 Hello, Doug. Good morning. Yeah, for you. Good morning. Yeah. I'm over the morning. 5 p.m. my time. Yours is 8 p.m. I guess. Correct. On a dark rainy day in Northern California. Northern California. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, here also a dark green day actually. But it gets light earlier already. And we have a dog who had a cat and they wake up when it starts getting light. So by mid summer, we're at up at 430 in the morning. It's funny that we, it's funny that two of us now. Where is everybody? Are we in the right room? I wonder. This is like the link that Jerry sent yesterday. Yeah, that's what I. Let's wait another one minute. Probably people are generally I'm late when I'm a few minutes late. It's already full. It's already packed. So it's doesn't look right. Do you have a link for an earlier? Here comes somebody. So we, you know, where is everybody? I think they're really exactly. Anyway, good talking. There are a whole bunch of people here. My goodness. Wow. John, excellent. Glad you're here. Good to see you Jerry. Lovely. Oh, this is lovely. Jerry, you shaved. I did. The purple thing, the purple eggplant is gone. My wife thought that was very cool, by the way. Oh, thank you. I did. I did take some pictures of it. So that's good. But it was, it was my vow that when Trump was off stage and could no longer push the nuclear button that it would go. And so it's gone. Mercifully, I think too. I liked it. Thank you. I've never seen bobbing for eggplant work out so well as it did for you. And I've got my favorite. My favorite shirt on this is the undue eraser. I don't remember where I got this. I got it a really long time ago. I think we have a lot of undue to do. Yeah. So I saw this just before. And uncanny. But it's also uncanny. When I think of you Jerry, you could have the same kind of role. I put it in the chat. It's better to see it because I can't explain it. If you've seen it, then it's like, wow. Eric, can you screen share it? Yeah. Yeah, I can. Just a moment. You should be able to screen share it and play it at 16 seconds long. I didn't play the whole thing, but it's hilarious. Just a moment. Yeah. Yeah, it should show us from the beginning. So, yeah, go. There we go. Okay. So that's weird. I'm going to load for a moment. It's full screen. Have you seen the movie Joker, by the way? I actually have never seen it. All I've seen is trailers. I'm just not interested in that franchise very much. Okay. But it is famous. And we're not hearing your audio. Really? From the computer. Yeah. I don't know. Can I share it? That's weird. Yeah, I don't know how to do it then. Yeah, usually the audio doesn't come through directly from your PC. You have to like put your microphone next to the speaker. But I think people kind of get the point. Yeah, the thing is that it's, it's, it's a. When it's actually trump itself and then the Joker is put on top of it. Yeah, they basically deep faked the makeup on top of his face. It's really the expression of the Joker, but it's Trump speaking. Like you can really feel this could have been the Joker speaking. Yeah. Probably in real life, he's got makeup on, on top of this, which is his natural appearance. I don't know. Exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. And I have my favorite OGM background going. The world is angry. One of my favorite OGM, the backgrounds, which is the last scene from Raiders of Lost Ark where they're losing the Ark in the warehouse. This is what our world of information is like these days. So welcome to OGM. There's a couple of people who haven't been on our weekly calls yet who are on the call, which is awesome. We normally just go, I go kind of up the grid and we check in. We talk about things that are OGM in our life. And if you haven't been here very much, that won't mean very much for you. So I will leave the newbies sort of toward the last of the, of the check in and you can pass if you'd like, there's no, there's no requirement to check in, but this way we kind of turn the soil and figure out what kinds of things are happening in our lives that have to do with helping humans make better sense together. And I have to say that there's a whole bunch of activity kicking up around the world that seems to point to where we're heading, and that's what I believe is important. Because of the different kinds of things. So I'm seeing a lot of residents in different kinds of projects. Gail, I thought you had a conflict on the call. So I'm glad you're here. Through it out. You threw it out. Yeah. So nice. Awesome. So why don't we start with Judy, Kevin Ingrid. And see where everybody is. I'm having a great week, mentions, but there's some building themes of coalescence and multiple organizations about seriously diving into diversity, equity, inclusion. From an organizational level of what does it mean to our organization and as individuals, how do we participate and all of that kind of thing in a much more structured and informed and engaged way than I have seen. So that feels really positive to me. And it's kind of a chance to do my favorite thing, which is experiment in different organizations with what I have learned or observed from this group might be effective way to open dialogues to conduct constructive shared outcomes. Do the DEI conversations seem like they're breaking through to some new way of being or some new kind of interaction? Both, but more importantly to actually affirming what the shared view is or the vision, what does this mean if we're effective and then what would we need to do to individually change as leaders to make those changes easier to do and how would we help an organization engage? And in one of them, one is the national science support thing that I do and each chapter is gonna approach it differently. There are 15 different chapters and they're in different places in readiness. So that's normal, but the richness of the information about the things they try and do and the success they experience and the reactions they get from their partner universities and the differences between what, 50 different universities are doing, I think will be really rich in terms of understanding what the dynamics are, how you identify where the best opportunity for progress is within a whole spectrum of potential change, how you measure change, how you embed change. I'm excited that many universities are starting to include in graduate education, diversity training for future faculty. So the grad students are learning from a knowledge content and a practice content in ways that weren't happening before. So that's probably enough, but that's kind of the sense I have and that's really exciting to me. And in a separate one, both of these hitch into my interest in education because the science one is around science education, there's discussion of moving the scope of the national organization back to be more inclusive of undergraduates in addition to graduate students, which I think would be really good to do. And in the arts areas, it's around community engagement with the schools and other things. So it's sort of like there's a rhythm to it that's both inward improving and outward reaching that is kind of exciting. Love that. John, who's on the call for the first time has an education startup that he'll talk about hopefully in a little bit when he checks in, John Cumber's. And then second thought is, if I may say so, it is just such a pleasure to hear you talk about positive things like what you described as opposed to everybody trying to go to the airports to protest the Muslim ban entry ban or playing defense for four years and wondering what the next tragedy is going to be. I mean, there's plenty going on in the world but it's just so nice to hear positive actions like that. One other positive thing and I shot you guys some stuff on policy issues in science in DC, just FYI, but I'm now back on a national chemistry committee on policy, science policy communication. And so we had a policy briefing on what's hot right now in Washington and what our professional society is doing to try to drive wedges in lots of different directions to enable positive change in policy. And the people on the committee are pretty high-powered people. People from director level positions at NSF, NIH, leaders in industry, just really high quality people with broad perspectives. And so I think I'm going to really enjoy that community. Which professional association? The American Chemical Society. It's an international chemical society about 160,000 members worldwide, owner of about 50 or 60 journals that they published started early as well as chemical information systems. So they're an affluent, well-funded foundation from their own revenue streams of publications. And they're a good body of people and they have a lot of outreach. They have a separate diversity area of activity. You just go to acs.org and you can kind of take a look at what they're doing. But they have a complicated and rich infrastructure of committees and the committees are populated from people all over the world. One of my personal friends is on this policy committee and he's at a policy level in science in the UK. I've been very involved with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which of course has all sorts of resources on science and tech and works with ACS and everybody else. Yeah, AAAS is also doing a lot of good stuff. I just haven't been as involved with them. Cool, thank you. So let's go Kevin Ingrid, Mike. Thanks, that's really interesting, Judy. I've been working on this friends and family funding for entrepreneurs who don't have a rich uncle for about six or seven years and we've got this new fund. And we figured out that really what it has is that it works for a really long time. And so we've both embedding it in a church context as a perpetual mission fund. And then we've got a college, one college and we're talking to two or three others who wants a club around it. And they would engage their students with local Brock and Brown businesses that are growing and they could do things like help with marketing plans, but that the money that keeps coming in for a long time. So in the church context, where at least we're setting it up, half the money will be for a future resilience bond is what we're calling it. And people 26 and under, which is where church groups mark off youth will be a majority of those who decide what to do with the returns that come in from the revenue share and that half the membership of that will be in the communities you invest in to decide on the money. But it's kind of just, and to be put there, the change you wanna have has to take more than five years. And so it's just having this future orientation with kids leading is kind of the design principle that people are getting pretty jazzed about. And I think we're gonna do some kind of thing alongside that like to augment that money with a girl scout cookies thing where the kids would sell something from one of the entrepreneurs and half, they would split the profit with the entrepreneur and half would go to the future resilience bond. So it's a pretty cool little design thing that people are getting really jazzed about. And it does a lot of power shifting. Kevin, did this grow out of your neighborhood development kit, the neighborhood economic? Yeah, oh yeah, this is all from that. And it's just a, yes, and it is. And one other odd thing, I've got some friends who are still Trumpers and they're really excited. Proof, they say that Italy is the one that stole the election. That explains so much. That explains the pizza sauce on the server. Yeah, you know, Italy is such a source for coherent, you know, well-placed power that they were the ones behind the election steal. So, and they did it through satellites. So anyway. Was it the new Starlink satellites or just old? There's a satellite that they're, you know, the Italians are actually connected to and that's how they reached all 50 states. But anyway, but the new design is pretty interesting because it's power shifting in lots of ways. Let the kids be in charge and then let the people you invest in decide, you know, be half of those deciding what to do with the money that comes in. So it's pretty fun. Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. Love that. So let's go Ingrid, Mike, Julian. So I can't help but say that it, what a week it's been of just change from two weeks ago when I was on this call and I feel like there's something interesting in the air in that a lot of people now, I think are focusing on for what I'm feeling is the chaos of the whole vaccine thing and not on the giant issue that was Trump and all of his cohort, right? So I feel like there's a lot of, not to sound too woo-woo, but some strange energy in the air, especially because I'm over in the Netherlands and we were having something that came unexpected to me having riots after they put the curfew in and sort of changing the whole feel over here of, I thought I was in a different kind of country and making me feel a little unbalanced this week. So I'm kind of wrestling with those kinds of things and don't have anything other than that to share this week. Thank you. I really like you drawing our attention to what's in the air because I have the same feeling. That's what I was trying to describe as I intro this call is like something's going on. There's a lot of people in resonant movements and what we can do now, I think, is find one another and sort of go to town on making things better and hook up Kevin's project to everybody else's project. So cool. Thanks, Ingrid. Mike, Julie and Gil. Yeah, it definitely does feel a lot different in Washington that people are not climbing the walls or waking up in the morning and checking to see what Trump has tweeted. But there is a lot of anxiety still and a lot of walls that are still deployed around Washington in case protesters show up again. And just more and more crazy stories about these Republican QAnon supporters who are in the U.S. Congress. The stories about the recently elected woman from Georgia. Montry Taylor-Cream. Yeah, and just the Washington Post just did an expose looking through the last five years of her Facebook posts and just really threatening language and conspiracy theory thinking. On a personal level, at Carnegie, we do an annual strategy process trying to figure out what are the big problems to work on. And I have to say, I'm in charge of technology and international affairs and there's just too many issues right now. And that's matched by the fact that there's just too much confusion and misinformation around all these policy issues. Used to be science and tech policy was a pretty narrow close net group and people had been in it for a while and they really understood the issues. Now we have all these people popping up from nowhere with no real experience, just repeating rhetoric and trying to influence the debate. And it's most obvious in the internet area but you can see a lot of fear and uncertainty and biotech in our other areas, artificial intelligence. We're working on a big project right now on developing a framework of key questions that people thinking about doing a machine learning big data project should ask themselves. So it's a way to foster more responsible use of artificial intelligence. But it's just one of many targets we could work on. And again, this is an area where there's just so much confusion, people talking about accountable or about ethical AI and transparent AI as if the technology can be designed so that only good people can use it. So there's a lot of things we're fighting against. And I'm feeling quite overwhelmed just by the amount of information that's being produced. Just this week, there've been like three major reports on the US, China tech decoupling or the tech Cold War and the experts that are getting airtime just don't seem to be doing their homework or they're not communicating. This week is the World Economic Forum. It's gone virtual, it's not in Davos. The panel's on digital stuff, just really hodgepodge and confused. Good people, but no real discussion. So I'm sounding a little, maybe down which is funny because I'm optimistic about where we're going, but I don't know how well we'll get there if there's so many different threads and so much confusion. And I think- I feel like what's happened now, oh, sorry, is that because of all of the Trump era policies and all the misinformation that it's seeped into everything. I mean, literally you're talking about science. These are hard facts and nothing's hard facts anymore. So now we have to spend all this energy wading through all that crap to just get to where we should be which is discussing what's real. Yeah, well, I think you're exactly right. The undermining of the whole idea of truth and the fact now that policymakers, particularly on the Republican side, are so much more influenced by a catchy slogan than by sound analysis. And so things are moving very fast and ideology and press releases have a lot of power right now. Which is, sorry, go ahead, Mike, finish up. No, I think that's the key point. Yeah, which is where I was kind of going is that OGM is about shared memory as a way of making better decisions. And I think that we need to do that like now. What we're doing is actually pretty urgent. And one of the little examples that floated by my radar this week was there was a question about Republicans are saying, oh, the January 6th was just a demonstration that got out of hand. That's all it was, right? And I was thinking, well, actually no, there were some well-equipped, well-trained, well-armed people who were on a mission and had they actually gotten a hold of Pelosi or AOC or whatever, we don't really have any idea what would have happened, but they would have very likely been lots of danger. And then I remembered, I was trying to tell this story and I remembered, and it took me a little while sort of to hunt it down, but there was this guy, Anthony Kirchio. Does anybody know about the Craigslist, Robert? So years ago, when Craigslist was young, he decided to build himself an escape route. He robbed a Brinks truck by spraying some pepper spray in a Brinks driver's face and stealing bags and getting out of there. But before doing that, he had posted a job opening on Craigslist that said show up at this square in a blue shirt with your toolkit and goggles, and it'll be like 28 bucks an hour, you'll get work. And so there were dozens and dozens of men walking around in blue shirts and guess what he wore to do the Brinks heist, right? So he basically disappeared into the crowd. And it was a super clever crowdsourced escape route. And to use that as a way of explaining that, if you're a proud boy or a 3%er or whoever who would like to get into the Capitol and do some mayhem and stop things, you're not gonna make it through anybody in your camo and your goodies with whatever, but you could very easily get through in a crowd. So all of this is like great cover. And that means from my perspective only, there's a whole bunch of innocent people in the crowd going, woohoo, man, we just kind of washed up toward the Capitol and then look what happened. And I'm also a little bit drawn toward Darren Brown, the not impressionist, what's it called the people who basically influence us? Hypnotist. Illusionist. Hypnotistic. And hypnotist, yeah. And Darren Brown has a thing where he's in an indoor mall and they give him the microphone and he just starts sort of patter. He starts talking, talking, talking and then suddenly he says something and everybody in the mall holds their hand up. And they don't know why they did it, but everybody in the mall just sort of held their hand up at the same time. And he was busy with his patter sort of priming that, priming that behavior and then kind of triggered it. And it's a little bit like that's kind of happening on a larger scale in different weird ways. And then the whole GameStop thing that just happened is not that but it's a similar kind of crowd phenomenon that we need to pay careful attention to because there's people trying to, we're trying to figure out what world we're in, right? I think we're busy trying to say, how does the world work? What's happened? What have we broken through the looking glass? How do we do politics? How do we do banking? How do we do development? How do we help people who are hurt? All these things are up on the table. Like they're up for discussion right now. And there's people with really strong feelings who are the old guard, who have traditional strong feelings who were maybe Mike, what you were describing at the Davos panel is like, okay, good. It's good that you have an idea about digital privacy, but boy, that's like 10 years out of date. And how do we update? How do we update everyone and get ourselves on sort of on the same page here? It's all orchestrated by the Italian government. Just want to- And how do we get a hold of those Italians? Exactly. Terry, just to tag on to what you're saying about the insurrection, I watched some analysis of the footage and there were these military intelligence folks going, there was very clearly a group inside that large crowd that was on a mission. They were going through Senator's desks and Congressman's desks and photographing documents and they were telling guards, there's a million of us out there, which is a psychological tactic to say, you're overwhelmed, you shouldn't even attempt resistance. It was very clearly a lot of military and security folks embedded in that crowd who were there to do some real damage. Even more than those apples, Ken, if you listen to the audio, there are clearly people who had military command experienced and were coordinating and directing action. There were plenty of veterans in there, including among the defensive forces and everywhere else. Yeah, lots of people experienced. Let's go Julian Gil Cedar. So Jerry is a side note to what you were just talking about. I wanted to bring up a Will Smith movie called Focus came out a few years ago and it's an enjoyable watch and concentrates on what you were talking about, creating illusions and getting people to do things. Thank you. I've been making some progress on importing the ACMC graph digital library into a graph database finally, making some progress on it. And the other thing I'm busy with is trying to track down someone's relatives when there's no immediate source of information but at least has an unusual spelling of his last name. Are you involved in any communities that are doing genealogy or other sorts of things or? No, no, I'm just trying to find we know Bob had a sister and a brother but apparently they moved to France and I don't speak French. So it's just trying to slew things down. I think Cappuccino might speak French. I just had to... I can help anytime. Okay, thank you. I just had to hire a German genealogist to help find possible errors. My uncle had a 35 year old Will that mentioned his wife's siblings. She passed away 20 years ago we think the siblings passed away as well but in order to get the Will settled we have to show a death certificate or something. It's quite a process, particularly for a small estate. Also I posted in a couple of places online recently that I didn't know until I was 24 years old that my mother's father's mother was Jewish and they lived in Berlin and there's a whole family history there that I don't know very much about because nobody ever told me the difficult stories of their childhood. So I got invited into on Facebook the Jewish genealogy forum which is an invite only forum that I stepped into and then like just held my breath and haven't done anything yet because the torrent of people like, what about this other? Like it's amazingly fertile shared investigation into people's history. So I'm looking forward to finding the time to diving into there but there's all sorts of people doing all sorts of work here. The challenge in Germany is that all the privacy laws mean you can't learn anything about somebody who was born less than 110 years ago. That does suck. So let's go back to our Q here. Gil Cedar Klaus. Thanks Jerry. That was a good one. I didn't know about that. Cool. Thanks, really appreciating the richness of everybody's check in. Boy, on a good day I'm in a mood of fascination and wonder living in the middle of history, the big historical wheels turning. And it's not just COVID and the democracy crisis in the United States and elsewhere, but also the whole shift to post-World War II geopolitics which is just basically turned upside down and people are trying to figure out how to even think about it much less deal with it. And