 to the computer or to something else. I just end up running around. That's funny. This is the OGM check and call on Thursday, February 1st, 2024, first day of February. Just as a note, I had previously scheduled a governance call, topic call for later today, and just realized that my travel is going to complicate it, et cetera, et cetera. So I moved that schedule forward by two weeks, sent a note to the OGM list, and I will send a proper invite to that call after this call, which everybody is welcome to forward to whoever else. But so there's no 10 a.m. call today on the topic, 10 a.m. Pacific. And my apologies if that messes people up, who didn't invite lots of other people, but I think this will make it a little better for all of us. This is a check-in call. We are in check-in mode. I don't see anybody who doesn't know how to do the dance, so I'm going to go quiet. I will encourage us not to use the chat too much during the check-in round. Feel free to take notes on your own and then share them at the end of check-in if you'd like. I will not be traffic controller during the check-in round, so I will just step back and use your Zoom hand or just step in if nobody's got their hand up, but that's how I'll know what the queue is. And feel free to take a pause between everybody speaking so that we have some quiet periods in between. That's one of the virtues of our check-in protocol is that we take our time checking in and just being present with one another. Please don't go twice in the check-in round. Just go once and wait until everybody's had a chance to check in, and then we will go into general conversation in our usual flowy mode. With that, I will step aside and see who would like to take us in to today's check-in. I guess I'll go first. It was great to have Jerry and Pete, and then we also had, I hosted a celebration of Doug Engelbart's 99th birthday on Tuesday, and ended up having some of the key people. Broda Haigland, he's really been focused on Doug's on the word processing part of it, the future of text, and he's developed some tools for the Mac platform on trying to bring in some of that functionality. And then Simon Buckingham who was at OpenUK, he's in Australia now, and I'd sent him a message and he said, I'm under deadline and I won't be able to, and then he did chill up anyway, so I was very happy to see that. And then I've been quite involved in the International Society for the System Sciences, and we're actually going to be having the conference here in Washington, D.C., at the University of District of Columbia, and then I just found out that Fielding Graduate University, we're going to have our in-person summer event in Washington, D.C., at the University of District of Columbia, so it's great that I won't have to travel, I was expecting to have to go to Chicago for that, so the main things, and then I've been trying some experiments, the doodle pole isn't working well and stuff, so I'm just going to pick some times, but Sunday's actually the 56th anniversary of Martin Luther King's the drum major instinct sermon, and then I don't know if you saw the MSNBC documentary a few years ago, but Harry Belafonte actually hosted the Tonight Show, February 5th to 9th, 1968, had Martin Luther King on there, RFK, like a whole bunch of people, something like that, so just looking to organize something to have a conversation around that, so I'll be posting that on as LinkedIn events, so hopefully something you'll be able to attend. Well, I might as well take the second bite of this cherry. Well, what's top of my attention right now is futures of democracies and governance. This morning I listened to last week's recording of last week's OGM call about governance, really fascinating. I wish I had been there at that discussion, but the recording of the call plus the chat makes it accessible for me, and I will be able to make three of the four scheduled calls in Jerry's email, so I do hope I'll be able to contribute to that. As most of you know, as I've talked about it before, I'm very busy with my co-organization of the Iceland conference about the futures of democracy starting the 21st of February. I know the website's been put into the chat on other occasions, and I can put it in again after I'm taking this turn at the microphone, and as I had said before, it's going to be a working conference. The second day will include three full-day parallel future labs about important drivers of change in society. The lab that I'm going to facilitate is about governance paradigms and institutions, and to prepare for that I've been working the last couple of days on a short handout about some of the challenges that the governments and people living in democracies are facing, things like general fear of the new and the fear of the future and the fear of the other, and people being angry at being shut out of society, not being listened to or respected, a hunger for more certainty, general dumbing down of people due to education, systems failing, media attention span issues, the idea of elections as a competition with winners and losers, things like that. So I'm trying to work out a sort of value neutral expression of ideas like that so people can take them or leave them as they start talking themselves about how they see the challenges to democracy and what they think is important to do with them. And the second thing on my mind these days is the continuation of the initiative for intergenerational dialogue in this year. I've also talked about this and written about it before. We're looking at organizing or helping other people to organize up to 10 or 12 sessions between young people and society's elders in as many countries as we can find. And the topic is in this big election year, what does democracy mean to me and what does voting mean to me? Why should we vote in elections? So we're investigating how to find people for that type of initiative. This morning I spoke to a friend and colleague in Italy who was helping to work with a youth assembly in one of the larger states of Italy, Emilia Romana, where Bologna is the capital. They've prototyped a youth assembly where young people between six and 12 and another group of young people between 13 and 18 are looking at how they can influence lawmaking and the issues get discussed for preparing policy deliberations in regional elections there. Yesterday I spoke with someone who is facilitating world cafes with university students about how they see the future and he's going to put it to a number of the students to see if they're interested in these type of intergenerational conversations as well. So nothing really new as far as things I haven't said here before, but those two work processes I'm involved with are moving on. Hi Judy, welcome to the call, the strange silence. I don't remember how many of our check-in calls you've been on, but we're taking lots of time to step into the circle and then participating only once, such as as a reminder. Thank you. So you don't think, what happened to these people? Nice to see you. Likewise everybody else too. Thank you. Maybe I'll step in. So we started, my partner and I started to get into sort of ground level of the industries where we've been developing a networking meeting that's different with the medium-sized companies in the food business throughout the supply chain farmers all to CPG producers consumer packaged goods producers and everything in between and it has been incredibly regenerative I mean just completely beyond our expectation on how receptive this group really was and then what you realize is that the missing link in this creative soup really is for them to be connected. So what occurred to me in the process is actually what my next newsletter centered around this topic is that when you work in a large corporate setting you have any resource you need, a phone call away, you need some engineering talent or you need finance or business planning it's right there when you have no specialists joining your team coming in and out as you need it as a project lead. Well when you're working up by yourself there's a lot of blind spots you have in the marketplace that you that are not