Living Between Worlds 4.9—Stop Making Sense-Making!

Foreign, Yes. But what sort of provoked us for this week's call, or this month's call is the current popularity of sense making, which puzzles me and kind of amuses me, but mostly puzzles me, it seems an impulse towards something clear and sense settled that may not be available to us right now. Just may not be available. It reminds me of the old joke about the city slicker asking the country bumpkin for directions, only to be told, oh, you're muted, lost. My punchline can't get there from here. Yeah. So. So as we explore the challenges of what Aviva Zornberg calls spiritual vertigo, or what gymnast Simone Biles called the twisties, when your brain and body disconnect when you're spinning in midair, not sure how you'll be able to land or if you'll be able to land, or what Bio Acomolafe calls being generously lost. And of course, as we explore what all that has to do with our current metacrisis world, unlike Simone Biles, we don't have the option to leave the sport. You know, unlike the old Broadway play, we don't get to say, stop the world. I want to get off. So is sense making the only possible response to being bewildered, to being unmoored in these times? What does acomolafe mean? That by being generously lost? Ken, come on in. Let's talk a bit and then we'll open it up to everybody. So I just put the full quote in the chat. This is from one of Bayo's, actually. I discovered it's bio. When he teaches, he says it's time for a bio break. So that's how I remember how to pronounce. His name is bio. This is from one of his videos that. It's a lecture he gave at a church, I think, in Vancouver a few years ago. And this really jumped out at me because I have been involved in asking questions for a long time, and this idea that the question and the answer are tied up and they. They put us inside the box. People say, think outside the box. The way we frame our questions is often the box we're trying to get out of. And I love this idea of confusion, the gift, bewilderment. And I want to ask, you know, I'm looking at my life and saying, where am I bewildered? If you've seen the latest out of Johann Rockstrom's work about the. The. The way in which the planetary boundaries. I think we're now at seven out of nine boundaries have been crossed. I am bewildered that we have not managed to take effective collection action on that. You know, I'm bewildered by a lot of, a lot of what I see that, that people are engaged in that seems to be totally disconnected from the world, as if they're the only ones alive, the only ones who matter. And so I'm lost. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. I don't know how to relate to that at the moment. And rather than try and force it or make sense of it, I'm just sitting with being lost. And when I was in the Boy Scouts, I had a Navy SEAL as my Scout Master and he taught survival. And he said the first thing to do, just like on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is not panic. Sit down, take a few deep breaths, look around, figure out what's going on. And before you make any moves, just do it from a calm state. So I'm trying to cultivate a calm state while I'm lost. It's not easy. And I'm interested in hearing from, from people how they handle that. But let me see if you wanted to say more about this, Gil, before. David, we're, we're. I've seen a lot of threads on LinkedIn lately where people are clamoring about the emergency and talking about the urgency. And a couple of people strikingly have said, this is no time for strategy, it's urgent. And I'm reminded by the, the observation for. Was it, was it Anna de Vere Smith who was. I might have the wrong person. No, it's Nurse Jackie. She was on the show, Nurse Jackie. And she said, you know, being involved in a show about a hospital, you know, we actually studied and I discovered that, that people in emergency situations, there urgency manifests as focus, not as panic. She was on the show. There's people running and clanging and yelling instructions at each other. And she went to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, where wounded veterans were coming in from the theaters of war. And there was no running and there was no shouting and there was no apparent excitement. There was just complete focus and diligence and, you know, in fact, behind that, a strategy and a plan and training and preparation for being still in the midst of the turmoil. So, you know, I think our inclination as Westerners, I find it in myself, is to get out of bewilderment as quickly as possible, figure out where I am, figure out what to do, what's going to solve this problem, what's going to be the next step. And we are sensing in ourselves, hearing from lots of wise people that say, even when it's most urgent, bring it down, take some time to orient and orient, maybe indifference. And all you saw was these guys flying. And if you ask her what's going on, she said, I enlarged my center. I did not panic when I saw them come. I mean, I made myself bigger and I stayed grounded and centered as they came