How are you doing, Doug? Okay. I'm on the line early in the call, so if you need to prep. There I am. There you are. Good morning. Good morning. Who's this crew behind you? The Brady Bunch. Did you never watch TV as a child? No, I didn't. Never had a TV my whole life. Your whole life? That is awesome. That is just awesome. When I was a kid, we had some neighbors who had a TV that was about that big. And we would all gather around and watch the Scissor show. And, but that was it. We had an hour of TV in the evening and that was all networks were coming up with at that time. Wow. That's awesome. And since Caesar, man. He was the show shows, right? Something like that. Yes. Yeah. So premise of Brady Bunch. I mixed them up because there's another show called the Partridge family. George. Hi. Good to see you. Hey, Scott. I think that the Brady Bunch is originally like the original blended blended family where these, you know, this couple meet, but they each have kids already. So they marry and you'd have like all these other kids going on. Scott, do I have them? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which one is the blended family? The Brady Bunch, what you have there. Yeah. Yeah. It's important to know. Am I on time today? Ah, cool. No, we've moved the calls to eight o'clock to eight a.m. Pacific. In general as well. So you're right on time. Cool. Morning. That's, it's funny. I'm a bit creepy Jerry. So this may not be a cultural reference for you. This is a show called the Brady Bunch. Does that ring a bell for you? Well, just a name. I'm not sure. I didn't realize like we have sort of an eclectic group here. I thought that the Brady Bunch would be like an instant. Instant. Yeah. For everybody. And it's like, Yeah. What's your YouTube to get a feel for the show? Exactly. I see you're playing Alice, Jerry. Actually, if he just watched the, Eric, if you just watched the intro to the show. Yeah. It actually tells the story. Because here's the story. Of a lady who had three girls and then met this guy. Yeah. Boys and then they come together. I mean, that's basically right. That's basically all you need to say. All most previews are better than the movie. When I first got on the call, Lizzie. Lizzie's got a fire and everything. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Oh, look at that. Yeah. And Sean, I'm trying to take off my video. Yay. Great to see you. That's awesome. So Mike is in one window and there we go. This is great. We have a, we have a two vantage point shot into the same backyard. We're doing our social distancing thing. That is awesome. And the dog is like carrying beverages back and forth. Yeah, absolutely. It's my roommate's dog. He decided not us. Sweet. Well, Happy almost new year everybody. We are on the cusp of departing. 2020. Which is like some, I thought a sentence I thought I'd not get to utter soon enough. And yet here at all. We're on it. Yeah, or at all. Exactly. It's like, oh man. How'd that happen? Can we just go around and get one word for how you feel on this last day of 2020, just one word. I'll just say names. So one word, Lizzie. Lizzie, John Pete. And Lizzie, now I don't hear you. Oh, you're, you're, you're phone is busy connecting to audio. Shoot. We'll wait until you come back in. So John Pete, Mike. One word. Yeah. Exhausted really. Yeah. Hopeful. Hopeful. Mike can. Apprehensive. Can startled. Startled. Close. Eric Scott. Anxious. Anxious Eric. Tired. Tired. Scott, Lizzie. This is one word that describes how you feel right now on the last day of 2020. Scott. Grateful. Grateful. Lizzie. Excited. Excited. You just muted and went out. And you're so muted there. You're so cautious. You're so cautious. You're so cautious. You're so cautious. You're so cautiously excited. Cautiously excited. A double word, but still it's good. It's a qualifier. It happens. You know, you ask for one word. The one word doesn't always come out the other end. And then we have George Doug and me. Exuberant. Exuberant. Naive. And I'll say hopeful. And Kathleen says resilient. Oh, brilliant. Thanks, Kathleen. Hi. So here we are. And last week we did some looking back. We also got wrapped up in other kinds of discussions, but we did some looking back on 2020. I would love for us to look ahead. And. And think about either our expectations for the year for the globe, our community or whatever, or our personal plans, like the thing we hope to get done in 2021. Given the world situation, we hope to be able to do that. And we hope to be able to do that. And we hope to be able to give everything else that's going on. So. So I think I'll, I'll do a similar sort of thing. I'll, I'll start at the bottom of my grid. Hey, good morning. Hey, nice to see you. We just went around quickly and did one word for how you feel at the end on the last day of 2020. Does a word come to mind for you? Excited. I hope that 21 will be a good. The sentence we've been putting on a holiday cards as we managed to write those and send those out was made 2021 be twice as, twice as good as 2020 was awful. Yeah. Cause it, you know, time owes us now. There's like a, there's like a little deficit has accrued where we could use a, a good year. It would be good. And I remember being excited about 2020, like, okay, good. This is going to be an awesome year. And then. And then can prove, but then things like this happened. And I'm not so sure that we would have found the time, had the time, made the time to be in community this way. You know, since I don't know when our first OGM call was April, May. I can look it up. But, you know, we found the time to be here and to be with each other in, in this kind of patient way and to find our way through a bunch of interesting issues. And I'm really grateful for that. So I'm happy about that. In a few hours, we will have 2020 hindsight. That's right. Exactly. 2020 is supposed to be about per perfect vision. So, so let's, let me just open with anybody who would like to have general, general ruminations about 2021. Just if you want to set the stage for us a little bit, how you're feeling about the shift, about the new year, something like that. Anybody. I can, please. I realized pretty early on in 2020, like, well, early on in the pandemic, so maybe around June or so May, June, that it was going to be really easy to be grumpy and focus on all the negatives and the constraints and the things that weren't there. And I made a very conscious decision that because there were so many things that I was finding at relaxing in my life that I wanted to focus on the things that were still there. And that has really carried me through the year. And I'd like to continue that into 2021 of really working from strength, working from, okay, you know, we're under lots of constraints, but there's still an awful lot to be grateful for. It's an awful lot to build on. And so I just want to put that out as a frame for continuing on into 2021 of, you know, focusing on what's good and what's possible and what's useful and what we can do. Thank you. Yeah, there's a, there's definitely sort of this, this notion that there are silver linings to the year we've just been through. It kind of showed us a lot of, it showed us a lot of things that were present, but not visible to most people. And I think they've now been sort of called out, pulled out, put front and center. Cool. Anybody else with a perspective on that? Go ahead, Scott. So I've learned to be in the moment more, which I've talked about before a little bit about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous. And I think being a remote worker for a while, started me thinking about that. And what I realized was that I had shifted from most of my time interacting with people being, you know, in real time in an office, it had been shifted to, I'm reading things that people created a while ago, and I'm sending them to them to read later. And my interactions were not in real time. And starting these zoom calls and thinking about that, I have found that being in the now. And saying, this is what I have is, is way healthier for me. And it's not trying to cram dozens and dozens of people producing content that I can skim over. It's actually this right now, this group is existing in the same moment at the same time. And that is, it's richer exponentially than the other experience. And so I'm really leaning into that and trying to make, make myself aware of what's going on right now. What's going on right here right now? What am I doing? Who am I interacting with now? Instead of trying to get, you know, hundreds of hours and days and people and then just take skin to surface on that. So I'm going to carry that over into the new year. Thank you. That's awesome. We should rename the group be here now.  That's mulching leaves and feeding the fungus at the cold face of the knowledge thing because, because so, so too much of my day is spent watching the flow, picking things that are interesting and memorable from the flow and putting them in context in this weird brain artifact that I have. And that's a very, there's something very flowy about it for me. So I'm very much in that moment and I'm like excited and following things and connecting things. And then there's something that takes me out of this moment that we're in about that. So, so, so for me, it's too edged because I feel like I'm curating this thing. And it's important that I love it and I'm, and I'm working with it right there. I'm like very present to it. And yet I'm not. Doing what you just said, Scott, go ahead. Yeah. It's just to, to kind of book in that. What occurred to me was that it was my antidote to more. So, so the idea that. If you just are more efficient and more productive and more, you can do, you can take in more and more and more. And what I realized is that that the flow is infinite. And you can't. You can't do that. You can't do that. You can't do that. Like you said, I'm curating the brain right now. Okay. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm not trying to do anything else. And, you know, it's, it's that, it's that antidote to more that, that false. Promise that you can just keep up. With everything. Right. Yeah.  Go ahead. Famous New Yorker cartoon where the guy is at his computer. And he says, honey, I can't come to bed. I haven't corrected the internet yet. Exactly. Exactly. And I just switched my background. Anybody recognize the scene. I will probably wouldn't resonate for me there. It's from the movie Coco. Anybody watched Coco. Coco is a lovely movie. It's one of two animated pictures about day of the dead. It's one of two animated pictures. And so Coco is kind of the Bardo. It's kind of the, the place between. Living and dying and the afterlife and whatever else it is. And it feels to me like this moment between 2020 and 2020 on 21. Had this Bardo ish aspect to it. We're kind of. You know, we have to suspend what we thought was going to happen. We have to figure out how to be in the moment. We have to figure out how to, how to sort of. Cross over. We have to figure out how to be in the moment. We have to figure out how to be in the moment. We have to find the metaphoric rivers. To get to this new place. Anyone else with just reflections on this moment. This moment of transition. Feels like the world has been through a collective ringer. And not everybody went through the same experience. And certainly not everybody had the same starting point. Some people had a really, really hard. It was sort of like. 2020 was a game of musical chairs. You know, it was a game of musical chairs.  You had. And some people had no chairs. Some people had a chair. That also was the place of living for somebody who they were in a terrible relationship with or whatever. I mean, there's all sorts of things happen. And then.  