Living Between Worlds #2.3: Capital-ism's _Structural_ Defects

For those of you who are joining the first time, just a bit of introduction. We're calling this series Living Between Worlds because that's where we seem to be. We're in this transition zone. Some think of it as the Bardo, if you know that between the, between the old world and the new, between the fossil era and the renewables era, that's obviously on its way for us. Between linear economy and circular economy, between the post war global economic order and something that we don't yet know the name of. And in that space, in the middle of uncertainty and what my friend Chauncey Bell here on the call calls messes the, you know, not, not just problems to solve, but a concatenation, a tangled web of things that are disordered, not clear, challenging, frustrating. As Russell Redenbaugh just said on our call earlier this morning, in the world of messes, those who can navigate have the advantage. Those who are trying to predict are at the disadvantage. Here we are living between worlds in a world of massive uncertainty. How do we live, how do we move, how do we stand, how do we act, how do we interact in a world where all the prior bets are off? And yet here we are with deep concerns. I think one thing that characterizes the people on this call is that you're all people who care deeply about, well, about many things and many of them in common as we'll unfold in the call. So what I'd like to do today is an experiment. My, my mentor, Buckminster Fuller used to always advise, never show incomplete work. And I'm going to do that today, actually. I'm going to declare that what I've got so far is complete for what it is. And it's on a, on an exploration about the nature of capitalism in the world today. What's evolving there, the challenges and what I've. What I've called provocatively in the invitation, the structural defects of capitalism. So I want to experiment with you, lay out my thinking so far. I'd like to hear your. What it provokes for you, what makes sense, what's missing, how it may affect your perspective on the events that we are living through and shaping at this moment in history. So capitalism may be one of the most adaptable of all systems. It metabolizes change and challenge so effectively bringing, bringing challenges into itself that Adam Smith would barely recognize it today. This is often the case with profits. Things are done in their name. That may not be what they thought they were talking about. And Smith, I think, would certainly not be pleased to see where we are in this world of what some people call late capitalism. Capitalism is under fire. And it's under fire not just from the left, which it long has been the target of, and not just from the periphery, but from the center itself, from corridors of power. Bastions of capital are wondering, where are we now? Is this working? Can this world adapt to the challenges that it's facing? How does it meet the needs of now? We look at the response of a largely capitalist planet to the challenges of climate. We see what Alex Steffen calls predatory delay, massive innovation, greatly accelerated action. Those of us who've been in the field for a long time see that the level of commitments being made by countries and companies and cities is sometimes actually thrilling. The level of action and performance against those goals is decidedly not. We've just come through at least the next phase of the COVID pandemic in the world of pandemics that we will live in for the rest of our lives. And we see both some stunning coordinated global action and also one after another, balls being dropped at a stunning scale. Umar Hague wrote recently that when the G20 gathered in the spring of 2020 to talk about a global vaccination program, the bill was $17 billion and they couldn't raise it. $17 billion is a lot of money to you and me, but to Mr. Bezos or Mr. Gates or Mr. Musk or Mr. Buffett or any number of people, it's chump change. It should have been on the table like that and it wasn't. What does that say about us and where we are now? We see the commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals from the United nations. More than 190 countries have committed to these 17 goals that are impressive in many ways. In my growing up, we would talk about reducing poverty and reducing world hunger. The SDG set the goal of eliminate poverty, end hunger. Just the fact that that's on the table and declared as a public goal by 190 some odd countries I think is notable and important. And yet all of this is inadequate. Impressive, but inadequate to the challenges that we face. The adaptations that capitalism has gone through are substantial as well. You know, from the American and Western European models to the Scandinavian model, to Singapore capitalism, to Chinese capitalism or state capitalism. Also impressive has been the rapid growth of what we used to call socially responsible investment. Now we call ESG Investment, representing, last I heard, about 1/3 of the funds under management in the United States capital markets from 10 or 15% 10 years ago to 010 or 15 years before that. Stunning. We collaborated on a report released a few months ago in association with the United nations called Capital as a Force for good, which benchmarked 60 of the largest asset management firms in the world, representing probably about 30 or so percentage of the $400 trillion of capital that we could put our fingers on in the world. And in just about every company we talk to, there are significant initiatives at the board and C suite level to redeploy capital, to commit resources in support of the SDGs, to decarbonize, and many, many good things. Part of the point of that report is to give these folks a chance to look at each other's programs and say, well, I thought we were doing great, but maybe we're not doing quite so great as that other bank or that other pension fund. So it's kind of a competition for good in that process. But many of these companies with significant commitments to renewable energy are still heavily invested in coal and still continuing to invest in coal, despite the market signs and the ecological signs that would say maybe you don't want to do that. So, you know, and there have been lots of efforts at reform and reconsideration, people talking about moving shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism, to impact capitalism, multi capitalism, many other forms. And I want to offer a, a friendly critique suggesting that none of those, as good as they are, as beneficial as they are, are getting to the heart of the matter. I'm going to propose that there are structural defects in capital capitalism as we know it. Not moral challenges, not unhappiness, not calling out unfairness, but saying there are things in the structure of how the game is wired that are problematic. And this is the hypothesis that I want to put on the table. I'd like to test that with you. It's a diagnosis, if you will. You know, reading the science of the system, taking its pulses, taking its temperature, and saying, here's what might be going on here and let's see what that illuminates. So, So let me start with this. I found myself earlier this year in my writing, not writing capitalism, but writing capital, hyphen, ism, capital, you know, the ism of capital. This is a system that privileges capital, or more specifically financial capital, above all other kinds of capital and above what's been traditionally called the forces of production. And above all other concerns, capital, the number one thing, and specifically financial capital, the forces of production model, has long thought that land, labor and capital were the elements that drove production. More recently, people have added enterprise, or what I think of as human innovation and coordination as an arbitrary distinction from labor to the mix and the game that we're in now focuses on financial capital and returns to financial capital in conflict to returns to land stewardship, returns to labor, social justice and equity and return to enterprise is actually favored very well. The standard model here in Silicon Valley across the bay from me is that when you found a company, the founders get a big stake and the investors get a big and often bigger stake and all the other people involved in creating the enterprise and generating the value that it creates get a very small stake. That's one way to organize capitalization, development of new firms, but it's not necessarily the only way to do that. Multi capitalism. Mark McLeod, I don't know if he's on the call today, but has been one of the drivers of that, seeks to balance the returns to what they identify as five capitals. Economic or financial capital, human capital, natural capital, resources and earth living systems, social and relational capital. And Martin. No, this is not going to be a lecture. I'm going to pose a provocation and then we're going to go into discussion, so bear with me. I want to set the frame for the conversation and constructed capital or the built environment and physical infrastructure that human activity and mobilization, these resources has produced. To my mind it's an improvement broadening the understanding of what are the resource flows that generate value and activity in the world. But it's also seeded dominance to the metaphor of capital and surrenders to the financialization of everything. We can talk about human capital, natural capital and so forth by giving them economic measures. For me that's a double edged sword. Let me get the screen back up. Here's the hypothesis diagnosis that I'm offering to you that what we see is a system that is focused on accumulation without limit, concentration of capital, concentration of resources and wealth without the boundaries that we see in living systems. Which is a touchstone for me, for much of my thinking. The Dutch industrial executive Jan Hanhard used to offer the example of a pride of lions hunting in the African veldt. They'll chase down a wildebeest, kill it, drag it back to the pride, feast gloriously, and then what? Then they go to sleep. They don't drag the wildebeest back to the pride and then go out and get another one and eat some of it, and go out and get another one and eat some of it. There's satiation, you can eat until you're full and then you stop. And we have that in all living systems, we don't have that in economic systems. And we see the consequences of that in the world we're in extraction without reciprocity. I think of this in both the economic terms of how the value generated by labor is shared with labor, to what extent how profits are allocated among stakeholders. We see in the corporate sustainability world a lot of discussion about employee engagement and workplace enrichment and involvement of people, but very little discussion about sharing of profits or even more dramatically, sharing of ownership. That would be one dimension of reciprocity. Another is what Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about in her book Braiding Sweetgrass and the narrative that lives in indigenous communities around the world where people are living in relationship to the living world and everything is a conversation and an exchange. If asking permission to take something and giving something in return to maintain a balance in the relationship, we see alienation without care. People alienated from their work, from their own lives, from the concerns that they're committed to, and lack of care reciprocated in the organization. We can spend a lot more time on each of these. We see what I call abstraction without ground value that exists in human assessments and conversations, without regard to the value that exists in the living systems that give rise rise to everything that we care about. Our money and our financial metrics are disconnected from the vitality and viability and the regeneration of living systems. In living systems there's no abstraction. Molecules couple, chemists, chemicals produce reactions. Species eat or care for each other. It's very direct. It's physical and biological and chemical. In our world it's something else. And that's not a bad thing. But the disconnection between these, I would assert, is a bad thing. We have generation of stuff and value, but without attention to the regeneration of the sources of that value. And we have privatization without. I'm not sure what this is a placeholder word, without stewardship, without care for the commons in the context of a privatized society. And that will dip us in, in a deeper conversation to questions of the role of violence and its relationship to property. Going back to the enclosure accent further, let me leave that up on screen and ask you what does this provoke for you? How are you reacting? How are you feeling in your. What's going on in your mind and your body as you hear this? What make does this make sense to you as a useful window into the questions that we're looking at and what's missing? So please use the the hand raised button underneath reactions at the bottom of your screen to that will put you into a queue so I can see you in order of who's asking questions. Just a Reminder, for those of you who came in a little bit late, we're recording the call. We are not going to be. And we'll make that available to you. We're not recording the chat. So if you want to save the chat for your own purposes, use the three dots at the lower right hand corner of the chat screen. I've got Stuart and then Laura. Welcome. Thank you, Gil.

