 actually I caught up with him a little bit that first time in a while, he got burned out. I forgot, he's used by, I forgot what area, but in California up a bit, not quite very, but so yeah, it was like six weeks ago, I think more recently his house burned and they're out with his parents, but what did he say? Oh, he was really optimistic, he said that they have another 25 years now to rebuild and be clear because it burned so thoroughly that there's no danger of any fire coming for another 25 years, so that was like a really bright thing, you know. Anyway, the fires have been so frequent and furious in California especially that aren't areas that just burned last year kind of difficult to light on fire again or are they just charcoal and they want to light on fire again because wouldn't there be natural fire breaks from the large fires and you know once you've burned enough, it should be like you're not burning that much more, crazy. Doug, are you near fires now? Yes, about five miles and so we're covered with smoke and soot and before you worry about me, we're on the river so the river is always a way out if needed, but so far, I mean it looks pretty good at the moment, but California I think historically always burns, it's all going to burn at some point and we are not building as though that fact is known. That's true, but it seems like it seems like the intensity of frequency has jumped. No question about that, no question. Yeah. Anyway, a sobering start to our call, sorry, it's crazy. So this is the OGM check and call for Thursday, September 10th, 2010, 2020. How'd I do that? And how did a decade just slip by? Let's do a breezy check-in to see who's here and how we're doing. Let's start with Charles Scott and Rob. Breezy check-in is it's a perfect weather over here in Zurich. Light breezes cool, cooling down quite a bit at night. It's definitely heading into fall, but these are the kind of last days of summer. We had a bunch of rain for a few days and the temperature dropped like 15 degrees. It was quite abrupt and then it's coming back a little bit. It looks like tomorrow with my kids and their mom will have a picnic by the lake and do some swimming and hopefully the water won't be really freezing. And so that's a bit of seasonal stuff and I don't know, just swimming in all this Kiko Lad flow show stuff. It's been really incredible explosion and been wonderful to have you, Jerry and others here from OGM. Judy's here and I didn't look who else is here now so far, but yeah, there's been a wonderful cross-pollination happening. So that's probably enough from my side. We're organizing our newsletter and a bunch of goodies to share on Monday, which is the final flow show of the first series and onward to Kiko Lad. And we should probably sort of dig into some of that and find out where there's more points of collaboration and all that, how we can be more effective together. That'd be a great place to go back to once we've checked in. One thing just to place it is the discourse that we start to talk about. Yes, exactly. Perfect. Scott, Rob, then Hank and his new digs. Hello everyone. I'm from Interlochen, Michigan, where we are surrounded by water and I don't know if it's good that we're immune from what's going on, but it's always a reminder when I hear everyone's check-in and all the things you're going on. So one thought for this week, I was thinking about how to navigate the right and the left and how you describe yourself. And the idea came to me this morning that I'm a member of the free collaborative party. It was just a sketch of an idea and I thought it would be interesting if there was a definition of some other kind of, again, an alternative, a third way, if you will. So that's all I have for this morning, but I'm well and I hope the rest of you continue to stay safe. Thanks, Scott. I love that. And I have a t-shirt that says Team Human on it that I got a couple years ago when I attended in Portland, the World Domination Summit, which was kind of all about just like being on Team Human, which is maybe another nice approach. Rob, Hank, then Julian. Yeah, good morning from Washington, DC. It's been raining very strongly last night and into today, so it's a little gloomy out. A lot of our work is, my company's work is with the federal government, and I don't know if people know there's a pending government shutdown. It doesn't get any news, but it'll probably get worked out, but end of September is when the U.S. government fiscal year ends, and so if they don't approve a budget, then the government shuts. A bunch of random things get shut down called nonessential, and a bunch of random things are deemed essential, which really are not that essential. So, but most likely that will get sorted out. I appreciated Scott's quick comment there about the third, finding a third way. I think on my mind quite a bit is our political system in the U.S., the polarizing two-party system, I think is very broken and not what we all intended to be like, and I think the financial system is broken and not what we all want it to be like. So, I've been spending time thinking about those, and they feel both insurmountable, but also somewhat of an optimist that things do change. I'm reading a book called A Gentleman in Moscow, and it goes through kind of the Russian Revolution. And in a split of a moment, they renamed cities and streets for better or worse. So, I'm not necessarily recommending that mode of change, but change can happen. So, that's what keeps me coming back to these calls is trying to find people that agree that change can happen. And then a last bit. I was on a call with some very corporate types, including the former CEO of IBM, and I'll have to paste in the name of the group. I forgot it up my tongue, but they were using the term collaboratory. So, I was thinking of Charles and Lauren and some of the folks here. So, I thought that was very, I guess, a term that could pick up some usage. So, that's it for me. I love that. Thanks, Rob. I was just marveling this morning that there's like fires all up in the West Coast on top of pandemic, on top of reelection, on top of economic collapse, and it's just wacky. Hank, Julian, then Hamilton. Yeah, good morning, everybody, from the new digs. I'm still not completely settled in, right? Yeah, no, I'm jazz-handsing myself too, every time I put something away, even if it's like a paper towel. You know, I'm kind of in that phase. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I think I have been, I spent some time catching up on the call last week because I was kind of a little like mentally in and out of it. And so, that was good. Obviously, I still love to hear all the conversations kind of going on. I've been talking to some folks from this call, but not on this call about, you know, some of the topics that have come up just to kind of dig a little deeper. You know, as you guys know, these check-ins are awesome, but we kind of sometimes can like, you know, be the rock skipping on the top of the pond when there's, you know, the whole rest of the pond to explore. So, I just small plug to encourage everybody to continue to do that. And if you want to reach out to me or anybody else, please do so. And I think just a moment of kind of synergy, you know, I've been also just kind of thinking a lot about, you know, it's an questionnaire. Obviously, the divisiveness that can show up is rearing its ugly head. I found myself reading the Federalist Papers, or just going back and reading some of those, I was reading Federalist Paper number 10 recently, which surprisingly is a, well, coincidentally is about factions and how, you know, Democratic republics are supposed to theoretically be able to, you know, not necessarily control them, but be an antidote. And so I'm just kind of, I think, sharpening my chops, digging back into papers like that, just to kind of think, you know, what were the theoretical and philosophical basal motivations behind, you know, some of the ways that we're supposed to have discourse here that seem to be sometimes working and sometimes drowned out. So that's where I'm at. Thank you. Thank you. Julian Hamilton-Judy. So good morning from Dim Dark Orange, California. Since last week, I've been focusing on the ACMC graph history knowledge base. And this is addressing the history of the past and future history of computer graphics, one of my primary projects, but I've actually been getting the description together. It's based on, first off, having a lot of legacy databases to deal with, which are actually still living databases, moving into a triple store. And if you're familiar with the brain, it's kind of like a baby triple store. But in this case, I'm going to be using something bigger, like Neo4j, like a graph agents graph, one of many, and this is discussed in the report I'm working on. And then the other thing is how do you address it, because this knowledge is no good if you don't have a reasonable way of getting into it. However, for me, it's not something that you do through a screen. It's something that you do through using immersive technologies. So if anybody wants to discuss this in more detail, that's better left to a separate session that we can arrange, because it's, although it's relevant to OGM, it's not exactly on the topic for this call. Also, I'll be bugging out of eight because there's a fireside chat between Dean Allman and Jim Handler, who are two of the biggest names in semantic web technologies. And that one, that's going to be a good session to be a fly on the wall. I'm just curious quickly, what's that mean? If you've heard of virtual reality or augmented reality or whatever reality, that's all immersive tech. Cool. Thanks, Julian. Sounds really cool. And you made me, you made my brain want general purpose friendly AI that's on our side that can crawl history spaces and all these other spaces and help make sense with us to do all that. It's like, that'd be a great day. Let's go Hamilton, Judy, Mark. Hi, guys. Welcome from all of a sudden sort of cool and rainy Boston. My old digs in Boston, not Hank's new digs. We are still here in Boston, we're still 11 days away from school starting, which means 11 days until my kids start looking at different stuff on their computer screens than they have been for the past six months. So that's, you know, the fun that we're living through. You know, a lot of client work, it's really exciting. I think every, it's just really busy. September