 famous infamous proverbial cloud. This is Wednesday, January 9th, 2019, our first Rex call of 2019. After 2018, all bets are off. Anything could happen. It is very nice to see you all. I have a sort of a tried and true poem for us since I think going with something rock solid is probably a good way to go right now. For the year, it's a title, it's a poem titled Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, which goes as follows. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Let me give that a second read. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Welcome to 2019, everybody. How is anyone? Anyone want to check in? An awkward number. 2019? Yeah. It's a prime, isn't it? Well, I think it's divisible by something. Divisible by 2019 and one? Is it a prime number? I do not know. Oh, really? That too is an odd number. Greg, you've stepped away from from leading the consortium. How has 2019 dawned differently for you? Well, this is a year of transition for me from leading the work of the consortium to retirement. So we have a new executive director, Matt Seaman, who's been with us for many years and very excited about him joining. And I'll work with him over the next 12 months or so or whatever is necessary, maybe it'll be less. And then probably plan to do some writing. We're way behind on deliverables that capture the observations and experiences that we've had over the last probably five years. So to tell the stories of what's been happening. Yeah, yeah. That sounds fun. Yeah. I'm looking forward to not being the decision maker. I find that exhausting at this point. I think a lot of people are. Susan, the phone number is April. She just asked on the chat who the phone number was. Yeah, well, thanks, Greg. Do you have any plans to go deeper into anything you've been curious about for the last decade? Is there like a small scale quest in the back of your mind on something you care about? Well, I think one of the things we have yet to solve is a really effective reputation model for highly collaborative environment. We talked about some months ago on this forum. That continues to be a challenge. So. But there's a ton of stuff, observations and lessons learned around intelligence warming and predictive customer engagement and how not to be creepy, which we've also talked about on this. The difference between, I guess it's interesting to me how simplistically organizations approach the things they have to accomplish and no abundance is one of those that I think there are times when you operate for a principal abundance and there are times where you have to operate for a principal scarcity and the ability to make that switch. Is that called a duality? It could be called a polarity. It could be called a dilemma is a good word for it. Duality might work. I don't know if anybody uses duality that way here. And it reminds me of David Snowden's, you know, Knephen model where you can't treat everything the same. Not all problems are the same. Yeah. And yet organizations that, at least the ones we work with tend to approach things in a fairly simplistic linear and singular sort of way rather than appreciating that there are different ways to approach different based on the situation. So. Well, you can look at the same exact thing and try to solve something and depending how you frame it, you might take a completely different approach. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You might take a pragmatic approach to do something physical to the environment. And if you see the problem one way, then you might actually go try to solve something larger environmental if you see it a different way. And, you know, you've influenced a lot of the thinking around consumers and consumption and that from a service point of view, you don't consume a service, you experience it. And, but that feels to me like a losing battle to change that vocabulary. Really? Well, I, you know what? I haven't actually, I haven't actually fought that battle. And it sounds like a really fun battle to me. Like, like, like the, let's, let's, let's flush the word down the toilet. Yeah. Yeah. Especially in the service or customer experience environment. Yeah. Consumption is, it has no place in the vocabulary for that. So why have you not done that? I would have thought that that would be one of the first things you would have tackled. Susan, that is a very, very good question. I don't know. I've done it a lot in speeches. I've done it, I've done it sort of on local small bore stuff all over the place. There have been many an event where I'll give a talk and talk about the word consumer, et cetera, et cetera. And then I watch it play out for the rest of the event, you know, that the next speaker apologizes and stumbles over the word. The third speaker says it and doesn't care. But then I get glances from other people in the room who are looking at me with that, you know, see, see, see, it's everywhere. So, so at that scale, I've done it often and, and worked and I hope that it's kind of an earworm. It's, it's, you know, something that people will go, oh crap, I got to kind of remember that. Now the other thing is if you go big bore on it, then you get labeled as that and they will only invite you to talk about that. That's true too. That's true too. And I, and I didn't want to be like the guy who's angry about consumer. And yet, and yet it's certainly something worth putting a lot of energy behind for, for a burst and seeing where that goes. What I haven't been able to figure out, I think, is what's the bumper sticker for it? Because the short phrase is we're not consumers, we're humans or something like that, right? We're not consumers is not a, an inspiring phrase. It doesn't, it doesn't actually work for me. We are something. We're, we're mentions, not consumers, but, but in order to defeat the word consumer, you have to stigmatize it. You have to give it a, you have to give a little packet of purple dye and something to replace it and something to replace it, which, which I, I'm happy to do. I mean, I give people a whole vocabulary of words to replace it, just, just not prosumer or, or other funny neologisms. I'm not, I'm not fond of the, of the fake replacements. I think it has to sound like us. It has to sound like humans. It's a good question. You're, you're provoking me to, uh, How about we are human beings at the beings? Does that make it too long? Um, it's not bad. Confessional. As you may say more, you're muted. Sorry. Um, prosumer is a combination of, you know, pro from professional and consumer from consumers. So just flipping that, uh, the opposite of prosumer is confessional. A con professional. Well, I like your comment on tuberculosis. That's, that puts it in the right context in my mind. That is what consumption used to mean. Exactly. I'm reading empire of things. Oh, why don't you just say consumption used to be, yeah. So I haven't too, too many letters. Yeah. Long, confusing and scary. I was reading empire. I've been reading empire of things. I'm still not done with it. It's the history of consumerism and consumption. Super, super, really interesting, including, including, you know, including the facts that India before the British show up is quite self-sufficient in food and clothing. Like they have, you know, everybody knows how to weave saris are an ancient tradition. They make beautiful fabric, but it's all done on hand looms. Basically it's a craft done. It's a cottage industry, not even really thought of as an industry. The British show up, they illegalize the loom. They turn India basically into a plantation for sending materials to England. And then the British make stuff in Manchester and elsewhere and ship cloth back, which they force everybody to buy. So now your cloth has to come from England, which works for a while until, and the British are very reticent because on the one hand, they're really quite racist and classist. So they don't really want to elevate the Indian people to be consumers. On the other hand, heck, there's this gigantic market. These people should be buying our products. So grudgingly, they start selling them stuff until Indians start developing a sense of fashion and style and what looks old. And it's like they start refusing to buy some shipments that come in because no, no, no, that's the last season's fashion. And I won't buy that anymore. And that's very frustrating for the Brits who figure this is just like, it's a good deal. You should just go this way. So a bunch of stuff like that. Another insight I think I've shared on a on a Rex call is that abolitionism is a boost for for consumerism. So before abolitionism, the way you could tell who had high status in society and who was the richest person was who owned the most lives. That was the that was the show of wealth, like who had the most slaves who had the most control over the most humans, whether it was surf slaves or whoever, that was who the richest person was. And then abolitionism comes in and says, no, no, no owning humans, not so cool, you're going to have to learn to do that economically or some other way. And suddenly the show of wealth becomes important. And suddenly people start making luxury goods and then consumer goods after that. But but suddenly that the owning and showing of stuff and the dressing much nicer and so forth, really, it's not no longer a thing just for the royalty and the top of the aristocracy, where it was always important, like dressing beautifully