 This is the OGM weekly check and call on Thursday, September 22, 122, let me turn the transcript on as well. There we go. And welcome everybody, happy to see you. Such strange times we're in. There's now a thought in my brain that basically says, is it possible that Putin and Trump could be sucked under within a couple months of each other, maybe? And I may be way overly optimistic here, but world events are sort of pouring out in what seems to me to be that kind of direction. I don't know how either one of them keeps up what they've been keeping up for so long. And for Trump and for Putin, they're sort of a one-man show, like they've got minions, they've got people doing stuff obviously for them and keeping the pressure up. But really, like, if they were to fall into a coma for a month, it'd be all over. Like the operation I don't think would continue anyway. We don't need to talk about politics and such. So I just saw the chat, Eric, I think it's an extension. Actually no. If the condition around here sounds weird and you can't do hair extensions this short anyway. So it's a plug-in. We have our topic call today and we haven't picked a topic. I suggested one. I'm getting a little ambient noise. I think Mike, it might be yours. I'm going to mute you from here. That's okay. You can unmute yourself. I want to comment. It's just my idea. Klaus, I'm hearing your voice. Yes. I'm sorry. I did a video study. There we go. I just muted you, Klaus. So Mike, my apologies, it was Klaus. And so the floor is open for suggestions of topics anybody would like to use as our focal point. Please, Mike. Well, unfortunately, I'm only here for 50 minutes, but I'd love to at some point talk about India. Maybe we don't have critical mass on that. But we have a group of very impressive scholars at Carnegie India. They're looking at technology. They're looking at India and China. They're looking at the domestic politics and how Modi is trying to become Trump or Putin. I just think India is the, it's the, it's the fulcrum. In technology, it could side with the Chinese way of thinking about digital technology with control built in, or they could keep embracing the more Western approach where you want competition and innovation and openness and data flowing. But I just think it's fascinating. But again, if I'm the only one who cares, then, you know, unless we, okay, I spend quite a bit of time in India. They're not worked for metal cash and carry, you know, the German food wholesaler. So I have a personal interest. I'm going to be there in the middle in the end of October. And then I'm going back again, the end of November. Yeah, there's there's two very impressive technology conferences. At least the second one, the Carnegie India one, the Global Technology Summit will be webcast and it's going to be a great opportunity to hear about everything from scientific cooperation with other countries, data flows, biotech. I mean, a lot of interesting issues going to be on the table. Yeah, I get that. But the baseline really is do they have food on the table? And when, when we can, we can, I mean, metal cash and carry is a company that really interacts with local markets. And supports small vendors and so on. But Norma came in, the Tyson came in, all the, the global manufacturers came in and have made a mess in, in India, trying to introduce no monocop farming and using synthetic fertilizers and so on. And have destroyed a lot of small farms. So the India requires a customized solution for India. You know, you can't impose an American food system into that country. It's creating havoc. And I would be happy to talk about India as a focal point for a while. I feel under informed on it and I don't know who else feels strong on it. But if you were even to brief us on it, Doug apparently has a good perspective. So why don't we spend, that is a nice off road for us. And it seems relevant and important in the world and timely. And I'm good with that. And anybody not interested? Then let's, let's slip in. And do you want to? Who would like to sort of frame or organize a conversation about India? I can do a little bit, but I'd love to hear if Doug has something to add. Yeah, let me just start off with what's on my mind. I did get to spend six weeks in India as a guest of the All India Management Association and I got to visit lots of Indian factories. And my task was to tell them about American management. What I ended up telling them is that their management was better than ours. And the reason it's better is because the extended family system leads people to be terrific at dialogue in groups without getting angry at each other. And you could see that culture move into the factories. Very impressive. It's also a high craft culture with lots of attention to detail. And that turns out to be terrific for technology. As I think the the polytheism that gods are born on every street corner every moment is a perfect kind of way of sensing what a digital platform acts like. And we have the proof of how good it is and how many Indians are presidents of Silicon Valley corporations. They really dominate. And I notice even in the climate change discussions of which there are now almost too many online, the Indians play a very strong role. And so I think that the idea that India could be in the center of where the digital world goes, in particular, managing its problems seems to me quite plausible. They're quite different to the Chinese. And that way, the Chinese don't have the craft culture and they don't have the a kind of spiritual view that moves easily between mechanization and the material and the more spiritual world of digital stuff. Anyway, those are my thoughts. Thanks, Doug. Go ahead. That's a fascinating observation. I hadn't ever put together the Hinduism and its role. That's that's just fascinating. I had the chance to go to India for the first time in 1985. And I was also there for six weeks, although I was mostly spending time in the mountains, collecting rocks and doing surveys for a geologic project. But I had a chance to interact with a lot of the the key people in the scientific community, and it is so different than China. I mean, because it's just so chaotic. And the fact is, people think that Modi is in charge. But it's it's it's quite decentralized. It's not quite as decentralized as Canada or Switzerland. But there's a lot of power in the individual provinces. And some of them are larger than almost every country in the world. I mean, you have individual provinces that have 110 million people in them. So if you're the governor, then you can have a lot of cloud and a lot of money. That does make it hard for them to have national policies. And at times they've done some boneheaded things that have gotten in the way of development and have blocked innovation and blocked investment. But because they have all these different experiments going on at different levels and because there's lots of different centers of power within the government itself, the different ministries are always fighting with each other and individual ministries are fighting with themselves. There's room for new thinking. Again, I'm mostly familiar with the tech policy in India. And for many, many years, the IT and telecommunications ministry was completely schizophrenic. The older people in charge believed in five year plans and Soviet top down thinking. Some of them had gotten their technical degrees in Moscow. But all the young people in the middle managers, they all had seen what India was doing by embracing the global digital economy. And so they put up policy statements that they would start off saying India is perfectly positioned to exploit the new technologies and be a leader in e-commerce and information services. We need to allow for lots of innovation. And and and then the next sentence, the next paragraph would say, and it's so important that we need a five year plan and top down control and how this will develop. And then it just flipped back and forth. And again, no one paid attention because it didn't make any sense. So they all went all went and did whatever they wanted to do and made a lot of money doing it. But they're at a critical point right now. They are at a critical point. And Modi is starting to show these authoritarian tendencies and they're starting to use technology for surveillance. And the Chinese model is very, very attractive if you're trying to monitor your opponents and distort the media environment. The other thing that's just happened is they have spent about eight years trying to write a online privacy bill, a data protection bill. And they're torn because, on one hand, they want to have rules that allow companies to exploit the data and provide customized services. And the other side, they want to show the rest of the world that they're at least as good as the Europeans in protecting personal data so that other countries will feel comfortable working with Indian data management companies and IT services companies. But they haven't they haven't figured it out. And what they had done is they've been the parliament has been writing a bill for two years and it just got worse and worse and worse. And they kept adding all these provisions that didn't make any sense and counter-addicted each other. I mean, even worse than the California bill that was just passed. And what they did is they finally said, we're given up. We've got to start all over. We clearly don't understand what we're trying to accomplish. We've got all this garbage that we put in the language and it's poorly drafted. So they're starting all over, which could mean that they actually write a