Everybody, if you will please mute yourselves while I'm speaking to avoid echo and disturbances while I'm doing the presentation. And if you would please say your questions for the end and ask your questions using the chat button, we'll appreciate it. Also, I want to make sure that everybody understands that this meeting will be recorded. This is a university drive improvements phase one project. And this is the second community meeting that we have my name is Raul Lopez. I am the project manager. And I work for the transfer in public works department in the city of Warsaw. I want to acknowledge the presence of a council member and Zeta. She's in the crowd. Zeta, would you like to say a few words? I just want to thank everybody for participating. This is a project that's been long awaited. We've been discussing it, I think, since before I was even in office. So I know that many are excited to see these improvements come and I appreciate everybody's attendance and I'm happy to be here. Thanks. Get started. I think most of us are aware of what the project location, but just to sort of revisit that it's been a while since we had. The first community meeting. This phase of the project goes from just south of West Rosedale fly over over university down to the train river bridge and just shot the train river base, not including the bridge. Just to give you sort of revisited how the project was conceived, there is a community design center for more CBCFW. This is a nonprofit organization that was conceived a few years ago and their mission is to enhance quality of the communities in Fort Worth. It's made up of architect, professional engineers, planners and in general visionaries that kind of look at areas that could improve with certain kinds of facilities or lack of certain facilities. This is their pilot project actually. They identified University Drive as a very important spine connecting so many cultural and attractions of Fort Worth. And so the objective of the project is to improve the corridor in elevated to the standards that it actually represents is the gateway for all this venues and cultural attractions in Fort Worth. So these are some of the venues and cultural and resources that we have along a connect connected by the University Drive corridor. So the CDC study that ran a study in 2016 on it identified areas of improvement for for the entire quarter. And I'll show you what the entire quarter is here in a second. And so some of the points that they identified as needed improvements were number one, traffic and pedestrians safety. It has declined over many years. The quarter has a car centric look to it. It looks like a highway. And so it needs improvements to enhance all the transportation, whether it's pedestrian, bicycle, transit. Aesthetically, it doesn't really represent the gateway that it actually is to the different resources and attractions. And it's lacking signage to direct people to the right places where they're trying to get to. So this is the University Drive corridor that the CDC studied. So you can see it extends on the north side from Trail Drive all the way down south to Kansas Street, which is just north of TCU. Phase one is what they referred to as the commercial core. We have already identified phase two and that is in the work in the initial stages, in the funding stages. Phase two is actually the section immediately north of phase one from Trail Drive to just north of 30. So that we have a project identity. We are a project number. We have a project matter assigned. We're negotiating or actually dealing with COG, the Council of Governments, to finalize the funding. And actually beginning of 2021, we should be able to get the project started, procure a professional design professional and get the project activity started. And then the rest of the project, the rest of the corridor will be future projects as funding becomes available. So phase one, let me begin from the West Coast. I'll fly over to just shout out a bridge, but it also includes old university. We always talk about University Drive, but it also includes improvements along all universities. So this is just a picture, a real picture of what the existing conditions or the existing old University Drive looks like. As you can see, it's a vast expanse of asphalt, seven lanes wide asphalt street with no median and basically just no amenities. Very, very poor or poor on pedestrian facilities and there are no bicycle facilities. Same thing for all University Drive is the very wide street. It doesn't need to be that wide. So of course we have some constraints that we need to live with. This is what I call an enhancement project. This is not the typical arterial project where we're going to go in and demolish the existing road and reconstruct it all together. And that's not what we're doing. What we are doing, so what we'll be doing is basically enhance what's out there and I'll give you a little more information about that in a second. We have limited right-of-way and we're not obtaining the whole lot of right-of-way other than to accommodate transit stops. So we need to work within the right, the existing right-of-way in most cases. The project will not have a reduced number of through lanes. So there are six lanes today, six through lanes today. When the project is complete, there will still be six through lanes. And of course the limited funding will always have to deal with that. So to the scope, there are three or four major elements on the project. One of the most important elements on the project is to improve safety and what we're going to do is we're going to add a center median. On this upper left hand picture here, the center median is designated by the lime green shape. Another element of the project is to provide pedestrian facilities and safe crosswalks across university. And we will be providing a traffic signal at Collins Forest. Another element of the project is the construction or addition of hardscape and landscape facilities within the corridor to make it basically aesthetically pleasing. And it's just a sample picture. Continuing on the scope, this is all university drive. So all university drive, we're going to put it on a little diet. It's referred to as a road diet. So what we're doing on all university drive is to whatever a street for the traffic that it carries. And so we're going to implement a bicycle lane, which is designated on this picture by the lime green line work. We're also going to be implementing a parking lane on either side of the road. And we are going to be extending a few segments of the sidewalk as shown here in blue. The blue line work designated the extension of the sidewalk. So the idea of the work that we're doing all universities is pretty hard to get on foot or on bike from university drive to Trinity Park or the Botanic Gardens or any of those attractions north of those. And that's going to be a little bit of a difficulty in our state. Because the railroad bridges are pretty, the railroad bridges are a constriction of old university drive. If you try to get through from old university, I mean, South University to North University, the sidewalk is probably about a foot wide. And that's actually a sidewalk. Technically a sidewalk is just a section of concrete. One of the Scottish people from taking that route and we're going to, the idea is to of course bicycle users in pedestrians to go up old university, connect to Trinity Park on the north. And then if they want to get back to old university, there are trails that will bring them back to old university. I mean, sorry, to university drive. On the scope of the project, we will also be improving the transit stops right now. What's out there is basically a concrete bench on the grass throne and grass strip. Those are not obviously, they're not ADA compliant. So we will be constructing ADA compliant facilities. So what is the deal with Trindy Metro is that we will be constructing the concrete work with the approach and the apron in front of the shelters. And then Trindy Metro will come and install the shelters themselves. We're also going to be installing wayfinding signage. And we will be working with the CDC on where the signs should go and also what attractions they should feature. And they're going to look similar to these. They're going to be similar to what the ones that are in downtown and the structures. I believe there's some of those. So this is sort of an overall aerial view of the projects all together, project scope all together. This is just so you guys can see the center median and so everything in perspective. But I'm going to be walking, zooming a little closer segment by segment and discussing what we're going to be doing there. So the center median is designated by the time, the 10 shaped here. And this is, this colorful island, there are literally islands, is where we're going to have landscapes. So that's the necessity of having electron lanes on the quarter that basically limits the median width to a minimum of five to six width. In some cases, four foot wide. So we cannot implement landscape in those areas. So we are limited to landscape at the north end between University Park Village and Collins Forth, this little area here, and also just south of Collins Forth. So just to zoom in, the close up of the north end, this is the West Rose Hill Overpass. And so this is where we're going to have an island landscape going southbound. There will be a left turn lane for the Pancake House. And then going northbound, there will be a left turn lane that will provide access, left turn access to the gas station. Again, the blue is designating the sidewalk improvements. The sidewalk improvements, again, where we're not going to improve the whole corridor. We're not going to take all of the sidewalk out of the entire corridor and reconstruct it. We're just basically winding where we can, where we see the opportunity to widen the sidewalk to provide higher capacity, pedestrian capacity. As we move on south to the University Park Village and Old University intersection. Again, the center median is designated about a 10 shaped. We will be installing a new signal at Old University Drive. And we are eliminating the crosswalk along the north side because we have identified that that's a major safety concern. I believe there was a pedestrian hit there in the past. And so we are eliminating that crosswalk, what we are providing a crosswalk along the south side. This is one of the enhancements. Those crosswalks are going to be stamp concrete. So it's going to give the corridor a little character. All of the curb ramps will be upgraded to the ADA or accessibility standards. We move on south. This is kind of a special case. Ultimately, there will be a median all the way from north to south with only median openings at the intersections. And the left turn lanes that I've already discussed. But in an area in Bay, we have talked to the trademark. The trademark is the owner of these properties, both West Bay and I believe the old Hawthorne sweet sites. So they reached out to us and we have agreed to provide a temporary left turn bay to access the West Bay development on the east side of old University's drive. So this is again temporary and the agreement is that we will allow that to stay for five years after the completion of construction of the project. Or at the time when the West Bay and the south development of the old Hawthorne sweet site is redeveloped at which time they will be able to provide a driveway at Collins Ford and make it a four-way intersection and then provide access to this site for southbound traffic, southbound left turning traffic. And then at that time they will close that, they will bridge that gap there, they will close that gap there. But the reason we're doing that is because the allowance of a left turn lane here is counter to the objective of the project and it represents a safety concern left turn, I mean left turn traffic here going northbound and left turn traffic here that's too close to that, those two movements are too close to each other. And we want to limit the safety concerns right there. So this is actually the ultimate condition basically at the time when they either redevelop that site or five years later we will go ahead and we're working on an agreement with trademarks so that they will actually, at the time they construct these