I've been kind of surprising myself watching some geopolitical analysts who look at the world through that lens rather than like a lot of us here through a lens of kind of meaning and purpose. And so we all want to go somewhere. And so I'm always looking at events through where I want to go and where I want the world to go. And I've been listening to people who don't do that. They're just saying, here's what we're seeing happening. And here's how we see those patterns in historical patterns. And it's been very illuminating. So on a good day, I'm fascinated. On a bad day, I'm terrified. And I'm almost turning into a man of key and I'm seeing this ultimate battles of good and evil playing out in front of me. So that's sort of the background of where I am. In terms of activities, I'm thinking a lot and doing a lot in the realm of climate finance at a very practical level, working on a project in the Bay Area, trying to figure out how in the world do we finance the changes that have to happen both to mitigate and adapt on climate. I'm not encouraged. Just completed a project sort of loosely associated with the UN looking at how global capital is applying itself to climate change and social good and surveyed about a third of the managers of global assets highlighting positive movements and starting to build a framework to shine a light on where the gaps are. It's a much more moderate and bureaucratic report than I would have done if it were just up to me. Less edgy, but I think potentially very significant. So there's that. And my own creative and entrepreneurial projects are starting to get back into gear the last year or two has been a lot of hiatus due to personal family medical issues that we've had handled, but those are clearing. And so the base report on me is I'm back in the saddle and just sort of getting the horse to trot. Can gallop is a ways down the road but maybe we'll get to trotting pretty soon. Is Cantor like a Jewish way of writing? Just kidding, bad pun. Your family's rubbing off on you. Exactly. And just pulling a small thread from what you're talking about and I'll describe this as layers of funding but one of my amateur beliefs is that too much money attracts the wrong kinds of people to the wrong kinds of ventures. And that many social problems that bedevil us aren't money problems, they're actually structure problems, framing problems, incentive problems, whatever. And yet there's some things like getting a vaccine out to everybody in the country that require top down and money and so forth. And I'm trying to figure out does anybody know of or has anybody worked on like layered funding approaches where what happens at the lowest levels it's not necessarily microfinance but isn't too much money because too much money tends to corrupt, right? And power tends to corrupt and money tends to go with power and all those kinds of things. Has anybody created a model of this? This doesn't ring a bell for anyone? Well, the question rings a lot of bells whether anybody's created a model or structured systems to do that, don't know. Yeah, Matt, were you gonna jump in? Well, yeah, Jerry. I was just gonna maybe probe here just a little bit because we've talked about this a couple of different times and even in early on with OGM saying, boy, if we could get ourselves a couple of million bucks we could start building out these platforms and pay a bunch of people and all that stuff. And you've been resisting sort of that. And I wonder if you could go a click deeper into where your belief is coming, where your belief says coming from and what is this dilemma? What is the tension that's created? Cause I think conceptually I agree that money corrupts. I believe that it also has a way of disincenting certain things but it's also the only resource right now that we have to really get large numbers of people working on something for an extended period of time. You need to be able to pay those people, right? People still need livelihood in some way. So unless everyone's doing things off the side of their desk, and I think the side of the desk, if you're a VC and a guy comes in and says I got this great idea and you love the idea and stuff and you say, how much time are you gonna spend managing this? And they say, well, 20% of my time because I got this other job you'd never invest in that person. So you do need dedicated capacity and I don't know how to get there without some sort of financial stability. So I don't know what your thoughts are there or you can illuminate a little bit more. Happy to and I'll try to do it quickly so we can get back to the check-in but you're opening up great big juicy questions. So first you said like money is the only resource we have to get many people working on something together. Just look at Wikipedia and we can create collective important artifacts without money being necessarily the problem. And then you said also that money tends to taint or change a lot of things and that's totally true too. And then you said that and not in this order that it would be great if people who wanted to dedicate a lot of time to some project could actually make a living doing that which I agree with a million percent. And so how do these things, I think part of it is how do these things blend together? How do we make it so that we can make a living while feeding the commons and improving the commons and building our systems of social interdependence and figuring out how governance works and all that kind of stuff. But a lot of these things and then I'll turn to education where everybody's like education is the primary thing. It's one of the SDGs. Let's just pour a lot of money into education and here I have ambivalent feelings like teachers aren't being paid enough, daycare isn't being paid enough, et cetera. But on the other hand, the moment you pour enough money into education to build gigantic bureaucratic infrastructures of education, you're undermining what education kind of is, does and maybe ought to be. And I'm trying to figure out how do you invert education so that it's learning? How do we scaffold user, learner led learning which shouldn't cost that much money and then how do we flip it so that lots of people can make a living while coaching, tutoring, exploring, leading expeditions, doing a whole bunch of things around learning and drop the educational bureaucracy and all the other kinds of pieces of it. So I think money is needed, but big money and education from my perspective is going to mess things up more than fix things. So that's why I'm asking this almost rhetorical question like what are some really great funding models that will trip? And I think here getting people rewarded for a new role and building that out as a market so that lots and lots and lots, we didn't know that there were gonna be shared people using their own cars to drive around the world, to drive people around their cities. Like the sharing economy and ride sharing is a new business model as of a decade ago. That's cool, because there's a whole lot of people supplementing their income right this minute trying to make it through a difficult economy by doing that thing. How do we just do something more permanent, more interesting and that has actual money flowing through it that isn't the large blocky bureaucratic money? Very two thoughts. One is an example of how stupid we are about money. In the early days of the business and environmental movement, investors were ranking companies based on how much money they were spending on environmental improvement. Completely irrelevant, because you could be spending a 10th as much and getting four times the results and you get dinged in that system. Just completely as backwards. And you get what you measure? Second thought, universal basic income. Yeah, which is its own own work. We have to have the baseline met, right, before people can do the other stuff. Well, there's a lot of things on this. Some people think that if the baseline is met, people will just lie around and watch TV and smoke dope all day. But they've proven that's not the case. And that's the other case is that with basic needs met, people will actually do things that are creative and fulfilling and innovative and take risks they couldn't take if their survival depended on it. And also they're finding that just directed payments to people who are unhoused have remarkable benefits that cost less in the long run than the interventions required when these people get in trouble of all different kinds. There's a whole bunch of sort of evidence here and yet it hasn't influenced the policy regime enough that we're making the major kinds of changes partly because there's a series of stories playing at the politics level that we're not willing to let go of. And these are the stories of neoliberalism and libertarianism and normal capitalism and pre-marketarianism and all those kinds of things that kind of are seizing people up because and then there's all the don't tax me so much, taxing is taking, et cetera. And these are extremely strong means. And the other side hasn't done a very good job of figuring out how this all works. And I apologize, I've gotten this off into a pretty deep tangent, but I really like, this is an important tangent to me because I think that what we're trying to do together here could influence those conversations. And I'm very happily spent time doing that. So let's go Cedar Clausmatt. Yeah, hi, I'm Cedar. I'm a recent graduate looking for work in the broad domain of trying to make a positive difference. This is my first time engaging with OGM in any capacity whatsoever. I discovered it through the Consilience Project, which I don't know if that's something that's familiar to this group or not, but another sense-making project. So I'm here just to see what's going on in this group, try and make some connections, see if I have anything to contribute. That's awesome, Cedar. Thank you, welcome and your cat too. Thank you. It's really nice to have you here. And I'm familiar with the Consilience, but not the Consilience Project. So the book and the work, I've got, oops, I did the wrong thing here, there we go. Yeah, I can pop a couple of links in the chat. It's something that Daniel Schmockdenberger is working on, if that name is familiar. Yep. That sounds great. Thank you. And so Clausmatt. Yeah, I think I'm going to turn off my video because I'm on mobile network. Yeah, this has been an interesting week. And like everyone else, there is indeed a lot of change on the way. For once, I'm posting here how the Queen Noodle Network has coalesced now and really has become a force because it's unified and there is a unifying message. Just to give you an idea here how this all works, we're now operating at state level, putting in legislation at state level that impacts farming, soil health. And to give you an idea of what's at stake here, last year, farm income was 40% government subsidies. So 40% of farm income in 2020 came from government support payments that were made to compensate farmers, mostly commodity cores to deal with the disruptions in the global trade caused by the Trump administration. So we're now directly linking with the mislectures leaders who are writing bills and putting forward bills and have the capacity to actually pass them. And the impact this will have on the agricultural sector is really amazing. Just another number to give perspective here. When you take all the farmers markets in the country and the consumers supported, agriculture, CSAs combined, constitutes less than 1% of total food sales. So we have to get into the retail markets and into the general food supply chain in order to open that up, which means community activity. So we're starting to work hyper-local and engage at community level because that's the only place where it can really work effectively. But we're creating a macro structure where we have, for example, written policy proposals that can be adapted at the local level. So it's basically a modular system of support that communities can pull from and apply at their own local level. You can imagine the tension this is causing and this is just the agriculture sector, food sector we're talking about. You have the same energy getting into the fossil fuel industries and in other places. So what the Biden administration does is what we refer to as shock