 know, I'm all dressed up. There we go. Except for your chin. Except for my chin. It's got a little fuzz on it. So I'm on a bus in Kalina, Lithuania. We just finished a day of conference where I was the first speaker and we're heading off to dinner right now. So I figured I would see who would might be interested in hosting again. Grace, I didn't want to lean on you again, but if you'd like to or Jill or whoever. And then I will bounce and head back to the folks here. But it's nice to see people. And I'll be home tomorrow night late. This is the last day of my trip. Travel safely. I can't host. I'm just sort of lurking here today. Grace, are you okay hosting? I'm driving so I can't host today. I can't host if no one else. Sounds great, class. I will make you the Vuber super duper host. I know. Here we go. Make host. Oh, how about that? That worked so easily. I'm on the phone. I've never used. I've never used Zoom on my phone. Thank you. It's actually working pretty well. That's what I did a couple of times. And I'm on the bus's Wi-Fi. So this is like an executive bus and I'm like, Ooh, free Wi-Fi connect. Because otherwise I'd be on Google Fi using up five minutes. Let's try the Wi-Fi. And you guys sound perfectly clear from the set, which is fun. It's pretty cool. It's got you can just swipe and go into like safe mode. Oh, interesting. Yeah, you know, in Europe, we're civilized. Even the regular people's bus has Wi-Fi. Civilized. It's a civil right, right? There it is that. It's got to be necessary. I think today is a topic call, but it doesn't need to be. But if you all want to talk about what topics would be like interesting to go for, that'd be fine. Because I think last week, Grace was just a check-in call, right? I think so. Yeah, it was a beautiful park we're driving past. Does anyone have a suggestion for a topic? Or you could pick one of your current puzzles. Klaus, I mean, you've got lots of issues you've been putting on the list. Grace, you're, I don't know how much progress you've made in your open calls if you want to talk about that kind of work. So whatever you guys want. I've got a weird one. I've got a very weird one. This is inspired by Ken Homer's email sharing the Yoda lip-syncing. That's damn Yoda video. So my question is clearly there are trillions of extra hours that people have to devote to creative things like that. The cognitive surplus. Is there any way we can just get one or two percent of it going in a direction that would change the world? I totally agree. Now you're making me want to stay on the call. It's a great question because partly what I'm saying is, you know, everybody in the world doesn't contribute to Wikipedia, but almost everybody uses Wikipedia. It doesn't take a lot of people to build a huge shared asset. So how do we build a shared memory? Let's get a couple of us to contribute to the shared memory and rather rinse repeat. Yep. I'd also like to have two minutes on what your conference in Bucharest left you with. What would it take? And also whether you've gone across the city to go to the International Telecommunications Union meeting. There's three thousand telecom walks who meet every four years to determine what the UN will do to help or hinder the development of the telecommunications infrastructure. They really need to hear from you, Jerry. So Mike Nelson has my proxy. I agree with everything he's saying. Let's do whatever he says. But first, Jerry, if you could tell us about the conference in Bucharest, the unfinished conference. So it was my third year doing something with unfinished. They found me two years ago and invited me to do a keynote. So I recorded the keynote in Portland in some videographers garage. And then they showed it as one of the keynote speeches during the 2020 unfinished. But I got to know them a little bit online. They were just delightful. And it's a shoestring operation that makes us a whole lot of art in music, painting, tactile experiences, somatic stuff. I mean, it's really, really cool. Along with more conventional talks and other formats. And then last year, I did some story threading. And then this year, they're like, hey, we're going back to in person. And they move venues because this used to be held in a large art museum, which they raced around in and took over in a cool way. But they found a university of Bucharest property that had a big house and some grounds and a greenhouse in the back and then another little cabin. And they did the most phenomenal job repurposing it. They had to clean up the little forest. They broke up some concrete sidewalks and made like gravel paths out of them. They put globes and fire pits with chairs out in the middle of the forest. And then we had a whole bunch of events. And I did a keynote talk that I think went really, really well. And my team was basically, how did I build? So the thing I said in 2020, how did I get that thesis? And I got that thesis from paying attention to my contrarians, my outsiders. So I told that story and it worked really, really well. So I'm looking forward to that talk being available on YouTube. And then I met like the first person I meet is like this Brazilian singer, songwriter, guitarist who starts running, running everybody around the campus to do an opening tour. Then I made two young Brazilians who are brother and sister. Phenomenal dancer singers wielding TikTok and Instagram. Like I've never seen anybody do. Like he was just scrolling through his Instas. I'm like, wait, you took all those? They're incredible. And he has a stutter. He's a rapper. And when he's singing, he's on. It's insane. It's incredible. And like when you speak with him, he's this beautiful, genuine guy. He's got a pretty heavy stutter. So those are the first couple of people I met. And then other sorts of folks came in and the guy who does the modern love column for the New York Times, every day would host some people reading some of his favorite modern love columns. There were exercises, there were trends of stuff. So it's a special conference. I really, I was really happy to be there. And is it related to the unfinished live conference that's held in New York City? So Mika Sifri wrote a piece about, on my advice, he wrote a piece about how unfinished live is trying basically to steal the brand. And Christian, the founder of Unfinished Romania, tried to interact with them, maybe a licensing of the name or something like that. And they were assholes. So I don't really like Unfinished Live. It's on my on my show list. Thanks. Yeah. And if you Google Unfinished Live Mika Sifri, you'll find the article or I can post it when I'm not on a bus moving around downtown Canas. Any spillover from the Ukrainian conflict into the discussions? So it's funny in Romania, which is right next door. There were signs of support on the street, but it really didn't make it into the conference very much, although some people were like really supporting. Here, the support for Ukraine is much more visible on the streets, just everywhere. And then I sat down next to a woman yesterday on the bus and I said, oh, where's home for you? And she had a kind of Russian name. She says Kiev. And I almost started to cry and we had a really lovely conversation. And so the last slide of my deck for here was basically a homage to Ukraine and, you know, Slava Ukraine kind of posters that I saw at the museum I visited on Tuesday. You just really feel it here because the Baltics have this like, hey, we are, you know, we are a stone's throw from Russia and bad things could happen here. So yeah. Any other questions for Jerry? Anybody? Yeah, I'm gonna have to bounce because we're about to get off the bus. Is your talk this week also going to be webcast? So they did not webcast. I did my talk this morning and it was not recorded or webcast, but I like it a lot. And I think what I'm going to do is expand on it and then re-record it myself and just post it. What I do in the rear case where the conference won't record is I wear a wire. Yeah, I was thinking of recording. I'm just using my phone in front of me and recording it. And I was like, no, I won't do that. But I better bounce. I'm going to turn over the contact to Klaus. It's really nice to see you guys. Thanks, Jerry. Thanks everybody. Getting us going. This is awesome. Thank you. Well, so any suggestions for a topic? One of the topics I've been thinking about a lot, which I think a little bit connects to what Mike was saying was what would the attributes of a better social media platform look like? I was talking to a lot of people doing that and I was saying if I were creating a group like this community and I wanted a better platform, what would be some of the things? One of the things might be if somebody posts something a little bit nasty, it gives them time to regret. Are you sure maybe you want to have your coffee a little bit before you post that thing? Something like