 So this is the OGM weekly call for Thursday. Oh, thanks Pete. Thursday, May 19th, 2022. And I was just showing some Ereje drawings. Ereje is the Belgian artist who drew Tan Tan. Here's one of them with a little less shine on it. And he comes from the era when King Leopold was still running Belgium and there's a book called King Leopold's Ghost that tells a story of Belgium. And it turns out that King Leopold was a freak show like a really bad freak show. And he always wanted a colonies. Like the Germans have colonies, the French have colonies. Why can't Portugal, Belgium have colonies? So for 20 years, he was kind of shopping for a colony. He almost bought or made an offer on Uganda. He was looking at a lake, you know, different things here and there. And then he realizes, then he realizes that nobody really knows Africa more than five miles from the shore. Like they know the Nile in Egypt because Egypt, South Africa has been taken over and it's like a little nascent republic, but the rest of Africa is basically a big mystery to everybody. So he hires Stanley of Stanley and Livingston and sends him up the Congo river and says, here, you're my agent now, go do my stuff. And Stanley then goes up in signs deals with local kings, not only for resources, but for the free labor to pull out rubber because rubber is the thing they start to realize is really important. So he basically conquers this whole thing, sets up an elaborate scheme to convince the world that this is a project to reduce the Arab slave trade. And so Arabs were busy up and down the East coast of Africa, I think mostly, selling slaves and basically kidnapping people. And so he then kingly uphold the second of Belgium has a big conference, a big fancy conference where he invites dignitaries in and they talk about slavery and all that. Meanwhile, he's enslaving the Congo and the more you farm rubber, the deeper into the forests, you have to go to get rubber because the trees tap out and the quotas keep going up and nobody's getting paid for this. So at some point he starts cutting people's hands off and they don't meet quota. And there's many a famous picture of people inside Congo missing hands because they missed their rubber quota. The whole story is horrible. And the rubber pulled from the Congo is a large reason, a large part of the automobile craze that was starting then because who needed a lot of rubber, cars did. And there were no, there still are no good substitutes for the rubber in the tires of our cars. You know that Ford lost their, the biggest investment Ford ever made was in the rubber plantation in Brazil and it went south and they lost like a billion dollars. That's just when a billion dollars actually met something. Ford Langea. And. Exactly. There's rubber is subject to same, I don't know if it's in the same family as the Irish pit of famine, but they are subject, rubber is subject to parasites and viruses. And there's no, there are rubber plantations in Asia and there's, you can be in Brazil one day, you know, walk around a plantation, fly to Asia the next day and nobody checks your shoes to see if you're tracking anything. So, and without rubber, there is no industrialization. There's no decent fake rubber. So we're very precarious here. Rubbers rubber is one of those very, very strange things. So I've got King Leopold's ghost under my get mad cannon. If you want to get really pissed off, I'll read you. So the underground history of American education, the omnivorous dilemma, life incorporated, copyrighting culture and indigenous people's history of the United States, the people's history of the United States by Howard Zinn, you know, so you wander around here and it's like, so I don't mean to put us in a bad mood for the beginning of our OGM call. This is where you go, the jury, it'll bounce back. Oh, you think? Okay, good. You think we can recover? Nice to see you, Neil. And so how is everybody? And what would we like to talk about? Just letting you know, I haven't got long today. I was ready an hour early. I've got the timing wrong. And dinner's shortly going to be served. So I'll hang around and see what you guys want to talk about. And I'll just say hi. I just want to drop in and say, love yous all. Just haven't been around much. Thank you. Good to see you, Neil. Yeah. Topics that are in people's hearts. I would lie, if Doug is up for it, he sent out a proposal, a plan, you know, a draconian plan a week or so ago to the OGM list. I'd love to see if people want to chew on that for a little bit. Sounds good. Doug, you want to kind of reframe that for us? I have been so busy since then that I've forgotten what the content of that is. But I've got new ones. I mean, certainly, well, Ken, can you remember a part of it? It'll bring it up. I have to have to go look at my email. I've I've I've read so many things since then that it's kind of floating in my brain. So I can say sort of what's on my mind at the moment, which is given that the temperature is going to keep going up. At some point, people are going to respond. For example, I'm most concerned about people leaving their jobs and poking holes in the infrastructure. So is that a real issue or am I kind of in some kind of negative romantic fantasy about that? Why are you worried about people leaving their jobs? Because if they happen to be, for example, a truck driver bringing food to the Safeway and the food doesn't get there or if they happen to be maintenance people on the grid and they don't show up or an operator in a nuclear power plant and don't show up. So you read about essential jobs to maintain basically continuity of essential services. Yes, essential workers leaving because because we're in the middle of a great resignation. And if you're hoping people don't leave their jobs, this is the wrong moment to have that wish because a whole lot of people had a pandemic to sit down and go. Damn, I don't really like this job or or this job is nasty. And I'm not getting paid enough or any number of kinds of things. And it's not elegant, but there's kind of a reshuffling of who works where and who wants to do what. So that's that's just in the air right now. Right. So let me add to it another dimension. Yeah, I was part of a conference of economists. Yesterday and there was to be a proposal of a major effort on dealing with climate change. And I was kind of interested to see what's it going to be? Well, it turned out the proposal was that if we shift from a 40 hour to a 30 hour week, people will be working less and so it will produce less CO2. There was no awareness of, for example, the anthropology of poor people who would take the opportunity if they had 30 hour a week jobs to work two jobs. And things like that. I mean, it's a total lack of imagination as to the consequences outside of a differential equation which compares the flow of one thing with another. I was pretty shocked by it, even though I've been around that environment for a long, long time. There's there's there's also a general force and I have no numbers on this. I'd love to see the numbers to drive people below 30 hours a week anyway, because above 30 hours a week, corporations have to give them benefits. So why don't we make you just part time? So you have no so you are randomly called in on shifts. There's no predictability. But you're not making enough to make a living and you're not making enough to qualify for benefit. That that's been happening too. And my guess is that this little group on the screen, none of us could work 30 hours a week. We just could not cut our activity back to that level. But that's because we don't drive a truck a long distance or whatever else. We're busy thinking about what we're doing and making calls and doing whatever. We're we're in a strange strange netherworld where it's hard to turn off, Gil. You know, and none of us doing things that are mission critical to the economy and the world's functioning on a day to day basis. Right. So that, you know, why 30 hour a week? Why not go all the way to Universal Basic Income? Take people off the job standard. Now, then people don't then people don't have to work two or three jobs. Right. So I don't think UBI means no work week, which is an interesting implication. Neil, just picking up on Doug's first point. People are going to leave. There's a heat wave in in Spain at the moment, and that's heading our direction through into Europe. India was at 60 degrees ground temperature recently. People cannot work in that temperature full stop. So any economy that's based on labor isn't going to work full stop. The question then becomes who else has chosen to leave because of climate grief, because of over because of recognition that the job is meaningless. So this is a re-evaluation of our values and whether I want to die today digging a hole for a rich person to repair this road or whatever. So there will be infrastructure collapse and there will be other people that are choosing for ideological reasons, whether or not they want to go to work or not, because my best time spent now is with my family or creating a garden or doing something that might be more meaningful, given this is happening. And so at that level, that's one one aspect. The second aspect that Doug referred to was he was shocked that they didn't go deep enough because of the questions and the assumptions. And again, nobody is having these courageous conversations about what collapse actually means. The food security process here in this place is based around in Lervon in Belgium has had a broad stakeholder representation but has become more of a talkfest about how to provide food justice, which is important, but not how are we a region that's about to go into a drought, going to survive with a population with increasing climate uncertainty and no water in the soil. And so there is no recognition of survival. It's how do we redistribute excess? And that's still the assumption of the extractive economy, business as usual, Horizon One, which is we'll just bounce back, we'll bring back tourism, we'll bring back whatever. Look at Sri Lanka right now. Look at Ukraine. Look at the impact on food security in Africa and throughout the prices that are rising. These are impacts that are happening right now. And what Doug's touching on is the tip of that iceberg, which is that the people that think they're doing it have no systemic clue, no collapse awareness or zero collapse acceptance and are not actually doing anything meaningful for design for a future that we might actually have some chance of survival. And in the meantime, people are concerned about the near term effects of inflation, for example, and how to mitigate