 There we go. So this is the first of a series, I don't know how long, of calls around design from trust and designing design from trust, making it something that exists in the world. So we will see what that turns into. I figured that we would start with a little bit of explanation. And the funny thing is that I just got off a call that is a perfect, perfect design from trust call. It's really incredible. It's with a researcher at New Castle University named Toby Lowe, L-O-W-E, who's doing work on complexity-informed public management. And we just talked about a whole bunch of really exciting stuff about how people make decisions, how public policy gets set, things like, it's funny. Things that sound boring but are actually completely riveting in different ways. Doug, yay, welcome. I'm just starting a soft dog. Oh, okay, I thought I was late. You are only five minutes in and we're just picking up now. Fabulous. Partly, Jack and Balds and I, like, you haven't talked to each other and seen each other in a long time, so it's kind of recent a little bit. So partly I wanted to start with, like, what is this design from trust thing and then do a little bit of brainstorming in this call about how might that be manifest in the world? Is the framing right and what are sort of useful ways to make this happen in the world? So why don't we start there? And Doug, Baldus, Jack, were you all able to see the first, just the first design from trust video? And Jack, I know you did. I did, yeah. I did not. Sorry. Okay, no worries. And Doug? But I've known you for a while, so I probably have a good feel for what it's about. Probably very true. No, I did not see it. Okay, good. So why don't I recap a little bit and just talk about the concept in general. And one thing I did, there's a company nearby here, a design firm that I do a little bit of work with and we had a couple lunchtime conversations around this and I said, I asked them, what do you think or what do you wish design from trust meant if you didn't hear my explanation? So I actually might do that first. Actually, let me stop and do that. Just if you don't mind, Baldus, what do you wish I meant or that the term design from trust meant? What would be the perfect manifestation of this in the world? Well, a lot of times when I'm talking about trust, of course, I'm coming from the network angle. Trust is there not necessarily for design, but for emergence. So when trust is there, good things emerge. People develop good working relationships and they learn from each other and they get stuff done, innovation can happen, all sorts of good things like that. As design, a lot of times I think of design, well, there's engineering and there almost doesn't have to be trust because some great brain is designing the process or the situation that will take care of all that messy human stuff. I like that. That's kind of mine. What is the possible promise of the combination of those concepts of trust plus design? Well, actually, both of those work together in organizations. We have the hierarchy which is designed and then we have all the different networks or as John Husband calls them, the wirearchy, which are all basically emergent. People get together, they find, they like interacting, they like talking, they like working together, they continue to do that even when they're no longer on the same project. So we're actually, as humans, we're used to both design and emergence working together. We just, some of us think it's more, the emergent aspect is a little more important, others think the design aspect is a little more important. So usually the technologists think, well, we can solve anything with technology. That happens a lot, yeah. And the rest of us say, hey, you forgot sociology. Exactly. What about them humans? Yeah, what about them? So I'm going to come in on the human side and I think of trust as not being a cognitive thing, confidence levels and statistics. But a thing which is an aesthetic experience relationship with some others, it's deeply emotional, it's attractive and the way to build into a trust community is to stress how attractive it is to be in an appreciative relationship with people that you trust. I'm sorry my video is off, but I have low bandwidth problems so on. That's all right. I can hear when you started talking that your voice is clipping a little bit, but it's strong and steady now, but thank you for that. Good. Yeah. It's super interesting. Love that notion because the idea of the aesthetic dimension of this whole thing, I haven't really touched very much and I think is super, super important. It's really interesting. And then back to Valdez's comments, I'm treating design, some words I tend to define pretty narrowly like community, I define relatively narrowly or at least true community. But design I'm defining pretty broadly here because I think that when we wake up in the morning and decide what we're going to do that day and maybe make some notes on our calendar, we're designing our day and when we decide what we're going to wear that day, we're designing our outer expression in the world for the day, etc., etc., all the way up to when politicians decide what to include or not include in some new regulations, they're of course designing the constraints within which society will live. So to me, design is just kind of ubiquitous. And part of my fascination is how might we add capacity to or perception and capability to all designers kind of meaning everybody. And here I'm borrowing a little from something I'm not fond of that Nike says, which is we're all about athletes and then they're like, but everybody's an athlete. But from my perspective here, this is kind of designed very broadly spoken to head back toward what Valdez was saying as well. I'm going to jump back in here for a moment. Design to me speaks to form and form is a much broader category than quantity and quantification. If you take things like the pleasure pain spectrum, which plays such a role in utilitarian thinking, it tries to eliminate any reference to form whatsoever or comparison. Design is a form issue, which means that there is a much broader set of skills of the qualities and quantitative thinking. Super interesting. In particular, given the call I was just on earlier, I was saying before you got on the call that that I just finished a call with a fellow who's doing sort of institutional design and public management research. And one of his findings is that there is a huge push in sort of the nonprofit world toward performance management systems and sort of managing to outcomes. It's impact investing, whatever it's called. And he has written some papers proving that these systems are screwed. That basically once you start aiming toward measures, it immediately causes gaming by all the participants in the system. And that you can't avoid the gaming and that the gaming destroys the actual sort of work that people are trying to get done. And we were having a conversation similar in tone to what you were just saying. Jerry, would you mention him again? Toby Lowe, T-O-B-Y-L-O-W-E, his research is on complexity