 take us in. This is Thursday, March 15th, 2018. We are Rex and we are heading into a call and their custom for the start of calls is to have a poem or maybe two. I have two very short ones for us today. Hey Kelly, hey Todd. I have two very short poems for us today and the first one is titled Rice by Chun Yong He and it goes as follows. To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely. To you who sleep a lot because you are bored. To you who cry a lot because you are sad. I write this down. Chew on your feelings that are cornered like you would chew on rice. Anyway, life is something that you need to digest. So to you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely. To you who sleep a lot because you are bored. To you who cry a lot because you are sad. I write this down. Chew on your feelings that are cornered like you would chew on rice. Anyway, life is something that you need to digest and the second poem is titled For a Moment by Ron Padgett. It's funny how if you just let go of things they will come to you. That is to say sometimes. So what good is such a generalization? It makes you feel good to say such things from time to time as if you actually and really and truly knew something. So again For a Moment by Ron Padgett. It's funny how if you just let go of things they will come to you. That is to say sometimes. So what good is such a generalization? It makes you feel good to say such things from time to time as if you actually and really and truly knew something. Something about both poems captured the moment. I don't know what it is exactly but something took me there. And our goal now in this call today is just to check in and see where we are and see what we're working on that feels kind of rexy. And so with that in mind and I've got a couple items I'd love to check in about but who would who would like to step in and just say where you are how you are? Anybody? Jame? Were you pointing to someone else or were you volunteering? Yes I was pointing to whomever is to my my right on whichever screen you have. And on my screen that is the margin there is nobody to that side of your figure so it was a good try but all right that's why it looked like you raising your hand see. Frustrated. Unable to be shocked anymore. The thing that came out last night about 45 bragging that he was making stuff up in his conversation with Justin Trudeau. We have a trade deficit with you. No you don't. Yes we do. No we don't. It's just sad but not shocking and I wish I could be shocked these days. I long for the days of being surprised by horrible things. You know unfortunately the what that means is that when I do get surprised by something horrible it's gonna be really fucking horrible. Pardon my German. Because the because the hurdle for surprises gone up so much? Yeah that said we've been having some rain in Northern California and that's good and my wife and I have been just getting along we're like disgustingly still in love with each other even after 30 years so. Do you make the cats turn their heads? No we make them watch. I'm gonna report you. Please. Let me know if you need photos for the report. Oh dear. That's lovely. No it's not. It's horrible. No I mean the love part not the cat pornography part. I said nothing about pornography. I know I was in first in the gutter totally. Yep. Driven there by the times and I don't mean the newspaper. The financial times. So we live in a world where things are falling apart so what do we do about it? Do we simply hope for the better? Do we start planning a revolution? Do we go out and do 17 minutes of protest? I'm not young enough to do that. I think you need to be a Gen Z slash digital generation or what is the term? I think it wraps around generation alpha. We're starting over again. The greatest generation mark 2. If you go by the Strauss and Howell model for generations it actually would be the return of the greatest generation cohort. Interesting. But I'll shut up now. No that's alright. I was gonna say something which, huh, it's gone. I think, well partly I was gonna mention that, oh I think I know. I was a little surprised that there are apparently going to be talks between Trump and Kim, right, North Korea talks, that showed up somehow. And there's a school of thought that looks at Trump and his methods as breaking so many norms and so many boundaries that in fact he's shaking things up and might lead to some interesting results. That everybody else who would be minding the guardrails with great caution in making sure that they stay within the historic context of everything probably would not make a lot of progress on things. And I don't know I'm as struck by how out of control and you know how the wheels seem to be coming ready to come off at any moment. But what if everything needed to be shaken up a lot? They're shaken up a lot. Depends on whether you leave the lid on when you pick something up a lot. I think it can be useful. It probably was very useful to be to shake stuff up. But to do so in a way that is beyond chaotic. Do so in a way that actually, yes, you can get a good mix occasionally. You're also gonna fling stuff all over the floor. And occasionally the pot might break. And that's one of the big dangers right now. Right. Yeah. Hey Dave, hey Kevin. We're just going around checking in. And would anybody else like to go ahead? Somebody else. Please somebody else. Please. Anybody? Todd, would you like to check in? You're still muted. There you go. Sure. I'll tell you kind of what's weighing on me right now. You know, next year will mark 10 years since I left the world of employment and tried to do business in the way that I had clients and not a boss. And it's been quite the the road of starting and running a business and understanding who I am and what I offer and how to communicate that. And right now, the question that I'm asking is that most of the world is in a problem solution mindset that is especially consultants don't get hired unless there's a problem to solve. And if they want to hire you, then your job is finding the problem that you are going to solve. And I'm feeling that this is so not getting to the roots of the matter and exploring how we move towards possibilities rather than solving problems. So a move towards an aspiration of vision of possibility rather than solving problems. Because the truth is, when you're solving one problem, it's always connected to a dozen, a hundred others, and you're not making change at a systemic level. So I am grappling with that. And it's a creative tension that I enjoy stepping forward and saying, are there some possibilities that your organization wants to move towards rather than you have a problem that you want to get solved? And the whole problem solving thing as a problem itself from the people who do appreciative inquiry is easily applicable to what you just said. It's like if you're trying to fix problems, that's in fact not a great way to go about what you're doing. Yeah, many sort of, there's a global problem of perspective of how we're seeing ourselves, what we're seeing, how we're going about trying to fix what might be broken, how we're seeing what's broken. We're all over the map on that. Estee, you have to, I think, take off the call pretty soon. Would you mind checking in? And you are muted. I finally found the place where I wanted to write down problem solving versus possibilities. An undercaffeinated problem for sure. Now that it's written, I'm happy to check in. Had I really appreciate the way you framed that 10 X years post employment and possibilities versus problem solving? My check in is starts with really grappling with that question of what, who are you in the world if you are not employed and what happens over time when your free agency status seeps into every corner of the way you live life and relate to time, etc. I feel like I'm, I've had two kind of lovely discoveries as daylight savings time of the year has begun to assert itself. One in each of the two sectors that I consider the places where I would like to leave a legacy if one ever gets to do that at all. And so one is on my work in the, I think the sphere that brings us together most directly in the, and recognizing that the work that I've been doing around mind and multi-minding and describing what is as opposed to the model under which we think we operate, which causes is no longer useful. I realize that what I'm about is what this really is is a new grammar of productivity. And something about, I know this group appreciates that pop up to a new word and a new framing has been really powerful and simplifies. And I'll just point briefly to the other people who've been on this journey know that I tend to say things from a woman's perspective because I think that me, I feel, I always feel like I'm representing that 50%. And also try, I feel like I have a viewpoint from my involvement in Jewish life and Jewish learning, which are synonymous. Some sort of perspective about time frames. I was talking to Pete Kaminsky yesterday and he was, we were talking about the Long Now Foundation and how they're explaining to someone how their mission is to get you to think in time frames of a thousand years, for instance. And I suddenly realized that, yes, that that's a little bit of part of what that does. I love how they write dates with five digits. Yes. And speaking in terms of centuries, you know, well, we're at now we are at the century mark in Judaism. We're at the multi-century mark of hitting enlightenment. This is the way Jews talk about history. And we're at the century mark of the Holocaust and the collapse of Europe in the last globalization meltdown. And I've gotten involved with a wonderful podcast group of people called Judaism Unbound, which is just a delight to listen to two guys, you know, one in his mid 40s, one in his one, one probably mid late 40s, one mid late 20s, you know, having conversations and talking to other people. It's just a riot and feeling inspired to help them make the impact that people are wanting from them. So it feels like aside from everything we've said about Trump, which or the administration which I had my one check in there, I think that what we're experiencing now is precisely what people were afraid of when they said don't normalize. I think that almost every day I'm like what these pseudo these as if it's okay on any level as if there's any logic here as if as right. This is when it when we now know completely it is not. So that's that's my checking. