 went away but I can zoom is messing with the interface they've also added a stack of apps yes which are showing up on the right in a pesky way because I really don't want them there yeah and some of them looking possibly interesting but who knows can we get rid of them no there's no way to get rid of them oh close lower right three dots lower right close dock maybe that'll do it I think that's is that oh is that that this dog or is that the bottom dog no that is the dock good thank you gone I do it that did it okay good excellent you can't reopen it it's gone forever oh well impossible I don't think I did though no he's asking me no bill I did that at least not this morning maybe sorry it's just a bad sorry you know I mean I better an old guy you said possibly no I mean possibly would be better I have said that at some point in my life I mean it was a punny humor thing yeah yeah like I'm not you will not infect you it's got house guests at home I know yeah um cool so Doug hasn't shown up yet I wanted to wait till Doug showed up to sort of inquire within whether I've got the right process but if not I think we'll just start rolling with that process if that's okay with people my goal my my intention was to experiment with something more something closer to Doug Carmichael's conscious conversations process for the call which means to me to treat it a little bit more like Quaker meeting than like you know OGM check-in and Kevin had replied on the OGM list that the chat is really useful and if you know me you know I adore chat and I think chat is super useful but this is an exercise in attention management and giving the gift of our full attention to whoever is checking in and the chat is distracting in that sense so I think I'm going to ask that everybody keep their own notes in a separate little notes document whatever thing you want for when we're done with the round of check-ins just make little notes whatever anything you want to put in the conversation and then when we've when we've done a round of checking in we will then see what's up and share those notes whatever whatever bubbles to the top at that point Gil did you want to say something before we start yeah just a brief observation last week when you handed the con over to Ken he did a tiny thing that may have gone unnoticed which said he just took a few beats between when somebody finished speaking and when he called on the next person and for me it had an enormous impact in quieting and deepening the conversation thank you that's very much in the spirit of what you're saying but I just wanted to flag that for you very much I love that yes um and I'm sort of watching who's coming into the room I've been keeping the list sequentially just in order of arrival which I think is a reasonable way to start a list of order for check-ins so we don't the protocol of each person who volunteers to check in picking the next check-in person gets confusing and adds mental burdens so let's let's not do that let's not do that we tried long ago maintaining a list on a google docker elsewhere for who wanted to check in that that's clumsy too so let's just go with this for for now uh and see where it takes us I'm noticing that I'm not on the list so I should probably add myself um and um there's Doug one of the dugs the other Doug the other Doug hi Doug um I'm hoping that Doug Carmichael joins us right now so we can go in because I'm honoring his request to do the check-ins differently um okay so so uh we'll start the check-ins now I'm going to post whenever somebody else jumps into the room I will update the list that's all I'll do I'm going to ask that we not use the chat today until we've done all of our check-ins and then it's free for all time in the chat I'm going to ask that each of us keep notes if you want to in some other app where you can copy paste or do whatever but but let's keep the chat still so that it's not distracting I'm going to close my chat except for what I'm updating the list of you know who's in the in the queue kind of thing um and then I don't think I'll step in between I think maybe we'll do what Gil just suggested and will we know exactly who's next in the check-ins but if you'll take a moment pause a moment um at the end of whoever was before you before jumping in that'll help and it'll help us um sort things out and um mine the space with that the updated list and uh Stacey you've got the con yeah I'm glad you mentioned that last part about pausing a minute because when Gil said what he did I was thinking it's also like a two-way kind of street like we can help by just taking a minute ourselves although sometimes it's hard I know for many of us we feel like somebody else will jump in before we get that opportunity um so what's really on my mind right now is as we're watching like the circus unfolding congress is that I'm really disappointed because as I had just mentioned last week I thought that this was finally an opportunity as we were going through the tax returns that people were finally going to learn something about the tax system not necessarily about Trump and as we're watching this media circus I'm thinking about the stories that aren't being covered and one that's really on my mind is the attorney general in the virgin islands who is linking Chase Bank to Jeffrey Epstein's business dealings and it is not being covered at all and I'm just I'm frustrated because even the new media outlets that I was very optimistic about like the Midas touch and things like that they're all doing the same thing all I've heard about is Kevin McCarthy and the truth is the way I'm thinking it Trump is the one that's gaining from this because we're not talking about any criminal charges that are coming up anything in his taxes any ties with you know the story I just mentioned so I just wanted to say that we're kind of all to blame because we're all I mean that's all I've been seeing on Facebook in social media and I just wanted to get that off my chest because it's it's frustrating and Mr. Heavenstright uh if you're following the the cues I gave at the start uh you're next and I thought you were just waiting a beat but I didn't I then became unsure if you were waiting a beat so okay so how long a beat is so uh well and if I and if I and if I interrupted the beat you were giving us tell me right now and I'll I'll not jump back in like that okay so just happy new year everyone uh yeah I'll um refrain from the political side of stuff being a federal employee an employee that uh that is that is just it is insane what's going on um I guess well I've just been taking a lot of um kind of but we'll take a step back with everything I mean I'm with from the doctoral program just trying to really focus on on what on priorities like I think I've got ideas about how to identify you know what it's the most strategic thing to be working on and I've found a book um right it's a great question I think I had mentioned it before I guess yeah next week if things were were better I'd be out in out in Santa Barbara with my doctoral program so this is the pool at the Hilton in Santa Barbara it's my one of my backgrounds I'll go back to yeah so there's this book um Life's Great Question um that Tom Rath the Strengths Finder and um actually has a companion website Contributify so I'm gonna be working through that to to um we'll see what insights come from that and I've been doing a lot of work with the I.S.S. so there's a lot of good things there and then so I guess I'll just leave it at that now for me to check in I want to take two more. Morning everybody yeah um so how many things to think about and check about um so I've I've I've entered the year in what for me is