or five years later, they will actually fill in the gap and construct the ultimate improvements which is basically a solid median and then a landscape improvements in the center. Again we are installing a traffic signal at Collins Ford and there will be crosswalks but there won't be a crosswalk along the south side again that's because of safety concerns there is a visibility concern coming off the train river bridge. The third landscape outline would be just immediately south of Collins Ford. The existing left turn lane provided access to river on will remain and of course there will be a left turn lane for Collins Ford going northbound. This is the close up of what we're going to be doing on all universities. So the hatch in here represents basically a buffer between the travel lane and the bike lane. So the bike lane is going to be the little tick marks here that you can barely see. Those are the T-shaped tick marks that we put on the surface to designate the different parking spaces. So that designates the parking lane on either side of the road and then immediately just into that there will be a bike lane and there will be a three foot buffer and then we will have the two lanes traffic lanes. The blue again designates the extension of sidewalks to provide connectivity to the trinity trails and we are providing a crosswalk right at this point just north of that circle to connect to the trinity trails again. And then this blow here designates the connection of the bike lanes to the trinity trails. So this is the proposed landscape. These are the three islands starting with this one. This is the one at the very north just south of Roastill, of West Roastill. And so this is sort of the color palette that has been proposed for the landscape on the hardscape. I think I can zoom in here. So this is going to be, there's going to be a brick paver, sort of a perimeter around the island and then we're going to have of course landscape in the center. So they're similar in concept, they just vary in size. So this is the one that's going to be ultimately constructed between Collinsport and University Park Village and this one would be the one between Collinsport and the bridge. And this is actually pictures of the plants that are being chosen to implement the landscape. We have stasis and we have skull caps and these are the different colors they take on different seasons. So I think this is going to be really, really nice and it's going to give the corridor a different character. Project cost, the construction budget is $2.4 million. Overall budget for the project is $4 million and we are still within budget. So our schedule is concerned. We just completed the preliminary design at the end of the summer. So we're now working on what we call the 90% milestone, which is basically almost complete but not quite. We hope to have 100% plans and construction contracts drafted by the end of this year or January 2021. We will start right away acquisition within the next few weeks. We're just waiting on that right away acquisition meet and balance descriptions to be provided to us so we can provide it to property management for them to approach property owners. Utility clearance, we should be able to start that in January and it shouldn't take any longer than six months, maybe six, seven months at the most. Both right away and utility clearance are not anticipating major delays caused by that and that's why I'm putting this construction schedule, I mean this project schedule on the slide here. If we were to basically go by our standard project schedules, it would be a lot longer but because the right away acquisition that we're doing is just a few strips here and there basically to facilitate the construction of the bus stops, that's not going to impede us from starting construction of the median or striping along old university. We shouldn't delay that portion of the work so we are confident that we should be able to start construction around the summer of 2021. Same thing with utility clearance, we don't anticipate a whole lot of utilities to be moved because they're not winding the road. We're basically constructing a median and there may be a few ground boxes here and there that may have to be relocated to avoid conflicts but I don't anticipate that to be a major delay. We will have, of course, another community meeting and that would be when we are ready to go to construction and of course that will be announced to everybody just like we did this time. With that, that is my contact information and so I'm going to go ahead and open it up for questions now. If you'll please post your questions in the chat, we would appreciate it. I'm going to give everybody a chance to, if you're like me, you can talk faster than you can type, that's me. Well, we have a pretty small group as well, so if anyone would rather just ask the question, just put it in the chat, you'd like to talk and we'll unmute you one at a time so we don't talk over each other. We also have one call-in person as well with whom I can unmute. Can you unmute him? Jeff, I don't think I can. I have unmuted whoever called in on the phone. The last two digits are A2. A2, yes. I've unmuted you if you'd like to talk or ask a question. I don't have any questions at this time. All right, thank you. We've got some questions coming in now, let it roll. Okay. Another question is what are the impediments to placing trees in the median if it is cost? Then there is the possibility of allowing donations to cover costs. So the hardship of putting trees in the median is not cost. The hardship of putting trees in the median is the fact that where we're building the median is a paved over area that has been paid for many, many, many, many years and it's over-consolidated. The subsoils are over-consolidated and we discussed this at length with our parks department or tree experts in the parks department and they thought that it would take naturally our landscape architect as well. They thought that it would take excavating anywhere from 8 to 10 feet to remove all that over-consolidated soils and import proper soils for the trees to be able to take root and establish themselves. So that's the part that makes it hard to plant trees in the median. So we decided to go with the short, slow profile landscape. Another question says, when we met last year, I asked about the extra traffic cost by the median. You mentioned sending it to Rogers, which is already overcrowded. Is that still a plan? I'm not sure I understand why the median would cause extra traffic. I would assume... I would assume you mean that the median would cause basically concentrate lecturing movement at the intersections. I think that's what it's meant by that and I'm not sure why it would go down Rogers. I'm not really sure if that's a construction concern during construction. Well, I'm going to go ahead and unmute Mr. Garcia. Yeah, can you unmute Mr. Garcia to clarify that question? Hi, yes. Okay, last year when we met about this at the zoo, talked about how with all of the entrances available right now to University Park Village, there are already times that traffic backs up into the number one lane going northbound on University. And as we reduce the available entrances from northbound University to University Park Village, I can't imagine that it's going to do anything besides increased traffic. And last year when we met, we talked about that hadn't really studied the traffic patterns yet and that you expect for more people to go down Rogers Road, which again, if you drive down Rogers Road, trying to go northbound at five o'clock, heaven forbid there's an 18-wheeler coming off of the, out of the rail yard, trying to go that direction also. The traffic already backs up beyond the jack in the box, sometimes even beyond the northernmost rear entrance to University Park Village. And I can't imagine how much worse it will get if there are more cars added to that. So I'm trying to open Google Maps here if you'll bear with me. Aaron, are you there? Jeff, can you unmute Aaron Freaky? Yes. He's muted. I'm here. Can we talk a little bit about traffic? Well, I don't... People will go down Rogers Road if they want to get out of the University Park Village parking lot.  That's not what I mean. I mean, traveling northbound down University, anybody that is trying to just get north of I-30, right now, there's already an ungodly amount of traffic and there's times that I'm trying to go east on I-30 or north of I-30 from where Hofbrau was and the traffic backs up already to Old University Drive. And as we back cars up in the center lane, like the left-most lane of northbound University, I can't imagine that that traffic is going to do anything but increase. And when we've talked about this last year, when this project was supposed to start in June, we discussed that you would expect there to be overflow traffic going northbound on Rogers. People trying to get around the whole area. I don't recall exactly that conversation, but what I can tell you is we're not reducing capacity in Old University. We're not taking lanes away. Yes, we are taking a left turn movement out. We're concentrating on certain points, but the stack and distance that we're providing for traffic to basically queue on those left turn movements has been designed to accommodate the volume that is expected to make left turn lanes. Yeah, well, we're going from three entrances to one and the entrance by each of these oftentimes is backed up four or five cars. The entrance at the light is backed up four or five cars. The entrance at the Apple store, Starbucks is backed up four or five cars. And now you put all of those into one. I don't think that they're all going to fit in that one turn line. So that has been a counterpoint in the traffic study and that's what I'm trying to explain. Okay. All right. Well, when we met last time there had not been a traffic study yet. Yeah, we completed traffic studies in the left turn bays or the left turn bay at Old University Drive and as he turns on to University Park Village it's long enough to accommodate the queue that's anticipated as a traffic study. So that's all being looked at. We realize those queues are going to be longer because we're concentrating the left turns into a single location versus multiple locations. Repairing and replacing the triangular meeting at Old University and Rolls-Dills is part of the plan. That's about that, Michael, many times. Whoops, I'm going the wrong way. Aaron, are we including this? I think we were. At one point we were going to include it, but we didn't receive a direction of putting people into that walking area underneath Rosedale. We were basically going to take people across that lane and put people in that underpass underneath Rosedale. So there is not an intention on putting a sidewalk underneath there. So we backed off of doing that until funding or a project comes up to address that, a place to get from this Rosedale area to the Trinity Trail. Right. The other catch to that is, and Aaron, you correct me, we were talking about this. Is this text us right away? Correct. Yeah, so the other catch to that is that text that has changed their permitting processes and now they're requiring what they call a local on system agreement. And those require probably, I'm going to say, nine to 10 months to get through or what little improvements we might be proposing. So we would not want to delay the project by eight or nine months to get a permit from tech that on that. Yeah, the cost of removing that all of that soil and bringing appropriate soil is very significant. So that's what's prohibited in the addition of trees. Raul, another addition to that comment was when you water trees in that median in order to get them going for about the first few years, you're going to have a lot of water in that. And with the subsoils and the compaction that's been happening or that's happened over the decades of this thoroughfare, we have to put in some type of sub drainage, sub structure for drainage. That's the right way across to the closest inlet or storm drain. Yes. That will require tearing off the pavement. And so, yeah, that's basically cost compounds. Will there be more bike share lanes or university drive leading on to all university drives? No, the answer to that is no. Bicycles will have to remain on the sidewalk until they get to all university