And then go to work. And then go to work. And then go to work. And then go to work. And then go to work. You know, techno rectangles living with each other. Mike, you wanted to jump in and then back to Scott. Kathleen. Oh Kathleen, please. Yeah. I'm just drinking my coffee, but anyway. And congratulations on the engagement. Thank you. Should I be questioning my, my wisdom? No, no, I know nothing. Incriminating about Mike. He's good. He's good to go. And he's known me for 30 years. Yeah, exactly. I'm more geeky than I am. Wow. Anyway, what we've discovered is the great part of being urban nature. So we've discovered all the wonderful parks within an hour's drive of Washington, DC. And never would have appreciated it in or explored them.  So we've really enjoyed that. And I think that's something we're going to take away from this year is the appreciation of urban nature. We're, we're avid joggers, but we've also started making time to slow down. And take a break from the zoom panels and just walk in the woods. Yeah. That's what we're just before with Lizzie and Sean. Love that. And I lived in McLean for a few years, way back in the day, a long, long enough ago that my email system back then, I used to have an Olivetti letter of 32 reporters typewriter. And I used to take my little Olivetti to Turkey run farm park. And go sit on the picnic table there with paper and type letters to friends. Basically.  I did that a few times. It was kind of fun. It's, it's a cumbersome way of doing email, though I don't recommend it as a daily habit. But, but anyway, Scott, you were going to jump in. Yeah. So as you're talking about marking the end of the year, you know, we know that that is actually based on physics, but, but you know, we've decided to say this is the end and the beginning and the end of the cycle. And what's interesting to me is that my. Day to day has been pretty much the same. And so I actually, I decided to dress up every Sunday. Because I wanted to have something to say today is the start. Or the end of the week. And what I'm realizing in this. Transition from. Today, tomorrow, this year to next year. Is that I've just enjoyed the day to day more. Even though I think it's important to mark. The passage of time and in the year, I think it's, to me, it's more if I was out and I wasn't paying attention to a calendar or a clock. And I thought, well, would I even know that it was a new year? And this idea that something magical will happen tomorrow. Is. I understand the hope in that. And that that's what we do, but, but it also writes off what's happening yet today. You know, a couple of weeks ago, people were saying, I can't wait for this year to be over. I thought. Two weeks. I don't know what's going to happen in the next two weeks. But I feel like it's going to be a really important thing to me. Because if somehow. Something, again, magical will happen once the day comes around. Thank you. Love that. Lizzie. Go ahead. Can you get closer to the mic, Lizzie? Yeah. So I wanted to add onto that feeling of. Wishing something away. I've started to feel that it feels more like a second wind, you know, that we're in this match for our lives to be a little dramatic, you know, with COVID and with climate change and the kind of energy that I've been feeling as I read articles or as I talk to my friends is that as the year comes to an end, it feels like we're in the first round of the boxing match and now we're all ready to get that water. We're all ready to, you know, box back in. We've learned our new moves. Hopefully, we've learned our new moves. And I think it's been very indicative of kind of, as Kathleen said, resilience or human resilience that all we need is this kind of made up holiday, you know, saying, oh, there's a new year now. And now suddenly all of us are ready to grind out harder. We're all ready to take what we've learned. So I'm, I think it's, I would say maybe there's some wishfulness, but I'm hoping that there's been a lot of lessons, because I mean, just talking with this group, it seems like there's been a lot of lessons. Maybe we're all ready for round two. Thank you, Lizzie. And I'm reminded that pandemics usually like nuke the world for a couple of years, you know, the Spanish flu is at least two years worth of trouble for everybody. And that's the last major one, but pandemics do take everybody out for a while. And we're, I think we're going like, awesome, vaccine, we're good. This is going to start sort of wrap up pretty soon. And it could be the 2021 is a lot like 2020 was in different ways and has other kinds of problems because the economic problems have all built up and cascaded. So that could happen. I'm reminded also by what Scott was saying earlier that, and Lizzie, what you just echoed, that we're celebrating the birth of Christ 2021 years ago or something like that. And that the world has synchronized itself around that particular thing as what the calendar is. And I don't know why we're not on the Mayan Long calendar, which was really very good way back when or any other version of this, but that's the one that we're kind of on. And that is our synchronizing act for much of the world, most of the world. There are other new years celebrated, but they don't dominate the global calendar the way this one does. And I think that has its own effects on us in different ways. But it's good now and then to have synchronizing events. Scott, go ahead. Very quickly, I realized as I was working in the corporate world for decades, same job, same job, same job, playing off of what Lizzie said, which thank you, Lizzie, for kind of bringing me back to the other side. I started wishing for the end of the semester, you know, from a college where, okay, you know what, that was tough. That was advanced calculus, and oh, wow, I'm glad that's done. And now all of the stuff that I had done for better or worse was done. And now clean out your books, clean out your notebooks, get that fresh, that fresh spiral bound one and start over again. And I appreciate that perspective, Lizzie. Thank you. This is like, I wanted to add on the theme of being disengaged from times. The motto has been any day is every day, or every day is. For me, last few months, it's also been every hour is any hour, because I've been kind of living in three or four time zones. Now that everything is online, and there are conferences that used to be just in person, or Zoom conferences, you're not just watching, you can actually be a participant or a moderator or a speaker. I mean, I find myself sometimes up in the middle of the night, so I can do something with Taiwan, and then I'm on a panel in India, and then I'm doing something with Belgium. And then finally, Washington wakes up and I make copy for Kathleen. And it's not a good way to live, but it's also an opportunity to bridge some mindsets. I mean, that's the main reason I do it is just to understand how differently people in other countries are approaching the internet and the cloud and the entire digital economy. And sometimes it's shockingly different. You just assume that people, engineers and technology people tend to think everybody thinks the same, because it's all equations, but when you're talking to people, even people with the same background in other countries, you often do find these fundamental differences that you couldn't find if you weren't awake at three o'clock a.m. I think also for those people who did travel a whole lot, and I think you'd be in that basket, their travel got cut away, but for most everybody else, their reach into the world expanded dramatically under lockdown. Like it's been easy and zero marginal cost to communicate with people in Delhi and Taiwan and wherever, and it was time zones. You had to get up at strange hours and bundle up if you were sitting outside. But it's been like expansive in that sense, and it was also kind of democratizing. I mean, someone pointed out years ago that the iPhone is a bit of a democratizing technology, because the wealthiest person buys the same iPhone that the poorest person who can afford an iPhone also gets. It's the same device, has no special features. And so they all have that kind of special power coming. So let me shift us into looking ahead to 2021 and maybe start with, anybody have any expectations that are different from what we would think? And George shared with us a nice article sort of earlier this morning about sort of different perspectives on what might happen. I thought maybe I'd go to you George first just to relay a little bit. I'm pretty sure most people didn't have a chance to read the articles, but kind of out of the box ideas about what could happen over the next year plus. I'm not sure which article you're referring to. Oh, and I'm George, I'm talking about George poor, who is now I think frozen in my window. So sorry, I totally space that there were two Georges on our call. So my apologies, George poor. Can you can you sort of check in and talk about those pieces? And you're muted. Okay. So yeah, it was that article. I don't know the guy who wrote it, but I enjoyed very much title or something like the US Capitol, the US Capitol moved to Jackson, Missouri, I guess. And it was, of course, it's a fantasy piece. But it was a very interesting imagination about what will happen on January 6 in the US and the integration day. Basically, it resonated a lot with me because it's spelled out a scenario, not quite unthinkable, which reminded me that most of my liberal friends are lamenting on the polarization of the public in the US and everybody wants to build bridges. And I am saying that instead of blaming Trump for polarizing the public discourse, we should be really thankful to that useful idiot, useful for the long sweeps of evolution in which the falling apart of the empire is not the worst thing that can happen. Particularly, what is really happening, it's just he became a tool for the differentiation of the culture waves. Why don't we want to want to let the Trumpists live in their own republics after the secession? And the rest of us live where we want to live and the two world, the true set of republics can be in peaceful coexistence with each other. So that's what I wrote about that. Yeah, that there will be violence on January 6 or not. It's not as a vital question as that Trump will use whatever will happen. It's no doubt that the armed militias will show up in DC and the DC police will be overwhelmed by their sheer number. But whatever will, so it will be intimidating the public and that's what they want and they will get it. And so whatever Trump will get is that he is building the momentum for his inauguration day which will be on January 20. He will have an alternative inauguration day in which he will inaugurate himself as the real president of the real United States and his cultists will believe it and in those republics, in those states where they are in a majority, they will follow him and worship him as the president. So that creates the de facto separation. I don't want to prophesize how far it will go into legal and potentially military confrontation. But that's shocking and it will be shocking on the short term and on the longer term. I think that that's not a bad thing. George, thank you for putting that on the table for a couple different reasons. One is that I think that all of us are trying to make sense of what might happen next. That's kind of how humans stay alive. And we have a window of possibility. It's like that we're looking ahead and we're thinking, well, this could happen and this could happen. And then every now and then things happen that are just way outside the window we thought were going to happen. Maybe a pandemic is one of them for 2020. But the notion that the U.S. might end up in a different shape at the end of 2021 or five or something like that, that we're on route to a breakup of the United States and of some sort, hadn't entered my thinking very much about 2021. And yet I have a thought in my brain, which I'm about to share, which is called decline of American empire, which very clearly says, hey, we're kind of on the downhill scoop here. There's a whole bunch of good and interesting reasons why this thing is pretty broken and may not hang together. And a leap into virtuality means that the shape of new countries doesn't have to be contiguous states. I mean, what if there was sort of a virtualization of statehood