 Cool. So it's 7am. Hank turned on the recording. It's Thursday, November 5, 2020. It is two days after election day in the US. We had the workshop just last Thursday. It is important that we go back and curate that and sort of go into it and figure out what we have and what it's going to turn us into. But wait, there was an election just two days ago. In fact, this thing appears to still be in process. Before you leave the curation piece, though, or the digestion piece, I would love to help with consolidating, creating diagrams, flowing, because that's part of what I just love to do. So why don't I set up a call for, let me just ask first. Tomorrow at 8 or 9am, is that a convenient time for us to sort of start meeting for things like that? Okay, why don't I set up a zoom for 8am to start? West Coast, which time? 8am Pacific. Hey, Charles. Hi. Just to quickly say, I'm not around probably because my kids are coming for the weekend tomorrow, but in general, I'm in for this stuff. And you've put in probably more effort than any of us in digesting and transmuting and improving the work product. So thank you. And Jerry, I also think that we should talk a little bit on this call about a possible kind of set of buckets or set of frameworks that maybe instead of, we have to do some processing of the whole, but I think that there may be ways of processing component pieces that emerged out of the conversations. And maybe we can test a little bit of what those pieces are with this, you know, with this group because I think everybody's been thinking about that as well. And that may give us the ability to divide and conquer a little bit. It's a perfect suggestion, but I'd like to add a dimension to it. I should say and I'd like to add a dimension to it. And that is, it might be more helpful given the complexity of processes. If we started with processes rather than buckets, just from the standpoint that I think it would help our organization have that sense of connection and be a little simpler than the sort of endless groups of categories of topics. Can you give me, can you help me understand the distinction that you're making between buckets and processes? Can I just offer that I hear process as communication and I think fundamentally just sort of agree on one of the channels to talk about it, like I guess discourse, there was a kind of consensus about using discourse for this, just whatever follow up so that there's continuity in the conversation. For me, that would be the fundamental process. And Judy, that's what you were referring to. Yes, I'm also wondering though, because there's a, they're sort of like, take a category, make a bunch of identify the things you need to accomplish, build the steps to those outcomes. But from a process standpoint, do you start at the end and the feed streams to it, or do you start at the category heading and the derivatives of it? And I'm not, I don't know how to verbalize this very well, but it's the flow part in terms of the movement of energy that I'd like to see some way to capture if possible. I think Mark has something to add to this. Yeah, I'm a bit, I think I understand we all want to direct and digest and make diagrams, but I feel that the groups were still trying to digest their own experience. I mean, we all had reporting from the groups. And I know in our group, we are having a lot of processing of what happened and further asynchronous thinking. And we do need to each digest as a group and report to the larger group from the smaller groups again, because we have further thoughts from the first exchange between the groups. And I think this needs to be reported. And I think we need a meeting just for that before we know what the buckets could be, whatever, we classify buckets. So this could be an optional exercise for each of the teams to reconstitute themselves and just hold a call at their convenience soon to do, to A, process what they were working on and see whether they want to report it back to the whole meeting, and if so how. But B, to also do a little sensing from what they heard the other groups doing and move toward that a little bit and see if they can do some integrative work from their own perspective as part of their report back in. I think that would be really helpful. And Judy, I think part of what you're looking for is process on this thing that we're talking about, which is how do we take what we learned on Thursday, but I think also part of what you're trying to figure out is process first on how do we move forward to organize ourselves into buckets, for example, like buckets is a great cause, but how do we decide buckets? And how does that turn into teams and work and how does that turn into milestones and reporting back? Is that right? Yes. And there's a dimension of process that's culture. What is the way that we accomplish things? How do we agree as a collective to move the flow in various directions? How do we allow the flows to split? And how do that kind of thing? And so far, more or less like a slime mold. Go ahead, Matt. I don't know if I like that analogy. Well, which is actually a good analogy, but still, go ahead. There's a there's a there's a choice point here. You know, we did one kind of one cycle of work. And if you could, if you think about it, we did maybe two cycles of work where we individually did some work, and then we started to share it, and then we started to, you know, to process it. And I think, Mark, what you're saying is that so one choice is that within the teams, we need to do a second iteration or a third iteration, right? And that's and that and that iteration is that is in a whole is like the holistic OGM system, right? The other way to attack this is like if we were doing a multi-day design shop, the second piece that we would probably do here is we might say, it's like a Rubik's cube, you design the whole, now what we're going to do is we're going to design a cut this way. And we're going to break up into teams and do parallel cuts of different kind of different strata. And then you might rotate it and then do another round where you design the cut this way, right? And then you take it and then you design the whole again. So, you know, the question that I have right now is one choice point could be we stay within the same kind of groups and we do an iteration at the whole. The other is we stick, we get into new groups and we do an iteration of the whole. The third option is we get into new groups and we do a cut of some of the pieces, some of the elements that we know are important, right? That emerged out of that first iteration. And that's when I said the word buckets, I'm not talking about perpetual teams and all that stuff. I'm just talking about it's a slice of the whole so that we can get a little bit more detailed about that slice and then we can put them back, you know, we can see them and put them back together. So I think this is a little bit of a choice point. And I know I'm also recognizing that Thursday's call have people on here that are, we're in a part of the workshop that, but have, you know, contributed, you know, really valuable ideas, whether through discourse or through these calls, you know, to this to this question as well. So I want to honor, you know, I kind of want to honor that as well. So that's a process question, you know, Judy, if that's what you think. I like what you're asking. I think the more that we mix things up into different ways of examining them, the more richness there will be in the ultimate resolution. So that's a great suggestion, Matt. Lauren and Charles. Oh, I was just wondering if we could offer anything. We have a lot of minutes on order. I don't want to step on Pete's toes here. If Pete's are doing the translation, but we could throw it in there and it could do the translation. And I would love to go through the materials if they're available someplace. I couldn't be there because I was moving, but I would love to help process the information and to listen to what went on. And Hank and I haven't gathered all the recordings yet in one place. Go ahead, Charles. Just to offer a variation on Matt, what the kind of options you were laying out, which is maybe a combination of staying in the same groups for another iteration and then mixing it up. Yeah. I'm comfortable. And I think this is the wonderful thing about OGM is it's a bunch of, in some ways, facilitators facilitating facilitators. And it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. And I don't have any desire or need to control all of this. I'm sure you guys feel the same way. And yet we all have puristics and processes and other things that we want to bring. So this is, I think, part of our culture defining Judy, right? It is. I'm on the side of continual mixing because I think that you add richness because you'll put a bunch of people together who are working toward the same whole, but had a different vision from their group. And we will get that blending of those to a more holistic view. And then if you do it again with another mix, you're starting to really refine the picture of the space and the possible topics and flows. That's my bias. And the reason is because we all love falling in love with our own models. And if you hold groups too closely together, what happens is you fall in love with the model and then we debate those models versus if you keep that mix, then the ground isn't settled, right? So I would just offer that I love all this and there's some good stuff in the chat there as well. And I'm just trying to strike a balance that's good, that works, and that doesn't sacrifice the coherence or continuity of what's being emerged in the initial iteration of phase. And an interesting analogy. In our case, in our group, we were playing with this wholeness egg. The egg model and metaphor could be like, we need to form a thicker shell, a little more of a protective shell before we, you know, I don't know. So just whatever works. But as long as we don't lose some coherence in the first phase. Yeah, maybe it's a both, maybe it's a both and we give people a choice. Other thoughts on this? Somebody was just speaking up. Sorry. Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. Hey, howdy. Go ahead. Hi. So maybe we could identify the models which came out of the first round of discussion. And then because I remember there was something with lots of circles in it, which looked very interesting. And I remember in our group, we had some interesting looking arrows and, you know, communities of Noah's. And we could then give people the freedom to explore any model which they found interesting. And we could then allow for continuity plus, you know, like re re looking or new looking at those models. And we could have maybe one placeholder from each team sitting with the model to do the show and tell and refine the model through group discussion. Maybe that's maybe we could even go through several of the models if we had time. Just a thought. And we could judge them like a science fair project. Most of the sessions. I'm hoping that what we're in is a generative stage where we're not judging and choosing between ABCD, because the world is really big. And the more that we explore the multiple dimensions, I think the more coherent our overall end vision will be. End vision will be a very OGM E statement. And also there's a bunch of people in the room here and on the list who weren't able to be in the workshop. So in a sense, we have to brief everybody else on the best of what we think we got through to kind of catch up and synchronize together, which is partly why I was saying that if the teams can reflect a little bit on what they heard from the whole and then bring that back to this whole, I think that'll step us forward a bit. Lauren. I just kind of got stuck on that. That's a very OGM E kind of statement. And actually, I think we could explore that. And what was it about that statement that was OGM E? And out of all the things we've said here, what are the most OGM E kind of things that fascinates me? What can we decide? What are OGM E kind of things to say? And I think, Lauren, what you're drawing our attention to is the birth of culture for a group, any group that's organizing itself to try to achieve something. And I think when we say that something is OGM E or that something is googly or that something is name your older organization with an actual strong culture, what you're calling out is what's unique about the culture and what sort of matters in the culture and all of those kinds of things. And here, it's a little bit said tongue-in-cheek because there's been such a focus on estuaries and emergence and natural metaphors and so forth that when we do something that feels a little bit like emergent, it's like, oh, that's OGM E2. Or also, when we're talking about how do you record and link up this massive information that everybody's generating, that feels OGM E2. So there's a little tongue-in-cheekness to it because it's like a massive, inchoate, hairball information that we're going to try to tackle. What? But I like exactly where you're pointing, which is how do we... And this was part of our mission in the workshop was how do we distill what OGM is good at and special for as opposed to the Game B people and the Theory U people. And there's large crowds of people doing earnest work, solving interesting problems, like how are we different and what do we contribute? And I think that goes directly to that. So here's something that's Kiko Laby and OGM E and Future Howie and it's about harvesting. And what we're trying to do for us from the workshop in our respective groups and as the whole OGM group that did the workshop and then for the others that are here and elsewhere that were not in the workshop, then it's harvesting. And I just wanted to invite everyone to the 23rd of November in North American Europe, Kiko Laby's having a harvest party. And so it's about harvesting what we've been doing and what we got and what's on the feast table. And I think this is a useful metaphor, call it a natural metaphor, maybe not. It also relates very much to the Pyrogogy Wrap as a pattern. And so we'll be wrapping or harvesting what we've done, but also the protocols, the processes of harvesting itself. And there's the bridge back over to OGM. Check. Other thoughts on this? I think OGM E keeps shredding your cat alive longer. Yes. Well, you know, I see OGM as open mind and that what characterizes us is a smart conversation from many points of view that are not integrated and pushed into a single silo. And that the way we would interact with a client, for example, would be to invite them or invite us into their conversation where they get to watch us struggling with multiple points of view where they can identify with the parts that are meaningful to them. So the idea of pushing OGM into a single system is not attractive to me. And I'm interested in OGM as process or verb or intention that is in some sense a little bit contagious so that there would be in the middle kind of an organizational structure and a core that is trying to nurture that thing, but that OGM Eness spreads and that in some other community, they would be like, oh, let's do something really OGM E now. And that would mean something to them. It's like, let's use the Xerox mean something to everybody right now. Right. Let's Xerox that. Oh, we're creating a new world in OGM Eness that I think will be very catalytic and infectious and engaging of a larger community, which is a big part of my vision of OGM. The metaphor that that occurs to me just as you started talking was that we are weavers or quilters or whatever you want to call it. And we still haven't figured out exactly what the needles are and what the yarn is made of. But we know that there's a big ball of yarn out there and that there's a whole bunch of people trying to make sense of the world by weaving, but that we've broken a lot of social ties, we've broken a lot of trust, you know, science is being undermined, but the world is really messy out there. But we still know that we need to reweave the fabric of society and the fabric of decision making for corporations and all of that. And so I think part of our process here is to discover, like, what is the new knitting look like and what is the loom look like that we're hanging these things on and how do we find threads and make that make very different yarns and threads compatible? And how do we turn this thing into an attractive tapestry rather than a hairball? Yeah, and, you know, along those lines, you know, some of the things I heard out of and, you know, obviously some people, you know, weren't in the workshop, but just to sort of bring people up, some of the things that I heard is that there was some energy around what one of the languages that came out around questing, like actually doing something, right? You know, there was one team that said, look, we need to get into the action because it's through the action that we will discover kind of who we are, whether that's, you know, whether that's repairing and helping to rebuild the, you know, the place right next to UJ, right? And thinking about that, whether it was working on the food system or the education, like people had energy around kind of, you know, doing some getting into the quest, right? And then letting that quest define, you know, the system and the support and the mechanisms and the world behind it. I also heard that some people were saying, well, I want to, I think we need to get into the, get into the lab and just start building tools and processes and, you know, whether it's, we want to, we want to perfect personal knowledge management or we want to talk about, you know, other, you know, ways that we share information and those things that was, there was sort of like the lab that is in support of the quest, right? Think about it as like, you know, for James Bond fans, it's like Q or the Bat Cave or some people wanted to be in the Bat Cave inventing, you know, new tools and toys and all that stuff. I did hear, you know, and Judy, you were mentioning, I did hear people talk about needing a nerve center, needing, needing something that is, you know, helping to connect dots and hold this, hold some level of requisite shape and structure so that we can continue, you know, to operate and that nerve center would define, you know, Thursday calls, Tuesday calls, whatever those things are, the mechanisms and all that kind of stuff, that that was, that was important. And then I heard that we need, we need a manifesto, if you will, we need a shared, a shared point of view of our intentions of, you know, of when we say, oh, GME, what do we mean by this, right? We needed that. And then the, and then the last thing that I really heard was this notion of how do we manage our network? How do we grow our network? How do we invite new people in? When do we invite new people in? And, you know, what are the things there? You know, those are kind of like, for me, different categories of stuff that needs to, needs to be advanced. Now, we, you know, part of that, the manifesto piece is also this worldview creation, part of the nerve center, I think is, you know, some governance things about, you know, what are, are there rules of engagement so that as we get into projects, and do questing, how do we, you know, share