bill that works for the the artificial intelligence machine learning age. So those are snippets. Those are my my pieces of the elephant. And again, I just I find India fascinating. Let me just put a couple of things in the conversation because there's there's so many major different ways of looking at it. When Doug was talking, I was thinking of the the deep contrast between China and India. Like serious major contrasts in so many interesting ways. And then some things that are very similar. Correct me if I'm wrong, India is due to become the largest country on earth any minute now surpassing China and well on its way to go past China because it never had a one child per family policy or anything like that. And so so kind of in India is is like the big player population wise technology wise, it's very strange because for me I wound up seeing India as a Microsoft loving home of people who weren't innovating that much in technology, who were very happy to provide services and delivery on services and outsource everything and turn everybody into a either a programmer or a support person, which would fuel the economy a lot. But I was not seeing Indian startups with interesting stuff that wasn't either they were just not interested in in pitching us or or the press wasn't picking up on it or it wasn't necessarily happening. So I wasn't seeing innovation in that sense much at all. It's notable that I think Sundar Pekai and Satya are from the same town in India. I think they went to the same school, which is unbelievable, like kind of kind of crazy. And then and then India has this history of sort of being princelings and principalities and kingdoms and fiefdoms and 550 languages plus and so on and so forth. There's this there's this on the one hand, looseness of borders like Kashmir is still a disputed region. Like if you go up and try to draw a line about where India ends and Pakistan starts, you're going to pick a fight, right? Like like you can draw a line, sadly for Mexico, but you can draw a line around the United States and say, here's where the border is. But you can't easily do that in India, in different places. And then and then partition, I think partition was a horrible thing. I don't know why I why anybody did that. But and it seems weird to me that partition had to happen, given what I just said about all the kingdoms and principalities and sultanates and so forth that it had because it seems a comfortable agglomeration of many different parties with many different power bases with many different goals all kind of making their way forward together in some way. So so and I don't know exactly how that works. Also, their elections are the world's largest elections. Nobody has a bigger election cycle than India does. They had an ID system called Adhar, where which apparently got hacked easily. And you could go down to your local bazaar and pick up a DVD with the entire Adhar database with, I think, biometric information on all the citizens if you wanted to, which sounds like a bad thing. So so that seems like sort of incompetence and worrisome stuff. But to their credit, the president pushed the idea of getting digital identity and 800 million people did it. Yeah. And so that that kind of digital leadership made a difference. I mean, exactly. And also I think they're fixing. I mean, I think they're doing something to make it more secure again. But exactly. And then and then if we shift to what Klaus put on the table a moment ago, severe weather, which could lead to a ministry for the future kind of incident actually now ish crop failures. Massive massive crop failures happening right now. Water scarcity like we wouldn't believe glaciers melting, meaning rivers probably drying up, et cetera, et cetera. That there is a cataclysmic set of kind of geological weather food events happening around India that I don't know anything about how they're trying to manage that because it's, you know, with the world's largest population and all those things happening, they're going to have their hands full all by them all by themselves. Right. And don't and don't forget that they're an incredibly active seismic zone and some of their largest dams are sitting on faults that could cause a magnitude eight earthquake tomorrow. Sweet. And we're talking, you know, when I was there, we pointed this out to the head of the Geological Survey of India. And he said, and we said, you know, you know what's going to happen if one of these faults rupture, the dam is going to be compromised. And, you know, you could, you know, you could lose tens of thousands of people. And he looked at us and he said, Dr. Nelson. We built that dam in 1947. We were in the middle of the largest famine in the history of the world. Two million people died. That dam saved the lives of a couple million people. If the earthquake happens tomorrow, 200,000 people will die. We still come out ahead 180,000. At the time, the US had just stopped a dam project in Tennessee because of the six inch long snail-darter fish. It was like, what kind of calculus was that? But it made perfect sense. Um, Gil and Klaus and Gil, you're still muted. Sorry, Jer. OK, yeah, I forgot what I was going to say. No, use the chat as a prompt, as a reminder. Yeah, I'll pass for now. OK, Klaus. Yeah, you know, you know, I have, I have this like one track topic here, which is now food and, and, uh, and survival, right, because food is at the base of the pyramid of needs and without food, you know, everything else collapses. And India has. Faced its population by basically training its aquaverse try. And currently, they're still in relatively good shape because you have an exaggerated runoff from the glaciers. But once that stops, you will have a dead stop in food production in India, and they're completely unprepared for that. So the, the what I've done several would be called operations audits in India for our company was working for. So I was meeting this wholesalers, you know, his producers, you know, his customers and so on. The they have a highly decentralized procurement system that is actually very efficient, you know, working with these small farmers and they're creating they have aggregations that are almost medieval. Now, I mean, you go to a wholesaler there and he has like a little scratch paper who owes him how much money and who he owes money to and so on. It's a very simple system. But it supports small scale farmers in the aggregation and when Western companies came in, the first thing they wanted to do is get rid of all this cumbersome decentralized supply chain. So they wanted to centralize the supply chain, meaning you need bigger farmers, you need bigger logistic systems and so on. And that has created absolute havoc in the in the economic structure of India. So what what what and there was one really quirky thing in the way they handle payments, right? Our company was completely incapable, I mean, German bookkeeping, right, to deal with this chaos that Indians considered an accounting system in the pricing system and so on. And my take was we need to adjust and accommodate, you know, their culture and the way they do business rather than trying to reeducate them. And most companies didn't take that that that route. They wanted to change how India does business. And and all this tech stuff is all wonderful. But if they if they can solve their food and water problem, then everything else will be overpowered by by that simple item here. Super interesting in whichever way India decides to tip itself and tips a lot of balances. I mean, it's really interesting how in the Cold War, John Foster Dulles basically went across the world and said, you're either with us or you're against us, meaning, you know, the the red menace. And a whole bunch of countries became like the non-aligned nations. And I don't know enough about them, but India was kind of in the middle of that because India is pinned right next to the two large communist parties in the world. They, you know, cannot join the far left or they will probably be invaded or something bad will happen. And so we kind of forced them into a strange place. I don't know any other any other perspectives on India here and its role. Mike, what's from the other from the analysts at Carnegie? What points are they making in terms of India and the global future? What were were the levers or where the potential forces of play that they care about? There's at least four different answers to that. Awesome. The most interesting and current one is the Quad. And some of you may have been following this, but the US, Australia, Japan and surprisingly, India have decided to form a little three four way discussion group on Indo-Pacific security. And, you know, it's it's, of course, partly in response to China. And I think India probably wouldn't have joined two years ago. But China went and started shooting at Indian soldiers in the high Himalaya because there's a border up there that wasn't very well drawn. And I think something like a hundred people were killed or injured. Modi, Modi reacted in a lot of ways. The most interesting was they banned 200 of the Chinese apps that many Indian kids were addicted to. We're talking some of the most popular apps in India. We're suddenly banned in response to a military skirmish. But the fact is that Japan and Australia and the US and India are now talking about joint military maneuvers and how they're going to prepare to deal with all sorts of military threats. And so that that's that's one interesting realignment with India. I think India's second issue is India's pissed as hell at Putin. You know, they want to play all sides