that. What would be the attributes of a better social network? And I think it does connect to the topic of how do we get everybody to use a little bit of this for time to make the world a better place? I feel like there's a connection there. Okay. I think there's totally a connection. The reason I only join about half of these calls is because at 11 o'clock on Thursday, every other Thursday, I have a Net For Neighbors call and it's a little bit broader than your question, but most of it is about how do you design the internet and particularly social media so that I can organize the people in my neighborhood to do something in the real world? It seems to be very hard to do that. I can organize 15 people to play a video game in 17 countries, but just reaching out to the 400 people that live within 500 meters of me and cleaning up the park on Saturday morning, it's very hard to do that. And part of it is because there's no trust, part of it is because different demographics are on different things, and part of it is because there are people that just don't want to use these tools at all. So I love your question. I love your question. And I wish the people at Facebook and Twitter were paying more attention to that question of how do you build community? How do you get people to come back to the platform if they've left or how do you build trust? I mean, all that. Yeah, that's a good one because I'm actually also in that same parcel trying to connect in my local community and get people engaged in it. Yeah, it's a challenge. Why don't we pick that up and go around? Do you want to start? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. And spent two hours this morning in a working session with my partner in Argentina talking about creating a persistent, open to synchronicity cafe or salon. And the holy grail for me that I've been trying to arrive at and achieve with another human being in a Zoom container is a space where I don't know how many of you are familiar with the chakra system. But that the sort of ticket for entry is that you're coming in with a sort of consciousness awareness of the throat chakra, which is the first of the three intangible higher chakras that have to do with transcendence of I, transcendence of ego, transcendence of self, because so much of social platform engagements never seem to be able to get out of either competitive show and tell or sort of falling into woo-woo without it being possible to combine that with doing, with creating, generating new. So it's sort of like people can do one or the other, but they can't seem to do an integrated version of both. So that's the living piece for me, like Heller Highwater and maybe I won't make it before I'm gone, but that I'm like looking to experience with others. So that's the piece of the puzzle in this medium that lives for me. Okay, I'll call you after your hand up, but then you're up next in any ways. You want to go ahead? Yeah, this is at the heart of all the things I've been working at too. It's interesting, I was saying just as I got on to with Jerry that there's like all this convergence around people with disabilities participate in the virtual world type of thing. I mean, that might be the greatest challenge we've had technologically, technology-wise, as far as like the people side of things. So yeah, there's a future of text group, and I'd actually written a paper last year for that kind of said that it's a text-based interface that's required for people with disabilities to participate in real time and things. So I'm going to update that paper as prior one of the projects, but yeah, it gets to, yeah, and then well Howard Reingold kind of one of the ones who kind of coined virtual world and virtual community and stuff, and he talked about Doug Engelbart's vision as being intelligence augmentation instead of artificial intelligence and Ben Snyderman wrote a book that got published back in February on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and he frames it as a second Copernican Revolution. We need the algorithms need to be revolving around people rather than with stuff. So those are two of my, those are kind of two of my sources and stuff, but it gets to this whole thing too. I mean the technology is really, I mean the communications technology, I mean with what we've had within the past couple decades. I mean everybody in the world can be talking to anybody else in the world in real time and stuff through technologies like we're using right now and stuff and that enables so much stuff and we've had in the last 100 years we probably had like four epochal shifts in communication technologies. So it's just a peak that's such a people. I mean that's what the authoritarians are able to take. I mean it's like it's easy to have propaganda about how great the world was when you were a child and stuff but trying to convince people that we can, that we can really create a better world is tough. So it's kind of, I'll leave it there for now. Carl, there are two aspects here really. One is the media platform and which has opened up incredible opportunities to communicate across the time and space. I mean in vast spectrums but then there's also what you're going to talk about and so the structure of the conversation, the topic of the conversation, how do you see that? Yeah, that's another one of Dunning-Eberg's concepts is about co-evolving human and tool systems. So the technology, the tool systems we've been involving amazingly were devolved. Our human systems seem to be devolved right now but it's, yeah, it's how do you, a big key for me is facilitation methods too. So how do you engage people? So there's like this whole like enabling environment that we need and then the, then these facilitation methods can leverage that to really get people communicating more effectively and stuff. Okay, thank you. I'm just having a conversation with Judith who doesn't have, doesn't have sound. I think Gil, could you go next please? Sure. Mike's got his hand up. Maybe that's a direct comment. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see that. Yeah, Mike, go ahead. It's not a direct comment but it is about this problem of the bad squeezing out the good. And I've just seen so many discussion lists degenerate because one or two people decide they have an opinion and if everybody doesn't share it, they're going to keep stating their opinion. And I think Reddit has been amazing in terms of, you know, pushing up the good and pushing down the bad. But we don't have that for most of the platforms we use online and clearly the Facebook algorithm is almost exactly the opposite. If someone says something disgusting, revolting, provocative, quote, provocative, that gets pumped up even if it wastes everyone's time. Well, that's by design. That's their intention. Exactly. But I don't know that the non-profit social platforms have found a better algorithm that or they found a better algorithm but they haven't found the best algorithm. So that's the challenge for some of these other people out there. Well, the uploading, downloading is an interesting thing. The problem is just the algorithm platform would have a platform against me for scale. So I want to come back from Mike's your suggestion about how do we do something with the cognitive surplus? I personally don't feel a lot of cognitive surplus. You mentioned Reddit and I remember like all the platforms I'm supposed to be tracking that I don't track. So there's that. But the notion is intriguing. And I really miss Ken Homer in this conversation. The reason that we come here in a moment, as I started thinking what you're suggesting, I think of sort of three layers immediately. One is setting, which is using cognitive surplus of computing power, but that's not a constraint anymore. So that's not the issue. The second is the kind of mobilization strategies, you know, both direct and network generating action, getting people to vote or getting neighbors to do something like you're talking about. And, you know, you'd have platforms like we don't have time out of Europe, which is not well known in the United States, where it's got millions of people who are climate action. And the third layer is what we're doing here, which is human beings having conversations that move something forward in the world. And that's what intrigues me. And it's why I want Ken in conversation. It's kind of a it's a wizard of that sort of thing. You know, it's, it's not like we need cognitive surplus to figure out what to do. We need cognitive surplus to get us engaged with each other, you know, living in the world differently, interpreting the world differently, having different moods about the shit show that's around us, and generating effective local and national international actions. That's sort of like my that's what's immediately about what you're saying. It's obviously kind of superficial. But the, the, the, the