 We'll keep going. All right, go ahead, Judy. This is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, October 19, 2023. So since I'm one of the early people here, I'll start. We had a really interesting event on Tuesday night here. I'm co-president of the Minnesota chapter of ARCS Foundation, which is Achievement Rewards for College Scientists. We give $5,000 stipends to high talent grad students in STEM. And it's always a great event when we get to give out those awards that hear what these young talented people are doing in their PhD dissertations. And this year, we combined it with our Scientist of the Year event, which is a separate celebration usually, but it worked well to combine them. We honor someone at the University of Minnesota usually, although occasionally it's from corporations nearby that are leaders in science, in terms of being good scientists and well advanced in their career. And the honoree last night was Dr. David Bernard, who's the department head for BMVB at the University of Minnesota. He's also the head of the Metabolism Institute and his personal research is Diabetes and Metabolism. And he gave a really great talk. We will have a recording of it, we hope, if the recording worked. And I had no idea how important the thin layer of adipose tissue under our skin was until we explained it to us. It turns out primarily it's our first immune response because it protects us preliminarily from all of the things that happen and it has a lot of capability. And of course, it gives us the fluidity of skin, which allows us to bend. But in greater detail, he explained all of that and it was just fascinating to understand. And he's well recognized. He's a fellow of AAAS. He's had some awards and he's just really a talented speaker and a wonderful educator who's wrapping up a 50-year career at the university. That's cool. What's his name again? David Bernlour, B-E-R-N-L-O-H-R. And he was just, he was really impressive and kind of inspiring. And then you follow him by seven really talented grad students telling us what their research is about. It's always a high event. So that was my news for, that's my major news. Other than I came out to a car with a dead battery because I didn't inadvertently hit the hazard flashers and that made it a very late night trying to get someone to provide assistance so that I could get back to my home. Thanks, Judy. We're off to our check and start just because we started talking and Judy started checking in and we're like, let's go. So I think everybody here knows the rules of the road. I'm going to step back from the conversation, step in when you'd like to, take your time, stepping in, et cetera, et cetera. I will tell people in the chat when they come in, what's up. So onward from there. I'll check in. I'll start with the dead battery because I was sitting here waiting for this call to start and then I realized that the clock on the wall has a dead battery. So it wasn't making it until 11 o'clock. I didn't really, just my last half hour has been so interesting because I came in, I got the mail. I got this Phi Beta Kappa publication that I haven't gotten in almost 40 years. And it led me to start thinking about school. And I was thinking about what was going to be my check-in today. And I started, anyway. In the middle, I get this ding on Facebook Messenger and it's my college roommate that I haven't spoken to in 30 years. And she puts up there a list of, I had made her this list. There was this roommates game that was going to be like the newlywed game. And so I had put all the list of all the things I liked, my colors, my toothpaste. So she sent it to me. And it was literally at the moment that I was thinking about sitting next to her and a poem she gave me, the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem at graduation. And it was right in that exact moment that this ding came in with this 40 year old list. And it was just interesting. And most of the things on the list haven't changed. I now take my coffee black, but it was, so that's really what's on most. I have other things, but maybe when we get into the conversation, we'll hit on that. But right now, this is the fun part. Thank you. That's awesome. So does this mean there's a topic that people wanna talk about? Not until we've completed the check-in round. I'm asking if the reason nobody's jumping in, I'm just putting it out there. There's a reason behind the silence. So I was comforted about the silence a couple calls ago, a couple check-in calls ago, because I was getting a little bit nervous that we weren't sort of jumping in. And I am now treating these calls more like Quaker meeting, which is basically silent meeting. And we'll jump in when we jump in and that's groovy. And for the people listening in later on recordings, I'll treat this more like a Quaker meeting. And you can read up on that. I'll put a post in the chat about what Quaker meeting is like. But I'm heading that way and I'm much more comfortable with it that way. If anybody's really uncomfortable, let me know. And if what Stacey just asked is true, say so in the chat and maybe we direct ourselves directly into a conversation about the Hamas situation or about AI and Mark Andreessen's crazy-ass techno-optimist screed and whatever. There's plenty of interesting things to be concerned about these days. But I'll go back into silence and let the call roll. So I wonder what Quaker meeting would be like if there was chat in the background. I find myself constitutionally incapable of using chat. The reason is simple. If I'm listening to what people are saying, there's several levels of listening. There is what's being actually said and then what gets stirred up in me in reaction to what's being said. And if I go to chat, I'm gonna cut off my own subterranean flow of thoughts. And I assume that that's true for other people too. The result being, as we look like we're looking, listening to each other, but we're really not. I mean, come on. Chat just is a disruptor of those deeper flow. I'll go next and I'll start with that. I love chat. I love the multi-dimensional conversation that enables. I love the many layers, Doug, that you just described, but it is not Quaker meeting. And it is not fully listening to each other. And doing that is really rare in modern times. I have the experience. I suspect that many of you do of listening to somebody through the filters of what I'm already thinking, what my assessments are, what they're saying, what I wanna say next, et cetera, which is not the same as listening. And maybe it's a lost art, maybe it's an artifact of modern times. I have deep respect and admiration for Quaker meeting and Jerry, what