 we are recording a Designing Design from Trust call. Nominally, the topic is what does Design from Trust maybe look like as a personal practice, but, Kabeer, if you have other things you'd like to talk about, we can go, we can, as usual, trot anywhere over the terrain. Happy to go anyplace. Or, and also, happy just to listen to what reflections you have on things at this point. Well, I'm really excited to learn more what's in your brain about Design from Trust, and maybe, just as a starting point, I can reflect for you. I was thinking about this question after our last conversation with Eric and Raj, and realizing that, in a sense, in that context, we're designing from trust. We really have no idea what we're doing with each other in the room. We just trust one another. Like, four strangers, really, have come together and they're trusting each other and committing time and energy to some sort of an emergent design. And so, I'm not sure that that's precisely what you had in mind when you kind of coined the phrase, but I was really looking for where can we see Design from Trust and Care Maps and whatever else we're working with showing up in that context. So, I'd love to hear any reflections from you about that or how do you see us there designing from trust or what does that spark you to share and help clarify my understanding of what you see? That's lovely. That's a really nice example. And I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of Design from Trust, but it very clearly, I mean, we're, you know, for whoever listens to this later, there's four of us who've only just met. A few of us met at the Quantified Self Conference that was just a couple of weekends ago here in Portland and a conversation got sparked there that we are now continuing online. And each of us is really pretty different from everybody else. We have some really interesting, juicy, sort of shared interests in the middle of our own paths and our own interests that have to do with, you know, fixing the world and with mapping, using mapping as a way for people to express connections and care and a whole series of other things. And I think that maybe our emergent goals in this conversation are overlapping, but maybe not so much, but we're approaching this wholeheartedly in a way of saying, well, what might we invent together? Which is really exciting because it's completely intrinsic. It's like we're here because we want to and we really love this conversation and we like admire the people who are in it and it's been really fun. So as one of the basic principles of design from trust is assume good faith, right? I'm borrowing that from the open source community and from other places that have done this, but you know, there's two kinds of people in the world. I hate that, but it's always fun to bring up. There's good to believe that there are two kinds of people and those that don't get it. They're exactly that. And in this case, there's probably three kinds here in what I'm about to say, which is those who believe that people are born good and basically that our people are looking to do good, not looking to harm others. There's those who believe that people are born evil and given any opportunity will, you know, abscond with the jewels or cause mayhem and probably the third category is those who don't feel strongly about this and are just there's probably a large, you know, pool of people in the middle who are like, meh, I don't know, but occasionally I feel optimistic, occasionally I feel pessimistic. So I guess it's not, you know, it's not that binary, but I think that the presumption here is like, let's assume that people are born good because really good things start to happen if you start from that assumption merely. And like, I'm not a big fan of game theory. I think game theory is a very male way of looking at social dynamics and it kind of freaks me up because it doesn't assume ongoing relationships. It doesn't assume a whole bunch of stuff that actually happens in the real world, right? Because I would behave very differently if I knew that I'd bump into you next week, for example, in most game theoretic kind of constructs. But in game theory, it turns out in sort of a tit for tat kind of arrangement, the move of doing something good first is like the winning move. That's the winning play in a tit for tat kind of game and game theory. I run out of what I know about game theory pretty quickly. But lots of interesting things become possible if you approach most situations from the assumption that everybody there is trying to do some good and would like to connect and figure out their role and their way forward and whatever that might be. And even when bad things happen, interpreting them gracefully, sort of like, there's plenty of wise sayings that go roughly, be gentle with everybody who's path you cross. You don't know what their day has been like, what their life is like, right? So even if they lash out or do something or whatever, there's probably a reason behind it and each of us is the center of our own little universe and all of the wrinkly detail that I have about me and my goals and my life and my relationships, you have as well and everybody else out there has, right? No. That's a point you just raised. I'd like to apply a little pressure to you. Sure. And see what happens there. And it had to do with good intent. And the way that I tend to think about good is that good is the emergent result of a negotiation between two subjects pursuing their own version of beauty. And when our versions of beauty intersect, that intersection is good. And so there's two pieces to what you said. One was assuming good intent and inside of that, I think there's the assumption of the intersection of beauty. And then the other piece was when something uncomfortable arises. Forget what you, how you offended, some sense of having a degree of patience and maybe humility and compassion for that. And I might be trying to be too scientific with this, but I think we do a lot of assuming good without unpacking the underlying perspectives of beauty that are at play. I love that the Native American frame is to walk a beauty way. When I sit down to work on capital construction or to do the bucks or to send some emails or to organize files or to have a meeting with