 This is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, January 4th, 2024, the first call of the new year. And here we are. We were just kicking back and forth a tiny bit that it's going to be an exciting year. Mike is relentlessly and hopelessly optimistic as is his course through life, I think. It's an easier path. Although at some point I'll be diagnosed for being pathologically optimistic and I don't know what they'll treat me with. There should be like a DCM entry for that. So, what is the DCM? What's the diagnostic manual? It's a DCM. Yeah, it's a DCM. Happy new year. Today we alternate formats, usually, and today is a check-in call. We have a check-in format that not all of you have been through, so I'll explain it briefly. We've evolved one where we sort of pause between check-ins, so we have people step in when they feel like it. When they feel moved to step in and check-in, we try to check in only once during check-ins and I do not play sort of traffic police during the check-in. I just sort of step out and wait for people to step in unless there's somebody new into the group that doesn't know the protocol or something else runs awry, in which case I will step in. I'll wait until everybody's gone and then we'll pick something that came up during the check-in and use that for the rest of our time today. But the notion is just to make this a pre-space. And a couple of our calls at the end of, yeah, Stacey, a couple of our calls were in the fall of last year, felt a little bit like Quaker meeting. There were long silences and I was getting, even I, who I'm pretty patient with silence, was getting a little bit nervous and everybody was like, feels like I'm meeting space, it's great. So I rolled with that and it's been great. With that, I will, what did I forget from the protocol? I think that's it. With that, I'll step back and see who'd like to lead us into check-ins. Quick question. Please. These are pretty intimate conversations, but we do record them and we make them available. Do you have any sense of how many people watch the replays? So I occasionally look at the traffic we get and most of our calls to get 20 or 30 views within a couple months, which is tiny but not zero. So my support is Aikido, one of my buddies in the dojo often will watch our calls and will make a comment to me in the dojo on Thursday nights. So Thursday morning is our call, our group call, I upload, and then he will have watched a piece of it or something by Thursday at six, which is interesting. So some people are enjoying these and I get the occasional comment. I got a new LinkedIn friend request recently from somebody I didn't know and he said, I just want to thank you for posting these calls. I find that they're convivial, intelligent conversation among people who care for each other. They have been like, I'm paraphrasing poorly, but they've been sort of an oasis for me. And I was like, that's exactly what I'm hoping. I couldn't ask for anything better than that. Maybe we're spreading optimism. Well, thank you. I suspect most of them are people who are part of our community and just can't make it. But I was just curious whether we had followers in China or something. I think it spreads beyond the people who are explicitly in OGM. I think there's a reach for people who've, I don't know, who'd like the conversations. Thanks. That warms my heart. Thanks for asking. Yep. With that, I'm going to mute myself and step in at some point during the check in, but I'll let everybody take turns coming in and feel free to pause for a while. Use your electronic hand to get kind of in the queue to check in. And whoever's next to check in, if you unmute while your hand is up, that will tell us that you know that you're ready to jump in, but you can take as long as you wish to give us some pause and some breathing space before jumping in. So we are off. I will jump in. We started by talking about optimism, but I'm going to be a little down. Mostly because of my professional work on digital policy. And in the last two weeks, there's just been an eruption of really troubling developments that will fundamentally shape the way we use digital technology. If they go the wrong way. And so we have the New York Times suing open AI, trying to basically make you read, make you pay anytime you want to read something. That's basically where that leads you. It almost is a footnote tax. I mean, if you want to copy somebody's text and put it in an article you write and add an annotation, you will. That leads you to that kind of end result. Everything's locked down, you pay for everything. More, more seriously, we have in the UK and now a number of states, the idea that companies have to design in surveillance. We have a lawsuit where several parents who lost children to fentanyl, who were able to get the drug through encrypted message services that automatically erase. These companies have been sued because they didn't make it easy to track activities. Fundamental change in how we view the internet. I mean, and again, the next step in that logic is that every phone call should be recorded so that if there's any illegal activity on a phone call, the police should be able to find out. Another one that only the nerds care about is that the White House, for political reasons, decided they're no longer going to fight for global flows of data. This has been something bipartisan. We've all thought for it for 30 years. Everybody thought it was a good idea. But apparently Elizabeth Warren decided that this is something that benefits Google, so she's against it. And so she called up the US Trade Representative and we're now backing away from some one of the core foundational ideas of the internet. And it doesn't just affect social media, it affects general electric engines and manufacturing and security. So I'm just watching all this go on and wondering who's thinking seriously about it and feeling a little inadequate because I don't write all that well I should be writing a 500 page 500 word screed every three days, given what's out there and I'm tweeting but that's not sufficient. And then a health thing I'm discovering that I can't trust medical devices. I saved money and bought Warby Parker glasses about a year ago, went back to the optometrist and discovered that the prescription was not only wrong there was is actually warped. It was the lens was not correct and I've been having problems with eye strain. No idea why. So it's just there's all these, all these things that I'm frustrated. But I do have this belief that things will get better in the long run and that technology can help us out. So that's where I'm at. And I did have a wonderful break for Christmas. And I did watch some incredible movies. If people have not seen boys in the boat which came out on Christmas Day. Even if you don't care about rowing and you don't care about sports. It is a great movie. The book is even better but it takes longer. And the boy in the Heron is the latest from the Ghibli studio in Japan if you like animation, it will expand your horizons on what animation can do. Okay, well I'm going to jump in here. I was really struck last week by the fact that Jerry called for us talking about