 Judy. Judy awesome. Hi, how are you. Good actually surprisingly. Feeling better. Yeah, I'm I have. I yesterday I felt more like I had a stuffy head and cold and I still have a little bit of a cough and stuff like that but basically low grade symptoms. And I'm almost sort of five days into the thing so turning out as good a cases could be and I was faxed all the way to buy valent vaccine so I think that probably helped. And if there's silver linings anywhere I understand that having caught COVID and gotten past it plus vaccines is even better immunity from future cases. And I'm being told by several people that hey, don't stop taking this thing seriously. You don't want to get covered twice. It's really interesting. So yeah, so and sort of every time it attacks your system in funky ways and nobody's quite figured out what it's busy doing to us. Yeah, I know my daughter and her fiance he had COVID over Thanksgiving. She and his mom tested negative but now she has COVID and she doesn't know whether she picked it up from his rebound or picked it up from a conference that she attended and left early because she started feeling like she had a cold. That's probably it. Yeah. So I mean, it's hard to know whether she picked where she picked it up but it's also really hard when you're around humans at an event like humans are lovely and we just want to be with them and it's so hard to keep distant and keep masked and keep everything it's like it just breaks everything. She's been pretty careful biology person but anyway, it is what it is but it's sort of affecting my humor because I don't know whether they were planning to come home for the holidays and I don't know. I'm sorry. Someday I want to meet Blair. She's cool person. I've heard so many good stories about her. So, cool. Nice to see everybody. I don't know whether Grace is going to be able to join us. She sometimes comes in in transport or whatever but I'm going to hang out there for some of the things I wanted to say. Hey Pete. Hey Michael. Nice to see everybody. And actually, I'll start. I'll start by saying that I'm almost done watching last week's episode of this hot series the OGM weekly calls. And I'm just blown away by how lovely last week's call was and wanted to, as as first order of business I just wanted to thank Grace from the bottom of my heart for stepping up to offer to host and for doing doing such a brilliant job hosting, especially on such a different difficult topic. And so, I just wanted to thank her holding a position, sort of not opposite but different from the mainstream position in this crowd, and doing it with grace and aplomb, and, and so forth so I just wanted to say, and I'll repeat this if she comes into the room. I just wanted to offer my thanks, because I was just really moved by the call. We're present right now we're on the call so you experienced it firsthand. I'm sorry I could be on the call but I think my absence was really useful to the call in ways that are course unsettling to me, but good for the call so hey, what the heck. And then I wanted to say that I've got a poem I'd love to start this call with by David white called start close in. Let me paste the link to the poem so you all can follow along if you'd like. And it's kind of, I think it's, I think it might be less relevant to the topic that I thought it was when I remembered it. But I think it actually might still fit really well so let me. Let me just read the poem to us. It's like this. Start close in. Don't take the second step, or the third. Start with the first thing close in the step you don't want to take. Start with the ground you know the pale ground beneath your feet your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions don't let them smother something simple. To hear another voice. Follow your own voice wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics be humble and focused. Start close in. Don't mistake that other for your own. Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing close in the step you don't want to take. Oh good someone did turn on the closed captioning and I, it's gone from my menu Pete was that you. I can't figure out where it went on my menu is it gone from hosts. Maybe. I guess. So, so thank you for all those things and then I wanted to briefly share screen and show my notes from the call from last week. Here's, here's sort of the quotes and some of the connections that I took, and I've kind of sort of ready to head in from someplace around there into this week's call. So let me share a link to this thought with everybody in the chat in case you want to follow along. And for anybody who was on last week's calls, I think a good place to start is any afterthoughts or reflections or things that have came into your mind afterward or comments you'd like to make now. Do you like Mueller, anyone. Did you like it, not like it. They see liked it, thumbs up. I like the Roman Colosseum style. The body of the lives. Michael liked it. So cool, let's let's keep going in then. I asked on the OGM list, if anybody had a mirror space we might use to draw about this. And I haven't checked back, but last I looked, nobody had said, here's a mirror space. But if anybody wants to put a mirror board into the chat, we can do that. I was partly interested in, and I had, I wound up waking up this morning dreaming this. I was visualizing sort of several questions that are some of the questions that are in the middle of this issue, like how biased is liberal media and how might one go about thinking about that? How much is the far right being shut down? And I had several other questions kind of formulated. And then I was gonna try to figure out how to map different points of view on the same sorts of issues and maybe have us collaborate on the mirror board, posting thoughts, ideas, resources, whatever else. Yeah, Michael writes that I like that we got uncomfortable. And it was really interesting because I find just my own experience of, for instance, the pandemic is that when people are dying and chits going on and things get squishy, some of us, probably me included, tend to want to find a party line so that we can get lots of people collaborating in the same way. Thereby skipping past the useful exercise of public thinking and discourse, which is the thing that would actually get people aligned and collaborating. And so part of what I ended up thinking at the end of the call, just reflecting on, was how poorly, how little trust there was in the environment, how the pandemic arose at a moment of low trust of governments and media anyway, and how all of the above proceeded to act in ways that more often than not broke trust rather than grew trust. And that that trust in those conversations and the sharing of evidence and open questions and the ability to open those questions might, I'll underscore might, have led to more trust and more sorting out these issues. And then another thought, and then I'll stop and see who else would just like to sort of jump in, how complicated some of these issues are. Like at some point, the lab leak hypothesis came up in the call last week, and Grace said, I don't know why the lab leak or wild origins is so controversial and I'm paraphrasing badly here. But she basically said, like it doesn't make any difference to the virus where it came from, but it makes a difference to how we treat it and what we might do going forward. And I was like, yeah, and there's probably geopolitics behind China deciding to protect all the information about what happened and the US making accusations about lab leak, which would then make this an international political incident as opposed to an international healthcare incident. And that very likely played in somewhere that we don't know about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. A little bit like this morning, Brittany Griner got traded for Victor Blum or whatever his name is, the merchant of death, an arms dealer that I'm not sure anybody wants on the loose, but hey, that was sort of a swap. And who knows how the sausage got made behind that curtain. So let me pause for a second and see where anybody would like to take any of this. Y'all are shockingly untalkative this morning, shockingly. I thought from watching last week's call that you'd be like, okay, let's go, let's go. So let's go Klaus, then Pete, then Judy. So I thought what we missed was a hindsight perspective because now we know what happened. So in the fog of war, so to speak, I mean in the fog of the crisis, a lot of issues and controversies and so on were flowing through. But at the end of the day, the United States came out with flying colors. The way we are handling COVID today is exemplary. Our economy functions, our hospitals are not overrun. But our debts were way worse than most countries. We had a shocking number of debts here. Right, so now compare that to China. China can't open its economy. I mean, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't because their response simply