Morning, Doug. Hi, how are you? I'm hanging in there. By a thread. Oh, by, by B cells, T cells and whatever hasn't been killed by the chemotherapy. So, so yes, by a thread. I like that we're alive at all. It's such an amazing thing. That is an amazing thing. I'm grateful for it every morning I wake up. I love that I stepped into the conversation right as I heard that that made my week, Doug. That totally made my week. Terrific. Wow. Good morning to you, Jerry. Good morning. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you. Nice to see you. Thank you so much. It's good to see you. I'm. Good to see you. Thank you. I'm not pretending to participate much more, but I respect my limits. Oh God, what is that? My limits. Yeah, what's respecting your limits? What I, I said concept. It's new to me. What, what. What is that? How does one. What?  Certainly that.  And, and there we are. There we are. Wherever we go. Here we are. Here we are. Exactly. Be here now. Be there then. I really believe. Yeah. Be where why. That could be our new motto. Be where why. Where why. Be where why not. I was going to tell a joke about time travel, but you guys didn't like it. God, I've never heard that one before. And I've even posted it in a couple of places. Darn it. You know what househeimers. It's like all the jokes are new again. Like we don't serve your kind in here attacking on walks into a bar. Oh man. Hey everybody. Good morning. Afternoon evening, wherever you might be. Exactly. And wherever you are. There you are. Be there before. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So partly, maybe I'll, I'll check in early in the, in this round as well. As we go. Hey, Claude, say Charlotte. Hey, Stacey. Michael. Kenneth, welcome to the call. Glad to have you here. And why don't we go into a bit of a check in round and let me start a little bit with a bit of a check in, which is. OGM is slowly making its way into becoming more of an organization, which has been a, an exciting and occasionally bumpy path. And we're getting places and one of the things that, that will happen or is happening is that we would love to bring more people sort of into the organization. And at this point, partly that means somebody who loves like project management, getting things done, minding where our documents are helping us see our way from meeting to meeting kind of thing. So if you know anybody or a few yourself are interested in those kinds of things, let us know we are. We were to say, like Pete has been Pete Kaminsky, who is inventing massive wiki massive everything. It has also sort of functionally made himself kind of the way and project manager for the middle of this.  So we're kind of in some sense trying to enhance that function and take it off of off of his shoulders. So if you know of anybody, we'll let us know. In the spirit of OGM, what we do is we just go around and check in and see what anybody's doing that's OGM. I kind of just go through the list. We don't always make it through everybody, but this is not a big group right now. So let me just start with. Gil is your video off because you are in a moment where it would not be convenient to, to jump in. Yep. Okay, good. Then I'll pass and I'll come back to you. So let's go. Stacey Klaus can. And we're chatting on matter most, a link that I will put in the zoom chat here. And we're going to go ahead and go ahead and click on it. And it'll ask for a login and that'll bring you back, but we're trying to keep a persistent chat between sessions. So I didn't refuse to see. It's okay. Well, first, I just want to ask you real quickly, what exactly would that entail? What are you looking for the person to do? It means, well, for a moment, it's a volunteer position. One of the things we're doing is we're busy creating a reservoir that is under, that is a fiscally sponsored entity under a charity organization. So it become its own charity under theirs. And then we can apply for grants and things like that. So part of it is we're organizing ourselves to start taking grants so that we can have things like OGM fellowships, because a bunch of people who were in here doing really interesting things and sweating blood and building pieces of what are eventually sort of an OGM environment are making no money from it and could use some support. So we're trying to get there. So I think my question is what's the skill set you're looking for. Yeah, exactly. So the skills I'm looking for is actually attending meetings, listening to what's going on and organizing it into agendas and to-do lists and sort of project management D. Okay, last time we said we're going to do this, how to go, keeping notes, all that kind of thing. And then we're using massive Wiki right now as our note taking structure, which is a bit geeky because the documents are all on GitHub and you have to know how to push things to GitHub and how to use a markdown editor or hack MD, all of which might be gibberish at this point. But most of us are moderately fluent in it.  I've heard of Felix Kramer, but don't know him. Don't know him well, Gil. And so we're also at the cusp of trying to figure out some of the tools issues between staying on massive Wiki to do all that, moving into notion, which is what Lyonsburg is using pretty heavily at this point at scenes, or falling back on Google Docs or something else. And we'll sort of see, because a piece of open global minds exploration is this tools mix, how do we save and link up the things that we know and that we're doing. And so it's kind of project management D and administrative in the particular role we're looking for. Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, Stacy, I had to explain more of the background so that so that. Yeah, whoever it is that's interested would know the kind of the context of walking into exactly. Go ahead, Gil.  Felix is putting together something called active allies, which is trying to marry. For want of a better word, more older folks with younger folks intergenerational partnerships of mentorship internship collaboration. And it might be any is focusing primarily on climate but it might be worth having a chat with him about exactly this. That's really interesting. That's super interesting. Was he part of the Cal cars initiative that initiated Cal cars, which was the drive to get plug in hybrid vehicles adopted by Toyota and others and into the market so he did that. Okay. I haven't, I haven't really applied many things and we've worked, I've got somebody working with me now that came through him. On my critical path Academy work and so he might be, he might be an ally and getting those people that you're looking for. Sounds great. And I have him in my brain under that and nothing else. Okay. So I thank you for the research. I'll send you contact info. And I'll be back to Stacy class and account. Okay. So, I have nothing really to share other than my, you know, recently. I've been asked to engage in some conversations regarding what's going on in Israel. And I have said for the past few years that is the one conversation that I'm not comfortable with it all. I've been thinking like I want to be comfortable with it. Part of the problem is I don't know enough about it. problem is, I don't know enough about it and any source that I go to is usually a biased source. So I was just curious, you know, if anybody had any thoughts about that and that's it. That's what's on my mind. So Stacy, that's a lovely question because I share your hesitation, trepidation, whatever hesitancy about the topic. I have a bunch of friends who are deeply on one side, a bunch of friends who are deeply on the other side, and I sometimes fear to tread. And I feel uninformed because there's so much going, partly also because there's simply so much going on and there's so much history woven into this. I'd love to know if anybody on the call has good advice here. Gail, go ahead. I don't know if I have good advice, but I have thoughts. I'm deeply, I'm deeply in both sides and I hunger for thoughtful, not balance, but thoughtful multi-perspectival conversations about this and I find it very hard to find. And you know, Ken, you've seen my stuff on Facebook, I don't know what your assessment of it is, but I've tried to be thoughtful and nuanced and historically grounded. And offering contrary perspectives. My post stuff that I don't necessarily agree with and that I do agree with to try to try to broaden and round out the conversation. And it's pretty difficult. I'm in an open conversation with somebody now, I actually intentionally didn't respond for a day. I'm going to do that after this call where, how to say this, well, let me give this specific example. A lot of people are seeing this current conflict as having begun two weeks ago or begun 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 30 years ago. And I posted a list of the events of the last hundred and somebody said, well, that's really biased. OK, I said, well, OK, if you think it's biased, you know, say why if there's things, if you think it's biased, because it's missing important things, please add them so we can have a more complete history. And then I got from a couple of people, you know, sort of, you know, chastised for well, for being biased myself, for shutting down the conversation. People, some people responded to the history of I saying, yeah, but Israel's doing horrible things. I said, great, yeah, that's true. There's other threads about that. Talk about that in another thread. This thread is about the history. And so I got, you know, got yelled at for that. So it's very challenging, I find. To have that, certainly Facebook is a difficult venue for it. There are bunches of Israelis and Palestinians working together to try to break out of this thing. And that's an interesting conversation that, you know, people have tried in various forms, Joan Blades, Living Room's dialogue here in the States. John