 This is an inside Jerry's brain call on Friday, March 15th, 2019. We're already halfway through March. I'm in Portland, Oregon where suddenly we almost don't have to wear a jacket anymore. It feels like spring is about to spring. The leaves have not yet cracked open, but you can feel them. They're like this pent-up energy, perhaps this pent-up abundance, one could say that is on its way. I'm excited to host a call on Abundance Mindset, but in relation to profitability. I will do a little bit of background to just open up the topic and say what it means and how it fits, and then we'll just open the floor as we usually do. Oh, good. I just saw Mayanka, Logan are here, April's on. Excellent. Everybody, when you first come into the call, you're muted, so learn how to unmute yourself in the Zoom. If you'd like to jump in and I'll do just a little bit of opening of the subject here, and then we'll open the floor and anybody can jump in. It's a free-for-all at that point. In case you're wondering what we mean by inside Jerry's brain, I'll do a little bit of a tour. This piece of software that I am now screen-sharing is called The Brain. As you can see up on the left here, it says The Brain. And it's a mind map. It's a mind map that I've been filling for 21 years. So there's 21 years worth of things in this mind map. And the place I've pointed to is today's call, which is 1903 means 2019 March, because I always do a year month, because that way they alphabetize nicely. Inside Jerry's brain, abundance mindset and profitability is our topic. But there was an earlier inside Jerry's brain call, which Che Ferenbach was our guest on, because she and I had been going back and forth on this just broad notion of abundance and what's up with abundance. So this is the link. This is actually a YouTube link to that particular call. And if you were in my brain and you clicked on this link, it would send you off to that video on YouTube, which is kind of fun. And I've connected it to the broad topic of abundance mindset, which is under abundance. And there's a whole bunch of things under abundance, like wealth and the abounding river. I don't remember why I put that in. Here's something I kind of invented. Scarcity equals abundance minus trust, which I think will come up a bit in our call, because these things are actually related in funny ways. And then I just noticed that abundance mindset was not connected to mindset. So that gives me an opportunity to show you how this brain thing works. If I grab any one of these three little circles, which are the only ways that one thought can connect to the other. If I grab the top one and drag up and let go, I get an open little space. And now I can say mindset, because I know that I've got mindset in my brain. And I know enough to find this one over here, because I've got a lot of mindset in my brain, apparently. So this is mindsets, which is the general topic of mindsets. And the W next to it means that there's a Wikipedia page associated with this. So if I click on this, I'm just going to do it now. If I click on it, it will launch my browser over to the Wikipedia page about mindset. So that's what the brain thing is. And the reason I call these calls inside Jerry's brain is that we just want to have a nice conversation about an interesting topic with you all interesting folks. But we'd like to have it with this added context of the brain, like a mind map that I've been curating for a really long time, so that we could put into the conversation the kinds of things that I've already sort of discovered and curated, but also so that during the call, I can add things to my brain that we all put together new ideas that we come up with, things that sort of make sense in that way. So that's kind of his background on the brain. Any questions on that? We're good? Oh, good. Mr. Homer's here. Excellent. Good. So abundance sounds like a good thing, right? It sounds like it's always a good thing. And it turns out that it's not always a good thing. So I'll go actually back to screen sharing because I was just starting in the shower this morning as I was thinking about this call. I was like, okay, okay, I need to create a thought, which I did, called when abundance is harmful. And for example, American food policy favored creating cheap carbohydrates and really messed things up. So we made it, we subsidized farmers, we made it after World War II, roughly, there was a policy initiative to make sure that corn and soybeans and things like that were insanely cheap. So all sorts of policies were instituted and industrial farming was favored. And we made it really, really cheap to create to create carbohydrates, sort of corn, starches, other sorts of things. And as a result, we have an obesity epidemic in the U.S. So I think I will click on obesity in the U.S. and connect, make us a bit of a causal link. So now I've just connected, U.S. obesity is caused by overproduction of food. I can actually make that link here. And then here's a bunch of articles about obesity, particularly in the U.S. connected to a bunch of articles about obesity. And so there's a piece of this which is that abundance isn't always plainly a good thing. And then there's another piece of this which is about basically fake abundance, which is, let me see where I put it, abundance mindsets. I know it's under fake stuff, but I put it under, oh, pseudo abundance, that's what I called it. Let me actually edit this thought to be called pseudo and then fake abundance so I can find it easily next time. And so a different kind of abundance that isn't necessarily good for us is that we have the appearance of abundance. When you walk into a store, there are aisles and aisles and aisles of product, but when you go and turn the boxes or the jugs around, you discover that they're really only made by a couple of companies in many cases. Like the detergent aisle has probably 50 different detergents made by two companies. The cereal aisle has probably 50 different cereals made by two companies. So in many cases we have functioning duopolies or monopolies on a lot of things, yet it looks like there's a lot of abundance, partly because marketing is creating this perception of difference between products so that different people will buy different things thinking that they're getting something that's abundant. But in fact, it isn't really necessarily abundance. And here I think we can get into really interesting philosophical debates which I'm looking forward to because on the one hand, if you go to an old East German store or to a store in Venezuela right now and you see that there's nothing on the shelves, that's the opposite and it's not desirable. But I'm trying to figure out what is the balance between those kinds of things. And then I'll give one more example which is because we have a couple of guests on the call from India and I will ask you to correct my history here. But basically India was a whole series of kingdoms and fiefdoms and so forth before the British Raj shows up. But it was mostly self-sufficient for food and clothing before the Raj shows up. The British Raj basically illegalizes the loom because the British Raj wants to turn India into a plantation where it will create cotton and other sorts of goods, ship them all the way over to England where they get manufactured in Manchester and other sorts of places in the early industrial revolution and then ship back to India for purchase. So Britain wants India to no longer make native fabric. And one of the reasons I think why Gandhi as one of the symbols of his movement was spinning his own cloth and wearing cloth that he had spun was a reminder of this. He was reminding people that India had in fact just recently, just not 300 years before, not 200 years before, been self-sufficient in these sorts of things. There was an abundance for everybody. So that's a form of abundance turned into scarcity on purpose in order that capitalism, in this case mercantilism and early industrialism might thrive. It was done intentionally to both create raw material sources and a big market for products. So that's a different kind of tangle of abundance and scarcity introduced to reduce abundance. And then I'll just give one more little story in the early factories and in the trades before the factories. If you were a carpenter, for example, you had a right to pick up and take home the things that fell on the floor. So if you had cut a piece of wood and there were a couple little pieces that came off or other extra pieces, that was yours to take home and it was just a side benefit of the job. That was a form of abundance of a sharing of production in the early industrial age that went away and what we have now is, in some cases, inspections of workers as they enter and leave the factory so that they take nothing with them. We have sort of a denuding of this sharing of assets in different ways. So I will pause there and stop the screen sharing and then I will apologize because as we start talking, I will occasionally take over the screen not trying to interrupt you while you're talking but trying to add to what you're saying or collect up what you're saying and add it into the brain context. So having thus lit a tiny fire, I would invite anybody who'd like to ask questions then throw in comments, take the conversation anywhere you would like and remember that mostly you are muted right now. Jerry, I heard you say in previous calls, etc. that something to the effect that abundance is not the opposite of scarcity and I think that needs to be understood if we're talking about the mindset of abundance and actually drop a few prins about what really is abundance and what are the mindset elements beyond a concept of saying abundance. So because there's lots of confusion on abundance meaning excess, you just pointed out just now that in capitalism it has a different connotation then there's something in the chat which talks about abundance, underlying the disposable society. I think Ken has talked about that. So probably there's some value in trying to trace where this mindset has come from why has it actually become a mindset and then if we want to reverse it or we want to mitigate the ill effects of the lack of abundance in terms of thinking and in terms of mind. What are the things that we need to