is, it's interesting to see that even in a pandemic, September has a business to it. So that's sort of comforting in a way, even though it's exhausting. And the fun stuff I'm working on working with Peter Van and Amber Case, who mentioned some of you guys by name the other day, Lauren, yes, you. We're working on a 45 minute video for Sybos this year. It's our InnoTribe video. It's featuring Ann Pendleton. She was on our first call and some work she's doing with John Sealy Brown around imagination and the next level beyond design thinking, which she calls designing for emergence and scaffolding and a lot of stuff that you guys I'm sure are familiar with. So it's fun. I get to be a student while doing work. And I'm drinking from the fire hose from Ann and JSB. So that's me. Awesome, Hamilton. Thank you. Judy, Mark, Kevin. Sorry, needed to unmute. Just busy trying to sort the information flood that I'm digging into on various topics and spent some time yesterday with Pete getting some instruction on how to better organize things. So it's there's just such an inundation of information. And I'm trying to translate it and simplify it to take to the groups I work with who are failing to some extent in their communication modes. Love that. My handle these days on Twitter is Coral Paul up in the info torrent, which is really clumsy. But that's kind of how I'm how I wish I could feel, because right now I feel sort of lonelier than that from the information curating side. But I'd like to be collaborating with a bunch of other polyps moving nutrients through and feeding each other and that so one ahead there. Mark and then Kevin and then Ken. Yeah, I wish I wish I could that's that's from my balcony. That's not a background. Nice. So that's Oakland. And I don't know. Yeah, you know, nicer than yesterday. Yesterday was eerie. I mean, I felt I'm really starting to feel that all combination of the fires, covid. Yeah, you mentioned the election and all these like, kind of getting heavy and heavy and every time we talk about it. It's like, you know, it's nothing changes. Really. And it's up so slowly that it becomes, you know, not even noticeable, really. This being said, there is lots of great things happening in the world. So I'm so excited about that too. That's why I am right now working on still the same things. So focusing on indigenous people, they're preserving the traditional knowledge and systems. And and yeah, so I'm doing thanks. Thanks, Mark. And I would love to build some bridges to some of the community communities that you're helping. So it would be interesting to think about how we might be more helpful to them in some way that it's actually useful to them right now. So Mark, I wonder it looks white behind you to us because of your camera. What color is Ducey when you look in the sky? It's gray. Yesterday was orange, like completely orange. Yeah, yesterday was just like the road, the book by Cormac McCarthy. None of you have read it. It's like you have to read the end, like I really did three nights. I couldn't stop. But it's that. Is that what you see? Yeah, crazy. Thank you. Kevin, Ken, then Doug. Yeah, thanks. Well, you know, I responded to a thing Hank posted on our website thing about what he is, OGM, and I said, Oh, it's just discovery. That's all and we do things offline. And I felt good about it. And then I realized, you know, I could be totally wrong. And I started thinking maybe if this is a collective intelligence platform. And as I mentioned, I've been reading what's happened with the Balinese water temples and collective intelligence. And they discovered that networks can be both problem solving and self organizing. If you just know what the four rice pot patties around you were doing. And then the guy has done has started teaching at the complexity Santa Fe complexity Institute. And it's really, you know, maybe there is a emergent permeable collective intelligence thing. I looked at some of the things Charlie Blass was doing. And then a really interesting woman named Zoe, who's kind of the maven of a thing that she calls fandom, which is what she thinks is the new commercial economy. And a great example of it is if you go to the masters, the golf tournament, you get to buy things in that gift shop that are only there at that time. And people pay enormous things for them, not just to come home with the t-shirt because it's part of this bonding experience with everybody. And she's calculated how that's also true in eSports and everything. So collective intelligence, when I was sure it was not that suddenly I realized like probably I was wrong. So that's all. We're trying to work our way up that ladder, Kevin. Thank you. That's cool. Thanks to the link to Zoe as well. Ken, Doug, Tony. Good morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you may be. I am in Centrefell, not far from Oakland. And yes, yesterday was really eerie. It was so dark at eight o'clock in the morning, I thought it was eight o'clock at night. And I'm currently house sitting. I drove up to Willets, which is about a little over two hours from here on Monday to do some census work. And I missed the first exit. So I went up to the North exit, rather than the South exit. And as I was approaching, I saw this huge column of smoke. And there was this called the oak fire, which had just broken out terrace before I arrived. Within 45 minutes, I had five nixle alerts. Nixle is a, for those who don't know it, it's a, you texture your zip code. And any local fire police sheriff will text you emergency alerts. So I had five alerts within 45 minutes of arriving. They evacuated the town up until four miles away from where I was staying in the hotel. My boss said, you know, what do you want to do? Do you want to stay? You want to go? I said, if they're going to evacuate, I'd rather drive home now, when it's daylight and I can see where I'm going. And I'm the only one on the road with normal traffic. They'd be woken up at two in the morning with the entire town trying to leave. So I was a little 250 mile round trip for not a whole lot of, not a whole lot of production up there. One of my team members was actually trapped up in Laytonville, about 30 miles north. The road had been closed on 101 between Laytonville and Woods. She had to drive all the way out to the coast down one, down route one to get back to Fairfax and to get home till one in the morning. Fortunately, the hotel manager let me go into her room and get all of her stuff. So I rescued her, her clothing and everything, but it's been a little bit hairy here. That was really my closest brush with the fire was, you know, to see this huge smoke, like we're really about five or six miles away from the town. And it just, it's been really surreal. It doesn't even begin to cover what it's like living around here right now. Pointy thing, I'm house sitting for in a friend's house that I've been coming here for 12 years to take care of their Australian shepherd who passed in March. And I keep walking around the house and seeing, you know, like expecting to see him around the corner. So just I'm feeling a little bit tender around that. Didn't realize how much I missed this dog. I've spent a year of my life with him when we lost a dozen years. Didn't realize how much I missed him until I got here and started to not see where he should be. And then my wife just wrote me that, that, Emma Peel has left the building. I'm, you know, I loved Diana Rigg was such an amazing actress and I just feel sad that she's gone. So I'm kind of all over the map. And on the really good side of things. My friend, April Orloff, I invited her to join us today. I'm really happy to see her here and I'll let her introduce herself. But she's a phenomenal human being, I think will be a wonderful addition to this group. And I'm happy to see everybody. I realize every time I get off these calls, how much these calls mean to me. I just, I love being on these calls. It's, it's, it's an oasis during the week of just feeling connected to people who make me feel connected. Thank you. No, thank you, Ken, so much. It's, it's a, it's a really poignant moment for so many, too many reasons right now, poignant and unfortunately dangerous. Thank you for that. And April, welcome to call. I'll be with you in just a moment. I'm working my way up my screen. And you were early. There was like a pre-party here when I arrived. It was delightful. Doug, Tony, then Pete. Doug, you're muted. Doug, we can't hear you better. Yeah, good. If I unmute myself, the impact of this fire on people of lower incomes, people like carpenters and house painters that are able to work in these conditions, plus the employment for a lot of such people is just down a lot. And the pain is incredible. And we live in a kind of cocoon where we, between our, our neighbors, our colleagues and the mall that we go to for food or whatever, we don't see the way people are living. And, you know, I think it's worth getting in your car and going to what you think is the poorest neighborhood just to see what it's like. The two things that are occupying me now are trying to finish up a good version of chapter one of the book, Garden World Politics, which is a book about how to have a vision of where we might be going coming out of this on the idea that it's very hard to do recuperative work if you don't have a vision of what you're trying to achieve. So chapter one is just about done. And this weekend, we'll start sending it out to a lot of interesting people. And encouragement is, is appreciated. Along with the book, I've been doing something kind of unusual. And that's trying to come to terms with the work of Bernard Latour, Bruno Latour, which is quite complicated. And I've been reading it over the years, but I feel now an obligation to really come to terms with it, because he is doing the work of figuring out how we get from the progressive, conservative, right, left political axes to something that's more meaningful. And he's really good at this. So that's what I've been doing. Thank you, Doug. And when we hit thing, nuggets like Latour and some of his work, I'm really interested in how we represent that back into the collective intelligence. And so that's kind of like this open wishlist conversation for OGM. It's like we are each of us filtering so many interesting points and so many interesting levers and tools. How do we feed them back into what we know together? That's kind of where I'd love us to