Live from Sustainable Brands—The State of Sustainability. LBW 6.10

Foreign.

Hi everybody. I'm Gil Friend. I'm CEO of Natural Logic and Ontological coach to Purpose Driven Leaders. And together with my co host, Ken Homer, I'm delighted to welcome you to the near the end of the sixth year of Living Between Worlds. This conversation about living where we are now, between worlds, with courage and dignity and power. As Ken said, I'm coming to you today from San Diego from the Sustainable Brands Conference, one of the premier sustainability business conferences. This is the third or fourth four days. There's way too much to sum up, but in a nutshell, about 500 sustainability sustainability professionals from a wide range of companies, large and small, all living with the common challenge of the common challenges of these times. You know, the pressure, the cast, the challenge to the momentum in the business case of sustainable business. Some of you have been following some of that conversation on LinkedIn where people are of very different views of it's failed, it's shut down, everybody's gone to no, it hasn't failed, it's gone quiet. But the investment and innovation is proceeding. And there's been a lot of that discussion here. And so I thought, rather than attempt to summarize, I'd try to bring together some of the leaders from this conference to share their perspectives with you on the state of sustainability and what is to be done. And so here on Zoom with us we have Rafael Bemparad from BBMG can tell you about the company himself. We are hopefully going to be joined by a few others. We're competing with sessions and lunch. And so I'm expecting that some folks are going to wander in and out either on Zoom or live out here on the plaza at the lovely Town and Country resort in San Diego, where the weather has been semi cooperative with us. As you can see, there's clear skies above us and rain on either side of us. So we'll see how that goes. Rafael, welcome.

Hi, Gil, great to see you. And good afternoon, everyone. It's a real honor to be here as I look across these beautiful faces and I'm really eager to dive in and welcome the conversation.

Very good. Rafael on the first day of the conference led a resilience summit. It's an emerging focus area for his firm. And Rafael, why don't you start by just a very brief, very brief introduction to the company and a little bit more introduction to the resilience work. And third, what have you been observing and experiencing over the last few days here?

Great. Well, and please, I'll very much try to set the context, offer some information and provocations and then quickly get to conversation and dialogue. It's a great honor to be here. I've had the honor of also knowing Gil and working along alongside Gil, I think now for 15 years as part of the sustainable brands community. My name is Rafael Bemparat. I'm a founding partner of a branding consultancy in Brooklyn called bbmg. And we have been focused branding, sustainability and social impact for 22 years. That's how we were born in 2003. And our orientation to why brand is a part of the sustainability conversation is that we think of brand not only as design or something that you experience in an ad. We have a very different orientation. We see branding as the manifestation of the systems we design and the stories that we tell. And so when you think about brands as designing for the system, business models, where products come from, who makes them, the communities and places and the resources that go into them, how people are treated, what happens when we use products or after we use products, all of those deep questions around design of the ecosystem, those manifest as brand. And so brands are the systems we design, but obviously, and equally, brands are the stories that we tell and come to life in culture. They shape our identity, they shape our beliefs, our behavior, our sense of connection, community, and belonging. And so when you think about branding and the Sustainable Brands Conference very much tries to embody this deeper orientation, we're really thinking about this moment where we're asking, what does it look like to redesign the systems and retell the stories that can help regenerate the world at a time of such great challenge? And business for so long, with profit maximalization inside of shareholder primacy and capitalism has been so profoundly extractive. And so when you think about redesigning systems and retelling stories in ways that can be regenerative, well, then that gives us a new opportunity for branding as a vehicle for transformation. I would also like to reinforce, like, what does that mean to build a regenerative brand? And there are three things that we think about that we invite into the conversation. And then, Gil, I'll pivot into why we're starting to think about resilience and adaptation.

And let me just. And let me just make your heart, your time harder before you say what that means to you. I just want to. Part of my experience here is that lots of people are using the word regenerative for lots of things, kind of being slapped on top of a lot of stuff, not necessarily with some depth or anchorage to it, which I suspect you have. So I wanted to frame you up that way. Take it away.

Super. So we've been thinking about what does it even mean to act regeneratively when you're designing brands? And there are three characteristics that we've identified that we try to design into every brand. The first is regenerative. Brands are aware, which means that they sense and serve the deepest needs of human beings and society. And so we're really hunting for, by being aware, what is a human truth? What is a deep human need? Where are people living dynamic tensions and conflicts and challenges and hunt for not only what people might say on the surface, but the shadows and what's unspoken, and really be sensitive by being more aware to the needs that we can help fulfill and place a human and planetary need at the core. The second is building on aware is additive. How do we design brands that give more than we take and are part of a interconnected, interdependent living ecosystem? As we mentioned about the supply chain or the value chain, there is no brand without a web of interconnected relationships of life. And so not only how might we be aware of our deepest needs, but how might we be additive and give more than we take in an interconnected, interdependent, living ecosystem? And the third characteristic is alive. So aware, additive and alive. And alive is how do we live in culture? How do we shape who we are and how we live? How do we create momentum and energy so that this shows up in the world around us and can be part of our daily experience? So we're thinking about brand as the systems we design and the stories we tell. And to take a regenerative orientation, it's to be aware, additive and alive. Any pause there? Just. Or I can also now share context for why we're starting to think a lot more about adaptation and not just regeneration.

Applause for me, I have the mic and maybe some other people have some things to say, but aware, additive and alive, those are good things, clearly. Why do you call that regenerative?

Well, ultimately regenerative, if you think about agriculture, is thinking very holistically about the entire ecosystem and then making choices that enrich and not extract, whether that's soil health, whether that's crop rotation, if you're thinking about ag, whether it's about grazing, whether it's about putting native seeds and planting in ways with permaculture that create more abundance. We're trying to take that spirit of enrich and not extract and talk about brands in the world. And ultimately we think brands can regenerate when we are serving a human need, not exploiting a Human need, that we are additive to an ecosystem, not extractive of an ecosystem, and that ultimately we're shaping culture so that the behavior loops that make all of the other things possible are ultimately unleashed. Because the role that consumers play, for example, in a circular economy becomes consumers become the supplier. So there's a lot of behavioral dynamics inside of culture that's required if we're going to move toward a regenerative system.

Gotcha. I think enrich rather than extract was the code word that I was looking for there. Okay, so back to you with where you're gonna go with the resilience.

Yeah. And I'll open any other questions broadly about, like, why might brands be a part of a more regenerative future? And I'm happy to pause for a minute and then I can set context for why we're starting to think about resilience and adaptation.

