Social Ecologist Stuart Hill Wants You To Lie—BOLDLY! (Living Between Worlds 6.8)

Welcome everybody. I'm Gil Friend. I'm CEO of Natural Logic and an ontological coach helping world changers change worlds. And along with Ken Homer, your host for this series of conversations for possibility, this is Living between worlds for August 20, 2025, the middle of our sixth year. Of these conversations, I began these during COVID with the name at that point of the Only Way Out Is through. And a few months in we changed the name to Living Between Worlds, inspired by the prescient quote from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary who said that the old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born and between is the time of monsters. And as I've said before, monsters for us conjures fire breathing dragons and lots of talons and so forth. But the Latin root of monstrum is a divine messenger of catastrophe. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse, both shelter and warning at once. So that felt like an appropriate title for the times that we're in the liminal space, that we're moving through the uncertainty that surrounds us at just about every level. And how do we live well, with courage and grace and power in these times. That's our theme. For those of you who are new, just to let you know, we have we have talked about pandemics, sustainability and climate systems, politics, business strategy, personal strategies and many other themes along the way. It's been a rich conversation and we're glad to have you here and hope you'll explore the ARK archives if that's of interest to you. And last month we had a rollicking conversation about dictatorship and democracy, inspired by Jean Sharp's book of a similar title, talking about strategies for nonviolent non cooperation to thwart either the rise or the presence of authoritarianism. A group of you have volunteered to work on a grand strategy paper, so perhaps more about that another time. So thank you all for being here. Those familiar faces and the new faces in the room. I'm really pleased today to introduce my old friend, Stu Hill, Dr. Stuart Hill, emeritus Professor Stuart Hill, Emeritus professor of Social Ecology. I met Stu when we were both active in the sustainable agriculture and regenerative agriculture world. That was a long time ago for me, but a continuing focus for him at McGill University in Canada and now at Western Sydney University in Australia, where he is coming to us at an ungodly early hour. So sue, thank you for being willing to do that and just a fascinating career and powerful insights and a really creative toolkit about social change and change in policy and how human beings interact with complex systems in a way that actually open new ideas and move things. And I thought it'd be really fruitful and rich to share some of his perspectives and tricks of the trade with you all. And so, Stuart, welcome.

Very happy to be here.

And let me ask you this as a first question. What is social ecology? I should know because I actually lectured at the Institute for Social Ecology at Goddard in Vermont 100 years ago. But you're in the trenches on that, so tell us a little bit about what that is.

Well, I also lectured there and had to stand in for Murray Bookchin when he was sick. And so social ecology is really looking at the whole picture. And the whole picture for social ecology is the relationships between the personal, which for a lot of people includes all the psychological processes, the social, which for social ecologists assumes that it includes economics, politics, all the social services, business and all those things. And it doesn't privilege economics. And this is where we have a difference between the so called triple bottom line, which really is economics and then society and the environment. So it's not a very balanced view. And the other part of social ecology is the environment and all the aspects of it. And then a third area, which for me is the unknown. And for some people it's the spiritual and it's the rest. And there's a relationship between all of these things. And when we look at social change, what we find out is invariably people who have solutions for anything leave one of those areas out. And so they set off to bring about change, which doesn't work. And then it's sort of depending on who it is. Oh shit, I forgot the people or. Oh, I forgot the environment or whatever it is.

Yeah, when you were talking about economy and society and the environment, you know, it brings to mind the common image of those as concentric circles. And of course, years ago somebody flipped them around and had environment as the larger circle and society within that and economy within that, which in fact is what the evolution of human history has been, Right?

Yeah. And just incidentally for me, because we're all on a terrestrial plane at this minute, most life in the terrestrial area is actually in the soil, out of sight. So there are most species and most biological things going on and it's going on in the soil and that's usually left out. Mostly we think about eagles and wolves and lions and tigers and in Australia, koala bears and so forth. But actually they're minority actors in the process of enabling life and an environment that's suitable for the rest of us.

So it's not just dirt. Right. It's how people dismiss it.

Yeah. And I should say that in that environment there are mites and springtails and fungi and bacteria and so forth. And in fact, the smallest beetle in the world that lives in that environment is named after me. So it's called microdina. Hilly.

Way to go. So you've been, you've been at this for a long time. You've been, you've trained I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of students in various places. How do you, how do you take the concept, the orientation that you just talked about and make that real in a very pragmatic way for the folks you work with?

Well, mostly by listening, actually, not by talking, by finding out what people are interested in. So each of those areas that I mentioned, some people are more interested in the social and want to work with social change systems. Some people are interested in the environment and want to save various species and environments. And some people are interested in personal change. And so whichever one it is, that's what I engage with. And in all of these areas, like you mentioned about working on democracy, well, we actually work on cooperacy, which is the next stage on from democracy. Democracy is really just 50 plus one. And you're still stuck with power relationships when you deal with democracy. But what you actually need to work with is cooperacy. And one of my students wrote a book called Cooperacy. And it's the only way we're going to have political systems that actually can function. As long as we're still trying to make people democratic. We're still stuck in the groove of power, power relationships.

