 This is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, October 12, 2023. It kind of sort of a summer time because Hamas attacked Israel last Friday, I guess, or Saturday morning? Friday morning or Saturday morning? It's really time. It was Saturday. Saturday morning, I think. I think. I don't know. It's all mushed together these days. Yeah. And everything's happened really quickly. So it's changing a lot of stuff. Changing a lot of assumptions on the ground, I think. Last time we talked, we kicked around this topic of storytelling and narratives and stuff like that. That felt like a very nice excursion, but still a very OGM-y subject. Sort of like, what about stories? The power of stories? Storytelling tools, whatever comes up. And I figured that would be a great way to focus on stuff. The, I think the most recent story I've heard that got me excited was actually a video that Jack Conte recorded about how they have upgraded Patreon. Patreon's been through a major makeover that I really like. And this video is amusing, informative, skillfully created from, there's a camera overhead, there's a camera over here, he's a musician, he loops in some music, other kinds of stuff. So it's very highly produced, but he's using an app called something like Endless Paper, which is very Prezi-like. And he sets it up on a huge monitor in front of him. So whenever you want, it's a really lovely example of how to talk about something really pragmatic, like, hey, we redesigned our system and keep going. Hey, Doug, hey, Hank. I just pasted, I'll paste it again, I just pasted a link in the chat of a video that just came out pretty recently by the founder of Patreon explaining upgrades and changes and a big makeover to the system. And I just really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it the way I enjoyed Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff, which is, if I had to come up with one example, like in the moment, to tell people about it would probably be Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff, because that's a highly, highly skilled narrative that I think I read somewhere cost like $130,000 to create. That was the level of investment needed to come up with a video with an animation that she could stand in telling that kind of story. So let me pause for a second and see what direction anybody would like to take it in or anything you'd like to throw on the table. Well, one thing that I've thought is that any scientific enterprise or technical enterprise, which purport in a way to be narrative-free, are always embedded in the narrative of some kind. There's no science paper that doesn't have a narrative implicit behind it. But we just don't teach people to be conscious of what they're doing and how to do it better. You're reminding me of a couple things. One is that there are some efforts to do better communication, like Alan Alda has made a career post-acting out of trying to help people express scientific ideas better. There's also a fun thing I don't remember exactly what it's called, sing your PhD. What is it? You all have heard of it, haven't you? It's where doctoral students have to sing their thesis. They have to explain it really crisply in song. It would help if I spelled properly. But there's also three-minute thesis, which is, I think, different. Three-minute papers, three-minute thesis. Five-minute university. There's five-minute universities, which we've talked about, which aren't necessarily storytelling. But these are attempts to take something complex and get it explained really crisply. Was that singing PhD? Did you say, Jerry? I'm trying to figure out what its actual name is. I thought it was singing your PhD, but let me just google that. Dance your PhD. That's it. Oh, much better. Yeah. Dance your PhD. Started in 2008, has a Wikipedia page. Good. I will paste that in the Zoom. The reason I liked singing your PhD in terms of narrative is some years ago when running an innovation camp in Finland, in Espo, the second largest city in Finland, in his introduction to the camp and his working assignment for all the people participating, the vice mayor, the deputy mayor of Espo, sang it. And that's one of the things I'll never forget in my life. He's a small guy about my size, very thin, singing about what he wanted, all of our people here to know about. I don't do it nearly as well as he does, but I can guarantee if you ever hear something like that, it's unforgettable. So sometimes just the contrasting delivery makes a really big difference. And it may even hinder the message. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of nuance and a lot of whatever that was missed, but boy, you remember that instance. And a piece of this conversation, I think, I hope, is also the crazy-ass narratives that seem to be traveling really, really well through society, the troubling narratives that people are willing to believe that demonize other groups or create conflict, all kinds of things, all kinds of things going on. So there's all sorts of bad stuff up. Hi, Judy. Hi, Bill. Good morning. Judy, have you been in any science presentations where somebody did something different than amusing? I don't know if you were on the call yet, but I mentioned dance, your PhD. There's a couple of other things like that of trying to spice up, spruce up, and change the mode of communication for complex stuff. No, I haven't. But maybe it's just because Minnesota is sort of an upper Midwest, slightly conservative environment. And most of the PhDs I've listened to were up here. And the other ones were 40 years ago. So that's a long time. So they could have done like him, your PhD. That's true. That would have maybe suited better. But I guess that didn't get done either. No, I think the most that I've seen is sort of colorful photography, amusing photography related to the, I did the topic of a lab work or something as sort of a placeholder slide before the person stepped to the podium or that kind of thing. Yeah. Anybody else had experience of these kinds of things anywhere? The fact that we haven't sort of saddens me. I had a friend who was an opera singer. And she frequently sang rather than talking because she said it was better for her vocal chords, which was very disconcerting to have her just singing conversation. I don't think so. That's very interesting. I can think of as oh, say, can you see the point of my PhD? Oh, nice. Good job, Ken. So narrative storytelling. Anybody else take it, take it wherever you'd like to. Favorite narratives, failures of narrative, anything, Ken. I'm going to put a very cynical excellent to into YouTube. Everybody knows Steve cuts, the animator Steve cuts. This is called rat race. And it's just a brilliant takedown of modern society. So I think it's about four minutes. It's cynical and a little depressing, but really well done. You're muted, Jerry. Somehow you shut yourself up. Good. I muted myself so that I wouldn't play the video for everybody. Thanks. I have a video of his called man and I have him, but I don't have rat race. So watch that one. Do you want to describe it a little bit? Or is that a plot spoiler? No, it's just it depicts a bunch of rats in human form and what we chase after and how we chase after the dollar and where that leads us. And it just shows the destruction of society. And it's got a nice little twist at the end. But yeah, four minutes worth the look if you want to have a cynical view of the world or reinforce your already existing cynical view of the world. Yeah. And you're reminding me of mouse mouse one and two arts arts Beagleman as storytelling masterpieces. At least, at least I think they were they were incredibly memorable. And, and part of his story is about how how his dad internalized a lot of things that happened to him. During the Holocaust, one of which is he his dad takes will take a half box of cereal back to the store to try to get a refund for the uneaten cereal. Because there's something of value there and you don't throw anything away. And he hoards. He's got a giant ball of aluminum foil because he won't ever throw away a piece of aluminum foil or I think it was aluminum foil. Those kinds of those kinds of things. But they were. And he tells a story with rats, mice and cat cats. And dogs, I think, I think the poles were dogs. And it's really compelling. It just really works. So why are we not reaching for alternate modes of communication more often as a society, not us on this call necessarily. But, but if this is powerful and memorable, why is it also so rare? I have a in the failure of storytelling or narrative or something