 Okay, we are 10 minutes in to the May 2019 check-in call for Rex I just realized that I'd forgotten to turn the recording on because we just started chatting and then it got interesting And then it was like wait wait wait wait a little light is not blinking that we're recording so back to back to where we are Okay, so the idea is to start doing blogs In other words the woman that we brought in that's written this book and everything knows how to do blogging unlike YouTube and stuff And so we're going to do videotapes of her describing attachment theory and things like that and encouraging people want good relationships to a take the work job and then communicate that they understand the value of good relationships and the value of Basically creating a secure Relationship etc in other words so that you get people talking about it And then when they go to match.com or fill in the blank, whatever else and They they want to sort of connect with somebody to see well, but have you taken the course? You can actually have like a badge you can give us Education that shows up on next calm that says I'm a graduate of Bill's loving relationships course So at the end of the day you get this attractor state that moves people away from ghosting to Understand what a good relationship is and constructing it and there then there's enough, you know research 30 years of research by Dr. Sue Campbell and I'm nuts Campbell Sue Johnson That really gets into that the whole attachment theory and how how it structures and what the values are etc etc So I mean there's there's really good material that people Millennials in particular over the ones going to a workshop are going to find helpful So I was kind of kidding about the badge But now I realize I'm not kidding at all about the badge for match.com or or Tinder or whatever Have you have you considered doing that and would you go approach like harm and e harmony and match.com and say hey What if there was a badge? Right? Absolutely, but this is a great work We want to start with our own sort of badge creation in other words create something on YouTube for Our site's going to be love school.org Yeah, the day basically people are going to see that other words and Then when we can you know approach a match.com or the harmony or wherever They're they're going to see that this is really attracting some attention Love school.org currently gets hijacked and goes to bad places Take I actually had somebody else had it but they had it for sale So but it takes a week to port it over so on the 14th or 15 Is that 14th? Isn't that Valentine's Day? February only in February. Yeah, unless you do Valentine's Day every month, which is such a good idea Yeah, so bottom line is that it's going to take us a week to port it over Okay, good. Good in the meantime don't direct people to it. It does bad things your browser You Know what that that you just pegged the meter you just absolutely like the little recsometer in the red zone Quivering in the red zone quivering that was really awesome And just to recap because we saw the recording late. You're starting a school for love and relationships Physically based in Miami. Yes, right Are you gonna are you gonna do like virtual courses to are you gonna stick to the face-to-face for a while? Well, we're gonna stick to the face-to-face just until we make sure that we've got it home Other words so that we really have something That works that is awesome and Todd just posted a couple of really interesting. Yeah for you in the in the chat Yeah, you want to describe those Todd? I do Bill. This is timely So I was introduced to a woman named Christina Weber in Los Angeles Who started this organization we deepen? that started off as kind of a dating networking sort of organization and then quickly discovered that The real purpose was about relationships all together and We the first conversation she had she and I had She stated I really think in the next decade. It's going to There's going to be a lot of human connectivity Networks and organizations that take off that are focused on relational skills relational wisdom She's a lovely woman and then she introduced me to Carla from choose love now that's based in New York that had a love parade last week And I think you're on to something Bill. I mean, I think the Institute the anti-institutional Part of me would say why do we need? Something that is highly organized for this but I I think there's a demand I think people are are Lonely and isolated and want connection and they want some sort of guides to Connection and that guides that guide can act as You know a coach a place to meet with like-minded people I would really encourage you to to check and check out these other women and these organizations Right good. Yeah, I've got them Recorded here, so I will definitely do that But that was the basic thing that Bell Hooks was saying in her in her book was basically Where's the school for love? Why aren't we being taught this? I can handle that I'm there. I'm so glad you stepped up Bill. That just that is just awesome And I bet I am I'm willing to bet that a lot of your other initiatives kind of circle in and tie You know find thready find their little Root systems connecting back to to the school of love Right now we're gonna be on school for love. Yeah, there's that you know what that's gonna be needed next And then we're gonna have to have D programmers With its own antidote industry I like that Dave Susan Todd any any check-ins you'd like to Jump in on here Well, I'll jump in my So you might recall that on some wrecks call a rather I did a dry run of a talk about conversation and Turning trying to figure out how to use interaction. I'm sorry to use the patterns of of human everyday Conversation to inform the interaction with our technical counterparts And I've been I've been working that I've got I just realized A couple of days ago that I have four or five talks now and I'm just I'm just honing in on it. So And I'm actually Today's talk for instance to the thought leadership team at collab works was to add a piece of the story So I'm just adding you know pieces and pieces And I've got five or six now, which is getting to be something um Anyway, the the point I wanted to make today was that The reason that I think it's in urgent and important actually to start working on this protocol business that I've been talking about or Whatever, which is where you where you have certain principles and so on so things that would apply to Alexa and Siri and all the rest of these things As well as the robots that we're going to work with I mean I've titled the talk today Something about how in the world are we going to actually get work done with these bots? I for one welcome our new robot overlords and I just looked at listening right now right so But we could the interaction we have with them is going to need to be a little more A little more human I don't think we wanted to go all the way human because I don't think we can that's a little creepy It's not just creepy. It's just like so Pardon my language fucking complicated so it's It's just staggering. Look, I have a phd in linguistics. I have field at conversation analysts in the field in the work situations for years Wonderful stuff coming back and you look at it. You go. Oh my god We're so and the timing is so squished milliseconds hundreds of milliseconds so anyway, um Today's talk with the point I was trying to make the the one point was that that we needed a definition of agency And there's a new book out Since this is a bookish crowd except my book is in the is in is not here with me um is uh Hang on here I will get it just up front. Okay. It's called gods and robots Um So I and there's a definition of agency that I will throw out here because it's the one that I was using Basically the capacity condition or state of interacting Operating or exerting power or energy in a given environment capacity condition or state of interacting operating or exerting power or energy in a given environment I like that definition because especially because you can focus on the environment as well as the conversation itself And the example I used was this new one that came out this week called uh that you know, I don't know if you saw this but amazon amazon's using software to monitor employee productivity And they have a program called adapt uh associate development and performance tracker That tracks the rates of each individual associates productivity and automatically generates warnings or terminations regarding quality and productivity without input from supervisors Now this is alarming Now, I don't know the whole story But actually that there's no conversation with the employee either. It's the charlie chaplin seen From way back when brought to life It's or or lucy, you know lucille ball at the at the chocolate assembly line. Like this is this has become our reality I'm just sort of like So anyway that that puts some urgency On on on this idea. So i'm actually Plotting in my capacity as a distinguished visiting scholar which keeps getting extended at stanford to um to actually see if I can Work up a course at the d-school Do you know bill cockane at stanford? No um, I just kind of note from him Uh, I forgot. He's in an innovation department at stanford and I imagine that's almost redundant But there's probably like a thousand innovation departments at stanford, but uh, I met him years ago. I think through ift um And he wrote me and he said hey, uh my class and I've been wondering about how