#5 The Only Way Out Is Through—Living with grace, calm and power in a VUCA World | Call #5

You.

Those of you don't know me, I'm Gil Friend. This is the fifth in a series of calls that I've been hosting on living with grace, calm and power in a volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous world. Anybody recognize where you are? VUCA is the acronym that came out of the Air Force for that. Why are we doing these calls? I'm hosting these to bring together people who care in various ways about a world that works to offer an opportunity for us to think together and to build our individual and collective capacity to live with grace and calm and power in this crazy world that we're in now. So welcome to the conversation. As always, these are being recorded. We'll send you links for the recording and the chat after the call. Gene, let me. Let's go to the next slide, if you would. So we're in an amazing time of change. When we started these calls, we were talking about COVID crisis and climate crisis and the connection between them. And now you look around you and we've got the racial justice issue and police issues exploding in the background. U.S. china, relationships shifting back up a slide. Gene, thank you. U. S. China, relationship shifting, climate still looming. Not front of mind on anybody's news agenda right now, but certainly they're in pervasive. And in the face of all this, we see remarkable, what we would say, impossible change in the way the world has motivated most of it around Covid. The outpouring that we're seeing around Black Lives Matter and actually, let's go past this slide, if you would. I'm sorry, my bad. Move on, Jane. Next slide. You know, change happens faster than we realize. You know, somebody once said it takes longer than you think, but then happens all at once. Jane, can we get next slide please? There we go. Some of you have seen this set of slides from Tony Siba. A 13 year gap more than 100 years ago on the left hand side, Fifth Avenue in New York City. All horses, no cars. Actually, one car. Thirteen years later, all cars, one horse. The blink of an eye. This is not in tech time. This is 120 years ago. Things just flipped completely in 10 years. Take the next slide, please. Next one. And you know, many of you have seen these technology adoption curves where it takes decades for new technologies to come into the culture, and then fewer decades and fewer. And just, you know, 4G in a decade. IPhones. Rapid, rapid change. Next slide, please. Crazy man Elon Musk introduces the Tesla electric vehicle. Next slide. Because we're having some trouble with our slides today. One more. Next slide. Keep going. Well, I guess we're not going to get there. So there you go. So Tesla just jumps away from the pack and becomes the dominant electric vehicle, actually, electric vehicle, the dominant luxury car on the market in just a matter of years. And now The Tesla Model 3 is the top selling car in the United States. Just, you know, blink of an eye. While everyone else is saying, this can't happen. It's always been this way. It's impossible. We couldn't possibly do this. We couldn't do it this quickly. We couldn't afford to do it. And yet you see things like this. Next slide, please. And then speaking of everything happening at once, well, there you go. This is the Berlin Wall coming down in the late 1980s, six months ahead of this happening. No one could have anticipated it. There were no predictions, none of the intelligence services. No one was saying this was going to happen. In the cold decades of international tension flipped in a heartbeat. Next slide. And then, of course, this is where we are now. You see the very rapid rise of sentiment around Black Lives Matter. And then suddenly, an explosion, a change in concern, a change in people's sense of what's real and realistic and what to ask for in the blink of an eye. Next slide, please. Our slides aren't cooperating today. Sorry about that, folks.

One more.

And so here, here we are today. You know, I've been really struck. A lot of the chatter that I see on social media is people saying with absolute certainty what's going to happen around Covid, or with absolute certainty what the election is going to be like in November, less than five months away, by the way. And yet, if you think back to December, no one anticipated a global pandemic. No one anticipated an instant shutdown of the global economy. Four weeks ago, no one anticipated this happening on the streets in hundreds of cities around the world with a fervor and a diversity in the crowds and a remarkably, just incredibly heartful spirit. In a place where there could be enormous rage, there's also enormous heart. So here we are. Next slide, please, Jean. And the great Pete Seeger said some years ago, he said, history gets made when people come to the same conclusions from many different directions. And here we are now. And that's the challenge for all of us as people working for change. What are the conditions that give rise to this? It strikes me that one is that there's urgency. Second, there's an underlying sense of care. Things that people care about that get brought to the surface in a particular moment. And third, there's our capacity or readiness to act when these situations arise. And, you know, and even in that, you can go to the. Go to the next slide, Jeanne, which will be a blank. And so we have this mounting enthusiasm, but let it be said, there's enthusiasm on the other side as well. We've seen police officers, not only some police officers take the knee, but in other cities, police officers have resigned in opposition to the tighter controls that they know are coming. We still see a steady 30% support for Donald Trump, despite everything that we're witnessing. And we see very dramatically this weird phenomenon of confirmation bias where all of us, me included, and I suspect you included, have a very selective approach to what we pay attention to. Right? We look for the data that confirms what we already believe, including the belief that we can know what the intention of other people might be. And I say this not to be nice. It's not about being nice to the people that we disagree with, but, you know, forging our own strengths and capacity to live in a diverse world where people disagree, where we have to forge new kinds of agreement initially with those who share our concerns. And eventually, hopefully someday, we start to stitch together the social fabric of this country. We have an interesting piece of evidence now, Jeanne, go to the next slide. The pandemic has shown us that we can take action at speeds that we did not think were possible, with coordination that we didn't believe was possible, and on a scale that we didn't believe is possible and remarkable, without the cries for predatory delay that we are used to in our entire lives, such as, how are you going to pay for that? How many times have you heard that challenge thrown down to any good idea? Or, yeah, we want to do that, but we need to take things slowly. So the question that we, in this case, we, myself and a dozen of my favorite competitors, sustainability and business strategy consultants and climate activists, brought to 80 of the world's leading companies 10 days ago to ask them, what if we could bring the speed and scale and scope and coordination of their. Your pandemic responses to the other mega issues that are looming before us. Next slide, please. And so we proposed to them to sign a covenant. Oh, there you go. I'm sorry, we've got linkage synchrony problems here. You can read the text. I'll read it as well. Actually, if someone want to volunteer to read this, someone pop a hand up. I know this is not a shy crowd. There you go, Eckhart. Okay.

I solemnly commit to do what is necessary at the speed, scale, and scope that is necessary. I Commit to disrupt the ideas and pathways that got us here and to ensure that we don't go back to a broken system, but go forward before the ink is dry. In this covenant, I will begin creating economic, social and governmental change at speed, scale and scope. I will practice and advocate for unprecedented levels of collaboration, and it will mobilize my organization and others in my circle of influence to do the same. Oh, is that it?

