 And look, there you are. I have never been so happy to have something canceled on me. Seriously, I drove all the way across the bridge, got to where I was going, and then was told that the meeting was canceled the day before. So I'm glad I was up to. I actually watched a little bit of the reporting from Klaus's meeting, which I found really interesting. Yeah. Cool. Love to hear your thoughts. Hey, Gil. Through the morning, he's still pre-literate this morning. Then I'll keep talking. That's why I stopped. You know, yesterday was a great meeting, and I like process as I speak. Like, that's that's how I work. And so because some of those ideas started four years ago, and they've constantly evolved, depending on the situation and who I saw out there, I forgot some of, like you had asked me, like why it had to be the two things. And I forgot the importance of being able to actually design and play within the video game that was being created. So like, you know, some of us in this space, if we wanted to be able to go in and help design the room, because I was thinking it's really about reimagining. And it ties into education. And I'll wait till my check-in to tell you. Cool. Cool. Thank you. No, that's great. Already got me thinking about so many things. Hey, Pete. Hey, John. Today is going to be the peak of our latest heat dome in Portland. It's supposed to hit 106 or 107 today. Fortunately, somebody invented air conditioning some years ago. Yeah. Well, I'd like to wait for a couple more people to join in and then start a round of check-ins. In the meantime, I was going to find a poem here. I think this one. Yeah, why not? It's not the happiest poem in the world, but it's an interesting poem. And it's titled, let's see if it's still on the page where it was. It's called Lies I've Told My Three-Year-Old Recently. And it's by Raul Gutierrez. And it goes like this. Lies I've told my three-year-old recently. Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very, very quiet, you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago. Everyone knows at least one secret language. When nobody is looking, I can fly. We are all held together by invisible threads. Books get lonely too. Sadness can be eaten. I will always be there. Fabulous. I'll put it in the in the Mattermost chat. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for being here, for making room for Open Goal of Mind, which is a toothpaste, a floor wax, a movement, but not necessarily an organization. We're still figuring out what we are and how we work. Yeah, not all lies about the little bears in the drain pipes, you mean? And why don't... Pete, I have a feeling that you may not want to jump in first, but you have a lot of stuff about emerging events, sense-making, and other things going on. I would just love to start with you and then work else-wise through the crowd. So, why don't you go first? What would you like to know? What is the... What is the... What is the... What is the... What is the... In the spirit of checking in, what is the current state of emerging events, sense-making, and maybe also what do you wish would happen with it, and then we can go to other stuff? So, I've got a project called Emergent Events Sense-Making. We've got a project, a number of us. There's a chattel in Mattermost. I picked up recently the idea that... Well, the idea is that there's a lot of activity and confusion and looking for information, and looking for answers that happens when we have a quick information event. I'm drawn to quick information events. So, the ones I can think of are 9-11, what the heck just happened. Maybe the start of COVID around February 2020. Another one was the GameStop short-sweez. That was a vertical event for only a certain people, people who were watching the financial markets, but it was mind-blowing. All of a sudden, the people on an internet forum caused the gains and loss of billions of dollars in a split second, more or less, in the way these things go. And the most recent one is the Delta Search. Delta coming in like a freight train, starting at the beginning of July. So, I was watching it and thinking about it already in July. And I didn't around to getting, well, actually I procrastinate a lot for the first couple of weeks of July, saying I don't really want to get into this again because I've done COVID information. And I could see it happening that there were a bunch of people who didn't know it was even going to happen. There were a bunch of people who were thinking that I want to honor the people who have COVID fatigue and pandemic fatigue and let's just rip all our masks off and have a party at a grand old time. While I could see this freight train barreling down the tracks, ready to just plow into society, thinking that it's a really interesting thing to watch, a train wreck happening, and information kind of going from small places out to everybody. So, emergent events since making is like kind of leaping into the breach of those information events that happened suddenly and have this weird sheer effect where there's a few people that know a lot about what's going on and what's going to happen over the next weeks or months. And then a lot of people slowly kind of learning that information diffusion happening over weeks or months. With the Delta search thing, all I wanted to do was build some tools and processes to leap into that breach a little bit better and actually only the very beginning part of sense making. Kind of catching up with the information and starting to spread it around better. How do you catch a lot of information all at once? How do you sort it into ways that people can maybe downstream from that, hopefully kind of also in real time. People downstream from that can make sense of it. So, we've got some tools and processes, some observations, some learnings. One of my big learnings, and we all know this, but every time you experience that it's pretty deep and profound, just actually doing something instead of thinking and being theoretical, actually running the experiment and doing stuff. So, for me, that was just grabbing a bunch of information off of the web and putting it someplace and going, what kind of information am I grabbing? Why am I grabbing this and not that? Why don't I try to grab something that's completely opposite of the stuff that I've been, that I kind of just, if I'm not conscious about it, why don't I grab really weird stuff? And so, a few of us have had some good conversations about the kinds of information and what kinds of tools that you want to just start making a little bit of, like starting to make a collection rather than just see everything flowing by and wondering what, if you start to actually kind of collect it a little bit, what happens? What do we think? So, there's not a lot more result than that. And I'll continue to kind of write it up. And it's been an interesting and fruitful experiment. Another odd thing, of course, is that it's gotten to be a weird world where billions of dollars flash changed hands in weeks or hundreds of thousands of people are sick and some of them, a significant chunk of them, they're going to be sick for the rest of their lives. They're going to have deficiencies because of carelessness with masks and other people's carelessness with masks and other people's carelessness with public health and with the health of polity. It's really an interesting thing to watch. And after the last president and his administration, we kind of got forced to sit and watch while insane things happened. It's really striking that I still catch myself. It's like I should be really upset about this or I should be really... And I'm a lot better at being zen about things and going, you know, I totally get it. There are people in the world who you can tell them a truth. Like you're going to catch COVID and there's a decent chance, much better than winning a lottery that you're going to be sick for the rest of your life. And I'll go, you know, America, my freedom. And you kind of got to go, okay, cool, I get it. You and your God and the gods of your politics are more important to you than your life or your kids' lives or whatever. Okay, cool, I get it. Instead of, you know, Gil, most startling or useful thing I've learned from the effort is probably just the practice of doing it, actually doing the experiment rather than cogitating about the theoretical nature of the experiment. There's a whole bunch of interesting things about Delta and what people do or don't believe and why they do or don't believe it or learn it. But I don't know that any of that's particularly interesting. We know all of this stuff from long time ago. Cigarettes and seatbelts and COVID in 2020 and, you know, belonging to a belief system is more important than your physical health in many, many ways. And it makes total sense if you think about it. That's, you know, how humans have survived for a long time. But we all know those lessons pretty much. Do you want to talk briefly about the roles that you were describing or envisioning in the middle of EES? Yeah, sure. And thanks for this little feature at Durey. Let me share my screen real quick. And I'll show you a thing that I started working on. A description of the, what I call the intake system. Just something that could deal with a bunch of, you know, a bunch of material coming at you really fast. So I ended up calling, we started off with, hey, let's just post a bunch of links. And it turns out that while you post a link and then you post some information around it, like a title or a thought, and then it's like, well, sometimes you post a quote from somebody or sometimes you