people filter all the information that's coming to them And you're one of our like like case studies We're we're watching you in the brain and how you filter and categorize And you know, maybe you could talk to the students or something which I said yes to but But I think that there's like really You're pointing to a whole series of very human issues that are going to be Gigantic in the next 20 years if the future of work looks anything like we think the future of work does And automation keeps getting smarter um, so i'm wondering Who were the you know, who are the top practitioners in this area? Yeah, i'm too. What what can we say that is a rexie? Contribution to that conversation because I think that You know, I think the school of love and relationships is very rexie and I think that what you're talking about is equally rexie And how does this all work bill go ahead? I just happened to be reading a book that touches on on one of the conundrums of this, but it was it's interesting It was written back in 1964. Oh my god. That's like a long time ago. That's right. Like ancient ancient It's practically aristophanism. We were growing up some of us It's called the revolution in psychiatry by urnis becker And he's really a very strong supporter of uh, uh, john dewey and everything because half the book. Oh, yeah About but what's fascinating in it which sort of touches on this issue the agency is that his fundamental Answer is that we have gotten boxed into a perception that we don't have choices And that it's the choice aspect that is fundamentally Not being understood in psychology and psychiatry That is really sort of like missing. In other words, and then it's what he calls the broader perspective In other words, don't be so reductionist and medical about this whole process. It's a social process And half of the processes were conditioned not to believe that we have agency that we had choice I just went off the charts on that finger. You really did. I've never seen something like that. I've never had to do that All the work this moment. I've never read a scale and off the charts Totally the needle broke over here and my fingers went off screen. I this is wow Okay. Yeah, say more Well to me it's it's fascinating to read something that was written in 1964 Which to an extent has not gotten any legs in other words This is what he's arguing about literally is a hundred years of resistance To this broader perspective And to the extent that you get into that in other words He's just going on and on and on using really technical issues like schizophrenia and everything in order to sort of build the case That we're totally missing how to deal with this because of the fact that we're not just going in and expanding opportunity to the people So one of the things that trying to medicate them Yeah, exactly One of the things that keeps bubbling out of the ground at me is the resistance movements to the current dominant frame And there have been many resistance movements over time long ago. There were enclosure movements and we we've sort of systematically brought about modern society in ways that were very traumatic to a whole bunch of people who fought back And mostly they did not fight back successfully And so the model we have which kind of in some weird way peaks in the 50s and 60s and 70s And the organizational man and leave your emotions and your personality outside the door Your job is just to be here and make profits. We know kind of the the elements of the sort of modern capitalist Whatever sort of point of view Homo economic is basically Where the other parts of you sort of in some sense don't matter where religion Through the gospel of prosperity has blessed homo economicus and said yes. Yes. Yes that thing go go go crazy and Periodically these resistance movements bubble up and people write and do really good things. So the postmodern philosophers If you I've really not read them I don't really I find it hard to read postmodernism because they became people who are just writing and talking to one another in increasingly opaque Language, but they were all over what's happening today the society the spectacle gi de bord We are living in the society the spectacle donald trump won because he understands the society the spectacle I don't mean the book But the the concepts in it better than anybody else on the political battlefield And and you can go back to a bunch of others who are you know Who who outlined all this they were just way too early because the thing hadn't cusp yet that the tsunami of The modern lens hadn't broken over us And hadn't started to sort of suffer backlash and other kinds of things They were they were in the middle of its if it's still kind of culmination, right? But they were right And there's it's insane how many people have been how right over how long And and how naive we are these days when somebody writes a really good book and it's like a critique of whatever it's like God, why did nobody say that before well? They did well they did and they mostly got stamped out And and so the stamping out of objections to dominant paradigms that last a long time is super interesting to me Because in a sense what we did was we stamped out love and relationships for the last 100 200 years um And did so we devalued them we did so like really well and then Men white men who are raised in this paradigm and then go out and find that they're not happy But like shrug and like what happened? Well, they're the product of layers and layers of efforts to do that thing Anyway, I got off on a on a tangent there. Kelly go ahead and I know that you have to leave in a couple minutes for I do and so I'm reading a book called why we sleep Which came out a couple years ago, and it's so interesting to me how many things we've talked about Here in these 30 minutes that are mentioned in the book as as we have gotten worse at sleeping Right just in terms of all of the things about modern life that make us not sleep up to and including like Because sleep is for the week and I'll sleep when I'm dead and the whole sort of like, you know I'm pulled an all-nighter that makes me kind of awesome like The how many things sleep does for us including greatly increasing our capacity to have emotional connections with people And how much some of the this new Research that that this particular guy is doing Talks about that is the real benefit and the real sort of like this is I mean, it's it's about, you know, why we sleep and what do we know about why we sleep and it turns out the the the patterns Of our brainwaves while we sleep in different cycles Totally affect our ability to be in connection with other people Which I had not ever heard before and kind of love so there and I'm you know a quarter of the way through But it's a it's a great and easy read and it's very interesting in terms of what we should be prescribing sleep for as opposed to All the medications that we are prescribing for things. So well sort of scientism is part and parcel of the modernist lens And so that means that, you know, a drug will fix this right Um, which is crazy, too And with that I have to say it's been great to see you and now I have to run Before you run Kelly, but you know, have you ever heard of David asked for you with bulletproof coffee and all that kind of stuff? Oh, yeah. Yeah, really big big on mitochondria and I was just watching an interview of him with doctor Well the guy that that does the functional medicine stuff And with Cleveland Clinic, but but they were emphasizing the value of sleep relative to mitochondria Because oh, yeah, that's a very very strong aspect of your health and your vitality and and you know Lack of fatigue and stuff like this and apparently sleep has a big impact on mitochondria interesting No Well, then I should be in great shape because I sleep a lot And I don't apologize for it. There you go. The happiest mitochondria on the call Yeah There was a book not it was a couple years old about a brain scientist. You had a stroke and she Was a really good tedx talk. She did my stroke of genius. Yes, that's right She probably turned into a book and yep, and there's a line in there about honoring her need for sleep And I was like, oh, that's a really interesting like I had not ever heard that phrase before and what a What a nice thing my stroke of insight Jill multi-tailer. Yeah Which I think somebody told me the science they've updated a lot of the science around the kind of the understanding of her recovery But um, but the book is still great. So Anyway One other scientific support for the sleep thing Apparently a scientist sort of figured out that an interesting way to test the impact of sleep Is to look at the change when we do the spring forward and fall back and see if there are any results Of that and apparently the number of heart attacks and deaths increases substantially when they cut out the hour and goes down When we improve, you know where the words increase our Right totally, you know Unknown that there is a statistic out there that we can look at Well, I've only heard the first half of it. The the compelling part is the second Right. Wow. So if you want to shake out the weak and the infirm from the population just move the clock back an hour or two And then again and again weak all that trouble with eugenics. Why bother? And with that sorry good night, Seattle Exactly. Thanks, Kelly Oh Dave are you going to transform? I am not. I'm gonna go to um the kaufman, um conference on ecosystem When instead that week All right, and