So is cooperacy like sociocracy?

It precedes sociocracy. Sociocracy. This is one of the things that goes on in our society. People are forever coming up with branding their, their particular version of thinking. And so I, I prefer to use the word cooperacy because it's a, it's a, a visual word that enables you to think about cooperating and collaborating and listening to one another and working together and holding hands. Sociocracy is a long way down in my preference for terminology.

Cooperacy is certainly more immediately visually evocative for me at least. But you said democracy is still tied up in the games of power. Isn't there always power? Isn't that always a feature of human relationships in any form?

Well, not if you've done enough psychological recovery.

Say more.

I run workshops on leadership and the strategy is, how do you become an anonymous leader if you're wanting to be an anonymous leader? It only really is possible if you're working in a large group without an ego, and working on a long time frame and a large space frame, and using indirect strategies that engage with the whole system. And all of those things are missing in conventional approaches to change and sustainability.

Well, let's forget the conventional approaches for a moment and drill in here a little bit. I mean, somebody once said that it's amazing what you can get done if you don't care who takes the credit for it. Tell us more about anonymous leadership. How do we, how do we cultivate that in ourselves?

Well, all of those things I mentioned, I think for me doing psychological work is absolutely essential because all of us were born in our society traumatized. A birth in a Primitive society takes 20 minutes from beginning to end, and in our society, on average it takes seven hours. So if you were designed for a 20 minute experience and you had to survive seven hours of getting born, we're all born traumatized. And so we're all in recovery from early stages. And then unless you're breastfed, you're traumatized again, having some foreign substance stuck in your mouth. And for all of us, when we're traumatized, We're in a recovery process. We're constantly trying to recover. And we go on doing that spontaneously as a small child up till the age of about 7 to 11 when we actually give up. And we realize the only way we're going to survive is to adapt to the mess we're in. And so all of us have two types of self. A core self that is spontaneous, empowered, aware, clear about visions and values in the present, and collaborative. And to survive, we have to develop a whole lot of selves that are the opposite of these, which are disempowered, unaware out of the present and with patterned behaviors. So I'm sorry to say, as I look at all of you lovely people, all of you are mostly because of the age you are functioning out of your adaptive selves. And that the only way you can function as an anonymous leader or as a responsible human being, as a loving person, is, is to get back into your core self. And so one of the ways to do that is to remember when you were a small child, what were some of the things that were precious to you? A pet, a place in nature, a book that was read to you, a favorite aunt or uncle or a loving parent, and reconnect with those, those memories. Because when you go back into your childhood at that stage, it actually connects you to your core self. And so it's your Core self that I'm wanting to be communicating with today, I'm communicating from my core self. So I don't, I don't. For example, it doesn't matter to me if there's anything I say that's useful to you. It doesn't matter to me to say that you learned that from Stuart Hill. I would be absolutely happy for you to say that you discovered this phenomena and that it's yours, not mine. So that's what, what anonymous leadership is really like. It's what I'm demonstrating right now.

And, and you did. You know, I was going to ask, I was going to say, I don't expect that we can unlock all of our lifelong trauma in the course of this phone call, but by talking about re. Presencing an experience, childhood where I was in core self, something shifted in me.

Yeah.

Instant. So I discovered something.

Yeah.

And I'm remembering it associated with you, but it doesn't have to be right.

