This is the OGM weekly check and call on Thursday, April 14, 2022. And there's plenty of weird stuff happening in the world. Yay, Joy. And Sam. Well, this is cool. Paul, welcome back. Nice to see you. How's. Go ahead. The student that I tutored right back to class. And so I don't need to tutor this morning anymore. Oh, good. Excellent. How's the middle of California or the north of California holding up. It is raining. It is raining. We're like two inches in the forecast and it was really getting weird. The grass was crunchy underfoot and everything was just withering up and it is raining outside. It is wonderful. That is fabulous to hear. We have been in Portland, Oregon, deluged. We have been, there was snow a couple of days ago. Hasn't snowed in Oregon. 80 years, apparently. It's raining here, but we're still at about one third of capacity in reservoirs. Every major reservoir in the West is below half. Oh, definitely. I'm just celebrating the rain this of this week is such a delight after three months of just. We would love to. It just got totally snowed in in bed. I wanted to shoot my camera, but it doesn't reach.  My car is, but it's buried. We had two inches of snow a couple of days ago. And yeah, I was like, wait, what? It's very crazy. Cool. Very nice to see everybody. We have a couple of new people on the call. Joy Sam and Ozzie are all from system.com, which is if you haven't gone there, let's put a link in the chat. Oh, sorry, they're not from system. They're from Bloop. My, my idiocy. Yes. Totally different thing. And I will find the Bloop URL unless you beat me to it. I apologize for that. What's the thing they're not from? System. Okay, which, which is a mapping project kind of a, there we go. Get bloop.co. And more on actually might not be a bad place to start. Although you guys are new to this call and this is our check-in call.  That's just too obvious and too cool. Could be. We're still in consideration of the different options. Someone else called those bloopians recently. So that was really funny. Yep. Bloopians is good too. Bloopers sounds good because then you could have a blooper reel, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, heck. Who can pass up on that? So let's do some, some check-ins and let's start with. Let's see a Klaus. Okay. Dave. Stacy. Yeah, I just made it back to Ben's. So I think our, our way back through a snow storm. Which was somewhat unexpected. But I guess what, what really rattled me up this week is. Conversations I'm having with. German and Germans. Now people have. Highly respect and, and have known for some time. And their attitude towards the Ukrainian crisis because. Just this morning, there's a CEO of a company. He's saying, well, let these guys run out of ammunition. The faster they run out of ammunition, the sooner this war will be over. And to which I responded that this is a serious reputational issue for Germany. And I think that we have to, to have such a sentiment here because the Ukrainian people are really fighting for their cultural identity. If the, if the Russians go in there, they will be treated like the Uighurs are being treated in China. Now. It will be a cultural annihilation. This is just horrible. To, to, to see. It's sort of hard to push that away from, from your thinking, you know, what, what is happening there. Other than that, we. We're making good progress on the next webinar I'm moderating. So we are now at pushing 800 attendance. And have been able to stimulate some interesting conversations. About the need to fund farmers in this transition. And I actually had a call from. A restaurant. Of the premier. The, the Passily and startup in. In meat, in plant based, meat extracts. Just sort of an exploratory discussion with their global brand manager. And it was really astounding. To me. To see that they have had no consideration for the supply chain. I mean, and do things. And the question that we're asking is, can you help us with organic sourcing? Can you steer us in the right direction? And my response, of course, was there is no such sourcing available. You have to develop your own supply chain to do that. But it's interesting to see the industry waking up to this challenge that you have to engage actively in your supply chain in order to help farmers to turn that around. Which, of course, is the focus of our conversation in this Tuesday webinar. Do you want to put a link to the webinar in the chat? I will. Thank you. Cool. Thanks, Khaas. Yeah, I had a conversation yesterday with someone who was talking about influencing and shaping narratives and things like that. And she's got, she's having a hard time talking to people about the possibility that a scenario that we prepare for is when the power goes out or the internet is down. And we can't actually use all this beautiful, delicious media to communicate with each other and whatever else. And she says that people don't even want to contemplate that there might be a situation in our future in which like we can't use the inner tubes. Really interesting. Let's go. Dave Stacey Hank. Hey, thanks. Hi, everybody. Gosh, what's been going on this this week? I guess there were two things that are kind of top of mind for me. One was a thanks to Kevin Clark. I did a presentation on an intro to regeneration, which was the first time I did it. And it was, you know, interesting to try to pull together the themes. And one of the puzzles that I'm still chewing on a little bit is this. And I kind of want the notion of regeneration to be a big 10.  And I was realizing that people kind of see it differently depending which door they come through. So some people come in through like I've been working in business and sustainability. And I see, you know, I worry about shareholders and prices and things. Some people come from agriculture and some people have come from landscape development. And, you know, some people have come from social justice, I think. And anyway, then your perspective of the issue is a little bit different depending on which which door you came in through, I think. But but still, there's, you know, a thing in the middle kind of it. I'm trying to, I don't know how to say that, you know, what is this when you have this overlapping, you know, you I guess you have the Democratic Party or something like that. But anyway, it's been it was useful to go through and try to go through the different definitions that people have been using for the term regeneration.  So that was that's been interesting. And then the other piece that I've been playing with a little bit, I just want to mention it to folks is this this idea that the National Science Foundation has a grant request for building an open source ecosystem, which I think is really interesting. I'd love to be involved in development of an open source ecosystem. And I particularly like to be involved with one that had to do with bioregions, if there was some way that we could support infrastructure that makes bioregion development more sophisticated and better and faster and cheaper and things like that. So I was thinking data layer, open data layer that supports bioregions or and or a software layer that supports bioregion. And I'm kind of looking for a software product or data layer that might be appropriate for this proposal. So if anybody has any suggestions, please let me know. Thank you. And I put one link to the post you had sent me about the NSF. Here is a different one as well as a project called Pose Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystems. That sounds super interesting. Has anybody else heard of these? Anybody on the call? NSF getting into open source ecosystems? Okay. It sounds really cool to me. I'm just feeling like a small unit in front of the very large organism trying to figure out what might we do. But also I think that was the deadline for submissions like now? There's two pieces. There's a $300,000 planning project. I think really it's just kind of planning. And then there's a $1.35 million implementation version. The $300,000 one is due like May 12th, I want to say. And they also are offering, you can send in a one page kind of concept document to them and ask them whether this is a good match and they'll give you an answer. So there's an even, you know, there's a quick and dirty. That sounds really cool. Okay. So what if we, whatever the hell we are, and maybe what's the conversation with Jordan at all, what if we actually submit it on that?  Be David, I think it's a totally doable thing. I think it's worth going to get the one catch is you need what they call a mature open source product that you're building the ecosystem around. Right. And mature is a pretty fuzzy term, I think. But you know, but there has to be something I think, and I think it would probably be enough to have an entity that has a product that they would like to open source kind of commit to open sourcing it. That would probably be enough.  And could it be something like Yuri is doing with hypothesis where the rock is somebody else's open source project that you're extending or building on? I think so. Cool. I like ideally that product has some contributors are helping build it and some users helping use it, right? I mean, that somewhere in there is the definition of mature, right? Right, exactly. Thanks, Dave. And is your regeneration presentation in Google slides or anything like that that you can share? Do you have any artifacts? Well, yeah, I can share this project. I would, I would love that. That'd be awesome. Thank you. And let's go, Stacy, Hank, Paul. I'm going to give up my time because I don't want to miss this opportunity to hear from our new guests from blue. I really want to hear and I know we run out of time sometimes, so I'm giving up mine. Well, okay, I'll come back to you once we've made that loop of blue. Okay. And then let's go, Hank, Paul, and then Joy. Okay, I've got a couple of things of interest, I think, to bring. I have been working on a number of events that would be relevant in the first week of June. The Stockholm Plus 50 week concluding on the 5th of June, the Sunday, which is World Environment Day. And the group of people came together earlier in this week to work out that plan for a kind of dialogue in the metaverse about the mid-century, what different age groups of people now think is going to happen with our innocent rivers, our ability to walk in a forest, and in fact the whole concept of a world environment day, 30 years from now. And hopefully we'll also have someone making an immersive experience in augmented reality, so people can experience different possibilities for the decade of the 2020s, the decade of the 2030s, and the decade of the 2040s, before they are transported to the year 2052, 30 years from this coming June, to talk about what they did 20, 30, or 40 years to have those type of futures, what they could have done, could it work out differently based on that immersive experience. So I think that's one of the things I'm quite excited about, and I think it's a type of OGME thing to bring into the conversation. So lovely, yeah. Anyone have questions about that or inquiring within? Cool. Let's go Paul, Joy, Michael. This time of year is the year when I'm getting the garden going, and so I've been working on sprinklers a lot. Based on some of your guys' input, I got the dawn of everything out of the library yesterday, 10 pages into that one. And then the other book I've been reading is that just blowing me away is Breeding Sweetgrass. It's just amazing, beautifully written, and such a great way of tying together the scientific with the personal and indigenous. Every chapter serve a message or something, right?  