 And this is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, June 29, 2023. We are in check-in mode this week. And Doug was just telling me about a ship that is docked in the harbor nearby in Montenegro, where he is living for a while. First, I need to turn on the transcript. And now we're off and running. So I'm thinking this is a natural segue into our check-in round. And I'll just explain the check-in protocol, which we've been using, the S protocol, which is I'm going to step out of the conversation for a while. Please use the zoom hand raise to raise your hand when you'd like to step into the queue to check in. Please check in only once during the check-in portion. Then when we're all done checking in or passing, we will choose a topic to go into. Don't drop your hand until you're done talking so that we stay sort of in our focal point. Otherwise, you'll fall into the chaos of the gallery view. So that's just a tiny note. And also, when it's your turn, the hands raised display is the same for all of us, meaning the queue looks alike for everybody. So you'll know where you are next in line. And when you are next up, please unmute yourself so that we know that you know that you are next. But take a moment to step into the conversation because we have figured out that pausing is really good for our conversations. So having explained the protocol, I will step out of hosting until we're all sort of done checking in unless people arrive and they don't know what's up. And I'll pass the mic to Doug. Well, what's really on my mind is the crazy event of Zuckerberg, Lex Fridman, and Elon Musk doing judo together serious. And I think, what does the world come to if the presidents of leading corporations are spending their time throwing each other on the mat? If they think it's not their time writing poetry or reading history, it might be better off. But in a way, it's a joke these three guys doing with each other. There are videos online so you can see them all. But what's it say about our leadership and the state that the country is in if it has leaders who are spending the time doing this and the end of chicken? Shall I go next? Please do. OK. I was catching up last night on all the OGM emails. And the one that struck me quite a bit that I think about this morning is the one from Gil Friend on AI, ChatGBT, and its potential for analytical thinking. And I was grateful that he made it possible. Let's see, was that from Gil? I think it was originally from somebody else, maybe. But I was grateful that I could get a copy of it and I intend to use it. So thank you very much. And that's it for me. OK, this is a slow start this morning. I'm really struggling to maintain my emotional balance because like most everyone here, I'm so tied into what is happening in nature around the globe. And it is just really frightening because it's running at a pace that we still haven't processed now. It's, first of all, irreversible. These changes are accelerating exponentially. And the challenge really is to have people understand this. And there was a hearing in the Senate. This JBS is one of the largest meat producers in the world. Controls about 25% of the US meat market. And the Oregon senator has done an investigation on them and the way they bypass sourcing meat from the Amazon regions that comes from places cleared of the rainforest is by originating animals in illegally cleared forests then transfer them to a farm for a few days that is in compliance and then certify the origin of the animal to that farm. So long story to explain that these multinational companies absolutely refuse to accept their responsibility in reducing the damage they're doing. So it is an incredible challenge. And the only way that you can really overcome that or surround that is by localizing food. You go local and regional and change productions. But in order to do that, the challenge then really is to explain that and to engage the local population, not just the decision makers, but really to have the local nonprofits and social groups understand this in a constructive, positive, actionable way. So I've been working with the Kista Ground Group now to give me a license so I can use the movie in educational settings. And I'm working on an outline where we take the educational component of the Kista Ground movie, which is only 45 minutes, but it really just explains soil and the importance of soil life, the microorganisms inside the soil. And the title of the discussion I want to create is Kista Ground. And then do what? Because, OK, so now that we all understand this is, and people are really moved by the movie. It's very emotional. It really penetrates, particularly for all the social groups here. And so I found the local restaurant, a microphone where we actually giving us their banquet room for free. And the owner is very engaged in environmental and in sourcing from regenerative farmers. So the hope is, the title is Kista Ground. And then do what? Because Kista Ground, the movie, is widely known. Over 2 million showings. I mean, they really had a very wide audience. They are now working on a sequel or they already have released a sequel that will come out in a few weeks. And so using this movie as an impetus to say, OK, so what are we going to do about this? And then come forth with really actionable items that show the importance of bio-regions working within the environment that you have the attention over, that you see, not where you know the farmers, you know the processes, you know what is coming from. But the pace of change in the environment, the risk to the food supply, there are no normal reserves anywhere, then there's nothing left in storage. So we completely, last year was a fiasco in losing yields around the world. The Yangtze River tried up, Spain tried up so many, I mean, really global impacts of environmental disturbances on the food supply, which is not talking about it, we're not really aware of it. But this has the risk of creating migrations in the millions of people, because when your food runs out, then what are people going to do? So anyway, I'm trying to find a lever where you can engage people at an emotional level with in ways that you can actually do something and act upon. And I get, this Reuters has these huge events, all the companies are involved. We're talking at the top level and the solutions that are being proposed are top down instead of bottom up. So we need to create top down bottom up dynamics that bring this energy together. So I don't know, I'm sort of rambling here, but I tell you, I am really scared. This is, I just know too much, it disturbs your sleep. I'll hop in on that cheery note, thank you Klaus. I woke up this morning all pumped for five minute universities, so I'm standing down on that. I'll wait till next time for that. Thank you, Jerry. I have not been a climate doomer, extinction guy. I've not been somebody who says it's over let's surrender, but the signs are becoming increasingly clear that we're headed for an enormous amount of shit. And I find myself thinking a lot, not just about the biological part of that, but the political part of it and the political chaos that's going to ensue as more and more people realize what a mess we're in. And I've had this weird prediction for a long time. I'll put it on public record here that there will come a point where the Republicans will run on a climate platform denouncing the Democrats for inaction, which of course they themselves block. So mark my words. You can hold me to it. We can make bets on the side and see when that will happen. I predict that will happen. On a more uplifting and maybe interesting note, Ken and I have been having some discussions