 Hi, this is an Inside Jury's Brain Call on Wednesday, February 6th, 2019. Our topic is, are things getting better or are things getting worse? And I hadn't started the recording quite yet, but Ken quoted Tom Atley a moment to go and then said other brilliant things. So Ken, can you like hit rewind and just say that again? Yes. Yeah. Hello. So back in 1999, I encountered Tom Atley's phrase, things are getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster. This was in the context of working around Y2K. And over the years, I've revisited that phrase a lot and I think it's useful to remind ourselves that there are things getting better and there are things getting worse and both of those are true. It's not an either or. So it's really important where we put our attention. And I found that personally, it's more useful for me to put my attention on recognizing all three of those and then how do we want to work given the acceleration of both the better things and the worse things? Where is the use of place to intervene in the system and make the change without the mind of any of them? Exactly. Exactly. We're the points of leverage, which is Donnella Meadows and a bunch of other thinkers, Saul Alinsky, a bunch of the people about how do you create system level change, which is, for me at best, fun, well, fun at best, for me at worst, maybe. It's not like to be fun and thorny. Yeah. Exactly. So let me share another article that I didn't, I couldn't find it by the time of sending the invite. Hey, Judy. Welcome to the call. So here's another article that showed up on my radar that was kind of, this one was much lighter read than the others, but it was a pretty good summary. There were only a few things I thought of adding to this list, but Axios is a brand new news service that has kind of taken the English-speaking world by storm. They're doing really well. I like reading their summaries. I think they do a good job of catching what's new and they believe in something they call smart brevity. That's it. Smart brevity. So they try to write things in a way where the bold stuff jumps out at you and uses good enough words that they kind of capture what's going on. So this one came by January 14th and basically says, you know, life brightens, sourness surges, and it was kind of around Davos and talking about, you know, the conversations that were happening at Davos. But it really went through and said, look, Bill Gates, Steven Pinker, factfulness from Hans Rosling, a bunch of others are saying, hey, guys, look at the stats. All these stats are getting better. The world is actually much better than it used to be. There are fewer wars. People aren't dying. Lifespans are up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then here's Greg Ip, started the year with the headline, the world is getting quietly, relentlessly better. And even Nick Kristoff sort of made a related point, like, you know, why can we look at these things? But then here's a pretty reasonable list from Richard Haas of, hey, there's a world in disarray, in particular from the invite I did to this call. You know, there could be a climate apocalypse building on us that could, you know, knock a whole bunch of things off kilter and be really quite threatening. But you know, debt is at an all-time high. The president just took us unilaterally out of the INF, the Intermediate Nuclear Weapons Treaty. So who knows if there's going to be another nuclear weapons race, et cetera, et cetera. So here's, I'm going to post the link to this article in our chat. Oops, that means I have to stop sharing and go back to our chat because it's easy for me to type that way. But, and then I couldn't also find Neil Goranflow, the publisher and founder of shareable.net. He did a post in Facebook somewhere, maybe more than a year ago, and he just went on a bit of a rant, but he was like, look, these are the different ways in which things are really, really screwed up. And I think a lot of the reason why there's a global rise to the far right, let me just screen share again and go back to my brain now because this is inside Jerry's brain after all. I was just looking at Tom Atley. But I think one of the big reasons for the global shift to the right is that there's a whole bunch of people who believe that the system is broken, that the system is rigged. Why is my, there we go, global shift to the right. That was a little too long. I think my machine is getting tired today. But I do have a, this is related, but I have a thought in my brain called was 2006 peak democracy, right? We had Francis Fukuyama saying the end of history, liberal democracy is where it's at, we're good, we're done. And then it turns out, holy crap, there's this global shift to the right, which I think probably belongs under was 2006 peak democracy, just to put things kind of in the right place. And under here, under global shift to the right, I've got the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi, Duterte in the Philippines, you know, the rise of the European rightists. So here's a whole bunch of the European rightists, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Norbert Hofer, Kaczynski in Poland, Jörg Heider, the Golden Dawn Party. There's a whole alternative for Germany and Germany. There's a bunch of craziness happening, I think in part because things are way more broken than the optimists would speak to or would say or can acknowledge or something like that. Or maybe they're just saying, look, stuff isn't as broken as we think it is. Let's just cheer up and look at the stats. So that's kind of the setup for this call. I have more I'd like to go into. And I don't think my brain is as organized on these themes and thoughts as it could be. So I'm going to be doing a bit of screen sharing as you all talk. I apologize for the visual interruption. But that's kind of the game here inside Jerry's brain. So I'd love to know where you all fall on these topics. So I'm going to go back to our things getting better. And so this thought right here, I mean just before I sort of hand the floor back to you all, this thought right here when this call is done and I posted up on YouTube, this thought will be a link to this call. And so it's under inside Jerry's brain episodes where you can find links to all the calls usually ordered by year month. So 1812 is 2018 December. And then here's the topics, peeling background assumptions with Hannah Clinto, et cetera, et cetera. So this call will go up there and is connected to the articles that I referenced in the invitation already. So here's the Axios one, here's the things getting better or worse. And here's Pinker's re-bottle to his critics, right? So I have a whole thought, critiques of enlightenment now. And then that is under critiques of Pinker. And there's a whole bunch of people who are really angry at Pinker and have written some excellent things about why he's just not on point with what's going on. All right, now I promised I'd stop babbling. I will stop babbling now and whoever would like to jump in. It's sort of like throwing all the ingredients to the meal on the table and saying, okay, okay, who wants to make like an omelette or. I have two comments. Yes. Focuses, I think things can be getting better and two specific things are terrifying, first the climate change. And then the intentional destruction from within and without of the European project, which you highlighted pretty well. I think that you may have underplayed the amount that that destruction has been influenced by outside forces. They aren't just homegrown influences, but they have a lot of homegrown influences. There are a lot of authoritarian Hungarians. There's a pretty large number of authoritarian Austrians, sadly. There's a lot. Yeah. I mean, there's, it's really interesting. In the US, we have the lost cause, which is basically fans of the Confederacy who think that really they just almost won and they should have won. And it's a noble cause and it was really about states' rights, not anything to do with slavery, et cetera, et cetera. Same thing across Europe. There's a whole bunch of conservatives who are like, Hitler almost won, should have won, we need authoritarian rule and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's crazy making. It's completely crazy making. The observation that the Confederates lost the war, but won the Reconstruction, has always struck me. Which they did because Andrew Johnson was a crap president. He was from the South in order to balance the ticket for Lincoln. Lincoln gets killed. Lincoln would have had a really good plan for Reconstruction. And here comes Johnson. Maybe, well, so maybe he would have, and reflecting on our myth of the triumph of World War II Reconstruction, Marshall Plan et all, which is true, but it happened after the sort of attempted deindustrialization of Germany and effectively killing of a lot of Germans, and they finally decided that that wasn't going to work. You couldn't have a deindustrialized Germany and so then they did the right thing, or what we decided was right. And super interesting things around that, just a point of historical trivia that I learned at one of the retreats I run, when there were a bunch of cameras out on the table. People had brought historic cameras and all sorts of photography gear and started telling the story of how Russia comes into Germany and basically picks up anything that is not bolted down and kidnaps it and takes it deep into Russia to put into Russian factories and make stuff. They take a lot of the optics from size and all those and they take them to Yugoslavia, I think, which becomes the center for optics, basically a lot of really good camera gear comes out of there. The Americans race in and they get the patents and the paperwork and all the IP and they then kidnap all that and take it west and they give it to Japan in order to seed some industry in Japan. So there you get Nikon. You basically get a really, really strong