drive. There's no room to ride a bike lane on university drive. Currently the signal timing for pedestrians of university and all universities so short of pedestrians almost don't have time to get across. Yes. The timing will be redesigned basically with the addition of the signal. There will be a new signal and obviously pet buttons get across and new timing. Yeah, we realize that pork chop is really bad. We can look into that. I'm not sure. But if it takes that long to get it approved by TechDOT, we may have to put that up and maybe until the next phase, phase two. But I want to throw a caveat in there because for phase two we're getting federal funding and federal funding basically we need to stay within the limits that we've designated for that federal funding so we can't go beyond those limits. So we can look into that and see if we can accommodate that. Is the goal of the project to increase pedestrian traffic between West Bend and UPV? Do we anticipate... Whoops, I lost my track here. Is the goal of the project to increase pedestrian traffic between West Bend and UPV? The answer to that is the goal of the project is to provide more pedestrian mobility either across from one side or the other or along the corridor. Do we anticipate people walking from HG supply to Banana Republic? I don't know where HG supply is. Can you unmute Mr. Garcia, Jeff? It's to the right along the river. HG supply is... HG supply is in the easternmost part of West Bend along the river in Banana Republic is in the westernmost part of UPV. I'm just wondering if there is a need for this, if people are going to use it, if we're solving a problem that exists? The intent is to promote pedestrian traffic across the street. If you're going to shop on UPV and you want to go have lunch at West Bend, instead of moving your car, you can go across the street. My question is... My question is that going to be a realistic expectation of people that they are going to walk across the whole parking lot and across the street and across another parking lot instead of just moving their car. That is what we're trying to promote. Yeah. Okay. We're trying to promote it, but we don't know that it's... Okay. So we're hoping that it's going to happen. Right. And it's not happening today because there's no radius to go from one end to the other. You have to go across seven lanes. The city of Fort Worth has become really strong on what we call Complete Street Project and active transportation. So we are promoting all those other means of transportation in addition to the traditional vehicular transportation. This is our one chance for a long, long time to be able to get treated into the median, and it's just the cost of the solar removal and drainage. I believe there are property owners in the area to be able to fund renew the cost. Well, Michael, that's a possibility, but I would really need the CDC's help on that because we don't have additional funding. If you think you can get additional funding, external funding in a timely manner, we would definitely be able to consider it. We just don't want to delay the project by a year or a year and a half waiting for people to make up their minds to be able to fund the project. Initially, at the beginning of the project, we talked about can we do an adopt the median type program? Well, those things are voluntary. We cannot just go knock on doors and say, do you want to maintain this median? We have to have somebody to come forward and volunteer. So the CDC can help with that by trying to persuade the different organizations or different groups and to augment the funding. That would be ideal. I would love to see trees out there, trust me. Now it looks a lot better. Roll another fund. Go ahead. What was that? Roll, this is Aaron Fricky. Another thing we discussed about the trees, we had a big discussion as to whether we're going to do trees or landscaping at the bottom. We talked about trees, low bushes and shrubs. One thing about the trees was due to the city thoroughfare plan and the requirements, there was a setback from the intersections and from the nose of any left-turn lanes that it really minimized where we could put trees. We only had about four trees we could put in the median. It wasn't like we were going to get a whole row of trees. That's true. We can't lose perspective of the fact that we were envisioning a sort of a tree-lined median, but that's not what we can achieve here because we only have three little pockets where we can put trees. Like Aaron said, they need to be setback a number of feet from the median cuts. I'm going to open the presentation here. Again, these are the only three spots. That right there, this right here. This might be able to sustain trees. That's probably about 150 to 100 linear feet, but we can't plant along the full length because of the spatial constrictions. The median will probably be able to plant maybe a few along the wider section of that area. Then we might be able to plant just a few here so long as they're not in conflict with this left turn movement visibility and also this future U-turn or left turn movement as well. Those are some of the limitations on the trees. We might be able to plant a few, but it's not going to be that tree-lined field that you have maybe along trail drive or some of the corridors. Jeff, can you unmute Michael Bennett? Can you hear me? He's unmuted. I understand that we're not going to end up with a tree-lined boulevard, but I would encourage us for the sake of making this a place where we may be slow down traffic a little bit, that the trees are helpful for that, for a place that feels a little bit more pleasant. Like I said, for a kind of one-time opportunity to sort of improve this corridor, I would encourage us to do everything we can to find a way to have trees. I understand that trees and traffic control and traffic sort of regulations don't necessarily play well together, but I think this feels like a freeway today. And I'm afraid that we're going to do all this work and spend this money, and it's still going to feel too much like a freeway. And so I would encourage us to do all we can. I think the community and the landowners around it would encourage you to try to find every way you can to green this up as much as you can. I don't know if the lanes are still the same width that they are today or if they could be tightened up a little bit. So I would just encourage us to look at all those kind of things. That's a good point you bring up, Michael. The lanes would be slightly narrower. We're going to narrow them down to 11 feet. So some of them are 11 feet today, but some of them are probably 12 feet. So they're going to be 11 feet. So it's going to be a little tighter. So that would help with the traffic calming desire. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And yeah, absolutely. We can talk about, you know, maybe, you know, if we can augment the funding and we can get stakeholders to pitch in and augment the funding, we can probably consider that option. Well, let us know as soon as you can and we will do all that we can to make sure that we've expended all the possibilities here. Yeah.  I hope you understand. It's one thing if you just say no, it's another thing where you say, if you can come up with, you know, numbers up $100,000, then if we, if we, if we try and we can't do it, that's one thing. It's another thing just to say we, we weren't given the opportunity. Right. I understand.  No, that'd be great. Appreciate it. And thank you guys for giving us the chance to hear all of this tonight and to weigh in on this. Oh, absolutely. Much appreciated. There's a comment says, that's from our council member. We greatly improved the area, Texas would fix the beat up curves in both sides of I-30. We can talk to Texas about that. I don't know how much cloud I have with Texas, but we'll talk to them, especially when we're doing both. When we do phase two, Texas will be involved because it'll be federal funding and so Texas would be involved in the monitoring of the project. This question about trees along the sidewalks is not on the median. There are no new trees in the project, correct? So, yeah, as we discussed, we'll reconsider the trees in the median, but there are no trees along the sidewalks. There's a very little room. We barely have room to widen some of the sidewalks. So, there won't be any trees along the sidewalks. So, we have some takers. Trademark is willing to put up as much money as needed. That's not what the comment says, but I'm just speaking on Kathy here. Hey, Kathy. We'll quantify the cost and come back to the CDC and probably include trademark in it. Yeah, we understand and integrate the sidewalk when we have a very wide parkway. The parkway is what we designated from the curb to the right-of-way, but the parkway is limited here, especially when we have street lights that are going to be in the parkway as well. We have sidewalks that we need you that we would prefer to widen for bicycles to use and more pedestrians to use. We have to provide bus stops that are ADA compliant. That requires a greater width of sidewalks. So, it's a little more challenging to put the trees on the parkway than it is on the intermediate. I just had one comment that I was going to make, and I know this might be a little anecdotal. This is Councilwoman Zeta. The question was raised about what people would walk from HB Supply to Banana Republic. And I can tell you that I do that today and many of us are waiting with bated breath to be able to walk this area and not have to get in our cars and drive from one parking lot to another parking lot. This whole area, the way it stands right now, you feel like you're taking your life into your hands to cross university, but I think that this will make it all of it more interconnected, which I think will benefit all of the businesses in the area. I even go so far as to take the number seven bus here and walk around and take it back or walk home all the way up to the other side of TCU. So I think there are a lot of people that are really excited about making areas in Fort Worth more walkable, and I am definitely one of them. So I appreciate this effort. Absolutely.  Yeah, I would have to say that the number seven bus only running once an hour is a bit of a challenge for taking public transit on this corridor, but hopefully we'll make some improvements there as well. Yeah, they say build in there will come, right? We don't have the facilities. We're not going to promote pedestrian and bicycle movement. Question, can you outline the aspects of this plan that will reduce accidents from my 30 to the Trinidad River? So most of the accidents identified have been left-turn movements, even that it is a two-way left-turn lane. So the reduction, the potential of reduction of accidents comes from the addition of the media. That is the last question for now. I'm going to give everybody a couple of minutes if you haven't been able to ask questions. If not, we will adjourn in a couple of minutes. I want to thank Council Member Zeta for joining us and providing her insight as well. Thank you very much. With no more questions, I thank you everybody for your attendance. And again, we'll have another one of these hopefully before we start construction, but we will get back with the CDC on the three matters. Thank you very much, and Jeff, and thank you, Council Member Jeff, and Erin, if I can talk to you for a second. Thank you guys. Bye. Have a good night, everybody.


