The interesting thing that, you know, with something so obvious as a safety belt, my mom said, we don't actually know what the developmental implications of tying your kids up like that is. And we never will. Exactly. So I think everybody on the call here remembers the days of flopping around in the backseat of the car as your parents drove around or whatever. No restraints, no whatever. Yeah. So we were just talking about sort of perceptions of things over time.  And what do you do with people who did bad things? And it was provoked by the 10-10 art that I've put on the wall to my right here. Because if you know anything about 10-10, he was Belgian and some of his earliest cartoons are kind of racist and not great, but his line art is really beautiful. And I did a video, which I'll post in the chat. I did a video long ago called Globetrotting Boy Detective in which it dawned on me as an adult not that long ago that my childhood heroes, actually, let me do a, let me go see if I can, there we go. It dawned on me that my heroes in childhood, there we go, it dawned on me one day that my childhood heroes in fiction and later Calvin and Hobbes, but Johnny Quest, Rick Brant and 10-10, Rick Brant was the Rick Brant science adventure stories were sort of between Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. It was a series meant for boys back in the day, but it was a young boy who was the son of a scientist in a scientific community that lives on Spindrift Island off the coast of New Jersey, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it dawns on me one day that my heroes, except for Calvin maybe, although arguably this could apply to Calvin, my heroes were all boy detectives who were Globetrotting, who were going everywhere. And that was kind of enlightening because I think that's a little bit of what I became as an adult, anyway. No Space Ghost. I didn't watch Space Ghost, didn't have Space Ghost. So how is that? That's great. I'm good. I'm happy to be here. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Nice to see you. Yeah. Happy Thanksgiving. I don't even have Space Ghost in my brain, although I've seen him, but he's not in my brain, so I'm gonna add him now. And Mighty Mouse. I have no idea who Space Ghost is or what. It was in cartoon in the 60s. Oh, I should remember the Hardy Boys, speaking of childhood heroes and role models, but Space Ghost doesn't really bell. Space Ghost, Beanie and Cecil, Underdog, Mighty Mouse. Mighty Mouse. Mighty Mouse, yeah. I love Mighty Mouse here. I come to say the day. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Space Ghost, adding Space Ghost. And I'm thinking maybe we start a little bit with some gratitude since it's in the US at least allegedly gratitude day. It's also the day of the Great Turkey Slaughter. But maybe if we just wanna just either, what do you prefer, go around the room or type into the chat things that we're grateful for? I'd rather hear it from people than read it. Sounds great. Would you like to lead off? Sure. I'm grateful to be alive. The older I get, the more I appreciate waking up and getting vertical. Like, that's an accomplishment. Someday is more than others. I'm grateful for flavors, for food.  I remember when I was a kid, I think it's about five and my uncle had a tomato garden and one day in the afternoon in August, he said, come with me and he grabbed a salt shaker and a knife and we went outside on a hot August day and he sliced the tomato in half and put all salt on it and he said, eat this. And I remember the tomato dripping down my chin and this flavor just flooding my mouth. And I was like, wow, the world tastes good. This is amazing. Cause it was really hot and juicy and ever since then I love tomatoes. How old do you think you were? About five, four or five. That's awesome. Love that. I'm grateful for having a roof over my head and a marriage of 30. Well, I've been with my wife now for 33 years and for lots of friends, for people on this call. Judy, it's nice to see you. It's been a while. Yeah, Judy. Wow, good to see you all. Although it's a crazy hard time to be alive with so much disappearing, I'm grateful to be alive in this time. I think it's an amazing era in which to try and make a contribution, doesn't mean it's easy to make a contribution, but I do try. It seems like a great contribution. I live in this amazingly beautiful place and everywhere I look, there's something of beauty around me which is kind of incredible that I get to live here. I don't have to shovel snow, having grown up in Maine, that's a big deal for me. Let's see, I'm grateful for all the teachers I've had for the people who've taught me things, who've mentored me. I'm even grateful for the tormentors, you know? I wanted mentors, I got more tormentors than mentors, but they taught me things too. And I'm grateful that I managed to get to the point in my life where I can be grateful for people who tormented me and recognized that they were doing the best they could, which wasn't very good for me, but it doesn't do me any good to hold grudges, so I'm grateful for being able to let go of that. Let's see. Yeah, I think that's, you know, I'm just, positive psychology, I taught people they are important to keep a gratitude journal, but I didn't realize it myself until the pandemic hit and after about two months of going, oh, I can't do this and I can't do that, I can't do this, I can do that. So I have to switch to focusing on gratitude and so for the last two years, I have had a lot of opportunity and a lot of practice in saying this is what I'm grateful for, which has really helped to shift my focus from what I'm disappointed with in life and what I feel constrained by to what I'm grateful for and I'm grateful that I actually discovered that and started doing it instead of just talking about it. So I'll stop there. Thank you. And our brains head toward what we think a lot about and they rewire pretty happily into those kinds of things. Kalea or at least Kalea's avatar. Yay. Thanks for joining. Stacey, let's go, Stacey Klaushank. Well, I actually thought a lot about this and I started off with my house and the fact that my dog's, my almost 15 year old dog isn't in pain, but I came around to an answer that I normally wouldn't say out loud but I will share it. And I'm grateful that I really like myself and that I can accept the blame and the credit and that I don't have to turn away from the parts of me that maybe in the past I would have tried to hide. And I just recently met somebody, I haven't met them physically because I've been sick with COVID. So I've been like isolated for like three weeks. But, you know, we get along a man and we get along really well. And when I'm talking to my friends, I'm explaining how much I think he thinks like me and I'm saying it like it's a good thing.  I was like, no, I think I would. So I'm just grateful that I like myself because I can't imagine what it would be like. And I think there are a lot of people that really don't. And I'm grateful for, and that's not to take away that I'm not grateful for everything around me because I feel that I'm attracting all these positive things to me. So it's, yeah, so I'm grateful for all of you and just life. Thank you, Stacy. It also feels like in many societies, in many cultures, many kinds of social requirements or institutions make us feel bad about ourselves in different ways. And take us away from the thing you just said, feeling like we're whole and fine and liking ourselves and all of that. We're often driven away from that by culture. So thank you. Let's go class Hank Judy. Yeah, I think the highlight for me this year was that our son moved to Bend and bought a house and is doing really well at work. He is the head of culture and employer branding. So something that didn't exist when I was working, but for SEMSARA, which is a logistics company that works with artificial intelligence to guide logistics operations and international companies. So in the process, we could really close and closer than we had ever been. And he wants to teach me meditation. He comes over and so we have really great conversations and that's so important to me because I did not have that relationship that was any good and it messed me up quite a bit. And so to be able to have that and give that to him is a dad that was really special. And then we were able to retire to Bend some years back and it's a beautiful little town and we have found a very comfortable place to live. So I do love the shop, although it's a ski resort and it's pretty high up in the mountains. But so yeah, so this has been, I mean, as crazy as everything around us is it has still been a good year. I found a partner, maybe he found me, who is a retired executive from a biofuel company who was a CEO of a billion dollar biofuel company and he decided to set up a five from one C3 and he actually did this in like three weeks. It was crazy. Now to how well connected he is. So we just finished our website and we'll go public