Record to my cloud or yours? I guess yours on my cloud. We're in my account. So it's going to record to my cloud, which is good. We're good. You can think we're all set there. And I think Gil can make someone a co host as well. I can do that and Jerry leave your hat on. Precisely. I just want to show you guys, I just want to show you guys this place because this is the most beautiful retreat center I've ever seen. No, I'm not leaving Wi-Fi. So this is danger. But here's one of the buildings on the premises. Where are you? I'm in Baja California and El Pescadero is the nearest town. So we're an hour and a half west back up the peninsula from Los Cabos, which are two towns at the bottom called, you know, basically Cabo is two towns that are kind of twins. And we're at a place called the Modern Elder Academy run by Chip Connelly. And Chip is the guy who founded the Juarez V hotels, which grew to 52 hotels and he sold that. Then he was the chief hospitality officer for Airbnb for several years and wound up becoming like an elder mentor for them. And that kind of catalyzed him to buy a property and the design of this property is astonishing. So if you if you have a group. We've got 25 rooms here so maybe up to 50 people, but there's four different buildings. It's unbelievably well done. Yeah, just to tag on to that very briefly. The thing he learned court as the mentor at Airbnb was that the young people were mentoring him, and he learned from more from that experience than anything else and he wrote a book about that. Exactly. And the group that's here is the Silicon Guild. He's done a bunch of books very thoughtful, insightful, good stuff. Emotional equations is one of them. So the group that's here is a group that April is a member of called Silicon Guild, which is a bunch of authors of books. So it's really about writing books and that kind of thing. And I was going to say something else, but I'm forgetting. Jerry, please, please give him my best regards and tell him we were just telling that we're just talking about him yesterday. So we'll do I will do that. Enjoy. I just remember what I was going to say. So to the to your comments just a moment ago. Chip kind of started calling himself a mentor, which was like a mentor who's also an intern, because that's what he wound up doing like walking around sort of learning the business and being behaving like an intern, even as he was an elder sort of mentoring.  Have fun. Thank you. Enjoy. Bye bye. Bye. They know what. That is the question, isn't it? Yeah. I was curious about who was going to show up today without Jerry's leadership. The experimental list. Well, you know what we say in open space, whoever comes as the right people. So what, what is Chip's last name I didn't catch that Connelly Connelly, C-O-N-L-E-Y. So I have more books to read which of his books do you recommend most highly guilt. I haven't read any of them so I don't know. So I think I've read through his book about, you know, mentoring or whatever he calls that. I did. I read one of them. Which one was it? The Equations. Was it? Is that it? I've read one of them, but not personally. We always hear about emotional quotient, you know, EQ, but I've never actually seen anybody who's done rigorous assessments. I mean, it's not like IQ where they think they can actually measure something. Is there somebody who's designed a methodology to decide that somebody has more EQ than somebody else? Yes. There's, there are some assessment instruments. As a matter of fact, a small consultancy that I have an affiliation with just asked if I wanted to debrief and coach people on the results of their EQ assessment. And I looked at the EQ assessment and my mind just went, no, no, no, no. The level of technical detail that they drill down into was just, you know, insanity. It was like economic formulas. And I said, no, I don't think, I don't even think I'm going to read your assessment, let alone debrief it. You haven't taken it yourself. No. Absolutely. What are the, Stuart, what do they claim they are measuring? EQ. What's the Q me? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Well, emotional, emotional quotient EQ. I don't know what that means. Okay. So I don't know what it means. A guy by the name of Daniel Goldman, who is a psychologist and researcher at Harvard from the nineties on has written a whole bunch of books about EQ. Essentially, the five, five, five main elements of EQ. Self-knowledge and self-awareness. Sometimes those two get lumped in together, self-knowledge, self-awareness. That's kind of one. Number two, self-regulation, the ability to manage your own emotions. Number three, self-motivation. What's important to you in life and your capacity to go after it? So those are all inward facing. And then the two that are external facing or outward facing is empathy. Number four and number five is kind of social skills, ability to form teams to manage conflict, to create relationships, da, da, da, da. And that's what his articulation of emotional intelligence is. Which isn't bad. No, no, no, no, there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Matter of fact, in his own cosmology, within the last few years, and I think he's written a book about this, he's moved off of quote emotional intelligence into social intelligence, thinking that that's more important than in some ways an integration of the inward facing concepts. It's also probably easier to measure. How often do you self-assessment? Do they ask you questions?  Yeah, I'm sure they do. I just, you know, I don't know why, but I've always been kind of turned off by trying to measure the immeasurable and create little boxes that just don't, don't. Yeah. I'm with you, Stuart, and my reaction to EQ was partly that. And partly the quotient didn't tell me anything until you explained that it's about measuring emotional intelligence, which is the name of Golden's book, which I did recognize is having heard emotional quotient, which, which is an expression of the problem that you and I have with measuring these things because it's not, you know, if you're not only measure them but also make quotients of the things that you measure that you can't measure. That's a mess. Yeah. Yeah, as if, you know, as if it was a, as if it was a quote, as if it was a science, you know, you're modeling it on IQ tests, right? Yeah, you're going to make an analogy or metaphor to something that exists, you know, at least pick something that hasn't caused a great deal of harm and angst. Yeah, and to me, you know, some of these things boiled down to Oh, someone wanted to invent something so they could make more money, or have more visibility, or as an expert in a certain area, as opposed to something that's of, you know, real intrinsic value. The book is the new business card and without a book you can't go on the Stephen Colbert show. I think tests are useful though that Myers Briggs test in particular is so simple and straightforward.  It is no as no grounding in science. It's the for effect the Barnum effect. And people go you can't talk to me like that I'm in this it's like, and every time I take it I come out as an omfg. So I don't know what to say about that. I've taken it four times and gotten three different results. But I've never you want something that's grounded in you get you get this. It's just it's a language it's a box in which people can drop themselves or feel something that's really useful look at the big five. It's awesome as canoe let's use conscientiousness open as to experience neuroticism extraversion and was one other. Sorry, it's escaping me but that's, that's been normalized over 10s of 1000s of people it comes out of positive psychology. It really looks at what are the dimensions of humans that that we inhabit and I think I put a book in the chat for you it's called how emotions are made the circle I for the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. I've been reading it now for over a month it is fantastic. It will definitely challenge a lot of what you think you know about emotions like the fact that there's no such thing as an emotional fingerprint you cannot tell what someone is experiencing by looking at them or their tone of voice. There is no single emotional fingerprint anywhere. Emotions are what that's known as population thinking so variation is the norm. Somebody who's angry might smile.  