was always important to show to show high status. Now that becomes a thing that everybody starts stepping into who can afford it, because that's how you show your wealth and position. So abolitionism, unfortunately, is a boost to consumerism. Very weird stuff like that. You know, we deal with that very same thing in organizations, the executives assess their power base and their wealth based on the number of people that report to them, which is kind of archaic, I guess. And it's been and certainly is not based on a model of abundance or a principle of abundance. And it gets it's hugely disruptive to creating a highly collaborative organization. So I want to throw something out that just has started I'm going to start ruminating about as in like in the last couple of minutes. Wonder if there is a connection between the rise of consumerism and the decline of village culture, small, you know, small community culture, because, you know, as Jerry points out with the, you know, with a connection with abolition, part of what happens with consumerism is trying to display a particular style, trying to display a particular something about your identity, which is less necessary if everybody knows everybody else's intimate details. But when you're in a mass society where you were a less individual or less individually recognizable society, then you need to be able to show yourself, you know, peacock a bit in one way or another to be able to be identifiable. And to be able to show your distinctiveness from the gray masses. So I wonder, and this is just, like I said, conjecture off top my head. If there is, you know, there's not much on top. Hey, Bill, makes me wonder if there is a, you know, interesting cultural connection between the rise of consumerism and the decline of very small communities. I think you're right, Jim. But because if you think about the small village life, which really, you know, its final extinction event happened in the 19th century. Everyone knew who you were. So if you wanted to dress well and be better than you were, everyone would laugh at you. They know who you were. They knew how much money you had. They know your father was. They knew it all. So it wouldn't work in that society to pretend you were something you were not. Just so. Also, a tremendous amount of, you know, the now very highly evolved form of consumerism we have is all about how do you show that you're an individual? How do you separate yourself from the crowd by buying stuff? And how do you create your identity through branding? And, and, and consumerism wants everybody to have their own thing. I keep remembering, and I can't find it anymore. I need to ask Doug because I'm pretty sure it was in an introduction to a Doug Rushkopf book. But he describes how he grew up in Long Island in a lower middle class community where every, every weekend was really cool because they lived on a cul-de-sac and every weekend one of the parents would come out and put some coals in the, in the one brazier that was there in the park. And then everybody would come out and put their food on. There was a block party every weekend, basically. And then his dad got a promotion and they moved over to Westchester where everybody had their own barbecue. And the block party died. Right? And it's a very nice story. It's a really crisp little story that says, yeah, prosperity basically separates us often. And then this need to keep buying stuff and having stuff was pumped, was driven, because if we stop buying stuff, the economy stops and then really bad things happen. So, so Susan's asking in the chat, does it have to do with identity? Very much. And then one of the weird things that happened, and I haven't, I haven't been able to really track down the causes so much yet, is that we used to have initiation rituals for our youth. And also when kids grew up, they grew up in community so that the neighbors and all, everybody else knew you by the time you were 18. You had, you had swept, you had done their lawn for years. You had swept their snow. You were there when they were stuck. All of these things have kind of been cut away in many communities, not everywhere, but mostly cut away so that we don't know our neighbors. And we're thus, part of the problem here is when you have an initiation ritual and you come up in community, you have a society, like you have an identity rather, sorry. You are known within that community. And when you don't have that identity, you need to turn to other things, things that look more dangerous, things that are outside identity. You pick up whatever is the edgiest thing because a part of an initiation ritual is actually danger, right? A good initiation ritual puts you out in the wilderness for two weeks to come back with an elk that you've skinned by yourself or something. I don't know, but initiation does involve sort of pushing the edge of your capacity, breaking some new boundaries, whatever it might be. And we got rid of those. We have no initiation rituals for our youth. We don't bring, and elders have, there's discrimination, there's ageism, ageism is rampant, and elders are no longer pulling young people up into society in different ways. So gangs, smoking, drugs, looking like a gangster from the hood, whatever it is, is insanely appealing. And then a last touch, which is really ironic. There's a woman photographer who went around photographing cliques from different groups. And she did the London skinheads that used to have the big hair stuck up like this, and she went to each group. And group to group, they were incredibly different. Like the skinheads looked really different from, I'm forgetting the name of what David Bowie was when he started his career, as something boy. And yet within group, the differences were minute, minute. So the whole group within one clique all had a chain dangling from their belt, all had studded jeans, the studs would be in a different pattern. They were all wearing Doc Martens, all of them. Like if you didn't have Doc Martens, you weren't cool. So in group, identity was differentiated on a much finer scale. Oh yes, yes. And there's a woman, Penny Eckert at Stanford, who did jocks and burnout studies. And it really is, I mean, I don't know why we're surprised by this, because we all grew up through this. We all learned how to do identities in high school. We were only offered a couple. And she, but the best story I remember from her research was taking the kids who were the burnouts, and in this case, the Goths in a high school here in Palo Alto, and asking them what those particular things meant. Okay. And so, you know, what does, and they kept talking about, you know, they had, they were wearing things with skulls on them, of course. And what does that mean? And one of the girls said, oh, it means death. And one of the guys go, oh, I thought it meant pirates. Wow. So it's a very, it could be a very shallow kind of thing. But I also, again, you know, leave it living next to the condition of being men at night. The difference between hooks and eyes and buttons, the difference between all of those different things is manifest. And zippers, oh my God, zippers, huge deal. So the other thing was also noticing in villages in India where the color of the saris varied from village to village. Now the villages were fairly close, and they were bright. I mean, you go to one, and it was all sort of pinks and purples and blues, and you go to the next one, and it was yellows and oranges and reds, and you go to the next one, and it was something else. And the variation in the patterns was very, very small. And the way they wore their saris was pretty much the same from village to village. But the saris wearing, whether you let it fall off your shoulder, whether you, how many folds you put into it at the top, how you, I mean, it's just so, so prevalent. It's, and I don't think that's changed. We changed maybe what things are. I think this carries through to modern American society. It just takes different shapes, right? We just, the need to belong, and the need to be identified as an individual, both are really, really strong in humans. And these are ways in which that plays out. And I think the converse is true too, if it's the converse, is that right? Which is that people, is that it's important also to not be like someone. Right. So, you know, there's great stories about, there's a woman who was a graduate student at UC Irvine who was studying with Jean Lave, and she was able to sit in front of you and transform herself from a white person to a black person. And it was very powerful. And she dressed outrageously because she, I think, didn't want to sit. I mean, I don't know, but it's possible that she didn't want to signal on the basis of her dress what was going on. So that, I think that being, not wanting to be like those people when we were doing things at the Institute for Research on Learning, a lot of not wanting to learn math was not wanting to be like the people who did math. I just read Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. Autobiography, yeah. He does an interesting thing about language along those same lines. You know, if you talk like me, then you're likely to be like me. And if you talk in a different way with a different accent or different language, then that creates problems. It was a really interesting, I thought, very interesting observation. Yeah, I think we should stop talking about hierarchy and talk about inside-outside. Say