on December one. So that's really something special also to have that recognition and now a professional connection so we can move into a market niche that is quite apparent in the operationalization of generative agriculture from farm to table and all the way along the supply chain. So yeah, so that it has been in that sense from a personal perspective, it has been a really good year and I'm really thankful for it. Thanks, Koss. You got me thinking a little bit. In your wanderings and conversations, are you running into a bunch of recovering food and fuel retirees or maybe just food retirees? People who were in the system, deep in the system in production, industrial farming, in the food logistics, in the system, food services, whatever else it might be and who had an enlightenment of some sort about what was going on. Are you bumping into a lot of people and I think I'm describing a bit of your personal history in some sense, you did food for your whole career and then the light bulb went off that like, oh my God, we're doing this backwards. We're wrong. It didn't happen until I retired and started to take courses and Corsair about just about came up out of retired in 2012 and I took courses that use the Illinois Introduction to Sustainability, Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia, MIT. So I've taken about a couple dozen really amazing courses even so they were online and they were just giving me all the information. But no, my former colleagues who are still working younger folks, they are so stuck in this system. Just like I was, you just can't move. You don't have the flexibility. So Joel also coming from the biofuel sector, he didn't really get into this until after he retired. So because when you are in this corporate world, you just cannot move, right? I mean, you get, this is where we're going and when I used to make can be, should be focused on nutrition. They put me in charge, Disney put me in charge of socially responsible merchandising to children globally, right? I mean, for all the theme parks and all our operations and they parked at me with Coca-Cola and Nestle to do so.  And so that's really what you're dealing with. It's to set of these many professional people who are working in the corporate frame free, set them free to act. It was creative evolution because that's where all the resources are. That's where the skills are. That's where you can really make a difference where the money is, but it's not there yet. Interesting, thank you. And I was wondering also if there was any kind of a community or a meeting place virtually for people like have gone through your experience, but you're not saying that you're meeting a lot of people who've had that light bulb turn on. So maybe- I have over 5,000 people following me on LinkedIn and a lot of them are my former colleagues. So every time I talk with someone, they know exactly what I'm up to and what I'm doing. They're following me and they're reading what I'm writing. They can't comment, they can't get into it, but they're really, I mean, they're on the topic. At least I can get the topic out and talk. In front of them, yeah, that's great. Thank you. For those of you just hitting the call, we're just doing a round starting with Gratitudes and see where that goes. So we've got Hank, Judy, Rick. Yeah, great topic. Well, I guess I have to say I'm grateful for having been able to live a good life amidst many good people around me. I'm grateful for some wonderful conversations with remarkable people leading to exciting ideas. I'm grateful to have lived at a time of relative peace the last 75 years in places that are comforting and challenging and inspiring and also relatively at peace, right along that last. Grateful to have come now to a personal transitional moment, a moment of legacy. The legacy we leave behind and the legacy we leave ahead. From being interested in everything to focus on where I may be able to make some kind of difference. And grateful for moving from thinking about how to make a contribution to choosing to go for it. Grateful to be still open to learning new things. I'm grateful for this theme in this conversation now and the opportunity to think about what gratitude is and to listen to all of you. And I'll leave it at that. Thanks, Klaus. I mean, thanks, Hank. I was like looking at Klaus in the middle of my screen. I'm like, no, no. Thanks, Hank. Appreciate it. Let's go, Judy, Rick, Grace. Well, I'm grateful for so many things. I've been gifted with a wonderful family that encouraged curiosity and education and continually learning new things too. It was always the answer to my question of why is something was always, well, what do you think? Where might you look that up? And that inquisitive character has been a key part of my life throughout the passage of time. I'm grateful for the opportunities I had for education. Many wonderful mentors and teachers, both in and out of school for a collection of close friends with whom I can share things. Some dating back to college days, seems a very long time ago at this point. And it was. Grateful for the family that I now have with the daughter who is in her mid-30s and teaching at a university and engaged to be married in May. I found her life partner and they seem so well suited to one another. Just, it's hard to express. It's just, I'm feeling very full of gratitude. I feel most fortunate to have encountered so many wonderful people along my journey that helped me become a better person, a more balanced person, learning to meditate a number of years ago and discovering that it had its roots in my eighth grade bayet teacher who had us doing some stuff, but it came easier than for folks who'd never done anything. It was just, the list of people is almost endless because each person brings such a unique gift and the longer they're in my life, the bigger the impact that they have. So, and I'm grateful for this group of people because it's not easy to find a group of like-minded folks who share openly, criticize responsibly, question all the time. And it's been a mainstay for me during COVID actually when I was very isolated during the height of COVID. I'm still staying relatively isolated given the persistence of the disease, but it's just, thank you to all of you. Thanks Judy. And I'm grateful for your courage and fortitude early in your career because you've told some stories of being the only or one of a very few women in a man's world in engineering and other sorts of things in chemistry.  And it seems normally sure now than it did when you were busy doing it, when it was, you were a standout. That just reminds me that I meant when I was thinking about this to say, I was grateful for my 30 plus year career at 3M which is a company that actually values innovation and attempts to inspire individuality and creativity. And I couldn't have found a better place to be. So I was very fortunate. And I have many friends from that that have extended well beyond retirement. And I'm grateful to be 77, 75 which I just turned this year which means I've outlived all of my parents and siblings but I have not yet outlived my grandmother so I'm shooting for 90. That's great. Now, thank you very much. How about Rick Grace John? Well, thank you. I'm an infinquent flyer to the group. So I appreciate the openness to the group for me to pop in episodically. And actually I felt a great gratitude when you were expressing your gratitude and the cascade of gratitudes. And interesting enough, I was on a blog post this morning from an old friend who used to be the Executive Director of the Well-Being Trust and he was talking about gratitude on Thanksgiving but he was saying the same thing. He was saying, we need to practice on a regular basis. And it might be worthwhile considering expressing one gratitude in 30 seconds or a minute on a regular basis just because I can feel the difference in my mindset by hearing all the gratitude that's been expressed so far. It's infectious and we don't do a very good job of doing that. So I just want to encourage the option of maybe doing that on a regular basis at the beginning of all meetings. Well, are you grateful in 30 seconds? Because it's just so reinforced. Anyway, so what I'm grateful for, I'll go back to my mother who I felt that I never really expressed enough gratitude to while she was alive and sometimes you don't realize that until somebody's gone.  