 go. And Pete, do you mind turning on the transcript? Because I'm not going to puzzle it through right in a second. I will go for it. Good. And my laptop has just decided to join the world. So hold on a second. Good. All right. That's great. We had a lovely call last week. There's all sorts of things that occurred in my head since. And I was interested in what else that occurred in your head. So I thought we would do a debrief of that right now. And just for the record, this is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, November 16, 2023. And I thought I would just open the space and see first, like just emotions, whatever, what, how have you all, what has happened for you since that call? I mean, any insights, any comments, any thoughts or any emotional reactions? Go ahead, Gil. So I wouldn't call the call. I wouldn't describe the call as lovely. I would describe it as good and rich and very appreciated. It's hard to use lovely in these days. Stuff isn't happening in my head. It's happening in my body and my being and my moods. The PTSD has calmed down some. The grief is ever present. My impatience has grown. I actually blocked somebody yesterday. I blocked a friend yesterday. It's the first time I blocked a friend. I blocked, I think, three strangers in my however many, 15 years on social media, two of them in the last month. And that's reflecting an impatience with in contrast to what we did here with the oversimplification that so many people seem to be thrown to. That one person who said online, well, it's really plain and simple. I thought, well, fuck, man, it's not plain and simple. You're plain and simple. If you can say it's plain and simple. And so I'm really struck by the challenge that so many people have of holding complexity. I'm shutting off any images of destruction that are always posted of like one side suffering or the others. I'll grip my teeth and tolerate something that shows both side suffering, but I will not look at the violence point of one side or the other. And, yeah, and the person I blocked yesterday was partly for all the reasons I said, but a series of posts that just felt to me downright cruel in their political posturing, cruel and heartless. And I won't tolerate that. I've seen that from both sides. And I won't look more from the so-called pro-Palestinian side, but from the Israeli side too. And I won't tolerate that. So a long way of saying, I appreciate the care and reflectiveness that we've had in this conversation here. And I've tried to nurture that elsewhere, but I'm discovering that I need to just kind of step back from being in social media conversations about this stuff and focus on my own stuff for a while. Bill, thank you and well put. And thanks for correcting my use of the word lovely, which seemed awkward when I said it, but I was trying to figure out how to explain what kind of a call we'd had. So that's really helpful. It was a good thing. Good and hard. Good and hard and tender. Yeah. I was just touching my, I'm on my laptop now as you can probably tell, but I went to touch the screen on my Mac and that doesn't work because it turns out that the interface is different. Anyone else with reflections? I really liked the video you posted yesterday, Bill, on from Elon Musk. I thought he was really spot on in describing this from an unbiased observer perspective. Right. And I mean, I must say my biggest takeaway from the discussion was Simone talking about the messianic influences that are driving these passions. Because then you have to think that these passions are also prevalent here in the United States because and what really hit me is I spent some time in the church in the 90s mostly and at that time the most popular reading in the Christian community was left behind. I don't know if you're afraid of this serious. That's pretty scary stuff because that's celebrating the idea of the rupture and leaving this earth to join a better life in a different place. And so when you when you think that there's a significant share of the US population that is really believing this, I mean, really fervently believing that the end times may have arrived and they start in the Holy Land and it will be all good because now the and so that's real. This is not this is, you know, we are looking at this as thinking of it in abstract terms, but that's a true belief. And so to reach out and find ways to pull people out of this mindset and this worldview I think is a real challenge for us now. Pete, Ben Gill. Thanks and thanks for setting up the call Jerry. It was it was rich and I really appreciated it. On reflection, I won't talk about the subject too much more about about the call rather on reflection. I was really touched by Shimon's discussion and it made me feel a lot. I left the call feeling a lot more hopeful and less stressed than than than I thought I would would have and that I thought I would about the topic at all actually. So I really appreciated the call. As you might know, I also set up a transcript and a GPT for the call afterwards and in doing that looking over the call and playing with the chat with the call a little bit. I was struck by something I was struck by something which I thought was really interesting. There were a bunch of things that kind of hit for me during the call that I noticed and made a mental note to myself. You should go back and listen to this call again because there's interesting prospects for peace. It's going to be take a lot longer than we thought it would. There are concrete next steps to do a bunch of kinds of things that came up for me in the call that the best I could do during the call, it wouldn't have made sense to take notes or anything. I took mental notes I guess but it was like watch out for these things the next time you watch the call. I ended up not watching the call because I hate to say it and this might sound stupid or something but having chat GPT process the call for me in a couple different ways was enough for me to get the high points that I had remembered to flag for a next watching. I got them better and quicker and richer and deeper and more of them. I would have caught like four things about the call on a rewatching. With just a little bit of discussion with chat GPT I got eight things. I thought that was really interesting and it makes me sad that I don't have a ton of time to rewatch all the really good calls in the world and it also makes me a little bit hopeful that we have tools to help us see more of the world faster because there's so much more to see. So not so much about the topic. I wouldn't want to get into that but it was interesting digesting the call that way and I appreciate again having a call where we're on one topic for the whole time and we're able to get 90 minutes or 13,000 words of kind of rich material on one particular topic. I really like that. Pete, thank you for the post-processing you did of the call. That was terrific. That was really helpful and you're reminding me now to go back and do more with it which is one of the things I wanted to ask about as a part of the after action review. So thank you for that. Hank, and hold on a second Hank. Gil, I think you had your hand up or someone had your hand up. I did. I did in Zoom took it down just very briefly to classes if I could. Hank, thank you to class's point about the messianics. My interpretation is that one of the reasons this thing is so complicated is that both sides are in the grips of their crazies right now. And the messianics are different in the different Abrahamic traditions. I mean the Christian messianics are happy for Israel to get blown to shit because that arches in the next age and the Muslims have a notion of death being an honorable way to live your life and the Jews have their own different craziness and great resource on this is Karen Armstrong's book, The Battle for God about the fundamentalist extremists of all three. But in the aftermath of last week's conversation I found myself wondering who are the Israeli settlers in the West Bank who in case you don't know are not only not only exacerbating the battle over land but the violence in the West Bank against Arabs has grown enormously in the last month. And we can go into that another time. It's horrific, I think. But I found myself wondering what percentage of those people are American immigrants to Israel. Turns out it's about 15 percent. The Israeli population overall it's about 2 percent. So and these are not Christian millennial fundamentalists. These are Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists but they're also coming out of the cowboy myth. They're carrying the American Wild West cowboy myth with them into the West Bank. So