 This is the billed OGM call for Tuesday, January 4th, 2021. I was going to say before the recording started that I was hoping to get up to Portland between this year. Unfortunately it does seem like more work. Yeah, yeah and travel right now and I'm a fun going crazy and all that it's just, it's very weird. I got my booster shot last Thursday. So, for a couple of days and I got the flu shot in the other arm at the same moment so for a couple days I couldn't raise my arm very much. Yeah, I'm going to get a flu shot tomorrow. I'm well boosted but also reboosting I think in February. Okay. And any other complications from your, your systems your personal like, sorry, vaccination complications you expect. You're good. Okay. Yeah. You know there's the shingrix. I mean there's, you get vaccines, you know, over time. But certainly, everybody is unclear as to some of the anecdotal things that I've seen been passed around where everybody in a family who's back to his mask, and, you know, and they all get the breakthrough infections but boy we'll just have to ratchet up a bit the, the carefulness. And it's hard to be careful when it's almost two years in. It's like, it's like really hard unless, unless you've been painting or maintaining completely strict discipline the whole time, and they're just not going to waiver from that which means kind of not seeing anybody. Yeah. I did go to the interior of a restaurant. A couple days ago. You know and mask and sit down and have some ramen. Yeah. And I avoided the restaurant that was packed. Yeah, exactly. And it wasn't the other ramen restaurant, which is very likely the better restaurant. No, no, no. Unfortunately, it was some of a restaurant I hadn't tried before and it was not wasn't near as good. Oh, I mean the pack one was probably the better one. Yes, the back one was that that's what I meant packed is usually evidence of popularity or quality or cheap prices or something. But this, but this conversation is like kind of right next door to the movie we watched on New Year's Day which was don't look up, which is right next to all these issues about hey let's ignore this and how do we make decisions together and and all of that. And yesterday's feature is brain calls was a nice peek into some of that stuff as well. Not familiar movie but I'll look it up. Oh, the movie is a new satire by Adam McKay I think is a director not that well known. It's got Leonardo DiCaprio Jennifer Lawrence and a whole. It's got a bevy of stars. And it's basically the first two or star our scientists who discovered that there's a comet that is on a direct path to hit the earth, which is an extinction level event it's it's a big enough it's like 11 kilometers across. So big enough it's kind of like really really whack things and destroy things. And of course the President of the United States who is Merrill Street playing a Trumpian kind of character ignores it. And then a movement arises late in the movies and saying don't look up because because once it becomes visible then they could I like at the beginning it isn't right it's only visible through telescopes. And so DiCaprio goes on TV and a whole bunch of other strange strange things happen where they're just trying to tell everybody hey like we're all going to die. And nobody's listening and and and in the semi rotten social media environment of the times slightly darker than today. It's spun up, you know, spun while the out of control. You know, there's nothing up there. A whole bunch of different conspiracy theories, etc, etc, etc, etc. So, so all of which to say that I still harbor an optimistic hope that people thinking together out loud and showing showing their work in some sense. It's it's really kind of interesting because you know do do the research, or do your own research. I think, do I or is the acronym is like a phrase out of Q and on and some of the conspiracy movements because they're like your own research Well, the sentence before that that doesn't get spoken as ignore the experts, as they're lying to you, and then do your own research and then if you find the right set of websites you can spin wildly down rabbit holes that will take you in entirely wrong directions. Great. So, so how do we have discourse in a place where the fact checking isn't going to work. I mean, the fact checking might help. I think it's interesting and unpacking things is interesting. But, but it's going to be dicey. Anyway, it goes to our whole purpose for sort of sitting here, talking about open global mind. We have three participants here. I don't remember correctly, which This is charted at this the build OGM fall. Right. Yes, yes. And OGM being Stacey, Stacey, I just I just needed you temporarily she's I think bringing her dog back in inside and I just needed you as you can. I'm going to jump in. Yeah. Being an organization. Right. And certainly, you know, different people appear in these calls at different times. People with partly their own agenda is including me. And in the general kind of supportive notion that There may be some kind of leverage in organizing. And, and yet, certainly, We may not yet know where we're going. As we certainly My interest in podcasts is low. And interest in kind of retiring and going to a beach. It's pretty high. But, but here I am. What's what shall we do today. I know. And of all the people who sort of streamed through OGM and all that you and I are the two who have been moderately obsessively filling out one large database or map of stuff for a long time and have that and I think more than most understand the point you brought up yesterday, which is that the mere process of doing this affects your life in a really profound way and changes your thinking in interesting ways. And there's a bunch of other sort of second order repercussions from from the act of creating that memory. And, and I think a piece of what I think you and I share this common hope, which is that more people would do this kind of activity, and would do it in a way that can weave into one another's ideas or thinking or at least make them comparable or, you know, be able to pose them those kinds of things right. And, and, and right now there's bazillions of people posting wildly on tiktok snapshot Pinterest, all the all the socials Instagram right there's just like insane numbers of people following and clicking and posting. If you had if you told me 40 years ago that everybody would have a high definition video camera in their pocket and would be like populating the world with images many of which were like fantastic. I would have said, How's that going to happen. Right. And yet like with cameras the size smaller than your pinky. People are out and about doing exactly that. And there's a neighboring behavior, which sometimes I think might drive people like us here to desperation because it's so sometimes so vapid and vacuous and senseless and, and whatever but it's connective. That might have a piece of which might be harnessed into sense making. And there's a bunch of other sort of pads we could take but but Stacy opened a couple of really good questions recently which were. Hey, what if what if OGM was a game show or a scavenger hunt or a scavenger hunt game show, or what if there were teams who were busy doing things that were both fun and useful. And we had kind of goals and frameworks and all that and I like the idea I just don't know exactly what to do with it. So I just sat down at her at her