And I had severe dyslexia as a kid. I won't go into the details, but she was an advocate for me. And if it wasn't for that, I would have never, never have gotten to medical school. And that set my life on a trajectory of security, meaning and whatever. And I've always, I said to my mother when I was age of 16, she asked me, what do I wanna be when I grow up? And I said, a doctor, an airline pilot and a hippie in that order. So I had that sort of old style hippie still inside of me where I'm driven by meaning and not by money and purpose. So it's something that's, I'm just not driven by money. And so I, anyway, so I'm also grateful for my wife in the background who's making lasagna. I was gonna get a recipe last night to make lasagna because we're going to some friend's house, but she already started preparing for it. I wanted to surprise her last night and she already started doing the preparation. So I'm grateful for my wife and family and I need to do a better job of being grateful for people while they're still alive. Yeah, one of my regrets is not having asked for more family history from my grandparents while they were still alive. And not having had a chance to apologize for things I realized late in life that I wish I had done a little differently. Brief side story and it's a reverse kind of gratitude maybe, but my maternal family escaped Germany in 39 and they never told me the story of how they escaped, what happened. I never got it, partly because they wanted me to have a nice childhood. And then my thing when I was a kid, I don't know, 11 years to 14 years, something like that was building little model airplanes, mostly World War II airplanes. So I would be sitting in the kitchen next to my grandmother who'd be making me breakfast and lunch to go off to school with, putting little swastika decals on a Messerschmitt airplane, blithely unaware that this might actually be traumatic to my grandmother. And they never said anything.  And weirdly, my hobbies seem to track into trying to figure out family history because there was a lot of stuff buried in that era and I don't know, somehow, I think this is like a tarot card reading, but I was busy sort of squirreling away at this and never got the stories. Anyway, that's a regret, not a gratitude. So for some more gratitude, let's go to Grace, John, Kalia. So interesting talking about people when they're alive. I was supposed to be in the U.S. right now visiting my dad because he's not well. And he decided that because he's not well, he won't take any visitors. So I had tickets and everything and he and his wife were just downright nasty about my visit. So that was kind of disappointing, but I'm grateful that I, I mean, the thing that I'm most grateful for is that I just have so many tools at my disposal. I've really spent a lot of my life studying how my mind works. And that includes meditation and that includes everything from Tony Robbins to landmark, to like all this stuff. I've just done a ton and ton of work. And I did that before three years ago when I needed all of this stuff. That's a good sequence though. It's the right sequence. I did it when it was time, when there were good times and when, like, I don't know who foresaw that. I mean, it's not that I didn't foresee something was gonna go wrong, but and I did those things because I wasn't accomplishing what I wanted in life. And I did those things because I really had a lot of negative thinking and depression and things like that that I didn't tell people about. And it's interesting because it's not easy times for me in some ways, because I live alone and, but everything about my life is so great. And I noticed that I wake up every morning thinking, I have a great life, I have a great life. Like I wake up and I'm like, here I am in my cute little bed that I love in my cute little room that I love. On the last few weeks I was traveling around as like, oh, here I am in the Giveth house in Barcelona. Here I am in this really cute little Airbnb. And I just wake up every morning with that thought.  And I know that I put the thoughts there in the morning that I want to have. And it took a long time to change those habits. And I'm really grateful that my lowest lows now are like better than my average day used to be. And some of that comes with age and hormonal changes and whatever else, but I know I did the work. And so I'm really grateful for having been given the opportunities to do that work and the finances to do that work and just these resources. And we do live at a really crazy time in history, but knowing that I have the resources to do something about it. I'm not a billionaire, I can't go save the entire world, but I at least have the emotional resources and the right groups of people who I know and a direction in my life. And I'm really grateful for that. I'm really grateful for that. All of the things that I was taught about education were very academic.  She thinks it's a horrible waste of money. Even though you know we're Jews, it's like you get an education, you get, you know, education is good, but that's not education, that's woo, woo, blah, blah. And I didn't listen. And it's the best education you can have. It's the best education you can have.  It's not money in the bank.  I've been quite irritable and grouchy lately and just kind of feeling grumpy. And I see how I respond to people and it's like this automatic response of, oh, that seems like a good idea. And, you know, here's maybe an idea for improvement or, oh, I can see how we have different points of view and your point of view is very different than my perspective.   It used to, you know, and my eyeballs don't roll. I get, I spent a whole year learning how not to roll my eyes at everything people say.  Yeah, just to like, yeah. And I was in a program, my coach said, you got to work on that. I'm gonna put, every time you do it. It was like a whole, you know, it was at least three to six months. Eye roll shock therapy?  I'm like, I do not.  I roll my eyes. Yeah, I do not. Anyway, but just that, it's like, you know, my dad is really afraid of death and that's why he doesn't want to see me because I haven't had my flu shots because in Europe, if you're under 65, you don't get, it's just like automatic. And I told him I would get them if he wanted, but he's just so petrified of death and I remember some of the teachings that I have around that and like around meditation and around how my ability to see the thoughts in my mind and the fears in my mind as what they are, which is thoughts in my mind.  You think that about everybody, Grace. I'm like, yeah, I do think that about everybody. And it's just the thoughts in your mind or when I'm feeling like things are hopeless. I'm like, oh, well, that's just a thought in your mind. It's so, it's just so profound and it really see the contrast between myself and my family who doesn't have that kind of training and the people around me and just my ability to be with things that are the world that's scary and overwhelming and be like, oh, that's scary and overwhelming. Those are thoughts in my mind. Yeah, that's what I'm most grateful for. Thank you. I'm grateful for your journey, Grace. Thank you and your presence. And I'll just ask us to go into silence for a little bit so we can ponder what you just offered us. I don't know if you can all hear it, but there's a train in my background that is serenading the neighborhood with a train horn, which is unusual. That's not usually happening here, but there's some freight train that's making its way through. And it started just as I went into silence with us and I'm like, it's like a little serenade. Grace, and particularly that moment when you described how you wake up now and how you used to wake up and all that, that really struck me. Congratulations on doing the work so hard. And my mom was, I think, like your parents who stigmatized counseling, therapy, self-help, any and all of those things and then suffered the consequences at the end of her life where the demons she hadn't dealt with basically showed up as her ability to fend them off mentally dissolved.   I could switch them out and I just don't have them anymore, but that's new. That's new, that's 10 years. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. John Kalia Stewart. Okay. Well, you know, I could say I'm very grateful for many of the things that have been mentioned, especially Grace's, the only thing about Grace's that I'm not grateful for is that I have to come after her. But thinking about that and say, oh, yeah, of course, I'm grateful for those things that you mentioned. Wow, that's really the heavy stuff. I said, so okay, John, what else? What else are you grateful for? And an interesting one came up and this came up before you mentioned your dad or your mom. The thing that I thought I was grateful for for this last year. Well, the word that came to me first was death. But I'm not talking about in that philosophical way of, you know, if we didn't have death, we wouldn't have life. You know, I mean, yeah, that's there. That's there. That's interesting, but it's not emotionally resonant. You can't get there on a bad day. What I appreciated about death this year was I lost my sister. And previously I had lost my nephew, who my sister's son, who was an amazing character. And what both of those deaths did, especially my sister's, was it took the wounds of a distributed family that sharply, you know, just went different ways culturally and is dealing with a lot of all the classic stuff, you know, on some, on one part of the family, you know, all the substance abuse