 This is an Inside Jerry's Brain call on Wednesday, December 11th, 2019. It feels very strange that very soon we will be in 2020. I cannot get accustomed to writing that out yet, but I imagine it's going to sink in pretty soon that we are there. This call was sparked by, and I will share the screen as I explain a little bit about Inside Jerry's Brain. This call sparked by an article in the nation titled, Welcome to the Global Rebellion against Neoliberalism. And the notion, this is written by Ben Ehrerike. I put it here in my brain under critiques of neoliberalism and also connected it to lots and lots of countries in turmoil this year. So 2019, so in Inside Jerry's Brain calls, one of the things I will apologize for right up front is that I will overshare my brain. This is my brain here. And as we talk about different things, if you're talking, I might actually take over the screen and start showing things that I think are relevant. I'm not trying to distract from what you're saying. I'm trying to enhance what you're saying. But for example, what I do every year, you'll see up here on a pin board, things I put up here, stay up here on the pin board to have the year 2019. So come January 1st, I'll change that to 2020. But if you look down under here, this is what I thought was memorable in 2019. And at the end of each year, these things fill up naturally. And it's really interesting to look back and see what ended up during the year seeming to be important. So here's Backlash Against Technology and Technologists. So Techlash, The Avengers movie, Philadelphia shooting, Assange arrested after Ecuador ends as a silent protection, Hurricane Dorian whacking places, all of that. So if I go down here back to the nation article, there are a whole bunch of countries that are having a really hard time around the world or there are street protests, some of which are provoked by seemingly small things like a municipal transit fare raised by 3%. But I don't think it's the transit fare raised by 3% that is the problem that causes the street protests. I think it's an accumulation of things. And the article that we're pointing to here says, you know what, almost all these things trace their way back to the neoliberal agenda, which is an interesting thesis. I just wanted to throw that in the middle of the conversation and I will stop sharing for a moment so I can see who all has joined us. Susan Bo Ken, awesome. And I just want to open the floor and see where, and Ken, it may make a lot of sense to have you take us into some of the deeper waters here, just, and you are muted right now. But if you want to take us out into the waters, that would be great. Okay, hello, everybody. I want to put a special welcome out to my friend, Michael Sillian, who's calling in from Sweden, who, this is Michael's first call. It's nice to see the rest of you. Hello, Doug, Michael, folks, Jerry. Last week, Jerry emailed me and said, you know, I want to hold the inside Jerry's brain call. What's on your mind? Which is a really big and dangerous question to ask me at any given time. So I had just read this article about the global backlash against neoliberalism and I had been noticing that there had been news reports for some time now of really massive protests in multiple countries. And this was the first article I saw that actually tied it together, saying the underlying cause is neoliberalism, neoliberalist agenda. Jerry just said, you didn't think it was the 3% transit raise that caused the problem, but from my understanding is that 3% sort of was the tipping point because it kicked a lot of people who make minimum wage into, now I have to decide, do I go to work by public transit? Or do I suffer and not eat food? And when it comes to that sort of choice, 3% can be a huge thing. Watching what's happening in Britain with Brexit, France was just paralyzed this week by a huge strike. So there's plenty of energy for change going on. And I honestly don't know what's underneath it, but I was recently on a call with Robert Gilman of the Context Institute and we were talking about social tipping points. And he said, you know, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the media pundits were all saying no one saw this coming. He said, however, I saw it coming as did many other people involved in citizen diplomacy. We saw for a long ways off that the Soviet empire was not sustainable because we've been talking to people on the ground. And so my question, I guess for those of us who are on the call is, who are you talking to on the ground that is either reinforcing this idea of there's a tipping point being reached and things are about to change massively or we're missing something else. Is there something else going on here? I really don't know, but it sure seems like the energy for change is enormous at the moment. And I believe that's really a good thing. How it plays out, I don't know, but I'm hopeful that's going in a good way. Mm-hmm. And whoever wants to just jump in. And I'll add that I have a parallel thought to this that will be the subject of a future inside Jerry's Brain Call, which is are we in a generational tipping point? Because not only of these protests, but climate change protests and a whole series of things where youth are kind of banding together and showing up in large numbers. And if they can actually link up, that could be very significant. And that could be a generational change of leadership across the board. I mean, if young people figure out that the moment they're capable of voting in whatever jurisdiction they happen to live in, if they activate and go do things, that's a large number of humans. Is the new prime minister from Finland an example? Yeah, yes. What's her age? 30, 37, 34. Youngest ever. Jacinda Arden in New Zealand is very young. And a bunch of other people, AOC and the squad basically in Congress, these are all aspects of this. And in Finland, they now have an all-female cabinet, which is pretty remarkable. And they all, the picture I saw, they all looked pretty young to me. So I don't know their ages, but I was like, wow, this is young women. This is great. Oh, it's whippersnappers. So here's the thought in my brain, this 2020 market generational tipping point that I haven't connected up to the nerd fighters, nerdfighteria, Jacinda Greta Thunberg, who just got named times person of the year, the Green New Deal, AOC generation, Zed is basically the generation, but also the stone, Marjorie Stone and Douglas school kids and their attempts. I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of people and also Pete Buttigieg for president, who is like, I swear to God, he looks like Topo G. Joe. Does anybody else think he looks like Topo G. Joe? Did that hit anybody else? Yeah, yeah. I was like, oh my God, we could possibly have a president who looks like Topo G. Joe, but anyway, back to a serious subject. Whoever just posted the thing from Financial Times, it's been remarkable to read the economist from the Financial Times and Forbes and some other can usually considered right of center, very conservative, financial reporting organs, saying things that I never thought I'd read in their pages. Right, that was both posting. Yeah, the final science and the economists, especially the Financial Times, is clearly onto this. I mean, and the way to look at the Financial Times, it is the global elite newspaper of capitalists and elites of the world. I mean, the readership is not, The Wall Street Journal, it's a very elite leadership and they see this coming. And Jared and I have been talking for some time that a renegotiation of the social contract has occurred in the past. That's what the new deal was and it will occur again and we are definitely in that time right now. Yeah, another interesting figure here is Nick Hanauer, who just recently did another TED Talk. He did the Beware fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming before, but I just watched a couple of days ago, this one, which is The Dirty Secret of Capitalism and A New Way Forward, which was pretty good. I mean, he's one of a few people who was out there saying, hey, look, if we keep doing this, we're really going to screw up the world. I'm not that crazy about, so here's the five rules of thumb that the new economics suggests. He's trying to propose a new economics to rethink capitalism. And he says, successful economies aren't jungles, they're gardens, we have to tend them. Inclusion creates growth, not segregation. The purpose of the corporation is not to enrich shareholders and he points to the business round table recently changing their mind about that. Greed is not good, which I connected, oh, I failed to connect it to Greed is Good, which I should, of course do. Here is Gordon Gekko. Here's Gordon Gekko's speech on YouTube saying Greed is good from the 1987 movie Wall Street, which is part of the neoliberal belief system, right? And a big piece of what Hanauer points to is Homo economicus, this set of beliefs that individuals act in their own selfish best interest and that together, the invisible hand and the efficient markets make the whole thing function, et cetera, et cetera, that profit maximization is okay. All of these things that were busy proving wrong through a series of, you know, including through a series of Nobel prizes and things like that. So, Jared, do you think you could put links in the chat when you're pointing out all these videos and stuff of these and sort of that? I will go find a couple of