And so this is where really important communication goes on is between my core self and your core self. And the same with all you, you others who are watching is, is my aim is to communicate between our core selves. The minute that we get into pattern behaviors, you know, you've stepped out of core self. And one of the commonest patterns that it, in terms of the things I was explaining is denial. So when we're, when we're wounded and traumatized as a child, the only way we can survive that is to deny that that happened. And so this is what goes on in a lot of therapy is people breaking through their denials. And people might say, oh, that happened to, it probably happened to my wife or my husband, but it didn't happen to me. Or it happened to obviously happen to Trump or Gorbachev or Putin, but it didn't happen to me. Well, it happened to all of us. And we're all to some extent in denial about all the traumas that happened to us. And I remember when I first got into, to therapy, my wife got very depressed when her mother was dying and she went into therapy. And I had grown up in England and I thought, well, that's good for women. I didn't, it didn't occur to me that a man would need therapy. And, and anyway, as an Englishman, I thought it only applied to Americans. Anyway, that, and, and eventually it looked so interesting what she was doing. I went into therapy and, and I was blown away by what happened and then trained as a psychotherapist and in fact ended up being a psychotherapist to a royal family for some time. And so I've had incredible experience with people in therapy. And eventually I offered therapy where people could only come and see me once. And I'll just explain this briefly because it explains about core self and trauma and all the things I've mentioned. I didn't set out to only see people once. I just thought one day when I was driving along, what can I offer that's not available? And I thought, there's nowhere you can only go once. And so I did that. And what I found was that people did phenomenal amount of work. And the sessions I, people came and did, I said, they can last as long as you like. And everyone went over an hour, and only one out of hundreds went over two hours. And people were finished with the bulk of what they needed to do in under two hours. And one woman, who was actually a senator in the Canadian government, had been in psychotherapy for 25 years. And she seduced every therapist she had had. And she was finished in under, under two hours with me. And then she ended up sending all her politician friends who she had seduced to me as a, as a client and another, another patient who had been in Jungian analysis for two years. And when she worked on what she worked on, it included being raped when she was very young. And afterwards I said, you did really, really well. I don't normally comment, but you did really well. I guess that's because you've gone over that material so many times with the analyst. And she said, oh, I've never mentioned any of that to the analyst. And then I realized that's the norm in therapy. So most people in therapy are doing, working on things. In a sense, they're checking out if the therapist is capable of dealing with, with what's really the traumas that they, they need to deal with. And because those traumas happened when we were very, very small, before we had language, we, we functioned basically like an animal. So when you have a trauma, your instinct is that I could die. Your feeling is that I could die. So actually, paradoxically, for therapy to be effective, the therapist has got to assure you that I'm not going to let you die if you deal with your trauma material. Now, as far as I'm experienced, have experienced, I don't know any therapists who assure their clients they're not going to let them die. But paradoxically, when I said to people, I'll only see you once, the clients all made two assumptions. One, this is my only chance, and the other is that he's not going to let me die. And so they all dealt with things that they had never dealt with their therapists with. So that all may seem very dramatic stuff. My thing is that anything you see going on anywhere is what's going on everywhere. So the ineffectiveness of therapy, which is the norm, is exactly what's going on politically, economically, business wise, social change wise. All of every area you look at, there's denial and avoidance and settling for a little bit rather than the whole story and only looking a little bit of the picture. So the possibility, the paradox, in a way, of all of this is that the possibilities for significant transformative change are enormous because we've hardly scratched the surface in any area you look at.

Wow. Take a moment.

I should say that with my, my students, when they, they, they get something, I ask them to go, haha. And if they go ha ha, you know, that's coming out of their adaptive selves. Whereas what I did.

Please unmute your mics, everybody. Oh, yeah, and Stuart, lead us in the reaction.

So, so, so if you can all go. So that. That's coming up from your gonads.

Hi, Thomas.

From your gut.

Yeah.

You know, whereas when you, when you go like the strangulated version, it's just coming up from the. I don't think I asked for. I don't think I asked for a phone call back.

You have said you.

Now that we're not.

Peter, you need to mute.

Yeah. Everybody, please remute your microphones. Thank you.

So it's starting to be interesting, though, was.

Yeah. So, you know, we've gone, you know, talk about social ecology, you know, psychology, soil ecology, personal change, social change, all this. I'd like to. To kind of lead us into a broader conversation and connect the, the dying and lying. But before I do, I'm going to wager that Ken Homer has a thing or two to say.

Can I just say one thing?

Of course.

A related thing to the HAHA is when introducing yourself, say, I'm Stuart and you're pleased to meet me.

Ha ha.

I'm, you know, all your various voices. So when you, if you're, if in any part of this session, you have to introduce yourself to anybody else, that is what I recommend you do.

Okay, Very good, Ken.

So I'm Ken. Good to meet you, isn't it? Stuart, when we were planning this call, you began to tell us about this process you use of having people lie boldly and how you actually use that to design your classes and have the, the students themselves design the entire course and I just, that was the theme that Gil put out in the newsletter here. So I'm just kind of anxious to get into that. Everything you've said, Sarah, has been wonderful and I could listen for hours. But let's get into about this lying boldly business and what is that about and why is it useful?

Well, I'll just briefly tell you how I discovered it. I was running a workshop for about 200 ranchers and their families on how to make their whole operation more sustainable. This was in Australia. And I had them in pairs say what they would do and then we had a go round. And everything they said was in my estimation, absolutely pitiful. It wasn't going to transform their whole operation. And I.

Hold on. Anybody ever have that experience? Yeah, okay, everybody keep going.