somebody, for me it's becoming more and more important in my life that that is in alignment with walking a beauty way. Which means that what I'm engaged in has to first and foremost commit to the beautiful world I wanna live and create. And that for me has to be non-negotiable. Somebody wants me to do something ugly. I better be doing it for a higher beauty purpose in myself and not for somebody else's thought of good. And this is a theoretic, but I have never seen that I can think of any evidence to suggest that anyone anywhere has ever done anything that they thought was probably the lesser good option for them. If they, from where they stood, if they saw I can go this way or I can go this way and going this way is gonna be worse than going this way, I don't think anybody has ever gone this way. They may have convoluted reasoning. You can maybe able to stand objectively outside of it and say, well, that's a really bad decision you're making. But if you investigate their reasoning, I can't believe because I don't think I've ever done it myself. But I've seen clearly two paths and I'm gonna take the path that brings me less and hurts more. That's sort of the definition of altruism sometimes. Like you give something up so that someone else might have something. Now, there's also interesting conversations. Still I want them to have that thing, right? Well, there's interesting conversations about altruism because your win is they're having the thing and you're happy because of that. But utilitarian perspectives on that say that you just gave up something you actually really wanted. Yeah, but I think that gets to be a little bit like with the weaknesses of game theory. Like utilitarian isn't useful if it doesn't actually address what's really happening. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't get to enough the narrative or the benefit or the whatever. And then the reason that I bring this up is if you and I are working together, I don't have to trust that you're going to design with our shared sense of good in mind. In fact, I can count on that's not what you're doing if we haven't defined that together. If we have left the good between us to be implicit and not co-created in a conscious way, then I can ensure almost certainly that you're pursuing the path that to you seems the most beautiful. And if I run into a place where our shared intersection fails, it's not because you're trying to do bad. That's a projection I might make that would actually just be a way of degrading the situation. But it's because you're trying to do a good that I don't understand. And so if it violates a shared commitment to a defined good, then I can investigate the clarity of that shared commitment. And if we don't have that shared commitment or it doesn't violate that but doesn't feel good, then I can investigate what is the good that you're trying to advance? And decide if that's something I want to align with and continue with. So I guess that the pressure there for me is just that that all feels very pragmatic and clear and it doesn't feel like there's any leap of faith that I have to make. There's no trust that I have to make except that, I mean, even, I don't know this, maybe it gets to the whole Jesus thing about turn your cheek, give them the other. You know, like even if you're lying to me about what our shared vision is, doesn't that fall on me to be skillful to discern what good are you pursuing with that lie? Anyway, that just, I guess triggered a lot, so. Yeah, yeah, you've put like five really beautiful things in the conversation, including the concept of beauty here and walking a beauty way, which I really like. And also you're really bringing to like the idea that if we haven't discussed what good means between us and if we don't begin to get an idea of our shared notions of that good, then we're probably only working on our own purposes and that may or may not work for the other person, but the mutual benefit really only arises when we start to figure out where the mutuality is. I like that a lot. One thing that came to my mind really early in what you were saying was that this notion of good or good intent or good faith is often really messed up because my mom always wants to do things for my good, but for a really long stretch of our life, I didn't want her to do those things. And she would, in her mind, they were the only useful things she knew how to do for me. So she forced me to accept them. And it didn't work so well, and it's still not working so well to this very day. But she was acting in good faith, I don't doubt that. It's just that her information about what was good and her ability to listen to me say that is not good were broken, are broken, right? And couple that with probably her ability at her age to find other ways to do good, to be flexible in some way, to learn some new thing, to listen with care, all those kinds of things probably aren't there at this point, but they would have been there like 20 years ago when this kind of started. So good is kind of both relative to what we understand, how to be, like, I really like the question, what does it mean to be a good friend, right? Because for some people, I don't know what percentage that is, that means whatever you say, I agree, and I'm gonna back you and help you. And for other people, it means the moment I hear you say something that's probably going to harm you or those around you, I'm gonna have to tell you that. And that's what it means to be a good friend. I might have to intervene at some point, right? So, and I think those are two really different conceptions of what like the friend dynamic is and you could have very different notions of good faith depending on which of those visions you're entering a relationship with, for example. What's your exposure to stages of adult development? I've been, yeah, I mean, I got the, you know, Psych101 part of it and a little bit more since then probably because I'm interested in people like Alice Miller and a bunch of others. So my exposure to that field comes from Suzanne Cook-Reuter and Bill Torbert and Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy at Harvard and Terri O'Fallon more recently and her greater partner and that Kim Bartha drawn on Piaget and some others. And in our conversation the