resources and time and appreciate each other? So I think that there's, there are things that live underneath that, that still need to be worked. The question is, do we need more of the whole conversation before we start to focus in on different pieces? Or do we, can we do both? Can we have a whole conversation and focus in on pieces, right? Well, what will we appear to have jumped straight into this conversation? I know, and I know people want to talk, probably talk about the election too. Well, some of us do, some of us don't, I think. What I liked about Ken's question was that it really wasn't about the election. It was about, and Ken, correct me if I'm wrong, it was about the election has, it's sort of a punctuating event for a lot of things and resets where we are and maybe resets our expectations of what the next several years will look like and what is possible and what's going on in, you know, what the background radiation looks like. And to discuss what that opens up for us, like what, and where we're individually, we think we might orient in that space. And I'm probably taking your statement in lots of different directions Ken. So why don't I pass it back to you and then to Klaus. You know, Peter Block says a really good, a very good question is slightly ambiguous. So what's important now is however you want to meet that, wherever it touches you, what is important for you right now? I do agree that this election and the way it's dragging on and the anxiety it's producing is producing one set of feelings in me. And then there's also the fact that I'm very surprised that it was so close. So I thought it was going to be very different. And so clearly, we have to quote a former president, misunderestimated the reach and the brand of hatred and divisiveness. And I think that's a wake up call. It's really to me feels very important to start looking at, okay, if there's that much division, if there's that much us and them going on, then there's a different weaving that needs to go on. We are not doing a good job of listening. And by we, I mean the big we, not this group here because I think we're all very good listeners. But culturally, we don't have a culture of listening to people, especially their stories. Because there's so much suffering going on, as Doug pointed out a couple of calls ago, there's so many people who are losing their homes who have lost their jobs who have lost loved ones. And that that has been weaponized and turned into a bludgeon that has divided the country right down the middle to the point where it's razor thin and winter take all. That's not the kind of system that I want to be participating in or supporting. And yet I am at a loss of how to, how to turn that around. At least in this moment, I'm just in kind of shock. And so that's, that's some of the things that are showing up as important for me. Thank you. A brief thing then to Judy, and then after everybody will just sort of signal to me as you'd like to jump into the conversation. One of my ahas yesterday after seeing an article that said the Lincoln project didn't move the needle like a couple points. I was very, very entertained by the videos and the ads of the Lincoln project, which is made up of a bunch of conservative pollsters and strategists who got together and said screw this, we're never Trumpers. They just started making a series of ads and putting them out there. Same thing with the Midas touch and Republicans for, I've forgotten what it's called, but there were like three or four major groups that kept turning out really good ads. And I think I realized yesterday that they were making ads for the left. They were entertaining the left, they weren't permeating the right. And then it dawns on me that advertising is consumer mass marketing communications. They were sort of trying to advertise their way to victory, which is why all the campaigns were asking for so much money from everybody and why this was the most expensive campaign in the US ever. Yet we have this knife edge decision, partly because both sides were pouring money into it, but partly because this is not discourse or governance or community or anything of that nature. This is combat. And it's consumer mass marketing combat, all of which led me to a realization that what we're doing in this little group right here about opening minds and having conversations and sharing what we know might be more essential than ever. It might be really interesting to move forward. And then the subsidiary thought, which is that advertising tries to produce the quick win. It's like, we need your money right now because we're going to throw ads at Georgia because this is happening. And what we're doing here is like slow, connective process. It's like roots reaching out to each other and figuring out what do you need, what do I need. It's deep listening to people who we haven't talked to before. It's all of those things are part of this process. And so I was like, well, hell, I felt like doubling down on this project and these conversations with you all because they seemed much more important than they had to me just even like a couple of days before the selection really hit us. So that's my own take. Judy, to you. When I thought about responding to what is important now, I was looking at this big picture of a divided nation antipathy escalating and that what was really needed was healing and sharing and developing mutual understanding because polarization isn't usually very helpful. And so if there's a process, it's important that we embed that healing quality in what we do. And so I took the, you know, healing is most important and the big system is chaotic at best. So my sense is that this is a kind of good time to start local and reach out. Not necessarily local like only your neighbor, but whatever you're already connected to, to put the energy toward those groups that's healing and questioning and bringing multiple viewpoints to a shared understanding because it's difficult to move off the pool if there isn't a shared understanding. Agreed. Pete? Pete Finclough, that's fine. I think the country is deeply divided and that's something that is going to take a long time to fix and that's something we need to fix. I just wanted to mention in here somebody, somebody I know that smart and technically savvy makes the point or supposes or asserts. He asserts that a great deal of the vote count was actually hacked ballot boxes and not, you know, so even though it kind of looks 50-50, the actual votes may not have been 50-50. It might have been much different from that. Kass? Yeah. Ken posted something that he wrote here about Trump voters, which is, which really resonates because there are macro trends that are underway, which really drive this insecurity and divisiveness in our society right now. For example, artificial intelligence is in the process to take jobs from white color workers, bank insurances and so on. So this pandemic is accelerating this shift where companies are laying off more people on a permanent basis. These jobs will not come back. Unfortunately, like everyone else, I had hoped that the election would send a signal, you know, to return back to a sense of normalcy and fixing problems that we need to engage like climate change and social disruptions and so on, but that obviously is not going to happen. So we are in a longer period of disruption and divisiveness on the national level and even at state level. And we have at the same time an increasingly larger share of the population disenfranchised from this economy. And they don't see a way back. I mean, I don't know what a 50-year-old bank teller who just got laid off is going to do. So my sense is, and I think that coming back to what Kevin was saying earlier, I mean, the solution really is local, community level. And it has to be a shift in the way that we economically sustain ourselves. And I think it has to be in community. So the action is not at some national endeavor, but it has to be, we have to find some kind of macro structure within which a community can organize and synthesize itself. So that was sort of my thought process that came out of our meeting last week. And I think what Judy was saying, what Kevin is saying, you see this idea of we need to move towards local, but what does that really mean? You have to have some structure in organization to move into local. And the set of belief systems about what works, what doesn't work, how to approach, how not to approach, I think those things we have to sort of bake through as well. Kevin has been working on neighborhood economics for years now and is sort of deep, deep into this where the rubber meets the road. And Kevin, if you'd like to jump in, but also have Jay was waiting for the floor. But Kevin, if you want to explain some of what you've got. Yeah. In fact, we are just put the link to the presentation we're giving today to a bunch of loan funds. Yeah, we're working on an interconnected economy as opposed to an economy of rugged individualism. And all the economic innovations are de-financializing and keeping the assets local and democratically elected. This thing we're doing today is kind of interesting. It's a friends and family fund for entrepreneurs who don't have a rich uncle. So you need to, you know, if your uncle more gives you money for your startup, he's not going to attach your Toyota Corolla, right? It's going to be like equity. So we're making it like equity, but you get a deduction going in and you get lifetime income. We think it's going to be really valuable. And I think the other part that's interesting is that there are a lot of new community economic development funds that are trying