Marks at Search for Common Ground, which actually that might be a place to check out, Stacey, because they've gone into conflict zones over the past 30, 40 years in Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland, place like that to try to bring people together to have face to face, explore our conversations with each other. So that's an initiative that's been going on in the Middle East for many decades. We've had old friends who were. Gosh, I guess back in the early 1960s, having secret dinners at their home in Israel, that, you know, just like couldn't be had, couldn't be acknowledged, but were had. And there are people who on both sides who wanted to do that. There's a thought that this blitz through and, oh, gosh, sorry, I lost it. That's OK, Gil. That was. And you know, it's it's it's rough and it's and it's deeply, deeply tangled. I guess that's one of the things about it for people who are looking at both sides. It is so bound up in lived experience and socialized experience and actual history, going back for, you know, for a fair piece that it's not something we can say, well, in this moment, this is what should happen. Yeah. There's a lot of discussion without context. Here's some of that years ago, there was a project, one of many projects trying to bridge Israeli and Palestinian points of view that sent a bunch of Israeli and Palestinian youth to a favela in Brazil. I think it was Brazil might have been South Africa, a township or something like that, where they had to work together and they became friends over the course of working together to fix something that was that was broken in all of their eyes. And that did some help, right? But it seems like all those patches end up healing temporary and so forth. But it feels like and I'll just say the parallels right now to the American political situation are remarkable because because the well is very poisoned in America for trying to have discourse about a lot of these issues. And it feels to me like the most important thing that OGM might be able to do in the near term is create for or even just process or even pointing to best practices for how to handle these kinds of situations and where to look. And Gilly just mentioned search for common ground, like just knowing what initiative to go look into and start participating in is a big help. Sure. That's the easiest place to start is pointing to resources and initiatives are already underway is very different level of lift and trying to create one. So that's something we can do immediately. And I would exactly do that. You mentioned the poisoned well. I mean, one of the things that concerns me deeply about this situation is how is the continuing poisoning of the well in Israel. Which is not separate from the poisoning in the United States because Trump and Netanyahu and those guys play together. Right. And so, you know, sacrificing the social fabric on the altar of political expediency is something that's happening in both those countries. I mean, Hamas has been Hamas forever. So that's not the new deal there. But Israel has as I read it, I haven't been there in a long time. It has deeply, deeply soured. And and.  Yeah, so far. So there's no in theory, there's possibility there. But that's that's that's for me, the point of despair right now. It's not so much the immediate bombs and rockets being thrown back, but what's happened to Israeli society in the last and culture of norms in the last 30 years. Yeah, class, did you want to jump in? Yeah, my daughter married a young man from Tel Aviv a few years back. You know, they have two little children now, three and one and three and two and one on the way to the child. And. She really is in this. She fell into this whole of. Publishing on Facebook, some of these messaging that comes through, apparently, to the Israeli population via Twitter and others. And they're superbly one sided and superbly negative. Messages, which I wish she wouldn't publish there because most of our friends are rather on the liberal side. You know, and that's always, I mean, she's she's she went to college in Orange County in Hong Kong and in Germany. And so she has friends everywhere. But most of her friends are really who are not Jewish, are really not. Not so so one sided. And it's a really difficult thing. So she stopped talking with my wife, which is just breaking my wife's heart. And and so it's and without us having said anything, no, the only thing that I have published on to her is a little photo album with pictures of family pictures and situations and with the title of the only thing that really matters is friends and family now. But it's really horrible how the how they are pumping the the opinions there. I mean, this is as bad as it is here, you know, in in in radicalizing the people, people's opinions. Really, there's like no room for any kind of dialogue or compromise. So this is really, you know, and it's it totally coincided with Netanyahu losing his government and having to reposition this. So it's it's it's just a horrible thing. And so we we are like, yeah, we can't really say anything. Yeah, there's there's a body of opinion that says that the reason that Netanyahu launched this particular action at this particular time was because of the difficulties in forming a government. And this is a complete distraction from that story. It's sort of like the dog. It's sort of like the dog. And, you know, the extremism, of course, cuts both ways. I don't know if people saw the news yesterday, but there was an incident in L.A. where Palestinian youths attacked people dining in an outside restaurant asking, you know, are you Jewish and beat beat some folks up? So they didn't ask, are you a supporter of Israel and Netanyahu? They said, are you Jewish? So this is no, that's the scary downside of this. Karen Armstrong, the the brilliant lapsed Catholic none has a book called The Battle for God. In which she asserts that the the the fundamentalist extremists of of each of the Abrahamic religions have more in common with each other than with their co-religionists. Yeah, it's it's just it is that it's a really it's a really upsetting insight, but it rings very true for me. But all of them are being agitated for political purposes in each scenario. And that that is really in them. But for us to not be able to get a handle on that is really scary. Yeah. Mark, did you want to read the passage from Haritz? Haritz that you found that you mentioned in the chat? If you're still there. Yes, I am still here. Although. Good thing. Well, it's it's not just one article. It's there are many and I like I like Haritz. And one of the things I don't understand is one source that I go to. But there have been for the last four years looking at Israeli societies as a body that's moving dramatically to the right. As is anyone in Sebastopol lives in Sebastopol or around Sebastopol. There is a very interesting Israeli community there. Very lefty people that left Israel, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. And very critical of Israel of what they see when they come back there. They most of them say that they don't recognize it. Mm hmm. And it's quite it's quite telling how some of them are former IDF officers, long term officers, careerists. IDF, Israeli defense. Very, of course, very, very defensive. So there is there is even there and even in Europe, actually a division of Israeli society that that and Jews Jewish societies that we did. We we didn't think we will see a game. Thinking of after the show. It's it's really particular to see that division when it shouldn't be. Yeah, the larger one of the larger frames here is just how do you resolve human conflicts, how do you resolve longstanding bias, longstanding conflict? Did truth and reconciliation work in South Africa, for example? And we had I had a call two years ago, maybe longer with a fellow, a white fellow in South Africa who said, frankly, apartheid's still on the ground. I don't know that truth and reconciliation fixed anything. Et cetera, et cetera. And so I think our quest for peacemaking is is huge and important. And I anybody has glimpses of bigger hope, please say so. Ken, did you want to jump in? Yes and no. Yeah, yeah. I have one of my closest friends is 81 years old and was sort of one of the founding citizens of Israel. He went there when he was 17 years old and shows up in several books. And he's a heavy duty Zionist and I had lunch with him yesterday. And he actually said something that really surprised me.  And it's he's been sending out stuff about how they're they hide behind children and, you know, they target civilians. And I'm like, well, we can go back to the Peloponnesian wars with the salting of the earth afterwards. I mean, civilians have been targets in wars for a very long time. So that is not to me an argument about how bad those people are, because every single country that I can think of, you know, who's been involved in war sooner or later targets civilians. So we've got to move that from the table. I'm interested in is there's a process called dynamic dialogue. And in dynamic dialogue, you have a group of people who represent the really sticky points that are that are showing up. So maybe in a group of 30 or 40 people, you choose a half dozen, maybe maybe eight, and you give each of them a line. So, you know, one of the lines is we just want to live in peace.  