Living Between Worlds #2.4: Capital-ism, Economism & Systems Change

Welcome, everybody. Glad to see you here. Welcome to what? This is, I think, our fourth call in the Living Between Worlds series. And I'm delighted to have those of you back who've been here before. And welcome to the New folks. I've called this Living Between Worlds because that's my assessment of where we are. We're between an old world that we see is fading, perhaps dying, a new world that we don't know what it is yet. We're between the fossil age and the renewable age. We're between the post World War II international economic order and something yet to be emerged and yet to be named. We are, many of us, between worlds of working inside large organizations to try to shift them and working outside large organizations to try to challenge them. And if you're anything like me, well, let me not put it on you. I find myself often profoundly unsettled these days, living in this uncertainty. There's personal dimensions to it as well, in our family and of course, in the world. And not to mention the climate emergency that is not only upon us, but that more people recognize as being upon us, the struggle for democracy and the. The risk that I frankly never imagined of the emergence of fascism in the United States as an actual possibility. We're in the fight for our lives at many levels, and unsettled is a kind of understandable place to be. What's striking for me is that mostly, strangely mostly, that's not with the mood of anxiety. Mostly it's with the mood of curiosity and adventure and engagement and yes, some terror too. But I'm struck that more often than not, I'm curious to see what comes next and how we shape what comes next, rather than just being freaked out about what might come next. I have framed these as calls of exploration. This is not a problem solving group. We're not going to build a list of problems and tick through them one by one, but more explore this unknown territory and who we are in it and what's evolving with us and how we can live with grace and dignity and power in the face of all this. My friend Chauncey Bell, who may be with us today, Fires his big guns at the notion of problem solving. He says that as soon as you talk about problem, the mind goes to solution, and solutions before you understand the problem. Well, Brad Warren on the Call has reminded me that prescribing medicine without an adequate diagnosis is considered malpractice. So we're intentionally spending a lot of time in diagnosis, in exploring our diagnoses, reflecting on them, thinking about them learning from them. And not to say we won't be problem solvers, because many of us are those. But I want to try to do it in a more open and exploratory and less certain framework. Certainty is one of the things that's gotten us to where we are today. So let's, we'll try a different approach here. I thought I should also say to you why, why I'm doing this, why I'm mounting this series. And some of you know, I started my sustainability adventure nearly 50 years ago with Buckminster Fuller at the Worldgate Workshop in Carbondale, Illinois. And one of the things that moved me deeply was Bucky's commitment to a world that works. And many of you have heard the phrase for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time. And I've actually long been troubled by that. I signed up as a 23 year old kid and said this is my life's work, but something about it feels too small now because 100% of humanity is not the story as we've come to understand. So I'm doing this out of a commitment to a world that works for the ongoing well being of the living world on which everything that we love depends and on all the beings with whom we share this world. And to do that in the shortest possible time. Bucky's words again now through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone. So that's why I'm here. I assume you're here for something similar to that. And let me then recap what we did last week. Last month, some of you were on the call, some are not. But we talked basically about the structural defects of capitalism. What I've come to call capitalism with a hyphen, because it involves something special about the notion of capital in the modern world. You know, capitalism is a tangled mess. It's not a discrete issue. It's many things woven together that can't be solved piecemeal, but that fundamentally privileges capital over the factors of production, traditionally understood as land, labor and capital, more recently understood as land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship, the four factors of production. And our society has come to focus on capital as the premier of all those. Not only the most important, but often the only one that is considered. And if others are considered, they're considered in relation to capital, in relation to capital value. And we privilege capital above the other capitals that people are talking about now. Multi capital scorecard folks talk about natural capital and human capital and social capital and constructive capital as well as financial capital. But all the other concerns the ongoing well being of the living world to which we belong and the inclusive well being of all the other beings that we share this world with, if they are considered at all, considered secondary to that. Let it be said, and people have said this to me as I've shared this critique, that capitalism is an unprecedented contributor to human well being in the world. The engines of production and creativity and scale and distribution that it has, that it has mustered are stunning in their impact. One case in point, for me, when I did the work with Fuller In 1972, the world population was about 3 billion people. About 1 billion people went to bed hungry every night. Staggering, staggering. That's actually what got me into that work, was concerned about hunger. Today the planet is closing in on 8 billion people and about 1 billion people go to bed hungry every night. That's still a horrible number, certainly if you're one of them or if you have any compassion for them. But as a proportion of the human population, it's been cut by two thirds. Stunning. Absolutely stunning. And you know, in the course of a generation or two, on the other hand, that progress has been subsidized by the despoilation of the life support systems that we all depend on. Soils, waters, oceans, insect biodiversity, climate. And it's been distorted by the massive concentrations of wealth that this last, not just last century, but the last 50 years, 30 years of neoliberalism and runaway unrestrained capitalism has produced. So we're in the question of does that bargain make sense? Is that bargain something that's going to work in the long term? So it presents structural defects, as I'm calling it, that we are generally blind to and that few of the multiple noble reform efforts to reform capitalism in some form or another are mostly blind to it as well, or at least not engaging directly. So let me, let me summarize what I framed as the defects and then we'll open the floor for discussion and we'll have some other tricks up our sleeves. I call this structural defects because I'm not looking at moral questions. I'm not looking at things that we don't like or that are unpleasant or that we consider unfair. But I'm trying to understand what is in the structure of the game, in both the explicit rules of the game and the implicit invisible rules of the game that we all carry within us. Chauncey Bell, welcome. He's just joined us. Chauncey likes to talk about the little gnomes that sit on our shoulders and whisper things in our ear about what's right and true and Proper and proper as even an area of discussion, invisible to us, kind of unnoticed by us. But you know, but they're filling up your head with ideas that are the norms of a society. And they evolve over time. We'll talk more about that later. But there we are in those. So in the listening that I've done, I find a short list of five. I'm trying to get to the shortest and most complete and impactful list possible. Accumulation without limit. This is a system that values unbounded growth without constraint and without satiation. My friend Jan Hanhart, the Dutch industrialist who wrote the seminal book Ecofeedback back in the day, talked about the example of the pride of lions out on the savannah in Africa. And mama lion goes out to chase down a wildebeest. Sometimes she's successful. She drags this large animal back to the pride and the pride feasts on it, rips it apart, eats, eats, eats, eats, eats. And then what do they do next? Anybody pop your mic up, have a thought, Sleep. They sleep. Exactly. They go to sleep. They have a real good deep sleep. They do not stash the carcass and go out and get another one and then another one, and then another one. They eat till they're full and they stop. We don't know how to do that in this system. Another is extraction without reciprocity. It's a one way flow of resources with impeded circulation through a system that depends on circulation of value. And there's unbalanced exchange in the human economic systems. Again, works differently. In living systems we see alienation without care, alienation from our own work, from the value that the work generates and how that reciprocity operates there. Alienation from ourselves, alienation from what we call nature, what I prefer to call the