like that. Jerry, you and I both and probably most of the people here, I, you know, back in Silicon Valley 20 years ago, 25 years ago or something like that, it feels talking about storytelling or narrative as a powerful medium feels to me like salon discussions we used to have, you know, a quarter century ago. And now often memes when and headlines when I like, I know a bunch of people who know who have everything they're going to think about a particular topic from a strongly worded headline and maybe a, you know, a quick image or a quick video or something like that. And so I feel like a reverence for storytelling. I obviously I, I'm, I have a lot of feelings for story and narrative. And, and yeah, it seems like something that that in our kind of twitchy neurophysiology, you know, hyper stimulated web experience web and app experience anymore. You know, it's a long thing to watch as a tick tock. And, you know, I like we don't do story anymore, really. I don't know that there's actually a contradiction there, at least not in my head, because the 60 second story is the lingua franca of our time. But if unless there's a thread there somehow people aren't as compelled. And a lot of the animation around it seems to be getting sort of automated or easier to do or easier to apply because everybody thinks that, you know, the tick tock thing was some was certainly with a soundtrack, but then also some text floating across and some some effects or whatever is catchy and will will feed the algorithm or something like that. But I think that I think my interpretation of what you're saying is that really, really short stories are incredibly effective. I feel like it's something different. I feel like most of the things that we, the short things, the 30 second, you know, 20 second video, it's not a story. It's part of a story. It's an impression. It's an emotional reaction. It's it and and I'm bemoaning the fact that people don't present 60 second stories, they present, you know, 10 or 20 second, like flash impressions. And that's good enough to hook people, hook people's brains and their limbic systems and things like that. That's interesting. Because maybe I'm different and differently lured by these short things because the YouTube shorts that I'm attracted to are, did you know that in Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen blah, blah, blah, blah. And like in a minute, I've learned a thing that happened on set, you know, during the filming of a movie. And it's some of these are really, really well done. I love them. The guy, the guy luxury LUXXURY who analyzes songs and tells you who copied whose song and who sued whom and who got the money for whatever. Oh my God, some of these things are mind blowing and stuff I never ever knew and couldn't have funded down. And I couldn't have shown you the parallel tracks because he's got, he's got the digital versions of the music and he's like, hey, look, play, play, play, same tune, interpolated and interpolation is okay, but copying sampling without rights is not who knows. So for me, they're, they're very stories, but you're right, many of them are not at all. They're just like, Hey, here's my sandwich. The flip side of this is stories about the future. It seems like most of the stories we're hearing about the future are really grim and dark. And I love the rise of solar punk, which says, you know, we're gonna paint pictures of the future that we can live into that are that are hopeful that are, you know, show humans thriving. And the media seems to constantly latch on the stories of despair and grimness and murder and mayhem. And it's like, where are the stories that are circulating that actually give people a sense of purpose and hope and pride and something worth living into? And then always looking for stories like that. That's only we knew somebody who convenes people to create stories about the future. Gosh, I think Hank is distracted right now or he would jump right in. Yeah, I'm trying to type here in my own notes while I'm listening and thinking of something to say. Echoing Ken and what you just said, Jerry, I find myself always talking about we need new stories, we need better stories, we need positive stories. And that's one of the things I showed up today to try to hear what I mean by that. I mean, I'm not sure what I mean by that. But I was thinking if that type of conversation emerged here, it would help me understand. Yeah, there are people in the world of futurists who do convene people to tell good stories of the future, but they do it within their own work frame and not necessarily make them available to others. So let me take that question of yours, Ken, and yours Jerry, to the World Futures Federation Studies Conference in 10 days in Paris and ask them, just I think that's a great question. Can you reach back into your time at these convenings and you've convened young people to do stuff and so forth? Are there a couple of memorable things that stick out in your head like, well, that happened and it was really pretty cool and unexpected or something just like from the realm of storytelling or framing context for stories and all that. Yeah, I've got something to share. It's not in the realm of young people, which is still something I'm trying to work on. But many years ago, when I was working for government ministries, departments in the Netherlands, we had courses in how to tell your story so that your colleagues become interested in your work. And what we found when we had people telling them sort of an informal setting before after lunch is that people who were doing almost the same thing, but not talking about it with their colleagues, got together and were able to create the synthesis of one plus one is three or 11. Because at least in those days in government circles, people tended to think, well, what I'm doing is so complicated, nobody could ever understand it. But when they were able to tell it as a story, yeah, it turned out that not only did people understand it, but people were doing the same thing, which resulted in much more effective work when they were trying to figure out how to include citizens in their policymaking. Cool. When you started talking about new stories, I just went into my brain and looked up shared looked up new stories. And that took me to the sentence, our old stories keep us from hearing the new stories. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. So I connected to that. And that reminded me of watching this TEDx talk, take back the power of your story by Mary Alice Arthur from TEDx keel University. And I will post the link in our chat. But it's a really, it's a really lovely thing about stories. And then I'm remembering now that there's another one, the danger of all of one story, I think it was called another TEDx talk, that's all about storytelling and really, really good. If I just say danger story, story, does anybody remember the name of it? Here, the danger of a single story, that's it right here. So I'm going to link these two because they're connected. And I've got them all under articles about storytelling. But the single story robbed people of dignity. The single story creates stereotypes. There's a different story about climate change starts with water as an article about this, a post called complicating the narratives. Oh, there we go. Let me copy this into the chat as well. I think this is by Amanda Ripley in medium. And she has a bunch of really good advice here, but complicating questions is a piece of it as well. So let me stop the share and paste some of these links. As I'm listening to this, I get the feeling that a narrative is so powerful because it cracks open the present, like splitting it out. As soon as you take a present moment and put it into a narrative or pull a narrative into it, amazing things happen. But I think we also have to be cognizant that narratives are being shaped to direct opinions. So there's a great purpose behind it. I mean, my neighbor is a retired Lieutenant Colonel who was stationed in Europe at NATO and was working all over the world. And he just floored me a couple of days ago because his understanding of the Israeli, of the Palestinian uprising there is because we released $8 billion back to Iran and that funded this effort and made it possible. And I'm going like you. I mean, you should have better strategic understanding and not pick up a slogan like this. But that thing, that meme has spread far and wide to discredit instantly the Biden administration. Before anybody even thinks about forming a narrative, you have teams of people looking at every world