nodes here that I just touched and put them, put the links to those in my, in the chat. So here's- I have a lot of FDR articles on this, but you know, there's a severe paywall there and that's why I usually email up to Jerry in totems so that he doesn't have to try to get behind a paywall. Thank you. I pay for enough subs, so thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. And Doug, I come back to you a lot on this because you are an economist-herder and I just wonder how your experience of that goes, what you, what changes have you seen over time, what hope or despair do you feel in that conversation? How does that flow work for you? Well, I don't think my thoughts are very linear here. I guess I would start with the idea that the big push will be to change economics from within economics and maintain the same basic discussion that it has to do with capital growth. Distribution becomes a minor thing on the edge, but it's to maintain the growth mechanism. My own view is that we cannot change economics from within because it's systematically excluded everything to do with society and values. And if we don't get into a values and society discussion, what kind of world are we doing want? We're not gonna be able to change anything. And I think that the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Economist are all trying to change without changing, that wonderful line from Giuseppe de Lampedusa, things have to change in order to remain the same. That's what I see as the key thing is to tweak this economy so that it supports capitalism and green growth without questioning the concentration of wealth that's going on or the real destruction to the environment. And do you find individuals or groups of economists in your spheres who get this and are pushing really hard on it? I mean, I'm interested in the texture of it for you. Like day to day, are they trying to rally troops? Are they contacting you and saying, hey, what do we do? Or like, what's the dynamic of the community? Well, it's fascinating. I was in Washington last weekend and I was at a reception with a lot of economists. And I did 10 interviews while talking, I talked to more people, but I made 10 interviews. And I said, after the chit chat, oh, by the way, what do you think of climate change? All 10 of them said without a hesitation that technology was gonna solve the problem. Oh, wow. What I saw was an inability to let the problem in to the circled wagons. That's pretty much something. They just started to go there. And I think we need to be very careful about what that means. I think that people don't go to the real issues because they actually have no idea what to do. And in fact, there's no agenda of what to do. Things like going solar and wind as alternative electrical energies. Don't work if you can't convert a house that burns gas to electricity. And that's a multi-thousand dollar project. And there are 80 million of those in the US alone. So that the impermeability is the anxiety around not having any plan as to what to do. I think that if you push people a little further, and some of these were willing to be pushed, these 10 people, you get to a level of exhaustion in trying to think about what can happen. And just terrified actually of what's going to happen with migrations, with the death of agriculture and many parts of the world. That's what you get to. And I just have to say, I look around a lot. I don't see anybody having made a plan as to what actually to do at implementation. They all are clear about what the problems are. They're all clear about the need for policies. But implementation is not being discussed because actually it's impossible. Well, yes and no. I mean, I've got a whole big collection of things on mitigating climate change and lots of people trying lots of different things. And I think that I agree, I think completely, and I'm not sure you're saying exactly this, but I agree that the complexities of any effort undertaken to mitigate climate change are like whacked and crazy and really defeat our ability to say, okay, good, this is the one best answer and let's go try this and let's go try that. But... Jerry, I'm open to possibilities along those lines, but I think if you take any of the projects, for example, and Paul Hawkins list of 100, if you try and scale them out to the size of the problem, we're talking lots of time, lots of manufacturing, lots of distribution of technologies, all of which actually have a negative impact on the environment while you're doing it, take a long time and cost a lot of money. So here's my thought. What to do to mitigate climate change is not straightforward. And I've got that under climate denial arguments. But surely it is straightforward to cease the process is to create climate change. All that does is it drives the economy to zero and then what, right? If we stop making, stop driving, stop burning, that basically grinds much of the economy to a halt is the argument. And the problem? It's like, you've got a fire, it needs fuel, it needs heat, it needs oxygen. Right. You take anyone who knows the way it stops. We've got the equivalent of a fire destroying the planet. Which of the three do we take away? Not the fuel, no, the heat, the oxygen, the better analogies, we can take that pot off the burner. If we all spend some time contemplating the virtues of a three-day working week for a while, solve an awful lot of trouble. Yes. And so interesting arguments like, should we go to a four-day working week, a three-day working week? Should people, all of those kinds of things? What happens to the world? Those are great conversations that are showing up because among the many assumptions we've swallowed is that everybody must work really hard all the time. And there's a whole bunch of really punishing policies, employment policies out in the world, including the really crazy two weeks vacation a year thing, which is where you start in the US. Yeah, so it's a narrative. And the narrative has been growth, the needs for strong central economies, export markets, globalization, comparative advantage, y-y-y-ya. And we need a narrative that is distinct from that. Captain Futur, what narratives have you been hearing? Yeah, that's a lot of talk. What we do here in Sweden is a model for good, but we have our fair share of problem here as well, but we can subtly learn from each other how to do things better. And the focus is like, yeah, we work not as hard here and we've done experiment with four-day work weeks and we have our six weeks of vacation and we have one year page, child care and everything. And it's all good. But it's the level of competence and wisdom of the people working in the institution organizations here is not sufficient to actually understand what's actually going on and how a society actually works and stuff like that. So do we need more sophisticated models of what's going on, of what's happening? Would that help? I mean, I'm deeply involved with some of it. The thing we need the most, I think, is like sense making and wisdom. Uh-huh. Yeah. So there's not even a conversation about this in Sweden until recently, the guy called Thomas Björkman and another group of people around him started raising this question about how did we take Sweden? Sweden was one of the most poor countries in Europe 150 years ago, but we took it to a superstar industrial welfare nation in 100 years and that's what they called the Nordic Secret and wrote a book about that, let's see. And it was all a program to teach people. So they made retreat centers where they gathered people around about 10% of the population that actually spent three to six months teaching them how to be nice and how to behave and how to be wise reading philosophy in the country. Really? So what do we learn more about this? The book is called The Nordic Secret. Thomas Björkman, yeah. He has a TED talk about it as well somewhere. Sweet, thank you. And I do not have it in my brain, I'm gonna fix that. Yeah. So that's the talk, there's a lot of people now gathering around both the Jim Rothschild podcast now. He introduced a lot of people in California, Daniel Schmetterberg, Jordan Hall, Jamie Weal and Nora Bateson recently today, she came out with an episode of about this, they call what they call Game Bee and they're around to something very profound where they're talking about and thinking about. Game Bee instead of Plan B? Yeah. So the Jim Rothschild, I seem to do most of the key people. There is also the podcast called Rebel Wisdom and one called Future Fingers, a free good podcast around these subjects. Thank you. Game Bee, there we go. Oh, Jordan Hall, right. Yeah. I don't have much around Game Bee, I'll show everybody. I have it unlinked to anything basically. I have it linked only to Jordan. But I've got a bunch on Nora Bateson and warm data, for example, and a bunch of things that are happening there. So for example, one of the things that Nora is about and I don't know if this is connected to him, she says that data in context is really important. She calls this warm data. Yeah, exactly. And is this part of better sense-making? Yeah, of course, it's definitely part of understanding complex interactions between systems. And much of the science studies we do today, then they're all done in silos and nothing contextual context. Interesting. So that's what she's talking about. We have to understand. And that takes a lot of hard work to actually understand things. And we need a lot of more people doing that. And