I've been worried about that. I'm even more worried knowing the number. The most video people hadn't seen it, he said, Lex Friedman said, so what do you recommend? He said for the Israelis to flood the zone with gratuitous acts of compassion. My brother-in-law used to talk about his strategy for Israeli Palestine. The issue would be to fly planes over and grab chickens, just drop lots of food. So outside the box, kids. Thanks. Thanks, Gil. Hank, please go ahead. Thanks. As any of you heard last week when I was on the call, I found it very emotional. What's happening there, I'm taking in a very emotional way and I was rather emotional on the call and I was very, very happy that most of you and most of the people on the line were able to lift it up out of the emotional sea of suffering that's happening and really talk in ways, systemic ways and other ways about what might be done to stop the war that's going on there. And right after the call, I was feeling better because I realized that you can apply systems, thinking concepts and others like that, complexity concepts to looking at a world situation like that. And by chance that evening, I went to a lecture by the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mafo Tutu, who lives in the Netherlands and was lecturing about a book she wrote with her father some years ago called The Book of Forgiving, The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and the World. And that's a message that I think could have been expressed better in the call and if we would look into that type of message, we could see that what happened in the awful and somewhat analogous situation in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee shows that it is possible for human beings who look at each other hatefully through the barrel of a gun to tell their story, name their hurt, grant each other forgiveness and then renew a relationship as Tutu, elder and daughter, call their Fourfold Ways. And a day after that I went to hear Kim Stanley Robinson, who was in Amsterdam speaking about ministry for the future. And in a totally different way, it gives me lots of hope that people can decide that something has to be done and in very, very many ways attempt to understand different things that have to be done. And I'm not sure how that is in America, but in all climate demonstrations in the Netherlands and a lot of them in Europe, climate and social justice and the war between Israel and Palestine are all intertwined. So between Mrs. Tutu and Stan Robinson, I think there's a lot to be thought about and a lot to be learned. And the last question on your after action review list, Jerry, is where we might take this topic and I'm going to take it on a side step and say I think it'd be wonderful if OGM and calls like this would address real life issues in this type of emotional, but also cognitive science way. So I'll leave my comments at that. Thank you. And I'm heading forward that question as well. Do you want to say a little bit more about that? Are you saying let's do more of what we did or are you saying something different or am I misunderstanding you? I'm saying I thought it was wonderful to take such a situation as Israel, Palestine and Gaza and address it in the way we did. And it would be useful to take it further if there's enough interest for people on the call, but also to take other major challenges of the world. I think as you're saying, Peter, one call for one issue or maybe two calls for one issue and apply our different perspectives on the world to making sense of sometimes senseless situations. Thank you, Hank. So I'd love to do that. Eric, then Pete. Yeah, hi, everybody. So I wasn't on the call, but I watched it last Saturday and it's an emotional thing to hear everybody's different opinions and I could understand all of you. As a Jew, it is a really tough thing. I'm sort of like weighing both sides. It's hard for me to express a concrete opinion, but I need to look at it practically what in my life makes sense. So I donated to several charities that I believe in and I posted information about Seeds of Peace and I asked a question and it's in the chat as well. So personally, like this Sunday, I'm going to be teaching a music class to Hebrew school children and this hits home like how do children understand what's happening in the world? Are they even told about it by their parents at certain ages? What's the right age for a child to know about war? So in the music, I have Israeli dancing, Israeli singing and pictures of Israel when I was there in 1989 and that will be like a half hour thing. There's something else going on the rabbis doing as well, but it really is tough for Jews right now all over seeing the depth of the antisemitism that's coming out there and the guy who was killed and the students who are locked in a library. So what message do we tell our children? Well, this is the world we're living in now and you do have to be careful as parents and teachers we're here to protect you as best we can, but you have to learn to hide certain parts of yourself, it seems. And then in December, I'll be doing talking about Flory Jagoda who wrote a Hanukkah song, famous one called Ocho Kandelikas and she grew up in Bosnia, Sarajevo and had an amazing story. She had a great childhood but then she had to get on a train by herself with nothing else just her accordion and travel to split another town in Croatia and wait for her parents there and she finally got reunited with her parents but could imagine that agony for a 15 year old to have to take on the world and suddenly just drop everything of your life. So I understand how powerful forgiveness is but practically I don't see that happening with the political structures in place. This is going to play itself out somehow and it's scary. We just have to really look at our local communities, make sure we're safe where we are. Thank you. Thanks Eric. Pete you're next and please take your time and stepping in. Thanks. I will pause for a few seconds to let Eric, thanks for bringing that to the room Eric. I appreciate it. And it actually, not that it needs to do anything except be heard. Thank you again Eric. It helps illustrate something that I wanted to say. Hank kind of reinforced the idea of the one topic call and I think it's really powerful and really good. I wanted to note one of the things that made it a good call, a rich call was hearing from thoughtful, passionate people who had skin in the game. So Shimon for instance or Klaus with his daughter for instance, Eric just now. I think part of the format of those kind of deep calls on complex subjects, complex, large geopolitical sized subjects need to have a fair amount of grounding in lived lives and lived experiences from people who are actually entangled in the situation. I think that is what makes it a good call. So then also part of the reason I did what I did, I didn't do a lot of work processing the call but I did some and a big part of the reason I did that was to help others spread, help others distribute the messages in the call. And kind of the meta messages too. Hank kind of said this but maybe I'll try saying it a different way. One of the things I got from that call was not just a little bit, a tiny bit of a better understanding or a less unsettled feel about the situation, not that I'm settled about it at all. But one of the things I got out of the call was somebody like Shimon or somebody in that class not freaking out in a situation that could be really freaky, really, really hard to deal with. So a meta message from the call was we get through these things. As Hank said, you can actually bring some of your tools like systems thinking into a situation where before it just felt like, oh my gosh, there's so much going on and it's so scary and it's so confusing and I don't know which side and my hair is on fire. You can actually bring that down and partly because you have to, Shimon or Klaus or Eric have to live in the world with a terrible situation. You just figure out how to deal with it and you start working through things and you start looking for the light, looking for people who want to help and start moving forward. So I really appreciate that about the call too, that it was a meta message of hope and moving forward. Thanks. Pete, thank you. You moved directly to the second question, which is what worked well in the call. The third question I'll remind everybody that I posed is what didn't work and I'd love to get there as well. But you just very nicely explained a bunch of things that I hadn't crystallized myself about what was working well. So thank you for that. Anybody else? What worked well? I think there was a sense of fortunate