to, you know, get capital to minority entrepreneurs, but they're not ready for debt. You know, they don't have collateral and they don't, they don't have two years clean financial. So this is revenue share that gets you up at that level and then you get debt in a couple years. So we want it to be bolted on beneath all the cities that are trying to do something about this. And they realize that, you know, the gap is friends and family. And we can do that in a really interesting way. We've modified something that was created by Stanford called a pooled income fund to let donors give but get lifetime income. So that donor, you can put it going for $100 or you could, you know, put the proceeds of your IPO there and avoid capital gains tax. So it's anyway, we're working on a bunch of other things like that. But we, I think this is a real easy one to replicate in a lot of places where people are already realizing that these debt funds don't, the people who you want to reach can't actually, they're not ready to tote the note. So it's friends and family for entrepreneurs who don't have a rich uncle. And this is one of many, I think locally oriented really great solutions. And this is at the finance level and other ones would be at the, how do you create structural incentives to shift from industrial farming to regenerative agriculture, et cetera, et cetera. But if we can sort of lather and repeat on those kinds of things, observing and evolving some general principles of our own about how do we do that? How are we helpful to you and, you know, that effort while figuring out our own secret sauce? Jay, did you want to jump in? Yeah, thanks. Does anybody else watch Fox News? Okay, so a couple, a couple of few of us. I do my best to go back and forth to try to listen and kind of track what, what the narrative is that is appearing. I think there's kind of a basic thing that I believe which is that the, the right is a much, much better storytellers in general than the left. Maybe like a level of a difference of like a, maybe an eight to a four, which is, which is pretty significant. The, you know, there's a gap because it's not necessarily, the purpose of the storytelling is not necessarily connective across the whole, the purpose of the storytelling is kind of connective inside the pod. So that it doesn't really matter what the other group feels. So it's, so both parties are using fear. One's using fear and they're both using fear as, as division. But Fox News and that kind of side is if you listen and you can like write off the, oh, it's your, the, the stolen ballots and oh that, you know, we get to, oh, what are you talking about? This is going to win. I just listen and I listen for what they're trying to say and how that relates to what the president is saying. And my concern is that we're, we're just, the goal here is, is the goal is further separation kind of radical separation. And so I know that's been on the march, but now we're at a moment. And so I'm just kind of in that place of not that it's going away anytime soon, but what do stories look like that actually cast vision instead of cast horror? And how does that relate to what everyone acts on on a daily basis? So that's, that's kind of where I'm at. And I'll, and I'll just add on that. I love the, that vision exercise that we did two weeks ago as well, the, the kind of looking back from, from five years and I'm curious about the context of where, where that's fitting in the process going forward as well. As am I, because I don't know that many of our teams in the workshop used a lot of that material in our work. And so I'm not sure that, I'm not sure that that much of our vision, our back casting from 2025, our future, our future histories are in the discussion yet. And I think those need to be filtered in as well because they, like, they were important. So let me go, let me go back to the question Ken posed to us. What's important now? Yeah, I'm just going to add one more phrase that the thing that really strikes me now that struck me when I was staring at the white face of George Washington cast against the Black Hills last month is it's a question of divergent evolution. So we're, we're, we're being reinforced into a kind of divergent evolution. And the challenge is, I think the challenge is to, to practice realignment, like radical realignment. And the process of that realignment involves figuring out distilled wisdom about what we see and how to act in the world. And then instantiating that as some kind of manifesto, which could turn into, I mean, Pete and Mark Antoine and a couple of us are working on a pattern language approach toward this, which would be basically small stories nested in each other and linked to each other that tell a larger story about how to go about doing things in a way that's sort of practical and community built. So we're going to, we're going to come back to the general, the general call here in some moment when we're, when we've got that ready, but basically say, Hey, everybody, we've got, we're trying to evolve a pattern language to describe what it is we do and what we think this is. So one second, Jay just asked, can I define story in which context you mean, Jay? You talked about nested stories. I'm really intrigued by, but I just wanted to clarify terms. I was, I was sort of adding what you had said about stories back into the notion of pattern languages and interpreting a pattern as a short story, which it kind of is. And those of you who are pattern aficionados, you know, you can either jazz hands or jazz hands down. But, but in a sense, a well sculpted pattern language around some domain contains memorable, retellable patterns, retellable stories. And so my favorite is light on two walls from a pattern language, which is a pattern language for designing villages down to homes, right? And that's the domain of that particular pattern language. So one of them in the middle, and this one has 253 patterns. But the one of them in the middle says a room to feel inviting warm hospitable should probably have light coming at it from two walls. And this is distilled wisdom of good designers. And now when you walk into a place, you'll be like, oh, that's why this place is almost working, but not quite, is that there's just one window on the street and there's no other light coming in. And it feels kind of dead that way. But light on two walls is like a short story. And it's like, remember, there was this exercise, six word stories, right, baby shoes for sale, baby shoes never used, right? That's the most famous six word story out there. And so a good pattern language is like a bat repeated and then woven together in a way that is intentionally easy for newbies to digest and then experience and then start applying. Scott, go ahead. Two quick things, one right off of what you just said, I noticed something I could be wrong. But I noticed that that Trump's messages tend to be a fewer syllables. His language is so one and two syllable words that they're just they're just easy for anyone to understand. And that that I think helps helps make them and they're very visual. The second thing I wanted to mention is a personal story about how we can get some of this stuff to spread. So I'm the oldest in my family. And I want to talk about mimicry very quickly. So mimicry is a social thing we do what other people other people do. My wedding was my first wedding I'd ever been to college was the first college I had ever been to when I had my first child it was the first child in my group that had ever, you know, out of all of my friends. And so I always felt like I was on the edge on the front and it always was a scary place to be. And a lot of what I see this group doing is saying, we're going to be the big brother the big sister going first. Because that's huge, I think for people I'm thinking about some of the things that that, you know, what we're talking about here. And I think, wow, this sounds like a great place to be over here. And yet, getting there. That's that's really scary because I don't know how to get there. And that's just my simple framing of that is that, you know, how do we be a big brother big sister someone who goes first and says follow me. This is safe over here. We've done it before. And Scott apropos Trump's communicational style. In the after the 2016 election, Scott Adams, who was a big proponent of Trump's. And before that election, he and Scott Adams is the writer of Dilbert the cartoon, right. And he published a series of really, really useful and interesting analytic articles about Trump style, and how the repetition of really simple things top things and I then based on that and a bunch of other input recorded a bunch of videos about trying to understand Trump. And one of the one of the things I realized was that in, in the week after the election, my buddy Al asked me so Jerry, what was what what if if Hillary had won this election, what was she going to do on inauguration day? And I was like, I don't know, make sure Pell grants don't go away. And then he asked the $64,000 question, which now doesn't seem like a lot of money. But he then said, so what is Trump going to do on an immigration day? He's going to build a big beautiful wall. He's going to block my, you know, Muslims from entering the country, he's going to, you know, and he had trained me in his entire goddamn agenda, which I found abysmal and horrific, but I had been perfectly trained in reciting the agenda. And that's about storytelling. And that's about that's about stories that are reaching in and latching on somewhere other than the logical rational brain about what makes sense to do what is the humane thing