Living Between Worlds, with Grace, Dignity, and Power #2.1

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Gil Friend. I'm CEO of Natural Logic. We're a strategy consultancy working with some of the world's biggest companies, as well as some of the most creative small companies and cities and regions to discover and deliver on the massive value available from applying 3.8 billion years of open source research and development to the challenges of business and policy and building a world that works. You can call me a trim tab for Trim tabs. Some quick logistics for the call Please keep yourself muted until you're recognized to speak to be recognized to speak, raise your hands either on screen or in the button that Zoom provides to you, or use the chat for ongoing conversation, both to raise questions and among yourselves. If you're responding to somebody in the chat, please put their name in your response, because otherwise it's impossible to track who's talking to whom about what. You can always save the chat using the three dots in the lower right hand corner of your chat screen. We are recording the call. We will also save the chat. Those will be available later. The recording will be posted to my YouTube channel. We'll email the chat out to all the participants. So this is a this is an open conversation. This is not a private conversation. We're being streamed live to Facebook, so be aware of that as you go. How how this is going to go is that I'm going to speak for about 20 minutes, offering some perspective and provocation. We'll have an open discussion among us all for about 20 minutes. We'll then go into breakouts of five people where you'll have a chance to talk in smaller groups with more airtime about a few questions that we'll pose for you. And then we'll come back for 20 minutes discussion in the round and then about 10 minutes for closing and some requests and offers that I'm going to make to you. And then we'll rinse and repeat monthly with some other things to come, which I'll describe in a little bit. This is not the kind of webinar that you've probably been seeing all over the web for the last year or so. This is, you know, I've seen thousands of panels of talking heads. I want to try to have this be as interactive as possible with a large group. My hypothesis is that it's possible to do something together in conversation about the things that we care about. And most recently summed up beautifully for me by Tyson Luca Porta from Australia, who said yesterday in one of those many panel Zoom conversations Maybe the best you can do is make a good story and share the story, and that way the ideas last forever. So let me start with a poem that I wrote about two years ago this month. How do we work this weaving of worlds? Challenging ourselves, challenging enough in words and song and attention, cultivating our tribes and our worlds, our interpretations and our possibilities, feeding each other, each fluidly shaped by the other, enabling just maybe something new to emerge. The great philosopher Yogi Berra observed some time ago that you can observe a lot by just watching. Great phrase maker. I've been observing a lot this last year. I've been listening a lot. One of the things that I've observed is that people want meaningful conversations that move worlds. So this is an invitation for us to have some of those together once a month to start and then more to come. I envision this not as a place for debating strategy, though that's important, but as a laboratory of a sort and experiment together, a laboratory of conversations. Maybe this grows into a community of inquiry and a community of practice. We have shared concerns. That's why you're all here, I assume. We have different perspectives and that's part of the richness that's available to us in this conversation. Again, more at the end of what we're planning to do with all that. Let me start with a brief poll. Gene, could you bring the first poll up? Those of you who've been on these calls before know that I talk a lot about mood. Mood is sort of your. The way you show up in the world. The way the world shows up for you.

What's your.