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Peter, you're you're representing from Brussels. Is that I assume that's where you're right now? What's in with you? In Belgium, Flanders. I feel pretty okay to what Todd just said, there is a very nice post from five years ago, I think by Gene Russell, about Imagine Possible Test and Proof. I can't, I mean, I can find back the link, but it doesn't seem to work at this moment. So I'll try to drop the link in the chat box. You can see if it works, but there is a diagram in there and I copied the diagram in a Word document. So if I can do share screening, then I can show it. So this was the, can you see that? Yes, it's working great. It's astonishing when technology actually works for you. So this is a nice representation, but then she pointed to this link, where it's the same story, but this is the picture. And so Todd was talking about possibility here. But there is art in just before that on what is imaginable. And then science people want to check out what is testable and not people want to prove things. Science encompass hypothesis as part of its testable hypothesis. Yeah, so yeah. So that was what was going through my mind when Todd was checking in. And then I'm going to show something else. So I left an employment work two months ago. But I'm still in parallel doing my stuff on art and whatever I'm doing. So I'm working on a project that is called Hot Dogs Tonight. Well, it has to do with hot dogs. Because you're talking so much about Trump over there. So I have this one for you. So this is another nice. I like that. That says a lot doesn't need to be read though. Well, it can be. So but this is part of a body of work that I'm on. And I'm not going to bore you with every detail, but it started with with work from an American artist. You did say hot dogs tonight. I was like, was that hot dogs? It's like, yes, you did say hot dogs tonight. Okay, I just kind of let that go thinking, well, maybe I didn't hear right. So there's several stories I can confibrillate after the facts about this. So but when I was in the army in Belgium, when I was young, we had the military service obligatory compulsory obligatory compulsory compulsory. And so every Thursday or so, there were hot dogs. And that was the best meal of the week. Forward to hot dogs tonight. And this story started with this picture from an American artist about Robert Gober. And it's a prison window. So and I saw it in the Museum of Art in Brussels. It's an installation. So it's in real size. It's about three meters high the window. And I like the colors of the sky. So I wanted to paint it. And so over time, I'm not going to bore you with everything. But at a certain moment, I condensed the image to this. And then my teacher said, Well, maybe you can put, like stripes on it, like heat herring. And then I have a version of this somewhere, where the bars are not bars, but our hot dogs. So I can do a lot of things with this. So what? So but the story is about what you call it the golden cage or whatever cage, killed in cage. It's a golden golden golden cage or looking from inside and looking from outside inwards. And it has also to do with the sort of surveillance from social media. So a lot of things I'm trying to say, but in essence, I condensed this window to to this thing that is over here. That's the essence of the window. And I can do all sort of nice things with it. I can create text style out of it. Yes. And it has become a obsession. So when it becomes an obsession. Then I have standardized the whole thing. So I know exactly what are the proportions. It's like a font. You've Yes, it's like a font on it up as a letter. Yeah, and then it gets like some things like that. And then I make imprints and monoprints and collages. This is a big collage of 720 windows. And it could become an app. It's a night phone or a world clock. Where you guys in San Francisco are over here. So your nine hours, not not today, but normally your nine hours behind. So this is 12 o'clock and this is long and one hour before and this is JFK six hours before. So it becomes a sort of code. And then I'm making these small sort of things 20 by 20 centimeters that I can present together. And then somebody said you should go full digital with this. So I have the prison window from the prisoner inside being surveilled by somebody and the one watching in the cell. It's probably something that you guys can use in a in the US these days. It seems to somehow resonate. I don't know quite why but it's like looking to freedom from behind bars. So that's what keeping me busy besides having three chickens now and a sound system where I make soundscapes and a garden that I'm preparing for spring. That was my jacket. Lovely. Thank you. Is spring springing right now yet or is it raining and forecasted some freezing cold windy snow weather for the weekend. Got it. In Portland this weekend was the beginning of spring whether we get a cold snap again or not. But the leaves the blossoms are coming. The cherry trees are in full bloom. Spring has sprung. Thank you. I might suggest that you take a look because you've come up with a visual repeatable theme visual memetic as it were that you take a look at the blue dog phenomenon because it's very similar. Right. There's an artist that comes from Louisiana where you know he's using this single repeatable visual thematic. It was a dog that he owned. Right. And the blue dog series became very popular. Right. And so you may take some lessons from looking at what he did. It can go all directions of course. Nice. Also the obey giant meme basically is huge. So you're very likely inspired by that. But but if you haven't looked into it look at that because it's a it's basically a high contrast picture of Andre the giant and made its way as a very powerful meme worldwide that gets stenciled all over the place. Have you done stenciling? Have you gone out and done a little graffiti? I mean you know if you're going to try all the media. So this this thing I also have versions of it that look like a tag. Perfect. Like that's right. You had a stencil in the middle there. These things. Sweet. Anyone else would like to check in? I'll check it in. Please. I have two boys who are 12 and 15 almost which I'm like oh my god that's like pretty. How that happened. Right. Like that was that took 15 minutes and I have gotten to a place where I'm like the the primary question is am I okay today? Am I okay right here in my living room today because of sort of all of the news that just keeps getting worse and worse that I just can't even believe because of the conversations that I have to be having with the kids like because of sort of I feel like I've gone very Buddhist in my sort of like all I have to worry about right now is right now which is sort of new for me that's a different that's a different approach than I've taken and it and it has made me feel or wonder if I'm being terribly self-centered. Right. There's too much going on in the world for me to only you know sort of check in with myself but it has been really helpful. It's been really it has felt so good to be able to be present specifically for the kids right through all of this total nonsense and to be able to talk to them about things without being completely triggered by my own fear nonsense. So there's been that piece and at the same time I work for a little not-for-profit think tank and I've been there for seven years now and the executive director is talking about retiring which has brought up all kinds of interesting things. I mean like apparently this is a thing that you do when you get to be 67 or 68 it turns out you want to retire and I think this is a horrible idea because he's also my dad and I really enjoy working with him and and so that has also been a real