Yeah, I'm sorry, I got. My thing got muted for a second. Okay, Sorry, guys, I'm having tech weirdness over here. So, as I said, we presented this in a gathering of 80 companies, companies who you'd consider leading players around sustainability and social justice and the like. Half the hands in the room went up instantly. People said, yes, we're in now. These were individuals. And so the challenge we said to them is, this is not about you just signing on to this, but bringing this to your company, challenging your company to take on this commitment. And that process is under, is underway now. So the question that we're really asking to them, and the question that I'm asking to you, Next slide, please. Is in this moment, what would you attempt if you knew you could not fail? If instead of making the calculations of what's reasonable, what's realistic, what do I think I can really do? If we started from the question of what really needs to happen, and what if we assume that that happens and think backwards from success, reverse engineering the challenge of how did we get there? Not how do we take the first step today to an imagined utopian future, but if we could get there, if we could have an America where systemic racism was gone, if we could defund, reorganize, reinvent our police forces in a way that they actually protected and served our communities in a way that everyone felt safe and included by that, what if we start with that and say, you know, make the goal really clear and then think, well, you know, what were the last steps that got us there? What were the steps before those? You know, this is, this is the technique that NASA used for the Apollo mission in the 1960s. Declared a mission and then actually reverse engineered it in the 10 year process. They planned the 10th year first and then the 9th year and then the 8th year, worked their way backwards, found the gaps, found the technologies that didn't exist, and then systematically invented the pieces that needed to happen. Of course, for us, the challenge is bigger. It's not just technological, it's cultural, sociological, very personal. And so we're dealing not just questions of. And of course political. So we're dealing with questions that are of a very different nature than the ones that NASA had to deal with or that engineers need to deal with. And that's why I have talked with you, those of you who've been on the prior calls a number of times about mood and about what our mood is. And Gene, I think we didn't talk to set up the polls in advance, but you should see a poll available to you. Can you bring that up or not? Maybe I can bring that up.

Let me see.

I can do it.

So why don't you do it? Yeah.

See if. And I may need to stop sharing. We'll see. Yes, I think it'll work. So I'm gonna break up a poll just very quickly. I've laid out a spectrum of possible moods that you may be finding yourself in these days or in this moment. How would you characterize your mood?

It.

Kathryn, sounds like back casting exactly what it is. Some of you are familiar that this is a technique that's been used in the natural step framework and other approaches. It's a powerful tool when you're facing an impossible challenge, when you can't see how the available first steps will get you to where you want to go. I see some people. The submit button is not working. It does seem to be working for most everybody. So I don't know what to suggest to you on that.

There are two questions. I missed that there were two questions. So the submit button only works when we've answered both questions.

Thank you, Chauncey. Just scroll down your screen for the second question. I didn't realize that was coming up at the same time. Okay, so last call, vote. If you haven't voted, I'm going to end the poll and you'll see the results. Here we go. Let's focus on the first one for the second, not the who you are, but how your mood is. Now, Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, said that moods aren't just. Just symptoms of physiological changes or, you know, like we think of as emotions, but they reveal something. They reveal to us the significance of the situation that we're in. Their foundation for our judgments. They connect us with a sense of what matters to us. And I would say more than that, they, they predispose us. They actually affect our listening, what we're able to perceive in the world, how we engage and encounter the circumstances that we're in. Go to the next slide. Jean, if you would. And you'll recognize these because you've been there. And here Fernando Flores and B. Rouse characterize These moods as more productive or less productive, meaning not they're good or bad, but moods that obscure possibilities or that reveal possibilities that constrain your degrees of freedom or that open your degrees of freedom. Gail, there's a request that you speak louder. Some people are not able to hear you. Sure. Crank up my volume. Full. Is this better, Gene?

Need to ask Chris Risley.

Chris, are we doing better now? Yes, thank you. Thanks for raising that. I'm gonna proceed. So, you know, your mood is not so much your feeling in the moment, but the state that you live in. You know, the state you're in before your feet hit the ground, when you get out of bed in the morning, and when you're in a mood of resignation versus a mood of resolution. You move differently in the world. You hear differently, you engage differently with people. Let's go to the next slide. Just pulling a subset out of that list. This is a matrix from Robert Dunham, a student of Flores, that took four very familiar moods and laid them out on these axes of positive and negative, active and passive. So ambition is a feeling, is a positive mood, opens possibility, and it's active, whereas acceptance would be more passive. Let me actually unpack this a bit more on the next slide. Because every mood has behind it or within it an assessment, a judgment that you are making in the world about what you see and the future that you see. Go to the next slide. And so here you have that unpacked a little bit. Ambition, the future holds possibilities. And I like it. And I know and notice that 40% of you indicated that mood, 28% determination and resolve, which I would put in sort of the same mode. Very few here. No. No flagging of resentment or anger. Resentment is very common. It's, you know, others have determined my fate, and they are to blame. It's their fault. And, you know, implicit in that, there's nothing I can do. Resignation related to that. Nothing I can do in the future will make any difference. And here you see a political landscape mapped out in a mood landscape of how people see the world. Select the information they pay attention to, select who they speak with, select how they react in the world. And I. Raise these for us because this is, to my experience, in an inordinately powerful way to ask that question of how do we live with grace and calm and power in a vuca world? Because we are living in moods, in the grips of moods, and yet we have some agents here. Go to the next slide. As I've understood it from my studies with Flores and Chauncey, who you just saw and others, is that there's really three things we can do with moods. We can observe them, observe our own, notice what they are, ask ourselves, what's the assessment that's underlying the mood? If I'm in a mood of resignation, it's because I've made a judgment about something I've interpreted, something that says I have no options here. As I look at that, is that an accurate interpretation or not? What is it based on now that I see it in that way? Are there things that I can do to start to shift the landscape that I'm in, to open up new possibility? So we can observe our own moods. We can cultivate our moods like a. Like an athlete cultivates a physical skill, or like a musician cultivates capabilities in their body to generate beautiful music. Or like we cultivate a garden, we don't just throw seeds in the ground, but we prepare a soil that is rich and nurturing in order to enable something to grow and to emerge from it. And third, I'm told, and this is a place where I don't have skill yet is that. But we all kind of do this a little bit, is that we orchestrate moods. We affect the mood in a room that we're in. We set the tone for the mood of a meeting, an orator shifts the mood of a crowd. Something has shifted the mood of this country in the last month. And so big possibility here as we start to think about and engage this. So let me stop here and ask you, let's discuss together what does this provoke? Freedom? What is this stimulated? What questions has it raised? We can take the slides off the screen for now and as always, raise your hands in the participants button if you want to chat. Or of course, feel free to comment in the chat bar on the right. Anybody care to speak? Yeah, this is Cliff.

