 Exactly. This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, June 22nd, 2023. And I think we're going to continue our conversation from last week about Indigenous ways of knowing. We'll just wait a little bit for more people to come in. And I was just checking in with Doug, who is in Montenegro, and a friend of his who is a ship's doctor on a cruise ship is coming into dock tomorrow and we'll be visiting. And I was marveling at how those ships stay upright, because they're, as Doug just described it, they're basically apartment buildings on a hull. Like I did a tiny bit of work for Carnival Cruises a long time ago through the Institute for the Future. And it was very interesting. We met a bunch of people and these people have hotel, restaurant and performance venues and amusement parks all on board like a little floating platform where you've got to do everything and you're not allowed, you know, you have to be really careful with the ships because basically harbor practices have changed dramatically in order to keep cities clean. So it's a it's a crazy thing. And then comes the pandemic. So it's a mad world. Greetings all. Anybody with anybody with a want to do a very light check-in? Like what's up for you? We're good. Well, I'll do a brief check-in. I've been thinking a lot about why is this problem-oriented society with technical capacity. We don't look at climate change as a technical problem. I mean, with parts. People don't look for the parts, the cross connections. It's just amazing to me. I think some people are looking at it as a technical problem, maybe not enough that there's a critical mass or maybe the policymakers don't seem to be acting that way because I know that I watch a few people who are very, very much trying to pick it apart analytically or scientifically, you know? Yeah, there are some, but it would be more general capacity from a high school education to think in terms of problem solving. Right, right. I think that gets filtered to our capitalism and financial system. So there are obviously people who care deeply about it, but they don't get a lot of traction because it doesn't make financial sense. Or I mean, it totally could make financial sense, but the general wisdom of the capitalist community is that it's not an interesting problem. There's a bunch we could talk about on that topic. Let me bring us back to picking up from last week's program, which was already in progress last week. And I was wondering if somebody would like to, if maybe a couple of us, could summarize where we've been in this conversation. And then separately, I was interested in what what should we be aiming for in this conversation? What would be some some fruitful ways of framing this this this talk about what does indigenous ways of knowing mean? And I'm hoping that Mark Karanza makes it into the conversation relatively soon. But anybody want to take a swing at like where we were? Nobody wants to come to bed. And I know it's kind of hard, but just to refresh, like refresh the, let me put a link to last week's call in the chat so you can all be the kinds of things we were mentioning. Well, what I recall very schematically is a kind of slightly romantic view of what indigenous people are like. And then we began a slightly more critical phase of looking at the concept of people and the way they actually live. That sounds good. I think a lot of this is about how we frame and what what lessons we learn from the different cultures. And part of the problem here is that different cultures are good and bad or brutal and gentle at different times in their lifespans. And we tend to collapse these things down with one particular memory or something else like that. I'm interested in one of the broad sweeps here that I'm interested in particularly is how we managed to how basically what I'll call sort of left brain male thinking managed to eat our brains and the planet and wipe out a whole bunch of more balanced ways of seeing the world that were really useful. And we have been struggling with that ever since in lots of different ways. And so for me one of the reasons that earlier ways of knowing matter a lot is that they seem to me in many cases and not all cases to be more balanced about their attitudes about people, about nature, about the planet, about all those kinds of things. And if we could re-adopt some of those ways of seeing that might actually help us solve some of the problems we've got now. Pete, go ahead. Thanks, Jerry. I think that I like that. I wanted to make an observation. Most of you have heard me talk about hyperscale social structures before. So it wasn't that people decided to be it wasn't that people in good conscience decided that capitalism was the best structure. The best structure that out-competed other hyperscale social structures largely out-competed, obviously there's there's still a bunch of them around. But the one that out-competed the others in the arena of survival and growth was the one that was disruptive, acquisitive, imperialistic, destructive to other systems. So it's a little bit like and then another thing I'd say about hyperscale social structures is it's really hard for one individual to think about how big and how complex those things are. But kind of a way to think about it, it's kind of like there's a mind virus that took over and we're fighting, we have to figure out how to fight that mind virus, the epidemic of that mind virus, and not just change hearts and minds, but actually have strategies that disable or disrupt that hyperscale social structure that has evolved to be super efficient and super lethal and super consumptive. You're sort of saying that human history is an episode of The Last of Us? I'm just kidding. The Last of Us is interesting way to tell the tale of of humans surviving not surviving. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And Ken posted in the in the chat that the mind virus is something possibly called Huethico, which is a Native American concept that sort of means psychic starvation or insatiable hunger and is kind of a characteristic of this modern civilized way of being on the planet. Doug, please. I mean, sort of Doug B. There's a just to sort of shift the contextualization in a way that might be interesting to explore, which is that our trajectory in terms of Western civilization has been exhibiting a form of psychosis in the way we experience each other, the world, and our disconnection and loss of relationship to our world. And I think that's at the essence and core of Indigenous experience, their experience today. And I'm talking today, so just to sort of like isolate the focus from all of the sacrifices and monstrous Indigenous previous civilizational anomalies and dystopias, like I'm not talking about, I'm talking about the orientation and way of relating to and experiencing themselves, themselves in relation to their environment, themselves in relation to the rest of the biome, themselves in