 This is a Inside Jerry's Brain pop-up on Friday, November 23rd, 2018. Conversations in context is the notion behind this, and I want to be picking interesting and sometimes thorny topics and make an invitation that will bring interesting and seldom thorny people like you into conversations where we feed off of this mind map I've been building and feed the mind map during the conversation so I'll be screen sharing a bunch off and on and I apologize ahead of time that sometimes as you're speaking about something that I realize I have a lot of material on I will pop that into screen share behind us you'll probably on the recording you'll still be able to see who's speaking next to it but but the idea is partly to explore what happens when we have context around the conversation does it does it improve our memory how does that work sky you're making it excellent glad to see you there I'm just kind of explaining a little bit about what what the idea behind Inside Jerry's Brain is and I think let me just jump right in with a screen share because I had two things I wanted to talk about on the way in on this notion of screen sharing reset my screen a little bit one of them is the notion of one of them is one of my inspirations and probably a lot of people's inspirations is Brené Brown and if she's not an inspiration to you and you've got a critique of Renee I'd love to hear it because so far she just hits the right notes for me all the time and the talk the talk that kind of woke me up to her existence on the planet if you want to mute yourselves in and out that would be awesome turn it off I've had it on excellent so the talk of hers that that sort of made me aware of her existence was her TEDx talk in 2010 she did a she did a TED talk later on which was really good but not as good as this one somehow somehow this TEDx talk was really pretty fantastic TEDx Houston and she tells the story of her her her psychology professor mentor who basically said if you can't measure it it doesn't exist and then she goes into a whole series of things about vulnerability shame and so forth and in particular that things like what makes you vulnerable also makes you beautiful and that vulnerability is the path to authentic connection and joy and that the way forward is true vulnerability which is letting go of control so a bunch of these things we can come back to in different ways I just wanted to I wanted to give a quick glance of this in my brain because what I do with this is a TEDx talk so you can see from the icon that there's a link attached to this thought each note in my brain is called the thought and again also my apologies that for those of you who who are coming back to inside Jerry's been I'll probably do a little bit of tutorial as we as we go through it just for whoever's new so this little red icon that looks a lot like a YouTube logo is in fact YouTube's favicon because this is a link to Brene's talk if I click on the link right now on the on the little logo it'll launch my browser and start playing Brene's talk this one in particular so what I do with books and articles and posts and videos that I really love is I debrief them into my brain so this is not in the order she said them this is just an alphabetic order because that's kind of how the brain organizes things but you know she says things in this talk like let yourself be seen deeply practice gratitude and joy what I what I just went to and later articles like this one that refer back to this talk so here's a post I think it's a post by Bill Gross about vulnerability and about how vulnerability can help you succeed in business in this case let me just click on it and go to the browser and see what the post was because I don't put all the details in the brain I rely on the links to give me back what the articles were there we go so this is an article by Bill Gross the founder of idea lab and he recently saw Amanda Palmer's amazing Ted talk in Long Beach and is basically talking about that so he writes this post vulnerability can help you succeed in business which is referencing Amanda Palmer and Brené Brown so if I click on Amanda Palmer who I'm also a big fan of she wrote a book titled the art of asking and is an artist who really really throws herself on the crowd in a really interesting way so here's the book the art of asking which I just noticed is not connected to her talk so I'm gonna make that link because I'm pretty sure that the talk preceded the book led to the book so now I've made a little link like that so let me go back to Brené and the talk and then I'm going to go someplace else for a second but let me just pause here and just see if any of you have any thoughts or comments where we are well a question and it may not be appropriate for today but you noted that these are an alphabetical order not in date order is there a way to force other kinds of sequencing or do you find that useful to do or not so there's and it's totally like great question not an interruption there's two ways I can organize the views that I have on the thought so everything above and over here these are sibling thoughts so these are these are children of common parents child thoughts and then these are all the child thoughts right now I can organize them either alphabetically or by last touched I think I'm not sure whether it's touched or changed but chronologically right and those are the two choices when you're organizing how to view your brain the thing that I do now and then when I want to preserve some kind of order is I number them okay so I'll do I'll do numeric order so the place I think I showed this I showed a numeric wisdom so that that's I'll just do one dot and then boom and then they sort alphabetically in the right order what I also do for example on my event schedule is I do a year month so this is 2018 February 2018 March 2018 April right 1804 is 2018 April because if you do year month with two two numbers for each it sorry you know once we got past the Y2K problem it sorts very nicely and naturally into a readable order that is also happens to be chronological yeah so if I go back to Brene what I wanted to I also show as an opening to the conversation is a piece that most people don't know exists in the world so it's funny in one sense this is me my most vulnerable spot in the brain because I'm sort of saying this is what I believe to be true in the world in another sense I'm hiding in plain sight because nobody knows my brain exists you know those of you who've just joined the call are discovering this probably mostly for the first time raise your hand if you knew that I posted my beliefs in my brain excellent so Judy ran across it and nobody else so I actually wish sorry go ahead Judy comment that as I mentioned in one of my notes I think I started looking at the brain back and probably maybe not right away after we met in 06 but maybe an 08 or something after I started coming into some of the Y10 calls and I was fascinated and a little over more than a little overwhelmed by your brain way back then and it's just gotten bigger but it is really fascinating and and I love the depth and breadth and connectivity of it thank you one one of the dangers of doing inside Jerry's brain and giving tours of my brain is that other people are dissuaded from trying to do their own mind mapping or other kinds of connectivity because they're like well crap you know look how much stuff is here I'm never going to get there and to them I say hey after I put a hundred things in it was useful and it was fun but part of the part of the thing that's really fun is not seeing the completed cake but baking the cake and and the little decisions you have to make along the way of okay so how am I going to treat this I've noticed a recurring issue I've got lots of books in my brain do I put authors above the books or below the books those decisions come up a bunch and you have to figure them out and then you have to remember them later so that you're consistent over time my own my own take is if you're not consistent in that way your brain becomes mush and then and then you know chaos ensues and then the end of the world will catalyze right after that because it seems like authors would be better because then you'd at least cluster in a topical direction rather than the title because the titles get really random so what I did was I always put books under authors and I always put blog posts under authors because they are creating it's a generative work they're creating the work the work descends comes from them so my own take will on it and other people have used lateral links for authors I've seen whatever you want but for me it seemed like an author was writing creating this creative work called the book now I put actors under their movies because the actors are are acting in a movie and I put the author of the screen the screen writer or the novelist who wrote the novel that the movies based on are above the movie so I can I can show that as well okay and I do that pretty consistently so then all actors are under their movies now if an actor also directed I use the lateral links for directing so they can get a little bit messy but actually not that bad and if an actor directed in a movie that he or she also acted in that breaks me I can't I can't put the actor in both roles that doesn't really particularly work so I put them as the director because that to me is the more important role and you'll figure out that they also acted in it when you go look at the movie kind of thing right but but here like I go into some territory that's pretty normal like hey I believe in global unity I think that you know everyone is actually sort of we're all deeply inter twingled for example so global unity is a really nice thought that collects up lots of different people's ideas about global unity everything from tile hard the Chardin's idea of the Noah's fear which is one of many different spheres we can come back to that to John Muir writing about global unity way back when the quote is probably down here in the notes field which I've covered over with your videos for the moment the idea Jagdish Chandra Bose who had really idea really interesting ideas out of biology about global unity and he talks about how plants actually have feelings in different ways he's a polymath so for instance I've got a thought called polymaths which is people who knew a lot about a lot of stuff which is an interesting thing to me and then back to global unity Edgar Mitchell one of our astronauts who who he was on Apollo 14 ended up co-founding the Institute of no edict sciences etc etc so interesting things there so global unity not that controversial I think yeah go ahead I'm not to accuse you of being obsessive or anything oh I would never cop to that no but can you give us some sense of how much time you spend with the brain I mean maybe you're in it all the time but I'm just trying to get a feel for the the temporal investment in producing this map we're looking at here yeah so the brain is a very practical ask cuz I've as you know I've made several attempts at working with this I've not been able to stay with it consistently and I'm interested in doing that I want some guidance about how to how to frame it cool well the brain I only I only author the brain on my laptop so it's always open on my laptop and I have as you can see from the way I've arranged my desktop but it may not be obvious to you I make it so that there's always an inch free so I can see my browser here enough so that I can