 It's been a it's been a journey and I don't what I'm saying is I don't know what I believe about the afterlife and about what shape we take once we die and all of that. I believe sort of energetic things about that, but I, I know, I know for a fact that mom is no longer constrained by her physical form and her mental constraints over time, and, and also whatever was pursuing her in her mind that made her she was she got some paranoia toward the end of her life, which I attribute to early childhood stuff that happened in Germany before they got out. So that photo album Jerry was unbelievable. Thanks. It really felt like I got a different experience of your mother to and there's a lot of cute Jerry in there as well but yeah that the glamour. Yeah, mom was a glamour puss. And I was, I talked about this a little bit on the call that just happened, which was an OGM call and I was reminiscing that I don't know where she got that from. Like, somehow mom got a hold of fashion magazines and stylish sort of things, and then just went, went, you know, all in on it, but not in the way of going and traveling to Paris and buying Givenchy from Givenchy, but in the in the way of subscribing to Vogue and Bazaar, which were always on our coffee table and tearing out pages and taking them to her dressmaker and saying, Can you do this. And then, you know, next next party mom would be decked out and something that looked pretty damn good. So the practical hackers Peruvian way of doing this. So yeah, so it's so this also frees up the hunk of my brain that was tied up in managing mom's descent in a way can now pay attention to other sorts of things which is, which is good. So and everybody and everybody has been just fabulous and supportive and lovely and, and that's been, it's been a treat just to absorb and to feel replenished by everybody's wishes. So that's good. Thank you. And I can vouch for that too I've had sort of a 50 yard line, a seat at the 50 yard line in a few different ways, but not ways that everyone necessarily were recognizes. I mean I think it's clear that like watching Jerry navigate all of this has just been like a lesson in grace and a lesson in equanimity and a lesson like how you do this with candidly one of the most difficult people I've ever met. And, and, and I couple things there you guys know like I lost both my parents young so I know death really well but I know sudden tragic like instantaneous death that comes out of nowhere. I don't know I found myself really. You might say like able to help but not I didn't have the answer like, I didn't have tips on hospice. I didn't have you know is new for me as well and so just watching him navigate this has been quite extraordinary. Also though, I have not known a day in life with Jerry, without his mom being and again I say I completely completely. How do I say that I really I respect her as a human I respect her as Jerry's mom. I have never had a relationship with her. She never really liked me I never really liked her. It ran both ways but you know I was competition for her relationship with her only son. And, and I also was willing to call out family dysfunction when I saw it and that was a no no in her book but you know. Jerry acknowledged that some things needed to be fixed to so I share all of this because I have never known Jerry without that person, you know that that source of life but also that weight on your shoulders and I am. And this is something I learned with my parents like my dad was my best friend, and my mother was effectively my abuser. So losing both of them and and love her and you know there was no guide but they did the best they could with what they had which was an incomplete set of tools. And so my best friend and losing my, you know, the monster in my life at the same time, I learned that you can actually have sadness and lightness at the same time you can have grief, and you can have relief at the same time. And I think there's just a piece of that going on and it feels really good to give Jerry the space also to feel all of that that we can be sad and we can also be like. He's at peace, thank goodness. And Jerry gets a half of his brain back and he says a third or a quarter I'm like a half, at least. So look out world, Jerry. And bow and Kelly I don't know if you've known but my mom died last Saturday. Yeah, you're muted bow. I figured that out logically my, my condolences Jerry. I was looking at your eyes and I was thinking, I'm not sure Bose read the retreat list or whatever on this side. I posted it to the retreat list to GM but I haven't. I've got a Facebook is open in front of me I haven't yet posted it there which would alert the rest of the world including like, you know the KGB and whoever else is monitoring those things. But yeah. The album, because the album is amazing. Was it a peaceful passing my friend. So mom had a stroke on the 15th. What I didn't realize is everybody knows that many people lose the ability to speak in a stroke. That's that happened to her so she couldn't communicate but she was already kind of confused before that. It wasn't just that she couldn't speak. It was that trying to point to yes or no and trying to sort out anything beyond are you in pain or not got was really really dicey and difficult. And then what I didn't know is that half half of the stroke victims basically lose the ability to swallow it's called dysphagia. And 90% of those recover capacity for swallowing within a week or two or four months of PT. They just don't make any progress at all. And mom was being of streperous with the caregivers of Kaiser. She was like kind of fight them off and all that so which then precluded a feeding tube or anything like that so mom was unable to swallow and feed herself. Couldn't the feeding to this other question and, and I know that mom wouldn't want to have restraints on her so that she could get an uncomfortable feeding tube so that so that she could come back to a confused state of being. So, so that led to a decision, my decision to accept hospice care. And Kaiser, the smartest thing I did in the last 20 years related to mom was getting Kaiser supplemental Medicare supplemental care, which is inexpensive and they were just fabulous at every step. I mean they were caring they were in touch with me all the time. My mom moved into hospice they, they supervised the whole thing they sent nurses every day to check in they, the whole thing. They were just great. Wow, your mom was a styling lady. I love these pictures. Yeah. Wow. And you met her multiple times. I did. She came over to my apartment on hate street I remember. And one thing. Well, and I think you, I don't think you mentioned this yet Jerry I mean Kaiser is like outstanding what Jerry was just saying but like that sense of you worry about end of life you're all these stories. Absolutely superb, like calling Jerry before his mom passed. You got called pretty much every two three hours. You got daily, you got daily check into but I mean it was, it was, it was, but you had palliative care. You had a social work team. You had her doctor you had her you had like, they were like this well grooved like it was just a site to hold. But the other thing is that I don't think you mentioned. There are special rules for hospice patients. So Jerry was able to visit his mom, every day if you wanted to, but like, was able to hold her hand was able you know and there were no COVID restrictions which, you know initially kind of freaked us out and then basically realized that's not what you know if that's possible like, like, like, like take it and appreciate it and so you were anyway just going to call that out that we feel like it was a real gift of grace that that that Jerry could be with her at all much less as much as he was technically they were still covered restrictions in that I was allowed to visit because of hospice care but I was only supposed to be with her for an hour a day, etc, etc, and because her assisted living facility accepted her back under hospice care she was able to be in her room with her and with people who knew her and cared for her, and they were and they knew me. So they could sort of look, you know, look the other way as I stayed for, you know, a few hours and, and so forth and but I had to I had to go in and full PPE I had to put on a gown and shield and my usual gloves the whole thing. But when I got to mom's room I would sort of take off half of it. Why is your mom holding up a time magazine table of contents, because she published the letter to the editor and that that issue of time. I thought it was something like that. Yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, so, so going through things like this make you pretty retrospective retrospective, etc, etc, and also focus you on your own mortality because it's like man as you see, as you see things sort of slip and go you're like, how do we how do we mitigate this how do we prevent it what do we do. All of those kinds of things, but it's been really it's been lovely to reflect on that and I'm grateful that my dad was a good and frequent photographer. Hey there are pictures here caramel I see that your parents in the moderate peninsula on the show. That's right, you're from caramel. So I think those pictures of them and caramel I think are when mom's pregnant with me. I think but I'm not sure. Oh, sorry, are these later pictures now. Yeah, well, they're down here and I, I, I know intimately know every corner of the coast and that's actually in Pebble Beach for sure, you know the lone cypress. So anyway, that why were they there. I don't, there's a language Institute there's all that you know, now they were just it was a vacation trip I think they loved, they loved that shoreline. The pictures are amazing my friend. So how's everybody else. How's how's everyone surviving the Trump apocalypse and the pandemic and the impending climate disaster. Now I've been completely focused on the climate disaster side of things for for three separate projects. Wow. Yeah. Which is a. How can we tell a happy story. And I can tell you stories of success, but they aren't quick and they aren't fun. It's just the, you know, whether I'm working with a, you know, with IFTF and in a broad tenure forecast project or I'm working with a other home chemical cleaning product company. There is this resistance to seeing this as a systemic issue. Now, obviously the resistance isn't quite as profound as the IFTF side because I've been pounding that pounding people's head on this for years. And with the ox. It was, you know, they kept wanting to talk about climate as a marketing issue. Do customers do customers respond to this. Oh, this is not, this is not marketing. This is existential. People aren't people haven't been used to thinking in existential terms. If there is a long term benefit to the pandemic, it might be, it might come from giving people a very visceral understanding of what a global global existential problem could look like. Yes. And what it looks like is a whole bunch of refusing to believe it's real. I see the comments about, you know, for now on every zombie