I wonder if we've ever done any comparison of the multiple AIs transcription and see who's really doing better. We have not done that for the calls. I bet somebody's done that for something.  Whisper is one you can download and install models on your computer and it's actually really good as well. Yeah. I like when I haven't seen no reason to change or even think about it. So Doug, go ahead. You're muted. I have a question. Yes. If I'm writing an essay and I go to a couple of paragraphs and I do that and then I say somebody says, what did you mean by that? And I have no idea because I didn't write it. How come this problem is happening more frequently? Maybe they read what they published before they publish. Yeah, but, you know, people are not, they just kind of stick the paragraph in because it feels good. But Doug, we've had this problem for decades. We've had research assistants that we hand over the pen to. They write two or three paragraphs on something we didn't want to waste our time on. We quickly look to make sure that the spelling is right. I think decades is short for that. I think it's centuries we've had that problem. Right. That's probably true. Very true. I mean, Doug, if you think people are just not going to have responsibility for what they publish, meaning they won't read it all, the things they put out under their name, then we have a whole different society. Right. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sent memos back, you know? Given the crisis and a failure to replicate in the research community, which has often been traced back to the heads of laboratories just signing their name to the work of the people in their lab, this is not a new problem. The problem is we don't pay people enough unless they are a lab director overseeing 20 people.  This is the open global mind weekly call on Thursday, April 4th, 2024. We made it through April Fool's Day without any major kerfluffles, apparently. I missed. Did Apple put out an Apple and April Fool's thing this year? They'll usually do something or Google usually does something like that. I missed it somehow this year. Gmail was launched on April Fool's Day. Isn't the world already April Fool's? The best tweet of the day was, it's April Fool's Day, the one day of the year when you're not supposed to believe what you see on the internet. Yeah. Yeah, I was just going to say that I saw similar memes to that. I was seeing a quote attributed to Murray Galman and stuff, our education system has been adapted to the invention of the printed press of dutiful scribes, creating a new copy of the. Yeah, I went to Caltech and that was a meme that was universal. All the faculty said that because they didn't want to teach. Gordon McCormick doesn't go far to find his fix. It just finds me, I guess. If you heard that audio that was on my side, because a video that was sitting in an article about fentanyl and Portland just started playing. Weird. I was like, what is that? What's happening? You guys are one of the fentanyl capitals of the country, right? Yeah, 15, I think. But I think the unrequined, the unrequined wrecking ball that ran through here was fentanyl and that measure 110 was a lethal combo that did not help anything. What is the measure 110? Measure 110. Three years ago, Oregon voted to decriminalize drugs and then proceeded to not put in place any of the social services that are actually essential for any measure like that to ever succeed. And so and so over this last year, they've had a big reckoning and the governor of the state just passed a measure, basically recriminal, mostly rolling it all back, not entirely. But it's a it's a big it's a big strike for decriminalization of drug measures wherever because Portland was a pretty good poster child. In fact, Oregon people went and visited Portugal and said, oh, what did you do? And the Portuguese were like, yeah, you have to do these things. And then somehow, magically, the people came back, ran a measure. The measure did not say we're going to stage this in. You know, we're going to as soon as there are services, then we can release. No, no, no, the measure just decriminalized and said, hey, police, you can only like give tickets or or whatever. So crazy. And it was all drugs. I believe so. I believe so. Yeah. So, you know, I hate to see a good idea done badly. You know, that's just, you know, that's interesting that you say into battle and then run away. It's interesting that you say that, Kevin, about a good idea going badly, because I often think why that is. And if you think about it, people say, you know, you'll hear these ideas, but who actually gets to implement them? And how often do they go back to where the source of the ideas came from to get input? That's a favorite trick in Washington. They write a half baked bill. It has the aspirations included, but none of the mechanisms of the funding for achieving them. And then two or three years after the bill has passed, the same people who wrote the bill have a hearing and bash the agency over the head and say, why didn't you do this right? And the agency is always too timid to say because you wrote a really bad bill that was impossible to implement. And it's getting worse. I mean, the legislative drafting is no longer a fine art. It's something that's left to press secretaries. Yeah, I had a friend who was a staffer when they did the earned income tax credit and he became convinced that the Democrats wanted it to exist and the Republicans wanted it not to work and they both got their way. So he left, he actually became the largest microfinance equity fund in the country. That's what he went on and did. And he just realized the system worked, you know. And this function was was the end result for that it was OK with both sides. In the really cynical times when I'm really being cynical, I look at what some of these people are doing, and it's almost like a poison pill. You know, they put something in there to make sure that the program self-destructs. Yeah, yeah, I was I was working for Gore back in the Senate. In 1991, we were writing this bill to dramatically expand funding for high performance supercomputers and Richard Gephardt, who hated Gore and who had run against Gore for the presidency in 1988, just put in a couple sentences that said, oh, and by the way, every dollar spent in this program must be spent on American hardware and chips. I mean, this is when the Japanese were making some of the best chips. And if you were going to make, you were going to buy some Japanese chips.  Luckily, we got to take out in the middle of the night. But that's how the sausage gets made. Yep. Unfortunately. So this week we have a check in format and last check in two weeks ago, we set a challenge for ourselves. And there's sort of two questions I want to ask. The first challenge we set was, hey, why don't we raise the bar a little bit on our check in? So it's not a general purpose check in, but rather what did you do last week that made things better? And things is a lovely broad word. But I think the idea is that made society better in any particular way, human life better in any particular way. And it can be a small war, it can be large war, it can be anything you'd like. And the second issue we have on hand is whether and how to use the chat during the check in portion of the check in calls. Because we sort of can't resist using the chat. I am certainly guilty of wanting to use the chat like crazy and have to resist. I have to sort of chew my knuckles during the check in portion. I'm exaggerating. But but we did have sort of a loss of chat discipline during the last check in call that was that was like I was I wanted pondering. Do I play stricter list mom or do we just change the rules here? As we go. So I'd love to have a short discussion about that before we go into the topic. How y'all feel about using the chat during check in? Anybody who wants to pipe up? I feel very strongly that it's it prevents good listening. It's not possible to be reading the chat and paying attention to the person who's talking at the same time. And my belief is that conversation stirs up stuff from down below, which requires a different kind of listening. It's not possible if you're reading the chat at the same time. So I pretty much agree with that. In the class I'm doing with my daughter, we were letting people do zoom in and realize that we couldn't pay attention to the people in the room. This is act local. So this is like people in our town wanting to look at things they want to do far to find his. Sorry, is that your fentanyl again? Yeah. And it's it's it's spontaneously turning itself on for reasons. Jerry on drugs, whatever. Anyway, so so so we decided to be the people in the town looking at this issue. And so we we, which is hard for me, I like to exist, you know, with my iPad and in the room. And it's like it's a discipline. I agree with Doug. I think I can I really hate it. I really like to dip into chat, but I think it's a good thing for it. I will I will put I will vote to put my attention on the people in the room. And the way that and the way the rules sort of stand the way our rules stand in check in is also that we shouldn't be replying to other people checking in. We don't want to start a conversation during check in. So we violated that a couple of times. We don't and just because we want to follow up and make sure that some link gets put in, we put them in the chat. We should just hold all chat until the end of the check-in round or the end of the session, because sometimes our check-in runs right to the 90 minutes and then paste all the note. If you want to take notes on a separate notepad, then plot them all into the chat at one time and that'll be fine. And we'll get all the links that we want and so forth. But we need to be a little more patient than we've been and tolerant if we follow the no chat rules. Does anybody want to argue for releasing the chat? I three quarters agree with Doug. And I certainly like the idea that if your only reason to chat is to throw a reference out there or to make sure that the official record includes some paper or podcasts, then that makes sense. I think there are occasions when somebody says something and it would make sense for me to send a personal chat. And it could be, hey, let's talk about this. I know some people and if I don't do that right away, my ADHD brain will not allow me to go back and do it later. So I guess my proposed rule is you can post, but you can't read. So don't don't don't respond to what other people say and try to do what you're doing in a one to one manner, not a blast to the gang. That seems difficult to govern, but Kevin. Well, you don't know. If you send a personal note to Doug, then you'll never see it. What if what if we had instead of bio breaks, we had a digital break every 45 minutes and then you could post stuff in the chat and you could be in your digital space when you are. I mean, I think Mike's thing is is great. It kind of reminds me of Juliet's response to her nurse when she's going to the ball. She says, I will no more in dart my eye than my word gives me leave. You know, turns out she she couldn't she couldn't keep it that way. You know, I don't think you can keep yourself that way. So that's that's what I think. I like I like I like that proposal with a 25 minute time.  