do because I think that would segue into the topic of today which is abundance and in relation to profitability because then we need to also dwell on this word profitability and see what profitability really means and what does it connot. Is it the money that I for work that I do and I put into my pocket and my pocket swells or is profitability something larger than putting into my pocket and then disposing it off in the way that I want to as an individual. Beautiful. Thank you. And I'll start by answering but I think other people are probably starting to answer your question as well and I want to hear from everybody else as well. And thank you also for adding in the original premise of this call which is how does profitability fit. But there's a couple interesting works on the topic of plenitude on sort of sufficiency, having enough whatever that means and the place we have arrived at is that capitalism and I'm going to be a little extreme here but capitalism needs us never to have enough. It capitalism requires us to be purchasing a lot of things so that the capitalist engine can keep making things and selling things etc etc. If we should decide that we have enough and we have long lasting things that we can pass down to other generations you can see Patagonia had a really interesting ad campaign a couple of years ago called have less stuff or buy less stuff. And what is it don't buy this jacket here we go this is the Patagonia had a campaign called don't buy this jacket which was in contrast to throw away culture the disposability of our culture and they were trying to say hey buy something good we make good stuff so buy our stuff but pass it down or bring it in and we'll fix it or whatever else right that was a way of doing it and this is actually a form of profitability with enough with plenitude and I think that this conversation about the opposite of scarcity is not abundance it's something different and I think it's somewhere in between these notions of enough how do you know you have enough and plenitude of there being sufficiency without overabundance without waste without things like that so let me just start with that and I'll come back to the profitability thing but let me start there and see what everybody else thinks I am well Tom how are you good just a couple different thoughts on what connect a couple of things you mentioned earlier where you're talking about the obesity due to the abundance of carbohydrate calories that are made cheap in the industrialized food supply and also the cotton when you view these things not as food but as product this is what tends to happen and how do we have a different mindset as to what are the things that we want to have there's food something that should be a product now there's food something that should be a right I just put a link in the chat there that I don't know it very well but this Jose Luis is coming up with a he's trying to get people to think of food not so much as something that should be commoditized but reconceptualizing it as something that can be abundant and available to everybody if we think of it as something that we're all entitled to so I'm just trying to figure out how this idea of when you how do you think of these things is it abundant or not abundant can really be determined by whether or not you think of it as something that we all need and want to provide to each other or is it something that America is like for example the food supply we subsidize our tax dollars the United States subsidize the growing of cheap corn so that these companies can make a bigger profit than our tax dollars subsidize turning that corn into high-produced corn syrup so other companies can make cheap profits and so the idea is the food was just a mechanism for moving money around that mindset creates this scarcity idea or this abundance idea and this is wondering how other people think of that and I think a piece of this comes down to how your own picture of human history looks because some people believe that we used to be hungry all the time that way back when when we were tribal and sort of moving around the land and scrounging around for nuts and berries you know the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was not abundant was actually a case of hunger most of the time and I'm of exactly the opposite point of view which is that most cultures around the world had to work very little to make enough food to have enough food to live really quite well and that people who understood how to live on the land and take advantage of the lands ebbs and flows so right about now is when there's a run on the river and all the fish come up to spawn so if we set a couple traps with stones and there's a 30,000-year-old weir on a river in Australia that the aborigines created and a weir is basically just a trap and it's open most of the time except when the fish would run they would go seal the bottom of the weir so that fish would come in the top the open piece upriver get caught in this little stone fence basically all it is stone ring seal the top pick out a lot of fish process them dry them do whatever so that they'll last a little longer and go on about the day and when the Australians show up they look at these fishermen just kind of reaching in a picker and they're like these people are so lazy that's the commentary written down in journals by the Australians who first show up and what these people are doing is they're just they're living in an abundant world so you don't have to work really hard to survive and eat and if you have a variety of things that you're eating you're healthier etc etc etc so I can put a couple of book titles in here and I'll show them also in my brain as we go but I'm saying all of that about history because the notion of food as a commons as a thing that we all as a community just create and have a right to and get from the community work I think comes partly from that history from that place and we have substituted commons completely with the idea that there are scarce resources that we are allocating through markets in economics through this system that apparently is the best way to allocate scarce resources or something like that right because that's one of the definitions of economics and it's one of the things we think that that markets do for us is that they allocate things really well but it turns out it's far from the only allocation model so that's my own take on these sorts of things but what do other people think? I think I'd love to ask about the last thing that you just said about what alternative allocation models there are because it seems that that is where the entire question rests so do you have apart from markets or apart from say perfect commons which we know can be easily abused what sort of alternative potentially abundance sort of maintaining allocation models do we have? So for example and this is going to sound long ago and in a tiny place but in the Algonquin tribes of the American Northeast was a matrilineal tribe and basically everybody would go and find things there's a whole story behind this about how most of North and South America and most of Australia was under active human management so that things were pretty abundant to find and as you moved around you could get things but whatever surplus there was that wasn't eaten right now was put in a longhouse that was kind of the storage house and longhouses were sort of the way they live they had some for storage some for families and the elder women of that particular tribe had to say to which things came out of the longhouse were given to which families or which people so that's an actual allocation mechanism and it has to do with human relationships in a small village context but there's no reason that can't be fractal and that can't replicate in many many places and at many times and that's just one example and I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist so I don't have that and I try hard to collect these kinds of stories because I love them but that's just one method of many and Doug is going to jump in right now and perhaps offer another So another piece of history that fascinates me Aristotle and Plato used the word economics meaning eco home nomos management or something like that and they discussed what would happen if you had a well managed estate and the view was a well managed estate would have necessity to produce a surplus then the question is what do you do with the surplus so Aristotle says the last thing you should do with it is spend it on things it should be used to create leisure in order to study philosophy and politics so here you have a purpose for the production of a surplus which legitimates that it's possible to have that kind of conversation What's amazing is that model of intent about surplus moved into the early Christian community and the idea that the estate was God's estate because he had given it to humanity in order that humanity would produce a surplus in order to create meditation and prayer so the Greek culture moved into Christianity we lose that entirely because historians look at the Latin translation of the Old Testament which talks about management and not about economy but the word economia is all through the Greek version of the new and Old Testaments to me what I like there is that it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about what you should do with the surplus Exactly and I'm pointing here to a blog post in a video that I did some time ago that plays off this difference and I'll put the link it's easier for me to fetch the link if I stop sharing but I'll put the link here in our chat and where I went with this particular video was ecology and economy both come from oikos the household why are ecology and economy so often at odds why are these things fighting each other when they're both trying to manage the household and my theory in this little video is that they both have a very different idea of the household most economists by far not all but most economists think of the household as me and my immediate nuclear family fighting other households for resources and for work and for money and ecologists think of the household as this pale blue dot basically this fragile planet which we must manage together and that that's the household and what they're fighting