 Welcome, everybody, to a deep adaptation Q&A. I'm Jim Bendell, and joining us this month is John Doyle, who works at the European Commission and lives in Belgium. Hello, John. How are we doing? Good. Thank you for joining us. I've just been watching you on YouTube recently. You've got a double bill of... Yes, yes. Not too many people get invited back twice, or it could be that the interview was so long that it had to be cut into, you know, I'm claiming the former. Right, so I was impressed that you were really not holding back. I mean, having met you in 2019 in Brussels at the event that you organized that I spoke at, I realized you don't hold back. You do share your view on where we're at as a society. And so you didn't in that interview as well. But could you just give us a bit of a context in terms of the role you have and the freedom that you have in that role to give your views on how you see the human predicament at the moment? Oh, OK. Well, the freedom is relatively easy to articulate because, as I think I explained near the beginning of part one of the Stuart Scott interview, the European Commission is actually quite unique as a public sector organization. I mean, it does all those things that a public sector organization should do with soundly and efficiently managed funds and that is the guardian of our treaties. And there's one also kind of very pompous one that I can't remember. But above all else, and what makes it unique is the right duty, obligation and privilege, as I see it, to take initiative for the benefit of European citizens. Now, William Blake has said that good ideas always start in a minority of one. I'm not entirely certain of that because if you look at great songwriting teams, it's always two, it's Jagger and Richards or Len and McCarthy or whatever. But so the European Commission is unique in this sort of... I do want to come back to find out who your muse is, John. But anyway, as... Oh, William Blake. Did I say William Blake? Oh, who do I say? No, whoever it is who's your creative foil. Yeah, yeah. So the point is that in this extraordinary construct, which is the European Union, that at least can claim some credit for stopping the French and the Germans beating the living daylights out of each other every 50 years. The unique feature, something that you don't find in any of the history of Western institutions is the notion that this special thingy a commission takes the initiative. It comes up with ideas like literally, wow, wouldn't it be a great idea if? And then this is proposed essentially to the member states and the European Parliament and they say, well, awful, we won't do it. Or that's not bad. Let's try it or very often we'll modify it slightly. So when I first landed in the commission, not as a full official back in 91, but ultimately I transferred into being a full official in 96. I was stunned by this sort of ethos that permeated everyday life. No, what's the best idea to do something? Has anyone got a plan? How about if we did it this way? And the best idea very often, even at a very low levels, okay, let's do it this way. Or let's try it this way. So I claim that even though sometimes my views are quite radical and I always preface them by sort of saying these are my views, but this is the sort of input I'm giving into the fora in which I am active in the commission, particularly foresight work. These are only my views. They are not the position of the European Union yet. Though I am an example of somebody who is particularly attached to the, this right duty privilege and honor to take initiative for the benefit of European citizens. I mean, the classic one is why don't we make common the assets over which the Germans and the French keep fighting? So essentially, you know, nationalizes the wrong word, but essentially by nationalizing coal and steel in Alsace and so on and so forth, the Germans and the French kind of lost their raison de guerre. Like it's a common asset. So it's both an invitation to be wildly, wildly I suppose, idealistic in proposing something that might work. And yet it's always extremely practical. So, yeah. So I'm hearing something from you there and I'm thinking, okay, creativity, free thinking, ideas coming from everywhere, ideas that can be bold and strange and that can actually bring peace to the world. And then I think that this is the John Doyle I know who's been preaching to all his colleagues for years that we're fucked. Yeah. So in that case, I think I might even have to use that word in the European Commission. That's a bit of a joke. So what's going wrong here? Like, why is it that with people with your freedom and your intellect and working on foresight that we are in such a difficult spot in terms of we are looking at societal collapse. We're looking at possibly even descending into mega death and war and fighting for the future of the species itself. Yes. What? And I'm not going to put all that at the door of the European Commission. No, no, it's a lovely question to ask. Why do we start with an easy one? Yeah, I mean, having said that and being quite attracted to many of the insights of the philosophers both East and West, the simple fact that one has the right to do something or the simple fact that one may even be right doesn't confer on one the blessing of being listened to or one's ideas being acted upon. I mean, I always give the example to my climate change friends of, for about the last seven or eight years, I've been whole food plant based. Now, at least since the China study, the wonderful Esselstyn and Campbell work, or Campbell in particular, I guess, we know even our Western rational mind knows perfectly well that the human species should not be eating the rotting decaying flesh of tortured animals, nor should it be feeding itself on dairy products like the breast milk and colostrum of genetically modified buffaloes is somehow an important constituent of our diet. It's going to be nonsense. Now, we deeply know this, but who acts on it? A couple of lunatics, a couple of the mad vegan crowd, but human beings were not built to consume meat. We are physiologically not that way. And yet, that's okay, we push that to one side. And this is what we do. I think