inflation through whatever means possible. Despite the fact that there's a lot of forces loose in the world that are going to head toward probably more inflation, as you just described. But yeah, and just there's a perverse cycle where more inflation probably means Democrats won't be reelected in the U.S., which means the spiral is going to accelerate. I'm reading a lot of things into that logic, but it's kind of there. So to go back to Doug's proposal, because I think it's I'm already feeling like, oh, God, we're into the problems now, you know? And I really like Doug's proposal, because it actually says here's something we can do. And I posted it up in the chat here. Let me go back here. I was just going to ask you to do that. Yeah, we work to discover people inside of several major corporations at middle management level, hence below the rider. That already know that they already know that the climate requires serious responses and they're getting it. We would get to them. Hold on, this is too small for me to see. We get them to network with friends and colleagues and several other corporations. I think five would be sufficient and we think of three people in each corporation giving a total of 15 that think the same way. They would work together to clarify their position, which would have to do with the need for draconian measures of scale. And the draconian problems of scale when they feel confident, they go to the CEOs and the boards of their corporations and ask if they could join the group and hold press conferences. So this is it feels like it's a good decent adjacent start. It's not it doesn't require us to do anything huge. We can we can start where we are with with people that we know. What do people think about Doug's proposal? There is what I'm curious about. It goes back to Mary Catherine Basin's statement that a small group can change the world. And the thing is how to find a small group that has the leverage. And in my consulting, I often came across groups of middle managers who understood the problem of their organization but weren't doing anything about it. And it never occurred to them to manage upwards in the organization. So I did a number of experiments of getting small middle level managers to, in fact, do that and it's exhilarating for them because it's empowering. And I think that it has the kind of leverage that's possible. This week, I thought of another model like this, which is if we took. Well, it comes from an experience in an experience in a small town where I was living for a while, where the town was going broke and a group of us were meeting anyway for coffee once a week. We said, what can we do? We said, let's go to the city council and offer to help. So we did that. We went, got on the agenda, went to a meeting and said, we came here to help. And the mayor said, nobody ever comes here to help. They just come here to make demands. And it turned out then they passed over to this informal group things like doing interviews for new employees and things that took them time that we could do that was very helpful. So I think if we took this group here and went to some leverage point and said, we're here to help. We know you are in terrible trouble and you can't get out of the rut that you're in. So let's try and do something. Be fun to do. I like the disaggregation of what needs to be done a lot in the sense of, hey, we need to, you know, we need to vet candidates and figure stuff out. Could you do some of that? And there's probably millions of things like that that can be distributed or done. You're making me also realize that we've handed off to large institutions work that in many cases, well, that used to be done by communities, by people in different ways, or work that just didn't exist. And there's a problem with really large institutions. And there's a problem with changing really large institutions. And a piece of what your initiative sounds like it wants to do is create a social network of trust with initiatives in order to catalyze change across large institutions. So what is a small crew we can help put in motion at a bunch of institutions that will then catalyze change throughout? And I think we would then need to figure out what are the levers we can offer each of them to learn how to create change across their institutions. Go ahead, Neil. So I was going to... Sorry to go on, Doc. To give another summary of what can pick up from what I had proposed. The idea is simple. If you have a small group of middle-level managers that can work together in several organizations, and they work together across organizations and go to the CEOs of their organizations, say, we need to talk to you, I think they would get a hearing. Would we initiate this around a particular focus, like climate or societal collapse, or leave it for the groups to figure out where their focus is? Well, I assume that climate change is the key issue. There are a lot of secondary ones that are really important, like soil fishing. Well, but I think that the issue would be climate change. It's the inexorable treadmill run we've got to get off of, if we possibly can. Neil, then me. There's a lot of resistance from business as usual to anything that starts with collapse or climate change. That's what I was about to say. However, we have some inroads, and in fact, some of the work that we're trying to do here in Belgium is enlisting people that we know like the way we think and building trust through them in their organization so that we can take it deeper. But we're probably going to need some sort of Trojan horse strategy. Initially, we have presented to them on the Three Horizons model to say that all three horizons are present simultaneously in the present. The most prevalent one is Horizon 1, business as usual. We need that, and you have to respect that because it keeps the lights on. And we've got Horizon 3, which is pockets of the future already present in the present. They're struggling, have no resources, can't be supported because they're too far out there. And then Horizon 2 is the horizon which is bridging between those two. Horizon 2 negative looks back to Horizon 1 and says, how do we become the next Horizon 1? Horizon 2 positive looks forward to Horizon 3 saying, how can we create transformative change? And when you come in with that sort of presentation, it gives them a broader framework for how to handle clients or differences across perspectives of how we move forward. We then hit them with a challenge, which is, by the way, the Three Horizons model isn't going to work unless you collapse aware because nothing we do now is of any value unless it's actually preparing for collapse. And that's a bombshell. But then some of them took that as a personal, that's just their view. So it hasn't actually sunk yet. But as it starts to sink, and I think this is part of the point, will people keep showing up for work? No, they will not show up for work if they've got a better option or if the option of going to work is no longer viable. And so we have to carefully frame how we build this because the identity, I see the government authority there, the identity of the individuals, the identity of the CEOs, the identity of the institutions is tied up in doing business as usual and in thinking they're doing it and being paid to continue to do that. So we have to find ways of actually enabling those that have the inside running and understanding of how their organizations work, middle managers and so on, who have sufficient trust with their boards and their organizations to be able to bring a proposal to the table. And I believe it has to come from outside the institution that, you know, as Doug is suggesting, there's a critical mass of people that are starting to form to do this thing, which is more innovative than what we're doing. And we have an opportunity to be at the table. If we don't, we're going to miss out. So you're playing literally on the psychology of fear of missing out at the same time as providing them with a towards model. And we're playing on that basis, trying to bring out collapse awareness, collapse acceptance methodology, which once accepted will redirect all resources. That's the point here. It's not about changing the institution. It's actually about redirecting all resources because they're going the wrong direction faster. I'll finish on that. Thanks. And well done, Doug. Thanks, Ian. Yeah. I was just having a talk with the perspective. They actually organized a process by which they determined how to deal with the nature issue right now in Holland on a national level and they set out plans. And this organization is focused on dealing with complexity. And there's this organizations like Rio's partners and others that really deal with multi-stakeholder processes. And these are the kind of people that. Know how to kind of make this happen. And. One of the elements I think in being able to face all of this is the psychology of the NIO. The NIO costs way less effort than having to face all of this. And it's not. I was just actually writing a post. It's a bit weird to say it, but I think it makes sense. So it serves. If I posted. Post on denial in a tantra world right now in a tantra world, a lot of abuses coming up. And then people who abuse who are the perpetrators, often deny what they're doing and not a lot. A huge circle around them creates this kind of. Justification and trying to see, yeah, they weren't really hurting someone. And there's a lot of stories there. But on a climate level, it's so much more. There's like, there's like a condensed block. Of denial. Dynamics somehow. And I can hear through one of the things that fear of missing out. That seems to be like a way of doing that. But I think we need a bit more. Clarity on the denial and also more processes of dealing with it. Like. She's actually facing that she's really looking at how do we look. At collapse. And how do you embrace that? What if I, whatever I do, it will never be enough. It's one of the questions she asks. And all of this psychology and how to deal with it. We need to figure out how that works. And then we need to figure out how that works. And then we need to figure out how that works. And then we need to figure out how that works. And then we need to figure out how that works. In our facilitation and in meeting groups. Also within ourselves, because I think we all carry it out. It's me personally. I have a lot of trouble with dealing with the existential level of this. A threat that everything is gone. Maybe going to disappear. So then. What can we do as groups also to support each other. To be with those feelings and to process them better and to, you know, to be able to do that. And then we need to figure out how to deal with it. And so I feel so much to this pair looking at this new news article about. And we do that kind of, but I think we need to do more of it to be able to be. Facilitators and really be aware of those processes. I really like what you just said. I will try to mirror two parts of it. That I think I heard. One is, Hey, there's a bunch of people like. Rios and others who figured out a bunch of really clever things here. Why don't we tap knock on their door and see how we can use their wisdom. And just broadly. Let's figure out who's, who's solving this well. And go, go tap their, what they've learned so that we don't. Work against ourselves that we don't do the wrong, you know, et cetera. And then the second thing is I, and I may be projecting onto what you said. It's really important that people coming in to want to help have a menu of ways to help because. The notion of climate change is often like just too big and too scary. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. It's a hyper object. So we can do a political turn off or whatever. How can we create lots of different avenues to come in to help make the change happen. Yes now. Yes. Yes. And to. To fully and deeply understand the psychology that goes on. All the different levels of that psychology. Not on a rational level, but really on a visual level as well. So that we can become more aware of how things really change. And we can look a lot at process and at Bellagogy and how. When does change actually happens if you go down into a group, a meeting with a CEO or government leader. You need to create an agreement. Okay. Now we're going into a process and I will be able to call you 10 times. And this is this agreement might be on paper or. You have some kind of clarity. This will happen. This will happen. This will happen. The kind of process that needs to happen. Before the movement and then they don't fall back into business as usual. A big corporation like Unilever. They've been talking about a local farming for a huge amount of time already. How come it doesn't work. I think because there is. There's this layers of coming back again. And not all the layers are addressed or. That needs to be more clear. Thanks, Eric. Interesting stuff. Pete than Hank. Thanks. And I really like what you said, Eric. I also really like what Ken said. At least twice. Instead of thinking, let's just start doing something. Let's, let's talk about a plan for doing something. And. I guess. I guess I wanted to really kind of my personal experience over the past few months. Or the past year, probably past year or two, maybe. Where even though I love learning about things. And I, and I especially love learning about systems. And all the systems that are going well and going wrong. And the way that they're interleaved or hyper systems and all that stuff is like super amazingly interesting for me. You know, I could kind of hit pause on everything falling apart. I would, I would just have a ball living my life, just learning about stuff and then worrying about, you know, the systems that we're failing and, and worrying and trying to teach people about what they should do about the systems that we're failing or what systems they are in that are being successful, et cetera, et cetera. Right. I could, I could really easily go down a spiral of naval and I would actually pretty much enjoy that. And in our culture, we have inherited a couple of really interesting things that make it difficult for us to act. One of them is learned helplessness. We've been taught by our culture, not to think and not to do and especially not to cooperate with each other. I believe that's largely a process of our educational system, our industrial age educational system, which was preparing us to be cogs in factories and sit there sewing shirts or, or, you know, pounding on a small part of a car or something for, you know, 60 hours a week. And you're supposed to do one small thing and do it well and not think about anything else. Right. And you don't, especially you don't want people to be working together because that means that the people in power end up, you know, with this revolt instead of a bunch of people just sewing shirts or whatever. So we've got this learned helplessness. That's one thing. The way our productivity and our consumption cycle goes, it's really important. It has become really important or it's fun or something. I actually haven't really thought about this very much, I guess, but it's really, we spent a lot of time just being entertained and making sure that we're entertained either because you're watching Fox news and you're scared of death all the time or because you're watching escapist fantasies all the time and you're happy or whatever. Right. We spent a lot of our time in a mindset of not going, hmm, today I feel like doing something. That's not a thing that happens as much as it could or should right. We fall into I want to be scared. I want to be, I want to be anesthetized. I want to be happy, whatever. And I'm just going to go to my happy place in front of the TV and just sit here and be happy. Right. Um, so, you know, there's so much information, so much exciting stuff to do. There's this learned helplessness. There's the entertain entertainment economy and psychology that we've inherited from our culture for, you know, interesting reasons, but not important for this discussion. The really cool thing is when you sit down and you go, you know, there's a gift I have. Um, and it turns out I have a, a meta gift which took me a while to kind of, kind of figure out. Um, I want to help, uh, soil health. I want to help social justice. I want to help climate change, uh, mitigating climate change, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, even something really interesting that Eric just mentioned, I would love to help on understanding the deep psychology of where we are and what we're doing. Right. Um, that's not my gift. Um, and even though it would be exciting and wonderful and fun for me to do that, uh, it's not my gift. My gift is helping people use their gifts. So, um, and this is not everybody's gift. This just happens to be mine and it took me a long time to figure it out. Um, but, uh, when I am super happy and concentrating and feel good about myself, this, you know, the, the proprio proprioception I get that I'm happy is when I'm, I'm finding somebody who's got a problem and a great idea or a crazy idea or whatever an idea that they're super passionate about, I can help them find out more about that idea, help find other people to help them and, and so on and so forth. So I think it's not a rationalization for me to say that I'm helping with climate change and soil health and social justice and, and equity and economy and all that kind of stuff by teaching people how that, how they can pick their goal and do more of it. Right. Um, so that's my mission and, um, and I've learned a couple other things that were hard lessons. Um, and thank you pandemic for, um, being a nasty taskmaster. Um, but, uh, one of them is, is self care. Um, uh, it, it became really obvious that you had to be really careful managing the psychology of being a shut in, um, two years ago, and we've kind of given up on that. And then it's all another story there. But, um, making sure that, uh, you take time for yourself, making sure that along with doing something productive and, and forward motion on your gift. You also need to like take time to reflect and digest and be with your family and work with other people. And, uh, for me, it's walking on the beach with my wife and my dog. Um, you need to make sure that you're taking care of yourself so that you can do the work that's, you know, rolling up towards the global, you know, goal of making a better world for everybody. Um, uh, and, and part of that self care is really noticing when you get into that loop of, of reflecting on how wrong things are. And, and you know, so I look at our pundits, uh, each, each and every one of you, right? Doug or Stacy or Ken or Neil or John or Eric. And it's like, oh my God, I wish I could help them with their, I wish I could be doing the thing that they do. You know, Eric was so articulate about, uh, the psychology of, of facing problems and the deep psychology around that. And then the psychology is like, I would love to be working on that because learning stuff is where, you know, I, one of my joys, but I also have to kind of pull back because it's like, I could be working on Eric's stuff. I could be working on Stacy's stuff. I could be working on Neil's stuff. Like on the content of it rather than helping them do it at a meta level. Um, I, you know, and you get into this, this parallel paralysis of choice. You know, there's so many things that I could be helping on. Um, so that the answer, I guess kind of the, the summary is find your gift and work the hell out of it for, you know, 60% of your time and then make sure that the other 40% of time you're taking care of yourself and your situation in your family and in your community so that you can be working hard the other 60% of the time. Thanks. Neil, you have to boogie soon. So I will go to you first and Hank and Doug. Yeah, thanks. First, I just want to thank Pete for that. Pete, you've reached out to offer me assistance, but I wasn't ready to receive it at that time. So thank you for that. I just wanted to second what you said, finding you're in a calling in global context. And this is the challenge and putting a little plug in for the work we're trying to do with courageous conversations is an inner and an outer journey, which is coming back to, I think what Eric was saying before, the inner development, but also the recognition of where people are at and, and holding safe enough space for them wherever they're at in their journey, not making them be at a particular point at a particular time and not making it a safe space where you can ignore the realities which are facing us in the face. And so how do we hold that safe? My partner, Ann, is a psychologist. So we've got the psychological background. We have the understanding of the developmental processes. We have the facilitator David in Australia with the facilitation. How do we hold a safe enough space to have real conversations about real issues and enable that to hit the ground and the connection back to the event I mentioned recently when we dug into what were their views of the future. Most of them sitting in this organization didn't want to be doing the work they were doing. They want to be creating food forests. But when they put the idea of food forest consortium