What's your mood today? How would you describe it? Ambition would be. There are possibilities here, and I like that. Acceptance. Things are the way they are, and I can accept that. Resignation. I don't like how it is, but there's nothing I can do about it. Resentment. It's their fault. Where do you find yourself? And you know this can change throughout the day. It can be different from day to day, but often there's a mood that you find yourself waking up into, typically on a given day. Okay, 80% of you voted. There's 15 more. Hit a button, folks. Okay, Gene, you want to share the poll with people so we can see it? That's who's here right now. It's kind of what I expected and it's kind of what I was looking for, and I think that's why you're here. So I call this living between worlds, because that's what we're doing right now. We're in multiple senses, we're living between civilizations or a world order, if you will. Each of us trying in our own ways to build a new world in the shadow of the old. So what do we care about? We care about the climate crisis. We care about the pandemic, which may be an era, not a single pandemic. We care about the public health of the living body of humanity and the Earth. We care about justice and dignity. We care about power, perhaps in ways that you don't realize. We care about the pursuit of happiness, that brilliant phrase in the Declaration of Independence. We care about change in the conversations that we have, and I would say in the conversations that we are, and as I said, creating new worlds in the shadow of the old and new selves in the bowels of the old selves. So what are we looking at? Greta Thunberg in the Financial Times a couple weeks ago said, as she often does, you meaning us, meaning the adults of the world are not dealing with this crisis like it's a crisis. And she's absolutely right. But it's deeper than a crisis. Crisis is when there's a hurricane on the Gulf coast and the Red Cross and FEMA go in and take care of things in the crisis. This is something much more profound and existential than that. And it's not just climate. The UN says that we're on the edge of an abyss, which includes the collapse of biodiversity. We don't talk about that or even know what that means. There's the persistent cancer of racism in this country. There is the disconnect of ourselves, each of us from the living world and from each other, enforced in the economic and the economics and the politics and the norms and the structure of late capitalism and the financialization of everything. I call it capitalism because of the focus of the world we're in now on capital above all else. What are the characteristics of it? The structural flaws, Accumulation without limit, extraction without reciprocity, alienation without relationship, abstraction without bounding, generation without regeneration. That's all there. Maybe that's in the background. The massive geopolitical shifts underway in the world with the rise of China presuming in their eyes their rightful place as the global leader they've been for thousands of years, except for a lapse of a couple of hundred huge challenges for the west and what we've known as the post world economic order, which is gone. One of the voices I've been listening to is Peter Zehan, a geopolitical strategist. And I learned a remarkable thing from me. I Learned that when I look at the world, my eyes have an agenda. I'm looking for an outcome. I have a desired future that's always alive in me, that always colors what I'm looking at. Zehan, to my eyes, is much more dispassionate and neutral. Just trying to call what he's seeing. They're not saying what's good or bad, not saying what should or should not be, just observing what's there. And it provides a very different perspective on the challenges that we face here. I mentioned the cancer of race in this country. You know, there's good news here. That conversation has shifted to a significant degree in the United States. Not enough. Somebody observed yesterday that the second biggest crime in relation to the Derek Chauvin trial, second after the murder of George Floyd, was that we were all uncertain about what the outcome of that trial would be. Sort of a measure of the mess that we're in. But there's progress. The conversation is on the table in a different way than it was a year or two years ago. The environmental conversation has shifted profoundly. Renewables are plummeting in price, are out competing fossil fuels across the planet. Electric vehicles are on the rise. The Green New Deal is actually on the table in the White House and in boardrooms around the world. ESG is on the table. Environment, environment, social and governance as a factor in the management of capital around the planet. One third of investments in the United now go through some sort of ESG filter. Sufficient. No. But there it is. It's part of the norm of the conversation now. Things that all of us have been saying for the past decades. I think everybody on this call has the experience of being dismissed as crazy or at least a little bit on the edge. These things are part of the normal story right now and yet were in the grip of what Alex Steffen calls predatory delay. Everything too slow. Nothing at the speed or scale of the crisis. In the face of all that, I'm also listening to what I'd call the background. To the background, how we speak and listen to each other, how that shapes us and literally shapes what we are able to see and what we're able to hear, colored by the histories that we bring to the moment that we're in right now. I hear a background of anxiety around the world and a background of dissatisfaction, of people frustrated with the way things are now. And it can play out in very different ways that can feed progressive and regressive strategies, it can feed collaboration, it could feed Trumpism, but it's there, I would say Pervasively, there's massive creative action and innovation around the world. It's not what gets covered in the daily news, but, you know, when the networks you're in and proliferate that times a thousand, there's enormous activity at the grassroots level, at city level, in companies and neighborhoods around the world. There are also conversations of resignation, of, like, you know, we're in deep shit and maybe we're doomed. Do we accept that? The. You know, a lot of people that I hear say it's over on climate, there's no way to turn this now. To an extent, I agree with that. There will be suffering. But can we reverse the trend? That's a different story. I think we can. I think most of you here, having polled ambition on the poll, would agree with that. I also hear weak interpretations about power, particularly on the left. I hear too much whining about fairness and Hypocrisy. Oh, Mitch McConnell, he's such a hypocrite. It's not about that. He's the master player of the game of political power. He understands the rules. He runs them well for the purposes that he's organized. Complaining about hypocrisy or unfairness or trying to shame people who can't be shamed isn't what gets us to where we want to go. It's playing a different game of power in its many dimensions. Not necessarily power over, but power from. You know, the definition in physics is the ability to do work. And we all of us share in power, that is political, military, the power of force, police forces, armies, and so forth, power of ideas and the power of social relationships and the respect and trust that we build together there. So I'm inviting us into a fourth forthright conversation about what power means to us. How do we learn to embrace it and use it and use it for the things that we care about. You know, this was, to my mind, this was a strategy on the part of the Republicans and the Trumpers, a strategy of apoplexy to make us so crazy that we sputter in dismay and get frozen like deer in headlights. And we came out of it. We had a remarkable election last year. Trump is gone, but it was damn close. So this is something where we have work to do in mastery to achieve. And there's. And there's something to be done around how we listen to each other and how we interpret other people's interpretations. In the world of social media and tweets and headlines, which are themselves interpretations of articles, which are themselves interpretations of complex phenomena, we've gotten very simplistic about how we form judgments about other people based on knowing very little about them. And here in this country, for example, we have sort of two games that we're in. One is winning elections and enforcing policy, which means beating other people who disagree with you. But if we're going to ever do something like reweave the social fabric of this country and the communities that we're in, then that also takes engaging with people that we disagree with, and that takes listening, listening deep to them, not narrowly. My wife and I had a conversation last week about Joe Manchin in relation to the filibuster. And Jane was angry that Manchin was not going along with the democratic unity around changing the rules around the filibuster. And I was too. And I realized we've never seen what he has said about this. I looked at articles, there was nothing that described what he's actually saying, except no. And we found a long. I guess it was a letter, an article that he wrote that I'll tell you, I disagreed with, but I respected because it was clear that here was a thoughtful man with a perspective as a senator of a very small state and a perspective on the constitutional compromise and the role of the filibuster in protecting the rights of the minority of the smaller states against the larger. As I said, I disagree with them. But having read that piece instead of the headlines, I, I could have a different conversation with him and his supporters than I could if I'm just running off of the high level disagreements. This is what I'm hearing in the background. The challenge that we have, as I see it, is to reinvent everything. Everything. I've heard this from people as diverse as Kathryn Greener, a Six Sigma sustainability consultant working with corporations from around the world, to Fernando Flores, one of my most important teachers who talks about the reconfiguration of everything in language. We need to reinvent everything from the technology that we live with, which in fact is the easy part, and it's moving along well to how we live our daily lives, to the workings of the economy of an entire planet, this planet. And to do that in one generation. It happens in ways that are big and small. Biden tomorrow is going to announce what appears to be a 50% greenhouse gas reduction goal for the United States by 2030, which will drive all sorts of change through everything that we deal with. Wall street firms are competing with each other to get their investments out of fossil fuel and into sustainable development in various ways. We just did a report in collaboration with folks in the UN Secretary General's office benchmarking 60 of the largest finance firms in the world. $100 trillion under management, benchmarking them against their ESG claims and actual actions. Corporations are competing with each other to see who can be carbon neutral faster. Cities are ratcheting up their plans. Many of you know that I had the honor of working with the city of Palo Alto for five years, where we crafted what was then five years ago, the most aggressive climate action plan in the United States. And it's now basically table stakes. Nothing impressive about it anymore. It's like everybody knows the bar is far higher. It has me wondering how change happens. We know it does. We see small change in many ways. Mothers Against Drunk Driving. What was that? 40 years ago, two mothers of children who had been killed by drunk drivers changed the conversation in the United States about what is acceptable. When I was a kid, it was cool to be able to hold your liquor and drive. Sorry to say, I didn't do that. That's what the mood was. And now it's unacceptable everywhere you go. I was at a street fair in San Francisco six months before COVID hit. Food trucks up and down Market street. Trash bins between the food trucks, green, blue and gray. And as I often do whenever I go into an institution, I looked into the bins to look at the compliance impeccable. No signage. No signs that said, put this here, put that there. No pictures on the cans. Everybody just knew as the norm in this culture what to do. There are historic, historic examples that are big. FDR in the Great Depression, transforming the economy of the United States. And we can talk about that story a little later. FDR again. World War II, JFK and the Apollo. Moonshot in the 1960s. The scale of COVID investment. Last year, 2% of the global GDP went to military, as it often does. 9% with the COVID pandemic. I don't know about you, but I never heard anybody say, where's the money going to come from? We just made it happen. One other example, in terms of making it happen, Gray Brecken, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, saw a slideshow that he did a few years ago of the infrastructure of the United States and the Great Depression. And I realized that everything that I took for granted as the kid growing up in the 50s in New York City, everything I took for granted, the bridges and the tunnels, the libraries and the parks, the roadways, the sewer treatment plants, everything that was the normal of my life was created as an intentional act of national will in the middle of the Great Depression, with 25% of Americans unemployed and no money. So that rings for me as a metaphor for the possibility. When I observe history, I see that. Well, actually, let me quote our friend Vladimir Lenin on this. I don't quote often, but Lenin said that. For a long time, nothing happens and then everything happens at once. So here we are poised on that. One thing that is certain is uncertainty. This is the rule of the rest of our lives. We don't know what's coming at us. We don't know when it's coming at us. I'm out of the game of trying to predict anything, but I'm trying to attune myself to see pattern and see moves that may be beneficial and see where I can contribute in a meaningful way. This is the game of the rest of our lives. My question for you is how do we embrace rather than resist the uncertainty? How will we live with grace and with dignity and with power in support of the world that we want to bring forward? So let me ask you, what has this provoked for you? Timothy? Unmute yourself.