you're trying to bring to us here. And whatever the discomfort of it, I welcome it. And I'm guilty of chatting during stuff also, which I'm not gonna do now. But Doug, thank you very much for that. You know, sort of an indicator of how unfamiliar we are with this and Stacy, this is not at all a criticism, but you're discomfort with the silence. This is nice. I wasn't uncomfortable at all. I was asserting my agency to recognize something. I actually thought one of the two dugs wanted or were contemplating jumping in, not uncomfortable at all. Okay, okay. Okay, well, let me say it a different way. I was fascinated by the break in the silence for a meta comment about the silence as opposed to the silence just continuing. So, you know, anyway, there you go. Just to add to that, I would have liked permission to, I mean, actually, I would have liked to have add to it, but because I knew there's a rule that everybody has to check in, I didn't. So I was wondering if, you know, I like the more natural flow of a conversation where if you feel moved to speak, regardless of anything, if the energy is right, you can speak. So the way you jumped in after Doug, or I tried to start with the battery after Judy. Good enough. So my check-in is two parts. One is that I've been in a state which a friend diagnosed as PTSD for the last about 10 or 11 days in deep shock and anguish and anxiety. At, you obviously know what I'm talking about, the situation in the Middle East, I found for a couple of days, I couldn't speak about it much and didn't post about it much. And then did and was really surprised that no responses, no comments, no nothing on any of my posts, which is really unusual. And then Wednesday, maybe last Wednesday, maybe last Thursday, I forget when, I posted something carefully, gently provocative, asked a question and have had a more engaged and extensive conversation on Facebook than I've ever had with anything before, which is fascinating in itself. And well, so the question I asked was this. I asked, I said, I'm seeing lots of people telling Israel what not to do, which I completely understand and mostly agree with. And I'm not seeing hardly anybody telling Israel what to do. So what would you say? And if you were the boss of Israel, what would you do parentheses? It ain't easy and they're in suit of conversation. So anyhow, that's the background of my world these last couple of weeks. And I have periods of time where I'm able to work and focus and be relatively normal, human being, whatever that passes for these days and periods of time where I'm just not moving, not able to focus, not coherent and strangely very, very coherent within all that. So that's story number one. Story number two is that Ken and I yesterday hosted Carol Sanford on our monthly living between worlds call. Carol, do people know her? Hands, fingers, mostly not. Okay, so Carol's a masterful and highly regarded business consultant. Iconoclastic has worked with folks ranging from Procter and Gamble to seventh generation, New Muti, was written, just came out with her seventh book. She's written a lot about regeneration and regenerative business and has a very different approach than most. Very set in her ways about it. The new book which is called No More Gold Stars regenerating the capacity to think for ourselves is both a screed against incentives and rewards and goals and all the usual tricks of management. And a kind of nurturing love poem for how do we redevelop the capacity to think for ourselves. She's so committed to that that she didn't want to do questions and answers in the call because she didn't want the whole framework of we have questions since she has answers. She wanted to nurture a kind of conversation in which the answers emerged was very rich. The breakouts were unusually rich. Notable on the book is that she's got two forwards to the book. Usually folks have one, if any and the forwards are from Tom Peters who says this turned him up on it, turned him on his head and Tyson Unicaporta, author of Sand Talk. So who sort of said it turned him on his head? So like two guys from really different worlds. I thought that was a fascinating move. Anyhow, it was rich and full of wonder and for me, very provocative in terms of how I work with clients. And one of the things that Carol said is that she tries to never do the same thing twice. So if she's gonna give a speech on a topic she's given it before, she does not pull out the deck and tweak it for the new situation. She starts from scratch again or so she says because she wants the freshness in the moment of each thing. And that was a challenge to all of us. Fernando Flores, as you know, I've been studying with a lot says he's never more than 60% prepared for anything that he does. Carol sounds like she's maybe less than that. So the provocation of how much to be prepared how much to have planned how much to have designed is a really interesting one. In my coaching work, I noticed that lots of other coaches make offers that say, I've got this, I've got this 12 week program that's gonna take you through these 12 steps. So I'm gonna deliver you these three results or something defined and prescriptive and predicted. And I find in my coaching work for better for worse from marketing perspective, I resist doing that. And I'm inviting people into a conversation that will move something but not through a prescribed series of steps not a sequence, not even a guarantee because it depends on what they do. The guarantee I guess is the provocation. Anyhow, so that was just yesterday afternoon lots still stirring from that. I've been gradually working my way through these seven books in reverse order and we'll have the video posted probably late this week or early next week and I'll share the link on OGM once it's there. And Judith, you were there I was really glad to see your face. And at some point would love to hear how that was for you although that does not need to be now. So thank you. I was there too. You, oh, I didn't see you Stacey, good, cool. Well, same to you. I'll see here what your thoughts are also. We had, I don't know, we had probably 50 people and I couldn't see everybody on the screen, so. I'll go. I always do enjoy the silence. So thank you, Joy, for holding space and thank you Stacey for wondering if we wanted to shift. I have a thing that is not the thing that I want to check in on and but I'm going to anyway because it's the thing that's kind of looming in my head. This weekend is the 40th anniversary or it's 40th, 40th alumni reunion for my university which is just mind blowing that we're all old enough to have a 40th reunion. I'm actually still on leave. I took two years of