PC. There we go. Cool. So, so, so part of the conversation that I think is really useful to have is okay so what is what is our format, what is our, what is our framework what is you know what is the thing because so far for me the framework has been. Hey, how do we get information into some more mixable format. What are the tools with which we can look at it that makes in and help make sense out of the world. What do conversations between those people look like. Etc. Etc. And then, you know, we've been doing free Jerry's brain for almost two years and we haven't freed my brain. We've done a simple export but but not that much more. Go ahead Stacy. I just forgot. So once you brought it up. Um, I was listening to something, and I heard a phrase called shoe. Oh my God, it was, oh my God, it was a good for what it meant is, it was about look it was like a conspiracy to contact tracing that's what it was. It was contact tracing conspiracy theories. In terms of like a game show and podcasts and all these things. The idea of a crowdsourced contact tracing conspiracy theory could be a good way to go in and find the relevant information and Jerry's brain can tie into that. Or if it was a competition some people choosing to use Jerry's brain and other people not or, you know, different sources similar I mean I don't know I'm just, I like what you keep saying about scavenger hunt, because there is this drive inside of us and we're trying to stay away from competition, we have to fill that need somewhere. And I think that scavenger hunt thing gives us that adrenaline that motivates us. Could you, I guess. So my instant reaction to scavenger hunt is is face palm. Sorry, because because but why. Yeah that's what I'm trying to. I'm trying to reason out, I guess, and and say, you know, the, the amount of time personally that I would put into a scabbard scavenger hunt, kind of the way I'm imagining a scavenger hunt is like, I boy I'm so busy I just have much, you know, maybe not better stuff to do but yeah I've got I've got to focus on survival. The, the kind of, how do you say, what I was attempting to ask. Before you asked me the question was, what is the larger goal that the scavenger hunt would serve would it be building teams that could be reformed or building a repeatable kind of behavior and skills that if the teams don't reform then actually, the would form different teams. I'm, I'm, I'm confused as to what benefit a scavenger hunt may provide. Okay, so for me, you want Jerry did you. I want to jump in after you but I'm, yeah, go ahead. I look at a scavenger hunt differently. So the role you might play is if I see something I need on the list and I say, I bet your mark knows something about this, I would go to you and say, do you know or can you steer me in the right direction. You might connect me to someone else. So to me that scavenger hunt is more about connecting and using the resources of everybody involved to know where to look for the answers to find the best answers. So yes team building will happen, but it's also, it's also using the collective to move in the right direction for different things. It's really interesting because way back when gamification was really popular like a decade ago. I was like, Oh God, and like an environment and a bunch of people proposed idea environments where you would get points for your people like your idea and rated it up you would get points and level up and all that is like held zero interest for me in the way that I think you were just describing Mark. And yet, and yet, there's this mixture of fun and work that's really important to have the formation of teams or guilds is something that that like Jack Park and topic question all that have gone into for a really long time you know there is that a very deep thread there. And it was interesting because I was trying to stand up guilds inside of GM, and Michael Grossman basically said hey when I heard about guilds and quests I was like I'm almost out of here. And I and I and that caused me to just sort of stop entirely on the guild thing even though I still I think I've come back to it and I really like the guild thing there's there's plenty of guilds that are serious out there in the world. I just want to jump in because what would make guilds feel better to me is if there were more fluidity, if you could come in come out if you could switch if you could share, because otherwise it sounds so. Well, since we haven't framed them up and we don't even know what how they work inside of our structure, we don't know whether they're fluid or strict or whatever. Exactly. And the word implies that to you in some way which is really interesting. And we could be sort of very member fluid in guilds, for example, you could be an apprentice to as many guilds as you felt like and being an apprentice in a guild means you flow in and out you're on the conversation threads wherever they're being hosted. You are learning something some process from people who are senior to you in that particular guild. There's a few people at the core of the guilds who are like the heart of that particular activity that kind of meal, and they make it a better guild and improve the practice and pass it on and all that kind of stuff, but the but the borders of that. The borders of doing it sort of like that would be really simple. The threshold would be just identifying yourself and showing up on a conversation platform would be like what membership would be like in a guild, right. As opposed to, you're going to be apprenticed into the furrier skill, which means the next seven years you're going to live in the master's basement, make no money, and like go wash toilets and bring the bring the the yarn in from the field, like full of friends until you graduate and can do slightly more interesting work, which there's no such equivalent in what we're talking about. Although maybe Stacy because you've been taking a swing at doing the translation of the Darrell Davis call. There is sort of that kind of work I don't know like that's really interesting I just thought, Oh gosh. So, so Mark, Stacy's been sitting down and taking the Google automatic translation of the interview I did with girl Davis and turning it into a nice transcript. Right, just just manually kind of through brute force and Stacy today at 11 Pete and I are going to go through the macro that will hopefully skinny out the carriage returns that don't belong there, which we could have just I guess pasted this thing into word and use the word that but we're not that smart. So instead we're going to use a complicated macro, because Google Docs doesn't support the function. Anyway, there are, there are tasks where you can kind of earn some some cred and some, you can sort of invest some money to work in a guild. I mean that's actually like not that far, not that big a stretch at all. And, and, and guilds on quests, let's you frame up in a fun way pretty serious things like hey let's go questing for what causes people to slip into the queue and on rabbit hole. Let's, or let's do something else sort of semi seriously I mean what you just said about contact tracing conspiracy theories is like kind of really interesting. Right, because because it's sort of, it's a little bit of don't look up ishness. And then, and I'll also say that sometimes, sometimes the interesting thing is the edgy thing, the dissonant thing, the thing that sounds like it shouldn't work is, sometimes