that's what we call navigators or weavers as well. So we need a whole new role in society that people who spend their time seeking wisdom and connecting what they find to others. Yes, and we've had multiple conversations. We have people in this Zoom room who are network weavers and connectors and so forth. And I think that resonates very strongly with us. Doug, go ahead. Do you want to jump in? Jerry, on the issue of modeling, I think we have pretty good models of what's happening. And I think we're pretty clear about that. What we don't have good models of is what we might do. So take, for example, going to the three-day workweek. People think, oh, that's great because it saves a lot of energy. There's less commuting. But the obvious thing is what are people going to do with their two new free days? They now have to heat their house rather than their office. They are going to spend the time shopping or going around or entertaining the kids. So the model there would say, maybe there's not much payoff for going to a three-day workweek. We have to take all the proposals and work out the secondary consequences. And we're not doing that. And secondary consequences and unintended consequences are very hard to predict and very hard to model. So we can try. Plans are useless, but planning is pretty helpful. Well, let me give an example of where I think we could do it. And that is shifting from coal produced or oil produced electricity to solar and wind produced electricity. People think that if you get the price down to being equal to what happens with coal and gas, the problem is kind of solved. But it avoids the problem of the conversion of 80 million homes that are heated with gas to being heated with electricity. We could model that pretty easily, but it isn't being done. People stay with the idea. I'm getting funny. My apologies. I clicked on the link to the TEDx talk, and it started playing, and I couldn't stop it in time. I blew that. I should have muted myself before going there. So I think the modeling of possibilities would be really helpful because I think people get stuck on possibilities that we already know basically aren't going to work. It's efficient. So I'm deeply interested in this modeling thing in general and mapping and mind mapping, obviously, because we're inside Jerry's brain. But there's a possibility that I'm assembling some resources and some funding to rethink this brain-like thing and to go into some new infrastructure that lets us do collaborative sense-making better. So I'm going to come back to this topic a whole bunch in this call sequence, because A, this matters, and because maybe more importantly, this could be materializing into an actual project. And part of my goal in that, my own current goal, as Beth understood, is to facilitate lots of different people with thoughts of different tools approaching these problems and sharing what they learn and how they learn it, meaning this has to be an environment of open, shared, distributed data, and various analytic tools that allow us to come in and create narratives and explanations for what's going on and what to do, and then play them out and model them in different ways. But if anybody knows big thinkers on those fronts, I'd love to connect with them, because I think that that's going to. Jerry, I think we need simpler models. Good. More complex models. I think we need simpler models that are absolutely undeniable by almost everyone. Has anyone ever played musical chairs? Mm-hmm. OK, so imagine that you're playing musical chairs with lots and lots of people, and periodically, there's a chair taken away. But people don't get out of the game. They have to figure out how to sit on the chairs that are left. Sit faster than everyone else. Well, no, everybody has to figure out how to sit on the chairs that are left. Right. So periodically, they keep taking chairs out of the game. But the people left have to figure out how to sit on the chairs that are left. Now, imagine that the chairs are actually money, so that the people in the economy have to continue to figure out how to live on less and less money and circulation. And no, Michael, this is not an entry-free. So, and periodically, the government has to deficit spending to put money back into circulation because the last thing I read, that the rich currently have over $30 trillion in offshore tax shelters. Where do you think it came from? It's not, I mean, that's the thing that Hanauer talks about over and over again, is the rich, the problem with the rich isn't that they're rich, it's they don't spend their money. He talks about how many pair of pants does he buy? How many carters does he buy? How many houses does he buy? The money that he accumulates doesn't circulate anymore, so that the people in the economy are, the flow is starved. And the musical chairs thing is something that just showed up this morning, and I sort of like it. Musical chairs is a really simple game, and it's a vivid metaphor, so that's really interesting. Thank you for the contribution, because everybody I think understands that, although you just applied it in a way that ran a little counter to my intuition around it, because to me, the basic principle of musical chairs is somebody keeps removing a chair, and everybody else is always fighting over the chairs, and reframing that game so that we can all have a chair is I think maybe the interesting question. Doug, you wanted to jump in? Well, I was just going to say about musical chairs, that the people who don't get the chairs actually have lost. They've got nothing to sit on, and in a way, their ability to adapt is gone, because they're not allowed back in the game. If we think of the chairs as being jobs rather than money, I think the analogy is much closer. I'd say we have to think of the chairs as being life support. Life support is being removed constantly. We are converting forests into cash, and leaving behind waste to use, and so we're all having to, we have more and more people on the planet with fewer and fewer, I hate to use word resources, but less and less life support available for them until what happens. We're already way out past the edge of the cliff, hovering in the air before we look down to find out that we're in order. But this is all a Hannah Barbara cartoon is what you're telling us. Exactly, is it Hannah Barbara, is it Looney Tunes? I don't know which one was like Coyote and Wool. One way or another, it's gonna be, that's all folks. You know what? That little conclusion is gonna be what we're gonna see at the end screen in the restaurant at the end of the universe. And while I agree with what's being said, what if musical chairs, what if buying the chair narrative is the problem, and what if we all sat comfortably together across legged on the ground? I mean, for some very strange reason this morning, I was sitting pondering how furniture started and how we all started getting chairs and I don't know, except we all started getting chairs is a Western conceit because you go to other cultures, you go to Arab cultures, and they sit very comfortably on carpets and pillows in their rooms and it's like room after room that is very comfortable for a whole lot of people. And we're sitting in chairs is an odd custom that lots of cultures around the world ended up having to adopt as they got Westernized. It was simply a piece of Westernization like wearing suits, right? Thad, go ahead. Yeah, well, sitting on the ground would imply a culture change. And the existing elite is gonna do everything they can to prevent that culture change because it would interfere with the flow of cash towards them. So culture change is on the agenda, but nobody knows how to get there because the conservative forces are so strong in this society. I think everybody's busy fighting that battle and I don't mean everybody, but I mean there are large parties who are busy trying to figure out what the new narratives are to control the scripts that run in our heads. And this is the Titanic battle of the ages. We are at a weird punctuated equilibrium moment right now where all these narratives are in flux where we're busy trying to figure out what, is it capitalism? Is it socialism? Is it democratic socialism? Is it capitalism with a Chinese bent? Like what's the right model for our country? And then how does the social contract, how is that supposed to work? Should we all emulate Denmark and Finland? Or should we go invent some other sort of thing? Or should we reconsider money? Should we reconsider property and ownership? Should we remember the commons and start living on the commons together? All these questions are, and I love this about this moment, all these questions are hot questions right now. We're like at a moment where these are all okay questions to be asking. And a few people are having all these conversations, but in some communities they're trying to avoid the conversations. Doug was saying earlier how some parts of the economic community are trying to avoid the penetration of important questions about what to do and how things work. Or they've offloaded the implications of this situation to technology will fix that, right? Things of that nature. But I adore that we're at a moment where we can have this conversation and it's meaningful and it's happening in many different places. Also where our sharing of resources is simple, easy, productive, leads us each to go like follow different rabbit holes of information down. I've got now a series of