome. The no labels party doesn't seem to have a candidate. They don't seem to have anything viable. RFK junior seems to be getting a lot of money from strange people and have enough money and qualified in a couple states where he might draw some votes away. That's kind of a problem. And then there's a couple other small pieces. Nobody's as big as Ross Perot back when he was a major, major issue right in that election. But Kennedy could do some damage. Yeah. I had always hoped to always in the last half year that Liz Cheney might become a third party candidate and channel lots of normal Republicans rather than mega Republicans away. But there's been no news about her in the media here in Europe. Hoping she and Mitt Romney and a couple other centrist Republicans would get together and actually do something substantive and we spawn a conservative party in this country that was normal. And that appears not to be on the agenda. Hey, Doug. Sorry to catch you mid blow. Good. Ken has not made it back in. Go ahead, Gil. No, I was just saying I was just observing that. No, Ken. Yeah, no Ken. No, Ken. I'm observing three, three, or maybe even four white beards. Stacey. I know this is a interesting demographic pickle where we find ourselves in. We just haven't gotten Jerry to shave his head yet. Yeah, yeah. Enjoy it while you have it. Stacey hasn't shaved her head yet either. She said that she's not gonna thankfully and thankfully she doesn't have a beard. My hair's always been like pretty thin but my hair is not my hair is not white. I'm just very surprised my hair is not white. So you're doing something right. The beard, the beard is white. The beard does come in white. Okay. Kevin, excellent. Kevin has joined. Kevin, we're sort of hanging out waiting for Ken to come back in because he had no sound. I have this funny feeling he's rebooting his computer or something like that. So we're just going to start in on a check-in round. I think we all know the ground rules for OGM check-ins so I won't worry about them and I will go quiet for a little bit and see who would like to check in. What's up to check in about? It's kind of interesting. We've set up this mash-up between impact assets and Eagle Market Streets, the CDC that we've done the fund for sole proprietors becoming job creators with. And basically it's flying off the shelves and we don't really even have it. It's kind of crazy. We can make any non-profits existing donor base feel like more powerful givers and be more engaged. And all these non-profits want to meet with us and figure out how to do it because it's giving to invest. And they all, and we can do it as low as $5,000. So our innovation was to make it tiny and available to anybody. And you can do it, you know, from your civic club to something you care about or your Sunday school class or your eighth grade environmental science class. But what's crazy is that everybody who hears about it knows exactly what they want to do with it and they're going to go out and do it. So I'm hiring somebody who we're getting an FAQ together and we're doing a class on it on the 20th in person and on Zoom. And I'm hiring somebody who will go around to, you know, civic clubs and churches and non-profits and explain it. And so that's all. Kevin, can you explain, I'm just feeling a little dense. Can you explain traditional person donating non-profit versus what you're doing for that contributor? Yeah, so where's your last Kevin? Yeah, usually, yes. Usually you give the money and it's gone. In this, you give it and it comes back because it's gone out as a zero interest loan. And a scenario I was talking to somebody about today is they need $10,000 in insulation to lower their monthly heating costs by $150. So we can take a cut of their heating costs and they can get $75. And probably what we're going to do as a standard is let you keep the money for the first year, whatever you're doing. It's either cutting deferred maintenance or it's a capital expenditure that's small that you can pay off with something. And then you get two years to pay it off, the $10,000 that is purely that or it can be as low as five, obviously. But then it comes back when it's paid off into the individual account of an individual. You can get a sub account at impact assets is $3.5 billion donor advice platform. And you, so it comes back and it's your money to give with again, so you gave $250. And in, let's say this three year cycle in year two it starts coming back to you so you can give it again you're more powerful you're effortlessly more powerful. I think that's a feeling people will like the people will like feeling effortlessly more powerful. And is there an intrinsic on the initial give on the. Is it framed as a loan or is it framed as a contribution is framed as a loan. It is it is a loan that is expected to be paid by they have a year to use it, and then two years to pay it back. There isn't the tax deduction dimension. Yeah, you get a deduction when you open the DAF account at impact assets. Okay. It comes back into your little private family foundation that can fall as soon as 50, but to go out you need to partner with enough other people to get 5000 hours out. So one thing that could happen is that an undifferentiated group of donors to, you know, feeding program why become a coordinated giving circle that is evergreen. And so they're more engaged because they feel it when the money comes back. They can decide to keep it and, you know, give to some other nonprofit. The money can't go back in their pocket, or they could recycle the money at this thing group that they already care for. So it works for groups who care, who gives, and it makes them more powerful givers. I'm going to break them a little bit more because Kevin, I think we're really interested in what you're saying. Maybe two questions from me Kevin one is, I've seen, I've heard you name this many different sorts of things. Does it have one name you really love that we can kind of address it as because I've heard watershed fund and a bunch of other kinds of The fund would use it. It is, it is right now the mashup between Eagle Market Streets and impact assets. It needs a better name. You know, it's the give to invest platform. So it needs a good name. And then what you're describing is very similar to microfinance where loans are repaid and then like with Kiva the loan circles back into somebody else's loan, which is terrific. These are larger loans. These are smaller loans. The idea is they can go out at $5,000. Well $5,000 is larger than Kiva. Kiva, Kiva's like by a cow. Yeah. Yeah, well the problem with Kiva is that you need 25 friends with $25 to get up on the Kiva platform. So with the accelerators that I work with, not one entrepreneur in either border or up in the business bootcamp in Oakland had 25 friends with $25. So Kiva is actually an exclusive platform. You need friends and family with money. You mean to be to accept donations on Kiva. Yes, to put your project up there. You need 25 friends with $25. I was working with two different minority led accelerators and not one of them had one entrepreneur with 25 friends with $25. Wow. So it's the friends and family. That's why I've been working the friends and family gap for about a decade because of that fact. Yeah. And so this, you get a deduction going in with Kiva. I think it comes back to you and you get to decide this goes into your donor