make an observation about something. Here's a scientific study that has a surprising result or something like that. And so those are what, we ended up posting links, but also different kinds of information. So I ended up calling those exhibits so far. So people who grab those exhibits and put them someplace are called evidence collections. Evidence collectors and they put them in an intake stream and there's different intake streams. You use the one that you like instead of the one that everybody else thinks you should use. And then there's an intake bot that looks at your beginning proto exhibit kind of and decorates it a little bit. It can add dates and times and it can grab stuff off the web if there's links in your exhibit. So then an investigator comes along a little bit later and the intake bot has set up the exhibit better in the evidence database, but the investigator is really the one that can take it apart a little bit and say this one is connected to that one or this is actually three or four different things. Let me make three or four separate exhibits. One of the things that the investigators do is connect what I call the short narrative. The original name for this was narrative because it made sense to me, but it starts to be like, Pete, you're trying to make too much sense of this. So the idea of a short narrative is a pretty simple thing. It's like vaccination is good, vaccination is bad. I don't get enough oxygen if I'm wearing a mask, all those kinds of simple kind of short statements of when people say something, they a lot of times they'll demonstrate something to you, but they won't actually say what they mean by it. So this is just meant to capture a little bit of meaning, mostly to classify it, not to make sense of it yet. And then later in the stream, there's going to be curators and narrators that tell the story of the evidence that's been collected and what you can see the stories out of it. So that's about as far as I've got with this. This obviously needs some diagrams and many more paragraphs of explanation. That's where I am. And it's interesting to note that this system is pretty complicated and has a lot of richness and a deep schema. And my initial thinking about what this system would be is like, well, just post some links in a Matimos channel or in a factor stream and we're good to go. And it's like, yeah, okay, that's not actually what needs to go on. So just this little front end of data collection has a lot of richness and complexity and things like that. And also stuff that people do not deal with. Like what did somebody say when they posted a 40-tweet stream and there are a bunch of replies to it? And some of those are PDFs and some of those are links to data dashboards that are going to be changing every day and stuff like that. How do you capture that as an exhibit, rather than it's not a link or it's not a link to all 40 things? It's actually a really rich and complex data object which we don't really deal with, that kind of richness and complexity. How do I make sure that I can see this in the future when Twitter's maybe changing, Facebook is maybe changing, Facebook maybe won't let me see this unless I'm logged in? All that kind of stuff. It's hard and complex. Thank you. Really? Yeah, Pete, that's all fabulous. I wanted to just mention, you probably remember Jamie Joyce from Society Library. I've seen her internal process. It has a lot of similarities. And at some point, if you ever have been with it, it might be good to compare and contrast and see if there's anything you all could inspire from each other. I'll try and remember to share this video with her when it gets posted. But just wanted to kind of bring that up. And also, I have some researchers working for me on Gullibot and Gullibot's currently working on the vaccine. Would it be cool to have them in that process somewhere? If it's useful and valuable to them, yeah. And I'd love more participation in this project. Because part of the experiment is how wild and mully can the participation get and can we still kind of help maintain order somehow in it? Yeah. So I think the area that would Roy be hopeful in is that kind of the taking the information that's come in and it's probably at that kind of narrative level. And then so we'd be putting them in Gullibot. So that would be one of the narratives, which is kind of a mapping of like for your example. That would be awesome, yeah. So I'll work with them. I'll figure out the best way that I'll get them in the chat. And we'll figure out how to coordinate. Thank you. Are you architecting Gullibot to be able to be able, at some point to answer the question, so what should I do about the Delta variant, for example? Somebody comes in and types that to Gullibot. Is that asking way too much or is that like where you're aiming? No, that's, well, what to do about it. Gullibot is in the space where you have a specific proposal. So right now it's, should I personally take the vaccine? Right? So it helps you walk through that. But then later on, if someone says, oh, we should do a mask mandate, or we should require vaccines or something like that, that kind of specific decision is where Gullibot is. That kind of outer process of brainstorming and coming up with the proposals is kind of outside the scope at the moment. But yeah, if someone has a question like that, later on being able to search, you know, Google or Gullibot, hopefully they'd run across it and find themselves better informed and be able to participate in that discussion. Cool. Thank you. I put the links to the two channels that Pete has set up for this in the chat, in our channel, on Metamost. And does anybody else have any questions or comments or suggestions for Pete on this? Doug? Yeah, it's an alternative model. I have to frame this a little bit. I've been working with a group that is historical, was the group of people that worked with Al Gore and the first Clinton administration on a project called Reinventing Government. And that group has reconstituted itself and included me. I ran the network for them back in the 90s. And it's quite interesting that they're together. Well, in thinking about Reinventing Government, they got pretty stuck on what it could actually mean at this point. So talking around what we got to was the relationship of government to journalism and the press was a critical element to rethink. So the question is how to do that? And we came to a model which is, in many ways, overlaps what Pete's doing, but it's very different because of its simplicity. The idea is to create a resource for journalists and congressional staff that would be a webpage across the top are the leading stories of the day. You click down to background stories of what's the immediate background to those stories. And then you click down further and you get to historical and sociological studies that are related. So that would be the day, all fitting on one page. The next day, there'd be another series of stories, probably some overlap, of course, with links back to previous days. So the idea would be that a reporter who's covering a story could go in there and immediately ground themselves down a couple of layers in order to do a better job with what they're doing. And they're really committed to doing this and trying to raise money for it. So that was yesterday an amazing outcome. Super interesting, Doug. Thank you. Thanks. Real quick, I want to mention there's a thing called Help a Reporter Out, H-A-R-O. And there's certain source people, librarians or specialists. Help reporters. And it's a pretty well-tuned system. It's not dashboardy, like the thing that Doug is describing. I like that idea, that dashboard and the depth of it. Thank you. And let's go John Gil Stacey. Sorry to spring that on you, John. I typed it in the out of the chat, but I'm not sure you're looking there. All right. So this is a check-in, yes? Yes. So I had a rush with COVID. The person I take care of got sick and his wife tested positive. And so I stopped the caregiving and he went into the hospital. He's still in the hospital. And his downstairs neighbor got tested positive. And I just got my results. Just minutes ago and they're negative. And so I'm very pleased, very grateful, but I'm really struck. I was struck by the contrast because just within 24 hours, I was watching the news. I was seeing terrible things happening in Afghanistan. How many terrible things are happening everywhere, right? But then when something comes right, this truck just glances off you and you're standing on the highway. It's a very different experience. It's much more like whoa, you know? And then also just the arbitrariness. The woman, well, the fact that my client's wife got it is kind of, I mean, they live together. But his downstairs neighbor, and she has Lyme disease. So she's got an impaired immune system. And I'm like, this is so arbitrary. This is so unfair. I mean, I know life is unfair. I wasn't expecting life to be unfair, but when it just kind of comes and hits you in the face, you go, wow, that is really bad. And I don't know that there's much I can do about it except get better and then go back to helping people. But I'm still reeling from the, like I say, the impact of this and also the arbitrariness of it. So that's enough of a check-in. John, thank you. And glad you tested negative. And you're reminding me that when SARS hit, I was actually living in Hong Kong briefly. And in Hong Kong, SARS, they discovered one building where there were a lot of cases. And strangely enough, the cases were all in like the F apartment on each floor. And they couldn't quite figure out what