the year past and the year to come and nobody did that. Not only that nobody talked about climate change and related issues. And I'm just wondering whether the lack of participation here is a deeper phenomena that's related to the fact that we're not talking about the things people need to talk about. I don't know what to do about it or what that means do not have a positive interpretation of it well I sort of do. And that is that we like to have a place where we can hang out and not have to deal with serious issues. But that's a great reach. I'm mostly thinking like we just are avoiding the obvious. I mean we're on a crash course with history. Coming out of cop. It's clear that there's no leadership in the world to pick up the baton after cop and go anywhere with it. And the cop itself was very thin in terms of any outcome. People were still talking about oh we've got to keep keep from reaching 1.5 degrees when the scientists have told us we've already reached. So I'm deeply puzzled and personally concerned that we're not talking about the things that I particularly care about. And I'm seeing it as a group phenomena that I don't yet understand. And the thought Jerry can you I'm sorry to interrupt but I see myself signing in on the bottom there but I'm not I didn't do anything. Can you kick that other Stacy off. The other Stacy will fall off. Let me see if I can do it. I can remove. Yes. Thank you. I don't know how that it just popped up. You are there now only once. Thank you. Are you okay. You still have your hand up. Oh thank you. So for 2024. I'm still following the logic of the Neil book. Because it really. It really gets you to to follow a process of thinking deeper into into without having a preconceived ideas. It's what theory you call stepping into the future as it unfolds. You don't really quite know what unfolds and how but when you see it you step into it. So, the, the, I've been working with a with a range of NGOs, no climate reality project and Sierra Club and the American Sustainable Business Network and sort of a consortium of Agriculture and food focused NGOs and a lot of time for the last almost two years now has been spent for us to really dig into the farm bill and understand the legislative process and the technicalities of the farm bill and we have just made huge strides to to really get into the system. But what my partner from climate systems solutions and I are now working on is to is to engage with business people, you know, and And to to draw in, you know, farmers and processes and technical service providers and so on into a discussion. That allows a a synchronization effort, because what you see in the industry. And that's just actually wrote in one of my newsletters about synchronicity. Is that the, the industry government is working in silos. So you have the silo approaches to to finding solutions that are often contradictory that fight each other. Inadvertently now because some great sounding idea is creating externalities that are just not being content that it's just not surfacing because the process of developing ideas and and solutions isn't isn't creative. It's just it's not it's not bringing up these these relationships and and and connections and interdependencies. So we have a workshop that we kicking off and not a founder from the kiss the ground organization is in there to board share of the organic consumer association we have a couple of farmers. We have a couple of international companies who are providing equipment, I mean, technical solutions that are that are quite creative and interesting. And we want to see if we can find develop synergies that that leads to more ideas and and and spark, you know, new ways of thinking. And so I don't really have any intentions I just turned 74 in December. I have no intentions of exiting my retirement. But I do I do like to provide thought leadership based on my 50 some years of experience in the food business and and see where where that can take us Jerry that new book idea was absolutely amazing, you know, because it provides guidance, you know, in the structure, you know, in the way to to explore a topic and advance it. And then working with AI has been another amazing thing, you know, it's just like my body. We are having conversations. And it's it's absolutely astounding how how you can in in half an hour explore a topic with background information that would take you days to to accumulate. So that's that's sort of my hope is to to bring topics down to the base. Because they when you when you talk it at middle level. The people, there is an understanding in stories, it's a structuring stories to where they just make sense. One of the most difficult things to develop in story format is when everybody says, you know, of course. Right, because when you have this, of course, kind of effect, then you just have really achieved something but to get to that just takes a lot of time and work. So, so I'm all in for common sense, a high effects that have people engage and understand and and and sign up for for changing adapting because as Jack already mentioned, we were hitting 1.5 degrees Celsius this summer last summer. We are scheduled we are on track to hit two degrees this summer. I was listening in on a conversation with Bill Gates, where he very nonchalantly says yeah two degrees is already baked in but done with that. You understand below three degrees. And I'm thinking how insane is that I mean every scientist out there will tell you that the climate models basically unable to model anything beyond 1.5 degrees. They had this threshold where they thought that up to 1.5 degrees. You can sort of predict what will happen you can sort of, you know, understand the mechanisms that govern the system that we are discovering we are. We are totally dependent on but two degrees bets off and this guy is talking about three degrees like yeah maybe we can stay below this right. There is this insanity in in people who have incredible impact, incredible resources that they put to use. And if they're thinking is misguided, and they invest these these 10s and hundreds of millions of dollars in places where they do more harm than good. Really, in deep trouble and Bill Gates is out there buying up farmland is already the largest farmland owner in the world. So, so the to to to get to consensus opinion on on where we are what we're facing and understanding that food really is the base of pyramid economy. And that's the point out which we the society will simply collapse. If you don't protect the bottom 50 60% of the population. I mean the US at first 44 million people on food stamps. It's going to be, it's going to be an interesting year. And we'll keep on. We go into your book and and develop stores and see where we'll take us. I'll jump in. I want to say much personally. It's interesting. I just want to pick up on one thing that a class said, the idea of digging in and analyzing the farm bill. So, my, my, my take on on such things is that here we are intelligent, rational actors. Unfortunately, we're dealing in a world where rational action is not present anymore. I heard a report. There was I was listening to report this morning about the situation at the