opportunity to do some interesting work and self-reflection and and am I okay right now and and and will it be okay because there's a really interesting this is the first time I've gotten a little choked up about it in a little while. What has come up for me is that if if in fact the organization which I treasure and I think is an amazing group of people that's been built over the last 25 years and I and I get to be sort of part of the community binder in that if it's okay without him right does that make me disloyal which is not something that I would ever think about like that took a lot of sort of working through to figure out that that was what was going on for me so. So I feel like there's just been a ton of stuff that's very close to my heart while also the world appears to be sort of burning but it's not burning in my living room so I'm okay right now. So that's that's where I'm at these days. That's that was that's fantastic thank you and I I I don't have kids but I oscillate between wishing I was 12 or 14 again because what I had at my fingertips when I was 12 or 14 it was nothing compared to what's out there now and the access and the power and the magnification and the everything the leverage you have is just insane if you're sort of awake and curious and go go find stuff and you know the ability to connect with other people and then at the same instant like I'll flip then into the mode of I I don't envy any parent of a child these days not from the conversations you have to have not from the fear you might have and anybody who is of color and going outside I had a I had a moment a couple of years ago when Black Lives Matter was was big I had a moment where I was like I'm going to go drive to the grocery store and it flashed through my head that I'm not concerned that getting in my car and driving over to the grocery store I might get pulled over for a broken taillight and shot and killed. I don't have that concern and yet there's a bunch of people who do and very justifiably and you can say what you want about the statistics about it but this is a long-standing concern. So it's hard to exist in a world like that and maybe you know what this is all a false flag operation by the Buddhists. This is basic basically Trump's election all these other things are a way to get more people to become Buddhists because it's the only way to cope with well you can also go for deeper into fundamentalism I guess there is that that sort of does exacerbate things but then you know you choose a camp you just go go go but but maybe this is all a way to get more people who can cope with severe whiplashing kind of change and Kevin what's up in your world? Well and I'm perhaps my perspective is a little bit you know different I'm kind of enjoying the destruction of complacency right now. The fact is that we're ridding ourselves as toolmen you know said we're ridding ourselves of unjustified assumptions right about you know what is possible both positive and negative right at the moment so there's a bunch of built up potential energy that is being released kinetically now right because people are being forced to being their own journalists to being their own fact finders to being their own you know ability to sort through this you know the ability to delegate to other people is being revoked right and so this actually puts us back into a form of representative democracy where we have to represent ourselves a little bit more you know forcefully I think that the you know the the reaction to current events is actually going to be pretty interesting it's it's hard in the moment but I'm very now interested in what the opposite reaction is going to be in the not too distant future right so that's where I'm coming from I'm seeing a whole bunch of things that are you know were new hypotheses and new ways of seeing things right that we wouldn't have imagined a couple of years ago are about to become possible and so I thrive on this kind of stuff so it's actually a kind of a an interesting period I don't know if any guys watch any of these Highlander movies right but there's a there's a group of people who aren't trying to destroy each other to become the one right they're called the observers all right and I feel like I am in the best place to be one of the observers right that I've ever had my entire life well enjoy being in the Highlander movie but you know it's a great time to be an observer super interesting yeah and it's hard because the whole the whole notion of observing or witnessing is part of the action it's very hard to step outside the action now because everybody's kind of connected and everybody's involved and if you can preserve equanimity while watching you may come up with a better strategy for solving the whole thing which is a great way to you know to be an observer yeah and yet the mere act of observing is is hard well I mean you know like quantum physics observing puts you into the action right it causes by observing things change right and so I recognize that in the act of observing I'm changing some things you know I've found a lot of solace in you know writing of the people who you know are in the behavioral economics camps and the you know social psychology camps you know they're they're they're all saying you need to be able to step in the other just joined us I think we're getting some background noise from your your mic it's it's like the the mice from planet Mars have joined us yes exactly I just muted bill's mic for a second bill if you want to join in unmute and please do join us we're busy checking in going around there we go so I think that's that that's kind of it for you for me I mean I get as distressed as anyone all right in you know from time to time but then I try to pull back and kind of do a Marshall McLuhan and say well you know the medium that is being delivered is a message to bill we can't hear you we're yeah we don't we don't actually hear your voice you sound like a durable that's being squeezed through a spaghetti machine yeah no not not better not better now we see your ceiling there you are you are it is actually you speaking but we don't hear a thing who gave him helium and sped him up oh totally totally I want this effect though I know you still you still sound like a durable on on on amphetamines I think I saw this on episode of the outer limits right bill you might need to log out and log back in which is I think what you're doing now good we control horizontal that was funny Kelly keep it together keep it together there was wasn't there an episode of Spark Trek where they got sped up and they were eating their lifespan too fast yes and Kirk cut actually Kirk got sped up to help them out and it turns out he falls in love with a fast moving woman and there's kind of a good song about this too yes is this any better oh my gosh we can hear you now bill that is exactly what you sounded like to us it was really great okay but now you sound normal and you've missed a bunch of check-ins that's what we're doing we're going around and checking in with everybody let me turn to Dave for for a moment so you can match rhythm with us and then we'll we'll go to you yeah it's fun it's fun just to kind of hear from everybody the I was resonating with the the kids story because I've got my two college age boys have just shown up in town this week so it changes the changes the tempo of the apartment a little bit when you add their energy so but it's fun right I kind of you know I I think I'm on the I'm jealous of them side not not and they're really really out in the world now like they're they're doing stuff yeah one of them supposed to graduate from college this in June we'll see see what happens then and the other one of course is you know flying around from country to country so it's uh it is fascinating to and then passing watching them interact too because they fight so it's a treat and then also just resonating with what you were saying Todd because it's definitely you know the transition for me from from thinking about problems to thinking about possibilities has been really kind of important you know it's like it's been a way to you know kind of feel like the world's got got potential and is worth kind of funding the way through so I don't think I quite got into the equanimity of Kevin yet but so the the question is for you know how do you you know how do you like for me it's like how do I do even kind of small initiatives that I consider to be progress how do I make contributions yet get traction on stuff and this week the topic has been so you know been very excited about regeneration and regenerative agriculture and how do we think about kind of large-scale systems changes and the one of the you know the focus has been then well due to kind of a landscape or a community basis like if you're going to be doing these systems changes in a place because it doesn't help to do change one part of the system one place in one part of the system another place they don't interact and so the question that we were talking about this week is is an issue like simultaneity you need many things to happen at the same time how do you teach in a