and awe coming out with so many things in so many places all at the same time. It is overwhelming the capacity to have a directed pushback and an effective pushback. So this is pretty good, but at the same time, at the same time, this is creating huge angst and anxiety in very powerful groups. So this is going to be an interesting future. Klaus, thank you. That's super interesting. And it makes me think a lot about how we can sort of bring information, move information around about the highest functioning or entities that are causing positive change in any of these fears. And for you, food agriculture, the whole food system, but how do we share with one another who's cracking the code on how to reorganize the way that particular ecosystem or value web or value chain works and then share what we learn from each and to the other kind of thing. Doug, do you want to jump in? Go ahead. Yeah, I want to ask Klaus a question. Klaus, in the agricultural projects that you're familiar with, is there any attempt to integrate housing, habitat into those projects so that people can live close to where the agriculture is actually happening? That's actually one of my pet projects, intentional communities. I haven't gotten very far with it. There isn't enough anti-qualizing around it, but I think it is going to be an absolute necessity to have to focus on this because there are millions of people who will not be able to go back to the jobs they left behind or they're gone permanently. And many of those are white-collared jobs. They're not entry-level positions like banking insurance and so on has started to replace a lot of work with artificial intelligence and forms of automation. So it will be dead center for people to pool their resources and assist each other. You go to Scandinavia, Sweden, other countries, it's already commonplace. They're building, in fact, they're building housing structures around the idea of communal living. So the answer is, I mean, I think if I can see an opening, how to get into it, I would love to, but I haven't been able to. Thanks, Klaus. Go ahead. And I want to ask Klaus, when you talk about 40% subsidies, does it do any differentiation between these so-called giant corporations and then likewise individual family farms? The bulk of the money went to the top 10% richest farmers. It never reaches the family farmer or the small-scale farmer. Oh, I'm shocked. Yeah. Yeah, most people don't know that. Julian, did you want to jump in? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, most people don't know that. Julian, did you want to jump in? You ever had that? That was my question. Oh, okay. Cool. Good. Let's go, Matt Bentley Cappuccino. Well, hello, everyone. I'm also really excited to see a bunch of new people, new faces, and welcome to the Thursday conversation and, or the Thursday check-in. I've, a couple of dots just connecting for me. I read an article in the Atlantic. I put it in the Mattermost chat. It's about the historian who could see the future. And he was a biologist, I think, studying beetles and ecologies and noticed in that field that you used to take these bugs and sort of put pins in them and all you could do was sort of categorize them and measure their legs and their size and all that kind of stuff. And so he started to run some mathematic algorithms on their population so that he could predict whether or not their population would grow or shrink based on sort of these complicated system dynamics. And he learned everything that he could learn about that. And so he left and he decided to take on the only science that he knew that didn't use really mathematics in its calculations that it was all observational and that was history. And he's built a model that basically can, that he believes will predict when societies will collapse in on themselves. And while there's probably lots of different variables, the article sort of states that it, that the, like a major factor is when the production of elite kind of the elite outpaces the number of elite jobs. And so what happens then is you get people that become counter elites. And he would say that this is where the, the bannins of the world would be and even kind of even Trump in the world is that, take the number of senators we have in the United States, it's still the same number that it's always been. And yet the number of people who are qualified to be senators now is exponentially greater than it was when the Senate was originally created. And that's just sort of this, that creates this dissonance. And then what happens is is people, people who say, wait a second, I went to Harvard and I got my Harvard law degree and I spent all this money and I came from a good family and I'm networked in connection, can't find elite jobs, right? Because now, you know, because of whatever it is, the AI and those sorts of things that they, that that dissonance caused them to start to kind of create these counter revolutions and counter elite movements. I just find it interesting that first, the mathematics of it, and can we, can we understand? I think Gil, you were talking about, you know, history, but can we understand history a little bit different than just, you know, through the sense making of the anecdotal? I'm also, I'm wondering Klaus and Doug, if in your conversation, where does, where does the kind of, the kaboots come into the conversation? I mean, these are, you know, community farms of, you know, shared living. You know, is that something to, you know, to look at? And then I also think about proximity to land and proximity to food and, you know, just like restructuring all of our concrete. And then also the fact that we have to preserve more and more of our land, right? And I think Biden, I was happy to see he was talking about, you know, kind of radically increasing the amount of land in the United States that's gonna be untouchable, hopefully permanently. And a lot of governments are going here. So I, it's an interesting kind of tension as you think about, you know, the garden world, Doug, what does that look like? And actually can we, can we claw back every single parking, empty parking lot? Can we claw back, you know, roads? Can we claw back, you know, things in, you know, there are places in Detroit that are just wastelands of buildings. In fact, I was at one last night, which was a high school here in Boston that's actually been shut down for three years and it's completely boarded up. And it's this massive structure, you know, that should be torn down and turn back into green space. Like how quickly can we demolish, you know, those things and turn them back into green space? So those are the things that have been on my mind, you know, lots of different fragments, but I appreciate you listening in the time. Thank you. And these dynamics are absolutely fascinating. I think we're, I think we're all interested in them. So let me go to Bentley before he has to drop off the call. Someone want to jump in? I put a website in, from Intentional Community, Matt. That's a group that connects people who have an interest in shared living arrangements and they have multiple examples between like rural or inner city and so on. So anything anybody wants to do, there's already somebody out there who has laid the structure and the foundation for it. Sounds great. Let's go to Bentley before he has to drop off and come to team Ben Ken. I was actually just corrected by my wife. I have 30 more minutes. So I apologize for jumping the line, but I'll take the time anyways. So talking about misinformation and making group decisions, I'm starting to go public with a project I've been working on for a while. It's called Gully Bot and I'd appreciate it if anyone would want to participate or give advice or just any sort of help. I posted it in the forum and I'll post a link in matter most. But basically it's kind of to fight misinformation and it goes into a lot of what some people were saying in the chat about facts, understanding what facts are, how that leads to decisions. And what the Gully Bot is just a character that kind of models this proper thinking but it also has, it also documents all the conversation and puts a math on it to kind of show you how Gully Bot is coming to its conclusions. So that, and then it organizes the informational way that's really easy for people to explore what they need to read rather than reading everything. So it saves people a lot of time and understanding it. So that's the project I'm working on. And so if anyone finds that interesting, reach out to me. Cool, and it's in the matter most. If you want to replicate that link in the Zoom chat, that's great. Okay. He just threw it in there for me. Perfect. Love that. So let's go to Capuchin, John Cumbers and Kim. Hi, I think for me there are quite a few things cooking ready to talk about... Your audio is cutting in and out, yes. I think I'm having a problem with my headphones. If it breaks again, let me know, I'll stop. So far so good. Okay. One of the things that got me most excited recently is this book, which maybe a lot of you are familiar with, David Epstein's range, and which is basically a little manifesto for not specializing and looking elsewhere for patterns and all about knowledge transfer, which I feel goes hand in hand with having a diverse community, looking for solutions in other fields and so on. So this is a little bit OGM-y. And other than that, the I think biggest project on my mind right now that relates a little bit to some of the things you've discussed is the transfer of our festival and finished into a permanent platform. And I've always dreamed of making a time bank as because we have this model of pay with your time to get into the festival, but we're really, or I'm really searching for ways to find this as a kind of long-term solution and looking at alternative economies. And I mean, I don't have a solution, but Jerry, your question earlier was very on point. And maybe I know that there have been some documents shared previously in emails related to this subject and relationship economies, but if anybody has at any point, something very practical in previous experience related to using time as a currency, I would love to hear more, but I can also dig in through emails because I know there's a bit in there. So there's a fellow who's in our communities. I don't know that he's on the OGM list, I think he is, but he hasn't been on our calls here much. His name is Michael Linton. And he was one of the people who helped create a local exchange trading systems or LATs. He would know a lot about this. He's trying to work on circular currencies now, which are hard to understand, at least they're hard for me to absorb. But, and then separately, the Holochain people come out of a project called MetaCurrency, which goes back 25 years worth of hard thinking and hard research. And Arthur Brock and a few of his collaborators have thought about these issues very, very deeply. And apparently Pete's very interested as well. Yes, great. I will thank you. Looking forward to talking, Kevchin. Michael is always on, almost always on the MetaCogs calls on Tuesday, I think it is. Let me know if you're interested. Cool. And do you wanna explain MetaCogs? Hi. And Judy, could you meet your, Judy, do you mind meeting your? MetaCogs is a sister organization, run by Robert Best, as far as I can tell. It's a good crew, very quiet and contemplative, but also lots of intelligent thinking and discussing. Cool. Thanks, Kevchin. Let's go to John Cumber's and then Ken and then John Kelly. John, you have frozen on us. Ken, do you wanna step in until we get John back? Sure. So I just learned something about Zoom this week that after all these years of being on, I didn't know if you're in gallery view, you can actually move people around. So we just click on them and you can move them. So I've been actually lining people up after they've gone. So I know who's still left in the things, just kind of helpful to, it's a little thing to do. I have a question kind of directed at Mike, but maybe somebody else knows this answer. In 2018, I saw General Martin Dempsey, retired general from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he told the audience, he said, the thing that keeps me up at night is cyber. He said, the US is falling behind in cyber and the new administration, he was still at that point, fairly respectful of Trump, said they're doing nothing about it. And then of course we had the huge Russia hack and I haven't seen anything coming out of the Biden administration about what are they doing to strike to harden our cybersecurity. So just before I go on, I just wanna know, Mike, do you know anything about that? Has he made any announcements that you're aware of? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's happened there and including some really good people. Rob Joyce is gonna be the head of cybersecurity at NSA. No, it's moving ahead and I could put this thing and I have to leave here in one minute, but I will put something out right now. There's a lot of excitement, both the quality of the people and the fact that this is on the agenda. There was also a meeting, the State of the Net meeting was yesterday here in Washington, it's an annual conference and there was a whole thing on the Biden plans in digital policy. And of course this was one of the areas. Now I'm very confident we're making good progress there. Thank you, I'll sleep even better tonight than I've been sleeping for the last week, which has been way better than it's been for the last couple of years. So I appreciate knowing that. On a more personal note, I'm experiencing vicariously a fallout from a diversity, equity, inclusion initiative at my wife's college. There's a person there, it's a very small college, they teach nutrition and it's not like a big sparring campus, but there's a woman there who's Asian and she is just waking up to diversity, equity, inclusion and she's very triggered all the time and she's expecting other people to not trigger her rather than to develop a little bit more forgiveness for people's unconsciousness and she's forcing this issue on other people and it's having a really bad effect. So I'm just noticing that and I've seen this before where people get a little woke and they start to, you need to be better about this instead of how can I help other people to wake up themselves? It's a very directed thing and it's had a really harsh effect on my wife's job level of satisfaction. Suddenly she's like, we're supposed to be teaching nutrition and we're devoting twice as much time, it's all online, to diversity, equity, inclusion and the students are not getting what they need to do their jobs and to get through the course because it's a pretty technical science-based course, there's organic chemistry and stuff and so I'm just noticing that it's one of the ways in which a very well-intentioned thing can be really misused and the woman is not in a place where she's actually ready to talk about it, she's just too triggered by it which is really my third point. For those of you who know the organization called Braver Angels, I'm gonna put a link here in the chat, they have a bunch of events all the time but one that I've signed up for tonight is a national online debate about what are facts so you can get online and if you want to engage or just observe, you can watch people who are self-identified as red or blue which I really don't like those labels but that's what we have, talking about what constitutes facts which seems to be something that's been threaded through this particular conversation so the link's there and you can log in, they have these all the time so if you can't make it today you can go another time, I think it's at five o'clock West Coast time tonight and just really nice to see everybody here and some new faces and also the, I don't wanna say old faces but the familiar faces. Thanks Ken and your timing is really good because maybe for yesterday I got a note from an old friend I haven't heard from in a long time who's writing a book about what are facts so I'm gonna send him that one, love that and I think we lost John C. I think I don't see him in the grid that he may have had to bounce at the top of the hour but I don't think so anyway. John Kelly, would you like to check again? Yes, thank you, quick personal I've been devoting more time than I wish I had to to non-COVID or COVID ripple health related emergencies that affect people in my circle they can't get care because of COVID's in front of them and so then I have to deal with things in terms of negotiating how to get them taken care of or get substitute things going on and so that's taken a lot of time it's important work on some level it's gratifying but you wish it wasn't happening both for their suffering and it takes me away from OGM kind of stuff. I'll share one kind of wild kind of crazy OGM idea. I very interested in the subject of misinformation, disinformation. I used to teach a critical thinking course developed by a global business network called Asking Better Questions. I've looked at the material that's developed for teachers it's good material, you know on how to analyze media, how to look at things. There are several sites that do this kind of fact check fact analysis and also do bubble mapping, you know this is the right, this is the middle, this is the left you know and I've looked at those and a threshold for all of them is you have to care considerably more about the issue of misinformation to make it through those sites then the people to whom those sites are directed. So that's the basic problem that the people who are misinformed don't see misinformation as a problem. And so here's the leap, here's the incorrect leap and then you can move backwards from the incorrect leap to a better solution. The incorrect leap is well remember when we had equal time on the networks, remember when oh we're gonna show this side we have to show the other side we have to give them the same time. This is, this went away in the 80s. Reagan administration took it out but also it doesn't apply to internet reality, digital reality. But if you take just that concept and you say all right, I just accessed this site. If you wanna tell me all the factual problems with that site, I'm not that interested. In fact, if you wanna show me an alternative site I'm not sure I'm interested but if you just went down the site and you said okay here's something on this point here's an alternative view, here's this other site. So it's not equal time, it's contrary follow. You look at A, well then you're gonna look at C next. Sorry, you know. Now you say well wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's a complete violation of people's freedom to search. Okay, so what I'm talking about is a voluntary browser that might be adopted by schools. So it's an educational device. We say okay, let's look up something that has a point of view. All right, now notice, notice that while we were looking at it, the AI was saying where is a twist, where is an assumption that's in this page that it can be reversed with data on another page? Go get that other page. Now put the two next to each other. Now the teacher or even if it's in independent learning you now have the capacity to discuss oh wait a minute here's two points of view and there's data between them. Wow, what does that mean? And people might sit still for that especially if it's a voluntary thing or if it's done with students you volunteer for this you go through that process you'd sit still for that longer than you would sit still for fact checking which is important but it just it loses the critical audience that I think we need to engage. So if anybody else is interested I noticed what Bentley said I'll follow up on that and also any related things, let me know. Okay. Thanks John. There's a few things that have crossed my path of people trying to figure out how to do argumentation how to compare facts, how to open people into that conversation because I think you're right that fact checking is like a thing you ignore. It's sort of a thing that's very easy to just dismiss. So we need to enter that loop some in some other way. Let's go Doug Scott Eric. Okay. I noticed that the word information comes up in many contributions this morning. And to me it's a very problematical concept. It implies that we know what we're talking about and we know how to measure it. It's striking for example that a random string of characters the length of Hamlet has more information in information theory than Hamlet itself because Hamlet's filled with redundancies which reduce the amount of information which is of course counterintuitive to what people like us would wanna make information mean. So it's core concepts like that that I think are up for rethinking. One of the ones that's been on my mind this week is it comes from a book that I've been reading called The Form of Politics. And the analysis is that politics begins with friendship that Aristotle and Plato were clear that coming together out of the family into the town was based on friendship and anything that looks like an initiative is the organization of friends who have shared interests. That tells us a lot I think about the Trump supporters that their relationships are much more based on faith, fidelity, relationship. I'm with you because we share the same kind of thinking. It's really powerful if you start thinking of friendship as the core of politics because our society organizes against friendship in so many ways. Isolated families have replaced the center of the town with craftsmen with them all where you go in anonymously, you buy and you go back home to indulge with your private toys that you purchased. So I think that's really helpful. Another piece that's been on my mind and this is almost too complicated to talk about but I'll try. A friend of mine, Bob Arnajani is retired chair of the history department at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. And he's been writing a book which is in draft on complexity theory and its impact on public policy. And basically what he's saying is that our history is in two phases. Phase one was mechanistic science leading up to Newton and on with people who thought atomistically and in billiard ball models. In that world, the humanities was pushed aside because it found the mechanical view ugly and unrepresentative of the issues it was dealing with. What happened within science was a process that opened up the Newtonian world through first thermodynamics and then quantum mechanics. And that opening is now beginning to affect the way the humanities can think about themselves as being rational models that are not causal in the simple sense that A causes B. I find it a very powerful framework because it's saying basically we can think about the humanistic future and more disciplined terms without having to become mechanistic in our thinking. So anyway, those are, I guess the context for all this is my work at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and trying to get economists to think out of their formalistic patterns which just support the rich getting richer. Yeah, and I wish we had David Weinberger on the call here. He's a very good informational philosopher as well. Gil, did you wanna jump in? Yeah, just real briefly. I wanted to wrestle with Doug when he started but I really love where you got to as you rambled through, Doug. I'm of the mind that information and reason are highly overrated in our world. They're not important, but they've become central for some of the reasons that Doug was talking about and missing the power and the value of emotion and body wisdom. And very much relationship, Doug, as you were talking about. And when you're talking about information density, I found myself thinking about poetry which can be full of redundancy. Just think back to Ms. Gorman at the inauguration last week. And you said that Hamlet, which is full of repetition, has less information but in a Shannon-esque way, maybe so, but in a human way, it may have many, many more layers and dimensions of information. So we need to break that story open. Thank you, Doug. And there's a whole bunch of angles here on sort of emotion and presencing and sort of our interpenetration of each other that matter a lot. And one of the nice things about our Thursday calls is that we sort of get a lot of that here. That we're trapped in little Zoom rectangles but we're sort of not because we're in this other kind of space and we're some of the things that we talk about are very heartfelt and we bring ourselves in that way. So I think that we need to keep diving down that