informed public management. And I'll put a link to his node in my brain into our shared chat, so you can see him in context. Fantastic. Think, think, think. In fact, I can probably put my brain up as well. I'm flipping back and forth between a lot of things, but let me put it in our shared chat. There we go. Jack, I'm curious also, what could design from trust mean if it really turned out good? I, to be honest with you, I have to claim that I'm in student mode here, and I'll tell you why. I'm not ducking your question. I would love to have an answer for it, but I've been so deep into the bowels of what the word trust means in the knowledge gardening context and how trust can evolve in role playing games and so on and so forth that I probably am doing design and don't even know what I'm doing. So I'm here really more to do some learning. You're clearly doing design. Do you want to say just a little bit about the knowledge garden project for others on the call? So the brief history is that, you know, I've been involved with Jeff Conklin in dialogue mapping, and I did a PhD proposal, thesis proposal, and defended it on how to clean up structured conversations using topic mapping. And then Martin Radley asked in a serious conversations meeting in Palo Alto one morning, he said, how can we have civil conversations online about politics? And that was the day we hatched topic quests. And my proposal was that we would use the guild dynamics of role playing games. I pointed specifically to World of Warcraft and all of the literature behind what guilds do. And I made reference to a John Celia Brown YouTube in which he opens the YouTube with I would rather hire a high level World of Warcraft player than an MBA from Harvard. And he used the rest of the video to tell why. That's my point. The guild mechanics and guild dynamics do something to humans that make them trustworthy, make them more trustworthy, make them more productive. Yes, so what was his thinking on the hiring decision? Well, it's been over three years since I watched the video, so I can only give you a sort of a, it's not even Cliff's notes. But so if you go and watch the video, you're going to find that I'm simply giving you interpretations. But fundamentally, it is the discipline that staying in a guild brings to you. And it is the leveling up, going, graduating from roles that you're not strong in to roles that you can now be strong in, leveling all the way up from, you know, the lowest mage to a guild leader yourself. It's that process that means, and this is pointed out, that there is literature which documents the fact that World of Warcraft players, typically on Wall Street, are allowed to get up and leave a corporate meeting and go home to be in a raid. And the reason is they are such productive people, they are such good leaders that they allow them to continue that training course, which is to be in the raids. It's fundamentally the psychology of what is going on in a guild that falls out and makes a better leader, makes a better person. I was just protecting in our chat that Joey Ito, who now runs the Media Lab, used to hire people from his World of Warcraft guilds. He, the kinds of coordinating and calculating and cooperative skills that it took to run a really good guild raid were exactly the kinds of skills he wanted in some of his projects or startups. Yeah, and I would think that any guild, whether it's Warcraft or, you know, going back to shoemakers in the middle ages, all of those survived and thrived based on trust. Yes, and then there's a dark side to guild history with restraint of trade and a bunch of other stuff, but in general, the guilds are a lovely model for social learning, for the vetting of capacity. Like, how do I know you know your trade? Well, back then, you know, once you once you got to a journeyman stage, you were provably really good at your craft. Right, right. And these days, what we've done is we've substituted the college degree for that. So we've created this expensive artificial mechanism that also takes time and I think a lot more expense, although maybe being apprenticed for no money for seven years is expensive too, right? Yeah. So, yeah, whatever, it gets really interesting in the details, but we've replaced a social network where people knew who was who within the guild with one metric like, oh, I have a degree from X university and it's X degree, which turns out to be a really crappy proxy for capacity for whether you know anything. Right. But still, you know, most high level hiring, you know, that's not good enough. Yeah, it's still, if I, if I want somebody to help me with my startup, I'm going to, I'm going to call you. I'm going to say, hey, what do you recommend for this? Well, and that's why in a normal hiring job where people are coming in cold, you follow references, you do this, you do that. We try to sort of back it up with a bunch of things. But I'll tie this back to design from trust right now because I do open sort of with a salvo against the formal education system, the bureaucracies of education and one of the open questions, several of the open questions in designing from trust in education are, how do I show what I know? How do we know who you are and that you're trustworthy? How does the education system need to morph in order to do this? Because, because everybody exists, everybody exists within social networks, except for a few like hermits who've carved themselves out of society. Most everybody has people who know who they are. I think Brett Kavanaugh is facing this problem right now. And well, the interesting problem he's facing is that everyone knows who he is. Some are willing to support whatever version he wants, because that's what happens in networks too. He can do no wrong. He's one of us. And this is kind of perfectly leading to what I wanted to bring up too. But, and then the other part is say, well, you know, we saw him different and we're no longer part of that network. So we don't have to blindly support all members of that network. And we're willing to say something different because we feel fine about that. We have our own network that'll support us. And we don't need to, you know, for lack of a better term, kowtow to that old school network that we were in. Well, and to take that just a little bit deeper, because I think it's hugely important in the dynamics we're seeing in the world right now and in the conversation about design from trust and groups and societies. Membership in a group is hugely valuable to humans and they will do anything. They will avoid obvious truths. They will bend the truth. They will dodge around corners in order to preserve membership and groups that they care about. In particular, if they see no alternative, if they see that, you know, if they see they're going to be ostracized from that group and that nobody else would love them, take them, help them, hold them, feed them, hire them, then they'll do anything possible to stay in their particular current in group. Right. And that's, you know, unfortunately, you know, that works, it kind of works in a strange way. So, so