This is the OGM call for Thursday, November 3rd, 2022. There we go. I admire your discipline, Jerry. My what? I admire your discipline. Oh, thank you. I'm not disciplined about everything, but I'm disciplined about a couple of things. And this is actually a habit that I grooved early in the pandemic and has paid off. So there we go. And then, and then the part that I remark on a lot to myself is, when I get the little notification from zoom that your recording is ready, I actually go download post and then, you know, tell people where it's posted that that part's kind of hard to keep up, but hasn't been a problem so Yeah. And I just got a I just got a nice email this morning talking about stuff saying actually it was from Dan whaley the founder of hypothesis saying hey, are you new podcasts with beta works not posted to YouTube because YouTube does auto text auto trans translation to texts, and then lets you do cool things like this and he was a he had a hypothesis annotation on the translated text of one of the episodes and I'm like, that's really cool. So you said a hypothesis annotation is that you said. Yes, hypothesis hypothesis dot is is a, I think of it as a shadow web service that lets you add comments and do markup on on arbitrary web pages. So you, it's free it's open it's an open source service. And Giri Laos project uses hypothesis is basically based on it. I believe, but it's, it's very cool. And I have never figured out kind of a working flow to use it properly, but I think it's an important piece of infrastructure we ought to be using more. And you put the URL in the chat for hypothesis you bet. I was just about to. Spelling that didn't work. That sucker. So let me. I thought I got that right. So is that work for you. That's, yeah, that makes more sense. Cool. And then let me, but do I still have it open. Don't know heck fire. Yes. So here, let me just do a quick screen share and show you what Dan, what Dan sent me a link to this morning. Here we go. So, so this is an, this, this is actually a not an episode of the podcast this is an episode of fellowship of the link. And I mentioned that I'd met a rapper in Brazil, who has a pretty bad stutter when you speak with him and it's just a beautiful soul, but when he wraps completely fluid so Dan posted in hypothesis which is this window on the right, which I'm logged into but I don't usually use. So Dan's in as a panel when you need it. And he then added this link that stuttering and seeing what we understand so I'm going to add this to my brain under stuttering and come saw. That's pretty cool. And the article is why I do not stutter when I say why do I not stutter when I sing and go from there. I don't like it when you drag a web page and the HTML is different from the title on the page. Let me just see if that's the right page. Drag it in again. Yep, that's the right one. So now I'm going to post in the title that's on the website, clean up the colon, clean up the colon just doesn't sound like a good thing but I understand celery is good for that. This that we are here talking about the fiber of society so in the body politics in the body politic metaphors that just don't end, which certainly needs some cleaning. Hey good life is with us. Lovely. Great to see you. Thanks for coming Vincent is with us.  Excellent. In what city. It's the Baltic Sea. And you're here twice. It's amazing you're in two places at once and you're not anywhere at all. You're proving non locality and zoom. And in fact, we need to mute one of your microphones life, or both. Not the video videos cool but the mic. There we go. Except now I just heard myself echo again. Cool. And Stacy Stacy I hope you feel better. We're here. We are as often happens underrepresented by the women of GM, which pains a lot of us. Or we're over represented by the manner with you. You could say that works to you could totally say that. And grace is not on the call at least yet. And that was the one who raised the issue that I sort of rediscovered because I kind of taken a note last week at the end of the call, and my, my, my take on it was the following statement which I will, which I put on the notes for last week's call. And I'll put it in the chat. And since we are graceless. Another pun. We don't need to talk about this topic but I like it a lot. So I'll see what what y'all think and I we, the floor is also open for other thoughts about topics because today is a topic call we, or we alternate formats between check ins and topics. Can I start. Please life. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. And I was reading. The article from the former minister of something in UK. And she was telling about the youngsters at the youngsters are not going to the job to work. They go to the job to get disability. Be in touch with social media. They have that focus. People in these employers generation totally miss their aspirations for the future. And this is a very interesting also observation because it's gives a clarification of why we had the yellow west in Paris. We and that is also very interesting from the contribution to value creation in society. If you're in it for your visibility or if you're in the job for creating value. This is a little starting point for thoughts and reflections. And I can send the article to you. That would be great if you want to put it in the chat or send it to me as email I'll post it closer to the list. Gill is asking in the chat how does this connect to the yellow to the gilet jaune to the yellow vests. The revolution that if you're dissatisfied with the job, it's easier to go out on the streets and claim the streets. So I have a thought in my brain which I'm sharing here and actually I should do a screen share just because it's nice and richly linked. I have a thought in my brain that says we are involuntarily renegotiating the social contract around the world. And I point to Extinction Rebellion, the Arab Spring, never again the Parkland shootings, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Republican Tea Party, the Trump-Occulates Trumpism, the umbrella movement, which is a little bit different. The umbrella movement is the only uncomfortable one in here, I think, because it's an attempt to not get tractor beamed into the PRC. But there's a whole bunch of people who believe that their children's future is worse than the present and they are pissed, and a lot of these people are young humans. So I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Leif, but I think that my little thesis here kind of agrees with what you were just saying. And if so, then we probably have to find the bridge. Or the story or the something. I mean, I think there's a lot of people out there hunting for that bridge or story to tell a lot. Yes. And the solution. Right. Because it's funny, I mentioned on an earlier OJM call some months ago, George Monbio had a really nice TEDx talk in which he said, we're missing like we're missing a new narrative. His story is the new political story that could change everything. Sorry, I'm going to screen share again because it took copious notes of it. This one, the new political story that could change everything from 2019. I'll post the link to the YouTube video in the chat in a second. But he says, look, a long time ago we had Keynes's story. And Keynes's story got replaced by the neoliberal story. And now we're missing a good new story to shift to, and he, he offers one he calls the restoration story which ain't half bad. But I know that it's not just about story. It's not just about concrete solutions like you were just saying so I don't know anybody else like to jump in the article was the headline, the new crusaders, and you perhaps remember the old ones. There's a fictional superhero team called the new crusaders which I didn't know about. That's the first thing that came up for me. Contemporary extreme right symbolism is that the right one. No. I would send the link shortly. Thank you.  Well, I'll speak to that anyway. Came across an article yesterday about how the Republicans have been investing massively in the young. And so the, you know, the mood that we're seeing among the young United States, which is part of the right of what what the young were when we were all young. It's not just a random arising from the times but it's part of a systematic strategic investment program that the right has been running for decades in this country and perhaps elsewhere. And I'll see if I can find the link but somebody here probably find it faster than me. Thank you all. Mike, you want to say something about libertism. I haven't read enough of it to know all the pieces of it, but it's a three volume set. And they define this philosophy of what they're calling libertism, which is based on freedom to do whatever to do. It's about maximizing the freedom and the options that people have. So freedom to get information freedom to speak freedom to tools. It's coming out of Europe. And maybe this is a topic for two weeks from now, and we can, you know, read a one page on the building movement. Have you heard about this. So yes, I participated in a call that Lena Rachel Anderson ran just recently about Nordic building and building in general. And just for everyone's background, there was kind of this this model of Norwegian folk schools here we go folk high schools starts back around 1844. And this guy NFS Grundvig is kind of the back the background for it. And what happened was about a fifth or a quarter of Scandinavian youth went to folk high schools for a couple years I don't remember if it's a one year program or a four year program I don't know what, how long it was, but the emphasis in the folk high schools was very much what we would have called civics or, you know, citizenship or civic education back in the day. And this notion of understanding how society works and that we're all interdependent and those kinds of things and here, here I'm basically projecting on to it probably what I wish was in the curriculum so I won't say much more. And then there's a there's a nice article the Danish secret here which has a whole bunch of the history and points to it so I'll post this in in the chat. So it says here the Danish secret is a special I think this is one of Linus articles, a special kind of education called football building and it should be replicable everywhere. There's one thing about Scandinavian design, etc, etc. So so that's what I know about building sorry for