So, yeah, I mean, I agree with everything that's said with a great punctuation mark. And we continue to perpetuate this without regard to the killing of the golden goose, which is the earth. And we are essentially destroying the earth. We are eating ourselves alive.

And people coming into the system are.

Encultured in that way. And they just keep going on this rat wheel. One last thing is that most folks.

Don'T realize that we essentially are still.

Living in a feudal society and the king has become the corporation and people are kind of tethered in that way. So thank you for articulating this.

Although in the feudal society the king had a responsibility of care, it was a reciprocal relationship. The king had obligations to the lords and the lords to their vassals. But thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

And that.

That raises the whole notion of corporate responsibility as chartered and as it is.

Named in the legal system.

So thanks.

Yeah. You know, I keynoted a conference for a bunch of advertising executives about 20 years ago, and they wanted me to speak about corporate responsibility. And I had a speech prepared. And I walked in and got into the podium and just had one of those moments where I thought, no, this is not what I want to say today. And I went on a rant about how much I hated corporate responsibility. And the reason for that was that it felt it was superficial. It was a wrapper on what the company is actually doing. Exxon was giving tons of money to symphonies all over the country. Well, that's very nice. I appreciate it. I'm glad they do that. It's a good thing. What does that have to do with what their corporation actually does in the world? And so I wanted to challenge that disconnect and we natural logic. My company stopped doing anything that smacked of corporate responsibility and wanted to challenge. Raised the question of, excuse me, what business are you really in? What are you committed to doing in the world? What's the value you're committed to generating in the world? What opens up with that kind of question as a different approach? Thank you, Stuart, for raising all that. Laura Nettleton, Greetings.

Well, I actually think something that's missing from the list is the idea of awareness about how the world works. And I find that the population in general has an amazing lack of awareness about how basic natural systems work. And so I think part of the whole viewing of capitalism is. And the whole reason that it exists in, in the way that it does is we. We don't really understand the consequence of it in any sort of real sense. There's just the sort of sense that the world is going to continue no matter what we do. And don't. I don't think we really as a people understand the, the, the impacts that we make on it. I really don't. I don't. And because I don't think we understand how it really works.

So what I hear you saying is that my language, not yours, is that we're living in a story that's blind to those things. But what does that tell us about the structure of modern capitalism and how it contributes to maintaining that story?

Well, I love the way it's discussed in Eisen. Is his name Charles Eisenstein? His book, the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. I think in, in that book he talks about the story of separation and how we see ourselves as separate from one another and not understanding that we are connected and belong to this whole. And until we have that basic reverence of, you know, the world that we live in and one another, we're kind of doomed on this path.

Thank you. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna tag that in my mind to the point about reciprocity. Come back to that. If. Laura, if you'd be so kind, could you put the name of the book in the chat for other people? Christine Rosen, welcome. You're on mute, Christine.