And I'm now at towards the end of the book she's talking about emotions in the legal system and it's really fascinating. There have been studies that show that judges before lunch mistake their hunger for guilt and they sentence people to much harsher sentences right before lunch so you want to have your sentencing after lunch, you know, and judges so we're impartial and it's like this the neuroscience is not back that is impossible to be impartial everyone is subject to interceptive and affective experiences and this it's a myth so it's it's really and it's this is per super written but it's very, very accessible. She's talks about a lot of technical stuff in very accessible language so highly recommend that. So you just, you just triggered so many things can. And this is probably about seven, eight, nine years ago. I was at a two day training at Cal Law School, also known as both hall or previously known as both all I was teaching there as an adjunct, but they had a two or three day seminar on meditation for attorneys at over 200 attorneys there. One of the speakers was a guy by the name of Michael Zimmerman, who was the former chief judge of the Utah Supreme Court, and he got up and said, you know this notion that we're impartial from the bench.   You've got to know a little bit about where your biases lie so that you can factor those in and any kind of rulings you make including the whole notion of, of, of, what day it is and what's gone inside of you at that moment in time. Insight inventory is an instrument that I use it's very down and dirty for working with with with with other people is short and simple. And I designed an instrument for America ASTD which is now American Society for Training. It was actually 15 years ago, and it's an assessment instrument about the generative capacity of an organization. I never wanted to or had any interest in statistically validating it, or using it as a measuring tool. But when I work with groups, I will often use it just as a conversation starter to get people talking about why they, they evaluated certain phenomenon in certain ways, just to get people aware. What's going on, and how different people see different things in the organization. I think instruments are great conversation starters. They, they, they can drive you into that deeper introspective conversation. But the idea of, you know, statistical validation for all the reasons that can talked about in terms of the motions I don't think is of great value. Yeah. I think it's 45 cents. Gil, sorry to jump ahead of you. Ken's mouth was going faster than my mind was. It goes faster than mine sometimes too. So, I'd love to see that generative capacity instrument and I agree with you on on the role and value of instruments so thank you for that. Ken. Geez. You rattled off five things and referring to it as an it it it but I don't know what the reference was on that. The big five, big five personality traits. Good. I'll dig it up for you right now. Hold on a second. Is that a known thing called the big five. It is a known thing called the big five. Oh, okay. Or canoe set right canoe canoe or ocean.  So there's the there's the Wikipedia link for it. So you have openness to experience conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and eroticism. And that's the big five of what what's the heading on that is called the big five personality traits personality traits. Yeah, and this is it's a suggested tax on me for grouping personality traits developed from the 80s onward based in psychological trait theory. Is that less bullshit than Myers Briggs and everything else much more less bullshit because it's actually grounded in in scientific observation I mean we're talking about subjective stuff so we have to have some fuzziness there it's a social science not a hard science but Is it cross culturally validated. I believe it is. I'm skeptical but thank you. Take a look here. Initial model was advanced in 58 didn't really just reach research and scientists of the 80s. At least four sets of research has worked independently to reflect on the traits for decades and identified the same five factors and can it's not helpful to have you be reading from Wikipedia. All right. Thank you. Go ahead and read it yourself. Thank you for the link. The other thing on the cross cultural validation had a friend who years ago was doing cross cultural work in Bay Area hospital systems. And he talked about being in hospitals where there are people from like the 37 different nationalities. And they found that not only were affects and language and so forth difference but in in in some cultures when people would say would not this way for no. And so you can imagine the massive confusion that would result when people are trying to coordinate activities like will you do this. Right. So yeah so color me skeptical about cross cultural validation of social phenomenon. So this says that they've been. It's been you cannot tell what somebody else is thinking feeling. What's been showing up a lot in my coaching lately is the phenomenon of of people making assessments of other people's assessments of them. And it gets very it's turtles all the way down messy. But we assume we know what's going on. Last thing I want to say about this is that my mentor Brian Franklin used to say that the most powerful person in any room is the person who's most emotionally flexible. And I don't have a mental validation for that but it struck me is very powerful. That's it. I would agree with that last statement completely Gil. No fixed boundaries. In other words just kind of the ability to be present to what someone else is saying or feeling. Without levels of fixed boundaries. And it starts to get into the metaphysics of stuff. And it was a real big learning, moving from being a practicing attorney to to a mediator to be able to not advocate for something, but just to be a clear open presence for what was going on in front of you. There's directly related to that. In IBM, we did executive training and one of the things that we did was the Herman brain dominance index test, which is I think a much more effective way of assessing your intellectual and emotional strengths than Myers Briggs. And IBM had been using it for 30 years. So they had like half a million people who had taken this test and a lot of very important correlations. And I think I've mentioned to the group of the some of you that that there were four categories and there was a real predominance with an IBM for yellow blue people, creative analytic Swedish. The green were the spreadsheet people and the red were the emotional people who could read emotions. They finished my results. They told me five jobs that I'd be particularly well suited for. And at the age of 45 I had already had four of those jobs. It was hysterical. But what do you think the typical CEO profile is for emotion, analytic, creative and structural. Say that again. I don't know what before that CEO CEO. Okay, they've done say the four again. Structural emotional. Analytical creative for emotion. The trick question. Yeah, I wouldn't be there week they're mediocre in all four. So the point was that they knew a little bit about how different people think, but they also understood very well that other people are much better at all four of these attributes. As you'll said, they were flexible enough to listen and learn, and yet informed enough that they could understand what they were being told.   But a CEO who's a four. I mean at least they have a little understanding of how that works. Right, my late wife used to used to bust me all the time for the organization of my sock draw Mike. I just had a share. At least my smallest problem. I can't see you've been waiting. So, can you hear me. We can. Okay, good. Have we wandered into an agenda. I lost that have we wondered where I think we've wandered into an agenda I think we have spent 25 minutes on the first topic on the agenda we're waiting for a second one. I would like to hear from pie if she's got a topic to, to dive into two. I mean there's, there's so much going on right now. But if you have an idea, forward Doug. I'm going to protect it a little bit. She's from Malaysia. One of my favorite people at Carnegie Elena nor is from Malaysia as well. She's in our Asia. So she could be a state or not. And I'm going to Malaysia in in October so I just turned down a speaking gig in Malaysia in October. Oh actually no September, September. It's not in the main part of Malaysia though it's in Sarah walk it's on the island. Back to you Doug I'm sorry I'm distracting. So that's, I just wanted to raise the question whether we've got ourselves an early lockdown agenda. Thank you. Like any agenda for this group works out this far. Doug I don't know what it is but your audio is really crumbly compared to how it usually is. Is that better. Yep. Much better. Okay, I've got to get rid of my earphones. Yeah, so I was saying that have we wandered into an agenda we don't really want to be in. But with this group maybe any agenda works. Yep. We're waiting for agenda item to. I could throw out a couple. But, well I've got one. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to go back to the agenda item. But might not be might not be popular. And that is put it this way with the end of the world coming. What are we going to do? We have an opportunity to create a culture around this event. Should I wait till Ken asks, what do you mean we or should I. Whose world exactly is that exactly. That reminds me of the, of the old joke. Does anybody remember the old joke about the Lone Ranger. Yeah. What do you mean. We white boy. What do you mean we. He was savvy. When he was talking about the NATO meeting of jokes. Did you hear the joke that Zelensky told. When he was. I'm trying to remember where he was. It was one. It wasn't at the NATO meeting. It was just before he left for. And he told the story of. Two old Jews in Odessa were talking. And one of them said to the other. Did you hear that Russia attacked NATO. And the guy goes, yeah, what happened. And he said, well, 70 million Russian soldiers dead or injured. Thousands of tanks and vehicles burned up. It's a total disaster. And then the guy goes, well, what, what about NATO. And the first guy says, well, well, they haven't shown up. I mean, I knew that that guy was one of the top five leaders of the 21st century. The multiple layers in that joke are stunning. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can watch it. I mean, it's, it's, it's in translation, but it's, it's a great joke. Peter, Peter Zion, who is a geopolitical analyst who I follow a lot. He says that the, that the characteristic military of strategy of Russia for hundreds of years has been to throw bodies into the breach. Yeah. All the policy when they leave or, you know, if they have to withdraw scorched earth. I don't know about. I'm very depressed about the global warming climate change news. Partly because I've been reading it for 35 years. But to see Putin doing what he's doing. And to see the power. Of having. You know, $500 billion at your disposal. It's horrifying. And it's not just, it's not just, you know, he's not a unique. Example, we've got North Korea. Which is siphoning off half a trillion dollars and money through cyber crime. Actually, no, that's wrong. It's, it's like a billion. That's only about a billion, but still you can build nuclear weapons with a few billion dollars. And we've got the Saudis able to buy whatever they want. They're trying to buy half of the sport professional sports teams here in Washington. Watch the, the CAD, what is it called? It's like the war for football. It's on Apple TV. It's a four part, brilliant documentary series about the Super League. Oh, which speaks to that question very much. So like, in which, which channel was it on? Apple TV, it's called Super League, the war for football. I believe there's a title of it. It's brilliantly made. I don't know how they managed to pull it off in the midst of this global intrigue. But you know, as you talk about Putin and Korea and Saudis, I also think about Musk and Bezos and, you know, very, very, very wealthy people who can do whatever they want and Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg who think they are smarter than they are. But they're going to have a cage match. So it's all cool, man, because you know, that's going to decide who's the best, right? That goes back to Doug's question. How do you get a focus on the global community when these guys can make these decisions? And it's, it really is. It's, it's, it's, it's so scary. Yeah. And that, you know, from reality and Musk in particular, my theory is he's doing some kind of drugs. Or he is some kind of drug. He's a leader.   And I think, I think that there are, there are, you know, all of these folks are driven by, driven by ego, weak ego at some level, that they're trying to prove their dominance in the world, especially Putin. And, and, and we're just blowing the place up. You know, so where I'm coming to is that now we've got to destroy, or we will destroy this beautiful planet in some ways. And the species that currently exists. And the, the, the, the hope or vision for the future is what we create in the future. There is a level of huge, huge calamity, because all of these things are just pointing in the direction of destruction, destruction, destruction, destruction. And everybody, everybody is acting out of their own quote self interest. And, you know, and I realize that there are, there are islands of sanity that are percolating in so many places, without a huge level of coordination. But I don't know that we're going to actually kind of get a critical mass of that bubbling up before things just, you know, kind of fall apart in the way that we can't even predict right now. I don't know, that's, that's some of my current, my own current thinking for whatever it's worth. Doug, Doug asked a different question than how do we get to a world that works? He asked the question, how do we deal with the world that's coming apart? But to paraphrase you, Doug. And Mike brought something up that I'd actually like to talk about, which is, this group tends to be very serious and very cognitively focused. And Mike said, I'm really depressed by the news. And I'd like to talk about how people are feeling about what's going on with the planet heating up and what, and with all these things falling apart, because I think that often gets shunned. But let's not talk about our feelings. Let's talk about focus on the results and what we can achieve and what's our opportunity. And it's like, you know, it's right now, I'm incredibly distraught, you know, looking at what's happening, how fast things are moving, how quickly things are heating up, the storms, the droughts, the fires, all that stuff I listed the other day. Where do we go to talk about this? OGM is not a place we've traditionally talked about that we tend to go, well, let's analyze this. And, you know, it'd be just nice to hear what other people are feeling right now. I feel because like, like Mike, I've been watching this for over 35 years, right? This is not news to me. But the fact that it has suddenly gone up an order of magnitude or maybe three or four years of magnitude, it's terrifying. I have existential angst and dread in my life, very present. I don't have a lot of people to talk about that with. So if that's something people on this call be interested in, I'm right there. If not, I understand it's a very hard thing to talk about. So just put that out. There are two of us, three of us, it looks like. I look at it. Four. Four. I look at it. Five and one abstention. There is the fact that I see a lot of it through my daughter who's 26. And just to see the assumptions that she's making about the future and to hear the reports from what her friends are saying. I mean, she's very well educated on these issues. And it's, no one's offering her some way out. I mean, there's all these tokenist things you can do, right? Bring your own bag to the grocery store, right? But that doesn't seem to get at the problem that the amount of ice around the Antarctic region is smaller than it's been in a very long time. And Greenland is melting faster than it's melted in years. But I see this in the politics. And I was going to actually try to narrow this down to a topic that I've been thinking about. And it ties together the, how do we deal with the crises that are piling up? And how do we get people to look to the future in a more coherent way? And it's weird that I'm going to ask this question. But the United Nations is preparing for the summit for the future in 1994. And they are seriously inviting comments on what the UN could be or should be. And I'm thinking