wasn't as effective as ours. So where we are today, right? China today, if they open the economy, they have a million deaths because they haven't solved the problem of immunizing the population, of educating the population in ways that helps them and makes sense. So when you look back, we've done, I mean, as crazy as it was and as tumultuous as it was, we have done a pretty good job to find a middle world is what I thought, that's what I thought. And I don't want us to sort of relitigate which country had the best outcomes. I think that that topic right now is like really complicated and touchy and hot. But appreciate that we're at a place where we can sort of look back on it in that kind of way. And maybe it's a topic for a future call to sort of unpack more of that. And I know that Pete's wife spent a tremendous amount of time during the pandemic actually going in and figuring out what was up. And I wish that, I don't think she was posting any of that publicly, was she Pete? I'm like, my heart is like, oh God, I would have given a lot to be able to peek over her shoulder digitally to see what she was finding and where it was going. So let's go, Pete, Judy, Kevin. You're muted, Pete. So I missed last week's call, so I'm missing a bunch of context, it appears. And I also kind of wanted to recognize Rick's thought in chat that it'd be better if Grace were here because she set the agenda. Having said that, I'll keep on. So Klaus, thanks for that. A viewpoint that the America has done well. I would have to strongly disagree. I think we've had an extremely bad failure of public health policy, public health policy. And we let our society get divided across the line where it didn't need to get divided and it's gonna be deleterious to us for decades, probably to come. So the thing that's easy to say upfront and hard to take back is that I think we're talking about COVID, right? From what I understand and from what my wonderful wife, she's done an amazing amount of research and knows a lot and doesn't tell anybody because it's not popular to tell people anything, even if you say, I think this is true but I don't know or this is something I think and I don't care if you, it's really hard to say. But from what I know from what my wife knows, COVID is a long-term thing. It's not a short-term thing. It does insidious and often invisible damage to the lining of your blood vessels and your blood vessels go everywhere in your body. So it randomly attacks and disables random systems in your body and different for different people. And then it's kind of a statistical thing. Oh, great, my liver didn't get affected. My brain didn't get affected. And people go through that and think they got through it with flying colors. But there's a bunch of stuff that's like common sense that we should be thinking about that we don't. We should be cleaning indoor air a lot more. The reason we don't have cholera all over the time, all over all the time is because we cleaned our water. So right now we're breathing dirty, filthy and infectious air all the time and think it's completely normal. So, and then in that environment, my wife and I mask all the time when we're out indoors with other people. Very few other people are. And it feels really weird to be the idiot that's trying to take care of themselves in the face of a bad situation. And so I think what we're going to find is that, so you don't really get immunity to COVID. You get a little bit for a short time from a vaccine or from getting sick. It trashes your immune system. Doan says it really knocks out your T cells, at least in some people. And that means that you're gonna get sick more easily next time, either with COVID, another COVID or with RSV or flu or whatever, Staff A. Certain number of those people are going to be sick for a long time, months or years. Many of them are going to die. It's heartbreaking to me to watch a country that I thought was a thought leader or smart or able to, I grew up- Oh, you're being optimistic there. Well, I'd followed the Kool-Aid back when I was a teenager in the 70s and 80s. And I'm not that dissolution anymore, but I'm still aghast at the failure of public health policy in the US. And even now, the folks that my wife hangs out with who think that we know about COVID, see, I have to say it that way. It's like, I think I know how biology works and I think I kind of know what COVID does. Not that I can tell anybody that because they're gonna say, oh, you believe in the science. I believe in the science and it says, the CDC, it's a joke, like literally a joke at this point. The CDC used to be a well-respected global institution of science and it stumbled and kept falling first under Trump and then it just declined and declined and declined. And recently the CDC finally said, well, even if we don't tell you, you have to mask, maybe you should mask anyway. And a bunch of the COVID people were like, you know it's bad when the CDC says you might start wanting to think about wearing a mask. And, you know, it's like, that's the weakest sauce like recommendation it could have made. And I understand kind of why it was so weak sauce because no matter what you say anymore, people get really upset. And, you know, thanks to Mr. Trump and then probably a bunch of political stuff after that, we got ourselves into a situation where even talking about something like this is just fracturing of society. And, you know, and it's really frustrating. And I, you know, so maybe I'm a little bit glad that, you know, that our economy didn't get as trashed as it could have or something like that. I really wonder if, so I'll not go down that line. That I feel, and maybe this is a rationalization, maybe this is not. I think we, the US in particular was driven pretty hard by external forces, external nation actors and maybe some internal ones. We were driven pretty hard to continue opening a wedge in a wedge issue, you know. So forces of disinformation that want to take the US down a notch, whether they're internal or external, they look for a wedge issue like abortion rights or, you know, whether, you know, what color your skin is or something like that. And you just kind of like drive a wedge in and you split society. This was an astonishingly effective one and left us like a patient flayed open, like writhing around, you know, like literally dying by the millions. And I think it's going to continue for five years. You know, in five years, we're going to wake up and say, oh my God, what did we do five years ago? Why weren't we paying attention? So, thanks. Thanks Pete. Judy, then Kevin and Karin. Well, my thoughts are a bit of swirl because I'm trying to both listen responsibly and retain the thought I thought when I wanted to talk. But it seems to me not to oversimplify but it comes down to a couple of key things, both of which involve trust because we don't trust our news sources for many good reasons. We don't trust the government partly for good reasons and partly because of artificial polarization that's been introduced as Pete suggested. And we don't really trust the medical community or science and the underpinnings of understanding stuff. And so some of the major science societies are starting to look at this issue of trust in science because if you can't trust science or only the scientists trust science because they can critically discern if the experiment was done right, then we don't have the foundation for solid content and knowledge to then give the community which doesn't want to listen if it disagrees with what their local population says because their sense of needing to belong overcomes their sense of independence and seeking of knowledge. And it's kind of frightening because we've become so polarized and because individual states are letting those politics affect what they'll allow people to do or what they'll support doing. Some states will let you get back slow but if you have a positive test conservative states like Texas will only allow it if you're in the government suggested groups of over 65 or have a preexisting condition. So there's a whole population in Texas that's getting less treatment than would be optimal for the disease because they're under 65 and they don't have a critical disability already even though we know that COVID promotes all sorts of long-term consequences to health that will ultimately be very damaging to people. So I think the conversations that we've had about trust as a general principle almost needs to be segmented into different kinds of trust in order for us to be able to attempt if it's possible to influence a change in trust or a change in effective communication of informed content. There's so much disinformation out there that's polarizing and disruptive and it's deliberately positioned I believe by evil parties. And that's really destructive but it's the kind of pandemonium that can contribute to a breakdown in all sorts of civil processes. And as soon as you get people scared that there's gonna be an uprising