 Hi Dave, this is the Neobooks call for Monday, January 22nd, 2024. Dave, are you back in Berkeley? I'm in Berserkley, yes indeed. Excellent. There we go. Hi Jesse. For what it's worth, I think I need to leave at the top of the earth. Okay. Cool. Our major Neobook writers are not on the call yet, although I'm busy turning away on design from trust. And Dave, do you want to talk about what's up with you? Yeah, it's Stacy. Well, you know, the biggest, hi Stacy and Rick. Yeah, the biggest in the last couple of weeks, it's getting moved to Berkeley, I guess has been the big, the big accomplishment. We did spend a week in Honduras with some snorkeling and scuba diving too. Yeah, it was tough. And kind of digging back into the global regeneration co-lab. I owe you some stuff, Pete, I was going to follow up on the Plex, I'm way behind, but I didn't know if you wanted in the description of the GRC or if there were some other ideas that you had there, but and it's just kind of, you know, just like coordinating a community and what's it mean and how's the, I was thinking we had interesting information failures around posting events and people ending up on different zooms. And, you know, it's just kind of the practicality of information flow is really a pain in the butt, but a learning opportunities. And then, and then we're trying to figure like what do we go in the next year and can we, how do you shake something like that up? How do we change what we're doing kind of in a way, and if the environment around us is changing, how do we evolve the system? And that's been kind of interesting. So I'd be like trying to recruit a new person to like kind of run it for a couple of months or, you know, I don't know, does it help to change coaching staff? I mean, what's the right strategy? So that's been an area of thought. And then the other one is kind of still thinking about this landscape regeneration stack, which I still feel it's kind of neo bookie right in that in that what you're trying to do is organize the intellectual capital that allows something to happen more effectively. Right. So I want landscape regeneration to happen. And there's going to be a lot of technology required technology meaning tools and processes that are required for that. And the more we can compile those and organize them and make them interact and the better off we're going to be kind of long term, and that, and that intellectual stack is capital that's being managed right so in the capitalism sense. It's managed by commons, I guess. So how does it what's, you know, what's the what's a commons based capitalism look like? I guess it's been one of my questions. And then another piece is that stack also looks a lot like an ecosystem map. That question. What's a commons. Well, I was, I mean, one of the things that I've been wondering about is like the intellectual assets that make up this stack are intellectual, you know, we talk about them as in as capital. We have a growing body of capital it is appreciating. Right. It is cumulative cumulative. But it's it's not owned by Jeff Bezos it's owned by the commons. It's still capital. And it's still being managed and we still want it to have a return. Right. Those assumptions are capitalist assumptions about capital. No, they're, they're, I, that's, that's what I would like to know more about I think there are assumptions about human progress. Right. I know that early humans worried about capital and the increase of capital I think they worried maybe about yield, like our crops are dying or how do we make them live but but the notion of capital and the requirement for returns on capital are I think much newer. So somebody has made a different differentiation one of our calls between profitism and capitalism. So what we usually think of, you know, Jeff Bezos is a profiteer as much as he is a capitalist. He or an entity like him could be accumulated capital to push the capital back through the system. And that's the way we're set up. You know, you accumulate capital and power, so that you end up with profit. And I think there's a, a, you know, like in microeconomics you would talk about consumer surplus, you know, and in some sense there's a, there's a bar really negotiation that goes on between the supplier and the buyer over who captures that consumer surplus right. It's a similar thing. I mean, you could drive down the return on capital and increase the size of the and increase the size of the capital probably. But, but, but I so that maybe there's I think the fun the question I'm probably you're pushing on Jerry that I wonder about is, I think capital, the growth in capital, this intellectual asset represents improvement in human status. That there is in fact a relationship between, you know, humans being better off and the growth in our capital. And the issue we're really dealing with is like, well, who is it that controls the capital we all want it to grow. We want that stack to get better. We want landscape regeneration to happen faster. Right. So we're both reacting I think to your control of capital comment Pete I don't know. I don't want to talk to you but no I, I, I appreciate I like the idea and I'm wondering about it to relationship between growth of capital and, and, and increase in quality of human life. A different thing. The one I was reacting to was we all want, I want it to grow. I, the growth thing bothers me. If I said they could get better. Well, yeah. But, but, but I'm unconvinced that making lives better through growth of something is is a good goal. But he's popping in the word improvement or better for the word growth so like with you drop growth and said improvement or better. Would that be better. I'm still concerned that growth is hiding behind there somewhere. Right, right. But it's also in the, but in the, it's certainly in the intellectual space for talking about something that's abundant. Yeah, I'm not sure that we're better off than, you know, an Amazonian tribe who's who's not been changing their life for 1000 years and, you know, it's pretty cool that, and I guess that that would be the really the fundamental I think that's the bottom line question and I don't know how you resolve that one is like, take a poll or something like that. You know, I would rather be here today than I would be in the Amazon a couple of thousand years ago, I think, although they may not have found the city I'd like to live in yet so maybe it'll show up and then that looks okay. So it's like, well, maybe I wouldn't mind it. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure I would rather live today than back then. If you were to compare the settlement back then with other settlements around the world of back then, and had to choose which place the land on the planet in that era. You might have ended up choosing a place that understood how to use commons and create and create abundance. And here the word abundance is also tricky because there's a there's a fight between abundance and sufficiency or other words that are having enough where abundance seems to mean over sometimes seems to mean overproduction right thriving is another great word exactly. And so abundance comes with its own little bit of baggage, and then I put in also property ownership control all those kinds of things in this. You have to control some things to have thriving commons it seems or that's what Lynn Ostrom's principles for governing commons would say. Otherwise, you like commons can can break because they don't naturally like it once humans get involved they don't naturally keep going. But but all this stuff is kind of tied together into a vision because your first, your first question about what is the stack. What is the landscape regeneration stack look like. I'm totally in on that that sounds great to me because I've got this notion of stacks also in my conversations and landscape regeneration is really important for me to. So I was with you there. It was when all these other terms that that are freighted in different ways for each of us showed up that I was like. Well, it's