Living Between Worlds 3.3—Can we afford to have a future? (With Andrew Winston)

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for being here. This is the third call in season three of Living Between Worlds. This is a series of conversations I began in early Covid for us to explore together what it's like to be living between worlds. The old world order which we foresaw was coming to an end and now we're smack in the middle of it, ending and no idea where we're going. The pandemic, the climate crisis, broader ecological crises, crises of nationalism and participation and fascism and late capitalism and esg, whatever that is. It's felt that we've been between worlds in so many ways, groping for how do we orient, how do we act, how do we live with grace and dignity and power in this time when we can't be healthy. If we're going to be reactive to the news of the moment because we're just going to get whipsawed back and forth one way or the other, and we can't predict what's going to come. We can anticipate some of the disruptions and some of the anomalies that we're facing, but prediction at this point is a fool's game. And I frankly quit that game. As most of you know, most of my work has been in the realm of what we used to call sustainability and now call various things regeneration and ESG and other inadequate terms looking at how to help the corporate world and the human economy reorient to the challenges that we're facing, which I sum up lately as how do we live as though we actually belonged to the living world and there are challenges in that. And my friend and colleague Andrew Winston, who I'd like to bring on screen now, has written very pointedly about that in the last few days. Well, he's always writing pointedly about one aspect of this or another. So just by way of introduction for those of you who are new here, I'm Gil Friend and I'm CEO of Natural Logic, a strategy consultancy and founder of Critical Path Capital, a new holding company trying to make a difference from the capital side of the game and the story more about that another time. Andrew Winston is founder of. Is the consultant in his own right, author of many books, most notably and most recently, Net Positive, co author with Paul Pullman, former CEO of Unilever. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Good to be here.

Andrew wrote a couple of days ago. And actually, let me just. Why don't you summarize, just say the post that you posted to LinkedIn, because that put a pithy headline on the whole issue here for today.

Yeah, so with my co author from the book, Paul Pullman, we wrote a piece called yes, Investing in ESG Pays Off. And it actually came out of a banker, came up to me a couple months ago after a talk and told me how great it was that we needed to put trillions into the clean economy. But none of it really pencils out. And so I just came back from that trip and just started drafting this about what are the reasons you don't think it pencils out, even though it really does in the larger sense. And so we put down kind of five points, a lot of them very familiar to this group. But the externalities problem was kind of the first one. Like you're not pricing things right because you don't have the right prices, but mental gaps, the kind of inertia, the biases we all bring to decisions. And even bankers don't make decisions entirely on numbers. And we went through a few examples of why we're not taking into account the full long term value and the full breadth of value that things we might invest in in a business will bring. So we only just measure kind of cash back and not all these other values. And finally we just kind of pointed out that, and this is, I think what Gil and I probably want to talk about some today is I'm finding it increasingly surreal to have to justify investing in what is now, I think, our survival and building a thriving future. And yet we still face this question.

Well, you said it very Pointedly in your LinkedIn post, Andrew. You said the banker said thus and such to you. It doesn't pencil out. And you said, well, yes it does. And end of post, there you go. And we know this, we know this from your work and my work and our colleagues work with dozens, if not hundreds of companies over the past couple of decades where we see it, we see the value, we see it measured, we see it being realized. And yet there's this background conversation that we seem to be living in the business culture that it doesn't. And that's a part of just about every conversation I have with just about every client over the past 30 years. Yeah, we'd like to do this. It would be nice if we could do this, but we can't afford to do this. I remember the first time this came to me was back, gosh, early in the century when we had a green building practice as part of natural logic. And folks would call us up and say, hi, can you help us? We want to build a LEED silver building. The LEED building rating system has tiers of certified bronze, silver and gold or silver and platinum? Silver, gold and platinum. And people would say, we'd like to build a lead build, and we'd like to do silver. Can you help us do that? And I'd say, sure, of course we can. But why silver? And they stopped because they'd never thought about the question before. And they said the answer was typically, well, certified isn't interesting enough. Good, you have points for that. And golden, platinum are too expensive. And we would. Our script was to not say anything when they say that and just leave them in the uncomfortable silence until they finally say, well, isn't it? And our answer, of course, is, well, not necessarily. Not necessarily. And let's start looking at the details. And in fact, at that point, we knew we could deliver LEED platinum buildings at no incremental cost, but lower operating cost and therefore net positive financially from the get go. But everybody's assumption was it has to cost more. Why? It's better. It must cost more. Better, must cost more. Which seems to ignore the whole phenomenon of innovation. Yeah, it's got to be what it was. I mean, is that, Is that similar to what you hear?

Yeah, I mean, look, I. You said you get the question for 30 years. I'm going on 20 years now, getting it kind of daily. So maybe we can talk today about how you handle still getting it. Because I'm, I'm kind of losing it, honestly. I just, you know, I got, you know, asked to write another piece about the business case in, like, a magazine. I'm like, you know, so I think for me, what would be interesting in this conversation with everybody here today would be not going down the path of what are the reasons that's wrong? I think we can say those quickly. But why is it kind of. And I think about this a lot. Why are we still getting the question, what's the kind of root causes of that and what can we do about that? Because we keep putting out the answer. The piece I just wrote on esg, with a few little minor exceptions, that could have written 10, 20 years ago. Right. And that's true of a lot of what we're saying.

So we keep putting out the answer, and there's only more data that supports it. And there's more examples of more companies stepping up, making investments, seeing handsome payout. I mean, our friend Ray Anderson said almost 30 years ago, Ray Anderson was the founder of Interface Floor multibillion dollar carpet company, has been one of the corporate leaders on sustainability for decades. And Ray would say mostly to other CEOs he spent the latter years of his life flying around talking to CEOs about this. He said, look, if your sustainability program is costing you money, you're doing it wrong. And his sustainability program delivered a half a billion dollars of value over several years when the whole industry was in down, his whole industry was in downturn. But he was seeing it hit the bottom line. So what is it that has people not understand this? And not just not understand it philosophically, but, but people look at the data and see the numbers and still think it's not happening. Where are we stuck?

Is that open question or did you want me to.

Let me start with, let me start with you. So as far as the runner show, let's you and I talk together for, you know, for a little bit and then we'll open it up to the room and fairly simple, let's go a little bit further together.

Yeah, well, look, I think to step way back, the macro reason is story, right? It's narrative. It's this dominant story, the neoliberal economic story that you got to maximize shareholder profits in the short run. And there's a bunch of little adjunct sub points to that. And one of them is that anything that takes you away from that immediate focus must cost more. Anything that's green, that seems now liberal, that's Al Gore related.

Right.

Is, is going to take you down the path and just cost more. And so there's just doing, doing, doing.

Good must cost more. Right? Right. Being sensitive, being compassionate, caring about things must cost more. Right?

Right.

As a, as an, as a knee jerk.