in their neighborhood they're a lot more tolerant of controlled state things that are not the foundation of our history. So I don't mean to be such a downer but it's a really big problem and it would be helpful if we could discern leverage points or discern some consistency of practices and behaviors, communicate trust of those practices and behaviors to other people, so forth. I'm always the only person in a room with a mask on now. I'm still masking, I am over 65, relatively healthy but it's frightening to me that to go anywhere in public I'm going to be surrounded by people who are not masked who most likely are carriers if not active with COVID and that's just not a great way to live. Judy, thank you for that and your whole life had been science like you were still involved in scientific associations and all that and looking at what Rob just put into the chat like how do you reflect back on where are we with science and life and this thing right now? Like how does this make you feel about your role or vantage point into science? Personally it makes me feel really stubborn because it's just science is science it's supported by data that can be duplicated by other people in the simplest of statements and it's the best approximation that we have right now because new information might change the whole ball game. So if we could somehow communicate that's how science works as conundrum as it is that would help a lot. I think that informed organizations as opposed to individuals need to take stronger positions on things. They're afraid to do it because of public reaction and a lot of other things but if you get editorials within science journals that are more available to the public or there's more communication in the media about science from trusted news sources whoever they may be or there's podcasts somehow we have to break this information lockdown in order to cause people to say maybe I don't know what's really right or true. I mean that's the fundamental thing and science kind of don't believe anything till it's proved seven times and tested by five other people but that's not how human beings think. They're influenced by how many of their friends think more than anything else. And so reaching communities, reaching people with an alternative message or perhaps even an alternative question rather than a message but not everyone has the skill sets to actually do the research like Pete's wife has done and I try to stay up to date on a lot of stuff to the extent I can but I'm out of date as a scientist but I might spend two hours tracking down a bunch of these references just to see whether they make sense to me before I'm gonna start quoting them. That's the science process but that's not the human process. The human process is do I trust person A? Person A told me this, therefore I think it's truth. I'll promulgate it as my truth because I don't have time to look into it. And sorry, go ahead. No, I'm rambling here but it's just it's something that really bothers me so much that I'm considering backing off from a bunch of stuff to try to figure out what I can actually do about this and through what agency? Cause it isn't just the science groups. The science groups trust each other but if the American Chemical Society says this is good or this does or doesn't break down or this goes to this body organ nobody's gonna see it except the 150,000 members of ACS and another 100,000 other scientists who tangentially watch that stuff. And that doesn't influence the media. So I actually think that the bouncy type positions are really critical and they need to be more public even though it's unpopular these days for them to make public statements because of government and political reactions. And I think there's a naivety in America too that there aren't deliberate disruptive forces at work that have really amplified the divides and thought and worked hard to amplify those divides and thought because that level of unrest facilitates movement toward dictatorships. I completely wholeheartedly agree with that latter statement and would love to be proven wrong. Kevin, then Carl, you're muted. So I've been thinking about where lack of trust started and I have one path to how we got here. Back in about 1905, a church in Fort Worth, Texas published what they called the Fundamentals which was an epistemology to regard the other. These were folks who felt overwhelmed by what was called modernism at the time but their epistemology has proven to be modular and replicable. And what they said is they wanted to be militant and separatist and use proof texts where possible as if they were weapons. And that way of saying that you have to be separate and literal and separatist, it's a warlike kind of thing made them afraid of slippery slope coalitions and partnering. I was doing investigative religion reporting in 2003 when the Episcopal Church was trying to elect the first openly gay bishop and I was everywhere on that thing and there was one meeting between potential meeting that they wanted to vote to have between North and South Korean people of the same faith. And there's a group that was funded by the folks who had taken over several other denominations with that methodology. It worked for the Southern Baptist, it worked for the Methodists, it worked for several places to split the Presbyterian Church. That same epistemological methodology of militant and separatist and using texts as if they say everything. They used the text around what could be homosexuality or it could be temple prostitution and they ignored the next text next to it that said, don't eat shellfish. Anyway, they said, why are you against this? Just this meeting of North and South Koreans of the same faith as well, you're demonizing. And they said, well, they need to be demonized, otherwise there will be infection coming in. And that way of thinking became two things. It became aligned with the state, Trump mostly aligned it himself and that created the whole kind of Christian nationalism and around the same time or a little earlier, Zuckerberg realized you can make more money if you cause people to fight more and this way of thinking causes people to fight more and helping people on the left also see these people as being militant and separatist with the people on the right who are acting out of fear. I think it leads to where we are. And then we found that the modular epistemology of fundamentalism picked up in this Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas in 1905 is a key way of seeing truth that I think is at the heart of our lack of trust. And it's also a huge money maker. You're muted, Jerry. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. So sorry, newbie mistake, first time on Zoom. Sorry, Kevin, wow. And is the link that I put in the chat the right link to the fundamentals? Is that the set of documents you're talking about? And then I just wanna do a Vulcan mind meld with you on this topic because I just, you have so much rich context here about how this affected the church and the politics and dynamics and power dynamics of the Christian nationalist movement and all that that I don't have. And I'm like, holy crap. You've just like popped a lid on a bunch of stuff that's happened in the world that I wasn't aware of and you're muted. Yeah, one of the things that makes the left incapable of responding showed up in Barbasi's book linked on what right to life groups did versus freedom of choice groups and the right to life groups were able to make single issue partnerships and forget about what they didn't agree about. And I saw that when I was being an undercover reporter in a meeting where a group that was against women in the priesthood and they were nine points against it met with the group that was leading the charge against gay folks. And so we'll forget about being against women and I saw them have that nine points and they eliminated five of them and agreed on four. And the deal was done. And whereas the freedom of choice groups needed a litmus test of what you agreed about. And so you had to agree about four or five different issues. And so their sites only linked arithmetically, whereas the more effective Christian right who compartmentalized things, rud geometrically. So, you know, there is a way that the holistic approach of the left makes them weaker in any battle. And that's another whole part of it. But thanks, I hadn't thought about that epistemology in a long time. But I think it's a, you know, it really is one of the creepy modules in the new operating system. And it's been co-opted by, you know, Caesar slash whatever just like the original Christian thing was co-opted by, you know, Constantine and whatever made a tool of making people docile when they've been willing to give up their lives to fight the state, you know, the week before. And so, you know, it's an interesting, you know that piece is still there. Militant separatist and using a text as a weapon and you choose which text. And so it's the most effective