really visible until you get deeper down into the operational environment so there's some there's a lot of failures now in the startup business simply because you know they missed something in the supply chain they went away off or there's a consumer acceptance issue and so on and so on. So we actually had such a good feedback that we are pitching today not the 10 o'clock today to a co-op in the Palouse that has that operates over two million acres of mostly wheat main farmland one some of the most productive farmland in the US and they're connecting them with a European flour mill that is mounted on a 40 foot truck container and can produce protein extracts from virtually anything which is the hardest market out there right now is to produce protein extracts and to do that locally meaning you have sea or shipping cost you know the entire process is there is is opening up a plethora of opportunity for farmers to call to call small batches smaller batches of highly localized types of crops that are that are like perennials perennial grains and so on that are very productive to restore the soil now Derek sequestered nitrogen into the soil but so far these farmers don't have a market for these products they get so particularly not a value adding market so here's an opportunity to do this in a prototype way Washington State University has an extension there Idaho State is right 10 minutes away on the other side of the border the Palouse is right between this triangle of Oregon Washington and Idaho so we're super excited about this I've worked with this team in the Palouse before so they're they're they're very motivated super super engaged people super very excited about this I think this is this is just going to work because Siemens coming in I mean the company that does the that produces this technology Siemens which is one of the largest electronic firms in the world based in Germany so we have all the resources we need to to make this work but then you know instantly comes to mind creating a project like this has a flow you know and the imaginary type of project flow is just uh very conducive you know to bring it to to get through these stages of design feasibility check you know design adaptations another feasibility check and so on and work towards something that has you know a really good chance to making it work so I think we just need to really turn towards practical things you know that that can actually make a difference in the field and if and and to to assist you know these these innovators in the market to get a foothold and to get gain access to these tools and resources that that uh I mean that take a lifetime it's not just knowing that there's a tool but also how to use it and and how to work this process it just takes a lifetime of learning to to to get your mind wrapped around it so yeah that's uh that's a big departure and I've been working with nonprofits for the last six figures or so um but we just there don't just you just don't have the resources and and and it really doesn't translate you know into into a practical application of actually creating a product you know that that works so I'll uh I'll let you know when when we have something more tangible but uh and the interesting the fun part is that in this meeting in this networking working meeting we had the CEO of a consumer packaged goods at the table and she's going to be coming right up front into this meeting so we basically have a farmer and then we have an end producer and we can now communicate what type of product what type of protein do we need you know for this kind of super popular product uh yeah and so we have from the from the get go we are having farm to table discussions you know where we are exchanging market intelligence going both directions yeah so uh so I'll speak um first thing I want to do is uh a little bit of show and tell I'm about to put on um some socks that I bought as a souvenir on safari in Africa I haven't worn them I bought them in October and the other thing that I happen to have on wearing today is a wonderful t-shirt that um my late wife bought me many years ago she saw it in a window in a store in berkeley and had a body I hope you can I hope you can see it great so um I want to thank Jerry and everyone for the opportunity to to share because as people were sharing I was making some notes about um what I've been up to and what's been going on and um um good stuff um so uh some things are starting to uh come to fruition I've been frustrated over the last uh months uh in part uh frustrated in an inquiry about the notion of doing versus being um and what I think is starting to happen is so many of the discussions and little projects that I've been involved are starting to um move uh into a little bit of doing and and and I'm I'm kind of gratified in some way by that um the thoughtful citizen handbook um which Jerry is writing a chapter for is starting to come together um um and it's taken on a global aspect which I'm I'm very pleased with um I think that the the neobook project is this is about to start to move into um a kind of a a doing phase where we're actually putting out stuff that's that's a value um society 2045 combined with with with Jose's radical is starting to get some traction in terms of uh doing things um which is uh really good um the med Wheatley spiritual warrior stuff we're starting to do some some more things out in the world um kudos to um to Gil and to Doug B for introducing AI uh into the conversation because I've been playing with that of late with um with my quote burgeoning a piece of writing called getting to relationship and you know the AI tools are wonderful writing partners when you start to learn how to use them I mean they they can provide extraordinary um benefit and and and value um so that's the kind of the stuff that's been going on let's say um outward facing um inward facing uh it's it's a really I think an interesting time um I just got back from a week in New York uh staying with my sister and visiting family and um it was an amazingly grounding feeling um of ordinariness um and it kind of reminded me of of um of a of an occurrence that happened I don't know 2025 years ago I was going to a Halloween party and I decided to go as just an ordinary person whatever that means meaning as opposed to some Superman or Batman costume like thing I just went in a you know scruffy pair of jeans and an old pair of sneakers and a baseball cap and ordinariness came up um in a zen calendar entry which is something that I look at every day and and the zen calendar entry was um in zen we're always told to leave the danger of the high places and go to the path of safety that path means just ordinariness to be able to return and settle in normality is the final stage of zen and it was just like oh boy this is really interesting and it came up also um you know I got back from uh a week uh in New York and Jennifer's been working in Europe and and one of the things I said to her was you know it's really interesting I was sharing what my experience was like in New York around ordinariness and I said it's really interesting that uh to some degree you and I both live in these identities that we've created um as opposed to the ordinariness you get when you're with family and visiting old friends you know to be called stewie by a couple of old friends was just so incredibly um wonderfully heartwarming um yeah exactly you can't you can't beat that stuff um you just you just can't beat that stuff and to be embraced as uncle stewart by nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews is just an amazingly warm um feeling so I think I'll leave it at that ah today's zen calendar entry I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion and where it isn't that's where my work lies and that's our ramdas quote yes I'll go next um stewart's mention of of um feeling like things are taking shape in some way like there is a movement towards doing and that that this year so far has felt very much like a um a reality and it's and it's happening in surprisingly uh collaborative ways um been communicating with uh with folks across the pond on on some movements