the long digression. And here's that article from Lena. Also, it seems to touch metamodernism a bunch and I don't I know only enough about metamodernism to be excited about it. So metamodernism seems to be an update of the, what was the not simplicity. There was kind of a, the new sincerity is is a bit of is a bit of a movement. The new sincerity was a little feels a little bit naive but metamodernism feels much more real in some sense. So post metamodernism in the chat as well. Does that take anybody any place cause you said in the chat that it's important that we know the causes I think. That's what I was going into. With the work that I'm doing. I'm just starting to get into community level work here and then what you what you realize is that we are so disconnected from the natural world. That what seems to be no obvious solutions when you when you when you dig into the the reality of what we have been doing to the to the to nature to the biosphere that we are just not aware. I mean, we simply don't connect that they are that the restoration of biosphere keeping life alive, you know, in the soil in the ecosystem around us is of any significance. And so, in, in working with the Sierra Club, for example, I continuously see solutions offered to problems that are not defined sufficiently to to solve. I mean, give me give you one example here is a lawsuit pending here in Bend, where no we have water we are short of water 86% of the water in Bend is used by farmers. But when you look at the sustainability plan that Bend has, they're focusing on the 14% you know they have to use different shower heads and water your lawn less frequently and stuff like this. But the 86% of water that's being used for farmers is is being used to go hey, which being shipped to Japan and Saudi Arabia, you know, in China. The most water intensive crop there is so we're exporting our water and no one is really aware of why are we doing this. And so this one of the solutions being offered is for farmers to continue to have access to sufficient water is why don't we pipe this water, you know across these 10 miles of a little creek running across which farmers are using for their water supply. And the water is sinking into the ground and it's evaporating. So let's stop this and pipe the water instead to this farmer. And the response then is, so you are you are closing down the water supply to several miles of ecosystem that twice out destroys the entire biosphere in this watershed, in order to pipe water to a farmer who grows alpha alpha to ship to China. So the systems thinking, you know, that that needs to be applied to really bring logic into into the process is just really lacking is because we are alienated from nature. You know, what I think I would call yet forbidden hide the connection to the earth. And, and that's, that's actually going to kill us if we can't figure out how that works and the, the, the damage we've done to the biosphere and to the to the to the to the world around us is just incomprehensible. But it's so embedded in our way of thinking now and it's like this this extractive kind of thinking. We really take a shift now a reformation in thinking before we can solve problems. It's, it's, it would be ill at last right now to, to, to use solutions to to in our current mindset, which will just increase the damage. Who, who came up with a number 4086% what agency in your local town. That's the local soil and water conservation district. Mm hmm. So it's an accurate number I mean it's it's it's a very research number. Yeah, you're you've got your hand up and you said in the chat logic and public policy what a novel idea, and then I've had a couple kind of hope and inspiring conversations recently about, hey, if we work real hard to get open data and like focused on the data while having these conversations we might actually force policymakers to use real data and make evidence based decisions and set up experiments and all that kind of stuff because that ain't what happens most of the time. And then just going back to water and so forth, water rights.  All over the place like like they're unfair, you know if you happen to live higher on the river you get to use as much water as you want is usually the way water rights work. And there's a lot of bad blood and bad everything around the use of water rights. Sorry Mike, go ahead. Oh boy you just opened up a whole new three are going to pop a cannon worms good.  Water rights is certainly a good one I have a fantasy about writing a book called why things are this way. And it would be seven or eight chapters on different broad areas of public policy that affect our lives often without us experiencing them. Water rights is probably not going to make one of the chapters but zoning, certainly would, because that affects where we live and how much we pay for our housing and how many homeless people we see on the streets. Obviously tax policy, which is an arcane art manipulated by the wealthy. And my favorite or at least favorite is copyright, which is completely out of control. So what's the right this book, even the people who, you know are making lots of money off of off of their content and their copywriter unhappy that they get one price from the people who stream their music and another price from the radio and another price from the CDs they sell. I mean there's no consistency. And now everything's kind of merging together. So it's just crazy that we have all these esoteric rules which are generating lots of money for copyright lawyers. So I started the outline for your book here. Here's here's the book you wish you write here's over protecting IP tax policy water rights zoning laws which are my pet peeve as well. I have a lot of material for you here all you need to do is like bounce over and start writing so I think I think the two of us need to write this book very soon. Write it like a conspiracy theory, you know we could say, you know, the stuff you don't know. And, and the only differences that our conspiracy theory wouldn't blame somebody for it we would just, you know blame the system. Well it is out of control because it is allowing the wealthy to buy the political power to write the laws to make them more wealthy and more powerful. And what's so brilliant is that they do this under the table, you know very quietly and, and it just blows my mind that we're so unable to see what's really going on. And I think if we did this, you know you and I wrote this book and it became the best seller that it should. It might push us in the direction of better mental models for our society, because I'm struggling just like all of us. There, there, there needs to be a better way of describing a future. And I'm biased, you know my future would be empowered in large part by better access to more data and more powerful tools. And I'm here with you, I am missing my favorite e government conference of the year. And if you don't know about FWD 50. You need to learn about this this is a Canadian conference run by Alistair Crowell and his sister Rebecca Crowell. And I just do an amazing job of bringing in the unusual suspects to talk about how government could really work. And it's it's much more nuts and bolts it's not grand mean about about 20% of it is grand vision, and, and sort of cyber philosophy, done by some of the best people. I think there's a little bit about it here. You need to you mean this. I don't know how much he's going to charge to let people watch the videos from this year. But they just had the Minister for Digital Safety from Australia, given incredible speech. And they have a lot of practitioners people who are doing great stuff, and making a difference. Often it's about freeing the data. Yeah, the woman, the minister's name with her last name is Inman Grant, and we should recruit her for this call. I think all the way all the speakers this morning except Alistair were women so he's doing his thing for getting new voices that often aren't heard. So that's my pitch for FWD 50 full disclosure I'm on the advisory board, but that's because it's a great conference. Anyway, that's a that's my rant on alternative models of the future and why we don't have them. That's the take from Lake Wobagon. Which maybe actually just one more appropriate to say anymore I don't know. Go ahead. The woman who tuned in from Australia at 115 started off by quoting John Perry Barlow. And go like almost everybody else who quotes John Perry Barlow these days. She was saying look you know he had a vision that was the one that we could have achieved. Why didn't we, and went on from there. The other thing I just have to share with you. I am I'm in the process of emptying out a basement full of 30 years of detritus, including some of the papers that I, you know, collected when I was at the White House and and we're not talking, you know, nuclear. You have a stick in your basement. No, but I did want to share this one thing. I didn't just have one copy of this. I had 20 copies of this 20. Have you ever heard of Robert Steel. Sure.  