other day, I mentioned the idea of the human species being a diverse evolutionary set. And the things that you just described about what it means to be a good friend to someone. Actually fits very nicely into some of the distinct stage conceptions that those various researchers that I just described have modeled. And so when we talk about, you know, we should be a good family or we should be a good friend or we should be good citizens or we should be good global citizens or good patriots. All of these things are translated very differently depending on the evolutionary state of someone's self-conception in their consciousness. And so when we talk about models like design from trust, if we don't take into consideration the different ways that these terms might be interpreted, it becomes violent, much like you described with your mother and your mother and you likely come from different stages of consciousness development. Living in the time that we do, it's likely that you have exceeded your mother's internal sense of self matrices in terms of how far yours has gone. And so she can't actually make tangible sense of a lot of the things that seem really important to you. And, you know, I've got some close friends who've had this problem recently with what's been happening in the news. Like the tangible sense to be made from the Kavanaugh trial or I think it felt like a distraction to them. It felt like, yes, yes, lots of that muddy stuff goes on. Why does it have to get in the way of doing something important like picking a Supreme Court justice? And so, yeah. So how does design from trust deal with that? I know. Challenge. Let me go back for one second to the stages of development piece because that's just, it's a giant body of work at lots of different levels. So there's like Piaget and development of human development from, you know, childhood through adolescence through adulthood. Then there's organizational or cultural stages of development and things like spiral dynamics and integral theory and all of that. And some of that makes me squirm in a couple of different ways. So recently I've heard of term early adulthood and my own narrative here is that we keep extending childhood. So one of my inspirations is a retired New York high school teacher named John Taylor Gatto, G-A-T-T-O. One of the things that Gatto does is he tells stories of very young people who did things of remarkable responsibility and cleverness. So David Farragut was our first admiral. I used to tell the story that Farragut was put on board a ship, a warship at age 12 as a midshipman because he came from a naval family. And it turns out I was wrong when I went and fact checked myself, I was wrong. He was put on board a military vessel at age nine, at age nine, which was normal then. You were like the powder monkeys and you had rank over some of the able-bodied seamen because you were expected to become a captain or an admiral. Your position was inherited in the British Navy in late of the American, not later, not in the American Navy, but anyway. So I come from a worldview that says that remarkably young people are capable of incredibly mature, connected adult reasoning, logic, perception, et cetera. Our training education socialization systems tend to squish that out of us. They tend to actually remove a lot of the connectedness that we're born with. And so then we kind of have to retrain it back in or hope and pray that it didn't get stamped out or whatever else. And then our cultural assumptions, it used to be that a high school diploma was enough to go out and get a job, not anymore. And an undergrad isn't enough anymore. You now need an advanced two to four to something degrees of advanced degree before you kind of get into a trade and get hired for a well-salary position of some sort. But we also sort of keep, we also have a lot of sort of adult children. In particular, I think white men in the US. Leading us, for example. For example, like orange-haired adult children who aren't that aware. And they've gotten really old and they like, who knows what awareness they have of any of those issues. Although there's a complete separate discussion to be had about whether Trump is a lucky idiot or an evil genius and I'd love to go there someday. But the development models I see a lot tend to work the wrong way very often. Just like I see, whenever I see Maslow's pyramid hierarchy of needs, I cringe because mostly it's used by people to say, see, poor people who don't have shelter have no aspirations for higher self-development. And I'm like, you know what? Some of the most developed spiritual people I've ever met have very, very, very, very, very little. And some of the laziest mentally and otherwise people I've ever met have all those lower layers in the pyramid fulfilled. So I'm a little leery of mental models. Some of them are really powerful and really helpful. Others are very messy. And I've been radicalized on a couple of those ideas, like the idea that very young people can be really connect, that we're born good and really deeply connected to nature and to perception. And that our socialization processes basically cut that away from us a lot. And in fact that the model that happens to rule in the world you grow up in, if you grow up in feudal society, if you grow up in a tribe someplace, if you grow up in capitalism and consumerism, those things actually become the frameworks of your mind about what's possible, how you see everybody else, what your goals in life are, all those things come out of the model you were just born into. And 99% of the humans born into a model will adopt those goals and frames of what life is supposed to be like. And then the 1% become the philosophers and the criminals and the kids who get sent to the principal's office because they see through the system and they're like, no, no, no, this is wrong, right? We've got the wrong priorities here. This is not the best life we could possibly be having. So these are like lots of digressions that you're provoking really interesting places to go here. I say a lot of this and it's still really important to design from trust because when I say trust, when we say good faith or good, I think I'm making a whole bunch of assumptions behind the curtain about what trust ought to be like, what