 Perfect. Offhand, I don't know how to turn off the waiting room. So I think I might just skip that. Yeah, I don't know if they've changed. It used to be you could only do that when you're actually in your account. You couldn't do that live. That's what I'm guessing. I don't see anybody in the waiting room either. Did we have a topic for this call? I think Jerry said just checking. I haven't seen you in a while. Yeah, I missed last week. I've been doing the collaborative writing with Mark down and get thing for a couple of weeks. And that was it. It wasn't meant to overlap this call, but it started to overlap. Yeah. Morning, Pete. Sorry. Jerry is parking his car. He said to be here in three months. Well, I knew a book is at 50 pages. That's great. It's still in the same place. So we've got people joining me. It's just starting all slow this morning, which is fine. Stacy, Kevin, we're waiting for Jerry kind of for other people, I guess, too. Stacy, you're muted. You're so muted. I was just saying that I'm trying to get on on my other computer, which I'm having problems with. So this is good. I have time. Yeah, your background looks all different. Which is fun. It's a nice change. Yay, Clea. So we're waiting for Jerry who is parking his car. Kind of funny. We could be doing check-ins right now, but then it's like, well, if I check in now, then. Jerry won't be around and then I'll have burned my check-in spot. It's interesting. The anticipated storm system coming through the Gulf of Mexico, the first storm that really made it into the Gulf of Mexico turns into a monster, which how could it be otherwise with the water temperature in the Gulf? Yeah. Stuart Doug, we're kind of waiting for Jerry who's parking his car. Thank you. It's interesting. I was just watching on the weather channel and they actually were saying that we kind of left out. They said like the eye kind of started to collapse just slightly and shortly before it actually came on. Sure, it could have. It was looked like it was going to intensify well into the category four range. So that's scary. We still, it's still doing plenty of damage. The damage is what they were estimating in the Guardian. But the mayor of Big Bend, which was one of the major targets there, came on and he talked about the intensification of these storms and frequency and so on. You have to believe that climate change has a role here. And that's, I mean, unfortunately, I think everybody knew this by the time you see it, it's too late to do much about it. Well, except, except Mr. DeSantis is doing something about it. He's just turned down a third of a billion dollars of federal climate funding. It's incomprehensible. What's striking to me is that we measure the damage of the storm in terms of dollars, not in terms of, for example, relationships and lives. Yeah. Not lives lost, but lives are scattered. And the cost there is extremely high. Well, you can't measure relationships. Therefore it doesn't matter. You can measure crop losses, for example, which no one is talking about. You can measure social capital and people were doing it all over the place. That's really not accurate. The thing that really bothers me is when the reporters say it's the worst storm since. And then they give a day, which implies that it's cyclical, not a trend. Yeah. And the reporters fall forward. They've got to get that line in. It's the worst thing that happens since 1937. Well, what happened in 1937? I don't know. That's the big flood in New Orleans. That's what 1937 is. There's a great book about it. And then it started to flood the Cajuns and protect New Orleans. Wow. The infamy of history. Sorry for the delay. I am back. Took me a little longer to. I can come up here than I thought. How's everybody this morning? Good. Good. Kevin, you look like you're in the middle of an alien abduction just from the lighting on your face. Yeah. I thought my, I need to move it. It looks. Yeah. I will move to a better. You know, you know, I thought this would get over it, but it's not. That's all right. And I'm actually happy with you looking slightly alien. It's okay. Yeah, it might be more accurate than some other depictions. So anyway. And I thought we would do a check in style round today. And we can either go with the. Check ins only until everybody's had a chance to check in. I will step out and we can step in basically the S protocol. Shall we do that? Yes. Sounds good. And so no converse. So don't let's not be conversational until everyone's had a chance to check in. I will step out and raise your. Okay. Zoom electronic hand to take a turn in the queue and take your time stepping into the conversation, please. Just give it a little pause or a breather between each person. So we have a chance to sort of sink into things with that. I will step out for whoever would like to go first. Okay. I go first. That's been. I'm going first. So we, we, we keep working on this new book and in the last meeting, Jerry offered a really unique challenge by saying, let's write an 800 word essay. About each car about each color. We actually had talked about just doing red, blue, but then as I got into it, it turns out I had to really cover every color. And, you know, as, as, as Jerry predicted, these are really unique and inter interrelated. I mean, this came out amazing. And so I just posted this sub title of the book, you know, the sub chapter. So we're getting pretty close to, to wrapping up a coherent story on this. But the, the, the reason why I'm, I'm mentioning this. We had an interesting exchange on our, on our emails and with Jessica and she's not here. So I'm, I wouldn't, I would love to, I mean, we went offline to, to exchange a couple more emails, but they came up this issue of morality and, and the idea that living systems principles don't include morality as an issue. You know, living systems principles are somehow designing a better way of designing good models and then morality, which somehow seems to be political and a distraction. And that really, particularly when you look at this within the context of our evolutionary principles, you know, of understanding how we build cohesion in a society in community seems to be something that deserves further exploration because if people in AI reject the idea of morality as a guiding principle, then we have a, then we have a disconnect, you know, in, in how we use metaphors to create meaning and meaning making in my mind because the, the, the, the biggest issue we have in our form of capitalism is that we have alienated entire groups within, within the society to be, to be uncoupled, right? From the, from the regular economy. And in order to change that, you would have to build inherently less efficient forms of, of economic structures that assist or that, that pull in people who don't have, you know, particular technical skills and, and great forms of productivity. So I just, and, and it's so, and we know we had this exchange going back and forth where you're saying amoral automatically defaults into immoral because by definition, if you want to make a decision divorced from morality, you will always default into what is most profitable, you know, most efficient, most, you know, in, in, in most favorable, you know, in advancing and, and, and you would ignore by default, you would ignore people who are getting disadvantaged by these decisions. And that's what we see is really happening. And if that is so deeply inclined in the orange part of the population really, you know, then, then we'll have, we'll have a problem going forward with these designs because they will continue to alienate, you know, the groups of people in the name of efficiency and productivity and, you know, advancing our models here. So that's, I would never throw that out. There's a discussion point that, you know, we should have a better understanding of morality and as a, as a self-serving principle, you know, another way of putting it is altruistic, is, is reciprocal altruism is another term that has been floating around. It's completely self-serving, right? Because if your neighbors, I mean, you see it in every community, you