videos to watch as a result of this conversation, et cetera, but then feed that back into the world of this collaborative sense making set of communities and artifacts. So I love all that. Ken. I'm going back to something Doug said earlier. I think we enter into the conversation in the wrong place, a lot of us. We enter into how do we fix it? And that's way far down the line. I think what we need to be doing is convening conversations with multiple stakeholders which include women, people of color, the young, the old, the very young, the very old, the people who have not been yet been born, animals, all of these folks kind of a council of all beings approach from Joanna Macy's work that asks what type of world do we want to create? What are the shared concerns and the things that need to be addressed throughout time? Whether you're born now or 10,000 years from now or 50,000 years from now, what needs to be there for humans and other life lumps to flourish? And then once we've got a sense of what that is, then start to say, and what systems would allow that to happen? And then what actual steps would allow, would we need to take to create those systems? So that's how I see the creating more coherence in this conversation. Because when we get into, we have to have a problem to fix. We've got climate change, we have this or that. When we look at the world as a set of problems, we go into problem solving mode. And that leads to technical fixes rather than adaptive shifts in our way of thinking. When we start to think about the world as a set of shared concerns and recognizing that everybody's got a legitimate claim to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, whatever the things are, the last one I saw is soil, soul, and society. If we start to design human existence for flourishing, we get very different outcomes than if we look at how do we fix the mess that we're in. It's my little way. And courtesy of Mr. Homer, I had a conversation yesterday with Hilde Gottlieb, which was mind blowing and absolutely delightful. And one thing I will point to here, she has a, she's created a process. She runs a small group called creating the future. She's created something called catalytic thinking. And the three questions that crack assumptions are lovely to ponder. And this is informed by things like appreciative inquiry, which is a, oops, got to spell it right. Appreciative inquiry is basically a process that says that focusing on problems creates negative discourse, which spirals downward because we're all busy trying to fix problems as opposed to, and also that focusing on problems causes us to look for who caused the problem and accused the other, et cetera, et cetera. And that the right approach is to look for positive things we might do together, even with people who have very different opinions from us. So this is one of the many streams that informs the catalytic thinking process. But the three questions that Hilde is trying to get us focused on is like, what is possible? What is the best possible thing that could happen? What brings out the best in us? What do we think of each other? Is another framing for that? And then what do we have together? What can we build together? What can we make together? And I like these questions a bunch. One of her beliefs is that changing the questions we ask changes our assumptions, changes our whole framing and belief systems. And I agree with that. So I like, Ken, you're pointing out that we're coming at this wrong, we're asking the wrong questions. I think that's very likely true. And I think also that, I'm gonna over-generalize here, but the male analytic way of looking at things probably contributes greatly to that. We're not thinking about this in left brain, young kind of ways. And softening that and opening ourselves to other ways of seeing these issues would probably help a great deal as well. Doug, go ahead. I'm muting myself here, getting the mouse in the right place. Some of you know, I've been thinking a lot about what the possibilities are of what could happen. And I like to start with the basic needs. It seems to me that food is emerging as one of the real anxiety points. And we're gonna have to do a lot to create new ways of making food. The other thing that's gonna be a big need is habitation because living in big houses that are heated with gas are not gonna be part of the future. So if we start with food and habitat as the design goals, then we begin to think of what kind of civilization we could make. They would meet those in a new and interesting and adequate way. And I think that's a wonderful conversation to have. Agreed. And then there's a bunch of people working in extremely different ways on these issues of food and habitation. Everything from regenerative agriculture to manufactured food, synthetic foods of different kinds, urban farming, all different kinds of things. One of the striking things about a lot of that conversation is that it looks at agriculture new ways of growing things, but there are no people in the pictures. I think the idea of combining the agriculture with habitat isn't really an attractive civilizational moment. Well, and then one of the other funny little assumptions here, and this is a pet peeve of mine, is that wildlife should be preserved with no humans in it, that we need to create spaces on earth that are human free. And one of my beliefs is that humans who know what they're doing are really good for the landscape. And I connect this back to 1491 and 1493 and books about Australia and how basically North America, South America and Australia were all under active human management before Europeans showed up and obliterated the knowledge of how to do that and allowed the land to be reclaimed and sort of rewilded by itself, but that while these lands were under active human management, they were intensely productive. It was easy to live on those lands. They were really fruitful in different ways. So just the tiny sliver of that is why do we insist on making sure that nobody lives on pieces of land? Why can't we encourage sort of the active use of land in the smartest ways we know how to do? Susan, thank you for joining us here and I see you nodding a lot about these things. I'm wondering which of these things trigger for you and what part of this would you have us focus on and you're muted right now? Well, I feel a little hesitant to participate because it's a new group to me, although I know a couple of you can. And Doug, my goodness, since spirited work days, it's been a long time. It's really beautiful to see you. Yeah, and these are such big questions. I have more questions than I do have answers, but I think as I wrote in the chat for me, I come more from Ken's orientation probably, but that it really is a spiritual question. And when we move from the current this and a lot, I do find the way Michael Lerner talks about this helps me understand it. So moving from the paradigm of scarcity and which leads to everything of dominion and we have to get a piece of the pie and we objectify and other each other, which we're just seeing the extremes, not only of climate change, but of othering on the planet right now, everywhere it's just an infectious disease. So we've got to shift to caring and love, basically. It sounds very schmaltzy, but it's really all we need. If we move to love and really truly feeling that we are one with each other, we're one with the earth, with the animals, then we'll figure it out because it all comes from that. So I think so many things have disconnected us. So my main practice is compassionate listening. And we believe we're so wounded and hypnotized by our culture and the lessons and the wounds we get, we are not in contact with that and we're afraid to even admit it or open to it like that makes us unsafe, we won't be able to survive in the world, we won't get ours. And so it traps us in that place of fear. And so we can't think in a new paradigm, the way Einstein reminds us that from this place of being in that paradigm of scarcity and fear and separation and othering, we can't solve this. So to me, it is a big part of the question is how do we make that leap? And I've been in a couple of experiments this year of what is the we space is the way it's called. You've probably heard about that. So partly with Terry Patton in the New Republic of the Heart and then also with Thomas Hubel. I hope you're familiar with his beautiful deep work. Talk, yes, talking about trauma healing. And also Patricia Albert, this transpersonal space. And I'm really experiencing for myself and then can bring this in places where I go that we really can transform everything within ourselves and between ourselves when we come from that deep essential part of ourselves that the deeper knowing like our little three and four year old kids know. So that's all for now. Thank you very much, very much. I did a video some years ago, I shot it on the beach, the Oregon beach. And it basically, it seems like it's apropos here for this conversation and the conversation I had in the last hour and a half, which is I asked the question, why are ecology and economy so different when they both come from the same route? And Doug and I have talked about this before a bunch, but the root of ecology and economy is Oikos, which is the household. And both of them seem to be about the management of the household. And my own little amateur theory on this was that in economics, the household is seen as me and my immediate nuclear