We do have a comment from Kevin Doyle Jones.

He says regenerative is often just environmental.

And not social undershoot, as donor economics says. Does regenerative focus on the social undershoot as well?

Hi, Kevin. It's great to see you.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. We. We apps. We do not. While there are layers in conversation, we absolutely embed social and environmental.

Yeah.

So that hasn't been my experience of regenerative.

Yep.

I agree post Helene. I was working with folks doing renovation of houses with underemployed folks and unemployed folks undocumented. And the regenerative folks here said, well, if you start using regenerative materials, we can work with you. So what about the folks who need a career and this is a path forward to learn, you know, how to repair houses? Well, we don't work there. They just. But if we. If we somehow found the way after paying for, you know, the training of folks who are underemployed and unemployed and undocumented to move to regenerative materials, they would be interested. Otherwise, we had no spot on there. This was part of the regenerative Bioregional financing Facility. They said, we fund wood, not people. You know, so it's like, okay, thank you. A very clear environmental perspective.

Totally agree.

Let me jump in on that, if I may. Rafael, please. This has been a struggle in the environmental community for as long as I've been in it. There are, you know, work about the gap between environment and labor. Environment Labor Coalition, seeing these as competitive issues or conjoined issues. So, Kevin, I appreciate you raising that. And there's a big opportunity here. One of the themes here has been talking about bringing in all the issues early, not doing something and then tagging on sustainability at the end, but bringing it in as part of the design conversation at the start. My colleague Bill Reed always talks about in his real estate and construction design projects of getting everybody at the table early, talking about everything, makes a profound difference in how things unroll. And we're joined by another guest. So Raphael, you keep on talking while I'll bring Sally in.

Oh, fantastic. Wonderful.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're.

We're being joined by Sally Aren from Forum for the Future here from the uk. Sally was MC this morning. You can clip that on somewhere if you like. Yeah, Raphael has just been introducing regenerative really elegantly, and Kevin Jones down here in North Carolina, ask them about is regenerative environmental or social and how do those things fit together? So Rafael, over to you and then I'll introduce Sally a bit more.

Okay, great. So. Hi, Sally. So good to see you. So in thinking about where we've been moving toward resilience and adaptation as a focus, I just want to reinforce Gil's theme and Ken's theme about living between worlds. One of my favorite philosophers, philosophers and authors is Charles Eisenstein. And he's written that we're living in the space between stories. And I feel similarly that we're facing the remnants now or the consequences Now. The story that many of us in our lifetimes inherited around a consumer economy, around progress and capitalism, around the idea that the market will continue to provide more growth, more opportunity, more benefit. And I think that we have participated in that story and now we're seeing the consequences as we're literally at the precipice of environmental collapse and social inequalities, societal dysfunctions. And we're asking, we know that the story that we were born inside of and we've inherited has really outgrown its limits and it's no longer serving us. But the story that's emerging doesn't yet exist. Or the stories that are dominant in the west or the US are quite terrifying right now if you think about the dominant political culture. And so in the space in between, the story that we have inherited that's outlived its usefulness. And the emerging story, we're in the space in between. And one of the things that will help us make sense in the space in between is, you know, really looking around and trying to understand where are the, the broadest societal dynamics with, with people. And with our partners at GlobeScan, we just completed a 33 country study of over 33,000 people. It was in the field in July and August of this year. And I just want to hit a couple macro trend points that provide context for what it's like in the space in between and why resilience is emerging. And number one is, we asked, well, what are the things that are most top of mind for you? In the past, they may have been like issues across the spectrum from health or different sustainability issues, but there were three issues or three things that were most urgent and most important that were significantly above the rest around the world. The first was global poverty, the second was climate change, and the third was war and conflict. And I was struck by those three. Together, they were all the same. 41% around the world saying these were the most important three. Poverty and income inequality is really at the core of our survival and our economic stability, and that is rising to the top. Climate change, obviously, is coming so quickly as we have more and more disruptions around us, and that has become an existential reality in our own backyards.

And.

And then war and conflict is raising, can we as a society in any way work together to solve a problem versus this deep division and dysfunction? And so I think in this moment in time, people have moved beyond, I care about plastics or I care about clean water, or, you know, I care about fair labor. All of those things, of course, still matter as issues, but they're moving from issues to basically survival, which is, will I have the financial stability to feed my family and house my family? Will I live in a. In a changing climate, Will I be next? Whether it's a fire or flood or a hurricane, and is it. Are we literally teetering on profound collapse of our societies? And so that's our space in between, our living in between worlds has moved toward moments where the very foundations of life are being questioned and highly of concern. Similarly, 74% of people. Two of every three. Three of every four. Sorry. Around the world has said they personally have experienced the impact of climate change in their own lives. And when we asked what was that impact, about half said it impacted my physical health, my psychological mindset and mental health, and my sense of personal safety and well being. And then 39% said it affected my finances. So people not only are seeing these issues as survival now, but they're feeling it in their daily life in ways that are making their health very precarious.

So, Rafael, I want to ask you why you guys are choosing to hang all of what you've just said on the hook of resilience. But before you answer, let me bring Sally in. If you have any reaction to what Rafael said, but more, more broadly, sort of what's your, what's your sense both in your work and being here the last few days, of where we are and what's needed?

Yeah, I mean I definitely agree with, to use your language in between worlds, to use some of my language, we're in between systems. So we're in the middle of a massive energy transition, a massive transition of our food and ag system, our health system, our economy. And in that accelerated phase of system change, which is in between what we had and what we could have, it's incredibly turbulent and disorienting. And there, there is in some ways I'm hesitant to use sort of battle terminology, but there, there is a battle going on right now between those of us that believe that a systems transition is possible. And in some cases in some parts of the world, the energy transition is already here. And those that actually don't want the transition, you know, they quite like the system as it is at the moment. And it wasn't. This isn't one of my quotes, but I shamelessly use it and I probably should find out who said it. But the closer you get to a system transitioning, the harder the existing system pushes back. And that's why I think, to use an analogy of between worlds, monsters can emerge because that resistance is incredibly, incredibly powerful. So that's where I think we are at a sort of meta scale. But having been here for three days, I would say, and I am, I am an optimist, optimist, you've got to be in this trade. I think the last three days here have given me lots of reasons to be cheerful. I think the energy here is huge and everyone is here because they can see themselves as part of this new world, this evolved system. And we need to be realistic. It's not a given that we will make it. Even though I just say I think energy transition have happened, it just much slower here in the US So I'll be back. I think this last few days actually for me personally as well, just to make it really personal, has been really good for me because doing what we all do, it's hard work at the moment and particularly here in the US we have a team here, it's really, really hard work. It feels literally as though you're under attack and in some ways we are. And actually being here with like minded people that share the same goals, the best tonic you could ever wish for.