the thing that actually will work because it sounds, it attracts the right mix of people. Right, so I'm so and so gameplay for me. Although I think I would normally have the, well wait, we're doing serious work and we're trying to figure out how to make a living here. And so that's one of the things that I wanted to mention that which, if the gameplay could be really super interesting. And, and, and if we were really sophisticated here, the gameplay could all be part of a dowel, and we could be minting occasional NFTs, which could be shared among the people who are members of any of the guilds in the community. And you know, NFTs have a couple really lovely features, one of which is the smart contracts can include terms that that apply for any subsequent sale. So as any NFT gains in value as a speculative instrument, 10% of the of the subsequent sale value flows back to whoever's in the smart contract, which could be all the members of the of the guilds that minted that NFT as that on that date. And for example, right. That's, that's really interesting because that suddenly becomes a way of making a living, because, because the NFT might sell for $1,000, you know, the first time, but for a million dollars and third time. And that, like, like, in any previous technology for supporting art and being a patron of art, subsequent sales of works don't do anything for the artist they're like, oops, thanks so much. Right. There's a famous couple called the Fogels. He was a postal worker and learned how to like learned about modern and conceptual art, and they went and collected except they were they were brilliant collectors who donated the collection to the Museum of Modern Art. I think, before dying, except they were paying Robert Rauschenberg 600 bucks maybe for for a work that that is now worth probably 20 million bucks. And it's like, damn, like, like, if only Bob Rauschenberg had been able to benefit from, from, from NFTs. So anyway, that was a lot of things strung together. But, but the game frame, let's us play with all of this and kind of mash it together and see what happens. And if NFTs becomes, and I'm really intrigued. I think that that mark you and I are busy building the rudiments of the beginning of a shared global memory of this of this shared mind, because we have a we have a durable curated artifact, whatever, right. We can continue to do it after, after decades, and despite all. I think that that that kind of experimentation with the tools that are available and the fit that it has made for that kind of use cases that we have either developed on our own, or, you know, found that fit the tool. Those are, I think they come more from the types of people we are then from the outside world, imposing, you must do this use case. The, I have nothing against games I have nothing against, you know, getting a bunch of people and, and having fun and trying to do good. At the same time, the, the question more than I'm trying to look at is, what is the design space of OGM, you know, are there 200 people. And would a scavenger hunt of a particular guild or a particular subsegment segment attract 20 people of those 200 or their 2000 people and that segment would be 200 people that would be interested in that game. And then, you know, what does the, what does the meaning of being in the group. How does that change evolve when something like that scavenger hunt either gets a whole bunch of attention. Or, you know, like, was it Michael Grossman said, you know, he's out the door. This just isn't what he wants, and he misaligns something like a scavenger hunt with, say, a more a more integrated and more articulated purpose that fits his needs like, you know what, you know, global global warming is the thing or, you know, the collaborative user interface is the thing for him or me or whoever. That's what's on Stacy. You know, I don't think in terms of video game I think more in terms of game shows. And there's different reasons that people do things so I have. Let me just go back when I first started on Facebook and I didn't have anybody to collaborate with. I made friends in different groups and talk to different people I was more focused on what I an ugly political thing that I saw happening before it really got ugly. So the game that I had in mind was sort of like remember when people were playing it was like a Pokemon game, but you used to get it out in the neighborhood. Pokemon go it was called. Right and I would watch my son. So what I wanted to do is couldn't do it by myself, embed clues in different groups. And the goal was to get people, because they were looking for the clues to get them to go to different languages and to mingle and to converse about different things. So, even when I think about a game. I'm thinking about like a lot of cross pollination between different ideas. So like, where in the world is Carmen San Diego, something like that. It has so many elements to it. It had the music, it had the learning about new geographical locations. It had, you know, if somebody were creating that show, they were writing scripts, it had like something for everybody, whether they want to play the game, create the game, just watch the game. So, when you said, what you put design whatever it takes to get people who think differently to make progress together. For me, the glue is here. The glue is that we like each other, and we want to do something together. The glue is that we all want to do something for the better. Hopefully, we don't want to hurt humanity. If we're not actively looking to better it, at least we're not looking to hurt it. But then, some people have certain content areas, they really want to focus in, maybe they could be giving, you know, guidance of where information could be found. Like somebody like me, I would love to have access to certain experts that I can ask specific questions, not hear the whole opinion once it's been formed. I want to go back to the basics and, and hear the facts that made somebody believe this I don't want to hear how they got to it. So, again, that's what I liked about that conspiracy theory contact tracing is in this one video podcast that I listened to, they went back to the first time it was ever said on a tweet. To the next time it was retweeted to the next time some right wing media person said it and how it grew. And if you get people to go back and actually go to the root, they can find the, you know, the truth for themselves. Because they're motivated to look normally, we're not motivated to look for evidence that goes against. So for me it's how do we motivate people to look for that evidence that may change their mind, because they have to find it themselves. So, so a couple thoughts. I put Mark when you asked so what are the boundaries or what is the scope of our operations that's what that's when I design whatever it takes. And if it takes game design to bring people in and create a collaborative memory of a shared mind and start and stop hitting each fantastic. If it takes inventing a new exercise program like CrossFit to get people together to do something fantastic if it takes creating a joke telling marathon to do like I don't know if those things actually work. And often, I believe a lot in oblique strategies, you don't aim directly for a thing you do this thing over here that has that the desired outcome as a byproduct. It's like profit should be the byproduct of a really interesting company that engages