family. The household is small and private and it's all about ownership and competition with other households for a scarce set of resources. And then in ecology, the household is the planet and the ecosystems within it. And that we need to maintain the whole household or none of us are going to do well and we will all suffer. And that this shift from, and I'm oversimplifying here, but seeing the household as the larger, not the smaller could lead us to understand that we are all deeply intertwangled, that what affects me affects you, that there's a whole bunch of beliefs we're trying to get people to absorb when one of the winning narratives of the last couple of decades has been that being greedy and self-interested will work because in the aggregate, the invisible magical hand will suddenly make this all work. So don't worry about other people doing so is stupid. There's no such thing as society. So just go ahead and be selfish. And as W said after 9-11, just go shopping, shop more. And that is the answer, right? And that's kind of the battle, is like how we see ourselves and what is our vessel what is our container, what, you know? And then we get lots of different people with really interesting ideas about how to explain this like donut economics, which I like, but don't like. Because I think it's really hard to navigate inside a donut. Have you ever done that little mirror thing where you try to draw a line backwards by looking in a mirror? It's really hard. So to me, donut economics staying within boundaries feels like it's not abundance mentality it's not trying to figure that out. But I like the idea and it's gotten really popular. And there's 50 things like donut economics that are out there, the 2% solution. I mean, I'll go to my brain as soon as I stop talking and show what some of these models are. And I think that 200 years from now we'll look back and the name of this era will be whatever the name was of the winning theory that got us out of this fix that we're in unless this thing plays out really poorly in which case the name of this era will be when we lost our handle on civilization and destroyed Europe. Yeah. And we're kind of at that little cusp right now where it could swing either way. Yeah. So I would just like to interject two things. There was talk earlier about the youth. See, and I think they see through this a lot more. They see, well, even their experience as kind of global, what do they call them? I mean, they're really global citizens. They have friends all over the world. They have from the beginning, they play their games online with people all over the world. They understand that borders don't make any sense. And then the analogy I like to use for understanding the wholeness, I like to always turn to our body in a kind of organic way. So I realized, thank goodness, my liver knows its uniqueness. And so does my kidney and et cetera. And they know they're totally that and how to do that. And they also know at the same time they're 100% me, the whole. And in the same way, it's really kind of mind boggling, but when we think about our body, we can get it. And so it is with each of us right here right now, we are each totally separate, but we are all 100% interconnected. And the more we can really get that, I think our behavior will change because just as we love and care for our family and our tribe, when we finally understand we're all part of the same tribe, including the four legates and the trees, then we can act differently and shift our way of being. So thank you. Thank you. And sort of sadly, I think we're kind of preaching to the choir here. I think that all of us on the call more or less buy these things and agree with these things and wish that whoever our other is with a capital O, also could consider the possibility of seeing this way and feeling this way. So I love the way you articulated that. And I'm like, okay, so how do we propagate that? How do we open a conversation with people who believe very differently? Well, I'm actually leading a group to Alabama in a couple of weeks. So I'll have an interesting experiment and experience with that. If there's a meeting, I'll report back to you. I love that. And would you mind spending a couple of minutes explaining a little bit about Terry Patton's process through New Republic of the Heart? Cause I've got it in my brain, but I know nothing about it really. Well, Terry wrote a book a few years ago. I don't exactly remember when called the New Republic of the Heart, which it's a great articulation of a lot of what we're talking about. He personally is very, his focus is climate change. So he decided to convene, oh, sorry, I'll turn this off. Oh, except it might be something I don't know. It might be Terry Patton, who knows. No, I don't know. It might be that we're having a document about it. So I'll come back in a minute. Well, I'm without me for a moment. Cool. I will meet your client. Well, Michael's shaking his head. Michael, did you want to say something? Well, I always want to say something. I remember Hazel Anderson once telling me that if we all achieved the sense of being a bear in the woods, that would sort things out. And I suggested that the bear doesn't need to sort itself out. It's in the woods already. People becoming like bears is not going to solve the problem. I can't learn to play a Beethoven sonata by deciding that I would like to play a Beethoven sonata. There's a disastrous whole, I believe, in this theory that if we all get together and love one another, it will all work. I absolutely repudiate that possibility. All you need is love. Give me a break. Sorry, we need to understand the reality of our situation, the technology that's causing us trouble. Switch off that technology, apply other technologies. There needs to be changes in the functionality of human behavior. And for me, that's about money. And for me, it looks that simple. I keep listening to these conversations and wondering what are the criteria by which a serious proposal is acceptable as possible in some way. I recall that old parable, the guy in the floods who was offered relief and he said, no, God is coming. And gradually, God said, well, I sent you a helicopter. Well, I feel the same thing here. The question I would like to leave today is how do we know when something is an appropriate and possible and substantial response to this situation? Now, I build that into Douglas, the food and habitation issue is it. Yeah. Are we gonna know food and habitation and we have also handled energy? I think there's one word I wanna call it from your sentence which gets us in trouble, which is substantial. And that I remember like long ago, I was an advisor to AT&T Labs. Back when AT&T was actually still AT&T and Dave Nacol was in charge of the labs. I was part of his advisory board. And they couldn't consider a business if it wasn't going to be a multibillion dollar business real soon now. And so they got killed by IP telephony, for example, because every engineer knew that TCPIP is a stupid way to do telephony. By substantial, Jerry, to cut that, I do not mean big. So partly I think I'm with you entirely in the spirit of what you mean, but we keep looking for really big solutions that solve the problem for a lot of people all at once, kind of in an engineering way of frame of mind. And I think a lot of the things that a lot of us are fans of are behavioral and adaptive and can work at small scale in a lot of places which turns into large scale when you add up the numbers. Like, so, and I like to say that it won't scale or the three words I've seen kill more good ideas in the world. Well, if the sense of scaling is the standard linear aggregation and growth by power, if the sense of scaling however has more to do with mycelium, the propagation of ideas across the subculture, then the emergence of these things can happen all over the damn place. So it's like that. It's like mushroom. We've got to be thinking in new analogies in this process. Sorry, I just have to rant occasionally. Love that. So here's mushroom, he's mycelium. I love mycelium as a metaphor and as a thing. And somebody wrote that we are in the fungularity. That's great. I love it. Michael, I wanna join. No, Rayford. Love is all you need is not all you need. I think love is requisite. And by love, I use Umberto Maturana's definition of love is granting legitimacy to the other no matter how the other arises in your awareness. Once you grant someone legitimacy and say you have a legitimate right, then you can enter into a productive conversation. But the idea of love being all you need, it is very insufficient. You gotta have a little bit of hard work and arguments and bad feelings and ways to deal with the bad feelings that don't involve killing. And I particularly object to the premise that we are lacking love at present. My perception is that there's so much love operating in the world, otherwise we would have killed each other, stone dead, six generations back, right? Like the world operates in this vicious, violent, ugly situation is a testament to the depth of love that is inherently amongst us already. So let's not say we need to love more. Let's say we need to love more intelligently. Well, why? Well, Michael, there are different perspectives on love. Thank God for that. In other words, the rich who are in control love the control. Oh yeah. Okay. And to the thoughts about different ways of thinking, well, it's good to think differently at the same time that you do that, you