Well, yeah. Well, thanks. Thanks very much for this gathering and for providing the occasion to have such a conversation. And I think it's critical that we give some thought to. What is it? To go back to your Lenin quote, Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Then everything hits. Is a classic emergent reality for lots and lots of movements. In the predatory delay realm. I keep in my mind pretty consistently the line from Bill McKibben that when it comes to climate change issues, winning too slowly is the same as losing. I know because we've known each other for quite some time. As long as we've known each other, we've had people predicting, well, we're at the tipping point. We're over the tipping point. It's all over. People can talk, yak, yak, yak. The climate change is done. We were already at tipping points that can't be reversed. Indeed, now we're in the tough, tough, tough conversations that will come up intensively over the next five years. I would suggest that the only thing we can do is intentional geoengineering.

Will.

Be something that will absolutely keep coming back as the reasoned, technologically possible response. How we think about how we're thinking about these things and how we feel our way through them is absolutely critical. And sadly, we have to also keep in mind Greta Thunberg's admonition that it's really mostly important that we act as if we loved our children.

Bill McDonough, the architect sums up his focus by asking people, clients, companies, countries, how can we love all the children of all species for all time? For me, that's as potent a definition of sustainability and regeneration as I've ever heard. Stuart Levine.

Thanks, Gil, and thanks for kicking this off. I think that to do nothing would be to sit in a place of terrible resignation. As I look at the demographic on this call today, I see a lot of people similarly aged as myself, elders. And I think, as I think about it, we don't have quite the energy that we did in the 60s, but we do have a lot of wisdom, maturity and presence.

Well, at least experience.

At least. Okay, at least. And I think it's just so critical to be engaged with all of those critical, I don't even want to use the word issues, all those critical crises that are all around us, so that when we go to bed at night and when we die, which is perhaps not that far, far off, we can at least be able to say to ourselves, you know, I did the best I could in the circumstances of the day, to day where I am, or to say it a little differently, do what you can where you are, with.

What you have about, about what you care about. We don't all need to be doing the same thing. We all need to be doing something about the things that really matter to us most. Carolyn Raffensperger. Good morning or good afternoon where you are.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Gil. I wanted to respond about dealing with uncertainty. In the work that I've done on the precautionary principle, which is the decision rule, that you take action in the face of scientific uncertainty and the likelihood of harm, and the instinct is to reduce that uncertainty through more science, more studies, and in the face of irreducible uncertainty or. One of the things that I talked about with James Hillman, the Jungian psychologist, was that you choose beauty, that if there is no other path forward, choose beauty. I think that that gets at the kind of grace that you mentioned. How do we live in a world with grace? And the uncertainty leads us to choose, I think, beauty when we can't, when science isn't going to help us out of the mess immediately, when the choices are limited in the moment. It seems to me that our radar for ugly is a biological cue, that if it's ugly, we're going to agree more that standing in the back behind a diesel bus stinks than we are about which kind of furniture is the most beautiful. But the instinct for beauty, I think, will help us navigate uncertainty.

A beautiful observation about beauty Carolyn Gregory Bateson writes eloquently about beauty as part of the evolutionary process. So thank you for bringing that up. Let's go to Michigan. Alan Haber, Greetings, old friend. Yeah, unmute. Thank you.

Thank you. It's so nice to see you, Gil and all these other people who I must have known 20, 30 years ago. So this actually last comments go directly to what has this conversation arisen in my mind.

And.

The situation we are in is a war system that needs to be transformed to a peace system. We need to make peace. No peace without a meeting. No meeting without a table. Focus exactly on what is the demand for system transformation in its magnificent details. Bring it to the table. And indeed, beauty is the test of truth. And the table that me and my experience created for the purpose is beautiful indeed. It transforms the square representing earth and what is to the circle representing heaven and what is to be from the war system of being bound by the principles of racism, militarism, consumerism and nationalism. The fourth side of this Martin Luther King triad. And take as a common objective now the affirmation of the culture of peace and non violence and the political program. Put it out in a beautiful way. Use this peace table that was designed at the end of the Vietnam War, served for peace in a family for a generation and then was the opening table at the La Hague appeal for Peace in 1999 with Nobel Peace Prize winners around it. A table with karma for the world transformation that we need.

Alan, where is.

So that. Anyhow, I put that forward as peacetable.

What is it?

