Sustainable Design—of EVERYthing! (LBW 7.7)

Welcome everybody. I'm Gil Friend, CEO of Naturologic and Ontological Coach, and together with Ken Homer, pleased to welcome you to the July 15th session of Living Between Worlds. This is a monthly conversation for possibility that we've been hosting since the early days of COVID Now we're in our 7th year now. And our secret agenda is right there in the title. It's about living between worlds, between an old world that's dying and a new world that's waiting to be born. And how do we orient and live with grace and power and dignity in these times? And I'm very happy today to welcome a special guest, Jeremy Faludi, who you see on your screen there. Jeremy and I have known each other for almost 20 years. We came together first time around the magnificent world-changing project and book that Alex Stephan and others led. We've actually done some client work together together. I have fond memories of sitting with a group of corporate product designers and marketing leaders and brand owners and corporate counsel sitting on the floor with screwdrivers and hammers smashing the company's products because there was no other way to disassemble them. And it was a great lesson in design for disassembly and other things. So a little glimpse into a delightful piece of work that we did together. Jeremy has taught, taught at the Stanford Design School, um, and I think Dartmouth too, right, if I remember correctly, uh, and is now ensconced at TU Delft in the Netherlands, where in addition to teaching sustainable design in the engineering faculty there, he's the author of a new book called Sustainable Design: From Vision to Action, which kind of sums up his whole approach to this thing, which we'll talk about today. And we'll— as you'll see, a lot of the book talks about the design of product, which is where the mind naturally goes on this question. But there's a broader matter of design of systems, supply chains, business models, strategies. For those of us who are not in the game professionally, the design of how you live your life and how you intersect the design of products game every time you go to the store or an online purchase, whatever, designing what you purchase and how that builds the life that you lead. So what we're going to do today is invite Jeremy to kind of give us a brief overview, 10 minutes or so overview of the book and his approach. Then as as we often do, Ken and I and Jeremy will engage in conversation for a bit, and then we'll open it up to the room to invite all of you into the conversation. That's the basic game plan.

Um, let me say something really quick. Um, we keep trying to figure out how to use the multi-speaker view, but I think it's specific to your computer. So if you want to see, you can check, uh, in the upper right there's a, I think, 9 dots that show you the gallery. So I recommend dynamic gallery as a way to see who's speaking if you don't want to just see everybody on the screen there. Thank you.

You could do dynamic gallery or you could do multi-speaker, and that may prop— may give you some tabs at the top of your screen so you can choose different views. So that's going to be up to you. Our control room is off watching the match and you'll be your own editor. So with that, Jeremy, welcome. Glad to have you here.

Thanks very much for having me, Gil. And let's see, can I share my screen now?

You should be able to.

Okay.

Okay.

Can you see my screen?

Coming in. Great.

Cool.

So yeah, as Gil said, this is the book that I'm showing you. And I know that most of you are not designers or engineers, and that's okay. We'll talk about how this could apply to you and what you do. But As you can see from the title, the main goal is to not just talk about theory but get you to actually do stuff. Like, how can you make the most real impact with the least effort and be really effective? So it's full of tools and methods that are design tools and design methods, but design in the broadest sense, you know, like We could be talking about the design of the webinar that we're on, the design of the national electric grid, the design of company ownership and governance structures. You know, like one of my PhDs is redesigning clinical trials for drug development at Johnson Johnson. Another one of my PhDs who graduated last year was doing 3D printing for repair. So this can be all kinds of different systems, services, software. Yeah, and, and the main framing is that sustainability overall is more of a design problem than an engineering problem. If you look at the ecological footprint per person for different areas around the world, North America has the highest impacts per person. It's about— it's almost 50% higher than the European Union per person. And it's not because the US has higher technology, uh, or is, you know, a much richer, uh, higher developed standard of living, uh, and, and it's also not that Europe has some magical technology. It's that European lifestyles are designed differently than North American lifestyles. Our cities are designed designed differently, and the way we get around our houses, our offices, and our transportation networks are designed differently. And so, so yeah, and like I said, the goal of the book is to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and the main benefits of this are not only getting things done, like I said, being effective with a minimum of money and time and resources and other efforts. But it also means avoiding greenwashing. You know, people often assume that greenwashing is motivated by evil, malicious, you know, manipulative intent, but In my experience from having worked with a lot of companies in a lot of different industries is that the vast majority of greenwashing is unintentional. It's people making decisions through hunch and hearsay rather than making evidence-based decisions and making decisions that consider the whole system rather than just the one little corner of the system that they are most familiar with. And the tools that we have in the book are designed to get you past that. And yet, like I said, the design— the book is mostly aimed at product designers, engineers, and managers. This can also include executives, entrepreneurs, whether they're at manufacturing companies or consultancies, but it can be broader than that. It can be anyone who's doing services or systems or software. It's not the best book for policy, but, um, but even, even then it can give you some technical framing and tools and methods that you could find useful there. And so, for example, I'll just go through some examples of stuff that's in the book. Like, you're all familiar with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, I'm sure, but do you know how to operationalize them in your company? For what you're doing, we have an activity for that. If you like to think in systems but you want to translate that concept into step-by-step, how do you do this in your tool, your products or services or systems, we have a method for that called Whole System Mapping. Actually, this is by far the most valued method of anything that I teach. I've, I've surveyed more than, uh, 300 professionals at over 30 companies and surveyed more than 100 faculty, 130 faculty at more than 50 different universities, and this is consistently the most highly valued method that I teach. And I'll just give you quick nutshell version. You can ask details in the questions, but step 1, you consider the whole system by physically mapping it out visually. And then number 2, you quantify the impacts with life cycle assessment, or LCA. So if you're familiar with carbon footprints, that's a kind of LCA. And you use that to set your priorities for improvement, and then you brainstorm new ideas on the system map to try to get the whole thing covered and get that systemic perspective. And then when you're making decisions of what to actually move forward with, you first estimate the impacts of those ideas so that you can make an evidence-based decision rather than just taking a guess of like, oh yeah, that sounds good, I heard somebody did that. Um, but you can actually— because Oftentimes it's counterintuitive what will actually make the impacts of your system or service or whatever, uh, the best rather than, uh, suboptimal. And then we've got other simpler tools in the book like simple chooser charts if you want to choose a greener metal or a greener plastic or compatibility in recycling. You know, a lot of metals actually don't need to get separated from each other when they get shredded for recycling. They can be separated chemically in the processing. So when you're designing, you know, your phone and how the different parts of it fit together, you actually don't need to separate copper from gold or platinum or silver in the electronics. As long as they all go into the copper recycling stream, it's fine. Just keep them out of the aluminum recycling stream or steel recycling stream, things like that. And of course, we teach you how to do life cycle assessment so you can do your own carbon footprints or count other things like acidification, eutrophication, ozone depletion, land use, etc. And we— the specifically the methods that we teach you, we have a free downloadable Excel calculator, so it's, it's just spreadsheet that lets you do the calculations, and it lets you— the way that we teach you how to do LCA lets you do it in at least half the time and maybe 80% less time than people usually do. And we can talk about that in the questions later if you want. But then also we have a bunch of pre-calculated LCAs if you don't want to ever do your own calculations, you just want the answer of like I'm designing a laptop, where should I focus on? Should I focus on energy efficiency or the materials or the transport? Spoiler: basically never bother with the transport. It is almost always a rounding error. Not always, but mostly. Or yeah, or a t-shirt, uh, the use phase can be surprisingly high sometimes. And not all of the tools in the book are technical. Some of them are— we have two chapters on business models. So this is a business model canvas with the Presidio Sustainability Booster on it. Or we have a chapter on diversity, equity, and inclusion for conversations either within your team or between you and a client about how you can talk about positionality and privilege and who you are versus who the other people are. Or we also have a whole chapter on collaboration and leadership where we talk about nonviolent communication, and there's an exercise on that just to make you more effective in teams and to basically multiply your effectiveness as you lead other people in your organizations. And at the end of every chapter, there are resource lists. So like This is a long list of websites and databases to choose green materials. This is at the end of the first green materials chapter. Um, and at the end of every chapter, we also have step-by-step activities on how you apply it to a product you are designing or a service you're designing or software or a system. And so this is what I said earlier about bridging the gap between theory and practice. And, uh, that is mostly it. Um, this is a full list of chapters, so just to go through it quickly, the first 4 are basic sustainability literacy that can be useful for anyone. So the SDGs, planetary boundaries, the eco-design strategy wheel, cradle-to-cradle and circular economy. And then there's one chapter on whole system mapping, that's the introduction, and then the second one is on complexity. So that is 12 leverage points, and then 3 chapters on LCA. And then the action chapters are, there's 4 on materials, 3 on product lifetime extension, you know, durability, repairability, recyclability, remanufacturing, things like that. 3 on energy, 1 on behavior change. So how can you get your user to change their behavior to be more sustainable? Through their interaction with your product or service. And two on business models, two on biomimicry. I briefly worked for the Biomimicry Institute 15, almost 20 years ago. So if you know the website asknature.org, I designed the first version of that. And like I said earlier, a chapter on equity and inclusion and one on support and collaboration. So that's the Conversations and Leadership. And yeah, there are different ways to use the book, whether you're redesigning an existing thing or if you're a startup, but we can deal with that in questions. So yeah, that's it. What questions do you have?

