 of California burns at some point. So you can't escape it. What we did escape was any active memory of what happened. Right, right, right. I do remember years ago reading an article saying that California would probably be the better place to be during climate change. I need to find that article. And it turns out, no places. Arawan. There's nowhere backwards. There's a lot of places backwards. Just look at Texas. Texas is unbelievable. But it takes us, people in power, not unsurprisingly. Well, what's surprising is the way the Supreme Court just looked the other way. Do whatever you want. Go ahead. Install the stasi. Turn your citizens in for attempting to have an abortion. We'll reward you. It's crazy. Every citizen has standing to sue anybody involved in an abortion. It's unbelievable. Except the woman. Right. They can't sue the woman, but they can sue her husband if she gives her a ride or someone who tells her where to go. It's like, this is, as I saw last night on Facebook, someone said, Texas, where the handmaiden's tail meets the Taliban. Well, that's a cheerful start to our call today. I thought I'd pick an appropriate background for the mood. Yes. Very nice. Yeah, we were touching on where to go next. Well, we ain't going to Texas, that's for sure. So not to Texas. Not to Texas. Let them drive. I live in Texas, so I don't have a choice on that. That's right. Where in Texas are you from? Texas. I am in, well, I say Dallas. I'm in a suburb near Lake called, the suburb is called the colony in the lake. It's like the response. It's not like you need a green card. It's not like you need a green card to move. No. I was born in Brad and Dallas. Have you seen, have you watched Jason Roberts' TEDx talk about starting our better block? It's not, it rings a bell. Let me post it to the chat. He is, it's just a lovely, lovely talk. He's so excited to tell the story that he's like jumping up and down. And then he tells the story of being in Oak Creek, a neighborhood of South Dallas, and deciding to blackmail himself by posting a fly that says, hey, show up at this intersection on this date and time and see what's up. And he then convinces some buddies to go turn that intersection into a cafe, basically an outdoor cafe, pretend that it's a nice intersection. They paint a bike lane in, a local nursery donates some potted trees, so they put those in to make sort of a bike lane and some fringe. They set up some outdoor tables with umbrellas. They serve coffee. And then they hang a big banner on the brick wall of the empty warehouse that says Oak Creek Arts District. And then just to make their point, they print and then paste on that wall all the ordinances, the city ordinances that they're violating by doing this. Just in case somebody were to come by and say, gosh, this was a great idea. Why don't we do this? And in the process, they launch a movement called Better Block that starts just spring up in lots of places. I have no idea if they're still alive or whatever, but I just love his talk. Hey, Dave. Hey, Ken. Hi, everybody. I'll post the link to it in the Matter Most chat. Hey, Jerry, it occurs to me, I was looking for the link this morning. I didn't see you put an email out about the call. I have been lax on that. I should probably do that now, huh? Yeah, I'm just saying, well, here's the thing. Maybe you don't want to do that. Maybe we'll have a small attendance so we can have a different conversation or maybe we want to help a whole bunch of people join us. So you think about that? I'm not sure that my kicking it out on the list brings that many more OGMers into the call. So I'm going to bet that most people don't have the link bookmarked. And if they don't see it in their email, it's like, oh, well. And because we don't have a shared calendar, I am going to send a note to the OGM list real quick. Thanks. So talk amongst yourselves for a moment. Hey, Dave. Dave, that's not your usual place or are you somewhere else? It's a different back. We're in Vermont. We're in Vermont. Lake Willoughby from the Northeast Kingdom. We're, I don't know, 30 miles from Canada. Cool. I love Vermont. It's beautiful. While I'm doing that. Yeah, the Vermont is nice. I heard it's a safe place to be. I heard it has like green mountains. And there's some boys in those mountains right here. Have you been affected by the weather? Everything's missed us. It turns east before it gets to us. So we're watching all the floods in New York City and stuff on the videos, but it's sunny here. New York City was insane last night. Everybody caught any of the YouTube videos, but there was flash flooding in New York. In the sunweights at the meeting. And on the streets, there was a picture. It was a video of a bus going to this lake, essentially, and women standing on the seats because the entire aisle of the bus is flooded right up to the level of the seats. Wow. I know. This is insane. And here we are, you know, in need of, dire need of water out on the west coast. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, can you just ship the water around in different places? So I'm having, I'm having every time a very interesting conversations about the things. And I'm just wondering, I might, I might sound like a jerk on asshole every time. That, you know, that the last one was about what, what, what is it you posted about the oral history of the world, that the working people, I think it was. It's not an oral history of the world. It's an oral history of it, of the people who came to be known as the Iroquois. Yeah. I'm going to sound like an asshole every time. You did. I mean, to say that Paula's not an Iroquois without knowing her story is, is, no, it wasn't the best move. What is your, what is your belief on Paula? That she's not. And you know this for a fact? Well, there is, there is a, that's why I wanted to, to, to bring that up. There are a couple of really interesting resources to, to check on people's claim. Well, and Native American is like blood quantum, sort of weird, weird stuff to be a, well, that's well number of the US. It's all, it's very strange. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not, I'm not the best person to talk about it. But one of the things that seems to be coming back in many conversations about that is that a tribe claims you or claims this third person rather than a person claiming an heritage. It's, it's really, it's of course very difficult to, to, to address in, in that. But there are a couple of resources. One is by Jacqueline Keeler, who is a journalist, Native American journalist and author. And the other one is all websites that I've known for quite a very long time. And it's called new age fraud.org. I can post that somewhere. And so you can type any person that claims to be Native American and you're not sure and see what this, what, what this Native American researchers have done to see if that person's claim hold. Yeah. Website is new age frauds and plastic shamans. No, that one is new age fraud singular.org. That's where I am. And at the top of the page is NAFPS, new age frauds and plastic shamans. I'm just reading from the website. Oh, and plastic shamans. Yes. Yeah. That's the one. That's the one. Yeah. And so there is something about, about. And who is behind this website? Some, some Native American. Money is all. So who we are doesn't list any names, which is very suspicious to me. No, well, we should not be very suspicious to you. Okay. It just, it just needs, it just needs a little bit of research. It's all forearm. The people that were there for it, the old issue about what's called pretendience, right? And, and, and how they acquire so much fame is such a sensitive topic that I, you know, I don't feel very comfortable getting into. So for, there's what, what is called lateral violence. And for a lot of Native Americans that do this research, they would rather, you know, feel completely shielded from the public rather than, you know, speak a lot. And perfect example is Jacqueline Killer, who has made a list of about 200 pretendience. And what she aims to demonstrating is that all these people are in place, especially in universities, academic and art, and would do everything in their power to keep, to keep hold of, you know, the power that acquired over the age, even though they have absolutely no claims, no, you know, they basically stealing an identity. And, and she has received a lot of backlash. And, and yet she has continued doing it. She has listed about 200 individuals, prominent artists or scholars, academics, and expose them. So, so it's called the pollen, the pollination, I think it's called the pollination.com newsletter. No, that seems seems like it's not a pollination magazine. The pollination magazine. Thank you. So it's just pollination magazine notes are in front of it, commentary by leading indigenous thinkers and writers, techniques and analysis, etc. So, and this is their tagline is dedicated to fighting the invisibility of Native people. Yes. And here, she put that in the chat, if anyone's interested. I'm adding it to the matter most chats as we seem to be, we seem to be losing a message discipline chat, so that is persistent. So let's try to get out. Anyone else do you want to turn over this rock about about authentic origins, who gets to speak for whom? I had actually not heard the term lateral violence. I just looked it up. I was like, oh, shit. Right. Lateral violence appears to be when you attack those people who should be your peers on your side instead of the other side kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it is, it is super difficult because of all, you know, the history of Native Americans and how states and governments have done everything in their power to destroy the social fabric of these people. And so between the kids that have been kidnapped or taken away from their families to other tribes or people that felt important for them to live and move away and not necessarily on the roll or officially recognized by having a tribal citizen card and so forth. It becomes very problematic, especially for the T's. So there is a lot there, you know, just there. But what Jacqueline Keeler has done is really focused on the people that are actually making money. And our next step is to quantify that how much is actually taken by way of people applying for grants, for instance, claiming to be Native American. And taking that away from people who should be there, but to go back to Paula and the wood. She's one of many that have claimed some sort of, you know, connections with a tribal nation and speak on their behalf. And when I'm always very uncomfortable, because from what I have experienced personally, that it does not happen. It's very rare. And usually someone, white person who will come and say, well, you know, I was given that task. It's a