 All right, this is an Inside Jerry's Brain call on September 24th, 2019. It is 10 a.m. Pacific time, which is where I am. We have a collection of notorious rascals on the call to try to talk about climate issues. And I just wanna warn everybody beforehand because this is an Inside Jerry's Brain call that I may occasionally, while you are talking, screen share my brain in an attempt to put something that adds to the conversation into the call and we will see how that goes. Mr. Homer, welcome. I think Judith Benham was gonna join us as well, but I don't see her yet. So we have before us a bunch of questions and I think maybe it would make sense to begin the call just with a temperature taking. I'd love to do a little round robin and say where each of us is in a couple sentences. Don't need to go on at great length, but how are you feeling right now, given the moment, given the climate strike kids, given the many reports coming out about the urgency of the situation, given the global setting. Are you maybe sort of a bit of mood, but either something that has got, either a thing that has you particularly sad or particularly glad about where we are. Hey, Jane. So anybody who'd like to start, go ahead. Jean, I'm asking everyone to do a quick round robin about where we are on this issue in any order at all. I'll start since I'm at the end, at least on my screen. I'm in the middle of reading or listening to a book by Roy Scranton. We're doomed, now what? And so I'm actually in a relatively pessimistic place and I tend to be pessimistic by default, but Roy Scranton is an interesting guy who's written a lot about sort of apocalypse and collapse issue and it's a depressing read. How depressing? That, you know, inevitable, we're not getting our heads around it, we're incapable of getting our heads around it and we're just marching off a cliff, basically. And socially, we're just not gonna be able to wrap our brains on this and do anything useful. Is that kind of where he's going? Yeah, I mean, you know, it, and I'm following a lot of this literature quite closely and I went back and found a cartoon yesterday that I think really tells a lot of it. You know, there are a lot of solutions out there, there are a lot of people talking about pathways and low carbon transition pathways and yes, we can still get to 1.5 as long as we start right away and all of this stuff. Most of it's an engineering conversation in terms of if we only were to deploy this technology at global scale this afternoon by 3 p.m., we'll be okay. But all of those discussions miss a key cartoon which is in my brain, but it's probably not in your brain, which is a very complex sort of set of formulas on the left side of a big blackboard and it continues on the right side of the big blackboard and in the middle, there's just a little thing that says insert miracle here. A miracle happened. This is a famous, famous old cartoon. Yeah, a miracle happens here. Yeah. Right. And that's sort of, as I was looking at that cartoon again, you know, it just occurred to me that all of the conversations we're having, virtually all the, except the ones that just say we're doomed, which are sort of based on human nature, all of the solutions conversations involve insert miracle here. And we don't talk a lot about that miracle and we don't talk a lot about how do we bring about that miracle and which tends then to simply bring us back in but we're doomed to category. Anyway. Thank you. Very, very nice check on it. I appreciate it. Who would like to go next? Bobby, you're muted. There we go. Mr. Bobby, otherwise, there was really much hot on them though. No, I'd be happy to go. I was going to share one thread, which is I spent the weekend with the deliberative poll of the people of, a random sample of the US gathering in one room and one of the five topics was the environment and climate change. And so watching the way a microcosm of the entire country grappled with climate change and trade-offs and I watched multiple small group discussions that connected to it and the experts and then presidential candidates responding to it, the questions from the audience about it. And so just seeing that process brought me to a certain set of dimensions, I think of the consequence. I think that people can grapple with this experientially, but the expert statements were as challenging as the citizens. I think the experts talking about how all the renewable energy in the world will be of waste if we don't get to smart grid levels that we're so far off from that it's just gonna, I mean, is it all these sort of threads that made it hard for people to see a sort of feasible path. So I wanna, there should always be a route to optimism and I look forward to Jerry's brain micro gathering that suggests for feasibility of hypotheticality that there's survivability of this planet. If only we can survive the sentences, that'll work out great. So Sheila, Liz, Judy, whoops, we lost Judy somehow. We're checking in basically a quick scan of where are you on this issue of climate? Are you despondent, hopeful? Has something really hit your brain that stuck there on this topic? Where do you think it's headed? And we're going in any order, anybody who wants to jump in. So who would like to go next? Ken, please. Good morning, good evening, wherever you may be. Sheila, very nice to see you after many years. Yes, nice to be here. I am schizophrenic, I go back and forth between despair and excitement, grave concern. I'm in the middle of a project right now that I'm interviewing various people involved in planning for sea level rise here in the Bay Area. So I've interviewed watershed planners and folks from the Climate Resiliency Institute and county planners. One of the things that's becoming very clear is that there's a lot of good science, a lot of good technical fixes out there. And the reason I'm interviewing these folks is I'm a facilitator and my thought is there's probably very good science being done, very good planning being done on the part of municipalities and counties, but there's not a lot of inter-agency collaboration because we've got FEMA, we've got the Armed Corps of Engineers, we've got the Bay Coastal Commission. There's just so many different entities and they do not play well together. And I'm trying to figure out if I can help with that. And what came up yesterday in a very interesting interview was all the different stakeholders who are just admit that it's gotta be their way. So you've got land use planners. You have people who are what's known as major asset holders such as Union Pacific who don't talk to PG&E, who doesn't talk to the city of Berkeley. And I think I mentioned this on our last call. The question that keeps arising for me is what kind of people do we need to be in order to work on this problem and have it be effective? And another one that's come up since is our institutions are currently failing us. So how can we transform our institutions rapidly in ways that allow for good governance and good guidance to come forth? And that's the exciting part because I know a little bit about how to do that. I'm not saying I have the answer, but I've got some ideas and I've worked with folks on that. So that's the exciting part. And then our big hairy audacious goal is to have the Bay Area prepared for six feet of seal will rise by 2045, roughly 25 years from now. We're asking people, do you think that is reasonable? And we're consistently getting the answer that the scientists will tell you that the science does not back that up, that they're much more conservative. But every single person we've talked to says on a personal gut level, I think it's gonna be at least that. So that's where the hairiness comes in of people have an inherent intuition that it's gonna be worse faster than we thought. And there's so much to do and so many interlocking things that have to be addressed that it feels hopeless, but we've got to start somewhere. And I feel like I've made a little bit of a start. So that's where I am, I'm kind of all over the map. Ken, thank you, that's awesome. And I just showed Andy Lipkis and treat people because there's a story that happened that maybe 15 years ago that I'll tell as quickly as I can because it might play really well for the Bay Area, which is that he noticed one day in the news that the Army Corps of Engineers was gonna raise the walls of the Los Angeles drainage ditches, which I just drove over on Friday. I was in LA for the day on Friday and I drove over them thinking about Andy. And he started writing to them because he found a treat people way back in 1973, which is just looking to plant more trees in the city. But he called the agency or got in touch because he was like, you don't need to build the walls higher, you need to break more concrete in this basin, which is basically poured concrete so that it never rains. But when it does, it's a disaster because the water is not absorbed into the aquifer. And so somehow, and I don't remember the story now, he realized he got these agencies talking to each other because it turned out that the Army Corps of Engineers and the local flood control and the local parks and rec and the local water utility and the local sewage utility and the federal, whatever, none of them were talking to each other. They weren't aware of each other. They had overlapping mandates, overlapping resources, sometimes contradictory goals. And once they started talking, they were able to share more, rationalize what they were up to and make a lot of good and plant a bunch more trees and break up some concrete. So I don't know, there's just miles and miles of concrete everywhere you look in LA. So I don't think they solved the problem, but they opened up conversations that weren't happening before that were essential to the thing that you just described exactly in the Bay Area. So, and I've met Andy, if you want, ping him and mention me, whatever, but I think that might be an interesting entree for you. Cool. And everybody use the chat to offer resources, jump in with questions, whatever you'd like. Doug, do you want to go next? And you are muted. Yeah. I guess I have so many thoughts here. It's hard to put them in any kind of linear order. I'm most struck by the fact that the technology people are not drawing logical conclusions from what they talk about. So for example, the idea that as soon as solar produced electricity or wind is on a parody and cost with fossil fuels, the problem is solved. We have in the United States, 60% of the homes are heated with gas. They can't just push a button and switch from fossil fuels to solar produced electricity. They would have to take out their gas-fired furnace, replace it with an electric-fired furnace. 