awesome with that. It's really like a language to figure out what the words are. This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, October 27th, 2022. Halloween is upon us soon. Winter is coming, and I don't mean that in the Game of Thrones sense, although some might take it that way given world events. And then Ken, I took a year of Russian in high school from Mrs. Sennicke, who was a Ukrainian refugee. She had escaped through the Iron Curtain and all that and made her way to teach Russian at a high school in Huntington Beach, California. And they were not offering first year Russian that year. So it was a second year Russian class. So I spent the entire year with my face buried in an English Russian dictionary. And the only thing I really remember is how to read the alphabet. But that meant that when April and I rented a car and drove around northern Bulgaria, I would read out the signs on the highway. And phonetically, she would look at the map and go, oh, okay, that's this town. And that's how we made our way across. It was like just, you know, just enough reading the alphabet made us got us around. Winter in the college second sense or or nuclear winter in the Edward Teller sense, or actually Teller would not have been arguing about nuclear winter. He would have been a fan. So I don't know who the nuclear winter people would be. But anyway, I wrote a book about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so Eric and I will be co-watching tomorrow morning, another episode of connections, which I'm just going to go to there we go. Screen share for a moment. Here is the connection series in my brain. I have it under a thought, you know, my like, which is books, paintings, movies, ideas that shaped many people's lives. So here's Lord of the Rings, met George Laycock's metaphors we live by. And so each of these things, of course, is lives in its own context. Engelbart's mother of all demos, Asimov's foundation series, Picasso's Guernica painting, the musical Hamilton, Indiana Jones. And by this, I mean, things that when we were kids, like lots and lots of people, Star Trek and Star Wars are gigantic influencers of people and their lives and their careers and stuff like that. And for me, it was actually on PBS, I think, watching the connection series back in, you know, 1978-79. And so Eric and I have watched two episodes so far. We watched the trigger effect, which turns out is mostly the first 40% of it is about the Northeast blackout of 1965 and how that happened and everything like that. And we learned that Gil missed being trapped in an elevator by four seconds. He had just stepped out of an elevator when the blackout started. So that was kind of cool. But then the other episode that we listened to was episode seven, the long chain. And long chain here means polymers. So this is about the invention of synthetic dyes and chemistry and all that good stuff in the Haber-Bosch process and so forth. This was a really, really, really fruitful call. And I ended up, you know, here's the color mauve, which was invented by William Henry Perkin, who was busy trying to do something else, but all of a sudden he discovered mauving. And it turns out that coal tar, I'm going to connect this to coal tar, which is a byproduct. And so a whole bunch of things come out of coal tar, including chemical dyes. And so let me connect that to mauving. And Sherri, there's a movie opening tomorrow at coal tar. Yes, which is about a conductor. Nothing to do with this, but there you go. Exactly. Oops, tar. And just because I'm addicted to movie trailers, here's a psychological drama about online shaming that features Kate Blanchett as a crazy badass conductor. I hear that it's not just about online shaming, but about power. Yes, it looks like it's about that in there too. I would agree. Sherri, isn't Burke kind of a naive optimist about technology? He is not what I would call a deep techno analyst. What he sort of does is he finds links across things that happen and has a breezy kind of a theory of change and theory of progress. But for an 18-year-old at the time, that was like pretty good food from my perspective. And I think my thoughts on technological change now would be far in advance of that. I had never heard of Kransberg's Six Laws of Technology, but here they are. These are pretty good, right? So, yes, I would agree with that. His old website's still up, so if you wanted to see what he was thinking when the internet started. James Burke. And Burke, funny enough, was a fan of the Brain early on. And he had a Knowledge Web project, which was using the Brain. Here's K-Web in the Brain. He was busy using the Brain really well on the cover of his website. And I was like, oh, good, this is going to go mainstream. I met him in person one time. I think it was at the launch event for the Apple Newton. And he gave a speech on stage. And I rushed up on stage afterward to the edge of the stage at the end of the talk and said, oh, I love your work, your connections influence me. And I'm a Brain user too. And he said, oh, so nice, thanks next. And so we never got to chat or anything like that. But anyway, long, oh, the best shot in television is, so I just, I'm just seeing the chat again. So, I just saw that fly by. Yeah, exactly. So is it right here? No, let's see. So, so basically it's the scene where he starts talking. And at the end of the shot, he walks right in front of the launch of one of the space missions from Cape Canaveral. And the scene is available on the web. I'm forgetting. Let's just see which this is a tweet. So it may or may not. I don't know how durable Twitter links are, permalinks. There we go. This scene right here. So you probably can't hear it. I will share this link in the chat. But he's just walking across. And at the end of this shot, it's like you have to start talking at exactly the right time because there's a countdown behind you. So this is a famous thing. So here's that link. Jerry, this is After the Warming show also somewhere in this channel. Which warming show? After the Warming. James Burke After the Warming. It came out, I think in 1990. I remember watching it. It was the first time I ever heard about the ocean conveyor belt and what happens if it slows down and the melting of the quacial lake that caused a little ice age. It's a really interesting show. So I have it, but I don't have a lot about it. And I don't think I watched it. It's really great. Yeah. Here's After the Warming. Articles about global warming. Documentaries. That's all I've got. And usually I put a link under the thought. This one very likely has a Wikipedia link. So I'll find it and add it. But thank you. So anyway, anybody who'd like to join, it'll be in this usual Zoom tomorrow morning at 7am Pacific. And we'll probably run a little over an hour or something like that. Just watch the episode. What we will pause maybe once or twice and chat a lot. We'll pass links in the chat and be doing stuff. But Episode 7, I found myself rushing to connect things and add things because every four sentences he'd be introducing some new chemical or movement or whatever. And it was really interesting because... We learned that our modern world is just an accident. Like several accidents led to polymers. Exactly. Also, he doesn't mention this book, but I want to recommend it. It's a perfect red empire espionage and the quest for the color of desire, which is about the color red. And it's about cochineal, which is a little bug that infests the Nopal cactus. And it's very finicky about climate. And so Oaxaca happens to be one of the places on the planet that cochineal loves. And the color carmine. And when you start adding other chemicals to cochineal, after a retreat in Oaxaca, we went off to see some natural weaving village nearby. And they put some cochineal in our hand and we squished it. And then they started adding a couple of different elements. And each time you'd go from a light pink to a deep carmine. So when you see Bishop's robes during that era, the dye was probably made with cochineal.  And then chemical dyes show up. And so here, so I put it opposite this book about mauve by Simon Garfield, where suddenly everything changes and whoever was in the cochineal business is like, oops, so bad. Sorry about that. So sorry, long, long windy intro, but very nice to see everybody. Let's do our check-in routine. And oh, interesting. Blue is an interesting color. Nature doesn't make a lot of blue. And the fact that the sky is blue and the ocean is blue are refraction, reflection, optical effects. It's not because there are little blue molecules in the sky and little blue molecules in the ocean. Super interesting. I am no physicist, but that has always impressed me. So let's do a, yeah, a little check-in. Let's go. How about Bill, Mark, and Hank? Mr. Anderson, the floor is yours. Okay. So I'm just responding to some couple of climate stories today.  That's it. There's the UN report that just said, guess what, right? There's even more greenhouse trapping gases. Hey, we made another deposit in the atmosphere last year. In fact, it's higher than it's ever been. So not such good news. So that's, I got nothing else. I've been fighting news anxiety and debating whether to withdraw from absorbing news and all that just because things look so bad, including the midterm election coming up shortly. So between the report you just pointed to that and other things happening, I'm like, oh, well, I will say it's a chemist, you know, and somebody who studied thermodynamics, kind of really interested in the climate stuff, you know, heat, whatever. But I'm still, you know, what can I tell you? The sun shining, it's going to be a beautiful day here in Austin, Texas. So there is that. There is that. There is that. And we're here together and still cackling in our normal ways. Thanks, Bill. Let's go, Mark, Hank, Stacey. Good morning or a good hour of the day, wherever you are. Let's see. When it rains at pores, on Sunday, the woman I've been in love with declared her love for me as well. So life is, life is interesting. A couple of days later, we found out that a mutual friend had died. So that was it's been kind of an emotional exhausting time. Love is an affliction, as is life, apparently. We live until we die. Certainly, Fred Stitt made it to 87 and thought he'd make it to 100. Certainly didn't make it, but may we all live a great long life. Red and Puppets is going to be in town. Today, and they're staying at the Internet Archives, so it's going to be a mob here. They're a fantastic street theater group. They make their living selling their art. So that'll be great fun to have them around. Let's see. I am attempting to basically change the ability of humanity to tell the truth to themselves by attempting to continue to work on my MX project. I see Eric there. I have to apologize. Again, love is an incredible distraction. I understand. My favorite distraction. More powerful than any drug I've ever taken and I've taken a few. So again, a bit distracted. I have been following the news. Yeah, boy. I certainly believe that we need to fight a nonviolent way using the tools of psychology in a very principled way. Things like shame. Things like the Catholic Church have learned to do. And certainly as I tell a joke, I mastered Catholicism, so I don't practice anymore. I changed my religion to fail Buddhist because no to self.  