3.2: Living Between Worlds — "That makes me so…"

So welcome to today. It's March 16th. This is Living Between Worlds, season three, number two. This is the 16th of these calls that we've done. I'm Gil Friend, I'm CEO of Natural Logic and founding director of Critical Path Capital. And I began these calls in early 2020 as Covid was upon us, reflecting on this weird phenomenon that we seem to be living between worlds, between an old world that is ending in a new world that is not yet here, what the Italian revolutionary Antonio gramsci, just about 100 years ago described as the time of monsters and interregnum, where we don't know where we are, we don't know where we're standing, and we don't know what's coming. And it was an invitation to explore that together. Let me start with a quick reading shared with you a bit from Bruno Latour's book. Down to Earth, about the climate crisis. Here's from his latest. This is not going to behave itself. It looks like this is a book called Metamorphosis. There are many ways to begin. For instance, like a hero in a novel who wakes up after fainting and rubbing his eyes, looking haggard, murmurs, where am I? It's not easy, in fact, to tell where he is, especially now, after such a long lockdown, when he emerges into the street, face masked, to meet only the fleeting gaze of a few passersby. The thing that especially disheartens him, no, alarms him, is that recently he has taken to gazing at the moon. It's been full since last night, as if it were the only thing he could still contemplate without feeling uneasy. The sun, impossible to be glad of its heat without immediately thinking of global warming. The trees swaying in the wind. He's eaten up with the feet. He's eaten up with the fear of seeing them dry out or go under the saw. Even with the water falling from the clouds, he has the unpleasant feeling that he's somehow responsible for seeing that it arrives. You know very well it'll soon be in short supply. Everywhere, delight in contemplating a landscape. Don't even think about it. Here we are responsible. Bear with me. Here we are responsible for the pollution affecting it. So if you can tell if you can still see the golden wheat fields, it's because you've forgotten that all the poppies have disappeared thanks to the European Union's agricultural policies. Where the impressionists once painted swarms of beauties, all you can see now is the impact of the EU decisions that have turned the countrysides into deserts. No, really, he can only ease his Anxieties by resting his eyes on the moon for its circling, for its phases, at least he in no way feels responsible. It's the last spectacle he has left. If its brightness moves you so much, well, that's because, you know, you're innocent of its movement as you once were when you looked at the fields, the lakes, trees, rivers and mountains, the scenery, without giving a thought to the effect that your every move might have, however, slightly before, not that long ago. So here we are, you know, here we are in the depths and the tangles of multiple crises, climate Covid, the Ukraine war. I woke in the first few days of the war in a profound mood of grief. Not a place I usually find myself, certainly ample reasons for it. But it's not where I've been and it's where I was. I woke up into it, I was suffused with was a grief partly connected to the tragedy of death that was going to unfold in the first land war in Europe. And what 70 years is partly a grief in recognition of just the tragedy of the human condition, that here we are again, here we are still in the same stories in many ways that we have been in for centuries or eons. That's where I woke. That's where I've been a lot, you know, in the particular world of climate, where many of us have paid much of our attention, it's a mess, you know. The UN released its latest report a few days into the war. Thank you, Ken. Putin's war. Yeah. Not Ukraine's war.

Something. That's how I shifted.

Thank you, Christiana. Powerless and powerful. I like that. I saw a hand, but now I don't. Ken, can I call on you to expand on what you put in the chat?

Sure. Hello, everybody. Ken. So the question of who is we? Is often up. The word we gets tossed around a lot with very little definition. So there's we as in us, too. There's we as in us on this call. There's we as in Americans, there's we as in Ukrainians. You know, there's we toss it around as if we understand what we are or who we are, and we don't. Most of the time.

Yeah.

And we many years ago, and I.

Fell into that trap. So my apologies and thank you for, once again, twice in two weeks. Busting me for that.

Good.

So I went to Harvard about 10 years ago to take a course with Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy on Immunity to Change. And in their book, Immunity to Change, why People Don't Change, they open with the Story of if you are a person who is told by your doctor that you must make lifestyle changes because your heart is going to give out within 5 years, what are the chances that you will make those lifestyle changes? And they're very, very small. Most people who are diagnosed with heart disease end up dying from heart disease even though they could make lifestyle changes because they just, they're immune to the fact that need to change. And Kelly, have a whole developmental, psychological perspective on this and these levels of what's underneath and competing commitments. And I like the idea very much of competing commitments because what makes change so difficult is we want change on the one hand to improve our health, but we don't.

We.

We are also committed to if we live alone and we're lonely, food is our friend. So we eat all kinds of food that's not actually healthy for our bodies or we are joints hurt, so we don't exercise. So there's lots of things that are in the way. And I think when we, us human beings start to look at the changes necessary in the world to escape the trajectory that we are currently on with regard to global warming, planet warning, loss of habitats, you know, all the multiple crises we're in, it means we have to be uncommitted to the way we've been taking care of ourselves. That's a really big ask. That's a really hard thing for people to consider. How am I going to live a life that is so different? Anyone who's ever been addicted to anything knows that when you're faced with the bottom of I have to change. You can't imagine how you're going to get through a day without whatever your substance is. And I think collectively we are addicted to our way of life and we can't imagine any other way of life. So I think it is an issue where we need to engage our imaginations and create narratives that are attractive to people. Not if you don't do this, you'll be in trouble because that does not work, that just retrenches people. But if we can create scenarios and narratives where you're invited to step into a new way of life and yes, there'll be some adjustment. There'll be, you know, not necessarily the easiest thing, but it's going to be so much better than what you have, then I think we might have a chance.

Ken. Thank you, Ken. My friend Sarah Cove shared on a call this morning the image of standing in the future and calling people to it rather than trying to push people from here into this unknown future. Did Keegan at all say anything about where they saw change happening? What. What they saw as the components of. Of people getting unlocked.

Yeah. In. In their model, there's. There's your. You have a four. I don't like their columns. I don't think of consciousness as moving from left to right. So I actually rotate it 90 degrees so it's top to bottom. And the top level is. What is the change you want to make? What do you. What do you want to do? I want to lose 20 pounds. Okay, so then the next level is, what are you. All the things you're doing and not doing way of that. Well, I'm having two desserts. I eat dessert after lunch and dessert after dinner, and I'm not exercising, and I'm eating too much, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And then what's under that is. That's how you identify your competing commitment. My competing commitment is I don't want to feel hungry. Right. I don't want to have discomfort of being hungry.

Or.

And then under that is an assumption. And so their model is to isolate the assumption and then test it. What happens if I actually say to my mother, please don't give me second helpings. I'm trying to lose weight. Feed me two smaller helpings, and then give me the second helping after a smaller one? Or will I really feel terrible if I don't eat that pint of Ben and Jerry's? You know, so testing that out and then finding out, hey, you know what? My assumption's wrong. So they're working on changing people's assumptions. That's the model that they use.