serendipity in some sense because I got a message the night before from Shimon saying, oh my gosh, this topic is great. I need to clear my calendar a little bit. I'll be on the call. I think I can be on the call. I wasn't even sure he was going to make it. And I'd forgotten his many links into the topic. And so the fact that Shimon is a member of our community and saw the invite was a piece of fortune for all of us, I think, in that sense. And another thing that Stacey pointed out, which provoked the call, was that the tone and tenor and manner of our conversations enabled us to step into the topic in a way and with the history and with the trust in each other that I think was useful and helped make the call better that it otherwise might have been. Anybody else with things that worked well? Okay, then. What didn't work? So it was a perfect call. This is like Trump's perfect call with Rappensburg. I mean, it could not have gone better. Hank, go ahead. It's a combination of what went well and what you could do better. I think 90 minutes was really the upper limit going into a topic like that. And what we could do better. Well, that's the one topic, one, two or three calls idea, which seems to be appreciated by a number of people here. So usually I would say in a different circumstance, oh yeah, well, if you can talk for 90 minutes, you can talk for 120 minutes or even longer. But I was happy that it was only 90 minutes. I tend to favor in 90 minutes often for conversation like that or conversation that matters to me, partly because at the hour, very often at 50 minutes is when we've just gotten cranking and things are sort of warming up and we're figuring out where we are and what's going on. And so having one hour slots is like therapy is 50 minutes long. And I'm like, that's just such a shitty timeframe. Because for some people that you just start sinking into things at 50. And then it's like, ah, sorry, time's up, gotta go. And so, and then I think there's a kind of emotional exhaustion that sets in if you've been at it and really in for 90 minutes, where you either need a break and then reconvene or do it next time. So I really liked the 90 minute format and two hours seemed long. And when I hit podcasts that are three hours long, I don't listen to most of them. I can't sit for three hours listening to something unless somebody guides me to exactly what mattered for me or something like that. It's hard. But thank you. And in the interest of what didn't work well, or what could be made better. I'm always interested in how we note take about what we learn from the calls. And so I'm extra grateful for the post-processing Pete did and also want to go back into this and see how we could together in different ways curate resources out of what we're talking about that might be useful to other humans. That always being the purpose for such curation for me anyway. Gil, you're muted. So yeah, thanks, Jerry. Yes, on 90 minutes for all the reasons that you said. I don't comprehend three hour podcasts. Neither the people who make them to the people who listen to them. I don't understand how people have time in their lives to listen to three hour podcasts. And for the people who say, well, I do it while I'm doing other things. I think, gosh, wouldn't it be nice to just kind of be doing other things and have your own thoughts instead of just the constant. This is the Ken's Fomo Jomo thing, maybe. I haven't looked at Pete's custom GPT on this. I'm intrigued by that. And I like the combination of Hank and Pete's suggestion. Let's do I think not to maybe three or four sessions on topics of this complexity and have the GPT processing in between and mention for all of us to look at that or interact with that some kind of way and maybe bring in the GPT into the conversation that we're having live. Ken and I are probably going to experiment next month. We've been training four years of living between worlds conversations on a custom, not a GPT, but something else someone's building for me. And I've been interrogating that. We're thinking about Ken, I don't know if we've talked about this much or this is totally new to you. So I'm thinking about bringing the bot into the conversation with our 40 people on the call, putting it up on screen and inviting people to poke it and ask it questions and see what it generates, then discussing that live and the interaction. So there's something interesting to play with about calls. I think we're set at 90, how many to do in a sequence of a topic and how to play with the GPT as a, not an artificial intelligence, but as an augmented intelligence for us in our conversation. Thanks, Gil. Judy and Pete and take your time stepping in. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't muted. What I find highly valuable in these conversations is the richness and diversity of the knowledge of the participants and their ability to bring in not only talking points, but references for deeper dives as well. And I like that that exists in the OGM chat cycle that we use because it allows me to take in contrarian opinions, synthesize. I mean, it just allows a much deeper level of pursuit of understanding, which then leads to internal pursuit of self-awareness or self-positioning. And that's really what keeps me coming back to this community. At the same time, having said that, I appreciate some of the less formal conversations as well because I think it lets us connect as people without the mantle of the weight of some of the topics that we choose to discuss. Thank you. Thanks. Quick comment for Gil. I really like the idea of bringing, well, actually I do and I don't, I have to say. I really like the idea of bringing in GPT into a conversation. Having worked with the bots for a while, the advice I would have maybe is not to treat it as a participant and not to treat it as a person. And even though I break that rule a lot, I'll say the bot understands or the bot thinks or the bot knows something. All of those words are actually for humans, they're not really for bots. But on the other hand, we don't have a word for the thing that a bot does when it's acting very much like it understands something or acts like it knows something. So you kind of get stuck. But anyway, I use a chat bot a lot and I use an art bot a lot, both. And the thing that I grew into, and I think this is true for everybody, is it helps you do things and you don't want to let it have the say on what something means. What something means is for people. There's a great quote that Bill shared from Emily Bender. I'll look it up. But people make the meaning of what a bot says. The bot says things that sounds like it has meaning, but it doesn't. So in a conversation with a group, the thing that I would be interested in as somebody who's used bots a lot is, yeah, okay, so the bot regurgitated and put together a really interesting couple of thoughts there. And they do it all the time. Putting together things out of things that humans have said. But I don't really care what it says. I care what the person who's asked the bot the question thinks about that. Okay, so the bot said blah, blah, blah. I think it's right in these ways, maybe wrong in these ways. And that makes me think of other things. I'm really interested in the human reaction to what a bot says. I'm not so interested in what a bot says. Thanks. Thanks, Pete. And I think it's fun and exciting that we're asking questions and able to have resources and tools that let us ask questions like you just asked and to ponder about how do these new intelligences play in our conversations, et cetera, et cetera. That's like, who thought, I didn't think I'd be writing down the numbers 2023 on checks and papers. That seems like a distant number. And the thing you just said, I'm like, well, there we are. We're in a little magic wonderland of strange things. So thanks for those reflections. Klaus, then Doug, please. Yeah, I agree that the bot is really very much reflecting on your thought process. And if you have set it up to stay within boundaries of how you want to frame your thought process, then you get some pretty amazing and pretty fast responses. I mean, I did scan the the bot asked me to scan in the Neo Book 57 pages in order to write a review. And it was very offensive because it took exactly one second for it to read these 57 pages and it's gone. And then it comes back with what looked like a really professional book review. But it really is a reflection of your own thought process because you have to sort of tell it where you want to go. One thing that I really got out of this conversation that really disturbed me in this conversation last week is the broader context. First