So that's about it for me right now. Thanks Paul. And I figured out, for those of you who haven't seen this before, I figured out how to use an OBS subset to make my background in Zoom actually my brain. You can use, you know, anything you could share in, but it's easier and less intrusive than doing a screen share for everybody, although I might also do that. If you want to see what I'm doing, because it's probably too small in the thumbnail view, just pin me, and that way you can watch me take notes during the call. And then I wanted to add that Breeding Sweetgrass is part of my non-white guy canon, which includes a whole bunch of interesting books, always interested in additions to this list. But there's a bunch of interesting things here. And I am taking notes this way during our call. So, and the tech is, oh, it's, so it's called FlowTricast. And it's basically, so OBS is a popular open source, but very complicated. Oops, got to take out the space. There we go. FlowTricast. So OBS is this thing, open broadcaster software is really popular video broadcasting and mixing software, but it's really complicated to set up. Boy, does it take a lot of effort. So the people at Flow Immersive, Michael D. Benigno, who has been in and out of OGM, he's been involved here, he mentioned it. And I was like, well, that sounds really good. So you can download FlowTricast from the link I'm going to share now in the chat. And then you basically configure it a little bit. It's way easier to configure than full OBS. And voila, the first time I tried it, though, the resolution of the text that was showing up was miserable. It was illegible. So I gave up for a while. And then I just randomly tried it sort of 10 days ago again. And suddenly everything was sharp and everything was good. And my previous efforts to troubleshoot it had been for naught. And all of a sudden, it's pretty readable. It's not perfect, but it's pretty readable. And Ken says it's still a little fuzzy. Is it readable, Ken? If I zoom in on my screen, can you make it larger? Is that my question? Oh, I can totally make it larger. Watch. I go here and I say, hey, make this text bigger. At some point, it gets too big for me. That's actually, that's better. Work comfortable beyond screen. It's still a little bit fuzzy, but I can now make out what's there pretty easily. Okay, cool. Love that. And then let me connect FlowTrycast to today's call and OBS to today's call and get back to the call. Thank you. And Michael's in transit. Okay, good. And let's see. We had Joy, Michael, so Joy, Judy, and Ken. Hello. My name is Joy. This is my first time here. Hi, Joy. Welcome. We met with Jerry last week. Was it last week? I think it was just last week. It might have been a little bit more than a week, but yeah. Yeah. And it was part of the business or like startup accelerator that we're participating in called Techstars Filecoin. So it's been a crazy few weeks. And we just released a prototype earlier this week of sort of this browser that tracks where you're going and visualizes sort of something like Jerry's brain without you having to manage everything. And we made it for people who have like 500 tabs open or who are just exploring a bunch of topics and want to keep track of it without going through a very heavy handed workflow. So that's been really interesting and stressful and but also super exciting because yeah, like building a it feels like we're building a startup feels like we're making progress. So anyhow, if any of you guys are interested in trying Bloop, it is out in private beta right now. And we'd be happy to invite you to try it out. Do you want to do a screenshot, Joy? Do you want to feel free to do so? Permissions are open. Okay, let me do that. Just so people have a visual. It'll make a lot of sense when you show a bit of what it's like. Okay, this is what it looks like right now. We are hoping it'll look better at some other points. So let's say I'm going down in that hole and this will actually visualize where I've been and you can actually just visit other paths in the rabbit hole really easily. So if I am reading this and it's all interesting, I want to learn more about Murphy's Law. It just automatically charts a path between Fungal Rules and Murphy's Law. This is in fact, Murphy's Law, not Murphy's Law. It's very cute. This is not the actual Murphy's Law. This is a proofreading and editing law. It's very cute. Cool. Makes sense. So yeah, and you can save sessions so that the next time you come on, you can basically just maybe just move free. You can save it, then you can load it up again. You can also load previous graphs or previous sessions. So where have everything stored right now? Let's see. Let's say horse care. I want to look at my horse. Sorry. I would like to add that the screen that she actually saved the stuff is just it didn't show up on the screen for some weird reason. Sorry, can you say what you're explaining again so we know what you mean because I don't know what you mean or what saved where or didn't say where? Joe just saved the file that she was in right now and loaded anyone. Ah, okay. Yeah, she just like that didn't show up like for some reason that the pop-up box didn't show up in the screen share. I'm just there. Okay, let me share it in my other view then because that's probably what's going on. All right. Here you go. It could be one of those things. So I'm going to share it now and you should be able to see. Ah, okay. Okay. So I can just save it however I want and then. Wait, Joe, no, nothing is. Nothing is shown. We're looking at your slack. Oh, I see. Okay. I'm sharing the last screen. Desktop two, share. Here we go. Is this working now? And now we're, are we missing a pop-up? There we go. Cool. Yeah, so you can actually save this somewhere and just like load it up again. We want to go back down. We're adding the functionality to edit the connections here as well. So that would be helpful. And in the, in the words of Jerry, if it's not worth remembering, you can actually delete it. So yeah, that is, and the nice thing is we've also made it compatible with obsidian. So if you want to like save this, but here I'll just show you. So if you export it to obsidian compatible stuff, you can open it up in obsidian and then see, like continue to take notes here. So like now I have this former blue path that's visualized right here and I can, I can just be like. And this is, and now you're using the built in obsidian plugin that does graph view or is this your own visualization? This is the built in obsidian. Okay. We just automatically format it so that it works in obsidian as a graph. Cool. Yep. Yeah, so this loop also just is able to take in a series of JSON files and map it automatically as well. If there's some JSON file thing you want to import into here, and then we're planning to add like functionality in which you can just bump into others to other people's maps within the browser as well. But that's for next version. So right now we're like, Hey, let's make it so that there's automatic maps, you can curate and share it. And then you can also translate it into your personal network note taking app obsidian if you want to. Sweet. And we've been doing a bunch of work with markdown files and GitHub and obsidian sort of at the fringes here in OGM for a while. And then we also were playfully talking about maybe absorbing some piece of my brain, which exports as JSON objects into Bloop and seeing what that does. And probably we need to take a little capsule, a small piece otherwise, like, I'm getting close to a half a million thoughts.  But yeah, true. How many, how much data is that? I, I, it's not that huge a data file, but okay, I don't, I don't, there's probably different kinds of measures. So. Nice. Yeah, that's what we're at now. Cool. I love that. And joy, this was your graduate project or what can you tell us just a wee bit about the birth of Bloop? Yeah, oh my gosh, also I seen the chat that Eric got it founded loop. That's like why we called it that's one of the reasons why we called it because there's this weird, there's this nerdy concept behind the dumb name. So origin of loop, it was my master's project before at Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. And I actually started out with how can we allow the question of how can we allow people to collaborate on sustainability projects remotely if everyone's starting their own sustainability projects? Is there a way to share the data set to help us move faster? And then as I was researching that, I found there's just so many issues with research paper transparency and like paywalls and different people like their different tools. So it didn't seem to make sense to go into sustainability in particular. And eventually I realized, wow, like browsing history is actually not leveraged at all in terms of extracting insights from everyone. And right now it's just being given away for free to larger corporations who then profit off of it and add based business model. So what Bloop is trying to do is try to enable like use more usability and actual actual, sorry, morning, brain dead. Like what if people can draw insights from browsing history as long as you're sharing what you want to share. And I think for me, I can see myself really getting excited by seeing my path. And I find myself no longer reliant on tabs, but I literally just click back to a node. And then I can see my path automatically generated there. And now we are at Techstar. So we're hoping to get a really nice project product out soon so that more people can try it. Love that. Thank you, Joyce. I really appreciate it. How do people sign up for beta? What do they need? What special secret handshake do they need to know right now in order to be on your beta? So actually, if you want to skip the sign up list, you can just email me. I'll put my email in the chat. Awesome. Thank you. And I'll get you set up. Beautiful. Then let's go, Judy, Eric, Kevin. Well, I've been working a fair bit on sort of a combination of organizational development and tasking and a couple of different venues. But in particular with the National Initiatives of the Arts Foundation, which is a group that's dedicated to providing scholar awards to high talent graduate students or undergraduate students in science and technology areas. And there are just so many issues burgeoning right now with the impact of COVID on science and technology, the world political climate, and the issues of communication with science and spawn. I wanted to share a report that I found just recently that called the State of U.S. Science and Technology done by the National Science Board. And it's a really good update on sort of where are we as a country in looking at science and technology. And there's a message in it that I thought was really important because it's the first time I've seen an actual acknowledgement of the necessity for us to retain the influx of immigrants and scholars and students to the creation of science knowledge. There's been from the all right kind of groups some backlash to those kinds of patterns in education and not seeing those people as U.S. citizens so to speak. So I like the fact that that report highlights the importance of the diversity of contribution to our well-being. I put a link in the chat so people can look at it if they want to. It's a long report, but there's a good kind of about two-page executive summary that hits the high points. So organizationally, we've been trying to bring groups of people from different parts of the country and states together on significant initiatives to identify science opportunities and institutes that we can contribute Monday to to support that science. That's been keeping me fairly busy. That's great. Have you heard of a guy named Franz Johansson? No. Let me find him in my brain. He's got a company that's doing diversity and innovation stuff. He wrote the book, The Medici Effect, this thing back in 2004 and then built a business around it basically helping do innovation. But his pitch is kind of that diversity improves