a part of the. So if we were to try to step back and and have a global bank account right there was owned communally in some ideal way. A global bank account, a cap our portfolio of capital. Right. And we were trying to collectively have a we want we want to have a return on that investment we think we can do better. We can use it to do better we can get smarter and more capable and we can have more people educated and they can live better lives. Right. So we're we're instead of Jeff Bezos we have a we kind of playing that role of manager of the capital. And so I think there is kind of a global accounting right that that that that tries to I don't know if you have to maximize the return on capital. But you would like to see a positive return on your previous investments. And I think that's a natural human instinct. Right. I want to learn more. Right. I mean I can do better. I can go faster. I can you know we you look at professional I was like thinking about professional football and how incredibly good. These people are that is so stupid. Right. But Sam they're good at it. Right. And so we've taken this thing and we've decided we're just going to keep getting better. And I kind of think that's a human characteristic and I think our capital reflects that that will you know the landscape We have to have that landscape stack improving in order to kind of meet our requirements for reliability I think but the system that's where the ecosystem around it has to be dynamic enough that it drives improvement. And does that require a capitalist or can we do that in the comments. Thanks Dave. I am I am find the comments intellectually very interesting. I don't think it's a natural human condition that everyone wants to get better or wants to see continual improvement or anything like that. I think that's a virus that we caught a couple thousand years ago and and and you know the the dominant cultures. The Asian Chinese culture and the European culture killed everybody that thought different. So now we're caught on this treadmill of like well it's got to get better because it's got to get better because you know we've been doing it and literally I think we killed off Bast swaths of human culture that that are good enough just being good enough. The reason you know the reason I can say Amazonian tribe is because we killed everybody else we just haven't gotten around the killing the Amazonian tribes quite yeah we did a really good So the funny thing is you know that's the I think over the and this is a little bit of an argument from dawn of everything but I think over the course of you know the past 10 or 15,000 years. We've had lots of cultures and lots of cultures were perfectly fine, just with kind of a status quo and eating enough and you know sleeping more than us and just kind of hanging out and having a good time. And I think it's really hard for people in our culture to even like think that way. So I do appreciate where you're going with it, even though I kind of disagree with a lot of it I think I do appreciate, you know we can't slip a switch and make us all, you know, living in a culture from 10,000 years because we just can't. So we're stuck transitioning between where we've been for the last hundred years and where we need to be in the next 200. And, you know, deconstructing the, the capitalism prophetism progress arguments, and, and loosing up a little bit and looking at how we actually work and the things that don't the things that we might need, being able to say, you know, okay, I get that we want to make progress and I get that that's tied to capital and increase in capital and, but maybe we should have that owned by the comments rather than 100 rich white guys. I think it's really important to have that transition story out of where we are to a better place. But, but overall I kind of, I'm not sold on the, you know, people want to get better, people want more people, you know. So, thanks. Super stimulating day. I've got a bunch of sort of resources on things harder and wisdom, things that humans learned over time over generations, and how they passed it down in pre written societies so oral, oral traditions societies where once you learn to speak and pass things on and I think that's a very nice milestone is you get some kind of language so you can pass things on in a more organized way. But then what happens and practices like when you harvest eggs out of a clutch of eggs, don't take all of them. Leave leave an egg or two behind so that the animal can reproduce and be back there when you pull up the roots in a particular area don't take all of them leave a couple and then spread a couple more around so that the next time you come back. There's a little bit more. Now, that doesn't presuppose a finite bank account of assets that doesn't presuppose growth as a requirement that doesn't all it says is, don't kill off the thing that just fed you. And if you do that over and over and over again, the landscape just gets better and better, and we thrive as a community over time, and there's no concept that any part of that is fixed or finite, although maybe by what I'm saying is don't kill off the thing that that's a kind of fixed or finite it's like, it's like, you know, if you were to take all of everything you touch, you might in fact end up with very little at the end and I think that was a hard one realization because the cultures that killed themselves off were the ones that exhausted the resources so famously if you chop down all the wood you no longer have wood to burn in the winter. So, any numerous examples of cultures that without being overrun by the neighboring culture, which is the other big problem managed to wipe themselves out by by, you know, resource over consumption. There's an idea that the Mayans who disappeared like that probably disappeared from resource over consumption, although I haven't really checked in on what the latest theories about all that are. When you say that the instinct to grow or get profit or increase from your assets, I think you're putting a really modern frame on very old behavior. And the notion of ownership capital assets money that everybody needs money to stay alive it's 1700 1600. It doesn't really predate that. As far as I know. Before that we're just trying to make living and before that we're being. If you're a peasant anywhere on the earth your blood is being squeezed from you by whoever dominates your land, whether it's your church or your king or whatever you don't want to be a peasant kind of anywhere in modern western society and also in other societies, because once rulers have enough power to control people and to send military or, or police or their private army and you're you're kind of screwed. One of my big puzzles is, how can you be a smart pacifist society that takes care of his landscape and survive on slots from all the people who aren't because that seems to break all the time. Yeah, so I do want to say that I do think that there is a natural instinct because of our curiosity and because of our need to create to want to do better. I think the conversation might take a bit a more productive term. If we looked at how we measure that added success because where we have to stop measuring it is in terms of capital. You know, as far as as far as financially as far as money. But, and because so much of what we do is, you know, we just do it because that's the way it's always been done, changing the conversation to that where we value other things and and think of that as part of how productive something is. I think that would be helpful. I totally agree. And I'm wondering, for example, how things get passed down. When I say hardwood wisdom. One of the things I think happens a lot is these stories get passed down, but then some of these stories get ironed into religions that don't make a lot of sense but we do them anyway because our ancestors did them. And some of those are really unproductive. It's fabulous and if you stop doing them, you're like you endanger the tribe. And how do you know which is which, and how do