provocation that you're offering of what might happen if 1% of the trillions of apps going into bullshit media stuff got shifted into something else. And I'm content to start with nothing more specific than that and just go wild with that both in this group. And that might be a place to start out in the world is like, you know, take your provocation and put it out wide and have some kind of structure to harvest whatever it generates. And just let that lose as a wild virus in the world like what might happen if you know, if each of you took two minutes off from TikTok or MSNBC or whatever your drug and choice is. And that's not very much, but what if like, you know, five million of us did that what might be possible. My friend David Kirshan who runs the Empowerment Project out of where out of Woodstock, New York has just done the cool block program around around the country, getting neighbors to work together around environmental and sustainability improvement. It's like the old barnways and it's like, let's all of us work on water heaters this month. All of us work on guards next month. It's a very cool program. And David's great line is that, you know, people say, whatever I do feels like a drop in the bucket. And we all know that. And it says, but what if I could show you the bucket? And what if you could see all the little drops starting to fill something up. And that's what I, that's how I listen, Mike, to what you're saying. I love it. And let's let's do something. I should get him to come to my call for, you know, the session or brainstorming. Send me a note and I'll make the introduction. Thank you very much. Of course. That's it for me. Spouse can't hear you. You're muted. That's a whole key mistake. It's a firing offense for folks. Grace, you got your hand up. Grace, can you hear me? Yeah, I just have, I got one of those glass covers for my phone and now I have to press really hard when I want to unmute. So yeah, so it's interesting because I don't think two minutes is gonna is gonna kind of cut it. But I love what you were saying about the bucket. And I think that it's like the question is really interesting, right? Like, what, you know, what if we could get people to, you know, take some time out and actually do something positive and get them to feel that they had done something positive because maybe two minutes is enough to get you to do four minutes next week. You know, maybe that's, that's good enough for now. Hold on. Let's stop. Anyway, so that's a great start. And I think one of the things that I keep thinking about whenever I think about this question like what would better mean is like is exactly that. What, what do I mean by the purpose? And I think maybe there's no one size fits all. So one thing might be, okay, how do we design social media that gets people to at least speak to someone in person once a week, right? Go to an event and meet somebody because there's a need that we have that this kind of, when we talk about Zoom fatigue, what we're talking about is it feels weird to be in these relationships online without actually talking to somebody. And the loneliness kind of endemic loneliness that we have. So one purpose might be let's, yeah, meet up without meet up, right? And another purpose might be one of the things that I think so much about in groups and in communities is in, in, in a business it's called churn, right? What happens when somebody leaves? And how many times have you either left a group or somebody in your group is left and nobody said anything? But your cable company knows when you're about to leave. Your cable company has all kinds of statistics and about when they start to see certain usage patterns, they call you up and offer you a deal because they know you're going to leave. They've even anticipated that you're leaving based on your usage patterns and other usage patterns. And that would be easy in a social network. If you weren't a group like this and people stopped coming to the meeting, well, that's obvious. Or if somebody used to post a lot and they post less or whatever, there might be even certain posts that you know, if certain words are used, that person who got spoken to that way might leave. And how could you, how could you create more groups that stay together longer or care about people when they leave? That's one of the things that I think a lot about because when I think about a part of it, because I'm in the, it feels intrusive. Yeah, well, social media is intrusive. But it's not just intrusive. I mean, when you're in a group and you say I'm on a quit or I'm upset and nobody does anything about it, it feels like shit. And when you leave and nobody calls you, it feels like shit. And that's how I would say, I don't even want to say what percentage, but it's something like very close to 100% of the groups that I belong to are. If you leave, nobody says anything. And I work in the crypto world where a fork is like, well, if you don't like it, fork it or rage quit. And I think that's a really, when we're talking about social cohesion, I think that's an extremely, maybe you don't want to anticipate it. Maybe that is intrusive. But I do think good social media is in some way, any AI you're talking about is in some way intrusive. Show me the things that are happening near me or the things that I might be able to have impact on or the things where I'm an expert on them and I could contribute. All of that has to be by definition in order to be useful in some ways. It has to be a little bit intrusive or maybe very intrusive. Just knowing what my favorite movies and music are. Sometimes you go to somebody's house and the first thing you're doing is looking at their bookshelf to see what's intrusive. So anyway, but I think that there is, so I think it's really about that. So I think about these things as in how to get people more, like what are you measuring in terms of more related, more cohesion, longer relationships, more meaningful relationships, physical relationships, like that's kind of what I'm thinking about because we're so lonely. The UK now has a junior minister for loneliness, which I think is just brilliant and badly needed. I don't know if they've accomplished anything, but it's certainly a topic we need to need to explore. Your idea about keeping people together reminds me of the Cohesion Committee that we established here at Carnegie about five months ago. We're bringing people back into the office and trying to give them a reason to come to the office. A lot of us are knowledge workers and we often work away on our papers, don't always reach out and talk to people. I'm an extrovert, so I can't imagine not talking to people constantly. But in order to create more cohesion, we've been trying to do things that would help. And I'm sort of in charge of using LinkedIn as a platform to build little groups that Carnegie people could subscribe to and maybe there's a sports group and maybe there's a culture group and maybe there's a research methods group. But I haven't found a lot of good examples. And again, it comes back to the point someone made earlier. I'm supposed to be following 50 different conversations every day. And how in the hell do I do that? But the Cohesion is sorely lacking. And even in our neighborhood, just to share a personal story, the couple who moved in four and a half years ago in our townhouse complex is moving out. They sent an email saying, hey, we bought a house. And I kind of counted up how many times we actually got together with them in four and a half years. And it was probably six times. And they've been busy, they've had a child. But it's just it's so easy not to reach out and to just say, well, if they have time, they'll reach out to me. It doesn't work if they're both sides are saying the same thing to themselves. And we all are over committed. But it just sometimes we just have to somehow welcome the community into our lives and see who returns the email. You know, I wonder what all these associations play who have before internet traditionally filled the community sense. I mean, the League of Women Voters comes to mind, but there is I mean, dozens of special interest groups know that perpetuate themselves somehow. A lot of them aren't perpetuating themselves. A lot of them are collapsing. A lot of bowling leagues to Elks clubs to the veterans groups will carry on forever. But there's a whole lot of these communities that have just faded away. Yeah. And COVID certainly threw a curveball into all this. Yeah. Stacey, you're next. I don't even know where to start. I've often said I've often wondered what about if we look to solve for loneliness? How would all the other problems be solved? Because I really think that's that's the starting point. I used to I used to serve on the board of the temple and I was on the welcoming committee. And that was really the turnaround of where we had a new rabbi. And that's where our