 This is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, January 25th, 2024. We have as our topic the second rev on governance, which I will explain momentarily. First I'm going to turn on the transcript. There we go. And I'm really happy you're here. This is an exciting topic and I think we have a lot of things to cover. Ken Homer is probably not going to be on this call because he got COVID a couple days ago. And it was, you know, that wouldn't be a problem because he could be isolated at home, but he was feeling really crappy and running a pretty high temperature. So I don't think he's going to make the call. He and I are interested in organizing a separate set of calls on this topic that would probably run at 10am Pacific after this after this slot on Thursdays for four weeks starting next week. And at the end of this call, I'm going to do a show of hands to see if we should even try doing that if there's any interest here. But I would love to have some some some wiggle room some spare time to actually go deeper into the topic. So I'll explain that again at the very end of the call. Cool. And the start of the start of this is really a question of hey, what is a good form of governance for a group, a large group of people, which means some people say well it's either democracy the way we have it or socialism or communism and look how horrible those have been which is a false dichotomy. There are really many different ways for a group of people to come together and make sense of the world. In fact, in my brain, there's a topic called variants of anarchism, and there are some 20 odd varieties, just of anarchism which we've managed to write off entirely as a terrible chaotic thing that nobody should ever go look at. And it turns out that Bookchin and others who were the like were anarchists, we're really trying to figure out how do groups of people come together and govern each other without creating massive heavy structures that that a lot of people then wind up protesting about. So we had a great conversation two weeks ago. Eric, thank you very much for reminding me about the recordings in the transcripts I haven't uploaded them all yet properly into the matter most but I completely got stuck in my process of uploading and reporting into the channel for the recordings so I will finish those and I will then put these up after which means they'll kind of be nice and together, but I totally messed that up. And I wanted to ask one question for us to answer in the chat just as we warm up and get into this conversation. And that was as follows. What would you wish to find and I'll type this into the chat. And I'll give us a minute to sit and think about it. What would you wish to discover find to take away from discussions about governance. The thing how what words would you put around the thing you would love to take away from fruitful discussions around governance. And I'll type that in the chat and then let's go quiet for a minute and then as you wish you don't we don't have to wait and and you know pause and go but put them in the chat as you come up with them. So Dave we're going quiet for about a minute I just put a question in the chat which we are going to answer in the chat. Realistically is totally good here. Thank you. Love that raise your hand if you'd like a little more time. Think we've heard from most everybody. Great. Awesome so let me just go back and read through them. So Eric writes I want to better understand the issues people have with the governance model as outlined in the US Constitution. I wrote what's working. How might we improve or update our current forms of governance. Jake if I'm speaking idealistically I'd love to have some kind of epiphany that helped me see a new angle on the question. Stacey new questions to think about. Eric again sharing a website represent dot us. Gil what can we learn from Rojava. What can we bring to our worlds here. Dave how can governance evolve. Dave how can governance evolve to support regeneration of living systems like bar regions and all the members there in rivers trees etc. Pete I would like people to get an idea of the dramatic range of scales where we need governance from a handful of people who know each other well to a massively heterogeneous hundreds of millions to billions of people with very different concerns and sensibilities. Sorry I got to stop and give that a heart. And then Jose how not to fix but reimagine society in a way that is actionable Doug a form of governance that makes us feel larger and open not smaller and scared of that. Love them all actually and Patty what landmarks can we watch for that might indicate that a new model is setting us up for a new version of the old model. We can be aware of falling back into the old ruts Patty like like shiny new object looks great we go over there and oops we've just reincarnated the old system that we didn't like. Totally agree and way too much changes like that, in particular because people don't particularly like change and people who control systems managed to reroute things so that they work. I think he missed classes. Pardon. Oh, sorry, where's and causes facility conversations between population groups based on trust. Thank you. You're totally right. I didn't my eyes skipped over it. There's been a whole bunch of talk about the Civil War recently it was an anniversary of something I'm forgetting what. I subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson who's really really good. And what happens after the Civil War with at first sort of reconstruction era and then the backlash and the KKK and Jim Crow and everything else is so heartbreaking. It's really so heartbreaking like we fight a war this you know that many Americans die and then we just run right back into the same old ruts in so many ways. So how do we how does one prevent that. So let me pause for a second and we'll start kind of scatter scattered wherever, whatever rang here that you would like to take us into the topic as I said, can wrote me a note after the last call proposing a structure for some more structured calls which I really like, which I'd like to do separate from these calls. The structure he proposed seemed like more than we should do within the OGM standing call framework that would take longer and so forth so we're going to take. Four Thursdays. If there's if there's interest and sort of focus on that and try to bring more people to the conversation. So let me just pause and see what part of this is is active for you. I was going to kind of reaffirm the topic Jerry we've been doing a weekly series on regeneration and governance and the GRC and a lot of the conversations have been really productive. And I mean I kind of feel like we're on the, you know, the edge of a pretty important in governance technology, if you will, and, and that you know this this is one of the paradigm shifts we're experiencing is how do we evolve governance to cope with the, you know, opportunities and issues that we're facing going forward and other, you know, and you know the last one was a couple That's right within our lifetimes that'd be awesome. Anastasia and I had a first conversation just before this call and she said a lovely thing at the end of it which was, in five years, governance will be the new climate change. Like, we won't be focusing on climate change the way we're so focused right now, hopefully because we've dealt with it better. And we will be having all sorts of interesting conversations around governance. Anastasia I don't know if you want to elaborate on that or Sure. Thanks. Well, not quite. I still think that we should, and we will be focused on climate, but governance is just such an important variable of also solving for that problem. And so, you know, my invitation to discuss in this group would also be to understand what are the models that could open us up to governance beyond national borders, and what could planetary models of governance look like. As so many of the things that's, you know, in my foundation we're called hyper objects are concerned like our concern to more than just one nation, you know, if we take Himalayas, that affects the lives of 3 billion people. And, you know, China, Pakistan, India, everybody's involved, but somehow we have not managed to figure out a way to govern that in a collective sort of way. And in terms of the planetary object that's an object like Himalayas is or the new the river Danube, or the Alps. So many of these hyper objects require new systems of governance, new understanding of how these things could be brought together and thinking in planetary terms and beyond just the national borders. That's one. Secondly, I would also like to, I don't remember who wrote it but the narrative of regeneration and understanding governance items not as objects but as agents. For example, you know, if river or a tree could be an engine in governance, how could that relationship look like, and how do we switch from object based model of governance to to an agent based model of governance. So that that would be my my two suggestions understanding the planetary governance systems and understanding the relations between the agents rather than objects. Jill, I see your, your hand up you wanted to thank you. Before, before passing the gill. That's okay before passing the gill. I also want to say, religion is not out of scope for this conversation at all. And we've had conversations here in these calls before about maybe the re sacralization of the world as a way of getting people to see each other and to govern differently. So, this doesn't need that we don't need to limit ourselves to voting democracy governance alternatives to democracy. What would replace how people bubble up a decision that doesn't need to be the the the narrow scope of this conversation. We can range pretty widely because religions are governance models, I think very much. So go ahead and kill them costs. I want to, I want to, I want to poke at the term governance and the frame a little bit