 Hey everybody, this is Inside Jerry's Brain. We are the date is Monday, September 2nd. Hurricane Dorian is closing in on Florida, albeit very slowly. One of our guests here is actually lives on the Outer Banks and has been told that should this thing stay strong and keep going, he may have to leave home, but that's a couple days away. We are and I'll offer my apology right now that occasionally I will interrupt when somebody is talking and show things in my brain that I believe to be relevant to whatever it is they are saying. This is not my trying to upstage them, but rather within the limits of Zoom technology, my trying to contribute to the conversation. And I'm very happy to hear other people and about things that we'd like to add to this context. And also if you want to share your screen with whatever it is you're looking at, I would love that as well. So given that start, I just did this, I just set this call up as a show and tell because we haven't had an insider's brain call for a while, for which my apologies. And I think that we are all like nostril deep in things that we're passionate about, frustrated about, you know, busy working on. And it would be really just nice to hear what those things are. And I also have a hunch that the thing that one of us is stuck on a different one of us might actually have a little bit of WD-44, so mental WD-40. So maybe we can figure our way through to loosen up the lock nuts and make some little bit of progress here. With that, I'm going to just see if anybody would like to step in and talk about something that's like top of mind for them. And you all don't know one another. So maybe that's a let's just do a really quick go around and say where we are, who we are, and what's, you know, what we care about. Doug, do you want to start? Well, sure. I live on the Russian River, north of San Francisco. I'm by background a physicist and nanopsychoanalyst study with Aaron Fromm and doing a lot of consulting ever since, which takes me into my current thing, which is looking at what we do about the economy since it's broken and the politics that fix it is broken. So there's a lot to think about and that's what I do. Thank you very much, Bobby. Hi, I'm interested in systemic change these days and approaching that from the perspective of what are the underutilized capacities in the world, whether the global volunteer community or the ability to prevent harm and recycle that to pay for social innovation. And we've been creating a series of social innovation oriented research collaborative initiatives on topics from biophilia in hospitals and cities, which pay for themselves with 100 outcomes of consequence or medicinal foods for stress, sleep and anxiety, citizen science, data science, or forest fire prevention derivatives and reinsurance prevention of risk. So looking at that for flooding prevention through coral reefs, health and forest fire prevention, we're looking at zero subsidy, affordable housing, effectively, each of the areas is a context where there's an economic, radically underutilized combination of capacities that makes it possible to have some kind of utopianization or optimization towards social innovation, scaling to the scale of sustainable development goals and beyond as gap. And we've been orienting in that kind of portfolio of directions. Thank you. I think I think I first ever heard of social impact bonds from you and a bunch of things. You're always kind of you're always exploring the the systems perspective on on interesting social problems and kind of complex networks or complex solutions that that can sort some of these things out. It's it's fascinating. Jean. I live in the outer banks of North Carolina. My wife is howling. What? 100 mile an hour winds Friday morning. That's a fun news reports. I live on the outer banks of North Carolina and the hurricane is on its way. Personally, I'm a recovering systems thinker. Hi, Jean. Everybody, everybody missed the queue. I'm a recovery from from a you're supposed to say hi in their first name. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah. And so that's on my way to to try to figure out how to become a storyteller as opposed to a systems thinker. Jean is also a black belt Kumu user. Kumu is a systems diagramming app that is quite brilliant. He made a very good faith effort to train me up in Kumu. But my brain is so solidly welded to the brain that I was unable to begin thinking differently, which was an interesting lesson to me. And and and to add to that, I had a 21 year love eight relationship with the brain with the brain as well, like uninstalled it four times or something. Oh, more than that. Yeah, because I really wanted it to be Kumu and it was never going to be so but now I figured out what it's really good for. So I'm now an advocate for the brain to love that. And Ken Howard, thanks for joining Howard was also on this morning's call. We're just checking in really briefly and then we'll go dive in on whatever anybody's, you know, really interested in and would like to put on the table. Michael, where what how this is just a quick check in. West coast of Canada Vancouver Island. Being involved with community currency systems for something 37 years now. And I think we've just found the magic element, the final piece of the puzzle. So I'm I'm I'm rather distracted by the oddness of not seeing what was sitting right in front of me for the last 30 years. Well, that sounds awfully promising thing. I'm curious and eager. So I just realized that pretty much all of you are in my brain. And I should, given that this is an inside Jerry's brain call, maybe it would be appropriate for me to share what you look like in my brain. So here's here's Michael. Let's look at Bobby. Bobby's been hosting a visionaries and revolutionaries hike and get together for really how many years now. Well, since well, the hike came out of meeting David Hodgson at your retreat years ago, Jerry. So you're responsible for more than 50 hikes that happened since that wouldn't have happened if Hodgson and I hadn't co-conspired there. And then here's Doug. Each of you are richly, richly woven into this context. I mean, there's and then here's Jean. I've got you under Kumu Blackbelts systems thinkers. The visualization posse. The visualization posse is everyone I've ever met who would be great to have in a conversation about a visual sense making environment, for example. And Ken, would you jump in? Hello, Ken Homer calling in from Centerfell, California out in my garden enjoying the waning days of summer. Just always happy to be on a Jerry's brain call. There's such interesting people and things to be explored here. So happy to be here today. Awesome. And here's World Cafe, Cafe facilitators, collaborative conversations as kind of Ken's, I think, central, central gig. And Ken has been sort of our lead guest on a couple of these calls. Talking about somatic experiences, basically, how do we how do we manage to figure that out? John, would you like to introduce yourself briefly? John Grant, I'm based in the Northwest of England in Manchester. I'm a software engineer by training. I'm an entrepreneur past 15 years involved with data science, looking at the skills in the IT job market. I'm interested in the future of work, automation, machine intelligence, and the impact that we'll have on the future of work. Kenevin, complexity science, wardly mapping. And really, today I'm here to listen and hopefully ask some questions. Beautiful. Here's Kenevin just as a as a how we go. And Howard, do you mind checking in? I just wanted to Please. I was just going to share, mention the future of work and future of skills. We released a paper I just sent the link to in the chat around how the future of skills, if you look at each sub industry, appears to be VUCA skills and that there's strategies for learning VUCA skills, perhaps associated with service learning, skill volunteering, association with social innovation, but in general, that largest institutions are all sort of self identify as missing VUCA skills when when