innovation and performance might be really useful to what you're doing. Oh, great. Thank you. And I just sort of e-met him through April recently, but I'll add him to the links to today's call. But he wrote another book called The Click Moment Seizing Opportunity in Unpredictable World in 2018. So in case that's useful. The other thing that I've been spending time participating in, attempting to help so forth, is the Meta project with Jordan. And that's been consuming a fair bit of time in terms of meetings and sharing expertise and thinking about how we can frame the sharing of resources and working together to accomplish things more rapidly. And for anybody who's interested, Jordan has been a really lovely influence through OGM and neighboring communities and is trying to create a Meta project is sort of a project of these different communities to try to bring us together and figure out where we overlap and how we share things. There's calls you can join on Wednesdays if you're interested. Pete Kaminsky is a good sort of path into those calls, but there's something interesting brewing there as it goes. Thanks, Judy. Do you want to say anything else about Meta? Since we don't have too many other people, Stacey has been involved a lot in Meta. There's a few others, but we're still in really the formative stages, kind of sharing values and being talking about how we can be sure that we are of shared values and viewpoints in terms of the openness of the community and the desire to move forward and trying to be inclusive so that we can determine the needs of people in different dimensions who are coming at various projects worldwide at very different levels of technology support, for instance, as one particular area. One of the things that I really like is it is a pretty global group, and there's some neat people from other parts of the world that are involved. I'm interested to see where it will go because I think there's a lot of potential for that sort of grassroots collaboration to lead to constructive outcomes. Thanks, Judy. Anybody else with questions or comments on Meta? Cool. Let's go Eric, Kevin, Ozzy. Nice to see some new people, and that was very impressive joy. Just to explain that reference to Bloop, it's from Douglas Hofstadter's Goetl Escher Bach, which is a pillowed surprise winning book, and I first found out about it in college when my computer science professor recommended it, and it essentially changed my life. I got interested in Bach's music because he goes into that, and yeah, so that's led on many directions. So I'm excited about this dawn of everything. I didn't realize how big this book is, and it's 100 pages of footnotes too. So it led off to looking at Leibniz, and I made a video about what I learned, and now something, I don't know how it's related, but Carl Sagan's Murmurs of Earth. I did a video about that also because I found on the Internet Archive that you could download a CD-ROM that was put out years ago with the actual music and pictures from the Voyager, which is billions of miles away now, but just the fascinating process of looking at ourselves as we were in 1977, they had basically two months to figure out how to send a message to outer space, and what do you say about Earth? Well, they thought music was great, so there's an hour and a half of music from all cultures, and listening to that is eye-opening and ear-opening, and then the pictures, how do you represent pictures, and then coming up with a language for communicating in mathematics, so just looking back at that, it's just a way of jump-starting something for thinking about our future. Okay, that's all I'll say right now. Thanks, Eric. And also, Eric, you were story-threading the Leibniz thing and all the connections, so I really appreciate your taking the story-threading angle, and I'd love for more of us to sort of come in using whatever tools and methods we want to tell these stories and weave new narratives and figure out how this thing works together, so I just want to encourage everyone to do as Eric is doing and then just pitch your contributions into the bowl, because it really helps. Just a comment on Dawn of Everything, there's a book club meeting informally as a subset of Metta reading that book, kind of a chapter at a time for discussion, and you can find a link to that in the Mattermost channel of CSC Agora that Jerry posts in Perogium. There's an actual Dawn of Everything sub-channel. There is, and here's the book circle, and here are some of the participants, and I'll link that to our call today. Thanks Jerry. Thanks for mentioning it. Appreciate that. Let's go Kevin Ozzie-Kim. Yeah, I've been getting involved in the last couple weeks sort of in the infrastructure side of Metta, and it relates to kind of a larger issue I've been tracking for a long time. Ronald Coase, who did Transaction Theory, also had a theory of markets that you go from discovery to cooperation, one off where you're driving through an unfamiliar neighborhood and you don't know the culture of who rolls to stop and all that sort of stuff, to coordination, which is where markets and train tracks work, and everything is understood and you don't have to reassess every transaction. A lot of people jump from discovery to coordination and it just doesn't work, and Metta is wanting to coordinate across networks, which I've found really hard. I've been cooperating with a lot of people for a long time, but somebody I've been a business partner with for a long time has a platform, a donor, and bystanders of public utility that'll be housed, it's being housed at community foundations, and in the Metta there's a marketplace inside the technology infrastructure behind it, which is open future coalition and those two things are coming together at just the right time. It seems to be allowed this coordination level at a low level of infrastructure that allows coordination across projects to proceed as they should locally, and that seems to be a really good timing and a real change. Interesting pieces of baseline train track infrastructure that allow a lot of local innovation on top of it, but I find it's pretty encouraging. Thanks, Kevin. I'm happy to hear you're encouraged by that. That's great. Let's go, Ozzy, Ken. I am managing two computers at the same time, so I'm trying to use the wrong mouse to unmute myself. Hi, I'm Ozzy. I'm the CTO of Bloop. I don't have much to share other than if you run into any bugs for issues with the private beta, let me know, and I will try to address them as soon as possible. Cool. Anything on your wish list, and not specific to Bloop, but what have you always wanted to have exist in software that doesn't exist? I don't think I have a good answer for that because I tend to build everything that I need. Oh, good. The wish list is thin because you're busy building them. Kind of, yeah. It's a fun experience. That's great. I love that. Thanks, Ozzy, and thanks for joining us. Let's go, Ken Gil Sam. Hello, everybody. Nice to see new faces. Always thrills me to check in here and see people I haven't seen before, so welcome to the new folks. What's going on with me? I have some more work coming my way, which is really nice. Just got a big boatload of new coaching clients for a major bank, which will be interesting. I haven't worked with banks in the banking sector before. I am also part of the Dawn of Everything book club. We had our first meeting yesterday, and I got to say it's fantastic, and it's going to be really interesting to see if we can actually stand on topic. Once we got talking, we spent an hour just referencing other books that the Dawn of Everything seemed connected to, and we decided we needed to put, rather than a parking lot, if you're ever done a facilitation, you have a flip chart label parking lot for things that come up that you want to talk about, but not now. I came up with salon seating, because these are areas where topics people are naming that are saying, that's worth an entire phone call just for that, so let's put that in the salon seating area, and then when we get enough, we can start holding calls for that. But really excited to be reading this book with folks. I haven't done a book group for a long time, and I always find that when I am part of a book group, I absorb and retain the information a lot better, and it helps me move through a book, especially one as big as Dawn of Everything, because I tended to, I used to read big tomes all the time, and I sort of gave that up for a while, and then last year I got hold of The Wizard of the Prophet, which is about the same size of the Dawn of Everything, so I'm getting back into the longer form books, but it's just really helpful to have folks to talk it over with and get their opinions, so that's about all that's going on with me. Nice to see everybody, but Jerry, you're on mute, I think, if you're talking. Sorry, yeah, I totally forgot. Thank you, newbie mistake. The idea of books building on other books and sort of threading through is like how human culture exists, right? It's what happens, and it's one of the reasons why I like the mapping is that instead of putting things in a parking lot and then talking about them one by one, we actually, you know, so in The Dawn of Everything, somewhere there's a reference to the book Man Makes Himself by Gordon Child, and here's Gordon Child, who was a Marxist archaeologist who studied, or I think this is an archaeological site, he studied in the Orkney, he was doing archaeological works in the Orkney Islands of the Neolithic Age, etc., etc., but to me, I'm having this experience of being able to link together all the, you know, here's a couple of the sites that are referenced early in the book, Kalianke, and so forth. And how do I say this? I wish that I was doing this with everybody in the book club and everybody else on the planet. I wish that this were the way, and it doesn't need to look like the brain, but this idea of connected data that is discoverable and linkable and all that kind of thing has changed my life in the way that Gerdler-Scherbach changed Eric's. And so this is one of the motivating factors behind OGM as a thing. Just needed to sort of say that because the book discussions about Dawn of Everything really light this up for me because the book is so rich in all these references, and then the conversations around the book are doubly rich, so. Just one more thing about that. It seems most of us on the call yesterday, there are only four of us, Judy Joy, a little bit later, there are five of us. We're all either have read or are reading Sand Talk, and there's a lot of overlap between Sand Talk and Dawn of Everything. So that was just that made for the conversation to be incredibly rich. And of course, Wendy Elford was on the call, so she knows David Wengrow, and she knows Tyson, and so that just led to a whole other layer. And we could have just chatted without even mentioning the other thing, just the books we've all read together. So that's why it's just going to be an interesting cat herding experience to try and keep this thing focused. Yeah, I concur, Ken, I think. And the book is so dense as well. Exactly. Thank you. Let's go Gil Sam Stewart. Yes. Thanks, Jerry. Good morning, everybody. Yeah, I'm about a third of the way through Dawn of Everything on my own, loving it deeply. I would like to try to plug it to the group, although I'm in like four other reading groups at the moment. I'm struggling with the art of how do you do those anyway that really works, being on topic and allowing the necessary drift in that. We listened to Sand Talk this morning, Becoming Animals, another book that fits into this story. David Abram, author, spell of the sensuous. Boy. Kevin, yes, connection and collaboration and coordination. I think that's the big challenge for all of us. Jerry, I love the vision. Let's see if Blue can get