We're going to fight back. And so everybody just says their line a couple of times to kind of get in the body. And then they start to speak their lines one at a time and go around in a circle. And you just want the people are watching, you know, we're just observing. And then you give people permission to start to move as they speak their lines. And anyone in the in the observing group can say, stop. And everybody is stopped to say what's going on. And you look at body posture. You look at relation, spatial relationships. And after a while, you start to allow them to say things that that keep them in character rather than just the line in the beginning, but they're in character. And you can see people start to shift and turn. So it frees up the log jam around the ideological stance where they take the next logical step. It's a fascinating process. I've only done it a couple of times. It's very, very useful in helping people to see the unconscious dynamics that are going on. And by people physically moving in the room, I was doing this with one group around. What they call it plan Bay Area, which is this thing where people are sitting in the U.N. and is trying to take over our rights. At one point, this woman was was pointing her finger at three people and saying her line and all three simultaneously just turned their back on her. We said, wait, what happened there?  We didn't want to deal with it. And when we start to recognize that, it's like, we as an observing group recognize that these kinds of things are so disgusting. We want to deal with them. And that allows us the space to say, let's change the conversation. And the last thing I'll say is, he asked me what I thought the solution was. And I said, get rid of all the leaders and put grandmothers in charge.  To me, war is a failure of leadership at the highest level. And if we had grandmothers who were in charge of things, I think things would really be very, very different. And he's like, well, you'll never get that to happen. I'm like, well, maybe, maybe not. But unless you propose the idea, I've had this idea for a very long time of an army of elders. What happens is when there's a hotspot, we send in young men under 25 whose frontal cortexes aren't fully developed. We hyped them all up with all kinds of jingoistic slogans. We armed them heavily and say, go out there and settle the problem. But if we sent people in their 70s, grandmothers and grandfathers with blankets and soup and said, you look cold, have a blanket, you look hungry, have some soup, tell me what's going on? How did this start? What's your role in this? Who's the enemy here? And just began to listen and feed people and keep them warm and give them some respite. I think we'd make a lot of inroads into solving some of these problems. There's people out there who are suffering tremendously with lack of everything you can think of.  And we somehow think that that's okay. These are not unrelated. Billionaires create a lot of this, I don't wanna, let me say, a system that creates billionaires creates a lot of the problems that we're seeing. So we've got large system dynamics that need to be addressed. They have to be addressed at all levels, from the level of the individual all the way up to the level of the system. And the leverage points are difficult to see, but dynamic dialogue is one way to start to reveal some of those levers and help to shift the perspectives. So just to pick up one thread from what you said, and this is gonna sound like a weird path into it, but I think you'll see the connection. One of the big questions in the back of my head is given the crap that social media is in right now and how the deep hold at Facebook seems to have dug for civilization, is what if Facebook were designed for citizens, not consumers? How would the affordances be different? How would identity be handled differently? How would information be handled differently? Certainly you wouldn't be selling off anybody's information. There might be a fee for who knows, but how would you do it differently? But wouldn't it be cool if the interface for Facebook then prompted you and said, hey, it seems like this community could use a process. Here's three, one of them is dynamic dialogue. And what if the interface could then find somebody who could guide them through it and connect them to the group or coach them through how to do dynamic dialogue themselves or whatever and then debrief them after the process and feed that back into the public sphere in a way that works, right? So that other communities could be like, hey, I'll have what they're having, right? And then maybe good behaviors and positive processes would trickle their way across community, community in some organic fashion and it doesn't have to be the same process and you can adapt it and so on and so forth. But we need a way to sort of undermine the top-down narratives of spin and control that have seized the scripts that are running in our heads and taken over our ability to just sit down with other people as humans. And if this form of dialogue lets us wake up a little bit out of that reverie and see one another as humans again and come back into a trusting dialogue, that's awesome and it's kind of priceless. And by the way, it's cost-free. I mean, at most what they should cost is fairer make a living wage as paid to facilitators, coaches, other people who know how to hold these spaces and do this with people, right? Doug, I'll give you just one second and I'll turn you to Doug. I've been listening to Celeste Headley, who's an NPR reporter who has a wonderful talk at Google about how to have better conversations. And she said, you know, it's really important that we learn how to have conversations because the last time Americans were this divided, we were killing each other, it was the Civil War. And small talk is really important.  And in the last 20 years, as screen time has gone up, empathy has plummeted. So we need a design in social media that fosters empathy rather than indifference and rather than contempt. Because I think we've got a lot of platforms that are fostering contempt. I see it all the time on Facebook and Twitter. And it's like, I would never say things to people in real life that I see people say on social media. I just wouldn't do that if they were in the same room. It's like, that would be horrible, you know? So if we can start to design for empathy, I think that would also be a really huge step. Sorry, Doug, go ahead. Go ahead, Doug. Yeah, so much of the discussion about Israel and the Middle East is based on the idea that if we could change attitudes and thoughts, we'd make a big difference. I tend to disagree with that. I'm not normally a Marxist, but I think a material analysis of the Middle East that is where are the economic opportunities? How are they moving? And how is that affecting people's underlying attitudes? It's as though the Middle East is really a game of musical chairs and everybody is afraid of losing out. Made complicated by the fact that climate change is probably gonna make a lot of the Middle East unlivable. And people are kind of anticipating that in the energy that's going into these dialogues. But I just don't think the dialogues are gonna make any difference. It's the material conditions that are important. And a piece of what happens is if we push on many different directions at once and they're mutually enforcing, we might actually crack the code too. Cause I think that the dialogue from... There's a story about Black October, the PLOs. Black September, I think, sorry, not, sorry to insult October. There was a terrorist organization that the PLO started years ago that pulled off the Munich attack and killed the athletes at the Munich Olympics in 72. And that got Yasser Arafat a seat at the table. He started getting invited to talks and taking seriously as an organization. So then he needed to make sure that they stopped doing a lot of terrorist things, but they had 300 finally trained terrorists who were like eager to go do some more damage. And so what they did was they put a call out across the Arab crescent and they said, the chairman needs your help. Young ladies of the Arab crescent, the chairman needs your help. And they basically married off the 300 terrorists. They gave them a bonus. If they married, they would give them a flat and a TV. And if they had a kid, they'd get another bonus or whatever. And they basically successfully melted a terrorist organization by giving them lives, by giving them the ability to have a normal reality. And I may be idealizing, and there's an Atlantic article that I learned this from that I'll find and post to the chat. But so I'm really torn because a huge piece of this is about people otherizing others and fearing them so much that they'll do anything. And that's not necessarily resolved with economic, well-being, like if I'm doing better, I still may hate those people over there. It's just that I'm a little comfier now. So I have a feeling that like all fronts, multiple fronts at once is some way to get through this. Any other thoughts on this particular theme? And then we'll go back to a check-in round. Stacey, thank you for opening Pandora's box in that nice way. Jerry, I had not heard that story about the melting of the 300 terrorists. It's a remarkable story. It's important because the teenage and young adult male cohort is the most dangerous cohort in the world. Especially unemployed and angry. And that's what I was gonna add, unemployed, angry and hopeless, no prospects. So there's the combination, there's where Ken's story and Doug's story meet each other. Yeah, go ahead. People may know that Shimon Parris, former Prime Minister of Israel, was focused on exactly what Doug was talking about. And they're trying to build a co-prosperity sphere between the, both the Israeli and Palestinian populations and Israel and the West Bank and Jordan to create economic development together. It was a very grounded and strategically thought through initiative that seemed to have some promise. I don't know the exact history of it, but I think it was probably died around the time that Rabin was murdered. Which of course is where the whole game in Israel starts to spin seriously out of control. Yeah. Ken, did you wanna jump in further on this? Yeah, go ahead. 25 years or so, 27 years ago, I think it was, I went to a multicultural men's retreat led by Michael Mead and Jack Cornfield and a few other folks. And it was terrifying.  