to do, like, like these are stories that bypass our humane instincts in many ways. And they're latching onto something else entirely. So and I think hacking these stories. So one of the more important thoughts in my brain is emotion and membership, Trump logic or reason most of the time. And and part of the reason that's part of the existence of OGM is that is that on the one hand, I believe in preserving memory, gardening at sculpting it into something that's useful later and ongoing, and that maybe the logic of that might be might convince people. And on the other hand, I believe what I just said, which is like, you know what, logic applies right out the window when agreeing with your logic means I might be ostracized from my tribe. And so we need to sort of figure that out can then pass. So some of you were saying just triggered a memory for me back in the 90s. I knew somebody named Fran PV, who was part of the Buddhist peace fellowship and author of an article called strategic questioning. And Fran had gone to Rwanda after the genocide and asked people, what happened before people started hacking each other up? What was going on? Rwanda did not have television, but they had radio stations. And the radio stations were broadcasting these messages of and by the way, if you can, we've lost you, you froze. No, Ken, come back. There is a gremlin inside of zoom that is bad. And as I listen to you having internet trouble with his service providers, yeah, Ken, if you want to turn off your video and go back like three sentences, this divisiveness of we're going to make an enemy out of people who have traditionally been seen as leaders. So your connection froze on us about three sentences back four sentences back. Sorry. Okay. So I'm listening to I tell you, the zoom gremlins gremlins are really good at this. Especially they notice if somebody's leaning in about to make like an important point and then that's right. It's like the death scene, you know, what you really need to know is exactly. And it's hilarious that Ken is still off the air here. Let's go to Klaus and let's get Ken back when his connection is a little better. Yeah, Ken, maybe you turn your video off. So, so there has been multiple studies trying to understand the mindset between what you perceive as liberal versus conservative. And it seems one of the defining differences is the capacity to handle change. And there are links to IQ that are connected here as well. So the capacity of cognition, the cognitive capacity of a person to handle multiple data points. But the overriding difference seems to be the ability to handle change and to become very upset and very insecure when change is happening too fast. And of course, everything we experience right now, even when you look at our own careers, right, starting with punch cards and then moving into an iPhone and the transition tool. There's a lot of people who are unable to handle that and who are now stuck in jobs that have morphed into technology that is beyond, is challenging to keep up with. But then also in the social environment, the way that you do banking, the way that you handle mail and all of these things, it is overwhelming a lot, the large part of the population. So Trump is appealing to that notion of saying we'll make it good again, we'll stabilize it again, we'll go back to making America great again. So he signals to this population that is so overwhelmed by change that we can stop this and we can go back to normal. A couple comments on what you just said, class. I'm leery of any overarching theory that says that conservatives or Trumpists don't process information well or are afraid of change because there are actually, some of them are trying to provoke dramatic change that the left is trying to avoid and paper over. So I'm unclear that avoidance of change is the overarching thing. And I think also that framing these people as somehow less able to cope. Oh, you piece of shit. I'll be thinking, can you back? You're unmuted. So that was the first thing that came back into the conversation. And I think that the Zoom gremlins are working overtime today. That was the topic. The next thing he'll be having a shower in the background you want. Sorry, sorry. I've been having all these network issues and I keep dropping out. And so I didn't realize that I was actually back on when I when it looked like I dropped out again. Oh, you piece of shit. Will you just shut up, man? That's the best piece of social commentary I've heard coming out of America. That was very OGM-y, Ken. Oh my God, that was good. So let me finish what I was saying and then Ken pass it back to you to see if you can go back and restart your brain where you were. Although I think you just fell off the call. No, you think you slipped into a different window for me. Okay. There you are. Good. And let me see if I can find my threat, which was I'm leery. So when people don't seem intelligent or whatever, like if you poke under the covers very often, they can recite baseball stats back to 1931 and they know exactly like if you find the domain that they give a damn about, they're perfectly smart. Like they got memory, they got quick, they've got whatever. It's like it's on deck. It's just hidden behind something because the thing we want them to perform on right now is uninteresting, irrelevant or whatever, or they're viscerally objecting to the thing we're asking them to perform highly on. So I think all of that is sort of swimming in our medium and I'd like to bring us back to what's important now and the way from the analyses and digestions because I think a part of what we can do together is these analyses and digestions as we sort of get into, okay, so how do we approach this group and we can set up an experiment and that experiment can go one off and try something and a different experiment might be in the same domain and try a different theory of change or a different theory of what's up and I think that's exciting and interesting for OGM to engage in and not that we have to invent all those experiments, but we can identify who's actually busy doing that and go help them do it and incorporate their learnings and their results and bake that into what we think we know and how we offer that to other people. So long way around a bunch of different thoughts. Ken, back to you in the booth. Okay, so this is coming at a totally different time now, but what I was saying is I knew this one friend, Peevie, who best known for back in the 80s, I think she was in Europe and she set up a table and two chairs with a sign that said American willing to listen and people would just come and talk to her and say, what's going on? She says, I'm just here to listen and she heard all kinds of things, but she went to Rwanda after the genocide and asked the people what was going on right before the genocide occurred and they did not have TV, but they had radio stations and the radio stations putting out these horrible messages about the other and what is really frightening to me is the othering that is coming out of the Oval Office with the horrible pictures that are happening in democratically controlled states and democratically controlled cities. Suddenly the Democrats and Republicans move from being the opposition to each other, which is we move through opposition. You can't move if you don't have left and right, they have to work in tandem. In fact, when I was in Kansas a few years ago, I asked everybody who was a red person to plant their right foot, everyone who was a left or bloopers plant their left foot and walk and they just went in a circle. We need both to move. It's really scary to me that there is this narrative emerging that is being gobbled up by many people that the Democrats are the problem and the Democrats are the enemy. I really don't want to be in a country where a political party is suddenly the enemy of the state. That's very, very frightening to me and I'm really concerned about how to counter that narrative at the local level. At national level, I don't know, but local level, I can talk to people. Jerry, you've often told the story of the black man who has all the Ku Klux Klan robes. How can you hate me if you don't know me? How can we hate each other if we know each other? To me, that's one of the most local things we can do is reach out and start talking to people that we might see as other. It takes a little time, gosh darn it, and it doesn't have instant responses like advertising sometimes does when it works or goes viral or whatever. There's a reason we use the word fabric to talk about society. We talk about the fabric of society because the warp and the weft of the fabric is all those little interconnections between humans. It's us sitting together over meals. It's us sharing childcare. It's us solving problems for neighbors. It's us doing those things. Also, in a lot of neighborhoods in the middle of the country, that fabric is much stronger than it is in urban centers where we're mostly aliens to each other. When your tractor burns and you can't bring in your crop, your neighbors will show up and they'll be like, all right, we got this and figure it out. You leave your keys in your car and all the things that we hear about are in fact still active in places that are not getting attention in other ways. Let me go back to the question of what's important now to us, given the sharp punctuation that this election is giving us. Doug? So we're clearly struggling here over what's the narrative frame that's most helpful. The one that I hold is not well shared, but it goes like this. The Democrats used to be the party of labor and they became the party of the professional class. And