 Here we go. This is the Rex call for Wednesday, July 8th, 2020. We are beyond the pandemic into the weirdness, I don't know, the swamp. I call it the meltdown. We shall see where we go. And I have two poems for us this morning. One of them is a We Short Thing by Richard Brodigan. I will paste a link to it in the chat over here. And the other one is a little bit longer but I think pretty fun. So the first one is called Finding is Losing Something Else by Richard Brodigan. Finding is losing something else. I think about perhaps even mourn what I lost to find this. And that's the whole poem. Finding is losing something else. I think about perhaps even mourn what I lost to find this. And then the second poem is a favorite of mine. I'll paste the link again. It's called Fictional Characters by Danusha La Meris. Fictional Characters by Danusha La Meris. Do they ever want to escape, climb out of the curved white pages and enter our world, hold in Caulfield, slipping in the side door of the movie theater to catch the two o'clock, and a caranina sitting in the local diner, reading the paper as the waitress in a bright green uniform serves up a cheeseburger and a coke? Even Hector, on break from the Iliad, takes a stroll through the park, admires a fresh bed of tulips. Who knows? Maybe they were growing tired of the author's mind, all its twists and turns. Or they were finally weary of stumbling around Pamplona, a bottle in each fist, eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile. Perhaps it was just too hot in the small California town they'd been written into a lifetime of plowing fields. Whatever the reason, here they are, content to spend the day roaming the city streets, rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders, enjoying the bustle of the crowd. Wouldn't you, if you could, step out of your own story to lean for an afternoon against the doorway of the five and dime, sipping your coffee, your life somewhere far behind you, all its heat and toil, nothing but a tale, resting in the hands of a stranger, the dingy sidewalk ahead, wet and glistening. I love poems like that. That's one reason why I like Billy Collins a lot. All of this is Dinesh- Richard Brodykin. La Meris, pardon? Is it Richard Brodykin? Did he write the poem all watched over by machines of loving grace? I believe that's him. I can confirm that in a moment. Richard Brodykin, all watched over by machines of loving grace, correct. He's got several that I really like. One titled, Attila at the Gates of the Telephone Company. Very creative writer. Hi, everybody. I'm doing okay. I don't know if you recall. So, last month, Janice was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Yes. And so she had her operation at the end of June and is in recovery now. She just got the pathology back. And it was, if you're gonna have cancer, this was the way to go. It was stage 1A when they got it. It was fully enclosed within the endometrial tissue. So there are no signs of it being anywhere beyond that. And it was, there were no mismatched markers. That's what they said. Basically means that it was just random chance and not a genetic disposition, which doesn't make much of a difference when we're the other for Janice, but it means that her sisters are not going to be, unnecessarily have the additional likelihood of getting this, having this happen. So, all in all, it's been heavy. That's a scary incident, yeah. It's been, it's resolving, the recovery is going well. Is she home now? Yeah, yeah, but she's been working from home from March. That's from the, she works at UC Berkeley, the Biosciences Library, and they managed to figure out a variety of tasks for their library of people to do remotely. A lot of categorizing and going through old documents and the like. And so she's taking some time away from doing that. But even so, she'll probably get back to that in the next few weeks. It's mostly, it's recovering from being stabbed multiple times by a professional. Yeah, well, hardly a difference. Hey, Susan, hey, Estee, you are muted. Continue to have to remember that I'm muted when I'm first entered. It's hilarious where you're like, in the past, they used to, I always had to remember to mute myself. Hi, Jerry, nice one. But now it's like the opposite. It's so funny. It's like once you get trained, you have to untie it. Anyway, hi, Susan, hi, Estee. Hi, just saying hi. Hi. We're just checking in. Jame was just telling us. Yeah, we're just doing check-ins. Yeah, Jame's had a big, a big few weeks, a big. When was the diagnosis, Jame? When did all this- Diagnosis was mid June. This is of Janice. Wow. Jame's one. So this is all through the three weeks. Yeah, went mid June. They, well, she had unexpected bleeding and said, you know, at her point in her life is just not what she was expecting to find. And so made an appointment and the doctor said, yeah, let's check this out. And did a biopsy called a few days later saying, yeah, you're gonna need a hysterectomy. Wow. And got it scheduled for the 29th. So it went all pretty quick. So it's just, you know, and for me, because they don't let you in the waiting room anymore, it was drop off, you know, drop her off at the hospital. Say goodbye and kiss her goodbye and- Pat her on the hand. You know, then go pick her up eventually if she makes it, you know, that kind of thing. So just mildly stressful. Yeah. But it's all, it's all working out about as well as you can expect given the context. Yeah, given the moment and time. It's remarkable. Yeah. Yep. So this has been a fun 2020. For everybody. And it's only halfway over. In our own special ways. Yeah, we've only made it halfway through. I don't know that anybody in December last year looking forward to 2020 expected anything like this. That's for sure. Although periodically I find myself wondering, gosh, I wonder what the next big thing is that's gonna take over the news cycle for a long time. Like I have that thought now and then. I'm like, we're wandering along, things are whatever, prosperity, small incidents are happening, you know, fires burning in the background. But every now and then some, you know, 9-11 happens and suddenly like your world view shifts a lot. And a bunch of things in your world shift and had not thought it'd be a pandemic, but sure, sure did change things. Would any of you still have asteroids coming? That's true there. And Bruce Willis is still alive. So I have hope that if asteroids do come, we have the man to send up. April, you were gonna jump in? No, I was just gonna comment this sort of total side note, but it's been in the last two, three weeks. And I think really it was around this notion of like, oh, it's halfway through 2020. There was some sort of symbolic marker in my mind, which is related, some of you may have seen it, some of you may have not, but on the last day of Q2, I did the longest hike of my life. I went, I hiked 30.2 miles in a day, which is 50 kilometers. Yeah, but I have to tell you, because there is a trail in Portland, which technically is within walking distance of our house, that is 30.2 miles long. So I share this because there was this notion of, it's something I've dreamed of doing for quite some time. It is a commitment, but it's in Forest Park. It's the longest trail in Forest Park. It's actually the longest urban trail in the United States. And I dreamed of doing it, but I was always traveling. And it literally is so long that you can only do it in the summer when there's maximum light, because I basically started when the sun came up and Jerry picked me up at the end and it wasn't sunset yet, but I needed every minute. But anyway, so obviously this year, travel shift, there is no travel, there is no real, I don't know, there's not gonna be a vacation this year. It's sort of like, I'm gonna do this hike. This is my vacation this year, so to speak. And I was looking at the dates and I was like, this is how I'm ringing out Q2. So I think, anyway, that's separate, but I had that like, and that was really cool and I'm happy to recommend it to anybody. I loved it, it was hard, but I never thought that I would still be setting personal endurance records at my age. I was like, oh, this is a very good confidence booster. But it was around that time that, I don't know about you guys, but I think throughout Q2, once lockdown hit, I was just so focused on what was happening now. And I could sort of, we would think about pre-COVID, which was like February. But I wasn't going back in time to look at what I was writing. I wasn't going back in time to look at what my expectations were. I wasn't, it was like reading a past journal. I wasn't going back to read the past journals. I was very much focused on what needs to shift, what needs to evolve, what needs to change and reorganize in this lockdown time. And so in the last couple of weeks, I've just had multiple opportunities to go back and read emails that I had sent end of December, mid-January, end of January. While I was on my trip in Asia, when COVID was still a thing, but it hadn't really hit the U.S. yet. And to just, I mean, it's not a big aha. It wasn't like I noticed any particular thread, but this notion of how what I believed would unfold or the expectations that I had set. I was trying to get together with a friend in San Francisco. And I would go down about once a month and we kept missing each other. And so my last note was like, oh, well, I'm pretty sure I'll be there at least two, three times in Q1. Certainly one of those will work. And here we are, I'm like, I don't know where I'm going to be in San Francisco yet. And yet you realize that those were missed opportunities with that friend. And so it's just little things, but I hadn't reached back into my memory log until the last couple of weeks around how we were