Yeah, that would probably that'd be usually we only go for like 50 minutes to check in. Yeah, Bob, I'm with the one and one chat. Is that it changes the state of mind of the person receiving it? But not if you have chat open. You'll get a notification. You read it, but then you require everybody in the group to be reading it to know what's happened. No, Doug, what Mike is saying is just don't open your chat at all until the end of check in time and you won't notice. Whatever. Yeah, unless you have a personal I mean, sometimes it's a personal notice, you know, hey, Fred, really sorry to hear about that. You know, I have I might have some ways to help you or something like that. And you want you to know that there's a mysterious person who's joined us to help with gender balance. And my God, seriously? She's real. No way. Lizzie is the Lizzie is here. Yeah, she's muted, though. Yay. I'm eating breakfast. I'm off the video on you. Awesome. I'm so happy to see you. Welcome. Good to see you, too. We are we are just getting ready to go into our check in phase where people talk about what's well, Jerry will explain. Yes, right after Stuart and Carl go. Yeah, a couple of thoughts. One, research has revealed that multitasking is a fallacy. OK, it's just the human mind can't do it. You miss half of each thing. So the idea of, you know, of chatting while checking in is not a good idea. Second, what's brought to mind is a great statement by the guy I studied divorce mediation with who opened the program by saying rules are made for the guidance of wise people and the adherence of fools. And so let's not legislate this. Thank you.  You know, it's not going to you're going to remember it, I think, or write a little note to yourself. That's those are my few thoughts on this one. I like that. I will have to add that I am very skeptical of the multitasking as a fallacy thing, in particular, as a facilitator of of events, I'm paying attention to 10 things as an event unfolds. Ken apparently has an answer to this as well. You're muted, however, you're going to have to task the little mute thing. I got a great distinction from a book called essentialism, the discipline pursuit of less, where he says it is possible to multitask. We can wash dishes and listen to the NPR at the same time. We can drive and have a conversation with somebody on with us. However, multifocusing is not possible. If it requires a focus, it's very like you're really trying to pay attention and you can't you have to be single focus. So and I think people had a tendency to bleed their multitasking into multifocusing and then they end up not remembering what's going on or not paying attention to what's going on. So that was a distinction. I really like to just thought I'd offer that out in this conversation. Thank you. That is awesome. And Stuart, I think your hand is still up from before. So let me go to Carl. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, there's a book on single tasking, but I like that single focus. Better, I mean, that I've also seen referred to like it's multitasking, but like a chef, how do they have every like all the dishes and get to be ready at the same time kind of thing. So you're like another that takes like 10 minutes for you to pot a coffee to brew. What can you be doing in the kitchen for those 10 minutes while it's happening? So that's kind of that type of thing. The other thing is can we if there's a notification, do you have to click on it and stuff like so? Can we can you get to the sometimes I don't look at the chat at all and it gets up to like like there's like 58 number there, but it's it maybe gets to the point where it's overwhelming. So then it's if we can take the chat and just feed it now, you can feed it into. You know, just we can look at it later like you post the chat too. And then one of the other things that's really cool is I've just been looking at the brain 14 and starting to get into some AI capabilities and one of the one of the things that's really cool is it can go through and it will generate a to-do list out of. And stuff with all. So are you are you checking in? Oh, I guess started started to break in. So that's yeah. OK, so you sort of swung into it, but also we have a challenge for today's check in, which is we want to be answering as much as we can. What did you do last week that made things better, which I put in the chat? So I'm going to propose that we swing into check in mode and that we honor the note chat. I'm I'm I'm going to make the so, Mike, I'm going to ask you if you want to DM something to somebody to just make yourself a note that says like DM Stacey about support for the call she was on or whatever that just make a note to yourself. Let's hold off on all chat if possible until the until everybody has checked in. Let's not converse during the check in. Let's pay attention in a mindful, quicker, meetingish kind of way. And let's see how that goes. And if we have a rough time doing that, we can talk about it at the beginning of the next check in in two weeks. But for right now and also for Lizzie, because you're new here, we alternate formats for for these OGM calls every other week. So next week, we'll have a topic and the topics we sometimes have a funny time funding, but we pick a topic and we go into it salon style. And then every other week, we go around and we I will step out, I will step aside and just be a participant until we're done with check ins, unless there's a little bit of housekeeping that needs to happen. But the way to step in is to raise your Zoom hand to form a queue and then to take your time. There's no problem with Quaker like silence between people stepping in and checking in. And normally our check ins are about what kind of OGM things are happening in your life. Today, the bar is a little higher, which is, you know, what did you do in the last week that made things better? Where. What, you know, things and better can be broadly construed, but that's the intention of our of our call. If all of you will help me enforce the no chat until end of check in thing, I would appreciate it, because I don't want to feel like the nasty list, mom. I think that'll work out just fine. So we've raised the bar on check ins. With that, I will step aside, meet myself and see who'd like to step in. Well, I'm always talkative and I'm always doing things. I don't know how much I did this year this week that was making the world better, but the most exciting thing is that we've put out a report on report cards for digital policy. And so we're looking at four countries, Malaysia, Korea, Japan and the US. And in 10 different topics from encryption to cybersecurity to online privacy, we evaluated not the policy, but how the policy is made. And specifically, whether the president and the prime minister or one of their appointees is actually pushing the process so they can get something done. And it was where the report's been out for about four weeks, but we're now talking to people about it and preparing to do a similar thing for Canada, Taiwan, Singapore and perhaps India, although that's quite a challenge. But the idea is to tell the world when a country is doing something well and to tell the world when they're not doing it so well or when they were doing it well and now they're kind of falling down. We were talking earlier about how the theory is often very good from the parliament or the legislature or the White House and the implementation is not always so good. So that's that's been my effort to make the world a little bit better piece by piece. I am a flaming optimist when it comes to technology, but a political pessimist. So my and we've heard that before. So my general approach is Meliorism, just a little bit more, just a little better, just work hard and maybe the right thing will happen. And the way I usually make things happen is by launching some kind of new way of thinking about the topic. Sometimes it's just a buzzword. Sometimes it's just a different way of of reflecting on a hot topic. The other thing that I'm trying to do to make the world a little better is just to keep tweeting and posting as much as possible of the very best. Five sentence reasons to not vote for Trump, I just.  I will I will try to post the best Venn diagram of the month after the chat opens up again. And I do want to also say that probably the best thing I did was I convinced my daughter, Lizzie, to join this call. We've been talking about this call forever. She met Jerry about it must be 10 must be 12 years ago. I guess she was in and she was about 14. So it was 12 years ago. And she and a friend joined us for a weekend retreat here in Washington. The Jerry organized and I don't know if it had the same impression on Lizzie that it had on me. But I think she did come away convinced that there's some really cool people who get to do really cool stuff. And I'll let her introduce herself when she when and if she decides to speak up. So that's that's my little bit of goodness. And I hope. I hope I've been a good model. Well, I guess I'm the only one with my hand raised, so I'll go next. The good thing I did was forward an email. This was something that came along and in my. Before two weeks ago, when I was in charge of content for my our events business, I would have put it all into place and made a made it a big part of the content as it was. I sent it on to the younger people who are going to be leading it and to say, hey, I think this is really important. This was what I would do, but I haven't thought about it again. And then I was just on a potential partner. We've gotten on the on the stage to the point where a lot of people want to partner with us, neighborhood economics. And so this I was saying, what can we do? And I was on there with one of the younger people who's going to be leading it and me and I said, you know, my job is to be irresponsible here and at least creatively irresponsible and imagine all the things we could do without realizing how it would be in the way of what Tim and the other folks are trying to build and do. So I was able to imagine a whole lot of things I wasn't able to do when I was had to be building the conference two weeks ago. So it's it's I think I'm able to deliver a an occasional bound of creative irresponsibility on the front end of any partnership. As long as I don't have to be around to see how it all works. So it feels really good to forward things. So that's that's what I did was stop doing stuff and let the other folks do it. Am I good to jump in? All right. I think I usually wouldn't have anything on what I've done this week. Internet online wise, I work in I'm getting my master's in public health and I work as a public health analyst. So most of my stuff is how to improve health care outcomes for Americans internationally, generally. But this week I got to participate in a focus group for developing survey questions for an international survey on Americans, not international, sorry, a national survey on Americans feelings towards telehealth. And so I have gotten to lead focus groups very frequently, but it was really meaningful to be on the other end to as somebody that has had a lot of experience with telehealth. I used it extensively during the pandemic, but also I've, you know, interviewed a lot of people of varying demographics about their own health care needs. So I was able to bring kind of what I would like to believe a culminating perspective to that in developing those survey questions. So that way, the final national survey that hopefully everyone gets to see and participate in is more representative of the needs of all Americans and is more representative of ways that telehealth can improve and grow and how are people's feelings about their trust towards telehealth, the security. So it's kind of all the different elements, which was really cool. And I think maybe hopefully we'll make a really big difference. Well, so I just recently back from six months in Malaysia and previous to that was six months in Montenegro. So two anti-podes of the world experienced and what's striking to me is how similar they are. And actually similar to the US. People look the same, they dress the same, they drive the same cars. Now, the atmosphere is quite similar. But there are differences that are important, but that's for another discussion. Ideas of what I did was helpful to humanity is a pretty presumptuous idea.  