 Let's see how that works. There we go. This is Wednesday, January 9th, 2019. I'm a little bit frazzled because my Zoom room would not open or work properly. I just finished a Zoom call a half hour ago and then tried to get back in, and it wouldn't let me. So my Zoom account is in limbo somewhere, and I have an abundance of anger for the Zoom people right this moment, which will dissipate when they tell me what went wrong. But that'll happen later. Michael Linton has kindly lent us his Zoom room, which is where we are right now. And therefore, I expect people to be trickling in as they discover through email and she posted on Lever that we are now meeting elsewhere. So hopefully, we'll get some people in and begin our conversation about abundance. So I'm going to take a breath so I can come back to the topic and actually be here. In fact, what I'm going to do is see Rob, Dave, Michael. Are there any thoughts immediately off the top of your head that you were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, abundance, this thing, this thing right here? Do you want to just throw that into the basket right now? Moderation in all things. Even in abundance. Yeah, selectivity, discrimination. Too much of a damn good thing. Got to be selective. So it's all about sense making in abundance. We're treating abundance like it's a thing proper, right? Seems to me more of a description of you have an abundance of time, an abundance of money, an abundance of food. There's not, at least in my mind, when I think of abundance per se, there's nothing filling that category, right? That's my only thought for the moment. An abundance of abundance. Well, that's... The thing that I've been, you touched on in the video a little bit too, because I've ended up, I think coming back to the abundance is most helpful to me as a framing component, and I'm a really framing zero sum versus positive sum outcomes. So we're just unable to imagine positive sum outcomes because we've been taught by economics to value scarcity. Oh, there's a Zoom outage going on. Zoom, so my apologies. Anne Walston just sent me an email downdetector.com or something like that that shows a major Zoom outages, and that's probably what's whacking us right now. Well, I couldn't get in actually at first, as I mentioned to you, so I believe that. So, back to you in the booth. David, were you finished your thought? It was a great thought. I think that, I don't know. I mean, I was close to the end anyway. So we have a scarcity of Zoom now, that's... But anyway, but the capacity to think beyond zero sum, like in environmental stuff all the time and all these organizations that are going to zero carbon, it's like, I don't understand why zero carbon's a magical place to go, right? We should go to negative carbon. But that's not in our normal engine. And so to me, the abundance framing is helpful to try to get us to positive sum engine. Super interesting. Yeah. And I'm trying to figure out if there's a difference between abundance as a concept, as Rob said, as a description of things, not a thing itself, but also abundance mentality, which is in some sense part of what we're aiming for here. I mean, we're trying to figure out how do we get people to think abundantly? And the place I always go back to, the place I tend to start here, unfortunately, is that capitalism hates abundance. It actually has a schizoid relationship to abundance. On the one hand, capitalism is all about creating abundant stuff, like more stuff than anybody can consume, stores are full. You go to Macy's and you look across the shop floor for the few Macy's that are still actually in business and you see rack after rack after rack of ugly clothing that somebody might buy who knows that somebody didn't get paid enough to make it the other end of the earth, et cetera. And so there's this perception of abundance, that there's a whole lot of stuff and yet it has created scarcity at a return and I went to business school, the thing they teach you in business school is that scarcity equals value, which is a code for or a proxy for. And if the thing you're trying to sell is not scarce yet, you should do something to make sure it is scarce. So here water, for example, like the history of bottled water on earth is really fascinating, including Nestle, going into cities in New Hampshire and elsewhere, sticking a pipe in the ground, sucking up all their lovely aquifer, selling it off elsewhere and not having to pay anybody anything because it's aquifer. It's just abundant water on the ground that turns out isn't abundant at that scale, right? So crap like that happening. So for me, capitalism is one of our largest threats toward the kinds of abundance that we have. And just in the last couple, in the last week or so, I've been diving a bit deep into aboriginal ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, but in particular with aborigines in Australia, because they have a history that goes back 60,000 years, maybe longer. And it turns out that a thing that, and they've heard me say this a moment ago, but a thing that I knew to be true about the American continents from the book 1491 by Charles Mann was that most of the American landmass was under active human management. It just didn't look like, this is my plot where I grow pears, here's where you have apples, here's where you're gonna grow corn. And an insight that came out of looking at how aborigines did the same thing most of the landmass of Australia is that, and let me switch here, since this is inside Jerry's brain, let me actually share my brain here, which I shut down, I have to put over here. There we go. So here's our call on abundance. So I have a thought, aborigines domesticated the landscape, not the species, which is super, super interesting because what they created was abundance on the land. And a lot of these speakers, like Bruce Pascoe, has a really nice talk here on Aboriginal culture and history. And Bruce is trying to prove his case by quoting some of the original European settlers who arrived. And so he's quoting from their journals to make a point about Aboriginal abundance and Aboriginal culture. And he's basically reading in the journals that, well, these people come ashore and they see what looks like an English gentleman's park. It doesn't look like a wild woods. It doesn't look like a tangle of everything. You go in and there's sort of a clearing where there's a particular thing growing and so on and so forth. And there's fruit and food growing from the trees. And it turns out that aborigines were using a fire stick farming, it's called, and a bunch of other things. I think I've got fire stick farming probably linked to his talk. If I don't, I should do that. In order to do very extremely controlled burns, so here we go, fire stick farming, which I'm gonna connect to Bruce's talk. And there's a book I've started reading called The Biggest Estate on Earth, How the Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage, another speaker on this whole idea that aborigines were domesticating the landscape, not the species, by which, and I'll give a little bit more explanation here and then step out of the conversation for a moment, by which my interpretation is they created places where wildlife that they wanted to hunt and eat would be really happy. So they created spaces where these animals could feed on things they really like to eat, could hide in the forest if they needed to tuck away in order to reproduce, and were safe for some period when they weren't being hunted. And they sculpted the land so that it would work for the species that they wanted to provide for that were providing for them. And since they didn't have a notion that this hill is mine and that hill is yours and they were kind of sharing the landscape and they moved around, we have this, we have this, I think we have an invisible script in our heads that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was somehow very meager and that we were desperately going around looking for fruits and nuts. It turns out that if you pay attention to the seasons and the animals and all that, you can do really, really cool things that don't take a lot of effort to get a lot of food. So for example, in a part of Australia called Brewarna, there are some fish traps that are basically, it's a shallow part of the river that every now and then has runs of fish and they put stones in the middle of the river in several places that look like an oval with an opening at the upstream end and fish, when there's a fish run, fish would swim into the little pool of stones, not really know to swim out. You just put a couple of stones and block the, you know, close the entrance at the far end and then you reach in and you pull out a bunch of fish. Then you dry them and you live off them and whatever. There's several other ways to create traps on rivers that give you a whole lot of fish when you know that the fish are coming and that's abundance, right? And as long as you don't over fish and destroy the habitat and there's a bunch of other things you have to understand about your habitat, your landscape, how to take care of it and ancient cultures in most places understood this and in the places where they didn't understand this they killed themselves. So Easter Island famously denudes itself of all trees and denudes itself of all humans because they run out of the capacity to feed themselves. For some reason, you know, Easter Island civilization goes away. There's plenty of places on earth where we screwed this up but there are more places on earth where this was actually going really beautifully. To me, that form of abundance and the capitalist dichotomy or dilemma around abundance are squarely sort of facing each other. And to me, that's a super interesting place to try to crack some of this code on how to think abundantly because we've managed