thinking before and how we're thinking now. So may or may not be advisable. I don't know. Also, April, do you want to stand up a little bit because your sweatshirt from here says get lost? Oh, so I'm sorry. And it actually, it actually says nicer things. Get lost to get found. This is my writing sweatshirt. It's a very baggy sweatshirt. It makes me very happy. But, and that might be a good segue. So yes, this just says get lost to get found. I'm not telling you all to get lost. Thank you. Maybe I'll just go get. Sorry, I love that. I was so excited to wear the sweatshirt today because I'm writing. The irony is I've offended everybody now. And I'm sitting here looking at you going, it looks like your sweatshirt says get lost. And I know that it doesn't, then you know that it doesn't, but nobody else does. There, I can, here, I can put it up a little bit. Yeah. Well, and should I give a quick update because I actually had a couple of questions for people too. So ironically, so get lost. So I think some of you know. So I am now in full book writing mode. And that's why, well, I've been less present on rec stuff. I probably will be less present for the next few months, but my book was finally acquired and I'm in full writing mode. And a couple of questions for people. I have just recently launched this Flux Mindset Explorers Club, which is very much an, a rec scene, very much inspired by recs, which it's, you know, this is just a happy band of people from actually all over the world now. I literally launched it on Monday, finally. Wanted to make sure that any recs member who would like to join is, I will add you to the Google group. Zero commitments, zero expectations other than sort of participating when it might be of interest. But the goal is, you know, it's really this happy band of people. And now there are, I mean, there are already a few hundred people on this group who have proactively said I want to get better at navigating and learning what it means to have a Flux Mindset and learning what it means to navigate change or rethink how we think about change. And so it's sort of collaborative, it's emergent, it's this motley crew, which thus far I'm actually really excited about. It's been amazing to see people sort of show up. But the Flux Mindset itself, and actually SD, I still have to give you a shout out because your feedback way back when was so helpful. And I think, touch wood, I think you'll be happy with how it's evolving, taking into mind some of what you shared with me. But the Mindset itself is a set of eight disciplines and the disciplines themselves are, I don't want to say unconventional, but it forces us to rethink how we think about discipline. One of the disciplines, so when the pace of change increases, society typically tells us that we need to just run faster, we need to keep up, we need to cope, we need to be on hamster wheel. And oh, motley, motley crew totally, yeah. That's where my brain goes too. But I need a better word, sort of this eclectic, eclectic sense now either. But very diverse and very international and people just from all different kinds of backgrounds, I've been really happy about that. But anyway, so different disciplines. And so one of the disciplines where we typically think about running, like when the pace of change increases, we just need to run faster, we need to keep up, and there's a discipline in learning to run faster, which I actually think is a disaster path. And so one of the disciplines is actually learning to run slower, which we can take that in many different directions, but what does that look like? And it's so interesting because everyone says that's what I need in my life, but they're not necessarily sure how to get there and they think about it differently. Like some people like, oh, that's a four day work week. Other, it's like, I need to deal with my info flow. I mean, it sort of is taking all these different manifestations. But the point being, I have this sweatshirt because another one of the disciplines is actually get lost. And that will relate where a lot of the ideas and insights that I have learned from different travels and different cultures, different cultures look at change differently and navigate, think about change differently and what can we learn from them and what does it mean to get lost to get found effectively? So when I found this sweatshirt, I was like, I have to get that because it's very resonant with the book and also with my approach I supposed to travel. So let me pause there. It's been a really generative time for me. I've been very, very grateful about that and just have a pretty big, feels like a bit of a mountain to move in the coming months but did want to just update rexers and see, make sure that anyone who wants to be involved, again, no pressure, but anybody who wants to be involved is involved or at least gets put on the list of folks who will be learning more together. Are we nice? You guys are adding all these oom louts. Look at this. So now I have a... Right. It just did strike me that you're wearing the sweatshirt of the first poem. Yeah. So actually, it's funny what that you was saying because I did not know that Jerry was gonna read that poem. I said immediately, I was like, I love that first poem and I'm going to take that and it may end up, it could easily be one of those random poems or quotes that ends up in a chapter and that would be the chapter. So it's going into my Scrivener document right now. It's part of the reason I liked the poem when I found it. Thank you. Well, good call, Jerry, because you didn't tell me. It's great. Anyway, thank you. So. Any other thoughts for April or whatever? I'm on the list and I'm so excited about it. And I'm really intrigued by the idea of helping people get more comfortable with ambiguity. Right, because this is very much kind of what we talk about in my work, which is the whole sort of like, just tell me the answer. Well, except we have to find it out together. So, and what works over here might not work over here. And so I need people to just be able to sit in some ambiguity and having a skill set or like a set of sort of practices around how you might get better at sitting and that is interesting to me a lot. Yeah. I was just reading a little passage by I think an ecologist. I'm forgetting where the passage was because I've read too many things lately. And it was saying that a combination that really works in this valley might not work in the next valley. If you try to combine the same ingredients, use this seed and do this to the soil and whatever, it may not work in the next valley over and you have to always kind of be adapting to local circumstance and experimenting and doing whatever else. So humans are even worse than that. Susan, do you want to jump in? I was just gonna make a comment on that and then I'll let Kelly go back. In a former life I had something called Wild Knowledge, which was the moniker. And I used to use, and I thought about it and I thought, well, if it's wild then what does it mean to tame it? As a metaphor to think. And ended up with looking at the back of seed packets and finding pictures of wild corn and then looking at seed packets to see what it was that was different about the landscape in which you planted. What I decided was that what all the plant design and everything else was, was a way of trying to assess what the plant needed. And then if it didn't have it where you want it you dump some fertilizer on it. One of the things that shocks industrial farmers about natural and regenerative farming is the amounts of compost used. Like every traditional farmer goes no, no, no that's just gonna kill everything and it's gonna be a disaster. If you heap on that much, if you amend the soil that much not with chemicals but rather with naturally composted stuff. And at the beginning when the soil is in crappy condition you really do, you put heaps on and then you reduce the amount of compost needed as the soil gets healthier. But composting is this gigantic part of regenerative or natural farming. It's really interesting. And then, oh gosh, Madeleine Lansky, we treat her, talks about composting as a psychological process. She talks about how we compost our memories and everything else, which is really nice. Who is that again? Madeleine Lansky. Yeah, I can send you her info but she runs really deep on that. Anyone else like to check in? Bestie, Kelly, who's this? Yeah, I was thinking this morning about what a check it might look like. I decided I was really only coming today for the puns and the poems. So, so far we're doing pretty great. I hope we've met your quota already, your USRDA. Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. Multiple umlots will do that. I think that's the way to go. This is making me really think about though we've had this conversation about how you implement KCS, Knowledge Center Service, which is a knowledge management technique. How does that change depending on the soil that you're planting? Because we think that there's a really, is there a way to determine the quality of the soil, right? Which is kind of an idea that's been floating around. And the quality of the soil is the culture of the group that you're trying to do it with, right? And so what is that? The way we might implement is totally different, I think in a high trust environment versus a low trust environment. And what are the ways in which we would determine the quality of the soil? I'm really loving this idea, so. That's super interesting. You're muted April, go ahead. I love this, Kelly. And I'm wondering this is just a very big picture. Some of you may know. I don't know. Yeah, it did come up. So Dave Whitzel, fellow rexer was hugely helpful. But I've been spending the last couple of months working pretty hard on this, a big keynote, but a lot of different moving parts around it, around the future of food and food systems. And classic case in which they were like, we know you're not a food expert. We don't want a food expert. We want you to apply everything you know from everything else to food and give us a sort of inside or outsider view. And it has been, Jerry's witnessed it. It's been fabulous. And the event is actually next week. So I'm sort of in the final phase. But one of the things that I was really digging really deep into was obviously regenerative agriculture, and I've watched countless webinars on, and there was one on just soil scientists, which was just like, right? But for me, it wasn't about regenerative agriculture. It was regeneration as a concept. And so what can we learn from regenerative architecture? What can we learn from regenerative business models? What can we learn from regenerative medicine? They're all using this same term, but ultimately it's like, how can we design and create and innovate better? How can we look at the world not as a serious trade-off? And so I bring this up because I had to zoom out to then zoom in. And what you've just said about soil is so true. And now I'm trying to zoom out again and say like, okay, all of this that I've now learned about the food system, how can I take that and, you know, lift it and shift it and apply it, sort of not reverse engineer, but apply it back into these other domains. So I love what you're saying. Cause I'm like, oh yeah. And even Jerry, you are the one to recommend to me once the events happened and then I can share more publicly and so forth. But just writing a piece on, you know, regeneration and another key, the three themes that I focus on, regeneration, distributed innovation. Like what is distributed innovation? Because right now you have food and agriculture by and large in a, not a silo per se, but like there's a huge conversation right now about how cities need to have their own food systems and food mapping. And thus far cities have never really seen food and agriculture as in their domain. It was something that was taken care of by national policy or by large, you know, big food, blah, blah, blah. And that's a real shift back in. So what is distributed innovation looked like when you have these different silos that thus far have not been really talking to one another. And then the third one, which I think relates directly to trust as well, but it was intention, you know, that like again, this is a group of food scientists, right? They are responsible for creating alternative proteins. They are responsible for creating high quality dense nutrition. And then the ones that are getting us to provide, you know, a hundred different flavors of Cheetos and creating their food scientist looks at the question of create something that's high calorie density and high nutrition in the same lens as they look at something that's like create something salty and addictive. So, you know, whether you're one's intention, you have too many scientists that aren't necessarily, I think they all, many of them feel bad about some of these problems, but they're like, that's not my role. My role as a scientist, I'm here to create, I'm here to solve problems. And it's like, we need to have a rethink about your intention. And, you know, one of the big challenges that they face is that more and more customers, I won't say consumers, but more and more customers don't trust the food system at all, right? Because there's this sense of, yeah, you're designing with the intention to addict me or you're designing with an intention that doesn't work well for me, but it works well for, you know, your company's bottom line or whatever. So, but the sweet salt crunchy is so good. Exactly. Anyway, so I just bring this up because it feels like it's in the same spirit and it all goes back to soil at the end of the day. Right? So it's funny that you mentioned that about the food scientists because that is a familiar mindset and it has nothing to do with food. I had the opportunity way, way back in, well, I guess it would be the mid-80s to lead groups to Lawrence Livermore National Labs to talk to nuclear weapons scientists. And to a person, they did not care about the, not just the politics of it from the sense of our nuclear representative, but just they were interested in the physics. Here they have an opportunity to do the kinds of physics that they could do nowhere else, kind of high energy research, the kind of deep atomic structure and nuclear structure research, the access to lasers and such that they simply would not have access to anywhere else. So the fact that it all ended up in explosive material, it all ended up in the form of weapons was kind of secondary because they more or less accepted the notion that, yeah, deterrence works and so these will really never be used, which for 50 plus years that more or less has been true. So that mindset of here we have an opportunity to do something really interesting. The fact that it has less than ethical consequences is not as important as the opportunity to do something that I would not have the opportunity, no one would have the opportunity to do anywhere, anytime else. And I don't know that that's an easily dismissed argument because you do make some, when you're researching these things, you do make some interesting discoveries. You do find things out that you couldn't find out before, couldn't find out otherwise. And if you're of the perspective that expanding knowledge is in and of itself a good thing and I tend to lean towards that, I'm not altogether opposed to that kind of mindset. At the same time, I recognize that there are some real pathologies there. So it's a dilemma. Well, and I think too, I mean, this is just me pushing off the cuff and not unique to food, but it's like we need to have better filters or some kind of, I don't know if it's an ethics officer, I don't know if it's an audit, I don't know what, but what's interesting is like, I know I'm with you, I don't think that's quite right. And that's again, hierarchical or whatever, but the scientists, because if you wanna push the boundaries of what science can do, because without food scientists, again, particularly we're looking at a lot of food security and like, or even food for astronauts, whatever, like they're doing all of this. You want that pushing the boundaries, but it says though the scientists assume that someone else is doing the ethical check or all we're here to do is solve problems. If we can solve a problem, you give us the mandate, we solve it, we get a gold star, our conscience is clear. What they don't realize is that their invention is typically going straight into the hands of marketers. And there's no one who say- I think they do realize it. Well- I think they do realize it, but they don't care. Well, actually what I will say this, again, I'm speaking only from the lens that I've had the last few months. It plays out very differently region by region around the world. Like right now in Latin America, there is an absolute, pardon my word, shit show going on between food scientists and the culture wars, basically because big food and is starting to come in. This is where like Chile banned all soft drinks effectively. They're extremely hard to find, not just in schools. They're extremely hard to find because they're like, we can't, this is intolerable. Food scientists are sort of caught in that debate where they're like, we're doing our job, but people don't like it. The government doesn't like us. Our companies were sort of glad to be there, but not really, you know, we're not appreciated anywhere. And yet what are we supposed to do? What's our option of them quit? But back to just this notion of, so there's marketing that come up with a product that does its goal, and then the marketers get ahold of it and it's off. And here I'm talking particularly about stuff that's not helpful for us. As opposed to having some kind of check and balance about assessing out, like what are the downsides? What are the blind spots? What are the things that we're opening ourselves up to that have very human consequences? Cause right now they're just looking at how much will this build our bottom line? And so is there a role within an organization that is, and I don't know if it officer or audit or anything like, but like a function, a piece of the value chain, a piece of the ecosystem whose role it is to be, to call out the blind spots and to be a bit of an irritant, but to make sure that we're not creating. I mean, I will not bore you guys with the details right now, but like nevermind that food insecurity. So one stat, food insecurity is going to double or more this year as a result of the pandemic, but also just to show how fragile our food systems are. 70% of the United States, 70% of Americans are overweight. Two billion people, like a quarter of the world's population suffers from obesity. Like this is just out of control. And if the food system doesn't wake up to this, they will, you know, and actually the question of this whole conference is like is our food system or a pandemic, is it the single greatest threat to human survival? But, you know, we're really sowing the seeds of our own undoing as we look at the kind of system that we built. Anyway, not that this needs to go out of food, but back to that role. You know, I just keep seeing the way this interweaves with other things I've been thinking about other issues, topics and that, you know, hear what you're talking about. The phrase that comes to mind that I've seen that has emerged around things like, you know, military robotics, the responsibility to say no. And that is something that when you teach ethics around, especially around technologies, and that's not just IT