Well, I could make good stories about pieces of it. But also I used a lot of energy to do it, a lot of travel, a lot of taking other people's time away from the things that they were doing. So I just don't know the idea that it was helpful to humanity. Another line would be that just simply existing contributes to the human condition in a way that's worthwhile that we all get to do them and the putting standards on it like this was good and that was bad. This is the point of what life is really about. I've been thinking a lot about the issue of social change. And I've been playing I study with Eric from and Eric from had the idea of a social character, which is how an individual's way of being is adapted to a particular society. I was thinking recently about how social change requires people who are willing to move into social change into the change itself and circumstances that support the person making the move. And we don't talk enough about the fact that the circumstances we are in actually precludes our being helpful to humanity. And that's really a difficult thing. But anyway, those are the things that are in my mind and I'm done.  I said it last week, it was just something about it. And I really thought about it for a long time. So the quick answer of what I did is I went and I visited my friend who lives in another state, her mother in an assisted living care, because I really wanted to make sure that she was being taken care of. OK, but that's really not what I want to talk about, because what struck me when Mike brought up the Gephardt story. And I was thinking how many people are like that that do things just to hurt other people? It connected to the way I felt when I when I left the call last week. We're really shocked. It was nice hearing everybody talk about doing little things, because I think little things are really important. But after listening to everybody talk about how, you know, they held the door or how important it is to say thank you and all those really, really important things, I was kind of shocked because I sort of assumed that everybody on this call does those things. It never like. Like I look at all of you like, of course, you guys do those things because we're good people. We do that. There's not a rule that says we have to do this. And yeah. So a lot of my conversations lately have been about religions and how bad it is that we need to codify things to make us be better people and the lines between government and religion. And I try to get people to see how that's not really a good idea. But between last week and this call, I'm thinking maybe we need rules that say you have to say thank you. You have to hold the door like all the things that I learned in kindergarten. Maybe we do need to make those rules. But not necessarily with a punishment. The punishment is just that we all like stare at you like, oh, you didn't do it. But anyway, that that's my two cents. Because it. It really did surprise me because I'm thinking how many people. Don't do that. Like, I know there are people like that because I've met them, but I don't meet them more than once. So I don't know how many there are like that. Thank you. Yeah, so. Thanks. Moving projects along Thoughtful Citizen Handbooks, of which Jerry wrote a chapter, is looking like it. We're getting ready to publish it. There's a few more things that need doing so within the next few months.  And it's about how do we become a global citizen in this world at the current time? So that's one piece. One, first pass at an outline of a book about how international schools can become one islands of sanity to can plant the seeds of how young people can create the kind of world that we want to live in going forward. It's a combination of of of my work and Jennifer's work, which is really similar, but from two different fields. And I'm kind of excited about the potential of that one. And I'm starting to see that the last piece come together, the book I'm working on, called Getting to Relationship, which will be a Neo book or distributed in in some form. And as it's related to to Neo book, I'm really seeing the potential as I hit all the things that we need to work on on this planet to make it livable. The potential for lots of people to make contribution and have it be very much alive is just within me in the sense that, oh, I don't have to do this all by myself. There's lots of people that know a lot more than I do. And as opposed to in an old paradigm where you'd have to go do all this research, you can now just open it up to people who know a lot and they can make their contributions and let's see where this might go. So. This seems to be my full time job making contribution.  And I'm sure he'll tell tell everybody about his project when when he checks it. Well, I was a bit shocked when Jerry sent his email yesterday and saying this was going to be what the check-in was about. Because I'm doing lots of things, which I hope make the world a better place, but who knows? And you only know afterwards, probably. So I spent a better part of yesterday and today thinking about how I could answer that question and the best thing I came up with was I very often smile and nod and say hello to people I pass on the street when I pass them and I mean, I don't don't want to fall in the trap that Stacey mentioned about, well, you should do that anyway. But at any rate in Amsterdam where I live, people don't do that so much only when they get out into the countryside. It seems that a lot of people do that. So I think whether it should be should be something we do naturally or not. My smiling and nodding and saying hello to people sometimes brings expressions of what's that person doing here. And it sometimes brings an unexpected smile and a nod back. And when it brings the smile and the nod back, I think, well, that sort of is helping to make things better. And now when when we've been on the call and I see how a number of other people are interpreting the question, I could talk about the project that I'm working on, Stuart, that he referred to. I could refer to an article I'm writing, speculating on what the futures of corporate learning could be. If corporates change their purposes to being relevant to the rest of the things happening in the world, then there's a lot of interesting speculation on that, which I hope can get published. But to be honest, I think smiling and nodding and saying hello to people was my biggest contribution in this week. As far as this week has kind of been different for me because I needed to actually focus on myself more. I mean, I'm so driven towards I mean, the framework on developing for my dissertation is about contributions inspired by Doug Engelbart and very future focus this week. My dad's back home and he had been in a rehab center for five weeks, getting his he had broken his leg back in early February and stuff. So I just had to have to focus on the household. But I just wanted to bring up sometimes we need to do that too. And take a step back and self care. And then I've got my two major organizations are going to have we've got both had their conferences in D.C. this summer. So I'll be looking to organize some things and like there's that democracy forum I've mentioned before and introduced Hank to some people who are involved in that. So just a lot of things like that. But I'm just wanting to bring up that we need self care in some weeks. I joined a little bit late, but I'll hop in. And I guess, yeah, I'm going to go back and look on my calendar to see what I did last week and maybe it's a little bit like like like Hank's. It's like, you know, well, I try to do good things most of the time. And I'm pretty much smile. But, you know, even in Berkeley, people don't pay that much attention. But but last week was notable because I left my cocoon of my of my house and family and zoom window and went out into the world and participated in events. And I just really haven't done that in quite a while. So I spent a couple of days that's a Bioneers conference. I dodged a day actually. I did kind of a day in between there. And I did a tour of the of some of the sustainability regeneration sites in Alameda and the Bay area, which was really interesting. And then went to a slow food meeting at the local, you know, lesbian owned bagel shop and that they had invested in. And it was kind of like, I'm not exactly sure how that was good to anybody else than me, but it didn't feel like it was connecting in a different layer. And the ideas were moving around and it's fun to see people who are so committed to making the world a better place, not having to look at all by myself. So that it was distinctly different anyway, it was like the whole week where I was outside the outside the house. Well, Jeff, I'm having a hard time. This week with that concept, with the prompt in that it was a very odd week because my wife got quite sick.  I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but it's pretty rough and highly contagious. And we are in a place right now where we're staying in one room. And I pretty much had to focus on taking care of her while not getting sick myself because she had she had some she's a choreographer and had a rehearsal scheduled in that just began and for her to be OK and be able to follow through with all the people who were involved was important. And she wasn't going to be there to care of me this week if I got sick. So so I wasn't doing anything for the world, per se. But I I really was struck by and this sort of speaks to the multitasking question a little bit. You know, I'm usually spreading myself very thin without any single focus and working on a lot of projects with a lot of people in a lot of zoom rooms. But I had to make my paramount focus on her and our tiny home and and do a lot of cleaning and do a lot of you know, occasional errands to get the the fluids that she might be able to keep down, you know, just very. A lot of minutia and and that very simple and focused service work was kind of kind of freeing in a way. I mean, I didn't feel the sense of the juggle and overwhelm that that I usually do in in trying to be involved in a lot of projects. I had to put some things on hold and had to cancel a couple of meetings and, you know, I don't know how much I ended up accomplishing for the rest of the world. You know, I didn't get to open as many doors as I normally do, except for, you know, virtual ones with some forwarded emails and stuff. I didn't get to smile as many people on the street. But I learned something that, you know, hopefully will will make me better in in other weeks to count. All right, I put up my hand just as Ken unmuted. I'm like, ah, right. So I think my contribution to making the world better in the last week was I I resisted using my death ray to wipe out Toledo. And I think that was a good move. I think just for a minute there, I was like, ah, wouldn't it be fun? I mean, imagine the chaos, imagine that the news is going to make.  So I didn't do that. Another very small, very good thing. I can notice last week that my voice was a little cranky. Yep, that was a cold coming in the door. And I stayed away from my dojo for a week and tried to not pass it on, etc. So I think that was a very tiny thing. I've been I've been trying to figure out how to explain the Neo Books project simply and clearly, and I'm not anywhere near done with that yet. But I feel like Neo Books are a contribution toward figuring out how to liberate knowledge and help us know what we know and use it better in the world. And then finally, I had a first conversation with a startup founder that was really interesting. It's kind of ed tech. And on the one hand, it has a bunch of really lovely things about it, about how to deconstruct knowledge. It's kind of Neo Bookie in spirit. And on the other hand, it had gamification and a couple of other things I'm not really very fond of. And, you know, a deal with a really major educational publisher that I'm kind of suspicious of was in the works and all that. And so I think in the conversation, I may have influenced the direction of the startup a little bit, which happens a bunch when I talk to startups, it's like, oh, have you considered this? What about that? So I think that was my other small bore contribution toward making the world a tiny bit better. Thank you. Well, you just saw my I held the door for Jerry. So that was my contribution for the week. Like Hank, I walk around my neighborhood. I say hi to everybody I see. And sometimes people like look at me like you say hi to me. And, you know, sometimes I have to say hi 20, 30 times. And they'll start to go, oh, hello, you know, I don't take it personal when people don't say hi back or they look weird at me because they're in their own world and who knows what's going on there. You know, and, and, you know, maybe they've had bad experiences with strange men saying hello to them. I don't know, but it doesn't dissuade me. I just keep smiling and saying hello to folks. And I've actually gotten to know a lot of people in my neighborhood as a result of that. And I've also gotten to know people on earth through their animals.   