 Is it the chicken or the egg? So that's one of those questions that, even as a kid, we used to play with, right? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? And so sometimes we wonder, what comes first? Is it the individual or is it the community? Is it the individual or the group? And Giselle just answered the question. So what comes first is the environment. What comes first before the chicken or the egg is the farm. This is Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with two friends, Giselle Huff, who's the head, she's the founder and president of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and also John Powell, I-Net board member, but more importantly in this world. He's the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at University of California, Berkeley. And he's also a professor of law, African American studies and ethnic studies, also at Berkeley. John has been a mentor to me for many years. Giselle, we met two, three years ago and you were an inspiration almost immediately. And so I'm very excited today because they convened a group which I had the good fortune to participate in on the questions related to automation and the various, how we say, visions of opportunity and belonging and a way to get beyond some of the, what I'll call, frightening and divisive turbulence that haunts us all at this time. They created what I would call a North Star of vision, which we'll explore in this conversation, which directs us all in the long term to a place where we create and build and educate people into a better society than the one we see right before us now. Thank you both for joining me and let's start with Giselle. First of all, how did you meet John and how did you guys decide to get together and do this report? What inspired you? So I, it was my plan to do this convening that created the report. But I was well aware that, you know, Giselle Huff, founder and president of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity was not enough to get this going in any meaningful way in terms of bringing people on board that would have the heft to, you know, to give this status. So through Wendy Ackie, who was both a participant and also is a collaborator of John's, I started a campaign to get introduced to John and eventually got to speak to him. On the phone while I was at a conference on my cell phone, while people were walking by and got him interested in this project and eventually he agreed much to my delight to become a co-sponsor so that now we had the gravitas that we needed in order to make this a success. And I would say from my own experience, John is kind of a north star and guiding in direction of many things I net dust. So maybe we needed a north star to help us create a north star. John, what inspired you to join this project and get, how do you say, roll up your sleeves and head out to space? Well, first of all, thank you, Rob, for hosting us. And so, as they say, I was waiting for years to get that in that conversation with you, Sal. So when it finally happened, I was delighted. And I think the visions that she brought to this was just so important, not just for this project, but for the whole country, for the whole world. And the ability to sort of step back and look at where we are going and where we want to be in a generation and to invest some time and energy and resources into that I think is extremely, extremely important. And it may be hard to sort of appreciate just how important, given that we have so many immediate crisis that we have to deal with. But we always have crisis, some big, some small, but the future is coming, whether we're ready or not. So this seemed to me a project to help us be ready and participate in bringing that future forward. Giselle, recently you made a podcast with a woman named Becky Pringle, who's the president of the National Education Association. And I was really taken aback on, I think the name of the podcast was Common Ground. I was really taken aback by your interaction with her about when you met. You had very different perspectives on what the reimagined education should look like. But by focusing on your star of that project in the distance, you found a great ally in somebody that, at the outset, how do you say someone less thoughtful might have found is an adversary. Did that inspire you in the construction of this, the experience that you had with that 27-person group along with Becky? Absolutely. When I founded the General Health Fund for Humanity, which is named in memory of my late son who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54 in 2018, when I founded the fund and I looked around because his passion was universal basic income and my mission is to forward that idea. But that idea is only part of a much greater idea that he captured in a techno thriller he wrote called Crisis 2038, which is a fiction portrayal of what will happen in 2038 if we don't do something now, if we don't start doing things now. And of course, doing something now means having something to go for, a goal to reach. You can't just do things without knowing where you're going. So when I got involved before, way before he died, with the education reimagined experience, which was, we arrived at a North Star for K-12 education and the result of that exercise was this lifelong friendship that I've established with Becky Pringle. And I looked for where I could make investments in the fund in activities, initiatives that would move this along, his passion, his ideas. I decided that I needed to do the same kind of thing for the future of the social contract, if you will, that I had done for K-12 education, that I had participated in K-12 education. So that's how I got, you know, I brought together and I hired a consensus building institute, the same facilitators that did such a great job when Becky Pringle and I were involved. Was Zitobi and David worked with that project as well? Oh, yes. Zitobi