see the link and the URL because when I drag something into the brain when I put something new in the brain what I do is I grab this link and I drag it to the brain that's just the quickest way for me to put something new in the brain so my browser is open so that there's an inch of the brain showing on the far right yeah okay right which means my brain is always visible to me it's always sitting here and it's both a reference and a repository so so it's both the place that I consult for gosh gosh I could have sworn I already read an article about this right so when I have that moment and I know that the article was worth remembering I'm pretty sure it's in here and the act of finding it will refresh my memory of that old one and then we'll let me put this new article that I just just just somebody wrote yesterday that I discovered this morning in the flow of emails or whatever and put it in and the act of putting something in the brain is 30 seconds to a minute right because I have to make I have to make a couple quick decisions one is it worth remembering yeah two where does it go three drag it in and then like how do I improve it do I do I connect it to more things do I put the author's name in that kind of thing and that's probably about a minute now if you were using delicious or a bookmarking service you would probably spend 20 seconds you know bookmarking it's delicious if all you did was control D in your browser and add it to the long list of links that that are stored in your browser's history that would take you know two seconds except it would be useless right so so you actually have you have to put a little bit of work into the memory part of this in order for it to pay off later on down the road but but I do a bunch of this all the time and you get pretty quick get it after a while I mean it's the gesture of remembering curating gardening connecting something in is not that time consuming to me but that that you're also distilling I mean you're pulling out the three or eight main points what's really interesting is that I can then go back to articles or books that I really care about and not only that but you know I can find a thing that then connects up to another concept of wholehearted list which then takes me to the five hours of a wholehearted apology that was written as in the book effective apology by John Cater right and I don't remember that I made those links but but wholeheartedness itself is a topic and that's something I my brain really works that way so I value these little lateral travels through the rhizomal connectedness of everything that that gives me a little oxytocin hit in my brain when I do that right so so there's a natural reward system for me for the work of putting in making sure that everything's typed pretty clearly you know if you just jam everything in there and don't pay attention to it it turns into a like the dark forest really quickly so pretty much whenever you're at the computer you're also doing brain as partner pretty much yeah and and so whatever comes by that's interesting deserves to be remembered it's a little bit like the history guy history that deserves to be remembered so you sit only on your laptop so when you're out and about with your phone or your pad you're just not curating I will if I'm at a meeting I will capture notes in an Evernote I will capture links to put into the brain later unfortunately I sell them go back and harvest those links just not a habit I have so so I can I can lose a bunch of good links in some periods and there've been two or three times in the 21 years I've been using the brain in fact in a couple weeks it'll be 21 actual years that I've been feeding this one mind map because the file you're looking at right now is the same file that I started 21 years ago and there been two or three times when the brain was broken for a month or so while they were busy fixing the software so that it would work again and I've got a couple of you know Evernote files or something like that from those days that are a couple hundred links or whatever that probably never going to put in the brain and the only funny thing that happens is that every now and then something will be in one of those files that I thought I put in the brain because I did like half the act of remembering it but then I go look in the brain and it's not there so not a big deal but it's interesting it is so do you find that it's not workable to use it with iPad with a I find that authoring on the iPad is not functional it's it's I can do it and in fact the sync works so it's syncing through the web brain server so the iPad will sync properly and I'll see it again here on my laptop but I have not figured out a quick way to author in the iPad okay thank you yeah and it's used it's kind of useless on a phone yet the phone is just too tiny too tiny you can't read it yeah it's pretty on an iPad and I don't have a 12 inch iPad but I imagine on a 12 inch iPad is probably gorgeous because that's just a lot of screen real estate any other questions or thoughts on this part is this available for us to look at you can browse my whole brain for free at jerry'sbrain.com so just go to let's let me type it into the chat real quick well that's right I'm in I'm in screen sharing mode so I've got to figure out how to get the chat up there's the chat okay so if you go to jerry'sbrain.com there's a link that says launch Jerry's brain just go there and that will launch this it it will launch it with a vertical line through the middle which I can't change I can't change the default launch format which is too bad you have to learn to change it around so that it's easier to see because I move my screen around so that I see like the whole blue part of the brain and occupies most of my most of my screen real estate but you can go browse this you can go find yourself and and anything you know any other kinds of things so here's a Center for Social Change Bill Burdette member of Rex under and in fact I should I should attach the Center for Social Change the social change which I'm pretty sure I have a thought for and social change is then connected to a whole bunch of stuff and it's connected to scales of change which then comes back to personal change systems change technological change organizational change etc etc so there's a balance here Jerry between you curating what's interesting to you and you being encyclopedic yeah I feel sometimes like I'm Cliff Claverin gone amok in a bad Stephen King novel yeah which which is maybe the the dark side of doing this and being this but you know what I'm okay with that and and if I'm at a conference like I'm sitting in the audience I'll be looking in my brain and if there's a side chat of the conference which I love I'll be posting links from the next speaker right so somebody goes up Parag Khanna is coming up on stage and meanwhile I'll be sitting there basically saying oh I know Parag I mean I've not met him personally but look he wrote how to run the world he wrote hybrid reality he wrote technocracy in America he's a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation etc etc and so I can I can put I can put I can harvest any of these individual links the I can also go up and say hey brain give me give me a web thought url so this is how I send somebody a unique link to a thought in my brain so if I say copy web thought url or in this case also command shift t it will copy to my clipboard well that's interesting my my pad just disconnected it will copy a link to my clipboard that I can then paste in a chat let's go back to our chat here I'm running version 10 I'm on the latest I'm on the latest rev of the brain so I can so that gives me a short link that will take you directly to that spot in my brain which is really handy except you may have to wait 60 seconds to get there because it's kind of slow so the next place I wanted to go was let me see which one where do I want to go so a slightly more controversial thought that is in my in my beliefs is is trauma necessary for greatness for people to achieve greatness and if you look at the biographies of most of the North American abstract artists a whole bunch of novelists and poets a lot of people who created great works many of them had really torturous childhoods so here's unresolved childhood trauma here's you know bios of abused people I think I have another here we go I thought I'm looking for is people who had traumatic childhoods there should be a lot more listed under here than because it's it's I think it's kind of an epidemic and that's a bit more controversial than we should have global unity or a belief in some kind of inter twingularity but it informs how I think about what's happening because I also believe in sort of systemic trauma basically that a lot of things we do as part of socialization are in fact you know inflicting subtle kinds of trauma on us in different ways so one of my sources there is Alice Miller who is was a psychotherapist based in Switzerland who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and is in my list of contrarians who make or made sense which is one of my favorite spots in my brain this is where I collect thinkers whose work thinkers and doers whose work has influenced the way I see the world and Alice well Jerry what was the name of the the man that Alice Miller was writing about in her works because he was a writer Herman I don't I don't remember but any of it he he should be listed on one of your you know trauma people otherwise that was the whole basis of her work he may well be which Herman let me try and see if I can find do you remember in which book the main book the main book that she had so the drama the gift of child right exactly so the drama gift of child goes back so far for me that I don't have it very well annotated in my brain therefore I haven't really connected it in the ways that I ought but if you can find out who that is I will add that because it really sort of like started her whole work the fact that he himself did not really sort of project that it was a trauma and yet she was saying that that's part of the problem is that he was excusing his parents for abusing him and in a way didn't even acknowledge that he was abused that makes total sense it does make sense yep well in the eternalization of not okayness too that I mean most everyone who has a trauma first place they go is shame I must have called this somehow yeah exactly so in in thou shalt not be aware Alice talks about how Freud so Alice is one of the few people who got access to the Freud archives another one is Jeffrey Musaev Mason who himself is controversial but in going through the archives and looking at Alice Miller's early cases she discovered that one of the earliest things he got famous for was the study of hysterics and it was six or eight women who were basically kind of catatonic which back then they called hysteria and it turned out that all of these women had been abused by their fathers and it turned out that Sigmund Freud realized that there was no way he could go out into polite biannese society and say so he couldn't report hey this is what I've discovered so he invents drive theory he basically invents out of whole cloth yet the edifice complex the electro complex all of those kinds of things he kind of invents them and that those become psychological dogma those become what we do and if you think about it what does the what does the edifice complex do but reinflict the draw the trauma on the child that accuses the child of trying