really almost like right away, a red flag. Anyone else with feelings about this issue, about outing people who are pretending to be something they shouldn't be in general, specifically about Native tribes in the US, any of that kind of thing. Because it's touchy. It's important. It's sad to me that some that peoples who have been through so much also have this to go through in different ways. It's like, damn. Ken, do you want to jump in? Well, I can speak, not in general, but I can speak about Paula because I knew Paula. And I first met Paula at a systems thinking and action conference where I was, I was a volunteer and I was assigned to her room. And I was amazed because I saw this woman who did not with Native at all. And you know, she's got this medicine well up on the board and she's doing these teachings. And it's like, this is the right place for me. This woman is bringing some really great wisdom to business people. And I wanted to talk to her and she was really busy. There's a lot going on. So the next morning I saw her in the coffee shop and approached her and asked if I could speak with her a little bit. And I found out her story that her grandfather's great, great grandmother was Iroquois. And there was a council going on where they decided that they were going to abandon the old ways and adopt the European ways to in order to avoid the genocide. And she realized what that meant for her. So she was a wisdom keeper and she went back to her lodgings and grabbed everything that she could and fled the village. And the man who stayed behind defended her because of the cost of his life. And she went into town, which you know, was a little tiny settlement and said, I am no longer she went to a Quaker household and said, I am no longer of the people will you shelter me. So when they came looking for her, she the Quakers will not why I said there are none of your people here. And so she passed down her knowledge through a Quaker line of European descendants. So and Paula never hid that she never attempted to say that she was pure Iroquois. She told her story quite openly. And when I met her, you know, I told her my personal story of when I played Cowboys and Indians as a kid, I was more interested in being the Indian than the cowboy and that I had this, there's there's no native blood anywhere in my ancestry, at least a Korean 23 and me until we go back to the end of all times, right. And she said, Well, you know, you have two heritages, you have your your biological heritage and your spiritual heritage. And you're clearly, you know, you have a spiritual heritage that's connected to total island. And then I think of Malodoma, some a who I also did some work with. And he said, you know, he he had met more indigenous people in Europe and North America than he ever met in Africa. And his theory is that when you kill the indigenous people, their souls re inhabit the children and grandchildren of the genociders, the murderers, the murderers, exactly. And I just I love that that thought. So I got great benefit from Paula's teachings. And I know Paula was was ostracized by many people who were Native American, some embraced her and some said, No, you don't have the right to do this. But she felt that the teachings that she had the wisdom that she was able to impart was worth putting out there despite the heat. And I don't see her as a fraud at all, based on what I learned from her, which was extremely valuable. So I know it's controversial. You know, and I don't step into that controversy. I just I met someone who was a really deep and wonderful teacher who was extremely generous with her teachings didn't, you know, I don't think she was making she was she was hardly rich. I she lived out in Fairfax. And she was not, you know, she was fairly marginalized her whole life because she was a woman attempting to bring indigenous wisdom to the world and not exactly embraced as, Hey, you know, there's a televangelist, let's send money to her, right? So I'll, I'll leave the whole controversy of whether she was or was not Iroquois. I mean, grandfather is a great great grandmother. Okay, that's back a lot of generations. But to me, it's not so much the blood purity as what are you carrying forward? And what are you able to impart to people that's useful? So that's where I come down. And I will say that when she wrote the walking people, she actually journeyed she used, you know, she drummed and journeyed in order to live into the stories that she was told would pass down to her. And I think it's a I've read this book, it's an extremely interesting book. It's about this thick, it's kind of her poem. And reading it puts you into an altered state, you can really feel that this is a very well crafted tale. And I know somebody who is another native person who said this is only about 30% of what anybody with what any tribe would know. So she's got one third of a tribe's wisdom. It's not comprehensive, but it's far more comprehensive than than what most modern people have in terms of understanding, you know, history and how to be in the world. And this topic also slips right into cultural appropriation. And into, hey, so one of my beliefs is that we used to understand how to be together in community on the cons. Awesome. And we used to know that in indigenous tribes around the world, who Europeans have systematically tried to wipe out, and I guess everybody else tried to, but Europeans like systematically went around the world trying to stamp out the people, the culture, the language, the native dress, the everything. And so how are we to reintegrate that knowledge? How are we to work with it in productive ways, unless some of the people who are not indigenous try really hard to bring it back, to revive it, to fit it with what's going on, to promote the change, to do whatever it might be. And then how do we do that work without misappropriating what it all is? Hank, great to see you. You're in the red. Yes, I am. Only virtually, though. Excellent. But anyone have thoughts about cultural appropriation and the right way to walk this path? Well, it's interesting who we individually actually identify with. I find myself at times identifying with all the DNAs in the woods around me. So I'm part of that. Sometimes I think I'm connected to the cave painters and the Neanderthals. And my guess is that we all have these kinds of mixed identities now that span all over the place. And if you go into the spiritual realm and either talk about reincarnation and actual lives or just talk about the general mixing of our souls and how that works, that gets really fuzzy, really fast. And it also gets really lovely really quickly because you can begin to see origins, alliances, connections, meanings, other sorts of things that are unrelated to your physical presence, which is interesting. And then just a separate note, all of the Africans and Eastern Europeans and others that are sort of coming back to Europe and Europe is anti-immigrant and so forth. I'm like, dude, this is called just desserts. Like you are the colonists. They speak your language only because your ancestors showed up and wiped out theirs and made them be like your people. So now they like work. And it's like, please. And then I look at the European football teams and they're incredibly mixed and beautiful. And then people in the stands pissed at how mixed they are, right? People racist in the stands were throwing things at them and yelling at them. It was like, we just can't seem to get past this. So I collect stories of white nationalists who sort of switched all that kind of stuff. I have a whole, I'll share a link to my brain to sort of white nationalists who woke up and came to the other side and then become activists to try to deprogram some of their colleagues and family and friends and all that kind of thing. This is just this boiling, seething issue under the global veneer of civilization. That would be lovely to find a way to lance this thing. I don't know if this is true. I saw it on Facebook. So it's a meme. So it has to be true. Exactly. So it said there is one holiday that is celebrated more than anything else on earth. And it is celebrated by 135 nations. And it is, guess what? Independence Day from Britain. Holiday on the planet. So it must be true because it lines with my values. But you think about that of just that whole history of prior colonization. And it goes on today here inside this little cranium of how colonized is your mind? And I just want to put a little plug in. This is my latest book that I'm reading called, Oh, it's a word. Sorry. Negotiating the non-negotiable story. Right in front of your face. Right in front of my face. Yes. There we go. Nonsense focus. Negotiating the non-negotiable by Daniel Shapiro, who is the founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program. It's excellent. I'm only 20 pages in. But I'm drawn in immediately because he starts off with a story of being at Davos and working with 50 world leaders behind the scenes out of the site of the cameras. And they're, they're told, okay, you have to, you're sitting at tables with 60 film tribes. And you must solve these problems. You have one hour and you have to answer things like should capital punishment be legal? And this professor says, you know, this is impossible. We can't do this now. And he says, no, no, everybody who does this does it in an hour. And of course they don't. And so suddenly the room goes dark. And there's this loud bang and a flash. And this alien comes in that says, I am here to destroy the earth. You have one hour to come up with, with values and, and for me tribe that I can negotiate with to prevent from, from destroying the earth. And of course they can't do it and it gets destroyed. And he's like, this book is what I have learned about how to bring people together. So they, so they actually can save the earth rather than, than destroy it because we divide into all these, these things. And there's a professor there that says, you did this, you made this hard. You told us we had to do these things. And he says, you're right. I did. I gave you these rules that you played by the rules. You didn't say this is ridiculous. We should change the rules. So you made the choice. And he's like, whoa. So this is how the book starts. And I'm like, yeah, I want to read this book. He's, he's a very good writer and, and tells great stories and, and offers a lot of, you know, this is what I've learned to really difficult situations where people have been in genocides and, and horrible things that of how to get past your, your values. So he talks about relational identity and core identity. And it's just, I can't recommend it. How are you enough. So, so the lesson I'm taking from your, your lovely short story right now is we should all play Calvin ball. Absolutely. We need to know what, Mark, do you know what Calvin ball is? Is it Calvin Hobbes? Yes. Okay. So Calvin Hobbes, Calvin Hobbes played this game called Calvin ball where they made the rules up as they went along. So if Hobbes didn't like what Calvin he said that you're violating this rule and I'm going to make this rule and Cal would do the same thing. And so it's like Calvin ball is, is, it's, it's delightful anarchy. It's, it's a fun game. It's an infinite game. One could say it's always, it's always the other, but it's not me. You know, yeah, yeah. It's just like, what is it? What is it called the do, do what I said, not what I do? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Dave. Yeah. So I was going back one step here. I don't want to game rules are also interesting. The NFL does that a lot too. So they play get Calvin ball and anything. But I was thinking back on the, we visited Monticello, you know, the kids probably, I don't know, 20 years ago, and got a tour of the, the beautiful house and what Jefferson had done to it and things like that. And then went again, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, when they had introduced the slave tour. And they actually had, you know, they would take you out to like the, you know, the place where the slave had to did and, and the old white guy would give a little bit of explanation about what was going, what had happened. But, but he was an old white guy, you know, and he was kind of uncomfortable with this kind of thing. And there would be questions then about like, what did Jefferson do with the slaves and what happened and, and he had Jefferson didn't, didn't free, I don't know that big history exactly, but didn't free and Emmings and like, you know, or the kids and he says, but you know, but some of the, some of the slaves did walk off the plantation and, you know, and then I'm, and he walked off the plantation a few times and I didn't know what it meant. And it was basically, you know, they were white enough to pass. And so they could leave the plantation, move into white, be, moving it to be white and then get the hell out of Virginia. Basically, you had to get, I don't know, best past Ohio or something like that. And then you became white. And it was better to be able to walk off the plantation than it was to be a free slave, right? Because you, you change race. And it's so interesting in the context of, I mean, one is like the woman who like, who like was, was outed for really being white when she was acting black kind of bit. I was thinking, oh, you could go either way, I suppose, right? You could pass either direction and change race. But you know, and then the idea that race is a fiction. And, you know, you adopted in your culture kind of, but anyway, I found that story. And I mean, really curious to go back to Monticello now and see how they're doing the slave tours. But and the, the sort of the use of the euphemism and it may be an unintentional euphemism, but they were able to walk away, which has no meaning to the average visitor. They don't know that that's the full comp of the larger context of what it means. Like, oh, they walked away. How weren't there slave patrols? What, like, what, what, what's like, what's going on here? So thank you for that. I appreciate that. Have you seen High on the Hog? I've started seeing it. I've not finished the series, but we've been watching. It's an excellent show on Netflix about the history of, of how African American cuisine transfer in America. And one of the, there was an extremely gifted chef who served both Washington and Jefferson. And, you know, he'd be cooking for the elite of the land, right? And he was in, when they would travel to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had a law that any slave who stayed in Pennsylvania for six months would become free. So at five and a half months, both Washington and Jefferson would ship this slave back to their plantation for six months. This is, these are the people that we hold up as the icons of the founding fathers, right? It's like they had some really nasty aspects to them. You know, we need to be mindful of this. One other, one other tidbit on that, we can, like the, at the very last episode, they go to the church of the Immaculate Barbecue in Huntsville, Texas. I've eaten there and it's quite tasty. Also a good series to watch before you watch High on the Hog is the Black Church, which is a three hour, I think PBS series, which was a real eye opener for me. It's like, oh, okay. And I'm, I'm a, sorry, I'm a church skeptic, et cetera, et cetera. But the role the church has played for the Black community is astonishing. And the AME, I'm like, whoa, okay. I suddenly start to understand other, other pieces of what's going on a little bit. And so is franchise, the Golden Arches in America, which is a book that I've not read, it's in my queue, but I saw the presentation by the author. McDonald's has played an enormous role in the empowerment of Black people. There's, I mean, it's, it was really fascinating book talk. One, I didn't realize McDonald's is not a restaurant. It's a, it's a real estate company. And the reason they're able to stay in business is all the real estate they own. And very often what happened is the Black people were able to buy franchises in McDonald's would become the de facto mayors of quote, Black town. They'd be the ones who'd broker deals and they're kind of like Godfathers in a way. So it opened up huge economic opportunities for Black people and also gave them enormous power inside their communities. So if you have a chance to check that out, I recommend it. I heard the woman who wrote it is extremely good researcher and really did her homework on this. I want to hear her speak right before the pandemic. It's one of the last things I saw was she gave a book talk at the Jewish Community Center here in San Francisco. Love that. Thank you. Mr. Timon. Yeah, I don't know which one I'm, I want to talk about first. Yeah, I've been church, you know, there is church and church. There is church, the church of the people and church of those guys upstairs. Right. So the thing that goes right now in Haiti, for instance, is a lot of on the place that has been hit by the earthquake. The last one. They, I think they calculated that about, or they recorded that about anywhere between 200 and 300 churches had been hit by the earthquake. It's not a big area where, you know, almost as the damage was, but two to 300 churches. That's a lot. But to go back to the issue of pretending and taking another people's identity, I think a lot of what some people like, what was, what was his guy, Carlos Castaneda. That's another one who fictionalized the story and maybe, you know, and, and great books too, great books too. But at the end, you just feel like cheated. So what is the need of claiming to be someone when you can actually be that someone? I don't know, without pretending to be Native American or to have made this wizard somewhere in Mexico, Yuceta, whatever. It's, it's, it's a bit sad, you know, to say the least. But my dear friend can, I'm sorry, but if you want, you can check the all the research that they've done on PulaoNewH.org and you'll see that great, great, great, great, great, great, whatever. He's actually the daughter of an Indian fighter. That's make it even sadder. Let's move on. It's something for a nice friend, Fenir. And again, anybody who's got good resources on cultural appropriation and how to avoid it. Please share, because that's, I think, really important here. Well, Jochen Keeler actually has a podcast. And you can find it on Facebook, the Polynesian, or the Polynesian magazine on Facebook. And she, she has covered a lot of ground. So, and how to avoid it, you know, the proper ways to repair it, etc. And she's pretty good. Thank you. So let's go into our check in rhythm a bit here. And let's go Hank Craig Dave. All right. Well, I'm back. It's been a long time. Great to see many familiar faces and a few new ones. Just for a sense about how long it's been, Ken, I did not know that you shaved. So there we go. But good to see everybody. It's interesting that you guys were started, you know, that I kind of came in as you were talking about cultural appropriation and all that stuff. I think recently I, excuse me, I've been like really trying to read a ton this year and I've been successful at it. And the last book I literally just finished it was bury my heart at Wounded Knee was the first. I know it's like on everybody's list, right. And I've really engaged in a lot of conversations about it or tried to at least and, you know, it doesn't, I haven't really grappled with that specific conversation, but it's one that's in my head, right of like, how do you revisit all these culture that were in, well, specifically America, right in the case that I was looking at or and, you know, the Americas, I would say without kind of taking that position of, you know, universality of like, oh, you know, the subtle racism that can be associated with, you know, oh, it is my job as a, you know, white individual or as an American to step down and put you in this place of power because, you know, I took it from you. And it's kind of a weird line to toe and one I think that that I've been grappling with personally in some conversations, right. And so that's kind of where where my head has been at. I mean, you know, and otherwise it's been nice. I'm going to take a real kind of hard pivot from that. You know, I haven't been in these calls for a long time. And I was missing them a lot. But that gap created an opportunity, I think for me to start bringing some of these conversations into the work that we've been doing with clients. And I know Matt talked about it a little bit last week. So don't want to, you know, beat that into a beat that down here. But it's been cool. And it's been, I think, reinforcing in a way that like, even though this group can be small sometimes, that a lot of people are thinking about a lot of this stuff, and just doing things differently. So I really kind of valued keeping up with the recordings and at least participating in the conversation asynchronously. So thank you all for that. That's my check in. Thanks, thank you. Much appreciated. Let's go, Craig, Dave, Michael. I'll only take a short moment. Hello, everybody. I've just had a busy, busy week, nothing particularly OGM-y. But the the discussion about colonization reminded me of something I heard. This is light hearted. The invaders come to your country. They kill your sons, rape your daughters, steal your resources. They might build a road or a railway, but when they leave, everything turns to shit. And that's why it's called colonization. There's a colon involved. There's a colon involved, yeah. That was a comedian in Singapore. Chinese Singaporean. That's