For me it's not just the good people and the shared goals, but really you know, substantive reporting of real work and real progress. I mean, significant progress in terms of, you know, changing corporate strategies, changing product, measurable movement of, of energy and water and money. And so, you know, part of the cheerfulness for me is coming away with more data, more evidence and more stories to tell. I think of the time as kind of a battle. A battle for the story of the world.

Yeah.

What story are we going to live into?

You just heard me. Narratives win.

Exactly.

And guess just on that point, I was privileged enough to moderate the Regenerative Act Summit on Monday and I've been in Regen AG now for quite a few years and I was blown away by exactly your point. Five years ago it was, this is the change we need to see. These are the frameworks we need to use. This is the vision. And that's very much at the heart of the work that we do at Forum. But on Monday's like here's example after example of the system moving. And that was incredible with that. I might have to leave you if.

You don't know Sally's work and Forum for the Future, they are magicians at large scale systems change, strategic system change. Not just looking at a company, but an ecosystem of companies, supply chains, community and so forth. To Kevin Jones's question earlier on about how do you bring all the players in to look at a complex system and strategically move it? So have a look at what they do.

Thank you. Yeah, that is indeed what we do. And I was sat there on Monday in the region accidentally thinking, wow, we've been part of something. Not just us, but we bought the system together five years ago and the system has connected and it's moving. So I need to go and see Mrs. Cohen.

Very good. Thanks for joining us. Just you, you were there, I think, when Andrew Winston did a keynote on Monday.

Yes.

And one of the things he said, he said he's, he's asked, he's speaking all over the world and one of the things he's always asked is, are we losing? He said, no, we're under attack, which is different. And you're under attack not when you're losing, you're under attack when you're winning, when you're, when you were a threat.

To the existing system and now we're being taken really seriously because we're on the edge of new systems.

There you go. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. I like your little microphone.

This is called a dead cat thing.

So cat.

It's a dead cat. It's a noise canceling. I'm making Noise for all of you. I just couldn't resist.

Say that in front of the puppies last night at the reception.

Have a good lunch. See you later on. Daniel, why don't you come on over here?

Yeah, that's what we're. Daniel.

Yeah, put that on. Turn this one off.

And hey, wait, it didn't bounce.

No, dead cat.

It's supposed to have a dead cat.

No, because I, I didn't know if we were going to be tag teamed today, but here's Daniel Aronson, friend and colleague of some decades now. Actually, Daniel is CEO of Valutous, which is we do two things.

We quantify the ROI of sustainability and then we increase it.

Pretty good. And Daniel led the lead, an ROI summit, if you will, on Monday. A few hours of several of us working on those challenges with 30 or 40 or 50 people. The memorable line for me from that when people say, well, we can't afford sustainability and what's this worth and how much is this going to bring to me? Daniel will say, well, the one, the one answer that it cannot be is zero. And then we bounce up from there.

Yeah, I can't take credit for that one. That was John Sterman at mit, another great sustainability mind. But I repeat it everywhere because it doesn't have to be something that I came up with if I can help spread it. That's good.

Sting once said when people accused him of borrowing riffs from other musicians, he said, genius borrows nobly. So there we go. So I want to come back. Rafael was talking about, about resilience as kind of a hook to hang this emerging story on and wanted to ask you to say a little bit more about that.

It's useful to have a hook, but for me, the question of what the hook is is determined by what we call aim. Who's the audience, what information do they care about? And what's the right messaging? Now, for some people, the reason that.

Resilience and it's one of the places where we differ, because I don't think information is what people care about. But that may be a conversation for another time.

Yeah, and maybe we're using the same word slightly differently. But the key thing is who's the audience? Right. So if you say that the messaging is resilience versus something else, well, then the, the assumption there, the reason that you would do that is because the audience will receive, respond more, will resonate more with the word resilience. It could be because they are in the process of being buffeted about by the winds of change. Metaphorically and also the very strong winds of tropical storms, hurricanes, droughts, everything else. And being more resilient is something that lands concretely. One of the things that people say about sustainability profession, we talk too much abstract or it's not connected and so forth. Right. It doesn't connect to people. One of the classic opponents tactics is well, they care about spotted owls, but not people. But one thing about resilience is that if you're in the process of being guffetted about by all these things, then clearly that resilience matters to you on a personal level. Another possibility is that the things, the other things that we would call it would trigger negative reactions on the part of people who are, who have a trigger against certain words. There was a famous study some years ago where they gave people two light bulbs and a few dollars and they said, here's some money you can buy. The more you can buy, the more energy efficient one, which saves energy. Or you can buy the conventional light bulb. And in the neighborhood of 6, 60% of Democrats and 55 or so percent of Republicans bought the energy efficient light bulb that saves money. And then they added language about that energy efficient one also saves the environment. And the percentage of Democrats buying it went up and the percentage of Republicans buying it went down, even though it was additive to the savings of money. And one of the reasons that you would then say resilience or whatever is if something else would trigger a reaction that prevents people from truly hearing you. Two quick things. One is, I think one of the problems that some sustainability people have is they believe what we say is what people hear. That is never ever true in any field, but in particular it's not true when there's a contested environment. If we say sustainability is good for the business, that doesn't mean people hear that. People hear the opponents say no, no, that's how you drive people out of business. That's how you cost people their jobs. That's how you decrease the possibility of people getting out of poverty. In fact, that is one of their favorite approaches to, to stop sustainability because we can't afford obviously value. This our perspective is that sustainability creates much more value than people see. But we don't believe that that means, because we've said that, that people have heard it. First of all, sustainability practitioners don't sort of universally say that. Second of all, they don't want to hear that. So my view is in answer to the question about resilience, that aim audience information messaging, resilience is a good messaging for some audiences.

Rafael sure to hang all this stuff on.