the good is and where it goes, right? And when I look out in the world, a whole bunch of our institutions are designed from mistrust. And I can describe that, I can paint that, but I'm not sure that everybody can paint that because if you buy a lot of the assumptions of capitalism, for example, they don't look so bad. Well, you know, there's just one, there's one card I just wanna set up on the table, which is this idea that I like to entertain as a distinction between the pace of progress and the pace of integration. And we all live in, as you suggested, so many multi-layered stories of implicit assumption. I mean, we'd go to the principal's office because our story and the dominant story don't match. And at a species level, this works in order for a species to function and thrive. But at an individual level, it's a source of a lot of confusion because the species knows exactly what it's doing. If you can say it's got a brain or a mind of its own, which if you can say that it's not anything, yeah. But the individual, very easily arguable, has very little idea what they're doing most of the time. They're following a prescription, but the whys and wherefores that arose, all a concealed mystery, often in the realm of things we don't know, we don't know. And so designing, excuse me, the pace of progress, which is reflected really well in capitalism, as we know it today, and I think you mentioned there's many different forms of capitalism, I think that's fair, but taken as a whole, capitalism is very much a linear, goal-oriented process that seeks to move from a problem here to a solution there. And that's linear, and the sooner we're away from the problem and arrive at the solution, the better. So we wanna move at the pace of progressing along that linear trajectory. I'm not sure how linear I think capitalism is, but I'm with you. Okay. Because capitalism has done lots of stuff everywhere, sometimes all at once. Yes, but it's balancing these contradictory forces, and go ahead, it's balancing sort of these contradictory forces and goals, it does a lot of things. Yes, but it does most of that by externalizing things. Yeah, but not, maybe linear is the word I'm hung up on in some way. Well, so I equate capitalism with, often with linear objective rationalism. By linear, you don't mean sequential, you mean just that cause follows effect at least in the intention. What do you say when you say linear? Because I'm hearing serial, like one thing happens before another happens, and then another happens. And I think that's more complicated than that in capitalism. Well, I think that's a part of it. But capitalism is really about growing capital, right? To me that's a linear process. The way it actually occurs in the lived experience is multi-dimensional, and I don't mean to take any of that away, but the orientation is linear, it's from not enough capital to too much capital. So maybe also this means it's a vector that's pointing toward wealth. And that's the simple success function. Is that sort of part of what you mean by linear? It is, and then the idea that much is negotiated in that process is a negotiation of what can we externalize without hurting our progress to that goal? And what do we have to integrate in order to achieve that goal? Okay. And I think ultimately the flaw of capitalism is it externalizes too much. And that becomes the cumulative drag or friction that eventually brings capitalism itself to a halt. My list of the flaws of capitalism is a bit longer than yours then. Yeah, but basically it eats the planet at a certain point. Yes, correct. And you're done. Oh, well, capitalism didn't work with right care. Yeah. And so I think that essence of capitalism in the sense as I've described it is a natural evolutionary expression. I go from the beginning of my day where I don't have enough food for the end of the day and I don't have enough shelter for the end of the day and I haven't avoided enough predation for the end of the day to the end of the day where I've externalized everything I can in order to meet those basic needs. Well, also, I mean, a lot of Darwin's early theories of natural selection, et cetera, were used as justification for capitalism. I mean, there's a real twinning of the science of evolution as interpreted by lots of people and with lots of things ignored. I remember years ago, I decided, who are these horrible anarchist people? I'm gonna read something by an anarchist. So I picked up a book by Peter Kropotkin and the first half of the book is all about mutualism and society in animals and the termites and wolves and he just goes through species after species after species and look how they collaborate to make what they make and I'm like, this is one of the dreaded anarchists, what's going on here? I mean, when I use these things, I'm like picturing a hedgehog. Yeah, I'm not trying to equate human beings and say that human beings just try to avoid predation and get food and get shelter. I don't mean to reduce anybody to that and I don't mean to reduce a hedgehog to that but that's a much bigger part of a hedgehog's concern than it is mine on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. I watch the hawks all day long, I don't think for a moment that they might swoop down in the evening. That's true, that's true. And so, that has to do also with like Black Lives Matter and me too. Like, I'm a white guy and when I walk down the street, I don't cross to the other sidewalk much because I fear somebody. All kinds of things we don't have. Yeah. But my point is that we express this, part of what I think you're trying to address with Designing from Trust is the collective expression of this linear process. It's in a way, it's a critique of particular expressions of that process. That's right and so I think that when we just kind of try and move quickly through our day, through our conversations, through our business initiatives, through our opportunities to make money or make a change or do something good for the world, we pursue this in a way that beautifully, in an evolutionary sense, advances as quickly as possible our vision of beautiful. Like if I could just get a bunch of flowers on my desk, that would be so beautiful. Right. Now, it's not a new thing at all to enjoy and take my time collecting