me. That's your colon check-in. Well, thank you. I haven't heard that one. Let's go, Dave, Michael, Stacy. Yeah, I don't know if it's changed very much since last week. I'm still focusing on kind of how to make the global regeneration co-lab useful. Trying to develop this idea of what it means to do peer-to-peer support for regeneration makers and trying to figure out if we're actually on a path of success or not. If you're trying to get on an exponential curve, how do you know you're on one versus just flat, things like that? And maybe some theories that we've been holding lots and lots and lots of Zoom meetings. And I think recently that characters changed a little bit so people are kind of asking for support around projects they want to do or ways they want to make income and things like that. And there's a theory that all of the Zoom meetings that we've done so far have created enough kind of trust and awareness that people are now able to kind of ask for more support and other people are willing to give it the hopeful kind of intuition. But I'm not exactly sure if it's true or not. But it's kind of this open question around what is useful to do to help people be more successful at the work that they want to do and then a leap of faith at the work that they want to do is actually going to contribute to a better world out in the future. So that's the puzzle of the moment. And I'm still trying to figure out how to capture that in Google Ads. It's the technical. Nice. Thanks, Dave. Michael, Stacey, Ken. And Michael, if you're off-planet right now, I'll come back to you. I was just trying to get to my microphone. Can you guys hear me okay? We hear you just fine. Are you performing the space walk right now? I am actually in a car. It's very similar. Yeah, yeah. But interesting from a check-in point of view, I am headed up to rendezvous with Vincent Arena and Wendy McLean, who I don't know whether she's been in OGM meetings before, but also overlaps a number of our communities. But we're getting some face-to-face time for the first time. So it's always interesting when the OGM community bleeds into meet space. Absolutely. Please say hi for us. I will do that. And Wendy McLean's been on our chats. I'm not sure she's been in any of the Thursday calls, but she's around. Yeah. I gave her the Zoom link for today's call. I can't really scroll through to see who all is on the call, but she may be with us in the future. It's the wake of the flood here. And there's sadly, you know, the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit New York last night, and it really was kind of unprecedented in terms of the amount of water on the streets of Brooklyn. It was sort of an ankle-deep rushing river. There were some fatalities here. You know, people who drowned in their apartments are drowned in their cars. So it's nature doing what nature does. But it's a bright and sunny day today with still some road closures. Yeah, that's my check-in. Thanks, Michael. And have a great face-to-face meetings. I remember those. Um, fondly. Stacey, Ken, Bentley. Yeah, well, I was late today also because coming home from upstate, there was so much flooding, it took me an hour to get a half a mile. And then I just had to like go around the world to get home. So that was kind of shocking, like going past, you know, the shopping center, and it literally was a pond. So that, that, and then I have to say coming into this conversation was really hard. It was very, very heavy for me. But to just bring it back to, like, where we are in our own lives, I've been watching the show Gentification on Netflix. And it's the Mexican experience, and they happen to be working in a restaurant, and there's like a Chef Ramsay-type guy. And I'm thinking, I'm guessing you all know who Chef Ramsay is. Hell's Kitchen, you know? And I'm just thinking we sit and we watch this behavior, and then we rush to get to the restaurant. And why are we supporting people that treat other people like that, regardless of what demographic they're treating like that? Just, you know, again, I always think in terms of tea bait, and I just had these like fantasies of interviewing Chef Ramsay. That is horrible behavior. And last night I was with friends of mine upstate Garrison, beautiful home. It was beautiful to watch the rain from a full, you know, windows all over. But when the husband came home, he was talking to me about a client he had. And this man was like a real Trump supporter, and I like looked at him like, so what was the conversation? And he really, you know, the guy was like attacking Biden for looking at his watch. And he really put the business relationship to the side a little. And, you know, he tread lightly. But I really thanked him. I said, you know, because I know, I know how much it's asking somebody to speak up when their livelihood is at stake. So I really do appreciate when people do that. But as a culture, if we did it together without, like attacking, without like swinging the pendulum, you're all bad, you're all good. It could be so much more effective. Like, I don't think Chef Ramsay is a bad guy. I mean, I don't know if he's a bad guy. But it's not okay to talk to people like that. I lived in a relationship where I got spoken to like that. It's not okay. And I just, I think that's something we have to deal with collectively. And that's my check-in. Stacey, thank you. And I think being gentle and how we go about is a good thing, dealing with these gently. And our conversation was kind of heavy at the start when you stepped in Stacey partly because Mark launched us into a topic that I picked up on because I thought it was like interesting and important. And he had replied pretty sharply to a comment of Ken's on our Facebook forum. And that kind of got us sort of moving into this topic. So in that way. And I think like handling one another more gently would be a good thing. And inquire within and sort of opening up the spirit of collective inquiry where it's appropriate and where we can to try to figure out what are these kinds of issues and unpacking them. But thank you. And I didn't know about gentrified at all. Had never heard of this. Well, in Spanish it's gente. Gente means people. And so gentrified is a pun on gentrified, right? But I hadn't heard of this series at all. Like totally a mystery to me. And I'm like, damn, what's great? I love it. I just started. I really love it. More to watch. More of our life hours to absorb on other people on flat panels. It's like perfect. Sorry. Julian, thanks for joining. So and Craig, good to see you. Thanks. So let's go. Ken, yeah, exactly. Ken, Mark and Julian. So Stacy, I had to put a link in there in the chat for some good chef behavior. I don't know no chef Jose Andreas, but he is the chef I most admire in the world today. This man is an amazing humanitarian. And right now he's in Haiti. He goes into disaster areas and works with existing restaurant crews and restaurants and local producers to not just crank out meals ready to eat like the like FEMA does, but actual gourmet meals that really nourish people. And he's on the ground every time. And I read an article, a profile about him in New York Times a while ago where he is an incredible organizer. He's not just a chef and he really, there are people who are in awe of him in the emergency preparedness and emergency response community of the way this guy is able to bring people together. So there are antidotes to the Ramses out there. So just throw that out. Hank, it's really great to see you. I shaved a few months ago. I've actually been doing some work for collective next on these inclusion dialogues. I've got to say I've done 25 of them now. And it is really heartening to see the way that people are embracing what's going on. There are a lot of interviews where they pulled scenarios from the culture of non-inclusive behavior, which are then enacted by voice actors and the folks that I've been facilitating. The most common response has been, you know, I'm not surprised, but I'm sad this is still going on. And they're really grappling with these. So, you know, this is a global financial services firm. And it just, it brings a ray of hope to my life that if this is happening inside financial services, a pretty, you know, exclusive industry, and the fact that these people are really grappling with this and making sincere efforts to be more inclusive, it lights me up in the sense that maybe this can spread to some other sectors of the of the economy and really make a difference. I mean, I added it for all of the hatred and all the vitriol and pathology that I'm seeing on the right wing that's going on. So, you know, I watched this panel conversation the other day, and Kim Stanley Robinson was one of the speakers, and he said, if you think of humanity as kind of an estuary flow, you know, we're all coming down and headed for this larger ocean. And Renew! Renew! And a wrong movie, sorry. On the top is Froth and Chop, and the media reports on the Froth and Chop. But that ignores the deeper tides and currents of people who are working really hard to make the world better. And I just, I love that image, you know, that that I'm interested in the deeper currents and the tides. And there are counter tides and counter currents, but they're, they're, you know, Martin Luther King, the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. And Gandhi's talk about no matter how terrible a tyrant is, you know, sooner or later the tyrants are overthrown and deposed, and they have their moments, and then they disappear, and then they pop back up again later. So, I have to do this from my own heart, my own soul, to focus on that and find ways to, to find an appropriate focus of goodness in the world. Or I go, I get into despair and I go crazy. So, I'm just grateful that thanks to Collective Next and Matt to be invited in, and as part of this work, it's been a really gratifying part of my life. And that's, that's what's going on with me right now. So, thank you. And please pass my appreciation on to Matt. I know he's super busy, so. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks. I really appreciate that. Let's go Mark Julian. And I leave at the top of the hour. Oh, okay. Mark Julian, Doug, Vincent, and then... One of my, well, actually my very first real job was with a company that was pioneering research-based models to support people into making decisions. And that involved a lot of data gathering. So, market research, but also running trials and testing. And really, that has stayed with me. I'm kind of actually really enjoying doing research of that type, just every time. And I see a lot of articles written about whether it's these meta-analyses, meta-studies, and so forth. And for instance, in the food space, the impact of eating red meat, for instance, on people's health. And I'm always wondering, but what was the question? Because the question defined the answer. Very often, what we read are just an interpretation of something. And not necessarily backed up by something that is of high level of confidence. So, a lot of these studies are actually low confidence results outcomes. And so, I'm enjoying that. And I finally found the time to, and I spoke to Jerry about it, to really look into the interaction between early humans and the megafauna. I'm on a roll to dispel the myth of humans ending megafauna, annihilating the era of the megafauna. And that should be complete pretty soon. So, I'd be happy to share that with all of you if you're interested. That sounds great. I am interested, totally. And in fact, it would be interesting to represent it as a story or visually or as an argument or as a I can sort of do it in my brain as a mind map. And there are other things like that, but I feel pretty strongly. So, for example, many people are convinced that life used to be nasty brutish and short, in particular short. And it turns out that infant mortality was pretty high. But if you made it to like 40, there were lots of old people. We find old bones. People grew the nice ripe old age and maybe they'd lose their teeth and have trouble digesting. But lifespan itself, human lifespan, has not increased dramatically. Sanitation has not enabled people to live longer. And clean birthing processes and a whole bunch of life saving techniques and a bunch of other things just changed the humps on the statistics. But it's not that people 3,000 years ago lived to be 30. But that's weird. And so how do you tell that story? What do you do? And I think each of us probably has a couple of things like that where we run contrary to a generalized, accepted conventional wisdom and wouldn't it be great if only everybody knew this thing? And then at some point, we slide over into like, did you know that everybody's actually lizard people in control of the kind of the world? And then that that's like a bridge too far, I think, to mix metaphors. I don't know if the lizard people in the bridge too far necessarily cross culture. But anyway, just interested in how we represent those things and how we tell again, how we tell these stories. But I just wanted to say one of the potential ways to share that in a useful way, because a lot of those topics would be contentious is the Gullibaw project. So when we talk about visualizing those, if people want to take their meaningful expression, and if it's going to be a contentious issue, schedule some time and try and put it in the Gullibaw format and see if that helps people understand the nuances and the reason why they may have to change their thinking on that. Thank you. And we'll put a link in the chats, which is easy. And also, I'd love for you to explain what you mean a little bit more. But also, there's a weird audio artifact when you're speaking. We're getting like a little digital rush every time you say something. So it's not coming to be clean. Let me change. I think your flux capacitor is overheating or something. I'm using the moment. Is that better? Yes, no artifact. Your voice is now thinner because you don't have a nice mic, but we're not getting a little funny digital rush. It was like at the end of everything you would say, there'd be like there was a wave breaking over your voice. Yeah, that was part of this one. Anyways, is it? Yes, it's still happening again. So it's not the microphone. It's something else in your Zoom connection or somewhere else upstream. Oh, don't worry about it. I would love to hear more about what you mean by putting it by connecting these ideas with Gullibaw. How would that work? So Gullibaw, when you're expressing something like humans did not meaningfully reduce the megafauna, it's great to express that in a story, but also to have some simple way for everyone to kind of look at the facts and the I say pros and cons. But the reasons for and against kind of believing that as a main fact, Gullibaw is a hierarchy, well, it's a character, but it's a hierarchy of those facts and the reasons and showing how they had up the main score of what Gullibaw believes about it. And then if people disagree with what Gullibaw believes, Gullibaw, they can then add those facts to it and it's kind of community project of doing fact-based reasoning to come to a conclusion on a fact like that. So that just sounds like one of the good examples, it's not. Some of the things that the program doesn't work with is like, oh, what should we do about climate change? But if you're saying we should do this, then Gullibaw could have a discussion or that something did happen in the past. That's a good example. It's a super interesting thing. And let's go. We have Julian Doug Vincent. Oh, Mark, with respect to your dialogue about questions and answers, just remember the answer is 42. And a zero at the end, for 20, depending on how you feel in the morning. I've had a real up and down week. On Monday afternoon, I had a chat with my advisors about the Computer Graphics History Project and they agreed that it should be reformulated to cover not just ACMC graphs, but all computer graphics organizations. This is something that's always bothered me. It's kind of leaving out a good chunk of history. So for the last couple of days, I've been up to my elbows in Unity reformulating all of this stuff, which is joyful to be getting work done again. But with a down of dealing with a traumatized kitty who managed to get himself into a bad situation and earned himself a day at the vet. But he seemed to be comfortable now. You can do video loops as your background in Zoom. So maybe at some point you record a little bit of your Unity worlds and make them your Zoom background. That'd be kind of cool. You can, huh? Yeah. Okay, I'll look into that. It's like some people will have like a beach scene where you can see the trees waving and whatnot, or what not. It's totally doable. Just for fun. Since you've got that flash to the past, a mist in the background right now. Okay. Let's go, Doug, Vincent and me. Okay, I'm finding myself fairly inarticulate this morning. I guess the flow of everything going on. But I've got a quote from Richard Feynman, whom we all probably love in one way or another. And I had not seen this quote before, and I find it amazing. He says, we are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the situation and pass them on. I just find that remarkable. I mean, the idea that we're at the beginning of the human race, it's obvious. And I've never heard it. It's lovely. Yeah, yeah. It changes the old perspective, doesn't it? It does. Well, and then like race and evolution and all that are suddenly like at a manipulable elbow point or junction in history, where we can now mess with DNA and we can now do what are they, what is it called? Gene races, gene runs, gene drives, gene drives through populations of creatures. We've clearly got amphropocene effects changing the landscape and the flora and fauna and all that kind of thing. So that our evolution, the normal pace of this evolution, I think, is now being interrupted. Which means to last 10,000 years, we've got to be pretty good at this. So, you know, to last several more tens of thousands of years. Anybody else on sort of how young humanity is or where we are? We certainly act like a youth, like an irresponsible human. Well, it depends if we have to go back all the way to, you know, three million years ago with some more abilities or more activities. But there is, yeah, I mean, almost 7,000, 300,000 years. And I think how how about us didn't have zoom, right? They were not, they were not fucking zoom windows. Yeah. They weren't acting, you know, where that was much more manageable. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, doc. And I'm also the kind of decline one seems like pretty damn brilliant. Vincent, and then are you around? For me, Vincent, come back in the airlock. Ah, he's going to super now. Okay. Sounds good. So let me check in for a bit. Which is confusing, because I've had so many conversations lately that I'm trying to sort all these things out and figure out how they all fit. For OGM, the place that I've come to, which I'm trying to figure out how to explain well is, and then I haven't started this yet and I'm like, okay, should I go ahead and start it? We do a lot of calls like this. And this, if we package it up a little bit differently, could easily be like a podcast or a blog or a show. So it's interesting in what we do. But the thing I think I'm heading toward is something that on the surface looks like a show or a blog called weaving the world. And that what we do is with these devices that, you know, the brain, kumu, graph is all these different things are kind of looms, they're kind of idea looms and connectors of humans and thoughts and concepts and so forth. And so weaving the world on the surface would look like an interview show where we go talk to people who were, who have really good ideas for trying to solve the problems that we've been sitting there talking about. But under the surface, we would be doing OGM-y kind of stuff, OGM-y jujitsu on the calls, on the raw materials of the calls, on the information in the calls, on all the things that are sort of going around them. And just, so I haven't, my machine is sort of, the fan is on, it's unhappy. But, you know, as we've been talking through these different, these different things, I, every week I curate just live, curate our Zoom calls, the whole list of Zoom calls are here. So every one of our calls looks like sort of like this as they build. So here's the list of all the OGM calls we've had. Every little red icon is a Fabe icon to YouTube. So if you wanted to play the call, you would just go there. After I've uploaded today's call, the present icon, this is the thought that I created during this call for this call. And then I've got it connected to the Jason Robert Sadex talk, to Paula Underwood, to Calvin Ball, to Identified, Gully Bot, Lateral Violence, Negotiating and Non-negotiable, which I did have in my brain, but not well connected. And so what I do afterward is I go back to all the tabs and I curate this. This is just sort of an example of one aspect of the weaving that I'm talking about. And then what are we weaving and why? Like is this just like a tapestry dang on the wall? And there's two metaphors that I'm kind of torn between. I sort of have favorites now, but one metaphor is that we're weaving a big quilt of what we know with other people. And the fun is a couple fun aspects about a patchwork quilt. One is that each of the patches is sort of internally consistent and hopefully beautiful, like the patches themselves come together. And the second is that it's a social act to