about is this notion that if you think that the household is the planet then we're all in it together and we better make sure the planet survives if you think the household is just me and greedy behavior is okay because this invisible hand is going to make markets perfect and and solve for things in the large which is I'm describing a complete philosophical belief of you know libertarian or other kinds of traditional neoclassical economists then you would behave that way so there's huge disparities in behavior depending on what you think of history whose economic model you bought and and a lot of this is not stuff we actively think about a lot it's stuff that we were born into it's the community of birth where we absorb and are socialized into that way of seeing the world that way of seeing history that way of being and we don't question it more often than not we die before we question it and when that belief system is challenged we often will fight it before actually thinking about it we will fight for it you know we will actively defend it rather than thinking it through and growing holy crap we've been we've been sitting here thinking something that's a little messed up why don't we change the way we're thinking Terry do you believe that this is common worldview across cultures across the world or is this a very western view I'm just saying this whole that there's this other play of individual versus collective right the one very key very key to so one is the element of trust but the question is that when you talk about ecology and economics and the way you illustrated it that they are at loggerheads with each other something tells me that that also has to do with a very individualistic and me versus them kind of a feeling which is very very driven by the conditioning of a culture in which you're brought brought up in a worldview that you get to get conditioned to accept and believe I completely agree and I'll bring in a couple other things here as well on that because a piece of this oh shoot where was I about to go oh heck I just lost I had a really nice thread I was going to throw in oh I'm just getting it back so a piece of this is goes back into the history of philosophy and I'm also no philosopher but it really goes back to how did these ideas perk up that the invisible hand economics all these sorts of things and that that can be a longer discussion one of my favorite books here is the great transformation by Carl Polanyi who is who is describing in 1944 the shift from pre-industrial society into early industrialism and he talks about how it breaks a lot of things and what the economists of that day think and how they're working then we roll way forward to the advent of communism and socialism and attempts to create regimes and what Western economists will point to is look how terrible Mao and Stalin were and here I'm going to bring in something entirely different which is that even though Mao and Stalin and Marx and everybody else were sort of working toward a you know the best for all kind of frame of mind they were all working at it from a what I will call a young point of view so let me throw a different little crazy theory of mine in which is that I'm borrowing Yin and Yang from Taoism right and in Taoism and there's a whole lot of other stuff around Taoism but just that if I could borrow the core of it Yin and Yang Yin is generally feminine receptive dark earth energy and Yang is generally male active outward bright energy and I will overload the two terms for me Yang is also paternalistic hierarchical command and control analytic sort of divide divide kind of energy and Yin is organic emergent spiritual social connective emotional energy and in Taoism it doesn't mean that men are Yang and women are Yin at all it means that any entity whether it's one human a family a company a society in order to be healthy needs to have Yin and Yang in balance and in creative tension because the interesting stuff happens where these two things kind of meet right and so my own little amateur history hypothesis is that somewhere between three hundred and three thousand years ago Yang won and Yang didn't say well let's come on Yin let's go make a society Yang said Yin is heresy anything that sounds like Yin should be ignored put aside suppressed destroyed and so when we got to the era where philosophers and economists and whoever else were thinking about how do we organize a society for collective good they thought about it from a completely Yang point of view and they invented something that was paternalistic hierarchical controlling and very easy because it was a pyramid when Stalin an ignorant peasant from the Republic of Georgia decides he wants to take control because Lenin is dying it's very easy for him to go kill people off and take over this complete pyramidal structure that is the antithesis of what your average syndico anarchist would basically recommend doing with exactly the same goals in mind of how do we get the most for everybody communally working together and anarchism was completely expunged from everybody's vocabulary because God we can't have lack of control which is what they thought anarchism was but in fact it was an attempt to establish different forms of collaboration from the from the roots coming up and then in the west we demonized socialism and communism so you can see that playing out right now in the election cycle where Alexander Ocasio-Cortez declares herself a democratic socialist and everybody's like and she's trying to normalize the word socialism a little bit again because the northern european democracies are all like democratic socialists and it's working reasonably well for them for years now why is it such a crazy thing it's a crazy thing here because in the 50s and 60s during the Red Scare we intentionally demonized these terms so sorry to bring like eight different things in but I think this Yinyang male-female schism is a really big piece of what lets us today dismiss really good ideas because we've there's sort of layers of taking away from discourse and from our ability to solve problems taking away of great ideas and great things that used to happen and we don't study history very much so we don't look at how people were I happened to think that long ago we were really smart and we knew how to live in community on the commons and if you look at indigenous traditions around the world you find that everywhere and then the reason I say 300 to 3,000 years is that 3,000 years is kind of the beginnings of languages and Leonard Schlein's book the alphabet versus the goddess blames linear alphabets for some of this and then 300 years is the beginning of the industrial revolution when really we tour society inside out completely industrial revolution has insane crazy effects all over the place so let me go quiet and see what y'all think tell us a little more unbox commons for us please so commons is sort of a a foreign word a lot sorry Ishtal Logan Mayanka are you guys familiar with commons? is commons a familiar territory for you more or less you're muted right now so I can't actually hear an interview Mayanka Mayanka Mayanka you're unmuted but I can't hear you though so yeah is your microphone plugged that you're hearing us fine something else is going on where I can't hear your voice keep trying until you until we like still not hearing you shoot or use the chat or use the chat or if you want um drop out of the the zoom and come back in and see if it connects you better to audio or do that there's also a test inside of it when you can when you log in that'll test your audio so you can see but we'd love we'd love to hear you I can hear you but I have traffic sounds so I'm going to go back to mute oh interesting excellent so Logan Logan or Ishtal did you want to talk a little bit about what you've seen about commons and such I mean very quickly coming from a background so researching in economics very traditionalist notion of what the definition of commons are um and the tendency to move towards seeing commons as a particular type of good and the which has a particular sort of public good delivery mechanism and the critical piece of this is we can learn from how commons do things like deliver public goods how we create institutions to ensure that they continue to do so and how we learn from those to apply those to markets where markets fail in other ways to try and replicate the sort of public goods delivery where the market itself wouldn't that's kind of my my take on I'd be interested in in knowing if there's any really sort of different take and I would love to hear that too I think there are many and I think Tom started us off down this path saying you know it's food a product that should be sold in markets or is it something that comes from the commons how does that work and then Doug Doug is a professional economist herder he is a shepherd of economists I think trying really hard to help them change the way they see these sorts of things I don't know Doug do you want to share anything of your experiences and on this particular part of the journey you've been on and you're muted right now there we go okay well what's striking is that economists get socialized to a vocabulary and a formalism that tends to avoid things that are social emotional interpersonal so you can't really refine economics from within because the leverage points are already missing which makes it they've been they've been excised on purpose kind of like our discourse does not include those things because they're squishy and unmeasurable and if you take things like the commons which economists tend to treat as an aberration in an economic system it came first that is we had the public the commons long before we had the private individual and my understanding of the interesting word private is it's Latin from pre-vatus which means to remove from the public space so it's already a secondary concept and that that the private became the center of society rather than the commons is a long historical evolution that leaves us in a bad place completely agree one of the things since I've got the microphone at the moment that I think is in the background of this conversation is what is going to happen to the idea of surplus and profit under severe climate change if you take the model that the