that are happening there um and wanting to collaborate say what collaborate what uh for so long everybody's been trying to uh build their own thing and trying to figure out how to position themselves and what's difference and different and uh you know thinking through a lot of work over the years to to do this um the stuff that needs to be done and to see communities actually reaching out to one another uh unprompted un unforced uh is is uh both heartwarming and uh really practical because we're starting to see how those pieces come together um the the work that we're doing within uh radical and moving towards radical world which is um an understanding that the work we had been doing in um the world of work um is too limiting um we can't just work and help people reorganize in a different way we need to help people see the world in a different way um and that that seeing the world is the underlying uh way for us to be able to make those changes for the last four or five years we've been running into issues of you know bringing people together who show interest in in changing how their organizations work to be more self-managed to be more uh human to be more compassionate to be a whole bunch of different definitions of what that means and it turns out um that we don't know how to do that even though we want to do that and uh we don't know how to do that within organizations we don't know how to do that in an ecosystem of organizations uh and we don't know how to do that in our society so how do we how do we look at that uh at a bigger picture and so that's the the direction we're going and the the neo book project that uh Stuart mentioned um is um as I've spoken to to Pete and Jerry um is an effort to bring more folks to be involved in that question of what have we seen that has caused the society that we have seen as the reality and what is the reality that we can see that will allow us to do the things we all want to do we just don't know how to do and so that's the that's the goal it's a it's a project that I would love for as many of you who would like to be involved um and includes bringing um bringing voices like yours to the table not just to talk about what you see as a future and whatever efforts you're making towards making that future come about but also um or more importantly I think to talk about what brought you to the point where you think that's necessary what experience have you had because there's so much power especially us older folk uh there is so much power and our experience so many young people already feel what we feel but have not had the experience with that we have had and so they cannot connect with something in their past they need to connect with something in our past and we need to tell that story and I think the more stories we can tell the more diverse the stories we can tell the more um it will resonate for more people and so that's really what that book's about and so that's something that 2045 and Radical are going to be bringing together with um with the Neo Books project hopefully that will they'll work for us and um and open this up for everybody to add to that book it's not a book written by any one person or any group of people it's a book written by us and that includes you um and so how do we how do we do that multi-lingually uh culturally uh adapted to different cultures as well and find ways to uh to tell that story so that that's the work we're doing it feels like we've turned the corner um and it's um a lot of work ahead but it's it's good work thank you I had two different thoughts that I'd like to share briefly one was that I think how we got here was the intense focus on individualism the the notion of competitiveness personal competitiveness and you know to be the best meant you were better than others and distinct from others all of which it seems to me a significant misconception of the right way to run the world and I think there's a lot of things we could do to address that but I not rather than go in that direction right now one thought I had was that I wonder whether you might have considered in your book inviting participation from grandmotherly grandfatherly type people or otherwise people just as like an insert not a not a treatise but you know three or four paragraphs or something small that just drifts along place different places in the book that might have an opportunity to share a bunch of these experiences in a context that could be particularly constructive I don't think I'm supposed to be speaking again but to answer your question we we've the maybe we can have an offline conversation because the way that we've structured it is a little bit different than the average book and it may answer your question thank you thank you and I can see Jerry smacking my hand for speaking twice now a third time oops a fourth time well Judith was added on the check-in for you oh I guess I from a check-in standpoint I've been doing a lot of the same sorts of things in the various nonprofits that I work with trying to put in place as I'm sort of exiting as a senior the inclusiveness and the sense of vision and continuity that the nonprofits need to have and the diversity in their board participation that will help them assure that to happen so we've been doing a little bit of OB and some of the nonprofits and some future visioning and things like that and that feels like a nice legacy to leave thank you well good morning everybody and thank you to all who've spoken Gary I think we're not supposed to reference things that people said previously but I'm going to do one since we have a precedent for rule breaking rule breaking thank you Jose you know what you mentioned about young people needing to connect with stories in our past really resonates for me right now I've been noticing noticing a shift in the conversations that I'm hearing from the kind of okay boomer dismissal of older people we need to focus on younger people get younger people on stage don't have older people on stage which I've talked about before is a challenge to getting speaking gigs these days and I'm detecting people saying you know we really need to get some of this elder wisdom and experience and understand what's gone before and the shoulders that we're standing on the work preceded the work we're trying to do now so I think you're very timely with that I'm encouraged by that let's see I've also been poking around in the neo books world or I guess Pete maybe the neo book adjacent world I'm not looking to write whole books together just yet but to engage engage the crowd in refining some work that I've done previously I've been in a period of creative ferment both doing new writing and also looking at prior writing that I've done and I've talked with the Pete about taking my now 15 year old book The Truth About Green Business came out in 2009 was extremely well received great great reviews on it and we wrote it to be relatively title as principal based and it mostly holds up on that count but you know 15 years ago the exact the the case studies need to be different the examples of what's been done needs to be different their elements on the landscape of sustainability and business that weren't there 15 years ago and so I'm looking at updating the book this is like it's like a it's like a green business for dummies truth about as a financial time stress imprint that I took the rights back from so I'm looking at doing an update and then putting it out in the wild and inviting people to comment and suggest and provide additional you know updated examples and what's missing and what's stupid and so forth so we're moving forward on that and then I guess not neo bookie but you know but adjacent in my mind because of the online publishing component and back to what Jose was saying about our past 30 years ago I did bi-weekly column for the LA Times syndicate on business and environment I think one of the first of that sort and I'm looking at pulling those doing a collection an anthology of you know collected essays anthology maybe under the title of the roots of sustainability or maybe something else from open suggestions but to provide the tens of thousands of