to divide the father and the mother etc etc so she's trying to say hey we have we have like completely covered over what happened here and and in the 80s I watched as this this notion started to actually bubble up and there were some cases of people who were suing their parents for abuse etc etc and then I watched the immune system the social immune system basically come up and invent repressed memory syndrome false memory syndrome etc etc so here is Peter Freed is one of the people there are a bunch of people who basically created a foundation and they basically said nope none of this really happened this is a form of gaslighting so I should probably I should probably connect it to gaslighting and a small a small side trip that you guys might enjoy so gaslighting is denying things that ever denying that things ever happened it comes from a play called titled gaslight written by patrick hamilton in which a husband drives his wife crazy by messing with her memory right so that's why we said gaslighting the movie was in the Bergman in uh what right right exactly and so I have gaslighting under Trump's favorite tactics so I have a absolutely I have I have catalogued as best I can right and clearly this is not exhaustive and the categories aren't clean but uh you know hey he he makes sure people think he might just be crazy enough to do that he invents numbers to this story he makes sure he gets free airtime because he's so controversial deny everything that's damaging distract people from paying attention to significant matters claim victory in defeat claim you don't know people you know really well like you know whatever tons of examples but but um yeah exactly well uh puffery basically yeah promote yourself at every opportunity uh promise something make grandiose claims because puffery is legal you know and he's really good at using the law by spurting the law basically do things that are completely outrageous but yet not just barely not illegal over and over again but we Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has been chronicling these tactics for years so um should take a look at that so in fact if I type in sorry my between zoom and the brain and everything else is slowing down a little bit now but I have a thought funny enough titles Scott Adams on Trump great you're there okay where where Adams who's a real contrarian here um he basically said hey look at Trump from the perspective of persuasion techniques and the seduction community and all those kinds of things it turns out that Trump is a map is a black belt he's an absolute master of persuasion and Adams goes and does a close reading roughly of some Trump speeches and says look how he's you know how he's repeating the same point six times over and he sounds like he's an idiot and he's like talking to idiots but it turns out that if you repeat something over and over again it sinks in and it you know the message carries so uh Scott Adams was one of the people who uh predicted uh Trump victory uh along with Michael Moore Mark Stallman Mark Bly that David Gerstein David Betras uh the daybreak poll got it that that they were going to win uh an i a sorry uh an an uh an election prediction service predicted that he was going to win etc and I'm sure there are many many others that I didn't catch but this is my little bag of who understood ahead of time that Trump was likely to win who got that something was very different what was happening so then I went and read and listened to a lot of what these people said which then led me to you know to to do post some videos after the election that about how I changed my mind on things and and I'm really interested in changing my mind I don't think I'm easy to change my mind I don't think I'm quick to to to vacillate on stuff but part of the reason why I post my beliefs and this goes back to sort of this this conversation about vulnerability is that I want to I want to say out loud the things that I believe so that as we dive deeper into layers of conversation I can say yes but aren't people generally born good right or some other sort of thing and at least we can have that conversation and then maybe we locate the place where we agree to disagree so if somebody else is like very Hobbesian and they think no no no people are people are born evil and we just have to we have to build institutions and create systems to stop them from doing evil as opposed to the people are generally born good and we should build institutions to maximize genius and then deal together and very flexibly with the evil that shows up those are two completely different ways of building institutions right the two completely different approaches to how life works how people work the whole thing and I think that conversation is super interesting and I'm perfectly happy to talk with people who have opposite opinions I just wish more of us made it more explicit so that when we sat down we could figure out where are our points of agreement where our points of disagreement let's go buy a nice bottle of wine and go have a good conversation about the places where we disagree and then I I can be swayed very can you hear me go ahead Ken yeah I want to throw something in around people being born good or evil please I was on Bali in 2006 for a quest for global hearing conference and I got a tour of this big temple and the guide said you know notice we have a place here for cockfighting and gambling we believe that these are these kinds of vices are inherent in people you can't wipe them out to have a god called the rock which is the god of good evil and if you make offerings to the god of good evil you keep the god of bad evil away so if you try to wipe it out like the puritans want to wipe everything out right that would be totally pure then um then you end up having really bad things come about but if you say okay there's always going to be gambling there's always going to be people who want to you know sex work right so we oh wow we make that as safe as possible and wow actually promote it but we we don't try to wipe it off the face of the planet and then you get a much different kind of society than one that is constantly trying to eradicate the root of evil do you remember that how to spell the name of the god i think it's b a r a k but i'm not entirely sure so i was just trying to find god of the god of good evil that didn't work yeah let me try barak god is good for you nope barak and god master of akina i will i will try and find i've got i i still know people from the bowie institute for global renewal i'll see if i can find out i'd love to because that's exactly the kind of thing i'd love to put in my brain and that's the kind of insight i mean i'm really interested in institutional design which sounds super boring except it drives most of society and culture right super interested in institutional design and making room for the dark side rather than trying to squash it out of existence is incredibly important and doing so in a way that people can coexist with really matters right and this goes down to prohibition and the legalization of pot and whether prostitution should be legal and the whole whole you know there's a whole angle of things there and another thing that i've put out there is back when sort of the main umbrella for my work was the relationship economy expedition or rex i created a thought called the rex platform right and the rex platform says let's eliminate the electoral college let's legalize gay marriage let's legalize prostitution let's abolish patents let's create a u.s department of peace let's eliminate the department of education and agriculture let's reform the spectrum let's stop corporate welfare let's reverse corporate power including corporate personhood let's get rid of the farm bill let's get rid of agricultural subsidies these are all things that like if somebody gave me a magic button and made me king i would just go do these things um and i and i'm not sure i'm a hundred percent on each of these but i feel pretty strongly about them interesting i'm just i'm just sort of re-familiarizing myself with the list right now just looking at it with you it's very funny and i haven't visited this node in my brain in quite a while so partly looking at this makes me think oh okay i should come back and do a little more gardening right and makes me think gosh was i too optimistic about this one or like do i really believe that one or how do you know how does that work um and then so under here like the rex platform revitalizing cities is a really lovely nexus um it's a it's a it's a very nice place this is just the a through d's because there's a scroll bar down here so you'll see there's a lot more here this is all initiatives books articles ted talks whatever about people who've really been rethinking cities in interesting ways so it includes uh the edible landscapes of todd morgan in northern england so here's food scaping edible landscapes here's pam warhurst's talk how we can eat our landscapes uh te uh she did a tex way back when it's under revitalizing cities uh and then you know the way they make it inclusive is they say if you can eat you're in that's one of their little code words and then another talk i really love is jason roberts the inventor of better block and he gives an excited talk way back around the same time actually so all of these i collect up because should anybody be looking for ways of making cities better i i mean this to be a resource for them so jerry do i get to grab your revitalizing cities um uh cascade and clone it into my brain i don't know how to do that i don't know how to copy a bunch of things you'd have to sort of choose how many you know degrees to go from i don't really know how to do that it's not possible as far as i know okay this is part of the brain's limitation is that the servers each live in a separate instance and don't know how to talk to each other which i would not have done because that would be crazy awesome if we could actually do some brain merging so i can give you a link to this thought right now so here's so copy web thought url i'm gonna paste this into our chat right this second so that's easy and you and you can add that link into your brain or other tool and say hey here's a link to um you know uh two interesting stuff that somebody curated that works that works easily yeah but the rest of what you're looking for which i would like as well don't know how to do good have you asked it of course okay yeah okay yeah other thoughts would any of you put your beliefs out in this way is this uh is this feel like an unnatural act or a natural act or a useful act or a useless act i'm interested i think it's a natural act what i'm curious is do you have um a range in which you say okay these are really firmly held beliefs i i've i've you know really been rigorous with this and yeah it's gotta be have to be something to change that would have to be really of a large magnitude these are kind of still developing beliefs and these are the ones i'm not quite sure of is that part of your strategy i have not done that the only way to discover that really is to investigate how fleshed out or thought out do they appear to be because i have more and less evidence on some of these and you know so forth uh or to talk to me and ask me directly so that there's no i i could use a coloring scheme you know i could use intensities of color on the on the different nodes but i have definitely not done that it's an interesting idea i just i just didn't know how