event to see how they can translate that to fire up the base. And then you have to now think about how to push against that. And then they're already totally reversed how to respond if somebody pushes back with facts and all of this stuff. So we don't really have an effort to create narratives that push people into a positive future, that creates visions of what we could be doing. And people are really hungry for that. I mean, when you start working at community level, and you come together with the everyday folks who are engaged with non-profit efforts and so on, they're hungry to hear things about potentially we could do this and we can make our lives more secure and better. But there is no concentrated, there are no think tanks on the regenerative side, let's say. We're targeting messages that they can put out there that give people hope and direction. Doug, is your hand up because you wanted to jump back in? No, that was purely my fault. No worries. Paul, I was attracted to your work because of a story you told on a VHS tape many, many moons ago of you working in the hillsides of central Northern California or somewhere in that geography. And it was a quiet but compelling story because for me that was like your narrative about how you were changing and healing your landscape. And I think in your blog you try to tell stories a bunch as well. And I'm wondering if you would maybe just riff on some of that what it's meant for you. You're muted. First, I apologize for not being around for like half a year, but in the summertime in the heat, I need to do my work outside early. So anyway, it's cooler out there now. So I decided, hey, take a break and rejoin because I've always enjoyed reading the emails that get posted afterwards. And so I know you're talking about stories today. Yeah, stories, I find people are pulled to my or moved by my stories. And rather than talking about them, I'm going to just shift over to my current thing on my current things, which is I'm semi retired from the school we started kindergarten through eighth, but I still help out and twice a year we do camping trips. And around the campfire, I tell a story. And I kind of feel like it's kind of our little version of very home companion. And I get to tell a story from like we'll be gone. And they're really aimed at the kids trying to plant a spiritual seed in the kids is kindergarten through eighth grade. And I find that deeply, deeply satisfying. And I love the way the parents also come up to me afterwards and talk about how that story meant a lot to them. So yes, so stories, they are a mystery, they're seeds that sprout in ways it's hard to know. And I'm not sure where to go from there, but I'm happy to talk about stories. Thanks, Paul. Anyone else want to jump in? Pick up from where we are. Yeah, one of the places I ran into the old story of investing before this thing called impact investing was around was when I got into Bill Gates office. And we were wanting to invest in a fair trade coffee company that it was been one of his direct reports. And so we got in and in 16 seconds he said sit up and said, I can't be around this story, you know, or this this this I can't be around this concept and act like it hurts and the back of his head hurt. And he said, I have two pockets, I want to put one and want to put all the money in the world and the other I want to small pocket I want to do some good with and you see there's a link you have to leave. And people we got kicked out by two other or we got our conversation stopped by two other billionaires but they let us pay for breakfast. And so we created this other story but they couldn't be around the concept but they could be around the reality. So we made so cap over overly abundant. So it feels like it's drinking from a fire hose so that it targeted the amygdala and people liked what they saw but they but we avoided the prefrontal cortex where people knew they didn't like it before they saw it. It's also interesting that the same story can be framed in different settings with different characters. I mean there are you know Nazreddin is is the character of a whole bunch of stories from Arab culture Nazruddin Nazreddin and there's all kinds of stories that show up in other cultures in other places without Nazreddin. It's just that there's a an object lesson or something that somebody wants to tell but if you were to tell it to somebody who doesn't like the frame they would bounce right but the story might not be objectionable just the frame. Yeah subverts subverts of the prefrontal cortex is the way you can get to easier change. Yeah yeah. Well I can jump in until one other story if I can just do this quickly. We started a publication for a farm raised catfish back in the late 80s early 90s and it took off in Mississippi because there were some ponds that wouldn't drain and then the farmers got 87 cents on the retail dollar compared to three cents on cotton and seven cents on soybeans or no seven cents cotton anyway but everybody new catfish in the old way where it's a scum second bottom dweller you know it automatically gets they get an internship at McKinsey but if you feed them a nutritious grain and aeration they are a filter feeder and so you could replace them with Dover Soul and so what we did was we hired Willard Scott to do go to all the small NBC TV stations up the Mississippi basin and going to Salina Kansas with you know the morning woman and the morning guy and you know the shishi Salina restaurant and where we worked with him on a recipe says you know catfish is a white tablecloth thing and the the technology changed the fish because it's a filter theater and McKinsey was disappointed obviously but the uh and it grew into a $300 million industry because in all those small places people they trust said the story is different with a restaurant that most people in that town wanted to go to and Willard was the reason we got on the air. That's awesome and so many stories of influencers being influenced and people reaching out to celebrities I mean a big hunk of the Sam Bankman-Feed FTX story is all the celebrities who jumped in and said oh yeah you got to put all your bitcoin over here in FTX who now mostly regret it uh but but the power of of getting somebody well known drops you into the media which is kind of our storytelling mechanism right other than things that travel word of mouth or word of mouse uh media is what we do. Yeah well you know you used to be able to buy a celebrity and now they create their own on TikTok it's there's a real power shift these influencers have their own things it's really different you know I used to see them as a commodity and just figure out which which one of the commodity you wanted you know drop in Paul Harkin okay good. So Jerry you mentioned Nazrudin this book was given to me for Christmas 1973 uh subtleties of the inevitable Mola Nazrudin and I'll just read a very short story from this it's called two halves Nazrudin opened a lecture agency he knew so many people who felt that they had something interesting to say why not become their agent the ones that felt they were interesting however were usually not interesting people got many complaints next time I shall make sure he said one day a telegram arrived from a study society please supply a wit to address our group on sunday this time I can make sure said the Mola he sent two of his lecturers and replaced and replied that telegram wits are difficult to find so have sent two half wits instead moral the sum of the parts is not necessarily equal to the whole love that that's why he's the incomparable Mola Nazrudin exactly I haven't I have another Nazrudin story to share too please it's the one I tell kids kids get it or else they go what but Nazrudin is eating lunch next to a river and as he's eating he sees his traveler approaching from the other side coming toward the river when the traveler reaches the river he yells how do I get across Nazrudin says you are across that's a location joke right frame of reference joke yeah isn't it the Mola Nazrudin who told the story of a rich man who slipped or slipped off the bank of the river and he was drowning in the river and someone came along the side and he said give me your hand and the rich man went down for a second time and the man who wanted to help called out give me your hand and the rich man went down for a third time and then the person trying to help said take my hand and his hand was taken and the eye was pulled out of the water love that so let's dwell a moment on underhanded stories and on disinformation that is packaged up in ways that sounds