So I like. I like the mechanism of the stack, but it misses the thing that you started with. It's starting with, I want to lose 20 pounds, but why do I want to lose 20 pounds? You know, because I want to feel better, be more fit, be able to play with my grandchildren, not die. Do they talk about that layer, or is that just not in the story?

I mean, the book is this thick, and there's. There's. You know, there's lots of things that they talk about.

We had one chart. In the chart, does it go there or not?

So the chart does. It's. It's. It begins with, what is the change you want to make? They don't ask why you want to make the change. In some cases, it's because you've been told by your doctor you need to make this change. If you don't, you'll be in trouble.

Right.

In other cases, it's like, well, I just, I know I feel better when I'm lighter or whatever it might be.

Yeah. But if I'm told by my doctor that, that I'm going to die in five years if I don't make these changes somewhere, that activates in me. I really don't want to die.

It might.

And why? And it might anyway. So that question of what do we, what do we actually care about, that's behind these commitments and behind these actions and behind these habits, I think is a really interesting territory.

Tremendously so. Especially when we get into. I want to make sure that 10,000 years from now people are not cursing. My generation says fucking baby boomers who.

Screwed up the planet by name. That guy. Yeah. Ken, thank you. Let me go to Shel Horowitz. Thank you.

Yeah.

I've got a few things to riff off Ken's very interesting comments. One is a personal story that my doctor said to me. If you don't want to be diabetic, you need to lose weight and up your exercise. That was somewhere around 2010, somewhere 2011. I had been aiming for an hour of exercise a day and settling for half an hour and I doubled that. I now aim for two hours. I have a minimum on non travel days of one hour and most days I exceed that. So I made those lifestyle changes because I didn't really want to deal with diabetes. So it swung the equation. There was a book I read a long time ago in 2007 and I'm just. I've copied but not yet pasted the link into the chat. I reviewed it back then and I haven't read it since, but it was called Just Flip and get the exact title screen there. Influencer, the Power to Change Anything. Carrie Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler. And I remember being extremely impressed by this book, which most influencing books are about marketing and this one was really about global social change, which are the.

Same thing, aren't they?

To achieve global social change you need to be a marketer. But I don't think it's global social change to have people switch to a different brand of yogurt. So I will put that link in the chat. But as far as what I am personally doing, that's different from what I was doing a month ago while recognizing the crucial stuff that's going on in Ukraine and wishing I had a good way to amplify the Pete's voices who are saying this is not as one sided as the American media makes it look. I'll put another Link to Robert Hubble had a really good analysis that he borrowed from some military flyer about why a no fly zone in the Ukraine simply will not work and what the consequences of that could be. I haven't really felt the place where I can be empowered to act on Ukraine, but I am part of a little tiny group called Jewish Activists for Immigration justice and work on other fronts continues during this war. And I'm one of three people organizing a demonstration, the local piece of a national coordinated action by a group called welcome with Dignity on Monday. So for the last certainly week or 10 days, that's where my energy's been going. And it feels really good to be doing that. In spite of that, I could potentially be doing something on this larger crisis. But we need to not let this crisis sweep all the other ones under the rug. It's rather a shame that Biden didn't the moment during his State of the Union and say, okay, this is why we really need a green economy, so that we're not dependent on dictators in their petrol stores.

Bill McKibben and a bunch of other people encouraged him to do that. And it struck me watching the room that he could have boxed in the Republican opposition very handily and would have generated, you know, standing ovation all across the floor if he had done that. And for, you know, whatever reasons, which we don't know the politics of, he chose not to do that. Yeah. Thank you, Shel. David Morris and then Carolyn and then Marna.

Good afternoon. Yeah. The things that I've done.

One of.

The first things is really to double down on, on climate and support the same things I've been working on for years. And I like that. I just, I've actually come out of the last couple of years battered and beaten, but yet I've it has given me opportunity to go deeper into some of the things that I've been working on. Now, since I've gone deeper now, we're kind of icy, is kind of out into the a little bit more open sky. There's not really much I can do about Ukraine. I did go to a street center meetup which was really great. I said, gee, I'm going to go to that. It's only a few miles away. Very successful. But on my way over there, I'm thinking, gee, I'll probably see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while. And I did. I saw so many people I hadn't seen for a year, two years. And these are people I used to see every month or more so that was. That was good. I'm enjoying now getting back together with some of my groups in person. I like this Zoom group simply because I'm in Oregon and most of the people here are not. So I ended up getting a high mileage Prius. I have needed a bigger car for a lot of years. I just decided, gee, what I'm really missing is getting to go more places and feeling like I don't want to be guilty. That was fun. Anyway, one of the people that I saw at the Ukraine meetup was said, gee, Dave, how come you're always so positive?

And what'd you say?

I said, well, it kind of took me aback because I'm here meeting with a lot of people. A lot of them have smiles on their faces. I said, well, you know, what the heck is the alternative? I don't know. I don't know what I said, but I'm naturally a positive person. The Ukraine thing is kind of turned me upside down a bit. But there again, all I can do is maintain my status quo and move it forward, continue moving it forward. And I think that it then helps other people to see, gee, it's not all doom and gloom. Let's just do more of what we can.

Thank you, Dave. Well, I'd like to come back to the question of why are you so positive a little bit later in the call, but just to note for now that both you and Shell said for me something similar, which is that there's. There's things that I don't think I can affect. There's things that I do think I can. I can affect. And I'm going to focus there with just the caveat that we don't really know, do we? You know, one person walked out onto the. Into the studio of the premier Russian news program a couple of nights ago with a sign about the war and of course got trundled off. But how many million people saw that and saw a different story than what they've been seeing on Russian TV in the last few weeks? Who's to know? Carolyn, coming to us from the middle.

I live in Iowa and I want to say to Christiana, thank you so much for what you are doing. I want to be a we with you. I want to stand with you and honor what you are doing and tell you what I am doing. If we can be a wealth, I'm living in a state that is supposedly part of the breadbasket, very similar to Ukraine. We also have a farm in North Dakota where we raise wheat and other things. We've had multiple crop failures in the last several years in North Dakota. And one of the things that I'm concerned about is the status of the food system. This week we had avian flu hit Iowa and we had a million egg laying chickens killed. We had 50,000 turkeys killed. That's two out of the three that have happened so far. It's a very fast moving virus. And we're one of the very large states producers of poultry. And when I start to look at the food system overall, we are in deep trouble. We are in terrible trouble. And I think that with the food supply chain issues, the border issues in the United States where we get so much of our produce coming up from the southern, from Mexico and California's drought, everywhere I turn, we are facing food problems. The thing is that I don't think we have tools for looking forward that are robust in some ways. I'm part of a group of. All the others are indigenous. And some of those indigenous people have a deep dreaming culture and the dreams that they have had about the warning, larger crisis.

