 Great, this is Rex, the Relationship Economy Expedition. This is kind of the first call of a reconstructed rethought Rex, and we're going to be diving into a whole lot of issues that center around trust. And I'll explain as we go into this, but I usually start Rex meetings with a poem. And I just thought that this meeting, the poem that I'd love to read is, creates the energy that I think I'd love us to have in Rex. So it's a poem that we read at our wedding. So April is my better half, and it's called Summons by Robert Francis. Cozes follows, keep me from going to sleep too soon, or if I go to sleep too soon, come wake me up, come any hour of night, come whistling up the road, stomp on the porch, bang on the door, make me get out of bed and come and let you in and light a light. Tell me the northern lights are on and make me look, or tell me clouds are doing something to the moon they never did before, and show me. See that I see. Talk to me till I'm half as wide awake as you and start to dress wondering why I ever went to bed at all. Tell me the walking is superb, not only tell me, but persuade me. You know I'm not too hard persuaded. So welcome. I think we're going to accrete people as we go into the call as people figure out how to get into our meeting. Marty, welcome. Hi. Thanks. Hi, Marty. And I wanted to just check in to go around real quick. And if you'll say your name, what city you're in, just so we have a little bit of geography, then one word or phrase that would somehow summarize the last month of your life. What has the last month of your life been like? For a moment, let's give each other a second of time. What has your last month been like? And it can be like disaster preparation and hectic, whatever. It can be, you know, calm before the storm. Who knows what kind of thing it might be. But what word or phrase represents the last month for you? Right? And I'll start us off. For me, the last month I think is about convergence and remix. I have this feeling that a whole lot of things are coming together in a very interesting, serendipitous, yet somehow understandable way and that everything I'm doing, I'm busy remixing and shifting around how it's happening in the world. So for me, it's convergence and remix. Marty, what's it for you? Well, I like convergence. It's been very intense and things feel like they're converging at some sort of gateway in a really different form, but intense convergence would do with it. And you were just outside Sebastopol, right? Yes, yes, and we're watching the winds today. There's some sense that the winds are going to change late this afternoon. And so pray for the winds to just stay calm. The winds change. It might blow more of this closer to Sebastopol and we're trying not to panic. Yeah, exactly. For anybody who doesn't know, Sebastopol is right next to Napa Valley. It's right next to the fires. If you throw a stone across 101, you basically hit Santa Rosa. Yeah, exactly. Which went up in smoke just recently. I don't think there's going to be anything left of that town. It's really incredible. But yeah, it's right next door. So we're watching the winds and wondering if we should... We're not anywhere near evacuation zones at this point, but you have in the back of your mind, pack my car, not pack my car. Well, I would assume your trunk is full of whatever you want to sort of scoot out of their way. Well, we haven't done that yet because we haven't been close enough. So, but it's a little bit at the edge of the radar screen today. So neighbors are conferring. But envision quiet winds. It would be lovely. OK, we will all envision quiet winds. Thank you. Thank you. Karen, can you name City and the word or phrase that represents the last month? I'm Karen. I live in Kirkland, Washington, which is a little bit outside of Seattle, Washington. And my last month feels like it's been really scattered. Like parents visiting and stuff going on at work and stuff going on in life and just a million different things that I'm trying to deal with all at once. And it feels like playing whack-a-mole. Whack-a-mole is a feeling I can empathize with heavily. April, do you want to dive in? Sure. I'm April. I am in Portland, Oregon this morning, which is home base. Though, let's see, last week I was in Berlin. And next week I'll be in Cape Town, South Africa. So as Rex proceeds, you'll find me dialing in from various spots on the planet. The word for me for the last month, I would say, is some combination of reflective and generative. So I've been lucky that I've actually been traveling less over the last month, which has allowed me to be more sort of in creative mode, which for me feels like a real blessing right now. I don't get enough of just being in one place. Thank you. Mark? I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Atlantic time zone. Last, actually, even before you mentioned converges, that word popped to my mind in terms of converging on a target with an interim target. So kind of harvesting a whole bunch of stuff from several directions. And then now it's onward because it's just one step. Thank you. Bill? Bill, we can't hear you if you're talking, but I hear keyboard tapping away. No, Bill yet. Let me go to Todd. And Bill, jump in whenever you can. Keep troubleshooting your audio. Go ahead, Todd. I would say the word for the last 30 days for me is energy. And I think it was represented yesterday. I decided to do a day of fasting just as an experiment and was still incredibly productive and actually moved 2,500 pounds of plaster. So having that energy to be present to family, to be present to clients, and to do a lot of creative destruction in my home. Yeah, I'm just very grateful for my health and how it feels like I am fully engaged with life. Love that. And I think Bill just stepped out and was going to try to reconnect so he can get his audio back. So let me do a little introducing of where we are and why we're here and what's up. Partly it's the story of Rex, the relationship economy expedition, and partly really it's the story of the opportunity in the world. The more I've chewed on the topic of the relationship economy, the more I've realized that it circles around trust. And we are at a global trust implosion, a global trust deficit. There's an opportunity to reconnect the world, to re-understand, to re-integrate trust in ways that haven't happened in a really long time. Yay, Bill. Do you want to go ahead and say hi, see if we can hear you? I think Bill might be actually just accepting to come join us. There we go. OK, finally. I've been having technology problems all morning. It's working now. Yeah, good. OK, so background. I'm with the Center for Social Change in Miami, Florida. We operate in about 11 different states in the United States. We deal with community banks and do community building. So the whole idea of understanding relationships, especially in an economic environment and how you do that in a way that enables the growth and transcendence of human nature up to a higher level is very much on our mind all the time. We have many different projects. We deal with 360 different charities nationwide. We're trying to find inflection points on how we can improve things. And what word or phrase represents or synthesizes the last month of your life? Changing. I think that I'm learning things deeper and deeper about what one author calls the internal contradictions of our capitalism and trying to understand where the real opportunities. So the changing aspect of it, understanding change, understanding systems, just came back from Wales, working on systems planning issues with David Snowden. So change. Love that. And we'll be getting into Snowden and a bunch of other topics as we go. Probably we kind of want to share out what we know and the different perspectives, the different pieces discovered. Also, change is really interesting because the Trump administration in some sense has kicked up so much mud from the bottom of the river that it feels like everything is plastic. It feels like not everything is going in great directions. But there's a real opportunity for changes. There's a moment where a lot of things might be done very, very differently from what they were before, which I think hasn't haven't felt that sense of plasticity in the air for many, many years. So I think we'll be talking about what opportunities are presented there and how that all works. So I'm going to retell a little story about how Rex came about and how we're shifting Rex at this point. Basically, 20 years ago, I was a tech industry analyst, not a Wall Street analyst, but a trends analyst. And I realized in the middle of that, hearing probably 4,000 startup pitches that I didn't like the word consumer. And I just noticed that in the middle of all these briefings and consumer this, consumer that, we're going to have consumers do this. I've got a couple of more specific stories that kind of triggered this for me. And I paid attention to that word for 20 years. And it gifted me this idea that a lot of the heroes I had, people whose work I had really enjoyed, people like David Snowden, Alice Miller, George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, a whole series of