 This is an Inside Jerry's Brain Call on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019, the day after April Fool's Day. So everything we say today has to be factual. Yesterday was the day of skepticism on the internet, which is rare, because mostly everybody buys everything that gets said. So here we are. And I was just saying that next week, April and I are going to be at a conference called the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, hosted by the CU Boulder, Colorado University at Boulder. And it's all volunteer. Nobody pays the speakers. And you get put on a lot of things, some of which are in your sweet spot and some of which are not. And everybody knows, okay, good, you know, you're not an expert in this thing, but we just want to hear what you have to say. So April and I are each on about eight panels, plus a couple other events. And before going, once we were accepted as speakers, we were asked what topics would you like to talk about. And on those topics I put on there, something like today's topic for this call. And it turns out that I'm on a couple of panels. Of my eight, two of them are about gender and women's issues and things like that. So I'm very happy about that. So in some sense, this call, it's a little bit of prep and just turning the soil for me for what should I say next week? And then, Judy, as you just said, I think maybe there's a really good opportunity to sort of have a revisit the topic afterward and see what came out of it and what we've all thought about in between and so forth. So I think it's a great idea. Thank you. Relatively stable group of participants in this conference over the years or how do people find out about it and attend? So it's sort of rare to be re-invited a lot. So we're very happy, you know, they like us, we get high ratings, et cetera. So they've invited us back and we're a twofer because, you know, we've roomed together, come together. The way we even know about it and got into it is that we have dear friends who live in Boulder. The woman and the couple is part of the organizing committee for CWA and she proposed us. And so three years ago, they said, yes, and that was our first year doing it. So we stayed with this couple while we're in Boulder, which is fantastic because we get quality time with them. We get to be in Boulder in the spring and we get to, you know, mix and mingle with all these people. But the crowd of speakers, the hundred speakers they invite, shifts around considerably year to year. And there's a couple people, there's a fellow who used to be the chief creative director for Cirque du Soleil. He gets invited back almost every year. They have a jazz festival, Porninken. They have a bunch of other things that are kind of repeat events. One night is a big, you know, jazz performance in the auditorium, et cetera, et cetera. They used to have Molly Ivins show up regularly until she passed. So now they sort of honor her, but she was a regular at this event and added a touch of humor and sort of cynical observation of the world during it. So it's pretty interesting. Great. Cool. And they have a free app. They have an app so you can see all the speakers and all the stuff and I was just, you know, looking through all the, all the different sessions and you can see bios of all the speakers and what other panels each of the speakers is on, et cetera, et cetera. Last year, they poured the data into the app like an hour before the whole event started. This, this year it's all set and ready to go now. So if you install the CWA app, which is free, you can sort of see what's going on and track it. I don't think they live stream very much. They do publish some of the videos later, but they haven't really published any of the sessions that April and I have been on. So that's one of one of the things I want to make sure somehow happens is that they, because April was on a panel about grief last year that was really phenomenal. And I was on a panel about storytelling. That was phenomenal where I made a friend who is an Irish storyteller with a beautiful accent who really who goes around the world telling stories. And in a very beautiful way, stories taken from many deep cultures. So part of what Jean was saying, and as we were just hanging out waiting for everybody to show up was. And I think this is interesting in terms of the topic we're heading into is that, you know, how much of this is data and how much of this is story. What do we do, but let me let me frame, let me take five minutes to frame me too is a men's problem is men's problem so that we can kind of dive in. I find it tragically ironic that one of the world's most notorious bullies and misogynists is currently president of the United States. It blew my mind as it happened. I think that the two year cycle of the election process. Broke a lot of things certainly broke a lot of norms in this country which then trickled across the rest of the world for what can be said in public what is acceptable behavior, what things you can get by with get away with whatever. It also in interesting ways cracked open. I think helped crack open the conversation about me to and others other kinds of things I think that that in some sense it broke enough things that through those cracks energy that had been suppressed was making its way through as well. You may you may. And I don't know that I feel strongly about that in that particular narrative about me to because me to is every now and then these these things sort of surge anyway these are. We're sort of living with a series of wounds or traumas that until we actually deal with them properly keep bubbling up over and over again. And the quality of all people is sort of a big umbrella for some of those wounds. We have their racism and slavery we have their, you know, the disaster humanitarian disaster of what happened to Native American Native American peoples and indigenous tribes around the world, etc etc. And the more we ignore these things the more they faster and then now and then that pot bubbles over so to speak. So. So I'm going to this conference and I have a couple panels that are about women's issues so in some sense. I thought of this topic partly as prep for it. I was also struck by the Kavanaugh hearing and I posted I'll put the post here. But I wrote a post during the Kavanaugh hearings like right after the day of testimonies. In which I basically said, gosh, I, you know, after hearing Blasey Ford's testimony in the morning I was like, wow. And then the moment Kavanaugh started my first thought was, well, okay, I guess he's given up on ever getting this nomination and being on the Supreme Court, he's just going to rant. And I, I, I mistook. I didn't realize that some people saw his anger as righteous indignation for having his name besmirched and that that was just fine. There was also another agenda behind the scenes, which was there were a whole bunch of people desperate to get him on the court to balance politics and so on and so forth and they were willing to overlook pretty much anything and run over anybody. So that's a separate agenda. But I think that the Kavanaugh hearing really put a lot of this in front of us because the testimony was so vivid and a lot of this is really coming out. I will, I will add that one of my beliefs is that violence against women and girls is epidemic and way under reported and is a real problem everywhere. It's also institutionalized and systemic. And one of the problems, of course, is that when you report things, it's a career limiting move. So that's, you know, that's a, that's not a good thing. There's a, there's a group called gender Avengers started by Gina. Oh heck, what's your last name. I'll get it in just a second. Gina Glance who used to be at SCIU she was basically Andy Stern's lieutenant at SCIU retired out of SCIU. And then her original thought with gender Avengers was what if there was a network of ladies of a certain age who don't have any career threat over them if they speak up who would be available to help defend and protect represent backup younger women who were facing these kinds of issues. That was the original idea behind gender Avengers. What it turned into was an organization focuses on gender balance at conferences. So the thing they've done a reasonable job of is creating like a hall of fame and a hall of shame for conferences and there's an app in the app store you can install on your phone where you can look at the conference schedule for any conference you attend. Count the number of men and women type it in, submit it, and then the ones that are well balanced get go into the hall of fame. The ones that are terrible get shamed in some sense, which is, which is great. But, but I loved Gina's original, original goal for the network, like how do we back people who need the backing. But then again, and this comes back to the topic, the wording of the topic for this call, like why should women be defending what like men are the problem. So, like, why is this up to women to create a network to defend where, etc, etc, like, much as I liked Gina's, Gina's thing it's like, no, no, no, there's another problem, a deeper bigger problem going on here. And then I'll say just, I grew up, I grew up as an expat child of an American executive in Peru in Argentina. And my, my, my dad was really interesting. He was a man's man, without ever being a macho man, which is really interesting, meaning he taught me how to shoot. And he's the load his own ammo taught me how to shoot weapons and gun safety taught me carpentry. We built a little model of a, of a catch he wanted to own, but never got to own a whole bunch of like, manly men sort of things, and never boys don't cry. Nothing, nothing bad about women ever, etc, etc, etc, none of that, which was I find sort of weirdly unusual. And despite that, and through my experiences with boys and men in the world, I grew up ashamed of men. I grew up, I grew up not really liking men very much, making better friends with, with girls and women. And I grew up never wanting to like, drink