if so, if you and I are are sitting on a subway and two people and one person sitting across from us has a has a Trump MAGA hat on and another MAGA hat gets on, they'll sit down and we'll start talking to each other. They'll be instant friends because of this, you know, this thing in common. They already know, you know, what kind of each other knows. And if we bring something up as, you know, they'll say, ah, these guys are just a bunch of libtards, you know, forget them. Let's go. It smells like. Car and, you know, continue our conversation. Yeah. So, you know, this whole thing about membership and how visible it is and how important it's become is, is, is really, you know, this, this, this very strong driving force for us. Whereas, you know, there's there's people that that are members of a single group, you know, everybody around them is like them, but there's others. And I think maybe many of us here are our partial members of multiple groups. Now, that gives us. It has both benefits and drawbacks, you know, the benefits are that, you know, if one group goes totally batched crazy, you know, we have other groups that we're members of. But since we're only partial members of groups, we may not get the same benefits that real members get. So something goes really wrong. It's like, well, we're not going to help Baldis because he's just, he's just a part-timer here, you know. But, you know, George over here, we're going to help him because he's true blue to us and he would drop anything to help us and we would do the same for him. So there's this, you know, there's advantages to memberships but there's also kind of a drawback and then there's advantages to multiple memberships but there's, you know, there's a drawback but we all choose what, you know, which one of those we want to do. Because some people feel comfortable in being in a very tight knit, all supportive group whereas others may feel much more comfortable in being in multiple groups that may have multiple opinions and approaches to life. Being brokers or bridges or bumblebees or whatever the term is for those sorts of things. Boundary crossers is a lot of- Right, right. Or what we find in a lot of the analysis that we do is that they're multiple members. Those are the best ones because bridges, that bridge can fall apart. That span can be there and it can be gone but if you have people that are members of both group A and B the advantage is that they can be seen as one of us with air quotes from both groups and that gives them the ability to be translators, you know, to be those intermediaries. So I find it delightful that Marty dropped into our call right as we were talking about membership. That was like, oh my God, okay, this is a very Marty moment. And Marty, I'll come back to you in just a sec. I'll give you a chance to sort of range into how we're talking about stuff. We were, I started by asking people what, without hearing a lot about my explanation of design from trust, what do they think it could be if it were, just from the words design from trust, what might that turn into if it was perfect. But I also wanted to take a little digression into what Baldus was saying right now because the conversation I just got off with a guy who's doing kind of policy design work. I mentioned a video I just put on our chat about a book called The Institutional Revolution which is about the pre-modern British aristocracy and all the really weird behaviors they engaged in. They hunted the hounds, they hunted the foxes with hounds, they gave their daughters to the court, they had dueling, they didn't teach their children anything useful, they learned Latin and Greek and they did the Grand Tour of Europe but they intentionally did not teach them something useful. Why? Well, it was that set of institutions' way of developing trust at a distance, at a time when nature could interrupt and ruin anybody's plans. And so through this weird set of institutionalized ways that the British aristocracy worked which they inherited from other aristocracies but they almost perfected in a way, they knew that when Sir Walter Raleigh was on the other side of the globe and you wouldn't hear from him for like maybe half a year that he was acting in the crown's best interest, not his own best interests. So super interesting, quirky, weird institutional arrangements but led to something that gives you rule of the Chinese for 200 years. And then to get closer back to what Walter was saying, one of the things I hope that people on the left don't underestimate is the sense of deep community and connection that a lot of the people in the Reddit subreddits about the alt-right and whatnot are getting by running this insurgency. Like being part of the upsurge on the right worldwide and by taking license to break norms and doing all kinds of stuff. If you were Pepe the Frog Gif is the one that goes viral in the next week and you see your work suddenly spread across the world as a really great troll, that is a sense of bonding and community. You are a member of a community, I'm not fond of, but I think to not underestimate the sense of belonging that that is creating among people who feel very disenfranchised in many cases. So wandering around the topic a little bit but Baldus did that trigger anything for you? If not, I wanted to just go to Marty to say hi. Well yeah, part of that is that the right and the left, the right having a structural advantage over those of us on the left because basic human nature is birds of a feather flack together, this thing called homophily. And we feel real good about that and it's very natural and it's just how we're wired. And the right's got that because they're all very similar. They might have a few nuances on, ones for guns and other ones for against immigrants but for most part they're pretty much the same whereas on the left we're a much more diverse group. So homophily really doesn't work for us. So we have to work a little harder to include everybody. I'm scratching my head Baldus. I'm scratching my head about the people on the right being very similar part of it because I have a funny feeling that a lot of very different groups have found common aim under the far right banners, the alt-right banners but also that the right side of the political equation worldwide has done a much better job of enforcing message management and making sure people don't stray from the talking points and running a really tight campaign but and I get that historically it seems like the left is like all over the place and really scattered but I'm not sure that they're more diverse than the other side. Well, I don't know if the right has done a better job of enforcing I think people in their group has have just more easily adopted that which has been kind of thrown up there. Because enforcing usually doesn't work with any groups but if somebody says something interesting and it's like, oh yeah, this is cool and the left really hates it so there's even more reason to like it than we'll go with it. But I think the left is generally just a much more diverse community. We have people of color, we