I want to expand on what she just said in a weird way. I teach in a business school and I love, I really like the list of structural defects you've developed here. And what struck me is that you were describing in much more detail than economists normally describe, the whole concept of market externalities. And, you know, these are structural defects in the capitalist system. And even conventional economists understand, at least on some level, that there are structural defects in our market system. They don't call it the capitalist system. Usually it's a market system. And one of those is externalities. All these effects that the market has on nature and society and culture that aren't taken and calculated into the price the market sets for the goods. And we're just alienated from that and have blinders on and don't see that. And a lot of my colleagues at the business School know this, you know, taking classes, may even give classes, but they just don't take it into account. And I love, you know, and I don't. There are other market imperfections, like imperfect information, which is also a problem, and public goods and so forth.

I wouldn't call imperfect information.

So you might want to connect that, you know, so that you could speak to economists as well as people who like to talk in more poetic ways about these problems.

Yeah. Thank you. I wouldn't call lack of information a structural defect. I would call it the human condition.

But it's also a problem because it's part of the human condition in the market, because people don't, you know, for a long time, people, most people at least, didn't know what effect, you know, our emission of greenhouse gases was having on the atmosphere and our climate. Now, it's harder to say that that's not a known problem.

Right. But now I have to decide that I care about that and bring that judgment with me to the marketplace and decide to buy across the price difference because of what I care about rather than have this reflected in the prices. So. Totally agree with you there. We don't capture externalities in our economics, but it's worse than that because, of course, we subsidize the generation of those externalities. We are paying for our own destruction. So there's that whole big mess. And it's one that, you know, I've given a lot of attention to. How do we. How do we get the prices right? Just one side note. I would challenge calling this the market system because there have been markets since long before there was capitalism. So it might be interesting to think about what that distinction is. David Schoenbrunn, you're next. Welcome.

Thanks, Gil. I wanted to point out this analysis is functioning on an institutional level, but what to me is missing is the personal level. And the personal level is really focused on, as I see it, alienation without care, that there's an innate cruelty in the behavior or decisions, rather, of corporate executives that implicitly involve screwing the public, screwing the environment and doing heinous things. That's on a point, personal level, not just an institutional level. And this is where there's a miss or there is a missing level of ethics. There is a missing level of empathy and connection. And to me, this is the heart of the problem.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, David, would you. Would you say that it's always active screwing or kind of screwing by circumstance? I mean, you know, I think very few people. Paul Hawkins said this years ago, he said, you know, very few executives go to work in the morning with the goal of making the world more foul, polluted and cruel that day, but they accept that as kind of inevitable consequence of doing what they have to do. You know, how many terms have, how many times have you heard the phrase, well, you know, nothing personal, David, it's only business? You know, I don't mean to screw you personally, but this is how the game is, and too bad. And that's also an alienation of those executives from their own selves and their own cares, enforced by this game that we're in that says you must maximize quarterly returns. To hell with everything else. That's what you got to do. And people buy into that story, right? So point very well taken. I mean, it's not so much that it's missing. I think each of these bullets has got a whole stack of stuff underneath it, and you've raised several of them that need to be there. So thank you for that, Jan Ballard and Lena Leonard. Next. And folks, if you've already spoken, please take your. Lower your hand using the same way you raised it, and that'll help my screen function a little better.

Okay, Jan. Hello, everybody. Gil, thanks. Thanks so much. I just appreciate your thoroughness and don't have any disagreement with anything. I'm inspired to. I just put in the, in the chat to see if maybe we're finally willing to take on the grunch. Bucky's last book, Grunch of Giants. Gross. Universal cash heist. So I was reminded this morning about the Scanlon plans. And historically, back in the 20s and 30s and 40s, a man named Joe Scanlon invented gain sharing and profit sharing and how to go inside a corporation and create a constitution with labor that 80% of the labor agreed to about how they were going to share the gains and share the profits. Probably the only consultant in the history of the country that was on the COVID of every major magazine in the country over the years, we've forgotten how to make decisions in small groups. And what undermines that persistent institutional stupidity syndrome is what I call it, and is this crisis of collective will where in small groups we're unable to make healthy, coherent decisions with each other consistently. And I believe that that is the underlying thing that allows the grunch to occur at the macro scale. The other underlying thing is that everybody's focused on profit and return, not cash, when the cash is the only thing that actually exists. So I just would remind people or inform you, if you don't know that we're dealing in a society where the accounting system was set up in the 30s. Just left out a report about the bank account. So the entire culture is operating blind with this fake idea called profit and a fake idea called return, which don't actually exist in meaning or mathematically. So we're all basically being distracted. We're not keeping our eye on the ball. And the eye on the ball turns out to be that in an organization that's going to last for decades or centuries, there needs to be an equal amount of cash and profit going at the same time. And the cash needs to be a little bit greater than the profit, which it never is. So I'm just throw out to everyone that actually requiring in the generally accepted accounting principles that a cash statement on what's called a direct cash statement be presented may actually be the underlying thing that allows all these small groups of people to make better decisions. So I would posit, and my assessment of the situation is that the almost complete lack of objective transparency about the facts of property, contract and cash in any organization is actually underlying the shitty decisions that we continue to make without information.

Thank you.

That's one piece of this puzzle.

Thank you. At least two challenges to the people who make the accounting rules. One is to reflect cash in the way that you're talking about, and the other is to reflect what we've been calling externalities in the way that Christine was talking about. So. Thank you. You might want to put in the chat how people can find your website, then find a deep story about what you're talking about. Welcome.

Thank you. And thank you for doing this.

Thank you.

I guess what I would like to put forward is that we've got a lot of vicious circle feedback loops rewarding people at the micro level and clouding the effect that is happening at the macro level.

There's a visual version of this chart which is not yeti for primetime. But yeah, I'd love to talk to you about that more, but keep going.

And it seems to me that it fits a little bit under probably the last one of privatization without stewardship. Because there's the idea that there can be action without consequences and that the consequences as we spoke about with externalities, you know, or some somewhere out there, but I forgot who it was said there's no out there anymore. And so. Pardon, There never was, There never was. So I think that if, if we could pay attention to reward systems and disable some of the reward systems that give us really destructive behavior, that would be a help. And even pointing out some of them might be a help.

Lena, could I ask you where or what do our reward systems arise from? Flip side of the question is where's the point of leverage? Where are the points of leverage to shift the reward systems?

Well, I think that they're arising from measures of success that are dealt with at too low a level of recursion. So people are rewarded for profit. They're rewarded for basically going as close to the line legally as they can. They're rewarded for gaming the system. And I think the leverage is really has to be information about what the effects of their behavior are.