of writing a three page thought piece on how the United Nations has to completely rebrand itself. And so rather than United Nations, which emphasize the organizations that are responsible for a lot of the bad policies and corruption and concentration of wealth, we rename it. Either it becomes UP, United People, or PU, People United. Somehow you just lay it out there and say, this is about a global organization that coordinates and supports rather than talks all the time and attempts to impose global solutions on people through their governments. And then there's probably four or five kind of radical policy proposals that go with that. One of them is unfettered access to encrypted internet. Another is more transparency so we can get rid of some of the corruption. There could be some core principles of this new idea. That somehow if we could take this community of six people and turn it into a global community of six billion people and unleash the potential of all that talent and time, that would be quite an energizing concept, particularly if it allowed small groups to organize and tackle global problems on a local level. I can write the speech. You can write this incredible speech, but you have to have somebody who can deliver it with credibility and consistency. And you have to take on the fact that there are all these governments who like having power. But anyway, that's Mike Nelson's thought and if maybe I'll just write the piece and throw it to all of you and you can tell me why I'm completely delusional. But I like United People because it's up. Yeah. No, write the piece, Mike, but write it fast because you said the Summit for the Futures in the US, you'd have to really accelerate your writing to break the Lightspeed Barrier. Yeah. Are you P not P you for obvious reasons? So at least in this culture. We have to check and see how it sounds in French and Spanish and Chinese. Exactly, all that stuff. P you. Write it and then figure out who's the person to deliver it. That was a real quick intervention I think. Okay. Because I want to respond to Ken, but go ahead Doug. Okay. The idea that there is a solution. I've given up on. But if you go to a funeral, there's the opportunity for great orations. Maybe that's where we are. And we've got to celebrate what this party has been in a way that's meaningful to all the participants. It's a different task than try and engineer our way out of this. And it's a different task. And it's a different task. Which, by the way, I think is impossible because. CO2 is going to continue to rise. Temperatures are going to continue to rise. And we have no procedure for stopping. So we're moving towards. A word that I heard this week for the first time. The Venusification of Earth. Venusification. Oh, yeah. And that we're going to dry up and eat up. And that's going to be it. So what about funeral orations? Paracletes and Athens. That would be a powerful. That would be a powerful op-ed. Over to you, Gal. Once again, too many things flying by to respond cogently, but I guess the, the general point is to pick up on the question of the existential dread. I guess Ken is maybe how you put it. I've been finding. So I'm sharing it. I've been, I've been a congenital optimist most of my life, but I'm always a glass half full. What's the possibility in this mess kind of person. And. And as I watch events now, I feel myself. Much more shaken often. Both with the police, with the, with the, you know, unraveling of democracy, such as it's been on the one hand. And the pace of the climate breakdown on the other hand. And I've known for decades that this was coming, but the, what feels like an accelerating pace of breakdown in the last year or so is kind of staggering.  And some people are saying, don't talk about it. And Florida. Fireman's fund just became the fourth insurance company to exit the floor of the market. And the DeSantis response is, oh, there they are being woke. I've got a call. I've got a doctor call. I got to take, I'll continue later. Sorry guys. Carry on. Yeah. Okay. So I'll, I'll, I'll pick up on that. And I too have been following for 35, 40 years, both in an organizational context and in a climate context. And I think I had the good fortune 30 years ago. To all of a sudden step into Buddhist thinking and Buddhist philosophy. Just a little, little brief story. I'm staying in the Marriott hotel in Atlanta. And I just, this is in 1999, around 1995. And I decided to look in the night table draw. Expecting to see the book of Mormon given the Marriott family. And the book of Mormon was there. But in addition was the book of Buddha. It was all about Buddhist philosophy. And I said, well, this is interesting. I wonder who left this book here. And as I'm walking in the hall in the hotel, I've seen that there's a stack of the book of Buddha on the chambermaid's cart. So I felt a license to take it. And I have been in and out of, and especially over the last eight years, you know, deeply entrenched in, in, in, in Buddhist thinking, the work of, you know, Chogan, Chogan, Trump and the Shambhala warriors trying to preserve humanity. But the whole cosmology has made me in some ways, you know, in it, but not of it. And I've gotten to the point where I'm just observing the craziness that's going on in politics and in climate and in world government and in war.  So how am I feeling about that? There's a, there's a sadness.  And though we thought we were in a flowering, you know, this will be lovely going forward. We seem to have cooked the golden goose. And maybe it is time for a funeral and a saying goodbye. And who knows what, what, what would emerge out of that. You know, Mike, I love your thoughts about what I call reimagining America. You know, it was an ideal created, you know, way back when, but it needs to be updated because that world no longer exists.  And this is the pronouncements of the law of the land.  It's, it's insanity. Yeah. I just came back in hearing Stuart screaming. It's insanity. It's insane. You didn't miss anything then. I have stupidity. I don't have stupidity to mix also. Okay. Well, yeah. So to where I was when I left. So firemen's fund is exited the Florida market. And the dissent, this government is denouncing them for being woke. As opposed to having actuaries who do math. Florida is the state which outlawed a use of climate change or seal a rise in any official government documents about 15 years ago. More Carolina was the first one to do that. You cannot discuss it in planning documents. So you've got this incredible insane denial going on in the one hand.   But that's, yeah. Well, for distorting the market, it's the free market could have solved this problem and the Democrats got in the way. Yeah, the free market with fossil fuels subsidized to the tune of, you know, three quarters of a trillion dollars a year. Yeah. Right. But in some truth that there's some truth to it. I mean, the fact that we don't have a safe and more affordable nuclear. Energy industry is because so many conflicting goals that we didn't, we didn't develop the technology properly. Yeah, I would disagree with you on that. Well, part of the problem was as we had all this nuclear Navy technology that wasn't well suited for nuclear power plants. But because we had all this experience and all these Navy engineers, that was the first generation of nuclear power plants. Fair enough. Fair enough. And look, the French have done a better job than we have. Clearly. But there are two fundamental problems in that game. One is the nuclear fuel cycle. You know, like the inherent risk of managing the nuclear fuel cycle. The other, and we're starting to see this now in France is that a thermal technology needs cooling. And cooling needs surface water, delta T, and they do have that. And was it three years ago, four years ago, France powered down their reactors in the summer because they couldn't cool them. And they're facing that again today. And that's true of any, any thermal technology. So all the fossils and all the nuclear face that risk in the heating world. And nobody talks about that. And then you got grid instability.  