population is increasing but the ability to produce food is decreasing because places are becoming no longer agriculturally productive because of temperature change so that we're going into a period that's going to really test these concepts in new ways I think that's a really great point and it has to do with also survivalists and other people who just want to go away with enough food to live for a while but there's a very nice argument to be made that increasing everybody's capacity and creating abundance everywhere is the best path forward through the kinds of traumatic change we're likely to see because if you have a lot and everybody else doesn't you are not going to fare well either so there's a whole series of issues there I'd love to know which parts of this which parts of this resonate each stuff for you and everybody else and where would you like us to steer into this thicket of issues because I think we've put like 15 heavy things on the table all of which I'm fascinated by but I'd like to sort of serve this in a direction you want to go and we haven't gotten back to the profitability topic yet either so I want to head there as well I'll just quickly jump in here I feel like I wanted to kind of dial back in which is why I connected with Douglas's question I wanted to dial back to the harms or harmful effects of say abundance or an abundance mindset and I was just wondering what could we identify as the complementary pieces or piece to abundance mindset in order to kind of counter or cap the impact it could have so for example the way that we view the resources of the earth is as abundant in so many ways and what it's led us to right now is just devastating so what are the pieces that we can identify as say counterparts or complementary to abundance and then profitability yes I love that Mayanka do you want to try speaking and see if we hear you oh maybe you're not hearing us yet are your ears in now you're muted I think she's not hearing us quite yet Pishta if you will troubleshoot with her okay good success we can hear you now yay sorry I don't want to kind of barge in so you can continue and I'll jump in in a moment that sounds great thank you feel free so let me segue I'll just do a quick segue into what Ishtar was saying perhaps so when we see the earth is abundant has abundant resources then there's a tendency to say well this is an infinite source of resources so I can take away as much as I want and I don't need to replenish etc etc that's the narrative that we've been hearing for such a long time what's very interesting for me is to try and try and look at nature and figure out how does nature handle abundance you know I mean so nature does handle complexity much more than human beings can it's got that level of resources that it manages to manage and yet it keeps everything in balance without all the characteristics we talk about capitalism greed lack of trust scarcity etc etc right so it would be very interesting to figure out you know can we get pointers from how nature manages the abundance that it creates and how does it keep growing and how does it keep evolving because I think that's that's something that can that we could really take a leaf out of for business and suicide that's mine take it thank you I'm just showing here in my brain ecosystem services which is a tiny slice of what you're talking about Sunil but I love your question like how does nature manage abundance or create or handle abundance and in some sense there's another conversation we had about personifying nature about whether there's you know an intelligent designer someplace who's sort of controlling this or whether these things just sort of sort of emerge on their own in different ways but one of the things that that happened was we turned the commons and nature into a pool of natural resources to sequester and plunder and there's a guy named Lee Anderson uh who was he died but he was the oops oh we've got a lot of things here we go we are plunderers so sorry not Lee Anderson Ray Anderson I mistook his name so I look for the we are plunderers but he basically was the CEO of interface flooring and one day said came to a realization that hey we're actually plunderers we should not be doing this I'll put this link in our chat which is a talk he did long ago about this and uh oh it's interesting and I haven't I haven't sort of looked at this for a long time but uh there's a lot here to think about in for our conversation but let me go quiet for a second while everybody else jumps in and says what you think I think mayanka has a hand up perfect please hi sorry I'm so new to the zoom space I am still learning the conventions thank you for this this has been very interesting I just kind of on the topic of abundance wanted to ask two related questions one was kind of because you kind of brought up marks and kind of idea of kind of it reminded me of abundance and relationship to alienation but more largely kind of how does abundance relate to a certain cultural fetish fetishizing of choice and also related fetish fetishizing of speed because we're also kind of in a time where abundance is also met with kind of rapid development you know fast projects everything needs to be done quickly overnight and so there's also kind of abundance in a strange way of speed so you know things kind of in that sense condensing at the same time expanding and I wonder if kind of how that ties into these kind of larger conversations about in some ways contextualizing the conversations about abundance love that thank you and I love cultural fetishizing I think that's that's sort of a perfect encapsulation of a lot of what's happened here is that is that we've shaped we some people before us have shaped our cultural expectations our cultural norms our cultural goals I mean in in in you know American western capitalist society he who dies with the most toys wins everybody should you know it's the ownership society it's a whole series of things and freedom of choice is considered one of the greatest freedoms sort of like you know to choose what you do with your life to choose what you can purchase to choose where to live all those things we absolutely fetishize them and speed has been created as a premium also I like how you're adding that into the formula and we deprecate slow things so if you go study unschooling or interesting topics about alternative education one of the things they point out is that we absolutely like oh I have the answer that's apparently the smartest kid in class is the one who is quickest with the answer and that's complete nonsense and so you know giving people time to actually think gives you better answers gives you cooperation gives you a whole bunch of things so I think we've absolutely fetishized all these things in the culture and the culture is busy reinforcing the values you've described right and that's that's part of the problem is the culture leads there but that's just my slice at it Tom, Ken, April do you want to jump in and take a swing? And Judy is that you on the phone? Sorry who was just jumping in? Ken go ahead go ahead Ken and then I'll and then Judy after that Yeah a question has been been bubbling in the back of my mind has to do with you know Darwinism being applied to economics so I just sent Jerry a link this morning to an article about science and how conservatives and liberals use science differently it's a big experiment and confirmation by it so if you're conservative you look for things that are in criminology and economics that are going to back you up and there's been a a huge usurpation of the scientific fact to say you know we are homo economics economicists and we're not you know this is we're not built that way no one is wired that way no one makes those choices but it holds court as the standard by which all these economic decisions get made so how do we create a kind of a we that includes everybody that we can start to make some economic assumptions about and begin to to reform an economics because it seems like it's very much an abstraction that comes from old dead white guys basically you know I mean there's where is where is the the living structure where's the living heart of economics that guides the conversation so that we're making wiser choices I call them the pale patriarchal penis people which I'm borrowing from someone from long ago but it's memorable and quite funny so anyone else well I'll jump in Jerry if it's okay please Judy yes beyond too long car phone because I worry about the background noises around me you sound quite clear go ahead first of all compliments everyone for the discussion it's greatly improved my transit experience but I think that that this question two things came to mind to me listening to the discussion and one is how could we redefine abundance in a more organic and natural way because abundance is more in my mind about the availability of things that it is about the possession of things and that concept is sort of the organic nature of abundance and nature as a model and what nature does for itself and how other species interact with nature is I think a fruitful area for all kinds of modeling of social experiences and other things and then I also think that this artificial definition of economics in a very profit driven mode and I kind of dislike the word profit although what you do with profits can be a very constructive thing so again it's how do we look at economics as a kind of a normalizing experience a way to measure value I mean we have a lot of things that involve economics but they aren't necessary profit and loss centers although to continue to exist one level of subsistence at least or reasonable ability to move to higher purpose tasks is requires some type of exchange of resources or sharing of resources so this gets kind of convoluted and I'm sure that I'm just mumbling about and people don't can't figure out what to do with right with what I'm thinking but if we could explore and sort of tease out some of these zones the organic unit area and the preservation of resources and sharing of resources and effective utilization of resources and those could be natural or human so forth those would be areas I'd be interested in super thank you Judy what you're saying immediately leads me to a funny solution that's sort of at