here. So I think we're in trouble as soon as we starts using that word. And the problem is, is expressed in the clip from etymology, etym online that I posted. You know, the first, the first phrase there is to rule with authority is the way that we think about governance about rules commands, etc. But the etymology goes in a different direction and Norbert Wiener contributed to this problem with his book cybernetics and what Jerry 1948 or something like that. I know you know, and Seminole work and it was subtitled the science of communication and control. I think in humans and animals or something like that for the whole subtitle. But he said communications and control, which I've always thought of as a mistranslation. And if you look at the etymology, it's actually about communications and coordination. So cybernetics comes from comes from the Greek for Gibranon to steer or pilot a ship to guide or to govern. And so guidance is different than govern as we think about it in the West and coordination is different than control. And to me, that's the root of the issue that we're looking at here. One of the ways to coordinate activity among humans is with governance. There are many ways of doing governance. Some of them were dominating some were horizontal. But I really want to keep that frame open because coordination seems to me to be an inevitable necessity. Control is an option that we use sometimes default to sometimes. And for me, the touchstone is always the living world to look at how, you know, what can we learn from 3.8 billion years of open source R&D. And what I see there is a lot of coordination, a lot of symbiosis, a lot of mutual exchange, very little of what we think about as governance in the modern Western sense. So I want to, for me, I want to open the conversation up in that direction as well. I like things like self governance and collaborative governance and sort of modifications of it. So I've kind of stuck with governance here and I have a whole riff on the difference between large big G government and little G governance. Where I make some points like you're making, but I've been sticking with governance, although I love collaboration, coordination, a bunch of those other words are very, very happy words for me. So thank you for that. And I'm fine with you sticking with governance and just serving notice that I'm going to fight you periodically about that. I love that. That sounds awesome. Klaus, then Doug. Yeah, maybe along the same lines as Gil was just referring to, when you look at the evolution of governance. So in Europe, for example, during the feudal times, you had the royal class make decisions which became increasingly more difficult to execute on and to live with. You see a society evolved into a more technology driven and a more complex form. So you had, I mean, for example, as a story about Hamburg, you know, Hamburg used to be a city state. And it was dominated by by Royals who made some really bad decisions that impacted the economy and it impacted the well being of the of the working class. And that came to a an agreement where you would have like a city council that had a specific role of governance in based on permission from the royal class, the feudal class, but based on logic and what's best for the commons and what's in that sense best for everybody. And so the even today when you when you look at the role of government. Now you have the working class with very specific rules and and needs. And then you have the elites with who dominates the the controlling capital and control and instruments of control with conflicting, often conflicting interests and the government has is sort of is supposed to sit in the middle in a negotiating role that keeps the commons intact and that takes care of the needs of the working class. And we're talking about education, health care, things of that sort that are required in a modern society. Once you once once the government gets compromised by one or the other group. It loses its negotiating position. And that's I think is where we are we have lost the negotiating position of governance to to to work within interest groups. And it's dominated by by obviously those that are more powerful and control mechanisms. For for the economy. So I think I see the, I see here in negotiating position and a role of of protecting the commons, if that's maybe the best term to say. Those are great words. I love those words or stewarding or shepherding the commons or curating the commons or somehow being guardians of the commons. Those are great words cause when you mentioned feudal Europe, you reminded me of a really interesting book Amsterdam the history of the world's most liberal city, which says that Holland was one of the few places that didn't go feudal during those ages and a part of it was harring and I'm forgetting the rest of the book but holders means that half of half of the Netherlands has reclaimed land and they had to figure out how to cooperate and anybody screwing up could flood the land and like ruin the country. So there was a different ethos about civic participation in Holland over time that came out of that. And then separately. Some some Dutch merchant in invented the the herring bus, which was a why a beamy vessel and then they invented a way of processing herring the herring they kept the spleen and the liver in the herring. And the enzymes from those organs would make a sweeter herring so Holland herring was like premium luxury goods back in the day and those merchants got wealthy. But there were a lot of them. There wasn't there wasn't just like the herring king there were a bunch of people who figured this out and got wealthy. That mechanism was part of what kept Holland from going feudal, which and there was a different dynamic in other countries that led into feudalism with kings and all of that sort of thing it's not like, like the Netherlands didn't have kings also. But, but I think that there are vagaries and twists and accidents and conjunctures and there's another interesting book of history that talks about conjunctures and accidents and all that I'll see if I can remember that one that lead to different forms of governance and to different kinds of ethic or spirit of collectivism or not all around the world. And I think that we have limited and narrow knowledge of these things often giving is exactly it. Thanks Pete. And that's exactly the term of how you process herring that makes it taste better. So with that I'll pass to Doug C. Okay, Jerry first, you're talking so fast. It's awfully hard to parse your thoughts. And in real time, you can't hit pause and rewind. Can you know, I would just say slow down. It's all good, but it's unprocessable. So here's my thought. And another project I've been working on my garden world project. I've come across the difference between governance and civilization. Governance implies a state with boundaries with rules and regulations. Civilization is a much deeper, wider, more open, more fluid, and actually more interesting structure. And probably for the things we're concerned about civilization is the playing field we need to be in, not the state. So I'll stop there. That's fascinating to me because I've been turned off the word civilization lately by a bunch of books including against the grain. And for me governance does not have to imply a state. It just means that there's some coordination mechanism for people to thrive. It does not imply national boundaries nations, anything nation states are not for me under the umbrella of governance. And civilized has become a pejorative term for me. Does that map to what you're experiencing or how you see them at all. Well, I recognize the issues. I think that governance does imply rules and regulations. Some kind of culture of those things where civilization is more open. And I agree that civilization is a problem. I think governance is also. And, but the fact that the two are different gives us leverage points that we might normally avoid. Thank you. And what you said and what Gil said earlier I think are things to watch out for basically rocks on the shore of this conversation which I appreciate everybody alerting us to Pete and Dave. Thanks. So where we're kind of poking at the edges of the concept of governance. I feel like I might caution us a little bit about allergies or sensitivities, particular words, and maybe the way to kind of navigate that is to rest easily with a word and ask, you know, okay so when you say governance, are we talking about, you know, government, or are we talking about co-regulation or, you know, what what in there. I think that, and so now having said that I, my, I have a little bit of a problem when we start talking about governance rather than co-regulation, because for me, I don't have a word, a problem with the word in particular but it, it kind of telescopes back in to me to, for me as a US citizen, you know, living in 2024 it, I have a history of governance, the American history of governance back to, you know, the mid 1700s something like that. And, and then my brain starts to go okay well you know we out of the different you know three or four different possibilities we pick democracy and then you know we, we wanted represent, representational democracy and you know and then it narrows the voice of my thinking down a lot. And so I kind of have to unpack that and it's like, you know representational democracy was kind of a quick hack for a country that had very poor communication technology compared to what we do now. And so I think it's a good idea for bookkeeping and accounting technology, and a lot of homogeneity. So the governance, government governance model of, you know, 1780 America was, okay, let's, you know, let's get a representational vote from all the white male and we'll call it good, you know kind of tallied up and call it good. And that's, it's a, I mean, the whole thing is clever and all that you know I'm not, I'm not disagreeing with that but it comes from a completely different time in