It's good. Let me start. Jeremy, thank you so much. Let me start with this. I mean, you all get a sense of the breadth and depth of the book and many different ways it can be useful. Again, even if you're not a product designer, Jeremy, I'm curious, what did you learn in putting this together?

Oh yeah, so many things. I mean, in a lot of ways—

Jeremy James, can we take the slides down so we can see each other?

Yeah.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Thanks.

So in a lot of ways, this was the crystallization of more than 20 years of what I've learned along the way teaching students, you know, from engineering students at Stanford to, you know, who are at the master's level, to, uh, you know, sophomore art school design students in Canada, to professionals in industry workshops. And, uh, a lot of the learning happened along the way in terms of what sticks and doesn't stick, where, where do people run into problems, where do they hit barriers that they need to overcome. And, and that's a big part why I systematized it into the activities of like step 1, you do this, step 2, you do this. Because that was something that I struggled with a lot when I was getting into this industry. You know, I had read all these books on theory, you know, Cradle to Cradle, Natural Capitalism, etc., etc. And those are great books. But then like, how do you do it? You know, how do you operationalize it? And when you get stuck, then what do you do? And so that's really what motivated me to do this. And then even when I wrote the book, and it wasn't just me, it was a team of people, mostly here at TU Delft. And even then, you know, I made a first draft of the book and we tried it with our students and I sent it out to a bunch of people in industry and at other universities like at Dartmouth and UC Davis., and, and had people try it and give feedback that again, uh, you know, some places they needed more depth on some things, some things they needed less. Those were all specifics, but I, I think the, the main lesson that I learned is throughout all of sustainability, we have all the theories we need. We don't need a new paradigm shift. Uh, we don't need a new revolutionary idea. We need to actually do the things that we already know more than anything.

Great.

Yeah, it's on your mind, Ken.

I'm actually really curious here what people are taking away from this. It's, it's so rich. Um, there's so many things I could dive in on, but, um, I'd like to open it up and hear what other people have. I see Jane's got her hand up, so why don't we go to Jane.

This is so beautiful, Jeremy. Thank you for creating such a beautiful, beautiful filter for people contemplating designing something. It's a very rich education for the imagination of anyone. And I'm struck by how much it flips the traditional interpretation of human engineering as a very male-dominant task, um, um, and how very feminine and fertility-serving the filter that you've created, the micro-engineering of events and attitudes and approaches to those events and outcomes. And it brings to mind when I was thinking of universal basic incomes, that whole conversation, I was thinking how much we need universal basic outcomes that are life-promoting. And the filter that you've created seems to me to tip the odds in favor of design that increases the capacity of life to generate more life ever more creatively. So it's really an instance of what Fuller called livingry. It's a heuristic for livingry. So really, just thank you, thank you.

My pleasure. I'm glad you like it. And yeah, I was definitely inspired by Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek and Janine Benyus and, you know, all, all the others along the way there. And, and you're right that design as a discipline, even not sustainable design but general, uh, product design, is usually, um, you know, you, you use the word sort of feminine, and it's usually very user-centered. Like, good design doesn't start with I have a thing, I want to push it out into the world. It starts with who is my user and what do they need and what do they want? And it starts with empathy for your user.

Now, in this case, it's the biosphere. Basically, it's the body of the Earth. How do we take care of the body of the Earth? Pregnant women, we're often very medically and health-wise interested in what to give a pregnant woman. She's in a delicate condition. That idea that you must take care at that stage when a baby is growing, and the whole Earth is pregnant with life all the time, as long as it's alive. And so this, this attitude of taking care of the body of the Earth is really something we need to foster. Forthrightly. So that's a little further out from the text of the engineering charts and depictions, but I think it's very, very basic in the individual who's going to take this up and use it or try to understand it. They're really, um, working with a pregnant creature. The Earth.