have to be aware of the construct within which we are confined. Those who are in control that continue to do things to maintain control. I mean, I just went back and read Chomsky's Requiem for American Dream again, and it's horrifying. What is being done to us on an ongoing basis, mostly without our awareness and then reading Democracy and Change by McLean, and I'm even more horrified. Personally, I think John Glob is right in that the average lifetime of an empire is 250 years and we're about to explode. And Jean, I created a thought where I collected up the different materials that you were talking about. I don't know if you've seen this. I wanna say, I think I was being a little facetious when I was saying all you need is love. Obviously, we need lots, lots more, but I think once we are really connected to ourselves and each other through love, unconditional love, accepting everything, not othering parts of ourselves or each other, then we are able to deal with everything else, including conflict, which is in fact, my calling is to help us step into conflict. It's an important, beautiful energy. It's just telling us we need some attention. I always remember that a teacher of mine, Dan and Perry used to say that the conflict is a cry for intimacy. It's really saying we lack love. So when we have the love, then I think we have the container within which we can step into the fire and we can deal with our issues in wise ways. There's also really nice ways of framing conflict as an opportunity to step into something or there's a hostage negotiator, Chris Voss, who's really interesting, and he says, no, it's just the beginning. Like, when you get a no, you have a response and it's, you know, and when somebody has said no to you, it puts them in a different place in a relationship with you, in a place from which they're more open to think, to say, to consider, to do anything else. He's got really interesting ideas because he's been in high stakes negotiations around lives, but he has really interesting ideas about how communication is framed, received, connected between us. And then one of the thoughts I put up, I showed earlier that's in my brain, is that we, this is one of my beliefs, that we are in an epidemic of not listening. That we truly, most of us, when listening to somebody, are busy preparing our rebuttal rather than absorbing what is going on. And I'm really torn by this because inside Jerry's brain calls, I'm listening, but I also wanna share what I've thought about this issue before. So I'm busy then trying to stay present to what's being said while going and fetching the thing and sharing the screen of it, I'm gonna admit. And it's hard. And I fear that I'm sacrificing a peaceful listening in doing so, but my apologies for that. I'm curious, John Susan Bow, you haven't jumped in that much. Any thoughts? I wanna just pause because make a little room for people who haven't seized the floor in case you'd like to take the floor. Okay, well, I'll take a little shot. Oh, I'm really enjoying all these different perspectives. So I am, I think, an economist. And I was just on a previous call and I was pointing out to Jerry that economics has a very big ethical dimension that nobody admits. And this is the kind of thing that gets buried in models. It's gonna be very dangerous. It's full of ethical choices about who deserves what resources. And so I'd like to point that out and to make it clear that that's what's going on. And we need an honest conversation about that. And frankly, when we cover it up with models and theories, we don't have an honest conversation. A second thing is that capitalism is this thing that we don't even really just define very well. Is there something going on? Is it okay? Somebody's- I think it's noise from someone else's that I don't mind. Don't know. Go ahead. So all capitalism is, and it's not that it's a small thing, is rationing resources via a market. And it's the best thing we've figured out to do after the fall of feudalism. And we present it to ourselves as the only way and de facto just never argue with it. And in fact, yes, we can argue with it. It is a rather recent development on this planet. And we have the other right to question it ethically and in every way. And whenever I hear talks of models, all these assumptions are buried in these models. Like Max Bubbers, the Protestant work ethic, that capitalism is just loaded with Protestantism. It's loaded and just freighted with judgments about what's the worthwhile life? What should people be doing? And if we want to rejigger the system, all of those things have to be confronted. Otherwise, we'll be having conflicts about things that we're not really even, it's not bubbling to the top of the conversation, but we're just taking it for granted because it's implicit, because it's built on this. I think that's all I'd like to add so far. And I'm really enjoying everything that people's all these contributions. Thank you. That's awesome. Thanks, Bill. Susan, John, if you want. Cool. Anybody else? There I am. Pardon? Oh, good. I was just going to, I couldn't find my unmute button. That's what our lives are gonna be like in the future. So that's gonna be our primary issue is no longer going to be battered or do I have Wi-Fi? That's going to be I can't find how to unmute. Yeah. I was trying to find a framework that I used to use to talk about how it is that we get to how we actually make sense of things and how to slow things down in a conversation so that we actually follow through to the end of a sort of cycle. People try to make it linear, but it really is sort of asking a bunch of questions like assuming that as, I mean, Bo just did it. I used to code conversations this way. The assuming that when you go into an interaction with people that it's always what they have to say comes in as data, right? And it comes in and it has to be what is this? What is this? And all the questions about, and what does it mean for me? And what does it mean for us? And what is it all of these things? Those questions, you can sort of, I've done it in numbers of groups where you just can see the dysfunction. I mean, it's just, nobody gets past or is taken past with something. And so somewhere here, I have that model and I also have five lovely questions and I'll try to dig them up because you can sort of say, well, it just slows down. It's part of the whole listening thing. I'm sure there's oodles of them out there, but we don't hold ourselves to it very well. Yeah, not at all. When things are sort of hot and heavy, we just jump in and there's a nice practice of taking a breath before speaking, which is... Yes, and it's perfectly natural to do that. That's the problem. It's not, it's the way our brains do. I mean, it's the whole system one, system two, I don't care what model you have. Yeah. It was a great practice I got from Craig Neal. He used to hold these some before the age of Skype and Zoom, we'd get on something called the conference call and then 60, 80 people on the call and you couldn't see them. And he'd open it up for comment and he'd say, before you speak, after someone finishes, before you speak, allow two heartbeats before you speak. And the remarkable thing was that when people practiced that there would be very few people who would talk at the same time. Something about two heartbeats allowed enough of a space for 80 people for someone to say, finish speaking and someone else to let two heartbeats go and speak and it really had an amazing rhythm and flow to it, which when you think about heartbeats is all about rhythm and flow, right? And I think that it goes well with all the neurological findings of how it is that we work and why we work the way we do. And almost every culture has some way of dealing with this and we have Robert's rules of order. But there are talking sticks. Talking sticks, it's sometimes about, some people think it's about turn taking. It's not about turn taking exactly. It's about taking the floor, getting the floor, being given the floor. And you have to have all those things in play before you are allowed to do that. There are all kinds of things around decision making. There's also a wonderful decision making experience that I went through, which was based on how it was that American Indian tribes actually got up and moved so fast from their village. And the process that was going through was very simple, right? It was a very simple thing. And it was people from the west and the north and the south and the east. And then there were the warriors and never did this. And then with that, you played roles and you stuck to your role. And the questions were, well, what? According to my role and what I'm responsible for, what is it that we, what is it that we... Sorry. Is that your phone Susan? Sorry, we have two Susan's. Susan's part now, your line is muted, so it probably couldn't be you. Right, and it's not me. Okay, good. And I don't have a phone that makes that noise. I don't have an iPhone, so there we are. Right, so anyway, the point is the questions are very simple. I'm just going back to underscore. There's no, you know, simple but workable. I mean, none of them is any more right than the other, but they all, you know, contribute something anyway. So sort of like, I remember being a warrior and it was sort of like, okay. The question was, what will happen if we do this and what will happen if we don't do this? And just asking those two simple questions from a point of view gets you a long