 This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, March 10th, 2022. Today is a topic call and I'll bring up the topic in just a second. We were talking about some emails I was reading recently. Well, one of the things that this fellow wrote was that American policy sort of rolled out and forced it on the rest of the world through organizations like WTO has been bad for other countries and he contrasted here subsidies for agriculture in America, which are legal under WTO, and India's attempts to create markets for poor people's merch, which is what the Indian protests have been about recently, which are illegal under WTO apparently. And I don't know the details behind it, but he was saying that that the particular things that America wants in America usually gets are often often create really terrible pressures for other countries and other places, and that that just sort of happens. So there's stuff like that. So there's also stuff like in the 90s. People as radical as Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and George Kennan who was the architect of the containment policy strongly advised the Clinton government not to push NATO eastward. And Perry apparently almost resigned over it. And one of the one of the pieces in the note I was reading said that James Baker, the third proposed to Gorbachev that they create sort of a frozen zone between a buffer zone in the former Soviet states that wouldn't be NATO but will be something else between. And he's like, you know, with this would this have played out differently if that had to happen. And that's a very, very interesting question. Cool, nice to see everybody. Thanks for joining our question that came up. Grace and john replied on the matter most channel and Grace started with something that I'm paraphrasing is how do we calibrate what we hear, which I think is a nice starting point maybe for our conversation today, and we can take it lots of different places. But a piece of this is a piece of this is about crap detection Allah pure God G and how around gold, a piece of this is about fact checking and so forth. But then another piece of this is about how voices show up in public conversation. How we deal with private conversation that's difficult, all those kinds of things. Let's open the floor with those kinds of things and see where anybody wants to jump in. This race will be with us. I think so, I'm hoping I'm waiting for her to shop. Mike, please jump in. I'm going to apologize I have to drop off in about a half an hour and I'll try to get back on but this is a great topic. My colleagues at Carnegie spent a lot of time on influence operations. They've decided not to call it propaganda or disinformation because it, it really is more than that. And you mentioned the problem of correcting the facts. Then there's correcting the interpretation. And then there's changing the emotional impact. I never talk about that very we just, we always focus on, let's get the facts right and then people will understand, or I'll give them a different way to analyze the facts. But the, but the truth is that a lot of the influence comes from installing a certain emotional response into people. Sometimes that comes from the fact that I'm part of your tribe, and I'm really mad about this. And because I'm really mad about it, and you're part of my tribe you should be really mad about it. And that bypasses the facts. Analysis has very little to do with that. That's the part that we've not done enough work on. And the Ukrainians are doing an incredible job of using emotions to make an impact. And to me they've got a billion people on their side now. And some of it isn't because of the facts or the history or what is being said it's because of the, the fact the empathy factor. They're listening to the president they're listening to the random person in the street, and they're putting themselves in that position and thinking, God, that's just terrible. And so, anyway, that's, that's another piece of this and I hope we'll spend some time on it. Thanks Mike and a piece of what I was reading this morning was apparently conventional wisdom from foreign affairs that nations have interests not principles. But when they do something big they're usually acting on their interests but then when they explain it to their people they have to pretend that it was based on principles so they invent a narrative that they tell their people about this is the principle of why we're acting and what's going on so these narratives and counter narratives then sort of do battle in the public sphere but, but if you pay attention to sort of interest that you can often detect where things are coming from. That's an interesting way of looking at it. At grace thanks for being on the call I picked up your topic from matter most, and have made. How do we calibrate what we hear a paraphrase of your, of your question, the starting point for our conversation. So, glad you're glad you're in with us hope that's a reasonable paraphrase, and over to Gil. You are muted. Sorry, trying to be polite and be muted. And that's what you said it strikes me that we, that we, all of us live in an interpretation that human beings are fundamentally rational creatures. And we act and we act in all kinds of way, yeah I know, but we act in all kinds of ways if, as if that's true, even here among us. Because we're all rational right. But for the other guys and you know and so the principles and interest distinction I think is really key. The interest question of course takes you to whose interests because a country is not a unified collection of interests. I was really struck by something I got from from Fernando florist couple years ago he's in response to this question he said no we're fundamentally emotional beings, but biological things number one with nervous systems and biochemistry that react to things. And we're emotional beings, which is a layer on top of that and we're historical beings you know formed by like not just the tribe but the history. My family and my parents parents and where they come from the stories that have been passed down, and the cultural artifacts of all that that are there before all of that stuff is there before I do anything like what we call thinking. And thinking this is kind of other layer on it we focus so much of our attention there, but we're these, we're these crazy old critters in this soup of, you know, of hormones and neurotransmitters and stories. And this external layer Jerry is I think he named it really well that there's this story of principles, and this reality of interest but also there's interpretations of the interest like you know, you know linsky is outraged that we're not doing a no fly zone. It's in his interest that we would do a no fly zone I mean they you know change the dynamics of the war we're in the story of Holy shit if we do that will Vlad push the button. And I don't know the answer that question probably nobody does so there's a elaborate calculation on top of layers of intelligence on top of pressure from all sides. If you ever, if you ever had the thought you would never want to be president of the United States this is a good time to have that thought. Yeah, exactly, exactly no I don't envy the, the job to anybody these days, especially in sort of modern warfare and whatever else is going on. I would go slightly meta on the conversation for a second and then pass it to john, which is, let's make room in this conversation for unconventional perspectives on what we're thinking or talking about let's make it which is a sort of slightly ironic because this is about how we hear what we hear so let's let's pay attention to how we hear what we hear. And let's just let's sort of stand aside and look at it, rather than react to it so we can make a little bit more space in the conversation as we go. Okay, so. Yes, to a lot of what I've heard, I had to step away just for 90 seconds. It's considerably worse if you could better or worse but mostly worse that we're not only not rational creatures, but if we tried to be, if we tried to do the full fact checking. We would be overwhelmed. So what we're really looking for we're not, we're not, you know, it's it's not. You can't handle the truth. It is you can't handle the truth. It's because there's too much of it. I knew this would all come back to what's that what's the name of the movie. A few good men are you good men thank you. So what some someone had a comment and online the other day they said, it might have been an ogm ogm person in a non ogm context I somehow had that recollection. Well, Putin is a war criminal. Well, what about that is a statement. And I immediately go and my my my react my negative reaction is not that it's not true or it's not or that I you know it's my my reaction is that's not a powerful metaphor. That's not a powerful fact squeezer because we all got to have fact squeezers and we want ones that are rich. Neither that they have to be both intellectually rich and emotionally rich to sustain our energy as we navigate this very difficult area of sensemaking. So I'll give you one example. There is an article on medium. I know who's seen it by Jessica wildfire, who doesn't usually write in this kind of space house really and she says, Putin is already one. And what she lays out is a model. It's a model of, it's a little bit like the mafia model. This is what's he doing well he's doing, you know what a godfather would do. Why do you, why do you excessively and dramatically overkill a client, you know, because you're trying to communicate to the other clients, what's going to happen to them. Why do you focus on the nuclear power plants. Well, because you want to, you know, you want to communicate this extra layer of you know, I'm a lot I might be crazy. I'm a lot more dangerous than you think. So, you know, don't even think about resisting if it comes when your turn comes up. You know, your turn might not be coming up now, but just I'm work I'm doing the long game here. Oh, yes, and you're, you're, you're going to hurt my economy and you're going to hurt the Russian citizens and blah, blah, blah, you know, and I'll paste over that with, you