wacky sometimes the nuttier the story the better it travels the more improbable the story the more people will jump in and believe it and that's something that's it takes a real skill to figure out what shape the story needs to have to be wacky enough that credulous people will jump in but not so wacky that nobody will buy it at all like QAnon yeah exactly exactly and QAnon is sort of a collection of stories like that woven out of controversial subjects you know in different places so you see that there's a bunch of mothers concerned about vaccines and autism and Jenny McCarthy goes and like talks about it and becomes you know screws up her reputation but brings a lot of attention to it and then you see a couple other other stories that are sort of swirling around in the world and you paste them together into a larger narrative of corruption deception and underhandedness and evil coursing through the world and then sell that and sell the whole thing as an ARG an alternate reality game there's a really nice essay by Adrian Han where he says QAnon is an ARG and he's right there's like a key master who drops clues there's a community that runs around like chasing down the clues and doing stuff it's and and and and when you think of QAnon as an ARG and the storytelling woven into something like that it shifts how you might try to tackle it and what you might do about it and I have not seen anybody do something productive with his insight I have not seen a countermeasure I've not heard a story told of a countermeasure to QAnon that was developed because they understood it differently which is too bad Kevin go ahead just that QAnon was not a viral phenomenon it really conforts to Damon Centola's complex contagion it had Q but really it had little groups and if you do research and I did a bunch of this and it was small groups of little facebook groups in a subdivision or whatever and so three or four people that you know and trusted is how you heard the story and so it was and that's what's happened with the complex contagion they don't buy the story they buy it within a nest of small relationships and but it makes the reality harder to break up and that's why like our closest volunteer fire department a fewer than half of them got the vaccine because they were building the story internally in a little in small groups and so you know when people think storytelling is a viral phenomenon to cause change it's really not it's groups of small folks small groups who trust each other who do it in cells and then gather that's what I think Centola's right and trying to do broad-scale viral behavior change is failed in its interculture that no longer exists so this is the book change how the power in the periphery makes big things happen yeah and he's got a center at Penn State and and he does consulting and stuff but it's but it's really just the that it's a complex contagion you get it from multiple to so you know you don't just get it like a virus you get it you have to be around three or four people or whatever who who are in it and they create the reality around you it works in a world where broad reality is broken but these are things that j golden would call retellable stories yeah but it's not that they're retellable is how you receive them that it's a complex contagion that the the fact that it's complex is more important than the essence of the story it's the it's the social structure that I think Centola is really right about um so I think you mean the shape of the communication topology or the shape of the communication yeah right exactly yeah they just complex it in small groups and they create their own reality there and they don't have to have a reference to a broader reality um I just want to explore what what that means like the broader reality is the shared story of QAnon and the example we're going through so there is kind of a shared reality it might be that the details of the story got told very differently as it propagated like the game that you don't have to there is no shared social reality that they participate in this is a post-truth phenomenon that works in small clusters uh I'm trying to just understand what you may be a shared social reality because I think a piece of what we're talking about is that this didn't show up on cbs or abc there's no broadcast there's no central broadcaster that's basically saying here's the story and we all adhere to it like Sesame Street or something like that Stacey please so Kevin's right so what was happening happening in these small facebook groups is that they would connect on one point of part of the Q phenomena the people didn't really know each other well enough to know this person's a crackpot if they would have spoken more about different things they would have realized oh wait this is not a trusted source so he's right it's it's um I mean it's happening right now in another group um around the Israeli crisis where I had this very long drawn-out conversation with somebody that most people wanted to throw out of the group and I was like let her have her opinion let her speak because it's important for other people who normally would agree with a lot of what she says because it might make sense in other things that she was saying um to a class was saying I just want to add since I'm speaking I carry a meme on my phone which is which addresses the misinformation about the millions of dollars in Iran and I think what's called for now is you know we're talking about storytelling which is one person telling a story but I think when it comes to like the masses we have to find a way to ask the questions that allow people to put their pieces of the story and to figure out how we weave that together so again I'm dealing with not as educated people so when the whole thing with the Iran money comes out I just after you know showing them the correct information I just asked sort of an open-ended question that might relate to Russia having an interest in this just to get them to start thinking and kind of like not to give them an answer not to say oh no it's this but to just throw out different possibilities because there are so many and these are there are a lot of people that I mean we're all curious beings so some of us are more educated some of us are less educated some of us are not that smart or good critical thinkers but we all have this desire to think that we know and I just think that maybe better questions with a little bit more room to breathe and then trying to create stories is what's called for love that thank you um class yeah the uh there is an interesting dynamic right now where the republican house has suggested all these drastic cuts to to a wide variety of budgets and one of those cuts would impact snap benefits school meals and a range of nutritional assistance programs and so on and the general public by and large hasn't dialed in with this is not really aware with it so in the meetings that I've had now in Bend because I'm not really trying to get dig into the community connections I explained this linkage now and when you think about the emotional impact of school meals now when you talk with mothers who uh finally after years of fighting not to put a program together that they are pleased with and local sourcing and fresh food find out that this money to support this is supposed to be cut by by their republican representative that really rings now now you have to structure these stories really succinct really short you know really easy to understand but the our republican representative here in Bend is a member of the house agricultural committee and they're already back peddling because uh no she already got enough feedback that this is a this is a hot iron to touch and and so the to to to help people understand the reality of what's being done in the political process and how this will impact their lives in real down to earth you know bread and butter kind of examples now that's that's also you know an important part and it takes just a lot of patience you know but the moment you find touch points which you know me working inside the meet we did this focus group kind of exercise here and then you find where the community is really sensitive and where you know they you know they they have passionate opinions about and then you link that you know in a way that the system becomes transparent and and how how these things fit together and work I mean it's an insane time when you when you have a republican party that talks people into voting for things that against their own health care their own you know their foods and I mean their basic sustenance and and