relation to the world, the universe, and beyond. And our bias in shifting into cognition as the center of our experience and orientation and validity. At the expense of our physical body connection on an earth level to the magnetic fields we live within, our disconnection on a water and emotional level to balance where everything is geared toward driving fear or anger as a steady state, loss of safety from an earth standpoint. These are all like elemental energetic dimensions of our existence. Air is where the intellect resides and that's where 85, 90 percent of everybody is preoccupied in our world today. Fire, which is the transformation, the bringing things into manifestation, transforming something, transforming wood into light and heat, it's the energetic doing action part of things is running rampant, but without the balancing effects of earth and water and space, which is the container for all of them, it's also the connection to source, it's the undifferentiated awareness of being part, being part of a whole and transcends the ego and the eye and the self is like gone. So egocentricity rules and Instagram, the sort of apex manifestation and Andy Warhol's everybody's famous, well now everybody's famous in their own minds all the time. So the whole thing is out of balance, but it's a product in function of our loss of connection to self on a fully embodied whole being basis. Hence the idea of psychosis and a friend that I worked with, Bernie Krauss, he's one of the fathers of bio, of acoustic ecology. He ran around the world starting in 1968 recording in natural, the most remote natural biomes around the world. I called him the keeper of the voice of the planet, of the living planet. And from 68 to the present, over 50 percent of those areas are now silent, also known as, you know, devoid of life. So, and he coined a phrase which was nature deficit disorder. And we as living beings, going out into nature, being in contact with nature, having our feet in the earth without the intermediation of socks and shoes, which insulate us and cut us off from grounding in the magnetic field of the planet we live in, the environment we live in. Like, all everything that we've done has been designed to disconnect us from our reality and each other. And so just a living take on a way of orienting and relating. And what the indigenous people didn't do is forget. And, you know, around the world, all of them have one thing in common, which is they remain connected to a part of sensory awareness of the reality and world they're in and they're connected to. So with that, I'm complete. Thanks, Doug. Let's do it and pick whatever time you want to step in. So I agree with everything that Doug has said. And thank you for the question. So here's what pops up in my mind. The notion of picking up on Doug's theme of psychosis or schizophrenia that we live in, I started to think about history. And I started to think about how did we get into that psychosis? And the simple explanation that popped up in my mind is fear predators. You know, we were these little naked human beings running around the planet and there were dinosaurs and tigers and lions. And if you weren't careful, you'd be lunch. And so this whole fear-based mentality is very much deep in our psychology, the whole notion of we resort to lizard brain when we're in times of stress or threat. And it carries over into, even though there's no threat of fear or death, when people think they're going to lose their job, that same psychology pops in. So in some sense, beyond that, it became a mantra, a vision, a quest to get beyond that fear and conquer, slash subjugate, slash tame the evil forces of Earth. And so in some sense, and it's funny because I heard this last night watching the wonderful TV drama, Bosch, which I just got into. It's a wonderful escape, you know, and he was talking about learning in the orphanage where he was. We all have two dogs inside of us. Which one do you want to feed? The good dog or the evil dog. And then technology starts to appear in the form of weaponization and the ability to subjugate other populations. And so somehow that has grown and also out of that came, let's exploit the technology. Let's see if we can use this to our advantage. And somehow, quote, the notion of capitalism evolved out of that. I'm speculating, but here I am creating. Periodically, historically, a new religion is cropped up. Which all have the same ideal. It's about reconnection to Earth. It's about indigenous wisdom. And along with that, you know, prophets and messiahs. So in some ways there is this deep longing inside of us for a world that works without the destruction, without the violence in a place of peace. And so here we are, in some ways, you know, at a cusp of evolution. Where will it go? What will it be as these warring factions play themselves out? And that's where we're sitting and speculating and wondering. Today, I have spoken. Love that. Thank you. Carl and then I'll step in after. Stuart touched on a couple things I've been thinking about. I mean, it really, I think it really goes back to the creation story and the whole tradition of dominion. I mean, just think if the word that's been translated as dominion actually meant stewardship. And then the other thing too is about, there's a great article I had seen and talked about imagining the like utopian university of the future and stuff and then trying to live that into existence. And part of it said one of the things in there that I drew from it is that basically privilege means you have the freedom to fail and stuck, which struck me. And then and then also I guess there's like the tripping over a root and the saber tooth tiger got you. There's that preservation piece of it and things. And then the last part is about wanting predictability, I think is another huge part of it. I'll stop in there. Thanks, Carl. I want to unpack a little bit what Pete said about hyperscale systems and whether and how we have any control or say over them. And that's interesting. The system wants to lower my hand for me. There we go. And I wanted to share in, for example, and now there's too many things over. Here we go. In 1493, Pope Alexander the Sixth, Rodrigo Borja basically writes Intercetera, which is part, leads to the Treaty of Tordesillas, which basically divides the world between Spain and Portugal for explorations and basically says that anyone who doesn't know the name of Jesus Christ is your vassal in the treaty. And so I think there are moments like this in history that empower, enable, turn, tweak, motivate, whatever you want to say, a whole bunch of activity that then spills out afterward that changes the path of history, that changes the course of history a lot. And I can point to a few of those moments like that, whether it's sort of manifest destiny in the US or other sorts of things. And then in other realms, other statements that kind of gave permission or motivation to large groups of