But we need to not let this crisis sweep all the other ones under the rug. It's rather a shame that Biden didn't seize the moment during his State of the Union.

Isolate the assumption and then test it. What happens if I actually say to my mother, please don't give me second helpings. I'm trying to lose weight, Feed me two smaller helpings and then give me the second helping after a smaller one? Or will I really feel terrible if I don't? E pint of Ben and Jerry's, you know, so testing that out and then finding out, hey, you know what, my assumption's wrong. So they're working on changing people's assumptions. That's the model that they use.

So I like the mechanism of the stack, but it misses the okay, this.

Is why we really need a green economy so that we're not dependent on dictators in their petrol stores.

The thing that you started with, it's starting with, I want to lose 20 pounds, but why do I want to lose 20 pounds? You know, because I want to feel better, be more fit, be able to play with my grandchildren, not die. Yeah. Bill McKibben and a bunch of other people encouraged him to do that. And it struck me, watching the room that he could. Do they talk about that layer or is that just not in the same.

They do. I mean, the book is this thick and there's, there's, you know, there boxed.

In the Republican opposition very handily and would have generated you know, there's lots.

Of things that they talk about.

We had one chart in the chart. Does it go there or not? Standing ovation all across the floor. If he had done that and for, you know, whatever reasons, which we don't.

Know, the chart does. It's, it's, it begins with what is the change you want to make? They don't ask why you want to make the change. In some cases it's because you've been told by your doctor you need to make this change. If you don't, you'll be in trouble.

Right.

In other cases it's like, well, I just, I know I feel better when I'm lighter or whatever it might be.

Yeah. But if I'm told by my doctor that, that I'm going to die in five years if I don't make these changes somewhere, that activates in me. I really don't want to die.

It might.

And why? And it might anyway. So that question of what do we, what do we actually care about? That's behind these commitments and behind these actions and behind these habits, I think is a really interesting territory.

Tremendously so. Especially when we get into the politics.

Of he chose not to do that. Yeah. Thank you, Shel. David Morrison, then Carolyn and then Marna.

Good afternoon.

I want to make sure that 10,000 years from now, people are not cursing. My generation says, fucking baby boomers.

Yeah. The things that I've done. One of the first things is really.

To double down screwed up the planet by name. That guy. Yeah. Ken, thank you. Let me go to Shel Horowitz. Thank you.

Yeah. I've got a few things to riff off Ken's very interesting comments. One is a personal story that my doctor said to me. If you don't want to be diabetic, you need to lose weight down on, on climate and support. The same things I've been working on for years. And up your exercise that was somewhere around 2010. Somewhere 2011. I had been aiming for an hour of exercise a day and settling for half an hour and I doubled that. I now aim for two hours. I have a minimum on non travel days of one hour. And I like that. I just, I've actually come out of the last couple of years battered and beaten, but yet it has given me opportunity to go deeper into some of the things that I've been working on and most days I exceed that. So I made those lifestyle changes because I didn't really want to deal with diabetes. So it swung the equation. There was a book I read a long time ago in 2007 and I'm just. I've copied but not yet pasted the link into the chat. I reviewed it back then and I haven't read it since but it was called just flip and get the exact title screen there Influencer the power to Changing on now since I've gone deeper now we're kind of icy as to Anything by Terry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler. And I remember being extremely impressed by this book which most influencing books are about marketing and this one was really about global social change. So I prefer this kind of out into the a little bit more open sky. There's not really much I can do about Ukraine. I did go to a street center meetup which was really great.

Same thing aren't they?

To achieve global social change you need to be a marketer. But I don't think it's global social change to have people switch to a different brand of yogurt.

Right.

So I will put that link in the chat but as far as what I am personally doing, I said gee, I'm going to go to that. So only a few miles away it's different from what I was doing a month ago while recognizing the crucial stuff that's going on in Ukraine and wishing I had a good way to amplify the Pete's voices who are saying this is not as one sided as the American media makes it look. I'll put another link to Robert Hubble. Had a really good analysis that he borrowed from some military flyer. Successful. But on my way over there I'm thinking gee, I'll probably see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while and I did. I saw so many people I hadn't seen for a year, two years and these are people I used to see every month or more. So that was good. I'm enjoying about why a no fly zone in Ukraine simply will not work and what the consequences of that could be. I haven't really felt the place where I can be empowered to act on Ukraine. But I am part of a little tiny group called Jewish Activists for Immigration justice and work on other fronts continues during this war and I'm one of three people organizing a demonstration the local piece of a national coordinator now getting back together with some of my groups in person. I'm not action by a group called welcome with Dignity on Monday. So for the last certainly week or 10 days that's where my energy's been going and it feels really good to be doing that in spite of that, I could potentially. I like this Zoom group simply because I'm in Oregon and most of the people here are not. So I ended up getting a be doing something on this larger crisis. But we need to not let this crisis sweep all the other ones under the rug. It's rather a shame that Biden didn't seize the moment during his State of the Union and say, okay, this is why need a green economy so that we're not dependent on dictators in their petrol stores.

Bill McKibben and a bunch of other people encouraged him to do that. And it struck me watching the room.

That he could High mileage Prius. I have needed a bigger car for.

Lottie that have boxed in the Republican opposition very handily and would have generated, you know, standing ovation all across the floor if he had done that. And for, you know, whatever reasons, which we don't know the politics of, he chose not to do that. Yeah. Thank you, Shell. David Morrison, then years.

I just decided, gee, what I'm really missing is getting to go more places.

And feeling Carolyn and then Marna.

Good afternoon. I don't want to be guilty. That was. That was fun. Anyway, one of the people that I saw at the. Yeah, the things that I've done.

One.

Of the first things is really to double down on climate and support the same things I've been working on for years. And I like that. I just. I've actually come out of the last couple of years battered and beaten, but yet I've. It has given me opportunity to go deeper into some of the things that I've been working on. Now since I've gone deeper now, we're kind of icy, is kind of out into the. A little bit more open sky. There's not really much I can do about Ukraine. I did go to a street center meetup which was really great. I said, gee, I'm going to go to that. It's only a few miles away. Very successful. But on my way over there, I'm thinking, gee, I'll probably see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while. And I did. I saw so many people I hadn't seen for a year, two years. And these are people I used to see every month or more. So that was. That was good. I'm enjoying now getting back together with some of my groups in person. I'm not. I like this Zoom group simply because I'm in Oregon and most of the people here are not. So I ended up getting a high mileage Prius I have needed a bigger car for a lot of years and I just decided, gee, what I'm really missing is getting to go more places and feeling like I don't want to be guilty. That was fun. Anyway, one of the people that I saw at the Ukraine meetup was said, gee, Dave, how come you're always so positive?

And what'd you say?