and all that kind of stuff. But it isn't that it's not that it's more like the, we're over here, you're over there. So therefore we can't be together, you know, you guys, you guys back East or you guys living in that other world that does Zoom calls, you're so different from us that we can't be together. And then you just kind of raise the bar. You just say, okay, someone who we're all connected to is now dying and is now dead. Wow, okay. What do we do about that? And fortunately, people came together. People didn't just show up at a funeral. They actually wrote original stuff, original poems, original stories, songs. They did multiple ceremonies. I mean, it was like people came out of the woodwork, people who hadn't heard from in years came out of the woodwork and we said, wow. I wonder, I mean, Mary Jo, thank you. I hope you're seeing this. We're sorry you had to die for it to manifest, but wow, it really is something. You really have given us a gift of appreciating indirectly you, but then appreciating what we have in our connection to each other, which we were not honoring and we were not behaving appropriately about. So that's a big one to be thankful for. And I think that's enough. I think I'll just stop there, although I really, really appreciate this group and a number of other things that have already been mentioned. Thank you, John. You're making me think we should have pre-death appreciation ceremonies. And it reminds me of what Lauren was doing with the gratitude circles and the videos that she was creating by asking people who knew us to sort of say, what do you think of so-and-so? And it was lovely. And these moments of tribute and peace are important for humans. And we run, we sort of trample over them at risk of our sense of connectedness and equanimity and appreciation of our connections and love. Akalia, I muted you earlier because you were getting a little bit of ambient noise, but would you like to jump in? Kalia, Stuart, then Doug. Hi. Hey. Oh, thanks for muting me. I was fiddling around my house. Well, it's interesting to think about what we're grateful for. I think for me, the fact that for a year now, I've been working with Lucy. Because she's the compliment that I needed to kind of take the skills and knowledge that I have out into the world and earned some money from them because we spent a long time on the edge of the frontier of the internet and nobody frigging cared. Like, and it was really, but now it seems like we've got enough momentum behind the emerging technology that we're gonna make a big difference. And I don't know that I could figure out how to take my skills into the market without someone who has business knowledge and speaks business, but she also cares about the planet. Like, it's a very good match. So that's Lucy. It says my battery's going down. It'll be fine. It's a 20%. It's nice to see Grace and John here. Hi. Sorry, I can't let you into IW. We sold out. It was crazy with 350 people. And there's the 35th IW workshop. Yeah. One day you'll come, Jerry. I know, I know. One day I'll come. It's true. Yeah, I'm grateful for Lucy and my friend, Laura, let me sublet her place five years ago. I'm still in it. Where are you geographically? What town are you in right now? I live in Glenview in one part of a fourplex that I still sublet for me or at Laura. I guess rental markets are crazy, right? And I'm finally pulling all my stuff from storage from San Leandro to this little garage here that Laura's moving out of. So I have all my stuff in one place for the first time since I left home when I was 18. Well, not quite yet, but we're getting there. Like a month from now to all be on this property, which is sort of weird and great. But it's kind of making me take stock of like, okay, where am I? What do I really want? What am I really? You know, what of these objects that I own? Am I, do I really need to keep pulling with me into the future or not? That feels like enough. I have a business. I have a phone call with Europe at the top of the hour, so I'm gonna leave because they don't have Thanksgiving, just- I know. What's up with that? Are they just not grateful? What about their- No, they just don't have. They have other holidays. This holiday is really weird. I'm Canadian. I still don't really dig this holiday. I'm like- Well, do you have Canadian Thanksgiving, which was passed already, right? Do you celebrate that? It's not the same holiday. Yeah, yeah. It has the same word. It does not have the same meaning. Like in that kind of, this is America's secular religious holiday. Well, as they all are, right? Yeah, but this is Valentine's Day is the Hallmark holiday. No, no, no, but you don't- It's deep, man. It's like America made this holiday that everybody of all religions can celebrate because it's not a religious holiday. It's just America. Now, there's a whole problem about the origins and how we reconcile that. I think we're gonna work on it, but anyways, I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you for all you do to bring us together, Jerry. Oh, thanks, Kalia. You too. I just want to respond to that, actually. Gratitude, you know, when you're as far ahead of the technology as you've been, Kalia, getting paid for it or appreciating it is like impossible. And, you know, I experienced that, but not to the degree you do. I might be two years ahead or three years.  You know, congratulations. You know, I hear more and more talk about SSI now, everywhere, and your work has paid off. And yeah, congratulations. Thank you. I was just gonna say, if any of you subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson, who is a really good historian, every Thanksgiving eve, she writes the story of Thanksgiving and I just posted the link to the one she said yesterday.  And the Civil War was tearing the country apart and Lincoln was like, we need something to weave us together. Several governors then declared a day of Thanksgiving and then he said it's a national holiday and sort of created the modern version of what we think of as Thanksgiving. So you can sort of separate the Puritans and that from the story a little bit, although that's the narratives we tell and then just substitute that for trying to overcome racism in this country, which is a battle we're still fighting. Hey, so you swap in a different story. And maybe interesting how the two crimes the nation was founded are both related to Thanksgiving in an odd way. Hmm, never thought about that before saying these sentences right now. With that, let's go Stuart, Doug, then me. That's the amazing value of hearing yourself speak things for the first time when you have the courage just let the words kind of fly out of your mouth and go, wow, that's interesting. I didn't know I was gonna say that. So I'm grateful for this little respite from hankering in the world to try to make it a better place which all of us do in our own ways. So it's wonderful to just step off that rat wheel for this short moment in time and this short day. Some things evoked by this call and listening, a number of people have reflected their own personal journey. And I was on the phone with my sister this morning and she was starting to talk about how one of her friends, 14 year old daughter had been hospitalized as suicidal. And I said, it's understandable in today's world. And then my sister reminded me of my own bouts with suicide at a certain point in time having what for her were slightly frightening and difficult conversations. And it made me think about my own journey and how fortunate to have kind of stepped on to that learning journey. God, I'm trying to think about the road less travel. Okay, Scott Peck's masterpiece, an epic book. A lot of people misquote him. A lot of people say, and now I'm losing the quote. Many are called you, I can't remember what the misquote is, but the real quote is many are called, the misquote is many are called few were chosen, but the real quote is many are called few choose. You choose to step onto the path of learning and growth so that you can learn how to operate your own machine. This extraordinary, beautiful biological machine that we've all been gifted as a result of human birth. And one of the things I have been having gratitude for every morning is the first thing I do is, when it comes from meditation practice, is celebrate the miracle of breath.  