know, if you have homeless people living in tents under bridges and, and striving to, to get food and, and, you know, fight for basic survival, that's not a good thing for your community. So it is completely self-serving in that, in that sense. So anyway, that was sort of my, my, my way, my pondering for, for the day here. Kevin, you're muted in case we think we're hearing you. I will check in. You know, I'm trying to, I want to, I want to flaunt premise that you're buying into with that story. And that's just another thing. I'm working on a mention River personhood and that's a way. Yeah. Can you hear me? Your audio is janky for me. Everything got compressed up. Okay. So everybody had trouble hearing you start here. You might want to just start your, your thought over and reconsidering just sitting your sounding. let me put on some headphones and see if that when I go from that may have been the wrong button to press the phrase when I vanish altogether I think he I think he hit the eject button and he's out of a cockpit now it seems like a metaphor for modern life isn't it look here he comes back yay he made it back should I jump in again yes floor is yours okay well one I want to doubt and be willing to debate Klaus's basic premise that the dehumanizing is more efficient and more productive and that I won't go there I just think it's that's a that's a that's a bad story to buy into I've been working on as I mentioned last week river personhood and that's a thing where in in our county for example if Duke power wants to frack which they do and they want to have fracking ponds with toxic stuff in them it's illegal in North Carolina to look into what's in those ponds you can't do that Duke has that kind of power if you had a river personhood on behalf of the Swanninola River you could look into the the waste there and towns and counties are doing it all over Ecuador's decision last week to stop a mining project was also done by the same group center for environmental legal defense fund and they've they've built the premise on it and they don't but economic justice is not on their agenda and talking to them and we want to probably have a local group because it's a linear task and people can get behind pushing it and it's you know a lot of incremental wins like it was for civil rights or women's rights or day rights small things that you know what Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a great strategist on that but clear good Marshall was and what's her name with gay rights but a lot of small things that aren't like Roby Wade that you know Ginsberg made it okay for women to have checkbooks and to have credit cards and to own a deed and own title to land that kind of small things but they you know they said there is one community where there is some ethnic diversity but it's not an issue and there's another group called River Network which is all about climate justice and so I'm talking to both of those groups and I'm wanting the folks doing climate justice you know which is how everybody gets shot upon if you're poor downstream don't have the tool of river personhood which can give them status so I'm trying to link those two groups so that's that's where I'm going I think Doug you're pausing intentionally but just in case just to remind everybody of the protocol you've raised your hand so you're next in the queue and take as long as you wish to step in to the conversation thanks but do you will have to unmute yourself just to Kevin share I don't know whether whether you're familiar with the the Lake Erie Bill of Rights case where there was a Lake Erie Bill of Rights granted to Lake Erie by the citizens of Toledo and in the case it's it's Drew's Farnes p-ship the city of Toledo it was considered this huge victory because it was basically acknowledging the lake's right to exist sort of a fundamental natural right and the judge basically overruled it and dismissed it because that concept was just too broad as a law in its potential imposition projection on people that would infringe on that right to exist in a clean healthy you know sustained you know regenerative sustainable vital way because human beings didn't have certainty in in things they could or couldn't do that would violate it and intrinsic in that just to loop it full circle to class his share the underlying you know essential knowing on a morality and values level answers that like has the ability to guide that to inform that our legal system is not a moral system yeah our legal system is a system designed for enforcement of rules and laws and to prescribe penalties for violating them but there isn't a morality dimension to our legal system doesn't exist it's it's about force and power over and compliance and morality is the missing degree ingredient I think yeah I'm really familiar with that decision there's been a lot of them since then one of the things that seems to be happening we're not we're not in conversation mode right now I apologize okay sorry yeah okay if you can just hold this thought and come back in when everybody's checked in and Doug you sort of brought this on by responding to everybody else but that's okay I just want to interrupt because I'm trying to obey the protocol we've agreed to right okay no problem thanks so whoever else would like to go and check in please raise your hand and step right in so I guess this is me um I have been working on a framework of frameworks for my own interest for about I don't know a couple years now and I decided to turn it into a book which is more of the collection of pages explaining all the hundred elements or so but I was having trouble writing it because I didn't have a chunk of time to devote to this section so what I started to do was I had an outline I already knew my content because I've been researching it and thinking about it for a couple years and I would dictate into my phone when I was doing other things it happened to be but if I was going on an errand and I was going to be in the car for 10 minutes I would just put my phone in this little spot and hit record and I would just riff on the next section in the outline so there's five minutes here 10 minutes here it sometimes do when I was walking sometimes on a riding a bike because I like to ride bikes with no hands I think that's fun um so what ended up happening is in six months I had 35 000 words and now I'm in the process of editing and I think that that is a viable way to write something if you are stuck trying to write something of any size and it feels overwhelming the the dictating into your phone while doing something else is conversational it's like you're explaining it you're thinking through it while you're while you're saying the words and it's just something I wanted to share because it's worked exceedingly well for me so that's all okay I can check in since nobody else has got their hand raised I said why bother um so a few interesting occurrences this week um I don't know if Gil was the one or um I did it myself Fernando Flores uh is offering this new program called mobilizing and I was really kind of curious about what he was um offering um I studied with him in in in around 1990 um took a long program with one of his disciples but was exposed to his work and his work has been great and informative um and so I went to a a an informational zoom and it sounded kind of interesting um talking about mobilizing in the current world and my my one concern in the background was you know is is this mobilizing um to make our organizations more effective current organizations or is it mobilizing for a new world in some ways so I had a a further interview with one of his staff people and you know I talked about what I'm sitting in in terms of my concerns as I look out in the world and you know he was with me and with me and then I and then I asked what the cost of this year-long program to be I see Ken laughing and it was 18 grand and where where my mind goes with that is you're the fucking problem you're the fucking problem you're this brilliant wonderful beautiful guru who's probably got more money than he ever possibly needs and