to implement it consistently go ahead judy well it seemed when i was on this that it that some of the elements of what you have in your fundamental truths and your cannons um does create that hierarchy of the ones that have coalesced to be stronger than the individual elements that's actually really true and the intention thank you for discovering those and mentioning them right now because i had forgotten i put them in here um because i did this so that i could say how do i simplify and one thing that's not connected here um that matters a lot to me is um i don't know did we even go through this in the last call yeah we did because i talked about the 10 commandments right right and i went to deep listening and loving speech and to me um deep listening and loving speech is also needs to be connected to my fundamental truths because if we if we sort of drive that way a lot of other good things happen so so here we are so we shouldn't harm children god is in everyone which is comes to me out of quaker uh thinking uh there's plenty of there's plenty of other belief systems that believe god is in everyone uh the one that the one that informed me is quaker thinking which i love about the inner light about being silent together you know one of their sayings i use all the time in my retreats you should only break the silence to improve on it right uh but but by the way uh quakers were essential to the development of a whole bunch of things including the industrial revolution um it's it's super interesting the the history of like the british confectioners and will british woolens and confectionary early on where quaker uh there's a book called quaker's money and morals uh which should be under articles about quakers here we go this book basically talks about how um quakers partly um partly because they were outcasts right there's a certain silver lining to being cast out of society and you can see this in judaism you see this in a lot of different places where persecution kills you or makes you stronger in some ways or forces you into things that other people are rejecting so um the industrial revolution starts when people like quakers are clearly not going to be in the clergy or the aristocracy or the mercantile trades or the professions in fact they're being driven out of town so a lot of innkeepers at the crossroads become quakers a lot of biologists who go on sailboats around the world and send back seeds to queue gardens and other places are quakers because you're getting as far away from you know mother england as you as you possibly can but also the quakers look around and they say what is what's up with this machine for lifting uh lifting earth by fire you know the early steam engine and they're like well let's see if we can't make some use of that and nobody else wants to touch it there's no reason for it it doesn't have enough power to do much of anything and and last little sort of link here um the cost of coal at the coal phase is zero and coal mines are having trouble with flooding um and then there's another link here which is uh one of the reasons oh this is actually interesting um let me go to coal and see if i can find this thread um so britain is really quick to the industrial revolution because it has coal it had coal right out by the surface and it was easy to access but once they started digging it out they started having flooding problems and the first steam engines were like the new common pump were used for pumping water out of coal mines and the cost of fuel at a coal mine is zero because you're just chopping it out of the wall and it's not until much later that you can make steam engines efficient enough to drive a train and put it on tracks and move freight etc that that comes a whole bunch later but the quakers see this early tool and start to harness it for moving mills instead of water wheels instead of you know other kinds of power at the time a long long digression sorry but i i find this stuff really fascinating jerry the person in alice miller's book was herman hess oh okay of course yeah so i was wondering whether you met herman hess and i don't think i have the connections properly made to um to alice so i will i will make a note to myself to go explore that and she used him because of the fact that she really couldn't use legitimately in other words legally her own clients and so she used somebody who was notorious in other words who had a lot of people had written about and he had written a lot about and his parents had written about so she was able to piece together both his abuse and his denial of it um thank you that's that's awesome and if you have if you know of any articles or books that point to this particular narrative i'd love to know that and i'd also love to know the the barack story of good evil uh ken if you can if you can find that i'll send it to me or put it on the just put these things on the inside jerry's brain list and i will harvest from there and drop them back in my brain but i'll do my own research on these as well okay i can send you an article in a book review that gets into this fabulous that's perfect thank you and it's interesting because alice miller is herself very controversial um what what's what's interesting to me is that some of these people who have contrarian views are in fact really controversial because they're contrarians right and what they're saying can't be stomached by other people and contrarians are really really close to wild ass totally ridiculous conspiracy theorists there's not that much distance between them all the time so you you've got to figure out what what fits the model what is your filter when when is somebody a contrarian with a really useful point of view and when does somebody just wacko with a point of view kind of need to need to skirt around um and when is it not just a kind of a self referential affirmation yes and also there's some people like ted kitchens key the unabomber who's who's critiques of society are pretty on right a lot of people are pointing to the unabombers manifesto as hey this was actually pretty literate and pretty dead on about stuff even though he was busy mailing bombs to people and hurting people um so one of the things i'm discovering is that and and and this is where i need i could use your guidance or your language or your own experience on this um how to how to find your way to how to find your way to listen to people who many other people are just not listening to and i'll give you an example here so steve steve bannon is now seen as sort of the antichrist by a whole lot of people on the left and other sorts of places right and he's he's no longer in the trump white house maybe thank god maybe not because now he's got a lot more freedom so i have i have a thought in my brain called bannon in the trump administration under articles about bannon uh and here's the you know new york times articles about the fall of c bannon is he being forced out uh blah blah blah blah but uh there was an interview that bannon did uh with zany minton zany minton bettos uh who is a writer at the economist uh and uh so here's her uh her twitter handle but there's this interview that's online at youtube here's the link and uh and i wrote to myself as a note of that that bettos does not manage this argument well she's trying to sort of it's a little bit like the now infamous argument with uh jordan peterson uh and the journalist where peterson basically walks all over this journalist who's trying to pin him down and i disagree with jordan peterson but it's super interesting to watch as a as a conversation but here bannon says hey look the party of davos took care of themselves and let the devil take the hindmost and he coins this party of davos thing he that's that's one of his you know uh one of the ways you can control dialogue in the public sphere is to coin a lot of things that other people then adopt so he says the party of davos also brought on the global financial crisis and the rise of china so i'm going to link these two um and i'm going to link uh causes so i have a thought i know i have a thought called causes of the global financial crisis so all i had to type right now is causes glob and because i know what i've put in my brain i realized nobody else has that you know that that full perspective but because i knew that now i just typed the down arrow hit return and i've now made a link with causes of the global financial crisis which as you'll see is quite complicated has a bunch of stuff connected to it which is connected to causes of the subprime crisis which has its own set of of questions and issues etc etc so now back to bannon's assertions so i learned a tremendous amount about the populist nationalist movement that bannon is trying to create because he now has a movement called the movement which he is recruiting um so here's matthew salvini is in it michael mondry common is in it who is from the people's party in belgium he's basically trying to unify the global shift to the far right which is a thought i have as well okay um so i learned a ton of the logic behind why this might be appealing to people by paying attention to bannon who is not on my list of conferents who make sense i've not to me that's an elevation that i don't want to give him but he's a he's like not an idiot absolutely not an idiot part of the challenge right now is that there are a lot of as you tell me people who are rather effective at pitching a particular viewpoint that's ungrounded in scientific fact or business fact or other things strictly from a point of appealing to people and taking advantage of a high skill set in persuasion and influence and communication tactics to sway large numbers of people you know in a society where we have not embraced the fact that everyone needs to develop the skill sets to respond to those i mean if we were to try to elevate society as a whole somehow we would start in the kibbutz level of education with validation and self-esteem and openness and vulnerability leading to trust because it's safe to do those things and then that evolves into a self-actualized person so judy not only are you exactly right but mr bannon understands that you're exactly right because his cronies have been fighting a battle against critical thinking in education for decades exactly and and that's probably right up there with positive elevation of connectivity is the deterioration of critical thinking in education as one of the greatest flaws woes of our society today and it doesn't take much to get me on a pulpit about it and with other educators who share that to talk about specific tactics in sort of every social situation where those of us who value critical thinking can in a i don't want to say a sneaky way but in a in a non-confrontational way invite critical dialogue which i think is where some of this is heading very when you talk about things in context is that in order to reach critical thinking dialogue you have to be aware of your own thoughts but open to other thoughts that are contrarian that allow you to then connect with the person of contrarian viewpoint and actually have a meaningful dialogue absolutely that's a skill set that can be taught but it's not taught in school and the fundamentals of questioning fact aren't taught in school i had a sort of a epiphany moment in grad school in traditional sense people presented articles from science and over summarized them in the group discussed them and critiqued and so forth and in one of these in my early years the professor