living world because I don't want to support the distinction of humans and nature as two separate things. And alienation from a future that is from what I'm listening becoming profound among the younger generations today. People in their teens, 20s, 30s, who don't see a future are not starting families or not buying homes, don't see something that they can look forward to. Fourth is abstraction without ground. And what I mean by this is that we have market value that's completely severed from physical value. In living systems. Value is as fundamental as molecules that will fit into the shape of other molecules to enable a biological process to happen. You don't get to talk about it, think about it, or change it. Things fit or they don't. For us, value is interpretation. It's what we Say or think or feel something is worth. And that's obviously a bit more complex than that, but it's not fundamentally grounded in the physics of the real world. You just have to look at the, you know, the price of gasoline here in my neighborhood, we complain that it's over 4, but according to Rocky Mountain Institute, the true cost that gasoline is north of 16, maybe $20 a gallon. So we have a market that lies. And if you believe in the rational man's theory, there's no way the rational man can make a rational decision with false information. And finally, we grappled with this a little bit last time. Is privatization without what. And I've come to think that it's privatization without solidarity. It's a severing of the private holdings from the social connectedness that human society depends on. We see this very dramatically in the enclosure of the Commons in Britain and other areas, which we tend to forget was a violent action. It was not just a policy action, but it was at the point of a sword, as, of course, was slavery. I've mentioned to you before the book the Empire of Cotton, which details the evolution of modern capitalism from war capitalism, of these acts. And we see the dynamic, repeated, consist repeated dynamic, the privatization of profit and the socialization of costs. The free market, as was taught to me when I was a kid, was that an entrepreneur takes risks and if he or she is successful, earns benefit and if not, takes losses. And we built a game where those are bifurcated. So accountability is broken. So that's what I saw and that's what we talked about the last time. Carolyn Raffensperger, if you're willing. You had some interesting comments to me after the call. I don't know if you want to share those or what were what arises for you. Now, hearing this list again, you're muted, Carolyn. I think I'd rather wait and weigh in on the conversation because, you know, my response was pretty immediate. And so I'd like to enter into the fray as it's happening. Fair enough. What does this provoke for the rest of you? Some of you hearing it again, some of you hearing it for the first time. Well. Hi, Gil, it's Daniel. Hi, Daniel. The invisible man. For me? Yeah. Not on purpose. Let me see if this will. Don't worry about it. Keep just. There we go. So two things. One is I love the ambition, and the other thing is that I think that we need to exercise a little bit. My feeling is that we're not quite including the things that people might say in Opposition to these. What did you call them? Defects, Structural defects. So, for example, the pride of lions doesn't go out and get more food. But that's not true of the squirrel. The squirrel eats and also stores. And that's because capital or stocks of anything. Right. Capital is just a certain type of stock, are buffers against things. And so in general, they serve two purposes. One is to buffer, and the other is to raise the level. And, you know, the squirrel, the lion, they more or less have a subsistence life, which is okay, but we want to bring people above that. Now, to me, the thing that comes out of this is that the squirrel population, you can get cases where the squirrel population or some other population grows beyond the bounds of nature. Right. The classic example, I think it was, what was it? Small is beautiful or something was. That's what cancer is. Something that grows without respect for the limits of its organism. But it's not so much the concept of stocking, of increasing stocks that I think causes the problems, but rather the ability to put boundaries around that and to produce feedbacks. And I think there's a lot of. I think a lot of the work is like, well, what is the value of the stock of nature? I mean, it has its own intrinsic value. And I obviously, personally in my life have been avoiding killing things that I believe have intrinsic value for 30 years now. More than 30. But there's also a value to people, right? The value to the future and the value to the stability and ability to plan. And so there's the, you know, we're eating the seed corn, I think you said last time, which is true, but we're also destabilizing the stability of the system. And both of those have real value to humans and are therefore easier to convince people to think about. The reason that I think we have trouble with. Well, not the reason, but one of the reasons we have trouble with this is stock slows and delays. They're just insanely difficult. And you add things that seem intangible, and they become even more insanely difficult. We can't do it. But it's difficult to understand if you haven't been oriented to those distinctions. Right. And. And even, you know, I mean, I. Right. So I don't want to go. I don't want to spend. I don't want to take too much of the time. But I will just say that I went to MIT for graduate school to do stock and flow modeling and system dynamics with Peter Senge and the originators of that. And even now, having done that and having Been that way for 30 years and having written an enormous thesis on environmental economics and everything else, I still find my intuition is often wrong if I don't model it. So it's difficult. But I don't know if it's the accumulation. My intuition is accumulation by itself can be natural. The polar bear eats and then accumulates for the hibernation and the squirrel accumulates for the winter. It's something else is my intuition. Thank you, Daniel. And the point is well taken. And that's why I'm not saying that accumulation or growth are defects. There are people in our community who think growth is bad. I think growth is an inevitable part of any living system. But what I'm claiming here is that accumulation without limit is one of the issues. And then we can talk a lot about what the limits are, where they come from. That's why all of these are three word phrases, not one word phrases. Thank you. George Mowbray. Hello. I was reading some Cicero this morning and one of the people he was talking about was referred to as a capitalist in ancient Rome. So that's one thing I'd like to talk to. The privatization without solidarity. Over the years, I've studied Gandhi and economics, and my position is that we get Gandhi wrong, that his focus was not primarily political and his nonviolence extended into a non violent, non exploitative economic system. And he and others in his wake have developed those ideas. And one of the ideas is the idea of trusteeship, where the owner of a business sees him or herself as the trustee for all of the stakeholders, the stockholders, the workers, the suppliers, the customer and the community. Now, you might think that this is an outlandish idea in modern economics, modern American economics, but there are a number of examples that are out there. One of them is the Market Basket supermarkets here in the Northeast, which a few years ago had a strike, and the strike was to reinstall the CEO who saw himself as a trustee. The managers went on a strike, the workers went on a strike, the suppliers went on a strike, the customers went on a strike to reverse the board's decision to get rid of that CEO, and they reinstated the CEO. Chobani Yogurt, for instance, is another example of this, where the owner sees himself as a trustee. There was a, I think in Ohio, a glass factory, a window factory that was bought from the owner by the workers. There are a number of these ideas that are out there. There's the guy in Washington who limited himself to what, $75,000 a year salary and raised everybody else's salary and then writes on Twitter over and over again about how good they are doing. So that there's another stream of consciousness in economics which points towards nonviolent economics. Now to finish, I think that Martin Luther King Jr. Made a real mistake when he studied Gandhian non violence but never picked up on Gandhian economics. And I've asked veterans of the civil rights movement if they ever studied Gandhian economics while they were studying the nonviolence. And the answer has always been no. Fascinating, George, because he was so fierce about economic injustice in addition to racial injustice, but not that piece. Yeah. And he, he left out what Gandhi called the heart of Satyagraha. Right. Which was Swadeshi. And in Gandhi's case it was a spinning thread for cloth, cotty cloth, homemade cloth, which was a second income for farmers and villages, which is what Gandhi was focusing on. Right. Village economy which we could transfer to neighborhood economies now. And it was this idea that you have to do a daily discipline, a productive daily discipline for the benefit of the community in order to