Hi, Gil.

Hi.

Can you hear me? I think what has been revealed is the polarization around race is a manifestation of the broader polarization around how people want to live their lives. And to me, this is the whole cultural issue. And.

I have to admit, the only.

Thing I know about culture is I was told by a vice president, Yula Pakin, many years ago that the only thing that changes culture is only management can change the culture in a company. And we do that by the metrics.

So if you remember the HP Way.

Which was well known for respect for others and all that, and which was a pioneer, I think in acceptance of all of diversity was drawn a lot from the values of the founders and those values manifested in the way people were evaluated at work. And it carried through. I mean, and so that's just one example.

I'm sure there are many others.

But.

That'S a clear example of where founders gave rise to a culture that was powerful and durable, lasted many decades, had enormous business significance and cultural significance for the people there. But you started off by saying, that's the only way. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was expressing that that's what the executive said.

The only way we in business change a culture. And I was talking. Actually, the context was a safety leadership initiative where Mike Waddrill and I were expressing that we're going to have to create a safety culture around economics. That that was a narrow tactical issue at the time.

And that's what he said.

We have to change the metrics. Okay, so here are some thoughts about that.

We have other examples now where Amazon workers walked out to push Amazon to step up to climate the way Microsoft had.

Right.

Facebook workers are telling their executives, sorry, this is not what we're here for. So. Right.

So they're reacting to the leadership. And the way the leadership is having Amazon show up versus the way those employees want Amazon to show up. And so there's a gap between the culture employees want and what the executives at least have, how they've positioned the company so far. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah. And this is, you know, this you're talking about in a company. We can talk about the same issues in a national culture.

Oh, my goodness.

Absolutely. Or in a family. Yes. This is real for all of us. This is the human matrix that we live. And let me call on Stuart Levine. Thanks. Thank you.

Yeah, great. Thanks, Gil. So two things. Number one, I mean, I woke up Saturday morning to the news of what happened in Atlanta, and I just hit myself on the side of the head. It's like, what are these people thinking in the middle of so much going on around race? What were these two white cops in Atlanta, what were they thinking? I mean, the whole notion of education, training is huge. Exactly. They weren't thinking. And we have the capacity and skill to train people in terms of their reactions. You know, cops have been trained to shoot well. They need to be trained. The opposite. So that's one piece. The other piece, just in terms of the cultural piece, is I've always believed that culture is held in relationships in any organization, any context. And you can impact culture by being more intentional around what are agreements between how people will treat each other. Most things are not spoken. And we need to Be much more intentional about spoken agreements, about how we'll treat each other, whether it's a family, an organization, a team, a country.

All right?

Most things aren't spoken and most things can't be spoken. You can't generate a list of what to do in every imaginable situation because there's an infinite number of them. There needs to be something much more compact and generative. In the case of police culture, who you hire.

Yeah, absolutely.

How you train them, how you manage them, what expectations everybody knows are there and how those are carried forward and enforced. The level of police violence in the United States is so high than in other advanced countries. I saw a video last year, some of you may have seen this, of two. One in the United States is a man, a black man, of course, standing on a lawn with a knife, surrounded by about eight or 10 police officers at a 20 foot distance. And he's clearly messed up, he's in trouble, he's belligerent, he's yelling, he's waving the knife, they're yelling things at him. And at some point one of them shoots him, and then all the other guns go off and he falls dead with 20 bullets in him. Similar situation in Switzerland where, you know, a guy with a knife surrounded by police, unstable situation. He finally starts to lunge at them and one of the officers shoots him in the leg and he drops and they come and arrest him. Similar situation in Great Britain. Man with a machete on the street, also the black man, also, you know, apparently out of control. Eight bobbies come around him with full body shields. You've seen the shields that police have in riot situations. They circle him with the body shields and as a unit they move in and move in and move in until he is just surrounded by these body shields and he can't do anything. And they take him down and arrest him. Similar situation. Three completely different responses. Not because somebody on the scene is thinking about what we should do, but because they've developed in their body and in their joint operations together as a team, a way of encountering a dangerous, uncertain situation and responding with different options. Stuart, thank you for raising that. Alan Haber, please unmute yourself.

Yes. Hello, Gil.

It's so nice to see you after these years. Yeah.

So I. There's so many things I would like to say. I think that the shift that we need. This is a broken system. There's a general recognition that the system is broken, whether you call it medical or housing or education or whatever it is. What is the system? The system, I think we need to think of as a system of war, domination. And that is what has prevailed in this sense, that for the affirmative action to work in the corporation, top management has to think about, has to approve it, otherwise nothing changes. That's what the science says. And we have to move from that system, a cultural change, into a system of peace and caring, sharing, helping, healing, recovering. And that is the opportunity now to see that these experiments in mutual aid and community coming together are really shifting from relying on the government and the corporations to do it, for us to do it ourselves, in some sense, of creating the community commons. That's the opportunity, I think, is really away from the war system that has dominated all the social relations. And so that's.

Let me ask you to be concrete. How does. How does that start? How does that happen in your experience?

Well, when you said, if I could do anything and work back from it, I would say, and, you know, I made the table for the meeting to make peace in the world. How do we envision the peace meeting of the community and the police and come to the table, put down the gun, put down the coercion, and come to the table to talk in whatever the situation is and make the table the image of the transformation.

Alan, thank you. Appreciate that. Chris Rosen. Chris, are you there?

Yeah, I'm responding to this conversation, which is focusing on the police violence and the sense of emergency that we have now. And given that our broader purpose is to talk about environmental, corporate, environmental sustainability and societal sustainability, what strikes me is that I feel more hope around police violence right now because there's so much awareness that didn't exist before, so much concern that's been elicited by all the videos of all this obvious police violence. You really can't say it's anything less. And people rallying around the idea we have to do something about it. And the challenge is, I mean, we don't want to wait till climate change is destroying things in such an obvious way that we can finally rally around doing something about it. I don't think. And ideally, I mean, police violence has been a problem for, you know, decades. We've had some videos for a number of years, and we've had Black Lives Matter, you know, since 2015 or 14. I'm not quite sure when it started, or 13. And so I guess I want to ask everyone here, how do we. What's exciting about right now is that people you talk about, we have to get people to the table. And we're talking about that in a hopeful way that we can actually get them around the table to talk with one another.