who was not my major professor but i was in his listening group because i needed more context of his stuff said something to the presenter like do you believe that and there was dead silence in the room because no one had asked themselves that question and he said you need to understand that science is just our best approximation every time you read something you should ask yourself if you believe it is it supported why do you believe it you know things in your chemistry books are pretty much true or the best model we have because they've been tested over and over and over and over and over but you're going to see literature that hasn't been tested rigorously and that was an epiphany for me i mean i'd always been a little contrarian by personality because i was like the why kid why why why why why i drove my parents nuts but we're not teaching that we're not encouraging kids to ask those questions we're not even encouraging adults to ask those questions and that's pretty scary so i just want to pick up on one of the threats i love what you're saying i want to pick up on one of the threads that kind of crossed through here which is i'm a i'm a big critic of the compulsory education system i do not like standard schooling i think in fact it causes and reinforces many of the problems we're talking about it undermines critical thinking and then we wonder why we don't have critical thinkers but we've built an institution that was created to create good consumers and factory workers and dumb people down so one of my heroes one of my contrarians who make or made sense is john taylor gatto who died just recently and um he was you know he he turned into a cranky bastard in his old age which happens a lot to contrarians because your whole field is sort of turned against you and you have a few people who are cheering for you but um he you know he wrote a book called dumbing us down among many other things in fact my first exposure to to john taylor gatto is uh where is it here we go is this essay called the sixth lesson school teacher that doc serles uh sent me in the mail because it was published in the sun magazine which is a subscriber published uh you know articles magazine and uh basically uh docs mails me this and i read the sixth lesson school teacher in which in which gatto says you know nominally i was your high school english teacher let me tell you what i was really teaching you and he talks about the hidden curriculum of schooling um about which i become a whole lot wiser and so we wonder why we don't have critical thinkers but then we think oh let's just put that in the curriculum of school and to me that well that's a dog that won't hunt right so so to me we actually need to fix schooling uh in a different way and i'm uninterested in taking down the bureaucracies in school i'm super interested in building um a way people can learn of any age learn any topic minimal cost together and to me that that falls under design from trust and it's one of the things i'd like to flesh out and i i bought the domain uh i just for fun i have a website at learn.net l3rn.net i have very little up there right now but this is kind of a project for design from trust that i would like to put in the world and go do something with whoever wants to show up right okay i like that i mean i think that there's there's certain um teaching mechanisms of very intelligent thoughtful people who do create this continuous learning dialogue and the curiosity and if you're wondering about that go look it up um go find it some of us i mean i i didn't know there was a name for what happened to me when i didn't track with the rest of the class because i was a couple a couple years ahead in school um and bored out of my gourd so i lived in the library all the time and i'd end up with all these books stacked around me because one thought would lead me to another question i go find another book and i bring that back to the table and and this was like grade school behavior and we don't allow that to happen in schools everybody has to sit in chairs and do the same thing and perform exactly the same tasks that other people around them are doing which is not how any natural organism learns. A friend of mine's uh first grader was disciplined for being just too fidgety in class and that was her cue to pull the kid from school do something else right another family um their daughter came home from maybe kindergarten and started telling them how to organize like the knives and forks at the dinner table but but not in a hey i learned some etiquette and here's how but rather in a this is how we do things kind of way and they're like whoa what just happened to our kid so so the system is designed uh to break curiosity and and uh to break this this this sort of natural linkiness between things doesn't fit well when you have math class then science class then english class right and then we don't teach you common sense stuff like how to live and how to have a relationship and how to be honest and all that stuff is not actually in the curriculum it's just it's a mess and we not only eat your childhood with this but we're extending childhood right adolescence is a novel term um one of the things that i love about gato is that he collects up stories of um of autodidacts and so self-taught people and also young people who did really amazing things and one of his favorite people is uh ferragut who was our first admiral oops i think it's it's david ferragut not john uh so here we go so and i'm giving away a little bit of my my my plot my plot here because um i used to say in speeches that ferragut was put on board a ship at age 12 uh a warship right because that's what you did with kids who were sort of of the aristocracy of the navies of the time it turns out he was put on board a warship at age nine at age 12 he got his first command of a ship because the the captain of his ship had actually taken a prize a ship an opposing ship as prisoner and he needed that prize to be sailed to the nearest port and he's he puts ferragut on in charge of the prize and and uh the captain of the captured ships as i i'm not going any place with a 12 year old searing and ferragut says uh you know if if he shows his face above dex had him shot and on on we go to our first major admiral you know uh in america but but young people are actually extremely capable but we keep we keep creating this narrative that no no no our brains formerly late and we keep we keep extending childhood in ways that make it much easier to sort of control people's lives i think so again this is this is editorial for me about which i can then show you evidence in my brain just throwing a little plug sorry go ahead if any about times when lifespans were shorter people had to come of age sooner and live their lives sooner uh and in fact many of the founding fathers were like 17 to 21 years old so in fact that's mostly true except for one thing i'll take issue with which is a conventional wisdom that we used to live really short lives and now we're living longer lives and i just posted about this on twitter it turns out that it turns out that infant mortality used to be huge really really bad and what that does is that skews how long you think people are living but it turns out that that human lifespans have been about the same for millennia that that if you look back in the fossil record and whatever you'll find 70 and 80 year olds among the cave people among other people people were able to live a long age um april and i were in tanzania and we did a little safari and we had masai guide you know uh walk us around and we had lunch and then he took a twig from a tree and brushed his teeth with a twig and he had better teeth than i have when that was just a habit passed down through millennia he just like crushed the end of the twig a little bit so it was kind of brushed like boom boom boom done and i'm like this idea that we used to live only till 25 or 30 and then you know now we we suddenly get a little longer i'm trying to dispel but i completely agree with you that way back when you had significant partly this is connected to the way we used to be raised by the village like you would get graduated responsibilities as you got a little older so you know when you're five or six you know your your mom says go borrow some flour from the people next door when you're nine or ten go watch the the goats for the afternoon when you're eleven or twelve why don't you go help build the house that we're building for uncle bob right and in doing so everybody in the village gets to know who you are you form identity you build skills you get graduated responsibility and by the time you're fourteen you're pretty capable doing most everything that everybody every adult is doing and people know you're a known quantity in the community all of that all of these methods we've destroyed like like they exist still fragmentarily in different communities that protect it but mostly we now get dropped in an institution pop out of that institution with a degree and a grade or a rank which is supposed to be a proxy for all this other rich stuff that i'm just describing and is not fails completely to be that proxy and then our employers treat us as a completely new unique individual who's being represented by this resume which is ridiculous as well not only that but then in adulthood the same thing happens with the these are the things you can do at this level if your questions go beyond that level too soon it's not appreciated it's discounted or prone to be annoying unless you have happened to have a particularly enlightened organization and some enlightened mentors who are like thrilled that someone's getting there faster and can maybe move further on this particular concept and i think this notion of clustering and standardization is a an abysmal failure because the spectrum of capability in any age group is extreme i have a friend whose daughter is in a stem school in fourth grade and they have kids in the class in fourth grade with math skills between what they call grade two level and grade five level and they have five different teachers teaching separate subgroups to help try to move them all along effectively whereas your community model allows people basically to do what they're capable of doing unless they screw up and if they screw up then someone says we maybe shouldn't have had you do that yet but there's no shame associated it the adult owns the fact that we let you do something that you maybe hadn't learned quite enough to do so it's not a shaming thing to fail you can have instead the opportunity to maybe succeed at things people would never have guessed you were capable of doing and we're just minimizing human potential instead of maximizing it which just makes me want to bomb it basically what if what if vomiting is the natural reaction in other words the way that the system changes itself a lot of the buck mister follower concept that if a system isn't working right stop flailing adding another one and let it fail one of the the programs that we're supporting is called learning one to one foundation which basically is homeschooling but creates a curriculum in the sky so that whatever it is that the school system says you're supposed to do you'll get that done in five seconds and then go do whatever else you want and there's a Sudbury school that basically has been doing that for 30 years 40 years and then Miami has just gotten their version of it down here but what i'm getting at is that sometimes you have