the result was that no, neither party represents the bulk of the lower half of the population. So people are really upset because there's no narrative which really deals with the situation as they feel it. The Democrats abandoned the large part of the population and that's a key driver from the past that leads us to where we are now. And if the Democrats don't face up to that in some way by kind of an apology for what the Clintons did in moving the country towards neoliberalism, the Democratic party is not set up to represent the population, even half of it or even a third of it. So that to me is the core driver of the narrative we are in. And the way I like to approach a problem like this is, where are we? How did we get here? And what can happen? And given that, what should we do? And Doug, I maintain narratives like what you just said in my brain, and I just sent a link to one about Bill Clinton brought the neoliberal agenda, which is connected back up to how the left bought the neoligible agenda and ignored the middle class and all that. And one of the things I actually enjoy is layering on narratives like that in this context that I carry. I love that. And conversations where I learn more about history or somebody else's idea about what happened when the Mongols hit the Great Wall of China and bounced toward Europe. And then everybody starts contributing things. Those to me are really exciting conversations because they change my theories of change about why things are happening in the present and how we might go about doing things in the future. And to me, that's very OGM-y. It's like sort of curating the story of how we got here and why we do things and what we should do together. And our tools to do this are still incredibly limited. So back to what's important now. Klaus? Yeah, I would argue that this whole conversation circles us right back to community because a community is where we have relationship and the only way to connect is through relationship. And building relationship can be done through helping and through creating support structures. I think the national conversation, even the state level conversation is so polluted at this point that we will not see anything happening at the micro level for some time. And what's cool is that we can see lots of things happening at the micro level, at the fractal level, at the community level, at the local level. Matt, then Hank. Yeah, I mean, I think I don't disagree that community and acting in a way that's kind of on the ground and living in the terrain is an important mechanism for change. We talked about healing. We talked about wounds being open. Neil, you referenced that you need to let them air. You need to show them to the light. There needs to be vulnerability. But a healing is this, in some ways, is this radical realignment that we're talking about. And you get that through real human-to-human connection and those things. I think at the same time, though, I'm really troubled by the fact that we have yet to define a meta-narrative that people can attach their own personal experiences to that are different than the meta-narratives that we currently have in place. And I think simultaneously, that's why I think the local global thing is a little bit problematic to me. We're dealing with a system that's been built up over years of time that have embedded mental models in them and these narratives that everybody is operating under. And we're all struggling to sort of figure out how to maintain those mental models and those meta-narratives through our own action. And I think they're just fundamentally flawed. I think human beings took a wrong turn in terms of our language and metaphors and mental models. And those things have to be reset and they have to be reset at the scale in which they currently operate. And unfortunately, we've gotten to a point where the scale of our meta-narratives are operating globally. They're things like the role of consumption and powering the economy. All of our growth was powered by this idea of an unlimited supply of and the unlimited use of resources that we pulled from the ground. And the reality is we've reached the end of that. And unless you fundamentally change, I think that's a problem. So while operating locally and having good connections and doing little micro-interventions, and Hamilton and I were discussing this and debating this the other day, I think the challenges, unless we fundamentally reshift the way we think as a species, we're destined to keep making the same mistake and perpetuate the same existence that we've been on, which is built out of the industrial age and built out of views of the way that science is supposed to be the cure-all for religion. And we're still holding on to all that stuff. We have to catalyze a profound shift in thinking, and we might have to connect locally with people to engage them in that profound thinking. Because I have a lot of friends in Michigan that I'm friends. Well, but I have a lot of friends in Michigan that are really close people to me that I know voted for Trump. And I know don't believe the same things, but we're starting to have those conversations. But until I have a narrative that resonates with them, they're going to have this unwillingness to change. And so I don't know. I think we have to start by defining an ethos that works for everybody. A quick thought before I pass the mic to Hank, which is through the three words I've heard kill more interesting projects are it won't scale. And my own theory on that is that I've got this thing I call designed from trust. And I wrote an essay called the two oh shits because when you hit systems that are designed from trust they seem completely counterintuitive and broken and like they're never going to scale they're never going to work, but they work like Wikipedia. The first oh shit is oh shit this will never work. Who was the idiot that designed an encyclopedia anybody in the world can come in and change. The second oh shit is oh this seems to be working. How does it work? I'd like a little more. Which is why I wrote Toxoflasmosis and when Harry Metzali. Because I think one of the best mechanisms for change is either I'll have what she's having at the scene when Rob Reiner's mom is in the diner and Billy Crystal you know Meg Ryan basically fakes an orgasm at the table in the diner. Remember that scene it's a memorable scene. I would like to have that happen socially everywhere so that by contagion and by picking up what people do people start changing their behavior. Toxoflasmosis is the thing that makes mice unafraid of rats. So it changes the rat the mouse's brain so it goes up and suddenly gets eaten by a cat and propagates the Toxoflasmosis bacterium or virus I forget what it is. Anyway but so so large scale theories of change that you then engage publics with don't work for me as well as engagement with the belief system that then replicates through contagion or natural propagation. And that then cascades into large scale change that I call adaptive scale because it won't scale is industrial scale or engineering scale or mechanistic scale and I've lost my belief in that as a general mechanism for for fashioning a better society because it it doesn't really work. But if you tell stories and and help people envision what their future might look like and then help them when they ask for help instead of coming in with your theory of change often that actually works in sticks. Right so I'm trying to figure out what does that look like as an operating system going forward. And to me that involves storytelling a whole big bunch both from the practical storytelling of here's what happens when you plant trees near a savannah and how you can read you know reversed desertification but also storytelling for the emotional engagement of what life would be like if we only did this other thing here. So Hank then have Hank Kevin Jay and then Harry. Hank's gone. Oh Hank's gone so sorry Kevin Jay Harry. Okay just one thing about gloom I was talking oddly enough I was talking about five years ago to eight episcopal bishops and they'd gotten this gloomy economic forecast and I came up with this line that I still believe and I said you know the times are too late and the situation too dire to be anything other than firmly helpful and that's still what I believe so fuck them all. Jay and Harry. Yeah two things first of all you know my belief my operating principle around this is that each of us has many stories that can build into one story with with shaping and refinement to hold those many stories and that each of us in our one bigger story can add together to make an even greater story in order to do that we have to orient ourselves around some terms and approach in order to kind of see what we use how we use that word in this in a similar way but I think we it would be a worthy experiment to figure out what our story is through our stories. Yeah I guess I'll stop there. I like that a lot thank you. Harry then Judy. Yeah so this may be a little like I mean a bit of a jump but I've just been listening to this and you know if I think of the dynamics of the system right maybe the question shouldn't be what's important now but what's going to be important in a very short time for some other timespan because I mean how long could it continue like this right dynamic systems oscillate so you know if your level of polarization was some kind of indicator then it would oscillate too right unless it was like damped or like a degenerate or I don't know something like this and I think the other thing which I really liked was the idea of connecting to people through stories and you know I heard the