it's possibly a characteristic or simply, I wouldn't say a flaw of the species. I've seen it written that we're the only species condemned to wander the earth, obsessed with our own mortality. Now, with that notion of mortality in our minds, therefore we have to kind of literally cordon off parts of it. I mean, it would be very difficult to walk from one end of the street to the next in any large city and be truly affected by the poverty and misery that you see sitting on the sidewalk. So you have to push it away. You have to not think about it. So I think part of it is that we literally, to kind of get through from day to day, we have to not think a lot. So it's something like that. Why should people listen to me? I'm reminded that when I spoke at the event you organized, I asked the people who were mostly European Commission people who here believes that societal collapse will happen in your lifetime. I would say 90% of hands went up and I just thought maybe they were just being nice to me, made me feel welcome. But then I think, so yeah, I think when I hear you talk then, I'm thinking, so you're saying that there's this cognitive dissonance. We kind of know how bad things are, but we're going to work as normal. I'm wondering then, how do we shift? How do we create change? Is it that change is coming anyway? What's your model of change? With the foresight that you've got, you've been talking about the potential wet bulb events, you've been talking about COVID-19 being something that will keep coming back again. So your view of the future is very troubling to quite a lot of people. What's your theory of change? Is it through speaking out more? Is it through trying to collar the politicians? Is it through just waiting for collapse? Oh, I think no one's above. I think what I've increasingly found is that first and foremost, one does what one does. And I think that may seem trite, but it's also very true, no matter how much you reflect on it, no matter how much you may think you have pre-planned, no matter how much you think of yourself as goal-oriented or driven or aimless and wandering, you do what you do and so does the rest of the universe. So one of the notions I think we have to move slightly away from or back away from the notion of total human agency. We are the very pinnacle of evolution success. Therefore, we should be able to handle this one. There's more to a notion of actually we're surfing the wave, whatever that particular wave is. Now, at this point, it seems to me to be so brutally obvious, given what has happened with COVID, that the pretense to engineering some sort of a soft descent, if I can put it that way, and it's only a descent for humans. We're one manifestation of life and of nothingness, depending on which way you're looking at it. The notion of manufacturing a soft descent seems to me to be fundamentally erroneous. We've had over the last few months kind of seven to 10% drop in economic activity, maybe as much as 14 by the end of the year, which is roughly speaking the absolute minimum that even hopelessly conservative organizations like the IPCC would have said what was necessary year on year for the next 10 to 20 years to give us a tiny chance of avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Now, when you see what that has actually meant, and when you see how desperate society is to get back to normal, you realize that at no point was there actually any chance of agency in all of this. There was the delusion of agency. We manufacture green cars or electric planes or something like that. We should be able to do it, but this is much more like the world we will have to live in or will be living in should we survive. So for me, the change now, as I think I probably said to you when we met, I would have rated our chances of still being here as a species 15 years and say this date is zero before COVID. But bizarrely enough and horribly enough, this brutal parent, which is our biosphere out of which we come, has decided almost to create something which perfectly gives us a chance of survival while at the same time causing unimaginable grief and hardship. So the flow of the way things are are precisely the way things are. I do not see that there was any agency to begin with. The delusion of that agency has now been taken from us. We are not the creators of the ocean, but we've got to surf for it and we've got to learn to surf. Okay, so I'm hearing quite a challenge to this idea that we have agency that we can have theories of change and strategies and that we can have them all. It's great fun. But they're not necessarily going to get us anywhere. It's marvellously entertaining for intellectuals like you and me. I mean, it's great fun playing with this. There are signposts to what's actually happening or to the reality around us. I think I shared one other thing with you today which was my former withdrawing from the groups that I have animated for the last three or four years within the commission. Because I was profound. I found myself writing something one day about COVID. I think it's in the Stuart recording. And I found myself writing. The future will be composed of, will certainly not have anything to do with ideas or meetings or men with beards having chats on Zoom, but will unfold as it unfolds. And the words now almost have become a distraction to me. And I suddenly realized so why am I still talking and why am I trying to animate something? So I've withdrawn. I will now work on very specific things as they attract me rather than feel like, I don't know, like lead my men to the top of the hill and back down again. I hear you. I hear you. And of course then what is in our power is sort of sense making and meaning making out of it. And you talked about Earth as a brutal parent and that stood out for me a little bit there. Of course we have lots of different stories about where we're at and maybe that's a bit of an anthropomorphic view of planet Earth and also as some kind of strict parent. Is that something that you've, it's not something I share. Is it something you hold, is that meaningful for you? Is that connected to a tradition? Cause I've also heard you talk, you know, in what you just said also sounded quite