apocalypse movie has to include a subsection of the population running to embrace the zombies because they don't believe that it's real. Yeah. And our plumbing system. Took a dive yesterday so we're waiting for a plumber to show up today. Yeah, that's always fun. And I got to ask Jerry in a completely superficial and inappropriately. Stupidly attempt to stupid attempted humor. What's with the Doby Gillis beard. Oh the Doby Gillis beard. So this is a Trump artifact. I didn't shave the weekend before the election, and then Tuesday shows up and I watched the results. And I'm like, ah, shit, this is going to take a while. So I decided not to shave until Trump was off stage. And so I had so I had a scruffy full beard for a while and then Trump does the mistaken tweet or whatever he says president like Biden know I didn't really mean that. I shaved off all of this and left a full go team. And then as things get whittled down I whittled off pieces of the beard so now I just have the Doby Gillis section. You're going to end up with a full path, aren't you. That's where we're heading probably and then the notionally when Trump steps off stage I shaved the whole thing off. And I'm kind of fond of this this is like thinking thinking works better when you have something to kind of pet stroke. Yeah. I don't know how distracting the biz for April, just as someone who's married to someone who has a beard who occasionally shaves it off in pieces. There are mornings I roll over and I'm like, oh my God. Oh, that's right here. Who's this guy. Um, I've never seen Jerry with the beard. So, and my dad had a full beard, which I, which I loved, but I have decided, basically, a full beard does not look good on Jerry. No, not not a thing, but the go to I can actually live with the go to is, it's, how do I say this I mean once I got past the I just shaved that thing off like enough I want the Jerry that I I've also figured out Jerry looks when he had a beard. He aged 10 years, just like without anything else and I was like oh that's scary. So like the more he shaves off the more like youthful Jerry comes back. I'm good. I'm good with where it is now. I think it's been a fun experiment and I'm, I'm ready to go back to, you know, you know, I think it's like 1950 kind of beat vibe with it. Yeah, that's Berlin Getty. Yes, Berlin Getty. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Chin merkin. Oh, that's kind of kind of funky. I'm proud of being a merkin. Oh, that's weird too. And I just posted a YouTube video link to a PC forum panel I hosted I wore a beard for a year and a half back in the 90s when I was at working faster. So there you can see me with full battle regalia and it, it took me a really long time to figure out that I look terrible with a full beard. I think I was at that one. Hey Bill. I think I was at that one really that was my favorite panel of all the five years I did PC forum. It was on online community and it was a weird selection of panelists like Bob Kavanaugh what but it was a great panel and at the end of it I remember sitting up there going, Okay, this is phenomenal and I wish we could just go on for another couple hours, just with this one. But of course we have a program so we must get on with the show. Right. We're just coping with said pandemic and everything else. One day at a time in my neck of the woods. Well, I gotta say in Portland where we can walk around like in my neighborhood. So it's almost like, it's very nice I mean it's not like it's almost like it's not really happening because I'm glad not to be in a dense place like California where you can't even go outside hard. We walk around our neighborhood and people don't even bother wearing masks because we can all avoid each other we just step off into the street and everything. So it's almost not happening I just missed the restaurants closing I don't know about you Jerry it was nice for the brief time they were open to have a decent martini again. You can't learn to shake your own martini. This is a place called angel face near me and they just make cocktails and it's, I make my martini is too strong they make them just nice. We discovered the jalapeno olives. No. It doesn't matter what else you have in the martini as long as you get to the olive at the bottom. As long as you can still find the olive at the bottom. Yeah, doing my philosophy stuff online with my zoom with my friends I mean we're still going through hey go we're just philosophy has been really a great solace. Good moment for philosophy. Yeah, Kelly you were going to jump in. I was only going to make a crack that what we miss most about the bars is that the Peter and I have heard all of our jokes it's the bartenders laughing at our material that is really missing from our lives. We need an audience. You need to get together now that always that that's a good idea that's what we'll start. That's really funny. I'm also going through kind of what what's who to give more money to at the end of this year like my symphony tickets. I just gave all the money that you know they called me and they led with do you want your refund and I'm like no I want the arts to survive keep the money damn it. I don't have the rest of you but I'm just like well well where am I going to send money to now because I just now just think of the world after this and what's going to be left. And how am I going to say what I want. You know, animal rescue was always a good one. And I was also going to say anything around food security. Food banks feeding America's hungry here locally here or globally, the number of people I learned about this through Dave remembers I did this thing on food, food has been a theme that has shown a more on my radar this year than ever before. The number of people facing food insecurity this year globally is going to more than double. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of people and you know, also separate conversation is supposed for a different, a different thread. The future philanthropy is getting really mixed up and all this too because obviously a lot of nonprofits either their budgets just like boom, when it was something you did optionally. Right. So I think about the kinds of support services. I mean it's interesting bow because I'm with you I want to see arts and culture survive absolutely do. At the same time, I think those real the basic needs. I'm actually grateful that so long as, for example, paintings can be held in a building safe and climate controlled. They're good. They're good we can't see them right now we or we can see them online but like they're there. We're much more concerned about food, food being a really big one and if we can't fuel our brains we can't really do much else of anything, but also just the inequities around access to food access to education that's worth me. So, I was going to say something else about philanthropy and I forget what it was, but you're talking about innovation and philanthropy and changes going on. I will that that I think this is a time that it wasn't and I'm trying to think because it wasn't. So a lot of nonprofits are finding it much harder to keep the lights on, but at the same time when we realize how interconnected and interdependent we are, we're also seeing shifts and how people want to give. There's actually just an article yesterday about how Venmo single handedly redefined how we engage with philanthropy, because we've made it that much easier. I also found it interesting this is separate but that right now, you know, levels of savings are actually higher than they've been in the last 40 years. So this is on the one hand we have higher savings, but more people being insecure because of again it's exposing the systemic inequities of how we access these things before the pandemic. But coming out of that, I'm just seeing, I mean, there's just a, there's a greater generosity of spirit. But again, if we don't have the basic fundamentals in place, the basic measures of security, the basic measures of well being were kind of screwed up for everything else. And then the cars in Texas to get food was just shocking. And then we have here in Oregon we have the southern from the center to the southern all those places burned down I give a watch to the right cross because. Wow, I mean they just lost their homes are gone. You know, exactly. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, just like in our own state, you just go south and it's, there's lots of people in trouble. Yeah, so I think if we want to redeploy our funds I mean there are lots of ways to do that and we're, we've received a couple Christmas cards where people typically these are family members and they typically make a donation to a global nonprofit and they're like, you know, it's not that we don't we're still supporting their work but they, that's the gift that we get is you know, some kind of contribution. And this year I was actually going to grab it but it's um it's feeding America's home feeding America's America's hungry. And it's a national consortium of food banks. So, I don't know. Anyway, we have a friend Jay Golden who's a storyteller who lives in Ashland with his family and Ashland is right next to the two towns that burned to the ground. They were in Oregon so they that hit them hard and around that time they actually took their family and drove east to sort of hang out with family like camping on their family's backyard, and then came back but that was really hard on them to see so many people wiped out that way. Bill it strikes me that of all of us on the call here, you have your feet closest to the ground to all the things we're sitting here talking about and I'm wondering how your, how your world is. Well, just one little factoid relative to funding to nonprofits. We've got a data source that basically it's out of Vancouver it's called foundation source and they basically have data on who's giving what to whom. And they called us because of the fact that they knew we've got 70 nonprofits in our organization said that that statistics are showing that 40% of the nonprofits in the United States are going to be gone by the end of this year. Well that was generating the reason that he was getting in touch with us is that there are there were a lot of foundations and money sources grant sources that were willing to give money to charities, just to keep them alive. They didn't have to prove evidence base blah blah blah no just we want you alive. And the point was that they're afraid that they're going to be in a situation where they can't deploy the 5% that they've got to buy by law. They're afraid of 40% of the charities are gone. So we've started to work on that and one of the charities the first ones that we've worked with was called invisible hands deliver, which is a just a basically a millennial surge to deliver over 1000 meals a day to shut people like that in New York City because of the fact that they can't they can't go out they can't you know they don't know how to get the food. In any event we're supporting them and we're actually going to be supporting them at the beginning of next year to expand to other states