I'm really interested in this topic because I've done some Asian movements, more G-Gong than Aikido, but I haven't really developed it into a regular practice, and so I'm really interested. I have a friend who's actually, her husband is very active in Aikido, and she's, she and her daughter also are, and they have a newly, a relatively newly formed Domo Center or whatever the right home would be. Yeah, up in the White Bear area, near where I'm on the Board of Arts. And so I'm just talking with her about the whole thing, and I know she would be interested that she's in a different meeting today. So I'll send her the link, and I suspect she's very curious. You would like her, she's a free walk thinker. But anyway, I'm real interested in how you would take the sort of systematic, self-reflective and physical action of Aikido and transform it into a sort of a human development, be better in every moment sort of thing, which is kind of what I took away from your brief comments about it the other day. Yeah, excellent. So it's, as a marker for the call, it's Friday, February 8th, 2019. This is an inside Jerry's brain call. Our topic at hand is Aikido, which is a coining of mine. I built a baby website. So if you go to Aikido.com, you'll see the starts of what I hope will become a place where we, you know, we and whoever else is attracted to this can figure out what this is and maybe practice it in different ways. And I'm not entirely sure what practice it means because when you do Aikido, there is a practice. You go to the dojo and you work out for an hour at a time and there's a particular pattern to it. There's a warm-up and there's pairwise exercise. So you're always working out with somebody else. But let me do a screen share and just walk through the website just to basically show what that looks like. So here's the website in Google Sites, which I'm basically building out. So, but let me go to the finished product at Aikido.com. And I don't know why the URL aliasing isn't working properly on the site, but there we go. So this kind of, this cover page tries to tell the story that Aikido is Aikido plus this idea of upward spiral or uplift. And that Aikido is a defensive martial art that is known, hey, Mike, how you doing? I'm just, just out again. So Aikido is a defensive martial art that's noticed for sort of blending with your attacker's energy and then neutralizing them either through a pin or a throw. That's typically what Aikido is all about. Oh, Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba, the guy who's in the video below, was really about peacekeeping. He learned a whole series of different styles from jujitsu to a variety of others and evolved from them this notion of Aikido partly as a way to prevent conflict. There's very much the ethos in Aikido that you're not an attacker or a salient, but that you're trying to slow things down and the worst of all things is conflict. And it's funny because most martial arts seem to attract alpha males who want to hurt other alpha males. Aikido is not. Aikido attracts men and women who want to learn to do something that seems sort of spiritual, definitely physical, probably useful in a defensive kind of way, etc. So it's pretty interesting. And I did a couple years of Aikido when I was in Berkeley, living in Berkeley. I went to a dojo called Berkeley Aikikai that it turns out is the parent in some sense of the dojo where I go now here in Portland. So I returned after a 10-year absence. I basically found the dojo that was really close to home, went to it and discovered that the two founders of this dojo studied under the Sensei, Shibata Sensei, who runs Berkeley Aikikai. So partly I'm bringing Aikido forward here because I'm involved in it and really enjoying the involvement. And Aikido is used often as a metaphor. So if you go on YouTube and look up talks, you'll find some people who are basically talking about Aikido strategies and this notion of blending and circular motions and so forth. I'll come back to more about Aikido, but I embedded a video here. Hey Ken, good to see you. I embedded a video here of O Sensei basically taking on students, attackers are called Uke, and which is basically Ukemi is the art of taking a fall. And Uke is attacking, but it's going to be thrown or pinned. You'll see a series of moves and it's actually this video, even though it's back in 1935, is a reasonable exposure to what Aikido is like. So that's a side of it, which is about peacekeeping. And here, I know it's a martial art. It's about combat. It's about Samurai and Bushido and all those kinds of things. So what's that got to do with improving everything we touch? So now let me marry that with this other concept of uplift or upward spiral and uplift. I don't mean uplift in the David Brinn science fiction author sense of it so much where he is saying, how do we uplift dolphins to be smarter than humans kind of thing? He basically had a couple books where uplift was about improving different species, capabilities, basically giving them superpowers. Mike, did you want to jump in about Brinn? I did. Did you see his latest post about how the human species seems to have uplifted itself? No, I've not seen that. There's a really interesting article that he dug up by some German sociologists. And the contention is that just in the last 100,000, 200,000 years or even less, probably since the start of agriculture and city states and kings, there's been this real strong selection pressure against homicidal maniacs. Homicidal maniacs were very useful when there were tribal cultures and it was hunter-gatherer and you had to take control of animal grazing lands from the other guy. But according to this work, and it's based on some interesting observations in pre-agricultural societies as well as just looking at history. And it's speculative but fascinating. The idea that we've tamed ourselves both because the kings had absolute power and if somebody was getting out of control and hurting other warriors, people that were needed to defend the clan, it was better to just get rid of that person. So the king would just cut off the head of the somebody before they procreate. And the same time, according to this theory, there is sexual selection from the female side. Not wanting to mate with somebody who might get themselves killed very quickly. Right, right. So he referenced his own books. He said this is mankind uplifting him and herself. I don't have my eyes on the chat right now, but if you could find the link and put it in the chat, that would be great. And I want to come back to the conversation about tribes and violence and things like that. Again, for Inside Jurispray and other things because there's a couple of books that have affected me a lot on that. And just one tiny side note I'll put there is that a lot of combat, a lot of tribal combat is very much show and isn't very lethal. It was really quite interesting. It was sort of about the ritualization of combat. And it might be, oh, what's it called? Single, I think it's called single combat where you send a representative forward and whether that person wins or loses against the other person's champion determines the battle as opposed to a thousand people dying on the battlefield.  But let me come back here so I can fold upwards viral into the concept of Apikido. So Arthur, Arthur Brock, a certifiable genius.  Years ago he sent me a link to a video, not the video I've embedded here because the original video I think disappeared. But it was a really lousy quality VHS video of this very, very quiet guy who was walking around the hillsides of Northern California, sort of central Northern California, with a trowel, with a hand trowel. And he was walking into the hills and paying attention to how water came off the hill. And he noticed that if water collects a lot, it cuts a gully into the hill. And the gully starts to separate the hill and then water drains off the hill instead of staying up high. So one of his strategies was follow the water up and then block damn the water a bit so that it spreads high on the hill. And when the hill is retaining moisture up high, plants, trees, everything grow more vigorously, etc. So through that action and a couple other kinds of principles like that, but being observant about nature and helping nature do things. And if you think about it for a second, what beavers do is kind of that same action. They dam water, which then sort of spreads out in an area and creates a different ecosystem than there was there before. So Crayfull and his work in the hills of Northern California was lonely work with a trowel. This was not social work. And yet his simple single actions were busy lifting up that entire environment. So he has film of some area that he goes back to and it gets greener and lusher and more animals and so forth. And then a couple months, and I haven't put this on the website here, but I will. A couple months after that I happened to cross some videos of the Los Plateau in China. And Los is basically very loose, friable soil. It's actually the word is loose. It's a German word. And there's a Los Plateau, which is the size of Belgium in the middle of China. And I happened to cross basically a video by a guy named John Liu who had gone to the Los Plateau when it was basically a dust bowl. And because this is very erosive soil, there were huge dust storms in Beijing. And downwind of the Los Plateau was a mess because the soil was basically blowing away. And everybody was leaving. There were sort of kids going to school but grown-ups were just leaving the area because you couldn't grow anything or do anything.   