temple really started to be where people would say we became a family. You know, the idea of trust was mentioned before. And I've had this conversation with a few people. It's very hard to build trust when the truth is most people come into these spaces with an agenda, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they do. And some people don't. I've left a lot of different groups, but I've always left with friends that I keep with me. And those are the ones you trust. And I've met a lot of them in person. And I will hopefully continue to have them. I'll jump that I'll jump to where grace started with the social media, because this week alone, I must have removed three comments within a few seconds of writing them. And one time it was because I was like, oh, do I really need to say that, you know, it was just a matter of self reflection. Is it a rhetorical question? Do I need to say it? Is it going to further, you know, or, or am I saying it for attention? Whatever it was, it was about self reflection, which the majority, you know, I mean, people in this group probably do a lot of that, but your average person on Facebook doesn't. So having a question pop up like, is that rhetorical? Do you want an answer? Are you being sarcastic? Who knows, that might help. The other time I was trying to make a correction, because I could see it going in a bad direction. So I left it up for a few minutes, long enough to the person who posted to see it. And then I took it down. What else did I want to say? Oh, as far as engagement, it seems that we keep trying to think of how we could get other people engaged. But I think if we focused on what can we be doing that we're enjoying, you know, Mike talked about, I didn't see that the video that Ken Homer posted, but whatever was posted, the person that made it was having fun making it. So I mean, obviously we enjoy coming to these calls because we come. None of us are coming here because we're like, oh, it's Thursday, I have to come to this call. If this wasn't enjoyable, we would not be here. So my feeling is, start from what we're enjoying, working together and see what grows out that way, as opposed to projecting out there and figuring out how to get people to do the stuff out there. And with that I'm complete. Stacey, what platforms are you using the most? I see you on Facebook. I only use Facebook. I only use, I just can't. People send me tick to I just can't. Facebook is enough. And I like it better that way because I get a full picture of somebody on Facebook. I see how their friends relate to that. I mean, I don't spend a lot of time on there anymore. But when something does come up, I can see how they relate with people they actually know. I could just, you get to see them in a lot of situations, whereas you don't have that full picture on the other platforms. You just see like a slice. Okay. So no, no, what are the other social media platforms here? Instagram. Instagram and TikTok here. Did you see any changes in Facebook over the last year or so? Any, any difference in the way they, they are structuring themselves? Well, I can tell you for me personally, I don't even get to see friends anymore. I'm just getting group, you know, like suggestions. I'm just getting groups coming to me ads. Get I sometimes I have to go to somebody's page. I'm like, have they been posting? You know, I don't get friends. It's, you know, when I first went on Facebook, it was because, you know, my friends were putting up pictures, you know, parties or, you know, our kids were all being bar mitzvahed. I wanted to see them. It was a way to keep in touch. I don't see that at all. You know, I, yeah, I feel isolated. Ah, Gail, you have your hand up. Yeah. Couple of reactions to what Stacy said. Thank you for that, Stacy. Well, so disclosure, I'm, I'm active on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. I try to do more on LinkedIn professionally. I've tried to control Facebook, which is just a weird day on place. I only friend people who actually know and meet space. That's my particular quirk there. And I've learned painfully to not comment on comments from people that I don't know. So there were a couple of times where friends, friends have said something. I've said something. It's like I wanted to chitchat. So I don't do that anymore. I've looked at Instagram, but I'm not really on it. I've never touched TikTok and Reddit is random and Signal is random. So there's that. You know, it seems that we need different cultural norms. I mean, we have cultural norms about how you behave when you meet somebody at the market or how you behave when you visit them at their home or in your faith community or maybe in your community organizational where that's deteriorating and we see that on the news. We don't have norms for this online stuff. So we're using habits that have evolved in other places to yell at each other here. It's kind of weird. Grace, to your comment about people who come in with an agenda, I hear you and another way to think about that is people who are coming in with cares. I mean, Stacy? I'm Stacy. Yeah. Sorry, Stacy. Yeah, my screen got covered. I didn't see you. There you are. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, what if we think about people who are coming in with cares rather than agendas? How do we engage with them and understand what they care about? There's been a lot of work on the power of deep listening and learning to listen not to what people are saying, but what it is that's behind what they're saying as a way to open a different kind of door. This is another reason why I wish Ken were here. She's all over this stuff. As is Fernando Flores and what's her name? Wheatley and a number of people who have been real, real students and teachers in this realm about how to discover a conversation that's not obviously there and get past the obvious to a point that where people can actually connect. And we're like, you know, Mike, your neighborhood stuff is like that. You know, there's a level at which, you know, it's cleaning up, it's cleaning up the vacant yard a block away that has nothing to do with your politics, religion or anything else. It's like an obvious care, you know, common, common care in the neighborhood. And it's a way to build a connection that maybe opens up into other conversations. So that's it. Doug, can I just respond to that? Because I sense like most people, the word agenda kind of felt icky in some way, like, but I want to speak to that because I think it's important that we, whether you call it a care or an agenda, the point is if you feel that somebody is coming to you because even if it means they like, you know, they like you, there's still a conditionality there. You know, it's still like there's still inside. It's like, well, if I don't say what they like, they're going to think differently about me. And so I think it's important to acknowledge it. So you can use any word you want, but the truth is you really can't build trust that way. And that's what I want to put out there. Jill, you still have your hand up. Did you want to go? Oh, that's just floating up there. I'll take it down. Okay. There is this strange mix between anonymity, you know, no matter how you're on the net and then evolving familiarity and friendship and so on. So because it's just not a physical relationship. Dr, go ahead. Yeah, so so I spent, I've spent like the last six years up until about six months ago, 35 hours a week in Zoom, long before COVID hit. And I related to it as sort of the counterpart to my collaborator in Argentina. He was pursuing the academic PhD track. I was doing the field work. And it was, you know, half of that was focused on gatherings that were topic and agenda blank slate, just coming together to talk, to connect. And the favorite of all of them was actually a guy in in Livening Edge, which was George Poor's teal steak in the ground in the wake of Lelue's book. But this guy just said, you know, I really like meeting people and talking to people. So I'm going to do these regular things every first and third Thursday of the month. And they were called community conversations. And what I loved about them was they were agenda less, they were subject less, they were not in service to purpose or producing or doing anything. It was just in service to meeting and connecting. And I ended up sort of in stewardship of the third Thursday. He took the first Thursday and that became sort of a storyteller place where people would come in and share. And then that would be the launching pad for people to go into breakout rooms and share takes and feelings and reactions and then bring them together in larger sessions where they'd be shared. I ended up with third Thursdays and I would pick a meme, a word, and come up with a couple of questions, one internally, introspectively oriented and one extrovertedly oriented to explore my own particular twist