up the line to their manager, the manager said, no, we don't do that. And they said, well, we've got all these latent skills that nobody's actually explored yet. And I've done this course and I've done this course, but they're not ready for it. So how do we actually show them there is a market for what their heart desires that actually aligns with global intent, which is getting a little bit close to icky guy, right, and to use the gifts of individuals, collectives, corporations, organizations to redirect their energies and their attention to things that might actually make a fucking difference rather than doing the wrong things right and being paid very well for it. And that's where they're at right now. But unfortunately, and this is the other psychological problem, the threat is to those who stick their hands up internally, because if they move the wrong time and they just look that little bit crazier than the others and they don't get the position back on the board. So therefore they have no influence any further. And that's what's some of the dynamics that are going on there as well. So this is a very, very delicate dance with the system based on the best objective information you can bring, the best reflective processes you can bring, the best interpretive meaning making sense making mechanisms that you can bring, and then assisting them to get to a decisional outcome on. So now what am I going to do with this one precious, wild life in the words of Mary Oliver, wild and precious life. So thank you so much for hearing me for my brief drop in once every six months to say, oh, I'm still here with the rage and the love. And I've got to go shortly, but I'll hang around until I get the signal and I'll keep my mouth shut from now on. Thanks. Thanks Neil, very much. Hank. Get ready to talk. Okay. I think this is a terrific conversation. I'd like to thank lots of different people. So I'll start by thanking Ken for bringing it up again because last time I was here was two weeks ago. And we talked about it for about 20 minutes and then dropped it. And I think Eric and, and, and Neil and Pete just said terrific things. Really good. So let me, let me try to be a little bit of an advocate of the devil throwing sour cream on, on the bleanies and like that. So there are different ways to change organizations. There's bottom up, middle out, top down. So middle out, that's what Rio's partners and I know those people. And I know other groups like that. That's what they're doing and they're doing it a step at a time in this, in, in what we used to call the third world countries, I guess that's quickly incorrect these days. They do, they're doing it not in the powerful countries. They're making a big difference in the lives of thousands and 10,000s of people. There's also bottom up. And I used to really believe in both bottom up and top down and middle out. But there's, there's a very interesting Dutch book by, by a Dutch left wing editor of Dutch left wing newspaper. And it's called the better environment doesn't begin by you. And in fact, the argument in the book is that even if you got 30 or 50 or 100 million people in the world using lead lamps and bicycles, and eating vegetarian food, things have gone so far, it really doesn't make that much of a difference. So there's really only as far as I can see it, one approach that can make a big difference fast. And when I say fast, we're in this UN decade of doing and we spent a couple of years already not doing anything but talking. So if you really want to do something in the next eight years, what are we going to do? Yes, I totally agree. There's a lot of denial in the world. There's a crisis of imagination as Amitav Ghosh has been calling it. The problems are too big. They're too scary. There's learned helplessness. We are, we are hypnotized to look for happiness and entertainment. People are who've ever looked up or scared to look up again. People are being paid to do business as usual. There's just plain fear every place. And to paraphrase one of those, one of those management jokes, I'm not sure exactly where it came from, but I think you'll all recognize it. The ten most frightening words in the English language are we're from the government and we're here to help. So we're from OGM and we're here to help. We're from Rios partners and we're here to help. My God, Antonio Guterres is on the television twice a week from the chair of the United Nations and he says I'm here to help. But nobody wants to admit they need help. I mean that's, it's tough, tough, tough to say that you're in a problem and you can't figure it out when you need help. Okay. That's my advocate of the devil story. And let me take you again to something tough down which I brought up two weeks ago when we talked about this before. And there's nothing wrong with Doug's middle out plan. But I'd like you to consider again the top down. Two hundred people in the world in interlocking director ships, heads of major religions, politicians, opinion leaders, we could probably all name them in the next 25 minutes if we wanted to write the names of two hundred people who make all the big decisions that move the world. And we know who they are. And if we're going to look at the deep psychology, we should look at the deep psychology of those people because if those people change their tune and start doing things differently, lots and lots of the millions and millions of others will follow. And let's just say of those two hundred people, 50 of them are really evil by evil bastards and are doing it because they don't give a damn about the rest of the world. And the other hundred and fifty, we give them the benefit and the doubt and we say they are scared, they're frightened, they're being paid to do something else, they're mortgaged there. And we get a number of them and they all know each other and we get a number of them to change their tune, to get a new narrative. And the new narrative, although I'm not really sure if that cuts the knot at the moment, but my best guess at the moment is the new narrative is you, 150 or you, 200 people will go down in history as the 200 people who saved the world. And if you don't save the world, there won't be any history. But if you do save the world, if you do change the way we're using fossil fuels, energy, extractive economies, you can get a statue from your children or grandchildren. But there won't be any statues from any children or grandchildren if you keep on doing the things that you're doing. A bit of a somber message perhaps, but put it back to you. Thanks, Hank. That was a whole basket full of ideas and I have a whole series of reactions to what you said. I know. One of them is, you just described kind of Klaus Schwab's motivation for WEF, for Davos. He wanted to bring the most powerful 200 people into rooms to go sort out the world's problems and it doesn't appear to actually work. Although I don't want to say that the idea that occurs to me is what if we had a very public hall of fame and hall of shame? And what if we said the people in the hall of shame, the leaders of the companies that are fucking up the world, you have an opportunity to climb across into the hall of fame. And make these things quite visible. And give out prize like the Ig Nobel prize or whatever else. There's a whole bunch of negative prizes. There's one who used to give out the Golden Fleece Award for the contractor who would charge the most for some stupid part for the U.S. government. There's a way to draw attention to negative behavior. But without giving people an option to adopt positive behavior, I don't see how that actually works out. The people holding up their hands just changed dramatically. Let's go Doug Stacey Eric. Doug Stacey Eric. The first is from my experience, people at the top are not picked because they are leaders. They are picked because they are maintainers. They are picked because they are the least likely to shake up the system of all the people that are available. That's a totally different view. I don't think those people can be mobilized to do anything because they don't have any imagination. They were pushed down into the organization. And that's going to be my second point. I believe that the awareness of the issue is huge. In my community where I get to talk to carpenters, farmers, vineyard owners and managers, they all have a pretty solid picture of what's going on with climate. Where they're stuck is not in denial, but in inability to see that there's anything worth doing. And that's because the things that are worth doing are so severe, nobody wants to go there yet. My second point is going to be that society is held together by the glue of relationships. As we take on managing our little projects to help things out, we are creating more glue. It actually makes it harder to change the society the more glue there is. I don't know what to do about that. But certainly if you talk to somebody for example who just got a grant for a few million dollars to do a scientific work for the next three years, they don't want to talk about climate change until the three years go by. They want to maintain their contracts and relationships as long as they possibly can. Even though they are critically aware of the difficulties of the problems. So those are my thoughts. Thanks Doug. Your comment about the glue of relationships may be causing less flexibility for change is puzzling to me. Maybe we mean different things by relationships or whatever else that keeps them in place. But also the glue, the ligature, the commitments of relationships, the bonds are what cause rapid change in moments where things have to happen. I mean it's really interesting. Without those bonds, really deep, important change doesn't happen because you don't think you're going to be held or kept or anything after the big change. So it's really complicated. And let's go Stacy, but Jordan, you were in the queue and you dropped out. Did you want to jump in or? Whenever the right time is, brother. Let's go Stacy, then you then Eric, which I think sort of reconstitutes where you might have been. So go ahead, Stacy. So I'm a little bit comforted to hear, not just in this call, but other calls, a more willingness to be in a state of discomfort or in uncomfortable situations. What brings the most of that though, is when we look at ourselves. And I'm still skeptical of how willing people are. But since this started with Doug's plan, I want to bring up that when he first suggested it, I spoke on the email, the OGM mailing list. I spoke in the Lyonsburg town square. And the ask was really, really simple. Just come up with a list of names. We use the stone