people and shifted how energies were used on the planet, mostly not for the good of lots of other people. And could you go back and kill baby Hitler kind of thing, like if there was time travel, but do we have some degree of influence over those moments and those responses and those actions? And I don't know, Pete, if that's like how that fits what you were saying. And I've not read up enough on sort of hyperscale or superscale and super organisms and how they evolve. But it seems like there are sometimes these turning points that matter a lot. Yeah, it's maybe a little deeper than I've thought about it. I think the overarching thing for me is that humans tend to look for an individual like Hitler or a turning point like the fall of the Berlin Wall or something like that. We focus on the random event as if it were the only thing that could have happened rather than looking at kind of an overarching story over thousands of years where the western people like to call it the March of Progress, whatever you would call that, the March of Doom or something like that. Over the thousands of years, there's a tendency to kind of move towards a certain place. And it doesn't matter too much the things that we think of as turning points did a small shift, a tactical shift in that overall direction. But the overall direction is a lot bigger and has a lot more momentum than we attribute to one individual. So it is in my little human brain, I think of Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, God forbid. And it's like, oh my god, it would have been somebody else if you had gone back in time and killed any of their grandparents and they weren't born. Largely, the same things would have unfolded maybe in a little bit different way. But the large thing has got a lot more mass than a few individuals. And which brings up a bunch of really interesting things, including the great man theory of history, which is like it's all about these individuals. One of the things you said was as if we were the only thing that could have happened, which doesn't quite fit what I was kind of intending in the sense of, for in many cases, when we look back on moments in history, we're like, oh my god, that person was so significant. But as this event was happening, it could have gone either direction at any moment. There were little razor's edge incidents all along, a bullet that had gone an inch to the left would have killed that person, then history might have been changed. And I think what you're saying is these energies, whatever the big outcome was of the moments in history we're talking about, we're just going to happen. And it was who knows whose name we were going to remember afterward and blame for or crown for the moment. It was just going to happen, because that thing was in the air. It was in the flow. It was heading toward us anyway. Is that kind of where you're going? That's pretty close. Yeah. And I think it's even more than that. So whatever precipitated World War I or World War II or something like that, it actually, that's a big shift. And the outcome of, you could maybe say that World War I, very simply, World War I led to World War II, World War II led to Pax Americana, the global domination of the world by the United States. So that's actually a pretty big shift. And that wasn't foreordained, I think, by whatever came before it. But there's kind of an even larger thing. As soon as you had social animals like humans that were competing over resources and had the ability to self-modify the way that their cultures worked, it sprang into being that we had hyperscale social structures. And kind of like a domino effect, it's very, very, very likely that 2,000, 5,000 years later, you've got some really big hyperscale social structures that are just like killing machines. They're super efficient at doing what they do. So capitalism is just the winner of a bunch of evolutionary battles between different other hyperscale social structures. And you can just say that, well, maybe it wouldn't be exactly capitalism. Maybe it wouldn't be the United States. But it's kind of foreordained, I think, that you're going to have a hyper efficient thing that's built around competition and domination. And it's just going to be the winner, basically. Something like that. So it doesn't have to be the United States. It doesn't have to exactly be capitalism. But you're going to have a domination machine built out of thousands of years of social structures interacting with each other. And interestingly, Janet asked in the chat whether evolution favors the aggressor. And one of my sad observations about human history is that all too often, pacifist, matriarchal, other kinds of cultures are overtaken by warring cultures because they don't have the weapons or the skills to defend themselves well. And so I think history time favors aggressors all too often. And I would love to find some means of living on the planet where that doesn't turn out to be the dynamic or the case. And one of the interesting things about Corey Doctor's book, Walk Away, is that when aggressors show up and take over the village that has been created by this interesting group of people, they just walk away from that village, turn it over to the aggressors, and like, good luck to you. You will destroy this thing. But because in that science fiction future, there is the capacity to 3D print and sort of construct everything you want and make the next village better, you're okay walking away because you can go start the thing again someplace. And that seems like it's one little spin on how to handle this dynamic. And I'm not sure it's even a satisfying spin. I'd rather have some sort of cordyceps fungus that infects people with goodwill. Wouldn't that be kind of cool? Can we do that? Can we engineer cordyceps so that it creates goodwill instead of this other thing? Let's do it then, Doug, see. Yeah. So just to pick up on exactly what Pete and Jerry were saying, there's this phenomenon of emergence that seems to be going on. And what is emerging stuff that people on this call don't like very much. But that's the trend line. That's where it seems to be headed. And here we are in some sense in a place of protest, in a place of no, there's a better way, in a place of looking for other solutions, in a place of recognition that this is terribly destructive. And in some sense, going back to the schizophrenia piece, this is in Disha of the worst of humanity, that this was not, quote, God's plan, however you hold the word God. And so what can we do? What can we do? That's the question. And I think that's the bottom line question we have wrestled with and wrestled with and wrestled with here. And periodically, it pops up. Jerry just said, how can we infect a virus in the whole population? Knowing that there will always be a marginal element that is going to be outside whatever order is created. Right now, it doesn't look like there's any kind of a win-win out there to