new kids in the game with some perspective about what it looked like 30 years back in the building blocks that a lot of the current work has been built on so open to thoughts and ideas well thoughts whether that's a good idea or not whether it's the right thing to call it and I'm having having a lot of fun exploring the technology options and how did I do this thing in a way that's both streamlined for me and cool for people who encounter it in that context I also have been doing a bunch of playing around with AIs yes to it very much as a partner as a research team I got two major projects underway which I think I've talked about before one is with the living between worlds webinar history that you know monthly conversations that Ken and I have been posting and by the way last month we had Hunter Lovens as our guest I don't remember we talked about it here before but it's a very lively and engaging and realistic perspective on the climate crisis the COP conference and so forth so I encourage you if you're at all interested in that topic it's a terrific resource for that so we've built we've trained an AI on that corpus of you know some 40 or so conversations over the last four and a half years and piloted it in our session in December and we're working on refining it now I just discovered yesterday that I could ask the AI to look at the corpus and give me a series of tweets that I could post from it so I'm starting to play with that it's a little stupid needs some need some help but you know sort of looking at how to enhance the workflow give people give people good jewels that also will attract them into the conversation and the other project is is a is a coaching bot you you all know that I've been doing one-on-one coaching for a number of years ontological perspective focused on people who are leaders and leaders leaders and emerging leaders in the climate and sustainability realm and it's been deeply gratifying work both because of the impact that I'm having with my clients I'm finding that the one-on-one work with people is in many ways a lot more satisfying than the grind of trying to move a large organization and sell consulting projects and that big game so I'm gratified by the impact I'm having on them or what they say is the impact I'm having on them and I'm also really surprised at the impact it's been having on me every single coaching session I come out with discoveries about myself insights about myself new moves that I can make it was really a surprise in that work anyhow I'm in the process of extracting all the transcripts from all the clients over all the years scrubbing them to de-identify them and then dropping them into a language model and by the way the all of these I'm finding all of these recording bots fat them and otter and so forth are really good at what they do they are not very good at user experience and managing the archive of sessions extracting exporting sorting and so forth not not good there at all and so we built a preliminary coaching bot came to that stuff it ain't bad so far it's not good enough for anybody to see yet the motive there is twofold one is to is to just make this work available much more widely as you can imagine one-on-one I have to charge for something and a lot of people can't afford that so I'm looking at something that could go out free or very inexpensive way to a wider universe and then yeah also it'd be nice if it could be a monetized source of a financial flow for me the experiment the current experiment I'm sorry I guess I'm going on wrong let me just say one more thing to try to move the stochastic parrot into a more useful direction I've been looking at giving it a kind of context of you know where do I come from how do I don't my my my my technical partner is out of the world of programming and machine learning and is inclined to provide if then instructions like if you hear a phrase like this say that which of course is not how human beings work in conversation there's elements of that but it's something much more amorphous and cloudy but I'm trying to characterize what are the where am I coming from what are the traditions I'm standing in what are the flavors of approach that I do and so I've been trying to build a short list of the lineages that I'm standing in and it was going to be three or four things and it's now seven or eight then what the list is now is that I'm informed by ontological ecological Buddhist Hasidic Aikido trans contextual somatic systems theory and language actions perspectives and an attention to what Gregor Bateson called the pattern that connects so I say that to you for a couple of a few reasons one is you all know me in some sort of way I'd welcome your suggestion of words that would characterize the lineages or perspectives that I'm standing at I welcome your reactions to the list that I just read and this has been a very fun exercise for me so I invite you to might want to try it for yourself at some point last two things in the in the work on this this morning I discovered a paper from Steven Nachmanovich of musician improvisation musician and a close student of Gregory Bateson who just published a paper called being whole w-h-o-l-e and I'll get a link out to you later it's a it's a really for me very rich and provocative reflection on the work Gregory Bateson with a lot that's relevant for many of the themes that we're talking about here and last but not least those on the webinar this week with a guy named Nikol Mehta M-E-H-T-A who some of you may know he was the founder of service space only five years ago or so which is a an international now an international volunteer organization focused around generosity and reciprocate and and and folks around generosity I guess and flow nippon created karma kitchen some years back in Berkeley which was a restaurant where you don't pay or you pay what you want to pay and look service-based.org look it up it's profound in what they've done and it got me wondering about moving from at natural logic we move years ago from selling time to selling projects and we experimented with asking clients to pay what they think things were worth which is still transactional as opposed to just you know doing stuff to do it and see what happens and so I'm sort of beginning a thought experiment of could I do something like that in my coaching work and in my consulting work what might that look like how do we move out of the transactional rest reciprocity is good but transactional is a bit of a trap and if we look to living systems as our teacher which I often do it's rarely transaction so that's just that's like a new pebbles in the pond generating ripples that's a big stone that got thrown in the pond and is rippling in me right now and I will stop there thank you for this thing I guess I'll step in I unfortunately was late and I have to leave a little early I think I know most almost everyone I'm Mike Nelson live in Washington DC but right now I'm in Palm Springs because my wife works at Sunnylands the the state of the former state of the Annenberg family and she had a long business trip and I decided to come along and do my work here two weeks ago in the last check-in I was pretty pretty down I just overwhelmed by the amount of bad things going on the amount of information you have to consume both professionally and just to keep track of all the bad things going on and and maybe spot a place where you can make a difference and push the arc of history towards something better I'm a little more overwhelmed but also more hopeful this this day one thing is that I discovered an amazing essay by the former head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where I work some of you may have seen this it came out the day and a half ago William Burns who's currently the head of the CIA wrote a wrote a very insightful short essay on state spy craft and state craft for foreign affairs and foreign affairs put it outside its paywall so grab it while you can it's not very long but very deep and you might end up reading it twice covers a lot of topics very very nicely the other thing I found is a great podcast from Tuesday with Brian Kloss he's written a number