So this guy spending billions of dollars on. Yeah, Robert David Steel, who became a completely wacko conspiracy theory guy he was on info wars, anti vaxxer who died of COVID last year. Wow, did not know that was the end of his story. No, his, I mean he got more and more fringy. But what he sent me was 20 copies of the special inaugural pre print reprinted issue information environment tools and ideas. And so this is, this is what we had before the internet. This was 1993. This is 300 pages Xeroxed of articles from the whole earth review on how we need to think about information. And I have 20 copies and so if anybody wants to send me. I just googled for it and it doesn't show up easily you could scan that sucker and post it to the internet archive, and then that would be interesting around easily. I don't know if I can I mean I don't know if if the whole earth review is copyrighted. It was published in the whole earth review. Hello, these are all reprints. He just Xeroxed articles from the whole earth review. Oh, okay, so this was basically some is dot. You know he wanted to make sure that everybody at the White House knew what the whole earth review had written in the previous 10 years about how information should be used. Okay. Of course, everybody in the White House had time to read a 300 page book, but it's a historical document. And as I say, if anybody you know an article, you know, Tim, Tim Leary and and Ted Nelson and of practice here. Yes, the Internet Archive has permission to scan and put up all of the whole earth review and coalition quarterly so mail it and I'll get it scanned. Okay, just to your attention. I'm sure I'm 300 Funston I forget what the zip code is but yeah please to my attention. Thanks Mark I mean I, as I say I mean I in some ways I don't want to be associated with this guy because of what he did 30 years later, but he was a disrupter back in 1993. He was amazing on the well I've known him since 89 on the well so he, I'm sorry to hear that he went as a number of people I never expected to go went into some strange land that I don't recognize. I had a large number. He had a large number of book reviews on Amazon. Very voracious reader. My theory is that he started taking this, this drug that was it hydrochloroquine that Trump was advocating. Apparently Michael Flynn has been taking it for 30 years. And I think a lot of the military people took it sometimes they took it when they were posted to places that had so many bugs that they needed extra protection. But apparently, there are long term effects and maybe that's the nanochips buried inside of it that you know lead to mind controls gosh. I think it's the way around I think the drug just doesn't need the drug does it all by itself it doesn't need a chip but if you read the stuff that Michael Flynn is saying now. I mean, yeah, yeah, a lot of people are clearly unhinged. A lot of people have gone off the deep end.  Sorry, thank you very much. Thanks Mike that was fascinating. And oh and I want to come back to it but after after Gil. Yeah, totally fascinating that conference Mike only has 654 speakers that seems pretty pretty lightweight. I couldn't find anybody to come in. There you go I agree with Jerry you should definitely write this book. I'm expecting you not to copyright it. And, and Jerry you've got a remarkable new service here which is posting all the books that all of us intend to write. Yeah, I think that'd be good and outlining them and then being our like cyber ghostwriter to co write them with us and just you know, triple our productivity in publishing so I'm in for that when I'll spend you a list of books I'm not writing back on on the stuff about water rights and the rest. And memory leavens used to say that the generally the cause of problems is solutions. And a lot of the things that were cranky about are things that were that were positive innovations in their day. I mean, you know, copyright had a reason it's out of control now but there was a reason for copyright initially to, you know, to give some protection and benefit for creative work rather than to lock up IP. The water rights thing Jerry. Yeah, in some places the people upstream have dibs on whatever they can grab. In some places the downstream people are protected which has the effect of upstream people not being able to do water captures like you know right depending where you live you maybe cannot put cisterns connected to your downspouts because you're depriving downstream people of their waters it's complicated. When I was working in Palo Alto is chief sustainability officer. It was very challenging to deal with the procurement system, which had been put into place as an anti corruption tool because there had been a lot of fraud and graft and abuse some decades before. And so everything was ridiculously locked down to the extent that if you're going to interview a vendor. You had to you have to work off of a written script. Had to be exactly the same script with each vendor, the same member of the interview team had to ask the same question, no number three you're asking number three and Mike's asked number four of each vendor. Follow up questions because then you might be asking different questions of different vendors. And so, you know, well intentioned originally but a mess, as a result. So, that was just the thought on that you know we, we, we, we, we, how do you, I guess the question there is, can you design innovations that are anticipatory enough that they don't, you know they minimize the chance of falling into counterintuitive traps down the road, and maybe not. Maybe you need to just be agile and adaptive. Thanks, Gil. I wanted to go back and weave a little bit, what Mike was saying, and partly the book you want to write Mike is part of the reason that today's youth are disillusioned the way that life put in the conversation at the stop at the top of the call. The resources that I just shared in my brain are all deep resources on these issues because I, they're my pet peeves as well. But we could crowdsource this it doesn't need to be you writing a book solving all these problems. We could create frameworks and then four of us could publish books, books about this topic that we've together the stories that we care about and we can concurrently publish them for example. This is a small digression, but I have a naive belief that PowerPoints and books are just playlists PowerPoints are playlists of pages. And I played with this with Kenneth Tyler, when he had when he was running seed wiki and we made it so that I could create a one page on seed wiki that was basically a presentation. All it had on it was a list of pages that lived in that wiki each page was a slide. And then there was a play button that he wrote for me. And when I press play it went full screen gave me left and right arrows and played that playlist that's all it was right. And so books are playlists of chapters chapters or playlists of nuggets of interesting information. And it would be really fun to have a system where we could share out the nuggets where we reuse where clause rights and nugget about regenerative ag, and and and what's been defeating it and like, I have a whole bunch of thoughts about how terrible it is to be a small farmer in the US right now like small farms are in a war that they did not declare. It's really hard to stay alive. Never mind what Bayer Monsanto and everybody else or and John Deere and everybody else are busy doing to you. And that's a that's a piece of it. But but this could all just be put in the commons as resources for movements and for policy building because how the sausage got made whatever stories we have around that is inspiring to people but it's also information for how to fix the system. And as soon as young people figure out that there's a way to fix the system. By collaborating and sharing open data and then building on these resources with us, we're kind of like often running and rolling in an interesting direction.  And it strikes me that we already are doing a piece of this I mean in these conversations in the in the matter most in the various wikis that Pete's got his hands in. We are semi publishing a lot of stuff. And it needs a curation layer and an edit layer and maybe a marketing layer. But there's there's potentially something remarkable here if we follow this thread a little further. I agree and one of my pet peeves on my great other great frustrations is that we're posting on a mailing list where they were everything goes off into the bit bucket. Instead of taking interesting ideas and posting them in public view at least on blogs or some kind of persistent place maybe even on our own wikis as pages we can refer to and improve over time. So when I see interesting stuff float by on the list I'm like ah damn. I'm like oh my god that's interesting. And then I'm like ah damn again and I harvest those and put them in my brain which is this quick thing that isn't yet connected properly to a commons that we can share.  But we need to sort of use our own techniques and technologies here to actually bootstrap this thing into being.  So we need to invent an alternative term to dog foodings so that we can all avoid using it. Unfortunately, it's a it's an evocative term and everybody's like oh yeah, eating your own dog food, which is the disgusting thought to but still. It came from software I think anybody correct me if you've got a better etymology I'm sure people have a proper article found within seconds of the etymology of dog pudding, but it was. When you need to test software you should use it yourself to see if it actually serves. The concept is clear I'm wondering how to eat your own dog food emerged as the as the as the label for that practice. I think it comes from the same world that invented breathe your own exhaust and other kinds of aphorisms. It's learn green and Alpo. Wait, learn green my dogs. Oh. So then it was a Microsoft manager that picked it up. It was Microsoft. Love that. Well, an early form of that was in the corporations. I will the dogs eat it. Makes sense. I got that a he would pack it in the 70s. That seems more likely.  Yeah. So I'm going to start putting all this information together. It seems to me it develops a center of gravity as to what the world view is. How can you come along and add something which actually shifts the world view. The momentum and the pieces of information is really high. And so my amateur to my own amateur take on this is that my brain contains a point of view that I have been nurturing for 25 years. And as I contributed into the Commons, that's one source of energy and content. And I would love for it to be mingled with a whole bunch of other people with the different and sometimes completely contrary points of view. What I'm looking for is an arena, a techno arena and a digital space within which we can compare contrast our points of view where Doug when you make a brilliant argument about how to get our way out of the current conundrum and I love your argument I can include it by reference as representing a piece of what I believe as well sort of by proxy. Right. And all of that can begin to become this organic context the space within which we start making decisions together so it's important that the space preserve different individual opinions, but it's also important that the space not promote 8 billion different opinions just being published out in the world but rather some crystallization or synthesis or collapsing together. And that's one of the well expressed points of view on things so that we can converge instead of diverge and sort of drown in everybody saying everything they believe in Doug does that resonate for you at all. Yeah, but I want to bring up an example. The tendency in the data world is to bring big data and artificial intelligence and some of the big platforms together as a world governing system. The momentum there is high it has a lot of payoff in terms of business and so on. It would be very hard. Once you have that system with its own momentum to raise questions about it. It's going to be always put off in some kind of okay we have a space for contrary opinions, but they can never take over or challenge the central metaphor. There's many dystopian futures we seem to be barreling toward that's I think one of them well described. And it's interesting to think about whether you could architect this space such that it couldn't be co opted to either automatically reduce dissident voices so that they're all marginalized and not heard a kind of as you just described or something else and then there's a lot of smart people out there trying to undermine the whole system and gain power and that's just a reality of what's happening. So how do you how do you create a system that is have some kind of inoculation against that, while permitting the open expression of ideas and the way grace expressed in the call two weeks ago that was kind of the seed for a piece of this conversation like how do we still make room for those things. And in particular, a whole bunch of dissidents just want their points of view to be heard honestly and sincerely and with respect that's what they need. They are invincible. But only when they've gotten to that stage are they invincible maybe otherwise in some other ways.  