And yeah, it's like saying to students, you know, what, what do you want to do? And they say, they say something pathetic. And they say something pathetic because they, for two reasons. They want to be able to say something that they think is acceptable to say in the group and then they want to say something that they, they think they, it, it would be possible to say for themselves. Like if I say to students, what do they want to achieve? They say something fairly pathetic because they don't want to be failing in their achievement. So anyway, when we had the go around, one of the great, the, the ranchers said that he had put a solar collector on his pond where his cattle got water. And I thought, whoop dee doo, you know, it's not going to transform your whole farming operation. So I was so annoyed, actually. I said to them, okay. And I was quite rude. I said, okay, you bastards, you get back in your pairs and you boldly lie about how you made your whole operation completely suspicious, sustainable. And the noise in the room was deafening. It was very hard to stop them. And eventually I got them to stop and we had another go round and just notice the difference. The guy who said he'd put a solar collector on his pond, this is exactly what he said. And this is, he's an Australian, so this is the Australian version of an American Rancher. He said, 20 years ago, I put a nature strip right through my 200,000 hectare property. And I've been monitoring the bird species ever since. I got 200 species of birds now, I like those birds. And then he said, with a glint in his eye, I saw one of those bastards coming out of me nature strip. And a small dinosaur, he said, coming out of his nature strip. I thought, God almighty, I've tapped into something completely Different. So what I realized was that what he'd said before was something that was okay in front of his neighbors. What his nature strip was connected with was what he, deep down, was loving. And he shared that by talking about the birds. And so I asked him what had he actually done related to his lie? And it actually put in a windbreak between two paddocks. And he'd noticed the birds on these trees, and he thought, if I was a bird, I'd want more than one row of trees. And so then I worked with the all the grays, all the branches, to find out what would be the next step they could take from. From what they've done towards their lie. So when you're working with social change, the only thing that leads to social change is taking a doable step from something you've done towards what you really want to achieve. And when most people work with social change, they get people to division and to established goals and all those sort of things. And 99% of those are never achieved. They remain as background visions in your head. Whereas the lying process actually involves people achieving things by identifying the next step. So, for example, with those people, some of them, they had a really hard time thinking what would be a next step. And so I said, well, for me, it wouldn't matter if the next step, the thing that you can guarantee to do is when you get home tonight, tell somebody what happened today. So that is an achievable next step. And everybody could do that. And if they did that, they would then be in a position to take the next meaningful step. But to come back home and think that you're going to actually build a solar collector or do rotational grazing with your livestock or something like this, it's not going to happen. Or very rarely going to happen. So somebody just asked about a reference. There is no reference to this. This is my creation. So you are now the sources of information for this process. I did send Gil a handout that I used with students, and in it, I used Kurt Levine's Force Field analysis, who said, if you want to bring about change, look at what are the driving forces for change and add to them and strengthen them, and what are the restraining forces or barriers and weaken them and remove them, and then make a commitment to a doable act, and then find somebody who can be a buddy to you, an ally, a friend, who can be a witness to what you are going to do, and to be somebody who checks in with you and says, how's it going? And. And. And I think the other Thing that's quite helpful is, is telling people what you're doing. You know, it's even bragging.

Stuart, before we, we go too far down that path, how about we make this real for the folks that, who are playing along at home here. What can you, how can you frame up a bold lie and we'll put people in breakout rooms and you give them some instructions and let's get them working on this.

So I think, I think there's a sequence that you need to go through when you're doing this. One is to get in touch with your small child and something that is really precious to you, that you can remember because that's your anchor, your foundation for doing this activity. Then think about in any of the areas that we talked about, the social, the personal, the ecological and spiritual and so forth. What particularly do you want to progress in one of those areas and sort of try and picture that a bit more, and then we can start boldly lying about something really, really phenomenal that we've achieved in this area that you've chosen. So at first it needs to be something, something enormous, like this rancher who said he, he, he put a nature strip right through his 200,000 hectare property. You know, I, I have, have had a, like, I. The other day I did one, I wrote a letter to Trump as, as his psychotherapist and said, I just want to remind you of when you were a client of mine and there are a few things I want to check in with you about at this moment. It can be as creative and dramatic as something like that. One of the things my students had to do was to adopt a minister in the government. And they wrote to the minister and said, we have this weird professor who's required me to adopt you. And what they actually did was monitor everything they did, the politician did, and they gave them honest feedback and every one of them was accepted by the politician because they said to the politician, the challenge for me is that if you don't accept me doing this, I'm going to fail the course. And so they all accepted. So, and maybe just a small story out of that. One of my.

You said that policies actually changed as a result.

Yeah. One of my students adopted the Minister of the Environment in Quebec when I was at McGill and we had no pesticide legislation. She was very passionate about the problems with pesticides. And by the end of the semester, we had pesticide legislation in Quebec. And it not only led to that change, it was so empowering for the minister that he went on to be a federal minister and was a candidate for Prime Minister of Canada. And so these are the sort of bold things that you can imagine. You could imagine you never ever had another argument with your partner.

Yeah. And notable there with this and the other ones you mentioned is that even though at the end of the process you're going to take a first small step at the beginning process, you're not constrained by what's a reasonable first step.

You're just like no.

And wild. As wild as you can get. Not. Not held back by your sense of reality. Just like boom. And then you can come back to where you are now and take a step.

Yeah.

Before.

Right, Absolutely.

Very cool. Very cool.

I'm interested in getting people into breakout rooms here. Let me see if I've framed this up properly. So choose a domain. It could be social, ecological, spiritual, whatever. Where is an area that you'd like to make a big impact? What's meaningful to you and what would be the bold law you're going to tell people about what you're doing? Is that capt. The instructions well enough. Would you add anything to that, Stu? Is that. Is that a good framing?