and they'd like to continue doing trade with India with Russia. And they are they're getting some great deals on Russian gas right now, but they just are appalled that Putin would march into Ukraine and then all the war crimes make it even worse. And in fact, there was just a summit meeting where Modi dressed Putin down and said, this is not a time for war. Like, stop what you're doing, you idiot. And and and referred to a phone call that they had had privately. And he said, as I told you on the phone call, like, this is a bad thing you're doing, which is notable, like made the news. Yeah, so we have refugees from our Carnegie Moscow Center, which was closed down soon after the war started. They are now in Istanbul and Berlin and Central Asia, but they're continuing to write some great stuff. And so they wrote a couple of great pieces on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which just met in Central Asia. And if you want to really follow what's going on and and also, I mean, Kazakhstan just pulled back from Russia. And again, you know, in some ways, they're reorienting towards China. The most provocative piece that they've written lately was on is is is Russia becoming China's vassal? V.A.S.S.A.L. And the answer is yes. Well, so Putin is putting himself in a place where he's going to owe a lot to a lot of neighbors if he survives. Yes. The other thing just to add on to the list of things that they're following in Delhi. A lot of interest in data. We just released a paper on data policy in Korea and in India. And this is data policy with regard to how government data can be used more effectively. And then the big issue, which is what kind of controls do you put on cross border data flows? And in India is being very schizophrenic here. On one hand, they're telling the banks that bank customer data has to stay in the country. You can't use cloud services run by Amazon. And, you know, that requires data to be pumped up to other countries. On the other hand, they want to be part of the global digital transformation and they want to serve customers everywhere. And then, as I mentioned, the other thing that's getting a lot of attention is privacy and encryption. And the. The leadership isn't there. There isn't a clear answer on that, just as there's not a clear answer anywhere. Just as an aside, as a footnote, a couple of days ago, the European Court of Justice decided that the German law on data retention was illegal and a violation of human rights. So in in Europe, too, we have these proud privacy commissioners saying that they're the best in the world on data protection, and then you have the German police collecting data on people and demanding that phone companies and social media sites retain data for years in case they might need it. But the courts just threw that out. So that's going to be interesting to see how that works. So interesting. It is. I mean, as I say, India is right in the middle of all these big tech policy issues. It's, you know, it's making choices about how to align with Russia, China, the US and to a lesser extent, Japan. If you could if you could put your lasso of truth around somebody in India around this. And we I don't know that many of the players, but just in terms of positions, whatever, what would you want to know? What questions would you want to have? Like honest answers to right now around sort of India and its future? That is a great question. Again, I usually focus on the technology side, but technology is a case study for the broader economy and it's becoming the broader economy. I guess the the the thing I would ask is, you know, what is the vision? Is there going to be a shared vision among the people of India and the business leaders and the policy leaders? Is there a shared vision for how India works in the global economy? And is it a integrated vision? Is it one where, you know, share and share alike and you welcome foreign investment and you move data across borders? Or is it a Chinese version where you try to keep out the foreigners, you try to, you know, steal as much technology and investment as you can, but you. You maintain control over the companies. And then the second piece of that is, you know, are you going to focus on a society where individual liberty is a high priority? The First Amendment is the First Amendment like it is here. Or is it going to be much more. A state designed for the interests of the government and the political leaders. And I don't know what they'd say. I mean, I'd love to hear what the different parties would say on that. Modi clearly seems to think that he is God's gift to India and that he should stay in power for a long, long, long time. And the more power he has, the more he can solve India's problems. I mean, it's almost like Trump, you know, it's like only I can solve India's problems. Super interesting. Doug, please. Yeah, I think Mike to call it schizophrenic is to pathologize what might be something that's quite positive, which is the ability to float in a polycentric world without making choices, but let things develop all together. My own view is that the future of technology is to manage the world with big data and big platforms. And if we look at Silicon Valley today, I think the production, the prediction would be that Indians will manage that system. Very interesting. That's very interesting. But I but I those those executives, they're not schizophrenic. They know what they want. My point is is that in these government agencies, they don't know what they want. And they're actually they have civil wars going on inside the bureaucracy. So it's maybe it's not a mental illness. It's not a pathology. Maybe it's just a it's bureaucratic warfare conflict of the worst kind. And sometimes it's not just two camps, it's three or four camps, writing different proposals and giving different speeches. And it leads to a enough uncertainty that some companies don't want to do business in India because of that polycentrism is actually positive. Until it comes time to make a decision. I mean, I agree with you. Western bias. Well, I agree that, you know, seeing the world from seven different viewpoints is incredibly powerful. But at some point, if you're going to make long range plans, if you're going to spend billions of dollars, you want to know what the what the constraints are. I think we should look at the success of Indians in Silicon Valley as managers and whether any of us have experience of working under some of those Indian managers. Well, I worked with I mean, the head of IBM is now Indian American, and he's he's astonishing. I mean, he's like the best thing that could ever have happened to IBM. So. But I don't I don't see in him somebody who dithers and tries to I mean, he does reconcile lots of different viewpoints. But at the end of the day, you you go forward with the game plan. Mr. Kranzer, good morning. Greetings. I'd be interested in a one sentence. Notion of what this call is about or if it started with. Theme or is it just evolving? Sort of go ahead, go ahead, Mike. I was just going to say the future of India and how it will shape the global the globe. I mean, my thesis was that India on technology, on the stability, the geopolitics of Asia. I mean, they are going to be the decider. They are the fulcrum and and Doug and Klaus have added a couple really interesting perspectives as well on. I mean, particularly on food, we could India could drive the global family. And although I hope you're wrong, Klaus, I'm a technological optimist. I think the Indians will figure out how to use the Internet of Things to do what Israel has done and stretch their water supply by a factor of 10. But the damper better get started soon because that water supply is running really low. Well, I also have the problem that if it's 130 degrees, nobody can survive. Mm hmm. Yeah, and this is where I think, you know, it needs to be laser focused because it's a survival issue and all the technology won't help much once that once you're out of order and just mark to complete an answer for you. At the top of the call, Mike suggested the topic of India. He took a quick sort of thumbs up, thumbs down in who was in the call at the start. And it was like, let's go there for a while and it doesn't need to be the whole call. So that's kind of how this framed up. It was also very nicely different from our usual our usual kinds of topic. I'm sorry to be 10 minutes late. I'm happy you're here. Oh, thank you. So go ahead. Go ahead. I'll let you finish. No, Mark, you and then Mike and then Wendy. Yeah. So it's interesting hearing about all of this sort of top down focus at D web camp. There were about seven to 20 Indians. I think seven came from India. They were D web fellows. So there they were subsidized to come in and participate. And they were astounding people and really integrated with the social networks of things like Filecoin and Internet governance conversations. And I was incredibly impressed. And my sense of what would it be known as very quickly and shortly that technology or the Internet or hackers will root around things. If they find an obstacle, they will basically go to the street and basically create incredibly innovative, beautiful artistic solutions to their own real world problems. And that kind of. Indigenous creativity is something I haven't heard yet in this conversation. And I'm aware of it in the Bay Area and somewhat in other parts of the United States and certainly Mexico, but not from the perspective of the Indian Street, what really amazing stuff is happening that we don't really hear about because we're not. We don't have feet on the ground