to forget and eliminate and deprecate and demonize and suppress those ancient ways of thinking about abundance or thinking about together creating abundance so that we could all live really well. We just like flush them out and there's people trying to give talks and trying to write books to get some attention to this topic who I think mostly don't get that much attention, right? So let me stop and step out of the conversation. Trey, thanks for finding us. Did Jerry, is the critique of capitalism essential in that argument? Is, I find it distracting. I feel like people kind of invoke capitalism for a lot of things that are very vague. And I don't know, does communism manage abundance better? I don't know. So you've just asked a phenomenal question. One of my beliefs is that capitalism kind of ate our brains, it ate the world. One of the things I really like from Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation is he says, market economy requires market society by which he means once you think that the market is the way to go, the market must have a lot of free labor, a lot of free land. Everything needs to have a price because that's how markets work. It does, it can't have people happily living off their land. It needs to push them off and turn that land into sheep grazing. So you have the enclosure movements. There's one thing happens after another, after another, after another and capitalism at least in the West eats everything. Suddenly everything has a price. Suddenly if you don't have money, you can't stay alive. And the same, yeah. The same is true for socialism though. Let me get to communism in a second. So the way that I just described that aborigines and Native Americans and other aboriginal and other indigenous cultures around the world used to live is sometimes called social communism? No, what's it called? There's a word for it. Something communism, I'm forgetting now. And it's sort of almost a funny pun on communism because what happens when communism actually shows up as a doctrine for running countries is that it is co-opted because it's hierarchical pyramidal. We create power structures that a peasant, an ignorant peasant from Georgia, and I mean the country, not the state can take over a country and become Stalin and like kill millions and millions of people because he inherits this hierarchical patriarchal sort of system that isn't really communism. That is almost, they create almost the opposite of this old form of living on the commons, nurturing the commons and making it work. Instead they apply new more or less modern industrial capacities at industrial mechanistic scale and then almost kill themselves. This happens in Russia, this happens in China. Mao famously with the four pests campaign says we need to get rid of crickets, ants, mice, and sparrows, I think are the four pests. And it turns out that sparrows eat a lot of insects and when they manage to kill off almost all the sparrows in China they create a famine that lasts almost a decade. Kills millions and millions of people. And that's communism, right? As we experienced it historically, it has nothing to do with actually minding the commons and trying to figure out how to live together. So that was maybe a preemptive answer to your questions. But does that make sense? And with that, so go ahead, Michael. Yeah, I was going to point to that both regimes operate through a scarce measuring system called money. Agreed. Right. So the abundance that you're talking about, Jerry, is a non-economic concept. Whether it's capitalism or communism doesn't make any difference. It's a non-economic plenitude, I suppose, is what you're trying to describe. And I think putting the word economic in here is really complicated because economics, one definition of economics is the allocation of scarce resources, right? Which has the word scarcity, damn it, right in the definition of economics. I have a video online about how come economics and ecology both have the same root stem, the Greek word oikos, which means the household. And both economics and ecology think that they're managing the household. My own interpretation of this is that the household that each of them is imagining is different. In economics, it's me and my immediate nuclear family. It's a zero-sum game. We're trying to fill our little hockey puck full of enough to live off of and maybe pass to our kids, but it's competitive. And in ecology, the household is this pale blue dot that we realize is fragile and we could destroy. So we need to somehow live together and, well, the dominant system is capitalism. So how do we make capitalism obey ecological precepts? That's kind of the battle that we're in. But to me, the moment that economics in here complicates lots of things, that money complicates lots of things. Which means you've got to simplify money. Or at least you've got to distinguish. Distinguish between a money which is inherently scarce. That's its modus operandi. That's its design, its form, and its function. And its result is evidence. Dave, we live in a zero-sum world. And that's all we can contemplate. And then we think about economics and money as being the nastiness. Well, we need to rehabilitate in that place. We need a money which is not exclusive, not competitive, which is sovereign, reciprocal, sensitive, which is ecological, which knows where it is. I would love to have, I think it'd be really fun to have an abundance of economics. I mean, if you thought of it as the academic field, then I think, Robert, then it's like economics. Like the scarcity is an assumption that we built into a bunch of economic models to make the curves bend the right way, right? So if you suspend that assumption, and you say, okay, well, we don't have scarcity. We have abundance. Now what do the curves look like? We have abundance everywhere, but some places we do. It would be really fun to have people writing some papers about what are the motivations for producing abundance or working within sectors of abundance and stuff. Maybe it's already happening around open source software, and I've just not been in school recently. And there's been some attempts to do that that are not what you mean, I think. Like Chris Anderson, the former editor, a managing editor of Wired, wrote some pieces. He wrote a book called Free the Future of a Radical Price. He also wrote The Long Tail. He wrote a bunch about the economics of abundance, but in a different way than we're thinking about here. So here's abundance in my brain, including excess, including plenitude. Judith Shore has a... Wait, is it... I'm going to make sure it's Judith and not someone else. So here's the book by Juliet Shore. Sorry, not Judith. Juliet Shore, Rethinking Wealth is the topic I put it under, but The New Economics of True Wealth, where she's talking about visualizing a plenitude economy. This may be closer. This may be closer to what you're talking about than Chris Anderson's perspective on this. Don't know. And then also under abundance are all of these articles and books and so forth as we go. I'll come back to this, but what I really want to do is pause for a second and make room for Shay to step into the conversation because this whole call is very much motivated by raised eyebrows that Shay and I have passed to each other across rooms multiple times when we've been in settings where abundance was being thrown around as a great and virtuous thing. And yet I think we both felt like nobody in this room really understands what abundance means or what they mean by it or what they just said. And it was being put into mission statements in a way that to us, at least to me, tell me if you agree, seemed superficial or maybe even counterproductive in some ways. And I think part of what we're looking for is how is abundance the right word? Maybe it's plenitude, maybe it's thriveability or something else. Don't know. If it's abundance, how do we frame it, phrase it and make it so that your average capitalist can run by and read this thing and absorb it and go, oh, this is different somehow. So if you want to just riff on that, Shay, whichever way you'd like. Sure, thanks, Jerry. Thanks for this conversation. First of all, I think you know how much I appreciate that we're bringing people in. And I'm really appreciative that there are people that I've never met and never heard from before. John, it's great to see you again and Trey, great to have you here as well. So I think a bunch of really amazing points have been made here and things that I've been thinking over myself, particularly since Jerry said, hey, do you want to have this conversation here? And I think that's the distinction between abundance as a mindset versus abundance as a concept that we try to define. I think from my perspective, and I think from the, having been inside of these organizations that were trying to really put this concept out there, I think they were focused more on the mindset because I think the programs that we delivered were focused on, okay, how do we go from this capitalist, very scarcity-based mindset to looking at the world as plentiful and not just looking at it as plenitude. So I think that one of my questions there, to put back to all of you, one of them is how do we define an abundance mindset and what are your experiences with having either seen it in action or the consequences of the lack of an abundance mindset? I think it's really important for us to learn from that, understand it and learn from it. But I think coming back to just the question of how do we define abundance just simply on its own, I think Jerry, you and I have spent a lot of time in this and I keep coming to this idea, I keep coming to this sort of difficulty where I think in the EXO community and in the Singular University community and in those areas, abundance kind of gets talked about as this very esoteric sort of woo-woo