know, patriotic garbage. And it doesn't matter whether it works or not. I mean, the interesting thing I didn't like, I liked the article because it forced me to rethink my model. Damn, what, you know, it's like, wow. You know, and it said that a lot of these things that we might have thought were worthy efforts, either tactically or in the fact finding sense that they wouldn't matter if you accept this model, which is the mafia model. He's basically a gangster. He's basically showing you what's what's in store for you if you get in his way. So my whole point is that is that sense making, not that it's right. It's not that it's right. It's that it forces you to rethink and reorganize all the all the incomplete facts that you're carrying. And so if I'm going to go forth and try to make sense, I want a bunch of those. I want a bunch of very powerful, very disturbing in a way. Very emotionally, you know, stories about what he might be doing, what's what's strategy, you know, what's so linsky doing, what's the strategy, what's our strategy, and I probably need a couple of those and I have to not like some of them quite a bit. Or else I'm not really doing my job in terms of forcing my brain to juggle its mental models. So, for now, thanks john that that's I love that and you reminded me of a piece I read recently by Umayur Hake, who is usually pretty out there and in this case says hey, Putin is doing this to show everybody he can beat anybody up and destroy them. It's this is basically a thug on the street warning everybody and plays that logic out and and entertaining these different projects is really important. And a piece of framing of how politicians and spin meisters frame is to make sure you don't look at alternate framings. A tactic they employ is to guarantee that you don't pay attention to other ways of seeing something. And yet, both sides isn't isn't helping civilization move forward. Right. So, so how do we find a middle ground between these things. Doug then Gil. Okay, I think that what's on my mind is our illusion that we are language is adequate to the times that we live in. There is that problem too, but language is such a thin structure on top of reality. It maps in but not very much. So we're left. Well, since I'm also a painter. I look at the world in a painterly way at times. And it's a totally different world of the world I see in language. I mean, if you just look at the room around you the incredible amount of detail that's there, that language just doesn't touch. I think that we, in our education, we generally learn that the way the world looks at one language might be different to the way it looks in another language. But we're not taught very much about how language in general is a very weak map of reality that we have to live in. And that's why emotions play such a big role because it ties together the facts in the language world with some connection down into stuff that's more real. But it's not terrific. So anyway, that's my thought this morning. And then there are there are eras or periods where certain words in a language developed deeper resonance, whether it's the change in historic context or meaning. So right now, freedom is a word that's very different from what freedom maybe meant 100 years ago. It's sort of a little laden right in the public sphere. But that happens all the time in languages pretty weak. Gil Grace Mike. Yeah, that goes to what john said I mean this is a time of huge importance of exposing ourselves to different sources and different perspectives including the ones that we really don't like. So there's that. It seems to me that we're, we have this real problem like human beings are not very well set up with handling complex information. We're not set up for contradictory multi, you know, we want logic we want binary choices things are not things are messier than that we're going to keep going chair. Your fingers don't scare me. The whole intention of hand signals is to not interrupt you which I'm doing now but this is meant to be like, I'm not so sure about that. I know, I know it's okay. We like clean binary choices we don't like messy decisions we don't like multivariate logic we don't like in, you know, choosing between really bad choices. The mediators layer on top of that and give us black and white views of a very, very messy world we can we as all of us and we as the mediators both we the nature of humans and we the way the modern media society works. And back to the, to the bully question. I mean, I think about this one a lot you know what how do you deal with bullies. You know, you yield you back away you yield some point you take the bully down the threat of taking this boy down is that he's threatening to blow up the whole game board. And I posted the link to that wonderful scene in the untouchables where Sean Connery the season cop is advising Kevin Costner that you know this the straight up good guy at the age and about how you deal with the mob in Chicago. It's, it has an emotional appeal. It's like, you know, take the bully down on his own terms, but we are under a threat or an interpretation of the threat that if we did that that would be catastrophic and so we don't know. And, you know, the polarized mediators play hard on one side or the other how could you not do this. The other complexity of the game of course is that the Republicans are going to push Biden into various actions and if he takes them, they will condemn him for taking the actions. They pushed him into classic classic game they play. And everybody negotiating in this space is playing a variety of different games with their different audiences and their different constituencies and stakeholders and all that. And on top of their interpretations of their interests and whatever degree of knowledge they have about what's actually going on, part of which is what do we know about what's in Putin's mind and the mind to 10 people around him and the whatever number of dozens people around them and what are they actually thinking and what are the dynamics among them and Mike, you may know I sort of don't know what, you know, to what degree we have any view into that at all I assume we try but those. You know, it's interesting and there's so many threads here but I want to go back to the original thread of sense making because it's really interesting to watch how people are talking about different sources and challenging their mind. And really what happened for me and this this happened when the during the first lockdown. I just thought I don't know anything it was the first time I really had this experience like I cannot trust what anyone is saying in any immediate outlet anymore. Nothing seemed to me at all trustworthy. And I thought all right well what do I know. What do I know firsthand. And you know I'm close enough to Italy to know okay yeah there's people dying in hospitals I knew that in Milano that was really clear people dying in hospitals Milan. And I, there were two ways that I was thinking about what do I know one was where's the video footage. Right, there was a lot of missing video footage of things that were being claimed. Like I just didn't see videos of it was like oh there's this this and I'm like wait a second but there aren't any videos like, you know people post when they're drinking a cup of tea on Instagram if people are dying they don't want to see the videos. Why don't I see that. So that was one thing and so. And I've kept that you know like right now it's like okay who do I know who's Ukrainian. And do they speak a different language and Russian yeah they do. And how do they feel specifically like the people who I actually know and what are they saying, and people who you know people have met and touched you know like, and, and, and it's really on this crew that people are all talking about different perspective and nobody's talking about like what's my lived experience because I've really defaulted to that. And it's been very interesting, and you know one of the things that has been been you know very alternative experience where you get into this place is you know I haven't got the vaccination, because from the very beginning. I, my lived experience of that was a lot of people I knew, we're getting side effects from it, and very few people, you know seem to really be getting long. People are getting it. And I'm, you know, because death is not the real problem it's very low death rate but getting more and more COVID is the big big problem. And I thought well, it can reduce my percentage from 0.5% to 0.3%. A lot of people I know are getting side effects, and it was just out of personal experience that I made that choice. And now some of the documents are coming out about how pervasive those side effects were and how much of that was, you know, you know, was happening and so it's like okay you know. And, and some of it also was my lived experience of the health professionals that I talked to. And I go to some alternative health professionals because conventional medicine has never done anything for my, I've had chronic sports injuries and things like that. And I was wondering how that stuff has and they, you know, all those people are like I don't touch that dangerous poison and I'm like okay that's a little bit off there a little bit off their rockers with the dangerous thing but, but still, you know, those were the people I trusted on my physical body, because I had physical results in the physical world that made me trust those sources. And so it's very primitive it felt really it feels to me like I'm back to this very primitive state like where, if I don't see it with my own eyes, have, you know, five people who I know actually tell me it happened, then I, you know, I got to like the trucker convoy or something like that I've got to see the video footage. I got to hear somebody who I really actually know who was firsthand there with the, with the convoy with that was great they had these like people who just walk on the streets 24 hours a day. And so what was going on and in Ottawa I'm like okay I can believe that because a lot of times the street is just empty they really are there and sometimes the