And you're getting, you're getting. And you know, kind of the, the classic thing coming out of generally the right in the US Obviously is that tackling climate change will destroy the economy. So they do it at both the company level and the macro level. And of course, that statement is just ludicrous now given the cost of climate change and the lower and lower cost of doing something about it. But it's so deeply ingrained and I think fighting this story is kind of the work we're all really doing deep down. But it's very, very difficult. They've been told, everybody's been told that this is the purpose of business. Right? It's just profit maximization. And all the talk about stakeholder versus shareholder capitalism in the last few years, it matters, it helps, but it's not like it's sunk in very fast. I mean, I think it's better than it was, but it's still.

It'S better than it was in some Circles money's been moving into esg ranked investments in the market. Whether that does any good or not is another question. But there's some growing attention to the issues. The question of tanking the economy happens at two levels, of course. One is the economy as a whole, the other is whose economy. So the sustainable regenerative future will mean less fossil fuel industry. Hopefully none. At some point, somebody loses out in the game. Others grow. There's currently in the US more people employed in the solar industry than in the fossil fuel industry. So on the one hand, that's good for the economy. On the other hand, if you're in the coal business, might not be so good for you. So this is political power playing out in the middle of that narrative, right? Right.

Well, because there are losses, right? We can't pretend there aren't. There's losses as we transition to new, new sectors and new technologies. And so there's a lot of questions about a just transition. I think we have to have that. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but it brings everyone along. Like we can't get there, we can't get there politically without getting that buy in from those parts of America, of Canada. I was just in Canada yesterday having this conversation. You know, they have a very deep connection to their shale and their oil and gas. They have a really deep problem.

Right.

In Canada, I'm getting to their greenhouse gas goals and not abandoning a big sector. So there are losses and there are things that cost more upfront. And as we say in the article.

Wait, no, I got to stop you there because that's part of the narrative where we lose it because people say it costs more upfront. But if it's a matter of building a new factory, I don't say it's going to cost more upfront. I say I'm going to invest a billion and a half dollars in this new fact. Well, that was my point, that we.

Have to talk about this as investment. That's the language we have to use. But I just mean, you know, quite literally out of pocket if you're going to do things, I think your examples on the building side, you can, you can push and innovate to get to not costing more, but there's things like living wages costing more is the point. Right. You're actually trying to raise wages. And so there isn't, you know, an upfront, ongoing labor cost, but it is an investment in your people and in many other things. The benefits of that, of having a stable supply chain or communities that are more functional, like all these other benefits that no one ever gives credence to. And that's the part that we have to kind of push. Right. Part of the solution is getting people to see a broader sense of value and at least if not, measure it perfectly. I saw my friend Daniel Aronson's on this call somewhere, and he does that work of a lot of work on measuring the unmeasurable. We can put the best numbers.

Yeah. Daniel talks about submerged value, the value that you can't. That you can't see in your financial statements. Paul Herman, I don't think he's with us today, does a lovely job. When he speaks, he asks people, what's your most important asset? And everybody, having been well trained, raises their hands and says, my people are my most important asset. Great. Pat on the back. You got the answer right? Where are your people on your balance sheet? And the room just goes cold. And people realize, holy crap. My people are liabilities on my balance sheet.

And salaries are just expenses.

And salaries are expenses. So how can you manage if you mischaracterize your fundamental assets? How can you manage if you take certain investments and call them investments? Take certain investments and call them costs?

And that's the thing, that's the story. I don't think there's another category like sustainability where the assumption is it's cost, not investment. Because literally every penny you spend in a business is. Is a capital choice. There's no free right? So you're going to put stuff into marketing or R and D or whatever, and nobody has to convince someone in those categories that it's always a cost. And so there's just this. Sustainability is guilty till proven innocent. And getting off of that has kind of been my mission and bane of existence for years and years as it is yours, right?

As it is for me, I don't.

Have the right answer besides just pummeling people with it. But. But then pointing out those inconsistencies, right? And saying, why do you think about it this way? And that does get people thinking.

But. Well, it's more of that. And that's how you and I pummel. We sort of ask questions and invite people to think a little differently with the, you know, with regard to the cost versus investment thing. We say to our clients that we're not asking you to give sustainability a free ride here. You know, don't cut us slack. Hold us to the same investment standards that you hold every other investment to. No more, no less. See how it works? Confident that in a large percentage of the cases, the sustainability investments, if they're smart, if they're well targeted, if they're well executed and done well, will deliver acceptable or better than acceptable roi. But we've got to get people into that question in the first place. One thing that dawned on me a while back because I was struggling with this. Why do people assume that better costs more? I started thinking about when I started buying cars when I was a kid. Think about cars, and everybody knew that a Mercedes was a better car than a Chevy. Substitute that with whatever you want today. Is Lexus better than Corolla, what have you? Everybody knew that it was a better vehicle and everybody knew that it cost more. And that made complete sense. Therefore, better costs more. It's just not true. And you look at that in the world of food, you look at the world of buildings, which I mentioned. Integral, an engineering firm here in the Bay Area, last time I checked with them, had built about 40 or 50 net zero buildings. These are commercial buildings, offices, warehouses, various other factories, various other things. They produced more energy than they used. What was the incremental cost of doing that? Zero. In every case. Not a dime more capital cost. So I ask people, what's the roi? What's the return on investment if you have lower operating costs and less capital cost to get there? You're dividing by zero. It's an infinite number. How can you not do that? And it's because people assume that you can't. We've got some hands starting to go up. You want to make one other point before I go to the room or. Yeah.

I mean, Jonathan, this is so much of the nature of my talks now to try to get people to see that this ESG thing, that they're now all being kind of frog marched down, that they all have to do. They all get that now they have to answer to this, that this is good for their business, that it's really hard to get people to see the shared cost of systemic risk, meaning as we go down this existential path with climate change, you know, so quick example is Swiss RE has estimated that the cost to global GDP will be 18 or 20% if we don't do enough on carbon over the next generation. And that sounds like a lot, but it's like a depression, right? And, well, who bears the problem?

Who bears the cost?

Well, who bears the cost? But yes, I mean, that's an inequality thing. But the point I try to make to people is even if it were, even if the number's right, if it's 18%, it's an average. Some places in Canada and Russia will do better, longer growing seasons. But the vast majority do worse. And for, and my larger point is that for some it is an 18%, it's 100% loss. Like if your town becomes unlivable and we don't have a good way to ask what's it worth to invest to stop as you dividing by zero is what got me thinking about it. Like zero is in the, in the denominator. In this case it goes to zero.

Yeah.

You know, how do you value saving those places? And we don't have a good set of tools in some ways. Right. For the shared value of systemic risk.

Reduction, we don't have the economic tools. I mean if I'm an executive of a company, it doesn't, the shared social risk doesn't show up in my financial statements.

Right.