in some sense around the breakup? And I'll point out that I live in Oregon. And if you looked at these precinct by precinct voting of 2016, I live in a tiny blue island in what is actually a red state. You take five steps outside of Multnomah and Clackamas counties and you are in a 74% Trump voting precinct in 2016. So it's not like all of Oregon is liberal and it would all just sort of break off and that would be fine. There's a sort of weirdness about the polarization that's happening. So sorry, Julian, you wanted to jump in? I was going to bring up the quote from Thomas Jefferson who said, God forbid that a nation should go 200 years without a revolution. And another idea from the Framing Fathers, unfortunately, which was that most of them didn't conceive that the vast expanse of land that was out in front of them, which was not largely unmapped at that point, would all be governable under this one constitution under this one framework. Like many of them pictured that this would be several different countries rolling out. Klaus, go ahead. Yeah, I think we also need to be realistic about the how interwoven our economy is. We have, for example, our farmland in most of the red districts. We need to change the way we farm. So we have fundamental disagreements about how the environmental challenges are facing us. Then we can't really, we can't really move forward. So we have to have a unified approach to deal with the challenges that we're facing through climate change, changing technology, artificial intelligence, jobs and all of this. There has to be a common strategy in place. I mean, California, for example, has a very significant Republican strata in it. You would have to break up California under this theory. Or it could be like the partition of India. It could be like this horrible mess where everybody has to move toward a place that is politically more like them or religiously more like them. Yeah, we have to have a unified understanding of what is reality. And when you look at the momentum that is in the public media, I should sort of scan these things. But I was listening yesterday to Tucker Carlson talking to the governor of Texas about the risk that is coming from Californians moving to Texas and destroying the Texan culture. I mean, bringing all this insanity from California to Texas, that is the level of discourse currently on American media. So if we are unable to cut through this, and we are unable to respond to the challenges that we're dealing with as a country. And you're bringing into this conversation the notion that we need to heal the land and change how farming works and all that brings in the notion also that if we were to split up and half the country was actively giving no damn whatsoever about climate change, it's going to be really, really hard, never mind internationally, but it's going to be really hard domestically to do anything significant about climate change because we kind of need to act together. We need to sort of figure out how to shift a lot of things. So there's aspects of governance that don't interact very well with the need to have collective intelligence to do collaborative science making and to take action on all these problems together. And so the politics could really already has thrown a huge wrench into that as it is. So I mean, one of my hopes is that we're actually finding that the mycelial little tendrils that we're connecting between organizations and across people who have capacity to do things might actually lead toward the kinds of bridging and healing that we really need, Mike and Eric. Yeah, if I can just turn us in a more positive direction and a little more humorous, I'm a pathological optimist and it's worked well for me, you know, the internet thing has sort of provided a lot of opportunity. But 25 years ago when I was in the Clinton White House, I drafted a joke memo for April Fool's Day. And I was thinking I'd leak it to the Washington Post. And the idea was that it was time to move the Capitol, that, you know, we were clearly in the wrong time zone to be a global power. And we needed to move the Capitol to either Seattle or Portland, or better yet, some place halfway in between, because then would be, you know, eight hours from Europe and eight hours from Asia. And we could, you know, sort of readdress the global challenges from a better perspective. And we could make a lot of money selling all the expense of real estate in Washington, D.C., you know, it's like 10 reasons to move the Capitol. I think number nine was, we could still be Washington, you know, we just stay. But seriously, I have this fantasy that in 2021 or 2022, we're going to realize that we're an Asian power as well as a European power. And that Asia, that some of the leaders in Asia will start providing the leadership that European and American leaders haven't been providing. We saw a little bit of that with the Prime Minister of New Zealand. But what's fascinating is you go around India, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, you see some of the best case studies in different aspects of making government really serve people. I mean, Taiwan is doing amazing things right now. Refuting Chinese propaganda, squashing disinformation before it does any damage. They've been amazing in how they've dealt with COVID, partly because the government earned the trust of its people. India's got all sorts of problems, but they managed to give a billion people a digital identity, which is opening the doors to banking and government services for 300, 400 million people that were previously just isolated. And you can go down to the Bazaar and buy their biometric data on DVDs now for a couple bucks. I didn't say it was done properly. I said that they got the political will. Thanks. So we have a lot to learn from Asia and I do think I hope that the new administration will build some new alliances and restore some old ones. Thanks, Eric. Yeah, I'm starting to get interested by polarities and starting to get curious. What are they really? Like just before an hour ago, I think my best friend was calling me and he's a hippie called Nurek.  He's just amazingly afraid. And his girlfriend is in the conscious scene in Holland. And they're like, yeah, it's all about love. We don't want to go in this fear and all kind of circle reasonings and QAnon theories that can be hashed. And it's really extreme how like people that I considered friends in Holland now, I'm starting to think like, how do I have to relate to them? And I was thinking now like, I'm answering to this call of together first, and it's about like an alternative governance system to the UN. And what they call one of the basic limits to progress is actually psychological. Like all the solutions are there. There are actually quite a lot of solutions for the biggest world problems. But one of the biggest problems is that people don't jump on the car. And that's like, I'm starting to get interested. Like, how do you talk to someone that has such a different worldview? How do you talk to someone that has this kind of capacity even to follow you? Because they don't even think logically anymore. They just think, oh, this is all intuition. And I follow my intuition. And my intuition is right. Just like Trump also kind of does that. So yeah, I'm getting really interested in this polarity thing. And that's what I'm wondering like 2021 could be maybe an era where we really try to discover that how to deal with these polarities. Thank you. There's a global effort to renegotiate or re-investigate the social contract and the governance models and the economic models that underlie all of those and how those all fit. Go ahead. Yeah, there's one last point is I'm reading a book called How Does the World Think? And it's kind of the things that you already know. Like, there's all these kind of worldviews. But somehow it's shocked me how deeply they also underpin how people are thinking, how people are interacting and how these polarities play out. Like, the Eastern way of thinking, the Islam way of thinking, the Christian way of thinking, the logical, rational way of thinking. That's, these are all paradigms. And a lot of it returns also in the discussions. That's just another insight that I had. Thank you. I'm George Silverman then John. Yeah, I've been following these trends for about 30 years. I ran some focus groups about probably about 30 years ago of people who sounds like a very quaint term right now. We called them telecommuters. That term telecommuting is gone now. But these were people who worked three, four or five times a week from home. This was before the internet, before personal computers. And I wrote a report that all this stuff that's happening now is going to eventually happen. We were going to have not only picture phone, but we were going to have group picture phone and all of that. And that people would have no reason to go into work. Now what I think is happening is I'm both pessimistic and very optimistic. I think that what's happening now is let's say Jerry has a team and I have a team. And we both have the same objective for that team. But my team, I can pull the best people in the entire world onto my team because we have repealed geography. Jerry has to pull his team from Portland. Nothing against Portland, but you get the point. My team is going to beat Jerry's team hands down every time easily because I can get the best brains like the Manhattan Project. Now what they had to do with the Manhattan Project, they literally showed up at somebody's door and grabbed them and brought them into Los Alamos. Here we don't have to do that anymore. So I'm very optimistic that, you know, the cities are not going to come back. There is no reason for a high rise office building anymore. They're going to be very, they're going to live on, but they're going to live on in movies. Vertical farms perhaps. A few years from now, the people are going to see those movies and say what were they thinking? How could they do that? Why would they do that? It's going to look weird. Absolutely weird. So the rich people are going to move out of the cities to the nearby suburbs and small quaint towns. But my optimism is that we are becoming very aware of the need for and the economic incentives which drives everything for collaboration rather than competition. And there's a new found awareness of metacognition and, you know, how we think, how we use our minds. I'm trying to document a lot of that in my mind skills work. I think it's going way faster than I thought it would go because I'm using Rome and I'm using the brain, I'm using all kinds of tools that are making me really 2030 IQ points smarter. I can outthink anybody of my IQ using those tools or anybody 20 IQ points higher using those tools. And people can catch on those tools, go into interface that is Rome's objective to have a collaborative system. And we're going to go places we can't even begin to imagine. But again, the cities aren't coming back because of e-commerce, because of food delivery, because of computer dating, because there's just no need for them anymore. And it's going to be cataclysmic, but it's going to be wonderful. Thanks, George. Before passing to John, I want to pull one thing from what you said, which was this idea that economic incentives which drive everything. And I agree with most of what you said. I think we're in a really weird moment where we might be getting a little bit post-economic, where there might be whether it's a basic income or self-sufficiency or any one of a number of things. But the monetization of our lives, which has eaten our brains for the last 100 years, might be behind us in some interesting ways. And we might be entering a world where economic and reward systems might not need to be behind everything we touch and do. And this is my ideals in speaking, because I think the road to there is really bumpy and weird. But that's the place I'm hoping we get to. In particular, if things just get automated to the point where there's not enough work, we're going to have to enter some post-economic place. And if