university and went on leave to earn enough money to go to Europe with a friend which of that time in my life, the Europe trip is almost as important as my couple of years in university but so I'm still on leave. I haven't finished my third and fourth year and I probably won't but so there's a little bit of a trick thing where I'm not actually really invited to the alumni reunion. So I'm going a classmate who I knew but didn't haven't been in touch with for 40 years. Ping me and said, hey Pete did you want to come to the reunion and so we arranged it so that she's not bringing her husband so I get to be her plus one and it's all weird. It's actually starting today, today, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and I've been trepidatious the whole time. It's like I don't want to think about it for lots of reasons. I'm a little bit shy in person. I'm going to be wearing a mask the whole time even during dinner, which I'm always cheered by my wife Joanne because she's like, whatever I'm not embarrassed by it. I'm just gonna wear my mask. I had the opportunity to drive a couple hours to kind of an in-person event with a bunch of people I never knew but it was a super cool thing and I was wearing a mask the whole time. I was self-conscious the whole time and I get self-conscious in weird ways because I don't want other people to feel bad. Like, oh, I wonder if I should be wearing a mask in front of that guy. Why is that guy like mucking up our pictures with a mask? And then I feel bad because other people might feel bad because it's like this whole thing. Plus the alumni weekend is not cheap and includes a very nice dinner which I'm going to probably kind of like cover around and pretend that I'm there but not actually eat anything and the whole thing is weird. So I've kind of been ignoring it and I thought it was Sunday. It turns out that the main event is actually tomorrow. So I get to drive up a couple hours to Pasadena and have a cool time with people I kind of know from 40 years ago and then come back. It's a beautiful campus, very cool university. I happen to go to Caltech, which is just a wonderful gem of in the world in a lots of different ways. So it's exciting, scary, disappointing because I'm going to do the whole mask thing. And so that's what I'm thinking of mostly this morning along with a bunch of other things I could be thinking about. I've got thoughts about some of the things we started talking about and because that wouldn't be a check-in, that would be a conversation. I will save those for later. Maybe we'll talk about them, maybe we won't. Thanks. I'll do a check-in and Pete heard a piece of this conversation, I think yesterday or day before we had a nice conversation and this comes out of the Neo Books Project which is a series of calls on Mondays where we're trying to author books that kind of intersect and are reusable and are more interesting online than they are in the book form. And that has caused me to start thinking like a Neo Book. And that's kind of the thing I want to explore with you all as my check-in, which is one of the conceits of Neo Books is that the nuggets that make up the Neo Book that roll up into a Neo Book are actually composable and reusable in different settings. So if somebody had written a terrific description of how ChatGPT works for example, then why not just use it in lots of different places where you need a description of ChatGPT if it fits and if it's written in some modular reusable format. Now that breaks what I think is a taboo of book writing and I think that one of the unwritten rules of books, correct me if you think I'm wrong but later when we can talk is that books should contain entirely unique original content and that a book, an actual real book has all words that were generated for that book only. And I'm trying to say, nah, not really that books could mix, match and reuse and you could have a series of different books. So for instance, Klaus is writing a book that combines regenerative agriculture, water and soil fertility with spiral dynamics and some theory you sprinkled in at the end as like a seasoning on it. And I can easily see that there could be another book that takes the same first half and changes it for a different second half about applying a different framework to solve the problems. And that might turn into sort of a short series. I can also see that his bottom half about spiral dynamics could turn into its own little starter of a book about applied spiral dynamics and that might appeal to spiral dynamics fans, et cetera, et cetera. And then other people might pick up different pieces or nuggets that he has created into their own threads or their reinterpretations riffs on a theme. And that might turn into a web of book-like artifacts that actually the books are each point of view snapshots taken of a really interesting tapestry of nuggets that is interacting online. And so my meditation is how do you write for reuse and for composability? And I've been trying to do that. So I'm trying to write a Neo book about design from trust, which is an idea I had back in I think 2012-ish that needs to exist. And it's really fun. It's I'm having a very good time. And anyway, there's more on that. I could go in lots of different directions from there, but that's kind of when I step outside of the global crises that are busy crashing around our ears all the time, that's the space I'm stepping into. And it's fun. It's been really enjoyable. I'm a late joiner, but I'll leap in. You know, all kinds of substantive stuff to that have been spinning around, including Andreessen's manifesto, which is like really. But I was thinking of taking the lead from Pete. I was like, it's personal stuff. And I'm probably most focused on what we've got. It's like kind of swirling things in the family or one piece of news, and hopefully is that people will be moving back to the Bay Area. My wife's taking a job as the chief social impact officer at the School of Public Health and this university in Berkeley. And so we'll be moving back to the Bay. And meanwhile, my kids are kind of heading off in different directions. One of them's heading to Thailand to become, to the expense of time at least as what I think of it as a body man for a month. So he's going to be traveling to Sri Lanka and then India and is considering joining a monastery. And the other kids rented a car as driving across the desert in Kazakhstan. And it's like, I don't think he knows how to repair cars. So I'm not really sure. Well, he's thought this one through. So anyway, everybody's in flow at motion. Which I think is good, but it's a little disconcerting. I think I'd like to check in. So I don't