and the consensus building institute. They were the facilitators. They were the writers of the education we imagined, equivalent documents, the North Star document for that organization. And, you know, the experience here wasn't really as dramatic because we couldn't be together. We had to be, you know, on Zoom, and given that this happened in 2020, in our case with the education, we actually met two and a half days, five times. And when you break bread, you know, when you look into people's eyes and you share a glass of wine and you hear their life stories, you're in a different place than when you, you know, participate in something with Zoom. When I was a little boy, my father used to say to me, this was in Michigan, in the Detroit area. He'd say to me, when you get into a dispute, always meet with someone. I said, why, dad? He said, because if you let them think you're a dragon, then you're a dragon. When you meet with them, you're a human. And that are not a dragon anymore. And I, how do I say, obviously require some skills and issues, things like, what's his name, Nathaniel Rosenberg's book, Nonviolent Communication and so forth, to make those personal interactions a healing. But I think it did make things much more complicated to be only online for our group, given the large size and number of people. Let me just put together a list of the people who are co-participants. And then I'm going to ask you, how did you get this wonderful roster? You had that. You shaped a very interesting group of people. As your mentor mentioned, Wendy Aki from Johns Othering the Longing Institute, Reverend Jennifer Bailey, who was the Executive Director of Faith Matters Network, Robert Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters, Whitney Campbell Cole, Director of National Programs and the Center for Rural Strategies, Sarita Gupta, Director of Future of Work and Workers Program at the Ford Foundation, Derek Hamilton, who's now, I believe, at the new school and the head of an institute for studying race stratification and political economy. Jussell, myself, John, Olivia Lamb, Vice President of Federal Relations, Strategies 360, Richard Murphy, Brilliant Man, Editor-in-Chief and Director of Service Now, my friend, Manuel Pasteur, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, American Studies, Ethnicity, and he's a Director of USC Equity Research Institute. I don't believe that's about the stock market. I think that's about the human condition, but I'll just make that clarification. Ann Price, President of the Insight Center, William Rogers, Professor of Public Policy, Chief Economist of the John Day-Helgrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, Scott Santin, Senior Advisor of Humanity Forward, and Andrea Severi from Severi Consulting, who I know Jussell, you've held in very high regard, related to the education dimension, which is a part of this report. But how did you, what was the process, how did you bring together this roster of people? It was done at the suggestion, some of the suggestions that John made, and actually some of the connections that the Consensus Building Institute had. And once you have someone like John on the roster, and you can ban his name about, you do get more bites, you know, people are interested in participating in something with a person of the stature that John has. So we lost a couple, three people on the way, but we actually, you know, stuck it out with the 16 people, and they were all signatories. It's one thing to come up with a work product. It's another for people to actually put their names to us and be willing to be recognized as, you know, creators of it. And that was our problem. So the whole exercise was a real success both in terms of the content and of the process considering what we were facing, the coronavirus. Well, John, I'll use the analogy of a moonshot. Maybe you're the Neil Armstrong that inspired all of these good people to come together, but how did you see what were you looking for in putting together this team? What you said I mentioned earlier in terms of starting her foundation part in her son, looking at universal basic income in the future of work, which is a big issue. I live in the Bay Area in Berkeley. I work closely with a number of community groups but also foundations and tech companies looking at automation in the future of work and there's some experimentation with the universal basic income. And so I think as people look up they see, again, the future is sort of rushing toward us. Automation is here and I appreciate Giselle's characterization but I think she could reach anybody she wanted to just using her own name. I think people respect her for obvious good reason, but I also think the issue is really pressing. One of the difficulties is that it's pressing in a pressing time. Giselle mentioned that we have not met in person. I hope that maybe one day we still will meet in person as a group because I think it is a different energy a different kind of exchange, Rob, that you mentioned from your dad. So I think that the trick is how do you keep people's attention when there's so many things pulling on their attention? I think all of us have a stretch way to them and yet these issues are so important and also I appreciate what you're talking about in terms of Giselle interacting with other people who may have differences. There's a book I recommend called High Conflict by Amanda Ripley. She talks about how to move from high conflict to essentially productive conflict. Conflict is going to happen. It's going to make it something that's productive and in fact if it's productive, we learn from it. We sharpen our understanding. We see our blind spots. So I think having a large group of people, not everyone agreeing on everything at the outset, but to work things through makes this a better project product. So really delighted to be a part of it and I think I hope it gets a lot of play