I'm I'm not going to transform either. Um, I'm I'm I'm just thinking it'll probably be quite an interesting gathering It may be it may be I I also kind of like I I confess it was a little bit of a reaction to kevin kind of I kind of He pretty much screwed over mark mirage last year and it's like, yeah, it's heaven. But still Didn't want to reward him for it. So, yeah And this is a kevin dole jones production um he is uh Basically, and he's the guy who's uh with a couple other people created the socap conferences that did a really good job for a while There we go the transform series What is this conference? Let me see if I've got the right website here the transform series. He's basically Let me put the link in the chat Plop He's trying to pull together A bunch of different communities that are trying to transform the earth Uh, and this is reminding me of something else that just kind of came into my attention recently. That seems to be important um called, uh Transition design anybody heard of transition design Um, and maybe what I'll do is just by way of my own check-in. I'll just describe this transition design thing for a second. Um Let me do a screen share and find transition design in my brain There's that here's the transform series and transition design is um So I recently had coffee with a woman who just moved to portland and she said even though I just moved here I'm going to be spending a year in pittsburgh at this program. Uh called The transition design seminar that's part of the carney melons school of design Like well that sounds interesting Um, so let me copy the url for the program I'm pasted into our chat. Oops the chat is always hard when I've got screen sharing on But I think this will work. There we go. Um So it turns out the transition design is a nice confluence of Great transition movements meaning the transition towns movement that started in england because we're running out of you know Fossil fuels, but lots of other you know commons transition, which is I think david ballier. No, which is actually uh, michelle balance and a bunch of other people Uh, there's a whole series of kind of people going how do we how do we design our way through or out of the mess That's going on right now. So that's in transition design Then also a big helping of wicked problems and systems thinking and systems change and wicked problems is horse riddles um idea that that some some problems are you know, gigantic so so big that We feel Helpless in front of them and we don't often try to to sort of solve them But they have a bunch of really interesting ideas about how to do that and then um A bunch of things about social change and also about conversation and listening So they're drawing from something called the council of all beings Which comes out of a book by john seed Titled thinking like a mountain actually Joanna macy and john seed thinking like a mountain toward a council of all beings I'll put that link in our chat as well Is that the a sense of fractal? I don't know And now I can't find the chat where'd it go? All right when I stop sharing all I'll I'll share it up And so I can recommend highly watching Uh a talk oops. Let me go back to The program there it is um, so A terry urwin is the the dean of the carnival and school of design She gives this talk here where she explains transition design But it also turns out That cameron talking wise I think Was one of the designers of this whole thing, uh, and then he left carnival on to go to australia. So he's now at a school In in australia instead Um, and so I just wrote him but my the email I have is outdated So I've got to sort of get a hold of of cameron, but I recommend if you're interested in this Watching this talk by terry urwin Which I will also copy into our chat But she's basically just describing where does this come from and what does it do? and it's a very It's a really interesting set of ways of designing together that seemed to me to to Pull a lot of good thinking in the room. So that's uh and that was kind of a not very coordinated way of explaining all of this but Partly, I'm interested in maybe helping implement transition design as a practice with you know consultants So I'm part of the digital life collective Which is a group. Uh, that's sort of virtual, but um, they have a website. Let me make sure I get the right modern website here And they're they're kind of trying to figure out. Um, how do How do humans who are independent workers come together? Uh into business arrangements Uh to do projects together that are equitable and that don't have sort of the old models Uh of work around them so that we actually Can track who put what kind of effort into what where did the project go? How do we work as openly as possible a whole series of things like that? How do we build stuff using technology we trust? Uh And and all of that anyway Let me pause on what I'm saying for a second because I just put like four things that are that have been really super interesting to me in the last month In the conversation and hi tom Any questions on any of these things? I'm happy to dive deeper, but I don't want to keep going Because I'm apparently in free association mode Well, what is that? That's okay. But what was that? What was that the entity? That you're talking about the last one about work the digital life collective. So, um Uh christina bowen who I think was on a recs call. I think we had her as a guest on a recs call a while ago She Is connected up with a bunch of other people philip scheldrake, uh philip prid more brown who's here in portland Uh christina is in the gorge. Uh, so the hood river gorge really close by Uh, and they're trying to come together to build a platform Some of you might know yohakim stroh Yes, no apparently not Todd does So they're they're coming together to build a platform and a way of seeing businesses and also There's a bunch of mapping involved which is partly the attractor for me because christina Is a black belt mapper using a tool called kumu And kumu is a very good systems mapping app Meaning if you're trying to model water scarcity in the columbia river gorge Uh, and you want to draw this affects that and this affects that kumu is a fantastic tool for that In a weird way, it's almost orthogonal to the brain and how I use the brain But the two are actually very complimentary partly because they serve such different purposes So a piece of what that conversation has bubbled up is How many different kinds of maps would you want to Use to see your landscape your territory better And and so susan one of the things I was interested in when you were talking about how You've done four or five talks now on these subjects and how you're getting a bunch of different pieces is Have you tried to draw the landscape of these ideas at all? Have you do you have a visualization that lets you Connect the ideas to one another and to other realms of you know of thinking or or scholarly discipline or whatever Um Are you talking about the brain? No, not that i'm talking about i'm talking about your work and any kind of visualization like You know talking out loud in front of a graphic recorder for an hour and seeing what they draw or Using any no, and I and I'd be happy to to help you know manifest it in some way if you want but There's a there's a so what's that? I need to get a piece of paper. I'm sorry. Ah, okay The drawing on the table won't work What was the last thing you just mentioned? Um Taking a graphic facilitator somebody who's really really skilled at listening to what's happening in a conversation and having them Just draw what you say. Oh god. Yeah, that would that would be interesting. Um Uh, you know, there's multiple ways to to kind of take you know tackle this task And I'd be I'd be very happy to you know Have a separate call and listen to what you're saying and we could even get several of us who are interested in Kind of helping you manifest what these things are Usually and we could take three or four different approaches to Designing it and you can pick your favorite Well, that would be wonderful Because we're you know, you're acting In the arena at the collision of online spaces Chat bots and automation and and good old humans Yeah, right and and there is a just a conflict brewing brewing right in that space and you're You're you're you know at some piece of ground zero of that with a lot of research on how humans react when When shit hits fan in these sort of contexts and Well, yes Yeah, it's like jim spore said to me. He said I kept writing these papers He says you have to know at least three or four literatures to read your paper People say they want multidisciplinarity, but they don't it's a lot of work Yeah It's a lot of work I mean, I mean a part of the reason to have somebody who's good at multiplicity multidisciplinarity Which is way too hard to pronounce is when they are Adept at translating or synthesizing the different disciplines for the insight that lies in the middle at the intersection And so it's too much work for all the other people to do all the work in the different disciplines So we need we need the crystallization the synthesis of of what's happening And the more and the better of that we can deliver to one another. I think the more useful we all become right So the so those five or six stories now one was for the facilities management world one was for the HR slash technology world one was for the Well the tech human and technology community at stanford And in my to my sense that I'm stopping