us there and if the NSF can pay for it. Checking on me a couple of things. Jerry, you talked about things we don't want to contemplate, like the loss of the electric tubes. I was thinking about that just yesterday, hearing about the rush of the cyber attacks in Ukraine and thought, well, we're like, we've got solar, we've got batteries. So I can fire up my phone, my computer, but there may be no net to connect to. So it's funny what we take for granted. And there's a lot we don't want to contemplate. Germany doesn't want to contemplate going off natural gas and unplugging from the Russians. We're playing the West to sending the Russians a billion dollars a day for oil. But how do we contemplate not being dependent on that? All of us here, everything that I'm wearing today is a product of extraction or oppression. It's really hard to not be tied to the game. So woke up this morning thinking about the sort of three big wrong turns in human history, one of which is the one we're on the verge of now, which is the metaverse as a disconnection from the living world. So I'm concerned about that. I wonder about that. A lot of thrilled by the opportunities it opens. And I'm concerned about humans forgetting that we are biological beings in a biological world. So that's background. I'm really joy. Thank you, and Ozzie for the loop. I'm going to check that out. I'm one of these 500 tab guys. The main front front of mind news for me right now is that some of you know, I'm standing up a private equity fund to produce ecologically grounded and employee owned and community rooted companies. I am finally moving into fundraising mode on that. It's really daunting. It's also slogging and slow just to get appointments people. But, you know, all sorts of imposter syndrome self doubt and just the difficulty of finding finding the people who will invest the money in an idea that is untested in a team that is untested. So that's sort of my daily trying to really stay on beam with that while I'm also fascinated by all the other things in our world's conversations that I not just want to be in but really enrich me by being in. And yet maintaining focus on a project that I'm committed to moving forward. So that's sort of a quick story for me. One thing I'm reading an observation by way of my friend Fernando Flores who talks about reading as a conversation with the author. Not as a quest for information. And he observed that a lot of people approach texts as move the mindset of what can I learn from this? And what do I agree with? What do I disagree with? Kind of start with that. Do I like this? Do I not like this? And there's another way to approach it, which is how might this text change me? How might it enrich me? So just a different approach to reading. This is what it sounds like if you don't have everything that was going at. And I thanks for the link. Can I want to check that out? So that's my story for today. Thanks, Gil. And Gil, it might be you, but it sounds like you're talking while crinkling a paper bag. There's some sort of artifact in the call. I don't know if it's your channel, but it's in the background. I have no artifact. One other thing, let me just remind people next Wednesday, third Wednesday of every month, I host a webinar conversation on living between worlds, which reflects on a lot of the things we're talking about here with a different kind of focus and depth. So you're all welcome to that and I'll put a link to that. Thank you. Klaus, then Kevin. Yeah, Gil, I just wanted to respond to a couple of items that you were mentioning. One is Germany and the Ukrainian situation here. Germany has moved itself into an impossible position because of their energy policies over two decades, right? I mean, turning off their nuclear power because the green movement in Germany was so strong that they forced the nuclear power plants to be disconnected. And then the attempts in hindsight, completely naive attempts to support Russia and keep them peaceful by buying their energy and keeping them providing money to them. But in hindsight, that was just not a really good strategy. And so now they're stuck. I mean, there is a real risk to the German economy going into a tailspin here because they can't replace Russian gas. There is just not enough capacity. They don't have enough terminals to take liquid nitrogen and LNG gas in. They will take a month to build that. So it is a horrendous scenario. And so there is no good outcome for Germany in this thing. And in the meantime, from a reputational standpoint, they're really facing some serious headwinds. And then the other thing you were talking about at community level, this discussion that we're hosting now about setting up funding the transition really wants to create a process structure that is inclusive to farmers of all size and all types of crops. And I think that's the challenge has been in the carbon markets that everyone I've been engaging with is talking about you need at least 5,000 acres before carbon markets make any sense to you. So there has to be a process where, and Kevin, of course, is all over this where a community can pull together a 2, 5, 10-acre farmer maybe starting up and funding them. But in ways that is verifiable, reliable, there's a plan that that you know is being executed and so on. So I would really say let's maybe engage your conversation there. I mean, what I'm interested in really is only to set up the structure for this to happen now. Kevin? Yeah, just when Gil was talking about a book, I recall that I had a conversation this week with someone who's a good friend, and she says she's reading three to four books through Blinkist every week, which is this thing that just extracts the little things they, you know, their team of third-year marketing grads think is the essence of a book. And I just thought what an impoverished way of getting information at a diluted commodity level.  It just seems like such a terrible time. But she is proud of what she's consuming. She is a volume book consumer through Blinkist. She's getting something from that. You're important, but anyway, I felt like that. I mean, it's a weird thing, Kevin. If you imagine reading Dawn of Everything for Information, so what am I going to do? Memorize dates and archaeological sites? That's not why I'm reading that book. I'm reading that book for a different kind of story of who we are and how we got here and what our possibility is. And that doesn't come out of a list of facts and certainly doesn't come out of Blinkist. Yeah, thank you for that. Cool. Thanks for that. Let's go, and Sam was next in my queue, but I think Sam has dropped off the call. So let's go Stuart, John, Stacey, and John has dropped off. So Stuart, Stacey, and then Michael, if you've landed someplace. Oh, and Doug. Thank you, Jerry. I'm going to push back on Gill and Kevin a little bit. It's another tool for gathering information. One of the great things about reading is it tickles your mind and stimulates thinking. And if you're looking for the essence of what's in a book to make a decision about whether you're going to read it, that might be a really good tool to use. I'm just saying, given the volume of material out there. And I also agree that you know, you've got to dig in to really get the conversation that the author is saying. I guess at some level, the most critical thing is the piece of science fiction that I'm working on is in the hands of an attorney agent in Los Angeles, who's a friend and is looking at it. So I'm going to get a preliminary read about whether or not I've got something that she thinks would be of any value in terms of being a commercial production. So that's kind of cool. And the other thing is that I'm going to have have fun for the next six months in the midst of all the chaos and calamity. And it's really interesting. I don't know how many folks over here who are on the call have been to a Passover Seder. But one of the things that happens at a Passover Seder is you take one finger and you dip it into the glass of wine, and you recall all the plagues that were reaped upon the Jewish people before they left Egypt. And a dear friend of mine, Alan Briskins, started to talk. Ken, I think you were on the talk that he did for Society 2045. He started by going through the plagues because that's where we're sitting as a species right now. And it was kind of a really interesting way to grab people at the beginning of the talk. That being said, I just looked at my calendar and I just got a lot of travel over the next six months, much of it for fun. And so in the midst of the chaos, I'm going to take some time to just enjoy some of the things that this planet has to offer. And that's my check-in. That sounds great, Stuart. Thank you. It's interesting. I was just going to my brain under a Passover Seder, and I saw that David Brooks wrote a column titled On Conquering Fear at some point the way back when. And the one note that I took out of that article was storytelling, become central to conquering fear, which I really like. Yeah. That's interesting because there's an important piece here about not forgetting, and we've just sort of brushed against Germany and German culture and how Germany is stuck in some ways. And Germany has basically guilt over the war that is long and protracted and led to a series of the kinds of policies that Germany has had until just recently, in particular demilitarization and all those kinds of things. But stories that don't get told and retold wind up getting repeated in real life, it seems, you know, Santayana's old wisdom. And so, yeah. Anyway, any other thoughts on this? Well, just that for those, for anybody not familiar, where I'm sure there are many, with Passover Saders, essentially what the, what it is, is a long relaxed dinner in which the story of the Jews exodus from Egypt and events leading up to that is told in some way and question and answer form. Very long form, apparently. Very long, yes. I've been to five hour Saders and they don't eat till the last 30 minutes. And the stuff you get to eat along the way is bitter and salty and I don't know. Oh, that's a good part. Yeah. All right. My mom remembers growing up in Jerusalem as a kid, not getting eaten till after midnight at the Saders or Orthodox. Most of us are not that serious. The thing with the wine dipping that Stuart mentioned is it's remembering the plagues that were visited on the Egyptians as part of the exodus. And the story on the story is that we diminish our own joy by remembering the suffering of our enemies, the teaching being to never rejoice in the suffering of your enemies, you might need to fight them, but don't take pleasure. And Jerry, if I could just add one more question I forgot before I request a conversation with anybody who's interested. Can you mention new work coming in? I've got new work coming in and it's coming in from the Gulf States. And I'm deliberating what to do about that. Do I accept it or not? If I do, how do I do it? What are the boundary conditions that anybody who's dealt with that sort of issue, even if you haven't, but would be willing to help me think through that? I would really welcome that. I can say something quickly if it's useful. I worked for a long time with a woman who's a pacifist who is asked to do some work with the Air Force and she's like, how can I work for the Air Force on a pacifist? And we both shared the same teacher and our teacher said, well, what's their intention? You know, which part of the Air Force? And it was the Air Force Hospital at the Academy. So they have noble intention. They're attempting to heal the people who've been wounded, right? So this idea of noble intention has been really big for me in the last 15, 20 years or so of when I'm approached by a client that I might have trepidation about to want to work with these people. I look, what is their intention? Do they generally want to change for the better? Or are they just trying to further their own aims? And if their answer is the former, then I'll work with them. And if they're just going on with something I don't agree with, then I will not. So I don't know if that helps clarify or not, but I'm happy to talk to you more about that anytime you want. It helps that I'm basically with you on that and have applied that before. It may not always be clear. That's the other thing. Then you have to decide what's your intention. How can you change them from the inside? Maybe not even today. I mean, it's, you know, the change from inside is the option here. I mean, you know, one of the things happening in the Gulf States is that at least some of them or some of the people are recognizing that fossil fuel is over. At some point in this century, there's a transition. Some of them want to be leaders in renewable regenerative economy. But they also want to ride the oil demon. So it's very complex. Who is this person? Where are they in the system? Et cetera. So I would love to talk further. Thank you. Mr. Jones. Yeah. Just something brief. We had this large conference called SOCAP and sold it about three years ago because it was getting too mainstream. And the buyers thought they were hedge fund guys. And so they thought they were smarter than they were, which is kind of redundant. But anyway, they wanted to convert Wall Street. And it's been a complete disaster. It was a multimillion dollar pretty profitable business. They're meeting with us today. Their investors have kicked them out and they're asking us to take it back. But when they came with that intention, we said, hey, this is a cash deal.  