practical sense and particularly from an investment perspective how do you get investors to think about simultaneous investments in multiple parts of the system you know they're coordinated enough that they can be reinforcing and is that a you know in some sense that a salable product you can make in the social investing world where you could go to a Rockefeller and say you're going to invest your endowment you need to make sure that you're doing it in a simultaneous way so that you can get higher returns and more certain things but you know those are the kinds of things that have been you know in in play in my work right now Dave I have a question how did your work with regenerative tie into what Hodgson is doing and what Jones is doing with Regenicon do they do they connect are you cooperating or collaborating I'm a little bit kind of in the weeds about how they you know interact with each other yeah so so my stuff that we you know like thinking about regenerative agriculture has been kind of just to like I need to focus on something and that spawned directly from conversations in Hodgson started so you know the concept of RASA the regenerative agriculture sector accelerator was like the google docs folder name that Hodgson came up with and then Kevin I'm not I'm not particularly well tied in with Kevin I know Mark Barash a little bit so I've been meeting with Mark kind of regularly Mark's helping with the events so there's a better if you guys know this there's a regenerative economics conference that Kevin Jones is going to be hosting at the impact of in San Francisco in the beginning of May and I'm kind of excited by it because it does seem like one of those kind of you know it's another sign that the concepts are getting more traction and so Kevin's you know I think maybe in his own style discovering it as he goes so he doesn't seem particularly sophisticated in the thinking of stuff I mean you know I like I'm looking back and going oh you know Gene Russell was talking about the stuff years ago and I never got it and so you know there's a little bit of history to it I'm just kind of catching on if he's like you know two years behind me so that's that's not a good place to be but but they all kind of interrelate and then he is taking more of a you know people are taking kind of narrow and and a lot of reviews and I'd say he's at the society level kind of how do you think about a regenerative world and so it's interesting to see you know we've been trying to focus on agriculture a little bit just because there's a lot of cool examples but you know you really don't get to do agriculture without changing around agriculture so the society stuff turns out to be very interesting as well. Thanks. Thanks for trying to connect the dots. Yeah if you get a chance come out for the event I think. Well I was invited but I'm in Japan at the time and I'm I'll be out in your neck of the woods I got invited to something Institute for the Future is doing in April so maybe we can tag up then. I would love that yeah be fun and I still haven't caught up with you behind me so it's like you know San Francisco crab incident or something. Kevin what do you remember what it is at IFTF that you're doing in April? I yeah let me just it's a it's part of the roadmap that you guys came up with recently and this is kind of the future of work and befriending the machines roundtable. All right cool thank you. Is it I'm going to pronounce the Parminder. Parminder sounds right. Yeah correct pronunciation. She invited me via Derya Lam which was an introduction that you made Jerry so thank you very much. Cool cool cool I'm part of that. Bill now that you don't sound like a Dribble being mangled do you want to check in? Although I gotta say the Dribble. The Dribble thing is. Oh unique I mean maybe if that was my check-in. Yeah and I'm feeling very much like a squeeze Dribble today's. Right um you know it's interesting that you're asking us to sort of like focus on on how we're approaching these things. There are two things that are sort of like center in in my thinking on this right now. One is that we we went from about three years ago to having like 28 shareholders to the point where now I'm the major shareholder of our company and I'm in the process of buying out it hopefully all of the other shareholders in the next hopefully month or so and specifically around the question of what's the point of the company. In other words they're all investors who came to this from the point of view of I want to make money. And from the get-go 10 years ago 12 years ago I had in our articles of incorporation the socially responsible investing concepts in other words respect to the environment blah blah blah all this kind of stuff so they can't knock me for being social impact oriented. And in essence because we use social impact as a marketing thing it has become sort of like a tension with them that I'm spending so much money literally giving away like a million dollars a year and in their mind that's their money and I'm saying no it's marketing and so it's like you I mean I literally had to write them a letter saying here's an offer to buy you out because I can't do both I can't do social impact and maximize earnings for you I just I don't wake up in the morning wanting to do that or willing to do that and excuse me according to our shareholders agreement with more than 60 percent of the stock I make all the decisions so thanks but here's you here's some money go away now I think it's I forget how you're organized are you a b-corp for benefit no it's a c-corp because it was before b-corp yeah yeah we started this operation okay but but on the other hand the thing that I'm sort of dealing with with some coaching and everything is the impact of one's own focus you we've all heard that phrase you don't see what is you see what you are in the world and I've been toying with in other words practicing that in the sense of taking the exact same situations and changing my perspective and then looking at it again it's like you know it's like you're seeing that in action you know that your attitude your focus what you're looking at what how you're interpreting all of that shifts when you change in a way who you are looking at that particular event or circumstance there was I didn't want to make any of my shareholders wrong I didn't want to because it was really getting kind of tense for a little bit and then I sort of backed off and said no I'm not going to go that way um but my point is that it got me to the point where I was I was actually able to play with that perspective shifting aspect and not not sort of start from the point of view of I'm right you're wrong or this is the way it should be and that's the way it you know no it's just it keeps shifting so I'm in a very fluid situation at this point and all these issues that you listed trust institutional change social movements human dynamics I mean in other words those those are front and center I mean we're working with the with the legal women voters that has been asked to lead a Miami Beach women's march next week and and they're pushing for this sort of creation of institutional change around women focus you know in other words in the social movement for the Parkland school etc in other words all of this stuff it seems to be bubbling up with a change of perspective approach in other words we're not going to focus on you know in essence what are the impediments no this is what we want and you're going to give it to us in other words we're going to find a way to get what we want and to me that's a beautiful beautiful experience with the millennials that they're willing to commit themselves to that and not back down and I'm really sort of hopeful that they're going to succeed at that you know sort of break the the dam that has been creating that intransigence I'm hoping to yeah I'm wondering what we might do to to help them achieve that I don't know you're you're what you were just saying made me think of one approach to getting people to see their choices differently which is and I've not gone through it or read the books but Byron Katie is well known for the work right and there are four questions that she says you ask yourself the first one is is it true this thing that this thing that you're facing is it true number two is can you absolutely know that it's true which is really interesting it takes the whole the whole question to a new depth the third question is how do you react what happens when you believe that thought what is your response to it and number four is who would you be without that thought and these are really profound questions I mean these these questions will take you right down deep into what you were just talking about Bill which is how you're seeing any particular situation they don't they don't cause you to step out and try to take someone else's perspective I don't think that's part of part of her work although Kelly is that part of what happens well so then after you do the four questions um they she has what's called the turnarounds and so you you take your original statement and then you turn it around to the perspective