street is full and so there's this like drop down into like kind of the most primitive sense of like only if I actually saw it happen, which is, you know, kind of shocking in this age. Anyway, so that's what I've been thinking about sense making that's kind of how I came around to this like, I realized I don't trust anything anymore. And it's sort of like your, your brain went tribal during these incidents of lots of things happening was like, I'm going to believe my senses and people I trust and, and at some extent media and there was a question in the chat about how do you know what videos to trust and you you addressed that a bit but but how do you like, do you wind up trusting particular video source because they prove to be true over time, even though you'll never meet them probably or something like that I mean, how do you extend the reach of what you believe. With the yeah with the video sources it's multiple video sources and not any mainstream media sources like for me it's like okay this is actually a person on the street, or an actual trucker filming what he's seeing or an actual and a lot of aggregating what a lot of what I would consider like actual people are seeing instead of like, because I'm only trusting what I do. Like I'm not trusting what some broadcaster is going to tell me I'm going to trust what individuals tell me kind of thing and it's really interesting. I mean, one of the things I think I might have said this in this group was this thing about the. When I was in Berlin recently, the Jewish Museum is the only place they didn't request a green pass. Surprise, surprise. And they had a display because I wouldn't I was like, I'm not showing a green pass like I was not willing to show. I'm willing to get tested everywhere I wouldn't visit my friends without getting tested that's ridiculous but I'm not going to show people my past. So, I went to the Jewish Museum and there was a display with the passports like with the you know the yellow star passports that you have to carry around. And in the display it said half of the Jews got out of Berlin, and half of them, you know, didn't I thought what were the other half thinking, and then I thought, Oh, that's what's going on now. It's like half of us are going to make it because we'll have figured out whatever it is we need to figure out in the next pandemic or in the world with Ukraine where like half the people make it and half the people don't because we're you know as as a general rule we don't know and some of us figured out. So yeah. Thanks Grace. Mike then Ken. I know you are going in a lot of directions but I want to go back to a couple points that were made earlier and talk a little bit about what Gil said about whether we actually know what Putin is thinking. Clearly, very few people are even in the room and it seems he's not sharing much with even them about what he really thinks. It's extraordinary how the US government and the intelligence community has been able to get insights into what Putin is planning to do. All of these transparency about the interceptions that have been made and how we have their plans for disinformation and false flag operations. It's extraordinarily successful. And if you haven't listened to it. CSIS did a session yesterday on C-SPAN with Leon Panetta and Bill Cohen, the former Republican Senator who became Clinton's Defense Secretary. And two of them were talking about this new mode where rather than the spies carefully hiding what they know, we're now exposing as much as we can about what the Russians are up to. And this is completely undermined Putin's efforts to deceive people into believing that the Ukrainians are somehow at fault for the invasion. And there's some very scary stories coming out now that the Russians may do some kind of chemical attack and blame that on the Ukrainians. So, stay tuned. But if you look at how the intelligence community does its job, they have these very intricate ways of kind of tracing data back to the source, making sure that their spies aren't being deceived by double agents. They could benefit a lot if everybody was required to take a class in college on the basic elements of spy craft. It also probably would be good if we learned how to write like spies because they do have some very rigorous, well structured ways of conveying information. And if I can find the one paper that I know of, which we used at Bloomberg to train our analysts and how to suck in all this data, some of which is wrong, and then spit it out in a way that we can, we can justify and validate. But the last point on validation is that I learned on the hill that it's also about what you know, and who you know, who you know who knows what I have to drop off right now, but I will, I will come back on and I'll be watching that watching the watching. I appreciate it. You'll go ahead. You're muted. Okay, not you, you were waving at something else. Okay, good. Ken, if you want to go back to we if not, if you have another comment, if not, yeah. We is a very troublesome word to me, and probably I think to many other people. In prime, we, you know, we need a range of ways. So when I hear Bill say we don't like to make, you know, choose among bad decisions and we're not set up to handle, you know, multiple messy problems. I don't feel that I'm included in that we I actually like to tackle messy problems. I'm one of the and I know other people who do so I'm part of a we that actually does like that. So that's my only point is, and I really I have nothing to contribute to the conversation about Putin's war on Ukraine because it's so fucking complex. I haven't figured out what kind of sense I can make out of it and so anything I say is just going to be an uninformed opinion. So I'm keeping quiet until I have more information, but I am troubled by the by blanket statements like we and I'm not picking on Gill in particular it happens all the time and I'm guilty of it just as much as anybody else and maybe, maybe sometime we could do a call on what are the multiple variables of we and how could we map them and put language to them that where we could start to make really fine distinctions about different ways that would be an extremely useful sense making effort, I think, for OGM. I think, in fact, the landscape of a we around a particular topic is probably really interesting things sort of a topographical perspective on who is included in we have what kinds of we right now, because I think that moves and shifts and varies. Sorry, Gil, go ahead. No. I totally agree Ken and I was sloppy I said we referring to an interpretation about generalized humanity I should have labeled it as that. It's a useful way to speak if it's labeled and I what you're talking about drives me crazy because I see documents from people that use we in three different contexts within two paragraphs, without distinguishing between what they are. And so it's maddening. And let's get yet another call for context in our language. Thank you. Thanks go. So what are useful frameworks for building shared context. I think I'm posing this back to you grace as a starter which is, I have a naive belief that shared building shared construction of context and story is interesting and important and useful. So how do we go about that and maybe the way is we go fetch pieces of direct evidence and things that make sense to us and we contribute those into some pile in the middle, and then build from there I don't know but but and maybe this, there's a corollary question here which is in your approach to gathering data on this where does narrative or store your motivation, or that level of thing step in and how do you process that. Yeah, it's really interesting I mean we've really lost a lot of the context in which we can operate with shared narrative and it makes me to be religious, and to have a narrative around, like, okay what are appropriate behaviors and different, you know, different situations I mean one part of that particular narrative is, we love to argue to choose three opinions like that's part of a narrative is like that is a fun and entertaining thing to do is to disagree. I mean that would be a great way to start is to not be like, oh, you don't think that diversity and inclusion is important. Okay. That would be fine. Yeah, I don't, I don't, you know it's really hard how do you build that from the ground up how do you build culture from the ground up and how do you have that shared narrative. That's for me a really big puzzle, because religion has done a really good job of that but you know we don't have that basis and I don't. You know I think the United States was formed on a particular like culture and some values, but that kind of got lost and I do think that it does go back to what George Washington said which is like you know the purpose of education is to, is to teach people to be part of a democracy and we even forgot what those values were when I, I sent my kids to public school. And in Israel because of the disagreements between the secularist and religious. All of the secular schools teach almost nothing about Judaism and my husband and I agreed that that was not okay with us and we sent our kid to it was a public school but one that had a Jewish curriculum and a Bible curriculum as he said well what the heck is a Jewish state about like, you're not going to have a Jewish state for very long if you don't have Jews in it. Anyway, lo and behold. Thanks grace and before I go to Stacy I just wanted to add. Scott posted Scott mooring isn't on this call but he posted a really nice thing. I'm forgetting where I quoted it from or copied it from but I'll paste it into the chat about just tell me more. Which is the lovely way of inquiring within on people who might hold very different opinions like hey, I can see how your point of view might have shown up. I don't fully understand it tell me more help me understand your point of view help me help me hear or see the way you see. Love that Stacy. Yeah, and I was just going to say Mike didn't get to go deeply in his opening statements about it but he mentioned the emotional part of what happens within the tribe, and I was just going to say that