Table.orgpeacetable.org Please put it in the chat. Put it in the chat. It's waiting for its call to service. And I think everyone realizes that a system change that we need and we need to define what is the old system and the new system and all the elements of it fit together and indeed a beautiful regenerative way.

Alan, thank you. Thank you very much. My friend Frank Dixon at a gathering at the UN a couple of years ago, trying to summarize what we're up to, he and Terry Molner and Jed Emerson, folks some of you know, came up with the phrase systems change for the common good. A lot of people say system change, but system change for what? And you know, everybody's got their different story, but that that settled the room of 50 people down and said, yeah, that's it. And common good goes to the notion of the commons, which needs to be part of our conversation here. Let me. Alan, thank you. Let me go on to that.

Is what we are doing in Ann Arbor, the creation of the Ann Arbor community.

Alan, I need to move on. I got a lot of hands raised. Thank you. Marianne Gallagher. Greetings.

Hi, Gail. Thank you so much for that beautiful overview. And I think keeping the overview in mind is really helpful for me. I want to make a suggestion that one of the things we can do or have our eye on is changing the conversation that it is the enrolling conversations that pull us into a new future one piece at a time, as you so well described. So fly a man to the moon and back safely by the end of the decade.

Marianne, it's the enrolling conversations that create a present future.

Yes.

In us right now. Coloring what we see.

Coloring what we see. I think that's what we can do very well, each of us and collectively, if we name the conversations that we, that we want to live into. So I'm personally proud to be part of the Geyser Glacier. Like, we move slowly, but we are together a force.

Anyway, thank you. There's something to happen with the geezers and the youngins, you know, and there's a, there's a whole bunch of chatter on the web about, oh, the boomers did this and that. I think it's. For me, it's kind of silly because I see the world much, much more through class and other characteristics than just age. But I'm finding a growing number of young folks wanting the mentorship of geezers and geezers wanting the passionate energy and enthusiasm of the younger folks. And Felix Kramer, I don't know if you're on the call today, has been creating something called Active Allies to partner folks up intergenerationally on projects and collaborative work. So there's a big opportunity there. Thank you, Marianne. Hank in Hawaii.

Hank in Hawaii. Hi.

Greetings.

Hank Rogers in Hawaii. I have a foundation called Blue Planet Foundation. We moved the ball in Hawaii towards having a renewable, 100% renewable energy by 2045 future. And I plan to do the same thing for the rest of the planet by starting an alliance of all people and all organizations that are trying to solve the problems. And the way I look at this is that the solutions exist. It's just people are stuck, like they have lead boots on or something like that. And they just need to move. And a lot of people just don't know what to do or how to go about it because the problem looks like it's so big. And the answer is that we have to give it to them in bite sized chunks. So there's two things I'm doing that are specifically aimed at moving people. And I'm only looking for solutions that, that are worldwide solutions. One is in addition to a star rating system which we all use when we go to buy something at Amazon or choose a hotel, have a planet rating system, five planets. In other words, how good is this product or this service for the future of this planet? And I want people to start choosing the products or the services that are better for that future. And then people who provide that product or service will have to compete to make better products. And the other side of it is actually my background is I'm a computer game designer. It's kind of an action game where it's action yelp for actions. And basically we're looking for actions that will move the ball in the right direction. Starting really small, like turn up a light switch or pick up a piece of garbage and ending with huge things like creating legislation which is going to change a country. As you go up a level, you get more and more interesting things to do. We use a little bit of AI to figure out what it is that you might be interested in doing or that you might actually do. But the whole point of all of that is to actually move the ball. So I'm past talking about these things and I, and I'm only looking for things that are going to change things in the right direction.

And let me ask if you could put, you know, put some links in the chat so people can track down what you're doing. You know, on the first, on the, on the, on the rating systems, I will just say there's, number one, there's a lot of folks trying to do that. So at some point these things will have to come together and harmonize. Second, as somebody who's, who's done that a couple of times, we built what was the precursor, the precursor to what became the B Corp. Rating system and have done rating systems for some of the largest retailers in the world. It ain't easy. The complexity of getting it sufficiently inclusive and sufficiently simple is a really tough design challenge. I wish you well in doing this and let people know where to find you. Nancy Clanton, good to see you.

Good to see you too. I've really enjoyed this conversation. One thing that we have been doing to help with the situation is to work with communities on establishing micro grids where they take control of the renewable and be able to share from neighbor to neighbor and to get every single pavement in the United States all hardscape, photovoltaic, and then do induction looping. So we can charge our cars as we drive and use those batteries to come back and connect in and change all our distribution to D.C. in our homes. We can immediately, I mean, like Hank, what you said, we can immediately reduce energy by at least 80% just by going micro grid and with those technologies. So I just wanted to offer that out.

Thank you. Nancy, let me suggest in the chat that you connect up with Hank, who has a hand, has a business with a hand in that story. And also Josh Harrison, I think I saw you here, who is looking at ways to. Yeah, there he is. Josh, wave your hand. Of turning hardscapes into greenscapes at scale with phenomenal impact in economics. So you all need to know Nancy's been a leading, what do we call you, green architect, sustainable design person for a very long time, one of the generative forces in this field. So thank you. Let me just take one more and then I want to take us into the breakouts. Let's see. Greg Delon, where are you, sir? Here you are.

Thank you so much. Greg Delon, I'm with the Deep Blue Institute working on blue economy models in Louisiana.

What's going on, Greg?

What's the blue economy?

What does that mean to you?

Basically, green and clean ocean based technologies and economic activities, particularly climate change and protecting and saving coastal communities and island nations.

Right.

Sidebar. Please meet Tim Moshe. If you haven't done that yet, hook up in the chat. Keep going.

So, yeah, I just wanted to follow up on a couple things, you know, that Stuart said about a bit of the demographics of the group here and also Alan's comments about war and peace. And Gil, you comment a little bit about the different generations and citing work of our friend Debbie Acosta, the former chief innovation officer of San Leandro who's starting a podcast called Smart City Diaries. And I think one of the things, I think, you know, looking at the demographics of this column, what we're talking about, there's a lot of fractionalization going on. Some of your political comments, Gil, and that fractionalization Debbie's really uncovering that this generational change, these different generations, there is a fair amount of existing animosity. But I think it's another case where the animosity, the slight animosities that exist or don't exist are being leveraged to create fractionalism and to create conflict.