Seems appropriate. Exactly. But how we communicate, I wonder about this word at scale. And again, I think that there are more important notions than story. Things like stop lights that we agree to attend to collectively. Things like, what is it called? The catalytic converters that we attend to collectively. I mean, these are not stories. They are technical achievements and there are agreements that we've made in the state of California. At least we have different catalytic converters than the rest of the nation. It is the mass behavior that is not a story. It is actual behavior. It's actual technology. It's actual agreement that is possibly driven by story or possibly. Story helps with the legislation. Story helps with the adoption. But these are real non-narrative things in the world that make great collective change. And I'm just trying to help to figure this out and ask for help to talk about and really figure out how to make effective change at a global scale. That's why I'm here to listen and basically respond to what I think I know as truth without trying to force that truth on the rest of us. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Mark. You provoked two things for me. One of them is to shame, which is what the American civil rights movement relied on was non-violent social action, which relies on shame. Basically, you take punishment honorably and visibly to the point where the perpetrators and the general public see how shameful that behavior is and do something to stop it. And my fear is that we've become enured to these kinds of displays that visually there's just so much awful stuff available 24-7 at any moment that we've somehow diffused that, but also that the far right has figured out that being shameless and just saying things that are clearly ridiculous and stupid or inhumane or whatever else doesn't seem to hurt and wins them an audience and funding and all kinds of other stuff. So I'm afraid I fear that shame has lost its currency, which is a horrible thing to say, but I just want to throw that in the conversation. Then I have a second thing also.  So I'm going to try to find this. I saw a beautiful quote by Joseph Heller that basically said, you know, to convert vice into virtue, a whole list of other things. One didn't need any intelligence whatsoever. One just needed no character. And boy, it's easy to have no character. I'll try to find the quote. Please continue your second one, Jerry. Yeah, thank you. Now, anybody else with thoughts on that first one on shame, because Gil? Well, two things. One, ridicule is a powerful tool also. Certainly in the current environment with the orange guy, it's probably much more powerful than shame, although a lot to call them out as a coward. Yeah, the mayor of Bogota years ago, Antonas Mokus, hired mimes to try to stop jaywalkers because there are a lot of people being killed on the road. So they hired mimes to basically make fun of jaywalkers and that worked reasonably well. A combination of ridicule and shame in that case. Yeah, yeah. But I think I think you know, you talk about the civil rights movement, I think about people like Dick Gregory. Yeah, who had powerful effect, not through shame and direct action, but through ridicule. So there's that I came across something the last couple of days and trying to find it that challenges the notion that that we can generate big change by thinking big. And that, you know, the sort of grand strategy stuff that we've been cooking here and other groups will look at is fundamentally flawed. And big change comes of small pieces in different contexts. So I'll see if I can find the links that might be a fruitful topic for us. Thank you. And anyone who discovers how to undermine and neutralize the tools of destroying discourse and trust that are being wielded these days, like raise your hand or like share it on the chat because that that's the situation that we're in right now. And it's just really hard to figure out what on earth to do. And then mark the second thing that you raised what maybe this is quirky for me. But when you talked about stop lights, and kind of the social contract Eric put in the chat, and it's like, these are agreements we make. And one of my heroes is Hans Mondermann, who helped pioneer traffic calming.  And we should remove them. And we should redesign our intersections so that people actually have to make eye contact. And pace match.  And so there are affordances like stop lights, which we've agreed to, and which your average traffic engineer will point to as a must have got to do, which in fact are bad agreements. And I'm way over generalizing here, there are times when you probably need stop lights. But in general, they're bad agreements that we sort of fell into, that we think of as normal, and we've normalized them to the point where doing something different from them seems crazy and dangerous, right.    And so I just wanted to like shine a light on the semaphore, haha, to point that out. I agree completely. The interesting thing is the phenomena that Jared Lanier points to of buy-in and, you know, the difficulty to prevent a monopoly, say, of Microsoft Word. And now the monopoly is Google Google Sheets or something like that Google, Google Docs and Docs. And, you know, once you get an economy of scale, i.e., stop lights and the companies that make stop lights and the traffic engineers that don't know better, making a change takes you into a dream of temporary chaos before you get to the higher level of the higher level order and making these transitions and looking at interfaces, looking at, you know, where the boundary is crossed and how to make these, what is the language of chaos where you basically make a transition to another regime? Phase changes or? Yeah, that type of thing. Yeah, phase change or regime transition. I used to know the language a lot better, but we have all these wonderful ideas and tools. And boy would I love that, you know, elementary school education was able to, you know, really help kids understand how to make change without getting hurt. Not sure that, again, we can change elementary school education as easily as we can send Elon Musk to Mars on a rocket fueled with ketamine and a Bible full of acids. Which is a nice dream. It was depressing to see him walk into Twitter headquarters yesterday on video. Doug Carmichael. Yeah, let me be extremely unpopular. Please raise the question of how what we're doing fits what should be the culture of check in? So it depends on what you mean by check in. And for me, it's the dip and stir dip and mix thing I've described before, which is every I sort of figure out who didn't get to check in last time. So I picked them first next call, if I remember properly, and I kind of create some kind of a line of of check in. And then as people say things, I or we respond to what they say and mix it if it's interesting and see where it goes. And so sometimes it goes really interesting places and we don't get we don't make it through the line. Like a couple, a couple calls ago, we never made it through the room. We got stuck like three people in and it was a great call. So so Doug, I may be not checking in the way you'd like to check in or I'd love to hear what you mean by your question a little bit more. Well, check in seems to me as people to say sort of what's been on their mind, not to give a long explication of it, because we're smart enough to figure out from what they say, what the thing is that's on their mind and to make it through the group and creating a really rich complex atmosphere and see where we are, rather than getting the role. So I don't see my interventions like I just did twice with what Mark said and Mark was pretty pretty quick in his check in as derailing. I see it as enriching and creating the long chain of fibers, but I could be wrong. And I'd love to hear from other people what your preferences are. I think I'm making the stew richer by saying, hey, how about this? How about that? Remember this thing? And then other people chip in and so forth. Anybody feel sorry? I'd like to hear more as a stewing. I'm not sure exactly what change you are pointing to that you would like to see. Well, I think it's more fewer digressions and more like just hearing what everybody has on their minds in the form of checking. And again, Jerry, I'd like to hear from Doug. I'm sorry. Well, I just agree with what Jerry just said. It's a check-in is a check-in. Not a time for long monologues. The challenge, of course, is that every check-in triggers all sorts of associated thoughts and threads we can follow. And so the question we follow them as they come up or do we find some way to save them and let the pressure build and then at some point open the conversation up to stir the pot. Agreed. In the spirit of actually checking in, let's go Hank, Stacy, Paul. Yeah, I just had a question. My question is, what is the purpose of a check-in? Because that would at least help me to figure out how I feel about what Doug said and how we do it. So the way I treat check-ins in OGM calls is, what is happening in your world that has anything OGM-y to do with it? And it could be anything. My question is deeper. My question is a little bit deeper. It's why. And not just for you, for all of us. Like why? I would think that the purpose of a check-in is to stimulate everyone's thinking and provide new perspectives, whether it's on a long explication of something or very short. A good conversation can have 35 short check-ins or two extensive diversions on themes. But for me, it's stimulating our thinking and broadening our horizons. So does anybody feel differently about the purpose of a check-in or is everybody in agreement that that is why we have check-ins? Not to not to get orthogonal to your question, but maybe it has nothing to do with check-ins. So the thing that lives for me is what I experienced in Doug, what Doug said, was he's challenged. Like he's got a tickle about if you're setting the expectation for me we're checking in and all of a sudden we're down a rabbit hole, then like that's sort of challenging. And on an energetic level or experiential level how people do these things together, I'd really like to know more about that. Like what is the tension that's provoked for you, Doug? Because that's not an infrequent occurrence in lots of places and contexts.  