lately about the diversity of the crowd in our living between worlds conversations. And I know we've had that one here as well. And I woke up this morning with a couple of very different thoughts about the question about what we've been calling a problem, but this may be not a problem. And I thought about it in these regards. One is that nobody tells an artist that they need to change their art in order to broaden their audience. Actually, some people do. The record company executives might tell them that. But an artist does what they do and they attract who they do. And the audience broadens or doesn't over time, either does or doesn't. And I don't mean to be self-inflating by calling us artists, but Ken, you and I have some things to say. And maybe the job is just to say them and see what happens rather than work hard on broadening the audience. And the related thought is that there used to be a thing called affinity groups. People here are old enough to remember them. And people would gather around common interests. And the common interests were sometimes, but not necessarily related to physical, biological, genetic identity, but were sometimes related to necessarily women's groups who would have that character. But there were other affinities that called people together. And so I just want to put in a soft vote for that, that as we consider DEI in the biological dimension, that we'd be open to it in other dimensions. And that's what I got this morning. Yesterday and at various other times, Pete and I and others have had a conversation about shared memory and whether it's possible, how it works, why habit, a bunch of other things. And I'm right this moment. I'm forgetting the details of our conversation. But it's a conversation that both frustrates and excites me because I've had my hair on fire for quite a while about, god damn it, we need to have a shared memory so that we know what we know so that we can solve some problems together. And by this, I don't mean a canonical answer to every question known to mankind that we all agree on through consensus, because I don't think that's actually even possible. But rather, I mean a space that we refer to and keep improving where we can answer some of these questions. But we can also see other people's answers to similar questions because the more or less consensus view in this room about climate change and what to do about it. And I'm not sure we could arrive at a consensus. But I think we would be broadly agreed in our points of view on that here is really quite different from people who are like, eh, ice ages have happened before. This is just the earth will heal itself, whatever else it is. And I'm really interested in building some resources that let us not have the same arguments over and over again, I think is one of the benefits of a shared memory. And have a space within which we can complexify the different questions that are in front of us, figure out who's got the best answers to different parts of it, write narratives and stories that are emotional rather than factual around these things, a little bit like we're doing in the Neobook project on Mondays with Klaus and others and Patty. And so I'm interested in anybody's thoughts or opinions about whether such a space is possible or desirable. One of the sort of threads that wove its way into those conversations was when Chachi Piti got hot a couple of months ago, several people posted things like, ah, note taking is so passe. We should all stop taking Tiago Fortes, building a second brain course because we're just going to consult the oracle that now can speak back to us and think in whole sentences. It used to just like spit out things it found. Now it can actually tell us about what it found. We don't need to do note taking anymore. And I think that's as big a mistake as outsourcing our memory to Google and Wikipedia was a couple decades ago, which seems to be what we did. So interested in all thoughts on the notion of shared memory, how to explain it, how you see the needs or whatever. And I remain really convinced that we need a place to sort of pin things, call it just a pin board for important stuff, but important stuff that doesn't sit in isolation, but rather is pinned in relationship in a web of connections because these are thorny problems. They are systems of problems. There's a French word, problematique. Russell Aikoff, an early systems theorist, I happen to get lucky and take some courses from him and one of the first things he would say is that the French have a word we don't have. This is problematique, which means systems of problems because very few problems exist in isolation. Mostly they are interconnected and interrelated and interwoven. And you have to then take a solution approach that touches many different parts of a system if you're going to have an effect on the whole system. It was one of his conclusions. So that's my check and for right now. I'm just pondering that heavily because I remain an advocate of shared memory, hive mind, collective intelligence, collaborative sense making, whatever term you'd like to give it. I think this is a possibility and not just a possibility but a civilizational necessity. If we're going to make it through the eye of the needle, the thin passage, the event horizon of the singularity, whatever the hell you want to call this moment that we're living through right now together. So I almost dropped out of a queue because Jerry, you were going someplace else. And then you did the perfect segue for one of the things I wanted to say. I'm reading a wonderful book called the Spiritual Autobiography of the Dalai Lama. And I got the link to it through reading some other book about Peace for Heart. But I just read this morning about the Dalai Lama talking about interdependence. And what a lot of people don't realize, and by the way, the book is extraordinary because it really bottomed lines, Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist science. Many people think of Buddhism as a religion and it has that aspect of the religious piece, but he beautifully distinguishes spirituality from religion and also goes into the scientific, psychological, underpinnings of Buddhist thinking. And it's just an extraordinary book. I commend it to everyone's reading because in my own thinking, we know what to do. We just haven't developed the will or awareness of doing it. When Klaus, when you were speaking about all the folks in doing nasty stuff, they were just following their own conditioning. I mean, this is the notion of compassion. They've been told to be good capitalists and that all they need to do is make money. And that's the mantra that they're following. And I kind of remember when I was trying to have an impact on the legal profession and was running around, ranting and hating all lawyers. And then I realized that they're just playing inside their game that they've been conditioned to follow. So that's just a different perspective. I'm not saying it's right, but I'm just saying that's what's going on. The answer seems to be heading in the right direction. So that's a good thing. I've actually got some energy back. It's blood counts are going in the right direction. It feels like an amazing, and actually quite wonderful spiritual journey to move through this slice of time and a journey of proactivity in terms of, not just accepting carte blanche, what the medical community says, but being proactive and engaged in care. It's kind of like, instead of waiting till my doctor gives me permission to go to Africa for three weeks in October, I decided to tell him that I was going and let's figure out how to make that work. So that's kind of a little bit