And I'm, again, an amateur on these things but that that's how I think the dynamics play out a bunch. Yeah, I would argue that the algorithms that are driving a I a downright dangerous and one example here is in 2018 McKinsey published a report on the future of food to the World Economic Forum. And it was completely driven by techno solutions which gave us, you know, the impossible meats and the slap on the protein substitutes and so on without any recognition to the impact they have on the ecosystem. Well, and then on the socio economic systems that are that are being impacted. So they're trying to create this monstrosity of solutions in food that are actually driving this whole system deeper into the ground. So the disconnect that we have with the natural world and are not understand simply the socio economic impacts of innovations, not that alienate entire population groups, but then also the ecosystem where we still have this extractive mindset, you know that we can get out of the environment, what what is most conducive. It's, it is absolutely devastating what that does. So AI is basically an extension of our way of thinking of our mindset, you know, and until we can step back and really look at this holistically but just aggravate the issues we have. I'm class if there's a way for you to find that particular McKinsey report that was so influential I would love to add that I've got a bunch of McKinsey reports in my brain but and I just scanned them and none of them was about food or the food system and I found some Googling about food handling. The food handling industry but I don't think that's what you were talking about. So what do we do about this dog I can tell you're about to speak. And if not then Michael just raises hand. Yeah, go ahead. So what comes up for me is it's sort of the gun in the hands of a bandit. So the the aggregation of the data aggregation of the information is as well in hand. There's a metal layer to that, which is the user interface. So what's the, what's the meme of the moment that I am in that I'm touching that enables me to plug into your brain let's say and sort of instantaneously have a huge starting place. You know, the third leg of the stool is what are the values and what is the purpose of the person in that driving seat. And I don't know that there's been sort of the equivalent of Bill of Rights declaration of independence whatever whatever whatever but whether there's ever really been a concerted effort to maybe define a value space and a purpose space for who's using it for what purpose and service and if that were a defined thing then on an automated basis you could actually have an automated monitor that is looking at what somebody is doing and identifying when they're going off the rails when they're going outside the frame or when they're in violation. Who defines what the rails are? Well, that's my point. I mean, I think there's this tendency to say, you know, if someone's defining it then it's skirt because it's cognitively biased or it's got an agenda or somebody's using it in service to their own interest. But I do believe, you know, there is a history of people that got together and got as close as they could to principles based, values based, you know, sort of fundamental and universal things that say this is good and that's not. And that's a legitimate dimension of our capacity to drill into and put a stake in the ground. Even if it's a beginning stake, but to say there is a frame that says this is in service to the whole and the commons transcendent of any one person's individual benefit return interest and that on one hand it's using resources but if in alignment with that higher purpose than the value that it's generating and feeding back into the system makes that loop work. You know, there's, there's, Carla's been working with, I'm blanking on Bill's, Bill's last name. Anderson. It's a framework that has to do with control appreciation. And I think it might be control appreciation gratitude but it's different degrees of power and control over things being done or created. And it's a framework where the question he started with was in generative endeavor, it's all about energy. And where does the energy source from for bringing things into manifestation for creating things like, where does that, where does that come from? And where, where, what is PhD ultimately identified was purpose. That purpose is really the source of energy and then applied, you know, brings it to power in service to generate your generating your manifesting, but that purpose piece is really sort of the source. And the only thing that makes it the source is if that purpose is in service to the greater grander and transcendent of self interest and egoic guy. And so if that were just sort of a lightning rod, you know, in the ground, that could be the starting place for defining what is in service to the good on the greater grander whole on the species level on source level and all of those. So that's, that's just what's living for me as it's in the soft stuff, it's not in the, what can we do now technology look mile what I can do. It's like, who's driving and who's providing, you know, is there any kind of reference to evaluate is this an alignment with that or not. And if not, then we have to go back to the drawing board to figure out a way to create or do what we want to do that isn't aligned. So I'm done. Sorry for the way for that. That's okay. Thank you. Thanks. Michael then Mark. Yeah, I mean I put a lot of what I was saying and thinking in the chat.  But the ability to take those inputs and express them as a searchable filterable metadata, you know, is using the example that you could have one article that, you know, appears here and here in Jerry's brain was mentioned in these five blogs is cited in these two Wikipedia entries is, you know, that the sort of back linking of things being, you know, made to be more searchable and more filterable upon so that in a given moment, you're able to, you're able to filter on the subject that you're looking for. There's no, I mean, this obviously is, is really opposed by the attention selling business model because the idea of letting you on the fly filter down to the thing that you're really interested in and why, you know, I don't want to see the most popular stuff on this. I don't want to see videos.  I mean, at another time you want to might want to say, you know, I want to screen out all academic views and I want to see cat videos, blah, blah, blah, but that should be so much easier to do than it is and could be and would let a lot of platforms bloom, you know, that you could look at it via, you know, your brain and link out to the other instances as you wish you could. Like, who else is looking at this thing I found and, and what did they think that's to me the Holy Grail. It's what, you know, factor philosophically is all about. And, you know, it's that's just one, one lens on stuff. And, you know, some people are going to want to look at it in a, in a map and, you know, a wiki and you name it. Yeah. I know I'm preaching the choir, but we need to keep working on it and work together. Or at least we should sing something together so that we can be the choir. Thanks, Michael. Mr. Cronza, you're muted. My muted. And now you're not. Am I not muted? Okay, there we go. As somebody raised by very strict Catholic parents. And who became an eagle scout, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, brave, 50 reference. I think I goofed up for like one of the first times in my life. Oh man. It's a, it's coffee time then. 50 brave Queen and Reverend. Thank you. Thank you. But I never got the obedient part personally. I did. Yes. In. A milieu such as this one. I defer to the common kind of goals of, of everybody here. I don't want to go off on my own topic about, I don't know. How great ketamine is or something like that. But. I'm hearing a couple of things that. Disturbed me as usual. One is this notion of AI. And a technical solution to a human problem. This. You know, I talked with an educational. Researcher at UC Berkeley. About 20 years ago. And the problem isn't access to imagination. The problem is how do you get kids to be curious? How do you get kids to be. Involved in government or, or, you know, basically the question of agency. There's another UC. UC Berkeley researcher that I was turned on to, but I haven't made the, I haven't made the click to open the document. But basically. A woman talking about people who had. Miracle cures of cancer or, or. Multiple sclerosis or some kind of thing as the story was told. Again, I haven't seen the document. And apparently. This document and the woman has been embraced by the Louise Hay. Organization, but basically. The thing that is in common that people basically healed from. Is a sense of personal agency is my responsibility to fix it. It's my responsibility to attend this meeting. It's my responsibility to criticize. The attitude that technology will save us from ourselves. It's my responsibility to not go off on some wacky topic. That isn't of interest to all the people. And the lack of agency. That is. Basically, you know, the entertainment.  