was going on. And it turned out that SARS droplets, when people flushed the toilet, SARS droplets were aerosolizing out of the water supply. And there was contagion up and down that particular pipe in the building. And now we've discovered that Delta variant is way more contagious than previous ones, including strange cases where people just pass, never mind, you know, five or 15 minutes in a room together, and people passing each other in the hall as contained vectors. So all bets are kind of weirdly off in different ways. Let's go Gil, Stacey Doug. I think Gil wrote that he was going to pass. Yes, I just hadn't looked up. Thanks, Gil. Stacey, Doug, Paul. Can I pass to Allison because I haven't met her and I'd love to know who she is. I was being gentle and letting Allison go late in the intros, but I'm happy to do that if you want. Allison, if you'd like to jump in and possibly introduce us to your feline companion. The aggressive Amiri over here. I am Allison, Lisa, and I'm friends. I was invited by Mark People, who is not here this morning. I'm not sure why, but he told me about the group and invited me last night. And I'm pleased to see Gil, who I've interacted with before and always enjoy following his conversations. And this is also interesting. So let's see. I guess my updates or a little bit about me is I have been working in the economics education space for a number of years. And I'm very interested in how that narrative informs all that we do and think and see. And my interests are in one, cultivating economic ecosystems and communities world to healing economic trauma and three, designing strategies for economic drawdown, meaning sequestering that metastasizing money that is invested in the cloud and nothing meaningful, basically, and putting that into productive projects. So as I enter right now, I'm entering into my school year. I have a very strong sense of a mental health crisis amongst youth. I think that the way that we talk about things and the way that we dialogue, the way that we inquire, all contribute towards that, the way that we share news, the way that we frame our curiosity. So anyway, here I am. I'm happy to talk, but nice to be here. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Could you just say a little bit more about mental health and kids? Just it could be about your sort of perspective on it or it could be what you're what you're seeing or other sides to it? Sure. Thank you. Yeah. Well, one of the things is it was about, yeah, as a number of years ago as a teacher, by default, most economics teachers or teachers by default, most have not been trained in economics. If somebody does any upper division training in economics, it's probably because they're geared towards being finance and finance in Wall Street at whatever level. That's usually the crowd that's drawn in. So those who are tasked with teaching it at the high school level need to take some kind of training. The training happens to be dominated by neoliberal framework, as is all of the curriculum. Coming into teaching economics by default and recognizing that simultaneously, there was a mandate in the state of California to address the suicide crisis going on. Suicide is just one tiny symptom of a mental health crisis. It's just when it gets so bad, you're in a living hell and it's worth taking your life. But in order to catch some of those, what the response was legally, each school needed to have a suicide prevention awareness program. And that meant a video and a survey to find out how often students are ideating suicide. And that was the extent of the response. The rest of the research that I would see addressing this growing crisis had to do with the amount of time young people are spending on their devices. And of course, there's a number of things that are toxic in that realm for sure. The solution was to petition Apple designers to make less addictive telephones. So you see that very, very... So for myself, I've been coming into really, we've got to recognize economic trauma. Yeah, that and then coming out of COVID there were more shootings from the time students started back in school from March to the end of the year, which was part-time school. It was just a few months. And during that time, we had more shootings than we had had in three years. So we aren't... Yeah, it's a big deal. And I do think that the way that we are unable to reconcile an economic system that is aligned with the patterns of nature and our own sense of what is good, it creates some painful dissonance and our interactions with one another as a society. And it's interesting to me that it's nearly invisible. Thank you, Alison. And you raised a question in my head along the way. You raised many, many questions, but one of them was, I wonder who has studied or written about neoliberalism and mental health because there are many things about neoliberalism that lead to crises and mental health just about the way it operates. And but I don't... Searching my memory, I can't think of somebody who's actually made those connections or teased that out or tried to find relationships or implications or things like that. If I could address it, I personally, I would like to see more attention than just myself because usually I feel like I'm a hairy mom and an unacknowledged school teacher. And in my free time, I'll try to get blogs out. So I've written something about first childhood experiences and trying to make the association between economic trauma. But I would hesitate to specifically bother with making a case about neoliberalism as an ideology that actually it's interesting because there's a lot about the neoliberalism that feeds into the COVID philosophy and approach. What's deeper there? And without having an ism or a set of beliefs that were superimposing on an unexamined design, system design, that we have a system design that we're treating as gravity and then creating a translation. So there's a lot of interesting truths to neoliberalism that are unreconcilable within the system design and have a lot of negative outcomes. And so instead of blaming neoliberalism, we're focusing on that or pointing that and then immediately creating some kind of bifurcation of our and then further division of our discourse, then we can focus as designers on a solution-oriented approach and looking at, well, what are the main functions and what is it that we're going for? And I kind of think that that's an interesting conversation even to bring into the news and media space or the research space. We have to recognize what is it that we're going for when we're looking to see what the COVID responses are because when we're coming in with our, what is it that we're going for when we're looking for news reporting? Can the news source actually say that? Could that affect the funding models? And how could that affect people's faith and trust for those news sources when we're explicit from the get-go about our own objectives? Agendas, objectives, yeah. So my agenda when I come into the classroom is to say I'm wanting to understand what the major functions are and how the economy operates because what I'd like to see in society are peace, in society, prosperity in communities, well-being in individuals and regeneration in our environment. Those are my objectives and if it gets us towards that, great. Let's keep looking at it like designers and thinking like designers and that tends to feel like a productive approach. And when we take a solution-oriented productive approach towards envisioning something that we might want to see at the outcome, I think that has a massive impact on mental health. So instead of taking a pathological look, what does neoliberalism do? You know, further diverting our populace. What does neoliberalism do to harm our mental health? How about what does focusing on what brings us all together and what we might want do to improve our mental health? I don't think there's any time to waste being pathologizing anything right now. We have to have a solutogenic approach. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. That was really rich. I appreciate it. Stacey, you generously ceded your spot there, Refu, would you like to step back in? I would love to. Thank you. So I'm excited by a lot that I've heard. I'm really interested in Doug's project. I think that's exciting. I was excited to hear Bentley. Now I'm like looking to see what it's going to look like when Bentley's bots add to Pete's project. One of the things that I noticed though, because I had before I got on the call, I was watching the Klaus's call. And one of the things I just want to point out is the difference between Pete's approach and I think it was Patricia. She didn't speak about it yet. It's for running a meet, how she's going to run the meeting with the storytellers. And the reason I think that's important is because for Pete's project, his is like even the language and everything. It is perfect and tailored to people that are going to be working on the project. And then the way she did things, which it seemed to me bothered some people, is perfect for different kinds of projects. And Jerry, the more that you and I've been talking and especially with this idea of weaving the world, what I've realized is that what I'm focusing on is weaving the designers as opposed to weaving the... And those are two separate channels. So going back to the whole thing we've been talking about as far as a show and a video game in which we could actually create these things. And to Pete's point about actually doing, one thing that I would like to see done just as an exercise to do is to create our emoji that would