I would say they're partly concentration of power and manufacturing of the nuclear products. They're partly carbon footprint production. And they're mostly carbon footprint production. And they're mostly production of the nuclear products by subsidy. Because if the fossils aren't paying their freight, they get a free ride. And then you get Saudi Arabia. Yeah. So. So I want to present a different view. And that is, it's in human nature to produce more babies and to make more connections. And the two together are lethal because they weave with something that was inevitable. It's interesting and it suggests that the best place to live is not at the end of a civilization but in the middle. No and yes Doug, yeah that's the best place to live or maybe at the beginning could be from also but the impetus to have more babies is breaking down and a number of major countries again according to our friend Peter Zain are facing demographic growth including China. And nature's taking care of it as well with the huge drop-off in male fertility in the last 50 years. Yeah but what you what you're resulting is a demographic is a demographic pyramid that doesn't look like this but it looks like this and so you do not have enough young people to support the older people in the population. Okay so that scenario takes us down to about six billion it's still way too many. Well you know how much is down to six billion over decades you want to go faster Doug don't you? Well within a decade or two and I just don't think we have the time and I do want to argue that it's in our nature to gotten ourselves into the jam. Well it's in the biological nature of every living being to reproduce. Yes exactly so they all go to the point where they break down. Well I studied population biologists I'm back in my youth and the breakdown can be catastrophic you know sigmoid cursorizing or crashing or they could be you know there's this curve and there's and there's this curve which is the more natural one the sigmoid and then there's the crash and those are the options right? The third one's most likely given the breaching of the planetary boundaries that are going on it's not just global warming but if you look at the planetary boundary we're coming out of Stockholm where we've breached seven out of nine I mean how much more can this take before it all comes crashing down? The reason that sigmoid happens is that boundaries constrain the growth could be predator-prey relationships you get too many deer the cougars eat a lot more deer and there's less deer. Yeah I think that's based on stable conditions we're talking about we're in well let me let me we've never been before. Let me go a little further. The the breaching of the planetary boundaries that we've used our technology to overcome boundaries in the short term so it's like it's like you build a fence to hold off the cougars and you build a taller fence to hold off the cougars and at some point you have a lot more cougars than you were ever prepared to deal with so the capacity exacerbates the problem to your point Ken. The cougars and the antelopes never went into an exponentially rising curve past the center of equilibrium but we humans do through weapons and technology have created escalations that are new in nature and that we have no control over and they're going to kill us but the complaint that we could have done something I think is wrong. I agree well well Doug the the the put it done something is the last 50 000 years of human history the can't do something is the last 500. Well I'm saying it was built into our nature from the beginning and what's amazing if you go back and read ancient history like Mesopotamia there were armies with 50 with a half a million soldiers and 200 000 dead in a single day battle over and over again. It's been very difficult for a long time. Well there is no planet B so in now what? Yeah time for a eulogy and creative yeah that's a good story. You and Mike got some speeches to write. Yeah so I have a candidate to give the eulogy. I posted a couple Carnegie talks. One of them is happening right now about the very topic. It pertains to a nature magazine article about safe boundaries for the earth and you know why we seem to have gone beyond what the the climate system can sustain but the the thing I point you to is what happened two days ago Adam Tuze who is one of the most articulate mega thinkers that I've heard and who now is a fellow at at Carnegie. He spoke with our president Tino Cuiar and they had quite a conversation about everything from climate to China to Ukraine to you know talent and artificial intelligence but if you if you have a chance at least watch the last seven minutes because it goes directly to what's really going on with climate and what really is needed you know the drastic changes in our systems and then it talks about China and its role and it really I mean the whole thing is worth watching but that last seven minutes is is really pretty special. I also put a link to the nature paper which I think a lot of you have probably heard about but I'm optimistic you know the Harvard professor found that there's you know evidence of an extraterrestrial spaceship from beyond our solar system and we just have to wait to show up and see today. Remember Fermi's paradox. That's exactly right I think he's playing on that but he's he's got a huge amount of coverage for this. There was a big meteor off of Papua New Guinea and they went looking for the debris on the ocean floor and they found all these very peculiar little sphere oils the result of molten metal kind of raining through the atmosphere and falling to the ocean floor and some of it was pretty weird. I mean it was there's a debate I put up a skeptical analysis of what was really going on but you know he got he got on all a lot of the major talk shows and news shows basically saying that you know this this is unexplainable you know maybe maybe there is something going on.  Mike why does space chimes make you optimistic when they're actually all just coming here to harvest us and eat us? Well my theory is that we're actually part of a Truman show kind of sitcom that the extraterrestrials have been watching for at least 10,000 years. When does it get funny? I don't know there's certainly been some good plot twists some of which yeah and the tweets the tweets that's what it's all about maybe these extraterrestrials eat tweets.  Yesterday there was a report on the PBS news hour about the results of the is it the Gibb telescope? The web telescope. Seeing stars new stars being born and created like you know 100 billion life years away so eventually you know there will be other stars with perhaps the capacity for human life but one of the places that I that I went to in my reflections, consultations, meditations was all of a sudden Atlantis came up. Now I'd never drill down into that whether it's purely science fiction or whether there's you know some evidence of this. Not being used by all types of military types of governments all types of corporations for all types of purposes achieving narrow goals externalizing me I apologize. Okay so I don't know if Atlantis is just you know a piece of science fiction or or has some documented you know evidence of the existence but okay all of a sudden it was like you know when Doug talks about a you know a funeral that's what popped up as you know just another layer in the archaeological record we think of ourselves as as so important in and and and you know based upon results we haven't been very good stewards of this planet. There is an amazing book called Noah's Flood by Bob the guy who found the Titanic and he documents what happened about 10 to 12,000 years ago when the sea level started rising and the black sea basin which had been cut off from the Mediterranean and had dried out suddenly reconnected to the Mediterranean and for two or three years there was this massive flood of water going through the Bosporus Straits and refilling the black sea and it's absolutely fascinating because they they took their submersibles and were able to find all these remnants of prehistoric houses on the bottom of the black sea and it really seems like this was some myth that was rooted in this incredible catastrophe 20,000 years 10,000 years ago and there it's not just the bible it the same myth shows up in northern Iran and in the Ukraine where the Ukraine is I mean there's a bunch of reports of the great flood and this this happened I mean also happened in eastern Washington 40 times at the at the end of the the last ice age I don't know that there's any Native American tales about that but it's