asked as largest risk to them. So that that linked to the future of work, future of skills, future of skill gap and impact opportunity aligned to skill gap is something I just shared. Oh, you have a VUCA section. Oh, of course, are you serious? Of course, I've got VUCA. Well, and I've heard her pronounce VUCA. So who knows? I mean, it's a little like, like Giff and Giff, I guess. There's also VUCA to vision, understanding, collaboration and agility, which somebody else recommended. And then Jamey Casio, getting a little tired of VUCA, basically presented Banny. There we go. Brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. So he basically says that we're actually not in a VUCA world or in a Banny world. So there. Wow. Yeah. How about that? Now, Howard, do you want to jump in? Sure. Well, this morning's call lingered with me. So I thought I'd join again. I'm in Portland, like Jerry, Portland, Oregon, and currently teaching at Pacific Northwest College of Art, teaching systems thinking and foresight and enjoy working with younger folks. So here's PNCA, which is walking distance from where I'm sitting. And then, Howard, you had sent the link to this post of yours this morning, which I am not finished digesting. So I was actually following up the article that you refer to. And later, I'm going to curate a little bit more of that. But what I was doing was curating the thought for the call where I connected to, we talked about culture strategy for breakfast because wikis are very much about culture, system one and system two thinking, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm going to garden it into the context more as we go. So I will stop the sharing. It's actually, I can't tell you how pleasant it is that everybody on the call is richly represented in this context that I curate because, I don't know, because it feels like I know some part of you and I can show some part of you to one another in a quick, efficient way that normally we don't get. I remember many, many, many years ago, Jason Calacanis, who is now like a media phenomenon and conference or he was like a skinny kid who would bring, come up the elevator, drop a bunch of mimeograph copies of Silicon Valley reporter on our front desk and escape down the elevator. At one point, at the very beginning of when I could share my brain, when I was publishing my brain, he sent me an email and he said, Jerry, I just spent an hour in your brain and I think I learned more about you than I would have learned in five hours of conversation. And he had run across thoughts like things my dad taught me. Which don't come up in normal conversation, right? But he had just gone wandering and found a bunch of things, partly because I'm publishing pretty openly a lot of these things. So let me pause. And we just heard a bunch of really interesting things. Anybody want to talk about something they're chewing on that might be of a shared interest? I want to hear what Michael figured out. Michael, you're muted right now. There might be a command performance waiting here. Well, let's see what I can do in a short thing here. I've been on the money gig for a long time and that I see conventional money as an alien intervention. It's their money. It's not my money. It's never been my money. And yet we've seen how locally organized or generally organized mutual credit, that is a bunch of agents interacting with each other and just keeping score. Well, well seen, well defined, but it's never taken off very strongly, although there are large business to business networks doing what are called commercial barter. I know 20 billion a year or something is the current status of that trade sector. If you go and talk to a bunch of businesses about having their own money, a chamber of commerce, Rotary Club or whatever, they run screening for the hills. They panic. It's not inside their headset and they don't want to know about it. And we've been addressing this dilemma of how do you make it available to a business to understand the added value of having its own money? I mean, literally a sort of a coupon that's issued by that business that's a successful supporter of a circularity in the economy that always therefore returns loyal customers to them. Very difficult to get that through people's heads because the sort of collective unintelligence of the business community is deep and profound. What they're not going to accept is very well established. And so we've had a lot of difficulty. Now we always used to think you had to approach it by going to a bunch of businesses, a bunch of nonprofits, a bunch of people and setting up this complex roundabout deal, which was feasible, but took maybe $30,000 and three months of three good people's time to put together and therefore didn't get a hell of a lot of pickup in the world. Because although we could do it, we couldn't demonstrate that it was a lot of fun. We're referencing the Wright brothers earlier in today's conversations that it's not so much whether you do it. It's how it is seen that you do it. That makes the big difference. Well, we had to create a small scale community currency, very small scale in a hurry to demonstrate this idea to our local bar. And instead of going on the big route that we've been using for years, we thought, well, listen, why not just print up a bunch of these coupons and have them in a bucket or a jug or jar and the counter and there's a sign by it. And it says, if you want to help the fire department, which is volunteer in our department, put cash in this bucket, take out one of our coupons. The cash will go to the fire department. Bring your coupon to the till by your beer. Now, this is in one pass, achieving the three components we've figured out as being pretty much essential to a business having credibility in monetary issue. One is that they must give the money away. You can't just try and spend it. You print money and try and spend it. You look like an idiot and nobody will buy into it. And you can't just give it away from a helicopter. You can't scatter dollar bills around town because that is obviously cheap and useless. But if you commit to service like the body shop used to offer its staff two hours of paid work a week to go and help in a local charity or something. Well, it's a good idea because you're sort of by proxy lending your businesses slack time to the support of a charity or a project, but it's very inconvenient, very inefficient. It would be far better for the body shop to give a bunch of coupons to the charities and the charities could sell those coupons for cash and therefore be in position to look after their own needs. And the people who provided the cash have got coupons to go to the body shop. And that's our basic model, but trying to set it up as a three-winged surfer in three months was a pain in the butt. However, doing it with this stuff, it's Mickey Mouse. It's so horribly simple. It's embarrassing. And my context from this morning's meeting was the way in which issues like this achieve velocity and contact in the world is very important. If it goes through Amazon, it's not the same as if it goes through the cooperative movement. I would really much rather went through the cooperative movement than Amazon. So I'm focusing most of my energy at the moment is how to having this cat now out of a bag. How do I want to support its propagation? So that's that's my story and thought. Thank you. So just to try to reflect back some of what you're saying to see if I'm understanding it. It's a little one little piece of it is just as banks create money by giving out loans, you know, loans are effectively new money and they have to have fractional reserves to pay them back. But basically they're inventing money through through lending. In some sense, a merchant can invent money by creating coupons they're willing to honor that other people then purchase and and put it put into circulation. But but that original merchant has just made local currency. They've just made it out of whole cloth. They created a promise, which is everything that money should