starting with California. So bottom line that definitely is a big issue. So, the one thing that I thought was sort of like an interesting addition in the last week or so there was sort of an announcement about this inclusive capitalism. Council with the Catholic church with the Vatican. Yeah, I just saw that. I started doing so I thought, wow, that's a great concept, you know, inclusive and always that's sort of the opposite of what you normally hear about with capitalism which is exclusive. In other words, it's all about me not you forget you. And so I thought that was going to be great to try and sort of like support and courage and organize around that and then I went online today to sort of find the background of it. And for all intents and purposes, it's big business co opting the left side so that they can they can say oh we got this covered don't worry about it. You know because you read the list I mean first of all the woman is a Ross child who founded it. And then you see Bank of America, you know, chase, you know, there was all these big companies, not one sort of little thing and their 100 page outline of what is all sort of basically they're going to take care of us don't worry. Well good luck with that. Is it pope washing. Yeah, well, at the end of the day, they were obviously looking for some gravitas some sort of stamp of approval that says yeah we're good guys. Don't don't pull your pitchforks out, you know for us. I just this conversation reminds me of how institutionalized our formulations around human suffering have become. So, a large funder wants to make sure that the 40% of nonprofits don't go away but we have so many nonprofits in this country because our other systems are just like really really broken. I'm struck by Peter Buffett's op ed years ago where he said look, there's this philanthropic industrial complex and I discovered it when I attended these meetings that sometimes the right hand is trying to fix what the left hand broke. And if we fixed what capitalism is busy doing we probably wouldn't need the majority of the nonprofits because they're all busy, like putting fingers in the dike of an extremely broken system or am or am I just wrong about that. My feeling is that he was Peter wrong or were you wrong. No, I think I agree with Peter, and I'm thinking that if capitalism wasn't hurting us so badly by by creating its perceived abundance and all that. We really wouldn't need. And if we didn't have the particular brands or flavors of ownership and access and everything else that we have, we wouldn't need this whole big crop of nonprofits. Right, I agree. And to April's point with respect to food, I read a statistic that we have, we generate a third more food than it would be required to feed the entire planet. We just don't have the distribution system. You know, and apparently for like 10 or 15 years there's been a group that was organized a long time ago to try and see how they could do that but in essence as you can imagine, big corporations don't want to really support that they want to make that happen. They want to shovel the extra corn or milk or fill in the blank out the window and say no no we've got scarcity forget the abundance aspect. Abundance is so relative. There's so Richard Nixon told Earl butts agriculture secretary to go create cheap calories. And the butts basically put in motion a lot of the stuff that turns into high fructose corn syrup being and grains being insanely cheap. So fatty carbs, being too cheap to actually compete with in other kinds of ways and from their tumble a whole bunch of health issues that cascade over to somebody else's department so why would, why would robots care. There's been in place all these massive policy things around assumptions and around politics and on everything else that also hurt us so how do we hit the grant the grand undo, how do we take advantage of meltdown, which is what I call this phase we're in which is a combination of pandemic from apocalypse climate change black lives matter me to. Name your name your favorite crisis and sort of drop it in there. How do we take advantage of this meltdown to actually create fundamental institutional change, meaning in the damella meadows leverage leverage points in a system to change the assumptions that design the system, the assumptions that are behind why the system is the way it is. I mean I'd love to go. I mean it more deeply into your, your positive scenario is I feel like that's one of the missing pieces kind of as we, we know what we don't like we don't have such a strong idea what we do like kind of. And even like the notion that this is capitalism is bad it's like what do we mean by that, you know, right, you don't like markets, you know, like money, you know, you know was it was I mean. It was founded to you know do the regeneration framing, and, and like make a pitch to get, do some fundraising for our little nonprofit, I should probably get on to that. And the argument I'm coming back to is, you know, the UN Secretary says the world's broken. And then Buck Minister Fuller says he got to have a change in system you can't use the same system. Alright, so I think we're that far. I'm like okay what's the new system, and I'm calling it regeneration. Right. That's what we want we want to do right now. I don't know what regeneration is exactly. And I think it would be useful to flesh it out more, but you know it has an abundance component. It has a positive some component and you know I mean I think we could kind of define some of these things and I would love to do some some brainstorming around what we, you know what this better world that is different from the current world starts to look like. And I've even laughing at the link that Jay that you put in here for the inclusive capitalism one I mean look at the goal. They're going to make the world fairer, more inclusive and sustainable and not going to get fair, or inclusive just better, you know, and it's like, well if you're going to set out with that goal just don't even bother. So anyway, I'd love to like what is the what is the scenario in the world where you do actually win. So first of all, food, shelter and health care should not be at stake for anybody in this society. Period. I think that's a requirement it's like in this future world these things are granted. Now it still doesn't get you the how, but it gets you a minimum set of principles that you want to have. And like in America it's we have such a multi layered corrupt inefficient like first of all, health care in America isn't even capitalistic. It's it's it's a bunch of fat cat oligopolists in a structure which makes no sense, either for actually delivering health care, or for the efficient deployment of resources makes a lot of sense if you're going to give a bunch of profit margins to a bunch of politically connected people. So that that's the fundamental thing is a bunch of these arguments in America aren't even set up correctly it's not even. It's not capitalism versus single parent capitalism isn't really what's going on in our healthcare system. And frankly people are just going to be sick of it and we'll go to single parent and I'm fine with that. I'm done playing this game. When at the time of Trump's election. And some of the some of the introspection I did back then, I was thinking, like, if so Trump want I think Trump wants the dismantled government but if Trump went in and dynamite at the Department of Education, I would be applauding from the sidelines. And if you wanted to get rid of the farm bill, I would be like, dude, you like go right and those things haven't happened. But one of my fears of Biden coming in is that if he doesn't cause enough profound change of the nature that we're talking about. We're going to have Don Junior as president in 2024 or Ivanka will be the first female American president ironically, and I just caused Kelly's neurons to go into like total fritz overload. I like, yeah, I just internalized it I like I look calm but that thought gives me the willies as well. But but I think that that reinstating sort of Obama Clinton kind of kind of history, which is the shepherding and of the status quo, which is broken is a real mistake. And we're seeing the cabinet forming up we're seeing sort of the initial, the initial swings that how to how to, and, and Biden is being handed a play a tray of steaming shit. Like, like, and on his way out Trump is damaging everything he can damage, and possibly creating a parallel government in exile inside the nation that will refuse to cooperate in any way whatsoever, which is like also cataclysmic. I think that our opportunities are right on the table because we can communicate for free. These ideas are burgeoning and I'm going to put a couple links in the chat. I collect up, you know, promising solutions to world crises, which is like the 2% solution simple, that there's a whole bunch of smart people, donor economics, a whole bunch of smart people have put a whole bunch of theories and practical projects in the world. Not all of them have worked well like Earth Island Institute didn't really work all that well, etc. But, but how do we distill the lessons from these and propagate the best ideas out of them so that local communities can adapt them to their own situations because my own prejudice on this is that the people on the ground are the best best available to understand their situation and act on it. And besides says hey just do this, it doesn't stick it doesn't really work like you can best practices all you want but coming in and telling people what to do. I don't think ever particularly works well. So, well, and I mean I'd be curious again on in the, all you futurists whether this is a was it's true or not but I've ended up with one of the differences about regeneration is that it's an opportunity to solve something you're not trying to solve problems you're trying to, to create opportunities. And the reason that matters is if you're solving a problem you're inherently stuck in the last paradigm. Right, that, by definition puts you back in that old framework. So I feel like this conversation that we have can't shouldn't be based on the problems we're seeing in the current system it should be based on some kind of backward back casting version of what the future is we'd like to see but is that true that work. So, I'm going to, I'm going to speak in favor of, or at least as a devil from a devil's advocate perspective they speak in favor of slow conservatism. And basically what Biden do not expect radical change from from Biden I did not expect radical change from Biden before he announced a single person is cabinet. Yeah, this is not I don't say it's a caretaker administration, but it's a stop digging administration. You're in a whole stop digging and all of these much better solutions are untested, or at least untested at scale. And if they don't work, you make things worse. At least that's, I think that's an arguable perspective that you if you have a choice of doing what you know, work fish is, you know, won't make things worse, or doing something new that might