know if it's much to add, except for several years, actually maybe when OGM started, I really got into trying to understand how primary first order learnings are about how the world works. Just growing up as I did. So I called it like, you know, unlearning. So it's been, I'm just reading today's plex. There's a note in there about Ken has a piece all these little things come up in your mind or any of criticisms, you know, you should watch out for them. So I guess I would say I'm pretty aware of that. And I wish I was able to say something, but I don't think I have anything to say since I'm still kind of at sea. Doug Carmichael's writings have been pretty helpful in a way because I like the questions Doug poses because they don't have a simple answer. But I just feel like I'm in a, years ago when I was studying thermodynamics, I got to a point where I was a problem. I couldn't, it basically took me five years to come to it, to actually understand what I was trying to figure out. And I feel like I'm in kind of a weird space like that. Like, I know there's some connections here. I have no idea what they are. I know I'm gonna have them, but I guess I'm not having them now. So I feel like I'm in a very somewhat confused, but I don't know. I don't know what the word is. I just don't know what the word. I wish I could make more sense out of things, but I think the truth is I can't right now. So maybe you guys check out time. I'm reluctant to give up on the community sense that's here. So I'll give, yeah, being a federal government employee and stuff with all the craziness and stuff, the first thing that always gets canceled is any training and stuff. So there was a, or there was a big conference on disability, things in here in D.C. area. And I mean, the conference providers, I mean, they got the money and stuff, but all the exhibitors that put the money in to come to D.C. and then we were probably 75, 80% of the attendees were probably government employees. And I don't know if everybody was in the position to have to cancel, and I guess other big companies do that too, if there's any kind of, whenever there's any kind of issue, the first thing we do is cancel training, which seems like a little disappointed there. Just this continued roller coaster as I was joking with Breitbart, it's more like a high-speed elevator. Just work to make the elevator car or padded, padded at least. So yeah, Charlie Brown syndrome, bunch of projects and you look just a step or two away. So that's kind of where I'm at today. Okay, I'd like to, this is kind of a meta comment, but I feel like right now, we're in a kind of state where we're trying to give everybody time. We're gonna be quiet until everybody checks in. And I know I took a very long time just to decide if I was going to. But I feel like there's no time bound here except for 11 30, the hour and a half. And so if people do not wanna check in, there's no way to say I'm gonna pass because I do not wanna check in. And so something that Doug Carmichael mentioned, it's like, so in a way, it's a little bit like computer race condition, what's gonna be stuck because there's no way to move forward. Doesn't feel like there's a way, there's a clear way to be stuck. So maybe that's what it feels like to me. This came up a little bit in the chat though. And I said, we don't really have a pass protocol. And Stacey just said, you can, or actually Gil just said you can pass in the chat or you can step in and pass. And I am consciously waiting for just about everybody to check in. And since this isn't like friends meeting, Quaker meeting, which lasts an hour, so at the hour you stand up, we don't have an elegant way to know when we're done or when we transition, which is intriguing. Yes, it's a race condition. Reminds me of waiting for Godot. Well, we're supposed to be ourselves. Anybody who is writing in chat is not listening to the silence. Is that important for other people to listen to the silence? Well, the illusion is that we're in the silence together but we're not. Jillian, you muted. I wanted to break the silence by bringing up one of my favorite movies, which is Peaceful Warrior, roughly based on the life of Dan Milman. And Nick Nolte has a line in the movie, which is there is never nothing going on. So there's pretty much nothing going on in the Zoom chat except I hear occasional taps of somebody put something on a desk or something. But outside this screen that I'm looking at, there's plenty of noises. The neighbor is getting a new roof. There are planes flying into San Francisco airport. There's the sound of the space heater. There's no silence. So it's like, again, there's nothing, there's never nothing going on. Well, we've lost Doug B, who as far as I can tell, was the only person who hadn't jumped into the conversation and rather than step any stepped out, I think, unless he accidentally pressed the eject button. So with that, I declare our silent meeting portion over and we can head back in to any of the things that any of us raised, many of which were like really like super interesting and like places to go. Pacey, please. Yeah, can I just add Doug put in the chat that he has to go, but would like to leave a question for all. What is the single most important thing that could be most valuable and generative in service to all? His answer is coherence, connection and resonance between us in service to responding to what is needed emergency, emergently, moment to moment, what say you all? So that's the question he left us with. And ironically, perhaps in the context of this call, I completely missed that that had happened. So I thought he had just bailed. Stacey, thank you very much for pointing that out to me. And a thing I would love to do is debrief with all of you about the process of this call. Like for whom, Doug, it felt like it was very, it felt like you were being, the way you expressed yourself during the call, I heard that you felt you were being disrespected by people who were chatting during the call. Is that correct? No, I didn't feel like disrespected is that it was any of me. I never had any thought like that. I just thought that the silence was somewhat hypocritical. So that it was disrespectful, but not disrespect that you were not the target of any disrespect, but it was disrespectful of us using the chat to the silence. Gil then Pete. That would be a conclusion about what was going on. I had no conclusion about what was going on, except that it seemed to me a waste of time after a while. All right, Gil then Pete, you're muted, Gil. I found this to be a fascinating and uncomfortable experiment. And I'm glad we did it. Disrespectful Jerry is a judgment about something