going forward as people think about these issues. I find it fascinating because that roster I read off, you've got people coming from all different places we'll talk about the issues in the report but they're what you might call subset. Everybody's focused on a subset but how you all got everybody to focus and come together. Not only on a deep dive about this issue or that, but the integration across multiple issues and I think the I just marveled at the conversations. It almost looked like a whole bunch of butterflies and then it all converged and it looked like the geese that are flying migrating in the fall. Everything was in formation at the end and I didn't feel any coercion or intimidation or anything in the process. So how do I say you each are quite artful and I think you brought good people to the table and we started to paint a picture for that future. Facilitation was important as well. Facilitators who can help people hear each other, Toby and others they did a really great job. That's right. People hearing people. Yeah. They kept the even the electronic boxing gloves from being put on. I never saw a real breakdown. I saw a fervent discussion like you said the kind that Ripley would talk about as being constructive and illuminating but it never got off the rails in my view. So let's talk a little bit about the key issues that you talked about. I enjoyed the fact that there was a background acknowledgement that there are what you might call processes in society but we weren't going to go into the means we were looking at the ends. But you did state as a background that we won't be there unless we have a healthy and responsive democracy and we have a healthy planet so that we can continue to live in a place as a society. And so those underpinnings then took us to a whole constellation of issues how we can make technology enabling how the communities are communities that belong to how we embrace different identities how Libertarian education brings people authentically into those communities and respect for their identity. And I just felt like these interactions were extraordinary and I have to say the principles that you wove into a coherent design was great but how did which ones resonated with you what got how do you say excitement, what made your heart trigger off and go up? What I think about Rob and I know you listen but Rob's been very active both the television, the movie and the music industry and it would be like saying what do you like better the drum or the guitar it's the drum and guitar together that's what I like so that you have great solo players when you put them together then you got something special and I think the various issues and again in some ways you could say when we think about the future there are many different ways of thinking about it in terms of climate change and demographics coming out of the census you have to think about technology and those things are interactive and some of them inspire fear any of them can inspire fear certainly the changes that are happening in the climate but also when people think about AI and technology and automation we can almost keep that thought at bay because it's so scary we don't understand it things that we don't understand are easy to fear and just put our heads down so I like the fact that we're pulling all these things together and so when you think about technology when you think about climate when you think about people themselves that we're a diverse world and it's always been a diverse world and the States has been at the forefront of that experimentation and we're being called to live together not in our box that we have a shared box and the way you do that in part is through education education is a key Thomas Jefferson made the observation that people aren't born citizens they're made citizens through education we're doing a pretty poor job right now we're not educating people to be citizens and some people may be surprised that I'm quoting Thomas Jefferson I'm well aware he had 200 enslaved people even though he wrote the Declaration of Independence he struggled he was imperfect like all of us but he also said part of being a citizen is learning to take the other person's perspective and in this society in this world right now we're just the opposite we don't even want to hear so I think all of those together can create a really beautiful symphony beautiful but beautiful tapestry but not one by themselves they all have to be together so the thing that excites me is bringing all these things different threads together I'm going to play with your reference to my own musical background in its relation to technology because technology is both tremendous potential and you say at times frightened I'm very frightened of drum machines because I think it stops that improvisational sensitivity and interaction and it makes the music more saccharine than if you have humans who might be not mathematically right on the beat but if they're a little behind or a little ahead that has feeling and so there are times when I think technology is not what you might call nirvana but on the other hand I think being too afraid of it you're missing a great deal of opportunity but Giselle you had lots of experience exploring through these issues and in many ways you were a pioneer in the education realm what caught your fancy as the report started to unfold or come together as a vision so what I really appreciated was the fact that at the core of this report is the individual and it's like peeing the onion in order to please to make life liberty and the pursuit of happiness a reality you have to create an environment within which the individual can thrive what this report does by picking out the environmental factors that are prevalent in the 21st century like automation the lack of community that has been growing because of all of the political divisions that we've been living through as you look at and the