think make things better but might make things worse and it takes a lot of going to take more time for people to understand it. It's safer to do the thing that you know how to do that isn't great, but isn't bad. Or at least, they can believe that it isn't great but it isn't bad. And so I really think that what we're seeing with Biden is very much a, let's do what we know seems to work and not make things worse, but it wasn't. Now that may or may not be may or may not be accurate, but I think that's the perspective that's coming into this is that it's not a, you know, we are champions of the status quo, it's a shit we got to stop making things even worse. And, you know, once we stop digging, then we can figure out how to actually make things better, but coming in here and trying to do all sorts of wonderful new things is just going to scare people who are already precarious. And might not work in the way we expect probably won't work the way we expected to might not work the way we want it to. And potentially, could cause the system to go even further into collapse so I mean I'd agree with the perspective and I totally understand what they're why they're doing this. And I will say I got a tear in my eye when the first cabinet announcements came out and it suddenly dawned on me that competent human beings who cared for the offices they were about to step into would have their hands on the tiller at some point again. And I'm like, Whoa, I hadn't that hadn't that hadn't entered my head I'm like, so happy that Biden appears to have won and they might actually become president that that all the repercussions all the extra. Hey Susan, all the extra sides of it hadn't dawned on me and so I was like, weepy when when I saw the first people showing up as as you know cabinet members and other other important positions because competence and caring and intentions. I think first of all they're they're trying to stop depression. And Janet Yellen is clearly all about that and not neat things about her she's a labor economist. Exactly. And most of her work is about inequality. So that remember, do you remember she got castigated because of the fact that she mentioned, you know, the whole concept of being concerned about inequality when she mentioned that she got lambasted when she was on the on the Fed. Yep, they don't want to hear that. She's the first Fed governor to even ever mention that. Wow. So, yeah, yes, that's right. So, so right now, I mean, that thing that that Steven Munich and did the Treasury Secretary of trying to take the money back from the Fed, that they were using a prop up. I don't realize in economics is this thing whereby having the ability to do something, you know, it makes it so you don't have to do it. So the Fed didn't even have to spend that money, but everyone knew they had it knew they could do it. So they never weren't even challenged. So that is literally that's trying to burn system down that's. So, we're obviously want to stop that. But I was just thinking historically speaking, all these. There was this female Labor Secretary under Roosevelt, and she's the one that got unemployment done. She's the one that got just all these things we take in the modern world happened in the 30s and 40s under one person in Roosevelt administration. And because, you know, the whole social contract of America was completely rewritten in the 30s and 40s. So, I mean, that is an opportunity that lies in front of us. And it's almost, if we handle this depression to and managed to averted, we might not have, shall we say the reason is on the tour to actually do these kind of wonderful things. Sorry, I have to think as a realist. Because, you know, in the depression, they decided to tear the whole social contract up and rewrite it. Anyway, which, which the far right has been trying their mightiest to undo ever since like, like, they're still mad about social security. They're still mad about that. Absolutely still incensed about all those things and the far right went nuts at that point, and it's still not about all these things. Yeah. And so, and so the green new deal sounds to them like the doubling down on this terrible thing they've been trying to hit undo on all this time. And so they're just not, you know, they're not in with the program at any level on those states and so how do we, how do we shift ourselves around the table such that we can actually begin to solve these problems together? Because that's crucial if we if 72 million people voted for Trump and the entire Republican Party is too frozen to acknowledge Biden's victory, because those 72 million might then like bomb their home. I think a lot of politicians are actually afraid of physical violence. If they if they don't toe the line, they're actually afraid of physical violence. It's not even I you know can't act on principle I might not get reelected I don't think that's the level at which some of these people are responding now. Hey, and don't forget in the in the Depression, we had World War one veteran striking in Washington and McCarthy went out there and just we had the threat of violence then to the bonus marches. Yeah. And nothing really important as I want to stress everyone is that it's clear to me that the depression happened because of policy errors. It was caused by policy errors. And what's really fascinating about it is we had like a year and a half things are getting better and then we bounced the budget through everything or right back in and we did that like three or four times, all the way to World War two was shocking we kept just basically running ourselves back in the ditch. And Republicans are talking right now, just like they did back then. So, don't count the ability of us to go back into depression. And because it wasn't this exogenous thing that just hit us, we kept screwing up. So just policy error caused the depression just make sure you understand that okay. And is that was that happening globally. Yes. So, so the first good book of history I've ever read was tragedy and hope by Carol Quigley who was a mentor of Clintons at Georgetown talk foreign affairs. It was presented to me not well it was mentioned to me by john Taylor Gatto the first time I met him in New York. And he said you want to read some good history try this. I've forgotten a lot of the thesis, but basically it went into describing how in the Great Depression, each country sort of policies created a log jam against the other countries that they were basically, they were basically stuck against each other in a way that they couldn't untangle because of stupid beliefs and bad assumptions and foreign policy and God knows what, but but it was an international mess that that that was exacerbated at local levels. Each way, so the history of the stuff is fascinating. Yeah, in fact the way Europe dealt with Greece and everything they went into austerity. Yeah, exactly how we caused the depression we kept going back into austerity. So the EU is at a turning point, are they going to finally is are the Germans going to let them spend money, or are we going to bounce the budget and go to hell again. Well, let me just comment to the extent that I was just listening to a talk by Giannis Verifakis, who was the Greek finance minister at the time that they went under. And he was saying that be prepared for the next step which is going to be going into more austerity. When Germany begins to shift toward surplus again, they basically opened the gates to non austerity, because of the fact that they were having problems, the minute that they solve their problem. They're going to shut down the rest of Europe, just because of politics that they just can't get away from like you're saying that sense that somehow austerity works, which it doesn't, you know, anybody who's followed my, you know, mark the lies or Steve Kane, they tell you over and over and over again austerity is the worst thing you can do when you try to do it across the board, who is going to be on the upside. And so part of what's happening also right now with the advent of automation and the sort of the deconstruction of work and jobs and all these other things is that a whole bunch of people will be systematically unemployed and, and we'll have a very hard time coming over back in April's been doing a bunch of speeches and work on the future of work and sort of the delamination of the economy and so forth so we're, we're that plus pandemic and economic mess means we may need to make our way toward basic income or really different solutions from what we have right now. And so the world of where shelter, shelter food and healthcare are our rights of some sort seems mentally and sexually really really really far away from where we are, like we may be shoved there, especially if you add the ingredient of the fact that the 1% want more unemployment, so that they've got more pressure to keep the cost of labor low, because excuse me, you know, if you spend it on all this social stuff, we're not going to have the money, we need in order to build the economy. So it was interesting when April was mentioning the savings rate is up. I don't know whether anybody is really sort of followed the fact that we've got a glut of absolute worldwide glut of money, and it has nothing, nothing to do with savings. It has to do with the basically the Fed and all the governments pushing money for the benefit of the banks and protecting the banks. And so we've got this glut of money out there that's only available basically to the 1%. Nobody else can get their hands on it. In economic theory, there's something that was the iron law of wages, but I'm wondering if you're familiar with this. And it's not called the law of wages it's not called some economists law, or it's called the iron law of wages what it says is that I will quote from my brain. Wages tend to the minimum necessary to sustain the worker. It basically says as an economic precept or a baked in assumption that wages can never be fair can never be like where somebody could actually try that's not that that doesn't happen in economics. We just go to the minimum necessary to sustain the worker it's this. And to me this is like brilliant marketing brilliant marketing for mass holes for trying to make sure that labor never actually has a seat at the table gets its fair share. People, people can't be sustainably nourished in some way, but it's called the iron law. And when somebody calls something like you like my my BS radar just glows bright red, like, oh this is juicy. So we have so many stupid things baked in economics. I'm PBS last night I love watching that news hour with Leslie stall. There was a great story on the labor participation of women. Wow, women are dropping out of the workforce like crazy. And also how they're being hit this time versus 0809 because it's all the service industry. It was men that got it no 809 and this time it's large, it's much more women and people of color. 