hand which is the sharing economy strangely enough and and there's a little there's a little phrase that comes out of the sharing economy which is basically access is better than ownership meaning if I can pull out my phone and press a little button and the car of my choice shows up washed and fueled and ready to go someplace and I don't have to worry about ensuring it or parking it or whatever else isn't that a better deal and if I wanted to rent a yacht for only a day and not own a yacht and have all you know everything that goes around that that you can see that apps on your phone and there's plenty of dark side to the sharing economy but apps on your phone are a form of abundance that makes better use of those assets etc etc etc so I think Judy there's there's kind of a practical answer to what you're talking about that's even at hand right now that doesn't require having people think differently because there was a comment a little earlier in the chat like isn't part of this about not caring what we leave behind the future generations and you know old tribes used to understand that if they screwed up their commons they would their offspring would have nothing left so historically around the world people really understood that they needed to leave things better than they were and they were this this notion of seventh generation thinking was relatively common I think and somehow this capitalist brainworm that's eaten so many people's heads says no no no your selfishness right now your active selfish actions will lead to some magical balance don't worry about it because if we need regulation we'll create regulation that stops the bad things from happening and that that's an extremely common belief that is has completely gutted this notion of thinking longer term you know intergenerationally like that so if we thought more like nature more naturally and I think I'm probably going in a different direction than you intended Judy we would also think I think longer term in these ways Doug Yeah, am I unmuted? I think Yes Okay First on nature the way nature works is to breed to the limit at which point that it's met by predators or diseases or whatever and slows down so it's an equilibrium that's actually quite costly to the lives of the critters that are in a state of equilibrium I would think we don't want humanity to quite use that method of breeding to the point of limits now with that shifting over we tend to to talk about economics a lot and not talk about politics but economics is a way of distributing decisions out into the environment into the population through consumer choices the problem is you can no longer manage the totality with that principle the things that are big issues go unmanaged and we don't like to think that because big issues lead back then to centralized government or centralized authority monarchy things of that kind which might be where we have to go if we're going to do estate management in the sense that the globe is the estate and the real task for the future is managing the relation between the human species and the globe I don't think you could do that in a decentralized way completely it's going to require some centralized authority and we're not moving in that direction just to take one slice of what you said Doug a friend of mine from Woods Hole, Massachusetts Andy Mafay is trying to reinvent bookkeeping so double entry bookkeeping dates back to Luca Pacioli who was a priest in Renaissance Italy he invents double entry bookkeeping which is what we do but most companies keep multiple sets of books and I don't mean necessarily here's the books that we're hiding from the tax authorities and here's the books that we're doing some companies do that but there's a series of books where we say here's where resources went through our system and we're accounting for we bought this much coal we bought this much corn it went into this process we shipped this much product then there's a whole different set of financial accounting there's almost no except for where it's regulatory needed accounting for externalities basically this is how much carbon we emitted this is you know these are the other things and the system Andy is working on would register each exchange in a way that would actually model all of these transfers and he's very far away from having sort of a working system that we could sit down and use but I love the idea that when you started accounting for how things move through a system that you could begin to then say okay great we took this in but it caused this externality it caused these monetary flows etc etc so to me that's that's a piece of it is that economists don't realize how impoverished a lot of their observation they have a very tiny porthole into what's going on but they think that that's the world in many ways and then they use aggregate data time series data to try to get to big conclusions when in fact I remember in my econ 101 class when we got through externalities in about 15 minutes and I was like that seemed like an important topic how did that go by so quickly right so so we don't even really have a full system that we're studying how do we how do we get any place on these things I think each study you wanted to jump in and then Mayanka as well no so straight to Mayanka please you need that perfect yeah kind of on a related note not that we're bashing economists too but kind of wanted to ask you also your thoughts around kind of abundance in some way also co-opting kind of the language of impact and I mean that in the sense of kind of models around philanthropy or models around social change which now prioritizes you know kind of giving and generosity honestly justice and here I'm boring from Anand Giridhar Das his elite charades of changing the world which I think is fabulous in this context and I wonder what your thoughts are where kind of impact social impact on different ways of doing good and like giving out money and redistribution is becoming about still doing more and not nicely questioning about what to do less of or what to not do at all and yeah just kind of this new yeah just this new kind of language around doing good which in a lot of ways is not at all questioning this kind of yeah just the kind of abundance mentality which has created a lot of harm but also created a lot of waste you know it's a lot of kind of material harm as well completely agree and I think of the the part of Anand's critique that wealthy people don't really like and that capitalists don't really like is that he's sort of saying to them hey you all love going to these you know good do good and do well reunions as long as it means you can build some new stuff and own more things but the moment we say that maybe you shouldn't have so much you're like no no no that option is off the table we're not going to do that thing but everything else is okay and look we're gonna have a great time doing good and look how many people we fed last week or whatever else and very few people are sort of prying the hood off this thing and looking underneath it for systemic problems and and for other sorts of ways of affecting the the system as a whole so I I completely agree with with your premise and it's it's unfortunate that we don't look a little deeper because when we don't question these premises we walk through this with bad logic so for example the tragedy of the commons is is basically a mind worm that has eaten a lot of people's ideas of how things work and in fact the essay the tragedy of commons written in 1968 by a soil biologist named Garrett Hardin is a stupid essay like he is not working for many on real understanding of commons and he says look you know you can overgraze you over-farm commons don't really work most of the time and there's all these people who've critiqued the tragedy of commons and commons don't naturally happen easily but Lynn Ostrom won a Nobel economics prize for her studies of the commons and part of what we're starting to understand is that we live in the middle of a whole series of commons and we're trying to figure out how do we manage commons together so when you talk about what are the other distribution mechanisms Logan when you were asking earlier what other methods are there and I mentioned the Algonquin tribe and longhouses this is the bigger idea it's like okay smart people are trying to figure out what are the rules with which people can create lovely thriving commons from which many people can thrive and profit and so let me actually go to profitability for a second now before we and so we're at we're at the top of the hour we're going to go 90 minutes so we have another half hour to talk but we have yet to sort of brush up against the this whole notion of profitability as well and let me go back to our call topic here in my brain there we go because one of my big questions and I have a I have a thought in my brain called big questions I love to answer so how are we rethinking or renegotiating the social contract what if we trusted you is my question from the last decade but how do we build profitable businesses around abundance and the commons is a is a huge one and I'll give you a couple examples my favorite example my go-to example on this is IBM and open source software and back when I started my career as a tech industry analyst a few too many years ago IBM was the 600 pound gorilla in the market and when IBM did anything we all jumped and I was an analyst in the market I had clients who wanted to know so IBM would announce some new thing we would we would write something up a quick report and we would FedEx it back in the days before email and in email newsletters and websites but we would FedEx this paper document to all of our clients and you know as quickly as we possibly could and then at one point it looked like IBM was going to collapse they were there they were being undermined by some micro systems and cheap servers and a bunch of other things and at some point a couple of executives inside of IBM went and started looking at open source software and long story short over the course of a couple years they basically adopted first Apache then Linux then they donated a system of theirs called Eclipse to open source they turned into open source software they basically bought into the new commons of shared software rather