and the observation, I think it'd be interesting to separate our observations from our judgments, if we can, not easy. I have a couple of observations. One is that I got twitchy and my intention was to ignore the chat, but I periodically would glance at the chat and I sometimes wrote in the chat and found it very difficult to not do that. So Doug, to your point, thank you. I find that it's challenging enough to be still and silent by myself. And it's maybe easier to do it with a group of people all facing in the same direction like in a Zendo, in a shared practice and looking at something or nothing altogether. And it's very different to be sitting, looking at each other and doing that. So it's a really novel exploration. And I find myself wondering if we went to an hour meeting, if we had, well, it's not gonna happen, here we are. I was just imagining in business context going to an hour meeting and having everybody talking for an hour and then the meeting concluding or being in a meeting where nobody speaks for most of the time and in the last few minutes, some people speak and the meeting concludes. Is that okay? Which is better? I don't know which is better. I don't know which produces more whatever clarity, unanimity, a common direction. Stacey asked in the chat about a goal. There can there be gatherings of people without a goal? And I found myself wondering if all of the thoughts periodically coursing through my quiet mind were similar to the thoughts that are coursing through your quiet mind, which of course is the question of what's thinking anyway. Fernando's fond of saying that, somebody was saying something once about, well, I think this and this about that. And he said, well, you're not thinking. Thinking is something that's happening to you. So I was thinking about thinking happening to us while we're sitting here quietly. Thanks, Gil. I wanted to skip over reflecting on the experience, but I guess I shouldn't. I wanted to jump into something that came up in the conversation that I thought would be more productive. But thanks all for participating in what turned out to be an experiment, I guess, despite Jerry's protestations. Jerry, I really, really, really appreciate you holding the space for that. Thank you. For context, and I'll get to the fact that I was one of the loud people on chat, but for context, that was in some ways one of the most more productive OGM calls I've had. And honestly, I goof off in a typical OGM call because it helps me pay attention. It's a weird thing, but the easiest way for me to pay attention in chemistry class of one of the things, I think I've told this story before, so I apologize if you've heard it before, but the easiest way for me to pay attention in chemistry class was sitting right in front of the teacher so he could see absolutely everything I was doing and I was doodling the heck out of it. And very technical doodling, like trying to write backwards and cursive, trying to write vertically and cursive so that if you turn the page, you could see it, like kind of the hardest doodling things my mind could do. And that keeps everything in my head so that I could actually listen to him. So I cherished that teacher. I don't know if he knew what I was doing, trying to accommodate whatever kind of ADHD that is. I've never been diagnosed and I don't think the diagnoses are, a lot of our scales are kind of weird. They measure something, some of the right stuff and some of the wrong stuff. Anyway, I don't know if he knew what I was doing or the other thing was I always got A's anyway. So it's like, okay, I can keep track of him. He's not being disruptive to the class. He's gonna get in a whatever. I'm not gonna worry about it. So during an OGM call, I have to spin a lot of dials, search a lot of stuff just to be able to pay attention to people talking. Anyway, sorry to get off on attention a little bit. The thing I wanted to say for context, I could have had a lot more silence. I understand I felt uncomfortable a little bit too, but we didn't even get close to my tolerance for the amount of silence that we could have had together looking at each other. And the more we did it, the more I enjoyed it. I had more fun doing more silence. So I never got to the point where it's like, you know, I'm freaking out and have to say something, not even close. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing. And I understand, and I have a lot of empathy for people who don't work the same way. So one of the lessons I think is that neurologies are different and the expectation that you have that we're doing something wrong is not necessarily the, it's not necessarily the consonant with everybody else's neurology. For me, we were doing the right thing and we could have done more of it, a lot more of it. And I would have been happier if we had done more of it. Not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's just, you know, for context. I took a couple of notes. Let me make sure I hit all the high points. The one of the things that I wanted to say that I didn't say because I didn't want to break the silence, even in chat. At some point I'm freaking out. I'm like, okay, everybody's uncomfortable. I'm starting to get uncomfortable because other people aren't uncomfortable not because I'm uncomfortable, but I'm starting to freak out a little bit. Okay, she's gone, he's gone, you know, that person's gone. You know, are we just held up on one, you know, what's the deadlock, right? What's the race condition here? And then I remembered I've relaxed. I'm like, Jerry is a consummate facilitator. Jerry, I don't, I'm not gonna think about who's the holdout yet. I ended up figuring it out later, but I'm like, I can relax because Jerry's got this. Jerry's a facilitator. No matter my discomfort level is kind of mounting and because other people's discomfort level is mounting. So I kind of wanted to say that in the moment and I didn't because I didn't want to say it at the moment, but so I trusted Jerry and that made me, my blood pressure go back down. It's interesting to say that there's an, they say like a question, did we achieve our goal? Was there a goal? Should we have had a goal? I love having goals. For me, there was an emergent goal of being in silence together that was really beautiful and wonderful. And that was, and we got partway there. We could have gone further and gotten more of the goal that was emergent for me. Again, not that that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's, you know, what I felt. I appreciate Doug's comment that the people in chat are cheating the silence. And I talked a little bit about using chat as a side channel or a fork conversation