thinkers, Russell Aikhoff, Christopher Alexander, and I have a companion of these thinkers, that they were all basically saying the same thing, that we stopped somewhere along the road trusting humans and that they each of them were presenting ways of arranging society, whether it was economic or social or decision making or personal growth or families or whatever, from a basis of trust and a reconnection built on trust. So a lot, so the TEDx talk I've done is called What If We Trusted You, which is kind of the question that's been in the back of my mind for the last 15 years, 10 years. And one thing that seems to be an opportunity is part of the inspiration for me to come up with any of these ideas was finding people in the field who were actually doing this work, the kind of the heroes I call them like contrarians or outsiders, because some of the forms of being in the world run contrary to the majority point of view of, well, in capitalism, everybody should be self-interested and greedy. I mean, the traditional classical economic framework that we've kind of built out our systems and institutions with. And when you tell people, well, maybe profit and growth shouldn't be the objectives or maybe we don't need to imprison our children in schools and put them through the same lockstep all the time, or maybe if you removed stoplights and intersection traffic would flow more freely and there'd be fewer accidents. All of these things are kind of counterintuitive and cause a lot of agita for people who are looking at the world through a traditional, capitalist, modernist, even scientist lens. So there's this huge opportunity right now. And what happened was in 2010 I decided, well, why don't we convene change agents and I created this RECS group. But for the last seven years, it's basically been a private salon, a private conversation among change agents where we shared what we were thinking about what we were doing and dove into ideas that were like, I refer to it as shining the flashlight through the giant hairball. Basically, because the world is, everything is kind of holographic and inter twingled. Each of our conversations was a way of looking through this whether it was a slice of education, whether it was about design and the influence of design, whether it was about how do we respond to emergencies, personal growth, a whole series of issues, each of which are sort of intertwined in these topics. In the middle of all that, actually very, very early in thinking about RECS, I came up with the six forces of RECS which are free, open, social, abundant, emergent, thriveable. And I'm kind of cheating because the last one, thriveable actually has three things inside of it, profitable, joyful, and sustainable. So that thriving is sort of a compound of those things. And I realized recently that RECS wasn't really kind of living up to the six forces. We weren't doing any jujitsu with the six forces of the relationship economy. We, our conversations were closed. We weren't using social dynamics to connect out to other groups. We weren't building things together. So the shift really is into more of a gift economy, more of a bridge building role and more through all that more collaborative sense making. How can we come together and ourselves puzzle through some of these hard issues, help the people who are getting work done who are part of our group, but then put material in the world that other people can use that would be useful in these particular ways. And I've been using my brain for a long time. So I will share my, I'll share my brain for a second because there are, for example, a whole series of communities that, there are visions that are resonant with RECS. There are a whole series of examples of communities that have been, here we go, communities and processes that exemplify these kinds of things. So just recently I found a label, a voluntary disclosure tool that corporations can use. It's an ethical label from the Living Future Institute, which is run by a man's, a man, a surgeon who might haven't met. These kinds of efforts, if we can begin to tie them together and begin to bring them together with the things that we're doing, point to them at worst, actually help them get traction or help them evolve their ideas. I think the best would be a really great thing for us to do. And I think that each of us in RECS will get out of it whatever we put into it. So I'm interested in where can we sort of, how can we discover our own superpowers and then how can we actually move toward helping other entities to do these kinds of things. So in RECS, and let me stop sharing my screen for a second so we can go back to just conversation. In RECS, what I'm going to do is we'll have one call a month as the synchronizing sort of a touch point where whoever can make it makes it. But then I will begin to do things like interview people and propose questions and create media and run experiments. And I'll put them on the RECS list. And I'll put them on the list where we can all go, oh, that smells interesting. I'd like to be on that call. I'd like to be part of that experiment. I'd like to offer just a couple ideas, whatever else it might be. And I'm just doing this, well partly I'm doing this because I'm compelled to do it and these are things that I think are really important in the world. But I'm also doing this to model it for all of us because I'd like any of us to pipe up and say, hey, given this framework we're sort of in, there's an open question that I'd like to investigate or there's a person that would be great to interview or bring into the group or whatever else it might be. But what I'd like to do is have the flow in our conversational list be a flow of opportunities, of insights, things that we can do together as we move forward in this world. So partly I wanna encourage you all to jump in. And April, it looks like you have something you'd like to throw in. Yeah, a couple questions. And I guess selfishly I'm glad to have a call like this which allows us partly to level set. Also it's a kind of tutorial for anyone who wants to come watch this later and be onboarded and all of that. I know that in the past you had calls where you would invite a guest in and it would be hosted and I loved, I mean, I love that. Obviously it was more intensive. Will that, how the monthly calls, how will they be focused in terms of will they have themes like before? Is it more of just a cross group conversation? That's one question. And then secondly, I'm just trying to figure out in terms of you mentioned the cross group, the channels, the communications, love that. Is that going to be more or less like a list serve or does that have different pieces to it? Both in terms of technology as well as in terms of convening spots. Hi, Michael. Oh, he's just been on his ears. Hey, Michael. How are you doing? He just put on his ears. That sounds nice. Thank you. I'll catch you up in just a second. April just asked a question so I'm gonna answer that. So one thing I wanna emphasize is that everything right now is plastic. Like I, this is an experiment. I really want us to work together to craft this into a better instrument to get our work done together for each of us to get our work done better individually but also for this group to kind of coalesce and be helpful to other groups and sort of pick up there. So I will, one thing that happens with like interviews when I invited guests in is that if there's only one maybe the original classic wrecks had two calls a month which meant there was room for two interviews if we were gonna bring two guests in and that was kind of it, right? We weren't doing much out of ban. Here there's an opportunity to do a whole series of interviews where the timing can be set so that whoever really wants to be part of it can join it, et cetera. So I have a feeling that guests coming in to be part of a conversation will probably happen ad hoc during the month wherever they happen. And sort of we'll post to the list for now, the Google group will be the flow where everybody can see what's about to happen and say, oh, I'm interested. Let's make sure, you know, I'll make sure that it happens when I can participate. One of the things that has been sort of a chagrin to me is that some people have a standing meeting when we have a call scheduled and they can't actually make the thing that they're really interested in. So we'll do that. And then the structure of our monthly calls is also up for design and redesign. I think it's a way to check in and see each other even though we're not face to face, you know, in person, but it's actually a place to see and hear what we're up to, what's working, what's not working, what we think we'd like to do, all of those kinds of things. So again, open completely to designing and redesigning it. One thing I'd like to do is at the end of our monthly calls, walk away with something that we'd like to do. Walk away with a bit of an assignment so that we have some fun tasks to look forward to. Fun is kind of important here. I did an interview that most of you are backing me on Patreon so you saw that I posted recently an interview I did with Audrey Tang who is a minister without portfolio for the