on the Indian Street, how technology is evolving, not top down from bottom up. And I don't I don't know. I'd be very interested in what people do know. And I'll pass along to Wendy or Mike. Mike wanted to reply to something a moment ago and then and then Wendy. Just real quick in the chat, I listed a book that is on my must read list. Some of you have probably read it. It's called The Argumentative Indian came out about almost 20 years ago. But it's a nice overview of Indian history, Indian culture. The other book I'd recommend is one I've mentioned before, which is The Histories of Nations, 30 chapters by 30 different historians describing their own country's history and how it shapes them. And the one the chapter on India is particularly interesting. It's the second. It's the third chapter after Egypt and China, because it's in order of of how long the country's been around. And I think I, Mike, I read that after you recommended it way back when. And I found it really uneven. I found I was getting a very bumpy, really uneven. I was getting a really bumpy notion of the different nations. And of course, because each chapter in each country is written by a different person, they didn't mesh together at all like there was like a little interplay. No, and it's worse than that. I mean, you know, in some countries, they picked a Marxist historian who gave a totally different perspective than an economic historian would have given or, you know, so it's a hodgepodge. Yep. But that's kind of the beauty. I learned a bunch. Yeah. The other point just to add on to the point of creativity in India, the good news is India speaks English and they have a very vibrant tech press and particularly in the mobile apps, they are doing astonishing things. They had these two brothers who went to war with each other to see who would dominate mobile phones in India, and they basically spent billions giving away phones to try to get market advantage over the other. But the result is suddenly two thirds of Indians have cheap phones and they're all doing really cool stuff with them. So I can I can share some sites that this one is this one plus or someone else? Reliance is one of the lines. Oh, OK. Reliance Electric. Yeah. No, it's it's crazy. I mean, it was really a personal feud that and both of them just went hugely into debt. But it was to the benefit of the people of India. So I'll see if I can find a good if you can put some light up on that, because it's it's it's still evolving. It's still a crazy, crazy situation. Thanks, Mike. Sorry, Wendy. You haven't had a chance to talk and I've been talking so much that I'll need to shut up over to Wendy. No, no worries. That's fascinating and you can't make this stuff up sometimes. Yeah, exactly. And a planned planned for things like that, you know, if you tried. I just wanted to add a little piece in the thread around data security and yeah, that whole piece coming out of India and the concerns there worldwide. From what I know of companies, I'm connected to that piece is largely solved with the new core internet that's coming. So I just kind of wanted to throw that into the room and and just see what up the pieces are that other people have on that from the company. I know, which is IOE Corp. They already have it. It's already built and they are looking for partners to, you know, to to connect the internet of everything, all the things, you know, but in terms of packaging the data in a secure way and managing a worldwide network of information, they've they've already they've already done it. And the guys that work there from what I've been told, many of them, they have about 50 guys working there in the engineering group that came from and who worked on the original internet decades ago. So that's part of the reason why they've been successful. They've layered on the blockchain, the versions of blockchain that we've all been dreaming of and the quantum tunneling and everything's already layered in. And so in a couple presentations, I've been in there. They're ready. They're already done. They've already proof of concept is done and all that kind of all that kind of stuff. So no matter what we understand about that and whatever we think the timing is, it's pretty clear to me that's coming. And I'm just curious what, you know, in in light of this conversation, how we think that might change the landscape. Is there a is there a link to a nexus of the architectures you've just been describing that you could point us to? Or they have a website. I'm not really happy with their website from what I've heard in the presentations is not what I'm the fullness of what I'm seeing on their website. And at one point, I told them that, you know, for a couple of us who are saying, hey, you could build this out. It'd be much easier to share it with people. I'm trying to get my hands on, you know, whatever documentation they're willing to share at this point. And that seems to be slow and coming as well. So whatever. But IOE corp.com is their website. And I hope it makes sense to someone. I can give you a few more details of things that I've heard if that's of interest to people, but my my knowledge from a technical perspective is extremely limited in this area, and so I can only speak in generalities. But the fact that they've worked with they've already worked with companies to do proof of concept and have made them successful, so they had a couple situations where they worked with smart cities and people had tried to roll out, you know, corporations, governments that had tried to roll out smart cities in the US and had failed because it became too expensive, just because the amount of data that was running through everything and their system allows for the data to come to a conclusion at the site of the you know, at the site of the piece of technology, right? I'm not saying this well. The at the site of the phone, at the site of the device, I guess is the right way to say at the site of the device, and then it's just passing the resulting information or conclusion in the network, I mean, can do things like that. It's got the packaging of data piece, which can become more of currency, although they haven't built it out that way. They're very much not trying to sell out. They want this to be used in a way that's positive and in support of, you know, all the things that we've been talking about here and more. They know what they have, right? And they're trying to they're trying to be of service where they can and still working within the traditional economic model that that the world requires them to do. Yeah. Thank you. Very cool. Yeah, Wendy, are you or is anybody familiar with any standard space or standards kind of like standard organizations or IOE standards organizations that are actually publishing what these protocols and infrastructures are? I'm not even sure I understand the question. I'm so sorry. I do a lot of work. I do a lot of work on standards and I have not heard anything that relates to standards that IOE is using. And in general, a lot of the blockchain world is not being built around standards that are endorsed by some particular standards body. It's it's it's if it works, it's more like if it works, we use it and that's what we're seeing now is these different versions of distributed ledgers evolving and changing just like Ethereum just changed its core technology. But I'd be curious if anybody has seen some infant standards activity around distributed ledgers, I'd love to learn more about it because I I need to learn a lot more about this, quite frankly. And we're going to be doing some work on this at the Global Technology Summit. So two thoughts and response in case this connects and you'll have to tell me whether it connects because, again, my lack of depth of knowledge here. I do know at one point they were working with some people from the federal government to create the standards by which they would be evaluated. And and they the the government representatives needed to bring in people from IOE Corps because they didn't know how to evaluate what they had. And I'm not sure where that stands now, but that was six months ago. And those are those are standards for cybersecurity and that makes sense. But yeah, OK, the ledger piece. I know they haven't they haven't built out that aspect of it. That is not they're really going for partnership with the Internet of Things, the devices market, right? So because that's what makes their system sing the loudest and sing with harmony using totally non-technical words here. But right when those two things are partnered up, it's the amount of data that they can handle so well. So that's really where the proof of the concept is. And so that makes the most sense in their world. It was another thread. No, but I lost it, so I will stop. All right, thanks. Thank you for the pointers. This would be an absolutely fantastic. You know, theme discussion in the future. I guess emerging technology, although maybe centering it on. Something like either blockchain or Internet of Things. Yeah, two. Yeah, two more. I remembered one is if people are really interested in getting more information, they're not doing kind of big presentations except at the tech conferences. So but I can definitely reach out to the connections that I have. And if it if it, you know, if it makes sense, we can have a meeting with people who are interested in learning more or I can try and be more. I can try and push for more information that I could share that speaks to people who have a technical background. Yes, Mark, saying yes. So that's in the works. And then the last thing is I do know that