or things like that. I could talk on and on about whether or not, you know, I want one conversation or multiple conversations or whether or not chat is a distraction. I'm very conscious and very self-conscious about chat. So right away when Doug said, Doug said what he said, you know, people in chat are essentially cheating the system is the way I heard it. I don't think Doug was that judgmental either. Like I disagree because when I was attending to chat, obviously I wasn't listening to the silence very well, but a lot of times I would stop chat and listen to the silence. And it was the silence was louder and more effective than talking usually is for me in an OGM call. I don't know if that makes sense. The thing I wanted to respond to, to flip the channel a little bit. I have a very, very, very weak, poor answer to Gil's challenge question, which is, okay, here are a lot of people saying what should Israel, you know, what should Israel stop doing? And nobody says very few people say what Israel should do. I have an answer for that. And where I sit, it's easy. I want to acknowledge very deeply that it's very easy for me to say something or, you know, think that, oh, I've thought about this problem and I have the answer. And, you know, nobody else has thought, you know, nobody over there has thought about it. I don't know why they just don't take my advice. That's not what I'm trying to convey at all. But I think I know the answer, a way to express the answer. And I don't know how you would do it, but I think Israel should practice radical compassion. And that's the only way that bootstraps out of this whole thing. And I understand if I were in Israel's shoes, you know, Israel, it's kind of weird to say that because Israel is a whole complex of, you know, political leadership that is in the driver's seat and not driving very well and causing a lot of problems. And then there's a whole societal thing where it's a very complex and rich society. You know, it's not like it's one thing that's going, oh, well, I'm gonna beat people up instead of practicing radical compassion. But if I could say, you know, if I could whisper in somebody's ear and say, you know, I found a really good, I think it was a tweet by a guy who's Jewish and said, you know, so here's the deal. This is a bad situation in lots of ways. And there's lots of historically bad reasons, you know, it would have been nice if, you know, back in the day, the people who decided to gift the land that Israel sits on, it would have been nice if, you know, the British or the Americans or somebody, maybe they should have cited that in the middle of Europe somewhere or maybe they should have cited it somewhere in North America where there wasn't a contentious, you know, claim over the land. And the reason they didn't do that was kind of through a weakness, an inability or insensitivity to a lot of other things that were going on. I don't mean to dissect the whole thing, but, you know, there's a lot of issues there. And everybody who's on the ground there is in a really difficult situation. And, you know, I feel for that. And it's going to take generations to unwind. And I come back to, you could keep fighting a war or you can say, I'm just going to be, I'm going to do the opposite of that. And the opposite of that is actually, love thy brother, not, you know, not kill your brother. So, easy for me to say in my seat. I have another odd thing to kind of go along with that. One of the folks that we know a little bit in OJM, I know I'm a lot better from other communities. He and I are working at stitching communities together. Michael Lennon, probably some of you have seen him on calls. He and I got into kind of a deep discussion about it. And to Judy's question, you know, when you're talking with your friends, do you talk geopolitical like deep stuff or do you just talk, you know, kind of easy, easy domestic stuff? I do some of both. And with my friends, we end up in pretty deep conversations. Michael and I got to talking about music, kind of following on the OJM music call. And then he said something that really touched me was a YouTube video. There's an organization in Israel that gets people together in kind of radical connectivity. Instead of something like silence, like we practiced, they do song. So there's a great video of a song called One World. And they have a group of people. There are some parts, it's in Haifa, I think. There are some parts of that part of the world where your neighbors are not just Jews or not just Arabs or not just Muslims, but you get all three at once. And that's kind of like, oh yeah, I'm friends with, you know, next door's, somebody different than me. And they're not different from me because we're all neighbors, we're all the same, you know. So this song is taught to a large group of people in a hall or something like that over the course of an hour. And then they sing the whole thing. And they sing the whole thing in Hebrew and English and Arabic. And I think I'm butchering the Arabic part of that. Anyway, and, you know, he said, I wanna communicate, I wanna communicate why this touched me. And what this situation reminds me of is he had some personal interactions kind of with the edge of the Iraqi war after 9-11, which he thought was just a travesty of justice and things like that. You know, we ended up fighting the wrong war with the wrong people, killing a bunch of people who didn't need to be killed. And this particular situation reminded him of that. So he, you know, he kind of wrote up a little blurb I was gonna put it in Plex and then an hour or two later, he said, Pete, I've got a Jewish friend who's got a hard stop on anything to do with, he just doesn't wanna see any of it in the media. I just don't wanna, he just doesn't wanna think about it, which is fair. And he said, Pete, I don't know what you should do with Plex, I don't know if you should run this or not run this. I ended up thinking wanting to run it, that is it, Jerry. I said, you know, I need to talk to more people. My editorial process is Plex ends up being a lot done late at night at the end of the day and past everybody's bedtime kind of. So maybe I'll run it next issue after some talking amongst us. So thanks, it's a tough situation. And it's a tough enough situation that I even wonder, so the reason I mentioned Plex, I wonder if I can even talk about it, you know, in Plenary. And then it's like, so if we're not talking about in Plenary, then that's really bad, right? And that's, I don't know what that means, but you know, maybe you should go. Judith, can you step ahead of me for just a moment? Would that be okay, Judith? Yeah, just very briefly, Pete. I'm very