There were 110 men, there were 40 African-Americans, 40 Latinos, 30 Angos and one Asian man. And there were a lot of angry youth there. And we opened up and they said, there's two rules. Rule number one is conflict hour. We don't put conflict off. When conflict arises, we deal with it in the moment. Can we all get agreement on that? Yes, everybody's like totally down with that. Rule number two, we don't resort to violence when dealing with rule number one. Can we agree with that?  So I just, I think that that one rule among quote, civilized nations of, we will deal with conflict when it arises and we agree not to kill each other in the face of conflict, which of course goes against the entire military industrial congressional university complex. But if we could simply adopt the rule of, yes, I see that you have a very different way of living than I do and you have different values and mores, I'm not gonna kill you over that disagreement. You know, we'll sit in difficult conversations as long as it takes to work through and get to an end. So yeah, that is what the UN is supposed to be. We haven't, but we've reserved the right with our military might to say, we will kill anybody who gets in our way. And that is so anti-democratic. It's so not what this country was founded on. And it's one of those stances when you arm the whole world that leads to the kinds of problems we're having. Ken, did anybody kill each other at that retreat? No, after three days of people of the facilitators talking with the guys who had the guns, they decided to leave.  And I came here in the hopes that we could actually get to know each other and find a way to be together in peace. I understand you can't be here, but I just wanna wish you that you stay safe is wherever you go.  But I felt this need to say that. I was like, I didn't know where that came from, but it was actually, I didn't know where it came from. It came for the reason I went to this retreat. I knew it was gonna be hairy. I knew it was gonna be hard. But I really wanted to get down to the nitty gritty of life. And like, I have to live in this world with people who do not like me.  Cause he's like, how can you hate me if you don't know me? I wanted these guys to know me that, if they're gonna hate me, at least know me and know why you're hating me as opposed to just because I'm a white guy. Thank you. Let's go back to our check and round. We have Klaus, Ken, Charlotte. Okay. Yeah, switching over to agriculture and climate change and food security, food supply and just one more comment to what Doug was saying. The Middle East is running tri and Israel has the capacity to export agricultural technology that is unparalleled in the world, but instead exports weaponry and advise the Saudi Arabia on the latest espionage technology and so on. So that's really sad to see. But anyway, we were able to do our webinar a couple of days ago on just putting in the website again with business climate leaders. And we ended up with 954 people signing up over 500 came from LinkedIn. So it was a very professional group. My partner here, business climate leaders is divided into sectors of the economy. And the guy who partnered with me was a CEO of a biofuel company is a chemical engineer by background. And he invited a lot of chemical engineers into the discussion. And we had a surprising number of people from the finance sector also joining us. We had 445 people show up. That's a 47% show rate, which is really amazing. And there's people from all over the world. There are people from Brazil, from Africa, I mean South America, Africa, Europe, dialing in on it. And the discussion was really focused on using agriculture and land use management to regenerate the soil and fill the soil with carbon, pull carbon out of the atmosphere. So we have, we've got tremendous feedback and we are now starting to work on a second webinar focused on biofuels because that is a really hot topic that not much focus has been on there. And there is a lot of damage being done in biofuel planning. So now, but we have the chemical sector on board now which is wonderful. For the OGM side of things, I find we have some time to focus again on the plans that we have with Jordan. I have a meeting with Jordan on Monday, a workstation to set up a business plan to put some structure around where we want to take this. But for those who haven't listened to this so far, we have to make contact with the Global Regeneration Collab, which is David Witzel, who is also a friend of Jerry's. They have developed a wonderful platform that we could use to attract people and to assist groups of people who are working on community food systems development. And we wanted to find a niche where the gap that I see in the market is really to bring small scale community systems into the wholesale market because in the United States, at least the aggregation capacity and the brokerage function has basically been taken out completely and large companies have put all of that inside and moved into a form of contract farming that shuts out the small farmer. So there is, I mean, right now the USDA has a $96 million fund chasing investment opportunities. They can't really even find places to invest where there is enough competency, where you feel that the scope of individuals from within the community has the competency to use that money and turn it into productive uses. So that's, there is enormous energy. I mean, there are literally billions of dollars ready to be invested in the sector, but there is no clear strategy on how to do it. There is one point that would lead to further centralization when you look at where the multinational companies are going. And then there is one movement that says we need to decentralize the entire supply chain in order to empower the farmer to use regional seeds and crop types and so on in order to deal with local soils. Soils are uniquely regional. They are, first of all, soils themselves are different by region than you have climate differences and border accessibility and socioeconomics that are related to this. So it's an exciting project. Yeah, it's very ambitious and we'll see where it goes. Now Ken and I are on a course at the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership and this week there's a couple of young men from Uganda working on a local food system. So it's just like a really fitting discussion to have and a meeting with them tomorrow to give them feedback on what the Coop was thinking about their presentation and their efforts there. So a lot of happening in that space and yeah, it's hard to retire at the same time. So we're balancing this. Yeah, that's it. Oh, thank you. I just pointed to the channel we have in Mattermost for this theme. If people wanna participate, learn more, do things like that. And I'm excited that this is forming up as something that can sort of stand up and be an entity. That sounds really awesome. So thank you. Let's go Charlotte Ken Michael. You are still muted. You're hunting for that mute button. You found it. Hunting, I have three screens. So I brought this on myself. Yeah, I just had a period to check in this morning and we're going forward on the version four and of the handbook and our course. We have another session at noon today, second session. And as far as the podcast, this discussion was really useful and helpful because difficult conversations is our subject for our June podcast. And I might be contacting some of you to see if you'd like to come on and talk about it. It's, I don't know, I think a critical topic for our times. But that's about it. Got out rowing this morning, set my day straight. That's great. Love that. I think each of us has our way of setting our day straight. I used to work for Esther Dyson who famously loved to swim first thing. And if I got to work at 7 a.m. on Fifth Avenue in New York, she would already have gone all the way down. Her favorite pool in Manhattan was way down South. I don't remember what pool, but she lived like near 14. She would have some way down. Swam at six or something like that. Or earlier, like 5.30, come back right off and she'd be at work always before me. That sounds like her hand. Almost always. But yeah, but for her, and imagine in the days before internet, when she's busy traveling to places in the former Soviet Union, her assistant's main important job was to guarantee access to a pool every morning, which sometimes meant bribing a guard, sometimes meant like all kinds of other funny things. I would love to see just April's pool memoirs. I think that'd be a fun thing. Yeah, it's fun because I got there about 6.30. There are people coming in at 6.30, who would come out at 5. And they see, like that's the sunrise I see when I get there early enough. That's beautiful. But it's just really, it just puts everything in perspective. I love it. And also love that piragogy and liberating structures and a bunch of other things that are sort of sister organizations are all focused on how do we bridge this divide? How do we have difficult conversations and get somewhere? What are the tools to make that work better? How do we make that actually function? Yeah, I think Judith is gonna be one of our guests on that. And then some folks from Washington state that I know close to Idaho. Sounds great. Let's go Ken Michael Lauren. And if Lauren can talk while she's on the house. I'll keep this short since I've already spoken quite a bit today. Along fitting into the topic of the day, I've actually been paid recently to lead a couple of difficult conversations for a client. I had 30 people on a Zoom call.  You know, we don't have time to, we got to talk.  