of all, that these conflicts are happening all over the globe right now. And that there is a clear run towards authoritarianism, towards theocracy, towards monoculture and so on. And so what came to me was the culture and crisis from Zorochen. So I pulled up his book and ran it through the AI. In fact, I sent something out yesterday about it. But the reason I fell back on Zorochen is that he really almost perfectly defines the time we are in, this turmoil, this period of transition and the pressures this brings. So his theory really is that in this time of transition, we experience an attempt by the existing structures to maintain control, to maintain instead of recognizing where to shift to, they want to stay in place and double down on it. And it's creating enormous tensions. But in order to step back and really recognize what theory what Dr. Schame is calling, allowing the future to unfold and stepping into the future, that process is very difficult to do. And I mean, coming back at all the information that we have now from science is that we are in a very precarious situation with the environment, running away much faster than anyone expected. And the conflicts that we are having is something we absolutely cannot afford, because it is global. And these conflicts add some, first of all, the waste resources that could be otherwise dedicated towards building technology and tools and processes that we need to catch this. And then on top of it, then create more destruction and more pollution. So I think AI is going to be a real an amazing tool. It's fascinating. And the most astonishing thing is how fast we've gotten used to using it and just working with it. But I think we really need to, I mean, chat GBT wouldn't have thought of using Zorkin and this paper on its own, right? So it's not like you can ask it a question and get magic answers. No, you can really only use your own thought process, but then then have the AI take a deep dive on this that would that moves you way beyond where you would have landed. So it's, I don't know how to describe it, a helper or whatever, but it's an amazing research assistance. And in some ways, it mentors you, right? Because it brings out issues that way beyond what your horizon was at the time. Um, thanks, House. I'll note that we're sort of having the meta longer discussion a little bit now in our comments. And I do want to cue a little bit to the after action review and then sort of let us back into the topic, I think. Doug, what's it like living with family guy? Um, lighter. Well, that in in the times we're in, and it's just like, yeah, just the Simpsons living room. Um, I, I'm, I'm not sure actually which it attributes to it's the one that vibration the lightest and sort of most joy provoking. Um, I, I, where clouds just left off is sort of where I'd like to pick up through a different lens and really referencing back to the after action of like what's right. And stepping out of the bringing the rear view mirror in terms of all that's known, all that we can do all that's happening then, and stepping out of projecting into a future. That doesn't exist yet. In the, in the present moment, in the space that OGM represents and is co-created by the people that assembled, there's a spaciousness and there is a balance and Eric can share his emotional reality and Shimon, what was most shocking to me in it in Shimon sharing was a lack of his, you know, being emotionally engulfed, the degree to which he was just in the moment in response to in his active way it was as it was possible to be in the belly of the beast in as many directions as possible. And that this space is safe enough so that, you know, people's feelings can be expressed and this space is safe enough that people's fire can be expressed and this space is welcoming and open to people's capacity to wrestle with really complex things and attempt and endeavor to make sense. And underlying all of that is a groundedness I think in the value that's rooted in him. Thanks, Doug. Let's talk, let's bounce to the next question, which is how might we improve such a call for a little bit? Judy, I'll go to you in a second, then I'd like to shift to this, which is we're talking about maybe doing a series of three or four calls. I'd like to actually sort of mail that down so that we can figure out what we mean and I can plan for it in the call sequence. But go ahead, Judy. I was just going to comment that over the years this group has evolved into one which has a high level of trust in the values and frameworks of the people in the group, which then allows really deep conversations and a trusting of the additional resources that are brought into the group by other members of the group. So I think that what we do online is really important because that trust is built in the human contact, but I think that how we assemble the aggregated knowledge afterwards is another important dimension worthy of some further conversation that's frankly beyond my scope from a technology standpoint, but those of you that are better at it might have some thoughts about how to make the shared wisdom more available to people we trust to invoke deeper conversations in other settings. I'm reflecting here on our group and our call and some of the things we're talking about and realizing that I don't want to over praise us for what we did in part because I don't know that we have any representatives or anybody who feels strongly at the very opposite end of the spectrum who is in the room. And I think our dynamic might have been different had there been or if there were in our community somebody like that. So I think we did well with being I think within a range of reactions or emotions about the topic that were bounded in some sense that weren't as broad as they otherwise might be and I don't know what might have happened had a few participants been in the room even if they'd been in our community for a long time with stronger feelings about the Palestinian side of things or whatever I don't I don't know but we didn't have that. So I feel like we did well for who we are and what we do but I don't want to over reach on that or overstated. So I'm tempted go ahead Gil I'll come back to what I'm about to say. Just just briefly I know for me and I suspect for others that we I don't know what the word is Jerry we sort of curated ourselves in this conversation. It wasn't just open your mouth to speak I was reflective before I spoke careful how I spoke not in the sense of self-censorship but just be careful in the context of what we have built here together. And so that as I say that I just think that that may be something worth some observation in another time about what of the relationships the process the history the way we've talked together has given us the ability to shape a conversation with care like we had last time. And I think your your other point if there were more if there was more diversity of views in the room that might be challenging or that might be just absolutely what this needs to try to do that in this kind of frame which harkens back to truth and reconciliation and other things that we've talked about. So thank you very much that's that's really helpful. So I'm I kind of borrowed this normally we've been alternating a while ago I'd forgotten exactly when but I could find out we decided to alternate formats between check-ins and topics and I borrowed this call which would normally have been a check-in because I was really interested in processing how last week's call went so we're doing a bit of an after action review but I'm getting the sense that we might actually want to sit down and do a three or four week run with no check-ins in between on maybe this topic maybe this topic reframed or slightly brought a topic I don't know but something like that and I'd love I'd love to get the sense of the room and figure that out so that we can kind of map it and then plan for it as we step through the calls and see if we want to wait or shift the calls in some way that might be useful to us I'd like to experiment with the the the group that we have the the souls and minds that we have present and see how how to tackle this so the floor is open so to speak to format suggestions process suggestions experiment suggestions whatever else you'd like go ahead Pete with without derailing that request I think that's a brilliant and thoughtful and useful request I think another another step is to understand why we're having these calls so what's the charter of this call series what what do we expect to get out of it what how will we share it with the world if if we share it with the world how will we think how do we think the world will change if we're