80% of the homes in the US cook with gas. The conversion cost here is just tremendous and nobody seems to be taking that into account. My own view is where we are is we're badly stuck because there's no plausible scenario of how to get to the future that it coheres. I think we're gonna have to go through a bottleneck with very high costs before we can get to a future that we can begin to manage. And nobody wants to go through that bottleneck. Nobody wants to be the person who says that's what we have to do. Historically, for any kind of slow burn problem, everybody avoids it. I mean, nobody's willing to be the one that does the damage. I mean, it's funny. I think that climate change is sometimes compared to the Y2K issue, right? And arguably Y2K wasn't a big problem because a whole lot of people went and found a bunch of code that would have been damaging and fixed it. And then the problem is, okay, we spent a bunch of money and nothing happened so there must not have been a problem. And with Y2K, what's striking is the problem could be located in individual industries and assigned to individual people. We can't do that with climate change. It's just a totally different kind of organism. Just as a footnote on sea level rise, I have the concern that we're gonna spend the entire national budget building seawalls to protect the property of the rich. Thank you, Doug. Who would like to go next? Can I make it, Jerry? Can I just make a quick comment on something Doug said? Yes, please. There's a fascinating PowerPoint that Stanford did a number of years ago and I'll put in the chat that looked at, and this comes back to the idea of building seawalls to protect the rich. It looked at sand and gravel supply and what it would take to protect the world's major ports. Only the world's major ports, the top 100, 200, 300 ports, whatever. And it basically said to do that would require expanding our use of sand and gravel by a factor of 200 per year. And so the idea that we're going to have even just the resources in terms of sand and gravel available to protect everyone's homes is going to turn out to just to be fanciful because there's actually a hard, there's a hard, we just don't have enough sand to do the kind of protection that a lot of people are sort of assuming will happen. So many of these things are at such a scale that the remedies are boggling. And then there's, one of the problems here is that many of the remedies or mitigation strategies don't have general purpose agreement. And I think that's an important piece of our conversation here is that sort of generally true? What do we think? Because I think everybody on the call here is convinced that this is happening, that climate change is a real issue. I think it would be really interesting to sit down and figure out what sort of mitigation strategies would we all agree to, even us on the call here. And I'm not going to try to go that way, but that's one of my concerns here in general. Who would like to go next? This is Elizabeth Carney. Hey. Can you hear me? Hi, Jerry. I hear you like you're inside my ear. I'm sitting out in nature at South Park. And maybe because there's not quite so many women on this call, I'm really inclined to offer some of the more feminine approaches. I think often climate crisis discussions are filled with what is the technology that we can bring forward. And like the indigenous know, there's nature's technology that is often all we are as a major focus that would really make a huge difference. Whether it's enormous planting of trees or regenerative agriculture, or these kinds of things have a huge impact. And we aren't bringing our pictures of having a garden planet back into the conversation. But if that were where we wanted to go, and oh, by the way, that would change our climate situation drastically today, then maybe we could start to implant some of those kinds of pictures. So that's kind of a jumping in in the middle. But I do think that we have been oriented for the last, I don't know, maybe 500 years with dominating nature. And maybe there's something that's more about allowing and working with the indigenous knowledge about historical patterns that I was talking with Ken about yesterday. There's so much more known about where floods come and where fires come. If we could have a little bit wider view, we might be able to see and plan based on some of what's already known. But the main thing in terms of check-in that I wanted you all to know is that as I've been working in Eastern Oregon, my work has to do with a new paradigm of medicine that's more about self-empowerment. And working up there, we've been establishing a prototype for a clinic and a community center that's nature-based using traditional medicines and herbs. So I think that there's a tie here that we need to make more connection with people and nature. Not only do things like planting trees and regen agriculture have a huge impact, but things like using forest bathing and herbal medicine and that kind of diversity actually is good for our immune systems. Like there's research now about the terpenes and trees and how they stimulate our human immune systems. And I think the more we can find ways to talk about enlightened self-interest and how our own health is intimately tied to the planet, I think we'll find more interest and less apathy and hopelessness than we're seeing now. Elizabeth, thank you. I completely agree. And while you were talking, I flashed a couple of things. One was a really good article that was written in 2018 in the New York Times that I just saw last week, and I can dirt save the planet, but it points to a whole series of regenerative agriculture efforts and other things. And I'm sorry, Dave Whitzel's not on the call here because he's in the middle of a whole bunch of regenerative economy, regenerative ag stuff. I also showed briefly a thought I can go back to, my ahas on food and soil, where I've collected up a bunch of the sorts of categories of wisdom we know. And I didn't show, but a part of my brain that I love is on indigenous ways of knowing. And I think that we dramatically under-appreciate how we used to understand how to live in society on the commons and how we used to understand how to maintain the commons, which is knowledge we've gotten rid of. So I'm completely in agreement, but thank you for a wonderful check-in. Who else would like to go? I could just jump in. Mark, please. So I guess on the kind of despair aspect, I think there is a lot of that. I was just talking a couple of days ago with a friend of mine who's basically, said he's gonna signed off from watching and listening to the news and so on. And so I don't think that's uncommon to a greater or lesser extent, both in older people and in younger people, actually. And then the core of a lot of, you know, everyone says, for example, unlimited growth imperative is really at the core and heart of this. And I think that's true. And the question is, well, if that is the extremely malignant meme that has possessed us, how do we stab that meme in the heart? And that meme is carried in our hearts and minds and our love for our families and et cetera, et cetera. So it's very hard, which is kind of the other aspect. There's so many technology solutions, but as we realize more and more, technology in some sense trains and learns from us human beings. So you can't get away from the fact this kind of ultimate paradox that I'm really struggling with. You know, basically like Buckminster Fuller said, you can't change people, you can't change society, but you can change technology. So let's change technology and that will change things. I think that's, I think he's wrong. Where do we go from here? Thank you. And I agree with that a lot. It's a very, it's a very male approach to just try to fix the technology and apply engineering. And there's a whole discussion to be had around that, which I won't, you know, detour the conversation around right now. Who else would like to check in? Sheila, do you want to jump in? Yes, quick introduction. I'm from Singapore, but I've been based in Botswana, Africa, Southern Africa for the last 10 years or so. What brought me here was my work. I do a lot of work with the five disciplines in this work, but my practice is in its application on what's called persistent issues or stubborn problems. I just love the work of systems thinking. So I do a lot of work with system archetypes. And so what I do is I convert a lot of that work into research. So one of the things that I was struck by coming from Singapore and being in Africa is just how dry it is. Especially