of books the most recent one is called Fluke and he also was kind of going through how did we get in this mess and what are we going to do about disinformation and polarization and political violence and not just in the U.S. but around the world but at the end he had some positive points on how we can start fighting for truth and perhaps as individuals help other people find sources of information and sources of satisfaction the other reason I'm a little more optimistic is I finally push through my writer's block and I'm finishing a project on digital policy and it's a really big picture look at how Korea Malaysia United States are tackling these really tough political issues their their their digital policy issues but they're they're really hard because they've become political and yesterday's hearing with five of the CEOs of the social media companies highlighted this just a four hour festival of PR and sound bites and theater I've never seen this before they they they were looking at how social media has destroyed or at least damaged young people and they invited all the parents or they invited parents of probably 40 different people victims people who had committed suicide or people who had found drugs online and they had them sort of as a cheering section for the senators as they pounded on Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Twitter the CEO of TikTok it was it was I guess it's the next step you know Trump has shown us that you know how to do campaign rallies and these guys have decided that rather than using hearings for fact finding they would use hearings to generate pressure on the social media companies and basically brow beating them into saying yes senator your bill is great you should definitely do that even though anybody who's analyzed these bills for more than 20 minutes knows that they would be incredibly damaging they wouldn't fix the problem and they would cause all sorts of other problems including collection of huge amounts of data violations of privacy and preventing teens from finding each other online and and finding resources they need because they would be censored out of most of most much of what they'd want to get would be censored so it was uh uh this uh as they say this this book was uh this uh the book is the latest book by cloth is called fluke but the podcast on the bulwark platform was called why everything we do matters which I also also thought was a kind of powerful um powerful uh uh motto but going back to my professional work and the digital policy that is the same thing there you know people are just kind of giving up on a lot of this and they're not looking for real solutions anymore they just want to be seen as pretending to solve problems and and it's all about PR not policy uh PR not progress and I'm hoping this little paper will poke some holes at some poke some ribs of some policy makers in this country and Brussels and elsewhere and get them to start focusing on real solutions because we've we've been very stuck on policy because so many different groups have so many different agendas and it's easier for politicians to just stand up and say well my goal is to protect everyone's data and make sure we can monitor bad people online at all times and to make sure that our national security is protected and to block Chinese apps it's it's just kind of a hodgepodge of of contradictory goals so if anybody has a way to cheer me up a little bit more that would be good um but in the meantime I'm spending a lot of time finishing up this project and enjoying being in Palm Springs and away from home where you know I don't know about you but when I sit at home I often look around and just see seven projects that I haven't gotten to yet that I really should fix up or whether it's filing or fixing a window a long ramble hope it was useful um and I hope I gave you a few URLs that you might find helpful the uh the force of humans talking to humans is strong with me today I'm feeling all of you as you show up and report in what's up other things in the world have been sort of reinforcing this and I'm just feeling those dynamics a lot uh I'm part of what I wanted to report in on it was something that I experienced over the weekend when April and I were in San Diego for a workshop a few of you have heard some pieces of this if you've been on calls with me earlier this week but I wanted to relate something there and I also got a chance to hang out with Pete and his wife in person um which was simply awesome it's been years and years since we actually were in the flesh together and it was lovely and San Diego is beautiful and it was sunny and we went out and saw the ocean and the bay and things like that part of the workshop uh this workshop was run by a woman who is an NLP master neuro-linguistic programming she is a terrific facilitator of groups uh she was very experienced and really good terrific sense of humor but also this insane sense of how the human spirit shows up what happens to us through life in our interactions with family and others how we process or fail to process that maybe how to liberate some of that all of that was kind of in the room in the workshop which is really interesting and we did a couple different exercises one of which was a family constellation which I had heard of before in fact during the dinner I'd never participated in one in person and I'd heard of them and I was a fan and during the the opening dinner on Friday night we got my little table of four got into conversations and I brought up internal family systems therapy which we did some of and family constellations which we did some of and so I was really excited that that happened and I'm just going to describe a little slice of the family constellation so you have an idea of what it is and I give a bit of the punchline first which is uh and Michelle our facilitator said this going in and then said it afterward she said um this works every time we just don't know why it works we don't understand it we have no no understanding of why so before the exercise she asked anybody who wanted to sort of deal with some issue to who would like to volunteer to be the client of the exercise because the constellation is for one person at a time to put their names in a hat with a brief brief description of the issue they were trying to fix or get let go of and uh I don't know probably a dozen people put their names in a hat one was drawn and Michelle drew that somebody else do the name Michelle looked at it and didn't say a word and then asked for two volunteers so two people stood up she put them in front of her and then she stood behind each of them put her hands on the shoulders and then walked them sort of into the circle because everybody was seated in the circle and put them someplace that felt right did that for both of them and then interviewed them and said what are you feeling roughly and pretty much instantaneously they both went into very intense feelings and the first person who went out started feeling shame and sort of rage and like was and just you could you could see it you could feel it and then I talked to him afterward he said I don't I don't know what happened but 30 seconds after she sort of assigned me and when she assigned these people their roles she didn't say a word didn't tell them what the role was didn't tell them what was up none of that but they instantaneously went into this connection with what turns out to be a very accurate probably very likely accurate representation of what that person in that situation might have felt then she asked for two more volunteers and that that was all it for the volunteers then after a while of going back and forth and sort of asking these characters and turning them a little bit toward each other and you know what now what are you feeling can you report in just just sort of pulling that out and she did this really beautifully and then asking them to say things to each other that she heard in what they were saying or reporting back then she went to the person who was the client in this thing with none of us knew who it was who then stood up went and sat next to Michelle although Michelle was walking