It has to do with what's in the nature of the way things flow that triggered you. And so that's a question. Doug, the question is to you if you'd like to answer it. Well, I think I said what I had to say. Okay. Then back to the cue it is. We had, and it was pointed out that Paul has left the room, so we were Hank. I got to scroll back up. Actually, just got a paste. Hank, Stacey, Michael. Stacey, you're back in the queue since your dog appears to be taking care of you. Yes, he's taking care. Okay, so now that I know that it's just you. But Hank didn't check in yet. Oh, sorry. So it's Hank then you. So I'm going to check in by talking about what's been on my mind for the last five weeks. More or less, I spent four weeks on vacation in an unusual place, Albania, a country that has been so-called a free country only for 30 years. And before that, it had hundreds of years of foreign rule, mostly dictators as followed by its own horribly cruel dictator after the Second World War. And spending a month in a small country, because Albania is actually a very small case, gave me a chance to really think about how the world works. The country that's now called Albania used to be at the very center of the Western world. At some parts, it's only a 45 minute ferry ride and 30 kilometers from Italy, and only three miles from the Greek island. And it used to have a lot of very important cities starting about 300 or 400 years before Christ. And I can tell you the names of a lot of those old cities that I visited, but they won't mean much to you. One of them might mean something to someone who studied classics. It's Apollonia. That's where Octavian, the adapted son of Julius Caesar, studied before Julius Caesar was murdered and he became Augustus Caesar. Another is called Antigonia. It used to be the capital of King Pyrrhus, that famous guy of the Pyrrhic victories, who was also the only Greek who ever defeated the Roman army. And then there were a lot more, but they're now just crumbling walls and piles of stone on on mountaintops. And you can go there and virtually be alone for hours, looking out into the distance and thinking about the waxes and waning of civilizations. And that's the old stuff. And now the new stuff has to do with Albanians and the stories they tell you about themselves and the stories they tell themselves about themselves. Things like, oh yeah, but we're not like Western Europe, we could never do that or that might work in America, but that would never work here. Or the occasional person simply being entrepreneurial about life and trying things out and making them work. So it's about hope about the future and confidence in doing exceptional things. And yet knowing that in the past, very exceptional places were important for 300 or 400 years. And now nobody knows their names when they're just piles of stones. So I'll leave it at the moment that that. Thanks, Hank. That was lovely. Stacey, you're up. Yeah. So in the background, when I was taking care of my dog, I was listening to the talk about shaming and what's been on my mind for the past week in all different aspects I've been thinking about mental health. So I'll use the example of Kanye. And just for the record, I'm Jewish, I've served on a temple and I've also been called anti-Semitic because I don't 100% defend Israel all the time or whatnot. That being said, on Facebook, somebody was talking, going after Kanye had anti-Semitic he was, and I agree it was a bad comment. But my question was, where are his friends reigning him in knowing that he has a mental illness? And somebody remarked he has none.  And to me, that was the more important point because you take mental illness and you put it with isolation and that's a deadly combination. And that brings me back to what I've been interested in for years, which was the school shootings, the anger, the hatred, all of that. And again, that tied in when you start, when you were talking about politics, it tied in because there's a group around him that are making it seem like there's nothing wrong with what he's saying. And it's what, you know, when all the family used to be on, you could mock that kind of behavior because everybody knew that it was being mocked.  And so it doesn't work. And I don't know if I'm making my point because I'm all over the place because it ties in a company. It's relevant in so many ways. There's no one formula to how you use humor and mocking and shame. But it could be, it could, it's really harmful sometimes when you're dealing with people that are emotionally unwell to pile on them. One of the other things that's coming up for me as recently, and I will talk after actually Doug B, I want to talk to you. There's somebody that I know from Facebook from years ago that used to come to a lot of global challenges, talks. And I've spoken with him in Zoom call, he's a very nice person, has over 2000 followers now. Yeah, I'm going to just drop that line. What I will say is there have been more than a few times where I see somebody saying something that seems like it's out of the realm of what we would call normal. Anything can be weaponized. And it all depends on who's doing the judging. And I listened to Herschel Walker. Somebody else in power could look at these lies. He could be classified as some sort of borderline personality with the right people in power. He could be locked up. Yeah, what I'm trying to say is what's on my mind right now are protecting the rights of people in general, mostly women, mostly people with mental illnesses. I'm going to a conference later. It's a NARPA conference, which is specifically about advocating and protecting the rights of people with mental illnesses to not be treated over objection. What's in my mind is how somebody like Brittany would have a conservatorship and somebody like Kanye would not. So that pretty much sums up what's in my mind. Thanks, Stacy. Thank you. Gil, Doug, Doug. Yeah, so Doug's check in plan is tricky because each of us follows somebody else. Okay, so it's on my mind this morning's democracy and fascism and the mood of premature surrender and the arrogance of doom and the ostensibly smart pundits who act as though they can predict the future. I heard somebody last night, there was this MSNBC. So someone was talking about the absolute folly of the polling architecture, the enormous imprecision of that and all the weight that we give it and how you can't tell anything. And by the way, there's unprecedented amount of early voting. And by the way, XYZ and all these other dramas that are yet to happen, immediately followed by somebody who said, oh, the election is done, the polling is going to win the house. Faye Rung be intended to discourage people from action, etc. So I think about this next most important election of our lives, the next following most important election of the lives. I have found a site I'll post it in a bit of a collection of relevant strategic actions that people can take who are too busy. We're not going walking three sinks in Arizona, but places that you can call or text or send money in very strategic districts, not just looking at Congress, but also at state races and so forth. And so of course the big danger here is that with election deniers taking over state legislatures and state secretary of state's office, we don't know what elections are going to look like in the future. So I'm going to share, I've been sort of a way of dealing with my own shame at being agitated about this and not doing much. And so what I'm doing now is saying here's things we can do, writing some checks and making some calls. So that's one thing. The premature doom thing obviously shows up around climate. David Wallace Wells in The Times, I posted a link earlier up there, had a piece about how the news is both better and worse than we've anticipated. You know, we are, we may be in motion to head off the worst of projections, we're nowhere near what we need to be to have the world that we want. And I posted that and someone tweeted in response to the headline, yeah, we're all fucked. And I said, well, did you read the article? He said, no. Okay, well, the article has a point about it's more complex than that. And so, you know, we've all seen this phenomenon of reacting to headlines rather than to substance. That's one of the emerging norms of now. So I think a lot about norms in the context of this conversation, the traffic lights, the traffic circles, the expected behavior in society are softer matters than power and authoritarianism and control, but they're very powerful, if you will, in our life. I wonder about how norms shift. Last thing, I remember what it just was. Wait a second. Yeah, I'm just this morning coming into this column is really struck at the at the arrogance and privilege of doom and surrender of people acting as though we can predict the future and saying therefore why bother but of course, non-action is a kind of action. People say, well, I'm not going to do anything. We're not doing anything that's doing something in my vote. So there's a nice little ribbon I wanted to tie this off, but I don't know what it was. So maybe I'll come back later and then check it. That's it for now. Thanks, Kim. Doug B. Yeah, so I am a partner in Germany. We are pretty deeply immersed in an application of ancient five elements, principles to real world contexts like business, like bringing it to ground. And we're 12 months through an 18-month curriculum we developed with our first cohort of people that were interested in learning about it. And for us as the providers of this, we two years in almost full time just got to clarity about what we're doing. And the difference between our focus is really on the energetic dimensions, ebb's flows, mixes and balances of people coming together to co-create. So it's in the completely intangible domains of how we talk to each other, how we relate to each other, how we are connected or