Strategic Intelligence & Strategic Ikegai (Living Between Worlds 6.9)

Welcome, everybody. This is Living between Worlds for September 17, 2025. We're in the last third of our sixth year of this series of conversations for possibility. I'm Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic, and executive coach, working with purpose driven founders and executives to help them kick up their game. My usual co host, Ken Homer is not with us today. He's down with a nasty bout of allergies, but that's okay because we're here and our special guest is here, Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall is a coaching client of mine, an AI wizard, actually a wizard of strategic intelligence. He. His work over the past several decades has moved through both of those worlds, as has our work together. And the conversation, I guess was last week. Marshall, we were talking about it and Marshall had a very interesting formulation about a challenge that I know bedevils many of us, and that's going to be one part of our conversation today. And the strategic intelligence piece and the AI piece may be another part of it. But the formulation was this is that how many of you have faced the challenge in your life of seeing a difference between the clients who you really, really, really want to work with the most and the clients who can pay you well? Anybody ever have that conflict?

You're singing my song in three part harmony there.

There you go. So I figured it's more than one or two, and so Marshall said something about that. And I know, Marshall, I don't know if you remember your words, but if you can tell us what you said, because it was provocative for me and I thought was a good seed for our conversation here.

Sure, yeah. Thanks, Gil. Well, I want to first just say thank you for having me here and thank you to everyone for joining us and for allowing me into this space. It's an honor and I'm excited to get to meet at some of you here and to have some conversation. And Gil, big thanks for the invitation and for all of your support. So the comments that I think provoked Gil to ask me to come here was inspired in part by having just gone to see a women's volleyball game at the University of Oregon, which was just an amazing show of athleticism and these incredible young women from all around the world who had come to play this sport that I almost never watch. But the strategy of it all and the athleticism was so inspiring to me that the next day I got to thinking about the X's and O's of a football coaches board or the, the volleyball strategy where the. The young women would hold their shirts out in front of them. So they could hide their fingers behind to signal play two, play three, play four. And, and I thought that same kind of, of rigor of strategic thinking is something that I, I often try to bring to a lot of different parts of my life. But in this weird time of growing authoritarianism, amazing, inspiring emergence at the same time, how might I engage with consulting clients, with collaborators, with the dominant paradigm and the dominant culture in a way that, that sort of decomposes things a little and thinks of it in sports like terms? And the answer came to me just immediately and I shared it with my partner and then I shared it with Gil. And I'll share with you now real briefly, the four circles that I am picturing myself engaging with in different, in these different contexts. And I'll share this with you just so that you can see my worldview and do with it what you will. It might be useful in some ways. I don't ask anybody to see through my worldview and adopt it, but it might be useful. So the four circles and how I'm thinking about engaging with them are first, an outermost circle. Where I'm in the center of the outermost circle is, well, the, the powers that be, in traditional terms, the, the US Federal government, the, the global financial elite, the Trump administration. And that is an area that I have historically engaged directly. I have, I have been pretty confrontational from being a young person at the Seattle WTO protests, both organizing and doing media afterwards for the anarchist contingent at those protests, to later being a data journalist and uncovering some of the first data analysis demonstrating shock of all shocks that Donald Trump engaged with white supremacists extensively online in some analysis that I did that got picked up by Fortune magazine, the Nation, Mother Jones and some others. But I don't want at this point to, to be attacking head on. Right now I, I'm, I'm coming up on 49 years old. I've got a lot of different plays that I'm running right now, and I want to outright avoid myself. That outer circle of, of power, I don't want to confront them directly. I think that would be a strategically poor movement. Now just inside of that circle, there's a third circle of sort of mainstream America, the mainstream corporate world that purports to be apolitical, just wants to stay out of it. I come from the, I've spent a lot of the last 20 years in the technology industry and have made my living engaging in that space over the past 20 years a lot. And my current thinking is that I want to Continue engaging with that circle as needed in a way wherein I support my clients business objectives in exchange for getting access to resources and skills. I can continue to learn from the technology industry, et cetera. But inside of that third circle there is sort of a middle tier that I personally don't feel extremely aligned with, but I hang out with sometimes, perhaps Democratic Party aligned folks who are primarily concerned with the defense of due process and democracy and cool. You know, I relate to that middle tier as a place where I can also engage as opportunities arise, I can share resources and skills. And when I meet people who are have that, that kind of sensibility and proclivities, I can refer them to my favorite people in that tier. So for example, the communications consultant Anat Shankar Rosario comes to mind who's a real high impact Democratic Party aligned progressive communications consultant that has zoom calls with like 500 people and Adam Schiff and heads of the AFL cifo and if you just incredible confidence on, on, on her team and their study groups and their history and oh, it's amazing. I don't feel absolutely politically aligned with her, but I refer people to her regularly on her Words to Win by podcast. She's a student of, studied with George Lakoff and just an amazingly inspiring person. And so I want to refer people to my favorite folks in that circle and then where possible, I want to share with the people in that circle some exposure to my innermost circle of the people that I feel most politically and spiritually aligned with. And right now, for example, a few of those people include a major collaborator that I have in a group called Regen intel that I've just joined as the Global Ecosystems Director doing biz dev essentially for a global consulting firm spun out of Project Drawdown. If you're familiar with Project Drawdown's meta study of the top 100 solutions to global warming, the research team that led that research now has started this group called Regen intel that is very much at the intersection of indigenous knowledge and science, spirituality and science and Western science in all to add up to thought leadership in regenerative transformation.

And I excuse me, are we still in the middle tier? Have we moved?

No, no, that's, we're like right at the heart of it right there. I, I feel deeply aligned with, with that, that inner circle of folks. And I've got some other collaborators. A dear friend that I'm working with who's a geologist and memoirist, a dear friend that works in prescribed fire. My partner does intuitive art and writing facilitation in groups and, and all of those folks in that innermost circle I want to bring and flow resources and skills into and where possible, co create resources with. There might be a future someday when I can make my whole living working just with that innermost circle of people I'm most aligned with. But there might not be. And, and so it may be a dance perpetually of relating to all four of those circles in a dynamic kind of way. I'm sure it will be. And that's my current orientation and it's helpful for me to think about it in those terms.

Yeah. And I suspect that, you know, even if you could make all your living from that innermost circle, you might still want to interact with some of the others for strategic reasons. So let me, let me just recap for a second and then ask you a question. So we've got the circle of the, the dominant state and capitalist global economy power. We've got the, the mainstream world of business. We've got the middle tier of democracy advocates, to use not, maybe not the best word, but sort of what you talked about, both Democratic Party and folks trying to preserve due process, rule of law and so forth, and the regenerative universe that's actively focused on transformation of the whole game.