the flowers. Capitalism would try and decorate the desk as quickly as possible because then I could probably show it off and I can sell 10 other people on decorating their desks and if I can get that done in a week then I can buy a Lamborghini. But what I've run into, and maybe this is speaking from my own pain, what I've run into in an organizational context and many contexts is the pace of progress takes precedence over the pace of integration and the pace of integration is almost certainly slower. What do you mean by integration? Well, it means that when you and I set out to do something we actually slow down enough that we can take in moment by moment when do those implicit assumptions of what's good present themselves? Okay. So we don't rush by 100 a minute and when we do notice one coming up we actually stop our progress in a linear sense to integrate that question. We haven't been doing that much in this conversation and that's been a source of tension and anxiety for me. Oh, okay. And I have a tremendous amount of trust for you and so I just kind of charge forward. But my point is that the pace of integration would be a very different conversation and lived experience and society and wouldn't be designing from trust at all. It would be designing from very measured, very careful clarity. Of course it would be designing from trust in some other sense, but... How much of integration is about permeability? Permeability? Same word, what you mean? Am I permeable to your ideas? Do I shift in my ideas because of what you said? Do I receive them in a way that folds them together and makes something better? Or am I just like, look, here's my priorities this is what I believe and I'm just gonna kind of plow ahead and if it fits, it fits, if it doesn't, it doesn't. See, I think this, my model of living right now that is a question of how deeply integrated do I feel in my identity with the entire cosmos? Because if I'm feeling sufficiently identified with the cosmos, then you can't have a contradictory view. It's just my view that I haven't heard yet. And if I am feeling isolated in the cosmos, you almost can't have an idea that's good enough for me to integrate it. And so that feels like a personal accountability. What can we do right now to integrate better what we're doing and saying? I guess if I would want to ask you to explore out loud, what is your highest hope for this conversation? I mean, you called us here together. So overall. And just the broad framing for this particular conversation is this idea called design from trust that took hold of my neurons some time ago that I would love to see expressed in the world in as many ways as naturally play out. So the thing I sort of put in front of this call was what if design from trust was a personal practice? What does that mean? Sort of like Buddhism is a personal practice, right? And Buddhism involves meditation and meditation involves different, there's different forms of meditation. You can point to a practice area and describe what parts it has. And here, what does design from trust look like? So one, maybe probably the most explicit goal for me is to flesh this out and see who shows up and see if anybody's really interested in playing out any of those ideas to a manifestation, then awesome, I'm like a playmate. I'm a total partner in doing that, right? Then there's like this hopeful, less spoken aspect of it, which is I came at this as a single naive individual and I've got my own thoughts about what it means. What does it mean to other people and what is behind it? Like what, and you're doing a beautiful job by your presence and the way you walk through ideas and present them in helping peel back some of those layers about what are sort of maybe my assumptions, our assumptions, what does this process look like? What role does it play in the larger picture? Those kinds of things because I have a faith that poking into those places and letting those permeate me, that letting those ideas in is going to broaden and deepen this whole concept and probably touch lots of other parts of what I do. So I'm interested when something shows up that hasn't been in this conversation yet and it's like, oh, that sounds really interesting and valuable. And then just, the first reaction is how does it fit? Wow, what do I do? And then the next reaction is like, okay, let's just listen and see if we can figure out what this might mean and let it sit for a while because it's gonna take a while to turn into stew. It doesn't cook together right away. I'm just checking here. Do you have a song until five o'clock? I have a song for an hour. There's no, we don't have to turn it off at five. Okay, great. So I have a high level thing and a low level thing. Okay, I'd like to do, so I'll start with a high level thing, which is just to reflect back on your, forgive me if I call it allergy to developmental structures. My occasional skepticism of developmental structures, how about that? Much better for me. I'm not allergic to them all. I think they're really useful. It's just that I've seen them break things that I believe in. Yeah, no, and I think they do. And I think that's a real danger. And I'll actually be presenting on development to a local group here next weekend, but. Sorry, yeah, my card's on the table. This has been an area I've been immersed in studying for about 12 years now. And I started that study when I enrolled in a program that was designed explicitly, well, implicitly. It was not explicit to the participants. It was explicit part of the design of the designers to see if they could move people in the integral model of development from achiever to strategist. By taking them through a leadership development program for 18 months. I enrolled in that program and no idea about that aspect of it, or about what any of that stuff meant. I just had people I loved and trusted were putting it on. I wanted to be a part of it. At the same time, my estranged 10-year-old daughter moved in with me. So I lived in this developmental context while studying development. So I really got just soaked in the Kool-Aid on this one. And I think of most of our models today are implicitly in large part that linear rational objective dynamic that I attributed to capitalism, including the study of development. And