you're the fucking problem so I just have to have to laugh at that one um so that's that's one occurrence of the week um the second occurrence of the week is um working on um um what has come to be in my own thinking you know a neobook a combination of you know things that I see that that need attention as we do our best to remake the world in some sense um my poetry and my models for getting to a relationship for having collaborative conversations and creating sustainable collaborations and um just when you're in conversation with other people you realize you know how much how much you're missing um so one of the calls I was on I realized that in my 33 things what I forgot and class was on the call one of the things I forgot was you know it was sustainable agriculture which is such a critical and foundational piece so this whole notion of being in relationship and being in dialogue uh is just so so critical because it informs our thinking um yeah um and we actually had a good discussion about that you know using the work of angeles arian to allow yourself to be informed by what you hear but one of the things that I said was missing in the the 120 130 page manuscript I had so far was um this fable that I'm creating for what the world might look like if you applied some of these uh uh principles and models and um I hadn't looked at the manuscript in a few weeks and when I sat down to to work on it and work on this fable I went oh yeah part of the fable is so what's the agreement among the hundred sovereigns who just think there's no hope for where we are and where we're going what's the agreement they might come to and I'm I'm starting to have a lot of fun playing with the nuance of that so that that's been a good thing and I appreciate the the opportunity to be engaged in that vehicle um and the third thing is um I've been in conversation for a number of years with a guy who is a future former president in the world future society he's in South Carolina he's spent his life he's he's now in his eighties and he's kind of run out of money um because he spent his life after selling a family textile business um engaged with the future and um he's created this network um and has been working on this project for years called the communities of the future he was originally focused on economic development of regional areas and and new kinds of leadership but you know he's come to realize that all right we're in a collapsing world how can I use this network going forward and it's so congruent with organizing on a regional level so um I've got Rick and we've done some writing together to gather people from regions all over the country um and internationally to really talk about so um where are we going what's going on and there's some very interesting folks on it so I'll be facilitating that conversation sometime and and my thinking is ah let's kind of expand this thinking and see if we can't create um more um regional folks interested in where the world is um and more and more I see that people are you know um engaged in where the world is so um and it's really interesting and and Jerry I'm sure you experienced some of this also Jennifer's in Singapore for almost three weeks working and it's it's interesting to step back into even though we don't live together but it's it you know all the time it's interesting to step back into uh that space for an extended period not just for for four or five days um I'm rather enjoying it thank you all for the opportunity to speak so I'm uh just feeling that our reluctance to join in uh to our self declarations is kind of unusual for this group I think if you look around the screen this is the kind of the core group with a lot of horsepower and like most groups we're not able to take on the common climate change and it's a little bit like the movie don't look up except instead of an asteroid it's climate and we're sort of stuck um I think I'll just stop there for me just a kind of a side comment but something that's been sort of a an earworm brain worm uh made a new friend in our building a couple weeks ago and he sort of reminded me of Christopher Hitchens kind of brilliance and I've been watching clips of him interviewed or on panels or talking in front of audiences and all that and when he has someone or something in his sights he is very direct and like crisp in his critique so if you don't like his style you're really not going to like his style but I like I love the crispness and humor sort of love humor but but very sharp hand with which he delivers his messages so there's just a whole bunch of Chris Hitchens online he died of cancer unfortunately and is is does does atheism sign a sort of some credit I mean the ways he explains his stance relative to other things and other people so that's been it just keeps popping in my head a lot of the things that he that he says and in particular the the way he says things which I really admire um Scott we're not in the conversational part of the session yet and I'd love to hear more about what you're talking about so we want to wait for people to check in but I want to question our protocol because last time Doug last time we did the s protocol in particular where I step out and I don't manage people coming in we were very reluctant to come in and I was really puzzled by it and we're sort of doing it again it's like we're not we're not all just like oh lining up and jumping into check-in so that we can talk we're being uh real sort of slow to do it so I wanted to uh maybe ask the group how you all feel about the protocol and what happened was the following check-in call I just ran it my old style way which was I just called people in and we sort of went through it pretty briskly but I'm okay with whatever the group likes so I'll go quiet again I'm not reluctant I'm patient I don't know how it is for other people but I'm kind of appreciating the different pace of the call and the opportunity for breathing and reflection and I'm I'm kind of amused Jerry that you're uncomfortable since the Quaker meeting is a meme that you bring up often with with what I experience is great admiration and affection it seems to have had a profound effect for you you've appreciated a lot and here we're doing something like that and so for me it's not reluctant so I guess that's a vote for doing the s process from time to time and thank you miss s for that um and since I have the floor I'll I'll check in on two things I don't think I I gave an update last time did I give an update last time about about Jane's cancer journey so let me just say there she's been put on a new regime as of July just just approved in October um Stuart not relevant for you just yet this is only for people who've been through four or five cycles of other stuff and relapsed but it's been it it's extremely sophisticated medically because it's a monoclonal antibody that targets two proteins on the surface of the specific cancer cell and attracts your immune system to them so it's a kind of you know activate your immune system rather than kill the cancer cell strategy her critical blood markers have gone like this you know for for for years like like that and now have gone off the bottom of the chart and and the effect on her mood as well as her physical well-being is stunning like mojo back for the first time in years kind of cool so that's one story and on the on the private equity for good front people who don't know I'm looking to build a machine to acquire small and medium-sized climate relevant companies from retiring owners and raise their value improve their effectiveness Stuart in fact using some of the work of floris and and chauncey bell in doing that and put them in the hands of their employees as employee-owned companies whether co-ops or esops or trusts or something like that the pipeline process finding the companies has been very slow and remains slow we've looked at a couple we've not proceeded but are continuing to look but recently I think some really breakthrough work in the design of the acquisition process and financial system to be designed because in contrast to a usual deal where there's two