400,000. The last report there was 400,000 people that fell out the other dropped out of the labor market. That's amazing. Huge, huge numbers. Susan was going to say something good Susan. No, I just said, I was going to say, I said, watch out. I mean, if, if the, the women and minorities get whatever, enough, maybe we'll be in the streets. I think there's a good argument to be made that one of the things that made the large scale black lives matter marches and protests possible. Over the course of this past year was the pandemic driven recession. So many people out of work or working from home. Yeah, who had who suddenly had the space to act. And I think it makes makes a good argument or gives good support to the idea that people are a lot more radical in their beliefs, then they're able to be in their actions, simply because of the need to survive. And a lot of that has been in some sense let loose recently I mean one of the effects of Trump normalizing all kinds of craziness in the world is that people feel agency to go out and act and do a bunch of like stupid ass things. They're kind of liberated to do so it's been sanctioned. So it's okay so so the overton window for acceptable behavior was shifted dramatically by by Trump exactly the overton mouth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know you, you've heard me make this argument. But the idea that, you know, those of us who are on the internet in its early early days, really celebrated the idea that what the net enabled was for marginalized communities to actually form communities people who felt isolated at home, isolated in their small towns, etc. And could actually meet other people with similar beliefs orientations etc. And we took it as a given that that was a good thing. Not realizing that not every marginalized community is should be unmarginized. We basically gave the same power to neo nazis that it gave to LGBT. And, you know, I think, I think you're seeing a similar thing here with the, the enablement of action. That's, you know, come out of this last year that it gives us the same potential to act and to act out to people who want to kidnap the Michigan governor as to people who want to march in the streets to protest police violence. And I'm not trying to make any kind of claim that they're the same thing, or have the same level of morality or anything like that. But it's simply it's the same openness, you know, availability of agency that they didn't have before. Susan you appear to have something you'd like to say about that. I will calm down. I'll just thank Jame for saying what I've been trying to say for years, but I don't understand saying it nicely. And so thank you for that. But I still don't understand how anybody could think that wouldn't happen. Do you remember the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace by John Perry Barlow. Oh, yes. It was, it was an incredibly optimistic and heady time. I know. And so I think people just thought that this that we by having freedom we would do good. And a lot of us did, but not everyone. And I think it was one of the hard lessons of the rise of the internet. And I don't think we are really have fully engaged with yet. Right. Well, I think that's true too. And I can I complain that we're still digging into what's wrong with the current system. And I haven't heard a lot about what the next one looks like kind of I mean, I feel like we keep getting trapped in this, you know, what's going wrong with our world thing and I don't know how to break out of that. So can you say a bit more about what regeneration means to you, and then we'll go to April. Well, I mean in some sense regeneration just means all the good things right. I think it's kind of the problem because it needs to be kind of realistic, but the reason I felt like I had an epiphany around it was, I felt like there was a range of thought that I've been trained into and learned and stuff. You know, through the Kennedy School through economics through business that I was not considering and it has to do with abundance. It has to do with positive outcomes. It has to do with kind of with language choice and stuff. The sense of possibility. So I really do think that that the, you know, the framing is exactly in that website that you posted, you know, I was just trying to tweet it Jerry but the, but the idea that we want to make things more just. No, we want to make things just. And that's a big step. Right. And I wasn't making that step so the sustainability scarcity model is an improve the world more slowly, and it's a lose more slowly strategy based on incremental change. And what we need is a winning strategy. And what is that winning. So regeneration is the winning strategy. And regenerative has lots of different facets to it. There's regenerative agriculture, there's regenerative economics, there's other kinds of regeneration is restorative justice, there's I mean I think in every sector there's like a regenerative probably, but I don't know what the words are. Yeah, and by the way this relationship economy thing that we're sort of standing in it was was an attempt to phrase and frame those kinds of issues so all the regenerative stuff fits really beautifully inside of inside of Rex. April, can I jump in since I have to leave in two minutes. Oh, yes, please. It's so great to see everyone. It's really made my day. So, I just want to say a few things, and I love this conversation and my exploration has been what needs to shift in the dynamics of the system, rather than what structures need to change within the system. And it's a very strange path that I'm on. But I feel like it's a both and like there's a lot of conversations happening out there around. What could this look like, how do we get there, but not what is the quality of the interactions and the relationships and how do we get there. So, hopefully I can jump on some more Rex so I can just pull wisdom out of your hearts and brains. As I'm on that path and I have to, to jump on a call here at one. Thanks, Tom, nice lovely to see you. Thanks for leaving that note with us. And I'm going to, I'm going to chime in just very briefly it's more to further. Well, it's, it's not in relation to. It's not in relation to the problem it's it's so I've been really struck and and maybe this is some constructive feedback criticism, like criticism for for Rex, as well as what I'm learning about writing my book is that Dave to your point like, we are really good at talking about the problem here. Really good at it. One of the things I mean I love this group, but we need to be about solutions. And one of the things I learned about, I have to give both presentations and this that and the other, and it's, depending on who you talk to it's like the 6030, sorry this, the 3010 60 rule or but that like, we need to spend more than half of our time, you need to get to the solutions as quickly as possible because I think here like we get the, the many different facets of the problem and how the problem that you know like, you do not sell a book by talking about the problem, you sell the book by telling people what your books, what your book holds that actually has hope or a path forward. And so I just bring that out because I feel like that I adore, I, and it's not just about Rex but I think this is one of those groups where we're really good at like going through all the different things and that's wrong and that's wrong and that's wrong and that's wrong. And I'm like, how do we actually apply some of this regenerative thinking, in a way, to our own structure the container that we're all sitting in right now, not zoom but like Rex. I'm going to make that point because I'm like, yes, this is exactly. I think this, this like lights my fire but also I'm learning, because I've even, I've had to put together some presentation, and I've discovered how good I am at describing the problem. But realizing I mean that's and then I'm over my word count before I've even gotten to the solutions and what I want my book to do so I'm trying to sort of share some of the medicine that I've been having to take recently. Yeah, I'm sorry, go on student, please. I was just going to give a resounding yes to that. And one of the things that I've noticed is that if we just take the words, the problem solution language out and put it aside. Okay. And not let ourselves do that so I what I've been substituting as resolution to and it's nice because there's resolve. And when you were saying David that part of the regenerative thing is to shift vocabulary I find that very powerful. And problem is that of course, then things turn into means again. You know, and we're just like that and languages like that but, but I think, I think, yeah, I think resolution and is a nice way to think about what needs to happen rather than solutions. I put in the chat a little earlier that rase coffee to talk about dissolving problems. But dissolving problems, solving problems, which is also a sweet sort of lipstick to just to, but he but he actually sort of did that he would reframe problems in a way that that suddenly one minute story because it's it's memorable. He was in a consultancy once where his office mate was working on the London transit system where the conductors were dragging the drivers off of buses and beating them up during the day. And they were trying to figure out labor relations what's going on here everything's broken. And so Russ asks his colleagues so how like how many buses are there. So, and then his colleagues sort of tells them it's how many how many stops are there. And his companion tells him, and it turns out that drivers are being compensated for meeting the schedule. Conductors are being compensated for collecting all the fares on the bus. And at rush hour this turned into a shit show, because they couldn't do it. So Russ's answer was at the beginning of rush hour conductors step off the buses to the stops and collect all the fares at the stops. At the end of rush hour they step back on the buses. And he sort of dissolved the problem by just thinking in a way that you wouldn't normally do like you know why would you have the conductor step off the bus well they can't make their way through the bus because the bus is back. Right and they're beating up the drivers. So anyway that's an approach and then also appreciative inquiry, which I've just haven't practiced enough haven't gotten my handles around enough, but appreciative inquiry starts with the belief that trying to solve problems creates negative discourse. Because you know your head goes where your body goes where your head is looking and if you're looking at the problem you're kind of diving in into the problem and it also gets you into he said she said, and you did it first and you know you took our land before we took your land, and all of that kind of thing, as opposed to what might we do now that's really productive. And with that, I will end a series of just just digressions that that interrupted jamae taking the floor. Interrupting me is always the right course of action. So three things. First is, with regards to the problem solution, the language that I that I like to use is dilemma response, because dilemma takes away a normative aspect of saying we have a good outcome and a bad outcome. Sometimes