quote a phrase. But who knows? Who knows? So we keep tilting at windmills. Why? Because there's nothing else to do but follow the deepest part of our own hearts and psyches to preserve the spirit of humanity, to preserve that spirit of humanity. At least that's the cosmology that I've been living in. Thanks, Stuart. Doug, see you whenever you'd like. Well, my thought is pretty simple. I think the conversation tends to divide between talking about individuals and talking about large collectives, states, nations or whatever. It seems to me like the real space for innovation and engagement and understanding is the meso-level, the in-between. And we just don't go there very much. So we polarize ourselves into just me or all of us together. And then it comes out kind of hopeless. On the hopeless side, I think most of you have read Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. We're basically just saying, look, we keep making things more complex. And the more complex they are, the more fractional they are. And the more complex they are, the more it leads on the fragility. And they don't want to do anything about it. I think where I'm going is how do we get some basic competence in what we're talking about that goes beyond cloudages. Finished. Can you say a little bit more about the meso-level? Well, it's the, what's the name of the window with 120 people in it? I'm forgetting it at the moment, but that anthropologist came up with. You don't mean the Overton window, you mean? Yeah, the Overton doesn't have a number of people associated with it. So that's saying something about the meso-level. The meso-level is where we actually interact most days with most people, is with intermediate institutions that are more than one psyche, but not all of them. And it seems to me it's the place where things could happen, but we don't look at it. So we disempower ourselves. I like that thought a lot, Doug. I want to come back to it. There've been very interesting conversations on multiple lists about the Dunbar number, or many Dunbar numbers, or many different breaks in social dynamics and how they work. And we're all kicking around ideas about that, but I think it's a useful place to think a lot more. Pete, then Doug B. I kind of want to agree. I like Doug's observation of polarization between individual and large scale, like civilization scale. And it's clear to me that the answer for lots of things is smaller autonomous organizations in what we call decentralization and federation now. So I know I work and think in that kind of area, and I know a few other groups of folks working and thinking in that area, as is OGM. And I don't feel like I can say much more than that, but I'm putting my money on that kind of whatever that is. A small comment on decentralization and federation, as you said, Pete, I was thinking, it's very interesting that you meant those two words, I think, as very similar concepts, as related concepts. And one of them is all about the going apart, and the other one is all about the coming together. And they're both about the interactions of a bunch of groups, right? But one of them is about the dispersal, and the other one is about how do we agree. And it makes me think that I like the word federation more than decentralization because I'm interested in how do we agree and come together. But I don't ever really like the word federation when I see it. I think of space federations, I think of Federalist Society, like the Fed role gives me a little heebie-jeebie just unconsciously that I'm just bubbling to the surface now. But I like the intention of federation more than the rest. So maybe it's group association, maybe I have no idea what the better semantics are. The languaging is difficult. And has already been colonized hundreds of years ago. So similarly, for a long time, a number of us were talking about sovereigns as the base unit of decentralization of federation or whatever. And it turns out that sovereign is actually even worse than saying federation. It's a really bad word for a lot of people. So language is difficult. Yeah, Jerry, you use the word bubbling. I've been using the term islands of sanity that are kind of bubbling to the surface. And will there be critical mass at some point in time? Maybe. Before or after total destruction? Maybe. It's a race. It does create a certain dramatic tension in our societal moment that is intriguing. Doug, be whenever you'd like. To go orthogonal a little bit, but on the same meme, on the same point. The polarity's lens always ends up in service to disconnection. And I think maybe a different way in response, Doug, to your comment, which I think is dead on, a different way of looking at it, instead of the middle ground or getting above, that maybe there's a proto level that affords an appreciation and understanding of the forces and energies and dynamics at play. And then that is subject to fractal reality. So you can zoom all the way into a cell or into the operation of somebody's body as a living thing. And you can zoom out to a society, a continent, a world. And what is and what manifests and the way in which humans as a species respond or react and relate to that is within a context where there are sort of some fundamental natural laws that if you do this, then not. There are things that have consequences. And we create our reality in terms of the relative resonance and comedy between us as a species and the biome in the world around us and each other or not. And the tendency to leave the tendency instead of going toward natural laws and properties of the reality we're in tends to get supplanted with our capacity to abstract and to get intellectual and to elaborate and to layer and make deeper and deeper and deeper abstractions and layers built on top of abstractions and layers. And to get away from the immediacy of what are the real sort of multi-dimensional mechanics of reality and natural law. And those natural laws apply on the microscopic level and they apply on the macro level. In that sense, there are some that are actually consistent and underpin everything. So just another take. I'm complete. You make me wonder, Doug, if we would agree on what the fundamental natural laws are. Because I think the way you express this, like of course we would all agree on these fundamental natural laws and that drives a lot of behavior. And I think that we would have a really interesting debate on what some of those are. And we might learn a lot about how we think from articulating what we think the fundamental laws are. And some of them might be fundamental behaviors. Some of them might be fundamental assumptions. I don't know exactly how to phrase it, but I'm curious what those laws would be and to what degree we all, even just those of us sitting here in this conversation, would agree on them. Yeah. What also pops up in my mind from what Doug said was reality. What an interesting word that is. And there's so many different places that we