border. Something like 300,000 people cross the border last year in Texas. And Biden has proposed 1.2 12.2 billion dollars to deal with the with the border. The Republican Congressman I think from Oklahoma said, there's no way I'm getting near voting on that or acting on that, because I don't want to give Biden any kind of credit at all. And that's the world we're we're operating in. So when we look at rational action and think about rational action. We're gonna go with that. You know, there are no more statesmen there are no more people who are there are few shouldn't shouldn't say all few people that are actually looking at the greater good. But you've got a lot of players playing in that way. So, I'm not sure anymore. What kind of windmills to tilt that at this point in time. So that's all I want to say and that's today and yesterday was probably a little different. Maybe tomorrow will be a little different also, but that's today's thought. He thinks about your program computers for 35 years could use one, but that would be a mistake. I just want to share for me since I said check in. I really liked what Mike said about optimism. I think I've been a very optimistic person most of my life. I've been fortunate, actually, in my life. So, but I'm recently had a visit with a doctor and so they go through at least questions, you know, and they ask you, well, you know, have you been depressed. So I said, it was my sleep doctor. I said, well, aside from raising the news, like, you know, from what's in the daily news, and she sort of like, yeah, yeah, I looked at her. I said, no, I'm serious. It actually does make me anxious. And I waited for her to like, actually listen to it. So I do feel a little, I'm not as, I don't know, I don't know, especially what Doug has been talking about to about being in conversations about what I'm feeling is really important. But anyways, I just, I have some stubborn faith in humans, because we're human. On the other hand, what Stuart said about humans, you know, we're also a little, you know, crazy sometimes. So anyway, so that's all I can say about this year. I'm a little anxious. But I'm happy to be here with you all. Participate. So go ahead. Oh, sorry. Sorry, I missed the first five minutes and I missed what Mike was saying about optimism, because I am a big fan of optimism. I've always tried to be optimistic. I always look for the possibilities when other people don't see them. And I'm happy it was a framing comment for this conversation. It's very valuable for me. I try to get here whenever I can. But I don't like to use this forum for negativity. So let me, I mean, I don't want to say I'm not concerned with what's happening in the world. In the last week, the Dutch newspapers have been articulating the certainty of Trump in the election this year and giving endless coverage of what's going on in Gaza and the Ukraine and the right-wing populists who won the election in the Netherlands. And what that may bring. But instead of talking about negative things with some of how I try to avoid as much as possible, I looking for lenses, another new lenses to look at what's really possible in the world, whether they be from philosophy or science fiction or fantasy. I'm just trying to find new and unexpected ways to enter into the conversation. So since it's a check-in, I guess I should say I've been revisiting the Harry Potter films in the last holiday period and the Hobbit films, which were all broadcast on Dutch television. And looking at them through their imaginative content to the emotional content they seem to have on or seem to have had on a lot of people. I am taking a number of philosophical courses, which is helping me learn how to think through the lenses of philosophy, science fiction, fantasy. I've just registered for a course called How to Read the Tea Leaves about what science fiction novels can tell us about both the times they were written in and the times of today. I've just registered for a second course about how society has viewed nature through the lenses of philosophy and literature since the Christian age. And of course in man in search of man, humanism and religion in the past 200 years, starting with the axial age that's still continuing. And not being blind to what's happening in the world outside of fantasy and philosophy and science fiction, I'm constantly triggered by how authors, poets, artists, philosophers have been able to change the way their societies have thought about the world and acted in the world in the last 2,500 years. And knowing that it always has been possible gives me the solace and optimism that it may still be possible in our times. Well, let me say differently that it is possible in our times if we find the right notes to play. So that's my contribution this afternoon. So all should be saying what I'm really thinking. And what I'm thinking is, this is a waste of time. You're wasting my time, all of you, sitting here in a dead silence, when there is so much to say and talk about. And then what gets talked about doesn't seem to warrant the meditative time that went into it. You're free to turn off soon. And I appreciate your urging us to higher levels, but this call is what it is right now. We love having you here. You push us quite hard, but you're free to leave. And we're in the check-in round. We're not in a conversation. And I for one hope Doug does not leave. I second that and I also second what Jerry said. I'll check in now. I've been focused more on what's really what really drives me, which is spiritual psychology and been spending more time thinking about conscious evolution. And part of that is becoming responsible for our choices. So that's the only reason that I would echo what Jerry said to Doug, which is you can leave because that's the truth. You could. And that's not to say, Doug, I do want you here. But I think it's really important that we are very careful with what we say and the energy we put out. I can go in a million directions and I don't want to do that. So let me just stick with saying what Hank said touched a few things in me. So I'm a very optimistic person by nature. But I'm also pragmatic. That being said. So interestingly enough, over the past couple of days, I finally got in a little bit of the Israel conversation on Facebook, not that I wanted to. But it was somebody that I know and respect somewhere over. I don't remember if she's in the Nether. I don't remember where she is. But all I can do in that conversation when I'm talking to somebody who has different views, meaning that they're very pro-Palestinian is try to highlight why people that don't agree with her what their fears are and what the barriers are to the other side listening. That's in general, that's usually what I can do to help a conversation is let the other side know what the barriers are to the other side hearing them. That being said, she sent me this Facebook video to watch, which was about spirituality. And I haven't responded yet because it really takes a lot of time and effort to do a good job and I just, I'm not ready to do that. I haven't slept. I'm tired. I have a headache. That being said, Hank, I feel like there is some crossroad there where spirituality