have old white guys like us. Well, you'd be surprised that how many people of color voted for Donald Trump? Black women did not, like that number definitely not but Latinos, lots of people who you think would have been mortally insulted by Donald Trump's very efficient dueling with everybody voted for him. So I don't think that his followers are all very similar. Sorry, that troubled me a little bit from how you were describing it. Well, yeah, we can agree to disagree. I think they're much more homophilist than we are. Marty, if you'd like to step in and either say hi or anything you wanna say about membership in human beings which I know you have a couple of things to say. A lot to say. Yeah, well, hi, Jerry, thank you for all of this. I mean, I just came in a few minutes ago and so let me just toss something in and see if it's useful. It just the bit of the conversation I've heard it makes me think of a little bit of our neurophysiology as humans which is that in our brains depending on our context, whatever context we're living in, our brains go about assigning meaning to events, to political candidates, to whatever and based on the meaning, we assign a value and that meaning and value together drive choice. And which candidate am I gonna vote for? So I think when we're surprised by people showing up as quote unquote members of a group like the members of the group that voted for Trump or didn't vote for Trump, when we're surprised by that I think that we haven't taken enough time to really study the context that those people are in and what meaning and value has been created in their own consciousness which drove their choice. If we don't get as deep as context then we don't understand any of this membership trust whatever group. So that I think is we're looking at a world that's been so fragmented in so many complex ways. We don't realize how deep we have to go to really start to understand again. Totally agree. Yeah, and we find too in all our consulting work that context is like context and trust that are like right there together. Yeah, part of what I'm trying to say about the right political right in recent history is that with and I kind of clock it back to the Gingrich revolution in 94, the contract with America, all those things. What happens when Gingrich comes in and becomes the majority leader in the Speaker of the House is that he and others force everybody to no longer mingle with anybody on the left. So they all used to exercise together, eat together and room together, all of which created moments where they might actually talk to each other as humans, make compromises, do a little horse trading. And they were basically overlapping groups. You had these overlapping groups that actually physically had time together. And the right, I think it was the right, said no, you cannot do that. And then at some point just a little while ago, I think during Obama's last speech or something like that, there was a moment where a retired representative came onto the floor and he was called over by one of the leaders, Mitch McConnell or somebody like that. He was called over and McConnell might not have been him but somebody said, what were you doing? And he said, well, I was over there talking to my buddies. Like we used to be colleagues together. He'd crossed over to the other side of the aisle was talking to Democrats. He said, we don't do that, right? So between that and the funding of primaries and the tea partying of the party and all like this, there's really complicated dynamics that I think have been very efficient at creating a pall of dread on a lot of people from stepping out of line on the right. And now that they've all voted for Trump, if not by actual protests and not wanting to vote for him but then being on the same party but then by not standing up and stepping out now, they're basically complicit, membership in this journey is something that they will drop at great cost. So I'm watching the Kavanaugh hearings and I'm thinking, okay, Flake basically put a one week buffer in which gave everybody a moment to breathe. Why are these people so low to not see this through? And there's plenty to say here and I don't wanna make this call all about politics but I think that the design of political institutions and systems is clearly under the purview of design from trust, how do we govern things together? And we talked nicely about apprenticeships and guilds a little while ago. I think all of this is really nice fodder for these discussions about design. Yeah, Jerry, exactly what you were talking about, there's a new book out just came out I think yesterday. Steve Kornacki is one of the guys on MSNBC wrote about it and it's all about exactly what you were talking about about how it all started back in the 90s with the so-called Gingrich Revolution. Wow, I gotta read this. I did not know what to talk about. Yeah, you do. I mean, it was like, I thought maybe you had already, you know, either read it or started reading it but you were talking just like he was talking yesterday. Wow, excuse me, I just looked in my brain and I've got Kornacki but not the book. Yeah, yeah, it just came out, so it's brand new. Super interesting, thank you. So let me take our conversation back to the starting point a bit because partly I wanted to just turn the soil on design from trust, see what you all think a bit, see where we think we're aiming, what we think this is, a little bit of the blind men describing the elephant kind of thing. But partly I'm interested in how this journey is framed and I wanna just open a couple of questions and ask for some recommendations for maybe role models or benchmarks out in the world because my instinct is I'm calling this process design from trust very intentionally and I'm gonna come back and explain kind of why I mean those words. And I'm seeing something like design thinking which exists as a methodology in the world. I did some work with IDEO through Charles Warren years ago where I kind of absorbed that and saw a piece of that and there's plenty of really good critiques of design thinking in the world today. But I see design thinking as a thing that kind of ate the world and it ate a lot of design and it had its own force which is to me a matter of fascination. So might design from trust be the next design thinking is where that sentence leads and if so then do we need, I need whoever wants to need to come together and formulate it as a first you do this, then you do this, then you do that or is design from trust more like becoming an Aikido practitioner. And I'm taking Aikido here, there's a dojo that's like five blocks from home in Portland. I did a little bit of Aikido when I lived in Berkeley and Aikido is really very much about a way of being next to the person who is attacking you but you don't learn it in sequence and series. You certainly go through stages of very much like martial arts or very much like guilds and apprenticeships. The seniors help the juniors, there's a whole bunch of really nice parallels between learning martial arts but it's a way. Aikido, the do and Aikido is the way, like