I know that also most of the people I mentioned to varying degrees implicitly and explicitly are working with those developmental models in a way that integrates a greater plurality, a greater multi-dimensionality to the proposed phenomenon. And that is what I mean when I say development. So when you say that you're gonna have an exceptionally well-developed child and an exceptionally lowly-developed adult, I wholeheartedly agree. And I think that because we have categorizing minds, that's one of the things we will continue to struggle with for a time in these models because I think that the developmental categories or rather the categories into which I develop are unique to me and an infinite set. And there's enough implicit overlap between you and I that a scientific observer can pick a piece of those infinite dynamic sets, freeze them in a mold and say, this is what they are, and then measure your development and my development through that mold. And it has some bearing in value, but it doesn't ever touch the living, breathing dynamic mystery that we are. So that was the high-level piece I wanted to iterate because I do think it's important to keep in mind those dynamic motions of linear increasing capacity and skill in certain generalizable dimensions that help us frame structures for dialogue and interaction and collaboration with people that takes into account people's different developmental stages, whether it's their capacity to work with gunpowder or their capacity to design a warship. Or the capacity to entertain a new idea. Yeah, exactly. And so then taking it to the low-level thing, the thing that came up for me to ask you when you talked about how do I make designing from trust into a personal practice? So what if I say, I am your willing accolade and I have full faith in this design from trust thing, I think it's my path to God, but I never did anything like it. What are the first, what's the first, what are the preliminary practices that you would advise me to take on in practice in order to start to familiarize myself with the things I need to become proficient in to design from trust as a personal practice? Do you want me to tackle answering that? Yeah, cool. So as you're saying that I'm realizing that I'm borrowing from plenty of existing traditions, right? When I said, assume good faith, I'm borrowing that from open source software movements and they from elsewhere. This is not a new thought. I'm also a fan of Quaker thinking, basically the religious society of friends. And one of their fundamental beliefs is that God is actually in everybody. God is like not a separate being that judges us from above and all of those kinds of things. The reason that they at least used to use what's it called plain speak I think, where they call each other V and Vow, was that the capital TV and Vow was the holy in the other person. They were not trying to be pompants. They were just speaking out of respect for the other and seeing that of God in them and in themselves in the present moment. And I think if we did that with humans and your average rock and table, and if we treated the things around us with respect and dignity, a lot of other stuff easily tumbles out the other end. That changes a lot of behaviors right up front. So I think there's some piece of design from trust as a personal practice that's about reorienting the way you see things and treat things. And Marty Spiegelman, who I might have described to you, she's used to be a neurobiologist and is now a shaman, basically teaches people the traditions of the Quechua and Amara peoples of South America. She carries a couple other traditions as well. But she's really good at sort of taking people into this space of seeing differently. And she and I together have crafted a workshop we actually never given, but the phrase that we both aim toward in the one day workshop is see, be, do. So if you can see differently, you will begin to be differently and that will naturally make you do differently. Your actions will be different. And part of this is just trying to get people to see a little differently. And that means a lot of things to a lot of people that easily and quickly runs into belief systems, prejudices, fears, there's a whole bunch of stuff that can easily pop up. So there's a hundred really good questions about, okay, so how do you walk out to those waters? How do you try this out without drowning? I think sort of the flowing river metaphor is nice for changing your behavior, right? It's like, what, you want me to cross this list like raging torrent river? And unless I see that there's some steady rocks in the river, I'm certainly not gonna try it. And unless I see some other human who crossed and survived, I'm probably not gonna try it. But there might be like really great life across that river, across some behavioral change or some attitudinal change or whatever. So I think behind this as a personal practice is, how do I change some of that? What kinds of things might I do to affect those sorts of things? So, I think we saw for just a moment there. Sure. What kinds of things can I affect to change which things specifically? Your outlook toward the world, your approach toward things and people. So for example, this may sound silly, the sillier version of it is something like three hugs, but random acts of kindness or even just smiling at people. So I treat most conversations and most emails as an opportunity to make the other side smile a little bit. So I have a funny greeting and salutation that I just sort of developed over the years that I like that's a little bit quirky and hopefully not too alienating. No, hopefully not too weird as to be like, who the hell is this guy? And I will play with language. I don't think I'm teasing so much because teasing can be a little dangerous, but I'm trying to be lighthearted when I'm in contact with other humans in a way that might make them a little bit happier in the day. That's simple, but that's an attitude, right? And there's a lot of other people that are mostly just functional. And there's some people who aspire just to clarity in their communications and they just want every word to mean exactly what they mean and for the details to all be there. So there's not a lot of doubt at the other end as to what I