parties and you have to do a deal that's reasonably fair for both parties we have four or five parties in the deal we have the owner who's selling we have us who's buying we have our investors we have the new employees who become the new owners and of course the living world as the container for it all and we will only do deals that are beneficial to all five so it's complicated and maybe complex and we've had some conversations in last week with some new allies who appear to have a really elegant way of framing and addressing and transacting that kind of challenge so I'm newly invigorated on that and I have a question for you all so there's a game that came out of Stanford in I guess in the 90s it has become widespread in the United States in business schools called called search fund where an investor stakes a newly minted MBA to a year or two to go find a company to buy and then stakes him or her to buy the company and then they earn out their ownership through their leadership of the company entrepreneurship through acquisition ETA and it's a thing and it's an interesting thing and I'm sort of noodling on is there is there a three letter acronym for the thing that we're doing which is like you know ownership through something or I invite your all cleverness about that not to discuss now stick it in the chats and me notes I think you know from where I sit the notion of broadening ownership is an important piece of the puzzle whether we are collapsing or not and collapse is going to be collapse is going to be unevenly distributed like just like the future is unevenly distributed so this appears to be a game that's got a lot of power for a lot of reasons connecting to the community work Stuart that you were talking about and Kevin that you were deeply immersed in and so yeah so my request is for a little bit of branding creativity on that and that's my check in thanks all I'm a bit trepidatious I raised my hand kind of to respond to Jerry's question about the format and Gil I exactly what you said is how I felt I really like the little bit slower rhythm and I love being quiet together I have a weird check in I wanted to do like a minute or two minutes I wanted to do like two minutes of show and tell the thing that's super alive for me right now is our good friends AI friends chat GPT and and right now it's mid journey for me in image synthesizer I can I can say I had a really great experience with chat GPT coaching somebody through a fairly tricky data analysis kind of thing it's somebody who's savvy about you know tack and but he's not a programmer but he's had some programming experience and he's got this massive spreadsheet literally dozens and dozens of columns that's come in from data collection this is part of a sense maker process where they're collecting stories from the field and the stories get marked up with some metadata that helps you collate them together and and it's it's there's there's a ton of data to kind of like grab the qualitative things and synthesize and just managing the data is a big deal so we wrote some Python programs together mostly chat GPT writing Python programs together to kind of pull this stuff out of the out of the spreadsheets and then do stuff within it's amazing so that's not the show and tell the show and tell part is some I wanted to show off 17 mid-german images kind of random pretty ones from the last couple weeks I have literally generated 11 000 or something like that mid-journey images in the last three weeks so I'm always at the at my phone out in the world doing mid-journey stuff so I appreciate your forbearance in watching this if you're not enchanted and you don't have to be enchanted but let me share my screen and we'll see how this goes this is a an image thing that I will do full screen so one of the things I really like about these synthesized images are the colors and the textures and the and the depth of field this is actually not even the prettiest little glass candle thing that that I have but this is a nice one it's got that nice flame glow thing almost real plumerias I can't decide quite if I like the almost real part of this or not but again colors and textures and stuff like that I love these kind of atmospheric things part of part of my hope here is that some of these things will look different than what you think AI art looks like mid-journey is spectacular at generating all kinds of mandala shape things and it's still mind-blowing to me that it's good at doing this symmetry stuff it's really good at it and this again probably isn't the best one it's got nice colors and pops but I love this little miniature bonsai city thing I like miniature stuff and this just is enchanting the way it's got a bonsai and a city super cool again faces faces are really good and of course when you're doing mid-journey an occupational hazard of mid-journey and of course an occupational hazard of being somebody who looks at mid-journey images is you see tons of tons of super attractive young beautiful women so it's really fun to also know that it can do things that aren't super attractive young beautiful women so I think this guy is still super attractive super cool I guess I really like textures and colors and stuff and the depth of field on this one is super cool too it's good at textures and colors I love this for some reason these one of the things that I'm enjoying most about mid-journey is the way it comes up with sets of colors that just make me happy this might not be a set of colors that makes you happy but this just looking at this makes me happy so there's a bunch of images like that from mid-journey I guess I also like miniature stuff I also like these are kokeshi dolls it turns out from Japan I like the little hand-painted details here and of course it's synthetic hand-painted but I still think it's cool there's a weird thing where it doesn't quite go forward and these are kind of matriska dolls from Russia and again the hand-painted detail and some of the focus stuff some of the things are a little bit more focused and less than focus that just enchants me and then this is the last one here if we can get to it I still don't know what this is but it's like wow that's cool so another thing that just makes me happy to look at so there you go chantel thanks good book program are you using again this is this particular one is mid-journey 5.2 one of the one of the one of the tricks with mid-journey is almost any image it makes is gorgeous beautiful so then there's you end up you end up finding the really trite ones there's a bunch of things that generates over and over for everybody kind of so one of the things that I'm trying really hard to do is look for the ones that aren't found easily if that makes sense chachi is the same way by the way klaus it's it always does beautiful language so one of the enchanting things about it is that it always does beautiful languages the language so then the trick is to get beyond just the beauty of it to a little bit of novelty and and innovativeness and stuff like that okay I'll check in um yeah I'm feeling stuck in the way that I probably felt for the past five or six years because again I'm focused on the politics and a couple of days so some most of you know that I'm in North Carolina with a friend who's lost her husband and different people are stopping over and they're of the other political persuasion so I you know and I know that before we even talk but a very nice man came over yesterday and he worked for IBM he was an intelligent man and he so you know we talked a little bit we didn't get into politics but he mentioned that on twit you know I started talking to him about AI you know and I just mentioned you know I hear a little bit I understand a little and that was a nice place for us to start so he told me how he was on Twitter and there was this um video and it was Hillary endorsing DeSantis and he we both laughed and we both like you know knew that that was ridiculous but what it triggered for me is that a couple of days earlier I had watched this not very public Trump video and I got it off of the Trumpers page you know it's like