We just said we want no part of your future. So that's just, it's an interesting thing. After three years, they're asking us to give it back to us. So that's, sometimes their intention just means it's a cash deal. Don't trust the motherfucker. That's kind of crazy. It is kind of crazy. Amazing. Doug dropped off the call. I was just going to go to Doug. So we're back at Stacey and Michael and Michael, I don't know if you're still in motion, but Stacey, if you'd like to jump in, this is your moment. Okay. Well, I'll just connect, you know, all the things on this call that are the focus of my attention really boiled down to what was in the dawn of everything. The meta project has been important to me because I'm interested in the values that are instilled at the very beginning. I think Kevin mentioned earlier how in small groups, somehow the people are able to find each other. And I want to scream sometimes because I know how important that is. I mean, there's no way that a computer could describe every part of me. And that goes for all of you too. There's just no way. It's through interaction. If we're talking to people, I'm very glad that the people from Bloop were here today. Going back to the dawn of everything and that whole conversation with the author. I look at the, I mean, I've read the first three chapters, but in the very first page, for me, all the answers are right there. I would just like to spend time talking about the questions they asked. To me, that's the conversation about human nature that we need to address. And that's it. I just throw out a few points. I have nothing concrete to say. I will let Michael speak. And Michael has just arrived from running two marathons and biking over Pikes Peak. And looking around for the word on the Arab street. Not being in a brown subway station under attack. Yeah. Thankfully. I moved to answer a question we were having a little conversation in the chat because I mentioned that I kind of blew up a Seder a few years ago. My father has always been, you know, when he, when he was a little Seder, he had this patched together Agata that was part of which was from Rampart's magazine. The radical Agata of 1967, which I remember had mentions of like Barry Seal. And, you know, I mean, it was, it was not, it was a very Berkeley Passover. But at the same time, it was very much of the kind of chosen people Jewish centric stripe as, you know, as a religious, as a religious activity is want to be. And I think it was during, I don't know, maybe it was during the first Gulf War or something like that, when, you know, people were always tossing around the term, you know, so, but what about the Arab street? You know, what's the, what's the conversation on the Arab street? And I just like, haven't always felt kind of weird about this sort of chosen people narrative and, you know, God did this and to, you know, deliver his people from the clutches of the evil Egyptians and Pharaohs. And, and I just sort of like brought it up for conversation like, well, let's see if we could frame these events from the vantage point that we never consider, you know, like, okay, the, the angel death passed over these houses that had, you know, that were marked to spare. But imagine like the terror of the firstborn of an entire people being slaughtered, you know, how do you frame that? I don't know, it was just, it was, it was a great conversation and not a comfortable one. But it kind of speaks to our whole thing of, of dealing with news and triangulating reality through the different vantage points we can catch, you know, like when I'm reading political news, I was, you know, like to subject myself to a little fox and some bright bark and some gateway pundit and, you know, whoever whatever else from whatever vantage point I don't share to say how is this framed. So yeah, just just sharing that. It's interesting how, I'm going to over generalize, but how seldom we hear from the other side, from the other perspective, right? We have narratives, we have myths, we have a whole series of things. And it's, and after a while, that this is why those myths work after a while, a repetition and a cultural that it's really hard to take the other side and to see something very differently or to see something from other peoples. And one reason I love Howard Zinn's book, the, what was it called the underground history of American politics, I'll look it up in just a sec. But one of the reasons I loved it is that in the opening he says, hey, guess what? We have all these myths about American history. I'm going to try to tell you American history from the perspective of the people who got trampled along the way. And then, you know, chapter after chapter, he talks about the people who actually occupied these lands before Europeans showed up. And then he talks about the people who were transported from Africa to do the work under slavery.  Thanks, Ken. And, and I was like, wow, that was a simple, systematic exercise to go look at events from other perspectives. And it's terrifying. It's and really enlightening. So I wish we did more of that. Go ahead, Gil. Yeah, I've been to satyrs that were very much party line, you know, reinforcing that that shows the people narrative and exclusivity and so forth. I've been to satyrs that were deeply radical and intersectional.  You know, we talked about the slavery of Hebrews under the Egyptians and the slavery of the blacks in America. The satyr was a powerful metaphor for the African American liberation movement in the United States because of the resonance of that. And some folks use it as an opportunity to break things open and question things and look for exactly those different perspectives. And others don't, you know, as as I think it's probably true in most every culture. Michael, one of the things back in the 60s, I don't know if this was what you saw, but there was something called the freedom satyr that was put together by rabbi, well, now rabbi Arthur Waskow, then we'll see for policy studies Arthur Waskow, that really emphasized that angle and was multi denominational and multi ethnic satyrs by design as part of political movement. So I don't know if that's in your brain, sure. You might want to plug that in. Not yet, but it's going in. I was just going to respond to what Kail said real quick. Just, I mean, it really was a ramparts magazine, you know, thing that he was incorporated, but I think he might have, there might have been that too. And by the way, it was the metaphor between the enslavement of the Israelites and the Jews and African American slavery was definitely, definitely drawn, but it just, the way it left out the Egyptians was the thing I pushed back on. But yeah, here you go. Yeah, so I just, given that we're talking about satyrs, I just recalled a, you know, a warm story. It was about 97, 98. I was teaching in Sydney, Australia, and it happened to be the first day of Passover. And somebody at a break in this program of about 100 people, somebody came up to me and said, you know, Stuart Levine, tonight's the first night of Passover. What are you doing for Seder? And I said, I really don't have anything. And she said, well, then you have to come back to my house. And it was kind of like a Seder. It was the same Seder that I experienced growing up in Brooklyn with my grandfather present. It was just a wonderful, warm, gamut-like feeling. Love that. Love that. Eric, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Hitchhiker's Seder? I had never heard of it before. I looked it up. Yeah, something I created in 2010. It's an audio recording where I just mixed things that I learned and parts of the Pagoda with music. So it's something I did. So I didn't realize it was your work? Yeah. So if people don't know much about it, they could listen and get an idea of the experience. Love that. Thank you. And then I'll connect it to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Jerry, since you mentioned it earlier about storytelling, you know, I came late to the Seder experience. It wasn't until I married my wife or met my wife, you know, that I started to hang out with Saders. And I was very struck, the power of the storytelling of, we tell the story of how we were liberated from slavery every year to remind us to reflect on where we are currently also enslaved. And I just thought that was an amazing, you know, kind of fractal pattern of, here's the big sweep of history and here's how it shows up in our lives today. And I've always been struck by the, there's many traditions in Judaism that, you know, I really appreciate as connecting to a larger narrative, a larger whole and recognizing that there's these patterns that show up both at the macro level and very much at the micro level of myself. And there's a whole history of people who've struggled with those. And the stories are what makes them real and brings them alive and makes them relevant. Has anybody celebrated Kwanzaa? I take that as a no. I have not. So let me actually do a full on screen share just for Grims. So here's Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 out of the Black nationalism movement. It's kind of an honor. It's another sort of holiday, cultural holiday like Juneteenth. And then there are seven days of Kwanzaa and seven principles of Kwanzaa and they're lovely. They're Umoja, they're unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. And every day you focus on one of those and go through it. And then an OGM call, which is great, but just wraps it all up. Exactly. Well, OGM is the eighth principle of Kwanzaa. Yeah, but these are just lovely sorts of things. And I did connect it. In some cases I didn't, but here's self-determination. There's here's self-determination in philosophy. Here's self-determination theory in psychology and so forth. So these things kind of connect back and forth. But I've also got this thought under enumerated wisdom, which is a thought that will amuse everybody. The two rules of personal Kanban, the three elements of the newest OS for business, three mistakes we're making, three ends of motivation. Those are all under enumerated wisdom. But I aspire to participate in or attend Kwanzaa one of these years as one of these rituals that does the kind of work, soul work and community work that we're talking about here. Judy, anything else we've actually made? We've made the full cycle, which is unusual. Did Paul go? Paul went early, but briefly. Oh, sorry. I missed it. Did I miss anybody? Well then, can I share what I really wanted to bring with me? And it lost my, you know, I got confused because I was listening to so many other threads. See, when you leave an empty chair, then somebody shows up. I had to go to the bathroom. Before I came, though, I was watching this documentary of this farmer from East Kenya. And there were so many things about it that struck me. One is that, well, first of all, watching the relationship between him and his wife and their seven very young children. It was the first time that, I mean, it's the first time I've ever seen in film, like that kind of fun kind of love in this really impoverished setting. And that did something to me. But what I want to say is, at one point, they were really, their crops were all failing. There was no rain. There was drought.  