So I did my shortest ever somatic practice for folks and they got it. They really, they were very appreciative. And I've been hanging out with Lauren and Charles and Vincent and Judith over in the Kiko lab. And it's been really wonderful to see what's going on there. I'm just so excited for what's happening around our experiments and collective intelligence. And I finally, because of this last difficult conversation with this client decided I'd write a blog post on how to have a conversation with complaint. Because I think a lot of people don't understand that there are times when it's necessary to complain and there's ways to do that that are effective. So I put a link in the matter most chat if you wanna check it out. I'd love any feedback you have. And that was like sort of my first post, fully vaxed post emerging from pandemic move, professional move in the world. Like I'm getting back into the swing of things after this long period of being sort of locked down. So happy to be back. Very nice to have you here. Thank you. Mike, did you wanna jump in? Okay, you raised your hand somehow. So I was just responding to that. That's for checking later. Oh, okay. It was just an involuntary gesture then. Oh, it's for checking later. Okay, good. I'll make sure you're in the queue. Cool. So let's go, Michael, Lauren and Pete. Hello, everyone. Yes, check this out. Oh, can you not hear me? We hear you fine. Okay. Sorry, that was just me making fun. Okay. Thanks for the good conversation about a difficult conversation. And I don't have much to add, just a lot to absorb there. On a much, much smaller scale, I've been in some groups dealing with the difficult conversations around interests and overlaps with the folks that in various co-op organizations and co-op promotional entities like Zebra's Unite and some of the other groups that are trying to foster more platform cooperatives, et cetera, and figuring out structures for which organizations of different types can throw in together and be interoperative, be conversant, you know, it's interesting. I think it was Klaus was mentioning something about, actually I'm not sure who it was, but was mentioning something about a group that had set up a discussion platform that was really great. And there are a lot of siloed areas of intelligence that are really great for the fact that they're as siloed as they are.  But at the same time, the public space wants access to that kind of knowledge and sober wisdom on a subject that isn't a soundbite or an incendiary tweet.  And these co-op groups are really, really interesting and really smart. And I don't know if anybody's involved in the Zebra's Unite group, but it's really a good bunch of people and I encourage you to get involved. I encourage a couple of them to come join us, which they haven't today. Anyway, that's what's on my mind a lot is having those difficult conversations around structure and competition and cooperation, which is, I feel like it's usually what's on my mind when I come to these sessions. So yeah, that's it for me. Thanks, Mike, Michael. So a couple of things. One, Mara Zepeda, who is one of the three, four founders of Zebra's Unite is a dear friend and has just recently moved away from Portland, but the founders, many of them were here in Portland. And where I spoke at the first, they had a dazzle con two years ago, which was their first get together. So they gave me 15 minutes to show my brain related to Zebra's Unite kinds of topics, which was really fun. But it's a great group, really interesting, heavily skewed towards sort of creative finance, like what are the financial models that live here? Second thing, Mark Caranza, we were having a chat on Mattermost, which is answering some of your questions. And I think you're on Mattermost, because I think you posted one of your lists from your database on Mattermost. So if you'll see, I posted Zebra's Unite and all that over there. If you'll take your chat there, you can join up. And then Rob is asking, what is that list? So I will pass the floor to you shortly so you can explain, I think, what you've done and how that works. So that will work. Last, a story about difficult conversations. I was just browsing my brain trying to find him. There's several books about difficult conversations, one of which is pretty famous and it was written by four or five authors. Ironically, one of those authors was on the board of an organization April used to work for that was deeply dysfunctional and he was no help whatsoever. Like there were difficult conversations they were not having and the organization eventually went under. So I was like, oh, good, glad he wrote that book. Anyway, small side note, these theories don't always work. So with that, let's go back to Lauren, Pete and Rob.  Yeah, sure. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I don't have much to say. I'm just super excited to be here. I don't always get to come because I'm trying to reduce my calls in the afternoon for my kids, but I'm just really happy to see you all and to take part in the conversation. It's fascinating as usual and it's great to be back. Yay, thank you. Thank you for all the many things you're doing. It's amazing, like Kiko, I was on fire. So that's a great thing. Let's go, Pete, Rob, Mark. Thank you. Lots of cool stuff happening in the Federation world, the federated sovereigns world. Top of mind for me, OGM Bootstrap is, looks like it's ready to sign the MOU with Linesburg, which is awesome. Check the Stewards channel for a little bit more on that or ask a question in the Stewards channel. The Generative Commons is bootstrapping up. There's a channel for that. Massive Wiki. Do you want to explain Generative Commons for a sec? Actually, I would point you to the, I wrote up a great summary of it in the channel today. So if you're interested in the intersection of intellectual property in the Commons or if you're tired of enclosure and want to do Commons instead, come join us and talk about the Generative Commons. And lead the document that you posted in that new channel. Sorry, Pete. We're all super excited about it. It is, although for me, it is one of many super exciting things. So maybe I'm not conveying the super excitedness about it as much as I could. Massive Wiki is going well. I'm having a fun time hooking up with people who are kind of outside of our usual circles. And some of them are helping me a lot. So it's going well. Even though I feel like Massive Wiki hasn't moved much in the past week or so, it actually has internally and that'll cause bubble out into the rest of the world. Trove is coming along super nicely. Congratulations Vincent on how well it's looking and the stuff that's upcoming. It's awesome and wonderful. Vincent and I are also, every time we get together, we talk about how Massive Wiki and Trove are going to be working together and start to work together already. And for that, please feel free to join our flotilla Friday called tomorrow at 9 a.m. Pacific. There's a private work group right now with a few of us talking about income from curating and curated knowledge, information, and wisdom. So some of us either have assets of lots of curated knowledge or tools that work with that. And it's only been a few hours of conversation over the past week or a half or so, but we're pretty far along and we're not quite ready, I think, to ask for more co-thinkers, but we're getting there. And I'm actually super excited about that and it works really well. It mashups up really well with the generative commons, too. The genesis of that income from curating and curated knowledge, information, and wisdom. All of us are also committed to nurturing the commons and putting as much of that stuff out into the commons as possible.  There's some interesting kind of conceptual stuff fettering amongst the sovereigns in different ways and also had a great talk yesterday with Benjamin about different architectures for, he made the observation that if I'm in an organization, sometimes it feels better if I've got my little wiki all by myself and then, you know, I don't want to necessarily jump into somebody else's wiki. So, we talked about different ways that that happens. Sometimes, CSC MatterMos is a good example of kind of a commons of information, our infrastructure, communication infrastructure, where it actually feels relaxing and generative, maybe is a way that I kind of feel like it, that we have in one place, you can kind of pretend that you're just OGM and you only hit a couple channels in MatterMos, or you can also be an OGM and Kiko Lab and a bunch of other formed and less formed kind of entities within the same information commons. So, I think that's gonna happen with wikis too. Some people, the organization wants a wiki that they feel like they can control and it makes more sense for them to be closed. And maybe there's other situations where they can go talk to a larger community in a commons wiki or maybe they can link up with another organization with a closed wiki and then their wikis might talk and gossip to each other a little bit. The cool thing in talking about that with Ben was that massive wiki out of all the other kind of wiki architecture is unnatural. That kind of like, you know, it can either be closed, it can be open, different wikis can gossip to each other really well, it can be closed and then later kind of progressively open. So, I'm super excited about that. And I think that's it for me. Pete, thank you. A couple of things. One, thank you for coming in with like an agenda of stuff that happened. Thank you more for like your energy and all those things, like moving everything forward at once. I don't know how you do it. I believe you are like octopus man, including the fact that only like 20% of an octopus's brains are understanding is actually inside of its head. If the arms are all pretty independent and smart. So maybe, I don't know. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Third, when we opened this call and there weren't as many people, I put out an ask for somebody for OGM who can start to pick up some of the things that you're doing around project management and note-taking and sort of stewarding the stewards and seeing our activities through. So I want to repeat that call now. And propagate it. Gil, the numbers will become less mysterious in a second. I will get to Mark and check-ins. So let's go Rob, Mark, Judy and then the mystery shall be revealed. Jerry, are you saying Pete is your octopus teacher? You could sort of metaphorically say that then it would sort of work except I'm not like holding my breath while talking to him all the time.  Yeah, yeah. Or get eaten by a shark almost. Sorry for the plot spoiler, everybody. Cool. So there was something happening outside. Is it me now or somebody else? It's Rob, then Mark, then Judy. Cool. Well, very excited to be on the call. I typically have a conflict at this time slot which was canceled today. So I'm happy to be here. I've been in and around OGM for a while. I help Pete behind the scenes on some of the things and that's always interesting to me. And I get a lot of inspiration from this group so I'm glad to be here today in person. For those of you I haven't met before or interacted with, I'm a consultant, kind of a management, technology, design consultant in Washington DC. My wife and I own a company of about 50 people and we primarily serve the federal government, primarily Homeland Security, and primarily within that FEMA, with lots of other clients along those primaries. One interesting project that we're sort of incubating now is one of the things we support are the alerts that you all get on your phone, whether they be natural disaster alerts or amber alerts. We support FEMA. FEMA provides the plumbing for all of that to happen. That system is called I-Pause, I-P-A-W-S. And all of the counties across the country are connected to that. So counties and the National Weather Service are the primary originator of alerts. It goes into this plumbing and then it figures out whose TVs and phones and radios should get the alerts. So it's pretty interesting system. It was originally designed as the presidential communication system. So the president is able to go to radio towers all across the country and they tap in the secret code and pick up the phone and would be able to broadcast presidential communication to the whole country at once, which is kind of interesting. So a little sidebar on that or a little reason for me talking about it is we are thinking about kind of what Jerry was talking about, what if Facebook was designed for citizens? So something in the space of community organizing, alerts, i.e. getting real-time information, and next door. So somewhere in that space we're exploring how can we build some sort of glue that helps connect communities, helps people organize communities and helps people share information. Next door does that well in some ways and not so well in other ways. And it's obviously a commercially provided service. So we're really in the early stages of that, but it's kind of interesting. Second, I went to my company office yesterday for the first time in a long time and it felt weird. And then it made me stop and think of how, maybe not how easily, but how much we've all been reprogrammed in the last year to kind of something that I've been doing for 20 years now feels odd or different or whatever. So it's interesting to think about how do we shift ways of being, ways of thinking, ways of operating both in populations, but also individually, my personal habits and how do I start the day and how do I experience life? So all that was kind of an interesting thought. And just a coincidence or we were talking earlier about difficult conversations and we had done executive coaching in our company with about 10 of us on difficult conversations. So it was interesting for us. It's just so important for the company to have our people communicating and working well together that we invested in a coach. It's someone's been working with us for a long time but we did this new program for about six sessions over four months and concluded it yesterday. And lastly, I'm a passionate about Bitcoin. So been kind of engaged in lots of conversations following on Elon Musk's ill-informed tweets and kind of helping people understand some of the ins and outs of cryptocurrency which I know some people here are interested in. So that's kind of it, a menu of things and all lots of good ideas going out of my head. You saw the news about the Chinese government's new policy on cryptocurrency. Yeah, I think they've banned cryptocurrency about 10 times now. So they're an ongoing evolution. Yeah, very good article in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday on the state of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. If people wanna catch up in a three-minute read, really, really useful article. It's been a fun week to be a Bitcoin participant. Super fun. It depends what fun means, is that it Mike? Brief thing, Rob, on what you said about going back to the office and how we reset. I feel like early in lockdown, I somehow internalized the plot of the Martian. And I feel like Matt Damon outdoors, every time I go out, every time I've been outdoors, it's now going away. I'm double-vaxxed and things are slowly returning to normal, but I had this feeling like everything was toxic and could kill you. And I said, you bury that pretty deep in the system quickly. And hitting undo on that is very hard. So, let us go to Mark Caronza and then Judy and Gil and Mike. Hi there. Good morning or a good time wherever you are. I'm primarily an artist who's interested in the aesthetics of the experience of knowing, of being human, kind of an aesthetics of anthropology, of being and becoming, of learning, how it feels to learn. Since 1984, I've been basically listening, writing or reading, writing or thinking, writing with a computer system that basically, I type something and it enter. I type something else and hit enter. And it basically cross-links those two it's. So those it and it are knit. And basically having done that 17 million times, I have the world's largest, possibly the world's largest weird self-portraits or knowledge. Personal knowledge web. Personal knowledge web. What's your favorite descriptor? I call it a MX. The letters M and X for memory experiments. And borrowing from the Memex, which inspired you. I did not know Memex existed. Oh, right. Then I chose those. I chose those for basically changing the meaning of Ronald Reagan's missiles on trains.   It didn't quite work, but basically it turned out that a meme exchange would be another kind of notion or a meaning crossover that when you take any notion like Jerry and Gil or dog and cat or black and white, there's a tension between those singular two notions that is uncountable and infinite. And to basically take that incredible mystery of what is a Jerry that we iconically recognize and have tacit knowledge of and go to a Gil who we immediately recognize and have tacit knowledge of and say the relation between Gil and Jerry is dynamic, uncountable, unputtable into words, but we can use words and words oddly enough are things that are digital or can be digital. And so I am attempting to theoretically deal with the unit of the basic unit of sense making, which is a sign, another sign, and a human putting them together, a particular human at a particular time in a particular database and having billions of those across the planet. So if I type in OGM call Thursday, May 20th, 2021, 8 a.m.  And apologies to Lauren for not being able to do it real time in her amazing and Charles Bass's amazing Kiko lab calls. I am recovering from lymphoma. Well, congratulations.  I may not 25% of people, according to a New York Times article, do not develop antibodies to the COVID vaccine. So I'm participating in a study to see if that works and still being careful.   Yes. They're my heroes, Brewster. I'm convinced that 200 years from now, people are gonna look back and think of Brewster Kale as the Benjamin Franklin of our era. Let's hope we can all contribute in some small way. So, boy, I've got a set of challenges where with the MX, the size of the corpus, the 2.3 million unique text strings and 14 million links in between them, since 1984 in a DOS program is the proverbial elephant in the room. I cannot have a discussion that seems to point to what I'm really interested in, which is an instrument to think with, with words that basically is driven by your experience of meaning inside your own head. So I don't really care about the millions of thoughts that I have over the years. They're only important really to me. And it's the inspiration or providing a tool to other people so they can have this dynamic feedback of thinking in a free association processor or basically a simple tool to simply record the utterances that they encounter in the world, like I've done and posted in Mattermost for this call, that that's really the heart of this. And people keep on in conversation saying, oh, we want to do this heuristic modeling based on your data. No, it is basically how is it that we pay attention to the way thinking feels, to the way being feels. What does it feel like? How could it feel like? You know, what does it feel like to think? You're just accidentally, yeah, good. Yeah, just accidentally. So instead of say linking VC companies to the names of the partners in the VCs, et cetera, my canonical notion is, quote, I wish I had a better relationship with my mother. Now, for everybody, that means something different. And the notions in a list with that title are uncountable. But if we as a community, you know, for every possible expression have the connection to the expressions that make sense, moving from that expression to the next expression, that weird kind of multi-dimensional database with the time, the date, the location, the person, and how many times that person has expressed that over time, how many people a set of people have expressed similar things over time, basically gathering vocabulary in a repository, not of narrative, but of individual expressions and one at a time, their connection to another expression. What has that been difficult? But I continue. And thanks, Jerry. I'm learning how to ask for help. That's fabulous. And very glad you're here, Mark.  