people that does good work for the world and then there's some profit over there and you make a living from that, as opposed to let's suck everything dry so that all we you know we collect all the profit from everything which is what capitalism tries to do. I was reminded here of Joey Ito who ran a guild on World of Warcraft back in the day, and was hiring people into the meat and this is before he worked at media lab. He was hiring people into his VC firm called me at me from his guild, because running a company took a whole series of skills and he was watching young people who were running around organizing other people are maintaining like spreadsheets of who who who has what and who like basically ops and logistics, a bunch of other things, which because the game was complicated enough that you could you could just see who shows up and who had stuff. And he said, you know, and there's a famous quote that Jack Park will say, like every third every third call he's on. He's quoting John C. Brown saying I'd rather hire a World of Warcraft expert than Harvard MBA or whatever the quote is I've got it in my brain actually. And that's that's really interesting because because games are on the one hand they're playful but on the other hand, they're testing grounds for a good game, not a shitty game, but a good game. In fact, it refines your skills shows off your skills other other kinds of things like that and that's interesting. It breaks my heart that a third of the Philippines is playing axi infinity, a stupid game in order to try to make a little bit of money. You know, in the in the Dow world out of out of NFTs minting NFTs. And that's just like, shit, could we take that human energy and devoted to really interesting things. Then I wrote down that hi-fi, which are the tips of root systems in particular like like mushrooms basically mycelium, the little tips of mycelium are called hi-fi, hi-fi are quests for nutrition. The body of the mushroom is basically looking for where's the food, where's minerals, where's stuff that I can break down and go use. And in some sense, a scavenger hunt for information would be kind of very much like that. Hey, here's a funny question, here's a funny puzzle, here's a weird thing that happened. Can we find its origins? Can we find out who it influence? Can we can we do contact tracing of the mean viral mean, and then go back through it and say, did you realize that when you forward this it would cascade into and then and what did that mean to you and how does that like that could be super, super, super interesting. And then and then another thing I wrote a little earlier is that game design is really, really hard and really important here. And I know a couple of world class game designers in particular Jane McGonagall, who is a super game designer and I worked with her a bunch at the studio for the future Ian Bogost, I know he would recognize me. He's very funny. He's like a cervic I think would be maybe the word for him is a cervic a good word for for Bogost. He's very funny, and like really cutting like like like the irony runs deep in this one. Yeah. I've read a number of his books. He's very insightful. Yeah, not not met him for or seen him talk on a video. And then there's other game designers like Adrian Han who I don't know but who wrote that really great article about hey is Q and on an alternate reality game, which is a completely fantastic insight because Q and on kind of is an ARG. And for me. What's confusing an ARG, and the alternate reality game is within was by taking it over by becoming a different alternate reality game by by by like playing, playing sort of sort of in the same body of work. And then, and those ARGs are work because they have some grains of truth mixed in with completely outrageous things that like well shit if that's true then all bets are off let's go. And then you're off and running. Michael welcome. Nice to see you. Welcome to the call we were just taking your name in vain a little bit earlier. Oh really. Well, well we're back to the conversation about about should ogm or could ogm hold host or design a game like a scavenger hunter others or those sorts of things. And we're playing with what motivates people to show up. Could there be a serious scavenger hunt. I was using the metaphor that that for my ceiling. We are quest for nutrition, like like the little tips of the growing mycelium are looking for their following a gradient, a nutrient gradient and they're like oh found some minerals found some sugars found a tree with some roots let's wrap around it, and exchange some some commodities that you know that kind of thing, not in this conscious away as probably I'm articulating but still. So rat, and this all in contrast to the more serious work of. Okay, how do we sit down and create a great visualization scheme and like like create formats that allow us to exchange and improve information, which need to happen. But it might not attract nearly as many people or something like that so so we're playing with those ideas because Stacy's been like, Hey, there's a different way of doing this that could be super interesting, more like scavenger hunt. Right. And I find it interesting and then, and the reason I brought you up earlier was that when you had said hey when I heard that you were thinking about guilds and quests I was like this could be a showstopper for me. And that that stopped me from using that language, but I'm kind of found I found my way back to that language I'm like, I really like guilds and jack park has been on guilds for knowledge quest foundations forever. And it's, and we're sort of trying to we're trying to work that polarity to design OGM as a more of a thing that is doing a thing. Right. Because right now we're a community of practice kind of with a bunch of different people who some of whom have our own our own agendas that seem to mingle well together. And we have a series of standing calls and a few side projects. I'm curious to ask Michael but for me when I hear that word the reason it's a turn off is, I hear power dynamics and I don't know just is that what it is with you two. Well, I hear, I hear. Ye oldness. Yeah, just change the word and power and men and Yeah, I mean I just, you know I an armor, you know, and it just I'm, I'm the associations. I mean I get it. And it's not like where you were saying it was sort of a gating issue for me. It's not that I mean I would participate in something with guilds and quests, but I'm concerned that other people would hear guilds and you know I mean it's like I'm imagining a landing page where you're you know kind of being set out. You know it's being set out for you okay this. This is the glossary just the basic glossary. Right. And as soon as you see that like the key words are guilds and quests you say oh this is kind of a D&D in the basement boys, you know, I mean, I get what you mean but I'm just worried about the initial turn off factor for some people, particularly women and I don't know what you think about that Stacy. I totally agree. I hate the word. Okay. Okay, so the blending of hunter hunts and guilds is not a good blend. This does not a fine a fine coffee maker and you already have the hunt. So I'm just going to say in general, when I when I look to pick words, I either look for something in the gardening kind of you know nature realm, or I look for something in the theatrical realm, like roles or you know things like