particular chute because there's a lot there. It's a great topic. Doug, can I just, you know, I'm interested in, can I put something again in the chat, but you know, human beings make decisions primarily on kind of three factors. One is the rational factor and this is what we're talking about with information and facts and it's about facts and figures and stuff. And we like to believe that we're more rational than we are. It's a very small part of our decision-making process. You know, the second piece is based on our emotions, right? Our fears and our wishes. Ultimately, those motivations. And then the third sphere is this political sphere and politics actually, I like this idea that it starts with friendship and ultimately what friendship is it's a connection between two human beings or a group of human beings. And human beings, I think we sometimes, again in our reckless abandonment of viewing ourselves as being a part of nature don't really see ourselves as what we are, but you know, we're hurting animals, right? We'd like to be in large groups of people and you know, the idea of safety in numbers and I wish I could kind of point to the research but I once heard that our brains light up with the same level of fear when we're being ostracized or shunned from a group as if there was a lion in the room, right? That is the, in some ways the most painful thing that you can do to another human being is to sever their ties from other human beings, their ties from that friendship, right? It's the reason why, you know, a baby would die without human contact even if it was fed and you know, had all the kind of the support structures because we're so dependent on intimacy with other people. And so political decision making is all about maintaining your status and your power within that group so that you reduce the amount of risk of being ostracized, of kicked out, of being shunned. And I think that's why it's such a powerful motivator and to say that the origin is about friendship, right? I think the origin of friendship is in our idea that we can't really survive on our own. We need others to survive. So just a thought to, you know, kind of poke a little bit with what you're saying. Well, let me respond back a little. I'm going to object to the idea that rational and emotions are two separate domains. Emotions are very rational because they're in the service of life and that leads to quite a reframing of the way we think about those. Yeah, and just to add on that, how you feel in your inherent sense is a fact. So I want to think rationally about our emotions and our state. So, yeah, I don't see them as a dichotomy. I mean, I'll give you just a practical example of where the separation comes into play, right? You go down to the car dealership and you want to buy a car. And they say we have everything you need. It fits your family. It has the safety that you need. It can break, it's got the heated seats, whatever the features and functionalities are of that car that you want and you desire for your family, but it's in a color that you don't like. And so you choose not to get the car or you choose to spend an extra, you know, a couple hundred dollars to get the car of the color of your desire. That's a different type of calculus than going down and saying, well, I could choose this car, a minivan, which has all the things that I want, or that car, a suburban, you know, big Escalade, which has all the things I want, but I'm gonna not choose the minivan because I live in a neighborhood where people will look down on me if I have a minivan because everybody drives the Escalade. That's really about maintaining a status, you know, your status and power. So yeah, they all have a type of rationality to them. I don't disagree, but they play out in the way in which we make decisions very differently. And sometimes we go against things that make sense, right? In the kind of the purest form because they feel good to us. And that's something that I think we have, that's the reason why I wanna make those distinctions is because it starts to explain why it doesn't matter how much facts you put in front of someone. If it doesn't feel like it fits their identity or fits their relationships or fits their idea of the group that they're in that they're trying to maintain status or power, then they'll disregard those facts and those kind of those features. Gil, and then back to our cue. Yeah, I appreciate that, Matt, but I wanna be careful with your assertion that emotions are facts. Because- I didn't assert that emotions are facts. That was, that was me and maybe- Oh, Bentley, then I'll beat up I mean, I understand what you're saying but I wanna challenge it from this perspective physiologically. My body signals for what I'm afraid and what I'm excited to say. The physiological facts are identical. The interpretation that my emotions give to it are different. And those are on one level true but they're also something that I can cultivate. When I began my martial arts training I'd be afraid when somebody would strike me. As I develop different responses in my body there'd be no fear, there'd be opportunities for movement that weren't there before. Same physiological facts. So this is something it was, I was hearing an earlier part of our conversation when we talk about informational facts we need to really carefully distinguish between, well, common everyday example, honey, it's hot in here. Well, no, you feel hot but I feel cold. Well, the thermostat says that the temperature in the room is 69 degrees. The fact is 69 degrees. So the artifact of the machine. The it's hot in here is in a different realm. It's a request. That feels deeply true. It's an indirect request. The person who's saying it, it's an indirect request. Yes, it's also somebody's interpretation of how they are feeling in that moment completely valid for them but not in the same domain of truthiness. Just to step in the middle between you and Bentley. So isn't it a fact that the woman who stepped into Ken's wife's forums online got triggered and is like pissing all over the conversation and really warping things in some way. Doesn't that sort of remain a fact in the community now because she did that and it was her emotion and triggered it. And I completely agree with what you said about how we deal with incoming stimuli is up to us. It's a choice we make, totally sold on that. But the fact of a thing happening, of an emotion being triggered, like lies in the ground and effects other people. And isn't that a fact? I'm gonna draw a distinction, Jerry. The fact that that person spoke in the meeting is a fact. Right. Probably. Go to the video to me. The fact that she triggered an emotion? No. Absolutely not because the emotions, the emotional reactions of different people in the room are likely gonna be different. But that's fine. Aren't those their local facts? That's their local experience. Yeah. Which is an important thing to take into account when you're being rational. She goes emotions. And when you're being human. And so the fact that someone has that emotion is one of the facts to consider. We're actually arguing over the definition of the word fact and the truth is the word fact encompasses all of what we're saying. We're just using the word in different ways but all of them are factual. That's where the danger is Bentley. Because we use the word in different ways but we treat them as equivalent and we lose something very valuable in blurring these distinctions. Yeah, I have another project to help with that by the way. Very cool. I mean, it's a fundamental problem. You've probably seen the witness studies where they show people a movie of a blue card driving down the street and asking them to describe what happened and some people swear it was a red card and some will swear it was green and some will swear it was blue. It's going on there. So we should carry this over into the philosophy zones of our discourse forum online, I think. Because these are big deep issues. Let's go if we can. We have only a few minutes left on the call but Scott, Eric, Vincent, Pete. Hi everyone. I'll take it back down to a simpler level. I've made really good progress on my thinking skills for kids program. And I'm gonna pay something to the chat but I'll kind of read it out loud. So I tried to explain this to my 30 year old son who's an AI researcher and he said it was a bit much. It was hard for him to grasp the whole, sort of like the room behind you, Jerry, because my approach had been to show him here, look. And he said it's too much. So I found us in the two days that followed, I found a better way to say it. So this is about making friends with the thinking skills you already use. Gonna learn how to think deeply about anything, how to save thoughts for use later, how to make anything that doesn't exist yet, how to play games with everyone else and how to aim the story of your life. So each one of these categories contains simple stackable lifelong skills. I wanna see the kids see themselves as agents as in they have agency and understand they're in charge of their lives and how amazing that is. They can then fight, we'll see if this comes about. The evil wizard shrug and break the subtle and insidious spell that's being cast over the land of helpless. I'm picturing it as a pilot enrichment program for independent schools and homeschooling parents to begin with. Very nice. So that's what I've been working on pretty hard. I've been pulling back and going deep on that. And my goal is to make it just dead simple. It has to be or it doesn't work for me. It's kind of where it is. Where does the conversation we were sort of just having fit in the model, which is how do I process my emotions and my somatic sensory visceral responses? Yeah, it's all in the story framework. So my story framework is attention, valence, balance, sequence, lessons, and you. And each one of those helps you grasp the sense of where you are in this continuous flow known as your story. And so it's really a, again, without trying to get too far off into it, that's my testing in the last several weeks has been in every interaction that I have when they're having a conversation, when someone says something, can I point to my framework and say that's where it goes? That's great. And I'm wondering if, I guess I'm wondering if Scott, what Jerry's adding to is another how to, which is how to feel, right? Well, what I'm trying, I'm not my goal in the thinking skills. And this is deeply embedded in my own personality, is I do not tell anyone how to feel. I won't do that. And that's the part that I'm teaching you how to think, how to engage with your environment, how to think about a problem, how to build something, but I'm not telling you what to build, what to think, what to feel. I'm not saying what you feel, but there are, maybe the place where Jerry's at is, there are techniques. And I think, Gil was suggesting some of these things which are about processing your feelings at a much. Journaling. So one of mine in the last category, I have reflect why and sense. And so those get to the sense of what happened, why was I a part of it? Was it random? Was it malevolent? You know, that kind of stuff and figuring out your place in the stream of events. But yeah, so the thing that I'm gonna try to do is get it out in a sense that in a way that people can look at and then ask the first question, which is, does this make sense? The next question that I'm trying to avoid at the moment is, what else does this need? Because with groups like this and the groups that I've been interacting with, that's just, that's a bottomless bit. And I wanna make sure that what I put together makes sense as it's on. The last thing that I'll leave you with is this is something I wrote down. A week ago, I think. It's just a thought I've been thinking about. So it relates to trees. And the thought is that young buds and leaves can't understand their place or purpose without understanding their trunk and branches. And it was just this, and I don't know if it's true, that's what I'm thinking about. But it's this idea that the new growth needs to understand its connection to what came before it and what ultimately might be feeding it or how it's feeding back into what came before it. So that's a theme that Jerry, you've stated before. How do you bring