That sounds good to me. All right. I'm just going to go and put the heat up a bit in my. This room because it's quite. It's very early. It's five o' clock in the morning or quarter to six in the morning here. So it's very cold. So I will just be putting on a sweater and I'll be back in a second. All right.

We're putting people in breakout rooms while you're gone.

Okay.

Okay. Well, let's see. It's. Let's do 20 minutes. We'll come back about five after. So I've just put the. The destructions there in the chat. I hope everybody can see that. So any questions before we go?

You understand what you're doing? I just say. Say after. After your. Your big lie. Go. Hang on.

And before you go, if you want to save the chat, do that now. Three button, three dots. The. The top or the bottom of your screen. We don't send the chat out but if you want it, you can grab that there.

That was the other thing I was for trying to remember at the owner starting up. Okay.

All right. All right.

There you go. Join the breakout rooms when you see them. Welcome back. I see a bunch of liars here with us. So who'd like to either share. Let's do this. Why don't you share someone else's bold lie? Somebody who said something you went, whoa, that's an awesome lie. I'd like to hear some awesome lies. Who heard an awesome lie? Just raise your hand and shell your first one up.

I heard yours, Ken, starting, what was it, a million death cafes, extinction cafes all around to discuss how the planet is, is shifting and we're shifting with it. And I do not have all the details and I'm not going to scroll back up to the transcript to find them, but that was quite impressive.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, my lie is I. I started extinction cafes. And after five years, there's now a million of them taking place every day around the world of people talking about how we're going to face down the extinction event and change and extract ourselves from extractive economies. Randy, please.

Yes, I don't know that. You may not know this. I got the lie, big lie from Jane that she's the top social ecologist in the world and teaching all over the world. And I was so lucky. And I just realized, Jane, we did not get Stuart to tell another lie, so he'll have to do this. Please, Gil, ask him to do that. I was so fortunate. I mean, I won't get over was so great.

There may be time for that. Thank you. Randy Marinda. Am I saying your name correctly?

Yes, that's correct. It's not so much a practical action, the big lie, I got it from Craig, but I just love it. He said freedom is directly connected to responsibility.

And so I just thought that was worth repeating. Thank you, Phil. Good to see you.

You as well.

Thank you.

Yeah. So the Big lion, our group that, that struck me the most was Jim's. Jim is going to transform commerce itself and sort of redirect the fundamental engine that's away from making the problem to not making the problem. If, maybe, maybe I misstated that, but a lie, really, that is true to my heart and I really appreciate it. Thanks. Film. Who else heard a good lie they'd like to share with the group?

Well, I heard one.

Okay.

Heard one from dawn who said that everybody in the world has ready access to clean water.

Oh, very nice, Very nice. Don, what did you do to make that happen? Can I ask?

Yeah.

Well, I realized once a year I.

Hold a water ceremony and I need.

To be doing that on a. At least a monthly basis and with more people participating.

Thank you, Peter.

Well, I'm just going to build on Ken, your, your. Your previous lie about the extinction cafes. And I think that the, the only problem I can think of with that is that you said there were A million cafes, which sounds a little bit implausible to me.

It's a lie. It's a bo. Nitin, am I saying your name correctly?

Nitin.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Kelsey had a great lie and she said there would be absolutely no waste whatsoever in the world if she was in charge. Everything would get reused.

I like it. I like it a lot. Thank you, Kelsey.

Yes.

So actually Nathan had a great lie and that was that through his writing that he could raise the consciousness of humanity. I think if I am getting that right, I remember it was just through writing and that's what struck me the most.

Oh, fantastic. Nitin, what are you writing about that's going to raise our consciousness?

And hoping specifically that companies would start honoring their values and employees and doing good over profit. But haha, you know, when might that happen?

Well, you know, if I could comment on that, I, years ago was part of a dialogue group called the Narrings Live dialogue group. And Narrings Live is a Swedish term that if you are in Sweden, you'll see a section of newspaper called Narangs Live. And if you ask a Swede to translate that for you, they'll say it's the business section. But if you say, what is the words? What do the words actually mean? They'll say it means nourishment for life. And so actually Gene Dunaway was part of this group. Gene's on this call here. And the purpose of the group was to explore what if the purpose of business was to nourish life. And that was a very bold thing in the mid-90s for people to start exploring that. Because that's not at all what business is about. But if you're going to transform something, you got to start somewhere. So don't let the fact that just because it's not there now get in the way. Lie boldly and lie your way to the truth.

This is part of the trick that Stuart is offering us. We noticed in our group, and I've noticed this in a lot of my conversations, is that an immediate response to the bold lie is, well, that couldn't happen, or that's not practical, or I don't know how to do that. All these things that we do, that's fine. But in this exercise, drop. That doesn't have to be there. It's just like, go, go big. In our group, it was hard. Some people had trouble figuring out, like what, given the big lie, what's the next small step that Stuart invited us take? And we realized that the next small step could simply Be telling the bold lie to somebody else. Yeah, one Small Step, Jeffrey.

So I was just going to mention.

Gills, actually, which I really liked, which.

