 That way, this is the OGM weekly call for Thursday, November 17, 2022. I'm going to turn on the transcript as well. There we go. And welcome, everybody. Nice to see you. I just had a lovely call with Jurgus, who is on the call who I met when I spoke in Bucharest at Unfinished. And I think I came back and I might have, if any of you were on calls where I debriefed about the event, I was like waxing crazy about this fellow who, at the end of the whole event, I'd gotten to meet him a couple of times during the event because we were both speakers and there were dinners every night for the speakers and such. But at the end, he basically went into the middle stage outdoors and started bringing people into a circle and singing and playing music and getting people singing and jumping and coming in and pulsating together in a way that was really magical. It was just genuinely beautiful and transformative. And I just said, hey, Jurgus, how can I help you? So we just had a call and got to know each other a little bit more. And he was like, OK, if I hang out into your OGM call that you're describing. And I was like, you bet we've been struggling with how to stop being an intellectual salon where Pete and I race to answer questions in the chat and instead enter soul space, other sorts of things. And and and Jurgus was just mentioning a bunch of things, including Psycho Magic, which I'd never heard of, except I'd sort of heard about it because there's a Mexican movie director named Alejandro Jodorowsky. I will share his link in the chat and Jodorowsky. Basically, there's an article. Let me actually screen share for a sec because it'll make more sense when I do. There's an article I had put in my brain some time ago about the psychomagical realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky. And I didn't have this topic of psychomagic, but I did have Jodorowsky connected under general semantics, which is a strange and interesting realm of thinking that influence people as different as Frank Herbert, Alvin Toffler, Doug Engelbart, John Grinder of Bandler and Grinder, the inventors of neuro-linguistic programming, William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, Esai Hayakawa, the linguist or semanticist, I guess. Anyway, super, super, super interesting lineage of thinking. And I should stop talking so much because it's all about thinking. But I'll connect that to to this call. And thanks for joining us, Yurgis. And how's everybody else? Bots, anybody just want to check in lightly just as we start the call? Hmm. Did you call on me? I'm sorry. I did not call on you, Klaus, but you're walking to jump in and just check in. Just for. Oh, I was sure. Did you say class? It was a. Well, it has been a tumultuous week, hasn't it? There's so many moving parts here. I'm I'm just working on another webinar set up here for Oregon. And I'm really excited to have a panel coming together that includes Oregon State University and the United States Department of Agriculture and Farmers and so on. So. Yeah, the the there seems to be. Energy building up, right? I mean, it seems to be that. There is an increasing sense of unease and and realization that the ship is moving maybe into the wrong direction. And the question really is how do we develop a coherent strategy so we don't suboptimize the system? Gil was sending out a file yesterday that showed how different sectors of the economy are being financed. But then you ask finance to do what, right? I mean, the the they're all working in their silos and in their bins and they're either oblivious or callous about the externalities being created in these individual silos. So this this coordinated energy that that is now required to move us into a common direction. Seems to be work in progress. That's sort of my my observation for now. Thanks, Klaus. And you talked about coherence. I'm just going to pluck the word coherence out of what you were just saying. And a piece of my conversation with your guess just now, we he said, have you heard of shuman resonance? And like, no, I don't think so. And then I go look in my brain and at some point in the past, I added shuman resonances, which is sort of lightning and electromagnetic and other sorts of things. And then we were talking about live music because Yurgis uses a guitar and a drum machine and his voice and his his presence when he performs. And he brings people together in a really like spiritual tribal, really basic, lovely, resonant way. And then I, you know, I didn't know about shuman resonances, but I sort of did. And here's Winfried Otto Schumann, who created them. But then we started talking about chi and other kinds of and I just created right this minute, this thought and connected it to today's call here, but visions of resonant energy. And there's acoustic resonance. And then I key dough, for example, means I key and dough. The key is chi. So I'm going to connect chi to visions of resonant energy. And there's a whole bunch of others because we talked about organs, Wilhelm Reich. The therapist basically believed in organomy and organ energy. So I'm going to connect organ energy to visions of resonant energy. And then there were other kinds of theories, some crazy, some not. But everybody's trying to say, hey, there's this other energy that binds us, that connects us. That's really, really interesting that organ is like what you need if you're going to defeat a UFO, says Eric in the chat. And so I just wanted to put some of those things on the table because we're very logical and salonish and intellectual and in our heads in these calls. And I think we need to be less of that often or we need to just own it and do that. Jamie, thanks for being here. I'm very happy you're here. And so I just want to go quiet for a second and see what this little bag of ideas means for anybody who'd like to jump in. Since you plucked the word coherence out of Klaus's talk, when I was working with the designers of the World Café, we often would ask ourselves a question of how do we design for coherence without control, which is a really interesting question that I've been working on for about 25 years now of, you know, if we're creating the conditions for coherence to emerge, it's very different than being directive. It requires a much more of a gardening approach and figuring out, OK, who needs to be planted over here in the sun, who gets the shade, who needs water, who needs fertilizer, you know, how do we create these conditions for things to emerge? So I just picked up on coherence there. It's I think that's a word that's not appreciated enough that there's a whole lot more to be said for coherence and there is control and we're moving from a world where things are going out of control, but not necessarily out of coherence. So my hope anyway. Love that. Yeah, thanks, Ken. Makes total sense. Anybody else? Yeah, I mean, Doug wants to talk. Go ahead, Naomi, and then Doug. Yeah, I've been actually absorbing a lot of information along these lines this past week, like from getting into a Twitter this discourse about the word wilderness, right, like First Nations academic scholar in British Columbia was saying, actually, the wilderness has a very colonizing connotation to it. And I was very I mean, I've been using this term all the time talking about conservation, thinking I didn't really I didn't view it that way. I thought, well, wilderness, I thought was more about like appreciating the natural expression and beauty of nature. But she brought up that, you know, in her language of her First Nations tribe, they they don't have a word for wild, right? Everything like biodiversity actually food in her people's language. And yeah, it just set me on a whole spiral. And then today I was also watching a documentary about the you guys and how we're in the Kali Yuga, which is the the age of hypocrisy. And we're still at the beginning of it. But we're all it's a very, very complex map of time really developed in ancient Hinduism. But it yeah, there is a little glimpse of optimism there because I think what I got from it and yeah, my takeaway was that, you know, we're at this point where we're kind of becoming more internal, right? And some of us and we're understanding that design has to be done sensitively, which I guess this is also very aligned with what I how I want to contribute in the technological regenerative technological space is design needs to be sensitively done. There shouldn't be this, you know, a famous Silicon Valley saying is throw throw shit at the fast and break things exactly move fast and break things. Yeah, and this is not this is wrong. Like we need to do perfect practice makes perfect, not practice makes perfect, right? So yeah, new paradigm. I love that. Thank you. Thank you, Naomi. And I hang on for just one second. Doug, I wanted to share screen again for a second because the Kali Yuga here are the Yugas, which are historic cycles from ancient calendars in Hinduism. The Kali Yuga is based on Kali, the demon, and it's basically held up against the book of Revelation as a dystopian sort of vision. There's a book I've not read the Kali Yuga Odyssey, a spiritual journey by Ross Jackson. And I know very little about it other than at some point in the past, I put it in my in my brain. But then also, let me stop the share. But then also this idea of wilderness is really interesting because one of my beliefs, and I said this before on an OGM call somewhere, is that we create these wilderness preserves where we don't let people live. We shove everybody off the land and all the native people and one of my thoughts, which I will connect to this call, is