Yeah. So I wasn't really hoping to talk about resilience as a marketing buzzword. That isn't my intent here. I'll share a little bit more about our orientation. I agree entirely with Daniel. I grew up as a speechwriter for a governor named Ann Richard. She was the last Democrat to be a governor of Texas. And what I learned, both writing for Ann and getting to carry her purse around the state as a travel aide was people do things for their reasons, not your reasons. So aligned with what you're getting at, Dan, you know, people will care because it helps to save them money or provide something that's durable or give them a sense of joy with their children. I mean, it's. Those are the things that are going to be important. Not because we're putting a construct or language on top of it. That's about us. But the reason why I was hoping to talk a little bit about resilience, not so much the word, but the moment for resilience is that a year ago at the sustainable at Sustainable Brands, the Resilience and Adaptation Summit, I met an incredible polymath and brilliant woman named Ariana Gomez. Ariana studied with Joanna Macy, with Nora Bateson, Francis Weller on grief work, is an expert in eco philosophy. She's an AI ethicist. She's really a polymath and she's just wonderful. And we started really talking about what we mean when we say, you know, this living between worlds and her ethos or her perspective, and it's obvious to all of us is that we're definitely living in a moment in human history that we've never seen exactly this way before. If you take environmental collapse and AI transformation, what's coming at us as human beings and in our civilization is like literally going to pull the carpet from under all of us. The disruptions that are coming. And what she is appreciating is that many organizations are thinking about resilience from a technical perspective. So they might be creating redundant supply chains or moving toward renewable energy, or thinking about disaster response plans, hardening infrastructure, but very few are thinking about human resilience and what will be happening as we try to navigate the emotional, the cognitive and the relational dynamics of such profound disruption. And she's created a framework called the resilience spiral. And it is a five element spiral that I'll cover very quickly, Gil. But it helps to see them in, in relationship that she believes will create the kind of human, emotional, psychological infrastructure that we need to navigate what's coming. The first, and I'll use her language quite honestly, the first of these five elements of the resilience spiral is surrender. And surrender doesn't mean giving up. It means the radical acceptance and appreciation for reality and what is already emerging around us. Because when we can see it instead of hide from it or run from it, then we can start to face and engage. So really, surrender is about seeing reality as it is and saying, okay, I welcome. This is reality. Whether, you know, it's not like, yay, but it's certainly seeing what is. The second is.

Sorry to interrupt. Just a second. Let me ask you to do a slightly condensed version of this. I want to have time to open up the room to.

You got it here, so I'll go fast.

You got it.

Thanks for the steer. The second is grief, which is processing that the world that we live in now is changing, and much of what we've known is ending. But that doesn't mean everything's ending. It means something new is beginning. But we have to process that we are living in a time of endings and grieve for what we have known and process the grief. The third is belonging, which is that we face grief and move toward imagination in community. The fourth is reimagination, and it asks in this reality, as we're in a time of endings and beginnings, who am I in the emerging world? Who are we? What can we be? And we start to reorient what's possible. And the fifth element is becoming, which is, she calls it symbiotic co creation, which is if we imagine what's emerging in possible futures, we are at a moment where we can design, with the wisdom of nature, the compassion and kindness and love of humanity and the power of AI. And if you bring those three things together, it opens the door to great potential and great possibility. So it is surrender, grief, belonging, reimagination, and becoming. And it's the cognitive, the emotional, and the relational infrastructure that allows us on the human side to navigate change.

Thank you for that. Beautifully summarized. I'd like to hear what this is provoking for all of you in the room. And before I invite you, well, let me invite you now to raise your, you know, your zoom hand sort of line you up in queue. And I want to turn to Daniel first. I know his time with us is limited because of other commitments here. So what's what. What is. What is what Rafael said provoke for you. It's kind of a different realm than where you're usually operating, right.

And I guess it provokes Two specific things for me. One is I'm glad someone else is handling that because look, the reason in partly ingest and partly not, the reason I got into quantifying this business value and all of that is because other people were better at other things than I was. And this sounds like, I mean a framework to do that. A framework to do that is very handy. And that's not something we're going to cover. Right. Mike, what we are going to work on is covering the how do you quantify the value and the risk of this human transition, which is still a huge issue, and then the non human capital and everything. The second thing is that to me this connects is something that we do a lot of which is quantifying the cost of inaction, which is that if everything is changing then your two options are one, do more and two, I mean, I guess three do do the same and three is do less. Right. But the thing is if doing better with the human transition and doing better with the capital transition, if that costs more, that's not the end of the conversation, that's the beginning. If there's an investment for that, that's not the end. Because you have to also quantify what happens if you let that human transition go badly by not doing enough. And what you're describing seems like a way to operationalize that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

George Mokray. Welcome.

Hello.

When people talk about resilience, I begin to think about Nicholas Nassim Taleb and his concept of anti fragility. And I just looked at my notes from reading that book and I think he missed a little bit because for me what he's talking about in antifragility is hardiness. Right. And so wondering about that resilience, anti.

Fragility, hardiness, they all sound similar, related. You're saying there's some distinction between them?

Well, yeah. How do you use them where each one of those can be most useful? We were always talking about resilience. We don't talk really about hardiness. And we, and very, very, very few people even know Nicholas Nassim Taleb or anti fragility. So I'm wondering about these, these concepts and how they can be used and expand the way that we're thinking about these concepts.

I make a quick final comment.

Go ahead.

Quick final comment before I unfortunately have to take off, which is that the concept of antifragility is that disruption or stress actually makes you stronger. Like this example is muscles and bones and so forth. That's I think the other half of the Cost of inaction or the benefit of action, which is we're under stress of all kinds, planetary, personal, whatever, to the extent that we can use, figure out how to use that stress to actually improve performance, to grow and evolve. That's the opposite of denial and decline. And that difference between those two, that's a huge difference for the world, for people and for businesses and organizations.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for joining us, Daniel. I'm not sure, George, about which words are right for which circumstance. For me, I like to have a basket of a bunch of words in my pocket and I try them out in any group that I'm in and see which ones work. And I'll steer and navigate based on what resonates hardiness for me, you know, brings to mind, you know, raising, raising plants in a greenhouse and setting them out in the cold weather that are hard, you know, to harden them off, to be able to adapt to emerging conditions. You know, most generally, what I'm hearing here is there's, there's resilience, commonly is about how do I maintain what I've got, how do I stay the same in the face of perturbation if something tries to knock me over, how do I, you know, like the old bouncing punching bag clouds. But what I think is more salient now in Rafael, this is in your list, in your spiral, is how does, how does, how does resilience or anti fragility, if you will, build my capacity to adapt in the future on the assumption, which I think is a safe assumption for now, that this is going to get more so, not less so for the rest of our lives. And so how do I not hold the ground where I am, but become more and more capable of being an effective and generative and contributing human being in the world to come?