their timeline is they have funding, that's not the issue, but they they're in terms of moving forward, looking for engineers and eventually engineers, they will train to build things on top of what they've built. So that's where they're going and should have that by next year. Thanks, Mr. Carmichael. Self here. There you go. OK. I think the issue that's really important here is the difference in culture. The Indians are much more comfortable in having playroom and living without standards than we are. We think it's pathology to not have a rigid system. The Indians think it's pathology to have one. So I just say that the and the cultural basis for that, which I mentioned earlier, is the extended family system where Indians are used to having large meetings, that is 10, 12, 20 people around family issues that allow for tension without its escalating to violence. And they're really good at that. And since I didn't get to have time in management systems in India, I could see how that would play out when you when the boss calls a team meeting. They're like those family meetings. They're very they are emotional, they're open, they're playful. And they love to play in that space. Well, thank you. Any last thoughts on India as our focus, because I would love actually to take the rest of our call time and go to the opposite end of the playing field and do something that's more about feelings or senses or personal immediate experience. But anyone want to put a bow on the India conversation? Not that we've solved anything, but I've learned a whole bunch. So I hope I hope we all have some. We're good. Also, so every once in a while. Yes, I'd love to, like in the middle, take a what's often called a bio break to basically not miss much of the conversation, but be able to stretch. Well, we could do it. I mean, we run 90 minutes, which usually is I think ideal used to have a 90 minute rule when they ran events, which was we don't keep people from the bathrooms or from a break from anything longer than 90 minutes, but you could mute your as long as you're pretty good about muting the video, you're good to just like wander to the restroom on premises, you know, or there's always catheters or bottles that you could pull the Amazon warehouse thing and just pee into into into a bottle. Sorry, Doug, you're you wanted to jump back in or something. You're still muted. Go ahead. Opening to a new thread, that's what I would like to participate in. So did you want to suggest a new thread? Is that what you mean? Sure. I've been in so many conferences in the last couple of weeks that are looking at climate change as something to add to that. We want to add our project into the current mix in order to get to a better place. My view is that additional economic activity exacerbates the problem, however good the project is, and that we're in a much more difficult place than people who have projects they want to further seem to be aware of. So I would like to talk about that. I mean, I think we're at the situation where right now there is there is no plausible scenario left on how we can actually cope and hold on to what we have. We're going to have to let go of a lot of stuff and we're not talking that way yet. I like this topic and we've glanced off it a few times before. I'm eager to get us out of our heads for a moment and out of generalizations and things like that and sort of get grounded in sensations and our presence. So and I don't I'm looking around at the windows going. Yes, no, sorry. So if you'd like to switch toward sensation and motion, give us a yes if you'd like to head or into this other topic, which we can come back to Doug on a different call as well. Jazz hands down. So can I can I suggest that we can combine that? Because what Doug is referring to really gets into emotions and sensations. Does it ever? But I'm not sure it does so in a way that's going to help our psyches that much. Or we could just say I could ask a very simple question, which is like, what emotions come up for you with Doug's question? Or the choices? I was I was steering us towards any kind of discussion that really leads back to our personal experiences and our personal emotions and sensations and feelings, because we spend an awful lot of time spinning in our heads, talking about really big and important things, but talking about them in relatively abstract ways. And the alternative is what Doug just put in front of us, which is, hey, his thesis is that any kind of economic activity is going to cause damaging byproducts, it's going to eat energy, it's going to do something else. And Doug, correct me if I'm if I'm misrepresenting your point of view and that we need to we need to start changing things in a much more dramatic way than anybody's talking about or thinking or doing because because the consequences of not doing so are pretty terminal for for the planet. Those sound very different. I'm confused about what the merging of those was. My attempt to merge the two was, hey, when you contemplate Doug's question, what does that make you feel and to actually talk about the feelings for a moment? If I if I may. Please, I mean, they what they're doing in this Tuesday food and soil call on no agenda conversation is really to to work to understand the emotional connections people have or must have to understand the world around them. So what Doug is referring to, you know, this climate crisis and this enormous difficulty to adapt and to mitigate and adapt to a changing world is a deeply emotional issue for all of us. But we all live in different contexts and that could easily be defined in socioeconomic terms. So what we're what we're doing, machine and I started working on on a model is to really to really try to to develop structures and segmentations called it archetypes to to to try to understand what kind of an environment, what kind of a world, what kind of contextual structure are people groups of people living in and how can the information they need in order to alter their behavior be made available and transparent because it's completely emotional. It's completely irrational. Everybody reacts differently. But the challenge is to design outcomes that leads to a better place for the comments. Right. Shit, I was muted. John, Ken, Doug, good Lord, I'm sitting here going, John, John. And then I look down. OK. All right, so this is just a tricky point to parse here. So this is I've also been involved in a lot of the conversations that overlap. Some of ours involve climate change and at the emotional and feeling level, there's a lot of frustration. There's to me, there's two big balloons of frustration or two big balloons of emotion that we're addressing. There's the big balloon of emotion of the people who do not have or do not acknowledge the data that most of us in this room have. So there's a whole set of questions there about how do you how do you engage, move along, but not panic, not cause violent, whatever reaction to that group of people? That's a big one. Then there's a different one. I was some. You know, if you sample lots of sources, you get some some big macro numbers and the advantage of some of these big macro numbers is the clarity. There's a compression of clarity. And I know there's enormous nuance detail in the experience of the people in this room and that nuance detail is very valuable if you're going to actually start to do something. But just in terms of. Getting a big picture. A couple of things. How much CO2 and, you know, yes, of course, it's non CO2 GHGs, but how much CO2 is there? Yeah, roughly 2400 gigatons. Does it matter if it's natural or manmade? Actually, it doesn't. Because if you think by saying it's natural means it'll go away naturally. No, no, you can look at history and you can see that if it ever was close to this high, a lot of beings, us and others would not survive. So, you know, we've got to fix it, whether it's natural or human, you get that one off the table. So what do we got to do? We got to sequester 50 gigatons a year. Why? Well, because we're pumping out, you know, 38, 40, you know, round numbers, but huge numbers, huge numbers. And then, you know, I think Doug has this analogy. How much CO2 is that? Well, it's as much as all the cars in the world, a billion cars. That's how much it weighs. Oh, oh, OK. So the conversation I'm having here is about big numbers that have a simplicity that allows you to have that conversation with both groups that are emotionally upset, you know, the big group that doesn't want to face it and then the smaller group that's rational, that's exasperated because we can't get a grip on it. And then now where do you go from there? Well, now now it gets trickier. But a conclusion that a number of people that I believe, I think some of you would say is no. Industrial, this is a corollary to what Doug is saying. No industrial decarbonization project has anything like the net scale or the net negativity to work. Yes, you can make a negative. You can make a negative net negative. I mean, you know, a carbon negative activity, you can make that. And we should we should make a lot of them, but they don't have the scale. But some of the quote unquote natural ones, like engineered wetlands, like while planting trees, but not any kind of trees, you know, kind of trees that support sustainable foraging, sustainable tree based or permaculture based agriculture. But in in gigantic numbers and with people nearby who are going to be fed by those trees so that they will keep them from being cut down. So that that's, you know, I told us I had this conversation with one of the best scenario planners I ever worked