moved by what you said about radical compassion and felt it would have been much more powerful if you just had stopped there and surrendered to the silence. Because my experience was that you filled it with lots of chatter after that. Out of whatever for you. And the experience for me was that it took me into, oh, well, you know, there's the history, but I have a different interpretation of that history and you got this fact wrong. I'm just like, then I'm just like into the briar patch. Whereas if you say radical compassion and stop there, I'm left with like, huh? What is that? How would that, what would that be? What would happen? It just like takes me to a very different kind of mind. And that's, I think the brilliance of that suggestion is that this whole thing is mired in everything that's said before on all sides. And everybody's interpretations of everybody's interpretations of everybody's interpretations of what's been said before. And there is no fucking way out of that. And you dropped, you know, you dropped a pebble in the pond of something very different and wanted to see the ripples of silence. Thank you for what you said. And Gil, thank you for that. That's really useful and clarifying. And Judy, thank you for letting the interruption happen. Take your time jumping in and you were muted right now. I had to get to the unmute button. I have a number of thoughts. And first of all, I liked the experiment of silence. And then I was intrigued by where that led me because it wasn't mental silence for me. And I wanna preface that by saying that part of what I most love about a typical OGM call is that it prompts me to learn more about whatever the topic is that has come up. What I'm learning it through the chat because people who've done more than me are contributing links that I can then go to to learn about things. But what I find most stimulating and valuable about OGM is the invitation to continue learning about things you don't know about or wish you didn't know about and the opportunity to take counsel from people who have dealt with them in more depth that would be essentially a guide. So I view the fellow OGM participants as my personal guides in terms of a lot of different areas of study that isn't just study but it's study that leads to action and leads to an opportunity to either do something about it in my community or gather a group of people to see what the local community thinks or whatever that might be. But it's this very subtle transition from intellectual concept to definition to potential action to taking action that to me is what this community represents. And there's a richness in the people who are here because these are people I would never have known and I feel comfortable sending them an email saying can you tell me more about X or what's happening in your area? So I wanna acknowledge that as the main reason that I really love OGM is the complexity of viewpoints and wisdom of all of the people in the room. Having said that, it was fascinating to see where my mind went in that much silence. I live alone. So I have the opportunity of personal silence whenever I want. All I have to do is turn off something that's streaming or whatever. And so I'm not so much interested in going to a silent event as I am experiencing the gentle stimulation of what OGM has provided to me. Makes great sense, Judy. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Yeah, I wanna clarify that I'm really comfortable in the silence when I disturbed it or interrupted it or even thought about whether or not it had gone past its usefulness. It was because I so respect and value the opinions of the people in this group that I kind of wanted time to go into the topic that Pete brought up later. I didn't wanna see that time wasted if the purpose of the silence had been accomplished. I also come from a place that I think it's really important that as individuals and as groups, we question why we do things. So typically I try to keep my answers, my contributions short. There were many times in the silence where I felt like I would have liked to interject just a question to think about. And I'm curious if that would have thrown Pete off or if that would have been as comfortable. I didn't feel like I wanted to do that from my own personal insecurities and reasons. And just to give you a little bit of background when I'm in a Facebook group and I just ask a question in some places, I am constantly called a Karen. I've been told people like me should be exterminated. I mean, I get battered all the time. Luckily, it's not like that here. But for me, I keep hearing. I mean, and I loved, Gil, I loved the speaker yesterday. And the reason that I was thinking about college today is because I recognized that I'm being drawn to people that I've never read or heard about. But I recognize that I have probably through teachers I've had or people I've spoken to been impacted by them, whether I've realized it or not because we're all the product of everybody and everything we've ever touched. So not to go on a ramble, but anyway, back to today. There were times that I felt like I wanted to channel Maxine Waters and reclaim my time and just grow out, take 10 seconds to just grow something out. And then we could be silent to Gil's point to have that interplay between words and silence. That's what I'm most interested in. So thank you. So I just want to add, Jerry, if we want to do this again, which I thought was really interesting and has value, I still think that, with this group's been around for a long time, I have been sort of a haphazard, idiosyncratic participant. But nonetheless, there is perhaps even an unspoken primary task that you gather people together for. Sometimes it's more explicit, right? Here's a headline from the New York Times. Let's talk about this, right? Okay, so that's expected to be a conversation. Around, right? So if we wanted to really have this kind of open silent check-in, I still think it really needs to be bounded in a way so that when we come here, we have some expectation about how the time, what's gonna happen in the time allotted. You know, like when I was an active Zen student, right? You go to the Zen door and it's, you know, whatever, it's three hours and what are you doing while we're sitting? If anything, they're gonna ring the bell, we're all gonna chant and go to work or whatever. So, but it's, you know, it's bound, it's got boundaries and there's, you know, kind of like, you know what you're there to do. So I think that might help. I mean, you're really, I mean, you know, as a facilitator, you can sort of manage that. But I mean, my little uncomfortable was I felt like, okay, we're just gonna