go into a possible video and not our emoji, our avatar. Our avatar. But our realistic court... Like I use Bitmoji and somebody else might use something else. And then we could see the different... Like there's something there for the tech people to evaluate which might be better. Anyway, I'm in too many directions already. But what I want to say is I'm really looking forward. There was somebody on the call in classes called Joshua. If there's any way that I can get contact information, I'd really like to speak to him and I'm really sorry that Hank's not here. His last name is Prieto. P-R-I-E-T-O. And I think I might have his email. I'll see if I can connect you to him. And I'm just excited. And Allison, it was... Oh, that's what I wanted to say. Barry had tagged me on something that I think is relevant. It was a quote by Dr. Glenn Doyle who I didn't know who that was. But he said, don't underestimate the power of fantasies and stories and characters to get you through a rough patch. It's more than just playing make-believe. It's psychological and emotional survival. And it's not just for kids. And where that ties in is this whole idea of part of the educational software that I mentioned the other day and mental health. It is a way to incorporate education with games but in a way that's healing. So, again, I'm interested in the mental health part of it and I'm glad that Shimon, the psychiatrist, is actually on the call. Excellent. And we're, he's in the queue shortly. And I just put Joshua's LinkedIn link in the Zoom chat. Thank you. So you can friend him up right there. Let's go Doug Paul Shimon. Okay. Well, I talked about the project with reinventing government and journalism. Another project I'm involved with is with a group of economists. And the issue there really is, since economics has, as a discipline, has isolated itself so much from society, can it have any impact on the current problems around climate change? There is no worked out model there is no worked out model as an alternative to neoliberalism, unfortunately. So there's no guidance as to what to do. And so I find myself in the middle of this trying to figure out how to create conversations among people who are fairly narrowly educated in silos. So the first method question is if you have two people with really interesting ideas and you put them together in a conversation, are they likely to turn more conservative in their own thinking? Or do they get stimulated by the thinking of the other and new things emerge? My view is if you put the people together, interesting things happen. So I'm trying to work out a model for that. We have in this organization that I'm working with, there have been a number of really good podcasts that are pretty strong. What nobody's ever done is put the podcasters together in a conversation. So yesterday we made an agreement to take the top 10 podcasters dealing with economics and put them together in a common space and see what happens. And I think that's really pretty interesting. There's so many overlaps with what Sharon and Allison have been saying that could be a really long conversation, but I'll stop there. Yeah, that's great. I think Allison and Gil have seen working viable of the alternate models. Allison, do you want to step in? I'd like to see Gil first if he'd like to speak. However, I'm sharing a document. If you'd like to see, it's just a rough overview of what I call a relational design thinking process. And I really do think that the way that we think together and communicate together are important foundations to set in place before going into a room to try to quote-unquote solve problems or come up with solutions. And I think that there are some assumptions that we have when we enter a classroom when we're talking about clinical thinking. And some of those assumptions result in ignoring that in order to think better together and communicate that we want to be in a place or really need to be in a place of optimal emotional well-being. So we kind of enter into these spaces and we're already triggered or concerned on some levels. And to what degree can we get our nervous system calmed? And so, and for that, I do a lot of to focus on noticing nature, basically. Now, we have kind of a nature attention deficit disorder and that that is an important thing to be able to notice nature, not just because it calms our nervous systems, but because it also allows us to invoke the intelligence, the intelligent patterns of nature into our thinking. Now, we sometimes don't even notice. Yeah. Alison, is that, no, that's okay. Is the relational design thinking process your creation and the, and I had to click ask for access to the link. So you'll have to maybe change the settings or maybe you're going to get a flurry of requests for access right now. But is this your invention? Because I think what I think what Doug was stating was, there's no commonly known alternative, which I think I also think is not necessarily true. But there's certainly, I think I agree with the statement, there's no consensus alternative to the neoliberal agenda that the ways to fix it haven't sort of converged in any way and may never. But sorry, Alison, is this your creation? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. That is a pretty obscure way of teaching. It's a great way of teaching. I love what you're saying. I love everything you're saying. I just wish more, you know, everybody knew about it. The Solidarity Economy Network is one of the things that, you know, I think that throughout the world and throughout Latin America, there are a lot of agreements on how to approach economic solution making that definitely are divergent to the neoliberal paradigm. But because it's Latin America and Africa and these areas that aren't dominating our education spaces, but they're popular education spaces that they're not getting heard or seen by us, so it's really interesting too. I think what language or what funding is going on behind conversations has everything to do with whether or not we're paying attention to them and see that they're happening in big ways. So there's been spending decades mapping out different strategies for Solidarity Economy efforts. So that's one thing. Thank you. Gil, if you're in a place where you can speak, if you want to unmute otherwise. Yeah, I will. I was trying to handle some householding this morning, but I'm just going to have to surrender and come back here. Yeah, a bunch of comments. But first, Doug, could you clarify what you mean by no workout model? Is it what Jerry said or is it something else? What do you mean by that? Well, there is no model of production and distribution and relation to the broader society. That is of a worked out enough to be operational. There are lots and lots of good small thinking, lots and lots of projects, but they don't cohere into an economy. Okay. All right. So I'm going to interpret that back to you as not that there's a lack of models, but that the dominant model is dominant than the others are peripheral and emergent and perhaps experimental or perhaps not at scale. So at smaller scale, I think of the things that Stacy was talking about at medium, larger scale, Verde and Mexico at larger scale, Mondragon in Spain at larger scale, the Scandinavian social democrat economies that are not as fully captured by neoliberalism as the UK-US axis and some of the rest of Europe. And so yet clearly, we are in the grips of neoliberalism have been for about the past 50 years and longer than that. And parallel to that, we're in the grips of what Hazel Henderson calls economism, where economics itself, who was it, was it Allison who talked about gravity? It's a taken for granted is how the world is. And we've come to the point where economics is the lens through which we evaluate everything. And it's a reductionist economics which makes it worse, but is there the workout models to a different way of living in the world and seeing everything through the lens of economics? I think, you know, not dominant, but there is very rich work, both theoretical and on the ground. And it very quickly takes us out of the realm of economics and into the realm of politics and power. So this is not a battle that's one intellectually only. It lives in really in other realms. I'm sorry, I'm not very articulate here because I've got a slow start this morning. But I think I want to challenge no workout model as a way of characterizing it because I don't think it opens the doors that we want to open here. Well, it would be interesting to take something like Mondragon and see if it would scale up to a world economy. I've spent some time there and my conclusion would be no, but I'm certainly open to conversation about it. Yeah, how would we know, Doug? How would we know if it could scale? I mean, it's obviously, it's rooted in some very characteristic local characteristics, I guess. And it doesn't have to scale exactly the way it is, but the notion of a solidarity-based collaborative economic enterprise, I don't know if there's any theoretical reason why that can't scale. Can it scale successfully in this world where concentrated neoliberal forces will quash it like it has done with other emergent experiments? Don't know, but that's not a theoretical refutation. That's a political refutation. I don't know that we can debate it here, but I want to invite you to see if there's a different kind of characterization that might offer more emergent possibility than no worked-out model because neoliberalism is winning at the moment. It feels a little circular to me. I don't mean to be antagonistic about this at all. I'm just really curious. I