Well, we're kind of getting a lesson in not what we have to do, but in what happens. You know, something shifted two weeks ago with George Floyd's murder, right? Maybe it was because that 17 year old girl was brave enough to run the footage, run, you know, run her phone the entire time. Maybe because of how that video got out, maybe it was the way the cop looked at the camera. But something shifted in all of us. And yeah, we've seen these videos before. I listened to an interview yesterday with the CEO of the Federal Reserve Board of Atlanta, Black, black man who, you know, who talked about how he, even in his elevated position, is still scared every time he goes walking on the street in Atlanta. And he said it's like the scales have fallen from people's eyes. People are looking at what they've been looking at for their entire lives and all of a sudden can see it differently. Chris, thank you. Let me move on to Harvey Stone. Yeah, just unmute it. For me. The biggest surprise in the last two, three weeks since George Floyd was murdered was the incredible range of people who have come forward. From all the people participating in the.

Protests to the military leaders, to cabinet.

Members that are speaking out. I can't remember a time when the range of people in organizations have come together. And for me, the critical piece here in the next several months or 147 days till the election is that Trump for the first time to me seems really vulnerable and wounded, and yet he's a very dangerous man and a very smart man when it comes to politics, and that there's going to be some kind of a reaction to the actions going on now, we know that, that.

This is the time to not stop, but to actually do more.

Whatever organizations we're involved with, any way.

We can participate in this election to.

Get him out of office and Republicans out of office, the enablers, so we.

Can move forward with all the possibilities that are out there in terms of sustainability, in terms of food production. It's incredible, but we got to get these folks out of there.

For me, this is the critical period.

For all of us to pile on as much as we can.

Thank you. We'll come back to that before the call is over. So thank you for raising that, Harvey. Bruce, last hand up and then we'll move forward to the next phase. Bruce Greville.

Great, thank you.

Thanks for your comment.

Harvey too. That was really, really right on.

I want to say the most telling.

Factoid that you presented earlier was the graph that went zooming upwards in the last few weeks of public attitude that came out of George Floyd's killing and how quickly that can change. And I suggest that we look very closely because ordinarily we think of, well, how can I change my city and then from the state and then to the national, or how can I make them change because they're in charge. And I think the message is that the culture has changed before, the structures, and now everybody's racing to catch up with the culture and the kind of change. The question is, how do we continue to feed the means of change, the mechanisms, if you will, of change of culture to keep that happening at the peak? Because the politicians who seem to be in charge are suddenly going along with the prevailing wisdom of all of us. That's being expressed in so many ways as, to me, as a reflection of where our culture has moved. And how do we continue to feed that?

Yeah, well, and how does the culture move? I mean, this is a mystery, you know, how do we continue to feed that? That sudden, you know, rocketing upward of the graph around support for Black Lives Matter came after years of it not being rocketing, but the issue being, you know, leisure, being alive in the black community, being nurtured and raised again and again. Most of us were asleep to it. I will say. I'm not. I can't put my finger on any of you. I know. I. For me, it was something I was aware of but was not front of mind. For me, it's not something I dealt with every day. I live in a racially mixed neighborhood. It sometimes comes to mind, but it was not, you know, until events in the world captured me, it didn't become front of mind. And that's what you see in that New York Times graph of all of a sudden, something that everybody was aware of became front of mind. How do we provoke that? I don't know. If we do, how do we build readiness for that? I don't know. You know, certainly you had. Would it have happened without Black Lives Matter in motion over the past five years? Don't know. So back to the line I offered earlier on. The change happens very slowly, and then it happens all at once. I think the question for us is, what do we need to do to cultivate the awareness, the listening, the conversations, the relationships, the skills, the commitments, the actions that move it steadily forward a little bit and have the ability to move it forward a lot when the door is open, Sheila Jacobs. Then we're going to move on. Thanks, Bruce. Sheila, you got to unmute yourself.

Thank you. You can hear me okay?

Yes. Hi.

Thank you for the opportunity. I'm a trained licensed marriage and family therapist for 30 years. I grew up in a different kind of family than most. I grew up in an underserved community of signing deaf community. My dad was a well known deaf leader nationwide. My deaf sister, also my deaf grandparents. So I'm just speaking to all of you today because I just want to acknowledge the diversity or lack of diversity in the demographics of what I just can see and what I've heard so far and who is feeling comfortable to share. So I'm taking a risk and I'm going to talk in a way that my community talks so that I can share my point of view. My experience in training for 30 years is about dealing with multi generational family patterns that are healthy or unhealthy over multiple generations. And what I'm not hearing is it seems to me the Civil War never ended. And it seems to me that we need to look at why did white folks accept slaves in the first place? Because whatever was the reason behind that I believe has continued to this day. And I think that men, especially what I see demographically present on screen, the way that you're talking about these issues is very different than other communities talk about these issues and how we talk about them. So I'm just sharing with you my feeling that I'm listening to this, that no, these things did not just happen five years ago because of Black Lives Matter. I mean, I think that people have been trying to say this has been ongoing since we allowed slavery, perpetuated it by the people who did that and why did they do it is what I want to know. Because that's continuing and has infiltrated every part of what we're talking about.

Sheila, thank you very much. I would add to your question of why did they do it? You actually said this before is why did we allow it?

I'm very curious because I don't hear any conversation about the origins. All of this is all as a result of all the stuff that happened from those people early on. What would you say that also came in and took land away from other people? So I'm not hearing a conversation that's really historically aware. And what I'm hearing from Black Lives Matter is they've been trying to yell and scream this message for a long time. Generations. I was married into a multicultural family in Oakland. I grew up in Oakland. This is this just because you guys haven't been able, you know, people are saying, I didn't it wasn't on my radar. Well, it was on my in laws radar. I married into a big family. I just got divorced. A multiracial family, black and white, over multiple generations. My mother in law from Texas, she'll never go back to Texas. Several of her husbands African American. So I'm just saying we all need to wake up, but let's be careful of how we're talking about it and be very aware that how people are talking about it are based on where they come from. I come from a different background, so I just wanted to take the risk. And I'm the first woman that has spoken.

Actually, you're not. Chris Rosen spoke before.

That's true. But she does seem to be familiar and part of your circle. I'm new.

Chris, before you.

I'm sorry, Gil, before you move on, can I say something?

Please? Go ahead.

