 of that. This is the OGM community check-in call Thursday, July 21st, 2022. And hey, Mike, you're in an airport? Not up or down, left or right? Looks like you're in an airport, maybe. And I saw in the news just now that Biden has tested positive for COVID. It was in the New York Times list of things I didn't look at. Didn't have a chance to take a look at. It's a long list. I got. It's incredible sometimes. Klaus, nice to see you. Somebody remixed the new JWST Deep Space photo with Starry Night. And it's an image, which I will see if I can't share with you, because I'm pretty sure I have it now on my computer. Yeah, here we go. Let me at least screen share and show it. Go back here. Share a screen. Think and go back. Oops, wrong thing. There we go. There. So that is a blend of the two. It's not bad. It's not bad. It's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, it's just stunning. Kind of fun. How is everyone? Okay, despite all the flurry of things? Yeah. Yeah. Does anybody else subscribe to No Opinion, the newsletter? This is by Noah Smith. He's got a sub-stack pub. He's sort of an economist at Stony Brook and very opinionated. And last night, the last thing I read, which may not have been the best thing to read before sleep, but he basically was writing about how degrowth, doomsaying, and third strategy, I'm forgetting right now, are not going to work. They're just unrealistic. They're not going to work. And then he talked about other dynamics. And he makes, if nothing else, a pretty clear case for his argument, which I'm going to try to find the time to model out as one end of how one could look at this and needs to look at this. And he's kind of blending political realism with dynamics and motivation, with what you can do and can't do at a societal level with a bunch of other stuff. And I think it's totally open to contradictions, oppositions, write-ups, whatever else. I'm going to forward his newsletter to the OGM mailing list right now and put a pointer to it in the chat. Yeah. Is that the most recent one, Pete? Or Allison? Sorry. I was so used to Pete putting them up so fast that I went straight to Pete. I think that was posted yesterday. So yesterday. So actually, this was titled, How Will We Fight Climate Change? Oh, okay. So that's at the top. Thanks. Yeah. And let me get that URL now. Somebody's put it in, I think. No, that's the whole channel. Ken put in his whole channel. Here is the one in particular I'm thinking about. Okay. And it made my brain go in lots of different directions, but it made my brain go very OGM. It made me think a lot about what we do and how we do it. I wanted to kind of crave the article to figure out how to deconstruct it and deepen it and tag it up and other sorts of things. So that's the thing we might do. This being a check-in call, we kind of go, we alternate rhythms between a topic and check-ins. Why don't we go Klaus with the Starry Sky. Klaus, Pete Allison. Yeah, I'm just putting in a conversation I was listening in on yesterday between you will know a Harari and then a philosopher I've never really heard of. And it should be trust in nature more than ourselves. You have to rewind it. I didn't put it in the right spot here. But the thrust of the conversation basically is that you will Harari was talking about nature. Nature does what it does. It is what it is. There's no negotiation with nature. And the philosopher talking about all the gyrations that we are going through to challenge that assumption to think we can do something different. And I'm actually in a real funk right now. I had a meeting yesterday with a group of Oregon-based NGOs, but certainly some NGOs like the Oregon Climate and Agriculture Network and groups of the high desert food and farm alliance. We talked about soil and water. And Oregon is in a drought, not as bad as California, but the high desert region here of Oregon, central Oregon is in pretty bad shape. Just one step. I mean, about 80% of the nation's carrot seed comes from the high desert from the central Oregon. And they had to they had to fell half of their land for lack of water. That means 40% of carrot seeds are not going to make it. I mean, you should think about random stuff like this. So we had someone make a presentation on water rights in Oregon. And this is the same thing you see in California. These water rights were assigned 120 years ago when the first settlements came in, and they're attached to the land. So when you buy a piece of land that has attached water rights, and these water rights are at seniority level. So here in the in the central Oregon region, 86% of all water is assigned to agricultural farms. And there isn't enough water to go around. There wasn't enough water 120 years ago when they assigned these water rights. Now, of course, now you have you have this traumatic scenario. So in order to change anything, you know, when it comes to water management and agriculture and so on, you have to first of all make it through the political process of wrestling water rights away from people who are fiercely defending it. And they're defending it by for example, flooding their fields, because if they don't use the water, they lose it, right? And so this whole system is just so insane. You don't know where to start, untangling it. And in all reality, I mean, from a practical perspective, when you, you know, listen to opinions like Jerry just mentioned, I don't see how we're going to get through this in time to make a difference because we're already, you know, at a breaking point, where where agriculture, you know, and the global food supply is challenged. I mean, look at the Europeans, right? The worldwide, you have a reduction in yields and in in access to water and so on. So I don't know. I mean, I just think this has to crash. I mean, I keep thinking what can you possibly say to people to get them to understand the seriousness of this. And so another thing that struck me, I mean, these are all people who are working in the field, climate change and agriculture and water and all of this. And at the end of this conversation, I had one lady say I could, I had to tune out, it's just overwhelming to listen to all this negativity and all this horrible stuff at us. But, you know, I mean, tuning out is not making it go away either. So I mean, I mean, it's just really overwhelming to deal with this. And I'm like winding down here, I'm getting really tired, you know, dealing with this stuff every day and trying to renew my energy. And so many people really want to make a difference and want to help and all of that. But then, you know, I mean, for example, you know, the Sierra Club and Citizen Climate Lobby have basically been told by their funders to stay out of the farm bill. Right. I mean, Sierra Club got 130 million dollars from Bloomberg. I mean, so they are, you know, they have funding, they're deeply penetrated with funding sources from people who have opinions. And the staff depends on those funding sources for their budgets and for their livelihood. And when you know, in the farm bill, it's just nothing but disruption and disruptive forces. Go ahead, Charlie. You're muted. Sorry, first time on Zoom. If I can bring this in for a second. Mika Sifri, who is in here a little bit, but he wrote a newsletter recently, but he and I talked about it beforehand, which was Bloomberg has had a very strange effect on gun activists. And a part of what happened apparently to the Marjory Stonem Douglas kids is they started getting a lot of attention. They went out on the road to try to convince people to pass some gun legislation. And Bloomberg, which already was funding mothers against guns or whatever it was, I'm forgetting the orgs, I've got them in my brain. But they basically showed up and said, we know exactly how to absorb names and put them in a database, but you need to sign these papers. They basically signed away rights to a whole bunch of stuff. And there were a bunch of things that sounded kind of directive, manipulative and limiting toward what the Douglas school kids could or should do in some way. And I was, my head was turned on the influence of funders. And if they have a particular agenda, which is hidden from view, how that might turn out. So you're mentioning Bloomberg here. And I don't want to blow this out into something much larger than it might be. But I think that happens a bunch. I think that one way of controlling activists who might be doing really good work is to make sure they got enough funds to be around, but not so much that they actually tip the cart. And not tackling the farm bill is a huge thing because the farm bill really desperately needs to be redone. Yeah, but there is just so much political power behind this. And we have gained traction. We have really made everybody very nervous because it's a multi-punk approach, right? So on the one point, we focus on farming and water. So by shifting from climate change to water, much of the defense that they had all prepared is melting away because everybody is worried about water. And water, focusing on water has the same impact on agriculture as you're saying, I need to carbonize the soil. So it's the same thing. But there is no defense there. Then we go into the consumer side. And we're talking about glyphosate in the breast milk of mothers. You know, glyphosates in urine samples of babies, which is now documented now. It's out there. And the Supreme Court has already rejected arguments against the lawsuit that Monsanto and Bio lost in regard to the impact of glyphosate on cancer. So there's no defense here. So the farm bill debate is getting really intense. And there is traction here where we can influence both the consumer and on both ends, really. And so it was just an interact for my webinar. I have zero support, right? I mean, no money, nothing. Because they basically have been told to stay out of the frame. So anyway, but I mean, the thing really is, how do you energize this to the point where people really understand what's at stake here? And we're not anywhere near that. And if you wait through this summer and you queue up the next calling season without having made any changes, this is going to get really bad. And right this minute, we're going through all these traumatic