getting embarrassed about saying the same thing over and over again So I'm getting better at saying it. Yeah, but that's it's uh Yeah, I just sort of woke up this week. I had and teddy was here for a few days. So we had a Teddy's murhal some of you may know. Yeah And Anyway, I was explaining to him where I was at in this all this and he said I said, where should this land in the in the enterprise world and his idea was the The uh chief product officers Which is the elevation of product management And he was telling me who he's observed Is project managers who become Uh cpo's I didn't even know there was such a thing But there always is okay, and um And that they are the kinds of people who came out of product management and they could see across all of these different things And and now they they have a mandate to see across Um These things in in for some parts of strategy of the company That is super interesting anybody with thoughts on this And if you had three chief product officers together, would they be C3 pio Probably We could try it's an empirical question. I just couldn't couldn't help that I couldn't It's okay I was going to take it seriously Yeah, that's the good part about deadpan delivery. Yeah Um, so I just added chief product officers to my brain, which I didn't have yet I did have a whole bunch of cxos that showed up in the last, you know decade or two So chief sustainability officers security risk. Here's product chief technology cto's trust officers Uh Chief learning officers knowledge officers chief globalization globalization officers, etc, etc Chief blogging officer. I think that was just somebody's cute blog title You know, this might uh, touch on what you're getting at susan, but I I sort of put it in there You know in our chat box a reference to an interview that was done by skeptic magazine of jared diamond He's got a new book out called a people And it's interesting two things in the interview one is this whole interdisciplinary aspect He apparently gets beat up personally, you know consistently because Touching on various aspects, you know, and and they just say poo poo on him, you know, he doesn't know my field my silo But he doesn't he doesn't worry about that. But the the interesting thing was that His most recent book of evil basically is structured around His wife's work as a psychiatrist for crisis situations And in essence what he does is he's apparently got a checklist of like 12 different aspects of when somebody has gone through a trauma crisis How do you get them to sort of focus on something that that takes them away from potential for suicide and things like that? And so, you know, you whether it's a Cpo, in other words a production manager or whatever if they get Diverted by a sense that this is a crisis. Well, it was me, you know, I'm a victim You know, I'm a victim then they don't focus on again going back to the agency aspect. What can I do? And that's basically what his whole book is trying to say is that we can do things But you have to realize that you're in a crisis environment and you have to start to Analyze things with a bigger broader perspective so that you don't get that sort of focus that Takes you away from really solving the problem with rather than responding to the symptom Well, and there's this whole thing of well feeling guilty about being Heartway into a discipline And not all the way and and because I have a deep a deep discipline I know what it feels like to have somebody say something about language. It's just ridiculous And so I try to keep that in mind You know as I go across but uh, I just love putting pieces together And like you said that that I know you do jerry and it's like when you get that one point It's like I was on the everyday conversation for like two years, right? And then finally Finally, I just realized it was agency that really needed the attention And it was uh, I first Did this in a paper. Well now five six years ago on Automating uh automated cars and driving and and noting that whenever you have an intersection of agency Autonomy in particular You start a recursive process of authorizing Right, so if you authorize agency And then you have and then the agency takes an action that is then That create that goes into the automation, right? But the automation by the time you get enough algorithms in there to spin that sorry The um actually have a telephone the anyway is That it's in that nexus Right that we can really lose track of where things are going on. This was all the The brian arthur digital digital economy thing So there were some good examples in that paper that I can never remember off the top of my head, but they had to do with Things like, um, you know insurance companies calling when your car got in an accident Before before the police got there before anybody got there, right? You're gonna call about oh Do you need help? So we take you to the emergency room and the people in the car are going like what? And now normally, I mean how about anybody that just sets off a whole train of of things And I think it's it's the nexus of those things that can just You can get stories where you just sort of watch it go through and it's going to get lost You know in the digital economy somewhere down there and we're not going to know how it works So anytime you grant agency like this granting agency Is dangerous if you don't know what you're doing Interesting. So a couple thoughts you just triggered one is Man, I wish you'd started using the brain 21 years ago like I did because I would just love See what you captured and how you connected things and the nexus of the various disciplines And if you had at your fingertips the study that you just referred to that I don't know which one and like and what the like what it was It would be so cool to be able to just wander that and talk through it together I mean right now it's my it's it's my fantastic online filing system And maybe we could get brain to read it Maybe not. Yeah, yeah And my bookshelves. I mean I have bookshelves like bill does back there and I have them You know and they're portioned off every now and then I reorganized them Right all the red books over here. I get it. You know like I get into virtual reality Then there's a whole shelf of virtual reality Then I get into the talk and conversation I reshuffle them so that I get all those And I bring them over and it's usually a live set of four shelves by my by my chair Which are the ones that I'm working on the ones that are hot right now. Yeah Yeah, that makes total sense. It's about time for me to switch Right. I kept a whole list. I kept a bottom shelf on innovation because I once read three 23 books before Judy estrin Animation and created this spreadsheet that was you know printed out was like this huge With all these things that went through it. Wow Yeah, anyway, so So that That's like wishful thinking on my part Second thing is that a big piece of rex has to do with the sense of agency So when you say agency that that really rings a bell here Did you like that definition? Yes, I would and and I put it in there for you. Okay. That's right. Um and partly partly The consumerization of our world took away our sense of agency in many ways Yeah, and replaced it with hey you have agency to buy product a or product b that we're advertising to blah blah blah And so there's a long end and there's a question for bill that comes out of that Which is to go to your point about choice That you made early on in the conversation Um, how does that how does that? Relate to to jerry's Conversing point here about choice in consumer land. Why isn't that agency or is it in a way? It's agency, but it's focused In the wrong way In other words, you think that those are your own because you watch the advertising and you've got that the urge to Sort of accomplish the objective of being thinner or having a better car or bigger house or a better You know dressed or fill in the blank because that's what's being thrown at you There's the perspective that somehow those are the correct choices And yet They're they're not only not only the only choices, but they're probably the wrong choices But we don't know that and we've substituted A lot of things for commercial activity. So so Instead of going and being a citizen, uh, why don't you just root for a professional sports team? Because hey that that sounds like city so that must be about city So i'll become a 49ers fan or a redskins fan or whatever um And instead of actually being a citizen of san francisco or dc And connecting in with other citizens do fixing shit. So so to me pro sports I I can't I watch pro sports, but I can't stand what pro sports did to society It's basically substituted in large measure what being a citizen was supposed to be about Yeah And what we get what we then get is these jingoistic Idiots who are busy like flying flags for their favorite team and fighting other cities when they should in fact be collaborating um So so there's a whole bunch of I could go on about agency for for way too long But it's it's super important in the conversation here and at the beginning when kelly was describing She had done an open space for the summit that they just held When you when you get back this sense of agency because something happened You I think it's addictive. I think you want more. It's like it's like that. That was really interesting Well, how do how do I get more of that? And then the last thing I want to throw in from what you were talking about a moment ago about multidisciplinarity