And it's divide and conquer. It's the time honored strategy.

Exactly.

So, you know, there's so much wisdom on this call. There's so much wisdom in your community, Gil, and in all our communities. I think that's really one of the things that I'm learning right now from the discussions with Debbie and other folks is that we need to figure out a way to reduce that fractionalization, that division. And the critical component is reaching out to those millennials, reaching out to those generations, and figuring out the best way that we can pool our energies, our intelligence, and our momentum so that we don't spin out of control. And we're seeing it here in New Orleans, the crime rates going up, violent crime. It's been really rough. We have to figure that one out. It's a tough one.

Greg, thank you. Let me use that as a bridge into the breakouts.

Gil, just a quick comment before you do that.

At the risk of throwing your agenda off.

There's only three more people with their.

Hands up, myself being one of them.

And I'm just wondering if we could just do those three. I'm finding this conversation incredibly valuable.

We can do those three if you do them really succinctly. Go. It's your webinar. So you decide.

But I just thought, this is great.

And if it means five minutes less.

In the group, I like the big.

Group, but that's my personal opinion. Yeah, we've told on this before, and some people want big groups, some people want small groups. Some people want me to just lecture for 90 minutes. So I'm trying to weave among that, but thank you for that. Okay, so we got David Schoenbrunt. David, really succinct, Please.

Yes. I have no hope.

But I'm still an activist, and I still feel inspired.

To move forward despite not having any.

Sense that it's leading to something.

I wanted to say that, David, if you had any sense that it was leading to something, we might call you delusional, because who knows? You know, who knows what connects the actions each of us take with the whole cascade of phenomenon in society? I feel inspired to act, and I keep doing so.

And I have a whole new level.

Of energy that came in as a result of my.

Of healing my inner trauma. And so I'm just feeling my way forward.

Good deal. I'm glad you're here, David. Monica. Monica, you got to unmute. Yeah.

Thank you.

And please keep it succinct if you can.

Yeah.

I was wondering if at some point we could also.

I live in Puerto Rico.

I come from here.

And something that I've seen a lot.

Is that a lot of discussions are.

Being made in larger, richer cities than this.

And in my environment, I see a Lot of people that are much poorer. Puerto Rico has been in an economic.

Depression for 15 years.

And it makes our solutions have to.

Be much more local, much low tech, much more. It's geared more towards personal self sufficiency.

And resilience and sustainability than it is within a community.

But it's very much different from the.

Kinds of solutions that I'm seeing in.

New York and California and other places.

Yeah, but in a way, that's an advantage that you have in Puerto Rico. Francisco. It's tougher to do things with the rich neighborhood rooting and vitality. So take that and run with it. Thank you so much for bringing that up, young Ballard.

Yeah, I just. Thank you, Gil, and thanks for the convening. I just wanted to say that in 1994, I reserved the URL commons.org I've been stewarding that for 25 years, waiting for the group to show up that knows what to do with it. And they're showing up and they're in their late 20s and early 30s. We're part of a group called Leave Normal behind, which is a new renaissance group of that younger generation. And I just want to share with the group that I believe that the solution is going to be creating what humans have always done in the face of overwhelming odds is to create extra governmental, extralegal entities that care for the whole. And I think that's the direction we're going to see is we're going to see all kinds of things happen that are not legal institutions, they're not formal. And if anyone wants to go and look at leadership, Santa Barbara county that I founded 30 years ago, you can see a model of any community that can learn together through that community conversation. Almost 500 focus groups to perform that curriculum so far.

So just offer that as a direction.

Good offer. Please put links in the chat. And it reminds me that this is a good time for people to reread Murray Bookchin. And if you haven't read them before, read them for the first time, because this is this and what Monica said, this is where Murray's profound work has focused over the years. So check that out. Brad Warren, you provoked this last little flurry. So you get to close it and then we'll go to breakouts. Go ahead. All right. So back in my freshman year in college, 1969 or 70, limits to growth was published.

I don't know how many of you remember that. And it just reminds me of the.

I believe it's the French proverb, the more things change, the more they stay the Same. And we're having this conversation 51 years.

Later and it seems like almost the same conversation.

And so my philosophy at 70 years old now is most of you are.

Familiar with the starfish story about the two people walking down the thing and that. Okay, some are you shaking your head.

But the bottom line is the kid picks up a starfish after being told.

There'S thousands of them here. What difference does it make to throw them back in? You're not going to be able to.

Get to all of them.

And he picks up one, throws it.

Back in the ocean and said, I.

Made a difference to that one.

So for me it's small micro actions like putting food into people's cars.

Every Thursday morning I volunteer for two hours to load boxes of food to people who don't get more than that box of food that week. Global.

Yep. But what can I do globally? I'm not really sure what I can.

Do is what I can do.

Like Stuart was referring to earlier, do.

What you can with what you got right now.

And Brad, you know, you referred to 50 years ago. Let's go back 2,000 years ago. A sage named Rabbi Tarfon said back then that whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it's terribly important that you do it. So with that, let's go to breakouts. We're going to take you into groups of I think four. You'll have 20 minutes total. You'll have take one minute. We're going to rely on you to manage your own time tightly here. Take one minute to introduce yourselves to each other and then take two to three minutes each to answer these questions with each other. And then we'll come back into the large group and have some debrief on that. And we'll have to figure out how to fit more into less time in the future. But Gene, take us away into breakouts. So welcome back Everybody. We had 24 groups. We've got about 15 minutes for report outs. We won't hear from everybody. We'd love to hear from a few of you. So somebody please raise your hand and tell us not so much what happened, but what moved for you.

I did raise my hand. I just am so glad you're doing this, Gil. And I really look curious to see where it goes. I just want to share my clarity that there's no existing legacy institutions institution that's going to do what needs to be done. That we have to form new planetary level institutions that are extra legal and extra governmental. And that's what's always changed history. I Refer you to the assemblies movement in the south that probably none of.