Taiwanese government and is doing some absolutely fascinating work in Taiwan rethinking democracy and how participation works and all those kinds of things. But the first thing we talked about was something that she's written about called optimizing for fun. And she presents as an anarchist. She says, I'm an anarchist and is very forward about that. And by which she means that she believes in emergent structures and that she doesn't believe in giving orders and sort of command and control, but rather creating a setting where people want to jump in, where things happen and where you kind of flex according to what's happening. And I think that's a really great guideline for productive use of our time and productive meetings in different ways. So April, that's partly sort of what's going on here. Michael, I asked people when we first went around, we did a little check-in, just name a geographic location and then what word or phrase describes or somehow encapsulates the last month of your life? Could be good, could be negative, whatever you'd like. Michael Lukowitz, I'm in London, Ontario, just outside of Toronto, Canada. And the word would be forced patience. Love that. It's not really a word, but you know. Yeah, well, no, it's good. In fact, this is the single word, it can be a phrase. It could be a sentence if you want it. No problem there. Any other questions where we are right this second? And April, go ahead. A follow-up question. So I'm also gathering that particularly the monthly check-ins are places where somebody else just joined. Hi, Dave. Dave Whitsall. There are also places where if any member of the RECS cohort has an idea or a question or hey, I just wanna surface this with other members of the group that there is a space to do that. Which I wouldn't, you know, before it was more structured and led by you, which is fine, I mean, this isn't better or worse. It's just, is that right? So if I have an idea that I'm noodling on, bring it to people, I can't control who shows up, but that it's assuming it's a RECS-y kind of topic that that would be okay. Okay, cool. And I will make every effort to show up and facilitate if somebody wants me to, but really like go wherever. And as much of this as we can, we will record and post together to a single stream so it looks like a vlog or a podcast or both, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, that's very much the intention. Hey, Mike. Mike and Dave just joined as a check-in a little moment ago. I asked people to say your name, your geographic location on the Blue Marble and a word or phrase that describes your last month, the last month of your life. Yeah, I see the eyebrows go up. Mike, do you want to shoot first? I'm Mike Pocco, I'm in the UK. And the last month has been, let me see, characterized by a convergence of concerns from a number of my clients all relating to how do we cope with interrelationships when things get tense? Beautiful. Thank you, a great topic. Dave? Dave Witzel in Oakland, California. I guess probably kids traveling in strange places. And trying to make sure that you actually know where they are kind of thing. Well, and that they don't get nuked and stuff, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cool. So any other questions right now where we are? Can I make one request, Dave? You look like you're wearing, can ever, is everyone, I can't actually see Dave. Oh, Dave, the problem is you have a black triangle. Just shift your, maybe. You look like Lord Vader before the cloak comes out in the morning. Well, that's okay. When Vader's trying to sort of keep anonymity going. I'll go close the shades. That's all right. So let me explain a little bit about kind of roles in recs. And it's pretty simple, but it's kind of different sorts of people here for different reasons in different ways. So all the people who were members of the first seven years of recs, as they come into the renewed recs, will be charter members. So we'll see them as charter members. That's what, you know, that's, we don't have to refer to each other as esteemed colleague, charter member, you know, Bob, Joe Bob, but rather this is just kind of so we know who's in the room and how. And I will share with you a spreadsheet on the website that has our membership lists so far in a moment. Then anybody joining now is a member. And they're exactly, and Karen is a new member. Bill, you're actually a fellow at this point. Yeah, so you were a member in the original thing, but actually your role, for reasons I will explain right this second, has changed into that of a fellow. So fellows, there are two senior fellows and will only be two senior fellows. Marty is one of them. The other is Arthur Brock. And our fellows basically are in the world building out something that is about the relationship economy. They may not call it that it's their own mission, their own effort, but it falls beautifully and is a fabulous example of the relationship economy at work. So they're on a mission, they have a project, they're teaching people, they're creating matter, media, whatever else it might be, that really exemplifies the thesis that we're at. And so there's two senior fellows and I'm now beginning to invite a series of other fellows to come in who are from the communities that inspired this whole idea in the first place. So the goal here is to create a bit of an estuary. And I had to kind of go out and look up stuff about estuaries, but estuaries are really nice metaphor here because the estuaries where saltwater meets fresh, you know, bays, places where rivers empty out into the ocean are estuaries. A lot of the world's largest cities are actually located in estuaries, which makes it hard to be an estuary because you get pollution, you get population, you get all those kinds of things. But where salt meets fresh is this really nourishing kind of environment where a lot of innovation happens, where nature explores and does interesting things, where there's a lot of combining of ideas and species and so forth. So partly metaphorically speaking, the fellows are already well out of the sea, swimming in some direction on, you know, doing some thing. And a lot of people in organizations are seeing these energies show up and they're counterintuitive. They don't make a lot of sense from the normal profit maximizing perspective or the normal, it's a whole series of ways in which being open, you know, free open, social, abundant, emergent, thriveable doesn't engage. And so members and charter members are implementing those kinds of things in their organizations, they're learning, they're digesting. And I think that the interaction between these different groups will be super interesting. So part of what I wanna do is create a way for us to say, hey, that thing you mentioned on the last call or on the list or whatever sounds super interesting to me, is there a way I might help? And instead of jumping out of band on the side, wherever it happens is fine, whatever it might be. But I wanna create a way that we can see those opportunities and have permission, freedom, agency to go jump in and do those kinds of things. So there's senior fellows of whom there will only be two because there were two fellows for the first seven years of REX. And then we'll start to see some new fellows come in. Bill Burdette was a member in the first thing, but as you heard from his introduction, he's out there sort of practicing this in Florida and other states as well. So it'll work that way. And then there are two more categories of participants here. One of them is catalysts. And right this minute, we don't have any catalysts on the call, but catalysts will be younger folk who are just, I have to say, amazing. And I've had the really good luck of meeting a bunch of young folk who have their heads screwed on right and an astonishing way of seeing the world and who will both, I think, bring a younger perspective to what we're doing here, but also we may benefit their path. I mean, I think there's gonna be a lot of really interesting interactions there. And one of the people I've invited to be a catalyst is actually Dave's son, Zach. So we shall see what country he's in when next we speak. And then the last role here is advisors. Todd has been an advisor to Rex from the get-go. And so advisors, basically, there are people who've been really generous with me with understanding what this process is. They're people who are there to think of the shape and direction of what we do. And they're there for everyone else to get advice as well, but it's kind of a different role in the community slightly. Any questions so far? Yes, the young lady on the upper right of my grid screen. Sorry I'm gonna do this, but this is actually really, I think, helpful for older members, seasoned members of newbies. How big is too big? Do you want this to become really, really, really big? Do you want this to be intimate? Do you want this to have overlapping concentric circles? What's your vision? Cause I think the more people, and those of you who know me know that, I believe that we're in the early stages of something that's much bigger than any of us and quite emergent and very different than how business has been done and all of