heavily to get drunk and go, you know, join a frat and do whatever I like that whole lifestyle just repelled me. And, and I found it interesting, I just sort of absorbed that somehow and kept going, I will pause because Judy has raised your hand, please. Well, I wanted to run a couple of ways. I could certainly go on at length as a person who's now out of system. Judy, I don't know if it's me or you got or you, but your connection is breaking up and with impact. Shoot. Judy, my apologies. Probably my connections on the table. I've closed all the other windows. Okay, your, your image is frozen and your voice is coming in and out. So I'm afraid I might ask you to restart your comments. But if you'll start again and speak slowly, we'll probably hear you. Hey, John, welcome to call. I'll try again. I was going to say that one of the most impactful things I've seen recently is some major scientific societies, actively stepping into the ring, publishing policies about appropriate behaviors of all types, not only about women, but all diversity, holding seminars at scientific meetings about that. It was kind of led by the American Society of Geology and AIP, which is physics picked up on it, ACS is picked on it. And they're starting to be international discussions about international codes of behavior and processes to address. And societies, some of them are excluding people from membership if the investigation verifies the inappropriate behavior at national meetings, for instance. The panelists that have been helped have included men and women, and these have been packed rooms with a lot of occasionally not mostly genuine questions from men about how you really, you know, it's like somebody will say, well, isn't it okay to say one looks nice, you know, and depends on how that's received. And so women in the audience and panelists responded with suggestions of appropriates to approach the topic to be clear. Examples being don't say you look nice, they blue is a great color for you. It's a different kind of comment, or is it all right if I comment on how nice you look or something of that order. So I think there are examples. But I think looking at some of those larger institutions might offer good suggestions for people to explore. Love that. Thank you, Judy. Anybody else with with comments around codes of conduct and things like that. I just say, I've noticed in the last couple of years, there's a very interesting phenomena around age. So a lot of the older men in my life are kind of like, Oh, me too, he's soon you'll be able to say, you know, just what Judy said you will say give a woman a compliment. It's going to be seen as sexual harassment. And younger men seem to have a much different take on that that they understand the difference between a compliment and harassment. So it's very intriguing to me what is it about this gender thing that is so different among the older generation. Maybe it's the way that we were brought up and inherited things from our parents, particularly our fathers. But I have noticed that among younger men in my life, there is a much finer shade of gradation around what constitutes harassment versus what constitutes a compliment. It's very interesting. Joe Biden is facing a little thunderstorm around that this very moment, right. It's, he's kind of a touchy feely sort of guy, very huggy and it's, it's like, not working at all. I don't like his policies, but whatever but but he's he's currently being sort of drawn and quartered for being a little too intimate with people. Sorry, it's very interesting. I think there's an interesting conversation to be had here about what it what is the lot where do we draw the lines and what is the line. And in particular, a thing that that I don't know how to talk about is we're in a society where this kind of a vigilante mode with you know off with his head or her head is the response to a lot of things. When some when somebody goofs somewhere like where they fired was their career destroyed where they sent out to the wilderness, as opposed to could we sit down and have a conversation about what broke make sure it doesn't break again learn from it, and did this person learn, in which case maybe they can go back in and you know keep doing stuff but but I think that the more the stakes go up on these incidents bubbling over the less people are going to be forthcoming about trying to be helpful the less the conversations going to happen about all these kinds of things you know once once execution is the way these things are handled. Nobody's going to volunteer to step up and say hey I did X or hey I did why Doug did you want to jump in. Yeah, I mean this is a very difficult conversation. Having to do with human nature and what we want to be as a species and how we want to live with each other. I find it very unsatisfying because the tendency in the current situation is for people just to withdraw from each other, which doesn't seem to me good. I grew up in New York City in a fairly kind of Protestant severe culture. Now they lived in Mexico for a few years and learned to be totally different. In Mexico you learn to touch everybody. It just is what you do it's the way things are and I've learned it well enough that I know back in the States. I can touch people all the time. I'm not aware of it and I've never had a negative reaction to it people just accept that it's in the context of being friendly and being supportive. The issues of what teenage sexuality should be like. Some teenage grandchildren and they seem to be fine with what's happening. But I think they're much more detached from each other and sexuality than my generation was. All of which is to say you know I don't have a position about this except it's a really difficult conversation. Yeah, thanks Doug and I'd like to I want to sort of gently take us toward what should we actively do and we meaning men in particular we as a society as well but we meaning men can go ahead. Thanks Doug for bringing up culture. I was in France two years ago working with a mining company which in honor of International Women's Day they wanted to do some work around women and inclusion. And we developed a process using a lot of post-its of asking people different questions about their perception as well as their reality and had to do with men's advantages in the workplace and women's disadvantages. And it was very lopsided deal the men had all the advantages women had almost no advantages and men had very few disadvantages one had huge disadvantages. And there was never in either France or Belgium when we did this work. Anybody mentioned anything about what we would call harassment here and I pointed that out and they said Ken you're in France. We can do stuff here that we land you in jail in the United States. You know it's very different in France and Belgium in terms of how they hold sexuality and women in terms of interaction between men and women than it is here in the U.S. or Canada or Asia is very different as well. So it's a very messy, messy thing and I think you know my experience I'll try to extrapolate from my experience over the groups to a larger scale of it comes down to setting norms. You know in the when we have unconscious assumptions bumping up against each other and creating that kind of huge reactivity. That's the time to say well what actually is okay what and what works for you and how can we make this work for everybody and what is okay and what's off limits and then let's get agreement about that and have permission to be clumsy because for some people to be a new learning and so they're not going to get it immediately. So give them the grace to say I'm trying you know rather than you screwed up and off with your head because that whole thing as Jerry points out just leads to total breakdown. Yeah I'm really I'm really displeased with the off with their head culture I think that and this goes way beyond me to issues this goes you know to the Boeing 737 Max problem and whether who you know who is to blame for two airplanes just going down and good weather. Because there might have been a software plus a policy glitch like there's going to be a hunt for for the guilty and there's the conversation is stifled because it's a hunt for the guilty and we know what happens to those guilty. Although gotta say it's a lot different from back in the days when the king would actually say I mean we're using off with his head metaphorically here back in the day it was actually not such a metaphor. You know it occurs to me kind of the compliment to your design from trust conversations is restorative versus punitive justice. Yes on the flip side of that is when people do make mistakes when there are severe consequences do we look for learning and and you know holding people accountable and giving them the opportunity to to make some kind of reconciliation move. Or do we just punish them as as harshly as possible. I don't know if you ever seen it was a night which details the evolution of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It's really a fascinating documentary. Does it look like this one. Yes it does and that's yeah it's 20 years ago. I thought it was a little more recent but yes. And I'm a huge fan of Truth and Reconciliation in fact one of my ideas is to create a norm or a practice or even an institution don't know where corporations could invoke TNR commissions around something they've done as a way of clearing the skeletons in their closet. So here's here's here's that idea. What if we use TNR for relations between communities and companies. Right. So this would be a way for a company to say hey we've been doing acts and we know it's not good. We'd like to not lose the company and be driven bankrupt and be put in jail for it but we'd like to make amends and fix it and do whatever how do we go about doing that. And there is no there is no thing like that right what you get is the VW diesel gate problem where it just gets buried and then everybody has to kind of go with it until it shows up. And it goes into public view or PG&E let's start with PG&E you know. So I've got a thought for scandals I've got presidential scandals sex scandals business scandals financial scandals political scandals. So here's businesses behaving very badly. Over protecting IP is its own category. Etc etc etc. And this idea of skeletons in the closet which I should connect. I should connect to what if we had TNR commissions there we go. And from this earlier when I said we had some buried trauma. I kind of think about that as ghost ghosts in our past that we haven't dealt with so. There's a really nice and I'm borrowing this from an interesting book titled ghosts of Spain. That's about Spain which basically when Franco died and Juan Carlos took over and reinstated the regular democracy. The quid pro quo was basically everybody was quiet. There was that they were nobody was to speak about what happened nobody was to look into it until years later they started finding mass graves. They really started bubbling over. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program which is about like what should men do and one thing that I think is really interesting as a as a thing to do is being a good ally. And this comes I think more out of race relations than gender relations but I think it applies everywhere. A bunch of things about being a good ally but you know learning to be a good ally. I think is an important thing to do here's the selfish activists guide to ally ship. Here's another guide to ally ship I've got you know some of these resources I can I can share with us, but I think that's a that's one kind of answer. I'm interested in what else what else comes to mind for everybody. One of the things that strikes me about this conversation is the polarity between men and women, which is a very low level of diversity since men come in all sorts of strikes and women come in all sorts of spots. Isn't the social issue that the normal boundaries that we grew up with as children are breaking down. And we're getting a porosity between identities among identities, which creates his own problem because people don't quite know what to do and who they are. And that's where I think the issue is is that the the old frozen identity of masculine and feminine to hardly exist anymore. That's really interesting because gender gender has become a big issue identity politics is the weaponization of these issues, you know for politics for political purposes. But there is a lot a lot broader grayscale or a lot broader spectrum of gender identity than they used to be, at least in the public conversations, so I agree. So another thing I'm going to throw in here is the idea of identity politics has been seen by some as a marketing opportunity for corporations with identity products, especially clothes. And it's a distraction from the key issues of our time, which have to do with the breakdown of governance, automation and climate change. And so we're all going around doing identity politics and destroying each other. Gene is raises hand, go ahead. You said one of our greatest learning disabilities is our belief that the problem is out there. And Covey said that true productivity begins when we realize the extent to which we are part of the problem. So rather than, you know, looking outward and talking about all these other things that are the problem, begin with self and say, how is it that I am contributing to the problem and not contributing to the solution. Thank you. Do you want to add any stories or context to that just for for us here. I mean, I get that and and I think that a lot of the willingness to talk about these issues comes from people who don't see themselves as propagating these things very much but probably are in different ways. I want to be aware of that. But I'm interested in where you would take this. When we look in the mirror we see what we want to see. Okay, we believe ours about ourselves what what we want to believe. And, and if you really care about understanding the extent to which you may be part of the problem. You need, you need a true mirror, which is the people around you. You have to be able to ask questions to find out the things that you can't see. I, I once found myself responsible for a group of about 50 people who were proposal writers and editors and graphics designers. And, and there were things going on in the organization that that I needed to understand. And they wouldn't tell me. So, one day, being relatively courageous, I got the group managers in a conference room and said, Okay, I would like you to make a list. I want you to do a SWOT analysis of me. The things I'm doing that contribute to things that I'm doing to get in the way the things that I need to do better than you say, need to stop doing. And I'm leaving. When I come back the only, I will not argue with any of the comments. I will not seek to understand whose comments they are. I will only ask questions to help me understand if there are aspects of it that I don't realize. Probably the longest 30 minutes of my life being gone wondering what the hell are they saying. They didn't believe me. And the feedback that I got was relatively reserved. But there were some things that that I could understand about the organization and things that were happening between people. And I posted the results on the wall outside. Well, I didn't have an office. I had a desk in the middle of the floor. And I posted it on the wall and I said, I will work on this. And I actively worked on it so that they understood that I was working on it. And three months later, when we did it again, the feedback was much more honest. Getting to a point where it was almost brutal. Though it was a way to actually have these people better understand each other by focusing on me. And me to understand things that I could never get them to tell me directly because they felt it wasn't safe. And to date of the hundreds of people that I have described this to, I've only found one with the courage to do it. In an organization. There's just too much fear of what people might say about them. So in terms of using that approach to find out things that you might be contributing to the problem. There's an approach that I have repeatedly used and it's just marvelous. Even though I think that often the people closest to us are often bought into identity or we have too long-term relationship with them that hasn't been dealt with or whatever. So I'm wondering how that might break. I have a feeling my connection is not very good right now. Yeah, my apologies. Judy, you had raised your hand. Yes, I think that one of the most impact things that I've observed is when a man and a quiet, calm voice speaks up in an uncomfortable situation. It may just be I'm not comfortable with the behavior that I'm seeing in this room today. And someone will explore that and it will lead to a calm discussion because it was broached fairly neutral. And it was broached with ownership by the individual. So I think if we're talking about this individual and their opportunity to influence culture, private and public conversations in a respectful exploratory way and viewing with a different perspective can be really, really constructive. Much more so than a woman because it's automatically puts the person we're on in a defensive position unless you've become very skilled at delivering 40 or 50 years on that at it. So that's something women could do is teach other women how to address the situation as well. But one of the things that I observed recently and it was in and around the hearings that I think might have mentioned even in an article. There was there were the hearings of the men just couldn't believe that this was happening. No, he had been that no, so he did the replay and women in the room explain a different reality to him, which then led a gay man and root to explain his assault and the difficulty of being at the time. So it can be very humanizing and powerful if people can speak authentically individually about something. Judy, your voice was clipping in and out a little bit more toward the beginning. So maybe next time you speak up, if you'll mute your video while you speak, that'll probably give you enough bandwidth that we hear all of your audio and then you can come back on video. But I think we got much of what you said. I also wanted to this is go there was this article about how any way parents raise their kids without yelling and teach them to control anger. And one of the principles of Inuit child rearing is don't ever shout or yell at small children. So what they do instead is they talk about the episode later and they use kind of dramas to describe better behavior. But what's what's interesting is that the Inuit see losing your temper as a major, major bad thing to do that self control is important and you never do anything in anger. And I think that's an interesting and profound thing to be that deep in a culture, right, that their form of discipline is actually storytelling. They tell stories and they have the kid, they'll have the kids do something that has some sort of repercussions and they'll say, well, why are you doing that? Do you want to do more of it? How do I feel about it? They'll talk through it in that way but calmly. So I think I think calm and safety are really important here and we're in a society at a moment where there's very little of either. John, any thoughts? Do you want to just whatever's whatever's on your mind from from where we are? This is a very difficult subject because not only is it you need to make sense, you need to have a lot of understanding and experience. And also for somebody like me who was born in the 60s brought up in the 70s, it is a kind of a minefield by meaning well, you can kind of say the wrong thing while you're trying to navigate. But I want to come back just to help me understand we've got a group of people here today. It's that your point, Jerry, where you say, what does we men can do about this? What I struggle with at the moment is it's human nature is on a continuum and we have bad people at one end and say good people at the other, whatever