So at a very large scale, a scale that maybe only China is capable of doing, the citizens of the Los Plateau did something very similar to what Craveville had been doing by himself in Northern California. And Lou then documents that over 10 years this area re-greens. It becomes verdant. People start growing crops successfully. The hills are all covered in green. And my favorite thing is at the end of that documentary, he interviews a woman who says, hey, 10 years ago I was making 600 yuan a year and life was really, really tough here. Now my apples are doing really well and I'm making 6000 yuan a year. And so those two things were kind of my wake up about different scales of activity where if you pay attention to nature, you can intentionally improve it. So at some point I had this idea, why don't I sort of just point a term up keto and make a little experiment out of it and figure out what the practices of up keto might look like. So how might we, what sorts of things might we do so that we improve the things that we touch? So the question here at the top is how might we improve everything we touch? And I think this is a complicated question. This is not a really simple question because I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Is people trying to improve things but often fails, right? Also, one of the lessons I've had is that if you're not listening to what actually matters on the ground and what people care about and what they're good at and so forth, you can't impose on them some better way of doing things. How might we improve everything we touch involves actually serving and listening and not coming in with the better answer or the best practice? And I see a couple of, a decade ago I attended a conference called Opportunity Collaboration twice. It's basically a meet and greet for three days at a resort in Mexico, kind of ironically. Half the people who attend are funders, foundations, family foundations, looking for good social ventures to invest in. The other half have interesting social ventures that are doing good around the world. And out of all the social ventures that showed up at Op-Call, I discovered one whose MO was we arrive in a village and we go talk and listen. And we say, what do you need? And we don't show up with the solution. You just have to install this water-driven, this pump that looks like a merry-go-round, that kids will power and everything will be fine. We actually came in and listened and at one point they wanted a soccer field. And we're like, don't you really need a hospital? We're like, no, no, no, we need a soccer field. And it turned out that the soccer field got the kids out of trouble and off the streets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So part of, I think, Upkido practice is deep listening and there's a variety of things like that. So on the website I created a little page for practices where I've just put a couple of starting points. But what I'd love to do is, and also in my brain, of course, I've got a bunch of resources around Upkido, which I will share as our conversation deepens. But what I'd love to do is just sort of stop there and see what you think, because this is either, oh, good, Christina's here. I didn't even see you come in. Woo-hoo, thank you. Christina shares my enthusiasm for Aikido as well. So I want to give just a little context there. I lived in Dojo for a year and a half in San Francisco training 13 hours a week and went to Japan, got my black belt, and it's been a huge part of my life. So you are way deeper into it than I am and love that. Thank you. So let me go quiet for a second and just see what your first thoughts are. I will take notes in the chat. I'm now reading the chat because when I'm screen sharing, it's hard for me to see the chat. So I'm glimpsing over there. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Can you put the link to the page you were just showing in the chat? That is in fact at upkido.com, which I own. And it's a Google site, so it's super easy for me to give anybody right access if you'd like to go in and mess with it. And part of the idea here is to co-construct a practice of upkido. And you're muted. It's giving me an error. Oh, that's weird. Upkido.com, can anybody else go see upkido.com? Looks like it's loading online. They don't have the page up there. I get a 404. Yeah, that's bad. I get a Google 404 also. All right. Let me... Well, I just changed the setting. Let me force it. You can fix it later. I can look at it later. Yeah, exactly. So actually, let me give you the Google Sites link on the chat. Oops, I'm going in the wrong place. Let me give you the Google Sites links and tell me if that works right there. I also get a 404. The redirect worked on the first one. So that's the same URL that the first one when I clicked upkido.com, it showed me the sites.Google. Oh, but the Google Sites is not publishing for you. Which is very weird. So I'm going to click publish settings. Thank you for sharing. Pardon me. Yeah, sorry. I'll figure this out and make sure it works. This is unusual because usually the Google Sites thing works quite transparently and works quite well. So my apologies. So why don't I screen share what I had just for a moment again. And then... So here's the site in Google Sites, where I have upkido is Iketo plus Upward Spiral. And then I described for a while why Iketo is interesting here and the principles of Iketo are interesting. And then where this notion of Upward Spiral showed up in my life through Arthur Brock. And the marriage of those two things I think is interesting as a subject of a practice, as something that humans might do individually and together. And the question then is, like, what do we do? And so I created on the practices page, I set up a couple of simple questions, which I think even as I'm sitting here talking about it, I'm like, oh, okay. I can think of a question I like is, what are my superpowers? I think that's an interesting question to figure out. I have here, like, assume good intent, think abundance instead of scarcity. Which way is up is meant to be kind of a question about uplift, upkido, Upward Spiral. If we're trying to improve somebody, how do we make sure we do that with their consent and participation and from them, not to them, right? So that's what this which way is up kind of question means. And again, I'll go quiet for a second and see what other things come up in your heads. Jerry, I really like this concept of upkido. It's a nice play on words and it's just got a great resonance to it for any reasons for me. I'm not an upkido practitioner. I'm a Qigong practitioner. And I took auto-sharmers four levels of listening from through you and tied them to a breath practice. So I have people in my, when I work with them in workshops or if I'm teaching courses inside of companies, having them start up with putting their hands really high in their chest and breathing just into the palm of their hand very, it's shallow and rapid. So it makes them kind of dizzy and it gets them, this is our Sharmer's first level of downloading. Most people don't breathe very deeply. They might breathe a little bit more deeply than I do there. It's kind of intentionally exaggerated. But that's the breath for just listening for, okay, we're in agreement. I have to think very hard. It's all fine. If someone comes along and says, no, I see things differently. I disagree with you. We've got to be more in our bodies. So I haven't dropped their hand in their solar practice. Breathe there. And that's the breath for when someone comes along and says, hey, I have a different opinion. So we can be more grounded in our bodies. Then the third breath is putting their hands on their hara and breathing there, which is the empathic breath, which drops us out of paying attention to the content and really listening for, how is it for this person? How is the world struck for them? What's important to them? What are their values? What do they care about? And then the last breath is a combination of the first and the third, which is you breathe from your hara all the way up, filling the belly first, filling the entire torso with breath. And that's what I call the enlivening breath of, if the future is born in the present moment, there's always something we're talking about that is trying to be born. That's keeping us alive here. So what's enlivening? What's happening here that wants to grow and move between us? And oftentimes that's something that can be really hard to discern because it's really subtle. And other times it's something that is immediately apparent because someone says something and the hair on the back of your neck goes up or you find yourself leaning forward. And it's like, okay, let's grab onto that. After I teach this practice, I have people get into pairs or trios and share a personal story.  I do this with some clergy people and I have them talk about what's a challenge my congregation is having. And the listener's job is to listen from their bellies and to not pay attention to content so much and really see how am I responding on a somatic level to this person. And what always happens in every case is that people come forward with the most incredible stories of, wow, one man said, I'm from the Aham school of listening and when I did that, I stopped doing that and I really heard this person differently. Another man said, I'm so used to having to problem solve all the time. I was like, wow, I'm glad I don't have that problem. And then I could actually say, and I feel how challenging it must be. So this very simple process of listening from the body rather than from the head and using breath as an anchor so that if you find yourself getting caught up in the story put your hand on your belly and breathe deeply really challenges people in very productive ways. And I found that it helps them to have better conversations. So I don't build myself as a conspiracy theorist. If you know the root of conspiracy is to breathe together. So my theory is you have better conversations by breathing deeply and listening so I invite you to prove my theory. And I will add that I'm extremely grateful to an early girlfriend who at one point said, because I'm like a guy and very analytic and love to solve stuff. And she said, look, I don't need you to fix this. I just need you to hear me. And my whole world sort of like shook because I was like, wait, what? I'm doing my best with the thing I do really well. I'm coming in and trying to fix this. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's entirely not what's at hand here. It doesn't really work. Christina, over to you in the booth. It's so good to meet you, Ken. And that's actually, I've done, I had somebody teach me the iron jacket or iron shirt she got. So I've done a little bit, we called it the body. I was just doing this like intense practice for a while. And I was doing that in college. So I have some experience with Chiang. And of course it ties all into Aikido and that, that what you said about when people disagree with you and what you feel in your body, there's this really interesting practice called trauma release exercises. You're familiar with the shake.  