said. And you and I probably both don't like it when you get a message that says, great, I'll talk to you next Thursday at three and you're like, what time zone? And does next Thursday mean this Thursday or the one after? Cause next is an ambiguous American English word, right? Things like that, right? So the clarity is a virtue too. But I think behind here is some ways of seeing and being that play out then in all different kinds of actions. And behind that are narratives like the fact that long ago I think we used to understand what the commons were, that we live in the middle of a whole bunch of commons and that if we don't take care of our commons, we actually don't, we may not survive, that the commons are something we have to care for together. Well, the model that we're living in, capitalism plus consumerism, basically turned the commons into natural resources to plunder and make things out of. So the model barely even contemplates the commons and usually then only when commanded to obey regulations about, oh, you have to do this. So the model itself is out to plunder as much as it can for self, for its own benefit with this crazy narrative that there's an invisible hand so it all works out okay if everybody's greedy which makes me nuts. But that's like you get a primitive take on capitalism and economics and that's what it is, right? But it's true as long as the whole planet is desertified and uninhabited of life, as long as that fits into your definition of okay. Exactly, I love that, precisely, precisely. So those are some of the aspects of this and I realize as I'm describing some of the things one might do, they're maybe kooky or idealistic or they're maybe too broad but there's more specific things one can do as well. If I reflect back, what I heard you saying, if I heard you in an essential sense was the practice that you're advising is that I look for ways to lean up against the edges of my assumptions and my worldviews and I go looking for the edges of my worldview so I can try a different one on. Maybe next or maybe not too far away, maybe far away but I actually look for the edges of my worldviews and I try to escape those boundaries or modify them in some way. And to be doing so with an intention of making things better with a real caution about what better might mean, very much in the spirit of the conversation we just had about what is good and what one's intentions might be. So to be alert that when you think you're making things better, you might not be, right? And I'm a hugger but in these days of being cautious around people, you gotta ask permission for things like that and figure out where this all fits. So better isn't always better to everybody and I think what I'm grateful for is that we're beginning to understand more and more where these things go wrong although that awareness bubbling up has caused a lot of backlash in the world as well. So it's all very messy and right this minute the waters are very turbulent because there's a whole bunch of emotion that's been kicked up by the last electoral cycle and all of the messes that are sort of coming out from that. Before this last electoral cycle, these forces were present. They were just sort of quiet and suppressed beneath the surface. They existed. Nobody had lanced the boil, so to speak. So now these things have burst forth that are messy on the landscape but that gives us opportunities to actually talk about them and deal with them. These are conversations we were not having before. Not enough maybe. So for me staying with my question about what's my neophyte acolyte practice, what I think I hear you say is that the advice is that I look to discover if I have assumptions and likely that I do. And when I find those assumptions I look to test them and explore outside of them. And that as I continue to do this practice through my graduated stages of capacity with the design from trust practice, it's likely as long as I keep with that preliminary practice those assumptions will become more complex and wider and they'll go from I assume Trace and Melissa in the next room to I assume you and I share a value around transparency to I assume democracy will save the world. And that's a line of practice that I might take on in order to personalize a design from trust. I like that. Okay. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, cool. There's also other smaller sounding things. One of the problems, one of the ways in which we've ended up with systems designed for mistrust is that we've taken away people's sense of agency. We've institutionalized a lot of things. The word that got me here is the word consumer by treating people as mere consumers not as full humans and not as citizens, for example. Our job as consumers is to buy stuff. And it's not to- Just to consume stuff. But it's just to consume stuff. And that's what Lynn says, to use up, to deplete, to destroy. Very Lynn twist, yeah. Yeah. And also if you've heard people talk about the difference between the linear economy and the circular economy and things like that, right? So the assumptions of the consumer economy don't lead us toward the kinds of things that we're talking about. If I can just take us a little tangent for a moment. Please. I used to be fascinated with this idea of an AI that would start to select for its own value set and would eat all the people, you know? And what struck me about a year ago is that we have such an AI. It's the capitalist system. It now writes its very own rules. And it uses the entire planet and every living organism on it as its food. In stocks. And it runs out of control. And so actually the term consumer, because what I want to address is the wellness of the human species. And implicit in that is then its ability to be well with all of its living relations on the planet and the planet itself. And the cosmos beyond, but I'll be happy for us to just get along with the other plants and animals, especially them, let alone one another. But the thing that has happened is something smarter than us. This advanced intelligence called capitalism has started to write for us the narrative of ourselves and our lives. It's not human beings that call each other consumers. I have no reason in any context to refer to anyone else as a consumer of mine. Or a consumer