label you want to attach to that. I'm going to keep it simple about them good or with intentions. And it's the same with sexuality. There are men who are predators. No matter what you say or how you try and change their behavior, it's as if the brain is wired that way. I'm not going to use the word brain damage or mentally ill for the sake of this argument, but they are different. Many times it's nothing to do with their upbringing or life chances or their education or a stable family or a lack of a family or childhood abuse or trauma. It's just in that instance they are predators. And then if you start to move further up that scale, you enter the realms of horror films, of nightmare, of men that not only abuse children, they will inflict pain and harm them and murder them for sexual gratification. Nobody can understand why that is. I would regard that as mental illness. So the next thing is to say, well, what do we do in a society is we put those people into a prison and try and rehabilitate them. But if a man is inclined to do that to children, let's forget the sadistic pedophile. There are men who will say, well, I just love children and you do that but you don't have sex with them. That's different. And that's how I see this argument to say, well, imagine trying to have a conversation with that person, a person which you can't really better look at because of what they've done. And then a man who is just to say, see, this is where it gets difficult, well, a low level predator. See, they're all predators. You either have good manners, you are polite or you're not. How do you have that conversation when, in my opinion, to date, I feel that you can't change somebody or rehabilitate them when they are of that disposition. This brings to mind, for me, the idea of the bell curve that on either end of the spectrum, there's people who are not going to budge from their position for whatever reason, whether it's the way they've been conditioned, brain damage, mental illness. But there's also the vast middle, which is where we have to have the conversation to set the norms. And oftentimes, people in the middle who demonize those folks at the end, you have to watch out, there are really bad people and we have to protect ourselves against them, gain an inordinate amount of power through the use of fear tactics. There's this great quote from Solzhenitsyn that I've often used in the bottom of my emails in the past, if only it were so simple, if only there were evil people off somewhere doing evil deeds and all that was necessary was to separate them from the rest of us. But the line between good and evil runs through everyone's heart and who among us is going to cut off a piece of our heart. So how do we maintain compassion for the people who are never going to fit into a social mold where we would want them to be around children or women or anybody because they're dangerous and not act towards them punitively and not allow the fear of them to color our relationships with the rest of humanity, the people that we love and care for, that we want to be in good relationship with and create ways to be in good relationship with. It's very naughty, very messy. There's lots of interacting things that are hard to see and have kind of delays and stuff. But I come back to, you know, I think having the conversation is really important. Gene, I really appreciate your point earlier about working within. So in my case, it was getting married that really woke me up to a lot of my bad behaviors. I have a strong wife who said, hey, you don't get to do that, you know? And, man, I learned the first 10 years of being together with this woman taught me so much about my shortcomings and my conditionings and how I would often put her down to make me feel bigger, you know? And that was really not okay. But it was an adaptive strategy from my youth that had to be gotten rid of. And, you know, she's like, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, but you can't do that shit anymore, right? So, and we can't marry everybody off, but I think there's a lot to be said for that of having someone in your life who loves you and cares about you and says, this is very immature. This is something that does not, will not stand. We can't keep doing this and you need to find a different way. And, you know, in the presence of that, you can see great flowering, you know? And in the absence of that, you can see great withering. So, you know, how do we create those kinds of relationships among people where it's, it doesn't have to be your romantic partner or spouse, but that kind of community where men can go, all right, I'm going to walk into a lion's den filled with women and be yourself for a little while and give them permission to give me feedback without getting defensive. Be an interesting social experiment. I think what we're talking about right now would be a good up keto practice. Basically, you know, how do we get better at improving the things around us? Part of this is listening to others and helping each other let go of things we're doing that don't really actually work. A bit back to what John was saying, my own belief system is that trauma is actually pervasive and institutionalized throughout society and that most things, most of us are sort of carrying some sort of trauma because the system has incorporated and absorbed a lot of automatic ways of inflicting trauma on us, but I also believe that a bunch of evil is convertible. I think that John, I think that the people around that spectrum of good and evil almost at a moment's notice and that some people have these things so burned into their neural paths that they're effectively sociopaths and I'm unsure of how you reach them or whether you can reach them. So I get that, but I think that for a whole lot of people, the things that they do that are provocations that are insults that are attacks are often prized for help and here we get into sort of cliche territory of how trauma is being seen sometimes in society. But I think that many people are sort of switchable to a different path and I'll share here a documentary I watched on Netflix recently called Right, Right, Meeting the Enemy where Dia Khan, who was basically, she's Pakistani who, Pakistan basically didn't work for her and she was having to leave the country, tried to go to New York and do what she was doing before, that didn't really work. And then she ends up doing this documentary where she, a woman of color with a camera and I think maybe one sound man, maybe not, goes into places where alt-right people are at a shooting range, basically practicing their weapons for when the military come to take their weapons away or whatever and makes friends with a lot of them. To the point where later in the documentary, the one guy who's like the spokesman for this white nationalist movement is like, well, no, you're my friend and she's like, but people like me should leave the country, right? And he's like, yes. And she says, does that include me? And he's like, well, yes, but you're different. But you can actually see the people she's talking to with great empathy but really poking, I mean, she's asking very hard questions. You can see them wrestling with the questions and softening. So this documentary gave me hope that there's actually ways to shift people in where they are and that a lot of the positions we've gotten into in society are largely because of things we haven't actually dealt with that dealing with some of these issues might reduce the number of people who feel isolated, hated, victimized, whatever, whatever. So for me, the answer often is compassion and reaching out and connecting with others and listening to them. And first listening hard and then offering alternate paths that make more sense. Doug, go ahead. Yeah, I'm struck by the possible hidden assumption in the conversation that strong action is bad and calm is good. Is that the model for the future for humanity we want? Could we live with it? What are the consequences? I'm going to add that to the record. Anybody want to tackle that? I don't see it as an either or. I think there's times when strong action is necessary and times when calm is appropriate also. Judy, do you want to jump in? I would just say that I agree with Ken. I think require strong action. Not necessarily anger for say, but strong action and others lend themselves to private conversations or thoughtful discussions. So it's kind of not black and white from my perspective. Yeah. And I think some interventions that are sharp, by which I don't mean violent, but that are more shocking or strong, that I think would fall under what you might think of as a strong intervention really work and can be very, very, very different. Sometimes you have to be gold into a situation. So one of the things I love about the old world of text adventure games and text interaction is that just plain old ASCII text masks a lot of the identity information about people that we see here because we're on video with each other. And two kids might be playing a game where they compete against each other and learn to respect each other and then realize that one is an Israeli and one is a Palestinian or whatever. But they build some kind of bond before they discover other aspects of self. I think that's interesting. And then the video that Ken put here earlier, I think is the video where first people stand in boxes in a set and the box is their external classification. Over here the people of color, over here the women, over here the whatever. And I forgot what the boxes were. People have been their whole life, the immigrants, those who grew up in the country, those who've never seen a cow, you know, and they're all, yeah. And they're all kind of standing in boxes like, well, okay. And then the host starts asking questions. It says everybody who hasn't known where they were going to get a meal on any particular day, please step forward to the wall. And people step out of all the boxes and go to the wall. People step out of every box and go to the wall and look at each