have the moral fiber to stand up to political and social injustice in a nonviolent way. That's not part of Kingian nonviolence. It's left out completely. I believe that there's a solar Swadeshi that we can do. Solar, civil defense, flashlight, radio, cell phone, extra set of batteries which cost what, 20 to to $40 with off the shelf equipment that we could then possibly leverage if enough people did it. So we'd have one day a month or a year where those who want to don't use grid electricity and might have actually an economic impact. But you know, it seems to me that that's more and more necessary these days for survival. Right. What are you going to have in your go back? But it's not part of even extinction rebellions ideas they're not thinking about how do we do this in a way, how do we prepare for the next weather emergency in a way that builds to the transition that we need and that can leverage that little bit of economics that we take away from the mouth of the beast into something that has some political and economic power. George, thank you. We'll come back to some of these things later in the call. Alan, you had your hand up, I think. Alan S. Yeah, I just wanted to respond to that first comment about capitalism, stock and buffer. Bring it back to a very personal level. You know, have you ever heard someone say out loud I need, I don't feel comfortable unless I have X amount of money banked away, you know, and for some people, that might be $10,000, but for other people, that could be a million or $5 million. And they are perfectly sorry about that. They are perfectly honest in saying, I don't feel comfortable unless I have that much money just. Just sitting there. And, you know, that's. That's part of the human reaction and human nature that we are dealing with, along with more enlightened streams of consciousness. Well, there's a real basis for that, as Daniel talked about. You know, the squirrel needs those nuts because she can't get the nuts during the winter. So you have to take care of what you need to take take care of. I suspect there's not many people who you ask that question of who would say, I'm really not comfortable unless I have $10 billion stashed away. There's, you know, the curve doesn't rise endlessly. I mean, in economics and certainly in the venture world that surrounds me here, we've got the J curve, you know, exponential increased rate, exponentially increase in. Exponential increase in the rate of increase. Right. You don't see that in a living world. You see the S curve. You see growth at a certain rate, and then a flattening out and a stacking of those S curves is giving you another kind of growth. So, you know, absolutely, yes, there is something that people need. It's different for different people, given culture and family circumstance and so forth. But again, I'm going to say that without limit is an important term there. Well, I. I would just say that because of the sort of a neurotic quality that people have which they can overcome. But unchecked, this ceiling, there is no limit to that ceiling in people's minds at any. Alan, is it a neurotic quality in a person, or is it an emergent property of the system that we're living in? Or the gnomes on Chauncey's shoulder? Because this was not how humans always have been since forever. Right. It's a combination because we do have an inherent craving that doesn't have a limit, but the system shapes that quite a bit. Okay, so you said that we have an inherent craving that doesn't have a limit. I'm not sure that's true. So that's a good thing for us to inquire into more. Daniel, I see your hand, but I want to see if there's anybody else who wants to speak first, and I'll come back to you, okay? Any thoughts, comments, questions? Unusually quiet group today. Interesting. I see Carolyn's got her hand up. Good. Thank You, Carolyn, and then Daniel. I'll go to you next. Thanks, Darren. I like doing thought experiments around these. And the thought experiment that I've been running is around the one place that I know people, one of the places where people accumulate money and that's for retirement. Structure of retirement, at least in the United States and some other places in the world require us to actually save something so that we can survive when we're 90 and hopefully pay for that nursing home with a drooling roommate and the bad linoleum floor and the closet that's the size of, you know, the gym locker when you were in seventh grade. But I think that if we, if we revolution, imagined old age, for instance, we could reconfigure a lot of the economics in the United States. There's some other things where people save for, say, the college, the education of their kids. But retirement seems to be. To be a really big one. And I wonder if we would have a different idea about limits and accumulation if we had more security and certainty around old age. I've watched a number of the older people in my friend's circle who cannot survive on social. They're getting $600 a month, they cannot survive. And it's driving a lot of decisions that they're making now and that younger people are making. And I wonder if we rethought systems like that, how we might address the structural defects of capitalism. Great question. Which for me ties in with the question about alienation without care. What you're speaking of is a society that decided to care for its elderly as a social commitment in a different way than we do now. Peter, I see you. Let me go to Daniel and then Stuart and then Peter. Carolyn, thank you. Yeah, just a couple of brief follow ups, I guess. One is that I think it is inherent in humans as it is in other animals, for them to want status and for. For excess to produce status, peacock feathers or what have you. And I believe that's been the case for many years. There are a bunch of great books about status and different. And status seeking and different types of animals and so on. People, there's a saying which I believe is true, which is that after a certain level of wealth, it's not that wealth is useful in any sort of instrumental way. It's a way of keeping score. And I believe that's true. The thing that seems to me a big problem here is that we keep score with things that require taking. It used to be Paul Krugman pointed this out some years ago and it stuck with Me, it used to be that the CEO of GM or whatever made only in quotes, 30 times what the average factory floor person made, as opposed to 300. And so they had to create their legacy and to stand out by building something big and substantial, as opposed to just privatizing and accumulating great wealth. Yes, and we could also do that if we could. If we could dematerialize these things. That would be great. Like, you can have endless development as long as it's not physical. Like, you can always have more education without destroying the natural world. You can always have more knowledge and science and so on. If we can move from competition around things that require physical destruction to channeling competition to things that don't, I think we can have accumulation without limit. But there's physical limit, and that's a different thing. Well, yeah, physical limit on a finite planet is a bit of a challenge. To your. Your point about status is a good one, Daniel, but I don't know, I. I don't know how much. Good one, Daniel. But I don't know. I. I don't know how much it is biological. I know that there's certainly a cultural dimension to it, because status in the potlatch cultures of the Pacific Northwest is from giving away what you've accumulated. That's where you earn status. And so we know, at least we know that that's possible in human culture because we see examples of it on the ground. Stuart and then Peter and then Shell. Stuart, you're muted. Please unmute your mic. Sorry. Thank you. We're dealing with really complex phenomenon here. It's got to do with how people, how individuals are encultured. It's got to do with politics in the sense of socialism, communism. All the Ismons have become kind of, you know, these terrible red herring things to look at. You know, we live with a degree of socialism. It's here, it's present, it's in Medicare, it's here in present. Especially what's happening now in terms of child payments going out. So everything in the structures of what we've built are off. And the examples that I like to use are if you think about where China was and where Israel was at the end of World War II, they were very, very little. But you've had levels of communism, levels of socialism in those places that have really kind of created prosperity and created a society that works. The other one thought that I wanted to say is the lack of a safety net, not just for old age, but the lack of a safety net for people drives so much that is terrorism. So I think we need not just a redefinition of capitalism, but. But we need to look at all of the systems that impact people. And we need a great reinvention of planet Earth right now. Thank you, Peter. Liza, Unmute Peter. Sure, I'll jump in. You know, Gil, I always go back to some of the work of Bucky and sort of the belief that there's not enough, there's not enough to go around is core to almost everything in our lives. There's not enough time, not enough money, not enough sleep, not enough wealth. So that's just sort of a foundation that we live within. And the World Game was all about debunking that myth that