more. When we talk about problems in organizations, we tend to talk about in corporations, for instance, as all this top-down, bottom-up stuff. That's just the wrong dimension for getting anything done. I mean, the structure of how work gets done and the structure of how you do your work is an inside-outside kind of thing. And you signal lots of things, whether you pick up the phone and call someone. When you pick up the phone and call someone. When you use email. When you use Zoom. When you use Skype. When you use, it's all still there. We talk about it as a network. Is that the same as inside-outside? No, actually, I don't think it is quite the same. Two things, two reasons. One of them is that it's not, networks don't do anything. I mean, they don't do work. Really? They ship information around, but they don't really interpret it. They don't make meaning of it. They don't do anything with it. And so it's an important social configuration, but it's not the same. And there are various, once upon a time, I had a model of about six or seven kinds of parameters, which you could switch around and you could get gangs and you could get, community to practice and you could get interest groups and you could get out of all those, you just adjust all the little parameters there. Yeah. So there's some who would assert things only happen because of a network. That's because of who, work gets done because people know who to get things done with. Well, that's the network that you have. I mean, if that's true, I would look at the network and I would find more parameters of cohesion. I think it's how cohesive it is. Well, and there's, yeah. And then social network analysis. Who wrote the book The Secret, The Hidden Power of Social Networks? Some years ago it's, from IBM, he does a lot of work with social network analysis. And there's some, there's some 20 parameters that they have on social network analysis that talks about closeness and distance and absolutely cohesion is one of them. But to call all of those things networks is to miss, I think, some of the important subtleties about which configurations are best for what? Andrew Parker and Robert Cross. Yes. Robert Cross. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, his assertion was that's the only way work gets done is because of the relationship between people. I think that's not true. Not a reporting structure. Well, certainly not a reporting structure. That's not, that's true. But I think that there's, well, sorry, I'm a student of work. I'm going to shut up. Student of work and how it gets done. So. But I was thinking that I think Susan, what you're saying overlaps pretty nicely with some of the stuff I think is coming out of economics too, where we're moving from this model of kind of optimization and people are optimizing utility kind of in the old days to behavioral economic stuff, but still not understanding the motivations of behavioral economics. And I think we're starting to see, you know, what people really optimize around is relative to their group or groups they compare against. So I want to house a little bigger than my neighbors. I want my CEO needs to be paid a little bit more than the other CEOs. So it's a relative ranking, which I think is kind of the inside-outside idea. And I know like this guy, Duke has been talking about some of this stuff. And it's kind of like, oh yeah, because it helps me understand some of the politics stuff. You know, what are the Trump people trying to do? Well, they're, they're, they're adjusting, you know, they're comparing themselves to certain cohorts and wanting to be, what was that, could the line that the woman had the other day that he was hurting the wrong people? You know, yes, he's, he's not, he's, he's supposed to be hurting those other people. Yeah. And I think it's those people in that group that are the things that we naturally be compared to. So there'll be some new economics around optimizing around group categories or something. Right. I think if I can, if I can just clarify for a second, the feeling I get in the, maybe the semantic distinction between networks and inside-outside groups is that the network doesn't appear to have boundaries within it. So there's no inside or outside. It's a network. And it's like, it has sort of complete whatever frictionless or friction full access it has between the people. But it doesn't, like the, like inside-outside is maybe a series of overlapping small networks, right? But yeah, if you want everything to be network, then it becomes meaningless. But yeah. Right, right. And weird things happened once everybody could reach the CEO if you knew their email or if you could just, you know, there was this weird democratization of communication when email shows up. Because even outside people can suddenly come in and, you know, there used to be defense measures so that nobody got to talk to the top leaders, right? There were a series of filters that would pretty much get rid of your message. So it was pasteurized and homogenized by the time, you know, the CEO heard about it. Those things are kind of gone. Everybody's pretty visible. Somebody else was chiming in. And Bill, did you want to jump in? I just happen to be focusing right now on pure relationship issues, which is an interesting overlay on this. The three psychologists that I'm reading on are Dr. Sue Johnson who wrote Hold Me Tight and John Wellwood, who's got a book out called Tort of Psychology of Awakening, which is basically integrating psychology with spirituality, but in a very functional way. And then the third one that really touches on a lot of what we're talking about here is work of a psychologist by the name of Terrence Reel, R-E-A-L, who I'm right now reading a book. He said, how can I get through to you? Which has got a brilliant sort of breakdown of his fundamental issue, which is that we've got a patriarchal, psychological, pathological process going on for thousands of years, and it basically eats into everything else that we've been talking about, whether it's hierarchy issues, network issues, relationship issues, the difference between a village and not a village, all of those things basically get eviscerated because of the hidden aspect. And he not only talks about it hidden in a sense that we don't really sort of pay attention to it, but it's almost like psychologically it's intended not to be talked about, because we really, really want to dig into the victimization of the woman, the feminine, in other words, that it's really, really bad. And we don't even talk about it, because if we have to talk about it, then it's going to get worse. And so it's really giving a different perspective to everything that we're talking about, relationship exchange, because if we don't understand what's basically undermining the notion of relationship, in other words, all the discussion of the consumerism, in other words, we're trying to figure out where's the beginning of this erosion, where is the beginning that we need to go back and pay attention to, because if we don't pay attention to it, it's going to keep eroding. It's like the proverbial, you know, bailing the boat faster and faster, when you got to hold the body of it, nobody's paying attention to hold the bottom of the boat. So it's fascinating in all the stories, you know, that Terence Realtale tells are amazing, in other words, the resistance that males have to even, you know, personally in relationships and everything addressing this, because they don't want to let go of their dominance, and they have the ability to just walk away, oh, she's got a problem, you know, I'm going to walk away. It's Bill, thank you. This is a really rich, and I don't know any of these books, so I'll go look them up, but it's a really rich path into discussion, and I completely agree. Over the last week or two, I've been paying a lot of attention to Aboriginal ways of knowing and watched a couple of simple TED talks that were really, really moving about things that had happened, and realized a thing I had realized, excuse me, I think I had learned about the Americas from the book 1491 by Charles Mann, which was that before the Europeans show up, most of the American landmass is under active human management. It just doesn't look like what Europeans do to it. It's not fences where I'm growing pears and you have cows. It's basically everybody working the landscape with fire, with careful planting and pruning, with herding a whole series of other things. Well, it turns out that the Aborigines had done the same thing in Australia for a hell of a lot longer, because Aboriginal customs go back to at least 60,000 years, may go back longer, everybody keeps discovering new evidence of earlier sort of transmissions. So I say all of that because one of the talks I watched was about intergenerational trauma, which is a very real thing, I believe. And that brought me all the way up to identity politics, which became a very, very hot thing in this last election cycle, is clearly a hot thing for people on the far right to poke at because, hey, look, everybody gets really mad when we poke at this thing. It's like a hornet's nest. And sort of this transgenerational trauma is the background fuel. It's the underground coal fire that's been burning for centuries that bubbles up every now and then into things like Black Lives Matter, into things like when the shit hits the fan socially these days. And the more we don't deal with