other like, hmm, how about that? And a whole lot of sort of tough questions like that come up. And the whole exercise is one of, hey, look, we have a lot more in common than we don't. And this is the famous saying from Joe Cox, the minister of parliament, who was stabbed to death a couple of years ago. I think as part of this movement that we're talking about, this sort of outrage over gender and politics and, you know, who gets to do what to whom. You know, Jerry, there's another piece you mentioned, the word sociopath earlier, and anybody who's seen the corporation, the documentary, the corporation, you know, they take the DSM and they look at corporate behavior through the lens of, you know, are these sociopathic behaviors? And they are. So many, I'm not going to come out and say that the sea suites of corporations are filled with sociopaths, but they're filled with people who are acting in sociopathic ways. And I think that gives permission for a lot of the behavior that we see that is unacceptable, that is antithetical to creating the kinds of quality relationships where people really care for each other. And instead, they're objectified, they're dehumanized. And so that's another layer in this, you know, it was very interesting to me as you started this conversation that the world's biggest Boolean misogynist is President of the United States. And yet Harvey Weinstein was knocked out of power. And, you know, the list is long of guys who've been knocked down by accusations. And why does this one guy have the ability to stand up there and not be touched by all of this? What is going on there is a really interesting question to me. And his, the power of his office grants legitimacy to so much that is just abhorrent in my mind. And how can we have conversations with people who are supportive of that in ways that help them to see something different? And there's this quote that I heard attributed to Gandhi, but I've never been able to find it by Googling the quote to see if it's related to Gandhi. But I love the quote and it's, your greatest ally is the part of your opponent that knows what is right. And if you work from that, then when you look at someone who is an opponent and Gandhi did use opponent rather than enemy, you know, because he saw opponent as opposition as you need to move left and right together, right? Opposition works to move things forward or backwards or whatever. So if we look at people who have differing perspectives as opponents rather than enemies and ask ourselves, what's the part of them that knows what is right? That the part of me knows what is right? That the reason and how can I craft questions and evoke that from them so that really opens things up? That's really different than coming in and trying to persuade them of the rightness of our position. And it's probably the hardest thing I know. I really struggle with this one. It's very, very challenging because I get hurt emotionally, you know, and my brain freezes. But every now and then I'll get a little clarity on my question and something will open. And it's like, wow, this is quite amazing. So, you know, that's enough keto practice, I believe. Yeah. And part of the strategy of nonviolent social action is to peacefully provoke the other side into doing things that are so heinous that everybody looking feels shame for them and feels like this needs to stop. This is not right. But intentionally, you know, walking over the Pettus Bridge or the salt march to the sea that Gandhi leads or whatever, just doing things that will, that the other side needs to not let happen. But in the not letting it happen in the violent intervention, bring shame. Basically cause that part of all of us that knows what's right. I love that saying to show up a bit and then make and then do something about it. And I love the Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail where he says, look, a lot of people on my side of this are saying, hey, you're moving too fast. This is not the right time. We need to be calm. And he sort of comes back and he says it's never the right time. We, you know, we could wait forever. We've been told to wait over and over again. It's really never the right time. Let's get this right. Let's figure out how this works. Judy, the floor is yours. I just was. Can you can you meet your video as you're speaking. Right. Get that help. Yes. I was struck by Ken's comment about the application of DSM three to an institution and having led a corporate life in a relative humane corporation. I'm uncomfortable with generally classifying stations, but I think the idea of applying DSM principles to all sorts of institutions would be really helpful because there's a lot of undesirable culture here in many institutions, especially ones of longstanding in history who are reluctant to change what they've done before and somehow finding a way to introduce that extension. That questioning. The best way I think to invoke change is to explore. Why are we doing this? This way is there a better way to do it. And sometimes that allows a shift, but I think there's a lot of approaches, but I'd be interested to actually consider other engines in addition to corporations, whether they're commercial service delivery systems, educational systems, we could pick any number, but looking at the cultural behaviors and the enablement of undesirable behaviors. Judy, I've been reading a bunch of things lately from different that came in from different for three different portals kind of, but that had a common theme, which was that capitalism, neoclassical economics, capitalism, and all these sort of things that go together are sort of like a human who's had the moral part of their brain just taken out and then sent out into the world to go do stuff. And that the institutions. Yeah, that was that it. That was it. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. I, based on the last inside Jerry's brain call, I had written a blog post around abundance and how much time we spent talking about scarcity and it reminded me that in a book called the general theory of love and the authors explored the limbic system, which is what separates us from reptiles. It's, you know, what allows us to have to love each other. And so they make a really provocative statement towards the end of the book that says corporations are essentially giant neocortexes coupled directly to society's brainstem. There's no limbic system. So you get really exquisitely ration rational decisions that just are there to simply make money without regard to anything else. And there is no limbic system to corporations so you can have systems of service but systems of care are very, very difficult to find. And that's one of the things that I tied into. Umberto Maturana says, you know, in biology, everything changes around that which is conserved. And if you are conserving money, you are changing old growth forests into board feet of lumber, which then feeds, feeds, you know, the money supply, but it doesn't. It externalizes all of the ecological costs. So the world is changing as we conserve money. The world is changing into ash and dust as our money grows and gets concentrated in the hands of a few people. Thank you, Ken. And here's your, your post in my brain. You're totally right. You were, you were the synthesis. Jerry, go back to what you were saying. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just wanted to not miss what Ken had said and I hadn't really made note of it. I was saying what Ken just explained better, which is that capitalism and neoclassical economics, the systems we take for granted as the operating systems we live inside of have basically are basically like a human with no moral part of their brain left intact. And you know, we'll go eat the world because they're trying to maximize wealth or they're trying to maximize some other variable where biology doesn't doesn't really do that. So we're trying to figure out, I mean, there's a whole lot of people trying to figure out how do we change the narratives. The, the, I've had a couple of design from trust and other calls around the scripts we have in our heads. Maybe this is something I need to come back to. But for example, I've listed conservative, conservative scripts, for example. So here's how conservatives took over the agenda. The four conservative G's, God's guns, Gays and Grizzlies. There's think tanks and foundations. Here we go. Conservative means. That's what I'm looking for. There we go. The liberal elites pro life tax and spend teach the controversy around intelligent design, the war on Christmas liberal bias job creators judicial activism global climate change. Family values, the death tax, you know, academic freedom. These are all terms that that have sort of been reinforced in the conservative. These are conservative messages against the left, right? This is which part of the conservative strategy, and I've been collecting them for a while, the liberal media welfare queens, etc, etc. Ownership society, which, which, you know, got really big. All of these things kind of run against having a thriving society and a thriving comments. John, you had raised your hand. Go ahead. And then Jean. So to pick up on what was mentioned before about rehabilitation. I believe in that too. I don't. I think there's only a tiny fraction of people who are born evil. Everybody's redemption is there as if they wanted. I talked about the DSM, which is, as far as I know, is classification of mental illnesses. But there's one other area I'd like to talk about which is to do with just general intelligence. Again, it's a continuum or a normal distribution. We all fit somewhere on that scale. And it can also be influenced by your upbringing, your life chances, your quality of your education. And with the rest of society has a responsibility to reflect back on somebody who's trying to make sense of the world. Again, talking about men. Now, if we look at, if I just pick one example, just to get a response is say some, a man, a boy between the ages of 12 and 16 growing up, and all