And then all of a sudden there was this huge rainstorm and there was such joy and everybody's happy. And by the way, he was teaching everybody to plant trees and he was talking about the soil because he had gone away and been educated and then came back to the village. But so the rain was so heavy that it destroyed their house and the roof fell off their house. And the next day they were talking and he's saying, today is a good day. Nobody's sick. Nobody died. Meanwhile, they no longer had a house to live in that had a roof. They, I mean, it was just very dramatic to watch. In the next part, though, you see people from nearby coming to help them re-roof their house. And what I really got me is they were joking. Like the woman, the wife in the story made a joke about, well, now her underwear is all over. And I don't know. I mean, I'm getting chills now. There was just such joy.  But I wanted to share that because for him to be so grateful because nobody died and he meant it. It wasn't just for the cameras. He really meant it. And I just wanted to share that because when we got on the call, you were all talking about the rain and the weather. And I just wanted to add that. So thank you. And Stacey, I apologize. It took me a moment to tune into what you were saying. Where did this happen? Where was the event? He lived in East Kenya. But I believe the documentary was made in 2015. Thank you. And do you remember the name of that? I have it, so I will send it. And it might not be 2015 because I might be confusing. You know, there's no penalties for misremembering in an OGM call. It's good. And what happens in OGM stays in OGM. So there we are. Anyone want to pick up any of the threads we talked about today or shall we wrap early? Which we've never done. It was called The Climate Diaries. I witness. It was part of like a series. I think it's from Al Jazeera English. Thanks. That's fabulous. I have something. Please. I have a question for Ken. And this is kind of personal note. That's why I'm asking. But it might be of interest to the group. You mentioned that you have new clients from the banking industry. I'm curious. I was writing you an email, but I'm just going to ask you now. I had a call from a lady who said she loved my book. She works at Deloitte. It's a big management firm. And she thought there was opportunity for me to work with corporations around a thing like ESG or SDG. Anyway, she was just kind of saying corporations are trying to create a new model. I was wondering if your banking clients, if that's part of what is going on and just what is it all about? That is the question. What is it all about? So at this moment, I don't actually know enough. I've had the first phone call with the group to be told the program that we're going through. But I have been assigned the clients. I don't really know that much about the bank. What I can say is what I saw on the program is that this is a big bank in Europe and they are really recognizing the volatility in the world and going, everything's blown up. We can't rely on our old methods anymore. So what we need to do is build as much resilience into business units as possible. They need to be able to get information, make decisions, not be managed so much as self-managed along the lines of what are the principles that we're going to operate with. So that's where they're headed. And from my reading of you, Paul, over the years going way back to the early days of Chrysalis, the currents of hope, you have an enormous amount to share with the corporate world, how you want to do that's up to you. But you bring an enormous wealth of information and a paradigm for thinking that I think is really needed out there. Thank you. I'm never quite sure what it is, but people say it is. Well, it's a way of thinking. I am unusual in that I don't have a university education. I'm pretty much self-taught. I've always felt a little bit of an imposter going into a situation where, what do I know about running a business? But I know a lot about building collective intelligence and a lot about how people create better relationships. And I think outside of the university corporate paradigm where there's an article in Harvard Business Review a few years ago about cognitive diversity. You can have people who look very different from each other, different skin tones, different ages, different genders. But if they all went to university, they've been trained in a way of thinking. You come at looking at the world and saying, how does this work? What happens if I move this over here? What happens if I use my trial here and dig this? So you approach things from a completely different paradigm, and that's the value. It's this ability to help people step outside their way of traditionally thinking into how do the system dynamics actually play out here? What's going on instead of the modeling that they got, the academic, we're going to analyze this and extract and then figure out what's going on. You're like, be in the system, be part of the system. So that's what I think I see in you in terms of your gifts. So a key question to ask of the bank is, do the ESG folks report to public affairs? Or do they report to a line of business where they'll be tied to changing how the business is run? And if they run, if you report to public affairs, you can get good speaking fees and you will help them tell better stories about the bad things they do. But if they report to actually somebody in the line of business, you could make some change. So figure out who they report to because they send people out, you know, Chevron tells really good stories and does a few good things in a few wetlands. But just find out where the ESG people report. Is it expected to be part of the business? Or is it just the thing over there, public affairs, PR? Yeah, this is spot on Kevin. And this has been the problem with the whole ESG sustainability thing for a long time, public affairs, government relations, not in the business. It's been changing though. We're increasingly seeing the sustainability departments tied to operations sometimes to finance. We've been lobbying for a long time for the CSO, Chief Sustainability Officer and CFO, Chief Financial Officer to partner up. And it's starting to move. We're also seeing that corporate sustainability departments have gone from one or two people to now they're being 15, 20, you know, serious operational shifts starting to happen.  But, you know, there's at least motion. The challenge that the banking or investment in the community really has is that anything climate change related has multiple issues. And I'm looking at this from a farming perspective, but it's true for the energy sector and others as well. So for example, in farming, when a farmer engages in, let's say watershed repair, you know, or issues like biodiversity or pollinated protection, who's going to pay for this? And in order to aggregate funding for a farmer who wants to transition or is prepared to transition, you need to pay for things that are not directly linked to the financial performance of the farm. So in other words, the farmer is not going to get a return on investment for repairing a watershed. And so then how does, where does this money then come from? Who's going to pay for this? And there is plenty of funding in USDA, for example, in the farm bill. But it is not being allocated in ways that one project can be funded holistically in multiple ways. There's a report here that just came out from the EU to see how they are approaching this mechanism. So that's really the big puzzle right now, is to figure out how can banks work with the various industries to collect money from multiple sources and apply them. And then how do you get the assurance that this money is actually being spent in the right way? So that's when you come in with blockchain-based technology, ESG and so on, to develop that. But this is really, where I see the direction trending here. Paul, did you want to add something to what you were saying before? No, it's just interesting that, okay, I now know the official phrase ESG. I knew there was an E and an S and a G. I didn't know the order. And obviously a lot of you are familiar with it. For me, it was just completely new. And I'm still just kind of, I'm off of my little couple of acres out here growing stuff. And it's good to be linked into people who have much different perspectives on the world. So I will now read up on ESG and just find out what's going on. What caution there, Paul. ESG is the official corporate Wall Street phrase these days. Some people say it's the same sustainability, but it's not. It's really a checklist approach to programs that companies are doing, but it doesn't necessarily map to the impact the companies have on the living world. So there's a growing debate in that world about that. ESG is the name you'll see on the face of reports. Is it too much to, is it an over-generalization and maybe an over-critique to say that ESG is a way of avoiding the actually interesting and important issues of rethinking organizational intent and activity in the world? You could say that, but I think that's not fair. It's an attempt to find a way to organizationally deal with these issues, but like anyone else, you know, the organization bends things to itself in its form. It even looks at change as a way to preserve what it is. There are, you know, there are very good people in this game trying to do very good things, and as Ken will echo, really complex tasks of changing everything about how an organization operates from their incentive systems to the mindsets of the people that are in it. And ESG came out of the attempt of investment organizations, actually driven by activists originally, to see how do we assess companies' behavior around these things that we care about. So these structures of criteria have been built out. You know, you build a set of criteria and people will manage through the criteria, not necessarily toward the purpose of the criteria. That's part of the problem with measures. I mean, on the one hand, you get what you measure. On the other hand, everybody will gain the measures of whatever system you create. So you have to be really, really cautious about measures. Yeah, my sense is I'm listening to people is that it kind of reminds me of Amory Levin's article of 20 or 30 years ago where he's saying we need to invest in energy efficiency, not producing more energy. And it seems like what we're dealing with now is a culture that is profit driven and we need to shift from profit driven to there's a whole bunch of bad stuff's about to happen. And we need to we need to reduce it. And by reducing it, it's not making a profit, but it's reducing the expenses. I mean, I can imagine insurance companies, we had the very forefront of this, but just, you know, shifting from how can we benefit from this? How can we collectively avoid worse situations? Yeah, Amory is a great thinker. So is Hunter. The challenge with the efficiency game is that it makes a lot of sense and it's very profitable to different people make the profit. If you're if you're moving efficiency, then if you're moving oil, there's plenty, plenty of money to be made in efficiency. That's part of what's working now is that there are new financial incentives motivating people to drive the transition. But there's a lot of money in the game. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, high taxes on petroleum products is what caused Europe to become much more efficient with cars. And so you don't find big lots of big SUVs. Well, now you do because consumers and kind of one of over the long range. Cool. Our chat has been both distracting and really rich and I really appreciate that today. Really, Jerry, you've managed to avoid that horrible fate. Which horrible fate? Ending early. It's not a horrible fate. It's actually not be a terrible thing. But thank you. And thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it. Next week we'll have a topic. So let's pick a topic on the calls channel. And I had a great conversation yesterday with Rachel Weidinger of narrative impact, which might actually lead to an interesting topic. And she might actually join us for that. That could be really a lot of fun. So awesome. Thanks, everybody. Let's be careful out there. And so long. And thanks for all the fish seems like the appropriate way to wrap this call. Happy Pesach. Happy Easter. Happy everything. Exactly.