than the proprietary way they approached software before that and it saved the company and then they started making two, three, four billion dollars in service revenues on top of shared open source software so to me the story of IBM and open source software is a really terrific example of how this actually works so Linux distribution suppliers and what I just said is in different bits and parts in my brain but I need to I'm realizing as we're sitting here having this conversation that I don't have the time while talking to go make these links and connect these things but I need to connect the IBM story which goes back to a guy named Bob LeBlanc Robert LeBlanc who I interviewed way back in the day who was part of this IBM open source thing etc etc etc so I'll I will stop the sharing and think about how I will weave that later but I think Ken is looking for the floor and you're there you are actually I wasn't but I will say something there's one other piece that comes up for me which is who's deserving right as you were talking about commons and you know everybody gets to benefit there's a really big pushback from the right on I'm not giving those lazy people who don't work anything right and this is another one of those polarizing things that comes into play in economics so if we create a system where everybody benefits there'll be free riders there'll be people who will not contribute anything and I'm not willing to do that and so how do we cope with that and that might actually get into profitability because they flip side of that is who's deserving of being a billionaire what are these people who are raking in billions of dollars actually contributing in terms of real value to the economy or to the world so there it's the two sides things around who's deserving which I think is an interesting question to pose lovely anyone else want to start with an answer sort of that Tom yeah this just kind of connects a couple of things that have come up earlier and given behaviors really kind of you understand the environment in which people operate you understand a lot about how they might behave and as I frame the world I think we have our social environment natural environment of the social environment but I've been lately thinking about this the environment of the ideas that are circulating or the new sphere or the idea sphere we need a good word for this but there are certain emergent ideas that change behavior a non-market world ideas and break reframing of giving us to think differently and bringing it to this idea of who is deserving we and I been looking at of what called the age of responsibility we reframed what responsibility means very quietly over the last few years starting with Ronald Reagan Margaret Thatcher and everybody whereas we used to have this more communal at least in the United States idea of responsibility for each other and we've reframed that to responsibility for oneself and personal responsibility has become the mean that's really created all this idea that you're only deserving if you're personally responsible for yourself if you are unemployed it's probably because you didn't work hard enough or you're not looking for a job or you didn't try in school whereas you know what there are certain structural issues that can cause the hard workers to be very very unlucky and so we've taken this idea of a social safety net and said it's not for those who have this idea of bad luck and he talks about two different forms of luck there's the kind of gamblers luck right we take a shot we put all our money in the stock market and we lose well that was an intentional thing but what about the unlucky idea that you've gotten cancer or you know you have the inability to work anymore due to an injury we are not we are taking the social network away a safety net away from each other right now it's becoming a very very insidious idea so if we were to think about what are those ideas right now that are circulating that if we simply change the few of them we could help each other reframe what is economics how do we behave in a way that looks out for each other and for those future generations that were mentioned earlier we have some very bad ideas right now that are causing very bad behavior and how sustainable are these bad ideas the problem is very very difficult to to change a dominant idea the idea that we have business as the solution to everything right now is really a bad idea it makes us elect a business leader to be present as opposed to a political leader you know we have this idea that business is the solution to everything Anand talks about this why do we believe that the solution to all our social problems is entrepreneurialism you know it's creating a new company or a better company what happened to the idea that politics is how we help each other what are the other social institutions besides business but then the idea that the business mean has overtaken many different domains is perhaps one of the roots of all these problems that we have I completely agree Tom and I've moved to a couple different thoughts in my brain here that I think feed what you're saying Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street played by Michael Douglas of course one of unfortunately Michael Douglas is one of those people who you can always tell when his movies were shot because he's always using a cell phone and they're huge anyway but this whole this whole trope of greed is good is a really perfect encapsulation I call it a successful mean and I put it under the conservative capitalist point of view that says that successful capitalists deserve to keep what they make because they spend it tax cuts create jobs trickle down economics without the threat of starvation nobody would work people don't value what they don't pay for everyone benefits from markets and no protectionism so I've been collecting up all the different ways in which sort of capitalism tends to see the world and the American dream is pretty aligned with this sort of capitalist point of view because America is sort of seen as the the roots of capitalism even though it really isn't then I've also connected this before to possessive individualism which is kind of what we're talking about here which I guess goes back to C.B. McPherson I don't remember putting him in here but he's a political scientist and a philosopher at University of Toronto because well I do Toronto Hughes University of Toronto and Toronto Faculty and this idea of possessive individualism led to things like the Reagan revolution and thatcherism right in fact I don't think I have I think thatcher comes after Reagan right so I have oh that's interesting how do I not have thatcherism that's very strange I'll just do something I'm using for you for one moment here so I've got Margaret Thatcher obviously what I don't seem to have here I've got neoliberalism under her I'm going to include thatcherism I think that's spelled right and now I will connect that to the Reagan revolution over here but then I'm going to connect it to a very fun thought in my brain called isms and if I go to isms this is a bit of a digression actually we're seeing it better right from where I was because here these are sibling thoughts this scrolling list on the right these are siblings of the current active thought so they're common children of isms so here's anti-intellectualism anti-authoritarianism anti-semitism arianism asceticism associationalism adivism atheism atomism so if we go to atheism there's a whole bunch of things around atheism and here's articles about atheism etc etc end of digression back to greed is good and I will cede the floor to whoever else would like to jump in so I'm just wanting to go back a couple of points about freeloading and you know people who don't work don't deserve anything I just want to make a couple of points and I think they're just data points as pins on the conversation more than any opinions here so one is you know if we go back to the conversation of how does nature handle abundance so if you look at nature it's not doing only the good stuff so if you look around you see in the forest you have weeds which are not really good from somebody's point of view if it's in your garden then you want to weed it out but in the forest the weed is needed as a part of the ecosystem of the ecology and similarly you have parasites the most beautiful orchids in the world are actually parasite plants so that's the way nature looks at it and we you know in our constructs of governance in our constructs of as of the isms we try to come up with our own worldview and judgments as to what is right and what is wrong and therefore there becomes a I think that we get us get skewed into one or the other and the balance then gets shifted so that's one data point that's coming to my mind I thought let's bring bring that on on the page the second thing I think is a little bit more important for me and this goes back to part of the experience of being in a startup and you know what happens in startups typically is that you start with a great deal of enthusiasm and soon enough if you're kind of successful then you see that you've got revenues coming in you see growth happening and then you find lots of dissatisfied promoters and employees because most of them feel that they did all the heavy lifting and the other guys were freeloaders and that brings me to the point that actually that happens only because you want to take you want to make a judgment or you want to do a review on a timestamp shot you're not looking at a continuum you're just looking at a timestamp snapshot right and I think that becomes the bigger problem so if we start looking at it as a continuum I think something in our head will tell us that you can actually go forward with an abundance mindset and not worry about what you think are freeloaders at that point of time and maybe you know they have a different set of things of value that they can bring in along the continuum and therefore that becomes a very very much more sustainable model of abundance in my point of view Agreed one of the interesting dilemmas of managing commons is how do you how do you deal with people who are trying to freeload or who are taking advantage of the commons or or whatever or who are plundering the commons and it's a really