with who's back east and he said, how come there's not nine slides that say this? You know, he said that that would that's a very clear message. That that could that would help him. So I said, gee, you're right. I haven't seen those nine slides. Maybe I have to put them together. But let me check with this room because you guys know a lot about this kind of stuff. And is it true? Could we put nine slides together that would would don't get all the way to the what do we do next, but that point very clearly away from some things that don't work and point very clearly towards some things that might work? I welcome a good and big question. Stacey is enthusiastically supporting your notion. Gil is to Gil does as well. So do you want to take a swing at a Google slides deck and just share that into one of the matter most channels and say, here's a start and then give it just give it a go with text on nine slides or whatever the number turns out to be just retell your story in Google slides for a moment. And then seed that with us and see where that goes. OK, I mean, I may need some little tutoring on getting it into matter most and stuff like that. I'm happy to do that. Are you participating in the matter most server at this point? I signed up. I have a I have a I can sign in, but I run into trouble very quickly in terms of let us get you on trouble. So one of us will sit down with you and get you more fluent on the matter most, but that'd be great. OK, so if you want to if you want to take a swing at a deck and share it on the OGM mailing list, which that's easy, then we can put it on a on a channel, probably OGM Town Square for starters, maybe one of the others and then bring you in there and make sure that you can find your way around. Cool. Thank you, Mr. Homer. Hello, everybody. I invite you all to put your feet flat on the floor. And take a deep breath. Find your breath. Just connect with your breath for a second. Notice if you're connecting on in-breath or now breath. Unless you let the breath wash through your body. Let it connect you to whatever sensations and feelings you're experiencing right now. Been a lot of heavy stuff on this call. My mind is reeling. My body feels pretty grounded. Thank you. I'd like to talk about ambiguousness with relation to climate change. There's a Bay Area psychologist named Renee Lertzman who says, you know, we need to talk about the three A's. We talk about our aspirations for climate change and our anxieties. And we don't talk enough about the things we feel ambivalent about. And last year I lost three 40 year old Japanese maple trees that provided shade and beauty to my patio and my house and air conditioning. And so what did I do? Because I had to I had to buy an air conditioner. And I know that that air conditioner is contributing to global warming. It's the worst possible thing I could do. But it's my comfort. Do I stay inside a home where because of the fact that I have a wall of glass there in the afternoon that goes up to over 100 degrees and is unbearable? Or do I put myself? Do I do I say, fuck the future, I need my comfort. I'm buying an air conditioner. Well, I bought an air conditioner. And this is what people do. You know, I'm not the only one who does this. Eric posted the question in the chat. You know, what does it take for people to realize their lives are unsustainable? I drive a fossil fuel car. I could sell it and buy an EV, but then I would have a car payment. My car is paid off. It gets reasonable mileage. It's a good car. I'm not going to take on more debt. So there's all these very personal ways that we plug into this larger system, many of which are completely at odds with our stated desire to say, I want to be somebody who's making a difference in not harming the planet. I'm also reading the nut makes curse, which I highly recommend as a fantastic book. And here's just one thing of this. He's talking about the military. This Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States and probably in the world. A non nuclear aircraft carrier consumes five thousand six hundred and twenty one gallons of fuel per hour. In other words, it burns up as much fuel in one day as a small Midwestern town might use in a year. But a single F 16 aircraft consumes a third as much fuel in one hour in ordinary operations, seventeen hundred gallons. However, if you put the afterburners on that plane, it goes up to fourteen thousand four hundred gallons. The military that is at the world's militaries are the single most ecologically destructive thing on the planet. And yet there's all this talk about, you know, bi-electric vehicles and save your conserve water. And nobody is saying, how do we pair back the military? Somebody was saying to me, you know, they don't like the fact that we have these terrible weapons of destruction, but they're glad that we do consider on our side, we're the good guys, right? Until you see one of these four complaints coming on the strafing run aiming at you and your kids. It's it's all very nice. But then suddenly things change. So I find myself really in a. A little bit of disgust with myself of, you know, I've claimed to be ecologically aware now for 35 years. And here I am buying air conditioners and driving a car. And because of where I live, it's I've tried to go without cars. And it takes me two and a half to three hours to get somewhere by public transit that it would normally take me 15 to 30 minutes to drive. So we're stuck in these with these systems. And I have a lot of ambivalence about it. I want to be making changes. And yet I will sacrifice the future for my own comfort. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. I may be the only one willing to state that on this call, but I doubt it. But, you know, we've got to start looking at this and saying, we say one thing and do another all the time, even with the best of intentions. And I have some very unpleasant sensations in my body when I consider this. It makes me a little bit ill. And yet I don't do anything to change it. So that's my riff on sensations and feelings. Ken, thank you. And before we we total on through our queue, which is lovely, let's take a moment and just stay quiet with what Ken just put in our conversation. I'll bring us back out. Thank you very much. Appreciate that, Doug and Doug. If I could ask an immediate question to Ken in response. Oh, you even have a question mark in your in your box. So I didn't even know I'm trying to mark. How do you do that with signals? Go ahead, Mark. Thanks. Ken, what kind of help are you looking for? Would you accept for? I don't know. Life choice changes. I think it's what I what I'd be looking for would be conversations with people who are noticing the same thing in their lives and saying, you know, this is really this is unacceptable. We're trying to make a difference. And yet we're we're undoing the difference we're making by our day to day behaviors. And we need to really look at that. And it's not just, you know, I could make some changes in my life. They'd be sacrifices. I'm not willing to make those sacrifices, but I would be totally willing to make those sacrifices if they would lead to things like a really useful mode of public transit where I could get around where I want to go. Right. So it's it's I'm not personally looking for help so much as looking to start a conversation that has the chance of of shifting the way that we are in the world. You know, I've I've done the low carbon diet. I've taken 10,000 pounds of carbon per month out of my out of my budget here. You know, I I don't leave things on at night when I for sleeping I unplugged them. And, you know, I've done all kinds of stuff as a renter as much as I could if I own my home, I could do more, but that's not enough. And as as someone who wants to be in the world as a responsible citizen and wants to contribute to making the world a better place. I need to be in conversation with other people because it's it's not enough for me as an individual. It has to be a collective effort. And we've got to look at some really challenging things. So that's that's what I'm looking for. So very quickly, it sounds like there's a ratio of proportion between me and we that you're looking at and you want more of we to drive me. I'd like my me to to join a us who are trying to make the world better in a real. Concerted concentrated effort, something that actually has the ability to to have some traction in the world, because I think too many of us are just focused on what we can do as individuals, and we've got to move past that into how individuals come together and make really big changes. What will it take to pair back the Defense Department's budget from, you know, whatever it is down to a tenth of what it is? Well, that's going to require that we have a whole lot more trust in the world. So we've got to bring Jerry into design from trust. And, you know, there's there's all these moving pieces that are way bigger than me as an individual can handle. And I want to know how people who are concerned with this can come together and be effective because I've watched now for, you know, 50 years I remember the first Earth Day. Oh, things are really great by the time I'm an adult. Well, man, the frickin environmental woman has had so many setbacks. How do we create genuine change that is that is irrevocable, that doesn't get undone the next time some Yahoo gets elected to office and undoes everything with a stroke of a pen? You know, it feels like humanity is faced with this existential crisis. And we have all this technology and all these brains everywhere. And it's not being applied