and robotics, but could be biotech, could be just food science and general, the responsibility to say no is interestingly enough that it's actually a critical part of military training. When you are a, when you're especially officer training in the U.S. military, and I believe across the West, you are, it's drilled into you from the outset that you have a responsibility to refuse to obey illegal commands, a responsibility to say no. And, you know, something I've been writing and giving talks about in recent months has been, the more you use autonomous and semi-autonomous hardware in the military, the more you need to start thinking about how do you integrate a capacity to say no into military robotics. And, but that same issue, how do you say, how do you teach the responsibility to say no to people who are getting that, who are getting an opportunity to do interesting science, or getting an opportunity to do really cool things, knowing that there will be undesirable consequences of their work. And it's interesting, because speaking as a lawyer, the only, basically, that would often historically, I think it's been like that lands in the legal department's domain at some point, but it's like, that's all, their only bet is, is it legal or not? And if it's illegal, who's gonna say, who, and the irony is, within any organization, I think often like, basically, who are lawyers? Lawyers are people who say no. We don't like lawyers, because they just say no. Maybe they tell us what we can't do. And it's not the legal obligation. It's the moral obligation. It's the ethical, it's the human obligation that's not about whether something is legal or not, but whether it's actually helpful for humanity or going to, again, so our own undoing. Well, I put in the chat that there was a super-spitter Indian wedding recently where they knew that a few people had COVID and they held the wedding anyway and the groom was dead two days later. Yeah, and a whole bunch of people who attended the wedding basically caught one about it. So what would have been the say no? Who would have said, I'm with you? The say no was like, we're canceling the wedding, nobody show up. Nobody show up. But it was too embarrassing to do that, I think. My own hunch, like, no, we're gonna have this wedding. Indian wedding. It'll be okay. Indian weddings are really big deals. Things like that. Sorry, Susan, you weren't jumping in. Marsha Bionard is great. You're muted. God, excuse me. Yeah, so I was thinking about Barbara Gross's effort at Harvard, she's retired this year, last year. But the thing she did last was to do ethics for computer science and stuff like that. And her idea was that it should be worked into that there shouldn't be a course. It should be completely embedded in the thinking that you do all the way along. And it's remarkable how hard it is to get anybody to it. I have a little story about this. So I went to work and for grad school, the second year I was on the dean's advisory committee. So every month, four of us got to meet with the dean and the vice dean. It was Dean Russell Palmer at the time. And in one of the meetings, I'm like, well, we have this little like six weeks ethics module and that's all fine and good, but that's not the way to teach ethics to anybody. What you need to do is hide ethics cases throughout the entire curriculum so that any student at any moment gets to say, oh, this is an ethical question, even though it looks like an accounting problem. They did not go for this. And Wharton is not known for graduating the most ethical people. Being a president who seems to have lack of moral compass entirely. But I totally agree. This is not, and that's why earlier April when you were saying that maybe there's a compliance method or something, I was sort of doing the meh because really this needs to be soaked into how people see what they're doing, how they judge what is worth doing and what they ought to put resources into. And all of this is matched up against a reality, a real world where the exigencies, the pressures and all that are exactly the opposite. Like there's all sorts of pressure to do unethical things all the time. Just graduate as a data scientist today and wander out into the world. And half the stuff that are really well-paid job opportunities are things that are ethically skeevy. And so we don't have much chance. I'm on a mailing list where there was a thread recently about Jeffrey Epstein funding scientists and funding a bunch of people to go on nice trips to his island and all that. And some of the people in this conversation on this mailing list had been on some of those trips or had gotten funding from Epstein. So it was a close to home conversation. And part of some of the interesting nuggets that came out of that were A, as of 2008 anybody who Googled Epstein would have known that this was a problem. Like this was clearly not a smart thing to sort of get involved in. And the amounts were relatively small like Epstein wasn't giving out huge buckets of money. He was giving out small amounts. But everybody was under so much pressure like Joe Ito and others were under so much pressure to fund their research labs and research efforts and PhDs, all the doctorate students and everybody else that they started breaching a whole bunch of ethical boundaries. And then the conversation broadens out and says, hey, most big buckets of money. DARPA has funded the internet and a whole bunch of people's research on this list, et cetera, et cetera. And that's not the cleanest money in the world. And so this is a constant conversation everywhere. And to this point, I think society lacks the ability to push back on the rudder and say, hey, this is actually a series of stupid things we should stop doing this. That happens very seldom. The pushback tends to be when catastrophes happen and when like shit hits fan. For him. This is actually a really interesting example of the drawbacks of distributed evaluation or crowdsourced evaluation. Because I really, I doubt that anybody who was getting the money from Epstein made the point of Googling him because everybody they know had was getting money from him. So of course, if there was a problem, they would have heard about it, right? You know, it's just, I am part of an environment where we're all responsible to each other, which means that nobody's responsible. But I think there was plenty of real full ignorance along the way. I think that's, I think that's a useful mentor. No doubt, but I think there's a broader cloud of people who, and I can think of, while I have received no funding from Epstein or anything like that, I could totally imagine myself thinking, well, these people that I respect took his money. So they have done that initial level of evaluations, I can trust them that this is okay. Or surely somebody would have passed a rule to say that this is not legitimate to do, which in Eto's case, they had done. Like Epstein was off limits to take money from and he circumvented those rules, which is where you really start dropping into darker waters. Yeah, okay, yeah, no question. Yeah, yeah, there were rules. Don't take money from this guy. There is one thing though, if you want to point out, I think is that if you really want to embed these ideas and have them take life, then it does require changing practice. And I've been living in that world, changing practice for so long now, and different kinds of technique. And one of them is, I mean, it's really careful. Jerry's very good at this, obviously, but is inserting into a conversation another word for the thing you've just described, or it's very small. It's very carefully placed stuff. And if you don't do that, it's not gonna change. I remember a client I had where I was when I was on my, it's the work, don't manage talent, don't manage the work. And it was going on about this and eventually was working with a healthcare company on this idea and how to put it into practice. But the thing was that I was watching in their meetings, I was watching the mind shift because the person who brought me in said, I get it. Yeah, it's managing the work, not the talent. And this was somebody who was sort of in nature, but mostly learning and development. And so I was invited to attend a few meetings of the team that was building a work marketplace. And as I did that, I watched and I had sort of, I got to the place where I thought I had three ideas. This is for you, April. I thought I had sort of three terms, three ideas about what I was looking for when I was looking for the change. And as I would go through my notes and as I listened, I would notice whether those words were coming up. I would notice who was using them. I would notice in what order they were coming up and they were coming up in any old order at all. And it was, and different people would pick up on a different word in the conversation each time. So it was what, you could watch the mindset shift. The mindset, all right, that's good. And the mind, anyway, watch that happen in real time and realize that that's what it takes. And then to know that as soon as they go back that the rubber band effect will happen. Because we're smart because we rely on our context and our context is, I learned this, it took me 30 years, but our context is very rich and we rely, we rely. We don't just depend on it. We rely on it to do part of the work. And our context is reinforcing a lot of the bad things all the time because we've poured those things into some form of concrete, whether it's institutional design or layers of bureaucracy or gates we have to pass through or external measures of success. GDP is a bad measure. Well, yeah, except we've poured that into concrete throughout the economy. And concrete as we know is forever. And concrete lasts a really long time. And