Was that the prices of things would.

Reflect their true ecological and environmental costs so that you would no longer need some special education or to read a white paper, as Gil put it, to understand the impact of your choices. So everyone could see that immediately by the way things were priced.

And he's going to do that by.

Writing a book that he's working on.

The Small Step is, is a social post right after this.

Thank you, Jeffrey. George.

For the last couple of months I think I've been practicing the be lie. And I do that by do by presenting information to large language models on problems that I want to see solved. So how do you, how do you get net zero energy building adapted, you know, immediately? How do you make a near net zero transportation system using regenerative braking and batteries and things like that, you know, for instance, Barcelona's public transit system has regenerative braking and batteries which are then used to charge electric vehicles. All electric vehicles should have an in and out so that everything from an E scooter and an E bike on up so you have a rolling grid available to you at all times.

Right.

So playing with this kind of stuff and asking them to, asking the large language models to summarize the information, which I think is what they're very good on, and then also proceeding to business plans and elevator pitches. So I've been doing that for a variety of things for the last month or two and looking for others to share that information with.

And do you have a big lie to, to further this? Cause.

Well, you know, what I'm using is, is I'm, I'm lying to the large language models, you know, saying this is my big butt.

Yeah, they're probably lying to you too, so why not, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're, they're, they're always trying to manipulate me, you know. Oh, that's a great question. What an interesting topic. So I let that go.

George. I've instructed mine to not flatter me.

Kevin I said always.

Definitely. You go first.

Rick Perlstein had a comment the other day, said stop anthropomorphizing large language models. That's one thing that we can do. Don't give them names, don't think of them as people, Think of them as machines and tools and stop giving away our power to these machines. And I think that's really a logical thing to do.

Yo, haven't I always said I wanted A leader who can lie to me effectively. You have. So the anonymous leadership that Stuart speaks.

Of.

Is something we can all aspire to in our bold lying to each other. Thanks, Jane. Aha.

Craig.

Yeah, thank you. I think the big lie is that we have democracy in America. I think the big lie is that any of the values that we were taught that we have in this country are totally a lie and that we have allowed the Congress to fund a successful so far coup against our country.

Greg, hang on, hang on. Yes. And notice how quickly you moved away from the lie. The lie which was powerful to me was we have democracy in this country not as like a wish, but as a lie like it that's happened. And just hold that for a moment. It as you know, it's a lie. It's a lie for the reasons that you said. But I think Stu's invitation is to speak the lie and hold that and let that have some presence in us. And then. Okay, well, I. What might be one step.

I think sometimes it's important to illustrate the lie.

And that's what I was attempting to do for sure. But that's not what the exercise we're doing is. We're doing, we're doing an unusual thing that this guy's crazy guy Hill from Australia has cooked up. So. But thank you for, thank you for offering into that.

Claus, can I pick on you? Would you be willing to share your big lie for those who don't know? Klaus, Klaus is working on a really enormous initiative around food sanity and food regenerative agriculture. And I'm just curious. You don't have to, but if, if you don't mind sharing what your big lie is, I'd love to hear it.

And cloud, in fact, clon should meet each other. And now they have.

Yeah.

So my big lie is that people really care about organic food, about food that comes from healthy soils, from healthy waters. And, and that they really, they really engage in the, in their shopping habits, in their dining habits to be reflective of where this food is coming from and how it has impacted the lives of those around the soil that have generated this food. So I'm working on developing an AI as a service system. I mean AI as a service capacity, as a white label back of house function to assist farmers to shift into regenerative practices. Teach farmers, not teach, but advise farmers on how to restore their soil health. But then at the same time also assist to move differentiated products into markets because the entire food supply chain has been taken apart in the last 30, 40 years. So in Order to introduce a value differentiated or different type of crop, like a perennial grain or a legume that restores soil health, you need aggregation, storage, logistics, processing, customized processing. And then you need a market that is willing to adapt their recipes and processes to create and innovate products to receive these differentiated types of crops. So we have developed an AI capacity. It's a five agent AI team that guides every step of this process. So in a nutshell, so we are actually launching, we have already launched, we are in precede, but we already have taken on a couple of clients and I'm really excited that my local community in Bend, Oregon in the high desert has accepted a pilot proposal that I just submitted. We're working on developing a local food system because it's all about bioregion specific food. When you think about bioregions, think about Japan, think about Germany, France, Italy. These are bioregions, specific cuisines that have evolved over thousands of years to maintain a relationship with the world, with the land and nature around you. And here in the US in the modern world, we have lost that connection. We want to grow the same crop in Oregon that we do in Kansas or in Florida. And we are overpowering nature with chemicals and machinery in order to make that happen. So we need to return back into a bioregion specific approach where you grow crops that are indigenous to this type of soil, climate, access to water and socioeconomic realities you're dealing with. So that's my lie in a nutshell.

That's fantastic. Somebody just requested, could you put a link to your work in the chat?

Sure.