people have. It's not questions are often taken as disagreements. So in terms of how do we change that culture I think that's an important piece. And I feel like I've had pieces of this conversation several times in different contexts in different ways just in the last week about how we receive information like like our ability to hear something without getting triggered is really important. How we respond to stimuli is really important. And some people who are spin masters are busy counting on their ability to spin us up to do things go ahead Stacy. So what I want to say I think what's even more important is how we respond after somebody responds to our questioning. So the response to the response or does that mean does that just mean staying in the receptive state or. Okay, so so hold holding that place in some way. Years ago, so small side story which is one of my favorite examples on this in a way. One of my favorite books is the Great Transformation by Carl Polanyi talking about the transformation into early industrial society and how it completely changed what was happening before. Then I read a six page letter by Murray Rose Bard, who, and I've got a link to it in my brain, who the six page letter was supposed to be kind of a review or critique of the Great Transformation, but it's a screed, and it's a screed to his followers who are libertarians because Murray Rothbard was the head of the Mises Institute as in Ludwig von Mises. And he's basically telling libertarians do not go read this book it is terrible and then he accuses Polanyi of a whole bunch of things that that he himself actually commits in his six page letter. None of which Polanyi from my perspective is actually doing it's really, really interesting. It's clearly a message to his followers this is don't don't even go look at this don't don't bother it's not worth it. And so I think this happens constantly where we're constantly directing others attention toward or away from their felt experience, whatever else and you know gaslighting. What I don't know enough is contradiction of direct experience. Right. That's roughly what gaslighting is. Oh, sorry. You just don't need to touch your jumping. Yeah, that was an accidental. I was trying to answer something in the chat and my wrists touched. That's funny. John, please. I have four living siblings, and I have a sister who is a priest. It's very unusual to have a woman priest in a in a Christian church, but she is one. And I have a brother and his brother and a sister-in-law who are pretty confirmed atheists. I have a sister who is anti backs, and I have another sister who is a nurse and suffering from cancer. And you know, it would be risky to visit her if you were anti backs and had not been vaccinated. But what we got here is a kind of a pressure cooker of disagreement. And we had a prior, we have a long, long history of valuing what lasts. Realizing, you know, we are the only ones that have the relationship that we have to each other in this life. That's it. We don't, we don't, we can't trade each other in. So we stuck with it and we're still sticking with it. We have a zoom call every week, you know, and we go over stuff. So I wouldn't wish that on someone else, you know, unless they voluntarily decided to do it. It's a maybe an extreme form of what I'm suggesting, which is, if you want to be a responsible sense making group. Yes, definitely. I definitely agree with the graces thing about go to go to primary source. You know, don't don't buy the media version go to connect. Can I get any direct quote from someone on the ground, someone video. Absolutely do that. I also kind of agree at the outset that we are going to mutually consume contradictory versions of what's going on. And so when we come to the table, we are going to have spoken, or haven't have read and absorbed and we actually did this we actually had. We had to read the stuff that that the people who disagreed on the different sides of the vaccine and on the different sides of these other issues had put in and and so that it just basically expanded our minds in terms of what we were able to navigate. And we didn't so much. We didn't. I mean, we're still not. You know, I meet with my unvaxxed sister, and we go to restaurants we eat outside she can't get in now she could but I mean she couldn't get in because you wouldn't have a vax card. We're still navigating this, but I would say that the, the process of agreeing upfront that we are going to. We are going to respect, not just each other, but even models that are not from our siblings but are from outside, and that are contradictory and in troubling and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So our ability to absorb that enhances our ability to be who we are and to be available to each other. So, that's it. Thanks john grace. Yeah, I really love that I mean that was one of the things I found most painful in my family was that there was no desire to understand why I was saying what I was saying. There was no desire to understand what I said what I'm saying. And, you know, and, and I've never been infected and nobody wants to ask me why that is either like what I've been doing, everybody got it. You know, even as vaccinated people got it and we're not asking you like, there's no, no wish to understand and I really, really admire your family and I just want to say that that's an amazing practice and one of the interesting practices that I have to talk to somebody was creating this decentralized system for conversations. And that's exactly the way they constructed the way that you were talking about is like rather than saying I disagree with your opinion that they would post I see the jobs now off somewhere I'm like suggesting the next thing that along to do with that. But what people would do is they would say what it was about the article or the piece of evidence that they fatmate that made them feel uncomfortable. So that they weren't critiquing the other person's opinion they were critiquing something about the article that the other person presented. And the person who did this research said that it was amazing to see that people were able to be open to other opinions, when the critique wasn't about their opinion but about the source article that they'd sent. You know, like, I read your article and it seems that that person was, you know, employed by so and so or I read the article you sent me, and that person seemed very emotional and that kind of turned me off and so, rather than critiquing the opinion they'd be critiquing the pieces of article and it turned out they were able to have better communication because the role was you couldn't critique the person's opinion only the article they presented and so it was really interesting. So she was presenting that as like an alternative to Facebook or something like that where it's like I hate you it's like oh well this article that you presented seems to me from a suspicious source. Your grace you're reminding me, there's lots of good things in the conversation here you're reminding me that some facilitation formats intentionally defuse personal attacks I mean certainly there's a bunch of sort of things about like this course, I'm talking about the writer's workshop format, and Dick Gabriel what a nice book about how to run a writer's workshop, and in the writer's workshop everybody contributes at work, everybody reads it and then one at a time, the writers who's the writer whose work is being critique steps out of the circle, and everybody faces the middle of the circle, where the work is sort of sitting, and they talk about what does the work what does it sound like the work needs to be what would make it more of what it appears to want to be. And, and critique of the author like oh my god what idiot wrote this piece is completely off the table for that format on purpose on purpose so that, so that people are willing to step in and do stuff. So, yeah, and at the risk of going on off on attention, I'm really interested in, I read some of Mirshammer's pieces Michael do you want to jump in and just talk about just frame frame what he's saying for us. I can really do it justice but, but it's it's really. I think I think the interesting framing to back up to is is the US in particular in the West in general behavior in the post Soviet era of kind of unicolar power of wanting to precipitate. Through economics and in the case of the Middle East at times military action, a sort of reverse domino effect of liberal democracies taking over the globe and everything's going to be fine. And maybe taking a provocative step too far. He points to the, I think it was 2004 agreement in Budapest to make to say that Ukraine would become a member of the European community would be able to join NATO down the line. And, you know, just really put Russia on notice and, you know, in other longer pieces than the one I like to the talk in the New Yorker. He talks about the Monroe doctrine and and the Cuban Missile Crisis and you know just all the real politic involved here that led to this situation. Whereas if Ukraine had been, you know, allowed to be Finland. We might have had a different story than than we do now, and that, you know, it's easy to just turn everything black and white and say, Putin evil madman Ukraine, good guys, this is completely unprovoked ridiculous, but it's more complicated. I love that the best sort of encapsulating sentence I heard about this thread yesterday I think maybe the day before was imagine if Mexico joined a security alliance with China. Like we'd be a little upset we got a little upset over Cuba getting missiles right and and imagine you know Mexico big country next door that we consider like practically part of the US because we stole a third of their country anyway. So, so like that. Anyone else want to elaborate on this part of it. Yeah, just the irony of this is that the best possible outcome that I could imagine to this war, which is that you know Putin stands down. He gets Eastern Ukraine Ukraine stays out of NATO is exactly what Miersheimer was proposing after the war, and what Ken was proposing 30 years ago. And so, you know, I'm happy to