Exactly. And I think that the five elements so very much align with antifragility. And that part of antifragility is that the challenge becomes the strength. It's almost the obstacle is the way and that we're moving.

Rafael, you just froze. Can you back up and say it again? Because you just froze on.

It's part of antifragility is, is that, you know, the. That the challenge and the obstacle becomes the strength. Like the obstacle is the way and we're moving into more and more disorder. And then rather than running from disorder, antifragility is creating the capacity to navigate disorder. And that. That actually strengthens us. I think it is hardiness, like you're saying, and is very aligned with what Arianna has imagined, with the Resilience spiral. I will put some background in the chat. So if you're interested in learning more, here's a document that Ari and I have created as kind of the overview of what we're thinking about when we think about the resilience spiral and the different elements. And we welcome anybody's questions by email. You'll see our contact at the end.

Thank you. Anybody else? What's this provoking for you? How does this intersect with your life and work and experience?

Michelle has a hand up. Hi, Shell.

Hi.

Yeah, I, I was very interested in Kevin's comment where he talked about meeting people who call themselves. I'm sorry.

Oh, you spoke his name and he appeared on my screen. I love it.

So, you know, the, this idea that environmentalism can, or worse should be separated from social justice is abhorrent to me. But I have certainly come across it and like right now here in Massachusetts, we are having a little battle with the governor who wants to override a citizen initiative that made it basically impossible to build a nuclear fission power plant in this state and was passed by 67% of the voters in 1982 too, which is kind of shocking and amazing and wonderful, but somehow they can't seem to make the connection between. Yeah, okay, so it's lower carbon in the actual reaction process, if you don't count the mining, the milling, the reprocessing, the, all the rest of it. But there are these little things like accidents and radioactive waste and the human costs are very, very high, even if on the surface it might look like it's, it's an environment beneficial thing. And of course, the whole environmental justice movement has sprung up in the last 20, 25 years, really making the connection between the communities. They're bearing the brunt in our own US Slum neighborhoods, but also in developing countries that get hit with the extraction industries and very little of the benefit. So to me, they can't be separated. That's all I want to say.

Thanks, Shell. Kevin?

Yeah, I could go on about, you know, the, the genocidal history of environmentalists liking a pristine wilderness. But, you know, and I could talk about other experience with the poor. Petra people in Mitchell, I mentioned this really briefly. We were working with the poor Apache people in Michoacan and it was a pine resin refinery thing and they were growing pine resin and they got 90% of the revenue from it because they, the refiners had lost two thirds of their supply because of climate change and they had to let the people get the value to, in order for them to maintain the, the, the resin. And so it worked. And they were getting, you know, 90% of the money on pine resin. And I got with a group of five family offices and they said they loved it. Biggest regenerative project in Central America on forestry. But they couldn't invest in it because they couldn't. It was predicated on indigenous wealth. And they had three criteria. Is that do they poach, are they reliable labor and is there civil unrest? And so if there was value in the people, the environmental family office group had no way to look at the people as being intrinsic and valuable. And so they didn't invest even though we had better metrics of the things they cared about, because they just had no way to see the value of the people. That's just, I've run into that with other environmentalists. It's, I don't, you know, it's just, it's a myopia. I don't have any problem with it.

Is this, Kevin, is this environmental myopia or capitalist myopia?

No, no, this was purely environmental. They could only see the trees. They could not see the people. They could not see that you needed livelihoods among those people to make the project work. They, you know, I can just go there about that. I mean, I also. We just got given 25 to 30 old order Mennonite carpenters who will be working in our low status neighborhood. Post Helene on a housing fund and they'll donate their labor, but about 25, 20 houses between November and May. And we also have to restore the soil because we're hilly and the land got scoured. And so houses are sliding and mudslides are happening and the land is dead. And so to secure housing, we have to restore the soil. So we need to bring in a permaculture approach to reducing risk, which probably means we'll need to use community embedded insurance because it's going to have a bid. You know, that's not a factor an insurance company can factor. So we'll, it'll have to be community embedded. And I just, you know, it's a whole bunch of resources I don't know how to handle. But I'm. We're assembling them, working with a really strong community group who's the lead, who asked us to build the fund. And they're doing about 60,000amonth in rental support by cash and utility support. And they said we need housing. You know, one in six houses was either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Our house is uninhabitable. At the moment, they're going to rehab our house for free when they're going.

To live on our farm.

And just how you assemble that kind of free labor.

And.

And we got some innovative finance things, the Deerfield Fund and other things. So the cost of building the house will go down and the cost of getting a down payment will go down and stuff like that. And, you know, I. I would like. We need a regenerative approach because the soil is part of the deal. If you don't restore the soil to a biodiverse thing that will cling to. If you don't make the soil alive, your houses are at risk. Because this is a hilly place and we lost 40% of our trees on September 27th.

Yeah. It's not just there. Soil is key wherever we go. I'm hearing two things, what you're saying, Kevin. One is that there's environmental myopia, one of many kinds of myopia that misses value and misses care. But you're also describing examples where a more integrative approach finds ways to put all these pieces together. And I think the key isn't the volunteer labor, because, in fact, people need to have livelihoods at some point. But considering labor, housing, soil, community economics altogether produces a different kind of opportunity than what those family offices were blind to. So thank you very much for offering that.

If anybody wants to talk about how to assemble those resources into some ecosystem, follow up on it, because it's. I got a lot more yeses than I even expected. They just, you know, the Mennonites reached out to us because we have land, and they have 25 to 30 folks that will be there from November to May.

Kevin's been doing some remarkable weaving of these kinds of things for decades. Most recently, the Neighborhood Economics Conference in Chicago. Was. That was earlier this month, right?

Yeah, it was.

Yeah.

And so check that out as well. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin, put your contact info in the chat, please, for people want to reach.

You, for you and for whatever links might be worthwhile to follow up on. Thank you. Ron, over to you.