that. But I'm also just thinking in terms of the intimacy of the recs group previously was also really nice. And so just how do we balance some of those things? That's fabulous, thank you. And you're asking all the right questions. And we have not, there's been no collaboration on, these are not prompted or paid questions, these are. You just know, you just- I know, I've been quite busy in recent months and years and have observed Jerry, but no, I'm not asking these in any way. This is where, when I introduced myself, I said I think I'd like to be a member of recs, whether or not I was married to Jerry. And so I'm asking, I think more with my strategy hat on. Yeah, thank you. So I would love to have the problem that we feel like recs is too big. One of the things that was really good about the first generation of recs, the first seven years of it, was that it was really intimate. You know, we kind of, the group that was convening and talking to each other quite well, the conversations felt private and small and intimate. And I think that what that did was it created a core group of charter members who have already pretty high trust and high knowledge about each other and can see some of that or carry some of that into the new sphere. The reason to scale back to one group call a month and then have everything else be ad hoc is so that all ad hoc can be as intimate as need be. Does that make sense? So somebody will say, okay, I wanna do an interview with Michelle Bowens about a particular question or topic that's interesting. And it's gonna happen next Thursday at seven. And then whoever is interested in that particular thing will show up. And it's not going to be probably 100 people unless they get Donald Trump to show up to talk about trust, in which case the numbers might go up. But I think what'll happen is we'll have conversations at many different scales and we'll learn really quickly how that works and what's working and how to control it for the degree of intimacy that we want. But I would love to make this, it's funny, I had a conversation with a fellow who is, he manages the Aspen First Movers program, which is part of the Aspen Institute, but the Aspen First Movers fellows are all business people, mid-career executives, kind of sort of fast track executives who have a sustainability or other kind of bent. And he and I both came to a conclusion that other people may or may not agree with, that there's a bunch of networks that are trying to pull together people who are trying to fix the world, change the world. They do a good job recruiting and the people are happy to be in these groups, but I don't think any of them feel like they're really helping leverage the individuals in those groups. I think that the hosts of these groups are really frustrated because they're thinking, oh, we really, we brought everybody together in order to just put turbo boosters on their feet and see everybody jump into the stratosphere and that doesn't seem to be happening much in the different groups. So if we can begin to cross fertilize, cross pollinate and bridge some of the groups, maybe there's some interesting possibilities from doing that, that implies getting considerably larger because then there might be a bunch of people coming in from Wikipedia, a bunch of other people coming in from some other place. And I think that's really an interesting thing to posit. For example, I thought I had years ago when Wikipedia got super popular was, okay, good. So now we have a whole bunch of Wikipedia volunteers who have high trust within the system, even though there's plenty of controversy and there's a lot of difficult things that go on inside of Wikipedia just because of its nature. But here's a group that's very well-groove to produce one thing. What else might they be interested in doing? What other kinds, how do we take leverage what they've gotten really good at doing and bring it into other worlds? Those kinds of questions, right? And I think there's a lot of groups like that doing fantastic work in the world. So that's part of it. And that may not have answered your whole question. I'd love to hear what anybody else thinks about size here as well. Michael. I love, love, love, love this approach and where you're heading with it. I love a simple anchored thread where we can see your face and come together and have these kinds of conversations and that the whole spirit around all of that is doing great things. And however that happens, you are one of the most extraordinary people are creating that energy and space for things to come together. And so this structure that incentivizes this to happen or that enables it more broadly, I'm really excited to see where it goes. I think it's like it's bang on. I've got a bazillion ideas bouncing in my head on ways to engage, but I'm just gonna hold them there right now. Fabulous, thank you. I really appreciate that. Jerry? Well, I tend to be more toward trying to find ways to act on what we learn. We actually call our sort of center for social change is social lab. So that we're trying out different things. What I'd like to suggest could just, you seem to have a flexibility of plasticity that enables you to have different segments of this. And what I'd like to offer is the willingness to use some of my staffing and everything to support somebody's perception of what next they wanna do. In other words, I love the variety of things that we touch on, but sometimes I sense that I don't hear what came from that. And if somebody could say, okay, I'm gonna have a takeaway, I'm gonna, I would like to do this, but I need this kind of support or that kind of support. And to an extent, as we probably all know from nonprofits and everything, capacity building is the basic problem. In other words, they don't have accounting. They don't have some extra time to do an extra project. In other words, it always takes time. And so if I can sort of maybe, at least initially volunteer some of our staff to help on a particular project. In other words, if somebody comes up with a concept, then that might help people to get involved because it's not like the Aspen situation, where, okay, we got all these people together, but what happened? Right. You know, I mean, I'd like us to be known as a happening place, not just a thinking place. Well, when I started REX, I described it as a think and do tank. And in retrospect, it became a think tank. It became a salon or a conversation. I wasn't putting the energy in for the doing. We weren't organized for the doing, all those kinds of things. So I absolutely appreciate your offer of resources when we start figuring out what to do. And I love, like, just sort of thinking out loud. Marty, you have a zillion things in your head that would be fantastic if they found their way into the world as things people could do to reconnect with the earth, with each other, et cetera. That would be somatic, physical, perceptual exercises. Maybe one or two of those we could produce nicely in ways, figure out who's interested in doing this, and then riff on it so that there's one manifestation which looks like one would expect, but then we invite people to come in and take the ideas and we mix them in some way. I'm just like, how could we do these different kinds of things in ways that draw on our creative energies, that help us actually sort of all pull together on these things. And sorry, Marty, go ahead. Marty, we don't hear you. You're muted. Mouse over your screen, and there we go. Perfect, now we hear you. I have a gazillion things in my head. The two at the top of the list are, one is to find really high level leaders and influencers who are willing to be intensely trained and immediately bridge the training into their businesses. So yeah, it may be connecting to the earth and that stuff, but the immediate bridge has to be into how we create value and how we distribute it and into our collectivity. And I want that to be small and intense and really highly qualified people. So that could be an extraordinary institute that's part of the whatever Rex is becoming and would be spectacular. The other thing is a project, I need a bunch of designers, I need really good designers and tech people. It's a project to create in the current vision, maybe five, 60 a second videos that explain the organizing principles of consciousness in ordinary language. I need a team for that, yeah. Really, so those are the biggies right there. Love that, so just I use the occupy hand signs a lot and when I give speeches, I teach these to the audience because then they stop being a mere audience and they're a little more connected to the speaker. So this means I agree, this means I disagree. So, so. No, no, no, I'm totally on board, I love this idea. So one of the nice things about being on Zoom is that if we're all sitting here being grim, that's one thing, but we can at least see each other's faces and that's cool. But if we start doing some gestures and just sort of monkey around a little bit, I think it would be great. It'll liven up our conversations. And it also gives you our. You have to comb my hair, so. You know what, April has a similar problem with the morning, the morning Zoom is not a happy thing