Judo, right? I wonder like Nintendo, never thought of that. And then the key in Aikido is Chi, universal life energy and I as harmony. So I think that- Jerry, can I come in here with an observation? You bet. Jump in, we hear you. Jerry? We hear you. Okay, I'm gonna make an analogy. A few decades ago, we were talking about the learning organization and it always struck me in corporations that tried to take it on that learning became a process and they never talked about the content of what it was to be learned. I'm worried that trust could be the same thing and as we talk about the process of trusting without ever talking about what the project is that we're trusting about. So for example, the world of Warcraft to me puts out danger signs because I'm not interested so much in trusting people who are just in a war and killing each other. The nature of the project seems to me deeply intrinsic to what trust has to be about. I love that, I really love that. And then to me, the moment you step outside of the useful contexts of trust, you lose a lot of its value and a lot of its understanding and it's hard to be, and I think, appropriately hard to be formulaic about it and to say just do this and this and this. So I really like your critique. And in management consulting, one finds, I find my friends consulting with projects that I really don't like, like trying to control capital or build better weapons or do security systems that are a threat to democracy. And yet they're talking about we've got to have a trustworthy team, we've got to trust each other, we've got to be creative and honest with each other. Love that. I think most of that's bullshit in the context of what the project they're asking us to trust about. So I completely agree with what you're saying and my question then to the group is, what, how should design from trust if that's the right, if those are the right three words, how should this movement, this thing frame itself so that it can be put in the world in useful forms? And what might some of those useful forms actually be? Should it be a board game, a reality TV show, a political party, excuse me, a workbook, a methodology, which is the piece I just came out of. It's like, well, that's the sort of normal business school intuitive thing is, okay, let's go make a methodology and let's put it in the world as a design practice. And I'm agreeing with what you're saying a lot, Doug, because that doesn't smell right. But if that doesn't smell right, what does? And I think partly it's a process of being in community with people who are developing a different way of seeing. And here I'm drawn to work that Marty and I have done together, which we boil down to see, be, do, which I will paraphrase as being if you can start to see the world differently, for instance, start to see that you can start from an assumption of good intent, that you can look for abundance in the world instead of scarcity. If you can start to see differently, then you will be, you will actually exist in the world differently and your actions, your dues will consequently be different. So if we, as a practice, as a community in practice, community of practice, community in practice, can come together and begin understanding what this process means, we will then all go out separately into our different contexts and act this way. Sounds lovely, I think, as an umbrella principle. I'm unclear how to develop that. I know that Marty takes students and takes them through, initiates them into indigenous ways of knowing, which are extremely deep and ancient, which is a very parallel process here. I mean, Marty, you've got years and years and years of experience firsthand yourself picking up this wisdom and then transmitting it. So very much there's a set of practices there that I think are very worth looking at here. Yeah, well, if I could add a little bit too, just if I'm gonna put my scientist hat on again. In our nervous systems, this experience of trust follows experience itself. You can't trust before you experience something. And in the world today, we're sort of asked to trust without experience or we're asked to trust based on assumption or somebody else's idea. And I think that this concept of designing from trust is really important because we ought to be able to trust how we build the world, but what has to precede that, I think, is some way of engaging people in the experience of the deep principles that guide us in designing, building, creating dependable stuff. And I think if people experience, this is really how the indigenous training goes. You learn to embody certain universal principles and that shifts your understanding. It actually shifts how you experience the world and it develops a very different relationship with the world. So you're quote unquote more trusting, we'd say in English, but it's based on something real. It's based on something in our neurophysiology. So I'm wondering if design from trust couldn't start with a board game or some sort of game because we love games that puts people in the experience in some way of these universal principles of consciousness which are not isolated to one culture. They're everywhere. For example, years ago, I bought and got a card deck that was sort of a challenge game where each of the cards was go do this in the world, go do that in the world. Which is interesting and I didn't do a lot of them but I had nobody else who knew about it. I had no community sort of to do that with. I just typed the word agency into the chat partly because the word consumer dragged me down this path. One of my realizations was that the consumerization of our lives in every sector of activity from voting to shopping to eating to being healthy and to even seeing whether we are beautiful or enough. When we consumerize all of that, part of one of the effects was we took our sense of agency away. Your only job as a good consumer is to buy the stuff that's on offer and if you stop buying a lot of stuff, the whole economy is gonna grind to a halt. Your civic duty, it's funny to use the word civic here, but your duty here is to buy a lot of stuff and not ask too many questions about how it got to your plate because that also screws things up. And the path to understanding design from trust is to begin to have a little sense of agency again. So the reason I use Wikipedia a lot as an example and in particular the edit this page link on Wikipedia, the reason I go back to that so often is that it's a big common shared experience, but often it's the moment when people began to say, oh, oh, wait, how does this work? And then, oh, wait, this seems to be working. So the two oh shit, I call this. Like the first oh shit, you'll hear this if you listen to my design from Trust Talk, the first oh shit is like, oh shit, this can't possibly work. This is counterintuitive, irrational. Humans don't actually behave this way. They behave like Anne Rand writes about in The Fountainhead. The second oh shit is, hey, wait a minute, I just went and looked at a bunch of pages about something I know a lot about on Wikipedia and they were pretty damn good. And