blame Putin for being the thug, but I can also blame us for being stupid and greedy in the way that hedge funds often are. One of the biggest problems here is polarity polarization binary choices lack of complexity. And, for example, my under my primitive understanding of the beginning of the Cold War is that john foster Dallas and his brother, Alan dollars, who ran the CIA and the State Department respectively went around the world and told every country you're either with us or you're against us and forced countries like India they were there were sort of countries that tried to become non aligned nations and stay neutral if possible they were under enormous pressure to go one way or the other. And in enforcing polarization, we then eliminate clever solutions like hey how do we create a safe buffer zone. So that NATO can still be NATO Russia can still try to be Russia etc etc. And to find a reference skill I will try to figure out where I got that from and Mike or others who who know more history than I do might might correct the story. Mike you want to jump in. Okay. So we sort of went we went around the world and presented everybody an ultimatum. And by the way, being on our side means later agreeing to all these treaties and other sorts of things that roll cap, you know consumer capitalism over your country that create overweening intellectual property regimes that there's like, you know, the Western consensus or whatever phrase you want to use around this Washington consensus is a thing and, and when you pick sides. It's funny, you drop into a vortex of activity that changes you forever, and good luck being sort of a sovereign nation that just can do its own thing. You're sort of joining a we you don't want to be part of in some way, but it's because you have a choice of two neighbors, neither of whom you particularly like or trust. And you're going to have to go to one of their parties. So how do we absorb this information what, and then, and then on the other side. How do we make decisions about this the trickle upward into elections or actions that matter that make a difference in countries how does this turn into larger scale collective intelligence and decision making. Doug. Yeah, I'm wondering is, is what's going on in the Ukraine, and what's going on in much of the world, a reaction to climate change, and the deep feeling that things are really changing and shifting. And what's happening is beginning to line up power as to how to deal with that. So I'm saying this is a larger frame that we're all sort of aware of but not talking about that creates the conditions for the tactics that we're witnessing now. Thank you. And what's interesting is that there were there were more than a handful of articles, kind of after Biden State of the Union in light of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, saying hey the world has changed geopolitics are different. The current attack even though Putin's aggressions on Ukraine go back 15 years is this this sort of is a new moment, and those articles didn't from the ones that I saw weren't pointing to climate change and our ability to come together to try to do things collectively in a way that might actually sort of work to fix those those problems. And there is an opportunity to do so. There's a moment where we might act together more wisely on the important issues in front of us instead of being distracted by all these other kinds of measures which may in fact be what people would like us to be doing anyway. So if you want to stay in that and go back to it. If not then grace grace. I feel like the answer to this question is the same answers to Ken's question about why we all live in these organizations or in these collectives that don't serve us with government central service and I think there's two answers right one is because we haven't built something because there's a lot of talk about what doesn't work and there's very little. Okay, let's move to something else. And let's try something as a group and as a community. And when you do do something as a group and community which is you know a lot of what I'm working on, you still end up dependent because you need some gas for your car. And you still end up dependent on this monetary system which is really pervasive and I talked about a lot. And but you know and I actually think to some of the great, rather than this global frame that Doug put on it for me there's a global frame, rather than the ecology but that. I mean, we're in a completely unsustainable economic model that isn't working for people. And as Ken said a very unsustainable, what we're calling democracy but governmental model and framework. And it's almost like as the systems are crumbling right in front of us, the systems themselves and I'm just going to, they've kind of taken on their own. Fitness and anybody who's tried to you know work in corporate, you know change management and stuff like that like the corporation takes on its entity and it's like a big ship moving in this direction and it's like, it's not that even that there's a person in it doing it it's just moving in this direction. And as these systems are crumbling, they're kind of trying to not have us look at them and fix them, and, and trying to kill off anything that might fix them, and including our attention. You know, if we were calm and relaxed and not worrying that you know oh my gosh there's another war and talking about Ukraine. Maybe we'd have time to be building something that's an alternative to something. You know, so even distracting our attention to these things as part of this big old mechanism that's just like don't look over here. I think one of us, I think you said like don't look behind the curtain don't look that's really happening in your government don't look what's happening with central bank digital currencies don't look what's happening with government control of the media. Just, you know, Ukraine look at that look look look. You know, so there's a little bit of that going on. Wendy. I appreciate that addition grace of, you know there's not necessarily an alternative yet right and so that's the place that we're really stuck in so it's easier to it's very easy to distract us and to something else because building something new is really really hard. And I've been having a lot of conversations lately where we're talking about how it's both philosophical but my belief is that people generally I think it's pretty well accepted but people tend to make changes when they're scared of something or they're afraid of something or right the running away from something, or they're in pain. And that's just human nature that we do that. What I'm interested in seeing is the tipping point when people start making changes, because something's better is calling them forward. And, and that is not has not been our history. That's not usually when great change happens great change happens when pressure is put on the system, kind of forcing the system to change. I'm, I'm, there's a part of me that's horrified by everything that I'm seeing and there's a part of me that goes every single time and I'm like for the last 10 years, every crisis that comes along ago. This is also fodder for the kind of change. And I think the evidence of, you know, the evidence is right in this group, we wouldn't be, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for coven. The group would exist in this at least in the same way if it weren't for coven. A lot of when I get up in the morning and I think about my priorities. It's fueled by wanting to see change happen faster. If I was in a position where I was more relaxed and played back this would all in my own life be happening more slowly and I think that's probably true for a lot of us. I think I'm propelled forward, and I try my best to also be propelled forward by what is calling me forward, what's emerging and I think that's the crux that's the shift. That's the joy to me in this group is that we're trying to listen for those things in the midst of being afraid and frustrated and angry and all those other things we're trying our best to put those things aside. I want to hear what really needs to come forward next, not just the next slight variation on a theme that's just going to make us feel better for five minutes. Wendy I love that. And also as inspiration so why don't we just go go quiet for just a moment so we can process what's been said so far. And I'll bring us back up. And you made me think of something that I'm just putting in the chat just as we redesign our futures together to do kind of what this conversation is about which is to be really open in that process because it's really easy to design a future that stays in the ruts that we've been raised in the ruts we've been taught our ruts or the constraints and all that, and many of those constraints are artificial are, are not actually real so navigating change at that scale is really hard but but doable. Doug then Mike. I think part of what holds us back is our understanding that the better future that we're talking about and would like one that's actually quite different from where we are would require the death of a lot of people. We have too many people on earth to sustain a simpler system, which we need. So we're stuck. So overpopulation is one of these things I know almost nothing about and have strange ideas about and wonder what other people think about and would love to know more about in the sense of it. And one of the major arguments for sustainability is look it's going to we need seven earths to actually carry, you know, the people who are on it on the planet right now, etc, etc. And for me, like, with a couple changes in habits we can in fact actually feed everybody and it also seems like most countries except for Latin America and Africa are depopulating the major growth of the next couple of decades appears to be like Africa's going to double from 1 billion to That's at least what the trends show. And Europe is like Europe, Japan, a whole bunch of places are just depopulating and they're not that interested in immigrants although Poland just absorbed a million plus Ukrainians. Hopefully temporarily, but