I said, well, it kind of took me aback because I'm here meeting with a lot of people. A lot of them have smiles on their faces. I said, well, you know, what the heck is the alternative? I don't know. I don't know what I said. But I'm naturally a positive person. The Ukraine thing has kind of turned me upside down a bit. But there again, all I can do is maintain my status quo and move it forward, continue moving it forward. And I think that it then helps other people to see, gee, it's not all doom and gloom. Let's just do more of what we can.

Thank you, Dave. Well, I'd like to come back to the question of why are you so positive a little bit later in the call, but just to note for now that both you and Shel said for me something similar, which is that there's things that I don't think I can affect. There's things that I do think I can affect. And I'm going to focus there with just the caveat that we don't really know, do we? You know, one person walked out onto the into the studio of the premier Russian news program a couple of nights ago with a sign about the war and of course got trundled off. But how many million people saw that and saw a different story than what they've been seeing on Russian TV in the last few weeks? Who's to know? Carolyn, coming to us from the middle.

I live in Iowa and I want to say to Christiana, thank you so much for what you are doing. I want to be a we with you. I want to stand with you and honor what you are doing and tell you what I am doing. If we can be a we, I I'm living in a state that is supposedly part of the breadbasket, very similar to Ukraine. We also have a farm in North Dakota where we raise wheat and other things. We've had multiple crop failures in the last several years in North Dakota and one of the things that I'm concerned about is the status of the food system. This week we had avian flu hit Iowa and we had a million egg laying chickens killed. We had 50,000 turkeys killed. That's two out of the three that have happened so far. It's a very fast moving virus and we're one of the very large states producers of poultry. And when I start to look at the food system overall, we are in deep trouble. We are in terrible trouble. And I think that with the food supply chain issues, the border issues in the United States where we get so much of our produce coming up from the southern, from Mexico and California's drought, everywhere I turn we are facing food problems. The thing is that I don't think we have tools for looking forward that are robust in, in some ways. And so I'm part of a group of all other, all the others are indigenous and some of those indigenous people have a deep dreaming culture and the dreams that they have had about the warning, warning us about food shortages have been substantial and important. And we are convening a meeting coming up to look at the dreams and to look at where we can build in some resilience in the face of probable shortages coming. So looking at pantry supplies, whether it's flourishing or say cooking oil fats that you use in your diet, whatever else, to be prepared with those and to help some of our neighbors provide stores and get ready. But we're looking at how to address what seems to be a cascade of food problems. Climate change, the war disease. So bison in the Great Plains now have a bacterial disease that's decimating a major food source of Native Americans and have big ecological impacts. I could go on and on with what I'm seeing, but between inflation, climate change, the war disease, we are in trouble and getting ahead of that now to build in resilience. We're looking to crowdsource in all the avenues of wisdom that we can find, whether it's dreams or whether it's the science to put them together and map a way to take short term, medium term and long term steps to provide food in that will keep us alive. And right now I, you know, the sorrows that I feel are, are there and to build in the reciprocity with the natural world so the rest of the world will feed us and we will give back to the earth. To find ways to do that is one place that I'm focusing my, my non work time, my work time is devoted to climate change and other things. But I wanted to share that with you because I don't think we use our dreams and other gifts in a way in this culture we have left ourselves devoid of that richness. Thank you.

Thank you. Carolyn. When you talked about tools for looking forward. I didn't expect that you were going to talk about dreams, and I'm really grateful that you did because it reminds us that, you know, the Western mind says tools and thinks in a particular direction, but these are capacities of living beings to encounter the future in different ways. And the world of dreams, you know, how much of us pay attention to our own, much less share them with others?

I just want to add that the deer in Iowa have Covid. I have 21 deer in my yard the other day. 21. And the percentage that probably have Covid. And then when you get the zoonotic diseases going back and forth, we are in trouble.

Well, we are in trouble at a whole lot of levels. And that's part of what my friend Chauncey Bell calls the mess, the complex intertangled nature of all these things that are breaking at once. And yeah, we're in deep trouble. But let me ask you again, tools for looking forward. What else comes to mind for you? And I'm asking not about the plans of what to do, but the how to look.

Well, the dreams are the ones that. And then pattern recognition, looking for the patterns. What patterns are we looking at? And who's good at that? So I'm not as great at looking at certain kinds of patterns. Food I am. I look at each person in this group, and we are a library of knowledge. I know things that none of you will ever even imagine knowing. And I know that some of you are entire encyclopedias. And to put that together, what patterns are we seeing together in the world? How do we. How do we. How do we look at that? So I think pattern recognition is one of the skills, one of the tools that I would add to it. Those are the two that I'm. That I chance upon.

That's good. Other people invite you to put thoughts in the chat about what tools for looking forward you use. For me, one of the most powerful has been scenario planning, which I know some of you are familiar with, was developed or popularized at Royal Dutch Shell back in the 70s, advanced as a fine art by Global Business Network. It's a book by Peter Schwartz called the Art of Longview. And this is a process, for those of you who are not familiar with it, of constructing stories of possible futures in a very systematic way. Thinking about what are some of the key trends or anomalies that may be in front of us and using those to construct clusters of four very different stories of what the world might be like, not as an attempt to predict anything, but to start to Sensitize us to pattern recognition of, oh, this is. I'm now seeing that kind of world in which these other phenomena were happening. What are the social phenomena, the technical, the economic, the dream time? What are, you know, what's showing up in culture to help us orient to surprising changes that are always just past the threshold. So, for me, that's one of the tools that's been very effective for that. Marna, you've waited patiently. Let me call on you, Carolyn. Thank you very much, Marna. And then Elena and Dale.

Hi, everyone. My name is Marna Schwartz. I'm here in Albany, New York, traditional land of the Haudenosaunee and the Mohican people. This is Road Runner. She's having a little bit of wry neck right now, so we're giving her some extra tlc. It means her neck isn't working very well. And. Will you say the question again just to recenter my share?

Well, the opening question was how have your moods or interpretations of what you've observed or commitments shifted in the last month or two?

Beautiful.

I think I'd like to start with. I mean, just first of all, to land myself in place a little bit more. I have the very great privilege of sitting next to my dad right now, who had the very good sense to raise me on science fiction. And so I feel in many ways more a citizen of the world of, like, say, Star Trek than I do of the United States currently.

You're not alone, Marna.

What's that?

You're not alone.

Yeah.