you, how do you promote curiosity so that you can innovate a pretty modern word but you can so you can invent new stuff that makes our group better, and how do you get off next year than we were this year or next decade and we were this decade, and how do you pass that story on to the next generation. I think, for me, one of the reasons for religions is to codify the hard one wisdom and pass it on in some more rigorous way because the passing on breaks really often. And I don't think that that worked well either necessarily. I mean, the dietary rules for Islam and Judaism seem to be sort of like that although a lot of dietary rules make little or no sense. So, I don't know. Yeah. So, so our culture now has kind of lost that wisdom though the, you know, leave an egg behind thing. We've gotten back to the point where it's like, well if I'm an oil company and I can make profit. And that's going to destroy the world for everybody else for 100 years or 200 years or 1000 years. Yeah, we still win. So, you know, that's the right thing to do. It reminds me of the last Dota birds were killed by, you know, museum museum curators. It's like, well, you know, there's only six left, but we need to get ours for our collection so I'm going to club that one and maybe that one too just for the heck of it. It's like humans, man. Humans are a virus on the planet. Well Dave, thank you for sending us down a fun way. There's a good rabbit hole. Well, one of the variations on the capital, the, you know, the open capital issue has been, I didn't see anybody doing that analysis but I'm curious about the contribution of open source software to international like the third world GDP. Right because one of the byproducts of the comments, the opens tools is that the return gets distributed in different ways, I think. And so, you know, we've got it up. We've got 20 years of experience now. I wonder if we haven't seen growth in, you know, Vietnam or Ukraine or Poland or something that's tied to Silicon Valley investments originally but has gotten distributed into other communities. I have something on a completely different topic kind of a check check and thing. And I think this relates to new books because it involves authoring text potentially creatively. It turns out over the weekend I bumped into some some folks in my AI clubs that actually need version controlled text a lot. So if you're making a GPT, you're copying custom instructions into the little web web page for open AI. And then you want to tweak it and then you want to tweak it again and whoops, oh shoot, I just typed over something or I like what's, you know, selected something and then typed and deleted things and there's no undo in the Web interface. So people have learned non technical people writing GPTs have learned that, wow, it's good to like copy and paste each version into a document or into a spreadsheet or something where you can keep track of a lot of versions. And I said, you know, between obsidian and get I know how to do this really well and it works pretty easily and it's not hard for non technical people to learn so I had a 90 minute session yesterday I'll have a couple more this week, just showing people obsidian and obsidian and get. So, for folks who don't know maybe I don't know if we have people who don't know obsidian get but obsidian is a nice text editor that includes file management stuff. And then if you add get to it, you get a nice texture that has file management stuff and can maintain a version of a file as deep as you want, and, and can kind of navigate back and forth between those versions it doesn't do that as easily. So, I'm teaching more people non technical people. The, in some, some places I call it pros fusion pattern some places I call it the massive which pattern some places I call it the obsidian get pattern. It's a, it's a good pattern, and it's usable for lots of different things and I now kind of inspired to push a little bit more push us a little bit more towards that for new books to at the same time it's totally fine if you write a new book and whatever you want. Google Docs Microsoft Word, longhand on a paper, whatever. Longhand is that is that aren't going away our kids learning how to write longhand anymore. It's coming back a little bit I've got a, my brother is a high school teacher and 10 years ago so he got super fascinated by handwriting, and the fact that they stopped teaching in schools and kids stop, you know, reading and writing. And so he ended up with kids who couldn't read handwriting from their parents. His personal interest ended up in like going back for a couple centuries over the history of American handwriting and got really good at it. But anyway, I think it's coming back a little bit. But it's, you know, on the way out. So Chris another similar thing Chris Aldrich was blogging with a typewriter Smith Corona 1940 something typewriter I think from the indie web camp. So that was a lot of fun to watch, especially when our power strip, you know we were at a cafe or power strip overloaded or something like that and all the people laptop to like, Oh my God. So Chris is like sitting there typing away he's typing a blog post about how his typewriter still works even everybody else doesn't have power. Did it go online though or I mean was there a was there. I don't know his whole thinking on the subject I appreciate a lot actually the way he's got his typewriter and his no cards and stuff like that. At the end he takes a picture of it and that's what gets blog. So he needs power at some point along the way. My email device in the 1980s was an Olivetti letter of 32 reporters news typewriter which had a little case that I would take into Turkey Run Farm Park, and Northern Virginia with some carbon paper. And I would type out letters to friends and I've just been going through old boxes and I found I found a whole bunch of my old carbon copies of things I had sent and then the replies and it's just crazy. And I'm like, Okay, so this box here represents a couple folders of correspondence in my modern email inbox. And it's much more beautiful and tangible and took a lot longer in this box with all the cards and 20 folded letters and humor and drawings and all the stuff we're squeezing out with email. But we have emojis right. That compensates totally makes up for it totally makes up for the loss. The new Apple people can do the thumb thing so you know you got that too. Exactly. We've got fireworks man. Good any anyone else want to check in with. And my apologies I'm going to take my leave. I'll see you around. Thanks for the conversation, especially if thanks for all the fish. Rick, did you want to check in a bit. I know that you have a manuscript you'd like us to look at and things like that. You know, I'm flexible. I did share something well back but I on an email, but I thought it'd be better if people have read it first, rather than just doing it here. It's, it's a thought piece so it's not something you read and just, you know, create something the idea is to actually get people to go beyond reflection in action to reflection on action so to speak. And require some time to think about things that's the premise of that. Can you share the link to it again in the chat so that we know which one because I've got a bunch of short shared a couple. I'm just trying to remember which one it was now. It was on MLK. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, you can do that one. I can find that. I'm just got so many screens open moment. Let me just see if I can. That is what modern life is like. Yeah, exactly. Just give me a moment and I'll get to it. I don't know which of these is the MLK one. Look at the image. It'll be in the image there but oh I see. Yeah, I'm nearly there. Cool. Yeah, just a second here. Yeah, there's, there's one. And I don't even have this one in my brain. Keep going. No, actually, one thing I did do it. I found it fascinating. I actually attended quite a few of the world economic forum sessions. And, you know, I was thinking that I don't know whether this organization or other organizations are on the proposed the idea of other organizations. You actually crowd swarm a group of people to go to it because you can go into LinkedIn as things are going live and I was writing in questions and whatever. Because it's, you know, in the stratosphere, I just came from another group where they were talking about the elitism of the world economic forum. And, you know, I say, yes, and not yes, but in that, you know, you know, they have constraints to work with and it's so easy to, you know, take potshots at them. You know, the whatever his name Kevin, who was the head of the heritage foundation, I don't need to sort his, you know, two minute diatribe about the elitism. And it was such a political hatchet job, it was really done talking about the elites. I don't know if you saw it enough but Kevin Roberts. Yeah, thank you. And it, you know, so, actually, you know, I'm so, you know, they have a group called uplift on it which I haven't really gotten involved with but it's supposed to be a platform for innovators. But it's still a pretty high level and it really needs to have, you know, input so my suggestion for next year for organizations are interested. The ones that I'm connected with is to say why do you take a group of people and say let's start watching these things live and actually, you know, commenting or because it actually went up to LinkedIn so you could put a comment in there. Actually, I, the guy who just came out with the, the Oxford report about, you know, world of inequality. I posted something and I reached out to him thinking, I wouldn't really even accept my invitation so to speak. And he did. So, you know, in terms of, you know, trying to use a networking more effectively of events that are in a public forum. I think I'm going to, I'm going to make a more concerted effort next year to do it because this year I just sort of just did it on the fly. But I think next time I'll be much more purposeful and looking at what is actually on there who do I want to look at and see if the organization's willing to put their membership on to watching different things and generating comments and reactions to it. Thanks, Rick. That'd be very interesting. Rick, I don't know if that was the right time or some point I'd love to hear you because as far as as long as I've known you, you've been working kind of around this equity men shot concept and you continually worked it. I'd love to hear some of the process insights around, you know, how's it gone and you know what kinds of lessons you got I mean I just feel like you've been really devoted to it and it's really curious I'd be just curious to know how it's gone. Yeah, well actually what I've been doing is I work, I've been working on the sidelines of organizations as you know David, and I'm in many different organizations so I'm trying to learn from different organizations of how they operate and thinking about well. How can we create a learning and I'm getting close to it now actually I feel like okay I've got to, I've had enough experience of different ecosystems, and I can see the strength and weaknesses of different ecosystems, thinking about well how can we create something that is deeper than what we currently have. And, and so that the, you know, the blog post that I just shared with you, for example, could be and it's, it's focused on questions and it's really to get people to to create a space for generative dialogue people have got to think about something events they got to ruminate on it. Not just show up and you know BS about stuff which we're very good at doing, but you know going a little bit deeper, and it's really trying to enable people to develop their an appreciation of the metacognition skills. Actually there's a report that just came out and I'll have to find it because I just glanced at it last night, talking about the rise of irrational thinking. No surprise. A study demonstrating the rise of rational thinking, and it was putting a lot of the attributions to the misuse of social media which is really the reptilian brain it's the, you know, it's rubber necking it's, it's all click bait and just getting people roused up and shooting a breeze and, you know, not really using their whole and I think we can use, you know, these platforms to do it but we have to, you know, I sort of regard myself as a sort of learning design architect I'm thinking well how can we create things that are very different. And one of the reasons why I'm interested in the books is that, from my point of view we've said this before, Jerry, you know, near books to me should be something that me my blog posts I go back and I get feedback somebody gets angry with me or whatever. And I get so much crazy shit sometimes I'm thinking, actually, it's helpful to listen to crazy shit. It helps you understand where the hell people are coming from. And if you don't understand where people are coming from, you're not going to be able to engage and I've had a few very interesting exchanges of people who I completely disagree with, but they keep on coming back and that's what we need we have we have to have engagement with people that we don't have any, you know, reason to want to, you know, getting connected with. And if we're going to, if we're going to deal with this divisiveness it means you've got to really work out ways of creating spaces where you can do things online which is very different to, you know, zoom calls where I went to one a couple of weeks ago for the living room conversations. And they had a nice framework of how to have conversations but it, you know, that's not where the action is the actions in social media. So we have to master this far better than we, than we have been doing if we're actually going to harness the benefits of AI. That's enough of my rent there you go David. I hope that wasn't too much of a download for you. I respect the, you know, I feel for a lot of the stuff perseverance matters so. Oh, absolutely well actually I just came from the XO meeting and it was fascinating as a group there on AI. And there's a group, the XO group is really fascinating. And I think I'm going to get more involved with that group. The other one actually, David, I don't know if you've heard of a group. I only discovered this a couple of day called our dash future. Regenerative future. You want to look them up I listened to some of their stuff. And I didn't have a lot of time I wish I had it was a four day event and I can only go to a couple of them. But what I really liked about it was I felt like there were kindred spirits, ways of thinking about regeneration I mean one of the words that you were talking about was growth and what I put in there was regenerative flourishing can we focus on regenerative flourishing as a way of not only our natural systems but our human systems as well. So anyway, that's just a different spin on your take on growth which I think Pete was having some differences with. Rick, when I thank you for sending your article last week so I could have a little moment to read on it and like I shared with you if we had actually conversation. It would have created some kind of, it would have generated more questions and then relatability like for instance how do you define freedom from from my standpoint freedom is like letting go of anger and anxiety and violence versus, you know, freedom for all. It's more of a mental state but what my point is is like I'm working with Kylie and Tray on a regular basis to create more of a framework around supporting people that I have mindful meetings, mindful based meetings, and talk about metacognition and you know that the question changes the discussion and everything but when we're speaking about the difference between productivity and like experience. As an experienced designer, it's holding both and having the space that we can evolve and move forward and build and create at the same time people are being recognized they're being heard they're being acknowledged. It takes quite a lot of expertise to do that unless they're unless