soup analogy, just throwing a name. You don't have to be all in with Doug's plan, but help out a little by throwing in a name. Nobody seemed to be willing to do that. And I'm not just talking about in this case, some of you know, Peter Jones from ecology of systems, thinkers. He continued on with Michael Giusefowitz's work, working with people in Africa on print internet. Four days ago, he put out a play, because one of the people that Michael had been mentoring needed a cell phone. Four days ago, they needed to find somebody from the UK. That could donate a cell phone. And in the thousands of people that we must be friends with. I don't think he's gotten that cell phone yet. So I just want to talk about the little things we could do. And the fact that we're not. And with that I'm complete, but this is one of the difficult conversations. That I think are important to have. Thanks, Stacy. And there is Pete talked earlier about just talking and how exciting talking is and talking is so cool. And we could just keep talking. And the doing is actually more better and more interesting. So how do we get into some more doing Jordan, then Eric and Pete. That's a great segue. Yeah, I was just as Doug was saying, you know, small group of people could change the world. And we're looking for 15 middle managers. We're looking around the 15 boxes on this call. And then thinking about the extended circles of networks. And we have at least, you know, a couple hundred people in our. Close network of networks. And so I was, I was wondering what makes us think that. Like we should be working to help other people do something. And I was, I was wondering what makes us think that those 15 people are any more influential or capable than the 15 people here. And what would it look like to try to come up with an internal path of action that we could act on. That would kind of eliminate some of those external path deficiencies. And so. Yeah, that's kind of. What was pinging me. So what would it look like if we acted as if we were those 200 people who had responsibility? What if we acted as if we were those 200 people that we're going to be looked back at as those who decided whether to act or not. And what kind of future and legacy we left. Thanks, Jordan. I think we'll have a couple. I go real quick on a comment on that. Yeah, go ahead and jump in. I don't have a lot of information on this. Maybe someone else knows better than I do, but my understanding is that. Fossil have all and the velvet revolution, they saw how broken the Soviet system was and they decided to just act as if they were already in a new system. And I love that idea because that's taps imagination. That's, you know, like we're just going to act as if it's already here. So. Let's let's do that. Thanks, Jordan for. Oh, can I also come in with a quick comment. Thanks. Go ahead. What people are thinking in most times is the actions to be taken are positive actions. I think that's not where we are. But I think the actions that have to be taken are draconian and will be experienced by most people as negative. For example, as of next Monday. It's illegal to produce any gas driven cars. Period. As of next Monday. Here comes a hard one. No airplane travel, except to get back home. Period. And it's going to take tough decisions to do that. And followers will not emerge quickly. Jump in here real quickly. Doug, you look at the record of how effectively we've dealt with COVID. Where the evidence, you know, despite the disagreements there, the evidence is fairly clear that things work and things don't work. And we're now in backslide again, what, how do we get. How do we get the confidence and how do we generate the focus. And how do we be able to drive on popular decisions. That's what I think that those CEOs nudged by their middle managers would say they basically have to be saying our organization must stop. If we are to deal with climate change. You got 100 companies that are responsible for 70% of global emissions. It's not whether I get on a plane or not. But you know, how do you get those 100 companies to move, given that they have shareholders? Because we have to say what they're going to move on. They've got to move on things like cutting their plane travel. Let's go to Eric and Pete. It's hard. Okay, I need it just to one breath before I can recover myself. The conversation is getting dense for me. Yeah. So, yeah. All these strategies is really difficult because they all make sense, but they all don't make sense. And for me that certain moment, my mind breaks. You know me. And one part is in this book, IFS innovations and the vibrations. There's two chapters. And I just want to name the titles dealing with racism. Should we exercise or embrace or in our biggest. So one fundamental question is. Do you shame someone or do you. Do you think you should motivate them to change and be present and be compassionate? System of IFS is mostly the compassionate way. But sometimes the compassionate way is the best. I think it's sometimes there's hard ways and hard votes you have to take. But in terms of psychology, the other chapter is called perpetrator parts. There they talk about. The founder, Richard Schwartz, he works with. People who were abusers, sexual, physical, and it's a very uncomfortable subject. He was compassionate to people who are perpetrators. And he, he was able to reach them. It's not that everybody can reach you each that way, but some people got reached and healed their own perpetrator parts. And there's something in this whole psychology with how we deal with everything. It says the first chapter that I read is our inner bigots. Like. There's a lot of complacency in ourselves that maybe mirrors the complacency of those leaders in this organization. And it's difficult because we're, I don't actually know what the problems are of those organizations when you look at them from their own view. Is it the shareholders? Yes, could be. It's, oh, it's too complex. We don't have the proper systems. Could also be. And then the second level, which I might have named in another call is one of the fundamental things that needs to happen is putting value and numbers on, and mapping the global value change because that's how you will convince those shareholders to change. It's by putting numbers and money. And it's also a collaboration between governments there and what's the societal cost of our collapse. Put it in numbers and put it in clear numbers that are being broken down to the smallest details of the whole value chain, like if a farmer doesn't get enough money, because the crop in a social way is not produced, that he gets enough money, he won't be able to be a farmer anymore. And then that farm doesn't become sustainable. And that's another sustainable example, but something about, if you map the whole value chain, you can then start to see all the different pieces of the puzzle and how that can change better. And then we can all look at the same picture and see, oh yeah, that could be changed. It's not that big. It's not extremely complex, but it needs to be there. I don't know if that last part was clear, but I'm passionate about it. Yeah, thanks Eric. Pete. Thanks. I wanted to respond to Stacy and not because, not because I wanted to disagree, but because I thought it was a good lesson. So, you know, you said something interesting, which is, I don't know how much we want to engage. I don't know how willing people are to, to actually do the work and, and you've, you made an observation that, hey, I put out a pretty simple ask and didn't get, you know, any response. I just was asking for names of middle managers and, you know, how hard that can that be. The lesson I have for my life, a lot of it was being a software entrepreneur and having a wonderful product to, to sell to people. They were actually wonderful products. It took me a long time to, to realize that people just don't like adopt your, you know, like grab your wonderful thing, your wonderful idea or your wonderful product and start using it because it's obviously I built it. It's, and I'm built it to be wonderful. You know, you don't, you don't want to use it. It took, it took me a lot of working with marketing teams and especially sales teams to understand that getting awareness and interest in people is, is the hard job of product development to actually even. And so, something else I've learned in, in situations like, like this group over long experience and email lists and things like that. I find that broadcast, please don't usually work. So saying, you know, hey, let's do this wonderful thing that would be pretty easy to do into the, into the void of the ether of the mailing list. Sometimes you'll get lucky and people will jump on it and it'll, and it'll spin up and be really exciting. And most of the time they just both, they just fall flat. So what I learned on this was a really hard thing for me to learn is that if you want to get something done, you pretty much need to reach out to people individually, grab somebody by the ear, which is a very uncomfortable thing to do. Grab them by the ear and say, hey, I need you to give Peter Jones a cell phone or you need to help me figure out who can, maybe you don't have a cell phone to spare, but I need you to help me, right? I know that I'm making you feel uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable making you feel uncomfortable. None of us, none of us like this, but this is me and you trying to solve a problem, right? Not me and kind of everybody on the main list. It's just you and me. So, so kind of the first lesson for me was when you ask a mailing list to do something, it's not going to happen. You literally have to reach out to individual people. The other thing is having started to reach out to individual people, even though I don't like doing that, is that there are lots of good reasons people can't honor your request, right? Maybe it doesn't make sense to them. Maybe they are 110% full up with their BS life, right? And they can't literally move. They can talk to you for long enough to say hi and stuff, but any other thing is going to tip over the cognitive apple cart and like cause them pain for the rest of the week or the rest of the month, right? You don't know. Maybe they've got, you know, maybe they're super well managed in their life and they just can't fit you into, you know, their calendar, whatever, right? A hard lesson I learned from watching sales people do it is you can't let, so when you're grabbing somebody by the ear and saying I need this from you and they say, well, I'd love to, but I, you know, not today or another time or whatever, you have to kind of honor