what's good of the old and what's good of the new? And so that's my thought. Bertiline, thank you, Scott. Just two things. One is, I love your framework. I think you're achieving a Christmas of expression that is lovely. And Matt was channeling my question really well. And all of this reminded me of a conversation we had many calls back, which was, hey, this is called open global mind, but what about open global heart? And like mind means thinking, means rational, means maybe we can all figure this out just by logicking our way through. And hey, half of our discussion here has been about, you know what? We get hijacked all the time by stuff that isn't about thinking. It's about how we respond. It's about how this all happened and how we suddenly were not able to think or we're thinking about something entirely different because our reason got hijacked. And also that there are players who are intentionally hijacking our emotions that limbic hijacking is like apparently a sport now for smart political operatives and other interventionists. So I think that there's a whole juicy mix of things that we can dive into over time here, but I think what Matt and I are trying to ask is, how does that nexus of stuff, which is just like what happens to our lives in the world, how does that fit into your framework? Is that the way what we're trying to ask? So we have not, go ahead, Scott, do you want to reply? Yeah, that's the challenge of trying to give you 100 individual words that are nested in a framework that looks something like this in a brief overview. So I get it. I appreciate all that feedback. And I can't do anything with it without doing a deep dive that we don't have time for. Awesome. So we'll have to make room for the deeper dive. Thank you. Eric, Vincent, Pete. Yeah, one thing I was thinking about during the call is like, what's the overarching theme was my question in the chat. And it's like, often in the media, they state it as a problem is like, people don't take in facts. They don't take in science. But then I think, no, that's not actually not really the right place of the problem. It's more, for me, it seems like knowledge management. That's the problem. We don't have societal knowledge management that's properly done. And that's why I asked the question, like, what's the most overarching word to say that? And I think philosophy doesn't cut it. But yeah, that's one topic that, for me, is interesting. What do we call that problem? And up until now, I've been calling it like societal knowledge management. And then the second thing I was thinking about, yeah, I would like really to have like a group of people supporting each other on making things move forward. Like, I would really like a kind of co-coaching group or something for OGMers, collective intelligence people. And I'd like to set that up. And I wonder if there's other people who have the same. Like, it's like a really practical group where you really work on your topics, on your work. It could also be something like facilitation or anything which you want to make happen in the world. Can you riff on that for just a moment longer? Because I have three different versions of what you might be saying shut up in my head right now. I'm like, which one do you mean? Ah, what do you mean? So can you just explain a little bit more what you're envisioning? So co-coaching is basically, it's a real method where it's two people that talk to each other and they coach each other. And it's both professional coaches that coach each other. But my idea is like, you have a group of people and you have like a check-in, like, I wanna work on this, I wanna work on this. And then you pair up or you are in smaller groups and you work for a while. And it's kind of pragmatic, but it could also be emotional stuff that you're stuck on. Kind of with the question of what is getting you stuck in the moment and what will help you move forward in where you're at. Oh, I could definitely not use that. That sounds good. Yeah. Okay, well. No, I'm kidding, I'm totally kidding. Yeah, I understand. But yeah, okay, let me sing. So it strikes an emotional chord in me, I don't count help it. So just a moment. I'd like to organize it and find someone who can help me. So if anyone wants to step up, I'm not a good single organizer, I'm a good organizer with others. So if anybody else feels like that, please. Pete, does this sound like we could create a co-coaching channel in the Mattermost? Yeah, certainly. And just, Eric, you're on the Mattermost, right? Yeah, and I'd like to make it complex also, like recurring calls weekly or something like that. Yeah. Let's figure something out on the Mattermost and see who's interested in playing there. Okay, Grace. And then with apologies for your lateness and the cue, Vincent, then Pete. Hi, everyone. So I don't know how much it was mentioned at the beginning, but I've just been completely flabbergasted by the entire GameStop stocks shorting right now. And it kind of sent me into a frenzy of trying to understand what's going on and what are the implications for larger-scale, coordinated action to summarize for anyone who hasn't been kind of watching the news. A Reddit group called Wall Street Bets that went from like 2 million to 4 million members in the last 24 hours, basically coordinated to all buy GameStop. And so, and it was a bunch of retail traders and they bought it because it was short, it was going to be shorted by a bunch of Wall Street hedge funds. And so the hedge funds are losing millions, if not more of dollars because they basically shorted the stocks and had calls in. And so when they ramped the price up, they were forced to buy them when they were high. And the fact that people are figuring out that the stock market is kind of just a big game and are now trying to like play it in the same way that the Wall Street people do is incredible to me. And I think it's kind of showing the ridiculousness of it. And also there's a lot of pushback right now where all of the like traditional financial institutions are going on and saying, oh, they're like breaking the law, this is illegal, but it's like the same exact thing that the big financial firms do, except now it's being done in a peer-to-peer way via Reddit and they're really mad about it. So yeah, I wanna fuel the shenanigans potentially because I think this is incredible, but I'm wondering what other people think about this and the implications for coordinated action. And now that we have like Reddit and the internet, what that means and TikTok as well. It's like crazy recovery. Thanks Vincent. And yeah, he has a lot of useful links for that story. Go ahead, Matt. I just had a data point there. We do a lot of work in the financial services sector and the sync blew up right away across that whole sphere. So it's being taken notice. I think one of the things that's getting interesting is corporations are waking up to the power of sort of the negative power of the social media, right? They used to kind of push it off, at least some of my clients, oh, that's politics and that's Trump and that's all this kind of stuff that's going on outside of us, but it's coming to a theater near you. And I think the more that that happens, then the more people are gonna wake up and go, time out, we've gotta think about things differently. Now, it's interesting about whether or not you think each individual action is positive or negative, but it's clear that systemic changes is happening because of where we are with our technology and people are taking notice. Again, we're sort of trying to figure our way through this. Mike. Just real quick, I've been fascinated with this as well, but I'm concerned about the long-term implications because it could mean that the social media platforms and Reddit is pressured to kind of try to rein in some of this behavior. And there is a national security concern that some of this is being fed by bots and trolls from overseas who have already undermined our democracy and our faith in elections and now would like nothing better than to get a few thousand people doing things that undermine our faith in markets. And the system usually elaborates some kind of defense mechanisms, like there are circuit breakers in the stock market if trades exceed certain thresholds, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe that happens without sort of closing things down entirely, maybe that happens. But we need to learn how this works because if anybody can say, hey, let's go get even with so-and-so down the block, and then it turns into their economic wipeout, that's a big deal. Yeah, but it's kind of already happening. It's just as Vincent was saying, only a few players have the ability to do that because of their size and scale. So maybe we wake up to those nefarious actors as well. So the first good... Reading overseas now, we're seeing at their markets and other stocks affected. Ah, interesting. So the first good history book I ever read, I love history, but the first good one I ever read, and I'm not saying this is the best history book, but is a book titled, Tragedy and Hope, written by Carol Quigley back in 1966. Here's a link to it. And basically it's a history of the financial world from about 1900. He gets the 1900 pretty quickly by talking about major sort of layers. And then from 1900 to 1966, going through the Great Depression and a bunch of other things. And it was super interesting because it was like pulling the curtain back and saying, well, this is kind of what those powers were doing. And until recently, the curtain was pretty opaque. And all of a sudden the curtains being drawn back, I don't think it's fully drawn back by any means, but at least the power shifted of the shoes on the other foot to borrow a corny metaphor. And so we're in new territory now. Pete, do you want to check in? Yeah. It's funny as we were getting close to 930, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to keep it short and quick. And now it's like, well, I'm past 930, so I don't have to keep it so short and quick. Thanks, Vincent, for bringing up the Wall Street Bets hedge funds tangle. It's interesting to me. So I recommend that some of the links on the forum thread I started, which there's a link in the chat too. Don't assume you know anything about it until you at least read at Toxic's thread on Twitter and some of his replies to questions about his thread. It's very interesting. For me, there's some interesting emergent and collective action things. And also innovator incumbent dynamics, which we've learned about, which Christensen taught us about a long time ago. It's odd that the innovator in this case is a collective action and the incumbents are the core of our, literally the core of our life, the finance system that we've kind of all grown to be subject to. So it's a very fascinating thing. It's a watershed event. It's very important. And again, like literally you don't know what's going on until you start reading more about it. And then even then there's no way to find out. The wolves hiding in a collective crowd of sheep is just the same way that the capital situation was is definitely a component of it. So, you know, hedge funds, there were hedge funds that made lost billions of dollars and there were hedge funds that made billions of dollars. Another thing that's really top of mind to me is a thing and a meta thing. Top of mind for me is B.1.1.7, the UK COVID variant and the other related variants. They are certainly more infectious. It's funny to me that when I hear this on the news it's always they're much more infectious. They're highly infectious, you know. It's like, oh, it's 50%, 60% more infectious which gets turned into in the news like highly infectious. And it's like, well, but on the other hand that highly infectious encapsulates an understanding of or it doesn't actually, but it points to an understanding of exponential growth. Humans, I just watching the past year and before that it was always a lesson about, it used to be in the olden days, the before times. Exponential growth was about interest rates, right? Hey, you should save $10 a week for your whole life and a girl like this. Nowadays it's like, okay, we just changed the exponent from 0.9, they are not to point from 0.9 or one to 1.4 or 1.5, you know. And what does that do to the exponential