could take that word. So here we are existing in some ways in an over-intellectualized conversation about stuff that at some fundamental level is much more simplistic or might be. Doug C. So I don't know if the fundamental laws would work in our favor. For example, I think it's fundamental about humans that they're sexual, hypersexual, which means more of us. And we make connections, which means we're weeding in every tighter fabric of society. So we strangle ourselves because we can't move. Those are two fundamental laws about human behavior. And the outcome is not terrific. It means collapse. Not only do we want to live to think about the middle space in terms of space, that is meta and micro systems, micro and yeah. Yeah. But also in time, because maybe the sweet place in time is early in the civilizational cycle. Late in the civilizational cycle is not so terrific in words we're finding out. So like there's optimum sized groups, there's optimum sized spaces, and there's optimized time frames. Finished. Doug C. Thanks Doug. I found myself reacting negatively to your second fundamental truth that groups weave themselves ever closer together until they sort of choke themselves or something like that. I'm paraphrasing badly, but can you say more about what you meant? Well, I like your paraphrase. It sounded pretty good to me. Just that I imagine if you had 100 people standing in the middle of a football field and they're close together, any one of them can move, although there's a little resistance through the group. But if each one reaches out and grabs the arm of somebody nearby, the structure becomes impervious to movement. And I think that that's what we do. We have a society that's hyperly complex connected and it's very hard to change. So our connections and our relationships bind us in ways that resist change. Is that a piece of what you're saying? Definitely. So the relationship part is great when you have smaller numbers of people, but they become pathological later in the process and maybe later in the process is inevitable. But also these little bindings, the fabric of society is one way of talking about it, are also the vectors for change. These are the pathways that change follows to cause sometimes deep transformations in society, right? Well, first of all, you said little groups. And I'm talking really about slightly larger groups where the creativity is more creating constraints than opportunities. And just if ever, you know, I talked to a lot of people. So for example, in the last week, I've talked to some people who have new grants. What that does to their timeframe is take them away from climate change because they want to finish their grant first. Let me finish my grant, then I'll worry about climate change. But that grant then links those people to other people. And since everybody's doing that, I mean, we spend most of our days making relationships tighter and tighter and stronger. Anyone else have thoughts about that particular idea? Or does it either trouble you or do you agree with it? I think I'd love to unpack it a little bit. So connection in terms of proximity and within a context that's a structure or a frame is different than a human emotional, sensorial embodied connection to another living being. So, you know, there are two different connection dynamics at play in that. And earlier, Doug, when you referenced sort of hypersexuality. So, you know, one of the four fountains, one of the fundamental human needs or drivers is reproduction. But that actually is something that changes over the arc of a lifetime. So at younger ages, it's about sex, but at older ages, it's about what am I leaving behind? What's my legacy? And so in that, in the times we're living in, I think hypersexuality is an expression of imbalance of that sort of one of the pieces of that psychosis I referred to earlier. It's not a balanced reflection and representation. In fact, you don't see indigenous tribes literally populating themselves out of existence. Why isn't that happening if that's such a natural thing? It's a distortion effect in what reality in our paradigm, you know, the prevailing paradigm is today, it's a byproduct and effect of that. So, you know, I really think that it's not connection, intrinsically, that creates the strangulation you're referring to, creates the fixation, the hardening up of the frame, the society, the culture, the patterns and the ways people are doing what they're doing societally. I think that fixation, that hardening up, that turning the world into nouns and to objects, and attempting to impose and project into reality that somehow we actually have the ability to control it and to control the outputs and outcomes is at the root of the problem because the truth of the matter is life happens and shit happens and we're not in control of nothing. But there's a whole bunch of science and, you know, construction around projection and, you know, the church back in the day, you know, said nature was wild and it needed to be tamed, tamed by who, tamed by us, like the whole concept of control and predictability and effect over future is fundamentally misguided and that hardening up is really where that strangling ourselves to death, under our own systems, under our own constructs, I think, is more the dynamic. Thanks, Doug. Doug C., is your hand up from earlier or are you stepping back? No, I'm done. Sorry. No worries. Mark, the floor is yours when you'd like. Good to see you. I apologize. I had a number of things in my head and they spaced out the actual time for this call. Preparing, preparing, preparing, preparing. So apparently my brain is not particularly ready for the real world yet. I heard something amazing from Doug and from Doug C., Doug Carmichael and from Doug Breitbart. Certainly, you know, we hold, we let go, we hold, we let go, we hold, we let go. That's life. It's not only hold, that is never the case. It is a dynamic and not a static system and this notion that we're not in control of nothing. Yes, we are. That's the question that Mary Catherine Bateson talks about in our own metaphor that Gill Friend loves, a wonderful book about the effects of conscious process on human or biological evolution. Where does decision making come in when we talk about evolution? Now, there's two important notions I could just mic drop. One would be the book by Owen Barfield called Saving the Appearances, which is basically his way of saying, let's look at pre, how did you put it? The pre-human past and the human past, how how the consciousness of pre-literate people dealt with what was real and how we have now models which we think of as real abstractions in Doug's case, but really, uh-uh, we're just looking at the appearances and calling that science. Now it's a very short, incredibly difficult book. I don't expect out of a hundred people holding hands, three people to ever read that book, but it's that and and that's the depth of my questioning. How do I inspire