outer circle of the graphic that they've created in this report the healthy planet and the healthy democracy which are like fundamental but all of the elements that bear on the individual both as the individual develops relationships with the community and for me belonging is the biggest thing and I'm taking away your thunder John because that's the name of your organization but really belonging is at the bottom of many of the strikes that we're going through now people don't feel that they belong which is why as an aside UBI is a unifying factor because if everybody gets a thousand dollars a month everybody is everybody so it's very subtle but it is so that's what we need to be looking for and I think that's what this document addresses it shows how the four different influences on a human being in the context of the environment in which they live can be fashioned can be set up so that they enable that individual to be empowered and to feel like they belong which of the two things that you know an agency with that they feel that they have controlled the three things that they make for happiness as much happiness as we can find in this veil of tears so to me this document captures that and Rob if I could just add a little bit to what you said I think it's really important you know one of the preeminent questions we always get is is it the chicken or the egg so that's one of those questions even as a kid we used to play with right which comes first the chicken or the egg and so sometimes we wonder what comes first is it the individual or is it the community is it the individual or the group and Giselle just answered the question so what comes first is the environment what comes first before the chicken or the egg is the farm we're going to have to pay attention to the environment it's just there it's the container that we live in and take for granted we normally don't think about can I breathe the air that's right when we can't breathe the air we think about it a lot and so what we're facing right now is we have cracks in the container the very things that hold us the very things that give us air food and water literally I mean California we're talking about running out of water a friend of mine just visited his name is Paul Hudson he lives in LA he's lived in his house for almost 30 years there's a creek that runs through his property he says for the first time in the 30 years that he's lived there the creek is dry so we have to attend to the container if we are going to drive as individuals in our community and we haven't really done that very well most of the time we're just taking it for granted and what the report is calling our attention to is that even as we empower the individual we have to make sure the container is there and working for us that's so well put John and it's also very true that the container the earth is the major, the fundamental container institutions of the containers too and we've totally ignored how they've gone away right I just watched a wonderful forthcoming documentary on the question of water and how water being commodified it's now destroying the farms and driving up the price of agriculture and how water should be, which you might call part of the common good it's a forthcoming documentary that I was just asked to have a view give them some feedback on but it resonates exactly John with what you were saying about the devastation of the farm the devastation and they were talking about all kinds of creeks drying up they're talking about all kinds of places in the middle of California that can't function any longer and obviously that has all kinds of social ramifications as well John other than belonging I've always thought that there's a synonym for othering I call it fear othering rarely makes sense and if we're talking about humanity othering within humanity it's out there with very toxic effects you and I, we grew up in Detroit we had a lot of experience with other but how in this vision of the North Star with the declaration, if you will that othering has no role how do we ward off the fear that allows it to grow yes well you know it's a question that's actually faced people for much of our lives you know I sort of remind people if you think about western civilization and Hobbes is sort of considered one of the chief architects of political philosophy out of the west and Rousseau is another so they both looked out of the world they both saw a world that was a little bit scary and Hobbes' idea we're in a state of nature where all is the consul so we entered the state to create these institutions to protect ourselves from each other but then he goes on and he says, but in doing so we give up power to the state to protect us from each other and now we have to protect ourselves from the state and as you read him on he's obviously brilliant but he sounds like a little bit paranoid he's on and never stops Rousseau looks out and sees the world as scary as well and what he says is that the way you deal with the fear and uncertainty of the world is solidary you deal with it by holding on to each other so one vision is that the world is scary and therefore it's all against all we're in a constant state of fear and that's my stuff and so I'm going to get my gun and my tank and my charged fence and my boundaries and my wall and then I'm still afraid not only am I afraid now I'm also lonely so that strategy constantly tearing us against each other and even against ourselves generates not the loneliness when you think about half the guns civilian guns in the world are in the United States or not the most safe country just the opposite so Rousseau says don't turn on each other turn toward each other how do we do that we need help we need institutions I just did a special on Detroit our hometown round and especially we talked about the wall of if you would call on that where they build a wall to keep the black and white community separate in Detroit