and dimension of how I relate it to that word as a orientation point. And but the underlying intrinsic sort of knowing and value that evolved was a practice that I ended up calling emergent conversations. And it's not in the experience of it, it doesn't feel like there's any constraint doesn't feel like there's any framework doesn't feel like there's any elaborate anything. But there's actually art in that. Creating a safe container, not bringing or imposing anything, not having any quid proposed, not having any prerequisites. But so part of that was in the design of the invitation itself like the announcement of the event, the framing of that. And part of it was in a couple of steps at the front end that the first one had to do with people hearing their own voices, speaking to others in breakout rooms, like just the act of having everybody responding to each other. And usually in groups of no more than two to three people. Brief. But everybody coming out of that was like present. Like, I'd seem really basic, but like it's a deal. It's a big deal for people to actually be in the room. And the fundamentals of connection, for some it's about like being invited and feeling safe to express themselves, to use their voice, their agency. And, and for others, it's being heard, like really truly feeling heard. And then there being the space and the time for people to acknowledge and enhance that by saying, yo, I heard you. They're really fundamental basic human experiential things that are missing in a lot of what's going on out there, but that are achievable in a Zoom context. Like it can get really intimate as in into me see, you know, that kind of intimacy. And it can be very powerful and connections can be very strong. And I have partners and people that around the world I've never physically shared space with that are very, very, very close to and vice versa. So it's in the soft human spaces where the magic and the energy is. And the connection is, and that sort of is, is as Jose Leo loves to invoke, that's proto, not meta. It's like fundamental and before you get to talking about something. And it is amazing if you create the invitation, the space, the safety and just enough of a frame for people to either feel comfortable about how to or feel safe enough to have that opportunity. And that can be stirred into any existing context, corporate or political or whatever. But there are dimensions that most people don't attach a thing to, don't relate to as something necessary. They jump to chapter four and get busy. So I just wanted to offer that. Mike, go ahead. Doug, I guess I wasn't listening quite carefully enough and wasn't taking notes fast enough. What was the name of the person who instigated these communities? And what was the umbrella term? It was a living edge. In liveening edge, George Pore's magazine staked in the ground community for the global teal movement. But the community conversations were not teal-centered. They were just want to get together and meet each other and talk. And Pore was spelled P-O-R with the dots over the O, although I've never invoked the dots. But George is a movement guy. Got it. I love what you had to say. I wish we could make this group the board or at least the board of advisors for some new social media platform that a billionaire other than Elon Musk would fund. But I thought your three-part mission statement there, create a space where people are present, where they feel heard, and where they feel safe. I mean, that's sort of what we need. Why hasn't the market given us this? Thank you very much. I thought those remarks were amazing. Thanks for the clarification. Sure. You're next. Doug, thanks for that. It was beautiful. I love the proto versus meta distinction, very rich. I'm finding in many of the regular groups that I'm in. I was just running a count in my head. I think there's six extended Zoom conversations that I'm in on a regular basis. Some of them weekly, some of them bi-weekly, some an hour, some two hours. Many of them have been moving toward more time in breakout groups. Well, some started with brief breakouts in my living between World's College, Ken's been co-hosting with me the last couple of months. We're doing a kind of mini-world cafe where we do an introductory in plenary. We used to have a lot of discussion in plenary. We've gone to just not doing that, going into breakout with a question, breakout with a second question, and then back for a harvest. And the feedback's been very, people said, this is why I'm here. Finally, this is why I'm here. They've been hanging out for a long time, just to say, I want that. Some of the groups are pretty much all breakout. Some are very little, but it's an attempt to get at that, you know, at the qualities of crimson and being heard, feeling heard and feeling safe. And we've noticed that a number of people are starting to establish direct one-on-one relationships with each other out of that. So I'll just stop for that next. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, you have your hand up and your music. Yeah. So the thing about, we talk a lot about being safe. And I've thought about, and we're talking a little bit about online versus in the real world, right? We want people to do something in the real world. And there's always a risk. There's a couple of examples in my life, but one of the obvious ones is, if I work in these extremely male-dominated industries, how come I can never get a date? And it's like, well, I'm not going to take a risk in those environments when I'm face to face with people or going to an industry event. Like, I'm not going to get drunk at a party in my industry. It's just not going to happen because there's a risk, right? And it's not just about like safe, right? It's about risk. And then another example from my life is, I went, I got a haircut at this place and it wasn't very good. And I'd say with my glasses, I got my glasses at this place and they were like, okay. And then I had to write a review on Google. I was like, I'm not writing a bad review. Those people live two kilometers down the street from me, right? I actually know them in real life. And so there's a risk. And then the third example I want to give is we've all been in business relationships or personal relationships. And if you're perceptive, you've noticed you don't really know that you can trust that person until something really went wrong and you fixed it together, right? Until you have that breakdown and that misunderstanding and you saw each other's ugly, it's like, I'm not sure I can do business with this person or I'm not sure this person is my friend. And so I think being unsafe is a really important part of relationships that we're pretending isn't there. It's like, oh, if everybody felt safe all the time, well, if everybody felt safe all the time, I wouldn't know if they're just like kind of being phony. And it's so much easier to be safe in this environment where it's like, I'm not at risk. Like all of you guys live on the other side of the ocean. My chances of actually meeting you in real life is really low. So I can say whatever the heck out, you know, right? There's I think risk is a really important part of relationship. And it's an important and it's really touched me when Mike was at the beginning talking about getting the neighbors actually physically together. Because as long as you don't think when you go to pick up stuff, right, how do you dress? If we're going to go do a garbage pick? How do I dress for the first time you see me? And how much garbage are you going to expect me to pick up? And what about that gross thing I don't want to touch? And, you know, all of a sudden there's going to be all these behaviors that aren't expected of me. And then Stacy was talking about synagogue. When you go to synagogue, it's this, you know what's going to happen. They're like, and the welcoming committee, if you go to a good synagogue, and the first time you walk in, they offer you an aliyah. And either you know how to do that or you don't. And if you know how to do it, you're like, okay, I know exactly the words I'm going to say. I know exactly the melody. I'm going to say it. I know what's expected of me. And it's and I'm not going to get the first one. So I'm going to get to see the other people go before me. And there's no no, you know, like it's a very small risk at the beginning. And there's certain behaviors of how you sit and how you act. And I feel like in the neighborhoods, there's like a there's all this risk that you don't think, oh, so so I feel like we need to both mitigate that and also create that in a way that works. I don't I don't know how to do that, but it's not all about safe. It's about unsafe to. Thanks, Chris. I switched gene and Mike because Mike, you have to help out in a moment. Do you want to go next, Mike? I just wanted to say thank you for an incredibly fruitful conversation. We