you have a choice between maybe ones better but they're just both difficult, and you have to choose, you have to respond to an issue. And so basically trying to get away from, you know, declaring that there's always a right course me sometimes there's not a right course. So dilemma and response. Finally, another language thing. David you've been talking about, you know, pushing back against the inclusive capitalism or whatever it's called because the, the fairer language. See, what it immediately put me in the mind of safe sex versus safer sex. You know, back in the early days of the movement that was a response, primarily to AIDS that moved, you know, be it went beyond that safe sex was a language and they realized no no no. Safe sex is an ideal that will never really get to and people when they can't get to it. They decide well I can't do this all the time so you shouldn't do it at all safer sex was saying that this is something that we can accomplish. You can, you don't have to be perfect, as long as you're better. So safer is actually a was a more useful, more useful language and safe than that in that context. And that is true in the problem solving context. You were you you reduced the problem. Right, it was, it didn't, it didn't stop AIDS, right, but it reduced the incidence of AIDS, so it made it was better. It was better but it was not a win. And that's kind of the, so I'm not sure that this this framing works very often, but, but I don't think we have it enough right, I feel like the what's the winning strategy framing. We're not out there enough, we're too dependent on the, the scarcity sustainability model, which is we'll do a little better a little better a little better, we'll never do better will never do good enough. Right, we're never going to sustainability ourselves in the climate change repair. Right, because we're tackling the wrong end of the system. Right, we're treating a symptom, and we're going to try to reduce the impacts of that system that symptom, but we didn't solve the problem. We have a losing strategy that is widely adopted. I love Bill McKibbin's comment that if you heard somebody describe their marriage as sustainable. Wouldn't think that was a very good thing. And Bill McKibbin is dead set on stopping climate change, you know, it's like, okay, but what are we going to do about biodiversity loss what are we going to do about what are the water shortage is what we can do about, right, I mean it's. And that actually becomes, and that actually helped to point to the, the, the argument for taking the, if not incremental approach a less than full win approach, because by laying out the scale of the problem that is not just climate is biodiversity. It's habitat change, it's, you know, you sort of go down the list of things that make it bigger and bigger and bigger, and we have to do all of this perfectly. Yeah, screw it, I'm just going to play video games. It, it, I think, trying to cast it as you either you either do this perfectly or you have failed. And that makes it really difficult for people to feel like that it's worth putting the energy into energy into and money into because they don't think it's going to work. But let me just, I want to get to the third. Oh, sorry, sorry, I wanted to get to the third of my, of my points, just very quickly. It's responding to, I think it's something with April was saying about articulating things as you know really good at articulating problems were problem describers, not problem solvers. And I had, you know, and I was actually just talking about you may remember the very beginning of the call and I was talking about do all the stuff around climate. It's not just people, it's not just people who are looking for the solution to understand the problems are a lot of people who just simply don't recognize the scale of the problem. When we talk amongst ourselves we, we, it's great we should talk about solutions, but we should also recognize that we're unusual this group is unusual in that in the level of the understanding of the scale and nature of the problems we face, compared to people and organizations who have other things to worry about. And so I just, I don't want to. I don't want to denigrate problem description as being a being useless. It's not actually can be very useful if you, especially if you're getting people getting organizations to recognize. That they've been they've been intently studying a blade of grass and not realizing that they're facing up, you know, a Savannah. You know, again, like the, like I said, you know, the example I gave early on is that it's, you know, this company saying climate is a marketing issue, a consumer or customer communication issue. Because that's the way they've framed these things, not seeing the immensity of the issue. So I'll turn it down. I was just kind of, you mean like, I'm sure there's value in an analyzing problems, and, and I'm not really saying that we shouldn't do that. I'm just saying we don't do the alternative very much. And in the case of the, for me, the rebel resolution, the realization of the climate change issue right which is, I strongly feel is just a symptom, and I strongly feel that we're playing whack them all with these symptoms. Right. So we're not, I think, in a winning frame place. And to me the alternative is not like, do the analysis of climate change better the, the response has been something like regenerative agriculture. Let's change the framing completely to a positive framing, where let's just farm better. And if we farm better you get the satisfaction of a better farm where you have more nutritious food you sequester water and you sequester carbon, and you're making more money and your animals are happier and, and one of the products is that you're close to, and you're, you're, you're on a serious, you're, well you're on a better path than we are today. Right. It's safer not safe. It's better not best. It's just one part of that's why I'm asking for this view of a future, right, that enables us to address these problems you're identifying, but without, without trying to do the scarcity analysis so what is this abundant possible positive some future where regenerative agriculture is an example, right, that gets us down the right path, right, what are the other things we can do and how does that look that's the imagination I'd like to have. Yeah, and I fully agree we don't want to be constantly striving for minimum sufficient solutions, which is what we, what we tend to do, you know, is this good enough. It's the iron law solutions I guess, you know, is this good, it's good enough. And so, I fully agree with what you're saying, but putting it in but I see it in the context not so not just of our conversations, and, but in terms of the conversations we've had with people in organizations who have actually were actually in positions to do something. Do they recognize the need to do something to make a radical change when they've, you know, what they've been thinking about all along is let's do the minimum sufficient because it's least harmful. Let me throw four quick things in the conversation. One is a cough also used to use the French word problematic. He said they're in the real world there isn't just a problem you can isolate and optimize the solution for there are systems of problems and the French word problematic is systems of problems we don't really have a similar word and that means that to fix things you have to tweak here tweak there, you have to have influence and make changes in lots of different places. And second, the framing of dilemmas which Bob Johansson has been on for a long time as well, makes me uncomfortable on the one this I'm totally divided on it on the one hand I like dilemmas because they give you a juicy framework to sort of address things. On the other hand, there are some cases in which, if I need to flip you from scarcity mentality to abundance mentality. And if abundance mentality will actually make a better world. That's just not a dilemma that that's like, it's going to be a better world and I need to flip a bit in your head, so that you see that if we collaborate to create abundance that's a better outcome period. And I don't think that's just a dilemma where I could go either way and dilemmas put me in like this squishy Netherlands, where I'm like, it sounds like I both both solutions and the dilemma are equally valid or possible. Well, that's what you're jumping from here to there without looking at the intervening path. Yes, the, the, the scenario that you are the abundance versus the scarcity. Yes, go for it. That's great. Recognizing that it's likely going to be an extremely costly path along the way as we transition systems in the real world of people who have to send their kids to school and, you know, put food on the table put their family to quote the inimitable George Bush. You know, and so getting from here to there is where the struggles live. So the last two things I want to say was. So cause Mager is in the OGM group, and he is a big proponent of regenerative agriculture and sort of flipping model, and he made a really simple statement which I really, really, really like industrial agriculture is one of the largest causes of degradation of the climate change and greenhouse gases and everything else. If we managed to flip most of it over to sustainable regenerative to regenerative agriculture. It would not only stop doing the crap that it's doing, but would heal the earth, increase aquifers, like it fixes six different problems. Right. So, so that that is that that lever with a lot of little farmers doing a lot of small farms at a very local level level and, and Dave I keep going back to singing frogs or jumping frog, singing frog farms that you, that you and I are Claudia visited that really that visit was really informative to me. But if we can, if we can do that over and over again that catalyzes into really big changes that are positive on every curve, it's the curve that you're not looking at, or we said it seems. Yes, we know that it's bad here, and we know that it's ideal here, but how do we get from here to there in a way that isn't going to temporarily temporarily make things worse. I that's, I think that is the, when you're breaking system broken systems, even if you're breaking it to replace it broken systems hurt people. So I don't think I might be right but I also feel like we don't have the new vision yet. So I think you're, you're one problem of a head of us. Okay, in the regenerative case, it's unclear how much. Meanwhile, meanwhile, the farmers in India are, you know, in the streets, and the, the big firm, you know, reliance what's his name. Reliance capital. Yeah, no reliance industries that the two brothers. Anyway, I met one of them once. I was on, I was on his retreat, I retreat with him, you know, and it's like a different on Bonnie on Bonnie. Yeah. And on Bonnie, yes, he has a little place on the other side of the Bay of. Out of out of out of Mumbai. And you take a little boat over this flat stuff to a nice little camp that was probably built by the Brits. Anyway, so. But, but