Japanese optics and camera industry from the seeding of things that came out of Europe. So there were lots of large scale social sculpting, country sculpting things going on at the end of World War II as there are at the end of any war, right? The Paris Peace Talks of 1919 is one of those places where I would love to be a fly on the wall because so much bad stuff got ironed into the world at the end of World War I. So now we're on the verge of possibly seeing the European project, which has done a reasonable job of keeping some peace fall apart. And then I'm a bit of an amateur student of history. So I have a lot of wars and battles in my brain. I can't track the number of wars and battles that have been fought across the European terrain. It's nuts. It's completely nutty how often they've been in each other's backyards, killing each other and, you know, stomping on their grain or eating it or whatever. Here are your comments on Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic and how they got certain technology and sadly weren't able to capitalize on it because of the economic system. You know, two of the three largest scanning electron microscope companies are based or have substantial presence in Burma and the Czech Republic. And that's also where Kurt Girdel was from. So we have this concentration of, you know, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a strong, I don't know, a strong client, is it worth? But anyway, but rolling it around, we have this destruction of the European project is the stated goal of a lot of these parties. And it's, I think it's terrifying. You know, it counters some of my polyamnish optimism. So what makes you optimistic right now? The number of things that I see, things I'm involved with peripherally or directly that are doing good things. You know, I'm working for the company where we're trying to grow fiber networks in an open way. So equal access to different ISPs over the same fiber. And there are all kinds of opportunities to do that better that incumbents just haven't done because it was easier to throw more technicians, more field engineers at a problem than to decide which engineers you should send at the problem. But it also turns out that it's hard to do software and design and planning of that sort. And so if you have the background and skills to do that, maybe you traditionally have done something else in the enterprise, but I think we have a whole lot of opportunities which become possible when intelligence and experience are more widely spread. You know, there was only one Claude Shannon and we got information theory, but that was operating in this context but then led to the world we have now where everyone can apply the rules that he learned. It feels sort of circular, but oh yeah. We were just, my colleague and I were talking about Bell Labs this morning and how to convert markets from the physical to an increasing amount of digital. So how much of what I do can we do in software? It turns out, you know, if you go from 0% to small single digits, that's potentially a big deal. But see this. And along the lines of what you're saying but a different path, I recently had to work really hard to find this essay again because I was like, who the hell wrote this essay? Who wrote the essay that we're heading toward a world in which we no longer have to interact with other human beings? The joke in Silicon Valley is that most of these startups are young white guys who are trying to replace their moms, right? So I need to be chauffeured somewhere. I need to have a meal delivered. I need my laundry done. I need my dog walked. These are all like, you know, home errands kinds of things. And so David Byrne, it turns out writes an essay. I'm like, whoa, David Byrne, he writes this really good essay about, that's not it. Here it is, eliminating the human from 2017. And he basically says, technology is eliminating human interactions. We are moving toward a world where you will, in fact, be able to press a button and get what you want in terms of a thing without having to interact with anybody, because the vehicle will be autonomous. The robot will deliver your groceries, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, those kinds of things. Judith, go ahead. Well, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was just gonna signal you that at some point, I guess the thing that makes me optimistic is that there's still increasingly free flow of knowledge content as an opportunity to be exploited. And I have to hope that knowledge sharing will have a positive impact on thinking and directions. But that has to be, I don't know, modified or there's a gatekeeping component that has to do with the absence of the ability of facts per se to influence changes in attitudes and behaviors. And so it becomes more of this question that we've explored before around collaboration and openness and trust and beginning to understand other points of view that I'm just hopeful that the sort of chaotic state that has been amplified in recent two years is raising people's consciousness about their personal responsibility to engage in some way to try to keep the world stable and sane and reasonable. Thank you. And some days I think that maybe we're splitting into two kinds of people, the people who see that we must connect and who are inquisitive and trying to figure things out even if they disagree on the how and the people who are cocooning and walling themselves away and reinforcing their beliefs with friends who believe exactly the same thing, reading things that reinforce their things. And once you groove neurons pretty deeply, they're really hard to budge from those deeply sunk paths, neurons that fire together, wire together. And you do enough of this over time that humans have a very rough time bouncing out of those rats. And that's one of my fears is that we have a lot of people in a lot of communities where these things are just being reinforced, reinforced, reinforced to the point where they're dogma. And then I'll add in a complicating factor which is one of my beliefs is that, and I'll just go to it in my brain because I've got a bunch of materials on this. I use the word Trump's here just because the pun was sort of painfully joyous but basically emotion and membership in a group Trump's reason most of the time. So one of the things that I see happening a lot right now is that people are completely willing to overlook obvious inconsistencies, contradictions, whatever it might be because if they did so, if they accepted those facts or whatever it was or admitted to the contradiction, it would get them bounced out of the group they happen to be a member of, whether it's their religion, their political group, their neighborhood, whatever else it might be. And humans need membership so much that this is a reasonable trade-off. And so one of the paths that I envision for how we might fix this is helping create new kinds of membership for people so that when they say something that gets them ostracized when they go to church in the morning in rural Pennsylvania, they still feel like they have community and have linkages and have other places to be and other groups to be in and something to do in life because if everybody around you has the same sort of point of view and you're now a dissenter, life is really hard. I'm a big fan of the Quaker's historically. Go ahead, Michael. Yeah, when people try and form groups, when they set out to usually they look for people that fit their criteria of pattern. So that usually means going out into the long tail of the universe and the internet. What seems to be happening nowadays is that more and more the external is less reliable. We have to start looking more to the local where the community you're dealing with is who is there. It's not a selective issue. And it becomes much more a question of that normalization, allowing us to be more tolerant of our differences in the locality, focus into the variety of that community rather than its inadequacy on this little hick town I got to get out of here, you know. Well, there's no out there anymore or at least not much reliable and so coming into the community. I also think some of the things that Schmeichenberger has been talking about, about the phase shift in are we on Schmeichenberger and Jordan Greenhall and all that stuff. Daniel Schmeichenberger? Yeah. He was saying the caterpillar before you get to the cocoon which becomes the butterfly, the caterpillar is eating everything in sight. And it's just collecting the energy into a package which self-destructs and emerges as a butterfly. So when you see all this crap hitting the fan, all the mess going on, at least you can say, oh, and all this shit must be a pony. It's one of those sort of optimistic perspectives that you can reframe the disasters that are happening everywhere in the theory that it's a self-destruction of that regime. Anyway, so I take a sort of cheap zen approach to that. What do you mean? Well, what does cheap zen mean? I mean, really, it means anything you like and that's the opportunity, reframing on a grand scale. God knows what's going on. With all this chaos, it must be wonderful. That's the level I'm working at these days. Nice. See, I was on this call the other day about adaption. Apparently we've given up on prevention to stop it. So we're gonna have to get used to adaption. And this seminar think tank was a great whale in. Everybody was just, oh my God, yes, we've got to come to terms with that. We can't change it. We can't fix it. We're just gonna have to survive on that. And they were saying, oh, I've been thinking this for two years, four years. And I was thinking, listen, I've been thinking this for 13 years, but it was the 13 years between 1969 and 1982. That was my desperate period. Then I got into funding money and community currencies and I felt world is wonderful. No problem. Ah, except for the problem that nobody else is quite up for that conversation at