So I have, I have two recommendations. Number one, everybody should be paying attention to what John, John Stewart is saying about the police right now. If you haven't seen that, pay close attention. Is a quote from him is, we have outsourced our accountability to the police. It's more in line with what Sheila just said. Second thing, I had the privilege many years ago of spending eight years working with police and politicians in the 50 largest cities of the United States on behalf of the United States Conference of Mayors and, and the National League of Cities. I was attempting to head off what we're seeing here, and I failed. So we point a finger, and I'm pointing three fingers back at myself when I point the finger. But as Sheila said, we need to look much closer to home. The conversations here about what the police are. You have no bloody idea what it is to be a policeman and to have the, the responsibility of carrying a pistol and being responsible for providing violence in our society. It is their job to provide violence.

So can I just.

At the same time, we're asking them to do other things. Go ahead.

I would like to clarify that it is the white supremacist attitude and way of life that I'm referring to that it seems to me that these families. My mother was from North Carolina, My father was from California. What I'm trying to say is these white supremacists living apparently have just been continually told to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. Why this is flaring up is because Trump just brought in a whole bunch of white supremacists, is schmoozing with Putin and bring every single norm that public politicians do. So I think that from My point of view.

Sheila, Sheila, I'm going to interrupt you right back.

Doesn't have to do with a lot of things that go on in our family.

I'm going to interrupt you right back. Trump is our kind of guy. That's the problem. He's not an anomaly. He is our kind of guy. He is the white kind of guy in the United States, and we don't acknowledge that. And I'm going to recommend one more person we should all go look at, Jane Elliott, who is an anti racism lady who says things very similar, what you're saying. She does a shtick where she asks the white audience, will anyone who wants to live the way that black people in the United States live, please stand up? Nobody stands. Then she asks it again. Nobody stands up. And then she says, look, you've just demonstrated by not standing up that you understand fully what I'm talking about and you understand. We all understand fully what you are talking about, Sheila, and we do not acknowledge it. And the finger needs to be pointed back at ourselves, not at Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is a buffoon and a rock star in a weird and unfortunate world. But the problem is us. Thank you for your comment, Gil. Thank you for opening it the way you've opened it. I'll shut up.

Thank you both. Chris Rock drives that point home even less subtly than, than the person you referred to did. He says, you know, he says, nobody wants to trade places with me and I'm rich. You know, there's no white man that wants to live life even as successful as I am.

Right.

And we all know.

So, Gail, Gil, I'd like to weigh in here, having worked.

John. Yes, go ahead.

In this, in this arena, I had the privilege of working with Mayor Bradley in the, in, in the 80s, obviously, a black mayor and police chief, and was very horrifically inducted into this world because of the habit of the LAPD to kneecap any Hispanics. They stopped for a traffic violation. And the jails at the time in LA were filled with Hispanic people who had been stopped on some routine pretext and severely injured. So the war on the population of the United States, manifesting so much today in the great revelation of the last few weeks has been very apparent to me since the mid-70s. And just to put it in historical context, at the time of the American Revolution, there were a half a million white slaves in North Africa and the Middle East. I have an ancestor who was a slave for over four decades in my family. So slavery was a global institution that was affecting everybody. We have this myth in the United States that we ended slavery in the world. We did not. The British Empire ended bombing out the slave place down in Africa and they started the movement many years before us. And when we quote unquote won the Civil War. And I'm very involved in that. My great great grandfather was the convener of the Gettysburg Address and the founder of the cemetery that the battle of Gettysburg was fought around. So this has been very, very present for me for decades. This whole situation where what happens in the black community is happening everywhere. And I want to surface something that hasn't been discussed or mentioned that I think is very similar in scale, even greater in scale and will end up coming out with this Covid thing, which is has anybody seen an institution in our society say one thing about enhancing immune health as a public education benefit from this whole process? And the answer is no.

I've seen individuals speak to it, but not institutes.

There's no institutional speaking to it. And that's because the pharmaceutical mafia has such a lock for a hundred years on inexpensive, cheap ways for people to be well. And we are looking at literally a century of suppression of innovative grassroots ways for people to stay healthy. We have a disease creation system that requires it has to keep 80% of the people in the system. And this is coming up quite a bit in the Black Lives Matter because Covid is having such a disproportionate effect on the black community. And actually the big thing, at least on the west, it's in the Hispanic communities. So. So this episode is going to reveal and unpack how the permanent war dynamic infuses everything. And I believe that, you know, I mean The Nazis killed 6 million Jews, they killed 6 million other people. All the disabled people, all the autistic people, all the gypsies, all the, you know, anybody who had money that they could steal. Going on since World War II. And I am looking at 20 or 30% of the population is seen as expensive. You know, a new york gangster. Like to stand that that and civilization has grown over like things like banking getting created for the and slowly co opted and take it for their own civil war. And has continued to win counties in the United States with black and party system kept them running the Senate and the Congress. We civil war from a country point of view. And is my opinion being the north or whoever thinks we ended slavery.

I mean this moment today or three months ago or six months ago, I.

See a wondrous process where the call the collective will which is the small groups of people four to Six people to come to. We are now all across the planet forced into small groups. We're being forced to confront all the wound matrices we have. There's a massive grassroots thing called the ACEs test where families are sharing their traumas. We're literally being forced into building a global commons. We will end up, I believe, with an extra governmental institution similar to the clans and the Presbyterian assemblies that will self organize. But right now we're all being forced to get really focused with our family if we had to in place how many decades long disconnects, you know, families have been at each other connect for years. How many of those things are now have to come to the surface and be healed for all of us. So I'm just, I'm very excited that the fundamental structure of human life has been changed in the last 60 days. And every one of us, the transformation of education, the move to digital. I'm thrilled about the whole thing, even though I know it's tough.

The remarkable thing about this moment and what I'm seeing in the far by in the chat is that there's this odd sense of possibility in the room here. There's a sense that something is in motion. As horrible as much it is, there's something unlocking, doors opening that maybe we can try given, given the momentum in the conversation and what I'm sort of scanning, I can't read the whole thing. I was going to take us to break in about 10 minutes. Like it's probably more fruitful to stay in the round.

But please, if you've got gems you've created that give context for us and invite us to focus the conversation, please don't hold those back.

You know that I'm not shy and I focus with my opening and I want to have more time to have you speak and interact here. So let me go to Shel Horowitz next. Let me encourage people to not be shy. Raise your hands if you want to private message me. If you don't want to speak out in the open, we can do that as well. Okay.

So Shel, and just technically everyone must unmute themselves. We can no longer do that from our, from our end.

Yeah. So shell unmute yourself, please.

Okay, there we go. Hear me now?

Yes.