tat and Taoist in terms of, you know, or everything is just as it should be and emerging even if it's painful in the process. Yes. The brutal parent, I'll have to think about that. It's an interesting insight. I am an Irish male, so I will revisit that with my counsellor of choice. Yes. I think that makes sense to me now, but it might be my age. Next Thursday I'm 60. But a thing that makes sense to me now is, is much of what is in fact, you know, either Taoist or Eastern or Zen. I've become a huge fan of Alan Watts. But the notion, but I wouldn't say that it's in any way anthropomorphicising. It's exactly, in fact, it's exactly the opposite. It's an acceptance of the way things are and including the limitations. That seems to be something that human beings shy away from. When you gave me this wonderful, rather dry list of topics that we should talk about, I came back being a smart ass as is my want and suggested that the destruction of modern science by Newton might be a far more interesting thing to begin with. And I gave you the reference to the wonderful Noam Chomsky's lecture on the ghost of the machine. So, a thing that people, that we cling to as thought generators is that humans have infinite potential. We don't, of course we don't have infinite potential. Life has infinite manifestations, but as soon as something becomes physical and manifest it is limited. You get to have opposable thumbs or gills. You don't get both. So, do you share the view that COVID is like a great humbling for humanity and it's in that humbling that perhaps there is this opportunity for change? Because you're saying that you give us a slightly better odds because of what's been happening over the last few months. Well, it's not a great humbling for humanity. That's an anthropocentric view. It's what's happened. And even the notion that it's sort of unnatural that this has happened, but again, that's a human construct here. We may be the creatures who will utterly destroy the current biospherical paradigm from which another will emerge. My feeling is that, anything that's in sort of the dynamic equilibrium that the Earth is in so beautifully wants to more or less stay in that dynamic equilibrium. So, the Earth doesn't particularly want to jump to an average temperature of 22 degrees centigrade rather than 14 or 15 or what we're at now. So, it would rather stabilize like any organism. It doesn't want to have to get sick to get better again. So, it's not really about humans. It's about what is. We talk in terms of it being about our lives, next generations, the less favored nations. But these are the very limitations of where our thinking and our words can go. John, I'm interested in you as somebody in your position, you just said coming up to 60, and quite some people call you a maverick. But what's interesting is that you are one of the few people I've met within an establishment organization who can think big and talk about the future in ways which might be upsetting to some people or it's certainly a bit taboo. Yes. I have talked to quite a lot of people over the last two years in senior positions who do believe that it's not working. Reforming capitalism in order to keep societies together to be sustainable, it's not working, it can't work. But they don't find a way of talking about that publicly, let alone then finding a way of working on it, like trying to find out what to do about that. And so, they're walking around with this sort of anxiety about the living one world, publicly, professionally, and then they've got this private... Slawed up inside, yeah, yeah. Some of those people, I presume, if they're not on the call now, we'll be watching afterwards. And so, what do you say to people who... And because you must meet them in your work all over the shop. What do you say to such people? Absolutely. There's very little, if anything, new to be discovered. It's all just revealed, you suddenly see it. You know? Wow, it's like waking up at the moment in Brussels. And suddenly, I woke up the other morning and there were bees buzzing, the bedrooms on the first floor. I could hear bees buzzing, or I thought maybe I'd tinnitus. And I'm like, wait a minute, this is my garden I'm hearing. Wow. I think reality... Reality is a big word. I think the world endlessly gives you these things to kind of go, wow, isn't that amazing? And I think the important thing is to be consistent in your articulation of what it is you feel and believe. Because, ultimately, that leads you to the position where those who are desperately clinging to whatever it is that causes them in place for the time being. Ultimately, the absurdity has become manifest. So, I can give you an example. At the inception of one of the climate groups that I used to belong to within the commission, I was arguing very forcefully that half a snowball's chance in hell we need to stop the common agricultural policy, no more subsidies for German car manufacturers and agriculture within the next five to ten years had to go to being a net sequester of CO2. And then the IPCC 1.5 report came out which to me is a horrendous whitewash. But my colleague sort of said, wow, this is so good. It says we have to reduce by 7% year on year or maybe 10% year on year. This is what we should hang our hats on. I said, oh, it's not good enough. Now, in the end, something I don't necessarily regret because, again, this is a group of people talking and saying, okay, and I stayed in that group for long enough to find other groups. No, listen, we have much greater political traction if we just say we need to stick to the IPCC figures. And I said, okay, because I mean, I was thinking to myself, well, 7% year on year is pretty much what we have now with COVID. I said, well, if they even did 5%, it'll be an incredible change. And if they did that year on year, well, who knows. But of course, the minute we get anything approaching that, everyone kind of goes, God, we can't live like this. Which is fine because it's extremely difficult to see how we can live like this or how we can engineer this. And my feeling is that we don't engineer it, that the reality emerges. We adapt or we don't adapt. Some do, some don't. We never actually had the control