that. And you have to say, okay, thank you very much. Is it okay if I come back and bug you another time for something else in a month or three months or a year or two years or whatever? You have to let them be, right? And you have to move on to the next one. And so the hit rate for salespeople for cold calls is, you know, like one in 20 or one in 50 or one in 100. And so kind of for me, if I've got to ask for somebody and I've asked one person and then they said, yeah, I don't understand it. When I asked the next person, they go, I'm sorry, I don't have time or I asked the next person and, okay, great, Pete, I'll love, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll definitely help you. Just send me an email and they never get back to me or whatever, you know, until I've done 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 of those, I'm not even going to assume that there's something wrong with my request. I'm not even going to assume that the world isn't ready to hear my message. I'm just going to keep plugging away and keep asking people, right? And by the time I get sick and tired of it, then I remind myself, hey, Pete, there are salespeople in the world who do this day in, day out, eight hours a day, calling up people and getting rejected. And so that's when I go, okay, so now I'm halfway done with my cold calls. I'm going to keep doing, or a third of the way done with my cold calls. I'm going to keep doing it again and again and again. And at some point you finally get like, like that when you repetitive injury, when the pain goes away because, because you've done it so much, you finally get a call us and you go, okay, I'm going to call another person and, and ask them this favor because, and it's not even going to hurt because I've done it so much that, you know, I can't feel anymore. So until you go through that process, I find that you can't, you can't assume that people aren't listening. You can't assume that, you know, you have to, you have to keep slogging and that's, I agree with you. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the work and that's a problem. But another part of the work is just slogging through making the, you know, making the requests over and over and over and getting rejected until somebody finally rewards you with a, you know, hey, I can help. And I've got time right now. Let's start working. Thanks. Can I just ask one rhetorical question. And Jerry, you're muted. So I'm going to take that as a yes. Yes, go ahead. So my rhetorical question is, do we want to keep behaving in a way where everything's about sales and what we can sell or buy from people? Because I hear I love to take that. Yeah. I said the word sales. I also said the word marketing. That's partly because I come from a background where those were technical tools that my organization used. You can think of it in different ways, right? You can think of it as a stone, I'm a stone soup. I chef, I guess. I could, I was, I went through a stone soup seller. No, that's not right. It's a stone soup purveyor and a little bit softer, but not right. Stone soup chef, I'm making stone soup. I need people to know about it. It's just a fact of life. And this is something that I wish we had been taught in school, but it's a fact of life that everybody's got their own stuff going on. And you need to recruit people to your cause. When you have a cause, people don't automatically flock to your cause. You need to explain it to them, which we can use the word marketing for. You need to get the word out, which we can use the word marketing for. You have to do persuasion, you have to do negotiation. A good sales person is actually not somebody who goes out and with a club and hits people, hits customers over the head and drags them back to the office and makes their hand sign on the dotted line. A good sales person is somebody who has a product on the, on the one side and a need on the other side and is matchmaking between those things and negotiating, understanding and understanding between the offerer and the. Except or so that everybody is happy. That's what sales is. And that's what most, you know, the good sales people I worked with are that they, they love helping people. So when they're, they're, and they're energized by finding that one person out of 10 or that one person out of 50 that needs their help, that needs the product. And they're not going to bug a bunch of people to do that. They're not going to. So it's a fault when we think sales or maybe it's not, it's a fault of capitalism that sales has become a bad word. But I've got a story from my favorite educational institution Sudbury Valley school. I never went to Sudbury Valley school. I've never been there. I've just read about it. I homeschooled my kids. So I know a little bit about how kids are excited and willing to learn the stuff like that. It's, and this is a, this is a story that happens over and over and over and over and over in Sudbury Valley school. Sudbury Valley is a place where there's not really a difference between teachers and students. There are some adults around to kind of make sure that people have questions. If people have questions, they can answer questions. Um, everybody gets a democratic vote. There's a town council at school council once a week or something like that, where they decide the issues of the day. You know, somebody did something stupid and should they get punished or not? Yada, yada, right? Uh, somebody, we're not, we're not taking care of the toilets. They're not getting cleaned enough. Who's going to do that? So the, the, the, in that environment, um, uh, I'll, I'll post a link to the long essay that I'm thinking of. Somebody told the story that there was a question. What about, what if you need to learn a really specific skill like speaking French or something like that? So the writer of the essay goes, well, here's how it worked. Um, my friend one day decided that she wanted to learn French. She talked to me and I said, yeah, that would be kind of cool. I would like to know a little bit of another language. So we talked to some of our other friends and pretty soon we had a group of people who were all interested in learning French. So we went to one of the, the, one of the teachers. They're not really teachers. They're adults who happen to be in the mix. We went to one of the teachers and said, Hey, we think, you know, some French, could you teach some French words? So they set up a little class system, um, of, of teaching, you know, uh, teaching enough French that the adult was able to find the more materials and more books. And pretty soon they eclipsed that teacher. They were like gung ho about, about French. So then they had to set up something where they got to hire an external expert. Um, you know, somebody who knew more French and could teach them more about French. So that, that happens over and over and over at a place like Subbury Valley because that's what humans do. Humans in life. And this is the only way that anything ever gets done. Humans in life convince each other to do things. Hey, I'm, I'm building a stone soup. Do you want to help me build stone soup? And if somebody says no, you know, but it's a sales process. It's essentially a sales process of convincing and negotiating somebody, uh, into an agreement of the, with a project that you're doing. Um, and that's the way projects get done. So, so maybe recruiting is a better way, uh, a software word to say than sales, but I, in my mind, they're kind of the same thing. Um, and there's more we could go into on that in lots of different ways. Um, I'm not sure that when you invite somebody to come do something and then go do it with them, I don't think that's a sales process or a marketing job. It's like a, hey, uh, let's go do this thing. And then suddenly they've tried something new and, and changed their minds. Um, I think that's very recruiting. Recruiting reminds me too much of S, but I like recruiting a lot. So I apologize for my capitalist language. Um, I do not mean the capitalist, uh, overlord bullshit. Um, I mean simple processes of human negotiation and, uh, collaboration and collaboration to use another set of jargon from another, another group of folks. And Stacey in the chat says she prefers recruiting or enrolling to selling as well. Um, John, you've been really patient. Um, I also wanted to be in the queue. Jordan. I don't know if you intentionally moved yourself behind but, uh, let's do some mix of John, Jordan and me. Okay. Coming to you from a diner in Gilroy. So that might be some background noise. Are you eating garlic? I had not, not garlic, but I had a great breakfast and I've got to continue to my journey. Um, first of all, I have a couple of phones. Uh, I have an Android, you know, it's maybe three years old. I have a couple of pre smartphones. Anybody who needs them for any cause contact me. I can't get into it. Um, Secondly, I think probably at least half of you, maybe all of you are either familiar with, or you've read ministry of the future or ministry for the future. Uh, I wouldn't say that it is a, it's not great literature. You know, I mean, it's, it's a great contribution to the counter to our conversation. It's not great literature, but that's, that's a minor point, you know, it's, that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to make this conversation. You know, you're not, we're not trying to be poetic. Maybe Eric is, and maybe he will be, you know, on occasion, he is, but we're mostly trying to move the ball, you know, forward. You get, get us into survival. Um, I, I reference a ministry for the future because. He kind of in a stealthy way. Outlines the range of options that were under discussion here. Uh, his, his main character engages in. Sales, you know, as, as Pete defines it, you know, broadly, he engages in negotiation, engages in collaboration. And it's interesting that he makes, he makes a reference to a darker process, but he doesn't go into it in detail. And it's, it's a writer trick. It's, I mean, I think he does, I think he does that part actually pretty well. I don't, you know, he alludes to the fact that the ministry of the future has a black ops. And then he later on says, he describes various black ops and by a black op, I mean, you know, it, it would be somebody executing Doug's plan of no planes by, by such and such day or no fishing, you know, fishing is really a problem, especially commercial, you know, especially these giant, giant boats. And so he sets up a situation where instead of a green piece boat, pulling you over an armed, you know, crew pulls you over a fishing boat, takes off all the enslaved people who are working