Thank you. So that's where my sensibilities lie. I had a coaching client ask me the other day, what do you think of inflation? And my response was along the lines of, I think it's a symptom of a problem. I don't think it's the problem because our relationship with value is so far removed these days from what's valuable and in my realm of thinking. And I've used the COVID time to really drench myself in. Learning from my chickens, learning from my plants, learning from space, what. What's possible and what the nature of life itself. And. And what I come to again and again is, is the. The answers lay in a hyperlocal nutrient perpetuation and amplifying the importance of those cycles. So I don't think, you know, inflation, I'm not like, oh, no, inflation, I'm like, wow, the system is broken. And how do we build a different kind of system with values? Like I think Carolyn was saying, and like many of us are pointing to where the nutrient flow is supported, you know, as close as possible to people, you know, where we create human scale growth opportunities and gilding of plants and gilding of people. And furthermore removing the need for everyone to have their own supercomputer. Her pocket, you know, because I feel so grateful to have a friend. Where is he now? In a refugee camp in one of my other friends here who knows Benriki Christiana. Where is Bemriki? Do you remember call Uganda, Is that right? He's doing a refugee camp in a place. Bemriki from grc. And that's the other thing I've been doing is building community through the global regenerative collab. Is Bemoricki in Uganda, do you recall? Yeah. He's in a place where basically there's war and refugee circumstances because of our need for like gadgets. You know, we're mining, we're mining so many minerals out of the ground that don't need to be out of the ground. So how do. So I'm looking toward how do we create community where like, you know, a village of 120 people can share a computer lab and there's like maybe 10 computers with like high speed Internet that you can go to when you need them. You don't need one all day, every day. You can spend your watching time watching chickens instead of Netflix. And so I'm just dreaming into this possibility in this world, but it makes a lot more sense to my heart. I think it makes a lot more sense to peace on earth and the supply chain, which is just another way of saying perpetuating life.

The dream is good. I'm reminded that refugee crises and war and brutality predate supercomputers in my pocket. So I want to invite us to be careful about thinking about cause and effect, because as you said, the problems are complex, they're intertwingled. I live in a world where people talk about climate crisis as the existential crisis of our. As the existential crisis of our time and as the number one issue. And I increasingly see it as symptom of the kinds of breakdowns that you and Carolyn and others are talking about, about the relationship of human beings and human economies. World, you know, the, the extract, the extractive system without reciprocity. We talked last year about the structural defects of capitalism. Hyphenated. And you know, and so the question that I find myself in more and more, this is one of my answers to my question earlier is I'm asking myself and my clients, the people I talk with, what might it look like if we did business and if we did everything we did as though we actually belonged to a living world. Very different than sustainability, doing less bad, polluting less, being nicer to nature, taking better care of nature. But what if, and not even, as some of my friends say, we are nature? Well, yeah, what if we belonged to a living world with a whole lot of other living creatures in this living world that only exists as a whole? What might we do? How might we live? How might we act? How might we transact in that world? So thank you very much for what you shared. Thanks, dad, Elena, Leonard, and then Dale, Byron.

Well, the change that I was thinking most about was how the time frames are colliding. I look at what Putin is doing and it seems like it's out of a playbook from 100 years ago or more where countries simply came in and crushed a smaller country and didn't pay any attention to the rule based world order or boundaries or any of those things. And the contrast with Ukraine, which seems to be led by some really media savvy 21st century people. And I was struck by the fact that it's certainly possible to acknowledge that what led up to this is very.

Complex and that Russia does have some.

Legitimate security and other concerns and still think it's wrong to bomb residential areas and kill people indiscriminately and make war on your neighbors.

I think that.

Is something that really, really can't be acceptable no matter what is going on and what your concerns are. And I was, I said I was just on a YouTube presentation earlier this afternoon about the team's integrity process, which is a process to bring a wide variety of perspectives from people who care about a common issue or common question together and to essentially hammer out a value structure and maybe some plans.

And that that is one of the.

Areas where we can organize on the ground in communities, whether they're communities of practice or residential geographical communities, and really kind of share together what we need. And it seems to me that what we need is to look at both the limitations. Apparently there aren't enough minerals to make batteries to make battery operated power feasible to the extent that we think we need it to be, but also to look at the frugal technologies and how they are coexisting and a lot of those are from aboriginal people. And I guess, finally, I wish there were more I could do to help.

But there doesn't seem to be much.

One can do except maybe contribute to a relief organization or help refugees when they show up. So I'm Interested in learning about that and also interesting. Interested in educating people to I guess.

What Bill Rees talks about as the.

Central problem that we have, which is overshoot, that we're simply drawing too much.

Of our natural capital rather than living.

On the quote unquote interest of the natural capital.

Well, I hear you describing Elena. Not that there's nothing you can do. You just describe to half a dozen things that you can do and that you do do. Sharing these ideas, orienting people differently to the world they're living in. We all of us vote and choose people who make decisions on our behalf. And you talked about teams, integrity, which is a huge contribution. I invite you to put something in the chat so people can track that down because many people on this call are concerned with how do you bring diverse groups of people together to find some kind common concern and common purpose and common action. It's, you know, it's not easy as we all know. So the tools for that are very welcome. Thank you for sharing. Dale, Byron, welcome.

Okay, thank you, Gil. Thank you very much and great to see everybody. And as always I, I find myself, you know, thinking about one thing and then hearing so many juicy ideas. But one of the things I was.

Thinking about, you know what that is? You know what that is, Dale?

A good, good conversation.

It, it's also, it's also a reflection that when we talk about, I'm thinking and this is what's in my mind is that that's not exactly accurate because there's mind here.

Yes.

There's a conversation happening inside all of us that's not separate people having separate conversations. There's this other phenomenon called mind. But anyhow, I inter. I. Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to.

That's well said. It's well said. And, and a couple things, I printed out a couple of things from your note yesterday, Gil and I noticed here's a, a quote he says, as Unger puts it, transform. Transformative politics is not about blueprints, it is about pathways. It is not architecture, it is music. And for those of you that that was in Gil's email yesterday. And then you started out with this story which was just incredible about the moon and the imagery in that story. And so here's what I can to refer report about. You know, I, I self select around certain kinds of art and a big part of my work has been to bring a certain, you know, art into unlikely places to try to connect or help people connect. Head and heart. That would be one metaphor I would use. And so I was thinking that the people that I'm connecting with these days, and I've made a wonderful connection. There's two people, one resource that I wanted to mention, and maybe a number of you will know his work, but there's a guy named Nate Hagens who has a podcast and a program he's doing called the Great Simplification, and I think it's incredibly worthwhile. And the point I was going to say is that he and another person I've connected up with from the modern monetary theory, economics world is Fadel Kaboob. Anyway, all the people that I'm talking to are saying how art. There's this thing about that we need. That art needs to be in the mix, that art needs to be. It needs to be part of what we're doing. And so I think my own work is to try to imagine. It's not so much about going on some big strategic plan to say, oh, I got to get poetry. No, no, no. I think. I think what's happened if you. If we look inside our own lives and I. Look, Gil, what you sent yesterday and what you started with today is that we have this urge for art. We have this urge for that now. And I think that. Yeah, I mean, I think that that is something which is calling us, and I just want to encourage each of us to. Don't resist that. Don't resist that. You know, in my own vision and something that I've. I've used as a. As a framework, as a map for me is that there's three kinds of art or there's three big, huge needs we have with art. And my thing. Thing is poetry, but it's to connect with ourselves, to connect with others, and to connect with the great other. And that's not going to strike anybody as, oh, my God, I never thought of that.