to mounting an appropriate response. It's being applied to how do we keep what we have in place so that we can continue to have more of it instead of recognizing what Doug just said, which is if we continue down this path, we're really fucked. So we've got to start looking at what can we let go of it? How can we how can we shift things here? And I just forgot what I was about to say because I didn't use the chat to remind myself, so Doug C, then Doug B. OK, here is a project project I'm involved with now that I was not involved with a week ago where I'm hoping to make some difference. And it has to do with Pakistan. I'm sure we are all aware of the problems of the floods in Pakistan. So I got invited to a meeting that had a bunch of Pakistanis talking about what's going on and basically their proposal was repair. And so OK, repair what? Well, 4,000 miles of roads were destroyed in the floods. So they want to repair that. Well, my thought was that's reestablishing the old economy of industrial transportation that we might be trying to get away from. And the people who who had huts, shacks and small plots of ground growing small amounts of food out on the flood plane might be a much better target for what to do that would be helpful. Those people know how to build shacks. They know how to get at least one generation of food out of the time between floods. Helping them looks like a much better model of what to do for the future of Pakistan than rebuilding the roads. So I'm pushing that discussion as hard as I can. Thanks, Doug. Doug B. So I'm sort of really focused on the question that was touched on, which is. And I think, Ken, you were speaking to it in a slightly different framing. So what does it take to make more people care? Like the single biggest, most powerful engine or change transformation of anything is the greater the number of people that are motivated and perceive themselves as committed, invested and aligned in a common course of action. And people are susceptible to virality. And people are susceptible to collective action in certain contexts naturally, almost autonomically. And there are examples of all of the tricks and the tools and the technologies and the means that exist doing that effectively. So we have the technology, but is it being applied in a way that speaks to that? We have strategies and models and all sorts of sophisticated abstract stuff. But is it being applied not to building and creating things and creating solutions in terms of more nouns? But is it being applied toward awakening the population, the global population, to be catalyzed into action and even the action in that catalyzed into action doesn't have to be homogeneous, doesn't have to be everyone everywhere doing the same thing. So I just I can't help but wonder whether the orientation, the trim tab shift in orientation, is to the human beings part of it. And how to focus not on what's to be generated or created to fix and solve, but to in service to catalyzing and awakening people to action. And I'm complete with that. Thanks, Doug. Gil, then Stacy, then we're getting close to the end of our time together today. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, everybody. Guys, so many things. Let me try to weave a few threads in some of the recent comments. In terms of emotions, I find myself very my motion, my emotions are very much in motion these days and they wander between fear and rage and ambition and enthusiasm and and and sometimes really what I strive for is equanimity, kind of a calm mind in the face of all that's going on. I'm sort of my personal quest here. I'm I'm stirred up by this conversation. I'm frustrated by some of it and I'm intrigued by some of it. John, yes, on the nine slides and I'd be happy to help if I can be useful in any way on that, but but the story that you told presumes a kind of rationality in human affairs, which may be a little over optimistic. And sorry, somebody's trying to interrupt my. And we have, you know, we have people who are blind to the information that you're talking about and so making information more available is a great thing. There are people who are willfully blind, not in their interest to know that for various reasons. That's a different kind of game. And there's people like the folks who are flooded out in the Pakistan, in Pakistan or who are boiling their water in Jackson, Mississippi, who have very different frame on the story. And so I think it's important to think at all those levels, not to think that better data is going to solve this problem at all, because it's it's it's it's not lack of data anymore than headache is caused by lack of aspirin, you know, this connects to what Ken was saying and can I feel you? And I'm you know, I'm in my own version of the same boat. I mean, here I am, this supposedly sustainability expert guy and all sorts of stuff, not right in my life. Some of it is through choices that we're willing to make or not make. Some of it is simply through, you know, procrastination and neglect. But I'm sort of surprised to hear what you said, Ken, because there are gazillions of associations of humans working on various pieces of this puzzle. And you know that you mentioned a few of them. There's, you know, most recently, Marine Climate Action Network, which is taking a new pass at this. So the opportunities for collaboration are vast, you know, Paul Hawkins, blessed on rest books some years ago, you know, Chronicles, some of that. So it's I'm curious about what it is. It's not the lack of opportunity or in your case, not the lack of awareness of where the opportunities are, but what is something else? And it's deeply important because. You know, this is a this is a five dimensional chess game that we're in. You know, there's my personal actions. There's the there's the political environment that sets context and regulations and incentives and so forth. There's the business environment. Me as a customer of businesses or as an owner employee and so forth, what businesses do and choose to do. There's the global coordination level. There's the breakdowns level. You know, whatever you do in your home doesn't get to the gigatons that John was talking about. But, you know, what each of us has done individually has moved the political landscape such that the US has just made a massive investment in, you know, big but inadequate action on climate. So, you know, it's five dimensional chess ain't easy. We're not trained for it. We're certainly not trained to be strategic or chill in the midst of I'm seeing the chats fly by. I can't I can't absorb them enough. I'm on some on phone here. You know, on the on the John, how many gigatons was it per year? Whatever. Anyway, the only the only as far as I can tell, the only way we get. I was my numbers were that we pump out about 38. It was rounded up to 40 40. We're pumping 40 gigatons. But you had a thousands of many thousands of gigatons number at some point. 2400 gigatons is what's up there. And so if you do nothing else, if you just stop emitting. Yeah, this is what we all know in this room that other the general population doesn't get is that even if you went to zero right now and still be in huge trouble, the temperature would still rise. We'd still have big leases from peat moss and blah, blah, blah, lots of trouble. Yeah, so we have to pull down. We have to pull down clearly. So, you know, and stopping is a good thing. Because if you're in a hole, you want to stop digging or the hole is going to get deeper. The only things that I know of that are at the scale to handle, that many gigatons are soils and oceans. And very little of the attention is there. Klaus has been talking about a lot. Walter Yenny from Australia has been big on this. French agricultural policy is focused on increasing soil carbon as both in agricultural and climate strategy. You know, it's not clear how me or Ken as householders affect that, except as political actors, as citizens in activist organizations, voters, investors, whatever it is, whatever levels we play at. So. And I suspect that in terms of the emotions and moods that can often leave people, you know, daunted and helpless of, oh, fuck, there's so much to do. And I don't know where to start. Or people can say, I start here. And this is the part that I do because I can do that and do it as well as, you know, connected and informed with others as we can. Some I don't know if it was Mark who said that or some of maybe Doug said about about making people care. I want to challenge that construct, because I don't think you ever make anybody care. I don't think you ever make anybody angry or make anybody do anything. You know, you do things and they do things. And in my experience, people care a lot. Everybody cares. Everybody cares about something. Often those cares seem very different. But when you peel the layers away a little bit, people care about a lot of the same things. You know, we see that in the in the US non-democracy where we have super majorities in the population really coalesced around some issues on the climate. One of the fascinating things that most people and this is across the political spectrum, most people think that other people are not as concerned about climate as they are fascinating. You know, I mean, Republicans are majority concerned about climate and think other people aren't. Dems the same way. So there's a there's a reservoir of caring that's there. I don't think it's about making people care, but figuring out how to mobilize, focus, you know, align those cares in the direction of some kind of common purpose. And we do that here in conversation. We do that