Like I love dogs and cats, but I can't have them in my apartment. So this is where I get my dog love. And I always thank them for, you know, letting me pet their dog, whatever. Actually, I carry dog treats with me when I go hiking on the trails. And I always ask, is it OK to give your dog a treat? And this one one said, please don't, because if you do, she'll go home with you and not me. I thought that was just funny, you know, like she'll sell you out for a biscuit, right? So that's just, and this whole conversation got me reflecting, you know, I was a boy scout and I wasn't a particularly great scout. I made the second class. I wasn't I was just there a couple of years. I didn't become an eagle or anything, but but I still remember I just got a trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous obedience. Oh, I never did obedience very well, but cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. And I found us to be really valuable values to hold on to.  I was living in Boston, but I looked down the street and I see a guy in a wheelchair trying to get up over the curb. And he couldn't do it. And I walked over. He was an older guy at the time. I was in my early thirties and he was probably in his sixties. And I walked over and I helped him up, you know, and I started to push his wheelchair. And then I noticed he's homeless, you know, his had dirt packed in his hair and stuff. And I'm just talking to him, you know, when I brought him down to the tea station and got him on the elevator and the wife looked at me and said, I can't believe you did that for a homeless person. I was like, I didn't see a homeless person. I saw an old man struggling and if I'm an old man in a wheelchair, I hope somebody will do the same for me if I'm struggling, you know. So I just it's my basic stance to try and be kind whenever I can. And, you know, hopefully, as they say, kindness is always possible, right? So I don't try to make a big deal of it. It's just if I see somebody who needs some help, I try to lend a hand. And I don't really think about it. I'm trying to make the world better. I'm just this is how I was raised. I saw a woman at Costco struggling to lift a thing of bottled water out of the cart. She was an older woman. I said, can I help you with that? You know, I've learned to ask. I used to just go over it and it's somebody's like, no, I want to do this myself, you know, but just trying to the daily little things like this, I think are really important glue in our culture. And it's actually April, Jerry's wife, April posted something during the pandemic about how because people were staying home, a lot of the glue was falling apart. And there's just saying hello to your barista, you know, how you doing? Good to see you again. How's your day going? You know, these little things actually make a huge difference in the way that that people feel throughout the day. So I don't think about it. Just it's just the way I'm on how I do. And I have a friend who's. I met him in eighth grade back in 1970, and we've been together for 54 years now. And still friends. We talk every week.  And we always talk about the world. And I'm constantly trying to get him to see, you know, you're making a set, though, as maybe he's already plexed today, guilt side of the thing on moods.  And it's I'm very pessimistic. And I said, you know, I'm pessimistic too, in that there's a lot of really bad things that are happening that are going to continue to happen because the inertia in the system. But I can't let that stop me from doing whatever I can to to undo and redo things so that they're not so bad because as we get closer and closer to that narrowing of the funnel. I want to keep it as wide as possible. So people who make it to the other side will have more of what makes life worthwhile. And I think he's moves towards resignation a lot. Like there's nothing I can do and it's hopeless. And so my battle every week with him is to get him to see it's not hopeless and don't be resigned do which can even if it's just to say hello to somebody on the street that that's actually a big contribution to the world. So that's how I'm going about trying to make the world a little bit better for my having been here. Thanks, Kim. I believe that makes a complete round, which is unusual. It's not the top of the hour and we touched everybody we didn't do a lot of pausing, which means Carl it's grew for you to come in which means I'm releasing the hounds on the chat. And we can find our way to whatever we want to talk about for the next half hour. So Carl the floor is yours. Okay, yeah, just kind of a good segue then because several people weren't on the call last week but I brought up that. I wanted to ask trying to remember Mike and brought up. And I was looking at doing a paper a couple years ago I had. I talked about the micro aggressions and stuff that I had identified micro inclusions is kind of what I had with the eye and then when I did a search there was one paper from Brazil and Portuguese that was using it in that context everything was about imperfections and stuff. But yeah, then I brought up the thing about that I had help. I had a. I'm in DC there was a one del des coffee shop in the organization of American states building and I had a black man is probably mid 60s. I insist on buying me a cup of coffee because I was the first white man who had ever held the door open one. So that was kind of the context there I the one one regret is I should have really, it was like, we were everybody's in such a rush I should have really engaged him and found out more about his life experience. I could do it over again. I would. That's what I would have done. That's me and listening this morning is the stress on basically civility and good manners as being a core and it reminds me that Confucius came into prominence in China during what was called the warring states period. And he proposed basically that if we stress manners and civility and ritual in ways of dealing with each other it could cut through the war stuff. And it strikes me that we're the contrast was with Lao Tzu and a more Zen like way of being in the world. And both of course are attractive paths for us. But I think we're saying that right now, the civility path is the more important. It's a little bit like broken windows theory, kind of. I mean, the idea is, hey, if you get into a neighborhood and you see graffiti and broken windows you're more likely to commit other kinds of crimes or feel like oversight or care in the neighborhood is lax and you can do more and do worse. And I'm, I'm unclear whether broken windows theory has proven itself or not and certainly it was connected to a bunch of other strange policy behavior. But it's the civic scale of the interpersonal stuff that we're talking about right now which is, you know, acts of kindness and civility and courtesy among people just with with one another. Go ahead, Mike. Just a couple of questions. I sent David once the curfew on on chat was lifted I sent Dave a question about his conference so maybe we can follow up offline, but my main question was for Doug Carmichael. I got to go to Malaysia twice in the last year and a half and speak at some global conferences there and but also interact a lot with the digerati of Malaysia. I'd love to hear another minute or two on on your perceptions of Malaysia I've come away quite impressed. This is basically how they have decentralized a lot of policy making and so there's a little competition between the provinces. I got to go to both Penang and to Sarawak. I spent time in Malaysia so I'd love to hear your perceptions and how the different parts of the country are different and what we can learn from Malaysia. Because we, we've been very impressed we've been doing some analysis of what they're trying to do and for 20 years, actually for 20 years ago 25 years ago they had the vision and for 15 years that's all about all they had. They had a bunch of investment from foreign tech companies, but now they seem to actually be implementing and they have a lot of talent. So it's, I'd be investing if I could. Well, let me say a few things about that. I was really struck by first house similar Malaysia felt to me to the being in the States. As I said earlier, but the differences are also profound and that is, people struck me as basically happier. Basically healthier. There's very little fast food and people are suntan of course because of the climate. But the general feeling of well being is really quite striking and it's truly a multicultural state. Many people speak four languages, English, Chinese, the two Chinese languages and Malaysian. And it there's a mix that just is treated in a positive way for by most people most of the time. I felt that that generally they're more open. Their mind is more like a sieve than a vault. Stuff comes in and goes out more easily than it does here. We are more uptight for sure. And it really striking that their dangers of the multiculturalism could lead to civil war at some point, especially with problems with resources. But generally, I love being there. I had a really good time. I felt supported and stimulated. And the food and the coffee are amazing. Yes. The worst thing in Malaysia is the traffic in Penang last, which is a province. 33,000 new cars were registered in the last six months of the year. And we're going to put them I mean it's already an intense traffic jam in the whole place. I'm going to take us back to the conversation and civility because I thought it was really interesting and I maybe wanted to throw an idea into the group because, you know, I didn't know Stacy mentioned early on. There's this feeling and we're all doing these kind things were, you know, smiling to our neighbors were saying hello and it almost feels like you wish you could codify some of these things but like, not love like you know like Stacy said like, you know, it's getting a little bit more tangible to ensuring that that got done. And it got me thinking, as somebody that's doing, you know, I do a lot of public health I do a lot of public policy and we have a lot of focus on diversity equity inclusion, that some of those steps can be a really slippery slope right like you know what I think of, you know there's there's the smile to your neighbor but how you know how wide of a net we cast that we define as civility. Some of those things can be cultural, for instance, you know, we say we be we're quiet and respectful in public places. Quietness and respect is not necessarily a thing in other non Caucasian cultures you know there's, you know, a lot there's an assumption that somebody's being aggressive if they're black when they're really just being loud because that's part of their community that's part of their culture. It's not, you know, it's misidentified or it's misrepresented in different cultures and I think I really enjoy this conversation of civility. I think it's, it needs to be had alongside that multicultural discussion of how do we encourage kindness to each other without excluding cultures because we are associating kindness as certain behaviors that maybe don't aren't the same representatively across cultures I hope that made sense. Totally thanks Lizzie. I'm Stacy please. Thank you.  