You ever heard of that transformed the state of Virginia in the 70s and.

Was shut down, of course, once it started work.

Well, we have to create new institutions. We have to capture and transform existing institutions.

They will follow.

This is a game of both. Well, this is what I was referring to earlier about inside and outside, you know, and it's a challenge that I think many people here have taken on and it's a difficult one. So for me, I've been really looking at this a lot lately. I've intentionally focused my career at going inside existing institutions and trying to bring a new perspective into that. I mean, in the most concrete terms, showing companies that they can make new, make more money. That's their example. Existing model by operating in harmony with laws of nature. And you know, it's slow grind and it has had impact, but it risks being captured. It risks being, you know, done in the least possible ways for their own reasons. It risks burning us out with the resignation of those institutions. That's one part of my being. Another part of my being, I suspect, like many of you, is outside those institutions, trying to create new ones, challenging the existence of the existing ones, you know, ranging from reform to burn it all down. Which is the range that we hear, you know, from, from our allies. Some of us choose one or the other of those paths. Some of them try to straddle those horses and ride them both. My, my, My only specific comment, Jan, to what you suggested. This is what has to happen, is that that's what has to happen for you. So go for it. Your job is not to convince everybody else to do the same thing as you're doing, but to do what you're doing. Invite people in, recruit allies, and encourage other people to do where. Where the passion is for them. Let's some other hands. Thank you for doing that. Yeah. Want to tell us about your group, Stuart? Well, our group was two people and we enjoyed getting to know each other. I can't say that I think that we came up with.

I can't say that I have changed.

In any way, but I feel so I'm doing the right thing. And I think Bruce probably does too. Bruce Preville was in there with me. Great. Thank you. Anybody else care to share? Joshua, Josh, Harrison?

Hold on, let me get off mute. I don't think we actually managed to answer your questions directly, but I think the act of connecting with four people in our group was itself kind of an answer to your question. I thought I came out of that experience with a really renewed sense of just how broad, how wide, how distributed the responses are across every axis you could think of, from spiritual to practical to technological. And I just think that's probably the way forward is this combination of self organizing and formally organizing work. And I just. It rings true with what I'm doing anyway. But it just felt kind of independently validating to hear that in these very accomplished conversations that were happening in our group among people who had no other connection but you.

Good, thank you. Somebody else. You realize that I'm not above calling on you.

Hey, Gil, it's Kevin.

There's a couple names up, so I.

Was going to wait for you to choose somebody. So I think you said what moved versus what happened. So what moved for me is I got a jolt of energy and enthusiasm. I was on the phone today with a client who's a global water leader.

And he really was talking about, you.

Know, getting unleashed and, you know, being a wrecking ball and doing some damage. Right. Like getting outside of the normal box.

That we all play inside, which was really exciting.

And I told my group where I would start.

I got a team that's really good at having leadership groups name and articulate.

The current paradigm they're stuck inside of in language and then, you know, when.

Once they can see it, they can.

Do something about it.

So I'm really excited about finding multi stakeholder groups that have complex situations where.

There'S a lot of smart people, but.

There'S a lack of alignment or there's a lack of speed and you know, diving in and seeing how we can do some things together. But like a really tangible, practical on the court. Like somebody knows there's a specific problem and a specific solution, but we can't get everybody organized to get it done. So I just see that being really possible on a dirt industry level.

Thank you. I'm sorry, my screens are flipping on me. Well, Gail, Terry, go ahead.

This is Terry.

Go ahead. And then George, I think you said.

For me to go ahead.

Yeah, go ahead, Terry.

Yes, well, I came in late, but I shared something in our group and if Owen and Alan are okay with it, I'll share it. Here it is that I see one of the new inventions being something I've spoken with you, Gil, about in the past. The emergence of common good capitalism, that the mergers and acquisitions of companies over the last two decades has resulted in duopoly monopolies everywhere like Lowell's Home Depot and CVS Walgreens. And so what I see emergent is something that's quite radical, which is that the companies like Lowell's and Home Depot would get to.

With 25% of Americans unemployed and no money, that rings for me as a metaphor for the possibility. When I observe history, I see that. Well, actually, let me quote our friend Vladimir Lenin on this. I don't quote often, but Lenin said that. For a long time nothing happens and then everything happens at once. So here we are poised on that. One thing that is certain is uncertainty. This is the rule of the rest of our lives. We don't know what's coming at us. We don't know when it's coming at us. I'm out of the game of trying to predict anything, but I'm trying to attune myself to see pattern and see moves that may be beneficial and see where I can contribute in a meaningful way. This is the game of the rest of our lives. My question for you is how do we embrace rather than resist the uncertainty? How will we live with grace and with dignity and with power in support of the world that we want to bring forward? Let me ask you, what has this provoked for you, Timothy? Unmute yourself.

Well, yeah. Well, thanks. Thanks very much for this gathering, Gil, and for providing the occasion to have such a conversation. And I think it's critical that we give some thought to. What is it? To go back to your Lenin quote, nothing happens. Nothing happens. Then everything hits. Is a classic emergent reality for lots of movements. In the predatory delay realm. I keep in my mind pretty consistently the line from Bill McKibben that when it comes to climate change issues, winning too slowly is the same as losing.

And.

I know, because we've known each other for quite some time, as long as we've known each other, we've had people predicting, well, we're at the tipping point, we're over the tipping point. It's all over. Even though people can talk, yak, yak, yak, the climate change is done and that we were already at tipping points that can't be reversed. Indeed, now we're in the tough, tough, tough conversations that will come up intensively over the next five years. I would suggest that the only thing we can do is intentional geoengineering.

Will.

Be something that will absolutely keep coming back as the reasoned technologically possible response. How we think about, how we're thinking about these things and how we feel our way through them is absolutely critical. Sadly, we have to also keep in mind Greta Thunberg's admonition that it's really mostly important that we act as if we loved our children.

Bill McDonough, the architect, sums up his focus by asking people, clients, companies, how can we love all the children of all species for all time? And that's, for me, that's as potent a definition of sustainability and regeneration as I've ever heard. Stuart Levine.