and that belief system, that sort of crosses over where a lot of misinformation occurs, and it divides people. And there's something that I feel can be untangled there. And at least for me and where I want to start is where people want to consciously focus and become more aware of their own conscious evolution in small group communities where we are building relationships with each other like in this group. There are, you know, I mean, it may be to some people, it may seem like a waste of time. But I know, even though I don't know any of you, well, I know some of you pretty well, but something happens, something happens when you're meeting with people all the time. Yeah, I'm going to stop talking here. But that's the beginning point that that's that's my check in my incomplete check in. I've been taking around what to what to check in with and lots of different things pass through my mind and then I was listening to each of you. And in turn, and the thing I think I want to head toward is I wish I could see each of our reasoning trees or whatever you want to call it I wish I could see inside each of our minds, how we hold the things we hold because Doug, I know that you have one pressing urgent thing that means to happen that you wish we were all working on. And yet I think sometimes Stacy when you report in on conversations you've had with people who are very different from you and hold different opinions. And I think that that work is more useful than us logicking our way through or science in our way through a variety of things. And yet another part of me believes that we need to do all the work possible to make the arguments and data and evidence as evident as possible, kind of as Klaus was saying that that he's feeling that the argument is helping him through so that we can compare notes and figure things out but but many of us are saying things because we hold beliefs that haven't made it into the conversation. And one of my wishes desires hopes is that by keeping the conversation quite loose and letting it go places. We will trip across some insights and some things that allow us to figure those things out. I don't think logic. Certainly I mean there's a question there's a thought in my brain that's like what will cause people to change their minds about climate change. And it's been there for a long time now and we've in the meantime last year was the hottest year ever with a lot of extreme climate events. There's plenty of research reports and other kinds of things saying this is like the house is on fire and it's about to float down over over a cliff like the old Gary Larson cartoon of the crisis clinic. And still nobody's movable, partly because this is about politics and power, partly because it's about us versus them, partly because there's a whole lot of unexplored things that have little to do with reason a lot to do with this shift in tribe that we don't know how to get through. And I, I watched the news also and it depresses me also and what I keep coming back to is how do we let the air out of the tires of the Trump juggernaut and Trump is living in bullet time right now it seems like there's at least 91 bullets aimed at him and he is he's going to try to dodge them all. And I don't think he can dodge them all. And I'm unclear which of the bullets is actually lethal to his ambitions to control the country or the world again, because some of these bullets, Hitler and Lula both served time before becoming presidents of their respective and that didn't seem to slow them down. And they're very different people Hitler and Lula I'll say that for sure Lula was in jail because his political enemies put in there. And so I just would love I keep trying to figure out now that we have strong AI can we infer from somebody's speeches and writings, what that tree looks like can we. And I don't want to go into the distance because I'm weird I'm several sigmas way down the trail of the distribution because I externalize what I believe as much as I can every day into this brain thing which is also a little bit too weird and But I did a podcast some months ago was Tiago Forte the build a second brain guy, and I didn't read a lot of his stuff but in the call I learned that his second brain is his private external notes, and he's got a pretty elaborate note taking system. His third brain is whatever he publishes for the outside world. So most of the work he's doing in his system is just for him. And I think most of us I wish most of us were working for us not for me. Not for ourselves and that we would share and externalize as much of this as we can, so that it's more visible and as we approach each other in situations where we're concerned that our priorities are mixed up that we're not doing the right thing that we're not pulling or whatever, we would at least have some tangible issues to talk about including why we believe certain things so strongly. What is it that we're convinced of that makes us think that this particular thing is the one thing we should focus on and how that works. I want to somehow make that more palpable more tangible more useful. And then I think what Klaus was talking about a moment ago is that the exercise of doing that helps clarify your own thinking a bit. It's a moment I had many years ago when I was at New Science Associates probably around 1990 I think or 1989. I was writing a report about a speech I'd been giving for a while. And it turned out that as I wrote the report I realized that the graphic I was using the illustrative graphic I was using the speech had the axes backwards and wasn't really logical. And as I converted the stuff I've just been saying while waving my hands in front of like you get it there's an image like like this is this makes sense. When I had to turn it into words, it had to get more precise it had the words actually had to like work. If you pay that much attention to words for a lot of people words is just words, you know, they're going by. I will, I will stop now but I'm the reason that OGM exists in some sense is my quest to try to figure out how do we see and feel what each other thinks, including the feel part. I think the feel part is like insanely important. When we talk to people who disagree with us a lot they feel things as strongly as we do, and there's a reason for it and there's a way through there. And if we can slow down enough to get there then maybe we can all cooperate on solving some of the world's problems because our Mexican standoff right now means that we're not cooperating to solve anything. And that's going to kill us in the end, just exactly the way Doug is predicting if we don't solve the rest of these issues. So with that I'm complete. Thank you, since Jerry since you brought up words I just want to interject one thing that's been on my mind, because I tend to be very particular with the words that I use and I think it's so important. I recently learned that in like languages like Korean, Chinese, I don't remember which language specifically it was, but that a word that is spelled exactly the same has like five different meanings just based on the tone. And I thought that was so important when especially when you're thinking about sound and