honor your view, but I don't think the door is as closed as you're making it sound. My thinking is often along the lines that you're on. So I agree most really with what you're saying. Part of the problem is what kind of post-neoliberal economics can cope with climate change? Yeah, or pre-neoliberal economics. The ecological economists are taking a bite at that challenge of climate change with natural capital and carbon price and so forth, which feel like really important defensive first aid actions. Here's where I agree with you, I guess, is that those feel like band-aids. I agree, totally agree. I've not worked out models and they don't address the fundamental challenges of what's called neoliberalism and what I've been calling capitalism and what Hazel is calling economists and which is maybe more at the root because even modern socialist economies to the extent that they exist are still in the grips of economists. We're talking about a multi-value, multi-variant system which immediately presents us with the problem of how do we coordinate across human societies with multiple values in that society? One of the advantages of the neoliberal economistic approach is that if everything is reduced to the measure of money or the measure of finance, we have a lingua franca that we're cooperating with. It may be blind in all kinds of ways. It may be stupid and suicidal in all kinds of ways but at least we understand each other. And in the multiple model world, how do we understand each other and how do we coordinate across our multi-variant purposes? What are your big puzzles? Thanks, Gil. Alison, do you want to talk a little bit about economic drawdown and then John? Perfect, John. I'm just going to park it. Socastra, John. Okay. Yeah, this is good. This is huge. This conversation you dug in Gil and Alison, you know, it was so many places. It could go and needs to go, needs to go. Just one tiny little idea, and this is probably redundant for Gil and Doug, you know. It's the idea that you can either think of it as a ratchet or as a sustainable Lego block. And it's the idea of, of course, we want to dissuade the people who think, well, the only solution is airdrop bamboo trees, you know, and or do geo-engineering, you know. No, no, no, no. But we also, at the other extreme, we don't want to take the people who say, well, look, I can lower the carbon and increase the community of this community here with this combined transportation food, whatever plan. You say, okay, okay, would that be a sustainable Lego block? In other words, would whatever gains it gets be resilient enough to act as a floor from which you could build further? That it's a different kind of question. You see, it's not, it's not, is it the thing in the top of the drawdown list? No, it's not. No, we, the people who are, who spend a lot of time thinking about this, we want to go for the top of the drawdown list or the big changes while understanding that politically, you know, you can't always do that. So we want to do what's strategically significant, what's politically possible, and maybe what, if you can't, you know, if you're boxed in too much by those, what would give you a sustainable Lego block an improvement in a particular region or community on some metrics that would likely create a floor that's higher than where they are now and it would allow you to potentially build up. I know that's a, it's tough to come up with those, but it's a possible way to think about it. Doug, then me. Okay, one of the problems that we're struggling with is very concrete. And that is we've got to cut CO2, which means we've got to stop distributing the fossil fuels. And the problem is that any cut in the use of fossil fuels will lead to some dis, some unemployment, some slowing down of corporate activity. It means unemployment. It means mortgages not paid. It means banks failing. There's a cascading series of events that follow from actually cutting CO2. And yet we've got to do it. And nobody knows how to do that. There's no plan, and that's a challenge. As to what are the first steps to actually cutting fossil fuel use? So a couple of things, and I'll pass it to you, Allison. One, the three words I've heard kill more good ideas are it won't scale. And we have this sort of engineering mentality that we need to find the perfect answer, the best practices, whatever it might be, and then merely implement that with everybody. And then that'll be great. And we need a proof of scale in order to begin implementing kind of anything. And I think that that's sort of a flawed argument for how to move forward in the world. It could be that what scales is a whole bunch of different movements, all of which have shared goals and don't neutralize or counteract each other and in fact move us into some sort of new sets of economies that are not so tightly coupled that they can be taken down by John Paulson and Goldman Sachs and a couple other actors like the global financial crisis of 2008. Also, capitalism and the neoliberal flavor of it have so efficiently taken over our brains that we've forgotten that humans used to be like alive in the world really well. And if you go and read about pre-colonial Australia in North and South America, Charles Mann, the books 1491 and 1493, the book Dark Amu and the greatest estate about Australia, like humans were managing land masses without ownership of separate plots and they were thriving on the land masses. They were doing just fine. And the whole country, each of those continents was a forest orchard. It was basically like what we're trying to do now with agroforestry, an exotic form of agriculture to do in little plots of land was in fact happening across the land and like one method of economic distribution in the Northeastern tribes of America. Basically, the surplus of the hunter the gatherer was kept in longhouses and the elder women of the tribe allocated it to whoever whatever families needed it. And that's a method of allocation. And there's many others, but we've forgotten them all because we think everything has to have a price. And the last thing I'll say is I wrote capitalism as a cuckoo by which I don't mean capitalism is cuckoo which is a statement I might agree with but cuckoos do not raise their own young. Cuckoos are brood parasites. Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests and the first instinct of a cuckoo chick is to push everything else out of the nest. So a cuckoo chick is born and whatever else is in the nest it backs up to it, shoves it out. If it's another egg on the ground, if it's a live chick on the ground and then the robins come back and say, hey, Bobby's kind of big, but there we go and start feeding the cuckoo and raise the cuckoo. Capitalism cannot coexist happily with other economic systems that take people out of the workforce, that take land out of the ability to buy and sell it, all those kinds of things. And as a result, it's kind of eaten our brains. We're not able to think about alternatives. There's no room, there's no oxygen in the room for alternatives and we're busy thinking if something won't scale that it's impossible and that is a flaw in the conversation. So trying to figure out how to make multiple things flourish while figuring out how to move forward and then we have conversations like big croissants, degrowth. We must stop the entire petroleum economy and stop all trucks from moving tomorrow and all that are all negatives and those don't work because everybody's like, well, that seems impossible because we can't just stop all activity and we haven't figured out how to pick up new activity and in the meantime, we have climate disaster and in the meantime, we have small experiments with things like basic income which would in fact keep people going which are just a band-aid over the longer problem but we're not even paying attention to those. Most of the basic income experiments are either being shut down or being undermined in some way. So we don't have like consistent proof that even that's going to work well. Although you could argue that the relief packages during COVID have been a form of basic income and that they will be used as proof on a very large scale that, hey, look, this actually sort of worked. Alison and then Gil. Sorry, Gil has his hand up so I want to see it to you again, Gil. Oh, stop it, Alison. Go ahead. Okay, but if I start going, pop in, okay, because it's really fun conversation for me. This is juicy stuff and I find that there are, there's still three things. So I want to come back to those three things which you referred to, Jerry. And I think I read your piece or seen another one using the cuckoo analogy and I like it. One is cultivating economic ecosystems. Two is economic healing, economic trauma. And three is economic drawdown. And I think that we can focus on, what does it mean to cultivate economic ecosystems as we start seeing that that is, what are the basic functions of what we want to achieve here? And it's really fun to start thinking about that. That's exciting already. Everybody's got these projects. Drawdown is filled with exciting ideas that are so inspiring and the mystery is, why aren't those scaling? And it's not much of a mystery. It's really the forces of how money moves and where it moves and why. And it's habitual movement. And so I think that the next fun juicy part is when, especially the young people are coming up with designs within their community that they'd like to see. Usually we have a good idea and oftentimes the barrier tends to be some kind of money bottleneck, right? Well, I'd really like to do this amazing project that, how are we going to get