It still works. I'm dreaming and it's working and I can move my hands in these digits and I can ambulate and I can think and I can have this beautiful machine that I operate, you look at these guys operating machinery and equipment out building roads and stuff. And it's like, we've got these extraordinary machines and of course, they degenerate a little bit and you gotta do what you have to to keep them in repair at this point in time. So I'm grateful for this whole human experience. And so I just wanna, I posted a Thanksgiving poem but I wanna share this poem as the last piece of check-in and I think it relates in some way to what all of us are saying about the camaraderie and fellowship of being alive and it's called Belonging. Unfort in body, stillness of soul, safety close to home, respite from buzzing around, manic in search of quiet ground. Aside from what you came to do, you long for a quiet true. Your accepted can really be not what you do to find a real me. Deliverance sets you free, grounded focused how you be for the lucky good fortune shines comfort of quiet minds. Your own acceptance of powerful gift quiet inside without any risk in this solid place, sing your song, your heart revealed where you belong, fully seen, feeling so clean, discovering your unique human being. Fortunate, you can taste the honey, the sacred worth more than money. So one more thing that I wanted to say and Jerry, you evoked it talking about making model planes. Part of where I've been for the last months is, you know, I'm kind of running around the world, but piece of it, a chunk of it was what I call a European Jewish history tour, including many Jewish people who have lived here in Jewish museums in Krakow, a visit to Auschwitz, the Berlin Museum, and it was an extraordinary reminder of the gravity that human souls can step into. So it's time to, you know, live mindful lives and make contributions as we can and take care of those around us. Thank you all for listening. Stuart, thank you so much, really appreciate it. Mr. Carmichael, you are... Hi, good morning. Good morning. I find the grateful question actually so messy because there's so many contradictory things to be grateful for. I come to the idea that at every crucial point in my life, the world offered me more than I ever expected. I give an example, a few examples. At 15, I decided I wanted to understand the world and people told me that the way to do that was science. So I ran away from home and ended up at Caltech. At 15? At 15. Good Lord. Okay. And that was interesting in itself. I mean, so I came to California because I knew it was also going to be warm. And I had no plan as to what to do. I went to the YMCA because I know you could rent a room for cheap and the person in the Y, local Y, in Undale, California, had just quit a swimming instructor and I happened to have a Red Cross life-saving training certificate, which I used. Then, so I got to Caltech and by my junior year, I realized that what they meant by understanding the world was not what I meant by understanding the world. And Caltech had a program of bringing famous people to the campus to spend time with the students. And that year it was Robert Oppenheimer and I was on the committee to show him around. And he, being a smart guy, he figured out that I was even confused about what to do. And he said, what are you gonna do when you finish? I said, I have no idea. He said, well, I have a friend who's chairman of the psych department in Berkeley, why don't you go up and talk to him? So I did that. So I ended up at Berkeley for a while and got a PhD in developmental psych. And realized that psychology had gotten quite mechanical and had lost the human touch. So one thing led to another, I ended up going to Mexico and studying with Eric Fromm and becoming a psychoanalyst. Now, there's just the improbability of these things that's so amazing and they keep on going. So that brings me to, I feel grateful for being in the middle of a world mess that might be the mess that we needed in order to understand really what humanity is about. Earlier conflicts and traumas socially, we're not enough to reveal to us the complexity of our own relationship to the problems we're creating. Now, along with that comes the idea that maybe, just maybe understanding things is not the highest agenda that there are other agendas and we might fail them and that that's in fact, we will. And it's totally okay. And so I feel very comfortable in a world where I'm getting less sleep because I'm working harder than ever. It's quite amazing. I'm 85 and I just do not feel it at all. So I keep going and it's all just amazing. So I'm done. I love that, Doug. Thank you. Let me, let's go into silence for a second again just to absorb the history you shared with us and those observations. Thank you. Your story of your conjunctures and all that reminded me of a couple moments of accident in my life where something happened that changed my life and one of them is my housemate. One of my housemates second year in grad school at Penn said one day, hey, come with me to this seminar. I got a professor you're probably gonna really like. And we go into a little room with like a board table and five grad students and Russell Aikoff sitting at the head of the table telling Aikoff's fables. Aikoff is one of the founders of systems thinking. I had never heard of him. Had no idea what systems thinking was. Any of that. And he proceeded to tell stories in 10th grade language that illustrated things that I nobody'd ever told me about how the world hangs together. And he had a lifetime of ways of explaining how things fit in work that were really great. He was not great at human systems.  And that was just one little moment that tipped me in that direction. Many years earlier, an early girlfriend pointed me to the works of Alice Miller who wrote drama of the gifted child. And we talked, I read, and I came around quickly to the idea that trauma is pretty much ubiquitous in lots of different ways. And we managed to sort of hide and avoid and stamp it down and that we sort of need to make our way through it in different ways. And I'm sort of even misremembering a lot of the lessons I got from Alice Miller stuff, but there's a lot of those moments for me. Jerry, you fight? Yeah, please.  No, I just wanted to say that this just evoked a memory for me of my college fraternity advisor at Syracuse. I don't know why he chose me. I mean, he was a guy who lived in the fraternity house. He chose me and gave me a hard copy of Carl Rogers book on becoming a person. No idea why, which then triggered the thought that I remember in high school, having my father write a check in some obscure magazine, I saw an ad for Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics. And my father wrote the check and the book came and that was kind of the beginning of a journey. So thanks for evoking those memories in terms of quote, origin stories. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Thank you for jumping in like with that. I appreciate it. And then I took some notes in the chat as we were all talking and everybody said a lot of things that I'm equally grateful for. So I think what I wanna say is I wanna build on a couple of things that are already in this space. The first one is the thing I noticed when I opened the Zoom room and you all began to show up, which is like when I first tried another one of these weird little conjunctions for me was I was at New Science Associates and early in my career as a tech industry trends analyst, I had just broken up with a girlfriend and one of my colleagues said, hey, Jerry, you seem kind of blue. The Mrs. and the kids and I have been attending this Quaker meeting and Wilton, would you like to join us? And I'd never heard of Quakers, had no idea what it was. And then beat them to Quaker meeting on Sunday, I got there before they did. And John Lee greeted me at the door with the warmest handshake I think I've ever felt, handed me the little pamphlet that says, hey, here's what silent meeting is all about. And I went in and sat down and then spent more time there than Frank and his family did until I left and moved into Manhattan. But I had that feeling that I have often here, which is I'd go in, I try to show up a little early to the meeting and just go sit on the far side of the room and just watch people as they came in. And it's quiet, you know, Quaker meeting is just go and sit down and you have an hour's silent meditation with people. That's basically functionally what it looks like. But I was having this sense of just resonance with humanity and watching people come in and usually for the first 15 minutes of meeting, kids were allowed in the room. And so there was this one father and son who came in and every time they'd take the same bench and the son would put his head in his father's lap and just kind of not really fall asleep, but just kind of kind of hang out there. And at the 15 minute mark, all the kids would sort of stand up and head out to go play and do other sorts of things. And then people who became dear friends of mine would show up in the room and I would just have this sense. And I have this sense when we meet here, it's like I see you and I see you in your spaces and I know something about you in different ways and we've spent time together here. And I'm grateful for the whole mix of what that is and how it feels when it works. So that's big for me. I'm grateful for the birth lotto. I have a lot of privilege as a white guy born into the US who grew up overseas and got to see other sorts of stuff and has the ability to travel and a few attachments anymore