weaponization that happens as opposed to the thing that both best represents the ethos of who you were intending to be. So, you know, I'm not sure what other, you know, what is the, as I look back at this, we'll finish this up in Innawama County where my family's from, they voted up only 17% voted for against Trump in the last election and 1% more got vaccinated. So it was 18% got vaccines. And so it was only a little bit of leakage went out to public health. And so I think they're acting against their own best interests to believe a world they need to believe in. And I think complex contagion explains why these groups can be closed like that in a way, which is also complex contagion is why OGM is so much more valuable as a closed group than as an open group, which is another whole point that I'll just stop with. Thank you. I appreciate your crossover there to the other topic. And Kevin, thank you so much for the detail as I said, I'd love to absorb even lots more. Carl and Dave. Well, I got kind of a segue and stuff because I went being in DC area, we had a prayer for peace event years ago, Jackson Brown and Crosby and Nash and a whole bunch of, because I had a concert and then it was a whole bunch of Tibetan monks and things. And I was having a conversation with somebody and I was like, peace, you got a problem with that? And the one Tibetan monk was kind of taken aback Mila, peaceful. I'll post the link to the general page but I don't know how many people have seen the Dan Goodspeeds diagrams I've got. I've got one that's configured, so I've shared screen and things. They need to be experienced, they're just devastating. Do you want to share screen in a minute? Okay. I wanted to provide a little context. And then the other thing, one of the reasons why they were really down playing masks and the importance of them is because of the supply chain that caused the panic and then we didn't have any masks, we would have been, I think that that was kind of a major factor in things. You had another mistake, a judgment mistake early in the process, I'm afraid. Do you want to, you just muted yourself by accident. So that was the other thing too. I was holding the space bar down, so you can mute yourself all the time and then if you hit the space bar, you can hold down the space bar just while you're talking. Push the talk kind of feature, yes. Yeah, one step. Do you want a screen share or come back to it later? Yeah, I'll screen share. Okay. Yes, well I picked February 12th because that's when my dad got his first vaccine. I've filtered out all the ones except the very Democratic and very Republican states and since I first saw it, he's actually added in the U.S. average and stuff. I love bar chart races. Yeah, so this is the desk by state partisanship and so I can skip ahead. Holy crap. Yeah, so that's the- Will you share a link to that on the chat? Yeah, I'll post the link. So then he's got it by the most desks or by the fewest. Right. And well, the one thing you can see is that they're not very many very Democrat states in comparison and stuff, but yeah. And really understanding the way he's normalizing the data because you're comparing apples to oranges to the whole fruit salads. Carl, have you just a question in there? Have you looked at the way those deaths result in voting totals for the midterms? No, I haven't looked it. I haven't seen what he's done with it, but he's definitely- Dead folks don't vote except in Chicago. So is the thesis- Kevin, is the thesis- That's like the thing about tobacco. It's a great business except you have to find a way to replace the 400,000 oil customers you lose every year. Yeah, so the thesis here is that the right has basically killed off its voter base and lost the elections because those people just died. I think it's an easy and fun thing to think, but the number of deaths, percentage of deaths is actually fairly small. I think it's an effective strategy to kill off 1% of your base in the name of consolidating that base. Mathematically, I don't mean that in any human way. Obviously, that's not human at all, I don't think. But just because a lot of people are dying, and it's easy to say it's not the disease, it's the vaccine. I don't know why you people are even getting vaccinated at this point. And that kind of stuff, it just locks in your determination to keep drinking the Kool-Aid. Because you've lost one or 2% of the Kool-Aid drinkers, that doesn't mean that you've lost the voting population. Right. Carl, thank you for reminding me of Dan Goodspeed's charts. I'd totally forgotten about them and they are compelling. Are you done with that? I had one more thing, but no. It'll come back. It'll come back to you. We can pop back. In a different context. Dave, you want to chip in? Yeah, I think I hopped on as Kevin was talking and so I was immediately went. I wanted to highlight this David Sloan Wilson keynote speech that he gave to a bunch of theologians. And I just found it really compelling. One was this notion of adaptive fictions, which he talks about having. I think religion is probably an example of things that are fictions, but that somehow help the society adjust to different issues. And he's talking in the keynote about how humanity, as humanity is becoming an organism, right? And acting like an organism in the way a beehive is an organism. And that we're doing it at a tribal level and that he then equates it to good. Within a group, good is doing good things in your group and bad is doing bad things in your group. But a good thing in your group might be a bad thing to a different group. And so then you have this, that's where a lot of the conflict across groups come from, right? So you can kind of maybe help understand a little bit of the MAGA world where things that to me look evil are good in their context. And often they're good because I'm an adaptive fiction, which is like really weird, right? So they're trying to promote the apocalypse or something like that, which is a good thing in their group. Doesn't look good to me outside their group. Anyway, I just thought, I thought it was a really, really interesting talk and Kevin, it seems like it was up your alley. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. I was actually talking about David Wilson this morning because his group's use of Hylo is probably the best of their applications online community. And I've worked with David on a couple of things. He's the leading practitioner of Eleanor Ostrom's work. So there's a lot to like about what he's, what he's, yeah, he's doing some interesting things. I haven't looked at that, but they're actually, it's up on Trinity Wall Street, which is our main funder. So that's interesting in many ways. Well, that's good. Yeah, I was like, I chased it because of reading, I think I probably pitched this before, but reading Atlas Hugged, which is his attempted fiction, which is like really horrible fiction, but it's got a couple of fun ideas in it. Yeah, yeah. Is the keynote available as a video? Cause I see only the PDF transcript there, which is fine. I will download that. Cool. So where does that put us? I'm wondering whether this would lead us to contemplate alternative, potentially insidious forms of communication of influence. I mean, to me, what we need is alternative press, almost like during the revolution, you had to have free press. And somehow we have to mobilize larger numbers and reach larger numbers. It doesn't do much good, except help us rationalize our discomfort for all of us to sit together and talk about our shared perspectives because it doesn't result in change action unless we can take those messages to other organizations that have more span of control and influence. And I think the general public isn't the right place to take it. As much as I love the general public, there aren't enough people who actually have time and energy because of personal circumstances, let alone capacity to actually think through and discern issues. And we're talking at a really elevated level here and it feels comfortable and common because we're all at the same level of simultaneous analysis and interpretation and listening and judging and all of those factors. But I don't find that a lot when I go out into more general public communities. And I have to be sensitive to that to be able to have a purposeful conversation. It's sort of like I have to read the room or read the group and then decide how to position my comment in a way that will allow them to hear it. And that's a challenging, that's challenging as a personal dynamic, let alone as a societal one. And I think that's a lot of what we're facing here is this inability to communicate with people in a way that has credibility and shared intent. I want to jump in for a sec before going to Stacy because you just triggered a bunch of things that connect for me. My amateur history of the press, of the news business is that the earliest newspapers were completely political rags. They were from political