around a whole bunch and started crying because this was her life situation and it was apparently really accurate and I'll give a piece of the plot which is that this was a person who had been adopted and what turned out was that the characters being represented by those of us in the room and I was not one of the four who stood up and represented some piece of this constellation but it had to do with with the birth parents the biological parents having to give up the child and what that had meant in her life etc etc etc and it was at some point everybody was bawling it was truly powerful and I think that gives you a little flavor of it if you have a chance to participate in one just go for it like if I can highly recommend it and and at the end Michelle again said this this works every time and we don't know why can't tell why but it was it was profound for me as well and it's it's profound also for not just the client but also for all participants and bystanders and everybody else the people who volunteered to step in had experienced something very emotional and at times physical one of the people who would who was representing felt like she had like like super heavy and basically lay down where she was I just have to lay down I can't stand anymore like that so it showed up and it showed up in spades and it was a delightful example of human dynamics at play with that I'm complete for now thank you Jerry for sharing that um that may be parallel to what I was going to say earlier I wanted to pick up with what Judith and Gil was saying and just add that there is an importance there of matching what the listener wants to ask with what the speaker wants to say and in like in what you're talking about it's happening naturally and nobody can actually say what's going on um I wanted to share this I have this book here by my friend Molly Sargent and she wrote a book it's called same response and it's a book of poetry but she writes it in a way that she leads you on her journey through grief and healing but she invites you to take the journey with her and add your own voice and the particular poem I wanted to read is called her own sweet voice and um it's really what I think you know the people in this group are not are are different than let's say the regular people that you'll see on Facebook when I look at Facebook I see people that are dying to have their voices heard and maybe some of them shouldn't but the need is still there and so I think it's anyway should I read this poem now or should I wait until the end when we usually read poems it feels like a lovely thing to do right now okay please okay there is someone residing in you or waiting beside you not fully seen nor heard yet yearning to be please share with her these poems from me by chance she may know my voice by circumstance she may find resonance with my words just as soon she will encounter a choice my vulnerability will mirror her vulnerability welcome or weary some comforting or uncomfortable understandably she may be reluctant to acknowledge our connection she be like me exposed by these expressions no matter resonance not exposure is the point of my writing firstly resonance with myself being visceral resonance is its own advocate and will not be ignored not by her just as it would not be by me no longer complicit with the dark her many hidden parts will demand to be brought into the light refusing to continue out of sight only aided or resisted in their wish to reunite with her resonance a passive force becomes a choiceless choice so remind her will you gently how resonance for her as for anyone in poetry songs sex a walk in the park yields connection oh how she craves connection firstly with herself i send love to her through and in and by these words i encourage her to write down hers may she find resonance and welcome its choice in her own sweet voice this is the author again molly sergeant i'll go good morning thanks for thanks for being here and it's wonderful wonderful to see all your faces it's super fun seeing jerry with my wife hiking on the on the you know above the the ocean seeing the bay seeing the pelicans and and the wind and all that kind of stuff it was super fun thanks jay um the new book stuff is coming along pretty well we're coming at it from a multiplicity of directions which is kind of a new book's way i think one of the things we maybe learned this week was j pick the name new books because books are are an evocative thing for for our culture especially people a little bit older i think maybe but we talked about different ways of thinking about them and and the the big part one of the big parts of new books is that they're made of pieces and the pieces can come together in some way or they could be taken apart and put together in another way and sometimes it's a book sometimes it's a slideshow or presentations sometimes it's a video we're talking about integrating podcasting and audio interviews and things like that so i think to know about new books is it's a lot more about collecting and sharing maybe i was going to say information but maybe stories is a better way to say it i think some new books will be you know information but a lot of new books will be stories so you could either come to new books calls on monday's uh or you can ping jerry or ping me and and you don't have to be part of like the core of new books experience new books itself the project sits in amongst several related kinds of projects working on text and working on hypertext and working on sharing information and things like that so new books is kind of like the the center of of an interesting set of communities and efforts and people and projects but you know some of the people i think who are participating new books think new books is on their edge not in their center which is fine um i'm a little bit sad to be a correspondent this week perhaps from the ai world so on the one hand i'm super happy to kind of tell people some interesting things from the ai world and it's not going to be very technical this week um but on the other hand it's either a really important tool that we're going to have as we move into the next 10 or 20 or 50 years um or not it it feels like it's going to be really important um it also i don't know this week it feels a little trivial to me like there are more important things to talk about but it's where i live and and work right now so so here i am um as a transition from the new books thing there were about six or seven of us who got together six or seven ai explorers who got together a couple months ago and we wrote we we did about half of a new books experience um half half new books and half conventional um so that was a a trip um and fun and i can bring some of that experience of doing a compressed let's write a book about something experience to new books this book happened to be about ai futures it's called ai futures and anthology um our leader was a amazing person named Cindy Kuhn uh and it's i'm almost embarrassed to say this for whatever reason uh it's right now it's a print on demand book paperback uh in amazon and it's currently doing pretty well um so i'm going to grow into into that a little bit more i think one of the communities that i'm in uh that is really amazing and if you're interested at all in ai i recommend checking it out uh it's called ai salon and it's uh one of the main instigators of it is Kyle Shannon an old friend of Jerry and me kind of coincidentally um he's you know he's one of the early tech adopters uh as a non-tech person uh so a year ago uh he and some friends started this thing called a salon um they have two hour get-togethers uh every other week on tuesday kind of afternoon late afternoon evening and then there's an ongoing online community uh and it's a really the the um the feel of the community is uh you know hey this is something new and super interesting and all of us are new here and nobody knows a lot more than anybody else because everything is so new and there's a lot of sharing and giving feeling to it so uh it's a friendly and welcoming and human place uh to kind of live and grow into knowing a little bit about ai or a lot and we have a