that that they're talking about taking over agriculture and making it industrial in India. India has regenerative agriculture. Right. And we tried to give them fertilizer, which probably was. I don't know. But right now you're taking whatever that the pieces are that are capable of doing what they do. And it's. Last of my four items was that's okay, because that's what you just said added to what I was trying to head toward. I'm going to head back toward Dave and regenerative things and what does it mean in order to go. And what I like about the term regenerative is the re means that you got to redo it. Maybe that it existed before maybe that the process itself should be reflexive, but the re is really nice because it sort of informs me about the process and generation or generativity is in general for me a positive thing is that sustainability and resilience are like how do we hold the baseline against some kind of force against us for me thriving flourishing and regeneration are much more positive. And what regeneration forces me to try to do is to think of ways to watch the system and try at every turn to improve the system by tweaking the system. If I can increase soil for till if I can have cows graze on and Joel, Joel Salatin's chapter in omnivores dilemma was my eye opener on this, like, you know, every cycle of cows on this on this on the on the farm improved the grass because of the timing of the cows and the manure. Very briefly, you leave the cows on a patch of grass for three days because in four days they've chewed the grass too low it doesn't grow back fast enough. So in three days you move them off, and then you leave that patch of grass lying for three days and I'm making up the numbers here, because in four days the maggots that are in the cow pies turn into flies and you have a really bad fly that in three days all the cow pies have a lot of maggots who loves maggots chickens love maggots. So you take your rolling henhouse you drop it on that piece of grass. The chickens go crazy tear up the cow pies. They mix that the common you're into the soil which makes the soil better they then poop they're very nitrogen rich and phosphorus rich poop into the soil mix that in, and then move them off and let the soil grow back and every cycle the soil is better the grass is better everything else and then probably idealizing this whole system but but that system of watching and tweaking all that and I don't see. I don't see how everything breaks if we shift to that kind of system from industrial agriculture I'm not getting your thesis to me that if we cause any large scale systems we break them all, I do not buy that. And so I think that small changes done in a lot of places with experiments with local adaptation are going to work phenomenally at global scale phenomenally, and I just use the analogy earlier we're talking about change as a VLCC. You know as like, you know, sometimes you have to turn the large ship. I'm like no this is more like a swarm. This is this is more like a murmuration of starlings where this individual farmer is a starling and if they can turn, if a bunch of them turn then and the ones next door go like, Oh, they're turning I should turn to, we can turn a whole bunch of entities quickly towards some new target towards some new way of seeing their relationship to the earth their relationship to each other, the relationship to chemicals and industry and business, etc. And that's the anthropology of Canadians I like that collective now it's good. So, this is great it's like the parents arguing, and so I'm not going to get. I'm not going to get uncomfortable about this but I want to pick favorites bro you have to pick favorites. I'm going to pick where I'm going to go where jamae is going to I think what you may saying is when you change the status quo, there will be losers. And you can't be blind about that. And that's what I see jamae point about and in zero sum calculations that would be true. What if you're in a positive some of you change agriculture so there'll be all these industries and people and interest lined up with the old way, who all of a sudden, their, their life is gone. It's just like saving the old growth force here in Oregon meant that just drive through Oregon you just go through town after town. That's dead. Because we save the growth forest and their jobs are gone. And, and, and on building on that there are costs that will be limited one off maybe, but there will be costs associated with transitioning your physical infrastructure from one form to another. Maybe you haven't been raising chickens. You know you've been a cow only farm, and now you have there's a car, and I'm not saying that these are insurmountable. Exist. And that's, and this is something that I've already been I've gotten into with a lot of people over the years around idealized futures is that we can't just talk about the future without talking about the path. That's why I like to think of futurism as anticipatory history. Oh, I love that for it. It's, we're not just describing a point in the future, we're describing the path or the pathways that get us to these different kinds of futures. And that sometimes means, and in the example I something I said very early in this call that it's, we can talk about ideal, you know ideal successful climate futures, but getting there is going to be tough, because there are costs along the way. There are changes that end up needing to be made. There are costs that need to be paid. There are people who will consider themselves losers of economic power without but still have lots of political power, potentially even military power, and getting from here to there is going to be difficult. That doesn't mean that it is, it should not be done. It just means we should go into a clear ride. Before passing the baton to April really quickly one of my other lessons from visiting jumping singing frog farms was that the moment you've shifted to natural farming you've made enemies of the John Deere sales dude, the Monsanto sales dude, and the fertilizer sales dude. And those other wealthiest people in town, and they go to church with you on Sundays. And so, so one of my conclusions from that is one of the most important things we can figure out is, how do we help those people transition and how do we create new community for the Mavericks who are making the change, so that they don't feel alone and isolated. So all, all of those things factor in how you change and then there's a whole bunch of policy questions that just crept in my head, or just don't go to church, which, yeah, let's let's get that conversation, go ahead April. I'm just going to tie in some of what I've been working on. Not it's not as, it's not about regeneration per se but it is about how we rethink and reshape our relationship to change. Right, what we're describing here is change right and problems are often changes you don't want. Right. Solutions are changes you do want so we can have a lot of fun with language here as well but one of the main themes of what I've been writing about. It's, and I talked about like the superpower is you want to develop to be able to better navigate change. And one of them is the ability to see what's invisible. Now, that might sound a little trite on the surface but Jamay and a what you've both been saying. We need to help people. We need to help, though, help everyone see if you if we want them if we want people to, to follow a new way of being of working of living or farming of whatever. They have to see, and I think David's exactly the positive some piece. They've got to see what that looks like, because we can tell you can tell them story you can sort of walk them through the charts and the presentations and the other. And what's hard is that until they sort of sense it and feel an experience that they, they may not see but but there's a lot we can do in terms of sitting and listening and talking to people and understanding how do they see things because it's not just what you see it's also what you don't see. Right. And right now we and I don't figure literally figuratively but figuratively, we see what's visible we see right in front of us we see what we know. We don't see what we don't know we don't see something we don't see stuff we don't know about. Right, so how do we help people see this better path forward how do we help and part of it is storytelling but but that also is far from complete. So part part of it is also being collaborating and and sort of co creating co generating some of this stuff. And I think about, you know, right now agricultural industrial agriculture is so embedded where they are because they see a known system that is destroying the environment, but that they know it will benefit them individually in the short term kind of thing. They don't see a different scenario, any scenario they see disrupts that system, but they're not necessarily they don't they don't know what. How do I say this, they don't see what they're not their eyes aren't trained to see and can we help see what's and I use the term invisible just broadly, because I think you know what I'm saying. More crucial than that it might be that their culture and their community and forces not seeing those things that that they can't see them because it's a prohibition in their way of seeing from their culture community religion what have you. Go ahead, Dave and Jimmy arm wrestle. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say that yeah I love the way you're saying that, April and to me and that was what where I'd gotten kind of was as far as this hypothetical future is a paradigm shift. And kind of like definition I think you don't see paradigm shifts right I mean that's why they're paradigm shift. So, I mean I and, and in the context that I'm just bringing my problem into this venue for you guys so part of my the background question, Jimmy is, I've been working with this group the global regeneration co lab. This is the thing that David touch and spun up a year or so ago. And, and the framing of it is my current framing is it's it's like a maker space for regenerative Right. And so we're, we're raising the people and developing the culture that will enable this kind of regenerative framing and future and vision right so but in some sense I'm trying to figure out how to bridge to the future right I mean I'm trying to kind of create some infrastructure that will be part of whatever this transition looks like And it still feels to me even in this context of people who are kind of inclined, we need a better vision of what it is they're inclined towards. So that's it's that shared vision kind of thing, the seeing that I feel, if we had that, then our maker space would be better. And we would know more what culture we want to reinforce right because we would, we kind of know the principles and the predicates that we're trying to strengthen. No, go on, please. Just very briefly I was going to say, in my various conversations with people in agriculture, including big food and all of that. I don't. What's interesting is big food, they, they don't want to destroy the