for April. Exactly. Okay, April, what's your night? I mean, basically you're gonna see me looking like I've just done yoga, but I enjoy, I actually enjoy seeing, I will admit Govan, like Bill, I've never actually, I've never met you in person and I'm like, oh, finally, there's Bill, that's awesome. So I think if we all get over, if I get over myself and we all get over our respective morning cells, we'll be fine. Yeah. And also the way technology is going, we're all gonna be like lip syncing puppy avatars anyway. So, you know, we might as well take advantage of the brief moment in history where we actually could see one another through a barely mediated lens at the same time. So I like that a lot. Any other thoughts, go ahead. If I could respond to Marty's comments. Both of those things that you mentioned, the leader training and the videos and everything, I think that we've got people that can contribute to that. In other words, we've got a group that we sponsor that's called Techversify that basically teaches videography to students so they can probably put this into their project then it's something that they could be doing. So if you get any information about that, I'll put you in touch with the woman who runs that. Great, thank you. But on the leadership training thing, I'd also be interested because to an extent, that's sort of like basic capacity building 101. In other words, if they don't know what they need to know in order to help others, then you're sort of like at a loss. So I mean, I'd be interested in collaborating with you on what that means. Fabulous. All right, great. I'll get in touch with you. One of the ways to do this, and I'm thinking now about our process together, for example, Marty, you could say, hey, here's a question I'm trying to answer and propose that to the rec list. And if you wanted to, you can also do this as a private side conversation, but you could say, I'd like to investigate this question and ways of manifesting this, ways of expressing it. And then whoever's interested shows up for a Zoom call. Then you not only, you present what you think it is and how you think you wanna go about doing it, but then also other people riff on that and say, well, how about if you tried this other way of getting to the same goal? How about in, and I don't know what the Fs might be, but I think that if we're all helping each other be creative with our goals and offering very interesting alternate means to get to those goals, I think we're gonna have really interesting times here. And then from the conversation a moment ago, kind of about if only we could get senior leaders to do acts, what the moment is right now in the world is, there's a global general reconsideration of the social contract. Yeah. Like people everywhere are realizing that, like shit is bullshit and fucked up, which is my favorite sign from Occupy. Donald Trump, the apex predator of consumer mass market capitalism is currently the president of the United States, because enough people thought that things are broken in this country that they voted for somebody who might actually break it. My own theory about sort of why we have him there, right? So this is a gigantic conversation that we probably can't process and solve perfectly for anybody, but we might actually be able to set a table where people can come in and understand what the menu of offers is. And instead of the stupid false dichotomies of it's either socialism or full on capitalism to understand what groups in the world are doing interesting work. I mean, that's why one of the reasons I loved my conversation with Audrey Tang in Taiwan was that we went into these things and I left the conversation thinking, okay, this really opens up a lot of super interesting options for how we might have civic participation in genuine decision making around issues that matter. Terrific. So how might we not only have the specific conversations but then frame the conversations in ways that allow us to experiment and allow other people to come in and use what we create as resources for decision making? Does that make sense? Yep, mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, it's good. I think you asked how might we frame the conversations? I actually think we're already framing the conversations and we need to move to action way faster. So I think so many of us are ready to just actually take some action. I think the question we're beyond it. Yeah, so I own the domain fireaim.net which I bought years ago. April knows I've parked too many domains in the world. But my saying, I think the saying for the current world is fireaim never quite ready. Right, because in the old world it was ready aim fire and that implies a whole series of things about process, about okay, we're gonna prepare for the thing now. We're gonna aim with care but the ready was like, what are you aiming at? Well, everything else, and then you fire and then you correct and then you fire. Now it's like fire aim never quite ready which means go do some things, take some action. I mean, the world is kind of come to a screeching halt because people believe that they could be prepared for something they've never experienced before. And the only way we learn anything is to have an experience. So yeah, I think the ready needs to go. Well, the never quite ready also means that it's just going to be really uncomfortable. It's really going to be uncomfortable. But the never quite ready also means you're always feeling a little off balance. Yeah, but see that changes when consciousness changes. So it won't hurt too much is what I tell people. Yeah. So Karen has to leave our call to go to a meeting and just set on the chat, which I think everybody can see, you might not have turned on the chat. I've got it set so that there's the grid display with everybody's faces and then the chat on the right for me. But she just said she needs to hop off, but might it make sense for this monthly call to be a bit of a large accountability, accountability system sort of like over the next month I'm going to do X and then at the beginning of the next call we actually check in and see how those things went, which is an experiment I'd be very happy to try. And unfortunately you're not going to be here for the end of the next 30 minutes of our call, but we can try that out next month or start from the beginning. Hey look, I make a suggestion which means other people have to do things. I'm going to go away, bye. You're a good anarchist already. See you next month everyone. Thank you very much. I have to go to a meeting for the job that pays me money. As it is. So any other thoughts about the topic we just on? About how to do, how to, you know, a bias for action, which I love? I will start putting things on the list that are, and I'm interested here in what action means because for example, I've got three or four topics that I'm creating presentations around that I just want to record the way I've been doing with Prezi and with, you know, screen casting and whatnot to put out in the world. And one of them is about denial of discourse attacks, which is basically I borrow the denial of service idea and I say, look, how do you have discourse when some parties are actually trying to destroy discourse? I like to call that a denial of discourse attack. So I'm going to create some media and put it online. That's a kind of action in that producing media is a form of action. But what other kinds of things are up for us to jump in with each other? So I would love to talk to something you and I have spoken about over the last few months, Jerry, with the old incarnation of Rex, was by default, Jerry driven. And in order for this vision that you've shared and that has come together, it's still Jerry led, but it's member driven. So our responsibility is not for you to wait for the structures that enable us to give and receive what we need. It's for any of us to step forward and say, let's try this, just like Karen just did or just like Marty just did with Bill. And but this is going to require a change of habit because we have relied on you organizing, packaging, presenting. And I know you want something different now. You are exactly right. You are exactly right. And I'm happy to see what emerges and happy to use my skills in whatever way or appropriate for whatever things emerge, et cetera, et cetera. Michael. Yeah, so I mean, on that, I have two projects that are going to be shared and part of what I'm trying to figure out is what's the right way to engage with the community? Because they're things that I'd love to open up specifically because it is this community. And so there's two things around that as one is, what are, do we have some core protocols? Because I'm not sharing them publicly, very publicly yet, or only in specific ways. So do we have core protocols around how we share? And then second, is there a more asynchronous way that's more appropriate to be able to put out there what's going on so it's there and it can be a reference point or for other people to come as they come in to be able to check in on things. Fabulous. So yes and yes. At this point, the new Rex list, the Google group is private. And I've made it that way partly so that