for me, it was three hours of wisdom in one hour. And I'm really upset I have to drop off. But I'll hope to see you in the future conversations. All right. And I hope we can capture some of this for the people who weren't here. I'm sure Ken would love to know what what came down. The chat has about five percent of it. Yeah, it's being recorded. Okay, that's right. We'll do the clockwork orange thing and strap 10 to a chair and prop as I would make them watch the record and make them type responses to everything we say. Okay, you want to you want to go next. Thank you, Mike. Do you want to go next, Jane? I've forgotten what the question was. So okay, Grace, you want to restate it. The question is social media platform. How do we interact? How do we engage? How can we create community? Does that summarize it? Sounds like several questions. It was something like, what do we mean by better? And what would that look like when we say we want a better social media platform? Well, even before that, Mike had raised the question of what might we do with the massive cognitive surplus? All these gazillions of people spending all these gazillions of hours on various kinds of social media platforms. So it's more agnostic than the platform and what do we do with that? That's what I heard before. Then the question you mentioned. I would say take a risk and comment whatever you want to. You're safe. With all that said, Jane, what do you make of it? For all of those people who spend all of that time on social media, I expect that there aren't many of them who have a gun to their head forcing them to do that, right? So that apparently they find it meaningful for one reason or another. What is it that encourages you to engage with someone else? What is it that's actually the basis for community? You talked about who knows how many groups there are on LinkedIn these days and they're constantly trying to get other people to join. Though I find that the best thing that I can do is to figure out how to make the exchange I have with someone meaningful to them. Screw what I want. I can find it someplace. I could talk to you once and never talk to you again, so then who gives a shit, right? But if I actually wanted to have more than one conversation with you, then I have to begin to understand what you care about. I hear these people say, well, they don't care. Well, the only people I've ever met that didn't care were dead people. So I have it all figured out. I would answer the question, have I? No, no, you have done great. I mean, I really like your perspective of making the conversation important to the person you're conversing with. I think that's a really key insight here. And that's not an easy thing to do as a moderator or in any form of conversation. Because we obviously, everyone has an agenda and you're biasing your conversation with your agenda, no question. So to switch that perspective and look at the other person instead of your own interest, that's that's a good one. So it's still an agenda, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And then Gil is saying, it's not that hard at all. This is all relative, Gil. Stacey, you have your hand up. Yeah, Jean just showed me something about myself because I think that's why I do engage on Facebook. What I try to do is I respond to people in a way so that they feel heard. I think that's mostly, you know, I mean, I'm there for other reasons too. But usually when I get into a conversation in a private group, it's somebody is sort of asking for advice or something like that. So it's twofold. I'm trying to make them feel heard, but it's serving me because I feel valuable that I'm providing something. So I'm getting something that I feel like I'm serving in some way, but I'm doing something positive because they're feeling heard. So we're both connecting, we're both getting something. So thanks, Jean. I have the words now to say what I'm doing with my time. Jean, you have your hand up. To what extent might we actually be aware of how often we are seeking validation? I like questions better than statements. Well, that was a statement, wasn't it? Anybody want to touch that? Can you restate that again? A statement that ends with a question one. Considering the amount of time that we actually actually are seeking validation and that is our agenda. Are we aware of that? Well, that's why I took, like I said earlier, how three times I removed a comment because I had to ask myself, is that the reason I'm commenting? So I think that if we're introspective, then we're constantly saying, well, why am I doing this? But no, I don't think most people are aware that they're seeking validation. And I think that's why it's so important that we know who we are and what we want. Like I, most of the time, I'm doing the things that I want to do because I really like it. So if I'm trying to make somebody feel heard, it's not because, I mean, I'm enjoying it. I like it too. So it's a win-win. Yeah. Is there actually anything, is there really anything that's truly altruism? Are you shaking your head because you're saying yes or no? I'm saying yes. Absolutely yes. There's not a lot of it in evidence in altruistic world of today, but there is at least a conceptual pure altruism giving in service to without, as a one-way, no strings, no load, no attachments out of a pure altruistic driver. Yeah, I believe that exists. And how would you think that person would feel if they didn't do that? It's a great question actually. For me, not good. So you are receiving something? No, I'm not. Well, receiving something, receiving something, no. It's not a thing. So am I deriving a feeling and sense of well-being and fulfillment of value in the world, like contributing something to the world? Yeah, absolutely. But it's not the reason I'm sort of picking you up on the thing thing is because it's a felt-sensed lived dynamic for me, not a return in a transactional frame. We could have a great conversation about that, Doug. We'd love to do that. So Carl has his hand up. Do you want to go next, Carl? Okay, yeah. My first master's degree in organization learning, we had a class self as consultant and that was all about like you really can't be an effective consultant unless you're really aware of yourself and the moment type of thing. And it was funny because I had, there was like one glimpse that I had with it and then it's like I made contact, I contact with my professor and I realized she had that self-awareness of every person in the room. It was like that Kasparov, I think he like the national high school chess championships, he played every 100, they had the top three from every state, 150 simultaneous games, 149-0-1. He had 15 seconds to make a move. They had like the time it took them to go around the gym, 149-0-1. So yeah, as I said, there's like that mastery of it, but it's how can we really be self-aware in the moment and to see there's some, I mean, there's, with trust, I mean, there's authenticity that Carl, why he talks about trust is the bandwidth of human communication. That's one of my favorite quotes. Yeah, it's hard to. Yeah, thank you. I love that. Jill, you're next. Yeah, Gina, I like your questions. I fall in line with Doug mostly on this. I think that, in my experience, there is altruism and yeah, it can be transactional altruism, which is sort of a weird kind of altruism, but it's not like I'm getting something from somebody else. I'm generating a sense of myself when I act consistent with my sense of myself and what I care about. So am I still, am I getting something you could say that? But it's not that I'm getting something from outside of me. So I think altruism is rampant. I think it's one of the characteristics of human beings. I mean, why in the world when strangers run into spurning buildings to rescue people, they don't know. It's not just to get on the front page of the newspaper, it's needed that long before they're on the pages of newspapers. So I have to run. I'm late for another meeting, but it's been meaningful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gene. Yeah. Mark, you're muted. We can't hear you. Not muted in Zoom, but we can't hear you. Well, let you figure this out, Grace. You want to go next and we'll come back to Mark. I think you can hear me. Okay. Yeah. All right. I have a number of friends who look at relationships as in the metaphor of the economy. There's, you know, plus, there's minus, there's investing in people. There's kind of billing people for, you know, your time in some way. Again, kind of exchange model, transactional model. And that is something that does exist, but I don't think it is mandatory. I don't think it's, you know, I don't think everybody models human relationships in an economic terms. And it always disturbs me, especially when it comes to friendship, loving, romance, the more sort of human as opposed to kind of more kind of social