so many things are available for no cost, how do you compete with zero? There's a couple books out about that. Jeremy Rifkin has a book called Zero Marginal Cost Economy, which is really interesting. So John, to you. Okay. Wow. I really love these big ideas. And I've been kind of professionally working as a scenario planner in one of my previous lives. And we dealt with these big alternate scenarios all the time. So I love that. And that's a very important part of our thinking. I want to just inject a contrasting idea. In a couple of parts of this, one is a couple of elements. One is what are those little steps to get to the post-economic? And one of the ways to think about the post-economic is that there's a discretionary window. If your food and healthcare are taken care of, and we don't have this needle of hyperbillionaires on top, you can get to a kind of a... And it doesn't have to be Scandinavian, but those are the reference points we think about. Places where, gee, people are not starving and they're not super focused on that they have to get wealthier. But that kind of thing I'm talking about. So it's not post-economic the way you're talking about it yet, Jerry. Maybe that's down the road. But on the way there, we get to this point of kind of a larger discretionary window. I want to insert another little micro idea or wedge idea. And partly something Doug said in a previous session triggered this thought. If you're going out to the countryside and you're talking to people about politics, do they care about your ideas or do they care about whether you own a truck? And I think the point of do you own a truck? In other words, do you live with any of the physical constraints and reference points that I live with? That's an important factor. And I'm wondering if we could evolve so that we don't wind up like with cashmere, these warring factions within the same state. Can we design certain kinds of micro units? And they might need, they might actually need protectionism. Maybe. I mean, that's economically, there's a big debate there. But could you get together a group of people who share trucks? And I mean, trucks in quotes metaphorically. There's certain aspects of our life that we physically engage in. That defines our tribe. And part of our agreement is that we will not talk about religion and we will not talk about these other things. That's separate. And we have actually an ideology about the separation of those two. So that's a possibility. And then you create the economic viability of that by any number of tricks. One would be localizing, saying that the idea of only eat things that come less than 50 miles, that's a very liberal green idea. But there might be a red alternative. There might be an idea of, hey, truck, local beer, blah, blah, blah. And you build this little constellation of cultural and economic and tribal identities and it becomes sustainable in little pockets. And those pockets, then unlike the blue pocket of Portland versus the rest of Oregon, those pockets are kind of like border towns. Those are kind of like places where it all mixes up. I'm not promoting or I'm just thinking, what are all the different points of access? What are all the different things we could use to try to combat the depths of disagreement that we currently have? These little bridging places, places of moratorium, liminal zones. Early on when I was trying to describe Ojiama, I describe this as an estuary, which is where freshwater meets saltwater. And estuaries are very rich, diverse zones of innovation. They're full of nutrients. They support lots of different kinds of life forms. But also, there have been lots of attempts and many successful attempts to just create small events or small situations where people who are really pretty different can do the same thing together. That actually works. So I like a lot of what you're saying. Klaus, jump in? Yeah. I think that really touches on a lot of things that I've been working on.  Then we can disagree on how to solve it. We can use different economic approaches, different guides, different theories and so on. But we can't disagree on basic science. And unfortunately, here in the U.S., going all the way back to the tobacco wars, there has been a very, very designed initiative to mislead the public by confusing science to the point where you can talk to the average American. They have no idea what's right and wrong and what is science, and it has become really crude. So we can't operate on that level because we can't move forward on anything. But there is a hunger that people have because intuitively, instinctively, people realize that something is not quite right. And so climate change is starting to really hit, particularly when you look at very red states like South Carolina, North Carolina. I mean, they're getting hammered with climate events, losing millions of acres of corn this year again. So I started this promotion of the Kiss the Crown movie. So for next week, we have already signed up 460 people wanting to join this discussion with the filmmakers and with us from Citizen Climate Lobby talking specifically about what can we do as citizen lobbyists to engage the political process to start dealing with real problems that are impacting our community. And so go away from all this debate about the science. These are tangible, observable things that the film explains in very foundational ways. Here's what we're doing to our soil. Here's what we're doing to our environment. And here are some ideas on how we can rectify that. And people respond to that. So it has to be practical solution focused away from debating things that are too abstract for the average person to get into. Lucy, I believe you're not warming your hands, but rather wanting to jump in. Oh, you are warming your hands. Oh, man. Okay. I thought that was like it. I love the floor. Mike, go ahead. We'll jump in at some point. Okay, good. Mike, you're muted. Got a little fire pit there. So that's what's going on. I knew about the fire, but your hand was framed so nicely by the sky. I figured it was a call for the floor. I just wanted to bring in this question of how other people think and how we might be able to change a little bit of that. There's another book that's about 10 years old now. It's called The History of Nations. It's 30 chapters. I may have mentioned it on previous calls. 30 chapters by 30 different historians from 30 different countries. And in each case, explaining in about eight to 10 pages how their country sees their history and what it means for their relations with other countries, what it means for their style of government, what it means for their culture. It's absolutely fascinating. Now, each historian provides only one perspective. And I'm sure you could get a very different perspective from a different historian from that country. But it's a great, great book to read. And probably reading that with how the world thinks would be a great way to spend a long weekend. The other thing I wanted to point out though to pick up on your thought, Jerry, about changing our assumptions about capitalism. The BBC every year does a series of lectures that they broadcast called the Wreath Lectures, R-E-I-T-H. And I don't know if I mentioned it last week or not, but it's so important. I want to mention it again, because I just heard the fourth one by Mark Carney. He did all four lectures. He was the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada. And he basically points out that for the last 40 or 50 years, our economic thinking has been fundamentally wrong. And it's allowed us to override all of our values. I mean, the idea that somehow the only thing that matters is making money for shareholders. And that we can, as you said, that we can calculate the worth of human being or calculate happiness, whatever. We just got too far with the economic model. And he does this incredibly well. And the last one was on how our economics have made it impossible for us to really fix the climate crisis. Because everybody can just pull out the economic models and say, well, taking care of the planet for your great grandchildren doesn't have the right return on investment. But I'd really recommend, if you don't have time to watch them or listen to them, then read the transcripts. But it's the wreath lectures. Has anybody else watched them? I've got a couple of them in my brain, but I don't remember which ones. And I don't think I've got Mark Carney's in there. And then I posted to the chat history, histories of nations, how their identities were forged as a full title of the book. And I think I read it because I think I heard you recommend it some time ago. And it was really interesting because it was a particular sort of person having a perspective on each country. So you got, you certainly got one flavor of what that country's history was like, but it was, it was kind of personal and quirky in the sense of some of the profiles were like, oh, I didn't know that had no idea about that. So it was really useful and interesting. Thank you. Ken. So about 15 years ago, I was consulting in Kansas and I discovered, you know, because Kansas is a big red state and the people there are still, a lot of them really understand agricultural metaphors. When you start talking about the land and the soil, they, they understand that and they're, they recognize what cost is talking about that we've been destroying the fecundity of our soil and poison, toxifying our water and our air and people are getting sick. So I think the, the red blue divide and the, your worldview versus my worldview is a distraction. Hitchcock would call it a MacGuffin, right? It distracts us from what's really important that when we start talking about, you know, when you look at your soil and see that it has gone from a rich loamy soil to a hard, gray, dry thing, it's time to make a change. And you don't have to do a lot of convincing there. I just, I think this is an important point that we, we get caught up in the ideological differences and get afraid of that. And instead of recognizing that they're, you know, when it comes down to the soil and it comes down to actually what's important, I'm reminded probably five or six years ago, Reuters did a series on sea level rise and they never used the word climate change and they only used tide markers, historical tide bars and people have been keeping track of tides for centuries, right? And there's a Tea Party County supervisor in Chesapeake Bay who's standing at the edge of her dock and she says, I don't believe in global warming, but I can't deny the fact that my dock is under water and it wasn't under water 10 years ago. So all of a sudden you stop worrying about the ideology and the conceptual part and say, look, your dock is under water, you know, oil is fucked. We need to make some changes here. So if we focus on that, I think it gives us a lot more leverage and it was a big part of the fear. And personally for me, I was on a walk yesterday with a friend of mine. He said, what are you really looking forward to politically in 2021?  