Okay, I could have spared everybody a few minutes.

Yes, well, your description was, was good and actually helped clarify for me what you're talking about. So let's talk about that. But before we do, because most folks don't know your work, let's step back and talk a little bit about the kind of work you do, whichever of these tiers you're in. There's something that I called strategic intelligence was my label for some of what you do. And it's increasingly an AI augmented strategic, strategic intelligence that you've done for traditional businesses and technology companies and you've been involved in technology companies yourself and now you're doing this with Regen, intel and others. So talk a bit, introduce people to your perspective on what strategic intelligence is, why it's important, how you do it, what value it generates.

Sure, yeah. You know, I, I was having a, I, I asked both Claude and Chat GPT last week based on what you know about me, and they both know a lot, how would you characterize my worldview and paradigm? And they said both roughly that I bring a real focus on structured thinking combined with a commitment to social justice. And the format that's taken professionally over the last 20 plus years has been in the technology startup space and data journalism world. So if anyone's familiar with the the website TechCrunch, for example. I was the first writer hired at TechCrunch, which went on to become the the primary Silicon Valley start tech startup blog over the years. And I ran a couple of different editorial organizations, then productized some of my strategies and thinking, sold my own startup to a larger company that I then ran analyst relations and competitive intelligence for through its ipo, and then worked in venture capital for a few years. So I've done every stage in the startup journey and the, and the playbook that I bring to that is, is around learning for business advantage and impact opportunity. And specifically to zoom down just a touch further, I tend to systematically map out the key stakeholders in any ecosystem, whether that's a competitive ecosystem or a target account list that an organization wants to monitor, or my own watershed that I live in and the major stakeholders in the watershed and I map them and then I set up systems to monitor their work and bring all of their announcements and product launches and public communication into one centralized interface which evolves over the years. And historically I have been willing to just scan over a large amount of information and apply my own intuitive judgment to say, ooh, that announcement that just got made right there, I know someone who that would be of assistance to, or I'm going to write an article about that, or I'm going to take some action on that. But now, especially thanks to the rapid advancements in AI, other people's reticence to do the, to scan through and look for very weak signals in a very large amount of noise is something that we can get AI support in. So I built systems that, that allow organizations I work with to articulate their current priorities and then have an AI apply that set of priorities as a filter to say, okay, there's a thousand things you could read today, but here are the two or three that are most relevant to really what you're working on right now.

Marshall, can you give us a concrete example about how a particular client, whether it's a corporate or an activist, might use this kind of capability on a day to day or month to month basis?

Yeah, I'll suggest, I'll give you two short examples, one in the sacred and one in the mundane. If I, if I may. So one of the things that I do for Regen intel that I collaborate with, for example, is I monitor their cosmos of scientists, expert advisors that they have in their, their network that's of collaborators. And, and last week, for example, one of those collaborators who calls himself a regenerative thinking and business coach, wrote a Beautiful blog post about his advice to startup companies that are so focused on coming up with business plans and initiatives that they're working on that they seldom answer the question that he recommends. We all ask, which is, if this plan works, who will you be? And I thought that was beautiful. I thought that was a beautiful question to ask. And when I read that, I didn't know, you know, I asked it of myself a little bit about plans large and small, but it was, it was a perfect addition in a few days later when the Regen intel team was thinking about what to put in as the, as the capstone to their fellowship program in their goodbye and congratulations message. When people complete a fellowship, they have come up with a plan. I was able to say inside of our own network, this question has been posed and I think it's a beautiful one. And, and people said, yes, that's perfect. Let's plug that in right there.

Would you post it again? Just repeat the question.

Yes. So you, you've got a plan. If that plan works, who will you be? And when you reflect on that, sometimes it makes you want to revise your.

Plan.

And, and then you can ask it again.

Yep.

And it's a, it's a real nice cyclical, metacognitive reflection. So that's, I would say as a, as a sacred example, in the mundane example, I'm working with a technology publishing company that wants to sell sponsorships to their publications and they've got 500 target accounts that they're monitoring for product announcements and what have you. And our system then brings particular, brings buying signals to the surface so that their sales team can say, can reach out and say, hey, we saw you just made this announcement. That's great. It would be perfect to support that announcement with a sponsorship in our industry leading trade publication. And that way, as the buyer said, every, every organization should watch their target accounts like a hawk. I said, that's fantastic. Can I quote you on that? Let's put that everywhere. So, yeah, I just think there's a real relationship between information flow and energy activation and justice and growth.

Let's try translating that a little bit because I suspect that in the Regen Sacred transformation focused inner circle, people don't tend to use words like target account.

Nope.

And watching like a hawk and transactional opportunities so forth, whether they should or not. Generally they don't use that kind of language. So how does that phenomenon, that and the value surfacing that you're doing map into that universe?

Well, it still needs to be economically viable. Right. And so that's part of the role that I'm playing, is that I'm now I'm being brought in to have some business sensibility, it's all relative, and.

Take.

The connections that they're forming, help them form new connections, and then monitor those organizations on an ongoing basis so that similarly, we can effectively see buying signals. I'll call them buying signals. Other people can, we can refer to them as opportunities to connect, to say, oh, the, you know, we just spoke with this. We've got a good friendship with a group called the Open Earth foundation, for example, really, really neat group that just launched a cities accelerator program that cities around the world can use to get advice at scale on decarbonization projects for municipal planning. And we had a real good conversation with them. We've already got a good relationship with them, but now they're in my tracking system so that everything that they come out with in the future, I'll be able to be aware of and look for opportunities to come and connect with them and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts and do business with them.

Gotcha. Thank you for that. So let me zoom us back out to the four circles, ask you one or two more questions, then we'll open up the room for everybody to interact with you. So you've got these four tiers. You've got a priority of where you want to be most and how you're moving between them. But you said something about a strategic perspective on those four. Not just those four are there as a landscape to play in, but you have some strategic perspective about how and when to play where and why. Could you say more about that?

Oh.

Or at least you did last week.