that humans who know what they're doing are really good for the landscape. Like wise humans acting responsibly in ways you just described Naomi are awesome for the landscape. They make the landscape healthier. They make everything better. And we've managed to drive them off and give them like give Native Americans the worst little dry plots of land we could find in the country, which is just painful every time I reflect on it. So wilderness as a colonizing colonizer's word had not occurred to me until you just said that phrase, but it makes complete sense to me. And that's all I wanted to add. Doug, then whoever else would like to jump in. Well, just roofing off of coherence. Do we need a coherent system to deal with climate change globally? And can we possibly do that without authoritarian centralism? And the coherence in actions is how do we get it's what sort of what Ken was saying a moment ago. It makes it makes sense. It's not an agreement on principles and a project plan with 15 steps. It's something else entirely that achieves coherence in some other ways that might even be a little bit mysterious, but better resonant. Yeah, what I see going on now with climate is the number of fragmented efforts all moving in different directions is increasing very rapidly. And many of them are gaming the system. What's coming out of COP 27 is a cap and trade type regime that's so complicated nobody can understand. And I think we're going to just see a lot of that. Also around politics, I think we're going to see them because it might not be possible to indict Trump. And then where are we? Thanks, Doug. John? Sure, thank you. Great additions to the ideas, the flow of ideas. I definitely like the coherence control dimension and the idea that coherence is a spectrum. It's a huge spectrum. And what is sufficient coherence for somebody might be oppressive control for somebody else. So to the extent that we can come up with some measures, guidelines, whatever, that would be helpful. And Doug pointed out a good one, which is if somebody is gaming the system, take a look at that coherence. If you can, if you can possibly anticipate that and not necessarily eliminate it, but change the incentive mix so it's not as harmful. But another dimension of coherence is are you with us or not? Are you on board? And to what extent people of goodwill come on board or can stay on board or are dissuaded either by going too close to either end of the dimension? I more often disconnect from an effort due to its lack of coherence than its excessive control, although both are out there. So yeah, I'm pro-coherence, but a very tolerant coherence that would accept things like we're in the Cali-Yuga or there might be a Schumann resonance. Sure, but how do we integrate that all in a way that doesn't throw people over the side in exasperation? There is that problem. Thanks, John. Jamie, then yours. Hey, everyone. I won't be able to stay long today. It's been a while since I've seen all of you, but I'm at a conference. But I decided to pop out because Carl invited me to come over. And I hope this isn't shoehorning too much into your conversation. But I have something to say about coherence with data. So Carl, I hope this invitation was to share more about what we're up to. But recently, the Society Library's leadership joined the Internet Archive to work on digitizing and making machine-readable government documents and data from the municipal, state, and federal level. And what we found is that even though it's been legally mandated through open data laws in the United States, which is fantastic, it makes the job of getting all this data much easier, something that we've discovered is that there's not a lot of interoperability in that data. A lot of the data is not able to be combined or shared between different agencies. So when we're talking about earlier in the summit that I'm in currently, they're talking about bias in data and how one of the ways in which you can overcome bias is by having more and more and more data to offer more and more and more perspectives. So we're talking about coherence and creating that unified whole and things being logically consistent internally. I think that's a huge part of it, too, is getting to the sense-making aspect of, how do we know what we know, and that's really taking, we have to take into account what data do we have to give us different insights and lenses into the nature of things like climate change. So that's what we're working on. So if anyone has an interest in making or accessing government data, something that I'm really interested in is talking to different groups of sense-makers and learning about their pain points because that's where the US government is right now. Like there was a act that was passed called the Evidence-Based Policy Act of 2018. And so that's mandating that federal agencies create a role which they call the Chief Data Officer. And I think of the 630 rough agencies, federal agencies in the United States only about 88 so far have this, but they're very, very interested in making data accessible to especially public stakeholders and developing products to do so. But there's only so much that they're able to do and a lot of them work between intermediaries. So I wanna talk to as many sense-makers as possible and learn, how would you use government data? What's been preventing you from using government data and documents? Like what tools don't exist because the internet archive is working to position itself to be one of those intermediaries. And I, as leading the US division, really wanna work with sense-makers. So if you know anyone in this space, I really wanna talk to all of them. So that's why I popped on. Jamie, that's fabulous. Have you met Carl Malamud? Yeah, so actually Carl won an award from the internet archive at the launch of democracies library a couple of weeks ago, which is the name of the project. It's called democracies library. So yes, we know Carl, he's great. Fabulous, good. Cause he's been doing this his whole career. Aaron Smortz in an interesting way was trying to do the same thing by going into journals and liberating the data. Anybody else with questions for Jamie while she's here for a moment with us? Thoughts, comments? Well, one last thing I'll say is that thankfully, you know, heroes like Carl and Aaron no longer have to like risk their lives and safety in order to free this data because it's now like legally required to be open. Obviously not classified stuff, but it's been legally mandated that more and more data has to be open. So now it's just a matter of cool in what form is it going to be useful through what like platforms and systems would it be ultimately useful for whatever outcomes? So learning about whatever outcomes, I have a few ideas obviously about just even being able to track policy would be so helpful. Like if there's just a timeline of policy development so that we could see when like shady things happen. Like for example, the society library just released a data set about the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. And if I'm remembering correctly, they took an alcohol bill that made it like all the way through the legislative process. And then the day before it was going to be voted on they gutted this alcohol bill entirely and slipped in a bill to give $1.2 billion to PGN to keep this nuclear power plant open. So like just being able to like use tools to see like how drastically policy language changes and like add that to like a timeline people can literally start intercepting and we can literally start seeing like does the legislative process work or are people gaming it and in what ways are they gaming it? Are they using it like stuff the pockets of corporations? Maybe it's for the better but also do we want our legislative process to work that way? So like whatever ways you're thinking that we could use like an insight into government operations better and what lenses we could develop those are the things we want to develop for the Society Library for the Internet Archive for many, many stakeholders. So please reach out to me and I do have to get back to my conference because I'm like talking in the hallway and I'm sure they hate that. Jamie, thank you so, so, so much. And I have a feeling that your guess is going to slow our pace down just a wee little bit here. Which in the best of ways I think but it's delightful to hear from you and I want to figure out how we can be more helpful. Yay! Great to see you all. I'll pop off for now but I'll try to catch up again soon. Thanks, Jamie. Thank you for being awesome. DFTBA. Right, so you're talking about coherence. And so one of the things that we were discussing with Jerry previously is that nature is coherent per se and even the Schumann resonance is actually, it's like a wave. I don't know if it's, it's acoustic, it's an energy wave, right? Which is created between the crust of the earth and I think the ionosphere. And so it's being in tune even at that kind of level with what's going around. And I can give you a really good example of coherence. Like for example, when we talk about music, there's such exactly sympathetic vibrations, right? And so the idea is when there's resonance is basically that something is vibrating with something else and something is making something else vibrate. And so you have, if you hear the guitar, I'm gonna, I'm gonna untune it. And it just doesn't sound coherence. Something's not right. These vibrations are not in harmony with one another. And even observe the way that made you feel to hear that guitar enter a state of harmony with itself. And that's why I