concept that we cannot put words behind. We have a really hard time explaining what it is and I think that that is part of what makes those communities a bit of a bubble because the concepts, the terminology are not accessible. So what I've kind of boiled it down to for myself and I think we've gotten into this in the previous comments is that for me, abundance is really, I'm starting to distill it down to just meaning excess, like having more than you need. It's when you have too much of something and there's extra, right? And I think that that's a way to sort of, it may be right or wrong, I don't know, but it is a way to start to think about it and go, okay, what does that mean when we have excess? So we can think about questions like, how do we create excess? How do we make sure we have excess? What do we actually need excess in, right? And I think some of these other parts of the conversation, particularly what you were talking about, Jerry, questions like, does everybody need everything? No, we don't, right? Not everybody needs the same amount of energy or money. Money obviously is a pathway to all these things, but energy or food and we're learning all these things about health, our bodies, some person doesn't need wheat, so why should they have an abundance of wheat and gluten in their life, for example, right? So questions around that. I think there's sort of three things, like what do we mean, how do we define it and then how do we teach the mindset? And I think those first two are on one side of the question, which is what is abundance and then the second one is sort of what is the mindset? So I think I'll stop there. I have a lot more to say, but I want to see what you guys all think about creating distinctions between those two. I think from my perspective, gratitude has a lot to do with the mindset and how do we teach people to be appreciative of what they have and not wanting too much of it, but at the same time, is that abundance, if abundance means excess? So I would love to hear from you guys where we want to go, but especially how you've seen an abundant mindset in action and then also where you've seen it have, where you've seen the lack of an abundant mindset that have negative consequences. And I'm going to read all the comments and then sign for it there. Anybody want to jump in? Yeah, I could say a couple of things about that. I think for a while at least, we should allow ourselves to have three or four definitions of abundance because I think there's a lot of nuance, there's a lot of differentiation that's useful. I, to define abundance mindset in a useful way, in a, let's say, in a sprint context or in the context of helping an organization face the future. In that context, I would define abundance as the freedom from the scarcity mindset. So it's not that there's a lot or too much of something, it's that what you've been holding up till now, which is, oh, well, we can't invest in this and we can't do that and we can't do that. It's the freedom from that we can't stuff. And that version of abundance is positive and is very useful in doing organizational work to help people get over their sort of scarcity traps, their scarcity handcuffs that are holding their brains down on a different kind of abundance, maybe closer to some of the things that Shay was alluding to. The other way to think about abundance is to think of it entirely in terms of the abundance scarcity pairs and that to have an abundance of something means that there will now be a focus on using that abundance to address what was previously a scarcity or assumed to be, you know, impossible. So for instance, I don't know if you saw the notes I sent you, Jerry. I just had a chance to begin reading them and I realized that I wasn't able to get into my Zoom room. Yeah, you know, when you think life is, you know, when you think we're all mortal and you've got to earn a living and you've got a lot of other responsibilities, you know, you don't think much about death and you don't think much about life extension. You become a billionaire all of a sudden you say, oh gee, I have an abundance of resources. What's a scarcity for me? Well, what's a scarcity is time. I'm going to pour those resources into life extension. This is morally, well, let's just put aside the issue of the morality of investing a lot of money in life extension and just say that this trade-off between abundance and scarcity can be considered morally neutral until you look at exactly what it is that it's being applied to. I don't think it's morally neutral for a billionaire to be investing money in life extension given what else is going, you know, given the fact that life is getting a lot worse for a lot more people in the world right now. I think there's a lot of other things, you know, where to apply the particular abundance that a billionaire has. So those are just two thoughts. I, you know, could come in with some more but that's enough to chew on for now. There's a bunch of stuff. And some of what Shay said and what you said reminded me of two things I wanted to put in the conversation. One is a very interesting place to think about abundance where I think it makes sense to all parties showing up is energy. When you look at a Tony Siva and all those sort of the plots of how photovoltaic costs are dropping, when you think about an engine unless you keep digging oil out of the ground and feeding it to the engine, you don't get any energy, you don't get any power at the other end, but a solar panel in the ground unless, you know, you dust it off every now and then that sucker's going to create energy for you forever. And we could be getting to a place where we have energy too cheap to meter ironically not through the application of nuclear power which is where that saying originally came from but through the application of photovoltaics. And in the event that you have energy too cheap to meter suddenly water problems start to go away because the cost of desalination suddenly drops nothing, right? You build the desal plant, you sit it next to the ocean and you take salt out of the water and you pack it into cubes and sell it to Morton's or something. And I'm totally trivializing the side effects of desal but places where you have extreme water scarcity could be solved enormously by a surplus of energy by having energy so cheap. In the history of the steam engine part of the reason the steam engine happens at all is that coal costs nothing at the mouth of a coal mine and coal was already being mined to heat people's homes because the British had chopped down all the trees. So the king basically said, oops, trees in England are now only for the navy because of course we have to build these gigantic wooden ships. So no more trees for y'all for heating your homes. They then have to start digging and it happens that there's a seam of coal that's right up near the surface in England and the people who invent the steam engine apply it first to water seeping into coal mines. So coal miners have a problem. They're trying to use paddles and everybody down in the mine is like they're trying to basically get water out of the coal mine so people won't drown so they can continue mining for coal and somebody invents this engine and the cost of fuel at the door of the coal mine is zero. That enables people to start inventing more effective steam engines and dropping it on wheels and on tracks to get coal from the coal mine out to the market. That's the first train, right? So all of this has interesting cost perspectives. I don't know why I went down that whole digression trying to figure out what is the opposite story from incredibly cheap solar power that takes us someplace and then I wanted to add to that the perspectives that come out of the EXO basically shock on all presentations which are you may think you have X number of employees and this is how expensive they are but guess what now through a series of platforms we have staff on demand so there's an abundance of talent and skill that you could tap into and then let go of at a moment's notice which should free you from some of the perceived limitations about projects you thought to undertake data you thought you could collect et cetera et cetera and I think that's very fruitful thinking and I think that's one of the benefits one of the core and interesting issues in the heart of the whole exponential organization movement thing. Anyway I wanted to put those two things in play because there are some ways in which I think broadly people can agree oh yeah that's a form of abundance that kind of it's different from what capitalism was doing even though the price of PV down is capitalism at work so maybe that might ease the water Michael you wanted to jump in and then maybe Trey quick thing that I had news item yesterday about oil extraction driven by photoelectronics in Saudi Arabia ironic is it not it is and it's real, it's reasonable for sure it's completely reasonable there are costs of extraction you can save money by going photoelectric wow well and what's interesting like I said about water is that cheap electricity can solve a whole bunch of other interesting problems and create, when was that cold fusion thing, what, 15, 20 years ago? imagine the problems we'd have if that worked but aren't we Jerry aren't you simply taking aren't you still working within the same paradigm that we were talking about earlier the sort of economic concept and the economic notion of abundance and its contrast to scarcity and all you're talking about is a rebalancing of the economic factors at play, right in contrast to what Shay was tried to describe earlier concerning an attitude, an outlook a way of thinking about the world I think yes but I think I think I'm sort of trying to muddy the waters a little bit because the economic consequences of cheap photovoltaics lead to an abundance mindset