or societal models. Anyway, I see a couple of people nodding their heads or a couple of people looking confused. I'll pass to, I don't know if Gilles is still has his hand up for Grace. Yeah, I think maybe Grace next, I think you, Grace, you go ahead. Well, waiting for Grace, I'll just say, yeah, Gene's questions really threw me. And his, his point of view, I'm kind of really interested in finding out more and understanding him. As I moved from the mobile network to my home network, my phone went all kind of weird questions. I mean, there's just like an underlying something in these questions that I, I want to stand back from. One is like altruism, right? Altruism would imply that there's some separation between you and me, like that my good and your good are somehow separate. And given that we live on the same planet, that's probably not very true. And so even the phraseology altruism to me is a little bit like it implies something about the human condition, which isn't, doesn't occur to me is true. Like if I say something nice to somebody, I feel nice. If I say something nice to nobody, I feel nice. If I say something mean to nobody, I feel bad. You know, like this idea of altruism has this weird assumption that you're over there and I'm over here rather than that we're all part of some being, right? And so I'm not sure I agree with that. I think an interesting question is about heroism, right? So when you mentioned people running into a burning fire, that's not altruism. That's heroism. And altruism doesn't really risking anything, right? If I, if I give somebody $5 on the street, or say a kind word, or, you know, just help an old lady walk across the street or whatever, it's like, I haven't really risked anything. But if I go and I risk my life, or I stand up for something that a lot of people don't believe in, I could lose my job. I think heroism is a lot more interesting than altruism. I agree with, I agree with Gil that altruism is rampant, because it feels good and because we're connected. But heroism is a lot more interesting to me. And I think, and then the other, the other thing about both about altruism and the other question he asked about, like, how much are we seeking validation? As if there's something wrong with that. You know, like, what if I'm seeking validation all the time? Like right now I'm seeking validation. Let me scroll through. Is everybody smiling? Oh, look, Klaus is smiling. And he's the key, he's the host. So that's the best validation I could get. And well, Doug always smiles. I don't know if that's validation. And, you know, like, if there's something malfunctional about how our psyches work. And I don't, I don't want to scribe to that. I think that if we're seeking attention or we're seeking what, like, there's some reason that our psyches work the way they work. And yeah, it's better to be aware of it. But like, there's this implication, like maybe there's something wrong with something about us. And, and, and when you all need to be more enlightened, and I'm not sure that I ascribe to that. That's me. I heard someone say, sway back and I can't attribute the comment, but it's, it's, he was saying that the world will be saved by reciprocal altruism, a system of reciprocity and altruism. You have to, because we do expect reciprocity in order to build trust for it over, over time. Yeah, so yeah, that, that seemed to be because it is altruism is also selfish in some way, right? I mean, you help others to help yourself. Well, that was Gene's point, I think. Yeah, that's what I thought he was saying. Yeah, go ahead. I'm not just just racist point. The problem with validation is when you're seeking validation and moving away from what you really want. So when you're doing something that is not what you would normally do specifically to seek validation, I think that's, that's when it becomes a concern. Well, maybe, I mean, it depends. Like if your instinct is worse than what society would have you do, then maybe validation is good. We just live in a society where what our society considers good might not be so great. So because it's got to be functional, right? It's got to be functional. Otherwise, it wouldn't have survived evolution. Right. But I think, I think that need for validation, I mean, I'm speaking for myself now, the need for validation I think is rooted in fear and lack of safety. That's not a good thing. I would like to be able to feel safe without getting validation from other people. That's what I would like to grow towards. Yeah, I think the answer to that question may be very personal depending on what you're working on in your own personal life. Right. But if it's, if this is a phenomena and people are changing their positions based on how safe they feel in a group, that's why we have bullies leading large groups. I mean, I'm not, you know, picking on anybody, but that's how we would get a Trump situation. That's how we would get a Trump situation in a malfunctioning society. But in a functioning society, seeking validation could be good. Again, if we give the example of synagogue, you know, like there's certain things that you do because that's the behavior that's expected of you and that's, you need, you know, you want to do your share of the cleaning up after the meal. And you're seeking validation. It's just in a malfunctioning society, validation is malfunctioning. In a functional society, validation is useful and there's a right balance between not having the confidence to do what you believe in and doing what's acceptable. Like I just think these things are in balance. They're not 100% bad or 100% good. Yeah, they'll find you. I agree. Yeah. But I would still reintroduce this idea of reciprocity, you know, because it goes back into our evolutionary past. I mean, just the dawn of everything that we're discussing around that is very much based on we anticipate reciprocity because that's the way that we're wired and that's the way our society functions. Gail, if you have your hand up. Gail, you're on mute. I did get my hand down, but I didn't do that. Yeah, reciprocity is explored gorgeously in the book, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And I strongly encourage people to have a look at that if you're not familiar with it. It's not just in synagogue, it's in relationships, it's in marriages, it's in families. We have expectations of each other. There are social norms and cultural norms and sometimes they're misunderstood by different people in a collection, so it gets messy there. But that's there. I just want to flag what Grace said a while ago, because I think it's really at the heart of some of this conversation is do we live as though we are separate beings? Or do we live as if we're one? The way that I've been exploring it lately is what might it be like if we lived as though we belong to the living world? Which is very different than environmental care and management. What might it be like if we lived as though we belonged to each other? Which we sort of approach sometimes in families and maybe sometimes in other larger networks. But I love the Grace phrase that I didn't want to have to slip by. I think it's a fundamental question behind pretty much everything we're talking about in everybody's class. Yeah, thank you. Mark, you have your hand up. Yeah, it's reacting to something you said, Klaus, about there being some reward that the altruist gets. And then certainly that can be. And then certainly that happens a lot. I also believe there's the possibility and the reality of doing something without a reward. I as a software developer and designer have encountered many systems that try to algorithmically implement values, whether it's a reputation system or a friend of a friend kind of networking to kind of say, oh, you might like that person because they like chicken. And it's this sort of overlay of a, as I try to put it, a discrete system across a analog system. We are human beings. We have values. We are sometimes able or unable to express what we value and to ask for what we value. Or to know what we want. I have no clue in a relationship what's possible. I mean, it takes this interaction that's human that I see we want to have automated in some way. And it's that desire to have computers do the work of making friends for us. That's something I don't trust yet. If I ever will trust that from a kind of a foundational principle perspective. I'm glad that this conversation is happening. That's sort of my frame for, you know, when we talk about online communication and how to develop and design communities. I've certainly met people and kept, I met somebody at Flower Piano at in San Francisco a couple of weekends ago. And she basically designs communities. And I'm trying to invite her to this group. But again, I think the point before I got a little bit on a ramble was, I really do believe that humans are so diverse. And I love this term, the