think that when it comes to coherence is like these really simple concepts vary to four, four, four. I could, and that would create actually four, four, four or four, three, two would be more in line with the Schumann residence. So that was an inside joke for music, which was totally lost on me. What does tune guitar to A4, four, four mean? So this guitar is tuned most likely to A4, 40. But A4, 40 is the standard of tuning which was broad, which was accepted, widely accepted since like the 1940s. And many people have theories as to why that is. But tuning it, the guitar is slightly up or down. It's supposed to create more sympathetic vibration with the earth, which is, it has the Schumann residence, the Schumann residence, which has the eight, I don't know, 7.85 Hertz vibration. So that kind of returns to it. And so even listening to music, that puts you in resonance with the world around you, I think that'd be a great start for the basis of a coherent, I don't know, something or other. Place, space, existence. Naomi, please jump in. No, I was just saying coherent culture. David Bohm used to always talk about coherence and the culture. Yay, yeah. Bohm was fascinating. He's one of my heroes also. And one of his experiments, he invented a verb-centered language called Rio mode, R-H-E-O, like a Rio stat, changing the flow. Flow is Rio kind of. I almost called my, when I was trying to invent my DBA in 1998 and I ended up calling myself associate, the runner up was Rio mode. And I was like, nobody's gonna understand this. But he was very interested in sort of these vibrations between us and how that all works. Mr. Kronza, please jump in. I'm trying to lower hand. Don't worry about the lower hand. The unmute is more important and... Lower hand. Lower hand. The problem with lower hand as you start to speak is that now anybody else with their hand up winds up in my upper left and I lose you. I've gotta go find you again. And I like that you're still up there because I like not having my eyes too far from the lens in the bezel of my damn laptop. So to me, the hand lowering is far less important than the actual unmuting. But that's just me. Yeah, allegedly the ancient Egypt's ancient Egyptian priests at the temples where they had to have consistent music such that the sun would rise. And if the chanting, if the music would stop then the world would basically collapse. Thank goodness, they're still doing that. Yeah. You okay? Yeah, I'm just kind of finding the rhythm of the falses, the upwelling of... I'll go, I'll pass from that. But I was interested in Ergus's notion because in my amateur ethnomusicology there's so many different ways of having both harmony and kind of a constructive dissonance. I mean, there's so many beautiful and a Persian sheep-sharing song. So they're so different in harmony than we're used to. And I'm confused about an assertion of some kind of global harmony that seemed to be the direction that Ergus was going. Ergus, the differences in harmonies among many cultures, the Japanese and the Chinese have a different sense than we do. Yeah, but we're being colonialistic as well in that mindset, like saying that our music is the one, right? So we're thinking of our musicality, Beethoven Bach, jazz, Jimi Hendrix as being the standard for good music. Maybe we've lost our hearing. And the thing is that when you listen to Sufi music, Japanese music you listen to, I don't know what other, like anything, even just like rhythmic tribal music, you start to really to expand and to challenge your own perceptions of what the benchmark should be. So I look at music, like think about our musical traditions, say if we're including classical music, that's about 500 years that we have. If we talk about recorded music, we're talking about 70 years, but we've had music for hundreds of thousands of years. And so again, the question is maybe we lost our path or maybe we're just in a phase, like where in adolescence we listen to dissonant stuff because it speaks to us. So doing that on a planetary level, it requires kind of, I don't know, I like somebody who wasn't always talking about regenerative systems and things like that. I really do believe that I think it was Naomi who was talking about regeneration. I mean, the cool thing about regeneration is like it has some biomimicry, but even in its etymology, it's like a return, right? So I believe in like returning to something previous or some music, maybe what the Egyptians were listening to. And I have my own amateur feeling is that we sang and made music without lyrics before we had spoken language. I think it's easier for me to imagine that we started humming and making tunes together before we had words for things and descriptions. And who knows, very hard to do time travel these days. I wanna bring into the conversation the topic that Grace had raised that I had put in as our topic for today, because today is a topic call, although I adore where we've gone and we're not that far off topic actually. And the topic was one of, hey, how can this be a space or how can we in general create spaces that are safer for people with different opinions so that they can have their feelings heard and their needs met in different ways. And that was connected to, and here I'm rebuilding in my memory what I thought the topic was and I would appreciate everybody else's who wants to jumping in to make this better. But for example, American conservatives are feeling shut down and like they, there's basically cancel culture in a variety of different things that are causing them to feel censored and unable to speak and say what they believe. And I've got my own little constructs about what I think is going on and how, but I'd love to hear what we all think. And so if we can turn our conversation lightly in that direction, that would be great. Like woke totalitarianism, yes, exactly. So plenty to say there. And Jurgus, do you have your hand up because you'd like to jump in? No, you just took your hand down, excellent. Klaus, the floor is yours. Yeah, I was struck first in the conversation with Grace, there was a lot of pushback and then I think I was guilty of that as well because she was basically saying that the left is just as bad as the right and the extremism works on both sides and we just took exception to that. And for what I thought were good reasons, but in the meantime, a lot of data has come out that shows that for example, Governor Youngskin pretty much won the election based on the arguments that Grace has been making, which is that particularly mothers are so upset about this whole gender identification and the conversations that is being held with people too young to really have an opinion. And then this whole fluidity of gender identification and operating on kids or gives them medication to fulfill their idea of sexual identity, that is a big, say much bigger thing than I think most of us are aware of than I was aware of certainly. And so I had to come back and say, yeah, she is right. I mean, that is a form of violence to people who just think otherwise, and particularly for parents dealing with children. So I think that's what she positioned. She had a really strong opinion about that part of it and be compared to climate change and social policies and so on and that may not have been fair. Thanks, Klaus. I appreciate that that fills out more of what I'm remembering as well. Anyone else? I thought I heard somebody jumping in a moment ago, but I think it was just a twang in the universe. Yeah, let me say something. I just put it in the chat. David Grotin of the Knowledge Cafes, like Edvinson and myself and other other colleagues are starting to explore this through Oracy Labs, which I've mentioned here before. And at the moment, we've just started a series of sessions called Differencing and Diversity to explore just this theme in open conversations. So consider this an invitation to any of you who would like to take part in a kind of open conversation about this with other people very interested in a sort of structured manner, explore these ideas both with people whose ideas resonate with the ideas of the people on this call and with people eventually whose ideas we assume to be very, very different. Thank you. Do you have links to the series so we can participate or listen to the recordings or things like that? There have been two recordings so far. Yeah, I can set up a link to that and otherwise just use my email address to let me know when you can take, if you're interested in taking part or when you're taking part. At the moment, the sessions are taking place on Wednesday mornings in Europe, which is probably not an ideal time for people on the West Coast of America. But I mean, if there are a number of people who are interested in taking part, we can adjust which day and which time it's taking place. That sounds great. Thank you. And Stacey, you wanna jump in? Yeah, I'll give a personal example of what it's like to not wanna come in with like another opinion. So before the elections, I had been staying away from the news media. But what I shared with certain people is I was monitoring the predictions on the different astrological YouTube calls. So I was following a lot of different readers who had it right. And so I did not go in thinking that it was gonna be this red wave. And I did share it with a lot of people and then I was able to follow it up by watching things like the Midas touch and listening to how the polls were being manipulated. But I share that as one example of an area that sometimes we don't draw from because we throw the whole thing out as not being scientific, but there's