successful with our calls I would really like to understand that and that would help ground the rest of it you know the calls how do we set up the calls what the topics are who's involved what we do at the artifacts afterwards you want to take a first swing nope damn it contribute can I talk to them please just for like 30 seconds okay Jesse that I think that there we go that I thought I thought you were talking to us but you weren't sorry I wasn't that's all right thank you Kevin then Judy um Eleanor Ostrom says that a group of ranchers can manage a watershed about I think it's 47 percent higher than the government can if certain conditions apply and one of them is frequent kind of unplanned or casual interaction with each other like they meet at the post office they meet at a particular store and then they're they have good agreements about the watershed that are transparent of what happens upstream and downstream but I think the the check-ins are really good for that level of call this watershed management you know the check-ins is who you are and what you're doing and that's a key thing to cause things to flow well and if you don't have those the watershed is not nearly as well managed if you just meet at the meetings then you don't get to know the folks and you don't have folks in other context so I think it's uh it's useful for whatever we do to keep that kind of thing happening thank you for making that explicit I hadn't sort of realized that or thought of it and I a year ago I was getting more involved in the HOA in our building and I realized I realized that HOA guidelines or laws mean that members of the HOA who are on the board cannot talk to each other unless there are three or more of them present or some stupid thing like that wow wow like like they are restricted because otherwise it's considered a meeting or collusion or god knows what and I was like oh my god so joining the board basically screws up your ability to sit and hang and chew the fat and figure out what's going on and who thinks what that is just ludicrous it's systemically going to be less efficient back to reality um it was an anti-corruption it was an anti-corruption move some years ago okay it's it's it's common in government in legislative bodies yeah yeah but but what a damaging thing to the kinds of informal discourse we need I understand the safeguards so one of my one of my little tropes is that we pass we pass laws when discourse fails mm-hmm that I would rather have way fewer laws and have people able to sort of do discourse one of the one of the really bitter lessons of Trump's victory in 2016 and then learning about his MO is that one of the things he loves to do one of his favorite tools in his playbook is to break norms and the problem is that norms are not laws and you can break all the norms you want what you get is other people being upset but they can't put you in jail for breaking a norm they can put you in jail for breaking a law which 91 indictments are trying to do right now really hard and may fail don't know but but I would prefer to live in a society with way fewer hard rules and way more social interaction and norms and like Oscar Wilde said I'd love socialism but I want my evenings I'm misquoting him again but you know but all of that takes time and effort Judy please jump in oh I was just thinking and I keep following the current conversation so then I forget what I was thinking when I raised my hand but my recollection is that part of what I've begun doing carefully is populating conversations with other groups of people with materials that have been aggregated by this group and just saying just saw this really interesting thing for instance the one about the effect of colonialism on the current conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians and that sense of history I'm not a historian so I found that truly fascinating and have shared it with book clubs and other groups here just to get us thinking because we do talk about some of these topics but not in the same depth and so that's the the the aggregation of the information that you provide Jerry or the that our chat stream and OGM provides when we're offline from one another and someone comes in and says based on what we talked about last week here's this cool article I saw I find very very valuable and it reinforces the sense of connection that I have with the people in the group thanks Judy one of the things I love love love about our conversations is that my little understanding my amateur understanding of how the world works and what I care about and what's going on is always crystallized a little bit and improved and stitched together woven together a little better from these calls and very often will wind up lost in the wilderness for the first 20 minutes of a call and then suddenly find our way into something that just makes sense and clicks in place and I I live for those little aha moments and when a couple things click in place and you feel like you understand something a little better even if you're just fooling yourself about understanding those things it's a pleasant it's a pleasant pastime and maybe productive I'm also very interested in more explicitly and more visibly and more publicly clicking those ideas together so that they can be held up turned around examined experimented with compared with other people's perceptions I think that leaves you in the mechanisms for insightful learning it'll feel I think that's your audio no worries um so what um what should we do about these calls how should we structure this what would you like to do and we don't have to think really long term but what what should we do for the next two three four five six calls uh given what we've learned and talked about here what would you like to see happen Hank uh I what I think would be worth doing is discovering both for individuals on the call and for the collectiveness on the call if we address a topic for two three or four uh conversations does it really create new knowledge or new understanding and I don't want to say that we should try to quantify it but in a qualitative way I think it'd be a terrific uh experience to find out if a group of 10 or 15 or 20 people could actually uh deepen and broaden their understanding of the topic we're talking about I love that I found it interesting that shimon had actually taken kumu and drawn some diagrams of and and the diagrams that he had drawn were basically structural diagrams of how israel uh makes governmental policy decisions and the the role the interplay between religious bodies and government bodies and a bunch of that kind of thing it was just the beginning of a kumu and and I don't know that he's a kumu black belt but but sort of maybe curating and enhancing some of those things over time would be something we could do as well uh and and I could ask gene belanger or christina bowen who are the two the two kumu black belts I know of if they've already seen uh uh system maps about the situation or if they would be interested in helping shimon improve his or whatever because that that would be one interesting side project that might uh might help us describe or tackle these things and I say that also knowing that a really well fleshed out system map and kumu is often overwhelming to me and I need it to be unfolded for me and belanter's really gene is really good at doing that he'll say here's the start then you add this then you add this and all of a sudden you're looking at this system map and now here's what happens when you tweak the variables that that's really interesting and a second caveat to it which is that sometimes systems maps barely describe the system and aren't necessarily that helpful in changing it but I think they're helpful in making a few things explicit so that would be an interesting side dish that that I would love to to nurture along uh jesse uh well so last week's group time inspired me to write an article on compassion and mindfulness and compassion is just rolling in my head every single day um I love the idea uh if this group generates new understanding and I know that after now after you complete a zoom call you can have a little form like a little survey that says whatever you want to put in there like did you increase your level of understanding within the group's context of whatever I mean there's an opportunity to use that technology right after the zoom call um to start I don't want to say measuring but you know if it was an experiment to have that qualitative data for you to share with the group in the next call just to share I think that would be kind of interesting um I'm I'm not a huge tim ferris fan as a person but I but I really admire this