the southern part and the northern part of the continent. And what I've noticed about the indigenous knowledge, it hasn't been about how do you reverse that drag to become green, but rather the indigenous knowledge is how do I survive it? Should it become more brown? Does that make sense? Not okay? I think so. Can you say a little more? Yeah, it's the indigenous knowledge understands that well, the land is getting drier. So what must we do so that we can survive its dryness? Now that's not a knowledge that says, how can I turn something? Because when something is becoming dry, on a spectrum, that's like it was green, it's becoming brown. So when you learn to cope in a system so that how do you cope with it becoming more brown? It is not a knowledge that knows how to reverse it and make it green. It doesn't have that knowledge. Very interesting. Those of us who've grown up, and I was in Singapore, I mean, there's so much green there. We learned the more trees you have, the more rains you have. The trees bring rains, right? Yes, whereas here the farmer says, when it rains, then I shall plow. So it doesn't have the rest of the story that says, but it's when we plow more that we will get more rains. I love these issues, they're complicated too. Judith, just raise your hand. Let's pass it to Judith for a second. Yep. You are muted. Apologies. Try again. I really appreciate the comments that are being discussed from both polarities. And I think maybe at some point we wanna think on multiple levels to clarify points because I'm struggling a little bit with what I can do individually and what I can do to activate engagement with other people in exploring the solutions to this because it's not something that can be done in a hierarchical way. And our current structures don't lend themselves to the transition. So there's a sociological issue that needs to be discussed. But I absolutely believe that simplification of life and creating reality as that's coming from my perspective, my system or somebody else. I don't know. Somebody has some noise. It's still there. It might have been you Sheila because you just muted and the sound went away. Okay. Well, I guess I'm just, I think that the connectivity of people to people and people to nature as an ongoing theme is a remediation of philosophy and lifestyle. And all of those connections need to be enhanced. And then the question becomes, does one person doing something engage other people doing it? I don't think we can issue a dictate. I think it's futile to try to build seawalls. The ocean is going to be what the ocean is going to be. And it demonstrates over and over again especially right now in the spate of tropical storms and high levels of devastation that some areas are not going to be habitable areas. And the sooner that we realize that we can't fight nature in the ways that we could when we were a much less populated planet and had unlimited resources. That's a hard awakening and not one that most people will find hopeful and yet at the heart of it is a lot of hope that by responding realistically, we can do something. And so I'm wondering if anyone has experience in Minnesota, we don't worry too much about the sea but we're still having flooding issues because of the change and we're very green. So we get a lot of water but we're getting way more than we usually do. And we got way more snow than we often do, et cetera. So they're going to be geological and geographical issues but how do we sort of get lots of starting points for dendritic action that will let people come together and do constructive things? And I just posted to the chat too long ago similar conversations to this. I built two little websites. The first one's gone but the second one I rebuilt. So global warming real estate exists and basically the headline says if you don't believe the science maybe you see a business opportunity and the whole thing is an exercise in irony like what are we going to need if the sea levels continue rising? And then Raftify was actually, three quarters of the Earth's surface is water, is ocean. How do we learn to live on the oceans really well? And if we can do that well, there's energy, there's food, there's clearly water. A whole bunch of things exist on the oceans that if we can figure out how to do that properly it would work. And long ago I had a Yitam call with his fellow who was doing open ocean sailing, I think he called it. And when I tried to say, oh, so this is about seasteading, right? He immediately had an allergic reaction. He said, no, no, no, seasteading is being branded by Peter Thiel and libertarians to basically create cruise ships that live off outside the 200 mile limits so they can establish their own rules for civilization and live like John Galt would live and we don't want that. And I'm like, oh, okay, I get that. So I don't know where this is gone, I haven't followed up, but I'm extremely interested in novel ways of, because sea level goes up three meters, five meters and two thirds of Bangladesh is underwater because they're at sea level. Bangladesh is an incredibly populous country. Never mind a whole lot of island countries that are swamped and have to move, et cetera, et cetera. So we're kind of in those kinds of places. Oh, climate chess, never seen that. I'm gonna have to put that in my brain. This is like climate battleship or something. We should, you know, partly I'm interested in also in what things are happening that are causing people to motivate to step in. And some people are deciding to do only positive actions, right? So how do we only suggest positive things? So for example, adopting regenerative agriculture is a completely positive action. Planting more trees, totally a positive action. Other people like Greta Thunberg are, you know, she gave a really moving talk where she's on a panel and she says, how dare you? Like how dare you drop a really screwed up earth in our laps, where you've basically eaten up our future, et cetera, et cetera. And she's indignant and really angry to the point of tears. And that actually is motivating to a lot of people as well. Although the psychology of using just positive versus negative or empathy or threat, I don't fully understand. So anyway, so I think these things are all play pieces for the kind of situation that we're in. Michael, I don't think we heard you check in. Could you be so kind? Right on, yes. Well, by, I agree entirely and I totally disagree. It's just a position I sort of take. Not a position I take, it's a position I find myself in. There aren't any solutions in the current box. The one thing you can assure yourself of is if you stand up in a meeting and say, and I say, I've got an idea, you're dead. The collective wisdom now is that there are no silver bullets. These are all wicked problems. So there can't be, there's no solution. We're all in deep trouble. And I certainly take the deep trouble. For many years I've been resistant to the idea that there has to be a sort of a fragmentation and a breakup before any emergent possibilities can take ground. I don't see why we couldn't get on with it 10, 20 years ago in a different way. And recently the fragmentation has become so extreme. The political level, the economic level, the geographic discrotiation and whatever. And somehow or other I'm beginning to see some hope. Sort of like a no-till solution rather than pull it up and try again. The answer is not in the current box of tricks. For myself I just had a month of sort of paradigm shudder. I spent about 30 years telling people it's the money stupid, the money makes us do it, change the money, we can do that, it's easy and so forth. And I've been dismayed at the lack of coherence, penetration, awareness, contagion, whatever. And we brought it down to something that was going to involve a bunch of people for a bunch of time to put a bunch of things together to have something happen. That has not been working. About a month ago we suddenly saw much to our excitement and dismay that we'd been missing something for 30 years which was sitting right in front of us and that was how to do this big multi mess package of 30 people, 30 weeks, that sort of thing. Turn it down to 30 minutes and one by one. And it simply comes down to that we can't be responsible for anything that's happening in the conventional socioeconomic system. The money model means anything we do transmits shit on somebody else. Just get used to it, every time you move a dollar it's moving down the line and doing more damage somewhere else. I remember that, the moral thing when I was a kid, if there was a button that you could press and you'd have a million dollars or pounds in Britain, only drawback is some guy on the other side of the planet is dead because you pushed the button. Would you do it? Well, we gave up with that question years ago. We've been pressing the button forever. Give me the money and it's away. And I don't care if we give it to the pope or the queen, the money is all going to do damage. And so I've been saying, well, let's get money that's not damaging and I thought it was a big problem. And last month we suddenly realized it's not a big problem, it's dead easy. But communicating that is not dead easy. And with that, I pass to Gene. Gene, you're on. Take it from that line. It took me more than 30 minutes. Michael and I went around in circles for what? A year and a half? And then even after the last call you said, you got it. It took you more than 30 minutes to get it through to me, but I think you got it. So, but in terms of the subject at the end, Michael said there's no solution in the current box. Well, that's because of the mindset that's in the current box. It's the people that are in the box that's the problem. So that if you could push a button and eliminate all of the people from the world, everything would be fine. The earth would do well. And I think after we piss her off enough, she will get rid of us one way or another. And then she will recover. And, you know, I've read quite a few books on various aspects of this. Some people have talked about the regenerative farming and sequestering the CO2 and, you know, different aspects of things that we could do different technologies and planting. And the article that you put in there, the dirt saved the earth, I'm halfway through that. That seems like a really good article. Watched a bunch of videos. Has it created the largest movement to date in this arena? 