the money? And so we have two bottlenecks there that are kind of happening with one another and it has to do with well understanding how does money work and what is the money for? We have a bottleneck. There's not a lot that's circulating that we have access to. And we have this huge amount that's kind of pouring other places. So on one hand we get to create our own money to overcome that bottleneck. And then on the other hand, we get to attract and draw down and sequester some of that money. That's really fundamentally, we have people who are just wanting to park their excess capital somewhere, right? Or just need to park it somewhere. And we are getting more and more desperate to find safe places to put our money to secure a future. And that's a, we really can do a lot I think to assure people who are having this problem. I don't happen to have that problem unfortunately or maybe that's a lucky thing. I don't have to worry about that. But where do we, how do we make that argument? And for myself, one of the approaches that I'm trying to take right now is in investing in money, and which is one of the reasons why I found the phone, I spoke with Mark about that yesterday. Huh? I wonder Mark. Company. Investing in what? I didn't hear the last word. Land. Investing in land. And land. Yeah. Sorry. Gail, I probably should have just seated that to you. No, no, no. This is good. Instead of seating it to me, you've seated it for me. So. Oh, thank you. Investing in land, you and Bill Gates and China. Oh, see, we have to talk about that too. Yes. We all have a lot to talk about here. Two things. This is, I mean, this is so rich and hard to keep track of all the threads here, but two things. One is, I'm enjoying, Doug, I'm enjoying sparring with you. We agree on so much. It's fun to find little disagreements to tussle over. Reducing carbon emissions is not the only thing that we have to do. It's one of the main things we have to do and the others that we have to enhance the ability of the soil sponge to absorb and hold carbon and absorb and hold water. That's one example of many, not negative, but positive things that we need to do. Alice has talked about a bunch of them. Drawdown actually talks about a bunch of them. Many of the drawdown activities are stopped doing this, but a lot of them are generate this. And surprisingly, one of the most potent carbon impacts in their original model, I don't know what it's like in the revise, was the educational status of women around the world as a cascading trigger for a different kind of economic development that would draw down carbon. So it's a very, you know, it's a much more diverse territory than just stop fossil fuels over clearly that industry is dead man walking or needs to be. The other thing on the business scale, I popped this in the chat, but it may have flipped by when we talk about scale, we tend to talk about the Silicon Valley hockey stick model of scale, you know, endless exponential growth, although that doesn't live in the living world. We see sigmoids, not exponentials in the living world. But there's another kind of scale, which I think is the reason for OGM. I think is why I'm here is the horizontal, what I call the horizontal scale of the federated small. How do we do lots of small stuff across the planet and link it together in horizontal, not dominant hierarchy kind of models to enable them to be effective and to compete effectively with the massive scale of the big dogs. And is that a workout model? Probably not, but it's an emergent model. It smells to me like there's something very real and powerful there. It seems to me that a lot of what OGM is up to is about that in various ways, about how to enrich and increase the capability of not just decentralized, but federated or somehow collaboratively coordinated inter-twingled independent small stuff. Flotillas of entities, you could say. Say it again. Flotillas of entities, you could call them perhaps. You could perhaps, maybe. I don't know, or swarms. Yeah. And, you know, it seems to me that this is the sort of thing, it's not a workout model, and it will not be until it wins. And you won't know that it's winning until it wins. And you won't see it coming, which is maybe an advantage as well as a disadvantage. You know, the Chile experiments under Allende and Nicaragua under the side of the Nistas, now there's got stomped. You know, if there's an emergent model that looks powerful, it gets stomped. If it's an emergent model that's invisible, it's harder to stop. And anyway, you know, and we move into the realm of ministry for the future and other kind of speculative fiction explorations of this. But we're, we're, how to say this, we are arguably moving into a situation of such instability globally that big changes can happen quickly. That's not necessarily a good thing. Jeremy, I'm gonna wear it your fingers. You are, you are, but I'm happy. Like, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. So, you know, how do we, how do we nurture these diverse emergent models so that in a way that increases their potential to suddenly grow in scale and impact when the destabilizing conditions permit that? Typically what happens in that story is that a strong man comes in and says, okay, I'm gonna fix everything now. You all calm down. Hopefully something else. Or many something else that can happen in that situation. So, Doug, I thank you back to you because I've been feeling pretty dark this week with the, you know, with the IPCC report coming out and other things, dark but not, not hopeless, dark and determined. But having this conversation brings me back to the richness of this moment and, you know, maybe long odds, but very real possibilities of something else emerging. And I'll stop. Thanks, Gil. And thanks everyone. This has been a really rich conversation and I want to sort of gently bring us back to the check-in round because we've done only a few. I did want to add one thing to the conversation that just came up from what you were saying, Gil, which is I just wrote in the matter most chat that tight coupling makes large scale failures more possible or probable. And the case study for me is Argentina. I grew up partly in Argentina and for Argentines, like really they're more arrogant than your average South American or human. But they did nothing to deserve the economic shithole that they're in right now. And part of the problem was in the 90s and 80s, they were the poster child of the IMF and the World Bank. They privatized everything, sold everything off. Everybody's bank accounts around the world were kind of pickpocketed by the global financial crisis of 2008, 2009. And because everything is coupled to the dollar in the world economy is sort of linked globally, they're, they have no assets. There's, there's, you know, what all they can do is like try to renationalize the petroleum company, YPF, EPF or whatever else. And then it's like, oh my God, they nationalized, but, you know, they're done. They got rid of everything and there's nothing left in the country to basically bootstrap with. So, so it's chaos. And decoupling the ability to sort of intentionally buffer and create separate currency systems that aren't all linked together so that when somebody figures out how to crack the code on, you know, disturbing the currency system, everybody suffers. I think that's really important in our future. And then we may have a future with many different kinds of regimes that are overlapping and that have intersections and exchanges of value in lots of different ways and currencies. I don't know. And I would not be afraid of that future. Like to me, it's not is Bitcoin going to own the world? And then we transfer the entire economy from the dollar to the Bitcoin. To me, it's like, what, what variety of rich flavors can we actually move toward? Sure. You said that we're, you said the term loosely coupled systems. Yeah. Very important one for us to just kind of put a pin in. And thanks for sharing that article in the chat. I haven't seen it. Fabulous. Let's go to Paul, Shimon and Tony. This is all very interesting because it's been a very productive morning just listening here because I went into this meeting pretty much in Limbo and not thinking I was going to say anything. It's been hot here in Northern California, usually over like 105 almost every single day. So we spend most of our time inside. We're just retired. So we don't have teaching and it's real easy just to kind of float off into a cloud. And the last few days it's gotten smoky so we're inside even more. So I just been sort of in my own mind and right now I'm lying in bed. I'm not camping. I'm lying sideways on my bed so I keep moving my computer back and forth. But as I've been listening to this conversation it turns out that what I've been thinking about is what you've all been thinking about too. And so one of the things I've been thinking about is this whole profit driven economy. That's how I'm kind of thinking about where most people you get your money by working for some organization that somehow has to create a profit somewhere to be able to make the money to pay salaries. And we're all tied into this need for a profit and almost everything that the world needs right now does not generate a profit in an economic sense. It's work that, you know, it's primordial work. It's the work of beaver and earthworm and salmon and you can't justify it economically. And so I just see this situation where the systems that we have for making change are never going to, are always going to be behind the curve. They're going to do too little, too late. And that just seemed like a lot