Yeah, yeah, right. I'm, I'm thankful for the, the AI chatbot that we both have versions of our chat bots where we can go back and say, what did Gil say to me? What did I say to Gil? And, and then explore from there. But I mean, you know that that particular configuration of how I want to relate to each of those four circles is very specific to where I am in my life right now and, and what my, my financial needs are and what the apparent opportunity is. And, you know, I'm working on, on, on changing all of those. I'm, I'm working on dialing down to some degree my, my focus on engaging with that third circle of the mainstream business world in the tech world, but not shutting it off and dialing up that middle tier in particular, while finding a lot of solace and soul sustenance. In connecting with the innermost tier. So that's, that's how I would answer that. I mean, I do like, speaking of structured models, I do like AG Lafley's five questions. Every good strategy should answer right, what does winning look like? Where we play to win? How will we play? Where we win? What's our unique unfair advantage? And how will we measure our success? So I should probably answer those five questions with regard to how I'm currently relating to those four circles.

That's great. When you get a chance, put that reference in the chat so people can track that one down. Let me open the room up. People have questions. If you have a question, raise your hand, use the zoom, raise your hand button at the bottom. That will stack you up in queue and I can call on you in order and let me open the room to you all. What's on your mind?

What does this provoke for you as we do that? Let me just say thanks for the time and the space again, I know I'm all sharing a lot of thoughts and feelings here about my own life and I don't take lightly the opportunity to share these here with you all. I hope that some of it can be useful to you in your work in the world.

Great. Alice, I know you have just a few minutes before you have to hop. We'll go to you first and then to Dan. Alice, can you go off mute? There you go. Yeah, sorry, I'm trying to get up. You can hear me? Yes. Yeah, I put the question in the chat at the very beginning as you introduced yourself. Said, you know, your purpose or is really a combination of two things. The second thing was social justice and I was curious what your definition of social justice is and how you.

Yeah, yeah, what do they say? Definitions of social justice or like opinions? Everybody's got one and. But for me, I'm particularly attuned, I think to, oh, probably a pretty long list of justice issues and power dynamics starting from my own working class upbringing.

That.

Did not give me the opportunity to explore intellectually because it presumed that I should just be follow orders and create surplus value to gender issues.

And.

Of course the biodiversity and ecological crisis, the intersectional feminism and ecofeminism really speak to me a lot and I, I try to support those, you know, flow of energy in that direction in lots of different ways. Everything from skill sharing to sharing financial resources to emotional engagement with a wide variety of groups. In particular, over the last 20 years, while working in the tech industry, I've done a lot of climate stuff on the Side with groups like cultural survival, the 50 year old indigenous land and language rights organization, the United Nations Resilience Frontiers Project that looks for tiny projects that have scaled could dramatically transform humanity's relationship with the earth and groups like that, extinction, rebellion, et cetera.

I'm sorry, my Internet just cut out and literally I missed the first 60.

Seconds of your answer of your definition. You'll get it on the recording. Okay, thank you. We'll post that soon. And thank you for weighing in. Thank you. Appreciate being here. Dan.

Hey Marshall. I thought everybody thought in terms of concentric circles, but I, I realize that it's an organizing.

Dan. There are the people who think in terms of concentric circles and the people who think in terms of Venn diagrams.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I, I kind of think in terms of circles with crosses in the middle, kind of like you know, the power wheel. And lately I've added a bunch of, you know, put them all in because I come from an integral practice tradition. And, and so there's another circle that has to do with, you know, how much money do you manage on a daily basis? So nano, micro, mezzo macro and super macro economics, you know, going from tens of thousands to you know, billions and trillions. That's in the circle. But then there's also as we've evolved towards regenerative development. I'm, I'm fond of Markanielski's model of, of genuine, what he calls genuine wealth. And, and he divided the trip, the triple bottom line into you know, the, the people part into humans and, and society and the planet part into built and natural. And in the sender you still have capital. So you have the capital, you know, those five asset classes. And I realized that every day I'm walking through all five, you know, generally whether I go on a walk in nature or whether I'm concerned about what kind of house I'm going to live in and, and then my human relationships with my wife and family. And so to me it's the connection of all of those circles. But one of the big things when you were talking using business model language because I was a business analyst for the environmental industry 40 years ago with Environmental Business Journal and taught biology and chemistry and did molecular biology research. So I have a science oriented brain, not a programming brain, except for how databases are structured. But my big question for you is in the regenerative environment is how do you view what I am now calling and a lot of other people, I'm adopting the term extractive capitalism from regenerative capitalism.

Yeah, That's. I, I will confess it is. It is hard for me to, to think about a regenerative capitalism, but I mean, if it's as simple as a model where more accessible energy comes out than was put into the system, if those investments are done in ways that repair and renew and facilitate regrowth in, in systems ecological and social. You know, I think that extractive capitalism is pretty easy to easy to recognize when you see it. And regenerative systems are on some level easy to easy to see. But yeah, you know, I was having a great conversation. I don't think he would mind at all my mentioning conversation I had this morning with a man named Hugh Knowles, who used to be the CEO of Friends of the Earth uk, who now is assembling a concessional capital vehicle at the center of decarbonization, land use and equity. And one of the things that he kind of riffed on the famous special forces saying with regard to equity, said fair is slow and slow is fast and. As opposed to. Oh no, fair is smooth, fair is smooth and smooth is fast. Yes, because the old special special forces saying is yeah, smooth is slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. He said fair is smooth and smooth is fast. And so I think there is that. That's where he wants to put his money into, into regenerative systems that, that create more livelihoods, plural than, than they might otherwise in a more extractive capitalist context.

Yeah, I've kind of made the distinction of making a killing versus making a living. And you know, as I, I work in the bioresources arena, so if we're not talking biology, we're not talking regeneration. I mean rocks regenerate, stars regenerate, but not on a human time scale.

So I think you could even add an S at the end of that and talk about making, making livings, plural.

And I like that. Thank you. That's a good build.

But you also said another S word in there, Jan. You talk about regenerative systems and it may be the contrast not extractive capitalism and regenerative capitalism, but extractive capitalism and regenerative systems. We did a living between worlds a few years back on the structural defects of capitalism or capital hyphen ism as I like to call it. And one of them is extraction without regeneration as a structural dynamic of that system. And so how.

That's a good operational definition too.

And that's a topic for some more discussion.

Thank you.

Thank you for this. Let's go.

You know Gil, if I. You're saying that I want to just interject a thought real quick. I, I got to thinking yesterday about leverage and, and how I want to take high leverage actions and, and my current understanding of that and especially in dialogue with my own notes and with Claude is one where actions, where my independent variable of my action is able to interact with a system quality that serves as a fulcrum leading to an asymmetrical output in the dependent variable. Identifying those structural elements that offer that point of leverage feels like it could be particularly valuable. The fastest thing I could apply in that was I've been unhappy with how little strength training I've been doing lately and, and I but I always sit in chairs and so for the past 48 hours every time I get out of a chair I've been putting a hand weight on the chair and then when I come back to the chair I pick it up, pump a few reps and, and set the weight on the ground. And that, that felt like that that chair. It's not, not too hard to build that little habit of putting a weight in a chair. And now the really disproportionate benefits in terms of of frequency of strength training.