we thought we had. You know, as white privileged males perhaps, rather than, you know, poor, underprivileged people from some other part of the world who were very well aware of the fact that they didn't have any agency. So for me, what it is, and then I maybe go back to my friends and sort of saying, well, one guy was really funny. He sort of came back and said, well, this shows, John, that you were completely wrong for trying to force the commission to do 7% reductions. I said, I didn't. That was a massive compromise for me. It's clear that we're only able to do one or 2% per year. But that's suicide. It's all that's possible. You're kind of putting soap on the rope, so you don't get a neck burn. Why would you do that? So ultimately what happens then is people sort of leave me alone, which is okay. I think I'm more of a John the Baptist character. It's probably best that I be left alone. And it's more a combination of characters that make things happen. I don't think I'm a leader. I may be a visionary or an annoying prophet outside the walls, but it would be for different types of people to sort of say, you know, Doyle does have a logical point here. You know, if, you know, if we actually need to be massively sequestering within the next five to 10 to 15 years to have a snowball of confidence and hell, you know, new green deal really? Is that really enough? Which, and so privileged as I am to work in the European Commission where I can articulate these points of view, it's not difficult for me because I think I'm always logically consistent. When somebody points out somewhere that I'm wrong, I'm delighted. I don't have to live with that dissonance. I sometimes have to live with compromises, say agreeing, you know, at the inception of one of these groups that, okay, we'll just argue for, you know, for the IPCC figures. But I don't have to live with the dissonance that those around me do. And I do a good job and the day job. You know, I'm a pretty effective functioner, you know, give me a load of tasks and I tend to do it about twice as fast as anybody else. So I don't make myself fireable. Yeah. Yeah, I seem to remember when, when you were, when you were speaking at that event, I was actually said, look, if you're good at your job, you can get it done quickly, get it done quickly, and then move on to the stuff that, that really matters. Yes. But I think you've also just explained there how, if people are sitting around a table with you and having to make decisions, then they're, they're trying to be strategic and calculating. They've got their right, you know, what is possible to say, given the dominant paradigm and, and, and so forth. And, and in a sense, this also leads you to the blockage. Sorry for interrupting, but as an example, I say I'm not a militant figure. Sorry, I'm going to stop, I'm going to stop you there, John, because I do, I do want to move on. And there was a point I was going to make there, which is that those conversations in a sense are, are leaving people with a dissonance. You're seeing that. And also the distance was there before we had the conversation. Ah, yes. But is it also, it's in you at all. So for example, that, that reduction year on year, well, it's, it's not just the doing what's happened right now with COVID. It's more than that every single year for the next 10 years, at least. So it's, it's, so where you're going with this with people is to help them realize that it's not really possible. It's game over already. Isn't it? Isn't that what you're really inviting your colleagues to see? No, no, as I say, I think it's very, you know, aimlessness is massively underrated. You know, the objective driven life is, is, is not necessarily a productive one. Again, this is a little bit doused, but I'm not trying to do anything other than bear witness to my truth. And people can do precisely what they want to do. Everyone can do what they want to do. And not only can they, but they will. You know, in, in, in, you know, in some spinos and senses, maybe deterministic in, you know, in the Buddhist sense, it's, it's, it's, it's possibly the non-existence of the individual and simply those actions, which I manifest on the individual being some sort of fractal representation of. So, I mean, from, from my point of view, I'm not trying to lead anybody anywhere, but I am trying to be me. And I find, I kind of came to, I kind of, I made peace with who me was. My first of many peace treaties with me, but the first of my many peace treaties with me was, okay, I'm probably not going to become a director general or the secretary general or the head of the European commission and be able to drive my projects through to, but okay, so that's not who I am. And this was, this was a first massive degree of freedom that I didn't have to weigh what I said against the next promotion. Then increasingly, what I've been able, you know, and this has been both in my personal life and my, my, my public or professional life. Increasingly, there was the notion of seeing things for what they are, and thou art that if you like, or that art thou. The, wow, this is simply the way it is. And, and once one is consistent with that, and sometimes I'm not, I get, oh God, why can't I make, you know, I don't know, the energy commissioner see that we need to use the existing methane gas networks under most major European cities as hydrogen storage for renewable electricity. I mean, I happen to have been working on that this morning. You know, and I do passionately work on specific projects. But if he sees it, he sees it. If he doesn't, he doesn't. I mean, that's, that's what it is. And this, and this is only my interface to what the reality is. This is my interface. This is not necessarily sort of truth. It's how I see it. And that's okay too. Okay. Thank you, John. Yeah. I'm making an awful lot of sense here. You are in the sense that you've, you've prioritized in your work telling your truth. And that's led you to the position you're in. It's led you to your, sounds like your spiritual philosophy as well. And it's also led you to a place where you're not sort of scheming about how to win battles or, or convert bureaucrats to your cause. There's some very, very hard lessons in the doubt. Just on that, you know, you know, the kind of good and evil left and right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Cause we've got quite a few people who've joined us. So I want to go to other people. I'm really bored. Oh yeah. Must be. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to go to Gary, I believe. So Gary, if you unmute and ask your question for John, say where you are as well. How you doing? Gary, how's it going? Oh, I see something very Buddhist in the background. I'm impressed. Right. I believe you have said the current economic models will disappear in 10 or 15 years. Yes. Something of that nature. I presume you understand that this will not happen without resistance and a considerable amount of pain. Can you fill in any detail you care to about the process of shifting to a different model? And what will that model look like? Okay. For the second part of the question, brilliant question. For the second part of the question, having a clue. As I say, I suspect you may have seen the Stuart Scott interview or you wouldn't have asked me this question. That there would be great resistance. I suppose my deeper point is that it doesn't matter how much resistance there is. This is the way it's going. I say to my friends now, so I know somebody is quite high up in one of the car companies and so on and so forth. The real thing is, oh, we've got to get back on the road, get on those flights out to Wuhan to sell some cars to our wealthy Chinese people in Wuhan and could get into. And there's all sorts of people saying, I don't want to travel anywhere. Now, so my suspicion is that if you can't travel, well, what does that do to globalization? It's like people are sort of saying you can go to Irish pubs, but you have to stay kind of four meters away from somebody else. That doesn't sound like an Irish pub to me. It's not an Irish pub unless somebody spills a pint of Guinness over me and we get talking. That's the function of Irish pubs. So the change is simply happening. And I find myself sitting here in somewhere like Belgium and being blown away by the service that I get from people like the Uber Eats driver or, you know, the girl in the supermarket who's still there with a little mask serving me. I'm asking myself, what do I need to live? So I don't know what evolves and I'm certainly not painting, you know, Dorothy and Kansas type picture of what it'll be. I'd imagine it's going to be massively, I mean, to call it an upheaval is the very least you could call of it, but I think it would become massively local because the only real way of protecting yourself from infection is kind of limiting the amount of, therefore, how do you do that? Okay, you kind of retreat. If you retreat, maybe nature gets a shot to come back. That sounds good. So I don't know what this looks like. I have no idea what it looks like, but I can feel it happening. And I'm not entirely sure that it's necessarily negative. After all, if we go back to the way things were, well, that's what got us here in the first place. And we will try and get back there. And as I think I've said elsewhere, I've huge sympathies for governments desperately trying to keep some money in people's accounts. And I think that'll go on for a while. And then at some stage it's going to be what, how many macroeconomists do we need? How do you stop yourself dying if you, if you get the next version of COVID, looks like it's a resilient, a resilient healthcare state. You know, am I fit? Am I well? Okay, change the diet. Not because you want to be, you know, a holier than thou vegan. It's just you don't want to die in hospital with tubes stuck into all over the place. So, so, so just, I don't know what it looks like. People think profits are people who, who prophesied the future. There's nothing to do with it. A profit is somebody who sees the present as it is, because it's always now. And the present as it is right now is the European central bank bailing out one of the, some of the largest polluting industries through their corporate bond buying. So what I invite people to see when they talk about what could the next green system be? Should it be green new deal? Should it be degrowth? Yeah. Actually look at what's already happening. What's already being agreed. Business as usual is being rebooted. So. But can it be rebooted? The disk is destroyed. Sorry? Sorry. You said, you said business as usual is being rebooted. You can't reboot business as usual when the hard disk drive is broken. Yeah, you can try. You can keep slotting in the old floppy disk. But you can keep doing it. I mean, let's inventing the more money. I hope you get to talk to people who talk to the European central bank because then it's just, they're just pouring money down the drain then, aren't they? And in that case. Yes. And no, because again, it's very important. Like what do you mean by money? You know, this was again a key part of what. Well, I can tell you what I mean is, is that they're creating money from nothing, which basically dilutes our relative spending power by buying in the number of billions corporate bonds. So, so we know that money is created by, by the banks for the issue. Yeah. But let's, let's, let's move on there to another. We've got Alexandra with a question, Alex. Can you undo your. Unreach your thingy microphone. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. How you doing? I'm saying hello from Edinburgh today. Oh, wow. Love Edinburgh. I want to just get a bit of understanding of what you were talking about when you're talking about lack of agency. Of course I like to believe maybe like all of us do, that we have some agency. And actually today, when I was cycling here, I remembered last weekend when I found myself walking in a park with a friend of mine who's a care worker. And because she was down and wanted to talk to someone. And it was hard to say no. And we were working. We were walking. Which was fine except because I've had the COVID-19 and I thought, oh, you know, I'm immune. I'm good. And yeah, I had it. Yeah, it was stage two. Nasi, Nasi, don't go there. I wouldn't recommend it. But I thought that I was immune. And then I found out from my flatmate that she'd been in touch with someone who'd had it. And then I found out actually you could still be shedding virus. So this idea was going through my head because I've made this decision not to break lockdown, go for a walk with my friend who's a care worker. People could die because of that. Or maybe I don't have it. Or maybe nothing will happen. But maybe also people seeing us walking would clock in and go, oh, it's OK now. We thought it was a lockdown. Things are loosening up. So I was struck with the idea that there's a viral, our actions have a viral nature to them. And that you can't say that for definite that something that you do will have this effect. But on the average, if you look at us sort of collectively, that it's going to have an effect. And I was just wondering if we apply the same things. What if we live more compassionately, less destructively? Truly, there is kind of just the balance that these ideas will be viral. Thank you, Alexandra. So I saw two parts of that question. One is, John, is the way you're being, speaking your own truth, is that infectious? And also this idea of being more compassionate and how people are thinking about what is the right action at the moment and how that can have ripple effects or viral effects. Well, if I'm absolutely honest, I think, Alexandra, it was a very beautiful description. And I think you probably know the answer better than I do. So I'm not going to give the answer, what my version of the truth is because I think you've articulated it far better than I could. I notice here in Belgium, it's so strange, the lockdown, so quiet, the gentle smiles amongst people, the clapping every night rather than just Thursday nights, the politeness and the beauty of people standing in queues, the occasional asshole who insists that he has to get to the front. But there is that deep for me. And I think what you're trying to, what you're trying to, what you beautifully articulated is this strange sense of a different sort of awe. I think it was Kiki D, as well as that awful number one at Elton John, she had this beautiful sound that spoke of the rainfall of another planet. And there's that feeling of experiencing the rainfall of another planet, of something opening up. And I think it's that opening and it's that seeing that is the genuine manifestation of what you're saying. You don't have to make it causal or linear. If we lived more, blah, blah, blah, it's just, wow. And then you see cat somebody's eye and you smile at them. This is you fumbling with your silly mask. And you know your relationship has changed. And I think maybe that's where we are. But I think you knew that already. Thank you, thank you, John. Yeah, that reminds me of when people discuss like Charles Eisenstein invites people to think about how we can sort of have ripple effects. But then other people say, well, it's just, it's just good to live in love and live kindly and openly and in awe anyway, no matter whether it's going to have a ripple effect, whether it's going to add up to some impact to somehow save humanity. It's just good to do anyway. Just on that one is clearly living without attachment. Attachment to outcomes is fun. I mean, it's just feeling the awe and being part of the wave. Catch the wave, feel it. Yeah. How come did you want most of the things I have specifically pursued in my life in terms of say energy efficiency directors. I've worked in all the stuff since 2005. I've been a climate obsessive. I've been involved in so many climate initiatives. I would say 100% of them have been, have done more harm than good. I'm utterly certain of that. Right. Everything that I did with an aim. It's interesting, isn't it? Because some people say that, that, that you really need to have a vision that in a strategy to work for that vision. Otherwise people won't get out of bed or won't stay focused or won't try to do things. And actually there's so much evidence that, that it's not about that. So the visions here is the heart. A vision of being how to be rather than what to achieve in future. We're coming to Paul. Paul, you've got a question for John. Yes, thank you. Thanks very much, John. Paul, how's it going? Hello. Yeah. In England, in these midlands. Oh, well. I'd like, you've obviously got a lot of experience of pressing into the resistances that people have in governments. And I'd like to explore your experience of what creates those resistances. So there's obviously a kind of elephant in the room factor, talking about collapse. Jen talked about, you know, those conversations that you will have in the corridor with individuals. But it can't be spoken or there's no place for it somehow in the boardroom or in the committee room. So what is it that's preventing that truth being told? I think my theory and you picked it up is, I think Newton's got something to do with it. I think it's about the enlightenment progress and all that. Very good. More to the point, what do you think is the solution? How do we break into that? What are the methods that you feel need to be deployed? In dialogue in government, what methods, environments, cultures need to be created to enable these conversations to happen in public? Excellent question. Bluntly, I think it's the wrong question. I think what happens and the response I tried to give to Alexandra's insight, which certainly wasn't a question, is that you start to feel it. It's there in front of you. There is a limitation to what we can do with our thinking minds. Another thing I put on my list of things that I wanted to talk to, when Gem sent me his list, was my dog's nose and my dog's sense of reality. I mean, if you ask my dogs how to solve all the problems of the world, they would say it's all about smell. Honestly, you just need to perfect your sense of smell. You just need to be a little bit better with your sense of smell. I mean, if I was able to ask my dogs how to make an iPhone, they would say the key is all the different, every single molecule in that iPhone has to have a very specific smell. Maybe this is even possible. You're even running the software. Maybe you would smell slightly different running different apps. As dogs to smell, humans to thought. Thought, there's nothing