15, 16-year-old girl from Sweden who decides on her own to do something. And last Friday, there was... They sent 4 million people out. In 150 countries. Right. There's another one next month. Yeah. So... But it's still, you know, so far that we have to go to actually deal with the problem. And is there any experience in our history where we have ever had a problem of this magnitude to solve to which we have risen to the challenge? Well, the analogy she makes is World War II. And she's saying, look, when World War II started, we mobilized everything. We turned all industry over to making bombs and weapons. Clearly not what we want right now, but we mobilized at a completely fundamental level. And she's saying, why are we not doing that here? So we have done something like that. But the difference between World War II and this problem is this problem has a tipping point. World War II didn't. Okay? Yes. The tipping point, it doesn't matter how much you mobilized. It's over. So... Well, and World War II was not a wicked problem. Yes. Right. It's pretty straightforward. So it's nice when you have sort of a black and white, evil villain kind of thing that happens all of a sudden in this cataclysmic because people respond to that. Yeah. Because they see their imminent doom. They see their peril right there. And when World War II was over, the world still existed. When we go through the crisis we might have now, we might have really lost the world because all the easy hanging fruit is gone. It's gonna be much harder to recover. So I haven't checked in yet. So I'd love to do that for a second. And triggered by what you just said, Doug, which is on the one hand, I believe that humans like Alexander von Humboldt back in 1810 was writing about human effects on the planet. So this has been a long story for many, many years. He witnessed the changes already back then. And for me it was like, take a skeptic and stand on the outskirts of Los Angeles or Mexico City or Bangkok, the most polluted cities on earth on an average day and just have them look across the city and say, isn't something broken here? And there's tons of other examples you'd go to of just like physically experiencing how screwed up the earth is. So mostly I see that crap is going to happen and rich people are gonna weasel their way out of where the crap is happening to higher land, to a survivalist basements, to whatever. Titanic. Yeah, exactly. Until a couple of things tip that are actually, that actually start to destroy the whole food system. So the things I am most frightened out is basically killing off ocean life is a really big one. That if we manage like, we've killed off all the keystone fish species, oceans are acidifying, they're getting warmer, which is changing everything, destroying the reefs. We could in principle destroy the oceans and that would be, that would be just, that would, I think that sort of catalyzes to killing off most animal life. And then we can also make the air unbreathable. So if the methane going up in the atmosphere suddenly changes the chemistry of air, there is no way, there is no way we survive if the air chemistry changes enough that it's not breathable because we're not all gonna be wearing scuba gear. That kind of breaks everybody as well. And the reason we have green plants is that cyanobacteria basically poisoned the air for the earliest, the earliest creatures, killed them all off and then we had plants because we suddenly had oxygen in the atmosphere. That was an ancient event that killed off everything that existed before it. So I'm actually, I see that some of those calamities are actually not unforeseeable, not unimaginable. I think that the life-ending kinds of events are pretty foreseeable. And a friend of ours, Henrik Sala is a young global leader and a National Geographic Explorer. He has a proposal out to basically turn half of the ocean into a marine preserve, fully one half of the area non-fishable forever, which is brilliant, which is completely brilliant. And if you can enforce it, half the ocean would be like thriving with marine life. All the critters would be like reproducing and doing their thing. There'd be much more abundant fishing on the rest of the ocean, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, the part where the question is how do you enforce it? And that's a policy question that if enforced would be, I think, spectacularly successful. To me, that's sort of a no-brainer. Also, I love soil fertility, natural farming, carbon farming, whatever you wanna call it, your generative agriculture, I think is brilliant as well. And I wish we transformed all of our agriculture into that. So those things seem easy to me to do. And everything else to me seems like a knife fight and an elevator, that we have people who are on either sides of this for political dogmatic reasons, and that membership in the conservative wing of every government on earth right now means adhering to the plank on your platform that says there is no such thing as global climate change. And if there were anyway, there's nothing we can do about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that to me is a political cultural site. And in the past, we've also, just like there've been like five extinction level events, there've been a couple of major cultural events where humans change their minds about stuff a lot. And it doesn't happen in two years, but it happens pretty quickly. The reason I love Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, is it into the Industrial Revolution, right? And there's a, I have a short video I'll post a link to and for us to imagine today how we live before economic scripts in our heads. And I think the group gathered here has realized that those are scripts in our heads and is fighting them, but we're sort of really trying to figure out how to get new scripts in people's heads. And I think that, I think the big win here is when we look back 200 years from now, if we're still alive and can look back, the big win will be a couple of people who managed to put a new little script in the back of many people's heads that made them see themselves differently relative to each other and relative to the pale blue dot, right? And that's a simple cultural hack that will change a whole bunch of people's behavior and awareness so that they begin to adopt regenerative agriculture. They begin to take care of the commons and they begin to do all these kinds of things. So I'm particularly interested in the cultural hack, the scripts in our heads, the narratives that cause people to act differently, which I think are led to emotionally and not logically. I think that emotion and membership trump logic all the time. I've got a thought in my brain, I'll show you about that as well. So sorry, long check in, but I'm on the one hand really hopeful that we can start to crack the code on the narratives, the scripts. And on the other hand, I see that we're heading directly towards some cataclysmic things that aren't just gonna displace some people because the water level rose, but in fact are going to kill off our ability to make food or to breathe. And those things are cataclysmic. Mark, do you wanna talk a little bit about the great transition? And I think I'm aware of it, but I think there's several great transitions. There's also some stuff in the UK. So which, can you explain how they're different or what they're doing? Well, yeah, I was actually just talking yesterday to Andrew Gaines, who is the guy in charge of the Great Transition Initiative in Australia. And I'll send you a link to some of his work and documents and videos. And but hey, what he's basically trying to do is literally what you're talking about. His entire point is, is that we need to change sort of the script in people's heads and go for what is the term he uses. He's promoting an idea called kitchen table conversations. But his whole idea is that we need to get people thinking about a term and his term is... Sounds like? Looking for it, sorry. But anyway, there's a bunch of his stuff. A life sustaining society, he's got a different term though. But basically just getting people to rethink and to focus on a life sustaining or culture. But again, the problem here is, after talking to him for an hour and reading a lot of his stuff, I still haven't quite figured out that insert miracle here piece in terms of how do you do that? I mean, his idea is simply everybody reaches out to their networks and sort of proselytizes this idea and then those people reach out to their networks and suddenly everybody's had an epiphany. I'm not 100% sure it works that way. And by the way, here's the piece we were talking about in the chat a little bit earlier about sand and gravel. So I'll put a link to this in our chat. But thank you, Mark, I totally agree. Okay, so Doug had given us some interesting questions to ask as part of