let this expand. You know, until it bumps into the walls and we're done. Like the Truman Show. When you sail out and bump into the edge of the set. Thank you for that, Bill. Several things and I'm forgetting all of them right now. They're all fleeing from my mind as I'm focusing my mind on answering the question. So I love our quick conversations. I am a monster fan of it and I love racing with Pete to do the background and find the links for stuff and pour them into the chat. And I love the overwhelm of being able to sort of handle the conversation and this and that. And it is continuous partial attention as Linda Stone coined years ago, but I think that form of multitasking is really actually sort of a superpower and a fun thing. And I don't feel overwhelmed by it, but I know that it overwhelmed some people. The call we had today was roughly, but not entirely the opposite. And was also the product of us having built some sense of community among ourselves. Like the thing I used, once I started falling in love with Quaker Meeting and Wilton Monthly Meeting in Connecticut, before I moved into New York, I would arrive early intentionally to the meeting like around when the greeter was getting there. I would go take a seat across from the doors where people came in and I would just start watching everybody I loved come in and take a seat. And I found it really moving. I was moved just by the act of recognizing and welcoming quietly in my heart the people that I was like really growing fond of. And that was delightful to me. And Doug C, you're completely correct that chatting is not full attention and full mindfulness of a silence. But whether to chat or not chat, what the protocol is when we end, do we have an ending? Well, we always have an ending at 90 minutes. We know that we're not gonna run a lot past 90 minutes and we're about to bump into that edge of the set. But all of these things are just levers. These are all just variables we can play with. And I'm happy to play with them in any arrangement we like with what we could do on check-in calls and say, we're gonna do check-in protocol for the first 45 minutes and then we're gonna switch. And at the 45 minute timer, we're gonna bounce into conversation and whoever didn't get to check-in didn't get to check-in. Although part of the goal of the check-in call as we currently have a set is that everybody gets to check-in. But that would create a nice D mark and I'm happy to sort of do that. And there's this logical rational part of the brain that's like, gosh, as Judy just expressed so nicely, when we're together, we have these like zooming great conversations and we learn a bunch and we share stuff that I'd never heard about, a bunch of stuff that's in the chat today. And is it a waste to not be doing that? Is silence a waste? And actually it's like, well, gosh, no, silence is like this treasure. And trying to balance those things is really interesting, which is kind of why I'm sort of comfortable with our balance right now of alternating weeks where one week we go zoomie on something and we talk about narrative and storytelling and what role does it play? And then the next week we do this and we experiment with this format. So open to all suggestions, but that's kind of some of my thinking. These are all just variables. And we could in fact have silent meeting, meeting for worship protocol and turn off, I could disable the chat. And I could also request that people not take notes by themselves during the call, which would be hard for me to do, really hard. Because whenever somebody checks in and does something, I will also point out that the way we're checking in is not the Dug Carmichael protocol where his question is, what is like really worth talking about here? That's the question we should have been answering in the Dug protocol, which is not what we're doing either. So these, again, these are all just variables. Julian. I liked what you said about how the Quaker meeting protocol is. You know, following up for what Bill said, that seems like a good way to do it. The other thing I was wondering is if people were notified quite a few days ahead of time and then you get a chance to think about what you were going to do during that silence. I think that may conflict with the idea of trying to be in the moment, but yeah, I wonder what would happen if you get to think about it ahead of time. And also the point about turning off the chat, that seems to me essential if you're trying to go for silence because Dug is absolutely right. And I just noticed how twitchy I get, not just at the thought of turning off the chat, which I can live with, but telling me not to take notes. And Sherry, I imagine that's gonna be like really hard for you because that's what you've been doing for decades. Well, and then Quaker meeting, you can see everybody and there's no, nobody's got a notepad and pen out and you're fully present. And we had a fireplace that would be like lit. Somebody would show up early and light the fireplace whenever it was like fall through early spring. And that was just beautiful. And there was a window out to the grounds and you were just immersed in the experience of being in a beautiful space. So I love that as well. Ken is not with us today. He is, I think on travels to Italy. Is that right? Is that his timing right now? Which probably his flight got canceled last night. And I mean, this morning, I actually just sent a text so I'll tell you in a second. Oh, shoot, but I have a poem to read to us. So. You rerouted them. They forfeit the night in Milan, but off they go. Leaving in an hour, he said, half hour ago. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for the update. Love that. But he's getting the night in Zurich instead of Milan, which is non-terrible. Non-terrible, exactly. That's great. So I'm gonna read a poem by Derek Walcott called Love After Love. And I'll just paste it in the chat so nobody needs to look it up. And it goes like this. Love After Love. The time will come when with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror. And each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to itself to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit, feast on your life. And I highly recommend watching David White recite this poem by Hart, which is available on YouTube and in your grocer's freezer. He is a master of presiding poetry and he repeats lines in a way I don't know how to do that lets them sink in beautifully. It's wonderful. Thank you all. I think we're complete for today and all thoughts and comments welcome in the channel, in the call, ping me, zoom me, whatever. Thank you. Thanks all. Thank you, everybody. Bye.