so they could get along that wall is still there that's the Hobbesian model so I think that and I think Giselle is right that really can we belong to each other can we belong to each other can we have a we without my students and others that was that even possible that's our orientation that's what we should be reaching for we don't know how far we can go on it and it's not just a psychological emotional space it's an institutional space we can create institutions that help us or we can create institutions that hurt us and Jim Crow and segregation institution that says so how do we turn how do we turn that around and the last thing I'll say on this is that we I think we largely squandered the opportunity given to us by the pandemic what do I mean by that the pandemic had lessons to teach us one lesson which yeah you need to maybe give a shot you need to maybe have physical distance from each other but you end this together the whole world almost eight billion people is experiencing this at the same time there was one period where more than half the world was in lockdown it's the first time in human history that's ever happened so it created this possibility to say what's happening to you affects the person literally and figuratively next to you you're not in this alone you're constantly impacting each other so how do you turn toward each other and resolve this crisis together that's the only way we can resolve the crisis that's not just true of the pandemic it's true of AI it's true of the climate we're constantly being pushed to work together but as you said Rob fear gets in the way so I think we need help, we need stories we need examples, we need institutions we need models we can bridge but we have to do it the idea that you bring together which is what I would call all of these disruptors not necessarily a disruptor does not mean bad it just means profound change so technology and the environment as disruptors these kinds of things globalization the notion that the nation's state can manage the well-being of its citizens when all of these influences from all around the globe come ripping through the society all of this is very very catalytic to fear and so the North Star with the declaration of belonging seems to be to me the right vaccination for the heart I think you guys really I was part of it the team that you inspired really did a very good job by emphasizing that as the essence if I can just add one thing because we haven't given enough play to this in my opinion at the root of all of this is education Plato in the Republic when he's describing his perfect ideal society he says just give me the kids let me have the children and I will mold them into the kinds of people who will be able to live under the rule of a philosopher king and one of the wonderful parts about this report is that it doesn't call for liberating education it calls for laboratory education which keeps on coming up underlined in documents because it's not a word that's accepted I guess it's not recognized by spell check but liberating means that you are freed from the shackles of rigid traditional education which is what people are talking about that's what the people in my field for 23 years are talking about but liberatory is a deeper concept it means educating yourself and keeping track of how you're learning so that you can adjust that you can open your mind that you can listen to other people and you can make the things that this document calls for happen when you have a child or a three year old child in preschool and you train them with that in mind and you'll have a different world in a generation but if you don't do that there's not enough you could do faster now to get to where you want to be and Rob let me just throw out one other saying and I've been sitting on this and I don't want to be nitpicking but I hope this report has residents not just in the United States but the entire world as you think about the world we have to remember that the North Star is only in the northern hemisphere so we may need a slight variation as this report and these ideas travel to the southern hemisphere the penguins are in the south and the North Star is in the north and the Galapagos Islands and the north of the equator where the penguins thrive so we got to create a Galapagos and I would have come back to your sense of education because in the last couple of years I've been doing a lot of work with a group called scholarly encounters that Pope Francis inspired and when we get together he emphasizes that much of the world is in college on the order of about 80% of the young people second thing he says they will drop out of high school to get a wage out of economic anxiety to help their family or whatever unless what they learn in school gives them what you might call skills and navigation of the context in which they live and so his remedy is to empower the young people to tell us what they want to learn not live downstream in a vertical environment that's a one-way street where people come in and tell them what they have to learn and he's bringing this around and saying if we don't do this and these people drop out then 80% of the people in the world are not suited to navigate through the fear address change understand the difference between expertise and somebody who's yanking your chain and democracy cannot thrive so education empowered by the earnings of the young seems to me to be a necessary condition and I remember in conversations with you in discussions in this report that which you might call interactive nature of education the empowerment of the young of the student is very important and existential education too I mean not just learning things not just the acquiring of knowledge but the development of skills and dispositions and experiences where children are put through democracy what it means to punish someone who goes outside the norms how do you come to a resolution of a problem