You'd been already doing it for a decade plus. Super interesting. I have a series of short questions for you. First, what are the numbers at the left of each line in MX Mean? In that particular output, basically it's the number of connected nodes to that string. Oh, okay. In a static output, the network is hidden. But basically, the single layer of a single list, it has the indication that there are deeper connections there. Anything with the number three in front of it is basically connected to the list, the time and the date. So basically nothing deeper. So three is a not very connected node then. Three is a node that's completely untyped before into the repository. It's a Google bomb, so to speak. It's a thought seed that along with anything that even has 300,000 links to it already, it's an open list. It's an open hyper list. You add nodes that refer to a sentence or an expression, even any digital string, give it a unique number and take that number and link it to another number and cross ways link the next number to the previous number, A to B and B to A. So Mark, I was going to ask what's the largest number of three is the lowest. Maybe you just answered that with 300,000 or... It's in the 30,000s. 30,000s? Cool. So do you know Mark Antoine Fahal? I do not. I do not know how to even spell that. We will give you his name. He's in the Free Jerry's Brain calls on Mondays. Given how you talked about MX, I think you and he would have a really fruitful and interesting conversation. Are you familiar with the cult of Rome? R-O-A-M, not ancient Rome, but rather R-O-A-M. Yes, and I actually am friends with Connor. Yeah. Cool, because Rome is the closest thing I've seen to sort of what you've built. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, you wrote the code for MX years ago and you're the only person on earth using this, correct? That is completely correct. Yeah, it's custom for you. It was your sort of art and mindful note-taking project. But I think there's some really interesting things sort of in the Rome community that could learn from you or whatever. And I'm interested in the fact that you react so negatively to maybe other people analyzing your data in some way. Cause you have created a trove in lowercase, a rich trove of something, right? The last person who analyzed my data, I had asked Pete Kaminsky, if he knew of Dan Kaminsky, he died. So I'm like, ah, stop it, it's okay. I am so sad because I love Dan Kaminsky's security researcher, one of the most brilliant, loving and caring people I've ever, I've ever met. And I shared a co-working space with him and he died at 42 a couple of months ago. So there might be a little of woo-woo kind of scaring us there. But basically I'm working with Wendy Elford to kind of take this and put it into a piece of software that she works with. And what's important to me at the moment is, oops, no, I didn't mute again. What I have is a single layered network. I can only link Jerry Mikowsky to Lauren Mignon once. But that link in a phenomenological experience of living happens hundreds of times. And so if I have the icon, Jerry Mikowsky, I think of that iconic representation 20 times a year or more now, now that I'm getting back into OGM, but your wife thinks of it 40,000 times a year. And it's the additive sort of event of thought, person, time in a repository. You can think of a thought 50 times within a particular day, within a particular hour. And if we have something that tracks us, then we get this kind of additive and summable kind of record that creates patterns as a side effect, not as something that is driven by algorithm, but it's driven by recording of phenomenology. And so this is a very difficult topic to get across to people used to computer programming and used to algorithmic information extraction systems, convolutional neural networks. So I don't find it interesting that there's meaning in what I've done. I find it interesting that someone someday and hopefully many people will be able to use, again, the enhanced version that is multiple summing and additive and have that interface as a trusted part and secure part of their daily life and kind of a not high art, but low art that improves the experience of everyday life starting from childhood. So they have a lifelong thought repository.  I don't care what the graph looks like. I don't care if my... But what if other people found this immensely useful? Wouldn't you want to like open source your data or leave it in your will that your database is being made public and available? Something? I do, Jerry, but it would be kind of a scale problem, where? Let other people worry about the scale. Well... No, seriously. Like there's people who don't worry about millions of records of anything. Please allow me to finish. Oh, sorry. That's okay. If I have 2 million, 2.5 million at the most, that's 2.3 million over since 1984. And if I were to release this successfully over the internet, there would be an alphabetical list of 2.3 million thoughts every 40 seconds rather than just me over 35 years.  So I add 150 new links a day and of all links, 85% are new links, i.e. the freeze, and they don't refer to things I've already typed in in those 35 years. That's why I think I believe for other people that same kind of average of something, some new string being created and added to a repository is basically going to be the predominant experience rather than the language of others being encountered and repeated over and over again. I'm losing kind of a focus and energy here. That's all right, thank you. So I, and we've talked very few times over lots of years and I think I under-appreciated the aesthetic or artistic and emotional components of your work, which I now feel I understand a bit better. So I appreciate that a lot. Glad you're here. We are running out of time because several of us must bounce at the half hour and that'll be sort of 90 minutes for a call. And even though this call started small, we did not make it through everybody who was there at the beginning of the call as check-in, which is okay. It's not our goal to be complete on making sure we heard from everybody. I hope that's okay with people who feel like we didn't get to them. And we'll start there, we'll try to start backwards or with the people who didn't get found this week next week. But there's lots going on, this is exciting. So I think with that, maybe, does anybody have a closing thought given where our conversation went and then we'll just wrap from this call? Gil. Very quickly tied together the ending and the beginning. I found myself wondering, wondering, as Mark was talking about the value that these kinds of tools could bring to the kinds of difficult conversations that Ken and others were talking about at the beginning of the call. And we can't opened up for us the somatic dimension of it. This is another dimension and that might be a fascinating game to explore. By which do you mean, for example, if multiple people were keeping notes the way Mark keeps notes? I have no idea. Okay. By that. I just felt their resonance there that might be worth exploring in some way, somehow, by somebody, sometime. Awesome, thank you. Mark? I'm not nominating Mark and Ken to do that. But they might. No, the difficulty for me in expressing and helping people understand, again, Jerry, even at the 999 kind of possible connections is that a tool for thinking that does kind of interactive free association or dwelling and focusing or expanding is experiential. And basically allows one to play with expressions and expressing and refining expression and growing strings longer and more complex and growing lists longer and more complex. And it's very difficult to describe. And so in a future thing, I'll share screen and whatnot, but it's not always taking notes. It's more listening. And then when you go back to what you see, listening to what happens now in the new present, even though you wrote something back earlier today or 50 years ago. So basically tuning into your own experience of a meme that pops up either at random or on your self-directed purpose. So thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thousands of words. And there are algorithmic things that we can do to basically deepen our interactions with our own language, but at the moment, I'm more interested in what people create. In their minds, which is huge, and we cannot express all at once, but only bits at a time, either in a narrative or for me, what would be pre-narrative are these A to B and B to A, indexical lengths of iconic meme or string expressions in a digital hybrid extended mind. And with that, you have the last word on this call. I appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for another great call. Thank you. Great, bye. Hi, Judy. Hi, Vincent. Hi, Rob. Hi, Michael. Oh, man, that was tough. Anyway, have a good night. Good day. Bye-bye.