This is a build a GM call for October 5th, 2021 Jerry's out for the first part of this call so we're doing something a little bit different. We started talking about a few different things right now we're talking about free Jerry's brain. And so it's a little kind of subcommittee. One of the members has actually already said, or has has observed that we, we blew past the small done done bar number. And now it's, there's too much too much noise for the amount of signal. We have a hyper focused small group and we've kind of like accreted and gotten a little bit bigger and fluffier. Not, not a bad thing necessarily, but actually there's an interesting tension in, we have a, we have a private matter most channel which has got many of the members of the, the original group, and not some of the people that have kind of joined. So the, the channel doesn't map the call very well anymore. And I said maybe we shouldn't invite more of the people who come to the calls to the channel. So, so there's a tension between getting bigger and doing more stuff and having more stuff and having less focus. Small done by a number I actually don't know I mark it's a good question. The person who wrote me privately and said we've already blew past it. As I understand it, Robin Dunbar, you know the original number is classically thought of as 150 it's actually 150 plus or minus 50 is the way the original paper was written. And recently on calls I've been hearing people say, oh Robin Dunbar's new number is more like five or something like that. I don't know. So, I actually don't really know. It'd be interesting to be interesting to, to figure that out. Certainly five is one of the classical numbers for effective software teams. Yeah. There's the, yes, I agree. My colleague Ross mayfield used to have three or four sizes of networks, one of them was, you know, three to seven or something like that, which is also the scrum number. And close to the two pizza number from Mr. Bezos. But anyway, Ross's numbers were like, he had this, he's got a great post, I'll have to dig it up. But the small number around five to seven, and then a larger number of 20 or something like that and then the Dunbar number the classical Dunbar number and then he Ross actually likes something he called I think political or something like that which is thousands of people. And those different sizes of networks are really important. And they work differently. Hey Jerry. Hey there. Nice to see everybody thank you for for shifting zooms and so forth I really appreciate it. I just finished a pitch presentation that went really well so very happy about that. Congratulations. I don't know that we've gotten super far. We started talking about free Jerry's brain a little bit. So let me give him 10 minutes in you should have solved everything. I know right. There's a few tweets here and there about the Facebook outage and everyone is like okay Facebook is down for two or three hours let's fix democracy and and get everybody back to it. That's great. I love that. So, class had an interesting question. You know, by the way, I heard some of the, you know, stuff that the next evolution of Jerry's brain. And is that kind of like AI and helping it having it help think and come up with ideas and stuff like that. I said that's one thing we've talked about. It's probably the smallest thing. The, the big effort is still free Jerry's brain Jerry's brain is held in proprietary software that's got a kind of a slow innovation curve. And it would be nice if it were multiplayer and less proprietary and more people playing. So, Jerry likes to think of. He's got, you know, hundreds of thousands of nodes. And he thinks that would make great sourdough starter for a much bigger and grander kind of way of thinking about the world and connected knowledge and things like that. So the engineering folks in free Jerry's brain it's mostly engineering folks with some UX and UI people data, data science people. Hi mark on one. You know, we've, we've cracked the code it's, we've got the data out in a way that we feel comfortable that we're holding the data. And now we're, you know, wondering what to do. We could have a hackathon, or whatever, around the idea of. Hey, here's this big connected knowledge graph. You know what would you do with it. Another, another option might be the one that ice kind of suggested a couple people kind of suggested I haven't did a little bit. It might be just to take Jerry's use of the brain which is kind of idiosyncratic in a good way. And it uses a subset of the whole the brain capabilities, but it uses it a very productive way, take just that and get some UX people to kind of replicate a design for that, and then have the data science people hook up the data that we've got to that front end. So anyway, the long, you know, the big, the headline is try to make free free to try to make Jerry's brain more open more accessible, more usable, collaboratively by more people. Well, the reason I'm asking is there is this this self learning software that somebody developed an AI as a core structure, which you can feed information to and it's, it starts sorting the information and making logical connections and then it's becoming actually intelligent. Yeah. And it's actually military create because it's it's not restricted access because it is used for nefarious reasons, and probably already part of the back anyhow so I was just wondering if Jerry's brain is if you're if you're supposed to or if you want to create the capacity to ask it the question, and it then knows where to go to. That is, that is, you know, a specific algorithm. That now sounds like like a specific capacity of the software to to self learn does that make sense or is that correct. Yeah, that makes sense. If I may that so you're describing something like to PT three maybe open AI and that kind of stuff there's basically what it, what those systems do is you throw it way too much information like all the information you can gather. And through a process of kind of trying to make connections and then self evaluating how how well the connections map the information that you've given it. It can bootstrap up an understanding of the knowledge space that you've presented it. So, so then you can do things like like a complete the sentence game is a is a good way to think about it.  They're talking about red. So it would fill in that sentence with red. It can get a lot more sophisticated and that that's a really simple example. So GPT three now. You can, you can ask another way to do that it's it's still the complete the sentence trick but you can do it with questions to so you can say what is the meaning of life and it will ramble on quite intelligently about you know what essentially it's remembering what it's found in a huge knowledge sphere. So, so certainly you could take a pre pre trained model like GPT three and whatever language models you want to knowledge models and stuff like that and then it could also learn the connectivity that Jerry's got in his brain and then do like auto connect. So you could give it a new thing like, here's a link about the Facebook outage in 2021 October. And it would say I think these other things are related. So, you could probably ask something like that what's the cause of the Facebook outage and if it was connected up to enough Twitter and things like that it would say, it was a BGP error. And it was a pretty good guess of what the, the answer to that question is, you know what or what were the social ramifications of the Facebook outage. Well, you know there were people who were disconnected in Latin America and people who couldn't use face up and Instagram. It's the whole AI thing is important to get into to learn about, and especially to get ahead of how we control it or not. The fear is kind of that I, we're not AI is aren't going to take over the world like a sci fi thing from 1950 or 1960. That's not going to happen anytime soon. But the thing that's already happened is that humans and AI is are working together to manipulate things. So actually Facebook, a lot of the reasons Facebook is bad is because they've got a bunch of AI driving people's dopamine cycles. So, thanks to the whistleblower whose name I can kind of imagine him I have been not, I don't have it memorized yet k h. Now we know that Facebook knows that the best way to get or a very, very good way to get people's dopamine levels amped up and stuff like that is hate and, you know, things like that so they've been purposely kind of driving society into hate mode largely built on the fact that they can do AI. I was, I was going to use a term of art against the human interactions. It is actually. Let me explain that. A lot of times you'll say against in a technical term. You know, I'm using this algorithm against this data set and it's not. It's not the English version of it is not oppositional oppositional or adversarial, but Facebook has actually been adversarial to human society and nation states and humanity for, you know, for gain for profit. The whistleblowers Francis Hogan. You're welcome. And I had to look her up I didn't remember her name off the top of my head either. Briefly, I just want to build on. She's a hero. Yeah, totally. Big time hero and her logic on this is just great and just the one sentence pull quote of it turns out that Facebook has been, you know, choosing profit over like civilization while over fixing these problems over and over again. That's terrific. So a couple things. I've got a draft of a challenge to come in and work on Jerry's open brain the thing that that we sort of poured it we've exported my brain and it's kind of it's available but we haven't. We haven't pointed anybody to it. It has many different levels of challenge. So, at the top level is user experience user interface like what does the next user interface look like especially when I'm doing brain like things but someone else is doing cumul like things and someone else is doing other sorts of things what does that look like let's let's play let's experiment somewhere in the middle is machine learning. And there's a dozen different ways that machine learning can be involved and one of the reasons to get me out of the brain is that the brain has no API there's no programming knows there's no programming way to access what's in my brain. So, pouring it out and then saying hey machine learning people a, I would love as I'm feeding my brain to have machine learning sitting by my side going Oh, looks like that's a book. Do you can I can I put the book and it's author and the other books that she wrote in your brain and I'd be like yes go because right now everything you see in my brain the 480,000 thoughts in it were all put in manually by me, it turns out as kind of time consuming. So if an AI we're sitting if a trustworthy AI that was just doing what I asked it to not. I don't want it to go just absorb the world and put it in the brain because I need to know what's in my brain. That's great. So the brain could also be watching when I meet somebody, and it could go look at both of our brains and compare them and say, Oh, it looks like you all agree on all these things, and then you disagree on these things would you like to, would you like me to order a beer. So that you can talk about the things you disagree with, or the brain could also infer a lot of things about me and then make pretend to be me so there's a bunch of sites that are growing up that will create chatbots that you feed them, all of your emails and all of any documents you created or speeches you gave you feed them to this AI and then once you're dead it can simulate answering questions as if it was you. Right. That's a possibility. Because there's so there's like, lots of different things and I think the key here is to go knock on the door of some of these machine learning artificial intelligence communities and say, Hey, would you like to play. And I met Danny Hill is years and years ago he's part of the deep mind project at Google. That's, you know, there's a lot of different sort of avenues here to pursue, and I'm eager to get to the place where we can sort of even do that. That invite. Sorry, sorry to go along but I'm very excited about that layer of possibilities with the brain as a seed for this kind of information. Any other thoughts on this or questions mark. I'm totally not interested in AI, and I'm interested in I am interested in intelligence augmentation. Certainly. And for context, I've got a brain of 2 million nodes and 15 million connections that I've done since 84. What strikes me and been thinking about this for a very long time and what strikes me the difference. And I have Jerry's data, and I've been looking at it and I'm writing some basically API is to it.  