weather events worldwide. It's really weird and strange. And what we don't pay attention to is that the core trifle of this is the Gulf Stream slowing down. I mean, you're not about to restore the Arctic ice. I mean, so that's the dumb deal. And if there is actually a risk that this thing could stop, because there is a tipping point where, and there is a really good video and I think I posted it before that explains the way this guy explained it in some detail where the slowdown is already measurable. And there could be a point where the system collapses, which would have catastrophic climate impacts, particularly for Europe and the east coast of the US. So yeah, so there's no good news really is that. Eric puts in the chat that politicians need a way to save their face. So if you can help them find that angle, they're more likely to support you. And I'm really torn because the same argument is happening with Putin's invasion of Ukraine is like, does Putin need an off ramp to basically make it gently off somewhere else so that he doesn't push the nuclear button kind of argument? And I'm torn. I don't know where I land on this. I think it's a really hot, interesting, active question. In the background, my inner voice is saying there's a bunch of people in this country who need action, not adjustment, not adaptation. And there's also a bunch of players in the field who are taking advantage of adaptation and space saving mechanisms and whatever else. Like Manchin appears to me to be doing his funder's job really, really well and to be very efficiently blocking, you know, what more than half the country would like to get done. And by playing along and offering him alternatives and whatever else the Democrats have wasted a tremendous amount of time, which is his job, I think, is to eat time. I'm being a little pessimistic about it here. So there's a piece of me that feels like strategically that no exit, let's just do the right thing and see how we can get a done strategy might actually work better appealing to the voters who want to see action and who have seen action by people who wreck the room. That may be too cynical a point of view, I don't know. And Eric, if you want to reply or whoever else, otherwise, Eric, if you want to, if not, Mike, just raise his hand. Well, that's just something I heard years ago from another group and just bringing it forward, something for people who are trying to advocate with politicians in Washington or wherever. So I know it sucks, but that's the way the game is played. And you're trying to make a positive change in the farm bill. It's whoever's working in that arena will need to use the right strategies. Yeah, thank you. And I would normally come from the, how do we accommodate other people? How do we reach them where they're at? That's my normal approach. And I'm losing patience on that. And let's go, Mike, and then I might actually poke Ken and see how Ken feels about that topic. Mike, please. I just wanted to speak up for creative log rolling. I've been in Washington since 1988. And the first issue I worked on was climate change. And I got into internet later, but the fact was we were trying to get the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, to do some of the right things to cut greenhouse gases. And we actually got rid of half of the impact of the greenhouse gases that we were pumping into the atmosphere in the 1980s. Because Al Gore and others pushed the Bush administration to find the Montreal protocol, which eliminated the gases that lead to the ozone hole. If we hadn't done that, would have twice as much global warming today. And so that was an example of where, because there was one goal, saving the ozone layer, we actually made progress on greenhouse gases because CFCs are like 16,000, even 60,000 times more potent as greenhouse gases. And the irony was on the whole issue of climate change. We had allies in the White House, but they weren't environmentalists. They were nuclear power advocates. Bush's science advisor was a nuclear physicist. And he thought it was great that Al Gore was highlighting the need to cut down fossil fuel emissions because it was a great way to push back against the anti-nuclear crowd. And that's what we need to be doing, finding places where there may be a 50% overlap or a 70% overlap. Way too often, Democrats and Republicans, they have their pure mission and they can't bring other people on board because those people only sign up for 60 or 70% of their goals. And I get so frustrated. I'm a radical centrist. I'm trying to find a way to get people to agree on those things that 80 or 90% of Americans agree on. But right now, it's all about polarization and fundraising. And if you're the most extreme voice, you get more money. So part of my inner narrative, Mike, is that the Gingrich Revolution in 94, that New Gingrich led the way toward severing all of the loose connections that existed between the parties so that they no longer would come into contact with each other and no longer find moments where they could roll some logs or chew some pork ears or whatever, no, earmarks, all that kind of stuff. The kind of things that fed Congress critters so that they could go back to their constituents and say, look, we did something you like. Is that true or false? I mean, if that's true, then the opportunity for creative log rolling is really slim right now. That's part of the reason. And the members of the House in particular only sleep in Washington two or three nights a week. They don't have time for those Saturday barbecues with members of the other party. Their staff are still here, but there's definitely a our team, your team kind of situation. The bars that the Republican staff go to are different than the bars that the Democratic staff go to. And dream COVID, it got even worse because the Republican staff only went to bars where they weren't compelled to wear a mask. It's so frustrating. But the bigger problem, even more than the social interaction, the bigger problem is this sense that if you're not the most extreme voice, if you're not out there saying outlaw coal or on the other side, we will oppose all law that might impact coal production and burning. If you're not the most extreme voice, then somebody will be more extreme and they will attract more money from the people who care about that position. And it's also this old game. I mean, Gingrich was famous for this is try to go for three times more than you have any reason to expect. Ask for the extreme and settle for half or one third. And Trump does it too. Trump would grab hostages. He would do things that he would do things he would put forward proposals he didn't even want as a way to trade them off for the things he did want. Right. Thanks, Mike. Ken, do you want to jump in? Don't know that I have anything particularly profound to add. I think we're looking at a very broken system. And it's the only system we happen to have. And how do you have enough? A question for me, I guess, is how do I maintain enough distance to my desires to see change, recognizing that they're probably not going to come true and still get in there and work in some way to drive me effective? You know, there's days when it's like, oh, fuck it all, you know, it's just it's all too broken. And there's times like, well, but we have to do something. And I come back to with the Republicans, you know, Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to get a man to see your point of view when his paycheck depends on him not seeing it and Pete's hyperscale entities, which, you know, these are not people who are looking out for the common good, they're looking out for their own interests and their interests are at odds with the common good. And so, you know, how do we reconcile that? Because if we keep going for, we're going to support all the special interests, we're going to end up with no common good, and everybody's going to fail. So, you know, that's the kind of large skill framing I have. And I'm confused. I just, there's days when I just honestly don't know what to do. And I throw my hands up and, you know, I'm just trying to stay in the game and stay as positive as I can and do what I can where I am and recognize that there's probably going to be really big things falling apart and crashing to the ground all around me. And I'm trying to make sure I'm nimble enough to get out of the way of them falling. Thanks, Ken. Anyone else on this topic? Otherwise, I'll go back to our queue. Cool. Let's go Pete Allison-Ken. And Pete, thanks for the flex last night. Yeah. It's tough to, it's tough to change the topic away from existential death. But I will. Klaus, I wonder if you could put a link to your webinar in the chat? It's coming up in a week. And I think it's a great thing you're doing, Klaus. Thanks. Real quick, I wanted to put a link to, as part of the journalism of Plex, I set up a community calendar. And I guess I'm proud of it. Even though I'm not sure, well, it is what it is. I'm proud of it. So there's a two-step thing. You go to this page and then you have to figure out that you need to click here. It turns out that I couldn't embed a Google spreadsheet very well and this is how this is built. The way this is set up, it shows a week during summer time. I wanted to call this daylight savings time or summertime or something like that. It turns out, especially because of the other hemisphere. They're not in summer right now. They're in winter. So anyway, this is kind of the summertime hours and they're going to shift an hour or so from UTC in the future. So yellow is the weekly calls. Blue are the ones that are biweekly or monthly. Some of them. There's one closed call kind of, which I was a little wondering if I should even put it on here. But I think if you emailed Jerry and said, what is that FJB thing I really want to be in there, he'd probably say, yeah. So part of the reason to, I don't mean this to be readable on the screen, by the way, you'll have to click the link. Part of the reason to do this is we're starting an experiment called office hours. So I've got office hours here on Tuesdays and Grace Rikmani has two, which is the right way to do it, morning and evening. So this morning in Europe for her is quite crazy for