we have a place to do what you just said, which is to share stuff that's pre-public. So there's that and then the exercise I was going to ask us to do at the very end of today was actually to pair up with somebody else and then to book a time sometime to get together and create a profile for the Google site. And I will, I'll put a much more detailed explanation of this on the Rex list, but I'd love for us to have a page on a common website where it isn't your LinkedIn profile because that already exists, by the way. And it isn't your, you know, there'll be links to the places where you've already got some manifestation online. Your profile in Rex should be some combination of some side of you that lets us feel who you are, some notion of what your superpowers are, what are you good at, and some notion of the things you're working on that we might be able to go help with, the kinds of projects that you just described, Michael. And we sort of need to experiment our way to how public is that, how does that go, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But I think there being a place online, and partly one of the things I wanted to talk about at the end of the call was our infrastructure, like our techie infrastructure. And right this minute, as a start, I'm falling back on the place I've come back to because I'm so done with WordPress, I can't tell you, you know, there's so many, like good platforms are apparently still really rare, really hard to come by. So the place I've come back to is a Google group as a conversational mailing list. Most people have a Gmail address, it seems to work. A few people are Google refused nicks, which is a problem, but those people are usually in the minority. And then I built a small Google site, which I'll send everybody a link to, which right now is completely bare bones. I'm trying not to put too many things in there so that I don't overbuild, so that we actually build it, sort of build out the things we think we need. And that's where I'll put my profile and some other profiles. So my cast has bounced as well. Thank you for being on the call, Mike. Totally appreciate it. So I will put some things on there, and then I'm completely open to whatever other tools, instruments, methods we'd like to use. I'm kind of leading our way into these waters and then listening for what works, what doesn't work, following ideas, opinions. I mean, Mark, you like me have been in this world for quite a while, since kind of early days, and you have a sense for what's out there and what people have tried and not tried what works and what doesn't work. So advice you have about everything from tools to norms and all that would be completely great. And we can have that conversation out loud on the list or we can book a call and ponder these things ourselves. But I think this makes a whole bunch of sense. Other thoughts? Michael. Here I go again. I think one of the things that I think is our biggest untapped potential is the ability to actively facilitate connections within our networks. That specifically I think is one of the most powerful things that that brings because it carries the spirit of understanding of how we're coming at this and that very powerfully can inform who the right connections would be. So for example, if I get an incoming connection request from someone within this group, I'm gonna take that very seriously and with a different intent than I would anything else. And I think that that is our one of the most powerful forms of action we could do. So explicitly being able to activate and that in some way is very interesting to me, however, whatever that looks like. Because I'd be happy to try and work on facilitating introductions for anybody in the group as well likewise. I just don't know how we enable that. I'm struggling that without another project as well. So don't have answers. Yeah, I think that's a great and sort of central thing to what we're up to. Because as I said earlier, there's sort of, there's community, I'd like if this even makes sense, partly to address April's question about how big is too big. I'd like this to be a community of communities where there's high trust when we're together doing this work and where we're busy making those synaptic connections across these various networks or those mycelial connections if you want to use like rhizomal networks or other metaphors. But I think that being able to make these connections is essential to our work. Can anyone else, so I think this notion resonates for us but can anyone else put some more meat on the bones? Meaning describe how a fruitful way of making these connections might work for us. Because one of my superpowers is I'm a connector. Like in Malcolm Gladwell's, the tipping point, he describes what connectors do and I'm a connector. I do that a whole bunch and I'm very happy to do it. Don't always know whom I need to connect for what, right? Maybe you should invite John Husband along to talk about wire hockey. That's interesting, yeah. One thought I've been toying with and actually trying to write up some framework and stuff around it but it was trying to, like how do you weaponize a networker like you Jerry? How do you make that high value? And I don't really know. I mean, there's a couple of problems like how do you just get your impact out there and also how do you pay for yourself or something like that. What one framework I've been wondering about it is could we host virtual consultations? They would look just like this but somebody comes in with a specific problem that they're dealing with and then you can be a bunch of folks to consult with them. So could Rex offer to the world basically the opportunity for an hour of consultation amongst people who think about interesting things? And we get the benefit of hearing interesting things and meeting interesting people and you're trying to provide a consultative service to them. And I think there's actually probably an actual convenient, you get better at that structure and you're able to offer value within an hour or something like that. Yeah, so there's different ways of doing this and you just reminded me that for a long time I've had this wish list item that I just shared screen on my brain but I had less in there than I thought I did. This notion of power tools for connectors. And so I'm a connector. When I meet a new human being the work I have to go through to integrate them with my software is stupid. Like the number of places I have to enter them, et cetera, et cetera. And then when I want to convene a group or do whatever it's just way too much work. So one thing that would be really lovely would be to think about as you talk about how do we weaponize a network or a connector? We could put out wish list items for software or standards that ought to exist. This is stuff that I think LinkedIn could have done, should have done and I think there's many business plans right now sort of boiling over that we're gonna do LinkedIn right, right? Cause LinkedIn did one thing right. They replaced the resume. So everybody's resume is now their LinkedIn page. That happened. But everything else LinkedIn has done has not really thrived. They've not done a bunch of other things well and now they're owned by Microsoft which to my mind has a notable black thumb with software. So there's an opportunity here to do stuff like that. So that's sort of riffing on the idea of weaponizing networkers in one direction. But I'm interested in what everybody else is thinking this stuff again. I think we need to provide some direction on the Google group. That we encourage people to post help needed. And that could be help with a connection, help with a concept, help with a tool. But just for people to know that that's part of the purpose of the group is to ask for help. Cause the asking for help and responding to help is what helps build connection to. Yeah, one of the related, I was just listening to an interview with Neil Garham flow the other day and he was talking about the beginning of shareable and how the part of the beginning of shareable was a series of, they were hosting events and they were doing gift exchanges at the events. So we're gonna say offering for help. And it seemed like that's a really, especially in something like this where you want to be a network of network, something kind of concrete like that creates the contacts and reinforces the relationships you get. And sort of ironically, one of our members, one of our charter members is Mans Mansour who has sort of put all of his life energy and funds into a network he calls Cape 66 which is all about halves and wants, halves and needs. So he's trying to make a go of it as a single purpose for the network that he's constructing so we could bring him into the conversations as well in those ways. Other thoughts? One thing that's worth all of us reflecting on and feeding back to the rex list I think is what have we seen and experienced in our lives in the world that works? There are groups that have interesting practices and I know I've borrowed many a practice from one place and brought it to another place. I think of that as cross pollination. I had a household, five guys shared a house in West Philly