So there's, you know, and, and if the Street's on my ass for quarterly returns, I've got a short term dilemma of how do I articulate that and make that sense then. But it's not just a fairness question, it's a political question. Right. Because people will stack up politically based on these perceptions of value. Some of you remember a couple of decades ago the Prop 23 in California was a fossil fuel industry sponsored attack on California's climate and greenhouse gas programs under AP32. And a remarkable thing happened in that case. Typically on every environmental piece of legislation or referendum in California you had the classic division of liberals and environmentalists on one side and conservatives and corporates on the other side. It was like that in almost every vote. In this one it was not in this one it was conservatives and the fossil fuel industry on one side and liberals and environmentalists and most of the corporate community on the other side. Because the corporates had started to see their self interest and their benefit in California's climate programs and the industries split with fossil fuels the outlier. So maybe we need to see something like that.

Well, maybe someone on the call can confirm this. This is something that I was told a few years ago and I think makes sense. But if someone here knows something about the insurance industry, my understanding is that because you would think they're the ones that should price this systemic risk. My understanding is that most of the insurance industry actually only writes a policy for the next year. All that matters is do they think this thing will happen and to what odds in the next year? So Almost nobody's pricing 10 year risk or 20 year risk. That's my understanding. I'm sure there's the reinsurers. That's probably why they are the ones talking about this. They have something a little longer and institutional investors seem to have an actually long term prospect. But the people who would price it, including the government, have these really short term frames also. And I don't know how you fix that too, but maybe people can confirm that.

Well, I think you need different financial and economic tools to price that. That's part of the story. I think you're right. The reinsurance industry has been far ahead on this. Swiss Re, one of the two largest, did a conference with Greenpeace in the mid-1990s. I mean, stranger bedfellows you could not imagine. And then we're talking about exactly these issues in the mid-1990s, 25 years ago. They're still not on game. The reinsurers are better. But if you. I haven't checked this last year, but last year I checked the websites of the American insurance industry associations. Some of the leading companies couldn't find any mention of climate risk on any of their sites. Now this is a material risk. This is if you were, you know, if you were, if you're a shareholder in these companies, you might call it a violation of fiduciary duty if the executives are not managing material risk that your company faced. And there you are. This is arguably, like you're saying, one of the most pivotal industries in being able to move this game. And yet they don't get it either. Let's go to the room. David Schoenburn, your first people. If you'd like to speak, please raise your hands so I can take you in order and thanks, Gil. What you two were describing was a communications problem. And by coincidence I heard a talk this morning by a behavioral psychologist and I put a link to it in the chat. Essentially the issue is when somebody has a set of beliefs, they're not going to be able to listen to facts, that you have to first establish rapport with them and make them feel that you're on their side. That was what I took away. Thank you. Thanks, David. It's a good question.

Let me repost because it's way up in the chat. There's lots of good stuff going on in the chat, by the way. Yeah, I'll just read there.

And by the way, folks, you can save the chat using the three dots in the lower right hand corner. We're going to post the recording of the call, but we're not going to post the chat. So if you want to grab it on your own, Andrew, go Ahead.

No, that was it. I was just posting the link.

Okay. I think someone mentioned earlier that old line, is it. Was it from Upton Sinclair about it's very hard for man to understand something that his job depends on, and you.

Can'T wake up someone who's pretending to sleep. All those are good ones. Those are good ones. They're true.

They're good because they're true. I think, David, what you're saying is right, but I think the formulation maybe needs to shift a little bit because none of us can make somebody else do anything. We certainly can't make anybody think or feel anything. But what maybe we can do is understand their concerns and how they see the message and what resonates for them and then speak with them in relation to that. Not. Not convince you that I'm right because what I care about is important, but help you see how what you care about is affected by what I care about. And that, I think, is an important political as well as interpersonal formulation for us to think about. Because to get where we want to in this country, we have to win over people who disagree with us deeply about a lot of things. We only get there if we build a bigger, you know, a bigger force in support of this. Daniel Aaronson, the aforementioned Daniel Aaronson. Hopefully you can come on camera. Please join us.

Hi, Gil. I am in the airport. I don't know if this is going to work, but can you hear me all right?

It sounds fine. Keep going.

All right, so short version.

This is all.

This is all great and covers a lot of important issues. There are a few people who've been diving into some of these things for quite a while. For example, Renee Lertzman does Climate psychology and talks about this. And part of the trouble that we have is, to be honest, that we're not very good at talking the language in this field of CFOs and of finance. People who, people who put profit first. And so the people who know it's the right thing to do, and for them that's enough. They're already there. The people who need something else to push them over the edge like to see that we also care about their jobs or their income or that this is actually going to make them money. Because, you know, in the old days, it wasn't true. Early LEED buildings were very expensive, but it's not anymore. So they, they're behind. And they also miss a bunch of what, what we call submerged value. Like, and this is typically four to ten times as much. But we just finished doing some Work for Estee Lauder. That sounds many times more money than they thought. Many, many times. And it's because people don't, they don't have the lenses to see it. They think if that's on the floor, it can't be $100 bill, it has to be a crumpled piece of paper. But in fact that sometimes that actually is $100 bill.

Yeah. And as Amory Lovins is fond of saying, sometimes when you pick up the hundred dollar bill, there's a thousand dollar bill underneath it that you couldn't see until the first one up.

Yeah, that's very true. We want sound for just the talent. Benefits were a hundred times what somebody thought 100 times. But also we need to meet people where they are, which means in addition to trying to bring them closer to us, we need to be better at talking the language of finance. Like I once was talking to a group of people and said, you are all self insuring against climate risk. And suddenly the finance heads in the room went, oh, wait a minute, I understand that self insurance has a cost and I understand that what people do when they self insure is they lower the risk. And I'm not doing either of those things. And you can put a dollar value on that. You can put a dollar value on the increase in operational innovation, which we can actually quantify. You can put a dollar value on how much things, how much customers care. And we have about half a million data points on three continents about that experimental evidence showing that they care. Everybody has a different role to play. Somebody said earlier it's partially a communication challenge, and that's true. Partially a mental reframing challenge. And it's partially a. We need the same quality of metrics that they don't think we have so that we can show them we're not just tree huggers. We are tree huggers who understand money.

Well said, Daniel. But let me ask you this. You have for years now been building tools that disclose and display and analyze submerged value. You've been sharing that work eloquently with companies in a wide range of industries. Andrew and I have been doing our various stumbling approaches at the same kind of story. Without the analytics strength that you have of talking to CFOs and CEOs about the business value of these strategies. How is it landing in your.