parties. They were completely biased. And then sort of some of them start getting big and then the original author Oaks buys the New York Times and invents objective journalism and says we're going to print all the news that's fit to print and be objective. And that's a new thing. And then that grows because people are like, oh good, we have objective news. Then I think later is yellow journalism, which is the battle between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who gets the Pulitzer Award named after him. Fine, see that. A nice way to cleanse a reputation because he and Hearst basically invent yellow journalism, which is this titanic, exaggerated, crazy ass battle in the public view over public opinion. That's what it is. And then we have the inner tubes show up, which just tear news every which way and create new kinds of profits and kick out the stool of classified, you know, Craigslist busy sort of eats the classified business all by itself. And local media starts to wither and die. And now we have there, you know, there was a newspaper death watch website for years. It's probably still there. But I thought hyper local media might help. And for a while that was a slightly hot thing. And then it seems to have petered out. And so now the news business is in real trouble in lots of different ways. And I think one of the questions is, should we be trying to rescue or improve the news media or should we ignore it and find some new way to collaborate with each other into which I'll throw in my take on consumer and consumerism, which is that we replaced civic activities with shit like, Hey, everybody, go be a sports fan and go out and yell for the Redskins now renamed or whoever else and like go pump up jingoism and patriotism for your city instead of actually participating in civic activities. We replace civic activities. We outsource them to voting, which you get to do every now and then, which is the result of a consumer mass marketing exercise. The reason political parties want a lot of money from us is defeated into mainstream media ads and new and digital media ads to come back to convince us of one point of view or the other, which bears little resemblance to actual functioning democracy to me. So what I'm saying is the media and the democratic functions are all eaten by all of these forces that have destroyed them. And one of the reasons OGM exists as an entity is, Hey, could we puzzle our way through to figure out how to share what we know, share the big open questions, connect them to scientists, connect them to journalists, connect them to students, connect them to policymakers and change how that shit is happening. Because we're in real trouble if we don't fix that in the spirit of what you just said, Judy, like we should have collective collaborative inquiry so that we can solve these problems in a credible way. And at this point, so many of the entities that are out there are not credible or have lost credibility or are weak and broken, that we need to do something pretty dramatic to stand this thing up, I think. And there's a whole other thread I won't go back to, but I'll just point to, which is just exactly how broken is the mainstream media as an active question I have, because I still look for news items to tell me who killed whom, where, when and what happened and how much can you fudge that. And then as I'm reading those, I'm filtering for, oh, that's an opinion. Oh, and I put Peru in the chat just a little while ago. I just want to throw that in real quick because I grew up in Peru and I care about Peru. And the news articles around the recent ejection of the president by Congress in Peru make it sound like the president tried to pull a coup when my amateur understanding from the outside is that the Peruvian Congress is completely corrupt and bought and is almost unfixable because they've changed the constitution in ways that make it so that it stays corrupt and that they basically ejected a reasonable president before he managed to dissolve Congress. And so it really concerns me that the public opinion on this is, oh my God, thank God Peru just avoided a coup by the president when in fact I think the opposite is what we ought to be thinking. We ought to be thinking, how do we help Peruvians get through a really crappy political situation on the ground? Sorry to put 800 things in the conversation. Stacey, you just fell off the cue. Is it because you decided to step out and I said too many things or would you like to step back in? Well, I don't think I can remember everything I wanted to say but I did want to. That's why I use the chat as a helper along the way. Sorry, go ahead. But I did want to connect what Judy was saying with what Michael put in the chat early about last week's call which was the discomfort because all of that is tied in and not just in like, a lot of this conversation is focused on the creation of the media. I think I'm more focused on how we consume it. Somebody put in the chat about the nuances being left out and just to push back Judy on one thing when you talk about the public because one of the things that the public I think can be taught to do that I hope that I help in this is to talk to other people to get those nuances. The call we were on last week was an example of that but we were all people that cared about each other and but we still had those differences of opinion. So again, I don't think there was enough. I would like to have maybe at another time a deeper call about the discomfort because when Michael put in the chat, you know, that I wrote it was more uncomfortable to some of us than others and the reason I put that I went back and I watched the call. It was not as clear to me watching it how uncomfortable I really was at the time but I spoke up on that call which was something that was super uncomfortable for me. I don't know how it comes across but I think it was so important and I think it led to some really positive movement and I don't know, Doug, you were there but I think if I hadn't mentioned something further reflection would not have occurred that then was communicated and I think we moved in a positive step towards building trust, you know, and I see nodding so I hope you agree. So I left the call feeling good about it but it was hard and I was flustered and I wasn't prepared and not everybody's gonna, you know, like Pete said earlier, it's not, you know, people don't feel comfortable saying what's not popular so I'll just stop there for now. Thanks, Stacy. And just from my watching of the call, I couldn't tell how much stress or distress you were under but I appreciated what you brought into the call and did change things. Doug, did you want to comment on that real quick before I pass to Kevin? Yeah. So imagine that the human energetic and emotional layer were actually visible and prioritized first and then all the it's that provoke those responses were subordinated to that. We might avoid a bunch of wars and conflict and stuff. Sort of like, you know, that thing about the perfect reflection in a lake and you turn it upside down and I think, Stacy, what you're speaking to and where the real where the real juices and where the real opportunity and potential lies is figuring out how to invert that. In fact, in practice and reality and feeling sense into how to do that. Just like as a fundamental idea of like, how do you even do that in version? How do you like, what does it look like? How do you play? How do you express yourself? How do you listen to other people? Like on a really fundamental level are, you know, educationally, programmatically, you know, I'm imprinted from birth not to do everything in the system is set up to stop human beings from being human and from a place of connection with their own agency and with their own voice. And they're like, and feelings are really powerful sources. If you don't have emotions behind whatever the it is you're trying to create or transform or change nothing will happen. Like it's impossible to achieve or affect a change or manifest something different. Like they're the source. They're the energetic source. And so, yeah, I think you are you're dead on point and your share was dead on point. And it is the discomforts where the dragons lie. Like where the answers lie. So I'm complete. Thanks, Doug. Kevin then Scott. You're muted, Kevin. Kevin, you're muted. You're muted. I put a link to deep canvassing in the chat and it's been a proven methodology to change the view of the other. But it works in certain contexts. But I would suggest it doesn't work for OGM to do it. But it has worked for embattled people who feel threatened to talk to the other and not come in trying to convert but to listen. And so these were gay folks in LA who did it and it changed a lot. And then it was it's been done by Palestinians across to Israelis. And it's been done, you know, in rural North Carolina and other places, deep ways with folks who are committed to living as the 17 to 18 percent in Iwama