a very surprisingly common focus state I actually did a a year planning process that I've had in my files for a long time but I actually took it out and looked at it this time and thought about and kind of the five major domains of activity that I'm looking at in both business and personal my goals for each of them actually I I came across somebody who said don't set goals think about themes what are your themes for the year the goals will happen within that so it's a much softer way into that story and so I've framed out a few goals for the year and thought about what that means for the first quarter and what those mean for the first month and then just put that aside and found that my day to day is calmer clearer more focused in that context so that's one story the political circus is fascinating I posted a tweet yesterday observing that that the shit show in congress right now is not really any different from the general shit show which is a tiny band of people holding hostage a larger band of people which is what the freedom caucus is doing with the republican with Kevin McCarthy but what the republicans are doing for the country so there's that I was stunned that I think that got more views than any tweet I've ever done my tweets tend to run a hundred or two hundred views for some reason this was four thousand when I went to bed last night so it was kind of intriguing I'm more or less mirroring Twitter to mask the dawn but it doesn't seem to always work or maybe it works with very long delays but there's that world a lot of people talk about that and I am finally taking a sense of it since Carl set the pattern of show and tell and finally doing a serious dive into no doesn't focus into the tree of knowledge the bylaw instructions to blur everything so you put it right in front of your face and it might just turn off my blur oh anyway let's try this video back on come on there you go the tree of knowledge the biological roots of human understanding by Matarana and Barela rich deep profound I hopped around in it for years and I'm actually just going through it carefully and thoroughly now and been very provoked and enriched by it so for folks who are interested in things like human consciousness hop in I'll leave it there for now I wish I had something great to report anyway I want to echo what Stacy said I'm just really I guess my feeling had some reflections at the end of the year my feeling right now is that I'm quite I guess I don't know what the word would be I'm quite disappointed in basically our own power acting just the society we're in and how we're sociopolitically and economically thinking about things I feel I'm stuck in my own first order of learnings of how the world works when I was a little kid so I'd like to get out of that it's not as easy as it seems so I guess my one project for this year I think will be to learn how to manage my sadness right now so I'll let you know I don't know how it's going but anyway I'm kind of I'm Ken Homer pointed to something a book about which I have on loan I don't really remember much about the book I've got it on loan at the library it's a novel about a woman who is kind of ecological but she has this really love-hate relationship with a forest but in the end there's a little reflection where she comes to terms with what's going on in the forest and there's a line I just remember but it was like she learns that in the wintertime ants just sort of all nestled together in a big little ball and kind of hibernate and the line from that book is that she said she writes I wish humans had as much confidence in each other and I guess that's really just sitting with me right now so I would look forward to being as confident as we can with each other so happy new year yeah I'm actually on fire you know the the energy that is building up in in the markets in in in a general sense is incredible and I think the political fights that you see right now are a reflection of that I mean McCarthy would be a disaster as a house speaker and the entire configuration of having these lunatics line up to lead house committees on agriculture on energy on environmental issues and so on it's just unfathomable it just can't happen so now the people who are actually sabotaging McCarthy to get elected are the least likely you would have expected to do this it just makes no sense I was listening to an interview yesterday and the reasoning they have behind them is it's just pure ban and speak now it just makes no sense but it has I think it's it's a good thing you know this needs to sort itself out in ways that allow a functioning government to continue because these 20 folks who are preventing McCarthy to get into office would be chaos if allowed anywhere near a position of power if you have listened to some of these hearings that they're conducting is just incredible I think from from my perspective there is a film out and I'm sorry I know we're not I can't hold up the book but I'm going to put in the link which I watched yesterday which is with Jeff Bridges who is really good but it's living in the future's past if you haven't seen this it's a must-watch film because what it what what they're basically saying is we live in an illusion yeah the the levels of consumption that we currently have is completely unsustainable we are literally fraying the natural world around us it's really crumbling no because we continue to extract so much resources out of out of the on a global level while we are you know ignoring that we are consuming 1.8 times the regenerative capacity of the planet 90 percent of fish stocks are overfished 30 percent of top soil is lost already aquifers are being tried out around the world now refers polluted and so on it's a it's a madness what we what we see the escalation is just over the last year since I've been watching you know looking at this closer which since my retirement 10 years ago it has it has accelerated you know the the consumption and push levels but on the other hand you see more and more people truly alarmed and and understanding the need to change and what hasn't sunk in yet and and what this year will need to accomplish is to to help people really see that this is really an existential crisis this is this could really destroy our civilization in fact it will you know it's far more likely to not work long term than it is to somehow will make it through it we're not you know the environmental devastation we have we have created is so significant but yet it's still it's still kept at bay you know we are busy we are preoccupied and so on so that's that also led me to how can you supercharge this thing right so I looked at the artificial intelligence discussions and looked at some of the software and what have you but that really that really wouldn't I don't see that there's a is a useful tool at this point but what I do think is is going to help is augmented intelligence and in some ways we're all doing this already so when you when you take an article or when you have a specific focal focus point um and the algorithms that that we are all working with because of the searches that we are conducting and the relationships we have been stitching together you know you you'll come across an article that says exactly what you were looking for this this data embedded and all of this so you use this you modify it and uh and then you look incredibly smart because you came up with such deep seated knowledge in a topic in some ways that's the same as asking an artificial intelligence bot to write something but it's far more aimed and directed it's actually much of much higher value than than it would be otherwise so I really I really think and Gene Ballinger