there's a framework being used and agreed by all so it's interesting when I get into a classroom or some kind of session that I'm facilitating be it on mindfulness or health and wellness. If I come with an agenda. Everyone doesn't get recognized on why they're there, and like the first 10 minutes it has to be open agenda it has to be completely the room's responsibility to decide what the agenda is, or else it just becomes yet another meeting so lots of thoughts about this just want to share that I'm really fascinated by it at all and yeah. Well, I have to say you picked on one thing very important thing and that is before you even begin to answer the question you have to define the terms. Because if you have a different framework of freedom to me that's where a lot of this, this crazy dialogue goes on because if you use the word equity and, and somebody associates it with with, you know, Marxism that's their question equal outcome equal treatments, you know holding people back the audio that BS, you know, then you're going to be you're not going to have a so you have to even step back from the question to question the question to understand exactly what you're saying and the issue about agenda setting I couldn't really more that the the how well is shared decision making decided now it's difficult to do in real time. So if it's done iteratively over time, where people are creating a sort of a landscape of agendas, where it emerges and the people who show up can then determine okay let's let's go. So I think there's a lot more to agenda setting. And I think part of the reason why people have earned a group degrees of engagement is because if you don't buy the agenda, you're not going to listen as much, you're going to tune out. It's not relevant to you that moment in time. If it's relevant to you okay I'll get involved. So I think what you just impact there is a lot and I just don't think we're nuanced enough on our zoom calls about how to do it. Yeah, I mean you can't notice that someone's checked out on a zoom call, let alone in a in a classroom without a frame up a safe enough environment to be able to check back in and tune in. Safety is incredibly important and people have to trust each other. Absolutely. If you don't have those ground rules set up at the beginning, then it's very difficult for people to be vulnerable, where, you know, if they're not wanting to be. It's very, there's little opportunity for growth. Right, and those ground rules have to be developed by the people in the room to. So, yeah, or having models of it that people. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, so you have some ground rules about an engagement. Absolutely. I just don't think we put the sweat equity into doing that very well. I just want to add that that's also a place that we have to recognize that not everybody is equal. And you might have to develop skill. You know, sometimes I listen to people and they talk about trusting people and I'm thinking. Why would I trust them? No, I shouldn't trust them. And that's, that's reasonable. And I think, and it doesn't exist, but sometimes I hear people try to just like, right over that. No, people are different and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But like Jesse said, I think it's important. Whoever's in the room is going to shape that room. And that's a really important consideration. And it's because it changes. Yeah, my mind is going in 1000 directions at once. Well, take one. Yeah. Well, partly. Interesting. Jesse, you're just saying there was sort of in the air this idea of trusted spaces and all that kind of stuff. And that's how creativity or innovation shows up. And I'm probably loading the wrong words onto that, but, but how necessary that is. And in a lot of cases, sort of a dictatorial space where people are forced to do things causes a lot of creativity, and it can happen that way and often does. Steve Jobs was notably a tyrant, and he would go and wreck people's desks and say, no, you're not working on this and throw, throw what they were working on across the room. And then, you know, reass, but, but he, but he sort of knew how to corral genius talent to go produce like things like the iPhone, which, which shows up at the end of that. And, and at the cost of people's emotional lives sometimes but also sometimes at the benefit of getting someplace they couldn't have gotten without that sort of crushing pressure it's kind of weird. I was, I remember, there was a company called science back in the dot com era which was a system integrator. I learned about science when the founder of science Eric Greenberg who used to be a partner group showed up in my in our offices in New York. He had a deck, a little deck, and he says I have $8 million from benchmark, and I'm going to start a company called science. Would you like to join me, because I was quitting the newsletter and moving west to California and I said you know I want to be independent so he said tell you what, I'll give you an office I'll make you an advisor and I helped develop some of their first materials. And we put us in a conference room, and later I learned that Greenberg is an NLP master. So NLP is not natural language processing NLP and this setting means neuro linguistic programming, which is a way of mirroring pacing and influencing people's behavior. And you do a whole bunch of interesting things in NLP which I actually kind of respect even though it's a little cookie at the fringes. So I remember Eric would come into the room and sort of his eyes would kind of bulge out and he'd walk around and he'd say stuff, and we weren't locked in the room with no food that there was not that kind of pressure. But there was clearly pressure to create this like these launch decks, and stuff came out of us that that we didn't know was there under that kind of pressure slash shaping slash I don't know what else was going on. But it was it was clear clear that we were like getting someplace that we wouldn't have gotten in a relaxed laid back really safe space. And sometimes also people intentionally put themselves they stretch themselves they put themselves in someplace where their safety isn't guaranteed and that lets them exceed some. And a little piece of what's eddying in my head is what I think personal safety is huge I think people feeling safe to participate and all that is really important. And yet, I've seen how sometimes different kinds of stress cause genius to squeeze out the other And I'm not sure how I feel about all that and sometimes people's lives are broken or people's brains are broken by the stress. And that happens a bunch as well. You know that there's some some places like Japan has a general work ethic where you don't take time off you go to drinks after after the workday with your colleagues because that's what everybody does and that FaceTime is as important as anything else in that in that work culture. And here we're like, we've gone the opposite through pandemic and through whatever else. Lots of different examples here. It just a dovetail on a journey just in terms of what you just said. I think there's two ways of looking at one is do you create the safety so that conflicts can emerge that need to come out. Conversely, are the, is the situation unsafe that brings out the conflicts and the question then becomes, can you manage the conflict in a constructor or destructive manner. So, you know, you're not always going to have safety. Does the conflict come out and does it. Does it is it a race to the bottom of, you know, fundamental fundamental is debating where you're just saying I'm right you're wrong. Or are you actually beginning to understand different perspectives so you can say, oh, okay, I didn't look at it like that. I mean, Stacy just put in a comment about liberty and freedom. And, you know, and, and I think those words are ones where people have certain assumptions about them. And if you examine the assumptions and look at the relationship between them between equity and liberty. You might see things differently. But