And yet there are companies and even you can find this in pairs of competitors in the same industry who play the game differently. I think of Jones, Lang LaSalle, the real estate giant, as one example, where they six years ago, six or seven years ago, they stopped meeting with Wall street analysts. They refused to provide quarterly reports, which is all that Wall street was eating at the time. And their logic was they said, look, our entire team is on long term compensation. No one's getting short term bonuses. We' on 10 year plans. Why the hell would we waste time with you talking about three months when we were paying no attention to that? Obviously we're managing short term cash flow and basic things, but that's not where we're oriented strategically. So thank you very much. Goodbye. Since then, Unilever, Apple and I think a number of other companies have said no thank you to Wall Street. Obviously these are ones that are big enough that they could get away with it. It's hard if you're a little guy. But there's something else at work there that lives in, you know, strategic assessment, care of their people and their mission and probably other factors that are not exactly economic factors. So it's a very interesting territory to consider and it's part of a conversation that's not kind of the main agenda today, but that this leads us into, which is, given all this, what do we do? How do we nurture the kind of shifts that we want to see in the world? And my speculation, the reason I've roped you into this call is I'm speculating that this kind of perspective, this kind of diagnosis may help illuminate some of what's available for us. Thank you, Elena. Jane Bird. Howdy. Need to unmute?

Okay, I'm unmuted now. Jane Burton, Berkeley I'm remembering the moment when you asked, what does this list evoke? And it evokes for me the image of a disease, of a disordered organism. And I think that it might be possible to start understanding capitalism and capitalism as it is rigged as a parasitism and maybe a possible, possibly a kind of metabolic disorder. Lately I've started to study and come to understand something about cancer as a metabolic disorder. And so the meta, the metaphors are very ripe in my mind. But one of the things that. Rivets my attention is plays off what Jan had to say about decision making and people losing the ability, losing the practices and habits of sound healthy small group decision making. And how we live in this system that has a fundamental contradiction of. We have corporations, many of them very large, and they are not democracies. And yet we say that we have a democratic republic and we're involved in struggling with a representative government, representative form of government. And I can't help but feel that the daily life of people working in autocratic hierarchies of corporations, where the people have a sense of being caught in a mechanism that is just business, it's not a personal decision. Something bigger than us is determining all of this without the ability of the individual to make any difference in it is very, very similar to a logjam Congress with a population that cannot get its will exercised by representative government and is growing very afraid and more and more inclined toward violent outcomes to try and change things. And the longtime struggle to make a more perfect union, as it is called. Some arguing that we need a new Constitution, we need to strike a new deal, and just tackling this being present to this issue of a form of daily work that is not democratic and does not drive toward democratic decision making. I wonder if that contradiction in capitalism drives us more toward fascist outcomes politically. Not just boom or bust economic cycles, but fascist political outcomes.

Thank you. It's a very interesting question because, you know, the usual conversation about capitalism and corporate power and politics is about. Is about our system of legalized bribery and regulatory capture. But you're talking about something that's cultural, that because we spend so much of our lives in this democracy and inside systems that are not democratic, what does that do to us? How do we think about the world and us and who we are and what's possible given that we live in, you know, we live in this public story of democracy and this personal story of working in organizations that are not remotely democratic. Thank you.

Yes. And apart from Commerce Gill, we have a system of laws that came into being. Capitalism is made possible by conventions and law. Yeah. Yep.

Okay, Jane, thank you. Marie, stage is yours.

Thank you, Gil. And thank you for this presentation. This actually really resonates with me, I feel that this is really important and critical space that, you know, we really need to be looking into. And, you know, you had asked earlier, you know, if we could kind of look at the defects in capitalism in terms of the structure and what might be missing. And the couple of things that come to top of mind for me, because these are spaces that I'm currently very engaged in, you know, as we're just coming off the conversation, also democratic culture, our diverse and inclusive ownership within the capitalistic system, side by side with equitable and democratic culture. And I think that that goes hand in hand with all of these things that you're taking this deep dive into as we're, you know, sort of envisioning or reimagining this new economy that we might be able to emerge into. Those were just a couple of points that I wanted to draw out that came off of the top of my head that I think could work side by side along with these other ideas of how to craft a more humane way of approaching some of these models that, you know, we're looking at as being, you know. Yes, how also it feels to us, at the very least, disturbing, kind of sickening and definitely in need of some alchemistic transformation.

Alchemistic transformation, yeah, it's good. You know, what you said, Marie, reminds us, reminds me that there are lots of other things sprouting. There are lots of forms and models and experiments underway all over the world with different relations to production, different structures, decision making, different manners of forms of reciprocity. Those are places of experiment and those are also places of inspiration. Because it's easy for somebody to say, oh, that's not possible. But once you can show them that there it is on the ground working example that always comes to mind first for me is the 70,000 person worker cooperative, the Mondragon system in Spain. Clearly that can work. Okay, can it work here? Maybe, maybe not. But there it is as something to look at. It's not, you know, it's not a monolithic world that plays only one way. Thank you. Martin Butterfly, welcome.

Thank you, Gil, Nice to meet you. And great group of people you have here. And wow, when I look at these points on this slide, it maybe is not a complete critique, but it's a very clear critique of social media and a company like Facebook. And I haven't seen enough discussion. There's more discussion about critiques of social media and the impact on addiction or on the political system and misinformation. But I'm really intensely interested in holding a company Like Facebook, but not singling them out. Social media companies are big tech responsible for sustainability. And I don't mean their computers are solar powered. I mean, if you have 3 billion people on the planet, your network connects 3 billion people. And you connect us in such a way that we can't be effective in sustainability because our patterns of organizing aren't working. And if you have companies like Exxon or I don't want to single out companies, but if you have companies that may not be interested in sustainability, funding the big tech and social media companies, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. I would just love to see more discussion in the sustainability community about how current big tech architectures may be putting a limit on our capacity to solve problems in sustainability.