Thank you, Jane. Brad.

Yeah, Jerry, I'm just curious, what design process did you use to design the book?

Yeah, that is a good question. And I mostly used human-centered design, which, by the way, is not covered in the book because I assume you already know it. So because, yeah, because the main readers will know it, but there will— but also there are other good books on that anyway. So yeah, so I started with, you know, who's my user? What do they need? And also a little bit of the push side that kind of Jane was getting into of like, what does the Earth need? You know, what do we need people to know? And And the real goal, like I said at the beginning, was to give people the tools and methods for them to make evidence-based decisions so that you're not greenwashing unintentionally, but then also so that you're saving time and money and you're not doing all this work on stuff that doesn't actually make a difference. And so, yeah, so the process was taking it and, you know, like I said, we we had a draft that we, uh, that we tried out on our own students, the little self-published prototyping basically, as well as sending PDFs to these other people at companies and other universities. And, and yeah, you know, we, we designed the layout ourselves to try to make it very engaging and colorful you know, there's a— there's an image on, on almost every page for infographics. And because I also want to make sustainability, uh, you know, a fun, colorful pursuit, because the whole point of sustainability is to make the world, uh, more beautiful and abundant and just and healthy. So, you know, so I wanted to embody that sort of feeling in the book itself as well.

Brent, how about you?

Thanks. Thanks very much. I just wanted to share a quick observation, which is from my own background, trained as a mechanical engineer, very traditional reductionistic approach, Caltech, et cetera, who then encountered permaculture. And the ideas that you're embodying and the ways of thinking you're embodying really strike me as very much kind of like the overlap of engineering and permaculture. Because permaculture was not designed, it was not built, it was not created as an engineering system, really. It was a design system, but not really an engineering system. But I think that there are a lot of lessons for engineers. I mean, starting with become ecologically literate so you aren't just flailing around in the dark. But then beyond that, you know, maybe not so much the methods, but the principles of permaculture, I think, transfer very well. And it feels like that's what you're basically presenting in this book. In a lot of ways.

Yeah, so I don't have a chapter specifically on permaculture, but effectively what I've done is sort of translate the things that would apply to design, engineering, business strategy, and put them in here. So, so yeah, put— basically put them in language that people can understand without them having to learn a whole new vocabulary aside from the direct impact vocabulary, like learning about carbon emissions and acidification, eutrophication, you know, resource depletion, etc., etc., things like that.

Yeah, it's great. I'm thrilled. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Thanks.

And I see in the chat you've already got someone who's buying it today. So, you know, yay you. Edie, please.

Hi there. Jeremy, great to see you, and Gil, and the rest of you as well too. My nephew is coming your way, Jeremy. He got in. He chose Delph first choice. Cody Farwell coming in a month. So you'll see him. I'm going to get him— get your book for him right now as his graduation present. So about that. Yeah, I'm excited about that. So somewhat related, I think when you left here at Dartmouth— I'm near Dartmouth, for the rest of you— you said that Delft or the Netherlands, the sustainable engineering was 20 years more advanced than the US. Is that accurate? Great. So, I've been saying that, so I'm glad it's accurate. And so, I'd be really interested in how your teaching has changed since you were at Dartmouth a few years ago, now being in Delft, how you're going to introduce this subject to my nephew and others, your other students. And, um, and how you tied that into your book or not.

Yeah, so yeah, you're totally right. TU Delft is the best school in the world for sustainable product design. That's, that's why I came here, you know. I, um, I was teaching at places like Stanford and, and Dartmouth, and, uh, yeah, when I was at Berkeley doing my PhD, I taught classes there as well. And, um, and yeah, and Delft is easily 15 or 20 years ahead. Like, uh, the number of sustainable design classes they have in Stanford's product design program is zero. Uh, the number that they have at Berkeley, uh, I mean, I, I taught a class there for a few years, and there were, and there were a couple other people that taught for a few years, but, uh, as to my knowledge, they haven't had any classes on it in several years now. And at Berkeley when I was there 10 years ago, they had one class, and that's gone now, so they have zero classes as well. At Delft, we have 15 full quarter-long courses at both the bachelor and master's level, and, and this book is the required text for the sophomore level green design class, which is required for all sophomores. So everyone who does design at Delft has to take a full quarter-long class on sustainable design in their, in their second year. And I mean, I think that's the way it should be everywhere, because without sustainable design, there will be no other design in the future. So, so that's a really big difference. And of course, since we have so many classes and we can just get into far more depth in things, you know, so I can, I can teach at a level of detail here that I could never do back in the US. And then also the research that we do here is at a much deeper level of detail than I was able to do back in the US because, you know, —when, yeah, because at Stanford in their design school they have zero faculty who specialize in sustainable design. In— at Berkeley when I was there, one-third of one professor's research was sustainable design. That was my advisor Alice Agogino, and in my group at Delft we have more than, uh, we have 10 faculty and 20 PhDs and postdocs just in my group. So that's not counting mechanical engineering, architecture, civil, like this is just our group. And, and there are even more people in the design school that do sustainability. So we have like 60 total researchers throughout Design at Delft. That's so great. I love that.

How about Dartmouth? Do they have it at all or no? They do.

Yeah, yeah. So, um, so I, I taught the one, uh, class that they have on, on green design when I was there. Um, and now Benoit Kuschman-Rosen is teaching that class. Uh, he was, he was very helpful in being one of the, uh, user testers of the book, you know, trying early versions and, and he gave really detailed, helpful feedback. So, so, yeah.

Yeah, excellent. Thank you. I can't wait to read it.

Edie, great question. Jeremy, this, this particular piece is burning a hole in my brain. Um, and, um, you know, and, and, and, and speaks to the, you know, to the places to intervene in the system. Stanford, which is arguably the engine of the technology industry globally. You know, the factory for making new companies and nothing on sustainable design.

Well, now, that's, uh, to be fair, they, they have other classes on sustainability. Actually, they, you know, a few years ago they got the largest grant ever in history to a university to create the Doerr School of sustainability. Yeah. Um, and that is mostly sort of bringing together civil and environmental engineering and, uh, environmental science and, and, you know, some other groups. It's just that, um, that, that doesn't connect to their design group. And, and I think that is a huge missed opportunity because design is such a universal tool, and it's such a helpful approach to so many different problems in so many different areas, from engineering to policy to economics and business to science, etc., etc. Yeah.