that those, those tend to be more inclusive. I go ahead Mark. I have a. I guess a real world problem. And I see it looking at at Michael's picture here in this video, because I want to work with Michael I want to work with Vincent arena with Wendy McLean. We we've had one on one conversations. I find it intensely difficult to figure out how what my next engagement with Michael will be or Stacy or you Jerry, that will take the Venn diagram of our interests, so that we can work together to hopefully mutually benefit each other. And that takes time time which I don't have. And maybe Michael doesn't have and I Jerry, I don't think you have you know sometimes I reach out to you and I, I wait a while to get a response. You know it's just life. This is how, and that's the design problem that I'm looking at, and it doesn't map well with in my in my head. Does that make sense Michael, you know, it does. And I was I was thinking as you were saying that that are are. I don't know what the terminology would be but there's something where the relationships that we're creating by being together are sort of fractal, you know their their prison that we're, we're, we're adding to you know we're adding to what's on our plate instead of instead of narrowing in a way that is is a drag it's like you know I mean I, I talked to you and I talked to Vincent and I talked to Wendy and I talked to, you know Jerry and Stacy and other people, particularly other people who have projects, you know who have like that there is a thing that they've got, and they're coming to the group and saying I've got this thing, what do I do with it to blend it with what you're doing but unfortunately, we end up, you know, still with our own things and and talking about an amorphous group of things, but without, you know, we can have individual like I could have a conversation with Jerry about how his brain and factor could work together, and that would be a separate comfort conversation from the one you mark might be having with Vincent about how you could take what you've done and like merge it with Trove, and it wouldn't be leading to blending in the way that would make it easier for all of us and But wouldn't it, I mean like the flotilla calls are an attempt to do some piece of that right they're an attempt to say hey how does your peanut butter fill your chocolate Yeah, yeah, I mean a little bit but I mean having spent a year now in this, you know, it's like factors moving long Trove's moving along, your brain is moving along and they're still that, you know, massive wiki is moving along Kiko lab, other things in the, you know, collaborative technology, you know, Hilo and true and new network and a bunch of other people and things that, you know, I'm talking to you they're all, they're all happening and we all want to cooperate, but, but sort of can't, but I'm meandering a little bit away from Mark's point, which is more like, I feel that that sense of, I think it's So purposely we all operate but sort of can't. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I've talked about this. I feel like I'm a little bit of broken record on this feeling like it's a kind of, you know, a money problem. I mean, not not like lack of funding, though that's an issue for people, but you know it's a, it's a structural corporate capitalist system, you know, there is, you know, there is no mechanism, easy mechanism to say, you know, we're all in this together. We'll all be compensated, you know, fairly and reasonably if we put what we're doing into the pot together and trust, you know, and So Stacy, how would you create a game to address exactly the issue that Michael is highlighting. Well he said I mean I am I'm looking for one thing that we all belong to and Jerry's brought up you know tokens and stuff like that but I think Michael's absolutely right because no matter how well meaning of a person you are, there has to be something in it for every person, and that could be different at different times. You know it doesn't but you have to feel like, you know, my presence means something here. Well, a small thought that's still in the complexity realm but I wrote in the chat a little bit earlier sort of alternate entry passages. There's a world in which some people think they're playing an alternate reality game. And yet, when they show up in the middle and start doing the work of the energy they're actually doing real work. I'm reminded here of the movie The Last Starfighter everybody familiar with the last starfighter. It's fabulous. And so I'm going to spoil the plot entirely for you. There's a like a family that has that owns a gas station out in the middle of no place there there's a suddenly one day a video game shows up. And like on the gas station, and the young the young lad of the family starts playing the video game. He turns out to be really good at it. And it's like a starfighter kind of game with you know it's air combat and whatever whatever. And then he gets really good at it and scores ranks up top, top scores and all that. And one day this guy shows up and and reveals that he's actually from the future and that this game he's been playing is actually connected to reality in the future. And he's busy winning battles for the Alliance, you know, of the future. And then he gets transported into that has to fight a real battle and it's a it's a it's a funny kitschy way before good special effects kind of kind of movie right. And the other enders game had that same notion. And before Reem D introduced the Seattle company that basically, you know, transmuted counting passengers. You're familiar with that passage and Reem D. I forget what it is. Basically, it takes the say, guarding of an airport. Access terminal where people are just kind of they all have to go forward but some people could like walk backward, and it turns that into a Dungeons and Dragons game where you get gold for totally totally forgot that so thank you that's that's like wow yeah because I've read Reem D. And I know Stevenson to he's I've met him. And it would be really I mean and he tried to join a couple of ventures that haven't really gone any place so. So so there might be ways of making things that are in fact collaborative in the middle, but smell like different things to different people where there's people in the middle, who are doing the normal serious work of figuring out how the tools interoperate. And then there's other people showing up pouring energy into this thing who think they're playing a game. Yes, it's a play on read me. Exactly. Here's, here's something that may or may not be related. That, that, you know, just keeps coming home to me it's sort of my, my driver is that the units of knowledge that we all possess. And some of us in the form of Jerry you your brain, you know, make me a mechanism and the stuff that's in of mine in factor but you know there are other people's things here and, and obviously mark you with your thing, Stacy, I'm not sure what form the kernels of your knowledge are taking right now and where they live. They all exist. And that knowledge is something that we're all willing to to brain dump. You know, and, and not all of perhaps some of its private but you know we're, we're, we don't know. There are ways that our entities or companies or individuals or livelihoods, you know, how those can merge but you know our external shareable knowledge is something that we're able and willing to dump in the