You also can't always smile without having it taken the wrong way so you have to be careful with that too. What I wanted to say after Doug had spoken though is that part of what set me I mean I, I really thought about the question for at least a day. And my experience was more like, I felt like, so the reason I didn't like the question which I stated last week is I felt like we were asked to come here and say how great we are, what did we do that was so great and that is really hard for me I'm not somebody that's good at like, it's just hard for me. What made this question hard for me is that when I thought about the things that I do, they all felt so little. And I feel like this society has taught me not to value those little things. And I think that's a big piece of this. And I don't know why I'm adding this but I guess, in some way this connects to the commons and where I think I want to be able to help. I started thinking about Bob Hope and the service that he provided. And that that is such an important role. And somehow, and this is more of a neo bookie kind of conversation and goes with some of our other community calls. I think we, I would love if some of us could develop something for the commons. That's almost like an entertainment piece and I don't mean entertaining. I mean more engaging piece.  That that that's what I'm thinking. So anyway, I just wanted to point out that part of what we what we say we value is not built into the system to be valued. And I think we should put a little thought into that. And if there's something we can do to shift that. Thank you. Thanks, Stacy. I'm, I'm sure at least one of our regular viewers on YouTube is watching us for the comedy and for Ken's poems at the end. Yeah, we could do this as nerd criteria. I like it. So I just wanted to respond to something that was he said. Anybody here see the color of fear movie the color of fear. Okay, it's a documentary about a bunch of men people color on a weekend retreat and it's a pretty intense documentary and Victor Lewis was almost intense people on there I found myself. He's a black man from Oakland, I believe I'm myself at a conference with him deep ecology summer schools 1994 so 30 years ago. And there's people, you know, faculty and we're speaking and Victor going yeah, yeah, yeah, reach yeah, yeah.  He's like, Oh, dude. Thank you for telling me that you got to know where I come from I listen loudly, my people listen loudly when we go to church will say something good. We go, yeah, preach we want to hear it. That's the way I appreciate what I hear and I said wow thank you for telling me that because it was so eye opening that I had this.  And I just I got this deep appreciation for for the honesty that passed between us and also the fact that he wasn't being with respect he was actually being hugely respectful, and I did never occurred to me that that was the case so. I'm grateful at that lesson fairly early in my life because it's really helped me to open up to to recognize when someone does something that I have a judgment about to inquire, you know, why are you doing that. And it's like, Oh, okay, thanks. Let me know. I really appreciate that. I just wanted to thank you for triggering that memory for me. Well just are astonishingly different. I know in in Latin America, generally, I'm probably over generalizing anyway. If I'm if you're talking to someone and they're not going. Uh huh. Yeah, got it in the Spanish equivalence ballet see if they're not giving you a little act back periodically. It's like they're not listening. And in in our rounds here when we talk, we all go into respectful silence until a person is finished saying what they say, right. And I think to some people from other cultures it's like talking into a void, like like there's an anechoic chamber out here is anybody even alive out there. And that rhythm gives them more trigger and more energy to participate continue putting their energy into the conversation. And I think we're seldom aware of all these things. I know that long ago I read that in Iranian culture. If when you see somebody who's Iranian, you don't ask after their family. It's kind of insulting.  And again, I may be missing broadly. But we don't notice stuff like that and we're, we're sort of making passing insults in ways that people don't comment on because they've given up. And they're like, yeah, nobody knows that about me slash us. So I won't bother but inside. There's a little wound of some sort so it's interesting to just be alert to different manifold ways that humans exist on the planet and the things that we have as expectations and cultural norms and fears and all those kinds of things. And Joseph Jones is a man from Morocco is 84 now he's born, you know, in the Alice mountains and the dirt Ford, you know, and, and he's always saying you in his culture. Exactly what you're saying you always ask how's your wife, how are your children, how's your parents, you know, that was just, that was how conversation was done before you ever got to anything about yourself. I just, I find it's a lovely thing, you know, he says, you know, how's your wife, or he says how's the baby, you know, like, it's just, and if I don't ask after his wife and his kids, then he, he won't say anything but I know he'll be upset with me so I've learned how is, you know, how's your grandchildren, I'm not sure. And again, this comes back to some kind of the glue that holds us together. It's not earth shattering. It's very mundane, but it's very important that we do it because it really, you know, makes people feel that you're interested and you, you're seeing them and acknowledging them and I think there are so many people that I see out there don't feel seen and I think of Michael Mead when he was asked, you know, what do you think about cameras being installed in schools you said children don't want to be looked at they want to be seen. Thanks, Ken. Lizzie and we have a Q going. She's going to say it really quick it feels like we're in a conversation of an, you know, instead of a culture of civility but a culture of good intention. You know, if I'm walking into a person and I, I know that however they're coming towards me is with kindness and with, you know, warmth and with welcome. I can interpret that however it comes.  Nothing to thank you. That's great. That was that was actually perfect because I couldn't find the words for it. And that is exactly what I was thinking. I mean, one of the things I don't like about rules is that they're constantly changing. And you can't always know what set of rules you're walking into. And so, to me, it's about the good intention. But the, the other piece is the authenticity. I don't like when somebody asks me a bunch of questions that they think they should ask. You know, like, I don't like small talk. I just, I want to be with somebody and whatever comes out comes out but it's with knowing that there's good intention behind it. You know, and let's face it, there are some people that no matter what you do, they're going to see the negative in it. You can't change that. That was perfect. At the risk of peeing in the punch bowl. I want to point out the obvious which is that shattering civility and civil norms are what MAGA is all about. As a tactic, as a strategy, in fact, to froth up opponents and get them unsettled and out of their zone comfort zone and in fact in the fearful zone to shut down their options and their planning and everything else and it works. It works beautifully. Well, I've got a thought in my brain that's like a Trump's playbook, basically the tactics that Trump uses all the time and breaking norms. And I'm not sure I have being uncivil in there, but I will attach it now. That's that's in fact something he does regularly as a matter of course to own the political dialogue to get attention because he knows in modern politics and modern power politics that all attention is good. There's no such thing as bad attention. And when somebody's hating on you, if you look powerful as somebody walks by the CNN monitor, it's a win for you. And his followers seem to agree with that and it's turning into the taking a part of civility and all the things that we've talked about nicely in our conversational part of this call. And it distresses me no end because I love cultural norms that was especially when they're good. I love civility. I love kindness. I think all those things are awesome. And we're in in a moment now where those things are being weaponized very intentionally and that makes me deeply sad. And I don't think that means we stop doing those things with one another. But in fact, I think it what it might mean is that those things matter more in a time of aggression and conflict and, you know, all these kinds of things but but, and I'll add one last thought which is the, the accusation of snowflake was popular maybe five six years ago from the right to the left. And I'll say that the right is now acting like snowflakes. They're sensitive about everything about like whatever they can't seem to take it, but that's a whole separate conversation. Anyway, onto Mike Stacy then Doug. Once again, we're going to run out of time just as we're getting into the deep big issues. Just real quickly, I'm going to use a virtual PowerPoint to draw this Venn diagram. That's right. The world's best Venn diagram.  But up in the top corner, it said Reagan senile. And it had another circle overlapping bush incompetent, and then overlapping with both was Putin autocratic, and then the three way connection Trump. And it was just like, wow. If you haven't seen the articles just in the last 24 hours on prominent psychologists saying Trump will be completely senile within four years I mean it's, it may be the thing we have to get people to understand that we have to talk to our 60 year old friends and say, I'm a 35 year old father. And you've mentioned he's not thinking real clearly. That's what we're seeing.  They're just they're they're nonsensical. But that's the negative. Let me change the topic just a little bit and talk about how we find common ground. Anybody's seen the chart of Airbnb bookings in America for Sunday night. It's a map of the US, all these blue dots where people still have rooms available. And there's a red streak across the nation, where everybody has booked their Airbnb for the eclipse. There's nobody no place to rent, or at least no Airbnb's. When I go up to Erie, Pennsylvania, I have friends flying to Ohio and Tennessee and Texas. Here's an event that people of all political persuasions old and young are going to find, you know, really life changing or at least it's going to be, you know, something they never forget. I went to Erie in Oregon about seven years ago when Lizzie and I went down to see the eclipse. And it was it was the perfect place the perfect time. And I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that we don't have any clouds in Erie, Pennsylvania. And I'm hoping, hoping that the place we've picked to hang out which is a relatively small city park. They're going to have a pink Floyd cover band. They're playing songs from the dark side of the moon and food trucks. And I'm hoping to just talk to people about what this experience means and to, you know, forget about everything else that's going on in the world. It should be a very special time. We saw the last eclipse at a Christian school where my cousin's husband taught. It was a very different culture and politics than Lizzie and I, but it was, it was a community just entranced by the spectacle of the lights going out at one o'clock in the afternoon. The key, I think, is to get yourself into a really serious conversation about important issues so that you can make a claim that, yes, the sun will go away at a particular moment to win your argument, but you have to time it. You have to time the whole thing just right. So you are like old priests of, you know, what thousands a couple hundred thousand years ago. I figured it out. It was for the Egyptian priests, you know, the river would rise when they said it would. It beats virgin sacrifice, gotta say. A lot of, yeah, yeah, big time. Doug, over to you. Well, I forgot what I was. No. Use the chat as your Christian. You should have put it in the chat. Yeah, I sometimes use the chat as my little reminders on. Well, so I'm going to pass. I like it best if 2016 April Fools, Carl. Man. Yeah, that was, yeah. First. Yeah, I love that. I'm looking forward to