growing up in Seattle I spent some time in eastern Washington and you can see these incredible 12 foot high ripples and they're not made of sand they're made of softball sized boulders or cobbles and there was water moving 150-200 miles an hour across eastern Washington 20 times the flow of the of the Mississippi because huge lake covering a third of Montana had formed after an ice dam had blocked on greenage and then the ice dam melted enough that it floated away and all this all this water came out and then it happened 39 more times yeah we're we're living in a relatively catastrophe free time right now this is where I find an an odd bit of comfort in the middle of the chaos uh when I zoom out from from a weekly monthly annual kind of rhythm to a centuries and eons rhythm or logical time rhythm and just you know realize that I've lived in this 70 year very unusual 70 year period in modern human history um with you know with a sense of progress and advancement in all kinds of ways uh and in fact uh you know I was I was I was doing I was doing hand graphs before you know the history is much more like that not as smooth as I'm making it but lots of ups and downs sort of the grand sweep of time and it will happen again and there is no permanent solution to it there is no way of having that steadily go in one direction or another and it's uh like I said it's it's it's weird it's not comforting it's weirdly comforting it's not it doesn't make me any happier in in in terms of what we're facing but sort of calms me down and it's easier because we don't have kids and grandkids ourselves not like panicked about what happens to to a personal next generation but a social next generation very much and in very pragmatic terms you know how do what's it going to be like for Jane and I thought about the rest of our lives if there are various collapses on the way and so back to you know Doug you talked not just about eulogy but how do you prepare no fucking idea well the question that emerges is how in fact precisely are we going to die in the migrant wars temperature starvation bullets that's something I've never seen anybody talk about yeah thank you Doug for raising that because at the beginning of the of the pandemic when we were first kind of isolated and everything was quiet I had this great sense of you know being in a dystopian universe you know part of the part of the imagery in my own mind and this this may sound racist or culturally unaware in some way was you know folks from from Oakland invading the island of Alameda and kind of kind of taking over this you know bucolic place that I live in called you know happy town which was just thinking about the same kinds of things that that you just raised Doug you know how will this all kind of roll apart and so in some ways I live with the fact that oh you know one day my bank account might completely disappear one day there could be invaders one day you know there will be no food in the supermarkets all of this as as possibility so slipping back to what Gil raised in terms of things being cyclical not being kind of totally linear you know bunch of my work is based upon so what happens after conflict you know what what happens what's the new emergence or creation and and part of my own way of of of moving through that you know in the in in buddhist studies and I'm sure it's true in all religions you know after the physical body dies you know there's a a place of a bardo and you know perhaps the spirit lives on and there's a level of reincarnation now is there proof of that absolutely not except that we it yeah absolutely not there's no proof a number of years ago um a famous neurologist neuroscientist wrote a book hubs called proof that there's a life beyond and you know I read it through a kind of a lawyer's brain and there was there was no proof it was only his you know articulating that he had a beyond experience but proof now fantasy so I don't know in some ways that's what um that's the that's the the frame that just keeps me going that and the notion of of you know but I being used by all types of militaries all types of governments all types of corporate you're listening to schmackenberger I think I went to the link and he just started talking it's it's it's on my list to to read it's come through a number of multiple sources recently about about AI and I just I I trust his thinking on it anyway you know this whole notion of living with with that in mind and and the fact that you know we are just little specks you know we're all we think of ourselves as doing important stuff but we're just little little little little little little specks in the universe that's all yeah so now that we're all cheered up what should we have I don't know if you can hear us your video is frozen that's his internet challenge yeah well luckily I haven't been cut off yet but your face looks good though it's not like we're really some bad expression so you know five times it was tedious so I so I want to go to something was brought up earlier I think we really need to move beyond us and them beyond Republicans and Democrats beyond you know these people are doing this to us and these are the enemies like because there's only you know there there are there's one species there are many peoples and I think this is one of the challenges I think a lot of people faces you know the the Gnostic move is to get up above everything and say we're all one we're all one up here can't you see that but down here on the ground we're not one we are different and there are people out there who other people say you don't deserve to exist and we're going to take you out of the picture and that is a really big challenge that is that is where we're actually is an us and them because they're a small minority but they they exert enormous influence and if we're going to oh gosh let me find this thing just I just got this yesterday hold on a second anybody know have you ever seen Karl Popper's thing on intelligence back in the 1940s philosopher Karl Popper came up with something called the paradox of tolerance it goes like this if everyone is tolerant of every idea then intolerant ideas will emerge tolerant people will tolerate this intolerance and the intolerant people will not tolerate the tolerant people eventually the intolerant people will take over and create a society of intolerance therefore Popper said to maintain a society of tolerance the tolerant must be intolerant of the intolerant hence the paradox I think we're up against that right now how do we how do we collectively cease tolerating the intolerance because right now the intolerance is kind of taken over things and in that regard that is a really big challenge I think the majority of people are good and caring and loving people but there are people out there who have a very different view on things and they have enormous power at the moment and that is just one of the many parts of the multi-power trap that we're in where it feels like nobody can win because everybody wants to throw it away so there's if we're going to get out of this we have in Schmacktäberger says this there's nothing inherent in our biology that prevents us from accessing wisdom but there seems to be something inherent in the way we've we've structured our civilizations to access wisdom because we focus all on intelligence and knowledge and acquiring things and we take ourselves out of is this a good thing to do you know is it a good idea to go to war is it a good idea to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere that's the question of wisdom that that doesn't adhere to market strategies because market says no we're making money keep going keep going keep going so how do we work with this this this terrible of intolerance and this this idea of how can we create wise societies as opposed to wise people or in addition to wise people would be an example of a wise society in human history well if you look at indigenous cultures those that are still intact they would say is this is this going to serve is this going to serve people is this going to serve our well-being serve our well-being over the long term a lot of people point to the seven generations thinking and it always drives me crazy because most people that I hear talk about the seven generations say we have to think about seven generations in the future as if these people were so wise that they