of the other to the opposite and to the self and and so it's a I have this is actually how I've done a lot of the work around my dad's retirement is through the work right and it's a really interesting just sort of um having the opportunity to say this is sort of the belief that I'm holding and then you examine it with these four questions and then you do the turnarounds it really does allow you to put some different perspective in play right so the turnarounds the idea is you turn around the statement and then you try to think of a way in which that's true and and it doesn't it she is not imposing you know any sort of change upon you right she's not you don't do this work with the like man I really have to change my mind about this it really just creates a tiny bit of space in which to think about it differently I have found it just absolutely I mean really kind of life-changing I'm a huge fan that's cool thank you yeah I'm a fan but I've not done the work so to speak um or read the books or gone deep into it but it seems like a hugely valuable model um and that reminds me of nonviolent communication which has as its process model um that two people in opposition basically um are asked to paraphrase what the other said that that's basically the whole exercise is the two people sit down one person speaks and says what what is happening for them and then the other person is asked to mirror back to them what they said without agreeing to it right that's the contingency is that um they're not saying I agree that that this happened they're just trying to say this is what I heard you say am I right right um and that's that's um super interesting because the mere act of speaking and having to put your head into the other person's head and say what they said in a way that they'll agree that that's what they said causes some of that softening and some of that change right and that brings me to a TEDx talk by a hostage negotiator I think Chris Voss who says um the the moment that the person you're negotiating with says uh that's right you you you you have an opening because you've just said something that they hear you see their perspective right um which which um takes me over into my check-in actually strangely enough um and uh bill are you uh were you done checking in was what were you done checking in um I just like to comment about the um the work and it's sort of interesting I've sort of resisted doing the work to an extent because I don't know it's a personal thing watching uh Byron Katie is I mean she's she's so in almost a way arrogant about her way of doing this other words is that right you know like like she knows what's right and I have a really deep seated problem of error being wrong when somebody asked me that it's difficult but I happen to have signed up for a journaling thing with the daily ohm and the lesson number one was what they call revisioning your life now it's essentially the same thing as Byron Katie but they just say take a difficult event and feel it with your emotions and then choose and write out a new version from where you are now standing or forget about the past you know what caused that particular problem and just write out a new version now and it's in essence that's the same thing that Byron Katie is asking is that old perspective true and but but this approach gave me a way to get at it and I ended up writing out the description of the process that that worked in other words gave me a totally totally new perspective that allowed me to let go of that past perspective of of hurt you know of holding on to the hurt rather than letting go of it but but it's essentially the same thing as Byron Katie's you know because you're you're you're forcing yourself to see that there's more than just that thing that you're holding on to I was hurt and therefore I'm entitled to hold that hurt you know it's like right but but that's that's sort of like there's one other thing that I want to just post by the way because it's a wonderful book there's a book called The Scientification of Love by Michael Odent has anybody ever heard of him apparently he was the one that came up with like water birthing in other words birthing in a bathtub or a hot tub or whatever in other words it's it's it's really a very deep analysis of the natural way that birthing should occur and I don't want to make our job as relationship oriented too deep but basically he says that we've got to go back to birthing people the right way the natural way or we're going to continuously I mean they've literally done that back in the 1970s and I think that we're going to try to do a documentary on this there was significant work by the doc the the Department of Health the the NIH which you know in other words that does the funding for health initiatives and everything that came up with it criticism there was a worldwide analysis of birthing methods and the impact on social fabric and everything and they found that there was a higher level of violence in those countries where there was a less natural birthing process and our birthing process in the United States is extremely mechanical in other words all these doctors around fear of this ultrasounds of that 50% you know uh caesareans I mean we've got a an aggressive process which they basically are we're saying back in the 70s and then they took this report and put it in the bottom drawer and didn't want anybody to see it apparently and and in essence we're criticizing our fear creation at the time of birth and we wonder why we've got such such a violent culture we're creating it from birth and don't realize it there's a whole series of institutionalized kinds of violence and trauma that we don't recognize because we've normalized them we we call them culture and they affect us right from the start in many ways and our point in doing a documentary is it sort of like a documentary you are on dirt or you know in other words that you get to a basic level of do you guys realize what you're doing with monoculture do you realize what you're doing with the birthing etc yeah kelly you wanted to jump in just I I was having a violently visceral reaction in the with the thought of a male doctor really telling people how birth should go because I my my suspicion I had a water birth I gave birth in the tub the first time and couldn't the second time because I was having terrible back labor and I couldn't like I had to have people's hands on my backs and they couldn't they couldn't reach me in the tub but the my whole perspective on this is all about removing any kind of agency from the mother right the actual person giving birth whose body has been basically designed to do it the whole removal of let us go ahead and tell you how you're going to do this makes me insane so it I think it's a fascinating and the and and parenting outcomes right mothering outcomes and postpartum depression and all of this are hugely impacted by the experience that the woman has while she's getting birth so if you take all of her agency away then she's like why I don't know right like I was very lucky and that I came out of that and I was like I am a bad ass right like my body like it has completely met all of my expectations like this was amazing I had nothing to do with it I can't even believe the system works it's it's an absolutely miraculous situation that we are able to create people at all like and I can't even imagine the experience of having that be like no no no you can't don't trust your body trust me like I know like anyway it's hugely life changing obviously experience and I think it has profound implications love that absolutely love that a girlfriend long long ago pointed me to our critique of the Lamaze method as a way of hypnotizing the birthing couple out of the process basically make them make them focus on breathing make them focus on one thing in particular and then you don't have to worry about them look so that's an interesting take on that right because it's a I'm sort of like or it's a helpful tool in which you get to stay present with your own experience I don't know which but it was it was it was an interesting critique because because in some sense it behooves the medical establishment to you know give the couple something that has them feel like they're participating and yet not be a problem yeah also an old colleague of mine from the days at new science associates when his wife gave birth they were in the hospital the baby comes out and he says okay you know i'd like to hold her and he gets the baby and then they're like oh we need the baby now we're going to do this and this and this and he's like no you're not and they're like no no no but we have but we have to listen to a straight tizzy yeah like he says no no no you don't get to and they went into a straight tizzy he was recounting the story it's very interesting how the establishment has a has a routine that it needs to do okay but just a footnote to that jerry that this book basically says the father shouldn't even be in the room interesting no in other words that you really need to respect nature and the fact that that that woman doesn't know what she's doing kelly's