because no kids and all parents are dead and things of that nature. And I'm just appreciative of that and don't do enough to balance out the privilege I have with the work I can do in the world, but I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for the moment in time as Grace was saying earlier, the power tools that are available to us, at this moment, I and many of us are, I'm holding a little slab of unobtainium here that has a high definition video camera with which I can record and then upload for free or zero marginal cost, except for the energy costs to the earth, videos that I create or that I take or that other people create and we can share them out and we have near instantaneous global communications which are crazy. And I'm old enough that I grew up without email, without computer, without all those kinds of things. And I'm familiar with index cards in the card catalog at the library and all of that. And I've seen that span show up. There was a cool moment when I was a tech analyst where I got on loan. Actually, gosh, I have it in the other room, I should, maybe I'll bring it. It's a leather pouch that has in it an old HP model 100, which is a little clamshell DOS computer connected to a fat heavy modem, radio modem from artists and artists is the network that IBM and Motorola built for FedEx to do the first Cosmo system. FedEx was a great, like their edge was they could tell you where your package was and that was because of this data network. And so I got to use this data network just for email. That's it. And I remember flying into O'Hare in the winter taking the shuttle to my hotel, opening up this little thing, plugging in the wire and then sending an email going, oh my God, this is so cool, right? And now it's like email, who does email? And like this is such a given now and it's so commonplace that I have lived during that span of time thrills me because I have context to go back and know what it was like before and you can't unsee big changes like that. If you're born into a world where there's automatic teller machines, the idea of standing in line to go to a teller is like, wait, why would you do that? And then nowadays I don't go to ATMs anymore, period. Everything is touch transactions and whatever it will sort of be past it. Internal combustion engines will be a relic of the past much as horses crapping in our streets is a thing of the past. So all of that. And then, and I think that's it. I think that's sort of my check in with that. And Stuart is asking, was the Quaker meeting in Philadelphia? I had not discovered the Quakers in Philly when I was there, Stuart. This was Wilton meeting, a Wilton monthly meeting in Wilton, Connecticut. I was when I first discovered Quakers. Then I went into New York and started working long hours, including weekends. But also I went to the meetings in New York and one of the meetings had divided itself and split into the two meetings on the topic of gay marriage. And I was like, wait a minute, y'all are Quakers, you did what? And so I couldn't really find a vibe or the time to do it and it kind of broke there, but I still feel very much very Quaker-y. So at this point, we've got some time left in our call and be great to go wherever you'd like to go. Whatever came up, whatever else is on your minds, things you're looking forward to, things you regret. And we'll do this Quaker meeting style. We'll just go into silence and whoever wants to can pipe up. And the silence is really great, drinking the silence. One of the cool things about Quaker meeting is if a baby cries in Quaker meeting, that's the sound of God, it's okay. They don't need to shush and rush out of the room. And if they're feeling disturbed and all that, then maybe yes, but it's like acceptance of the sounds of the place. So I'll go quiet again, sorry. I just would like to share an observation because it's something that I am really grateful for. And I've been in a lot of conversational communities and a lot of Zooms. And I am just really grateful for how I've noticed people have really learned to listen to each other and how important that is. And I don't know if we really recognize that. You know, it's not just like people out there that have problems that need to be heard. We all do. And I think that we've become really good at listening. And I definitely see a change in the way different calls look. So I just wanted to share that and express that. And thank you all. Thanks, Stacy. I just hope that extends for this coming year into a broader context. So we don't have another year of chaos and turmoil in our national decision-making process. And it's queuing up to be another mess, the way it's going right now. And I sure hope there's a point of reflection in people who make those decisions and drive those systems forward to understand how precarious our situation really is and how the moment is, the urgency of the moment for us to come together and face up to this reality. I think what really has struck me over the last few weeks is how disconnected we are from the natural world. And I mean, I was most certainly completely unaware of how does the biosphere work and how does nature work and how are we linked up and so on.  So you have very, very smart people, very well-educated people arrive at conclusions absent of an understanding of the externalities, these conclusions would drive to this, I think Heidegger called it air-verbundenheit, the link to the earth or have the crown being crowned in nature. So I would, if we could just slow down for a moment and think now and get away from this chaos and mayhem that we're in the middle of, I think that would be my hope for 2023. Thank you, Klaus. We're shockingly separated from each other, from nature, from meaning, all those kinds of things. And one of my narratives 30 years ago, I realized I didn't like the word consumer. One of the conclusions I got to about consumerism, consumer society and the consumer frame is that it does that to us. It separates us from each other so that we can be rugged individuals and brand ourselves with, I do Nike, you do Adidas. And that's how I declare my identity and all that kind of stuff. And it separates us from nature because we don't need to treat nature well. We got people making stuff for us and there's abundant stuff in the world. And then the second thing I wanted to add was what you just voiced is one of the reasons I am here in these OGM conversations. I put in the chat the civilizational implications of OGM. To me, personally, the reason I really give a damn about this work we do together is that if we can solve how to have conversations about these serious issues with people about some of the crises facing humanity, we might actually find our way to working together to solve them instead of being in this Mexican standoff, which we find ourselves in worldwide, like there's so many elections that are here's breadth elections. Half the world seems to be fighting the other half instead of everybody turning toward the things that we could solve together. And if we can sort out that mess and part of that is a soft and emotional and about trust and psychological safety and vulnerability and all those good things. And then half of that is about, all right, so what's the evidence say and what should we do and how do we do it? So for me, all of that fits in here. Rick, please. Yeah, one thing that I just wanted to contrast, I've been trained as a family therapist and I just want to compare the stories between John Kelly and Grace. And that is that how families can heal but they can also tear themselves apart. And just to dovetail on what Stacey and Klaus were saying, well, Stacey, I couldn't agree with you more. I think there is a movement in that direction but to echo Klaus' reality perspective is that there are many mitigating factors and we're in a place where I think we have to think what has to die for us to heal or is it going to tear us apart? And I had a very interesting conversation with an Australian colleague of mine last week who I went to his complexity conference and it was a small international conference and he and I had great disagreements. I really love disagreeing with him about our differences. And one of the words that he had a very negative reaction to was virtues and from an Australian perspective, at least his Australian perspective, because he's German Australian, is that he had a very negative connotation to the word and he was saying it was a cultural American thing and I said to him, no, it's old and that it goes back to, you know, Aristotle, Socrates, etc. And then I was on another call with another German and I raised this issue up and she gave the German word for virtues and she said, you know, in Germany, virtues has a bit of a negative connotation to it. It's sort of two good issues. And so when we have words, when our language can get perverted and this is one of the things that negative deviants do so well is they turn something negative into a positive and vice versa. And if we can't out word Smith, the negative deviants and the propagandists, which is happening, we're not going to win the verbal war. So I think the challenges is how can we, I mean, today, from my point of view, has been a very nice demonstration of what needs to be amplified and how can you create upward virtual spirals that can reverse the downwards spirals into the amoral abyss and that's the epic battle of civilizations. So. Rick, thank you for that. And I love the last bit you put there because some of you have been here when Paul Crawfell has come into the room and he did a video years ago about upward spirals, which Arthur Brock sent me and I watched and was one of those little moments that changed my life a bunch. And what was interesting was that the reason Paul Crawfell showed up in these rooms was that a couple of years ago, somewhere mid pandemic, he said, gosh, I decided I wanted to meet more people and see what's up. So I Googled my own name and you came up because I'm a fan of his and I had mentioned upward spiral and all that kind of stuff. And a piece of what I'm trying to figure out is how can we behave in a way that creates an upward spiral that causes uplift? Uplift is sort of a term David Brin sort of popularized more from the science fiction realm. It's less interesting to me than upward spiral.  