County, which we've all left, but who will stay there in conversation. And you have to be persistent and patient and not come in to convert. And I think, you know, OGM is like a lot of groups I'm in where we say, how do we get them to be as enlightened as we are? And we don't know them and we don't really like them. And that never works. But it's always a persistent kind of thing we say. And I think it works if you're persistent and feel some level of threat and you are willing to stay in relationship with folks with whom you disagree a lot. So it's if you're serious, it's a real methodology. But I think we should not talk about how we can reach them because we won't. This is not what this group is about. So that's that's my point. Thanks, Kevin. I'm interested in your. So I'm a big fan of deep canvassing. My understanding of it is just it's different from canvassing, which is normally here's a brochure. Please let me know. Which is normally here's a brochure. Please work for my guy. Move on to the next door. Yeah, sit and have a conversation. But it's not a methodology like nonviolent communication. It doesn't have the depth of anything like those things. Or am I missing something about deep canvassing here? Yeah, I think you are. And there is stuff in. David, the birth of this thing, as I know it, is from the folks where the LGBT folks in in LA who did it and then made it into a methodology. So there I mean, there is a methodology and it's, you know, it's it's it's long and it's listening and it's finding out what they care about and what they're afraid of and finding the points in common between them. So anyway, but yeah, it is. It isn't just, you know, yeah, there are deep. The debt is awesome, Kim. I know that was really. That was really that was really. Yeah, it is a thing and you can be trained in it. And there's groups in North Carolina that train folks. And I realized I don't have the patience to do it, but I admire them. Scott and Judy. OK, so Kevin, this idea of being in relationship with someone we disagree with. I like that a lot. Because I think that means that you're you're hanging on. You might be at arm's length the whole time, pulling against each other, but you're not letting go. And I think that's in the spirit of what we were. I think Jerry, you had framed this week's call as something about making the space more comfortable for people with different opinions or something like that. And what I wanted to offer up was something. I had a new understanding of marriage in the last couple of couple of years. And it was. I'm not leaving. And how many relationships do you have in your life where that's married or otherwise, where that is that's bedrock? You know what? I'm not leaving. And I didn't have any reason to leave. That's not what I'm what I'm saying. It what I'm saying is that it changes. It fundamentally changes a relationship with another person. Because then what happens is whatever problem you have, you are stuck with for the rest of your time together. If you don't enter in and fight that little dragon, which will continue to grow and grow and grow. And you don't want to fight it. You don't want to open up that door because what happens is then, well, they might, you know, what if I say something and they're upset and I've now they leave. So now I'm not going to say anything. Is that better or is that worse? It's better right now. But it's much, much worse in the long run. And when you don't have that two people who are saying, I'm in relationship with you, no matter what, then you have no incentive to enter into that difficult conversation so that you can get through that tunnel, get to the other side and come to a place where, you know what, we went through this difficult thing. But now we don't have to deal with it anymore. Because now we have figured out maybe what the root cause was, maybe the one thing that you can do or that I can do that makes it a little better or makes it acceptable that we never dealt with, we never actually got to, oh, that's all you want me to do? Okay, you know what, I can do that. But you wouldn't have that conversation if you didn't have this kind of relationship with something. And that's what I'm offering up here is that, I don't know, I just, I like that idea. And that was an area in my own life where I agree it's incredibly difficult and you cannot have that relationship with a thousand people. I believe. Because it is so, you know what, you can say something that's 180 degrees from me. And yet, I still am hanging on. And so there, that's a comment. Thanks, Scott. I'm sort of going to take the layup and extend what you just said to online spaces and politics in larger groups. In part, one of the problems with online spaces is that it's so easy to leave. Another problem is identity and a pseudonymony and all that kind of stuff, but it's just so easy to leave that doing damage and just moving on is like whatever. And there isn't that ability to couple people into I'm not leaving. And then we were also a very mobile, very transient modern society. And that transience has hurt us a lot in the sense of. Don't like what your community is up to just just leave instead of stay and try to fix it and try to talk it through and get no people. And then a bunch of other things, including air conditioning and television drove us inside. So we're not out on the porch talking and watching the kids. There's a whole series of forces that that are kind of crazily changing society as we just kind of exist through it that break us away from the kind of commitment or promise that you just described, which is a lovely thing that I think maybe many of us miss. Thanks. Thanks for that offer, Scott. Judy Carl Michael. Well, the conversation always shifts so much in the time between when I raised my hand. But what I wanted to offer was some experiences that that I've observed in terms of communication processes that work in groups in addition to one on one. But if someone in a group voices a viewpoint that's quite different, there are questions that are helpful and comments that are less helpful. And so I find that if you can say help me understand where you're coming from on this. Have you considered this other position rather than stating the opposition point? Because there's an energy transfer that occurs in the kind of exchanges that we're talking about. And physicists have recently been able to measure it, call it interpersonal energy transfer. But the actual dynamics of the presence that we each bring into the encounter influences the people in the encounter, particularly in a physical sense. But I believe that a lot of it is much more complex than that because I can watch the tone shift in our group conversations, which are not physically connected. And it's the same type of influence that occurs. And so I think it's back to the old adage, look first to understand. But I think if you trust the other person enough or display an intention to trust by asking for more information about their perspective, they're much more likely to then hear you say, well, I'm looking at it from a different way. But I think this different thing, and perhaps they'll reciprocate in the listening. And I think that's easier to do one on one or one on five or 20 than it is thousands and thousands of people. But somehow, my hope is that somehow we can engage much more of humanity in thoughtful reflection and communication. Because without that, it's pretty hopeless. There's just not a lot that individuals can do even charismatic leaders. They often just polarize the audiences instead of seeking shared understanding that lets groups of people move forward. And what I really like about OGM is that it is such a capable and informed inquisitive group of people who are really interested in pulling apart the questions and trying to understand the different perspectives. So if it could somehow be replicated without unzipping itself or if we could clone it into a lot of other settings, I think it would be a good thing. Thank you, Judy. And we could do some work on being more accepting of people with different opinions from ours, which I think was illustrated nicely in last week's call. And which we haven't gone back into very well in this call even though I love what we've been talking about on this call. So I'm just sort of sitting with that for a little bit. Carl, Michael, Patty. Jerry, I'll carry that a little further. I'll share an experience I had recently that's gotten me really curious about this topic. I went home, my husband and I went home to visit my family in Illinois for a week. We just came back. My family saying with just for context and hopefully without judgment, you know, they're fairly conservative, you know, pretty strong opinions, right? Leaning Fox News, watching cohort, right? And I'm kind of an oddball in my family. And it was really interesting to observe what happened when I was trying to connect with family members. It was as if I would share something and it could feel