Saying that you don't have agency.   Do not. Organize do not show your own personal agency. Do not have group agency in any way. This is a human problem, not a technological one. And that's why I'm here to try and figure out how I can connect with Mike, with Pete, with Vincent, with Doug, Michael, and the folks here and say, you know what? We can do this together.  Facebook, I forget what it's called to do. So what I try to do in my writing my tool is say this is a tool for basically being honest with yourself, not with other people, but with yourself to understand who you are and to develop your own agency. Now, am I successful at that?  That's what I do. And that's what I try. Thank you for listening to my little rant. And again, I do not trust technology. Grace, there's a bunch of ambient noise from your, from your line. Thanks for joining us. And I have a funny feeling that the one week disjunct between when we shift our daylight savings and when Europe shifts their daylight savings might be the reason you're joining us now. Because we've also had a conflict, sorry. Okay, good. Cool. Thanks. So I'll come back to you in a second if you'd like. And I just wanted to jump in with what Mark said, because. And I, I, we've talked about this in a couple of different calls in a couple of different settings. But I'm of the belief that kids are completely born curious and inquisitive and trying to figure out their role in the world. And we socialize that out of them. And our systems, our institutions are designed for mistrust of the average person and stamp out curiosity, sense of agency. And then I've been chasing the word consumer for 30 years. And one of the things that that taught me was that consumerization drives away our sense of agency. Our only job as good consumers is to buy more shit, whether we need it or not. And if we stop doing that, the machine comes to a halt and we all die. Our role as citizens. Is to actually be engaged and be responsible and all the good things that come with a sense of agency and responsibility that that you were just describing Mark. And so, and there's an entire narrative that Barry Lynn has sort of documented or figured out about how there was an intentional shift of treating us as consumers instead of citizens. And, you know, if you scroll back 100 years, we were thought of as citizens and politicians treated us as citizens and we were trying to be in town halls making decisions. And that was driven away on purpose so that we are now consumers of government. And right now we're hot and heavy and electoral cycle where they want lots of money. I get so many emails every day asking me for money to pour into the media machine. It just irritates the hell out of me. And Mika Sifri and other friends of ours are busy trying to figure out how do we slow this process down and rebuild our relationships and trust instead of just spamming people with ads or, you know, leaflets and all that kind of stuff. And so there's a whole lot there. And I think Mark a piece of a piece of getting to a solution for you is has to do with fixing what's broken that we started out at the top of the call with which is there's a whole bunch of systems that are dysfunctional. A lot of people see that the future is worse than the present because of these dysfunctions. The system is rigged. The system is broken needs to be shattered. A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because of this. There's a lot of people who saw the choices in the 2016 election as do I want to maintain the status quo? Do I want to destroy the system?  Just that's immaterial because the system is so broken. And I think that the rise of the far right right now is happening in some measure because of that. I wish I knew to what measure and I wish Wendy Elford were on the call because we could use sense maker to find out maybe sense maker is a tool from the David Snowden. No relation to Ed Snowden, but David Snowden's Kenevin world and sense maker is a brilliant tool for collecting rich data down at the ground level. When the Arab Spring started, the US government did a survey to figure out in Egypt, were the people rising up because of US interference or was this just a local phenomenon and sense maker told them or the analysis using sense maker said this is not a US backlash. This is a local issue like, you know, go home and get some sleep or figure out how to help Egypt stand up and that's a whole other story. Anyway, those things are all meshed together in my head and really important and Mark, you know, are you trying to squish me or would you like to jump in for just a moment? Short comments. Perfect. Jump in because I thought you were doing the face and I was like, ah, that's just, that's just hostile. Kidding. Go ahead. I thought he was adjusting the dials. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I thought he was playing the theremin. I have, I have a different hand signals for different things. I like that sense for copyright. Kill you with these two fingers. Longbow. That's like the one in the one inch punch. Yes, one inch punch. Yeah. I just wanted to say. You know, the youth that I meet and I'm in a bubble here in San Francisco. And I realize that so much when I travel around. But the youth that I meet are not without agency. And they're, they're really kind of amazing. Aaron Schwartz day is coming up at the Internet Archive. I think there's a hackathon today for, for good somewhere. Yeah, kids I meet. They're, they're on top of it. Gil. Yeah, I mean, what Mark said actually fits this when you talk about the, the it's all fucked. Let's break it. They gave rise to Trump. The same mood. I think contributed to Bernie Sanders pulling 44% of the Democratic primary votes, despite a massive media blockout. And a lot of people who were Bernie bros voted for Trump because he didn't get the nomination. Yeah, not because they supported Trump, but because they wanted to, you know, they wanted to vote against what was so. And so the more interesting question for me is.  But in fact, there's evidence that there are other ways to play the game and that this defection can go in other directions. Well organized. Probably not. We're not well enough. But you know, it's a more complicated game than oh shit, we've lost, which is one of the moods that you hear out on the political hustling is these days. That's all. Thanks. Doug. Yeah, I'm back being puzzled by Doug B's point of view. And it raises a question. The idea that we could come up with a coherent intellectual strategy and structure that we can all agree on. Seems to me not possible in history. We're in a situation where we're playing a game of musical chairs. We're more than one chair disappearing on each round. And to get the people to all agree on what the strategy is just seems impossible. They're going to be struggles that are going to be somewhat violent and difficult. That's what we are going to find. And intellectualizing as a way of trying to contain it all and make it coherent seems to me not possible. Thanks Doug. I'm kind of, I agree with you on that. And I think that class you said earlier, we have to understand the causes. And I'm half on board with that because I think how the sausage got made is super important to making better decisions going forward. But I think also we can't agree on the causes and the causes are turtles all the way down. And our endless arguments about cause, like just go to Israel and Palestine. It's like, we had it here. You had it here. We had it here. You had it here. That just goes forever. But understanding how things happened, the book that Mike and we now need to write, or the books that Mike and we now need to write, that's really important. So all that background information is fodder for these kinds of conversations. Michael. I think that's partly in response to what, what Doug was just saying. I feel like, and I don't know if you were addressing this notion of. The technological. Pursuit of. I wouldn't call it consensus, but, you know, but sense making through. I don't think that that's an intellectual framework that, you know, everybody needs to agree on. It's more like a physical framework that allows people's disagreements, not to bleed over as tribally. And to be able to see. Oh, you know, right now filter bubbles work as. As aligning tools that say, if you're. If you feel this way about this issue, this other issue that you never thought about and you aren't passionate about, you have to be passionate about it. Like your, your views on, on, you know, tax cuts have to correspond to your views on abortion. Et cetera, et cetera. And if, if things were able to be more granular so that you could explore a subject and see, oh, you know, there's really relative consensus around. This, you know, this place in the climate spectrum and this place on the abortion rights spectrum. And this place on, you know, on the efficacy of trickle down economics, et cetera, et cetera. And there were just neutral. Ways of finding that stuff. I really, really think it would do a lot to bust filter bubbles and do a lot to, you know, bust orthodoxies. There's just, you know, we don't, all our products are, we don't, you know, we don't have orthodoxies. There's just, you know, we don't, all our polling tends to be binary. I was always fascinated in 2008, I think it was. There was a short lived third political party presidential effort that went nowhere.  What's his name, the kind of old school Republican who was ambassador to China and. Mitt Romney. Not Romney. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And the, you know, the party went nowhere. But what they did was they had a questionnaire online that, you know, you got to do, but I never got to see the results of that had about five graduated positions on every issue. And, you know, I was way to the left on a lot of things. And I was, you know, more libertarian on other things.  But I thought the more important thing was that.  