there is enough for all. And he goes into the. The renewable potential of the world, the ability of that renewable to provide clean water, clean energy for everybody. It really flips that upside down that there's not enough when there is. For me personally, I know I grew up in a. We're always trying to figure out how to. I'm sorry, her name, Carolyn's name of how do you get enough as you get later in life, which many of us are. They're great, great exercise. With Kiyosaki once, Robert Kiyosaki doing some of his work and his demonstrations and modeling were demonstrate enough. And that was the whole instruction. Demonstrate enough. And it took hours for many of us to do that with blocks and discussions and presentations. But it all came around. Did we have enough coming in? Sort of the definition that Buggy had of wealth in our wealth coming in of forward days to be able to take care of us years ahead. So sometimes that's revolved around money for many. I've been in some villages, in some parts of the world, there is no money. And in the Amazon there was no money. And they had wealth for years ahead in the lifestyle that they were living. I've seen it in other rural areas. It is not a money equation at all. So the idea of sufficiency and enough really came down to. It was almost a passive income in my lingo. Do I have enough passive income to take care of all of my needs so I can now go out and do what I want to do in my life to be more fully actualized? So that's the. That's my discussion around this. I don't have any answers there. But it's opposite sides of there ain't enough. But you all. We all kind of want to get to that place of enough for ourselves. Thank you. Let me take Shell and I Know, I've got another couple of hands here, but I want to ask a different question. So if you'd bear with me, let me. Let me go to Shell and then other areas. It is not a money equation at all. So the idea of sufficiency and enough really came down to it was almost a passive income in my lingo. Do I have enough passive income to take care of all of my needs so I can now go out and do what I want to do in my life? Okay. Yeah. I happen to be book shepherding a book on sufficiency right now. And the authors, one of the things they do is they quote Helena Norberg Carter on I think that's her name, on the experience of observing the Ladakh of India, who had been very much a community self sufficiency model until the modern world got to them and pressures then became much harder and people who used to do good deeds for each other as a matter of course were becoming enemies over money. So I think without romanticizing necessarily some of the models that we've seen in centuries past, including some Native American models. Gilliam be more fully actualized. So that's the. That's my dimension. The potlatch culture in the Northwest. I do think discussion around this. I don't have any answers there. But it's opposite sides of there. There ain't enough. But you all, we all kind of want to get to that place of enough for ourselves. Thank you. Let me, let me take shell and I know I've got. You need to kind of steer the discourse to let people realize. Many people don't realize that there are alternatives to just accumulate and take care of yourself and accumulate more and take care of the next generation. And on it goes. All the examples we're giving are not capitalist societies. Yeah, those are not capitalist. Exactly. Something else. Let's take a break from this for a moment. We'll come back to it. And Brad, I'll get you first when we come back. But I want to ask a different question for you. Sort of inviting you to be in this experiment, this thought experiment that I've laid out here. As you look at these five qualities and I'm calling structural defects, as you think about these, how do they affect each other? How do these drive each other, encourage each other, constrain each other? What do you see as the inter relationships between them? Not as just like separate declarations, but it's something that fits together. There's in the chat, there's a link to a Google Doc and another couple of hands here But I want to ask a different question, so if you'd bear with me, let me go to Shell and then we'll go there. Okay? Yeah. I happen to be book shepherding a book on sufficiency right now. And the authors, one of the things they do is they quote Helena Norberg Carter on, I think that's her name, on the experience of observing the. We're going to do is for. What's our time now? For 15 minutes, we're going to take you into breakout rooms. You'll have access to this dock. The number. Your group will have a number. You'll go to that number on the document and talk with each other about what you think the interrelationships of these are. How the items, the five items listed in the left column, drive or inhibit the five items, same five items across the top column and put in each cell for your group a word or two that describes what you see as that relationship. Okay. And then we'll come back and discuss that. It'll be quick. It'll be 15 minutes. A little bit of talk, a little bit of sketching. This is called brainwriting sometimes. And let's do that and see what emerges from that. And then we'll come. Then we'll pick up of India, who had been very much a community self sufficiency model. Discussion from where we were. Welcome back, everybody. Brad, I'm going to go to you first. What. What did this exercise provoke for you? What did you see until the modern world got to them and pressures then became from doing this that you hadn't seen before? If anything. Well, let me back up because I have much harder. And people who used to do good deeds for each other as a matter of course were becoming enemies over money. So I think without my hand up earlier. Well, no, let's, let's hold. Let's hold. You. Oh, you hold that. Okay. Well, as far as this, as far as this exercise for us, we basically came up with pretty much the same thing in every box. Do they all drive each other? We were talking about the two sides of a coin and how they kind of justify and exacerbate. So you have privatization exacerbates accumulation and so on. And so it was like that was what we saw. But thank you for that. And let me get a few other people pop up, keep it brief like Brad did, romanticizing necessarily some of the models that we've seen in centuries past, including some Native American models. Gil, you what did you see or discover or what new questions did you come up with for Yourself mentioned the potlatch culture in the Northwest. I do think we need to kind of steer the discourse to let people realize. Many people don't realize that there are all anybody. I have evidence here that you talk with each other, give each other a peek into that. Well, one thing I brought up Gil, was the way capitalism privatizes profit and publicizes or make alternatives to just accumulate and take care of yourself and accumulate more and take care public the cost of externalities. I think that relates to your fifth or the next generation and on it goes. All the examples we're giving are not capitalist societies. Yeah, those are not capitalist exactly. Point about the commons, you know that's gonna something else. Let's take a break from this for a moment. We'll come back to it and Brad, I'll get you. It's gonna be an inevitable obstruction to reforming any system when the people who are destructive able to profit the most by the system. Thank you, John. Anybody else? Jane, is your hand up actively or is that from before. First when we come back. But I want to ask a different question for you, sort of inviting you to be okay. I'm getting that nobody really wants to talk about this. And I don't know if that's because. Because the exercise was difficult or if it just didn't resonate in this experiment, this thought experiment that I've laid out here. As you look at these five qualities, what I'm calling structural defects as you think of that for you. But we've got some notes in the matrix that we'll harvest and roll into these. How do they affect each other? How do these drop into next version of this? As I've been reflecting on this, I'm coming to think that the diagnosis that I've offered you both last time and today actually doesn't go deep enough. You know I'm climb each other, encourage each other, constrain each other. What are these? The structural defects of capitalism. But the mess goes deeper than capitalism. Do you see as the inter relationships between them not as just like separate declarations, but it's something that fits together. There's in the chat, there's a link to a Google Doc and what we're going to do is for. What's our now? For 15 minutes we're going to take you into breakout groups. You'll have access to this doc. The number. Your group will have a number. You'll go to that number on the document and talk with each other about what you think the interrelationships of these are. How the items, the five items listed in the left column. Because these qualities are present in just about every economic system on the planet today. Capitalist, socialist, fascist, you name it, there they are. And so we're in the grip of something else as a planet. We're in the grip of something that Hazel Henderson has called economism throughout the slide here. While I'm doing that, Gene, I'm calling you in the meantime, pull this stuff together. Yeah, I, I noticed in the exercise I