these things, the stronger that fire sort of glows underneath. And so again, this is protection of white men in large measure because they're the ones who went out and kind of did this years ago. And I'm trying to figure out how do you frame or phrase this in a way that somebody who's resisting it might actually go, gosh, maybe we should apologize. Or maybe we should realize we have a generational responsibility if not a personal responsibility. Because the arguments against are things like, I didn't do this, right? It's not me who did this. It's some people way back when and who knows what they did and why can't bygones be bygones is the other thing. And all of this is part of this identity conversation, I think, because identity politics is an attempt to be seen for who you are and where you come from, right? When you make identity politics clear away its political taint and come back to what the issues are and what's going on, it's just an attempt to be seen and heard. It's not, I mean, I wouldn't say even seen, right? It's like you are who you are and where you came from, right? I mean, it's identity of politics is just politics, right? Yeah. Sorry. And that was a whole bunch of different different things piled on to what you started with, Bill. I think I took us a little a little afield, but I'm interested in what this what this melange of things means to any of us. But to just use one particular example that was sort of like the beginning point of Dr. Sue Johnson's work on relationship response, in other words, the willingness of each of us to respond to the emotional needs of the other, which to an extent is that intergenerational thing that you're talking about. In other words, we don't necessarily see it coming, but obviously intergenerational, that's going to be important. In any event, if you go on on YouTube, she's got a an example of some research where a mother is in a room basically playing with her one year old son. And it's very nice that the son is responding, he's giggling, he's being very, very emotionally stable. And then they have her for just like maybe 10 seconds, turn her head away, and then come back completely void of any responsiveness interface. She won't smile, she won't laugh, she won't talk, she won't do anything. That one year old baby, in other words, we're not talking about people, you know, being abused or you know, we're not talking about something, we're talking about a one year old absolutely going berserk that his mother won't respond to him. In seconds, it immediately knows something has changed, it immediately starts reaching out, trying to figure out, how do I get her back? I mean, it's almost traumatic watching this, you know, until the woman finally, you know, okay, go ahead, respond to the kid again, you know, the kid just like melts, you know, again, oh God, where the frick did you go? Wow. And the cues, the cues can be really small. I mean, a lot of this is very subtle about presence and attention and so forth. Susan, go ahead. We're just going to ask if any of you have encountered the work of Ken Friston. I think this group would actually like this and the one thing that I took away is extremely prolific writer, and he's, you know, a philosopher, but in England. And the thing that I took away was on the heels of reading about octopuses and their intelligence from the Peter Godfrey Smith book was that he says to be alive is to know that there is a, that is to have expectations and know that you have expectations. Well, anyway, that's consciousness, but to have expectations. And he goes through, so I've been doing a mental exercise whenever I hear something. So Bill, when I heard you talk about that last example, that child at one had expectations and the expectations were not met. And you can, it is so interesting to me, it's as profound as system one and system two, that so much of the local stuff that we do is about what we expect. And if it's not there, we're unhappy. Susan, was it Carl Friston or Ken Friston? Yeah, it was Carl. I knew I had it wrong. Yeah. And I still, this has been a very, very frustrating call for my brain, by the way, guys, because pretty much everything you named is not in my goddamn brain. And that won't be fixed. That promise you will be fixed by the end of the day. But I mean, this is like stumped the band with Johnny Carson and y'all are, y'all are going to get like Buick's at the end of the day. So. Well, I enjoyed it again, Susan, the thing about, because you reached for happiness, but then you kind of turned back from it, I think that, that, and I was listening to, I was probably Ezra Klein interviewing Kahneman the other day. And, and they were going through some of the, you know, the contradictions in our, in our behavioral economics and, and how we, you know, essentially we, we know that, you know, that we kind of remember the last thing most, you know, so, so they were asking, well, do you, like when you plan your vacation, do you end with a really fun thing so that you remember your vacation? And Ottoman goes, no. It's like, you know, it's like, none of us do, right? We, we don't, we clearly don't optimize for happiness. That isn't what drives us. You know, you can look at your own behavior and know it isn't happiness, you're maxillizing. But it is, yeah, right. And we often aren't aware of our own expectations, right? Which is, which are resentments waiting to happen. Unstated expectations are resentments waiting to happen. Yeah, then we're not hurting the right people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of the things about expectations is a guide perception. You know, that experiment where they have the monkey walking back there, but it's all about what people are trying to expect. So you don't even see it. So yeah, just try this experiment for a while and see how many things you can explain interactions that happen on the basis of failed or, or not expectation. So, so a small pet peeve of mine currently, people like Shane Parrish are making heroes out of Robert Chaldini, who exists in my brain under dangerous knowledge and wrote the book Influence, a rather persuasion, who is now coined the term persuasion, which is how do you prime people to be convinced of something before you've even shown up, before they even sort of dealt with the question. I'm like, Jesus, really? So we're busy, we're busy training generations of smart people in how to spin us and manage those expectations before we even realize it's happening. Great. Sounds lovely. That's what we're doing. Go Shane. Yeah, that's not new. It's just giving a name to it. You said it's called brainwashing, didn't it? But once you give it, once you give it a name, and once you broaden it, more people can then seize it and do it. It's a little bit like just a public opinion by Bernays, right? Once you formalize it, you can figure out how to fight it. That too, sort of. So how do you fight Trumpism? Two by fours? I mean, torches? No, no, no. March with torches, not two by fours. I think that backfires. You can watch, Jerry. I watched Babylon, Berlin. Wow. Isn't it great? I'd almost like every American to see it because, hey, check out the Weimar Republic, everybody. Europe has some lessons for us. The place where I am in the series, and this is a little bit of a plot spoiler, it turns out that there was a fighter base, a little airplane training base in Russia during the Weimar Republic because, of course, the German army wasn't allowed to, you know, rearm. And the Russians were trying to be helpful. So German pilots went to Russia to train how to fly. Then they went to Spain for Dernica and for like the Spanish Civil War to practice, all of which led to World War II. But what, you know, and it's all busy like happening undercover, and it happens here, it happens there. It's super interesting. So that's a plot point in Babylon, Berlin. But super interesting stuff. Well, as I recall, wasn't it the Germans who funded Lenin and sent him back into Russia? Yeah. I love history. I love history too. And so the war reparations under the Versailles Treaty were so onerous that the British, whose foreign policy was always... Don't forget, John Manor Cain's wrote a book pointing out, and he was a Treaty of Versailles. He said, next war is coming because of this. Exactly. So the Treaty is so onerous that a British foreign policy is always, hey, there can never be one dominant power on the continent. And at the end of World War I, the dominant power is France. Germany is a mess. Germany is economically just completely devastated. So the British fund any German repayments for the treaty. So the British basically helped the Germans get back on their feet and get moving. The French, meanwhile, are pointing east and going, the Bosch. They're going to come again. Look at them. Look at them. They're busy taking back stuff. And of course, that's how it plays out. Also an interesting book, Lords of Finance. It's a fascinating book. We Americans actually threw a lot of money. Our bankers, just like they did in Latin America these last couple of decades, we went to Germany and loaned them money hand over fist. That's why it works over there now, or sort of. Please, expatiate, Susan. What are you saying? Well, I was just thinking that where should we be watching? Well, we did after the Second World War, but I'm looking out for the next one. I'm looking at who are we helping, right? So we're helping China a lot. Oh, yeah. A lot. In