Yeah, thank you, Rafael. I really enjoyed your remarks. I ran an advertising agency for 25 years, so I know something about branding. But the question I wanted to ask you, and what I put in the chat is how much you're actually building on traditional marketing and advertising practices. And what I found is that we're just trying to re. Sacrifice. We're trying to sacralize business language. There's nothing wrong with profit. There's nothing wrong with service. But we've so narrowed It. So I just wanted to try this out. We got a grant to bring together the San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Presidio Graduate School of Management, where Gil has been very active over the years. And I'm trying to say to the seminary people, you've got to be more practical and define what ministry is. It's a service of some kind. I don't care if you're selling toothpaste or spiritual direction, it's still a service. So I'm trying to build on traditional languages. And to the business students, I'm trying to say we have to dig deeper into what is the participating more deeply in God's imagination. Pray, what is that? Well, that's what they. So the business students are all saying, what do they do over at the seminary? We're in the same building, this spectacular building in San Rafael. Some of you might know it, built in 18 something. So I just wanted to ask you, working with Phil Kotler, who's now 94, who developed the whole field of marketing, and he's been concerned about confronting democracy and capitalism and democracy in decline. And I'm just trying to say, Phil, we've too narrowed these amazing ways of building a market. A market is a commons. It's building community. So I don't know how you react to that, but that's the pitch I've been making. So I say to the seminary faculty, you've got to become more practical. The practical. The people at the business school, I got to say, what are they doing over there with spiritual discernment?

Bring them together.

Thank you.

Wow, Ron, that is amazing. My father is a 92 year old theologian and rabbi who taught for 30 years at the Vatican. He was the only rabbi to teach at Nevada. He was an interfaith leader. And so I completely agree with you. One of my favorite social psychologists is Jonathan Haidt. He teaches at nyu. He has a big book out now about the anxious generation. But one of his first books was called the Righteous Mind. And he talked about how important it is to start with what's sacred. When you want to communicate, your task is to understand what is sacred in the mind of the other and to honor that sacred. And what you're getting at as well, Ron, is that we can communicate the ways that we can be of service, we can be useful, we can create value by communicating ultimately how we meet that sacred need or that sacred idea. And so your juxtaposition of theology in the business school to me is magical. And I also believe that you're starting to speak to Things that are not transactional but are relational. And I think that's so in.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, if anybody's interested, you can. You can ask. You can go to ChatGPT and ask is what is pragmatic inquiry and how does AI work with it? And so we're trying to say. It concludes with saying that, well, AI can act as a mirror. Was it a mirror inscribed for the. For the student? But the work of discernment transformation has to be done by the student. And I went, okay, good, there's a place for us. So thank you.

Thank you.

Well, put your father's name in the chat. Has he written anything? I'd love to know about his history. I define myself as a Judeo, Christian, Christian, Catholic, reform, tradition.

Other questions that people would like to raise for anybody. What's getting stirred up, like, to offer? Heather, please. You're muted, Heather.

Yes, I know. So I'm visually impaired. It takes a while to find the right thing to click. I'm just really grateful for the turn the conversation just took because I've. I've been sitting here with my stomach churning and thinking about young children. So my profession was as an early childhood educator. So I immediately went to. How is all of this impacting how we're treating our children? Because we're all old. But, you know, there are. There are new humans, and what are we doing to help the new humans find their way? And my experience as an early childhood educator is that preschool children, new humans, are quite brilliant at figuring fucking things out. You know, they just need to be. They need a little bit of guidance around empathy and kindness and sharing and. But basically the basic goodness of humanity is born into each new human. And how do we enrich that? It seems to me, in terms of where I'm at right now in this moment, is how do we not only acknowledge but celebrate and enrich what I believe to be. The truth is that life on planet Earth is a gift from Creator. Now, you can call it God, Creator, you could. Whatever that whatever is happening here on planet Earth is. Comes from source energy of love. And that. That's. That's beyond a religious characterization or nomenclature. Everybody knows what love feels like. So if we feel more and think less, we'll get. We'll begin to get it. It's. It's. It's a thing. It's a feeling nature that we need to enrich because people actually know what feels good. Beauty feels good. Nature feels good. The stuff that's good for us feels good. All the thinking in the world isn't going to help correct a deficit of feeling, the goodness of creation. And for me, all of creation is basic goodness manifest. And I don't. I'm in a place in my life now where resilience has taken on. The whole resilience spiral has taken on a deeply personal. Experience. Because just this week I had a neuro ophthalmologist tell me something that I already knew, that she didn't know, but she could figure out by doing visual testing and seeing how my brain is processing things, that I had a traumatic brain injury either in early childhood or even before being born. And I know the story of that. But for this neural ophthalmologist to be able to watch my brain operate by looking through my eyes and to tell me that the traumatic brain injury that I'm dealing with didn't come from open heart surgery last year, it goes way back. And it's an intergenerational trauma that's come forward now. I'll be 76 years old tomorrow. It just blew my mind because in a way, I've studied enough about the science of trauma and adverse childhood experience, blah, blah, blah. I got all of that cognitive, cognitively. But this week I'm getting how it's worked its way out through me, my mother, my father, me, the intergenerational trauma from World War II, from sexual trauma, father to daughter. And I'm just freaking blown away that this notion of step one is to like, as, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, accept reality. It's like, okay, that happened to me. That happened to me. So I've lived in the neurobiology of fight, flight physiology since before I was born. And, and it's had these, you know, manifestations in my physiology that I'm half blind and dizzy and, you know, I've had two open heart surgeries, blah, blah, blah. It's like there's so much more going on here in terms of what it is to be a human being and to be a human being that is subjected to traumatic violence at a very young age, even neonatally, and that until we get to the, the dealing with the conflict and violence that we're doing towards God's creation, plant world, animal world, water world, I don't know, it just, it's like we have to start with feeling and, and extraction rather than enrichment. Extracting things doesn't feel good. Enriching things feels good. So can we just focus on. Let's just start with what feels good. Caring for each other, loving each other, having compassion, sharing with one another, dancing and singing, celebrating. It's like I'm just happy to be alive. I don't know how I'm going to tell my children what the news was I got about my health today. Because they're all concerned that I'm going to drop dead. And rightfully so. So I don't know how to tell them what the neural ophthalmologist told their mother about what she could see in terms of intergenerational trauma. Looking through my eyes to my, this occipital cortex, she could see the fight flight, freeze response in my brain. Just about how my brain responds to different visual stimulation. It's just fucking blown my brain. And it's like, it's like, wow. It's so complicated to be a human being in one way. It's not complicated to be loving and kind and compassionate, to share what you've got, to be generous. To be generous. Because God's creation comes from love and it comes with generosity.

And.