but I think that our narratives around overpopulation and remember the book the population bomb way back when that made a lot of people sort of jump up and do stuff but I think was proven wrong over time. So, these are the kinds of things that that form background narratives for why we make decisions and what we do. And this this we need seven earths to feed everybody thing. I refuse to sort of buy that I think that we can actually beat everybody we just feed them differently than we do now. Mike, Julian, then Gil. I wanted to pull back to what for me was the best quote of the discussion. And that was, you can't handle the truth. There's just too much of it. While I was missing in action. Did you talk much about information overload and all of that problem. Please tell me actually no we didn't we didn't address it at all. But, well if someone has seen a good article and that's written in the last 10 years. When we've seen a factor of 100 increase and how much information we're exposed to. I mean I'd like to see it. I read a lot of this stuff that was written 30 years ago when we all felt that there was more information profitably use. But what, what, what are people thinking I mean what is what is the answer when there's twice as much information at our fingertips. And I for one I'm very anxious about the fact is it's not just fear of missing out experiences and fun times it's fear of missing out something that's really going to help me understand the world I'm living in. I just want to cut in with one comment and that is the idea that we have more information. It might be true in terms of bits, but it's not true in terms of concepts and understanding. We could say that we've actually got a lot less now than we had 20 years ago. We have a lot more data, I would argue we also have a lot more information. We don't have more knowledge and we certainly don't have more wisdom. I think the information is out there there's a lot more people who have a megaphone and who can take the data and combine other people's information and spit out another article in my field of international relations and technology. There's just stuff being produced at an amazingly fast rate because people are writing something every week they used to work very hard and write something every six months. Yes, I forgot what I was going to throw in the conversation Julian. You were going to tell me the answer Jerry I think it has something to do with Jerry's brain I think that was the answer. Part of your question is central to OGM's quest which is like okay great how do we make sense of this how do we not run in the info torrent. And my naive answer is, hey, we take it we grab the bits that make sense, and we put them in the middle together to piece together some view of what's happening and what we think it means and why we why it came from. And then we can hold that up against someone else's argument for what happened and where it came from, and then maybe together we can have a better conversation and less of an argument about what to do together. And lather rinse repeat on that at all scales with decentralization down to the fingertips because usually the people closest to an issue are the ones who know the most about the issue. Which is really hard when you're talking about nuclear non proliferation or or you know nation scale crap like that. But synthesis doesn't always come from the edge. And synthesis often comes from talking to 50 people who are at the edge and you know are on the ground doing stuff. What I'm going to say is the principles that are needed to guide policy and business decisions. I'm missing the basic understanding of some of the trends that were up against it. We just mentioned population that's a great example of where the whole frame was wrong for 30 years. We've had several frames we've lived for a long time and I just remember the thing I wanted to sort of add to what you had said, which is a thing I'm skeptical about is that where the world is just getting more and more complex. I'm like, you know, staying alive back in the day of Marsh Arabs in Mesopotamia was really complicated and they understood things about nature and plants and interactions that would boggle us and we would die in a week if we know didn't master or absorb. That's what what they understood it's like things have been complex forever, we now have the ability to record them on things that are faster than clay tablets and, you know, in vastly more volume, and then there's the whole knowledge pyramid thing which I'm not that fond of either but but it's, it's, it's co Jerry we can have a beer and argue about that I think, I think the globe is definitely more complex because we're not just seeing our little piece of real estate we're able to understand things going on around the world. To say though, I'd rather be Mike Nelson in Arlington, Virginia than a Marsh Arab, living on the edge of survival. I'm very complex little world that they were in but not getting a piece of data was pretty severe. So actually, the reason I brought up Marsh Arabs is that I love the book against the grain in which he argues that the skeletal remains of Marsh Arabs were much healthier than the civilized folk who were raising wheat and grain in the communities, and that civilization was actually a step backward. So, so, so the thing you just said about living on the edge of precarity or on the edge of survival, not so true people who understood how to live on the landscape we're doing just fine thank you very much and we're spending if you'd read March. We're spending on stonage economics or whatever, we're spending 15 hours a week, making food collecting food, whatever, and the rest of the time they were passing heritage telling stories, going on. I don't know, going on rating rating trips to go and kill people and then they're neighboring tribe I mean that was the other thing in some cases doing that another case is not another case is going on rating parties to find a bride. In some cultures, you marry inside the tribe and other cultures you can't marry inside the tribe you must go to the next village to marry. And that's a cultural thing that gets passed down it's like these are super interesting things that dictate how how life plays out. Julian thank you for your patience. So the thing is that when I raised my hand we were on a different subject exactly about feeding the world's population I was going to point out that it's not a matter of feeding it's a matter of sustaining the population and the framing of that has been responsible for a lot of the approaches to trying to deal with it. So I like that Mike brought up this issue of framing a problem, because that's, you know, the problems itself is frequently the framing of the problem. So, I just want to throw in the comment about that and then get back to what my father. Wendy. Yeah, so Mike in response, you brought up a lot of thoughts for me about where the overwhelm is coming from. And I think, so I pushed into the chat then the movie social dilemma which talks about this a little bit. But also, I, there was a time in which I came across a bunch of articles around phantom work. And what I mean by that if, because I don't think it's like a very popular term is that, you know, the idea that companies who are looking for short term profit have offloaded work on to the average person whether it's you do more, you know, more people do their own taxes, or bag their own groceries, or, you know, fill out forms that are, you know, increasingly more complex and lazy or sign into, you know, a million different portals to give their information a million times over, you know, it's it's not that each one in and of itself seems out of context or seems wrong. It's that in total the amount of time we each spend duplicating the work that used to be done by say one local administrator or one local person that would come that come and help you out all that's been kind of stripped out for lots of reasons, and has fallen on the shoulders of the average person at different rates, you know, and I think that falls harder on people who maybe are marginalized or, or on the fringes of society or just our caretakers or things like that, as examples, and I'm over generalizing, but I'm saying in terms of overwhelm there's more than just the data overwhelm there's also task oriented overwhelm. And just being bombarded by simple things of life just somehow taking more, you know, products breaking more often is another example of just having to research and buy another product like all these things combined, each one is fine. All these things combined take up a tremendous amount of resources energy time from the system that could be put towards other things. So, for me that's a that's a big one as a as a mom. I have to interrupt and say yes, yes, yes, and share my pain. I got my eyes examined, got a new prescription. Warby Parker has now sent me three pairs of glasses, none of which have the right prescription, one of which had the this piece the temple was completely worked. And then yesterday, I got my new phone and went to the T mobile to transfer the data from this phone to this phone. 