The sustainability community, which I've been in for decades, lives with a very difficult challenge. You know, it's, it's, it's. How to say this at the, at the visible level, it's working with companies to change their practices in certain ways and with some success. With some considerable success. I mean, look at, you know, what was it two weeks ago when we had three court decisions in a matter of days against Exxon, Chevron and Shell, profoundly challenging their business model and their activities. And I remember thinking at that point how wild it is that the stuff that my colleagues and comrades and I have been saying for 20 and 30 years that was being dismissed as completely nuts is now there on the table in every boardroom in the world, in every cabinet room in the world, in the courtrooms, in the halls of Wall Street. It's, you know, the conversation for the most part is no longer should we deal with climate change, it's how do we best do it? Whereas 20 years ago it was should we do it? Or no one even thought about it. So a lot of the sustainability game is at the enterprise and policy level trying to shift what companies do. In only limited ways does it get to the rules of the game, and in only limited ways does it get to these structural defects that sit behind it. I was speaking with the, one of the execs at one of the largest sustainability conferences in the world a few weeks ago, and I offered to them that in decades of going to these things and speaking at these things, I have never heard a single conversation about who owns things. Never discussions of employee enrichment, but not discussions of cooperatives or employee ownership, nothing about the structure of the economy. And it's, you know, it's tough because they, they're running a business and they have to get butts in seats. They have to get corporate sponsors a correction. Not never one in 30 years, one. So the gap you're talking about is really important. Thank you. I got Shell and then Carolyn and then T.R. and let me ask. I know I see some of you. There's a lot going on in the chat. I can't follow it. So I'm going to invite some of you who've said something to pop into the room. I also reserve the right to call on you if I feel like it. Okay, thanks, Gil.

I have three points to make.

I was actually just about to hit.

Send in the chat, except I needed one more piece.

So you'll get that after I'm done talking.

First, the sixth one, privatization without stewardship. I think the real issue is privatization of profits and benefits, socialization of costs and risks. Second, I think it was. David was talking about the lack of an overt ethics piece here. But actually, when I talk about business ethics, as I have done for two.

Decades now, pretty much everything I say.

Is related to one or more of these things. This is basically an expanded definition of business ethics without using that vocabulary. And third, you, Gil, talked about the experience that so many of us have had, like, oh, you can't do that.

We've always done it this way, blah, blah, blah.

And that's one of the real positives of this last crazy 15 months in the pandemic, is that everything we've proven, everything can pivot. Anyone can pivot. That argument no longer holds.

Thank you, Shell. Carolyn Raffensperger, welcome. You're on mute, Carolyn. Carolyn, could you unmute, please?

So sorry, Gil. I'm really impressed with this. The structural defects. It works on a lot of levels. And there are a couple of things that you might do. One is you might capitalize the word limit, reciprocity, so that it has the same power accumulation. That's a small point. I am mindful of something Janine Benyus said, who worked on biomimicry, and she said that money is a proxy and there are no proxies in nature. So when you talk about abstraction without ground, I think about proxies and how that functions in the world, how unlike nature it really is. And then my final point is that the only one that doesn't fit as something that is primarily ecological privatization without stewardship. And stewardship is the only word that is jarring in this. And the problem that I have with privatization is its impact on democracy. So when we privatize public goods, you remove them from the democratic process in the public interest has done some Great. Work on what happened when they essentially gave the parking meters in Chicago to a private company. Nobody could work on climate change and reducing traffic in Chicago because they had this 50 year contract around parking meters. So privatization has a huge impact on democracy, but also equity. So when we privatize public goods, we deny some people access to that. And so it's a larger problem than simply stewardship. It's a key issue around democracy and equality.

Yep. Very good, Very good. Carolyn, you came in a little bit late. You may have missed when I introduced this. Stewardship is a placeholder word. I'm not sure it's the right word. That's why I've got the ellipsis and the question mark after it. We've been looking. We haven't quite found the parallel word there. So I'm certainly open to suggestions on that from everybody.

I was actually following up on you saying that, that I appreciate that it was a placeholder. It doesn't quite fit. And I get what you're talking about, but in some ways, the stewardship on the part of government that you're removing, moving that from the domain of the public good.

Yeah. This is also the realm of the Commons, which I know you've done a lot of work on. And it goes, goes back far beyond the current wave of privatization, all the way back to the enclosure of the Commons as a fundamental kind of privatization. And of course, the phenomenon of slavery, which is a privatization of human beings, all with a threat of violence or threat of violence running through it. It's a bit different than the other five and it's taking some care. And that's why I said I'm putting the incomplete work out for you so we can think together on that. Thank you very much. With that, I've got TR next and then Anna Costa. And Chauncey, you should finish chewing because I'm going to call on you before too long.

Hi. Following up on Money as Proxy, Structural defects and points of leverage. I've recently been reading Mark Carney's book called Values. I don't know how many of you are familiar with it. Carney was the Governor of the bank of England most recently, and prior to that he was the Governor of the bank of Canada. And he speaks really clearly about policy leverage in order. He has seen the light theoretically by holding these positions. And in Canada at least, he's speaking about the transition that is necessary now. However, if you listen to it very carefully and listen to the plumbing, he says that's in place to transform the monetary system, the Bottom line of this is we live in a fiscal dictatorship. He doesn't admit it, but he admits it in the structure of his logic.

By I missed the word. We live in a what? Dictatorship?

Fiscal dictatorship.

I said okay. Yeah, okay.

And so if you actually read his book and listen to a few of his talks, you actually realize that and you know, this man has been the guy that's had his hand on the levers to move Canada and the UK through the two last economic crises. You realize that the they realize how much money it's going to take to transition to a regenerative economy. And the bottom line is the wealthy people are going to control that because we don't have enough public funds to do it without their help. So bottom line of that is we live in a fiscal dictatorship. Never mind democracy, they're controlling the levers. And that's a little alarming to hear and I don't mean to put a wet towel on our conversation. It's just to actually look at the bottom line of the people who are controlling economic policy.

Thank you. Notably, a number of the central banks are now starting to talk about green quantitative easing, about whether there's a role for the central banks to, you know, as we like to call it, print money to finance the trend. Trillions of dollars of work that's needed to both mitigate climate change and adapt to the climate change that's going to hit us. Bank of Japan seems to be in the lead on that. But that discussion seems to be very live and connects of course, with the modern monetary theory conversation that Stephanie Kelton and others are driving. So a topic for more depth. Maybe for another time. Thank you for that. Ann Acosta. Welcome.

Hi.