There's, there's a pretty good plurality, if not a majority at one point on the meter, but if you turn it binary, you know, and label things red and blue, you can get polar polarization. So yeah, it's, I just want to push back on that idea that we're talking about an intellectual framework or a technical solution. When we're talking about the ability to granularly upvote and link to the stuff that's in the world. Michael, I'm, I'm with you on that a lot and you're what you just said sort of clarified a bit for me that the people on the far right are running an epistemic coup and the undermining of facts and trust undermine everything else. And so never mind getting to an agreement on the larger narrative and causes or anything like that. And that seems impossible to me. But we can't even agree that a fact matters and that we should make decisions based on facts, that thing. And if you can break that thing, that's very good for winning power and control when you don't own a majority of the actual votes. So that actually works. And we haven't figured out the antidote to that yet. And my own wish is that if we do this in a grassroots approach, we'll get a taste of actually using data to solve their own local problems. That actually would help a lot. I'm not sure about that class. Jerry, I just have to jump on it because it just like this is the second time you've done this and I've heard it again in this argument. There's this complete like right after Michael talked about how there's a spectrum. Again, you're with this. The right, the extreme right thing. And I got to tell you the extreme right is just as willing to and just as strongly opposed to factual arguments as the extreme right. And the extreme left has a lot more power in the media. And it's really exhausting in this conversation with this group of people. And I see it on the OGM list. And I see it here. This level of intolerance and inability to see that this is happening on both sides. And just the right is always wrong. And I find it, I just find this level of intolerance completely disaligned with what this group is about. Grace, thank you. And it seems like we've come back to the topic you put on the table last week after all, and I appreciate that. And I want to examine what you just said, because I think you just said that the extreme left is just as willing to undermine facts as the right. And I am guilty indeed of repeatedly saying that the far right is doing this to us and doing that to us. And I totally agree, but I can't agree with the statement that I just typed into the chat, which I think is a paraphrase of what you said. So can you help me clarify that? I'm having trouble looking at the chat, but I just wrote the extreme left is just as willing to undermine the right. Absolutely. I don't see where the left is trying hard. Well, did you know that there are more than two sexes in human being these days? That's just not a biological fact.   And that would be fine. I'm sorry, but that's not a fact. And you can't bear children. And I find that quite offensive. And did you know that two, two plus two isn't necessarily for all this stuff is coming from the extreme left, not the extreme right. And all of this, you know, the rewriting of history with people, colonization and this, this extreme radical, like gender studies on a lot of the stuff is so unscientific. And you just hear these people rattling off this stuff and rewriting history and ignoring whatever facts they want. And I'm sorry, I'm a centrist. I'm not like, and I'm generally associated with the left, but some of this garbage that I see coming out of the left, it's just so damaging to society.  And we saw what happens when men compete in women's sports. And this is coming from the far left. So there, that's how I see it. I just have to interact real quickly on this. I am strongly in agreement with the. Crazy talk that we're hearing from. A very small part of the left. I mean, the difference here is this might be a million people, whereas the Fox news viewers are 30 or 40 million people. I mean, at times some of the things that I'm hearing from the left almost sound like what you would say if you were trying to discredit Democrats in general. I mean, defund the police and the whole idea that you pick your gender and you can pick a different one next week. And I have to say with Jerry, the numbers are what's out of whack.  I don't agree because if you look who dominates the media, it's not Fox news. It's the New York Times. It's the Washington post, it's Facebook and it's Twitter. And those are all left wing. But it's much more power. And I guess I can tell voters around the world seem to be split pretty damn near 5050. And I think the power is pretty evenly spread like Bolsonaro lost not by 10% he lost by like a percent and a half maybe, which is quite amazing, like given everything that's happened. So, so these, I think we're on a knife edge worldwide. There's this crazy sort of even split. And in here and power is being wielded in really mysterious and interesting ways all around. I think gender identity is its own little complicated can of worms. The best explanation of gender identity I ever saw was Hank and John Green. I think one of them, the vlog brothers basically explaining gender identity years ago in a video that was really clarifying to me and I knew a lot of it, but not all of it. And it was also a nice way of setting one thing from another, et cetera, et cetera and differentiating from biological, you know, genetic background from preferences from other kinds of things. And I think that that's an issue that society needs to figure out how to deal with and talk about. And it then boils down to gender specific restrooms and gender assignment and personal pronouns, like it bubbles up as those issues, which are very easy to pull up and say, I hate this. This is awful.  We are near the end of our 90 minutes and we have a lot of enthusiasm in the room and a lot of people who'd like to jump in. Klaus was up a long ago and I was going to ask Klaus and Doug if what they wanted to jump in for was still relevant, given where we are now, it appears that yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Because I mean, I have a kickoff meeting coming up later. I mean, at noon actually today with a group of NGOs here in Bend members from USDA, the Soil and Water Conservation District and we're going to talk about water and soil. We're going to talk about food security, food shortages. We're talking about the impact of a changing climate, not about what causes climate change or even touch the topic of climate change, which is instantly leading to debates and nonsensical argumentations, but which are, by the way, coming almost exclusively from the right. But we're going to talk about simply every farmer out there knows that weather patterns have changed and that we need to respond to that, to protect our soil, to protect watersheds. So to come down to bread and butter issues, forget about all this, this aggravating argumentations that really lead us into conflict and no solutions at all. We are unfortunately in an era where we are experiencing the result of a climate crisis. We will experience food shortages next year that no one is prepared for. 2023 is going to be a fiasco and we are arguing about gender identity.  We are insane, is my perspective here. So we have to actually really focus on what is important for our most immediate survival. And we are dealing with a population that is so under educated, so uninformed about what we are facing. And so distracted with these nonsensical issues, that it is actually really scary. So that was sort of my, I think that fits in with what Grace was just saying. Thank you, class. And I'm a little stressed because we're near the end of this call. We've been going through all, and I love this topic. I really want to slow down and sink into it. I'm thinking we figure out how to formulate this properly and make this our call topic in two weeks again. If that resonates with the group, because I think this is really important stuff. And Grace, thank you for jumping in and calling me out on this. And I'm reflecting on how I approach this. I'm just going to go back to the floor. I already took the floor. So. Oh, okay.  I was just going. Yeah, I didn't bring it down, but I'm sorry. I cut the queue. I just had a 30 second intervention. That's right. Michael. Yeah. I'll have. The link isn't handy and maybe someone will beat me to it, but it though I don't agree with it. I think it's worthwhile to read Ross Dow. That's peace. Yeah.   There's not nothing there.      What, how do you mean that? Well, I mean, that is not where people are. That is where people have been forced to be. Not just a system. I mean, because I don't think the. I don't think the electoral system is inherently as broken. In this country as it's.  I mean, there are no two parties in the Constitution. You know, the things that make us be the way they are, be the way we are. Are fed by the fact that we have. Two entities, corporations, whatever you want to, like however you want to characterize them. That are motivated. To, you know, I mean, rank choice voting would be one huge. Help in, and, and, you know, jungle primaries and, and, and, you know, more divergent polling, as I was talking about before. All these things that could expose our non 50, 50, 50 nests are masked by, you know, by.  