be. But who's responsible for the promise inside one of these local localites or community networks. You hopefully have a bunch of businesses have been the issuers of this money and therefore it's underwriters and give the confidence to the general public that they can go to this bar and that grocery store and whatever. But it has to be achieved by genuine service. This is the mini magic that if the business has printed the money and took it for granted that it was a solid business you will love with my coupons then they're going to find themselves up against some sort of a cognitive wall reactive. But if instead they do a sort of a barn raising with it which is to say. We're lending our support to the hospitals M.R.I. fundraising the church roof the school this whatever we're lending it by putting our asset of this thousand dollars ten thousand dollars of promises. In the charity's hands therefore we have given our our service to that charity. And then when people buy those coupons they've validated it and they get to be the redeemers of the coupon. So it's basically giving it real value by creating it in service. And then having that service realized and show up back in the business is still then they've got real money in there in their till that is the evidence of their circulation and their promissory behavior. So it's it's basically short circuiting it's collapsing something that we had the components scattered around in time and space and organization when bulk easy as pie start here. And I can start too many brush fires in too many directions. I want I want some coordination. Right. And you had mentioned three components for the credibility of money. I wrote down one must give the money away. What were two and three. I think I skipped I didn't catch the. Basically they've got to give it away and it's got to be validated as genuine gift of value. And the way that that is realized is so he puts down 20 bucks on 20 bucks worth of coupons and then gets 20 bucks worth of beer. And what was the third be. Is that the real position. I'm not sure whether the cycle is creation. Validation. The second cycle is validation. That's very important. That's the transfer between hard cash and soft money. It's the interface. It's the edge effect. It's where the rubber on the road really meet. It's where somebody says, yeah, this is good money. It buys beer. And that's that's the ultimate affirmation is the money buys beer. So the last stage is when the coupon is presented. I literally redeemed. So you've got creation validation and redemption as the cycle around. And we've got it all down to a snap bang. And Bobby is sharing a bunch of things about advanced market commitments. A few other things that are like that. And we can go deeper into. I mean, there are many ways to make promises and to have promises act as collateral or as asset or as whatever. I think let's come back to this. Doug, I'm wondering at you, your nostril deep in economists trying to figure out how the world needs to be changed or fixed. Are they talking about these? Are these kinds of things part of that conversation or are they different? Or what's how does this work for them? No, economists do not talk about alternative currencies at all. A limited constrained imagination. And I haven't gone there myself very much because I'm interested in a more cooperative society, not one that's based on the trading of cash in any form. But that's just violent limitation. I mean, I think it's interesting to see what's going to happen. And I hope that that experiments in new currency light on the existing currency that we have. Like, why do we have it? Where does it come from? Well, why do we only have one, right? I mean, World War, sorry, the U.S. civil wars where the dollar originates and Secretary of Treasury, Sam and Chase basically says, hey, we need to finance this war. So let's create a greenback. But in doing so, let's forbid all the banks from doing what they've been doing so far, which is issuing their own local current local notes. Courtsies go back to collecting taxes in Greece and treating cattle and Mesopotamia. And it's a very psychological thing that we can treat these things as real words. Animals seem to not be able to do that. Probably lucky for them, I would say. Yeah, animals can't do an awful lot of things. The issue of our... We had that conversation this morning about Somalis coordinating in a cultural collaboration. They were cooperative in a context where their host community was less. Our host community in North America and the Western world is very competitive. And I think the Daniel Schmackstenberger had a really good piece a couple of weeks ago where he talked about the rivalrous nature of our society being utterly built in. We're just so knee-jerk. I won't do it unless I see the money. You know, your point, Doug, was about where to come from. It basically came from fear and greed. We fear that what we do is not going to be recognized. So I'm not going to do it until I get my piece of gold or my bag of whatever. So it's sort of a carrot and stick world that we have created with these value currencies, the dollar, the pound, the euro, whatever. And we've forgotten that the real world is, as in the natural world, one of service and exchange. Things happen. But for them to happen in a cooperative context, it seems to me absolutely essential that we have a cooperative money, just exactly as we are currently bedeviled with a competitive money. We're so much in the competitive money world we don't even see the damn stuff. So making that transition to not expand, not get rid of one, have another. It's rather, if you can make it with a competitive money, why not also have your own? What is the possible negative of having your own money? I mean, one example that comes up when you say that, we've been looking at the two dimensions of on the one level of volunteerism, we've organized 100,000 hours plus of time, but that's not through intrinsic, that's not through extrinsic incentives, that's intrinsic incentive motivated. But of course we haven't organized billions of hours of time, which maybe you require extrinsic incentives to reach some kinds of scale that are where it's dependent. But what we have found is the motivation of learning is the motivation of creative opportunity to collaborate with others and build social capital. These are motivators. And one interesting gap is that 96% of dollars for doers or volunteer matching grants, if you're familiar with that category, this is employees of large companies go unclaimed each year. In other words, 96% of people who work at Fortune 500 companies who don't volunteer don't allow the volunteer matching grants to flow. So there's billions of dollars each year of unclaimed resources that I think in a sense, how do you motivate 10,000 people who work for each of those large companies to collaborate on systems change and how to get their help to get the rest of the gap? I feel like that's a category of resource that's different from the underlying of an overall economy for all things, but it's a category of can we incentivize the motivation of people? Can we motivate people to collaborate? And can we have a capital stack of all of the incentives for participation? The other incentive for participation is your own liability. We want, in what we were proposing to Sacramento a couple of weeks ago, the idea that any person's risk of forest fire, if you can reduce that by half of the air pollution, that you're a stakeholder and you should care darn strongly about that risk. And the same goes for every stakeholder. You should propose that if you can reduce the risk for any stakeholder, they should care about that. And those existing liabilities are built into the system today. So in other words, one of the largest resources, yes, we have in-kind pledges. I think that's important what you're describing that we can scale pledges as the basis for credit and the basis for creating things across context. But I think beyond pledges, we have in the underutilized capital stack for