you know is the world champion in building tools and Jerry's brain right well building tools you know to try to keep this information together because it's beyond what we can track and then find it again when you need to make a specific argument because you cannot load into your brain the depth of information that is required to really make a point right so so I'm a yeah I'm a I hate learning to software I'm so sick of it but um I think the the the challenge really is to to think of ourselves as the supercomputer you know you think of yourself as the central processor um that needs to have information fed through and and sorted and made made interconnections and then look at all the data banks around you as servers you know and and then you can advance your your theories so yeah so I'm excited I mean I've got my my first webinar going the focus my focus is completely to make markets work meaning that the the reality that the food system the farmer has to change means that the entire food system will have to adapt itself and it's as profound in in the food and agriculture world as it is in the energy sector you know um we we like to continue on bouncing around on the surface to keep the existing ways to live uh going I mean we call it bow you know and and and to use technology and tinker on the edges to put it together but what is in front of us are deep behavioral changes and adaptations that we'll have to uh we'll have to make there's no way around it I see that Pete had passed that is correct ah okay um I apologize I got a bit of a late start this morning so out with the uh out still walking the dog so just a couple of of quick quick thoughts um one is a you know substantively not surprisingly has to do with with climate change I'm reading all the different stories you know uh the year in review for 2022 and how 2023 is going to be a great year and it's going to be the year that we finally make all this progress on climate technologies and climate markets and and and climate everything else and and of course we won't right I mean we we do this every year it's it's it's the ultimate hamster wheel um and and so we just just do the same thing over and over and over again it's just it's just mind boggling to me um and and so that's you know that's very frustrating uh just because it it how do you solve the big problems that that claus and others have sort of passing off a dog here to a wife um how do you solve the other big problems that we're supposed to try and uh solve when you know all we when we can't get even get off the hamster wheel not to mention the politics the polarization all the different things I mean I just I just can't figure out how one how one really makes progress on this um on a personal note I guess you know maybe it's linked to this maybe it's not my new year's resolution for the year I'm realizing is that at the end of this year I want my household to sort of be ready to transition in case something were to happen I were to drop dead my wife were to drop dead um I don't want my kids to have to go through what I went through when my mother died a couple of years ago um you know it was just chaos and and we've got a much bigger house than she did so I don't want my wife to be grappling for six months with the aftermath of my keeling over and so by the end of this year I really want you know 80 to 85 percent of the work could be done for an orderly transition should that become necessary and uh and so that that's sort of my main uh new year's resolution as as macabre as that might uh as that might sound thank you mark for sharing thanks for everyone else for sharing there's um uh noticing a lot of different thoughts and um my own response to what's been shared today and it's uh it's moving and um I'll try my best to to kind of um bring it all together in a way it's succinct I for myself I think this year I am personally stepping up into roles that have a little more responsibility for myself so I'm you know starting my own uh small business I hope to be in space with others and leading um kind of educational or community circles similar to this um with maybe a different lens and I think what is becoming clear to me or at least it just feels a little more pressing is the sense of responsibility I have to manage my own learn how to manage my own uh I don't I this is I'm afraid this is going to sound itchy but like um heart openness as I as I navigate being in community with others as I navigate being in a space of holding space for others um and and all the things that I feel can challenge or compromise that right and so even what we've been sharing so far um in this circle around what's going on in the news what's going on in our politics I'm in curiosity around how to be in relationship with what is happening not just in politics but you know all the change that we're collectively managing together um in a way that isn't bypassing it I'm I was and I'm still able to be present with the gravity of the situations but also in a way that doesn't disempower me and enclose and lead to my closing if that makes sense and how do I take care of my nervous system how do I take care of my physiology how do I be mindful of being not being pulled into what you know I guess my my lens around um using the the political uh seen as a as an example here um this kind of innately disempowering structure right and this is my lens in my opinion but I do feel that when I engage with media I am aware of how easily I tend to feel activated how how hard it is for me to maintain that feeling of openness and neutrality which I am yeah really starting to I think recognize can dictate how effective I am in a given day how uh effectively I'm able to connect with others and so just learning how to take care of that I those are awesome questions I'm holding for myself and curiosities um I think that's something that's really present for me right now and I feel completely with that thanks Patty I think um I think you put lovely words to things that a lot of us are working with and struggling with I know in particular for me that boundary between self maintenance and engagement with the world and uh it's come up several times from other people's check-ins but we're in a whirlwind that could end very badly how do we participate how do we where do we apply our energy how do we keep our heart and soul open and yet um there's definitely this feeling that if you get too engaged and too connected you could just rip things apart like inside of yourself and that's I don't know how else how how to describe it but I think there's a there's a feeling we're all skirting a dangerous spot uh a thing that I helped April put into some of her speeches is about the future and like your orientation to the future you see the future ahead of you is it a hole you might fall into is it a thing up in the sky you aspire to climb to is it a thing coming at you from the left that you're trying to avoid or dodge so even just sort of spatially like where is the future relative to you is is an interesting little exercise because that that's part of a conversation she does about the difference between hope and fear and fear is the hole in front of you you might fall into hope is the aspiration the thing to look up to I watched last night before going to sleep Zelensky's new year's speech because I subscribed to Jim Fallows the Atlantic guy I put this on town square in the matter most so some of you might have seen it there some of you might subscribe to Jim Fallows who is brilliant and wonderful but this is a 17 minute speech that ends exactly at midnight uh this last new year's and I don't watch it unless you're prepared to cry for a while because