pot. And what is the game that we can play that people can bring their, you know, the kernels of their knowledge to and whether they have a few, you know whether they're, they're spontaneously generating a few because they have no existing bank of them, they have, you know, at the other extreme Jerry you and, and well, and you and mark, you two have, you know, hundreds of thousands millions I don't know of kernels that could be dumped in some way. Yeah, if those are if those are the playing pieces or the, the, the thing that we're hunting among the, or the, the things we categorize I don't know what I don't know what the game is, but that those are the playing pieces is a is a sort of a lowest common denominator way that anybody can play, whether they have a little or a lot. That's that's the, the sort of an unresolved impetus that that I have. And throughout their two quick thoughts before I turn it to Stacy one is where I start to lose steam is that really good game design is like a genius act and requires really good game designers, and we're dealing in dangerous knowledge in some sense in a lot of these different ways of trying to have an impact, and that could easily get flipped on us in ways that we don't understand and can't foresee, especially in the game ish kind of environment where we're trying to break rules and make rules and do whatever else so so I'm like, I don't know how to do that I'm not an expert in doing that kind of thing. And then. Oh shoot I had a funny thought I was going to put in but I've lost it go ahead Stacy. So again when I'm thinking about games I'm not thinking video I'm thinking game shows or like shows like the apprentice. I'm telling you I know none of you watched it. And because it's his you would think, but it had something to it. It really really did. In retrospect, it was absolute genius for preparing preparing the ground for a run for president. Forget taking him out of the equation though what it did is take a group of people, and they had to decide amongst themselves, who was best for each role for every task they had to do. Now, where I don't didn't like what he did is how we pitted people against each other but that doesn't mean that it has to be done that way. But what I wanted to say to Michael's point was, whatever creation happens, considering you know if you're thinking where GM is the creators. It has to I shared with you how I used to do the spelling homework and it was like, how many spelling words can you use in your paragraph. It's like, for me the idea would be to take at least one thing from every single person and how can you weave it together which is an art. You know, there's that cooking show I don't remember their name of it. You're given a box of ingredients. Use every single ingredient. I mean, iron chef and a lot of those format. A lot of them use that format. Yeah. So the point is if you are, you know, it's changing our whole mindset, because we're living in a mindset where we want to conserve, we or at least we say we do, we want less, you know, but some things we should want more. Some things we want that abundant mindset, we should be looking to incorporate something from everyone, you know, little pieces. It's just a way of thinking that even in terms of Jerry you're like, you know, with the transcribing. I was thinking to myself, how much cheaper will it be to have a machine do it. And then I thought, well, even if it was more expensive to have a person do it. If it's not that much more expensive. We should maybe we should be thinking that like we think about everything in terms of money. Not necessarily in terms of quality time I don't want to say time because we do think about time. And I'm gonna I don't want to, I don't want to ramble. I think you have an interesting point Stacy which is and any of Jerry. And I think Michael have said it in alternate ways that we have a structural, not only a structural constraint in terms of I don't have to eat and pay rent but a structural kind of expectation where I hear the term incentivize in conversations about changing the structure of capitalism or, you know, you know, going beyond or changing capitalism and certainly incentive and I mean it's whether it's, you know, it's still economy. I was in Eugene, Oregon for a bio semiotics conference and we had a big argument on the drive back where one of the, you know, scientists I was driving with basically said that every kind of romantic or friendship kind of thing it's you know here's a, here's a cost here's a benefit you know this is, it was not how I thought of romantic or friend friendship relationships there's a, there's some kind of difference that, and I don't call it altruism because I really am really, really annoyed by the, the altruist community here. It's a perfect choice but anyway, the, there's a difference between play and having fun and saying, I'm doing this because I have found this inherent kind of motivation, and you know, there's that particular kind of motivation. And then there's the motivation which is very clearly, I'm working so I can get a paycheck. But there's the, and that's certainly incentive and certainly I accept that and then there's that gamification kind of incentive like, we've got to create an incentive structure that works. For me, some of, sometimes that sounds like manipulation. And other times it goes like fun and other times it goes like, yeah, we can make money doing this and, and we're writing halo three and boy, people are happy to give us money. Am I making any sense. There's this kind of range and curation of incentive that in some way, you know, yes we've accepted the capitalist. Yes, we know what we do for fun, because we like it and it just happens naturally. But then again, how do we weave that so that Michael and I are spending X hours a month on a schedule like, you know, it's, hey, seven o'clock on Tuesdays. So we're actually taking the time to make a synergy happen so that as Michael and I work together to say, understand what each other skills are, and how to work together that somehow benefits without us. So taking that same amount of time, how Stacy and Jerry work together or vice versa I mean it's it's kind of, it's the framework of interaction and spending time when we all have the small bits of time. And it's really to share I mean, I don't think that Michael and I are going to be, and you know, or Stacy and Jerry and I are going to be on zoom for 10 hours, you know, set a set 10 hours on one day and it's like, we were in a clubhouse. Playing with. What's the next step where I can. Again, find out what who Michael is, and you know Michael as a example, and say, haha. I'm not, I'm going to spend X amount of time learning where the overlap is. And X and Y amount of time contributing and z amount of time receiving. Yeah, that's, that's a, that's an experimental framework X, Y and Z. Find out give receive. And that's just a start, but that that could be a game. So that game would be doing that intro so that other people can look at what we found. And what we've done, and where the artifacts for those things are and then they can either learn from that as an example or add to add to that, you know, on their own time. Michael real quick for her. First, I just want to say for me that touches a little bit on universal basic income and just being, you know, part of it, but even like listening to your talk about this game right now. I'm thinking, okay, so I