wrong with being a thinking being, and there's nothing wrong with being capable of abstract concepts and so on and so forth. But it's no more truth than a smell. It's one window on reality. Oh, I've had loads of thoughts today. Is it real? God knows. It's certainly it's certainly our interface and the way we function. But I don't think it's real. So in the sense that you're asking it, the notion of, could we just have slightly better facilitators in, you know, participate of working group. No, they're awful. The last time I went to another one of these meetings, it was one of these meeting climate meetings again. It was so earnest and so sincere. And now here are the best ideas and we want you to go up with little blue dots and put a blue dot against your favorite green dot against your second. I got so frustrated in the end. I started sticking dots on the back of people's heads. Like we're not getting there this way. So, but how do you get there? Straight enough, I was watching. I was watching something on a guy called Bodhidharma, who was the, who was an Indian. He was probably the 28th, 28th top man and one of the kind of Hindu sex. But he was the guy who introduced, who reintroduced about 500 AD, reintroduced Buddhist notions into China and out of which grew Zen and then moved. And so he's known as the first patriarch of the Chinese system. And his notion was like one in a million people get it, get it instantly or just to just get it. As I think Alexandra has, you're just gonna go, wow, okay, I kind of get it. But I'm not sure those words for it. And Bodhidharma's notion was you have to work like a son of a bitch to understand a pine. I don't think that works either. I'm reminded again of Lala's beautiful poetry where she says, Oh Lord, I have traveled so far in search of you. And it was only when I gave up and turned around, that you were beside me all the time. What did you have to travel? So I'm not sure there's an answer to that in words or as the first lines of the Tao De Jing say, the Tao that can be spoken isn't the Tao. That's very helpful. Sorry. I'm hearing an invitation to bring mysticism into the heart of bureaucracy. Is that me just trying to look for a theory of change again? But that's what you do. It's all right. It's like my dog. Oh God, I swear we could build an eye for it. If I could just smell one more bit. Okay. Maybe. I don't know. All right. You've given me a nice metaphor. Last month, we heard a bit of advice from sister Jan, Jayanti from Daddy Janki. He was a don't think that was one of her bits of advice. Don't think we're going to go to Deirdre. He's got a question for you. Hi, John. I'm in California, but I'm from. Fantastic. So it's Deirdre, not Deirdre. God help us. Can we ever train these English people? So I wrote my question for you during the week. It's not a very practical question about water. I just, you know, I'm always worrying about water. And with the coming drought, you know, the, you know, drought that they're being predicted for this, the Northern hemisphere for this summer. And of course, future summers. I'm baffled why people aren't capturing water in Europe. And here, but even. You know, I don't, is that happening? Are people planning for water shortages? I, it's, it's a really good question because it's one of the things that I would like people to spend more time doing. It's a bit like you go outside your front door and I like, what should I be doing to save the world? And you see maybe the little old lady in the apartment opposite kind of go on. Would you need anything from the shop? So it's kind of, can we just do what's right in front of us? I can honestly say that the countries, the two countries I know best, Belgium and Ireland are not planning for water shortages. They're probably planning for the river Shannon to be about 50 miles wide at this stage. As you know, and I don't know whether there's enough being done at this sort of local, I'd almost call it civil defense level. And it's something I've been arguing for a lot. Water is not a strong point, but let me give you something that I do know a little bit about. So heat spikes associated with wet bogs. So, you know, it's not a strong point, but let me give you something that I do know a little bit about. So heat spikes associated with wet bowl temperatures. So I've been desperate. My dog is barking at the door. He's telling me I'm talking too much. But anyway, but the, and in Brussels, two years ago, yeah, in Brussels, two years ago, we were within one degree and 20 percentage points relative humidity of having wet bowl temperatures, which would have theoretically resulted in thousands of people, particularly in old people's homes here, because we don't have air conditioning, two or 3% of houses have air conditioning dying of heat stress. So I've been trying to look with some friends. Listen, what could we do? You know, if we get wet bowl this year, which is quite likely given we'll have an El Nino and rapidly, you know, even more reduced Arctic sea ice. And now I have a situation where even if we get them into, you know, a lot of people, the communal buildings. Well, how does that work with social distancing? So, so these very, very practical problems, I think are precisely the things you, we should be looking at. Okay. Where does my food come from? How do I do? So my answer is, are people looking at it? Not systemically, I would say. Should you be looking at it? Absolutely go for it. And as much as you can, you never know when you see, and it's the thing you're passionate about that you managed so I know that's not a huge help, but it's as good as I can do. That's also brings us on to a broader topic, which is that. If we're beginning to see more and more severe impacts are from climate change on our own lives, and you've mentioned a couple. Where, where do we go? Where do we, or who do we ask to act? Is it just to ourselves? I mean, do we try and engage the European Commission? Do we try and engage our government, local government? Are there organizations that you know of that are, like really helping on the practical level? Again, my feeling is that the more local you can make it, the better. So one of the things I absolutely adore