advice. So it stays in the giving world. Why don't we proceed with checking and we can come back to this if we want to at the end of checking around but thanks. Thanks for the explanation. Yeah. Is that clear enough. I think so. Okay, great. Thanks. Well, I can do a check in, although it's very different than than yours Kevin. You're working with practical things to help people have a more a better quality life and I'm working with perhaps more conceptual intellectual things. So I'll start off with my story. I'll say I'm only going to be in today for about an hour because it's it'll be six o'clock or quarter past six when I leave, and I want to be on the democracy call after that. And I'll also say I haven't been here for the last two weeks because I was in Iceland that the rethinking democracy conference. So I'll perhaps save that for the next call. And last week I had two visitors from New York who stayed five days with us. And that leads me into what's on top of my attention at the moment. It's about how you create knowledge and meaning and understanding in conversations. And the importance of the language you use the importance of the place a conversation is held. And that relates very much to the Japanese concept of bar be a which I usually translate as a shared context, and other people might say it's a moment of time and space which is given meaning by people. And I've had two workshops about it in the last couple of days. But the reason that's really top of attention is that on last Thursday evening. A very remarkable conversation took place between my two visitors and myself. The guy, the fellow is a cousin of mine from New York and his partner is a is a woman who runs a very special art gallery in New York. And we had a conversation lasting almost three hours with a remarkable clarity and a remarkable degree of trying to co create knowledge about questions like what's the language we need to understand the physical universe. The person is a theoretical physicist. What language do we need to understand what makes one work of art, a timeless masterpiece and thousands of others just something that you see and perhaps walk by. And we went at it in such a way that it seemed that we were not talking with each other, but we were talking with the space of the conversation. A physical space, a mental space and an affective space. And nothing would be contradicted. It was totally in the spirit of yes and even when each person might have said, I don't understand that at all. That was part of the conversation. And after three hours, my wife came home from her, her bridge lessons, and she felt what was going on. And when we wanted to invite her into the conversation, she said, no, let me just listen and do my own thing in the corner of the room. And it went on another half an hour until the moment was right. And as we might say, the bar of the space invited her in. And when she was in the conversation, it went on again for another hour. And it was such a powerful experience, which I'm still trying to understand. I know a lot about bar. I've been using the concept for almost 15 years and although it's a Japanese concept, I've even given presentations about it in Japan. But it's something that you have to feel with your body and grasp with your mind. And well, my hands go out and they're open for other ideas. And one last thought about this. The Japanese visiting professor of knowledge science and collective creativity who I did workshops with feels that bar can only be created in physical co presence and not online. And many, many experiences of having a bar online, a lot of them being experiences, for example, in OGM calls. So she and I are going to be in contact online, obviously when she goes back to Japan. And when she comes back in the autumn, we're probably going to give a kind of workshop about whether it's possible to experience the same bar in physical co presence with people or and online with the same people. I've got a lot more to say about it, but I'll leave it for that at the moment. I'll check in. Now that I have my computer back up after after dropping something on my ankle, I'm in a little bit of pain now but anyway. So this, I was also way last week I was at Kevin's neighborhood economics conference. And one of the things that really stood out for me is that there was that bar there. I didn't have the words to use to explain that. And I kept explaining to people that the energy was different because there were a large concentration of people, in my opinion, that truly were there to see how they could elevate others, as opposed to lots of conferences where people are going, what opportunity can I find for myself. I personally think that that's what the difference was, there was a certain resonance there. And I'll just mention because you brought up language there was a thoracic surgeon on the panel who actually said before she didn't have the language. So she was seeing what she was seeing that pertained, but she couldn't communicate with the different groups because the language wasn't there. And yeah, I thought it was a fabulous conference, it really was. And I guess Kevin spoke a little bit about it while I was trying to fix things. So, that's my check in. I've been thinking a lot about recurrence and emergence lately. And I've heard it in a lot of the conversations of our elk in various forms seem to be focused a lot on emergence, how does the new emerge and I realized that we also, we depend a lot on recurrence on stability on things that are repeatable and reliable. So I'm thinking about that a lot in general, in the context of the process of transformation. And also in very practical terms in my own life and experimenting with what with creating more structure and rigor. In my practices as a way to allow the immersion to emerge so to concrete cases in point. Excuse me. I'm now in the spirit of the flow guys, waking up getting out of bed and hitting the keyboard to do my to do my the creative writing that I never get to do on a normal busy day. And a few days ago, I thought, wait a minute, people, I know professional writers have have a words per day target. So let me add a words per day target and I thought, you know, I know people would do 2000, which is beyond my reach. I thought 200. I thought, let me just start with 100. And so for the last few days, I've written at least 100 words a day. The first thing in the morning. And it's cool. You know, and it's a it's a recurrent structure that's allowing for emergence. So that's sort of one piece of it. I've observed in my business activities, you all know that I'm doing a lot of one on one coaching. And I came to the assessment recently that I'm doing it as an activity, not like a business. And if I ran it like a business with the expected recurrence of structures activities results on some kind of steady pace, something interesting might happen. So I'm moving into that noticing resistance. I woke up this morning realizing that it's time to reread the war of art. Brilliant book by Stephen Pressfield. About creative process where Pressfield identifies resistance, not just as a mood or an attitude, but as a force in the world that is designed to kill you. That is there looming over your shoulder all the time ready to smack you down. And a creative person needs to be able to recognize and deal with that. So that's alive for me right now. Really interesting