that you actually have to work hard to wrap your head around because long ago my aunt I would call her now and then she would hang up the phone really quickly she'd say I'm fine your grandmother's fine bye bye because in the back of her head it said long distance phone calls are really expensive, right to us there's a whole lot of scripts about scarcity whether it's energy or water or what have you that these things are very scarce so I'm kind of making the argument for the other side for economics that yes some things and if you look at I haven't read Ray Kurzweil's book abundance I should but I'm sure he's all over this like the number of things that are becoming available and cheaply available this is the 20 Gutenberg moments that Celine talks about all the time yeah exactly that are showing up and we need to incorporate those I'm really interested in how do we pull the best of ancient wisdom and mix it with the best of what's happening now that's really big for me and the ancient wisdom part is the stuff I was trying to describe about how aborigines and Native Americans were managing the land and creating abundance on the land so well and the modern stuff is this hey the dynamics of our assumptions about the economy could change dramatically are changing dramatically and how do we wrap our brains around that and use these two things together well to come back into a commons oriented world that's really abundant rather than into a protected world where we have a lot of stuff and nobody can get to it what have you I think we've got to unwrap the brain rather than wrap it you've described how we've been conditioned by our experiences over the last generations decades millennia and we have become we take snapshots of what we've got what we've got is what matters the balance sheet is the state my assets are what I've got after incoming out and that's all I worry about so we're moving from the stuff to the stuff to the stuff snapshots of stuff and what's really behind all this under all this is process circulation so it's really we've got to get out of the mindset of nouns ownership things and get into the verbs the flow the process the pattern I agree Judy welcome to the call Trey did you want to jump in I know you might have a thing to say about this I don't know just a guess haha love you Jerry first of all thank you for being here for inviting me I'm really love this conversation I have a number of things to just throw out okay so not to riff too much on any one given time and Jerry I'm sure that you can add them to your brain if I go too fast if you can read listen to the recording so number one that from which I will harvest into my brain okay perfect so number one the fact that you bring up the word ecology over ecosystem love that part of the reason is is where you we're throwing around the word ecosystem like it's going out of style it's become the latest buzzword and I don't think people understand that if you have an ecosystem you have to have an ecology behind it the whole idea that raising the narrative okay much like what John Hegel talks about at Deloitte Center for the Edge we're very much moving into a place of not just focusing on scarcity which is what the whole focus on efficiency has been all about but moving towards that place of abundance from a place of learning so not scalable efficiency but scalable learning and that that's really key to raising that narrative and and all of us regardless of whether or not we're coming from operations or organizations but more coming from that higher purpose that higher motivation whether you want to call it an MTP whether whatever it is you want to call it okay another piece that I found really lovely when you were talking Shay about and hi by the way because we haven't really spoken the mindset versus concept creating the future which is a non-profit organization out of Tucson, Arizona has been working very very closely for over a decade pushing 15 or more years now on what they call collective enoughness and they actually are teaching around that mindset and what it means and it first and foremost comes from a place of how we're listening and how we're asking our questions and so offering that up just as a some more food for thought and something to look at the whole idea of excess and giving more than what you need I don't know if any of you are familiar with a new book that came out last year by a non Garrett Hadas wrote a book called winners take all it's a bit of a scathing report he's a journalist that has done a lot of work around the world and it's a bit of a scathing report on philanthropy and he has two big two big shifts that he's proposing that comes from that place of abundance and the number one is shifting away from this whole idea of giving back once you have overflow and instead of giving back giving up because there is still this sense that if I'm going to give away I still need to get back and unfortunately what that's doing is that's feeding into a dynamic that is actually creating more separation instead of more unity across humanity the whole idea of the stuff I really loved what you were commenting on I believe it was Michael thank you so much for that I think we get caught up in this conversation around stuff and we lose sight of the fact that really it's never about the stuff it's only ever about the people it's kind of like the philosophy that you know systems change we need to do systems change I agree yes and so it's a yes and not a but people run the systems so if we can come from a place of that mindset that place of fullness perhaps that maybe that might be something for us to engage in I love the comment that was made about unwrapping the brain there is so much that is happening in brain science right now in terms of scaffolding language how we are a product of the language that we use and unlocking that is very key to unlocking our belief systems which in turn fuel our actions and that whole ripple effect so that's just some really quick points on what I've heard so far and I know that we're running out of time but I would truly value continuing this conversation because I think it's very rich and I think there is so much to be gained from it and when we have these communities and using the term community I'm using that very loosely because that's a whole other conversation about how businesses use the word communities to its benefit as a marketing thing but we'll just use that phrase because we're all friends here from that place of community when we have the opportunity to truly step into what it means to be community and to have collectively enough between us that it changes everything it shifts everything and I would really like to have the opportunity to play in that sandbox a little bit more conceptually so Trey thank you and we started 15 minutes late and we had set aside 90 minutes for the call we're actually currently in Michael's room so Michael it's okay if we stay open for another bit but I'm going to try to go for a full 90 minutes in the call if we can by which time our collective brains may be a little tired given like how these things go and then what I encourage us to do in the process is craft a couple of other questions we can create inside Jerry's brain calls around and I will set them up and next time I'll make sure there isn't a global zoom outage that makes it really hard for us to get in here using the superpower of abundance that we're going to create together Judy jump in apologies for being late but in reflecting on this before we began the discussion and missing what happened at the beginning I would like to pick up the thread that was just offered in terms of this notion of collective behavior and particularly what does responsibility mean individual and collective behavior or shared responsibility because I think that's one of the underlying issues of this topic do you want to just take that and go a little deeper well I guess first of all I don't know whether individually as a society here or worldwide we have a sense of responsibility that I'd like to see us have in many dimensions for values for social systems for education and so forth so I think that's a side we could do probably a series on responsibility in different dimensions that I would find enlightening and helpful perhaps in trying to increase responsibility in the groups in which I participate but I think it's a very different thing when you start to talk about shared responsibility because it's a communal process and along with the changes in responsibility and our social structure we've lost a lot of the sense of community people are struggling looking for a community with which to affiliate they don't know quite how to introduce themselves to it they don't know quite how to contribute to it it doesn't mean they don't care but they need an invitation sometimes I'm finding or they need a suggestion of I've noticed you do this well might you be willing to help with that initiative that's going on I'm talking a sort of social dynamic here and I'm having trouble kind of on the fly defining it but I'd love to have a rich discussion about it thank you that helps a lot I appreciate it say go ahead I have a couple thoughts which are related and then I think make other points that we can stick to this topic one is that I think you know I'm old enough to know that society goes through cycles there are many many cycles and I think you know even since you and I started this conversation Jerry you know I was I was in a very pessimistic mode about my generation feeling like there's a lot of desire for stuff and a lot of that desire for stuff creating a lot of pollution a lot of you know mindless consumers and etc etc right since then you know and I don't think it's I think it's partially just my awareness and of course that I'm focused in this focus on this but I think it's there is a genuine cycle