hard issue so this is this is not an easy thing and and Ostrom's principles of managing a commons try to say hey devolve authority to the people closest to the commons set up boundaries so that you know how the commons is being used and not used etc etc there's a whole there's a series of eight principles for managing and effective commons but one of the things that I've come across and the reason I have something I call design from trust is that if you mistrust everybody you will design a system that restricts everybody's actions is evident so that you can police them and control them over time and what you do when you do that is you cut away the abundance of genius that's actually in the room you create this weird artificial scarcity by trying to control everybody's actions so one of the side effects of trying to build top down command and control systems that will get rid of bad actors is that you actually get rid of good actors as well you you you eliminate the freedom to do good things in the community and with the community and this education is my favorite example here of I talk about the ways that education the education bureaucracy and system creates scarcity and one of my favorite examples here is the Texas school board and it turns out that there used to be thousands and thousands of school boards around the U.S. when we industrialized education between the U.S. Civil War and the World War I we basically consolidated those school boards and now the Texas school board is a major one most of the other school boards don't have enough resources to analyze textbooks and all that and so they follow whatever the Texas school board says and once every five years they they do each of the major subjects so sciences math humanities whatever which means once every five years McMillan and Pearson and whoever are the big textbook publishers are either going to sell a whole lot of a textbook or zero or very few and guess who figured this out conservatives and so of the 15 members of the Texas school board 10 are very conservative and they're busy destroying the content of these textbooks and turning them into like Pablum and of course kids don't want to read these textbooks they're boring as hell and they don't have any controversy anything interesting in them and the idea that we can limit what somebody should study from is crazy to me anyway and so so that's just a little aspect of scarcity inside of a system inside of a bureaucracy et cetera et cetera now if you start from an assumption of trust for the participants in any system you then let the system then you have to be very smart about how you help the system come to making good choices about managing its comments dealing with membership trusting the members and earning your way up sort of some ladder of trust the way apprentices do in a guild for example there's a whole series of models here around the world and we're busy trying to figure all that stuff out including run a democracy sort of you know at least in name along the way and if you look at Britain and the Brexit you're like and the US is like right at the beginning of its next big electoral cycle which is absolutely fascinating and yet we have all these systems of control that don't actually liberate the genius that's already in the room if you believe that as an opening assumption so that's a great point you've made and I think if one were to look at it a little bit more in depth one would wonder as to why do you have especially in the education and the primary school or the school system we call these kids as bad actors because they're disruptive and they're disrupting what's already in place whenever looks at why is it that their energies are not being used it's because they're bored they're bored about with whatever is being doled out to them right and so on a much lighter note you know when when I was a kid I still remember I go back I mean that's a long long time ago as you guys can see couple years yeah that's right so so the smartest of the teachers would actually take the bad actors and make them monitors of the classroom right so their energy then gets channelized they get the importance that they need so if we if we were trying to take a leaf out of that book then we have a very different way to look at bad actors and free voters right you kind of shift the responsibility onto them and then design from trust and see where where you can take the whole thing and and I think that sharing those kinds of stories is incredibly important because any community any group with people trying to do something together needs to establish their own norms and their own patterns and their own methods themselves if they're if these things are poured onto them they don't own them they don't care and they're not necessarily going to obey so part of what we need is a rich environment of stories like the one you just told and then you experiment with them right and maybe that works maybe something else works who knows but but how one of one of the questions I love is how can you co-opt bad actors and turn them into good actors so on Wikipedia for example and I think this is very different now but when Wikipedia was young if you were a 14 year old boy what more fun could there be than to go in and vandalize Wikipedia and like replace the page with images nobody should see and whatever else but wikipedia's would greet you when you made a change with hey I see you are trying to edit this that's not quite how we do this please go look at this page for you know the norms we've established but you know can I help you be a better participant and an invitation based on trust into the community that offers you a way to ladder up and learn how the community works and then to to be exposed to these stories about what actually works for us and what works in other places is incredibly important and most of our systems don't do that and I'll point here to just for fun Oscar Wilde has a famous quote you know I'd love and I'm going to paraphrase it badly but you know I'm interested in socialism but I also want my evenings is like this stuff takes conversation it takes engagement it takes work it takes the building of trust it takes all these kinds of things that we've excised from our society because we're supposed to be able to consume our way to everything just by using our wallet and buying stuff and it turns out that that doesn't really lead to happiness it turns out that that leads to afluenza which is you know the disease of having too much all those kinds of things are now completely symptoms of the society we live in and we've lost a lot of it and and fortunately the people in this zoom are aware of a lot of the antidotes and that's that's part of why I think we're here having this conversation is that is that we care a lot about like Umberto Maturana and a bunch of other really great thinkers who've figured out how a lot of these things should fit together Lynn Ostrom and others so we're getting close to the end of our call time and I want to make room for I think the younger kids actually were much more wanting to understand profitability more than abundance and I don't think we got there you know you know what we could have another call if I know and we could start from profitability on the next call because I think we needed to turn this soil a lot but I just would love to hear from from you three and any thoughts including how to frame another call if you'd like to do one I'd be very happy to do one just like this next week or we capture I would support another call and perhaps in between and the blog that we have put in subtopics under abundance because this is such a rich and complex area that it connects to many other things and there's there's several subsets that we've covered today that could be explored more fully and I'm particularly interested in individual and collective actions or executions that occur could occur to move us more along the trajectory we believe would be productive thank you I've been thinking lightly about the problem of the collective form of the corporation as being part of the problem especially with limited liability limited liability seems to me at its core taking something away from society and making it disappear some kind of responsibility that is say you can amass capital to do things with no sense of the consequences and there's something deep there which I don't understand yet that I'd like to see get into the conversation what about just another thing I completely agree with that and I I love the thoughts that are flowing and just something that I was thinking about is while we were doing this I was kind of listing themes that have if you add abundance to them where they've led to so like information plus abundance is less led to open source and like skills and abundance is less led to labor on demand etc etc and I was just thinking an interesting thing to do over a call or however would be to kind of think of what systems abundance is already the abundance mindset has already allowed us to create or where we've had it which of these systems are working or have worked and which really need transformation so I know like Jerry we're already talking about education and how much still needs to be done and so if we could identify more such more systems or systems that are completely untouched by the abundance mindset it might help us to like look go beyond just like the realm of thought and conversation and also then start looking at actionable points that sounds that sounds awesome and I'll just do a really quick screen share because I collect up a lot of these sorts of things and I'll just give you where to look so I have a thought called examples of the relationship economy in action I will share a link directly to this thought right now when I stop sharing my screen here but I'm busy collecting up you know free and open knowledge the direct contributions unconditional cash transfers which are sort of a form of universal basic income simple things like co-locating daycare with elder care in some cities they do that the notion of commoning which David Bollier is a big fan of all of these things point to places communities groups movements that are in fact harnessing I think abundance mindset and trust and I think there's also for me an interesting intersection