Okay, thank you very much. Got time for one more before we go back to to Stu? Anybody else got a lie that they think the rest of us should hear?

Going, going, gone.

Okay, kill and Stu, back to you.

St what you hear? Did we lose him?

No, he's there. Hello, Stuart. Oh, he looks like he's frozen actually. Stuart, can you hear us? If you can hear us, looks like you're frozen. Maybe log out and log back in. All right, maybe he's going to do that. Meanwhile, as we wait for Stu to come back, anybody want to talk about what this process was like for them? We're not often invited to lie boldly. How was it to actually get into.

Liberating, joyful, childish, childlike.

Yeah, it makes, it makes you want to say something that you know should come true in life. Even though, yes, it may seem like a far possibility, but it's like, God.

I wish that was true.

Yeah.

Yeah, Peter.

Yeah.

So my problem was actually lacking imagination. I I, I wasn't quite ready for the idea of improving my lying skills. And so I would have, you know, I think I was a bit lame footed it.

It might take a little practice. Peter, this is not what we're all accustomed to. You know, we're all in the adapted cells. We're all constrained, we're all. I don't know about you, but my mind immediately goes to practicality and how and what are the steps. No, like that's going to be really hard and all which is fine. There's a place for that. You want an engineer to do that. But that's not what feeds the childlike, joyful, enthusiastic thing that Jane was just talking about, which we have, all of us had.

Yeah, I think there's a distinction actually between lying and bullshitting.

Yeah. Okay, say more.

Well, lying I think has a, is a certain sort of plausibility to it which is unrealized and. Whereas bullshitting is trying to deceive other people.

Yeah, yeah, nice distinction. It's notable. Most people don't, I think, realize this, but you know, the Ten Commandments don't say thou shalt not lie about that. They say, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Don't deceive in a way that hurts somebody else. But it invites what Stuart is asking us to do.

What I find interesting at what and what Peter just said is your imagination is a little bit atrophied. And I think that's a, that's a condition for a lot of adults. A lot of people have, you know, we've lost that connection with, with imagination. I do a lot of team building work and I bring improv in because if you ask people, all right, let's brainstorm, they immediately go to, that'll never work. And that shuts it down really fast. So if you want to kind of really fun exercise, say let's plan a birthday party for a five year old and use. Yes, but someone says, let's do it at the zoo. Yes, but then there's liability issues with the zoo and kids could get hurt and out and like it shuts it down. You say, yeah, and we could, we could, you know, like pin the tail on the donkey and use real donkeys and people start to really get into an imaginative space. Once you've woken up the imagination, then you can explore what's possible. It's very difficult to get into possibility space if you don't have your imagination working. If it's sitting there, you know, idling in neutral, Cameron can't raise his Hand. Cameron, please go ahead and speak and then I'll get to Shell and. And Kelsey. Cameron's been on there for a while, trying to raise his hand.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Just to mention about the process, my. My group, I got switched into another group. I was actually looking forward to chatting with Shu about this, but got pulled out.

My.

My group, the conversation went a little south and we didn't actually do any of the. The bold lying and.

But.

But I think it's important to share. Share the reason as, As a perspective. The exercise itself. I have done quite a few times in groups and, and with Stu and in classes. And when set up in a way in which you get an introduction, you hear the background to the theory.

And.

You go through the process knowingly, I found it to be quite powerful and sometimes not. I can't connect with that deep lie that is unabridged from my adaptive self in the moment of what my ego might want to create in the world. But just to say in terms of facilitating a group like this, without context, without giving the opportunity for people to say yes or no as to whether they want to do the exercise or not, that. That was at the core, I think, of the going south in my group. Thank you. Stu's back on. I can explain this again to Stu later. And I went into it not feeling in the space to do this bold lie exercise. But I went into the group and we ended up discussing.

Some.

Some more controversial standpoints which I, I did my best to hold space for. But just in terms of facilitation, this exercise can be very nice with a prelude and context and, and, and a choice to participate.

Thank you, Shell. And then over to Gil.

Yeah, so because I have lived in this world for more than 20 years, this world of attempting to create a really regenerative future, I have a very easy time with the aspirational lie. My TED talk was actually called impossible quote, unquote, is a dare based on a quote from Muhammad Ali. And basically it's the red flag in front of the bull. If you tell me something can't be done, I'm just going to work harder to prove you wrong. So the interesting thing is I thought by now I would have made considerably more progress in this work than I actually have. But I do see that society as a whole has mostly moved forward, although the last eight months, difficult to see that.

Thank you, Gil.

Yeah, Jeff, you have a real quick comment. We're nearly time. Yeah, just real quick. Didn't want to hear from Stu. And then we'll wrap. Yeah.

So I've been involved in problem solving techniques for a long time and one of my mentors used to have a technique which was to make it worse illegal or immoral.

So it's these ways of kind of.

Expanding the problem space that we're willing to look at.

Lots of, lots of ways, lots of ways to play here. Stu, I know you dropped off the call for a bit. Do you have any closing reflections? We're just about in time here, but give us something. Give us a pissy haha.