of people coming back to their social responsibility how much stuff they are using requiring desiring and then what is the responsibility that those products or goods or services took in their creation or their delivery so I think that that is a movement that I can now see more my generation particularly getting really getting behind and wanting to push forward so I think that you know the point there is that there are cycles and coming back to your point Jerry as well about you know bringing the best of the old world into the new world right I mean I'm considering right now building a small cabin finding land and building a small cabin and building right and I was just reading this morning an article that was talking about how you know you need builders but in the olden days it was just the community that came together right you just had help you had connections you had all that were willing to not necessarily give back but to but to give up their time right and it wasn't for them it was for you because that created you know good karma and connections which are really the the fabric of our society right and I think that's something that we do have a scarcity of is meaningful connections which we know we can talk about another time but coming back to Judy's point here I think one of the things that I've been considering a lot is how do we create and I don't think there will be an absolute here but how do we create a formula for abundance right and Jerry I think this partly sparked by your formula around abundance minus trust equals sorry scarcity was it was it abundance minus trust equals scarcity scarcity equals abundance minus trust yeah so and I think you know coming back to the questions about responsibility and impact so you know a very very loose way which is maybe the most obvious way to think about it is you know if we have abundance plus positive impact minus negative impact what does that equal you know do we have an answer for that how do we calculate positive impact how do we calculate negative impact does it matter per domain per issue or thing but you know what are some of the ways that we can start to measure someone's responsibility in these areas you know and and quantify it and you know of course coming back to this EXO I think about technology I think you know it's such an enabler you talk about the river and being able to catch fish right I mean I grew up beside a river so I saw that people had these systems and you know and and it's technology right so if we think about things like the blockchain you know how is the blockchain going to allow us to understand the our responsibility and the impact of our choices you know and then actually allow us to to distribute whatever the asset is you know in a way that actually you know takes away some of the need for money and capitalism and all of these very destructive structures that we institutions that we run our society by yeah thank you anyone else want to pick up on that well there's a lot of threads there we're going to make a whole quilt yeah so here's here's three points one is provides she has a good point yeah scaffolding same on notion scaffolding economics immune system getting to those ideas of community getting to that sense of wait a minute is there a different value system here so the folks I talked to who are you know back in scarcity or current it's not back I mean it's current it's how most businesses operate today when you bring in a little bit of the exponential when you bring in the what's the power curves you know the the energy curves and things statements like Jerry statement about how if you have very low cost energy it frees up water you open a window and they're excited for a while and while they're excited that's the time that's the only time actually it's the only time with folks like that that you can start to say things like community I find because if you start with community you know how are we going to pay for it we're already bankrupt you know you get all that kind of nonsense you know so the trick is to start with the curves as moving you from the current vision of scarcity and once the brain gets moving then you start to suggest other things and of course we know one of the things you run into is the immune system and it isn't just the organizational immune system it's the personal immune system and one of the things that keeps you know that sets off the trip wires on the immune system is complexity so when you start to say well we need ways of evaluating that are outside the current financial way in which we evaluate things we need ways to look at capitalism people go you know it's too much it's too much and that's when you need to go to the edge that's when you need to have a greenhouse and you can have a real greenhouse or you can have a theoretical greenhouse I'm just going to make one up here just so you see how you might do this you say all right I got a couple of things I got a company this is a scenario it's now or it's a couple years from now I got a company we got incredible 3D printing technology we can print tiny houses at very very low cost okay there's a land problem there's some land over here it's pristine it's actually preserved it's actually you know you're not supposed to build there because you know we're trying to protect the environment trying to protect the buttership so let's do this let's build tiny houses for people who can't afford other houses on this pristine land but let's do it in a way that is net positive in other words the houses give back more energy and they give back then they use so we're changing multiple rules at once so people go oh you know and as they're trying to figure that out you know now you basically you've loosened up the whole grid you can now you know now you have conceptual play-doh and you can you can do a lot more things with it one of the things that I think about this is a whole different kind of scarcity it's a scarcity of diversity and if I if you set up that community and you said yeah we're going to have teeny houses and they're going to be green and you can't live there unless you make a commitment to be green and by the way we're obviously trying to meet the needs of people who can't afford other houses what you wind up with immediately or very soon after is a non-diverse community of previously under resourced people so you need to think right at the outset about well wait a minute what's the what's the distribution of skills and talents and you know you have to think in a very multi-dimensional kind of diversity it's not just racial it's not just economic it's not just cultural it's also skills and it's also things like do you have any artists you know do you have any engineers do you have any you know and it makes the problem on the one hand it makes the problem very complex on the other hand why shouldn't we as a culture and as an economy now be running tens or hundreds of these well at least tens and 20s of these kinds of experiments so that we find out and imposing different rules on them yes no no no we're not going to have that equal housing rule anybody shows up you know you have to take them no no no we're not going to do that this is an experiment this is pristine land these are subsidized houses but we're going to have a different rule and we're going to see how the rule operates and where we're going to suspend those other rules for five years and then we're going to evaluate there's something to that effect otherwise we don't get the richness that we're going to need the richness of experiments to come up with an evolved intelligent semi-post-capitalist version of the possible community Thanks John Judy we didn't hear you earlier you were speaking but your audio was cut up a bit do you want to try again? well my brain has moved on from whatever I was thinking about then I'll pass for the moment while I reflect a little more alrighty anybody else want to put a different thread about abundance in that conversation? Michael go ahead you're muted the addictive cycle if you want to get somebody addicted to something you make it supply uncertain if I need money I'm not entirely sure when it's coming I'm addicted it's like if you're just underwater and you need air it's a pretty dominant feature in your life it's get my head on and so most of us when we're swimming are pretty conscious of get your head above water before you suck the air you know there's a distinction if you're lying flat in your back air becomes no problem you're floating air is not a problem in money we've got the same situation the dominant medium through which we define our behavior our living space our standards our opportunities it's in scarce supply and we've got a fight for it it's a problem now if by comparison we could also have a money supply also not about changing it, not like getting rid of it don't fight this thing but just have money which was sufficient in supply there was just as much money as you needed because it was a cyclic reciprocal engaged community process hypothetical just as hypothetical as John's building's in the wilderness but probably much more immediately accessible anyone want to riff on that I'm trying to wrap my head around being addicted to something controlling addiction through supply I'm not sure that it clicks for me and I'm wondering if you could explain it in a different way because I'm thinking I mean I think about many people who for example they athletes or musicians maybe athletes are not the best example but musicians they end up with a lot of money and they become very addicted to drugs because supply is very easy I'm not sure if it's an absolute or if you mean it in only certain domains but I'm trying to understand it pretty absolutely I remember back in the days of Alpert and Leary and Andrew Weil remember Andrew Weil brought a book called Natural Mind which he described the effects