fact, Bill Clinton, I mean, we've engineered it. And remember, the hope was just by bringing the Chinese into the world order that they would not go to militarism. And in fact, speaking of consumerism, we wanted them to get addicted to consumerism. If you think about it, I mean, really, this has been a peaceful way to get a lot of people out of poverty and do desperate things. So I'm largely behind the plan that we've done with China. But we shouldn't be naive about it. No. And we are naive about it, I think. And somewhat uneducated about it. I mean, just the finance minister of Greece, the one that was there during the debacle and everything is basically doing a lot of speeches to make sure that people are aware of... This is Varoufakis. Right, Giannis Varoufakis. The fact that a lot of people, myself included before I heard him, thought that the problems in Germany that came out of World War I were due to the hyperinflation that that basically led to Nazism and the Nazis taking over. What he points out is that if you actually look at the facts, it wasn't until they went into deflation that the Nazis started coming up. They only had, when they were in the hyperinflationary period, they only had 3% of their parliament that were the Nazis. Within 18 months of the time that it shifted into deflation, they went to 33%. Deflation, he said, is what causes that angry mob response because they're losing everything, they're losing their jobs, they're losing their homes, everything is going downhill. Hyperinflation is not the problem. And that was literally manufactured in order to get rid of the reparation requirements. I was just going to say that. Inflation is a great way to evaporate debt. Right, exactly. FYI, we have just gone through about 15 years of deflation worldwide. And look at the response. Mr. Parker, we've gone all over the place on these topics. I'm curious which of these things are interesting to you or if you'd like to take us in a different direction? Oh, I think they're all interesting. I don't think I'm not sure if I actually have any particular direction to go in. A couple of things spark off from the discussion on gender because it's so wide and broad. I agree wholeheartedly with that being a very, very key thing. Particularly interesting to me at the moment is how the relationships in gender are mirrored in our relationship with nature and in sustainability and the way that we actually treat the planet as if it were simply there as a utility and required no real empathy, respect or consideration. So that's one thing which has been running in my mind just recently just because I'm looking at doing something around sustainability and the environment in terms of actually trying to help people who are working in those fields deal with the constant avalanche of bad news. So we're trying to come up with something which actually means that they don't just give up and become totally hopeless basically and who keep coming up with solutions because if you're working on the front line in those areas then every day is just like boom. Oh well, there goes another species. So I think it is for any of us who are reasonably conscious or in the least bit bothered about what's happening. So that's one of my main themes coming up this year. Maybe doing a workshop in Iceland with somebody who's a professor in climate studies which will be an invitation thing to get people to consider ways in which we can help to mitigate the degree of stress to which they're all subject because of the sphere they're working in so that they can carry on actually being able to come up with solutions and ideas and see that there might be some way out of this. That sounds great. Have you know Hurund through Marty, right? I beg your pardon. So through Marty Spiegelman you probably know Hurund, Gunsten's daughter in Iceland? No, I don't actually know. This is a connection stream. My involvement with the Schumacher Institute in the UK. Oh okay. If your Iceland thing starts to come to fruition we should connect you with Hurund because you're interested in the topic and she does good work. She did the documentary Insight which is about intuition which is now viewable on Netflix. All right, yeah, yeah. I've seen it several times and I've discussed it with Marty a couple of times. It is really interesting and there's I mean there's a whole bunch of stuff in there around Ian McGillchrist's work around the privileging of left hemisphere thinking over right hemisphere thinking and stuff like that as well which actually plays right can be seen as playing right back into the gendered polarisation thing also. Ian McGillchrist the master in his emissary. That's right, yeah. Which was a much bigger thicker book than I thought was going to be. Back in the day when I bought physical books it's funny because now I buy mostly Kindle so you can't tell on Kindle that this is a tome and this is not a tome it's just a page count who the hell knows and they don't give you a visual it's not like I can get a view of my library where the books are stacked right they don't give a damn anymore about the visual or the heft or the texture of what used to be called the book which now we have to call a book book just you know to differentiate or a book classic I guess. Yeah. Pardon? Really I said. Yeah yeah exactly so anyone want to check in and take us in a in a different direction? Well I when we when I saw the topic of abundance it's one of the four principles it was really the foundation of a lot of the work we do. We've struggled a bit with what's the opposite of abundance we've always used the word scarcity although scarcity seems inadequate as an opposite of abundance because it has two dimensions and you know scarcity is there aren't many of them or it's very hard to get because it's difficult so difficulty to achieve versus availability are two different things as I'd be interested in maybe has maybe has some ideas on abundance versus whatever the opposite of abundance is. I think the opposite will be fear-based. Yeah I think it's I think it's meanness. Sorry? I think it's meanness. Meanness ah. A meanness of resources a meanness of feelings and a meanness of thinking. Interesting. Like Grgringe Grgrind in Car Times Charles Dickens. So we're taking mean taking mean back to its its older meaning. Yeah um. I see uh two by two. Oh Susan's got a consultant's perspective on this. Well I just was thinking that maybe we should put the abundance and scarcity on one dimension and on the other dimension figure out two other two other things to at least broaden the conversation instead of either or and I was gonna um what was the last oh meanness I think that well a meanness that's kind of like a a a murder of prose you know it's it's in that genre and and meanness could be one of those. Generosity so um generosity that uh versus you know it's because I just see fear fear is the whole thing. Yeah yeah yeah but it isn't the whole thing because we have lots of things we don't just do things because of fear in fact quite often fear is not a motivator I mean look at look at all the things that we could be fearful of that we're not. Well we we ignore a whole bunch of things we ought to be fearful about. So you get points Susan well taken. Yeah let me um let me share the screen for a second because I just discovered something interesting in my brain. Ha. As follows um I have a bunch of thoughts that I realized um that you know the opposite of addiction is not sobriety it's human connection exactly um which comes out of uh Johan Hari. There's a couple really nice ones uh here the opposite of poverty is not wealth it's justice. Yeah that's a nice one. Uh the opposite of consumption isn't thrift it's generosity. Generosity was occurring to me it's it's an opposite of meanness. I think yeah I think I like that that opposition. Yeah and I didn't realize I had all these so I'm going to actually connect them up to the thought opposites. So Susan I have a two by three now. Oh okay. Well that's unusual. I don't know if that's permitted. I know it's very hard to keep in mind is the problem. I might be violating a rule here but so one axis is abundance and scarcity of the other's meanness, fear and generosity. Are you ready to go one more and we'll be back to the two by four. Okay. There we go. We can just keep growing it. But it seems to me fear is the extreme state meanness is a result of fear and generosity is kind of the the other end of that spectrum. I think meanness being result of fear is a great thing. In fact then maybe that's where we could tuck a fear away actually. Yeah. I'm sorry go ahead Susan. No I was just going to say that's a if you think about well if you go back to the to the octopus and expectations then then the then it just sets it up. It sets up fear like you said. And then yeah disappointment when is disappointment fit with fear. So what's interesting here. Well a good question that was Greg. Oh dear. Repeat the question please Greg. Well so so tying expectations into this when expectations aren't met then we're disappointed or even resentful and how does that relate how does disappointment relate to fear I guess is. I would it certainly engenders fear doesn't it. Yeah. Yeah disappointment engenders a whole lot of things. Yeah depends on how big a thing it is. Yeah. I like where that's going. We've got a whole theory going here people. I like that. But one of the things I was thinking just right at the tail end of this