he sees are women reading 50 shades of gray. Wherever he goes, airports, by the swimming pool, it's everywhere. Just as a rotten example, I know it is, but does anybody see that we all have a responsibility? I think yes, but in some sense is my reply, which is a lot of people are engaging in a lot of pretty stupid behavior in different ways. As a result of a lot of history and a lot of tangly stuff, some of which I was just trying to point out in my brain. And I think we have to be gentle with each other and find some compassion and not rush to judgment. And what we do a lot is we use quick external signs to evaluate, categorize pigeonhole stereotype. In other ways, you know, deal with people because that's quick. That's what we do. We're categorized. We need to deal with situations quickly that aren't really that helpful. And that if we once we get to know people, we realize, oh wait, they're like a lot deeper than we thought, or the thing we thought was a symbol or a sign of this is actually something else entirely. I don't know, but I fear that if, you know, it's funny that the book I need to finish writing is called What If We Trusted You? And at the same moment, I need to write Why We Don't Trust You, because there are thousands of really good reasons why humans are not trustworthy. I'll go into that part of my brain in a second, but Gene's got his hand up, so I want to go to Gene as well. But there's like my overly optimistic thesis is that despite the tremendous and fabulous reasons why we humans are really fallible and stupid, I think that trusting one another and figuring this out together is in fact the only way forward. That's my thesis. And hence design from trust, hence up keto, hence our little explorations inside Jerry's brain, hence all these sorts of things. I think that trust is in fact the way forward, the linchpin. And I also think that we're living at a moment in time when trust has been shattered and most of our institutions have been designed from mistrust of the average person, which means they're coercive, which means they break away the genius that shows up when you let people collaborate and find each other, which means that we have a shoot the messenger or hang them off with his head kind of mentality, which means that many people are distracted by trivial pursuits, not the game but the genre, because that's what you numb things out when things aren't working for you, or if you had abuse or trauma in your life, or so all these things will cause very weird signs to show up on the surface. And to me it's important we get under the surface somehow quickly and manage to make human connections with each other so we can work our way out of this thing, because we're pretty deep down this little rat hole, and it can go much further down. Like, I don't think trust is nearly as broken as it could get. Like, I think trust is very broken right now. I think it could dive way, way further. We're nowhere near the bottom of it. The six of us are sitting here having a pretty high trust conversation, and we could be in a situation where this would be hard to find, get, or do. Like, there's a lot of room on the downside here. Gene, let me pass the baton to you. Ken's comments about organizations and money queued up. I've been reading The Uninhabitable Earth. Oh man. And there's a quote in there from someone else, a future historian who looks back upon society after we destroyed ourselves, and the quote is, they lived for money, and they died for money. We essentially perished, because that was the focus, as opposed to the learning to make connections and be together as humanity, as the comment about only humans can be inhumane. But then the other comments that were being made about trust and what it provides a basis for. I sent you the video, I probably posted it before, Semmer's video, the TED talk that he did. I mean, he is absolutely a hero that I have followed for the last 20 years, because he understands it and is able to communicate it in a way that's just brilliant. Absolutely. And I'll post a link to what I consider to be his best video. And I'll post a link to my brain here at this spot for Ricardo, because I've got, this is I think his TED talk. Yeah, it's Radical Wisdom, Radical Wisdom for a Company of School of Life, and these are the notes I took from the talk. So, yeah, I completely agree, Semmer's brilliant. And I'm sharing also, I have the website, www.dtui.com, and I have WID, so what if we trusted you, the other acronym, I have both. And in the one, I want to point to the other one. So here's what if we trusted you, which is the book I need to write. So here's what if we trusted you, we lost faith and trust in, we lost trust in humans, which anyway, here we go. So this side's dark mirror why we don't trust you. So these are meant to go back to back in contrast. Similar brain, there we go. Cool. Where are we, who would like to take us in a, in a different direction on this topic. So, nearly 30 years ago, I went to, there was something called Spring Hill, thought about Robbie gas, which was an amazing place where there were, for every three persons there were, there was one qualified psychologist. And it was a totally experiential weekend based on Alexander Rowland's by my genetic principles, lots of catharsis, you know, we would, it was a weekend for the adult children of alcoholic and abusive fathers, and I happened to fit into that category. And we sit across from someone on the floor and the instruction was, show me how you feel. Not tell me how you go, show me. And it was quite an amazing weekend. I completely lost my voice. I screamed so much. I almost broke my wrist punching a punching bag. I got rid of a whole bunch of stuff. But there was a question there that was asked of what does it mean to be a man. And listening to 35 men stand up in front of the room and answer that question was regulatory. Probably 33 out of 35. At some point or other said, it means I'm not a woman. Right. Men to find themselves in opposition to women. So frequently it is astonishing, if you ask them. The truth about to be a man is not to be not to be weak, you know, all the traditional male macho bullshit, not to be weak, not to not to be able to be counted on to be strong to be able to handle adversity, and very, very few men there. And there were many gay men who have a lot of internalized homophobia, very few men there actually able to talk about being a man is to be loving, it's to be able to care to create relationships. So this has stuck with me over the years. You know, I've, I mentioned a Jerry and email, I've been a veteran of four men's group sound last 30 years. And I love to pose this question, what does it mean to be a man, because for men to answer that question is a deep exploration into their own psyche of how have I learned to be a man or what does it mean to me. And I'm happy to say that as I've gotten older, and maybe I'm hanging out with a class of people, I am finding that way to say, or I'm loving father more than husband or son or spouse or, you know, whatever. But still, it's, it's something that I think men really have a hard time with. It's a very challenging question to answer. So I'll just start it out here for that sort of since we're doing a little bit of personal stories here around this. Thank you, Ken. I really appreciate that. And I think there's a there's a real, this goes hand in hand with our beliefs about homework and amicus and everything else this like a part of it is, what do you do to men and women and what they think their role is so that they'll hold up the rest of the economic edifice. Right. And how and then to me the major religions contribute to this I mean we have these patriarchal religions. Mostly that reinforce the economic models. Even though they appear to be very much so one of my amateur beliefs about about what's happening. And some of you probably heard this before I borrow you and young from Taoism with apologies to Taoism. And yin is generally receptive feminine dark earth energy, young is generally bright outward masculine energy and it does not mean that men are young and women are young. The idea is that any entity to be healthy needs to have in and young and creative tension that both need to be present and that the interesting stuff kind of happens at that margin of contact that's that's really the the place where juicy stuff happens. And then my my own amateur theory is that somewhere between 303,000 years ago, young one. And here I'm going to overload young and say it's not just masculine outward. It's also paternalistic hierarchical command and control analytic separate, you know, all of all of those kind of attributes where yin is emergent social spiritual, emotional, connective, all those kinds of things. And young one and said all that yin stuff is heresy, you need to ignore it. If you ever bring it into conversation you will be kicked out you will be fired. And what I've seen happen in the last only 1015 years, is that it's now okay to talk about meaning purpose love mindfulness and all that in the boardroom. Sustainability all the softer things that were squished out of play are now legit, not everywhere, but they're at least legit topics to bring into these corporate conversations where the corporation had its like little emotional system like removed. You know, there was a there was a moralectomy done as we design the system that we live under. And it's really interesting. So for me when I look at religions and corporations and the economic system. To me, this young one thing happened long enough ago that even attempts to create a society where from each according to his capacity to each according to his need. We demonize communism partly because the communist experiments in China and Russia were horrifying, partly because they were young wildly out of control. Using some message about hey ever it's going to be good for everybody to actually grab the bottleneck of the pyramid of this hierarchy and run rampant over, you know, millions and millions of people. So how do we hit