systemic change, there's underutilized capacity to prevent harm. There's underutilized consequences of consequences of consequences in stakeholders who could become part of turning externalities into internalities in a self-aware system that recognizes the opportunity to create good. And so I think that it's getting all of the intrinsic and extrinsic incentives aligned to the right community gap so that we address social innovation gaps as social impact movement gaps that exist aligned to financialization rather than financialization being seen as foreign. I think it's how you get externalities to become witnessed. Yes. Thank you, yeah, very much. Are there thoughts on this? About getting people excited about it. Don't call it system change, don't send it to Gene. Well, it's, I mean, just from the start of your description, Michael, we, the collective we, the United States and the Western civilization, back when we created fiat currencies managed to demonize all local currencies. We made them illegal and stamped them out. Mostly I think so that the tax collector could only have one currency to worry about and so that the tax collector could trace all the transactions that were creating value that were taxable. That seems to be the dominant reason. And the instability of small token type currencies. The amount of bank failures across the US was. Yeah. And every time it went down, it took a lot of people with it. So I think there was a lot of good reasons for outlying the small initiatives. They were just the big idea brought down to a less workable scale. Right. But similarly, we sort of demonized socialism and communism in this country in the 50s and 60s and 70s to the point where now when there's viable candidates talking about democratic socialism as a platform, everyone was like, wha! And in the last electoral cycle, there was nothing Bernie Sanders was proposing that isn't already working somewhere in Northern Europe. There was nothing new to the Europeans. They're like, why are these Americans freaking out so bad? So I think a piece of the freak out about what you're proposing that anybody who, any entity that thinks it could or should create its own money ought to go do that is probably embedded in some prohibition that people sense it's like that. There's a taboo on generating your own money and part of what you need to do is hack that taboo. Just like, there used to be a taboo on women smoking in public and the founder of public relations the guy named Eddie Bernays did the torches of freedom march on Easter Sunday parade and had young debutants pull out cigarettes and light up and suddenly smoking was fashionable for women and the cigarette company's market just doubled. So bad analogy perhaps. But I'm trying to say that you have a cultural hack to do as much as any infrastructure building or storytelling. Yes, and in the States, I always think the US particularly is rather like Spain during the Inquisition. You had the Catholic Church and you had the Inquisition. In the US, you've got the Fed and the IRS. Here's the torches of freedom march, which has all these super interesting side, side issues. The GW Hill was his client. George Washington Hill, who was the CEO of American Tobacco Company, which sold Lucky Strikes. That was his client who said, hey, we need to get women's smoking outdoors. Would somebody like to throw a different issue or topic on the table? Drag us in a different direction. Well, maybe this is a digression or progressive, but solar punk, is that in your brain already? Is that already a known thing to? One word or two? Two words. Ah, my God, it's a Google bomb. I hate it when somebody stumps me on this. So tell us more. So I just think it's a movement that's become really interesting. It's about nine years old. It has the caveat that where there is fiction and solar punk, it's all based on fact. So it's all hyper realistic fiction or nonfiction. And so the fiction is all material that you could copy paste into the real world instantly from the fiction and say, this is buildable today, it's realistic today. And ah, you do have it. Do I have it as one word? Because when I Googled it, it says, do you mean solar punk a single word? And the brain is not quite smart enough to figure out making two words one. Wow, very, very exciting. Just to share for 30 seconds, there's about 2,500 videos in the solar punk genre in the documentary film subgenre. There's about 5,000 paintings and there's about 200 books of novels and short stories at this point. And you're saying that these are kind of add water and stir kind of instruction stories? Each of these, look at the documentary films in YouTube. If you search YouTube in solar punk playlists, you'll find hundreds and hundreds of videos each with a different utopian example and a documentary film about that. So you can, I can send a link to one example, but the Babotonic I found there as example, the Babotonic is, have you ever heard of living tree? Sorry, living tree what? This is a living tree construction. So basically they designed, 400 years ago, they figured out you can merge four trees into one organism and they'll be single. And then they figured out you can do the same thing with 400 trees. In Germany, they built this building that is 12 stories tall, but is entirely living tree construction where over a 20 year period, the steel, concrete and iron is entirely replaced as the tree grows in. And it's 13 years in and I think it's replaced 70% of it already. And they then, that same firm designed a future city of 25 million people entirely of living tree construction without steel, concrete or iron that they've been publicly talking about the simulations of. And so solar punk were the first people I noticed who identified that. But effectively that and a thousand other documentary films. I mean, Farm Bot is another amazing solar punk subgenre and I just think that the sort of meta category of aspirational, the utopian future is here today but buried unevenly somewhere in the world. Let's find it. It's sort of like citizen journalism for solution journalism except that it's utopian oriented and it's and now there's original solar punk fiction written in 14 languages. Someone was telling me the other day which is kind of interesting and they had five years to grow in Brazil before it got to the US at all. So it's really not sort of an American dominated movement. It's more disproportionately non-US based. So I just think it's a really interesting phenomena for where social change aspirational people are convening where optimism is safe from cynicism I think is the sort of meta category of solar punk in a way. Has anybody else heard of the movements? Not so much. So I didn't have the living reconstruction in my brain but I do have Farm Bots and solar punk but not with the richness of what you've just described. And sort of reminds me of Corey Doctorow's walk away although it doesn't go into these terms but it's very much the premise of walk away as a dystopian future where there are normals who live in the cities which have fallen into a mess and then there are people who walked away into what appear to be uninhabitable regions of the world except that through molecular fabrication and the cloud and whatever else people can actually create building materials and have enough water and power and everything else and connect themselves up to the grid such that they can kind of live any place and make as beautiful a place as they want and when the normals show up and try to take over these things they're trying not to have weapons and not to become a weaponized society so their answer is to walk away because they know that they can fab a new town complete with a Japanese hot bath any place they want to and they'll fix the mistakes they made last time because they've learned and thought about the plan and they're always updating the plan which lives in the cloud and so in some sense the solar punk seems to be how do we share these plans? How do we sit down and write about this? And is open ocean sailing something like that