frequencies and you get into the more like the quantum physics kind of stuff, which you know if you're going to start thinking about how we manifest reality or if you're thinking about emotions or the messages that you give and receive from people, and then you understand that just the tone of something changes the entire meaning. Seeing it in print, at least in English, the sound of the word is going to have something like I think about the word like some people say you're trapped in the matrix. And I think of the difference between saying you're trapped in the matrix or you're trapped in a story. The word story has a totally different tone than the word matrix. So I'm just going to use that as the example and be quiet now. Thank you. Thanks, I will point out that we're not quite in the conversational part of our check and round yet. Sorry. That's okay. So, I've been more and more immersed in connecting with and reorienting my experience and roll through an energetic lens and giving far less weight and attention to the ration and far more attention to the sensing dimensions and grounding dimensions and motivation or fiery dimensions. And spiritual, not in a religious or rural context, but spiritual enough space opportunity, unbounded opening to and connecting with so sort of reverse engineering from words and reactions and behaviors to underlying experience. You know, Doug, what what came up for me in your share was not the words, but the underlying emotional driver behind it. This is this you're wasting my time. And which is about your relationship to you and your time. And that moment and that share was honest. And I want to acknowledge and appreciate you for sharing it and voicing it. I get I get you I hear that. And so through my lens, so much of what I am seeing and the way I'm experiencing it in terms of the news and all of the stuff is different and becoming more and more different by the day because so much of it is constructed and so much of it isn't that it can artificial. It's made by man. And so I'm finding the human preoccupation with the fact that we can think abstractly and create things and do all these things that those are meaningful, substantial and real and supportive to being and so much of it is made by our own hand. So much of it is our own creation of our own rajas and our illusions and attachments and beliefs and all of that. It's all rooted in stuff made by us for us. That doesn't have any grounded connection to reality. What's really abstracted stuff is driving most of the adverse and negative consequences and as much and as fast and as instantaneously as we're capable of creating it all, we're also capable of changing our mind and we're capable of letting things go and of dropping things. And so for me, I'm like insanely optimistic in my belief and faith that at a certain point, the sense felt awareness and connection to what's happening, ceases to make sense, and I have the ability to go, I know. I'm not doing that anymore. And I have a belief that, you know, 8 billion people like, you know, there's a healthy enough percentage of others who will be situated that will get to that point at some point sooner or later. Now, we have demonstrated historically that, you know, we've slaughtered millions and had wars in order to get to that point, but we do get to that point one way or another. So I'm really interested in things that can catalyze that awakening on an individual level. And so the holiday time was very much about deepening my ruminations around that. And last on a note, we've been a dog household since 35 years since my wife and I have been together and we rescued a cat two days ago. I was 30 degrees out and a neighbor knocked on the door and said, there's this cat and it's driving us crazy. And, you know, I'm going to call animal control, but I thought of you and what, I've come to learn there is something called the cat network, which is a network of cats and cats find their owners under these circumstances apparently. So I'm now learning and feeling into the world of cats, which is really extraordinary. And with that I'm complete. So check in, speak into this into the void or into the not void. I'm, I'm struck by a lot of what I've been hearing and the kind of relationship between various things. I had a great conversation with a friend. I over dinner about, you know, circles of control and the notion of being able to let go of what you can't control, but being active in what you can control. And certainly climate is, is there, there are things within your control and things beyond your control. The way that people on this planet relate to each other and the causes of disagreement and war and tribalism in its worst aspects are both within and without our control and seem to me crucial to being able to do anything about climate and war and hunger and income inequality. And I don't know that. I don't know that we're going to solve it in time to overt climate catastrophe. It kind of seems to me, you know, to get all get on the same page to do something about this within the time we have seems, and I'm an optimistic person seems a little bit like too high a bar for us to clear. I hope I'm wrong. But sharing brains and and the possibilities inherent in so I can put this coherently. You know, Gil mentioned that the idea of managing the public and private brain seemed like, you know, a heavy lift. And, you know, Jerry was talking about Tiago Forte and, and how little of what how little of his brain was public. And, you know, and then there's all the portion of our brain that is pubic. So, referring to the chat. So, you know, that's a distraction or a joy and a joy. Sorry. The idea that with the digital manifestations of what we are what is in our brain. We might agree to share and trust. But we're not in the sensical public. And therefore, thereby magnify our ability to find consensus beyond tribe. To me seems like the Hail Mary, that could win this. This battle. And it involves also involves trust and willingness to concede a little of the power that we poured to the consensus of all of us. So, you know, thinking about what's possible within my circle of control, I think about ways to enable that sharing of of knowledge and expertise and ways to model the kind of trust in others to concede that I don't know the answer and I want to empower someone who does. You know, it's I'm I'm dumping a lot of thoughts that are connected and not a conclusion and not a prescription. And wishing that we were all doing that and having a benevolent that could take those sentiments and let us let us find our commonality. Because we're so good at finding reasons to define ourselves differently, whether it's religion or race or nationality. Or, you know, party gender, you name it. Yeah, I guess that's where my head is and I'll leave it there. So, thanks. Well, for me, I must admit that in December, I was thinking 2024 was going to be our breakout year. For all the movements that are happening around the world. And today has been a downer. Excuse me. I think my guess is just about everybody here is an optimistic person. You probably wouldn't be if you weren't sitting here. And yet, all the optimism in nature to us isn't