when I was in grad school and one of the guys had been in a really high function house at York University in Canada and he brought with him these practices and we adopted them wholesale and they really stuck with me for a long time and they were different from your normal ways of doing things. So how might we share good practices so that we can go try them out? Yeah, one thought I'm having is about this idea of connections and I guess it relates also to the number of connections like Jerry, your brain has what, 340,000 or so. Hi. And so that's kind of a challenge in itself. And so I think one pattern that's emerging more and more is that of being cellular or starting at a kind of small level and that's something that's, for example, I think the meta currency project and the SEPTRA people are brought and so on are very much into, which to me makes a lot of sense, especially in terms of, for example, how you relate to privacy and pervasive surveillance and so on. And that also relates to how to be, how to create organisms. So the fruit of connectivity, maybe you can see as the mushroom that comes out of the mycelium is something visible. And so the activity underneath then creates something. So maybe that's really kind of the action component of thinking. And so I think that's kind of another aspect of how do you create a form that has a kind of life and integrity of its own? And I think in terms of political institutions, that's certainly a challenge. And also in terms of action, how do you have action that's not reactive or that's not purely reactive, but that emerges out of some kind of re-synthesis or paradigmatic shift or kind of newly perceived openness to some possibility. So I think it's a matter of how you create forms, essentially. And part of that thinking is that, what persists in our world really is institutions. You have the pyramids can last a few thousand years, but in terms of what lasts and what has lasting effect, it's institutions. And again, that's a kind of question of how we as human beings can create these new kind of meta organic forms. So I really, those are kind of large and maybe abstract thoughts, but that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about, basically. Those are great, great thoughts. Let me just respond to the institutions for a second. I'm hearing my voice backwards. There was a book called The Institutional Revolution, which was about the pre-modern British aristocracy. I read it a few years ago. And it was fascinating. It was like, why did those British aristocrats do such stupid things? They had dueling. They didn't teach their kids anything interesting. They hunted with the fox in the hounds. They had very expensive parties. And it turns out that all of the institutions created around that time were to create trust at a distance in an era where you couldn't tell what was happening at the other end. So you needed to know that Sir Francis Drake was acting for the queen and not on his own interests when he was half the world around and you weren't gonna hear for three months whether he was still alive or not. And so those sets of institutions, which were really crusty and hard to change, gave us rural Britannia for multiple hundred years. It's super interesting. When we talked earlier about, when I mentioned earlier, that we're sort of rethinking, renegotiating the social contract, part of that is these institutions. Part of that is also the scripts in our heads that are part of consumerism, which we're kind of buried in the heart of. And there's very clever and interesting hacks to do that can work through the cracks. The more you talk about institutions, sometimes I think the more impenetrable they seem. And yet, I think that they can be hacked and cracked and changed. I think that the scripts in our heads can be changed. And one of my beliefs actually is that once somebody has had a felt sense of agency again, once they've done something in the broad menu of relationship economy projects, from the sharing economy to open source software to traffic calming to unschooling to whatever. Once somebody's had a felt sense of agency in one of them, I think that puts them in a different place and they start looking at the world a little differently and looking for that sense again, somewhere else. Except they don't really know that it's available in all these different places. And part of my frustration is, I see it happening in all these places and I haven't been able to sort of weave that and put it in the world yet as, look, this thing is actually everywhere. We can do institutional change, I think, from a very grass rootsy way while also trying to engage as Marty was saying earlier, the leaders at the top to begin to see and perceive differently and reward differently and hire differently and plan differently. But that's a pretty big ask for people who are buried in the middle of systems that don't reinforce, Wall Street does not reward the kinds of behaviors we're talking about here. It's structurally different. So I think, I love the word institutions. Ethan Zuckerman would be a really good person to talk to you about this. He talks about sort of institutional revolutions and rethinking these things. But I wanna pick up that thread and throw it into our conversations a lot. So thank you, Marty. Another possible angle. I wonder if we could get some of this conversation into existing conference settings. So I'm gonna go over and explore SoCAP today. I don't know if there's a setting there. I met Josh, I was having a chat with Josh from Bioneers last night and gave me a free ticket to Bioneers next week. So I'll go over, I've never been to either one. So I'll go check it out. But he, and it seems like Bioneers in particular might be a candidate for kind of, I don't know if it's more of a panel or a track or some kind of, and I was gonna push Josh on, are there kind of like co-branded other next generation things you could do around regenerative kind of in my opinion. But they would help leverage what they've already built but make it more, I've always wondered why these events don't have exponential curves, right? I mean, do they get dramatically better or not? What's that look like, you know? And what would a learning curve for conferences look like kind of? So I don't know if that's the right question to be asking, but it seems like there's a spotter for playing with. I like it. I'm trying to capture some of your questions in the chat. Other thoughts, what else might we do here to experiment with these things? But I really like the ideas that have come into the conversation. This is totally random, but I think one of the, it's a different tack. One of the things that I continue to be just so fascinated by is where are there rexie places in the world? And I don't really know how that manifests. I mean, in our respective travels and that sort of thing. But that's read that as the community expands, I just, like the stuff that doesn't make the headline, the places that aren't about becoming the next, you know, smart green, whatever, whatever city, more, but I don't wanna call it neighborhood-y and I don't wanna call it necessarily grassroots. It can be all sizes, all scale, every single flavor. But this concept of collecting like a map, I would love this, and this is very selfish for me because I love maps and I love travel, like having a map, a rexie map of the world or map of the rex universe. Or I would love, again, as a community expands to be able to crowdsource some of that stuff because I continue to find that a really rich, robust, both potential resource, but way of thinking. And I have my own running list of rexie places, which I'm happy to share with everyone else. Some of them I visited, others I have not. But I just wanna throw that into the mix because it's one of those things that I feel like, partly it's a project, partly it's a request, partly it's one of those through thread themes that I wanna make sure is kept alive. And I keep a list of these sorts of places in my brain, and in this brain as well. I think maybe sort of pilgrimage is virtual or real to some of the communities that are doing this in fact, will be extremely important. Yeah, really interesting. And yeah, and there's just so many places in the world doing interesting things to learn from. Michael, can you ask your question? Can you say what you mean by something that aggregates social networks? Yeah, so I mean, even in a simple example, so if you've got a team that you're working with and is there a tool that will say they can all collect their LinkedIn's and we can explore the collective social network. Like I mean the actual human networks that are already identified. Because to me it feels like the map you're talking about April is actually already described in the networks that all of us have. And no, they're not all rexie people in that, but those would be incredibly powerful patterns if we could surface them. I've wanted that for a number of things repeatedly and it feels like that would be the best gold line that we could have and easy to set up if it existed. Cool, yeah. LinkedIn protects its network viciously. Like they don't want people scraping the whole LinkedIn network