What is it called my sequel. Jerry I don't know the privacy. The only thing I'm concerned about some thoughts are marked private which is a field in there. The only thing I care about is that those fields be though any thought mark private be eliminated from the public database that's everything else like go go crazy. I understand that I'm trying to figure out exactly what marks it private so I've got to get into this is a side conversation. And it's a minority of thoughts is way less than 1% of the thoughts are marked that way and should just be one field. So it's just a matter of identifying that one field. Basically, there's a lot of story to AI. Rather than actuality and then certainly for the next part of the decade, I imagine that basically is something that you can think of as an amplifier, but it amplifies a particular signal. I don't think it is a broadener a discoverer, a maker of connections that that's particularly human. And I by, I continue to go back to our document of the as we may think, and you know the computer does not make connections but it can store them. The question is, for me, I've done this individual work Jerry's done this individual work. How do we move from individual work to social work, and that's not an easy transition. That's, you know, I think of factor as something that's more much more social than what I do. And still, there's dozens if not hundreds of things like factor. And I don't think we're studying them very closely or carefully how to make that different from Facebook say different from, you know, dopamine, hey, there's dopamine is great. But how does dopamine link to curiosity rather than social division. That that I don't know how to answer. Thank you, Mark. I have a little bit of disagreement about a making creativity and connections but I care more about humans than as the moving from individual work to social work is a really powerful way to put it and I wanted to throw a caution flag. One of the, one of the, one of the things we have learned over a couple hundred years of capitalism is a kind of social work but it's it's it's ant like and stupid. We have been, we've gotten really good at scaling. We've been connecting many, many, many, many, many people, but it's connecting them in in mostly not very sophisticated ways in ways where people can chatter and gossip, but Facebook never got good at creating change and growth and emotional intelligence among, you know, a lot of people. So that that social work that we need to figure out how to do better is not 10,000 or 20,000 or whatever Facebook engineers building a system to make people as smart as ants. We need to figure out how to augment our human intelligence and be more emotionally intelligent and more thoughtful about the way that we work together in the world. So another, another like take on that is political systems, political systems theoretically are a way of scaling social work so that a nation is smarter and we could hope more humane and more thoughtful. But if you look at the US right now, the political system that we've got doesn't really scale very well. I'm sure it worked a lot better than, you know, then the town halls it replaced in 1780 or but, you know, it were, we're not scaling social work well at all. I would I would judge at this point and this is that's why we face ground challenges, the way that we do. I would argue that we are scaling social work, but it's something that has to be redesigned for, again, going back to the beginning to call many different network sizes, and many different, I guess, temporal sizes temporal scales. Certainly in this call we can collaborate and we can all listen to each other and comment. Certainly, I think, you know, the town hall works much, much better in a particular context than say, you know, voting within a shire or county or something like that, you know, to get conversation and thinking happening, rather than, you know, just get something in the mail read it and say yes or no. It's a much different kind of context class. Yeah, I was just thinking about social systems and and the US I mean we are. We are at a time right now where we are sort of requesting into all competitive instincts, because there is a shortage looming shortage of resources, which requires a redistribution in some ways of social capital. When we when we look around the world and how societies are dealing with using violence and hierarchy, you know, to have the most predatory instincts dominate the social systems. And some societies that have succeeded in waning that in better than others. I mean, when you look at the European cultures after killing each other off for a couple thousand years and and throwing stuff at each other they have sort of matured into a form of governance that seems to be more equitable. In the United States, you know, we are really sort of housing. I mean, just this this latest revelation about what is it pandora's project right. It highlights how how people who are the most worthless and the most reckless and the most disregarding the needs of social systems seem to come out on top of the pile. So how to how to rain that in and and deal with that particularly at a time right now where we are in an existential crisis because you know we are we are absolutely destroying the ecosystem that supports us in in in the in the process so not being able to rain that in means we are basically surrendering our future. So I'm sorry sort of rambling through the couple things here but this that yeah I mean to to to not be able to harness you know the direction that we move into as a society, the reconnecting through the pyramid of of the economy, you know particularly base of pyramid is going to be a real challenge here. Michael. This is I'm, I'm, I'm hearing back from a class was saying to to some of the things that you and Pete and Mark were talking about. And, and since you know mark had mentioned factor and other things like it. I thought you know just just wanting to speak on the differences between artificial intelligence, augmented human intelligence machine learning. I think I think it's sort of. There are people here who could find each of them very clearly, but there do seem to be fuzzy edges between a lot of things there and the difference between human control and transparency of something that some people might call artificial intelligence and something that's in a black box, or you know that that's huge that that's bigger that's a bigger difference within the realm of our artificial intelligence than whether we're talking about artificial intelligence or whether we're talking about machine learning. You know, and, and the thing that I would say that factor strives for is the ability and and frankly can't achieve until we have, you know, more technical expertise than we do is that like the black box algorithms that we suffer from in other places on other platforms, we want to put those simplified tools on the user's end to say, these are the criteria by which I want artificial intelligence or essentially a search or a saved search to work for me to say, you know, find me people have whose ideas overlap with mine to have a beer with for something completely different that's your personal mission but you are deciding what those criteria are instead of having to choose between the black box, you know, algorithm or artificial intelligence on this platform, or that platform or this tool or that tool. Why not expose that to the user. And I just, I feel like I don't hear that enough. As a goal is just like, let's just put the controls in the hands of each user because people do have different needs. Anyway, that was the point I want to make. Thank you. Yes, no absolutely the AI agree totally with Mark with Mark said about humans have to be in charge and I think we all agree with that. I mean we're speaking about collective decision making deliberate democracy. Humans have to be imputable and black box systems have no no place there. That said, well thing I disagreed with that Mark said is that AI is not good at finding new connections actually is a lot of good that needs us to validate it. Absolutely. But it does find connections. So AI as part of the advising ecosystem, such that, again, in terms of transparency, you know that whatever decision a human has made has been informed by a specific AI algorithm as Michael was describing. I think is a form of a valid form of transparency we get advice from tons of people and tons of other agents at this point that's the reality. And I do think, however, that being aware of what were you informed of when making a certain decision, I think is getting really important. Like we have so many, the notion of democracy as opinion poll, as opposed to informed opinion poll that was a distinction made by fishkin in deliberative polling. And there's other people in the CDL group. I'm also part of who are talking about if we're doing, if we're doing. Sorry, I got. I'm getting something in parallel. Yes. And I lost my track. It'll come back to you when you stop thinking about. Yes, of course, all of your wishes will come true if you could just sit in the corner and not think of a white bear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, the basic point about getting informed of what information was used to reach a decision, I think is now in that way. Knowing whether the information is useful. Oh yeah CDL people are looking at building a distributed by Asian network of people's opinion about risk factors. But again, how informed was that by Asian network, and in a vision network, you take into account the existing and missing information. Right. So, all this requires tracking what you've read, which I should be able to track what I've read, but, and we don't want that to become a tool of surveillance capitalism, but I need to know what I've read mimics does that for example it has a track of your that's the kind of hypothesis alternative mimics. It has a track of what I've read, and how to do this without invading privacy I don't know. I mean we have the whole surveillance capitalism practice of tracking what you've done, but I think that being able to know how did you reach a decision is kind of important to take information into account. It's a very, very, very, very tangential thought, but the, and then we would know like you were using a big AI, which can be valid, but can be misleading. So that will be part knows what there's a, there's a bunch of really interesting thinking going on around cyborg or Centaur people. And then it goes back mark to what you were saying about augmentation, which I think that angle bar presented in 1968 of humans collaborating augmented by technology, and then Steve jobs gives us personal computing and Bill Gates gave us personal computing and mostly rejected collaboration in lots of different ways made it really hard for collaboration to even actually show up. And so there's a lot of barriers in our way, but this the whole notion of Centaur and cyborg people kind of starts with chess. Deep blue beats Kasparov.  They said, Oh, this is cool. And they invented kind of freestyle chess, where teams are allowed to use as much software and as many humans as they want and then different teams form up and it turns out that the combination of software and humans is better than just software by itself, etc, etc, etc. Centaur's, you know, half man, half horse, or cyborg humans. And that's just gone, I think it's going crazy in lots of different places when we're trying to figure out, because our future is very likely a Centaur future that we're we're going and I feel like I've got a little bit of a head start on this and mark you too with MX but we have externalized tools that we treat as extensions of ourselves there. They're there. The tools are so integrated into our everyday behavior that they are in fact extensions of our reach, and our and our grasp and our ability to manipulate and do things which is, which is very centaur far as I can tell. Now the tools are very primitive at this point need improvement in the ways that we're talking about here. But I'm just to go back to AI. I think AGI artificial generalized intelligence is way far away and the goal of having something that reasons like humans do in every area and has common sense is way far out there I think those things are actually terrible goals for AI and machine learning. But I think that piece by piece, machines are now able to do many things way better than humans. So, so basically we're going to be pecked to death by ducks in terms of our capacity to do things and show up in the world. And I'm I for one, I'm kind of a fan of this except that all the people in dark closets in, you know around the world using this to as malefactors, we will never know how many of them there are who they are and what they're doing and that's really, really dangerous, because a tool that given a small slice of activity can get better than humans at it. And your Facebook you're trying to fight missing malinformation, right. Awesome. Well, GPT three now available, you know, for free on the web you can go use it or TensorFlow now available for free on the web can create mutations of messages that are close enough to being satire or something that you wouldn't want necessarily to throw away and dismiss or mark and encourage from the system. That's happening. So so that there's this arms race going on between people who understand human psyche and social movements, and are trying to sort of spin us all, and people trying to create platforms that allow us to connect with each other. And we're living through the rough part of it, but we don't really understand how this plays out. And Michael, it's your responsibility to fix this. You've got the con. I was just particularly going to speak to the thing that you were mentioning at the beginning of what you just said about bring myself back to it.  