of my product. It's only when I'm in service to this capitalism superstructure that that becomes a meaningful definition. And so we're using terms, it seems, strikes me in this conversation that are actually not even terms created by the human mind. They're terms created by the capitalist mind. And discovering a distinction there seems like maybe a powerful point of inflection. Absolutely. If we're gonna design from trust, do we trust capitalism? Has it earned our trust? There's things, I mean, I'm typing and talking to you through a capitalist device that, you know... Are you? A couple ounces of unobtainium and glass- Is it just really a capitalist device? It arose from capitalism, did it not? Is it the only way it could rise? No, it's not. I don't mind that it's the only way it has arisen here on it, but to protect capitalism because we value our computers seems like a dangerous mistake. I totally agree. And just recently, somebody kind of reminded me of Milton Friedman's famous pencil talk. Where he says, and this is from his Free to Choose or I think that was the name of the series he did on PBS way back when, you know, Milton Friedman has been a pivot point for how we think about the world. And he says, this pencil is only, you know, you could not make this pencil. You know, thousands of people and hours and investment and everything went into the graphite and cutting down the forests and painting the paint and the rubber at the end comes from a different place and this was all assembled and gotten to you at a price that's insanely low. Thank you capitalism, which is the only way it could have gotten to you. And that's Uncle Milton's, you know, phrasing for how this could happen. And I'm with you, I'm like, and no, not so much. There's lots of other ways this might have happened. And before 1650, we had stuff and capitalism didn't really exist. So how did we eat and make tools and share and do stuff? Lots of other ways. I think though the thing I wanna be careful of is that we don't see this is where developmental worldviews comes in to play for me. From the worldview of Milton Friedman, the only way this pencil could have come to exist is through capitalism. And that actually has a great deal of practical meaning and reality. And the fact that I can stand outside of that framework and say, I'll bet there are other ways, doesn't invalidate the legitimacy and the truth of that worldview in that space. It diminishes its usefulness if I wanna go forward and make pencils in another way, except by its example to avoid. But its example to avoid only has integrity if I'm willing to bring the whole thing as milk cherishes it along with me for the ride. And so there's this, for me, designing from trust, I think means a lot about radical trust. Trust that trusts my enemy. Trust that trusts death. Trust that trusts that which will destroy what I love. That is super interesting. And if I can do that then it frees a lot of energy, I think. And it might not be the kind of energy that will solve the problem I identify today by the time I die tomorrow, but I do think it frees the kind of energy that will advance a qualitative goodness for that set that I value, meaning all of life, further by the time I die tomorrow than me just getting the Lambo before I die. So there's like some tweaks of orientation in there about, if I'm designing from trust, maybe I have to understand something about my goals. Right, I mean, the word that's burbling up in my head right now as you're saying these last couple sentences is the word enough. Like most of us don't understand when we have enough. And most of us have been raised in with assumptions of scarcity and whatnot. And scarcity plays an interesting role throughout human history. But at this point, most of us don't understand enough. And we're not happy with enough. We're not, we don't stop at enough. Maybe enough is a deceptively simple word. Yeah, it's crazy, yeah. Because insufficiency is what destroyed the dinosaurs. Insufficiency has killed more species than live on the planet today. Not enough has been the devastation of countless living beings. And we're well on our way to doing that to ourselves. Right, and so this concept of enough that sounds simple enough, what does it really mean? But I think it runs deep. And I think it's a practice point to make, to pay a lot of attention to. Yeah. So designing from task has the quality of a really soulful relationship to enough. Yeah. I've been doing a meditation practice by a prescribed by a teacher named Dan Brown. His website is the pointing out way. When he describes the meditation practice there, part of the setup, and he's got this in the library available on the site. This is in preparation for your meditation. Think of a time when you really trusted yourself. When you really knew that you had the intelligence and the skills and the capacity to accomplish what it was you were setting out to do. And now get a hold of that sensation of trusting in yourself and your capacities and now bring that in as a tool for your meditation today. And that seems like that's the kind of trust I would want to have if I brought myself to you as a collaborator, find something together. I like that a lot. My device made of unobtainium is about to run out of electrons. Other unobtainium, great. Yeah, and also, this has been a really filling and a rich conversation. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. I really feel the same way. I really appreciate you extending the invitation and bringing such a really kind of a high offering letting us play with it. Thank you. There will be many more. Fantastic. It's a good journey. I want you to just keep just noticing whoever happens to be in the vicinity. Whoever gets it, whoever happens to have a free hour when the call happens, whatever. I'm not trying to book these or doodle them or anything like that. And as if you are struck with opening questions or with parts of this terrain that you would like us to talk about, send me an email with a framing of a conversation and I will put that to the group. And we'll move that way because it turns into whatever we all make of it. Dynamite. Super cool, thanks for having me along. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Be well. Thank you. Thanks, Kibir.