and using that. It's scrappable now. They lost a case, it is now scrappable. They actually legally lost a case that they can't, they're not allowed to prevent scraping. Oh sweet, okay, that's fabulous because they've really been missing the march on what that could offer, what that could create. But historically they've seen that network as the crown jewels and that's why they've defended it so badly. So now that it's open let's figure out who's using it. That's great, one of the things about the brain is that it would make a really nice front end to browse LinkedIn, right? Imagine you could switch the brain over to go cruise through people's networks who were your first degrees in LinkedIn. That's super interesting. I think that's exactly it. I mean to me that it's in that core because us choosing to affiliate with somebody is one level to express like the common values, the commonality and that then layering on the interest graphs and everything else. I mean that, and to me it gets to, I think the most actionable and powerful thing in this community is to facilitate these connections. So whatever we do to enable that, I think is how we can rather, more important than our ideas or our methods or anything else is us to do work with others like us and have that be the way that this influences and spreads in the world. Like Dave's suggesting, they're suggesting that us having people have conversations about this at conferences, getting those voices out there, et cetera. Like I think it's us getting out there and helping each other collectively get out there in some way and building those, strengthening the ties between us and our, those that were in common is, that's my dream in this one. Love that. I really love that. Yeah. I wanted to have like a God's eye view of the LinkedIn database and say like, who are all the, who's working on regenerative agriculture. And let me see the entire world of that. And I can only see my first and second degree of connection. Sorry. So one of my immediate goals is to approach some of the communities that have been doing the work that inspired the relationship economy idea and try to find three people in each of these communities and invite them into the conversation. I just want three people who kind of get it where we have some simpatico on these ideas. I don't want to invite 50 people in. I'm not sure we can figure that out. But if two of the three people show up and we begin to integrate, it's more than one person not enough, one person kind of alone and they can't convince other people in the organization they have to integrate and resell. Three people from a group like Wikipedians, like, you know, whatever, open street map, like what have you, like the art of hosting, for example, a terrific community. Three people brought in here will, I think, create some of the connective juices that you're talking about, Michael. And I'm pointing down here, because you're down here to me, who knows where I am to you right now? This video thing, I don't know, it's hard, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Never mind, I forgot, I lost it, also. Oh, shoot, you laughed and it fled. Anyone else, we're getting close to the end of our call. Partly what I want to do, and I think I'll just do this on the rex list and I'm going to do a little bit of social engineering. I will randomly, I will not randomly, I will kind of do a little social engineering and pair people up, and I will first create my own idea of what a profile might look like and sort of show you where it is. But I will ask people for next month to pair up and help each other complete your profiles. One part of that is a belief I have that most people are not aware of their, usually their strongest superpowers. We know we're good at presenting something because we studied it hard, we did whatever else, but for example, my better half, April, thinks that everybody can remember what they were doing this day for the last seven years. And I don't remember what I was doing this day seven days ago without consulting my calendar. I have no idea, no idea. So one of April's major superpowers is this calendric genius where she just, time is her friend, time is my enemy, time is her friend. So she might not know to put that down on a profile as a superpower. So I'm trying to figure out what exercises do we create so that we can discover one another's superpowers and add to them over time on each, on one another's profiles, for example, things of that nature. Because then we can sort of look around and go, who's really good at changing other people's minds? That could be a superpower. Somebody who's really good at selling ideas as long as they believe in the ideas, whatever else it might be. So let's see if we can aim for some of that tactically. And I think what that does is it makes future networks more actionable. It lets us convene teams more quickly, it lets us know more quickly who we are. A few people in RACs will become sort of human routers because they'll be really curious about everybody and their superpowers. They'll go around and look at all of them and there'll only be one or two people who under, who know the breadth of talent available but they'll help us do this as well. So I'm thinking in that way. Any thought or feedback on this? It's worth the effort. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, you just start pretty simply and ask, I mean, part of it is self-identifying superpowers and like I know now thanks to being with you that I have a calendar brain and I do and I've never taken it for granted once I realized that you don't have one. So, that's helpful, right? But at the same time, I mean, I guess I'm thinking just about a very simple version 1.0 kind of hack of this, which is self-identify half a dozen superpowers that you believe, you know, don't be bashful, go ahead and do that and each of us to cross-identify, not that we know everyone else but each of us knows a couple people in this cohort at least to have others self-identify what we see those superpowers are and then you've got, you know, a basic thing. I'm also thinking about this, not just, I mean, I think Marty has more superpowers than any human being I know. You're too kind. You have that ability to see but then I'm also thinking about more practical stuff which is like who tells a really good story or tells a really good joke. Like these are things that I'm discovering are really important for me professionally and I'm not a natural joke teller. So I would love to get, you know, so it's that kind of thing as well. So maybe there's sort of maybe three layers, one being self-identification, the other being group identification of superpowers and the final one being, and you know, maybe this is more like a wish list but what are those superpowers you'd love to be able to source within the community? So one thing is what is your growing edge? What superpowers would you love to have or have access to? But there's also like, you know, there's things that each of us probably wants to get better at and if we can put those forward, I think that helps too. Not necessarily what I want to call out though is they're not necessarily rexy in themselves. And I don't want to call them all about professional development or certainly not networking your strategy. And I will just use the example of knowing, yes, there are people who do an amazing job of helping people learn how to tell stories. So I think storytelling is a key skill but even going beyond that, just something like, well, I use the example of telling a joke that might be oversimplifying but something like that which doesn't fit neatly into any particular bucket but you know, I think Marty's work around translating difficult concepts into things that don't require many words. For example, or like that's again, it's a superpower but I'd like to translate it in different ways. Thank you. Anyone else? Closing thoughts? And I think I'll read the poem again as a close because not everybody who's on now was on at the start. Any other thoughts? Cool. This is exciting. So I will, at the very start, I read The Summons by Robert Francis which is a poem we read at our wedding. And I think given how we've been talking about what this could be, I think you'll see even more now that this is the kind of energy we would like. Keep me from going to sleep too soon or if I go to sleep too soon, come wake me up. Come any hour of night. Come whistling up the road. Stomp on the porch, bang on the door. Make me get out of bed and come and let you in and light a light. Tell me the northern lights are on and make me look or tell me clouds are doing something to the moon they never did before and show me. See that I see. Talk to me till I'm half as wide awake as you and start to dress wondering why I ever went to bed at all. Tell me the walking is superb. Not only tell me, but persuade me. You know I'm not too hard to persuade. Thank you very much. See you on the list. I will offer a bunch of guidance, put whatever questions you have, throw them on there. I'll answer them. We'll answer them for each other. But thank you. This is a lovely kickoff. Thanks, Al. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.