would be considered solar punk? The guy, I talked to this guy a long ago who was trying to figure out how do you open source how do you design an open source technologies that would let us thrive while living on the oceans? So how do you harvest energy from the waves and the sun? How do you grow plants? How do you, the whole kit and caboodle? Yeah, I mean, I think it's solar punk is a broad frame in that sense that it's anything that is aspirationally future oriented compatible with sustainable living but not diluting ourselves about the problems that technology can't solve but sort of seeking to solve all the problems that we're not solving with it today that are very solvable with it. It sounds like it's also a little bit related to Afrofuturism. Tell me about Afrofuturism, I'm not that slayer. Yeah, so let me share screen again. So here's all, I will fill out more on solar punk but Afrofuturism is both an aesthetic, it's both an artistic movement but also like a blend of magic realism and science fiction and Octavia Butler is a sci-fi author who kind of wrote in that Basquiat is a painter, Sun Ra I think is a famous character in the middle of all this in the experimental music realm. So it's kind of a, it's a blend of art and science and then Black Panther was very much affected by Afrofuturist visions. Yeah, so take a gander over into Afrofuturism. And I'll take a look at Walkaway by Corey Doctro too, that's fascinating. Yeah, and I know Corey personally, so if you want to talk to him or you know, I read Walkaway as a galley that he gave me. Here's the Afrofuturistic designs of Black Panther, I'll post, actually I'm going to post a link to Afrofuturism in my brain to our chat so you've got it handy, huh. Does this trigger any thoughts for anyone else on the call? Adjacencies are fine. I really like when people try to posit optimist of futures, I doubly like it when they start designing things and open sourcing them and sharing them out. I triply like it when they connect all these things with plot, story, context, humans, et cetera, and even nicer when they actually play these things out and try to build them. So to me it's a really rich vein. Well, I don't want to be negative here, but I'm not. That always starts a negative statement, Doug. You know that. I'm concerned for how the optimistic futurists play out against scenarios of what we do to stop climate change and cut back on fossil fuels. It seems to me that any plausible scenario of cutting back on fossil fuels is very disruptive for contemporary society and hard to imagine how it recoalesces with the population that we have now. Now take food transportation, for example. Most of our food is transported. If we cut down the use of fossil fuels, the transportation of food would be vastly limited. Are we creative enough to make up for the difference locally? And what about the large number of places on the earth that are not capable of sustainable growing? So it's a whole bunch of concerns that are basically, let's put our positive ideas against difficult scenarios and see if we can find a way through. So what, and I love this question and I'll just throw a tiny thing in. I just recently met in the last couple of weeks the founder of Blend Hub. I'll put a link on in a second. And Blend Hub, basically, he's making powdered food about highly nutritious powdered food. And I'm a Michael Pollan fan, so I'm a big believer like eats food, mostly plants, not too much. But one of the key inventions he's come up with is a portable factory that basically ships as one or two containers. And you can drop this any place. And his idea is to put this either in either the source of the raw materials or the source of demand and to use it to create high nutrition powdered foods that anybody can afford, anybody can get, should just move it the hell out. And here I'm thinking of Soylent, which is this mildly sexy food supplement invented in Silicon Valley because geeks wanted to be able to sit in front of their terminals 24 seven and not have to worry about what to eat next, et cetera, et cetera. But then I'm also thinking about urban farming and ways of actually distributing the growing of food right into the places where food needs to be eaten, which would dramatically lower fuel consumption the way you're saying, Doug. So I think there's a variety of people tackling this thing. I think that there is a way to also get there an alignment to that. We'll include food production, we'll be able to save it, help gains from affiliate pay for any city at a much greater level. And so in other words, if you have biofilia where the plants are free and the food is extra value, you can effectively grow much more in cities and then previously thought feasible. It's just the point is that if you take the apple as the end goal, you're not gonna get there. But if you take the progression of a thousand different kinds of fruit plants are necessary to achieve mental health goals in the city and you look at the mental health gains from biofilia, it's a large part of economic cost, air pollution likewise. So I think that if in whole cost accounting, I do think there's a way to increase the biofilia density to botanical garden scale density. And those kind of responses can also be resilience approaches for global warming context too. They can help provide more green from cities. Doug again, are the economists that you're talking to tackling major economic strategies for mitigating climate change or are they off the climate change conversation? Like are they talking about what happens when we cut fossil fuel you pretend that we managed to cut fossil fuel use dramatically? What happens then? Well, I wish they were, but my experience is that they're looking at how to get from this economy to a green economy where they could make more money. And the depth of understanding of that is very limited. I mean, for example, the idea that if the cost of generating electricity with solar panels was less than generating it by fossil fuels, then the argument is everybody would sweat. Well, in the US, 55% of the homes are heated by gas and 80% use gas for cooking and hot water heating. And so if you have a home, you can't just switch from a solar produced electricity and get rid of your gas furnace without paying about for the three appliances, maybe on the work of $5,000 for installation and to make the switch. And people just don't see that kind of contingency. They just imagine that if the price of solar energy was the same as fossil fuel energy, people could just switch, ain't so easy. And I don't see economists facing those arguments. I have something that might be related here. Please. I live in the Bay Area, I live in Marin County. And I'm looking at the threat of solar rise. We've already had nine inches of, the Bay is nine inches higher now than it was in I think the 1980s. And it's increasing. And as anybody who's been watching the news knows, Greenland and the ice caps are milking at a much higher rate than previously predicted. So there was recently an article in the local paper that said there's 10,000 houses at risk of flooding in Marin County by 2100. It's probably closer to 2045. So I've been interviewing some people in the area to try and get a sense of what's going on. My feeling is that there's a lot of related work that's been done by folks like Spur that got a whole atlas on this. Individual municipalities and counties have a lot of work but there's not a lot of good collaboration occurring across boundaries because there's so many different entities. There's the Coastal Commission, there's ABAC, there's the Army Corps of Engineers. These people do not know how to talk across boundaries to each other. So as I've been interviewing, last week I interviewed the watershed planner from Marin County and asked her what keeps you up at night. And it's infrastructure. Most of our infrastructure is at sea level and a one foot rise is gonna be a real problem. Plus in the event, looking at Marin County in particular, 101, everything east of 101 is built on landfill