the U.S. folks. But between one and the other one, she's awake for this time and she's also overlapping the U.S. and the rest of the world. Just kind of want to note it. Maybe think about doing your own office hours. Start to look for calls that you haven't been going to and wonder how they fit into your schedule. One final thing, every row is an hour. So Grace's calls, Linesburg calls, they actually overlap and I just made them bigger. So it's not like, let me schedule my day. It's more like, let me find my week and kind of orient to it. How do you want to handle overlaps? Because as we start doing personal office hours, they're just going to overlap with stuff. It's a really good question and the first, thanks for doing this. This is brilliant. I spent a lot of time. It's a really good question. I don't know yet. To get this to even this state, already I've got overlaps. I've got a couple of ways to where things overlap and in a spreadsheet to do that, I've actually got two columns and lots of merged cells in various places that make the whole thing work. I think I'm going to have to move to a different representation of this. But I'm up for the challenge. I think it might move out of Google Sheets at some point. And I think this is adaptive in the way you just showed for a while. So this looks like it'll work great. And Google Sheets are easy to embed in pages. So we could drop this on a OGM Wiki page, massive Wiki page. We could kind of each embed it. Yeah. The other thing is part of the reason this to draw out like this, Jordan was wondering, how do I know where in the plaques to slot things into a week? And now he's got a picture. Here's some holes. And so hopefully it will also encourage people not to overlap. Exactly. Thank you. Klaus and Allison. Yeah. Peter, I have a question. I keep puzzling about what Leinsberg is up to and what the deliverables are. Can you have a little synopsis of here's what we're going to do or accomplish your focus on? It's much more inspirational to hear Jordan tell the story. But the gist of it is, from my point of view, Jordan and the rest of us are trying to instantiate a different way of working together, basically, so that we have a lot more, I think, we have a lot more, I think smaller entities that come up faster and can be more agile and also much, much, much better flocking so that climate change is like too big or soil health or something like that is right now kind of too hard for me to wrap my head around how you would attack something like that. But the idea is, even a really big problem if you've got, if you've got not a couple dozen organizations working on or a couple hundred organizations, but if you had 10,000 or 100,000 or a million organizations working on it, each of them very small and focused on kind of what they thought was right. If you inspire everybody to be working together kind of and not necessarily like on the same team, but in a team of team of teams way, you hopefully will get people working towards the greater good for the planet and people, basically. It's, and one of the things I like to say in the, in it, it's bootstrapping is very hard. You know, we're trying to work on new social structures to work together, and it's really confusing to do that while at the same time, you know, almost all the examples we have are other ways of working that haven't worked as well. It's hard to, it's hard to communicate what we are doing to, because we don't know it ourselves, so people kind of join us and then it's like, so what are you guys doing? It's like, well, we're still trying to figure it out. We're building runway where we're trying to take off the plane. It's hard and it's confusing and, you know, so for many people, it's a little bit too early to be engaging deeply, and then the way to do it, I can speak about my project kind of massive wiki, which, you know, kind of, if you look at it objectively, maybe it doesn't have a lot to do with saving the planet, but it's the thing that I can work on strongly, and Bill, hi, thanks for working on it with me. It does, I think, help, you know, it's a tiny, tiny piece of the infrastructure that's needed. So for people who are interested, so this is a weird kind of example, because I don't, most people aren't interested in working on the nuts and bolts of massive wiki, which is fine, not complaining. But you can join a project that is kind of aligning itself with the Meta project and mostly be working on that project. You could be working on helping local farmers, you know, approach their local representatives about the water or soil or something like that, and there's a, I think one of the things that's really going to be strong with the Meta project is that you don't have to be working on everything in the Meta project because there's going to be a lot of stuff. You can be working on something that's really meaningful to you in a local context and get a lot of stuff done, and some interfaces are going to be helping find the rest of the interfaces of other people to join together to work together towards a much, much, much bigger goal. One last thing, there's a, it's confusing just to say, so what's the difference between Linesburg and Meta project? And then we have two Meta projects, one with capital letters and one with lowercase letters. And brackets. And then there's brackets. Meta project is kind of the movement of all of these things flocking together. Linesburg is kind of in the old world, I might describe it as something like a orienting foundation that helps guide the, you know, the movement that's Meta project. And it's there, it doesn't mean to, Linesburg in particular, it doesn't mean to enclose the whole movement. People might be working on the Meta project and not know much about it. Just they're just joining almost a hashtag movement, right? So it's, there's, we've got other things. It's like, why the Meta project? Why Linesburg? Wouldn't you pick a better name for that? And it's like, it doesn't matter too much. Let's just flock together. That's the big, the big goal. This may be metaphorically off, but I kind of sometimes think of Linesburg as Cape Canaveral, which is like, it's a launch pad trying to get other orbs into orbit into a, into a particular set of orbits, but, but something like that. I'm not sure that's very good. And then in parallel with your calendar, a thing we've been working toward, and in particular, Vincent Irina has been working toward with Trove is there should still be a landing page for each of our projects in the flotilla that basically somebody could go stare at and is kept up to date by the, the community around each of the projects, where you can see, here's our mission, here's where we are right here is like a little arrow with we are here without trying to over bureaucratize the whole thing. And here's what would happen if you were to join us or here are raw materials, the things that we built so far are on these directories on GitHub or in Google Drive or wherever else that would be a super lovely thing to have in parallel with the calendar and to have these things point back and forth to each other, etc. If you're any of your energized for that Vincent is Vincent's got something he's built and, and it's operating. You can put your organizations in catalyst. He's also working with some of the meta project folks on something called map weavers, which is kind of got some similar, similar intent. I think, I think that I think we need is the, there's, there's in meta project, there's an interesting thing. There's a group of tool makers like Vincent and me and then there's what we call social dimensions a group of people who are interested in the psychology of working together and things like that. There's a middle part where Lion's Berg meta project right, it kind of has a vacuum, and, and OGM has a similar vacuum. The vacuum, it became obvious to some of us that Vincent and I can build stuff, but we kind of need a layer of people helping us adopt stuff. Working on the UX user experience, the, you know, the way these tools work with, with people are just trying to get stuff done, right. So for OGM, it would be a great help to start moving into catalyst more or moving into the map we were stuff more, and then also helping us figure out how to get tools adopted help help people adapt to tools like catalyst and profiles and things like that. Awesome. Allison, sorry for the very long wait to get to you, but the floor is yours. Oh, that's okay. Yeah, with a hand up. Yeah, I had a question about the calendar and just to make sure that I was reading it right. So Pete, I'm seeing, let's see actually I'd have to open up the calendar again. It's kind of past moment here. But Grace is two hours is in conflict. It's happening at the same time as this other call. Is that right? Yep. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the, the, so Grace has two calls. So you could just go to another one of ours. The call that's conflicting there is Donna of everything, which only happens every two weeks. And it's a fairly specialized call too. So the idea is to kind of pick and choose the things that are interesting to you. And hopefully there'll be more calls than you're interested in in the in the calendar at least. There always are more calls than we have time to make it to Alas. Alas. Thanks, Allison. We'll be right back to you because you're sort of next up in the queue, but first Doug. Yeah. Here's a question. If we look at the physics of social change, that's not my typical position, but let's look at the physics of social change. Does interweaving projects together become part of the glue that keeps things from changing? Depends on how they're woven, I think. Because certainly if somebody starts a project, they want the project to continue. So if everybody's doing that, everybody's holding on. If we do a perfect project plan and we have perfect dependencies and create a rigid system, then yes, I think that the scenario you're describing would be a problem because somebody would say, Hey, I need to change direction. Everybody else would be like, No, you're not. I need your results for my project or whatever. If you have loose couplings and very adaptive mindset, I don't know that it's a problem. I think that it creates synergies and I'm just talking out of my butt here. Anybody else have strong feelings on this? In my cosmology, I don't know if I would use the word physics, but in my cosmology, the projects that I see are fairly self-contained and a little bit idiosyncratic. So they tend to flock together, but they don't adhere very closely to each other. And you don't end up with group think or group, group, group, whatever. Anybody else? And of course, that's the problem that we've got with the large political system in like the US and the large capitalist system right now. Everything is glued together and moving or enough mass of maybe it's a minority of the overall population, but there's enough mass glued together and cohesive in a bad direction. And part of what happened when lockdown struck is that we had just in time, had eaten the world, and we had all sorts of inventory streams that depended on cheap containers and people in ports and a whole bunch of stuff. And the supply chain was fragile way more than it ought to be. So we saw that play out in lots of different ways, including like trying to find toilet paper in the first two weeks of the pandemic. Klaus? Yeah, the meeting I attended yesterday was organized by a new NGO formed by the state. And their mission is to combine the work of NGOs located in Oregon and create some form of alignment. So in the meeting yesterday, I mean, we had people from the high desert food and farm alliance, from Oregon climate and agriculture network, I mean, about 30 different NGOs. And the presentation on water, for example, was kind of an aha moment, right? I mean, you can have all kinds of ideas and plans to change water, but here are the realities of how this all works. So to, there are certain pieces of information you have to have in order to make decent decisions, right? And the problem we have is that most NGOs even work in buckets where they focus on one narrow part of the issue without understanding the systemic connections. So I do think there is benefit in this kind of hive thing. I want to build on what you just said, Klaus, and tell a story. Some of you have heard before about three people in Los Angeles, where this guy Andy Lipkis, who just was just trying to get LA to plant more trees, realized one day he saw a notice that the US Army Corps of Engineers was going to raise the walls on the emergency drainage ditches that cut across Los Angeles, because it never rains in LA. But when it does rain, because we've paved over all of it, it can be catastrophic. Lots of water collects up real fast and runs off. And so he managed to, over time, bring together a series of agencies at different levels, whether it was neighborhood or state or city or whatever. He managed to collect them together and start looking at each other's assets and timing and missions and all that. And they discovered they had overlapping assets, contradictory mandates, they were working against each other, they had resources they could share, a whole bunch of synergies and dynamics that came out of it, which just weren't normally happening because these were all silos and which were highly productive for improving the LA basin's ability to hold water and do other things. And so I wish that that could be repeated everywhere. I wish that more agencies, and it sounds class like in Oregon, they might be heading in that direction. And I would love that because I'm in Oregon as well. And so I don't know, I would love to promote this as a general thing. And if one could enhance that process with an ability to see the assets better, which is a thing we're still trying to do here, and then create loose couplings that are highly productive instead of rigid couplings that cause brittleness downstream, that would be even better. As an example for my webinar next week, I'm actually stressing because when you look into the government programs, they're completely chaotic. I mean, my impression so far is that they have dozens of programs, some of which overlap, none of them are really coordinated to achieve a targeted outcome. So in a sane world, you would go to a farmer and make and take an assessment of what does this farm actually need to do in order to reduce nutrient inputs and prevent nutrient runoffs and things like this and restore soil back to life. But it's different in each farm. And these programs really only work like, I'm going to fix water sheds and I'm going to do pollinator strips and I'm going, and there is no coordinating effort. So I think what we will highlight in the webinar next week, and I'm trying to do this as general as possible because I so appreciate the government officials who are stepping in to actually do this, of how do we coordinate all these things? How do we bring in some structure here, which would be normal in a business environment? But for some reason, the government is just shredded now. Thank you very much. Let's go back to our cue, which I am very slow in getting us to my apologies. So Allison, Ken, Hank, and Allison's got a lovely project to describe, which hopefully you can reload into your brain now and tell us about. Oh, thanks. Thanks. I have been popping into the group for a while, but I have relocated to the year off of my teaching after tense burnout from the 2020-21 school years and decided that the things that I've been working on teaching, I needed to put to test out in communities because it's quite radically different. Teaching economics and government with everything that you guys are saying. It just feels a little bit negligent to really harnessing the essence of the moment, which for me is about harmonizing brains to be able to think clearly in times like these young brains are great. So I appreciate the position that I'm in right now. I moved to Kenya and I'm partnering with Grassroots Economics, which has been, I'm not sure. Has anybody in the group heard of this organization in Kenya? Yeah, we've talked about it. I think Kevin Jones about it to our attention. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I came to my attention when I was visiting family in Tanzania in 2017 and I've been teaching already about community currencies and said I'm wanting to, you know, I had passion for it and found them. Grace Rachmani actually is friends with Will Reddick who started it and had been an advisor for a little bit and now they're working on starting it down. You know, so it's, they're using crypto in not really crypto but blockchain in resource scarce environments using USSD phones and mesh networks and things like that are getting to the point where they are and empowering people to start their own vouchers, right? So to create their own money instead of using somebody else's and the ideas have a lot of integrity and the dress that I'm wearing right now, actually, I bought yesterday at a community who, yeah, was barely fluent in Swahili but they speak the local language. You know, this is definitely a long drive out on the road, right? Resource scarce but they had their own currencies and I got to buy this dress with that. So it was amazing to be able to participate and to work on regenerative agriculture from a solution-oriented place and I think that that's a way to drive conversation. It's kind of interesting like if we all just reflected on how much time we spent, like the complexity of problems is really, really large, obviously, and talking about the problems could, you know, we could all easily spend the rest of our lives doing that which, you know, is a direction of thought. It's a thought direction and it's not to say that we turn on blinders when we don't look deeply at the problems. We certainly know that they're there and we can even spend a whole lot of time debating about what's the most important problem or what's the truth of the problem, right? But then that's all time that we're not spending looking at growing and cultivating solutions. So from a mental health perspective, I found it really, really critical if we take a design approach since especially the textbooks can be very political and ideological and not evidence-based and things like that, contentious and whatnot. And so I think opening things up to a design perspective is probably the best way to harness curiosity and to be able to do that. So that is me taking a year of trying to use some of the frameworks that I've been working with with students to begin. And I emailed Jerry yesterday to tell him about it because I wanted to tell you guys about it. And Shimon also has done a lot of work with solutagenesis. And so I had, as well as a public health educator and working in forest bathing, actually, research on the impacts of forest bathing and mindfulness came across the solutagenic framework. And over time, just percolating and recognizing as I look at human needs, right, with students in order to get to economic design, that that solutagenic framework was a really great way to frame the economy. And so using that framework and using some others, I'm calling it relational design. So borrowing from pro-social communication and other things, how do we get past some of our biases and our blocks and deal with that internal ecosystem and radiate to the outward ecosystem and create economic ecosystems that can work now for us and dive into those. And it was interesting, somebody had posted that states are, you know, we're supposed to be models for what works and, you know, designing like, okay, well, this state's going to do that, this state's going to do that. Great, like we should have some flexibility and then we can watch and see what works best. But the state is still like too big, you know, and it's still so within the cracks that we see there is so much, so much, so much possibility. And and so I think that it's important to spend time on that. So we're going to be piloting courses that are a year long academic year in secondary schools across a couple of different countries, university programs across a couple different countries, and then 12 week courses that are microcosms of that year long academic course, trying to help train people to be grassroots economists, so that they can go into communities and help communities start these community inclusion currencies, so to speak, for the voucher