not moment to moment, and how all the intricacies and dynamics of, at least in the elemental context, five dimensions of that are involved. And the whole world of human beings as feeling beings while doing is sort of blank in our culture and the world we're in. It's not factored for. And so I'm just really sort of immersed in that space. And Doug, I hope you didn't take it as me putting you on the spot. But in the ebb and flow of this, your share in my world and universe says that just takes first, that took first priority. If somebody's triggered, then effectively they're now turned inward, like lost, you know, lost you on some level in having the reaction, which may or may, I don't mean to project that on you, but that's sort of the way we orient around the stuff. So if there are group of people working together and somebody reacts, then like the first order of priority is to bring, you know, get them back and do what's needed in service to, and with priority, tending to whatever triggered that. And the premise is if we're all connected, we're all part of a whole. If somebody's triggered, then that's at the expense of everybody. Like that's costing the collective. It's a little bit indigenous and tribal, but anyway, so that's sort of what I'm living in the middle of these days in relation to everything that's going on. Thanks Doug. Doug C. So yesterday while washing the dishes after launch, the water pressure dropped to about a third and I was kind of shocked. I mean, that had never happened before. And immediately I became aware this is going to be harder to wash these dishes. And I thought, gee, if climate change produces moments like this, well, I thought, what about the irrigation system outside, so I went outside to check it. If the irrigation system isn't working, we've got a lot of garden space that's going to be threatened. And I just was amazed by how personal this was and how deep it cut. And then this morning, when I woke up, I found myself thinking about, I should figure out how to get a solar panel that would power my laptop if we lose power. And Jesus, I hadn't thought of that. Shifting to a different level. I'm fascinated by the way we're thinking about the issues we're facing. And one presentation by a guy named Simon Michaud, M-I-C-H-A-U-X, who's an Australian living in Finland, has done a report with the following tight logic to it. We have one energy regime in the world right now, which is basically fossil fuels. And we want to shift to another one, which is basically electrical. He said, can that be done? So he does the amazing thing. He takes the table of the elements with all the squares and colors and goes square by square. He says, who owns this? Who's mining it? How much of it is there? Is there enough? And across most of the elements, there's no words dear enough, either being mined or that is known to exist, to make the transition from fossil fuels to electrical. And it just struck me that that kind of simple clear logic is not being done. I thought it was quite beautiful. And he has a presentation on the internet really worth watching. So it's Simon Michaud, M-I-C-H-A-U-X. I'm going to finish with one third thing. And that is at the institute where I do a lot of consulting with mostly economists. They have been very reluctant to engage in the climate change discussions. But with a lot of work, we've created an internal seminar that meets once a week on climate change. And it's got about 10 out of 30 from the staff coming. And what's shocking, what's amazing is the morale of that group facing the issues with full honesty. The morale has gone way up in contrast to the people who are not coming to that. And I found that pretty amazing. The level of respect, mutual appreciation, even the quality of love in the group has been just amazing. Anyway, those are my thoughts. Very cool, Doug. Thank you. It would be cool if there were some permanent like Sankey diagrams and open databases and other sorts of resources around things like the elements of the periodic table and what uses what and where it goes and all those kinds of things. Gil, did you want to jump in? Just real quickly. I appreciate, Doug, what you're saying. But it's not that no one has done that kind of analysis. There have been various folks doing it. I most recently saw Griffith at other labs in the past, well, in a different University of Vergeski at DOE in Jan Holmberg in Sweden. It's a very important kind of work to do. Griffith, I believe, was a very different conclusion about what the prospects are than the show. So it'd be interesting to compare their approaches and analysis. Thanks. Let's go, Eric. Ken Pete. Yeah, hi. So just a comment about what was just talked about. I learned that in the wind turbines, there are huge, I guess they're neodymium magnets and rare earth. So yeah, I mean, there is an impractical approach being taken by politics. Now, Klaus has planted a seed in my brain and I just can't dig it out. It's maybe germinating and maybe I'm not ready, but I attended a webinar this week about votes for the Pennsylvania State, the Secretary of Agriculture, whose talk was actually about diversity, equity and inclusion, but I threw in a few other questions to him and I was concerned about land use and regenerative farming. So I guess Klaus has got me thinking on another level now that what's really important is food security and the farmers issues. He's got me thinking like a farmer and so I'm kicking and screaming, oh no, I'm a mighty guy. I think I'm a farmer. And yeah, so I'm just letting it myself explore as things come across my way, just thinking a little differently. So maybe like a plant a few seeds myself, we'll see where that goes. But recently I lost a good friend who died at age 75 and I'm going to help his son clean out his house and who knows what I'm going to find. I mean, I can help like if there are things they don't want, I could hold on to them and then eventually donate to the Internet Archive, anything rare that we'll figure it out, but death sucks. All right. And it leaves behind a lot of things. Yes. You don't realize what the families have to do often. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Ken, Pete, Michael. Hello, everybody. Right now what's on my mind is I'm taking a media fast.  And it's just, it's just there to, it's more be afraid, be very afraid, be afraid. And I refuse to be afraid. I don't particularly feel courageous, but I refuse to be afraid because people are telling me to be afraid. And as a, I've been facilitating groups now for about 35 years. And one thing I've learned is wherever you point a group's attention, it's going to grow in their awareness. So if you're constantly saying, be afraid, people get really, really afraid. And I look around, I go back to Paul Hawkins, Blessed Unrest, where he says something like, if you look at what's going on in the world, then you're not really alarmed, then you're out of touch. But if you look at what people are doing, you're not really hopeful, then you're also out of touch. And so that's, that's just, you know, sort of my overarching state of mind right now is what can I focus on that is wholesome, healthy, nourishing, reading us in a, in a good direction. And I was doing the dishes last night, I was sticking with Doug's theme of doing the dishes and my water pressure didn't drop. But, you know, I was reflecting on a story my wife had just told me about a woman she's known for 40 years who's got a sister who's, she's quite elderly now and she's got a grandson who is over 400 pounds, lives with her, doesn't work, doesn't clean up after himself, you know, and he just leaves a mess everywhere he goes.  And that made me think about the scale of we have entire industries that don't pick up after themselves that leave toxic waste everywhere. People are always saying, does this scale? And it's like, what about, what doesn't, what about the things we don't want to scale? What about responsibility? Does responsibility scale? Does the human heart scale? Does compassion scale? Does care for the planet scale? Because those are the things that seem to me that we really want to be focusing on. If we want to get through this eye that you're right now, you know, I'm trying the best I can to see to it that the funnel is as wide as possible rather than narrow because on the other side is a very depleted earth for the future generations. And I want to leave a little bit more than is going to be left if I don't act. And I know that I'm one person, you know, don't have a huge amount of power influence, but that doesn't matter. I have to do what I can. And I can't scale that, but I can invite people to think imaginatively to focus their attention on things that are useful, that are good. I recently listened to, gosh, her name just about the shame researcher, the woman who... Brené Brown? Yes, Brené Brown. She was talking about politics. She said, how many of you would actually want any of these people as friends? They do horrible things in public. They do things that would have me ejected from any circle of friends, and yet we keep electing them. So I'm really kind of thinking about that, like, would I want a politician as a friend? You know, that would be a really great question. Would you want to actually be friends with any of people you're voting for? Would you want them in your house, in your community, doing the kind of stuff that they do? This is just... It's a mind-boggling thing to me that we're in the midst of this. And, you know, I firmly believe there are very few new things going on. There's a lot of recycling of old patterns. And so there must be ways that people have used in the past to recover when they get that toxic. And what can we do? How can we identify those? And Eric asked how to bring people together, and I put up the TV2. If you've never seen it, please watch this TV2 thing. I can't watch it. It always brings tears in my eyes. It's all that we share. And it's this... TV2 is in Denmark, and they bring together all these people. And you'll see some of these folks are really scary. And they ask a series of questions like, how many of you have seen the US? Oh, walk across the room. How many of you are in love? How many have had sex, you know? And at the end, these people are all hugging each other because they recognize their common-shared humanity. And that's what I want to scale. I want to scale common-shared humanity. Thank you. Ken, thank you. I love those exercises. They're just beautiful. And completely tear-inducing. Stacy. Stacy Van Gillen. Yeah, I