of the mind on drugs and he said that the real thing is what is your mind to do with the situation and he's focused on this deprivation and he said if you take something away that people think they need they get very advocacy for instance pants if you take away people's pants they're very uncomfortable in public so they become addicted to where's my pants and if that level of visceral I need it where is it that becomes the dominant driver now it could be said that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher basically turned society into rat race you know get your property be a winner you two can be on the upside of the curve you don't want to be on the downside do you everything something about the mid-80s has been about go get it, grab it and hang on and I think that's an addictive behavior and I think it's an addictive mindset and I think it's addressable we just got to have money but not that stuff that stuff shit that stuff's real problems no question about it that one is nothing but competition and extraction we need money which is contributive, communal pattern making the supercal, convivial entropy diminishing all that stuff Judy then John please well one of the things that Shane mentioned was of interest to me because I've been giving a lot of thought to the original question what is abundance and maybe a fun way to define it would be to say that abundance is minimal sufficiency if we were to look at abundance as sort of you need a full cup you don't need two cups and you don't need an empty cup and that becomes a thought movement in terms of do you really need six pans in your kitchen or could you make do with two if you're sharing your books with other people how many books do you need to own a lot of concepts that grew earlier from a lesser level of sufficiency being enough and I don't know how we would tack it because it's sort of a big it becomes an educational and value framework question and it's had labels in the past like minimalism or other things and it's becomes then almost a spiritual reflective thing what is the core of your life what do you need to have a happy life what do you need for health and family and connections and it isn't a 5,000 square foot house people have been very happy in 800 square foot houses if they have the things they need to produce the happiness in their life but that's not how we're trained to think it's not how we're educated to be successful so I don't mean to make this such a big issue you can't do anything about it but I kind of get bogged down in thinking about it I put in the chat a little earlier that the sharing economy has changed these dynamics a whole bunch because suddenly with an app on your phone you have access to stuff that you don't need to own and people are realizing that there's a burden to ownership you have to put the thing somewhere somebody could steal it you might have to ensure it you have to maintain it there's no burden to owning stuff and if an app can replace it such that when you want high end fishing gear or a better camera or whatever whatever if there's a system where you can get access to it right away use it and then hand it back and not have to worry about it and when you get access to this thing you have choice once you buy something you've invested in that one and it's going to get obsolete then you don't get to use the others so much so I think this really opens up the exception of abundance because the possibility of access lies at hand inexpensively for a whole bunch of things that used to be material acquisitions that a long time ago were just shared assets held in the village longer if you scroll back before capitalism they weren't assets you had to buy and own it was that go get the axe or the ads from Joe Bob because he's got the only ads in town and he'll let you use it and sharpen it a little bit before you hand it back and shaboom there we go but I'm interested in these dynamics because different from an abundance mindset but the perception of abundance at hand can release you from needing to own stuff and I think that's happening I think that's happening at some scale with younger people who are growing up realizing oh I can get access to stuff and I think one of the big selling points of access over ownership is choice the variety of things you can access all of which functionally are in some umbrella category like a car or a camera but in fact which are really different one from the other it might be really useful I'm going to add just a very quick anecdote and then I'm going to pass it to John because I know John you had something to say so just funny you know being the millennial in the room here like I bought a car in the last few months I bought an SUV I can't believe I bought an SUV I never thought I was going to own a car in my life it's ultra low emission but you know I don't think that means much and I built a platform out of wood and I put a bed in my car and I was on the road for two months and only recently have just landed back with a proper roof over my head and it was terrible to go on that exploration and hating myself the whole time for owning a car the thing is it was a necessary tool for that adventure for that experience but just the contrast of my parents going yeah like when I bought my car it was the most exciting thing that happened to me yet at that point in my life and I'm sitting here going oh my god I can't believe I have this I own this thing but I will also just make a comment about the power drill in the sidebar there which is that I needed a power drill to put together this wooden platform so I borrowed it from the neighbor and I used it for far longer than 10 minutes and it was a power drill that had clearly seen many many many hours and potentially days of use that's why he could lend me one because he's got a saw and he's got all these things in his garage and he's doing all this work all the time but he had two so he had an extra he had an abundance of power drills even though they were well used so anyway just an anecdote there but John I know you wanted to make a comment sure so both your comments Jay and Jerry I think I absolutely agree that the sharing economy is denting the obsession with stuffness or at least it has that potential to significantly change or bent at least the need for stuffness but something we haven't we've alluded to actually several different times we haven't actually explicitly stated it I don't think in this conversation and that is the abundant scarcity relationship with self-worth or respect and and then there's a little offshoot which I'm sure there'll be a little line in Jerry's brain that goes to Schadenfreude in other words that people are how they decide if they're okay and how they decide whether they have enough depends on what somebody else has and what they think their relationship to that somebody else is so if that somebody else's appear and they seem to be acquiring more that hurts you can get past it eventually but it takes quite a bit of maturity to get to the point where you say this person who I mentored and who's now way past me and is acquiring all these things is really taking on a burden that I don't want to take on and I have arrived at that consciousness but it wasn't easy and I definitely went through a period of wait a minute how come he gets to have all these things and I trained him but another part of me is feeling a sense of pride that somebody who I got started and helped on his way has rocketed past me at least in the capitalist sense and is doing quite well to bring it back to a goal that we should have both in this conversation and as consultants, designers of the future is we have to seriously address the sources of self-worth the sources of respect that are entangled with stuff but should not be entirely dependent on stuff I mean if we can to the extent that we can free up that relationship that would be an important contribution and I just pulled up on my brain Schadenfreude when you mentioned it and didn't remember I had connected it to this word confelicity pleasure in another's happiness which I hadn't really thought about and here's self-worth and self-esteem which is also under self-image there's a whole bunch of stuff here that we can go into some other time other thoughts about this notion of self-worth and respect and self-image I'm going to start with a question about scarcity Judy go ahead just a very quick thought that we often end up in these discussions coming back to the essence of intrinsic worth and self-worth and the paths to that sense of self-worth that can be fed in multiple ways but we haven't always learned how to explore those ways to become more in terms of our own reflections on ourselves and then wanting to validate that sense of self-worth by contribution to others, to the community and I think that's an underlying kind of root thread perhaps of this topic that would be worthy of more discussion as well and I didn't put into the conversation some things that were in the video that I cut which were about the abundance of relationships you can bring an abundance of presence to a moment where the person or some people are kind of half checked out they're busy thinking about what's next and they're not really present being fully present is a form of abundance and it's a gift to the other and these are all intangibles and I think there's an interesting and complicated conversation relative to money on here and Michael and I are applauding an IJB call about circular money and what role money plays and to me it's pretty it's pretty tangly, go ahead Michael pretty tangly but it's much tidier when you untangle it but we'll get around that later excellent to riff on Judy's point about self-respect and contribution it's very chicken-and-egg and my sense of it is that we get our self-respect by being ourselves in function, in service and product