Well, I've been saying for decades a version of what you said at the top, that the entire sustainability conversation is fundamentally a conversation about design. Yeah, totally. That's the core of the whole thing. And so connecting the Stanford d.school with the Stanford Sustainability School is a mission waiting for somebody to take on. Definitely.

Yeah.

I'm just— oh, I wanted to thank Jeremy for bringing this legacy of decades of work to the forefront, democratizing it, making it accessible. So there's no excuses, right, for businesses who don't at least pursue things like simplified LCA calculators to see what, what are my impacts at a basic level if they don't want to hire a firm to do that analysis for a high price potentially, right? So, so thank you so much for removing those obstacles and yeah, helping companies get to hopefully the double green solutions. I'm curious at this point within the world of product design, and I should say design overall, are you seeing the green premiums being a major obstacle, or do you feel like we've gotten to a point where there's enough externalities being internalized that we can say, you know, these solutions are double green, they're good for finances and the planet?

Well, it's, uh, it's funny that you frame it that way because a lot of the big consultants like Deloitte and McKinsey and stuff that when they talk about sustainability in business strategy, they use that as a motivator. They're like, if you label your product as green, you can charge more money for it even though it doesn't cost you anymore. Like it's literally a profit center to make things more sustainable. But on the flip side of what you're talking about is affordable sustainability, and this is something that is a fundamental sort of misunderstanding or miscategorization, I think, where yes, there are definitely some times where the sustainable option is more expensive, but there are a lot of places where the sustainable option is the cheaper option. You know, anytime that you're saving money or saving materials or saving waste, usually you are also saving money. And companies have already been doing this for decades. You know, the energy use of this phone per operation is much lower than it was for phones 10 years ago. You know, the laptop that I'm sitting at uses I'm trying to think, probably a third the electricity of what computers did 15 years ago. But that happened mostly through other business motivations. You know, people want it, want energy-efficient laptops so the battery lasts longer. And the fact that it's also a sustainability benefit they don't even notice. And so the problem is that oftentimes when the sustainability strategies in design and business also save money, people mentally recategorize it. They, you know, they, they, they no longer think of it as a sustainability strategy, and they think of it as a cost engineering strategy when And really it's both, and we need to remind people of that and really claim credit for that. Yeah, awesome. Oh, and if you're curious about how our LCA tools help people do it in half the time to 80% less time. Yes. Yeah, it's actually not any fancy software or analysis thing. Basically, the one thing that we did is I made the spreadsheet because we had this free open source LCA spreadsheet that has— it's not as good data as the EcoInvent database or other expensive databases that you have to pay money for, but it's free so that we can give it to all our students and anybody else who works with us. But anyway, but so the point is I made a little interface for the calculator that visualizes the uncertainty. So it lets you take rough guesses at things and then show, you know, maybe this item here, you know, like maybe you're designing a phone and you don't know how much energy it's going to use during its life. So you say certain amount of megajoules plus or minus 50%. Yeah. And then How much gold is going to be here? Yeah, maybe this much, plus or minus 20%, or plus or minus 100%. You can do this and make rough guesses for a bunch of things or for everything first, and most of the things won't matter because it's the, it's the Pareto curve, right? You know, it's the 80/20 rule where 80% of your impacts often come from 20% of the things. And so So those are the only things that you actually need any precision in your data on. And the other things, you know, like the impacts of transportation for the shirt that I'm wearing, you can call that a plus or minus 100% and it's still a rounding error. It just doesn't matter. So you don't need to spend a week hunting down all the supply chain data of where does this shirt travel, you know, from where the cotton gets grown to where it gets, you know, made into cloth and cut and blah, blah, blah. You can just take a quick guess in, you know, in 2 minutes and then move on with the rest of your analysis.

Nice. I can't wait. Looking forward to it.

Jeremy, it's a really— I want to underscore this point because it's so important. You see, sometimes people will cite numbers like, you know, 21.38 2.5 when all you need is 20% and the rest is, you know, is calculation overhead that has no value and has no meaning. We ran that LCA experiment back at Naturologic under 20 years ago where we did a full bolt ultra-precision input-output analysis and then a hand-built rough approximation. And it was, yeah, it was like 5% of the time and within 10% of the accuracy. And went back to the client and said, which do you need? Oh, okay, this is good enough for this, this is good enough for this, for the other thing we need more precision. But that kind of selectivity of the right tool for the job was a big eye-opener. So thank you.

Cool. And yeah, and, and by the way, if anyone shows you LCA data with like 23.621, that's a lie, because basically no LCA data anywhere ever is better than plus ±10%.

Yeah, but that ±10% can be a big deal. Uh, when you were showing the LCA charts, I'm reminded of work we did with Levi's, who did like— did an LCA on their blue jeans, and to their complete surprise, the big peak of the curve was not in their manufacture. It was agriculture, number one. And so like how cotton is raised was number one. So they built it, started to build a regenerative ag program off of that finding alone. And the other, which really surprised them, was the product in use, laundering of clothing, was the other big peak. And so what did they do? They put a hang tag in every pair of blue jeans that said, "Wash this in cold water." And with that one action that cost zero, because there was already a hang tag, just changing the print that's on it, pulled down the second largest piece of the LCA.

Yeah, and that's a great— both of those are great examples of systems thinking. Because yeah, and, and this is why that whole system mapping method that I mentioned earlier is so valued by people, because when you look at the whole system and then you think up whatever ideas you're going to do, uh, and then you estimate the impacts of those on the whole system, then it drives you towards much more effective actions that can also be much cheaper, much easier and take much less time, like you were just saying.

Could you, before I go to George and Mark and Daniel, could, I wanna ask you one more thing about the systems mapping, 'cause do you find that that often gives you strategies, ways of threading the needle, doing one thing that touches 3 or 4 places in the system rather than doing one action for each piece? You wanna say a little bit about that?

Absolutely. In fact, one little detail that I didn't mention is that when you're doing the brainstorm part of that, on the system map, you number one want to have new ideas for every part of the system, including the parts of the system that don't seem related to the priority that you're trying to fix. You know, like with the pair of jeans, like you were saying, if, yeah, if energy use is the big impact that you're trying to fix, you know, you can look at the washing, which is pretty obvious, but you can also look at the material side of things How can you choose a material that requires less washing? You know, like some companies have put little bits of silver nanofiber in their clothes. And, you know, the extent to which it actually helps is, you know, kind of a mixed bag, depends on the product. But, you know, looking at all parts of the system and how can you have an idea over here that impacts the main priority. And then the other thing that you do is when you're brainstorming on the system map is you You specifically should have a bunch of ideas that eliminate parts of the system. And when you're trying to eliminate parts of the system, that brings in ideas that will often have these more multifunctional purposes.