system that's tied into an overall Dow investment sort of opportunity but also supported by humanitarian aid. And yeah, so anywhere around the world be able to have a certain standard on creating currencies because as you know right now and you see the crypto world trying to solve problems, trying to focus on ReFi, a lot of it comes with some poor design and millions of dollars go into these things and they collapse and don't do anybody any good. So I'm really excited about the job, the possibility and so maybe since Pete you made that calendar, just going to put it to the group, I can either just kind of invite and throw out an invitation to some of the 12 week courses because I'm looking for feedback, like I'm, I want to be able to test this with a number of different diverse communities, you guys think and talk about economic systems and have deep breadth of knowledge, technical understanding, political understanding and I think that you would be a really awesome crew to have to take me to tasks, so to speak, you know and provide feedback on what works, what makes sense, ask questions. The materials still really need to be developed for public consumption but the concepts are there and developing and I'd love to be able to invite this group to go through a process that would probably look like an hour and a half a week of discussion and maybe some readings and then boom so yeah. Alison thank you, now you shared a draft Google doc with me which is three or so pages long, it's not a huge document which might be useful, I don't know if you want to share that with the group. Also we've got the Mattermost server, I don't, are you on Mattermost, do you have an account there? Yeah, I, yeah, if you could share that link then. We will do that and Pete I don't know which channel, which existing channel might be a great place to put this or we could, if you wish, Alison we could start a new channel for this. You could start in OGM Town Square. Yeah, OGM Town Square where we're putting the call information for each of these calls and then if the conversation gets energy it can spawn its own channel so we will share a link to that in the chat. That's a really good place for you to say here's some resources, here's some questions and then we can all kind of tackle it and there Alison just posted a link to the Google doc. Yeah, thanks you guys. Thanks Alison, any questions or thoughts for Alison? You mentioned many, many different interesting and useful practices and systems and communities kind of in that document, which made me ask you to like link it up a little more but I went off on about that. I did, yeah thank you for that. Yeah, I went off and you know this whole idea of relational design, there's a couple different risks on that that I don't think you're pointing to but that are also interesting, like relational design thinking is a thing and of course I'm, relational systems thinking. There's also relational design thinking that is a riff on design thinking so there's many, there's like, wait a minute uh-huh uh-huh yeah there's lots of sort of parallel strands here that make maybe originating from very different places but it's really interesting. Yeah yeah yeah cool. Thank you and and thanks for thanks for joining us from Kenya. Let's go back to the queue then which is Ken Hank Mike. Hello everybody. I'm still reading this really fantastic book by Damon Santola called Change How to Make Big Things Happen and I'm about two-thirds the way through now and I was noticing the earlier chatter on the OGM mailing list about should we revitalize the OGM LinkedIn group and what might that do for us? And I wanted to write back to that but I don't feel I have the, I haven't got all of the concepts from change in my mind yet so I don't feel I can make a really good case but what comes to me and it's easier to explain verbally than trying to write it is, is that if we really thought about what do we want to do so Klaus for example often posts questions you know in his emails it says you know why don't people see this and and this brings us to the we you know who is we there's, can I share my screen for a second Jerry? Yes it's uh the default is that anyone can share the screen. Okay so here's an example of we if I can find it. This is from Yale's Climate 360. These are the people who alarmed, concerned, cautious so we have 33, 25, 70 there's a huge number of people over here on the left who are very concerned about climate change and then the disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive make up a much much smaller percentage so why for example don't the people on the left have way more power and way more influence in the social sphere than those on the on the right and it's interesting that there happened to be lined up left to right like that and I'm looking at Centola's book on change he details the way that Twitter spread so it started here in the Bay Area and it took over the valley in San Francisco and and it looked like it was just growing gang busters and they thought it'll be in Portola Valley any day but it didn't actually get to Portola Valley for a long time because it went from the Bay Area to Cambridge, Massachusetts through what Centola would call wide bridges and I think if we can start to figure out we need a diversity of people who are speaking our language. Those of us in OGM we talk to each other we're our own echo chamber we all you know we understand what we're talking about and so we don't have a huge amount of influence on people who are looking and saying those are those OGM people but if we can reach out to our networks individually and start to say hey you know this is really some important stuff we'd like to try and build some wide bridges to activate other networks then I think we'd actually start to see people really getting involved the I go back to what was his name Paul somebody the cultural creatives Paul Ray you know he said that that there's this huge number of of green and deep green people in the States but they're all looking forward they don't recognize that there's people all around them who share their their same concerns so it's not a matter of trying to convince the disengaged doubtful and dismissive it's a matter of bringing together the alarmed concerned and cautious in new ways to make them see that there's this huge percentage of us that that have that share these concerns so I want to put that out to OGM of how could we use our influence in our diverse networks to try and link this together so that we do spread OGM social innovations and you know Centola's work is around information is a simple contagion that spreads just like a virus but social innovations that that require us to be exposed to risk of of social risk or financial risk or any other type of risk those are complex contagions they don't travel and they don't grow and spread in the same way that that simple contagions do and I think it's a real it was a wonderful distinction for me because it helped me to see ah this is why this isn't spreading it's a complex contagion it's different contagion infrastructure is his language for it so anybody who wants to hang out and read that book and talk about how can we create a a complex contagion infrastructure to spread OGM-ness through the world I'm right there me too thank you I think that's that those that I'm dynamics you're describing are really important to the work many of us are trying to do that may seem too obvious class yeah it brings me back to basic marketing no segmentation is the best predictor behavior and predictor of response so um like in in in my case we're strategizing to shift agricultural practices to become regenerative and to sequester carbon and all of these things well you have one segment that's let's say mothers you know women and they free god when they understand that there's glyphosate in the children's cereal and that there are traces of glyphosate most likely in their breast milk and the urine samples of children and the then the the toxic influence on on the brain development on the child development caused by chemicals contained in the food supply then you go and talk with people who live in Florida and see dead fish along their beaches and link that to the runoff from the Mississippi River Delta bringing nutrients down bringing farm runoff you know into their into their land so there is there is a meta perspective you know of what of what they're trying to accomplish and then then you translate this into a context of people you're trying to reach and that context has to be adapted to population groups you know that live in specific mindsets and that's the only way I know how to do it it and and you know I mean Mr. Farmville we have we have created a very effective strategy that has has run below all the built-in defenses of the industrial sector resisting change and it's getting it's getting critical so so that's I think is the answer now is to segment to segment the population groups you're trying to address and and look at how this particular problem you're trying to solve impacts their circumstances and their context absolutely thank you let's go Hank Mike Eric yeah thanks really interesting conversation so far there are a lot of things I'd like to talk about or refer to perhaps Allison's starting from a solution place or Ken spreading OGM this through the world and maybe some of the things I say will relate to topics like that but my check-in is about questions that have been provoking me to do some deeper synthesis style thinking so as I often say I don't have the answers but I do have a number of questions one of the things I'm quite involved in is this issue of youths climate anxiety and in various conversations both in OGM calls and a metaproject call and emails with people like Wendy McLean and Wendy Alfred we've been knocking ideas back and forth one of the really promising ideas that seems to be emerging also due to conversations with a friend of mine who's an Afghan adolescent psychiatrist here in the Netherlands is that it's important not to deal just with the symptoms anxiety without dealing at the same time with the real issue climate so if you talk about youth climate anxiety anxiety is a symptom and the real issue is climate and the idea that's