coming out today. It's it's kind of in this space of being able to perceive a focusing on the problem. All the problems. And think trying to think out solutions at scales beyond us. Somebody said, we need to control can we control this or control that. None of us control anything. Right. You know, maybe, maybe you control your brain, Jerry. Maybe you control, maybe you control some things. But your conscious self hardly controls anything. And, and I think that if we keep trying to figure out how we're going to fix this by controlling it. That if we try to figure out, how are we going to get logically above this or figure this out through logic or rational ways. It's not to say that we don't need those. We don't need more information about the problem. We need more solutions to the problems. In my opinion, we have them. We know what the solutions are the. I'm sorry, Mike, I don't know you very well, but name a problem that we don't have an idea about how to solve it. If we could only X, Y, Z. Right. We'll get a chance to talk about it. Yeah, well, let's talk at length about this, but I, I, I'm a technologist. I, I look at a lot of sociology problems that are unsolved. Open conversations segment is near. My, my point is to do just that to strike up a conversation that isn't about the negative that we've been talking about. But talking about the things that we can do as individuals. That we can act on today. And not waiting for another year and so that January of next year, we're not having this conversation again. Because I've been part of these communities for a long time. And every single January, it's the same conversation. And we're optimistic in December and we're down in January. And then we start the year thinking. Well, nothing's really changed other than the number on the year. And here we are with the same problems and the same issues in the same nightmare facing us. But I feel for Doug, because to be honest, I feel the exact same way Doug does. We're wasting fucking time. And we're wasting it not because we're giving each other time to think. And not because we're honoring each other's ability to speak and so forth. In my opinion, we're wasting it because we're talking rather than acting. And acting even in small ways, in my opinion, takes us beyond trying to think through problems, find the exact solution, come up with what we think is going to be the solution, whether it be in politics or economics or you name it. But how do we take action in small ways that diverts us from all that thinking about the problem and gets us active in ways that new ways of doing us better to steal from Doug turns into new ways of doing everything better. It just, we got to stop. We've got to stop thinking that we can think our way out of this. And then we've got to stop thinking that we can talk our way out of it. And we've got to stop thinking that we can figure out an answer better than the answers we already have until we get into action at which point we will figure out better answers. I don't know if that kind of energy is welcome this morning, but it's certainly what I'm feeling. Thank you. So there was a really nice piece in The Plex that just came out. And it was about conversation. I think Gill had originally published it. So I've spent the last seven years predating COVID 35 to 40 hours a week and zoom conversations basis. The favorite being the one that was just conversation without any agenda whatsoever. And, and the basis for that was inconsistent with my mantra, which is how to how do human beings do human beings better. Seemed like a good place to start was how do we talk to each other, like start, you know, crawl before we walk walk before we run. Like, how do we actually communicate to them differently. Doug, I mean, I may interrupt you for a second. I think you've already checked in. Correct. Yes, I have. There are still two people who have not. Oh, I'm sorry. And we're not in class also we're not quite in conversation space and I know we're going to run out of time shortly my apologies for that but to honor. That's okay. Thanks. So I think we have Stuart and Ken who have not not talked to and Gill. I talked. Oh, that's right. You did. My mistake. So if you can hold off for a sec. My usual optimism, but I talked. True. Let's see if Ken and Gill would like to go and if not we can go into conversation. Good day, everybody. And it's a good day. Above ground, but I'm vertical, and I'm with friends. And I'm healthy. And despite all the problems in the world. I'm still standing. So that makes it a good day. And even on days when I'm not feeling well, it's a good day because I'm above ground and vertical. Most of the time. You know, I'm not a theist. But I've studied a lot of different religions and read this wonderful book years ago by Stephen Mitchell who's a Jewish guy who's a Zen student. And a translator speaks several languages and he's called the gospel according to Jesus and he went back and looked at what did Jesus actually teach. They found out Jesus said two things more than anything else. And the first thing he said was fear not do not be afraid. The second thing he said was love the neighbor as I self which is an amazing systems thinking teaching. Because if you recognize that you're in your neighbor are the same. They know each other very differently. And I've written about this in the plexus elsewhere but turn off the freakin media. It is designed to make you depressed and anxious and afraid. I can't control the world. I can't control as I was able to say I can't control much I can influence more than I can control. What I want to recognize is that I find myself paying attention to media and I get anxious and afraid. I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, we're gonna do if I turn it off and start to focus on who do I know that's doing good work. And where can I find news of people doing good work. And if I look through the lens of what's happening that I can amplify that's working that is that is useful. There's tons and tons of stuff. And I focus on that as Jose was saying, what can we do that what's working right. And I'm really, I struggle with this because I do scan the headlines. And I tend to focus more on the climate stories and human interest or health stories or science than I do politics but it's really freaking depressing out there in terms of what's happening in politics but this is a very old story this stuff can go on for hundreds or thousands of years. Why do we keep getting tracked in the same thing because people are afraid and they treat each other as if they're different. Oh, you know, you're not like me, you know, I'm better than you. And in my work with organizations on a facilitate, you know, I try to make groups smarter together and the number one killer of collective intelligence is arrogance. Number one support is humility. I don't know at all. You know, I take information in I have incomplete information I make predictions about the future. And that creates a mood for me I've either hope and optimism, or, or fear and anxiety, and how that mood affects me is the way that I'm going to operate in the world. So I am refusing on a daily basis to operate out of fear and