30 gigabytes of my favorite photo are somewhere in between these two funds. Probably because Carnegie has all these software for security but the photos are not on either phone. It's complicated to some kind of cloud store doesn't pair. What if you dropped your phone in the ocean. I have, I have some of it backed up. Okay. It's one of those right it's and now this is a project that takes a tremendous amount of you that of course you want to pursue that takes in a tremendous amount of your time because the quality of the work being done is not great and now it's your problem. I think it's intentional I think they detected the fact that I didn't back up all my data to the cloud. They were going to show me. That's right. Backed up to the Carnegie cloud but anyway. Thanks. Ken. Thanks Wendy that you just triggered something at Pete and I've been having a little conversation to chat about hyper skill or systems and, and I'm viewing them as parasitic, not symbiotic and therefore detrimental to life and Pete I can't track and listen to all this and think it all but when you started to talk about, you know, how everything is made to break these days and, you know, you walk I had the flu, about five or six years ago and I was really in a bad way and I got a bit to in the morning and went to the 24 hour pharmacy looking for something. And I'm standing with the temperature 103 degrees at this wall of choices. And I'm like, just give me the fucking something's going to stop my coughing you know and we've reached this point where everything is designed to maximize choice and to maximize profit and in 16 things to know about life. Holguin talks he's a biologist he talks about maximization is is addiction nature does not maximize nature optimizes. And I think we live inside and here I'm using we again. And our economic system and Jerry we can talk about I'll send you the paper 16 things know about life. He example gives is is antlers. So you could increase the amount of calcium and hours but it might and I make them stronger, but it might also make them too heavy for the animal to lift its head. And so it's finding the optimal balance of getting things together. And I just feel like we're in this world right now that seems incredibly out of control. I'm a big fan of the rate to repair movement which I think is incredibly important, where people just don't have any sense of, we can take this and make a product and if it breaks it doesn't matter well, you know, it's that's going to drive up demand with no downstream consequences. I think that kind of sums up for me, part of the, the challenge we're facing is we've, it feels like the number of of the amount of attention that's paid to downstream consequences is incredibly small needs to grow exponentially large in every system for us to start to think about what are the impacts of this. When we're not here, or tomorrow or whatever so I'm not necessarily being coherent it's just a whole bunch of the cascade of thoughts got triggered when you were when you were saying that Wendy that seems really related to this conversation at Pete and I having about hyperscale systems and you know how the world works. So that's all I can talk and say right now. Thanks Ken and we are moving quickly and it is a bit of an overload it's sort of an exciting conversation. I wanted to throw in also the illusion of choice. And then very often if you walk down the serial aisle or the personal products out it's really only two companies that are offering you all those different brands. What we're trying to do is like fill the shelves and product differentiation and product variation. If you go look at Kit Katz or sometimes it's surprising like Reese's has figured out, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, every holiday we're going to have a Reese's variant and we're going to do like 15 different kinds of Reese's this Reese's that and it builds the shelves and more space means more purchases I guess but it creates this nightmare behind the scenes. Mr. A long ago, I read a book that basically said, with all the things that have been designed in the world detergents getting into the groundwater and cars the, the best things that humans could do was stop designing. And I thought that was hilarious. And I started an institution of one, the Institute for the prevention of design. And I continue to think about that for many decades since I was in 1984. And there's an aesthetic of prevention. There's a lot about prevention that can be beautiful that can be attractive. And it doesn't have to be warfare. I remember my mother who was one of the most unhealthy people I know, subscribing to a magazine named prevention. You know, ounce of prevention, worth a pound of cure. That's a different way of thinking. And I don't still know. It's only narrative narrative seems to me kind of a over focus and over coherence on a particular kind of thinking and there are so many other ways of processing information. I'd like to close with a quote I remembered from Marshall McLuhan. What for others is information overload for the artist's pattern recognition. And also for masters of whatever trade is recognizing chunks. Same sort of same set of ideas. Michael. Yeah, it's Mark neatly certain circled back around to something that was coming up for me before Doug had had pushed back on the idea that you know, there was really more information. And what there is, I think, pretty unarguably is more information availability. And well, I smile at the, the marks opposition to design. Design as as a designer for most of my life. I always bristled at the idea that design was seen as the frosting on top of, you know, I worked in publication design primarily, and it was like, Okay, everybody do their thing hand it to the designers they'll make it pretty and accessible to the outside. There's a lot of people's, you know, conception design a lot of cases, but when you think about architecture or, you know, systems design of many kinds, it's more essential and more to design something is to like, do do something much like the the antler question where you're you're taking all the givens, you're balancing the needs and coming up with a solution that that is appropriate. And we don't have the solution. We haven't designed the solution that's appropriate to the amount of information that is currently accessible and which would be the ability to filter by relevance to our need, based on the actions that other people have taken, where it sits in Jerry's brain, you know, where it is, you know what the, the new source of something is all those factors that could be technically for us to get us exactly the information we need at the time that we need it with some kind of collaborative weighing of its of its quality or relevance. And, you know, that's that's that's the design mission in my book. And I also wanted to. Sorry, let me let me pull this back. I lost a piece of what I was what I was going to say but that if it comes back to me I might put my hand up again. No worries it'll drop back into your mind as soon as you've like stopped trying to look for it. Thank you. That was a lot of stuff. What is that. I mean, let's we've got 10 minutes left on our call. Let's go back to the question a little bit and say, What does this mean about how we process news or information. Please Michael, you remembered it. I did and it's relevant to your question. Sweet. So the, the, the problem with, you know, facing that information overload and, and wanting to filter better and wanting to like say what things are relevant that, you know, people who I know have vetted or would bring to my attention, or would say take this with a grain of salt filter, you know, like what we're all doing here what I was doing when I brought up Mirschheimer, you know, take this with a grain of salt that it's worth, you know, putting in the filter. We are being in our news intake. We are being counter programmed by the economic force that is the attention economy, because, you know, as we're looking at a too wide to, you know, a big availability of information, the stuff that shouting loudest at us is the stuff that we're that's candy that's the most tempting to us. In the case of the news processing public, it's simple story, you know, outrage, you know, good guys, bad guys, mad man, nuclear threat, you know, the simplest terms on something like the current conflict in, in the Ukraine. And that, that that is happening with every story there is, is that advertising support for attention driven media and that being our access to information works in almost diametrically opposed the way to the way that we would want to be able to surface quality weak signals with the benefit of of the people around us. I'm just, I'm muted sorry. Thanks Michael there's a lot here about how we design the instruments or systems for propagating what we hear and see john had his hand up briefly before Julian Doug and Mike went up so john, then Julian Doug and Mike. Thank you. So, yes, we're at this point that we are frequently at where we've had a really rich complicated conversation, and some of us are struggling to make sure we capture the chat, because we know we didn't have an opportunity to think carefully enough about what we heard, as it was happening, and we want to reflect on it. I think it just came to me, you know, like, would, could we co author a Google doc of some limited number you know, 25 guidelines for for sense making from open global mind. You know, and we could, we could collectively author it and edit it, and it may it may gel, and it might be 25 I don't know that it's 25 I just made up, you know, but like basically let's. I'd be willing to contribute to something to see if we can get it to come together. And actually, if we, if we find that we have relatively opposite principles that some of us want to promote and others of us, you know, on a promote the opposite. That's an interesting challenge to have a format that would allow you to say, here's a, here's a point of here's a tech, here's a technique. And here's a, here's an argument against the technique or the opposite technique and here's the argument for that opposite technique, all aimed at the goal of sense making. So, I'm, I'm willing to put some time into contributing to that Google doc, if anybody else is up for that. Yeah, my see Mike's hand that's great. I like, I like the idea a lot. My path toward that over time has been to try to do pattern languages. So there might be a pattern language for sense making. And we've had a couple of efforts that haven't panned out to create a platform where we can actually start to maybe create our own pattern language but then also. And this is maybe just my goal but fold in the peer dodgy pattern language the liberating structures pattern language the wise democracy pattern language. There are a bunch of neighboring groups collections of wisdom of distilled wisdom that that feel to me like a piece of this sense making thing at different levels and layers and and figuring out how to steer our way through that would be really exciting to me. And to me that's not a Google doc with 25 things but it turns into multiple posts