of a bottom line. Of course, I won't do anything that's dangerous. I decided to combine three areas of writing into a new, what'll probably be an e-book, a little fable about what we could do, areas that I think need addressing in the world, my conflict resolution and agreement models, and I'm calling it getting to relationship as kind of an overview, because that's what I think we need. And I want to read a poem as part of my check-in today. It's called Kinship and it's today's poem. And I think it's just really what we all need. Kinship keeps us alive, holds us together, intact, no matter weather. Brings sunshine, sends away pain, no matter barometer or forecast rain. Holding a hand, kissing a lip, catches you with a startle or blip. Darkest nighttime, blackest hour, presence, a sparkling meteor shower. Amazing, simple, hearts connected, love connections, feel respected. Connected meanings are a source, wide smile on your face, of course. Sense of traction, feeling held, holding together, perfect meld. Infinite variety, yours for taking, crosses boundaries, it's generating. Bridges, ethnicity, religion, race, underlying lattice, our grace, when feeling down alone, loving kinship draws you home. I've spoken. Thanks Stuart, good thoughts and beautiful poem. I've been away for a while, among other things. I spent 10 days in Tuscany eating delicious food, drinking delicious wine and taking part in a philosophical retreat about transatlantic and intercultural thinking. Learned a little bit about trying to think like an ocean. But that's not really what I wanted to do my checking about. I prefer to segue into what Jerry was talking about, shared memory, creating spaces and resources to solve problems together. Since I got back from Italy, I've been taking up one of my standard passions, the idea of how to understand and work with distributed collective intelligence, of course, for solving problems, for making the world a better place. And I've been specifically thinking about the lived experience of thinking together and the lived experience of learning, whether OGM calls like this are experiences of collective thinking or experiences of networked thinking or networked learning. And if that's so, what's coming out of them, every person on the call gets something individual out of them. I get a lot out of it when I'm able to take part. But is there a kind of collective thinking or collective learning that comes out of it? I think that relates to what Jerry was asking about shared memory. And I've been specifically thinking about this in terms of an article I'm co-writing at the moment about creating shared context. The Japanese word is ba, a shared context for networked thinking and networked learning. One of the questions I was asking myself, which I thought I might ask this group today, does anyone have any experience of taking part in calls like this when there's also an avatar of someone else taking part in the call? A kind of AI intelligence of a great thinker or an interesting thinker of the past who's not on this call, be it an Einstein or an Archimedes and having that person's avatar also reacting to what we've been saying. Those are the things that are on my mind. And I'd certainly welcome any feedback other people have on that. Thanks. I hesitate to go because I like the check-in format and I especially like when the check-ins are disjoint not about the same thing because if they are too much about the same thing it ends up being a conversation which we do a lot. And then we single track. Zoom has a new thing. It says it's gonna lower my hand for me. But I wanted to respond a little bit to Jerry or check-in in some way about some of the stuff that Jerry and I have talked about over the past couple of weeks. And I wanted to start with stocks and flows. We know that flowing is like water and the stock is like a place where water accumulates or maybe it's material in a factory or something like that. I feel like I had kind of an epiphany because my passion is for very stock-like things called wikis. And I have to put a little asterisk there. Part of my wiki experience way, way, way back in the early 2000s with my wiki company was that we could have a very, very slow moving conversation in the wiki. So the wiki was not just a stock, it was actually a flow just at a timescale of months and years rather than minutes and seconds and maybe hours. So, but anyway, stocks and flows. The folks here are pretty familiar with knowledge bases or wikis or collections of documents, things that are very stock-like. We're also familiar with books and writing and reading. And for 500 years or something like that, we've had a tradition of taking a flow like a conversation and crystallizing it into a book, a written book or a letter or something like that. And then being able to take that and read it, turn it back into a flow. So humans have done this weird technology trick for a thousand years or something like that where we can pretend that we're having a flow conversation except that it's over time or with people who aren't in the same place as we are. And I think the people in this room, the people of a certain age have kind of like grown up with that and maybe we're some of the last people that will grow up with that. But we've grown up with that as a constant and a bedrock and as a bedrock principle that there's talking which is cute and stuff like that. And then there's writing which is permanent and travels around the world and does important things. And I kind of feel like my epiphany this past couple of weeks was that that is really an illusion that that primacy of the stock, the written word is a real illusion and that people only work with flows. You can kind of trick your human brain into doing this technological trick with the text and the book and the reading and the writing and stuff like that. It's a pretty hard trick. And I think I'm here to say that a few people learn how to do that trick and a few people learn how to do that trick well. But even the, I think the people who are good at it if we're not careful, we fall back into doing flow. So another thing I'm here to say is that that presumption that we have that the written word is the most important thing or that academics is the most important thing that's kind of bullshit too. So when I say that even us we can fall back into this flow state, I think that's being human. I think humans have been doing flow state conversation for tens of thousands of years. We're really good at it. Our brains do it naturally. Our brains come wired that way when you're a little kid your brain kind of knows how to talk. And you get shaved by the people conversing around you but your brain is primed to do this flow thing. So flow is really the way people work. Flow is really the way people convince each other of things. Flow is really the way that you have an emotional connection with other people. It's all about flow. And this stock thing that we've kind of exalted is a passing fad. So this is a rationalization for me partly because I've spent decades of my life working on this stock mechanism of wikis. And I really like wikis and they're really important to me but I also find that starting up massive wiki recently it's hard to get people to consider a wiki. It's hard to get people to write. It's hard to get people to read stuff. And I think in the past 20 years with the advent of the internet, what we see are the natural places people gravitate to is back to flows. So Twitter is a flow, TikTok is a flow, Discord is a flow, Slack is a flow, Mattermost is a flow. So one of Jerry's consternations is like, oh my God, we're doing all this flow stuff. Zoom call is a flow. We're doing all this flow stuff. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have a shared memory? So a shared memory is kind of, it kind of gets to the level of being a stock. And kind of what I ended up telling what Jerry was that we have the systems to create stocks. We have the systems to create knowledge bases or written versions of our flows that course through our flow state, soil health or climate change or social justice or something like that. It's not that we don't have the tools, it's not that the tools are particularly hard to use, asterisk. The tools are hard to use because stocks are hard. Writing is hard, reading is hard and it's a technological trick that we've learned that we think is really useful. It's really hard. So Jerry says, well, Wikipedia, Wikipedia is a wiki. Wikipedia is this big stock, it's super popular. Why don't we just do what Wikipedia did? And my answer is for the 99.9% of the people are using Wikipedia, they're not using it as a stock. You don't go to Wikipedia and you don't read 100 pages at a time about metallurgy or about social justice or about something like that. That's a thing that people don't do. The thing that people do is they go to Google or their favorite search engine and they type in social justice, Wikipedia or something like that. And they consult a stock by using essentially a chat interface to a big knowledge base, Google's front end essentially is a keyword kind of chat that we've learned how to use. We're getting chat to you now that's gonna replace that keyword thing with the actual language, but it's kind of the same thing. So the thing that we ended up, or I ended up saying maybe is that these stock like knowledge bases, brains, thinking reservoirs are actually important and they're valuable and they're useful and they make us smarter. And the way that they get built is not by making a space that then gets filled up, you could think of Wikipedia as having made the space to fill up within its encyclopedia articles. The technology was an enabler, but that's not the key to it. Is enough investment in creating the information within the container. And that investment in time and energy to do that, converting flows, various flows into a stock is a heavy lift. It's a big deal. It's what we've started calling sense doing. It's a few people sitting down and doing a flow thing together or one person sitting down and doing a flow thing to the world. I'm going to write down something into the world. That's what Klaus is kind of doing with his soil health right now. And in the successor to sense doing the Neobuck project, it's a lot of work, it's hard work. And it gets harder when you wanna do something smarter. A genius author sits down for five or 10 years to write a really important book when you have a few people writing a book together because they know the subject really well. Just the coordination of that gets harder and harder and harder. So we have this illusion that if we just make a massive wick here, if we just make an empty Wikipedia, it would fill up because people love to keep track of stuff. So in conclusion, my thing is that's not true. You have to invest a lot of time and energy into doing that. And I think I have a guess that my hypothesis is that Wikipedia was largely written in spare time by grad students or high school kids or retired people or productive procrastinators who were supposed to be doing something else. That's how we got so much effort to build Wikipedia. And so the thing that we haven't been doing within OGM is carving off some kind of investment in time and energy to take our flows and turn them into a valuable stock. And you can't just kind of divert the flow into a stock and just have it accumulate there. That doesn't count. You actually have to digest the stuff in the flow and organize it and partition it and add value to it. You have to sense due around it. And so we save all our chats, we save all our transcripts. They mean nothing to us because they haven't been groomed into something that's a useful stock. So the thing that we're missing is that time and energy and investment in creating stocks. So that's my checking. Thanks for listening. I wanna wait four or five minutes just to digest everything you said. And what's funny is that my check-in directly relates both to what you said and to some of the things Stuart touched on. I really think I'll start with your comments because that's the more intellectual piece. I was late because I was at the monthly Carnegie senior researcher staff meeting. And these are always the best part of the month. I mean, we have a chance to see who the new people are that have joined our team. And I was very excited to see that the Carnegie California Center which just opened two weeks ago as recorded as recruited three brilliant new people including a woman who was at Kiva the chief legal officer and is now and then worked in the Oakland government. And she's somebody who's working on how technology can make regional governments more effective. And that's an aside, but it was just a sense of why I'm so proud of being part of Carnegie because we're not a typical think tank. First off, we're in six different places around the world. And now we have this California office to look at sub-regional politics. But we spent most of our time talking about the recent visit by Modi from India. And we have one of the most brilliant authors and thinkers, Ashley Tellis, who wrote a bunch of things about the visit. So if you want to understand what just happened and why it's so important, I urge you to look at Ashley Tellis, T-E-L-L-I-S. And he also did some great podcasts. And so he's an example of where you have the stock, the articles and the flow because he does all these podcasts and discussion panels. But I've always found that dichotomy kind of wrong because I focus on the distillation part of making those stocks high impact. So you got it. I mean, I used the term bumper sticker, which sounds trivial, but so often the 10-page article will have an impact because somebody summarizes it in one sentence and a million people hear that one sentence and it changes their thinking. Ashley wrote this incredible piece for foreign affairs and the editor decided to entitle it America's bad bet on India. Anybody who's followed Ashley's writing or read his new book knows that he doesn't see it as a good or a bad bet. I mean, he actually helped open up relationships with China with India back in the Bush administration. And he's a big advocate of closer relations. But his article said, look, the US thinks it's gonna win India as a friend forever and that's what he was referring to that that's the bad bet. But the phrase bad bet has gotten everybody to pay attention to this article. And in some cases changed the way people think about the relationship. And so as I said, that's what I spend most a lot of my time on is trying to take all this stuff going on on digital policy and geopolitics and put it into seven or eight words. So people will say, ah, I was thinking about it wrong or ah, I've got to go read that six page article. Of course, the other thing that's missing in the stocks and flows categorization is the connection that I need to define to all the people like Jerry. Can I give you a brand new latte with cinnamon powder on it? I don't think we need to know your coffee order. But anyway, I couldn't get to the new button fast enough. Anyway, it was interesting for me. And the reason this ties into my personal check-in is I don't do stocks very well. I mean, and partly my field is moving so fast spending a whole hell of a lot of time to get the polished piece of prose about digital policy out to the world and