Okay, good. Yeah, I had unmuted myself, but it reverted. Okay. I want to make two comments. One is that I see a moment and a winnable demand in this idea that different police forces around the world treat very similar incidents very, very differently. And that the UK method that you described of surrounding people surrounding a Person with a whole bunch of cops with body shields and basically immobilizing that person with zero bodily harm is a winnable demand. You know, that police in this country reach for the gun first, maybe the Taser second. And, you know, in principle, I think the Taser is a reasonably decent approach. Very few people die of it, and those that do, it's not because they were deliberately killed, is because their hearts were not compatible with being Tased. But, you know, the idea of reaching for the gun first and reaching for it for very, very minor crimes, like George Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit 20 for this, he gave his life. That's so I think, you know, we hear a lot, defund the police. Defund the police. That makes me very uncomfortable, I have to say, both because on a strategic level, you just alienated all of middle America. Because the organizers, they say, well, defund doesn't mean defund, it means only take away some of the funding. That is so totally unclear and unintuitive. I think that that demand is a mistake strategically. But also police, we do need somebody to perform the functions of preserving order. And then the second piece is you had that wonderful four part matrix where resentment was in the top left. I wanted to get a screenshot of it. I wasn't fast enough and I'd love to see it again and get that screenshot. But I felt like that, to me is why people voted for Trump, is that they were in that upper left quadrant where the focus was these bad things are happening to me and I'm powerless. And I think if we keep those in mind, those are paths to action.

There's a bit more to that quadrant. It's, there's bad things happen to me, I'm powerless and it's your fault. That's part of the game here. So look, you know, part of the issue is the training of police and that can be addressed. But it's also a question of what are the police for their role in society? What are the, you know, the social and racial and class and other dynamics that keeping order is speaking to. And that's a harder conversation to have. I shared the question that you raised about the strategic weakness in the defund the police demand not the substance of it, but the communication strategy of it. But lo and behold, it seems to have done just what it's supposed to do, which is it's generating conversation. Yeah, it doesn't really mean end the police, it means reframe the police, blah, blah, blah, all the different verbs you could use for it. But the question, the role in organization of police in society, how we meet these needs, where you need force, where you don't need force, family therapy skills or drug counseling skills or other skills. Somehow, despite the knee jerk reaction that some people have, including myself, the conversation's on.

Yeah.

And I wonder how we take that momentum and get it to a better demand or because like the argument that defund doesn't mean defund is just.

Well, I think we're past that now. The question on the table is how do we organize our police forces for what purposes, what ways? And that is all of a sudden on the table in a way that.

Was unimaginable and that provides incredible opportunity.

Thank you. Because I got a bunch of other hands. Jill, thank you very much. Christine Olson.

Yeah, hi, Gail. Thanks. I just really, really want to speak to the COVID piece in this because I think people are mentioning it in the chat, but we're getting more specific on the police thing. That's one piece of it. Trump is one piece of it. But it's sort of this mutual recognition or more widespread spread recognition that these systems are not serving what we want them to serve. And that's been happening for.

Who's we? What's that? Who is we?

Who is we? Exactly. So I think a lot more people who didn't think that these systems were failing in the way they are are suddenly seeing it. Whereas a lot of people, which has been raised earlier, have known this for decades. Arguably, the systems were never set to serve people in the way a lot of people thought they were. There's been, you know, trauma and abuse and violence sort of built for whatever, 300, 400 years, whatever it is. So Covid provided an opportunity for a final push, you know, drawing the curve back, whatever the metaphor is, for more people to see it partly because they had more time. Suddenly a lot of people are at work. What are they looking? What are they.

I don't think. I don't think that's it. Because everybody has more time. The people who are watching Fox News are still watching Fox News.

Yeah, that's one piece. The other piece is a lot of systems that were assumed are just a core thing that's always been there and will always been there, ended or shifted very, very abruptly. So suddenly, you know, our lives are different overnight. Overnight.

I think that's really important, is it things that we took for granted, stable and predictable and will always be there, we all of a sudden see or not. And actually the joke is we think that's an anomaly around The COVID crisis right now. But, you know, that's actually always been true. We always count on the permanence and stability of things that live by, you know, very fragile. So I think that's one thing. I agree with you here. The other thing that strikes me about COVID is that there's a sudden realization, and Jan kind of hinted it, that we are one planet with one biology. And the national boundaries, you know, they're there for control in certain ways, but the biology is universal. The viruses don't care about your political beliefs or live. It's just, you know, we live in one soup together, one atmosphere, one oceanic system, one biological system. And that's dawning on people to different degrees. But there's a recognition, shared vulnerability, and a problem that we only get to solve together because there is no health around pandemic without public health. And that's not the way our healthcare system has been organized in this country. But that's now the reality that people are starting to get a glimmer of, I suspect. I don't know. I mean, what if George Floyd had been murdered in December?

I don't think I've seen murders on camera similar to that over the last few years. I'm not a mayor, but I lived in the States for eight years and I heard gunfire every week at my house. That wasn't the issue. I've seen videos like that myself before. I don't think that the nature of that particular video was white. I think it was the timing, specifically.

Yeah.

I think in December, if we would have saw that, it wouldn't have kicked this off.

Yeah. And in the language that I was using earlier on, I would say not just the timing, but that we were all in.

Exactly.

We've been living in for three or four months. Somehow dropped away some of the bullshit that we live in normally. Briscoe from the Federal Reserve talked about the scales from our eyes. I like Chauncey, uses the phrase bullshit a lot because it's so apt. And we've lived in a story that longer capturing in the same way. We're open to a different story here somehow. Chris Rosen, let me come back to you. You have to unmute, Chris.