George. Yep.

I was in a conversation online the other day, uh, about controlled environment agriculture. And I've been collecting links on, uh, urban and advanced agriculture for years. And one of the things that I noticed about controlled environment agriculture is that maybe from my observation, 1 out of 10 of the companies that go into it that think about energy beforehand. They're not doing energy efficiency from the ground up. Now, Joanne Garber, if I remember her name correctly, was talking about data centers and how she worked on building or imagining data centers which are closer to sustainability, thinking about energy, thinking about water, thinking of all those things from the get-go. But if you look at the news and the way that people are rushing to build these monstrosities, these behemoths, they're not thinking about any of that stuff from the get-go. So how do we get people to get into the mind frame of, oh, before I start building this thing, I should be thinking about the long-term aspects of this stuff, about the material and resource needs. Because that's not part of the process at this point. And we need that. And by the way, I've tried to contact Joanne a number of different times to find out more about her data center stuff so that I can put that information out there. And she hasn't gotten back to me. So I don't know about that.

But yeah, well, to be fair, actually, the industry before AI did a lot of really great stuff to improve the sustainability of data centers. I actually, I have a friend who used to be head of sustainability at Yahoo for a long time. And if you look at the numbers of the energy and water use per computer operation, you know, per flop of calculation or whatever, 20 years ago versus today, we've made enormous improvements. I don't know if it's improved by a factor of 10 or a factor of 2, 'cause I've never personally done data center design, but it's improved enormously per calculation. The problem has come in the last couple years as these AI data centers just requiring vast amounts of computational operations. And that is also a design failure. Because it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, there are already alternatives that are not that way. There's an open-source French AI, I forget the name of it, but it uses, I forget, a half to a quarter the amount of energy per question, per prompt as ChatGPT. And China's Deepseek uses about 1/100th the energy per question and also uses much less advanced chips. So the embodied impacts of the computers are far lower. And those are design decisions. So again, yeah, so Silicon Valley could be making these decisions if they wanted to. You're absolutely right that the AI gold rush has, Yeah, has basically blinded people to everything else. And, but to be fair, when we're criticizing AI, I think it's important for us to distinguish between the technology and the way that it's run, the design decisions and both in the technology and the capital ownership models, because All of the things that people hate about AI and are worried about AI ending the world, you know, the paperclip problem, gray goo, whatever, all of the things that people worry about in AI are already a problem in our existing capitalist methods of production, our short-term shareholder capitalism means of production, as opposed to any of the many other ways that capitalism could work. Could be run, worker-owned, community-owned, public benefit corporations, perpetual purpose trusts, things like that. So these are all design choices. And I don't know, we somehow need to get it into the heads of the Silicon Valley AI gold rush people that there are other things more important than short-term quarterly shareholder profits.

Well, gotta get into the heads of the elected officials also. So Governor of New York just signed an executive order putting a moratorium on data centers above 50 megawatts until certain questions are answered. It's not saying no, it's saying no unless. And this is what Joanne Garbin has been advocating for and actually going around the country talking to electeds, saying the stance to say Hertz, she reverses it. Yes, if data centers, if you meet these kind of criteria and, you know, the efficiency of design is one thing. People here probably remember when we used to buy light bulbs based on their wattage. Well, who cares? I don't want to buy watts. I want to buy lumens. I want to buy illumination. And my light is not better because it's more watts. It's better if it's more lumens per watt. It's better if it's more flops per gigawatt in a data center. And once you start to think about that, there's enormous opportunities. And we We see the range not just in the AI models, Jeremy, like Deepseek versus OpenAI, but we see it in data centers that are designed more efficiently. They're doing renewables with batteries behind the meter instead of jet engines as the power source. Load management that is moving compute cycles into low peak times of the day when that's possible, like already happens with your power at home. And there's the personal decision. Do you by default go to your AI for a simple search question that you could ask of a search engine? It's a fraction of the energy requirement. There are things that a search engine can't do and that AI will do better and use it for that. But for the default search, don't bother. So all the way up and down the stack, there are design choices. And right now, in this mad rush for we've gotta build as much as possible as fast as possible, the other part of that story is that AI data center CapEx is the only thing keeping the US economy float at this point.

I don't want to see this just on AI. My question was about the fact that people generally, when they start building, don't think about these ideas before they build. So not only is it AI, it's controlled environment agriculture. It's everything. It's marijuana grow houses, which a friend of mine who is a lighting efficiency expert just tears his hair out about. It's how do we get people to start thinking about this stuff from the beginning so they're not jumping to, oh, the profits are going to be when I finish this stuff and it'll be great, then I can cash out. But how do I do this thing so that it'll last for a long time? How do we make that mind switch?

And it's not just AI. No, it's not just AI, George. It's everything that we do. You gave a couple of examples. We could extend that to everything we do. And you do You do it by boxing folks in with regulations. You do it by pricing the externality so people actually have to pay the real cost for things. And you do it by citizens' action. You look at the stats on data centers, they are being stopped all over the country as a way of forcing this onto the political agenda and eventually onto the economic agenda. So it's a really fundamental point. And again, this question that Jeremy talked at the top of the call about design in every one of these realms. Is what we're talking about here. Jane, I see your hand. Mark was up first. I'm going to go to Mark Weiss and then over to Jane.

I was also there, although sorry, I do have one more point to answer George here before we move on.

Before you do, let me just ask people, if you can use the raise hand functions on the bottom of your screen, it helps us manage the queue for you better. So cool.

So, so just a quick other answer to George is is, in addition to the sort of regulatory sticks that Gil was talking about, we also need to make it easier for companies and people and governments to consider sustainability before they build and consider it in the early stages of design. And that's exactly why I created a lot of these tools or gathered existing tools. And like, that's why I wanted to make Lifecycle assessment so much faster and easier so that you can do it in the early stages of design. Because when I started this, that wasn't a thing. You built the product and then you had the data that you could enter in to do the lifecycle assessment. And then it was just for reporting, but that's too late. And so with the right tools and methods, it becomes much easier to think about this in the early stages. The edges of design as well. And okay, so who was the next question?