on the boat, sets them free, says to the guys who are running the boat and own it. Okay, you're adrift, you know, basically like leaves them on the boat, but without means to really, I think they take all the diesel fuel out of the, I don't know what they do, but basically like this, it's almost like they're saying, you know, we're not exactly killing you, but we're, we're putting you at risk because you violated the understanding. I'm certainly not going to, you know, I mean, I think he did an interesting job of presenting to us as readers, a set of realistically tough possibilities and tradeoffs. Some people would say, I'm guessing Doug would say, and I'd have to agree, he's a little optimistic in that there's this vague coming together, you know, that happens over the 25 years and by the end, there's great animal habitats, you know, the parks have all been listed, the bad agricultural land has been rewilded, it's under indigenous control. I mean, I'd love to see all those things, those are great. We could say it's a little optimistic. But anyhow, it's a, I think it's a, it's a point of departure, you know, you should, if you want to try to construct your own version that somewhere between the two states, there's no flying as of Monday. And I'm going to eat less meat, you know, I mean, there's a huge territory there. And Kim Stanley Robinson has given us a deliberately impressionistic, deliberately incomplete model to start thinking about that and push forward. I agree with Pete's refinement of what sales and recruitment are, I think that's great. We all got, we got to be doing something like that. And I agree with the, I don't know that, you know, I try to think of the, where are the middle managers, you know, that I know, and the problem is, if I, tell me if this is true for you, but I just have this feeling that the kind of people we are, we're like sense makers, knowledge workers, we're doing, we're self, self-motivated. We're a little bit out of the mainstream, you know, you know, Ken's got real consulting clients. I only have non, I only have pro bono and nonprofit clients at this point. I don't know middle managers, but I think it's great to go looking for that and to not, not be locked into, do they, should they be middle? Can they not be at the top? Or do they have to be at the top? Don't, don't do it that way. Where is there somebody we can, you know, turn? Like this guy who just pumped this billionaire, who just pumped money into candidates for pandemic prevention. Sam, you can look him up. You know, I don't know that he's reachable, but I mean, the guys, you know, he gets a whim. It's a good, good idea. Let's, let's prevent pandemics. He writes a couple of million dollar checks. This is somebody who should be talked to, you know, because there's much more efficient ways to, I think to do what he's trying to do. And I think some of us here and in other parallel groups that we belong to have some better ideas that we could, we could communicate with him. So thank you. And I really enjoyed the discussion. And I'm going to continue my journey. Awesome. Thank you so much. Jordan than me. I wanted to answer Stacy's difficult question just briefly. I'll just take maybe two minutes. And then we can move on or talk more about it. But as a infrastructure builder, you end up with a, with an intention and a program of action and a critical path. And there's like a lot of things that could be done that are all good things to do, but there's, you know, you might have a thousand activities that's available to you. So the big question is what, who's working on what and why. And there's this idea or principle that of a critical path, like a logical sequence of events that you can kind of progress down. And so one of the things that, that keeps me from responding to two things is that there's so many good ideas, but if they're not part of some kind of a logical sequence of events, then they kind of, they can pull a whole group of people's attention towards something and it, and it might be a great idea. It might not be the right time or sequence. Like if you, so if we wanted to create a network of middle managers, for instance, it's like, there could be a discussion of how can we do that? How do we contextualize that? What would the basic infrastructure and support be to have lots of those groups functioning? What's the invitation? How do we connect them up to the other things that are moving in parallel? And then there's like a time when that goes out that it's like, okay, the next thing we need to do is connect middle managers. And we could probably go find them. And so for, for me, that's like a really critical thing is, is if I hope if I called, you know, Ken or Hank or Gil or someone and I said, okay, hey, we all kind of agreed on this quarterly plan of action. We need to accomplish these three or four objectives. And hey, Gil, can you please make an intro to this person because that will accomplish this goal that'll, that'll move us along the path we agreed to. And that's another way that maybe makes those invitations a lot more compelling. So just for whatever it's worth, there's, there's a lot of business people and stuff in my sphere that are like, okay, I'm happy to help, but I need like a really efficient way to plug in and move something forward. So that's part of what I hope we can kind of develop together over the coming six weeks is a little better sense of that. Thanks Jordan. Let me put a couple of things in the conversation. I just made my notes and paste them in the chat. So number one, we are not sense making very effectively here. We're busy pointing to a bunch of things that not enough of us have read or digested. Saul Griffith is really, really smart. I'm, I've shaken his hand once he's put out a bunch of things we don't have at hand. A handy digest of what the hell he said and how it fits. Vaughn Klopp-Smil is really smart, wrote a great article. We don't have a really a useful synopsis of the measures and so forth. Nor do we have the juxtaposition. How are these two interesting approaches toward the future different and similar? Where are the overlaps? Never mind 15 other really interesting thinkers on the topic. So we're not working from a blackboard or a scaffolding of how these ideas fit, which ones might work, et cetera, et cetera. And I find that very frustrating and I can't slow myself to do that systematically in some useful and interesting way. I do that one off when I read a great piece, I put the word excellent at the end of it, thought in my brain, I debrief into my brain all the different pieces of it and I hope I make it back there. And I know that if I keep doing this over and over again, some of those sub points will connect up because other people said them too. And that is a force I'm counting on over time that I'm trying to do. So I'm thinking about the work of trying to compost at the article or nugget place. But we're not working from a shared memory of any kind. So we throw in a bunch of things that are important and useful. And this last piece about the billionaire who funded, I went and looked at the headline, he funded an effective altruist who then lost big time currently. But effective altruism is a movement that says hey, which of these different things might actually pay out? Why don't we put our energy behind this one instead of that one because that one just actually doesn't pencil out? And we, I don't know that we have any effective altruists in the group here, but it's a very interesting approach to try to rationalize giving because it came out of philanthropy where a lot of people realize that philanthropy was deeply broken. And I believe that philanthropy is extremely broken. And they were trying to figure out how to, they'd come into some money. How do we actually spend this properly? So I think there's a whole bunch of pieces around that. How do we slow things down enough to shine our bright little laser on some of these issues at a time, melt them into the public sphere so that they're useful and reusable and then replicate the beam, the laser beam, which we're sort of calling composting or mapping or whatever else in our many conversations here in OGM and across the world. And those are the two things that are really interesting to look at. So there's a big hill of, of entities that are near each other. And Jordan in the meta project, wouldn't it be great if there was some way of discerning what those next insights and projects are that put them on the map well collectively. Like right now in, in meta, I'm sensing a process but not a method. We're like blind people. We're like people in a dark room trying to find the creatures in the room and not having the easiest time of it. So one playful thought is, what if effective altruism were a religion or a social movement, as opposed to some rational way to offer mere philanthropy? How do we, and then one last thought, in the middle of all of our conversations, I'm always having this overly idealistic thought that somewhere in the middle of what we're putting on the table lie a couple of subtle things that will actually shift belief systems radically. And a hundred years from now, the conventional wisdom will include a few things that we've talked about in this conversation that, one, that one of those things actually worked and we managed to sort things out because of that and a couple other combined topics. It's a little bit like the history of industrialization and capitalism where a couple ideas and a couple people's essays sort of had an overly large effect and brought us into the world that we're living in, marinating in today that's causing the crises that we're busy sitting here trying to solve. So how can we be a little bit maybe more rational and methodical about all these nuggets of wisdom that we're busy sharing, but not really sharing? How does that actually, how can we move that forward more effectively? And it's kind of a plea to the community, I guess. Doug, then Eric, and then we're gonna be out of time. So I think people are still talking about doing good and finding a better way. I think the logic is wrong. In order to stop CO2 production into the atmosphere, we have to stop major economic activity. That's gonna cause a lot of pain and a lot of, for example, unemployment with cascading effects. So I think along with stopping things and we need a new welfare system that really guarantees taking care of people who were displaced by the process. That's gonna be a huge shift in the culture. Anyway, that's my thoughts. Thanks, Doug. Go ahead, Eric. I'm gonna try to make this simple so that the way I look at what we need is kind of a