You know, I'm so delighted to think it just we will not have that horrible, you know, destructive divisive energy at the center of everything that there's a man who's going to, he'll fail, he'll make all kinds of mistakes. He's not going to live to my expectations, but he's not actively trying to undermine everything. And I think that is a moment of tremendous shift in power and healing for us all because no longer will be somebody right there in the center who's got all this attention on him going, this is real, I'm going to keep dividing people and dividing people and stirring up hatred. A long time ago, I read there's no strictly speaking, there are no war like people, there are only war like leaders. And I think we've had a leader who's really been dividing us. And so I'm really just like to have somebody who's going to stop that and try to bring people together. And so for me, that's kind of what I'm looking at in 2021. I like your perspective on the climate change there, Ken, I call it the good old days perspective. You know, if you can tell everybody you'll get to roll snowmen again, that'll convince people. But I wanted to go back to my dad's point a little bit. I'm sorry, I'm like hearing myself on repeat. So I'll sound a little strange. It's okay, we can study you. But I took a class in my, when I was in college, in cross cultural leadership. And it was a little bit about, you know, the book that you're talking about, where we got this intensive three week experience into cultural perspective and what leadership looks like and, you know, all these different elements and even down to the EU level like Belgium versus the Netherlands and how there's really difference there. But kind of to bring back to our original conversation about 2020 and 2021 is I feel like the, you know, one of the largest benefits we've had in the wake of all of this destruction and sadness has been a really heavy dose of perspective, maybe not empathy, but perspective, where, you know, it's, it's hard to say I can't relate to the person in the city when the person in the city is dying, you know, just like the person in the country. And I think, you know, that gives me, that gives me some hope. But I really think that's something that, you know, we're talking about politicization and, you know, these cultural divides.  There's not enough empathy and there's not enough perspective, people taking the time to realize we're all kind of the same. And I feel like 2020 has done that. Maybe we'll see more of this, you know, country to country perspective, person to person perspective. You know, hopefully it'll encourage the listening, because it's a little bit easier to go, you know, I want to roll a snowman, so do I. Well, I don't want to die from COVID. You know, I neither do I. It was a large, weak calibration over here. But yeah, I just wanted to put that out there, because I feel like, you know, all the conversations, I'm sure Jerry's doing it on purpose, that they all have to do with each other. But I think it's interesting that, you know, I wish there was positive moments that really brought us together, as well as really detrimental moments do, but it seems, you know, war, disease. Those tend to be more bonding in the long run. Wish it wasn't that way. But at least we maybe we'll have it. That's my that's my, you know, excited, relieved, hopefulness. Maybe that dose of perspective will really give us the boost we need. Thanks, Lizzie. And you are correct. This is all my instrumentation. I am Q, in fact. So there we are. Scott, you want to jump in? Yeah, so I think Lizzie kind of keyed this up as well as as Ken did. This idea of common enemy, in a sense, uniting, you know, there's that, well, nothing unites like having something that you're both fighting against. And on the fantasy side of that is Independence Day, you know, the movie and and the aliens have come down and now the entire globe has to get together in 24 hours and figure out how we're all going to go and attack the common enemy. And and the reality, I think that we've seen this year is that happened. We had one common enemy that hit everyone all the way down to the Antarctic. And yet our approaches were all over the board. We couldn't figure out, you know, and I've often thought, well, all we need is a good, you know, alien attack to bring everybody together and make us realize, like Ken had said, there are bigger issues here than the little squabbles. And yet that kind of happened. And it didn't seem to, well, at least from a U.S. perspective, it didn't catalyze that. Maybe that was different around the world. So that was just my thought. Thanks, Scott. Doug? Yeah, boy, this conversation is a little bit reminds me of something like, if I have a box of marbles that I spill it on the floor and the marbles go running in all sorts of different directions, and it's hard to characterize. But here's the point that I want to make. Background, I'm working as a consultant to an economic organization that's trying to rethink economics. And what we've come to is the realization that it's very hard to have that conversation. Because most of the people in it think that the main categories of economy, like capital, are kind of God-given, frozen in space and time, not open for discussion. They're just givens. Whereas in fact, they're part of a historical flow. And in that conversation, we're realizing that people don't know very much history. They don't know, for example, how we got from the end of World War II, with the incredible, unique position of the U.S. and the world economy to now. They don't have narratives about these things. So that it's very, very hard to have a conversation when there's no shared sense of what history is, no common culture. For example, in that group, and I think in this one, almost never does anybody ever mention any kind of work of art. Movies, yes, but that's in the last 20 years. But novels, poetry, dramas, doesn't come up. Works of art, like Moons, the screen, not mentioned very much. So we're trying to have a conversation about the future, just skating on the surface of the present with no sense of the deeper tsunami that we are part of that has roots in deep history. Anyway, I could go on with that for a long time, but I think you'd probably get the point. Yes. I think the common thread between a lot of what this conversation has been is that we're all trying to make sense of what's happening, and we're all trying to hack change. I think we have a common desire to hack change at a personal level, at a cultural level, at a civilizational level. I think that's one thing that really unifies us, and that means we have to grab or describe or try to understand every different part of what might motivate change or what's connected to the forces that keep people in place, so that make people shift around, all of those kinds of things. And some of us are really good historians. Some of us are really good convincers, salespeople. Some of us are good at other kinds of skills, and part of what we're trying to figure out here is, how do we combine those skills to amplify the messages that might actually catalyze change? And I think that's a big piece of the OGM conversation is, okay, what are the moving parts, and how might they turn into something that's actually effective over time? Doug, I feel like we do mention a lot of cultural references, probably more movies than novels, but if you follow the chat over our conversations, and in particular, Pete just dropped off to be on a different call, but people will always look up a reference to just about anything and put it in the chat. We've had a whole bunch of really interesting references that are literary, and I may be making some of these up in my head, I don't know, off to Mike. Jerry, you've brought a lot of poetry to a lot of conversations over the years as well, but I do agree, we don't talk much about the visual arts, aside from movies. I mean, that's mostly for the cultural impact. Just to bring another thought in here, a lot of what I've done in Washington has been trying to put forward policy proposals, but sometimes it seems that the real policy decision maker is not the policy expert, and it's not even the congressman or the senator, it's the speechwriter. Sometimes the speechwriter captures the essence of an idea, puts the words in the mouth of the leader, and it launches a whole new movement. Whoever came up with the words strategic defense initiative for Ronald Reagan was a abysmal failure. The person who opposed the SDI, who came up with the phrase Star Wars, knew exactly what they were doing. So I guess I would challenge our group, and maybe over the next week people can play with this, write five sentences that you want Joe Biden to say in his inaugural address. How could five sentences redefine our perspective of our future? And this has happened. You know, Winston Churchill talked about the iron curtain descending across Europe, and Ronald Reagan had some great single sentences, tear down that wall. There are things that have really opened up Americans' minds to new possibilities. And so I was thinking of putting this on Facebook and challenging my Facebook friends, but I'll challenge you first. Give us five sentences that you want to put in Joe Biden's inaugural address or his State of the Union address. Love that. One of my concerns is that we're going to be all relieved that Biden's in charge, or we're going to go back to our day jobs. Biden is not actually going to change anything, and we're going to be back in this same battle in four years or less, that this is just going to be a titanic mess that we're walking into. So we need to share these ideas well. That's actually where I have faith in the activists. You know, oftentimes the really loud protests, I love, but you know, sometimes they're too much, but I think I have a lot of faith in young people right now is they're really angry and they're continuously really angry because we've got the energy to be really angry. We can drink Red Bull, you know, and that keeps us up. So I know that's, I feel like sometimes we're not very hopeful with young people. I'm actually really, really excited because I think they'll keep, you know, what is, John Mulaney had a great bit on SNL when he was opening, when he was talking about the election, he goes, oh, you know, there's an important event coming up. You get to vote for your favorite old man and have an entire bit, you get to vote for this old man or another old man. And I think that kind of his bit kind of condensed down that, you know, maybe, maybe some people get complacent, but I don't think many will on either side because there's not enough of, you know, a large scale, you know, there's Pete Buttigieg, maybe some of the young people would calm down because he's young and we're hopeful, but he's still old. So he's never got Pete Buttigieg. Don't mind. Joe Biden is still old. Joe Biden is old. Don't say Pete Buttigieg is old. That's really devastating to this group here. That could be emotionally harmful. There's still so much that really needs to be changed. I totally agree, Lizzie, and I just screen shared and you're on your phone, so you may not be able to read any of this. Does 2020 mark a generational tipping point? And I'm pointing here to youth movements, basically school strikes for climate change, the sunrise movement, the Douglas school students who were activated by the school shootings, Generation Z, a whole bunch of different groups that are coming together. And kids these days, they're wired. They understand how movements work. They've been watching these things happen over years. I've got nerd fighters in here courtesy of you, Lizzie. You taught us nerdfighteria years ago. So here's nerdfighteria. And Emily Grassley and other kinds of people who are trying to figure out how do we connect up? And one of the things I'm hoping OGM can do in the new year is to connect up and to serve communities like these to help them actually tip things. And I'm going to share a link to that thought in my brain in the chat, because I would love to do that. Lauren, you and Charles and Kiko Lab have been doing lots with kids. You've got kids. Do you want to share a little perspective on generational change here? Nothing brilliant comes to mind. So many people want to talk so badly. I'll just pass the baton. All right. Anybody else?   