this. One, what do we think is likely to happen? Two, what is the best that can happen? Three, do those possibilities survive analysis? And four, what then should we do? I like these as sort of gentle framing for what might be happening. Anybody have other frameworks you like? Ken, go ahead. I'd like to tell a story if I could about on a multicultural men's retreat with Michael Mead and Jack Cornfield. There were 110 men on this retreat. I was in my mid-30s, I'm not a very large man and there were a lot of very big, hulking black guys who were really angry hanging out and it was terrifying to me. I was terrified because the retreat begins with two rules. Rule number one is whenever a conflict arises we deal with it, we don't put it off. Can we get agreement on that? Everybody said yes. Rule number two is we don't resort to violence when dealing with rule number one. Can we get agreement on that? No, and there were at least three guns on the property. It was very hairy for about three days. There were 40 African-Americans, there were 40 Latinos and there were about 30 Caucasian men there. So we were outnumbered and I say weak as I'm talking about me as a white guy. There was so much anger in that room on the part of African-Americans, on the part of Latinos, towards white people. Even though I knew I personally was not the target, I represented the system of oppression they had grown up with. And there were a couple of remarkable things that happened. One was when we would attempt to solve an issue, if it didn't work the leaders would say, okay, hold on. And right there on the stage in front of everybody they'd say, just chill, hold for a second. And they would talk back and forth and say, what about this, what about this? Okay, here's what we're gonna try. They would try that. If it failed they'd say, hold on. And they would come back and try again with something new. If it failed more than three times they would say, we don't know what to do. Who here in the audience has an idea? And we would try that. But it was number one. Two, there was a man who was in his late 40s, a Caucasian guy who on the third day told the story that when his 16 year old son was killed outside of a high school dance by two Latino youth. And that when the trial was over and they were sentenced to life in prison, a reporter came up to him and shoved a mic in his face and said, do you feel vindicated? And Justin, do you feel vindicated? And he had such emotion in his voice when he said, vindicated, I wanted to shove that mic down the reporter's throat. How could I possibly feel vindicated? Not only did I lose my child, but two other families lost their child as well. And there was a moment in the room where there's something inside of us all cracked because it was real raw emotion that every single person related to at a very deep level had nothing to do with concepts, with ideas, with engineering. It was like, this shit is real. And that marked a turning. The third thing that happened was, and there's four of them. It's not a huge long story. The third thing that happened was I came out on the fourth day and there was a, there were about, the auditorium is about a third full. And there were five young men up on the stage, all of them under 17, and they were all people of color. And they're saying things like, I'm 17 years old. I have hit my life expectancy in South Central Los Angeles. I expect to die any day. I do not know if I'm going to be alive when I go home next week. And again, lots of tears. And I'm getting, Terry just talking about this because it's still in this, to this day, it was viscerally in me. And the fourth thing that happened was, after five days, and there was a lot of drumming, there were two African, Malodoma Sumay, who's from Burkina Faso, African American medicine man was there, along with two indigenous shamans from Peru. And we held a huge initiation event. We were naked in the woods. We built this, we dammed a river. You got held underwater till you were struggling to come up, you went into the earth. And I mean, it was really, really intense. And after that, between the drumming, the storytelling, the initiation, and the truth telling, by the end of that week, those 110 men who went in and were so afraid of each other at the beginning, followed to each other as allies. And this is the kind of thing that I don't think many people have experience with, especially if we are Western and educated in our tradition. So one reason I have an allergic reaction, people saying humans are a mistake and the earth would be better off is, I think we are very deeply part of a planetary consciousness, and it is through initiatory practices that we wake up to that. And when we undergo those and recognize the depth of connection we have to the earth and to each other, then things that seem totally impossible to us now become available to us in ways that then we can act on. So that's my little story. Let's just go into silence for a second. I just wanna process what you just said. It's a lovely story, Kim, thank you. One of the peers I have is that we're not smashing one another into each other in mindful ways, like you just described, that more and more we're cocooning, closing ourselves off. The filter bubble is alive and well, so we talk with people who are like-minded, I know many families who have rules over at holiday meals, we won't talk about religion or politics or don't bring up Donald Trump or whatever. I'm like, bring those things on, love those conversations, love to hear how other people think, but also that technology is separating us in too many ways. Even though it really super connects us, it also super separates us. And I just did a little swing through the East Coast, stayed with dear friends in Boston whose two daughters have gone through severe sort of addiction and other kinds of problems with technology. And one of the daughters would have friends over and they would sit on her bed, five girls sitting on the bed, all working their phones and posting and liking and posting and liking and whatever else. And then I just flew to LA last Friday on the flight down, I'm sort of peeking between the seats to the young woman who's sitting in the chair in the middle. The entire flight, her fingers are flashing on the screen of her iPhone faster than I can imagine. Switching between apps, flipping, opening, but two thirds of her time is basically looking through her photo roll at selfies. And it's some of them are selfies of just her and she's like inspecting herself and some of them are like her and her sister and mom who were sitting next to her in the chairs in front of me and some of them are a slightly larger group but it's selfies. That was her entertainment, it was watching. And when she went to places, the big thing was to take the selfie when she's on her own moving from place to place. The big thing was to look at the selfies and I'm inferring a lot from that behavior. But I'm worried that we have the capacity to actually be very connected to each other and very vulnerable to each other and present to each other. And we're just not using any of it that way. Part of which is due to the business models behind these platforms, how they get used. Part of it is something else. Part of it is like a deep fear that is in our society that could be alleviated by sitting through things with each other. Yeah, so one of my beliefs is that we have an epidemic of not listening. So being seen and being heard are interesting and that they're different, right? Clearly different channels, different sensory inputs and yet really kind of similar in the sense that one of our big problems is that many people don't feel heard or seen in society. And I absolutely, I think that's true. That's absolutely true. So how do we help people be heard or seen? I think is another big piece here. All of which to catalyze some kind of connection between people. Jerry, the five girls sitting on bed, on the bed texting to somebody, probably five somewhat overlapping networks, they're very connected. Just not in the way that we used to think about being connected. And I agree with that. And yet there's something about liking everybody's Insta photos immediately. There was an article, I don't know, five years ago when Instagram was younger that was describing teen girls' behavior on Instagram and how there was like a really short window within which you needed to like everything all of your social circle was doing or you were kind of on the outs. And this would explain phones out during dinner time, all the time, et cetera. And there was kind of no let up on this. So, and everybody was just taking a picture and everybody's like, you know, whatever it was. And it became a bit of a trap. So, and I don't know, I haven't seen good sociological studies of who's doing what and so forth. But I fear that on the one hand, I agree entirely that we now have broader peripheral vision into many more people than we ever did before because this is a superconducting medium and we have these gigantic social networks. On the other hand, are all these touches mostly superficial? And how can we slow it down? They're ad revenue. Yeah. And so they're designed to be addictive. Exactly. So Tiffany Schlein, who's the, she's a documentary filmmaker. She also started the Webby Awards. She just published a book and I just, I'm on her mailing list. So this morning there was a note, yay, my book is out. And she started to practice way back when she calls technology Shabbat. And basically on Shabbat on, you know, on the Jewish weekly note, no work day, they put away all technology. They unplug the router. They put away all their