seeing Trump and orange, but I'm not sure that's the orange I'm thinking. There's also a penton, a penton, a penton color of clownfish orange. I love that. Stacy, then Doug. Yeah, zoom had taken my hand down. I just had two quick things to say one, two, you know, as far as the MAGA comment, I just want to say that extremes are like that. So there are people on the extreme left and they are so not civil. And I think just the best thing we could do is to just be even more civil to whoever we're talking to. And that's one of the things I really do try to do every single day. And there was something else, but I don't remember what it is other than don't laugh. There are tons of people that are doing religious things and, and staying home and expecting crazy stuff to happen as a result of this eclipse. So like we're laughing right now but talk about like mass delusion and hysteria and whatnot. This is somebody out there is using it to their benefit. Exactly. It's happened so often in the past. It's kind of crazy. Doug, then Hank, then Dave, so I remember what I was going to say. Oh, good. That people like us, I think are on an obligation to understand Thompson Trump supporters a little better. A key thing is this society at the level of economics and our culture is not working for them. And they're deeply motivated by that and we need to understand. I agree with you entirely I'm pacing in the chat. The thoughts I've been collecting since I created this thought in 2016. Why do people support Trump. And I think there's a lot of good reasons why people support Trump, a lot of very legit reasons that we don't that we understand that we forget at our peril and Stacy thanks for pointing out that the far left and the rights beef against cancel culture and microaggressions and all that kind of stuff is exactly that it's like hey guess what, you all are trying to shut us down from even conversing. So, Hank, you muted. We're coming to the end of our time so I just wanted to say out loud something I just put into the chat I really like this developing theme of a culture of civility and small kindnesses and good intentions and assuming good intentions. Because you tend to forget or at least do it personally I tend to forget sometimes that it should be natural and it should be more of it. So, I don't want to say we should have this type of check in every week or every month, but I think it'd be very useful for people on this call and people like us to think about how that can be cultivated. And I just want to make one comment about Stacy what you said a few minutes ago, the things I do they all seem so small. And I have exactly the same thing, but now, listening to everything said here and about the small kindnesses and the, the, the other things like that, I'm getting to appreciate the importance of small things. Thanks, Hank. Dave. Yeah, thanks, Jack. Yeah, I was kind of Stacy provoked me around the left right kind of notion of like what people on the left are doing people on the right are doing. I was listening to Tyler Cohen talk with some woman who was doing a biography of Milton Friedman, and they were using the left right kind of analysis, and it struck me that that analysis is fundamentally wrong today. I'm just throwing this in here at the end of the session, maybe somebody responded later that it's not us. It's not a line with the left and right it's actually a circle, probably a spiral even right. And, and, and one of the things we're doing with my kicking going back to the left right analysis is that we're missing that there's, we've moved on into other spaces that we're not talking about anymore. I might understand Trump in a left right kind of framework, but he doesn't really fit there, you know, is somewhere else. And I think, like a lot of the, you know, in my world around regeneration, the kind of progressive, you know, regenerative agriculture will run right into the Ivermectin taking, you know, in prison Fauci people that they overlap kind of there, and then they start to look really maga, but you know so it's a circle, I swear, it matters, you know that it's not a line it's a circle. Anybody who's found an article that describes more productive dimensions or dimensionality or ways of talking about this please share those on the OGM list or here or whatever. I think that's really important that we stop using the same, the same sort of tropes metrics framing that we've been using because it's failing us. So let's just jump in real quick and just say to what Dave said we have to recognize that there's a difference between the Ivermectin crowd and the jail Fauci crowd. Those two are not the same they overlap but they are not the same. And as far as like the jail Fauci crowd, I don't know that you can talk to all of them. I don't, you know, it depends. Within each of those things, there are some that cannot be spoken to that go but that goes with all things with all politics with all beliefs. There's always going and that's why I always say, I try to get a baseline of how people make decisions. And if they change, depending on who they're talking to, then I know it's a lost cause. So why waste my time there. And I mean Stacey my one of my examples is it's the organic consumers association, right, which is the big organic association has the regenerative agriculture group, which is you know the big regenerative agriculture group, and they're calling people in that organization are publicly calling for Fauci to be in prison. Whoa, I don't know what to do. And just to say real quick in that case, ask what what I do is I ask questions, because then people could see. Well, that's kind of harsh or well why do you think that you know, just so that we see who we're standing next to. I think it's important. Thanks Stacy. Thanks for putting the big smelly fish on the table at the end of our conversation Dave. Brother Homer, do you have a poem for us to take us out of this very nice call. In honor of the eclipse. I'm going to read Theodore Roethke's in the dark time. In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening shade. I hear my echo in the echoing wood. A word of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the rim. Beasts of the hill and circumstance of the den. What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstances is my favorite line of this poem. What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance, the days on fire. I know the purity of pure despair. My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks. Is it a cave or a winding path. The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences. A night falling with birds, a ragged moon, and in broad daylight, the midnight come again. A man goes far to find out what he is. The death of the self in a long, tearless night. All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light and darker my desire. My soul like some heat maddened the summer fly keeps buzzing at the sill, which I is I. A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself and God the mind and the one is one free in the tearing wind. Thank you, Ken. Thanks very much. Anybody who's going to go see the eclipse, have a great time on Monday. It's funny, there's an Aikido seminar in Montreal, led by one of the founders of my dojo here in Portland. I'm not attending, but five of my dojo mates are going and they had to book early because the city was booking up because eclipse. Most of them are going to hang out through Monday to see it and recover. 75% chance of clouds in Montreal.  Apparently, Pike's Peak is prime viewing. No? Is it off-center? Shoot. No, it's way west. It's only 80% coverage. Don't go to Pike's Peak. Never mind that. What's the Aikido move against clouds, Jerry? There's not much you can do. Wave hands in clouds. Lizzie, thanks for being with us. Nice to meet you, Lizzie, come back again. Don't forget to be awesome, everybody. DFTBA. That's the nerdfighter, nerdfighter motto. Even the Girl Scout motto. Bye. Thanks, y'all. Take care.


The city of Fauston is mourning the death of its assistant fire chief tonight. 42-year-old Kerry Berberich, who you see fourth from the left in the front row of this photo right here, died earlier this week in a motorcycle crash about a mile south of Langby. Berberich was driving a motorcycle northbound on County Road 4 when his motorcycle veered off to the right side of the road. The crash was reported just before 10 a.m. on Wednesday. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Russia may conduct mobilization more openly after re-election Ukrainian intelligence. After the presidential election, Russia may conduct conscription more openly a representative of Ukraine's defence intelligence, Andrey Yusov said. After this farce, also known as the election of Vladimir Putin, mobilization activities may be more open. It is true, he said, conscription activities in Russia have not stopped. Yusov stated, In Russia were accompanied by numerous incidents at polling stations with attempts to destroy ballots, arson and explosions. Asked whether these were attempts at protest or provocations by the Russian special services, Yusov noted that there are still a large number of people in Russia who are ready to resist the Kremlin regime. Someone can set fire to a polling booth or pour brilliant green on it, while others are ready to liberate their homeland from Putin's regime weapons in their hands as volunteers from the Russian Volunteer Corps. The freedom of Russia legion, the Siberian battalion representative of Ukraine's defence intelligence, said. The head of Ukraine's defence intelligence, Kirill Obudanov, said earlier that conscription in Russia has not stopped since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is ongoing. The general staff of the armed forces of Ukraine announced on September the 11th that a massive forced mobilization of the population would begin in Russia under the temporarily occupied territories due to Russia's heavy losses at the front. Its numbers could range from 400,000 to 700,000 people. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to conscript another 130,000 Russian citizens on September the 29th, 2023. Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine Olexi Danilov said on November the 20th that the Kremlin could launch a total mobilization after the presidential elections in March 2024. British intelligence believes that the high level of desertion demonstrates the poor morale of the Russian army and its unwillingness to fight. This is due to the lack of training and motivation faced by Russian troops along the entire front line. The White House is sounding the alarm, again announcing the very deplorable state of the Ukrainian army which has lost US military assistance. As John Kirby, coordinator of strategic communications at the US National Security Council, said, the armed forces of Ukraine are beginning to retreat, losing territory, and this could turn into a disaster.A White House representative spoke on ABC Television where he criticized the US Congress for delaying the allocation of additional funding for Ukraine. According to him, the Ukrainian army, left without shells, is forced to retreat, occupying a second and a third line of defense. Kirby did not explain where he got this information from, but the whole point is that Kyiv does not yet have a second or third line of defense. They are only being built at an accelerated pace. So there is nowhere to retreat there, said the White House coordinator. Earlier, Ukrainian resources reported that the new Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, SYRSKY, is forced to send fresh forces to contain the advance of the Russian army near Abdiivka since the second line of defense, where the Ukrainian military could retreat, is not ready. Therefore, now Kyiv is buying time to build it with the lives of Ukrainian soldiers.AS SYRSKY previously stated, Ukraine plans to build three defense lines with a total length of about 2,000 km.AT the same time. Commenting on the consideration of the bill on assistance to Ukraine and the US Congress, Kirby emphasized that time is of the essence.