All right. So just so you know, I'm a professor at ucla, so I'm drawing on my own research here. There are times when people become more open to revising their mental assumptions. Cognitive scientists have done a lot of research that shows that we fit what we're perceiving into preconceived. Patterns, that our mind has Evolved to provide for us so that we can simplify our experiences because we have all the stimulation coming at us all the time and that unfortunately, you know, because it's easier, we do fit a lot of stuff that doesn't fit like and suffering that our black citizens have been suffering for the, you know, since the Civil War. A lot of the history, it starts with the Civil War and it, and it, and then you have, I mean, we fought a war. Well, died to free the slave. We freed the slaves. And then after a brief reconstruction period, when things improved for many black citizens, they got much worse. You had Jim Crow, you had all sorts of discrimination, legal, legally sanctioned. And people were, I mean people were fit. You know, we fit our. What we see. I think it was Christina was saying we take things for granted and we don't notice that, you know, we're moral, God fearing Christians, love neighbors and so forth. And we, we don't see what's right in front of our eyes because we're not paying attention. But what cognitive scientists have also said is that when there's a lot of disruption going on and people are starting to challenge for reason, like before the Civil War, you know, women's rights as well as the rights of slaves and immigrants, Irish immigrants as well, so forth, there was a lot of organizing around that. People then become more open to revising other schemas in their minds. And my research is focused on the early history of America's struggles with industrial pollution. And what I saw to my surprise. Solution was that judges who just didn't believe that pollution, industrial pollution, was a problem in these cases, suddenly Starting in the 1860s, during the Civil War and after it, to just assume that this actually is a problem, something had shifted. You know, it wasn't that the pollution got a whole lot worse, but then suddenly people were problematizing it. And so perhaps in the context of COVID and the growing recognition that a lot of our things that we just assume are good for us, you know, our systems work, we don't, you know, we can let the people in Washington or the people in our state capitals sort of take care of things and that, you know, that started to shift for throttled by the cop that now we're more open to actually seeing, you know, the scales are falling from our eyes because of what's going on in our culture and our society.

So Chris, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that scales fall under one issue make it more likely for scales to fall around other issues. It's a really interesting provocation because the other story one could tell about this is that we don't notice what's not convenient for us to notice. We don't notice what's not in our interests for us to notice. And so, you know, people whose income depends on pollution are going to be less concerned about pollution doesn't.

You're going to see a reaction. So people who don't want, you know, the police are now extremely challenging them. They are rallying, their unions are rallying in support of, you know, preventing all this, you know, terrible change. It's just going to destroy peace in our communities if it goes through and they get defunded. You know, there's always. For every action, there is a reaction.

I'm going to need to move on. I got a bunch of hands on up and we've got 20 minutes left. So thank. Thank you for that. Let me go to Daniel Aarons and please unmute yourself.

Hi. Just a couple of thoughts about. Partly about the last thing and partly about why this.

Let me, if I may ask you to succinct as you can, so we give plenty of people a chance to participate.

Sure. One thing is that sometimes there was a fad many, many years ago about, like, changes in paradigms, and I don't.

Want to relitigate that.

But.

But there's something about how people seem to work, which is that explain a.

Little inconsistencies over and over again until those little inconsistencies build up or finally can't be denied, and then their old.

Way of seeing things comes crashing down and then they reevaluate a bunch of their beliefs.

For example, there was a famous conservative.

Columnist named Max Boot who was very much in defense of all these ideas that he had for many years. He finally kind of decided that authoritarianism was a bridge too far for him.

And then he reevaluated all these older.

Ideas that he had.

And.

And I hope we're not seeing that in Covid, in Black Lives Matter, in.

All kinds of things, all at once. Njinga yeah. Thank you, Shelly Gordon. Daniel, thank you.

Well, first, I guess I was struck by the comment. If we had witnessed George Floyd's murder in December, it wouldn't have had the same impact. I guess I felt like I couldn't just let that go by. I mean, you know, Bill Moyers was interviewed. He said it was a lynching. You know, we witnessed a lynching.

Yeah.

And, you know, after reconstruction in the south, that became like gladiator. That was entertainment, you know, people. I mean, I won't Go into all the gory details of it, but. So whether it happened in December or May, I just. I just feel like I couldn't protect my mind. The thing is, I have read this.

I don't know.

Everyone's familiar with the 1619 Project, which the New York Times devoted in August of 1619. They devoted a whole issue of the money to History of Slavery in a way that I've never read about it before. That everything that we know about America, our democracy, all our institutions, our economic might, our industrial might, all happened on the back. And I agree that this is, you know, this thing, this systemic racism is, you know, it goes back 400 years. It's the founding of our nation. You know, what this punches people to think of. To think is that founding of America was 1619, not 1776. You know, not the freedom, but slavery. That's really the genesis of. Of our country. And so what I have done is I want to bring this into schools. I live in Arizona. We're talking to people at the Department of Education. Arizona has a terrible reputation when it comes to schools, but not when you get the interior of the organization and you talk to people who are committed and they're talking about teaching what they call hard history. H A R D, hard history. And instead of pummeling school students with facts, making that, you know, engaging conversation and discussion. And my opinion is that this is, you know, civic racism is going to start with education and educating people to think about this and not just be taught some sanitized version of, you know, what happened in the Civil War and how Lincoln freed the slaves. And anyway, the Pulitzer, you know, I'll finish up by saying the Poets center and the New York Times collaborated and developed free curriculum. And I envision, you know, getting that into every history classroom in America. That's one way to people about our responsibility for what has happened.

I'm grateful that you're doing that, Shelly. There's a book I'd recommend to everybody that goes into that. The story that you raised about how the American nation and economy and prosperity is built of slaves, called the Empire of Cotton. Chauncey, you recall the name of the author. We'll get that. Freeman. I put the title of the in the chat, and it's a rich, intense history of not just how America, but how modern capitalism is built on the institution of slavery. And that goes back to my earlier comment about, you know, people, selective awareness tends to have a lot to do with where their interests are. And so, you know, we have a global capitalist system as my friend Nora Bateson would ask if she were here, how many of us are sitting here today not benefiting at all in the clothing that we're wearing, you know, in the food that we're eating, in the way that we get around getting around that much right now. But we are, all of us, you know, beneficiaries of this. It's not just white skin privilege, it's, it's, you know, it's top of the empire, capitalist privilege. And so there we are. The, you know, the issues did not begin with the Civil War. Certainly not. There's very few people I know are aware of Bacon's Rebellion. I think it was 1930s, which black and white worker in the south against landowners and merchants, so forth, black together. And that was very quickly deemed and was one of the places where black, white hatred, hatred of blacks was created in order to divide a coalition, you know, 40 years before the so called founding in the country. So these stories matter. And I'm struck that one of the words that I have not heard spoken in this conversation yet is power. And you know, we have, we, the general we, I suppose that's represented here, relied a lot on moral power in the kind of work that we've done. Harvey Stone spoke at the beginning of the call about political power. We're seeing the exercise of military power on our streets. We see the exercise of economic power in the workings of the economic system that we live in. And these are things we need to have pretty forthright conversations about. We don't change them by just wishing them to be different. And this is why in the invitation of this call, I talked about living with grace and calm and power. It's been provocative when I talk with my friends about it, because everybody on the left seems to be against power. Power is bad because power is exercised in ways that we don't like. But in fact, power in physics is the ability to do work or it's the capacity to get things done. And so one of the challenges we have here is not just to have interesting conversations, but, but to look at how we build power in the world in ourselves, in our relationships, not power over. And I think that's a distinction in the sense of dominance and hierarchy. What if we thought about it in the sense of capacity to fulfill our commitments in the world, to care about the things that we care about. The questions that I was going to share with you were the breakout. See if I can find this here real quickly, which we don't have time to do now, is what has shifted for you in the last three months. We're talking about that some. But I would invite you to think about this personally. Really take some time, not just on the. To examine for yourself what has shifted for you in how you encounter the world, how you encounter yourself, what your moods have been, what possibilities you see. And in the last three weeks, because that's another interval in time, what are you committed to? I don't know everybody on this call. I know a lot of you, but I suspect that everybody here has deep commitments about a world that works, that is more just. More environmentally sustainable, more good in the ways that matter to each of you. What is that? And how are you cultivating your mood and your capacity. Oops, blank there. To fulfill your commitment? So I would invite you tap into that conversation with yourself, with your friends and family, with people that you work with, because in that conversation, power gets unlocked. I predict that you will find that in your. And in the relationships that you're having. So we've got 10 minutes left. Let me see where we are here. We're a little. Little off plan.