essentially. All of that was Bay that's been filled in. So there's some talk among certain people that 101 could be the berm. Everything to the west of 101 would be safer than the east would go. If that happens, Marin loses about 85% of its tax base because that's where all the businesses that generate tax come from. And then you've gotta pay people to buy their land back and to mitigate this managed retreat and then move them somewhere else. So do you open up open space and build more billion dollar homes or do you do high density infill? And it very quickly becomes a nightmare of epic proportions with all of these different layers of complexity and problems coming in where you just wanna throw your hands up and say, I give up, I can't do it. So as I've been sitting with that, my God, how do we cope with this? The question that's come up for me is in how to create public conversations that don't look at those problems so much as ask the question of who do we need to become in order to handle this? Because if we stay with the old version of economics, if we stay with, we've gotta make money and all these things, we're doomed. But if we can say we're being called to a larger sense of community, a larger sense of working together, then I think we stand a chance. And I don't know, my hope is to try and put together a pilot program that I can get funded by a community foundation so I can be some of this collaboration work. I don't know how successful I'll be. I've got a partner on this that we're working on doing this. But that question of who do we need to become in order to cope with these really large challenges is just ringing louder and louder in my ears with the desire to let's get some, start bringing people together in 50 or 200 folks at a time and having these conversations of what's important and recognizing the immensity of the challenges before. It's that there's gonna be a lot of things that it will not have. What could we do and how can we start to address that? So that's kind of the stuff that's taking my mind back down to these days. One concern that I have with scenarios like that is we're gonna, as the world is in difficult, that everybody's gonna wanna come here to Napa Valley and Sonoma. Like all sorts of interesting things about climate refugeeism that nobody's really dealing with, like any number of things. The survivalists who are really smart who actually manage to, you know, store away some food or they're gonna be assaulted. People are gonna come after the assets they've created. So the best survivalist strategy to my mind is to create resilient communities, like to make sure it's much bigger than just you and your plot of peas and potatoes because otherwise you're hosed. And then, you know, I think the Netherlands is gonna become really important to everybody because, you know, they've stolen land from the sea forever through poldering and they understand, you know, water. And by the way, this actually goes back to this morning's conversation about wiki culture and culture generally as well. There's a really nice book titled Amsterdam that talks about basically the origins of Dutch culture and the Dutch never had a feudal era. They basically started stealing land from the sea, figured out how to do that, used windmills to pump the water out, but everybody knew that everybody had to help, you know, keep the dykes up and make them, it forced a collaborative culture among them. And then they got this really thick layer of rich merchants because they invented a kind of ship that lets you filet herring while you're out on the ship. It's kind of a wide, a beamy fishing vessel that lets you process all the herring out there. And they invented a special kind of herring known as Holland herring where you leave the spleen and the liver in the filleted fish and the enzymes in the spleen and the liver basically pickle the herring in a much nicer, sweeter way. So Holland herring becomes a premium, barreled herring across Europe in that era. The merchants become fat and happy. So you have this very thick middle class of people doing business, doing stuff that's really interesting. And it creates a collaborative culture that others are busy trying to emulate. So sorry for the digression, but I started thinking about how do we build, how do we fend off the rising sea levels for some time, which is going to happen everywhere? Like the biggest cities in the world are mostly located on estuaries that where rivers meet oceans and they're all too close to the water and they're all gonna have a hell of a time. And I think some of you know this, but back at some point a couple of years ago in a Huff after a conversation at a conference about global climate change and how we're all ignoring it. And this is probably at least 10 years ago, I bought the domain globalwarmingrealestate.com. I've rebuilt the website that I put up on there. It's a spoof site. So it basically says, if you don't believe the science, maybe you see a business opportunity. And I posit that all the first floor lobbies are gonna need to be turned into Aquaria. The second or third floor windows will need to be turned into doorways with docks. I invent H2O motors, which will invent the SUV of the new urban city because who needs just a simple little skidoo or a jet ski? We need like the big monster truck, right? Et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, back to all of you in the booth. Howard, at PNCA, it's a design school. A lot of it I think is graphic design, art design, but and some of it is like, I'm sure some of those kids care a lot about social issues and are trying to do graphic design for social good. How much traction do any of these issues have there? And what are they saying? Yeah, I would say that 100% of the students are very concerned, aware of and concerned of the kind of issues that we're talking about, especially equity issues, equity issues in large as well as climate. And so, you know, well in my own curriculum development, I'm focusing on projects, right? So the students engage in projects in the world and the challenge is to cultivate skills that the students can offer to these projects so that it becomes a value proposition rather than merely a case study. And so the projects that I bring into the classroom are more kind of manageable scale, right? And so in the foresight upcoming foresight class, our focus will be on mobility and students will be taking largely a, you know, futures ethnography type of type approach interviewing people who are working on mobility issues and Delphi and scanning and et cetera. And in the systems class, we've got three projects coming up, one on one with a group called the Alaka Alliance, which is a group working out of Newport, Oregon to reintroduce the sea outer to the Oregon coast. The sea outer has been Alaka's the Chinook word for sea outer. It's been missing in Oregon for 100 years or more. And as you probably know, missing because of its value as a fur and so was, you know, nearly exterminated from the West Coast of North America. And those remnant populations have returned somewhat but not in Oregon, returned quite a bit but not in Oregon. And Alaka are the sea otters vitally important to the coastal ecosystem, right? For kelp growth and sea grass growth, right? Because without the sea outer them the urchins. So it's a classic state of alternative stable states, right? So you've got kelp dominated ecosystem or urchin dominated ecosystem. And the Alaka is the, the trophic cascade between the two is catalyzed by the sea otter, right? So that's one of the projects that we'll be working on. I like to work with early stage projects because that gives, you know, they haven't maybe fully conceptualized what they're all about or maybe the students can help them to conceptualize it, you know, with various, various diagramming techniques. Another one that we're working with is the Haas Institute out of Berkeley, H-A-A-S Institute out of Berkeley program on targeted universalism. So this is a policy approach to thinking about equity design for equity. The