Um, is that one of my favorite books that seems to do that well recently was um against the grain by james scott Uh, where he says in the introduction to the book, uh, I'm not an anthropologist I'm not a this I'm not a that but I walked this thing through all my You know smartest people in all these disciplines I could so what this book does is it tries to synthesize all their feedback into A thesis about the early, you know How did humans cope with early civilization and he talks a lot about grains and the role of grains which I it's Super fascinating and and now I'm reading sapiens which turns out to be a really good book. I should have not stopped reading it earlier I saw reading it too. How that I did I stopped early and it was a mistake I think that that then then a couple friends said hey jerry you need to read sapiens because Uh, you've all harari is sort of building parts of your argument Right and and he also fills in parts of my argument because one part of my argument is hey long ago We used to be really smart really connected and we knew how to take care of the commons And that's true But just before that we were basically rapacious predators on earth and we killed off all the megafauna Anywhere we arrived and touched land a megafauna die right away Because we hunt them to death and we don't realize what we're doing So I think I think our knowledge of how to live in community on the commons was very hard one over tens of thousands of years Including the extinction of the easy prey Yeah, um, but then now we're doing it with our ships once we got it. Yes in the oceans Um, but then then we tried to civilize people by bringing them into cities making them grow crops doing this and doing that and the And civilization is not good for humans generally and we resisted that a whole bunch. This is back to the resistance movements Uh, so the chinese had a word for people who'd been moved into cities. They called those people cooked And the people who were outside were called raw Uh, he talks a lot about the word barbarians Which is you know the barbarians are those evil people out there Barbarians were people who hadn't been civilized and brought into the cities yet Often barbarians health records were much better than the people inside cities who had Violent deficiencies and had a much much less rounded diet, etc, etc So so there's uh, really really interesting, um interesting things going on there And uh books and libraries I use goodreads a tiny bit, but I don't really go there much My problem my problem is I feed all this information into my brain and if you wanted to see my book recommendations I can point you exactly to where to look in my brain for those and then when you look at a book in my brain Oftentimes if I liked it it'll be highly connected To um the insights I got from the book And so let me just do a brief screen share of against the grain or 1491 or you know, there's a bunch of others but You'll see what I mean because goodreads doesn't do this So I don't spend the time on goodreads. Goodreads is hey, here's a book. Let's Write a little review and let's see what other people thought. Let's let's click on how many stars we like We're here basically against the grain talks about secondary primitivism, which is what? Um, it's a term defined by pure claustris about uh, what happens and I've actually forgotten about what it was um Uh serial grains made it easy to tax people. So a lot of the a lot of his argument about grains Is that grains uh grow above ground? Grains are visible divisible assessable storable transportable and rational hence Everybody y'all are going to grow grains potatoes are not visible I can't tell where you planted potatoes easily and they don't potatoes don't all ripen at the same moment So I can't have harvest festival and harvest weekend tax you now and take your grain Um taxable cereals required a lot of labor which drove slavery which drove war so There's a really nice article here The case against civilization Etc etc. So so for me The experience of going through literature videos Whatever as I see them is also the experience of weaving these things together as much as I can all the time Just I'm constantly doing that and when I find a link that I really like it's like you found that Puzzle piece you've been missing for for a day and hunting for and you snap it in place and you get this little oxytocin hit or whatever in your head, right? Um, and it and it is it's it's like really you're like, oh damn it good I just I just piece together a little piece of the answer to the to the big questions Um, don't people say to you Jerry you need to focus? Yes, of course that I think that would be a very That might be a very Very good friend like Susan you just need to focus and I was like, no I'm getting my jollies a different way. Well, I'm trying to I'm I'm busy trying to figure out how to get Uh, how to get paid for doing what I'm most passionate about and apparently pretty good at Which is this so I put on the retreat list a note for critiques about pick jerry's brain Dot com got to spell it right Not pick jerry's brian Um, so you all know I I think you all know that I have jerry's brain dot com I think you all know that I have inside jerry's brain dot com, which is kind of the the Conversations like this which I put on youtube meant to be kind of a show of interesting conversations with great people About thorny subjects with some context But I also have picked jerry's brain, which is an attempt to commercialize me Um on purpose and say hey look, I'd love to do a lot more of this and here are the rates um, but A lot of the feedback I from the note I posted to the retreat list came back, you know, I hate picking You know pick my brain turns my stomach etc. I'm like, ah, jeez I'm trying to sort of re harness it and do it on purpose because I actually have a brain that's pickable Yes And I can I can see why I mean I applaud your effort to try to do that because Because I don't ever I mean I should have probably years ago decided I was a brand but I didn't So now that I feel like I'm not You know cornered into anything or part of an organization or anything like that. I'm just doing what I do Which is awesome. And you're finding actually sort of people are finding you who what you know how to do Yeah, I mean I just was in england in london doing a a workshop first off workshop between My guy who does facilities management corporate real estate who put together a workshop of very folk among them Among them a puppeteer He's looking for people to get, you know, get the facilities people out out of the box and think about other kinds of things and This puppeteer's example. She's very very good puppeteer hand and she had this example of Some work she did with surgical teams And she would just gave us a little typology of puppets one of which was Benroco, I think in japan, which is about I don't know if that's the right word Which is about it has, you know, several puppets And they're people and they're working very closely together three of them on something And it's this whole how choreography of how do you work together when you're on, you know So if you think about a surgical team in front of, you know, a body and And having these a number of people who have to be completely coordinated in a small space all doing different things This was this gave them a I need a word for this. There must be a word for this sort of stepping one step away From your own world, but it's the same world and seeing how they handle it To provide innovation in in sort of how you manage surgery It's like a third person view of your own world. It's it's you you stepped out. It's like an out-of-body experience Of something like a surgical theater Yeah, um Yes, well, and it was theater for a long time. It was theater and it was all surgical theaters because you had they had rows of people watching to see what the hell How do I take out an appendix and have the patient maybe survive? Yeah Yeah, anyway, there was that person there was a person who had been Who had does statistics does training for the olympic teams for brit-britten? and And you get you get in there and it's just it's as intricate as anything else about what makes a difference about when you eat What which bodies, you know, how much sweat does somebody lose and how does that mean? How do you and they they measure it? it's different for different people and different in different situations and It goes on and on and on and you realize it's as complicated as brain surgery or you know, it's And another person was a food person who'd done a lot of called a foodist and they do food for For for startups in london the way somebody must do it here and They're they're very good. And of course the message was something like it's not about food And what is it about and a whole bunch of things she's actually done a great job of Searching secondary research and doing secondary research on different things that might matter about this whole thing And then there was anyway, I'll stop there. Well, there was a guy who grew up in egypt and then he became He worked as a unit's her special services were For written and now he's on his own as a consultant and And Blah blah blah. I mean and we We the three of the six of us because the conference didn't come off as planned Decided to meet in london and talk to each other anyway for a day and it was Magnificent, I'm not sure what he's going to do with it But there's a lot of this going on. Sounds great. Sounds