then have it completely overcome by events three months later just doesn't seem as useful as talking to people and changing minds 15 at a time in small group discussions. But I am judged by the people around me by how many words appear on the Carnegie website. And it's frustrating, frankly. I don't, I write presentations well. I draft really well. I just can't get to the last 10% of the articles. And I've got about five articles right now that are in that last 10% phase. So that's my reflection on my current frustration and how I've got to sit down and just lock myself in a room until I do the last 10%. But the other totally unrelated piece of this is plays off of Stuart's piece. I have too many close relatives and friends right now who are suffering from a cascade of care. And this is what happens when, you know, the doctor says, oh, well, you have this problem focusing. Why don't you take this drug? Oh, but that drug is causing these other problems. In one case, it's an older person who's taking drugs for bone density. Well, this particular drug on notes to her has a big impact on the integrity of your teeth. And the dentist that was working on her teeth didn't know this. So, you know, I'm just curious if anybody's seen a recent book or even a 10-page article on how in the hell can we get out of this situation where people are taking four or five drugs and we're having all these weird side effects and cross effects. I particularly worry about my parents who are 89 and 86. And, you know, they're in a nursing home where it seems that they're paid by the pill to deliver these pills. And I just, I worry about whether my father's dementia is related to some of this. And it just, again, I mean, this is a bigger problem. I've seen this for 30 years. I had very, I mean, long ago when I was in my 20s, I was treated for something and it turned out to be the treatment was so much worse than the disease. But I don't see this as an issue and people aren't talking about it. And perhaps it's because they have no solution and perhaps it's because the economics of pharmaceuticals are driving people to create new drugs and more powerful drugs and they're gonna have more side effects. Any thoughts on that? And then the last thing is back to some more good news. I'm setting up for a trip to get out of Washington for a week with Kathleen, going to Knoxville, Asheville, Chapel Hill and Roanoke, Virginia. If anybody has any interesting people or insights about those places. Then in September, we're going to Cyprus and Delphi, Greece. And then in October, it looks like I'm headed to Taiwan, Sarawak, which is part of Malaysia and Tokyo. So I got some exciting travel coming up. Kevin Jones is in Australia, oh, in Asheville, okay. That's good, Kevin, might draw by. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Mike. There was a piece on PBS yesterday about a young woman, I think she was in her early 20s, who died because she couldn't get a bunch of specialists to talk to each other about her conditions. And she was on all kinds of different drugs that counteracted each other. So I don't know, you might look there, but when the other piece that pops up in response is the whole notion of, as I understand it, the US and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow TV advertising of drugs. And Big Pharma has become the greatest drug pusher in the country. It's just amazing to watch the level of commercials about all these conditions that you never think you have. And then people who are sitting around depressed or in places of resignation think that that's gonna be the thing that gets them out of it because they've identified some disease or condition that they have. And then there's the whole piece around identity, which I've done some thinking about recently, people become their disease. And that's there, that becomes their identity, that becomes their life. So just a few random thoughts, thank you. Well, to play off your random thought, particularly elderly people, having a reason to talk to the doctor is a reason for socialization, they're so lonely. We are still in check and mode. So no back and forth please until we're done with everybody checking in. Thank you. Greetings. Our last living between worlds call, we've posed the question of what if you had to do something you didn't think you could do? It was specifically around climate change, the poly crisis, the matter crisis, whatever you wanna frame it as, but we are up against it as a species. I'm using we in the term of human beings here, we are, we've put ourselves on the endangered species list and we seem to be hell bent on becoming number one with a bullet, ha ha. When World War II broke out, and it's interesting I just started watching Oliver Stones untold history of the United States, which I highly recommend, it's pretty intense, but it's quite amazing. When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, the automakers came to the FDR and said, we have this plan to transfer over and to transition over into making our moments and in nine months. And after you said, no, today, we start today, and everything regishtalted, everything was oriented to the war effort. What's it gonna take to orient everything to a life effort? And what if all of our thinking about what that's gonna take is actually based on faulty assumptions? I'm really grappling with the worldview that I was inculcated into. Yesterday, we, Gil and I talked to a friend of ours who's become quite involved with the Consilience Project and Daniel Schmackenberger. And he said, you know, permacrisis, polycrisis, metacrisis, how do you distinguish them? And I thought they were all kind of the same thing. And he gave this great distinction of, you know, the polycrisis is a multi-centered crisis of interacting crises. And the permacrisis is how permanent that is. And the metacrisis is, what's the worldview that's bringing all that forth? And we always look to our white male ancestor. What would Socrates say? What would Einstein say? What if we started to look towards our indigenous ancestors? If we started to look towards the women who have contributed so much and never get credit for it. What if we started to look at the way that we're, you know, Mike, I don't mean to pick on you, but you just mentioned you're going to be doing all this international travel. That's a really high carbon footprint. We cannot continue to operate as if, hey, I can just fly over where I want, you know? And I had to deal with some addiction issues in my 20s. I thought my world was going to end because, man, I had to completely change my behavior. I was like, how am I going to do that? This is what I know. This is what I do. This is who I am. What am I going to do? But I recognized who I thought I was and what I was doing was actually incredibly harmful to myself and I had to make a complete 180 degree change. It was really hard, you know? And humans as a species have to make a very, very large change and it's going to be really hard. And I have a feeling that we're going to need not a whole lot of intellect, but a whole lot of compassion, a whole lot of heart, a whole lot of spiritual practice to understand grief and suffering. And so it just, it orients me in a different direction. And I'm like, okay, what are the assumptions I have about my life and my place in the world that are faulty, not serving? And that's not an easy thing to look at, you know? It's very, very challenging work. So we have to do that together. And I don't see, you know, I've been aware, I read Bucky Fuller's critical path in 1987. That was kind of my wake-up call in my life. Like, holy cow, there's a world out there I had no idea about, you know? And