could be 140 years in the future it's because they recognize there's always seven generations if you're a feel the long life you'll know your great grandparents your grandparents your parents your siblings your children your grandchildren your great-grandchildren that's seven generations so they say there's always seven generations therefore when we make decisions we have to figure out does how does this affect the very young how does it affect the very old how does it affect those in the middle how does it affect the unborn how does it affect those who have come before us how does it affect the world around us that's wisdom indigenous peoples lived with that for thousands of years I'm not romanticizing that there's definitely indigenous peoples who were very terrible and who were enslavers and murderers look at the meso americans right I couldn't even stay in the the teotihuacan exhibit because I was getting physically ill but look at the the Algonquans you know we wouldn't even have the enlightenment or or America without the earthquake confederacy but even they can the the confederacy came out of centuries of horrible violence and exactly bear that they were able to transform so exactly it's not that it's not the noble savage story necessarily but the human experience in transforming messes into you know friendlier kinds of messes of which that's one example and perhaps there are others the dawn of everything I think steps into some of that territory but you know to the questions that are swirling around here I think you know looking at looking for and and spending some time with those examples of transformation not of perfect societies in the past but if humans who have dealt with this kind of problem at their own scale and have have come out differently somehow that would be an interesting place to look the uroquois from the the story I got from from my indigenous teacher was that the uroquois had slavery for thousands of years and it took a thousand years to rid themselves of it and chief scanandoa said to washington jefferson and franklin you're really screwing up here you're allowing slavery if you allow slavery will tear your country apart we had slavery it took us a thousand years to get rid of it it's a stain on the human soul it's in front of human dignity you cannot have a culture that allows slaves without dehumanizing the culture and eventually will fall apart of its own because of the corrosive nature of that and the you know they said well you know we can't get the constitution voted on it because the southern states won't allow that so we're gonna have to deal with it well then we had the civil war right 80 years later so you know there are examples of of people who have overcome these very difficult things but they're few and far between but that doesn't mean they don't exist and how do we modern's how do we can it's not modern's how do we contemporary people because majority happened hundreds years ago how do we contemporary people grapple with that in in effective ways so go ahead Doug I want to come back to steward's comment about we are little people I don't agree little is a comparison and I don't think there's anything to compare us to we just are what we are with each other and our stories and our narratives and bigger and littler doesn't fit because any kind of little can be treated as a big and so on so so um here in in some ways um Doug kind of pushing back on on on me which is just absolutely fine but I think there in lies the some of the rub we're facing we talked a little bit about you know wisdom before wisdom societies and in some ways when I think about the word wisdom I also think about humor okay because there's so often there's there's humor in the idea of connecting different different little pieces that the mind suddenly grasps and and and just starts to laugh so I think that that you know we've created a culture that in some ways is based upon you know Cartesian logic and when you when you talk about wisdom it's not often logical it's almost some leap of faith you know I I'll use Einstein as an example who's a great scientist but he was also kind of a a wise ass guy and some of his greatest you know contributions came from that that that that leap and um and we've got to start accessing that kind of um that that kind of thinking it's not even thinking it's presence you know we've gotten to the point where the thinking mind is so determinative of so many different things the thinking analytical mind and yet when we talk about emotions this this heart space and the intelligence it's the heart and of course you know heart math comes up as as as you know someone who's kind of dug into this a bit yeah so I think Doug that it's it's both and we're little and we're big we're big in this call we all have a a big presence in this call but in the in the in the grander scheme of things we're just you know little specs maybe little specs we've completely remade the world so that makes us pretty significant little specs yep yeah we're little and we're big and to something that someone said before like the zen month to say not not one not two you know unified separate no no live in the paradox of that um I'm very curious try not to put you on the spot but we haven't heard from you is there anything you'd care to say uh we there's been a lot of fast talking going on hard to jump in but I'm curious to know what's on your mind or what's being provoked for you in this conversation uh after listening to this I just feel like I'm being ignored so the dawn of everything will be my next book after this it's a it's a very it's a very provocative read very different than what most of us have learned in our lives yeah I have another salon that I do on Tuesday afternoons with a bunch of tech policy people and we got into a good discussion about movies that have been most influential in shaping people's view of technology and the future and it was partly because I think I've mentioned I'm on the board of the Arthur C Clark Foundation who in the 60s and 70s got a lot of people to think 50 and 100 years into the future I'm just curious if people have time for you know one movie or two movies that they think are shaking up people's view of the future we we had a pretty long list uh her about facial intelligence was definitely on the list what's it doctor strange loves obviously had a huge impact in this world only one of us is not of that age um but yeah it was it was a fun it was a fun topic so I'd be curious if anybody has some some odd ideas on this one or maybe we don't maybe we aren't influenced by movies we just laugh at them I'm just trying to think I see so many let's see Michael was the first one you mentioned you said her her h-e-r oh her Johansson plays role artificial intelligence built to write greeting personalized I get it I didn't I didn't hear the silent h there was sim one back in uh it with al Pacino like 15 years ago or Simone I guess is one way to say it put a sim one um and there was uh x machina yes that care for um oh certainly 2001 was was one actually here's I saw a double feature 30 years ago of 2001 and we came in peace for all mankind which is a documentary by the Apollo project and they actually made a fantastic pairing and one of the astronauts was saying that the only thing that that um uh Kubrick got wrong is that in space you don't see stars because you need an atmosphere in order to catch the light so space is just black the only thing you see is our sun and the planets that are reflecting the light everything else just blackness which I thought that was very interesting um um Kevin Costner waterworld of critically critically tan and I thought it was a very prescient uh movie about what the future um would would be like um I recently saw um uh Anderson's new movie asteroid city yeah which is you know as all his movies are it's it's visually arresting and um artistically impactful and um and then and then you've got to reflect on it to think about so what was he trying to say but it was it was a little bit like to me like don't look up um like the absurdity of of you know of what we're living in but I think I think movies have a huge huge huge potential impact um you know if you could harness that that technology and stop making some of the direct that that that um to use a phrase to use an east coast phrase if you could stop using some of the