lot of people there uh who you would think of as regular people um they don't have tech jobs um uh uh they're different colors they're different genders um uh they're different ages especially and it's really surprising to see who are the experts because they're not people that you would expect um and it's kind of funny some of them are very bashful about it i'm i'm a little bit bashful and some of the other ones are even more bashful than me um one of the women is doing these amazing art pieces and she's like i don't you know i i'm nothing special i'm just you know playing around uh you could all play around the same way she's actually kind of special there's a lot of stories like that um uh and uh so it's ai salon ping me some other way and we can talk about it i can you can either kind of jump in by yourself or i could give you the uh 15 and 10 or 15 minute uh penny tour and say here are the different sub communities you kind of want to think about um it's it's kind of big it's grown from i don't know 500 people a few months ago to a thousand people and it's growing fast they're trying to grow up fast and they're starting actually uh in-person meetups too they've been doing uh in-person meetups in denver in the evenings right after the the big uh group call online and um they're starting to to have those volunteers are starting to spread that in and different cities around the us hopefully around the world at some point so one of the interesting uh they sometimes they have a guest speaker um at these things and uh this week's was really a really interesting person that somebody who's worked for pixar for 12 years or something like that and he's starting up a kind of an indie animation studio and so he went through a lot of stories about you know um poking their toe into uh ai uh how you do animation why you do animation and a big part of the reason he's involved in animation is to tell stories uh so he's done a bunch of like tech slash art stuff in a number of the pixar movies and he was telling us for a while about inside out inside out is from 2015 it's a disney pixar animated film it's got it's got an interesting mix of it's a cool story and it's also very emotionally affective so the way he described it a lot of the movie is actually the story of the main director watching his teenage daughter grow into you know through adolescence and turn into a different person and kind of the the background of how hard it is to be an adolescent and stuff like that and um he showed us a short clip of a film that his his indie studio has been working on it's a we saw a scene i don't know exactly the whole thing but we saw a scene where there was a like a teenage boy and a slightly younger girl um out doing some stuff in nature but the the girl happens to be non-verbal um in the way she communicates and she's a little challenging to to be in presence with so um he thinks it's really important to tell stories and his medium happens to be animation and um there was a there was a i think these were connected there was an interesting some of the other things that have been going on in the islam we talk a lot about you know whether technology is good about or how to adopt it and what to do with it um kyle i i heard kyle say this uh and um i can't even quite grasp the context because it was in a bunch of stuff that we do all together but um but what he the the question kyle had for us um in you know the the the common question when you're talking about a is like oh my god what if the ai takes over and you know kills us all or something like that he's like it's not a very interesting question and it doesn't seem very realistic either what if the real question is what if ai helps us to be more human and i suspect that that question made a ton of sense in the context of ai so on and especially watching this guy tell stories about how inside out is this amazing and wonderful thing and a bunch of you know a bunch of parents on the call said oh my god you know my you know my kid is this is how i related with some of my kids during their adolescence right we were able to see this thing projected outside ourselves and then talk about how that worked and it helped us become more of a family by having this external story that we could relate to right uh same thing with um the nonverbal girl you know um somebody said oh my my autistic daughter is watching this and she's got tears in her eyes right um so and then you know we poked at the we we actually are really good at asking questions about ai because we know a lot about ai um we talked to this uh indy um indy studio uh guy and you know asked him about how you're adopting ai and he talked about different ways it's super super good at helping you be creative and run through lots of lots of ideas quicker um they they haven't seen it to be really useful for finished product yet because it's not not good enough it's not up to their standards for you know final final production um but it gives you a lot of like creative uh capability to brainstorm um and and then he somebody said so compare and contrast you know the the process you do now and what you think ai will give you in the next couple years uh with inside out and he's like well inside out took us six years to do and at the peak it was like three or four hundred people working on it so it's a very important story to tell and i'm glad we did it and it was a lot of work um now he sees that you know in in the coming years he'll be able to do that same kind of scale with a much smaller team and then he's like you know so what happens to what what happens if i can do that with a 30 person team you know what happens to the other 270 artists or something like that and he's like i don't know it's a tough one i it's hard to tell but the thing that came out of it was maybe the thing to look at isn't you know how much quicker and cheaper you can do one film compared to another film but how many more you could do if you could do 10 or 20 you know inside out level things at at the same time as you would have done one you get to tell more stories so somehow that connected for me to the what if ai helps us helps us to be more human even if you don't check out ai salon and even if you don't think you're interested in this ai thing there's another everybody talks about chat to bt there's another one that i never hear about except for a few people who who play around with it there's a thing called pi.ai and that's the url pi.ai and you just talk with it and i haven't played around with it so i apologize for second hand information but one of my one of my one of the people i work with in ai salon uh he says he's he's uh he helps people um he's a volunteer in helping people cope with with things and he loves pi.ai he uses a lot himself and he says one of the things you can try is you know how you get to the end of the day and you've got all these thoughts in your head and you can go to bed and you're tossing and turning because you can't get all the thoughts out of your head just like before you're going to bed you know uh hit up pi.ai and chat for a while chat about the things that you're thinking about um and uh it's a good partner in unloading your brain for you know like so that you can get to sleep and that you've talked through resolved you know processed a bunch of the stuff that came up during the day do the same thing for the next day you know what are you you know talk about talk about what you want um what you're thinking about doing the next day um uh i see that we're getting really close to time i i want to run through let me let me do a slideshow 12 12 things slideshow real quick um these i found yesterday these are like found photographs to me uh and i this is mid-journey i hit up a new thing uh yesterday i was like oh my gosh all these prompts are just um uh take take a photograph with a toy camera basically um so we see a lot of ai images that are like weird and and shiny and super pretty and stuff like that i really like the old film feel of these and i like how photographic they got um and uh this last one in particular that one's really cool this last one in particular blows me away because it looks