people to read? That's this type of thing. The other thing is, you know, I'm lucky to have a garden and I can have a fire at night and invite people over to talk and whiskey, and my friend Josh is back from Tartu University where he's getting his PhD in semiotics and kind of being paid by Estonia to basically study for his PhD and write papers, and so he's arguing that, you know, there's a cybernetic mode which we have to transcend to get out of, if then else, linear, or even, you know, second-order cybernetics, adaptiveness to get to the next level of human consciousness. Now these are big, again, mic drop, boom! You know, I don't expect anybody to go to either of these two points and say, oh yeah, I understand this, because last night, of course, I'm kind of going, well, wait a second, Josh, when you say this, you know, what are the implications, you know, how do we make this change? You know, and so it's not going to be me marching in on a horse saying, I have all the answers. Rather, there's an amazing amount of questions out there. Now, I am so sorry that I haven't been brainy enough or capable enough to basically, you know, report on AIME, which I will have to, you know, bow out and report again, but basically these people from Australia got this funding for a 30-year project to basically use Indigenous wisdom to transform society from the bottom up, and they came to San Francisco and they spent three days basically doing performances with puppets as well as Maori dance, and they met about 20 or 30 people, and they spent all this money and all this time and all this preparation to meet this tiny little group of people, and now they're going to LA and Paris and Geneva and London and spending all these global warming resources to spread their message, and they're doing amazing things. You know, the notion of a programmed death of an organization I thought was incredible, the notion that the CEO doesn't want to be the CEO, that's incredible. The notion that they want to get a million underserved youth to match with in four person cells with somebody who can be a mentor from a joy corporation, joy organization, you know, somebody who in, you know, Orange Telecom or AT&T is willing to basically sit in with two underserved children and kind of a more Indigenous mentor, and as a cell of four have hundreds of thousands of these cells of four to basically have, you know, a transformation of an extra familial, familial, extra cultural cell that does what we're doing here. We're meeting as little cells to talk about important stuff, and then that each of the members of that cell can then say, hey, that was a really good experience. When this little cell ends its natural lifetime, I'm going to start my own cell or several cells with different little people, i.e., you know, again, the multiple cells that each of us are in. Doug Carmichael talks about the way he has all these other groups he interacts with. Well, we bring from this group or from the other groups that we're in, and it cross-pollinates, and it's that kind of, I would not call that Indigenous wisdom, but it's that kind of rules for radical cells that makes really robust change if that's the baseline of what everybody in our community, everybody in our city, everybody in our nation, does to have these formal informal ties. We come up, we come together, we break apart, we come together, we get something valuable, we share it with these other communities. It's not always that we're going to have these locked arms that prevent movement. No, no, no, we make a connection that's strong, and then we can replicate that strong connection and that strong letting go of the connection because we trust the people that we've made the connection with will replicate that elsewhere. Thank you for listening. Boy, was that a complex brain dump, and I apologize. I'm going to try to find AIME. I put a couple links in the chat. Am I finding the right AIME there? They're doing these things called Indigenous Knowledge Labs, and I haven't seen the YouTube that they have about that, but basically, they've been doing things for 20 years in Australia, Indigenous Knowledge Labs for 20 years in Australia, and they've got all kinds of awards. And again, this is new information to me since last Thursday, and certainly, you know, I am a skeptic, but I'm also open to finding new information. And of course, the human connection that they had, you know, everything felt great for these people from New Zealand. You know, Stephanie, a person that I talked to about how colonialism has not allowed me to access my ancestral past, and she says, same here. Yes, yeah, same here. I don't know, you know, the storylines that my, you know, culture talks about that link, you know, for years and decades and centuries all the way back to the ancestors. She doesn't have access to that. She has access to the idea, but not the actual experience of having that connection to the ancestors. And it's great that they got this funding and all this money and were able to do that. But, huh, wow, what are all the other implications of, you know, did they get their message across? Obviously they did because I'm relating it to people who've never heard of them and can, you know, now branch out and reconnect with them and help them in a way that might be what Doug Breitbart was pointing to when I questioned his direction. Thank you. Sorry to take so long. Thanks, Mark. Good foot for that. Stuart. Yeah, so some random thoughts. First is a humorous one. When Doug mentioned earlier, we're over sexualized. My immediate reaction was, I think you're talking about yourself, Doug. I'm sorry, I just found that kind of funny. The other thoughts, we're talking in absolutes. I missed the note, by the way. Oh, okay. Sorry, I'm not going to repeat it because, you know, it's one of those things that kind of just fell flat. That was my sense of it. Maybe it needed to be said in a moment. Anyway, we're talking about phenomenon that are, you know, at two ends of the spectrum. And, you know, and I think there's much more, so much more complexity. It's not either or, you know, and the idea of looking for the either or is just, you know, doesn't serve us well. One, two, we do want control and we don't have it and we do have it. I mean, and that's an example of what I was just talking about. I remember getting into advanced economics as my undergraduate major. And in the advanced economic textbooks, there were these 27-page formulas explaining economic activity, and I just went, this is just bullshit. This is just a bunch of crap. This is a greatest example of, you know, the inability of human beings to deal with uncertainty and not knowing because the formulas were just, you know, absurd. And I think that that's all I really wanted to point to in this discussion. Oh, and the only other piece was that, you know, there were those metaphysicians who would say that on this plane of existence that everything is perfect the