Yeah. There's something there with exercises. Yeah. So and Jerry, this, this ties into a question of how do we actually release organizational trauma of being like in hierarchical systems for a long time. So I have a question for the group of like, given the, the, the lots of, lots of agreeing that we're doing with each other, can we actually ask questions we don't know the answer to and get into something where we're not agreeing with each other where we actually have some ideas. We're at the edge of knowledge. And for me in that, my question is around releasing organizational traumas where people are coming up against the need to take responsibility and self-organization. The, the angst that comes out in teamwork when, when there's unacknowledged power dynamics, all of that, like that's a huge big tangle for an individual. I actually think that if everybody would listen to Ken and just be a conspiracy theorist, the whole world would solve itself. But all we have to do is, all we have to do is hang a portrait of Ken in the hall of the dojo for a keto. No, seriously, if everybody would just stand up straight and breathe, so much would get fixed, including myself. Like I find I go, you know, like in all sorts of, like if everybody just paid attention to that posture and breath, a lot of the world's trauma would go away. How do you implement that somatic experience in organizational team dynamics where so many people are not comfortable dropping into their body because they're in a team and a work environment? Absolutely. Absolutely. So there's a piece here, which is, which is about listening, receiving. I typed the word grace into the chat because one of the, one of the, it's kind of one of my favorite words because you can't, you don't know a lot about people until they're under pressure somehow. And the grace with which they act under pressure is a big tell. That's really important and trying to develop more grace so that kind of no matter how bad the situation is coming along, you can be calm and deal with it. And partly being able to be calm allows you to see more of what's happening. When you go into the fear response and adrenaline spikes and cortisol spikes and your attention span narrows and et cetera, that changes your physiological ability to deal with a particular situation and it alerts the other party that you are now in fight, flight or freeze response or something like that, right? So one of the things I love about Aikido practice is that when you're in the middle of a pretty complicated move that has like three or four different kinds of steps and you need to get the energy right and you need to get the hold just right and so forth, but then you're doing it and you're repeating it over and over again with your partner and you're in the middle of it looking around going, this is going pretty well. I just did this thing over here and that got better and there's limbs flying but you feel calm because you kind of know what's up and what's where, right? And that's a kind of grace. That gives you calm in a fight in a sense, which is important because we have all sorts of kinds of fights and I love also that Christina brought up different kinds of organizational or institutional trauma because there's lots of layers of it, right? And we never point to it, we don't deal with it, we don't give people some outlet to discuss it and yet it's in there all the time.  Well, I wanted to respond to Christina's question. First of all, endorse enthusiastically being at the edge of what we don't know because that's what I find most fascinating about these calls and sort of remarkable food for subsequent reflection after I leave the call and pondering. But one of the questions I think that's hard in organizational issues is that there's a lot of ingrained guarding many times, decades of experience of guarding who you really are and all you can really do I think is invite people to a different space. They really, they can do the, you can encourage them to take a pause and reflect and see what's going on. I've tried a lot of different things but it's challenging from an external because the change is internal. And so I like the somatic process that we're talking about here because if a person stops to breathe or stops to reflect on any question that's not the one that's creating the distress, that seems to help them move to a better space. And it works for me at least if I notice my own reactions that I'm getting in this zone of I'm about to become contentious, which of course it took me years to learn that I could predict that behavior. Then there are certain things I can do in terms of breathing and reflection that assist in staying in the space I want to be in instead of the one that's reacted. Christina. I disagree. Yay! I love what you said about guarding and the habit of guarding. I think that's super what happens. But I disagree that the only thing you can do is invite people. You can throw them. If we're going to be, seriously, that's how you make a noodle yukae. So, or when people stick on the mat in Aikido. So my job in Dojo, when I was living in Dojo was as an Uchi deshi. So an Uchi deshi is a really weird position because you have no rank. You literally don't have rank and your learning curve when you're being thrown that much is so much off the difference. It's like you could get all like, yeah, I'm Uchi deshi. And so you are literally above everybody and below everybody at the same time. You're responsible for the dust on the top of a picture frame if the sensei decides to get mad at you. And it's a really hierarchical weird position because you're in this rigid Japanese hierarchy from ages of samurai. But you're also above and below everybody because you have absolute access to the top senseis when they come in, but you're washing their feet. Does that make sense? I'm trying to explain it in the chat. So there's, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So your responsibility, like all of your other responsibilities as Uchi deshi go away when there's a new student. And when there's a new student stepping on the mat, your only focus as deshi is to make sure that they get integrated and learn because when you come into Aikido Dojo, there's not like ranked classes. Everybody's training together. And that white belt who's brand new, who just put on the gi for the first day is, it's your responsibility that they don't get hurt. So that comes before everything. And making sure, what you learn when you're working with a lot of white belts is number one, there's people that come in who, when you grab onto them, are very noodley. They just, they kind of like let you do whatever and they don't have any tension in them at all. And they're just, they're kind of a little passive. And then you come into what you're talking about in organizations, which are guarded really rigid that like it's hard to move them. And of course, what you're looking for, and every once in a while, a white belt will step on the mat who already has this feeling. What we are looking for is Gumby, right? Of like this resilient, rubbery, I'm going to move with you, but I'm in my center and all of that. And Judith, what I really wanted to say to this group in this context about organizations is there's something there about everybody thinks of Aikido in this framework when they're, when they're just exploring it and just beginning to learn, they're really focused on how do I do this technique. But what is actually where the learning happens is being thrown because that's when you feel what the sensei is doing.  And that's where the learning gets transferred. And when you're Uchi deshi, you're being the UK for white belts. And so as you're falling is when you're learning, I mean, it's when you're teaching as you're falling, you're showing them how to throw, right? By the way that you fall or don't fall, if they don't have it quite, you kind of stand there. And then when they're throwing you, you are protecting them and putting them up against the edge of their uncomfortableness. And there's something there that is really different, which is why I said I disagreed, than just inviting people to learn to breathe. There's a willingness to go in and be in conflict and confront these things that organizations so often put under the rug. And my own working theory going into this is that there's a repertory of options.  And here's where they might take you. And here's a path. And here's a bunch of people who are helpful, happy to help you pick a path through these things. And Mike, I'm struck that the great wave off kind of gawa is over your shoulder in the image, which seems apropos somehow. I like that. But trying to figure out, I think there's sort of a behavioral repertory that we sometimes forget exists. We kind of get locked into, we get habituated to our own responses to situations, et cetera. One of my favorite psychologists, therapists ever in the world is Milton Erickson, whose story I've told a little bit, I think on another Inside Juries Brain Call. But Milton basically had polio when he was very young and was laid up for a year and a half. And his family was pretty cool. They would bring him out and play around him. And he got extremely perceptive at reading skin tone, tone of voice, skin color, emotion, so that he could see what people's emotions were in the family. And then he got polio again as an adult, which permanently left him in a wheelchair with pain, which he managed with hypnosis.  