But I think more and more I feel like we have to talk to people also, just as humans and even say it's the right thing, have it be a moral thing, have it be, hey, your kids are asking you these questions because they're scared and they get how serious this issue is. And even I've said this to a lot of companies and I think it's right, but I've said even it kind of depends on who you're talking to. And when the CFO about to go into the investor meeting wants to hear everything you just said, the numbers, maybe the CFO over a beer at a retreat, you can talk about their kids, you can talk about the future. I think we have to have both of those in our arsenal and not be afraid to have some moral authority. Right? Because I can't help myself. Even when I talk moral authority, I still say, but it's just practically the right thing because just on a practical level, we can't function without a functional climate, without air, water, all that, you know, but, but you can still play this. It's the right thing to do. And I think for a lot of people, deep down, they do want to have that conversation. Not all of them. Zuckerberg is someone who doesn't care, but like most people do.

Well, there's, you know, there's not that conversation in a lot of places. But that's part of the challenge. We've got two eyes, so we can see depth. We've got two different complementary arguments here. You know, the 10x return on the one hand, and the world that you want for your children on the other hand. And this is where the business case gets really off the rails for me because the way people tend to use it is they say, is there a business case for doing this? Can I make money doing this? And using the business case as a decision tool? And what I'd rather see question Andrew earlier on about what do I say to my clients is say, what's the world you want? What's the world that we need to have for what you care about for your children, your grandchildren? Now you, as a brilliant business person, technologist, innovator, how do you build a business case that gets us to that world? The decision point is not the numbers. The decision point is the values. And the business job is to figure out how to profitably, systematically, reliably deliver that future.

If I can just say one thing before I have to go. I started a recent talk by saying, why should we do the right thing? Because it's the right thing to do. If you're worried, however, that you can't afford to, it turns out not only can you afford to, but you can't afford not to.

There you go. Nicely put. And you know, and that can come in a well reasoned and data supported argument. Daniel, thank you. If you've got to run, really appreciate you being here. It can come with a single question. I was talking with John Elkington, many of you know him from founder of sustainability and many other organizations. Was, was in a board meeting with the company some years back and one of the executives reported to the board that they are now 20, 28% compliant with applicable regulations. And John just looked at them and said, so you mean you're, you're, you're, you're 72% criminal. And the room stopped and nobody said anything. And 20 years later, this company is the leader in circular economy. It wasn't. You know, Daniel's analytics and numbers are very powerful. In this case it was just one question at the right time.

Now I'm curious who you consider the leader in circular economy.

You're going to have to ask them.

Caterpillar, Cisco, I'm thinking who talks about it a lot and who maybe does stuff anyways. We can talk offline.

Offline, offline and off directly.

Because it's a small circle of companies you could call leaders in circular. It turned out to be very, very hard.

It's a very relative term these days. Yeah. Let's go to Brad and then Marna and then Tom.

Yeah.

So.

The way I look at it, when we talk about changing behavior, most behavior is habits. The quote I always hear is first we make our habits, then they make us. I've read that 95% of what we do is habit. So a lot of what we're talking about here is about changing people's habits. Well then the question becomes how do you do that? And you can't replace an old habit with a new one, in my opinion. Until somebody sees that the old habit is, is so detrimental that they're willing to do whatever they need to do to put in the new habit. So that's one whole conversation about changing habits.

Let me ask you something about changing habits. How many people here on this call have ever tried to change a habit? How many of you have ever tried to change a spouse's habit?

Yeah, not anymore.

Okay.

We know how hard that is to do. How do we change the habits of 100 or 100,000 people in an organization?

That brings me to my second point. And then I'll be done. And Andrew, you said it's, you know, who you talk to, but maybe when, but it's also how, how you talk to them. If you talk to them from some righteous. I've got the Answer, you don't know what the f you're talking about. They're not going to listen. I think what I'm getting is the best habit changing thing is to ask better questions. When we start asking people better questions instead of being on our soapbox telling them it's the right thing to do, well, they may say, well I don't think it's the right thing to do.

Prove it.

No, you want to ask, you know, would this be in your best interests if this could happen? Change the statements into questions. And it does what? It makes them stop and think, which is in short supply today in my opinion also. But at least we get people to think, think a little bit more. Why am I doing it this way? Why have I always, huh. I never really looked at that before. Maybe, maybe I should listen to this guy.

Brad, Brad, you're a very experienced and effective personal coach. What's the most powerful question you've ever asked of a client?

Depends on what the topic is. But a lot of times it's tell me more about that. Which isn't really a question, but it's when I don't know where to go. Well, tell me some more about that or what else can you tell me about that? Or well, elaborate. And then they, well, I don't know. And Gil knows because I say this a lot when I'm just chatting with him. He'll say, well Brad, I don't know. And I'll say, well, if you did know, what do you think it would be? And immediately he starts to talk.

It's a great, it's a great trick. I've used it myself. I learned that from Brad. Andrew, what's the most effective or powerful provocative question you've ever asked a client?

That's an interesting question. Again, it does depend on the situation. It's more, it's usually something around why is this thing in your business? Just assumed that you do invaluable and why not that? And have them compare and contrast. And a quick example is working with a hospitality company and they're starting to invest in mobile so we can all check into our rooms on our phone. And I said how do you know that pays off? We just do. And this is from like the coo, we just do. I was like, so how is it not also an energy strategy, carbon strategy and it really stops people because it gets to this. Why is it guilty till proven innocent? Answer it but quickly. On Brad's point, I think the habit thing, the only thing, as you said, Gil, how do you change A hundred thousand. You have to have some process changes like I've seen companies do when the division heads or the C Suite gets together. You start the meeting with a sustainability conversation. You say, this is what we're going to start with every time for the next six months or forever. And it just, just that little habit makes people come more prepared to talk about it. And I think you need those little changes. Or everybody at Unilever has like four goals and three are business and one are personal. Right. And they're supposed to connect to their purpose. And it just, it forces everyone to do some of this thinking, just to have these little process steps.

That's the flip side of the difficulty of changing habits is we all know that all of us have changed habits in our lives and have seen people that we love change habits. We've seen companies and cultures change habits. When I was a kid, it was cool to be able to drink and drive. You could hold your liquor. And it was like this amazing bullshit story. And it's the social permission for it is gone. It still happens. Yes, but the social. The social norms have changed. And we're talking to some extent here about changing social norms. For me, the most powerful question I ever asked a client wasn't planned. I was with an executive of biotech company and asked her, what are you really here to do? And she stopped. There's long silence. She said, what do you mean? She said, do you mean in my job? And it was one of these rare moments where I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut and not answer, but just let the silence hang in the room. So do you mean in my job? Do you mean the company? Do you mean in my life? And the whole. The room shifted. It was just her and me in the room, but the space in the room shifted, the conversation shifted. And the most powerful interaction that I've seen in a long time happen from her just asking that question for herself. It's a version of what, you know, someone posted here from David Cooper. Right. What do you know? What do you care about?

Yeah. If everyone has maybe questions they love, just post them in the chat. It'd be good to collect the good.

Ones and we'll get to them as we can. But let me go to the hands that are raised.