idea here being that universalist policy design is, you know, leaves out a certain populations that don't have access and that targeted policy design is inherently discriminatory or can be challenged as such in the courts. And so targeted universalism trying to combine the best of the two. And I highly recommend the podcast I can put in the chat here, but with John Powell, John A. Powell on interview with him on targeted universalism. And the third project that we're gonna take on, which I mentioned to Jerry a few weeks ago is this one by a guy in the Portland area, Thompson Morrison, who is, has used Ward Cunningham's federated wiki to write about his experience in what he calls agile learning or agile education, trying to bring that into high school classes throughout starting in Dayton, Oregon and now throughout the state of Oregon. So here's, I did not know about Thompson Morrison before we had our beer and dinner. And so here's what I put in after visiting with you, Howard. Yeah, I mean, I loved reading his book myself. You know, I love pattern languages. As Jerry mentioned this morning on the call this morning, the federated wiki, you might consider it a tool for writing pattern languages, at least thus far, that seems to be how it's being used. Yeah, so I enjoyed reading his book in that format and following it along. He now has a manuscript and so we'll see how the experience differs. He's sending me his manuscript. This is the wiki that is the manuscript at this point, I think, right? Yeah. He's been basically doing a single author wiki using federated wiki to write this book. Right. Cool, thank you, Howard. That was a lot of super interesting stuff. Gene, where are you finding traction, energy, interest in trying to fix some of the systems problems that you care about? Damn it, you're supposed to say, yes, I like right here, look. First rule of systems thinking is not to talk about systems thinking. And there was no fight club. I am simply spending time endeavoring to provoke thought. I can't change people's minds, only they can do that. The best I can possibly hope to do is to ask questions in a manner that will get them to think. And so I connect with people on a ongoing basis and we have discussions about what's on their mind. I stopped pushing agendas because the natural thing is for people to become defensive. So I don't push agendas anymore. I simply ask questions. And it seems to work to some extent, but I have no idea the extent to which it works. But I get a lot of thank yous from people telling me that they have a different view of things based upon the thoughts that were provoked. Which is why I said I'm a recovering systems thinker because we've been trying to sell systems thinking for the last eight decades since the work of Bertilamp Fee in the 30s. And for the most part, the world isn't buying. And I have come, I think, to understand why they're not buying and it has to do with how much of what I have to offer you are you willing to listen to right after I tell you you're stupid? Probably not much. So I don't talk to people about systems thinking anymore. I talk to them about relationships and their implications. And I don't get the pushback that I used to get trying to explain the systems thinking to them. I asked them about if you do this, what's the implication and what's the implication of that and the implication of that. What are the influences? And they think about things rather than simply cause and effect. It extends their perspective on thinking about multiple relationships. And sometimes I even get them to draw diagrams. It's unbelievable. Because stop and think about it. You cannot hold more than one thought in your head at the same time. That though if you look at a diagram of multiple relationships, you get a sense of multiple relationships simultaneously, which gets you beyond cause and effect rather than simply looking at one, the result of one action. And I think I told you before that workshop that absolutely blew my mind it was an accident to start with a group of 35 people and that I didn't realize was going to be a workshop until a few minutes before it became a workshop. And starting out and saying, take out a piece of paper and on the piece of paper, draw a dot and label it cat. And a few inches away from it, draw another dot and label it mouse. Now draw an arrow from cat to mouse and label it chases. You've now created your first relationship model and if you feel faint you should leave now. And for four hours this group of 35 people were absolutely out of control. And within four hours they were drawing extremely complex relationship diagrams and using them to tell stories to other people in the room. They had a completely different perspective on how to look at multiple relationships and unfold them as stories to provide meaning, more meaning to them than they had about the subjects of interest beforehand before we started and convey meaning to other people. The connection I made, I spent years maybe decades developing relationship models and inflicting them on other people. And I would send them to other people because I wanted to impress them with how smart I was. And they really didn't care. And after the things I sent them made their heads hurt for a while, they'd send back a note like, well, that's nice. What they really wanted to say is, why did you send this to me? Because I didn't give it to them in a manner that they could understand. And one day I accidentally made this connection between a relationship model and a play. If you go to the play and you sit there, you watch the relationships unfold between the actors from one act to another. And it tells the story. And when you leave the play, you take the story with you. Suppose the playwright walked up to you, handed you the script and five minutes later said, what do you think? There is no way to comprehend what's in that script in five minutes. So I began to build relationship models and unfold them as a story and do a voiceover so people could see the model unfold as opposed to write papers that were indecipherable. And people tell me that they begin to sense the value of telling stories with relationship models as opposed to just building systems thinking diagrams. And the one I built about Esau stable, the voice who cries wolf just to prove a point. It's really marvelous in terms of the way that story unfolds as a relationship model. I would love for the relationship modeling that you described to be something that people discover across the million social innovations that have ever happened and the real data about the real world in terms of which social innovations could solve hypothetically which problems were. In other words, it strikes me that there's some automatic creation of relationship models that people could interact with in a simulation to say, what are all the causes and effects that are, for example, WSIP, you could see 40 years of cost benefits analysis history that have been studied in meta analysis since 1972. This link here, for example. And if you take all of the meta analyses that have already been done to say, here are some intervention. Now, obviously we want not only the interventions but innovations, but at least even if you just took the historical data, it seems like understanding cause, potential cause and consequence for stakeholders is something that could be simulated in a more general way. In other words, these relationships could be discovered through interacting with our aspirations. I feel like every person should adopt a future 2050, 2040, whatever the date is that they prefer rather than what's gonna happen without their existence on earth and then work like the demon to get the social innovation density of the world to the scale where their alternative history of the world is possible and that's sort of what it means to adopt it. And then, so I think the consequence is the relationship of cause and effect in terms of hypothetical and counterfactual social innovation. I feel like that's the agency and self authorship that I'd