uh it's beautiful it's it's what what Fallows did was he used to be a speechwriter for Carter and he drew attention to it saying this is like poetry this this is this is magic it's it's really good and it is really good it's it's just for a phenomenal talk so however it came about congratulations to them but it's really worth watching I flipped my toenail on Monday which is irritating but not debilitating but reminds me of my fallibilities and and now and then so trying to figure out where that goes and then more than anything I think my check-in is as the new year starts I'm I'm putting myself in a mental mode of this is going to sound macabre or morbid as well maybe it may be sort of going on Mark's thread but in a different way because we don't have kids so you know what what stays behind for family it doesn't matter as much as it does for people with kids but I'm pretending what if I had a terminal illness and I knew I was going to die in a year what would I want to do with my life energy this year and I'm aiming for bigger goals I'm aiming for a place to do more here with us and also kind of in general with my life energy in different ways because I'm I'm reasonably competent at hosting a series of salons that are relaxed and relatively safe not always for everyone but but that doesn't always get us any place and we've been critiqued I think well by by people who've come through the space about what to do what not doing etc and I wanted to like just go figure out from my perspective what does what does it mean to pour energy into this space for me and how does that mesh with what other people care about and what's going on so I created a page on the relate wiki which is like hey what are my bigger goals I won't screen share now or explain them but I'm happy to talk about them with anybody or you know talk them through if you're really interested ping me and we can do a separate zoom call the one through 12 list of things think of them as months of the year but also the project ideas there are bigger than one month worth of work one of them is write a neo book which is like write a book except a modular book that sort of gets assembled from nuggets that exist out on massive wiki style markdown documents that roll up into and then get produced out as in a snapshot version as an e-pub for kindle reading for example that's just one of them and that's clearly more than one can do in one month so this is a longer list of things but this is my list and part of the problem is that a couple of these there's only a couple people interested in maybe like me and a few others like the pattern language thing I think there's a few huge pattern language fans and otherwise there's not a great demand in the world for elevated and improved and more accessible pattern languages but I think that there's like a need for that so trying to figure all that out but I'm trying to figure out how to shift my days and my habits and my attention and my focus to do this instead of what I've been doing recently without losing too much of what I normally do reasonably well with that I'm complete John we're doing a different method today I'll paste instructions in the chat in a moment we're not using the chat very much and you haven't seen well who the list is but hang on a second and I'll put instructions in the chat with that I'm complete so at the risk of being perceived as a Polly Anna I'm sort of oriented around the present not spending a whole lot of time looking back and not doing any projecting into the future and finding myself energized and and getting sharper and crisper and clearer about um upping the upping both the the ante and the focus and the intention behind what I am bringing to the world how I'm doing me how I can do me better uh how I can be um more focused intentional and respectful of my time and attention in service to what I want to bring to the world which is more of a lived being thing than it is a a noun thing um a producing of nouns or objects or offerings thing it's more of a modeling living and projecting and energizing center focus so um and I'm getting more and more aware and excited at the power of any one particular person like rocking the boat and changing the world and um the number of people that are emerging and are affecting and influencing um growing to the to the the light wolf side of the ledger um and I'm just experiencing and seeing more of those voices of those messages of reason and um and insight and intelligence and perspective and all of that finding its way and and literally that in the frame of you know does it hit my eyeballs in years in the course of a day organically as a phenomenon um not going deeper than is it 90 percent dystopic um stuff or is it you know starting to balance out and starting to diversify more and and my sense and feeling is um there's really really massive shifting going on and um there is new stuff birthing and I may not get the the top three news networks attention you know it may not be um from a media through a medial lens the evident but just on an energetic projecting out manifesting in the world level um it's there and it's growing and um and I I attach a a optimism to the unprecedented reality of what technology and media and connection and communication means uh that exist today that are unprecedented uh for global reach global activation global reactivity as an organism that everything is visible in a way that it's never been visible in real time before and um and I I um Bill I hear you loud and clear about are we capable of doing better um as a species or not you know have we evolved enough to to turn the ship um I sort of intrinsically believe we are what the potential the intrinsic capacity is there whether we'll use it or not in time I don't know but but like the capacity is there and uh and I do believe in us um not that I can give you anything objective tang my head on for why I believe that but I do believe in us and uh so with that I'm complete thank you Doug um good morning this is a season of cold and darkness and um um simply getting out of bed putting like pants on um starting the day um going to work at the internet archive um fixing this bug fixing that bug thinking about the lifelong writing down of thoughts and the exploration into what is a thought what is a thought as an organism what is a thought as a sign in semiotics what is a thought as information um continues to occupy um not enough of my time I want to really focus on the sense that people can create a self-created system of their own truth in a software system that they can interact with that they can basically have sacredly private for themselves and kind of see in a very simple way how they themselves hear other people how they hear themselves a listening tool for the self I don't have the desire to be marketing or to be promoting or or being some kind of evangelist it's simply the ability for people to take time reflect quietly about who they are who their own mind is in relation to who they are who their body is in relation to who their friends and family and the information that comes from outside of themselves how they see that as true or untrue if I know anything it's that feelings are real and I want to focus on feeling and that's a that's a really different frame of being than the technological artificial intelligence you know chat gpt kind of um thing I had a friend uh text me and have I put my um two and a half million thoughts and chat gpt and see how it comes out that's not that's not of any interest whatsoever it's the way that language allows us to be together me communicating to you you communicate me me listening to you all of you um that is so incredibly