Yeah.

And at the same time, I would say, you know, don't scrimp on that. Don't scrimp on that. And I'm not suggesting anyone is, but. So that's. That's what's really up for me these days.

That's beautiful, Dale. Thank you for that. I was in a conversation with a friend last month who startled me by telling me that she saw me as a poet. I thought, what? I never identified myself as that, but there was something in the way I was writing and speaking that evoked that for her. And so we decided that in terms of letting go of old identities, I'm going to start showing up as the artist formerly known as Gil.

May I say this? I think that when you speak. Well, first of all, let me back up. A poem is any language that causes us to stop and pay attention. End of subject.

Say it again. Say it again.

A poem is any language that has us stop and pay attention.

Which itself is a lovely poem, by the way.

Yeah, well, yeah. Thank you. And the thing I was going to say about Fidel Kaboob, who is another amazing resource if you're interested in macroeconomics. And to get a poet interested in macroeconomics ain't no small feat. But he is brilliant and he told me a story. He said when he was in grad school, before he started teaching, he was giving this talk on modern monetary theory. And it was so abrupt and confrontational to this older professor that was sitting in the audience that he jumped up at the end of the speech and said, you didn't do a speech on economics, you did a poem.

How dare you? Yeah.

And so Fadel said, I took that as a compliment. And he gave it as a great dig.

Love it. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. David Schoenbrunn. Good morning. Good to see you here, or good afternoon.

Thanks. A couple quick points. I've been feeling that I'm living in a world surrounded by crazy people.

Nothing makes any sense at all.

And so I've done something that takes me out of my comfort zone. I'm part of an email list. And so I have organized a meetup.

In Berkeley of everyone to get together and bond and come to see what we have in common. And so that feels like a helpful step.

And one other thing, in my climate work, I was presenting some ideas to.

A rather highly placed person in the legislature.

In it, I commented that I'm. I recognize the state is not.

It's pretending to take action about climate change, but it's not really serious.

She responded to me in a very.

Forthcoming way, as if people are rarely ever candid.

And so I had taken something of a risk of expressing what I see.

As the reality.

Right now.

David, you're breaking up.

David.

David. Excuse me a second. David, turn off your video for a moment because we're not getting. Your sound is breaking.

Just the statement was. What I said was, I may be radical, but I'm blind.

I didn't hear the last line. Maybe you could put that in the chat because it sounded important, but it didn't come across. Sorry, thank you. Thank you for the sticking in the chat. And by the way, regarding the chat, we're not going to send out this chat. We will post the video to YouTube. But if you want to save the chat, use the three dots in the lower right hand corner and grab that for yourself.

Okay.

Sorry for the audio issue, because I did want to hear what you said. Okay. I just. I had a sound problem. Seems to be fixed. Anybody else?

What is, what is?

Aside from my initial question, what is this last hour of conversation and listening to each other provoked for you?

Okay. Who's that?

Liza Loop. Welcome.

Thanks.

Can you hear me?

Very well.

Okay.

When I was in college, we had.

A big deal about zero population growth. So I've been putting comments in the chat. I'm not hearing anywhere near as much commentary about the need to curtail population, human population growth. And I see our resource shortages and a lot of our crisis as the result of that. So I'm just worrying. Wondering. I'm worrying, but I'm also wondering why that's not. I mean, we hear a lot about equity, we hear a lot about inclusion, we hear a lot about dispute resolution, we hear a lot about conservation. But if we had a lower population.

We wouldn't need so many resources. Anybody want to respond to that? I mean, to my mind, Liza, the conversation, the dynamics of the conversation have shifted and there's a lot more talk about the demographic transition and what happens. The impact of education of women and reduction of poverty has to do with population growth. And in fact, we seem to be seeing a leveling out of the population curve. I mean, people are talking about 9 to 10 billion, maybe 12 billion, not 15 plus. So there's that.

That's helpful, but it's just not radical enough, I think.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

Yeah. No, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

On the one hand, we say it's a crisis. Then we say, well, what's underneath the crisis? What are the factors that are feeding the crisis?

Yeah.

And it's like, do we have a water shortage? No, there's plenty of water on Earth.

Humans.

This level of population of humans has a water shortage.

Well, this level of population and the way that we live, I mean, the population. When we talk about population crisis, we're usually talking about Africa and Asia. And a kid born in Los Angeles has, I don't know, two or three hundred times the resource impact of a kid born in Mumbai. So where's the population crisis?

The person in Mumbai wants to live the way with the resource base that the person in Los Angeles has.

And who's going to tell them that they can't?

That's the problem.

Yeah.

The game that I've been involved in for decades is saying, how do we make it possible for the kid in Mumbai to have not the resource base of the kid in la, but the quality of life. Some people may dispute hearing the quality of life in LA in the same sentence, but we're not going to go there. But people want adequate food and they want the food to be safe. So they need refrigeration, they need comfortable homes and so forth. Those are not necessarily linked to resource space. That has to do with how we design and organize our cities, technologies, homes and so forth. And still there's population pressure. It's all of that together. Right?

Is linked.

Yeah.

We human beings don't need refrigeration. We've lived for many millennia without refrigeration. That we think we need refrigeration is the problem.

Okay, you've got a lot. There's a lot to untangle because we don't, we don't start from the life in the village in central India. We start from, you know, multi dozen million people conurbations that we have to somehow shift, change or untangle one of the concepts. But you're right, you know, I haven't, I haven't seen as much discussion of population as I did when I was coming up.

Yeah. One of the concepts that I think.

Would be helpful is the concept of sufficiency.

We have a concept of subsistence, we have a concept of sustainability and we have a concept of wealth.

But there's something in the middle which is sufficiency. Absolutely.

I'd like to see more talk about that.

Jan Hanhardt, who's been one of my inspirations, he's a Dutch industrial engineer who wrote wonderful monograph called Ecofeedback back in the 80s or 90s. He approaches this question by telling a story. Imagine a pride of lions on the African veldt and they, you know, and there's a herd of antelope nearby. And at some point the mama lion goes out and chases the herd and brings down an antelope and drags it back to the pride and mama lion, papa lion, baby lions, all feast on the antelope. What happens next? What happens next?

Male lion takes a nap.

Everybody takes a nap. They go to sleep. Everybody's full and they are satiated. Another word for satisfied, you know, for, for sufficiency. They're satiated and they go to sleep. What they don't do is they don't say, look at all those other gazelles out there, let's go bag some more. They have enough and they stop. And then later they're hungry and they get some more. We don't do that. And I would suggest that. I don't know if this is a human phenomenon or if it's a capitalist phenomenon, but in the system we live in, there is no concept of sufficient or satiation or. I have enough. I hear. Ken, I'm doing the we thing again, but I'm talking large global cultural economic system. We. I know individual people and families who very much have made the choice around sufficiency and not only as a restraint against overconsumption, but as a choice of where to put their energy and where to focus and not be chasing the more, but do something else with their creative juices. So it's a really important question.