then in the early 90s, I got involved in deep ecology movement. That was when I started to look at, wow, we're really on an invader dangerous path. And I've been sitting with this for over 30 years now and it's really uncomfortable making and it's not really uncomfortable making enough to make me get rid of my car. And, you know, I'm going to live in a house that's heat and, you know, I'm in an unsustainable paradigm. How do I live in an unsustainable paradigm in a way that doesn't make it worse that actually might make it a little better? And how do I speak with people who say, no, no, don't worry. You know, climate change is going on for years. I have a meme of two frogs sitting in a pot and one's going, don't worry. Temperature goes up and down in here all the time, you know? So what do we do? How do we do that without alienating people without saying the way you're living is completely unsustainable from an ecological standpoint. You have to change and not make them wrong for that and not judge them for that and invite them into a conversation where they actually want to examine their assumptions in a way that could lead to change. That's a tough nut to crack. And I think that's walking up the river to change that stone, to change the course of the river. That's a place to go. That's a leverage point, but it's really, really challenging to do that. So that's what I'm thinking about lately. Thank you for listening. I'm going to keep my comments short. I wasn't going to comment at all, but in response to what Mike had to say, my response is a little bit overwhelming because I feel exactly how Klaus feels but about a different subject. And the subject that's getting me down is I see something, I see a major problem that has to do with the pharmaceutical industry and the hospitals. There are two books I want to call attention to. One is by a man by the name of Rob Wipond. It's called Your Consent Is Not Required and it has to do with forced hospitalizations. The other one is by an attorney by the name of Jim Gottstein and it's called the Zyprexa Papers. And this was uncovering of the corruption, I believe it was Eli Lilly and the problems that the drugs were causing in the patients that it was being given to. And there's evidence that these kinds of drugs given for mental health actually hurt the prognosis of the people that it's being given to. Today I got a call by somebody that was forcibly brought to the hospital and then released. Yesterday I was on a call and I continue to be part of this ongoing group. It's mostly lawyers that are working for the civil rights of people whose civil rights are being violated because they have a diagnosis. And there are no regulatory agencies that are making sure that the hospitals are following the rules and regulations for confinements. And as long as these people have Medicaid or some other insurance that's paying for it, their rights are being totally violated. I spoke to a friend of mine who was a social worker yesterday and she told me about a friend whose 12 year old child was kept in an emergency room pod for four weeks. That is traumatizing to a child. These things feel overwhelming to me. Number one, I'm a very sensitive person but knowing that there's no help out there. And first of all, because of HIPAA laws it's hard to find the other people to be able to gather together and have strength in numbers. Then because of the shame and the stigma around it it's hard to gather them together. The lawyers work for the hospitals so it's hard to get legal representation. This scares me because of what I see happening in politics because of the abuse that is happening. It is 30 times more profitable than locking people away in prisons. So I will stop for now and I'll try to get some resources together and put them in the chat in the matter most but I just couldn't let that go. So thank you Mike for bringing it up because it really weighs heavy on me. Is there anyone present who hasn't checked in who would like to check in? Eric, you said you're in viewer mode today which is great. I think the rest of us have gone. Carl has not, actually Mark I think you said you were in viewer mode. Eric, I don't know that you did. I'll just quickly talk a little bit. So one idea that I've been playing with I mentioned in chat is breaking a transcript of a YouTube video into five minute segments and feeding each segment to chat GPT and seeing what kind of summary I get. I tried it with like 10 minutes and then it got confused. So I think five minutes is the right dosage. And the theory is that it's trying to match more than necessary and it doesn't find matches. So yeah, now that could be automated and like it could also produce audio. But so I've just put these ideas out there but I don't know exactly how to put it all together. So and I've been just doing a lot with my vintage computers doing it. So I could build a whole internet with Apple computers now. There's a new little device that can do networking but yeah, I keep thinking about the big problems to the dynamic knowledge repositories that we should have but don't yet after 50 years but basically I need to really take care of myself and figure out where I'm at just day by day. That's what it is, little improvements here and there. Thanks. Before you go, Gil, Carl, did you wanna check in? We're just doing a check-in round. You came in a little bit late but if you'd like to, this is the moment. Okay, yeah, just taking care of some issues. I guess if healthcare is the part of the topic I spent, I made about five or six appointments. Now I've been neglecting stuff because of all the craziness with my dad and home care but yeah, it's getting there. In fact, I was just at the bank, which is why I was late so I'm clearing up some things from my father. So, I don't know yet. I actually bought the family home. So hopefully things will settle down and I can get back to doctoral research and things. And then I did post LinkedIn and stuff but we've got the deputy CIO of general services administration the positions open until July 21st. So if you've got people who qualify, definitely it's an incredible place to work. We're really at the center of everything as far as like data.gov and all these different things. So that'll stop. Thanks, Carl. Thank you. I'll step in and play moderator again. Gil, Laura's yours. Carl, I hope you'll carry our blessings with you as you navigate this challenging stuff. A whole thread of thinking rising in me, Mike, provoked by your sharing. Man, it's complicated. I wanna talk about messes. I was managing my dad's care during the last few years of his life and he was on, I think, at 1.16 different medications, all of which of course had interactions more than he could keep track of. So I had to manage the inventorying and the scheduling and the dosing. It was probably one of the hardest things that I've ever done in my life. And of course, the doctors didn't talk to each other. So there was nobody managing the interactions except occasionally when he was hospitalized there was a guy called a hospitalist who was designed to be a point of integration and was wicked smart, but very rare. So yeah, so you're in that. And at one level, I think about it as the mechanistic worldview, running muck dealing with complex adaptive systems. Let's poke this thing here and see what happens. And it's very hard to resist because they will tell you when it might be true that you will die if you don't take this medication. And Stuart, you're entering into this conversation. My wife has been in it for years. And in a constant reconsideration for her, should I be taking these drugs or not? Yeah, I might die sooner if I don't, but what's