history. So, back to kind of what I said at the beginning in the chat, you know that it's not like we have, even in the US it's not like we have a situation where you have like three or four levels of government you know you have your city and your county and your state and your, your country. And even in the US we have hundreds or thousands of levels of scale and differences and homogeneity, where it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to collect, you know, 300, 400 million people into Republicans and Democrats and have that fight you know it's like, what, what are we even doing. So, so for me, I appreciate that we're talking about governance and where I, where I want to talk more, or where I want to have that discussion go is towards co regulation and lots of levels of scale, thousands of levels of scale and decentralizing decision making, talking a lot more about negotiation and disagreements and differences and agreements between all those different levels and different kinds of people and things like that right. So, if that's what governance means I'm super happy. And when governance doesn't mean that when we're not dealing with the fact that we've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of different political groups and constituencies in the US, or then to scale it up, you know, millions of different kinds of constituencies to Anastasia's point, human and non human, you know, some of them are biological systems some of them are geological systems some of them are kind of, you know what we call what we're starting call by regions, big chunky, you know parts of the world that that need help, and need agency in our, in our discussions and decisions. That's kind of where I want us to go right to expand our thinking into a space that I think we forget that it's so big. It's not just, you know, a couple thousand white guys in the 1700s. And thank you for expanding the roominess of our topic by a lot. Really appreciate that Pete. Dave then close in. Yeah, guys, where you dive into the middle of this, but what so and Pete I've ended up kind of trying to think of the governance issue as I think maybe kind of like. It's how we cooperate. It's like there's there's rules and processes to allow humans to cooperate. And I've always assumed that we're cooperating so that we can make life better right and we I got pushed back on in this group a little bit about whether that's growth or not and whether that's a good thing and I'm still chewing on that one a lot. But, but my notion is that governance is how we coordinate our activities so that we can make our collective lives better, the global, the global life better. And the governance quote just is the category of technology we use to do that kind of thing. And one of my kind of recent realizations I think getting to your point I mean I wouldn't say democracy was a quick hack it clearly took several hundred years to develop and we're still working on it right. So this is the last technology that we're going to be making. And I do think one of the fundamental changes is that we're going to have to see governance more as a living system it is a web of interacting decision making processes. It's not, you know, three executive branches over this with the states, you know, coordinating cities. It's much more complicated than that. And, and I think that our, you know, our vision, our understanding of these living systems and seeing kind of into that web is something that we're learning to do right now. It certainly wasn't something I was taught in public policy school, you know, where you had to learn politics and you know policy and you were being a technocrat you're going to solve problems and stuff. So I just feel like, you know, and within this is this these ideas are emerging right so we're starting to see the possibilities of the adjacent possible for for new governments of governance approaches. And so the notion of, well, we're, we're going to have somehow have a biosphere that doesn't the crosses many national boundaries that still needs to have cohesive kind of investment because it's an asset that we want to kind of continue to grow and improve. So that's the new challenge. Right. And that's why we're talking about this stuff. Love that Dave, I think in the previous call I mentioned that what on my wish list of things would be a kind of a playful game where we started to try to collaborate on bioregional and watershed boundaries, pretending that there are no boundaries, and then just make that ever more functional and turn up the volume and how it works, and kind of get people to step over and volunteer into a new way of governing, making governments obsolete, because this actually would work better. But it would have to start as a low key game, it would have to start as something that's relatively playful and not that serious. Or you can just look at nation nation states as another beast playing in the living system of governance, along with multinational corporations and terrorist organizations and I don't know whatever else right. I mean, I don't know, imagining them away is one strategy, but I kind of suspect the other strategies just to see them as one of the actors in this very complex system. Love that. Thank you. Kevin, then Anastasia. And wait, in the queue, did you drop out? No, I'm here. I think I got skipped some know you somehow your hand went down. So please let's go say then Kevin. Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to second what Pete said. But also everyone else that's commented on the word governance. And I think it does influence how we see what we're talking about. And I think it does so in a negative way. We're so used to the idea that in order to govern, we need to have rules. And therefore we need to have people who create those rules, hold up those rules and so on and so forth. And I wonder if it's time for us to sort of take a step down and think about whether the way that we really regulate our society, but not govern necessarily is is through a different set of mechanisms other than rules. And, and or in addition to rules. And that sort of questioning the first principles of what we might call governance of how does governance work. Within, you know, we've talked a lot about nature within life. And it's not the way we've done it. We've created all of these kind of logical rational processes. And I wonder if if that's what we need to take a step back from and question that, and then from their build up, because I think we're trying to adjust what we've got rather than going down to those kind of first principles that can guide us on the way back up towards something new. Thanks. Kevin, the last question. Yeah, two things in the initiative I've talked about the working on the rights of nature and some carbon tax stuff locally. We're not incorporated and we're not. We've done it five once a year three done of a fiscal sponsor, but we're having to fire somebody who he brings anxiety and fear and wants to dig up the foundation when we've decided that's the foundation and we need to move on. We were just realized that we're we have a an ordinance that we are ready for the town of Black Mountain to look at and we've looked at other ordinances and a great one Wilson student and we can't have this guy in the room when we're going forward because he, he suddenly just gets, oh my God, you know, and whatever his anxiety is he wants to to to dig up the foundation when we want to build a bridge. And so we're having to do that. And one of the thing about governance, my wife has been on the board of this youth music nonprofit called the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps. And it's underage kids and kids up to 21 on the road for 10 weeks in the summer in buses sleeping in gyms. And so she's been working on the ethics, you know, protocols and rules and what do you do when this happens and what do you do when this happens because she wants to leave it. And so she's been, you know, she's out there now in California, hopefully delivering the final version of this is what it takes when you don't have an intuitive great manager running this thing like me because she wants to not do that anymore. And when there's an ethics violation, she gets an email at 2am and doesn't want to get those and she's 72. And so there's a whole, it's not norms, it is rules and it's when this happens, these are the ranges of behavior. And so sometimes you really need that and those are hard to do and it's taken her about a year and a half to figure it out because the other folks are not paying nearly enough attention. They're like, no, I'm, I'm stopping. You know, I'm stopping this is. You know, I told you in November, I'm stop, you know, this is this is almost February and so it rules really matter and that's a thing of governance you have to set up rules. Governance is used much more by nonprofits than anywhere else in business or in government because when you get your 501 C3 status you have to say. say no. And how do you say what you're not going to do? So every 501c3 has to have a set of rules about, you know, you can't have private enumeration. That's the big thing. You can't make money on the nonprofit. But beyond that, how do you set the rules? So I hear the governance is all over nonprofits because they need to figure it out. You know, how do they stay on their mission and channel the money and get people to be engaged? So anyway, that's all. Kevin, thank you. And thank you also for pointing to the slippery trickery around succession and keeping culture going and all of those kinds of things. I remember, and sometimes it takes little tricks, Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, was an advisor of social techs back in the day, as was I. And on one of our advisory calls, he said, you know, one of the ways I get people to use wikis is I'll ask them something they care about, and then I'll go start a page in the wiki around that topic that they really care about. And I will intentionally make a