make a patchwork quilt. And many of these are done in quilting beads where lots of people get together and work on the quilt. And it's also often a feminine art or craft, which is good because we have way too many sort of martial and sports and other kinds of metaphor things going on that are too masculine. However, the big quilt is this fuzzy soft thing that is kind of inert, and it's not an active feeling thing. So I'm unclear about how powerful the metaphor is, although I like it for the reasons I just said. And my alternate metaphor is actually that we're busy and here it's immediate mixed metaphors because we're not really weaving, but more curating or gardening. The big fungus. So I bought the big fungus.org and Stacy's liking the big fungus. I love the big fungus. And the big fungus, you have to sort of tell the story of leaf cutter ants who can't digest leaves. So why are they cutting leaves? They're feeding the fungus. They're basically farming a symbiotic fungus that lives inside their hive and metabolizes the leaf matter and oozes a nectar of tasty parts that all the ants actually feed off of. And for me, sitting there mining away at this brain thing between three years, I felt like a lonely ant at the fungus face. Busy putting things in, digesting, mulching, digesting, connecting, trying to explain my own perspective on how the world works and who's trying to fix it and what the problems are, how systemic institutional racism works, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And hence, my questions earlier in this call about how do we tell these stories without misappropriating them? How do we fold them into modern narratives in a way that actually works? Who gets to tell these stories and who doesn't? And is that a fair question, et cetera, et cetera? So I'm really deeply interested in those aspects of it because I'm trying to do this, this act. And as I sit there, sort of the lone ant at the fungus face, I'm really, really interested in doing this with everybody else, anybody who feels like it, anybody who wants to. And there are other people out there. So Mark Caranza isn't on this call, but he's been feeding a personal fungus since 1984. He wrote a piece of software he calls Mx, which is inspired by Mx, the Vannevar Bush's idea of this sort of ongoing memo that you consult. And he's been feeding this thing. And it's written in DOS. He's never gotten out of DOS. So every day he's taking notes in a little DOS window on his computer into this Mx thing. But he's got his notes woven together since 1984. That's pretty good, except his notes are not interoperable with my notes in the brain, are not interoperable with Christina Bowen taking notes in Kumu, are not interoperable with any of us drawing a diagram, procreate, and sharing it as a JPEG or a PDF. These things are all just floating around in the ether. And we're fortunate if any of them has a URL so we can point to them. So one of the things I can do in the brain is point to any resource that has a link in the world, which is cool. And then how do we visualize these things? Julian would love to help us visualize these things in three dimensions and walk through them and instantiate them as artifacts, objects, maybe stories or terrains or something like that. I would love to have that happen, right? So that's kind of where we're moving. And the thing I'm trying to figure out how to explain better is, so OGM is not an organization necessarily, it's more of a movement or a hashtag. It would like to have this show called Weaving the World that is that the above service thing that looks normal that people can be attracted to. And what we want to do is attract people sort of below ground metaphorically to feed the fungus together and to figure out, okay, let's slow this conversation down. Then I had a call yesterday evening with a woman who was in the Philippines, super interesting, super smart, and she showed a diagram with me that was kind of her story of civilization, kind of. And it had sort of, it was organic, it was teardrop, it was appealing, attractive, and it communicated a lot to me. And we had a great conversation over it that I want to sort of repeat as an episode of Weaving the World because slowing that down, mapping what I know and what I understand to it, letting it affect my narratives of how I think things happen is a piece of this process. And then motivating other people to create other shows to feed the same fungus, right? So that Weaving the World is just the first show in this sequence of doing this. Who else would like to come and join us to help elaborate this shared resource over time, which isn't just a bunch of sort of files out of the world, but it's in fact more useful than that. So that's kind of the place I'm at. It's hard because I'm, every conversation I have makes this more interesting and more complicated and shifts my focus on it. You know, Pete Kaminsky is the one who said a couple weeks ago about is OGM an organization or is it more of a hashtag or a movement? And by the end of the call, I was like, well, damn, I think it's more of a movement or a hashtag than it solves a lot of problems that were in my head to have it not be an organization, for example. So how all these moving parts actually fit is really interesting and important to me. And I'm trying to make that all kind of happen. So Stacey, then Julian. Hey, you are muted still, Stacey. Are you having a hard time finding us to unmute? Okay, I got it. Sorry. I just wanted to share with you why I like the fungus because I was thinking about this last night. It's both natural and magical, which brings the feminine back in in a way that doesn't have the power, the negative power dynamics. And I also think it's appealing to a younger generation, as opposed to weaving, you know. And it's also like making poop jokes. It's like, what do you mean the big fungus, right? It's kind of memorable and funny. And then once you sort of get inside the story, you're like, I love this. Like ants do what? So thank you. And it just feels very androgynous. The other thing I want to say is, again, to go back to the idea that I've been bringing up of the game show. So when I heard Ken talking, and he mentioned that wonderful chef, the first thing I thought of wouldn't be a great competition if that chef went to six different places, and the challenge was on those six different peoples to replicate what he does. That's the kind of challenges I'm talking about. So it's weaving, but it's also feeding the fungus and watching it grow at the same time. And by the metaphor of putting mulching leaves into the fungus and having a ooze, nectar and tasty bits, the nectar and tasty bits, the nourishing parts for civilization, are things like, hey, here's a story and here's maybe even sort of roughly instructions of what that chef does when he lands in a community so that they're easier for anybody else to try to replicate, improve, riff on, do whatever. So that things that work are more easily at hand and then applicable everywhere. And nothing actually sticks at part of my amateur theory of change at a community level is that nothing actually sticks in organizations unless they appropriate it entirely for themselves. Like if you show up and say, we've done a study and we figured out the best practices for doing X, Y and Z, and all you have to do is follow our instructions precisely and all will be good. That almost never actually works. That like breaks all the time. But when people sort of can appropriate them and make them their own, that works a lot because then they've made it theirs, they're invested, they figured out how it adapts to their situation on the ground, et cetera, et cetera. So there's this looseness about how to bring wisdom, make wisdom available in the world that's important, I think, that matters in how to do this. Julian. I just wanted to make sure I went to the bigfungus.org and it's just an abstract pattern. It doesn't do anything yet, right? Is that correct? Yes, there's just a picture of woven basket and I'm busy writing text to put on it as a start. That is correct. It's a placeholder website. You're entirely correct. The fungus is just dry at this point. It's just like an empty cave nest that I need to plant some starter in. You mean it needs rain too? Yes, exactly. Eric, do you want to check in? Yes. So I was just in the weaving lab. That's another similar group, remarkably similar group. They have weaving lab? Yeah, they're based in Amsterdam and they're about network weaving and systems change. How about that? How about that? There was this guy talking about how he got burned out trying to create all the kinds of movements after the Arab Spring and he created a lot of social change efforts but he said, yeah, because I burned out also it had a lot of effect on the rest of the movement. So for me, that was a really nice insight on well-being and how important it is to be able to also realize stuff into the world. When I hear a huge group of people that actually are doing change in the world, agreeing to it and making it really important, like they even put it in the center of what they do is well-being, universal well-being, they call it. So it's something like universal income. They call it universal well-being, you could say. So very inspiring. And after what I heard you say, I wanted to bring up in something else, is one model amongst so many is that of the heart, the hands and the brain. I see Jerry as someone really strong on the brain and also a really good heart. And then the doing, yeah, also quite a lot. You created quite a lot of things. And at the same time, there's something about pragmatism and I'm like, hmm, maybe I can be kind of the pragmatical counterweight in this group or something. But I also would like everyone to invite everyone to think about how can we be pragmatic in OGM? What is the things that we want to realize? Because one will feed in together. And they are two dimensions. They are kind of parallel, but they're very different in dynamics. It's a bit, I guess, in my setup, I had this idea, okay, there's a separate business model that generates the money. And then this feeds back into what I want to really do. And for OGM, I was talking about it with Michael yesterday. I think if I want to prioritize what would ever get money, if we would get money into OGM, it would be when it makes a difference. That's the first thing that I would like to give money to is, where does it create social change? Because that's the best business case as well. When we really as a group would create some kind of social change that's really visible, it proves our theory of change, then that would be amazing. So I'm really thinking about what is exactly the business model? And I think it's like a separate track. It's like a two track model. One is for