way toward bringing implications to the table. Doug, you wanted to jump in a little while ago? Nope, okay. Ken, go ahead. Just Susan, thank you. You just struck something in my mind for me. Doug and Jerry and a couple of other people on this call know that I'm involved in a project around researching the impacts of the rising tides here in the Bay Area. And so I interviewed a woman from the BCDC, the Bay Area Coast Development Commission and they were formed in the 1960s as a bureaucracy with the express purpose of slowing down the filling in of the Bay. And bureaucracy is something that slows things down. It is designed to move very slowly because there was this huge development going on. Now they have to become their opposite. The Bay is filling in with water, it is expanding and they have to figure out how to move quickly in order to adapt to that because old bureaucracy rules aren't gonna work. They recognize they have to move a lot faster and yet their very constitution is of how do we keep things really slow and put way or after way or other impediments and obstacles up. So I just throw that out as sometimes everything as you just mentioned, everything's a cycle, right? So sometimes you come full circle. It's like, okay, we have to reinvent ourselves now and move very quickly and nimbly and figure out how to remove obstacles so that we can actually adapt to the changing currents of what's happening around us. And how did they come to that realization? Because they're looking at the science that says we're gonna see significant sea level rise here in the Bay Area and it's probably... But how did they make the shift from? Actually, I should qualify and say they may not be in that position as an entity. The problem I was speaking with has this recognition and is working inside the organization to help them arrive there, but the entity itself as a governmental organization is not there yet, although it is dawning on more and more people that, okay, we have to do this. I went to something called Charge recently, which was a gathering of flood control managers, floodplain managers, people who are civil engineers, folks who are the ones that... They're the ones that get sued if people get flooded, right? And they're recognizing that all the data they've been working with, all projections about what to expect for sea level rise in the Bay Area are off, way off. And they're like, we've built policy and put procedures in place based on seeing a foot between now and 2050 and we could see two meters between now and 2050. How do we now adapt to that? So I think one of the ways that they're waking up to this is just sheer fear. It's the recognition of, holy shit, things are way worse than we thought they were gonna be and what are we gonna do about that? And the runways at SFO could go underwater at a two meter rise problem. The one entity that can handle it because they'll just raise prices and they have money, their own money, they don't have to worry about money and funding. So they'll just keep building up berms around the airport. And it's a limited territory, so they can do that. It is, but it's very interesting to see all the different players in this and to figure out who the players are that like to play with each other and cooperate, who does not, for example, the Army Corps of Engineers is its own entity and then the Northern Pacific Railroad has got lots of right-aways in the Bay Area and they don't pay attention to anybody. They do whatever the hell they want, right? And so there's cowboys and there's cooperators and it's really, really fascinating. And are you familiar with the three people story from LA? With which story? Three people? I don't think so. So briefly, and this is an old story, so Andrew Lipkis, who founded Tree People, which was basically about planting trees, discovers one day that the Army Corps of Engineers, I think, is about to raise the walls of the drainage, the flood control ditches across LA because it never rains in LA, but when it does, there's so much pavement that it really creates a crisis. He then goes to them and says, hey guys, this is really, really stupid. You should be breaking up concrete and planting trees so that the water will be absorbed everywhere locally, but then somehow, and I've forgotten the story, he discovers that there are tons and tons of agencies at federal, state, local, whatever, private, that have overlapping boundaries, mandates, resources, et cetera, that are never talking to each other. They're just not in conversation. He facilitates that conversation, which leads to a lot of good things. So I think you're seeing, you're right in the middle of a similar situation and maybe Lepkus would have some interesting insights. I would love an update on that story because I don't know what happened and how it's gone, but the mere connection of and sort of honest conversations between the parties in these situations, I think could be a great leap forward because it would allow them to start adapting, flexing, collaborating. You know, that, yes, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's wrong, what the problem is in trying to solve it. And we don't spend, in my view, enough time trying to figure out what's behind it when it does work. So that's an example of what's behind it when it does work. And not too long ago, I was dealing with how to think about mindset shifts, which is really one way of labeling what has to happen in these kinds of community. And I went back to look at, it happened to be at a time when the Cuyahoga River was celebrating the 50th anniversary of having formed such a group to clean up the Cuyahoga River, which you would call caught fire back in 1960, something or other. 32 to 69, multiple times. Yeah. Yes, yes. And so, but when you go back and look at what happened to get them all there, you can start to see a pattern that's emerging in these other stories, which is that it was the people with different views. They could agree on having a clean river. That's what they agreed on. And then take it from there. And we keep, we have these stories, we know this stuff, we know how this is working. And yet somehow when we get into these conversations, we are constrained by, well, the form of our conversations. Well, interestingly, along the same lines, the same woman was saying, part of the problem is everybody involved in this wants to make their name, including me. They want to make our name on this. We see this as a huge hit. Lots of people want to try and be the one, and that really gets in the way of cooperating. My colleague and I were doing these interviews with the hopes that we can identify who the players are and how well or how well they're not collaborating and offer them collaboration tools to help them do it better. That's our purpose in this. It's not entirely altruistic. Captain, in the future, were you jumping in earlier? Were you hoping to jump in? No, I'm just listening for now. Okay, I thought I saw your hand raising. Yeah, exact. And at this point, Susan is, so pass the mic to Susan. Well, you're gonna be sorry that you got me involved because I talk a lot. Awesome. I only went to stop. But your story, the other Susan, was reminding me of the story of Belcanto that Frances Moorlopay wrote about when she was there and they stopped hunger in that city. And after she visited and saw how it was working, she asked the mayor, I believe it was, well, how did you do this? And the mayor's tears started falling because she said it was so simple. All we had to do was decide. So once we decide we want a good river or we want to save our shore or whatever, and we get our egos out of the way and we are together and joined, we can solve it. So again, I think it gets back to what we were saying earlier that when our actions come from, it's not that there isn't always love, but when we release that to be what directs us and connect to the heart. I mean, I think that there's a lot of research now showing there's from HeartMath Institute that there's actually more pathways from the heart to the frontal cortex than the other way around. And when we learn to be more heart centered and directed, we can handle paradox, we can handle polarities, we can handle dilemmas, we can come up with greater wisdom. So how do we get our communities to get to the heart of the matter and decide we want to do this? And when we're led in that way, then I think we can't figure these things out. This brilliant brain of yours that we're seeing here, Jerry, is amazing, but it's just, it makes our head start to hard to get it all, in mesh, but if we slow down and are led in part from heart, then we can bypass that need to make it all make sense, in a way. Yeah. And I think you meant Belo Horizonte is the city that you said that you said Belcanto and I tried to look up. You're right, no, you're right. And I think you mean Belo Horizonte, yeah. Yeah, I can pull up, pull the book off the shelf and make sure that that sounds right. Cool. And I'm adding some links to the chat about this. And it also reminds me of people, I've been in a lot of future of work conversations, which my line is, and they're never about the future of work itself. The places we work and the people we work with and everything else, but the actual work has now been reduced to tasks, which is even more ridiculous. But anyway, is that we really need these interpretive skills. People say, well, what do people need to learn how to do? And we need these interpretive skills. And it's