go. Tony, Pete and April. Hi. Regarding this group, I've been thinking a lot about what is a story? There's a, I posted on the Complexity Explorers Facebook page the question, what is a story? And that's a, I got a lot, I've got about 77 responses so far. And it's very interesting because basically, you know, when it's described here, I'm scratching my head saying, why just don't fit in with how, you know, I can actually see it because I've got experiences as a technical writer and it's just different. And the responses I got were very interesting. Basically, like following Miriam Webster dictionary says there's two types, gives two definitions are the first two definitions of a story. One is a description of incidents or events. The second definition is often is a fictional narrative it gives. Now, Gene Belanger had me walk through his CLD diagram, causal loop diagram, related to, you know, him eating breakfast and I forgot the whole thing went but, and his, he presents a story, a well-rounded, well-presented story that's basically a narrative to explain the causal loop diagram. Whereas I'm more, I'm not the, I mean, that's a clausality-related diagram. I'm more of a, having a background in a activity-related diagram. In that regard, that's like a data flow diagram. And in that regard, a story is who, when, where, how, and why. So it's interesting to see that there's two types of story according to Miriam Webster and they fit in almost perfectly to give you a good conceptual understanding of what's meant by a story. Now I could switch gears and I could understand what's what people are talking about. So that's what I did recently. Cool. Thank you. There's so much of our own story is including plots like the Ur plots. There's a couple thoughts in my brain about like, there are only this many plots in the world and every story is derivative from these plots but the number varies wildly depending on who's writing the blog post. Let's go Pete Avril and Lauren. Hello everybody. I'm in San Diego, California. Our fires are four days old or something and 25 miles east of me. We just get high smoke and orange sun. Today looks like it might be white. It's actually coming along. They're starting to contain it. So that's good. And there's been some evacuations and buildings destroyed but not too many. I also read on the news today that La Nina is coming this winter. So that means our rain season will be shorter. Rain is in Southern California. The rain is only in the winter, basically. I've had a great week with talking with different folks from, you know, all of us and all the reference. I'm excited to, I've got kind of a question for the group and I wonder if we might have time for this call. So five or ten minutes but I'd want to come back to it later. And that's it for me. Thanks Pete. Avril, Lauren, Romer. Hi everybody. I'm Avril. I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I'm on a sort of a low-grade campaign to rename British Columbia because it's not British and we're tired of Columbus but not getting a lot of traction. I'm just very interested to be here. Ken sent me this invitation last week and suggested that I might like to drop in and see what you all folks are talking about. I feel like I've just walked into a very sort of the middle of a very heady river. So I'm, you know, it's going to take some time for me to catch up with some of the things that you're referring to and some of the acronyms and things like that but what can I tell you? It's been a strange time here just like everywhere else but in different ways. Obviously some of the turbulence that's going on in the United States is not a daily thing in our lives but it's we experience the reflected turbulence a lot. I think one of our Prime Ministers many years ago said that, you know, we're like the most next to the elephant and when the elephant roll over, the most gets squished. So what goes on in the United States is of, you know, big import to Canada. So we're watching. And me personally, COVID's been a time of reevaluation, rethinking, recalibration. You know, they say never waste a good crisis and so, you know, using this time to think about like what do I actually really want to do with the rest of my life, whatever left of it. You know, work has been slow and that's actually been kind of a boon. As long as I can pay the rent, I'm kind of happy to have this opportunity to reflect and to think about like okay, where next. And I guess the thing that's been occupying my mind a lot is relationship. It's always occupied my mind but now it's really front and center. And it's like it feels like that's at the heart of everything, certainly that I do, but it's also I think at the heart of just how we get anything done. So I feel like that's what's calling me for the next while is, you know, how to post hospitable space for human connection. So being part of hospitable space for human connection is a great boon. So thank you very much and I'll move back into listening mode now. Thank you so much. Really glad you're here and we're just waiting patiently until your country accepts citizens of our country again. I think somebody asked us to invade you. We may consider that. You are totally welcome. Just make sure you come down as far as Portland. Yeah. The Portland is high on the list. So my wife and I call Portland the Canada of America. Yeah. Because the people are actually really nice. Like Seattle is much more like San Francisco, but Portland is the Canada of America. We love that. Portland has my favorite store in the whole world. Oh good. Powell's? Of course. Yeah, we are walking distance to Powell's. Oh my god. Ten blocks from Powell's which recently reopened with lots of distancing and lots of whatever but at least there's still a lot. Lauren, Romer, Stacey. Hey everyone. Last week I mentioned because of Kevin's work on a purchasing cooperative I mentioned maybe making a purchasing cooperative for software and people seemed interested but I don't have the time to actually put this together. I was just wondering if that might be a subject of discussion because I think we're desperate for it because software, the good fund software to work collaboratively is pretty expensive especially if you do it in a team. And so I think that'd be a major step forward without having to make major decisions on global issues and stuff like that. I think it'd be a huge step forward. And Lauren are you looking mostly at software packages that cost 30 bucks or are you looking at monthly payment software like Notion and all the other things that people are starting to use? Yeah, all of that. Okay, other all sides. Also if anyone is around here just staying here thinking, God I just like to help someone. I could really use some help on the collaboratory kind of getting stuff together because what we're trying to do is basically create a learning pod that can be replicable that's based on collective intelligence. And so there are all these little parts to think about like onboarding and conflict resolution and security and stuff like that. That's really difficult for me to organize and think about and coordinate. So any if anyone is just looking to help someone out over here. Do you want to mention just just a tiny bit about what is happening with the Koolab? Yeah, so we're actually trying to kind of go forward with practical collective intelligence and use a lot of context with protocol like decentralized governance and stuff like that to make a learning pod for kids and their parents or grandparents. And so we're actually trying to put something forward and get people involved and make it happen. So we meet every Sunday with these kids, but it's really hard because the way we've designed it is to be intergenerational and very accessible to all kids no matter where they are and how much access they have. So that's pretty difficult design considerations. So that makes it inspiring and fun but also kind of difficult. Cool. Romer Stacey Phelan. Romer, there you go. Good. Hi. Good morning everyone. Romer Benitas here from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Hi Lauren. Well I'm just grateful to be with all these positive people here amidst all this crisis going around us and to all our friends in the West Coast. I wish you all well. So take care out there. What I've been doing right now, so being a home daddy, I'm so much engaged with my kids' education right now and most recently I received a letter from the superintendent where in currently my kids are on a hybrid program so they go to school in person twice in a week and the classes are cut into half and it's more of a cohort system so which kind of minimizes the likelihood of transmission. So for us that is okay and that's our threshold of risk where we could expose our kids. However, with the recent letter coming from the superintendent, the plan is he will gradually bring back the regular schedule and we're looking at few weeks away and this concerns me a little bit because number one, the school is going to be a real good hub for a network where transmission could occur and this kids regardless of age, I believe that you know transmissibility is going to be way affected by this. So with this concern, I've been looking at plan B of putting my kids in full virtual and at the same token I'm grateful with Lauren and Charles here with their project on Cool Lab. We are exploring that with them as well and I think this is a very timely project to you know get going and see how far these projects could you know move all these kids together. So while going back to my concern that is the plan, I'm looking at the plan B and I am just concerned with certain decisions that are probably a little bit more premature right now considering that we don't have even any vaccines yet or any answer to this kind of situation. So bringing all these kids back to school in a normal schedule is probably most likely going to compromise the safety protocol which is keeping us safe right now and it's a concern. So I hope that they can soon find a better answer. It's a huge concern and I'm kind of surprised that there are not better distributed better known plans for how to you know divide and conquer and bubble and isolate and all that because it sounds like you know they're going through that phase now but that they're getting overconfident is going to happen all over the place. Sure and I think in terms of decision making process it's all being our districts are empowered