started with alienation without care. Once we were not living in extremely small tribal. We became alienated from each other and drive or inhibit. The five items, same five items across the top column and put in each cell for your group a word or two that describes. I've started fighting with each other. Secondly, that led. What you see is that relationship. Okay. And then we'll come back and discuss it. To the. The tragedy of the commons. And people started extracting as much as they could because the tree just standing there was worth nothing. Where if I cut it down, it's. I can turn it into two. That'll be quick. It'll be 15 minutes. A little bit of talk, a little bit of sketching. This is two by fours, but I can only use so much two by four. So number three, we have to go to abstraction or brainwriting sometimes. And let's do that and see what emerges from that. And then we'll come, then we'll pick up. We have to go to some form of abstract fiat currency to store wealth. And once we got to that, to money essentially of different forms, then we were able to accumulate without limit the discussion from where we were. Welcome back, everybody. Brad, I'm going to go to you first. What. What did this exercise provoke for you? What did you see from doing this that you hadn't seen before? If anything? Well, let me back up because I had. Because it's just digits in the bank that are privatized and we just continue to generate more of that without regenerating any of the raw materials or the human wealth, human capital that's involved. Yeah, nice, nice. My hand up earlier. Well, no, let's hold you there. Oh, you hold that. Okay, thank you. And that's, you know, that's. We all recognize. Well, as far as this, as far as this exercise for us, we basically came up with that as part of the dynamic that we're living in. And maybe it's not just capitalism with its fetishization of financial capital does pretty much the same thing in every box. Do they all drive each other? We were talking about the two sides of a coin and how they kind of justify. But maybe it's also this thing that Hazel has called economists, you know, the zenith of economics as the arbiter of human progress. And the takeover of all decision making by economics was not always the case. You know, it accelerated during the rise of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s. But, you know, when you think about a discourse about public policy or personal decisions or you name it, economism is the framework so taken for granted that we don't even question it as something that wasn't always the framework. And here we are in that. And Hazel suggests that economics is useful as a profession, as an advisory discipline, but not necessarily as a science of governance that rules everything in the world. And that's the challenge that she's post posing. You know, for me, it's, You know, this is, for me, this is a dangerous subset of the notion of reductionism. The perspective of looking at the world in pieces that can be understand individually, not in their relationship with each other. It's an expression of a meth, of a mechanistic worldview, which is the, you know, the current explanatory mechanism of how the world works. There was a time when it was electricity. There was time and exacerbate. So you have. Privatization exacerbates accumulation and so on. And so it was like, that was what we saw. But thank you for that. And let me. Let me get a few other people pop up, keep it brief like Brad did. What did. What did you see or discover or what new questions did you come up with for yourself? Anybody? I have evidence here that you talked with each other. Give each other a peek into that. There's hydraulics. We're moving at the time when it's data. There were times in which we humans thought they were homunculi, little people inside other people there, you know, ways of interpreting the causal factors in the dynamic of the world. And now it's economics, and it is so universal. Well, one thing I brought up, Gil, was the way capitalism privatizes profit and publicizes or makes that we don't even see it, you know, and this has, I would say, damaged our capacity to be fully human when we relegate everything to measurable quality quantities of financial resources. Fully human includes being rational and passionate. It includes being analytic and intuitive. It includes being public. The cost of externalities. I think that relates to your fifth creative and emotional. And all that is pushed aside to the question of does it pencil out, does it yield an adequate rate of return. We have companies who are punished on Wall street if they miss, if they're profitable but miss their profit projections by a penny. There's a different kind of rationality that's pervaded everything that we do. So, you know, the thing that I wonder about is what point about the commons, you know, it's, that's, that's, that's going to be an inevitable obstruction to reforming any system when the people who are destructive able to profit the most by the system. Might a world look like that used economics as a tool, but a world that wasn't in the grips of economism. As a worldview, what would a world look like? Use economics as a tool, but not as the dominant inescapable worldview. Thank you, John. Anybody else? Shane, is your hand up actively or is that from before? What might that look like? Of course, the question behind that is how might we get there? But let's take the first one first. You know what I thought about getting there. To. Me, all of this discussion about economics and about development is really, really started even before agriculture as a way to hack. Okay, I'm, I'm getting that. Nobody really wants to talk the carrying capacity, you know, humans, let's say, had reached the carrying capacity of certain regions and they said, well, what can we do to keep our families but still have food? And that's how everything else developed. But that is part of the mentality of, yeah, we can do this. If we can do this, we can control everything the earth is. And I don't know if that's because the exercise was difficult or if it just didn't resonate is ours to control. To your point, how do I see us living differently in starting by saying it's not really the important thing isn't being economists, it's being. But we've got some notes in the matrix that we'll harvest and roll into animals living within the limits of our planet, which means the carrying capacity into next version of this. As I've been reflecting on this, I'm coming to think that the diagnosis that is of our region, which means that we, you know, we'd love to be able to keep growing endlessly, our families and our wealth and our lands and our. Or whatever, but we can't. So, you know, let's live within the limits and not think of economics as something that's going to save us and bring us better development, but as something offered you both last time and today actually doesn't go deep enough. You know, I'm calling these the structural defects of capitalism but the mess goes deeper than capitalism. But thinking of carrying capacity as the because these qualities are present in just about every economic system on the planet today. Capitalist, socialist, fascist, you name it, there they are. And so we're in the grip of something else as a planet we're in the grip of something that. Hazel Henderson Gatekeeper I guess to our happiness and being able to control ourselves within that. Thank you, Carolyn. Then Brad, seems to me that the origins of some of the economism is actually predicated on an ethic and that it's called economism. We needed a way to measure the greatest good for the greatest number and that utilitarian ethic was most usefully expressed in terms of dollars. And I think if we just shifted the metric for how to slide here. How we measured the greatest good the well being of us all we would use different metrics than say the gdp. We still want to undergird our decisions with ethics and it seems to me that's you know so however you think of utilitarianism you know it's one thing but if we began to measure governance I'm doing that Jean, I'm calling you in the meantime pull this stuff together. The success of the enterprise we would use measures on public health we would start with public health and all of the yeah I noticed in the exercise I started precursors to public health whether it's. We know that social determinants of health like racism are crucially important and if we address environmental with alienation without care once we were not living in extremely small tribal we became alienated from each other and the trauma impacts on public health the social factors on health and actually I've started fighting with each other secondly that led use those for evidence based governing we would replace economism which is really an expression of that ethic but badly done. But like you said to the tragedy of the commons and people said there's the convenience of having a single metric called dollars that you can use funds started extracting as much as they could because the tree just stands for everything. And can we envision a world where there's you know a dozen or 200 metrics of well being that get us there. I think we can make an index where there was worth nothing where if I cut it down I can turn it into two. We have a few things that go into that but actually measure well being progress indicator was one