of the conversation I hear out in the world not here, but out in the world, it's just high in the sky. It's too demeaning, but it's just not grappling with the reality of like the paradise fire that happened here two years ago. And suddenly you have 10 or 20,000 people homeless and where do you find a space? And they all moved down to Chico and after about a year people who had it by our insurance could kind of get back on the feet of the other five or 10,000 people slipping to what Chico would call homeless people and they're just, and now they're lost and they're despised when they had simply two years ago. So where am I going with this? And then people have been mentioning about scaling up and Elisha and I recreated Chrysalis Charter School, which is a small charter school and we keep hearing people around about, well, can you scale it up? And there's all this emphasis on scaling up and we had no desire to scale up. The whole idea is a small school, that's the essential part about it. And to scale up means, okay, you're gonna take this model and impose it on other places. I mean, I guess scaling up for us would be we're a teacher powered school or one of the vancards of that and the idea of teacher powered schools, the teachers decide what they're gonna, how the school is gonna run. So if you wanna scale that up, that's giving teachers the power to shape the school. And that's not really scaling up. I think that's what like Gil's talking about, it's not scaling up, it's giving this, it's fertilizing the ground around you so that other mushrooms can grow. So there's that and I'll stop there. Paul, thank you. Thank you for your lovely check in. Would you mind if somebody borrowed those ideas from your school and do you do anything to make the ideas easier to borrow and adapt to other situations? Yeah, there's a teacher powered school consortium out there and we didn't know about the phrase teacher powered school, we used the phrase teacher autonomy and we just got sent a survey about five or 10 years ago looking for teacher powered schools and we responded and they go, wow, you are about the most far out school in the country that you have every single autonomy that we imagine that they came and interviewed us and Alicia's been ambassador with them and so there is that teacher powered school movement and we definitely have been part of that. Well, thank you and a friend of many of ours, Arthur Brock, long ago was the headmaster of the Manhattan Democratic Free School and then separately had invented a bunch of advanced sort of learning environment stuff and has put an open source design for agile learning centers, ALCs, I think. I'll find the link. This is so weird that you mentioned Art Brock, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then he's in my world too. I can't figure out the guy, he's all over the place and he just arranged for me to be interviewed by another friend of his, Katie Teague and that's on YouTube now but it's just, he hit people like Art and you go, man, this world is really, the mycelia that are working in this world are really fantastic. It is, but partly Art is the reason I know you, Paul, is that years ago Art is the one who sent me the video to your Upwards Viral conversation over the hillsides of Central California. So I think there's lots of finding mycelial high-fay here and Arthur is, I think, a genius and is also busy trying to do Holochain and a bunch of other initiatives in this world but I think making good ideas more shareable and more adaptable and appropriable, I think is super important in these scripts, really, really vitally, centrally important. So Pete, when you're doing emergent event sense making, a piece of me is listening to that going how do we watch an emerging event and connect it to wisdom from what people have learned about pandemics and vaccines, what people have learned about temporary shelter for the Paradise Fire, what people have learned, like there's a whole bunch of stuff that if we told better stories and made the information easier to find and use, just easier to find and use, dammit, we could solve a whole lot of problems by letting people go figure it out on their own on the ground. They just haven't heard these stories and they don't know what to do and they're being told that FEMA's going to come in and solve everything but it doesn't. They're being told that they now have no life savings and they're, you know, good luck to you because we have a bad social, whatever, but I think that the replicability and adaptability of stories is hugely important. Sorry for the longer rift that I intended there. Let's go Shimon Tony Michael. Yeah, hi. This has been a fascinating conversation. It's like hard for me to sort of hold back as many of the questions and very meaningful discussions are areas that I'm actually working on. So to Doug's point about the government and the media, I actually have been working on for quite a while on the opioid epidemic, which touches on what Allison was talking about in terms of despair. Now, in terms of the opioid epidemic and government and also COVID, it's very intriguing to think about how some of the information initially, and it goes back to January 17th of last year from CDC, got communicated through the media and how it got co-opted. So one of the projects that I'm working on and actually sort of diverted my interest in the opioid epidemic was on a citizen's commission for COVID-19, and there I actually examined the role of the media, thinking about how to incorporate Wikipedia, how to think about C-SPAN. There's a lot of initiatives going on about public media, about local media, and various other topics. If anyone is interested in that aspect about media and COVID-19 and forums associated with misinformation, that's really important piece. I have gotten back to the opioid epidemic because as Allison was talking about, I think that one of the major crises as we face is a crisis of meeting right now, and I was very intrigued to hear or use the term salutogenesis. Salutogenesis is actually a term that I actually, my mentor in medical school coined, and I'm actually in the process of formulating and proposing a Center for Salutogenesis, which I'm trying to get into my medical school. I just actually presented at the international conference on salutogenesis about the opioid epidemic, diseases of despair, post-COVID, essentially economic challenges, and salutogenic approach. So I have a whole lot of information about strategies to approach aspects of despair and things of that kind. Tomorrow or today, actually, there's going to be a probably resolution of the Purdue-Sackler opiate trajectory of the last 20 years. I personally think, and there's a number of others who have written about it, that the Sacklers have been pretty much scapegoated, not that they were not responsible, but this is to the point of capitalism, neoliberalism. I think that by understanding the process from like 1995 all the way to now, we have a much better case understanding of how neoliberalism has really contributed to where we are today with the opiate crisis of like 500,000, 600,000 people dead, but more importantly, people suffering from unemployment and marginalization and alienation. And in my take on it and some other people that are writing about it, it's certainly a way to divert attention from what neoliberalism has done and by, in my opinion, by sort of like opening up as a case and looking at who can we understand all the stakeholder within this ecosystem and how to approach them, I think is really crucial. And I think it does have a salutogenic understanding. I'm actually very interested in education. I think a very important antidote to what we're dealing with is give kids dignity and purpose and the way to do it is getting them at different stages of development to understand how they fit into their environment. Whether it's in their home, their locality, their state or whatever, and also giving them tools to one more thing, one last thing. My efforts are directed to 2026, which is going to be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And that is certainly something to hopefully allow us to reexamine where we are as citizens. And I'm hoping through some of these activities of citizen commissions, there's a whole concept of sortition, case presentation. I think we can really make a meaningful impact on where we are as citizens. So I'm beyond liberalism, conservatism, I'm much more into citizenism. What does that mean to be a citizen? And actually, that's what my project is called and anyone is interested in that, I can share a link with you on that. Shimon, thank you very much. I love how all these threads fit together. Let's go, Tony, Michael, Mark. Hi, my project is to, well, a ways back, Derek Cabrera and his wife, Laura, and Gerald Midgley and Benjamin Taylor and some others came and did a presentation. It was, they said an astounding, I thought it was a very astounding fact that though unified approach to how to actually do hands-on do systems thinking has ever been articulated. And I'm saying, well, gee, it was all 400-page books I looked at and yet when it gets right down to it, those books talk about things about systems thinking, but they're not prescripted, they're not talking about how to actually do systems thinking. Big difference, I've worked in aerospace, I got hands-on experience actually doing it. So I came, I was gonna do it for a local school around here as a STEM day, but that got canceled due to COVID. But anyways, the whole concept of using videos, the hypothetical Carol's candy store, two-person store, Carol makes