Little kids know that. They get that. That's why I love hanging out with preschool kids because they're beautiful humans. They're way smarter than most of us grown ups. They haven't been corrupted by greed, so to speak. Anyway, I'm just, I'm like totally freaked out in this moment. And it's what, Wednesday? So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of this week has taken me to a whole new zone of experience of what it is to be a human being and to actually feel in my own physiology what inter generational trauma feels like as a human being. And you know, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good. I can't cook for myself, I can't clean for myself. I can still love every human being that I see every day. And that's all that I can do anymore is just love people. The strangers in the grocery store, my new home, health care providers. That's all I know to do anymore is to just love people. And what, what does that look like? It just means to lighten up, lighten up and let, and let the, the love light shine through me. I'm just going to be a beacon of love lighting the world. And that's all I can do. Gil's own me a long time. I've been in the trenches around organic farming since before God. But you know what? Anymore it's just, all I can do is just love everybody and everything and not argue with anybody or try to talk them into anything. Believe whatever you want to believe, think what you want to think. But if you're Hurting somebody, you're hurting yourself, and you can feel it. Do no harm. Because we are all part of the big cosmic wave of love. We're all particles and waves simultaneously in quantum thinking. So I'm a particle and wave of love. That's just. That's where I am going on to my 76th year on planet Earth. It's been a long, hard struggle, and I'm happy to arrive where I can just love things. I can just relax and say, it's all. It's really all good. Human beings are born basically good. If we don't do violent trauma to human beings, they will remain basically good. So the violence has got to stop. Everywhere, every way, every day. Just stop the violence. And, you know, we can do that individually. Anyway. I'll stop now. I'm going to start to cry. Thank you all. This has been an amazing. An amazing affirmation of what I've learned about my own intergenerational trauma. It's. It's a real thing. It happened to me, and I didn't even realize it until I was in my mid-30s. And I only on. On Monday got the full gist of it in my. In how my brain is not functioning properly. I'm not processing the. The information in my brain because I have a brain that. That grew up in fight, flight, freeze neurobiology.

Well, what you've given us here is pretty beautiful, so thank you for that with whatever brain you've got for that. Let's take a moment for a few breaths for everybody, just to kind of center here before we continue the conversation. Yeah. Thank you. Heather, I'm struck by what you said about accepting what is, not that, you know, not the thing, doesn't need things don't need change. But accepting that what is, is what is is an echo of Byron, Katie, and Tich Nhat Thanh, as you said, and what Raphael shared from Ariana Gomez of that first step of the spiral.

Yeah.

So thank you for bringing that all together. Want to introduce another guest who's joined us?

Hi, everybody.

Introduce yourself. Because you say your last name better than I do.

I want to hear yours. I'm B. Bunker Landro, and I'm a huge fan of everything Gil does. And I'm here at the conference.

It's vice versa.

So. So I'm just here to get. And Heather, thank you for that. That was so beautiful. And it's really just what I need to center myself to now. I will give a better presentation in a little bit. Thank you.

Good. We've been talking in general, about sort of, you know, people's perceptions, particularly folks who are at the conference of what we're. What we're seeing about where we are and what's needed next. And Rafael's been talking a bunch about the work that he's been doing with resilience and the Resilience spiral. Was it Ariana or Adriana?

Ariana.

Ariana Gomez. They talked about on Monday.

So.

Before I point to you, any. Anybody else have any reactions to what's been just shared so far in this last hour?

I just want to, I think, on behalf of all of us, Heather, thank you for the gift. What you've shared today was profoundly beautiful. You were speaking wisdom of the eternity and timelessness. And I hope that Gil can share the recording of the video today, because every time I lose. Anytime I lose a sense of myself, anytime I'm struggling, I will watch you again and again and again because you've offered just great love in. In your deepest humanity and for us. It's a great, great gift. Thank you for.

Absolutely. Thank you, Heather. And thank you, Rafael. Nitin.

Yeah, Just wanted to also thank Heather and. And express that this is actually what you just pointed to, Heather, is a journey that I feel like I've been going on for myself in a deepening of, like, what needs to shift fundamentally in our human consciousness for something new to emerge.

And I'm currently reading a book called Beauty in Leadership and Coaching and Its.

Role in Transforming Human Consciousness by Peter Hawkins. And what you were just pointing to.

Heather, I feel like this book also.

Really captures the essence. I'm only about halfway through it, but it really points to what needs to shift in our business narratives, in our relationship to society, and how beauty and love and. And that essence of human life and the goodness that's embedded within us and in relationship, how we can be vehicles for that to occur. But first, we've got to be the vehicles for that in our own lives and people around us, in our families, and then it builds from there. So I just wanted to point that as a resource for anyone who wants to go on that journey for themselves.

Thank you. I heard. A resource and an invitation for all of us to whatever we do, whether it's business or marketing or the analytics that Daniel was talking about or the politics that Rafael, you did in the former life and all the rest, operations and manufacturing and so forth, is to bring that spirit that Heather was embodying into all of it, all the time. That's a challenge and opportunity, I think.

For all of us.

Hi, Randy.

Hello, Gil. This has been fascinating, wonderful discussion and I want to thank Heather in particular. It's so, so insightful and beautiful and I totally believe everything she was saying about the truth of being human and that love is central to everything. And I love that you work with, have worked with little children because it's so true. I've seen, I remember at an airport where my 2 year old crawled over. He's, he was blonde and ladies, he could be. And he crawled over this little black boy and they just sat. They were two, they didn't know each other's language or anything, but they just, here's another human. I'm going to interact. It's so, so natural when they are little enough, young enough. And my very first book was called you Can Postpone Anything But Love and the idea of being in the present all the time and what is the most loving thing for me to do or not do. And it works so well with parenting and just about everything else, being kind to ourselves and to others. So it also reminded me of Ian McGilchrist's theory of moving away from the, the, the left brain to the right brain. We've been stuck in the left brain so, so long and seeing things holistically as the right brain does is what we need to do more of. And I think that's what kind of what we've been talking about of bringing people together and looking at the whole picture. You know, okay, we want a lower carbon footprint, but we don't want to build a whole bunch of nuclear plants that will make the world toxic for who knows how long. So being in the present and looking at the whole picture is, I think, is the path we need to follow. Thanks for letting me share.

B.

Where are you in this conversation here in the conversation of the last few days?

Well, it's really nice.

Can you start?

Give me a thumbs up if I.

Need to speak more loudly.