As mentioned, I'm Paul Lakuma from Uganda, from the Economic Policy Research Centre. This is a study on global minimum corporate income tax and what challenges and prospects it presents for Uganda. Just also to mention, this is a work in progress. So we will take every comment positively to improve the quality of the paper going forward. So the paper has a long motivation because we have to justify why we are really doing it. So we'll have like four slides for that. So I'll start with Uganda charges a statutory rate of 30%. That's quite high. But the CIT collection, the corporate income tax collection has consistently been 1% of GDP or below. Some papers in the past have given suggestions why that has happened. A paper by Lakuma in 2019 suggests that the average effective tax rate is 4%. A paper by Kuivisto Musoke, Nachambali and Shimanski in 2021 suggests that multinational companies in Uganda deduct about 20% percentage point more than their large domestic counterparts. And those two papers suggest that there could be profit shifting. Therefore, that justifies why Uganda needs to reform the corporate income tax system. Coincidentally, this moves globally to reform the corporate income tax system. About 138 jurisdictions have accepted and signed on a proposal to have a global corporate minimum tax rate at 15% of the global income. However, there's little empirical work on such tax rate on MNCs, especially empirical work concerning the implication for developing countries given administrative capacities and other problems which could emerge. However, there are some papers, particularly by the AMF, which suggest that if incentives are eliminated, we could have what is consistent with today's theme, revving up revenue. We could see revenues increase. Others suggest that profit shifting could be eliminated and competition, and there could be positive spillovers for jurisdictions with high tax rate. In the opposite, low tax jurisdiction could also benefit, but they could face administrative issues. Generally, developing countries expect to lose. Why? The business environment is bad infrastructure, skills level are lower, technology is much lower. So even if you harmonize the tax rate, you could see more investment flowing to the developed countries. That's the fear. So we need to examine what could be the effects, mostly on tax collection. So for a country like Uganda, we expect the GMCTR or the global minimum corporate tax rate to increase the average effective tax rate. Obviously, this will happen. However, given the business environment and the other hidden costs which are nantechnical, you expect firms to hide their output. What is popularly known as tax evasion, which could, in the contrary, result into low tax collected. In the past, a number of papers which I'm not going to cite here have used elasticities to measure the marginal excess burden of tax. The methods we use, they're in the literature. We estimate the mechanical revenue gain of moving from the current effective tax rate to 15% for the firms which meet the threshold. The threshold is already established. We also review the international literature to collect some elasticities. Unfortunately, not many studies have been done on Africa which estimates the elasticities, apart from two studies from South Africa which estimate and one unpublished study by the World Bank on Uganda. We grouped these elasticities into percentile. The three percentiles is the 25th, the median and the 75th. But most of the results are interpreted on the basis of the median. That's what you would call the baseline. We use the estimate and the changes in the tax rate to estimate the likely reduction in the tax base. As a reaction to the global minimum corporate tax, what is reported is the difference between the two, the mechanical and the behavior. The behavior has the elasticity in it. The data we use is a URA firm panel which has been curated by URA and UNWIDER and documented in a study by McNab, Nachambode, Giuste and Kavuma in 2022. This is the distribution of that CIT panel by UNWIDER and URA. I won't go so much into it. From the distribution of the AETR, what do we find? We find that the AETR of multinational companies increased with the introduction of the GMC ATR, the global minimum corporate tax rate as predicted. However, also MNC respond by disproportionately hiding output. That is the behavioral. So the behavioral reduces the tax burden. Overall, both MNC and DC's response to GMC ATR is not far from the behavioral change. That's the black line down there. So we look at the overall response to the global minimum corporate tax rate. Overall, there's a revenue gain, regardless of the elasticity used. Remember, I gave you three elasticities earlier, the 75th, the median and the 25th percentile. The elasticity is proportional to the revenue gain. So the higher the elasticity, the higher the revenue gain. Those are the three lines you see there. Those up there, the yellow, the orange and the gray.  The gain in revenue is higher than the current collection. So the difference between the mechanical and the current collection is about 500 billion. The revenue gain is about 500 billion. That's the lowest. So in general, there's a higher revenue gain with a change in the tax rate. Because the current one produces a much lower gain. The moving from the current ATR to the 15% produces a higher gain. That's what that graph is showing. So we also do a sector response. We are looking at the revenue contribution of every sector. So we got four sectors which contribute the most revenue in Uganda's context. These are information and communication, manufacturing, and then the financial sectors. The other sectors were merged into one single sector, which is others. So you would expect that there would be agriculture here, but agriculture does not contribute much to CIT. So we find that information and communication and manufacturing sector has the highest gain. The second highest gain is by manufacturing. The third highest gain is by financial. The other sectors contribute the least. Asset class, we break firms into two asset classes. That is the firms with assets above $15 trillion and those with assets below. We find that there's much more revenue gain with firms with asset classes above $15 trillion. Then we also see the impact of the revenue between highly thinly capitalized firms and the ones which use less debt in financing their investments. Well, there's a higher revenue gain among the ones who use less debt, but that revenue is unstable. As you can see from the graph on your, that would be your right and my left. There's more stable revenue contribution by thinly capitalized firms, indicating that this reform could reduce base erosion and professor shifting. We also measure reported and real response. We are reported as the loss in revenue and the real is the decision to either invest or not invest. Here we find that the manufacturing sector contributes the most revenue. And also has the potential to continue investing even under the new regime. Conclusion, what do we conclude? That there are size variations regarding response to the reform. Large firms provide more revenue gain. There are sector variations, as you have seen, communication and information sector, provides the highest revenue gain, but also has the least AETR, evades most taxes, and the financial sector is sensitive to tax changes while the manufacturing sector invests the most. Thinly capitalized amenities provide the largest revenue gain, meaning the new tax reform could curtail base erosion and profit shifting. Policy recommendation, there's need for coordination and enhancing administrative capacity. We need to adopt some safer rules to simplify and prescribing expected returns for specific sectors. Some sectors are more sensitive than others and firm sizes. Some firm sizes are more sensitive to this reform than others. Then the last is limitation of mechanical deduction for potential base eroding payments for investors deduction. Thank you very much. Next steps is, of course, there were some errors with the calculations which we need to correct going forward. And also taking comments from you people and also to improve the quality of the paper going forward. Thank you.


Headline News Update. Welcome back folks. Dow. Dow Industries finished up $3.37. You get the Nasdaq up $152. S&P is up $36. Now, this looks like a nice day, folks, okay? My take, this is a bounce in a market that wants to go at a lower price. And let me just show you why. So if we go look at the spy first, what you're going to see inside the spy is that you gapped open, gapped up today, bottom line, you hit $441.68, you did $67 million and you gave it up in spades, okay? We got over a high that had $130 million and it closed under the 440 or 4, saying guess what, you're going right back down to the lows of 426 and you very well may have a very large ABC structure. That'll take you somewhere down to the 412 level. NDX100, same type of setup. And the NDX was pretty hard to do what we were looking for it to do. And what that was is that closing under the $363.37. And it did it. It closed at $362.97. I had volume out here of 37 million chairs versus 57 million. So you got over the high of the 2029. It's a day later and you can see that how weak the cues actually are. They couldn't actually get up to the 27th or the 28th, rather, the 28th. Where the spy did, the spy gave it up there. The cues didn't even make it. Bottom line, same setup. Wants to get down to the low. And this very well could be a large ABC structure down. And I suspect it actually is because when I just did the numbers on it for the cues, projecting where the ABC structure would be, what you have here is this. Is that you have the aspect that that baby would go back to the breakout area of the cues. And so that's going to be serious business if that's what we get. Notes and bonds. You have the 10-year note down 116 straight in 130, 112. The 30-year up a full point down 158, 15. They both have pulled back with light volume. What you do have with the 30-year though is be low in a whole another range. Only by a couple of ticks, but it is. The 10-year is tested and rejected the low from Monday. And it did it with a lot lighter volume. Both of those are going to be moving out here tomorrow. We get the jobs number at 8.30 in the morning. You're going to see a lot of movement out here. King dollar down 71 ticks 94, 195. Have a great night folks. Have a safe night. Come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning. Kicks us off 9 o'clock in the morning. Great show.