undo on this? Like this is a huge thing because it's it's it's lasted so long and it's come back. And to me, the more we can honor me to and bring women into the conversation, bring people of color, indigenous populations into the conversation and reclaim, reclaim what we know together, what we knew together long ago, and then connect that to the new capacity to do things. Really good things happen. So if you look on the schedule of upcoming calls I shared this last night on the on the list. Basically, if you look at the spreadsheet, one of the next calls I want to do is how do we mix the best of the old with the best of the new. That's kind of where I want to go with that. But let me go to John and on from there. With what you've just said, Jerry, can we acknowledge that there is history. So if I look at the history of North America, for example, the railroads, the dams were built by men because it is physical challenging work that you need to be tough and strong to do that, not only to build the bridges but also to protect your colleagues. But we're now moving into an economy of knowledge workers. That's something I look at is the future of work. So we've got automation, machine intelligence coming down the line. We're not really prepared to adapt to that yet. But I am positive about that. That will enable an equalization of gender balance. That's what I'm looking for. So we can't do anything about the history. And I don't think it was deliberate. And I'm also keeping religion way out of this opinion. But men had to be men and women had to be women in order to survive. So in a way that's an old fashioned kind of stereotype, but I hope it makes sense. So I just want to throw a little bit of question into the stereotype, because I think the idea that all the men went and hunted and all the women stayed home and, you know, woe is broken. That doesn't work at all for me. And I think the modern spectrum of identity that we were just talking about existed way back then. And there were women who were strong and agile and really like the best shot in the village, and they went on the hunt. And there was no problem with that. And I don't know where this happened. I'm not an anthropologist, but I think that the idea that historically the men were the hunters and gatherers because they had to protect, like, no. I think that it was mixed and probably tilted in the way that you're saying, you know, men, women, etc., etc., and also care of children and all that. But really everybody, if you go to an African village, everybody cares for the children. The men, the women, and it doesn't matter. Like, if a baby's hungry, it'll go up to another woman who's nursing other kids and like suckle for food. And that's a normal thing in some parts of the world. These things are just shared and move around. And then if you go to Aboriginal tribes, you will see that the women are insanely smart about where to find food and what to do and all of that. So these things were, I think, they're all over the map. I do agree with the follow-on premise you're making, which is we're moving into knowledge work and other kinds of things where these gender issues about who's big and strong vanish and go away. But I think we do ourselves a disservice by assuming that gender role assignments were very strong in the past just because men are bigger. I don't buy that one. Does that make sense, Sean? Well, it is, no it doesn't, to be honest, but I'm going to say I've got an open mind. But just to throw some examples of modern day, a fireman. So if a fireman's up a skyscraper on a ladder, he needs to carry out another man, a 16-stone man. That man, you know, it's requisite variety. That man has got to be at least strong enough to lift that 16-year-old man and take him down the ladder in order to save his life. Now if it was a female and she wants to do that job and she's strong enough to do it, I've got no problem with that. But when we look at the, you know, the biology of men and women who do a huge server, they are smaller, they're not as strong. So by putting a woman in that position, you're not only risking her life, you're risking the people that she's trying to save. So why do we have women, firemen and women in combat now? What's up with that? There are women firefighters actually, not women firemen. Yeah, thank you, sorry. We have women on the front lines, you know, in Afghanistan or wherever, firing weapons, doing everything the men are doing. And they've been through basic training and they need to figure out how to schlep the heavier guy at some point, but you've got to be clever at that point. Like you use a sled, you strap things, you use leverage pulleys. I don't know, you have to be cleverer when you're weaker. But I think that, I don't know that this means there should be no women firefighters. Oh, I'm not saying that. I didn't say that. But I mean, but there are, right? We've gone toward, we certainly don't have wage equality, but we've gone toward equality of access to a lot of things that we thought were formerly just men's domains. If you look in the UK, I'm sure you've read this book, The Road to Wigan Peer. The Road to Wigan Peer? Yes, I'm not sure. I have not read it for sure. George Orwell. So you looked at how the life of miners in the north of England, how, you know, I just, it would be nightmare for me to be able to have to crawl through 12 inches of space to hack out coal. They used to put children down. Children suppled small. So, you know, there's the argument for it to say that a man's work is in the mines. Well, actually, no, it was children. Yeah. It is horrible to think about. So I've heard of the book, and I put it in because I read this book, The Intellectual We Deserve, which is a critique of Jordan Peterson, who's the darling of the far right right now. And it was written by Nathan Robinson. So I will share this link in a second. But I have not read The Road to Wigan Peer. So maybe I should put that on my reading list. And Judy, you have the floor. And can you, can you mute your video, please? And your audio is currently muted, so we actually can't hear you. Perfect. Thank you. I had the thought when we were talking about the moralectomy that was that you referenced in corporations, that part of what happened from my view of the history of these things is there have been dominant female cultures. The first were property owners in Egypt in ancient times. So this role of feminine, masculine dominance has altered dramatically history. And there's only a very small portion of it that's actually, in my mind, biological. But there's a lot of social structure about the normative behavior. And I think two landmark events in my mind were first of all, access to pregnancy control came about over the last hundred years. And then the politically active standpoint that led to reformation, if you will, in a social context with suffragettes and voting. But the entry of women into various fields has been not coincidental with those events. Fields have emerged when I was a student. There were very few women in the physical sciences now approaching 50%, but the women are underrepresented in faculties. So there are all these social movements that blend. And I think the individual meritocracy or the ability to be a whole person and express yourself as a whole person wherever you are in that continuum. And some of us, at least for me, I think our continuum isn't even a Gaussian distribution. There's some bipolarity to it. But I think that enablement of full spectrum of embracing of that as holistic in the yin and yang is an important one. And my perspective in the corporation, I saw a lot changed when the men in power actors who were trying to move in organizations. For the first time, they saw the impact of the organization on a woman from a different perspective than they had seen it in the past. And it was a moment of enlightenment. And then came advocates for amorphan culture, which I think led to some of the things you've identified. But it's just my notion is that there's a huge continuum and the yin and yang if you were to do a Gaussian would overlap in zones and you have ranges of behavior. I know some women I would not want to have a physical fight with. And there's just, I think we have to be very careful about labels and start to try to enable full individual personal perspective from each individual to explore. And that's part of that trust issue, I think, is if you're worried about stepping out of lines, it's harder to be your own voice. I agree and I think a big piece of this is how we deal with bad actors. And I want to sort of connect that into what should we do about these gender issues and me too and so forth is, is how do how well just to go back to our topic since we're near the end of our time. Do men deal with men who are doing stuff they ought not be doing, like how do we intervene, but how do we intervene in some kind of a calm way and some kind of a way that actually works. Or how do we intervene in a way that is startling enough that it provokes the person of focus to change their behavior or consider their behavior. And that's important too, because this isn't about beating them until they're until they got some sense into them. This is about waking up that part of their brain that knows what's right. So I love that quote, but trying to figure this out. I have us here on in my brain on matrilineal cultures because I'm extremely interested in who but where we're matrilineal. The Haudenosaunee, basically the entire northeastern of the US were matrilineal. And when people say well how else would you distribute things in a in a in a culture. Well, the surplus goes into a long house and the elder women of the tribe distribute it to the families that need food or you know whatever the resources that's being kept in common, etc, etc. But I'm really interested in what we can learn from from these kinds of cultures and assignments. And when I say that young one and basically marginalized or demonized in what I mean is that all these forms of living were basically