important for us to be able to express and share our humanity and build together um it's a sense more of poetry or literature than of advertising or design or um some kind of uh persuasion um I think that everybody has this incredible almost impossibly beautiful self within themselves and sometimes through trauma or disease or or just bad damn bad luck or terrible decisions we get in bad places and you know my focus is on healing um quiet cold appropriate to the season slow down just be here thanks so can you hear me okay yeah I uh I was I came in late for you doctor's office for my wife so I stepped on sound I appreciate what Mark was speaking to um and resonated on several efforts well actually it's the two marks uh so I should say both of them so uh can you hear me okay all right okay so um I'll be breathing uh my my word of the year is uh equity moonshot uh so we can be able to know this but uh in another group I said that's going to be my word until the day I die somebody said well hopefully the the word will live beyond your death actually that's part of my uh sort of my small effort but a legacy so um I'm I'm in the process of uh designing a learning uh experience in the process of um for how to address some of the issues that the first mark spoke about you know we just we just we just don't we're not moving the needle and I think we have to step back and think about it so I've been thinking about this for a couple of years and um I'm working on a uh Rick your audio is is actually getting worse um I don't know that your headset is actually giving us proper audio you were fine earlier but now it's harder yes that is better sorry to wrap you oh no thanks for giving me that I'm sorry about that uh so anyway I think the news is to sort of a socratic shipper east west um uh not a facilitator uh it's more of a guide for change of how can we cultivate them and create a movement around how people can ask big area issues questions so that's what I'm working on I'm developing like a five day challenge in the three month course but the most important outcome of that is creating a learning community around how to create generative dialogues to become more effective in solving complex rather wicked problems that we all know about and we're not doing it we're not very successful there so um that's what I'm interested in and I'm quite happy to connect with anyone with me via the link to end that's where I'm trying to do some work and collaborate with people um so that's it I'm not y'all so I'm Rick and I'm done speaking thank you very much for the opportunity for um saying what miss good mischief I'd like to get up to until I die overnight hello everybody good to be here happy new year and uh the last two weeks of the year um I spent having fun oh no uh it was in a Yiddish New York event and I was learning beginners Yiddish and uh some music like the modes that are used in klezmer music so then I have to stuff that all back into a box now because I'm back at work so is that the way life is meant to be lived the question that I gotta just take out little pieces of it here and there just keep myself motivated so a good thing is um I'm gonna be participating in a Purim play for my synagogue this year that'll be fun I'll be a train conductor they're doing the music man a parody of that for the Purim characters so that'll be cool so let's see um something my yoga teacher said that the outcome of this year will depend a lot on how we individually approach it or what we give to the year which makes a lot of sense it's the motivation is a tricky thing these days how to stay motivated with everything going on and working in different work environments and everything but I've actually been using Marc Caron's as mx system for my personal use and a little bit for work because like it tracks the time that I type something so I could see when I start something when I end something it can become a time tracking tool if people want that but I'm just having a fun with it just dreaming about ideas of how it can link to media like photos that I have where I could have some metadata about photos but is that reinventing the wheel like rebuilding Apple's photo system or maybe it's a better photos organization system for me because like I could take photos of notebooks you might see my pages and then maybe I could transclude them over time into other documents but I mean everybody's building their own version of that somehow and somehow I'm just avoiding other tools and I'm actually going back to index cards and manila folders for certain things and he brought up the topic of feelings and I'll mention that I have difficulty identifying my feelings and my therapists have known to notice that too it's a tough thing for certain people and just some interests so a related interest is linguistics now the structure of language and that's coming from an interesting path because I'm working on an exhibit for the Vintage Computer Federation when they have their event in April and the topic is computers and education so I'll demonstrate some mold computers running some music education software but as part of that my mind goes on a parallel track into research because there was the Play-Doh system years ago where universities paid a lot of money to get these nice orange terminals with lessons that the instructors developed and there was actually a music system developed for it called Guido and so I'm trying to find more information about Guido because actually work I did for the University of Delaware was an extension of what they used to have but they tried to reimplement it in what was at that time Java applets that's the part that I did and that lasted for 10 years until Java security issues killed that project okay so that's where I am looking at some hope for a new year thanks thanks Eric you are the last in the queue because Jong just commented in the chat that he had to drop off for some curative responsibilities and made the very astute observation that we're not actually doing serious conversation because as we got into this I went and checked my notes and I missed at least one important marker of the serious conversations process which is that there's this I called it conscious conversations but it was serious conversations and the question that Doug would put in front of the group is this one what's on your mind that's worthy of serious conversation which I did not do to queue us into this one so maybe we run this experiment again and do that I think we sort of did part of the format with the check-in as our individual goals and I think that's you know different in nature for what results we would get from the conversation but let's take a moment and just reflect on on the process and then go into whatever wherever takes that skill go ahead take a moment first first of all just really thank you to everybody I very much appreciate the quality the mood the rhythm the quality of what people spoke Jerry even without that opening prompt it was sort of there implicitly and might have been there a little bit more if it had been spoken so thank you for that I just really I'm really struck at how unfamiliar in a in a very familiar way this conversation has felt this is how this is how humans used to speak to each other once it's not how we do it these days very much and certainly not on this medium and it just feels very grounding and enriching and I'm moved by this and I can feel feel the moisture in my face so thank you for that if I remember correctly one of the other things Doug said is at the end of all the go around people could talk about well which of those themes do you want to pursue and it sounds like we're not going to do that just