phones and she and her family eat together, play together, do everything else. And she says it's been really healing for their family and it kind of slows down time. And the kids love it. They looked forward to it. And she's trying to just get this practice out there. She's not trying to convert anybody to Judaism. She's just saying, this is a very useful way to once a week sort of ground, slow down and reconnect. And that's interesting. So anyway, Michael, the video, can you annotate what the video is just so we know from later? Yeah, it's the long spoon thing. You're a long spoon banquet. Oh, okay. Oh, got it. Yeah. Thank you. Anybody else thoughts? We're at the hour and we have another 30 minutes if we'd like to keep talking. Where should we put our energies or our attention in all of this? Go ahead, Doug. To me, the action item that's come up in this conversation is working on the script, a new script that we could put into people's minds. I think it's a really powerful idea and probably it would be good to have another session that would focus on the script. Let me give one piece of the script that we're in as a kind of background. Some of you have heard me say this before. It was said early in the conversation that growth was the problem, which I believe. Growth is part of a meme that's very deep in our culture that goes back through the word capitalism, which comes from Latin cap, which was for head, which was used for a new head of cattle. So capitalism, the current growth meme is rooted in sexuality and the reproduction of more. The thing is, is there an alternative story for how we use our sexuality except for growth? Well, it certainly seems and I think in a lot of countries that sexuality is more and more divorced from growth, at least from reproduction. Yeah, but I'm talking about the way the idea of economic growth is hidden in a sexual metaphor that goes back to the grazing and raising of cattle. So the new birth of a calf raises the question in a tribe. Who owns it? What can you do with it? It was a problem from the very beginning and that problem is still with us. You have to think about calves as currency is that calves live and die. And so it's kind of like a currency with demarrage. And they're not divisible. I'll leave the clue there. Back for a second to the notion of scripts. I'll say something that some of you probably heard me say before, but it's in the interest of how scripts get planted. And it's not a pretty story, but a week after the 2016 US election, my buddy Al said to me, so Jerry, what was Hillary going to do if she got elected on Inauguration Day? What was her first act going to be? And I'm like, well, I don't know. She's gonna make sure Pell grants don't go away. I had no idea, right? And then he asks the $64,000 question, which is, so what is Donald Trump going to do on Inauguration Day? And I began to enumerate. He's gonna build a big, beautiful wall. He's gonna stop immigrants from, and I could enumerate his hateful platform and every plank of which made my skin crawl, but he had trained me through animal training methods on his entire platform. And I would not have attended a Trump rally, you know the whole story. Like somehow, magically, he had imported the whole thing so that I could go ahead and talk through his platform. That is the planting of a narrative. And I will submit to you that he is actually a very skilled communicator. And if you wanna read Scott Adams, the Dilbert author, analyzing Trump as a communicator, Scott Adams gives him like an A plus in the sense of communicating these kinds of things. So that to me is a very chilling way of transmitting narrative, but a successful one. And I'm not saying we should adopt Trumpian methods for trying to get new scripts across. I'm saying that there's lots of different ways to do this. And I think that maybe a script needs lots of different forms of expression and some kind of central consistency in the middle so that in some cases it's a video like the story of stuff, like Annie Leonard's story of stuff, which traveled far and wide. In some senses it's like Coney 2012, which was sort of fraudulent, but had the magic trick of, hey kids, get your parents to sit down and watch this with you and then get them to send money, right? Or the ice bucket challenge, which went absolutely wacky, crazy viral and every other charity on earth was like, damn it, why weren't we the target? Why weren't we the recipient of the ice bucket challenge funds? And hard to replicate because everybody else is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did the first one. But all of these things sort of move a lot of humans to do stuff. I've not read made to stick, but I know the Heath brothers and they forgot what the first book they did way back when it was. Made to stick opens with the famous, you wake up in a bathtub filled with ice and there's a note saying, and it's an urban legend, but people know this, it sticks to their minds and it has enough things to sound truthy enough to land in. So stick is an acronym and I can't, because I read the book when it came out like eight years ago. So I don't remember what it says to it being simple and timely and these things that are crafting ideas and narratives that are sticky in people's minds. And as Mark just said, we know how to do a lot of this, but major groups aren't doing it. So that's something to, there we go, success. It's great having a brain, Jerry. I wish I had a brain. And here's the six principles of stickiness we're to have under enumerated wisdom. Yes, but go ahead and read their newest one first called moments. Moments? Moments. And I just posted a link to a short video that will give you a sense of what moments is all about. Oh, thank you. It's actually, they've written four different books really and all four of them have been on one single topic was how to promote change. It is the power of moments. I have it in my brain, but I've not read it. So just watch the video and you won't need to read the book. Awesome. It'll take it down to four minutes. Love that. Anybody else with perspective on how to approach this? Well, one thing that I've posted up above the interview in the Guardian with Vaslav Smil. Someone asked him, the interviewer asked about approaches. I said, you know, there is no one size fits all. It's gonna be very local. And I think with climate change, it's gonna be very local. There are organizing principles that we can adapt and adopt. There are certain ways of working, but every watershed is different. What I'm learning here in the Bay Area is the interview people, you know, the topography and hydrology is very unique to the landscape. And I think the, you know, Tip O'Neill's All Politics Is Local also fits in here where, you know, we're going to have to ignore in some, to some extent, the idea of how to scale things and say, what are the good practices that are useful in this context that can be adapted and adopted here and not try to go, we need one thing that's gonna fit everywhere. Because I think that's a trap. That's a mind trap that puts us in a different thinking stance than what is, what's called for. Yes, all politics is local though, in terms of connecting with other people, some small percentage of the people you can connect with logically, and the rest of them, you need to connect with them emotionally. Yeah. Sheila, you're a system thinker. What aspects of systems thinking and systems interventions appeal to you most in these sorts of settings? And also, and maybe a second part of the question, how much of this do you think is emotion versus other sorts of sorts of things? Well, so is Gene. Gene is also a systems thinker. There are many on this call. Well, you know, I didn't join you from the beginning, so I'm not sure when I did say what I say was fitting in with way all of you were at. My quick two thoughts about global warming. It ties with agriculture. It ties with manufacturing. And there's currently a work that I'm doing with, I think you know, Seoul Society of Organizational Learning. There's a group in Europe. And so, you know, it's been interested in looking at agriculture globally as to why has that been declining over the years? And a big part of it is tight to climate change. My quick point about agriculture is there is a tendency as a globe to plant what's called dry crops. Do I make sense when I say dry crops? Crops that are okay without too much water, is that what you mean? Yes, yes, exactly. So what happens then is when you have crops that don't need too much water, they also don't release a lot of water. And so what that does is over the lands, there's a drying up effect. That drying up effect is what creates violent storms on land. A lot of these dry crops are used for agriculture for food consumption. But this is what I'm checking right now that a big portion of it is used for beer production and beer consumption. So these are data. So, you know, while I'm getting onto this project with Europe, I'm really happy that, you know, there's a team coming together that wants to look at global data. From a systems thinking, and to me when I do systems thinking, I don't just map a lot of things. I look for causality and system archetypes and that requires, you know, behavior over time graphs. So that's a work in progress. That's tied to agriculture. With manufacturing, yes, there's a lot of talk about fossil fuel burning and how that's contributing to global warming. And if, you know, I'm one of the few ladies in the room, so I'm really happy this conversation is happening with not too many ladies in the room. But if you look at a lot of manufacturing that's happening globally, if