then every now and then everything melts and blows up and shows up in a different configuration. I mean, the reason I love Polanyi so much is that he's describing the shift from pre-industrial to industrial society. And he's saying this wasn't just a thing that affected manufacturing, that market economy requires market society. That's one of his sayings that I adore, that a market economy couldn't have people living nicely on the commons without being available as laborers and needing to have money to buy stuff. It sort of had to stamp those out because people might wander over there and like that a lot. In the early settlement days, a lot of people used to run across and join the Native American tribes. There was a real problem where people would just go leave and abandon their settlement families or whatever and just go become natives and marry into the tribes. That happened a whole bunch. Esther or Susan, would you like to check in a little bit? I'll check in. Go for it. I almost bailed on my career altogether during COVID. In fact, I did. And then I had a few people who said, you're not done yet. And I thought, I am. I am because I can't stand everything that I worked for for all these years just going away. And of course, I came back to it because of these friends and because it looked like maybe there was an opportunity. And I thought, Susan, you've done this so many times. You've gone into a new situation, you've reconsidered it, you've changed careers, you've learned a whole new field, you've done this over and over again. Are you sure you wanna do this? And I thought, I have to, but I'm gonna give something up. And so what I gave up was all of the attention that I gave to reading about about business, corporations, all this stuff that I had spent so much time, I used to call it my junk reading. And, but I desperately wanted to know how they thought because I couldn't think the way they thought. And so, I mean, that was partly way back from when I became stopped becoming, being a Mennonite, Estie knows this, being a Mennonite and deciding, I'm not going to, I can't stay in this community. I just can't. And leaving and figuring out what you're gonna take with you. And so, that's been a big shift. And I'm not working as hard, but I'm gonna work on things that I think might actually matter and to hell with the rest. So, I feel strangely lighter. Has this opened up a bunch of time in your life? What? Has this opened up a bunch of time in your life? Because I assume- Yes, absolutely. Time consuming to be up to date on the thing you thought was real important. I don't talk to things I just don't read anymore. Yeah. And, or listen to or bother my head with or because what I'm not gonna do, the thing that I gave up was that I was gonna try to get paid to do this kind of work. Because I just thought, you know, that's not gonna happen. So, you know, you're spending a lot of time chasing stuff that never comes to anything. And even what I've learned since I left IBM was that even when I chased things that I thought I wanted to do, I found myself back in an environment that was gonna just beat it up. And so, I just, that's it. So, I'm just doing what I wanna do, read what I wanna read. I would say I'm going where I wanna go, but I can't go anywhere. And mentally. Yes, yes. Virtually. Yes, yes. I'm really glad I asked you to check in. Yeah. Oh, I'm done checking in. Thank you. That was lovely. I'm taking all kinds of notes. It's great. I'm like, you see me looking down. I'm not like avoiding anybody. I'm not like watching my phone. I'm taking notes. This is such a helpful. And what's amazing is like so much of this is feeding into being very selfish here, but into the book. But elements, it's almost like if I look at whether each discipline, let's just say, and you're turning this sphere and you're trying to understand it from all these different below and on the side. And it's like, oh my God, I hadn't turned over that rock yet, but it absolutely needs to be there. So, thank you. This is great. And well done, Susan. I mean, in terms of the, yeah. As to you there, are you listening in? Oh, good. You're uncorky. Yes, I'm here. I don't think I'm presentable. I loved everything Susan was saying as has been a pattern for us for decades. Yes. Yes. Did you take a turn this time too? Well, what I wanted to say is that I feel like I am, your words speak for me. And I'm now in a, so April, flux, there seemed to be for me these real dips right after I started proclaiming to myself that I'm all in on a piece of meaningful work. And this weekend, this July 4th weekend, and pausing that thing that we know we must do, which I did this weekend, really opens up the, does it really matter? Yes, yes. Line of thinking. So, I read Trumpocalypse. I'm like in my third book by black authors on life. And right now, I'm in a space of doesn't, it's yeah, undoing, undone. So anyway. Unowning. Yeah. So is that it? Is that enough check-in, Jerry? Take it from here. Yeah, totally, absolutely. I'm putting the link for Trumpocalypse in our chat. And I also have in my brain a non-white guy canon. I basically, I forget who it was. It might've been Shane Parrish from Farnham or somewhere else, but somebody posted a list of like essential reading and I looked on the list and it's like all white guys. I'm like, Jesus Christ. And then I realized that in my brain, I didn't have like a go-to link. So actually, let me share my screen and go to it because it's kind of fun. And let me chime in because I'll post it here. This relates more broadly to a woman, Laura Huang, who is a professor at HBS, she's young. And she recently, she was going through the different curriculum for like required MBA reading. And she's like, this sucks. It's all white men. And so she came up with what's called, what she calls a well-balanced meal MBA reading list. It's very much around business. But like if you wanted a, if you didn't want the stale, pale, male diet, how might you get a better, more balanced meal? And it's really good. And it's kind of gone a little bit viral and so forth. So I'm gonna post that here. Yay. Yeah, it's really good. Really, really. And now in fairness, and can I keep going? Jared, I just wanna add one other context. Yes, please. Because- I'm gonna scroll around the can while you're talking. Okay, so I just posted the little MBA reading list, which is excellent. But related to that, so this is, you know, lots of authors, lots of books by women, et cetera, people of color writ large, but not a lot of black authors, period. And here's separate conversations, separate thread entirely, but I'm part of a couple of, you know, writer's groups and so forth. And people who are focused on writing books for writers and so forth. And one of the people in that group was the co-author of, it's like the 100 best business books. It's like this, I don't know, it's quite a ways, goes back quite a ways. And he, great guy, and he went back through it, you know, sort of had his own wake up call and realized the 100 best business books of all time, which is sort of this, I don't know, historical scope, not a single black author. And he was, of course, aghast. He fully acknowledged his own bias, was like, I didn't, we didn't think, you know, whatever. But then he said, okay, what could I have done better? What are the business books out there? What are the business books written by black people? Like what was my inventory to pick from, right? So really trying to reconcile. And the fact is, and I can forward you guys the note, like there aren't business books written by black men or women, period. He found, I believe he said a total, it was somewhere between seven and 20, like business books at all, nevermind that they would make a list or something. But he thought, and that's like over the course of history and several of those, the most common type were memoirs written by black CEOs, which in fairness, hugely helpful, but not books that would show up on an MBA curriculum. So were there authors, were there co-authors or ghost writers also black? Oh, oh, don't know. He didn't go in that level of detail. I would go back through his, I can forward you his note. I don't know that he, for the, I think for the most part the authors are the authors that there wasn't a lot of, I don't recall him calling out either co-authors or ghost writers. But it was interesting because he totally got the blindness that he, the blind, I don't wanna call it, there isn't, I suppose an element of bias, but like just the blindness that he totally missed something that he should have been looking at. But then going back and doing his homework and realizing, no, this isn't something that I necessarily would have caught. This is just, this runs so deep systemically. So anyway, back to you, Jerry, the non-white guy cannon, not just business books. Go ahead, Susan. One comment, when I first started traveling the world when I was 16 and went from Wichita, Kansas to Delhi, India in a day, which was, yes. And subsequently to many other places and I've been traveling all my life and every place I go it's like a new language after I got done with my PhD in linguistics. So I think, and one of the things that I thought back in the 60s was, shoot, you know, we'd be better off in America if we were like the British, if our empire was over. Love that. Don't worry, we're getting really close. I know, I know. I mean, I don't wanna lose the good parts and we might lose them if we're not careful, but I thought we wouldn't have to do all this stuff we're doing. And then I look at what Trump is trying to do and I go, oh, shit. You know, I mean, it's sort of like, yes, we shouldn't be trying to get the world to be like us completely. We shouldn't be responsible for everybody and everything, but