an energy to that. And so that's one thing I just wanna throw out there without going any deeper. A separate example is what it feels like to disagree with people that you're normally in coherence with. So for example, on social media, most of you know, I mean, I have no tolerance for Trump. I don't like him, but he doesn't take up the same amount of space in my head. I'm much more concerned with finding common ground with people than I am with just focusing on him. And so the picture that was circulating was the wedding picture of the different Trump women and a lot of people were attacking family values, blah, blah, blah. The first few times that I saw it, I just ignored it. It just wasn't worth my time. But then finally I saw one person speak out about it. And because she was in the minority, that's usually when I step in, I say, well, I kind of actually agree. This is the one time I wouldn't fault them. I think it's a good thing when grown-ups can put their feelings aside for the sake of this, you know, adult child that's getting married. And immediately I was shunned, just for a second. And I was able to work my way out of it and you know, just call out, well, it's good that we could disagree, right? But the tendency to, something happens when somebody disagrees with you. And I don't care who you are and how evolved you are and how well you're able to not let it affect you. I do think and I am making a generalization, but I think that there's something universal that happens when all of a sudden you're not in coherence with the rest of the group. And I think that as a community, it would be in our best interest to figure out how do we make that more of a wonderful thing? Like, you know, what piece are we missing? You know, is there anything that we're not seeing? Oh, well, what about if we look at it from here where it becomes a contribution to see something that we didn't see before? Instead of, oh, this person's always pointing this out. So I'm sorry if my message isn't as mainstream. I don't need, again, I'll stop. Not a problem at all. Thank you for that. Anyone else thoughts on the same theme or a point of view like about this moment in our cultures? Because this isn't just a U.S. phenomenon. This is happening around the world in different ways. I wanted to just say one more thing since I was a year just right now. That's really the beauty of music that it's this big framework and you can plug in anywhere. You can plug into the instrument that hits you or the lyrics or the melody. I mean, it just, it gives you that big space to play in where you can do your own thing but not get in anybody else's way. I just wanted to share that. Thanks, Stacy. Gil is asking, which this do I mean? I mean, the this about safety for having conversations about topics that feel like they're being suppressed or whatever, where are the lines? How does that work? That topic. And I thought I heard somebody jumping in as well. Mark? I posted. Mark then, Carl? Oh, Carl then, Mark. Carl then, Mark. I posted a link to it again. I've been, the Peter Elbow had an article that he wrote about the believing game and I'm gonna try again. It's like I try periodically to get people interested but that's, this is more important than ever now. This is really a core part of it. And then talk about challenging things. This really challenges the prevailing paradigm of science. But it's a compliment and stuff. But it's a critical part. Can you paraphrase what he says in the piece? Basically, it's that our scientific method is the doubting game. And we need to have a way of systematically seeking validity in what we don't agree with and things. So it's a very deep article. I mean, you need people need to read it and then digest on it for a while and then this deserves a separate meeting. I think you brought it up on the June 23rd, OGM Check and Call because that's when I went and looked up the article and added it to my brain and I put it under believing as seeing and next to the doubting game which is sort of critical thinking, et cetera. And I don't know more and I haven't had a chance to read the piece but thank you for bringing it back to our attention. And then we, sorry, Mark, did you wanna jump in before Gil and Doug? Yeah, so Mark first. You're still muted hunting for that mute button. Yeah, hunting for that mute button with multiple screens. The mouse is hard to find sometimes. There it is. Yeah, I had a fascinating journey through turfdom, T-E-R-F, trans- Trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Yeah, that's right. And my good friend or former good friend is a turf and I had some other good friends that transitioned and I had written in a Facebook screen that, you know, JK Rowling is hurting too. And, you know, you have to kind of have some compassion and I was completely unfriended quickly. Which is, was kind of sad, but I talked about that with the person this weekend at the Aaron Schwartz day. And it's something that was fascinating to me that, you know, JK Rowling is directly, not indirectly, the cause of many acts of brutality towards trans people and I found that to be a strange claim because I would think as my understanding of causation it would be an indirect kind of contributor to cause, but the notion that a trans person will never be a man or never be a woman, whichever way they choose to transition is a very hot topic where people can exploit that and do exploit that to basically, you know, say that, to dehumanize the other, to basically say the other is, you know, not worthy of being in our tribe. And that's a very odd and strong political tool that's being used or abused by both sides. I'm reminded of, oh, maybe a 3,000 year old Chinese notion that people who are very intelligent extremes, I found that in myself, unless I'm not intelligent and I simply tend to extremes anyway. The notion of the center and the periphery, the play between the individual in society or even the individual in culture, culture being very different from society. The best term I heard about that is from the physicist Victor Weisskopf saying that society must have a human face. You know, we cannot basically give our decisions to DAOs that basically, you know, wherever we create bureaucracy and we create rules, if they don't have the judicial systems ability to basically have a judge in this case, we have a human being here and the law can be, you know, interpreted in a humane way. And these extremes can be interpreted in a humane way. It's the sense of having a doctrine or dogma and the difference between doctrine and dogma. If we have a dogma that's inflexible of saying all transitioning people cannot actually be women, they cannot participate in women's sports, they cannot use a women's bathroom because I'm a woman and it threatens me and my identity. I've thrown a lot of, how did Stacey say, shit against the wall to see what it's like up here? And it's, you know, I have friends who are tourists, I have friends who are former bosses and current works and people who I love dearly, who are trans people and I see it being used as a tool for division rather than a tool for meeting. And I'm concerned because I want my friends to meet. That's all. Thanks, Mark. And that last little stretch is the piece that I think I'm interested in us pointing to and then setting aside, which is that these issues are in fact very handy things to light bonfires under and blow a lot of oxygen on in order to get people really mad and get people like unable to talk and hating each other and move political blocks around. And that's happening right now out in the arena. And so let's set that aside and let's figure out can we untangle what's happening inside it, beside it, whatever else? So Gild and Doug. Yeah, many thanks to Mark who, many thanks to Mark. I thought this was a check-in call but it appears to be something else. Last week was check-in, this week is topic. That shows what I know. So full disclosure, I'm a big fan of the First Amendment, which says, as I recall, Congress shall make no law respecting establishment of religion prohibiting free exercise thereof or bridging the freedom of speech or the press. No law, not some laws, not laws under certain circumstances but no laws of bridging freedom of speech. William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice in my early coming up was fierce about that one and that's where I lean to. When I was a kid, in contrast to kids these days, one of the expressions we were taught, one of the sort of the normative catechisms with sticks and stones will break my bones, may break my bones but words will never harm me. And we seem to have gone in a very different direction about that, like words will harm me Mark, I'm right with you, like, JK Rowling directly caught, no, not directly at all, indirectly through a whole circuit of stuff and circumstance and interpretation. I don't know if people have read her writings on this. In the original, they don't come across as they come across in headlines. Very much the same with Dave Chappelle. So other disclosure here is that I find my thinking about this subject is really different when I'm in contact with trans people who I know personally. Then when I read about it in the media or hear the generalized dialogue or the theoretical dialogue about it, whatever abstract discomforts I may have in the theoretical dialogue are really resolved by direct contact with people that I love and who have found meaning in their lives. So just that as a flag of the difference between abstraction and relationship in how we deal with such things. The whole identity conversation I find really