book. I highly recommend. And other thing very much on my mind and I imagine this would be a topic in the in the democracy call is. I find myself being pulled away from my grand theoretical concerns, the very practical matter of how do we prevent amaga sweep in November. So, we can talk about that in the next hour. And last, but not least, I think most of you, most of you have heard me talk about Fernando Flores. Philosopher, mentor of mine for the last 10 years. Fernando is launching his last year of training programs this afternoon. If any of you are interested in knowing more about that, give me, you know, ping me in the chat and I can tell you more about that 3 to 5 today Pacific time you're all invited as my guests. If you know, people might be interested. This is a deep. Ontologically grounded language based approach to being and change in the world and in my experience has been enormously powerful. For me, so. Yeah, that's the that's the 2021 details. I will I can post in the chat a PDF of the current program she'll do afterwards. Thank you. Yeah, he's got an update for 2023 24, I think. Yeah, not for the faint of wallet. Yep. Not for the, I don't know that's the current price and as with everything in the world, there are, you can make requests and offers. Not to diverge too much, but I was invited into his last program, which was $18,000 and I said, I can't afford that. What can you afford? I put a fourth and offer. They said, we don't have a match. So. And that was after, after that was after being told I could be a teaching assistant. And I've since found out 3 people that I know are being teaching assistants at no cost. So I'm a little. Nipped about that. Honestly. Okay. Got it. And what I said still stands. I don't know what happened. Can I wish I'd known. I'll follow on. I had a really interesting phone call with, or a zoom call with Jordan. The other day. I said, all right, so good. Yeah. He had mentioned on a call. That he had done this large scale infrastructure work and, you know, he's working with all these different entities. And I said, oh, I really want to talk to you about collaboration. And, you know, he's worked on dams and skyscrapers and, and he was telling me. The most dangerous part of the project is when you're digging in the earth. Once you reach the ground level and you start building upwards, it's way easier. But when you're in the earth, you don't know what you're going to find different substrates water, you know, fault lines, all these things. And, and I just I thought that what a marvelous metaphor. We're trying to bring together our unconscious to build a foundation on which we can to reach a foundation from which we can build upwards. That's the most dangerous part. That's when it's fraught with someone's going to say something. You're like, oh my God, I can't believe that or how can you think that way. And it just really struck me as a beautiful metaphor. And I talked about plans and how, you know, he would make all these plans and plans never, ever work the way you think they're going to. In the business world, everything's about plans. They say, you know, failure plan is, is planning to fail. And his take on it is that the plan is there as a guide to teach you what you need to know. So when the plan doesn't work, you don't go, oh, the plan is not working, we have to, we have to figure out how to make the plan work. You say the plan just taught us something new that we need to now incorporate so that we're in a curiosity and learning mode. And again, I just was like, this is someone who works a lot on, yeah, planning is invaluable as someone who works a lot on collaboration. This is a great reframing for me. And so that's, that's just been on my mind a little bit the last couple days. Also thinking a lot about soul. I did a call last month for living between worlds where, you know, we started off with this idea of Ticum alone, Ticum alone, which in Joseph Campbell's the hero of the thousand faces he said it's the repair of the world soul through your soul site. And for me, soul is what connects me to the earth. And as I, as I look at what's going on the world, you know, I'm, I'm very cognizant of the fact that most modern and modernist to the wrong word because modernity is. Hundreds of years old, most contemporary peoples have no initiation experience of actually being connected to the earth. Indigenous peoples, you know, you go through some harrowing experiences that let you know you're nothing in the, in the face of the universe and yet you're something. And you know that there's a there's a great deal of fear that comes up in initiation initiation and when I went through my initiation. I was scared shitless so. I think we're headed for some big cultural initiations where there's going to be tremendous fear where there's going to be. Things that are going to force people to reckon to to deal with the things they they don't want to have in their consciousness right now. And we'll need some kind of emotional infrastructure and cultural infrastructure to deal with that that seems to be missing. So, there's a lot of talk on these calls about, you know, being world changer and finding our way to strengthen and resilience. It often focuses on technology and processes but it rarely comes down to what's the emotional infrastructure, what's the cultural infrastructure for dealing with the stuff that we're going to deal with. So that's a big question in my mind right now. So that's where I am. Thank you. I'll check in. One of the things on my mind, one of which is the junket that I just came back from in Bahrain which I talked about at the top of the call, which had me thinking about why people do but and influence and how do you, how do you polish reputations and what I could figure is the cause of this event was PMI Philip Morris International had some marketing spend and has a long standing sponsorship with Scuderia Ferrari, which is one of the auto teams for the formula one. And that's how I ended up going to Bahrain is that I think they're they're sort of the money and the reason behind the whole thing but I so much of the event didn't really pencil out in some sense and I'm still puzzled about that. Then we've got the governance call coming up at that 10 and Gil you had written and I meant to reply to your note to the list, you had written that we should really just worry about how to put out the fires to make sure maga doesn't sweep the next election. I'm intrigued by that I certainly think that that's an emergency and I think we'll talk about that in the next call. But I think one of the reasons we're in such a crisis is that we're completely missing an actual rethink and reconnection. And one of the of the tycoon alarm type that Ken was just talking about, we're sort of missing that entirely so tactical attempts to stave off the calamity are just worsening the calamity, in some sense, is the feeling I have. And I would love to find a middle way or some other sort of thing but but to me the. One of my new friends who's more conservative than me he says look. If polls tell us that most Americans agree with progressive positions on abortion and on a bunch of other things, then why aren't the Democrats just running the table everywhere, why aren't they large and in charge with majorities everywhere. Why is this even a contest with Trump etc etc. I'm not running the table because there's