like a to me it looks like a photograph from 1970 1980 except for the one world trade center this is the brooklyn bridge of course and this is brooklyn but this is an impossible shot too i i literally can't quite make myself think that this isn't a photograph a film photograph even down to like some of the fuzzy details the the focus and you know the trees and stuff like that it's amazing stuff so a lot going on with ai thanks i can go quickly before i go home um i do have covid this is day 10 i've been laying on the couch for 10 days um it really hit me hard uh first few days i'm sure 102 sleeping 20 22 hours a day um that's past but i uh i just have no energy i get up and just taking a shower you know i have to sit down after i take a shower because i'm exhausted and kind of shaky um so i just think to myself what if i hadn't had the vaccination i might have been dead by now um so i'm i'm and i'm super grateful for people in my life neighbors and friends who've been bringing soup over every day i haven't you know my wife got it four days after me she doesn't much less um much more mild symptoms but we're gonna have to cook people bringing us food every day which is just so sweet so you know like i guess i've done something right in my life if you spoke to shut take care of me because uh it was my heart um i do feel like i'm on the upswing um and i'm being really cautious and careful because i i've talked to folks who've had it like you know you really get the carefully it can be lapsed very quickly and be prepared um even after you feel better it's going to take you know four to six weeks before you have your your full range of energy back so bearing that in mind and practicing patients um i'm really tired of practicing patients but here i am um so i there's this poet by the name of david ignital who i really like and um this is a poem called as if the prayerful humanity of bach the soldier machine gunning i don't know how to reconcile one with the other and to the living where with others i walk stunned in a cafe music is blurring itself in joy for itself for anyone to dream of reconciliation with conflicted life further down the road an energetic man is eating his wife how to live in confusion and as skeptic angry to have been born to music and to screams intermingling as if one as if not one without the other to make a hole again as if the prayerful humanity of bach soldier machine gunning i don't know how to reconcile one with the other and to the living where with others i walk stunned in a cafe music is pouring itself in joy for itself for anyone to dream of reconciliation with conflicted life farther down the road an energetic man is beating his wife how to live in confusion and as skeptic angry to have been born to music and to screams intermingling as if not one without the other to make a hole in it that one just captures the feeling i have for being in the world today that's fabulous if you can put a link to that on the ogm list as you often do i will appreciate it and thank you for that and i'm glad you're on the upswing thank you me too and i'm taking it seriously and all of that yeah um thank you um please please feel free to pour links into the chat now or i release you from from chat uh purgatory purgatory or whatever yeah i'm wondering like what's the right what's the right conditioner what are you saying and of course i will be sharing the chat back and transfer back on the channel uh so that you can go find these um and thank you it's been really it's it's been a lovely session totally appreciate you're all being here very much until soon mic ideas about which thing oh about tim moves question you're muted right now yeah sorry um no he put a question out about seeking a phrase a buzzword for a more productive less toxic economy centered on medium and small producers there you go distributed capitalism i mean the chat already is providing some interesting ideas that's really nice that totally fits our governance call questions yeah you might i mean if i don't know if you know any other groups that might be interested in helping tim i know tim very well and uh don't always agree with his political ideas i often agree with his diagnosis though yeah and i do hope we can get a word to rally around a lot of good people would be there and all they're out too far too long what's the phrase again well he's looking for something that describes uh an economy that focuses on small and medium-sized enterprise and you know empowers consumers to build great new things rather than an economy that favors monopolies economies of scale and um and the like he's very much a anti-trust lawyer and you know he's written a lot about the consolidation of the telecom sector but that kevin jones has been playing in that space uh he's calling it neighborhood economics he's got a third conference coming up next month in san antonio oh good and it's got some deep work and deep thinking about this so check in with him also um gill if you follow the twitter link that mic put in the chat that's the exact thing that uh he's referring to with tim will because tim was super wooster yeah oh okay got it got it got it yeah unfortunately neighborhood economics um that's seven seven syllables which is two more than uh mic nelson's rule of buzzword allows i do have a another call called net for neighbors which gets to that idea a little bit but that's more redesigning the internet and he wants to redesign economics but maybe there is a way to do neighbor and economics somehow and pull it together neighbor now check out mic shuman also who's been a real pioneer in this space shuman and he he has a book called small mark okay small mark small mark as a as a contrary to mark yeah yeah good and he's a terrific resource for all this stuff uh this is this the small mart revolution how local businesses are beating global competition cool that'd be it there's a lot there's a lot behind that sign his twitter handle is small mart okay jerry do you want credit for neighbor now mix or should i say a brilliant friend told me i'm sure it's been used somewhere i'll check first i like i like it i like it a lot because again it it's less than five syllables and neighbor now mix could actually fit in a single column article headline grab grab the url and tweet handle now okay well i'll get off right now and do that but anyway thanks for letting me complain about life and um i always find inspiration and and and always a lot of urls so thank you thank you very very much this is really i thought i got off five minutes ago then i heard you guys still talking so i found you're still on my computer so i'm gonna take advantage of that to say one thing the family constellation stuff yeah is weirdly uncanny yeah yes have you experienced it or had you heard of it before once and it was like what the fuck is going on here no it's like channeling it's so it's some yeah i like that the person said we don't know what's going we don't know how this works but i saw things that were just you know like nobody in the room could explain how they happened but people validated them yep it's very strange yeah yeah it's and and the people picked up roles that were exactly and precisely right for what was happening and then and then michelle was very careful because as she was interpreting what was happening she said we don't know why they let had to let go of the baby for example when we're not going to make things up we don't want to project anything into here that that that you know that we don't know happen historically but here's what the emotions are and here's what's going on and it was just super powerful it was great more things in heaven ratio yep one last question has there has there been any discussion about what people are doing for the total eclipse or if anybody's going to go chase it we have not had that conversation strangely there's an aikido seminar in montreal that's right next to that eclipse and montreal is on the on the path but i'm not attending the seminar but it would be a good one to go to but nobody's talked about it you might get a cold clear day to watch it yeah okay take care thank you all this is wonderful