troubling in our urgency to categorize very complex beings into very simple categories. And in my experience, people are much more complex than the categories either that people put on them or that they put on themselves. This is particularly, and so I will distinguish how to say this. I'm concerned about categorization that shuts down conversation in a relationship rather than opens up possibility of connection and invention together and putting people in boxes and putting ourselves in boxes, I think, is dangerous stuff. Particularly around the transition stuff, I distinguish between transition for adults and transition for young people both because of the agency of a more mature person and the harmonic stew that a young person is in in very changeable, formative, mixy, mixy biochemical environment in their own bodies and what was I gonna say about that? There are native cultures in Turtle Island who identify seven genders. The Talmud identifies five. We have people here in this country who are fiercely saying there are two and only two. So it's a messier story than that. And so I'm in favor of both compassion for people who are in formation of themselves and compassion for people who talk about this stuff. I have found in my small sampling that a lot of the fiercest voices, labeling people as turf, et cetera, or Chapelle for punching down or what have you have not actually listened directly to what folks are saying. I posted in the chat a little bit earlier a conversation that John Stewart had on the Colbert show in the last week or so. Talking about this with striking insight and thoughtfulness, I really commend it to everybody to have a look at. And to simplify, well, to just pull one thing out of what he said, he's very strongly advocating that we listen to each other and listen to listen across the differences and listen to what each other has to say rather than rushing to judgment on that. And Ken and I hosted a conversation yesterday they got into some related territory about how do we listen to what people care about and learn to have ears that can hear that across the differences. Because across the differences, there's an enormous amount of human commonality. Even in the highly polarized United States there's 70, 80, 90% supermajorities on most of the issues that we care about. In the highly polarized United States, the last election was about 60, 70 million Democrats, 60, 70 million Republican, about 120 million not voting. So are we polarized or is it something else going on here? And for me that says let's do a lot more listening to each other, even people who we are uncomfortable with, maybe particularly people we're uncomfortable with. Since you asked. Thanks Gil, no, that's perfect. Yeah, Mr. Breckhardt. I resisted lowering my hand, Jerry, so that you could not have to go hunting and pecking. Thank you, I appreciate it. So I've actually been focused on, what are the internal mechanisms around all of this? And had a really interesting conversation with a friend, Collie. And the subject of attachments came up and I shared with her that I had really shed pretty much all of mine. I don't have attachments in my life these days. And my wife stuck her head into just tell me she was going out and where she's going and walked in and this woman said to me, well, you do have one at least. And I said to her, not so much. And I said, I have a very strong connection with my wife. I don't have attachment to my wife. And she knows who she is and she has her boundaries and identity and authority and agency, I have mine. And we are in relationship and the strength of our connection energizes the work we put into to maintain our relationship. We've been together 32, 33 years on. Attachment is different because attachment is fear, a belief, an idea, a worldview that someone has internalized and there is no longer a volitional discretionary choosing to hold that position, that position equals them and they equal that position. And it is not a function of choice and discretion at that point. It's a basis and way and framing contextualization of that person versus the world. It's a separation dynamic. It's a protection dynamic. It's an identity dynamic energetically. And the paradigm and world we're living in, at least in terms of Western civilization is sort of designed and set up to promote that, to play on and leverage, profiteer from and use as instrumentality and approach of control to keep people separate, to keep people disconnected from each other. Like there's a real concerted interest in us not recognizing ourselves and others and vice versa. And that's sort of a universal underlying theme and phenomena in all of the places where there's differences and the differences are rooted in disconnection and in separation, in othering, in polarization. And in a lot of the, I wear a bunch of different hats in my work, but in a coaching frame, a lot of my work is really, talking a client down from their attachments, loosening up the grip of their attachments, their fears, whatever, on their fully empowered, fully enabled discretionary capacity to be the God of their own existence and to create the world they want and to experience it the way they want. The third leg of this attachment stool is that it requires, I call it sort of the, I call it the golden idol syndrome. It requires that a person shift the source of their center of orientation to somebody or something outside of themselves that is the provider of their center of orientation. And that can be anything from an organized religion to a Tony Robbins to anybody that is the source. And I'm really interested in how, can we catalyze a reawakening in people to their own agency, their own authority, their own voice and restoring their own earth, their own center of orientation without Adams, without it coming from somebody else or someplace else. So with that I'm complete. Thank you, Doug. Mark. Yeah, I want to inquire with Doug as I agree with what he's saying. And in healing, I was sent an article which I've yet to read about how the difference in miracle cancer cures is that people take their own healing and not rely on, not totally rely on the medical profession or outside healers and yet we are a social species. We live with the words of others. We live, we are given infected with language by our parents and listening to Harry and Naomi and everyone else here. I get new language. I get things from outside of me which my agency I react with and engage with and in some way give up my autonomy to the group where I'm not talking the entire hour and a half where I'm listening and I'm bringing in from the outside. There's a play between, you know, connection and Doug makes a very interesting difference between attachment and connection which is food for my thought, is me being influenced by Doug, me not having, you know, 100% agency but some kind of submission to his idea, Doug. Yeah, that's really interesting thing. I really think, you know, that's a cultural reflection. It's sort of a cultural layering and imposition and judgment that has been almost programmatically stirred into the soup. If every communication is a battle, a metaphoric battle for a winner or a loser, then if I take in something you've offered, there's like this almost intrinsic emotional and printed surrender in that that I've somehow lost in some way. And the truth of the matter is, for me, at least experientially in every interaction, it is energetically, simultaneously at the same time regardless of who is technically quote, receiving or who is providing that there's a gift and a creation of value on both sides. Like my contributing something that maybe gave you a aha or a twist or return in a way that you haven't thought about it before is an opportunity to me of service for an opportunity for me to have contributed value and you on the receiving end getting that, right? Is an opportunity, again, for appreciation, right? And that appreciation, I think it is or can be intrinsic all the time in every interaction if it's not in a cultural frame where it's winners and losers and it's profitors and payers and consumers and sellers. Like, out of that matrix, all sorts of orientational things can happen if that helps. I don't know whether that addresses it, but yeah. Very quickly, I think you've touched on the notion of framing. Who is basically influencing the context of our communication? Is it Twitter? Is it Zoom? Is it, you know, the medium is the massager, the medium is the message. The media through which we connect structures our interactions, degree. We all have autonomy and whether we use Twitter to troll or to love. And, you know, here we have a frame of listening to each other in a kind of coherent way. Kind of the incoherent way of, he said this, I'm gonna attack him or her or whoever. We're gonna have the metaphor of attack or the metaphor of play. Thank you, Naomi. Play is gorgeous metaphor or gorgeous reality. Play or, you know, possession or like, can't come up with a P word that is the opposite of plan. But anyway, I'll stop and I'll have Jurgus. Please, Jurgus, go ahead. Yeah, it was something really interesting that Doug brought up. And it really came through his body language at the moment he was talking about, again, the framing as a conflict, you know, as a struggle. You know, again, as a box and you could, I could even see the way his face tensed up when he was talking about it. But again, I sometimes look at it a little bit. It's not so much the frameworks we've been put into but more about what is the intention when we come into them. And so that is completely cultural. So one of the things