something badly broken seriously badly broken, and my amateur attempt to sort of circle around and see if we can't think about governance, and sort of put some structure to it some, I don't think somehow is an attempt to say there's something fundamental we need to figure out about how the whole process works, and how we're collaborating to make a better world. And it's not it ain't working right now. And a piece of the protest a piece of the reason there's a fire on the, on the crisis clinic as it washes over the waterfall is that we're not recognizing those parts of it. I think it's that there's a, there's a fun conversation there about not very fun issues but I'm looking forward to that. And then I keep coming back to how do you explain how to be in the world as the future unfolds in this sort of weird clumsy, sometimes dangerous and scary way, and how to be in it in a way that improves the world as we go through it. Years ago for fun I bought the domain up keto.com, because my sport is I keto, and I thought what if you combine the concept of uplift or upward spiral with the notions of I keto and turn that into a fun martial art or something like that. And, you know, up keto is a practice where everything you touch is improved by your presence, or at least that's your intention because it's really it's often really easy to think you have good intentions and still screw things up royally but that's the general goal of it and I think one of the, one of the topics to address and thinking about up keto is what, what would it take to actually do that and I think there's lots of interesting conversations to be held there. Yeah, Ken found the crisis clinic the large the Gary Larson cartoon which is the thing I was actually exactly pointing to. And that's all in my mind because there's. We're on, we're in that crisis clinic right now and feels like, and weirdly, the crisis we're trying to save off is not, in fact, the set of crises that we should be collaborating to and to to avoid or change which might involve climate involve cast crises and a whole bunch of other things we're trying to we're trying to avoid an electoral crisis and other things around voting and democracy, when in fact we need to focus on other sorts of things so that's a lot of stuff all at once but thank you for that. So I guess I'll bring up the tail. Just sort of a little bit of a straddle between Hank share. And Jerry, what you're raising just like what might be a different angle of attack or orientation. And so I'm finding myself much more focused on. I guess, thanks by construct which I'm not familiar had not heard but I'm living in more and more frequently in more and more diverse sort of interactions collaborations and other and the feeling sensing into connection and understanding without any attachments without any without any of me being the living the sort of center concern or orientation but just sort of feeling sensing into what's the hit in the center and there's somebody in this community that that you know we've had a weekly coffee clutch now for going on a year. And I'd say nine months and we got to a place of transcending attachments the egos the old forms came to a separate piece about language where there were things that were said one way by one and one way by another, but we're pointing at the same thing. And we're just now establishing a kind of flow that really enables seeing where the differences are in positioning and context and orientation not in an oppositional way, not in a power power afflicted way where both of us are focused in the same sort of center of gravity from a from a fire and water stamp we know what gets us up in the morning why we're focused where we're focused and spending our time and attention or spending it on but recognizing sort of different the difference of the pole that he has to be doing what he's doing and that I'm experiencing and what I'm sort of focusing on their parts of the same whole if that makes sense but they're subtle differences in orientation and and yesterday we had a conversation where we surfaced at the differences but I you know I said to him I said I really think I'm a I'm sort of a pre stepper you're actually looking to energize and stand up a collaborative ecosystem like a thing you're looking to birth something bring something in manifestation and I'm more centered on contextualizing the thing you're birthing getting the story together as a way of in service to and in in help of the constituent elements in the thing you're looking to cohere and and and bring into existence and I was completely complimentary it was completely generative it was completely out of emergence in that moment there wasn't any bring in a whole rear view mirror in or projecting a whole future anything in it was in the moment of and the difference of that energetically and experientially subjectively you know was just completely different like in this in a whole being embodied way in a mental body way in an energetic body way was just a very different and the sensation was of being balanced across all of those all those energies so being one and being different at the same time and to get there the biggest single thing for me experientially was shedding attachments and shedding constructs and shedding nouns like really getting out of the noun game and getting out of the intellectual abstraction academic science game like really putting all that stuff aside doesn't mean it's dismissed or discarded it means it's present but not required like not needed in the moment of getting to that sharing of understanding so with that I'm complete I don't know whether any of that made any sense or was even remotely comprehensible because it's sort of not a thing of language that I'm trying to describe but anyway for what it's worth Stacy's got a question for you and Stacy you're muted not a question but I think everybody's checked in and I just want to add on so when Doug said being one and being different to me it attached Jerry to what you were saying because when you were talking about a keto and this might not what came to mind is like when you're doing something on the computer how you make a copy of it and you leave that original there and then you take the copy and you change it because I think uh-oh Stacy we're losing your connection Ken you're muted Stacy try turning up your camera example like Gil made a point about resistance Stacy we missed almost everything you said can you turn off your video I know and you were eloquent and right on it and you froze like this we lost you we lost you entirely so if you kill your video it's likely that the audio will go through pretty well or just put it to sleep try again and start killing your video just put it to sleep go ahead so you didn't hear anything at all we heard the start of what you said and right as zoom will do right as you really launched into it you froze okay let's see if I can remember I know that Doug had said about being one and being different and I was trying to say how Jerry when you were speaking about the a keto part what was flashing in my head was this idea of when I'm doing something on the computer before I change something I make a copy of the original and how important that was and then I went on to say that it's very easy to see two sides when they're totally opposite but when they're like the same but different it's harder to see those other sides without