 Why is it that you focus on narrative? What's important about that? That's what makes human beings unique in a way. Certainly our hands and our brains, especially our opposable thumbs and so on, are special. But what allows us to create what we've created is the coordination of human activity on a vast scale. And the way that we do that is by constructing unifying narratives that make sense of actions that otherwise would not make sense. So for example, America, that is a story. That's one of that's an example of what I mean by a story, a set of agreements that give meaning to life and coordinate labor and creativity toward a goal, toward something that no individual or even small group would be able to accomplish on their own. So you could say that the world is built from story. And that's why it's so important to look at what stories are we telling ourselves about who we are and how the world works and what's important and what's true. Because we then create the world in the image of those stories. You've been speaking a lot about climate recently. And I'm curious, what do you think about the current climate narratives? And what do you think could be a better climate narrative? Yeah, I'm a bit critical of the dominant narrative of climate change. And I'm not really coming from the point of view of the science is wrong and so on. It's a deeper critique than that. One aspect of it is what I call carbon reductionism, the idea that we can gauge planetary health by looking at this single metric. Now, I know that that in the environmental movement, there are people who have a much more sophisticated take on things, the planetary boundaries view, for example. But the dominant discourse is about greenhouse gas levels and rising temperatures. That is a mindset and an approach to a complex problem that rests comfortably in a culture that is that seeks to solve problems by finding a cause and then basically going to war against that cause. For example, say you're overweight. Say you've been putting on a lot of weight. What we're comfortable with is find the cause. Normally, it would be too many calories, more calories in than out. Okay, now I know what to do. Gotta cut those calories. I can fight my appetite. I can go get exercise. Like I know what to do now because I've reduced it to one cause. And then there's maybe more trendy causes for obesity. It could be, oh, actually, it's all about inflammation. And here's what you need to do. Or actually, it's all about one thing, find the thing. And then we know what to do. So that reductionistic mindset, I think is part of the problem. It's the origin of the environmental crisis and all of our other crises. So reductionism is one plank of the platform that we stand on, one thread of the old story. So transitioning into a holistic systems based living planet view, when I'm talking about the environment, I'm offering the living planet view that says that even if we cut emissions to zero, if we continue to destroy the organs and tissues of this living being called Earth, then the planet will still die a death of a million cuts. So I'm advocating that we expand our conversation and expand our rhetoric and strategy to take into account that this is a living being, not just some really complicated machine. And if we tinker with the air fuel mixture, then everything will be okay. Yeah, it's interesting how much of popular narrative nowadays is about externalizing the villain, the enemy. There's no kind of like if I if I think about the hero's journey and what Joseph Campbell said, he said the villain was always the best narratives was when the villain was internal, where you had to face your own inner demons and then battle through and come out the other side. But nowadays, in popular media, everything's about externalization and you can really see how that affects culture in terms of what you're talking about climate change, where we look for that singular evil villain and try and defeat that one thing instead of looking at how our actions are contributing to negative effects. It's also really disempowering when we pointed this external thing because no single person or single entity can battle something nebulous like carbon emissions. I mean, even if one company reduced their carbon emissions, it wouldn't reduce global carbon emissions. So in a way, it kind of makes everybody powerless. Yes. Yeah, those are good points. There's so much I could say about that. The villain, the internal villain, you know, that whole paradigm, whether it's an internal or externalized villain, the mindset of war still takes, it still has assumptions that I think we really need to question. And I believe that the war on the internal villain is a reflection of the external war on nature. It's still that same problem solving approach, same reductionistic approach of find the bad guy, whether it's internal or external. It says that the solution is to fight something. And I don't think that that is a realistic solution, especially and it needs to help, to hopelessness, as you were saying, because the external villains are so powerful and pervasive that there's no chance that we're ever going to defeat them at their own game. The military industrial complex, the surveillance state, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, the agricultural industrial complex. I mean, the whole thing is one gigantic complex that has all of the money, almost all of the money that has all of the power, that has the control. How are we going to defeat them in a battle of good versus evil? It's the only chance for victory is if they change sides. So then the question becomes, how do we create conditions for a change of heart? One of those conditions is to know that a change of heart is possible and to be able to see the opponent as actually deep down wanting the same thing we want and having the capacity to change, having the capacity for remorse and the desire to serve a more beautiful world. The same thing when it comes to personal change, to see that part of yourself that doesn't want to be addicted to whatever, to see the part of yourself that wants to be free from fear and to give attention to that. Then we can get somewhere. It's uncomfortable to step into that place because it means stepping in from knowing what to do or thinking that you know what to do to admitting that you don't know what to do. I call that the space between stories and it's a necessary space, the space of I have no idea what to do about this problem. It's so big, it's so complex and my customary ways of affecting change in the world aren't working and our culture needs to wake up to that. The customary ways that we as a culture are trying to make a better world are part of the problem. Every improvement, every bit of progress making things just a little bit worse.