to do its own thing and which is a good thing because everyone is every place is different you know their infection rates are all different but at the same token I think the bottom line here is decisions are reversible but the effect is irreversible. So thank you. Yeah thank you rumor lovely to have you here thank you. Stacey, Phelan and Matt. Actually go ahead Stacey and then we'll go to Kevin who raised his hand but go ahead Stacey. So I'm in New York and I've been mostly focused on a friend of mine's book Cognitive Politics which has a workbook in it on how to engage with people from different political spectrums. So I spend most of my time either keeping up on what's happening in our country which is a lot and talking to people that I may disagree with very much but trying to bring new perspective or insert myself where things are getting you know really hostile on you know on the thread mostly I think you know on Facebook is where I am and just trying to bring out new perspectives and new ways of understanding people and get us back to you know being friends so it seems very simple but that's where my head is right now. It's crazy simple and it's just amazing how much we've been spun up like like like humans like to associate humans like to collaborate kids like to figure out what their role is in society and I just started reading one of the articles in the flood of info past me in the inbox this morning and it was a New York Times writer who's saying I just I think I just watched one of my friends go Q and on and it started with you know some articles and some hashtags and suddenly she was like going that way and and you know this this whole idea that we're all living in an alternate reality game and that there's a bunch of people so kind of playing game masters and really enjoying taking civilization in lots of different directions and very intentionally I think go ahead Stacy. Well one of my big focuses is on this whole idea of letting people see how the far extremes are actually meeting together because um because we're not talking and because we're fighting we never even get to realize who's standing right next to us so I mean it just amazes me that you know I know some very religious Jewish people and they are in total alignment with some white racists so I'm just trying to get them to speak so they hear it from the other person because me so I just engage them in the conversation so they can see who they're actually dealing with from their own neck. Thank you you're making me realize that Zoom has a bunch of new filters but they need one of head exploding like little much little purple purple mushroom cloud just going up over your head that would be like just just quickly chimed in just yeah to underscore this extreme Jewish religion religious community networks supporting Trump for example and it happens here too there's a lot of expats in the Jewish community here and it's just I can't deal but anyway. Thank you. Kevin then Phil then Matt. Yeah just briefly it's I'm going to be leaving on this kind of sort of interesting of it. A lot of time we were in Rome we were speaking in Vatican we hired this group Context Travel to do tours with us and they would give us a historian one day and a food writer the next and we were you know really cool and not traveling so I'm doing a tour of Edinburgh Castle in 14 minutes with a historian and so I'm going to be leaving but but I really recommend them it's like 20 bucks and these are people you would like to spend the day with and you spend an hour with and they they're they're walking through the castles or whatever anyway it's a cool thing to do on Zoom. That sounds completely awesome can you share a link with us? Yeah I'll do that. Yeah please that sounds complete I love tours like that they're fabulous. Phelan then Matt. Hi guys how's it going? You know it's funny because I think that where I want to land is where Jerry kind of left off. Driving off of what Stacey said it's it's amazing the place that I'm playing in right now happens to be there just that understanding that the divergent path just seems so attractive these days you know everyone because of this crisis in sense making seems to be looking for their own divergent path something that makes sense. Can you guys hear me or my stuff? You're just fine yeah and you're making way too much sense so we're all we're all like stunned into silence go ahead. Do you hear us? We're hearing you fine. Hello can you hear me? Yes we hear you just fine you are not hearing us. Oh shoot we hear you. Oh you hear me just fine okay we hear you just fine. Okay seems like there's such a delay yeah it's it's it's interesting and I think that a lot of the work that I've been doing and a lot of the way that I've been synthesizing these conversations and the inquiries that I've been making is how is it that we can create something where these paths connect you know these paths connect like this whole intrinsic calling to do that we all have you know I think is being triggered because of what we're all just clearly sense making that there is there's something on the line happening here that the people who are supposed to know kind of like don't have a finger on and it's going to take a collective effort I think that's the intrinsic calling this feeling that all of us have to rise to the occasion to consume as much information as possible to process it and to give our take on it and as much as anyone might scoff about like a platform to do it or something to do it I mean we have like an internet you know um internet and I think the internet was basically sorry excuse me you broke up a little bit go ahead okay I know I'm talking a little bit too much but that's kind of like where my head is at right now and I would call that I would offer that we really explore that as a phenomenon and to start thinking around how is it that we might kind of like bring it together a little bit you know Phil that's really useful because you're making me realize this is very strange this check-in has triggered a whole bunch of things I wish we could do and wish we had and what you just said has made me realize I wish it were easy and and customary and frequent for us to tell our stories to each other in ways that were easy to see digest adopt enhance elaborate so that our favorite narratives were kind of at hand uh because we don't we even with a quick check-in and some time together over these weeks um we don't really know the stories inside one another's heads like like you know they could be they could be really different uh who knows and some of them are like really intriguing we want to pick up and go oh I didn't know that and then you know check it out absorb it add it to our collection in some sense I did a video a long time ago sort of the back in 2010 called nuggets narratives and points of view and it was kind of the beginning of the story threader idea but the concept was a nugget is any addressable little piece of information it could be a tweet could be a video could be five seconds of a video whatever um a narrative is an assembly of nuggets that tells a story and narratives can be retrospective like how did we get here or prospective like what do we do now and then a point of view is a collection of narratives usually within a domain let's say education or politics or whatever but these things bleed bleed across but but the idea was how do we make our points of view more explicit through these collections of narratives that are collections of nuggets and that was just language I was trying to trying to figure out around how do we how do we tell these stories with each other without everything being a 20 minute video right which are which are kind of impenetrable like like listening to a 20 minute video is great but there's lots of interesting nuggets inside of the video did you want to go ahead yeah it's it's interesting I have been thinking about framing a lot and I think that it's in it's in the framing um the the the idea of pods amazing I think about that but I think that the framing is something that we have to to really take a look at not something that is prescriptive but something that comes out of some type of um amalgamation of our collective will and intention you know something stigmagic totally agree thank you that's really generative Matt and you're muted you know it the the estuary is rich today um uh there's so many things that I've been thinking about working on and you know first I'm here in Boston and I feel I feel privileged to not be you know not to be dealing with the things that people on the on the other coast are dealing with although we're in we're in drought right now and and it's starting and I have a feeling that everything's coming to a theater near you so this is not this is these are not idle concerns of somebody else and and I've been thinking a lot about the fact that um you know what happened that created the outrage after the Vietnam War was that television started to show the dead bodies um and how little we actually see the dead bodies um and see what's going on and that comment of we don't see we I don't know who the we is we being the privileged um don't see the suffering in this world and and and right in our backyard um I'm also my daughter made a comment to me the other day about um she was talking about you know search and google and and looking for things that she's curious about and she says I don't like doing it because all I get is a bunch of ads I mean this is a 13 year old um or actually a 12 year old and that that they're realizing that our our world of information has been corrupted and I just feel this sense that things are corrupted um and and that's you know that that way is heavy um I also wonder about the tools um and here we are on a hunt some of us are on a hunt to build new tools that allow new things and if we only just got the right tool do we get the new things and um in some ways that hunt is what led us into this into this place and so that's kind of a paradox for me as well um and is this just more just fundamentally just a much more human thing um that we have to face each other and um figure some of that stuff out and then I appreciate the fact that there's a lot of energy around the fact that we have a lot of energy and we don't quite know how to marshal that energy and the last time we spoke we said um I'm happy to bring collective next kind of group processes into you know facilitating a meeting