feeling like you're negating one or that one is better they're just different conversations so as an example Gil was talking about resistance but then when Ken talked about his conversation with Jordan he brought up another time of resistance and sometimes that resistance is there to stop you for a good reason so even to like that's just the example that's coming to mind now but there are I'm going to stop now because I'm all frazzled with the camera and whatnot but I think that there are definitely some conversations to be had about things that seem the same and acknowledging the different pieces because not that it changes the conversation but they complement each other and if you don't separate it then you just get like a moshmash of everything instead of like if you think about the yin yang symbol if you just mix the black and white you'd have nothing like you have to sort of let things reorganize for the right time and the right conversation I'm sorry I don't have better words to explain what I'm trying to say thank you that was good and thank you for diving back in and giving it another go anyone want to come in back? Doug is nodding but I don't know if you want to come back in you're muted Doug yeah the Stacey you sort of nailed it if the underlying premise if the underlying context is that we're not in resonance alignment and part of the same whole the opposite of that is we're in contention we're in disconnection we're in adversarial mess to greater or lesser degrees if the underlying major premise is we're all connected we're all in the same boat headed in the same direction good better indifferent as that extrapolates down into the details and the weeds and the shrubs the fundamental underlying contextual premise difference in that changes everything it literally changes everything because I'm coming with excitement and curiosity interest and energy I'm not coming with my fists up trying to win or survive or whatever the polar version is and how to how to catalyze a reawakening on a felt sense level of what I see in you that I see in me and vice versa seems to me the sort of critical difference in shift and intrinsic opportunity in every moment between whatever factions and people there are recognition and acknowledgement of I'm you you're me like whatever the it is in the center let's figure it out and I have been accused of all sorts of naïvetés and delusions and being a simpleton and all that for saying that kind of thing many times over my life but the bottom line is I still stand by it thanks Doug I just want to draw a piece of what I think you're talking about and see if I can take it in a direction that's fruitful here hey Scott we finished our check-ins if you'd like to check in you're welcome to do so but we're sort of off talking about what came up during the check-in round I will have one when it fits excellent good I will pause in a second and you can check in I've hit a bunch of initiatives recently that are trying to create more civil discourse or whatever else and often the language that they use is language that I'm pretty sure from my naive outsider's role that people on the right that are trying to destroy discourse are simply going to laugh at and not accept and not step into it just no like if you start with inclusivity and diversity and stuff like that they're like yeah sure whatever these are trigger words that cause them to pull the ripcourt early and go because that's not whatever then I think it was in last OGM call or something like that Gil was it you who told the story of the Aikido story about the man on the subway I think it was yes and so you're muted so we're having mutitis today really bad case of muti everybody's like forgetting to unmute I'm trying to keep from seizing the camera when other people are talking I shared the story and several of us shared different versions of it yep cool and briefly for those who missed it drunken man who looks a little dangerous gets on a subway car threatens a woman from the back of the car oh and sorry and Aikido guy who's rising in the ranks is in the car like kind of eager to practice his Aikido and then just as he's about to go try to neutralize the drunken guy voice comes from the back of the car and says hey what kind of sake what have you been drinking and the guy says sake all my wife and I like sake and they start talking and I need a tiny little old man yeah and by the end of the ride the drunken guy is sort of crying under the arm of the tiny little old guy and Aikido master realizes where the real Aikido was practiced that day on the subway train it was the old man who said hey what have you been drinking which was a point of commonality right for me the thing that leaps out of that story is that the opening gesture the opening salvo is one of connection and commonality it's like hey we can both tell you've been drinking what do you like to drink and you know wife and I also like our sake and let's get talking and that's an opening gesture that is hard to refuse in some sense that makes a lot of sense that walks in at the right level I don't know there's a bunch of different ways to say it and so I'm I'm concerned that there's a bunch of earnest people with really interesting frameworks great frameworks that are framed in language that will not bridge that divide that will not cross the chasm that won't get won't get there and a bunch of people trying to prove facts or do whatever else when a lot of the story is emotion and membership and loyalty and faith and that worries me about discourse in general as we walk into this dicey eight months left until November or whatever the math is because we're already in three damn it five months left are you serious six months ah this sucks go ahead Gil so I have an invitation Sherry let's all take a deep breath and let's all take another breath very quickly just spin a tail just spin a fable spin a story like the Japanese subway story about the political cultural conflict in America that you just described what would that look like if it looked like the Japanese subway story well I've been trying to spin sub pieces of that fable for a while since Trump started campaigning in 2015 into 2016 and a piece of that just dive right into it don't tell us about it just tell me a story right now I'm trying to come up with a story that doesn't sound like a trope or like a thing so don't try to come up with just start speaking Doug has a thought I have a really small one so my wife and I are in Home Depot we're in the garden section and there's an old guy and he's clearly really hurting and we sort of caught his eye and he caught our eye and he was wearing a MAGA hat and I asked him how are you doing he was like well I just had gallbladder surgery and my wife is down a gallbladder she was like I know what that's like and we were connected and we had a nice conversation and we had recognition of each other and the MAGA hat part of him never came up and you know the domains of difference were as big as the Grand Canyon on many dimensions however we all got gallbladders some of us went down and we've all been on the back end of some surgical procedure and know how much that sucks when you're trying to get back to living so that's my example and unfortunately I have to hop but I really love this and appreciate it and I'm asking the question more metaphorically because one on one it's understandable I've had