at me. And I think this is something that we could all benefit from, of can we enlarge our center and stay grounded in the midst of urgency, in the midst of emergency, in the midst of chaos, in the midst of feeling lost and bewildered? That seems to me to be really something very worthwhile cultivating. I've been through that practice in aikido, and it's a remarkable experience to move this from the philosophical, abstract discussion into an embodied experience and a way of being in the world. If I focus on the attackers, I go down. If I focus on technique, I go down. If I get agitated or afraid and think about the outcome, I go down. If I stay calm and centered and in motion and accept what's coming at me and blend with it, they go down. And it doesn't matter if it's two of them or four of them or six of them, and it doesn't matter if they have sticks in their hand or not. It all lives in how I be in that situation. And the embodiment is so deep that it shows up on the highway and has saved my life two times that I know of and several times, probably that I don't know of. The real challenge is to be that way in conversations with other people and to be that way in meetings and to be that way in the fray of the meta crisis. David, what you got? I wanted to say that I. I believe one of the major reasons for confusion is how much we're being lied to by various authorities. I. I have cultivated different sources of information over the last three years, and as a result, I have a profoundly different view of what's going on than I would expect most people that are here today. Just as an example, I am extremely aware of how much we're being lied to by official sources of information about the war in Ukraine. Well, David, hang on. Let's not go into the specific lies. I think I'll be using it as an example. Let's not go into the. Let's not go into the specific. Why? Because the list is long. Yes, but how profound it is to be light on such fundamental things that. How are you not going to be crazed and confused? Well, yeah, well, I think you've. You've given us the clue, which is that you cultivate a. First of all, a sense of skepticism and second, a diversity of sources. I learned this back. Oh, gosh. I was. I think I wasn't quite in high school or I was almost in high school living in New York City, and got introduced to if Stones Weekly, who is a brilliant journalist who, who took it upon himself to digest the news every day, report every week on the live. It taught me that one of the critical, inevitable functions of government is to lie. Sonus, who broke the Gulf of Konkin, in addition to what I said, which is for me, the last three years have been a time of epistemological practice. I have had to learn how to tune in very deeply and to have an intuitive sense of who's lying to me and who isn't and, and to sense what is true and what isn't. And. Well, let's. Let's flag that for a future conversation. The epistemological practice and the intuitive practice. That's an interesting dance, and I'd love to hear more about that, but I want to take some other people right now. So, David, thank you for that very much. Jesse, welcome. What you got? You're on mute. Jesse, hi. My first time here. I think. You're back on mute. Doesn't look muted. Just like you lost your audio. Do you hear her? I don't. Okay, Jesse, we're going to go on to Amber while you figure that out. Amber, it says. Oh, there you go. Speak. Jesse. Yes. Something's not working on your screen. Maybe try logging out and logging back in. See if that restores your audio. That's probably the best thing to do. Thank you. Amber, over to you. Welcome. So thank you so much. It's my first time being able to attend, and I'm very excited. So. Yeah. So a little bit about me real quick. So I have a very different approach to PR and marketing. It's very holistic, oriented around sustainability, inclusivity, and, you know, really helping small business owners and community members. So just giving you a background. But one of the things that we've noticed in our work is the fact that if people don't have a set idea of plans and simple action items they can crank through throughout the day, you don't find that collective action, and that's just something that we've been doing research on internally, is how to affect change in a way that activates people in a way where they're able to make the movements that they need to without feeling that fury of emotion. So, you know, I'm really interested in these conversations. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. Michelle Horowitz, you're also muted. It's a thing today, apparently. Yeah. And it's good to see Amber here. I invited her a few months back, and I actually lost track of what I was originally going to say. But I instead will say that allowing for serendipity has been a great blessing in my life. And I once wrote a piece where part of the title was Blown by the Wind, and just opportunities open up that you don't expect ways of engaging. I used to have a T shirt that says, not all who wander are lost. But a corollary is that not who all who lost see it as a problem. Thank you. George Mokra, you're up next. Yeah, to. To a riff off of Sheldon before I go into what I want to say. No shell. Oh. When I go to a. A foreign city, I make it a point to get lost and find my way back again. And it's a great way to learn about someplace else. I've been doing aikido for over 40 years, and there's a thing about rondori, multiple attacks. What happens is that you become the center of the circle. Your center is the center. People are coming to you. You're moving your center to meet them. And it's like centrifugal and centripetal force, like a whirling top right around your center. There was one day I was practicing with a friend, and I was in that space, and he got really nervous. He said, where am I? Where am I? You know, And. And it was disturbing for him, but I felt as if I was in complete control of the situation, that. That I was moving him where I wanted to move him as he came towards me, but he couldn't feel his own center, possibly because I took it all away. I don't know. But the idea is, where is your center? How do you keep your center? And then when you're in that situation where you have multiple attackers, and in Aikido, you're always thinking about multiple attackers, how do you make that your center? The center of what's going on? And in real life, you always have multiple attackers or put attackers in quotes, multiple disruptions, multiple perturbations, multiple things happening that you don't expect and maybe don't want all the time. And that may be some of the bewilderment. And the lesson here is that there is a different posture that can be cultivated over time. Takes Practice, you know, you feel very inept at the beginning. I remember going back onto the mat the day after I earned my black belt and I felt like I knew nothing, beginner again. But the cultivation can produce changes in how we be literally in our physical bodies as well as in our ideas and our conversations and so forth. And some. Maybe there's a clue there to what we're exploring here. Alan Neff, welcome. Yeah, Gil, thank you. I've been coming on and off for over a year and making sense. I'm linking that to root causes. I think there's a lot of people would like to find the root cause of everything. And obviously if you can cut it at the root, then you don't have to deal with all the manifestations. They're all taken care of. But I think you're right that there's something about the situation that we're not going to find a root cause and just solve everything by, you know, peering down deeper and deeper. As you well know, the Buddhists say that the root cause is a threefold of craving, aggression and ignoring. And that's. That sums up, you know, what people are like in an unenlightened state, which is pretty much all of us. So I just wanted to put out that observation between root causes and not making sense. It's a great observation and we certainly hunger for root causes. Sri Nas or Gadata goes beyond the Buddha's threefold and says that the cause of all things is all things. In other words, it's all a tangle and you're not going to tease it apart. And yet you have to understand where you are in the map. So another of the koans that we live with here, Alan. Thank you, Phil. Mildred, welcome. Bill, can you open your mic? Yeah, I was trying to find my mute button there. You know, as I think of my experiences in life, of being lost, all of them involve some pre existing state of thinking I know where I am or where I'm going. And when that contrasts with the experience of being in a place that I know is new, not expecting to have it all figured out, maybe that's more of the generous, generous bewilderment. Because when I think of bewilderment, it doesn't come with a sense of panic, but just an acceptance of the newness of where I am, the fact that there's learning to do. Perhaps we could call it making sense of. But when I think of being lost, it's always been, you know, I'm in Walmart with my dad at age 5 and holding my hand. And I never had any sense that I knew what Walmart was about or how to navigate it. But I knew that as long as I knew where my dad was, then I would be fine. And then, oh, now I don't know where he is. And now I'm feeling this. This panic and this loss. And perhaps the world views we have, the ideas of how the world works, are become objects of grasping that set us up for the feeling of being lost rather than the awareness that we're somewhere new. And. Yeah, nice. Thank you, Jesse. Let's try again. Greetings. Yeah. I'm a physicist who noticed that physics didn't study the designs of nature, only the laws, which I found very strange. And in particular, there's just this experiment in physics. Everybody does throw a ping pong ball in the air and let a strobe light flash and make a dotted picture and then fit a parabola to it. And what it doesn't look at is the tossing and catching, which is, you know, that's the lively part of the process, the energy process, The default energy process of things in motion. Having a fixed pattern isn't what makes events eventful. It's the tossing and