So what is that like? And if you think about that in the sense of when you're sending an email, when you're greeting a person who's come to drop something off when, you know, whatever else it might be. So, Judy. And you were muted. Sorry about that. I was channeling the same thing, Jerry, that one of the things that this group as individuals does each time is that the individual expression of hope and charity and many other virtues is abundant in this call. And I suspect that most of us in the other settings where we go attempt to insert positive energy into whatever situation we're facing. And that sort of dendritic expanse might be the antidote to what's going on if we kind of moved it from the unconscious to the at least partially conscious and thought about it because we have the opportunity to infect in a positive way a lot of people through all of the people that we associate with. My apologies, Judy. Thank you for that, Ken. I realized one of the things I didn't list on my gratitude list, which is incredibly important to me is music and art. I don't have a TV. I've been, I got rid of my TV in 1990 and thought I'd buy another one when I got to California and realized, you know, it's kind of nice not having a TV and I haven't had one now for over 30 years, but unfortunately someone gave me a subscription on Netflix so I do actually watch Netflix on my computer or some TV shows. But I listened to a lot of music and one of the amazing finds that I had in this past year is a French fellow by the name of Vichar-Colossier who plays Bach and I'm gonna put the link to his, to YouTube for him. This guy is an incredible jazz pianist who brings a jazzy edge to plays Bach trio if you wanna have just a delightful experience today of listening to some really amazing music, click on that link and have yourself a good time. Let's stay such a unique name. I'm guessing it was the day of the week you were born. I was born on Friday the 13th. Stuart, is that you playing the link? That's very funny. Thanks, Ken. If anybody would like to put one or more of your favorite musicians' names in the chat right this minute, please to do so. Ken, one of the, I don't know Lucier. He looks great. I'm gonna go check him out. My equivalent for that in nearby genres of music is Claude Bolling who has a whole sweet, a whole set of albums called Sweet for Flute and Jazz Piano, Sweet for Guitar and Jazz Piano, et cetera, et cetera. Tootsuite is another one. And apparently when the first one of these was brought into a record company for maybe production, they started playing it in one of the offices and everybody from all the offices showed up and stood in the door and was like, what is this? It's just beautiful music. So if anybody else wants to put, oh my God, two of you just put Jackson Brown simultaneously? That's crazy synchronicity. That was really interesting. Jean-Michel Diary. So I just completed work on a 4,000 song playlist. It's taken me several months, but it goes to many genres and many moods. You also did a list of books and a list of documentaries and movies. Yeah, I've been cataloging different stuff in my life, but my music library just on my computer's got like 120 days worth of half of my hard drive is music. Ken, is any of this available and? No, it's all in my hard drive. It's not on Spotify or anything like that, but what can I say? I'm going to show them, okay. But Claude Bowling is fantastic. He's, I have several of his albums and I've got stuff from all over the world, all different periods of genres and periods of time. And I've also become a huge Chet Atkins fan. I've really come to appreciate Chet Atkins where I used to be like, oh, I don't do country music. And it's like, no, this is not country. This is just great guitar play. I have a YouTube playlist called When I Die.  And it's a collection of very meaningful music to me and in different ways. And I can share a link to it here. Other thoughts? We have a few minutes left in our time together. Just a quick reaction to Ken. And that is the whole notion of music therapy and how it's used in neurological disorders, including stroke. So it's, I'm not up on it, but I'm aware of it. Let's put it that way. So feeding the soul with music, I think is, has, we need to understand the benefits better. Yeah, that actually reminds me of hydrotherapy, aside from music therapy, hydrotherapy, being in water a lot. And just interesting, I've been swimming for the last 30 years and spent a bunch of time in the hot tub. And I was reading a biography a couple of years ago that the insane poet Robert Lowell who was diagnosed manic depressive. And one of the things in the psych notes was that they treated him with hydrotherapy which just made me kind of chuckle. Well, Stuart, I just have to respond to this because in our neighborhood, I hadn't paid any attention to it before. And for some reason I noticed it.  And it's like going into a meditative state. It goes completely dark, you can have music. I prefer black, no nothing. And I go into this twilight zone between consciousness and consciousness. And it feels like I've only been in there for about 15, 20 minutes. And I'm just amazed it's been an hour. So it's something that I'm treating myself on a weekly basis at the moment. So it's an interesting experience. Beautiful. Doug. Just a little contribution on group process. I run a group that meets in Zoom and we start the meeting usually about 15 people going around the room and each person saying what's been on their minds, they think it's most worthy of a serious conversation. The innovation is that because it's in Zoom, you can't quite tell us where the circle is. So I had it that the first person who talks picks the next person to speak. And the drama of who they're gonna pick really heightens the energy in the group. And it's worked amazingly well. And the people that people pick to be the next speaker is usually strategically right on as to where the group needs to go. So it's worked extraordinarily well. Thanks, Doug. When I do introduction rounds that retreats, I use that. And the funny thing is when somebody is fully present introducing themselves, they sort of forget that step. And so very, very, very often, you have to remind people, oh, and who's next? But then the who's next part really works well. And then one time at a meeting, I brought a kush ball in figuring there'd be like a token pass and this is something you could kind of toss. And I removed the kush ball from the room where somebody like hurled it across the room and knocked over a glass of water. And I was like, where did that energy come from? So anyway, but thank you. Leon Redbone. I put a link in to, I have a thought in my brain for my favorite music from different genres, favorite Latin musicians because I adore Latin American music. Sort of, there's a couple of movements from Latin America that are probably my favorite genres. One of them is called Nueva Trova or the New Wave from Argentina, Peru. Basically the dictatorships in South America. A lot of people immigrated, just left, went to France. Some people stayed in the countries and the music is sort of protest music in different ways. And then in Brazil it's called Musica Popular Brasileira MPB or Tropicalismo is a related category. And that's similar era, all that music. And there's a bunch of just really, it's beautiful and meaningful music at the same time. I wanted to call, Hank, thank you for that post in chat about Jackson Brown. He's an amazing combination of extraordinary pop music and these amazing, amazing lyrics that chronicle where we are and the power of social commentary. I saw him last year at the Expo stage in Napa