my quality of life if I do and none of it is certain anyway? And so there's kind of a constant question. So we've got this mechanistic worldview of complex adaptive systems, plus we've got private equity, which has been crawling over this industry and producing the message that Stacey was talking about and others. I think there's a project for Carnegie if you're not already doing it, which is given that the United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow public drug advertising. So not like ask your doctor about this condition, ask your doctor about this drug, your doctor's got 10 minutes with you. And you come in saying, give me this, and a lot of doctors are gonna say, well, okay, you know, this is strangely a place where AI may actually be helpful to be able to map the interactions and feed some perspective or suggestions to doctors. But I'm struck by a couple of things. One is that my sister-in-law, who's lived in France for 30 years and has raised two children and buried a husband and lived through breast cancer, has never seen a medical bill and has never seen a piece of paper. She just walks in and gets care. And the care is half the cost per capita is in the United States and the medical outcomes are better. So there's that. And there's a boatload of work to do there, but the drug advertising might be an interesting place for you guys to poke and see what happens. You know, for Jane and me, our basic response to the mechanistic versus integrated perspective is to choose a very deep practitioner, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture is kind of the leading edge of that as our primary care provider. We still have doctors, we still have health insurance, we still do stuff in the system. But our starting point is someone who has a comprehensive view of the living system as a self-healing system. And we always start there and reference everything there. Last thing, and thank you for permitting me to go along here. I was on a webinar yesterday. It was quite remarkable, a group called R3.0 out of Europe and the US which has been doing some very rigorous systems work around sustainability and corporate sustainability and policy and building white papers and tools and so forth. Had an exploratory call yesterday that started with the premise that this whole mess, you know, sustainability, climate, ESG is really about love. And entered into a conversation about love among people and loving organizations. And I'm a little uncomfortable with the direction that they're heading because it seems to be building an instrument to measure love and enterprise. I think some things don't get to get measured. But the instrument might also be valuable in just bringing the question to the fore and helping people think about what's going on here among us and with me. And is there love here? And what is driving us? And the reason I raise it is because I found myself aside from all my specific questions and concerns, I found myself in an utterly remarkable mood that I couldn't even name. But I was in a mood that I've never been, I spent a lot of time in these things like you all do. It was a mood that I've never been in. It was a tenderness and a reflection. And so the question is alive with me. It's threading through my conversations with Ken and living between worlds and a kinship worldview, which is one of the perspectives on the indigenous wisdom that Ken's been talking about. And it's just, you know, what if we notice love and what if we presence love in more and more and more of our lives, even the places where it seems like it has no place? I've spoken. Stuart and Doug, and take your time stepping in. Yeah, so two thoughts. And I'll come back to what Gil finished with, but in terms of medical system, and yeah, I think of my acupuncturist as a primary care and the other folks are doing the mechanical stuff. But what I thought about as we were talking was it's an interesting phenomenon. Kaiser's got a pretty good interactive system to communicate with docs, but you can't communicate with two at a time. You can only communicate with one. In other words, you can't copy two under doctors on an important conversation that needs a level of integration. And that's obviously by design, you know, obviously by design. It's not by omission. Stuart, I have actually sent emails complaining to Kaiser and engaged them because they use Epic. They're basically CERNR and Epic are the duopoly of hospital information systems. And I sent them a note saying, hey, Kaiser, your software sucks. Aren't you old enough and big enough to have built your own really good one? Could you go over and look at Global Vista, which is different and better? And they've kind of engaged a little bit, but they don't know what to do with the complaint about their user experience. But this is really important because I find that their software falls apart all over the place. And I do like Kaiser. So sorry to interrupt you, but I saw the same thing and I was like, people, you're stupid, stop doing this. Thank you. The other thing about, which ties into Gil's surfacing love. When I was doing a lot of divorce mediation and it's congruent with my conflict resolution models for conversational models, I would sit with a couple and I wouldn't get near any other quote, articulated issues that they were fighting about, custody, visitation, money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Until I drilled down and had a series of questions in a dialogue model that were designed to surface compassion and love and get them to see that other human being over there that at one time they were in love with enough to marry and have kids with. I'll tie that into Klaus's check-in about the food service industry and what's going on with clear-cutting. I guarantee you that all those companies have articulated values that are lip service to some of the things that we're talking about. And so in some ways, I would suggest that as a facilitation model, before you start arguing about the concepts and ideas that you bring people back to those articulated values and try to see their actions through the lens of those values as things to evaluate. I'm not saying that that's gonna work, but I'm just saying it's something that can be useful to just to bring up. Because in some ways, if you do that in an artful way, we're all human beings. And I think so many people are feeling the level of frustration now, but they're just not sure what else to do. People on a rat wheel, they just can't get off the fucking rat wheel. And yeah, and one more thing. And I put this in the chat when Pete was talking about, creating a body of knowledge someplace. I'm someone who avoided writing. I got an undergraduate education with writing one paper. And then I got to law school and I had to write a huge research paper for the dean. And my first draft, that totally and completely destroyed. I never saw so much writing. I shit these people are serious about writing. And I ended up as a student writing editor at the law review, coaching and teaching others how to write. Because I was able to turn around my experience and realized a lot of stuff about the writing process. It's a craft, it's an iteration, and it clarifies ideas. And is there a great learning process as a wonderful way to hold it. And then you get something that is, and especially if you have multiple people working on a piece, you get something that is very, very solid. And that's one of the things that I've decided to do lately just to get this work out in the world. I don't care who publishes it, doesn't matter. It's not that important. I just need to get it out before I die, which is not gonna be anytime soon. Thank