fabulous. Yeah Thank you anybody else want to check in or What's something else that's uh mildly rexie on the table Hey, I stuck a link in at the top of the chat. I think About It's a facebook link and I just it was just something I learned this week that I Is maybe ponder that the idea that the traditional meditation where you sit in our quiet it might be paternalistic structure And then like women are never able to sit and be quiet. You can't sit and be quiet with a child on your left And that it's it's part of the patriarchy and I was like, whoa, I had a lot of that So I thought it was kind of a fun thing to noodle with Well, I was thinking about things like that exactly in that vein about things like I was thinking about Writing software and focus and how intense that can be for people and how they can go for hours And they they have to keep this this thing in mind. It's very much like The flight controllers used to do Manually and they were known to have their limit to how many planes they could do it once it was somewhere between 19 and 26 I heard and And never to go over your boundary. Don't worry if you can only do 19 Just don't go over that because you can't keep track of them And then I was thinking about other things that take that kind of intense focus like fly fishing and golf And things like that and I started to think oh, these are all male things Well, I see mentions shooting and I like I had a good friend. It was a you know a rifle a competitive shooter And like the whole point is like still your heart kind of you know, yeah Well, I discovered meditation on my own one day in Kansas when I was a sophomore in college Um, oh, I said that no to something rexie wants but I was feeling miserable and I thought And I was Anyway, I want to describe the context but I was walking across a little park to the library because I was managing the library for the summer for the college And uh, and I just thought I'm standing here and look at this dandelion until I'm I'm ready to go And I did and I had this wonderful physical sensation of you know something coming up my spine and spreading over my head and dropping all the way down and That has stayed with me the next year. I went back to college. I got straight A's And every time I when I lose it I have to Remind myself, but I don't have children. I don't I mean there's a reason for that Hello Thank you um Just um part of that post and I haven't uh, Dave I'll go back and read the the post a little bit, but it also talks about I think uh Emotional work and things like that And one thing I wanted to share here in case it's useful And I don't know that we've covered this in rex calls although we might have Did I have I talked about the difference between emotional labor and emotional work? This goes this goes back to arlie russell hawk child And and I've tried to find a more definitive source and I don't know where it might be in anything she's written So I might be putting my own layers on top of this But my understanding is that emotional labor Is jobs that require you to be really happy friendly for example like like flight attendant where thank you very much come back Very really nice to see you. Hello Um, and my first job it was at disneyland in the park where you were greeting people and taking tickets or doing something And you had to be happy like better being a pretty good mood So that's emotional labor Emotional work is actually quite different emotional work is when you notice that that joe bob in the corner really Hasn't spoken up in the whole meeting and seems totally distracted and maybe afterward you pull him aside You say are you okay? emotional work is basically managing The emotions of a group and it tends to be done by women because women tend to be much more sensitive to it Etc etc and it's it's also deprecated by men men don't realize it's actually valuable So that when something happens at the end and it was successful They will they will just like gloss over the fact that somebody was sort of maintaining the team as a team And that that was emotional work that mattered and probably it was being done by women involved with the team in some sense so um I partly say that in order to you know motivate men to notice it and pay attention and pull some of that weight because it's really It's emotional work is actually super important work Um emotional labor is sort of controversial and it's more it's kind of a labor issue in different ways but but understanding what emotional work is and how it and the gender stereotypes around it And trying to build awareness was something interesting for me. There was a good example on KQED's uh, what's his name? Krasny Michael Krasny yesterday I was interviewing A number of women who've written books about Being venture capitalists And what their what their paths were et cetera and it was a story told about a woman who Um was on the board one of the first women on the board uh on up on a in a venture capital company And she was oh no in response to that was somebody who just recently gone on to a board who was woman and um and had Asked the the guy after the board meeting asked that you know, how did you you know, how do you think that went? How'd you feel about it all the rest of it? And when he was reporting back To the interviewer about what was different about having a woman that he cited that exact example Unabashedly And what way do you mean he cited it like like it was so good to have somebody here who understands how to do that Well as as reckoned he had to think about what was different about having a woman on the board And that's the that's the thing that he mentioned Tom Hi, everybody Hey Sorry, I got here late. I see a lot of familiar faces in I'm very much enjoying this. Thank you very much. I appreciate this and it's been very nice listening to what you've been saying um, but I just wanted to pipe in here because I I recently moved in with my partner and she has a job that's very much like what we're talking about here and I you know people will describe what they do But now that she and I both would both work from home so I can hear her doing what she does And this morning what she was doing is she's hired as a coach for a bunch of executives and companies Her primary class client is the CEO and that he had a meeting today And she really was not part of the meeting but she was listening in and everyone knows she's listening in Sometimes she moderates but that today it was just a monitoring And she uh heard the CEO ask one of the direct reports, okay You know we've identified the job that you'll be doing tell me the resources you'll be needing and He was very much challenging her throughout this whole thing And there's marci taking notes and i'm asking her what she's doing The tone of the entire conversation shifted in the entire meeting because when you tell somebody when you say look I respect you for what you do and if you tell me what you need to get your job done You should be the expert in knowing that And by challenging her he was almost he kind of shut her down and shut other people down in the meeting And so what she does is after the meeting is over. She just debriefs the guy Did you notice how The conversation shifted so he knows he doesn't have that emotional intelligence But he's very much aware of the fact that he needs a coach for that type of thing And it's just fascinating to hear You know when when I observe it I would probably make the same mistake But when I when you step back and listen to these things happening. I go, oh, it's very clear to me So if I were in that conversation, I would not have been noticing the same thing. Yeah um And so the the guy she coached afterward was the ceo who had uh Been doing the challenging. Yeah, that makes total sense It's it's amazing. I mean one of my favorite things in this realm is the privilege of privilege is not noticing the privilege Um And the the problem is that Men are just abilities to this stuff Just do not We just do not get it Um, and it's it's like Scary frightening sometimes because the effects that has you know in the longer term Um, you just tell me what you just said reminded me of the piece. I the brief piece. I wrote after the cabana hearings Uh, I'll just post it here on the chat And basically I started listing adjectives. I was like pristine blasey ford was Quiet differential polite honest, whatever whatever seemed honest. Anyway, um respectful Uh, and then I listed like cavanaugh and I got to like 33 adjectives Including whiny contentious Uh Assaultive or something like that. I don't remember exactly what it was And and so by the time I'd gotten done writing all these things and I kind of held them each against my experience of the hearing And I'm like yep. Yep. Check that one. Check that one. Check that one In subordinate was one of them for for cavanaugh, you know So when when Amy klobuchar who has a history of family alcoholism and abuse asks him As he ever blacked out and he'd like storms back at her. Have you ever blacked out? Like Jesus christ, seriously? And so my read on the whole hearing is how can anybody believe him not her how? How is this possible the math on the adjectives doesn't work? Right. He's acting like a guilty person and and the moment he starts talking in the afternoon in the hearings that right after lunch I'm like, oh, wow. He's decided he has no shot at being a supreme court justice He's just gonna freaking cry like a baby And some men interpreted that as spring. Yeah And I'm like, wow, we're so far away