to let things fail especially if they're institutional in in order to force the people to accept responsibility in other words the kid in such a way that that really you know that they're now motivated because they're in charge they're the ones i can remember having a dinner with some families in houston that were really struggling because their kids have gotten into addiction and this and the other thing and and partially because of a very adverse reaction to the school in other words they just didn't like being in school and i started talking about john taylor goddow's work and they love the title of his book weapons of mass mass instruction and she said wait wait wait and she wanted to text the name of that book to her son who was basically out of school because of addiction issues and everything so that she could tell him you're not wrong in making the school wrong you know you be who you want to be now to my mind and we think david snowden's work on systemic we're going into a period of of distributed cognition in other words there's no longer hierarchical silos and everything and we're being forced into more diversity more use of of various forms of organization and everything so it's more self-organizing and to me that's the quote systemic reaction to this problem it's a serious serious problem but we're not going to solve it with a institutional response right i think that the best intermediation of education is a fascinating concept that's happening now because anybody can send an email to a professor anywhere in the world and start talking to him and as long as it makes sense the professor will probably be intrigued in answer and this individual has skipped five filters to get to a direct connection with someone who can help with whatever they're trying to figure out right so that's an important dimension thank you for putting a positive perspective on that though because occasionally i i get really frustrated it's part of our 500 year plan we all do yeah ken and then i'd love to hear from sky and michael i didn't even notice michael that you joined the call because i've been in in screen sharing views so i didn't see you come in really glad you're here but ken and then whoever else would like to jump in this is quick unfortunately this is not widely available it's only being shown in theaters the moment but there's a movie called inventing tomorrow which chronicles four groups of students or single students once from hila hawaii young woman from banglore india a beautiful young woman from indonesia and three young men from montreal mexico and so this is outside for the most part american school systems these are 16 and 17 year olds who are doing astonishing things they go to this big um science conference sponsored by intel in los angeles the one that i found most intriguing was the three young men from monterey mexico which is a very industrialized and hugely polluted city so these kids are saying you know how can we make things better so we can't stop the pollution we can't stop the industrialization what can we do they came up with a photo catalytic paint that when put on bricks and struck by sunlight forms a water vapor barrier that actually pulls pollutants from the air and transfer and and transmits them into plant nutrients so it pulls pollutants out of the air and provides plant food and it's pipe it's paint it was really i was like oh my god these kids are 17 and it shows them in school with all this equipment talking to their professors professors saying well you got to test this you know what about this and that and it just it came last friday after being inside for over a week with the with the smoke around here and i went out and saw this oops we've just lost your audio can it was that inventing tomorrow was that the title inventing tomorrow yeah and i went to their website it's not available on dvd and the website's screwy for such a brilliant film about science they don't even list the showings in date order so you have to kind of see is it going to be near me hopefully it'll be available more widely but if you can get a hold of this see it in some way it will really give you a a shot of a dremelin around wow you know there's a lot of brilliant capable young people that are we're really looking at things in ways that are astonishing and and it'll uplift you so i'm going to throw that out thank you and i i've not heard of it so i've just gone and i'll be putting it in my brain shortly but uh michael sky do you guys want to jump in uh not so much jump i'm i'm just returning to being active i've been keyboard averse for the last couple of months now seriously you know carpal tunnel and all that stuff and this is a fascinating re-entry to to a rich context jerry i'm really appreciating it i'm going to dig into your brain a bit over the next few days and see what the what i can find in there i love hearing that look look yourself up you're you're all over there am i oh yeah oh yeah okay for sure thank you i was particularly interested the other day in your comment about the expression of beliefs as an entry point for a conversation and i've been musing on that as an opening gambit in this process can you say more about that well um yes the sort of declaration of axioms for instance here's a quick check beliefs on money um i hold these things to be common we all use money hands up really yep use it all the time number two we could all use some more number three we all know where it goes sometimes yeah no no we do know where it goes it goes away okay that is a function of conventional money it isn't yours you have no relationship to it it is a relationship to you but when you've spent it it's gone and the that raises the issue of okay that's a form of money it presents a proposition that there's nothing much we can do about that that's endemic to its form so can one create money that comes back how would it work for me to have money that i could spend that would return to me a circular economy based on my own provisions and activities so that would be a belief structure that i'm exploring particularly the moment and um using as an entry point to find out where other people's beliefs and behaviors are about money so um do you have this do you have this written in a post michael because i i just added a thought about these beliefs under that um i will follow up on that gerry at the moment i'm in such disarray it's absurd you know so um thank you for being here really appreciate it well i totally appreciate your work in this it's your brain is a wonderful thing and carry on excellent mr skylar well how much to say it's interesting to see the brain here you turned me on to it a long time ago and i've got a few things in it so while you're talking i'm also getting my brain to work here on the on the on the macbook but um one thing much of you've had the discussion about the brain this morning and you had discussion about concepts and one thing that's really interesting to me right now is working in non-conceptual nonverbal areas and so it was interesting to me to to look at the brain and think gee how could i use this in the idiom of music um to help me organize because that's the problem i have right now as you know i changed careers a few years ago and right now rather than shepherding words around i'm shepherding thematic and textual materials and in sound and um you know i've been using brain like things since the 1980s i think it was 1980 that um about 82 that david thornberg and some other people did their idea processor they had the little light bulbs you would put on the screen and link them all up so it's very much like the brain and yeah if you can look for david maybe you can find that in there um but i've been going from one brain to another over what is that about 30 years you know i mean 35 years and um this brain works as well as any of the others yeah so what did you find there i've got thornberg but i don't i don't have his idea processor or what yeah so that's interesting um i'd have to look back you know it was like uh in 1984 we had it on the mac inspiration it was cool wasn't it oh was that inspiration that sounds right i remember the light bulbs yeah anyway that's that's all i've got to say i mean i'm sitting here in the snow and just kind of enjoying the the conversation but also thinking about it in like a completely flip side different way of organizing things well the metaphor of music the actuality of music not just a metaphor but the connectivity of music is a is a beautiful way to envision maximized communication because it brings in all the different voices um with their own message so to speak and we take in a lot of our information auditorially anyway so this would be a topic i'd love to have you talk about or lead us discussion on sometime in the future as a the direction of just a different way to look at things yeah you know as a composer my goal my goal is to take all those voices and orchestrate them so that they work properly right and i work in a context where it is where everything is scored uh and also there's the improvisational context i'm a musician as well but sort of a lapsed one i haven't been very active in recent years but i there's but there's no such thing as lapsed and now the software will help you pick it up again i lapsed for 50 years all right well that's kind of where back in my 20s my parents were very opposed to my pursuing something they perceived as no way to earn a living and i'd had a lot of conditioning ahead of that about that didn't seem to acknowledge how much you actually used your brain to make music or art or other things so there was this kind of hard line division between left right brain concept even though that's misnamed um anyway so it's it's been an underpinning of my life forever but fascinating that you actually made the jump back into it i kind of left corporate life in science and went into art itself you know and then thinking how much i would have to practice to get back to the musical level i used to have well that's true but that's only true if you need to perform that's true if performance is your issue then you can use software now and software can do an awful lot of things that you cannot do as a performer because you've lapsed mm-hmm have you guys seen have you guys seen loopers um what are loopers sounds like a bad sci-fi movie yeah no it's not uh so so there's a bunch of people now the funniest looper is reggie watz who's got some priceless performances online but loopers are basically it's it's software with a bunch of buttons that lets you record a measure and then just have it recorded and repeated and turn the measures on and off uh you can sample you you basically you're sampling yourself at first either with an instrument zoe keating does this with a cello very beautifully yeah um she layers she loops layers right yep and and so what looping does is it lets you just get get the next measure until it's right and then cut it in and out so you're not actually performing live your performance is going between the different loops that you fed into whatever is coming out live and i think it's really really powerful so it's really good at that another one you should add in there jerry to explore is amy x newberg ne w or any u ne w b u r g she makes a big deal of it and i don't know which one it is sorry uh-huh but amy amy x i have amy x wang now amy x new their only stone writer so wrong person amy that's a big thing there's a there are companies built on this so ableton has a protocol able