mistake. And the moment they've shoved me aside and started typing and correcting my mistake, I know I've won. And so sometimes it takes stuff like that to get things done. Gil, did you have a short comment on what Kevin had said? Question on staffs, if I could step in for a second. Kevin, I wasn't clear about the governance insight. Maybe I missed it from somebody who needed to get fired. And what is that? What does that illuminate for us about governance? Because that's not rules. That's something else. I mean, it might be rules, but it's yeah, we've decided that his behavior is destructive. And, you know, even though we're, you know, not formed, he needs to not be in the room when we talk to the lawyer. And then when we talk to the town, I get that. So there's a we and the we has a certain ability to make certain decisions that affect him. But there's a government, you know, there's not a non-profit corporation yet, but there's a governance there in your relationships with each other that he may or may not understand, right? Yeah, I his ability to understand the scene is very limited. So it's just, I mean, you know, that's when it comes up when a group is working on a project and suddenly it's like, you know, this dude is going to wreck it. So you guys, you guys are are claiming authority to make certain decisions. We are. Yeah, cool. Okay. But I mean, that that is a governance thing. So now we have essentially a policy, you know, anxious, fear-based people who want to destroy the foundation or rip it up are not welcome. Yeah, that's that's our first rule. Yeah. There you go. At least it doesn't say named Bob. I'll pass you off to you. It's a subjective rule. Yeah, interesting. It is. After the call, I talked to the other woman is leaning. She said her heart hurt and I said my throat hurt and said, I want to feel like that. And I don't want to be the, you know, I used to be able to do that kind of force a lot when I was younger. And I liked it and I don't like it. And but I had to do it because he was tearing it up. And it's like, Oh God, I had to like resurrect 50 year old stand in the breach. Yeah, it's like, I don't have time for that shit. I don't I don't it's it costs too much. Anastasia, the floor is yours and feel free to take a pause before you step in. Sure. Just related to what has been shared already. The theory of governance could also be not to instruct control necessarily, but it's recognizing the learning needs of the system. And, you know, as my friend Indy Johar, who is much into this thing, tends to say he always says we're not just beings, we are becomeings. And so recognizing that these inter becoming agents that we are, we need some sort of governance in terms of human and non human machine, non machine systems. And this is the worldview that we've optimized. And then what happens is what you're governing is a learning capacity of these systems. It's like a school, it's a nurturing capacity of the system. What you're telling students to do the left or right, what you're creating is a nurturing conditions for for those systems. And for those inter becoming to be rich self aware systems. And it's the quality of that that becomes reality is really key. And so in that modality, what you start to do is you shift your theory of parliament to not being focused on instructions and policies, which are definite, but actually policies, which are about advancing and accelerating the learning capacity of the systems. And actually, to me, this is the identification of the systems themselves. And on the the theory of governance that goes beyond the nation states, I'm sure you've discussed in other conversations, the theory of network states. And while this opens the whole Pandora box of these discussions, but the idea of states not being based on geographic proximity, but on shared values and aspirations and learning capacities. So that's another big chunk of discussion. Nevertheless, I want to point it out, it is happening, these discussions are happening around the world. Question is when this becomes the reality of our everyday. Thank you so much, Anastasia. Yeah, we haven't brought it up. It didn't come up in the first call, but it's a good concept to bring in as well how to start a new country seems like the right topic for for what we're talking about here costs. Yeah, the I think most significant challenge we have at this time to govern ourselves, so to speak, is that we don't have a shared picture of what is reality. And we have we allow cops to interfere with our perception of reality in ways that are very, very invasive and powerful. So there can be so that and I think govern the form of governance is secondary to the need to have a shared understanding of reality. So for example, you know, I'm in spiral dynamics and the color spectrum of blue, you know, is people who know are in religious context and faith in faith environments. They have basically been told that you can trust what AI is saying, not to check it for any kind of factual things, but because AI is based on on bad information, because they are just as many science studies out there that deny climate change or reject the idea of climate change versus those that support it. So AI has bad inputs. So you can trust what it's saying. So bingo, here goes AI, you know, as a as a support tool to define what is what is reality. And if we if if a society allows to to have our groups misrepresent what we know about the world around us and the influence factors that that are driving damage to the commons, then we have really no way to to discuss a way forward of what are potential solutions. So we are on the one hand, talking about being a science-based, logic-based society, 21st century modern world. But on the other hand, we're not, we are not believing in fairy tales, a significant part of the population. And with that, destroy the public dialogue. And so there is a whole lot more to it. Who is the arbiter of truth? Who gets to decide? And in the American political system, which I think still say is the most brilliant political system ever, that is supposed to be, well, it's managed by people is the problem. But the structure, there is supposed to be the law, the courts that get to form a platform to debate. Now, think about David, right? I mean, is it is it right? Is it wrong? And so on. So you get you get a public debate going that then crystallizes, you know, here, okay, this is the most rational way to consider what is reality. So we are we are in a bad spot because we have power coupes with diverging interests that are destroying the public dialogue by design and on purpose. And it doesn't matter what kind of governance we have, whether that's China or India or the United States or Europe. If that kind of trust and understanding is gone, then there is no conversation that can lead to any reasonable conclusion. And so I think we need to break that down. What are the components required within governance to to empower and enable a conversation that can lead us towards towards common agreements? Paul, thank you. And day, thank you for we haven't mentioned crypto yet, which is interesting, because a year ago, two years ago, we've probably been mentioning all over the place. And I think there's interesting aspects there. I wanted to tell a slightly different story to bring something else into the conversation, which has to do with the the Neobooks calls that we have on Mondays. And this Monday, we were talking about a bunch of technical stuff. And so Pete and Gil and Stuart and Klaus and a couple other people and Stacy occasionally meet on Mondays to talk about building Neobooks, which are books as bait, meaning everybody knows what a book is. It's a cultural, a well known cultural artifact. But the interesting thing is the nuggets that make up the book that live on the web as living objects that are inter twingled with whatever else they mean, they mean and so forth. And a piece of the Neobooks vision is that this done by a lot of people properly could actually reshape science, education, journalism, governance, etc. Because you could begin to think together over time and you could begin to set up policy decisions based on research based on opinions based on whatever, but the objects would all be there to be commented on and improved on as you went through. And so we had a piece of that conversation this past Monday. And it was really exciting to me because part of the reason I'm interested in deconstructing how we think and in expressing it with one another in the commons in the space between us is that that might help us understand one another and arrive at agreements so we can co-regulate. And one of the things that comes up when you're doing this is questions of, well, how do we, and I'm going to use the word, how do we govern this space of ideas that are happened to be represented as markdown files on GitHub? And that means who gets access, what kind of access, what interface do we give people to do, what kind of change in what way that prevents chaos because it's really easy for people who don't know what they're doing to just mess things up, but permits participation and the improvement of the shared knowledge and all of that. So there's a bunch of UI design and community design questions that come up very, very quickly on an innocent project about building, rethinking how books might be written and presentations and podcasts and all that because those are all just artifacts that would come out of having a series of nuggets that are interconnected online, which wouldn't look that different from a Wiki, for example. So I love that that's kind of like a bottom up way of getting to the same set of issues and the same set of topics that we're talking about here. And I'm excited that these things might find a little progress in this. Please go ahead, Jake. Yeah, I think a couple of sideways bottom up and top down is kind of where my head is at. And also I'm going to verbally use that Wiki gambit so I'm going to make a whole bunch of mistakes