love to see from relationship mapping. I've enjoyed some of your YouTube videos, Jean, in terms of Kumu.io, Subuniverse and appreciate your contributions to the thought process. I'm just sort of saying that I'd love for that. Maybe it's a choose your own adventure story about alternative history of the world, the future of the world and then, each person fills in the blank of what things ought to get applied as social innovation to get their preferred versus their not preferred alternative history, but I do feel like there needs to be a narrative interface to deal with that we don't have a semantic web of social change. We just have these million stories, but even at a narrative level, at a relationship level, we should be able to take the data we have and the data we wish for and connect that into a matrix of self authorship. Well, I'm gonna say that shifting from systems thinking to competing narratives is a huge step. The whole feeling of a system, talking systems is being a heavy weight. Talking about competing narratives is like having a handful of butterflies. It's really alive, it's quite different. And getting people to think in terms of working narratives against each other seems to be like a good method. No scientific paper comes out without being embedded in a narrative. The problem is the narrative is usually implicit and people don't take responsibility for them. We're not teaching people how to do alternative narratives and it's a real mistake. We're not teaching young folk. Some of them like get this and I don't know how miraculously they get it better than I do, but sort of the bulk of them are not learning how to see the embedded assumptions, the context, never mind the history of a lot of life situations. So it makes it hard to question why the thing you're staring at doesn't make that much sense. Well, we've ended up with a handful of butterflies, which is a nice place to land, I think. And I was reflecting in the middle of the call, but I think everybody on this call has spent a great proportion of their life energy trying to affect how other people think. Maybe sometimes trying to directly change their minds, but I appreciate Jean your emphasis on that being a fruitless endeavor sometimes. But certainly every one of us trying to figure out how to get people to open up or shift their perspective or whatever you wanna call it. Change the scripts in their heads is one way I sometimes talk about it. The place that I finally concluded or the point that I finally rested on is that people always, always, always do exactly what makes the most amount of sense to them in the context of the moment based on their current understanding. And I can't find an argument to violate that because even if you attempt to act incoherently, you're doing it with an intent. Go ahead, John. Increasingly, I've worked on the idea that it's not changing people's minds, it's getting them to discover their own mind. And they can't change their mind to something which isn't kind of potent within them anyway. So you might as well work on that. Well, we didn't have- I've been thinking about the teaching of poetry. We teach poetry as, oh, kids, here's this great poem written by this genius. Wrong approach, much more important is, here's this interesting poem. What does it stir up in you? Let's learn how to deal with your own experience as you listen to this poem. Totally different. John, you were going to jump in? A question to Gene's point. Are you describing survivorship bias? Is that what humans at the moment are afflicted by? That's what I would- I don't know how to, I would have to think about whether or not survivorship bias connects to the statement that I made. The statement simply seems universal so that if somebody is operating with survivor bias, it's based upon what makes sense to them in the moment based on their current understanding, which to me all folds back to what Cubby said in the seven habits and he said, seek first to understand and then to be understood so that if you do something that makes no sense to me, it's not because of something you don't understand, it's because of something I don't understand. If I were you, I would take the same action. If I were you with the same understanding that you have in that context, in that moment, I would do what you did. So that what you do doesn't make sense it's because of something I don't understand. So it causes me to stop and think rather than react more often than not. Ken, thank you for being here. We're gonna wrap it up in another couple of minutes. Can you ask some more questions? It was a pleasure to see you all, take care. Super glad you joined us, thank you. Enjoy, Marie, and while it's still there before it's overrun by Syrian refugees or Bangladeshi refugees who two thirds of Bangladesh is at sea level, right? Yeah. Crazy stuff like that. I would just offer in response and support of all that Jean just said and almost everybody else in the same context is let them drink beer. If the money buys you beer, people will take it seriously. It's not simple. You've got to embed these behaviors in what people want to do already. So you just coined the name for your movement. It's called The Beer Revolution. You remember this morning, Dan, what's his name? The guy who led the Wiki. Sorry, which are the people? Yeah, which are the people? The one who liked the stop sign. Pete Kaminsky. Pete Kaminsky said that this was the human machine interface that he felt was one of the most interesting than one, the stop sign. And it doesn't have to be physically interactive. It's very present. That has a consequence. Similarly, the white line down the middle of the road, it's a very, very profound device. Most people work in different places. And we need some more sort of white line stop sign procedures that people just find convenient and effective and serve them. Just to show how complicated these things are. So I grew up partly in Argentina and Argentine drivers are notoriously bad. But one of the interesting things was that there were lines on the pavement. It's just that nobody obeyed them. So normally traffic in Argentina looked like a school of fish. And I got to drive in Argentina once as an adult. And I realized that it's just like a school of fish. You're allowed, you could go from the far right to the far left of a five lane road. And if you do it in small increments, nobody gives a shit. You can drive on top of the white line. Nobody cared. Now, this is probably no longer true. But back, you know, roll back 25 years. And this is how people drove. But if you turn too sharply, bam, you know, horns, whatever people, you know, glaring at you. So as long as you were obeying school of fish behavior, you could kind of do anything. And the lines were unimportant in that sense. And at the limit line, they would stop for a red light. They would mostly do that. But at the limit line, the cars jammed in between other cars, you know, overlapping whatever. And then back to Pete's comment about stop signs. I'm a big fan of traffic calming where what you do is you remove stop signs and you insert things like roundabouts and even so grudgingly. But when you do pace matching and everybody doesn't have to bring their energy to a full halt, you actually get better throughput, fewer accidents, et cetera, et cetera. So even a simple thing like a hexagonal red stop sign is a complicated affair. When you start digging into what would you use? You put it, do people understand it? Does it help? But it's not magic. And it's not magic. That's true. Um, any button with the last words for this call? I just wanted to say thank you, Jerry, for convening this excellent conversation of humans. I appreciate that we've been able to iterate forward progress of discovering a mental frame set by the end of the conversation that is a more useful toolkit than I arrived with. So thank you. Thank you all. Thank you very much. Thank you all for showing up with your full human selves and minds and all of that. I just, I really appreciate it. Cool. Until next. Thanks everybody.