the money and the pragmatics and building infrastructure. And the other is what is this really about? Yeah, of course, knowledge is kind of deeper quality, all the wisdom and insight, all the multitude of multitudes that can nourish so much. So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's my two cents now. Thanks, Eric. And that, to me, is sort of a polarity to manage. And this is this thing called polarity management that says wherever you see kind of opposites, very often it's actually polarities to manage and go between. And in this case, it's like abstraction and concrete action. So if all we did was pragmatic stuff, we probably wouldn't see any big picture. We spend a ton of time in big picture and we don't do enough pragmatics. So we need to balance that out. And part of what I'm trying to figure out is how to describe projects that are bite-sized pieces that then describe a mosaic. So I did five, I still have them open. Oh, I do. Let me do a screen share for a second. So imagine a multi-plane camera. So a multi-plane camera is how they used to shoot cartoons. So you put the characters up here, you put their immediate background here, you put the mountains and the trees and the sun back here, and then you shoot and you move different parts of the scene to make motion and create animation. So forget the animation part. But think of this as one layer of a multi-layer mosaic. And so one of the layers is entity. So this is the view from OGM's mass. So this is OGM where we have weaving the world would be a show that's feeding the big fungus in the spirit of the generated commons. Here is the massive human intelligence project, which is Pete's project in Massive Wiki and the idea of context weavers. Massive Wiki is infrastructure for the big fungus and so are other things. And then here is Vincent and Trove. Here is Stacey's show game. And a bunch of, you know, here's Mark-I'm-Twan-Twan-Twan and the hyper-knowledge project. If I go to participants, this lays over the bubbles I just showed you. So these are the humans that are involved in the projects that are in the layer below. But these humans are also involved in other projects. So they're separated from the bubbles, they're not in the bubbles, because kind of there's these interesting links that it would be nice to see between them. Then this is kind of how we do what we do, which is like several of us use different kinds of tools, whether it's the brain or factor. We have conversations in zooms like this one right now on Google Groups at Mattermost and this course. We then put some of our information on GitHub to share using tools like Massive Wiki and that there is an OGM Wiki. And what we'd like to have is a project dashboard that we can fund projects to go fill pieces of the mosaic I'm showing you right now. And then, what are the entities and constructor participants? Oh, and then this is kind of the meat and potatoes layer of this diagram, which is up on the left here, this is sort of the flow, the information torrent, which is dotted with little nuggets of juicy stuff in the flow. So these are all events happening over time. And some of these nuggets are videos or transcripts of the videos or clean links from the videos like Bentley and Pete have been extracting just the links from Zoom chats, for example, that's a small project to which we would add metadata. And then we would store all this in a public place to create a shared memory. Then some of us, a few of us, are turning these into narratives or into maps like I just showed you I'm doing with the brain. They might look like topic maps or argumentation or debate logic or animations. And then this squiggly line here is sort of where I'm calling the fungus space, because we're putting these out in the public use somewhere. They're not very well linked right now. And then this where this rectangle here is basically magic happens here. How do we get into an arena, a space, a conversation space, a trusted space, where we can compare these narratives and maps and rich them, link them, weave them together into the actual shared asset that we can then use to go back and do policy and do education and do science way. And then there's a line here because awkwardly on the far right here, everything is squishy and human and soft. And it's really about we're never going to get to this point of a shared memory or narratives or arguments or visualization, if we don't actually sort of trust each other. And if we can't sit down and have a good conversation. So this is about deep listening, bridging the cultural divide, creating safe spaces, and then allowing many different people with individual points of view manifest in whatever this set of tools are that appeals to them to play in this conversation. And for all of us together to ask better questions and then figure out what experiments we'll answer our questions, what what people should be invited in, who might be able to help us elaborate those those questions. And with luck, we don't end up with a big dog's breakfast of like all, you know, too many points of view and too many things to catch up with. But some of these start to overlap and crystallize and we start getting some more integral points of view. By integral, I don't mean to call out Ken Wilbur and integral thinking. I just mean that these are sort of integrated viewpoints in some way, and that that could actually be really useful to policy arguments to other sorts of things. So this is this is like a layer right dead in the middle of this mosaic that I think OGM might be. And I'll share these documents in the OGM chat channel. Any thoughts or reactions to that? Does that make sense? Yes, although I need to process a bit for a while. And I also don't miss a part of the pragmatic and of what is the fundraising model? What is the theory of change that we have that we can present to external organizations? That's a very simple story. But people can read. Yes. And I just realized as as I before I forgot to show the projects later. We've been led by the way is organized by Shoka because I see the label there. Interesting. Fascinating. Okay. So I forgot to show the projects layer, which is the important piece. Think of these rectangles as mosaic individual tiles that could be funded. The idea of the projects layers to have a dashboard or a big board overhead, like when you go to the airport and see what flights are going out. These that these would be the projects that are communities, GRC, OGM, other other kind of communities that are loosely linked. These are projects that we like to fund. So Mark Antoine might, this is just me, a conjecturing, right? Mark Antoine might create a sub project of his project where he can model a claim that's useful in the big fungus. What if we had a graphic recording app that allowed you to create deep links in the drawing you were drawing so that those links wove out into the big fungus? That could be a small project. Pete has a project idea out called Opal, which is a massive wiki from Den. So what would it look like? You know, he needs some funding and some support, actually writes in software to make massive wiki more of a wissy wiki. We have, there's all sorts of different pattern languages out there in the world. Pyrogogy, liberating structures, wise democracy, pattern language that are like just pattern languages sitting on websites. How do we instrument them so that they actually like are completely useful and usable in an improving world? And then the game shifting iPad frame app, which may sound totally opaque, is a way to do that. I'm borrowing game shifting here from Arthur Brock, who kind of created a group facilitation process that that feels to me like it would make a great iPad app, so that if we were sitting in a meeting and we had this app, we could then swap in different forms of facilitation. So we could say, hey, let's implement one to four all from liberating structures right now. And one to four all is a is a pattern and a practical group process tool that says, when you have a deep question you want to address in a group, give everybody some some time by themselves, pair them up, put them in fours and then come back to plenary. And that process is really nice for getting more people to meet getting richer ideas, etc, etc. That's one of one of the patterns in the liberating structures. So how would an interface help a facilitator of a conversation run that? Right? And a friend of ours does, there are now zapplets or zaps, I think they're called I'm forgetting zoom apps. So Ross Mayfield has joined zoom, and he's busy trying to promote third parties to come up with zoom apps. This could be a zoom app, right? And then we get sort of zoom connected into iPad connected into whatever else anyway, long rift, but that's kind of where where the thinking is going. So Eric, to your point, the dashboard of fundable projects, we need to we need to all try to create a discipline where we know how to describe a fundable project in a roughly sort of template kind of format where the projects are more or less comparable in terms of goals, resources fit, etc. But also a main narrative that sells, I would say like a whole like, it shouldn't just sound Oh, this is nice. It also should sound essential and something that makes a concrete literal difference in people's lives, even if you never heard about these knowledge mapping things. So so the layer that's missing is the why this matters layer, which I totally totally agree. Like, why are we doing this? I completely agree. You know, I want to do that. And and and towards also to the target audience that's not us. And also interestingly, the why this matters layer of this multi playing sort of model mosaic model is also one of the maps that goes into the mystical rectangle of how things, you know, of points of view of why things work so so that the model becomes a tiny bit kind of recursive or, you know, internal. So so totally, I need to I need to draw that layer scan. But that's kind of where things are headed. I haven't thought about the sort of like why this matters or like questions about projects. When I tend when I was like applying for, you know, like startup funding, I had, I maintained a list of like all the questions that applications asked, and then like kind of like a templated response that way, when I when I applied for like, you know, application number 37, I was like, oh, okay, I already have the answer like five out of the 60s questions from like a past application, I could just copy and paste that tweak it a little bit. I'm wondering if we have any start up like a list of those questions that like, like a super set of all the questions to ask about a project. Trove probably has a lot of the like, the ones that would not be free text, because we're focused on like, you know, filtering a