for us to to get together and so there's two things that we need to spend that concentrated time to maybe get ourselves over this get ourselves over the hurdle to get more alignment that I think people are are wishing for um one is to pick to some dates we need to we need to figure out when we're going to get together and I would recommend you know the old school way would say it's uh you know it's three days in a row they're long days and um it requires a lot of learning and those sorts of things I don't know if people can give that much time um so I'm interested in how much time people are willing to give um in a concentrated fashion to thinking about this I'm also Hank put something out there to say well what are what would you want to achieve and more importantly I would just ask what are the design questions that you have so if everyone you know in discourse populated the design questions then I can start to shape those into a broader set of objectives and that gives us the kind of the heading for um what we would do so you know please answer there um what you guys think the design questions are I'd rather not make it up on my own um and and then we can um we can find some time and um and just get us together um and I'd like to do it in a way that we accommodate actually a global population maybe even thinking about something that um something that runs continuously and people come in and come out of the process I'm not I'm not sure yet so um that's that's what I'm thinking about and I'm eager to help um you know eager to help um you know get this thing moving thank you Matt um a couple of things you mentioned Vietnam and film and that was totally totally right because there were suddenly camera suddenly the nightly news had video of people under attack and dying in the field and it was brutal for the American public and Vietnam completely knew that um scrolling back to the Civil War Matthew Brady is kind of the most famous photographer of the Civil War and he never shot live like he had to stand still for cameras back then so he wasn't in the live action at all but he showed up at battlefields and he showed uh the strewn dead body bloated bodies on the battlefield at Antietam and so forth and before that battles had been recorded by painters mostly as a heroic mix time record of what happened in the battle so over here on the left is the attack on the hill and over here is the tramp and surrender and over here is whatever and that was that was kind of notions or you had newspaper drawings that showed up that when they started illustrating a newspaper so nobody could actually see the death like like in the newspaper and that was that was brand new and shocking it really it really whacked people over the head Stacy go ahead yeah the only thing I want to say is that we're in a time now where people don't believe what they're seeing right in front of their eyes that's not true it's not real so that's what we're that's what we're up against well we're in we're in this moment of deep thanks where AI can sort of simulate and replicate and twist whatever's going on we can make people look like they're saying stuff they didn't say that's happening a little bit not a lot but that has created this general purpose skepticism about everything we're seeing doubled up with a president who easily without even blinking will deny things that we have video of him doing and saying over and over and over and over right like insulting the military like you know whatever you want like there's plenty of evidence of him saying things that he will then point blank save isn't and this gas lighting is destroying our credibility or our ability to believe in the things we see are are are mediated personal experience at least through things like like images but to that credibility to that credibility point the way that we've helped is some of us have been so strong and definite with our bias that the people on the other side they don't believe us anymore so they're not even seeing all these things because they're like everything you're always against him you're you're taking it out of context and sometimes they're right a lot of us have done that I see it on both I see it on both sides I do I I wonder I just real quick I wonder about and I know we have to keep these updates going that that there is no more white space to create new sort of new versions of society right it used to be that you would go and you you know come across the ocean and you conquer the Americas and then you could create kind of this new democracy you know and and I think about the innovation that goes on in the technical space because it's so it's so um you know there's always new white space but we can't innovate social systems that quickly and I just wonder if OGM ultimately isn't a social system that's you know becomes government-less and lives in its own space and has its own rules and and we we just step away we don't we don't try to combat the chaos we try to just create our own you know Xanadu and and and we have our own economy and we take our ball and we we go home and I don't I don't know I mean I know this is what Eline Musk is motivated by to get to Mars is he just doesn't believe that you can you know solve these problems and fight your way through it and so I see can I see the you know the downward but I you know I'm human beings have been trying to correct themselves for what is it 50 60 000 years and we just keep making more of a mess of it um it's pretty um it's pretty interesting so yeah exactly um Matt you're the end of the check-in so we're done with the check-in round unless I forgot somebody please pipe pipe up actually Luciana just jumped in awesome oh that's right you had a call during that first hour and I unfortunately have to go but so drop that in and then leave but um drop the bomb and move on I know and I don't necessarily believe it I'm just at a low point maybe in my desperateness of my optimism so before you go a couple things because I think the thing you were asking about earlier that somebody wanted clarification on the chat was we wanted to put together a larger virtual event for OGM so we can convene that's kind of the framing of it um I'm about to I'm I'm speaking at this virtual conference unfinished which is hosted out of Romania which starts September 27th and runs a week I'm thinking we might actually piggyback on to that conference our own meetings and participate in that and do something ourselves kind of all at once that may be too much of a mix up but the theme of the conference is trust it's really interesting they've got a bunch of interesting things going on we kind of pick and choose and if people sort of apply to to participate because as opposed to being you know I don't know yet whether they're live streaming the whole thing but if we if we can participate there that might be a really interesting and fun place to do what we're trying to do and kind of double up in some and use it as a learning context for some of our doing contacts okay exactly and that and that'll and that'll create a deadline for us okay so we need objectives and we need to spots it's sorry can you repeat the name of the conference it's in the chat unfinished okay thank you the question is do you know what platform they're using or I don't know is it like the the hop into which was really cool or that might be they've got they've they're working with a developer they've created their own platform called flow I don't have a link to it right now I've I've I've seen it and tested it it's actually quite cool sounds terrible yeah exactly yet another platform but but it's it's intriguing it has a couple of features that I think I think many of us will like and Luciana what we just finished doing was a quick check-in round which is like where are you what's up in your life and if you'd like to do that that'd be that'd be great sure so thank you for inviting me to participate here it took it took me like 10 seconds to connect to what was being discussed in the sense that it was very very quick to understand that well this is you know even though it's the first time I participate we are so aligned in in the purpose yeah of what we want to achieve of building really a better future based on trust and we we do believe that we can do a lot of the stuff together so Jerry and I met through OpenEXO network and I've been a consultant for a while with them I've worked in business creation and since January I've been working on a project which is redefining how we share and discover knowledge I think in that you know there are a lot of things that are happening right now that you know we we go to YouTube to Google and these platforms are not necessarily optimizing for us and they are not providing necessarily the best experience for collaboration yeah and I think we are knowledge networks and you know the the the more that's inviting this environment is to share knowledge the better it will be for people to thrive and to have autonomy so I'm happy to tell a bit more about Tether which is what we are developing our company is called Future Playgrounds you can go to Future Playgrounds they'll come to see kind of where we're coming from but yeah it's a pleasure for me to be here and I hope you know to be many more of these calls and see what we can do together thank you Luciana and in a little bit I wanted to sort of go back to education as a theme because Lauren and Charles who are on this call are working on some stuff that that you ought to sort of be connected into that I had mentioned to you so we'll go there as well and I was I just want to ask a question of the group here because I was on a call yesterday where I asked this question and we were kind of stumped and it's a it's a timely question which is there's an election coming up in less than 60 days in the US which is quite pivotal quite crucial besides phone banking donating making sure to vote making sure others vote talking to family what else could what else should we be doing right this second and in particular what might OGM do is there a story we might tell and propagate that would be useful and interesting so for example during the primaries before before it was clear that Biden was going to win I did a series of videos I did six out of eight videos about Trump about how to manage Trump during this reelection cycle and I'll put a post a link to the playlist in the chat but I my intention was always to do you know video seven and eight and