this point. So 37 years of frustration followed the 13 years of despair. But right now it's beginning to look quite hopeful because the shit is hitting the fan and people are beginning to adapt to the possibility and face it. So maybe good times are coming. Best of times, worst of times. How much shit has to hit? What kinds of fans for people to wake up and change behaviors or assumptions or actions or whatever? I don't think it's the shit. In fact, when the Titanic's going down, nobody's taking swimming lessons. People don't learn in the crisis. So I think you got to tease them out of it beforehand. You've got to give them skyhooks. So just lift them gently above the morass. Different perspective, different place. And that's one of the benefits of all the Bitcoin and cyber credit bullshit is that it's awakened the possibility of there being other ways to finance and negotiate. So out of the chaos shall come splendor, you know? Something like that. I like what you're saying, Michael. I think part of, for me, what it is, is that out of the chaos comes hope for something different, better, adaptive, whatever it might be. But if one is disinclined to wallow in the pit of despair, which I've been known to do occasionally, and instead thinks about what little thing can I do today that will improve the situation and importantly, self-importantly, how I feel about the situation, that's a positive step, which then leads to sharing that with someone usually, either inviting them to do it with you or telling them that you had a good day because this thing happened and maybe it will help their bad day. And it becomes a catalysis point or an initiation point for a potential chain reaction. And that gives me hope. Interesting to hear hope arise in this context. I've been working with no hope and the wisdom of hope. A few years ago, I was asked by a friend of mine to design a teacher course at San Francisco State University on Positive Psychology and Coaching. And I took her class and took the signature strengths test from Seligman and discovered that optimism was like number 18 on my list, not very high. And for my class project, I decided I was gonna go against the grain and actually, you're not supposed to work in below numbers. You're supposed to take your top five or 10 and work with those. And I said, I wanna take optimism and as my class project because I generally have an optimistic view of my life as an individual, but I have a very pessimistic view of human life in the future. And that quite often it's sitting out on a time horizon that's quite not known, but it very often comes and sits right in front of me and filters how I see the world. And so I interviewed several people who I knew identified as optimists. And one of them is an African American woman who said, I'm lesbian, I'm left-handed and I'm black. So the world has been against me since day one. And she is one of the most optimistic and she has amazing equanimity and I've heard stories of her life and the things she's been through. And I said, how? And we worked together on offering a program we called the Listening to Race because we think it's important to talk about race, but it's more important to listen to it first. And I said, you know, how do you keep yourself buoyant in the face of what's going on? You know, and she's worked for years doing diversity training and says nothing has shifted out of all the work I've done diversity, nothing. Wow. That's specifically inside of corporations, not necessarily what's going on in larger countries. I said, well, my ancestors came to this country as slaves 250 years ago. And 200 years ago, they had nothing there, you know, babies could be ripped from mother's breasts, husbands killed in front of wives, wives raped in front of husbands, all these things and there was nothing they could do. And they kept on. And then a world was fought and they got some rights and then they went through reconstruction and Jim Crow and Mistral Sea and redlining and you know, Civil Rights Act, they got some more rights and now we're watching black and being shot in the back by police on YouTube and it's time for more rights to come. And when I look at what my ancestors put up with and kept themselves moving with no hope whatsoever, but faith, faith that one day would change, which is different than hope. For her faith is the confidence and the possibility of change. I don't personally feel I have the right to give up and I don't feel I have the right to abandon the fight. And that was an amazingly powerful lesson for me to hear because I often have this sense of there's no hope but I somehow in me have a faith that it will work out that humans are made of really sturdy stuff and we may take most of ourselves out of the picture and might reduce our population down to some really small number but somehow I think that we're gonna, we'll make it in one way or another. I'd like to see it be a good way but it might be a bad way that, you know, and I'm not of the opinion that humans are a virus that planetly better off. I think we're actually an expression of universal intelligence that if we take ourselves out of the picture, the earth itself would mourn, you know, that we'd be a failed experiment for the earth. I don't know where to put that in my cosmology but it feels important to voice. So I don't work a lot with hope but I do attempt to maintain my faith in the confidence that there will be a shift. And as Michael says, man with all, there's so much happening. I can't track it all. I do not know what things to pay attention to that are positive generative developments and which ones are destructive. I can easily have a knee-jerk reaction and say so but in the longer term, who knows, you know, what's gonna be good. So what gives me hope is just groups like this and involved with lots of people where I can have these conversations where people are willing to tolerate a large amount of ambiguity and complexity and to talk through and say, this is messy and there's no clear answers but let's hang together and wow, I disagree with you vehemently but I'm gonna sit with your point of view and let it percolate in me and see what comes up instead of you're wrong and you're an idiot, right? So that to me is a tremendously hopeful thing. So it gives me optimism and helps me to keep putting one foot a third of the other on the days when I feel like it's all going to hell which I do have occasionally. But most of I just try to, you know, go, okay, I'm alive, I'm above ground, I'm vertical, everything after that's a bonus. So let's just do what I can. I like your differentiation between hope and faith made me just now realize that I have a personal aversion to the word faith and some trappings it had 50 years ago. But I do have that sort of internal optimism which is a dimension of faith. Hope is not a wish for me. Hope is an aspiration. And, but I think your word choices are important in terms of the dimensions of this topic. So thank you for sharing that. Thank you. These are words that, you know, get banded about and we don't have collective agreement on what they mean. And, you know, you have an aversion to faith based on things that happened for you 50 years ago. I often find hope. I associate that with people who are often ungrounded and un-opinistically ungrounded or un-grounded in an optimistic way. Like, where are you getting this from, right? So, I think we all have our little reactions to them and it's important to talk and be transparent about that, you know, and I wish we had another, a better word for it. So, I appreciate your reason that you, thank you. Thanks for raising this sort of, some of the gradations of meaning of definition between them. I think the words are loaded for many people. So, they mean really different things depending on what community you come from, what your background is, et cetera. So, they're difficult words to use. Ken, when you were talking earlier, partly I was going to one thing that keeps coming up and there was an article, there was an article that just made the rounds in the New York Times, got retweeted a bunch, before global warming humans caused global cooling study fines. So, it turns out that there's a study that went and found that after the great dying in the Americas, so I don't know how many people know this, but it's possible that as much as 90% of the native population in the Americas died off merely through contact with diseases they had no immunity to. Smallpox, et cetera, et cetera. And so, there's, for example, there's a book, Pox Americana, the Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775 to 82 by Elizabeth Fenn, et cetera, et cetera. And one of my favorite books is 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann, who goes in and talks about a bunch of this. But I bring all of this up because of the effect of humans in the world. And Ken, you were sort of talking about, do we do good or bad to the world? And my belief, this is gonna sound like a bunch of different things, piece of the other. I'm irritated at wildlife preservation areas where nobody is allowed to live, where they basically don't let humans go in. Because it turns out that humans who know what they're doing are really good for the landscape. And the reason they think that humans cause global cooling by killing off the majority of the people tending to the Americas was that the majority of the North and South American landmass was actually under active human cultivation. It's just that it didn't look like it. It didn't look like, I have a fence, you have a fence, you're raising cows, I'm growing apples. It looked like controlled burns. It looked like preferential planting of things that fed animals that worked well. It looked like the herding of animals into canyons where they could be culled carefully and so on and so forth. It looked like weirs in rivers. I was just looking at some pictures of Aboriginal weirs that go back like 30,000 years or something