just don't want to let this moment pass because, excuse me, I think that it's important to admit that most of us... So, the politicians that you're talking about, the really horrible ones, yeah, we won't want to be friends with them. But I think that it's important to acknowledge that most of us humans, we are drawn to people of influence. So, I know myself when I've been friends with politicians and they've been nicer people, it does feel good to be friends with people of influence. And if we don't acknowledge that, then we can't fix things because we're lying to ourselves. I don't know how else to say it. I don't mean to say not be friends with politicians, but would you want to be friends? Would you want to be best buds with, say, DeSantis? Absolutely not. No, no, absolutely not. But I just want to point out it's really important to keep the integrity factor there that you shouldn't want to be friends with somebody that you don't think has integrity. But I also want to... Not everybody has the best state of integrity. I want to point out that there is a natural tendency to want to be around successful or influential people. Hopefully we fight that and we do what's right. But I'm just pointing out it's a natural thing and if we're not aware of it, we can't fight it. That's all I'm saying. It's also a natural tendency to be much more judgmental of other people than of ourselves. Correct. We cut ourselves a lot more slack than we cut other people. Not if you listened to internal dialogue. I hear you. I appreciate what you said. I'm listening to it through the frame of norms again. And I find myself puzzled. I put it in the chat that everybody pretty much knows that it's not okay to dump your trash in your neighbor's porch.  Everybody pretty much knows that norms in a functioning society. And yet, we seem to accept people who eat the seed corn and poison the well. And that's a norm in this world now of extractive capitalism. We're living in a house of cards. We somehow accept that. But we wouldn't accept it on a personal face to face on my block next door to me basis. But somehow there's enough... I don't know if it's because there's enough distance and abstraction. But as psychopathic as the political and corporate leaders are, we are in a way also, if we tolerate this. And we do. Thanks, Gil. Sorry to bring you all down. No, that's all right. Pete, then Michael. I am happy to see all of you today and hear you speak. And I'm going to pass. Leave it at that. Thanks. And here I expected a long post of items on your stack. Thank you. Michael. I'm deprived of my buffer of Pete's check-in. So I wanted to circle back to the question of stuff. And Eric had brought it up in the chat. And well, Eric brought it up in speaking. And other people have brought it up at other times. And I think it came up in last week. And I'm just finding it fascinating. I think I suggested this last time that maybe it's a theme for a themed meeting perhaps next week. But dealing with the physical objects that everybody has gathered and some that are meaningful, some that are mass produced and not meaningful. How to scale that relationship with things, with objects, with stuff. And also how to follow the Internet archive. Leave what's worth leaving. Share what's worth sharing. Memorialize what's worth memorializing. The difference between collecting and hoarding and curating and things in things in attics that belong in museums and things in stores that are going to end up in landfill because they're not really destructible or biodegradable. There's so much stuff moving in different directions that lacks anything but a short-term plan. And I think we can do better. I've been thinking a lot about that. Working on some projects in that direction and really interested to hear from other people about their experiences, particularly around the stuff that their parents and friends leave behind and that they grapple with. So yeah, I'll just leave it there. Thanks, Michael. Anybody? Yeah, Mark Granza. We cannot hear you. How about now? Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I had to move the car for street sweeping. So transfer to phone. The Internet archive last week had its 26th anniversary. And all of us are very tired from hosting people that are flown in from around the world, our virtual employees, and hosting three parties for employees and the physical archive party and then the closing the street and having bands and taco trucks. And I've been thinking about giving and how this is seasonal giving approaching and how... Can you hold your phone back up close to you? Sure. When I've given successfully, the biggest gift has been to myself. How I feel after I've given something that was worth something to me and is worth more to others somehow. Certainly, I've struggled with hoarding, growing up with my parents and just realizing how damaging that was to me that I didn't realize as a child but realized now. And thank you, Michael, for bringing that up. It's how much do I need and how much have I basically overshot what I need sometimes and really wasted a number of resources. But yeah, of the person who passed away, the offer of taking his books and either trying to sell them and then those who don't sell checking to see if there's duplicates in the archive and taking those books and giving the gift of time to help his widow. Yeah, it's a tough call. I'm hoping to write a blog post about giving and what I've been able to give and how we at the Internet Archive appreciate the gifts that people give to support us and to share with each other. I mean, basically, click the upload button and you can share. Thanks, Mark. We still have time and I was going to check in but Mike just showed up. So, Mike, guess what? Oh, well, thank you. I'm tuning in from New Delhi. Still a little jet lagged after 17 hours of flying from Washington to Dubai to Delhi. I'm here for the sci-fi conference, CYFY, organized by a think tank that looks at policy. Of course, we're debating every buzzword under the sun from artificial intelligence to big data to quantum computing and a lot of talk of privacy, disinformation, the evils of Facebook, which is ironic because Facebook wrote a big check to pay for the conference. But it's a weird conference. I was telling somebody, I'm used to going to a conference where you get some panels that are just a bunch of people saying all the same buzzwords and sharing the same stories and the same statistics. And then you get a few panels that are really good and every so often you get a royal flush panel where four great panelists, great moderator, and each one of them provides great insights. We've had a couple of those grand slam or, you know, royal flush panels, but we've had a bunch of panels where people not only were just spouting buzzwords, they were misinterpreting the buzzwords and saying things that weren't true. And in some cases, there were people who had nothing to do with the field they were supposed to be pontificating about, which makes for quite a weird, almost surreal discussion. So that's what I'm working on this week. And I fly back after a stop in the Taj Mahal on Monday. I'm also getting to see some of my colleagues at Carnegie India. We have an incredible team that does a lot of tech and we're preparing for the Global Technology Summit, which I've mentioned in the past. I'm coming back on another 17 hour flight in four weeks. I'm almost traveling as much as April, Jerry. Other than that, just very tired, trying to figure out the next phase of our project on who's shaping the future of the digital world, focusing on Korea. So my plea to everyone is if you know somebody really smart who analyzes digital trends in Korea, let me know. The group of people who are really smart about digital matters and write English well is a pretty small number. I think it's even smaller. The percentage is even smaller in Korea than in Japan. Really? It's a bit of a challenge. Yeah. Japanese used to be pretty non-English, but they've been teaching English for about 30 years now. And at least written, yeah, more in the written than the spoken. Sorry to join late. We had another call. Japan has a bit of an inferiority complex and tries to make itself more worldly by adopting the patterns of America. Koreans, like, they don't give an F.  So they don't mind. Everybody has Halloween, which I think is the weirdest phenomenon. It's a Korean holiday. We were only borrowing it from them. Doug Carmichael, were you jumping in? Mike, how should my Korean friend get in touch with you? M. Nelson at P-O-B-O-X.com, just like Post Office Box. Good. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. And thanks for tuning in, despite jet lag. I find as I age that the long flights seem to get longer. Well, at least with Emirates, they have more distraction than I've ever seen on a single airplane. Well, that's good.  So you can look forward. You can look down. You can look back. And then they have, of course, at least 400 different movies to watch. The whole entertainment system on an airplane thing is funny to me now, because so many people just bring their own gear and they've loaded up one of 4 billion things that are available on the intertubes, et cetera, et cetera. But the reason you go on the system is because you'll have the serendipitous experience of seeing things you never would have seen. I ended up watching a movie called 18 and a half. And it's a brand new movie. It's historical fiction. It's sort of a what if. You know, what if there was another Watergate tape that actually captured what was on the 18 and a half minute gap that mysteriously disappeared? And what would Nixon and his goons do to make sure that that tape was never recovered and never released to the courts? That's hilarious. It was. It's pretty gruesome in parts, but not gruesome. Just it was very much, you know, CIA, Skull Diggory and a lot of tension. But I'm not recommending it as a great movie, but there are some pretty quirky plot twists that made for a fun movie and some very colorful characters. On my first flight to Australia, to Sydney, I was tooling through the entertainment system and happened across a documentary about protests that happened during the annual anniversary of the first fleet that happens in Australia back in the 80s. And aborigines from around the entire country, road buses hitchhiked, basically came in to Sydney and sat in protest. And it was the first kind of big national awakening of, oh my God, something was like broken here. And it was exactly the right thing to watch on the way into Australia. And it was because I was on a flight to Australia that it was even sort of at hand, I think. So cool stuff. Yeah. Thank you. And again, thanks for any help that can be got on Korea because we are. Yeah. Cool. Did you want to add something? I could talk forever, as you know, but I think I've covered the important stuff. Cool. Thanks. And I wanted to check in with sort of two things. One was back to parts of this conversation that we had about norms and so forth. And it feels like we're at a moment where a lot of relationships have been torn. In many cases, torn intentionally. And that the relationships which make up the fabric, we talk about the fabric of society because the relationships are like the warp and the weft of what holds us together.  