And this is just such a great conversation. I'll try to keep my comments short. I noted in the chat there's a book that everyone in the world should read called the New Science of organizations, published in 1999 by Gustavo Ramos, who was a colleague of Paulo Freire's in the 60s in Brazil. And his central argument is we have all been indoctrinated into the religious cult of economics so that the other major systems that help us make important decisions about how to live are. They're like matryarshka dolls inside of economics instead of being a Venn diagram or better yet, systems where economic decisions at all levels are subordinate to value based decisions. So Ramos essentially puts together a Venn diagram, although again, I would suggest it'd be better if it were concentric circles where politics or the polity is the realm of making collective decisions around contested issues, the socio cultural realm is that where we allow the full flourishing of human development. He wrote his book before the whole climate change ecological movement really took hold. I think he might put the ecosystems as the largest order of circles, but economics should be subordinate to that. And so while I love your five points, Gus, to the extent that we think that the problems that face us now are economic problems that can be solved through economics, the problem is as long as both our political systems and our value systems, including control of the media, are essentially hijacked and perverted by those who have economic control. This echoes TR's comment, we can't get there from here unless we shift the balance and the hierarchy of how humans make decisions that affect the long term health of the entire planet. Because if we try to fix the economics of it, we just can't get there. I don't know if that makes sense, but go read Ramos book, it's awesome. Yeah, I see David Grossoff just cited it.

Yeah, thank you Ann and David. And it does make sense and it's in a long tradition. Herman Daly, the great ecological economist, was saying what, 50 some odd years ago that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. That was the way how he put it. He was working at the World Bank, I think at the time. So yeah, that how you nest these systems is an important question. And again my, my hypothesis here is that a diagnosis of the structure, the, you know, the structural rules and norms and systems of capitalism will shed some light on how we do that. I've spent too much of my life saying, oh, the way it works is bad. You know, government is captured by corporates, et cetera. So great. So what that, you know, that lends itself to a political power solution, but it doesn't get at underlying issues that don't get solved by doing that. A more democratic society in itself doesn't solve or resolve these defects. Thank you, Chauncey. Would you mind if I call on you even if your hand isn't up? The reason for folks who don't know, Chauncey, is that we've been in dialogue about a lot of this stuff. The importance of diagnosis that I'm talking here is very much of a tip of the hat to you. And no, you've got, I suspect you've got something interesting to offer here.

We shall see the evidence. There's no evidence yet, but I'll say a couple of things. Thank you. I. The structural defects is, I'm assuming you're saying, of the Various proposals of how to understand the capitalist structures that we are declaring to be difficult, wrong, mistaken, misleading, etc.

I'm claiming that these are defects of the capitalist world system, as well as deficiencies or weaknesses or blind spots in many of the critiques and alternatives that are being put forward now.

Right? So the word. As you said, I pay a lot of attention to the word diagnosis. And when I use the word diagnosis, I'm looking for three. Three declarations. One is characterize the mess that is in front of us. I'm going to come back to the word mess in here, but characterize the mess in a way that shows us how it is causing the pain, causing the difficulties, damaging human beings, wasting resources, wasting. Wasting lives. First, second, answer the question, how did this come to be? Where did this come from? And third, answer the question, how come this situation has been resisting the efforts of smart people like us? Because wherever we have an important nest, we have people having conversations like this conversation in which we are blaming, complaining, whining, raging, etc. So what's the situation? How shall we understand this situation? How did it come to be? And how come it is stuck? How come it's resisting the work of serious people now? So I don't think that. I think that your phrase, your word without in this guild is in each case, it is a word aiming at hope and proposing a prescription in each case, or proposing a building of a prescription. And I don't want to see that in my diagnosis. I want to see if you've read the Declaration of independence. About 85% of the declaration of Independence says we have been stupid and we have been taken advantage of by the King. And it goes on and on and on. It's 5%. We are this kind of person, and it's 5%. And as a consequence of that, we're finished with this bullshit and we're declaring a new nation. It is 85 or 90% complaint, no prescriptions, about how the King can improve the situation or how we can improve the situation. It ends with saying, we pledge our lives, our sacred honor and our. And our trust and our money to.

Work.

Fortunes.

Say it again. Fortunes. Yes, thank you. Fortunes, honor and sacred, etc. So I don't like without in any of those cases, because they're all hopeful. They're all, you know, the whole structure of the thing is hopefully, see, we can understand that accumulation without limit is problem, but accumulation is not a problem. Extraction is not a problem, but without reciprocity, it's a problem, et cetera. So the structure of it is, I.

Recommend.

It doesn't help me to think what the hell is the real diagnosis that we ought to be making that will lead to conversations by smart people to really address it and shift it. So then in one more thing, I was going to say that two more things.

Want me to ask you now or wait till you say the other thing?

Wait till I say the other two things. One, I am allergic to the word problem. The word problem belongs to a dyad in which we automatically have a search for a solution. We teach our children in elementary schools now problem solving, such bullshit. I mean, it's not that they shouldn't have problem solving skills, but nothing about what we're talking about here is a problem. Everything here is what I call a mess. I call it a mess because messes take generations, decades or generations to create and they are not subject to solutions. The minute I say problem, the technology background that all of us walk around in is saying, well, what technology? What's the solution here? Where are we going to find the solution? It's a huge misdirection as a consequence of which I prefer the word mess because triggers everybody to say, well, wait a minute, what's he saying mess about here? The final thing I was going to say is we are addicted to thinking that we can follow cause and effect everywhere in our world. We go very quickly to blame. The cause of the mess is the government the cause of the mess. I was listening to you watched me earlier going after I went over after you, you were talking about politicians and. People inside the bureaucracies. And I said, the problem is not the people beside the bureaucracies or the politicians. We need better politicians. That's right. We need people with more care doing bureaucratic work. But bureaucrats and politicians are just one.

More.

Evidence of our addiction to blaming and not paying attention to what's really going on. So those are my comments. Forgive me if I ranted a little bit there, but you knew I would do that.

I invited you to rant. So thank you. Let me go to a couple other people and then I may come back to you about the without flag that you threw down on the field. Brad Warren, welcome.

Hi. I guess after listening to all this, for me it comes down to thinking. It comes down to how. Well, one question that I'm grappling with now is how do you change the way people think? Where do they learn to think the way that they do? Because as far as I can tell, people are not going to change what they do until their Thinking changes. Then it brings up the whole thing about the educational system. Well, but then people will argue, well, who controls that and what's taught in schools? And how is that all determined? But the bottom line, as far as I can tell, it's individual. All this talk about systems and capitalism, and I don't see how that's going to change until individual people make individual choices as to where they bank, where they spend their money, how they spend their money, who they talk to, how they talk to one another. I was reading the chat, been trying to keep up with it, and somebody talked about the common enemy. I'm reminded of Pogo. We have met the enemy and it is us. It's not something out there. I mean, the world is out there. But I think more time spent looking in a mirror and asking ourselves, how am I living on this planet? Am I driving my car too much? I think the pandemic forced me to stay home and I realized I'm not polluting anymore. I'm probably never going to go to a live meeting. I'm going to just do zoom and virtual meetings because that lowers my carbon footprint. But I'm just one person. But hopefully when 10 million people, 100 million people come to that realization, it might actually maybe not reverse some of what's happened on the planet, but at least stop the further pollution of our planet. So I'm struggling with all this. I don't know if this makes sense to people, but I just, again, I think it comes down to how do people think? Where does thinking come from?