It's a good hack. There's also people who developed a whole series of chair based exercises. Those of us who arranged chairs a lot. Thank you for that Gene. And then Heather. Yes I was interested listened you mentioning the word watershed and to give you a little context I am spend a.

Lot of time doing river conservation work.

And in the Ozark Mountains the White.

River is being developed so quickly along this river that they're clearing and essentially destroying the riparian stream bank areas as houses are built up and down and.

That activity is destroying the whole riparian ecosystem along the river which is not healthy. And I just wanted to was interested.

In your comment about watersheds and in.

Relationship to the that.

Yeah, thanks.

And maybe throw into that Marshall, if it's appropriate. You're doing some work with some water people.

Yep.

Maybe talk about how your scheme enhances their ability to protect what Gina's talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah I, I live close enough to river here. I'm real thankful that I could have my feet in it in less than five minutes just by foot and, and right along the river bike path there was where I, my wife and I first kissed 22 years ago and we just moved home to right, right beside the river which I'm so pleased with. But I am working with some folks here in Oregon who are supporting watershed councils taking steps to preserve watersheds and develop them in positive ways. I'm real sympathetic to the indigenous perspective that says we've got some software challenges inside of us, but if fixed, we could return to a place where the earth does. Where the earth needs humans, where humans are a keystone species and not a case of they call, a form of conservation that fences out humans. And so one of the things that I'm working on there is enabling stakeholders to listen to each other and in particular, leadership in the watershed councils to listen to the work that the different stakeholders are having publicly with their own constituents downstream so that the watershed leaders can. Can be aware of the changing dynamic landscape and look for opportunities to support stakeholders in their projects. You know, whether that's a river cleanup or, you know, changes in the utility provider and the way they're relating the river wherever it's. It's largely through, I think, supporting other people's projects that we then cultivate their support of our own.

So. So how does your technology game help them do that?

Oh, helps people be aware of. Of what's. What's going on in the, in the ecosystem there. I find that wherever I go pretty consistently, if I have, where I have a system set up to automatically monitor what people and organizations are doing and I pay attention to that system, I generally know about stuff way before anybody else does, and I'm able to come and bring that in to the group so that we can respond promptly to what other organizations are doing that otherwise we would have the very expensive reactive or just, you know, opportunities or missed opportunities entirely because. Because we didn't hear about that announcement from one. One party or another.

So Marshall, is this like. Is this like word of mouth and gossip and conversations at the general store but systematized? Or is it.

Maybe, maybe it might be. Yeah, the, the.

The.

The news that the storekeeper hears and. And helps helps connect.

Yeah.

One. One farmer and another. The, the asks and offers in the, in the community that. That otherwise.

Yeah.

Would be. Would all be trafficked through the neighborhood. The neighborhood store. Yeah. I don't know if that's too, you know. But to abstract the other thing that does come to my mind that I, I'd be real curious what folks hear how. How and it feels real relevant to these four circles. Big meta study of regenerative models. 200 papers looking at regenerative agriculture, tourism, all kinds of different fields finds that like 65% of discussions of regenerativity include discussions of internal transformation of values changes as an essential part of creating more regenerative models and a Lot of people just don't wanna, you know, it's hard to, that's one of the first thoughts that comes to my mind when I hear about housing developments, you know, destroying the riparian zone in a, in a river area that just got brought up here. I mean there's a strong financial incentive. Extraction has a real strong financial incentive. And what do they say? It's very, very hard to transform someone's internal landscape when their paycheck deserve belong, you know, depends on not doing so. So. Yeah, I, I, I wonder what people think about that.

Well, I'm a trial lawyer, so my.

Idea is, is, is, is, is litigation.

And that tends to get people's attention because you're right about the developers.

They think if, if I don't, if.

I don't destroy the ecosystem, you will.

So I might as well do it.

And the, the, the, the astronomical prices for lots now are, have gone to $100,000, which is unheard of around here. So that's, that's what's driving it.

Yeah.

Oh, I'll never forget a quote that I read from the former like Ministry, the head of the Ministry of mines or the Department of Mines in, in the United States in like 1875 or so, who, who said why on earth would I leave these mountains to be mined by future generations when instead of me mining them and my friends mining them ourselves now.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Gene. Good luck out there.

Heather, you want to pick it up from there?

I'm going to try because my brain feels completely kerfuffled. I spent an hour or so this morning in a local government meeting talking about land use planning and the Comprehensive Growth Management act in the state of Washington and all the parameters around the Growth Management act that local government has to meet in terms of how to plan for growth. It was a conversation around how the cities in my county interact with the county, on how to plan for growth management within climate change parameters, blah, blah, blah. The thing that kept coming to mind to me was this felt sense, like this is not the right conversation. We're having this alleged conversation about a design for the future. The paradigm that we're in is, for lack of better word right now, is the colonial capitalism mind of domination. And everything is predicated on the belief that well being is a commodity. And so people, we have to plan for people to have jobs so they can make enough money, so they can have enough money to buy their food and their housing, so that the factors that are critical to nourishing life now have a Price tag and how do we plan for our growth to provide a job so that people can have enough money to buy the primary critical elements to well being and life nourishment. Dan mentioned Mark Inielski. Mark's an old friend of mine and he talks about genuine wealth. And it's like our paradigm around economic development is in that domination mode of thinking that we have to extract that some group of people extracts the wealth out of the resources. And then we figure out how we're going to distribute that wealth so that people have access to what they need to nourish life. And that just seems like the wrong mindset. So my question, Marshall, has to do with strategic. What did you call it? Strategic intelligence. I have no idea what strategic intelligence would look like that would help my local county council and city council people begin to recognize that they're in the wrong paradigm. Well, not even in the wrong paradigm. That's a judgment to even recognize what. Pardon what effing paradigm they're in and to question the values of that paradigm and the goals of that paradigm. Because if we want to be in what I would call a more indigenous worldview paradigm where there's a commonwealth that everything that nature provides is a gift from creator to all of humanity to provide for our nourishment of life. I'm struggling to figure out what does strategic intelligence look like for me in this moment that I could ask a right question or pose a possibility that would help my community see the worldview that they're in and realize that there's a different worldview we could be designing for.