catching. And then I studied further and I found a bunch of evidence and then some theory that seemed to prove that every event begins with a growth process, a tossing of some kind. And because of the conservation of energy, because systems can't change instantaneously, they have to change developmentally. And so there are these processes that nature cobbles together to make things, the growth process, which is unsustainable. And everyone reaches a climax of either transforming into something else or crashing. And so if you look around nature, there are just oodles of examples of how growth systems transition to stability without the pain. And frustration that we are having, that it's something about us that makes us blind to what comes naturally for most other things or for a lot of other things. But it's how to respond to the declining value of the growth process and the increase in value of taking care of what grew. You know, after a child is born, their explosion from one to a trillion cells in the womb is over and it's time to take care of it. So that switch is present in every growth system that survives its initial growth. So I thank you, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm going to have to throw a switch here. We need to move out and then go into breakouts. So let me stop you here if I can. Well, if people study it, they'll learn okay, thank you very much for bringing that forward. And Amiel, where'd you go? I thought we were going to breakouts. But I will ask you a question. Since you called me sense making. That's a word I've always felt a warm feeling towards. First heard about it from Carl Weich talking about firefighters in the wild who would ignore their checklists and rules and end up all getting killed. And it's sort of an exploration of meaning making. So since sort of that one of the premises of this, this exchange had to do with sense making, I just wanted to understand better how you were thinking of what is sense making to you. Speaking to someone who has a very warm place in his heart for the concept. Speaking as someone who gets itchy when I hear the term. I'm not gonna. I'm declined to answer your question right now. Accept it. Because we want. I want to take us into breakouts and Jan, if I can have you hold until we come back. That was. Please, we're trying to. So stay with us. Don't go away. Ken, take us into breakouts and explain what we're going to do. Okay. Normally we have. Gil and I generated over 10 questions for this and we thought, you know, that's just too much. So we're just going to send you breakouts and say what is this conversation provoking or evoking in you? And take it from there. We'll have 15 minutes. We'll come back, we'll do a second round and we'll come back and have a long plenary to unpack what we're hearing sound good and what we'll do a little bit differently than usually is. We'll have, we'll have some space for that unpacked between the first and second breakout. We want to have some cross fertilization between you. You'll be in different groups each time. That will hopefully enrich the conversation and then a long harvest together in this in the last half hour. Okay. Okay, here we go. Well, I hope you're conversations were as rich as the one I was in. And once again I'll just ask this time who heard something that really they found shocking or, or really surprising. I would like to invite Glenn to say the last thing he said to the group as a, as a summary of our discussions, if you're open to it. Glenn. Yeah, we were talking about being in awe of the sense making and we shared quite a bit. My comment was Donald was talking about using biochar to enrich the soils and improve the nutrients for the uptake of water and nutrients. And essentially he outlined how he looks at sentence making as a living place making. And that was very intriguing. So thank you, Donald. Other folks who heard something interesting, intriguing, surprising, shocking. Kjell, please. We got into a discussion of all things free will versus determinism and whether people. And whether other kinds of animals that are not people are following their own will or whether they are basically programmed to do what they're doing. We do not have great answers, but we asked very interesting questions. Thank you, David. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the people in my group were interested to hear what I had to say. I was expressing some very radical views that I don't believe are shared widely in this group. And so it was really delightful for me to have dawn, and I think her name was Anne, who were. Who were intrigued to. To make sense out of the world as I was making sense. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna out somebody. Oh, sorry. We have another. Jesse, go ahead. I was just gonna say that I. I'm a little surprised at how it seems not to be recognized generally anywhere I go and in this conversation too, that this is natural. This is a natural process that was recognized 50 years ago by a lot of social groups and scientists and who have studied it since that growth would be a suicide plan and. And that our contradictions will. Would come to cause conflict. And so I'm a little surprised that it's. That it's news. Thank you. Jessica. I hope you don't mind that I share something that you said that really touched me. You talked about the loneliness of feeling like the being lost, being. The bewildered, being confused. Also feels very lonely. And I didn't have a chance in our small group to say how much that resonates with me. I have felt lonely around this for a very long time. And it's one of the reasons I show up in places like this. It helps me to feel less lonely to know that there's other folks out there who are sharing these concerns and also trying to do good work in the world. And I know you certainly are up to that. Yeah, it's. It's part of the value of these kinds of spaces, I think. And part of, you know, the loneliness is coupled with hope at the same time. And that in and of itself is. Is bewildering. It's. It's hopeful that. That this exists. It's hopeful that we're talking about, you know, aligning around living systems as a. As a paradigm, as a way of organizing that is in alignment with Ecology and how the world and life itself has always existed, that's of great hope. And it's deeply lonely that, you know, when this idea is expounded, people get it, but nothing changes. And to work in this is often an exercise in holding tensions and making compromises or saying no to work, as you were saying, Ken. And yeah, both of those things are true at the same time. What is also surprising to me, I think in the context of sense making, but I mean, in a lot of what we're talking about, we kind of entered into our conversation talking about SDGs, and so much in the sustainability realm and social innovation realm orients around morality, doing good. I work in tech, and there's much ado about tech for good, doing good for people. Whereas when we're talking about realignment, a kind of regenerative paradigm realigning around living systems and the way that ecology works, it's not about morality. Morality is, you know, maybe an outcome or good things can happen, but it's. It's a different. It's a different lens. It's not good or bad. Good or bad are human constructs. And yeah, I was struck in our conversation. Jesse, I think mentioned, or Ken, you mentioned Kurt Vonnegut's quote of, you know, we'll be the first species to. What is the quote? Help me out again. We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective. And Jesse offered the provocation that actually, no, we can look at Rome, we can look at Atlantis, we can look at other, you know, societies and, and we could probably even look into the natural world. And the point that I'm trying to make, maybe awkwardly, is like, that this has happened is part of a great experimentation. It's not, you know, people suffered. Yes. And good things came out of it. Yes. But it's a sort of timescale question. That it has happened is part of why we study history is part of. Part of the learning of the experimentation of society. And just viewing change as part of experimentation kind of removes the morality from it in a way that I think helps clarify this conversation. Thank you very much. Dale. Good to see you, my friend. You're still muted mute. Oh, thank you. Good to see you. So a couple of things. One is the. There's a line from a Wendell Berry porn that I mentioned in one of the smaller groups that I thought was appropriate. He said that the mind that is not baffled is not employed. And so, you know, it's kind of an interesting, interesting Thing, the other thing I was going to say, and I, I was trying to remember with regard to what we're aware of. And I've been. There's a little conversation about what we're aware of. And I think over the last two or three years I read William Cotton's book Overshoot, and I'm sure a number of you have read that. And as soon as I read that, I understood the fix that we were in. So I think, I think there's not, it's not that there's not a fair number of people that understand the fix that we're in. It's more as the. Another person who's gotten on my radar screen, Nate Hagens, the great simplification, by the way, I think that's one of the most incredible resources around in terms of the 60 or 70 people he has interviewed over the last. The last two years. An amazing group of people. And anyway, so he talks about the, the superorganism. And I think it, you know, it, it has a mind of its own. And as soon as you begin to see one fun fact, and that is that every barrel of oil does seven years of human work. A barrel of oil does seven years of human work. So the fact that we were going to get ourselves in trouble with that stuff is, is it to me, is pretty straightforward. So, yeah, I know we're in a jam. We're. We're in a serious jam. And so much that I don't even think in terms of hope and despair anymore. I don't think that's the, that's the, that's not the, the dichotomy that works for me anymore. But the, the, the point is, is that there is this narrows that we're going through that has been talked about in this forum many