That got interesting for me because what you've been doing is. I've been hearing it is exactly what Chauncey called out in advance of offering a solution to a problem. Which is good. And I agree with all the things you're talking about, and I try to do them, too. But that solution to a problem is not an engagement with the message. You talked before about changing how people think. Well, I don't think we change how people think. I don't think anybody changes how anybody else thinks. And I'm not sure that's the way to deal with it. But thinking happens. Our friend Fernando Flores is fond of saying, you're not thinking, you're not thinking at all. Thinking is something that happens to you.

You.

Right. So when you ask the question, where does thinking arise from? That's a very different kind of question. That's a very interesting one. Thank you. Brad. David Grossoff, are you still here? Can I call on you if you're still here?

Yes, yes.

What's on your mind. What kind of thinking is happening to you right now?

I guess I'm to add, construct rather than answer the question at face value. Something constructive is, I think, to add is there's something about the way that large accumulations of wealth can then rewrite.

The rules in order to entrench themselves.

And that goes beyond regulatory capture because it involves active attempts to misinform and confuse about things that really should be matters of fact. It obscures the fact that certain very small legal provisions have gigantic effect and could be altered and produce a dramatically different system like the bankruptcy laws and the corporate shield of individual responsibility of corporate officers and directors were different and you couldn't really buy insurance for it. That would really change a lot of behavior. And so the political dimensions seem a little underexplored here. And I'm not sure whether that makes us too America focused for the discussion that you want or whether it illuminates something about the way that monopolies and concentrations are really unstable.

Good. Thank you. You know me some, and those of you who know me some know that I think about those issues that you're talking about a lot. I very intentionally didn't include them here. Both because I'm not trying to get at the solutions in this conversation, to Chauncey's point, and because I'm trying to focus on not the relationship of capitalism with political systems and all the things you articulated, but speculating there are structural defects in the game of capitalism itself. So all the things you talk about come in another layer of this story. And there's writing I need to do on this, but that's why it's not here. I mean, in the realm, you know, if we're talking about what do we do about this, there's lots of layers. There's the rules. You know, we pass laws, we pass regulations, we put. We put together standards. There are. There are the practices that we actually engage in day to day, the companies that innovate, or Brad deciding not to drive what we actually do in the world. I should probably, should have said that there's practices, there's what we do. There's the rules that we're living under. There's the norms that we are embedded in what we understand, think to be acceptable, normal, proper, you know, acts of. Acts of God and so forth. And there's the narratives that we live in, right. The thinking that is happening to us and no doubt other layers to that. May I ask a question? Please? Yeah.

One thought I had about the extraction with reciprocity to try to meet you at the level of the principles that you're discussing. Contract law is sort of prior to capitalism, but is crucially enabling. Contracts are negotiated between parties with unequal power and unequal resources. So enforceability of contracts and the nature of them seem very much related to this extraction without reciprocity flaw. And I'm wondering whether.

Whether always have reciprocity, whether it's balanced, not. It's a different question.

Right. There's an exchange of consideration, but I'm not sure what you mean really by aggrieved parties later coming back and saying, well, you know, I baked the. You know, I baked the bread that you guys ate at the crucial meetings where this company got going. You know, gimme.

Mm.

So what's the scope of that defect? It seems fuzzier than the others to me.

Fair enough. And these may all be fuzzier than I'd like them to be. What I was thinking of, for starters there was. It sort of echoes the generation without regeneration. We harvest from the living world and we don't maintain its health and vitality. That was one of that. Another layer would be the approach of indigenous cultures to their interactions with the living world that they're embedded in and a sense of. A sense of relationship. I mean, you know, we hear in translation from Native American cultures the phrase all my relations speaking of the living world, from the two legged to the four legged to the creepy crawlers. And a reciprocity that involves conversation, exchange of value, gratitude, rather than just the taking. So there's two different poles of it. These are not tight, you know, these are intended to be a provocation for you to wonder and wander in. So thank you for calling that out, Jane Bird. And then I think we're gonna come to wrap up, so. Janie, try to go off mute.

I did not have my hand up. Are you calling on me?

Well, it told me that you did and I just called on you. Speak or pass?

I'll pass.

Okay, thank you. Anybody else?

Yeah, Gil, I'll just throw something. I'll throw something in here. Which I thought, just responding to what Brad said, that one thing that hasn't been mentioned is the deep, deeply embedded emotional dishonesty that most of us experience in our daily lives with our colleagues and our families. And I think that in the last few months particularly, I've come to see that a lot of my own confusion in my own head comes from withheld emotional charges that I haven't shared that filter. The way I hear what people are saying and Cause me to go into what I call kfck K fuck thoughts. And so whenever I go into K fuck, first I go into gratitude. And then I try to figure out what am I not clear about with this person. And my whole life has really shifted in the last 60 days because I've taken on some long standing things that I sort of let go by that I realized were filtering the way I was listening to people. And I see in my work with C suites and CEOs all the time, where a lot of the havoc that we have and the challenges we have and the confusion we have internally has to do with these swirls of emotionally charged withholds we have with one another, which as long as we don't unpack those and clear them, affect the way we listen and the way the thought process, the thought, the thinking happens to us. So I just, let me just end with just saying that. The Mankind Project, the New Warrior Project, has a clearing method, a little active listening sequence where we clear with each other with the data, the feelings, the judgments and our requests. And I've just found that that really helps me. And I think that's an underlying invisible thing that's not on your list. Emotional dishonesty.

I think it's a good thing and I'm glad that you raised it and offered some of your practices around that. It's not on the list for very intentional reason because I don't hear, I hear that as a diagnosis of human beings, not as a diagnosis of the structure of capitalism and small groups.

I'm saying small groups are where the capitalistic decisions that you're talking about, those executives are making those decisions. And in most cases there are very charged, unresolved, again, polarizations going on.