by the way, there's a page for every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which you're not gonna find in the Britannica or anywhere else, right? So I think that the sense of agency is one of the paths back to that sort of connection we have with our own responsibility, our interrelatedness, our connection to the whole. And that plays up things like our vulnerability as we come back into community and into the whole, et cetera, et cetera. I think those are the avenues back in. Yeah, and I think Trust is not a, a fraud thing. So Trust can be very specific. We can trust somebody about X but not about Y. Definitely not about Z. And we've seen this with online groups where people that are sick with terrible diseases get together and they don't know each other. In fact, I think on these online groups, I don't even think names are exchanged. They just know each other as, but they share experiences about the disease and they take great, well, great risk, but risk because they trust, because they trust this person has had a similar experience, whereas two cancer patients may be discussing something and Cancer Patient A says, well, I did this and this and this and this and I changed my medicine to this or my doctor changed my medicine to this and it helped a lot. And this other person says, wow, that's exactly my experience. Maybe I should do that too. So they're taking really a kind of a life-risking decision, but they trust that this other person is a lot like them and therefore they're willing to do that. They might not trust that person's investment advice or something else, but the fact that these two strangers have been through exactly the same illness experience, they're willing to trust each other greatly in that specific realm. Love that. I've said in a couple of speeches, as I use this as an example, I say I would trust David Reed with my proxy vote on issues of telecom on anything. Right. And I would watch David Reed ongoing to see what he's saying and see if I continue to agree, but he could have, he could legitimately speak as an authority and vote my presence in that domain, but I have no idea if I'd want him cooking dinner for 12 people next week or watching your child or whatever. Like, don't know, trust is not transitive in those ways. Now a person's approach to life might be such that you trust that if they're not good at this, they will tell you. And that helps a whole bunch because people who are like, oh yeah, yeah, I can do that. And then fuck it up, that's not so good. But I agree that the trust is sort of, it tends to be transitive because we make assumptions of trust. And in our community and the people, we've known each other a long time, everybody on the call here. And when one of us says to somebody else, hey, you should meet so-and-so, I think our first reaction is you bet. I'm gonna make that call right now because it's probably gonna end well. And there's a lot of transitive trust going on there. And when we open that conversation with the other new party, the party we haven't met, we're going to open it with an assumption of good faith. And in fact, an assumption that there's a shiny gold nugget there in the conversation, and all we need to do is root around a bit and we'll probably find it. How do we get this leaning in like that? Yeah, and it's just like this group. So if I'm on a plane and I don't know how many people you have in your Jerry's retreat group now, but what, 1,000? On the mailing list, fewer than that, probably half that, if not a little less. But of retweeters who've ever retreated, it's probably upward of 1,000, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so if somebody mentions that they're part of your group, that's like, that washes away 90% of the risk. I'm a serial killer, but I've been to Jerry's retreats. That's right, that's right. And I've fooled them all and I'm fooling you now. That's right. Would you like to sit a little closer? That's right, that's right. Come on over, let me give you a hug. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's something like that, that also, it just instantly bonds you with that person. And well, because you know, again, it's that thing we talked about membership earlier, is that if this person turns out to be a serial killer or equally strange in some other frightening way, next time, he or she knows that next time, I run into you, I'll go, Jerry, you know. Yeah, well, they're wow. Wave them off the deck. Yeah, how did you meet them again? Yeah, exactly, be that kind of thing. So it's, but yeah, so like you were talking about, they've read it's that there's certain people that we know, we trust as excellent filters. And again, we know that somebody that's been through that filter will have met certain criteria, and that criteria is fine with us. Exactly, so I'm still wondering, and I will continue to wonder, but this is just the question that's kind of high in my head is, so how is this manifest in the world? How do we get more people to enjoy it and adopt it? And I'm drawn here toward things that have gone viral that got a lot of attention about something. So for example, free hugs, right? Free hugs is one of those things you smile when you see it. You're like, oh right, right, right. Why don't I just go stand on a corner and wear a T-shirt that says free hugs and give people, and it's a very tiny thing. It's a little bit like Tom Monarchy trying to create cascades of good feeling by smiling at people. Like just being present for a day and deciding to smile to everybody who passes you is a good gesture. So one of the things I'll bring into this group sooner or later, depending on who's interested, is I own a domain upkido.com, U-P-K-I-D-O, which is, it's a neologism of iKido, which I talked about a little bit earlier, and uplift or upward spiral. And it's like, what would a practice look like? What does a dojo look like that teaches people to improve everything they touch? What does that look like, right? And upkido, upside is the old magazine. That was the damn spellchecker. Yeah, exactly. That's what I thought. I just typed in the other, the link. And I think I put a fledgling website there, but there really isn't anything on it. And part of what I'm interested in is, hey, if there were a dojo that taught up keto, what would it teach? What would it do? How would we behave in there? I think that's interesting. And I'm as interested in doing that as I am in formalizing a methodology for the thing that comes after design from trust, for example, which is still, I will admit, lurking in the back of my head, and not that there's a 10-week process where week one you do this, week two you do that, but rather that there's a series of challenges you put people through that let them have felt experiences of the kinds of things we're talking about here that bring them to a place where they can begin to trust one another better and see the world differently. That can also, I think, be a bit of a methodology, although it's different from the normal things we think about in that realm. So I'm open to all interesting suggestions of