times. And there is a way for us to move through those narrows, I think, which is more skillful than not. And I think that's what has us show up in places like this. Thank you. Thanks, Dale. Thanks for being here today. Stuart. Yeah, Quickly, I just want a shout out to. To Philip who, who raised the question of, you know, the, the joy of exploring and connecting and dancing with other people and how there's so much incredible juice in that, you know, as opposed to just showing up and trying to be the smartest person in the room. Very nice. I think. Oh, Phil, you are still here. Okay. There I was trying to find you on my screen. Yes. Just to build on Dale's mention of Nate Hagen, those of you who get my newsletter saw a reference to a conversation last week between Nora Bateson, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagen. I gave you the link to the invite. It wasn't live yet. It should be live sometime this week. It's a remarkably rich and disturbing and enriching conversation. And Nate comes in for last half hour. One of the things he said, he says he no longer talks about problems and solutions. You know, those of you who've been here for a while heard us raise that question because solutions implies that there's a way to tie things up neatly in a ribbon and a bow and move on. And so Nate's talking about problems and responses, not problems and solutions. That's a theme I've heard from many of you in this conversation. Yeah. Dale, there's a thing you're saying about hope. I'm reminded of a quote from Ken Bartlett who said a mountain climber doesn't help, he prepares. I don't know why this just popped in my head, but. And I'm not an expert in this, so, Stephen, anyone knows better than I, please correct me, but I understand that the Velvet Revolution that Baslav Havel and his compatriots decided this system is too entrenched, it's not going to change. So we're just going to act as if we're already in the new world we want to create. And that has always stayed with me as something. What if we just acted as if we're going to operate as if we're in the new world where we're paying attention and we're operating out of living systems principles and we're using. I don't really like the term biomimicry because it's, again, it's putting us outside of biology. We are biology in action. But what if we behave that way collectively? What if we look at the way that different social organisms are able to take care of themselves? Zumba, Emma Tamson, Willie Barker. Who says ants travel millions of miles every year, but they never have any traffic jams? How come humans can't do that? Ken, what would, what would be one or two examples of acting as if. Acting as if, you know, I, I have to draw from my own own life because I don't know that I have any large scale examples. But I just, I try to act as if my, my behavior matters. So for years I've been using these little green scrubby things from 3M, you know, and I noticed every time I get a new one, I scrub, I see all these little microplastic particles going down my drain and I'M really concerned about microplastics. So I got rid of, I threw out a whole bag of them and I bought steel wool pads. I'm acting as if my behavior matters. I try to look at, you know, I haven't bought plastic bags or plastic wrap in 30 years. I bought shower caps, various sizes, put over my bowls, you know, and I rewash the bags that I get from people and I buy. So I just. These are minor little things, but I, I behave as if the way I behave actually matters. And I think a lot of people around me say, oh, it doesn't matter, you know, I, I'm just, you know, I'm unconscious. They're unconscious. They, they buy stuff with lots of packaging. I write to Costco all the time. I complain about their packaging. I speak up. I'm lonely. You know, not a lot of people doing this, not getting a lot of traction. But it doesn't stop me from doing it collectively. If. What would happen if the million people said to Costco, from here on out, whenever you package something, I'm gonna unpack it right here in the store and leave this big pile of plastic for you to take care of. That would start to move things upstream. Maybe. I don't know. Story was told, I think it was in Sweden where years ago, folks would, they get to the checkout stand at the supermarket and they bought their, you know, bought their tube of toothpaste, which is a tube in a box in a shrink wrap. And there at the checkout stand, they would take off the shrink rack and take out the box and leave it there because the law was the company's responsible for the take back. And you know, you can imagine if enough, enough people start doing that, the supermarket starts calling the manufacturer saying, wait a minute. Yeah, that, that's a great example. And I think that was in Sweden. Yeah, they, they are now. It's actually in Germany. But anyhow, they're moving it upstairs extreme to, you know, it's designed. We used to say in the middle when I was in the Coast Guard rolls downhill, right? So we're at the bottom end of, of the re. We're the receiving end at the bottom of the hill. We've