Thanks, Gil, and thanks for kicking this off. I think that to do nothing would be to sit in a place of terrible resignation. As I look at the demographic on this call today, I see a lot of people similarly aged as myself, elders. And I think, as I think about it, you know, we don't have quite the energy that we did in the 60s, but we do have a lot of wisdom, maturity and presence.

Well, at least. At least experience.

At least. Okay, at least. And I think it's just so critical to be engaged with all of those critical, I don't even want to use the word issues, all those critical crises that are all around us so that when we go to bed at night and when we die, which is perhaps not that far far off, we can at least be able to say to ourselves, I did the best I could in the circumstances of the day to day where I am, or to say it a little differently, do what you can where you are, with what you have.

About what you care about. We don't all need to be doing the same thing. We all need to be doing something about the things that really matter to us most. Carolyn Raffensperger Good morning or good afternoon where you are.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Gil. I wanted to respond about dealing with uncertainty in the work that I've done on the precautionary principle, which is the decision rule, that you take action in the face of scientific uncertainty and the likelihood of harm, and the instinct is to reduce that uncertainty through more science, more studies and in the face of irreducible uncertainty or one of the things that I talked about with James Hillman, the Jungian psychologist, was that you choose beauty, that if there is no other path forward, choose beauty. And I think that that gets at the kind of grace that you mentioned. How do we live in a world with grace and the uncertainty?

So that anyhow, I put that forward as peacetable.org what is it? Table.org peacetable.org Please put it in the chat. It's waiting for its call to service. And I think everyone realizes that a system change that we certainty leads us to choose.

I think beauty when we can't, when science isn't going to help us out of the mess immediately, when the choices are limited in the moment it seems to me that our radar for ugly is a biological cue, that if it's ugly, we're going to agree more that the standing in the back behind a diesel bus stinks than we are about, you know, which kind of furniture is the most beautiful. But the instinct for beauty, I think, will help us navigate uncertainty.

A beautiful observation about beauty. CAROLYN Gregory Bateson we need and we.

Need to define what is the old system and the new system and all the elements of it fit together and indeed a beautiful regenerative way.

Alan, thank you very much. My friend Frank Dixon at a gathering at the UN a couple years ago, trying to summarize eloquently about beauty as part of the evolutionary process. So thank we're up to he and Terry Molner and Jed Emerson for bringing that up. Let's go to Michigan. Alan Haber, Greetings, old friend. Yeah, unmute. Thank you.

Thank you. It's so nice to see you, Gil and all these other people who I must have known 20, 30 years ago. So this actually last comments go directly to what has this conversation arisen in my mind and the situation we are in is a war system that needs to be transformed to a peace system.

Folks, some of you know, came up with the phrase systems change for the common good. A lot of people say system change, but system change for what? And you know, everybody's got their different story, but that, that settled a room of 50 people down and said, yeah, that's it. And common good goes to the notion of the commons, which needs to be part of our conversation here. Let me, let me. Alan, thank you.

We need to make peace. No peace without a meeting. No meeting without a table. Focus exactly on what is the demand for system transformation in its magnificent details. Bring it to the table. And indeed, beauty is a test of truth. And the table that me and my experience created for the purpose is beautiful indeed. It transforms the square representing earth and what is to the circle representing heaven and what is to be from the war system of being bound by the principle. That is what we are doing in Ann Arbor, the creation of the Ann Arbor community.

Alan, I need to move on. I got a lot of hands raised. Thank you. Marianne Gallagher, greetings.

Hi Gail. Thank you so much for that beautiful overview. And I think keeping the overview in mind is really helpful.

Racism, militarism, consumerism and nationalism, the fourth side of this Martin Luther King triad. And take as a common objective now the affirmation of the culture of peace and non violence and the political program. Put it out in a beautiful way use this peace table that was designed at the end of the Vietnam War, served for peace in a family for a generation and then was the opening table at the La Hague appeal for peace in 1990.

Helpful for me. I want to make a suggestion that one of the things we can do or have our eye on is changing the conversation that it is the enrolling conversations that pull us into a new.

Future 19 with Nobel Peace Prize winners around it, a table with karma for the world transformation that we need.

ALAN Weiris.

So that anyhow I put that forward as peacetable.org what is it? Table.org peacetable.org Please put it in the chat. Put it in the chat. It's waiting for its call to service. And I think everyone realizes that a system change that we need and we need to define what is the old system and the new system and all the elements of it fit together and indeed a beautiful regenerative way piece at.

A time as you so well described. So fly a man to the moon and back safely by the end of the decade.

Marianne it's the enrolling company conversations that create a present future.

Yes.

In us right now. Coloring thank you very much. My friend Frank Dixon at a gathering at the UN a couple of years ago trying to summarize what we see.

Coloring what we see. I think that's what we can do.

We're up to he and Terry Molner and Jed Emerson folks some of you know, came up with the phrase systems change for the common good. A lot of people say system change, but system change for what? And you know, everybody's got their different story. But that that settled a room of 50 people down and said yeah, that's it. And common good goes to the notion of the commons, which needs to be part of our conversation here. Let me let Alan, thank you. Let me go on to that is.

What we're doing in Ann Arbor, the creation of the Ann Arbor community.

Alan I need to move on. I got a lot of hands raised. Thank you. Marianne Gallagher Greetings.

Hi Gail. Thank you so much for that beautiful airy. Well each of us and collectively if we name the conversations that we that we want to live into. So I'm overview and I think keeping the overview in mind is really personally proud to be part of the geyser glacier. Like we move slowly but we are together a force anyway helpful for me. I want to make a suggestion that one of the things we can do or have our eye on is changing the conversation that it is the enrolling conversations that Pull us into a new future. Future one piece at a time, as you so well described. So fly a man to the moon and back safely by the end of the decade.

Marianne it's the enrolling conversations that create a present future.

Yes.

In us right now. Coloring what we see.

Coloring what we see. I think that's what we can do very well, each of us and collectively, if we name the conversations that we. That we want to live into. So I'm.