It's a beautiful question, Heather. Love the question. Marshall, does it feel like working a case?

Yes.

As if you guys were working together. What would the conversation be?

Yeah. Yeah, this. Yeah. This big. This meta study I was reading about regenerative models was focused around what they called paradigm blindness in particular. And. And I, I found it real, you know, interesting to. To just ask explicitly what. But you know, based on all of these, I guess I'm gonna, I'm gonna be an AI answer first just because honestly the cognitive power of it is remarkable. I might try taking the transcripts or the meeting notes of some of those sessions, putting them into chat GPT and asking it to characterize the worldview and paradigm are taken there paradise paradigms. Yes. They would make it explicit. It would justify that. And then you might ask for. For a few examples of adjacent but different paradigms that that might be easier, you know, and. And add some stereoscopic vision so that that's One thought comes to my mind, but I, you know, the, the beginning of your comment too made me think about what something I read about Abraham Maslow purportedly taking the Inverting the hierarchy of needs where when he originally learned about the, the relationship between material needs and self actualization, it was from an indigenous culture that said you've got to start with self actualization and once self actualization is secure that then that allows for the flourishing that will take care of the material needs. And he said, no, no, no, my western peers will never accept that. I really like these concepts, but we're going to need to flip them around and say it's got to start with material needs. And then self actualization comes out and we've been like, people have been bonking us with that stick for, you know, for 80 years or whatever or 60 years, you know, since then. And. But I think there's really something powerful to self actual leading with self actualization. And I think that happens has to happen through experience. Probably has to happen through, you know, the 12 Burma Shave signs along the highway. Not no single one, you know, convince people of things. Here in Oregon, there's a group of environmental organizations that have been taking people up in airplanes to fly over the forests to share with them the importance of the roadless rule that the federal government wants to eliminate. And that kind of facilitated experience, perhaps leading people to their own realizations, it feels like a potentially powerful ingredient as well. But I'd love to talk with you more about that because that's.

Let's please do that because I. Whatever strategic intelligence would look like in this moment, for me, I'm blind to it. I haven't found the right lever, I can't say the right words to get.

People to go, oh yeah, yeah, you know, I do think, I think social proof and examples go a long way. And I forgot I was going to mention when you began with that, that question, a model that the National Congress of American Indians used, used to or use to contest racist mascots. And I just think it's the coolest model. I mean they used Google alerts to, to look for places around the United States where city councils or universities were debating mascots. And then they had an information packet that they had put together that like made the case really well on a national level. And they would send that out to people, relevant stakeholders in the debate and say, here's some background information. The best we can compile to inform your discussion there. We'd like to offer you some expert testimony if you'd like to have anyone come and speak at one of the hearings about this. And we're going to add you to our email list and email you every two weeks with a new update on this debate that you're having in a national context and all the other places that it's being debated. And so I do wonder if you can find examples and show where other people are doing things like. Like rights of nature movements, for example. Yeah. Offering a stream of examples of different ways that other people in other places are engaging with some of these issues may help move the thinking of people otherwise buried in paradigm blindness.

So, Marshall, just quickly, then I'll stop. I'm visually impaired, but I'm going to try to put my email address in the chat that you might connect me.

That way I can connect you both. Otherwise, if that doesn't work.

All right.

Would you do that, please, Gil, because I can't see.

I will. Let me just draw a couple of notes out of what was just said and then, Kevin, I'll go to you. I'm glad to see you here, too. There's a couple of things I heard here. One is that the sending of the packet to the city council is a wonderful example of the right information delivered to the right people at the right time. And the right time was surfaced by this strategic intelligence scan that said, these guys are doing this topic at this time. Let's get something to them. So different than doing a blanket mailing to all the city councils in the state or something like that. So there's that. The word blindness showed up a couple of times. And I love the phrase paradigm blindness. Just people not even aware that there are other paradigms that might be possible. The aerial look at the landscape is another way to see paradigms in action. And the use of the AI, there is a wonderful example of not going to the AI for a right answer. It's not an oracle that will give you truth, but it's an. It's an augmentation of helping us see a pattern in a conversation. Yeah. It might be hard to pull out otherwise another layer of conversation that goes from there. So. Yeah.

And translating information from the context of council meetings to the context of paradigm analysis. Tim O'Reilly shared an article this morning arguing that that all work is translation work from one context to another, from one peer to another, from one committee to another, from a customer, you know, whatever. And so AI's translation of information from one context to another is in some ways just another day at work.

Very good. The other blindness. I wanted to Note here is, I think you hinted at it, Marshall, is possibility. Blindness is something. Well, until you've seen it actually happening, if it exists, it's no longer impossible. Right. It's been part of theory of change for me, Heather. You know, this going all the way back to Institute for Local Self Reliance. I just wrote a remembrance of David Morris, my co founder, who passed recently. And that was part of the MO of the institute is if we can show something that works and share that with people, then the conversation shifts. It's no longer that it can't be done, it's this work.

For me, absolutely.

Now it's a priority, but it just changes the entire story. If you can pop the possibility of blindness. Thank you. Let me move on to Kevin and then to Brent. And let me remind people, raise your hands if you'd like to speak. You may. I see a lot of you have your cameras off. You might need to have cameras on to pop into the queue. So let us see your happy faces. Kevin, welcome.

Great. Thank you. Gil, how are you?

Good to see you. I'm doing well. Glad you're here.

A great group. So my background is as a professional planner. So I've been involved in writing federal, state and local legislation around land use planning. Also worked with Bob Freilich, who tried the Ramapo case before the US Supreme Court on growth management. So back in the early 90s, so one is when you talk about strategic planning, I also was a city manager, county manager, community development director, and I used to tour the United States talking about nepa. I'm one of the top local government NEPA experts in the United States. So NEPA is, most of you probably know, is seven pages. And pursuant to nepa, there have been billions of pages of local, state and federal things.

Kevin, if I could interrupt for a second. I hate to cut you off, but I. I have a. I have a. I know how much you know about, how many things you know about. I just want to actually be mindful of the time so there's room for people to speak. So, yeah.