go about her head is about to start spinning right it's just like the father shouldn't be in the room if what he's going to do is scream and faint yes that is true right like but but the father needed to be in my route like i needed him he took this is a story for another time because i actually have to go but like he told this is how i got through it was he just told me stories the whole time like i was like talk to me right i can imagine a scenario in which that's not helpful but the the part where you get to choose right and and some structure around here's what might be helpful would certainly be right like here the things to consider as you're going into this fairly traumatic process is great but i i really bristle at this that which is natural right because work like i'm not going to go to a cave like and so you have this huge spectrum of like i was very lucky that i got to have two natural births like and i got to totally have them on my terms and i did it at a birth center and i write like so lucky and also my friends who didn't have that were also very lucky that they had medical intervention right but that they had the education and the and the resources and the wherewithal to kind of know what their options are i think is has just is huge there's a lot about this about agency yeah and and about how a lot of our social institutions take away agency for a variety of reasons good and bad yeah and about how having agency is a usually i can think of very few examples where it's not a really great thing where where that actually solves a lot of other problems um so um let me let me check in before we actually run out of our call time um and partly i'm at we're at this very weird plastic moment in history um and it seems like everybody got connected like like half the globe is on like not only sort of on the intertubes but sharing out their their most passionate personal things on things like facebook and snapchat or whatever um it seems like the social contract and the governance mechanisms are up for negotiation like nobody's clear what works what doesn't uh where everything goes um how it all works and i've got a couple different projects that are sort of like needy chewy right in the middle of these questions kinds of projects i wanted to describe those briefly uh and come back to this um because you know the historic argument kind of polarizes these different choices oh it's you know it's either communism which look didn't work or full uh full-blooded uh capitalism which of course goes hand in hand with democracy it's like well i'm unclear that capitalism is even friendly to democracy i think it likes to have democracy because it looks good but i'm i'm unclear that those two things go together you know hand and glove like like they're described to us so so a couple things um and and anybody who'd like to sort of offer advice or counsel or or jump in on helping do any of these things please contact me on the list or separately and and i'd love i'd love some help but one is i have i've been given one a keynote spot at pdf the personal democracy forum which is coming up pretty soon in june uh close to mid-june and um they're changing the format for pdf this year it it's historically like the last seven years have been lots and lots and lots of panels where every year they have like 120 moving parts called called panelists and they just go wham-wham-wham and and some of the speeches are quite memorable but it's speeches and panels speeches and panels they've decided this year to experiment differently they're doing 12 keynotes which are 15 minute presentations plus 15 minutes q and a with the audience in plenary and then every keynote runs a workshop in the afternoon that's 90 minutes and i'm going to go into trust and i'm going to go into talking about how did trust break how are we trying to recapture it i've got a wall full of post-its uh off close by here which is sort of my brainstorming so far and and would love to go deeper into that so so contact me if you if you want to come back but but part of brainstorming that made me do some thinking about the moment we're in right now and and how do i generalize up from the moment we're in and it's it's strictly my generalizations because there's clearly a whole school of thought that's saying hey things are getting better like like the world has never been this good look at the stats and you know bill gates his favorite book is uh steven pinker's latest about how the world is getting better and uh i'm sort of not buying what they're selling i think it's important to address that point of view and and go deeper into it but i don't want to i don't want to digress there i think that we're at this very strange cost that's potentially dysfunctional for a couple centuries you know back to this thinking in centuries thing um that you know the the the story many of us tell is when guttenberg and others kind of invent the printing press for 200 years the church sort of monopolizes it and turns it into a way to create uh bibles and indulgences and then for the next 200 years uh there's wars all across europe because people figure out no no no it's good for other stuff too and look um so that's 400 years of basically chaos um from the invention of that thing so where are we now the second thing is uh i'm working with salim ismail uh who wrote exponential organizations and uh working with him on something which um he's he's kind of on a quest to fix civilizations so i'm trying to to design a workshop process that might tackle difficult uh domains like learning is the the pilot domain but imagine we would also do um governance or we would also do aging or whatever else and try to figure out a repeatable process to tackle these issues and get some results like do some interesting work and and the exponential people are all about exponential technologies and change i find that a bit of a limiting perspective so i'm adding a bunch of things and one of the things i'm adding to the process is i'm inventing a role i call story threaders and a story threader is a bit like a graphic facilitator and and um we've probably all been in meetings where somebody's drawing on a big piece of paper on the wall um jamai you and i know some of the world's best graphic facilitators through you know through iftf and other sorts of things and i've always found uh even the best of them they do something that's really interesting and yet effectively the the the the things they create are very seldom referred back to they're not digital they're not useful artifacts in the long run so i'm trying to think how do i help in how do i help midwife a new way of creating useful materials during and after a meeting and so i created a description for these story threaders and i i was thinking of story weavers as well but i went with threading instead of weaving could go either way um and the notion is i'm going to invite people who are really creative in completely different domains uh and give them as much leeway of action and sort of freedom of motion and artistic license as i can create in the space and ask them to look for the shiny nuggets in the event in the conversation uh to intervene if they need to or want to and then to take some time after the event and to craft some story from what they saw to thread together the nuggets to basically string together the the interesting points and create a point of view and it might be their point of view it might be one they heard and want to represent they might go back to some of the speakers in the event and sort of interview them whatever and then they might create a card deck or a game or a video or a documentary or a super game like jane meganeville does or or or the notion being that some of these things go viral and cause a lot of change a terrible example is kony 2012 right remember back in 2012 there's this warlord loose his name is kony and and and the magic of kony 2012 is that the video says hey kids bring your parents to see this and send us money right there's this horrible thing going on and not not it wasn't accurate but but it had this magical little loop the way predates the ice bucket challenge that generated a whole bunch of cash for for for a donation for a charity and got a lot of attention on a problem even if it did so poorly so how so how do we create more functional models for change make them open and put them in the world and then how do we do this in a way that ratchets up so that every time there's one of these events it creates materials that then are the platform that the next one and other sorts of initiatives can use to leverage up and i use here as the as the model um thanks cali um i use here as the as the model wikipedia which unfortunately is just an encyclopedia right so they so fortunately they're an encyclopedia which gave them a mental model for what to do but unfortunately they're just an encyclopedia which means there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen with and around it or beyond it that they don't do for example years ago i wish that you know that we had a grassroots set of business sector briefing books so that if i had to go look at