got to go up and say, you know, stop making all this plastic. And you're up against a very big lobby that's like, no, no, plastics are good. You know, who cares if they're clogging every river in the world? Yeah, well, you're saying if there's the lobbying, which is one piece of it, there's the not buying it and handing it back and just, you know, clogging it up in another way. We got George and Phil queued up here, and then we're going to be close to time. George, First of all, an example of as if a paradise made in hell. Every emergency and disaster situation, people act as if. Right. Because they have to. And I think I lost what else I was going to say. But that's okay. That's good enough. That's pretty good enough right there. Thank you, Bill. Bill can come off mute. Sorry. Loss. I dropped out there for a second. But just to comment also on the as if idea, as if we're living in the world that we want to create Already, I think for me, that's really tried to take the form of not focusing on the transition, the problem, and particularly our survival, but focusing on what are the institutions that will exist in a world in which survival will not be a regrettable outcome, and just going ahead and trying to build those institutions now, because it's so easy to imagine that we construct a world in which we technically solve some of the problems facing us while leaving no one happy or thrilled that we did. And perhaps that is the organic development from the growth phase into a more sustainable phase, not antagonizing the growth phase, not seeing it as something needs to be shut down in order to be replaced by something else. But just go ahead and start doing that, replacing, start living in that way that would make survival not regrettable. Thank you. Jesse, would you mind if we jump to John? You've had a few chances to speak and we haven't heard from him yet. So I'd like to give him a moment and there's time. We can come back to you. Okay. John, are you there? Yeah. Thank you. I love this idea of acting as if, Ken. I really appreciate your surfacing it. And, you know, I find hopeful things all the time and the miracles that come out of all this confusion and wonderment. And just before this, I was just reading this annual report from a company called Draper, Fisher Kaplan. They're a. They're a. A foundation that's funded 300 different social entrepreneurial activities across many of the SDG categories. They've got about 10 of them here, and these people are all acting as if. And I just recommend they're in Menlo park, founded by Bill Draper and Renee Richards, the VC founders. But Draper Fisher Kaplan is an incredible example of a company that's putting its money where its mouth is and acting as if. And their last annual report is 300 million people directly impacted so far by that. That work. Thanks, John. Jan, can you put that information in the chat? It went by pretty fast and the transcript isn't keeping up. Okay. And Jesse, over to you. We need you to be real brief because we're coming up on. Well, the thought was to just be in learning mode. It's very engaging. And when you see something out of place, ask, well, why is that? Or see something in place that somebody seems to have just allowed to happen magically ask, why is that? And things like noticing. One of the first things that shocked me was realizing that every dollar I earn or save is spent on accelerating the system. I think of that as every dollar that you spend or save or drop on the counter is a vote for the world that you want to live in. We don't just vote every four years. Well, it does. We're voting every day. Thank you, Jesse. Ken, closing thoughts, mostly gratitude. This has been a very rich call for me. I'm delighted to see new faces and familiar faces and just I'm. When Gil and I started this, we really had no idea what. How this call was going to unfold. But I'm very gratified by the conversations I've been in and listening to the plenary session of, you know, people coming back and sharing. So thank you all for showing up today and for participating so fully and deeply. And I hope that we will continue to see you here in the future as we find new things to provoke you with in terms of creating conversations. Thank you for many things here. For me, it's a very rich call. For me, also, two things that stand out in the moment. One was Tasha's observation about sense making. She said, well, we don't have to be grasping for it. You know, it could happen, but the grasping takes us off. It's like. It's like in the aikido metaphor of grasping at the opponent instead of being in the flow. And Ken, what you just said about acting as if is very powerful. I can already feel the ripples moving from that. And it brings up this quote that I haven't had in reserve. But it feels timely right now from Anais Nin, who said, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. And so what if we acted as if we were the people we wanted to be in the world that we wanted to be? So let's. Let's be generously lost together. You can dance in a hurricane Only if you're standing in the eyes.