here between trust and abundance that I should explore more on these calls as we go forward so let me add that let me add that to where we are so here's that here's that link I was finding Jerry that the question that I had posed earlier about what is the complementary piece to abundance through the chat and just everything everyone's been saying it just seems to keep going back to the concept of trust and how that ties in yeah absolutely which is why I think trust is so central well obviously I completely agree Logan did you want to jump in yeah after all this and first thanks for this is an extremely interesting experience and true to the name of the project it does quite a lot feel like jumping in and out of your brain which is a really lovely experience that you don't normally get but the and I I love the hand waving too I've never seen that before and I think it's phenomenal this means I agree this means I disagree by the way which and I need to fingers down yeah that's disagree jazz hands down means no I disagree this is like and this is whoever's saying whatever they're saying right now I agree sorry go ahead you've got at least like four more dimensions of of digital expression here that you could go up in anyways the that's right all right after after all this and maybe this maps to how you organize your brain which is both associated and dissociated in that it's there are hierarchies and then there are dis-hierarchies and it's it's understood yeah it doesn't fit within a tree nor should it though my brain tends to default to that tree and so as a result after this call I'm thinking about how I fit a sort of a a collectively exhaustive definition of abundance so is the abundance mindset something that we can create in ourselves and then try and bring to a marketer in interaction or is it the result of having the right norms that govern a marketer interaction and we kind of jump back and forth between those two is abundance as a state what happens after we decide on a particular threshold of satisfaction or happiness with what we're willing to to give ourselves and we live within spaces within that which is kind of the the ecological metaphor or is abundance forever pushing out the frontier of what we can have ourselves through I think what we mostly went back and forth between what sort of technological productivity the ability to create you know ideas and markets out of nothing so I find myself really interested in trying to figure out what the right definition is love that and you're opening up a bunch of really fun Pandora's boxes for example there are people we talk about you know carrying capacity is a common term for ecosystems and people say that if you know if we keep doing what we're doing we're going to need seven Earths we're already beyond the carrying capacity of the current Earth and I'm like you know what humans are good for the landscape humans who know what they're doing actually make the Earth better humans who are screwing it up can destroy it like that but I think we have plenty of leeway to feed many more people if we happen to have more people etc my own take is that if we did things better right that a lot of the sort of the boundary conditions are in fact flexible that we could you know do a lot better it's just that we behave so terribly that we're probably going to make ourselves extinct but that's a whole other sort of a series of conversations and yeah I think it's a good good conversation to have and Mayanka did you want to jump in yeah just kind of to also thank you for a very interesting afternoon I had no idea what I was kind of getting into and this has been phenomenal so just kind of to add on some thoughts that are kind of in my head and I'm sure we'll kind of take it up in future conversations we're kind of around the idea of adding over to things and so kind of similar to what Ishtar was doing in terms of making combinations but also abundance related to kind of ideas of over wealth or kind of overworking or over time but kind of also these kind of ideas around having like too many choices and kind of of course the example that is relatable to most people is going on Netflix and you know spending an hour just trying to decide what to watch and then being too exhausted to actually watch anything but just kind of what that does to kind of the hollowness of choice what that does to kind of conscience ability to make any kind of informed decision informed choice but also what that does in larger sense to like our ideas and on politics justice and other kind of conversations for which we completely lose anchor because of the kind of you know a similar idea of abundance which is also related to kind of the idea of spectacle which is something I'd love to kind of pick up at some point but I do feel like that's a term that relates to a lot of things we've been talking about and opens up lots of other interesting conversations I love that so a couple of thoughts one is there's a little mailing list I can put you on if you'd like to be part of the conversation and get the notices for each call and rather than rather than say let's have another call like this what I'd love to do is invite you to help steer the calls and be on as many you know be on as many calls as you want but let's pick from this list of topics that we're talking about and just structure a few more calls and as we go into each topic let's think of who else we'd like to invite into the conversation including experts authors whatever else I mean we have a really broad network we have a lot of reach from the people who are in the room so we can we can go deeper into subsets of this as we want to that that's pretty easy to do so I just want to make that offer because I'm very happy to do that and I think it would be a really worthwhile journey for us so so if you don't mind I'll put your names on the inside Jerry's Brain Google group it's a Google group so it's just a simple mailing list that'll show up in your email and then let's use let's use that to have this conversation and figure out all right great so what topics and then let we'll just pick days and times for for these things we'll make them early on the on the West Coast so that you guys can make it there or you know if it's really late my time like 9 p.m it's early your morning so that could work as well we'll move things around so that we can adapt to different people any other closing thoughts from anybody I think we missed a core part of the problem of abundance which it starts with a farmer who grows more which lowers the price of what he could sell it for so the incentives are really off and we don't have a way of managing that boundary so overproduction leads to lower price leads to crises in different sorts of markets in different ways I think there's a an interesting thing there somebody I think it might have been Tom mentioned against the grain earlier in the conversation the book by James Scott which is a book I love I really got a lot from it and he's trying to study he's trying to study this boundary between the first cities and hunter gatherers or you know the and he's studying basically the marsh Arabs who were in the Tigris and Euphrates area and the first cities of Ur and Uruk and and he's trying to break our conventional wisdom that civilization with a capital C shows up when we domesticate the major grains and he says look there were 4,000 years between the domestication of grains and the first city states we resisted being roped in the city states and he talks about walls often being used to hold people in as opposed to keep people out in different ways it's super interesting and that people in cities suffered malnutrition much more than people who lived out on the land because people who lived out on the land had a much more diverse diet and people who lived in cities were often just getting grains and a few other things that made it into the markets or whatever else and interesting side note why grains why the four major grains rice corn wheat and barley I think why four grains a they grow above ground so you can see the crop b they ripen at the same time so there is a harvest festival a harvest season and the tax guy knows exactly who harvested how much when three they're portable once I winnow it and get the grain down and they store for a while minus what the rats and the rabbits eat so he basically makes the proposition that the four grains were really a benefit to tax tax authorities meaning kings and queens and rulers and that that those people drove the rest of us to make grains for that reason and potatoes are much more nutritious like but they grow on the you can't tell where the potato crop is easily and you can pick a potato out of the ground at any moment right so gosh not so much potatoes although there's a whole that's separate interesting history of potatoes but all of these things are part of really basic functioning assumptions we have that I that I want to also try to upset or at least try to contradict in our conversations because the more we free up the idea that we weren't stupid way back when and that we weren't starving way back when we weren't entirely violently with each other way back when the more we can reach back and find what was really useful from that ancient wisdom and use it again which is one of the big questions I want to talk about as well in this series which is how do we mix the best of the old with the best of the new and to me that's a really big part of this quest is how do we pick up and we didn't all die by 40 exactly there were really old people way back when it's just that infant mortality was pretty high so there was a dumbbell shaped distribution but if you made it past a certain age you are very likely to make it into a ripe old age right so super interesting that there's all these stupid assumptions we have about life was like I think I need to like collapse some of that stuff a little bit better in my brain as well because I'm not sure I have all these different things I just said I don't think I have them unified in one place so I'll go do that anyway this has been a big treat for me and hopefully enjoyable for you let's make more of a series of it and thank you I appreciate it until our next call thanks take care bye thanks Jerry thank you thank you thanks everybody