You.

Know, I don't know, do people. Is that, is that a. Is that a human defect or a cultural economic system defect? I don't be interested in what people think. Dale, I see your hand.

Yeah, I was just going to say, and I, I. This resource that I was talking about and the thing that Liza just said, Paul Ehrlich, who's still around, who wrote the population bomb back in the 70s, he just did an updated conversation with the guy I mentioned to you guys, Nate Hagens at the Great Central Simplification. So I think you might find that very interesting, Liza and I think that the things, Gil, that you brought up about the complications of too many human beings, and if you've got one human being that's using three and another using a hundred, those are not equal, you know, those. That. That's a complexity that that must be.

Be.

That must be dealt with. But I was just going to say his whole term, the Great Simplification, which doesn't that sound, I mean, how do you guys feel when I hear that? The Great Simplification. Oh, my God, that sounds wonderful to me. That means we've got to stop. We've got to use about 20% of the resources that each of us use individually, which I think, Eliza, that's exactly what you were talking about. So the point is, though, it's got to be done in a Bucky Fuller way. To your point, Gail, that where we got to think this is the best thing since sliced bread and we all rediscovered it.

Yeah, well, Bucky's, Bucky's slogan was more with less. How do we do more with less? So that's part of it. You know, the Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren some years ago came up with what was what came to be called the Ehrlich Holdren equation, and which basically Said that environmental impact is a function of population. Liza, to your point, times affluence, times technology. More people with more money to spend to buy more crap means more environmental impact. Ray Anderson did an amendment to that. He drew a dividing line and put in the denominator other kinds of technology, T1 and T2 as he called it. So technology that could reduce impact. And that was where he focused interface carpet on and many of us have focused on that, that, that Bucky S piece of how do we do more with less? How do we meet human need for well being and satiation with less impact in terms of how we design and use resources. Ultimately we have to get to less use because we're in an extractive economy that's digging out the life of the living system that we depend on. You know, I wrote in the, in the mailing yesterday that it's, you know, we talk about climate, but it's also soils which are intrinsically tied together with climate in a way that most people don't recognize. The viability of the oceans, biodiversity, toxication of ecosystems, the, you know, the, the rapidly changing human urban rural interface which Carolyn talked about with the deer in the yard, the impact of all this on human immune response all tangled together. Where's the point of action? You know, I think it was, I think it was Charles Schwab the senior that said the best place to put your, the best thing, the best place to act is where you are with what you have. So that speaks to the local and many other dimensions of what we've been talking about here. Let me go to Marna and then George and then can't see what that is there. And then Claudine.

Thank you. So I'd like to address your question about sufficiency from a couple different angles. She has wryneck, so she's trying to survive. The first thing actually goes a little bit back to the first question. What, how I've been, what I've been doing the last month. And there's a question about our conversation, very important conversation to have about the nervous system, human nervous systems, dysregulation and like this, this extreme context of burnout. I threw up a Facebook ad and got 190 women in a course that I did a beta course about how to stop burnout. And I think that that's common in the human experience where they're having this experience of like dysregulated nervous system, complete freak out perpetually. And I think that part of the reason the conversation for sufficiency is missing is because there's no, there's, in some ways there's no one home, right. They're stuck in a, in a loop of survival whereby they're not able to like, rest and go, oh, I do have enough. Right. They're just trying to get more, get by. It's what Native American people might call the hungry ghost phenomenon. And so, you know, helping liberate human systems is part of the conversation that I've been having around what can be done. What's important to do is helping give back that sense of sovereignty and regulated nervous system and so forth. Sorry, go ahead. The second piece around sufficiency is I don't think it's a human conversation because Native American communities had edicts around enoughness that there was, you know, a practice of you don't actually hunt the salmon until there's been, you know, so many that have gone by and then you can hunt. Right. It was built in that their practices of harvesting were based on ecological interest rather than, you know, an extractive nature of what can they get and so forth. Same in the Jewish religion. You know, there was edicts and understandings that you leave the edges of the field for other people. There was a sense of enoughness. So, no, I don't think that the hungry ghost phenomenon of more, more, more is, is by necessity part of the human experience.

You in the, in the ancient Hebrews, you leave the corner of the field for the poor. You rest the land every seven years. You free slaves every seven years. Every seven times seven, every 50 years, the land reverts to its original owners. So the game of accumulation which people will play gets reset. It's not an infinite accumulation. It rises and it gets reset. And this is, you know, things like this show up in many ancient traditions. The tradition of debt Jubilee goes back 1000 or 2000 years before the ancient Hebrews. David Michael Hudson has written brilliantly on this and forgive them their debts. Remarkable book. Have a look at that. Thank you, Marna. George, we're coming close to time, so we'll go George and Claudine and then Christiana and then we'll see where we are.

You might want to look up a cross cultural reference, the Native American Hungry Ghost tradition with the Japanese and Chinese Hungry Ghost tradition. And the differences and the similarities might be interesting.

And I'll bet that all these traditions have some thoughts about what do you do for the hungry ghost.

There's a very good story about God in the Japanese tradition, but I'll let you look at that up yourself. One of the things that I think that has happened to me is since Putin sent his troops into Ukraine is that a lot of what's not essential has fallen away. Part of that is also because I've been playing with the idea of the carbon budget. So I wrote a piece last week looking at a particular carbon counter which says that the budgets to stay below 1.5 degrees C will run out by July or August 2029. That gives you a deadline. With a deadline, then you can backcast. I've seen some stuff recently that will help me back cast like a report from RMI about what utilities have to do. Saul Griffith has his big energy overview that has just been released and you know, Mark C. Jacobson and all that stuff.

Yet Saul speaking at Verge a few years ago. Saul Griffith is A wizard technologist, MacArthur Fellow, runs a invention factory like Thomas Edison here in San Francisco. Saul speaking at Verge said, you know, we don't have 10 years, we have 10 seconds. In other words, we shouldn't be thinking about what can we phase in over 10 years. What we should be doing is doing everything that we know how to do correctly, starting now. And I'll be the first to confess I don't do that even in my own life where I have direct control, not to mention the places where I don't have direct control. What might happen if we did? What would it take for us to do that or even think about that or even be in conversation about not getting. How do we, you know, get, you know, not use up the deadline and the Runway, but what would happen if we did it as quickly as possible? I've been saying to everybody who says my here's my greenhouse gas emissions goal by 2030 or by 2040. I'm asking everybody to say by 2030 or sooner, by 2040 or sooner. It's not like you're aiming for this target out there. You're aiming for as fast as you can, but no later than. And that just like couple of words shifts the conversation.