what happens when two kids are in strike with each other how does the community deal with that this could be built in to the education system every day if only it was structured that way this is not rocket science we have plenty of people who understand these things and you know not everyone is an intellectual or can be an intellectual or wants to be an intellectual right everyone has their own capacity and we shall have room for that we should this is what this document says make room for everybody acknowledge everybody's deserving to be on this earth here they deserve to be here I remember when I moved from New York where I lived for 30 years and went through the whole social you know thing in New York it was the cocktail party in New York when people started talking to you they asked you three questions where do you live, where do you work and where do you children go to school and unless you answered those questions correctly I was in the way and moved on when I moved to San Francisco those questions were never asked if I was in the room I belonged there there was no need to further identify me and in the same way we have to do that to all the people in the world if they're in this world they belong there they don't have to prove it John you both you can shuffle at my divided personality living in Bolinas and New York City I cross those boundaries in what you might call the rituals of the game of what allows you I mean if you can read a poem you're pretty good in Bolinas and like you said school's credentials we work with in New York is more the currency of you know entry pass you know entry pass or whatever to conversation I think that's right I want to just underline what you said maybe push it a little bit further because today people think we shifted at some point from thinking of education from Jefferson's idea of making people citizens what was he talking about learn to take someone out of this perspective he's talking about bridging that's what bridging is we're someone else and at one level education has become technical training we learn how to do things we don't learn how to live together those are two different skills and so today we spent much more time educating the mind and not educating the heart and Jacelle point is that everybody belongs everybody belongs it's not provisional it's not like you belong if you go to fancy school or if you belong if you get a fancy degree or you belong if you have enough money no everybody belongs that's what we have to understand and then how do we live that out how do we make that real how do we say every child that born is deserving every one of them not just black ones not just white ones but everyone that's what's really tearing us apart is that we're saying some people are deserving and some people are deserving and we do that by race we do it by religion we do it by nationality we do it by a neighborhood and to me that's the real part of education that's problematic I'm at Berkeley a great school but too often not just Berkeley Stanford sometimes we're very proud of our engineering department and we should be but we're not so proud of our sociology and psychological department we're not doing Rob but she said that book Nonviolent Communication how do we learn to talk to people who disagree with us how do we learn to hold on to each other's humanity that's the hard lesson and so we have to broaden education to really talk about connecting to talk about love to talk about everybody belonging and so it's not just a specific concept it actually has meaning I often in this podcast recently around these themes have cited the late Jane Jacobs final book in 2004 it was called Dark Age Ahead and chapter three was called education excuse me educating versus credentializing and it dealt with exactly what you might call that different purpose that becoming an input to production people like Sir Kenneth Robinson who's got the most famous Ted talk of all time how schools kill creativity I saw an I say animates about one of his speeches about when you take out the criteria for a genius and you test children in kindergarten 70% to 80% show the potential to be a genius by the time they're in 10th grade it's less than 5% because the nature of what learning and education means is so narrow and as you mentioned it's head based there's a wonderful book by man in South Bend Indiana who used to be a lawyer and I think then worked with the ministry for a while and it's called the lost art of heart navigation his name is Jeffery Nixon and he gets right to the core of the kind of things that I was able to sit at a zoom lens and grin about as your group was talking and as you just emphasized yourself and I think this is this is part of an awakening I'm going to take it to a place that isn't in our report but something that affects upset I need quite a lot as you know we've had a lot of interaction with Asia and I have a friend who is a great scholar on foreign policies of what they Patrick Lawrence he wrote the book in 2011 I believe it was called somebody else's century and he was a publisher of Charles Johnson who had been at University of California Berkeley and wrote all about Japan but his theme is that notion of we and all of us that is in eastern velocity whether it's Japan or India or China or whatever is not going to accept what you might call the market based run of the individualist model the self protective alone me and the market model I think we're at a crossroads in terms of what you might call defining the North Star for world leadership I think the United States is being challenged if your North Star was not just words but the modus operandi of this country I think our coalition would be broadening rather than narrowing but that contrast that Lawrence puts out between eastern philosophy which has a lot more heart based elements to it the Dowding Ching and other things or some parts of Indian philosophy and what I'll call