description of like love 2.0 or something as like when you talk to somebody and you have like a positivity resonance with them and maybe that's a it's a great way to you know like be a change agent to to sort of do that and finally when it comes to stories I would hate to hear the same old story again and again and again so maybe novelty is a hook for people and communities and stories you know so just some thoughts thank you very much that's great um Judy I just think that if we're going to attempt to take action there's a sense of cohesiveness and optimism and potential for positive outcome in this group that's a core value that just ties us together and a desire to make the world better for everyone but it's so disrupted that I don't think we can tackle it on a big scale I think it starts almost person to person with I want to be cooperative with you and I think there's hope that we can make things better and if we just could get that message spreading as broadly as possible because maybe if one person hears it they'll say to someone else you know I had a good conversation Tuesday with and and the gist of it was just this and it got me thinking that could be a positive infectious activity one of my favorite things that I saw yesterday in the insane tweet stream was a woman who had just become a representative in Missouri and got on the microphone and said hey constituents I am the newly elect representative and I love you and because I love you I want your life to be better I want to make sure you have clean water because I love you she just went on and on like a preacher and it was beautiful it was 40 seconds it was not long but it was really beautiful and um and she was speaking to everybody in her constituency but she was also saying I want you to have a better life you know life as good as the people who don't look like you right so she was also speaking to people of color but but it was a broad broad message it was lovely Lauren um you know during that Iraq war they they the US developed something called shock and awe which was like such an overwhelming force that Iraqis would just be pulled over and but anyway that's not a bad strategy and we certainly um how can I say this um we don't really have the meta narrative but maybe we can do um some kind of local mission and when I say local I mean something that we could problem that we could handle the problem that we could solve and do it amazingly for an example to point to um where we actually can do something amazing and we feel powerful and we shock people by the some little amazingness that's small but manageable brief excursion into uh history of war there's a book written called command of the air by a general an Italian general Giulio Duhet who's the father of strategic bombing he basically said we're going to end all wars because no country is going to like bombing like that we just invented the bomber and his conclusion was that bombers are going to just eliminate warfare because the people will rise up etc etc and it turns out that he was dead wrong completely wrong that we have dropped insane amounts of ordinance on Germany and Vietnam like we dropped more bombs on the country of Vietnam than we dropped in all of world war two and wow I got pardon and louse and loud yeah Vietnam and louse exactly um and and the people didn't rise up and turn against in fact you know we lost Vietnam so shock and awe to me is is what we try when we don't actually have a better answer and one of the reasons I don't one of the one of the reservations I have about the exo movement the exponential organizations movement is that the way their sprints work inside of organizations is through shock and awe it's like we're going to show them that the fourth industrial revolution basket of technologies is just going to overwhelm them and unless they change and start adopting them now they're dead and I'm like I'm not sure that's your best opening salvo but it sort of works like it loosens things up anyway um shock and awe is like really a strange uh new ingredient old ingredient new ingredient in this formula of how do you get people to wake up and change and I think a big piece of our conversation here is that is like how do we get people to change and we all have our own conceptions about that so Ken then one and then Doug so in my work over the years one of the things I've discovered that is among the most powerful tools in my in my kit is not talking but having people um spend some time eye gazing pairing up and just looking into someone's eyes for five minutes um it is amazing the stuff that happens when when that goes on and I think that's one of the most critical things that we can bring when we're able to be back in physical space together um that and I also have paired this with some of Joanna Macy Joanna Macy's work around doing a narrative of can you see this person as a baby when they first came into the world can you see them on their deathbed can you see the the sorrows that they're carrying and um can you can you understand can you get a sense of how great it would be to work with them with their brilliance with their intelligence with their genius with their ideas I've done this in in groups you know uh and it's really it changes I call it softening the the collective body it just it makes everybody so open and I've done this with people who are very resistant to come in and they're like you know and it's it is really really potent so I just want to throw that out that this is one of the things that is available that we can be doing it was a beautiful advertisement and I'm not a big fan of ads but there's a beautiful ad for a health system somewhere I think I put it in my brain so I'll find it uh where they walked through a hospital and then stopped at each character and told a little bit of their backstory of the character like the person standing next to you and the hospital had just received notice that they had like stage four cancer and the person over there was expecting a baby and the person over there had this and it's like everybody you walk through has their own journey and be mindful of this in our hospital it's just it's simple and beautiful um so thank you and and they're very lovely simple ways of making this bringing this into a room as you just described there's also this stuff from tv2 and danmark have you seen their their ads um all that we share tv2 danmark all that we share check that out it's really let's find those uh lauren than doug yeah oh it's kind of weird now because I was just kind of like briefly responding to your comment um but what what I was trying to express is just um you know we can't like fix the problem uh like a grand-scaled problem of two people uh a republican and a you know democrat maybe we could fix someone's Thanksgiving and and maybe that's all we can do right now maybe we can make one family's Thanksgiving like really awesome we might just have to live with that that's what we're capable of yeah and I think I think individuals have scales of change that they are more comfortable with and and there are people who want to change the entire system with the better narrative and write that's capital uh and there are people who go and help the family get fed the next we can have a a shelter um and and we find our ways into the system and and we aspire to affect the system at different scales but I think we have preferences and we we take action at different scales um doug okay I think we're talking as though ideas can enter into the current state of affairs and make a difference I think that's leaving out that events are going to happen that are huge first for example the failure of the food system or uh a small number of evictions with people just living in the street in front of our houses those are the things we're going to need to respond to but we don't have to start the story it's going to be going on and we have to enter into the fact that it's already happening totally agree and would love I'll go to Jay then Neil and would love to figure out how ogm could help resource those things that are going to hit us such that those situations are better prepared better facilitated better dealt with I don't know exactly what I'm what I mean by that but but how do we think ahead of what these problems are going to be and try to make help figure out who's doing it and make those resources more available uh Jay then Neil I also totally agree thank you Doug um I also am thinking about what kinds of events might on the shadow side occur in the next coming days and weeks um as everybody's glued and cortisol is like pumping and people are like we're gonna win or we're gonna lose and what kind of um you know what can happen in Nevada or what you know again like the objective of the current regime to to cause epic disconnection and how do you recipe that because you if you've got four conflicts that erupt in four different places and it's played over a million times and people look up and feel that they are surrounded by civil war for example just kind of shadow territory my fear speaking what is a remedy for that um so and I look at it as not necessarily ideas but kind of ideas about action and ideas about connection kind of going with the group so totally not exclusive I think it's a complete for me a yes and love that thank you Neil and Ken I'm sitting here in Belgium watching a lot of Americans talking about the collapse of their society and I'm sitting here watching the failure of your institutions I'm sitting here watching democracy bastardized I'm sitting here watching a country that's 50 50 on the knife edge of potentially civil war um you've got a center center west that uh is