That's the idea behind what I'm thinking of in terms of back casting. You give yourself a deadline and you say this is where we have to be. So let's say zero emissions by 2029, July, August, how do we get there? And here are some of the tools that we can do it. I've also been looking at what the military does. So like the US has just put out a report about how they're to going, going to go green, renewable to power there. The British have and they have a. This is what we're going to do in one year, this is what we're going to do in two years, this is what we're going to do in five years.

Let me, let me, let me just make a offer, a tweak here, George, because that's, that's planning, which is a good thing to do. Backcasting is something different, which is what NASA did for the Apollo mission.

Understood.

Let me, let me just add it.

Twinkling. I'm intertwingling. Okay, intermingled. So everything goes, everything goes into the, in the, in the stone soup pot. All right. All of the stuff goes in the stone soup pot. So how do you use all of that information? The spark gap from my position is something that you said earlier, Gil, at the beginning was why didn't Biden draw the line directly to climate? Why is it so difficult for a candidate to say, oh, by the way, the fastest growing jobs in the United States for the last five years or so has been wind tax and solar installers? You very rarely hear that. I've heard one Senator, Senator Merkley on television as a talking head, make the connection between the hydrocarbon war, as Timothy Snyder called it in the New York Times yesterday, and climate and what is it that doesn't allow us to do this? Another thing that I wrote a week or so ago was about Ray Anderson and interface. And going back to what, what you said earlier about how all the 25 largest corporations are failing, we haven't model an interface that already went through the process.

So the mystery, the mystery is why when Ray Anderson spent the last 10 years of his life doing nothing but flying around talking to other CEOs about what he had done, why is it so sticky and why does it not move? So that's one of the mysteries I want to come back to the back casting piece. I think it's part of the story. When we're facing impossible change, changes or changes that feel impossible, people get immobilized, say I don't know what I can do now that will take me to that huge goal somewhere off in the future. And anything I do seems inadequate and I'm constrained by the realities that I'm living in now. This is, you know, this is not feasible. That's not feasible. What NASA did with the Apollo mission is asked the question on day one of what did we do in the last 10 years, in the last year of the 10 year run up to the moon mission? You know, it was not a question of practicality. It's like, what were the last pieces that had to be in place. And then they asked, what did we have to do in year nine to enable year 10 to happen? What do we do in year back, back down the stack? And then they reverse engineered the mission. And I find that's a very powerful tool. We were talking about, about, you know, tools for looking forward. We talking about calling from the future. There's also planning from the future, which is a way to unlock the frozenness that people and companies and cities and governments sometimes find themselves in. Looking today at this big open space of, oh, my God, where are we going to go? George, thank you. I want to take a couple more people in the time we have left. George, please put, if you would put in the chat where people can find your writings.

Oh, yeah.

Okay. Claudine, welcome.

Hi.

A couple of things now that you just talked about back casting. Another thing that came to mind is Otto Sharma's work in Ulab, which I also find very helpful in this regard. So he also has quite interesting methods to sort of work from the emerging future. Also like constellation type of work, which he calls 4D mapping, 3D mapping. 4D mapping.

Is it like family constellation or is that something else?

Well, it is, as in people are standing in the room and take roles. So it is a bit like family constellation work. And I've done it twice also for big projects and found it very helpful because it also unravels blind spots that are in systems. They somehow show up in these methods. I call this social presence in theater. But I really wanted to say something else because you said, how do you feel about the exchange in the last hour? And I'm in Germany. So what I feel very clearly is that the experience of war is far more immediate here.

Yes.

That the regenerative principle of place, I can really feel it now because I have lots of exchange with groups in the US and the exchange in the last hour.

Yeah.

And I'm in Germany. So what I feel very clearly is that the experience of war is far more immediate here.

Yes.

That the. The regenerative principle of place last few weeks, I don't feel that connected. I feel there is something else happening here in Europe that's very immediate in respect of the individual drama. So there was a Thomas Hubbell session one and a half weeks ago on collective trauma, where people from Ukraine and Russia and Hungary exchanged about how they felt. And that was a very moving and very deep exchange on the fears and the trauma that's underneath all of that. And I also think collective trauma work is one key to get out of this globally, I think it's like we all have our peace. The other thing is the role of the EU and the economy is very immediate here. Who are we between these power blocks, you know, and we can't defend ourselves, Germany in particular. And at the moment we get a very immediate sense that our economy is not sustainable without fossil fuel. We have no own resources. We cannot like the US where you have 85% that you cover by yourself. We have nothing here. Right. So that is like an hour manufacturing industry. It's like as if someone shows us near death experience what it will be like when we're running out of fossil fuel. Our economies are not sustainable.

That's just what it is as they are now.

Yeah, well, I mean at the moment we can still go on for a while longer and this is why Nate Hagen's work is really important on the climate map. How long will this last? And with all of this, you know, the fossil fuel running out and we're not having technology to replace it will just the population growth will automatically cease to be a problem. Right. Because we can't sustain the food systems and everything else. And the other third thing I wanted to mention like the geopolitical, the meta shift that's happening and looking at China, right. And what, what this really means in the, in the grand scale of things and that I learned from this now through the sense making I did for myself that you know, China has a grand plan to replace the US as a superpower. 2049 at the hundredth birthday of the Communist Party. That wasn't so clear to me. So and so all of this for me in the last few weeks, it's taking a lot of energy to hold all of that. And it's Alistair's here, so we're in another group together. There is like, you know, talking about this, the chain, someone has changed the wallpaper overnight and now I'm trying to, you know, do the pictures still fit? Do I need to change the furniture all together? And it's draining. It's like it takes lots and lots of energy in the background and it's just exhausting. So that's my life report from Germany.

Thank you for that. I appreciate that. You're talking about kind of the somatic impact of living in the midst of so much change. This is the living between worlds that I've named this conversation after because that's where we seem to be. China by the way, doesn't just have a plan to be the global leader by mid century, they have a plan to be an ecological civilization. It's actually in the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Nobody in the west seems to be aware of that. What does that mean? What's going on with that? The other thing I wonder about from what you're saying is, in the midst of the, for me, unimaginable urgency of the threat from the east and the refugee crisis and the tumult of all that, is there now much discussion in Germany about energy transition for you? It's clearly not a matter of running out of fossil fuels. It's fossil fuel sources being cut off or cutting them off. Is there room for that conversation yet, or is that not happening yet?

Well, not at a scale that I would think will be appropriate. There is still a state of shock because of all of it. And there is also, I think, the 16 years with Merkel. People are sort of in this sort of, like, somehow it will go away sort of mood. Yeah, it's sort of like, I don't feel a real sense of urgency other than, okay, can we give, like, special bonuses for the petrol and so for households and there's lots of immediate attention and, you know, like, I think what happened, like, people are not ready to cope.

Well, I'm fascinated by what something you just said, and we'll have to table this for the next time, but even in the circumstances you're in, there's not a sense of urgency.