crazy like that. Let me see if I have weirs, yeah. So there's a stone weir in a river. Oh, darn it. Anyway, I'll have to find it and come back to it. Where if you know when the fish are going to run and you set up a weir, you just kind of wait for them to go, block off the weir and then empty the trap and dry the fish and salt them or do whatever you're gonna do and you've got lots of food for a long time. Anyway, when the die-off happens, the country basically rewiles and goes back to a more nature's, more natural state that causes these shifts of climate which they're saying affected the little ice age way back when. So I'm trying to figure out how do we have more trust in humans as, in wise humans as good stewards of the land and of the things on the land because we don't believe that. We don't trust kids to be curious. We don't trust humans to take care of land. We sort of, just another thought that has a few too many links to it, but come on little brain. I have a lot of these, so probably finding them all. So for example, we don't trust kids to be alone. I have a whole bunch of thoughts under we don't trust you. So we don't trust you to drive carefully. We don't trust you to get your work done. We don't trust you to minister to each other. We don't trust you to negotiate gender and sex. We don't trust you to raise your family alone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll stop. Great, one thing I just popped up as you were talking about that is, I think one, I really love what you said about wildlife preservation areas where humans are not allowed to go in and that a major reason we don't trust people to go in there is that the kind of people who go in there are indigenous and Aboriginal and there's such a huge prejudice against them. It's only very, very recently that people are starting to recognize as Charles Mann did in 1491. There were these forests of corennial trees that provided nuts and it's like Europeans thought, well, it's just wild, but this was very carefully cultivated over generations. And so the idea that Aboriginal peoples and indigenous peoples actually had a culture and a way of relating to the land that was worthwhile is something that I don't think has a lot of purchase in mainstream society. So there's this huge prejudice and that feeds that mistrust. So I wouldn't want policy wonks going into a wildlife area, but I would love to have the Inuit going there. They've lived there for centuries. So that's a big thing for me. Yeah, there's a lot of indigenous wisdom. So some of my thoughts include that Native Americans are much more sophisticated than we think, but basically I love collecting up indigenous ways of knowing. And I'm trying to figure out how to communicate that if we take, and there's gonna be an inside Jerry's brain call on this pretty soon too, like how do we take the best of the old and marry it up with the best of the new? How do we take, and best of is this incredibly subjective phrase, like my opinion of what's best of is gonna be really different from yours from, and all of those will be very different from people on the other end of the spectrum from this conversation. But I'm really interested in how do we take the best of ancient wisdom because I believe that we used to understand how to live in community on the commons. So I think that everywhere around the world we knew how to live together as a group and how to take care of where we were. And whatever word you give community or commons, and this by the way, most traditional languages have words for all this kind of stuff, right? So Māori, so I collect up Kechua, Māori, a lot of languages that go back a ways have terms for all these kinds of things. And it's really fun to learn and I'm looking for more resources. If you have other resources I should look into, let me know. Here we go. Here's Māori language, tereo, but the Māori have words for reciprocity like utu is reciprocity, right? And so I've got reciprocity and reciprocation connected to, oh shoot, I thought I had it connected elsewhere to the other words in other languages, but I'll fix that. Go ahead. I was just going to say that popped into my brain it would be worthy of a chat session on wise words culture and exploring a little bit the context of those, you know, like seven words in Japan for stress, you know, and that's not indigenous per se, but I mean, what I'm interested in is exploring, I don't know, wise and maybe in context anti-wise because language and communication shapes thoughts and is recorded in how we view the world. And so if we could be more aware of our word choices that could be helpful. Absolutely. Go ahead. There we go. We're thinking the gradual sort of convergence of our systems, we've gone globalization, link across, go out, but when things are breaking down it becomes much more as though we're always on an island. And any island under the old rules of comparative advantages, rip off the exterior as much as you can and absorb as much trash in your own place. It's basically comparative advantage, Ricardo neglected the externalities all over the place. But if you really see yourself on an island the externalities of taking in crap and dissipating your resource base are very tangible. So you can see quite quickly. So I'm looking at the idea that we all exist in islands, many of them, my neighborhood, my region, my community of some sort. And for each of those islands I should be responsible for making the external world better rather than worse. And for making the island better rather than worse. So which the current economic model of course completely contradicts. So there's a- That's really interesting. Yeah, a piece of this, like 10 things about what you just said that I find fascinating, one of which is our propensity to care for other people or for a place. And we're, you know, I blame consumerism for a lot of our woes right now. And I think that we have consumerized our lives at the point where we consume food, we consume home, we consume even family, which takes us away from actually caring about it and taking care of it because it's a consumable, it's a disposable thing, right? And then also there was a good article recently that I can find in my brain about, you know, if you give your kids, if you pay your kids for doing their errands, you could kind of screw them up. And that attaches to the whole idea that extrinsic rewards kill off intrinsic motivation. And if you're kind of a type A managerial, capitalist, libertarian type, then markets will solve everything and people will act in their own benefit because they get rewarded for it in the marketplace, right? That's like, ah, how do I have a conversation with a deep libertarian to get to the juicy issues in the middle about what really provokes people to take care of the things we have in common so that we can all thrive. Yeah. I have this minor problem with my college age kid who is at San Jose State in that I can't actually motivate him with money and it's both a blessing and a curse. Mm-hmm, you're thrilled that that's happening but oh my God, now what? Yeah, I mean, I would like certain things. So he'll help me to do things out of a sense of family solidarity or pity maybe, not sure, but if I try and offer him money he just gives me a myth. Super interesting. So I was trying to type something out, it's faster to say it. Yeah. Compared to Maturana is someone whose works have influenced my thinking quite a bit and Maturana's posits that in early human life, what we call back in the tribal era before the advent of the agricultural revolution, the organizing principles were how do we make it safe for women to bring tiny, helpless, tasty to predator babies into the world and raise them up to be successful contributing adults to our social service. And so he says, you know, what I love is he has this phrase that everything changes around what gets conserved. So what got conserved in those days was love. And the original organizing principles of people were highly cooperative. We had to work together. And it's a much more recent adaptation that began to conserve behaviors of hate. That is not part of original nature, which is in direct this contradistinction to the church's teachings of original sin, which is another thing that myth that feeds into here, right? So, you know, I've had this argument with so many people where they say, well, you can't change human nature and it's like, of course you can change human nature. Human nature changes all the time from era to era, right? Your nature changes from the time you're a little kid to the time you're an elder. And this belief that people are inherently going to do the prisoner's dilemma thing as opposed to learn how to work in the comments effectively, which we did for a long time before the rise of capitalism and the aggregation of wealth through agriculture. So, that to me is a question of how do we recover our original nature of, it's in there. It's not something we have to invent. We just need to remember it, I believe. Absolutely. One of the things I like the least out there is the essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, which I've heard a couple of people sort of spin it positively, but Garrett Hartman was a soil biologist. He wrote this basically just shooting from the hip and it became dogma. It basically killed off the idea that commons even work. And I hate this essay. Here, I've got it under, I've got this essay under landmark papers that fucked up the world. And the only other paper I've got next to it there is Milton Friedman's cover story in the New York Times magazine of 1970, the social responsibility of businesses to increase its profits, which was a big dump taken on society. And it's the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, trickle down economics, supply side economics, what have you. All of that kind of comes tumbling down because that gives the moral authority to say people in business do not have to consider any