some of the talk of further conversations with some of the topics that came up here, and other convenings that are already planned will happen. So thank you so much everyone for openness and for the candor, and the really, really refreshing conversation in mind. Mark and I were talking, it's been a really great mix of local Los Angeles folks and our visitors from international and national, and the conversation has felt casual, which is great, but very honest and there's a bit of depth to the conversation that I think we really appreciate. I spoke to a few people earlier in the morning so that we would have a public, some anchors to respond to in the last couple of days, and this is again very casual from where you're sitting. Just sharing some thoughts about the last two days would be sharing the conversations you might have. So why don't we just start with that. As I mentioned to you, I asked a couple of folks, please begin, and then the rest will be a little more time to think about things. Not anyone of course needs to respond to things, he's very great, but why don't we start? I think I'm going to start actually. I am going to pick somebody. Sure. Okay, hello. You want to come down? That might be better. I'm going to go ask, we have to know just before I'm running for a call, especially every year, I'm with you. I'm the sectional general of the European Union. No, of an international, originally called IETM Informal. What we changed our name into is a few years ago, because we felt that Europe was too limited. So now we are indeed an international network with many members from other functions, though we are still based in Brussels, the capital of Europe. And our main part of the members are still coming from Europe. Having been here, as a guest to this symposium, and I've brought in a few members of IETM here as well, I must say that it was very enriching to feel how much it is really important. And you have a problem, and how much you have to learn from it as well. Especially while we now in Europe there are very difficult situations, many of our very strong traditional cultural policies are now in decay. So all of us are looking for new strategies, new models. We also realize that it's not only cultural policy that is in decay, the whole concept of democracy, concept of a federation of Europe, et cetera, et cetera. And that there's a growing awareness between the artists that they might play an important role in designing those new models. I think this is really a moment that we could unite and fight to work together both you with a history of, well, very weak support of governmental aid. And we, coming from a place where we have had this useful aid, have now tried to find new ways. I heard in our last talk about the film Artistic Community, something that I thought, oh, yes, this is very, here we can learn from how you do, how you work together with the corporate group. For instance, we did it about first. And I know that there are a lot of things like the Fortile House, and that as well as we have a whole tradition of this, and we know exactly how you could do this, this type of work. So I think that we are very concrete levels, and I think there are a lot of things to share. That's one thing. Part from that, I think those wonderful inspirational thoughts of the artist were really great. It was both talking about mirrors or chattering mirrors, the incentives of art as a spiritual experience to how you could relate fiction and reality. But it is a proof of how strong the choice of the artistic program is because I made new idols and that's all. I was born before, and I was very happy to restore our friendships. Well, yeah, thank you so much for having me here and for making us experience this. And I hope you all get once the opportunity to come and see the ITM in its functioning as a network. We have our pilot to meet this year. So look at our websites to see the right role of your group to be able to once visit those meetings. And with our talent, I am thrilled that this is happening. I've been dreaming about this for a very long time. We spent the last four years in England really considering how we're going back to Los Angeles. Is there a community? Is something happening? And for the last four years I've been flying back and forth and actually witnessed how every two, three months things are really coming up and coming up and coming up and then two years ago when we had Ray Arley coming here and also this cluster somehow really interestingly we've really actually synced phenomenally in this town because amazing things happen at the same time. We had Ray Arley, we had, I believe, Asian American Theater Festival, we had Fringe Festival and this year we have a Live Arts Exchange Festival happening and this is phenomenal. This is so important because I think we are recognizing that we have the power to impact the fabric of the city in a very specific way and the conversations that took place the format of it was really organic. It actually, the breaks and the breakfast and the lunch and the reception and hosting little gatherings in our space we know how much work goes into it. So thank you guys for doing this and for feeding us and providing that because I think actual food really allows for something very organic around the table type of conversations happen when ideas are born and actions can take place. So for me Ray Arley is the artery. It's a celebration and yet it's a really much a working session. I saw that it's, for me it's opportunity to for me to really take theater seriously, I do, but I mean I can really take it seriously now because I feel we are actually being taken seriously too by the city. We take each other more seriously too I think. I see a lot of people here that I know for years and I think we are getting more grounded and rooted. This has also been an amazing education. I mean I have a list of things. I mean planning meetings with the city, go to the neighborhood, council meetings go to the order of business improvement, history of meetings. Yes, we have to be very, very, I feel like I have to be an actress in life in all of those roles in order to make theater vibrant and in a stable position, not being appointed by the landlords, not sharing, not having odd marijuana dispensaries placed right next to our theater without any permits required when our fantastic neighbors next to our theater just got their liquor license because they don't have a urinary in their bathroom. And they have 90 days to wait for the permit for liquor license. This is where I think we have the power. We can integrate with communities where our theaters are located. We can represent our views on how the neighborhoods can be developed. And this has been a form of that inspiration and to grow those... We are the same. I really feel that we are becoming the same. And I would love to see this festival happening every year. We are communities. We have forums to address that, whatever we can do, we are creative. And I think that can be something really that stable every year we know we have it. So consistency and yearly consistency actually can charge our idols. If something is here, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hello, I'm Jolly and I work for Center Theater Group in involvement, but I'm also a local player. So these two days have been really... They formed a lot of questions for me. And yesterday I greatly appreciated starting off with hearing the manifestos from all the artists. I was inspired by Alice Twan and all the other artists. And as an artist, it spoke to me as like, yes, okay, here's how we sort of describe our people and sort of be unapologetic about it and not talk about it as sort of marketing speech. I appreciate that. But then as a person who works in donor relations and tries to get people to support the arts, I was wondering, okay, that's great. I agree with everyone on that stage, but how do we talk about this to people who aren't already sitting in those seats? Because whether we like it or not, there are a lot of people who aren't feeling in the seats, who aren't buying tickets. And I started thinking, I think there's a lot, though, what if we as theater artists, all the theaters just disappear? How long do you think it would take to really notice that? That's kind of a scary thought sometimes. I think we play an important role, but I think that because I like theater, right? And thinking about disciplinary approaches, I was really, again, very fascinated because for me as an artist, I love looking at things from different disciplines, and I get inspired by that. But as my own art creations, they're very formal. I appreciate language. I appreciate coming into a theater and letting the lights go down. For me, that's just different. That's a part of life that's completely different from my nine to five. So, again, how do we make this accessible is not the right word, but someone mentioned something yesterday about just letting people in. How do we do that? Is it just so evil-easing sometimes? Today, I also... So last night, I had a bit of a religious experience I was still in a different map. It was just something for me. It was like, okay, I didn't know what I was getting into, and half the time, I didn't even know what I was watching. But afterwards, I felt like, oh my god, I just went someplace else that most things aren't able to take me there. And I was able to step out of my typical theater eyes in the sense of, okay, I know a lot of theater. I don't know what to expect when. Okay, this is good to go there, and I'm going to judge this on how he surprised me at this point, blah, blah, blah. And that piece to me broke all kind of those rules for me. And still with me today, listening to the movie from 5.0. And then the panel I just came from where we were talking about creative placemaking and stuff. And I always feel like I'm in a weird place because I'm not indeed a Lois Angelino from Washington, D.C. And I come here and I'm like, what did I just come and gentrify in someone else's city? It was the same thing in my city. So I wrestle with that. And then as an artist, I think, yes, artists are already in this community. So let's give these artists, who are already in these communities, places an opportunity to exhibit their art, right? But then again, they don't need working with the funders. Okay, how do we get people to support this? How do we make it not necessarily sound sexy, but how do we justify what we're doing? And I think this is supposedly the past two days. I'm not quite sure if I've gotten any answers, but again, the questions, at least for me, are rising up. My question is that I'm leaving with are how can I join the conversation, but how can I come to the table as an artist, as a person who works in arts administration, and as sort of a citizen of Los Angeles and of the world, as a global citizen? All right, now we've got all these sort of questions and we've heard all these people talking. Next step, how do we make it happen? And I'm a writer and performer. I make solo plays based on personal story myself. I work with other people who have any connection to the rest of the personal story in a workshop called What's a Story, which has led me to begin an initiative with the Shoah Foundation called Witnessing Responsibility, where we'll be inviting artists to come into relationship with a workshop of testimony. And I have to echo the gratitude of the three people who spoke before me for this panel and talk about the conversations I've had, the many conversations. Oh, I live in Los Angeles. The many conversations I've had with my colleagues here in Los Angeles, who I see once a year, once every couple of years, out on the map like this, all of us say, how can we continue these conversations on a more regular basis? And so that's the question that I bring up to you. You don't have to do any work for us, but to us so that we can create it ourselves. When I was asked to sort of think about the past couple of days, the thing I think about has to do with ownership. And there's that, I saw, you should have stayed home more on, in the first scene of that, it's all about thinking what other people's had.  