But one word popped up for me early in this call, which I think I put in the chat, but the word resacralization that so many of our problems and I know too many syllables and a weird word because it has the word sacred in it. And I have to say it very carefully because I don't mean that all the religions should take over and get really big and run everything. That's not what I mean by resacralization. And in fact, in my brain, I was just looking, there's an ironic thought of how strange that organized religion seem to have made a lot of things less sacred. They seem to have broken a lot of things that we ought to think of as sacred. But what I mean is if a whole bunch of ordinary humans realized that we are all sort of sacred and share this little pale blue dot, this little marble that we need to take care of and could come back into relationship to cooperate to keep it well and make it better, a lot of other stuff would just sort of be fixed and fall by the wayside. But we're being driven apart on exactly the opposite tangent on purpose because power. And so I keep looking for one of the simple things that let us realize our interdependence, interconnection, and mutual shared responsibilities because Gil, when you say we all know you can't dump trash on the neighbor's porch, yep. But the seed corn is a concept. A seed corn is a futures concept. Seed corn says there's going to be a tomorrow and it's our norm, it's our practice because it keeps us alive for centuries to set aside some of this year's harvest so that we have something to plant next year. And that's long-term thinking. It says a whole bunch of different things, right? And I said this before on our GM, which is in econ 101 at UC Irvine, when we dispensed with externalities in 15 minutes, my little inner voice was like, man, that seemed important. How did that go away so fast? And the whole field of economics just doesn't care about the capillaries and didn't for years think of externalities as worth looking at. And it turns out they're killing us. And then I started thinking that what we've done because we're out of relationship is we've made it the government's job to write regulations to force companies to take care of those externalities because they're not motivated to do it themselves. And there's no practice or norm of taking care and cleaning up your backyard and making sure that whatever you dug or blew up is better than when you started. There is no norm for that. And then conservatives argue that there's way too many regulations. So every time they come into power, they dismantle the rules and laws that we try to build to do what society and relationship ought to be able to do. So I'm a big fan of norms and relationships and trust and all those kinds of things.  And there's a whole much more sort of to that dynamic that's going on. So re-sacralization means just the recognition of our sacredness individually and interdependently. That's all I mean by it. And I don't, you know, none of the organized religion piece of it do I intend. And I wish that would happen. Gil, please. Good riff, Jerry. Thank you for that. You talked about the seed corn being long-term and hard to see compared to seeing the neighbor's porch. But I reminded of the story, I don't know how true it is, that during the siege of Leningrad or Stalingrad or something in World War II, where the Soviet Union had the major seed banks, people starved to death rather than raid the seed banks. Wow. So there's something there. Oh, sure. And on the challenge of organized religion, any organization is the problem word there, but that's one of the ways that societies maintain norms. It's not the only one. There are disorganized religions and there are traditional cultures. In the long history of human beings, we have maintained norms in our cultures in various ways. The third thing on that thought, I don't have the reference in maybe you do, but there was a speech by Putin, I think about 15 years ago, maybe it was around there, where he talked about the strategy of breaking the norms in the United States as a major geopolitical strategy for the Russian Empire. Anybody can find that one. But for me, it's a background of color to what's happening right there. Thanks. And I'll point out- He gave about four months ago on why Ukraine isn't a country. It's both very important and really horrifying. One man thinks he can get some phony history in a race, a country. Peter Zion has had some remarkable stuff. And back to the comment I made about stoplights when Mark was talking, some of our norms are very dysfunctional. And so, and we protect them and they're baked in and all those kinds of things. So we have to worry about that as well. How do you pick your way through? Someone else had raised a hand, but it went down. Was it Doug See or Mark? Go ahead. Your multi devices. Good. It's working. Right. Yes. It's working. So a friend of mine who's a priest of the Western ritual tradition, he wants to bring back the cult of the goddess Anana, talked about things that are sacred in the civic life and certainly things like the palace of the legion or the huge, what is it, palace of the legion of arts? Or I forget the name, but the gorgeous civic temple here in San Francisco. And really, I'm not sure about re-sacralization, but basically we have things that are already sacred. We hold our children sacred. Some of us don't hold our parents sacred.  They, you know, the earth is our child rather than our parents. I've come up with the term, you know, the earth created us, and not the other way around. It is, thank you, Palace of Fine Arts. It's, the sacred is that, which we hold most here. We hold most valuable in our lives, as I've heard it. And it doesn't have to be religious. I go to St. Mary's Cathedral of Assumption almost every Sunday to listen to about an hour of organ music. And I hold sacred, not God, but the worship that people have made of God. The feelings of, you know, that created the cathedral, that created the music, that created the images, that created, you know, that impulse to basically hold something sacred is why I hold sacred. Thanks, Mark. Love that. Second thing I wanted to put in as by way of checking is that I've been doing a podcast for beta works called Tools for Thinking. And we've posted five episodes so far. They're really fun. I think the episodes are good. I've got trails in my brain. So I'm taking notes in my brain for each of the episodes, et cetera, et cetera. And I just recorded one yesterday or the day before, I guess, that was excellent and will come out. I think it might be, it was Wednesday and it might come out on Friday. But the conversations feel really fruitful and I'm winding up talking with people who are doing a lot of great work on this theme. So it feels like there's something there that's very OGM-y and I will report back in more depth on it. I'm also creating deeper show notes that I haven't finished yet, but I'm going to post those which will have like a whole bunch of information for each of the calls as we go. But it's been really, it's been, it's very fun. And the think and beta works is in the middle of a 10 week think camp right now with a few startups that are kind of in there. And apparently from what I'm hearing, I'm not been really very connected to the camp. The best part of it is just that these startups are sharing very openly with each other, what they're doing and how they're going about it. And one of the people in yesterday's in yesterday's session was Paul Roney, who is French and runs Cosmic.  Thank you. Yeah, it keeps correcting to Cosmic with a C. Cosmic.app I think is the URL. But his, what he's building in his philosophy was so wonderful. And there were stretches of the conversation where it was like, we all really need to come together and pull what we know, because there's this moment where we can sort of level up. So that was really lovely. The conference that you moderated for beta works on tools for learning with the render session. Yeah, the render was just amazing. There was so much optimism, just it was, it was quite the opposite of this conference I'm at here. I everybody taught me something. It was so, so interesting. Thank you. Glad you liked it. And it was very fun. I will put a page up actually, Kevin Marx live tweeted ish the render session and did a really beautiful job of it. And then before before we could produce anything, he had produced basically embedded the video of the conference and and everything else. It was great. Yeah, I've given that to many people. It was it was of all the different conference synopses that I've seen. That was the best. I mean, the World Economic Forum is famous for doing one pagers for each session. And they captured some stuff pretty well, but his he just did an incredible job. Truly he did. So anybody with any last thoughts were at the end of our time. I'm going to restart my brain, which just froze. I just upgraded to the brain 13 and it's freezing a bit. Because I wanted to share the length of Kevin Marx's notes on the render session, which should be available to me in 20 seconds.  It sounds like it. Yeah, it involves like holding neurons in place and then like running a spark through the amygdala. And it's just a bit of a shock. Bit of a shock. Electronic LSD. That's that's our next breakthrough. Somebody's going to get a Nobel Prize for hallucinatory B fields. Exactly. And Pete beat me to it. He's got the the link in the chat already. And it just came up for me. But there you are. So thanks, everybody. Really appreciate your being here. And let's be careful out there. And let's all vote. And everybody vote. Get your yeah. Yeah, don't do that in Britain. They don't get to vote in Britain unless you're a Tory member. Exactly. So crazy.