and have them go along with that you know so to break that it just requires some real patience loving insertions in story you know and it has to be story you can come up with a power point here thanks sauce so many complex angles to this as each of you is talking I my mind is going in lots of different directions and and sort of struggling with the nexus of things here other thoughts on narrative story wish lists what do you what do you wish would happen around a story narrative I wish the media by which I mean all the corporate owner controlled media would recognize that the that a far more effective way of being in the world would be to show people how alike we are how much we have in common and how imperiled we all are because I think they're doing such a terrific job of dividing us and if they if the media chose to shift their frame and say you know what we're all we got we need to work together it would radically change everything I know that's a really big wish but that's my wish in terms of using the storytelling capabilities of media which are incredible and they're currently you know locked up and being abused by by corporate powers are using them to just enrich themselves rather than to share the wealth of humanity I wish we had narrative that would work like QAnon that would work in fractal groups who create their own local truth because other we still have a metaphor and I still fall back on there to a broadcast reality but general reality is broken down and people are creating their own so we need narratives that work it's modular fractal and it happened in small groups I don't know you know I mean the the effort to do rights of nature as a counterpart to corporate rights is one of those that's happening in 20 cities I mean you know maybe looking at places where there's lots of rights like that that are similar that are bubbling up would be something and looking at the recent by our story about Thurgood Marshall in the New Yorker and how he used the same tactic you know he did 11 small suits that moved civil rights forward before he did big moves the same with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and what's her name Palmer with LGBT rights so small narratives that move things forward in local places but that's what I always say I love that approach I'd love to keep exploring that Pete then Doug I love it too that's that's really smart Kevin I think and it makes me think that I or I wonder how much Q and on is actually just a lucky evolutionary success rather than an engineered set of stories so so then there's kind of a meta question how can you you know maybe how could you deploy a set of stories in which you expect some of them to be evolutionary winners rather than trying to get one story that fits well into a bunch of fractal pieces Doug you're muted I'm getting a feeling that just listening that narratives are really dangerous things maybe the only thing that's more dangerous is no narratives well yeah I mean in framing this call I think that the disinformation side of this is at least as important as the as the how do we tell nice stories that are object lessons that help us educate other people or whatever Paul I like what the said about third partial that makes me think that maybe one of the powers of starting the small local stories is it it establishes your integrity that if you try going right to the big audience you probably have some ulterior motive for trying to do that and you're judged superficially quickly whereas if you're working on these small things and the people around you go this person has integrity this person's worth supporting worth telling others about I think maybe that's where the power comes from thanks Hank I'm really beginning to like this part of the conversation today and the way Stacy and Klaus and Kevin you put your statements out there are helping me to understand my own question better that question I said it earlier in the conversation I'm always saying we need new stories we need different stories we need better stories and that's become a bit clearer but I have a question again for the group who has to tell these stories and how are they made widely known are they told on television or in pop songs or in comic books and well let me leave it at that who has to tell the stories and how to make them widely known uh Kevin or someone else if you want to take a swing at that well I I find that uh I'm sorry do that jump right go ahead go ahead yeah no I find that stories work like a virus so it's a meme and if it's well designed it starts happening so so it doesn't almost doesn't almost doesn't matter where you insert it it takes on the life of its own but there are certain insertion points that are more effective no and and you you look for for corpse that are that are in that same frame of mind but when you make particularly important is to make connections you know to to bring in a systems perspective so people understand how stuff is connected and linked and I mean I wish there was a serious think tank kind of energy out there that that does the same what the Heritage Foundation does you know in all these five or six think tanks that are funded by mostly the fossil fuel industry but also by the food industry now because they're now starting to realize that you know there's some serious challenge ahead for them and so they're fighting it and and so they have targeted efforts you know to put out these memes that disrupt people's attention it's like this thing about the eight billion dollars for Iran right I mean all of a sudden changes the entire conversation and the mindset and it it it stumbles no the efforts of the administration to have a coherent position for us to take so the the the uh it's not complicated where to insert it you know if you have an idea that sparks and and and and that that seems to make sense I mean for example the the connection that trying out the soil with chemicals is disrupting the hydrologic cycles right will everybody know that chemicals are trying out the soil that certification is a common term but for some reason we missed completely that the climate models didn't incorporate the hydrologic cycle and the impact of of water on on accelerating the perceived climate change now and so once you put that out you have this aha because you're dealing with factoids that are fully understood and known by everybody it just hasn't been stitched into a story now so so this that's what I mean by acting like a virus the moment you combine uh known pieces of information into a conclusion or what the is what this means and it's just like super simple to get so to speak that stuff starts traveling I'd like to suggest the exact opposite it's it is a it's a mini to mini distribution method within a small group that's the nature of a complex contagion if I get next to you with covid I can get it with the complex contagion you have to get to three or four people that you listen to and then you work your reality so I think we need stories that work within local realities that would work in you know the small group of the volunteer firemen or the if you look at at QAnon there were also in email groups that did pick up of kids after school or you know the moms of a swim class you know the company it's it's completely you know it is a contagion but it's a mini to mini you have to touch they touch many times and your immunity to truth goes down because that group then becomes your reality and the the story nexus it needs to be more like a collage of evolvable stories to sort of riff on what Pete was saying a little earlier I think it's yeah something you know QAnon did it really well you know yeah admirably so unfortunately Doug B yeah I just I was triggered by Hank Hank's question so the question you know who's who's to tell stories I think anyone that can help and um so I took for several years I taught a personal growth development workshop in Israel and a group of instructors American instructors because they were the only one certified for a decade and a half then some Israeli instructors were trained and a group of American instructors that taught over there have have offered to convene a session with graduates it's a rather large and vibrant community on Saturday as a in service to and so I've been living this question um in a very immediate and demanding way um for the last week odd since this was sparked and it's a Kevin's point the the nature of the workshop itself and the glue of the community that's going to be there is individual self-empowerment and so people at the end of this usually um feel like they've been given a bunch of tools