Our subconscious is always on duty, always trying to do the right thing for us. It's often wrong. It's often extremely wrong. He was trying to use hypnosis to open a conversation with that unconscious to give it a wider variety of behaviors, more opportunity to do something fruitful at that moment when the terror was striking because the person is afraid of crossing a bridge or whatever phobias or whatever was going on for the person. So I like that. And when I talk about sort of laying out a smorgasbord or creating different kinds of behavioral opportunities, that's kind of where I'm going for that, is I can see that a bunch of people would hear what Ken described earlier about breathwork and go, yes, yes, yes, let's go, let's go. And then a bunch of people would be like, breathwork, I'm out of here. And so how do I get that breathwork, I'm out of here person to find something here that they click with and give it a world, right? Give it a world. And for example, one thing I found was it's called lean coffee. So if you, I've got links to it in my brain I can share, but I'm a big fan of open space, which is a self-organizing meeting format. I'm trained in how to do it by the guy who invented open space. I've run multiple open spaces, love doing it. It's kind of a big deal. You've got to like prep and all that. Lean coffee is baby open space done with post-it notes in a room that is posing as a lean technique. And people who do agile and lean are not necessarily the ones who will show up and go, ooh, breathwork, awesome. They're very often sort of geeks, type A's, alphas who really want to get things done. And lean coffee is a very efficient way to run a little meeting because it lets everybody's voice get heard. There's timers involved. You're moving through the meeting very quickly. And lean coffee is a sneaky way of doing open space and getting a taste of the shared power and responsibility of being in open space. Because one of the things I love about open space is that I didn't create the agenda for who's the most famous person who's going to give the keynote talk and what the panels are going to be. We all figured it out because we all have that genius and capacity to do it. So that's an example of what I call design from trust. So how do we find practices like lean coffee and just point to them? We don't have to invent them. We don't have to, whatever. There's a nice video I can put on a list, on a resource page on Apito that says, hey, here's a way of trying out this thing we're trying to get toward. And again, how do we describe the things we're trying to get toward? That's maybe where the practice is heading. Judith, you have your handrails. Well, I guess maybe I said use the wrong word or the interpretation of the word is different. When I say invitation, I guess where I'm coming from is that each person is responsible for their own space. They're sitting in a room with 12 other people. You can observe that the room is really guarded. As a leader, I have certain things that can do or not do. But ultimately, the trick is to figure out how to invite each person into his or her space to be reflective. And so I'm exploring different ways of doing that, some of which are easier to do one-on-one than they are in a conference setting with people. But if you can interrupt the dynamic of the conference group with anything that causes the individual to have to think, it'll get over some of their primal reaction and their resistance and other things, and then they can perhaps be more open to hearing another person with a different point of view. Because I'm usually focusing on a group of people. It's much easier in a one-on-one to do these kinds of things, and it's easier to share one's own approaches and give people opportunities to explore their approaches and so on. Agreed. Christina, please. I'll be very quick, but I disagree again. Okay, so it's not, it's just, the only thing I disagree about is the line of invitation is not around personal space or personal comfort, it's being willing to step on the mat. So once you're stepping on the mat, you're exploring conflicts, right? That's the whole, Ikea was about dialogue and conflict and how to resolve that peacefully. So being willing to step on the mat is giving permission for people to come in and push you off your center. And so having a framework organizationally where you're explicitly saying, we are going to get into each other's personal space, I'm gonna have you up in my armpit and over my hip and that whole thing by stepping on the mat is giving consent and then your personal space can be invaded in this safe space that you're in. And hi, Robert and Kevin. And Kevin, yeah. So by analogy, how does that carry over into, what's the workplace? Because there's not a mat in the office. Oh, you can make a mat as a facilitator of a group. You just make a space that you're like, here is where we're going. We are explicitly looking under the rug, right? There's a lot of stuff under there. It's gonna scare you. We're safe. You make a mat with the framing. What's really interesting is that the mat is padding, which is a form of safety, right? So the mat says when you get thrown, once we teach you how to land, which is really important, really important. So uke is the attacker, but is going to be thrown. So ukemi is the art of knowing how to take a fall, how to land in aikido. It's called ukemi. And so doing good ukemi is super important and you just get better and better at it over time, which makes you more flexible and stronger because I think so. So I think the perception of a mat... But then you get old. Yeah, exactly. Then you get inflexible and cranky and all that. But the perception of there being a mat, I'm really interested metaphorically in what that feels like in a work setting, for example. So Ken, then Kevin.  I'll try to keep this contained, too. To Judy, I also disagree about getting people to think, I want them to get out of cognition and into somatic experiencing. So one interesting way that I've discovered to do this comes from a friend of mine over in Europe who does constellation work, where he has people do a random walk and just stop next to somebody and say, okay, so close your eyes and stand shoulder to shoulder.  Now, feel. What is it like to be standing next to this person? Do you feel bigger? Do you feel taller? Do you feel smaller? Do you feel safe? Do you feel threatened? Do you feel warmly disposed for them? Do you want to move away from them, right? And just really sense your body, what information you're getting. Now, the person who's standing on the left of the person, move to the other side and repeat the process. And it is amazing what happens when you move from one side or the other because we all have electromagnetic and magnetic charges and sometimes just simply moving from standing to someone's right to their left will completely change the dynamic of interactivity. He actually pointed out to me that he worked with two brothers who inherited a family corporation. They were constantly at each other's throats. And once they did this practice, they decided that they need to change chairs at the table. And as soon as they did that, they started to work together really effectively much more so than they had them.  We rely on it too much. So I'm trying to open people up to different dimensions of intelligences and knowing in ways that are often uncomfortable. I get a lot of pushback when I do the breath work from engineers and type A people. And I often work with IT people. So I lead them through the process. I model it first and I'm a really good breather when I'm standing there after 15 years of Qigong practice and I breathe that whole room, breathes with me and then I say now do it with me. So I entrain them in that way. And I still get folks who are like, yeah, not so much for me. But I've had far more people say when you first brought this up, I was very skeptical. But once I experienced it, I recognized that it really did help to ground me and enlarge my center and give me new ways of accessing things. So I stick with it and it's been extremely well received. And the last thing is when I do have them pair up or to work in trios, the listeners can't respond with anything other than what they felt or what they sensed. So they can't say, that reminds me of the story about my uncle. They've got to come with, as you were telling that story, my stomach was in knots or I was really, I just wanted to grab your, I just wanted to move around. And it opens up a different vocabulary, a different way of relating. I'm complete, thank you. Kevin and Christina. And you're muted, Kevin. Okay, so yeah, the first thing you said when it's a man, I was wondering if I could bring a weapon.  That's just the first response. It's like, you know, well, if I'm in a fight, you know, what can I bring? Bring it. You know, yeah, exactly.  And it reminded me actually just in the way of knowing of Cornelius Clemens, who's a guy that really kind of, I modeled a lot of my discovery process. Oh, and I built software around and built businesses around. He was a black and literate guy who was a water witcher. And it turned out that he was discovered by the Texas Eastern Pipeline going through and there was ways that he could listen to water that would help them know where gas was. And so by doing that, you know, he started, he got these long pool cue holders for his willow wands and they would fly in business class up to Canada. And he put his daughters through school and he said, you know, tell me about the way you think. He said, well, you know, if I'd been full up with letters, you know, I couldn't have listened to the water. So he thought his illiteracy is what gave him the ability to put his daughters through school because his only asset was his unique ability to know everything about water you couldn't see for quite a ways down. And he could go deeper than other dousers too. He was more sensitive. And when he just said, you know, thank God I never learned to read, you know, wouldn't have room in my brain for the way I think. So he was a wise man who was proud of being illiterate and his kids went to college because he was illiterate. That's really interesting. And there's this fascinating series of layers of framing of socialization and training and things like literacy and how they affect our brains. Another one of my favorite books is Leonard Schlein's book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess, where he has this pretty out there thesis that the linear alphabet basically destroys the divine feminine around the world.  And there's like this sort of Bacchus Dionysus. Those are the stories of sort of pre-alphabetic Greece. And then you get the alphabet. And then suddenly you have men giving birth from their forehead and their thigh. The women are deprecated, et cetera, et cetera. And so anyway, there's a whole series of digressions that are interesting and sort of food for later conversations there. Let me go quiet again and see who else wanted to jump into the conversation. Christina. Christina, you're so quiet on this call. I'm kind of worried that your introversion is really showing through.  