something in retail or something in transportation i could just go look at a brief that this briefing book and get a really good snapshot of what's going on in that world that's not a task wikipedia is going to undertake but it's certainly a task that somebody could collectively create as a resource which would be super interesting um so um the story threader is one thing i'm trying to bring to this process but i'm trying also to design other things into the process to invite with care to convene with care and i'm all those things are up for design so if you'd like to know more about that or participate let me know and then some of the things i'm talking about i will bring into into rex in different ways and then i'm interested also in making rex rexier which has been my quest for you know a long time but i've got some ideas on what that actually might mean at this point which i think i will bring up in a in a future rex call but one of the pieces that is standing out here and this cuts across all the different things i'm talking about but it came up in a really cool conversation yesterday with the saline group was how to reach out to the other other with a capital oh whatever that means to each of us and how to bridge the cultural divide how to talk to people who are very different from you how to find some sort of unity or or agreement on what's going on and we've touched a little bit on on this during our conversation here but i'm struck by a couple different things a couple different chunks of media which i'll just mention here one is um have you all watched any talks by anand jerry daradas he's a guy he's got so like salt and pepper gray hair that almost stands up straight he speaks very eloquently he's also a very good writer he wrote he wrote a piece i think for the new yorker years ago about a prisoner and his victim that got him sort of attention but he wrote an apology letter in 2016 which he read as a tedx talk and it's an apology to those who have been who have been hurt who have suffered and it's really good it's very good and one of the things he says in the middle was i was listening but i didn't hear you i thought that my view that globalization is going to help everybody for example was sort of unquestionable and i didn't think i needed to necessarily understand your perspective on it and he goes through in a very nice way how we need to actually sort of listen to each other then through a a couple other conversations i ended up watching a tedx talk by the author of the documentary the red pill a woman named cassie j and i hadn't really heard of the red pill movement i'd heard of the mens movement and men's rights advocates or otherwise known as mra's and it's it's pretty controversial and it's interesting and cassie j basically reports in her talk how she spent a year creating this documentary because she wanted to go look at the red pill movement which is an obvious sort of quote to the matrix and do you want to take the red pill of the blue pill and there's a whole bunch of people who are like taking the red pill figuratively and diving down into into this men's movement and what she discovered she says um in the middle of it she had to transcribe all of her hours of interviewing and she says nobody will pay more attention to your words than somebody who has to transcribe faithfully what you said and only when she was doing the transcription did she realize that she had been busy projecting on to her interviewees what she was assuming they were saying what she needed them to say what she was looking to say with her documentary and at the end of it and to the horror of a lot of people out speaking in the world she realized that they weren't saying what she was assuming they were saying that they were bringing up some interesting and valid issues you can listen to her talk to sort of enumerate them and she does a really good job of enumerating the kinds of questions that were brought up and then that took me over through a couple other conversations to listen to an interview with Jordan Peterson who is a controversial psychologist at the University of Toronto whose name first came up for me when I put the patreon campaign up and went to look at a graph tree on to see who who is doing well on patreon and it turns out that Jordan Peterson is making was making at the time $43,000 a month from donations on patreon which is pretty damn good right well what's up there and so i'm skipping a couple things in between but there's an interview you can see online of him and a woman reporter for a tv station um which is which is an encapsulation of the divide and the difficulty of this conversation so the reason i'm bringing it up is that it's one of many examples that we could go to for how to reach out to the other and what this might what well this particular interview is an example of what it ought not look like because through the interview uh Peterson who normally is a little a little too smug for my taste and who who i have trouble kind of listening to on his own but he is calm and busy sort of expressing himself through the interview and the interviewer every time she says so what you're saying is dot dot dot the part that follows is always wrong like like the moment she says so what you're saying is then and then you're like even watching the thing you're like no he didn't really say that he's and then he defends himself really nicely he's basically this is a bit like a fencing match and he perries for thrusts and then replies pretty calmly no how about this how about that and and the whole thing is fraught because uh relationships between genders are fraught relationship between people of different races are fraught um the very ability to have dialogue is in danger because um tolerance has been weaponized in different ways so we're we're in a in a world where these things are hard to say and do um and so that that has me both very sort of engaged very drawn in to what's happening trying to pay attention to the dynamics of it because it's fruitful dialogue between people who normally wouldn't talk or would be driven you know away from each other um and i think there's something really interesting in the middle there and that that was sort of longer than i wanted to express that and then um and then a last thing by way of check-in is in january i went back to the dojo and i'm i've been back in aikido class which i did ten years ago i took aikido for a couple years in berkeley uh enjoyed it a lot and then moved into the city and just didn't really really reconnect with it and there's a dojo two blocks from home here in portland which happens to have ancestry back to the dojo that i used to go to in um in berkeley and so i have found it really centering and i've found that metaphorically incredibly useful because aikido as you've probably heard and talks wherever is all about blending with the energy that's present in the world normally an attacker tries to do something to you and you sort of blend with them and neutralize them or you know direct them somewhere else and that seems like a bit of a recipe for social change and for for crafting uh different kinds of things so i'm trying to figure out how how that fits with the other pieces of it but um another thing that aikido gives you is a sense of calm in the whirlwind of action and i was feeling that last night because i went and worked out at six o'clock last night and was doing all right it was a good day in the in the dojo and in the you're you're doing something that's a little bit complicated and it looks pretty you know whoosh whoosh whoosh and yet you know where to look and you know what to pay attention to and you're sort of in the moment in a different way than you would be if you didn't have that training or that frame of mind and so how is the work you know katie byron's the work like that how what are the fruitful sources for this kind of work that gives you some calm and some perspective for each of us and how might we share those and then work on those so long check in sorry i probably should have paused between the chapters kevin we can't hear you for some reason you're unmuted but but the police are coming after you i heard them in the background it sounds someone else's mic is the police is not actually here okay well it sounds like you're going through you're taking good advantage of the uh you know the the turmoil to uh make some positive changes that's good i like what you said earlier kevin very much it's it's a very it's a broken moment but when you know when things break is when change happens absolutely any time you're going through a phase change either from survival to success or realizing that success in and enough and you're going from success to significance is an opportunity to do a maximal change moment anytime you go through a phase change and we kind of celebrate people who go from success to failure back to success again we like that narrative right of oh you know um made it back and i think that there are people who um have been nominally successful for a long time that try to pursue significance and fail they fall back in success and they try that again