crazy, interesting, flaky, unusual things we might do that might bring attention. And I'll add one little story just for color, which is years ago after fretting about the word consumer and a bunch of other stuff, I then read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Schlein, Tiffany Schlein's dad. And in this book, he has a thesis about the marginalization of the divine feminine, in part through the advent of the linear alphabet. And I can explain that in more detail some other time. But then I read The Da Vinci Code. And two thirds of the way through this pot boiler thriller, there is a plot point about the marginalization of the divine feminine. And I understand from what little I know that his wife Sherry gave him that plot point. And I'm like, okay, okay. So how many people read Alphabet Versus the Goddess? How many people saw or read The Da Vinci Code, even though they know it's a work of fiction, that they had that bug planted in their heads? And how many people are going to read an academic paper that's going to have like a circulation of a couple thousand about exactly the same topic, even if the academic paper is really well written and totally accurate and very credible, right? So I think I'm looking at what kinds of things will help ideas tip and tip in a way where the tipping is part of the practice, is part of the shift of attitude and approach. And maybe that's too much to ask for, but that's kind of how my brain is working this problem right now. Well, yeah, that's all gotta happen within a group. Because it's one of those things that it changes your way of thinking, your way, your approach, your point, your whatever. And you don't use that and you don't do that easily. Yep. Whereas, you know, like I can sneeze and if we're all in the same room, just that one interaction, you all catch a cold. Right. But I can come out with an idea and just that one interaction may not achieve the same outcome. Yeah. I think sometimes the thresholds are easier than we think. But sometimes it's really a challenge because I, you know... Well, again, it might depend. You know, we may all be very similar and already exposed to very similar thinking. So when someone says, A, you say, oh yeah, I already know about A prime. So that makes sense. But it's that same thing. It's that, you know, for things that are risky or that are difficult, we want to know that more of our peers are doing it. Yes. And then being out on the leading edge of anything like that is hard. And, you know, five years later, everybody's doing it. But at the beginning, nobody's doing it and only the outliers go try it. So I'm thinking also of social movements. I'm thinking also of right now, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and Never Again, which are large, major, important movements that are happening to greater and lesser effect, you know. And how did they come up? How do they consolidate effort? How do they get diffused or deflected? Where are they going? How do they keep energy? All those questions are really interesting to me. But, you know, can design from trust be like that? And maybe it's not the term design from trust. I mean, the title of the book I need to finish writing is, What If We Trusted You? And I asked that question because I hope that it plants in people's heads a little bug of, first, hey, wait a minute. What do you mean they don't trust me? And then second, oh, how would things be different if they did trust me, if we trusted one another more? Right? That's why I like that question. That's why that's sort of my question for the last decade. It is a good question. Yeah. And it plants a little earworm that, you know, and also when I speak in meetings and I talk about the word consumer and how I don't like the word consumer, my hope is that some small portion of the people in the room, that that kind of sticks with them and that the next time that the word shows up, they furrow their brow a little bit and think about it. And that's good. That's progress. That's all progress. Huh. Yeah, it's even better that you say that to one group and it spreads. And you say that to another group and it spreads and then those two groups intersect. And so now they're hearing it from different voices but the same message. And now they're saying, oh, well, okay. Precisely. So this must be a thing. Exactly, Valdez. And I'm right now doing the jazz hands thing. And I'm a contagion vector for jazz hands, which my knowledge goes back to Occupy, goes back to General Assembly and the people in the Plaza del Mayo in Spain and probably has a history before that from wherever. But I'm a contagion vector because almost every time I give a speech, I teach this to the audience. And when I'm sitting in an audience, I do this and then every now and then I apologize and I say, I'm sorry, this means I agree, this means I disagree, just so you know. But then I'm really happy when I see that come up organically in other meetings without my prompting yet of that or connected groups because I feel like my contagion effort was successful. Yeah. And this is a practice of design from trust, by the way. Like hand signals from Occupy are one of hundreds and hundreds of practices that we can tell stories about about how do you change us from being the speaker and the audience being near consumers of content, right? What the hand signals do is they let me be an agent, an actor in the room again, and they let the speaker have a temperature reading for the effect of what they're saying. So all the dynamics around the simple, stupid jazz hands gesture are very much about design from trust and independently contagious. So that's why I love that one. And I'm just realizing I don't tell that story much. Right, and we used to have the red and the green cards in the retreats, right? And you know what, I invented those because David Eisenberg invited me to speak at AT&T Research many, many years ago and before I spoke, he did a poll of the room having handed everybody sheets of paper with the numbers one to 10 printed on them real big. And he basically did a in the room poll with everybody holding up numbers. I'm like, numbers a little complicated, but how about semaphore signals from traffic lights? So I did red, yellow, green, and then I simplified them until Occupy. And when Occupy hits, I'm like, holy crap, we all have green cards and red cards on board. Like they're attached. We don't have to pocket them. We don't have to do any of that stuff. And that was actually a thrilling moment because it's like, okay, forget the artifact. This is much simpler than needing to have an artifact. Yeah, and then we can even show excitement by holding our hands up higher. And you can just articulate, you can do a whole bunch of things. Exactly, exactly. I taught the Occupy hand gestures to a group of military in San Antonio in a room that was on a military base where all my electronics had to be locked in the trunk of the car outside the fence. Yeah, I've been places like that. Yeah, I bet. I bet with social network analysis. And I taught them all this. And at one point there's like a bird