that I love doing is going into corporate space and bringing in play. And play is very interesting because it's a non-fatal simulation. I mean, if it's real play, you're not playing to win, you're not playing to lose, you're playing to play to enjoy it. Again, the whole idea of music, you know, that music is about enjoying the moment, being entrained in something with another human being. And obviously when you're connected to somebody else and you're experiencing the beauty of creative rapture or just, you know, having perspective that expands you, the beauty of it is that you feel that you're connected to something well beyond yourself. The more the people, the more you feel that that is connection. So it's actually, for me, it is not, it's as if right now engaging other people in an expansive way is so risky that nobody wants to do it. But there's a guideline to working with this, especially when I make music with people. I say, always put trust over truth. Because the truth is something maybe you're attached to something that you have your perspective and you're like, no, I want, and it's good to have your own truth, but it's more important to be able to be in a trusting environment. Because only when you put trust over truth, can everybody share their truth freely and you feel again that it's not a competitive zero-zero-some game situation, but more actually where the more pieces of this consciousness is in harmony with the rest of the whole, the better time we're having. So I even just ponder on how difficult it is for us to take communion with other people in such an apprehensive way. And as a society, how we've worked ourselves into this such deep separation with one another that we were even frightened about it deeply. Absolutely. Let's just go into silence for a moment with that. Several people have said several things that are all stacked up, at least in my head. So let me, I'll bring us out of silence after a little bit here. Thank you all for where we are. Mark, and I'm going to go refill my coffee. So pardon my jump bouncing around here. As a young boy, my father would take me oddly to motivational seminars. And I very quickly saw the pattern of people exchanging trust for good feeling. And Yurgis, as you were talking, I came up with this term fake trust. And just found an article, three ways to avoid fake trust at work by Googling fake trust. And I find that there's a lot of research on scientific research. And it's being used by political influencers and even corporate influencers and people who create advertising to create fake trust. And the weapon against that is truth. So again, a balancing, again, a play, where do we go? How do we find the context of skepticism without cynicism? I'll try to be quiet as quickly as possible. And I'm considering muted while I find the mouse. And I'm going to clear the truth is the antidote, but I love what you just said. And I think that there's very definitely a weaponization of trust and an undermining of trust and a creation of fake trust and a whole bunch of other things. And then, and I've said this before in other OGM calls, also the creation of actual community. So one thing I can easily picture is that there's a bunch of people on 8chan or wherever inventing the next meme that's going to float through the echo chamber. And when my meme is the one that wins the day and suddenly is seen on the major media because I'm doing virtual high fives with my members of my tribe in my community who feel like insurgents. And we're having a sense of community that's not fake. That insurgencies are bound, soldiers are bound in battle on both sides of any war. Like that's kind of what keeps soldiers actually fighting is like, this may be a stupid war. I don't think I like the reason for it, but I'm damned if I'm going to let Jane and Bob die while I'm around. And so that there's a lot of this going on and these forces are being used very intentionally, very strategically and very intelligently, kind of against us, which doesn't make me very happy. We also like to jump in and maybe orient us. Like, would anybody like to take a swing at where are we in this conversation? What do you have a point of view on this topic or an offer for what we could do to get out of the topic better? And I don't mean out of the topic in this conversation, I mean to, as a society, make progress on these questions. The X-Files, trust no one. Okay, Eric, that was that. I think you just solved the whole thing right there. And then you forgot the second X-Files quote, which is, the truth is out there. So Klaus. Yeah, I'm looking at this, maybe from a more pedestrian point of view, what do people tune in on and listen to? And in my case, I mean, I'm working in the food and agriculture sector. Water is a magic connector because everybody has a sense of panic and fear. You know, too much water, not enough water, droughts, prolonged droughts, acrobats depleting. So we shifted in the regenerative act movement. We are shifting in the process of shifting the conversation away from climate change, which is just causing nothing but controversies and headaches and arguments. And we focus on water. And that is an emotional connection that helps us to work with people who are otherwise disengaged, big government, I mean, who have been so filtered with all this misinformation that has been propagated in this sector. So the important part is to find whatever it is that you're pursuing in your conversation to find this emotional connection. And I think we have really landed on water and send out some information later, but by doing that, like here in Oregon, I'm working to develop a webinar series with the Oregon Climate and Agriculture Network and so on. And then I put out this water-focused information, every 1% of organic carbon added to the soil, let's it hold another 20,000 gallons of water per acre, plus it increases the penetration rate drastically, right? Just thinking about this, from a very practical perspective. So I think we need to like power down on this theory and theoretical framework and find really practical, tangible connectors. Thank you very much. Anyone else? So for me, there's a nexus of topics. Let me back up for a second. I'm a big fan of call in culture, not call out culture. So cancel culture troubles me and there's a whole set of topics there. On the other hand, there's a question that's active in my head and I think it's active in a lot of people's heads about what is appropriate free speech? Where are the boundaries of free speech? So incitement to riot is an exception to the First Amendment. And it could be argued and it's actually compelling to me that Trump and company who at the time was the president of the United States was in fact inciting a riot and that he didn't have the legitimate right under the First Amendment, even if you really love the First Amendment to do so. There are other people who are like, oh no, no, no, he wasn't inciting a riot. And that gets into this, how many angels dance on the head of a pin kind of conversation, which I hate because it would be nice if there were a simple binary, if there were a simple way to say yes and no. And this is all complicated because from my perspective of studying Donald Trump far more than I wish to, he acts like a very street smart mafia don and a street smart mafia don is never caught saying, hey, you go kill so and so. No one says, God be ashamed if something happened to that guy or you'll take care of that, won't you? And everybody kind of knows unspoken. And if you listen to Michael, what's his name, the lawyer that has been trying to be angry at Trump for a while since Trump basically banished him, Michael Cohen, he's like that. That's exactly what Trump is busy doing. And Trump was trained by mafia dons, the construction business in New Jersey and New York, Roy Cohn, the lawyer who was his mentor. These were all people who knew exactly how to not leave an incriminating trail and all that and how to dog, and here we have terms like dog whistling and so forth, but dog whistles are silent whistles that humans don't hear, but dogs hear and metaphorically they are signals set to your followers that are encoded or embedded so that they're intentionally hard to point to and go, hey, you just told those people to go do this thing. Proud boys stand back, stand by. That's a dog whistle, that's not just the dog whistle, that's kind of an order to like hang out and get ready for insurrection, as far as I can tell. And so then there's this messy question next door of, damn, there were a whole bunch of artists and authors and writers out there who did extremely shitty things in their lives. They were misogynist bastards, rapists, alcoholics, who knows what else, what do we do about their art? If you're a fan of Woody Allen movies and his relationship with his stepdaughter troubles you, what do you do about his art? Do you go watch his movies or do you set aside his canon forever? And you could go endlessly through the catalog of creative people who've done things because this is so prevalent, so endemic and unfortunately one of my amateur theories about what causes people to create great art is that it's people who have demons they're trying to chase out of their system that often create the great art. For a while I collected biographies of great creators, great artists and so many of them had extremely, extremely traumatic childhoods and overbearing parents and the whole, name your trope or stick about difficult, terrible childhoods and boy, chances are that person was making great art. Low chances because there's apparently not that many people