way it is, because we get to experience all of these emotions that we're talking about, which you don't experience in other worlds. It's just something to think about. And also, the last piece is let's stay back from the notion of taking ourselves too seriously in these conversations. Oh, but that's so fun. And unfortunately, I've got to leave in a couple of minutes, but I thank everybody for this level of engagement. Thanks to it. And thanks for being here. How about we go into a little bit of silence? I think I know that my neurons are crowded right now, and I'll bring this back out, or after a while, if anybody else wants to pick up the conversation, feel free to as well. But let's go into a bit of silence here. I think a piece of what we're talking about here is the thing I said in the chat a little while ago, which is what are the dynamics of broad social change? I think. And that's intersecting or connected in interesting ways to how we see, how we think, whether we're connected to our senses, whether we're connected to nature, whether we're way abstract and up in the clouds, all those kinds of things, all those things are important factors in how change happens. But I think one of our common interests is this notion of catalyzing large scale change. And I use the word catalyzing very gingerly because it's possible that there is no such thing because shit just happens and it happens in waves and motions, and we're just like particles participating in the change. And here we are floating along. So Doug, see off to you. Okay, Jerry, I've been thinking about the question just the way you put it. How do you get large scale social change? And I've been reading lately Arnold Toynbee and the Study of History. And he takes as the key players civilizations of which he discusses 28 and why some fail and why some succeed. And what's striking to me about the book is that in fact, large populations do change religions when their societies confront each other. It's a big deal and it cuts deep into the psyche of the players. So I'm really encouraged by this model that needs to be taken more seriously. And the idea that people give up their gods and take on other gods under the flow of historical process is just fascinating. And there's so much more. I mean, if you take Israel or Christianity, the number of religions that preceded them and affected what came later is huge. I mean, like there are very few societies that don't have at least five. And in some cases, 10 or 12 previous religions that formed the psyche of the people. So I find that just amazing. And so Arnold Toynbee's the Study of History. There's a one volume reduced version on Amazon. That's really very good to read. He's a great writer. Thanks, Doug. Anyone else have experience reading Toynbee? I don't really know Toynbee's attitude about history or meta history or whatever. And I know that locating better descriptions of history has been important in my life. Like there were moments when I'm like, oh, okay. So this is a different way of seeing what I've been told so far. And it's informative and useful for me. And I don't know how Toynbee fits in that place. Anybody? I'd like to point out that rather than Toynbee, I read Mumford. And again, the meta narrative is, why don't more people read? That's what I'm concerned with. Why? Yes, gosh, I would love to read Toynbee. He's on the bucket list. I've got a book that I haven't read of his. But more, how do I spend more time reading? How do I take what Doug Carmichael has got from Toynbee? And in the transhumanist narratives or meta narratives of Silicon Valley, you know, they want to basically upload our brains into computers. And so all those files can be transferred instantly, bullshit. It's the time that it takes an organism to do the work that Doug Carmichael did, or I've done with Mumford. And how do we basically, you know, the Internet Archive, what is that motto, universal access to all human knowledge or all knowledge? Well, that's fine as far as that goes. You can bring me to Toynbee, but am I going to basically get the same thing, same insights that Doug has had, and how much thermodynamic energy, you know, or, you know, life energy in terms of cost, you know, the friends that I'm not hanging out with drinking whiskey around a campfire in order to read Toynbee. That stored human knowledge, that's amazing. That's how we are different from other social insects and social animals, baboons or wolfpacks. We have a symbol-based connectivity, which is amazing. But there's, as Bateson and, you know, the cybernetics group points out, there's also forbidden knowledge and knowledge that, you know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And basically we can manipulate mass audiences with a little knowledge that's repeated over and over and over again. Boy, do people know how to do that in media, which is our mass connection environment, and it's toxic. I would love Toynbee rather than Trump to be in my YouTube feed. It's not. Don't know how to make that so. Shall we have him exhumed? Shall we have him exhumed? Well, that's exactly what Doug is doing. Doug is taking the word, Doug, Carmichael, oh, sorry, I'm too bad. Doug Breitbart had to go, but Doug had to go. Yeah, Doug is taking the words of the dead and saying, this is how it affects my presence. And that's amazing. And that's what we as humans do. We can take Euclid. We can take Aristotle. We can take, you know, Jesus Christ or, you know, a fictional representation of Aragorn or Gandalf and say, aha, this speaks to me in my presence. And a wolf pack, you know, has, you know, a a hierarchy of leadership, and that doesn't have that same symbolic judgment or insight to say, I can be a better leader or a better year or peer mentor or, you know, my place in the hierarchy of things can be more influential from the influence of somebody who's died 40, 50, 100, 700 years ago. There's a wonderful episode with Machiavelli, who was a great reader, and he had a tower where he would go in the evening after a day's work and thrust an equivalent of a tuxedo, a formal business worker. And he said he would sit down and read the ancient books and hold conversations with the mighty dead. Thank you. I'll just, and I think this is a way of getting back to our topic a little bit. When I hear references to Mumford or Toynbee who are kind of towering intellects in the Western Canon, I'm reminded that they're in the Western Canon than their old dead white British guys. And I'm really interested in synthesizing and comparing what they came up with and how they influenced Western thinking with everything else we're trying to bring into the conversation here about Indigenous ways of knowing. And I think some pieces of the puzzle of what happened and at the superscale fountain of events or cascade of events that Pete referred to is buried in some of those comparisons, I think. Well, just to say Toynbee sees the West as probably a failed society over