Thank you. There's something to happen with the geezers and the youngins, you know, and there's a. There's a whole bunch of chatter on the web about, oh, the boomers did this and that. I think for me it's kind of silly because I see the world much, much more through class and other characteristics than just age.

Personally proud to be part of the geyser glacier. Like, we move slowly, but we are together a force.

Anyway, thank you. There's something to happen with the geysers and the youngins, you know, and there's a. There's a whole bunch of chatter on the web about, oh, the boomers did this and that. I think it's. For me, it's kind of silly because I see the world much, much more through class and other characteristics than just age. But I'm finding a growing number of young folks wanting the mentorship of geezers and geezers wanting the passionate energy and enthusiasm of the younger folks. And Felix Kramer, I don't know if you're on the call today, has been creating something called active allies to partner folks up intergenerational. But I'm finding a growing number of young folks wanting the medley on projects and collaborative work. So there's a big opportunity there. Thank you, Marianne. Entre ship of geezers and geezers wanting the passionate energy and enthusiasm of the younger folks. And Felix Kramer, I don't know if you're on the call today, has been creating something called active allies to partner folks up intergenerational. Hank in Hawaii.

Hank in Hawaii. Hi, Greetings. Hank Rogers in Hawaii. I have a foundation called Blue Planet Foundation. We moved the ball in Hawaii towards having a renewable 100% renewable energy by 2045 future. And I plan to do the same thing for the rest of the planet.

By on projects and collaborative work. So there's a big opportunity there. Thank you, Marianne. Hank in Hawaii.

Hank in Hawaii. Hi, Greetings. Hank Rogers in Hawaii. I have a foundation called Blue Planet Foundation. We moved the ball in Hawaii towards starting an alliance of all people and all organizations that are trying to serve solve the problems. And the way I look at this is that the solutions exist. It's just people are stuck like they have lead boots on or something like that and they just need to move. And a lot of people just don't know what to do or how to go about it because the problem looks like it's so big. And the answer is that we have to give it to them in bite sized chunks. So there's two things I'm doing that are specifically aimed at moving people and I'm only looking for solutions that are worldwide solutions. One is a in addition to a star rating system which we all having a renewable 100% renewable energy by 2045 future and I plan to do the same thing for the rest of the planet by starting an alliance of all people and all organizations that are trying to use when we go to buy something at Amazon or choose a hotel, have a planet rating system, five planets. In other words, how good is this product or this service for the future of this planet? And I want people to start choosing the products or the services that are better for that future. And then people who provide that product or service will have to compete to make better products. And the other side of it is actually my background is I'm a computer game designer. It's kind of an action game where like it's action yelp for actions. And basically we're looking for actions that will move the ball in the right direction. Starting really small like turn off a light switch or pick up a piece of garbage and ending with huge things like creating legislation which is going to change a country. As you go up a level, you get more and more interesting things to do. We use a little bit of AI to figure out what it is that you might be interested in doing or that you might actually do. But the whole point of all of that is to actually move the ball. So I'm past talking about these things and I'm only looking for things that are going to change things in the right direction and work.

Let me ask if you could put some links in the chat so people can track down what you're doing on the first, on the rating systems I will just say there's number one, there's a lot of folks trying to do that. So at some point these things will have to come together and harmonize. Second, as somebody who's done that a couple of times, we built what was the precursor to what became the B Corp rating system and have done rating systems for some of the largest retailers in the World, it ain't easy. The complexity of getting it sufficiently inclusive and sufficiently simple is a really tough design challenge. I wish you well in doing this and let people know where to find you. Nancy Plantin, good to see you.

Good to see you too. I really enjoyed this conversation. One thing that we have been doing to help with the situation is to work with communities on establishing micro grids where they take control of the renewable and be able to share from neighbor to neighborhood and to get every single pavement in the United States all hardscape, photovoltaic and then do induction looping so we can charge our cars as we drive and use those batteries to come back and connect in and change all our distribution to D.C. in our homes. We can immediately, I mean, like Hank, what you said, we can immediately reduce energy by at least 80% just by going micro grid and with those technologies. I just wanted to offer that out.

Thank you. Nancy, let me suggest in the chat that you connect up with Hank who has a hand, has a business with a hand in that story. And also Josh Harrison, I think I saw you here, who is looking at ways to. Yeah, there he is. Josh, wave your hand. Of turning hardscapes into greenscapes at scale with phenomenal impact in economics. So you all need to know Nancy's been a leading, what do we call you?

Green architects Immediately reduce energy by at least 80% just by going micro grid with those technologies. I just wanted to offer that out.

Thank you. Nancy, let me suggest in the chat that you connect up with Hank who has a business with a hand in that story. And also Josh Harrison, I think I saw you here, who design person for a very long time, one of the generative forces in this field. So thank you. Let me just take one more and then I want to take us into the breakouts. Let's see. Greg Delon, where are you, sir? There you are.

Thank you so much. Greg Delon, I'm with the Deep Blue Institute working on blue economy models in Louisiana.

What's Blue economy?

Greg was looking at ways to. Yeah, there he is. Josh, wave your hand. Of turning hardscapes into greenscapes at scale with phenomenal impact in economics. So you all need to know Nance has been a leading, what do we call you? Green architect, sustainable design person for a very long time, one of the generative forces in this field.

What's the blue economy?

What does that mean to you?

Basically green and clean ocean based technologies and economic activities, particularly climate change and protecting and saving coastal communities and island nations.

Great. Saibar, please meet Tim Moshe, if you haven't done that yet. Thank you. Let me just take one more, and then I want to take us into the breakouts. Let's see. Greg delong, where are you, sir? There you are up in the chat. Keep going.

So, yeah, I just wanted to follow up on a couple things, you know, that certainly about a bit of the demographics of the group here. Thank you so much. Greg Delon, I'm with the Deep Blue Institute, working on blue economy models in Louisiana.

What's blue economy, Greg?

Also, Alan's comments about war and peace. And, Gil, you comment a little bit about the different generations. And citing work of our friend Debbie Acosta, the former chief innovation officer, San Leandro, who's starting a podcast called Smart City Diaries.

And.