attempt to do that in the gross national happiness index in Nepal at a national level by fours But I can only use so much two by four. So number three we have to go to abstraction. But none of those are useful for governing because when I've looked at every we have to go to some form of abstract fiat currency to store single one of those indexes they are not very useful wealth and once we got to that to money essentially for translating into what does the state of California do to the suicide rate to get more people to graduate from high school to clean up the water. So a well being different forms then we were able to accumulate without limit that is actually used for evidence based governing I think would do a lot Pardon any place where that's being done effectively. Well I've just put together a list of data sources that have data over time because it's just digits in the bank that are privatized because you want to see the trend lines are things getting better or worse and then thinking about and we just continue to generate more of that tying especially public budgets to those indicators. So what without regenerating any of the raw materials or the human wealth where could government actually weigh in by spending money with public budget where could they set policies and so in collecting that kind of given capital that's involved information that is publicly available and that could be used for evidence based governing basing it on well being. Thank you. Thank you Carolyn. Bruce Kahan at UrbanLogic is one of the folks trying to put that system together at local government level. There's other efforts underway. Brad, thank you. And that's you know that's we all recognize that as part of the dynamic that we're living in. And maybe it's not just Brad, Jane, Lloyd, David and I may have to cut it off there. Stuart, let's see how we are with capitalism with its fetishization of financial capital that does the time. So please Brad, briefing to the point if you could. Yeah. So you started this by attributing the quote prescription without diagnosis is malpractice to me and I never thought that much about that. But maybe it's also this thing that Hazel has called economists. Until I listen to this conversation further when does one stop diagnosing, you know the. The zenith of economics as the arbiter of human progress and start prescribing when does the doctor finally take the risk and say I have enough information? I think this is what's going on with my patient. I'm going to prescribe X at the risk of killing the patient. And the takeover of all decision making by economics was not always the case accelerated during the rise of Thatcher. But also knowing that if he does it or she doesn't prescribe something, the patient's going, Reagan in the 1980s. But you know, when you think about a discourse, to die absolutely without a shadow of it. Great question, Brad. And this is why medicine is an art, not a science. Yeah, but that's a serious answer. Different doctors decide that differently. Right. Which is about public policy or personal decisions or you name it. Economism is the framework. That's why I'm wondering out of this conversation what I'm left with at the end of the day, at 1:30, I am just going to go make the choices that I have control over. Because this is just way too big. It's too frustrating for me to. So taken for granted that we don't even question it as something that wasn't always the framework. Listen to this conversation. Because it's like, okay, where do I start? Well, I'm going to start by. And here we are in that. And Hazel suggests that economics is useful. Recycling my water, you know, saving the water from the shower and using that to work as a profession, as an advisory discipline, but not necessarily part of my garden. I'm going to grow food. I'm going to recycle plastic. It's just frustrating, Gil, to be talking about this. And let me. Okay, now what. What if you describe the same story without the word frustration, you're going to start with as a science of governance that rules everything in the world. And that's the challenge that, that she's post posing. You know, for me it's. There you are. Charles Schwab, the father, not the current Charles Schwab once said that the best place to start is where you. With what you have. So you're doing that, and that's fine. And there's nothing wrong with that. Other people are more inclined to policy. Dwight isn't, you know, Carolyn Dwight is more inclined to education. Amos is public policy and urban reforestation. We are all in different places on this stuff. You know, this is, for me, this is a dangerous subset of the notion of reductionist. None of us is going to do the whole thing by ourselves. But my hope is that for you, in addition to frustration, there's maybe a little seed of something or maybe some other demon on your shoulder whispering some other things into your ear next time you recycle. Not to say that's wrong, inadequate, insufficient. But maybe you'll start to see some other possibilities here, Jan. I like that. Thank you. Thank you, Brad. And I'm sorry I'm going fast. We've got 10 minutes. I want to give people a chance to talk and say something else before we wrap. I want to say something else before we wrap. I may come Back to the Dr. Question if we have time for that, Jane. Please, folks, be succinct. If we want to engage our brethren and our communities to engage a different vision of the future than this capitalism gives us, we're going to have to figure out how to make that vision make the future entertaining and to make the story of that future entertaining and make the story of how we bring it about entertaining. And this makes me think that a business proposal for TV shows for the Home and Garden Network is probably the way to go. Okay. The perspective of looking at the world in pieces that can be understand individually, not in their relationship with each other. It's an expression of a mechanistic worldview, which is the, you know, the current explanatory mechanism of how the world works. There was a time when it was electricity. There was a time when it was hydraulics. We're moving into time when it's data. There were times in which we humans thought they were homunculi, little people inside of the people, ways of interpreting the causal factors and the dynamic of the world. And now it's economics, and it is so universal that we don't even see it. You know, and this is, I would say, thank you, Lloyd Hanson. We throw the word rational around, and most of what shows up when we talk about rational is highly irrational. And it occurs to me that rational people, one of the things they excel at is rationalizing anything, damaged our capacity to be fully human when we relegate everything to measurable quantities of financial resources. Fully human includes being rational and passionate. It includes being analytic and intuitive. It includes being. That seems to be in their interest. And the more intelligent people are, the more elegant are their irrationalities. So we need to question what is rational and economics is not rational at all in the main. Well, we might also. Thank you for that. We might also question whether rational is creative and emotional. And all that is pushed aside to measure. We want to look at. You know, our friend Fernando Flores is fond of saying that humans are not rational beings. They're biological beings and emotional beings and historical beings. And we come out of those phenomena at least as much as maybe more than we come out of the phenomenon of rationality. The question of does it pencil out, does it yield an adequate rate of return? We have companies who are punished on Wall street if they miss, if they're profitable, but miss their profit projections by a penny. There's a different kind of rationality that's pervaded everything that we all do. So thank you for that. It's provocative. David Grossoff there. I'm just wondering what the relevance to people on this call, what relevance they find in the great growth in the amount of investing according to ESG criteria. So, you know, the thing that I wonder about is what might a world look like that used economics as a tool criteria? So those are, you know, they're trying to evaluate some of the world's most powerful organizations according to their environmental impact, according to how well organized they are internally to make good, quote, rational decisions in the future along metrics of risk. But a world that wasn't in the grips of economism as a worldview, what would a world look like? Used economics, financial return, but also stakeholder equity and diversity inclusion, blah, blah, blah. And I'm wondering, I mean, I assume people on this call are much more familiar, starting with Gilbert, than I am with what's been happening since the Business Roundtable threw off the doctrine as a tool, but not as the dominant inescapable worldview. What might that look like? And of course, the question behind that is how might we get there? Friedman capitalism and went back to something more, you know, Germanic like stakeholder capitalism. But I'm wondering how relevant this is to now that people aren't trying to optimize on financial return. Well, a lot of players aren't. Are they or are they not? The area that David is talking about has seen a phenomenal growth in economics. Take the first one first. You know what I thought about getting there. To