imp of the perverse, where you take a perverse view of, you have to act this way. No, I'm not. You have to believe this way. You have to feel this way. You have to have this value. And it's in the vast diversity of humans to say, I'm going to just do this for a hell of it. I am going to give 10 bucks to the guy who's sleeping on the street. I'm going to slip $100 under his blanket. I'm going to give him dental floss. I'm just going to, you know, have fun with being nice and not have any expectation whatsoever. Yeah, Mark, my perception of reciprocal altruism wasn't to look for reward, but I look at it as an evolutionary survival tool. So it's a completely different thing. So it is selfish because I want to survive. I want to be around people who I can trust will protect me if it comes to that. So from that, so yeah. What I know when I study about evolution is that evolution is incredibly complex. We cannot look at evolution as an optimization engine. It's a satisfying engine. There are things that evolution produces that survive, that are vestigial, that don't have any purpose anymore, and they survive because it takes too much work to remove them, to remove the appendix from the human genome. It's not going to happen. It's not harming anything. It's not producing or reducing evolutionary fitness. It happened. It is in the historical path of evolution, but it's not useful. And there are many things in social evolution, technological evolution, biological evolution that just appear, and we cannot give functional description to those things. And so I think it's more complicated than that. I'm not sure that, for example, we can't do something like universal human income, and climate change at the same time, and everybody won't be having this moral danger of turning into couch potatoes in front of the TV. I mean, these are the kinds of evolutionary arguments that are made, or there are evolutionary arguments, evolutionary theory-based arguments, but I think they're often much more complicated than they're used. And I'm not singling out what you said, Klaus, but I think you have a really interesting point, and I think it's something that could be explored a lot deeper, and I don't agree with it automatically. Thanks, Rosen. Yeah. No, totally. I think the difficulty we have to even accept this concept is that we are so separated, right? I mean, if you're living within a closed community, then this whole concept of reciprocity, reciprocal altruism is easily understood, because you're creating trust, not basically. Now, we're living 8 billion people, we're communicating in abstract ways, so that concept is, in my mind, as vital and important today as it ever was, but it's just not obvious to us, and it's so easy to violate because all the anonymity that we have in our society. Stacy, you've got your hand up. Yeah. To Mark's point about not wanting an algorithm to suggest friends based on the fact that they all like chickens, I agree, but what was I going to say? So when I had said earlier, if there was something that said, are you sure you want to send that remark? I'd be interested in being matched up with people that remove their comments after thinking about it. That would be a quality that for me would indicate somebody that I would want to communicate with and be friends with. So most of the friends on my Facebook page, I have many different views. I mean, there are people from all walks of life that are friends with me, but the one thing in comment is that I've always found a way to have some sort of respectful conversation, and they've always been open to it, even if it may be started a little rough. I was always able to get them to where we could have some civility. To me, that's a key factor. Yeah. Thank you, Stacy. We're almost out of time, but Dr. Michael, we have you on the list next. Would you like to give us your comments here and you're muted? No. I personally find this a not a terribly engaging conversation, and I don't know quite why. Could you take a shot, Doug? Well, it seems to me that if we, in the long range of history, that we spend our time this way, rather than coping with the issues of society and the economy and history, will look strange. There's a brilliant book by Tom Standage called Writing on the Wall, 2,500 Years of Social Media, and he goes all the way back to the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii and talks about how that was a way that people shared information and even built community. People would sort of walk by the same wall and add things, but he spends a lot of time on the coffee shops and the letters written by these scholars in the 1800s and 1700s and how these new paradigms of community building changed history. And I could believe that what we've started is changing history and clearly the fact that Bill Clinton used the web in 1996 to get reelected, Barack Obama used Meetup to beat Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump weaponized Twitter. We've already seen three cases of these technologies changing history, or at least American history, which often changes world history. So maybe I'm a technological optimist, maybe because I'm so close to it, I tend to overemphasize what we're doing, but I, particularly given that we're only 10% of the way through the internet revolution, I think there's something really important going on here. What we don't have is a good answer to all the questions that we've posed. Yeah. But thank you for being the skeptic. We need that. Yeah, Dr. Two of you. Let me say what's on my mind instead, and I'll try and keep it very short. What if human beings in their interactions with each other weave a network that becomes increasingly tight, and as it expands across the globe, we get to the point where the weaving is so tight that actually nothing can happen, and we've built ourselves into a spider web trap that prevents action, and we just crash. Now my thinking is that that might be human nature, there's no way out of it. Human beings, by being inventive and relational, are going to weave themselves into a structure which becomes impervious to change. That is known in Heidegger's term as the enframing, where we define language so carefully that we can only use it in this, again, discrete way and not an analog way. I'm not sure that that's human nature, Doug. I think we're always, you know, my friend who was, his parents were hippies, he became a marine sniper. As the generations change, I think, you know, I trust eight-year-olds to be different from me. What was Heidegger's term again? The enframing. EN? Yes, EN, enframing. Thank you. Yeah, I would have loved to insert a question about, have you seen change in conversations over the last few months, you know, and has there been some sense of urgency of people becoming alert to the environmental discussions that are taking place politically, environmentally, and so on? So we didn't make it to that question. That one, Klaus, depends entirely on where you hang out. Because if I hang out here, I hear very different conversations than if I hang out on Fox News. Yeah, no, I didn't mean Fox News. I mean conversations. I don't mean the media. But the people who watch Fox News have conversations. And there are conversations as school boards and Proud Boy meetings and Republican election campaigns and, you know, supermarkets and so forth. There's conversations all where, every time, but they're influenced by different constellations. I hear, but I wanted to really personalize this. So for me, for example, I'm on LinkedIn. Now I don't spend much time on Facebook anymore, but I'm in the leadership team for the Sierra Club, Citizen Climate Lobby, Business Climate. So I'm in a bunch of groups. And I can see people starting to become more alert, dialing in more intensely to wanting to know what is happening around them in a sense that it may impact them personally. So I was just wondering if that is reflected in the group, in your own personal conversations with your own personal networks. And we're out of time. But now Chester, because I think it would be important to dial in, right? Because to duck's point, we're really in bad shape. I mean, this is, you know, what I'm working on dealing with all the time, we're in horrible shape. And 2023 will be a very rough year as it is shaping up. And I'm thinking about this in terms of food supply and no basic needs. And the Europeans, looking at having massive migrations, their phasing and so on. So yeah, I think that's what duck was referring to. I like the conversation a lot because we're social animals and then we are communicating through our social networks in social terms. Yeah, it's just the urgency really at the level that it needs to be. I think that was duck's question. Is that fair duck? Yes. Yeah. So with that, thank you so much. It was a great call. Really appreciated. Yeah. Thanks for hosting. Yeah, thank you. Bye-bye.