wiped out. They were basically trampled over worldwide. And the things that we assume our house society is run right now is what we were left with in some sense. Doug, I'm really I'm just I'm constantly curious about your environment because you're you're surrounded by choice with a whole bunch of economists. And I'm assuming the majority of whom are men I don't know how gender balance has changed over time in Inet but but I think that that your your role in changing the story of economics is super fascinating to me. And I'd love to know what you know what you see. Well, I can't push that into the last few minutes of the conversation. The first thing to say is that economists as a group are part of the movement away from humanity into mechanical systems. And that's a power trip. And the people who become economists do so because they want the class status of being associated with that. I would caricature us here but I think it's fairly correct. And that the, we would be better off in some ways if we never talked about economy and economists. But the good news about economy is its origin as a state management, which was a holistic concept for the Greeks could be reestablished as the major task for humanity now is integrating humanity. Which is the state management on a bigger level. So that's the approach I've taken not to throw out economy, but to restructure it. One problem is that if the graduate schools did that. The graduates would have a hard time getting jobs. That's just the beginning, but since I have the floor for a moment. I put in, I hear in the conversation, a lot of stress on the psychology of trust calm and all that. But the psychology we actually have is adaptational to an institutional world of capitalism, political power, and so on. So the question is where's the leverage to try and make things better. We're much better these days and talking about the psychology and the individual than we are about the institutional structures. What you're saying about ancient Egypt and the Urquois and things like that. Get to the point that we need to really expand our institutional imagination, because the institutions we have are the framework that people try to adapt to. And that's what's leading to so much psychological misery. Love that. It's funny. Brief. Sorry, I'm touching a link. Copy. There we go. So what you said is where I'm looking really hard, which is the boundary that interface between psychology and institutions and institutional design in particular. Also the design of social norms and cultural norms. I think that's hugely important. And I just put a link to five minute university I did on a book called the institutional revolution, which is about the pre modern British aristocracy, who did all kinds of really weird things. But the author of the book explains how these very weird practices and norms were in fact a way of establishing trust at a distance at a time when nature could ruin anybody's plans but you couldn't double check whether they were lying or whether they were you know that it was real. And all these really weird institutions give us rule Britannia for 150 years. So so very weird practices and you're like what, and it turns out that that this set of things they set out that were funky looking and smelling, turn into the dominant force a little tiny island off the end of Europe dominates you know world trade for quite a while. And so that was very much about institutional design and psychology and culture all sort of jammed into something and then forced into a shape that held for a while until it didn't and and the aristocracy kind of let's go at the end there's not a violent overthrow of the regime as there is in France. The aristocracy kind of let's go as other things show up and now we have globalization, right, which brought some good I've got a pretty inexpensive laptop that I'm talking to you all through etc etc. And yet brought a whole bunch of stresses and strains that we're not dealing with properly, partly connected to all of the mental models and scripts in our heads that we've been talking about here. And I'm really interested in those simple points of leverage. So how do we change the narrative and, and I collect up, you know, there's six different entities that have been trying to change the American dream. Right. So the American dream is everybody goes to college everybody has a house with a white picket fence and a station wagon and a Congress manual. There's all these elements of, you know, and it pull yourself up by your bootstraps that rags to riches story will arrange the riches story was invented for us. Like the rag rags to riches story was was intentional propaganda way back when what you just said about the American dream is really good because notice there's no people in it. And so there's a bunch of entities trying to change the American dream is a bunch of entities trying to change how we measure success at the social level like the genie index, and at the corporate level like triple bottom line. Tomorrow's company, there's a whole bunch of them I can, I can, you know, on a different call I can go through them in my brain but I collect them all up because I'm praying that one or two of them really catch on, and that we can shift how we measure success from the Dow Jones and GDP, and which are horrible metrics but are to this day the ways we we measure like things are getting better or worse. Right. So, so I think that this opens a path for lots of interesting conversation future. I think, I think we wandered pretty far from what can men do about me to and I kind of apologize for that but I love the conversation we have had. I'm going to pass the mic to anybody who'd like it for some closing comments on this. And if you want to frame questions for upcoming IDB calls, type them in the comments or tell me and I, you know, we'll set those up in the schedule but any thoughts. I turns out I would never respect this 10 years ago but I love institutional design and the emergence of cultural norms those two things seem to me to be much more important than we think they are. I know nothing about policymaking actually April my wife is better at it than me she's better trained in it and has more exposure to it but I find these things completely fascinating because architecture is destiny and the people who've designed these architectures know that. Right. Any, any questions. I'm not sure what you mean architecture is destiny. When you've poured concrete someplace people have to go down the road and obey the walls that you poured. And so metaphorically if I pass laws that force you to do something or force you into a framework. You're going to have to use that framework. So, for example, Native American lands are now corporations. So, in order to defend their rights they were forced to use a structure that they don't like. It's not natural to Native American traditions or ways of thinking, but they need to be in corporations and then each person has to be. There's a blood quantum they have to meet for different tribes to be actually voting members of the tribe, which causes all sorts of stupid things I was just watching a couple, a couple of conversations about this. There was a terrific conference called something unsettled last Friday and April and I both watched the live stream all day and one of one of the speakers was to the speakers or Native Americans talking about this blood quantum thing. So, so if you can design the structure within which other people have to act, you can either constrain their behavior entirely or you can begin to change their minds or whatever else. So, that's partly what I mean by architecture is destiny. Structure influences behavior until the behavior changes the structure. Yes, and until you change the architecture so I'm very interested in how we might change that architecture when before we hang up. I did a short video on our architecture is destiny so let me put that video up here. I did a whole bunch of stuff around it. So let me share that video. Come on little brain catch up. There we go. And let me put a link to that spot in my brain here as well. Cool. So we can go into that somewhere in future calls any other closing thoughts. Yeah, because I have a problem with saying that it's destiny. I don't mean it's I don't mean it's destiny forever. Okay, I mean, I mean that we follow the architectures that were given and that are poured for us until they break or are overthrown by somebody else's culture. And along this line, there's a literary critic Kenneth Burke, who talked about what he called the scene act ratio, the scene when you're in the theater and the curtain opens you can tell from the scene sort of the action that can be performed there. The scene contains the possible actions, which I think is getting at what you're saying about architecture, having a determining effect on us. I think it's really worth reading. He wrote a book called the grammar of motives. How about a rhetoric of motives that came later. It's also good. Oh, so there's two different books. Yes, fabulous. Thank you. I will find the grammar of motives to brilliant and I've not read any of his books I just found out about him and put him in my brain. Love that. Well, click on that to launch my brain to it. I mean my browser to it stop the share and say thank you very much we will. I will be inundated at a CWA conference starting for all of next week. So probably there's not an IGV call until the week after like April 16, but I'll book one now so we can think about it and have some conversations. Please feel free to go into the spreadsheet and suggest topics and name them and whatever. And on the list, please just chat. Talk on the IGV list. We have three young members who are from India who are on our last call. They're from Delhi. So I'd love to bring them into the conversations and engage them. What would you say the IGV list. I jb list the inside Jerry's brain Google group. Oh, okay, which is how you found out about this call. Okay, cool. Thanks everybody. Enjoy. Bye bye. Really appreciate this.