anxiety. It doesn't mean I don't experience it. I experienced it a lot. But I won't, I won't make my decisions from that place I will allow myself to let it fully enter me. Move through it come out the other side and say what can we do. So I may have told this story before, but three some odd years ago I was at a workshop with Joanna Macy. We did something called the Karen of morning. So everybody went out into the we're up in the woods of California everyone out and spent an hour meditating on something in the world that's disappearing. And we all found a rock we brought it back and we wanted to time get up and place the rock in the center of the circle and said this is for the dolphins this is for the seals this is for the wheels this is for the giraffes or the elephants or whatever it is and talk personally about what that meant to us. And I went back to this big outer circle and join us. And now the next circle in is the circle of reporting. Stand up, walk around and call out whatever's on your mind and people were saying, every 15 minutes a man rapes a woman in America. And the response is, we hear you everybody says we hear you, and people just let loose with all of their anxieties, all of their fears, all of the horrible things that are carrying around and declare them and everybody said we hear you. And the next circle in from that is the circle of emoting, which is, I am so freaked out, I don't know what to do. I miss all your emotions. And the response again is, we hear you. And the next circle and closest to the stones is the circle of surrender, and people will just lay on the ground and scream or we put or whale and cry and pretty soon everybody was in that circle and it was just, we were all reduced to a huge pile of sobs and tears and then it subsided it wasn't really quiet. And it was silent with deep, deep sounds. Somebody said something and somebody made a joke out of that and the whole everybody laughed. There was this tremendous release. And this happens every single time I do the exercise, we go through this horrible despairing dark, dark place, and we come silent, and then the cosmic giggle bubbles up again, somebody makes a wisecrack and everybody cracks up because that's the human spirit coming through on the other side of the despair. And whenever I find myself despairing, I try to let it enter me, it mode it, get it out of me, move into the silence and find something that I've been lost like that, something that's going to be carrying me forward. Michael Meade says that we need more public grief rituals. When we start to grieve in public, it used to be in the old, old world, when someone died you walked around with sackcloth and ashes and go and do you a morning. It was people are mourning anymore, and everybody's mourning. So, rather than try and fix stuff. Start to make your grief more public, have public grief rituals, I think would be an amazing thing to heal what's going on, because it's not going to be healed at the level of interact. So I can kill the level of words. It's going to be healed at the level of silence in some way. Doug Carmichael, if you can hear me. Well, sometimes when we do the Quaker meeting here, Jerry says, you know, the Quaker say, unless you can improve the silence, don't break it. And I sit there and go, I can't improve this silence. I find silence to be tremendous. I have sat 21 day meditation retreats and believe me, there's a profound healing in silence. So I have no trouble with the fact that the world is booming and I'm sitting silently. My first, actually, that 21 day of meditation retreat to 10 days, plus a day in the middle. So I moved from the meditation hall to a different hall as they brought in the next 10 day group. And the third day after that in the Dharma talk, the teacher very unskillfully said, well, look at the look at the genocide happening in Rwanda. Now I had no idea what was going on. I'd been in silence for 14 days. And all of a sudden I found out that people are hacking each other to death with machetes in Rwanda and it hit me so hard. And I thought, what the hell am I doing? I'm sitting on a cushion while the world is falling apart. How am I possibly making a difference? And I went to that teacher and I spoke to her and she said, I'm so sorry. I really was unskillful to not recognize the people here who didn't know about it. And she said, but now that you're in it, this is Duka. This is suffering. This is what it means to enter into suffering. And all you can do is sit with it and recognize that it is part of your life. It is part of existence. And you can collapse. You can have it over you. You can have it crush you. Or you can create space for it and say, despite the suffering, there's still good things in the world. There's still people sitting in meditation with loving hearts and kindness. And that's what I choose to focus on. Yeah, I know what's going on. Very intimately tortures me, but I don't surrender my agency to it. I don't surrender my ability to stand strong and say, even in the face of this, I won't be afraid. I refuse to buy into the media narrative that Trump's going to win, that the world's going to curl up and blow away. It might. And if it does, that's that's suffering of humanity. You know, you take on a body you're going to suffer. That's a direct quote from the Buddha. Take on a body you're going to suffer. And it starts with not being afraid. It starts with recognizing that the cause of your suffering is attachment. And if you can learn to be nonattached, which is different than detached, which is taking yourself out of the picture completely. We're not caring, but to be nonattached is to be present and active and open hearted. And you can find your way through. It's hard. I'm only a lot of times. That's where I am. Thank you. Thank you, Ken. We're getting right near the end of our time. Gil hasn't been visible, but I don't know if he's listening. I'd love to make room for him if he wants to go. If not, we can talk a little bit and can if you have a poem for us, that would be lovely. Gil's silence being a potential sign that he is not there. Let's go to Stuart Klaus and then a poem. Just a couple of thoughts. I appreciate Jose's reflection that every January this happens. We've all kind of been on holiday and disengaged from, you know, what we see and observe that's problematic. You know, Bill, the notion of, you know, a medical professional, not understanding that there is depression and there's cause to be depression in the universe that we're living in. Michael, I thought for a moment, or at least where my brain went when you were talking about AI as a solution, my brain went, oh, fuck, another religion. Okay, that AI is going to solve everything. I mean, that's where my brain went when I heard that. And just appreciation for all of the perspectives and wisdom and open sharing in terms of where people are, even though it, you know, wasn't pleasant and it wasn't activist. And Ken, thanks for your wisdom in bringing us someplace else. That's all. You've lifted me out of my depression and given me a lot to think about and cogitate. And yeah, okay. Yeah, I'll get back to tilting it with Mills. So thank you all. And for all of the