And then there's the whole story as a big issue for me, personal story, what are our stories, and then the question might be this morning, do we as theater members need to tell stories, you know, about the Canadian experience that's not telling stories? And then, we were just talking about, I think, Donald, you were just talking about the experience you had last night. I had a similar experience, and I also had more unspectively, since I knew that mouse for it, with Eldaya, where we go there, and it seems perfectly familiar, it's about auditions and performance, and digging into something. At the end of the first act, something, the roof lifted, and I was somewhere where I didn't expect to be. And, yeah, something else? Yeah, somewhere I didn't expect to be. And the amazing opportunity here is we get to talk to the artists, you know, we want to talk to the that actress who is in the center of that scene, because it took me somewhere that was extraordinary, and we were talking, and she said that's the story I was trying to tell. And she was telling it in a made-up language with music and her body, and it came kind of directly into me. And then I felt like I don't know if she's here, but Helen, who is the other half of Stones in the Mountain, the other creative person, because there was just something, I said, how do those women do that? They're not trained performers.  They wrote those words. They're all in the program. It doesn't tell us what they mean in English, but somehow their stories come to us via our stories and who we are and that's true propriety. It's true propriety, where I can hand over something that means something to me and leave room in it for you to fill in the books with what you are. And I guess that's what's coming to me so profoundly. So that's what you're going to see in the fourth place of that. But again, we're proud to take care of you. To all of you, you don't need to come down here to be able to count just to show a few thoughts. Yes, I found fascinating with that this entire series seeing the shows being human for panels on this stage is that it has completely altered the life perspective of theater and how it exists in our lives and where I can take the experiences that I have, particularly shows and see other shows differently. And then I was having this conversation just before this was in March when the panels changed how I knew what performance is because I realized that this was performance. We had people coming up and storytelling. And it was a conversation with the audience. And it was a combination of having a conversation with the audience and us being an ensemble. And so it was really fascinating experience for me and I thank you both and please, please have it. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I've seen, I guess, seven of the shows. Yay! And there's two more. Two more. This, fighting on the wing and I will receive a studio SCR series of self-disruptoria and I will also be able to secure the chance to hear. I guess I would say a moment of live performance that I found striking and compelling and thought provoking and confusing in the right way. And the thing I'm dealing with is pride. I just had so much pride that it's so much of the work was from L.A. theater companies. And so much pride that we're able to bring so much work from other places. And, you know, for a town that is not always seen as a theater town, I think the last two days we've been extremely a theater town. So thank you very much. Oh, yeah. I'm going to go to the full sphere of theater. Angela Maddox talked yesterday about this ritual with TVA of going in and out together as groups and community. And that, you know, as Crystal was just saying this theater we're in a theater experience right now. And this cannot be it's always made very clear to me that we must do this as community as those who make our art together.  So we need to be doing this as professionals in our field and to continue to see our mates and respect each other and the work that we're doing to stand in awe of the work that we're making the beautiful work that you've made possible to see in this bottleneck experience that we're having and I just want to champagne-like explode on the other end of it. You know, what's going to happen for all of us is going to be very exciting to track and see. And it is another reason why we need to stay doing this on a regular basis. So thank you. I also want to let people know that you like this come to the theory factory so there is an, you know, go on up to Portland and keep going, you know. The West Coast is identifying ourselves now and I feel this very strongly so I just, I want to give thanks and say hi to me if you haven't met me yet. I'm so excited to meet you. Hi. Hi everyone. I'm Natalie Darrell one of the Festival's associate producers. Thank you all for coming. It's been such an honor to meet you and to congregate. And one of the things that I find interesting, particularly with Lenny's work is this idea that the community can be can be professional can can wow us as professionals. And the question I leave for all of us is how do we not become a clique and how do we for radar like 2015, 2017 under the radar hype how do we begin to incorporate our community into these conversations so as not the cool kids gather to look at our cool work and talk about these amazing things that we are truly integrating our communities. So is that mean that every festival we require that we bring someone along from the community who has never attended a theater festival because if these conversations stay in tune we're doing ourselves and our communities in this order of service. So I want us to really remind ourselves and I'm very proud of the work that we've done but there's always work to continue to do and I believe particularly with us as artists we have to fight against being a clique. Yay! Thank you everybody. You didn't have to say that to each other. Thank you for taking part in one of the panels and thank you to LNTC for having us here and of course there's extra work already to be used each year for performances to add these conversations and extra efforts I really appreciate it but this building of course is well owned and operated by the well operated by the Latino theater company because they're the director owned by the city of Los Angeles and the department of cultural affairs thank you for working together with them during this course for your first and ongoing important support of Radar LA every aspect of it. Great. Other major funders Radar LA The Doors to Charitable Foundation was the first to step up and commit to support it and specifically to help make possible this symposium aspect of the discussion that we're having. Thank you. The other funders include Art Place America the National Endowment for the Arts and vital projects support from the National Performance Network especially the Performing Americans program K and Elizabeth and also for two projects in particular from the New England Foundation for the Arts the National Dance Project of NIFA and also the National Theater Project thank you Deena Selma our coordinator for this symposium theater group Malcolm has been extraordinary also


Item number, SCP-452 Object Class, Euclid Special Containment Procedures SCP-452 specimens are contained in a 5-meter by 5-meter isolation chamber at Site B. Specimens should be fed live insects, preferably crickets or mealworms, but other harmless insects are viable. At least once a week, and regular observation should be maintained to ensure the health of the specimens. Personnel tasked with maintenance of SCP-452 should wear sealed suits at all times, while inside SCP-452's containment. Experimentation on SCP-452 may be performed with permission from at least one Level 4 personnel, provided all safety requirements and regulations are observed. Specimens taken out of primary containment should be kept inside the specially prepared portable terrariums designated for safe use with SCP-452. Exposure of personnel to the effects of SCP-452 should only be performed in isolation chambers for easy recovery of SCP-452 specimens after exposure. Description SCP-452 is a colony of Latrodectis Hesperus, the Western American Black Widow, physically indistinguishable from normal spiders of its kind. SCP-452 has a preference to spin webs near areas where humans sleep, and when allowed to freely roam, will attempt to relocate if no humans sleep near its web for extended periods of over a week. When a sleeping human subject within 5 meters of an SCP-452 web enters Rapid Eye Movement, or REM sleep, SCP-452 suppresses the subject's ability to dream, even in subjects with chronic dreams and or nightmares. Subjects Upon waking, generally report having had restful sleep, though several subjects have also reported feeling unusual, like they are missing something. Furthermore, if a specimen used in this manner bites any human within approximately one week from the initial event, the bitten subject will suffer vivid hallucinations, in addition to the normal effects of spider venom. SCP-452 was recovered from following intercepted hospital reports of anomalous visions experienced by spider bite victims, after which a Foundation containment team was dispatched. Experiment Log 452-1 State Expunged Source D-21-017 Female Caucasian, 29 years old Subject D-21-020 Male Hispanic, 31 years old Procedure Specimen of SCP-452 in sealed terrarium placed near bed of source for one week, then subject exposed to specimen, resulting in subject being bitten, anti-venom administered to mitigate physical effects. Details Source confirms no recollection of dreaming during the week, despite a history of recurring dreams. Subject immediately experienced vivid hallucinations for approximately 11 minutes. Upon returning to normal, described hallucinations with great detail. Source later questioned and confirmed that the described hallucination matched the description of source's recurring dream. Date Expunged Source D-21-389 Male African American, 48 years old Subject D-21-395 Male Caucasian, 26 years old Procedure Source selected due to known diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of combat experiences and data expunged. Subject confirmed to have no military experience or interest. Details Source confirms no recollection of dreaming during the week, despite previously having recurring nightmares. Upon being bitten, subject experiences vivid hallucinations and is restrained after beginning to scream and thrash. After returning to normal after approximately 14 minutes, subject describes hallucinations as being in a combat zone while data expunged. The bodies of data expunged. Several details given matched that of standard combat procedures as corroborated by source, which subject had no previous knowledge of. Lesson Complete If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-451, Mr. Lonely, right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.