you. Mr. Homer at your leisure or a letter. I forgot when I was doing my check-in something that was actually very pointed for me this week. I never knew my grandparents. My father's dad died before I was born and his mom died when I was about three and he didn't like his endless. So I barely knew my mother's parents. But when I was a kid, my aunt, not quite a house in Saddle, Harbor Long Island, and I spent all my summers out there. And there was an old sea captain next door. His name was Captain Peters. And he was my grandfather figure. And this man just, he could seemingly do everything, anything and everything. He just, he was really an amazing guy. And this week I started to poke around the internet and see what I could find out about him. And I came across this story that I just put in the chat, this Mariners Museum. If you have three minutes, just read this story. It is astounding. I never knew this. The man had his ship torpedoed out from under him and he rescued all of his men, had a broken leg. The oil covered everything. After he got all his men off the ship, he climbed back up an oil covered ladder with a broken leg to get the secret papers. So they wouldn't fall into Nazi hands. I mean, I was in awe reading this story. It's this amazing thing. So I just want to put that in there as something that's actually quite positive. So enjoy that at your leisure or leisure as you prefer. Pleasure or pleasure? Exactly. And I do have a poem, but I still have a few minutes. So I'll wait till the end or I can do that now, whatever you like. I'm thinking dose of poetry right now would be welcome and lovely. And once again, it's one of these things where this poem came up this week and I'm listening to this call and it seems really apropos. It's called Five Ways to Kill a Man by Edwin Brock. There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You could make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this properly, you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to hammer the nails home. Or you could take a length of steel shaped and chased in the traditional way and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears. But for this, you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at least two flags, a prince and a castle to hold your banquet in. Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, bloke acid him. But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches. Not to mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs and some round hats made of steel. In the age of airplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and dispose of him by pressing one small switch. All you then require is an ocean to separate you. Two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath, and land that no one needs for several years. There are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat, is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle of the 20th century and leave him there. That is a sizzling, spanking, awesome poem, Ken. Thank you so much for bringing it to this room. Amazing, isn't it? That's a mind blow. I just didn't see it coming to that last, ah, just get ya. Wow. Thank you. Pallas, whenever you feel like stepping in. Yeah, you know, I was, I wanted to follow up on this discussion about love and the surprise that this is indeed one of the most powerful driving force in humanity because it's the oldest topic of humanity, right? Volstoy has, in my mind, done the most profound work in summarizing how love and empathy, empathy really may be a better term, is really the clue that holds civilizations together, that holds human coupings together. So every religion, and I put in a quick summary from chat, GPT here, on what is reciprocal altruism in love and you can see in each religion, this is the central theme. So why should this surprise us, right? I mean, it's just like, how did this happen? The question just arises, why does empathy not dominate our political process, you know, our companies, our, I mean, if we know with such certainty, right? Because it is, you can't be more certain about anything we know about ourselves as human beings. Then that empathy and love is the critical emotion, critical way of being, to have a successful togetherness. So why is this not a central theme in our conversations and discussions and in our political process? Because clearly we're running into the opposite direction. So it hit me as a surprise that this was a surprise and I would just, oh God, how do you get this more into the public psyche? I mean, when you look at Christians, right? Allowing Trump and getting so enraged with their culture themes, you couldn't be more misguided about what is the central theme of your faith than your belief, you know? So I don't know. I'm glad it surfaces, I find it more disturbing that it is not like right at the front of our mind, you know, right at the center of our consciousness. Thank you, Klaus. I will say perhaps overly optimistically that it seems to me that, and this may sound strange, that Joe Biden's strategy into the next electoral cycle and his administration seems to be to love his enemies and try to love everybody and just try to go do some stuff. Again, I'm maybe being overly optimistic here, but I think he is doing that in part because of its sharp contrast against the strategies of hatred and everything else that the other side appears to have gone all in on. Mark, you may have the last word today. We're getting close to the end of our time. From a communications engineering standpoint, love takes more communication and division or hate or it takes a heck of a lot less. And so there's an entropy kind of energy equation. How are we going to basically put in more work that it takes? I remember an amazing dating statistic that people more easily communicate and bond about what they mutually don't like than what they mutually like. And so thank you for the Maturana article, Gil. Very interesting. And I certainly have enough difficulty with love between two people, much less within the organizations that I interact with. But here's love coming at you, everybody on this call. Thank you. And I just want to echo that by saying we had a funny, slow, bumpy start today. And I just appreciate y'all's patience just sitting there with it and letting it kind of roll out and letting us get to where we got, which is someplace really interesting. There are multiple people said things today that I just will be stewing on and going back to. We're right at time. It seems like a good place to wrap. I am grateful for your presence and we'll see you on the inner tubes. Next week is five-minute universities. I will walk that in now. Gil, you had asked which format we're using. It's not Howard Reingold's format. It's a different one, which is whoever wants to present on something that they know something about or care about. And it could be anything. It could be in any domain that they'd like to share. It has five minutes and precisely five minutes to explain it and they could use a deck. They could not use a deck, probably easier without a deck, but five minutes. And then we do five minutes of Q and A and then we cut it off. And anybody who wants to keep asking questions, you know exactly whom to talk to. Then we bounce to the next person. So I will create a queue for who has offered to be in there. Eric, if you want to put people to sleep in five minutes, you can do that. And like if you wanted to hold up a little thing and hypnotize us, give that a go. I don't know. I don't know. But next week is five-minute universities. And thank you all. The Beatles came up in a response to Mark. Go listen to all you need is love. Excellent.