emerging is that it's better to acknowledge and accept anxiety and our vulnerability and then appeal to people's creativity asking them okay we understand you're anxious I'm anxious too you feel vulnerable and vulnerable too but when you think about what we need to do in this situation with the emphasis on do ask people well what do you want to do and ask it of an adolescent and ask it of a child so I'm trying to relate a number of interesting issues that I've discovered or been made aware of in recent weeks to this just put a list of them in the in the chat one of them is the the the need to search for the adjacent possible concept first developed by Stuart Kaufman I believe at Los Angeles Institute and taken up by others the idea of the ecology of freedom which comes to me through the discussions of the book dawn of everything and especially what author David Wencro says the importance of the third freedom the freedom to imagine alternative social orders and put these alternatives into effect and then there's the concepts listed as number three referencing Henry Minnsburg of community ship and how to encourage people's engagement with community ship and the fourth is negative capability I think I mentioned that the last time I was on the call comes from the poet John Keats back 200 years ago which he called the capacity of the greatest writers to pursue their vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty and intellectual confusion uncertainty is one way to describe the state of the world right now and the fifth issue has to do with art itself it's building on the last one but I think it involves all of the things I've set up till now and thinking beyond aesthetics what is the role of art in society and in social engagement and I want to just mention briefly a couple of things I don't know if there's much news about it in the United States it's a big issue in Europe a documentary held big art exhibition held every five years in Europe this year in castle in Germany this year it's being curated by an Indonesian art collective and because one of the works of art and the emphasis is on non-western art for the first time ever in 15 documentaries the emphasis is on non-western art and in one of the installations there was something that was called anti-Semitic although it was done actually more than 20 years ago it's had as a cartoon someone identified as an Israeli soldier with the face of a pig and although excuse me if I don't put the step on anyone's feelings here or long toes although Germany effectively eliminated 99% of all its Jews during the Second World War suddenly two generations later there's a big to do about anti-Semitism and you can't show anti-Semitic art in Germany the director of the documentary resigned some of the most famous German artists taking part with due their work although essentially it had to do with depicting an art collective non-European art collective's view of what the Israeli army was doing 20 years ago be that as it may I'm hoping to visit the document next month if it's still open if there's still any art there to see for myself what's going on when you invite non-western curators to curate what's supposed to be an international exhibition and start involving issues of what shall we say art's role in society social comment and then there are other individual artists that are very interesting American artist Alicia Egert Japanese artist Tatsuya Miyajima who are making art that ask very important questions about time and about change and about connections and about how long is forever unfortunately I only have reference to Alicia Egert's work through an article published on the website of the long now there's a reference to it Tatsuya Miyajima has an exhibition about time and forever in a Dutch museum which I'm hoping to visit on Saturday and then there's poetry nothing new in the work of Maya Angelou unfortunately passed away some years ago but I've actually rediscovered her work and especially her work about and I still rise a fantastic poem about how the artist as a perhaps how the perception of a person could be I'm a victim of society yet the perception of Maya Angelou as an artist is there's nothing like a victim if you still rise and all through her life she did still rise so those are a number of concepts that are trying to provoke me in deep thought and anyone on this call or who hears this recording of this call who's interested in sharing some lies or asking new questions about them I welcome all inputs Hank that was a very rich trove of things you just put in front of us thank you anyone want to comment or offer pointers or suggestions I'm also interested in kind of where are you pointing this flashlight and what would you like to sort of do next with this basket of things well to go back to my first set of sentences about Allison's talking about working from a solution space and Ken's suggestion about spreading the OGM-ness of these type of discussions around the world and I strongly believe that art however we define it has a role in it but I can't yet put a fingers on how or what I mean there's one way of looking at and saying everyone's artistic so everyone creates art in their own lives and that art should be made more visible to people and the other way of looking at it is saying for 80 percent of the people in the world maybe more art is something far far off it's something they do those elitists and those people in ivory towers but if you get the art that speaks to those 80 percent I think great things are possible and how I just have a question at the moment but I think in spreading the OGM-ness and working from a solution space as opposed to a crisis space or a calamity space or a despair space there might be ways forward which we need to explore together in conversation it's a bit fuzzy I'm afraid but I'm still still asking questions oh that's great you just reminded me of a fellow I ran across some time ago who called himself a knowledge artist and triggered of course in my head oh maybe I'm a knowledge artist my my palette is limited but but I see a piece of what I do is like what a librarian or or other kind of information architect might do but a piece of what I do is some kind of art I don't know and so I kind of like that you're definitely a knowledge artist Jerry but I mean from this thing to the people on this and the other OGM calls I'm sure every one of us could have some kind of label of being a thinking artist an act an action artist a clause perhaps or whatever but it's not about labels it's about the work we do and making it more accessible to people as I think that was the the the background of your proposal Ken cool thank you Mike sorry I'm spending much of the day at the internet governance forum USA it's a meeting bringing people together to debate the issues that will shape the future of the internet but I wanted to share Klaus's funk he's talking about agriculture and food policy I'm talking about digital policy and it it really is just so unfortunate that the political process not just in the United States is completely broken down one of our senior executives at the Carnegie Endowment is stepping down from his leadership role and he said policy seems to be either stuck or surreal and it really is almost like people of giving up trying to find consensus around solutions even though there are some low-hanging fruit out there I do think what this group does is incredibly important one of the things we're trying to do at Carnegie is use LinkedIn as a way to foster discussions and help people identify people of a common interests I don't know if anybody here can guide me to a handbook on LinkedIn groups but I could I could use that we're using LinkedIn because people are already there it's not trying to pull people into something new and we're we're we're sort of thinking of it as a kind of a hub or even a clubhouse and not just for research activities but if I want to find someone to play ping-pong with in our ping-pong room or go running with or if there's some great event that I want to tell people with so that my friends don't miss out a great opportunity over the weekend it's it's not like slack it's not meant to be real time but it's it's sort of a way to get more acquainted with the different dimensions of the people you work with so I'm looking for any help on that if the people can provide obviously past conversations of this group have helped me think about how to motivate people to collaborate I am although hopeful I did spend breakfast with Cynthia Chen C-H-Y-N who's in charge of policy for amazon web services in Taiwan and Taiwan is doing some so many things right they just created a new digital ministry and Audrey Tang who had been kind of uh not not a minister but head of a sort of an open source project to make the internet and the information space of Taiwan better is being dragged kicking and screaming into the bureaucracy if you haven't read about Audrey Tang you need to Audrey is fabulous I've got a interview with her and Shu Yang Lin back in 2017 which I'll post to the chat Audrey's fantastic yeah I've been under several different discussions and that gave me hope but it's it's sort of the they are the anti bureaucrats you know they're they're working from the outside to the end and now Audrey will be in charge of this ministry and have to manage things in a different way but anyway that's that's uh what gets me excited and I'm also flying to Portland in about four hours and that's got me very excited because Kathleen has never been to Oregon um and I I don't know if you're around Jerry but I'd love to love to connect at some point just let me know I sent you an email this morning just I have not made it through my email so we'll find it thank you that's great yeah or just call we can I mean I we have some time tomorrow for lunch or for on Monday we could also meet up awesome thank you thank you I I'm sorry to drop off I have to head off to a session but hey you can watch all of the IGF USA online really fascinating talks thanks for joining us that's really that was great well a little depressing with a little bit of hope at the end well that's hey that's our current state and one of the things about Audrey and V Taiwan which is one of the umbrella