Was it Jane? Next one is actually Mark.

Mark and Ken and Jane.

My first question is, since I haven't been on before, do we have more time or is this—

We're 90 minutes. We have another half hour.

Oh, good. Okay. So the first thing I wanted to do is congratulate you, Jeremy, You know, because of this session, I've decided on this call, I'm going to buy your book as a gift for my son's 46th birthday. Nice. But here's the question I had is really related to this disproportionately dense concentration of sustainable product design teaching and research at TU Delft that's putting Berkeley and Stanford to shame. And what I'm wondering about is, you know, I guess you get into why you think it's there. My question relates to, you know, global development. We have this model that we call sustainable innovation and inclusive prosperity, getting richer by becoming greener. And So it's— I assume that there's probably from all the work that's been done there, there's a lot of data, you know, by companies and products that really demonstrated not only the environmental benefit but the economic value of this approach. But something probably you don't have data on, but I'm just wondering if you've been there long enough to tell me instinctually, what do you think? Is there any economic impact on the surrounding community in Delft of having that concentration there? Oh, that's interesting.

I mean, there are definitely companies that have started in our department that are sustainability companies, you know, like if you've seen VanMoof, or you probably call them VanMoof, electric bicycles, that was students of ours or one thing that you probably haven't seen, but it's in several European countries now, is Swapfiets' product service system of bicycles. So rather than buying a bicycle, you effectively rent a bicycle every month from Swapfiets, and then they handle all the maintenance and repairs and all that kind of stuff. And then the bikes last a lot longer because they have, you know, because they make more money the longer the bikes last. And that has become quite popular through, yeah, like I said, a bunch of different cities in different countries around here. I definitely don't have any numbers that I could tell you, but I have seen it.

Yeah. Thank you.

Phil Eldred says he's in the air, so I assume it means he's on an airplane, but maybe he's somewhere else, I'm not sure. He's asked me to ask a question. I had one that I can blend together. So I noticed when you were giving your presentation that you had a chapter on the planetary boundaries, and I'm wondering about, you know, it's looking pretty bad from a planetary boundary standpoint. You know, we have about violated 7 out of 9 boundaries. Some of them are in really bad shape. That seems to be accelerating. We're getting El Niño and all this warming. I'm here in Europe where it's unbelievably hot right now. It was 102 today. And Phil's question— so with that as background, Phil's question is, I'm wondering if the ownership structure and the constitutional design is addressed in the book. It doesn't seem like our companies, if they're designed to constantly be extracting then it limits the impact of sustainable product design. How can we actually do good sustainable product design that's not greenwashing? And how can we make that part of addressing the issue of the planetary boundary problems that we're facing? Do you have any thoughts on that you'd like to share with us?

Yeah, so, uh, so like I said, there's two chapters on green business models. The first one is on product-service systems, which gives you a whole menu basically that you can brainstorm on for how to make your company or even just a single division within an existing larger company go from a business model where they sell physical stuff to a service system like I was saying with the Swapfiets bicycle share system. System. And because then that aligns the economic incentives between, you know, the longer the bikes last, the less you have to fix them and replace them and stuff like that, the more money the company makes. Because the company makes a fixed amount per month and they have to pay for all the repairs and replacements and stuff like that. So that's a very concrete circular economy strategy, but it's not for everything, and it doesn't fix things like, you know, capital ownership structures and governance models. So the second chapter is the one that I briefly showed the slide of, the Presidio Sustainability Booster for Business Model Canvas, and that basically lays out the normal business model canvas, and in every stage of the canvas, you know, like like your customer or your costs or your revenues or things like that. It has a list of prompts that you can brainstorm on to think how you can make that more environmentally sustainable or socially sustainable as well. And now it's not a quantitative assessment tool. It's not gonna tell you which strategy is better than any other strategy, but it can help you brainstorm in ways that you wouldn't have thought before. And there definitely, there's a lot further in depth that you could go. You know, this is an intro level textbook. So, you know, we don't go into super deep depth relative to what we could. So there are other books where you could get more into depth on alternative ownership models And actually there's a cool database that was just posted recently by a friend of mine, Julie Mentor, looking— that they made a database of investment funds for alternative ownership models of companies. So not a database of companies themselves that are worker-owned, you know, like Mondragon in Spain or things like that, but investment funds that, that invest in those companies that you could maybe also invest in. I don't have the URL for it, but I've recently posted it on LinkedIn. So if you look at my LinkedIn post history, you'll see it.

Great. Thank you. And I also just dropped into the chat, Anthony Upward, who's been on a couple of these Wals designed something called the Flourishing Business Model Canvas, which takes the Business Model Canvas and drops it into an ecological context by adding some several dimensions. So some people may want to check that out. Gil, before I go to you, which I see you have your hand raised, I'm going to go to your wife first. Jane?

Jeremy, have you looked at the possibility of a version of your book or the subject matter of your book, its conversion into an online teaching tool for people learning design. I'm daydreaming the possibility of something ubiquitous like the Khan Academy where any citizen person that wants to support good decision-making can have design capability, learning sustainable design, and being able to have design tools for civil decision-making in public arenas, city governments, urban planning, school boards, backyards. People go to YouTube when they want to learn how to do something. They want to see what other people's learning is on YouTube. And we need something like that so that this approach and attitude about design becomes ubiquitous in our cultures.

Yeah, so actually, I, I do have a bunch of resources online Design already. I, I just wrote into the chat. I didn't get the URL because I want to focus on your questions and answering them. But if you just do a search for Venture Will Tools for Design and Sustainability, you'll find a site that has about three-quarters of the content that is in the book. It's at least two-thirds of the content— yeah, more like two-thirds of the content that's in the book, but a lot of it is in the form of videos rather than text. And it has the same step-by-step exercises in it because, like I said, the book is a culmination of almost 25 years or 26 years of work that I've done. So, uh, so some of it, you know, is pre-existing stuff, and there So, and I also have a YouTube channel that has a bunch of videos, some of which are on the VentureWell site and some of which are just like a talk that I gave at a conference sometime on a much more specific subject, you know, like repairability and durability scoring or health hazard metrics or, you know, whatever. So yeah, so I do have a YouTube channel. And, but the videos that are on the VentureWell site are mostly ones that I made 15 years ago or more for the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop. And, and that was a situation where, yeah, they paid me to, to create a bunch of this content online. It's a bunch of little 5-minute videos. So So it's very easy for people to just drop them into existing training programs or curricula in universities and stuff. You know, I've met students who've come up to me saying, "Oh, hey, I recognize you because, you know, my teacher in high school showed us, you know, one of your videos," because those videos were seen by more than 5 5 million people in 140 countries. Uh, so, so yeah, so I do have a lot online.