Cartesian logical thinking it's a big challenge and opening up education in those realms which just tell I think you would agree Northern California does a better job of than New York City or probably put Detroit on the same side as New York City in that regard but this notion of education and the resilience of the spirit of our citizens in defining and enforcing and actively yearning for that North Star education is essential in reading and education come in many different forms formally and otherwise I mean my father died recently some of me heard me talk about him he was 99 years old there's some indication that he died of COVID but he was at the beginning so people weren't looking for it but he grew up in the south like a lot of black people that Isabel Wilkins talked about and warned about the suns he was a sharecropper so he dropped out of school in the third grade but he was one of the wisest and kindest and loving people I've ever met he had to kind of education that we all should really reach toward and I think of another book there's a book called Somebody Else's Children and the gist of it is that we don't have the responsibility it's a provocation are we responsible for somebody else's children educating somebody else's children and on one hand there's no such thing as somebody else's children they're all of our children that's right that's right there's a basis for the fact that the human species has been able to get as far as it has I mean we fly we swim on the water technology has gotten us there but the reason we've gotten there is because of collaboration not competition I mean competition in the economic sense but in terms of producing these things it's all by collaboration that's in our DNA we wouldn't have survived as a species if we didn't collaborate together unfortunately it's led us to world wars and all kinds of other horrors but it is in our DNA to collaborate in order to survive and we have to make that the load stone of our movement forward we have to emphasize that every time in order to get to the point where we understand that it requires everyone's collaboration everyone in order to get anywhere we stand on the shoulders of giants there's no way Jeff Bezos would be anywhere where he is if he didn't have all of the rest of history behind him that's right I think maybe the reason he got in that rocket is he was looking for the north star that you guys were he wanted to buy it huh I want to own the property rights be in Richard Branson and fish together but I think the questions that you're raising that all children are children as distinct from that kind of inside my walls the ones that I brought into this world biologically are the only ones I have to care about that just doesn't make sense I understand taking care of them I understand that how would I say sometimes when there's public goods they get under provided so having families step up for their own children is not a really bad thing but not to the exclusion of the common good and I think that's what your report in many different dimensions really brings to life and these are radical ideas and they're not radical at all I mean think about literally there are five states in the United States that are actually commonwealths commonwealths just think of the term commonwealth now we don't live that anymore and so Pennsylvania is a commonwealth we don't mostly don't even know that anymore and to Giselle's point in a number of books but including Harawi's book Sapien he argues that one reason homo sapiens outperform Neanderthals was not that homo sapiens were bigger or stronger or individually smarter is that homo sapiens learn to cooperate that's right there's a gentleman I think Christakis at Yale who presented a talk in our San Francisco I-Net office one day that resonated with exactly the same thing the capacity to collaborate makes you in a Darwinistic sense more likely to survive and thrive both more so let's talk just now for our audience they've been getting a taste of this but we're about to release this report I think sometime around the 8th of September the day after Labor Day in the United States and around the world all of our team can use their social media of this podcast we made in several of the members of our team we'll go do a little I'll do more podcasts what I'll call Deep Dives in some of the segments around North Star Vision that she created there'll be different neighborhoods in the North Star I guess not necessarily different all the neighborhoods will be treated the same but they'll have different dimensions but I think this was a fantastic exercise both just for clarity but also you're filling a void you're rising to the occasion the anxiety and the temptation towards otherness and fear is rising so in this respect you were talking about heart based education this vision is a vaccination and I'm curious as we'll release this there'll be a lot of feedback and exploration as the two co-founders do you have a vision of the next chapter after release, after feedback after as you hope and we all hope it engages the world quite vigorously what's the next play? in the best of all worlds this would precipitate the creation of groups of people who could talk to each other like I think they were called there was something going on in the 19th century like that with I can't remember the name of it the name escapes me but it was a way of people to get together like book clubs but on a much deeper and more important topic I would it would start a movement that brought people together something called better angels that I don't know where it stands now but a couple of three years ago it was launched and started getting some play I haven't heard much about them since the pandemic again not being able to get together is a big drawback but we need a national conversation about this we need to be able to bring people in to this faith people of faith people who won congregations I would