names the project she's involved with Polis is another one there's a whole bunch of it's like virtual democracy that's working really quite well and Audrey has been a minister without portfolio trying to sort of nurture these these infrastructures for democracy I think they're essential to Taiwan long-term survival and I think the danger to the people's Republic of China is that they see how fruitful this is for connecting humans in the middle of she trying to deal with protests around mortgages and bank failures and I'm reading all kinds of stuff that's just burbling under the surface in mainland China which is causing all sorts of havoc and then it somehow feels to me and this is probably hopelessly idealistic that a high functioning democracy which actually is very representational and conversational and high trust might in fact be a weapon of some sort and I can understand and appreciate Audrey's not wanting to be dragged into the bureaucracy and I think I can also understand how what she's doing might be seen as central and vital and essential to Taiwan's thriving in the face of mainland China's wanting to put it in the tractor beams and drag it back inside as they have now sort of done with Hong Kong anyway separate thread worth a lot more conversation in different places anyone else with thoughts on this if not we lost my thread here Mike just left us so let's go Eric Doug Bill Eric did you want to stay on the chat or do you want to yeah did you want to jump in sorry I was unmuted I was muted there so I want to talk a little so what's on my mind is where is the borderline between creativity and mania and we don't have to answer that question but like what I could see myself as like doing like 20 different things that interest me and realizing that okay well I could use like Stephen Covey's matrix for prioritization like if it's quadrant two where it's not urgent and important and that's the best quadrant to be in but there's urgent stuff and then there's things that are urgent to other people but not me and then there's the quadrant four not urgent not important where if you where sometimes I just need to take a break and go there so I mean that's a framework that's helped me in the past and I've even made a spreadsheet to like put things in a signum quadrants and sort it and then see but I'm never really following through consistently with any methodology it's like I could do something and keep it in my mind and then just go forward and then I'm surfing surfing life wherever it takes me and how do I know whether someone's manipulating me in a certain place and I see a boundary right now that I have to be very careful of so that's just where I am now and I'll be fine it's just a process of living and deciding how to live. Thanks. Thanks Eric. Pete. It's a great question Eric and actually one of the one of the diagnostic ways to know if you're being creative or manic is when you can ask that question but the large-scale thing is or you know the the main thing if you can if you and your team can you know self-regulate you can feed yourself and bathe yourself and clothe yourself and live in a place and not run out of money and stuff like that you know then you're doing okay you're coping when one of those things starts to fall off it's it's bad and maybe you're maybe you're in a manic you know cycle I I don't think you're talking about you but just kind of in general um the one of the things I said there was I didn't say when you can't cope right I said you and your team can't cope um one of the one of the failure modes of humans is to end up isolated from other humans and then coping gets a lot harder right when you have two people when you have another person you can kind of like bounce ideas off of or discuss things or three people or even a small community when you can do part of your self-regulation in community with other people and then help them self-regulate too then that's kind of a win and vice versa when you know you can't find the community to help you regulate yourself then you're in trouble. I just wanted to add two things to that one is I'm pointing right now in my brain to the hearing voices movement and there's been a a shift in thinking about schizophrenia for example which involves auditory hallucinations and I don't I'm not loading enough of this back into my head um but there's not a normalization of schizophrenia but a different understanding of how schizophrenia might be affecting people and what it is which is really really interesting and I think that's sort of slowing down and unpacking that rather than seeing this as something to be medicated away or whatever or whatever is interesting and then I'm really personally interested in internal family systems or IFS which says that we have psychological sub parts all of us are composed of sub parts just like family systems therapy says that families are systems and then they sort of compensate and overcompensate and have dynamics inside of families IFS goes inside the individual and says hey guess what it's systems all the way down and we have parts that are in conflict or that are trying to do things most of our parts that theory goes are trying to be helpful really they want to be and the IFS therapy involves finding who your actual sort of inner self is and then talking to the parts in a friendly way to align them so that they are in fact feeling like they're contributing to the mission and they're not harming you and so if anybody's you know if someone's acting in dysfunctional ways or has self-destructive behaviors often that's a part that's a little out of control which is interacting with the other parts that's probably too much time spent on the definition but it feels like these ways of understanding us personally and our boundaries between creativity mania and achievement and all those kinds of things it seems like the principles are sort of similar at societal levels and personal levels and group levels and we're maybe making some progress in understanding those things as some kind of set of primitive theories although I may again be too optimistic there. Thank you Jerry I just want to comment I think as a group it's important to understand the boundaries of the group and subgroups and individuals and when a crisis occurs to have something in place of how the group plans to respond and a lot of this is covered in codes of conduct and in other groups so just something to think about I mean this will take a long time to flesh out but I just want to put it out there. Thank you. Anyone else with thoughts on this whole thing? I'm not someone else but boundaries is an important thing Eric and then another thing is kind of coordinating a group of friends or something like that and then another thing that's important is when you the boundary between permission and not permission to help somebody that's a tricky thing to navigate and that's another thing where it helps maybe I can't help somebody who needs help and doesn't you know it's pushing me away but when I have two or three people and we decide it's the right time to help or it's not the right time to help that's that's super helpful so like that's like second order you know group or something like that being able to come together with a few people and go is it time to cross this person's boundary even though they don't want it and made sometimes it is. Thanks Pete and thank you Eric. Let's go Doug, Bill, Rick we're sort of out of time but Doug if you want to dive in. Nothing like starting. Sorry sometimes I start with you sometimes I end with you my apologies. Two thoughts. One is why are things happening faster than we expected them to especially climate things if you can remember back to when one and a half degrees look like a reasonable target or that we would solve our problems by 2050 or 2100 now it's right on top of us what did we get wrong second thought should we be working on some kind of lifeboat strategy and the thoughts. So there are movements well it's interesting brief brief response to to your great two questions and I just want to type in the second question oh good Pete already got that. When you look in when you look back after some massive event turns out a whole bunch of people were usually saying hey this is happening and nobody was paying attention to them. One of the reasons I like the big short is that Michael Lewis does the work to go find six very quirky individuals who profited from the global financial crisis because they saw that it was basically a Ponzi scheme house of cards whatever thing you want to call it and then figured out how to bet against it despite everyone around them pissing being like incredibly pissed off and saying you can't do this no way know how so there's there's almost always minority voices that are saying what's going on. Second is that in order to fit their predictions into political discourse and other discourse a lot of scientists I think may have biased toward cons being conservative in their estimates about the possibilities of change couple that with the unpredictability of non and nonlinearity of dynamic systems complex dynamic systems like weather and heat and all sorts of other things and that turns into the like this pudding of potential disaster and accelerating disaster and so so I think that that's like right we're in the middle of that because once things start to tip like you know the Antarctica starts to melt it interrupts the oceanic currents which interrupt the jet stream which cause heat waves in across Europe and that is climatologist conjecture that seems to be you know behaving properly as a conjecture right this minute across large parts of the globe and might be really hard to prove definitively for anybody I don't know I am no scientist or anything like that but we're kind of in the in the middle of all those sorts of things and last but I'll put in I don't understand why conservatives don't want to think about Pascal's wager here which is my my primitive understanding of it is you know Pascal who was a philosopher and mathematician and so forth said you know just in case there is a god even though I don't believe in god I should like go get blessed so that I'll end up in heaven case when I die and and here it's like conservatives