And I was thinking earlier, harking back slightly to like the 60s and the 70s, their cultural movements. And I guess we're kind of in a situation like that right now with my generation and Lizzie's generation kind of seeing the damage that's been done. And just we've seen the cycles that have been continued even with the knowledge of what damage has been done. And we're just really fed up and trying to break that. And we're really thankful for the older generations for making sure we're so educated. So we know exactly what we're mad about. Yeah. We're thankful, but we're also very angry. So thankful, and you're welcome. Yeah. But yeah, it's a very high level of anger, but it's not the anger in the sense of where we want to start fights. It's more of the anger in the sense we're angry with the lack of a better term in the system. And it's just very wave-like. It's just moving through. We were really the generation that got hit hard with the school shootings and just the mass tragedies that happened throughout our formative years. For high school with me, we grew up with just constant bomb threats and constantly with schools getting shot up today. It's very much, we lived in a state of tragedy constantly. And we never really have known a state of peace. And it's getting to the point where we're getting so worked up and just so tired of it that we want to know what that's like. And it's, and yeah, we want to know what peace is like. And in order to get that, we have to really change the system. Thank you, Sean. If you were born after 2001, for you, the United States has always been at war. Yeah. Doug, then Klaus. Okay. So it was something that I mean about history is that in the 1880s, more or less a decade on each side, there was a tremendous political struggle between the farmers and Wall Street, where the Wall Street was foreclosing on the farms. The railroads were squeezing people on profit and taking the money out. What's striking is the rural dialogue about Wall Street at that time is almost identical to the Trump supporters' conversation about the professional class now. If it's the same discussion, we need to know that to see how it might have worked out. For example, for Trump supporters, science does not mean laboratories and journals and conferences and all that. Actually, it does. What they see it is as an ensemble of high-paid careers that they're paying for and that their kids somehow don't have access to. So the meaning of science for them is very different than the meaning of science for us. We've got to understand these things. Okay. Klaus, then Scott. Yeah, I mean, what Lissy was just saying, I think that's really my hope for 2021. Because I think our generation's responsibility is to paint a pathway to the future. And there is indeed, there are things that we can do at community level. So I'm working with the Sierra Club, for example, to do that same promotion. We're coming out on the 14th of January to paint a vision of how we can engage at community level to make real changes, to agriculture, to the raw food system, food sovereignty, where we can engage without fighting with anybody. You just do it. And I think if we can stimulate this vision in ways that it becomes really clear and understandable to young folks, then they have a mission of purpose to dive into and make this change just happen, just do it. Because the only thing that stands in the way is our belief that we can't do it. Scott, then Ken. As always, serendipitously, the people before me start to go in a different direction and then come right back to what I was hoping. Thank you, Klaus, for that. So my perspective on the young people, which I'm attached to simply because I'm trying to create learning programs for them in metacognition, so thinking skills for kids. Because the problem that I saw was that they're all given problems that are neat, bounded, defined, one answer, and solve this, which is an algorithm that is not a heuristic. It is you follow these steps when in this problem and it will solve itself. But the world is not, that's not how the problems of the world are set up. And what I realized was that it's not about solving problems, it's about defining problems, which is turning a mess into a problem and picking the problems to solve. And by giving them the thinking skills at a young age, what I'm hoping to do is to give what Klaus alluded to the agency, the sense that games are made and created, rules are made, situations are made, as Doug had said earlier, by other people previous to us. And when we understand that we have the ability to make new games, to make new rules, then we have that agency. And if we learn that at a young age, we don't have to simply inherit the earth. We can inherit what we like and create what could be an improvement.  And when I later realized that the consumerization of our world took away our sense of agency. That when we're mere consumers and our only job is to buy more stuff where the economy will grind to a halt, our job is not to make things for each other. Our job is not to ask questions about how the thing was made because that costs more.  And that we're sort of living through the dip that that has caused in everything else in the health of our earth, in the health of human relations, relations, et cetera, et cetera. And lockdown has pointed a lot of us out. Lockdown has done a very nice job of pointing out a lot of these dangers. Ken, go ahead. So a few years ago, I went to Harvard to take a course with Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy, who are developmental psychologists. And this was on something they termed immunity to change. And they have a book by that name. And the book starts out with the supposition or the proposition of you are visiting the doctor and the doctor tells you, you have heart disease.  Does anyone want to take a guess on the percentage of people who die when faced with this? It's very, very high. It's very, very high. So this has clued me into something that I've been observing for a long time, particularly with regard to the environmental movement. It's been an embedded assumption that when people wake up and recognize how bad things are that they will change. And I no longer think that's true. I think we need to look deeper and say at the individual level, if we're threatened with death, if that's not sufficient motivation for us to change, then the same thing I think holds true at the collective level. There's plenty of evidence that we're really beyond several tipping points here and in great danger. And the assumption that we just need to educate people about how bad things are, I think is faulty. So it's necessary but not sufficient. And I think moving in the direction of informing people about how bad things are and giving them, as Scott was just saying, games and a positive vision that we can work towards this because fear is not a sufficient motivator, but desire for a better life, ways to thrive. How are we going to feed nine billion people in 20 years, given that we've got all this problem with agriculture? There's some really serious issues that go on here, but very little has been unleashed in the collective imagination. It's mostly been about fear and trying to wake people up. And I think that's a faulty strategy. So I just want to throw that out there for whatever it's worth. We are nearing the end of 90 minutes and I have to bounce at the top at the half hour to a different call. And I would love to do a little bit of rapping in the sense that Lauren has been trying to get us to do with a W, not just rapping because I'm not a good rapper. I have an OGM song, by the way, Jerry. Oh, really? Yeah. On the call the other day, on the Keekalab call, let me see if I can find this. Lauren said something about what OGM is, and she was talking about how it's a home for weirdos. So I'm going to post the Where the island of misfit toys, is that where we are? Exactly. I have a disorder that drives my wife and other people crazy where someone will say something and I'll start to make a song parody out of what they said. Is this next to the pun disorder or is this on top of it? Yeah, it's very close. I have a serious problem. So here is to the tune of Home Home on the Range is a little something I made up with about Open Global Mind. Now we have an anthem. We're talking about roles, but we're riffing off of your idea about roles, your posted things. So your roles in Weirdos came together. I thought you were going to sing it. All right, give me a role where the weirdos all go, and I don't have to be normal all day, where I can contribute my gifts, even if I'm not hip, but I can make a real difference anyway. Oh, OGM, where we are remaking the world with both quests and guilds, we operate them with good will, and we each contribute our best skills. Happy New Year, people. Yeah, that's awesome. Anybody else want to reflect on this call and where we went? I could do a little bit. Please, Pranjit. I agree a lot with Scott and Doug in that young people, stuff that the young Nalsons were talking about, that there's a gap between what we need to know, and Ken touched on this too, and what we're told. And so we don't get to the foundations, the origins of why stuff's that way and why it's actually wrong. So there's lots of wrong assumptions that are being made. And so in a sense, I understand, and I think that can very often explain the difference between the kind of woohoo spiritual people, in a sense, and people who are like, what are you talking about? Of course I'm going to get, you know, do whatever measure the government are telling me. So to some degree, I find it quite surprising that a lot of people here with lots of intellect are so happy to accept all the tenants that the government are kind of putting on people. But to some extent, I understand it because the information to everything else is blocked so much and there's so much energy that goes into blocking it. So I guess my hope for 2021 is that that whole mechanism of huge tranches of information that do get blocked, we somehow managed to kind of put a light on that stuff so that we can then find a reality that we're all more closely aligned to. And I guess where we can't do that, then they're going to be the bits where people are just going to have to live in their little enclaves and get on with stuff separately. But I'm really hoping that we can tear down some of those barriers 2021. Thank you, Pam. You're pointing out something that is a polarity and I think came out for me a lot in this call, which is the polarity between shared reality or shared activities. And our need or desire or the imperative to agree on what facts are and what science is like that kind of shared reality or to agree on the plot about how we came here and where we're going and all of that versus or with, and then I don't choose your joiner here, just the notion of going and using your truck to help somebody dig out their farm because they had a landslide in the back 40 or whatever else it is. But basically sharing some blood and sweat and food and music to actually come back into community and not worry about the political narratives that are on top and how it all works and who the lizard people are. So, so I don't know. It feels like like the, I think many of us on this island of misfit toys are we love the shared reality part. We're very attracted to narratives that try to explain where are we? How do we get here? Where are we going? Like really attracted? I know I am. And I think many of us feel compelled to show everybody else how the sausage got made. And in many cases, all you really need is like a barbecue. Right. And so what does the barbecue look like that takes us into 2021 and the rest of this damn decade in a really fruitful way. And I want to leaven that, you know, some of the spice here is, and if we don't act on a large scale in some kind of unison, doesn't have to be everybody doing exactly the same thing. We are unlikely to conquer some of the whopper things that we're facing. Right. So awesome fractals, small scale community, local actions, great, great, great, great. But unless there's some coherence at a higher level, which allows for local variation wonderfully, like everybody doesn't have to go do the same exact thing. But unless we get that, we're not going to figure out how to solve for some of the bigger problems that we're staring at, in particular, probably climate change. So any other reflections on today's call? And otherwise, I'll take us up. I just want to say thank you for what is, you've been the highlight of my 2020. That's for sure. I really appreciate everybody showing up here. I appreciate your patience, your heartfulness, your thoughtfulness. I looked forward to turning this into more things in the next year. But I want to wish everybody a happy new year as tonight strikes. I'll be thinking of you and toasting with some, I think, a fancy beer we bought. Happy new year. Thank you all. Happy new year, everybody. It's a happy new year. Happy new year. Thank you for letting Sean and Lizzie and Kathleen crash the party. Thanks for crashing. You guys are welcome to crash every time. So let me know if you want to be in the conversation. Thanks, guys. Kathleen, thanks for being here.