conversation was that what we have right now in the world is kind of this fear versus love kind of approach except a lot of people on the left are using fear as well. Right. The coming climate apocalypse is a call to fear. It's not a call to connection or love or empathy or whatever else. And a big piece of what we're talking about in the middle here is the feeling of belonging or connectedness some of it about empathy etc and how these things all play out together. So and I'm wondering what's the antidote to the glowing populist revolt around the world because there's a whole bunch of people voting in governments that are creating illiberal democracies things that look and smell like democracies but in fact are not functional democracies. They're more or less autocratic dictatorships of some sort that might go on forever because these people are making themselves presidents for life and things like that. So I think history is important back there. That whole thing about what happened in Germany I mean when the real triggers of that we should be looking for those and I've read things about that bring out one or the other of the of the things that drive that fascism for instance. Yeah you don't want to read Hannah Arendt's like her four books about this are just it sounds so contemporary it's very frightening. Yeah yeah good point. I really love Hannah Arendt. I think she's greatly underappreciated as a philosopher. How do you spell that? Sorry. Hannah Arendt? I just I'm typing it in. Okay thank you. It's good I'm retiring because it's going to take me a year to read all this stuff. Oh totally totally. Long enough I've been really catching up for the last four years and I retire. You know what else you could do? You could call Bo and set up a call with him separately and pick his brain just like all right Bo. I'm sending you a bottle of a bottle of brandy. Tell me everything about Hannah Arendt. It's yes. More than one bottle of brandy for sure. And that's probably true and it is Bo. Greg I just put a link to my brain for Hannah Arendt but I have not read her books like Bo has so I don't have his depth of knowledge on it. Thanks. So I really like the economist wrote something about this because what we were talking about is how do we stop this and then what it said is the tenor of the article was that liberalism got too comfortable with itself. Yeah and that what liberalism has always survived by responding and we need we we got we got to go go ahead Susan I think we did get too comfortable with ourselves. No I was just I was going to say that that looks a little bit like the progressive movement and so I'm really mad that it's being described as more left. Yeah I mean I don't think that's the more what do you mean those two things are getting jacks opposed in the press in a way that I wish they wouldn't. So we started the call with the conversation about how sometimes the background issue is very different from the foreground issue and would cause you to go about solving a problem very differently something like that. For me a piece of what's happened here is I'm going to say something I've said a couple times before with yin and yang with rex with here probably which is I borrow yin and yang from Taoism. Yin is typically feminine receptive earth energy dark energy and yang is typically masculine outward bright active energy it doesn't mean that all men are yin and all women all men are yang and all women are yin it means that a healthy entity whether it's an individual a family a society needs to have yin and yang energies in creative tension and I happen to like this some people hate dualistic models I like this one a lot and my amateur theory of history is that somewhere way back either 300 to 3000 years ago yang won so the forces of paternalism basically and then I overload the yang term to say that it's also analytic scientific hierarchical paternalistic etc etc etc etc etc etc like like you can make your own list but that those forces won and pursued a scorched earth strategy against yin demonizing yin it wasn't hey yin let's come and make a future it was all yin should be stamped out destroyed across the world because yin doesn't work and my belief to bring this up to the current conversation is that the democratic party and the republican party and most religions are basically yang and their responses and their answers to situations are yang and mostly hierarchical and large government you know the the conservative critique against liberals this big government and lots of taxes and those kinds of answers tend to be sort of yang the yang and the restless ximay you totally are like you're you're a rock star chat today the agony and the equity no how's that go anyway so so my thesis here is that is that goes back to the conversation we were having about paternalism sort of running rampant and that we need to somehow let the air out of that bubble because and this is why I think the me too movement is really important right now and why a piece of what I'm trying to create in the world is roughly hey I'm a white guy this is our problem not women's problem jerry isn't that all you just said that was the point of this book that's the thesis of this book passion of the western mind richard tarnas that's that's his that's what that book says I did not know that oh okay yeah not in your brain yeah but I don't think I've read it really okay well that's just that's his thesis dammit you just initiated his a thesis in its entirety huh richard tarnas there it is and I've not read it I know a little about it well it's good for us to have us all together right it certainly is well certainly I bet there's like two people on this call that for whom certainly is a is a meme okay okay yeah thank you oh you know what this is an unusual group it might be everybody on the call April does does sweetly mean anything to you that to me I don't know what you're talking about all right anyway back to our regularly scheduled program which is already in progress um can I stick in when I was curious the the thought about the opposite of abundance gave me a thought too because it's not it's not exactly the thing but maybe it it's fun thoughts around like regeneration we have often been trying to explain it in terms of it's the opposite of extraction and that there's some kind of balance between you know growing it and taking it somehow or another and so the generative process tends to be abundant the extractive process tends to be zero so thank you and I apologize I April was muted and not able to unmute herself she is now live and with us I was hi everyone I was just gonna say that unfortunately I'll crash the party that doesn't mean anything to me but yeah Jerry I I'm not I will follow up with you later on this I'm not sure how to unmute me but I wanted to chime in a couple of times but have been unable to shoot ping me ping me on gchat um and I'll I'll unmute you if you're if you've dialed in on the phone so we'll figure that out but in the future I apologize do you want to go back to anything you wanted to say no not at this point other than just say happy new year to everybody thank you yeah and welcome to call Ken yeah we should have said that up front jerry happy new year everybody definitely say happy new year first call of 2019 something like that I don't know or maybe I maybe I glossed past the happy part oh and I yeah and I absolutely love the poem it's just so perfect for today and everything around so thank you for that Mary Oliver is always good for depth always good for depth um also want to add something Jerry about your your thesis I don't mean to reduce it with sweet about the past of the western mind but having just recently read the ilia the odyssey and a large part of the old testament I mean when you read these documents and then you know history you know that within like the four five hundred years leading up to when those books are written which was quite in the 1200 bc both of them time so it's interesting they were the same time they weren't that far apart if you think about Greece and Middle East what you were seeing was the patriarchy had finally finished off the matriarchy and pretty recently actually and a lot of them there's parts of the Old Testament where they're making you know Asana and Gamora was a fit and women had a place there was a cleanup action yeah and so when you're reading these books as I just did recently they're incredibly brutal and aggressive and wow I mean the the Iliad you're just what it means to be they're teaching little boys how to kill the Iliad is all about getting young boys ready to go out there and when I was reading it was so interesting was how technical it is when you if I'd seen that movie with Brad Pitt in it and you're like wow there's so much detail well there's that detail in the Iliad because they're teaching them here's the weak point in the armor here's how to kill somebody they're really teaching that in the Iliad and when you read it you can tell they are anyway just I don't need to exaggerate the brutality because you can't exaggerate the brutality oh my god it's pornographic anyways so when you read those books the Iliad the Odyssey in the bible you are completely seeing the patriarchy setting it down and we're living in the aftermath of it to this day at least in the west yes I just watched the documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg oh cool her arguments with the supreme court and I was