seem to be betting the farm and much more than the farm I think betting the farm is a point in him in this case that the politics of this matters more than the actual physics of this and I hate that that that's really that's really depressing me I'm not liking that whatsoever so Doug thank you for putting two really provocative questions into the into the conversation and if you want to jump back in feel free if not let's go to Bill then Rick and we'll hang out for a couple more minutes because if you need to leave of course you'll leave Austin kind of for quite a while pardon thanks actually I just put it in response and I typed my typed my answer there so I'll exit to anyway I got to get going because it's getting late thanks for hearing my pitch folks but yeah that my pitch was kind of the answer to the question too and so I guess I'll verbalize it my take is that we take on too much of swimming in a cognitive depth of what's wrong and trying to consider solutions that are too too big rather than seeing what works and and we're getting to the point where we can rapidly information share so hopefully that cosmo local reader that I shared up earlier might be of interest to you guys I thought it might be but hopefully you'll get some feedback addressing these issues of eco anxiety amongst youth and solutions that they might have by connecting with nature all right please thanks thank you so much sorry I can't stick around right oh thanks for being here bill hello very generative call sorry I appreciate having a time to sit in and listen I don't I don't really have any questions so well there's only one question I want to throw out that's come up just thinking about what we've said so this is just off the top of my head was all the the work going on now to sort of build up decentralized autonomous ways of organizing it's like you know I like we're gonna let's get away from like you know the big let's all just get into little pods or sovereigns or whatever you know and my question is how well is that maladaptive to really trying to solve issues that basically need to be worked on in a large social way it just feels like I don't know I just it's just come up for me that there's this tension here so she in the US you know we're gonna go with the federalists who needs the federal government fuck those people you know it's just a freaking disaster and it you know they just waste money it's like hello but I feel like that I don't I feel that that might also happen with a lot of like we're just going to decentralize should be autonomous and take care of you know what we can take care of and it's like hmm I don't know about since you know what you need to take care of involves everybody all of us so I just I know it's a question for me right now I don't know what to how to manage that I will say to help with my emotional state which you know class really always puts the finger on so I appreciate that close I just been reading more poetry and especially the poetry of our upcoming poet laureate Ada Limone which I highly recommend you know anyway that's just to take care of my and the other part of my brain Bill thank you very much Rick yeah thank you Jerry I feel fortunate to come at the end even though I arrived a little bit late um but I'd like to provide a perspective of a lurker and interloper of this group I've only this is my third time I've come and so um I'd like to share a perspective that resonates with some of the earlier comments it's a pity Allison has left because I love to connect up with her I thought she described was really amazing so I'm curious to learn more about her work but the comments that um that Mike and Ken made about uh OGM I mean all organizations have a sort of inner sanctum an outer sanctum outer and then people who are beyond that and I'm very much on the fringe looking end and I think one of the challenges of complex contagion is how do you attract people who have reties to to to aggregate around cause and one of the things that I find a little overwhelming not being a sort of regular on the on the emails it's difficult to keep up with things and it's not organized in a way that I feel I can develop coherence because I'm not I'm inconsistent if you're consistent it's if you're in the inner sanctum that's different because you get to know the people whatever so it creates a sort of a little bit of an artificial barrier for people for entry so to speak even though it's got an amazing attraction to pull people in and I want to go back to linked the linked in common because linked into me is such a huge untapped potential for community building it's not even designed for that purpose but that doesn't mean to say you can adapt it to that purpose um and um at one point I got heavily involved in in clubhouse just to experience whatever and I did it for several months ran groups and whatever and and retreated from them um and you probably know linkedin has got an audio capability now um and somebody mentioned the linkedin group I was if this group were to take go public with its comments opposed to be in a sort of you know closed listserv and it was more open and there were episodic um audios where you would have maybe like what you've just done here you invite you know people eight or 10 people commit themselves to replicate exactly this process and you have people who will just listen in but one problem with linkedin though is that they don't have the capacity to record at the moment unlike clubhouse but that doesn't mean you can't record it and save it and post it after the event so that people can come if they didn't meet the event they could so the issue then becomes well how do you design complex contagion if you want to uh elevate ogm which I think that the more I'm sort of yeah I feel like I'm getting pulled in I said hey this sounds interesting I'm gonna get I want to hear exactly exactly Jerry and but the thing is how can you harness that yes exactly you don't have to go woo but uh you're sorcerer or whatever it is but you know it does it does help the ring yes one ring to rule them all yeah exactly but you know how to I just think I see such huge potential here if it was if maybe um maybe you've already had this discussion about how to orchestrate complex contagion of weak ties because at the end of the day if you're going to develop a decentralized leadership system you have to design it where people can pick up things and run with it themselves and the thing about where I would disagree a little bit with Allison was I agree you have to have the sort of the the local the sort of the the micro level thing but at the macro level at ogm you need to have an overarching vision that will help to facilitate these you know like a mycelium network of all these people doing things and so the question is how do you cultivate that so uh you've intrigued me to get more involved so I hope to come more often on Thursdays and maybe I encourage you to think about how to orchestrate all that great stuff that you're doing on internet and putting it somewhere where it's public and then it'll reduce your entry barriers so that's my two cents at the end rick thank you you've done a lovely job of actually sort of my hard to say tying together so many of the themes that that we started with and that we went through during the call about infrastructure about how to reach out and so forth and and I'm intrigued by linkedin we just had a discussion uh on the list about whether or not we should use the linkedin group that I started way back when you know two years ago when I when we started these conversations I went into linkedin and created a group called ogm it exists and we've done nothing with it we haven't sort of walked in and used it I'd be thrilled if we started doing something there and I think the question is sort of what for me linkedin brings a business audience a very very large business audience that you can engage in lots of interesting ways so that's kind of cool none of the platforms facebook or linkedin are particularly optimal for these kinds of things but they're not terrible for these kinds of things uh so oh cool so I will go look at your linkedin post and one question just one last thing I watched a movie called mr jones if you haven't seen it it's an amazing document it's an amazing story it's linked into the article there but it made me think about unsung heroes and he was an unsung hero and I was wondering whether you've ever done a mental map of unsung heroes giving recognition to people who have uh you know just don't get the credit and recognition they do so if you have any unsung heroes so the answer to that is yes rick and this is the thought this is exactly the thought the the center of my thesis around trust is built from stories I got from contrarians out there like uh Christopher Alexander who created a pattern language like Hans Monderman here's Hans who was who died some years ago but he helped invent traffic calming which counter-intuitively says if you if you if you subtract all the affordances we think create safety in traffic situations and then redesign your intersections you know thoughtfully it turns out accident rates go down throughput stays high and you rebuild community because people are making eye contact again at the intersections so so in many different fields of endeavor from parenting and child rearing to finance to urban planning these are my heroes and mostly they're contrarians because they were rejected by their peers yeah which means I think by definition they didn't get that much attention in the way that you were intending uh what you said so I'm going to post a link to that thought uh to the chat right now so you can add it to the blog post that would be even better if you have I'm going to put it in a couple places but it'll it'll end up in today's notes as well but thanks for asking that was awesome we've gone well over time almost 15 minutes over time I really appreciate today's conversation it really like it was heartening at a moment of of hard to find heart although in our communities I think we find heart and I really love that I love that we come together in these ways to do that anybody else have a final thought more good um thank you very much see you on the tubes bye for now