who managed to make great art in our society which might just be an attention problem or a media problem, but that's a different question. But anyway, what do you do about people who commit one bad thing in one area of their life but are good in some other ways? Years ago I sat next to a woman from Cargill and at a dinner, at a business dinner and I was like, oh, this is gonna be hard because I'm not that crazy about the grain merchants and all the things that they've done. I ended up learning that Cargill has a no excuses, no bribes policy worldwide. They and they work everywhere in the world and lots of places, you expect a grease payment to get your shipment of whatever through the customs or whatnot and they have a no exceptions policy. They are as far as I could tell at least intentionally a gold standard on bribery worldwide, even if I don't like them for other kinds of things. And that was a really enlightening thing for me because they could go teach a course on bribery as far as I was concerned in that moment. And I would attend the course, even though I disliked what they might be doing in other realms of their operation. And it's really hard to disentangle bad acts from bad actors and to figure out how to do it. But I hate cancel culture. So I'm sort of circling back to where I started this little rant. I can't stand cancel culture because salting the earth as somebody stood on and making sure that they've been beheaded, fired and never have work again in this town and ostracized human. That is like, that is humans short of execution. That is human societies ultimate terrible act to take. And you don't want to do that. If you can at all avoid it. You want to bring people back in, in the healing wisdom of Africa. Maladoma Somay talks about how tribes in the Dagara tribe of Western Africa, how they deal with bad acting youths. And they'll go bring your grandma and the shaman and whoever else that make a circle. They'll talk to you and say, hey, if you're going to be a functioning adult in this community, in this tribe, you can't do that anymore. What do we do to fix this? And I'm paraphrasing it all and sticking it sort of in Western cultural terms. But we bring people back in, call in, I love. And there's a couple of speakers out there who've done some, hey, we need call in culture, not call out culture. And I am hugely in favor of that. And then I'm going to juxtapose that next to the things I was saying a moment ago, which is, hey, by the way, out in the arena, people are extremely aware in a very sophisticated way of all the dynamics I just described. And they have decided to weaponize trust and the good faith that people might have that we should listen to you. And either waste our time like crazy. And it's like, don't talk to the trolls partly because one of their jobs is to simply exhaust you and waste your time and break your morale on whatever mission you happen to be on because they're trying to disable you. And it's a legitimate tactic in the arena of ideas and concepts at the scale and importance that we're talking about here. Like, totally legit, I don't like it. It's a nasty tactic, but it's totally legit. So, and then the right has learned how to poke at the left and froth them up and how to poke at the media and froth them up. And there's a bunch of lessons I learned from thinking about Trump and how he won the 2016 election that was like, oh my God, he knew exactly how to froth up everybody more than yesterday because we got used to yesterday and we sort of normalized yesterday as he tears open the Overton window of what is respectable or useful or acceptable discourse but not so much that you'll end up on the street and off the race. Howard Dean is exhorting his own people and yells a little bit hoarsely or something and he's no longer in the presidential campaign a week later, a thing I have never understood. A week later, the dean's scream has him out of the campaign. He's lost support and I do not understand. In eight years of Obama administration, his biggest scandal is he wears a light gray suit one day and Donald Trump on any given day in the run up to the election, never mind as president would commit like a dozen things that I would consider far worse than any of those offenses. Some of which are probably crimes but we haven't been able to pin him down on those. It's like, wow. So anyway, that's my story of this issue in different ways. It's like, I want call in culture but I'm painfully aware that some people will use call in culture against us as a way of jujitsuing. Okay, great. So that means you should listen to Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi and he should be able to speak at Berkeley. And I'm like, well, probably it's okay for Spencer to speak at Berkeley because like we gotta listen to people but how much do we have to listen to people and when are they citing insurrection and inciting a riot? What is it okay and not okay to talk about in public and what do we do with people in their life histories? Sorry, that was a lot but that's kind of what I've been doing about for the last two weeks thinking about this topic and coming into this call. And I just wanna know, does that resonate? Are people like, nope, nope, nope doesn't really work that way. This works this other way. Would you elaborate on this vision in some way that I would love to hear anything like that? Besides that, I got nothing. No, you got a lot, it's just quiet. And I for one love quiet. So I'm not worried about the quiet but I'd love to deepen this issue and I'd love to figure out what to say where about this issue. Is this something we can do something about in some way? Because it's really important. We can't have an open global mind or an open mind. We can't have a global mind without an open mind and we can't get to an open mind without solving some of these issues about talking to the other. And so I'm grateful for Grace for raising this question with us and saying, hey dudes, sometimes it feels really dicey to talk about stuff that's on the edge here. How to do that better? And I'm probably guilty of that myself. Let's go Stacey Gill. So I just wanna say one more time really quickly that it's probably harder for Grace to say something like this to a group that she's a part of than to be able to talk and disagree with somebody that you're not a part of. And so for me, it's always about starting with those closest to you because we don't have that experience. And that's where our attachment to go back to where Doug was talking about. That's where our attachment is the strongest. Thank you very much. Akil. Yeah. Thank you Stacey. I've been thinking about relationship and context a lot. Jerry, as you've been speaking and I share your dismay at the Dean's screen. It was like a, what, three second clip out of a 45 minute thing. And you take clips out of anybody's anything and you can make it look stupid. And it was a hit job on Dean. So there's that. The Nazi thing is really tough. I have a dear friend just turned a hundred this year. He's a concentration camp survivor. He lived in Skokie, Illinois, when the Nazis did a big public march in Skokie back then. And he was among the people organized blocking them. He was prepared to go out in the street armed to stop them for reasons that you can understand if you think into the story. But for the what's his name speaking at Cal no, I'm kind of inclined to shame as an important weapon. Shame and humor like there was a ridicule very important. There was a far right march someplace and people basically sold walk-a-thon tickets around the marsh. So that every step that each of these alt-right people took was actually making money for a charity they wouldn't like. And then they went up and sort of made fun of them a bit which is cool by me. For example, or surrounding the hall at Cal where the guy was going to speak. And maybe blocking it, but maybe not blocking it. Maybe providing a corridor that people going have to walk through. So how is that different from an abortion clinic having a quarter of people who believe in the sanctity of life? Maybe it's not. Maybe that's okay to do under these terms. Woof, I know. That's so hard. I know Woof, this is tough territory and this is not binary answers. But in contrast to blocking the clinic which I would say is illegal to assassinating abortion doctors which is clearly illegal to getting the guy banned from speaking at the University of California which I think is both illegal and a bad idea. Maybe there's a wall of shame or a ridicule or other ways, many other ways possible here that are more challenging but maybe more resonant with our broader and deeper values of how things proceed in the world. There are choices people make. What's his name? Yang, Andrew Yang spoke at University of California this week and crossed the picket line. It's 48,000 university workers out on strike. He crossed the picket line. His reason was that, well, I didn't know what the issues are. Laurie Garrett, the science journalist, epidemiology geek and so forth didn't speak at Cal twice this week and she said to them why and they arranged an off-campus online venue for her to speak in. So again, not binary, room for creativity and how to stand firm with values and also be open to engagement. There's a lot for us to learn here. There's a lot of ways of dissolving these problems in ways like you just described that we're not getting to because we're so overheated about the issues that they become binary and angry and all that awful stuff. Well, back to the thing about folks making us do stuff that I decried before, the media soup is designed to