And I just dropped your YouTube channel into the chat so people will be able to see it.

Thanks.

Uh, Peter, how are you? Pleased to see you again. But what do you want to say here, Peter?

Thank you. Uh, uh, Jeremy, Amazing what you've done. I have one part that really— I mean, the whole thing is exciting, but you said that we don't need any more new ideas, what we need is to use what we got, something along that line. When you talk with, engage with, you try to persuade people to use what we got, what is it that you run into that stops it from working?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And, and also, before I answer it, just to clarify, I'm not against new ideas, um, or—

no, I'm not talking about— I'm talking about you're, you're talking with somebody, hey, there's stuff we can do that works, and they're not receptive to you. What— in what form does that lack of receptivity Totally.

Yeah. So it usually takes the form of, uh, we don't have time for that, we don't have money for that, our customers don't care. Uh, you know, it's, it's the standard barriers to any sustainability conversation that you've heard. And so that's, that's a lot of why I and my co-authors have put together these tools and methods is to lower the barrier to entry, to lower the time and effort it takes to do these things without lowering the rigor of the results.

Right. And so then, again, I'm imagining that you— first of all, beautiful response, will make it easier for them. And it still seems to me that there's a chance, there's a way that there could be a getting them involved in sustainability because it matters to them as opposed to— clearly it matters to you. How to bring them into a shared sense of the moment? Because your sense of the moment is, "Hey, this matters." That's what orients your sense of things. I can hear it in everything you talk about. But their sense of thing is, of the moment is, "I need to make money," or something like that. Then how can we we shift that encounter so that making money is important, but it's not what matters. Yeah, people conflate what matters and what's important. And really, what's important is important, but what matters matters. And I'm trying to figure out how does does that terrain look from, from your perspective? Because you've been on it for a long time.

Yeah, and so that is not a question of the tools and methods that we use, uh, to design and engineer and create things once we've decided it's important. That is a question of how do you convince people, basically salesmanship or, or evangelism or organizational change. And, you know, I like, I mentioned this in the book in like one-third of one chapter at the end on the support and collaboration chapter. But arguably there should be a whole chapter on it because it is important. It's just that that is usually better done by different people with different skill sets. You know, that is much better done by people who are good at selling or good at evangelizing or good at organizational change. And that is, you know, it's certainly possible for someone to have both those skill sets and the skill sets that I'm talking about. It's just, you know, a bit rare. And in most companies, those are two different people. You know, like Gil is much better at the evangelism side of things and the, you know, winning hearts and minds than I am. You know, I don't have the patience for that. I'm like, you morons, get it together. Like, can't you see what's happening? And that's That's not a helpful way to change hearts and minds. So, but there are other entire books on that.

You're under— Jeremy, you're undervaluing your talents. And Brett, if I could just jump ahead of you, unless you want to respond to this specific point.

Oh, where I want to go with the thing is I believe that everybody needs to be able to distinguish what matters and what's important. Yeah. Because what's important is certainly important. What matters matters. And that pulls the conversation in a different direction. And we have become just overwhelmed with getting what I want because that's important to me. And the we part is more what matters. And everything you are, when you, every time you move towards sustainability, you're talking about something that's much bigger than me.

There's a couple of things going on here.

Thanks. Thank you very much.

Peter, thank you for raising this. And Jeremy, like I said, I think you undervalue your talents here because you're enormously persuasive and enticing and inviting in the way that you talk about this stuff. And yeah, different people have different degrees of experience with this, but everybody knows how to talk to other people. And more importantly, we've talked about this a lot on these calls about how to listen. And it's a matter of, you know, listen, what Peter's talking about listening for what matters, I talk about is listening for care, what people really care about. And in my work with corporates at senior levels, you know, for the last few decades is that— it's partly a question of what people care about, and it's partly a question of what people believe they can have. And I've heard from a lot of executives, even today after decades in this field, who say, "We'd love to be more sustainable, but we can't afford to." So it's like, what I care about and what I can have, and they're at odds. And it's a background thinking in this culture that's so deep that it takes truckloads of evidence to persuade people. It's not, you don't persuade people by massive evidence, you persuade them by examples of what works or how to do it or how to make it easier for you to do it or how you can discover the opportunity yourself. And so I think it's critical for all of us, and I think it's critical for engineers and product designers to be able to have those conversations with the suits, to understand enough finance so you can talk about finance as design that gets the CFO what she or he needs in a way that gets the pregnant planet that Jane talked about what she needs. So it's a different kind of conversation. It's very learnable. This is part of the work that I've been doing both as a consultant for years and now as a coach is helping people have the kind of conversations that really get to care and to possibility and to joint commitment to enable something to move. That has to be undergirded by the kind of tools that you have that say, "Oh yeah, you actually can do this." this. This actually works. It's been done before. Here's a methodology for doing it. It's economical. It fits with your other parameters. So I'm not saying that you should take care of the planet and bankrupt your company, because that, that doesn't go. But what if you could take care of these things and be more profitable and retain your employees better because they're happier to be there, and retain your customers better because they like your product, uh, and reduce your regulatory burden because you're designing way ahead of the regulators, so you don't even care what the regulators going because you're designing to planetary regulations rather than political regulations. So all these possibilities are there. And Jeremy, you're touching on some of them in the book. Some of them are implied and Peter very much called for by the question that you're raising. I put in the chat that one of the things I realized a long time ago in the matter of change is that if we can make stuff easy and profitable and fun, we're much more likely to get people to change. Change than if we got 2 or 1 or 0 out of those 3. So, Brent, thanks for your patience. And Paul, I see your, like, actual human hand up there.

Okay, we'll get to you next.

Oh, thank you. I just was going to— I wanted to comment. First of all, I completely agree with the point that, you know, new technologies new ideas can make what we need to do easier, but we have the technologies now that we need for 90% of what we need to do. And more importantly, there is no new technology out there waiting to be discovered that is going to make this simple or easy or entirely painless, especially for the current incumbents of the status quo, you know, the fossil fuel industry and so forth. So the— but there is a tremendous— and, and I say this as somebody who works with a— basically, I work with, with clean tech and climate tech startups for a living, there is a tremendous incentive in the US in particular towards innovation, quote unquote innovation over development and, and, you know, deployment of existing ideas because that is an opportunity. I think most of all, there's, there's, there are many mechanisms to support it. But I think above all else, it creates a scenario in which one's company can be valued speculatively rather than based on, you know, price versus earnings.. And that is the escape hatch that is sustaining the American stock market. And it's the only reason the stock market's going up. That is all.