multi-leveled or all, no, let's say all-leveled approach to this kind of mapping. We need a system that's at the same time as simple as possible, it's also very flexible and it's not really that difficult but somehow I also cannot get it across somehow. It's close to what Vincent is doing but somehow it needs any issue that's complex as a myriad of facets to it and to really get close to doing what we want to do and what you're talking about. We need a system also that holds all of it and this, I'd say that. I also wonder how to talk about this because all these meetings that I'm in, I get a brief moment to talk about it. In single meetings, I sometimes can get the cost but it's still just a fragment of it and I basically said, give me 300,000 euros, I think a year ago and I've been thinking about getting money for so long already but somehow I'm also searching for a more fundamental process of how to talk to each other so I can really advance my project and get across what is there properly. I've had moments where I've been able to explain a part of it but I also want a kind of patience but also safety. Like if I talk to one person, they might understand it but then the rest doesn't. Then what's this, what is it? What is the format of sharing the depth of what I've understood, something like that? Thanks, sir. And you're not done but I just wish we could sit you down with some college students who are looking for a thesis and have them help you express all the stuff in your head in ways that make you happy, right? Because I feel like I love, I have so much agreement with what you say and then you almost always hit a spot where it's like, ah, that didn't actually fit or that's not working and I'm like, how do we get you past that end? How do we get it out and set so that you can point to it and go, look over here and here's my offer. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. And if we could create a functional method system process group like that, that's useful everywhere. That's, you know, there's a whole bunch of students in the world looking for projects to do. If we could turn them toward fruitful projects in their neighborhoods with their neighbors, that's a great thing. Building sort of a common bed of wisdom. So I'm just reading Jordan's note in the chat. For me, Pete Gill and others, would it be helpful for me to propose the concrete system process way? I see this could work to resolve the concerns we have expressed here. I don't want it to feel too heavy but I think we collectively know approximately how to do this might have held back too much in the last cycle to allow for emergence. In the last cycle of conversation here or in the last major cycle of all of our conversations, what do you mean Jordan? To the last couple of years and the last six weeks, it's like, I think we have enough skills in the room between all of our various disciplines but there's a very basic framework that like humans have worked out over thousands of years, how you organize these diverse networked groups to deliver a shared goal. And it's like very well tested and proven and it's the basics of lean and integrated program delivery and all those things just how you bring together diverse networks of people to accomplish something that none of us can accomplish in isolation. My concerns then it's like, I don't wanna crush the emergence in the group or like it feel too heavy. So I guess that's what I'm trying to express but it's kind of like at the same time I can see us spinning and a little frustrated. So I'm wondering if I should try to take the time to articulate that and at least get something on the table that everybody could beat up and just prove. From my own perspective, Jordan, if you were to point me toward a project management system that included a couple of other people's project ideas or nugget sized tasks that need to be done and the dashboard where I could look and pick through things and say, hey, Jerry, would you list four things in this in this particular system? I would go list four things in the system. I think I understand where you're pointing Jordan and I'm just missing the system. I just wanna see the system beginning to work on the smallest bite sized piece of what could the simplest thing that could possibly be done. And then I'll contribute four nibbles to it and somebody else will put turnips in and then Stacey will bring like some Jambalaya and like check it in. But I don't know if you like Jambalaya at all but I'm wanting to see the artifact. Perfect. Thanks, Jerry. Gil, you may have the last word here. Yeah, okay. I think what Jordan is proposing is not just a system but an approach and he's offering to make an offer to us. And Jordan, I encourage you to make an offer and not worry about crushing the process because we can always say no or no thank you or yes, but different or as Jerry did say, yeah, but for that to work, I need this. I've been flogging the notion of requests and promises, request offers in the chat before. I think that's core to what we're doing here. We're talking about stuff and we're sharing our opinions about stuff and what we want and what we care about but it comes down to making offers to each other and making requests of each other which goes back to Doug's original starting point. Go to these middle managers and offer them something and ask them to do something. And that kind of concretization, I don't think crushes the process, I think it moves the process forward and it's been a great conversation this morning. Thank you. Let's go. Happy conversation this morning. Thanks Jerry for hosting. Yeah, thank you all for being here. It's a hard conversation because I think there's a latent, there's a shadow of frustration behind us a lot because we're deep in a series of crises. We've been talking a lot for a couple of years now and most of us would like to be doing more than talking with one another. I think we really, I love you all. I think you're, I love our calls, I love where we go. And I would like to be pulling on a rope together with you rather than saying, you know, twine is actually, hemp is more sustainable than plastic for that rope. And if we braid it like five times instead of 12 times, it's gonna work better. Like we're, if we don't act quickly, we don't get any place. And then also, I think there needs to be a smorgasbord of paths in. Doug, I can see you in a black beret with face paint like leading an insurgency to try to shut down the major corporations that are polluting. But I can also see this gigantic immune system called capitalism that will not allow large industries to simply be shut down. There's like all sorts of immunity built, baked into the system that I don't know how to get out. And maybe we can crowdsource buyout offers for the critical. So let's pretend we're looking at Shell Oil or Exxon or Chevron, God, Chevron. Why don't we figure out who were the essential staff at Chevron and give them lifetime buyout offers? Crowd source buyout offers for the staff that are irreplaceable at Chevron without whom Chevron can't function, offer those people a better life somewhere else. But I'm just saying, is there a productive, creative, funky, different way to cause the collapse of some of these industries that might actually work? I don't know. But I think that just asking them to shut down ain't gonna happen. There's too many people's money basically piled into these things and profiting from the actions. But I'm personally very open to clever alternate strategies to try to achieve the larger aims, the larger goals. And Greta Thunberg has spent a lot of time and energy and sweat trying to say, the house is on fire, we need to act as if the house is on fire, which is great. And then we began this conversation with act as if the new system exists, quoting Voslov Havel, which I love. I love behaving as if the new system exists. And to me, that means standing up the systems that allow us to come together to do the kinds of things we need to do. Hank, thank you for being here and we're just about to wrap. Anybody else wanna put a bow on this off or something else? We're good. Thank you all. Very much. Can we go out with a poem? Ken, we didn't hear what you just said. I think you're on local news. There we go. Can we go out with a poem? Oh, yes, please. So this is a poem that I think is about midlife for individuals, but I also think it's very appropriate for the time. It's by Rilka. It's called the Winged Energy of Delight. Just as the Winged Energy of Delight carried you over many chasms early on, now, raise high the daringly imagined arch holding up the astounding bridges. Miracle does not become miracle in the queer light of achievement that is earned in the world. Miracle becomes, no, miracle does not lie only in the amazing living through and defeat of danger. Miracle becomes miracle in the queer light of achievement that is earned in the world. Let me see, I haven't recited this for a while. Working with things is not hubris when building associations beyond words. For the pattern becomes denser and denser and being carried along is no longer enough. So take your well-disciplined strengths and stretch them between two opposing poles because inside the human heart is where God lives, where God learns. Would you like me to read the text? Yeah, I'm doing it from memory, it's been a while. Which is really impressive and I like it a ton. Pardon? I just said pretty damn good from memory. Yeah, exactly. So here, as once the Winged Energy of Delight by Reiner Maria Rilke, as once the Winged Energy of Delight carried you over childhood's dark abysses, now beyond your own life, build the great arch of unimagined bridges. Wonders happen if we can succeed in passing through the harshest danger but only in a bright and purely granted achievement can we realize the wonder. To work with things in the indescribable relationship is not too hard for us. The pattern grows more intricate and subtle and being swept along is not enough. Take your practice powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions for the God wants to know himself in you. I think that's a different interpretation. The one I did was from Robert Bly, but that's also a very good one. So there's... Thank you. And the original would be in German, so... Which I cannot recite from memory or even if I had it in front of me, so... Perfect and I think you're totally right. I think the other translation is closer to what you just recited. Thank you. It's a beautiful poem where we'll add it. Oh, and there's the German. Thanks, Pete. That's great. Ken, thank you. Thanks, everybody. Good to see you all. Yeah. We'll be closing. Bye.