right that's a less known narrative but it's equally heroic right in terms of trying to you know move out of you know the the complacency that's associated with merely being uh successful by a lower set of you know of you know ground rules so here yeah i i sent you a model i got to go but uh to help support your your upcoming talks so take a look at i i couldn't put it in the chat folks but i'm sending it to you jerry thank you very much i appreciate it kevin thanks thanks for being here jerry has a comment on your focus that that threads um story threaders right story threaders we we try to collect stories in other words that's sort of like a function of ours with the charities that we work with and everything and one of one of the challenging things to me that you could just have in the back of your mind is the degree to what you focus on creating safety in order to get improved outcomes in other words i find that even within our center for social change where there is no pressure to do this that or the other thing people come into the the center in other words their own background with such pressure to perform to to do well to prove that there were something that they they create their own stress and in a way getting people to back off of that in other words feel that the environment the ground that they're on is safe so that they can try different things not worry about quote failure you know okay if it didn't work try something else that that is it's it's such a conundrum because even that sort of going from success to failure and back to success there we we sort of assume that somehow people just step up in other words that they their own internal motivation structure etc is enough you know that they don't need a supporting environment that enables that and that that's why i sort of dig into things like the scientific the scientific education of love where they're saying that that safety that that that inherent feeling of lack of safety starts at birth you know and and it's almost like you it's very difficult to extract that and my only point is there i'm not trying to preach for safety because obviously if everybody's safe nothing happens yeah but at the end of the day there's got to be some level of focus on that some level of response there was the relationship aspect the willingness to to to look out for the other in essence you know you read the empathic civilization by Jeremy Rifkin 2000 years of consistent increase in the capacity to care for the other so the words that you've got the structures you've got the energy and you've got the systems etc etc and in essence i think that our our systems are challenged right now because they've been too individuated there was too much responded to and ran and it's all about me you know and i want mine the one percent wants to make more and more and more and crowd everybody else out of the the equation and i'm not trying to make that wrong i'm just saying that they're doing an excellent job of showing how good they can be well the american dream is built on rugged individualism it's one of the pill one of the pillars of the american dream is is this notion of individualism it was very we are the the apex civilization of that thought right and and look how much violence in crime and and problems at the top and the bottom that we create as a result of that and so that's what makes it even more of a challenge to try and post safety in other words an environment within which people can emerge as a nicer more in other words the exactly what you're asking how can we care about the other well you're not going to care about the other unless you're okay um it's interesting that what you say about safety because i'm i'm trying to puzzle through what that balance is because i think safety is really essential i think that that you know fear basically shuts down our brains we we have fewer mental options we're less creative we go fewer places and yet pressure of some sort um leads to creativity leads to innovation leads to results in different ways i i remember being in a meeting so i i knew eric greenberg who founded science when he uh before he actually had staff he had eight million dollars from benchmark and a 33 page powerpoint deck and i helped him in in those early days shaped their first pitch deck etc etc and i learned a little bit later that he was an nlp master basically and and he used that on the small team that was in a conference room shaping their pitch deck he would come in and and like there was a kind of pressure he applied and i don't i don't i don't know that he was a master of safety in any way whatsoever but i i feel like my future was threatened but he had a way of applying pressure that were really interesting things popped out of us that showed up in the pitch deck that we're there because he had done some unreasonable sort of thing requiring some kind of pressure and then to put a darker spin on this um one of my theories is that unresolved childhood trauma is the source of most human art and creativity if you go read the biographies of sylvia plath and rofko and and whoever just just just go down the list of of our famous artists and creators the the vast preponderance of them are basically working at sorting out demons in their lives and that that creates some kind of extra creativity and that those people never found safety or satisfaction many of them uh they they suffered through their lives and and yet made great work so okay but just to just to reinforce what you're saying i was watching a video on youtube by tim ferris the guy that wrote the the four hour body and all that kind of stuff and he tells a story of not too long ago maybe about 10 15 years ago where he was literally on the verge of committing suicide and he ended up not committing suicide obviously but but used his concerns to create something that he calls fear setting which sounds very similar to what you're talking about in terms of using that that pressure that the unresolved conflicts of childhood etc does but but in a constructive way in other words so that when when i talk about safety in his mind safety comes from accepting the fear knowing you can handle it yeah you know and in essence he comes up with a literally like a three page do this do this do this and you're you're okay in fact i'll i'll email it to you so you can post it and everything i i sat down and typed out his prescription because i want to use it cool but but it's that that balance between i mean you can be in fear you can have all the childhood traumas but if you use it with a sense that you're safe in it i think when we were discussing trust and everything the the the the original book trust basically says that the lack of trust comes from you not trusting yourself mm-hmm and so that's all for a friend is getting getting that in other words that you've got to create a sense that you can trust yourself to keep yourself safe love that thank you bill we've come to the top of our time and i'm just wondering if anybody would like to draw anything into our conversation by way of wrap up or taking us out peter i would like to have a chat offline with you on the story weavers etc sounds great because what you seem to describe is a technique of listening carefully and i think instead of thinking about registering content like a scriber i think it's a an interesting perspective to try to offer a risky perspective i wrote something about it recently and i used the word fear but in a completely different context i i i just stumbled upon another acronym afir a f e e r and the a stands for advancement and the f stands for fun and the e stands for edgy and the other a i think it has something to do with with alertness energy alertness and the last one the r is risky so that was a reflection of what is interesting work or what are interesting ways of listening or interesting ways of registering they may have those those attributes and so i have been reflecting a lot on how can i help people create events or immersive learning experiences using these these qualities that's great yeah there's this edge of edge of chaos ish a place that i think we can design for uh that helps interesting things come out and partly my inspiration for the story threaders comes from frustration from being in too many meetings where at the beginning i hear really good sparky things show up then i watch a process that snuffs out all the little sparks and then at the end i'm like well i met some interesting new people and i'm going to put them in my rolodex and stay in touch and not much really happens and i'm trying to fix for that so these are great design guidance ideas so peter let's let's just set up a call for ourselves anybody else if not i will let me reread one of our poems to go out take us back into our day and this is uh ron padgets for a moment it's funny how if you just let go of things they will come to you this is to say sometimes so what good is such a generalization uh it makes you feel good to say such things from time to time as if you actually and really and truly knew something thank you all very much thank you really appreciate the check-ins been fantastic