me, all of this discussion about economics and about development is economic activity from maybe 10% of U.S. investment 10, 15 years ago to about a third of U.S. investment now under some kind of social or environmental filter. Hugely important, a really good thing. And an example, I would say, really, really started even before agriculture, as a way to hack reform. Not that reforms are bad reform that isn't getting at the heart of the matter, as I've been laying it out here, the carrying capacity, you know, humans, let's say, had reached the carrying capacity of certain in personal terms, you know, I talk with our financial advisor about investing our money, such as it is, according to these standards. But we are still looking at what's the rate of return that we get from that because we're trying to plan regions. And they said, well, what can we do to keep our families but still have food for retirement and we need to accumulate Some level of accumulation for that. Right. So there's that and that's how everything else developed. But that is part of one of the myths that we've managed to break. Dwight and his team and me and my team of the mentality of yeah, we can do this. If we can do this, we can control everything the earth is of others like us is that we've to some extent helped shift the world from seeing it as an either or. Either you do good or you make money. You know, if you want to invest in good stuff, you're going to take less return. And we've been able to demonstrate and help generate. The business is ours to control. To your point, how do I see us living differently? In starting by saying it's not really the important thing isn't being economists, it's being you can actually do both. And in fact, maybe you can even make more money if you're calibrated to the living systems of the planet. So that's there and that's good. And that's one of many examples where I think we've seen huge, huge progress. I mean, the way that I've been thinking of it lately is that the absolutely crazy stuff that Dwight and Carolyn and I and others have been saying, animals living within the limits of our planet, which means the carrying capacity for 30 years. And we'd get thrown out of the window for saying these things. Remember Dwight, these of our region, which means that we, you know, we'd love to be able to keep growing endlessly, our families and our wealth and our lands and. Or whatever, but we can't. So, you know, let's live within the limits and not think of economics as is now on the table in every boardroom on the planet, you know, and every investment organization and every cabinet chamber. It's. The conversation has moved there and yet there are still these structural issues under the radar that we can't see and don't talk about that. I think to my perspective, we're real limits on what we're going to be able to do. Stuart, if I can, I'm going to point people to your comment in the chat and move on to close, if that's okay with you. Something that's going to save us and bring us better development, but is something. But thinking of carrying capacity as the. That's great. Thank you, Gil. We just got a few minutes left here. Let me just say first of all, by way of logistics, I want to remind you that this call happens third Wednesday of every month. We meet again in August. If I renew the offer. If some of you would like to dive into this exploration more deeply with me in a small group just let me know Gatekeeper I guess to our happiness and being able to control ourselves within that. Thank you Carolyn. Then you can see that I'm looking for partners in exploration exploring this line of thought. I do not have a conclusion to pedal to you but I'm trying to discover something that is calling to me in this conversation. So message me with that a couple of in the follow up email I'll send you some reading suggestions to think about for next time but if you're an eager beef rad it seems to me that the origins of some of the economism is actually predicated on on an ethic and that check out Disclosing New worlds. It's one book and another called the Ministry for the Future and you'll understand why as you dive into that. You know let me come back to where we opened here in the last one we needed a way to measure the greatest good for the greatest number. And that utilitarian ethic was most usefully expressed in terms of dollars. And I think if we just shifted the metric for three minutes left. Many of you are familiar with Donella Meadows piece on the places to intervene in a system. She built a stacked list. At one point it was nine items, at another point it was 12 of where there is leverage. You can see from the diagram the things close how we measured the greatest good, the well being of us all. We would use different metrics than say the GDP closer to the circle on top of the fulcrum have less leverage. The things further out towards the edge have more leverage. Most of our interventions are designed close into the fulcrum. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. We still want to undergird our decisions with ethics. Who's that? Hello, Carol. There was somebody in your and it seems to me that's. You know, so however you think of utilitarianism, you know the quantitative controls, the metrics, negative feedback loops and positive feedback loops most of our actions suggesting that there are deeper leverage points with bigger transformations it's one thing but if we began to measure governance into the actual rules of the system which is what I'm trying to get at in this conversation, the structure, the success of the enterprise. We would use measures on public health. We would start with public health and all of the of the system. That's one point. Structural defects, not just rules laid on the game. Also the goal of the system, something that's rarely discussed, you know A number of you talked about the greatest good for the greatest number as maybe one of the motive forces for what we have today. I say maybe because I'm not sure, but I think most certainly maybe precursors to public health. Whether it's we know that social determinants of health like racism, the mindset and the paradigm that we come in with the framework of what is real and what is true and what is important and what we care about, that then cascades down through the stack. And frankly what she has the highest on the list is the variability are crucially important. And if we address environmental to change frameworks or to question frameworks these in fact I think impacts on public health, the social factors on health and actually use those for evidence based governing. We interpenetrate. It's not that the ones on the top are better than the others, but they work with each other. The innovations like ESG investment being introduced into the market, tested ridiculed, denounced, become successful, become potentially dominant in many markets in the world. It's a proving out of a better mousetrap would replace economism, which is really an expression of that ethic, but badly done. But like you said, that then starts to shift what people start to accept as what's normal and what's acceptable. There are people who grow up today in that world that's normal for them in a way that it wasn't for me growing up in the world of the 50s and 60s that I grew up in. So there's a lot to explore here about where we are at any given time on this list. Brad, that's back to your point. There's the convenience of having a single metric called dollars that you can use fungibly for everything. And can we envision a world where there's, you know, a dozen or 200 metrics of well being that get us there? Where can you be effective and you know, be effective where you are. But step back for a moment and look at the rest of this and think about what is that? What does that suggest to me? Where does that give me comfort? Where does it give me discomfort? Where does it provoke an aha about that? Because again, we are living between worlds. We're in a dangerous, dangerous time. I think we can make an index where. Where we have, you know, a few things that go into that in human history. I say Antonio Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary, said the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. What are monsters? Monsters are horrific, terrifying things. On the one hand Monsters actually measure well being and the Children Progress Indicator was one attempt to do that. And the Gross National Happiness Index in Nepal at a national level there are also primal forces that you don't understand. Something's afoot there. The wheels are turning. Something is being generated that we don't know what it is. Maybe we get to have a hand in it. Arundhati Roy but none of those are useful for governing because when I've looked at every novelist has a more optimistic take on the same story. You've all heard this, I'm sure of those indexes. They are not very useful for translating into what does the state of California do the world is not only possible but on a quiet day I can hear her breathing and I from what I know of all of you, you are all people who can hear that on a quiet day. So you know to the suicide rate to get more people to graduate from high school. My question as always is how, how shall we live in a time of monsters? Well, to clean up the water to you know, so, so a well being index. I think we do three things. I think we build