that experience I became dear friends with a Trump voter some years ago energetically similar to what Doug was talking about and one to one I can see it and living room dialogues a few people together I can see it but metaphorically what's the subway story for America now so it's not Ken's cartoon but something more transformative than that this is a serious and open and curious question I appreciate it there's a piece of me that immediately jumps to an apology like hey America we're really sorry we fucked up a lot in the last couple decades and we'd like to listen and make amends and figure stuff out together like not ignoring you not bypassing you not whatever else but that's kind of where my mind goes to go ahead Stacy it looks like you want to jump in I was just kind of breathing but yes I will jump but I will because to me it's more there are people that are very emotional that get offended very easily on all sides and everywhere and to me it's about separating them out and moving towards the middle and finding those people to have the conversations regardless of what side I'm embarrassed to say this because I always am judgmental about people that watch reality television but I accidentally found my way to a reality TV show that was about trust so I could not resist it was fascinating but what's clear was fascinating for me because I was able to predict what everybody was going to do and it was a lot of fun but I did catch myself once when I saw one of the women showing compassion for another woman that was driving me crazy when she recognized why she exhibited what I just call nastiness but the point I want to make is that most people are not good at seeing complexity and that includes complexity in other people and I don't see any way to pull everybody into a conversation where that skill is required so for me the best thing to do is try to find the people closest to the center to move even closer and what I mean by the center is away from the emotion and more to the logic so when I see people that say somebody was talking and somebody gave an answer and then the person said that's so rude I'm blocking you and I said what did she say that was rude and then other people came in and said yeah what are you talking about we have to call those people out because too many people will listen to other people and say oh yeah that person is rude and that somebody who later was called the angel in the group she was voted off first and why because somebody else who reacted emotionally to her saying something very honest and standing up for somebody else didn't like it so again we have to divide the people that are not able to think logically and are too emotional and that's not women and that's not men you know thanks Stacy Scott please hi everyone I'll save my check in thing for perhaps a little later so something a reframing which I know we all know one of our favorites so something that struck me and has continued to strike me it was a couple years ago I learned I was introduced to the big five personality model which appears to be the most robustly studied personality model that's actually one that was not alright thank you Ken so there's a little support for that I'm not saying it's the end I'll be all but what was most interesting to me about this was I had heard that there is a correlation between politics and political alignment and what the correlations were high orderliness predicts conservatism, conservative is easy for you to say orderliness is a subset of conscientiousness which is one of the big five and high openness correlates with liberalism and the way that this was was introduced to me was how many walls should there be between things how many walls should there be between things on the high openness side there shouldn't be any walls there should be a free exchange across ideas countries people groups whatever any category should be should have permeable barriers on the high orderliness side it's the opposite bring on the walls we want clear divisions between our categories there's no gray between A and B and the interesting thing about it is that in certain situations it is going to be better for all of us if we are more one way more open we have the permeability we have the sharing of ideas we have and in other ways other times it's going to be better if we have high orderliness we have less sharing across boundaries let's talk about COVID for a little bit we don't want to be sharing everything all the time and the problem is that we don't know which is best in which situation which is why we need to be able to communicate with each other and say I think we should have more walls in this situation I think we should have less walls in this situation alright well let's discuss this but the reason I bring this up is that a lot of the comments that I hear in this group my knee jerk reaction is you're someone who's high in orderliness and you're not going to convince them because personalities have found to be fairly stable over across time they might change over many many decades or a lifetime as we become older we generally become more open you know but things things happen like anyway that my point being is that there's a divide there that is fundamental in the nature of how we perceive the world we actually see it as if this is better or this is better and it doesn't have anything to do with who your leaders are or any of that stuff it's just fundamentally which one I think is more the way we should be and obviously it's a bell curve it's a distribution and so it's super helpful for me as a framework to help see why it's difficult to talk because someone who is saying the border should be open is going to have a difficult time convincing someone who thinks that the border should be closed for reasons that are so fundamental that they're much deeper than politics so anyway that was my that was my thought there thanks Scott Scott I'm intrigued by what you've said I'm not familiar with the big five model I'll check that out later but I'm intrigued and perplexed I guess so you're speaking of these as though they are fixed categories that people don't change and they're fundamental and don't change but yet you're saying also that as people become older they become more open all the common wisdom is that as people become older they become more conservative so there's all that very very quickly it's in the space of a conversation such as Stacy's describing or several weeks you're not going to have that kind of movement okay anyway I'm going to follow these links and poke into that a little bit more but I as I listen to you talk about it's not like how many walls some folks don't want walls but it strikes me that one of the most fundamental organizing principles of living systems is semi permeable membranes neither fully open or fully closed but open to some things like membranes that cast certain things and block certain things but also will change their permeability under certain conditions and that model is very vivid for me as a way both in general and it's a way to hear what you're saying so I'd like to see how those things intersect as I had mentioned the big five one of the interesting things is each one of the dimensions is on a bell curve so there's high ordered linear snow distributed across populations so again most of the people are going to be in the semi permeable you know based on their on that distribution