to live that lets you loop and uh actually adjust the tempo so maybe we're a little off topic here but it's well you're not really because i mean i think this is connectivity in a different form it can be used for good purposes it can be used for social change and arouse emotions or well emotions um it's incredibly powerful because it bypasses all of the cognitive stuff and goes directly to other sense areas so there's a lot of richness in the topic i'm not yeah and and we and we play with that a lot so right now i'm scoring one film and i've got three others that are waiting you know they're going to get scored fairly soon and that's exactly what i do is i look at the vocabulary that i want to use you know i was on set as they were filming uh all of last weekend and my goal to be there was to understand what the uh what the actors were putting into the scene so that i can then modulate that to produce what the director wanted to produce okay so it's the same vocabulary that you're talking about now thank you for coming into the discussion and i hope you will lead one of these discussions at some point totally love that and i just pasted to our chat uh my favorite ableton performance you probably saw i was wandering around and i i sort of found it and picked it up but there's a french dj named madio and this thing is just a zoom on his hands and an ableton deck and he plays he says something i think the title of it is something like these are my 31 favorite songs and he then plays a composition that is mind blowing it's lovely um so happy about that we're getting close to the end of our call and uh uh ken has nudged me that we we haven't really gone through the the trust and vulnerability conversation that much we've wandered all over the place which i love and i will point out also that for me this is a really high trust space like like i know that i i know that you guys are here and you'll go let you will go with the wander uh and i know that um i can go into topics that are difficult whether it's alice miller and you know childhood trauma or whatever and we'll work on it together and kind of resonate but um i'd love to have us sort of go around here at the end of this call and maybe this means we set up another call and go a little deeper into some aspect of this because i think the topic is important um i think i think sort of what i love about brené's uh one of the phrases that i love about brené's work brené brown is that vulnerability is the the path to authentic connection and joy uh and i'm sorry can you say it again yeah vulnerability is the path to authentic connection and joy uh and what most people do is they want to avoid the vulnerable parts they want to skip around it they want to hide it they want to not admit it they want to just like park that someplace because it ain't good and it only makes you look weak and look bad uh one thing i meant to mention at the top of this call is um i created a little exercise that i ran with my insurance clients in australia a couple years ago which worked really well uh first i give everybody posts and i say hey for three minutes let's brainstorm on what what does vulnerability mean to a company like picture yourself as executives at your company and uh free associate on vulnerability and mostly everything that comes up is about weakness and you know corporate disaster and blah blah blah and then i say okay great now take a new new batch of posts and talk about vulnerability in in a relationship what does it mean between humans and most of the people uh in the room are like well it's a good thing it's it's like it's how you figure out that somebody's authentic it's you know how you a whole bunch of other sorts of things and and then we compared the two lists because one of my beliefs is that companies need to behave more like peers in the arena not gods who give us the next thing we're going to buy and the next thing we're going to do and the companies that can figure out how to show up as peers will be innately um credible and authentic and we'll have fans who don't need to be marketed to you won't need you won't need like you don't need to pay advertisers a lot of acquisition costs to get new people to buy your crap you'll actually develop stuff that is useful in people's lives etc etc and you'll be in conversation with us people as you do it so part of our problem is that we see vulnerability as a as a dangerous thing for organizations so for a future conversation is the notion of vulnerability as a as a as a tactic or as an approach or as maybe much better word an intention for organizations and like that a lot as well so let me have that old meme we have that old meme of it's nothing personal jerry it's only business exactly and well also through you know through the 50s 60s 70s the stereotypical era of mad men and big business your life and your personality and your preferences and your moral obligations were to be left outside the door absolutely on on purpose that stuff had no business in the boardroom had no business in the office etc etc even though that's also the era of men having three martinis at function coming back and abusing women but still um yeah so i think we're in a healthier era now and i'm interested in these conversations so let me just let me step back a bit and see what you all think of these resonates for me with the thing you said earlier about bali and then another thread i'd like to see as pull or push or exchange or something is the notion of inner wisdom that's intrinsic wisdom it could be indigenous you know moral fiber there's a host of labels that people put on it but i think that many people maybe even all people possess internal wisdom but it's been discounted or they've been taught to ignore it along the way and i think that part of becoming more authentic is owning your weaknesses as well as your strengths and allowing that inner wisdom to surface and sort of giving yourself time to let it surface i loved your comment last time can about putting any thought or plan aside for three days because you're going to think of things you didn't think of in the moment that will alter the direction you want to move and so i think as part of the authenticity and trust exploring that dimension would be really interesting to me i love that i just posted to the chat that there's a an essay or something that i want to create called snip which talks about how we cut all of the the ways in which we were connected to our intuition in which people have long term ties to community and outcome i have a whole riff on the global financial crisis and the many different things that were snipped in the run up to the gfc that allowed the gfc to happen that basically propelled it and and i haven't materialized this in a video or whatever that's my intention who else would like to go and ken please judy i love what you're saying and also jerry i want to amplify both of those points i think as we head into the 21st century and we start to find our way to cope with all the wicked messes and wicked problems in front of us trust and vulnerability becomes ever so much more important you know this idea of one person knowing it all is is an obsolete idea and yet it still seems to hold a lot of purchase and currency in in many organizations and organizational settings and the other side of that is i'm often in meetings where people will you know well let's set some ground rules and can we have confidentiality and yet i have almost never seen that work i have been in so many settings we will say i'll be confidential right and then at once you hear them saying to their you wouldn't believe what someone's always saying it's like so i ask people not for confidentiality to make things safe i ask them what do we need to put in place to create a brave space where we're willing to step out and take a risk and if they shift from safe to brave spaces is another part of the of the characteristic that we're attempting to because to be vulnerable for me means to step out there and say i don't know i have a half-baked idea i want to put out here you know shoot it down don't shoot me down shoot the idea down say what's good about it and being willing to step up and say to someone you know i i think you will have not thought this through i disagree right those are all risky behaviors and they require a willingness to set those conditions evoked from the group you're working with as opposed to imposed on them put to gather them from the group and it also requires a group commitment to the openness here without judgment ideas that may differ from their preconceptions and that's i mean one of the things that i worked on a decade ago and in the acs actually where i met jerry was setting a code of code of code of conduct so to speak for the board in terms of how we were going to behave in the board it was not critical it had no thou shalt not it had all positive statements about listening respectfully to other people whose opinions were different or various things it was very cursory and but it was it was something they'd never done before and it was helpful because occasionally when something went off rail somebody would pipe up that's contrary to number five john or something and it wasn't critical it was just an observation it wasn't a beat down um but i think what you're talking about is really important in terms of creating the right environment for open trust and communication if i get just you know the you you would you would frame this call as about trust and i think we've been all over the map but not directly chewing on that so i'd love to do that next time and it strikes me something i've been abrading a lot lately is that there we seem to be in a cultural moment that is privileging the mechanistic and the predictable um and i may be biased or ignorant i i i i tend to think of this more as a millennial tech phenomenon uh and as part of what's the hunger behind ai is that you know there are people who want to have everything kind of cut and dried and mechanistic and robotic so that we don't have to do this so that we don't have to have the sloppy and uncertain and vulnerable you know emergence of stuff in human relationships and i i'm just increasingly feeling that that's a big undercurrent of conflict in our world today is those two perceptions of how to live okay bill go ahead i see you had a functional element of that um part of what i'm sort of trying to work with is stuff related to the Monroe Institute and out of body experiences and everything you know create trust in me in other words when i hear the word wisdom unfortunately i i sort of sense sometimes that people think that they're wise but it's not coming from internal at all and and yet being comfortable with that in other words i hear a lot of people talk about oh we're going through this age you know this change of the new age and we're all going to become more multisensory and more more spiritual etc and and yet some of the the mechanics of that even within the language of the Monroe Institute is it no this world is intentionally supposed to be messed up so that we want to seek that deeper multi pen multidimensional area where we know ourselves to be coming from but we've forgotten and that the more we connect with that and trust it then the more that we can come from that even if it looks messy even if they think you know there aren't a lot of people that are going to to sort of pick up on that initially but if we keep coming from that then you know you you really you can start to