amazed I guess maybe I'm naive about how institutionalized the the male dominant has been in our legal system and and how she has really helped turn that around at least a start in turning that around but I did you watch the did you watch the documentary RBG or did you watch the new movie that's on netflix no the documentary okay not the movie is the movie good have you seen the movie I've not seen the movie I'm dying to and the movie is basically about an early case that she had that was in an appeal court I think something like that never made it to supreme court but she did something that was really really awesome which is in order to open up women's equality she chose a case about men that's in the documentary that it's completely brilliant it's like oh okay I'm going to show how this case for this man it was a tax case when he was trying to get a write-off for his nanny but the law basically said no this is only only this this is only applies to women can only benefit from it and and she pride opened the door with that which is like that that's how these things happen sometimes it's like something is used that that wasn't intended that way that that opens the door I'm just I'm still pissed at her at RBG from which thing because towards the end of his term but like shortly after the beginning of the of the second second second term Obama asked her to consider retiring because she was getting up there in years and her health wasn't that great and because he didn't want to run the risk of her being replaced by a Republican successor and she out and out refused and so and there's not but now she survived into at least the she just missed uh she just missed a session so we don't we don't know what's up yeah I don't understand I never understand that argument though why would it have been any different than what happened to garland to america the the the point at which he asked her was still fairly early in his second term so not to say mcconnell wouldn't have tried tried to do something you screw it up but um that particular the argument that mcconnell used around for for merit garland wouldn't have applied it didn't apply when he made it so yeah no that's that's a very good point but um I mean now there's a very good chance I think there's an excellent chance that Trump's gonna take her replacement so that's just my I got a question for the group so we talked earlier about liberalism we've got we got too comfortable well what what are the ideas what do we have here in the group about where to what's our innovation now or how are we going to evolve liberalism forward can I just point out I posted something that auto-sharmer has says recently written it's called it's an article in medium called turning the tide living inside the axial shifts and basically what he's indicating which you know anybody can determine whether or not they believe it is that we're beginning to turn away from left right and what he is calling open and closed as an alternative axis for discussion on politics and in economics rather than government versus markets it's well-being for the all versus GDP or the access points and then on education it's rather than public private its whole child versus memorizing knowledge you know or the access points and he's basically suggesting that there's more and more evidence of that axial shift as he calls it that's going on I hope so because in political economy in my school I remember I had a great chambers professor who taught us how to manipulate elections and manipulate congress with closure rules with game theory the two dimensions it was always an artificial construct nothing fits in this the political never I think one of the things I'm thinking is that where did I go I lost myself lost soon can you hear me yeah well I hear you I was just going to say that I'm increasingly increasingly thinking that the media is a problem and and I hate to say that which media media yeah old and new probably right yeah and and broadcast social everything I'm just trying to get a sense of well that I think what I'm thinking is that they buy into this either or argument all the time it's always either or either or either or it doesn't matter what they're talking about it's either or and we just can't have that kind of dualism we've lost any sort of perspective perspective we've lost any sort of nuance we've lost any sort of but partly I think what's happened Susan is that one of the parties of the far right has figured out that dualism leads to winning elections and provokes fear and they're they're basically using this in very very intentionally undermining facts undermining science undermining everything getting people pissed off because it energizes the base and it wins elections I think the key is like how do we how do we undermine that process from from like taking over yeah Jerry I was really struck when you've been making this point for a while and pointing about new Gingrich and when Bush senior died and then it comes out that when Bush senior went back on the taxes thing that's one new Gingrich so it was really fascinating how what you've been talking about for some time now was brought up again rather recently about and that was a seminal moment new Gingrich stopping off boy that guy got something done new Gingrich changed changed discourse in America much for the worse yeah it's a pretty single-handedly he was this he was this little guy from a nowhere district in the house not the senate of Georgia I mean and and suddenly he was the speaker of the house which I mean mercifully didn't last very long because that blew up too but a messy messy thing well let's go back to Susan's point I mean remember I remember reading the book you call it's boys on the bus so horse race I mean the press has had a lot of problems for a long time so let's have all that Susan let's let's keep going so dualism you know the horse race mentality I tell you one thing my wife being you know a senior executive the president of the company when people come to interview from the press press is so desiccated it's obvious they're just like what behind the ears the press doesn't seem to even have money to hire good people to work for it anymore that and yes that and they also you know I don't know how many times if you go to a place that has a bunch of newspapers whenever there's something that happens in the world it's the same photo it's the same photo in the economist it's the same photo it's a good photo right but it's there's only one you know that's documenting a particular activity um but that's uh let's let's let's hold on to this thought for a while yeah let's think about so I read the financial times in the economist the financial times is amazing I mean Lawrence Sumner's and Martin Wolfe and but my subscription costs $300 a year I know and I can now in retirement I can't it's like oh dear yeah and I when I send it get an article I send the text to Jerry because I know he can't get at it yeah so I'm here behind this paywall I get good journalism but when I go on Facebook I can't even share it and the stuff I'm looking out on Facebook my friend people sharing it's just dreck it's yes so how do we make how do we make what we do fun I mean I mean when you think about it uh negativism is a lot more and I mean oh yeah totally so much more you know um energizing yeah this this horse race thing about is is Trump going to get in peace and everything I really get tired and I get sad about it because we're not we're not challenging liberalism and we're not moving ourselves forward we're we're just this horse race mentality and what if it doesn't happen we've we've all lost we lost but we do have to articulate where we're headed now yes to hell well you know what hell sounds like more the people in hell are going to be more fun than the people oh yeah where would you rather be should go in the hand ask it manufacturing yeah when I was around Mormons and they would be telling me that how unrighteous I was I would I would point out to them if they were in heaven I would much prefer to be in hell because that's where the party is yes with Mark Twain said that the hell heaven for the climate hell for the company yeah exactly so Susan you're asking like what do we do and I'm realizing I have a thought in my brain called the Rex platform and it has a bunch of different things that like if somebody made me king tomorrow like what I would try to implement and I realized looking at the list that they're not that happy they're not this doesn't come from the space of the joy of connectedness and and honoring people and everything else and I think it needs a lot more of that but but there's a whole bunch of things in here like revoke corporate personhood rethink democratic participation so people are actually sort of back in there's a bunch of very specific things in here formers could make a survey out of that yeah into the house of representatives and see what people think yeah I mean it would be nice to know what people think about those issues or you know and I don't think a survey gets at what people think I well it may get at what they think or they think they think certainly doesn't a survey can be a good conversation starter yeah so one thing that that we've been talking about quite a bit is fear and um you know what I put jotted down in the in the chat a while back at fear is a fast catalyst empathy is a slow catalyst so we think about using fear as an engine of change for good or for ill