it's not something that any one of you would have in your feeds and what really bothered me is that as I if it was anybody else's voice I would have found it to be uplifting and motivating and absolutely beautiful to the point that I had never heard him speak like that before and my first thought is this is really scary but after speaking to him I started thinking that might not even be him and that brings me back to this state of confusion that I feel like I've been living in which is sometimes it's exciting and other times it's just like let me off let me off so that's that's my checking oh one more thing I just went to get coffee when I went off camera and because we have a visitor here just so you know what I'm dealing with this woman is explaining is modeling for my friend how she prays for our country and going through the whole dialogue and this is somebody that believes everything that Trump says so it's just so and I'm listening to her words how she's praying to be shown the truth and it's just it's really been hard for me to be here and Stuart mentioned to me last week that he saw it in my face how difficult it's been so thank you for letting me share thank you Jerry I've got to go I'd love to jump in on I think it was the Lake Erie case on River Personhood and there've been a lot of them since then one of the things that's most interesting is there's this town in Pennsylvania that passed a bill that was basically a town uh bill of rights if you will that would stop a pipeline that is a major player in that town where the stuff is produced and they did it 10 times and got it squashed by the state and at the 10th time that they passed a thing in the where there was the city or the U.S. Attorney or whatever they you couldn't file that kind of suit and the the pipeline gave up they said if people are this much against it we just won't it's not going to be worth it the cost is gone and so you know that's how this stuff is going forward you need a group of people who are pursuing this cause and then they stay with it persistently until they give up you know and that's uh they never got the legal right there but they got it stopped through passing it 10 times and getting their local ordinance shot down so anyway that's that's how this stuff wins that's all I think it's just Carl and Kevin left I mean Carl and Ken left and Judy well I guess I'll go um then um just in the past month I've taken I've done two workshops um storytelling uh when Dan Rome and he's got a new book out pop-up pitch which kind of put 10 slides together and it um basically is the heroes journey um the thing and then another another um course um there's uh Michael Margolis and Get Story and uh then what I'm it's interesting to hear of so many people with writing and stuff too because I got back into um Zettlecast looking at Zettlecast and and um actually looking to actually going to start out with um putting together a little Zettlecast and brain figuring out the like tags and thought types and stuff and have that be able to import that into some of my other brains and um and then with all the climate change stuff too as some of you probably know um Jeff Conklin but he at the with um he had um well he studied like course riddle and the whole issue-based information systems there was a tool compendium that um that he developed these he was in Copenhagen and developed these huge dialogue um maps and things but it's like there's a whole question idea pros and cons and you can really um put together things so I want to really look back at that I'm looking to really get and enhance my toolkit for getting back into my dissertation research so it's kind of where I've been the past few weeks. So uh hello everybody um my big project at the moment is planning my trip to Italy coming up in October and uh it's thrilling I have a it's an itinerary I know where we're gonna go around Tuscany and it's incredibly frustrating to find flights um you go online and it says oh yeah here's a flight from 501 dollars and you click on that and um there's no check-in advanced check-in there's no carry-on bag lab there's no meal and there's no seat assignment you are the last to board and you just get randomly assigned um and if you actually want to have any of those things uh and no check to bag it's 180 dollars for your first check bag 180 dollars for a check bag so if you want any of those things it actually starts at around 750 to 800 dollars and um I called the travel agent and you know she gave me a quote and said but you know we charge 50 dollars per ticket because we don't make any money ticketing so there's that's another hundred dollars on it and it's just like it's so deceptive you know you think you're gonna get this great deal you start clicking around for these great deals and they all end up costing 15, 18, 2000 dollars 15 had 100 dollars 2000 dollars so just finding myself really drained by it um and I was lamenting with a friend of mine yesterday too many choices is actually a horrible thing um there's so much choice out there for so many things I remember a few years ago I had the flu and I was really in bad shape at a temperature 102 and I woke up middle of the night coughing I couldn't stop coughing so I got into the car and drove down to the 24-hour pharmacy and I was looking for some cough syrup and there was a wall of cough syrup choices in front of me I had to be like 80 different choices and my brain's not working and it's in the middle of the night I'm like I just wanted some freaking cough medicine to stop coughing you know I had to go and ask somebody what do you recommend they said grab that one I'm like okay you know and I'm chugging it in when I get out of my car or just I sometimes look at what's going on with with you know all the choices and think there's just it's it's not a good thing to have this many choices you know um I think it really impedes our well-being and I'm working on a couple of uh projects right now around well-being we're a well-being of individuals intersects with well-beings of groups with organizations and with society on the planet so um that's kind of on my my mind um but I am getting excited to go to Italy and um you know it's it's becoming real that you know we're going to check it out see if there's a place you might want to retire and if so then I'll be going back in the spring and trying to find a place so it's also very daunting to the thought of oh my god packing up you know our house and and moving it and just like oh it's it's huge psychological hurdles there so taking it one step at a time um other than that I'm good you know I was talking to somebody the other day I said how you doing he says if I take out the things I'm not in control of I'm doing great and I just I love that line I'm doing great as long as I don't focus on things I can't control but as soon as my mind goes there it's like oh my god you know look what's happening and how you know challenging things are um so that's me thank you for listening and Judy I think you're the only person left who hasn't checked in if you'd like to feel free to do so now and then we can switch into conversational mode for our last little structure apologies for coming in late um I really resonate with what Ken is saying about well-being I've been spending a lot of time trying to sort through things that need to be dealt with decluttering the house eliminating things and giving the donations and things of things that I really they're not adding to my enjoyment of my current space and if I want to move to my condo in Kansas City at some point I certainly can't take all the things in the house so I'm in a major uncluttering mode physically which then leads to some uncluttering mentally and I've been involved with a lot of different nonprofits I'm trying to simplify that list a little bit and focus on the things where I can actually contribute something that seems to be helpful to a group of people or an organization so kind of just a reflective mode trying to sort out a friend of mine used to say Judy when you say that you're always trying to figure out the rest of your life so