and did you say that this is the best or one of the best of the personality models and if so it is the most robustly studied and validated real science minded not MBTI made up but somebody who didn't know what the hell they were talking about you know it's statistically derived is linguistic based which you might have depending on how you think about it you might have an issue with but I found it to be very interesting in that both sides of each of the five dimensions have evolutionary utility which is why they both exist gotcha and is ocean and canoe are those acronyms of the big five corrects thank you guys and then from my brain Cambridge Analytica used ocean to target voters back in 2016 so back to your question Jerry is why aren't the Dems using it I'm not so much asking why aren't the Dems using ocean to do this analysis I'm sort of saying why do the Dems think fundamental about how humans cooperate to make decisions if you if you address why this will protect your boundaries and which boundaries are important to keep you might create a bridge if you if you acknowledge that instead of trying to say tear down the walls you're saying here's these walls are serving us here's how they might not be serving us which is us bringing the openness side into the conversation a way that can be understood potentially and and again I think you'll you identified this already that but you didn't use the word so category would be a wall because any category is a boundary between you know it's it's real it's conceptual it's anyway so for the last three years or so since I've known about the big five I've seen it play out and it and I've never yet heard anyone talk about that the way that those two correlate with conservatism and liberalism so and then back to Scott for chicken if you'd like so the reason I jumped on today a little bit late was that I had something happen and Jerry you've talked about before about dipping your you know ladle in the stream of information and things like that and I had a very visceral experience that made it I thought it was really interesting so as a Christmas present to myself or no birthday present I bought a new camera which looks like an old camera which is why I bought it looks like a camera that I had 40 years ago and it's just wonderful because it's brand new technology except it it has the old aesthetic and it has all these wonderful dials and knobs and it's got knobs and gears and shit yeah it's very touchy and I like all of that and it's it's a refocusing on the aesthetic I just instead of taking pictures of my phone I want to take I want to take a I want to make photographs I want to see the world photographically I want to walk outside and say it wasn't that lovely instead of walking outside getting in my car and driving away alright so at the same time I also got a pair of binoculars and these are much more powerful than the lens on my camera they can really I can watch a little squirrel from out my window and what happened this morning was that I saw a little squirrel and I grabbed I stood there and I thought okay and I went to my little office and I wasn't sure which to grab so do I grab the binoculars now the binoculars are going to pull me in and I'm going to get to see those little squirrel really close I can see the little furs and it's just wonderful but it's gone all I'm doing is is dipping my ladle in I get to see it I don't get to remember it I get to kind of remember what my impressions of you know my impressions were of that but it's absolutely fleeting lots of detail but it's gone and then with the camera I can take a photograph but I'm further away it's more of a representation but I can view it later I can revisit it later and I'll remember that maybe I won't remember but actually there's all this detail that I couldn't see because I used a camera instead of binoculars and it was just a really instantaneous reminder of all the notes I take and all the things I collect all the memories of conversations and all those things kind of split into well I can sit there and take photos of it and I can take notes of it and that's my camera low resolution but captured for later or I can be fully present in great detail but it's effervescent as you said evanescent so I wanted to share that because it was just such a it seems like it's been a theme as we go through is how to capture a conversation how to capture a moment and in that moment I thought you know what I'm not sure I can capture low resolution or I can fully experience it but I can't do both I can't do both I had to pick binoculars or camera so that's my check in Thank you, thank you for that I'm going to go back to the earlier part of the conversation I'm a little feeling a little contrary today and a little cynical three things have come to my attention in the last last few days one I watched Rustin the other night fantastic movie I really recommend it today's Heather Cox Richard's in post was about the March to Selma and the people who were killed and beaten and then I got an email from a list I'm on that's talking about a book called the roots of white supremacy and how so there's always there's often in this group a lot of spiritual perspective and by that I mean getting up above things to see that we're all one and that's a lovely perspective to see that we're all one but it's ungrounded because we're not all one in the sense of there's very very different people out there and if you look at what happened to the red people and the black people in this country you see the incredible ugliness of that and while I love to talk about dialogue and being together and finding the places where we're all one we have to recognize that there are people who absolutely will kill you because they don't like the way you look or the way you sound or the things you believe and in today's Heather Cox Richard she talks about it took the shame it took front page news of showing beatings and people who had been just black people who had been completely destroyed and beaten and mangled on the front page as women and children to shame this country into taking action and you likes to point out we're historical beings we carry this with us this is not something in the past this is very much alive and everybody and so I just think it behooves us to bear that in mind when we're talking about coming together there's some really ugly shit out there and a lot of maga I don't like to use maga Republicans because I don't think I don't think that you can actually name somebody as that you can say there's a meaning towards it but it's not who they are it's an ideology towards and some of them absolutely absolutely will tear down everything to have their way they are not interested in a common good they're not interested in democracy they are not interested they're interested in being on top and oppressing other people from what I can see and I don't care I was talking about that a lot and maybe we should or maybe it's too too fraught a conversation I don't know but I'm just reminded of how challenging this is you know and to tie this back to something I spoke of in my check in the opposite of the spiritual perspective which is rising up above and seeing everything as one is soul which goes down it's associated with water it goes to the low places and it divides into self and other male and female part and whole and from that perspective things are not all