the direct that people are putting out with so much you know violence and destruction um it's a it's a media with huge potential power you don't want to see Rambo 14 one of the most interesting comments was from a french friend who watches a lot of movies and always has the perfect youtube clip to illustrate any point he wants to make but he said think about the godfather which in a way both glorified and humanized the mafia and mafia techniques and probably led almost directly to sopranos 20 years later and his argument was that particularly the sopranos sort of normalized mafia family tactics and that's why people aren't so surprised by what Trump is doing and Putin is doing there's just this understanding that well people are inherently evil and they will grab what they can using any technique that they can and it's it's a really different different thing than watching the uplifting movies of the 50s and you know that wasn't the intention probably of the people who made I couldn't watch it the sopranos the sopranos I watched the first couple I as as art I loved it I thought it was a brilliant brilliant program I just didn't want to spend my time with those people yeah I the other one is the is the simpsons you know that the simpsons taught three generations of young american kids to be totally insubordinate and smart ass yeah yeah yeah it's it's also a um a wonderful vehicle for entertainment and escapism it's like I can't wait to go see the new tom cruise mission impossible movie and and and and for entertainment and escape I I've recently got into this um prime series of bosh about a detective which is lovely and entertaining and I've also decided to look into some of the critical reviews because it really raises a whole bunch of I think you know important issues that we we're grappling with as a as a society in terms of law and police and all of those pieces so yeah well we don't have to worry about movies for a while because the writers are going on strikes so yeah writers are on strike the actors yeah yeah I mean the other piece that's parallel you know is the recording industry and the amazing power of song um you know Jackson Brown has been a hero for 35 years talking about what's going on in the world in a most beautiful poignant way I think going to a concert of his is like going to a revival meeting just beautiful beautiful uh uh expression of a of a wise guy who's observing what's going on in the world we might not have concerts anymore now that the fans are throwing things that if you're an insurance company would you ensure Harry style or Beyonce their Harry styles got hit in the eye with some persons but who knows what I mean they're throwing everything at these guys people it's just it's insane this isn't a movie but it's it's one of the best documentaries I've seen this a series of six it's called light and magic it's on Disney plus and it's the story of industrial light and magic and it is magical to watch this I mean it starts off with these geeky kids in the 50s and early 60s who got you know codec movie cameras and they began to do their own special effects and they're it's really hokey and and then um Lucas brought them together says I want to create something I don't know how to create and nobody did they had to invent all this stuff so when you see the battle cruiser you know in star wars they couldn't run that uh if it had been moving the lights would have caused shadows so what they had to do was invent a computerized tracking system where they could keep running it over and over again it would fill the exact same thing and layered in so there were no shadows um and it just it was I I'm a movie geek I really loved it so light and magic if you get a chance to watch that it's just very very fun and and inspiring um so that's that's my recommendation of tech so that would work well um thank you for for going that way we have three minutes left I just I have a poem I was going to ask whether Ken had a contingency poem in case before the poem shall we meet next week uh Jerry join us next week he oh that's right a week after yes yeah so I'm I'm I'm most curious about notice who showed up today in Jerry's absence I don't know what that if anything means all right but just just a just a thought I think the people are meeting next week are now enjoying our company Jerry's with us next week Jerry's with us some people probably joined and said oh my god Jerry yeah Jerry's with us next week but go ahead Mike if you like documentaries another really interesting one is Tim's Vermeer it's uh Penn and Teller did this film you saw it right that's fantastic yeah yeah I saw a different one in the theater about the making of the Vermeer exhibit um I also just watched the documentary about with Mike Nolan the director about the Oppenheimer movie just about the Oppenheimer project um which was uh mostly a personality study about who Oppenheimer was that was a I enjoyed that I'm eager to see the new movie yeah apparently both Asteroid City and Oppenheimer are sparking a surge in atomic tourism go to the White Sands test site where they tested the Trinity bomb you can go to Oak Ridge to see where they did a lot of the chemistry few people are even trying to go see Hanford Reservation although that's pretty well fenced off because there's so much plutonium flying around yeah I think it was about 20 years ago I actually did a training at Los Alamos for the military which was kind of cool just going there and being there yeah yeah I was lucky enough to go there a few times it's pretty magical and I'm going down to Oak Ridge and Knoxville in about a week so that'll be it okay home time so so Gil asked me last week says you've never shared one of your poems and there's a reason for that well I'm not I might like to recite poetry I don't find myself to be a particularly good poet but I have a poem that I was I had to write as an assignment so this is uh and it seems to fit today it's called earth I am earth I am I am earth our bodies are one yet differentiated laying on the ground staring at the sky the stars dance in all my cells earth minerals form my bones seawater courses in my veins and the great winds leave their traces across the landscapes of my mind as the earth rises to meet the sky I bridge the two my roots go deep my branches are wide with an eternal mystery glowing inside I think you wrote that for me that resonates in 15 ways I don't know if you're willing to send a copy but I'll put it up on the list and I don't know how you knew what the topic for the first half hour would be but I didn't I don't I never know and that's that's part of the Ken magic mic but that's that's the magic of poetry that it just shows up like that can I ever ever share with you guys the um Robert Robert why I wrote about poems before you do I just want to say that um um you're you're not a very good critic of your own poetry if you think you can't write good poetry shut up and just write it because that was fine that was I appreciate that there were at least eight or ten very powerful imagery or I could hear the sound you know so so I um Robert anybody who knows anybody who knows the the book uh the magazine The Sun they have this back page of this called Sunbeam and this quote so I have this book of Sunbeams as all these quotes and I'm reading it a couple weeks ago and I find this by Robert Blind at Bloomy Way he says one day while studying a Yates poem I decided to write poetry for the rest of my life I recognize that a single short poem has room for history music psychology religious thought mood occult speculation character and the events of one's own life I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem a poem in fact may be a sort of nourishment liquid such that one uses to keep an amoeba alive if prepared right a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years as well as our desires and airy impulses I'm like who decides I'm reading this poem I'm going to write poetry for the rest of my life like whoa I wish I had such a destiny and please please send us that as well as your poem I will I will all right looks like we lost Doug anyway I think you know I'm an open space facilitator and I really believe that whoever comes is the right people so I'm happy to be here with with all of you it's been a lovely day and have a great rest of your day you too thank me thank you everybody bye