Oh, that means, okay, you're good. You know, it feels so. I sign up for crazy things when my crazy friends are really excited about it. And one of the crazy things I signed up for was a relay race. It was like 24 hours through the woods. And somehow, maybe because I was the newest person on the team, I got like the 3am to 4:30am shift running through the woods. And it ended up being this incredible experience where I felt like, okay, all my team members are sleeping and I'm carrying forth whatever the energy, I guess, until the sun comes up and they wake up and someone else takes over. And this conference feels A little bit like that. Like, it's much smaller than these conferences have been in the past, and there are a lot of people that couldn't make it this year, but we know they're. They're there maybe not. Not slumbering on purpose, but maybe under a rock for strategic reasons. And like, this group, it feels like it's the group that's carrying forth the flame in, you know, more publicly, because we can, I guess, and more. More visually. And I don't know. I. I know the sun will rise. Not sure when, but. But it will.

Yeah.

So that's kind of where I am. And I, by the way, I. I showed up here thinking the sun would never rise. So it's. In that regard, it's been. It's been a shift. And I'm sure next week I'll go back to, like, no, it's never going to rise. But right now, that's where I am, and it feels good.

Anything. Anything particular that landed for you or affected you this week?

I think the conversation on how to speak to Maga, at one level, it was really basic, and at another level, I realized that I was being. Yeah, I knew this to some degree, but I didn't really feel it in my bones that, that my intolerance is playing right into the hands of.

You know, the power grab.

And it.

It has me rethinking how I approach my work. I've been a little bit just kind of denying that. You know, I, you know, I try to not be insulting and not be judgmental, but. But I also don't do much to. I don't know, to bring them in. It's just too exhausting. And I've been rethinking that. Do I need to approach things differently?

I think several of us would like to hear more about that, if you don't mind sharing some of the points that you learned.

Let me just add a little bit of frame to it and then go ahead and do that. This was a presentation by Bill Scheireman, who's probably my favorite Republican environmentalist activist for many years, talking about how to speak to Maga, which includes, of course, how to listen to Maga. And, you know, one of the things he showed is that this, you know, that the right is not any more monolithic than the left is. There's different voices and different perspectives worth knowing. And one of the things that I. That I've noticed in my experience with that is that when we learn how to listen. Let me back up for a second. I've had I had friends on the left who said, well, we really need to talk to maga, you know, like, tell them what's right, convince them. And I think, no, we actually maybe need to, maybe need to listen first and listen deeply for what people really care about. Because in my experience, most people most of the time pretty much care about the same things. They interpret them in different ways, they articulate them in different ways and come to different conclusions about what to do about them. But as I read the polling, you know, 60 to 80%, 60 to 90% of Americans, depending on the issue, are pretty much aligned on most of the same things. Where they go with that is completely different. But for me, it's an opening of a polling kind of conversation that's possible to have. It's focused on listening for what we really care about and speaking to that. And, and so Bill is going at that in a fairly structured and strategic way. I imagine the video will get posted on sustainable brands sometime in the next month or so. It'll be worth looking at. So with that frame, what else about that for you?

I, I would add to that, that. So I'm, I'm gonna tell, I'm gonna explain this the way I understand it, and it's not exactly the way he said it, but, you know, 10,000 years ago, you know, we're living in these small communities, you know, I don't know, 80 to 300 of us. And yeah, it's probably true what Heather said, that we, we are at, at our core good beings. We, we, we're social, we like to make pro social contributions, we like to help our neighbors. You know, when we help our neighbors, our oxytocin or serotonin or dopamine go up. We're wired to do good for each other. And, and true, and, but it's also true that if someone is out of line in that community and, you know, doesn't do their midnight shift watching out for the lions or, you know, somehow sets the whole place on fire or worse, commits crimes, that has to be taken care of. And that's also a very human impulse and we need to get rid of free riders before they destroy, you know, communities. And that second human, you know, thread is very unpopular on the left. Right? The protection, the conservation, but we need that as well. And so what I thought was fascinating about what he said was that's the energy behind maga. It's the preserving, it's the conserving. It's like making sure that, you know, bad actors aren't hurting children and you Might. You might argue with the specifics on how they express that and, you know, whether they really care about children because it's okay to have guns or whatever. You can argue with the specifics. But to me, I was like, there's nobility in that. You know, there's nobility in the energy and something. You know, it's just as community minded in a sense. It's just as pro social as, you know, wanting equity for everybody. And, you know, maybe it's gone wrong at some point between that energy and the expression of it, but it should be respected where it comes from.

Yeah. Bill was suggesting that the characteristic flavor, if you will, of the right is protector and the characteristic flavor of the left is liberator. And they're both relevant, they're both valid, and they're both important, and they're both misunderstood. And that sort of opened up a window of possibility of how do we listen to each other and speak with each other in a different way that can be more pro social and more regenerative and more resilient to back to where we started from here.

So I just want to say something super concrete that came up for me.

Good.

Which was to me, the idea that I had was what if I listened for that energy? Like, I get it. You want to protect what's, what's. What's beautiful. You want to conserve what's amazing. And just said, yes, and rather like, no, no, not the way you're doing it. You know, it's just like, yes, I hear what's behind your words because frankly, I can't stand your words, but I hear what's your behind your words. And. Yes. And how about if we proceed this way? So that was kind of the very.

Concrete thing, which is a beautiful way to bring us to our last few minutes and to echo what Heather was saying about love. Can I. Can I listen to Maga with love and with recognizing the love that's motivating that person, even if there's other things in there. It's challenging, but important. Ken, haven't heard from you yet. Anything you want to say as we come to closure here? I'd like to thank everybody who's contributed. This has been for me, one of.

Our richest and deepest conversations.

Truly been amazing. And Heather especially, thank you and Rafael, it's just been.

I've just been soaking it all in.

Not trying to do much and, you know, fill in some stuff in the chat. But thank you all. It's been quite lovely. Yeah, for me, it's been. It's been one of our richest and one of the most unexpected in how it's unrolled. And so just thank you everybody, those of you who spoken and those of you haven't spoken. I haven't seen anything that's been in the chat, but it's been rich and wonderful and I thank you all. We'll be back again next month with with another special guest. Elizabeth Doty will be joining us and more about her in the emails. As Ken said, we'll have the video up probably next week. It's been taking us a little bit longer to do these lately than usual, but we'll have that up for you. Save the chat right now if you want it. Three dots top or bottom of your chat screen. And thank you all for joining us, both of those of you who are new and those of you who are regulars. And Ken, do we have a little parting melody for people?

You can dance in a hurricane but.

Only if you're standing in the eye.

You can dance in a hurricane but only if you're standing in the eye.