So one of the things that I did back in the 90s, comprehensive plans, by their nature, as soon as they're printed, become outdated. And so from a process perspective, back in the early 90s, I created an automated comprehensive plan. And so you're integrating data, and this is the advantage of AI now. So data is online real time. So if you create a plan that is online real time, then your decisions, whether it's the city council, county council, planning commission, whatever it may be, those decisions are online real time versus decisions made based on a plan that is never current. So that's a framework that nobody has really adopted. So whether it's Oregon, Washington, California, whatever, in order to make more effective, efficient and equitable decisions, we need to make more real time decisions. So that's something I'm a believer in creating that framework and then rolling that framework out. Now, as you all know, there is no really good federal framework for decision making or comprehensive planning. So the local comprehensive plan under the state enabling legislation has not been something that the federal government has done. So integrating local plans and the regional plans and the state plans, multi state plans and federal plans would help us be more effective and efficient in the way we provide services. So there's a framework. I'm very, I am moving to Oregon, Marshall, so I'm interested about that. I created the Western States chapter of the apa so automated comp plans would be a very valuable tool. In that plan, I incorporated a couple elements that I haven't seen done. One is a NEPA element, so that goes. Ties the local plan back to climate change, if you will. And the other is an emergency management element. So there's certain things I think we can do as professionals to change the framework, which changes the paradigm and the mindset.

Wow, I hear you proposing a project, Kevin.

Yes, sign me up.

Okay, good. We should, somehow, I don't know, we've never done this. We should probably keep track of how many projects and initiatives come out of these calls.

Yes.

Pick this on the list. Kevin, thanks so much and welcome. Welcome to Turtle Island.

Kevin, I just shared the City Catalyst from Open Earth foundation that in chat there that might be of interest to you.

Great, thank you. Thanks. Brent Eubanks, you're up.

He's muted.

He'll figure that out.

Okay, there we go. Sorry about that. Yeah, I, I was just. We're talking about ways to come to grips with or to frame the challenge. And when I, when I was, when I fed this problem to my chatgpt, the phrase it spat out was counter mythic framework.

Counter mythic.

Counter mythic in that we are, we are trapped in a, in a myth of infinite material abundance and absence of ecological consequences, among other things. And that his recommendation, its recommendation.

You.

Know, or its framing of that was, was to approach work from a counter mythic perspective, which I thought was, you know, is a very good example of ChatGPT taking an enormous funnel of information and distilling it down to. Okay, here's the, here's the phrase that, that is the the heart of that.

So nice.

Just wanted to, wanted to share that I, I could. I, I've got the whole essay, it produced a whole essay about, about this if anyone's interested, if you did a pretty good job, if you'd like to.

Put the link in the chat, that would be great. Otherwise, you know, I can share it out in the, in the email that follows the call and give a link to something if you want to do that.

Okay, well, yeah, I'll figure, I'll set.

That up and let me, let me just say also for those of you who have not spent a lot of time with, with LLMs, shape your questions. Don't just ask questions, but give the, Give questions with context with what it is that you're caring about, what kinds of things you're looking for, what dimensions like frames, like counter mythic framework you might be interested in, as if you're having a conversation with a human being. Whereas if you're training a new employee or intern in your organization, you're going to want to, you're not just going to say, hey, give me a report, say, give me a report about this for this purpose, for these people in this kind of time frame, this kind of style, this much detail, et cetera, et cetera. So be, be in conversation with your tools. These are again, these are not artificial intelligence. Jane Bird likes to call them simulated intelligence. Marshall and I like to call them augmented intelligence.

I think if you're using them right, then that's what they are.

Yeah, I think of mine as an exoskeleton, you know, lets me leap to a single.

So anthropic. The makers of Claude just came out with, with a new geographic report on usage and adoption around the world this week where they said that in countries where adoption is relatively low, there's a disproportionate use of AI to automate work. And in countries where adoption is high, there's a disproportionate use of AI to augment and support independent human thinking. And I think that's real cool.

And.

Comes from knowledge sharing. I'll tell you, my newest hack along those lines has been to dialogue and create a button I've got in my browser now that says whatever page I'm on, grab the news article or the contents of this page and rewrite it in case study format with an executive summary at the top. And it's just delightfully digestible in, in that format. So I just, I sit and push that button all day.

Another fun button is to say, take this issue and give me the two major proponents of the two different size sides, let them have a conversation together. Yeah, you could frame it as a debate conversation, you know, argue and win. Or you could frame it as a collaborative conversation. What can we learn from our different perspectives and generate something with. So lots of possibilities here.

Yep. I have got a button that loads up GPT5 in thinking mode with deep research turned on and goes line by line against whatever text I'm looking at and finds well sourced critiques and counter arguments to everything that I'm looking at. And it's like, it's pretty darn good. So it just comes down to like, do I buy the, the counter argument or not? And, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't, but makes me hesitant to say almost anything because.

How could that, what you've just described, how could that be useful for one of your clients?

Oh, I mean one of the, the best ways to, to be successful in anything is to avoid the most common causes of failure. I am going to be. This might. Let's see if I can do this. This might be weird for some people, but like, let's see if I can drop. Yeah, right there. Those of you who, who feel comfortable with this, I just dropped the text of in chat of the. The JavaScript bookmarklet. And if you copy that into your clipboard, bookmark any page or edit a bookmark you've got in your browser toolbar and make that text the location of the bookmark, it will perform that function. Each time you push the button, it'll open up a chat GPT window with this prepended call for critique added to your clipboard. And then you just hit paste enter and you'll get your counter arguments wild.

Thank you. Very generous of you, George Mokrae.

In the chat I put out the idea that strict binaries are a symptom of an addictive system. As I spent about some time in the last few months reading over Anne Wilson's Shaft's work again. And so let me ask you, gil, you asked ChatGPT to do two. You know, the pro and the anti figure of speech.

Might be three, four might be a gang. Sure. Play ways you know, might be two, might be three, might be have them be contentious, have them be collaborative, have them be curious, have them be surprised. You're a playwright.

Good. I just wanted to make that explicit that we have to go beyond the yes and no into maybe, perhaps not yes, not no, neither, both don't understand at all and none of the above Buddhist logic. Yes Exactly.

George Mokrah would teach us. I wrote something years ago that basically I think the headline was something like there are never only two choices.

So I just put in chat there my saved prompt to generate synthetic Personas to reflect on any question. And if anyone wants to, you can grab that text. I have it saved in a Google Doc myself. And then I just go into the blank part where the question is and I type out my question. It can be short or long and in Claude in particular, it does a good job of coming up with a diverse set of 10 points of view based on people's personal and professional experience and then thinking through step by step the question to create a synthetic focus group that is fast, cheap and good enough to really expand my thinking and about vocabulary and topics of consideration for any kind of question.