Welcome to nobody gets embarrassed at all. Definitely not here with Ashley. Hi I'm here. Hello, and I am Canadian if you don't know We don't really get taught where all of the states are in the United States of America, but you do I Did at one point so I made a video of this at one time before Sometime what date was it also before the video starts? I know about this I know I got new lights installed. This is a temporary thing I just wanted to set it up real quick to make sure it worked I'm gonna route it all through the ceiling and stuff and you won't even see any of the wires It's a temporary thing. So I don't want to hear anything about like It's a temporary thing I think what we should do because I've already done this before in a video because I I forgot that I did this already I think that we should just go ahead and get right into you doing it Then I will go and everybody asking well Ethan this is unfair because I bet you don't know anything about Canada true That's but not true. Let me see if I can name all of them. Okay. Okay, there's how many there's 12 provinces three territories Okay, so 15 overall. So we have Nova Scotia P. I new Brunswick Newfoundland Quebec Ontario Saskatchewan Manitoba Alberta BC that's 10 5 left then there's Yukon none of it Northwest Territories Does Canada have seven provinces? What okay 13 so I got them you did did I will say sure did I Okay, so what we're gonna do is I don't know if I could get any of these other ones like nicknames Shapes is gonna be hard. So you're gonna do the map. Okay. This is all just the map of the mouse. Okay, so oh Okay, so you have 50 so where on the map is Washington No, oh, oh, I know this I think um I believe You're one for one right click to continue Oh, and it doesn't fill it. Oh, so you can guess We're gonna just mm-hmm Hail Mary mission. Yep. That's not Michigan Rhode Island It is little little it's the smallest state Yeah, there you go New York Arguably the top three most popular states. I should know this cuz I know that New York borders Canada also Yes, yes, that's not too bad with Scott, Wisconsin. I don't know if I could get this No Damn it. Why is it down there? It's one of the squares that all look the same Oh, it's one of the squares that all look the same North Dakota. Okay. I know there's also a South Dakota I do not know where either of those are I don't Know approximately, I think I could maybe pick it out Utah, okay, Utah, so this is Calvary. This is Nevada And I think you ties there. Oh, you've got 50% so far. I have just good for a person that doesn't live here New Mexico Oh, I think New Mexico is here, right? Oh next door Minnesota Wrong I Also for any of these if you want a light hint do you like a light hint a light hint sure Connecticut is in New England Okay, I was gonna say some of these are not in the big squares and I'm ignoring these cuz they scare me so New England is Do you want another hint yeah, it's a smaller state, okay, so Embarrassing myself a little less than I thought even though this is my score, you know I mean, this is still pretty good.  I wish they give you half points for when you click like right beside the state But that's a whole different state, you know, Oregon I know Oklahoma Kind of know what I'm gonna embarrass myself. I'm feeling Oklahoma I've got the little thing. It's got the little thing South Dakota, baby.  Yes, it's in the south and it's not the hatchet one It's not the hatchet one. I couldn't I don't know where I'll be like I know approximately where it is But I don't know if I would get a watch Alabama's in Florida. Mm-hmm Arizona do you want to hint? I know Arizona's like deserty something that might help more deserty probably more close to Mexico heat burping and it smells I don't smell anything so I'm good. God. I don't remember which one was in Mexico Because I clicked one of these two. I think I clicked this one. It was wrong Hawaii Montana Montana's one of those where it's just like I don't know it's a big state with not a lot on it Sorry, Montana. Damn. Hey editor. Make sure you put make sure you put a little star on every state that I'm touring in Here do it right now do it right now ready and make it like a cool Gunshot, no, maybe not This is Georgia Arkansas is another southern state Southern is shella where Mm-hmm, it's in New England. I was gonna say like is it over here. I'm feeling yeah, it's in New England Delaware, oh Okay, this is very confusing Midwest is like Like everything in here like the Midwest doesn't make sense. I don't know why we call it that the central u.s I'm pretty sure is where Kansas is I Feel like I don't know for sure you can either take that advice or don't oh You were really close and if it makes you feel any better I couldn't tell you what what state that is the one that you picked Wyoming that might actually be Close And you said it correctly too a lot of people from Nevada will get really mad because people say Nevada a lot Oh, I know this because my old roommate calf Catherine is from Nevada Which very quickly corrected me on my pronunciation. There you go flare flyer. Have you ever played the Florida man game? Yes, I have I think my Florida man He brought like Look, let's see what happens when we do a Florida man October 24th What a man arrested for having sex with stuffed Olaf at Target, there we go 26 Finds World War II grenade and places it in he brings it to Taco Bell. Why would he bring it to Taco Bell? Where is West Virginia West Virginia? So we had Virginia and West Virginia. What it's more north, Virginia Why is that North Virginia Indiana Indiana one of the most boring I am touring there and so it's sold out. Maybe it's sold out because there's nothing to do It's close to Minnesota Minnesota. Oh, it does not work It does border I mean the lake not not can't like sorry you have 20 left Alaska Alaska Mississippi But rivers do account for many borders, that's true. So the south is like And then like Midwest is everything else it's a for California Yeah, cuz see how fix the in a weird the borders that's the Mississippi River. I think I'm pretty sure Ohio Do you want to hint? Yes, it borders Indiana I'm gonna be honest. No idea where the hell Indiana actually I feel like I remember maybe if I which one I guessed But not which one it actually was except for the Virginia thing cuz that's what you want another. Yeah, please it also borders Michigan So hell do you want another hint? Uh-huh. It also borders, West Virginia. Ah Okay, we often think of Ohio as being a part of the Midwest for some reason Sorry, I like that Indianapolis or Indiana is here and then Michigan is here Michigan Which I learned this recently the easy way to remember what Michigan looks like is because people in Michigan often refer to Where they live as what part of the mitten are you in so people are like oh, I live like in the glove or in the thumb Nebraska, do you want a hint?  All right We're gonna go. I feel like I've already guessed and wrongly guessed all of these to the point where I pretty much think they're all gone Yeah, so no, it's one that you've clicked Definitely do you want a strong hint strong? I might be about to embarrass myself. All right. It's not South Dakota No, I'm not gonna find it. Okay, you know what I did already guessed this.  Yeah, I'm so sorry Chris. I know that New Jersey is like around here Do you want to hint here? Yeah, you know, it's like That's Massachusetts Pennsylvania Pennsylvania is a big ish state in New England in New England Yes, so we have I don't remember where New England stops. Oh, no, Pennsylvania. Yeah.  Nice. I'm not South Carolina, baby. There you go The process of elimination are almost there you have 13 left. Oh god, Massachusetts That's that weird one weird one Texas Large and have a very like distinct shape. Mm-hmm. I got those That was such a good guess cuz I wouldn't have guessed there Missouri, I don't even think I know where Missouri is Nice Nice nice nice nice. Maybe just slap it down there. Fuck. Yeah. Okay, Illinois, Illinois I was like, come on. I know I haven't guessed like any in here, Maine This is where I'm from nice New Hampshire. New Hampshire is also in New England Yep Vermont Vermont is near Colorado, isn't it? I haven't looked at a map go with your instincts Where's Colorado? So we have I think so let's say that's Colorado say that's Colorado. Where's Vermont what? Yeah, right near Colorado Ashley. No, I did not confirm that you just said is it Near Colorado, and then I said well, where's Colorado I know Tennessee Tennessee is a chode You only have these four left.  I was like hovering over in Brazil. Idaho. This is a bigger state It's a bigger state, and it's kind of a cool shape Well, you haven't clicked on it period Now here's a question where in California, are we Yeah, we might be closer to I think we're down here That might be like long beach, I think this is like general LA area. You have two left. Well, this is 48. Yeah You're on 49 this one you complimented it shape Yeah, that's where Sam is from I know that Louisiana is south and near Florida All right Ashley you have one more. I couldn't tell you what it is as in I haven't looked yet I don't know what state it would be. You don't know. Oh, Maryland.  Okay. So you got I did fail.  This is to be expected You got most of the Midwest wrong But I think that that's probably gonna happen to me also. So now I'm gonna speed run mine. Okay. Yeah, and do a quick 50 so here we go map of the states, California, Wisconsin Is Here yep main cool West Virginia is here Texas there Louisiana there Montana. It's here Wyoming.   I got that is like so much better than I think I would ever do I think also I just like remembered a bunch of the ones that you Just wow look at the comparison you suck You did actually do really good a lot better than I thought you would mean naming all of the provinces That's only 13. This is 50. If I'm honest, I don't even know what all our provinces are I know Puerto Rico or that's a territory. I don't know No idea. I think it's a territory or is it a problem? No, I think it's a territory now Let's go hard mode and play flags. Oh We're not gonna do this which one belongs to Maine. I don't even know if I can do this Yeah, there we go. Okay. Well, that's my home state. Well, Ashley You did it You did it you named the states all of which is your favorite state my favorite state careful Ashley Don't offend the people at home. What's the what's your favorite state? No, it's me


Um, Wesley, you knew you were going to be a film critic from a very, very young age. Were you always very judgmental? Yes. Yes. Yes. I would not describe it as judgmental. I would call it honest. I was telling the truth. And you had a teacher, why don't you tell everyone how you discovered that this was an actual career? Basically what happened was I got an assignment when I was in the 7th grade that was to watch a movie based on a book. And this professor, this teacher, John Cosimple, um, was, you know, he didn't want us to keep, you know, we've read a lot of books.  You're going to read this book. It's called April Morning. Anybody ever read that book? It was turned into a hallmark. Was that noise? I'm so sorry. I remember reading that 8th grade thing and nobody should read this. But really nobody should see the movie it was based on because it was turned into a hallmark, hall of fame production with like Chris, with Chad Lowe, and Rip Torn. Like you're already criticizing. We haven't gotten through the story yet. Well, no, I'm just, can't help it, I'm sorry. Um, anyway, I turned in the assignment and he wanted to kind of some nopses of what, you know, the book versus the movie. And I just sort of wrote about how I didn't like the movie relative to the book. Um, and he's like, you know, there's people do this for a living here. You seem to be good at it. You seem to at least be committed to the expression of an opinion. You might want to consider keeping continuing to do that. So I kept doing it. His saying that basically made me aware of the fact that there was a, you know, he, what he said was, you know, do people do this for a living? I think that's huge. No, I didn't have anyone. It was a doctor. I went to liberal arts school, so I never heard anything about making a living.