This, this is not the, this is not the time to debate it. I suggest that I've observed that behavior in just about every circumstance of human beings I've ever encountered. Yeah. Tells me that it's a function of human beings and maybe human culture in this world now, maybe in other cultures, but it's not. I'll find that in cooperatives and in socialist enterprises and in enterprises. Enterprises as well as enterprises. Therefore, it's not on this list for this purpose. It's not important. Yeah, this is, this is sort of a mental discipline that I want to ask and invite. Good point.

Thank you.

You know, this is not a list of all the things that are wrong in the world or all the things we think should be better or the things that we care about. This is an exploration of what's in the structure of this game that a lot of the stuff we think about doesn't get at. I'm trying to pose a different kind of challenge to us all and I love the conversation that we've had. I'm very grateful to all of you who've spoken. I'm enormously grateful to all of you have written. This is the most active chat I've seen in a really long time. I have not barely been able to scan some of it. I encourage you all to save it. There's the lower right hand corner of your chat. Three dots click. That will save it locally for you. This is something I'm going to read with some care later. Our next call is on the third Wednesday of July. We're the third Wednesday of every month. 12:00pm Pacific to 1:30pm Pacific. I have not. I'm not announcing a topic intentionally because I want to go through the chat and watch this video again and listen to what's been said and to what arises in me in this. I invite you all to do that. I'm open to your suggestions, if you have any, about where to take this conversation and I'll consider that as I choose where we go next. You know, I set this out as a one year series. I didn't lay out the catalog of themes for each month because I suspected it was going to emerge from the conversation. And you've given me a lot of food for thought for that consideration. So thank you very much for that. If any of you would like to join me in a small group to dive into this more deeply, please message me or email me separately. That'll be separate from the bigger conversations and then we'll see where we go. Thank you everybody for being here today. Thank you for all that you're doing in the world. I know this is, you know, not all of you know each other, but everybody here is remarkable. Being at work on good stuff out of a real sense of care for the living beings of this planet. So thank you for what you do, thank you for being in relationship and see you next month.

Defect it seems fuzzier than the others to me.

Fair enough. And these may all be fuzzier than I'd like them to be. What I was thinking of, for starters there was. It sort of echoes the generation without regeneration. We harvest from the living world and we don't maintain its health and vitality. That would be one of that. Another layer would be the approach of indigenous cultures to their interactions with the living world that they're embedded in and a sense of relationship. I mean, we hear in translation from Native American cultures the phrase all my relations speaking of the living world, from the two legged to the four legged to the creepy crawlers and a reciprocity that involves conversation, exchange of value, gratitude rather than just the taking. So there's two different poles of it. These are not tight, you know, these are intended to be a provocation for you to wonder and wander in. So thank you for calling that out, Jane Bird. And then I think we're going to come to wrap up. So Janie, try to go off mute.

I did not have my hand up calling me.

Well, it told me that you did and I just called on you. Speak or pass?

I'll pass.

Okay, thank you. Anybody else?

Yeah, Gil, I'll just throw. I'll throw something in here which I thought just responding to what Brad said, that one thing that hasn't been mentioned is the deep, deeply embedded emotional dishonesty that most of us experience in our daily lives with our colleagues and our families. And I think that in the last few months particularly I've come to see that a lot of my own confusion in my own head comes from withheld emotional charges that I haven't shared that filter the way I hear what people are saying and cause me to go into what I call KFCK K Fuck thoughts. And so I'm. Whenever I go into KFuck, first I go into gratitude. And then I try to figure out what am I not clear about with this person. And my whole life has really shifted in the last 60 days because I've taken on some long standing things that I sort of let go by that I realized were filtering the way I was listening to people. And I see in my work with C suites and CEOs all the time where, where a lot of the havoc that we have and the challenges we have and the confusion we have internally has to do with these swirls of emotionally charged withholds we have with one another, which as long as we don't unpack those and clear them, affect the way we listen and the way the thought process, the thought, the thinking happens to us. So I just. Let me just end with just saying that. The Mankind Project, the new Warrior Project, has a clearing method, a little active listening sequence where we clear with each other with the data, the feelings, the judgments and our requests. And I've just found that that really helps me. And I think that's an underlying invisible thing that's not on your list. Emotional dishonesty.

I think it's a good thing And I'm glad that you raised it and offered some of your practices around that. It's not on the list for a very intentional reason because I don't hear. I hear that as a diagnosis of human beings, not as a diagnosis of the structure of capitalism.

Small groups, I'm saying small groups are where the capitalistic decisions that you're talking about, those executives are making those decisions. And in most cases there are very charged, unresolved polarizations going on.

This is not the time to debate it. I want to suggest that I've observed that behavior in just about every circumstance of human beings I've ever encountered. Yeah. Tells me that it's a function of human beings and maybe human culture in this world now, making it another cultures. But it's not. I'll find that in cooperatives and in socialist enterprises and in enterprises as well as enterprises. Therefore it's not on this list for this purpose. It's not important.

Yeah.

This is. This is sort of a mental discipline that I want to ask and invite.

Thank you.

You know, this is not a list of all the things that are wrong in the world or all the things we think should be better or the things that we care about. This is an exploration of what's in the structure of this game that a lot of the stuff we think about doesn't get at. I'm trying to pose a different kind of challenge to us all. And I love the conversation that we've had. I'm very grateful to all of you who've spoken. I'm enormously grateful to all of you. Written. This is the most active chat I've seen in a really long time. I have not barely been able to scan some of it. I encourage you all to save it. There's the lower right hand corner of your chat. Three dots click. That will save it locally for you. This is something I'm going to read with some care later. Our next call is on the third Wednesday of July. We're the third Wednesday of every month. 12pm Pacific to 1:30pM Pacific. I have not. I'm not announcing a topic intentionally because I want to go through the chat and watch this video again and listen to what's been said and to what arises in me in this. I invite you all to do that. I'm open to your suggestions, if you have any, about where to take this conversation and I'll consider that as I choose where we go next. You know, I set this out as a one year series. I didn't lay out the catalog of themes for each month because I suspected it was going to emerge from the conversation. And you've given me a lot of food for thought for that consideration. So thank you very much for that. If any of you would like to join me in a small group to dive into this more deeply, please message me or email me separately. That'll be separate from the bigger conversations, and then we'll see where we go. Thank you everybody for being here today. Thank you for all that you're doing in the world. I know this is, you know, not all of you know each other, but everybody here is a remarkable being at work on good stuff out of a real sense of care for the living beings of this planet. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for being in relationship and see you next month.