then the world just like got turned upside down so I could still I could still do those videos and build on what I was saying there which is really like how do we how do we interrupt this thing because if we're in the middle of an alternate reality game and it's being spun very effectively and a bunch of people won't vote or will vote for Trump as a result of that of that like what can we put in the system that will that will change the the course of that of that particular flow for example so just that's probably too much detail because that's the part of the way I'm coming into the question but let me just ask broadly what might we do that would be really effective and Pete you've got the floor thanks I just dropped a link to Daniel's guide to taking action in the election it's a it's a good guide I just found it on the web actually that's not quite the way to say it but I I also want to like throw a flag here I think it's super important to get involved in the election and to and for everybody to vote their conscience like critical and yet just mechanically and structurally over the from our experiences over the past couple of years of election manipulation thought manipulation the stuff that's going on with facebook the stuff that's going on with you know uh um gerrymandering and the post office and all of that stuff just structurally it's pretty easy to predict that the vote is going to be contested um and one or the other side can easily manipulate or maybe not easily but um it's entirely possible that one or the other side manipulates the vote one or another way right I saw a very persuasive scenario that Trump a week before the election tweets that the election is postponed guys don't worry about it we don't have to vote in a week um and he can't do that can't do that legally um but what that could happen what that could do is force all of his people not to go to the polls and for him to lose by a landslide and that creates a condition where he can say guys this whole election thing was bullshit and I you know Biden may have won by a landslide but that wasn't true it didn't happen and then we get into this weird confluence of of stuff right so no matter which way it goes um it's going to be like contested to hack and it's just going to be a nightmare of legal battles and and political wills uh battles of public will back and forth and at least until the inauguration right if not after so um again it's super critical for everybody to vote and for us to get as many people to vote um uh and there's a follow-on battle just because we voted and we won or just because we voted and we lost that's not the end of the story that's actually just the beginning of the story I'm totally agreed I'm putting some links in the chat the playlist I just mentioned is there as well as the link to that plate that that set of videos in my brain where you can see everything that each of the videos is connected to um so you can go through it in that way other thoughts on what to do now like what Scott mentioned in the chat let's show that dialogue is possible I like that idea a whole lot um I think I've mentioned I'm sure I've mentioned before on these calls that two of my heroes are Darryl Davis and Dia Khan and Darryl is a black jazz pianist who's got a garage full of KKK robes because he very patiently went and talked with KKK members and they grew to trust him and they became friends and they realized you know his his his perennial question is how can you hate me when you don't even know me Dia Khan is a Pakistani woman who was a model and a TV anchor and a journalist I think and she left Pakistan because it was hideous there for her went to London it wasn't that much better came to the US wasn't that much better started interviewing white supremacists and she's the creator of the documentary White Right which is fascinating to watch and that's about conversation and then there's a guy I support on Patreon call who does a program called let's chat and he'll park himself on a little like card table outside of a church or a mall in some conservative part of town he's a rhetorician and he basically asks people what is something you believe 100% true something you are sure is true and then he'll just start sort of kind of undermining their position through rhetoric so so like so there's no doubt like so if it blah blah blah blah and it's and it's actually really interesting because he has a respectful conversation he records the whole thing with two cameras he's got a little rig that's got high quality audio and video and post those online that's cool what else can we do and there's a bunch of really nice links showing up in the in the chat thank you other thoughts Doug well I think in general it's important for us not to treat the Trump supporters and that group as being stupid they have reasons for why they're doing what they're doing and we need to understand those we have not done enough work to understand why people support Trump and what they're opposed to because you can't see their support except in the context of what they don't like so that's what I did in the sequence of videos that I just put on the chat it's like I don't believe that all of Trump's followers are misogynist homophobic sexist thugs I think in fact a whole bunch of people voted for him for quite rational reasons and I try to enumerate them one of the videos is about Trump's virtues which is a little bit crazy but it's like what does Trump do that you might actually consider to be a virtue and and like one of my favorite examples here is the week after the 2016 election my buddy Al says you know what what what if Hillary had won this election what was she going to do on election on inauguration day and I could name nothing and then he says what is Trump going to do on inauguration day and I could I could enumerate his hideous program and so one of his virtues is through behavioral animal conditioning methods he is able to teach people stuff and have them repeat stuff and that is a deep media skill right and if you and if you watch Scott Adams the author of Dilbert do analyses of Trump he will help you realize that from the persuasion community which is another weird subculture Trump is a black belt complete and total black belt communicator and you have to respect that Trump is also able to sort of lie without blinking and consistently and that's kind of a skill if you're trying to shift the conversation so anyway it's it's a little bit of a dark vision but that that's all in the video and I have a lot of I think I have a lot of compassion for people who feel strongly enough that the system is screwed up that they needed to vote for somebody who's going to shatter the system that's one of the logics I have for why people would back Trump because he is a fire ship and in in the days of sale a fire ship was basically one of one of the ships in your fleet probably an older one that you would load up with tar and pitch and and flammable materials light it on fire and then from upwind shove it into the enemy fleet so that it would you know make contact with it with enemy ships who are in line of battle and like like them on fire because really hard to prevent something from drifting into you when the wind is your is your power source anyway other thoughts Ken and Stacy you had raised your hand earlier I was going to echo what Doug said and yeah and what Pete was saying about vote your conscience a lot of people are not looking at it the way we are exactly oh precisely Ken then mark something that doesn't seem to get a lot of play in the media is something Laurence Leslie came up with last year which is that when they survey people 92% of us are united in saying the government does not work for us no matter what party affiliation we have no matter where we stand on the spectrum there's huge agreement and there's one of the reasons when I went out to see let's say get a Dominican University here he's he was actually hopeful about this election because he never seen such solidarity across political boundaries however I think that the current media milieu is completely overshadowing overshadowing that and still managing to divide people so there is much more unity than we expect but there's there's a concerted effort to make sure that people don't understand that they're unified and that to me is where that's a leverage point if we can figure out how to crack that open perfect if we can interrupt that flow somehow interrupt that narrative break that narrative that's that's that's like a point of leverage in the system that that really matters thank you Ken Mark yeah I happen to have some friends who are Trumpers and one in particular let's say prior COVID kept on asking this question he said you know we can be horrified by his discourse and his tweets and everything like this but what what has really changed in your life since his president it's true that you know individually as individuals very little now you have I have another friend and I'm going to read what he what he wrote to me uh actually posted it on Twitter he said why do I have the feeling the damn establishment doesn't give a crap about the outcome of this presidential election it's not like Trump is a threat to them contrary contrary to the true left sorry say that again mark um why do I have the feeling the damn establishment doesn't give a crap about the outcome of this presidential election it's not like Trump is a threat to them contrary to the true left yeah we're in a we're in a strange moment like that um I mean I mean if you if you look really at at at the position today is never Trump which is not really something that appeals to a lot of people if you look at the first comment from my friend Trump it's it's not going to change fundamentally what's wrong it just implies amplifying um you know things that have been here for 100 200 300 years that's really not much change there so do we want change do we need change and how do we go about it so I think I think that's one of the pivotal questions is and one of the problems is that after the 2016 election I realized that I had just voted for what I was hoping would be the first woman president of the United States but that unconsciously I had set aside all of my plans for radical change and design from trust and all the things that I thought needed to be changed in our institutions because I knew that Hillary was going to be a shepherd of the status quo and and and that was kind of