And this is, you know, this is not a quest for the right answer. This is a quest for building the user's own perception, strength and resources. I think about this like the folk, you know, the folks training for the high jump in the Olympics, they put lead weights on their ankles, they do high jumps with lead weights on their ankles and then they take the weights off and they jump six inches or a foot higher. This builds our capacity to think creatively, wisely, deeply, synthetically. So good stuff. Other questions or thoughts here? I can only see 16 of you. That's probably half of who's here. It's a lot to digest. I realize, Daniel, you should be able to save the chat with three buttons on the top or bottom of your screen, but that's probably true only if you're on a laptop, not on a portable device. And we just a reminder to people, I didn't do the housekeeping at the start of the call. We'll send out the recording of the call sometime within the next week. We're not going to send out the chats. If you want the chat, either save it or negotiate with somebody who is saving it. Heather, back to you.

I just, I know we're getting close on time. I just want to say give big thank you to everybody who's here today and enormous gratitude to Gil for bringing us together. I find these monthly calls life nourishing for me personally and for that I just say thank you.

Thanks for saying that, Heather. Much appreciated. It's a, it's a joy for me to have these conversations with all of you, not just by myself in my closet. So thank you. We're, as I said, we're. We're closing in on the end of the sixth year of These we've got some interesting stuff queued up. Some of you may have seen that in the mailings. Next month we'll be broadcasting live from the Sustainable Brands Conference in San Diego, which crosses some of the circles that Marshall talked about at the beginning of the call. So I don't know who we'll be talking with then, but that'll be there. November we're going to be joined by Elizabeth Doty, formerly of the HERB Business School at University of Michigan, who's doing work on corporate political responsibility as opposed to corporate social responsibility. Very interesting brain on that human. December is TBD Open suggestions if you'd like to offer any and let me turn the floor and the mic back over to any of you who'd like to speak or ask.

I'm going to share one more link here in chat.

Before you do that, Marshall, let me just say again, if you're, if you're, if you raise your hand and your camera is off, I may not be seeing your hand. So if I'm not calling on you, that may be why. Marshall, back to you.

Oh, I'm going to share and I hope that some of these are useful to some folks here. This is a link to a form factor I use frequently. It is a briefing book form factor combined with web search interpreted by AI over on Perplexity. So here I asked for a briefing book on Elizabeth Doty, CSR professional and in 10 seconds perplexity went, grabbed a whole bunch of links, brought them back and synthesized a nice kind of medium length briefing book on that individual and their work. So I run one of those a little briefing book before just about any meeting, sometimes adding focus on their work over the last 90 days or I asked that as a follow up question. But, but briefing book is a, is a good form factor and, and Perplexity handles it particularly well similar to the way Claude handles the, the above synthetic Personas in a way that I like best.

It's a great idea and it's, you know, it could be useful for spooks, but it could also be useful for regular humans wanting to have a rich, productive conversation with somebody. So when you ask your, your, your pet AIs to do some work for you, give them a for the sake of what? Why am I asking this? What do I have in mind? Where do I want to go with this? What kind of conversation do I want to have with Elizabeth Doherty? Whatever you can shape that research and shell thank you for the comment on sources. I've trained all mine to specifically give me sources and to give me accurate sources and to not lie and to not flatter me. And, you know, so. And I sometimes have had to drill in and challenge the sources and have it say, yeah, those sources weren't really any good, were they? So, as you would with a research team, interact. Okay, anybody else, Any takeaways for any of you from this? Does this offer you any next steps or next actions or aha. Or paths you might want to wander down? Michelle, Come off mute, please.

It's really exciting to see people who really know what they're doing playing with these tools and using it, for example, to prep for a meeting or to target an audience that's ready to move. I. I think those are really good uses. They would be enormously time intensive to do on your own. And I know because I've done some of that. And yeah, I. I prefer not to let any AI tool give me the writing I'm going to use. I, like, can give me a framework or a rough draft that I will play with, but I want it to be in my voice, number one. And number two, I think it's very easy to detect if you're even as sophisticated as I am. And I'm not so sophisticated with this. I can usually tell when something's AI generated. And I think people really.

It's going to get harder.

It will get harder. I agree. It's already harder than it was in the, like, two years ago. It was like, okay, yeah, this one again.

I'm hating that game because apparently one of the cues that people are using is an overuse of EM dashes, which I've always done in my own personal writing forever. So I'm.

Oh, yeah, me too. Punctuation mark.

There was a great piece in the last few days, I think I posted it on my LinkedIn about a professor who's struggling with this question about what's the role of AIs in the classroom. And what he does is he takes an assignment and he puts the AI response up on the screen in front of the class and has students read and critique that as a way for them to learn what it is and what it isn't and how to use it and how not to use it. So it's a very forthright embracing of AI, but giving it a context that's different than real or fake. Margaret. Hi. Welcome.

Hey, thank you. I just wanted to say that as a beginner in this, this has been very inspiring to me and I appreciate the links and some of the. But it tells me, like, the paradigm blindness you were talking about or like, where do I need to be hanging out? That would open different possibilities is one of the. One of the questions that has been generated for me, because you guys are way over my head. But it was very exciting to hear the chat, the chatter. So.

I would say not so much over your head, Margaret. It's just new territory for you.

That's what I'm saying is it's, you know, you guys are well advanced of where I am, but I took notes and look forward to the video and I, you know, captured the links and I just wanted to say this has been exciting, you know, generating a lot of passion and ideas for me about what can I do differently.

Glad to hear it. This, this reminds me, Margaret, of what you're familiar with, of the Dreyfus skills ladder, the stages of learning that people go through. And the first stage for all of us is a beginner. Like, I don't. Not only don't know how to do this, I don't even know what this is. I don't even words mean. I don't even know how to listen. And then start to get. Oh, you start to get the framework, and you eventually become kind of an advanced beginner. You're still not very good at it, but you're kind of oriented to what's going on, you know, moves through stages. And we are all of us at different levels in different things, in different places in our lives. And it's so wonderful both for me, both an orienting tool and kind of a depressurizing tool of not worried about. Well, I have to be somewhere where I'm not right now. You know, you start where you are.

Yeah, no, I. I just want to say I'm grateful for the. The space of possibility that's opened in this wonderful.