No, I don't want you to. I want to ask Ken a quick question. I love the idea, Kevin, of illiteracy as an asset and like people being proud of that. That's really sort of socially transformative. But when you're talking about groups, constellation practice, all of these different ways to get in their heads. So the group that I work with, the Digital Life Collective, where Jerry and Robert also are, so chime in, is confronting all the problems. We're a distributed co-op. Some of my closest, dearest friends I've never met in person. We're virtual. We're all over the world. We have time zone problems. And it's always these faces on Zoom. So how do you bring this embodiment into the virtual space before we have the VR capabilities, which will come eventually. I am sure that eventually I'm going to be able to, like, do Qigong practice with Philip in a hologram thing and we can sit and have coffee afterwards or something like that. But right now we're not there. And it's like disembodied faces on Zoom and we're like always in this context. And I would love to break out of that somehow and I just have no idea how. Certainly conversationally we can. But again, you're kind of getting people to talk about feelings or respond with just how they feel would help.  Yeah, you know, I was like, if I came to a Keto call, you knew it. It's awesome. Wow. Thank you. That's a really intriguing and large question and I don't know that I have anything off the top of my head. That's going to be brilliant. But I would actually offer the same breathing practice. I think that I was involved in integral transformative practice back in the mid 90s with George Leonard and Michael Murphy. You know, there's a lot of Aikido principles in there and there's also this concept of the long body. You know, that if your group is doing a practice at the same time distributed, there's an energetic connection to that. So I think if you begin your calls with people actually doing some shared breathwork exercises, that's one way to kind of sink your, get yourselves in an energetic sink. Also, you know, we're so used to on Zoom, we see each other like this. You know, we don't see each other like this. We don't see the profiles. We don't see the back. So put your computer up somewhere and actually, you know, be able to move around. So you just see, I'm going to turn around, see my whole body, right? So you get to see more dimensions of each other. Engage in, I used to meditate. And I discovered that if I, I couldn't sustain 45 minutes every day. And if I missed a few days, it became harder and harder to go back to the practice because I'd feel guilty. And that's like, oh, you know, and meditation teacher friend of mine said, just do 21 breaths. You can always do 21 breaths. And you sit for 321 breaths. So in other days, you do 21 breaths and get up and move on. So starting with 21 breaths, you know, that's about three minutes from most folks. It's enough to quiet the mind. Articulating an intention. We recognize we are geographically separate. Let's create a shared space here of connection at the heart, connection at the brain, a connection to the gut. We want to be able to sense and feel those three centers. Can we bring what would it look like to hold the call where we're doing gestures rather than speech, you know, gestures, the oldest language there is, right? Before we had voice boxes, we were jumping around. So these are just off the top of my head thoughts. I hope they're useful to you. Ken, thank you. And so I've got a group called Rex, the relationship economy expedition that I started in 2010. And I just picked it up as a practice that every Rex call every Rex meeting starts with a poem. And that got me reading a lot more poems and poems have this lovely feature where people shift into a different mode when they start listening to a poem. It's sort of like an involuntary reaction. Milton Erickson was famous for his handshake induction. He would shake hands with somebody and then slowly withdraw his hand. And by the time he was detaching, the other person was in the hypnotic trance. And he was taking advantage of the fact that the handshake is such an automated process that we go into kind of an automated process frame of mind. And if you hang in there for a while, he was kind of using that as the doorway in to hypnotic induction. So for me, poems have functioned. And I don't know how useful they are that way, but it feels like they're still useful. And also as a group starts getting used to it and everybody's like, oh, good, we're starting to meet. Here comes the poem. Everybody sort of shifts a little bit and goes into it. Another tiny example in one of the early online dial up bulletin board systems. I think this was not the well. This was somewhere else. I'm forgetting where it was. There was basically a little banner that went across the page that said, you know, please take a moment to center yourself before entering this discussion. And it didn't freeze your screen. It did nothing. It just, there was just a banner that asked you to consider something before entering the online discussion. And yet it created a bit of a threshold and made the discussion inside that place a little bit different. So I'm interested in all these affordances that create thresholds that allow us to be in a different space. Ken, I really love that you keep bringing into this. We need to get out of this thing, out of our heads and into our senses. So I'm hearing you and I'm feeling it. So let's see where that goes.  Yeah, I just have to say I left my phone on Bart today, which has my driver's license, my credit card, my ATM, and my room key. But I'm at the club and I've gotten my son, FedEx, and my passport to the hotel. And I can eat at the hotel and they'll recognize me. And I've got my cards canceled and I'm not panicking and going through my day. Even like when it went away, it was like, oh my God. And I've talked to the guy. Likely I had my clipper card in my bag and it's a, you know, so I can't call anybody until I go to the hotel.  Yeah, exactly. That's great. Robert, can you talk to a little bit of getting people in their body in the digital life collective context of like virtual teams, virtual conversations, virtual groups that are popping up all over the place or open learning context, whatever. Have you thought about that in your work? Sure. One thing I'd say is some of the spaces we're creating, although they're not sort of super far in that direction where it feels like you're in the same room together, it's sort of is heading down that direction of being intentional about sort of maybe the, I know you're saying, like get out of the cognitive and into the felt sense. But if you sort of provide a little bit of context of like, hey, this room means this and maybe we can think about putting stuff up on the walls or something like that. It sort of gives you a little bit more of a feeling. And yeah, I'm also interested in technology tools that we can use to sort of take that a little bit further. So there is, I don't know if any of you are aware of a friend of mine, Connor Turland, who worked on Metamaps, but he's sort of hacked together a little tool that uses some of the JavaScript libraries for sort of 3D, almost like real first person shooter games. But it has this, you sort of walk around in it with, as if you're Zoom sort of webcam screen is like a billboard. So you're almost walking around with like a billboard face and then has this potential to sort of drop in 3D objects and stuff like that. So something like that would be interesting. Give you more of a feeling like we're in a room together that we can kind of co-design in some way. Thank you. Actually, the one other thing I was going to mention was when you're talking about breathing was actually there's a little Google Easter egg. If you search breathing exercise, but something, some sort of app that might work for sort of syncing up breath, I think is interesting. So it has like this, just this white circle that goes in and out sort of the interesting to sort of sync up breath. Synchronizing exercises are really, really interesting. There's a simple exercise where you stand in a circle and you try to get the group to count to as many numbers. I think you have to try to get to 20, one person saying a number at a time. And if two people jump in at the same moment, you have to start over. And it takes a lot of patience because, you know, there's no queue about who leads or anything. You don't go around in a circle, nothing like that. It's like everybody jumps in. And then you put a coin in the middle of the group and you put it like on the floor and you say, okay, everybody focus on the coin and do the same exercise. And it's much easier. It's somehow much easier. I don't know, but it worked. So I think there's many of these kinds of things that exist in the world, good, you know, practices that people know. And I'm interested in building a nice bag of these sorts of modes and exercises and things that we might try and that anybody could try. Another way to make that easy, which I learned from being on conference calls with Craig Neal with the Heartland Institute. You know, there'd be 50, 60 people on this teleconference call. And this is before Zoom. It's just on the telephone, so you don't see anybody. And you don't turn up for questions. And he would say, before you, when someone finishes speaking, feel your heartbeat twice before you speak. And it was amazing because very rarely would two people actually speak at the same time. It created a space where the next person could just seamlessly move in and speak. And it was extremely rare that a couple of people would speak at the same time. Oh, excuse me. No, you go first. No, you go first. So that feel your heartbeat twice just, I've used that for many different things since then. And I find it really useful for folks because again, it puts them in touch with their bodies. Thank you, Christina. I have a question about that because I am me. And some of my best friends are people who we end up having these conversations and they're very, very fast. And we can interrupt each other like just, and what it's doing is it's like, it's like Jerry with his brain, which you've seen, it's going, I need to add a tag here. It's not like interrupting. And in working with somebody else who was, there was a context where I was having one of those conversations and realizing that the person that I was talking to was sort of the mapping Jedi thing. So we were going back and forth in this very fast thing. And then another person in the context was feeling that I was being rude by interrupting because this thing was going on. And there was like this, this is categorically rude. You can't interrupt. Period. It's a rule. And there was like a stringency around that. And maybe it was because there were other people at the table.  