and action if other people notice we feel rewarded and that helps but ultimately the self-worth comes from the experience of being worthy it's the action that starts it this relates to one of the concepts or one of these sort of analogies that I have been making in my mind around abundance I've been thinking about one of my favorite stories from when I was younger which is Aladdin and the magic lamp and so I think it's an interesting exercise to ask ourselves I think most people will ask ourselves what would you wish for and we focus on what do we want to have but there's this other side of it that the magic lamp and your genie disappears and all of the things you wish for disappear and I think it's a more interesting question to ask what do what happens, how do you feel what do you have left when all of those things have gone away and then particularly going into the inquiry of what did you learn from having those things and losing them and I think that's a really important exercise in this question of self-worth and in self-respect and in gratitude and then I think it also goes into maybe another Jerry's Brain conversation but in the question of personal development and what tools and processes we can use for that and then how do we put that into education and help people be more whole and complete without just saying that they are and trying to kind of glaze over the fact that people are suffering and in many ways in many cases they're on a chord right but yeah I think the magic lamp and the genie is a really interesting analogy therefore not just what do you want what is it that you want an abundance of but what do you do without abundance and it's interesting that we've gotten this far and not talked about people who don't have much or poverty and what that does to you one observation about poverty is that one of the thoughts in my brain the second is poverty is a dismal trap that poverty sucks you under money is much more expensive when you're poor you just try to get alone the rates are higher nobody will give you money it takes you more time to get somewhere you have to use up your time to get the same things done that anybody else can do conveniently poverty is a dismal trap it sucks you downward it's not very helpful that way and then Shay you were talking about favorite stories from youth so I had a privileged childhood in South America my dad was an executive working for American engineering and construction firms we had servants we had nice big homes and we had sort of a nanny slash maid and a guy around the house most of the time and my favorite of the nannies her name was Guala Lupe and at one point she took me to meet her family we took a bus and then we took another bus and then we walked for a long ways on a dirt road and then we got to a long narrow kind of adobe flat and I don't remember her family or the people one thing sticks in my head from that visit and that is that it was sort of lunchtime and she made me Eggs Benedict there and it's just flour and eggs and some butter Eggs Benedict is not caviar but it's a luxury good and I knew it was a luxury good and she made it in the middle of a very poor slum outside of Lima, Peru and I don't know why but that just really stuck with me I completely registered I'm like oh wait she's doing this and it was an act of generosity and she was our cook this was what she did normally at home but in this context it was a very different act and I sort of got it I just watched Roma and in fact the texture of Roma is the texture of my childhood like what that film like the driver with the dog in the old Ford Galaxy like we had a Ford Galaxy that was the car my parents had Ford Galaxy 500 XL in dark green with a black hard top I remember with no seat belts I was standing I would stand in the back seat they had bucket seats I would stand between them like looking out the window any modern person would have been driven crazy by how I grew up like that which many of us probably did small side note the girl actress who's 10 years old in Roma is a friend her name is Daniella we met her without knowing she was an actress she was a really cool kid and a family outing we did in Seattle last year later we find out that she's about to come out in a big movie anyway but we haven't been taking the perspective of abundance in the sense of poverty which also includes in measures of happiness around the world often people who don't have much are the happiest and that there's not necessarily this linear correlation there's plenty of studies that wealth makes people unhappy wealthy families often have dysfunctional kids because the passing on of wealth is really complicated and not handled very well there's thing after thing after thing that shows you that abundance creates dysfunction left right and center so I'm sorry to bring those things in so late in this call but I think they play a pretty big role go ahead Che yeah I think that's great Jerry and one of the thoughts that I had since some of our last conversations is riffing on some of our previous chats like I was living in Spain in relatively big city in Spain but also traveling to a lot of the smaller towns the mountain towns places that are relatively undeveloped and going there and going these people are so happy they're so happy they're so connected they are and the really major realization was their lack of fear they are feeling very solid in themselves in their situation and they're not scared or striving for too much you know they're very happy with what they have and it brought me to this idea I think we all understand how a lot of the political situation particularly in the US and Europe has come to be where it is now and a lot of it has to do with the divide between rural and urban values and this and I think what I started to learn because I grew up in Toronto Toronto is a massive very diverse city but a massive city and going back there I used to feel very at home there and now I don't feel at home there because I feel alienated and unwelcome and it's cold right and I realize how unhappy people are they fashion to each other on the street it's like this is not living right and I realize that cities make us really needy whiny babies you know and we forget what it really means to live because we've gotten in yes it is the New York City of Canada and it's just a really small which is more or less true but you know we become these dependent needy high maintenance people and we forget what it means to actually love our neighbors and connect with one another and connect with the food that we have and you know we all have what is the best way to the most efficient way or the healthiest way to source our food and our nutrients right but I don't think that anyone would disagree that it's important to be connected to that in some way let alone the person who you know drives away or is taking the elevator down with you you know every morning and every evening and you know don't know your name or don't ever say anything so I think that it's a really interesting question you know we can get into the political aspect of it if it's interesting but you know how the difference between the rural and the urban is becoming even more like it's becoming wider and I think that John like you have read my mind because one of the things that I'm trying to focus my energy on right now is experiments in community building and creating physical space for these experimental communities because I think it's very important that we create test cases for how we can cycle back to those kinds of meaning right I'll leave it at that very good if I may jumping off on what you were saying about cycling back I think there's something about circulation here cycling and circulation I think in a lot of ways we think still about abundance in a very linear fashion which is where I sort of wonder about the formula piece of it I think they're perhaps entertaining what is at the root of the difference between what comes from us versus comes from us and so I'd like to bring that up the whole idea of source what is the source what is that source of supply there's another book that came out late last year called The Abundance Project by Derek Rydell and one of the points he makes in his book is he says this is not a get rich quick he says this isn't a get anything book because the world doesn't owe you anything you're not here to get anything and he states that right from the get go which I found quite refreshing you know more on the science side of the equation there's vortex based mathematics Randy Powell's work that talks about the abundance of energy that is out there that it is right there for us and connected to the whole mathematics that create those vortex not create that's inaccurate language but accesses that abundance of energy that is around us on a more scientific side I think there's this real lovely opportunity depending upon or not being dependent upon whatever ilk you come from whether it be science or spirituality I think there is an opportunity under this narrative of abundance to blend science and spirituality to blend past and present to have it be a pivot point for us and that's where I get quite excited about about the conversation and I want to thank Judy for reinforcing earlier in the conversation about the collective there is so much it's sort of that whole idea that when you get two people together you have the work of two people but when you get three people together somehow you wind up doing more the work of three more than the work of three people and so on and so on and so on the harnessing of what already is and understanding how we are conduits I think there's something to that and yeah I'm just feeling really honored stimulated and honored to just be a part of this conversation right now and I'm grateful so thank you thank you Tray I can't resist the urge to play amateur physicist