approach toward hacking things and trying to make your way through whatever you know just the quickest way through something and I think that we could maybe do a little bit of hacking of of our of our approach and I'm thinking it could be kind of useful so so thank you so so if you would like to design a light poll um I don't use zoom plus calendar in the way that the poll you just mentioned might require because I think what you can do is after an event you can send registered guests a poll but nobody's registered for this call I don't do that I just have a link and everybody shows up for the link but what I could do easily at the end of a call is I could just run the poll during the call because I try to pull and it's not that hard to set up but I don't know exactly which questions you think are are interesting to um to put in so if you'd like to do that I'm happy to run a poll yeah you can actually make it so that you have the same question for all of your zoom meetings throughout the week and you don't even have to send it it just you know shows up but one question maybe a qualitative maybe quantitative I don't know but I think it's worth just exploring um but at a later time just wanted to say that technology exists cool we could also wrap calls with one particular question and ask for feedback in the chat or on the list or whatever else and if you want to help us formulate that question that would be awesome I'd love that yeah thank you and Mike is saying in the chat asking what is the one sentence that you'll most remember from the last 90 minutes could be interesting as well Bill then Pete uh Bill you took your hand down but you didn't unmute really I want it I want the technology to be intelligent not like you know not this faux stuff faux um so several things one I think Hank asked you know it's really an empirical question so what Jesse just says kind of interesting and what Mike Nelson put in the chat is really kind of great you know so if we're going to ask an empirical question we're going to like expect an answer somehow some kind of answer so we could do that for ourselves um and so I think that would be really valuable the other thing that's come up for me is a couple of weeks ago well I don't know I was in a conversation I got Jerry with you and Pete and some others and Pete said you know his notion is a book is a place where knowledge goes to die so I'm like okay I don't think I'll you know toast to that word but nonetheless I'm getting the feeling that a lot of what we produce here even in the wonderful thing you know the follow-up that Pete did is kind of you know artifacts about what we've talked about what might be learned what and they go to places to die like I don't know a google email list which is like what is that talk about a heap on the floor that's you know so I would like for me because things that come up for for me if they're thoughtful well I don't know I'm older now takes me time I like to think slowly so then I would like to put a comment somewhere but there is no like where would that go and would it be available and would it have any life that could be you know maintain that maybe it really requires for a group of people that want to actually preserve some of what they're discovering thinking with each other that we have to figure out and make some effort to have and I don't know what it is in the world an artifact right that can be that we will you know commit to maintain in some way and the other the one thing I'll say Jesse about the poll I think it'd be great on the other hand I think most of the time I would just delete them because I don't I hate that stuff but I like Mike Nelson's question about here take this question away with you you know if something comes up you know write it down or shirt or you know whatever so I think that's that would be really valuable thanks Bill um Pete thanks um and I kind of wanted to echo uh how how Bill closed there that I love Jesse Jesse thanks for the idea I love the idea of using a zoom poll at the at the end of a call and I know for me at least I have no idea what happened on the call at the end of the call and if you ask me you know I'll give you an answer but I won't I won't like giving you an answer and I won't it won't be a very intelligent answer it won't be the answer that you wish um so of course um as an uh you know information management designer or a UX designer or something like that I and and by extension all of us all of us know why the poll gets asked at the end of the zoom call it's because that's when everybody's still around and they haven't scattered to the wind however for me that's like probably the the exact worst spot to ask the question maybe I'll maybe I'll actually produce something interesting and probably I could train myself if I were asked every call I could probably train myself to have an answer for the call but where I wanted to go with this I would be super sad if we asked something at the end of a call and we didn't ask it five days later because five days later I can tell you what happened on the call why I cared about it what was interesting what was important um how I would do it again how I wouldn't do it again all that kind of stuff then you can ask me and I'll be able to tell you um so and of course in UX design land the reason we don't do that is because we've scattered to the wind um but uh kind of to Bill's point um uh it would be nice to be able to do that to ask the question five days later three four five seven days later um and it would be nice to figure out how we don't scatter to the wind to make that happen um Jerry actually did it did it today um he did a clever thing he said let's have an after after action review of last week's call so now we know a lot about last week's call much more than we would have at the end of the call um but obviously this is also I think unsustainable to have a call and then an after action review call um seven days later that doesn't work either so it seems like there should be something in the middle um I love the idea Bill of um I have something to say about the call and I want to say it I know now the way it works if we put it in uh the mailing list it will be lost to the sounds of times about 12 hours later um and if we put it on a matter most I feel like nobody's going to find it there um we don't have many people on the matter most who are also in the calls or on the mailing list so we don't have that you know water cooler after you know after after party discussion anywhere I think and I would love to have that and I don't really know how to do it um also real quick I wanted to mention um the thought that books over knowledge goes to die I I remember having um it's kind of a telescoped and overamped way of saying something that I I remember pretty distinctly having a similar thought uh when I was doing a layover in Chicago or something like that in airport and I went into a really nice airport bookstore they have you know it was it was a branch of a real bookstore so they have a lot of books in it um as well as magazines and candy and gum and stuff like that and just walking through the books you know um the the thing that struck me was bookstores are where knowledge goes die where ideas go to die because um uh of all the books and ideas that get published and packaged up into books and offered for sale to people the ones on the outside of the um the outside of the store the the trashy paper books and the flashy business you know um business management you know hotness and all that kind of stuff next to the candy and the and the neck pillows and stuff like that those are the ones that get picked up unused the rest of them feel a lot to me like a graveyard um a bookstore is a lot like a graveyard 80 whatever of those books you know get touched by very few people um and especially now uh in the in the olden days maybe people um uh people relied on books more because there weren't places that you would go and congregate and read and and talk and stuff like that nowadays we've we've gone past that um and so um the place where I read stuff is god forbid twitter or facebook or uh maybe a little bit better discord or even better zoom calls um I get a lot of information from my zoom calls probably much more than I read um so uh it's it's a bit of a dramatic way to say something but um I I think there is there is something to saying that um the especially the old medium of a printed book or even a an ebook is something where uh we talked about this on the new books call a popular book has you know got 5 000 to 10 000 readers a popular tweet has got a million readers right there's a there's a difference there um and so I'm not saying that we