But I just don't know how to navigate that very well because I need those conversations where I can totally interrupt my friends because they know what we're talking about. And there's like, because we have a limited time. We're trying to do stuff together.  That's what I say. Bring your weapons. In some cultures, it's like in a lot of Latin countries, but not all Latin countries. There's a constant acknowledgement from the listener. Like, uh-huh. See. Uh-huh. And it's happening every second sentence. It's like really frequent. And it's like the act signal back from the modem that says I got your signal. And if you don't do that, they're like, what's up? And in other cultures, if you make any noise at all, it's like insulting and hey, I've got the floor. What do you do in talking? Right? So I think that there's a lot of cultural, there's a cultural dimension to this. That's interesting. But one reason why I love jazz hands and why I teach it whenever I give a speech or whatever else is that it allows for a side band that's easily visible. That's not an attempt to take the floor. It's not meant to be disruptive or interruptive, although I think it occasionally can be. Um, but it gives it, and it changes it from speaker and audience to meaning makers sort of together where one person has the floor right now. And I like that a lot about it. So, so to me, jazz hands is a tool in my basket of things. It ain't a sophisticated tool, but I have to confess it was a, it was an enlightenment to me when I discovered jazz hands because for retreats I've been running since 1996. I invented red and green cards. Then I used to give everybody plastic cards this big that they could hold up during a meeting to say I agree or I disagree with what's being said with no intention of stopping the conversation. And then it's like, well, crap, we've, we've most, you know, we've got red, you know, green cards and red cards on board right now. Why don't we just use them all the time?  Brady Bunch. Brady Bunch, thank you. I have memories poor on this. Partridge family was a little partridge is working across the bottom of the screen. That's right. Okay. So, so Brady Bunch. So it's one thing to have that, like the Brady Bunch gallery view and see a lot of faces, but, but when you get more activity in, I think that livens things up a bit. And can I really like what you said earlier about, you know, how do we see more of our environment, more of us doing things, stand, move around, do whatever. And I'm also very aware that lighting is really crucial to a good video conference. And, and I put up a page somewhere about how to be better on video, just because most people don't know the basics of how to get there. And it's really hard to have a quiet enough room where you're not disturbing somebody, good enough lighting that you're visible, and then the mobility and the other things that you're talking about, like, how do you combine all of that so that it feels like you're more present as a whole person rather than a talking head? I can respond to Christina for a moment. This is one of the things that, that I believe came out of one of Google's projects, Aristotle or Oxygen, where they're working at what made for good teams. And something that really flummoxed them for a long time was this, they discovered it was actually norms that, that you could be on two different teams.  And both those teams would be high performing, but it was an agreed upon norm among the team. So when you've got, when you're talking with a friend, where it's just easy like that, you do it all the time, it's one thing, you add a third person, you need to actually talk about a norm and say, look, this is how we talk together, if that's too fast for you, we'll slow it down. I'm of the, I like to lean towards, I want to interrupt, I'm sitting here on these calls, these are great disciplines for me to sit here and be quiet and not jump in, you know, because there's so many things I want to put a tag on, right? And there's great value in slowing things down. So it's always something that I think that's negotiated. And if the negotiators are done with, with good heart and good will, generally they work out pretty well.  But when you've got somebody really rigid, how that becomes a question of how do you, how do you normally have someone who's very, very rigid? And that's a whole different conversation. But most folks are pretty, you know, if you say this is what we do, that's what we do. And they're, they're pretty onboarded. So I would love to talk to you more this bit, like when I know that that's the dynamic, I can do that. But the thing, the specific thing that I was talking about is that I was just meeting this person and we were recognizing in real time, the way that each other's brains worked and starting to go into this path. Like when I met another mapper that had this kind of thing, he, when I saw him realize that I had that kind of brain, he paused. He said, Oh, I can talk to you this way. And his rate of speech doubled. Right. So it's, it was, it may not repeat itself very many times, but it was specifically this thing that emerged at a conversation at the table with four people where two of us went into this different mode of speaking without really, I mean, I guess that's just a noticing that we're starting to do it. Cause it wasn't like a thing I was expecting at all. It wasn't a team norm. We weren't a team yet. So one of my interview techniques, which isn't exactly what you're talking about, but right next door was cause I'm curious about everything. And I know a little bit about a bunch of stuff. So in a new setting where it was some new domain and I was meeting a new person, I would ask a question or mention something that was kind of as far up the ladder of, of knowing something about their field that is I could possibly do. I would basically aim really high and say, well, yeah, but that happened or whatever. And you could often see, oh, okay. So they understand that dynamic about my business or my environment and they would shift to a different level of conversation comfortably and quickly. And so, so I learned that, you know, it was an opening gambit for me to aim pretty high in the realm of whatever the hell I knew about whatever they were up to that would transform the conversation. It worked, it worked a lot. And then I would often then have to race to catch up because they would then be saying things and mentioning things that I've maybe had never heard of, didn't know very much about. So I'm taking copious notes. Later I'd go back and like follow up on some of those things so that I could learn more. But I then could treat each meeting like this as a little bit of grad school.  We are three minutes away from 90 minutes of, of our intro call. So I kind of just want to make room for any wrapping comments. What I'm going to do is I'll create another insight. Jerry's been called on a pedo for next week. Give everybody more time to put it on your schedules if you can. I'm sorry, they're in the middle of the work week. It's kind of when I can, when I can put things and we'll see where it goes. But maybe a quick go around for thoughts about a pedo relative to our conversation. Anybody? Mueller, Mueller, Christina. So putting it back in the context of groups, the, what do you call it? So there's a, there's a, there's a mindfulness that is seen as individual mindfulness and Jeremy Lent in his, I actually put the podcast episode in the chat a while back, the emerge podcast that Daniel Thorsten interviewed Jeremy Lent, who wrote the patterning instinct. He was talking about cultural mindfulness and mindfulness as a group. What does that mean? And in the dynamic we were just talking about perhaps recognizing sort of the direction of the spiral of somebody else's comfort level and where their own capabilities and comfort zones are so that you're not, I kind of felt like an UK or, or on the mat in the Aikido metaphor, you, you're basically like putting a white belt in a place where they are in a little bit of danger. They're not, they're like, you don't want to get them hurt. You do want to push them up against the edge of their learning, but you don't want to get them hurt. So in the social dynamic where my friend felt I was being rude, there's like, it was like, it was like training with a couple of black belts that are going too fast for your, what you're doing right now. And so being able to have mindfulness, include mindfulness of the dynamic in the group, include like, not just I'm going to focus on my breath, but I'm going to focus on whether the person next to me is breathing. Thank you. And, and I'm also thinking about what you just said in the context of a zoom call, right? You know, how to pay attention to who's, who's doing what and, and what's going on. And it's, it's challenging, but sort of in some, in some respects, sort of doable. Anybody else thoughts? I know the practice that we had when I was spent, my years working with Juanita and David at the World Cafe was really periodically every three or four months. Gather some folks together and we'd sit in 10, 15 minutes of silence with the question, what if the World Cafe had a voice? What would it be telling us right now? Which is part of the principle of listening into the center, you know, what's, if there's one voice in this conversation, what is it, what's it speaking to us? And I think that's another useful thing to do on, in groups is periodically stop and say, okay, so what's emerging there? What's, you know, if there's, if there's some theme or some voice that is a deeper voice that's speaking through many different people, what is that saying? What's, what's, what's here? And I have a really short poem, if you want, I could close with when you're ready to actually close. Thank you. I know you're usually open with them, but I thought I'd offer them a close. That's lovely. Judy? I'm just thinking that the mindfulness key is central to all of this and to really what is the up of up keto, but there's practice and discipline. And I think my language doesn't match some people's language on the topic. But if we could, on a subsequent call, separate it into conscious divisions of dimension.  What do I invite another person to do? What do I, what works in a group? Because getting to group mindfulness, which is sort of peak performance zone, peak connection zone is what it's all about. But each person is at a very different place. And some groups are open to a physical approach to it. In a typical corporate meeting room, collective breathing would be met with a great deal of skepticism. But there are other pauses that can have some effect. And I'd be interested to sort of explore those different zones a little bit systematically if it's not, but not restrictively systematically. It's really interesting. I did some work with Sun Corp in Australia in 2015.  