don't say it's this new thing you're doing but it is kind of a continuous mode in both you know doing the things that bring you joy and doing the things that are helpful to some good cause of or another that's about all I can say really love that Judy thank you and thank you all for for checking in class off to the races yeah I I went to a meeting yesterday he and Ben because I'm really trying to get into the community and understand you know what what how how we can engage and assist at a at a real practical level and I went to a meeting of the local climate tech group and you know we're about maybe 12 people are still there they're all in their 30s now they 20s 30s and so on younger folks and I gave an overview of what's happening in the in agriculture considering that one third of global emissions across to agriculture and so on and I and I shot them a report from McKinsey that did a study to the World Economic Forum on the future of food technology and it was amazing and I also pointed out that there is an enormous shortage of technical supporters in the in the food system and there's all these innovations coming in with all these changes coming in and it was that it was so warmly received right because they're all struggling to find out where they should be going you know in the face of AI coming into their space and with so many changes and layoffs in different areas right so I thought that is really you know fertile grounds to to help younger professionals to see where they could slide in to to make a difference and at the same time builds their careers I started out by saying I'm 73 years old and I can't tell you I don't even remember how many times I had to change my skillset and acquire new ways of doing things in the process I gave them the the example of the excel spreadsheet you know to sort of equate what's happening with AI right now it's just a tool use it now and and and get better get good at it faster than anybody else and it will advance your career and that sort of thing so I was super encouraged you know by so they're all coming to this panel discussion in case the ground screening that that I've been organizing with the local citizen climate chapter and that's I think is a good point a good place to engage you know so I was really I was really chastised up you know coming coming out of this evening yesterday I love that sounds awesome um Douglas Stewart so I'm going to respond to Peter's uh diagrams which are beautiful uh and with a slight challenge and that is I have a painting of my own that's on my clipboard and I want to see if I can screen share doesn't want to do it what's wrong you have it open as an image you can just go to share screen and zoom you can either paste it into the chat because I think our chat is enabled to paste files or you can open it in image preview or whatever platform you're on and then just do the screen and show us that um I give up for the moment can't make it work shoot um Stewart yeah a couple a couple of comments couple of thoughts um when Ken was talking about um too many choices it it evokes for me um um the first chapter of my basic economic textbook as a freshman at Syracuse University and it talked about um and I can't remember who had written it whose textbook it was this is in 1964 um it talked about the fact that the United States was in a tertiary economy and what that meant was that approximately two-thirds of the cost of good soul were all about marketing and packaging and um my brain immediately went to well that's a really inefficient way to use resources you know how dumb is that and I don't know what those percentages are today but I would imagine that it's it's greater because you have so much such a higher level of proliferation of um you know high-end luxury goods you know and that that that I think is part of the part of the whole problem in terms of or part of the challenge in terms of consumption of resources and how much um people's identity is tied up in in in these in these brands um just just you know huge um Ken the other thought is in Italy if you go to uh Florence the Medici tombs which is not considered a huge tourist attraction but to me it was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had walking into the Medici tombs and so it's interesting there are six mausoleums in a hexagon shaped tomb that you walk downstairs to and um there are you know six sarcophagi but only three statues and when I was there last time you know a few years ago I said in the docent I said so what happened to the other three statues thinking that they had been you know lent out to some other museum or you know uh uh had been destroyed by marauders or something and he turned to me he said they ran out of money which I just thought was absolutely hysterical that their Medici family ran out of money to build the additional six statues and and in mausoleums which are sort of long-term thinking yeah yeah so Stacey I wanted to just say in terms of focusing on politics the reason that it the reason that it's crazy making is because they're all nuts here and hearing to an idea on ideology and they're not engaged in wisdom conversations or dialogue and that's why it's kind of crazy making to try and think um that this is kind of a some rational way forward in its current configuration and that's what makes you you know that's what makes us crazy that's why I've kind of you know just disengaged from taking them seriously because they're just in a tribal warfare over there um yeah so thank you and Stacey I have a feeling that part of what enables you to engage with people on the opposite side of the political spectrum is not considering them crazy right it helps so I'm wondering like if you want to reflect on that for a little bit yeah because because you're more than any of us um try you've been trying very hard to talk and listen and to engage um which is great well two things I want to say on that the in-person stuff it's harder because I can do it in the beginning when it's you know an even slate and I could bring up things like I mentioned before like the food system where we can totally agree upon I can talk about the joke in congress I could do that but I will I just want to go back because back in 2015 and 2016 on Facebook it was very different than it is now and back then I really saw potential to do something and apparently the republicans or the russians or whoever it was they were utilizing that potential and we weren't and I was trying desperately to get people to work with me to do the same things that they were doing and I had a couple of people where we would go together into groups talk offline about how we'd handle the situation very nicely and interject facts because it's so important what you hear going on around you and then of course I stopped and I hardly do that at all but recently I've gone back especially now that I'm not home I don't have to worry from my safety but recently I've gone back into community groups because some of these people it's very clear that they are just looking to stir up trouble it's just very clear and so I will start answering with facts because I know from talking to the people in person they really genuinely haven't heard these things so one of the things I'm focused on right now is you know everybody's upset about fentanyl they keep throwing fentanyl on you so that's the the opportunity to say to talk about Giuliani creating the sweetheart deal for Purdue and how the Sackler family didn't or the corporate executives didn't have to face criminal charges and they'll be like well what we don't know what you're talking about and then they can go and look it up and that's where we can unite but so I'm sorry I'm rambling but I have nobody else to talk to um but in these community pages I've had people come up because once I say something they all come out of the woodwork just with insults not with any kinds of facts and it's really like debating fourth graders they're they really there's nothing intelligent going on there and other people will say you know I really appreciate you doing this and but they're not listening and my