and been super empowered out the back end uh in the way they relate to the world and what they can do in the world and what's come up for me is um in terms of what's needed is there a story is there a narrative of that I can offer to catalyze in them a vastly accelerated way of healing and transcending and escaping the overwhelming grief and trauma that they're trapped in in service to being in service to their world their community because they're uniquely equipped and I share this because um would be very open and interested in any thoughts that anybody has unfortunately I literally have to go right now but um most of you know where to find me but any thoughts or any things that arise for you in that context threading this needle of respecting honoring acknowledging their feelings acknowledging the trauma acknowledging where they're at um and catalyzing offerings for them to rise above and gain some space and peace and peace without triggering anything without poking any buttons or adding any trauma or whether it's simply just listening so um I uh solicit all of you um for anything you might want to send or offer um to help me figure this out thank you Doug thank you for for telling us about it can you can you put a link to the or just mention the group so that we can kind of yeah it's it's um I'll put it in the chat yeah thank you thank you um anyone with ideas contact Doug and Ken if you want to enter the conversation at your pace at your own pace thank you Doug kind of building on what Doug just said um whose stories get told you know we have dominant narratives and then we have narratives that rarely get heard and you all know I have deep love of poetry and there's a wonderful um woman whose name is Caroline Duffy who's an incredible poet um and she's written a book called The World's Wife and it is a lovely book filled with um the misses of major characters throughout history and I'll read you really short ones called Mrs. Darwin 7 April 1852 went to the zoo I said to him something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you um which I find hilarious and then on a more serious note um bio-combo affe uh bio-combo affe uh I was listening to a talk of his and I extracted some notes and he says you know colonization might involve the stealing of people's wealth but that's not the central idea colonization about reinventing the frames of reference of the people so that the way they make sense of things changes colonization will say the relationship you have with that mountain no longer makes sense that mountain is a thing to you now so blow it up and build the highway there colonization is about the loss of meaning the loss of story and the loss of agency and I think this is a really important thing to ponder of how are our stories either empowering humanity to move forward or destroying our ability to exist because some of the major narratives as Doug pointed out earlier um are very dangerous you know the narrative of of um manifest destiny historical narrative incredible destructive power uh and yet people bought into it the narrative uh that the Jews are the problem has led to amazing suffering and it still goes on we're witnessing it right now the rise of anti-semitism around the world you know Jews make up a quarter of one percent of the population and they're blamed for all of society's ills why is that that's a very very tough story to go up against and figure out why does that have so much traction this human do humans really need a scapegoat and and does it have to be can't we have a scapegoat of you know a larger population like the catholic church would work for me i could scapegoat them for a ton of stuff you know um so the flip side of the story of whose stories get dominated become dominant is what are the stories that are lost when we have dominant narratives that are so seductive and powerful and and destructive not this quote from bao in the chat thank you ken i'm reminded of um cast and how uh colonizers invent cast in order to create subgroups that can be pitted against each other so that they can be one up and one down and there's a diagram on the wikipedia page i just shared there's a diagram of sort of the cats in latin america and there's other other you know cultures that did some most sorts of things to see and who to were invented by colonizers in order to separate people in rwanda and uganda and places like that these were all modes of control and is isabel wilkerson's book about it exactly um but these were these were all overlay stories and and i posted a little bit earlier in the chat uh george monbao's really really good ted ex talk about the the stories that that need to be replaced or brought in and he he talks about how kansas's story got replaced by the neoliberal story which now needs to be replaced by something else and he gives really nice synopsis of each of these and one of the things that he does is uh he creates a trope uh about all the stories start with like the earth is in danger or something like that i'm i'll go look it up but he does a very nice job of turning these all actually into into stories or tropes that get repeated and become part of the air we breathe and part of the assumptions we make about how to act in the world and and there are conservative tropes and there are liberal tropes and they are in combat in the in the field every day um kevin then paul i'm um in a gathering uh in uh albuquerque next well later tomorrow actually about them about digital twins and it's a they're making a big deal about it and that's like you can look down below and you can see how the planners can do infrastructure data transportation plumbing etc to design the future and as i look at all their schemas it it has nothing about the fact that in one zip code in albuquerque you die 10 years younger than you do in other zip codes social determinants of health that's the major way to look at it and it's also linked to redlining and so i'm what i'm gonna ask him is you know how do you design the future acknowledging the historic injustice that you're gonna you know replicate if you don't work to uh to get over that and you know as with many wonderful tech futurists they haven't thought about the folks who aren't like themselves or the folks who who the fact that there is structural injustice that their data structural injustice you know poor neighborhoods subsidize rich neighborhoods in every city and county and and you can go into why that is but you know the poor neighborhood is overtaxed the rich neighborhood is undertaxed and it is it is a total reality and it you know goes back to the fact that black boats weren't given fha mortgages or and they weren't given gi loans but the other part of it is that uh it's happening and uh the digital twins have not looked into history when they're looking into rerouting the physical and digital infrastructure so i'm really curious to see how receptive they are about that uh looking at this other dataset thanks Kevin and just to clarify on the digital twins thing is this a is this a gap in the data that meant then that the digital twins didn't actually reflect the harsher realities on the ground like how i'm i'm trying to bridge between what what little i know about digital twins and the situation you just described they the unjust economic architecture is not something they looked at they look at how plumbing worked how data worked how transportation worked how construction worked and they didn't look at you know uh where to bus routes not go you know or what neighborhoods are too far from a clinic and but then you know just you can start with the real simple thing of what neighborhoods are people dying 10 years younger you know that's the data set that that kind of analysis doesn't occur to tech futurists because they drive past those neighborhoods thank you and just before paul goes i want to say something very quickly about what kevin just said many years ago i was at a uh meeting in the mines conference and they always award people for things and there's a company here in the bay area that was given an award for creating um sensors you can put on your car and as you drive around it samples the air and then it sends it to a central location and it analyzes the air quality and it turns out that um due to prevailing winds a lot of of um neighborhoods that are in good neighborhoods have really poor air quality because we've got you know several refineries around here that pollute so um to amplify what kevin said there's zip codes where that shows up there's also um it's showing up as you know air doesn't reach air moves and so if you