Unmute.

Right.

Enormous thoughts listening to everybody. Part of the thing of bringing about social change is to make these small, meaning I call these small meaningful initiatives we can guarantee to carry through to completion. And the key is to make them contagious. One of the only studies, genuine studies of health was carried out many years ago and the person was asked, what are you trying to do? And he said, well I'm trying to make health contagious. And that's what we can do with all of our small meaningful initiatives and to make them contagious. What's contagious is a virus. It's not very easy to catch.

A.

Worm that's infecting you. It's much easier to catch a virus. So the idea of small things and making them contagious, and we also make them contagious by listening to people not telling them.

So back at the time when we met, when I was in, when I was hanging out in the sustainable ag world, I remember hearing from Merle Hansen, farm organizer from the Midwest, who said, quote, the good Lord gave us two ears and one mouth that we might listen twice as much.

That's a good powerful observation. And I think once you scratch the surface you find like anytime anybody was talking about their area, I had things I wanted to share because I've worked in all of these areas and my experiences that in all of these areas there are really important contributions that somehow people who are really committed to doing things don't know about. It's like with health. The only large scale long term study that's ever been done of health is the Peckham Experiment. I've yet to meet a medical or health practitioner who's familiar with the Peckham experiment in, in terms, I think it was dawn who talked about water. A man called Yeomans can PA. Yeomans wrote a book, Water for Every Farm. And it would. It's absolutely brilliant. Like every agriculturalist should know about Yeoman's understanding of water. But I have very, very few people are familiar with his work, for example.

Stu, for me, I'm right with you on that. For me, a core part of my theory of change going all the way back to Institute for Local Self Reliance half century ago is the line we learned from Ken Boulding, which said, existence is proof of the possible.

Right.

Show you something that exists on the planet, you can't tell, it can't be done because there it is.

Right. I mean, he, he, he was just such a brilliant person. I, I actually ran a workshop which his wife came to.

It was a force, was a force in her own right.

Yeah. And you know, and Peter Singh and John Todd and all sorts of other people were in that workshop and, and.

And.

Meadows, you know, Limits to Growth, they were all in that workshop. So, yeah, I think, and ask it like enabling change can often involve instead of thinking about what can I do, is to think about what can I ask somebody else to do.

Or invite somebody else to do?

Yeah, yeah. And be a coach and be a supporter for somebody else doing something. I mean, I give you a small example. I wanted to make agriculture sustainable in, in Canada. And I was on a Science Council of Canada committee as a very junior sort of person. And the chair of the committee was the Dean of Agriculture at Guelph University, which was the leading university. And he said to me one day, you know, I've got to go and give a lecture to every department of agriculture across the country and every research station and every, every institution concerned with agriculture, and I don't know what to talk about. And I said, well, you know, sustainable agriculture would be something you could talk about. And he said, I don't know anything about sustainable agriculture. So I fed him all the information and helped him get up to speed. And he went around the country as the leading, most powerful person around agriculture in Canada and spoke to all the government departments and all the research departments in universities and so forth. And prior to him doing that, Canada had as their three policies of agriculture was productivity, profit and power. And after he did his talk, they added a fourth leg to the stool, which was sustainability. Now, I didn't have the authority or the seniority to make that influence, but by supporting him, it enabled that transformation in the country out of his efforts and out of his efforts. Just like the, the guy in Quebec, the minister in Quebec, he gave up being dean of agriculture and became Deputy Minister, initially deputy Minister of Agriculture in Ontario and, and you know, moved into the political realm. So it's amazing, amazing what you can, you can achieve by asking somebody else or helping somebody else. And you know, that whole concept of adopting somebody, it could be adopting business leaders in, in the United States at the moment and just seeing the transformation that might happen in the country just by connecting to some of those folks and knowing that every one of them is wounded. And so what they mostly need is somebody listening to their pain and daring to take a small, meaningful step.

Thank you so much for this.

I'm absolutely confident that the future is safe in your hands. All our hands, all of you.

This has been a real gift both to learn about your work and to have a chance to try some of it on together. I'm really struck. This conversation is really prepping presenced for me your metaphors of the core self and the adaptive self and kind of seeing both of them alive and in interplay in this conversation. So that's a real gift to me. I'm reminded of Robert Schuller, who's the pastor at the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles or Pasadena some years ago, who's kind of signature line, signature question he would ask people is what would you do if you knew you could not fail? And that's a way of getting into the same territory of unconstrained by pragmatics to let something flower dance in and out of that. So thank you for bringing us along on this journey. We've tried, Ken and I have tried to cultivate over these years a conversation to. To build our capacity to live between worlds with courage and dignity and power. And as our closing line, we always turn to our friend Brandy Carlisle, who reminds us that you can dance in a hurricane but only if you're standing in the eye?

You can dance in a hurricane.

But only if you're standing in the eye?

You can dance in a hurricane.

But only if you're standing in the eye.