point is they may not be listening but there are onlookers that are reading that have never heard this and I put the articles there I don't just say this is what happened and I'm very careful to make sure that what I'm putting up is based on fact so like there is definitely something that I'm calling TPS which is Trump persecution syndrome and you would be amazed at how many of these 30 percent of true believers really feel like this poor man is being railroaded so I want them to see how Ruby Freeman's life was destroyed I want them to see that so again I wish there were more people on social media just having respectful conversations because they're not hearing first of all many of them have left Facebook because they've been told not to listen so anyway that's all I have to say thanks Stacy thank you since my hand is not up I'll just say that's actually one of the hopes that some of the co-defendants get an early trial a speedy trial sooner than later which will give Fani Willis in Atlanta the opportunity to present her case with these co-defendants without Trump so people can actually start to see some of the facts of actually what was going on and what they were doing without just this kind of a so the strategy may be playing into her hands in a very positive way interesting before before the 2016 election I read David K. Johnson's book The Making of Donald Trump I think that's the title I'll look it up unless Pete beats me to it and it was an amazing book because he's a good investigative reporter and one of the things in there is like the Trump and the Trump organization in 2016 had been sued over 4,000 times and and it's like you don't sue Trump lightly because he was coached by Roy Cohn who's like the first thing they do is they countersuit they they they darken the sky with lawyers because they know that being aggressive back is a really great tactic etc etc and I was like that is just astonishing to me I don't like like who's gonna who's gonna vote for this guy and and there were other overwhelming forces at play that meant the very slight majority of Americans did vote for that guy and still believe it and so I'm really I'm extremely intrigued by the interplay of facts and stories and and emotions and I unfortunately I still feel like emotions trump facts most of the time and we're doing a poor job of entering people's emotional lives in a way that they can hear and sort of engage and that that's I don't know that that's and that's like difficult territory that we don't I think pay enough attention to because there's plenty 2016 there was a great book Trump you know making of Donald Trump that had a whole bunch of facts in it that were hard hard to like ignore or refute and they didn't help and you'll go ahead yeah to gill just before you jump into to just quickly respond to Jerry one of the things I realized you know at some point time you know practicing law was usually in any case you know you had a number of irrefutable facts and then it becomes what kind of story can you make up around those particular irrefutable facts that at an emotional level would convince people or a judge to decide in your favor it's not about truth or justice that's why when I hear the word justice sometimes I actually go a little bit blank because the word doesn't have that much meaning to me from my own experience sorry gill thank you okay it's all it's all relevant um gosh Jerry what do you mean today white man you know I'm kind of amused that you have the assumption that that reasons should trump facts and that you're holding on to the belief that it can so I thought I've shown over and over in my brain is that emotion trumps reason most of the time so I'm saying I am rueful I am a rueful observer that that reason fails the face of stories all the time and emotions you're I get that you're rueful and you're and you're I don't know wistful wish you were otherwise but it ain't um the the the the David the what are the 4 000 lawsuits the fascinating thing about that for me is that that wasn't covered on the mainstream media in 2016 when it might have made had some impact um it was in like it was like in 17 or 18 that Michael Bloomberg um in talking about Trump's corruption and you know like not just sue 4 000 times but like you know decades of not paying vendors including lawyers as we've seen recently uh and Bloomberg said oh everybody in New York knows that he's like that nobody will do business with him because everybody knows that he's like that of course it's not true because people keep doing business with him for some reason but Bloomberg never said that on the debate stage when it might have mattered he said it afterwards yeah um Stacey thank you for the for the for the window into the bubble I'm relieved that like you know my bubble is better than their bubble I take I take comfort in that I posted in the chat uh speaking of bubbles a piece by Ben Hunt of Epsilon theory who's an analyst that I follow very closely these days um in a in a in a piece subtitle like this is guaranteed to piss everybody off on all sides and it's talking about the the nature of the bubbles that we live in and how we construct our narratives from within our own bubbles and you know um uh he's trying to do something planning even handed which I don't expect any of us to do because we're we're in our bubbles but it's it's a very instructive read to think about how all this stuff is constructed in human society today that's it thanks gilm uh ken is it poem time um uh it could be also have a comment uh okay about um I've now watched uh 11 episodes of Oliver stones untold history united states have to parse them out because they're so tough to watch they just leave me feeling devastated and depressed um and I'm really curious to you know the there've been so many moments in history where things could have gone a different very different way we're building a completely different world than we're in now and yet it just feels like the liars the there's so much back room backstabbing you know machinations going on behind the scenes starting with how Henry Wallace was booted from the uh the democratic ticket in 1942 and replaced with Harry Truman you know and and just every single president since fdr they they've lied they've cheated and yet people they don't understand they don't they don't see what's going on there and we keep being sold the lie over and over and over again and I'm wondering what's it going to take for you to wake up and say you know this is really this will not stand and I'm not seeing it I'm not seeing anywhere so that's just a question on the mind of why do we keep having um uh such naivete at a collective level to be buying the lies over and over again how do we wake up from that yeah so my comment sort of addresses that because I think part of part of the problem is we don't want to be accountable when it comes to us for our side so when I hear people you know talking about hunter biden and I point out that Ivanka was investigated her and donald trump jr were investigated in 2012 but think about it they made a deal with sy vance who is a democrat so the swamp is you know it's bipartisan so if we're going to look and say it's only them or it's only them that's going to be a big problem I do feel that democrats are more willing to hold their own accountable at least now in this moment in time I can't speak of what was 10 years ago right now when we I think when we see somebody commit a crime even if they're democrat we want them held accountable I don't see that with republicans there's a different kind of messed up loyalty that goes on there there's a deep calculus of membership and loyalty that's going on um we're getting uh noise from somebody's room uh claus then judy and then we're yeah I wanted to to respond to this idea of people being naive um and and that's really also the centerpiece of the neo book where we are talking in colors you know in the spiral dynamic sense of colors I mean there is a significant share of the population that simply doesn't have the cognitive capacity the education the skill sets to comprehend the complexities of