I mean, the questions that you asked, just the single, the single thing you think has the most impact.

Great.

I'd love to have like 10 of those.

Yeah, throw them in there. Marna, welcome.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Good to be together and nice to meet you. I Think you're new to me. Yeah. So I think that one powerful place to start is creating the. The precedent of being together as people first, sort of leading with the tenderness and the humanity element of people making space for that. One method that I really enjoy and appreciate around that is a sociocracy facilitation, which has a precept of, how are you doing as a person? Like, before you get into the what are you here to do? Like, how are you as a person? Another factor, another agent or structure that has that in a really nice way, is the Thanksgiving address in the Haudenosaunee tradition. So when you come together in a meeting, you start with, you know, we come together as people. As we look around the room, we see that the cycles of life continue, and we look into each other's eyes, and we're here together as people. So making that human connection, that tenderness, connection, I think, is necessary before getting into the conversation about values, especially given that a lot of decision makers currently in the culture are male or masculine types. And I believe it's been shown that in general, masculine folks have a thinner corpus callosum, and feminine folks have a wider corpus callosum. So the thinner corpus callosum lends itself toward linear thinking and the doing of things and the solving of problems, and the wider corpus callosum gives. Lends itself toward multidimensional awareness, which is why the clan mothers in the Haudenosaunee, the circle of clan mothers, were actually in charge and designated the noble, the circle of noble men to the problem solving and the doing of things. But that sort of multidimensional awareness element also being the grandmothers, where, you know, children would end up at their house in droves because they were the. The people that were trusted. But making space for that multidimensional awareness element of community, of what's really happening, of, you know, are the children healthy? Are the fish healthy? Do we have what we need? And the time and space for acknowledging that masculine power of the doing, but also the feminine awareness of, it's time to stop. There's already enough. And it's sort of what we talked about last time, Gil, that element of sufficiency. And so all of that occurred to me because we're transitioning culturally from a extraction economy into what I hope is going to be a nurturance culture where the value is on the quality of living rather than the arbitrary representation of pixels and decimals.

Marna, thank you for that. I'm smiling because I'm listening to my own inner conversation. As I listen to you and my male skinny corpus callosum, mine goes to. Oh, my God. But how do you do that in an organization where the cultural norms just aren't going to allow that that's, you know, male traditional. So, like, you know, I go into. I go into problem, and I go into problem solving, which is not the most interesting place to go. More interesting is to think about, you know. Well, leadership doesn't just come from an inspired CEO. It comes from a manager or a person in a meeting asking a question and maybe doing it again and again. My mind goes to David Graeber's remarkable book, the dawn of everything, you know, which looks at the last, what, 50,000 years or so of human societies and finds an enormous variety of ways that we've done things hierarchical, egalitarian, male, female. I mean, all of the categorization that we think applies blown apart in 50,000 years of history. We are experimenters and we've experimented in all sorts of different kinds of ways. And many things have worked and many things haven't. And it's a rich treasure trove to us think about bringing forward in this world now. So thank you so much for that. Let me go to. Let me go to Tom, if that's okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Thanks, Gil. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, everyone. You know, I spent a lot of time with my clients trying to help them work through these issues and problems. And I was reminded last fall at COP 26 that we've tried to attack this globally instead of industry by industry. And getting there by industry is a lot easier for some of my clients than it is for some of the others. And it seems to me it's something we've missed in this conversation over the last, whatever, three or four decades. If you're in the airline industry, this is a really hard problem to solve. But if you're in a different industry, you can get there pretty darn quickly. It's not to let the airline industry off the hook because there are lots of things they could do. But I was wondering what we're missing by not taking an industry by industry approach.

Andrew, any thoughts?

Well, there's on some level, I mean, going back to the proving the case, making the business case, and the industry by industry level, I think that's part of what some of the development of things like sasb, you know, the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board. There's. There's been some of that thinking.

Right.

Like the questions you should ask. What's material, what. What is the right business case can be industry Specific. I mean, I think we all have to have roughly the same carbon reduction goal, but there's different. It's like with the SDGs, right? So companies, they're not going to act on all 16, 17 partnerships, but at one, so they have a few that are priorities. And I think that is getting more sophisticated and sectors are coming together to work together. And that's really a critical part of it, I think. So I think it's a balancing act because some of these things just everybody's got to have a climate strategy now. Everybody's a climate company now. But there are kind of other things that we can do in subsets.

Yeah, I mean, to some extent, all the work that Andrew and I and our Daniel and colleagues do with individual companies is industry specific by its nature. There are industry associations, notably the textile industry. Textile, fashion industry, furniture industry, others who are doing multi company collaborations. But there's also richer territory because if you focus just on your own industry, you miss innovations in other sectors that could be applicable to you. So that cross sectoral fertilization has always been a core part of the work for us. It's why we always bring in multidisciplinary teams to expose our people and our clients to ideas they never thought about, technologies never seen, just wasn't on their radar in the work they're doing. Tom? Thank you, Joe.

Two other things I'll just throw in real quick. The consulting firm I used to work for, we were in the talent space for about 55 years when McKinsey wrote the book the War on Talent. And they suddenly became the leader in that space. And so I think there's a lesson to be learned there about, you know, who has the authority or who has the voice, who's got the megaphone. And the last point I'll make, I put it in the chat. We're now seeing around the world a billion dollars or more in losses from climate change or climate event every 17 days. It used to be every 30 days, it used to be every 60 days, used to be every 100 days. And that number is coming down. So the insurance industry that seemingly has the most to lose of anybody, any industry, at some point they have to stop ignoring and I get the reinsurers, but the, the folks that are writing the policies, they can't continue to pretend this doesn't exist. And I'm, I'm just surprised they're coming to the party so late.

I'm not surprised they're coming to the party so late because they've been off able to Push off the losses. And when we have disasters, the taxpayers bail them out. You know, you look at, you know, you look at how we handle floods and we, you know, we pay people to rebuild where the, where their house was flooded out before to rebuild in a forest fire zone. So we've, we break the incentives a lot of different ways. Tom, thanks for that. Joe.

Evening and thank you everyone. This sort of event is one of the good things that's come out of the last, last couple of years. Gil, you, you mentioned a little while back the sort of changing social norms around drink driving. Certainly here in the UK we've seen the same thing happened very fast when the government changed the law around using mobile phones in a car, for instance, that went from being totally normal, totally acceptable to within two or three years. You don't really see it anymore. So I guess what I'm getting at here is how much of what we're talking about here do you think is related to a government level change, a carbon tax, where suddenly you'd go, right, okay, the social norms have changed, the business norms have changed. And then it would just be something very different. And Andrew, is that related to in Net Positive, one of the chapters where you talk about the elephants in the room and the lobbying and all, all those kinds of things? Maybe, maybe that's related to it as well. So yeah, I'd be very interested to know what you guys think about that, that higher level things coming from the top.