not something an individual does. It is something that we do together. And we're sorely lacking in being more fine-grained about the steps that it takes to make sense, to find relevance, to decide. And we don't actually wanna believe that every time we go into another conversation, this is a wonderful conversation. But take this conversation and try to have it again with someone else. You have to go in, again, with an open mind, with a willingness to let it all unfold. But also nurturing it along to a decision. And it's not, a decision isn't an action step. With new people, you always have to start over. Right, and it's not just with new people. Well, yes, with a different, yeah, yes, you do. On every scale, it's a fractal process. I think there's also that morphogenic field. So, and I learned this actually, Doug, when we were at Spirit and Work, that you built, like this group, I'm brand new to it. I have no idea how often you've met. And in a way, we started anew, but not really, because I'm stepping into the strong field that you've created that makes me feel welcomed. I mean, at first I wasn't, but it was. So I think it's not totally starting over. The fractal, it's like, what do they call it? Expands and includes, right, each time. So it's starting over, but it's bigger because it's still containing what was there before. Yeah, morphogenic field. Jerry's brain has a place for everything. It's amazing. How many years have you been working on this, Jerry? This month, it's 22. Years? Years. Wow. So I was on the brain's first press tour 22 years ago. And saw the tool, wrote about them in the newsletter, invited them to our conference, gave them a little bit of spotlight, and then started using the tool. A month before they shifted to the public. And the file that I'm showing you, this brain file is the same file that I started 22 years ago. Wow. So that's the reason that it's here. That's the reason it has so much stuff is that I've got one brain file. And I know other brain users who create lots of brain files. Gene is an on again, off again brain user. And we know many other people who are brain addicted in different ways. And I've never seen a reason to have a second brain file. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's all connected. Yeah, everything is deeply inter-twingled. Yeah, inter-twingled like that. So here's everything is deeply inter-twingled, which is Ted Nelson. And in fact, I need to connect to my beliefs. So now it's connected to this much larger thought. Wow. About my beliefs. Huh. Boom. Woof. Well, I look forward to playing around with it. Jerryisbrain.com, just click on the little text link that says launch Jerry's brain. And you can browse all day, send me emails about any part of it. Like, can't find this, do you have this? How do I use this? Whatever, I'm happy to respond. Wow, I will spread the word too if that's okay. Oh please, no, definitely. And if you'd like to be on the inside Jerry's brain mailing list, we'll get further notices of these kinds of calls. I'll add you to that. Please. And we can go from there. All right. And we're getting close to the end of our time. Did Gina already drop off? Yes, okay. And so I'm just, is it's anybody have closing thoughts? Thanks, Susan. Yeah, I do. So in a previous call, I made a point about economies that I'd like to reinforce. The Egyptians had enormous surplus and they spent the surplus making cities for the dead. But they all agreed it was a fine thing to do. They all had something to do. It was meaningful for them and they did it and it worked for them. We build aircraft carriers, cars, air, you know, armaments. And this is what we've agreed to do. We can change our minds. And it's about nice. And so I love the position about love that someone mentioned. Utterly, there are millions of people every day that wake up and do things they don't have to do. This world is going on because of a lot of love out there. And lastly, what my first point was trying to point out is there's gonna be a lot of fear whenever we shift resources around. And we're gonna have to deal with that. Of course, people are gonna be fearful. And that's all I wanna say. This has been an honor and a pleasure to be with all of you today. I'm here. And I'll add that one of the things that allows people to contemplate changing something big and being a little less fearful is seeing other people who survived that change and are doing okay on the other side of the river. And so they kinda need to see stones in the river. They need to see a path to the other way of being. And they need to see that people are okay in that other world, just metaphorically. And that really helps. Nobody wants to be the dead person floating down the river like drown. And change looks dangerous and catastrophic. Susan, my normal practice is I'm gonna post this whole video. I've been recording, so I'm gonna post this all on YouTube. I'm then going to send a link to the video plus the text of the chat to everybody on the Inside Juries Brain List. And I will make sure to add you on that. And I'll add you to the list so that you can be on future notices for this. Great, how often do you tend to meet? Not often enough. And I haven't had an Inside Juries Brain call in a while. And I'm terrible about thinking ahead far enough to get the word out to make the calls a little bit bigger. So any help on that, I would appreciate. And any topics that you all would like to spawn as Inside Juries Brain calls, let me know. And we'll set them all up. But I appreciate that. Any other closing thoughts? Well, Jerry, I hope we continue this conversation because it's a really good one. Just started. I have two thoughts that have come to my mind. One is about capitalism. Capitalism is treated as kind of a way of distributing resources, but it's actually a replacement for democracy. It gives those with money the right to make decisions for society. And very rooted in ownership. And we've got to cope with that. Also, it has a very, very long history. It's not something new. Capitalism has been around for a long, long time. That is, it leads owning the resources that make society work. And before you move to the second point, can I just jump in for one second and say that we tend to think that the package we live in is capitalism and democracy. That these things are somehow naturally allies. Like, that's the thing we've been sold, is that the American dream is that we are in a capitalistic democratic society. And what you just said is a lovely contrast to that. My apologies, back to you in the booth. Well, the thing that's been on my mind a lot is I think we have an agreement that we have to cut the use of fossil fuels. But we have no agreement as to how to do it and what the consequences will be. It stops the economy. We've got to cope with that. Yeah, actually a great segue from me, Doug. Thank you. I just put a link in the chat to something called City Lab. There's an article that, we went to that article, goes to Sweden's new Storyteller in Chief. I don't know his exact title, but the man is, his job is to help people to visualize those stones across over to a good future. That climate change is not going to take root in people's hearts and minds, carbon neutral, and going down by this amount each year, there've got to be positive stories that involve human beings doing things that are meaningful. And this guy is on top of that in Sweden and I think we can all learn from that. So I thought it'd be useful to put up in the chat there. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And that's Pierre Graham, Chris. Yes, I believe so. Sweet. I know him. Michael, Captain Future, my friend Michael, this man is very quiet, he sits there and listens a lot, but he's quite deep and very well connected in the world of sustainability and Captain Future is aptly named, he is working hard on creating a good future for all of us. So, if you have to connect with him, please do so. Please connect on Facebook with me, so. We'll do, just did, actually, you're looking at today. Ooh, there you are, you have your own part of his brain. You are now brain famous, that and $4 if you're a coffee at Starbucks. I would just like to say in closing and maybe if we could go back to seeing all of us because I'm loving this that we're inside Jerry's brain, I mean he has a way, but here are all of our brains and we're all here. So I'm just gazing for a moment at each of you and feeling just so inspired to know your fantastic, amazing minds and brains and hearts are so committed. We're here because we care about our world and we're all doing what we can and we're so connected, your beautiful mind map shows us. So it gives me a lot of hope and gratitude. So that's just what I wanted to leave, yeah. Thank you very much. I love that. Anyone else, wrapping thoughts? You don't have to say them in rap. Yeah, I'm thankful to being part of another group talking about the future we want. So it's been amazing listening to you and I will come back as soon as I can. And thanks Ken for making me notice this. And Michael, if it's okay, I'll add you to the inside Jerry's brain list. Yeah, yeah. Sounds great. Cool people, thank you. This has been really delightful. I feel recharged, renewed, re-invigorated and now off into our days. But okay, I need to book more of these calls. Please. Happy Marikwista Hanasostekwansis, all those things. Festivus. Festivus, yes. That's great. I love Festivus. Thanks all. Feets of strength, I think, right?