And that, that's the only thing that people define themselves by, or are forced to define themselves by. There's no way to debate issues around the edges or have, you know, positions that don't fit with your color. And the 50 50 thing. Sorry. No, thank you. And I, and I agree with how you just framed that a lot. And oddly, in undergrad at UC Irvine, I had a polymetrics course from a Finnish professor whose name escapes me. And one of the weird things that came up in that course that I wish I could find more references to were, do, do politics just go 50 50. And at one point he had us count the number of countries or the population of countries on either side of the iron curtain, which is basically the Cold War. Right. And it was, it was kind of 50 50 for world population. You were like, good God, how do these, is there some kind of natural dynamic where there, there's wars of ideas that wind up splitting down the middle. And it seems completely bogus and forced in the ways that you were just saying Michael. If you have a poll. That shows that you're 48% and your opponent is 52%. You move in their direction. And that's the dynamic that moves toward that split. Yeah. And the other thing that I would say is, is true is that. Sorry, you'll just, just one more quick thing. That the. I won't go off on this. Yeah. Just a couple of minutes left. Responding to both Michael and to grace. The 50 50 thing is real problematic. And if you look at the 2016 election, it was about 60 million votes for each candidate, but there are about a hundred million people who didn't vote. So that's pretty important. Like more than for either candidate. If you pull people on the issues, and this has been true as far as I can tell over the past 50 years that I've been watching it. If you pull people on the issues and depending on how you construct the language, there are super majorities for all sorts of, you know, what we call progressions. Super majorities for abortion. Super majorities on climate. Super majorities on all sorts of stuff. And that does not show up in the elections. So yeah, there's an interesting question there. Grace, what you're calling the left is I sounds like mostly the American left, the American left or what we call the American left is pretty much centrist on a world scale of left, right. It's not left. The, the folks that you're. Ranting about, and I share your concern about that is a very small sliver of the American left that has captured a large sliver of attention and the power that Jerry just worked on you because in response to Grace's point, which is about a larger political dynamic, you went into a discourse about gender. And I was picking one of the issues. Yeah. Yeah, but, but, but for me, it took us like out of the conversation into a whole debate about what is gender and that's an interesting debate. And we can have that another time. That's sort of what I meant, but I'm sorry for the distraction. Really off of the question of the insanity of a grace for me is that you have, you have Democrats in the United States who are centering gender identity as an issue when the fate of democracy and climate and other things are the issue. And to your both side is and there's where I got to push back on you. You know, the Democrats are crazy and feckless and have all sorts of problems with them, but the Republicans are running a concerted campaign to dismantle the electoral system in the United States. They're going after 200,000 precinct captain seats at the local level around the country to put people who do not believe in elections in charge of elections. The left is doing nothing like that. Doesn't match the organizing depth, consistency, funding, strategy or objectives that we see through that. And I think that's the right. We see that in Mitch McConnell's, you know, refusal to hear, to allow hearings from Eric Garland and say his commitment to control the courts forever and we see how successful that's been. So I, I, I, I, I, I, I honor the questions you're raising about gender and some of the flaws that are left, but we are facing a very concerted systematic effort to smash everything that we care about. And I'm, I'm totally on that. And there was, I just retweeted. The election is in what is it for six days. There are places that you can still give money. There are places where you can do text and get it out the votes. I'll put some links into the, into the Jerry, sorry, the email thing. But there's actions that we can all take over the next four or six days that can actually have impact on political racism. I'm going to post a thread reader unwind of a thread by Thomas Zimmer, where he says this isn't, this isn't about political polarization or extremes that this is one side acting that the way you just described Gil. And I'm happy to contemplate that that's not right. That like, if the left is doing something anywhere as, as, as aggressive and destructive as what I, what I personally perceive the right is doing, then I haven't heard it and don't understand it. Um, far as I can tell the left is trying really hard to defend democracy at this moment. Whatever it's failing, whatever it's pre-processed, sorry, Michael, go ahead. I just want to throw in, you know, since I've been making a, you know, kind of plurality in the middle argument and, and I do want to agree that I'm gloating straight blue in this particular situation and, you know, and that we're, I think Gil, something that you linked to last time use the term, um, which I've seen a couple of places. We are within the margin of effort and, you know, doing, even if you don't have money to give at this late moment, doing any call banking that you can do, which I think there were some links to Gil and the thing that you shared, um, I just really resonate with that term, the margin of effort. Thank you. Um, any concluding thoughts for this call? Um, yes, please. Go ahead, Grace. I think my thought is that, you know, it's really important for democracy for us to, to listen to ourselves and to one another and to consider both sides. And whenever we find ourselves in a bit of an echo chamber, say, oh, wait a second. I'm in a bit of an echo chamber. And that's all I'm pointing out here is I'm saying, Hey, this might be a bit of an echo check mirror. Um, this and, and there's something to step back and look at. And I think that that's really what this group is about. It's about reflecting about our own biases and reflecting about, um, the way, ways in which, um, we might expand our horizons. And that's why we come. Totally agree, Grace. Thank you. And actually, um, Mark, you have before, but that was a beautiful bow to put on this conversation. I would like to. Honor the ancestors. The day of the dead. The day. Yesterday was honoring the adult dead. The November 1st, honoring the death of children. And people are dying. Stop killing people.  Stop killing people. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. See you all next week for a check and format of the week after for more on this topic, please use the OGM town square. Channel to refine this conversation or continue it between calls. That would be lovely. Uh, open also to not doing check in next week and just diving in here, but it feels like our rhythm of alternating is pretty good for how we feel. Um, so let's go there. And thank you all very much for being here. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here. Grace, thank you for your patience and love in, uh, interacting with us. Even though we're. Lost in our echo chamber in some, in some form. So thank you. Thanks all.


Hello. In this presentation, we will be discussing a trial balance. Objectives. At the end of this, we will be able to define a trial balance, list components of a trial balance, and explain how a trial balance is used. When considering the trial balance, we first want to think about where the trial balance falls within the construction of the financial statements. In other words, what processes go before the trial balance, what goes after the trial balance, where does the trial balance fit into our process. Remember the ending goal, the ending process of the accounting being to compile the data in such a way to create the financial statements, those financial statements being the end product. Typically, if we're thinking about a linear process, then we're thinking about all the transactions that would happen during the month, those being recorded in terms of journal entries in the general journal. So we would be recording a bunch of journal entries, one looking like this. This is recording draws and checking account for a shareholder who are a drawing from a sole proprietor being pulled out of the company. Then we would post all of those to the general ledger. So posting the general journal entries from the journal entries from the general journal to the general ledger, the general ledger being a list of all the accounts. So we're going to have a list of all accounts in order by assets, liabilities, equity, income, and then expense accounts. And we're showing all the activity for whatever period that we are now covering. Typically, we're looking at a month by month period or possibly a year's period, whichever the case may be. We're going to see all this activity when considering the general ledger, this particular account being a debit to drawings, here's the debit to drawings, and a credit to cash. Here is the credit to cash. That shows all the activity. Now the problems that we will be working, and also when you're thinking about a computer system, note that this tends to happen more all at the same time, meaning if we're working this by hand with paper and pencil, we would record all the journal entries, and then record the posting of all those journal entries to the general ledger, and then take those general ledger balances to create the trial balance. That's a useful way to think about it when considering how the process works. In reality, in a computer system and as much as possible in any system that we can put together, we would like to do more of this at the same time, meaning I would like to construct the journal entry and then post it, and then record the posting or the trial balance as we go, rather than waiting till the end. In practice, that's how we will look at it, but it's useful to think of this process as a linear process, as we're just going to do all the one, all of the journal entries, and then all of the GL, and then all of the trial balance when considering where the trial balance falls. Once we have these balances then, we're going to take these ending balances here, these ending balances in all these accounts, the ending balance for cash $6,160 for accounts receivable $800 for the supplies, we got $325, we skip over here to accounts payable, we have a credit balance represented here by the brackets, credits beating the debits of $1,890, notes payable credit balance of $8,000. We're just going to take those ending balances then to create the trial balance. The trial balance then is something that can really be a lot easier for us to look at and get a quick glance at just those ending balances, eliminating all the detail. For example, in the cash account, we will see on the trial balance $6,160, eliminating all of this detail within the trial balance, and thereby being able to work with something that's a bit more manageable and can tell us some different types of data. So when we look at the trial balance then, it could be formatted in a couple different forms, but we're typically always going to have the accounts listed in the same order as we find them on the general ledger. That's going to be the assets in green in this case on top, then the liabilities, then the equity, then the revenue, then the expenses. Remember if you remember that if you are talking about a sole