it's because we respond quickly to it um you know as opposed to to love which is a slow burn and just in doing some a little bit of side research about how much of the brain is used for face recognition because it's a conversation we were having earlier in the you know in today just discovering that fear faces are the first to be recognized by an infant a a five month old infant will will respond to a fear face more first before any other kind of change of expression now that evolved that expands quickly but fear is is the first response and so there's something we have to give babies raggedy in early why raggedy in because the features on raggedy in are very uh they're very human and there's a smile and so it's it's easy that the eyes the nose the mouth are uh are very present it's an interesting thing about dolls there's a lot of work on dolls no all right but just thinking about how much of our we talk about meanness as a result of fear we talk about fear being used by the other side or being used by uh the the left uh to an order around climate and i just i just wonder if there is there a what is the fast catalyst response i mean what is what is a positive emotion that has the same kind of fast response that we get from fear um sex i think that's all you get pleasure is what came to mind i was gonna say yeah male brains or female brains what what did you say you're breaking more i i said pleasure okay yeah but the same you know same general topic um so how can we how do you sex up climate change um nice well there is the naked news um as except that's russian propaganda oh good point good point um partly like like i just to go with what you're saying jimmy the you know the uh the shot of the shot of cortisol or adrenaline that runs through you when the fear response hits is one of the fastest human responses there is that's that's like it's a little bit like anti-lock breaking systems where you're like no no no no no a car is going to hit an object and before your head tips forward sensors are going to trigger a balloon that explodes in front of your face and pretend what how and yet it works right it's like damn that's pretty that's pretty slick the human fear responses is like that like shaboon right um and so i think part of the question is what are these other connective responses that can overpower that uh or set aside the need for that or whatever and i think i think somehow you know love conquers fear is is a piece of the strategy here with enough time with enough time but do we have enough time well it's actually we love about enough time like if you were trying to model what what you're saying i mean it uh so it's like i'm you know part of what i was saying earlier is like it's not happiness that we're maximizing or optimizing around probably closer to fear um but we're probably but even i would love to like know the model because i don't think we're not like maximizing fear either we're optimizing it so we want the we want we want enough fear that life is exciting in some sense i swear there's some kind of a feedback loop you know and and they're made i i wonder if like it's a side part of the we've gotten too lazy is life got a little too good we needed to juice it some create some catastrophes because that makes life more exciting you know and i i did a uh science fiction game book uh about 15 years ago steve jackson games a role-playing game system transhuman space so i wrote something about a good couple hundred pages on um what what the culture of 2100 is like um you know moderately realistic sci-fi world and one of the things i talked about were cultural extremophiles that basically people who had through both activity and engineering you know basically evolve themselves into seeking out the maximum biochemical action in their brains and so that kind of cultural extremophiles and uh i don't know if that fits entirely but just what we were saying there david just you know plug that into me and i love david's i love david's point because horror movies why do people watch horror movies indeed don't know um we are getting near the end of our time um anybody somebody save as quick talk to transhuman space toxic memes nice yep transhuman space toxic memes that's the book that's the book dang yeah i'll throw in a poem from dean ametskar i was gonna try and put it in the chat but i realized when i hit shift return it it just put the first line and the poem is called poem is called song she says there are we there are those who are setting fire to the world we are in danger there is time only to work slowly there is no time not to love and i've been coming back to that poem for many years now because i constantly get this sense of tremendous urgency of my god and it's burning up around us we've got to do something and i gotta wake people up and and i can only work with what i have where i am in touch with the people that i'm in touch with and i can only i can only be effective when i demonstrate love and care for them and the making of other which i admit i engage in pretty often and i really try to file that back but to grant legitimacy to the people that i that i am in great disagreement with is a really hard practice and um and if if we're going to engage people who are in the grips of fear and who's amygdala is being constantly um you know tweaked by the media or whatever we've got to demonstrate to them that we understand where they're coming from and we grant them some kind of legitimacy and that is a really really hard practice that after 30 years of meditation and you know 14 years of qigong practice and 10 years of yoga it's like i steal my body gets into this what am i going to do so i seek out fellow people that i can talk to and say you know be in these conversations and and and just keep on putting one foot in front of the other with the the hope that somehow it's going to work out but not no i'm refraining that i have the faith that it will somehow work out because faith is confidence and possibility but i don't have the hope it'll work out because hope to me is something that's ungrounded and and aspirational that i can't always connect with i think the end was cold that was beautiful thank you dude i wanted to add something else um i i just wanted to say that i mentioned this the aboriginal talks that i've been watching and one of them that i posted to facebook which i found really moving uh was a woman who was talking about deep listening as a path to healing the intergenerational trauma and she tells a story in her talk three different stories i think of moments where she could actually hear other people and hear their stories and what she did to draw out those stories because these were people who were in shock and it's really beautiful they like really i was stunned by uh by her ability to communicate let me see if i can quickly find um the talk yeah here it is uh the value of deep listening the aboriginal gift to the nation um i will post the link it is by judy atkinson whom i have not heard of before and uh here is the talk um and i think there's a big piece of that to be done for all of us i think there's a big piece of listening carefully yeah um so so there we are i agree but i don't want to do it nice there's a there's a good point to end on it makes me realize that i've given up humanity just isn't worth it we're not as special as we think we are well we can't give up we can't give up this is too juicy too juicy an issue isn't it i love that poem ken thank you and i think what you just named is really important i don't know if people are familiar with renay worksman but she's doing a lot it's a psychologist doing a lot of work on climate change and she said you know it's really important to bring in this third piece in the conversation we often talk about our anxieties and our aspirations but we need to talk about our ambivalences you know just named in ambivalence of yeah i know it's important and i don't want to do it she says i know i should give up meat to help climate change but i'm a meat eater i don't i'm ambivalent about giving that up and there's something very normalizing that that humanizes when we say yeah i know it's important but i don't want to do it let someone else do that because then we can start to deepen the conversation and include more people about what are you ambivalent about and you'll find i think more common ground when we do that and maybe even the movement towards doing something in progress yeah exactly exactly no well thank you all for being here um that was a great conversation i i my my brain has opened up in lots of interesting ways i really appreciate it i appreciate your being here and uh we'll see you again in a month but uh we'll make some calls out of this and if you want to propose topics for for you know if there were pieces of this that i'm happy to turn any of pieces of this into an inside jerry's brain call or other kinds of things put a note on the rex list put a note on the inside jerry's brain list send me an email whatever it is um and we'll pick out some pieces of this and go go deeper um because i think this we're on to some really good stuff here but do you have an ijb happening in a half hour i do on abundance in fact how about that i actually thought that's what this call was and it started at 10 so i apologize but oh seems i matters to get myself in well there we are cool same room so let me see uh see a couple of you in uh less than 30 minutes thanks everybody yeah bye bye