incorporate it in your work thank you right that's yeah fantastic statement because i think that the more people who can become and behave authentically with trust of all of the people they meet the more it spreads i don't know if that's what you're saying but that's one of my takeaways from what you were saying it is interesting because one of the the form of some was one of the first books it's called trust uh that was written basically i had even sort of missed this the first time that i went through it and i had to do a a sort of a spiritual journey where the native american indian group that that that brought me back to it in his analysis he he put in that the the movement or trust starts internally can you trust yourself not to hurt yourself you can't trust at that level then you start building this whole system around you if you'll make up for that that's a beautiful insight is this jack gibb's book yes exactly yeah it's literally a footnote in his outline of the thing that fortunately i was sort of guided to find they said oh by the way when you're trying to build trust understand where it's coming from there's another book that's 10 gentle but i'll throw it out jerry so you can capture it in notes i'm not quite up to speed on the note board um i read it probably 35 years ago if you meet the buddha on the road kill him that shall pop which is all around inner wisdom and that anybody who tries to tell you what to do to be wise is automatically a false buddha cool i book i've not read by the way anyone else other closing thoughts um the the piece uh a piece of what you were just saying bill resonates really strongly with me around what i was saying earlier around one of my outsider theories is that is that people who suffered a lot of abuse create great things create great art is a little bit and this is percolating a lot more now through this conversation is the idea that pressure leads to great outputs great outcomes great things that my favorite music in the world is 1970s argentine brazilian music basically new trova tropical ismo music and those people were all exiles because their governments were busy kidnapping people and killing them they were under extreme sort of social pressure there's been lots of you know social pressure and there's more of it coming right now apparently in the world but uh and brazil just elected a guy who's promised to make life so miserable for leftists they will either want to leave the country or be killed he said so explicitly in his last speech before being elected it's quite frightening but the idea that these kinds of pressures force us to introspect force us to connect force us to build you know build ideas differently parallel and behind this notion is that prosperity and comfort breed laziness and the lack of need to discover these things and rediscover them and then we forget them and then we allow the wave to sort of happen again so there might be a there's probably there's god knows there's a whole bunch of wave and cycle theories i i keep a bunch of them in my brain but but i think that that that's kind of interesting here but trying to figure out what is the path so that we can form these connections to me is really interesting a final note on that if you go to the former east germany you know to the ddr or the soviet union where everybody knows that the government is not trustworthy and in the ddr one in ten citizens are actually spies for the stasi the gray market the black market is an extreme high trust market the way you actually stay alive by trading favors and you know giving somebody a chicken or some potatoes or whatever outside of the official economy is a life or death matter and when you can go to the supermarket buy potatoes and roast a roasted chicken for almost nothing you don't see any of that that is not palpable to you not necessary you don't need to go to those depths of soul and risk to enter that kind of trust so one of my questions is to me how do we get into a society that's comfortable enough that we're all living well yet not so cozy that we forget why we're doing the difficult things that we're doing right because consumerism just wants us to be lazy consumers in the barca lounge or drinking buds and watching the football game which is what this weekend is all about this is thanksgiving weekend right lots of football games um so how do we get away from being mere consumers get back to being citizens is vulnerability and trust the path to that and i think yes that's why i made this that's why i think i made i made this the topic for this call it's like but but but it's really hard to change people's behaviors and it's very hard to take comfy people and disrupt their lives they don't want that that said i think our lives are uncomfortable enough right now that 40 of the us population just voted for donald trump for president they want the system shattered they want the system broken i think partly because their lives are that uncomfortable and their future looks that bleak now part of that is jingoism and oh my god there's immigrants coming in my country won't be my country anymore that's clearly a note there another part of it is hey in the big rush to globalization that bill clinton was so hot on my town lost all employers and nobody's come back and helped us do anything and we're screwed and my kids are screwed and at best they've traveled off to the big cities but but here is dying and and dead so so i think these things are all of course deeply intertwinkled it would be interesting in one of the talks to frame a topic right catalysts for change in the sense of what causes individuals or organizations to seek better wisdom or to find their new wisdom and it can be internally or externally driven and unfortunately we seem to allow the external to be the driver it has to get really really bad before we respond with the situation but i think maybe catalysts or um aha moments or something would be useful because what i find in the dialogues i'm having with people as i attempt to pursue this strange journey i'm on is understanding where they are and kind of reinforcing their issue points to understand them more fully and then they're willing to tell me more it's a very simple technique but i mean it's i guess i think there's wisdom in this chat room of other people who have found things that are catalytic that we might institutionally build on or non-institutionally build on as was pointed out as well in the conversation which i really like a lot that was probably my hopeful shock for the day is that the chaos is really constructive that was actually a good bright spot for me it's like hey life is meant to be chaotic and we that forces us to find our way through it was brightening for me as well bill thank you that that was a a nice contribution any other last minute thoughts before we uh will wind up this one michael ken anybody if not um thank you for joining this ride i really appreciate it i think i love this call this is this is terrific i'll put it on youtube again i'll make notes on to the inside jerry's brain list please put any afterthoughts on that list or critiques or improvements or if you want to frame a topic for a future call judy if you want to talk about what causes individuals to seek better wisdom or what what are the catalysts say it out loud on the list and i will package that up and pick a time that works for us uh i'm not very good at doodle polling and doing the whole you know i just kind of pick times and hope that people can show up but i think if we move forward on this we we can kind of get somewhere and share some interesting things out um anybody who wants to help author any of the websites i'm building just say so and i'll give you uh edit access i'm using google sites which is super duper easy google what uh google sites oh which you which used to be jotspot they bought they bought do you have a map available jerry of the sites you're working on or something that that would allow one of us who doesn't know what you're doing to say oh well that one is actually interesting to me that would be great good point so right this minute i'm i'm creating a now page on the jerry mikulski.com so actually let me publish it and you can take a look at it right now uh so let me uh if you go if you go to jerry mikulski.com in the up top nav menu you should see slash now and i was just working on this yesterday because i realized that i'm i'm doing too many things and i'm not sure this is a good map of what i'm up to but i want to i want to add to it with the you can put the map up jerry or uh actually let me just share the screen good point let me share the screen here at the end of the call so you can see what that page says it's not a visual map at this point so it's basically um uh if you click on this link you'll see uh derrick sievers basically said hey here's my now page why don't why don't we all put a now page out which is like what am i working on now right and right now i'm in google sites the editor so this is not the actual live website but then i say look my focus is on trust i'm going to make this a clickable link into my favorite talk about trust but then uh here's a link to consumer and then these are some of the things i'm building right now so inside jerry's brain what we're doing right now is here uh designed from trust is uh a serious effort to try to create a practice or series of layers of practice around designing from trust the joy line is something that came out uh in particular refaming of the insurance industry but it works for others if you go there you'll see a talk and a video and a bunch of other stuff i did and then the book i need to finish writing is called what if we trusted you and i want to publish it along with a website i have i have both um w i w t y dot com what if we trusted you dot com and i also have what if we trusted you dot com all spelled out but i also own w w d t y dot com why we don't trust you dot com and i think it important to show that i've looked around and i said look there are a hundred different reasons why we're actually idiots all the time uh and in fact i'll show you we don't trust you so i've got i've got all these of course in my brain collected up under um come on brain so here's uh we don't trust you to uh drive carefully we don't trust you to get your work done well we don't trust you to minister to one another we don't trust you to negotiate gender and sex we don't trust you to raise your own family alone we don't trust you to solve educate we don't trust you to design the spaces you will occupy each of which links back up to uh christopher alexander for example and the idea of uh open space and uh pattern languages and all of that so in fact what i'm going to do right now is connect this to pattern languages because pattern languages are a way of educating your average person so that they can take place in the higher level design discussion about whatever the space is right so that's that's why that's there so anyway so i'm collecting all those up my question is how much of these maps do i share at what level on what website so i'm any guidance from you about hey this was crisp enough that i got something or this made no sense at all will help me steer okay great thank you any other thoughts before we uh take this one out cool thank you everyone very very very much this was totally fun i appreciate it there will be another couple calls next week i'll send out a schedule shortly looking forward thank you so much thank you bye everybody