pump chemicals into the air and same thing with water you don't know where they're going to end up and um all that nice neighborhood that you're this this big tony neighborhood with these big houses and nice lawns are often ending up um being much more polluted than people thought but it's not known because the sensors aren't there and now that these sensor networks are getting out there that's kind of recasting how people think about the pollution sorry go ahead paul i'm sorry thank you paul i hate to disrupt the conversation but i just wanted to jump back 15 minutes ago to something claus said um he's talking about the water cycle in terms of climate change and talking about stories i think that is a story that is spreading right now so in terms of our interest in stories i think that's one just to watch because i think it's it's a good viral thing that is happening right now and it's it seemed like it's spreading really fast in the last year so it's just something for us to be watching thanks paul i'm struck that a lot of stories that move far and fast through small groups large groups whatever are bizarre stories they're strange stories they're funny stories they have they have some kind of a crazy twist and a big piece of what we've been talking about here is the telling the story of how things work in the world of science of facts and those things are i i'm afraid more boring now there's a lot of people who try to make science really exciting by showing you what you know up close in the microscope what that thing really looks like and it's like ooh gross or whatever but but do do important facts need to be dressed up in crazier clothes so that they'll carry better or is that a terrible idea like like the story of the water cycle can be told many different ways it's a it's a it's a narrative of facts and how water works in the world would it would it communicate better would it be more contagious if it were packaged differently or told differently right i'm a rhetorical question maybe can i just say can i just say something real quick on that yeah because when when claus was saying started earlier and he said everybody's always known i wanted to say no everybody hasn't always known and that's part of the problem because you have a large amount of the population that are questioning everything don't know anything don't know who to believe i actually think starting at the basics where there won't be an argument is the best place to start and what what and what the basics are it would be a very interesting conversation like small i mean very small basics yeah thanks um claus then p yeah i actually uh have an opportunity this afternoon the climate reality project not the algor initiative there they asked me to explain this story of the water cycles to the to a chapter meeting to they have like 96 chapter leaders in the call and um and i decided to make a story out of it to not have a powerpoint presentation but to just use my own words apologize upfront you know but hey i'm not a scientist you know but he is how i understand this works uh and just level you know with people who are basically at my wavelength i mean they're all professionals actually and uh from from all walks of life and uh so how do you process what this is and how this works so that's really uh i think that's a nice opportunity to to escalate this because algor has not been really incorporating land use principles into his speeches he's doing wonderful you know work in many ways but he hasn't he hasn't clocked that yet you know what uh and and how to how to frame it so so that's still that's still uh it's struggling but the i posted something from you will hurry there who is basically saying that you have to look at narrative and stories like it is software right because it drives our it what we believe drives what we how we interpret reality and how we respond to external stimuli so if we treat it like software right then it takes on a different way of of shaping it and unfortunately you know all these these um fairly recent recognition and sliker you will have Ari and others um have been picked up by all the wrong people right um you know you have you know the most sophisticated communications technology being misused and and uh being used to manipulate you know outcomes and so that's uh uh and there is no there's no thoughtful counter to that right so you really want to get into how do you stem against this and then that becomes i mean it's like dealing with with a with viral intuitions in your software you know how do you detect the virus how do you neutralize it and i mean it's just think in these terms you know and then that that shaping of stories takes on a whole different context thanks class um pete uh thanks um thanks class i i like that and stacey i like what you said too about starting with with uh things that aren't contentious um and moving on from there i i also like what you said before something that something about people everybody being many people being very curious about things and and when you give them things that when when somehow they find something that satisfies that curiosity or works towards that curiosity maybe it's a good thing maybe it's a bad thing um but but mostly i i wanted to connect kind of that to uh what jerry said jerry you had an interesting thing it's like stories about how the world works and science and facts those seem boring um and you know do we need to spruce it up and dress it up i i have a different model for that i think which is there are there are certainly people in the world who want to know how the world works and have tolerance or um the mindset or um the the background to be interested curious about how things work and wanting to um wanting to add to their scientific cosmology actually if you will um the scientific cosmology is obviously a useful and practical and and you know i don't know if i can actually say good or great or something like that because the scientific cosmology is is now it's apparent that it's a sibling of the capitalist extractive cosmologies which are clearly really bad so um but but anyway i my model for the world of humans is that most people do not belong to the scientific cosmology they go along with it um but the cosmology that they own that they live in is the one that they grew up with or the one that they reacted to because they grew up with a different one um and it's it's built around a lot more of things that i think the scientific cosmology people think are old school or or primitive or something like that you know and and i don't even know how to name those cosmologies because they're not mine but you know something more about animism or something more about humanism or something more about you know and and in their worlds telling them that hey do you do you know the facts um i can give you facts um and it's like why would i want that i get everything i need from the people around me who tell me the way the world works and your way of telling me the way the world works is bullshit i've seen people like talk up and down and like you know try to confuse me and it just doesn't make any sense i listen to the people i listen to and i'm very fine thank you very much so i think i i think there's value in enhancing the narrative qualities of stories that you can present to people but i think another big big big part of it probably much bigger is uh understanding your audience and who you're trying to talk to and whether or not they even share the same cosmology as you and if you don't do that you're talking to a brick wall basically and or or you're sounding like an ass talking to somebody who they feel knows a lot better than you you know i know how to live just fine without your science thank you very much so thanks awesome peep we have a we have a piece of a working experiment of that right now with claus's book in progress where he's applying spiral dynamics to uh the water cycle and healthy soil and asking chat gpt to take the spiral dynamics model and play out how would you communicate this set of of stories or facts to people at different levels in the spiral dynamics model and those people have different cosmologies they have different worldviews different needs meshes whatever it might be but i think that that that you know he's very much very much sort of experimenting with what you were just describing uh in that way for for pragmatic reasons of how do we tell this story to enough people that they'll make a change that they'll pick up and react um anybody who wants to join those conversations we're talking on mondays at 10 30 pacific uh in the same zoom