we should be an ethical responsible society for ourselves and maybe the nation state can go away and maybe this and maybe that, but. I just put a rather ugly link in the chat which was from an article in the Wall Street Journal this week about anger. And you look at the, I just have to share this. You look at the title for angry times. You look at the illustration at the top of the article which has some female images. As I'm reading this article, it has, I think I counted one. I couldn't bear to go back and read again, but one woman out of, I don't know how many quotes from men and anyway, enough said. It's astounding to me that these things still happen, but of course it's the Wall Street Journal. Female author too. Female author. Female author too, exactly. What the hell, what in the world? So if somebody finds a second female, I'm gonna put on this. I'm gonna post, this is gonna be fun to post. Okay, good, thank you. This is great. I'm gonna post and call this out. It's great, because you start just, you know, and well, you can just, and I can tag her and say like, you know, interesting article. Like, did you miss something? I don't know. Wow, this is crazy. Do you have an editor? Right, yeah. Yeah, blind, blind, blind. I just posted the blog post that came, it's Todd Satterston, it's his name, the one that I was talking about and same thing. So, you know, he said, try this exercise. Go to your bookshelves and find the business titles written by black authors. What did you come back with, right? Most people came back empty-handed. So he said, so I started a real search for business books by black authors. I checked list after list. The same books came up. I bought all of them. There might be a total of 20 books sitting on the table in my office. 20 books, period, that's it. A third of the books were biographies and memoirs. The next third were self-help titles and the final third were straight-up business books. So there's some total of what I could find was seven business books written by black authors, right? So it just, again, and we're blind. Well, I don't think we will be so much moving forward, but like, anyway, it's separate than the anger issue per se, but like, how major missing of, I don't wanna say the elephant in the room, but like, this woman, who? Elizabeth Bernstein, which again, I don't wanna critique her writing seems good, but like, yes, okay. One thing I've noticed, I did a, sorry, go on, Esther. Yeah, another thought here is what do we mean by business books? I know when I sat down to start writing four years ago or so, the first summer with the first air conditioning on the top floor room that is now my office in our new house, I was reading like a book a day and it took me more time that I'll care to admit to realize that all the books that I felt like I had to catch up with are all the people I wanted to hear about business or mail and started looking at, even to today, I feel like there's been some entries, but that setting up, it's either a memoir or a self-help or a how-to in a sub-discipline of some sort, the straight on quote, business books are still not quite as bad as this Wall Street Journal article, but it's astounding to me. I was just starting to say that I've done, been doing a similar survey to see if I could find what kind of work I could see, I could find by non-white guy authors in the future's discipline, in the foresight discipline. And there are some, there are some, there are some really good black futurists, lots of good women futurists. What I have found though is that to a very great degree, black futurists are particular, but non-white guy futurists in general focus very much on the, often focus on their particular demographics. So you have black futurists focusing quite off on the future of black communities. You have female futurists, I'm thinking, the futures of women by Pamela McCordock from 20 years ago, but 30 years ago. But they say, and I understand completely why that happens, but at the same time it's, I would love to see, I would love to see more. Can I add a little context here? This is interesting because I'm now, I've been folded in on the female side. I've become just gradually over time connected to a range of, there's now this, the FEM Futurist Society that you might have heard about, which basically there was a Forbes article written last year, no, early this year on the top 50 female futurists. And I found my way to that list, which was great, I didn't expect it. And so then Nancy Giordano actually do it, member, you know, part of the Rex community. She was like, well, most of the 50 of us who are on this list, we didn't know each other. I mean, each of us knew a couple. She was like, let's create the FEM Futurist Society. So now there's a website, I can forward it and so forth. So super great to finally connect with one another because what you'll not be surprised to hear is that the 50 of us are absolutely collaborative. We do not see this as, we are not competitors. We're like, this is great. We need to raise our collective voice. We need like totally different dynamic. And we're kind of like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if the society did something someday, like that we could work together but only to working together, not being like, I'm not gonna be there if she's there or anything like that. So as part of this though, Nancy held interviews with all 50 of us. So I mean, a total labor of love, which is just awesome. And again, I'll post the link. But this was what was interesting. When I spoke with Nancy, she said, and it's really informed my thinking moving forward. She said, one of the most interesting things that she's finding, and I would echo it absolutely, the female futurist, she's like, ultimately the through thread of all of our work. And there are data scientists in the group and there are material scientists and there are civil engineers and psychologists and artists and very diverse backgrounds of these women. She said, the through thread of the women is about the future all relates to your mindset or some aspect of how you're seeing the system relate to one another, to itself. So we're not talking, we are not a bunch of quants. We get numbers, but we're not doing that. We're not talking about strategy that is, again, destroy your competitor, beat your enemy, whatever. We're looking at this from the whole person perspective and I just wonder, if that's the case, then only a sliver of, to again, use a blunt tool, only a sliver of those kinds of books would show up in traditional MBA curriculum too. You would show up in an organizational psychology class. Okay, great. You wouldn't show up necessarily in fundamentals of finance. Maybe that's okay, maybe that's a good thing. But like, whoa, okay. So are we looking at, not to go down the rabbit hole of designing a different curriculum, but I think there is something there. There's that sense though, that if we're looking at this more from the perspective of if we see business as numbers and revenues and systems that we somehow tinker with, then you're gonna get one kind of author. But if you look at business as human centric and fundamentally driven by humans and human relationships and so forth, you're gonna get a much different reading list and I think a much different educational experience as well. So anyway, just bring that up because the women, it's not, it's different than say, BIPOC authors, but it's still, there's a theme in terms of where the majority of those authors, the majority of those individuals would position themselves. You've just- Sorry? It's an awfully white list. I'm looking at it right now. Oh yeah, Blake Morgan. Which list do you talk to much of me? The one that- The Forbes 50. The Forbes 50. It's very internet, I will, it's very international. I would say there aren't, I don't, the US is probably the greatest one, but it's got people from Finland and Lebanon and India and kind of, but I was looking for ones from Africa and there weren't many in particular that region anyway. Asti, go ahead. I wanted to loop us back to something towards the beginning which was, as I think of it, Susan nodding towards Jerry. A lot of this, April, what you said about the relational focus mindset, in some ways, what I hear and see is that these are relational approaches and they come in from the side or underneath, from the position that is available when you're not in control of the power and the dollars and the et cetera and have a lot to do with inserting the different word in a moment of practice formation or of practicing. And that is, in some ways, the through line here for me at least of what we've all been trying to do. And you just made me feel better, so. That's really interesting, but that we still assume that that's so fun. So, Asti, like the sense of like, occupying the space that's available, occupying the domain that hasn't been taken yet, but now I feel like there's a real reckoning and a questioning if that initial domain that was taken, i.e. dollars and cents and systems and objects that we can quote unquote control, if that almost, that was the first domain to identify and say like be territorial about, but now I don't know that the map is no longer that territory. Go ahead, Jerry. I'm also saying that given the domain of let's say a productive corporate entity, something like that, contributory, not to come in from the side flank of how you think about things, how you act, right? From the standpoint of what you build is determined by what you can see and how you can behave in the production of it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And I don't know, in some taxonomy of responses to oppressive systems, right? Deserves a position of great respect. What's also ironic to me is that in the early days