you draw the line, the number of products that we produce for the genders by male gender and female gender, you'll find that a significant part of our manufacturing is intended for the female gender. And so this is very interesting for me to see Greta, a female who's saying out there, but it's the men who is doing us wrong. But if most of the manufacturing is happening because the females are demanding those products, then she has it and all us females have it in our power to change the course of the story. So, you know, that's the kind of data and stories that I look for using system thinking. There is a very powerful process in doing this, but to your story about how do we help more see this, I've only found through looking at what we call data over time or behavior over time graphs of what has happened because that will usually tell us a story as to why things have happened that way. And a lot of us begin to realize that the power to change is not out there, that it's really in our own backyards. Just like the story I started up by sharing about the indigenous knowledge, how the conversations are happening today is actually making it worse for them. So it's really through looking at data that makes this easier to see. So I'm just on this beginning journey with Soul Europe, trying to collect this data so that we can see what's happening at a global scale. I'm hoping in about three to six months we would have collected enough data to see what's happening at a global scale so that I can come back and I'll be happy to share the kind of things that I have noticed in this process. So it's a work in progress. That's my long story short, but I was just talking to those two things. Dry crops in agriculture is aggravating global warming. Manufacturing that to a large extent, females and our desire for consumption is also aggravating the global warming story. So I can only say so much at this point, but obviously I'd like to collect more data to say more about what I'm meaning here. Many, hold on. There's a really nice book. I'm maybe a third of the way through reading called Empire of Things about the Birth of Consumerism and the growth of when and why it shifted to buying stuff as showing off status and all that, really super, super interesting history and I forget half the details of it, but I wanted to do a little screen share for a second on one of my early inspirations for caring about all this stuff, which is that many years ago, Arthur Brock, now of Holochain and a bunch of other things, sent me a video to watch called The Upward Spiral, which was a really crappy VHS quality video of this guy, Paul Crefell, I think is how he pronounces it, who was wandering around the hills of Northern California with a hand trowel, basically understanding the principles of how water can either help a hillside or degrade it and helping the water heal the hillsides. And most of what he was doing was following, he realized that water cuts gullies and gullies then carve large holes across hillsides. So he was going up and helping fill in the gullies so that the water would pool up high on the hillside. And then he has pictures taken over 10 years before and after on different hills in the area he was tending. And they got much greener and trees started growing up the hillside just through one guy's actions with a trowel. And then a couple of months after I watched this, I ran into, and I've forgotten through what, I ran into a bunch of a documentary by John Liu about the Loos Plateau in China. And Loos Loos is a very loose, friable soil. And this whole area of the size of Belgium in the middle of China was eroding away. And part of the reason why Beijing and other places were having terrible dust storms were that this middle of the country had turned brown and it was just blowing away. The top layer of soil was going away. And so what happened was at the scale of villages, the government got all these locals to stop free grazing their goats because they were overgrazing and then getting rid of any vegetation that kept soil in place. And then they employed them to terrace and plant trees and do a bunch of other things. So the opposite of one guy with the trowel at the village scale, they managed to regreen an entire area of China. And so 10 years later, they go back and you see like plants. And my favorite part was at the end, the interview a woman who says, 10 years ago I was making 600 yuan a year and I was really struggling. Now I'm selling apples and I'm making 6,000 yuan a year and things are much better. And it's not that this is China. It's not that everybody's gonna move back to this area of China and suddenly do everything, but that it's so possible to do things that heal the earth. There's also the Great Green Wall of Africa, which is an attempt to stop the desertification of the Sahara and the Sahel from moving southward. That there's a lot of people working on these kinds of things. So the idea that we're moving toward drier crops and that that is helping dry out different areas is sort of tragic to me as I guess it is you because it seems like there's so many interesting ways of not doing that and reversing all of this. That's the nature of reinforcing behavior. That's systems thinking. That's your vicious circle of causality. It keeps creating or leads us to take solution that feeds itself. That's how I interpret systems thinking. So those are the vicious circles that if we can identify those, what you talked about the story about the China story is basically the water cycle which we all learned in standard five, but we didn't, we weren't taught that that was actually a reinforcing circle of causality. We were just told that that's how they are related. No, it's a circle of causality. So there's more greens, there's more rains, more rains, more greens. That's how it should have been taught to us, but that's not how we learned it. So, and if we figured that story, it's not difficult to turn around this story. We had a Yi-Ten call with Bill Liao, a we forest years ago. And one of the things that sort of surprised me in the call is that he said, and I'm just, I think going to echo what you've been saying here. He said, we think that trees grow where there's rain. It turns out that trees produce rain, like trees create rain. And so if you can plant and protect trees, then that's really important because trees, in the very dry areas, trees will struggle. So you have to do things to protect them. But if you can do that, you can then move the rain line back across the desertified area. So- That's the strategy. That's the strategy. Once we see that, then anyone can turn around that story. Right. And so recently, Ethiopia made news because they planted something like 100 million trees in a month. And my question is, awesome, how did they do that? And how many of those are going to be alive next year? Yes. There is a strategy to it. It needs to start where it is already green and wet and then pull the rain in. So it's not just the planting trees anywhere. Exactly. Totally agree. So I know nothing about the Ethiopia story. I'd be completely interested in knowing whether they did this the intelligent way or the dropping seedlings from airplanes way where it makes the news and makes for a really good press release, but next year they're mostly dead. Makes the politician looks good. Yeah, exactly. So sad. Jerry, can I make a quick point? Yes, please, Mark. The, you know, the, what I think a key issue here is in terms of approaches is that not so much we on this call, but we generally tend to spend most of our time arguing about which is the right approach. And so, you know, there are 20 different narratives right now on climate change from climate justice to the circular economy to regenerative agriculture. And there are entire communities that spend most of their time arguing that they have the solution to climate change. And of course they don't, but that's the idea just coming back to the climate chess for just a second. And yes, it could be climate go except nobody knows what go is. But, you know, the idea being that we really have no idea how to get where we're trying to go. We just don't in terms of the ultimate objective. But we have thousands of pieces on the chess board right now. Everybody is simply playing with their piece, not paying any attention to all the other pieces on the chess board. You know, what if we tried to actually have a strategy around organizing and taking advantage of the opportunities to move individual pieces at the time and at the place where you actually have the opportunity to make some progress with that piece? But it requires, you know, a totally different way of thinking about sort of the strategic and tactical aspects of tackling climate change. So you're looking for the organizations that actually have an opportunity to make a difference and getting them the resources they need without having to wait five years for foundation support. And you're looking for the opportunities for sort of public policy interventions or other kinds of interventions and sort of getting them the resources that they need as opposed to everybody, as supposed to just assuming that Adam Smith's invisible hand is going to come in and solve all of this stuff, which is a bit ironic, which is what we do on climate change. But it's a bit ironic since it's Adam Smith's invisible hand that got us into this mess in the first place. Doug, go ahead. Yeah, to me, the issue is we're all talking about how to go, but not where to go to. There's not a sense of what kind of civilization, what kind of quality of life, what kind of culture we want to be moving towards. And that makes it