or sense that they were, they would kind of pull in something from their own experience that didn't totally feel like it related or it felt like there's almost like a physical gap between us where my framework was here. Their framework was here and we were trying to meet in the middle, right? And it just, it just wasn't happening. And my husband had the same experience and became home. We were like, did you notice this thing? He was like, yeah, that was really weird. And I've been curious about this since then. Like how do I meet someone in the middle and bridge this gap? You know, when our lenses, our frameworks, our way of understanding how the world works, our reality are so, so different. And it was really strange and interesting to observe that playing out when both parties were genuinely trying to connect, but it just felt so clunky and kind of awkward and kind of forced and little startling. Very interesting. And I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks about that. And if anyone else has experienced that. Thanks, Patty. I think that's fascinating. And I'm wondering if anybody has resources or questions if you can put it in the chat or jump into the queue because that's a, what you're saying is a super common occurrence and a really important thing for us to figure out. And the only answer I have off the cup is the tell me more question, which is like, you know, I hear what you're saying. I'm curious. Tell me more is like one of the best opening questions you can ask anybody. It's non-judgmental. It elicits more information. And maybe you can get to the place where what you said crashed against their worldview because it feels like what happened on their side was, man, I just heard something that sounds like cuneiform writing. And I'm unclear what it is. So I'll just offer this back. And we don't often take the time to sort of slow down and figure out where there was a mesh or a misfit. So anybody else jump in the queue? Carl, Michael, Pete. Okay. Yeah. I posted a link. There was this three practice circles phenomenon that really there was this couple of people they were in the Pacific Northwest area. And then just around time, COVID happened, they started going online and so this three practice circle. And it's it's actually a fairly simple format. Somebody volunteers to talk for two minutes. People can ask a follow up question beginning like, you know, Jerry, I'd be curious to know. And then people have one minute to respond. A person has one clarifying question and then it moves on to either other clarifying questions or a new volunteer. But they usually keep it strictly to an hour. And I posted a link. They have public ones going on. I mean, they they get into all kinds of issues and stuff. And they're open and stuff. And there's also recording and things so you can kind of really check out the site. One of the people is actually getting their PhD and we we're really adopting it at fielding. We've got a they've actually paid for several people in the name of equity. They are actually paying for some people to to become referees. And we're using it internally where some of our DEI conversations and stuff. And also decolonization of the curriculum. That's that's a huge topic. Thank you. That whole new can of worms. We should have some some calls about Michael Pete Doug. Yeah, I'm kind of fascinated by some of the connective threads here. I was thinking earlier and posted something in the chat about the uncertainty and uncomfortability of looking for truth in the realm of science and the temptation to go to people who are certain and clear about what they believe. And then off of what has has come up in Scott talking about not leaving and and Judy and Patty. This thinking about not leaving including don't don't retreat. Don't don't leave to go to certainty. Stay with me, us in exploration and uncertainty. You know, let's let's explore this together. Let's accept that. You know, you're different than me. But we're not leaving. We're here together. That that that certainty is leaving. Certainty that I am wrong. Certainty that others are wrong is is a form of leaving. You know, and and we're all in this together. We're, you know, all in this marriage together, this family together, this community together. Nation, planet and well, except maybe for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They're, you know, off for other planets, but for the rest of us. We're stuck on this rock for a while. Let's stay together in uncertainty and not not leave. Love that, Michael. Thank you. Pete and Doug. Thanks, Michael. That was that was great and similar to kind of what I wanted to say. And how do you thank you for that story? I have another story and I it may or may not may or may not be helpful. I don't know. I can tell the story. Sadly, my father, my 86 year-old father died a couple months ago and that precipitated my family getting together. I've got two siblings, brother and a sister. My sister lives in northern Nevada, where I grew up and where my dad was. My brother flew in from New York. My sister and my cousins in Nevada are kind of like all the way red. And my brother is kind of purple and I'm all the way blue coastal, you know. So it's it's a little bit like flying into a foreign country or something like that where everything is upside down. And so I wore a mask all the time when I was inside with with folks. I have a really dorky looking medical looking mask. It's this blue elastomeric monstrosity, which makes me look like a punk Darth Vader or something like that. Thinking and getting a worse one, by the way. But anyway, it's very it stands out. You know, Pete is Pete just came from, you know, some science science medical thing and he's got this big breathing mask on. I wear it because it's super comfortable and I can wear it forever and it doesn't fog up my glasses. So. But it's it's interruptives to people. So it was it was really interesting being with my family. That and I kind of like really quickly. Since Patty, you told your story, I kind of quickly went through the the stuff that we told each other to stay together during this difficult time and do stuff together, even though we have this like complete schism in the way that we believe in reality. So one of them, one of the core ones, thank you, Scott, is I'm not leaving. So my sister and I are, you know, and my brother and I and all three of us together. We're not leaving each other and especially, you know, in dealing with the aftermath of my father dying, you know, it's like we're going to stick together and do this thing. We're not going to leave. So we're not leaving. Okay, Pete, it's kind of weird that you're wearing a mask, but okay, you know, so so going to the funeral director and sitting in the somber, you know, her somber office and she's trying to be professional and stuff like that and everyone's in tears and stuff. I've got this like really interruptive mask on and the the funeral director is probably one of the people who thinks you're nuts for wearing a mask. My sister is sitting next to me, not batting an eye. I never felt from her like I'm embarrassed to be with you. She was like, this is my brother, you know, he's doing him, you know, live with it, deal with it. So I so appreciated that. So I'm not leaving. You do you. Life is hard and we're all trying to get through it and we deal with unknowns and uncertainties in different ways. And this is the way I look at my sister too, right? It's like, dude, I don't know why you believe the shit that you do. But I know that you're trying your best to get through life and life is hard and it's complicated. And you deal with your family, you know, her her her husband and her kids and her in-laws. And, you know, it's a whole thing, her church, everything like that. It's a whole system in society that she navigates in and she's just trying to do her best. You know, I'm trying to do my best. And so we make these weird decisions like she's not going to wear a mask and I'm going to wear a mask all the time. And, you know, we forgive each other. Maybe that's the wrong word. We accept each other, you know, even though we're different. Another thing that was really precious to me, I've got cousins there who I grew up with and we have a lot of fun together. I barely ever see them, but it was a great excuse to get together and have a beautiful dinner with some of them out on my aunt's backyard. We do this thing, which I think is remarkable where we joke across the aisle is the way I think of it. We come from these different cultures. They live in a culture where guns are kind of a normal thing. I live in an anti-gun culture, which is kind of weird in itself. They believe in, you know, I've got a cousin who swears that the King James Bible is the one true truth in the world. And I'm like, dude, why the King James version, you know, it's like if you're going to pick a Bible, why that one? But whatever, he's like goes into deep detail and we can sit next to each other and