the problem is, in the United States in particular there's such a monocular vision on the whole notion of freedom that it actually eclipses concerns about equality and equity. So it's sort of a, it's a reductionist perspective on ethics that is incredibly detrimental. And it doesn't see the complexity of different polarities of how values and virtues coming in complex ways. And, and we don't make distinctions between virtues and values people talk about values but that they're not very literate in terms of talking about the ethics of virtues. Yeah, so there's a quote that says a child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel it's warmth. Right. Very similar to adults. When you go to any type of conversation. Yeah, it's safety, everything, being able to define things together and see the different lenses of it all. It's everything. Yeah. So how does safety, like, there are some safe spaces that aren't really safe. This is the, this is the, the, the rightist argument about campus political correctness, where saying things that are too far on the right are unsafe and are those careers are unsafe, you know, there's, there's cancel culture is all that kind of stuff there's, there's a really strong critiques of what are supposed to be safe spaces, but sort of safe for whom and how I think is part of the question. And what's the right balance to do that. And sometimes, sometimes there's an outsider opinion that's probably right in the long run, but nobody in the space wants to hear it, like not a soul. The space is unsafe for that opinion to be presented. And how does that work. Again, as Stacy did reiterate that that the room has to decide that every time and it changes every single time that the conversation changes and the people change the answer to that changes. So it's not like this fit for all universal answer. It has to be posed to the room. That's why I was so taken by that word fairness though. Yeah, it. That's what I look for in anybody that I talked to whether I agree with them or disagree with them. Do they seem to me to be fair minded. That's such a skill. Or, you know, whether it's an eight wherever it comes from that's undervalued. I cannot and will not have a conversation with somebody that doesn't have the fairness, even if they agree with me, there's no point to it. And I just think that we need to do more to show what that is, or point out, even in ourselves, when we're not seeing something clearly. So for me, a lot of it's about self awareness, but doing it in a public way so that maybe we recognize in each other, things that we didn't see in ourselves. If that makes any sense. And part of that self awareness requires self regulation. And I think we're like off the beat on self regulation and that's like number one thing that I'm dedicated to for myself and for those around me. It's a big word. It's how to how to manage energy when you're in conversation. How to manage yourself. It's self leadership at its best. You know, when people speak, I, this is a very simple heuristic, but I often think, okay, is this person talking out of the neocortex, the limb amygdala or reptilian system. And depending upon their emotional reactivity, they will regress to the lowest level. And sometimes commenting on the process can be helpful for putting the brakes on the escalation downwards. But, you know, but even to have the language is sort of what I just said and people to be aware of, okay, there are times when we all get emotional reactive. But is that emotional reactivity being driven by your neocortex or by your reptilian brain. So, Rick, you're reminding me that classes Neo book explicitly brings in spiral dynamics and different colored layer models, and uses it to say, hey, different people are at different levels we need to actually shape the message of regenerative agriculture and everything else to the right level. And he's using chat tpt to create some scripts at those different levels. And it strikes me from what you just said that that's very similar is just a different model of brains. But it strikes me that like, Trump is connecting really beautifully with a quarter of the population this country by appealing to their reptilian brains. Exactly. But that's, that's a very successful strategy right now. And I think the intercept might also need to work at the reptilian level. But the answer is not to rise above that and to be like all all like smarter in the neocortex. And by the way the neocortex gets way too much credit in the world. It's like two two spoonfuls of pudding in the front of our heads that seem to control everything. I don't know. It's an oversimplistic model is the critique of that framework and I yeah, it's a simple heuristic it's fine, but when you start going deeper it's much more complex than that. Yes, bingo. One thing that I learned recently was the emotional reactions that people have are not interpretations that the brain is having but more predictions. They're there. Our reaction is it's like our brain is in this dark aquarium and it's trying to make sense of the outside world without knowing really what's happening so what its job is to do is to predict based on past experiences. And we think we're actually thinking but the brain is actually predicting and then it comes out in emotion maybe fear based like you said as a victim for Trump's strategy. And it's a yeah it's hidden brain two weeks ago about feelings and it's how it's not interpretations but predictions that the brain is making. And when I start sharing that with people in a room. Just, I've been attempting to do this about three times in the last two weeks, just by telling them that we're all just predicting here. Our brain is predicting. It shifts. It shifts something. It does become less reactive because we start thinking about well what am I predicting now and there's a gap between reaction and you know, it gets a little longer, the more that gap happens, the more self self regulation we have. So it's, it's a brain hack, just by sharing that. I think it's a great. I would add to a maybe a little nuance and be interested in what your perspective is and that the predictions are also predetermined by implicit biases. Yeah, the pre determinants are that so you're anticipating something. Yes. And then and really what you're doing is shifting out of reflection in action to reflection on action, which is moving more into the metacognition field, but I want to return to something you said Jerry, because I've been thinking about if we're going to take on the reptilian brain, you got to be a you got to be a smarter reptilian. You know, so I'm going to share with you. This is a, if you if you click on that link, you'll see this image that I created with. Nice. Okay. I just blown away by this image. I just thought, wow. And so we've got five minutes to create it. Yes. You'll see the title of it. So we need to start talking about the mass psychosis of the big lie. I mean, this is a sort of, you know, the full aid. I don't know if you've seen some of the spruce on on on Trump's full aid and there's a there's a there as well. I mean, this is the sort of stuff you have to get down to. And it's not to make any difference to the base, it's to get the independence out and say, do you want this asshole to be your president for the next four years. That's what you're appealing to. You're not going to change the base. You're only going to change the middle ground, a few percentage points and that's all it needs. Anyway, enjoy reading that one. I haven't heard the term full aid. I'm going to read up on it when we hang up. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, if you go on YouTube, you'll see there the full aid. I think the full length needs to get even, you know, that needs to go viral. So, but I think that that that that that mean that I thought was pretty good. So interesting. Yeah. Other thoughts on this. I'm just curious. I'm so sorry. No, go ahead. It's not important. You have a talk, Stacy, go ahead. I was just going to ask how many of you have seen the bizarre ad of Trump comparing, you know, saying about how God created Trump with hands soft enough to deliver his grandchild. Have you all seen that. Yeah. You know, you have it. Um, yeah. So the only place that I do, I've been staying away from social media as much as I can. Unfortunately, I mean, even though I really enjoy it, but where I will interact is with the very, very religious. That's even though they seem like they're off the deep end. I'm feeling some element of fairness there. Even if they can't help themselves. So it's sort of like. It's for me. And that's where the. Wanting to be better comes in for me. It's almost like a challenge. Can I speak to them in their own language. And use their own logic to show them. Oh, wait a minute. This doesn't make sense. Um, and the same with certain libertarians. So those are the two groups that I like to speak to, because I know I can find common ground if I really try hard enough, if they're fair players. So I don't know just when you showed that picture and that whole commercials just killing me. Um, and I put in the link to that commercial that say she just mentioned and also a link to the farmer video that it's based on and God made a farmer is a thing that dates back a lot further by Paul Harvey. I don't know how old I don't know when. So, in 1978, all Harvey did a speech called so God made a farmer which got turned into a video. And that predates God made Trump they borrowed they basically borrowed that trope reappropriated it to Trump, etc. And you would there's something else that was swirling in my head but it's gone down. You know, to your word fair, I think there's different ways of looking at fairness. There's a fairness of the individual, which is fair minded, willing to open to opposed to being closed minded. So, even though they may have a diametrically point of view, are they fair minded with a listen to your viewpoint. So that's one thing. But there is fairness at an interactional level, and at a societal level, how do you co construct the meaning of the word. And that's one of the things we don't do. And so we get locked into our different frames of the words and then we just go to battle because we have different value structures, underpinning those different definitions. And that's one of the reasons why I've got a bugaboo about, you know, the whole notion of a language about values. You know, we're, we have in this war of identity politics based upon collecting conflicting value systems. But if we were to develop ethical identities, based on virtues, then then you're going to move to more fair minded place. What does one of those look like. What does it look like. What it looks like is that that I'm more attached to my virtues than my values. And so if a political identity is a trap is is attached to a hierarchical value system that you know, Jonathan height talks about between the conservative liberal minds. There's just small differences in the priorities of the value systems that causes the great divisions. So that's political identity. On the other hand, if you have an ethical identity based upon your own personal constant constellation of virtues. And there's a website called values and actions where you can go and do a survey and actually profile your own virtues. What are your, what, you know, what are your virtues. And so if you base it upon your ethical identity and not your political identity, then there's a better chance that we can use values of virtues to guide our values. Well problem is we, we do it the other way around. So that's a mindset shift. Can you say more about virtues? What do you mean by our virtues? Well, let me very simply values are just a contrast values are about sending priorities and what's important to you. All right, so that's values virtues is about doing good. It's a non hierarchical way of thinking about what your particular character strengths are. There's a book that was published, I don't know maybe 15 years ago called virtues and value strengths by Peterson and Martin Seligman, and it was sort of like a typology. It's a, it's a hell of a book talks about the framework of virtues and character strengths. And it's the opposite to, you know, the DMS for character categorization of mental illnesses. And so we don't actually work. We don't really do a very good job of cultivating virtues, both in religion and in education. We don't really work with virtues on either. Was the book virtues and character strengths or value strengths. It's I think it's virtues and character strengths. I'll have to find it. If you look at Peterson and Marty Seligman. It's it. Yeah. But I'm not. Yeah, Peterson, my selling man character strengths and virtues. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. So it's a website. It's a private foundation in Cincinnati that have been supporting this work about how to get the education of virtues into school systems. And I've used the actual, the survey itself as a way of inviting people to complete the, the, the survey online themselves so it gives them a framework of looking what the virtues are. I'm less interested in the actual results. I'm more interested in the conversations you have with yourself and with others about what you think your character strengths are. So it's, it's a go ahead, Stacy. I remember Maya Angelou said that the most important virtue was courage, because without courage you couldn't uphold all the other virtues. And the reason at least for me that that's so important is because speaking your truth or speaking whatever it is, does come with consequences. It does have to do with safety and you do need courage to be willing to uphold whatever it is that you feel you're upholding. And that's where community comes in. I think as a community, we could, if we shifted away from retribution and more towards, you know, forgiveness and acceptance. I think we could change it so it wasn't so scary to be wrong, or to have an alternate point of view. I can tell you that with the whole thing it with the Israeli crisis right now. I'm in a group that supports Israel and I've been very quiet, because I'm very upset that what happened is you wound up having all these mag is converging with people, you know, Democrats let's say, you know people I won't say we're far left but people like me, let's say people who think like me. And now they're cohorts, and I'm sorry but if you didn't care if migrants were separated from their parents and put in cages. I don't really trust your virtues and your values and know that I want your support. It makes it difficult for me to have an uncomfortable conversation, because I know there are people that are ready to just destroy me. And what's the point, if I'm not going to make any progress, why just stick myself out there to be beat up, because there's no room for nuance. You know you can't have a conversation, you know, you can't have a conversation where you try to create nuance, because there are people that just want you know I mean they're like advertising get your guns, you know get your train it you know all this stuff that is so against what I believe. It's funny should say that I'll put another blog post in which I did about this about healthcare professionals and their role and their perspective on this issue. And I haven't gone back to it but I got involved with one guy he was completely misconstruing me as being pro Palestinian. I had to reiterate take a chunk out of it and put it in said did you read this. And he clearly I don't either he did read it and completely ignored it because of his biases. But, you know, it's got so. I mean, I don't know. I mean, the cancer culture in this country is so bad. It is unbelievable and so I mean our poor had this Palestinian artists who was going to have an exhibit that she spent three years doing at the Indianapolis University, and they canceled her. And she was interviewed there it was, it was, it was amazing to to hear her account of it and and that's, you know this is just, you know this is, you know reptilian brain stuff. So, Amidar who is an old friend