mechanization and the loss of any spiritual understanding. And it's just so interesting how many different interesting and actually valid causal narratives we could create about how that happened and what its effects are. And the causal narrative that you have in your head greatly influences what you think you should do next. So comparing notes on these narratives I think is interesting and useful. And then every now and then I wind up in conversations that drift too far into the abstract. And I start to realize that they're not necessarily helpful. We're getting near the end of our time. What's the Dr. Hope puppet? Oh, there you go. One Indigenous way of doing is putting on a mask and embodying another consciousness in the voodoo dance or the agora, the play of Orpheus and Uridixi, Uridice, where basically you are now inhabiting the God and the God is speaking through you. Now, I wish Doug Breitbar were here because I think that's what he's pointing to is we all have masks. I'm wearing a mask right now. I'm wearing my OGM mask. You're I'm a civilized human mask. Well, I'm not wearing my Internet Archive mask. I'm not wearing my hanging out with a friend mask. I am being a consciousness in the present that is receptive to a screen, a reality one pixel deep, where a representation of Janet and Ken and Carl and Pete and Jerry and Doug are influencing the mask that I am wearing right now. Now, when I channel, you know, the God of destruction. This is not this is, you know, a different mask that I'm thinking, you know, as you know, in my discussions with Jack and Stephanie and the other people of AIM, you know, doing universal imagination, custodianship of the earth and mentoring to the underprivileged young, they're wearing masks, but they're changing masks. They're wearing different masks. They're not only wearing one mask as I am wearing one mask right here and right now, which is my OGM mask. And I'm kind of, you know, being challenged by Doug Breitbart's notion, notions that I don't really understand to say, aha, is there something here where there are different tools that we can use to inspire people to have that kind of agoric connection that the city of Athens had in the plays of Euripides or the narratives of Homer, where everybody, like when I was a kid, you only had ABC, CBS, NBC, and everybody knew who Walter Cronkite was. And everybody knew when Walter Cronkite changed his mind about the Vietnam War on air. And that was a powerful togetherness that in the 500 million blogs of spear and, and, you know, attention economy, that's all shattered. We don't have that connectivity at scale in the same way that I did when I was seven, 17 or so. I would love to, I would love to compare the reach that Joe Rogan has with the reach that Cronkite had in his day, for example. And I think that some of these modern stars who have audiences much larger than mainstream media, so shockingly large audiences have crazy reach. It's just that there are so many more of them and everybody has access to the channel because it costs nothing to participate that we are now flooded with people trying to become that person. But the reach is impressive. Like modern reach is crazy stuff. I'm always disheartened when I watch old Jay Leno clips of him interviewing people on the street showing them a picture of somebody who is this, like a picture of Bill Gates or the president of the United States. And people don't know where is Bolivia? Isn't that in Africa? We are, we are way too ignorant. Ken, I'm mindful that you usually need to bounce at the half and that you often bring us a gift of a poem. And I would love to give you the space to do that if you, if you have done such a thing again. Thank you. Just reflecting on this conversation. We haven't talked a lot about indigenous wisdom. We've talked around it. We've talked at it. Haven't actually mentioned it very much. I haven't seen too much. And I've been thinking, you know, I have somebody said a little knowledge is dangerous. I have a thimble full of indigenous knowledge in my life, having been exposed to a few different teachers. And one thing I noticed that that is very challenging thing for people who are Western and educated, industrial rich and democratic is that there's a tremendous fear of the superstition of indigenous peoples. Last week on the call, Doug was mentioning the Kogi people and, you know, they have these oracles and these rituals and people are like, oh, man, that's voodoo stuff. There was actually a mark saying voodoo that reminded me of this. I think that freaks people out, like, because it's putting people directly in touch with a non-rational world, which happens to exist just as much as any other world. You know, William James said we're separated by the thinnest of veils from these other worlds. And I don't think modern people or I should say contemporary people, because modernity occurred a few centuries ago. I don't think contemporary people are up and ready for that. They don't have a nervous system for it. They don't have the cultural concepts for it. And it freaks them out and they run away and that could be a contributing factor to why we are lacking in indigenous knowledge today among most industrialized people. So with that, I will bring us to the great D.H. Lawrence. Escape. When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego and we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright, but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in and passion or make our bodies taut with power. We shall stamp our feet with our new power and old things will fall down. We shall laugh and institutions will curl up like burnt paper. Love that. Have a great week, y'all. Thank you. Thank you. That was a nice coda. I don't know where, you know, I just, I have this library of poems on my computer and I listen to these calls and I start looking, this matches. It's a magical thing. Poetry is a magical force. So anyway, have a great week, everybody. It is. Thanks, Ken. I think that's a really lovely note to wrap our call on. So we will see everybody on the inner tubes and next week. Thanks for doing that, Pete. I will go read your output. Very interesting. You know, one of the things I was trying to do is actually minimize disrupting with my quote. So I was waiting until just after the silence to know whatever I had in my chat and stuff. So rather than barraging things. So yeah, and then that could tie in great with the, well, I mean, yeah, we'll have to figure out how that ties in with potentially like that silence break too. Because I defeats the, on one hand, it defeats the purpose of silence to try to get into like meditative state. But then on the other hand, then people could be reading those posts that everybody made the last time. And that might trigger conversations. Just an interesting model. Exactly. Thanks, Carl. Sometimes we get overloaded or we sort of miss some of the cues, but I appreciate that. Thanks, gents.