shattering for me because I was like damn it I think we really need deep change I'm not willing to you know vote for the fire ship or the hand grenade but but we do need thorough change and one of the dangers right now is that Biden in order to win needs to appeal to a whole bunch of people in the middle and he needs he needs to appeal a whole bunch of conservatives away from the current republican party and in order to do that he can't sort of claim to destroy the system or you know defund the police he's got to keep arms length from that and I don't even know that he believes that you know in that movement I believe I believe we need to reassign what police does completely and there's a whole story there but but I don't think he's going to be that radical and my fear is that if if he wins and we go four years of Biden and he does nothing really dramatic we are going to have Don Trump Jr as president you know four years down the road or Ivanka or something like that I don't know but but but we actually need thorough going change and I think that's where the agreement is on you know on the surveys we just mentioned it's like that the system's broken uh everyone yeah I'm listening to this is very interesting because of course you're talking about the United States but what's the reflection of that in Canada it's not as deeply polarized and not as perhaps deeply dangerous or but we have the same thing that goes back and forth back and forth along sort of two sides of the middle you know which is to say people get sick of the liberals and then they vote the conservatives in and then they get sick of the conservatives and then they vote the liberals in and we actually do have more than two parties but the third party and the fourth party never get much more they don't get a lot of traction at the federal level and so we just kind of keep oscillating back and forth in a very narrow range and so the basically revolutionary and fundamental changes that need to take place never do take place because that range in the middle is still trying to appeal to you know as broad an audience as possible to get reelected instead of saying basically you know maybe we're here for a short time but we're here for you know are we here for a short time or a good time and then just go all out to make the necessary changes do what needs to be done and risk being thrown out in the next election but have stuff put into place that happened in British Columbia back in the early 70s when the NDP which is like social democrat party got elected for the first time ever and they made so many changes so fast and they only served one term but a lot of those changes are still in place today 50 years later thank you everyone that really um you're reminding me of a of a trope I like which is the difference between big g government and little g governance and big g government has basically become politics has basically become consumer mass marketing um and has little to do with humans actually sitting down and and managing their commons and figuring out how to set up policy and whatever else very little to do with it and so one of the things I like about ogm which appears to be sort of a floor wax and a toothpaste and a bunch of other things is that I consider it a bit of a ground up uh insurrection on this because if we could start sharing what we know debating it properly making better decisions and then broadening out that reach the way wikipedia kind of eight you know the encyclopedia space but but if we can do that for for both discourses involving trust and the fact base that we're all working from whatever that even means in this era of deep fakes and and mistrust of data but if we can sort of conquer some of that just through our actions we have a chance of in the longer run creating a provoking I think larger scale change at least I I have that dream uh Doug yeah I I think that people like us tend to think that knowledge and opinions and policy are really important I think for a lot of the Trump supporters and people like that it's the texture of lived life what you see uh the flow of stuff in the supermarket whatever that are the persuasive elements not policy um agreed and and one of the strange things here is like belief in covid as an important thing not just the seasonal flu I think fluctuates a lot with whether anybody in your first degree got whacked or has died of it and that that tends to wake up a lot of people and they're like oh crap this isn't what I thought it was um Charles yeah just to just to mention again I put in the chat much earlier um the link to the session from Tuesday which was over four hours with Tom Atley um but he went into a lot of depth and detail about dynamic facilitation as it fits into it integrates into his one of his kind of handful series of of models of collective sense making so just to flag that um hopefully we'll get to do our our sort of Kiko lab boiling it down thing but we haven't done that yet um but it's kind of really amazing and rich and some of some others of us who are here were there so I don't know if anyone wants to fill in but it's it's great and it speaks exactly to all that dialogue and deliberation stuff and if somebody wanted to summarize summarize that and put it back into the conversation I would love that first though Phelan and you're muted no you kind of touched up on what I was thinking about in hearing you rip a little bit like yeah definitely there seems to be an insurgency against the metal going on and it's definitely pointing to the poor evolution seems to be converging has to kind of like find a way back out in some different kind of configuration and um my question is this if it is about framing and we do have to frame like everything from the from the bottom up um and and knowledge itself is at risk here knowledge itself is being questioned you know knowledge itself is being questioned the the the the the apparatus that's holding all of it is being questioned um where do we start so one of my fears is that post truth is not like a four or ten year detour but a 200 year era so we have the enlightenment we have science we have a bunch of stuff and then shitheads fan and we get romanticism and we get much more political twisting and all other kinds of stuff and our our faith in humans as able to fix these things and maybe do stuff in that science will technology will will you know create the leisure society or whatever just kind of goes away we lose that faith and we get a whole bunch of stuff that we're still living through today so I'm really concerned that truth loses its grasp on us entirely and that for 200 years we're sort of at the at the mercy of people who have good narrative that mostly plays off fear and that this successfully drives enough crowds to take democracy in whatever strange directions they would like to take it and I don't I don't think that's a far-fetched scenario um but but that's kind of the the time span that I'm worried about because if we can do something to sort of anchor facts again and come back to it and at the same time I hold this very conflicted point of view which is that emotion and membership trumps logic most of the time that I can have the most beautiful crisp argument in front of you with the best visualization ever the big beautiful visualization with indisputable facts that recorded and and certified and digitally notarized and if agreeing with my my argument means leaving your tribe or being being ostracized from your community you will happily ignore my facts and so the so ogm is trying it's trying really hard to hold both of those things how do we perfect the visualization and representation of of argument often as story and how do we ignore the tech and ignore the logic and and actually approach people and have meaningful sort of conversations where we are more permeable to each other in our points of view and and where we don't look down on each other where we're respectful and and can hold that all of which is happening at a moment where some parties have figured out that intentionally destroying that capacity is a great victory plot right so there's like there's like multiple layers of crap here that I'm trying to describe that we're living through we're actually living through that right this second Charles you want to jump in yeah I just kind of fascinating thing to bring up as a as a kind of worst-case scenario of this 200 year flash that you had and just just pursuing that in a tiny sliver here so you had it the thought came with a kind of time frame and an endpoint so I'm I just kind of flashed on well what is it they got us out of that then 200 years later what could it be and and could we kind of just really go there yeah my mental model of history is that every now and then some big things happen which just sort of bend history and then one of the reasons I'm totally fascinated with Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation is because he's describing the bend from pre-industrial society into into industrial society and one of the many interesting things he says is that industrial industrial economy requires industrial society by which he means once we started shifting into industry we needed lots of free labor we needed lots of free land we needed we needed sort of the market economy to dominate so that everybody would be available which meant that this new market and industrial economy had to be like a cuckoo bird you know a cuckoo chick pushes all the other eggs out of its nest it couldn't have people thrive in communities that were on the commons that were you know having a great time staying alive that it had to destroy them systematically because everybody needed to be available as free labor and so it's a small digression but in the early days of western expansion a lot of frontiers people ran across and joined the native american tribes they were like man life is much better over there and we you know they may be under attack from us but there was a whole lot of jumping across and going and joining the native tribes for better or worse so so how do we figure that out and then we're getting close to the end of our of our call time um rob you had mentioned earlier in the chat something that i'd love to just sort of go into a little bit more which is like over attributing to trump the mess that we're in about covid and i've got a ton of stuff in my brain about the mistakes that a trump actually made they're like and and sort of things like