talk about, you know, here's how I see reality and he talks about, here's how I see reality. And they're all kind of like internally consistent and they make sense, you know, internally at least. It's completely separate from, you know, so the thing I really love is that we, I guess we've agreed to agree to disagree in lots of places, you know, whether the KGV is the right thing or not, or even a Bible or not, or a mask, a funky looking mask or not, we've agreed to disagree about those things. And really quickly, I was really surprised like the difference falls away. So I, you know, here I am, I'm self-conscious with my mouse the whole time I was in Northwestern Nevada. Going to stores and stuff, it was hard, you know, because I kind of look at everybody looking at me and every once in a while you get somebody who looks around like, why is he wearing that thing, you know? And but, but with my family, like after, you know, the first awkward half an hour or something like that, it all melted away and they never saw me as a person wearing this funky blue mask. It was just like, oh, we're, it's just like we're kids again and we just love each other and we're going to be together. We're not going to leave, we're going to let each other be different when we need, when we feel like we need to be different and understand that that difference isn't, you know, it's not a marker that we're different people, it's a marker that we've had different paths through life and that those paths were challenging and you end up in different places but we can still be together for the bulk of it, the important part of it. Thanks. Thank you, Pete. Thanks, Pete. That's Doug. Yeah, I, you know, the game where you put your hand up and the person across from you puts their hand up and you do this and generally there'll be a recognition response like it's fun and when you take your hand away there's nothing to press against and in my arc I was in a group and everybody was competing with their offerings proprietary, ego locked and related and I realized like we don't need another idea and I let go of my attachments, my core contributions and the further along I got after attachments became beliefs and so letting go of my attachment to beliefs, worldviews, rights, wrongs, polar, you know, decision points and I let go of all of that and these days I come to most every party empty like I'm not staked or attached to anything. My purpose is my purpose and usually it's in service too I'm an addict to connection and to serving to like helping whatever that may look like for whoever it is that I'm seeing across from in whatever context and from that place all there is is curiosity and connecting and I don't really create, feed, contribute to or engage in interactions where it polarizes like it just doesn't happen because it takes both hands pressing against each other to do that and if I'm not doing that it sort of like takes that it takes that manifesting of reality off the table and so for me it's in the living of that so it's a doing not a not a thing, not a noun and all sorts of like it's there's always something new to learn there's always like new discoveries so I'm completing that Thanks Doug Patty Yeah, thanks Doug something something you you mentioned Spark something that's been coming up for me the last few days I've been getting curious around we use the word beliefs right and we have a different set of beliefs and I've been I just feel like the word beliefs to me the way it feels and I think about that language that feels kind of like light and you know movable and that's just not how I experience beliefs in my own lens and how I experience that from others and I feel like what I've been getting curious about is how how many of us conflate beliefs with like rules like this belief that I have kind of ends up whether I know it or not becoming this like rule for for my existence or how how I am how I interact with others and it's been playing around with that and that's came up for you recently so I'm curious to hear what others might think about that I love that framing Patty do you mean for example someone raised in a strict religious household is raised absorbing a set of rules about what that religion believes and does whether it's keeping kosher or commandments or whatnot and that they then absorb those rules as given as if they were their beliefs and is that am I being way too simplistic about this good question think about for a second off the cuff to me that feels like a tricky example because I do think that that correlation likely exists often and that meant that directly in that manner in that context religion rules because I you know I was raised Catholic and I was raised as these beliefs this doctrine was these hard rules and if I break the rules that's where I go right and so I think that's a really good example but and even outside of the context of a religion someone helpful what's what's a common belief helping anyone popcorn well I would offer that that a belief is for me my best understanding to date it's not rigid but it's purposeful it's not easily dissuaded because it's been accumulated over my 70 plus years but that doesn't mean it might not be wrong I don't know though whether that's how other people interpret the word belief because I have friends for whom I believe belief is more rigid and impermeable and it's like a signpost by which they measure their actions and the actions of others and so this is the sort of thing where I'd loved each encounter with a new person to say let's talk about who we are and how we like to communicate and so forth but that would seem so intrusive to a person you first met that it ends up that you just have to sort of observe and deduce and share and see how the sharing is or is not reciprocated and judge for yourself the flexibility of the person's willingness to hear your viewpoint even though it differs from theirs I mean there's so many dimensions to this that it's really complicated and I think attempts to simplify it undermine the importance of getting it right and somehow that's what I love about this group we're willing to explore endlessly the complexity of something rather than trying to force a quick conclusion but I don't encounter that a lot in other groups of people and so I take it upon myself I guess to subtly attempt to influence that mode of communication in the group in a thoughtful way and sometimes it works and sometimes I just get rebutted vigorously but then interestingly often someone else comes in to rebut the rebutter and so these communication dynamics are fascinating if I were living another life I might not be a hard scientist I might be an anthropologist or a social scientist or something because I'm fascinated by the impermanence of all of it those squishy social sciences I know they should barely be called sciences at all and there's the reproducibility crisis all that stuff but it's so important I just want to riff on Doug's putting the hand when you meet hands exercise there's a tai chi exercise called push hands where you're sort of one person puts an arm out and the other person goes pushes to and fro I think Doug knows a lot more about push hands than I do and has done a lot more of it who just jumped in the queue sorry Doug Carmichael I mean but in push hands it's all about receiving and maintaining sort of even pressure back and forth as the flow goes and then I'm going to throw in another kind of maybe metaphor which is sometimes when somebody's pushing against you pushing hard the best answer is to let them in and and to go with go with what they're saying and accept it as as whatever it is and then come back sometimes you have to let sometimes instead of overcoming the pushing by pushing harder you have to let go and let in and I think we don't often do that we're very often just trying to either block or push back and that I don't know how to be articulate about about what that means in dynamics but I found that sometimes that really dissolves dissolves dilemmas when you let someone's assumption or assertion in Doug is your hand up from before or did you want to jump back in the queue Doug B Doug Carmichael you might have the last last word on this call because we're we're at time well just to say my experience is that I used to think of coming to these Thursday mornings is going into something I now think of them as time out from something it's a big shift say more about that well I don't want to ruin what I just said okay I'm going to leave it big that's good that's cool and and that is a lovely lovely note to to end the call on so I thank you all this has been a treat we'll come back into these into these places if you have suggestions for how to head back in and in particular how to turn more turn better the soil that grace opened up for us last week please say so and we'll go there because this is the important stuff that we have the possibility of doing something about it's everyone thank you have a great day thank you you too