and hope that everybody jumps in and wants to fix me. I don't fix what I'm saying, but maybe I talked about it last time, but working from first principles is something that we integrated into our social inventors toolkit. Looking at what's your cosmology, we talked a lot about that here. Is it Newtonian? Is it complexity? Is it evolution? What's a human? What's a political subject, et cetera? So the top down thing. But I just want to make a case or at least an offering to think about kind of the first vision or almost first feeling. What do we want? What do we want? Good governance to feel like. What does it feel like to live in a world where it's working? Is it a family feast? Is it hiking on a mountain? What is the moment? What's the feeling that you want to have? And then working backwards, what do you have to have to get there? Do you need a healthy environment if you're going to have that nice hike? You need safety. You need maybe a commensurate reality to get together and travel. So just working backwards and giving a call out to the feeling you want to have in the future. And I think about, it's hard to think. What does good government feel like or good governance? And is it victory like in horse race? Does that feel great? I mean, for some of us Obama winning felt great. That's a moment. That's a feeling. Is it peace? Is it boredom? What does it feel like? And anyway, just to anchor ourselves in that as well, because I know for myself I get very intellectual and I get structural, and I want to think about the systems that are in place. But if we're doing it right, walking out of that jury room and 12 angry men is like peak moment where the system is working or whatever, like justice. So just I try to think about at least honor both of those things, the kind of intellectual structural things and also the what feeling do we want or what vision do we want or paint a picture of the kind of world we want and then work backwards and say, what does it take to get there? Thank you, Jake. Love that. I'm curious about paths of inquiry into this topic, then what kinds of things you think would be useful? Given, I think we've kind of cleared the table and put a bunch of things on it and commented on the boundaries and the shape of the table and done a lot of work on that right here right now, which I love. And I'm wondering what's the most fruitful path of inquiry going forward. And as I said, Ken Homer recommended something that I'd like to try that I'll probably I'll probably ask Ken to describe it better on the OGM group. And then in the matter most channel so that we can get a good description of that going. But I'm wondering what else. And also anastasis connected to a lot of organizations that are that are doing this kind of work in the world. So is Jake, like, like several people in this call. This is this is their gig. This is the thing they really care deeply about. And I'm wondering what we can learn from them, whether there are connections to make or other kinds of things or knowledge to sort of bring into this conversation. You know, if I may just suggest something because the problem with these spaces, I mean, not just the problem, it's also part of the solution. But I'm experiencing that there are many conversations like this that are endlessly inspiring and people are sharing ideas. Now, how do we make sure, first, communities are connecting to other communities and we don't stay in one bubble. And second, what do we pragmatically do about this, right? There are there are many learning communities. For example, I'm now part of two great courses. One is run by Daniel pinchback. I forgot the name, but basically it's looking into alternative to current systems and discussing and you know, discussing hollow chain and discussing alternative ways of governance and discussing regenerative solutions that could lead the way. And the second is project tip and point that do cohorts of people about 100 people conversations much like this with an invited speaker. So there are many organizations creating their paradigms creating their communities. But it doesn't seem as though there exists like one unified narrative or like a plurality of narratives still united by a common desire to move into this direction. So my thing is how do we make sure that this terms almost into a movement of sorts or like people recognize that there is a big space to be explored. Thank you, Anastasia. I have a collection, of course, in my brain of communities trying to fix world problems, which I'll share here, which is my list of other groups that are doing and this isn't just trying to figure out governance. But some of these people are doing re greening. Some of them are revitalizing cities. Some of them are doing a bunch of other things. But I've been building this collection for a long time. This thought I put in my brain in, oh, just 2021. So I guess I connected up a bunch of different things. But trying to figure out what works. And then next to it, you'll see another thought confused efforts to fix world problems. And I have I guess only one org under that one. But there's some of these groups are just wealthy people who have from my perspective stupid ideas, but they've got enough funds to gather up a bunch of people who want to do the work and hey, go at it as well. And even those, I think, misbegotten initiatives often contain a few gems of useful and interesting work. Pete, then Day. Anastasia, thank you for their observation. I'm one of a few people I know working on trying to stitch together communities that don't know each other. And I would love either work, you're helping working on inter community stuff or just the communities you know of that other people should know of. Another person who's working on this. So the way one of the ways I do it a couple different ways, the way I do it right now is a small but kind of growing newsletter that comes out twice a month. And I'm looking for more communities to plug into that newsletter. We're also this group is friends with another person, Vincent Darina, who's working on something called Catalyst, which is kind of the same thing. But I'm specifically working on with the people I know in different communities. And there are a few people who are interested in inter community. So Anastasia and anybody else, I'd love to work with you on inter community if you're interested. I'll put my email address in the chat. Thanks, Pete. Thanks, Pete. Thank you. Yeah, I definitely like to follow up with anybody interested in that kind of proactive community weaving work. I do a lot of that independently and with friends. And so there's serious overlaps in here. I think probably Anastasia, we were on the the same call with Pinchbeck the other day and heard like Alistair Langer and yes, and then there's all kinds of others. Alistair? Yeah, wonderful. And so then, yeah, and there's interesting stuff comes up. I mean, a part of why I drop this three-body problem in here is because of something that's recently come up in the Holochain community. So it's interesting if you create primitives that allow people to establish governance, that doesn't mean that they're all going to establish the same norms with those tools. So it's like you give them hammer. This is going to build different things. And you might not always like it. And then there's kind of the question about then, okay, then what actually goes on inside the communities that are building these tools? So there's a couple of different levels of inquiry there. First of all, how do we how do we build norms and values into the tooling? But, you know, yeah, first you'd have to arrive at what are the norms and values. So yeah, I've worked with Vincent quite a bit. He's in the Collaborative Technology Alliance and they're actively working on what they're calling an ecosystem map that, you know, obviously he's been putting together resources on TataList for a long time. The ecosystem map is a little bit different iteration of that. And yeah, I guess just to reiterate the connection that I was making to crypto wasn't about crypto as crypto is often known, cryptocurrency or whatever, but the issue of distributed governance mechanisms that could be used to encode whatever it is that we decide is our culture and the pattern language that we're using for relating to one another. And so that was the connection. With that, I will drop Mike, but once again, would love to connect with anybody else doing that active network weaving. Love that. Thank you, Dave. And I will add your Worldwide Web info in and I would love to know no more. And if you want to put other links into the chat, please do so we can follow those. I wanted to add in another little bit of color, which is there's a thought in my brain that says we pass laws and impose rules when discourse fails. And I would love to live in a society, Jake, to your question, where we kind of negotiate stuff, but we don't spend all of our time negotiating. But because there are norms, norms are basically free negotiated things that are sometimes just cultural pass downs. Sometimes they come out of some problem that happened back when and we decided as a norm to do X, so that we can sort of avoid those kinds of problems in the future. One of the things I can't stand about Trump as a candidate and as president and as the potential president now is that his MO, one of his many tricks, is that he basically violates norms because you can't be put in jail for violating a norm. You can only be put in jail for violating a law. And so disclosure of taxes before the election. No, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. No, I'm not going to do it. Screw you. And it was a norm, not a law. And then now there's 91 indictments. And it turns out, it turns out that even laws can't stop this man, which is a really distressing and interesting and like fiercely frightening thing for me. If 91 indictments can't actually stop him, then I don't know what's going on here. But I would like to live in a society where