Yeah, definitely.

And this is the problem with short-term shareholder capitalism is that, yeah, it is optimizing for those high rates of return that by definition have to be growth companies. They can't be stable long-term companies. And so they always have to be growing really heavily, which then once you stop being a small startup and start being an established company with a big market drives in shitification.

Yeah, I call it cannibal capitalism.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it's,— you know, it's the short-term, partly. It's also partly privatizing profits and socializing costs and risks. If you put those together, you get different behavior than if you separate them. Paula, and then Daniel, and then we're going to be in home stretch, I think. Paula, you need to unmute.

Still, still can't hear you.

Daniel, let me go to you while she's looking for the button.

Okay. First, I love that you talked about making this easier and designing it in to make it easier because there are so many things people know they should do, like take their medication, for example, go for walks, eat better, that they don't do. And the second thing is, I I, I just wanted to convey that the toolkit idea and all of that, I think that's really handy. I'm actually ordering your book as we speak. Also, my personal recent experience with that, I thought I would just share, which is that, that there's a belief that you can see the value of sustainability sometimes but not actually capture it or make it real. And the weird thing is that a lot of that seems to be because we default to the technique of substitution. Reduction. We take out virgin plastic, we put in recycled. That costs more. But there are a whole bunch of other ones like tailoring, where you only put the plastic where it's required by the structure, or time shifting, where you change how things are done so that they're like Gil Friend was saying about power. So anyway, I've collected like 36 of these things, these techniques, and I, I find them very helpful. And I look forward to seeing the the large numbers of your— at your website and at the book, because I think that bridge between theory and actual practice, easy, fun, profitable practice, that's a key thing.

Cool. Thank you. Yeah, that's, that's definitely the goal. And, and yeah, making it easier is, is not going to be enough by itself. We do also need You need regulatory sticks as well as carrots. That's one of the big reasons that sustainability is so far ahead here in Europe. But yeah, making it easier and clearer that the sustainability can align with profits really helps, definitely. Thank you, Paula.

Thanks for waiting. Can you hear me now?

Yes. Okay. I live outside of Richmond, Virginia, and the topic of data centers came up, which is very salient for me. I moved in December of '24 to an area that is a mixed zoning of rural and residential and commercial. And 7 months after I moved in, our Board of Supervisors announced that they were contemplating a technical overlay district that encompasses 900 acres that border my development and will be about 1,100 feet from my house. Wow. Um, so since July, there's been a lot of activity, and I've gone to a lot of meetings— Board of Supervisors, Board, uh, Planning Commission, um, listening sessions with, um, a senator from Virginia, a state senator. And, um, on all of those meetings where there was community input, somebody tallied it and reported at one of the meetings, 97.5% of the comments were negative, but they are going forward anyway. There— we found out later that there was a non-disclosure agreement that was signed between Tract and the county, wow, 2 years ago, wow, that they didn't disclose. So when we were buying places here, we couldn't discover what was coming. And along with that, of course, is the the electrical infrastructure, the great water use, the pollution from the hundreds of peaker generators that will be coming. And they're not listening to us.

Okay.

The board, we did manage to get some concession where they agreed to lower the decibel level the maximum decibel levels from, I don't know, maybe 75 and 65 to 65 and 55, uh, 65 during the day and 55 during the evening. Um, but we, we haven't been able to get the commission or anyone to budge. So I want to highlight the fact that although it's possible for them to build data centers, it's a hyperscaled one to be more silent, to be less pollutive, to be more energy efficient. Our local government isn't requiring them to do so.

You, you, Paulie, you haven't won there yet, but more than 100 of these have been stopped around the country. Maybe something— it's 170 have been stopped. New York State has just issued a moratorium. I've just put a thing in the chat about the the organizing process behind the New York State moratorium. This organizing is tough. It's tough work. It's a slog. It takes a while. Sometimes there are losses before there are wins. But what you're doing is exactly what has to be done, which is, you know, talk with neighbors, organize together in the community, and work it and work it and work it. And so—

Yeah, we hired a lawyer. The neighborhoods in my area hired an attorney. We've got a lawsuit against them. Their process.

We need to not go into detail on that now because we're at time for the call, but I really, you know, I applaud you for doing it and hope you keep at it. We will. Okay, good. Jeremy, any closing remarks you'd care to offer? You want to put a ribbon and a bow on this?

Uh, sure. And, um, yeah, I think that that does highlight, um, how much we need more action. And I can't help with fixing government corruption, but I can, I can help give the tools and methods for the people that do want to make the world better. And, and yeah, and I'm sure all of you are those people. So let's go out and make the world more abundant, healthy, just, and beautiful.

Thanks for the work you're doing. Uh, thank everybody on the call for the work you're doing. Um, uh, we'll be back, uh, next month, third Wednesday of every month, uh, topic to be announced. So come on back, bring other people with you. And for all of us, whether you're doing, you know, the training that Jeremy is doing, the engineering work that Brett is doing, the local organizing, uh, that Paul is doing, um, remember— and Ken, uh, you You can punch that button now.

I just want to say one quick thing.

Go ahead. Please look in the chat.

I uploaded a wonderful article that I just received today by Sandra, Sandra Janoff, I believe is her name, and she's from Future Search. It is about whole systems development. I hear on these calls regularly people complaining about the way systems don't work. This is a way to get multiple systems to to develop the capacity to take action in the face of very great challenges. I think when you read this, you're gonna go, wow, I really need this. So please check that out.

And we'll—

check out, and with, but then since you're doing one more thing, I'll do one more thing. Yeah. Check out our archives for Living Between Worlds. We've had calls over the years that have gone very much into these subjects. It's there for you as a resource. We'll also send out to you next week the call Wiki for this call, which is an AI slice and dice of this conversation. Lets you follow, lets you query and follow different aspects of where we've gone here. It's a terrific resource. It's experimental. We'd love if you'd experiment and tell us what you think, see if it's useful or not. And remember, even though it feels tough and it feels crazy and stormy out there, and somebody mentioned the other day, you can dance in a hurricane.

—To which I will amend and say you need to stand with the we, not the I.

There you go. Thank you, everybody, for all that you do. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next month. Take care.

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.