and multiple things that some of us like oh my favorite are these are something like that. I don't know if that makes that you know and I was the earliest contributors to the group process pattern language back starting back in 2008 and I saw how long that took. It's the scale of that project which frankly I got a little depressed after working on it some and then seeing how long it was taking so. And yet the final product is I'm really glad the final product is there and it's worth it and it's good. Maybe. I don't know if I see that the Google doc is as a step towards that that. The path the pattern languages is likely paved with many a Google doc. Yes, so I think I think a pragmatic quick way to start it would be to do exactly what you said john. If you wanted to start a Google doc drop it into the most appropriate channel on matter most and then help you know see who else wants to show up for that conversation let us know on the on the ogm Google group. I think we can sort of go through that that'd be great. I will agree to start it I might need a slight bit of advice from you repeat about how to exactly inject it into the right matter most channel. Please do ask at the front desk, just raise the white courtesy telephone and someone will answer. Okay. When I do that. No, no, no, the white courtesy telephone is indifferent. And very objective is last last I heard. That's great. Okay, we're nearing the end of our conversation so let's go. Julian, do you have your hand up from before is I forgotten. Oh, it's still up. So let's go Julian, Doug, Mike, Stacey, and then Ken has a poem for us to take us out. And I wanted to directly answer your question about what do you do with information overload. Oh good. dandelions I think that's a very appropriate answer. Thank you for that. Mr Carmichael. I'm thinking that the word information is part of the problem. It gives the illusion that we know what we're talking about. And in particular, there's the hint that talking about information is relatively rational, because information probably can be quantified, which is totally false. Simple example, take all the characters in Hamlet. That's one thing. Now we're going to take another thing, which is a string of random characters, as long as Hamlet. In information theory, there's more information than the second than in the first, because Hamlet has so much redundancy, which reduces the information, which is totally counterintuitive, but it's implied by the idea of information. So maybe a future session, we could talk about what is information. Thank you, Doug. Mike. Just another piece of homework and a suggested topic. I had the weird experience of watching the five, which is a Fox News program, just as the Ukraine invasion was starting. I want to challenge everybody to watch 20 or 30 minutes of this and come to understand what's happening here. I mean, this is with Geraldo Rivera and three or four other people. I'll watch anything Geraldo does for God's sake. It is a, it is a farce. It's farce news. We have, we have Fox News, which actually reports some news just straight off the wire service. Then they tell you what to think about it. And then they have farce news. And it's like Stephen Colbert, except they lie. Except this real, like Colbert. And then they point out their lies. So after 30 minutes of this, after 30 minutes of this, you are just completely, totally discombobulated. And this is why so many people, not only in the US have just said, I don't know what's going on. But give it a try. And maybe we should have a talk about, you know, the confusion as a business model. And Pete, is that, are you able to locate the clip of the show that Mike was just referring to? Not sure. Okay. It's on every day, I think. No, no, Pete, Mike, I'm referring to exactly that moment when the invasion started with the show that you were watching at that moment. I would love to just have a reference to that. I did put a YouTube search, the five Ukraine. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cool. Doug, then Stacy and then Ken. I should have taken my hand out. Sorry. No worries, Stacy then can. I don't know how you did a half hour of that. I do five minutes and I'm, I'm shaking. I just really disheartened because a minute about three minutes ago I got a Facebook message from, I think I've mentioned that I've been having an ongoing conversation with a friend who lives in America, but she's originally from Russia friend slash acquaintance. I sent her that video of the three captured Russian soldier, and I sent it to her and I said, can you verify that they're translating this properly? Because I figured that's like a, you know, a good way to show I'm open and, and she just sent me back. Like that she thinks it's totally fake. And they don't even they look Ukrainian, not Russian. And where do I go with that? So I just had to vent. Thanks, Stacy. And one of the things that's, that's weird and interesting and happening is that these are heavily documented wars like everybody's carrying a high definition video camera and the communications gear that, you know, 100 years ago was unavailable that 50 years ago. And the reason CNN exists as a news entity, because you know, they were able to drop camera gear like that anywhere in the world, faster than any other news agency and use satellites to communicate back in etc etc and now we're all carrying it. And it seems like the backstory like someone behind the stage there recorded video and post like, like, there has to be a web. And they've had a thing called photosynth probably still has it. Oh, where they just, they just comb through tourist photographs of let's say the the pikes peak, the pikes fish market in Seattle, and they can assemble everybody's photographs of the same place, and then they can situate them in space and time so that you can then cruise through what the fish market looked like at different moments in time from different perspectives. It's really, really, really interesting done from casual photographs that there happened to be too many of in the world. Right. And so, so, where do those things meet, and where do those things meet credibility and digital notarization and whatever else so that we can start to trust that those image weren't images weren't manipulated because at the same moment we get TensorFlow and GAN networks and all kinds of crazy things that allow us to manipulate said images and then create faithful people saying things they never said etc etc and we're right at that cusp as well. And those two things are happening simultaneously and I don't know what to trust. Gil you have a last word before poem from Stuart brand had a cover story and co evolution quarterly must have been back in the 80s about the upcoming undependable other undependability of visual records. It was, you know, presage and face fake photography fake video fake news and so forth. It's very, it's very early flag. Back during the Tiananmen Square event some of my pals took it upon themselves to focus on delivering handheld camcorders into China, as their most significant action they could take. My first thought was, Oh yeah, there was a, there was a news report last night, I think it was on MSNBC of a restaurant tour in Ukraine, who had sent his wife and two children out of the country and stayed there to fight, and was puzzled that he hadn't heard from his father who lives in Russia for days days into the war had not heard from his father. So called his father to tell him what was going on as well that's not true. I said I'm here there are bombs falling around these fathers said it's not true. And I was remarkable. Just here, you know to see the effectiveness of the Russian propaganda that this is a man whose grandchildren are at risk. And it fled the country couldn't hear it. Thanks. Speaking of information. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I was trying to think of what's an appropriate poem for sense making. And one of the people that I found makes amazing sense of the world is Emily Dickinson. So there's a little poem by her. The brain, not Jerry's the brain is wider than the sky for put them side by side, the one the other will contain with ease and you beside the brain is deeper than the sea. They will hold them blue to blue, the one the other will absorb as sponges buckets to the brain is just the weight of God for have them pound for pound, and they will differ. If they do a syllable from sound. Read that one more time please. Sure. The brain is wider than the sky for put them side by side, the one the other will contain with ease and you beside the brain is deeper than the sea for hold them blue to blue. The one, the other will absorb as sponges buckets to the brain is just the weight of God. They will hold them blue to blue, the one the other will absorb as sponges buckets to the brain is deeper than the sea for have them pound for pound, and they will differ if they do as syllable from sound. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you everybody. That was a lovely, lovely call. Thank you so much for everything in case everybody scrambling to take notes and follow the chat. I always upload these calls to YouTube, and then I put the link to that and the chat and the transcript because now zoom enables auto transcripts for free and Pete remembers to turn that on when I don't, which is often. So things are available on the matter most and online in different ways so don't worry about the bulk things and then brief side note Pete and I and Wendy Elford had a delightful conversation a couple days ago about scaffolding. And so what things are necessary for us to make sense what artifacts we leave behind and that's just a thin sliver of the scaffolding conversation which I can barely explain, but there's a lot, there's a lot there and it was really rich. Thanks everybody. Jerry, there's a recording of that conversation maybe. Pete. I think that's I'm not, I'm not sure it's a share thing. I think it might be an internal thing that gets digested and shared. No problem. Complete form. Okay. Sometimes there are sometimes there are. Thanks. Thanks everybody. Thanks so much everybody. Bye bye.