While you're doing that, Gil. I'll just throw in one. One which is really picking up on where Sheila's going, you know, very close to home. We here in California have our own history of colonialism that is every bit as gruesome, if not more gruesome than what happened in the South. We have the only state legislature in the history of the country that authorized $25 a head for. For indigenous scalps, which caused, I think three or four thousand scalps to be turned into the sheriff's offices for money in the state of California.

Sean Armstrong up in Arcata has been chronicling the history of the Humboldt community around in very similar terms.

Well, it happened in the entire state. So we all have these places where the permanent war war mindset has given us what we have today. And it's been underlying everything. All the economic justifications, all the political, all the educational, they've all been setting an ideal that does not exist in a permanent war situation, where Katherine Austin Fitz identified that three out of every $10 in the economy is black. That every bit. You were speaking to it, Gil. Everything we do, everything we buy, it's interwoven with this permanent war black criminal dynamic. And that's the thing we all have to confront. And it affects the murder of women and the rape of women, which I would even say is a bigger issue than Black Lives Matter for me, because it's all women. And the same attitude has been there with the cops and everybody else toward women as toward blacks in a lot of ways, except they don't share.

What's your mood as you speak these words?

I'm thrilled that the real conversation is finally happening that I've been sort of biting my tongue on for 40 years plus, and this is now a general discussion. And a lot of this historical context can be brought to the fore with the Internet and we can all work on it together, realizing that we're all victims and we're all perpetuating perpetrators.

Well, I would say the time for tongue biting is over. To my assessment, we are in a once in a lifetime opportunity of social change now. What we're in now doesn't come very often.

That's right.

Its own choosing. And it's here. And this is our challenge to move on it. Let me actually, in that context and with reference to what Harvey had said earlier, let me see if I can bring up the second poll question. And then I have a question for you by way of closing. Let's see. Okay. Poll's not working. So the question I wanted to ask you back to what Harvey had raised earlier on on is a very personal one. In 140 some odd days, we face an election that will determine whether this gang of thugs continues in control of this country and completely locks down control of the courts for the next generation. It's partly captured. Now my question for you is where are you in action around that? So I'm just going to poll you to ask you if you're investing your time, if you're investing your money, if you're investing your conversations with people who you know and agree with, if you're investing in your conversations with people who you don't necessarily agree with or don't know. And we're, you know, we don't have time to discuss it in the open, but I personally ask. Each of you can comment in the chat if you like to ask yourselves. Ah, Gene is brought to polup. Wonderful, thank you. I wasn't able to do that. So take a moment. And I think you're able to vote for more than one option here, I believe. What are you doing and if you're not doing it now, what do you commit to do between now and the next hundred and forty some odd. And while you're doing that, here's the question I want to ask you. What commitments will you make and what actions will you take to cultivate the moods that support the stand that you are in the world? Every one of you is standing for Something in your life and in the world. Take this question home with you also. So we've got like about half of you have responded to the poll. No. 3446. We get the last thousand of you to respond and then I'll open it up. By way of logistics. We our intention has been to schedule these calls every two weeks. There is some glitches that you're aware of from the last mailing. Hope to get back on schedule with that. But also in the interest of further conversation tomorrow at the same time, I'm going to host a one hour call for a smaller group. I'm limited to 20 people so we can have a deeper dive discussion on this. I'll send the links out for that later this afternoon. It'll be a first come first serve registration. The following week, Wednesday, a week from tomorrow, I'll begin the first of the small reading groups. We'll have a text together that we will read together and discuss together. So it'll be a slightly different kind of conversation, deeper in certain ways. Watch for news about that. We had hoped to have that put together in time for this call. But what I've got put together is the schedule. So 12:30 tomorrow for discussion group continuing today's conversation. 12:30 in a week to dive into a text together and I'll let you know what that will be. Here's your responses on the poll. So we've got a good group here. What I didn't put on here, which I want to remind you of, is the voter suppression campaigns continue fighting. That is really key. I have sent out to you before and I'll send out again in the email after this call a link to the path to Blue Victory, which is both the strategy for not just White House but up and down the ballot victory in targeted states as well as a bunch of key resources that you can connect with to be in action, whether financially or operationally. So please have a look at that. Let's see. So with that, I want to thank you all for being here and for your enthusiasm and energy and your courage. Those of you who felt uncomfortable speaking and spoke anyway, I appreciate that. Back to Sheila's question earlier on about the diversity of these calls. I'm, you know, I started out reaching out to my networks. This is spreading. As each of you are inviting other people, please feel free to invite others in the future. I would ask you not to broadcast it to your list, but to invite invite selectively one or two people each because we're not, we don't have the capacity to handle a giant group yet, but more Voices is very welcome. And we all start where we are. Let's broaden it out. Last reminder, there's been a very rich chat. You can save the chat by clicking the three dots in the lower right hand corner of your screen. Great. But for yourselves, we will post the recording for the call. It'll probably take us a few days to do that. We'll let you know when that's up, as well as the link to the prior recordings in this series. With that, let me thank my co host Gene Dunaway, who's been behind the scenes helping these things work, and thank all of you for your time and commitment and who you are and what you do in the world. I'll see some of you tomorrow and hopefully see all of you again in two weeks.