Well, let me go first, Andrew, then pop it to you. I think at high level, carbon tax is clearly one of the critical things on the agenda because that's where the incentives are broken. Whatever level of consciousness somebody has, if it appears to them to be cheaper to do A rather than B, they're going to lean toward A if you can change the relative cost as it hits them. We're here in California, we're complaining because gasoline is hitting close to $6 a gallon. We were complaining when it was 4 and we're complaining it was 3. Well, the real cost of gasoline is probably $15 to $25 a gallon. If you look at environmental effects, health effects, the cost of military to protect, supply chains and so forth. I used to, reality is caught up with me. I used to say 20 years ago, if we were paying $20 a gallon at the time pump, nobody would be driving the car they're driving today and nobody would be making the car they're driving today. Well, that's now changing. You know, the ice, cars are going out, we're going to Be all electric before too long. Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in most places on the planet. So the change does happen. But, yeah, carbon tax is critical to do that, you have to get that through governments, through elected legislatures, with the force of lobbying that's holding us in place. And Andrew, over to you on that one.

Yeah, I mean, I just saw a comment in the chat about you have to mandate, like seatbelts, drunk driving. We do unfortunately need mandates. So it changes the norm. And I think the recent example that is, it seems so minor, but it could end up being so powerful is the sec, you know, putting out for comment that public companies have to report on climate materiality. They have to report their scope one and two emissions. And they're talking about, you know, adding scope three, which would be like.

And they're talking about it. Yeah. And they're talking about adding private companies as well.

Right, well, and there's actually a. There's like a kind of, you know, voluntary effort by a bunch of PE firms and others, private entities that are doing their own kind of transparency because they know it's coming, right. I mean, they're putting out their greenhouse gases, stuff about safety, like a bunch of metrics. So, yeah, I mean, look, we need government. And you mentioned in the, the book the Elephants in the Room and you know, just for those who haven't read it, you know, we talk about there's a lot of things we normally look at in sustainability, but there's all these things that companies don't want to pay attention to or don't want anybody shining a light on, like do they pay taxes? What's their, you know, how are they dealing with corruption, human rights, true diversity and inclusion. Like, how diverse are they? And until companies look at those things also, they can't really be having a, a full positive impact on the world. And they're hard and they're ugly, but they're becoming more transparent. Right. It gets reported more and more that Amazon doesn't pay taxes. That gets out there more and more and causes problems. But I think there's public shaming and kind of that changes some of the mandate. But then you still need. The OECD is heading towards putting a 15% minimum corporate tax globally. Right. And you need the mandate, right? That's a price. That's like a price on carbon, It's a price on tax, so that we actually fund government. So we need both companies. This is such a huge part of the problem. Companies have this enormous political influence and on the one hand, we want to get all money out of politics. But on the other hand, we're like, well, if the money is in politics, then let's at least point them in the right direction. So we want them to promote the right kind of climate policies and the right kind of wage policies. And they haven't. Right. Throughout history until now.

Yeah, let's at least get the companies who are talking a good climate game to be lobbying for a good climate.

And they're not.

ClimateVoices.org is working specifically on that.

Well, and they're disconnected willfully at times from their trade associations. And the Build Back Better bill was the most recent but just egregious example of companies saying they have these big climate goals and then letting the US Chamber of Commerce try to kill the bill because it rolled back tax cuts that they never needed to begin with. And so it shows you again this short term profit maximization. Clearly their leadership thought they had to keep those tax cuts more than the public private investment that bill would have created to help them get to their own goals. In particular, the auto companies that have committed to all EVs and they need infrastructure. So it's so dominant to just try to maximize and keep your taxes low that you don't even do it strategically smart for you. You don't even get the public private spending going because you need that scale. Government provides scale.

So we've just walked into the questions that we inevitably get to on these calls, one of subsidies or just say, where does the public investment go? What do we encourage? Do we pay for the future that we want or do we subsidize our own destruction? And that takes us right to the question of democracy. Because all, you know, whenever we talk about government should, that means us should. That means we have to win at the polls. We can complain about the courts all we want, but if we didn't win the president that elected the courts, there we are. So, you know, we're back to the question of from national level down to local level. And how many of us go to city council meetings or weigh in on issues at that scale? That's the less glamorous but utterly essential part of the game if we want government to do the right thing. Government is us, Dale. Byron, Need you to come off mute.

Dale myself. Okay. Is that working?

Yep.

Thanks everybody.

Wow.

Always gets so jazzed. And what'd you say? What was it, Gil? That prediction is a fool's game.

Early on.

Well, you know, I've. When I first started talking, Dale, about living between worlds and this unknowability the transition that we're in. I realized that I'm not going to try to predict what's happening next. I mean, who predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall six months before it happened? And who predicted what Putin would do in Europe six months before it happened? Yep.

No, no, no.

And now we are in utterly an utterly different worlds in this unknowability, the transition that we're in, I realized that I'm not going to try to predict what's happening in that world than last year.

It's a great mental health adjustment. And I want to do quick. Three quick things and such a juicy conversation today. Thank everyone that's on the call. One of the things that both frustrates me and also gives me hope is that political action is. I think you could make a pretty good case that it's a lagging indicator and not a leading indicator. And so I just saw a wonderful documentary recently about what happened in the 1930s and the political movement that really put pressure on Roosevelt to do all the stuff that he did around the New Deal and all that. And of course, we can't redo the 30s now. It'll have to be a new thing. It can't be Roosevelt's answers. But anyway, the point is that when we were talking about the structural thing, and I believe, Andrew, that you said something about that just a couple of moments ago, I was thinking about a simple analogy, which is a football league, and you say we're doing away with the referee. So if you have the money, you can put 15 people on the field, or you can put 20 people, or you can give them brass knuckles, you can give them sticks to carry. And so, you know, that game would be not so fun for not so long. And so the structural thing, from taxes to other things that people have brought up, even though government is not a leading indicator, it has to move and we have to create the structure to be able to do that. So that was the second point and the last thing I wanted to say.

Let me just respond to you on that and then we'll go to your last thing because to your Roosevelt reference, the story's told that when the heads of the American labor unions came to meet with the president and told them what they needed in terms of a social safety net, he said, yeah, great, I like what you're saying now go out in the streets and make me do it and.

Exactly, Gil, that's a good summation of it. And also, if you think about what Lyndon Johnson told Martin Luther King Jr. Because there is no, I don't know if there was a business case for civil rights, was there a business case for it? I guess there was. You know, you could have more people at the counters than a drugstore, but that's a pretty weak business case. The Morrill case was brought to this country via very much like what happened in the 30s and Martin Luther King led the Morrill case. And so anyway, I think that's what you both said, is that you can't, you can't do just the business. You've got to do both. And I totally get that. I totally get that. Anyway, the last point I was going to make is, and I may have shared this here and some of you may know about him, but there's a guy that's gotten on my radar screen and I've corresponded a little bit with and I've just gotten to be a junkie for the stuff he does. It's a guy named Nate Hagens and he has a podcast called the Great Simplification. And he is a polymath. I'll tell you, he's a down to earth humble guy. Has the most amazing guest on there. But one of the things that he said which, you know, and look, I'm a, I'm an old social scientist and a poet, you know, so some of these things are interesting to me from afar. But he said that essentially if you look at a barrel of oil, it does 4.5 years of a human's physical work. That's one barrel of oil. Okay, now you can break that back down to calories. So human beings need 2,000 calories a day. In the United States, we use 200,000 calories a day. If you include what we eat, the teeny bit. And then the oil and fossil fuels that we use. Now the other point is that that makes that each year we have. If you do the math on this, and here's where I fall down, but it's interesting, I think I've checked this. We have 500 billion fossil fuel slaves. Think about that number for a minute. We have 500 billion fossil fuel slaves. So there's no way that we're going to get out of this thing that we're doing without reducing the amount of things we consume and doing it in a fairly radical way. Now again, I'm all Bucky Fuller on that. We can do it in a way that will actually enhance people's lives. But the idea that we're going to be able to replace 500 billion fossil fuel slaves. Slaves is not practical. Maybe well, and again, again, I don't want to. I don't. Let's come full circle. I don't want to predict that. I'm just saying that it's amazing for me to think of it in those terms. Not as a negative thing.

No, it's great to think of it in those terms and give us a sense of scale and proportion, because most humans understand proportion better than numbers. So to get a sense of the shape of it, the scale is really important. Don Akin, who recently passed away, great leader in the solar energy industry, used to say that if you looked at all of the energy use in the human industrial system and compared that to all of the energy flux on the planet from the sun Every day, sun 17,000 times more than what we used. Now you can't get all of it and there's efficiency loss and all the rest. But his point was that there's plenty of room in there to move to renewable society without us having to freeze in the dark, right? To use less. We can actually meet human needs of everybody on this planet. And here's why I stray from bucky. It's not 100% success for humanity, but also with the vitality of Earth's regenerative systems, not having humanity thrive at the expense of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere, which is the game that we're in now.

Just so I understand what you're saying, Gil, you're saying that because we are overshooting 1.7 planets, we're in overshoot and climate is only one function of that overshoot. You're saying so that we stop doing that, Right?

We have to stop overshooting. Energy use in itself is not the problem. Depends on what kind of energy we're using. Fossil fuel. Yeah, we're in overshoot. Solar we can do. But if we do it at the expense of soils and biodiversity and the health of the oceans and the green cover of the planet, we're 40% denuded. Now, as a planet, you think that doesn't affect the energy balance and the hydrologic balance and the climate balance? It's not just greenhouse gases. It's how we live as part of the living world. And yes, that is an overshoot to the numbers that Dale cited. Some of you may not know, this is from the Footprint network. If the entire world lived at a US standard of living, now, we would need five plants, or maybe it's seven now, I forget the number, which pretty much everybody understands we don't have. Do we subsidize and run to the bottom as fast as we can. Do we build walls around ourselves since we're going to have it and you're not, which is, you know, aside from the moral question, is probably not good geopolitical stability, or do we do this game in a different way? Dale, did I, did you have more? Was that it?

No, no, no, no. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing. Dale Mokrae. Dale, Dale's figures are interesting, but there's something left out. Lawrence Livermore National Lab does a great energy graph. Every year of United States production of energy, we produce between 90 and 100,000,000,000, BTUs per year of energy. And we've been that way the year 2000. So we've plateaued for the last 20, 22 years. And every year they have, they say this is the amount of quote rejected energy. This is energy that does no useful work and it's about two thirds of what we produce. So we may have thousands of energy slaves per person, but 2/3 of those thousands of energy slaves are dissipated in heat, in friction and transmission distribution losses. So this is one thing that we should be thinking about when we talk about energy, but very rarely do we. George, thank you for that. And it's back to our earlier questions of given that, given this enormous gap of reality and opportunity, what is it that moves behavior of individuals, of organizations, of investors to make sense out of what's not making sense now? Thanks for flagging the anomaly, Andrew. I know you're going to have to leave for another meeting in a couple of minutes. Want to say anything in closing?

I don't have anything grand to say. I think we've covered a lot of ground. I think we have to keep pushing on all these, as you said, all these. But I like your metaphor, Gil, about having two eyes that provide depth, that we have to be coming at these things from multiple angles and just keep pushing. We have to keep going. So I appreciate, Gil, you putting this together so there's some place for people to gather in a time of total disassociation over the last couple of years, if people have started traveling again as I have, you've probably seen how happy people are to get together, even though traveling sucks just to be with people. So I appreciate just having this, this conversation together. Thank you for inviting me.

I'm so glad you're able to take the time out of what I know is a really busy schedule, as is everyone's.

Thank you, guys.

See you soon. Take anybody who wants to speak who haven't called on yet? I've got something to read for you, but I want to wait a little bit on that. David Grossoff, welcome.

Yeah, I'm wondering whether it helps to have at least some of the discussion about key points of influence, like where a few people have a great deal of power, can also change the tone and framework for a lot of debates. So there are 50 states with about a dozen or so maybe half dozen commissioners for public utilities regulation. And I wonder, wow, if we really lobby and focus on the framework and criteria by which they make decisions or to whom they are accountable and for what, maybe a lot of change can be driven quickly. Similarly, I wonder, without having remotely the expertise of most of the people in this discussion.

Let me just stop.

Fiduciary duty and other and pension fund regulation criteria and ERISA rules, things like that.

I didn't mean to cut you off. I just want to ask if anybody on the call knows of efforts in the direction that David's talking about, please note it in the chat. It may. You know, this is one of the challenges of our time is there's so much going on in so many different places, it's hard to keep track of it all. And if that calls to you, you need to know where it's happening so you can step in. Do you know what. Do we know what the dozen states are? No.

50 states.

Nobody said there were a dozen that had.

Oh, how many people, how many commissioners there are per state? It varies.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a finite number of people.

It's a very small number of people with a huge influence on what the emissions will be in 15 years.

Well, this is, you know, I like that you raised this because, you know, while we think about the grand political questions of, you know, presidential elections in Congress and the Supreme Court, which are desperately important, there are a lot of other arenas at which this game is being played out. And in fact, you know, in my interpretation, one of the reasons for the Republican success, if you want to call it that, what they've been able to accomplish over the past 50 years, next year, anniversary of the Powell Report, is that they have played a full court. They've been building farm teams for decades. They've been developing candidates at everything from city council and school board to dog catcher and grooming people and bringing them up through the ranks, through state legislatures and into Congress, really developing of phalanx of people in a much more systematic way than the Democrats have done.

So, Gil, on the record, you're now in favor of grooming.

I said It. I heard it coming out of my mouth.

I couldn't resist. I'm sorry.

The word had a meaning before those guys got a hold of developing talent at every level. And I just want to contrast that. I don't know how it is for you folks. Talk to your friends. How many of your friends are open to running for political office? Or how many people in your world like. And a lot of folks in my world say, oh, gosh, I'm not going there. I don't want to do that. I couldn't do that. And yet that's where part of the game is played. And we can complain all we want about the people who do it, but if we don't do it, what do we got? David, thank you for that. Who else? What is this conversation been provoking for you? And some of you know that I'm not averse to calling on people who don't have their hands raised. So be warned. Well, I'm not going to put you on the. Oh, Brad. Sorry. Go ahead.

And then I got pretty much after all these calls, Gil, I'm always in the same place, I think, which is incredible.

Oops.

Let me.

I'm trying to lower the hand. There we go. I'm incredibly hopeful and incredibly depressed when I hear all the crap that's going on. I just get if I allow myself to go that way.

Could you say that in another way without using the words hope and depressed?

I'm not sure.

Can you say it without using an emotionally latent words? Describe what you're saying in another way, please.

It's almost impossible to take emotion out of it.

But no, in the moods of. Of hope and despair, there are assessments that you're making about the world and how you're seeing it. What are the assessments behind those moods?

Well, one assessment is we're doomed, okay? There's no way out. The other is, oh, my God, what incredible opportunities there are for us to get out of this mess.

Okay.

That's why I love your calls, because they just. These things just.

Well, yeah, no, but is one thing. The other is that, like, I have an assessment that we're doomed. I can question whether that's accurate or not or what that really means. Incredible opportunity. I can say, well, what's that about? And what's that about for me? And where are the opportunities for me that support me or to which I can contribute, that maybe start to move the equation a little bit about how doomed I think we are? So I think you'd be crazy if you didn't Feel both of those things right now. You know, I find that tension more alive and fierce these last couple months than any time I can remember since. Since the 60s, living under the nuclear, you know, umbrella or sword or whatever it was. So, you know, and I'm finding that my moods swing very dramatically these days. I mean, Jane and I used to watch the news every night. We don't do it every night anymore. We just can't. We can't bear it. And yet we want to be connected and informed, but we can't physically can't bear it. And yet, as you can tell from the conversation with Andrew and Daniel, there's a world of opportunity here that we have been working on for decades. We're making a real difference in the lives of companies. We're delivering economic value. I'm starting a new fund to drive this stuff even further. And so there we are in both of these, you know, two eyes, two legs, living. Living in both aspects of this world all at the same time. So thank you for. Thank you for being open about that. Brad. Ken, Homer.

Thank you, Brad. When I hear people say we're doomed, part of me goes, yeah, we totally are. And part of me is like, well, what part of us is doomed? And I think our current way of life is doomed. It is completely unsustainable. That doesn't mean human race is doomed. I also think that there's enough inertia in the system, or as I like to put it, there's enough fecal matter that has left the delivery system and is en route to the blades of the fan to ensure we have several decades of tremendous suffering ahead of us. And so how do you find the place in yourself or your community where you can actually be with the level of grief that's going to come your way? No one's going to get out of this unscathed. And so I'm looking not for the assessments of we're doomed, but rather, if we're doomed, if our way of life is doomed, then how do we be resilient? How can we pass something along? There's a story I heard a very long time ago about the Lakota Sioux at the time when the U.S. army was carrying out a campaign of genocide and they held a council, and all the young warriors were saying, we must make a stand. We have to fight to the last man. This is our way of life. We have to defend ourselves. And as happens in those councils, the last people to speak are the grandmothers. And they said, yes, it's true. We are under genocide. We are being attacked. Our way of life is being threatened. But we're the human beings. And we must find a way to carry what it means to be a human being. So when the dark time is over. People coming after us will remember what it means to be human. And therefore, if we fight to the last man. We'll be wiped out. So how do we protect ourselves? And I think that's a really important question right now. Of what's worth remembering, what's worth passing on, what's worth carrying forward, no matter what. So that when the walls close in. And we actually come out the other side at some point and see what's left. How can we bring with us what's really valuable. That will seed those who are on the other side. With some kind of resilience and guidance and hopefulness.

Beautiful, Ken. Thank you. Two things. When you say that the way of life that we're living is doomed. One of the ways that lands for me. Is that the way of life we're living in is a house of cards. It's an imaginary life that's floating somehow. Disconnected from the living world. From the physical resources. And the living vitality. That sustains everything we do. We've talked about subsidy. Sometimes this is an entire economy living in subsidy. That doesn't pay the costs of what it's doing. And will inevitably hit the wall because of those things. Does that mean collapsed in agony. Or reemergence of something else? We don't know. That's what we all think about and live in all the time. I want to share with you a story that I came across yesterday. That in a way, in a little bit of an indirect way, but maybe direct way. Speaks to this very well, and some of you may recognize this text. Frischen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus hunting expedition. He found one of the successful hunters. Dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly. Up in our country, we are human, said the hunter. And since we are human, we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say, thanks for that. What I get today, you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves. And by whips one makes dogs. The refusal to calculate credits and debits. Can be found throughout the anthropological literature. On egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human. Because he could make economic calculations. The hunter insisted that being truly human. Meant refusing to make such calculations. Refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom. For the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began comparing power with power, measuring, calculating and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It is not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he couldn't have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities in any real life situation. We have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory dimensions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity and therefore make the basis of our civilization.

You have a link to that, Gil?

Yes, I'll put it in a second. Let's just take a few minutes, a few moments to just sit with that. Watch your breath. Something I've learned from our friend Jerry Mikulski, that sometimes the best thing a conversation can do is just be quiet for a bit. So this is the quote is too long for me to put in the chat, but I'll post it on various social media. It's from David Graeber. The book is the first 5,000 years. I also mentioned Graeber's more recent book, co authored before he died with David Wengrow, called the dawn of Everything Remarkable World Pivoting Works. So with that, my thanks to you for joining us in this conversation today. We'll be back next month, same bat time, same bat channel, noon Pacific on the third Wednesday of every month. I invite you to invite other people to join us here. We'd love to expand the circle of these calls, increase the diversity of voices and views that are here, that are here together in conversation. Take a moment. If you want the chat, save it now. 3. Yeah, David, exactly right. Three buttons on the lower right. Grab the chat. We'll post the video within the next day or two on my YouTube channel. If you're on my mailing list, you'll get notice of that. Nat, let me put that in here. If you're not on the mailing list, please join the mailing list there and get notice of this and other good things. I know I see that some of you have provided your contact information in the chat, so feel free to communicate with each other and I'm always glad to hear from any of you. Thank you all. Have a great day. Bye bye.