a lot of things are just talked through. And we live in a culture now where some bad things happen, some bad things happen somewhere. And we pass laws to prevent that moment from showing up again. A baby dies in the backseat of an overheated car or something. But we do a lot of things that are nonsensical and freeze them, pour them in concrete, which is kind of what laws are socially, instead of figuring out how do we get people to be smarter and act smarter and collaborate with each other? How do we have more freedom with one another, more ease with one another so that we can pick up when something goes wrong instead of being fearful about interfering because we might catch hell or worse. All those kinds of things are about how society works. So I'm very intrigued by like, how do we wish this thing would work? And I'm frustrated by the fact that norms will fail under concerted attack by somebody who's figured out that attacking norms is a great, great strategy. And breaking norms communicates to your followers that you are very powerful, which is one of the things that I think happens with the Trump dynamic. Gil Kosay, Kevin. Yeah, got so much here. Talking things through is great, but it's scale-dependent. You know, it's what we did in tribes and villages. It's what we do in families, but you know, that doesn't even always work at that scale. Very hard to envision at the scale of the nation state, very hard at the level of cities. So I think a lot about the, and by the way, the thing about norms is that one of the ways that norms work is by shunning. But the power of shunning depends on the coherence of the community. And that don't work with the Donald. So there's that whole story. I don't want to go into the Donald's story right now. I think a lot about the challenges of doing this on the ground. And families is one example. Cities is another. You know, some of you know, I was CSO for city of Palo Alto for five years. And there's a weekly city council meeting, which nine people sit at a dais with a, you know, three or four inch high stack of documents that they're dealing with that week. That was scary, crazy. And they have a finite amount of time. They always go over. They go to meetings until 12 or one in the morning. And at the beginning of the meetings, any citizen can come and have three minutes at open mic. And so you have this board of directors accountable to 66,000 members, you know, a dozen or two of whom come and speak every week, maybe on topic, maybe not. It's really messy. And it's really challenging. And so I think about the on the ground and like Kevin, you're in this too very much of designing enterprises, you know, we're looking at worker ownership structures and how do you do both the economic stack and the what we're calling the governance stack of those. And it's not obvious. And it's not simple. And it clearly depends in part on norms, which I think depend on really clear understanding of what people care about. That's kind of a fundamental place to start. And what agreements and commitments people are prepared to make with each other explicitly and implicitly about what they care about. It's long seemed to me that that's, you know, that care is one of the windows into the challenge here because others have more experiences with this than me. But I've seen that when the conversation can shift out of out of political blather and ideology and positions to what are the underlying cares that are animating people to get into those positions, something pop something possible opens up. So that's, you know, that's another Hebel in this pond. And I just want to flag I just came across this week from Phoebe tickled the notion of flat pack democracy happening in the UK. Anastasia, I assume you're familiar with this. I posted a couple of links in the chat. But these folks apparently have been successful at least with one town council in the UK of replacing all 17 counselors in one fell swoop with a very different people in a very different kind of approach and shared concerns and shared commitment. So something you know to add into our weekly conversations. Sherry, again, that's starting up next week. Yes. You mean these conversations? The ones you talked about with Ken, when when where is that happening? Yes. So that'll happen same zoom at. So right now it's nine a.m. Pacific will end at 9 30. So we're thinking at 10 a.m. Pacific for four weeks on following this call. Okay. Following this call a half hour break basically. And then another call for four weeks just to sort of take this topic and flesh it out. So I'll send I'll put the notice for that in the OGM mailing list. And then Ken will probably explain a little further about the process we'd like to use because a piece of what he was saying was that we kind of need to agree on some terms up front and figure that out as well. And then he had a nice way to step through it. Marjorie Kelly, we should bring in your right, Carl. I don't remember. I said I sent the note out a while ago that included Jake and a bunch of other people who care about this this sector. And I think Marjorie was on that list. But I need to do another round of trying to round people in who care about this. And I had also asked last two weeks ago, if all of you would invite people who don't look like us into the conversation, please do do that if you want to join. I'll take this moment since we're on the topic just to take a show of hands who is interested in this little sequence of four calls who would like to join in there, please raise your hand. Sounds awesome. So let's do them. That's a yes. And some more details on the OGM list. Anastasia, I'll get you on that list if you'd like to be on it. And let's go back to who is in the queue, which is Jose, Kevin and Carl. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah, I'd like to be in on that, but I'm not sure the timing is going to work with with the follow at 10 o'clock. The thing you mentioned about norms, I think I have this suspicion that when we have governance, what we end up with is abdication of personal responsibility. And that the gentleman that you were mentioning earlier, when he was younger and people didn't hem hem in, not his family, not his friends, not his colleagues, not the people he worked with, that allowed him to continue to grow to be the person that he is. It requires that we're responsible for each other. As some people have said at an earlier stage, not when we're already dealing with the risks of a nation, the risks of the world, but the risks of how somebody's treating somebody else. And I think how do we, again, go back to first principles and think about what's our responsibility as a community to each other with one another. Before we worry about how we deal with a runaway train, in the case of the person you're talking about, it's too late at that point. Nothing we can do on a individual level or a norms level is going to control someone who has learned by the people around them not to do what's expected of them, because he can get away with it. And 74 years of doing that, you don't all of a sudden decide that you can go the other way. We habitualize each other through these processes. It's not a question of what we expect that person to do now. I think it's too late at this point. Thank you, Jose. And I'm curious for those of you who want extremely decentralized, very low governance systems, what you've seen that works, like what would it be like, etc. And also I'll say that the sentence you said that I put into the chat, governance leads to abdication of personal responsibility, is maybe key to a libertarian point of view, which was like, government should be small enough, you can drown it in a bathtub and all control over personal responsibility is some form of transgression. And I'm not saying that you believe the libertarian point of view, but this is a core belief of libertarianism. And it's a very, I think, powerful and right critique of big government where one of the things that happens is we get a big department that's in charge of poverty and poor people. And like, why should I care? And why should I do anything about poverty and poor people? They have a whole department. Look, there's a whole bunch of people who are trying to solve that problem or who are supplying them with something that they don't deserve because because it's like the arguments are endless, but important because as we dive into these issues, we have to find our way toward what actually works. Carl, you are next. Okay, I'll just bring in a couple of things to the attention you already mentioned, Marjorie Kelly. Then Jamie Joyce has been kind of in the group, but she's really got an intriguing take on things that it's about building a policy space and having the arguments and seeking validity and things too. I brought up the bleeding game with her. I haven't had a chance to follow up, but I don't know if she's looked at that at all. And there actually is an evidence act of 18 in there. Mathematica actually has an amazing blog. I'd set a timer if you go on site because you can all of a sudden it will be four or five hours later. So I just want to bring those resources. Thank you. Thank you. Those are great. Dave and Kevin. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight, I stuck in a link to Jen Paul Kust's book, Recoding America. And one of the things that I heard, I haven't read the book of course, but I had to listen to her on some podcasts. And she made this distinction between intellectuals and mechanicals that I hadn't again, had never grok before. I think it was helping me understand the problem with technocrats. But if you think about the US government, we have Congress write these complicated bills and we toss them over the wall to the executive branch to implement them. And you can imagine all kinds of problems with that because you just don't know what's going to happen in the implementation process. And the executive branch is in traditionally kind of fudged things a little bit, trying to make things work, but they're not really authorized to do that, which we're seeing play out in the Supreme Court right now, right? I mean, this is a lot of the battle that's going on where the executive branch isn't allowed to make decisions if the new Supreme Court decisions come through the right way. So, say it again. Chevron deference is on the court docket right now. Right. So this is the battle. And so, but the notion was that the notion was there were smart people making decisions and there were dumb people implementing them, right? The intellectuals versus the mechanicals, right? And I think that's pretty deep into a lot of our thinking and a lot of our governance structures. And you know, one of these things is like, oh, yeah, I think that, you know, it's just deep in my head. And so, and it doesn't work very well, right? We clearly need a much more agile strategy. Thanks, Dave. Also, all these governance questions resolve back to things like, do you want to be in an LLC, an LCA, a C Corp, an S Corp, a What Corp, you know, all those different kinds of questions are the functional practical ways that we make decisions like these and then regs are hoisted on top of all those. Carl, you still have your hand up. So do you, Dave? And I'm going to go to Kevin then Gil. Kevin, you're muted. Yeah, I just wanted to point out that it was said in this space that Donald Trump is not subject to law and that he can ignore norms. You know, the latter statement is true. The other statement is not true and it shouldn't be accepted as anything like a fact or the law is grinding toward the little motherfucker. And, you know, he has committed crimes. There are people who are, you know, they're moving upstream. He will be subject to law. Buying into that Trump is immune is buying into what he, the way he wants you to think. And so I just want to say, no, he has not been proven that he is not subject to law. I don't know if that was my comment or not, Kevin, but it's not that he's immune. It's that he's very good at manipulating a system. Yeah, there's a thought in my brain that Trump is a weevil. Is a what? Is a weevil. Like weevils wobble, wobble, but they won't fall down. Like he can get knocked over or the other one is the punch, the punching clown is the other. I mean, you know, that's another metaphor of his immunity and it's just not helpful to bring out these things of immunity around Trump. He is not immune. The law is coming. Kevin, there's no implication of immunity in that just a slipperiness and wiggliness. I think it is because when you say they wobble and they don't get knocked down, he is going to get knocked down. He is going to be subject to law. At some point, somebody runs over the weevil or the punch clown gets perforated and suddenly deflates. So it's not meant to be an analogy to imply immunity. And I hate to have another immunity. So I'm with you entirely on this, Kevin. Okay, great. He will be subject to law if he gets convicted before he's elected. And then it gets very, very weird. But, you know, we need to recognize that we are in the grips of a massive amount of spin every day and people are working really hard to shape interpretations of what's going on. This is kind of a sidebar, but I was watching MSNBC after the Iowa caucuses last week. And I, you know, that's where I hang. But I like I had to shut it off in frustration because the amount of spin was just was unrelenting and nauseating. It was like working really hard to shape an interpretation of Biden victory out of the out of the Iowa caucuses. And I flipped a fox, which I hardly ever do. And it was the same shit from the other direction. And they felt so isomorphic to me couldn't stand it. That's not why I raised my hand. Why did I raise my hand? It'll come to you. Hang on a second. Oh, yeah, yeah. The intellectuals versus mechanicals bullshit. I really want to hit back on that because the meme that people in government are dumb, or the people in the executive are dumb, is false and offensive, in my opinion. I've worked in state government. I've worked in local government. I am consistently impressed by the intelligence and commitment and dedication and skill of the people in those positions, not universally, but a lot. And not universally dumb shits. The structures are bad. They, you know, they cause the kind of problems that make it look dumb. But, you know, imagine where we would be without those people doing what they do. Again, it defends myself. I did not say they were dumb. I said the system is structured so that there are people who make decisions and people who implement decisions. And that's a very old structure, right? And that, and it may indemnifies people because it takes away autonomy from the implementers. But it's only in the implementation process that you actually address the issues that come out in the failures of the planning process, right? So it's a very waterfall system and it's structured around a concept, which is there are smart capable people and then there are implementers. But I didn't say that was true. I just said that's the way we built it. But what you did say, and maybe you weren't saying your own opinion, but somebody else is that the implementers in the system that makes them dumb are dumb. And that's not been my experience. And the waterfall, they have no autonomy. Well, no, they actually, that's an overstatement, David, they do. And the waterfall has gates and dams in it. So at the level of staff within the directions and the policies, there's a lot of autonomy about how to do. There's interaction between staff and their, and their bosses. And there's interaction between them and their, and the folks who are setting the rules. Now obviously very different in the federal executive in Congress than in a city with a city council. But it's a much more dynamic and a non-stupid process than what I hear you suggesting. And I say that as somebody who was enormously frustrated with working in it because I felt the handcuffs, you know, and including things like, you know, like two year planning cycles about technologies have six year lifetimes. Like, holy fuck, what do you do with that? So it's, it's a mess. But it's, you know, we, we have, speaking of memes, we have pretty widely been swallowed by the Ronald Reagan, I'm from the government, I'm here to help you meme. And so you hear that even from the left these days, it's sort of become, speaking of norms, that's become a norm background. That the government is inefficient and wasteful and all this stuff and bad and oppressive to you as opposed to government is, is the expression of what human beings come together to decide to do for their common welfare. And so enough of my rant. Thank you. Thanks, Gil. I wanted to bring in, and sorry, I can't resist, but the, I hope this video is still at the link, but here's Ronnie Reagan saying the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government that I'm here to help. Which we've mentioned on a couple of GM calls in the past, because I've got it linked to them. And I wanted to bring in Day was, they put some comments in about a project he's working on on purpose driven startup founders and how to preserve that. And I wanted to bring in Jordan Sukut, who's a member of the broader community here, hasn't really been on any of our Thursday calls, but Pete and I have done a lot of stuff with him. He knows that some of the rest of you, and he is a big fan of steward ownership. And the big open AI kerfluffle that happened was a big disaster. In my mind, my own spin on it was it was a disaster of steward ownership. In that open AI was intentionally structured as a steward owned thing. There was a nonprofit that owned all the shares of open AI. But then there were all these little sub funky companies. And then all the people who really believed in the mission seemed to leave and create another startup called Anthropic that still has that mission and that structure. And then we watched over a very dramatic weekend as Sam Altman basically left and came back into situation normal, while kind of shedding off the cloak of the noble purposes that the whole thing was framed under at the beginning is what I think happened. I think that basically through crazy, very public thrashing, they shook off their social purpose in some way. And I'm happy to entertain other reads on the situation. But I think steward ownership is an attempt to create a governance structure and a legal model that will resist the courts that will resist takeover and all that kind of stuff. And I think it kind of in some sense failed them. Gil briefly then day. Briefly, open AI, and maybe this is a general issue with steward ownership, in the case of open AI, the stewards were not accountable to anybody. And this I think is a common problem and not for profit organizations that the boards self replicate and are not accountable to anybody. So you lose the checks and balances that the founders bless their hearts. We yell at them a lot, but the founders built into this system. So if the ultimate structure of steward ownership is that the nonprofit owns all the shares of the for profit, therefore is entrained to the goals and mission of the nonprofit, which is good. That's a good thing. That means that the board of the nonprofit is the end point. There is no other higher authority. What kind of regular whom should they be responsible to? What would you add to the structure? That's a really important question in the fifth sacred thing. The way Starhawk did it was that the town councils had people who were representing the redwoods and the salmon and the soil, and there was a cultural accountability, if you will, that people knew how to step into that role and be that voice. Any system where the buck stops, you know, the not for profit board that's accountable only to itself is cybernetically really dangerous. Plus, if that's the case, and this I think is a question with the whole employee ownership universe as well is how do you evolve under changing