This is, you know, something shallower in most cases than what certainly that what you and marker doing. But the idea that the goal for a collaborative intelligence is, you know, let's, let's make it easy for all people to, to do what they can do in a second brain context without thinking of themselves. I mean, you know, people would look at what either of you do and say, that's not something I'm going to do. That's a lifestyle, you know, and I'm not going there. But, but you know everybody has some stuff in Dropbox, you know, everybody has some stuff in, you know, they might have some stuff in Dropbox and some stuff in Pinterest and some stuff and on their hard drive, you know, just like all different and some notes. And here's all this disparate stuff. I think the first step to, to viable collaborative intelligence is making that really easy to port into and ideally interoperably into things like factor and trove and, you know, whatever whatever other non ad supported tools there are. Not being after dopamine hits but rather being after a sense of focus and, and like clarity and okay I've got my shit together and I know where to find it. And, and do that in very minor ways that can grow over time. And then the relationships between our second brains are something that should be consensual and and very you know, you want to put together your second brain on the subject of I don't know, you know, climate change together with a different group with different criteria than you want to put your second brain about you know, music and, and being able to, being able to just like at first do something as simple and basic and technically simple, you know, saying, Okay, I want to share this collection of information that I've got in my second brain that regards music with this person who's also interested in music. But then get to the point where you're doing something where the overlap there is is able, you know, machine intelligence is able to go through and say, Okay, you know, you have asked me to check in your group. I know which people are into this kind of music and know this kind of music and therefore might be interested in this artist. But for all of that to be, you know, tool controlled. The problem with most collaboration tools is you have to collaborate, and you have to collaborate with everybody who shares that tool with you in the same way. We need to be like dumber in our tool set and in more interoperable, more more basic to start with just you know sort of pulling the tagging that people are doing and giving people control of that, I think. Anyway, I'm sorry I'm rambling but really close to solving the whole thing right there.  And, you know, that some of these things are within reach. And on our roadmap, but, you know, have you gotten close have you gotten to articulating that technical co founders mission or scope or goal. Oh, I mean, do you mean do I have that that in writing. I could, I don't exactly. I'm interested in how you would phrase that and frame that because I think that that piece of the quest is important and if we can get word out maybe we can find that person for you. That's cool. I'm just saying, I appreciate that and you can articulate it we've got a lot of networks. Then you could do some speed dating and figure out like what if I can't build it they will come. Exactly. We just need baseball players in the field and a cornfield. Thanks, Michael. Are you done. Are you complete. Okay, let's go mark class mark on one. There's a difference reading programs progress and algorithms and AI and progress and data. And they are mixed. Certainly, the revolution data is what's driven current neural network types of pattern extraction and recognition. When they do studies of the efficacy of certain algorithms matched against the efficacy of progress and data data wins all the time. So that's one node. I want to highlight the others JCR lick lighter. Who came before angle Bart inspired angle Bart and basically talked about human computer symbiosis and how humans and computers can think together in ways, hitherto unimagined. And there was one other thing but I'll pass to class. I'm, I'm always thinking in, how am I going to use this stuff and where do we, where do we go with it. So I just started an initiative with a group of NGOs focusing on the 2022 farm bill. And when you look at so and I'm working in partnership with Finney and from kiss the crown and zero club and soil for crime and it's just a whole bunch of guys I got finally excited about let's focus on on this thing it's the size of the defense bill most people don't have any idea what it does and what it is but the outcomes of our farm bill policy are just horrendous right. So if you think about 80% of us farm of us medical bills due to nutrition, you think about top soil erosion you think about social systems disturbed and so on and so on. So the issue we have is that the political world is using data that is just simply wrong. Right. I mean, or incomplete. So, so where, and then when you get into a conversation you instantly get into a bunch of arguments that derail, you know, the logic tree that you're trying to pursue so there is no, there is no database right that is universally accepted as as this is the right the right information to use here, or statistically, this is more right than that right I mean you're looking for this pathways of most likely to succeed options here. And that that to me, you know would be the most helpful thing to have in terms of augmented really like the idea of augmented intelligence. Because you won't want to be able to go to a source where you say okay soil carbon is being defined this way in order to get to that state of soil carbon. Here's what you need to do and this is universally accepted it science it's evidence based. It's solid. And so that, because we are still making decisions where one partner in the decision making process will just simply deny, you know, come up with something completely different and then. And then you are, you know, in a no win discussion, leading to the next bad decision. So so that so so that that's sort of where what I'm looking for you know is is how do you how do you get to data or how do you summarize data. So one thing I'm working on right now is to develop a communications tool that is directed at environmentalists to help them understand why they need to focus on the farm bill. Because I know you can talk to the water sentinels or the anti crazers or the vegans and what have you, and they all live in a different bucket without seeing the system that they are that they are working within. And so to elevate the discussion where you each have a place within this discussion, but it's a bigger conversation that we need to put some structure around the set. So that's sort of where I'm looking at working with data. And I think class is exciting that you're you're working with other people in the farm bill, I would love to be closer to that. I think that the farm bill is really important like you do. And I want to see how weaving the world could be helpful. And other, you know, other pieces that fit into what you're trying to do there. So let's, let's come back to that. And are you still doing the Tuesday CFS calls. Because I'm sure I shifted course I just, I was offered a partnership with with forest and it's the, it's the planetary care group. And in fact, I'm doing an onboarding call this week with them so I will join in that that's a significant code that just got more than a million dollars in funding focused on building community based food systems. But interestingly enough, I went through several interviews with them. They are the idea of assigning value to me as a partner is that I'm so well connected with people who can help. That's really true right because this requires a lot of deep thinking to to set up the process structures that they want to scale. I mean they are ready to hit the ground and scale this thing. So we may. I would love to revive the conversations if I knew how what to focus them on I mean the farm bill would be one fantastic thing to focus on because you know it embeds the entire pathology within our system. It's also interesting because I'm also connected with the United Nations I'm on the advice report there. The United Nations has just I mean the US has just made the decision to separate from the from the EU farm strategy. The EU is going after a farm to fork of the community food systems in the United Nations, the US has decided to instead partner with Brazil, and of all places the United Arab Emirates, you know, to maintain basic well to maintain commodity costs, because the EU wants to get out of commodity costs out of model cropping practices. Yeah, it's a it's a big changing in direction, which is also one reason why the French are the most hated people in the American farm community right now because they created the four per thousand initiative. The political pressure on the US government by these multinational food companies is too strong.  Right. So, so, yeah, this is this is a big food fight predictably so right because the, if, if the European Union strategy implies billions of dollars in stranded assets to the multinational food company. I mean, I could spend some time explaining the technical reasons for this but you know you have this this massive corporate structure going from one standard buyer, you know to McDonald's and then everything in between that depends on monocopying practices couldn't do it otherwise needs the standardization within the agricultural process. So yeah this is this is existential stuff I mean this is big stuff coming through all through the system there and so we are mobilizing on the NGO and a group of NGOs and, and it really has to start with we have a common song song sheet here you know we need to have a common understanding of what we're for what we're against and, and, and cut school, so much information to help us do that. Marcus in the chat. What's the name of the French initiative your point. It's the four thousand initiative. If you type into the, I'll catch it. Michael, do you want to jump in. There's so much. I'd like to reply to first chronologically Michael. I agree totally that we need to have ways to connect. And some of that. There's a lot of simple solution, there's a lot of complex solutions. The simple solutions, totally unfortunately solve the problem because it could have been salt. Maybe. There's question of identity is being handled by the ID but the. I don't think it solves all the problem but it's already a huge step in that direction, owning your identity matters, but the reality is there's been a huge incentive for companies to for for social network companies to create your own identity on their own. And I think there is no, not going to be any answer to that other than probably regulatory or being able to create a good unifying identity system that people subscribe to enough that it gains, you know, it gets the big players have no choice but to adopt it but I don't know if that's possible. I think it's possible to create a kind of guerrilla account unification system as possible, and that's definitely something important interest and I think, and of course then the next step when people are the easy identity to merge and I keep saying, then we need to go to concept identity which is a really hard one. That's