one and that's creates a tension every single person and the integration comes in the heart of how do you live with that tension how do you live with the fact that one part of you sees everything as one and the other sees everything as divided and it's a lifetime's work to try and reconcile that integrate that in ways that bring about the kind of tenderness and the kind of healing that we so often talk about which is very very challenging and you know some days I'm pretty much on the we have a chance and some days I'm like today I'm on the you know it looks pretty freaking Raymond week and I'm seeing Mike Nelson just joined I'm reminded that a few couple months ago you were like I'm just in this really cranky mood and then things are looking really bad you know and I think you're different now but I'm having that just having that going on so I just thought I'd throw that in just to be a little bit contrary slow plot slow process of contagion Stacey I think a moment ago when I think when she was saying that you have to sort of separate between the people who are intransigent and those who are you can actually connect with was saying a piece of what you were just pointing to Ken and Mike if you want to quickly reply to Ken then I'm going to go to Kevin and Gil Yeah just real quickly I joined very late just to announce that I am swinging the other way in the pendulum we got some very important reports out last week on US technology leadership and that's generated some good discussion but that's only the technology side at the same time we saw the cable cuts in the Red Sea by the Houthi rebels who closed down 25% of the traffic going from Europe to Asia and there's bad policies going forward but I think it's got everybody here currently carrying our hair out is this prospect that Trump is going to actually possibly be in charge of our foreign policy and that has me swinging as far as I've ever been on the other side but anyway thank you for letting me break in and Ken thank you for being a little more optimistic and we'll see where we can get. Love that thanks Mike. Kevin Yeah interesting I don't think about big things like that don't worry about them I don't know they just don't occur to me but one thing I've done going back to what Scott was saying I went into cafes getting some coffee but not you bringing my iPad or any device just bringing a notebook and a pen and I'm finding it really a good discipline to not I'm a deep iPad person when it first came out I got an appointment at 6am at the Apple store on the first day I was on the TV news because I was the only person out there without a facial piercing or a tattoo above the neck and I'm leaving my iPad behind because I am a master at it you know it's just the natural thing to me and I'm just on the notebook having to think about the gaps between what I'm writing about we had a phenomenally successful conference but now I have to think about what's next and what I do in the place where I could live it's just the same thing and so it needs a lot of space and so I'm realizing I don't want to be in a contextual complex digital space I want to be on a notebook and just writing so that's what's working for me and I don't know why I don't worry about these big things other people worry about it's just it doesn't occur to me other people are on the job yeah you know I don't see that there's a lot of need to do all that I don't think there's a lot of need to do all that big worry I don't think it really helps anybody that's my perspective well according to Sapolsky we have no free will and it's all just going to play out anyway so there we go let's just be nihilistic about it Gil yeah I guess I'm predetermined not to read Sapolsky yeah I really appreciate the teachings from Scott and Kevin very much resonates deeply I observe that for me not only does my attention change but my writing and my voice change if I'm writing this way or this way or this way or this way the physiological entrainment of thinking and writing is really different so Kevin loved the story but in the remaining minutes I want to go back to what Ken said how to come at this this is really difficult complicated territory because we talk about I mean several of us have talked about it's like excluding the people who are that way and Ken you talked about the people who are that way you're going to kill you and you know we are all of us capable of horrors and we've seen that throughout human history Germany was considered the most civilized and advanced country in Europe and Nazism and the Holocaust ensued so I think none of us are very far from this on the one hand on the other hand damn what you've raised is something I've raised a bunch of times and are living between worlds calls there's this call to bridge the gap to find common ground we're evolutionarily wired to notice difference and that's adapt and we're also evolutionarily wired to live in wall harmony and that's adaptive and whether the Home Depot story or the subway story or my experience with my Trump voter friend that opportunity to find common ground and bridge the apparent difference and find something is really strong and important and if somebody comes into my house to kill my wife I'm likely to try to kill them first not sit down and try to find harmony if someone is hit by a car and is bleeding on the street you know someone is going to turn a kit them rather than talk with them about nutrition or health building or better traffic policy so that's I don't know I don't know where to go with that that's some of how I think about this present moment there are times and you know and Ken we've also got your story about the Monk who goes upstream and places the pebble so we live in both of those stores it's all I got Kevin your hand is up but I think that's a lag from earlier unless you wanted to jump in again if not then Stacy please and then maybe to Ken for a poem yeah so let me clarify that I'm not saying don't speak to the people that aren't like us I'm talking about when Scott's talking about that bell curve find the people that are in the center of that to have the conversations with the other thing is you know when Ken talks about from a spiritual point of view and then says we're not one part of that spiritual view says that that thing we're seeing that we hate is that's another way to look at it spiritually so again there's not one way to look at it spiritually so I just wanted to clarify the benefits of ignorance by Hal Sirowitz if ignorance is bliss father said shouldn't you be looking blissful you should check to see if you have the right kind of ignorance if you're not getting the benefits that most people get from acting stupid you should go back to where you always were being too smart for your own good somebody's got a lot of distortion there a lot of noise coming in if everybody will mute I'll read it again if you like the benefits of ignorance by Hal Sirowitz if ignorance is bliss father said shouldn't you be looking more blissful you should check to see if you have the right kind of ignorance if you're not getting the benefits that most people get from acting stupid and you should go back to where you always were being too smart for your own good I grabbed something short because I know we're over time so yeah thank you thank you that's one of my favorites so far nice choice Ken I will see some of you in a half hour thank you very much