yet but if I could just react to a couple of things when Klaus spoke earlier on about the the rapid destruction of the living world you know this is something that I've known about for decades and my work has been involved in for decades but at a fairly heady level and lately it's coming back and hitting me in my body more and more Klaus your reminder of that 60 minutes of all things had a peace Sunday night about this the news pickup was about how Paul Ehrlich has always been wrong about his population projections but what Ehrlich is was actually talking about was the destruction of the living world and the numbers Klaus are striking but it hit me very hard last night one of the moments of Zen that YouTube TV throws up of pictures of natural world quiet you know just like watching stuff and it was it was a field full full of fireflies full of fireflies and I realized that my nephew who's four years old five years old next month will never see that and so it took the the big story and the quantitative story and the documented story into a place of just you know personal presence and anguish at the loss of what it's like for people to grow up in a world where they have no contact with that aspect of life and so maybe that's part of the story about how we engage this and shift this and you know open up a different future I'll just say one other thing I have I like the process of keeping quiet notes outside the chat that was good when Mark spoke I was reminded of the quote that's often attributed to Winston Churchill it actually goes to goes to Abba Ibn the Israeli diplomat who said that nations do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives and you know will we exhaust the other alternatives in time I don't know thank you all for this thanks Gil Stacey thank you Gil I wanted to echo the first part of what Gil said and I wanted to say Jerry I'm glad you left out the last prompt about what's worthy of a serious conversation because part of what I really liked about this is everybody gave something of themselves and who is to judge what's worthy of a serious conversation if somebody's coming here with something they need to express they shouldn't have to think well is it worthy so I wanted to say I appreciated that because I don't know that I would have shared what I did if that worthiness if I had to go through that evaluation process thank you thanks Stacey um and what's worthy of serious conversation really ups the ante in a in a very interesting way and creates a different conversation and I think that that that is just worth thanks Penny oh Mr um Stuart and Michael we did our check-ins in a different way which was not exactly Doug Carmichael serious conversations but sort of toward it so we're debriefing a little bit and then going into a more normal uh round and if you guys want to check in after we've debriefed that'd be that'd be great too um Klaus yeah just to follow up for a moment this film that I posted there living in the future's past is really well done because it goes into the emotional it looks at us from an evolutionary perspective as a species you know what are the traits that we have as a species that made us so successful and how these traits are now at a at a point where you need to flip them because we did the the success has been so traumatic that we are now causing our own demise basically by continuing as we have and it explains the the only way we can really process this is in the heart you know in the in the in the emotional component part of it but there is a sense of helplessness that comes with this because none of us individually can do much about so so how do you how do you engage in ways where you feel you have a participation and a role in in uh in adapting and mitigating in our future but uh it's really a personal journey and I've long thought that the only way this can really happen is at the scale of a reformation because a reformation is a paradigm shift right so the this requires us to look at the world around us and the way we interact with the world around us in a fundamentally different way and collectively searching but it also makes the point you know this movie and they are behavioral psychologists evolutionary psychologists that who are who are talking there we are basically more like a swarm as a species you know we have this idea of being of having individual control or being independent so on but in our reality our behavior is swarm like you know more like insects and and and like more like a bee or an ant hive but so we have collective learning and and our behavior is within guardrails of cultural norms that force us into certain behavior so the cultural norms are the first thing that would have to change to enable behavioral adaptations to give permission basically to these adaptations and that's an enormous challenge when you're living in a political system that that has the old hierarchies the old forms of decision-making and and the the rejection of science and and the and accepting the reality as its realities in order to persevere you know in power structure so it's going to be amazing I mean because if we don't just succeed shifting we're gonna not succeed I mean this will be in our lifetime right I mean this is happening right now so yeah you know it'll be it'll be a fun right um just a thought class and I had this thought as we were going to the round of check-ins and I sort of put it in symbolically in the chat as if you're not convinced humanity is in danger click here and it's it's a reaction I'm beginning to have and I'm wondering if anybody else is having this reaction and my reaction is when I begin to listen to or read something from a person I really want to hear from but the first long stretch is we are very fucked we are doomed the earth is destroyed and here's how and this is failing this is breaking this is going bad this is terrible this is not working these people are dysfunctional this is awful and there's this laundry list this organ recital of what's breaking I am I am completely on board that we're steering the the the bus into a cliff or off a cliff to completely on board I just want to skip that part so I want to I want I want somebody to write a book that says hey or create a website which I might actually do that says that starts with if you're not convinced that humanity is in peril click here and over there is like all the evidence and everything about how things are really fucked up I just want to get to what are the best ideas we have going about how to fix it and I want to clear the text and I think this is why I had some some trouble reading Doug's garden world draft is like the first piece of it is like we're fucked I'm like I'm in I'm can I'm I'm I'm on board I'm convinced I'm okay with I'm not okay with that but but I'm like don't need to be don't need to be shown or told what's happening there I just before going to the people in the queue raise your hand if you first like jazz hands if this is how you feel as well a few of us many of us I guess pete is pete is so so and then I'll go to the go back to the queue Mark Caronza thank you oops lower hand um um one of the thoughts I had um last night was are there any other species biological species that have this notion of race um and then what what is the origin of that how how does race in in the human species come up how are there I know over evolutionary time you know these different separations within the same species it's a you know scientific kind of thing that I'm not quite qualified to study I don't know how much further I'll pursue it but you know it's one of the many thousands of things on that backlog of ah if I had enough in time to you know