moral aspects of what they're doing because regulation's role is to do that and the market's role is to do that, right? And we kind of know that that's screwed. So, a part of this is what I call scripts in our heads. When I say that I'm not a fan of socialization very much, what I mean is that we get socialized with a lot of bad scripts. We get socialized with a lot of beliefs that aren't actually true. I guess I don't have, here we have, oh, I wrote down scripts we have running in our minds, not heads so I couldn't find it. But our scripts basically shape our beliefs. And I mentioned on an earlier call today that South Pacific has a song you've got to be carefully taught, which is about racism. It really helps when you spell Pacific properly. And so here's you've got to be carefully taught is a song about racism that basically says we are not born prejudiced or racist, it is taught. And cultures inculcate racism. So we have to get these out in different ways. So again, it's not that human nature is immutable, it's that we're not aware enough of the means by which we might leverage human nature onto a different set of ruts, if that makes sense. Or out of the ruts and into the open field because we don't trust that the open field is going to work, right? So religions are in some sense a way of creating social order through a collective narrative. And partly it's because if we didn't have that narrative we couldn't point to a certain class of people and say, pay attention to them, do what they say, they're in charge. And a lot of that is because we don't trust the average citizen to behave well. Well, for the most part, we're really just following the brake lights with the car in front, you know. It's an idea of basically operation. You know, I think if you put up a sort of turn left here sign with enough clarity, everybody will go that way, you know? It's, remember the Sweden used to drive on the left-hand side of the road and they changed to the other side and they anticipated an awful lot of difficulty but it all happened just like that. Oh yeah, let's do it this way, that works, you know? And see the same often in society. I'm always drawn back to that Fisher King, Robin Williams movie in the Grand Central Station where there was a melee of people elbowing their way through the crowds and then on comes some Strauss and everybody's waltzing. They're all waltzing because the music is defining their pattern. Then of course the music stops and they all back to elbows in the ears but it's those sort of levels of we don't have to change people's deep meaning. People do not have to become at one with the depth of the universe and the, you know, all that stuff. No, you know, we weren't really people that made us capitalists, you know? So we can drop out of that stuff just as easily as we've dropped into it. I'd like to offer that Dagen H didn't just happen. It happened because a whole lot of people worked really hard. Which things that are gonna happen? Dagen H, the Swedish red chain. Okay, got it. Yeah, I mean it's not a spontaneous thing, that's clearly, yeah. No, not one night. Mind you, no. It happened in one night. They synchronized it. Yeah. In the states, no, go ahead. I was just remembering in Anacortes area in Washington state many years ago, the locals had a habit of when they would saw each other coming on the road, they would both change sides and then go back to their own side later. Sort of a local community chicken game or some sort. Maybe one lane paved roads in Hungary in the countryside with gravel shoulders and you go along quite fast and then when you see another car, you each slow down a little and drive half on the road and half on the shoulder. And it's just whoosh. Reminds me of driving in India. Yeah, so let me make that contrast a little bit because I talk a lot about design from trust and traffic calming is one of the techniques, technologies, methodologies that I refer to as a form of design from trust because it says, hey, if you trust people to make eye contact at the intersection, they'll make it through much safer than if you mandate that a whole bunch of people stop and wait for a while until the other people are through and then green light, red light sort of thing. And it turns out that it's a whole bunch safer. The problem is that we're now heading into robo-car territory and you can't make eye contact with a robo-car. So this is kind of screwed. Now, when, so back to the traffic calming compared to Indian traffic jams which you can famously see on YouTube. Traffic calming is thoughtful, careful design of the intersection and the roadway. It's not, five roads came here and people make it through somehow and some of them die. So the difference between the Indian intersection where it's like, oh my God, this is chaos and the traffic calmed intersection is that one is in fact completely dangerous and just emerged. It just showed up because roads showed up here and nobody actually paid attention or figured out that they could redesign this thing to be safer. And the traffic calmed one was designed with full consideration that there's a school over here there's a lot of traffic that needs to get from here to there, what do we put where? So that people naturally feel they must slow down because it feels a little dangerous, right? In the middle of design from trust, there's a feeling of danger or risk that you don't want to suppress because that feeling of risk or danger is what causes wiser behavior on the part of the participants, right? So one of the things I like to say these days when I'm explaining design from trust is that it leads to two reactions that are usually kind of predictable. The first one is, oh shit, this is impossible. This will never work. I tell you about the thing, unschooling, traffic calming, whatever. And you're like, nah, that sounds like a fairy tale that'll never work. Then when you then bump into it, you might then leave. You might just bounce off it and refuse to try it. If you try it and then realize that it starts to work, you'll have a second reaction which is, oh shit, this really works. How do I get more of this? I'm very, very interested in laying out a menu, a tasty, tasty menu of a series of simple experiences that people can have of these sorts of systems. Take your pick, you know, spin the wheel, throw a dart, roll the dice. Take your pick of a couple of these and go try them because if you try them and get the dynamics of it and feel the risk and feel the success of having sort of figured out the dance, you may in fact help figure out how to fix more of this stuff. That's kind of, I'm really, I'm after that sweet spot somehow. I don't remember if I sent this to you or not. Did I send you the stuff about Elizabeth Sawin? Say W-I-N? I say W-I-N. I say W-I-N. She's a colleague of Dana Meadows. No, I don't know anything about Elizabeth Sawin. Okay, I'm gonna send you, I put it in the chat window for everybody here. Just caught a Ted talk of hers. I think she's only got a couple of thousand views. This thing should be in the millions. She talks about something called multi-solving. And I'm not gonna, you know, my brain is not what it used to be. So, and I don't have your brain. So, I'm gonna just look it up for a second here. That's great. No, look it up, put a couple of links in the chat. And I'm gonna, after we're done here, I'm gonna garden the new stuff into my brain. And there's a wonderful link that I just saw the other day on this retuna. It's the name of a shopping mall in Sweden. And they have a recycling center and a dump there. And what happens is, people bring all their household stuff that they're rejecting and it gets sorted into lots. And they have created a shopping mall for everything there is recycled. It's upcycled. It's all secondhand. And there's enough of an aesthetic in the country and in the town to say, we don't mind buying secondhand, you know? Not gonna buy a secondhand underwear, but you know, I'll buy a secondhand coffee mug. And so there's actually this wonderful integration of, you know, we're upcycling. We're recycling. We've got merchants who are willing to put the effort into this. And there's this shopping mall that gets six to 700 people every single day and it's self-sustaining. And it's a tremendous way of, it's our retuna. I'll put the link in here for that too. Okay, so enough on that. I'm gonna hide myself momentarily and eat myself, but I'm here a lot with these things up. Awesome, thank you. So these are the kinds of practices that I think would be really useful for us to sort of bring in front and center and make easily available, to explain a bit about what the process is and what's going on, how it all works. Would it make sense to have a call somewhere in our lexicon company in the future that kind of re-explores commons? You bet. And I will go to my list of topics and bring up the commons. I think I have the commons here, so. I knew you'd have it in your brain. I'm just thinking that it changes. What the commons means is a linguistic question. It's a contextual question. It's a personal question. The enablement of it, the sharing of the concept, all of those things would be dimensions of what would be of interest to cover. So, so far what I have is a call about Linostrum and governance of the commons, which is down the list somewhere. It's what I think we need a different topic here, which is what, re-examining, remembering the commons. Does that sound like a good start or how would we phrase this? Right. Pardon? Remembering and updating maybe. Cause it's sort of like, when did we get there and what do we think it is or should be now? Realizing the commons. Ooh, I like that, Michael. I'll start with remembering because the goal is actually to talk about realizing, but I want the titles to be just quick enough that people will be like, oh, commons okay, want to kind of go in there. Because we're doing your IJB stuff, the context of that's really important. So starting with the context before we move into the next stage is probably wise also. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a bit bothered by all the Ostrum stuff. I mean, it's good work, but it seems so much based around scarcity and offsetting Garrett Harding, and that's reactive rather than grounded. Well, and there was so much positive energy in April's discussion about the sharing economy and the book that she's working on that the compare, contrast her voice on that table would be really nice as well in terms of where are we on this vector of change if there's a positive vector of change to be enabled or something like that. I've quoted a lot of stuff of hers not with attribution, but just talking to people about the interesting aspects of really taking the sharing economy to other levels and realizing the unproductive redundancies we have. Part of the reason I got to where I am is my starting with the word consumer because one of the things I realized was we consumerized everything. And part of being a good consumer is buying more stuff, even stuff you don't necessarily need. And we're all told that if we stop buying more stuff, the economy is gonna grind to a halt and then disaster strikes, right? And all these externalities, finished externalities are not really that problematic because the earth is infinite, blah, blah, blah, blah. But once you start thinking like a consumer and being treated as a consumer, it leads you down these like blind alleys where you get mugged eventually. It's just that it doesn't look like that. They look like shiny malls, right? And they look like abundance because there's the appearance of abundance on the shelves. But it's merely the appearance of abundance while in fact it's harvesting the actual abundance in the world and getting rid of it. Which is, I'm trying to find the elegant ways of explaining these things because it's the same set of words. Each perspective on the issue thinks it's using the same word when in fact they're using the word in a completely different meaning, right? The abundance of goods on the shelf in your average supermarket which blew the minds of East Germans when the wall fell. Like they would take their trabis and go into West Berlin and go to a shopping to an Aldi or whatever. And like their brains were blown. Like the abundance that was there as a result of consumer capitalism was astonishing. And yet anybody who knows how that stuff got there goes down the cereal aisle and the soap aisle and the toothpaste aisle. And it's two companies with like a whole bunch of packaging and a bunch of perfuming and a bunch of marketing drawing little distinctions across things that really aren't that different. And it's cheap carbs through regulatory capture that basically created subsidies for producing carbs too cheap to create obesity and diabetes and all kinds of other stuff. It's a whole series of nested, mutually reinforcing dysfunctional cycles that are creating this appearance of abundance. All you really need is Quaker's original oats. More or less. Not from Quakers. Yeah, which was not from Quakers, exactly. Has little to do with Quakers except the branding. Right? Right. I have a little short story. I had the flu a few years ago and I was really in bad shape about two in the morning and I dragged myself out of bed with my fever and get in the car and drive to the 24 hour pharmacy because I really need something to suppress my cough. And I look and I'm confronted with this aisle that has at least 200 different cough suppressants. And I'm like, I have no functioning brain to make a decision here. And it used to be there was Vic's formula 44 and something else. And I'm like, holy shit, this is fucking outrageous. And there's no pharmacist on duty at that time. So there's no one to ask. And I ended up just buying some more cold cough drops. But the overwhelming choice is not actually a choice. It paralyzes us, you know. It's like, what do we do? It's called the tyranny of choice, right? Yeah. It is. This is, what's his name at Swarthmore, I think. Actually, yeah. Very short. Very short. That's it. If I can interject something that kind of goes back to where we started, one of the things that makes me pessimistic rather than optimistic is what Bucky Fuller used to call the point of chemical process, no return. Have we put so many, there's 85,000 untested chemicals released from industrial processes into the biosphere since World War II? Almost none of them have been tested for synergistic effects. Have we reached a point where there's already so much poison and so many toxins in our environment that even if we start cleaning stuff up today, we're screwed? And I really don't know the answer to that. But it's one of those things where people cite trend lines of oh, life expectancy is extending and we're getting longer and more lives. But we're also watching the fall off of sperm counts everywhere around the world, the insect apocalypse. All these things, if we've wiped out that many insects, the chances are pretty good, it's gonna come to haunt our biology very, very soon. So that's something that really makes me concerned about where we are in the future. I think there's a stuka dive bombing your home right now, Ken. Sorry, I'm taking you on my little tea excursion here. That's all right. I thought the world was coming to an end in Berkeley first. I'm actually in San Rafael, but that's all right. Oh, okay. It probably will come to an end in Berkeley first. But it will not be televised. So what might we do? Are things getting better, getting worse? Has taken us down this path toward the scripts in our heads toward movements to understand where the leverage is and how to see the systems, all of that. What else, what might we do or how do we organize this? I think it could be useful to identify what are the verifiable evidence-based things that are genuinely making things worse? And then what are the perceived social, what are the social perceptions around that that either amplify or dampen it? This is really, really bad or no, we don't need to worry about it. We're denying it because that seems to me to be very critical in terms of what our response is. When we have a fossil fuel industry dedicated to disrupting the consensus, scientific consensus on climate change, climate change is real, not going away, but you get all these billions of dollars poured into don't believe it, don't pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right? That's something that really gets in the way of effective action. And I think there's other parallels to that on what's going on in both the positive and negative way. So just to crack open a different can of worms that you just sort of brushed against. Freeman Dyson is a noted dissenter on the general consensus of climate change and he's also the father of my old boss, Esther. So I read Freeman on this stuff and he was basically saying we really don't understand the mechanisms involved. And I think the can of worms that I want to crack open a little bit is I don't know what the best, not mitigation, but thrival strategies are around where we are already on climate change. Like do you form a Dyson sphere in outer space? Do you increase the albedo of the clouds to stop? Do you drop iron filings in the ocean to do you, like I've heard hundreds of alternative strategies for it to do? The one that's sort of most normal is let's just stop burning stuff and let's stop burning petroleum, let's turn off all the engines. Let's just stop that, but we already have, like we're like a VLCC that's going 50 miles an hour and it's gonna take a really long time to come to a halt. So even if we manage to stop everything tomorrow, there's overhang or whatever it's called that this kind of impulse forward toward where we're going I don't know what the best mitigation strategies are. Soil, my friend, soil, the answer lies in the soil. The answer lies in the soil, aye. It's even better with your accent though, Michael. Yeah. It sounds like five times as wise. Well that was, I know two other Dyson children of the Kayak man and another George and Becky. No, Katrina, I knew was, anyway, the Dyson's are everywhere. I actually think the Dyson's were the model for Kurt Vonnegut's cat's cradle book. Oh, interesting. That's really interesting. But just, that's just a little thought. Anyway, Freeman's basically he was pointing out that the soil turnover is the fastest way to get that carbon back out of the atmosphere. And everything we're hearing about agricultural regeneration getting out of agribusiness and into agricultural processes, it's all about build the process itself. Don't look for the end, don't look for the product. Look for the thing that creates the product. And that's the soil. So building the biomass. Yeah. And that takes us back to really interesting things because in the middle of my nexus on, so this is a really nice sort of tying together things. I have a thought called my ahas. Oops, my ahas on soil and growing or raising food, which about a year ago I realized I had a bunch of disparate things around mycelium, around soil fertility, around biochar, around no-till farming. And this little nexus kind of brings them together. And I also have it under useful starting points for understanding Jerry's brain, although it's a little overwhelming. But paying attention to the soil really matters. And part of what I have in here are some of the principles for soil fertility, right? So plowing destroys soil's fertility. There's a pattern language for growing food that's connected here. And a couple months ago I was in San Francisco and got to do a tour of singing frog farms, singing frog farms, oops, got to spell it right, which is up in Petaluma. And Elizabeth Kaiser gave us a tour of her farm where they're using all of these principles. And as she was busy describing what they do, she was busy building out this pattern language for growing food. Keep root dirt protected, distribute