proprietor, your equity will be capital and the drawings will typically be in the equity type area as well. If you're talking about a corporation, you're going to have common stock and you're going to have retained earnings. So you'll note here that up here in cash, we've got that $6,160. Again, we eliminated the detail here. Now the reason we're going to do that, of course, is that now we can manipulate this data and do more things with it. At the end of the day, we're going to use this trial balance in order to construct the financial statements, the end product. But the trial balance also helps us to kind of see what is going on as we go, meaning we can easily add up these assets and see what our total assets are, see what our total liabilities are, and make some quick comparisons as we would do with the financial statements with just this trial balance. Note that most textbooks, we're actually going to introduce the trial balance before we introduce the general ledger. Why? Because the trial balance is a lot easier to look at, right? It's a lot easier to look at the trial balance even though if we think about the normal systematic format, we look, we do the trial balance after we do the general ledger, the trial balance being constructed from the ending balances of here, the general ledger. But it's going to be easier to look at, so we want to look at that first. In practice, note that the trial balance will typically be constructed by a computer system as we enter data into the computer system. And a lot of times then in that format, we're looking at the end result, the trial balance, or even the financial statements. And we typically want to go back in time. For example, if I want to know how we got to this 6,160 in the cash account, if I'm saying, that looks too high or that looks too low, then we oftentimes in that situation, say we've already constructed the trial balance and then go back to the detail and say, let's see the detail and to the general ledger, how is this ending number created? Where is my thinking going wrong and me thinking that this balance is too high or too low? And we go back and find that detail. So that's another way we can kind of consider where the trial balance lies. It's used in order to construct the data. It's done from the general ledger when considering it from a practice standpoint in terms of how is the company doing. Oftentimes we start from the end trial balance, the ending balances, and then we can think about looking backwards to that general ledger. Note that the trial balance is a great cheat sheet, meaning if you can have a cheat sheet for any kind of exams or anything like that, or when you're just practicing with problems, you want to start off with a trial balance as a good cheat sheet. Because even if it's not related to the problem that you are on, it will give you a lot of information, meaning it lists all the accounts. So if you're picking some of these accounts that you may not really know, such as under and revenue, it's kind of an account that takes a little while for most people to get and not only get in terms of, now I know what under and revenue is, I've heard it a few times, but then is it a debit or credit balance? Often a question we don't really know until, but we can find it by looking at the trial balance. We can see here that it's in the credit side. It's going to be a credit balance. And the trial balance therefore is a great cheat sheet to have. So I highly, highly recommend getting used to a trial balance and having it in front of you whenever working any problems. It'll tell you what the normal balances are for many accounts. When working with smaller problems, especially like multiple choice questions, they're not going to give you enough information as you would have in real life, meaning in real life you would have access to a trial balance typically in a book problem you will not. And so therefore if you can get one in front of you, I highly, highly recommend doing that. Note the key component of the trial balance being that the total assets equal the total, I mean, sorry, the total debits equal the total expenses, which is the trial balance format, the debit credit format of the accounting equation with a double entry accounting system of assets equal liabilities plus equity. So if assets equal liabilities plus equity, then it must be that total debits and total credits will be equal for all accounts involved. So we broke this out in terms of debits and credits. We can also do very quick calculations, meaning if I especially if I'm in Excel, I can just highlight these numbers in Excel and add them up, give me total assets, I can highlight these numbers, add them up, give me total liabilities. I can subtract the revenue minus the expenses and get the net income very quickly. I can just add up the total equity and get those numbers very quickly. We can actually maneuver around the trial balance a lot quicker than even the financial statements. If it's formatted well, and if it's in Excel even even faster, the reason we're going to convert these to financial statements is because we're trying to convert it to something where people don't know debits and credits. But if you know debits and credits, this is actually a lot more versatile in many ways than actually the financial statements. You can basically pull a lot more information a bit quicker in this format sometimes than the financial statements. Note that I have represented the credits with brackets. That is not always the case. Depends on the textbook or the software you will see. Most textbooks will not represent credits with brackets, but many software programs will. And if you work with Excel, I highly, highly recommend considering this kind of formatting because it will make your life much, much easier. And so I'm going to try to show that and try to convince people, convince you of that. If you're going to be working with debits or credits a lot, you're going to want to work with Excel. You're going to want to learn Excel. You're going to want to make sure that you make Excel part of your learning process. And when learning Excel, it'll make your life much, much, much, much easier. If you start using formulas and putting credit brackets around the credits, we'll help to do that. The first example of that is to, if we were trying to convince a trial, condense a trial balance down, we can do so in this format. And note what this does for us. It's going to convert the trial balance from just two columns to one column. That seems like not a big deal right now. But when we get to later worksheets, where we're going to basically be looking at the activity that happens and then an ending trial balance, that would be six columns here. And if we can convince, condense those down, we're getting down to three columns. So the fact that this will increase by two columns each time we add something, and this will increase by only one column each time we add something is really going to save time down the road as you'll see when we start making worksheets. You'll see worksheets in the book and textbooks that will, you know, have like 10, you know, 10 columns, and that's a little unnecessary. We'll also see some complexity in formulas where if we were doing it by hand, it might be useful to do if we had a calculator. But if we're doing it in Excel, something I highly, highly, highly recommend we get used to, then then the formulas will be a lot more simple if we don't have the two columns and instead use this format here. So I'm going to try to convince us of this and show us in the problems how this will work and how to convince how to convert this back to this and back and forth as needed. And that's a typical kind of thing that we will be using in practice too. And we're going to have, in this case, the debits are going to be just the positive numbers, the credits we're going to represent with brackets Excel seeing those as negative numbers. And therefore we know that, of course, if the debits equal the credits, then if I subtracted debits and credits, that would equal zero. So if we then make the credits zero, the negative numbers, we can check our balance simply by summing up this row in Excel, meaning summing up would take all the positive numbers minus all the negative numbers. And that will show us we are in balance by it being zero. The pros of that is it's going to give us a really quick indication if that's any other number than zero, we're out of balance, as opposed to us having to kind of look at these two where we could kind of miss where we're out of balance. The con of that is, of course, that we can't define exactly how many debits or credits we have. But typically that's not the important information we're looking at here. The total debits and credits don't give us any information about how the company's doing. It just tells us whether we're in balance or not. The number that we want to know, here's net income at the bottom, a number much easier to calculate right here, we can just add it to the trial balance if we want to, if we use this format, because it'll just calculate, that's the calculation of this credit minus these debits, meaning that is income. Now that is not a loss. Now that's going to be, what we have to do whenever we learn debits and credits is to understand the difference between what a debit and a credit is as opposed to the functions of plus and minus. And there's no way to get around that whether we use formulas with brackets and negative numbers as credits or not, you're going to have to add and subtract debits and credits. So the idea of not having negative numbers or not having bracketed numbers reducing the problem of having to distinguish between debits and credits and plus and minus, I don't think is going to work really. We're going to have to, no matter what we do, we're going to have debits and credits, we're going to be adding and subtracting debits and credits, and we're going to have to keep straight in our mind, what does a debit and credit mean? Am I looking at something in terms of debits and credits, or am I looking at something in terms of a plus and minus operation format? And so we're going to have to keep keep that straight as we go, and we'll do that by just having a bunch of problems that we're going to work through in order to get that information. We are now able to define a trial balance, list components of a trial balance, and explain how a trial balance is used.