very hard to organize the actions along the way because they're implicitly going towards different goals. Do you think we can actually align large groups of people on what kind of culture and quality of life we want to have? That seems to me like a really thorny conversation. Well, I would start with simple things. Like we all want a livable community. We all want good relations with our children. We want some security economically so that we're not constantly frazzled by having to negotiate today's contract with somebody. I think there's some things that are fairly universal and then how to build them into a vision. I think, you know, for me, the idea of a garden planet, a garden world where we are growing food and people together in an aesthetically attractive environment is not only plausible, but I think most people kind of want that. And if we had a path to get there, I think we'd be making a lot of progress. And, you know, my view is it's hard because the path to get there still has to go through the crisis of our time. So weirdly, picking up on what you said way earlier and, you know, that nobody wants to go through like the bottleneck, so people who are accelerating the downfall of Earth's ecosystems may in fact be accelerating us toward a decision point where we actually really have to behave differently. So that thing to say, but go ahead, Ken. I think one of the challenges is defining what going backward and going forward means. So there's something called the Westinay Price Foundation, which is, they're almost kind of fundamentalists in terms of their food stuff and they believe in fat is good and, you know, not eating sugar. And I was reading one of their publications years ago and this woman said, you know, the future is going to be agricultural. It's going to be agrarian. You know, we're going to have limited amounts of manufacturing, but a lot of people are returning to farms and working the land by hand. Sort of, this is like 15 years ago. It's a little before the regenerative agriculture started. And I think for a lot of people, city dwellers especially, look at an agricultural lifestyle as going backwards, right? So how do we make that attractive? You know, somewhere in social media in the last few days, I saw something that human beings have evolved and are designed for, you know, rural environments. Well, I grew up in the kind of in the country and I certainly agree with that, but I know a lot of people are like, I'm not leaving my city, you know, and we've got so many people concentrated in cities. So this is one of the big dynamic pushes and pulls of how do we make a regenerative, regenerative agricultural garden planet attractive to city dwellers? They're 24, 7, 365 on all the time, access to whatever they want, whenever they want it. That's gonna be a very interesting conversation to try and thread our way through. Thank you. Doug, and then anybody who wants to add some closing comments to our call. I just have one comment that's probably, I was gonna say politically incorrect or something, but this actually, this is a response to the comment about, oh, there's so many different movements. Everyone has the right idea. There's too many of them, what do we do? And leadership, you know, you look at Greta Thunbury. She's a leader, because what does she do? She magnetizes people. She magnetizes focus on what the real issue is. And if you find someone who's a real leader, you're kind of willing to put, like for example, if AOC, Alexander Kaza Cortez were running for president, hey, I'm in man, this is by far, you know, and I would forget all the little, in other words, that's one approach, but I realize we are obviously for very good reason very suspicious of leaders as well. Anyway, that's my comments. Thank you. And Mark, if you look at Greta and AOC, both of them, I think have the same approach, which is they're not selling, they're creating something that others want to buy into. Okay? So that they're attractive, they're addictive, which is what creates a movement, as opposed to going out and trying to convince people. Doug? Yeah, I'm thinking on the meme and script question, that a core problem for us is that we think history is linear, progressive towards some amazing future. Most cultures in the world understand that life is circular. It goes through patterns that somewhat reproduce, like elites move into the center, they become blind to recircumstances and fall apart, things like that. So convincing everybody that we really are in a somewhat circular pattern, not a linear pattern. I don't think it would be too hard to do that. I mean, certainly the modern situation no longer looks so obviously like progress. Well, it's funny, Steve Bannon, arguably one of the architects of the Trumpocalypse, believes in the, what's it called, the Four Transitions Model, which is a circular model of history, that he just wants to be the one to catalyze the next disaster, so that he can be the one who's designing the next civilization. But yeah, I mean, so there's people on all different sides here who have adopted those kinds of models for different reasons in different ways. Any other closing thoughts? Elizabeth, Judy? If anybody wants to do research with me on systems thinking and global warming, please raise your hands. I think Jerry or somebody would have my email, so please let me know if there's anybody out there who would like to be a part of that. Excellent. And Sheila, are you on the Inside Juror's Brain list? Yes, I am. That's how I got to know about today's session. You can just post something there. And I think most of us are on that list and we'll all see it right away. Okay, I shall do that. That'd be great. Thank you. I'm not on that list yet. I'll try to do that. Please, I'll get you on the list, if you'd like. Thank you. And my closing thought comes via an indigenous elder who recently told me they've all decided that they need to share information that we're in too much hot water to keep their esoteric information closed anymore. So they're sharing. And one of the things they're saying is stop talking and act. Thanks, Elizabeth. Michael? Reference to Monty Python. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Internet. We had no idea the Internet was coming. Imagine if the Internet existed before we built it. It would have been a lot easier. It would have happened in three days. Yeah, but there's a lot of trial and learning there. Yeah, and on learning. Lots of that. Yeah. My closing thought would just be that there's tremendous power in any act of positive nature. People want to do the right thing. People want to have a better outcome. And the best way to lead is always by example. If you can IDA implement, even on a very small scale, something that makes things better, there will be people who want to copy that. Especially if you don't put a price tag on it. Yes, exactly. But you have to be careful of the bad apples that spoil the barrel. I'm not convinced that everybody wants to do the right thing. So this goes back to sort of design from trust and principles. And I'm right now trying to finish a post, a medium post titled, not naive trust. That basically says, look, the fundamental principle of design from trust is assume good intent or assume good faith, which does not mean everybody has good intent or good faith. It just means the majority of people do. And how you deal with the bad actors is crucial. Crucial, because what design from mistrust does is it designs a system so that bad actors cannot act badly, but in so doing, it constricts everybody's behavior. And design from trust tries to keep the degrees of freedom in the system so that the genius that's present already can actually be liberated to do it what it needs to do, while either converting bad actors to good actors because partly what they want is membership and then dealing with the actual bad actors in some way that's good for the system. I will point out that the incels and other strange people who are on the right troll side of the Trump apocalypse are feeling a sense of community and victory through their actions that they didn't normally have. They are a successful insurgents and when one of their Pepe the Frog GIFs goes viral and suddenly changes the news cycle, they're doing high fives in their community. And so a piece of why this is such a battle is that there's actually a sense of camaraderie and community on both sides of these debates and arguments that is partly to my mind a waste of oxygen. Why can't we figure out how to work on this together before we all die because we've killed the oceans? But we have to remember that there's a lot of normal social dynamics happening on every side of this. When you become the baddest ASS, everybody else figures out how to be better. Yes. So thank you, everybody. I will post this call to YouTube as usual and let's sketch out another call around the scripts. I think Doug's idea is good and figure that out. And I suggest that we also have some forum or process for more rapid sharing of things that are underway that might be working that can be emulated. So I've got a big collections in my brain which are unfortunately a little bit opaque to anybody coming in from the outside looking at it so I can try to make that more visible and curated. Mark has incredible resources in climate web like he's been curating that for as long as I've been curating my brain. So he put a link to his brain in there earlier and we're trying to use the chat here but the chat is messy. Any other suggestions, totally welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much everybody. And thank you to all. Thank you. Good night. Thank you.