kernel with lots of ribbons on his camo. And he's doing this, laughing, enjoying it, and everybody else is cracking up. And I'm like, that's a victory. That's a small victory. So we've come to the top of the hour and I can of course talk about this forever. What I wanna do is kind of be respectful of our time as we move forward and have these conversations. Give us time to sort of think and chew between sessions and give people who might listen to this call later as a recording the knowledge that they won't like go on forever and that they can kind of get through them. So I will pause for a second though and ask for any closing thoughts from all of you on the call for whom many, many, many thanks for being here. But anybody sort of closing thoughts for this call? Yeah, Jerry, I don't know where this fits, but I was just thinking in terms of how design from trust expresses, there's this concept of exchange. I've known you for so long and I've always heard you talk about the problem with consumer, that's a one way street. Just gobble, gobble, gobble and there's no exchange. There's no give back. There's no investing on the part of the consumer. And so all of the things that you're describing about giving people a way to respond is giving them a way to invest. And when people are investing in a membership or empowerment that builds trust. So this thing about exchange and actually if you talk to me and I have an exchange I can talk back to you with hand signals. That's my experience and experience builds trust. So I think the pieces here are really coming together. And my goal with this process of these calls is to invite people in and find out who'd like to do a subset of this and tackle a piece of it, which is investment, which is, and I'd like to make all as open, as open as possible. So that is the process I'm trying to start here. And I will ask before I forget it, as one piece of optional homework, if you can think of people who ought to be in this conversation, can you forward an invite to them to join the conversation please? I would love to figure out where this travels to. Okay. Anybody else? Jack? Bulbas? Doug keeps falling off the call, but... Well, I think it's more about the term consumer but I've been doing a lot of thinking about the various shapes of our networks and the shapes of the networks that we're dependent upon. So a consumer really is a spoke, in a hub and spoke system. And the hub has all the power and has all the knowledge. And the consumer doesn't, is totally dependent. And most consumers when they're in that process, I mean, we have ways of finding out about products and services now, but most consumers interact with organizations in a kind of that spoke to hub format. Yeah. And when we don't, we get some more power. I love that your icon here is you sitting on top of maps with hubs and spokes and connections and networks and all that. Yeah. Yeah, actually that was a thank you for a talk that I did in Latvia on networks. The banquet that I talked to, they had a great artist on staff. It's a great likeness, it's really nice. And yeah, he created that and I remember asking why the bare feet, but it just seemed to fit in it. Yeah. It's memorable. And I love the network as a hammock. Beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I know it's, yeah, that's why I use it. It's because it really fits, it's like. And also, also you're leaning into the network. Your hammock is supporting you. The network is supporting you. Metaphorically, it's really beautiful. Yeah. Jack, any thoughts? And here we go. Other than the fact that I got what I came for, I'm starting to get a grip on what it is you're talking about. And I intend to participate in as many of these as I can. Love that. How frequently do you intend to? So what I did was this week, I'm setting two calls today and Friday at noon as well. Noon is a little late for Europeans. So next week, at least one call that's at like 9 a.m. or something like that. I don't know. I think I have an appetite for multiple calls per week. And I think that I need to structure this so that people can dip in and dip out as they see fit. I think that sub-projects may end up having their own little thread of calls and I may be part of multiple sub-projects. And I think if I'm thinking of using the Google group as a way of keeping those announcements kind of consistent and visible and labeled right. So if there's a sub-project that gets named, let's call it jazz hands, then invites to those calls would be jazz hands colon join us on Tuesday or something. So I'm looking at something like that, but I'm totally open to all suggestions. That's my only take. My only concern was that week after next, I'll be in Kona. Kona's nice, except that's a little early for you then there, huh? But I've been known to get up early, but... But also what I can do, because I've got friends in Singapore who I'd love to have on these calls and in Sydney, in Brisbane. So I'm thinking maybe I do a call at 8 a.m. and a call at 6 p.m. Pacific or 8 p.m. Pacific and, you know, cross my fingers and see how this works around time zones because I'm really interested in trying to connect us up globally. And where will you be sharing these so that I can spread it through my group? Perfect. So I'm going to post the recording of this video. I'm going to post to YouTube in my account. So if you subscribe to my account, you'll get all these. That'll do it. And I'll then notify a couple of different networks that, hey, you know, this is available. So I'll post it to my Patreon page. I'll post it to the Google group that I'm starting for this, which I will add you guys to with your permission. Which is fine. And I'm going to do some email introductions from my group. So, well, actually, you already know most of them, but let's get them linked in. That sounds great. David and Sam and the others? Yes. Perfect. That sounds lovely. Thank you. Anybody else, any other closing thoughts or clothing thoughts? If you want to include like Australia and New Zealand and all that, if you were to do it at about four o'clock your time, they're up in the morning already the next day. And it's still, for us on the East Coast, it's just after dinner. So those would be good times to get the Pacific Ocean involved. That makes sense. I'm making a note in our chat and I'll remember that. And I remember when I was doing stuff with Sydney that that was actually a good time. I've got a team that I worked with in 2015 at Sun Corp, which have now kind of mostly spread to other places. That project blew up at the end of the year because they got a new CEO and a bunch of other stuff. But I'm trying to communicate with them and say, hey, are you guys interested in picking parts of this backup and coming into it? So if I hear from them, that will spark me to create a call like that in that time schedule. Cool. Thank you all for everything. It's been really, really fun and fruitful. I appreciate it. Yes, I enjoy it, too. Yay. Yeah, thanks, Jerry. Until Friday for some of you, and then see you all on the Google group. OK. Bye, guys. Bye, everybody. Thanks.