climate change and this group will relies on trusted sources so the the the the many when someone captures you know the trust of these groups then they believe they become believers trump has captured the imagination in ways that whatever he says is being accepted as true so that's not necessarily naive that's that's that's really um uh needing to trust and needing to believe because the cognitive capacity and and training education and all that that doesn't really allow this this group to to have a differentiated opinion and so that's that's that the challenge is really that our political systems and this is where the demagogue comes in right I mean this is as old as later the republic where the the part of the population that will that that that depends on uh um being guided in the in the sense is being abused and and misled you know and we let it happen in plain sight because we look at what is being said and and you go how can anyone believe this well obviously you know there are people there are groups of people who do and and I think we need to spend more time understanding why that is and how we can cut into that information stream thank you uh Judy then Stuart then poem then I think we're out of this call well I won't go too deeply I I was catching the word discernment and to me that has a lot of meaning but it also invokes a lot of conditions to as well to be a discerning citizen or a discerning person you have to be willing to contemplate the opposite of what you want to believe because you have to look at at multiple viewpoints and that's challenging even to find good sources of the viewpoints given the nature of media and literature and hampered further by the inadequacy of the reading level and comprehension level of huge portions of the American economy where the reading level is elementary school or middle school at best and that means that the only way information can be received is orally and orally is subject to no opportunity for discernment because you're trying to listen and so it's a vicious circle and I'm really at a loss for how to interrupt it except to ask questions that force the other party to stop and think so I have found that questioning is really helpful and I try to do it in a constructive help me understand given what you're saying what you would think about x and it's I try to be respectful but it's really hard and even as a fairly intelligent academically well-trained person finding good information is very hard and you can spend a lot of time my only trick is to look at both sides of any issue I always search x and then I search anti-x on the internet just to get a whole different sort of information and I'll stop there because we could talk for hours about this thanks Judy Stuart you're muted thank you in the world of persuasion in its in its best art form one it always needs to be ethical ethos it needs to be rational in other words you need to have the particular facts that allow someone to be influenced by what you have to say but the thing that really moves people are our emotions in the form of stories or poems you know the world of kind of influence and persuasion and speaking to to what you just mentioned Judy I think it's just really important there's a well-respected guru named Saad Guru that a lot of people I have respect for you know follow and I've never been able to quite get into his oral presentations his lectures but I've recently gotten into one of his books about karma and the guy is really brilliant there's a reason he has this huge following and I'll follow up with his book about inner engineering because I'm curious about what he has to say around that I wanted to read a quick quote because it was it's been mentioned on the call that a lot of people here are writing and it had nothing to do with with a book I wrote but but I've put it in the book and I think it's it's an unknown quote we write because we have to say what we believe we discover what we what we believe because we write all else of writing is but is searching for form style technique to show those beliefs in an acceptable artistic manner when we succeed our hearts are on the stage to touch the hearts and minds of the audiences it is an awesome experience thanks Stuart Michael and then we'll go to Kent because you haven't stepped into the conversation yet this call and I'm happy you're jumping in hey I just got to a place where I was I'm actually able to to talk really appreciated all the check ins today and I was struck by what Judy was was talking about and so I'll stay here right up earlier just about you know triangulating positions discussing what is true or at least perceived as true and and I was struck by what Judy said about looking up X and looking up anti-X and that the the duality of of every conversation in this country and the the categorization into red position and blue position are hugely problematic and problem solving here and and the toughest thing is like to get between X and anti-X to like any kind of solution that you know it just the conversations that we need to have with people to draw out their key key stuck places outside of the context of I'm anti-X or I'm pro-X but rather to say what is it about X that you're anti and what is it about X you're pro and sometimes it's just that it's associated with my team or it's not which is you know painful but in a way easy than easier to deal with and sometimes it's something like you know I mean I always like go to abortion which seems so polarizing and if you're if you think abortion is murder and if you think it's a woman woman's right to choose those are those are two polar opposites but the solution to both of them is for women not to need to choose abortion which means the thing that everybody should be uniting behind is better early childhood care better you know economic circumstances you know all the things that together would accomplish both of these polar opposites and and I feel like every issue is like that I'm sorry I'm speechifying and that you know I think my point is made but it's not it's not anti-X and pro-X it's just like let's really understand X anyway that's all thanks. Thanks Michael. Adam Grant offers a useful term complexification and he says sometimes in these issues that look really binary the thing to do is to sort of peel them apart and to see their complex their fuller complexity and then talk through the different parts together because you don't disagree on all the parts usually. Ken. So I'll read something I actually wrote about 16 years ago and Homer Originals and Homer Originals so if war worked we'd have peace by now perhaps it's time to try something different here's some things from my list what's on yours let's use our intelligence for life let's speak words for healing not hating let's try thinking with our hearts and feeling with our minds let's focus our gaze on the horizon and then turn towards each other and inquire into what we see together what's the tune our ears to the echoes of our grandparents love as we listen to the laughter of our grandchildren let's make sure we include infants and our elders and we need to make important decisions let's feel the earth flowing through us in each moment that we breathe eat labor love rest and dream and let's align our current ecosystems to harmonize with the earth's the earth's ancient ecosystems that's from October 21st 2007 week published somewhere published somewhere Ken uh you already are first folks so it's really beautiful on my hard drive I assume you'll share just share it to the list I'll share it to the list don't don't be shy Ken I think you have you have treasures in under your couch that need to be seen by more people I encourage the cushions might be some spare change here too you know yeah you know then you know in moving you might discover I might who knows thank you very much yeah one of my favorite Gandhi lines is if we keep on living in the mantra of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth we be living in an eyeless and toothless world yeah yeah well thank you everybody and a lovely oh gm-ish moment see ya see you on the tubes