of tech, I think the reason why at least several of us on this call are here is because back then you had to have an idea, a word, a category, a change that humans needed to understand in order to build a company at all, right? In order to build a product. So it started, no coincidence, I was on the positioning side of things for a while, but if you didn't come in from, in a sense, what we now see as the flank, if you didn't have that thing, what were you even doing right here and how would you get customers and how would you, et cetera? And that whole level has been of the business has been lost, that terrain has been hidden in the, I wanna say standard VC, your unrelational venture creation. So sorry for Brandt, especially when I'm not on video. Yeah, that's lovely. Well, and what you're saying, how do I say, for however you were feeling before of like, what's worth it? What you're contributing right now is so worth it. Thank you. Yeah, so I just wanted to pipe up, one of the reasons they keep going back to the scripts that are running in our heads is that they occupy space. They basically eat up all the mental space because they dictate what you can see, what you're unwilling to look at, what is taboo, all those sorts of things. And one of the other nice things that comes out of Kalani sort of thinking is that capitalism is kind of like a cuckoo bird. And cuckoos are brood parasites. Cuckoos do not raise their own young, they lay their eggs in a robin's nest or a wren's nest or somebody else's nest. And birds can't ID their own young like penguins do. So they come back and say, man, junior's kind of big, but the first instinct of a cuckoo hatchling is to push everything else out of the nest. So the little cuckoo will hatch and then it will back up against an egg or a chick and it will shove everything else overboard, killing every other egg that this family had. So it's, they are parasites. And capitalism has done that to all other ways of trying to collaborate and make a, make a life on earth as much as it can. And so when the discourse is about capitalistic enterprises like business, which is the big category we're talking about, then that's the space and the model, the mental models and the goals and all the other sort of buried assumptions in the model are what we're talking about. And also the patriarchy is alive and well, men are sort of the authorities. And there isn't a lot of room for the other, for the feminine, for anybody else's perspective. And occasionally you get the chalice and the blade or some interesting slice into the territory. And then over time, and I think we're at this big tipping moment right now where we're questioning the social contract, we're questioning why business has, the business round table yesterday and I mean last year in a big move said, oh, it's not just about stockholders, it's now about stakeholders. And I'll believe it when I see it because every other system has been designed to reinforce. No, it's really only about stockholders because the reason we have excessive executive compensation is that they're looking for a quick exit to get filthy rich. And the whole system is designed to let them do exactly that without having to worry about anybody they've harmed along the way, blah, blah, blah, blah. But so much of this is about shaping what we're allowed to talk about and how we see what's happening on the ground. So much of everything that's going on. And Tucker Carlson is a guy I'm watching with great care right now because he is the lead voice on Fox News and he is busy saying this is a cultural war and they're coming to get us. And get your guns, don't let them tear down monuments because they're out to destroy America, these leftist vandals. And Trump is busy retweeting what Tucker Carlson's saying because this is a rear guard action to try to protect exactly this edifice that needs to tumble down. Exactly the edifice that needs to tumble down. And it needs to be replaced by a conversation and a set of principles and beliefs that people can understand. And here, let me go on for a little bit longer because I put in earlier in the chat just to remind myself that matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy. I found a really, really, really nice article recently that said, there's lots of complaints about patriarchy and there's also things like abolish the police and defund the police. There's a bunch of very poorly marketed, really great ideas. And matriarchies tend to be egalitarian. Patriarchies tend to be top down and men in charge and women in most, in many patriarchies, women's roles are officially marginalized. Women can't become priests. Women are basically marginalized intentionally in all these patriarchies. Matriarchies are not the marginalization of men. None of that shit happens. It's basically egalitarianism and different ways, forms of distribution, different ways of assessing what is valuable, et cetera, et cetera. And men can't enter that conversation partly because they're paralyzed, I think. And they're like, oh crap, if the tables turn and I'm gonna be at the receiving end of the shit we've been dishing for centuries, this is going to really suck. And so for me, the thing I'm looking for a lot is what are those openings that allow people who are in positions of privilege to see a path across the very raging river that is more or less safe, that doesn't involve them drowning and dying in the river, that maybe doesn't involve them losing all assets and privilege that they sense that they have because they're going to defend that to the death. They're going to be defensive and not even enter the conversation as long as they perceive that their worldview is under assault that everything they have and value is going to be destroyed. So I'm trying to figure out what does that look like and how do we, I'm gonna use terrible language, how do we brand, defund the police better than has been done? I totally understand why defund the police is in fact a hashtag and the meme. It's because everything else like rethink, reform the police hasn't worked. Like I've read a bunch of great articles on how police reform has been a failure most places they've tried it. Like you can train them in empathy or whatever but when they've got full SWAT gear and an MRAP and a bunch of weapons, it's like Shekhov's rifle. They're going to use them. They've been trained exactly to do that. So I'll pause it because to me all these things are all linked together in the long web. Go ahead, Susan. I was just going to point out that Jerry was part of somebody's one of the efforts that I've been putting my attention to and one of the reasons Jerry, so this is a conversational intervention of sorts that I found to be particularly appropriate at this time and actively working on and the reason, one of the reasons why Jerry just because it goes back to this when Estie said relational and of course what attracted me to it was that finally somebody was paying attention to the quality of the interaction and the quality of the interaction and I think it was also designed from trust. It was like if you put two people together and you give them a little bit of a framework they will talk to each other. And then it's remarkably Estie like the two by two. Yes, unfolding. I mean, I couldn't believe it. So that's my guy, a guy whose father was an army. An army, what was he? What do you call those people? Anyway, doesn't matter. Officer. So I know he was an officer but he was more than that. He was a drill sergeant. A drill sergeant. And so you can kind of see this coming through and he knows it perfectly well. But I thought, aha, here's something I can grab on to that may have enough leverage to have some impact because it doesn't sideline anybody, it doesn't have to. And I owe you guys a response and I was hesitating because I was underwhelmed by the process. Yeah, I can believe that you were. Yeah, he built it up so much. And it was like, oh, I've unlocked the magic of how people connect and it's gonna solve all our problems. And then I, I know he's gotta get past that. And I spent three years, I spent three years ignoring it. Okay, well, I couldn't ignore it. That caused me to hesitate to reply. No, but I mean, I didn't get involved. I mean, ignoring the whole thing. You're involved, exactly. Yeah, so sorry, I'm gonna, I'll come back and I'll write you guys a reply. I wanna do one more approach from the side flank. As we're talking. Coming in from the flank. As to follow and pray, go. From the other side of the last one. Power Rangers, activate. She says, as her air pod falls out of her right ear for the 10th time. I wonder what's the impact of the quote, essential worker revelation we're having and the sudden at perception that if kids are home, life does not, the economy does not proceed as we count upon it to do. And therefore, privilege is either irrelevant or it's at least impacted in some way. So I'm leading to, as we begin to realize that this is actually getting worse, not better. And the difference, the distance between what the asshole in chief is doing, let alone saying. And the return to something, the return to something that we recognize is growing. What does that say for, oh, and I'll ellipsoid there. Rianne Eisler went on after chalice in the blade to do a bunch of stuff ultimately on what she calls caring economy. And the fact that it is unseen, unpaid, et cetera, but essential as she would have said. And that is relational comes from, is closely overlapped with caring. With caring for others, with responsibility for it, et cetera. So I'm just wondering for a moment, coming from the other, the hordes are coming from the other side. What opportunities, if we needed an opportunity, this might be it, sadly. I think we will find that when we look