is, the, oh, the, what is it? True food. Oh God, I forgot my guy's name. The initiative in the starting out of the States. I've forgotten this, but he's one of the great nutritionalist sons who has, who's got this. So anyway, it's all about, you know, helping people particularly in the States and so on and so forth, grow, eat their own foods. My, my feeling is local is best. So that's been around for a while. Yeah. I see someone on the call here in the rest. She was very involved in still is in transition towns. Yes. Exactly. Of course it comes. How do you scale that? And obviously there's been such great difficulty just working locally and often, often. I'm just going to let my dog in or he will scale the door. Okay. So just two seconds. Yeah. As long as you bring it on camera. So, yeah. So this is something that actually Matthew Slater is working on as well with me, which is, yeah, the question is, is that, if, if we're going to sort of, can there be, what do we do if we want to help scale local action? Is there no possibility for government or European level action for actually sort of a, some kind of quantum leap in localization, including growing local food? It's, it's an, it's an absolutely, I mean, it is the question, isn't it? I mean, how do we scale the, how do we go from the good that I would? I do not the evil. I would not that I do. And how does, you know, you know, you're meeting lots of nice people. And at the minute you aggregated up, you seem to have this horrendous monolith. I have no answer to that question. And I actually feel that it's possibly the wrong question to be asking. And, you were talking earlier about, you know, the interface that I have to power. And I've been, I have been very close to serious centers of power. Never have I met such powerless people, people who are entirely and absolutely the product of the, of the box. In fact, they're not even the product of the box. They make up the four corners of the box. They are the box. And I feel, I mean, I probably shouldn't say this, but when I look at someone like Donald Trump, I feel nothing but pity. This, this sad, pathetic man, obviously living the trial. I mean, I think he's bad just to see his father, apparently he was a 24 carat, bad person. So, you know, like if I had access to Donald Trump, could I change everything? I don't think so. Yeah. Of course it's not one access, would you want me to have, if I get the Pope to write a speech? Yeah. Would that work? So this then becomes a, we're going to come on to Matt Osmond then, we're going to have a final question for us. How you doing, Matt? Actually, this question's been preempted by others. So I think I'm just asking you to circle back on the same thing now. But I came here with a question in my mind, having watched your YouTube interview, the recent COVID related YouTube interview. And I was really struck by what you said about agency and how, how this pandemic has achieved, you know, like a kind of bullet point plan to fulfill all of Greta, Greta's demands. But no agency seemed possible of doing it. But rather than, for me, rather than framing it as we, we're realizing we have no agency. It seems to me it's more about getting better at naming where our agency lies and what we do have agency over. Beautiful. That to me, the whole of XR's work for me just seems about this regenerative work as communities of actually realizing we do have a choice here about how we live. It doesn't mean that I think that it's going to slow the climate. I just wondered if you had any, anything to say about that? I agree with you 100% feel your articulation of the point was far superior to mine. Thank you. Right. It was interesting, Matt, as well, you're saying that, yeah, so it's the way that XR organized has organized, particularly at local level, which is inspiring and meaningful for you rather than necessarily the way it seeks to interface with political power. That's what I think. I think a lot of people I talked to, and it seemed to share that view that it feels very problematic if you take it too literally, as if it really was going to do this or that. But when you look at how it's functioning in towns and villages and cities and communities across the world now, something really quite magical is happening there, something important. I would put in only one caveat. I'm good friends with Alison Green as well, who I'm sure has appeared on this. And in fact, I think Alison was at the same, at the same meeting as Jim was and maybe even prior to that. And I am massive admirer of XR and anyone who can organize anything together in any sort of way. It's wonderful. But I'm also quite aware of my own, you know, limitations and the character I carry through this existence, which is one of a kind of a semi-permanent outsider, which is okay too. You do need John the Baptist outside the gate screaming and shouting. I would probably be a lousy activist. I'd be fighting with everyone about everything all the time. And you have to kind of accept that. Like I said, we all have our roles. Maybe it's empowering the next person. Maybe it's just sort of saying, wow, that's really interesting. Glad I'm not him, but I'm good to organize something. That's all, all that's good. I, I, I do, however, claim exceptionalism for me and for absolutely everybody else. Do, do what feels good and do it, you know, and, and, and, and live it and let the others live too. Thank you for that, John. And I think that's also circles back to this issue because of, whether we can have this rather difficult outlook on the future, but also still stay creative, engaged, present to what's happening. Keep trying different things. Some people think we're defeatist, but, but I, I discover so much energy and creativity from people who do have quite a, a dark view of what's, what's, what's happening and what's to come. But they still stay present to it. And I think XR is all about that too. At least it was to begin with very much, you know, we are screwed, but we're going to do as much as we can. Yes. So thank you, John, and thank you everyone for joining. It was my immense pleasure. Thank you and thanks for all the effort yourself. And of course the incomparable Matthew Slater.