and it was like being at a revival meeting. He has dropped his pretty boy image, let himself go gray and his hair is kind of long and stringy a bit. But it was like being in a church or a synagogue. It was just absolutely extraordinary to be outside at night with him singing these amazing lyrics. And it was almost like he was preaching, not just singing, like wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up and the music that went along with it. It was just an extraordinary experience. Yeah. Now, if I may bring to your question one clip here that I posted, it's coming alive. I posted a short version and then the full documentary. And there's a guy who went into a senior home and started putting music onto people that was from their era. Meaning if you are talking to an 80 year old person, you play music that was in their teens, 15 to 20 year old. And it's just stunning. When you watch this one little clip there, the short clip of this black gentleman who was just like totally gone. And by the time they put the music on him, he literally came back alive. It was, it's just absolutely stunning to watch. And then consequently my wife put together a music tape for her mother. So she cuts music to, and her mom is playing this 24 seven. I mean, every time you come, she has this MP3 player going and it's enough. I mean, there's like so many hours on it that it doesn't become very repetitive. But the power of music is basically echoing in our brains at the level that is so deep. It's a subconscious emotional level. So if you haven't seen that, that's really a very interesting observation there. That's really cool, Klaus. It's also really briefly, playlists of whatever kind, Spotify, YouTube, what not, are really handy for family relationships like this because my mom wasn't very good at finding her way around apps on her iPad, I got her, she couldn't really figure that out. But I could kind of leave a playlist open that she could just sort of hit play and stop. And then I could feed the playlist from my end. It was just a playlist. And that worked really well. Same thing with a photo album in Google Photos. I basically created an album called For Mom, or Eva's album or whatever. And that worked really well because I had, I was busy scanning boxes of family photos and I could drop them in there and she could just have them on slideshow. And it turned into a little slide frame that could sit someplace plugged in and work fine. And then I put a link in the chat about the singing revolution in Estonia under the Soviet Union, basically singing of patriotic songs and sort of folk songs was illegalized. And there's a story of how Estonia had a gentle revolution to break away from the Soviet Union by people starting to sing these songs in public spaces. And then there's a famous moment at a folk festival because folk singing and singing is just a big thing in Estonia where somebody sings one of these songs and some flags come out of the crowd and a motorcycle goes by down the street with the guy behind the motorcycle rider is holding an Estonian flag and everybody suddenly realizes, we're done, we're out of here. Sorry, and Stuart, you were jumping in. Yeah, no, what I was just gonna say is in the late 90s, every year I used to teach a workshop at Esalen and I created a cassette tape and I used to use just tons of music in the teaching. It's very powerful, very powerful. I subscribed to Rufus, no, no, no, Steven Berlin Johnson has a sub-stack newsletter and yesterday he talked about cassette tapes. And he talked about how his lifespan, in his lifespan, the short life of cassette tapes was really important because mix tapes and everything else and a little sub-plot in his post was about India. And he says in India, there was like one record company that had kind of a monopoly on publishing LPs and they worked with only a couple Indian artists so that the repertory of music available was incredibly limited and then suddenly cassettes hit the market and everything exploded. And within a couple of years, all the music was being done on cassettes, there were markets for it, everything else went crazy. And Stuart, you sound like you know a lot about this. Well, no, what I was just gonna say is one of the reasons I hold on to my 2000 DW yellow bug with a sunflower is because it has a cassette tape in it. Oh, really? That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's really cool. Here's the link to Stuart's... I thought those came with eight track tapes. No, no, no, no, no. So who here ever had an eight track tape? I did not. I missed the eight track thing. I was like on cassettes and then over to CD audio. My wife had that. Well, we had a Sky Blue VW bug with an eight track tape in it. There you go. Yeah. This is a new... Yeah. At Columbia House. This is one of the new Beatles, Grace. It's one of the new models. Mm-hmm. Sweet. Rick? Yeah, I just wanna piggyback on what Klaus was talking about generational differences. At the closing of this other conference I went to, they had a dance party. And the music was not my genre. And so I went up to the DJ and I said, you know, could you play We Are Family? And the old timers in the group knew this from other conferences. And the old timers came together and we created this huge circle of people all dancing arm as an arm. And then it led to another event. But the thing was, I just felt, I couldn't dance to some of this. It's not my generational music, you know? And it makes a huge difference. So it had a, you know, it echoes what you were saying, Jerry, about how music can pull people together. So I couldn't help but share that because it was, it takes me back to old conferences where we used that song. My observation is having gone to lots of weddings and bar mitzvahs and other events is that if you play Motown, everybody gets up. Doesn't matter whether they're young or old, everybody's on the floor from Motown.  We know these songs, they're deeply embedded. Thank you very much. This has been really, really lovely. There's a couple more holidays where we have Thursdays and I will do the same thing, well, you know, because it'll be early in the day. I really appreciate you all being here. Yeah, I'm grateful for your presence. Likewise. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Good to see you. Wonderful conversation. Great rest of the day. Enjoy the music.  That's right. License to do so now.


Our next presenter is Dian Nelson, whose presentation title is Drug Delivery to the Lungs Using Parfluorocarbon Emulsions. A deep breath. The main function of the lung to bring air in deep enough such that it reaches the tiny air sacs or alveoli where the oxygen exchange happens. Inhale drug delivery, the golden standard for delivering drugs to the lungs, capitalizes on this basic function. The drug goes where the air goes. This makes sense, right? But what happens when you have diseased dysfunctional lungs? The problem? There are many lung diseases like acute lung injury or cystic fibrosis where the lungs are filled with inflammatory fluids or infected mucus. This decreases air flow and thus the drug delivery to these diseased regions. So how do you deliver drugs? You can't use the golden standard. What we decided was to fight fluid with fluid. Our proposed concept is to deliver drugs to the lungs by filling the lungs with another liquid called liquid perfluorocarbon. This delivery method is independent of air flow so that you can get a uniform distribution of the drugs in the diseased regions where it's needed the most. Now I know what you're thinking. Fluid in the lungs means drowning. But perfluorocarbons have a high oxygen solubility. So you can first saturate the perfluorocarbon with oxygen and then put it into the patient's lungs. This is what is done clinically in hospitals and patients do not drown. In addition perfluorocarbons have a very high surface tension so they can easily penetrate those clogged regions and actually reach the damaged areas. The only downside is that water and thus the drugs that we typically would use cannot be dissolved in perfluorocarbon liquids. So how do we create a uniform delivery method? We first dissolve the drugs in the water and then emulsify that water in the perfluorocarbon liquids using a fluorosurfactant emulsifier. This creates an emulsion with a very dispersed phase of tiny water droplets. We can change this emulsion formulation by changing the water content. This is the amount of water that's in the emulsion as well as the drug content. That's the amount of drug that's in the water that's in the emulsion. My research specifically deals with infected mucus which is what's seen in cystic fibrosis patients. And my goal is to find an emulsion formulation that maximizes bacterial killing. So I iteratively test my emulsions on a benchtop design of infected lung tissue as well as in live animals with the lung infection. And I believe that perfluorocarbon drug delivery is a great method to help patients breathe easier. Thank you.