in, you know, in civic organizations and activist organizations and the Indian legislature in conversation. So that's my that's that's my threads turn into the work and work of this thing. Thank you. Stacy, you took your hand down. Would you like to jump back in? Yeah, for a minute, I got overwhelmed, but that was the sense I had. Please, please, please come back in. Yeah. Going back to what Ken was saying, because I think overwhelm is a big part of what happens to people emotionally. But when he mentioned something about the defense department, I think a lot of times we want to get right directly to our solution and in getting there, we alienate half the people. So, you know, class has been focusing a lot on water because water runs through everything and affects everybody. And immediately what I in another call we were on, somebody mentioned the systems and a lot of people just feel like the system is stacked against us. And what I thought of is, you know, I was just watching a story about with the droughts in South America, how the drug cartels are now taking over the water supply and when Ken mentioned the defense budget and at the risk of sounding naive, my thought was, well, we have this budget. It would help our immigration problem and all those people that are so worried about all these immigrants coming in if we worked on stabilizing those areas. And again, it's something I don't hear a lot of talk about. But there's so much corruption that I have to imagine is the reason that we don't get into that. And I again, I'm coming from a beginner's mind. I'm naive on the subject, but I want to hear more discussion about it. And I could understand why people wouldn't want to talk about it. But I think it needs to be spoken about. Thanks, Stacy. There's a lot of strange bedfellows, unusual forces, unusual partnerships that actually function around the world kind of clugged together things that work somehow. Mark and you may end up having the last word for this call. Thank you, Stacy. I am a person who really respects. The American military, which is kind of odd because you know, hippie. Bump. Fear, there's so many of us, there's so many of us. Let's have a war. You know, I love this punk rock kind of aggression. But really, I've met colonels and generals in my life in weird situations. And they are immensely concerned about global warming, typically more than anybody I've met on this call, oddly enough. And the communication and I love this term communication pathologies. It's a very human problem. And, you know, I was about to kind of, you know, acknowledge Ken and or I'm sorry, what was it, Gil, who was basically saying, you know, things about propaganda. And basically, you know, and actually what Doug was saying about, you know, a trim tab shift in our orientation, again, going back to the chat and my making notes, you know, again, I'll just repeat what I put in the chat. Awaking people to action versus propaganda, emotional manipulation for the greater good. It's the kinds of friendships that we're developing here and trust. I mean, I haven't spent, you know, two hours walking through a forest with Klaus, but I have, you know, not spent, you know, 15 minutes on a phone call with us, but I've listened to Klaus over and over and over again. And, you know, I'd love to spend 15 minutes or two hours. And I have a kind of respect for his communication as Doug and the rest of us here. Carl, I haven't heard that much from you today. Love for for you to be active in the chat. Yeah. But I am deeply troubled by this control, manipulation and dichotomy. And I've had it explained in a organizational context where, as an employee, I accept control, but manipulation, where my boss tries to say, oh, Mark, oh, wouldn't you just kind of do this for us? Do you really stop? No, no, the motion, the manipulation is not a way that people should professionally communicate. Anyway, it's it's a big problem for me. I don't know. You know, I pay attention to it. I like to call my engagement with it passionately confused. But that's the hopefully short contribution and question that I would love to post. It's like, how do we? So very quickly, I searched for one of my favorite phrases, be more human. And of course, it's fucking trademarked. What? No. What? Look it up. It's, you know, it's kind of a good organization. But, you know, they're, you know, it's it's, again, pathologies of communication in a. In different scales, I mean, new girlfriend about four months and my carbon footprint has gone through the roof compared to my walking to work every day, not driving as much as possible because she lives in Alameda across the bay. And for COVID, I'm kind of avoiding the BART and public transportation. You could row across the bay. That would be actually pretty damn cool. I have a kayak, but it takes a while. That's true. Anyway, thank you for listening. Thank you for the call. And is there a poem to go out on? I could I could read one if I could find it quickly. Ken might have one handy. I think he just raised his hand. I have a text. It's not a poem from Pema Children, if that would be good, unless Ken's got a poem. I always have a poem, but I don't want to be the guy who always says the poem. So Mark or Gil, if you want, or I could read something to you. I have a quick one from memory. Go. I look in the mirror and what do I see? I see a mirror that's looking at me. The mirror itself sees not but reflection. It looks at itself in the other direction. That's me about 25, 30 years ago. Cool. Thank you. Are we good there? Mark looked up, looked up into the left to the wall or something to find the date reference of 25, 30 years ago. I'm intrigued by whatever's going on in your space. What is it? What is that called? You know, when you when you say, what's in your refrigerator? Then your eyes look in a particular direction and that's neurolinguistic programming. I know it's part of how you tell what somebody's dominant system is, is which way they look when they remember something. Good call, Gil. Real quick face. Stacey, yeah, I forgot. Grace wasn't here today because her dow launched, but she asked me to ask the group if she were to move her Tuesday call an hour earlier or an hour later. Would that make more people come? Because nobody showed up last time and she was wondering. Also, in the matter most chat, she did put three ways that you could be helpful. I remember one was tweeting out what she left there. Another one was with some crypto and I don't remember the third. Stacey, thank you so much. And anyone here would be able to attend Grace's like earlier, later, any directional advice here? A contract, please. What time is that? Right now, it's at one o'clock Eastern time on Tuesday, Tuesdays, which is Grace's call to figure out how to mobilize. Is it Tuesday or Wednesday? I thought it was Tuesdays. OK. Again, Jerry, could you continue that? Grace's call to what? Grace's call to talk about her dow for a priceless dow. Is that what it's called? Yes. To basically help launch the initiative and funding get get mobilized the whole thing. You can look on the town square in matter most. Yeah, exactly. It concerns me that we are not expanding. I see the same faces typically. You mean on this call? Yeah. I will have to talk to the membership director. I think our SEO campaign has been failing. Ken, did you want to read one in? Sure, I have an announcement also tomorrow, 10 o'clock Pacific time, Jerry and I will be I'll be interviewing Jerry for society 2045. Doug has been a regular on there. I think a couple of others you have shown up. So I'm trying to get a link from my friend Jose. I will send it out to the OGM Lester today. But if you can join us, please do promises to be a very interesting conversation. So there's a poem by Theodore Rothke called In a Dark Time. In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening shade. I hear my echo in the echoing wood. A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the rent. Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What's madness, but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? I have to read that again. What's madness, but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? The days on fire. I know the purity of pure despair. My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks. Is it a cave or a winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences. A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon and in broad daylight. The midnight come again. A man goes far to find out what he is. Death of the self in a long, tearless night. All natural shapes blazing with unnatural light. Dark, dark, my light and darker, my desire. My soul, like some heat maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill, which I is I, a fallen man. I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself and God, the mind. And one is one free in the tearing wind. I feel like they should have been dramatic music playing. I'm just saying I'm not that much for production values, but that was like, thank you, Ken, I had not heard that poem. So it's very cool. I love the line of what is madness, but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? That has been my clarion call for the last 30 years of my life since I first read this poem. Thank you, everybody. See you next week. I am traveling for two weeks and will likely have trouble hosting. I don't know that I will or won't. I'll figure out exactly what my schedule is. But let's figure out if someone else wants to step in and run the calls and we'll go from there. So thank you all. Let's do someone female. Sounds great.