growth curve? And it's just something that it's fascinating to watch for me that I guess this is the meta thing. It's fascinating for me. It's fascinating to watch that people just don't get exponential growth. It's just not a thing. You don't understand, you know, how the math works. There was the prime minister of Denmark, I think it was who had the, she has this cool metaphor of, you know, okay, imagine the national stadium filling up with water. You know, there's a faucet next to you, one drip and then two drips and then four drips and then, you know, and you know, the stadium fills up and I forget 44 hours or something like that, but it's not until the 42nd of those 44 that you really are panicked because the rest of the time is just like, yeah, it's not very much water. I don't know what we're freaked out about. So I feel this especially because Governor Newsom was apparently or felt pressured to, you know, start undoing the lockdowns that we have in place while in other parts of the country, Germany and France are going, okay, well, now we're gonna switch from this, these cloths masks were really cool, but now we have to get serious and use medical grade masks instead and out in public, you know, and it's, so this dichotomy of like, well, in the US there's a lot of feeling of, well, we got through it, you know, the case rate is declining, we're all good and we're declaring victory while other countries are going, okay, if we didn't have the surveillance that we did and we didn't do the sequencing we did, we'd be, you know, we'd think that we were fine, but we're gonna freak out because we see the train coming and it's, you know, not going to slow down, it's not gonna stop, it's gonna get really bad. We had some mention of genealogy, I happen to be one of my passions is genealogy and I feel like I have this big success story. When I, you know, for most of my life, I knew my grandparents, one of them, one of them actually was in an institution and she died without me ever knowing that she and I lived at the same time. My grandfather, one of my grandfathers passed away when I was just a little kid, but I at least knew who they were kind of, except for the grandma that was in the institution, but I really didn't have any connection beyond that, you know, and I kind of disparate of ever getting any and then finally way too late in life by the time that my grandparents had died, I was like, oh wow, this is really cool. What got me into it was probably DNA actually, but anyway, I started doing research and now I know like all of my ancestors back like six generations or so, and I know some of them back 10, I've got a few branches that go back 10. I wanted to share real quick, this kind of happened for me this morning, so it was top of mind. This is a picture of a tiny bit of my family tree from a little village in southeastern Poland called Sherman. The leaf nodes on the bottom are DNA cousins I've been in touch with and one aunt. But what's fascinating to me is that as you go up, these people were from a small village, so there was lots of siblings marrying siblings and things like that. And when I first started bumping, so you see that these lines start crossing towards as you go up. And since I have a very few leaf nodes here, this is actually a picture going up of a very small set of a much larger set of lots of cross lines and things like this. What happened this morning for me was I bumped into somebody's family tree who I hadn't known nothing about and she started filling in some of the blank areas up at the top here for me, which was really cool. So this particular thing, I know a fair bit about in the 1800s, I've got pretty good access to actually be thankfully, thanks to the Church of Latter-day Saints who really kick-started consumer amateur genealogy. They made sure that a bunch of the documents from the 1800s were preserved genealogical types of documents like parish records. So through the lovely beneficence of LDS, I've gotten to see like tons of pages of... But you know why, right? Oh, I totally know why. Yeah. They're gonna hijack and they're gonna baptize the people moment. Many of my, most of my, I have many ancestors who have been forcefully post-death baptized by the LDS folks. This is the greatest crowdsourcing hack ever. It's like, so the bad news or the news is they have a belief, I won't characterize it as what kind of belief, but they have a belief, very sincere belief apparently, that everybody's related up and you should baptize all your ancestors and stuff like that. The outcome of it is they have been of the religious fanatics that the US houses, for instance, they are fairly benign. And the other thing is they help me know my ancestors because they've done a lot of work. They do all their work. They give all their information to me for free basically, including things like microfilms of the chairman, baptism records from the mid 1800s, which I should not be able to get to, but they've got them in Salt Lake City. And then I can go into my local with some trepidation fear. I can go into my local LDS church and just for the cost of postage, no overhead, no handling, no anything, no rental time on a microfilm machine. I'm looking at microfilm records from the 1850s from my ancestors. So it is an amazing and wonderful thing. Familysearch.org is also run by them. They have an amazing amount of information. Anyway, the thing that fascinated me today is like there's this whole branch that all of, like my ancestors from the early 1900s were intermingled with all these people that came over from Poland into Chicago. And I could tell these people were like really close to each other and they were friends and things like that. But now, thanks to this new information, I'm actually a fourth cousin to the person whose family tree I bumped into. And I can see exactly how. And she's got a whole bunch of like filling in the gaps things. So one of the things that always puzzled me about this chairman thing was how they kept from marrying too close, cousins too close. And, you know, and so, so because it's like, okay, I'm sure we're fourth cousins, but I think we're probably related through a couple more connections. So we're 4.5, you know, 4.5 cousins, 3.5 cousins. And I was like, well, I'm sure they didn't have rules written down or things like that, but everybody just kind of kept track, you know, and there weren't that many last names. So you had to think in your head, you know, okay, so I know her grandmother and I kind of know her great grandmother and, you know, we're not related through any of these connections, so we must be good. So it finally struck me why there are wedding objections, you know, why we ended up with wedding objections, you know, do you have any just cause, why this man and woman should not be wed and holy matrimony, blah, blah, blah. I always, you know, growing up, I always naively kind of thought it's like, well, you know, he's gonna cheat or I don't like her or something like that. It's like, that's the last chance you've got to ask the extended family, everybody in the village, yo, are these people more related than they should be? You know, and I thought that was, you know, it's like, oh, that's why we have wedding objections. Scott, you have a thought. The most mind blowing fact that I learned last year is that you are the latest in a set, an unbroken set of ancestors that all lived long enough to successfully reproduce. And depending on your belief system, if you believe in the science, that goes all the way back until the beginning of life. And that to me is absolutely like, I can't even get my head around that. That you are the environment of the success. It's the only possible reason that you exist right now is that every single one of your ancestors successfully made another one. And I think I told this story a long ago on an RGM call, but I was using one of the answers besides long ago in the early intertube days and I started, you know, putting things up and I started learning what it took to verify one person, you know, in this tree. And then it dawns on me, oh, wait a minute. Once my verified person is a verified person in someone else's tree and our trees have suddenly clicked together as Pete was just describing, I suddenly had this feeling like I've clicked into the giant tree of life. And I was already an enthusiastic user of the brain at the time. So I then had the parallel thought, oh, I'm busy weaving trees of knowledge and whatever, whatever. And once I can start clicking mine into yours, into everybody else's, we're suddenly weaving this giant, my serial network of knowledge of what's going on. And that was really exciting to me. And it's one of the reasons why this conversation is happening now. I can sort of trace idea. I can trace MIMOL DNA back to that moment way back when. So Pete, thanks for taking us into this territory. Anything else you wanna add to that? I do. One more thing on, so if people are interested in finding people in the US, especially or DNA-based genealogy, I'd love to chat more because I think it's really important. I also have this weird guilt. Maybe it's not weird. Every time I make connections in family trees and every time somebody gets their DNA sequence to match up with ancestors, you're also feeding the surveillance bots that, you know, so me getting my DNA sequence means that anybody who's like, you know, within third or fourth cousins for me is also like extremely well-known at this point to anybody, you know, any law enforcement who cares to subpoena the right information. So then OGM stuff. For some people, especially folks that I think mostly have left, this call might be the main way that you think OGM exists. It also exists in other places and other times. Some of us just use this OGM, think of OGM as this call. Others of us think of it as a larger organism helping to make sense in the world and things like that. So there are places where we stay in church. There are forums or there's a forum and a chat system. I'm going to put my email in here and let me know if you want to be more connected to those. So now that I look at all the faces, I think we're all connected, except maybe Cedar. There was some good work this week on the steering call. We have a weekly Tuesday call that folks can attend and we did some good work on trying to think about whether or not OGM manages itself and how it might manage itself better if that's something that we want. I've also kind of in the background, I've got a lot of thinking about how federation, I've explained how federating within OGM. I keep explaining I guess and I get further along. So in the course of explaining a couple of times this week, I feel like it started to crystallize and I could imagine for at least a short time before I got distracted by other stuff, actually writing up a how-to document of how OGM works and how federation works. So that's in the queue kind of. Cool, well, thank you. My brain is full, it's a wet one. And I'm grateful for your presence, all of you. And maybe we wrap the call now. Sherry, do you want to do any kind of check-in? I mean, you've been sort of dropping things in a long way, but you know, you often are the one who does not check-in. So I just want to see what's up with you. Yeah, briefly, my brain is like all over all of the place, as usual, but I'm heartened because Frieder's brain is about to put things in the broader OGM community that I think will be really useful and lead to some experiments. My conversations with Jordan at Lionsburg are turning into something that we're going to present to the OGM group as well, that might turn into actual sort of organizational structure that let us do many more things and be part of a cohort of a federated set of entities that are kind of like us only in completely different spaces, moving forward and that's really exciting. And then all of that is in the background radiation context of this seems to be in the air. And I keep running into people who are doing stuff that matters, that's really like resonant with what we're up to. So that's got me very, very excited. Yes, definitely not. So that's just like the briefest of check-ins. I think next Thursday I'll do more of a check-in myself. I'll put myself on the queue. Thanks everybody. Awesome. No, no, no. Let's be careful out there. Bye.