would have an hour call where I would have five or six of you in, and I will get you to know each other more quickly. There will be another section where people will be writing in trove, exactly what you just said, and that incorporates Vincent, and then Jerry is mapping it, or doing what he's, you know, whatever he's doing and and we work together to build on that. Or maybe we stop their weight, take a breath, do the first session with the six people. Maybe, you know how that works. I get to try what I want to do, you know, and then design what the next step is and go from there. Briefly, so I went and looked in my brain for chopped because I wanted to connect it to today's call which is over here. And I had already written the chopped contestants need to use all the ingredients so that that's cool. But then I found this thing that I put in before cooking in prime time is a form of athletic competition. This goes back to iron chef top chef, all those kinds of things and this was a statement made in this article by Michael pollen, called titled on the out of the kitchen on to the couch cooking is what makes us human cooking in prime time is now a form of athletic cooking. That's kind of interesting, because I think part of our conversation here. I think a piece of what we're saying is, how can we make thinking together, productively to solve the problems of humanity, a form of athletic public competition for a form of fun of serious fun, serious fun is a phrase I really love. I love who talk about education and say that kids really want serious fun. And for me, serious fun is awesome because it's both learning and play. And that's really that's really important to me. And I think, I think one of the reasons we hang out in these calls is that we have fun together trying to puzzle through these stupid ass problems that are really thorny. And I think this that there's a pony here somewhere which is like, okay. And, and the thing that really agreed me when I was learning about axi infinity and people in the Philippines wasting their time playing this game to try to make a little money, which they were doing successfully or they wouldn't have kept playing it was, oh my God all that energy and effort to do this mindless axolotls battle and doing battle in like a little handheld game thing. What if, what if the equivalent amount of energy were used for the cognitive surplus bingo to actually build solve problems and, you know, crowdsourcing was big a decade ago, and we started figuring out how do you know how do you crowdsource solutions to serious problems that unfold at home, and people practicing folding proteins, and we discovered that that like a secretary at a chemicals company was actually like one of the best protein folders because she had this intuition for how the parts actually moved and fit and and humans were solving puzzles really really nicely and then in the middle of that there's this very interesting question about what does the computer do what does the human do. And I see this goes back to a conversation about how do we translate, you know, how do we transcribe these calls, but the proper sort of handoffs between what the computer does really really really well, and what humans do really really really well, and then factoring that into the serious game. So, I think all of those things are in our mix here. And it feels like there's something here and then a part of me wants to go invite Jane McGonagall into one of our calls and say hey Jane we can you know can we put something in front of you and see what you think. I just described some of these things or Ian Bogost or whoever but but Jane might be like really game to play. I don't know I could easily approach him and say hey dude we've got a serious question for you. I think that might be an interesting next step. So, I think I'll go approach Jane and Adrian and see if either of them is interested in coming back and talking with us. You're muted. Super right. But the original one was super. Yeah, I'm referencing some super. I don't remember where that comes from but it was a character in some things somewhere. Yeah, it's it's kind of like Jimmy Walker saying dino might. Yeah, sweet, dude, dude, sweet, like the Arnold horse heckling. Oh, exactly. Just to highlight the obvious I just want to mention with cooking. The other part of that aside from the fact that it's a creative process. It's something that you can do in your real world, it's something that you can watch you can participate, and it's feeding yourself I mean it's it's all good. I've seen pieces were big fans of cupcake for a while. I watched a couple episodes of that and I'm like oh my god seriously there's a show about this, but there's a show about this there's like lots of these things out there. And, and breaking bread together is non controversial politically breaking bread together is a terrific way to make friends with people and learn what they're good at outside of the things that divide you from them, you know, music, sports, food. And nature. These are all tremendously unifying settings where you can set aside your differences and go learn about people and do stuff together. I kind of wonder sometimes if, you know, it would be good or bad to take a musical break. I mean, we basically are here for about an hour, and I have, you know, other zoom meetings unfortunately that last longer. I think is really important but you know, the, just for that sort of fatic human connected kind of information to say, like I really enjoy that the Internet archive meetings have been structured in a particular way, where they start five minutes before the hour, and a musician is hired, or you know given a small stipend to play for the five minutes before the hour and the five minutes just after the hour. 10 minutes of play and kind of optional the five minutes before, but the meeting does start on the hour so everybody is joining in for those five minutes. And, and then the meeting goes on for the, you know, for however long it takes but you know there's that optional and there's a sort of required but, you know, but they both have that different human interaction of somebody playing music. And also I used to start all my Rex meetings I started Rex in 2010 I used to start every Rex meeting with a poem, and that caused me to read a whole lot more poetry, and actually let me just screen share quickly in case you like this. Yeah, I've written my brain poems read in Rex, and then poems for Rex. And so if I go to Dreamwood by Adrian rich, I read that in a call on in December. Sorry, in 2012. No, sorry, December 5 2010. Yeah, I know I don't know that poem, particularly. Yeah, so, so, so I'll share a link. Is that your brain wide date format just curious. No. So what happened was when we crossed into 2020. I think I had to change my numbering scheme because it. And so now I do full year month day. Yes, yeah, I was using the other numbers came in it broke that the bad way. Exactly. Exactly. To get to that thought there's a whole bunch of really nice poems under that and poems for Rex, which is, you know, I subscribed to poem of the day. A third of those go into my brain and into into that list. And so, and also I found that when people showed up for Rex meetings they were sort of relax into Oh good here comes the poem, but it also created a bunch of work for me to have a decent and often weirdly a poem for the topic at hand like like, I would look for things