soil as well as possible, foil and keep roots in the ground at all times. That's another root. Another rule, but I'm saying all of this because I have all those principles connected up as role models for the general principles of design from trust. Because metaphorically, soil works nicely for society. Yes. And so the piece of this work I haven't done is extend the analogy and basically say, okay, what does this mean? How do we explain it? How does this work? But I'm trying to develop the general principles of design from trust. And so far, assumed good faith or good intent I like, knowledge should accumulate as one that I like a lot, make the right thing easy to do I like, which actually comes out of Kaiser Permanente, believe it or not, it was a design principle there. Subsidiarity, local knows best, which is sort of a little Ostrom, a little other sorts of things. Nothing about us without us, right? Don't go making decisions that affect our lives without our participation. That seems like a good principle for design from trust. And I don't know what the rest of them are, but I think that some of these things we're saying about when wise humans are in charge of their place, they do all right. The question is who are wise humans and what is the doing involved, right? How do we find our way to more of that? And sorry if I just kind of hijacked the conversations in this direction, but we were heading right toward things that matter a lot to me and my brain. Coming out of that, you're mentioning of soil, Michael. So I have waste gasification, I have biogas digesters, I don't know that I have Jim Mason. Can you put a link or two there for me? Here's Jim Mason. Here's the ethics of why we eat. Is this the right Mason? Does polyphase farms is a method of soil? Yeah, polyphase is big. I can't take it as many of these. Joel Salatin. Yeah, yeah. So he's, so let me just go back to sharing for a second. Whoop. So here's polyphase farm. Here's Joel Salatin, who's an interesting guy. He's very, when you look at it, and I have him under, systems thinkers healing the earth. So Masanobu Fukuoka, the one straw guy, the no-till farming guy, Paul Craful, whom Arthur Brock turned me on too long ago, Elizabeth and Paul Keiser of singing fraud farms, Andy Lipkus of Tree People. So here's Tree People in Los Angeles. And then, I don't even remember why I put Daniel Christian Vahl here, let's see. He's into regeneration and wrote Designing Regenerative Cultures. I need to go back and sort of remember what I was learning about him. But these are some of the people who seem to really understand how things work. I also have a separate thought of people who deeply understand nature, like Nikola Tesla. So the reason these are two different thoughts is that I don't know that Tesla was a systems thinker healing the earth, but he definitely understood electromagnetism better than anybody seems ever to have and likely better than anybody understands it today. He had an intuitive grasp of the electromagnetic spectrum that is unprecedented and unparalleled as far as I know. He invented, so he helped install the turbines at Niagara Falls and the high tension wires that brought electricity from there down to New York. He basically invents the whole thing. Generators, high tension wires, step down transformers to the plug in your wall using alternating current out of his brain onto blueprints into the real world and it pretty much works. That's how genius Tesla is. Like, I can't understand how he did that or what he did. Lynn Margulis is another one. She's the one who discovers that the mitochondria in our cells are basically symbiotes. She coins the term symbiogenesis and she's like, you know what, somewhere long ago, our cells ate little energy production by bacteria. They became happy members of our bodies and off we went making energy of ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. And I know only enough botany and biology to get myself in deep trouble. But she's on this list of people who really understand nature. And then a lot of these people are under my faith, one of my favorite thoughts, which is contrarians who make or made sense. And these are the people who helped form my point of view about how things work, which include George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, Hans Mondermann, who invented traffic calming, Harrison Owen, who invented open space technology, and believe it or not, Buck Branneman, the horse whisperer. Because animal gentling is designed from trust. Right? Because what do we do with horses? We break them. Why do we break them? Because we have to make them submit to our will so that they can be domesticated and used by us when in fact all you really need to do is bond with them and they'll be happy to cooperate with you. So there's a whole thought here. I've got much more stuff in here about building trust with animals. That's clearly not a good nexus right there. But here's the lion whisperer, the dog whisperer. There's a whole bunch of whispers that came out of that. But there's this whole thing of natural horsemanship that has a really long history. And this is really interesting. Where is it? Doma inga, here it is. So it turns out that there are no horses in the Americas before Columbus shows up because horses come out of the Fertile Crescent more or less. Then some horses get free reproduced. So now we have wild feral horses in the Americas. These feral horses make their way down to the Pampas, down to the natives in Argentina and other places. And those people are like, well, what is this? And they learn to tame the animals by befriending them. So they never get shown that you're supposed to break a horse, whatever, whatever. And there's this whole sort of thing called doma india, which is just like animal gentling, like horse whisperer. A couple of Grammy in there somewhere. You bet. Now, Temple's interesting because her approach is all about empathy. Her approach is completely about empathy, but she's not stopping the slaughter of animals so much. No, but she's made, I don't know if you saw, what's the guy's name? Errol Morris' film about her. A Temple Grandin, this one? Clear Danes. No, that's with Clear Danes. That's kind of good. You're talking about a documentary. I'm talking about Errol Morris, who did Thin Blue Wine and Bog of War. He did a, I think it's called Stairway to Heaven, maybe. You know what? I bet if I go to a Wikipedia page, it'll tell me. Yeah. She designed a more humane slaughterhouse because one of the things that happens with animals being slaughtered is their amygdala's are just going crazy. There's all this adrenaline pumped through their systems or smelling and knowing the killings going on around them. They get really panicky. They release all kinds of toxins into their system. She designed a slaughterhouse where it's a spiral and they come in four or five abreast. They keep going into a narrower, narrower thing, going around a corner so they don't see anything coming and then boom, the thing hits them in the head, they're pulled out of there and the next one goes and it lessens the amount of toxins that go into the system. So if you're gonna have, you know, slaughterhouses, rather they'd be humane than that freaky animals out. Agreed. Agreed. So I'm just adding first person because apparently the thing you're thinking about, she is the subject of the first episode of this documentary series, so this interview series called First Person. I spent a long time, I watched a bunch of Errol's movies 20 years ago and some of his early ones that didn't get a lot of commercial success. And interestingly speaking to commercials, he makes his living off directing commercials because then he can make whatever movie he wants. He sells funds all his movies by these amazing directors. So he works for these companies, makes a bunch of money and then says, good, I'm gonna pay my own film now with my own money. I can do what I wanna do. Love that. So here's Temple and I've just added Stairway to Heaven and if I had enough time, I would go look it up on YouTube or figure out how to watch it and add that link to this thought. So now when we see Temple again, we'll see Stairway to Heaven there. And we're getting up to an hour, to our 90 minute kind of cap on this conversation. I would love to find out what's on your minds as we're hitting the end of this one and what to bake into the next one. And I don't think we've answered the question. I think it's getting better or worse. I think we've turned the soil pretty well in lots of interesting ways. And I also think that that's an important question to get behind. How do we talk to people who think that the system is rigged and shit is bullshit and fucked up and whatever else that their futures look bleaker than their pasts? I think that this is a really important topic for that but what else can we bake in here? AI? Please. The question of whether things are getting better or worse is a good one. A side question is which attitude makes us happier and more productive in life? And thinking that things are getting worse regardless of its truth, doesn't make me happier and it makes me pretty much fatalistic and hide under my covers. So it makes you afraid to go out and do anything kind of? Or also why bother? Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, the perspective of, I guess this has been searched for meaning. It's the attitude, the choice we bring to a situation. Actually nothing original there. Never mind. No, that's okay. It's good stuff. And I will interject here a point of view I have that seems contrary to other things I believe which is I sort of seem to believe that great creativity, great human achievements depend on childhood trauma that most of the great artists, poets, painters, et cetera, et cetera suffered greatly as children, were beaten, abused, persecuted, whatever and we're working out those demons in their adulthood which led them to make great works. If you go look at the biographies of all the North American abstract art school, most of our major poets, like I collect bios of dysfunctional childhoods because my first girlfriend turned me on to Alice Miller, the Swiss psychotherapist who wrote drama of the gifted child. And so one of my stupid theories is that people with very normal childhoods are unlikely to do great out of the ordinary things which then applied to the question you just put on the floor Rich is like maybe we need global catastrophe looming. Maybe we need the gloomy as possible outlook about what's happening that things are getting much worse to be activated to do extraordinary things to fix it. I'm not sure I believe any of this. No, so I will offer, well, when I have some thoughts about are they really scarred or do we have a selection bias thing and et cetera, there's some things there. But the other side there is, I have a huge amount of anxiety around say opening the closet where the monster might be there but if you open the closet and the monster jumps out I'm apparently from experience reasonably good at dealing with the monster. You're pretty good in the monster fight. I am. I mean, I have some experiences but the anxiety around facing the monster and I would offer that perhaps the fear about oh everything's getting worse is about not being able to open the door and actually confronting it like you're talking about actually having the traumas might lead us to things but worrying about the potential of the traumas maybe doesn't help us. And in fact, freezes us in place. Like it's not fight or flight response it's the fight, flight or freeze response. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And very few people are willing to fight. Flight takes effort. It means leaving your community, your place, your employer, your whatever. Flight means, flight actually takes work. Freeze or numb or let it wash over maybe it'll just go away is I think the very common response. Right? So having somebody else crack the door open and the moment you started talking about this line of reasoning I was seeing scenes from Monsters, Inc. in my head of course. But maybe having other people open the door gently so that we can enter those conversations is something we need to do like lather rinse, repeat. Because that will allow people to then confront, unpack, refine, dissect, critique and maybe do something about them. I think denial is also a form of freezing. The what? Denial is also a form of freezing. Yes. Yeah. And so when someone says I'm not gonna be in denial that often helps other people to find the courage or things to say, okay, if you can do that, I can do that. Together, to me the answer, if there is an answer to what we would do if things are getting worse, it's find courage within ourselves to take action. If we can do that, then I have real faith that something good will happen. Because I see so many people paralyzed in denial and just like I don't wanna look at that, don't make me look at that, kicking and screaming, ah, no, no, no. And it's like, okay, if they see somebody pushing at it and doing something effective, it gives them courage to say, you can do that, I can do that. And my amateur theory of social change is that the most powerful tool of social change is somebody you trust taking you by the hand to try some new kind of scary thing. That that that is the best mechanism for causing large scale change. It's sort of catalytic in that way. Michael and Rich, you were gonna say something. That Michael. Please Rich, you've been. So it occurs to me though that in the better natures and the whatever idea, we have had massive improvements which statistically most people don't recognize. If you ask them, I mean, this is repeating, I know, but what percentage of the world is not in abject poverty over the last 20 years? And it's this tiny percentage change. Most people don't have any idea in that in a world where a billion people can have been lifted out of abject poverty in the last quarter century, but a fraction of the people in the US know that. We aren't really having a real conversation. And Hans Rosling's presentation's really played this up. He puts up a quiz and he says, tell me, is it A, B, C, or D and you're all wrong? Yeah, no, I'm quoting Rosling. I are trying to channel him. Yeah, yeah. I'm done, go ahead, Michael. Yeah, I was thinking the cognitive dissonance issue. You've got it in your mind that climate change is a heavy duty, but you've also got in your mind you don't know what to do about it. And it's this lack of immediate simple, clear-cut, actionable solutions that throws everybody into apathy because they can't sit with the dissonance. So I think somehow or other, we've got to make it pleasant or productive or profitable or something to be in the question rather than just heading for the hills all the time. It's keeping people's attention on the thing rather than the spin away, spin out. There's a winner? Sorry. Yeah, just let, excuse me, the group effect, if there's half a dozen of people in a circuit who are equally witnessing their mutual realizations, that's a thousand times more effective than people trying to do it, so on. And Judy, I'm just realizing you had raised your hand in the Zoom thing earlier, so I apologize. No problem, there's been lots of rich discussion. I guess there's another word that I'd like us to add to our lexicon to explore and that's enablement. So part of the Inside Jury's Brain quest is to just do stuff about this and I've got a bunch of websites we can elaborate on, we could co-author articles, we could create a little smorgasbord of things that people could go try and do. So I'm gonna go back through my notes and some of that can also be Inside Jury's Brain call topics so that during the call we're actually co-working, building out some piece of a site or some essay or something like that. We could put up a Google Doc, five of us could be in there editing different parts of it. At the end, we worked for a week to clean it up, edit it and then post it someplace. But I would love to do some of those kinds of things together and to treat the Inside Jury's Brain ongoing call series as this sort of co-working space, ideation space, co-thinking space and I'll do my best to annotate it all in the brain but let's just put stuff out there that's not the brain, that's other kinds of artifacts and services and sites and ideas and whatever. Since you mentioned this, adding a word to our lexicon, Judy and you spoke earlier, we spoke earlier about different words and different meanings. I think it'd be great to combine it to compile a glossary of when we say this, this is what I mean and here's some, you know, maybe we have to invent some words or borrow some words from other languages. I mean, German has these amazing, you know, words like Schadenkreuz, right? There's actually an opposite of that too, there's joy in other people's joy. So I think it'd be really useful if we could start to put together, we talk about this, this is what we mean and get some level of agreement of at least approximately, this is what we're talking about, only say hope or faith or ambivalence or, you know, enablement and the last point on that is, Renee Wurzman is a psychologist working on climate change and she talks about the need to, not just talk about aspirations and anxieties, but also ambivalence to normalize the conversation. You know, when we start talking about, I feel strong about this, but I'm ambivalent, I don't know what to do. It gives permission to other people to name their ambivalences as well and we don't get the folks who say, Wurzman L-E-R-T-Z-M-A-N. Oh yeah, L-E-R, thank you. And, you know, there's a lot of people who are, Jerry used the analogy of we're on this train traveling, you know, and if we stopped it, there's people walking in the opposite direction of the train, patting themselves on the back going, I'm not on the train, I'm on the train, you know, so people who take a position of, I've got my climate shit together, I only use stainless steel mugs and stuff and it's really not about that. It's about saying, wow, you know, I've done what I think I can do and I wanna know how I can help other people. And I'm ambivalent, I eat meat. If I don't eat meat, I dream about eating meat, I crave it, you know, I seem to need meat and I know that's contributing to climate change. So I have ambivalence there, but I'm not likely to change and that's gonna be okay. Because if I'm wrong for that, I don't want to be part of the conversation when I'm made wrong for my choices and that's a really big field to open up. What are we doing personally that we know is contributing to the thing that we're not likely to change in our lifetime unless something really big shifts and maybe it shifts to the conversation. And you've also touched a really interesting neighboring topic that I'd love to have an IJB call on which is Anand Giridharadas has suddenly gotten a tremendous amount of attention for his critiques of the wealthy class and their ability to fund all sorts of philanthropy and all sorts of social innovation as long as it doesn't affect them and their status and their wealth. And this last Davos got him a lot of attention. There's now some active Anand backlash happening in the world which is interesting to watch. But I was enthralled by his first Aspen Ideas Festival talk when he said, my friends, you're like family to me and I've got bad news, but we're part of the problem. I was like, whoa, holy crap. And he's gone whole hog with that thing. And I think it's an important element of what we're talking around here. Cool. Thank you, everyone. I'm gonna have to sign off. Yes, me too. There's two IJB calls tomorrow. If you have time tomorrow morning, a Keto tomorrow afternoon design ideas coming out of unschooling. So if you can make it, password, invite other people in, especially women and people of color, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.