entries in the chat. Yeah, I just wanted to take issue with the idea that we know solutions to problems. I mean, as you know, I'm using theory, you the process structure of stereo for pretty much anything I do. And the reflective or reflexive response to identifying a problem is to think about a solution to have a solution for it. Whereas theory you really ask you to go down a steep curve, starting with the iceberg model to really look behind it and just give you one quick example in the food industry, you know, in the food system. You have all kinds of solutions to problems. No one thinks about the socioeconomic impacts of these solutions. You know, the fact that 44 million people live on food stamps. So how to changes. How do we do lap corn meats, for example, and revert into techno solutions here without addressing the people that are being that are losing their jobs in the process that require no skills. You know, you now see the electrification sector or initiative and complete failure to train people to work on electric engines instead of combustion engines. What, what are gas station owners supposed to do so that I can give you a thousand examples of where we have solutions without really having thoughts through what that actually means. Now, and so this is why I'm just so I was so impressed. I've been doing, you know, mega level projects all my life. And I see theory you as a project management guide system that really that really guides you through process steps to where you reach a state of alignment. That then allows you to really see what we have solutions can lead you to and start prototyping. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. We're near the end of our time but Michael and I'll say if you want to go relatively briefly. Yeah, I just wanted to, to quickly distance myself from from Mark Andre, since techno optimism in terms of what I was saying about AI, just that it's, you know, it's a longer conversation but the idea of flipping the model to, you know, the use of personally old AI agents, as opposed to the whole centralized model that's running roughshod is is what I was talking about something much more consensual. Just that. And then real briefly, plus, and, and I think Mike as well. When I say we know, I don't mean to say that we know how to implement those solutions in a way that will actually work. Our problem isn't that we don't have the technology or the ideas or the inventions or the, the necessary tools to fix the problems we have. What we don't have is a way of doing it. And we're waiting for that way of doing it to come from the place that it has come traditionally the top. And it's not going to come from the top. So that's my point. It isn't that, yes, we have all the answers and the perfect way of how it's going to happen. But we don't need new, you know, we're not waiting for the miracle to be the solution. Pretty much everything we've got, if we implement correctly, we could solve our problems. And Jose, I think you've opened a lovely topic for a future call, because it's a long conversation. It's interesting. It's nuanced. And it starts with, oh, that a recent guy in his techno optimism manifesto can't stand it, and all this other kind of stuff. But I think Mike, I think maybe we could think of how to organize a slightly more structured call around that. I want to remind everybody that next Thursday we're going to talk about democracy and or governance little G governance. What are some functional models what might the next. How do we either fix or replace democracy what should it be. And feel free to invite other people who are experts in this into the call and all that. Thanks to me. And Gil, you've got a moment and then we'll go to Ken for our closing poem. I just wanted to echo what Jose said. We have know how we have the technology we have the money. Mark Jacobson's analysis is that transitioning like 95% of the world's countries to 100% renewable wind wave and solar could be done for about $65 trillion about the money that Mackenzie says needs to be invested in maintaining fossils over the same period of time. So the question is not the technology or the money. It's the will. Yeah, do we want to do it? And that begs question. Ken's familiar question to who's we buddy. That maybe takes us into a conversation about democracy. Thank you. How long since your correct surgery finished about an hour. Wow. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, that's why I look bug-eyed. I was able to listen to that last 20 minutes. Ken, you've got the con. Let's go back to Mary Oliver again. The Cucabarras. In every heart, there's a coward and a procrastinator. In every heart, there's a God of flowers, just waiting to come out of its cloud and lift its wings. Cucabarras, kingfishers pressed against the edge of their cage. They asked me to open the door. Years later, they wake in the night, remember how I said to them, no, and walked away. They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs. They didn't want to do anything extraordinary, only to fly home to their rhythm. By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them. As for myself, I am not yet a God of even the palest flowers. Nothing else has changed either. Someone tosses their white bones on the dung heap. The sun shines on the latch of their cage. I lie in the dark, my heart pounding again. In every heart, there's a coward and a procrastinator. In every heart, there's a God of flowers, just waiting to come out of its cloud and lift its wings. The Cucabarras, kingfishers pressed against the edge of their cage. They asked me to open the door. Years later, I awake in the night and remember how I said to them, no, and walked away. They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs. They didn't want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly home to their river. By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them. As for myself, I am not yet a God of even the palest flowers. Nothing else has changed either. Someone tosses their white bones to the dung heap. The sun shines on the latch of their cage. I lie in the dark, my heart pounding. That poem is a heavy lift if you pay too much attention to it. Thank you. I just, I subscribe to the poem of the day and this morning's poem, I will put it in the chat, was about a woman helping her father through hospice care and it reminded me mightily of my own mom's hospice experience two years ago. So it's a quite sadder note, but it really beautifully captures the experience. I thank you all for your patience and your presence and your contributions and your co-thinking. I wish I could see it all. I want like a big x-ray machine. Maybe Zoom could add that as a feature, do you think? Anyway, go ahead. AI, that's our answer. That's our solution. Maybe we need a y-ray machine rather than x-ray machine. Oh, nice. And better than AI would be telepathic web. Thank you, Gil. I'll bring an envelope next time. I'll pretend to be Karnak. Study who to get on the coconut wireless. Jerry, it's all about the hat. It's all about the hat. Excellent. Love that. Thanks all. Happy New Year. Turn off the radio and the newspaper and the news. Listen to your friends. Bye.