although I'm not a physicist never took a physics class but nuclear physics basically says every atom basically contains this insane amount of energy and we can unlock it it's there to tap and it takes different mechanisms to unlock it but it's the same in some sense it's true of abundance or of love or of these ineffable things that are kind of in the conversation but kind of not in the conversation here and so Tray you were saying is abundance something you create or that comes through you or whatever and I'm like well is it sort of like nuclear power where you tap it and when you're in the right frame of mind and maybe it's because you put your finger in the socket and you are now like it is going through you through is maybe the right preposition I don't know but you know how that works but it feels to me like some piece of this is really really subtle about frame of mind perspective intention those words and that you can shift yourself and the group from feeling fearful and scarce and afraid into feeling solid and comfortable and connected and abundant through those things through your approach and attitude and demeanor and presence and that if more of us attempted that and understood what that means it would happen more often period just because partly it takes somebody giving that a whirl and it's a little bit contagious because people notice that it happened and they like it and you know some people will bounce off it and some people are like yeah yeah yeah that was good let's do more of that so I'm interested in what leads us to do more of that Jerry it's possible I think well here's the thing I have a foot on the dock and a foot on the boat and the boat is moving and I think you also this experience you may have stepped onto the boat and let go of your foot on the dock so you would be in a different place but from the perspective of the dock looking at the boat you know there's a lot of I know 10 living shaman you probably you must know a bunch of them I know a couple I don't know that I know 10 and well at least I've met 10 and at different points I've been asked by one to evaluate and nothing like is this guy real that's interesting or asked by my my mentee you know to go this person told me this was my career would you check it out and see if they're legit and if you put your foot on that boat and you try to stay on the dock and you try to stay on the boat I mean one of the you know it's a stretch literally and figuratively one of the things you learn is how many people who are still on the dock what are the cues that shut them down so you know there's a lot of actually even a word as safe as community in these Trumpian red state times the word community is enough to trigger that nope we're in scarcity can't go there and so it's really something to see someone who is a very skillful shaman but is also very culturally attuned to the room that they happen to be in and the people that happen to be in that room and so they will say things like they'll preface their remarks by the Harvard study on heart rate very good technique if you're a shaman you know bring in the Harvard study on heart rate so you know we're gonna drive we're gonna drive to Woodstock in an ambulance you know we're gonna take you there and in the safest way possible so that you know you're still with us as we've closed our eyes we're pulling our fingers we're slowing down our breath and then maybe we can discover okay we don't have to be the way we were we can actually explore some of these new ways of being after we've addressed sufficiently the issue of scarcity of abundance on the things that are preventing us from doing that don't worry there's a limo it has a wet bar or you know whatever it is the artifact whatever is the framework of stuff that allows people to feel like there's not only herbal tea here there's coffee totally coffee whatever the icons are that reassure those folks that you know yeah we this is a business where we know you're in a business we know you have to make money we know you have to meet payroll blah blah blah blah and we got some information here that's good to help yeah thank you we're right at our 90 minute mark so I wanted to see if Shay if you have some closing comments or anybody else who wants to put something in the conversation before we wrap this one happy to come back into abundance and we can even try a call sometime and get more lever people in because they probably got befuddled about what we're but closing thoughts no shortage of abundance carry on Judy the key to abundance I think is the notion and I think this connection you made of science and spirit is critical because it really is a metaphysical dimension and we each have potential abundance and the best way to create abundance is to share it and sometimes that's the simple act of listening that's part of what creates the community it's been an interesting experiment that I've been going through for four or five years in terms of random walks of community and it's surprising how good it feels and how impactful it can be listening is really really important and Trey has been talking a lot about it and made it a central part of her team's approach for the fast track sprint in Columbia and I'm trying to figure out how do we get more of that because one of the epidemics out there is that people don't feel heard and it's partly what John was saying is that somebody's telling them they have to change everything, they have to lose something that's wrong and stupid none of which is, hey I've heard you I know where you are I can talk to you in a way that's sort of comfortable and once the door is a little bit open you might be able to go someplace else but unless you open that door you're unlikely to get someplace new and different just seek first to understand other thoughts I'll just add a couple quick things here one thing that just occurred to me about the notion of listening and we've talked about community versus ecosystems and this literally has just come into my mind so it may not be it may not make sense at all but the idea that maybe one of the key differences between a community and an ecosystem is the way that we listen and I think community in many cases it gathers around a central theme, a central person, initiator, concept whatever it might be and it's not always but it's often I think one too many and then many to many outside of the one that is the leader but ecosystems by nature trade to your point earlier they have to listen to each other it's a dependent system and so I think that's an interesting, as I think about my work with EXO I think about how some of the downfalls or the issues that we had been having and I think are still there and I think a lot of it has to do with how the listening happens so I think there's a lot of learning there and then I just want to throw this out and I don't think it's something for us to dive into now obviously as we're wrapping up but for a next conversation Jerry you and I when we were talking about this before I was throwing out a lot of a lot of thought around the concept of agency and how agency and abundance are related and then we talk about commodification and gendering and all of these things that are sort of our influences but where does our and maybe comes back to some of the personal development stuff but where does our agency lie in relation to abundance and maybe that comes into that development of an equation a loose equation I don't think we can have a hard line equation for this but letting people, I think we're in society we are trying to bring increased agency to every individual I think that's sort of an umbrella concept that everyone in the world sort of understands except for maybe Trump I'll be the one that brought put his name into the call but you know how anyway how does that influence our concept of abundance and this idea of giving back versus giving up and how we spend our time and energy so I think that's just something to maybe dive into more in another call lovely and I just Jerry for this is lovely and I just put up on screen this idea that I have that consumerization took away our sense of agency that if your job is to buy a lot of stuff and to go hide away and make sure that you keep the economy running and go be a good factory worker your job is not to connect with your neighbors your job is not to bring up the young and you know whatever else and so we have this crisis where many people have no felt sense of agency which explains partly why they don't vote why they're apathetic why they feel alienated it's like well we've done everything we can to take away their ability to affect their environment and make positive change so why shouldn't they feel those things they're completely justified in feeling those things so part of my excitement about talking about the relationship economy or these other things that I'm I'm on about a lot is that I discovered hundreds of movements around the world where we're taking back agency or we're figuring out no no no we need to be in a relationship we need to figure out you know how this works and how it works differently thank you anybody one last one last comment Bueller Bueller no good thank you this has been marvelous Michael thank you for providing shelter in the storm apparently we're going to read about an outage that zoom had probably made the news because it looked like a big nasty map of outage I don't know what happened but I'm really glad this worked out I'm going to post the video as usual to YouTube so we can point other people into it and we'll probably do a follow-up call depending what topics you all recommend and say you know talk about it on the on the different lists that we're on and see you out there in the real world thank you thank you it's nice to meet those of you I haven't met before yes likewise likewise take care of you one thank you everyone bye