polarize us. It's designed to reduce issues to binary. It's designed to make us angry at each other and I'm looking at UMSNBC just like I'm looking at Fox and because the business model is, if it bleeds, it leads. Fire controversy, anger, gets eyeballs and their business is eyeballs. They sell our eyeballs so the more they can glue our eyeballs to them, the more they get and that's what they do. We get to do something different than that, hopefully. Let's go Klaus and Yurgis and we're getting, we're at our usual wrap time. Yeah, in regard to connecting, there was a brief documentary on the Santas from Florida, which was actually far more complimentary, which was from a liberal perspective done actually, but it really pointed out how this guy is able to dial in to what is really at the forefront of their mind of particularly mothers, families and a conservative group that's coming back to what Grace was pointing and was trying to get us to focus on, on the Santas is extremely skillful in coaxing that out. And so he is highly regarded in these groups. And it brings us back down to identify what is in a person's mind that you have to get past before you can enter with other pieces of information. And so anyway, it's really worthwhile to look because it completely flipped my perspective on what the Santas also. Thanks, Klaus. And there's been a lot of very, very smart work done by people like Frank Luntz and Fram and so forth on what words will provoke, what feelings and get mobilized people to vote and whatever else. And the sort of sad manipulative part of it is that has nothing to do with what the actual policies are. They're just hunting for, hey, what'll get people off the couch to go vote, for example, or to go to their school board meeting and threaten violence, for example. And there's a lot of very good mental energy expended on creating that and it sucks badly. Hang on a second, Gil. Yurgis first. Yeah, I was kind of taking in everything that was being said. And I love to think of things in terms of examples, metaphors or analogies. And the one that came to mind was one that I live with my kids very often when we play board games, especially Monopoly or something like that, where no matter what happens, somebody's gonna be pissed off. And you realize that they're games that bring out the worst in us. And over and over, we said that, yeah, a lot of it has to do with the media and the way that our emotions are being manipulated for ulterior motives. But what I find very curious is that, I mean, if we know that you cannot win at that game, I mean, you could play Monopoly and you could put all kinds of civility rules to kind of make things go down better. But what actually keeps people at the table are the relationships that transcend the game, the pizza that we ordered, as a family, we sat down at the table. And I think that there's this old hippie, I think, saying, I don't know, where the tension goes, the energy flows. And so when this gets so much attention in that game, it's kind of like an argument nobody can back out of. And so I'm quite, again, I work through music, which is always like, oh, let's not discuss it, let's just play music. Having more of that kind of attitude where it's like, let's step away from the table and how we create these spaces where the business people stand up, have a drink, politicians go have a cigarette and find the humanity on the other side of the argument. And for me, the main question is how we create those spaces because clearly at those tables inside those games, we will not be able to find the peace and solace who are looking for it. Thank you. Gil, even though you're eating, you're still muted. But you said even though I'm eating. Yeah, well, there was both. There were two constraints. I try to combine them. I'm a step or two back in the conversation, but with regard to what the right wing is doing, a lot of the stuff is straight out of gobbles. The Nazi propaganda minister. If you read his stuff, there's stuff that's almost word for word coming out of the mouths of Ben and Miller and others. Just saying. And also Goebbels was a fan of Eddie Bernays who wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion. That book was on Goebbels' bookshelf. Yeah, and Mein Kampf was on Donald's bedside table. That too. But the manufacturing of consent, all these kinds of things, that when I say that there's really smart people who spent a lot of time and effort figuring this out, though, then some of the intellectual origins of that work. Anyone with anything to say to put a bow on this conversation? Take us out. I'm interested in Gil's notion of federated small. And in my work, I find at the Internet Archive, I find that the idea of waiting until artificial intelligence is smart enough, rather to basically help with metadata and correcting OCR text behind the books that we scan, rather than basically working on the hard part of creating community and basically copying things that work in other contexts, like crowdsourcing the fixing of the OCR text while somebody's reading the book. Just have the text that's OCR next to the picture of the text. And yeah, as I'm reading the book, I'm happy to basically make these fixes. But that's too costly for our current infrastructure. It scales, but I don't know. What Naomi and Gil had brought up in the chat is something that I'd love for further conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. And Naomi, I wanted to ask you. You were talking about macro solutions may not apply here. It's really about micro small scale. Can you say a little more? Yeah. Well, I'm in this community called Kernel. It's a Web3 community that actually a lot of the content that we're talking about now is framed more in technological solutions and how to use technology as a tool to actually foster communities that care about each other. And I think one of the biggest takeaways I had from my cohort in Kernel was that everything is political and political is all micro. There's no such thing as macro politics because everybody is arriving to a discussion with their interests. And I think it's a competition for the space of the interest, which is the struggle that we're all having. There's a lot of competition for attention. And attention is care. Attention is love. And then we have the big tech giants taking our, like they're extracting our attention. So there's none left over for the people right around us, right? So I really kind of being extremely vocal about how I think this whole obsession with scalability is totally nonsensical and absurd. And if we really care about impact, all these VCs that are saying they care about impact funders is like, well, are you only looking for scalable solutions? Because actually the solutions that you're looking for, if you really care about impact, and if we want to go to the roots of problems, they're not scalable. They're hyper localized. And that's why I'm really interested in the decentralized movement. But I think even the decentralized people are not really adapted to the true philosophy behind what decentralized solutions really are, especially in the outside world, right? They're only seeing it from the technological level. So yeah, this is my struggle at the moment. Love that. Thank you. And thanks for sharing it with us. Scalable is one of those words that I've got a couple riffs on that's sort of one of my peeves in that it's not scalable often means there is no engineering solution to this. I can't force people to follow these steps and replicate it and grow it really big. But what we seem to mean when we say scalable is, gosh, I want this to affect a lot of people, right? And so for me, it's like, hey, drop the engineering mindset. Don't be Intel trying to replicate exactly the process that worked best on one of the lines for producing chips. But instead, create adaptive or fractal scale. I don't know what the best word for it is probably adaptive scale. But when you put a pattern language for how to facilitate group conversations out in the world and it's contagious because it's really useful, that's adaptive scale. Because the pattern language is going to migrate and mutate like folk music across human tribes and communities. But in general, its intention and capacities and content should make it around and touch a lot of people. And that's fabulous. That's all I want is for some change to cause a lot of change down the road. And the only way that I think change sticks is if people can appropriate the thing and make it their own. And like say, oh, this didn't work for us the way they used it, two villages over. But we took out this rule and we added in this thing over here. And now it's working great for us and it's ours. That thing repeated over and over and over at micro turns into macro change. And I'm really interested in facilitating that dynamic as it goes. And maybe that's a good place to take us out of the call. Unless Gil, you were raising your hand to jump back into the conversation. Gil, are you good? I'm very good. Well, I like that end. And I like that as a beginning for next conversation. Sweet. I think that's kind of what OGM is trying to do. It is. At least a piece of what we're trying to do, at least a piece that I care a lot about. So thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you, everybody. This is a wonderful conversation. And I love this, our time together here. Yurgis, thank you for being patient with us. He's in Lithuania. So it's a little late. And it's just awesome to be here with you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Bye, everybody. Bye. Thank you. Thanks. Bye, y'all.