So here's the deal with Fuji Flush, right? You got this hand of cards, right? And you are trying... They're numbered like what, one through 24 or something? Right, you're trying to get rid of all your cards. You don't want any cards in your hand and then you are the winner, right? So what happens is you put a card down on the table and the cards with really high values, there's not a lot of them in the deck. Like I think there's one of each of the really high value and then there's like two of the middling ones So like if you've got like a 16, there's probably not another 16 out there. There might be one maybe. I don't think there is. But there's a million twos. But there's like twos and fours like galore, right? So I put down a four. I'm starting the game. I'm winning. Two through 20. I'm winning. Four is the highest number out there, right? Rim plays an eight. Oh, I've been beat, right? We're going around clockwise. All the people who were beat, their card goes away and they have to draw another card.  My hand is not decreased in size. Therefore, I am not any closer to winning. I'm trying to get rid of all the cards in my hand.  So then Joey Jojo plays a two. That doesn't beat the card I played. It doesn't beat rims eight, but it hasn't been beat by someone after him. So that two stays. Now the next person plays another eight. So we got rims eight, a two, which survives, and then another eight. Well, obviously the eight alone would get rid of the two. Obviously the two is defeated.  But that eight ain't an eight. Well, rims eight wasn't defeated because it's an eight, right? And he got tied. But because now there are two eights on the table, they are now both 16s. And say Scott plays an eight. Now, it gets back to me. It's a four player game and I play an eight. 24. That's 24. All the eights are now worth 24. Right. Someone would need to make us throw those eights away. Someone couldn't just play a nine. They'd have to play a 25, right?  Other people have to combine their numbers together somehow to beat our combined four. So everyone like eight, eight, nine, nine. Oh, the eights got beat, right?  If you shared that card with other people, they also put their card in the middle. So you basically can form coalitions with other players to like, you'll all rise together. But it's not just a vote who wins game because you've got a very limited hand at any given point in time. You don't want a big hand.  You're trying to get down to zero. Your options keep decreasing as time goes on. You can't just say, man, I can see that rim only has one card left. I really need to team up with Chris against him. Let's not form any coalitions with rim right now. You can do that up to a point. Well, rim plays his four. And what I've got in my hand, two four is great. Now it is elegant though in that the bigger your hand still is, the easier it is to form coalitions with other people whose hands are bigger. So as you are closer to winning the game, your options for coalitions decrease. I think this is the one flaw in the game is that at the very end, you got one card and on your turn you play it. And that's all you can do then when if you get beat, you draw a new card and then when it's your turn, you play it. And it's pretty much at the end of the game. You're not making decisions anymore. You're just playing the card that you draw and hoping that it wins out at some point before someone else empties their hand. Now reducing that ability, that coalition ability of the leading players is a very good mechanic. It actually, it balances the game out like very well. If someone gets a little head with luck, they got to be real skilled or real lucky to keep getting ahead.  I think the way to make this game absolutely perfect and it may require adding some more cards to the game. But basically make everyone's starting hand three cards bigger and have someone win. If they get down to three. If they get two, three or maybe below three. As soon as they get to two cards left, they win immediately. That way at the end of the game, you're still making decisions. And it's not just down to 100% luck at the end where you only have like one or two cards but you're still have to win the same number. The game would still be just as long. You still have to win the same number of times, get rid of the same number of cards. But you never reach a part of the game where it's just draw play, draw play. I'm confident that, that small rule change. We have not play tested this, but I think that small rule change. You have to rebuild the deck because you need more cards. Yeah, maybe we have to test it. Maybe. You might just have to reduce the max. It takes up to eight players, which is also actually like rare. You could just, yeah, if you reduce the player's count to five, then you can give everyone three more cards without any problem, right? But I'm confident that a small rule change like that takes this game from good to great. And it'd be really interesting to try it and see if our hypothesis is correct. Cause I really, I played this game once. I really enjoyed that one play. It got high luck. You can see there is a lot of high level interaction for how short this game is. Right, you're like, how many, like rim plays an eight. And I say I got eight in my hand and it's like, well. Do I want to help? But you might look and play. I can also just play a nine and shut you down. Yeah. And then I say, Oh no, rim has a ton of cards in his hand. I'm beating him. Let's go on on the eights.  But there's nothing you can do about it. He already played. Oh, by the way, it's not just eights that form coalitions, right? It could be, we could be using that as the example, but it could be like there are times where someone played like 11 and someone else was like, oh yeah, 11 and there's 22. And then another person went, right?  And you'll see sometimes like someone plays like a four or a five. And then someone's like two and then two and then two and then two.  It's awesome. Yep. There are the low numbers can beat the high numbers. It happens. Apparently this game re-implements another older game called Drop Pelt and Drift Fuck. Great name. Designer Friedman Fries. All right. So I guess he remade the game. Okay. This original game had cards number two through 15, but was otherwise mostly this guy now because I remember him looking pretty young in the 10, 15 years ago. I think he's just been making games forever. Well, I mean, he made power grade. He doesn't have to do anything else.  The rules or the box gave no hint to the identity of the designer in July of 2016. Friedman Fries was revealed to be the designer. So he anonymously sent this game out to get it play tested, I assume, and then re-implemented it based on that feedback as Fuji Flush. Wow, he released it as a D&D game as opposed to an F and F game. Well, he had to hide. I wonder if there's other D&D games released anonymously that are actually him. Go for it. I'm going to look around. Dungeon and Dragoon. Dungeon and Dragoon. So this game, if you like, if you want a game like Six Nymphs or N Yet or even Wizard, this is just one of those games. You could just make, well, the thing with Witt, I was going to say, like Wizard is like the best still, but Wizard takes a while. You got a lot of hands you got to play. All these other games, these smaller card games, get you almost all the fun of the Wizard in a lot less time and a lot less space. Even Six Nymphs requires many plays to finish. This is just like bam, and it's done. I don't know, I've been enjoying these trick-taking-esque, light, relatively quick games that actually have pretty serious strategy. It's like, these games aren't so great and so amazing on the Puerto Rico T&E level, but it's like, in terms of efficiency, the most strategy and good brain thinking in the least amount of game, it's like, oh, it's just so elegant and efficient, and it's like, you can get a whole ton of good, satisfying, worthwhile, strategic gaming in 10, 15 minutes. But more importantly, they're quick to teach. They take like a minute to teach people how to play. Well, especially if they already know what trick-taking games are, right? But it's like, trick-taking games in general, I think, because it's like, it's all this strategy of like, all right, here's a bunch of cards, and how do I take or not take tricks? Hmm, even Hearts is like, oh, there's a lot of thinking going on here.  Now, what I've also found, this is kind of a side note, but this applies to all these games, independent, like as long as someone knows the basics of what trick-taking is and we skip that problem, it is readily apparent immediately when you teach this game to new people, some people just have a knack for understanding the core of what the game is once you explain the rules, and some people just don't. Yes, that is- And when we taught, when we played Fuji Flush, about two thirds of our table, no one had played the game before except the person who taught us, got it right away and started playing like this really A game like real quick, and the other people, I don't think they, I don't think even by the end of the game they really understood what was happening to them. Is that the game's fault, right? No.