start a new um uh you know degree program to kind of study um how race came up in evolution um because I don't we we have this world where we're shifting our ways of communicating with each other from uh person to person to where we are here um I'm looking at a reality one pixel deep where I see how many people 14ish um um I might be a bot um yeah it's um not sure if anybody has uh any pointers they can throw my way but I thought it was a fascinating question I've never heard dealt with in the scientific community but I know I know there's plenty of resources out there that have dealt with it fully fully trusting in that I think I've seen some things in the past but um I yeah it's we're a species that is quite different in many ways and we are changing and we have that ability to kind of choose how we change but to do that we have to convince other people in some way to to kind of come along with us um to you know try new things um including you know this wacky thing for me you know the new pronouns and the um I uh heard a little story about uh a little girl who decided that um she was a boy um and you know wanted everybody to you know call her a boy you know must have been like a seven-year-old and kind of going like wow where what do I do in that kind of situation um hmm anyway um thanks for letting me speak that out um thanks mark and I was busy looking wildly through my brain for a book that immediately came to me but not the title not the author and I finally found that it's Isabel Wilkerson's cast the origin of our discontents which goes into this sum a lot and cast is a formal way that colonialists basically discriminated along race in cultures that they colonized etc etc and the degree to which that became a huge thing is shocking and scary and saddening um and Pete just found a different one uh there's a lot of really interesting uh work in this field so um thanks for asking the question it's a it's a big civilizational level of question really appreciate it uh Doug B yeah I just um the that idea of um what what I give attention to what I voice I feed and so all the time and attention that's spent bemoaning what's wrong what's broken uh is ultimately serving it is ultimately feeding it and Doug Doug actually has said multiple times in this space that we we have to do that and start there and I think that's um I'm not sure that I necessarily buy into that premise that that's required it's in the rear view mirror and there's absolutely nothing we can do about what already has happened um so I you know exponentially agree with focusing and devoting the the time and the attention to the new to the way ways exploring the ways of doing this differently that doesn't produce um what we're currently on the receiving end uh mark on your thing about race just to give it a twist um I I dear friend of mine is a guy named Bernie Kraus he's a phd in in bio acoustics and in 68 he ran around the world recording in the most remote locations in the world um and coined the term soundscapes and each location had a biome the creatures that landed there landed there each one is unique and they land there because they found their frequency of voice and communication open available to talk to each other without interference and so you have these orchestral recording soundscapes um and one of one of his his uh uh revenue centers was he would be hired by zoos and amusement parks that had live animal exhibitry and whatever um to do sound treatments of the areas or the enclosures and he was called in to an amusement park and they were having a real problem because they're it was one of you know their zoo safari area um they were having real problems with the their gorillas and the reason they were having problems with the gorillas is because their sound programming in that area was for mountain gorillas and the gorillas in the exhibit were savannah gorillas they were driving them insane oh wow wow now that's not racism but it's sort of the natural analog to me is just in the recognizing of differences of place and and tribe and natural world meets the living creatures that are in it and what on a frequency and energy level feels right feels good is for me and i remember in a past you know traditional street business world time in my life i did 13 trips to japan in the year i was commuting every two weeks and but i remember the the contrast the cultural contract contrast of the japanese gestalt the japanese orientation experience of how to communicate and behave and move and and what was comfortable and familiar and safe i think it ultimately maps to safety and earthing relative to the american style and what a the learning curve i ended up in um learning how to walk talk and move how to how to interact and exist in a way that was uh not discordant not triggering not you know um and just the sort of neutral not political but neutral idea of having awareness at that level consciousness at that level we lost as a species like along the way somehow i indigenous tribes know know this stuff um but we like got fractured and polarized and othered and i'm not sure that racism isn't a byproduct of that somehow anyway with that i'm complete thanks Doug um as a tiny sliver example of this i got to drive in Buenos Aires many years ago i've only done it once but if any of you've been to be a they drive kind of crazy but and i don't i don't know if it's gotten any better if they've sort of westernized their their manners or europeanized their manners but the lines on the road sort of mean nothing and everybody's floating everywhere and it looks like chaos and if you're in a cab you'll notice that your driver's basically minding everything no but knows where everybody is um in india this is resolved by honking and there's like this insane amount of honking on the street because it's like i'm on your left quarter in your blind spot honk honk honk honk which is crazy making but in argentina it's the closest i've ever come to feeling like i'm part of a flock and and if you wanted to just sort of slowly drift across a five-lane and they have some really broad broad avenues if you want to just sort of drift around whatever nobody would be bothered it would be just fine put your car right on on top of the the striped line nobody's bothered if you make too sharp a turn the herd is unhappy and you will know it and it's really interesting and that was sort of cultural competence or whatever in driving in a city which is much simpler i think than everything else you were just pointing to but but i think we underestimate and underrate how those things work um so thank you um steward if you'd like to comment and also check in that would be awesome and i'll check in with michael after you sure so um a couple of comments i was i was moved by what what gil said uh in two ways one the idea that the natural world would disappear because we all know that when we're we're feeling off if you just go out in nature it's amazing how incredibly um healing and centering um that is because it's congruent with the living system i think that's that's inside of us but also the notion of gil saying um the quote you shared gil about you know nation states nations you know only get wise when there's no alternative left but back to einstein famous quote that we're never going to solve the problems that we have with the thinking that got us here the idea of how we've created nation state as an organizational principle for the planet it's just outworn its usefulness on so many different levels um we are dealing with global challenges when we talk about solutions and nation states um are focused elsewhere and leaders of nation states are focused elsewhere so that is never going