shouldn't those of us who love books shouldn't stop reading books or creating books but I am saying that um if you want to have your ideas be part of the conversation they need to they need to have smaller pieces and those pieces need to kind of flutter around the internet in lots of different ways so that's that's what I think about books um and it strikes me it strikes me we might want to have a call about this that particular topic some other time when we're not on this thread but uh I I care a lot about how ideas propagate and how ideas have sex and how we apply ideas into the world and and use all that information and I'm being intentionally provocative when I say that books are uh where information goes to die but uh Mr. Jones the floor is yours I want to question whether uh the thing I love about the check-in calls is that you're paying attention to that person in that moment and if you wanted to do a sum of it then you're thinking about how it's fashioned in the future and you're changing the time signature in something that is really nice and random and you can pay attention to you know Stacy when she talks about that and then I talked about somebody else and they're talking about something else to to put it into having a note afterward turns it into a future post and it becomes in a sense productized and then it's also evaluated and tested in a poll and all those seem things seem a really bad seem to be a commodity classification of serendipity that the group calls have so I'm a vote for no further productization of the moment that is the check-in and that's just my view. So that means I should call off my conference call with Nielsen where I was going to give everybody on the call a people meter so that you could turn your emotion meter up and down as your as the call progresses and I was going to like sell that data to them damn it. Yeah you know if you can do an electric shock when they do what you want them to do maybe that's a way to do it. I had not thought of that angle Kevin that's really clever I like that. Well you know most Zoom calls I'm on I want to get something down or learn from somebody this is not that this is this other thing. All right so sorry Nielsen off off with that. Gail Benpatti you're still muted however it's a movie mistake I understand. Oh I'm well I'm I'm I'm I'm fresh in every moment Jerry. Yeah reborn reborn every second. Yeah there you go so many many fingers waving for what Kevin said completely. So I find myself provoked by this books books are where information goes to die conversation for multiple reasons one is that books aren't dead second is that books aren't about information third about you know in the before times there were bookstores that had book readings in fact some of them had you know like two readings a day all the time throughout the year and people would come together. They're back at Powell's. Powell's you know Cody's books ink did it up the experience of going into into a bookstore like a Cody's when it existed versus going to a Barnes and Noble is utterly utterly different because you have a store where people actually love the books and love to read and know what's in the store and can talk with you go in and ask for a book and they say it's like pre-amazon here here's the book but you might also be interested in XYZ and a conversation happens and what if books are about conversations not information what if books are a conversation with the author and maybe with other people who read it you know open a book and I read some and that said that reminds me of something I know find another book or I go online and watch a movie or you know it's like in and out as opposed to a data download and just to note on a couple of things that have been talked about on these calls ministry for the future and the dawn of everything are not dead and they're not tweets and tweets are great and Amazon has been very helpful to me and I do Kindle and I highlight notes and the notes get fed back to me periodically and so there's like there's metal levels of stuff but yeah I'm not concerned about information going to die that seems the least of our problems right now Pete to what you said about about IP it is if somebody spends three years writing a book it'd be nice if they got some money in return for that otherwise in this property is the wrong way though they might not be able to do it property is the wrong way though property may be the wrong way and copyrights all kinds of problematic and but I noticed for myself that my attitude about IP shifted as I shifted from being a consumer to a producer but that's that's that's a whole other rich topic we play with it another time that might be a multi-call sequence too I mean you know we all know a prudence of that property can anybody else say what prudence said about property property is theft is what prudence said about pop pop early early 19th century socialist remarks here Joseph Prudence um Patty please really enjoying this conversation about books and the flow of information how information thrives and reproduces and moves and supports us in evolving so I I'm inclined to think that so if what humans I guess I kind of believe that what humans create has has life right and I would imagine that most of us here in this space have had an experience of coming into contact with a book in a super serendipitous and kind of like weird magical way at a really opportune or unlikely time I do think that there's a flow and a drive to how creativity moves on the planet and that it is a bit of a fundamental evolutionary power I guess and so I am if what humans create has life and if you know if you want to play with that if books have life I am compelled by the idea that they the information moves and might be subject to the same force that moves other life on this planet the same evolutionary force this is a bit of a wormhole in the rabbit hole but I also can agree with Pete and that um uh and that you know I've had the same feeling where I've gone to bookstores and I feel overwhelmed and hopeless and sad you know all of this you know incredible beautiful work that so many people have worked so hard to create and that will you know probably it might well gather dust and so I've I've also experienced that in um I don't know the experience of my relationship with books and reading but I guess I'm curious if if what humans if you want to play around with the idea that what humans create has some kind of life of its own I would suggest that this conversation itself is is an expression of life moving in its own way and the question I would ask is how can we do we want to and if so how can we create continuity between conversations how can we maybe even between discussions have some kind of it could be like thought homework it could be exercises you know that we are encouraged to think about and ideas were encouraged to play with in the week intervening between meetings but how can we um play with the idea that this conversation might be a living thing and how can we facilitate the growth of these conversations in a way that might be a little different than how we're used to quantifying results I love what you're saying Patty I'm totally on board um Judy then Mike and then we're getting close to the end of our call I'll try to be succinct I really like the calls as they now exist and so I have a slight sense of resisting to trying to change them into something else because we do a combination of deep diving on a topic and we at the same time get the diversity of viewpoints of all of the people in the room on whatever it is that we're talking about so they're very um intuitive and momentous in a sense because they're happening in the moment and so I'm liking the way the calls go at this point I'm not so much looking for another study group but I appreciate the wisdom that people share because then if there's a topic I want to dig into I go get that book and I read it so I personally feel that we've found a pretty good balance here and I would caution us not to improve us to a lesser level of performance well put um partly we landed on Gaza because Stacey challenged us and said why are we talking about music when there's this really important thing going on we could really use some focus and then also uh Doug Carmichael has frequently said hey there's all these great minds together here why are we like not lifting the world a little bit more than we could and he's been challenging us very frequently on that and I think appropriately so and so I'm torn between my love of the random walk theory of conversation where we share resources and show up as kindred spirits which I adore and the desire to actually focus lift pull help lift