But, but in the biggest room, they had a practice that had shown up where they would take an iPhone and do like a six minute meditation before the meeting. And they'd put the iPhone next to the speakerphone and everybody would sit back. And I was like, whoa, this is super interesting. And it helped. I don't know that it helped the whole bunch, but it was to me, it was fascinating that it was happening in a large Australian corporation. So I think that the door is not open much, but the door occasionally opens to interesting practices like that. And again, if we can have a variety of practices, that could be super, super useful. Thank you. Robert, Mike, can you talk? Sure, I can go. I'm excited that there'll be another up keto call. I'm sorry, I was a little late, but I guess my context for it is more Brazilian jujitsu, although I haven't done much of it. The one thing I shared a link in the channel, and maybe this is a can of worms I can open up on the next call, but something to look into is this concept of game shifting, which we could potentially develop further together. But it's this idea that groups in conversation can make their sort of form intentional and explicit, and then we can maybe visualize that on a board or something and maybe be polymorphic and intentionally flow from one sort of state to another. So maybe one of those states is two black belts rolling on the mat and we're just observing or something like that. And so, yeah, maybe just bring it up for next time. So I love that. And Arthur Brock did some game shifting for Rex meeting I held once in Austin, and he was using a whiteboard to do things. And I was struck that this would make really interesting iPad software for meetings, that letting people see which protocol we're using right now, what's next in the agenda, where are we in our little journey, et cetera, et cetera, would be super cool and interesting. So I'd love to create an open source package that does game shifting and figure that out. So I love that idea, Robert. Thank you. Mike, any thoughts? No, just thank you for a fascinating discussion. This is quite different than a lot of the normal topics that you've covered in the past. So look forward to hearing more in future talks. Glad my schedule worked. Sounds great. Yeah, thank you for being here. Really, really appreciate it. And I do have to show you one other one other of my favorite Japanese prints. This is not one of the classics. But can you see that one? Yes. It's lovely. It's a mountain village up in the northern Japan, so. Beautiful. Oh, it's lovely. And I saw a post recently that went into the Great Wave off Kanagawa Hokusai's print and showed that he did that same scene like at least four times in his life. And each time it gets more dramatic. You can see the lifetime shift of his forms of expression. It's really genius. And the last one is like boom. But the first one is sort of like, hey, beach scene with a wave. He did exactly that same scene because that's part of the series of views of Mount Fuji, but he did that same scene that same angle. He did that same scene from that same basically that composition. And at least four time I've got the images. I downloaded them to my to my drive. So actually just for for half a second before Ken and poem. Let me go to. So Hokusai. Here's the Great Wave off Kanagawa. And here's why the Great Wave is Mr. Missified Art Lovers. Shoot. I thought I had put the the different versions that wherever that article was here. But I guess I didn't. Brain fail. Amazing exhibit of his work at the Smithsonian about eight or nine years ago. Cool. Got the t-shirt. Nice. Ken, we have an umbrella with a great wave on it. How's that? And I think April has a tote bag too. Ken, please. There's actually a meme going around on Facebook right now of the Great Wave filled with plastic trash, which is, you know, a poignant and powerful statement. Okay. So William Stafford is one of my favorite poets. I had a couple of his poems committed to memory. And this one is called ultimate problems. So the promises in the Aztec design, God is in the little P is rolling out of the bottom of the picture.  There is no P. God is everywhere. But hard to see the Aztec frowns at this. How do you know that he's everywhere? And how did he get out of the P? Sweet. Sweet, sweet, sweet. Thank you. William. Stafford. Stafford, who I know, but what's the name of the poem? Ultimate problems. It's the most succinct course and comparative religion I've ever seen in my life. Sweet. Thank you very, very much. Thank you everybody. This has been a treat. I will put up a session for next week and we'll dive a little deeper into up keto. If you want edit privileges on up keto.com, I'll fix up, I'll fix up the 404. If you want to be able to edit that, let me ping me on email and I'll add you to the list and we'll go from there. Thank you. Nice to meet all the new folks. Thanks everybody. Have a great weekend everyone. Thank you.


Hello everybody, welcome to this presentation. Today I will be giving a talk about our recent check paper. Pay attention to raw truthies, a deep learning architecture for end-to-end profiling attacks. Let's start with the basic motivation of this work. Deep learning has been widely used in the third channel analysis in recent years. Many works defeat the concomitants like masking and address the desecronization issues simultaneously by deep learning. The neural network has shown its ability in the third channel context. In almost all of these papers, the selected narrow truth intervals instead of the raw truthsies are used, even when the implementation is protected by masking countermeasure. That means there is a manual feature extraction before the profiling. In our opinion, this previous work do the research with an implicit assumption that the number of time samples in raw truthsies can be reduced before the profiling easily. However, if we consider a practical black box analysis on a masked implementation, locating the leakages is arguably the most challenging part of the whole analysis. The assumption may be too strong or even invalid in a practical analysis targeting a masked implementation. Therefore, we argue that to fully utilize the potential of deep learning and get rid of any manual intervention, we need the end-to-end profiling that directly maps the raw truthsies to target intermediate values. So in our paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture composed of encoders, attention mechanism and a qualifier to conduct the end-to-end profiling. And here we have four main contributions in this work. The first is an architecture for practical end-to-end profiling, so it could directly profile raw truthsies. The second is that to build the end-to-end architecture, we introduce some new structures into the SAA. Third, we get satisfying results on public data sites with our architecture. And fourth, we explore the attention mechanism in the SAA context, which further explains why our end-to-end architecture works. Here is our new architecture. We propose this architecture to conduct the end-to-end profiling no matter the raw truthsies are desecronized or protected by the masking countermeasures. And we could see how these three components work from the viewpoint of SAA in this picture. Roughly speaking, the encoders will first encode raw truthsies to the abstract features. Then the attention mechanism will give each feature a score and wait to sum them up. Finally, the classifier generates the probability from the final feature vector. I will give a more detailed introduction of our end-to-end architecture in the next. First is the encoder component. The encoder component includes two paths, the junior encoder and the senior encoder. Here we start from the junior encoder first. For the junior encoder, we also have two kinds of structures to handle the synchronized and desecronized scenarios. For the synchronized scenario, we use the locally connected layer. This layer is quite similar to the convolutional layer, except it does not share the filter width among the steps when it slides along the truthsies. We could see how it works in the red-hand figure. We choose this layer because the locally connected layer decouples its neuron from the whole height dimensional input, which is crucial to generate fine-grade features with high quality, as we observed. For the desecronized scenario, we still use the stacked convolutional layers and polling layers. We use them to extract shift-in-variant features to address the desecronization, but we avoid the falling connections and very deep convolutional structure by other upper components like the senior encoder and attention. Then is the senior encoder. For the senior encoder, we use the non-short-term memory. So why do we choose LSTM as the senior encoder? First, LSTM could learn to control the data flow automatically when it goes through the sequential data. There are three gates in LSTM, and these gates will control what information is collected for God and Yeldin. Second, there is a built-in structure in LSTM called memory field for storing the combined features. Compared to some other gated recurrent layers without the built-in memory like JRU, we find that the built-in memory makes the feature combination more stable. Third, LSTM could theoretically handle infinite non-sequences. The LSTM in our architecture works under the second to second mode. The reason of using this mode is that including a two-long sequence into a single feature vector is still too hard. The LSTM still faces a great unusual impractice. As a result, we need some mechanism to reduce the hardness of training. Ideally, if we can show some critical time steps or at least shorten the time sequence automatically, the training will be much easier. Therefore, we select the second to second mode which imposes the heightened state at each time step to satisfy the necessary precondition. Our senior encoder consists of two LSTM layers with different directions, one forward and one backward. Since one of the LSTMs reads the input backward, the order of accessing the sensitive languages is reversed from the forward one. These two LSTMs may learn different kinds of combinations or features. And they are also two ways to utilize the output seconds of these two LSTM layers. We could concatenate them along the feature axis, like the figure on the left side, or keep them independent, like the figure on the right side. If we don't want the outputs of LSTMs to interact with each other through the margin operation, nor limit the representing flexibility of higher layers, we could just keep them independent. And the independent LSTMs give better explanation of how our architecture locates the informative intervals. We will give more evidence when we realize the attention mechanisms later.  