candy, she inputs this, she outputs that. Here's how we construct the model and everything else like that. It could be very, it's relatively easy to do. And I've done that primarily. I figured a STEM audience, a lot of schools, STEM is a big, huge thing here in Ohio. I don't know if people are familiar with it, but it's a big, big application. And there's also, there's a variety of products that could stem from this basic approach of using videos with dynamic pointers and stuff like that to explain certain things that can't be done as static pitchers. So I guess that's what I got. I'm in the process of getting a R&D grant. So I've made through the initial phases of getting R&D money for it. That's all. Thanks, Tony. Just a small side thing, there's an interesting, a guy named Sanky created a way of modeling the economy years ago as flows of water. It's called a Sanky diagram. And that's called S-A-N-K-E-Y. S-A-N-K-E-Y, thank you. S is in SAM. We will put links to it in the chats since we're busy like multi-posting and multi-chats right now. Allison, go ahead. Another thing that I threw into the chat, so I'll go ahead and just restate it in case it was missed, because there's so many need alignments here. When it comes to systems thinking, a video and pointing is one way. I do think that systems are complex and are really described by relationships. That's the space in between. And the flows of an economic system and understanding the flows is one of the best ways to understand systems thinking, but also what is constructive about that relationship building and that system understanding and where are we going with it as we're practicing. And so I do feel like I'm blessed to be able to be in a classroom with students for 36 weeks. Right? And so if there's R&D that you're getting funding for for teaching systems thinking, I would really welcome talking about that as far as understanding researching and designing how we impact our mental health perspectives in those systems, in the understanding of systems and how we can align those two and how we are part of natural systems ourselves. So there's something that I call nature attention deficit disorder. And I was really delighted to see that there is a group, I think it's out of Cornell maybe, that is focusing on peace attention deficit disorder. And I thought that was just really exciting that this is becoming a focus that we're looking at peace is not just the absence of violence. I guess there's continues to be a lot to say, but at what point, as all of us are doing different things, would we like to harness some of our energies towards seeing a beneficial impact by training teachers to understand how to incorporate the wisdom or go through nature. So I'm working with a Spanish speaking community. I'm really blessed to have Spanish skills. It's so much fun and it's so nice to be able to speak directly to the hearts and minds of folks over the radio about the importance of alternative economics and provide hope. And I got a bunch of phone calls saying, talking about mental health issues and get to do a course with some folks over here. I'm in Santa Rosa area and work on creating economic ecosystems as communities and how we build those out and how that feels like it's healing on some of the deepest levels of our thinking. And then what we result is a little bit more of an experience of prosperity because that social isolation is crazy making, really crazy making. And our scarcity limits our thinking and our bandwidth. And so we, like you were kind of saying, it takes the air out of the room, right? And you can't really think through this. Anyway, I would, I think that there's a lot, a lot of potential here to support what it is that we're talking about and being able to develop models through the churches, through the schools, having economic gains that can teach systems thinking and flows and come up with the alternatives simultaneously. Plus. Thanks, Allison. I think, Michael, you might get the last check in the day, I just realized what the time is. So my apologies, but jump on in. I'll make it very quick then. So maybe somebody else could squeeze in. I'm just really, really enjoying. This is one of those conversations where I'm just glad to be here and be listening, particularly to people who are so much smarter than I am on so many subjects. So I'll let you guys talk. Mark, would you like to jump in? I'm sorry, I missed the beginning and I'm so happy that Allison showed up this morning. No, I don't have anything to say. I'm just like, I'm happy to see all these beautiful faces here. The conversation has been steering in the right direction. Awesome. How about Bentley then? I've probably talked a lot. Let's have Benz go first. He doesn't pick up or if he doesn't pop on, I can certainly plug all about it again. Awesome. Vincent, are you there? Paging Vincent, please pick up a white courtesy telephone. Hello, this is the operator connecting you to Vincent. Yes. I don't know if I could summarize in a minute, but we just created a discord for the kind of catalysts, commons is the name. And I just wanted to share a kind of pattern with that is that the analogy that I'm using is, so I feel like the collective sense commons is like a really rich, like complex with like loads of different rooms. It's like a giant building. And so Trove had like one kind of small room where we were chatting in the collective sense commons. And I was saying, yeah, I feel like when you're like a teenager and you're like being super loud in your bedroom and you're like, oh, well, the walls are really thin. I think I need to like move out. So I think this like pattern of like, okay, I think we've like outgrown this room need to create another space. But I think we should like leave our childhood room there with our stuff. And we should come back and visit all the time. And I think all of us having like different channels that have like rooms that connect to each other's communities seems like a really cool pattern. So for example, within the catalyst discord, I'm hoping to have rooms for whatever groups are on Trove that want to basically boost into that. And then if you go into that discord, then they might have rooms for all the different groups that they're connected to. And so it's a way to kind of like connect across these different platforms so we don't have total silos. And I think this was mentioned by someone in the building OGM call yesterday that I listened to on YouTube. So yeah, I'm going to post a link in the chat and in the collective sense commons too, if anyone wants to join. Sounds great. Vincent, thank you. And somehow miraculously, we actually, I think everybody had a chance to check in. Any closing thoughts by anyone before we wrap this call? It's been a great call for me too. Thank you. I have one question. Wait, wait, wait, wait. One question only because we focus on words a lot. Is there another word that could be substituted for neoliberalism? Because yeah, I just want to know if there's, if there's possibly another word, I just I'm going to recommend that for a zillion different reasons that I don't want to explain. All right, anybody? Some people call it late capitalism. I think that's a much better idea. Crap. Capitalism. Wait, what did you say? Crap. Capitalism. That may not work as well. It's also. They say crapitalism too, yeah. Crapitalism is also related a lot to globalization. Libertarianism? That's a piece of it. Yeah, but it's not all libertarian. If it could be something that's not attached to something else, that would be good. Everything is attached to everything. No, but I mean, you hear libertarianism and you're thinking of a person. If it could not be attached in that way, like a little bit more. It's a lot attached in some way. People won't understand what you're saying. Well, that's a positive because then they don't get defensive. They attack some of their ideas that they hold tightly. You're looking for cleaner language, I think. Alison? I've just deleted the isms as much as I can from my discourse and look at it as design, system design. If we're talking about an economy, we do have the dominant economy. We could say a dominant economy. Dominant economy. And not necessarily have that be a value judgment about it being dominating, although it is. And I go the other way, Alison. I've added the ism and I'm now always writing capitalism with a hyphen. To emphasize that it's a system that fetishizes capital. Yes, nice. For everyone's amusement, this is capital. This is isms in my brain. Everything from altruism to careerism to citizenism. Simone, you're here to Clinton ism, centrism, catastrophism. And this is just A through C. You'll notice there's a scroll bar down here. Where's carnivalism? I don't know. If it's not there, I'll put it in. But you have you have cannibalism. That's good. Yeah, I've got cannibalism for sure. Garbism, golly. Please laterally connect that to capitalism. Yeah. My god, you have golly ism. Now what? It's golly ism. Yeah, yeah. That's Charles de Gaulle. Charles, it's good old Charles. People following Charles de Gaulle, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll put this link in the in the Mattermost chat. And with that, I think I'll stop the sharing. And thank you all for a great call. It's been really fun. We a minute to save the chat. Yes, the chat. Most of this most of the Zoom chat is replicated in the Mattermost chat, which you can go to for all these links. I think I don't I don't know that there's much of a link that showed up here that wasn't replicated in the Mattermost. So thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody.