Living Between Worlds 4.2 — Building _and Rebuilding_ Trust

Foreign. Welcome to Living between Worlds for February 15, 2023. For those of you don't know me, I'm Gil Friend. I'm CEO of Natural Logic, Managing Director of Critical Path Capital, and coach at Trim Tab for Trim Tabs and along with Ken Homer, we're hosting this call and conversation today. Just a quick bit of logistics before we start. We are streaming this call to Facebook as an experiment. We may try other venues in the future. If you want to speak, there'll be plenty of time to do that. Please use the Zoom hand raise function to raise your hand. That will stack you in a sequence. It will call you in order of your hand raise. Please use the chat actively. We will not share the chat with people who aren't on the call. That's your resource. You can save the chat using the three dots at the bottom of the screen. We will not send the chat out. So it's for you to save and network with each other there if you like. Also, and Ken, if you'd add the links to the chat. We have set up since last call. Thank you. For Peter and others who suggested this, a couple of offline spaces for sharing projects, requests and offers and for communicating with each other. We'll talk about that again at the end of the call. So those are there for you. And that's where we are. So this is our fourth year of these Living between world conversations or the full name Living between worlds with. With grace and dignity and power and how we navigate this time between worlds, as Gramsci called it, when the world is dying and the new world is not yet being born. What he called the time of monsters. So how do we live now? What do we do? And how do we be effective about the things that we care about? That's the general theme of this now fourth year of conversations and all this archived on YouTube for your interest. We've talked a lot in the last couple of calls about trust. You know, it's the fundamental currency of human relationship at the level of, you know, dyads and small groups and families and societies and being and trust in ourselves. We've developed norms to support trust in, you know, in sports and in society.

To provide.

How do we say, to provide support and reinforcement and sometimes replacement of personal judgment where we can't always form it individually ourselves. We talked in recent months about Malcolm Gladwell's work on trust and his thesis that humans are not very good at assessing trust, the trustworthiness of other people. And therefore his recommendation is to that we default to trust. Start with Trust, and if it breaks, then act accordingly. But trust does break. You know, we're, you could say that we're in a world of broken trust these days, and we're each of us faced with a question of how do we respond to broken trust? With remorse, Shame? With anger or vengeance? With despair or resignation? With creativity? John Robb of Global Guerrillas recently posted that he said network tribalization, networked Trib, which is what we see in the world of the Web around us, makes broad agreement on basic facts impossible. Every statement of quote, fact by someone in another network tribe is seen as an attempt to mislead. With that basic level of agreement, coherent social discussions and decision making are impossible. So we have a world of broken trust and the experience of broken trust in our lives. But trust can also be nurtured and can be rebuilt when it's broken. Ken's got an example of trust being rebuilt where you might least expect it. Ken.

So I don't know if anybody had a chance to read the link that came from the Washington Post about the House Select Committee to Modernize Congress, but I was astonished to read this piece. This was a bipartisan committee that had some people who really were at polar extremes in terms of their opinions. And they got together and they hired some very wonderful facilitators, including Esther Perel and Adam Grant and Priya Parker. And they worked through the differences and they managed to get over 200 bipartisan bills through Congress. In the 116th, 117th Congress. There's a very good, if you have a chance to look at it, very good description of what happened, how that came to be. And we talk a lot about mood here on these calls. And I really love this because it's a narrative that goes against the meta narrative that Congress is completely dysfunctional. It's an example of how people coming together, listening respectfully to each other, probing areas where they disagree, understanding that you're going to have diverse opinions and allowing those to be in the room and finding ways to work together towards shared goals of making Congress work actually did pay off and paid off really big for both Congress, the American people. So I just thought that was a wonderful example that kind of can shift our mood of cynicism, of Congress, can't do anything into, wow, they actually have done something. So we can build on that. I don't know if we can build on it with the current House speaker, but it has been done before. If it's done before, it can be done again.

And what enabled it to work? What were the keys to that I mean, you mentioned a few, but distill for us.

The key was, first of all, they recognized that they were there to serve the American people. So that was their overarching. We're here to make Congress work better and to make Congress work for the American people. How can we do that?

Let me ask you again, then. What was the key to getting tips that.

The key to getting to that was actually listening to each other. There were people on that committee who voted against certifying the election. And that was like, oh, man, what are we going to do? And they said, okay, we got to face this head on. Let's talk about it. Why did you choose not to certify? And one of the people said, well, there were a bunch of laws that were pushed through in a hurry right before the election. And I have questions as to the legality of that. And so I'm not saying that Biden didn't win the election. What I'm saying is I don't know if the process was fair. And so they actually sat down and talked. And it was a very difficult conversation. There were hard feelings. There were people who were kind of polarized, but they stayed in it. If I can tell a really short story, some 30 years ago, I heard Michael Mead speak to a bunch of Dharma teachers. He said, what's the greatest challenge facing humanity? And people gave the usual, you know, nuclear war, nuclear winter, nuclear waste, you know, loss of biodiversity, blah, blah, blah. So those are all really serious, but those are all secondary. Because until people learn how to sit in the same room with each other, particularly when they have differences of opinion and not either resort to violence to get their way or leave because they're not getting their way, we can't make progress on the rest of that. So I thought this was a great example of people sticking with the process and saying it's going to be hard. We have to learn how to be with each other in a respectful way. Because if we can't respect each other, we can't do our jobs.

I would add one thing to that. Thank you for that, Ken, is that we can resort to violence. We can leave. But what we often do is we stay but make judgments. How often we don't need to do a show of hands because it's universal. Somebody says something that you think is stupid or wrong or dangerous or something, and you instantly form an assessment of them, which. That's the first one. Well, you're wrong or whatever it is. And the option there is to respond instead with curiosity, which is what these Guys, did I disagree with you? I don't see it the same way as you, but I'm curious to know why you see it that way. What in your experience led you to form that perspective? Because then there's an opening to possibly engage, whereas with the assessment there's not. So that sounds like part of what was going on there. I'm looking sideways because I've got your faces off to the side. Let me bring you back into center screen. So what does this provoke for you all? Either at the level of the body politic of Congress or the personal relationships that we all live in? Brad, we'll start with you.

So I might have missed. Let me lower the hand. What year was this? I don't know. 116th.

This was the last two Congresses.

Now this is not.

This is the last. We just started a new Congress this year. This is the last two Congresses. The last four years. From 28.

Four years.

Yep.

Why have we not heard of this before? This is the first time I am hearing that the actual Republicans and Democrats in the last four years actually passed anything with a grant.

So can.

You might want to ask your favorite media sources, your favorite media outlets, why did they not cover it? Seems like a story, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Think.

Yeah.

Is there a link to that article anywhere?

I will pull it up. It's. It's in Gill's invitation to this call today. But I will, I will get it and put it and drop in the chat.

Thank you. Well, and just to finish. So, Gil, what it brings up for me is why the fuck didn't we hear about this sooner? It's like what stopped that? I mean, that's part of the problem is it's like good, bad news travels faster than good news. Good news sometimes doesn't even travel at all. And here's another example of that.

The basic watchword in newspaper journalism used to be if it bleeds, it leads. You know, it's easy. It's much easier to cover a fire than deliberative discussion. So that's part of it. The question that comes up for me is how do we. How do we do more of this kind of thing in every arena that we live in? But I've spoken enough. Let's hear from you all. David, welcome.

Thanks. A brief comment.

It's clear that US media are completely.

Avoiding the CY Hirsch article on NORD stream.

And.

What possible trust is there when they're obviously hoping this just goes away?

Well, the US media has a long history of avoiding all kinds of stories.

Yeah, but this is such, this is.

Such a huge issue that, you know.

I mean, the US Declared war, or.

Not declared, initiated war on Germany.

It's just, it's just that clear when.

There is a violation of trust that.

Profound and nobody's willing to talk about it, you have an immensely poisoned environment.

Well, poisoned environment, no question. I don't know what the conversations between the US and Germany were on that. And I want to not have the Nord Stream issue be the focus of the conversation here today.

No, I was only referring to the absence of it in any kind of actual media analysis.

Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. Thank you for raising it, Peter. Thanks.

Hi, Gil. Hi, everybody. I think when we're forced together in groups and Congress is a grouping that is forced together for two years, Senate for six years, and there is a problem solvers Caucus, Brad, if you haven't heard about it, that's really the, the team of congressmen that have said we're on both different sides of the aisle, but we're going to try to solve problems. So that's where most of that legislation came from. The Inflation Reduction act, when you go through the first third of the President's State of the Union, that was all Inflation Reduction act that was agreed upon. That was one massive bill, not the other other hundred that are talked about there.

So.

You can have a group of people and you will find, I think, a certain number that are willing to sit down and talk, not all of them because we have this bell curve of our, of our society. I know that personally, I don't go hang out with too many people on the other side of the aisle, that my group of friends, the places that I go to personally are pretty much those that agree with me. I, I don't go hang out with Trumpers or deniers or I just, I find them unpleasant and I choose not to. So does that foster mistrust or just the fact that I don't want to.

Hang out with them?

And so I think trust can be built when you're, you choose to be in that grouping or you're forced to be in that grouping and you have a good facilitator because that's often what it takes. But in my, in my social life and my group of friends, I probably.

Don'T interact with them at all.

Or in the media that I watch, I'm going to say the same thing. I, I will listen to the other side of the media only to hear it, but usually turn it off pretty quickly.

It's hard to do. I mean, I find I Check in on Fox periodically and it drives me crazy. And I know that, you know, I know there are people who check in who are Fox watchers, who watch MSNBC occasionally and it drives them crazy. And that's the, you know, that's the network tribalization that John Robb was talking about. There we are in it. George Mochri, good afternoon sir.

How do you do? There's an exacerbation of the if it leads, it leads that has developed during this Internet age because people have found that controversy and anger promotes engagement. Right. That's the truism for Twitter, for Facebook and all of those kinds of things.

It's the algorithmic for their game.

Right, right. So, so not only do we have if it bleeds, it leads, if it makes you angry, then you're involved and that's all it seems that the media understands. There's another story that came up last week that I'll put in, in the, in the chat, which is the citizens conventions and a deliberative democracy. Jim Fishkin, who's of Stanford now has been working with for 20 or 30 years. And in France they had citizens conventions around climate change and Macron has said that he's going to institute their recommendations. We'll see how far that goes. And now they have another citizens convention that's being set up to look at end of life issues. And again, these are, these are things that people know about only because they stumble upon them or because they're interested in them. The media itself, our media, because of all of these, all of these tendencies that they use to monetize themselves, are not particularly interested in developing consensus or institutions. They're interested in talking about horse race politics. That's what MSNBC is about. That's what CNN is about. That's what Fox News is about. If they spent a tenth of the time talking about really practical solutions that are available, examples of things that are going on in communities all around us, we'd have an entirely different, different way of looking at the world. But they don't, they're not interested in that.

So George, do you or does anybody here have examples of media sources that don't fall into that game, that do something more open, deliberative, solution focused than the network tribalization?

Anybody there? There are a few good news groups that are out there who are talking about good news. I've not spent much time on them because it's more feel good stories from what I've than it is about active solution.

Yeah, well, you know, in, in, in, in, in my history has been a long part of my trajectory from Institute for Local Self Reliance, the California Office of Appropriate Technology to Eleanor Lecane's more recent work with what's Working is featuring stories of what's working not as feel good but as examples of this can happen. You know, existence is proof of the possible. Here it is. It worked well. Ken's Congress story is an example of that something happened that is not what you expect or are fed in the usual news stream. Why did it happen? How did it work? What can you learn from it? How can you be inspired by it? What can you bring into your world to adapt and improve? That's a different kind of communications game than the news headline game. George, thank you for that, Mitch. And then Shel, welcome.

So I don't think it's a matter of which are the good news services or sources. I would say all of them occasionally do the right job. The problem is the infrastructure that we've built for news which is now 247 and completely immersive. And so we spend a lot of time filling air. And the way to do that is to be and particularly to get paid to be a commentator on a CNN or Fox, which is a is a real gig for people now is to create as much controversy. So it's all about counting coup, who won, who lost. Ties are boring in that environment. Although there's a very interesting conversation to have one we're not encouraging because we're trying to fill time about compromise and the real work. But that's long form journalism, which talk show journalism is not designed to support isn't. There's no capability there. And the reason I remember that when I first realized this, if you think back to when CNN went live with the after John F. Kennedy Jr's plane went down. And because I remember just realizing this, they were circling where they thought he had gone into the water as though he was gonna pop up and go here I am. And they just talked and talked and talked and talked because they had nothing else that day. It was a Saturday, if you remember. It was a completely non news day and they just had to fill air. Now you would have a a panel about whether or not George magazine was the right way to go or the wrong way to go instead of just talking about his life or the fact that he wasn't popping up. So I think we've built an infrastructure that sucks in controversy or manufactures controversy in order to maintain our attention. So I'll give credit sometimes Fox does good journalism sometimes rather than saying they're Always bad.

Yeah. But you notice how days every story is breaking news.

Yeah.

Shell, welcome.

Thank you.

Good to be here. And sorry I missed the first 10 minutes. So I put in some resources of news media that generally focus on the positive in the chat, but I also wanted to comment on dialogue between left and right. And again, I'm missing some context here because Ken was responding to you and I don't know what you said when I got here, but just from what I could interpolate, there are groups like Braver Angels, which can be very frustrating sometimes, but which. Their whole purpose is to put left and right in the same room and have them talk there. I've been part of maybe some more successful dialogue efforts. For example, years ago, we had something called the Middle East Peace Committee in this area of Western Massachusetts, and we had Arabs and Muslims speaking with Israelis and Jews and having very good dialogues and really looking at how can we make peace? And that was some of the more exciting stuff I've been involved with over the years. So I remain optimistic about the possibility and pessimistic about it becoming mainstream.

Does it need to be mainstream?

No, it doesn't need to be mainstream, but it needs to establish enough critical mass so that it can influence people in the mainstream. You know, the. The hundredth monkey or whatever, thousand points of light. However you want to do it, you need a certain amount of. According to Erica Chenoweth, it's about three and a half percent of the population. If they get actively involved in a movement, in a nonviolent social change movement, they're going to win. So to get that, at least that level of doubling.

Go both ways.

Right.

I'm sorry, three and a half percent going this way or three and a half percent going that way?

Yeah, you could have three and a half percent be Nazis, and that would be a problem because they could achieve their objectives.

We're gonna. We're gonna come back to this very topic next month and get into the dynamics of networks and change and some of the research behind the points that you're raising. Shell and some others will be joined by Bill Bowie, who's been doing some excellent work on that. So that's. That's for next month. Come back then.

He's local to me, by the way.

Okay, Are we ready to move deeper into this conversation in small groups or we. Anybody else want to speak up? All right, we're going to try something new, so I'm going to share my screen for a moment and walk you through this, and then we'll. Alan. Alan. Raise your hand. You want to say something?

Yes.

Yes.

Before we go into the next stage, I did. I was reflecting on this conversation and. And the initial question of how come it is so difficult just to come to the table to talk rather than to yell or strike.

And.

This attaches my attention because as I'm sure I've told most people, I am a cabinet maker, a maker of a table. And what is the shape of the table? For the meeting to make peace, and the table itself has to be attractive. And I think we would benefit for. By considering what really is the shape of the table. We need to identify the questions that we have to deal with. The questions are those that Dr. King exemplified. Racism, militarism, materialism, but also, most centrally, nationalism. I think that we are all part of this system, caught up one way or another in these illusions of false thinking, that somehow race or money or nation is what is meaningful in the survival of ourselves, our spirit and the world. And so we live with a lot of cognitive dissonance that what we see is really different from what we know is a reality. And I just keep coming back to that. What is the. And beauty somehow is the unifier. And so much of what we see is ugly. And what is the beauty of human relation that can somehow transcend it? Anyhow, I just wanted to put that pebble back into the pond before we go on to whatever is the next section, because Gil knows I talk.

It's a good. It's a good pebble, Alan. And I'll take the table, the actual physical table around which you're inviting people to gather as a physical thing, but also as an invitation and a metaphor for invitation. The confessional stuff that Ken talked about happened because somebody invited other people to have a kind of conversation.

Yes, exactly.

That we all do. You know, you can do it with the table. You can do it with a work of art. You could do it with a. Hey, but I'd like to talk with you. Somebody invites somebody else into something. And that seems to be one of the pivotal seeds of what we're talking about here. Ken, let's invite people into breakouts.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Alan. I'm all for solutions that are beautiful. Bucky used to say, if it's beautiful, I know it's the right solution.

Okay, it's not.

So let me. I'm going to share my screen here. So we're going to do is we're going to use something called the Google Jamboard. And I've created a bunch of jamboards already. So can you all see this? Yes. No, can you see my screen? So if you look up here at the top, you see these, this little piece here? These are different jamboards. Each room, each breakout room has a jamboard number on it. And so what I want you to do when you notice, when we open the breakout rooms, notice which room you're in. And then just scroll through here until you get to the jamboard for your room and take your notes there. If you want to take notes, just simply click on a, post it and start typing. That's actually not working for me. Okay, let's see if I can do this again. Yeah, so just, just start typing. Okay. And you can record anything that you think is useful. Hopefully there's enough post its on on these boards to capture whatever's in your room. We have a separate one for the next breakout and any questions on how that works.

And let me just add this. You know, no obligation to, to transcribe your whole conversation. This is what you think is interesting. And the cool thing we think about the jamboards is that you can see what's being discussed in the other breakout groups. We obviously when we return, there's only so much time to share what happened. This hopefully gives you a richer experience of hearing from others of you in the course of this.

These are persistent. They will be there after the call. So you can go and look. Mitch will get you one second. You'll notice at the top we've also got the questions here, so that'll remind you what we're talking about. And then after, in between calls, you can come back to this anytime. So if want to see what happened to someone else's breakout room. Mitch, please.

So we interact with this through zoom or do we visit a webpage that will be linked in the.

I'm going to, I'm going to drop the chat. I'm going to drop the link in the chat in just a second. Thank you for the question. All right, any other questions on this? Okay, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I have something to put into the chat here, which is right here.

Ken, how long will we have in breakout one?

Breakout one is going to be 15 minutes. So note your breakout room number, open the jamboard link, navigate to the frame, click on a sticky note to add text. There's the jamboard link. Very briefly, we just want to hear, how was that? Did the tech, did the jam notes do anything for you? Was it useful or not? Thumbs up, thumbs down. Couple thumbs up, thumbs down. Okay, more thumbs down. Than thumbs up.

I only saw them in our own room. I didn't see the other rooms.

You have to scroll. You have to go to the top and scroll.

Oh.

Some of you. Who said thumbs down? Why? Why wasn't it working?

We couldn't use it whether we were in view mode only.

We didn't have editing privileges.

Okay. I did respond with a broadcast message. Maybe it didn't go out, but I've changed it for the second round. So thank you.

It would have been there been more time.

Okay.

I just found it somewhat distracting trying to listen very intently to a very personal subject to the three people in the room. And then this post it note showed up that was on a completely different subject. I don't even think it was from one of our people because nobody said that. They just posted it. So it just. It like to stop and do that. I couldn't listen.

Right.

Distracting Gil is.

Thanks, Brad.

You're probably seeing a different room than when you were in Brad. So you need to scroll. But I think the point about the distraction of the conversation in the notes is a fair point. Again, this is an experiment that actually.

Was shell in our room putting it in the wrong one because we lost it too.

Interesting. Interesting.

In our room, there were two things. First of all, I kind of realized.

I need to have two screens.

Then I could be very dexterous, but.

That I don't have two screens.

So I really focused on what I was hearing that people were sharing very deeply and I just forgot about the notes.

So that was very.

To me, it was.

The subject was way more than the notes.

Gotcha. Thank you.

Thank you, Christiana. So should we skip the jamboard for the second round? Because we are asking people to go into some deep places and it is distracting to be so. All right. I'm going to recreate the breakout rooms. However, I have to tell you, the question is because we're just learning as we go here, folks. Okay.

Note of appreciation to you, Ken, for doing your best to manage this complicated tech and keeping it approachable for us.

My pleasure. Thank you. So here's our question for round two. What have you learned about establishing, maintaining and repairing trust? And what practical advice can you offer to others as a result of your experiences? What have you learned about establishing, maintaining and repairing trust? What practical advice can you offer to others. Who heard something in either round that they feel the rest of the group should be aware of? Please raise your hand. Use the reaction button there. Raise your hand. And we'll be delighted to hear from you, Brad. Please Yeah.

In both of our groups, we pretty much agree. Correct me, anybody, that it doesn't agree with what I'm about to say, but pretty much all of us agreed that action is important. You can't just build trust, maintain trust, repair trust by saying, oh, I'm sorry, I won't do that again. You actually have to not do that again to bring the trust back, because you could repeatedly. Oh, I'm sorry. I. Something came up. I have to be late again. Oh, you know, I got a flat tire. I'm late again. No, actions speak louder than words.

Thank you, Alan.

Yeah, I think something that.

I think it was Christiana said, try not to break trust. It's. It's awfully hard to rebuild it back. It's a slow process. Better. Better not to.

Mitch, please.

We talked a lot about, and particularly in the second group, after trust is broken, and whether or not what actions.

Or.

Lack of action keeps the channel open to discover what might actually explain what appeared to be a breach of trust as something else that might have been less.

Evil.

And being. Being able to ask questions that inquire about the reasons for the loss of what you perceive as a loss of trust ultimately is the biggest opportunity that we have, but it's also the biggest hurdle to get over.

Did anybody have suggestions on how to get past that hurdle, what they'd done to make it happen?

Well, actually, in the first session, not to speak for everybody. In two cases, it was brothers who came back together near the end of the life of one of the brothers. And it was. In my case, my brother died two years ago. It was the fact that we sat together and he knew he was ill. But in the other case, and I won't say who it is unless they want to volunteer, it was happenstance, apparently, although the other brother, the one who passed, did apparently know they were ill or at least kind of conscious of it. So they didn't know they were going to die, but they were conscious of an illness. So maybe we have a physiological response to that stress, impending death that opens us to things that we weren't open to.

Interesting. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch, That's. I'm the other one here, so it's fine to say my name here. The. In my case, it started with a friend of mine who was running through his 11 siblings and telling me.

Where.

Each one was and how the. Each one was doing and what they were doing and what they were concerned with. And I admired his relationship to his 11 siblings and. And said part of the reason why I admired it because. Was because I had a brother with whom I was no longer in relationship. And he said to me, poking at me, he was teasing me. He said, well, you probably are going to have to deal with that in some moment. And I said, yeah, it's very possible I will need to. And then he said, I'd like you to do that. And he was. He was pulling. He was, I would say pulling my leg, but not in the sense of being funny. He was. He was. He was exercising a right of friendship. And I said I would. And he asked me how fast I would do it, and I did it that same week. And then my brother, it turned out my brother was in other kinds of difficulty at that point. And so he was delighted to have me come back into his life and was grateful and appreciative and thanking me for being back in his life.

And.

And then he suddenly was taken. There was no, there was just no warning that he was anything to, like, how sick he was.

You know, that. That brings up the other thing we talked about in the second session that I was in, which is the. The role of the interlocutor. And I will give credit to Gil because I mentioned him in that he's been coaching me on some of my business decisions and having somebody help me open my mental space to addressing issues of trust helped me make a lot of progress. So maybe, maybe, you know, that also goes to the idea of setting. That it's the environment around us that shapes our opportunities to re. Establish trust, not just us.

Yeah.

And the network of friends. He's a good guy, this, this guy Gil that you mentioned. And many of us are here because we recognize that.

Yeah.

So.

Well, Mitch, the, the environment is part of it, but it's also how we engage with that environment, what we choose to pay attention to or not. Yeah. You know, there's an old. There's an old sage, I forget who the quote is from talking about the, the demise of prophecy in the human world. And the, the normal religious interpretation of that is that God stopped talking to people, but the other possible interpretation is that people stop listening. God's talking all the time, and the environment is there with its cues all the time. And what do we. What do we pay attention to? What do we select? What do we choose to act on?

Yeah.

What do we choose to make?

Well, that's why I cite. The book that I shared earlier is Seymour Saracen's the Creation of Setting in the Future. Society is this notion of creating an environment in which the dialogue and the goals can continue to evolve, which I think is where we are as a society right now.

Just on the, the bit about is God talking to us. I have had twice in my life basically a message that I was there for a reason, that that specific circumstances were happening where this is why I was there. And in one case that resulted in me starting a local movement that saved a mountain when everybody, all the experts said nothing, you can't fight city hall, blah blah blah. City hall was actually on our side on that one, but doing the impossible. But I also felt that calling again and have been much less successful in implementing it in the work I've been doing the last 15, 20 years involving the synthesis of profitable business and social change, environmental healing and the calling was in both cases just way too strong to ignore. Like you were put here to do this. Go do it like okay, I guess I will. And I'm not particularly a religious person. I, I do pay attention to what I call my guides which are around me all the time and we're actively in dialogue with. But these were both places where it was almost like an Old Testament prophetic incident. And as I said, one of them resulted in saving a mountain and the other one has not yet resolved itself after a couple of decades.

George, I'm sorry, just one thing before we go to you, George. You know, to your last point, Shell. This is not about a religious interpretation. This can, you know, you can see this as the, as the voice of the Lord or you can see this as an itch in your own biochemistry or whatever. But we all have the experience of a thought arises, a mood arises, an idea arises, we think something we hadn't seen the thought before see an opportunity we hadn't seen before and we act.

On it, or we don't.

You know, give it whatever kind of interpretation you do, but that this is a phenomenon that we've all lived with varying degrees. MICHELLE I've had the very same one of feeling called and it was not identified with the source, but places where the direction of my life changed because I thought something I hadn't thought before and said I must do this. It's a strange kind of trust, isn't it?

George?

Yeah. In the earlier discussion talking about setting, I remember Robert Ester up drugs in the mind way back in the 60s. Your experience with a mind altering drug is the result of the dosage, the set and the setting. Right? And I think that's true. And you can have dosages of trust and of other things that are there. And I also think in terms of John Boyd the OODA loop, right. Orientation is like setter setting. The orientation is where you come from, what your history is, how you perceive the world. And that allows you to observe and then make a decision in act and then go through that Udo loop once, once again. So there are some, there are some tools that are out there that we can apply from various different, different angles as we go about doing what we do. And behind me is a monastery in, in da LT Vietnam, which I visited just before COVID shut down the world. And what I discovered there in just a regular conversation with, with some people is my instincts have always been right, right. So that was a great lesson for me to say, oh, okay, if I feel that I should do this, I shouldn't question myself. My instincts have been correct throughout my life and I should keep on going with that. But maybe your mileage may vary.

Mine certainly did if I can add a quick story. So when I was 17 years old, I was smoking pot like a lot of 17 year olds. And there was a guy that my father, my father's girlfriend owned a restaurant and they had a taxi company. My dad was the dispatcher. And I got to know this one guy because he was giving me rides a lot and he was my supplier and he would tell me these stories about, you know, trucks and getting busted and stuff. And so I was going to buy some pot from him and I was going to buy about $50 worth. And he's like, well if you can get a better, I can give you a better deal. If you get 100, I'll give you more than twice as much for 100 bucks. So I gave him 100 bucks and he said, okay, I meet you at the bowling alley Friday afternoon at 3 o'. Clock. At 3:15 I realized I'd been taken for a real ride and never saw him again. He left town and I was really pissed. But years later I realized that was a very cheap. That was one of the best hundred dollar investments I ever made because it really wise me up to. I was naive and trusted people way too easily. And so it's kind of the flip side of not just how do you develop a bullshit detector, right? How do you know when it's safe to trust when it's not? And I don't know if it's true for all men. I know Robert Bly had a thing on the naive male, but a lot of young men have to be betrayed a few times to develop that bullshit detector so that they can actually then learn to genuinely trust. And I Don't think we explore that very much. You know, some. Some of the reasons that I'm able to trust people well is because I've been betrayed, which has given me a really good sense of what's going on at a cellular level. I'm. I'm attuned. And this is. Doesn't smell right, doesn't feel right. There's something wrong here. I got. I got a probe or this actually feels really good. And so I just want to throw that into the mix.

Listening to intuitions is really important. And sometimes you listen and you say, well, I disagree, but at least you're going in with your eyes open. But sometimes I. I've been told, you know, don't get into a particular car or whatever.

And.

When I have gone anyway, nothing really bad happened to me, but it was unpleasant, so I started listening more. And generally the guidance is good.

So I wonder, shell I've had the same experience that, you know, the times that I can remember where I have overridden a clear intuition. Every single time I've regretted it. The question that arises for me there is, what do we do? What, what, what, what do we do? What can we do to cultivate intuition that's powerful and trustworthy? Because we can. We can listen to noise in ourselves too. I've done that. But the rest of you, well, one thing we can do, recognize the true signal.

We can query it. We can say, okay, you're telling me not to get into this car. Is that because I'm going to get hurt? Or is it because I just would be better off waiting for a different car? Or, you know, just probe a little. And I find that usually there'll be an answer there and I can evaluate the answer and like, okay, that's not important enough to me. I can. I can not follow the advice I'm being given, and it will not be a big problem. I just started using this as to whether I should open haro queries because it was taking me more than an hour a day to parse through these 200 queries from reporters. And often there would be nothing in it that I wanted or was worth my time to answer. So now I just check in. Should I open this one? Yes, yes. No, no, no, no, no. Yes. And I found that it's batting average is very good if I open one to check. And it was one that I was told I didn't need to open. So far in the week I've been doing this, I haven't needed to open those. And the, the one time that it said yes to me recently, I opened it up and there was a query that was. I felt very appropriate for me to answer and I answered it.

Thank you for that.

We're.

We're approaching our close. Any last thoughts from anybody?

Brad, I was just gonna say I wish I had better intuition when it comes to playing Texas hold'.

Em.

I, I play a lot of that and many times my intuition just is.

Like out the window.

Sorry, just wanted to lighten it up a little bit.

It's practice, isn't it? It's practice. I'm sorry. It looks like Chauncey has left us. But one of the things I've learned from Chauncey, he's said this a number of times, is that one of the most important human capacities is the capacity to make good assessments and in particular the capacity to make good assessments about other people's capacity to make good assessments. So that one lives with me all the way through this story. There's so much here. Thank you all for what you've been sharing. I hope the conversations in Breakout were rich. Ken?

Yeah, I just want to give Peter one. Peter, do you want to just mention about what you've done in terms of setting up a spreadsheet for anybody who wants to add their information to it?

Exactly where we're going to go? Sure.

We created a sort of a self projects spreadsheet. So if you want to find out a little bit more about of the, the members of this group, it's totally voluntary. I think about 10 people have filled it out already. It's on a Google Drive. Put in your name, you know how to contact you, what projects, which things you might want to be needing or wanting. And it's, it'll be a tool if we want to use it to be a little bit more involved with each other beyond just the zoom meeting here. So Gil, I think can send out the invite to the members here or can't.

It's in the mailing. It's in the mailing you got a couple of days ago. It's in the chat if you want to grab the chat and save the chat with the three buttons, three dots at the bottom.

And I also put a link to something called Mattermost, which allows for persistent conversations. So if you join Mattermost, you can make comments. They're always there. So if you want to connect between calls or just put up something asynchronously, you can do that.

And here's a couple of logistics reminders. The next call is a month from today, third Wednesday of every month. Please invite people if you'd like to. I'm not going to read the rest of it. It's there for you to see. I thank you, as always, for a rich and wonderful conversation. And I'm going to ask Brandi Carlisle to play us out. You can dance in a hurricane but.

Only if you're standing in the eye.

You can dance in a hurricane but.

Only if you're standing in the eye.