others you know leave behind something the way Patty just described etc and I think this is not an unresolvable dilemma I think this is a polarity to manage and polarity management basically says hey use a little like infinity symbol and just go back and forth and and be explicit about when you're over here and be explicit about when you're over here and that those are two different parts of the rhythm and then the people who like this will be like oh okay we're coming back to that etc etc so I think that we can work it in a way and and maybe that's that's partly why we were alternating between topics and check-ins is that the check-in was this random walk feeling of community where and it was becoming more and more like quicker meeting which gave us sort of a piece of a different kind of dynamic in the group so I'm absorbing and thinking about that as we as we move forward thank you Mike I want to build on what Judith just said I do think a number of things work really well with this group the most important I think are the check-ins as opposed to the deep dives I think the emotional support we give each other I think the solution I mean often solutions that we sometimes get to for people's personal challenges can be quite interesting I mean a three-minute conversation can lead somebody to a resource that they might not have found and help them deal with one of their kids or some personal relationship I personally have found it very helpful to just enunciate some of the things I'm feeling whether it's the overflow of news or the the the challenges of juggling my parents the one thing that I'd like to do a little bit more in the check-in is to welcome people requesting help I mean I sometimes do that I take advantage of this group to say hey I'm working on a paper I know three of you probably have an answer to this question can you put it in the chat or if anybody has an idea let me know Adam Grant has this wonderful book give and take and so many of us have a hard time asking but and taking advice and I think we could nurture that in the in actually both of the calls but I'd caution against going into topics three four five sessions in a row or I mean I think there are different strengths in this group and somebody who might not be good on one topic might get bored after four days of the same topic and I and I think there is a point of diminishing returns I think the most important thing I get out of this is the the living bibliography I mean finding the right part of Jerry's brain but also just hearing from everybody else what they found helpful and sometimes it's a 25 year old book I never heard of I would put two issues on the table though I do think we could have a very good conversation about redesigning copyright it's one of my passionate topics and then there's the question of you know how do we do what Jerry has done so well we've had a number of talks on how do you curate all the knowledge you've accumulated I was having a great talk with my librarian at Carnegie yesterday about Zotero and how there isn't you know we don't have a good way to build our personal bibliography that not only works for us but collects data that we can share with others I've talked too long but thanks I'm sorry I joined late I was listening to an absolutely mind-blowing conference from Vienna called can machines save the world and I will send around the two sessions that you gotta gotta listen to one of them was on the history of AI and it was probably the most useful thing I've heard about AI the most useful 30 minutes I've heard since the whole chat GPT explosion and all these so-called experts talking about things they don't know love that Mike thank you thanks for that Judy and then I'm hoping Ken might have a poem for us and I know that my hand was up for before oh okay so so guess what Ken I do going back to Bill Stafford here this one's called learning the piccolo played then a drum feet began to began to come a part of music here came a horse company caught away my mother said don't run the army is after someone other than us if you stay you'll learn our enemy then he came the speaker he stood in the square he told us who to hate I watched my mother's face it's quiet that's him she said well again yeah would you please learning a piccolo played then a drum feet began to feet began to come a part of the music here came a horse clippity caught away my mother said don't run the army is after someone other than us if you stay you'll learn our enemy then he came the speaker he stood in the square he told us who to hate I watched my mother's face it's quiet that's him she said that's brilliant Stafford is a very brilliant poet yes who was the who was the poet William Stafford William Stafford okay thanks I posted a link to the poem in the chat and I'm I'm curious why did that poem if you know why did that poem arise for you in this moment because we're talking so much about learning and you know and especially about what's been going on in Israel and Gaza you know and for me any years and years ago I read a quote somewhere that war is a failure of leadership at the highest levels and that there are no warlike people but there are warlike leaders and those who tell you who to hate if you follow them that's the real enemy so I just thought that was a really potent you know way to say say very elegantly you know in a way that I couldn't thank you love that um Ken thank you very much that was a beautiful way to rip our call thanks everybody I'll talk on the matter most town hall channel ogm town hall or on the ogm list about what to do about format and sequence I'm happy to experiment I'm happy to try something intense for a little bit and see where it gets us and I'm happy also to go back to our normal casual flow so um as rostro so famously said a couple election cycles ago I'm all ears I'm just curious Kevin are you saying Jerry's head is full of holes yes I'm a colander yeah if you look at the brain that's you know it it it strains through it's it is the strainer so yeah I'm visually okay thank you there we are it's somebody I think it's more like a gold filter it gets the one percent that you want to leave behind that colander's you know it's that's more like 95 percent and we don't have time for 95 percent it could be sure well curation is a metaphor for sale two words were never spoken all generalizations are false jerry could you throw the matter most link in the chat and if someone would care to what's the difference between the matter most chat and the open global mind okay so open global lines is a google group mailing list hope I'm the second while I get the town square link and paste it so don't forget that so the ogm list is a is a google group where there is an archive but I don't I don't know anybody who goes and looks at the archive of mailing lists very often and so the conversation is pretty transient there and it's about whatever that's where I announce the ogm calls and a couple other things and that's where ken and a few other people post and you go often post hey here's a really interesting article here's why you should go read it or a video or whatever the matter most is a persistent conversation with channels around different topics and themes so there's a whole bunch of projects that are going on here like neobooks has a channel on matter most and the neobooks crew doesn't like chat about neobooks on the ogm list we go to the matter most channel and talk back and forth and share resources so you can what's cool about matter most which is an open source slack clone is that you can scroll back and see all the things that have happened and go back and forth and and you can add a channel if you if you have a project of your own that you'd like to have a conversation on you can create one there so I really like the matter most I find that should we deprecate the google list we've peed and I've had this conversation multiple times peed is not that fond of the ogm list but I think the things that show up in people's email are actually pretty important um and so I matter most doesn't uh if you have if you're if you're signal out uh for instance if I were to say at gill on matter most and you had an account on the matter most channel you would get an email that says hey somebody's somebody's pinging you directly on matter most otherwise no otherwise you'd be overwhelmed by email if every time something showed up on matter most you were getting an email as well there may be a setting in matter most where you can have it send you everything but I would never turn that on yeah okay thank you cool um thanks everybody that was um delicious they appreciate it or soon thank y'all bye bye thanks everyone ciao