incapable of seeing eye to eye with the people on either side of them on the coasts um I'm seeing divisive tribalism and it pains me to my heart because the things you're talking about are essential but not enough all right and healing is not going to be enough this acceptance is needed you need to accept this has failed this experiment has failed you have to grieve the loss of that and you have to move on to something bigger and better you need to disrupt coherence compassionately in the words of Peggy Holman you then need to engage those disruptions creatively again the words of Peggy Holman and you have to renew coherence wisely now to renew coherence wisely you have to have some anticipated expectation of a potential design and to make that make that viable it has to actually meet and face reality we are in the midst of an ecological and social collapse we have climate chaos coming at us and your democracy has failed all right you're about to see the small-scale institutional sorry the small-scale individual implications of that now I grieve for you I feel for you I want to help you it's not going to happen through just small projects it's not going to happen through just big language it needs a vertical coherence between those that can operate with levels of complexity above those who can only do a garden and those who can only do a garden right and all of the levels in between and it's not to say gardens are simple it's been working in mind that's why I was late so we need to recognize the ecological implications of this this is a complex social system a living system a complex adaptive reflexive system and anything you can do to get people to reflect on where the fuck they are individually and where they fuck they are collectively and do something about that collectively the better off you'll all be we're watching from this side of the world in pain fear and grief for what you had what you have thrown away on your watch before these crises came along right and now the crises are here and I can't see it healing I can see small scale opportunities for people to be better individuals and collectives in a collapsing society and to me the anticipatory design of communities that might work a bit longer not just prepping individually that might work a bit longer is a critical element of this and Doug's model around garden communities and so on is one of those exemplars clouds of stuff at the regenerative agriculture level is another but the big picture core what are the ethics that we operate by and how do we reflect those and everything we do together are so critical to changing the narrative doesn't matter how many small narratives that I don't line up with the big picture right we can tell stories about hope but if we actually look out the window and see what's happening it's scary as shit and my heart is with you so forgive my passionate embrace I've sat here and listened to an hour and a half of fear pain and confusion and with a mix of hope and aspiration and optimism I think I agree with you Neil but I think also sorry Ken and Judy I'll pass it to you in a second I was going to wait for a second but I just put this in like I attended a Scott Peck workshop he wrote the different drum which was about community building and it was a really interesting workshop and his model his model made me think that basically stress actually forges communities that that most communities that think their communities are actually in pseudo community and that when things get tough they would leave they would sooner leave than actually help and and that stress forms the diamond whatever you want to call it but but that in moments of stress is when we discover each other when we have to help each other that's actually the creation of true community so I think we're being faced by a series of dilemmas including an uber dilemma of the polarization of discourse and the fragment and the shattering of discourse worldwide because it because it's a it's a useful tool for creating power for for holding power and and I think part of our quest here together is how to undermine those problems and how to how to feed solutions to one another and how to act differently in the world so that we can overcome these things but but at the end of that process we will have forged a better community because because had Hillary Clinton won the election in 2016 I realized afterward she was a steward of the status quo and we we would not have faced the stuff I ever thought in my brain silver linings about Trump and and one of the silver linings is he just showed us ourselves he he just opened up a bunch of conversations we would not have had yet because he just tore the bandage off the wound that was busy like you know separating underneath and and that's that's interesting that opens up all kinds of opportunities can then Judy and then just a quick response to that Jerry going to turn the bandage off the word is the vulnerability wound open to the air but you've got to admit you were wounded right secondly the having the conversation and revealing the system to itself is part of what I just did to you guys right because a complex adaptive reflexive system evolves if it sees itself in motion and it can evolve successfully if it sees itself in motion in systems context if it's the wrong context or the wrong story it doesn't matter what you do you fucked that is a term of art that I agree with entirely can then Judy and then we're out of the call so I wanted to offer a story from a friend of mine a few years ago I took a I was asked to teach a positive psychology course and I didn't really know much about positive psychology so I had to read a stack of books on it for I could do that and in the course of that I discovered that when I did my signature strength success that optimism was number 17 on my list which is not where I wanted it to be and I was told do not attempt to work and raise something from lower up to higher but I said you know although I'm generally upbeat I have this vision out on a time horizon of dire circumstances that often colors my short-term thinking and so I decided I would interview optimists people who are optimists and one of these is a African American woman who has done diversity work for a long time in her career and you know it has not panned out she says she'll first tell you know the diversity work I did in corporations failed it really didn't change anybody's mind didn't change anybody's policies you know it just wasn't working and I said you know how do you stay optimistic in the face of all the failure in the face of everything you faced I know her personal story a lot which I will not share here but she's been through some shit and I'm like how do you stay optimistic and she said I steer through the rear view mirror I said what does that mean and she said well 200 years ago my ancestors were here on this on this continent and they had no rights they had nothing you know babies could rip from their mother's breast husbands and wives could be separated horrible horrible things we happen and there was no recourse there was no one who'd go to and say this is an outrage because we were not true to this human and then a war was fought and we got some rights and then we had to face reconstruction and carpetbaggers and and Jim Crow and and minstrelsy and all these things and we you know redlining and after the war and then the civil rights came we got some more rights and now I'm it's time again to rise up because black men are being killed shot in the back as we're seeing on tv all the time and when I look back at that and see what my ancestors survived and went through I don't feel that it's within my right to to give up or to feel overwhelmed because I have so much more than they did so in the event that things do not go well over the next few days I don't think it's within our right to feel despair feel definitely don't don't go in an aisle feel it but don't give up there's this hot stuff in the human spirit and we need to access that to get through thank you ken that's that's beautiful thank you um Judy you have a last word today I'd just like to close with the thought that the system has been broken for a long time and it has been in continual decline and some friends from Europe said why are you surprised at the election this this isn't the election isn't going to change much what's going to change is is things we do and I think that was incredibly wise because the system is broken and pretty dysfunctional and it's going to tug back and forth with very little positive movement and even if the person I prefer is elected I fear that will be the outcome because of other dimensions and the disruptive that clearly planned and executed strategic disruption that's being engineered for an unimaginable long period of time so I think we all need to reach right into ourselves and touch that heritage of our grandparents who had little and the connections that they made and the inner strength they had and just share that generously with each and every person we're in contact with because that's what's going to provide shared hope that allows us to then say um here's a hug I'm sorry you're going through this how can I help and that generativity can cascade so that's my insurrection um why don't we hang out with your what you just what you all just said for another half minute and then I'll take us out of the call but let's just go into silence for a little bit thank you all namaste good luck let's stay all right namaste everyone I sent an invite out from call tomorrow morning at eight and then we'll we'll have more calls thank you good to be connected with you all bye bye same here excellent