circumstances and stress? And that adaptability needs to be there in systems. And I think we, you know, it's one of the challenges to figure out how do you have, how do you have the agile adaptability in a broadly democratic or consensual cooperative structure? So Marjorie Kelly, whom we've talked about here, I think has written a lot about Mondragon and cooperatives. And she has a book called Owning Our Future, The Emerging Ownership Revolution, which I recommend. I'll see if I can't get her on our calls coming up. And she's the five core elements of generative ownership design is a piece of that book. There's a bunch of interesting things in it. But I think that there's a lot of people who have dug really hard into this topic, and we should try to bring their wisdom into the conversation. Mondragon is a sterling example, and Mondragon has executive layers. They're elected by the workers. So the layer, the board is accountable to the employees. The board hires the executives. The executives manage the employees. The employees elect the board. So there's a bus to the system. And when pandemic hit, or when slowdowns happen, they don't fire a whole bunch of people. They take a voluntary, they will do things like take a voluntary pay cut across the board. And then they'll take people who are idled because you shouldn't be making more widgets if there's no demand for widgets. And they'll put them into training for the next thing coming down the road. They'll invest in them instead of firing them. And it's just really interesting, you know, all these practices and how unusual they are for capitalist ways of doing things and how allergic capitalism is to sensible things like that. So one of the two questions cautioned us on that only because they also go on strike. Yes. So the owners, they also don't like the system well enough that they resort to striking. So there's an ability. So that's one of the two questions that I'm living with these days, Jerry, is why isn't there a Mondragon in America? There are many cooperatives just not as big or as famous as Mondragon. There's nothing like Mondragon in America. That's true. That's a nut that I've been chewing on a lot these days. I think it's inhospitable territory. Sorry, Dave, you've been patient. Go ahead. That's all right. No, I actually really deeply appreciate everything that you were bringing into the conversation, Gil. And yeah, that was actually good dialogue. So no problem. Yeah, I guess what I just wanted to say about there's a lot of takeaways. I think the open AI situation is actually really informative and instructional as a kind of a counter example, obviously. And but like what are some of the takeaways, Gil, you name some of them. And I think the methods of appointment on the board, the methods of appointment and removal on the board. So there was originally an eight person board. Yeah, but there was actually no direct correspondence between those board members and stakeholders that might have represented this lofty purpose. Much less that there were any mechanisms in place for those stakeholders to actually act upon making sure that the board was constituted in such a way that it was actually representing those stakeholders. Then beyond that, yeah, they were actually, as I understand it, there were not all of the board members present at the time. They were originally eight and there were four or something like this. And the other thing that was actually really interesting is incentives misalignment yet again, incentives misalignment strikes again, which is interestingly, we think of worker ownership as being a good thing. And it is generally a good thing. And I'm not speaking against it. But if the economic incentives of the workers are aligned with the profitability of the company, like if they have shares of this, then that actually aligns them in many cases with the pursuit of profitability of the company. And so if you have anchored your purpose outside the company, your purpose is kind of for the good of humanity. But then your incentive structures are like, oh, actually, it'd be great if this blew up so that we could all get rich. Then this was a part of the problem, the threat of Microsoft to take all of the workers wouldn't have worked if the workers weren't fundamentally misaligned. So those are two problems. But then you notice in that play, I mean, another thing that was wrong there is that instead of having, if you were going to have 51% owned by the non-profit and 49% owned by various other people or entities, that would be one thing. But pretty much Microsoft is holding like 49%. That just is a little too close for comfort. So having an outsized stakeholder on that side is problematic. And then ultimately, it's like, well, okay, there were probably problems with this way that they set up the actual structures and the lack of certain structures, as has been pointed out. But really key insight is that if you only are looking at what you're setting up on the inside of a set of structures, and you're not looking at how does what you've established withstand pressures coming from outside. So there's pressures coming from outside whatever you set up. And it has to be thought about in advance how you're going to respond to and deal with and adapt, Gil, as you pointed out, to shifts and changes in the pressures coming from outside whatever structure you've established so that it's more resilient and the purpose is more likely to be adhered to. The last thing I'll say, and I know I've had the mic for a while, is this concept of a perpetual purpose trust is largely premised on the idea that the purpose can be well articulated. And one of the challenges with that is articulating it really well. And can you articulate it really well in a way that doesn't become just hand wavy and abstract, where it's actually clear enough to be enforceable by some set of mechanisms, hopefully, that are established, but where it remains adaptable, that it can grow and evolve and learn and be a living system. So I think with that I will drop mic. Thank you very much. That is super interesting. We're at time now. I wanted to say something and then we'll go Kevin and I think we'll wrap the call. The thing I wanted to talk about came up as Dave was talking where I was realizing this kind of this weird roundabout and I'm going to say something I think most of you have seen before, but it was just lighting up in my head, which is when some interesting new idea shows up and Silicon Valley gets wind of it, they pour enormous amounts of money into it. Think Facebook when it's founded. Think Uber when it's founded. And that amount of money can basically eat the world and plant the company all around the world and create dynamics that make it the thing to dislodge, which is really, really difficult. Other efforts to create co-op based ride sharing, for example, there was a thing called Radio Cab or something like that. There were a bunch of little efforts to try to do ride sharing in a co-op basis where the actual drivers would own the company and blah, blah, blah, blah. They got mixed traction, no traction. They couldn't figure out how to stay in the game. And the distributed open platforms like IndieWeb and the Fediverse that Pete and I and a bunch of others on our standing calls every week bring up over and over again and try to figure out how to use, how to go in there. They can't take over because they can't get polished enough and popular enough and they certainly can't get any marketing dollars to go get people to use them. And my wish is that they would be good enough to be contagious and viral and would just take over through virality. I'll point out that instant messaging ate the world with zero marketing dollars. The original IM companies had no revenue model. Nobody was being charged for them, but they also had no marketing budget. And all of a sudden everybody was IMing everybody because it was completely useful and contagious. So that's some kind of a proof point that contagion like that might actually work. But I don't like this circularity because what we end up with is platforms that have addiction built into them that we can't dislodge. Should Facebook ever get found guilty of antitrust, my remedy for them would be force Facebook to redesign itself around citizens instead of consumers, which would mean dropping the ad model, which would probably mean charging for admission, which would mean a bunch of other things. But that would cause a thorough going redesign of the platform instead of what they've got and what we've done, which is alongside TikTok and everybody else seems to be eating our collective brains. Kevin, you've got the last word and then we'll close this call. In the chat, I've posted a really good report by Transform Finance on alternative ownership structures. People who were doing a lot of this stuff are really studying a lot and it'd be good to see what the people who are doing it and experimenting with it. Yeah, Davis was pointing to the same kind of thing. I mean, and there are things you can build into funding like we're working with the Chamber of Commerce here and they're going to do in a calm structure, which just means that you only get 3x on your money. You can put in all kinds of controls and that's the governance around how you finance and how you run an organization. So that report is really good. If you can't see the link, it's Transform Finance, alternative ownership structures really well done. Thanks. I've got it open in my one too many tabs from this call. I really appreciate that, Kevin. Thank you all for being here. We don't have Ken and I didn't prepare a poem, so we don't have a poem to take us out today. I'm hoping Ken gets better quickly and we'll see you all next Thursday for a check-in and then next Thursday at 10 for the first of four calls on this topic. You'll see more about that from me on our lists. Anything else? Any last words, last thoughts? Thank you very much. This was awesome. Really appreciate it. More soon.