and we fortify and we do battle. You know, we build technology, we build policy. Yes we do. We build relationships as important as the other two. We fortify our body minds that is actually used for evidence based governing I think would do a lot to. Carolyn Pardon? Any place where that's being done effectively. Well, I've just put together a list of ride out the rapids. We fortify the life support systems of our communities and hopefully our ecosystems and our planet. We fortify the networks of support and commitment and creation that we live in. And we ask what data sources that have data over time might an economy look like that it's not in the death grip of economists. How might the capitalism reformers escape that grip of economists? Because you want to see the trend lines are things getting better or worse? And then thinking about tying especially public budgets to those indicators. So what we're still operating within what would we each need to do to bring this conversation forward? Where could government actually weigh in by spending money with public budget? Where could they set policies? And so in collecting that kind of in our own lives, in our ventures, in our companies, in our communities, in our families. So I close by asking you again as I've asked you before asking you and through ums and your colleagues and your clients and your kin, what do you really care about information that is publicly available and that could be used for evidence based governing basing it on well being. Thank you thank you, Carol. And Bruce Kahan at UrbanLogic is one of the folks trying to put that system. What would the world need to look like to take care of the things that you care about? What do you do each day to bring that world into being or to hold it at bay in the clients that you choose to together? At local government level, there's other efforts underway. Bread work with the challenges that you pose to those clients in the investments that you make and the votes that you cast and the things that you buy every day, in the conversations that you have every day and in the interpretations that you live from in the face of the ever. Brad, Jane, Lloyd, David and I may have to cut it off there, Stuart. Let's see how we are with time. So spoken. Chance talk. So. So please, Brad, briefing to the point, if you could. Yeah. So you started this by attributing the, quote, prescription changing array of contingencies that you and I and all of us encounter every day. Thank you for being with us today. We'll see you next month. Without diagnosis is malpractice to me. And I never thought that much about that until I listened to this conversation further. When does one stop diagnosing and start prescribing? When does the doctor finally take the risk and say I have enough information? I think this is what's going on with my patient. I'm going to prescribe X at the risk of killing the patient, but also knowing that if he does it or she doesn't prescribe something, the patient's going to die absolutely without a shadow. Great question, Brad. And this is why medicine is an art, not a science. Yeah, but it's a serious answer. Different doctors decide that differently. Right. Which is why I'm wondering out of this conversation what I'm left with at the end of the day at 1:30, I am just going to go make the choices that I have control over because this is just way too big. It's too frustrating for me to listen to this conversation because it's like, okay, where do I start? Well, I'm going to start by recycling my water. You know, saving the water from the shower and using that to border my garden. I'm going to grow food, I'm going to recycle plastic. I just, it's just frustrating, Gil, to be talking about this. And let me. Okay, now what, what if you describe the same story without the word frustration, you're going to start where you are. Charles Schwab, the father, not the current Charles Schwab, once said that the best Place to start is where you are with what you have. So you're doing that and that's fine. And there's nothing wrong with that. Other people are more inclined to policy. Dwight isn't. Carolyn. Dwight is more inclined to education. Amos is public policy and urban reforestation. We are all in different places on this stuff. None of us is going to do the whole thing by ourselves. But my hope is that for you, in addition to frustration, there's maybe a little seed of something or maybe some other demon on your shoulder whispering some other things into your ear next time you recycle. Not to say that's wrong, inadequate, insufficient. But maybe you'll start to see some other possibilities here. Jane. I like that. Thank you. Thank you, Brad. And I'm sorry, I'm going fast. We've got 10 minutes. I want to give people a chance to talk and say something else before we wrap. I want to say something else before we wrap. I may come Back to the Dr. Question if we have time for that. Jane. Please, folks, be succinct. If we want to engage our brethren and our communities to engage a different vision of the future than this capitalism gives us, we're going to have to figure out how to make that vision make the future entertaining and to make the story of that future entertaining and make the story of how we bring it about entertaining. And this makes me think that a business proposal for TV shows for the Home and Garden Network is probably the way to go. Okay, thank you. Lloyd Hanson. We throw the word rational around, and most of what shows up when we talk about rational is highly irrational. And it occurs to me that rational people, one of the things they excel at is rationalizing anything that seems to be in their interest. And the more intelligent people are, the more elegant are their irrationalities. So we need to question what is rational. And economics is not rational at all in the main. But we might also. Thank you for that. We might also question whether rational is the measure we want to look at. You know, our friend Fernando Flores responded saying that humans are not rational beings. They're biological beings and emotional beings and historical beings. And we come out of those phenomena at least as much as there may be more as we come out of phenomenon of rationality. So thank you for that. It's provocative. David Grossoff there. I'm just wondering what the relevance to people on this call, what relevance they find in the great growth in the amount of investing according to ESG criteria. So those are, you know, they're trying to evaluate some of the world's most powerful organizations according to their environmental impact, according to how well organized they are internally to make good, quote, rational decisions in the future along metrics of risk and financial return, but also stakeholder equity and diversity inclusion, blah, blah, blah. And I'm wondering, I mean, I assume people on this call are much more familiar, starting with Gill, than I am with what's been happening since the Business Roundtable threw off the doctrine of Friedman capitalism and went back to something more Germanic like stakeholder capitalism. But I'm wondering how relevant this is now that people aren't trying to optimize on financial return. Well, a lot of players aren't. Are they or are they not? The area that David is talking about has seen a phenomenal growth in economic activity from maybe 10% of us than 10, 15 years ago to about a third of US investment now under some kind of social or environmental filter. Hugely important, a really good thing. And an example, I would say, of a reform, not that reforms are bad reform that isn't getting at the heart of the matter. As I've been laying it out here in personal terms, I talk with our financial advisor about investing our money, such as it is, according to these standards. But we are still looking at what's the rate of return that we get from that because we're trying to plan for retirement and we need to accumulate some level of accumulation for that. Right? So there's that. One of the myths that we've managed to break Dwight and his team and me and my team and dozens of others like us is that we've to some extent helped shift the world from seeing it as an either or. Either you do good or you make money. If you want to invest in good stuff, you're going to take less risk. And we've been able to demonstrate and help generate the business perspective to know you can actually do both. And in fact, maybe you can even make more money if you're calibrated to the living systems of the planet. So that's there and that's good. And that's one of many examples where I think we've seen huge progress. I mean, the way that I've been thinking of it lately is that the absolutely crazy stuff that Dwight and Carolyn and I and others have been saying for 30 years and we'd get thrown out of the window for saying these things. Remember, Dwight is now on the table in every boardroom on the planet and every investment organization and every cabinet chamber. The conversation has moved there. And yet there are still these structural issues under the radar that we can't see and don't talk about that. I think to my perspective are real limits on what we're going to be able to to do. Stuart, if I can, I'm going to point people to your comment in the chat and move on to close, if that's okay with you. That's great. Thank you. Gil. We just got a few minutes left here. Let me just say first of all, by way of Liz.