The attention mechanism evaluates each feature editor each from the senior encoder and gives each of them a score. The primary motivation of using attention is to reduce the valid length of a sequence, so it is unnecessary for LSTMs to include the whole feature sequence to a single feature vector. The attention mechanism selects some important time steps, and it essentially departs the sequence by the probabilities where the value is large enough. As a result, in ideal conditions, the LSTM could only remember the information in our shortened interval, that is, remember the information before a distinct attention peak. This naturally solves the gradient issue in practice. For the detailed implementation, we modify the attention mechanism proposed by Bodno by inserting a best normalization layer after calculating the Rothgauss. Then the Rothgauss are still normalized by the softmax function. Finally, we conduct a weighted sum according to the normalized scores, also known as the attention probability. We just skip the introduction of our classifier component, as it is just a simple fully connected layer. If we jump off of the implementation details, there are two variants of our architecture. These two variants are related to how our two LSTMs are concatenated. For the case that the LSTMs are connected along the feature axis, we use only one attention instance as the figure of Runt1. For the case that the two LSTMs are independent, we append an attention instance on each LSTM, like the figure of Runt2. In Runt2, the attention components are also directional. We find that the Runt2 could handle more complicated leaking scenarios. For example, the sensitive leakages are far from each other, or spread in multiple closed echoes. But Runt1 is more efficient in training when the leaking scenario is simple. So, what do we get through our new architecture? Let me start from some basic settings of our experiments. First, we consider the identity label. That means we have 256 labels, and typically we use the output of AES as books. And we also consider both synchronized and desynchronized cases. Below are the data sites we use in our experiments. Four of them are public, two from DPA Contest, and the rest two from FK. These four data sites are protected by BooleanMask. We also acquire 80128 data sites from an 80Mega128 MCU, on which we simulate a masking counter mirror. The 80128-F means the leakages of mask and mask value are far from each other. So, it is a harder trick that compared to the 80128-N when we consider the N2N profiling. You can see from the third column that we could use over 400,000 time samples directly in profiling. We also want to clarify that we use fcatv2 to refer to the data site collected on 80Mega8515 with variable key. The holders released a new tree set collected on ARM STM32 after the submission of our paper and also named it fcatv2. So, don't confuse these two data sites. First, we apply our network to synchronized trees. Here are the results of the data site DPA Contest v4.1. The first, second, and third column are the validation accuracy, validation loss, and the gather entropy respectively. In the first rule, we do not use the knowledge of mask. We reach the gather entropy zero in four or five trees. And in the second rule, we suppose the value of mask is known. We need only one tree to recover the key. Then we test the data site DPA Contest v4.2. In this data site, there are 13 sub-sites, each corresponding to a different key. We use the trees from all of the 16 sub-sites to train our tech. In the gather entropy figure, we could see that most sub-sites could be successfully attacked in 10 trees. The sub-sites 12 is harder to attack, and it needs about 120 trees. Next, we consider the fcat data site. From the figures of fcatv1, we find that our network could reduce the gather entropy to zero very efficiently. It costs about six trees to recover the key. To our best knowledge, this result is state-of-the-art, even compared to the result based on the selected PUIs. From the figures of fcatv2, we see that the attack is also pretty efficient. We use about 10 trees to recover the correct key. To our best knowledge, this is also a state-of-the-art attacking result on this data site. Even we use the raw trees. We give detailed explanations about the loss and accuracy curve in our paper, so I will not dive into them in this presentation. Next, we come to the 8128 data site. We use both of the variants on these two data sites to explore how to use architecture according to the different leaking scenarios. In 8128-n, the leakjes are limited in a narrow interval on the raw trees. Where in 8128-f, the leakjes are far from each other. Besides the efficient attack, the gather entropy indicates that the network based on variant 2 handles both leaking conditions better in terms of profiling quality. The advantage of variant 1 is that it could converge with a larger batch site when the number of training trees is the same and thus get a good network for attack faster. We also give a more detailed discussion in our paper about how to choose these two variants. So, what will happen when we consider the de-synchronized trees? Well, in de-synchronized cases, we use stacked convolutional layers to replace the locally connected layer. The delay interval in figures mean the range of random shift we added to the trees to simulate the de-synchronization. We also find that the number of trees for both versions of the adcat is not quite enough for our end-to-end profiling, so we also conduct data augmentation. Finally, as the figures show, we could reduce the gather entropy to zero with very few trees. Next, we test the de-synchronized 8128 data sites. For efficient attack, we also conduct a data augmentation. And here are the gather entropy results. Again, you can see that we need only several trees to recover the key. Here are some comparisons to the previous works on the data site dp context v4.1 and adcat v1. In the first figure, the blue curve is our result using the raw trees and without knowing the mask. Well, the previous was using the shortened trees with knowing mask. We can see that also our profiling is conducted on raw trees, the attack is more efficient. In the second figure, the comparison result is similar. Our network trained on raw trees performs much better than the previous work trained on the reduced trees, and the curve of our gather entropy is in the corner. Here is a summary of our attacks. The first column is the data site. The second column is the random delay we used to simulate the de-synchronization. And the third column is the number of trees to recover the key. We can see that for most of the cases, we could reduce the gather entropy to zero in several trees. For some more challenging scenarios, we need tens or even more than a hundred trees. Now we show some comparisons of our network to explain how one of our key structures' tensing mechanism works. These are the results of our network trained on 8128 desks in, based on the variant 1. From the SNR and gradients, we could conclude that our network has found out the leakages, and the comparisons of the tensing so that the tensing mechanism decides the time step after the backward LSTM goes through the leakages is very important. So we can see an tensing peak in the subfigure C and subfigure D. The network trained on F-CAD based on variant 2 could give a more clear intuition of how our tensing mechanism focuses on the informative interval. In subfigure F, we plot the probabilities of forward and backward tensing. We could observe that both attention instances pay special attention just after LSTMs go through the time steps between about 800 and 900, and these time steps correspond to an interval around index 45,000 on the raw trees. In other words, this interval is subjected by a tensing mechanism to be the most informative interval on the raw trees. Not surprisingly, this interval includes the 700 time samples that are manually selected by the authors of F-CAD. Finally, we dive deeper into the LSTM. We plot the GIT activation state, and try to find out whether the LSTM indeed collects the leakages before the attention asks it to output. The GIT state is presented by blue curves. We can see the GIT is activated just as the position where the peaks of S&R are located. Therefore, the input GIT of LSTM is definitely controlling the LSTM to collect the informative leakages. The relations among the attention probabilities S&R and GIT activation indicate that the LSTM and attention mechanism interact as we designed. Finally, we move to the conclusion. In this paper, we introduce a neural network architecture for end-to-end profiling. That means rather than leveraging the knowledge of implementation and the value of masks to locate the informative intervals, we could profile the raw trees directly now. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first architecture that achieves end-to-end profiling. We also introduce some new structures into the S&E field to build the architecture, like the locally connected layers and the attention mechanism. Besides the effectiveness, we find our approach working under the end-to-end context performs even better than the networks trained on reduced trees. We also explore how the attention mechanism works in the third channel context to verify the architecture works as we designed. For the future works, it will be interesting to replace the LSTM to self-attention mechanism to fasten the training process. Since the LSTM cannot be parallelized, the training is time-consuming now, and we will also explore other neural networks or training strategies to improve the performance of deep learning in the S&E. So that's it. Thank you for your attention, and you are welcome to read our paper to get all the details. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. Thank you.