to get us to where we need to be um um and and i also you know just agree with the thought that yeah we don't have to make the case anymore that it's all collapsing that case is just it just been been made so many times what what is it we're going to do you know it's like a business collapsing and everybody gathers and says okay what can we do we're we're heading we're heading we're heading for the collapse all right um it's a little bit of back to the who moved my cheese uh book in terms of you know um human human human thinking um so those are just some some oh and and and yeah racism is it's a made up construct it's just it's that's that if you read all the literature and i'm i'm still digging into some of it because new stuff's coming out it's just such a made up construct anyway um my checking very quickly is um i'm actually in process of putting a manuscript together i've gathered um like 15 testimonials my poetry will be out this year um that's uh it'll be a first edition because i'm still doing tweaking but any writers here know that you're never really done you know you can just go on forever but there comes a time where you just have to um to use Seth Godin's work uh you know ship it and it's time to ship it and i'll do a second edition you know um um um next year but um that's my check in and i'm really pleased to be beginning that out into the world i feel some compulsion to actually get it get it out so um thank you great to be with you all thank you Stuart um before curl let me go to michael and see if you'd like to check in yeah um good to be here i don't have a whole lot to say i'm uh traveling at the moment and just um had a chance to at least sit in on the end of this this uh ogm sesh and um happy to listen um the i'm i'm in the south right now and um and you know race race is always fascinating to to look at as you you know and people's reactions to race as you change locations and it's it's just it's just i don't have anything eloquent to say it's just bizarre you know that's such a that's such a construct such a make-believe thing you know could could have such effect on the way people behave and congregate and um and react to one another and have visible visible the reactions and differences are without even people being conscious of it i don't think yeah that's all that's all from me thanks thank you michael um mr heaven strike so there are two kind of two topics uh with some of the um real trailblazers i've worked with they kind of inspired at coined the term paradigm leaps and they see that as a system of um oh doug engelbart at my the explanation i came up for how his vision could be both so broad and decades ahead of everyone else's that seeing the converging trajectories of the paradigm shifts that were going on at the time uh and then the a major five minute of that is um is ray anderson with interface carpet and it was really funny i found a the crazy thing at gsa i'm going through getting rid of old equipment i found a box and it has a bunch of vhs tapes in it with this interview that the public building service commissioner um gave um or did with ray anderson back in 2002 so i did a search on something called the internet archive and found the found the um a digital copy of it so i i download downloaded it from there and uploaded it to my my youtube channel but it's really amazing i got the i've got the visionary like with a statement and it's like sustainability is not enough it's basic we need to get beyond do no more harm to how can we help the planet heal and because he did i mean coon's book uh i mean he came out in 57 he'd had actually written the caperna can revolution i mean and so yeah he was possessed by the incommensurability of things but if you like um um ray anderson he actually i have it like he went from conservation to this restorative so he if we if we think far and if we get to that next level then we can be pulling the wall down from the other from the other side so that's one concept i've been working with and the other one with time and there are two two major things we've got the the group that have been trying to dominate the whole thing about dominion and we were the we had this heaven garden of eden and everything's been going to hell ever since and as Doug talks about it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and then the other side is um rabbi learner wrote a book about the left hand of god and john howt is a Jesuit at georgetown um talks about um basically god is like a force bringing us into the future kind of thing so we the future is getting better and then i've had some conversations with dug but it's like that being in the present is that is where the tension is and stuff but then what's the duration of the present that's kind of where where we have we've had a number of conversations there but i'll leave it with that but um and i'll post the link to some of the john howt stuff thanks carl um mr treksar i think you'll have the last word today okay uh actually a couple of points gary on on a couple things that you were talking about um you know first of all this question of do i need to be hit over the head with the doom and gloom message uh that's not that's not really the question since the answer to that question differs depending on who you are and what situation you're in and what do you know and what do you not know and and yet we can't i mean there is so much discussion in the climate field of do we need to hit people over the head with doom and gloom or do we not need to hit people over the head with doom and gloom and the answer is yes it depends on who it is you're talking to uh and and that's you know that's where the whole idea of climate chess comes in and and getting the right information to the right people at the right time which ai tools should be eminently capable of helping us do today so that we're we're communicating with people along the lines of of what they need and yet i'm not aware of anybody doing that effectively today at at the organizational level and we just keep debating this question of do we need doom and gloom or do we not need gloom it's the wrong question that second very quick point is you talk about i was a bit surprised to hear you talk about maybe you'll set up this website for you know if you're not convinced that we're all going to die what do you do next um and you know i've been building that website in a brain for years and i've spent thousands of hours on that exact question so so before you go and build a website being the brain person you are i hope you'll think about well what other tools might be available to tackle that question as opposed to a website uh so let me let me leave it at that um mark thank you very much i wasn't actually thinking of uh about resources that already exist uh i i also think it's funny what you just said because a piece of what you and i and pete have been talking about a bunch and harlem from the brain as well is how to make the brain less brain like and more like a website uh so there's a there's some tiny ironies sprinkled throughout but i will definitely do that and point more to your resources because you have been working on that for decades and thank you appreciate that um we are at time this has been a super interesting call uh i think maybe we'll tweak the process and try something like this maybe closer to serious conversations in two weeks and let's think about a topic for next week uh we do a poor job of discussing topics before the topic calls and i don't i'm not a good shepherd of that conversation but if uh if we want to do that on the ogm town square channel on matter most that would be awesome um thank you all really appreciate you