and the founder of idealist.org, which matches people who want to volunteer with volunteering opportunities. He and I have been in touch for a long time. And recently, right after the Gaza incident he did a couple tweets that just went viral. And for the first time in his life. He has his numbers just tripled and all of a sudden he'd say something and a lot of people would respond. And he was getting, he was getting sort of important people following him and then saying no saying thank you for what you're doing and he, he struck some note that I haven't been able to figure out yet. But he struck some note that that could work that middle ground somehow that and he is an Israeli who was raised partly in Peru and and a bunch of other sorts of things but but something about how he was saying what he was saying really resonated. And I think a really great way and he's trying to figure out what what you know, gosh I've gone viral now what do I do. Do you have do you have a link to some of that stuff because I think sure this you know trying to navigate that this people are going to take pot shots it on either side which I caught. Yeah. And you know how do you how do you maintain that position of equanimity that you know you're looking at the, you know. Anyway, if you read the article you'll get the gist of what I was saying and I was using a lot of other references in that. See a bit more of a nuanced story not from my perspective just because I cited the articles people were immediately assuming that I. Right. I think that link is going to break because it doesn't alias any forward anymore let me fix the link and see if that works. Thanks. And what I would do is I would just take this account and scroll back. Scroll back to scroll back to the date of the Gaza attack. And, you know, the things he did and there we go. So I just took away the bang, the pound bang and it works. Let me put that in our chat now better. There. So just scroll back to the date of the attack and you'll see like the things he said. Alrighty. Well this has been a very interesting conversation, all in the spirit of near books. Indeed. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. I've got a whole bunch of things to go research. Open your mind even more right Jerry. Crazy. It's very interesting because I feel sometimes like I'm in the middle of a maelstrom and like while swirling in the currents I'm busy like oh this connects over here and this thing here these these two people should meet and it's like whoa. There's no limit to the there's no limit to artificial intelligence but there is to the human capacity. Alas. It is too true. So I shall we wrap our call. Sounds good. Sounds like we're sort of getting to that point unless I'm somebody wants to bring up a topic or keep going. Well I've got one for you but we don't have to keep going. I don't know if you were I don't know if your ears were burning yesterday Jerry but we were just talking with Claudia so my wife's taking any job. She's going to be the chief social impact officer for the School of Public Health at Cal. Oh cool. Yeah cool position and it doesn't have to exist to be fun. So what do you do. And one of the things I was thinking since she really needed to talk to you about the I was thinking about the retreats. And like they have you know kind of how do you do like the learning and cooperation in the retreats and how do you model some of that. But but more broadly the question is kind of like what do you do. Yeah. So they have they have a I guess the school the university has a change makers program. They have a lot of courses and stuff through the through different all the different schools I guess have change maker classes and if you do enough of them you get a certificate and change making. But then that's how we don't tell you is that it's how to make change in the drawer at Starbucks. That'll be $4 and 12 cents back to you man. Exactly. I'm not exactly I was listening I was I was sitting in a. I was sitting in front of the 10x Berkeley the other day, and I was sitting in front of some student who was saying yeah yeah I'm going to take this change making class. And she said I think I get a certificate I don't know. She didn't know what she was getting into either. But David on that very quickly very quickly, I want to develop an equity muse, which is a change agent thing it's about asking the questions. Your wife is interested in pilot testing and equity muse. I'd love to get it to undergraduate so let me know if it peaks a curiosity or not. Jesse we're going to say. Well, I received a masters and creative from the center creative change from Antioch your 20 years, lots of years ago. Okay. And over the years of practicing. There is no change management you can't manage change but really what it comes down to is collaboration. Locking arms, every single time, locking arms, and it's so weird how when you went when I noticed nonprofits or leaders that are thought leaders, and they're attempting to influence change, they stay isolated in their efforts. And yet they, they're, there's so many different partners they could have had to accelerate that impact, and it's weird how we do that. So, for everything that I do it requires inviting people to the table, even the people that I don't think should be at the table or people that could maybe accelerate more than I thought. And this is my version of right now, bringing collaborators to connect the dots of products and thought leaders and tools and to be able to impact food. But it doesn't matter what topic we're talking about, it's collaboration that's changed. Well, we were talking about the part of the reason we came up with the Jerry's retreat thing was the. I was asking if she was going to teach anything and she was waffling a little bit about what she, I think she asked you right away, but that facilitation was the first thing that came to mind to teach right because there's just so much, I think, kind of insight in the facilitation of technologies, and we just don't give it nearly enough credence like you know how do you create one of the right formats that create, you know, connection and, and, you know, how do you do different settings and how do you do it lightweight and heavyweight and you guys formats can you do. Are you guys aware of Howard Randgold's materials on this. Well, I guess I know Howard stuff I mean I haven't really thought about it in the content snow. Yeah, so he taught at Cal and Stanford sort of collaboration and online stuff. And he created a syllabus that he posted online he's he's had a whole bunch of materials he's put online. I can probably give you some links to it but he's he's lovely he's in Mill Valley. And you could go for a walk in the church of Mount Tam with him. And that would be pretty cool. Yeah, Howard is a deep resource on on these topics. Yeah I would not have thought I didn't didn't come to mind so perfect. Thank you. Yeah I was thinking about things like your five minute universities. Yeah, yeah, there's all kinds of fun things. So just put a link to my brain for Howard's bibliography if you then go up to Howard. I guess he under it tons of articles he posts on Patreon a lot. And I can look some more but in the middle of all this is a whole bunch of wisdom, distilled wisdom about how to do this. Cool. Thank you for opening that little Pandora's box. Yeah, never know which box is going to explode in front of you. Thank you. Thank you, David. And if you and or Claudia want to talk about it. I'm happy to get on a zoom and chat that'd be great. Okay, yeah, yeah, no you will. We'll definitely be fighting it and if you're down this way. We're making your return return to the motherland. We're going to fly over your head this weekend we're a plan are going to a workshop in San Diego Friday through Sunday so we'll wave on our way over but we're not stopping in SF alas. Well we've got we've got the spare bedroom now we're ready awesome thank you. Great to see everybody. Thanks everybody. Look on your workshop. Love the call. Thank you. Bye everyone.