Hello, Oslater Sync here. Recently I put out a video where I explored my current modular setup and it is, of course, the current modular setup of these things are never finished. And I thought what might be interesting rather than just talking about what each of the modules are and how I use them actually, maybe over a couple of videos demonstrate how I might use these modules to put together a couple of different patches in a couple of different musical settings. So that's what we're going to do today. So I thought today the kind of patch we'll go for is something a bit more sort of beat focused baseline up, maybe a cordy type thing in there as well, which we can definitely do with this system. Along with the modular, we have a couple of extra friends down here. We've got the Corg SQ1 which is a sequence that can either do two lots of eight steps or one 16 steps and we can do other things with it as well. And I've also got the Basel Castle drum here, which is like a bloopy-bloopy, very, very electronic percussion friend. It can spit out all sorts of interesting percussion seasoning. I've pre-patched it here to just sort of, as I say, spit out percussion seasoning because the video is not necessarily just about the castle. We could talk about this for some time, potentially. I may or may not use it, probably will, I think, depending on whether I've got space in the mixer, I guess. Usually I would also have on the desk a reverb generally or a delay just to give everything a little bit of space. But I thought I would just try and stick inside the rack. So I've got disting set to be a reverb rather than a sample player for once just for a little change. I think that's everything that we need to talk about before we can get patching. Anything else comes up, of course, we can talk about when we're patching. Okay, let's patch, I think, shall we? So I've got the Clock On-Pam set to 120. That will be kind of our BPM to begin with. We can always change that as we go. Let's start by patching up like a bass kind of sound, something 303-ish. So we'll probably use the 2HP VCO for that. And let's go sawtooth into a filter, which is set on dual mono so I can use this as two single filters. I could always switch that to the low pass gate if we need a stereo filter, but we'll stick with this at the moment so we can have some resonance. Actually, don't go on the low pass gate. We'll come out of the low pass, then we'll go into a VCA. So we can do those two things. We can either do them together or we can do them separately. And then from the VCA into the mixer. Easy enough, that's not going to be long enough. There we go. That's not going to make any sound just yet. Although if we turn that up, we should be able to hear something. Yeah, and if we turn that cut up, we should be able to hear something. Okay, we can get some nice squelch out of that. So just turn the VCA. It's a little bit tricky with this one because it's an inverting VCA. So you have to get it right in the middle to make it be quiet. Okay, in terms of sequencing, we could use the random type stuff with PAMs, but maybe for the baseline we should have something a bit more controlled. So maybe we'll use the SQ1 for that. Yeah, so we'll use the SQ1 for that. So we can come CVA out into the VCOs, false proactive. The gate, we're going to need at least one envelope. So we'll be going into stages. And we can just use a segment at the end here, just as a simple decay envelope. That'll do the trick. And yes, we'll need to clock the SQ1, which we can just do off PAM. So I'll just take channel eight at the end there, sync in there, lift the decay up there a little bit. If we hit go and make sure this is running, we should actually opened up the VCA. So we will grab a stack cable so we can molt it. We'll go into the CV input for the filter, and then we'll just bounce off the side of that stack cable into the CV there. There we go. Okay, I'll do a start. Obviously this is moving far too slow at the moment. So the easiest way, I've just got this so that the SQ1's sync will just do one to one with a step on PAMs. So if we come into eight here, we can just change the multiplier like that. And we can actually, we could put the slides in here as well. We could also change the active step to get it shorter. So that's more meaty, isn't it? Yeah, we can play around with that. That might be a nice place to start anyway. We've got the resonance there. Right. Let's get a kick drum in here because that's kind of important for this. So for that, we'll probably, so we could use Beehive, but I kind of want to leave a, one of these have the chords maybe. So maybe we'll just ping a filter for this. So if we take an output from PAMs, just go into the input of the other side of this filter. This is a dual mono, so this should just be acting independently. And we will come over to the width of one here, just make it nice and short. So just pings it. Just put a bass line onto it and kick on one. So we can come from the, probably the best one is band past to come out of the filter here. If we bring up the resonance. I recommend you to make that more aggressive. So let's start that first, shall we? Let's grab another short cable. We'll go into Terse Arena. Try the top channel, tweak that a little bit. Now if we want to make that kick drum a little bit more interesting, we could put in some like extra little small beats in the middle. So what we'll do, actually, we'll un-patch this for a second. This is just going to resonate away. And what we'll do is we'll patch that into this second channel here instead. We'll just set it up basically the same. So we'll make it a really skinny little friend. And I'm going to stick it in a much lower level, maybe 50%. So let's get that one going again. Okay, so that's the lower level one. So what I'll do here is I'm going to set this to run at twice the rate, like that. But I'm then going to tell it to skip most of the time. So we've got the random, where can I see it? The random skip here. I'm just going to turn this up to like 60%. So I only a little bit of that's coming through, right? So I've now got a quiet and not very consistent kick drum sound. That's okay. What we'll do now is we'll use the logic function in Pamela's to all this channel with channel one. So what that will do is that channel one will always come through whenever it is going. But whenever channel two comes in, it will also allow it through, but only it will still override it with channel one for the louder version. So it allows us to kind of get those incidental kicks in there, which we can then tune using the random skip. So interlogic. So you can hear there, we've now got those extra lower hits in there. So there's too many of them, so we can turn up the random skip so more of them get skipped. Maybe drop its level a little bit. So we've now got those nice little extra incidental kicks in there just to make things a little bit more funky. Okay, so we've got a kick in a bass going on there. At the moment, I think this bass part is probably a bit too static. Like I don't mind that it's melodically static, but it's also very rhythmically static. Although it's rolling over the kick drum, I don't know, it's not capturing my attention enough. It's not interesting enough at the moment, I don't think. So what we could try doing is rather than having this SQ1 also give us the rhythmical information, we could have pams doing maybe like a clarion thing to give us the information, the rhythmical information said, and then you'll get more interesting kind of interactions between the melody, the rhythm and what's going on with the kick drum perhaps. So what we can do is let's un-patch the gate here and instead we'll patch it into here. So now channel three is giving us our rhythmical information, whereas the SQ1 is giving us our melodic information. So if we come over into three here, we can obviously speed that up. So now we've got it happening every single beat, but we could come into its settings here. We'll lower its, oh it's a little bit, so it's not holding on. And then we can maybe use one of the Euclidean settings here, so maybe four steps in seven or something. How long is this at the moment? So this is seven steps at the moment, so let's make it five across eight instead. Immediately decoupling the rhythmic and melodic sequencer is just the more interesting groovy thing going on now. So we've got two things which are quite repetitive, but they're decoupled and that's groovy. Yeah, and those slides are a bit more meaningful now because they're sort of sometimes there and sometimes not. And of course we can change our sequence really easily and then still have that rhythmic grounding to it to the interface there. Cool. So let's add some chords. Yeah, let's add some chords. So we'll use Beehive which is a Platts clone for that and we'll just stick it in chords mode like everyone does. Cool. So what should we use to sequence this? Probably SQ1 again so we can have it controlled, but then maybe again have the trigger of it decoupled from SQ1. So we can take CVB out thread it through here like that and we'll stick it into the volts proctave there and then we'll come out of that into, should we run that through the reverb or not? Maybe not at the moment. We can always change that. It's the whole beauty of modular, isn't it? So we'll come into X pan and six then we can have it panning around which I think we definitely want to do. And we can patch the outputs of X pan into... I'll go into one of the channels with volume to begin with if we need to make space we can, but I think we're going to have to, aren't we? Okay, that needs a trigger input as well, clearly. So let's give that a trigger input from here to begin with just for testing CV gate, sorry, B gate out into trigger here. Now we want to change the decay of that. We could probably send it through the low pass gate instead. Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, let's go to low pass gate first. So we do have an emulated low pass gate in B high, but maybe we'll use an actual one. And it also means that if we take the trigger out, we can treat the auxiliary sound which is like the root note differently, which might be really useful to do. So we'll go out into the low pass gate and then out to the low pass gate into this side of X pan. And then we'll again, we'll just trigger the gate with the gate output on SQ1 just temporarily and then we'll decouple it once we've got the sound spoken. I might need to run that through a tenuator as well just to turn it down, but we'll just get the sequencer working first. I want it triggered like that as I say. And also just run that through a tenuator just to turn it down before it gets to X pan as well. Okay, so let's, as I say, let's decouple that gate pattern because that is not funky currently and we need a longer cable for that. That's a bad sound. So let's change that to a short ping for the sake of our low pass gate. And we could go with like a Euclidean pattern that's a bit sparse and then maybe put some random skips in there as well just to keep things out of the way. So again, we've got two elements here which are both kind of set in a standard sort of ones and like an eight, one thing's a nine, but because now we've laid them over each other, decoupling the rhythm and the melody, everything's a little bit more funky. We're going to get some modulation going on off. So we could just get some random modulation from stages. So we'll come across into the random segment, press and hold for looping mode, probably set it by polar. So we should see this go, yep, great, perfect. That's what we want. Come into Morph, turn the tenuator up. Okay, we're getting there, we're getting there. Right, I think we need to get those chords panning around a little bit. So I think we do want them swimming around, we want them pinging around. We probably want them pinging around, don't we? So let's maybe use pans for that. You've got three left and that's probably enough. So we can patch an output of pans into the x-pan where we've got our chord going on there into the pan input. Lovely. And if we come on to channel, come in here, set our wave to random. Right, it's only adding so something like that on the panning. Let's see how that sounds. Okay, that's probably too wide, I think. Spending a lot of time at the very extremes. So we can come in here, turn the level down. That'll probably set us mostly on one side without making it offset it. But now, let's get the Bastille coming in here. Let's synchronize it, just off the SQ1, it's probably easiest, I think, saves us using another channel on pans. So the SQ1 will pass, sink down the line, we might just need to mess with it a little bit. So the way I've got this patched, you've got the inputs on the Bastille which, click, get routed around in here. And this one here is going to accept sync, basically. Yeah, okay, let's bring that in on. I'm tempted to bring it in and pan it around as well. But then if I want to have an arpeggio or something, I probably want that. Okay, let's not pan it for the moment. And then we can make that decision in a second. So we've got an output here. And we'll just come in here. This should be making some noise already. That way we can get it biased more towards high hat sounds. We can do things like turn up the tempo model, which should give us little ratchets as well. It's a noisy little friend. Should we make it noisier? Because we could run that through one of the sides of Terci and get it really gritty. Perhaps we should try that. Maybe this one. I don't think it needs it. I don't think that's adding anything that we need in the context of what we have. So that's why I'm just bringing it back in. Sometimes it kind of feels like it's falling over itself, but it's staying in time. Okay, let's get like an arpeggio thing going on in here. Calm down. Which we, I guess we're using rings. That's all we've got left, isn't it? So for this, we can again use, let's use the random stuff on pams this time. So we'll come into number six. We'll set it to random and also turn on the quantizer. Minor pentatonic probably. Patch that into the vaults proactive on rings. What am I doing? Vaults proactive on rings and then we'll take that into x-pans so we can get this panning around as well. I think probably in here. Getting a little bit messy. Make it faster. We don't want it doing really low notes. So what I'll do is come in here and use the offset here just to raise it up. And then there's loads of stuff we could be modulating on this. So we shall. First things first, let's get it panning around. So we'll just use another random one here. Yes. Get yourself moving, my friend. And then which one was it that really, it's probably damp we want to modulate. I reckon. So same thing. We'll just get some random modulation going on there as well. Bipolar again. And maybe bright as well might be nice there. Might need to dial one of these back if we run out. I think we're okay though. Into bright. Let's run the whole of x-pans through the reverb of dystics, shall we, rather than straight into there. That's too much reverb. Oh goodness me, that's just too much. Now if I can just remember, welcome to remembering how to use this thing. I have no volume control for rings, do I now? So I probably want to again go another 10. Now I'm running out of cables. Anything else we can do just to make sure we're using every single patch cable I own. We're not using the orcs on Beehive, are we? So we could, so that would be giving us the root note. So an obvious thing to do there might be to let's take the orcs just into far too long for that. Let's take the orcs out of Beehive and go into another at 10. And then from that channel of at 10 with a far too long patch cable, let's go into the other side of the crossfader on x-pan for that channel. So that's right. We need to send that through the skate, don't we? Which we can then treat differently. There we go, that's what we need to do. So into the low pass gate, out of the low pass gate and into at 10. That gate was something. Luckily we have a spare channel there. Friendly for the low pass gate. So now we have, let me take everything else down, kind of two different versions of the root of the cord going on there. Well I think this patch is about as done as it can be because we don't have anything left. We do have one stages. We don't have to use everything, but I kind of want to. We could modulate, oh no, let's not use everything for the sake of it. So we've got our cords and up which is Plats, Beehive and Rings there. Those are panning around separately thanks to x-pan. We've got controls for each of those elements on at 10 there. We then have our kick which is our pinged filter from Pams, doing that sort of low high thing going on using the logic there. Our bass which is the 2HP VCO. That's been sequenced by the SQ1 for pitch and Pams for rhythm. We just got the Bastel castle drum just hanging out there. So yeah, there you go. There's a fun little patch. Need some more hands of control, I think. I need mute switches really for everything rather than doing it on sliders and trying to grab these. Well these sliders are pretty good. Anyway, thank you for joining me on this little exploration through the current modular setup. If you enjoyed it, if you found it interesting then as always if you want to leave a like on the video that's always massively appreciated. Make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synthy fun. And until next time, take care.


Statistics and Excel. Combining two histograms on one chart, part number three. Get ready, taking a deep breath, holding it in for ten seconds and looking forward to a smooth soothing Excel. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet. However, we started in a prior presentation with just our data set. If you do have access to this workbook, three tabs down below, example, practice, blank, example, in essence, answer key, practice tab, having pre-formatted cells so you could get right to the heart of the practice problem. Blank tab is where we started with just our data set so that we can practice formatting cells within Excel as we work through the practice problem. So what did we do last time? We had our data set on the left related to heights. We created a table with it. We then made a histogram from it. Now, because we're dealing with heights and we have a pretty extensive sample of heights, we get this nice shape which looks kind of like a bell type shape where we have most of the results somewhere in the middle and they're tapering off to either side. Then our objective is to take two data sets and put them on the same chart. To do that, it's not so easy to do if I go to the Insert tab with just a histogram, easier with, say, a bar chart. So what we did is mirror our histogram with a bar chart by creating our buckets manually, not really manually, but using Excel to do it instead of using a histogram to do it, and then we created a bar chart. So now we have something that we might be able to plot some other data on it as well. So we then said let's take our data set and make another related data set. Now, to do that, we just took the prior data set times 0.95, imagining this was for men, this was for women. That's not actually the case with this data set, but it just gives us an idea of what we can now do. So we then made a histogram from that data set and it looks similar to this histogram, but the middle point is different because of course we just shifted it by multiplying by 0.95 on the second data set. We then created a bar chart in a similar way as we did over here, but we wanted to make the buckets line up to the same buckets. This is where it gets kind of tricky because these bucket size, if you want to put two of these bar charts on the same graph, you want to have the same bucket sizes. So we took these bucket sizes over here and extended them to the lower regions so that we have enough buckets to contain all the data sets for the men and the women. Alright, so now we're going to put them on the same graph. Now before we do that, let's imagine that we just put them on top of each other. Like if we added these two data sets together in one data set and we made one histogram from it, it's going to come up with a mush, just a bunch of, it's not going to separate the two data, so let me show you what I mean. So let's copy this entire data set right here for the heights. I'm going to put my cursor up top. Let's just select the entire column of Z and then I'm going to right click and copy. I'll bring that on over to the right and let's just test that out in AY. We'll right click and I'm just going to paste it. Did I paste it 1, 2, 3? Let's undo that. Let's just paste it normal. Paste it normal. I did paste it normal. Okay, so it pulled in and then I'm going to go back on over. And I'm also going to take the data set for the women. Now I'm going to copy just the women's data by putting my cursor in the dropdown and copying just the data. So now I'm not getting the header and right click and copy. And then I want to put this underneath so we have this very large data set. So I'm going to go into the data set. This goes down quite far. So to get to the bottom, I'm going to hit control shift and down. That takes me to the bottom and then I'm just going to paste the data right here at the bottom. I'm way down here, 25,000. So I'm going to right click and paste this data. Let's paste this 1, 2, 3. And so now we have all this data going all the way down to 5,000 lines. We just put the two data sets on top of each other. What would that do if we entered the histogram to it? Let's put a table around it just to lock this in place. So I'm going to go to the insert tab, table group and insert a table. And so it's going all the way down to 5,000. That looks right. The dancing ants are doing their mamba around the proper location. I don't care if they're dancing as long as they're doing the work, right?  If the ants want to dance, then they can as long as they get it done. As long as you get it done. That's what I'm talking about. Anyway, so then I'm going to go over here and I'm going to insert, let's put our cursor up top. And so now I'm going to select all that data and let's just make a histogram from that. So I'm going to go to the insert charts and then drop down and let's make a histogram. So there it is. So now you'll notice what happened here is it kind of mushed the two histograms together, right? So when you do that, you might expect that it's going to give you kind of two histograms or something. But no, it's going to mush all the data together so I can't really separate the two data sets so we get this wider histogram as opposed to, so you can kind of imagine what happened here, right? We had these two histograms that we had, this one, and this one. We took the two data sets and put them together and we get something that looks like this. And you can imagine these are really kind of two histograms that are kind of mushed together because if we break them out in two data sets, let's do that now. So now what I want to do is say, well, what I'd like to do is show two different data sets, maybe have them as a different color. So what I want to do is take my buckets, take all this stuff that we made for the men and the women. And I'll put them together and then put them on the same graph. So let's put them together like that. I'm going to go to the left and let's choose this whole data set. All I really need are the buckets that we made and then the results. So I'm going to copy that. So I'm going to take this all the way down and right click and copy. And I'm going to go to the right to where we want to put it. And so we'll put it.