that but but i realize that that's a really important sort of uh debate point so i don't want to just sort of gloss over it here uh so maybe we set up a different conversation around it or something like that just just one sentence on it i think comes more from kind of the maybe the libertarian uh uh group of folks that think that whatever the government touches makes it worse and so to to say that there was you know we're all humans with free choice so we could have chosen to wear masks or chosen to isolate ourselves obviously there's a big component of him having the bully pulpit and and putting that information out there but i think there's a lot that that can be done was done could have been done at the local levels you know a lot is done at the state levels so yes he has a lot of sway but we also all have collective responsibility for for the world and the people so that would be the summary of agreed stacey then pete if you had something you wanted to yeah i i just want to add that focusing on what he may have done wrong it's like we want people to see that you know they made a mistake but we're doing it with shame you know you idiot you fell for this and i think it's much more important to just focus on what we want going forward where we are united how we do want to deal with it and take him out of the equation because he is a cult figure at this point a really good point and it's when i wrestle with constantly like i can't make my way past that and when i talk about things like design from trust i'm completely torn because my own belief still is unless you understand how the sausage was made before like unless you understand where that went wrong you're going to rebuild that same sausage you're gonna like you're going to go back into it because it's a groove it's a it's a set of assumptions that we're accustomed to so you have to kind of go through history and expose some of the the ways that things got this is my own logic and yet and yet talking about what what is the positive thing we could do together right now is the better approach for bridging this this big divide yeah without sounding arrogant i just want to say that there's a whole bunch of people that will never be able to understand all those levels anyway so we're trying to explain to them they can't get it you know and you know on all sides you know and i'm not putting any other assumptions on that i'm with you thank you pete do you want to have a a wrapping pete then judy yeah thank you um this is a kind of a question it's a ogm meta question and also an ogm forum thing in these kind of groups in social settings we often have a a bright line about no commerce no no commercial stuff this is a safe place this is a place away from the helter skilter world of of money and and things like that so i want to suggest or i want to ask maybe i want to i have an intuition i have an intuition that it wouldn't hurt us and it would help us if there was a little bit of commerce in ogm so to start off you know the the way i think of this is kind of just practically oh it would be super cool if there was on the ogm forum if there was a help wanted section and the help offered section and a stuff offered a stuff wanted section and a stuff wanted offered section and and it might be okay if there was actually some money attached to so it might be okay if i said you know uh i need uh i need a a calculator a certain kind of calculator from 10 years ago i wonder if you've got one rattling around in your closet i would be happy to pay you $25 for it conversely i've got you know this uh really cool book that you can't buy anymore um i i want to give it to somebody except i think if if i give it to somebody that won't value it as much as if i ask for $10 for it maybe it's a hundred dollar book maybe it's a ten dollar book i don't know um i i also have a use case immediate use case for the help wanted section um one of the things i have the dream of doing for ogm forum and i haven't had the time to do it is um it would be super nice if i or somebody else took every week kind of a snapshot looked over ogm forum and said here's all the stuff that's going on at ogm forum and you're missing out if you don't kind of look around you know um uh i wish i had time to do that i don't um and it popped in my head um i would totally say and this this is an unequal commercial thing and it's weird but i would totally say look i would pay somebody i here's here's a $50 you know thing i'll put into uh into whatever payment system we need to put it into square or or whatever um if you if you did four or five weeks of taking an hour of your time and going through ogm forum and saying look this is the top stories this is i'm i'm a kind of a beat reporter for ogm forum i would totally give you 10 bucks a week for you know five weeks i i can put out 50 bucks into the world for that i would love that i would hope that some other people would go dude i'll chip in for that too because i need that service i need it as well and i wanted to go past five weeks past um pete's $50 but um so that's my suggestion and wish question so let me answer pete directly and then pass it to judy for the last word and we'll wrap the call um so i'm totally on board i think yes and there's several things that we've been trying to do to do this so number one story threading is a job capacity a new role that we're trying to create which would be a paid role there would be a guild that would sort of bring story threaders up into capacity we would sell our services to corporations to organizations to governments whoever and hopefully that's a that's a commercial venture that's ongoing um second uh matt and the team at collective next have been trying really hard to close a client project that would actually involve ogm and where some ogmers would get paid to be part of the project etc etc and there've been a couple near misses but none of those have actually closed yet i'm actually in a conversation right now actually a couple conversations where that might happen as well and i'm just dying for one of those to come in and then third um this isn't framed up yet and probably we have to be a bit of a more of a business like either uh i don't really want to become a non-profit or four or three but public benefit corporation would be great but we need to have some kind of structure because i'd like to create a reservoir for money that organizations that want what we're doing to thrive in the world to pour some some money into which we would then divide among ogm fellows and ogm fellows would be people who as beach has described have given a lot of time and effort to ogm and that that funding would allow them to not worry so much about uh rent you know rent food or whatever and you'd be able to continue offering some effort here so all of those things are kind of in the air in the offering aren't aren't facts yet aren't done yet but that's and that's just the start and i'm totally open to other kinds of ideas including like swap meet and whatnot and we've got a bunch of hands up so so quickly fail them then lauren then judy i don't know if you guys have actually started to have conversations about that before i'd like the idea of the guild um framing you know uh i know lauren and charles deals with deal with it a lot within their cash bins um but like if there was a way that we can actually look at governance look at and break down like how is it that we might kind of have a a a framework that people can kind of adapt in terms of business best practices and push that along um yes yes yes yes yes i just had to in the chat that there will be a call probably next week about exactly that topic so it'll be separate from our check and call we'll have a call about what does a guild mean in the ogm context how do we do it uh what what should we expect of guilds what are some of the guilds we can set up at the beginning etc so they're totally on board with that um lauren and then judy for the last word thanks hank i just wanted to say that um maybe ogm isn't entity as much as a flotilla of things and that it could actually be united by like crappy brand and in fact we probably need crappy brand better than like shiny brand to unite everyone jerry are you you're muted no go ahead i'm talking to april having a side conversation my apologies go ahead yeah i mean it could be that we already have uh companies registered and maybe for example say if we were to get uh grant money or something it would be nice if we had like a full list of choices of different entities for different grants or different um of co-ops or we uh charles and i have both a non-profit and a dow and maybe there are other entities among us that would be really helpful to use to not have to do paperwork every time in order to do anything so that we could kind of reduce the amount of bureaucracy needed to do anything thank you that sounds that sounds great judy uh you've got the last word well i don't know that it's the last word but it occurs to me that we're putting a lot of emphasis in this particular call on the importance of the election which i totally agree with for many many reasons however elections are notoriously fickle and so there's another dimension of how do we plow ahead regardless of the new reality that we probably need to spend some significant time contemplating what are the continuing actions that will make the world a better place regardless of how chaotic the political scene is and given that we're going to factor in political craziness as a higher threshold than it has historically been what are the implications of that for how we act inside that umbrella so to speak or at the edge of the umbrella to work the fringes to change the umbrella and um i totally totally agree with that too and i think what ogm is doing is extremely valuable in either scenario whoever wins i would just rather be working in the frankly biden one scenario than in the trump one scenario because the the latter one is much more difficult so so many so many things are going to be harder um all right which is a slightly sort of bittersweet note to end on but i think that that's a good a good spot to hold this um thank you all go on the mailing list go on the forum and let's talk about these things see you in a week and i'm going to set up a couple of extra side calls about some of these different topics so thank you very much really lovely lovely sharing all this with you all everybody great to see you bye y'all