That's wonderful. You know, if I can interject there, my. My method largely of discovering new things and, and along the lines of a lot of this is by finding people who are, you know, further down a path that I'm interested in going in. And one of the. The people that I have been really excited about for years now is a woman named Wendy Schultz, who I'm going to put in a. A link to a YouTube video that she just shared with me the other day called Chaos Turtles. All the way Down Something, something, something. She's so used to have a company that analyzed the most connected nodes in any network online on a particular subject. And the Atlantic wrote a story once titled Where Are the Women Futurists? There's all these futurists being interviewed everywhere. But why are they all men? And so our company did an analysis of 150 women futurists online and we found that the most connected node in that network, the women futurist most followed by other women futurists was this woman, Wendy Schultz, who's in Oxford. She's amazing and we've become friends since then. But I just started following her very closely on LinkedIn like with the little bill, which is maybe overwhelming, but she is just an amazing conduit for all kinds of work around the world and a prolific resharer that I highly recommend and that video is really fun. I'm going to share, I'm going to put in her name and. And then David Hodgson is another most connected node in the network of regenerativity who is a major curator on LinkedIn. That is a good, good hub to get exposed to all kinds of new things. I'm, I'm learning a lot from watching the stuff that he reshares.

David is also the, the impresario behind my Celial Earth, which is a regenerative networking hub which I'll put the, that in the chat too. Marshall, why don't you give us how people reach you and find your work and your wares.

Yeah, so I'm going to put in. So that's my consulting company's URL and in particular the slash news page. I would love it if anybody here wanted to subscribe to. Our newsletter is a hyper personalized newsletter where you tell us what you're interested in. In a free text field we monitor a thousand organizations and newslets around the world and each weekend we'll send you 10 links that we think are particularly relevant to your interests and we explain why. And in that case I do let the AI writing go straight out the door. I spot check it. And Gil's been giving me some good feedback. I need to, I need to liven it up a little bit but it's like really, really useful. I, I think and I hear from others in a wide range of different fields, whether you're in solar power or, or city planning, that we'll, we'll find some, some interesting stuff each week for you. And then of course LinkedIn. Maybe I should drop my, whatever you can find it through my. If you're interested. I'm not hard to find.

Put it in.

All right, so yeah, and I just want to say again what a, what a groovy group this is and so many of the comments here have been so inspiring and I'm, I'M really glad to know you all, so thanks for. Thanks for the connection and the opportunity here.

You bet. It is a groovy group. I've never heard it named that before, but it certainly is that. And this is the conversation I hope for without knowing exactly what I was hoping for. We've talked about the four circles and the domains of action to play in and the ikigai challenge that we live in. We've talked about augmented intelligence and how you are playing to deploy new capabilities into the areas that we're all concerned about. And so very rich conversation. Thank you all for that. George, perhaps a final word. No pressure, no pressure.

Thanks a lot.

Marshall, when you were talking about monitoring people for most connected, the nose. That's the problem. How do we do all this stuff that we know is possible? How do we get it connected up fast enough so it makes a real difference?

What do you think?

Basically, all my life I've looked at what is available and I've seen that we have the technology, we have the ability to change, to do something that's different to think about. As I put in the chat, growth not only in terms of material, but also in terms of quality. Right. And as you know, I'm a. A sort of quasi old new alchemist, so by the end of the 1970s, I thought the new alchemists had really figured it all out by that point in time. How to live lightly on the earth and give back. But that's gone nowhere.

I just. I disagree. Regen intel wouldn't exist without that.

Well, it hasn't. It hasn't made the impact that one would have liked to have seen.

Different story. We're up against some very big odds here.

So. But you know, so for me, it's like, how do you. How do you get the spontaneous generation of behaviors that will avoid extinction as. As both Mr. Fuller said? So how do we speed that up? You know, I read Here Comes the Sun over a weekend because I found an advanced copy in a little free library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Right. And I'm looking at what Bill is talking about, and he's saying basically, hey, you know, just give everybody solar panels. Right? And to a certain extent, he's correct. Electrify everything, give everybody solar panels, and you get rid of two thirds of the wasted energy that we produce every year that does no useful waste work. You know, do the regenerative stuff, all of this kind of stuff. It's not on the television, it's. It's not in the media, and it's not even in the. Let me finish just one more thing. And it's not even in the dystopias or the utopias that are being imagined by the people who do our entertainment.

But it is in the world.

Exactly.

And it is in the business press. And if you look at the price of solar over the last 20 years, it's been doing what a bunch of us have been predicting forever plummeting renewables cheaper than fossils almost everywhere on the planet. China's deployed more solar in the last year than the United States has deployed in the last 10. China has peaked coal and emissions, not surprisingly. It's part of. I saw their 2014, saw one of their people in Copenhagen laying out their next seven five year plans of the transition from coal to renewables. And so while everybody was jumping up and down complaining about their emissions these last 10 years, I was frankly not worried because I saw them on track to a 2030 pivot. They're ahead of schedule. We're actively pedaling backwards.

Yeah.

This country. And that will be a mess. But so to your question, how do we do it faster? I don't know. We do what we're doing. We're making progress. It's not reported on the media. That's okay. If you look at capital deployments around the world, where the money is moving even within the extractive capitalist system, it's moving decidedly in the direction of renewables and electrification. Agriculture, the story is not quite as good. You know, water, the story is not quite as good. It's a mixed bag of progress and not. But George, let's you and I talk offline about maybe shaping a conversation around this in the future.

This seems, this is a meta conversation that we can put to the large language models and try and find the nodes, really could indeed.

Thank you, Brent. Briefly, because we're about a time here.

Yep. I will be brief as a, as somebody who's been working in the green building field for 25 years, I want to share an observation, which is that in the last five to 10 years, but particularly the last five years, the concepts of decarbonization and electrification have become very mainstream within the building world. And those things, those are, those are legit things that we're pursuing. They're real. They're changing the way buildings are designed. Also in the same time frame, the concept of regeneration as a process design principle has gone from being something that only weirdo permaculturists talk about to something that gets talked about in the normal, you know, in normal news and media circles. However, nobody knows what regeneration means. And so that transition that. That shift of awareness is very much in danger of being diluted into meaningless because. Meaninglessness, because people don't have the basic ecological literacy to. To. To know whether or not somebody talking about regeneration has any idea what they're talking about, basically.

So here's for all of us. You know, we can talk about regeneration, and we can be concerned that people don't understand what we're talking about because they don't have that orientation, or we can listen to what it is they really care about and talk about regeneration in their terms, in terms they understand and recognize happening in their lives right now. And so, on that note, let's wrap it up for today. We're at time, and I want to be respectful of people's time, but we've, you know, we've had a wonderful conversation. Thank. Thank you, Marshall. And thank you, everybody for what you contributed to this. We have several ideas of where we might want to go in some future conversations, so I look forward to being in touch with you individually or collectively about that. And without Ken here, we don't have our normal closing music queued up, but I want to remind you of our normal outro from our friend Brandy Carlisle 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.