environment they, they realize that they're in the early stage of an exit of an existential crisis, maybe not so early, like their, their goals are remarkably aligned. But they don't see how they get from here to there. So that was for me not a wake up it was it was actually quite encouraging. A lot of people in industrial agriculture. Don't want exactly where they're heading. And yet they don't see a way that they get themselves off this path, especially individuals. You know, that are one cog in a much bigger machine. And that's like, that was a real eye opener to me to realize, oh, we collectively need to actually help one another see. And it doesn't have to be everybody but like, there's more alignment than we might think, even though the business models look wildly different. Well, that goes back to I just told the story recently so if I told it here I would just point to it and say but remember this. And I don't know if it was here and in discussions I've been on mindset shift which is also language that some people use in this in this kind of situation and you know how does it happen. So, one of the things is to look at the ones that have worked. You know, and, and so I was thinking of the Cuyahoga River. Did I talk about that here. Oh, yeah, I happen to be thinking about this at the time that the Cuyahoga River caught well they caught fire in the 50th anniversary was not a couple years ago. And I just, I don't know just tweaked me to say go back and start reading about how in the world they cleaned up the river. Because you have all these different parties right, you had the fishermen, you had the people who wanted to go swimming, you had the shippers who were burning into things in there. And I think we're burning up and it was like it's just untenable for all of the people who partook of the rivers abundance abundance and what I concluded was that they, they did they had a shared thing. I mean, what, what philosopher told me was shareable a shareable kind of thing that they were looking at and the shareable thing in that case was everybody wanted a clean river. All the different parties kind of figured out their way of handling what they needed, what part of the river needed to work for them and how to get it there. And it took 40 years for that to happen. But when you go back and look at that story it just it struck me that you have all these different to overuse the term communities of practice that have a way of looking at things and they have their own ways of doing it and they changed those. So, but it was it was by taking what was already there. And, and pointing them to that, you know, don't you want to clean river. What would it take, you know it was, it was so common sense and I thought how come we don't study those more. I think because that was a rare event where you're the goddamn river right in front of your town is on fire. Yeah, and water is not supposed to light. And it was so unnatural so dangerous and so obvious that everybody's like okay this is really screwed up we must fix it, but so many of other other problems aren't that palpable it's like climate change climate disaster. Man, this is a slow moving, you know, slow moving massive thing. Yeah but the only way that that's going to happen is a lot of those small things I mean if you. Yeah. The scale we're looking at here is the scale of small things. And we don't know how to. We don't quite know how to kick that off reliably. But if you look around at that when I was, I spent some time in David Hudson's group a couple years ago trying to figure out what was what was going on and, and I, and I thought, good, okay this is good, this is a good thing. It's not my thing, but these people know what they're doing and this could be this is definitely a good thing a good way of thinking about things. So the future is, having lived in different places in the world makes you sort of see that you don't know everything right. And there really are different ways of going about things. So it's, it's going, the future is, is, is lumpy. A little bit lumpy and, and it's, and call you, you can't label it good or bad when it's going on because you have no idea. Right. It's, it's an article of faith, which faith is a weird thing. And in contrast to belief. Absolutely. The one thing I keep thinking is the great society, Johnson, I mean essentially Johnson walked around and like, why do we accept these problems. Why are we accepting like, you know, what, a third to half of American children and we are essentially flushing them down the toilet. And those same children who's going to build our future and pay our social security. I mean, to me to say that these problems aren't like these problems are right in our front of our faces and if you live in California, you know, climate is just real. If you live in Florida or the Gulf of Mexico, you know, and it almost seems like we keep thinking that we're not sure that they think that this, this is climate. This, this is climate change. Yeah. You know, I mean, I'm not sure that connection. Yeah, I'm not sure they're all making these horrendous outcomes all over the place. Right, but they don't make it that they might be due to something else. I mean, it doesn't. We didn't sweep the leaves out from under the trees well enough. I tried to do that one Thanksgiving before Thanksgiving dinner we got the rakes out and we went on break my forest. I love this for the hell of it. I have a picture of a standing with our rakes you can't want to come to dinner you got to bring. Where'd you put the leaves isn't. Well, come in the river, set them on fire. The leaves. Well, it is an interesting thing, because we just had the chipper's cut, we've just been mauling our forest in the, in the hope of not burning ourselves down, or at least what prompted me was could we clear up the brush around this dirt road here so that when I drive out. The trees are not burning trees are not going to fall on my car, because the fire trucks don't want to come in, if you know. So, we went through this. Got grants. Now I'm now I'm on the board for the South skyline Association of all things and it's like, Oh my God, why did I do this. But we. Anyway, the we cleared all the brush and we trimmed and trimmed and trimmed and trimmed. And then we had truck loads, truck loads of leaves. And stuff. Which is good material right I mean you can sell that off can't you. Don't people like wood chips for for multiple chips from you know, sudden no death trees they don't like. I mean even though they're not supposed to. Yes, you can sell it and you can get rid of it I mean what I do is to make a big pile. And my Russian tenants wanted to build gardens. And they shut my mouth. I just have to, because I've been through this I know what it. You know, I said, so, there's all that stuff over there we can turn that into soil we can. Yeah. It's like I'm living in several centuries it wants here. That's cool. So we've gone we've gone over our 90 minutes time flies when you're having fun, I think they say. I'm really happy that we solved all the road problems. David thanks for pushing us today. Yeah, yeah. This is my thoughts for the week for the week you guys have been hugely helpful thank you. And Dave, I want to, I want to talk with you about open global mind, working on sort of the food and farming system and like how we might like double up efforts up there so. Oh that'd be fun. Yeah, yeah, let me ping you and we can have a conversation about that. Yeah, you have to tell me why I was wrong about India. What? Why you were wrong about India. I don't. Well I was just saying, it's ironic that we should be talking about regenerative agriculture and how and how it's going to help ways in which it moves forward and the fact that India is about to dismantle village India is what they're going to do. It doesn't make it clearly doesn't make enough money for someone. It doesn't help the world is who it doesn't make enough money for not yet make enough money for the farmers either except the eek, the eek out of life, the eek and eat from that. You know, and I was in India in the village India in the middle of Mahadev Pradesh in 1965. And it was a beautiful life. Yes, people died of tetanus but. Before the British Raj, before the British show up and basically take over India, India is self sufficient in food and textiles. Yeah, self sufficient like doing just fine thank you very much. And then the British illegalized the loom like I didn't realize the depths of it. I didn't realize why, why Gandhi was all like spinning his own yarn and the loom isn't important. The British said hand looms in villages were illegal turned India into a plantation for cotton to send to Manchester and other towns in England to be made into clock to be shipped back to India. Yes. Like, like, like the scale of this is stunning. And so the British basically broke all these systems in India and subjugated the entire continent and screwed things up for really long time. So it's salt. And oh the salt. Yeah, the salt march and salt exactly I like like, they just ate the country it's really weird. And they ate the country by turning one ethnicity against the others they they sort of made buddies with the six who were good warriors and the six became the guards and then you sort of divide and conquer and use the minimum number of Brits who were usually the third sons of aristocracy, because the first son is going to inherit the second son's the hot spare the third son's got to go find fortune somewhere in the world. So the third sons of aristocracy were out there basically running this shit. And the British chartered corporations basically were private armies that were fully empowered to go launch wars and do whatever the hell they wanted to, for their own behalf. As long as it came back to the crown is like, like imperialism and the British empire like the whole thing just sucked for so many people. Right. So so did our own country if you recall. Yes, there is that. And somebody was saying how could we fall for all of this fantasy stuff and there was an aspen talk that I was watching this morning by to heard I can't remember. It was about it was about how why were why are Americans so prone to fantasy. And, and the hypothesis that was being put forward was that because the British. That's the people who came with the people who responded to these wild stories and advertising fantasies. That's interesting. If you can find the talking you've pushed it on the Rex list. Yeah, that'd be great. Somebody needs to talk about kittens and puppies or unicorns briefly so that we can end on an up note. Anybody, we can show little videos of pet ferrets. That's always cute. There's always word panda. There's a couple of threads that are like, you know, only good news kind of kind of. Good news is. But it's just isn't like disaster, you know, have the, the taste. You look at the subreddit happy cow gifts, gifts. But it's a whole bunch of animated gifts of happy cows frolicking and getting peps and talking. Awesome. So how. I gotta go. I gotta go to. Okay. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.