Sir Shane Roberts, who will be my special guest this evening. Go ahead, take a seat. Okay. All right.  All right. So, Sir Shane, tell us a little bit about your growing up and the circumstances of your family. I come from a very large family. I'm one of 14 kids. I am directly in the middle. There were 13 of us left. I did have a brother who passed away in 1982 from Folblom AIDS before anybody knew what AIDS was. He was one of the unfortunate beginners. So, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I was born in California, grew up in Detroit. It's been eight years in Houston, Texas. I moved back to Detroit. I've been in the Detroit metro area ever since, unless I'm in Indiana. That's about it in a nutshell. You mentioned your brother passing very early on in the AIDS crisis. How was your family able to cope with that when at that time there was very little infrastructure available? It was extremely rough. Even so much as where to have him buried and what funeral home to put him at, because at that time nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. He was actually not allowed to have the funeral in Catholic Church to find a funeral home to present his body and have the service there. It was quite a training experience at the time. This is right at the beginning of the crisis. It was tough. What sorts of complications did your family experience from that? Prejudices? They were both precutists. Like the plague. To try and explain to people that it's not contagious through bodily contact, it's not contagious if somebody breathes on you. At the time, obviously, nobody knew what was always involved with it. But it was the bubonic plague of the 80s. It really was. People didn't... Do you even more because of that situation that judge the family and a lot of discrimination, a lot? How did you see that situation evolve over the years? Oh, it's gotten so much better. So much better. I am, Ms. Kendra and I have talked about this many times at different events and I have publicly spoken about it at events in Detroit in today's community has always had HIV as part of their life, they were born into it. And when you experience full blown AIDS from the onset and you don't know it, it's just very same thing of I grew up with a rotary dialed telephone who would think that you'd have a cell phone that you'd be able to communicate, you know, so many years later, it's that you were born into it. So I wasn't born into it, but I experienced the first hand as did my family and so many others of my leather family. I mean, it's tough. You don't know the fights that have gone to understand it, to remedy it, to accept it. Acceptance has been the hardest thing I think over the past four years, I really do. You were married and you have a daughter. Tell us a bit about that. I was married when I was 18 years old. My daughter is now 40 something. I don't wanna get too much my age way, but I was very young when I started. I do have two grandchildren as a matter of fact. Looking back at it, it was an experience. It was something that I don't regret doing because it made me who I am today to have that experience. I ran into, I think I talked to you about this, about my ex-wife and I were divorced when my daughter was five and when my daughter was 30, I happened to be in a restaurant in Merrill Oak, Michigan. I worked for a retail company and we were doing a construction remodel project in the store.  They waited, so we made arrangements, we're sitting, we walk into the restaurant and we're sitting at a table. Three guys cross the table from me, the waitress comes over and she stands there and she takes their order. My daughter's name is Cheryl Lynn. That's not a very common name. When the guy's sitting across the table and looks at her and says, well, Cheryl Lynn, I'll have those and he starts flirting with her. And I took one look over and she's standing right here and I took one look over. I hadn't seen my daughter in 25 years. And I took one look at her and I said, Cheryl Lynn Turner. And she looked at me and she goes, I know exactly who you are.  I'm just dead. I'm just dead. So it just goes to show how small the world really is because I really didn't think, we had not had any contacts since then. One time we did have one brief encounter of contact because she was in trouble and here's daddy, I'm gonna take care of her. But I do miss the opportunity to have watched her grow up, go through school, make a life for herself. You know, I was there, I was not there for my granddaughter's birthday, the one of them. But it's okay. She knows how to get a hold of me and if the need be, the need will be. I find that a number of people in our community have children or have been married. What are your thoughts on that and how that impacts people within the LGBTQ community? I think in today's society as much more accepted, I was very fortunate. My ex-wife and I did not separate on bad terms. She knew at the time that I was bisexual as how I would consider myself to be at the time if I was gonna put a label on myself. It was not the reason the marriage didn't work. The marriage didn't work for a number of reasons, financial, age difference. She's 11 years old or nine. Society in general. I do have to believe that we were married in 1979 and divorced in 1982. So it was right around the time that my brother had passed away. 14 kids, everybody's kind of close at the time because of the age ranges were pretty tight. I think that took maybe a toll on the marriage and her not understanding of what was going through with the family as well. But I think that I find myself fortunate that she was accepting of the fact that I was free enough and knew who I was to be able to express my sexual freedom and play when necessary. And that's the way I would put it. I think that in today's world, it's much more accepted because the walls have been broken down, the communication levels are there and there's not tolerance for dislike. I mean, you know, I really do think that the acceptance is there much more today than what it was. How did you come out into the Leather King community? As early as 1979, when I was a senior in high school, there was a brown detourie. I think you and I talked about this as well. It eventually turned into the detourie vehicle. It was called the interchange and the underground communication of being young and wild at 18 years old. It's like, oh, great shiny thing. Let me try this out. That's pretty much my first exposure was very underground. It was not, even in the late 70s and early 80s in Detroit, there was not a Leather scene. It was very much what we would say today, Techno Club and very much the drag scene in Detroit. There were two Leather bars that I distinctly recall. One would be the R&R, the original, and the second one would be the interchange. So late at night, unbeknownst to friends, colleagues, people I hung out with, I would go to the back room of the Leather bars after hours and party heard it. I'm terrified to ask what you did. Well, I will tell you this, I will tell you this. The original R&R was on Michigan Avenue and the owner of the R&R just passed away a year ago and her name was Ruby. And Ruby was the first gay bar to put a pool table in her bar. And that pool table, till the day they closed their doors a couple of years ago, still stood at the newer R&R. And if that pool table could talk. I'm kind of glad it's not available because I might have to buy it. Should it go to the Leather archives, Dan? It could. So tell us a little bit more about the gay life that you knew in the early days in Detroit. What other places did you visit or did you visit other cities that also had? I would say that once I felt really comfortable with who I was and where I wanted to go, I would say that New York and Chicago were both of my favorite hearts. The mine shaft in New York. Chicago is probably a little bit closer to home where I probably would feel a little bit more comfortable. New York at the time, I would say was probably too big of a world for me, if that makes sense. It was just too hustle and bustle and too, I'm not sure what word I want to describe it with but way too busy, way too busy. I didn't get to LA until I was later on in years. Chicago and New York, outside of Detroit were probably the two places that I would venture the most. Tell us a bit about your time with the mine shaft. You mentioned that a moment ago. I'd rather not. It was more of an easy one. I hope this isn't making too much noise, but is there anywhere that stands out other than the mine shaft? How about in Chicago where there are places that you've frequented that aren't there anymore? Not that I can easily remember. I didn't get there a lot when I was younger. I haven't actually been there since 2005. So it's been a few years since I've been there but I can't really think that there was any place that I would make my home visit whenever I would go. I really can't think about that. What were your motivations toward the leather community? What drew you there? The mistake behind it, the brotherhood behind it, the comradeship and the true self-awareness that was brought to me, that it's okay to be different. It's okay to be kinky. It's okay to relate to one another on a specific level. And I don't even address that in a sexual nature. I mean, I was taught very early on and those of you that know me well enough know that hurt is HIRT and it's honor, integrity, respect, and truth and that's a code that I have instilled in my life for many, many, many years and I try to teach it. They're important traits to have and I'm fortunate that I was able to learn those in my early days of leather from some upstanding people who unfortunately are no longer with us but they in turn left their own legacy. Are there significant differences between the leather community you knew at that time versus what we know now? I do believe there is. I think the core values have gotten a little bit lost really years were reminded through events such as GLLA that those values are there and they are to be talked about and not to be forgotten. I have a favorite saying that is don't ever forget where your roots are because where your roots are is