back historically at this period that one of the most significant impacts of the pandemic has been in social politics. I don't think we would be having the Black Lives Matter political power that we see it having now without the people being quarantined. Because I think basically people being out of work or working remotely gave them the opportunity to speak out, to go and act in a way that they wouldn't have had under normal economic conditions. Correct. And I think just building on what you were saying about this enormous transformation in social, in the recognition of social roles and in the recognition of the, and in our ability to express our social beliefs. I think in this distance, we're gonna look back at this as being profoundly important, not simply for reasons of health and not even necessarily for reasons of partisan politics, but simply in finally giving people an opportunity and letting them experience what it's like to be able to speak. And to be able to speak about a layer of reality that has been literally un-inadvisably speakable. That is, inadvisable to speak about. One of the things... Go ahead, Jermy. No, it makes me wonder if we do eventually end up in a world or in an economy that has a strong universal basic assets income, etc. Economic model where work is more of a choice than a requirement. The politics there may end up being very radical, simply because people have time to think. What do you mean by... An opportunity. I'm sorry? What do you mean by that? Do you wanna elaborate? The politics could be very radical, meaning we could all become multifarians. What do you mean? No, I just mean in the sense of, I think we'll see more of a... Spectrum of options. A willingness to change. A willingness and an ability to look for changes in the world. One of the big questions that's lurking in the back of my head real quick is how to deal with trauma from the past. And the US was founded on two great crimes, which conservative Americans are unwilling to fathom, discuss, acknowledge, or worse, apologize for. And, you know, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are in the air, reparations are in the air. It's really, really interesting the conversation that's happening over a lot of the stuff. But, you know, I spoke with a guy, I think there was a Rex call a couple years ago with a fellow from South Africa who said, we went through Truth and Reconciliation. Shit is still fucked up here. We're like racism is still alive and well in South Africa and I don't know how much good it did. So one of my big questions is, how do you do this? How do you deal well with a large population with their pasts? And particularly the traumas of their pasts. And how do you get past that so that we might enter a different way of seeing one another and not fearing what happened and beginning to collaborate to create beneficial futures? Because otherwise, we're all busy protecting what we think is ours and what we think our privilege is and we'll defend that, you know, till the end and we'll pass it on, you know. If you read anything about the Daughters of the American Confederacy, it's just lunacy. I mean, the monuments that we're trying to tear down now were largely put up by the Daughters of the American Confederacy in the 60s, 50s, something like that. There was kind of a big run up, way post reconstruction and some earlier as well. But like, sorry, how do we get under that and tip those mental monuments over without destroying the people? Like, and bringing the people on board into some new and interesting world. And then the neighboring big thought immediately adjacent to that is, how does a pacifist society that's figured out a lot of these things survive in the face of active attacks from far less pacifist cultures? Because that's what happens all the time. Is that the people who understand how to live in community on the commons and haven't put up a whole series of defenses and aren't going and rolling over everybody else, get rolled over by the people who decide that the strategy of just getting better weapons and techniques works better. So April, thank you. Yeah, I'm gonna wrap the call in a minute anyway. We're about to head off. So having asked two large questions, anybody wanna answer those? 42. 32? 42. 42, yes, that is the answer to everything. Essie's gotta go too. So why don't we just leave, it's always good to end on a cliffhanger that like the series needs to have a cliffhanger. So why don't we wrap there and... Wait, wait, wait, Jerry, you just plunged me halfway down. Really? My depth. Yes, lift me up again or give me some grappling hook, right? Oh, wait, wait. I know. I think Susan has the answer. Go for it. I don't have the answer. Oh darn it. Well, if it's a cliffhanger, we've been here before and we need to figure out that there is no cliff. It's not hanging. And we need some other metaphors. We need to get cracking. Skin the cap? No, I hate that one. No, no, no, no. But I think I just realized that I'm having a moment, Essie. Do you remember that moment at the Darden Business School? Yes. When I lost my cool? Yes. Oh, why don't I know about this? Well, because I don't talk about it. It's embarrassing. Shoot. So there was one where glad and happy circles on organizational learning stuff and everything else. And we were going around the big circle and everything else. Estie was there, JSB was there. I don't know if he was there for that. Teddy was there. Teddy was there. It was the first time. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, well, it came to me and how are you? But to say everything's wonderful and ducky. And I said, I'm upset. And I was actually crying. I mean, I said, I am just so, I just, what makes us think that this time is going to be any different? And I said, you know, read the age of heretics. Read, I mean, any number of things, right? And something, I just think the way we're characterizing it is going to lead us back into the same kinds of trying the same things. And I just don't know, you know? So I'm saying, Estie, get your marketing hat on. Well, there's a piece of this that is like, how do we reframe, rename, defund the police, abolish the police? Not the best branding I've ever seen. But the idea is behind them, totally essential. It's all designed from trust. I completely agree. Like, let's go, go, go. Yeah. Yeah. You know, as the marketer here, as the marketing mind pipes up and says, you know where that language comes from, Jerry? You do. It comes from Republican strategies to defund education, defund the department of environmental stuff. That's a big action strategy word from that part of, from that estate for the last 20 years. And so this is borrowing language from what is really the other side, but is the language of the domain of discourse and big mistake in the, right, in the current. The word is needed and is not available other than this strange thing. Yeah. And I think we've escalated to abolish and defund because previous things weren't working. And Susan has the little blue book to show us. The little blue book by George Lakoff and Elizabeth Whaling. Yes, right. And I just want to read two sentences. And I think this is part of the answer. I mean, I read this and I thought this is true, but I never thought it. The progressive view, mostly in the Democratic Party, is that democracy depends on citizens caring about each other and taking responsibility both for themselves and for others. This yields a view of government with a moral mission to protect and empower all citizens equally. Mechanism for accomplishing this mission is through what we call the public, blah, blah, blah. Conservative hold the opposite view. That democracy exists to provide citizens with the maximum liberty to pursue their self-interest with little or no commitment to the interests of others. Under this view, there should be as little of the public as possible. So what he says is he goes on to point, they go on to point out that the Republicans talk in terms of values and the Democrats in terms of policy. And so they take all of the means and they know how to use them. Right. And I have to say, Lake Hoff is an acquaintance. I knew him in Berkeley and I've been in a couple of meetings with him. And I feel like Lake Hoff's approaches, which I believe in and like are completely overwhelmed by Luntz from and the rest of the conservative meme makers and by Steve Bannon's of the world, just totally overwhelmed by that thinking. And this would make a good topic for a future conversation as well. Let's have it. Right, because they take it all the way to defund. If you take away the money, you kill the infre... You kill the entity. A government small enough you can drown it in a bathtub, say a river norquist. Yes. All right. Was that a cheerful enough thought for yours too? No. I just think the policy, the policy versus values is important. Maybe we all need to send SD some cute animal video links. Yeah. What was the name of it? What was the name of the thread? Too cute. No, a cute overload. Remember, anybody remember cute overload? Oh, yeah. Oh, cute overload was awesome. That were like, if you needed to decompress, cute overload was the place to go. Does it still exist? Okay. I have a request. Sorry, Jermay. I don't think I want animals. I have a steady stream of those from my millennial son. Oh, good. But I do need, we watched Hamilton last night. We watched it on Friday. Yeah, we didn't wait. So I need the thing to watch after Hamilton. Oh. Yeah, that's a great question. If I might request. Okay. I just watched it too. I mean, it's pretty. It was really good. Yeah. We hadn't seen it before. Neither was me. Neither had I. So, all right, I must run. Thank you all tremendously. Thank you each. Thank you. Thank you one and all. Namaste. Namaste. Bye.