project directory by like, location or by topic or by type, like the questions that are like, where is this located or what location is it serving? Like, I guess the questions that I was thinking about is like, you know, what impact is this project making in the world or what is the what is the vision of this project? Like the ones that are kind of more like free text response that could be worded in lots of different ways. And that, you know, that would probably, once you find the project, you know, the questions that would really help you understand it and dive deeper in. So, awesome. You raised a whole bunch of great things. One is that we don't have but would love to have sort of a list of good questions and answers and how those things work. We're this moment not trying to sort of go apply for grants in different places. It's complicated time consuming and grants are often kind of limiting, but it's a terrific idea. And if somebody wanted to go do that, that would be great. I'm sort of appealing to people like Tabula Raza and say, hey, here's here's a I'm not trying to fit into a grant request, but rather just just appeal to people who might have resources to help us out. But there's no reason not to have sort of a list of questions, good questions that people are asked and what are our best answers to each of the questions. That's phenomenal. And those questions can be from conversations as well as grant applications, right? Second thing is that Vincent Pete has mentioned that you and I have a conversation with our teacher about the possible use of Trove as the dashboard for the projects, which makes a lot of sense to me. I'd love to do that. So let's like find the time to talk to figure out how that might work. And Julian, you've got a question. Well, not a question. I was thinking that this, what Vincent, what you're doing should have a more of a life cycle aspect to it. So not just list of questions, but who asked the question whether answers worked or not, because, you know, an organization is looking for a certain kind of answer. And it would be good to track what kind of answer you thought that they were looking for. So this falls into more of what they call life cycle. And a little bit of sort of double loop or triple loop learning on the questions. So we get some feedback. Sorry, Vincent. I think you were about to say something too. That's interesting. So Julian, are you saying, so obviously there's like, you know, having multiple answers to a question, but are you saying like, who would be the one giving feedback on whether or not the answer for a specific question was useful? Well, whoever was going through the process. Well, it'd be super interesting to have like electrodes implanted and the grant writer, the grant recipient, the grantor's brain, which could then register which answers really, really like rang their bell, and then have that feedback, you know, straight go straight to the data. That would be perfect. But I don't think that's going to be easily implemented. No, but I know that when I've applied for grants, there's been feedback coming from the institution. I think that feedback should be part of that life cycle process of here was a question, here was what happened. There's also a simpler, really, really blunt instrument, which is, hey, we won this grant, we lost this grant. And then wherever you win a grant, the questions and answers in that batch get promoted somehow. So because something in there was useful, but that's really blunt. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think a really good start would be like the top five to 10 questions that are usually asked. And maybe, you know, one of the things that I feel like a lot of projects need help with that might be something that OGM or some of the related communities can kind of assist is kind of helping projects just get started. Like, hey, in order to like, give your project legs, like, you know, Pete came up with the list of things that like an organization should have for a project, you'd like probably should have a mission statement, you probably should have a vision statement. And like, those things can be like tweaks and change once you have a basic one, if you're applying for a specific grant, that's kind of like in a certain domain that you might have to like change it a little bit. But I think just helping projects kind of get like 80% there in terms of like, having a public facing description of the project vision mission statement, you know, and being able to like have that, so that other people can share it. So it's also like, you know, if you go on vacation for a month, going back to like Eric's point is like letting us be the connectors for each other and not having everything exist in our brains, like getting it out into a public brain where we can say, hey, oh, you should talk to this person and check out their project. And like, you know, here's the like, you know, 80% there summary that might not be completely up to date, but it's close enough. Makes sense. Makes sense. Any other thoughts? Otherwise, we'll wrap today's call. Stacy, go ahead. So this is going a whole different direction. So I apologize beforehand. But, you know, I've started to think about OGM is almost like a social club in a positive way. And I just, you know, I also think about the whole, you know, solving for trust and how things would be different if people weren't concerned about how they would get their next meal or where they would eat. So, you know, if we just took what we needed, so, you know, we were working, we just took what we needed. Oh, I need, you know, I need a place to stay tonight. And I was just wondering what it would be like if we were to call in some people like Stephanie Rarrick or people that are really experienced with the gift economy. And what it would look like setting up a gift economy within OGM. For example, I have a place in Diane. If you're here, you can stay here for free. I'm just again, it's a whole different direction. I know it's not where you're going. But if it's something that's small enough, we'd be able to see if that would work. Like that could tie into this whole, the game, the show, the weaving, all of that. Absolutely. And to set a piece of the big fungus can actually be sort of within communities. What are the, what are the asks and the gifts that we have? You know, the asks and offers. And I think that those need to obey sort of community trust boundaries so that you don't want to make your room available to like all of Craigslist, but you're willing to offer it to people in this community, which makes a lot of sense and sounds awesome. Well, and I would start with our community. I think we should actually start by doing it. Right. Okay. And then some piece of that is really simple to do, which is like just to put a query on the OGM list or on the channel that says, you know, list something you've got that you can offer and something that you could really use and, you know, boom, that those things happen and they're pretty good. But the moment they get crowded and the moment they age, they fall apart. Right. So, so they have, they're easy to do quickly and they get a lot of fun things, but then they, they don't, they don't age well. The Stephanie Raric, could you spell the last name of the woman who? I think it's, I would have to look it up. You know, we have this, this, this incredible oracle that can tell us everything. The moment we try to have her on my Facebook friends. And I love that we can even misspell things and the oracle magically usually finds its way back to the right spelling. So thank you. Any other thoughts on this before we wrap the call? Julie. You used the phrase, a piece of the fungus. Is there a word for that? Funglet? That doesn't, that doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? No. Makes me think of what happens to coffee when you leave it sitting out for a week. Yeah, it gets a little fungly. Maybe a niblet. So I like to think of sort of nuggets in different ways, but I'm thinking usually of nuggets of information. Stacy, you said that just to me, but that's okay. What was it? So, rewrite. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And I'll, I'll find her online as well. And yeah. And the whole, I mean, in what Eric was bringing into the conversation earlier, like, why is this important? One of the things that's happening is that there's a, there's a wholesale involuntary renegotiation of the social contract happening globally right now. That the Occupy movement, Eric Spring, Gilles Jaune, you name the movement around. It's a bunch of people saying, Hey, my children's future looks much bleaker than my present, which is not that hot anyway. We need to break the system. We need to change the system. We need to figure things out. And pandemic has made that worse. And there has been sort of basic income experiments during the pandemic, even in the US, you could look at the rescue package that kept people in their homes and, you know, kept children fed as a form of UBI test. There's, there's, that's not an unreasonable way to thinking about what just happened for 18 months. And so I think these conversations are hot and interesting and a piece of why we're busy trying to figure out the big fungus is like, so which of these models wins? Like, can we help promote the healthiest of these models with it, with an intention toward, you know, well-being of the planet and the humans who are, who are parasites on it? Yeah. Do you know the term theory of change? Have you seen, if you looked up about it, read it about it? Okay. Because I think it would be nice for us to literally write it. Like, from like, this is what we're going to do. And we hope by reaching these people in this way, that change will happen. Yeah. I think so, so I definitely have theories of change. I don't know that I have a very sophisticated understanding of it. And then I've got my favorite models for sins making a big complexity and then models and theories of individual social dynamics and so forth and so on. And I even put the etching under theories of change. So I've got something around this. And clearly, I need to think about it deeper. Yeah. Maybe, maybe we can use like a template or something to fill in, to create a clear, clear idea. It's a bit like a business canvas model, but then for your, your model of change. Yep. Okay. Cool. Thank you. And sorry, sorry to load so many things laid into the call. I was just like, not organized to check in myself, but there's been a lot of stuff going on that I'm trying to sort out and make clearer. And this was really useful. So I appreciate your minds and hearts on this. With that, let's wrap today's call. And thank you. Let's go feed the big fungus. I hear there's a fungus among us. More than one. I'm tripping on you. Exactly.