where you're gonna end up and where you come from and what you can relate to others and teach and share the experiences with are good things. You also mentioned LIFE, what is that? LIFE is an organization and I still say is because technically they are still an organization. LIFE stands for Leather Institute for Education in Detroit and it was an organization that was founded in 2003 by Lovardo of California, Diamond Jen Brown of Detroit and Dale Ross of Detroit and I was invited that was my title year for Mr. Leather, Michigan. I was invited to attend the initial meeting of that and it was just a few of us sitting around the table and a bar talking about we need to get a group and an organization together and through my title year I didn't have a lot of involvement with it and then Lovardo moved from Detroit to California, Dale Ross who still resides in Detroit area and so does Diamond Jen Brown and over the years it would be a weekly meeting and you know we would have a bar night at Diamond Jen and it was just a place to congregate and to gather and then it became the true educational forum and then after Lovardo moved from Detroit to LA Diamond Jen was thinking about selling Diamond Jen so a couple of us that had been at the meetings regularly and became more and more involved approached Jim and said we would like to take over life to Detroit because he was gonna step back from it. So a group of six of us got together and we actually incorporated it and we took it to places where Jim and Dale never thought it would go. We were nominated for Pathion of Leather Community, small leather events, we've had some fantastic speakers at some events, we also founded Dark Weekend which did for Detroit area Rough and Kink Best Weekend that had a run of six years, Life Detroit Anniversary had a run of 12 years I think and through life unfortunately, you know people wane off and they get other interesting things and unfortunately I will say that the Leather scene in Detroit has pretty much gone to the side of where major cities now do in the Leather lifestyle. It's not as existent as what we would like it to be. I myself was the board president of Life Detroit for two terms, the first term I did step down. Because there was an opportunity presented to Life Detroit from the Leather Leadership Conference and I, Mr. Pandora and I can not think of his name now from Pontiac headed up the board for the Leather Leadership Conference and we brought it to Detroit and it was the first ever international conference because we involved Canada though which is right across the river. So they had tried to do that and they had tried for many years to do an international event and we offered that opportunity. While with that, Life Detroit was going to be the beneficiary of some of the funds that were raised from that conference and I did not want any hindrance by being the president of the board with that so I stepped out from the board so that I could get full concentration because it is a three year process of Leather Leadership Conference. You have to get awarded it, you have to apply for it then you get to be reviewed by the board, you have to go to the event and be interviewed into a long left lead process and when we were awarded it I made the decision right then and there. I'm gonna step down because I didn't want the possibility of somebody saying wow, there's nepotism. So we had the conference, it was very successful. I let the pro tem, president continues term and I'm pretty back me to come back so I did. Unfortunately, technically, I guess I'm still the president. We have not had a meeting of Life Detroit as an organization in probably three or four years and I'm not proud to say that but when the audience isn't there, who do you reach out to? Let's take a step back. You mentioned a moment ago, Dark Weekend. Please fill us in a little bit about that. What was that? About what? Dark Weekend? Dark Weekend, Detroit area rough came first. Very much a new concept for Detroit had not been done before. We had vendors, classrooms, educational speakers. It was always held on Super Bowl Weekend. So it was always the first week in February and then the first three were very successful and even though we ran it into Sunday, we were done by noon so everybody could go to the Super Bowl parties. But it was great because we were fortunate to have a banquet hall that supported another group in Detroit and the leather community for their annual runs. So we propositioned them and it said, come on. And Elmada Hall was our venue for quite a few years, completely closed down for us. Let us do what we wanted, when we wanted, no restrictions. Lou, who was one of the, we awarded Lou the last year of our event there because they sold the hall.  But in mainstream society, to see a person that accepting of just something that would just be the total opposite of who she is was pretty unbelievable. She welcomed us with open arms. We then moved the venue to a Knights of Columbus hall in Lincoln Park, Michigan, who is operated by the former chief of police of Lincoln Park. And we could do just about anything we wanted there as well.  Yes, sir. No problem. So we had some good times with our Detroit because it was a new event and everybody likes new. And it was interesting because we had some really good keynote speakers. So, you know, we actually had shark rental one. We had Jack Rinova. I can't even begin to tell you some of that. The star-studded names, but these are people that are real in the community. So it was important. It really was important. Are you currently involved in any organizations close? I currently am not. Great Lakes Leather Alliance is my baby and have been for a few years. What was, tell us about Leather Oste. Leather Oste was founded by my board, you know, and myself. And this came about, there is one leather store in the city of Detroit and it's called Noir Leather. And Keith has been the owner of Noir Leather for easily 45 years. It's the only place where you really could go to buy leather and very expensive. And those that were interested in buying new to go to Noir Leather. Bojano and I came up with an idea of, you know what, why don't we open a leather and fetish store?  And our weekends were spent. We first started Leather Oste with a curb table, about six pair of jeans, five on ones, a couple pair of boots, some leather vests and these were all used items. So our trademark on Leather Oste was Leather Oste, not so sloppy seconds. And anybody that knows my boy knows he is very meticulous and looks for every flaw that could be on anything. So we spent many days going through thrift stores as state sales, looking at line for lot closeouts. And we took a 12 by 12 space and within five years we're up to two, within the first five years we were up to three spaces of 12 by 12. And within six years we were up to nine spaces at 12 by 12. We sold used item for five dollar pair. We sold military uniforms, both vintage and new. We signed a contract with the military supplier. Boots, fetish gear, fetish implements, restraints. You name it, we sold it. If we didn't have it, we knew where to get it. The, and we didn't sell it for a huge market price. And that's what made us unique was we had many people that would come visit us at the store because they were interested in, they saw something that somebody else had. Hey, where'd you get that? It got that at Leatherosity. And they would come in and they would refer friends and advertise, their best form of advertising is word of mouth. And before you know it, we had some interesting people come in through our doors.  The woman has a booth right behind where we were located where we did our final expansion to as an adult novelty store. So we became real good friends. We would refer customers to each other. It was a great experience because people, we would give people the cost or the price that they were gonna pay for something.  Okay, you're gonna buy two or three pieces. We're gonna give you a better price. And when they started to realize that this was a no hold barred, no judgment pass zone, we got some good, we got some good repeat customers. So it was good. Boydino has since retired. My life partner passed away almost two years ago. I have been promoted in my job. So I work seven days a week. And it's, you know, we had to make a decision what are we gonna do? All right, you know, so the best interest is that we closed on July 1st, unfortunately, but we have some great memories. And if anybody's interested in buying some, sir plus more today is like, you know. I'm sure there's plenty of this here. Appreciate that, absolutely. So I hope this isn't making too much noise. What are your thoughts on mentoring in the community? It's a very big topic for us. There can never be too many. Some of that is through design and some of that is through circumstance. Circumstance would be some of the, almost all of my mentors are no longer here. But I do have to say that you're never, it's never too late to be mentored. There are people that I feel that we run across in our daily journey of life and they end up to be your mentor, whether it's for the minute, whether it's for the rest of your life together, whether it is just in passing. Mentoring and learning go hand in hand. I can't begin today. I'm a child learned from so many people in this very room, that's true. Is there anything you wish you had learned earlier on? I want to know, because what I know now could have killed him. I hope I did. If you could go back in your leather journey, is there anything you would change that you would do differently? No. I firmly believe that things happen for a reason at the time they happen. They happen for a reason. There's a time for everything to happen. I do not, I don't ever look back and say would I have done something different because it was meant to be at the time. A lot of my inner strength has come from not necessarily the widest choices at the time, but that's how you learn from things that you might have been able to do differently but you don't know until you do it. You don't know. There's not an instruction manual to get through life, so I wouldn't read it anyways. I'm sure we have title holders here and people who will be participating in the contests this weekend. What advice have you for them? Be who you are. Be true to who you are. Have respect for yourself. Have respect for one another. Have respect for the lifestyle. Have a true understanding of what you were getting yourself into. It's not, I can tell you from first-hand experience and I know things have changed over the years. It's been a few years since I was title holder in the public venue as a title holder and my partner the first year became a sash widow and it's true. But he also knew my commitment for myself and for eventually would become the commitment I had for the community. It afforded me a voice that was a little bit stronger by having the title behind my name. Be sure this is what you want to do. This title will follow you forever. Forever. Am I right these kinds of things? But it's all good. What's the biggest misconception about you? You know, I really didn't have an answer for that when you and I talked briefly a few months ago. So I did a survey at work. I had some quizzical answers. The biggest misconception about me is until you know me I come across as disinterested. I come across as angry. I come across as stuck out. I come across as don't bother him. Those of you that do know me know that was the furthest thing from the truth. I've been told those things to my face. What the real truth behind that is, I'm very intent. I'm extremely intent. I may seem disinterested. I may seem aloof. I may seem stuck out. I'm just very intent. I am surveying the situation. I am thinking 24-7. And there's a difference. I wouldn't change it either. It makes people keep guessing.