my hobby horse. I'm going to host I put it in the chat I'm going to host a hyper knowledge seminar with these things and please come and do the light luck to discuss that quality. But I think the personal identity is part of that equation, and especially because at some point, you want to know who you're talking to and how connected to reality they are. And this is where with classes thing is so profound and important. There's amazing work by that lock on super forecasters and people who have a track record of making correct predictions. And but that means even agreeing that the prediction was fulfilled. And in an age of not even being able to agree on facts. That makes the evaluation of that prediction turned out true or not. Another fraud thing, and I think that anything that helps establish a common ground of reality. I don't know if it was in this, then you are another that I mentioned project Starling. I think it was, which is a project to help journalists put their pictures on the blockchain as they take them so yes I was at that point that that point in place and time when I took that picture and creating the establishing a track record of pointers to reality. This is going to be extremely important going forward. The, what was that love question. I mentioned project Starling. You know, it's something I had to solve an idea loom where I was getting people to contribute mostly through email but at some point we were going to harvest from social media. And then I want to know that if you've put that remark on Facebook or Twitter or on this or on that. It's the same person. It's the same person so that you can still know the common identity so but I, and we all have these informal hubs, where we say by the way this is my Twitter this is my this is my that that's not proven by the way, can we make that proven verified and so on, so that we know the network of who am I globally. And that we can start delegating, like if I'm giving you access to my Twitter feed, my giving you access to my master bomb sheet and so on. These are the kinds of the Facebook one over the open web in part because I wanted a way to specify who can read this and Facebook pretended to offer that that of course pretended to offer that and that battle on people. And I think being able to do that in the platform agnostic fashion is key to breaking out of the silos. Anyway, that's probably six and it's it's fixable now, like there are amazing initiatives from the W3C with Ocap based on the ID. It's amazing what's going on in that field. It's, it's doable. We've gone over our, I'm happy to, this is the juicy conversation that we, you know, usually have been living these costs for an hour. So open to proposals or questions or somebody who'd like to put a bow on this conversation. Mark. Mark and Tuan, I think you might know of Kalia Hamlin identity woman and the work that she's done. Which is, please, please just, you know, Google identity woman. She has been a driver in the Bay Area and worldwide on gorilla gorilla identity just straight on there. The other thing I forgot to bring up his, for me, this is something I'm trying to figure out, but basically the commodification of the self that seems to, you know, rub me the wrong way as I wonder if it's my personality or the way I was raised, who knows, but, but simply, you know, self as brand, self as branding. I just, It's not working for you. It's not working for me.  See how easy that is. It's, it's, I don't know that I will solve this but I'm certainly going to be on the list of things I'm passionately confused about. Well, and like this branding thing is, is, is confusing in so many ways, a party is the commercialization and consumerization of our lives, the ransacking of our identities, the dumpster diving for our data, the abuse of filling our worlds with messages and all that. And yet we're moving into a world where full time employment I think is melting. Corporations are highly motivated to get rid of fte's corporations just do not want fte's they want a few very highly skilled humans who are still like making profits rolling, but everybody else can go away and certainly they mean fewer than 30 hours a week, because then they can know we can get rid of their benefits. That's just happening all over the place so we're moving into portfolio careers, I think, and to be a portfolio careers you have to have a personal brand. You've got to be known somehow and you've got to be found somehow. And what that means is unclear and itchy and cranky to a lot of us and, and yeah, it's a weird, weird world for that Stacy. Yeah, so I just want to speak to small groups, because I came on here with that thought, and at least it's really become clear to me that there's an unpaid role that's missing that needs to be built in. And that would be, I don't know the best word for it. I don't know if it's a coach and interpreter or connector or combination of all right. But you know I've been looking at you know the whole career path of coaches, and even people that are charging large sums of money to coach people. And it just strikes me that it's the people that are in need that are having to pay that seems to be, you know, something that's wrong with our system as a whole. Whereas I think the company should be providing that. So, you know, earlier on the call, I heard you talking about, you know, small groups the perfect numbers of three and five, which to me fits in perfectly like if I were imagining it. I would see that role, working for three separate teams of three. So it becomes something that, you know, let's say, I mean how many of you on this call work better by talking out your thoughts. I would think half of you. I just think that, you know, right now, the kind of role that I'm envisioning really either comes from volunteerism, or compassion, you know just taking time out for somebody that you like. And why are we devaluing that. Why isn't that a paid role. And one of the effects that that would have because I'm not talking about one person. I'm talking about a group of people that have this role that maybe, you know, move from team to team. And also take, you know, like when Klaus mentioned the value he has, that's a value that gets developed by being part of all those small teams, and a computer is never going to be able to determine who can work well together. They might be able to determine who's working on the same thing, but not who's going to work better. And that's about it. So the small instance Pete and I have a long going conversation with which is like just little snippets in there that I think we have a lot of agreement on about the need for matchmakers or or concierges or something like that who are cyborgs who have really great power tools at hand but where the humans are able to say, you know, you ought to meet Stacy and class. Right. And those, those little connections those recommendations matter a whole big bunch inside of broader social systems and those people are the butterflies and the connectors and the bridges across social networks who help make those those connections as well. Can I just, I just want to ask a question. Is there something that identifies those people, because just the fact that there isn't it's just not something that we normally think about is what I'm trying to say. So, two things on that one I think it's a brand new role in the way you were saying and I think we need to sort of foster that and describe it.  A lot of really good connectors and networkers are working quietly. They don't want fame, fame, like like attention will actually destroy them because then the people who really want to be network will show up and book, you know, book their calendar song, whatever, imagine your bad scenario but but I think that really good connectors are just like quietly doing the thing and it's a piece of what they do that we undervalue so maybe just pointing out the value is good, but I'm not sure that like, we could give them a whole bunch of coins or something like that as a result. I don't know. I see, I see a big schism. I see the people you're talking about. And then I see the people that already have that that are looking to capitalize on it even more. So, there's a greed in there as well. I think just from what I'm looking at. So real quick, don't think of that role as unpaid or unpayable. It's important to figure out how to, for lack of a better word in our capitalist society monetize that and reward it yeah. And there are plenty of people who right now I the, you know, some of my networks are kind of Silicon Valley style. There are certainly hyper connectors in Silicon Valley who because of deal flow and connections and things like that they're able to invest in in things that turn into money and, and they can do it with a light touch they don't they're not all greedy bastards. Some of them are actually very human. Wonderful people doing the work of the world. Let me say something if I may. I was going to actually invite you to do so. Yeah, perfect. Well I put everyone in this call has their own hobby horse so I put mine again in the in the chat. My hobby horse and I've mentioned it one or two times in these calls and Jerry knows this quite well. I think that groups like OGM are ideally suited to fulfill the function of a distributed global lab, leveraging collective intelligence of the hundred, or maybe 200 members of the OGM community to address the societal challenges, not that that's the only thing OGM should do, but it's one thing that OGM is ideally suited for. And what you add that I'm talking about this type of hobby dream. It's a combination of mine with other knowledge driven and co creating groups like the World Future Studies Federation and the new cover Paris and whatever. But the thing that you are ideally suited to do is bring in these cutting edge technologies that can amaze people. Whether experts like like Peter or Mark Antoine or so would say well they're not really cutting edge to me and the people like myself. They are totally amazing every time I sit and listen to one of these calls. I'm totally amazed at how much can be done is being done by so many people, and will so addressing Stacy of course who coined the word for me the models. The world is full of 98% models who will just like me be totally amazed by the ways that the people in OGM should a group of people want to really be able to help with and I mean my, my ideas helping with those very complex and well complex chaotic issues behind the 17 SDGs, and Klaus is already doing that and addressing some of them and probably other people on. I don't know about this call but I know David Boville is doing it Mark Drexler is doing it, and I know about 15 or 18 people in OGM, and everyone seems to want to do something like that. And we've talked a lot before about prototyping and learning by doing both in this call and free Jerry's grand call. And I would really think we should see Jerry has this weaving the world. Did you have four or six shows you want to do. And let's put something out there through weaving the world, which everyone will say wow I want more of that. So that's that's that's my, my hobby horse for today. So Hank wow, and thank you, and I was going to reply to you by saying, I think this is sort of exactly the intention of weaving the world, which is feeding the big fungus, which is also feeding our geek community which is building tiles pieces that solve the larger this shared intelligence thing. And I think that that dynamic is is a laboratory or a sandbox, or whatever you want to call it sort of as a whole taken as a whole. And I'm eager to get moving and repurpose the Wednesday call to be the from generative comments to be the weaving the world operations. So if you want to help design this and support tomorrow at seven is like we're going to head into that conversation. And I've got a bunch of documents I've got a project plan working which I'll share in the channel that I created for weaving the world. And I think I really want us to get off and running. And the funding I have is to stand up six episodes of weaving the world, plus public publishing of my connections in the brain of those calls and you know the weaving artifacts afterward and some and to funding to projects that build pieces of those tiles, one of which is very likely to be something that I think Peter central to which is, how do we automate some of the workflow of processing a call right. I get I get a note after calls like this today it's going to go to Pete because thank you for using your room. And after all the calls like this I get an email that says hey you're recording is ready.  