here hank then kevin thanks pete uh i totally agree with you and jerry for your uh extending that further and i want to extend it further but from another perspective i've been rewatching a four-part pbs television show uh about hip hop it's called fight the power how hip hop changed the world uh i myself never really liked hip hop never really listened to it but that television series has opened my eyes and my mind to the power that pop culture and and telling a story directly through a song can really influence people and if i understood if i understand the meaning that uh is coming out of this series it's that so many people in the world had that story but never heard it expressed and weren't themselves ready to express it and then when a couple of artists uh singers rappers came along and expressed it there was a whole uh a whole house at all the country of people around the world who said yes that's what i believe thank you for uh putting it out like that and i'll just ask one other open questions since we're getting near the end of it maybe ken you might be someone who wants to pick it up uh a rap song is a song uh some songs are sent out to one target group and some are sent out to a whole part of the population but how does poetry fit into that how can poetry become the song that opens the world to people thank you um kevin shooting i know i've talked a lot but i'll try to make this short um we have a conference that gathers the people who are want to repair local economies and our core group are the folks who've been disinvested and who die 10 years younger and we've got new economic things that deliver economic power to them but we're finding some single issue partnerships that led us linked to the new urbanists who think of themselves as the children of jane jacob's and they want to do walkable neighborhoods and they discovered that taxation is unfair and has been historically unfair and then they say oh and the people in those neighborhoods don't look like us oh well that's unfortunate but they want to make taxation fair and then we're reaching out to the folks that used to be the ballet network if you guys remember that and they want to invest in their local economies but these are the folks in the neighborhoods with trees and sidewalks who want to invest locally and so we're creating a platform where you can invest locally in disinvested neighborhoods and the absolute neighborhoods and they they don't we don't ask the you know the the liberal white folks to to make economic justice be their thing and which is i did for a couple years and it's just it's like shut the fuck up you know we're environmental let's go away um and we're just saying you know what are the thing you like that we can also be a place to gather uh and so we're gathering the folks who who are there's lots of local funds where you can invest average people can invest in local small businesses and we're gathering them because they have no place to really gather and there's several platforms you know there's main vest hunting comb and a new version of we funder and it's you know i go to claus barbasi's linked us the key thing where he said that rights of life only ask single issue partnerships of their folks but freedom of choice asked a litmus test and so one punches way above their weight because the left is you have to be pure on multiple levels whereas the we're borrowing from the the right saying we'll just agree on this and we you won't have to come in ira door so that's a way to to build a broader coalition and you know you have to get over leftist thinking you know that wants everybody to agree on all the issues you care about we're trying that might work i think a useful thing would be some exercise or process that helps people in particular here which you just said left leftists or progressives see what they're blind to uh basically yeah good luck uh well i i think that if that worked if we could find one that worked it might cure a lot of things um yeah judy and then we're getting close to the end of our call time you're muted you're muted yeah apologies it's because i get background phone calls that are very distracting um the question that comes to me i guess or the thought is that we're sort of sitting on the knife's edge of knowledge in terms of what we think we know which may be incomplete or limited in scope but it's our best understanding and the knowledge of a different group which is built from a different framework that's very unlike ours and it sort of goes back to that single truth of seek first to understand because unless you can come in at the perimeter of a known thought process it's very hard to articulate a thought that's oppositional and have it heard in any way at all and so there's a dynamic to this that is not so much about the content as it is about the communication process and we've touched on that several times today but i think that would be perhaps another rich area for deeper discussion or for sharing of resources because i've had to learn over my many years of interacting that the best thing i could do is keep quiet for a long time in a group of people and try to sense where the group is in order to then position something that's you know i'll start by saying i'm probably looking at this differently i might not understand you but i'm thinking along these lines and sometimes that allows the voice to be heard in ways that my younger more direct statements did not and so i'm maybe that's obfuscating but it's it's just a zone that i'm still continuing to explore after 35 or 45 years of trying to figure out how to communicate with people so i'd be really interested in continuing in some way the the process of communication thank you that's a great idea you're reminding me of the the i think real incident where i'm forgetting who it was raiment lowey or somebody some designer was called in to fix something and he walks in and basically takes a wrench and and bangs on a piece of equipment and fixes it and then sends an invoice for ten thousand dollars and the the boss is like what are you talking about so it's like send me a more detailed invoice uh if that wasn't worth it and he says like you know banging on the on the thing five cents knowing where to bang nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety five cents Ken i think we're at that moment where you might just possibly have a poem for us i do um and before before you do that i just want to appreciate that you do that for us and that you have such a deep well of poems that you reach into uh that you find things that are so good for us as a community and as a as a group so i just thank you very much for thank you thank you this gift this gift you bring us regularly appreciate that a lot i'm not sure if i'll be here next week i'm flying out next thursday to um idly pascanine i'll be gone for a couple weeks um if i if i'm not harried in the morning i'll i'll show up on the call if i am i may not but um i was talking earlier about carol am duffy and um about you know the the women's side of things so this is a little poem about mrs rip van winkel i sank like a stone into the still deep waters of late middle age aching from head to foot i took up food and gave up exercise it did me good and while he slept i found some hobbies for myself painting seeing the sights i'd always dreamed about the leaning tower the pyramids the Taj Mahal i made a little watercolor of them all but what was best what hands down beat the rest was saying a none too fond farewell to sex until the day i came home with this pastel of niagra and he was sitting up in bed rattling by agra awesome that's from a book called the world's wife by carol and duffy in which she just has all these mrs mrs rip van we call mrs darwin mrs zisipis you name a historical mythological figure and she's got a story from the woman's point of view it's really quite a delightful read i can't recommend it how you know can you put that in the chat ken so we can pick it up i can and thank you and uh herl thanks for reminding me to put it to pin uh ken while he was reading the poem but i didn't see your reminder until halfway through but i'll try to train myself to do that that was a nice idea as well um there we go thanks everybody this has been a lovely call stories many stories to tell from it uh judy good idea about how we communicate and i'll try to figure out how to frame that uh anybody with ideas uh talk on the town square channel or on the ogm list or ping me or whatever else i'm totally open to figuring out how how to how to maneuver that the topic um and with that see you all so thank you