turn to them in the first place to bring different congregations together because they have a mall standing with the people in the congregations I would make it a discussion in high school classes if we can get it into the curriculum somehow there would be another way of getting young people giving them the vision from the get go because they're the future without them nothing happens okay and John I want to reinforce your point from earlier that while within the nation within the communities to build your hope was that this helps us see a North Star as a global community and I would say that is not only important it may be necessary because I talked about that ring at the beginning the healthy planet we're not going to get there unless we cooperate to create the healthy planet we're not going to inspire the community we're not going to take advantage of the learning from people from different places around the world and different experiences so there's a great deal at stake about this kind of vision this notion that you call the foundations for a better society I think we all agree they have to reach far beyond the borders of the United States but the United States haven't been the metering of the world system since World War II it's the essential starting date I agree and going back to what Giselle said I mean belonging is the key how do we learn to really belong to each other how to belong to how to learn to belong to the earth not dominate each other not bludgeon each other into submission but how do we learn to really know and that belonging is not simply saying belong in your own family I agree to Rob family is important but we have to extend that how do we learn to belong to people who disagree with us how can you disagree with me and still be my friend how can you disagree with me and I still love you and you still love me how can you disagree with each other and still collaborate those are some of the things we have to learn and I think that's the size there's one winner everybody else loses we do that in a political system we do it in a legal system we do that with kids so I do think people want something different and I think they're they're heartening for it so if we could have these conversations these experimentations across the country across the world well a lot of it was designed with the hope this would connect people and it does but it's also been used to divide people and so I would also maybe look to the tech industry and say okay you have this tremendous platform it could be for good or bad right now the jury saw this it's a lot of good stuff but as you said Rob there's a lot of bad stuff as well how do you begin to deal with that and then finally I would say the imagination we we think about the past and most of the time this is an imagined past because most of us are not real historians we think about the past we imagine the past, what it was like but we don't spend enough time imagining and thinking about the future and I think it's not just imagining how do we actually then build toward work toward, orient toward a future if you don't know where you're going any girl will get you there so we have to have a sense of the future that we want and then begin to work to make that future a reality as soon as we can well I'm going to use your reference to my musical background and I'm going to take responsibility for creating the soundtrack that goes with this record and I can feel already that Aretha Franklin's song in the film Amazing Grace it's a Marvin Gaye song, Holy Holy we've got a it's like we have to band together we have to believe in each other's dreams but if you said to me from all my experience related to music and traveling the world when I sailed all over the world I told my children I wanted them to see places where there were no roads and no airstrips so they could see what Mother Nature really was about but I said even more importantly and I was being a little facetious in this regard I said I wanted them to understand that the most popular musicians on earth were not the Beatles it was Bob Marley and the Whalers and Bob Marley's song One Love, One Heart let's get together and feel alright that kind One Love give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel alright let's get together and feel alright let's get together and feel alright that might be the song that kicks off our presentation because Bob Marley I think is the artist who fused politics criticism, disagreement all kinds of things and love better than any artist that I've ever experienced so I think to conclude I look forward to reaching out to some of our colleagues again on September 8th we're going to release this report and we will have opportunity for lots of discussion, webinars I know I'm it, I know your institute will all be taking part in elevating this but to close today I just want to thank the two of you thank you for your vision, for your inspiration for your effort, for including me this has been a great experience well thank you Robin, I think it's been great to see this hour but also this project it's been wonderful and so I want to thank all those who participated to help make the future some place where it's a great place to live but a special thanks to Giselle for really spearheading this and with her energy and insight and wisdom thank you both and thank you John for helping me get this off the ground and Bob I've told you how much I appreciate what you're doing now and how you've taken hold of this and how you're planning to promulgate it I have no there's no way I could do that so the fact that you're willing to do it and that you're so taken with this project is just incredible to me I'm sure Giselle with your vitality John's expertise there'll be many more times I set up to promote your insights they're really extraordinary anyway thanks for today to be continued it was a lot of fun thank you and I'll leave the computer on for a while ok