So that would be a little tile in the middle of how do we build artifacts that we put in the on the fungus in the Commons, and then lather rinse repeat on toward. deeper more provocative challenges like what role does machine learning have with with this fungus like, like how do we actually make those connections, who do we invite in. How do we build the lab so that other people's labs fit very nicely into our work and us into theirs. We have to start to realize that we're working on the same damned artifact right and the big fungus is merely one funny way tongue in cheek way of describing the Commons between us, which is the thing we're trying to nurture. So, yes, on all fronts. And I think we're getting to the point where it's going to turn into action. If you think of a show and some projects under it as action enough. Yeah, my, my idea is, you make one big bang first impression. And then, then you see what happens and then that that's what you go for. So I would think any kind of action like that, which either either is addressed to the geek community or the model community or whatever community. I think it should be addressed to should be a real big bang. I love love to address the issues. Unfortunately, I can't join tomorrow, because seven in the morning at your time is still a six to seven, four to five here. And often people want that at the end of their work day in Europe for another thing, but I will definitely join it. I just want to make one other message, which I think I did tell Jerry but I'm not the others at the end of the month there's going to be a international conference in Berlin and I'm taking the risk of going to a real potential spreader. It's for the world future studies Federation. And I'm going to present the 90 minute workshop which will be live streamed about how that organization which is an international knowledge management knowledge creation based on the future and future studies. And how that organization could be come a distributed global lab for addressing sdgs. And before I go and I'll be leaving them 22nd.  In which way can I also mention OGM as being starting to want to do that as well. So I mean it's not a question for now it's a question that I'd like to have an answer to in about to to an athlete. I don't have to mention OGM but I think it'd be nice to mention OGM. Absolutely Hank and let's figure this out so that you can say something that makes sense in this consistent. And I, and I want to cross this with one of the big important questions for the sex six episodes that will start weaving the world is what topics and what guests to cover. It's really really important and not that they need to be famous I'm totally not looking for marquee names. They need to be thoughtful and they need to be woven into the kinds of things that we're doing. So close. If you want to think about for the farm bill project like I would love to frame a call, or several around that and figure out like, who, who does that mean we bring into the conversation what do we do. And can we leave behind for you artifact is useful for your work in that project, for example. And Hank, you know, maybe there's something that we even for the future society I don't know. And again, one of the goals here is to not be talking to white men all the time. And so how do we serve the underserved and make part of our path, our early path, clearly into other communities that that don't normally get the attention that they merit or whatever else so all those things are really hot on the table for me right now and we'll be talking about them tomorrow during the planning call and also on the channel, join the weaving the world channel on the matter most, which I think is where we'll focus a lot of this conversation actually sorry. There's two different channels I created for weaving the world. One of them is I is what I'm thinking about as the public chat channel for weaving the world so any, any person who comes in and is interested. If they asked say how can we talk more about this I would route them to the weaving the world channel on the matter most. Then there's a WTW ops channel, which is really where we talk about what calls to have what how to structure this thing all that. So, so I would join both channels and the ops channel is where we should have conversations about the structure and path and making the building of the world. Does that make sense. I don't see weaving the world on the on the channel. If you if you go down under public channels and search for them. It should be there. I want we can also easily put links in the chat here. Sorry, do public channels and then more more at the bottom. Yeah, more at the bottom of the public channels. That's the way to add more channels and there you'll see all the other public channels on this server. And you can join weaving the world and WTW ops. And if you feel like it the big fungus which I've got to figure out what this with this spread of conversation is between the weaving the world and the big fungus but I think let's let's let's go WTW ops and it for now for figuring this out together. Can I say one more thing before we leave. I mean, of course, this is, this is really hard to say in a room full of white men, because the first response is that's not professional. But when I was talking about that role included in it is one of nurture. And I just wanted to say that. Thank you, Stacy. And you also pointed out that my language around people not like around not like men wasn't very good. And I think you preferred people not like me, or like, what's a, what's a, what's in a delicate and like legitimate and respectful way to say, trying not to just go have a grand tour of white men's brilliant thinking. People who look differently. Because that could, you know, cover clothing, hair. I'm going to think a lot like us, I hope, like, like I'm looking, I'm not looking to find I'm not looking for Richard Spencer to be my guest on a show, certainly not right off the bat, and figure out how I can get like a Nazi to download his belief system. Down the road, interesting, like, like, I'm not, that's not outside my scope. But upfront, it's going to be people who think like us but don't look like us I think maybe that's the some piece of it. I like trying not to other people or to other the, the majority person so the white one of the ways I say it and it's hard to pull off but regular people or normal people, not like me. People who are normal, not white, not men, not, you know, but normal doesn't carry that balance for most people. I know. It's a hard thing. So regular is sometimes okay. Regular means they poop regularly. Diverse. Diverse, I like diverse. Diversity is holding that holding that weight these days. I mean that that's happening. Yeah. One more thing to class, since we're talking about differences, because I, I'm going to other for a minute, and by other I'm going to talk about people that are against vaccinations. I could really see them being a great ally and some of the work you're doing, because there were a lot of them are really focused on the immune system.  And, you know, that's where I think we need to do a little bit more networking. Totally. And, and, and a word I really liked in that kind of conversation is complexify, which Adam Grant puts in in one of his recent books. And he basically says that these things aren't just binary it's not just yes or no and there's not that like a whole package yesterday that you're voting yes or no against. All these issues are really complicated and I, you know, there's a whole bunch of problems I have with how corporate structures and you know the C corporation works in the world today, which I think we would agree violently with lots of those people on. So part of it is as we dissolve and complexity issues will find points of agreement and disagreement, and then I don't really know when we get to impasses which we're going to get to. What we'll do like I don't really know I think that like listening deeply and having respect and hearing people out it's going to matter a bunch but we'll get we'll get to some really uncomfortable places I think and that's okay. There are certain pinch points where that help you to go underneath the radar underneath the the defense so for example one thing that we identified in the food discussion is the idea that the biome the microbiome in the chemical mirrors or that your personal got by microbiome mirrors that of the soil where your food is coming from. So this linkage right so the chemicals that are being put on the onto the field. You don't have a direct impact on your muscular system but they do impact your microbiome and which then in turn creates all kinds of pathologies. Women in particular instantly relate to this right and then the idea that you have 20% of American women have glyphosate in their breast milk I mean things like this resonate now. And so by by by by structuring the information the conversation around things that are purely emotional deeply personal right, then you can go and offer some solutions. I love that. Thank you class makes a lot of sense. I watched the documentary years ago about endocrine disruptors in our system in the water system you know plastics chemicals other sorts of things pesticides. And it was just shocking and part of it was like early onset of puberty like like that's really changing. There's there's just all kinds of stuff happening all over the place that were that we've been busy doing to ourselves. It's like on a half hour over like just like that boom. So I think it's probably a good moment to wrap this call. I thank you all greatly see some of you on the call tomorrow and on the intertubes and to bad Facebook isn't down for another day but yeah. See you see you later. I'll see you Peter at the Wednesday wiki today. Awesome. See you there. Bye bye. Saving chat. Saved.


Now, prior to the 1998 season, something really big happens in your life. Yeah. You meet your wife. Yeah. Laura. Yeah. Now, she's actually in the audience. Yeah. And there she is right there. Now, the funny part is that, you know, there's so many different stories about how you guys met that I've read, and they all conflict, so I didn't want to ask you. Yeah. I want to ask you. Yeah. How did you guys actually meet? Well, I was back in Puerto Rico because I went to school in New Orleans in Louisiana. And I went to undergrad in law school. And I was back in Puerto Rico working as an attorney. And I was also working on a TV show. So I think he was home, and he was looking, you know, watching TV, and he saw me. And then that night he went out, and he saw me at this restaurant. I was with some friends. And then he says, I don't know if it's true, that he told his roommate, this is the girl, I'm going to marry. And then he started thinking, and he remembered that he had met me 10 years before at a softball game. I was pitching that game, and he was the substitute umpire for that game. And in the girl's softball league there, the umpire stands behind the pitcher. So he was standing behind me the whole game, and everything was a strike. Everything was a strike. Is that true? Everything was a strike. Everything was a strike. She needed her glove. I mean, she comes to the game without a glove. I forgot my glove at home, and I got my glove in the car, so I brought the glove. And she plays with it, and after the game she says, nice glove. And she says, I'll say thank you. And I said, can I have it? And I'm like, no. I said, I can get you one just like it. I mean, give me your number, I'll get you one like it. And she says, nah, it's all right. So that was it. Never seen her again. Why didn't she ask her out then? I mean, everything was a strike. Well, that was the number. That was what I was trying to get the number for right there. But it didn't work out. Oh, with the glove. See? It's hard. But it didn't work out. And then 10 years later, I mean, this, we went out and still, you know, I don't know that it's her. But then she tells me she plays softball. I say, you play for this team? And she says, yeah. And then that's how. Wow. Yeah. Pretty good story. Yeah.