that fit what we were doing and then there was always a size constraint because I wasn't going to read an epic poem. And I don't really like reading excerpts or small snippets out of longer poems I like to do whole poems. And then one day we had a guest who was it in McGill Custer somebody was a guest, and it turned out he was a really good reader of poems so he said, Oh, do you mind if I read the poem. So go ahead. And then he did this, he did this dramatic reading and we're like, Holy crap, that was good. I'm like, Oh, I got to learn to read better. Anyway, we've gone over our over our time. This has been as as as happens way too often this has been really informative and juicy and helpful for me and figuring out what's going on here. I will contact Jane and Adrian and see what's up. Thank you for for staying with the hey what if we did a scavenger hunt somewhere in here like how does that shape up. If anybody has better words than guild LMK because two out of four of us here really don't like the term. I don't know if you like it or don't but yeah, darn it, darn it. I need to have like Jack Park join us more often or something. I love I love Jack, and Jack has a particular kind of, you know, he uses a particular kind of language that is aesthetically out of, you know, we don't look at things the same when I mean knowledge garden. And he's mixing gardening, questing, and a couple other metaphors kind of kind of at the same moment. I appreciate condominium for a while he had condominiums. It was was a piece of the architecture and I'm like, I don't I do not understand condominiums in the middle of the federated gardens kind of thing I'm not getting it. I was going to say I think if we start with the four bullet points of what we wanted to mean. That would help like what you know. And repurposing or appropriating a term like guild is not a terrible act I think that that can be done and in fact if your guilds have very funny names. I mean, one of the things about the culture series in science fiction is that the ships that the spacecraft all have these long funny names, but like that's apparently the custom in this in this, you know science fiction future. SpaceX. When you look at the ships that the drone landing ships that they use all have funny long names. Like I think I like I know that I love you or something that that was one of them, based on the culture series. And what are the civilian applications. And that that's cute. It's it's it's interesting. Yeah, I was good. First of all, I like the idea of coming up with a new name because it's something that we haven't seen before we want something a little bit different. But just since Mark. Mark said about the music to marry two ideas. I've often thought that during the calls. If we had a break where we had some music but it also gave us a chance to journal a little bit. Sometimes when I get off the call, like I wish I could just talk to somebody about the call and if there were a little period of time where we could write our thoughts down and then come back with what those thoughts were, I think that's useful too. You're looking very quizzical. Is that about help? Is that face because I'm confusing you. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, I was actually taking notes. Oh, okay. But also one of the things that for me the weaving parties that happen after calls and leaving the world are meant to slow things down. And it may well be that we take quiet breaks during the weaving calls and then come back into things and like one of our problems. Generally, is that we speed through issues we speed through topics and a few of us are kind of taking notes along the way and leave them behind. And they kind of stay behind we don't come back to them and go Oh, how do we make this better. How do we connect A to B? I don't know if I still own it, but I own used to own side drawn calm because at some event, we were trying to think about carasses and, you know, stuff like that and I just like side drawn so I looked up nobody owned the domain and I bought the domain thinking, you know, I belong to a side drawn and it's not a little bit a little bit cyborg. But anyway, like if we want to invent a term maybe that's possible too. I just want to mention off Stacy off what you were saying, I don't remember how this love together but the thing I mentioned in the chat off of the cooking idea is just the very, very like, you know, totally analogous concept of, you know, if we're, if we're taking the dump of all our journals of information, you know, we, we, the judges or the makers of the stages of the show. Pull out some ingredients and put those ingredients in a box for different thinkers or teams of thinkers and, you know, we have a process. And, and, you know, if, if need be a winner is chosen I don't know how you know what we what we do or what the, what the end point of the game show is. So if you're thinking about a cooking show and how, as a home cook, you learn stuff. I mean, particularly if the people you're watching are decent chefs, which they generally are on a food network competition show. They're, they're people who work in restaurants or something. You learn something about, you know, solving problems quickly about you know how to use a particular ingredient that you've never seen before. Time management. What time management. Yeah, yeah. And the, the nice thing. I guess an issue that I've had with the kind of weaving the world show notion and the kind of there's there's a lot of real time stuff we're doing that's resulting in a piece of video an immutable piece of video. There, there are lots of ingredients but they're not seen or, or, you know, they're not separable. And if we were doing a show that rotated around a like finite and listed number of ingredients that were then available to people to use in different ways and recombine. I'm emphasizing the, the power of granular knowledge used in different ways and you know, some really, really useful ingredient that gets used a lot, you know, and people coming back to hey, you know, solar power that I'm going to make that, you know, an ingredient and in my problem solving. Yeah, I think a format that somehow emphasizes the power of ingredients in different connection is really furthers the kind of underlying concept that we, I think I'll share. That totally made sense but it's interesting what you're saying. And mech at the Internet archive had attempted to basically get a whole bunch of people to go on to YouTube and basically dissect instructional videos into. This is called this chunk of factlet or, you know, whatever chunk that we want, but basically, you know, here's the best five seconds that illustrate, you know, X plus why here's 12 seconds about sine X here's one hour about cosine X, you know, just kind of like curate all of these learning factlets. Something called the worldwide graph. That's one of his projects. Yeah. That's slightly different but yeah. I forget what my worldwide something was called. You know, I said that worldwide what is it OGM OGM works for me fine. I'm not going to. I'm not going to compete with that. Go with it. Anyway, Michael interesting interesting things that you're bringing up. Yeah, thank you. I feel like my head is full of things to chew on and and sort through. So, shall we wrap our call. Sure. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you more soon. Oh, yes. Do you have the recording for a second. Yes.