from any kind of woke on this. We're just so far from understanding um, the emotional dynamics at play Anyway, that was that was my read and to me That seemed plain as day And to many women it seemed plain as day plain as day like wow, there it is Yeah, the the visual signals in the auditory signals that we pick on the loud ones are easy to pick up on But it's those who are noticing the quiet ones in the corners very interesting You mentioned the books taken earlier and I love this idea Just taking a long deal of human history And this idea that we evolved to express our Mont state of mind on our faces that we physically change our bodies to help other people know what's going on inside That's amazing for me. I just truly truly amazing And I just as you were talking I'm just realizing that as we are moving to different communication platforms Like right now with what we're doing we can see each other's face. It's really helped But what are emojis? You know I'm about either us trying to figure out what is a shrug? What is an eye roll? How do you convey the most those more subtle things? I would love to know if there's any understanding on gender differences in terms of use of them. Oh, yes um also Also, I love that we're heading towards sort of the subtleties of this and and how it works I will point the more cynical maybe angry part of me will point out that Trump understands That what's being said actually does not matter And he will sometimes turn the sound off while watching himself do something You know in a in a repeat to see because what matters is when somebody walks by the screen in the airport and looks up at cnn What was on the screen and what was on the chiron underneath and does it look dominant? Does does your first does your system one go? Oh? Yeah, this guy's in charge. He must be smart And that's all he cares about All the rest of the subtleties and nuance and interesting things we just talked about He is intentionally shoving against the wall and saying ha ha gotcha Yeah, the idea that uh emojis can Can play can play the entire role is just to me ridiculous because as I was When I was in market research and we would watch people's faces You learn to read the micro expressions that are subconscious Because they will look at something and you still flash a look at the stuff But they'll tell you oh, yeah, I'd like that new idea And you know they don't All right, and so the idea of using emoji you're using your you're very thoughtful conscious mind But I want to know what's going on really behind all that and we're missing a lot of that when we don't have the face to face So the paul ekman is the researcher on micro expressions And if you want to see them in action watch a couple episodes of lie to me, which is a acute crime drama with tim roff Who is an apparently an expert in micro expressions and uses them to solve crimes And some we're getting a is that susan is that from your side? somebody's beeping ah Maybe it's the robots coming to get you But I understand that the robots are not going to have like a warning beep We'll just be vaporized without knowing what happened No bell flashing 12 o'clock thing. No no the flashing 12. I think they fixed that I don't know my kitchen's turned into a christmas tree. Oh, that's good. I think I like it I have something that's meeting in the house, and I can't find it and I it sounds like a fire alarm that's out of batteries, maybe yeah Susan that that is my that's my dishwasher So the sound of not in your house is this is so awesome I Thought it was in my house. Is your dishwasher out of batteries. What kind of dishwasher do you have today? Look, I've moved into a new house with machines. I don't know yet. So their personalities are just being Discovered My old dishwasher did not insist on being emptied when it was finished Yeah, uses to fit still with clean dishes inside. This is like empty me now empty me now And the microwave just is uh of annoying. Yeah Um, it was something I said that I was thinking about and if you don't mind the group I'm talking to a different way to take this because I'm going to connect two things you're mentioning Jerry with The idea that in safety and he talked about something called fictive language Which you know it's the idea that we've came up with the ability to talk about things that are not present but are not immediately seen and ideas of like gods in the sky And then now take that to the conversation you were talking to about the sports teams What are these unifying ideas that we have and I really feel is you know Jerry and I were talking about this at one point too that we're losing the strength of our unifying ideas Is um dissipating it can go you know, it's it's a lot of different things You know, it's the bowling alone idea that we're not all belonging to certain parts of public life Um, we've had this very strong nationalism that is one of the Predominant ideas that pulls us and binds it that binds us together and it's being used in both good and bad ways Um, and then we have this idea My job is like is my identity. I belong to this group called gm. I belong to this group called microsoft What are those emergent ideas that we need not that are not sports teams that are not the company or say that They're not your country. I think there's a yearning right now. So bigger unifying ideas that just I'm not I'm not seeing them and you know, there's weak signals in a lot of these and Since Gary you and I talked about this a little bit recently. I'd love to hear what the what the group thinks about What is it that can bring human beings together that is not nationalism religion or corporatism? um, so I've got a bunch of stuff on this in my brain, which I'm happy to share in a sec, but um, so Tom a thing you just mentioned. I think is the titanic battle that matters hugely that We have a set of scripts in our heads that are our belief system about how things work and how things should work and right this minute It's homo economicus and capitalism and a bunch of other things that are running most of the economy and most of the world And and there are big variants of it like capitalism with chinese flavors, but you know Uh, a lot of the same narratives of homo economicus. I think are probably probably true over there, although I think that's an interesting separate discussion um So putting a new script in our heads is what politicians and other kind of power brokers try to do and if you win You get to create policy run the table for a really long time um, and so that And so I like after trump won I went back and tried to figure out what what's going on here How did that how did somebody manage to insult every? narrow group and still pull off A slim majority victory in in this election and uh, so I think that the mechanisms of this when you get skeptical what I just said about not not listening to the audio, but only seeing the the The images on screen. There's a whole bunch behind that that goes into sort of persuasion technology and then and uh The seduction community and the whole series of angles on this that that go back on how you hack Public discourse in order to drive the public conversation by setting the means um And so I think that's what's happening right this very minute And we're at the beginning of another intense electoral cycle where this is going to happen again And one of my big open questions right now is how do you diffuse this? How do you counteract it? What is the antidote who is doing the right thing? Elizabeth Warren is showing up with policy. She is a policy wonk. She is brilliant. Her policy initiatives are fabulous They might in fact be too down deep in the belly of the beast for anybody to go. Oh, this is exciting I feel like I'm connected to her and I'm a part of the world Pete Buti judge is taking the exact Opposite Um approach. He's like it's too early to talk policy. I know I need policy platforms But we need to and then he says in his actual launch speech a couple Sundays ago. He says we need to change the channel He uses the tv metaphor Perfectly to say we've been completely fascinated by this trump fiasco on stage We need to change the channel. We need to come together. He's from a rust belt city. He's religious He's this he's that he's like a really interesting bridge builder But when you hear him talk, I hear the kind of thing you were asking for tom I hear in his in his rhetoric Precisely the kind of unifying messages that I think are needed With an appropriate dose of anger for what's been done to us and what's happened recently So he's not letting people off the hook for this the situation that we're in at all Um, so I like that a whole bunch and I'd love to hear what everybody else thinks Then jones by the way has also done a lot to bridge the cultural divide and a lad, uh, there's a A documentary recently that I'll show in my brain while when I stopped talking A woman who was born in pakistan almost killed in pakistan emigrated to london emigrated to the u.s Decides through this i'm under so much assault. She starts to go interview people in the alt right and the white supremacist movement She takes her little video camera into their shooting range And dens and then living rooms and talks to them and her obvious courage in doing this and vulnerability in it softens them It's super interesting And so that approach of making yourself vulnerable and listening with care and respect and all that I think is another big opening But i'm i'm busy collecting What are the mechanisms for? A creating a sense of global unity b bridging these cultural divides that are being provoked intentionally These are these are cultural chasms that are being being Created very much on purpose Because it helps you win elections Well, what worries me is that of the I can't say that guy's name. What's that guy's name? So this is terrible, but the best mnemonic is booty judge Booty judge booty judge booting judge Well, buddha judge is what his husband says buddha judge, but when I heard buddha judge, I'm like, oh, that's just like booty judge And it's much more. Yeah, so there we are right, but um I worry that we don't have enough presence of mind to ignore the hijacking of our amygdala's And I think I think trump has hijacked our amygdala's and lots of things have hijacked our amygdala's And I think in order to appreciate buddha judge and we're going to have to uh that some we have to have a way of Getting people out of that space and change the channels a nice one It doesn't go quite far enough but It's a good one to explain that a entry I put in there My personal approach is a more of a spiritual one And if anybody has ever listened to the the material of matthew kahn He basically sort of explains how all of this is sort of like part of the process In other words that to an extent Trump is the perfect person to have in there to coalesce All of these sort of you know sense of how we should be going at at this and more of a You know social and emotionally balanced way And that ultimately we've got to balance the feminine with masculine And you need a a true punching bag like like trump in order to be able to Accomplish that because we all know that the democrats are you know The liberals are not necessarily easily coalesced on their own And so they they need somebody that helps them to do that And I've listed one you know matthew kahn has one on youtube called the most important spiritual decision And the other one i'm going to try and find is on finding safety Which susan speaks to your whole point in other words. How do you address the amygdala? And his whole point is that if you understand that you're a spiritual entity having a physical experience You're safe You don't have to worry about all this fear mongering, etc It's just a process that they are going through In order to get attention in order to release the the energies that are caught up in them, etc, etc, etc All i'm getting at is that that happens to be my own personal way of allowing it to be going on Understanding that it's a process that we're supposed to process In other words, don't make it wrong And in fact, he's very very much into the idea of whenever somebody complains Compliment them bless them You know, I can certainly take their complaints. I can take their criticism. Can they take my blessings? You know, so I mean it's it's really sort of an interesting way to Sort of wake up in the morning with a sense that this is just like a play You know, like shakespeare said that we're all just sort of sprouting around on the stage And we're supposed to be incorporating and experiencing and absorbing these experiences so we can learn from them it's interesting because having a remove from the situation allows you to respond differently and being triggered drags you into the situation in a way that's usually Detrimental to your ability to respond to your ability to do anything and and yet Abstracting out of a situation is also not very connective to others Which is part of what susan was was talking about as well. So i'm wondering how to combine those things right Well, i'm sort of putting in here that the math you kind of think on finding safety Because in essence we've got to find a way to structure it so we can deal with the things the way that you're talking about it His particular way by the way of addressing the way that you just put it in other words that He's that really gone. He says Whenever you're you're responding to something you're expressing concern Look around the room you ran. Where is that concern? Where is trump? Where are the alt right? Where are the fascists? Where are the problems? They're not in the room And so are we really are we allowing the media and everything to make it up? Are we allowing trump to make it up that these are real problems? When you walk out and go to dinner or lunch or whatever are you bumping into them? Are they fighting you every inch of the way, you know to get to your lunch? He's trying to sort of point out that that we that amygdala response Is somewhat motivated by our Taking it in and making it important when it's not really in our face, right? Right, I mean, uh, who is it that says suffering is optional? Um, I can I can tell you from my brain, but but you know in Here we go suffering as optional is byron katie who does the work Um and in particular one of the things she says is that he suffers more than necessary who suffers before it is necessary and uh Tom is typing in the questions that the work involves which are great But I made a she made a really good children's book that I ended up buying for when I got a granddaughter who started to read on her own I bought byron katie's book to help her understand how to deal with you know The bully or the bad day at school. That is awesome That is awesome and part of the process of the work Let's you step outside the triggering situation. That's that's what she's sort of doing like You know if if this weren't true would my world change or I'm forgetting I've got it in my brain There we go And just before we wrap our call So she wrote loving what is four questions that can change your life and the questions are is this thing true Can you absolutely know that it's true How do you react what happens when you believe that thought and what would you be without that thought? That's roughly the path of the work Um, and I've got it under enumerated wisdom, which means I like it Uh and life advice where I've got a bunch of things like this, but uh, I think processes like this are really valuable I don't I haven't I haven't heard anybody give an effective critique of of byron katie's work Of the of this particular approach. I like it a lot Uh, and then can you absolutely know that know that it's true? Um, it's funny I just uh located something that I really like on this front, which I'm going to show you right now It's called street epistemology Um, and there's a guy who's doing I just backed him on patreon for a buck a month, but um And uh, he's got a series called let's chat Um and his name Is tie wells And he sits down and starts talking to people he says, you know, tell me something that you believe to be absolutely 100% true That's that's how he usually starts these conversations And then he uses rhetorical techniques to try to uncover like Is it plausible that they're 100 convinced about this thing? And you know, one of them is very religious and he believes, you know, absolutely believes that everything is about jesus here's you know, this one Etc. Etc. And it's really quite fascinating because he's having calm Uh calm conversations that he then um broadcasts And we have gone over our 90 minutes. So I we should wrap our call unless Unless any of you have something you'd love to talk about right now. I'm happy to hang out if if you want to Ask something about what we were just talking about but otherwise we can bounce the next uh For the next next call I just want to just throw a little bit in there bill I don't know if you've got any of there's a guy named Robert Sepulchre At stanford who wrote a book like zebras don't get ulcers This idea of there's really nothing around you bothering you at this point. He's a neuroscientist who talks about these How what's really going on in your brain and you're letting the stressors That are only in your head Bother you too much What was his name again? This guy Robert Sepulchre. Okay. Okay, right. I've listened to him right He's got a new book out that's on the best seller. You know, I got it, but I haven't started it. I'll behave this one right here Somebody sort of count up how many books we mentioned in this A bunch Too many to read a bunch. Well, that's why I do five minute universities. Um And i'm gonna put a link to him in my brain so you can kind of browse around. Yeah Go ahead Guys, you're so similarly there's a guy named brian johnson who has a website called philopticers, you know And he has little videos and and like two paid summaries for these different books. He's a big fan of Who we're talking about Byron? Katie Katie Byron. Yeah, by Byron. Katie Byron. Katie. Yeah, I've got a couple really good summaries of her work, too Um, I I only did a couple five minute use I'd like to do more of them But I just discovered recently that the one I did about Carol Polanyi is the great transformation has 25 000 views It's one of my most most viewed videos of anything I've done And I found that out because somebody said hey jerry look and it turns out that it was on the it was on the syllabus For a mook about sustainability and resilience, and I don't know what else I'm like Rock on I you know, I had I had no idea and it was really cool to find out So I'd like to figure out how do I do more of that? Um, so with that, why don't we bid and adieu? Thank you very very much for being here. This is really enjoyable to just co-think and to Try to figure out how we might you know make each other's expressions of what we're thinking about a little more powerful and all of that So I really appreciate it Thanks everybody. All right. Thanks everybody